http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-sf...0,7483745.story


Read the story, it's very interesting. The idea is to rename a San Francisco Sewage Plant after George W. Bush. My big concern is they rename it after him and well, it might stop working just like the federal government after the man became President.

I believe it is inappropriate.

It would be a waste of money to make the sign and such, so in wasting government money it would be a fitting tribute to Bush.

But a treatment plant is the wrong kind of facility. It takes raw sewage and purifies it, not vice versa.

Bush was a good southern governor but was clearly out of his depth in the big chair.

His legacy should probably be his portrait by a sign that says you must be this tall to ride and Bush is 6" too short but he road anyway.

I think that Bush is a pretty average guy a tad on the dull side to whom it wouldn't occur to be dishonest. He gets used like a power tool by various interests within the GOP and has lots of fairly crappy advisors and a few good ones that don't get as much face times as they should.

He should have had a word with Colin Powell and kept him close. I trust Powell more than all the rest of his cabinet.

Yea, I don't know much how his governorship. pretty much there was blame to go around.

A treatment plant name isn't a high award

.................I think it appropiate to post this here (afterall I'm pretty much disgusted at the bashing done by the left of a sitting President)

John Glenn (DEMOCRAT) said this ----- It should make us all think a little:

There were 39 combat related killings in Iraq in January. In the fair city of Detroit there were 35 murders in the month of January. That's just one American city, about as deadly as the entire war-torn country of Iraq.

When some claim that President Bush shouldn't have started this war, tell them the following:

FDR (DEMOCRAT) led us into World War II. Germany never attacked us; Japan did. From 1941-1945, 450,000 lives were lost ... an average of 112,500 per year.

Truman (DEMOCRAT) finished that war and started one in Korea. North Korea never attacked us. From 1950-1953, 55,000 lives were lost.... an average of 18,334 per year.

John F. Kennedy (DEMOCRAT) started the Vietnam conflict in 1962. Vietnam never attacked us.

Johnson (DEMOCRAT) turned Vietnam into a quagmire. From 1965-1975, 58,000 lives were lost ... an average of 5,800 per year.

Clinton (DEMOCRAT) went to war in Bosnia without UN or French consent. Bosnia never attacked us. He was offered Osama bin Laden's head on a platter three times by Sudan and did nothing. Osama has attacked us on multiple occasions. This one is a fact that makes me mad as hell.

In the years since terrorists attacked us, President Bush has liberated two countries, crushed the Taliban, crippled al-Qaida, put nuclear inspectors in Libya, Iran, and, North Korea without firing a shot, and captured a terrorist who slaughtered 300,000 of his own people. And the Democrats are complaining about how long the war is taking.

But Wait, There's more.

It took less time to take Iraq than it took Janet Reno (DEMOCRAT) to take the Branch Davidian compound. That was a 51-day operation.

We've been looking for evidence for chemical weapons in Iraq for less time than it took Hillary Clinton (DEMOCRAT) to find the Rose law firm billing records.

It took less time for the 3rd Infantry Division and the Marines to destroy the Medina Republican Guard than it took Ted Kennedy to call the police after his Oldsmobile sank at Chappaquiddick.

It took less time to take Iraq than it took to count the votes in Florida!!!

Our Commander-In-Chief is doing a GREAT JOB! The Military morale is high! The biased media hopes we are too ignorant to realize the facts.

But Wait ....There's more!

JOHN GLENN (on the Senate floor - January 26, 2004)

Some people still don't understand why military personnel do what they do for a living. This exchange between Senator John Glenn and Senator Howard Metzenbaum is worth reading. Not only is it a pretty impressive impromptu speech, but it's also a good example of one man's explanation of why men and women in the armed services do what they do for a living.

This IS a typical, though sad, example of what some who have never served think of the military.

Senator Metzenbaum (speaking to Senator Glenn):

'How can you run for Senate when you've never held a real job?'

Senator Glenn (D-Ohio): 'I served 23 years in the United States Marine Corps. I served through two wars. I flew 149 missions. My plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire on 12 different occasions. I was in the space program. It wasn't my check book, Howard; it was my life on the line. It was not a nine-to-five job, where I took time off to take the daily cash receipts to the bank. I ask you to go with me, as I went the other day... to a veteran's hospital and look those men ... with their mangled bodies ... in the eye, and tell THEM they didn't hold a job!



You go with me to the Space Program at NASA and go, as I have gone, to the widows and orphans of Ed White, Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee ... and you look those kids in the eye and tell them that their DAD'S didn't hold a job.

You go with me on Memorial Day and you stand in Arlington National Cemetery, where I have more friends buried than I'd like to remember, and you watch those waving flags. You stand there, and you think about this nation, and you have the gall to tell ME that those people didn't have a job?

What about Metzenbaum? For those who don't remember During W.W.II, Howard Metzenbaum was an attorney representing the Communist Party in the USA.

Now he's a Senator!

If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you are reading it in English thank a Veteran.[size="2"][/size]

Benji, no offense intended, but this is posted in the wrong place. This is the "Gay Left" forum, and that post has sufficient distortions to make it more appropriate in the "Gay Right" forum, not here.

eg.

Osama Bin Laden had not attacked the USA at the time President Clinton was alleged to have been offered his head.

It talks about Germany had never attacked the USA in WWII, but Germany was the ally of the nation that DID attack the USA. It was not possible to declare war on Japan and ignore Germany.

It talks about "<country> had never attacked the USA", but fails to mention that neither Afghanistan nor Iraq had never attacked the USA. Indeed, Osama Bin Laden was a Saudi citizen (I'm not sure, but I think he still is). There's no demonstrable link between 9/11 and Iraq.

Being pedantic, there were no "combat related killings" in Detroit in January (to compare apples to apples). The number of civilian deaths in Iraq in January due to political violence is reported as being 1,971, though the report admits that that is only an estimate and could be widely wrong. Regardless, it is a lot higher than the figure of 39, which only relates to USA casualties, not the total number of casualties. Hence Detroit is a LONG way from being "about as deadly as the entire war-torn country of Iraq."

That is not to say that there isn't a justification for "staying the course" in Iraq. Since Australia is part of the "Coalition of the Willing", I feel I have a right to say that I think we need to fix the mess that we've made. Cutting and running is morally indefensible to me unless someone can show me that that the Iraqi people will be better off if we left before the country had stablised. But that doesn't mean I have to approve of the original decision to go to invade.

..............This thread seem to be fitting as the gist was coming from Senator John Glenn (D)

As to Bin Laden;He has been indicted in United States federal court for his alleged involvement in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, and is on the US Federal Bureau of Investigation's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.



In response to the 1998 United States embassy bombings following the fatwa, Bill Clinton ordered a freeze on assets that could be linked to bin Laden and signed an executive order authorizing Laden's arrest or assassination.

Thanks for the info from 1998. Do you have the dates when Sudan offered Osama Bin Laden to President Clinton, and do you have any details of what strings were attached (if any)? I'm sorry if I sound suspicious, but, as I said, there were sufficient distortions of the truth on such basic things like Germany's involvement with Japan in WWII that I have to be cynical about the accuracy of the information. It sounds like the details have been spun to present a picture that may not match reality.

It's a good point on the information being from Senator John Glenn, but do you have a link that shows this? I did a quick search on that "39 deaths" statement and found lots of references that DON'T refer to Senator John Glenn at all:

More Non-Thoughts About Iraq by Jack Kenny
She writes in beauty..like a what's it.
Truth loses in Iraq war

And this is a great one, because it rebuts the points made. Oh, and it's from 2004 -- not exactly current. The points it was responding to are not exactly the same, but then it's probably not surprising that there have been a few changes in the original document in the last four years:

"Interesting Facts" rebuttal

All in all, unless you can show me where it is officially reported that John Glenn said these things, I think it's a scam -- the details go back too far and have been attributed to too many people for me to assume he really said these things.

..........I guess I got taken in on this one!

So did I, at first. I assumed it was something someone had said that needed to be corrected.

I've also found the following Snope article on the quote. As you can see part of it is an actual transcript of something he did say -- but it was only the last part and dates back to 1970....

It just goes to show that the best lies are still done by mixing in enough truth to make it believable

My comments on the morality of withdrawing from Iraq still stands, though -- we have a moral obligation not to do further harm to the country. I'm not convinced that withdrawal will be better than staying, but I can see that it's not a simple issue to resolve.

I guess it's kind of hard to talk about a sewage plant without bringing up a bunch of sewage.

The tactics of Bush's team has been to muddy the waters and obscure everything so that the truth can never be known. That's why naming a sewage plant after him is a recipe for disaster. As someone noted above, a sewage plant should be about cleaning the sewage, not making it worse.

Colin Powell's honesty and integrity were a shining light at the beginning of the Administration, but he left them many years ago, all but emasculated as Secretary of State. When he left, his shoes were covered in muck and both his honesty and his integrity were legitimately called into question because of the many lies (even if he believed they were true at the time) before the United Nations, the American people, and world as a whole. He wasn't the liar, but he worked for the people who were lying and that has tarnished his otherwise sterling reputation.

Unfortunately that is the legacy all Americans will have to deal with from the Bush Presidency, our honor and our integrity covered in the muck generated by this Presidency.

Saddam Hussien wasn't exactly the world's most popular person ~2002-03. After starting two failed wars of aggression, he was pretty high on everyone's in the region and at home's list of funerals that they would like to attend.

A key to Saddam's power was chemical weapons. During the eighties a rebellion took place during which Saddam gassed thousands of Kurds. After that, no one dared rebel against him because Saddam might wipe out their home village. In 1991-2 TONS of chemical weapons were destroyed but Iraq acted so squirrelly about inspections no one could really be sure if the chemical weapons were all gone. IT WAS IN SADDAM's INTEREST TO LEAVE THIS AN OPEN QUESTION BECAUSE IT KEPT HIS PEOPLE IN LINE.

Who wanted Saddam dead? Iran: after the decade long Iran-Iraq war in which hundreds of thousands of Iranians were killed or mained and for atrocities against their Shia brethren in Southern Iraq.
Kuwait's Royal Family: who was very roughly treated during the 1991 occupation.
Russia: Saddam double crossed the Soviets when they made nice to Washington and the Regan Admin. Later, Iraq defaulted on billions of dollars of arms sales.
the Kurds: who were gassed in the eighties and regulary mistreated by Saddam's regiem.
the Shia: who were targeted for rebelling against Saddam after the first Gulf War.
Syria's ruling family: for unknown reasons, there is real animosity between Saddam and Syria's ruling family. Must be a Baath party thing.
Saudi Arabia: the Saudis have put up with a lot over the years but an unstable Iraq has always been high on their list of headaches. Hussien did invade Saudi territory during his 1991 romp into Kuwait and would have probably gone further if his troops hadn't been badly mauled in the process.
Israel: Iraq was a major player in the Six Day War and supported the ongoing Intifata inside Israel and the occupied territories. In 1983 the Israelis destroyed a French built Iraqi breeder reactor in a daring air raid.
Turkey: The Turks hated Saddam's regime because it kept the Kurdish minority stirred up. This caused a cross border arms smuggling and border unrest.
Egypt: was appalled when Iraq invaded Kuwait after spending years trying to diplomatically resolve the Iran-Iraq War. They sent troops to joint the Coalition during the first Gulf War. Egypt's president was personally insulted because he was trying to negotiate an agreement between Kuwait and Iraq to settle Iraq's debt.
the Gulf States: Saddam made no secret about how he felt about the small, rich kingdoms along the Gulf like Yemen and Qatar. After what happened to Kuwait, members of the Gulf States used their money and influence to make sure Saddam got what was coming to him.
Iraq's Debtors: a number of countries pumped money and arms into Iraq prevent Iraq's collapse and to keep Iran from winning the Iran-Iraq war. Most of them were never paid back. They included France, Germany, Russia, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Qatar and, others.
His Own People: Saddam was not gentle to his own people at home. They were terrified of his secret police and all their plotting to get rid of Saddam ever amounted to were mass graves.

So many people wanted Saddam's head on a pike you really have to wonder: don't you suppose there were people lining up to tell the CIA exactly what they wanted to hear just to get rid of the bastard?

Whose lies were they? Iranian, Kuwaiti, Iraqi opposition, Kurdish, Shia, etc?

Actually, I believe that George W. Bush knows exactly what he is doing, and is using the "Awww, gawrsh, I'm just plain folks who cain't pronounce 'nucular' right" schtick as pure support-getting imagery. Bush took his degree from Yale with a higher GPA than either Gore or Kerry, and Yale is not in the business of handing out degrees that were not earned to the scions of wealthy families.

It's needlessly offensive to go around on the Left calling one's opponents "fascists", but in point of fact the Bush/Cheney mode of governance is (a) statist -- they hold that the more power is concentrated in the "Unitary Executive," the better the government will be able to cope with insidious enemies (whether real or boogeymen used to bolster fear and thus support for them, I don't know), and ( founded in a mutually beneficial alliance of Administration and the largest private-sector corporations, with each hand washing the other. This is in fact the dictionary definition of fascism, from back in Mussolini and Franco's day. I suppose it can be used as a morally neutral descriptor rather than insult, and that a fascistic government might possibly be beneficient. I am, however, very much opposed to finding out in practice.

I find it very irritating to see people carefully nuancing their definitions of "torture," "enemy combatant," and "right to fair trial" to bypass traditional Constitutional guarantees. I'm quite certain that whatever Hamilton, Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Franklin, and their friends might have thought about abortion or gay marriage if they were alive today, they would be aghast at what this country is doing in the name of the freedoms they fought for.

IMO, the fact that the man we supported taking the reins of Iraq is calling for a timetable for withdrawal of American forces means we should be doing just that. The BS about "freeing terrorists from Guantanamo" is precisely that. I think that accused terrorists should have a fair trial, and if convicted of terrorism, be executed post haste as convicted terrorists. I do not think that people taken more or less at random from Iraq and Afghanistan should be held indefinitely at Guantanamo with no right to a trial with effective counsel, not military counsel who have been directed to put up an unconvincing defence by their superior officers.

There are a lot of other rants about the Bush Administration I could make, but I'll stop there.

And I opposed that war, too.

Kennedy didn't "start" it, though. It was a leftover French war, and Eisenhower sent in some military advisors, and Kennedy sent in more; Johnson escalated it into a full-fledged war; and Nixon, while he had a secret plan to end the war, kept it a secret and expanded the war into neighboring countries. One can choose multiple dates for when it started and when it ended.

I am glad to read that we crushed the Taliban. Maybe somebody will email them this piece so they'll know they are crushed.

And for goodness sakes, Germany declared war on us when we gave Japan the finger. We'd have never gotten a declaration of war against Germany through our congress otherwise, even with the sinking of our shipping. Germany screwed themselves with that one. If they'd have held off even a few more months, Britain would have been much worse off, if not capitulated.

Surprisingly, the military counsels have been putting up a very stiff defence, which is why the process is taking so long. The majority of them seem to believe that justice is more important than their careers. Opponents complain that they are the reason for the delay in processing, because they keep appealing the process. The response has been consistently that if the process was fair, they wouldn't be appealing....

I have to say that I've been impressed by the integrity shown by the military lawyers.

As much as I dislike George Bush and his policies, there must have been something he did right. It's easy for the left to quickly dismiss this and say nothing about Bush is right. But maybe there was something lost in all the hullabaloo about Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorists, etc.

...And I did find something. Take a look at this NY Times article. Granted, it was written in January of '08, but the effects of his policy have already been felt around the globe. Okay, and there might be some things that we would disagree with (i.e. the inclusion of abstinence in sexual education as part of the initiative), but, overall, Bush seems to have done something right.

I have never heard of this before, and, I'm sure it was left out of the media because it would put a somewhat positive light on Bush. And, alas, we lefties do not want something like that to be done.

Here's the link: "In Global Battle on AIDS, Bush Creates Legacy"

When I first read the article, I had to do a double take. I mistakenly thought that 1/3 of all of the illegally pledged dollars by President Bush were for abstinence programs, so I did a little research and found these figures.



"1. 55% for the treatment of individuals with HIV/AIDS (and in FYs 2006 through 2008, 75% of this is to be spent on the purchase and distribution of antiretroviral drugs)

"2. 15% for the palliative care of individuals with HIV/AIDS

"3. 20% for HIV/AIDS prevention (of which at least 33% is to be spent on abstinence until marriage programmes)

"4. 10% for helping orphans and vulnerable children (and in FYs 2006 through 2008, at least 50% (of the 10%) is to be provided through non-profit, non-governmental organizations, including faith-based organizations, that implement programmes at the community level)."

So what's the legacy of George W. Bush?? I think it's one of a spend spend spend liberal who has no regard for the constitution or the state of the union once he leaves office and heads straight to the nearest happy hour bar where he can drink the last eight years of his life away.

Calling Bush a liberal is an insult to every liberal in the world. It's just a sign of how bad a president he is that people try to tag him as a liberal. None of his spending programs have really been on liberal issues or in liberal causes. Even his spending on AIDS has been loaded with social conservative programs like Abstinence-only mandatory education. There's nothing liberal about the man.

He IS a neo-conservative, though. His programs of making sure the well-off do not have to fear the taxman while everyone else does, telling you what you can and cannot do in your own homes, listening to everything you say or write, and letting thousands of our soldiers die for his friends' pocketbooks ahve been brilliant successes. The question of whether the United States will survive his Presidency, well at least we've got a real chance with Barack Obama instead of four more years of McSame.

Actually, Dan, Bush is the very definition of what a liberal is.

He's for a huge federal government because: He created a new government agency when we didn't need one, the department of homeland security. He gave senior citizens prescription coverage that they don't deserve using tax payer money. He spent billions on the war when the American people were against it overwhelmingly from the start. He gave billions of dollars in illegal foreign aid to other countries. He wants to wire tap phones. He wants to know what books we check out in the library. He wants to know where we were on the internet. He wants to know who's having sex with who and what position they're doing it in. He wants to make women carry unwanted babies to term. He wants to make sure that same sex couples don't get married. He wants to make sure that marijuana and other drugs stay illegal even though using them and selling them is a victim less "crime." He started the No Child Left behind Act. He didn't veto a single spending bill when his republican butt buddies were running the house and the senate. He wants there to be illegal immigration. He gave the United States the Patriot Act.......

I could go on and on about the ways that George Bush has proven himself to be nothing more than a liberal slime ball, but I'm sure you get the picture.

Also, please define neo-conservative without inserting rhetoric, please. I'd like to know the exact definition.

I doubt there's an exact definition, just like there isn't an exact definition of 'liberal'. It's one of those things where people have different definitions around the edges. They may agree on a number of points, but disagree on some fine detail.

However, here are a few definitions:

The Free Dictionary

Wikipedia

Your Dictionary

Answers.Com

As with most political discussions -- just pick the definition that best suits the argument you want to make

To me, a neo-conservative is one who likes big spending, tends to be extremely conservative socially, and is extremely hawkish. Bush is certainly all of those. Quite frankly, I have been becoming more and more liberal over the last four years, and it's partly because of Bush. It's also because of social issues. I am about as left as can be on social issues. Fiscally I'm more in the middle. I agree with Dan. We have a better chance with Obama. I'm still somewhat reluctant due to his relative inexperience, but he is certainly better than Bush and McCain.

He spent billions on the war when the American people were against it overwhelmingly from the start

Americans were by and large in support of the Iraq war in the beginning, even the more liberal media was supporting it at the outset. It was only after a number of major PR nightmares that the war lost favor in the eyes of the american public. The first one had to do with the selling of the war: the Bush administration made the strategic blunder of using "he's got wmds!" as the major selling point for the war despite their being an extensive reason of more viable reasons, mostly because they lacked the fear factor that WMDs do. When no WMDs were found, support for the war took its first big hit. This was followed by a debate over whether the post invasion situation should be called an occupation. Desperate to keep the positive image of the war as a liberation, media resources were dedicated to that inevitable failure of a mood war. This failure resulted in yet another hit to the support for the war. More importantly though, as part of trying to keep it considered a liberation rather than an occupation and cut costs in the process, not enough troops were committed to instate martial law. Instead they tried to rush Iraq into democracy and the result was the dual problem of the failure to form a stable iraqi government and escalating violence. That esclatating violence protracted over the course of several years, more than anything else, turned popular support from the war... by 2006. Years after the war was started and two years after people had alread had the chance to "fire Bush".

Summary of above: Stating that the American public was overwhelmingly against the Iraq war from the start is an outright lie.

Neo-Conservative really cannot be defined by a particular set of ideas or values, but they are based on what is happening with the conservatives as of late. Temporal evidence shows Neo-conservatives as people, who came out of the Republican re-alignment in the US with a new set of aims that appealed to a segment of voters.

However, not all Neo-Conservatives are pro-religion, pro-big government, anti-gay, and pro-war. The gambit runs a certain length among the Neo-conservatives as well from personal experience, they are not what you would call a truly defined group with established political ideals based on principles. The media likes to point out that Neo-conservatives are a group similar to President Bush, but they are independent and in some cases worse than Pres. Bush or better.

I keep telling people the exact same thing: there is no secret behind politics, it is a game of perception and if you can show the right image at the right time, then you win. Neither party in the US has solved many of the biggest problems we face, they merely delay it until it gets too convoluted to not fix. Tax code reform, welfare reform, health care reform, Social Security reform, business reform, subsidies reform, and a whole assortment of things have not been done.

The Congressmen and Senators in Washington care incredibly about the "FAT" or "BACON" that lines their constituents and districts. The more you bring in, then the more voting people will like you or the important one's with wallets and you can pump out trite advertising commercials about what it means to be a "GOOD LEADER". Then, they might sleep with some hooker or spend your real "Boss' Money" on a few luxuries and parties. The problem with America is not just with the Executive, it is within the very walls of congress and how democracy seems to run today.

As it was true in Athens and Rome, it is true for a lot of the representative governments that we have, money is too important.

About the War in Iraq, I find it no longer an area to leave, but it might not have been an area to go into at first without more troops. A surge was a better move than the original wait and see tactic that the Bush administration had in placed. I think that Bush will leave a legacy of economic malaise, strategic blunders, and political disparity. His administration is weak, because it was strong. A strong executive is not a bad thing, when you know a workable long term strategy. What we have today are problems on top of problems?

Here's the polling data from March 2003 according to Wikipedia

Days before the March 20 invasion, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll found support for the war was related to UN approval. Nearly six in 10 said they were ready for such an invasion "in the next week or two." But that support dropped off if the U.N. backing was not first obtained............support for a war dropped to 47%.

Also

Anti-war demonstrations took place in more than 500 US cities, among them Cambridge (Massachusetts), Berkeley, New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco, Hollywood, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Milwaukee, Portland, Athens (Ohio), Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Oakland, Madison, Eugene, Detroit, and East Lansing. In several cases demonstrators were arrested. The protests reached their peak just before the Iraq War broke out

You should really research what you're basing your arguments on, especially if you plan on calling me a liar.

Someone else stated above that there was no real definition for the word liberal, so I looked it up and here it is according to the New International Websters Pocket Dictionary:

Open to new ideas and concepts; not strict; lavish in gift giving

That was me

There definitions out there for many words, but when dealing with politics, few of those definitions are clear enough that everyone agrees that they fit the situation. After all, I know many people that would be considered conservative who would meet the definition of "Open to new ideas and concepts". I know of people who would be considered liberal who are not lavish in gift giving.

There is a concept of a "liberal" in politics that doesn't seem to fit that definition. For example, many "liberals" are very strict in what they'll accept in areas such as social justice, the environment and in welfare for the poor in society. The definition above doesn't fit them.

The above is a definition of the word "liberal". It is not a definition of the political stance of "liberal". I don't think there is a precise and generally accepted definition of the later.

So are liberals stingy?

That's not what he was trying to say. He meant that not all liberals are "lavish in gift-giving". He is actually being fair, because he is pointing out that a generalization is simply not true. I think Wikipedia sums it up nicely here:


Using a dictionary to decide what liberalism is seems rather short-sited for a number of reasons. First, politics is not easily simplified into short sentences like that. It's a much more complicated system. As for Bush, he does not fit this definition of liberal. He doesn't even come close.

We tend to think of liberals as being very generous with the public's money. But then the officials who call themselves conservative have been even more so in recent decades.

Sure he does.

You should really research what you're basing your arguments on, especially if you plan on calling me a liar

I noticed you neglected to mention how many were unsure or didn't care.... but ignoring that fact for a moment and pretending everybody was sure of their opinion and cared a lot... 53% being against is not an overwhelming majority.

Try choosing your words more carefully before you go on a rant. Overwhelming opposition didn't come along until after all those things I listed.

As for definitions of liberal or conservative....

There are no clear definitions, because liberal and conservative are simply terms serving as a loose grouping together of various political beliefs not all of which need coincide.

a few loose groupings on the liberal side are: pro-abortion, anti-war, anti-death penalty, pro-redistribution of wealth, pro civil rights

a few loose groupings on the conservative side are: anti-abortion, pro-war, pro death penalty, anti- redistribution of wealth, anti civil rights

Why these loose groupings aren't all that useful for labeling individuals:

Looking at abortion: Some people are against it on the principle that once a human life is formed society has a duty to care for it, period, and while the parents may be unable to do so society ought pick up the slack -ie pro-adoption. At the same time there's the matter of we simply don't have the infrastructure to handle such an undertaking and forcing women to carry children to term is simply impractical. Someone with those views end up accepting the "liberal" moniker in practice even though they feel more conservative on the issue.

That same person could be very pro-war, believing that to allow hundreds of millions of people to continue living subject to brutal dictators and radicalist fundamentalist leaders is a national security threat.

Again, that same person could be against the death penalty, firmly believing that a person in prison can be persuaded to reveal information after a time that would help in other investigations in exchange for a slightly more comfortable stay.

This same person can be very much inclined to the low taxation, minimal welfare state model where the individual is free to live their life as productively as they wish and reap the benefits thereof.

And again, this same person can be very much in favor of civil rights for a vast array of minorities who are otherwise treated as second class citizens.
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As I said... labels like liberal and conservative aren't so useful because it is entirely possible to have beliefs to either grouping. My example involved a pretty even split, but there are many for whom they tilt more to one side or the other with exceptions. Declaring someone to be a liberal or a conservative is utterly useless on its face because you don't know what they're predominantly conservative or liberal about.


That said, there is also the matter of changing definitions. Is a conservative someone who strictly stands by the constitution and all its principles? A few hundred years ago a conservative meant loyalty to king and country. A couple hundred years before that it was liberal to support the crown rather than the pope. At this country's foundation, the very concept of independence and democratic governance with rights was entirely liberal. Back then it was more liberal if you favored small, limited government. Nowadays liberals are the big spenders, but as it turns out, so are the conservatives...

The point is, there is no set definition of liberal or conservative. The loose groupings of political beliefs are constantly evolving.

I definitely agree with what you said here, Demetz. I'm willing to concede that calling Bush or anyone a liberal or a conservative in definite terms is a bad idea because it can mean different things to different people.

On the subject of the war, getting 53% might not be an overwhelming majority by some standards, but it's rare that 53% of Americans can be on the same page about an issue. Hell, 53%, or even 50% of Americans don't support either candidate for president. That might not be acceptable criteria for you, but to me it is. We'll just have to agree to disagree on that point.

And to answer Tiger's post a little more clearly, since I only had a few minutes to post when i replied, the reason I labeled Bush as a liberal is because he presided over the largest expansion of the federal government since Lyndon Johnson. Jimmy Carter didn't do that. Neither did Bill Clinton. None of the other republican presidents that came after Johnson did that. It was George Bush, which is why I find it laughable when John McCain and his right wing friends call Barack Obama a tax and spend liberal.

Bush is a Neocon