Tell Bush We Want More Than One Debate!

There is some very alarming news all coming from the new 9/20/04 issue of Newsweek that is coming out.
It is reported that Bush is now wanting to have only ONE DEBATE over the issues with John Kerry as opposed to the three debates proposed by the Debate Commission and the weekly debates proposed by John Kerry: "President Bush's team prefers only one face-off instead of the three that have been scheduled."Below that there are two articles. The first one is about Iraq where it says "It's Worse Than You Think... As Americans debate Vietnam, the U.S. death toll tops 1,000 in Iraq. And the insurgents are still getting stronger." The second article is called "Laid Off, and Working Harder Than Ever."These issues not only require but demand at the very least three head to head debates before the American people and especially the Town Hall format debate where the American people can ask both Bush and Kerry questions about their records and future agendas that will directly affect them and how they will vote!
Let's continue in our efforts to make many media contacts to pressure Bush into debating and answering directly to the American people like he should and also continue to flood the Bush campaign with calls, e mails, faxes, and letters pressuring Bush to seriously debate at:
Mailing Address:BUSH-CHENEY '04, Inc.P.O. BOX 10648 Arlington, VA 22210
Phone Numbers:Phone: 703.647.2700 Fax: 703.647.2993
Email Addresses:General Information: BushCheney04@GeorgeWBush.com
As you read in the current issue of Newsweek, too much is on the line right now for Bush to be refusing any debates and whether or not Bush does decide to debate like he should may depend on pressure and we all have the power to apply that pressure to him right now!Do you want to see Bush get away with having only one debate as it says below? Do you want to see Bush get out of doing the Town Hall forum debate where he will have to directly answer to the American people?Right now is the best and possibly ONLY TIME to focus our efforts into making Bush seriously debate the urgent issues below which will affect us, this country, and the whole world for many years to come!

The Danger of Distractions
The first responsibility of government is to keep us safe, yet we talk more about flip-flops and Halliburton than missing nuclear material
By Jonathan AlterNewsweekSept. 20 issue -
Brace yourself for the most tiresome part of the campaign the dreaded "debate over debates." President Bush's team prefers only one face-off instead of the three that have been scheduled. But if John Kerry who wants as many debates as possible argues the point too publicly, he'll walk right into another Bush trap. Bush has two reasons for debating debates: First, to lower expectations for his own performance, as he did brilliantly in 2000. The Bush crowd has gone so far as to claim that Kerry is the "Cicero" of debaters "the very best in modern political history." If that sinks in with the help of Kerry charging that Bush is afraid to debate then all Bush has to do is show up and do reasonably well (as he has done in every debate since he entered politics) and he'll beat the expectations spread and look like the winner.But there's a second reason Bush wants to spend valuable time debating debates. It runs down the clock on discussion of important stuff, like his record in office. The debate over debates is a classic "campaign issue" as opposed to a "real issue." Campaign issues have little to do with how a candidate would perform as president; they are manufactured by the campaigns to score points. The media, particularly cable TV (which drives so much of the agenda nowadays), make it worse by favoring hot-button stories over complex, hard-to-illustrate real problems that the next president can actually work on.Does anyone beyond the rankest partisans seriously believe that either Kerry or Bush deserves to lose because of something that happened more than 30 years ago? In a more peaceful election year, perhaps we could afford to obsess over whether Kerry bled enough for his Purple Hearts or Bush shirked his National Guard duty. But this is not such an election. We have a bumper crop of real issues this year. In fact, we have so many things to think about that it's easy to lose sight of the most important among them. Everyone has different priorities, but the first responsibility of government is to keep us from being blown up, especially in a world where a suitcase nuclear weapon could kill not 3,000 but 300,000 or more. "Safety" and "security" have had quite a rhetorical workout this year, but more as abstractions than real issues. There's a strange disconnect at work when we talk more about flip-flops and Halliburton than border patrols and missing nuclear material.So for my money, the top three real issues are these, all related to staying alive: Who can best protect us from nuclear terrorism? Who can best provide effective yet affordable homeland security? Has the Iraq war made us safer or less safe from the Qaeda threat? Anyone serious about answering these questions should read "Nuclear Terrorism" by Graham Allison, "America the Vulnerable" by Stephen Flynn and "The Lost Year," an article in this month's Atlantic by James Fallows that explores how Bush's decisions in 2002 to go to war in Iraq took our eye off the ball.Allison's scary book argues that if nothing changes, a nuclear attack is "inevitable." Cold-war-style deterrence doesn't work; there's no return address. Yet the tone is also hopeful. With the right nonproliferation policies in place, this threat can be greatly reduced. Unfortunately, they aren't in place. Despite some recent advances, especially in Libya, terrorists still have access to nuclear materials from Iran, North Korea and Pakistan. Allison shows mild-mannered Republican Richard Lugar chastising Bush officials this year for failing to move aggressively to secure loose nukes in the former Soviet Union. This go-slow approach after 9/11 is almost beyond belief, but it's true. Kerry gave a speech about it that received a fraction the publicity granted to typewriter fonts from 1972.Homeland security is one of those issues that's in the news a lot but also curiously detached from the campaign. Flynn, a veteran of the George H. W. Bush administration, delivers a blistering critique of how this President Bush has repeatedly failed to take common-sense and comparatively inexpensive steps to protect us. We see the head of one of the largest shipping-container companies in the world visiting Washington to offer his help on cargo security. He's given the runaround by well-meaning officials who aren't close to having their act together.Fallows's report is particularly damning of Bush. The impartial counterterrorism specialists he consulted all agreed that the Iraq war has increased rather than decreased the threat to the United States. He explains how Bush squandered the global support necessary to crush the terrorists, quoting an ambassador as saying "we should have focused like a laser on bin Laden and taken down Al Qaeda, breaking crockery in the neighborhood if necessary." If John Kerry has any moxie, all of these real issues will soon become potent campaign issues as well. Then maybe we'll start debating the right subjects for a change.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

posted by Joshua P. Angell  @ 13.9.04

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