Bush's Issues

• Spending. Bush has so many new government programs, Ted Kennedy can't keep up with them all. $1.5B to shore up marriage an an experimental adventure to give "problem solving skills" to poor couples who argue -- when really what they need is jobs and healthcare, so that they don't have something to argue about; $400B adventure to Mars -- to do what? Who in this country is demanding to go to Mars? Sure, we could do it -- but when we do, who will care? In the meantime, we spend $150B to go find WMD in Iraq which aren't even there, and you're saying "we didn't know about it" -- well, we did, Bush just didn't know we didn't know about it, while everyone else in the world did.
  
• No WMD in Iraq: David Kay's recent statements
  
• Valerie Plame: the grand jury is hearing testimony, which means we can probably expect an indictment to be handed down later this spring. Nothing like a good old-fashioned scandal in the White House to bring the troops down. And here's the kicker: Bush is big on loyalty -- so either Karl Rove and Cheney (oops, I mean, whoever it is who gets indicted) either resign and move out, and Bush loses is loyalty marks, or they stay in and the administration takes collateral damage as the grand jury fires its shots. The fact that the administration, by the way, played politics with the safety of one of our CIA officers and every contact she ever met, combined with their ignoring CIA evaluations of WMD in Iraq, shows that Bush Jr. thinks the organization his Dad was the head of in the 70's is nothing more than a tool for his political ends.
  
• Deficit deficit deficit. $850 billion in debt so far? Really? That's a lot of debt. And it's just going to get worse you say? When is it going to drive up interest rates, which in turn causes drops in that investment to re-start the business cycle, thus depressing stock prices, and sending the entire nation's 401Ks into the sewer.
  
• Values. Look at all these promises Bush made before the first election. Remember the faith-based initiative? He hired some professor from Penn State for 6 months, who ended up quitting in disgust, and nothing since? A bunch of empty promises for values in the White House. We can do much, much better.
  
• Safety from terrorism. Bush's vision of the future is either a nation in which we are all in permanent lockdown in our individual cells, or in which bombs are constantly going off in our local markets and football games. I say, we can offer a vision of neither -- when American's don't have a choice of either living in fear, or being locked into cells, never to come out. The US has much to be proud of, and it's time that we won the ideological war against terrorism: that our way -- individual liberty, financial opportunity -- is the choice they should come for, and that every government should offer its citizens these choices, at a minimum. And when they do not, we should recognize that governments who suppress their citizens and point to us as a boogey man are packing the nails into bombs which kill our children, and should be dealt with severely.