Dear Sarah, Actually my remark about "joining the Republican party" was directed at all of the "love it or leave it" crowd around here, but yes, it was prompted by your questioning of Aurel's reason for being here and his sympathy for 9/11 victims. Glad to hear of your political affiliation, I guess, but I have nothing against anyone's heartfelt beliefs if they respect other's beliefs. My problem would be w/ the (usually illiterate) responses here to anyone from another country who does not buy the Bush party line at the moment. This
is an international BBS, let me remind everyone. Your posts are very polite and I do not lump you together w/ them.
As to the issue of Bush's competency, I do think that it is relevant. We never get to see what really goes on behind the scenes, but I seriously doubt that he can hold his own in policy arguments w/ much better informed members of his own team. It goes to the question of who is really leading us, the guy who was elected, (I'm not even going to touch that one), or some extremely powerful un-elected officials that he has "surrounded himself with". Certainly all good leaders hire a substantial brain trust to manage government, but the assumption in our system is that the President is truly in charge of all of them. By all accounts, before becoming President GW Bush was marked by an almost complete lack of intellectual curiousity about
anything , much less complicated headache causing subjects like the history of recent world politics. He did compensate by being extremely lazy, though, working sometimes only a couple of hours a day while governing Texas.
It's a return of Reagan symptom, where the President is basically just a vesel for the interests of other powerful people, and can be easily convinced to believe their arguments. He is simply no match for them, intellectually speaking. Do you not consider that a problem, Jurgen?
