Leadership a dying quality in politics
In today's political landscape, leadership is a dying quality. I expect more leadership from the GOP than I do from the Dems because conservatism is a base that can breed leadership while liberalism is geared more toward people doing their own thing; not the best breeding ground for leadership. While I am disappointed in the GOP for their occassional misstep, their habit of wanting to make friends with liberals, and their inclination to cave in the face of public pressure on critical decisions; the Dems have acted just shamelessly for several years now above and beyond their normal shamelessness.
When you look at the Dems actions objectively, you can't help but picture in your mind a flag blowing with the wind or a tumbleweed driven here and there with each changing breeze. The Democrats are now desparately trying to extract themselves from their 2002 war votes and WMD comments. Instead of standing by their vote or even standing by the reasoning behind their vote, they want to claim they were misled. Somehow that is supposed to give them a free ticket to criticize Bush and escape the consequences of their actions?
The premise of Bush misleading is a fanciful deception on the part of Democrats that they could not get away with if they did not have their willing accomplices in the media to carry water for them. While Dems make ridiculous claims that cannot be verified because of the classified nature of the available information. However, deduction by logic clearly shows that there was no such misleading on the part of Bush.
We have claims of a WMD threat similar in nature and intensity spanning multiple presidential administrations and multiple countries. So powerful is that logical argument, that the Dems have waited until only recently to open the spigot of this vein of claims. Again looking at it logically, the Dems of necessity needed to spend a lot of money and time with media collaboration to prepare the public environment of thought in order to pull off this deception. These claims would not have flown 2 years ago. It is only after carefully cultivating the soil in the public forum that this can gain any traction at all.
Ohio Democrat senatorial candidate Paul Hackett recently showed disdain for the actions of his fellow Dems stating how ridiculous the claim to have been misled is. He thinks they should claim to have made a mistake instead. Hackett is partially right here. He is correct in the ridiculous notion of being misled, but incorrect in claiming a mistake was made. This is the difference between a leader and a non-leader. A leader takes the best information available and makes the best decision possible based on that information. If the best information available turns out to be wrong, no mistake was made.
A truly spineless charleton will take hindsight and portray it as being the best available information. That is what the Dems are doing today. In the language of word processing they are cutting information available today and pasting it into the past as if what we know today was as clear as day then. It is truly amazing how the Dems MUST deceive in order to gain any ground in the public.
When you look at the Dems actions objectively, you can't help but picture in your mind a flag blowing with the wind or a tumbleweed driven here and there with each changing breeze. The Democrats are now desparately trying to extract themselves from their 2002 war votes and WMD comments. Instead of standing by their vote or even standing by the reasoning behind their vote, they want to claim they were misled. Somehow that is supposed to give them a free ticket to criticize Bush and escape the consequences of their actions?
The premise of Bush misleading is a fanciful deception on the part of Democrats that they could not get away with if they did not have their willing accomplices in the media to carry water for them. While Dems make ridiculous claims that cannot be verified because of the classified nature of the available information. However, deduction by logic clearly shows that there was no such misleading on the part of Bush.
We have claims of a WMD threat similar in nature and intensity spanning multiple presidential administrations and multiple countries. So powerful is that logical argument, that the Dems have waited until only recently to open the spigot of this vein of claims. Again looking at it logically, the Dems of necessity needed to spend a lot of money and time with media collaboration to prepare the public environment of thought in order to pull off this deception. These claims would not have flown 2 years ago. It is only after carefully cultivating the soil in the public forum that this can gain any traction at all.
Ohio Democrat senatorial candidate Paul Hackett recently showed disdain for the actions of his fellow Dems stating how ridiculous the claim to have been misled is. He thinks they should claim to have made a mistake instead. Hackett is partially right here. He is correct in the ridiculous notion of being misled, but incorrect in claiming a mistake was made. This is the difference between a leader and a non-leader. A leader takes the best information available and makes the best decision possible based on that information. If the best information available turns out to be wrong, no mistake was made.
A truly spineless charleton will take hindsight and portray it as being the best available information. That is what the Dems are doing today. In the language of word processing they are cutting information available today and pasting it into the past as if what we know today was as clear as day then. It is truly amazing how the Dems MUST deceive in order to gain any ground in the public.
posted by All_I_Can_Stands @ 9:49 AM
8 Comments:
At 6:50 PM,
LA Sunset said…
"It is truly amazing how the Dems MUST deceive in order to gain any ground in the public. "
I am not altogether sure that when it's all said and done, they will gain anything. In fact, if the truth be known, they will end up losing ground. It has backfired on them each time, so far.
At 9:50 PM,
All_I_Can_Stands said…
Upon reflection the 'gains' of late do seem temporary and in the end cost the Dems ground. This is likely because the truth catches up with them.
At 10:11 AM,
LA Sunset said…
Harry Truman had poor numbers when he left office. It was not until years later that his stature as a leader and statesman was elevated to it's rightful place in history.
You are right when you say, the ideas will win out and the truth will win out.
At 11:53 AM,
Anonymous said…
You are intellectually dishonest.
I say that because we all know that you would be yelling your head off for impeachment and prison time if Al Gore was in office and had ordered a war that's already cost 2,100 American lives and $300 billion dollars based on flimsy claims of urgent threat. If the Gore administration had repeated over and over that they knew that Iraq had WMDs and that they knew where they were, only to find none, your postings would be endless about how the White House must have lied to Congress and the American people. The Downing Street Memo details of the Gore/Blair meetings would have filled this blog.
You would be demanding 24/7 investigations if Al Gore has squandered the FY 2000 surplus and run the country into trillions of dollars of debt, not to mention having a CIA operative outed by the Gore White House. You would be livid if a left-wing blogger was given a White House press pass and regular Q&A opportunities with the President, let alone that he was using a fake name and in his past he was a gay male escort, which SHOULD have been discovered by standard WH background checks. You would be ranting on about how the majority Democrat leaders of the House and Senate should immediately resign if they were indicted in a criminal case or under SEC investigation for wrongdoing.
And you would be furious if Gore was saying you were unpatriotic, helping the terrorists and hurting our nation for daring to hold him and his party accountable for any of these atrocities. You would call him a Communist and a traitor for trying to silence the democratic process of dissent. Your head would explode if Democratic lawmakers were calling Republican war veterans cowards on the floor of the House during wartime. You would call me a clueless Democratic dupe if I said that Republicans were just whining, pulling stunts and playing games by calling for investigations into pre-war intelligence, Congressional wrongdoing, administration cronyism, war profiteering and outing a CIA operative who specialized in WMDs during a war based on WMD threats.
But instead, it was George Bush in the White House, Cheney, Rove and Libby, Jeff/James Gannon/Guckert at the press gaggles, Frist and DeLay in Congress, and all you can do is defend every last one of them.
To truly honor The Truth, which you spout on about so cavalierly, you should rename this blog "Pathetic Hypocrisy."
At 3:21 PM,
LA Sunset said…
"I say that because we all know that you would be yelling your head off for impeachment and prison time if Al Gore was in office and had ordered a war that's already cost 2,100 American lives and $300 billion dollars based on flimsy claims of urgent threat."
You don't know the first damned thing about what I would or wouldn't do.
At 5:08 PM,
All_I_Can_Stands said…
Anonymous, keep reading and some day you will understand who I am and what I am about. For now, you are way off the mark. However, I do welcome your dissenting opinion here.
I am not a lemming or coolaid drinker. I question those of my party as well as those of the other party. My record in denouncing proven wrong-doing in my party is well known and there are examples on my blog and in comments on other blogs.
At 12:34 AM,
Anonymous said…
I certainly expected the "you don't know anything about what I would or wouldn't do", but am I so far off the mark? I don't see how I could be. If this were a Democratic administration acting as the Bush administration has, given the tone and content of your writing, I find it very very difficult to believe that you would not be up in arms about it and rightly so. From your precedence of silence here on these matters now, I expect you to be equally silent should any Democratic wrongdoing unfold.
But you're not silent on those matters, even if there's no criminal wrongdoing.
You've been silent on Governor Taft of Ohio, while finding time to charge Ohio liberals are trying to steal the 2008 elections. You chide "moveon.org types" but neglect to mention Republican 527s and acctivities like what are now troubling Frist. Inference by omission. Reading your blog you'd think the GOP is squeaky clean.
Nothing on Safavian. Nothing on Abramoff. Nothing on Scanlon. Nothing on Cunningham.
You find time to rail on about about a supposedly liberal media, actual American servants Wilson and Plame and (misguided) rants about Murtha, but have no time for comment here on indicted and guilty criminals.
An open and shut case of bias, hypocrisy and again, intellectual dishonesty from someone who so often raises the banner of Truth.
What you also seem to be missing in this post on leadership is that it takes a true leader to be able to admit when mistakes are made and take decisive corrective action as soon as possible.
You blame Dems for having faith that their President would not have given them a misleading 5 page white paper when making his case for war; a white paper that removed all intelligence caveats, even caveats from within the administration. You blame Dems relying on this executive summary and thus not having read the full 90 page NIE that was finally only available to them mere hours before the 2002 vote. You blame Dems for taking the President on his (redacted) word and being willing to support him as Commander in Chief despite any misgivings they might hold for the man who lost the popular vote but lead them through 9/11. You blame Dems for believing that the President would not hype intelligence and downplay caveats for something as serious as sending American troops to war. You blame Dems for stumping for the war, putting their names on the line in support of what they were being told by the administration. You blame Dems for thinking their President and his administration would not be misleading or lie to them. As America is coming to discover that there were indeed powerful caveats and misgivings in the intelligence community and administration that were downplayed (if they were even presented), people are asking questions about why there are 2100+ dead Americans, $300 billion in taxpayer money gone and the blood of Iraqi civilians on their conscience.
No doubt, there are plenty of opportunist Dems who don't deserve their seat because of how they pandered on their 2002 vote, playing it politically safe. It's disguting. Hillary tops my list on that one. But it's really not the majority of Dems. John Murtha is not on that list.
You are correct in realizing that Dems have a difficult philosophy to produce and inspire "leadership," and it is borne of a desire for inclusiveness and valuing everyone's opinion and encouraging them to have their own opinion and offering it. "Doing your own thing" is how you described it, though that lends a more selfish slant than is accurate. It is a humanist philosophy and leftover Enlightenment thinking.
And this is where the Dems are displaying leadership. Not always smoothly or successfully, but the intent is good. They realize they bought (and proceeded to sell) a spoiled bill of goods and want to take corrective action by having investigations and making plans for pulling out of a war that we never should have started in the first place, which is harming us every day in many ways. Financially. Militarily. World status and respect. And most importantly, this war has radicalized many in the Arab world against the US and western allies who would have never thought of it previously. US and foreign presence in Iraq is fueling the insurgency and terrorist recruitment worldwide. I agree with Iraq vet Paul Hackett (who essentially said what Bush did days before Bush did), that a timetable cannot be set by bureaucrats in DC but must be planned and done by the generals in the field. But it must be done. Otherwise for every Zarqawi killed, two more will be recruited. It's also what Murtha said. The Army has done it's job, we've done all we can do there militarily. What needs to happen now is political. That's what's needed to "win" now. Planning for withdrawl is supposed to be the second thing on the to-do list after how to start the war, unless you're planning to occupy the territory forever. The occupation must end.
Bush needs to get some humility and get it FAST. While I'd like him to eat some crow and admit this was all a big horrible mistake, I will gladly take a dedicated pledge and plan to bring our troops home as soon as possible.
In choosing to provide Congress with heavily redacted intelligence that removed warnings, Bush showed the greatest and potentially the most damaging lack of leadership not seen since the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that lured us into Vietnam.
Why did Bush feel the need to hide all the intelligence misgivings and warnings from Congress and scare everyone to death with ominous talk of mushroom clouds and sarin gas that these warnings were debunking?
Speaking of sarin gas, what about all that anthrax we had here in the US after 9/11? Anyone remember that?
At 9:02 AM,
All_I_Can_Stands said…
You are quite a hair-splitter aren't you? Since you feel the need to tell me what the agenda of my blog should be instead of getting your own, I will state clearly my approach on the wrong-doings of the two parties.
I never claimed to give equal time to each side. Sometimes when a GOP does something provably wrong I will point it out. There are many blogs out there devoted to this, so that is not primarily on my plate. If any GOP does something proveably wrong and it is brought to my attention, I will verify and admit the guilt.
I pointed out the DUI in Texas some time back. I did mean to write something about Cunningham and ran out of time. His taking of bribes is disgusting and despicable. I may have missed the others (Safavian, Scanlon and Ibramoff) you mentioned, but I will follow up. To tell you the truth I do not even know who they are.
As for the 527s, my only comment is that it seems before the ink was dry on the CFR bill that the liberal side of the isle started churning out the 527 loopholes and really got a head start on the GOP. They raised a phenominal amount of money before the GOP woke up and started building their own to counter. I don't know what your point is. I don't claim the 527s are wrong or unethical. They are simply a loop-hole around CFR. If it is legal and ethical, all is fair in politics. Next time the GOP will not be caught sleeping.
"Not always smoothly or successfully, but the intent is good."
I concede I make unprovable comments. In this case and others so do you. I do not believe their intent is good. They want power and since Bush has moved so far to the left on spending and other issues, the war and taxes on the rich are really the only key areas they can make a distinction since they are pretty silent on their other agenda points.
"Bush needs to get some humility and get it FAST"
Get real. Maybe here is a way some key Dems can make themselves useful by setting an example of humility. How about Reid, Pelosi, Kennedy, Durbin, and others. Humility is not compatible with DC politics. It merely is viewed as an invitation to get steamrolled.
Wish I could comment more, but running out the door.
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