A Democrat-Republican Conspiracy to give Republicans the Presidency
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I have been a life-long Democrat because what I have heard the Republicans say and seen them do have offended me most of my life. Yet, the Democrats are showing themselves as very pitiful indeed. It is as if they are wimps and afraid to speak up in order to win the presidency. In fact, it seems that this year, there in no presidency race at all on the part of the Democrats. Instead, it seems as if there is a race to make sure George W. Bush is elected president this time by a majority of voters.

If I were given to conspiracy theories, I could easily see those famous dots that the government is always asking us to connect surely connecting the Democrats and Republicans in a secretly agreed to pact that insures Bush will stay in office another four more years.

In this campaign, Kerry has behaved wimpishly as a campaigner for the presidency. He is lethargic and dispassionate in his speeches, and it is as if he is afraid to attack Bush, as incompetent and vulnerable as he is on an entire panoply of issues. Why? The Republicans have not been hesitant to attack Kerry on everything, even issues they are contradictory and totally weak on. And the Kerry Campaign has not exploited their weaknesses at all. Why?

During the Republican convention, a talk show had the Democrat Party's rapid response person on--the person the campaign has designated to quickly counter all attacks as soon as they are made against Kerry. That person was asked about Zell Miller, Dick Cheney, and the host of those who mercilessly attacked Kerry, and that person seemed as if he were in s-l-o-w motion; when his answers did come, they were feeble and flawed and frighteningly disappointing! How can the Democrats ever hope to win the hearts and minds of America with dispassionate John Kerry talking as if he is on a college lecture circuit instead of a campaign trail and have a Rapid Response person who seems so retarded in his responses to make them no responses at all?

This system makes one wonder whether the Democrats have somehow agreed somewhere in secret or merely conceded that the presidency would go to Bush. What is this pattern that we are looking at? First Bush gets into office without a majority of the vote and an unfair Florida election process; now he is kept in office by the Democratic leadership acquiescing to the Republicans' desire to stay in office.

America sees that John Kerry is as passionate and an arousing speaker as was Al Gore. And we all know by now how arousing that was. Who taught these men to speak in public? Whoever that person is should be not just fired, but shot! [In these scary times, I need to say that the statement above is just hyperbole, an overstatement of what I actually mean. Firing is enough.]

Last time the Democrats had Al Gore and Tipper Gore who decided to run the campaign their way. They wanted a clean, moral election--no doubt a Tipper Gore concoction for winning the presidency. So they refused to allow the master politician at this game, Bill Clinton, to go it with them. Whatever made them think that politics is clean and fair and moral? Nothing in American history teaches such an abdurdity. It is a pipe dream. Politics is dirty, and the greater the price, the greater the dirt. Therefore, presidential politics is as dirty and deadly as it comes. Tipper Gore, with her moral majority leanings, no doubt whispered in Al's ear that Clinton's reputation, because of Monica Lewinski, was far too soiled for her delicate tastes. And they suffered defeat, observing lying vanities and so they forsook their own mercies.

Now in 2004, John Kerry comes along mouthing that he is running for the president of these United States but seeming, sounding, and looking like Tipper and Al Gore, losers in their own right because they did not understand the game they were in and the rules that applied. Howard Dean was simply right: Politicians have to lie a little bit to get elected. Bush, however, has lied a big bit, gotten killed 1,000 American soldiers and wounded from 6,000 to 15,000 young American soldiers needlessly. And he has caused to be killed untold thousands of innocent Iraqis, but as one Pentagon official callously said about these dead Iraqis this president has indirectly killed through his unwise and internationally illegal actions, "They don't count!"

I wonder what makes John Kerry think he can talk to the vast majority of Americans as if they are educated intellectuals? They are not. There are roughly 40-45% of this nation's people who are functionally illiterate. Often these consider themselves patriotic above the rest, and they will vote each time there is an election. That group needs to be reached, and they are not going to be reached by appealing to them as if they are intellectuals. The intellectuals will automatically vote for Kerry, for they cannot imagine themselves being represented by someone as unsophisticated and crude as Bush and Cheney.

Kerry's appeal should be toward that 40-45% who are uneducated and functionally illiterate. They think that the person who talks the loudest, who says the meanest things, who talks a macho talk is in fact the strong leader they want--were Stalin running, they would vote for him because he would seem the strongest, and they believe in strong actions rather than weighing intellectually the options. Such foolshness of intellectuals!

Kerry has behaved as if this is a kind and gentleman nation. That is only a wish into the wind and campaign rhetoric that should not be believed. Kerry has behaved as if negative attack ads are not what America wants. That too is only campaign rhetoric that should not be believed; those negative ads have worked on him, and they worked for him when he wanted to defeat Howard Dean. Why won't they work now? Is there some tacit agreement to give away the presidency? When America sees the Bush Campaign attacking Kerry viciously and Kerry is out playing the gentleman politician, they think that Kerry is weak and has something to hide.

We all know that the Republicans have refined the art of human destruction to win; they will kill innocent individuals and assassinate the character of their opponents and all those around them in their effort to win. This is a known quantity of their political modus operandi; therefore, it is assumed that anyone who goes up against the Republicans to win MUST engage in the same strategies they use. But as things stand, it seems as if Kerry has not gotten the concept. It also seems as if only George W. Bush is campaigning for the presidency. Kerry seems to have lost steam and lost himself windsurfing and doing other cute and chic things of the rich who have no relations with the average Joe.

Although Bush was a C-student, and Kerry was not, they both went to Princeton. Yet we expect that Kerry would understand the dirtiness of politics, but he does not seem to concern himself for winning this race for the presidency. Or it could be that there is a secret agreement between the Republicans and the Democrats to let Bush have another four years to kill and wound thousands of American boys and girls and more innocent Iraqis who do, in fact, matter to some of us?

Iraq is a needless war of machismo where our great muscle men sit back in their safe surroundings with their loved ones so near and talk, plan, and implement war, as their poor and middle class proxies fight it and die for them. This is done by men who, when it was their time to go, got out of serving in harms way. But now they have become macho men, hawks in their own right, and they mirror the characteristics of most Washington nenocon hawks--they will fight the most aggressive war as long as their loved ones are not in harms way and they don't have to fight. Had the Bush daughters or the Cheney daughters been in the military, this war would have never been conceived in the minds of these two hawks.

The present administration is an extremist administration, Congress is asleep, and this Kerry Campaign is a soft and dignified campaign that does not understand its audience. Their message must match their audience to whom they deliver it. Instead, Kerry preaches to this audience as he would preach to the choir, us who will vote for anyone except Bush--even though the Democrats are betraying our trust.

There is still another problem for the Democrats, and it is this: after observing Kerry's poor representation of who w, the Democrats, are, that anybody but Bush crowd may be peeled off and decide that since the Republicans and Democrats have conspired to give Bush four more years anyway, they may want to vote their consciences and vote Green or start a new party.

Things are not going well for the Democrats, and that is a factor of their leadership's call. []

Frank A. Jones