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Originally Posted by AzTeK
Didn't know those numbers, but still, look at it this way. I strongly believe that the invasion of Iraq was absolutely wrong to begin with, but it all would have been a minor issue if it was done right form the start. The Bush administ fucked up from the getgo, and now we have the biggest mess the US has been in since Vietnam. I think McCain would have had the experience to do it differently. He might have gone to Iraq, but it wouldn't have ended like this. It's mere speculation, but that's how I see it. And thus, I think McCain will also improove the current situation in Iraq - in a different manner than I would like to see (withdrawal), but better than nothing.
McCain supported the Bush tax cuts - so do I. they have had a measurable positive impact on the economy and I believe they were the right thing to do to jumpstart the economy after the 2001 economic turmoils.
Another important aspect for me is the environmental policy - and the contrast doesn't get much starker than Bush vs. McCain.
I can't think of any other stuff that Bush passed through atm that McCain supported, I'd love it if you could enlighten me with some examples though so I can see where you'r coming from. Does McCain support the Patriot Act?
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Hi Aztek,
I'm short on time but wanted to go ahead and reply to your post before the day was over, sorry if this reply seems a little hasty.
For starters, McCain has changed his tune on Iraq. Although he was one of the first prominent people to criticize the number of our troops as insufficient, in the early stages of the war he supported Rumsfeld's light troop numbers:
""Our technology, particularly air-to-ground technology, is vastly improved. I don't think you're going to have to see the scale of numbers of troops that we saw, nor the length of the buildup, obviously, that we had back in 1991."
-on CNN's Larry King on Dec. 9, 2002
"But the fact is, I think we could go in with much smaller numbers than we had to do in the past. But any military man worth his salt is going to have to prepare for any contingency, but I don't believe it's going to be nearly the size and scope that it was in 1991."
John McCain, September 15, 2002.
"I think the victory will be rapid, within about three weeks."
John McCain, January 28, 2003.
And of course McCain was a strong advocate of attacking Iraq before Bush had even started :
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n 1998, he was among the co-sponsors of the Iraq Liberation Act. The law set "regime change" in Baghdad as U.S. policy and mandated support to opposition groups seeking to overthrow the dictator.
McCain said that by 1998 U.N. sanctions against Iraq were "breaking down," and Saddam had defied numerous Security Council resolutions. "Every intelligence agency in the world believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction," he added. "The policy was not successful."
McCain cited the same reasoning when asked why he and nine other Congressional leaders urged President Bush in a letter dated Dec. 6, 2001, to next target Iraq since the Taliban regime had collapsed in Afghanistan.
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Although McCain had access to the full 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, he did not read it, he only read its summary. The full report had a number of caveats about Iraq's suspected WMD, but the summary did not. In light of McCain's performance as a student, Im not surprised he didn't read it - McCain graduated almost at the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy, 894th out of 899 students. (Once you get past his surface image, he's a lot like Bush in some ways:a big partyer in his youth, an underachiever who got by due to his dad and granddad being very powerful in the government.McCain lost 4 planes due to accidents while "hot-dogging" before he went to Nam, and if not for the fact that his dad was a 4 star admiral, he would've been drubbed out as a pilot before then).
Lately McCain has repeatedly mistakenly claimed that Al Qaeda is in Iran...and of course he famously sang "Bomb Iran" at one of his appearances. So I think that if he were to get elected, the neocon foreign policy would would continue and Iran would be the next US target.
As far as the "Patriot" act, yes, he voted for it, and voted for its extension, voted NO on preserving habeus corpus for Guantanamo detainees, voted NO on requiring CIA reports on detainees & interrogation methods, and recently voted NO on the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 (which would've required the CIA to abide by the standards of the Army Field Manual which bans waterboarding).
As for the tax cuts, they helped the top 5 percent of the economic latter immensely, particularly the top one percent. The "trickle down" has not helped the middle class and the poor that much though....wehn adjusted for inflation, wages have stagnated for the middle class, and savings are lower than ever. If Bush had geared the tax cuts more so that the middle class would have benefitted from them, it would've had a much more positive effect on the US' economic growth.
Read
Conservative Rhetoric on Tax Cuts Does Not Match Economic Reality for more details on this.