Debates - Part II

ABC TV had the Republicans on last Sunday for 90 minutes and MSNBC had the Democrats on for 90 minutes last night. Whatever your leanings, left, right, or middle of the road, the issues presented by the major parties could not be more different.

The Republican's focused on abortion, illegal immigration, and the war on terror. The Democrats focused on the Iraq war, health care, and the U.S. economy. The choices will be very clear in November 2008 on what we want our new president to focus on. If you are happy with the current direction of the country you will probably vote Republican in 2008. If you're dissatisfied, you will most likely vote Democratic. My vote is for change along with the majority of other Americans. If there are two reasons to vote for change, they are the foreign policy disaster in Iraq and the deteriorating state of health care in this country. Iraq had led to an upsurge in Islamic terrorists, and we have a health care system that just doesn't work anymore. Steve Skvarra expressed the current economic state of affairs in the U.S. by talking about how he not only lost 1/3 of his pension benefits when LTV Corporation declared banktruptcy, he also lost health care benefits for his wife. His story was the emotional highlight of the debates because his story could have been any of our stories in today's economic climate. Business's have basically declared every man for himself - they are only beholden to shareholders or themselves now. The employee is viewed as an expense item to be controlled, not as an asset to be cherished.

The other major Democratic theme was how to deal with extricating ourselves from Iraq with minimal losses to our military and to Iraqi's who will be left to fend for themselves. As Barak Obama said, we only have bad and worse choices, thanks to George W. Bush. Make no mistake - this war has been a debacle. If you haven't yet read "Fiasco" by Thomas Ricks, you should. It is an indictment of the Bush Administration and their incompetence in leading us into an unnecessary was in Iraq. What is especially disturbing is the degree to which Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld ran roughshod over the experts who predicted exactly what would occur once we won the war to overthrow Saddam, and had to actually rebuild the country. We had no plan for the latter. Once Saddam was out of the way, our military just stood around waiting for further orders from Washington. The war plans that the military had in place for Iraq prior to the war were totally ignored. To date, no one has been held accountable for this political folly. The Iraq war leadership has been characterized as "a bunch of lions being led by donkey's", which is what the German military said about the British generals leading their troops in World War I. Our military is currently suffering greatly in Irag - extended tours of duty and less down time at home with their families. Congressman Ellen Taucher in our district has introduced H.R. bill 3159 to stop multiple back to back deployments used by President Bush to fight the war. Ms. Tauscher is trying to really support the troops but is being attacked by Republican's for tying the president's hand in fighting this war. When Republican's talk about supporting the troops, that really is code for supporting the president and his ill conceived war. If we really want to support the troops we will make sure they have sufficient time with their families before heading back to Iraq. The troops are doing their job - unfortunately our political leaders are not doing theirs.

In the discussion last night on health care, it is pretty apparent that any of the Democratic nominees will have this issue high on the priority list - today there are just too many holes in our health care system. The Democrats want to do something about it while the Republicans decry any attempts to fix the system as "socialized medicine". They fail to see that our Medicare system and Veteran's health care system while not perfect are pretty well administered. Our president and our Congress also have a great federally run health care system. The Republican's seem to be bereft of ideas for fixing health care. Not too surprising given the fact that the Republican's opposed giving Medicare the ability to bargain for lower drug costs for us seniors.


After listening to both parties this week, I will stand by my preference for John Edwards, Barak Obama, and Hillary Clinton in that order. I like Ron Paul on the Republican side just as I like Dennis Kucinich on the Democratic side, but I don't think either of them will get very far in the primaries.