How stupid do they think we are?

actually, really stupid, and with good reason. it worked in 2000, 2002 & 2004; why not 2006? the american public is notorious for having a very short attention span, and not being very bright, on average. were that not true, kerry would be in the white house, and we'd have a democratic party majority congress. clearly, that's not the case.

i believe it was p.t. barnum who supposedly said "never underestimate the stupidity of the american public." if he didn't say it, he should have! i am convinced, were i to run for office in my small, southern city, if i claimed that my opponent was a "known, flagrant heterosexual!", i would win in a landslide.

i too saw the "daisy" ad the one and only time it ran as a paid, political ad. i was almost 9 years old, the country was still in shock from president kennedy's assassination, and my dad's colleagues were being sent to this place called vietnam. some had already returned, in coffins and hospital wards. that's when quantico still had a real hospital.

it was also not too long after the "cuban missile crisis" had scared the crap out of all of us, especially those, like me, who were sitting on ground zero. suffice it to say, between the original airing, and the subsequent re-airing, as part of the evening news, it was a wildly successful ad.

two main differences, between now and then:

1. johnson was dealing with an inherited conflict, as was kennedy. not so bush and the repubs, iraq is pretty much their baby.

2. johnson actively sought out advice on the strategy to pursue. unfortunately, he got poor advice, from both his civilian and military advisors. macnamara may have known how to run a car company, but he very clearly didn't know di*ck about running a guerilla war. again, bush and company seem to be actively engaged in avoiding any advice that might conflict with their preconceived notions of how iraq is going to play out.

even though President Bush ignored the direct bin Laden threat before 9/11

Could you provide a link that shows this?

You write:

Clinton backed off when the GOP yelled "politics."  So who is responsible for bin Laden not being killed in 1998?  The GOP, not Clinton.  How stupid do they think we are?

I have always thougth the Repubs were wrong in their attacks on this, but this proves that Clinton, unlike Bush, was incapable of leading or knowingly doing anything unpopular. He never led, he just polled. In this case his lack of action let OBL live. Remember. Clinton, not the GOP, was President.

Now you can keep yelling about 9/11 and being on Bush's watch, etc.... But it proves nothing. Shall I yell about WTC1 in 1993???? I seem to remember that Clinton was Pres, and never even went to the site. Guess it was big on his radar, right??

As for the issues you raise, I would agree that they all need changing. Of course the port defense flap was about ownership, not being in charge of security. The US was, is and would have been. Guess the Left doesn't trust Arabs to manage companies. In the meantime we have po'd another country... I thought the Left was against that.

And what difference does "inherited" make? Conflict is conflict. The ad was an attempt to show that Goldwater would start a nuclear war. Scared Johnson into office and gave Johnson the chance to screw up Vietnam.

In the meantime the Left continues to try and scare us over loss of rights while continuing to praise those who leak national defense secrets..

Of course sometimes one of them sees his error. And in admitting it, proves that he is too biased to have the job he has!

As for advice, would you like a re-run of all the statements by the Demos in 2002?? Here's a sample.

"The threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real, but as I said, it is not new. It has been with us since the end of that war, and particularly in the last 4 years we know after Operation Desert Fox failed to force him to reaccept them, that he has continued to build those weapons. He has had a free hand for 4 years to reconstitute these weapons, allowing the world, during the interval, to lose the focus we had on weapons of mass destruction and the issue of proliferation." -- John Kerry, October 9, 2002

If the Demos would quit trying to use the war as a political issue, and demonstrate that want to work as a team on foreign policy, perhaps they could be taken seriously.