Get Your Blog Up

“This administration is populated by people who’ve spent their careers bashing government. They’re not just small-government conservatives—they’re Grover Norquist, strangle-it-in-the-bathtub conservatives. It’s a cognitive disconnect for them to be able to do something well in an arena that they have so derided and reviled all these years.”

Senator Hillary Clinton

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Reid comes out firing

It's a start:
The PresidentÂ’s failed record speaks for itself.

Just over four years ago, Osama Bin Laden attacked America and took 3,000 lives. The President said at the time that he wanted Bin Laden "“dead or alive."

But four years later, Bin Laden is still on the loose and continues to threaten America. Meanwhile, the number of terrorist attacks across the world has increased, and we now face the risk that Iraq will become what it was not before the war: a haven and launching pad for international terrorism.

Four years ago, the President declared Iraq, Iran, and North Korea an "axis of evil,"” whose nuclear threats we needed to preemptively strike.

But four years... 23 hundred American lives... and more than 250 billion dollars later, we have found that Iraq had no nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the problem of Iran has been outsourced to Europeans, and North KoreaÂ’s nuclear weapons program has likely quadrupled.

Four years ago, the President said in his State of the Union: "America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity" which include the "the rule of law."

But four years later, we've heard that the President has ignored the rule of law in order to spy on Americans. We've also found that the White House given the green light to torture, even though it violated our laws and made our troops less safe.

After reviewing the Republican record, I know why Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove want to play politics with national security in 2006 instead of having an honest debate about who can keep Americans safe. It's because this is a debate Republicans cannot win.

Go read the whole thing, as they say.

And it's only a good start, because the predictable comeback will be, "What will Democrats do differently?" That's an answer that will need to be addressed soon.

Here's a suggestion/question: What if Democrats pledged, in conjuction with troop withdrawal from Iraq, a full military campaign to capture Osama? Assuming political differences could be hammered out with Pakistan and such, would it help boost their standing in the public eyes?