Polls: The devil really is in the details
Kerry won the debate. Kerry gained in the polls. But look at the details, as described here. Particularly this one:
Forty-one percent of registered voters said they had confidence in Mr. Kerry's ability to deal wisely with an international crisis, up from 32 percent before the debate. Thirty-nine percent said they had a lot of confidence that Mr. Kerry would make the right decisions when it came to protecting against a terrorist attack, up 13 percentage points.
On both scores, however, Mr. Kerry still trailed Mr. Bush. Fifty-one percent of voters said they had confidence in Mr. Bush's ability to deal with an international crisis, unchanged from before the debate, and 52 percent said they had a lot of confidence in his ability to protect against a terrorist attack, up slightly from 50 percent last month.
In brief, despite the mess in Iraq, despite all the phony posturing and dodging the Vietnam war, people still think this clown can protect us better. They have no idea how absolutely vulnerable he has left us to a nuclear attack, for example.
He spends more in Iraq in a single month than we spend on homeland security in a year. Thus only 2 per cent of the cargo containers that enter the country each day are checked by authorities. And this from the folks who love to say how we "have to be right 100% of the time" to stymie the terrorists. A cargo container is the simplest way to get a nuclear device into this country and the door is wide open. And make n mistake about it - these guys are trying to buy nuclear devices and there is unsecured nuclear material all over the world - just about everywhere except Iraq.
Not to mention that he has 90% of our Army tied up in an unecessarily war, he's increased our dependence on foreign oil (thus we kiss the asses of Saudi Arabian leaders while that country does far more to promote terrorism than Saddam Hussein could ever dream of having done); we virtually ignore the threats presented by North Korea and Iran; and we've made so many new enemies - or lost so many friends - that it is next to impossible to bring diplomatic pressure to bear on the bad guys and the absolutely crucial sharing of spy and international police information is diminished. Gosh, it really makes me feel safe to have a mini-John Wayne as president.
George Bush is a security disaster. He repeatedly ignored warnings that could have prevented 9/11 and he is now ignoring dire warnings that could prevent an attack that would make 9/11 look like a picnic. The World Trade Center was not "ground zero" folks. It wasn't even close to being ground zero. To call it so is a total abortion of the term itself. "Ground zero" is the devastation at the center of a nuclear attack and that devastation is incredible, even for a small bomb. For example: Within 1/1000th of a second, a fireball would form, enveloping downtown and reaching out for two miles in every direction from the point where the bomb went off. . . Temperatures would rise to 20 million degrees Fahrenheit, and everything--buildings, trees, cars, and people--would be vaporized. "
And that only the beginning of the impact. So we kid ourselves dangerously when we call the World Trade Center site "ground zero." There are far, far worse things that can happen and George Bush is making the fact that they might happen a reality. Tough talk and strutting up to the podium won;t save us. Some common sense might. But the next decade or more are going to be at least as dangerous, if not more so, than the first decade or two of the Cold War.
