I-Magery Correspondence

EVENT: CONNOR

I got an email from Michael at i-magery.com several days ago. We've begun corresponding, and I've enjoyed his blog more than any other pro-Bush site I've come across.

His original email wasn't short (and my response downright long-winded), so I'm posting the guts of our correspondence here:

* * * * *

Michael wrote:

Perhaps you would understand our support of the president if I mentioned:

1) My father's friends were tortured in North Vietnam to the sounds of Kerry's senate testimony, much of which has since been proven to be outright lies. It makes him hard to vote for. I hope you can see that. If the Dems
had put someone a little more conservative up to bat, they might have gotten our vote.

By the way, my father has received five purple hearts and served two tours of duty in Vietnam.

2) I am a veteran of Desert Storm, Bosnia/Herzegovina and Mogadishu Somalia. We can discuss how that affects my choice of president if you wish, but it has a great deal with the manner in which former President Clinton managed
the military and how I have even less respect for Kerry in light of 1) the accusations of the Swift Boat Vets, the POWs that have taken a stand against him, the families of the MIAs, etc. and 2) the conduct in which he conducted
himself when he returned. Protesting the war is no big deal, more power to the protestors. This is the land of the free. ...but the despicable conduct of the people pretending to soldiers in the Winter Soldier episode along with the reports of Kerry's persuasion and coercion simply disgust me.

We could have a long discussion about his senate record as well.

At the same time, Michael is not unequivocally supportive of Bush:

I am not pleased with the Patriot Act though I recognize its tactical necessity. It still does not
please me.

I don't like how the focus on marriage has taken a central plank in this election, though I recognize its tactical advantages as well. It doesn't mean I like it. I think it is wrong.

The WMD thing does not bother me so much because I would have thought him incompetent if he ignored our intelligence and the intelligence of our allies. A lot of people were very persuasive about this, even Kerry agreed
in the beginning. There is still much we don't know, and I still suspect much that we are not being told; I think Osama is a smear on a cave wall, for example, but we can't ham it up because of how it would affect things.

Personally, I think we should have invaded Iraq long ago. Clinton should have made that call 3 or 4 years into his presidency. We killed far more people with those sanctions than we did in either war or both combined.

* * * * *

I wrote back:
My response was broken into statements on war records, social policy, and Iraq. I framed it in the context that my biggest objection to Kerry is actually that he is too centrist for my tastes...

VIETNAM and WAR RECORDS

I do not, personally, have any military experience to bring to bear on my views, although I am belied by my father and many of *his* friends who served and some who fought in Vietnam and support Kerry today. Honestly, from every measure I've seen, there does not seem to be concensus among Vietnam (including MIA families or POW vets) behind *either* candidate.

With regard to Kerry's war record... and the same could be applied to his senate record... I respect someone who has taken risks and made mistakes more than someone with limited perspective. It limits me in our own conversation; I have
to grant you a latitude of experience I cannot access... I have to allow that whatever you learned might be very different from what I'd guess. I apply the same to Kerry and Bush. I'd rather trust a leader in war who has personal knowledge of war and is witness to its expenses, even with a burden of heavy mistakes, (ie. Winter Soldier) than someone with a clean slate and no firsthand knowledge.

I also think, however, that Kerry hasn't gotten a fair shake in this area. I'm cynical enough that I've always translated the Republican advantage in campaign spending to allow them to "set the stage."

The Swift Boat Veterans, for example, claimed to be a non-partisan group, but many key contributors (Bob Perrys, the Crows, Kenneth Corties, Benjamin Ginsberg) had close ties to the Republican party and to the Bush campaign. Moreover, many SBV members had praised Kerry in earlier testimony, and after the ads came out, many men who served with Kerry (I remember William Rood's poignant editorial in the Chicago Tribune) came forward on his behalf.

On the other hand, regardless of whether Bush used his connections in the National Guard (which still seems plausible to me), he chose to exempt himself from the conflict. Cheney deferred five times. At the very best, they have no
*personal* accountability.

I might weigh this less closely in peacetime (after all, Clinton simply refused to go), but it seems a little ironic that our reserves are fighting this war full-time for us today.

SOCIAL ISSUES

My own experience comes to bear in this area... I grew up in Flint, Michigan, which has pretty much fallen apart in every way in the last forty years.

It's made me look at economics and social responsibility very closely. I do think the incentive markets provide are very important, but I also think that the polarity an unregulated market instigates easily get out of control. My friends went to school without toilet paper, proper lighting, insulation, sometimes in buildings that had been condemned... in Flint the homicide rate rivals that of several nations in civil disorder, largely because kids think they'll make more selling crack than working at Burger King. (Unfortunately, As a college graduate from a good school whose applied to hundreds of jobs and works as an office temp, I think they're right.)

So yes, I'm a big fan of social programs, so long as they're continually made more efficient.

The fact the Clinton balanced the budget where both Bushes and Reagan shot it is telling...

1) Making social programs efficient is not always the same as eliminating them or curtailing them. When there's a long-term return on the investment (eg. universal health care ~ higher life expectancy overall, or EIC ~ decreases in crime and
poverty), they pay themselves off or even make a profit.
2) I'm not such a bleeding heart that I'll insist tax cuts cannot aid the economy, but *Bush's* tax cuts aided it very little. The groups most affected were the corporate class (ie. those with such high incomes that their level of consumption is steady anyway) and the upper middle class (ie. those who will put it away in a trust fund to use when their kids go to college). My parents put their tax break towards bills. They didn’t go out and buy a VCR or take a cruise or even go to a restaurant. This isn’t economic stimulation.
3) Tax cuts and massive military spending in wartime simply don't work. Look at our budget turnaround in the last four years for a poweful example. I'm not in denial... I won't blame Bush for the recession happening in the first-place. The bubble burst. But I will blame him for handling it terribly.

TERROR and IRAQ

This may be fertile ground for agreement between us.

I could admit some Patriot Act provisions, though I think the whole thing is entirely too sweeping. And John Ashcroft (and alum of my alma mater) is just creepy to me.

bin Laden may very well be a smear on the wall. Though it'd be nice to know for sure.

You are right that the sanctions killed far more than the war. But if there was a *right* time to take out Saddam, it wasn't 2001, or 1996, but 1991. I remember an NPR interview with various representatives of the CIA back in 2000; they all said that WMD's were not a likely scenario with Iraq. Even at the time, with the exception "African uranium," which had been found to be disputed intelligence at that time, but even at the time. And yes, I do fault Kerry for supporting such aggressive action in Iraq when we so clearly had bigger fish to fry, but he didn’t pursue the war with the sort of adamancy that Bush did.

I think Kerry's absolutely correct, actually, in terms of needing to build broad international support. Bush has described terrorist networks as "shadowy enemies." In such a situation, our reliance upon intelligence, the fact that we are not fighting a based enemy consigned to a particular geography mandates a level of cooperation with our allies.
The Bush administration has made the argument that Kerry would not break from our allies when necessary, but I’ve seen far greater evidence that Bush has broken when it’s been reckless and unnecessary: We can't credibly lead a war against terror when we refuse to sign chemical weapon bans, or encourage nuclear disarmament when we withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missle Treaty.

That’s what I wrote in sum. Actually, literally, because I accidentally sent the email before I was finished.

~ Connor