Hi people, I am Ruben Krasnopolsky, a newcomer to the list. Or rather, a returnee after a *very* long absence...
I'm sending my first message in the middle of a thread, where I saw a position similar to mine a few weeks ago. I respect it, and I *think* I understand where Gautam Mukunda is coming from with his message. Let's see the points where I disagree, though. They are important. Gautam Mukunda wrote: >D. Brin, don't be absurd. _The American Conservative_ >is basically a platform for the frankly racist, >xenophobic conservatism of Patrick Buchanan. Perhaps that much is true: at least Patrick Buchanan has a big presence there, and they propose quite ugly bigotted ideas, some ugly enough to find no place in the practice of the current Republican mainstream. In that case, Brin was to some extent wrong when he said this was a "core publication" of American conservatives. It is a more or less fringe publication of that group. No big deal. Too minor a point to matter. In the current context, it is a detail. Here's the point that matters here, said in Gautam Mukunda's own words: >Many conservatives (myself included) are extremely unhappy with >George Bush, certainly. So you do agreee with David Brin on the major point: That many conservatives are unhappy with Bush, and some probably unhappy enough to plan voting against him this time. Your better knowledge of the conservative movement has apparently showed us that Brin has used a disputable example. That's useful and productive to know. But it does not break Brin's main contention. So, let's go ahead one step, and try to be even more productive here. You say that many conservatives are indeed unhappy. And given us *one* example. I think we on the mailing list would like to read of others, and of the reasons of their discontent. Maybe some of them are unhappy enough with Bush to vote for Kerry as a better choice. As a conservative yourself, and one discontented with Bush, very probably you can get that information faster and more accurately than most of us. >Many conservatives (myself included) are extremely unhappy with George Bush, >certainly. >Very few if any are doing anything but supporting him, given the alternative. But, is the alternative so bad? Or even, is it bad at all? The candidate opposing Bush this time is not Dean - it is Kerry Here a little of pro-Kerry arguments - enough of anti-Bush: Kerry has *said* he wants to fight the war against terrorists. He has already *voted* in Senate for that, and has never retracted that word ever since. Kerry has another important point in common with the unhappy conservatives such as you: Kerry at first voted for the actions in Iraq. At the time he trusted that Bush's government could be responsible enough to do it *with* a good plan of what to do once the military action was over. But such trust was misplaced. Now we know Bush had no such good plan. Here I cite from Kerry's statement before the war started: "...If in the end we are at war, we will have an obligation, ultimately, to the Iraqi people with whom we are not at war. This is a war against a regime, mostly one man. So other nations in the region and all of us will need to help create an Iraq that is a place and a force for stability and openness in the region. That effort is going to be long term, costly, and not without difficulty, given Iraq's ethnic and religious divisions and history of domestic turbulence." I expect this citation has not broken the context; you can check it for yourself at the website <http://www.independentsforkerry.org/uploads/media/kerry-iraq.html> (Please complain if you think I have been unfair here.) It is evident here that even at that very early time, Kerry understood the political realities of an Iraq after the eventual defeat of Saddam far better than Bush and his people did. Kerry is now consistent with his previous statement. Kerry does *not* propose to get away from Iraq all too quickly. Ideally, he'd hope to make as good as still possible on the needs he had stated even before the war. Of course, the mess left there by Saddam, by Bush's administration mishandling, and now by the Saudi-backed terrorists, all that mess well may be at the end too much to fulfill all of those needs completely. But there can't be any other way for Kerry now. Kerry always had at least a clue about the difficulty of the job, while Bush still today tries to show a picture that is far too optimistic. So, those many unhappy conservatives mentioned by Gautam Mukunda: What should they do now? Stubbornly stay on the wrong path? Is that a *virtue* ? The errors of yesterday must be followed to the deep end, no matter what? Of course not. Kerry did the right thing there, I think. He is not a bad alternative. That's not to say there are not some major risks with Kerry. One example: Although Kerry himself has promised to fight the war against terrorism, some other leading Democratic leaders have minimized the issue. Those leaders might perhaps have some influence in his eventual government With good luck, people like us will have on that day the difficult duty of taking care about these such major risks. With good luck I say, because Bush's leadership has already shown some worse problems than that - and they are not hypothetical. Ruben _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
