Your Reactions to the First Debate

[Bosh]

Aaaaaah, finally www.factcheck.org has an article up. Good look at BS that both participants of the debate spewed. I love this website its great to have a source that will call BS BS in a media climate that increasingly just presents both sides and doesn't bother to do any real digging:

http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=271

[Gangerolf]

[Gangerolf]

Kerry was the obvious winner. Bush was on the defence most of the time and he kept repeating himself.

[Swissy]

kerry may have been better, but there was no home run on his end or fumble on Bush's. There will be a two point bounce which the press will go nuts over. Overall, this only really helped negate some of the Bush campaigns portrayal of Kerry as being flip flopper. But, now the Kerry campaign must hold this message until the end, stray away from that and it will put the public image of Kerry the Flipper into cement.

And, Kerry didn't win. If you had seen his debates with Weld you can only call this a push. But the format agreed upon gave Kerry no chance to work his magic to the same dgree. Basically the Bush campaign got a set up that may have allowed Kerry to score a minor win, but not bury Bush as he did to Weld in the senatorial debates.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by DRoseDARs
Is it just me or did both candidates and the moderator totally give up on the little lights after like the first 15 minutes? Seemed like they were just blinking on and off in a loose pattern based on who was talking over them and whether the moderator could be arsed to press the buttons in the first place.

Everyone seemed to have enough mutual respect (debaters and moderator) that they just proceded naturally. If anything there were way more short answers than long.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Berzerker

They do add up, Kerry wanted the President to have the authority to go to war as leverage over Saddam but also wanted the President to try and avoid the war by following certain steps first.

Kerry's main problem was that Bush did not put a coalition together on the scale of his father's coalition. Kerry has a lot of praise for Bush I.

But, even though this criticism is somewhat valid in that Bush might have been able to obtain a larger coalition by caving to French demands, this position is not consistent with the other Kerry position that Iraq was a colossal mistake and a diversion from the real war on terror in Iraq... the wrong war, at the wrong time and in the wrong place. That is pure Deanism and is wholly inconsistent with Kerry's "nuanced" first position on Iraq.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Sikander


I'm surprised that Bush didn't step up and defend himself on this one. Well not surprised really, as he was so disorganized. But he should have defended himself here.

There were some serious limitations to our ability to project force into Tora Bora at that time. Firstly, logistics. We had very quickly elbowed our way into Afghanistan with very limited forces at that point. Most of the ground forces that put the Taliban to the run were Afghanis. We supplied air power, money and command and control via our Special Forces, but we didn't have ground forces capable of securing that area available in Afghanistan, and even if we had had them there, we would not have been able to lift them to, and supply them in that area.

Secondly, we just plain didn't have many troops capable of operating effectively at the altitude of the Tora Bora complex. Even the 10th Mountain isn't so much of a real mountain division as it is a glorified infantry division. For a very in depth article on the subject check out this link:

http://www.geocities.com/equipmentshop/realmountaindivision.htm

Suffice it to say that the Afghans were our only option if we wanted to move on Bin Laden while our intel was still worth acting on. The deficiencies in our capabilities were not something that could have been remedied in a timely manner. While one could fault Bush as the commander in chief for not noticing and beginning to rectify the situation during his first nine months or so in office, one would have to lay a good deal more blame on the Army, the previous administration and congress for not noticing these problems for many years previously.

That said, the campaign in Afghanistan was brilliant. The main reason that we even had a chance to nail Bin Laden at all is because of the rapidity and subtelty of our operations in Afghanistan. He just didn't see us blowing away his base so easily or rapidly with so few troops or so undercutting his allies with so much political acumen.

Bush?

That was an attack on Tommy Franks. Bush could not reply because he would look cheap passing the buck to this great general.

[Ned]

Originally posted by DRoseDARs


If only...

No no no, Bush is being resolute/stubborn on Iraq. Kerry voted to give authorization for Bush to declare war on Iraq and since then has become a critic of Bush's handling of the war. That's why conservatives are saying Kerry is flip-flopping. Kerry did vote 'yes', but he was expecting Bush to exhaust all other options before declaring war. Paraphrasing from somewhere else (the debate? another poster?) Kerry felt the authorization was to send a clear message to Saddam that we weren't f*cking around, that if he persisted in being a douchbag we were coming for his ass. It was meant to scare him into compliance, but also to allow President Bush to make good on the threat if necessary.

This is accurate. It also inconsistent with the Dean position that the war was a colossal mistake, a diversion from the war in Afghanistan, etc., etc., etc. Kerry maintained both inconsistent positions last night in the same debate.

But Bush never pointed this out, just the conclusion that Kerry has had multiple positions on Iraq. Bush could have done better at showing Kerry to be the flip-flopper he is based sole on this debate.

[Elok]

On reflection, I'm not sure if Kerry "won" actively so much as by sitting there and watching Bush hang himself. Kerry didn't really attack, but Bush nattered on the same responses to different questions and it made him look pretty daft to me.

MrFun's penance shall be decided later, so as to not unduly influence the election.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Berzerker

If we wanted to, we could have flooded Tora Bora with soldiers. Politics got in the way, not logistics.

No we couldn't have. Everything we had in Afghanistan was coming in by air. It's a tall order to supply a division by air as it is, it's a lot tougher to support it via helicopter hundreds of miles from the bridgehead in terrain that is above the operational ceiling of most of our helicopters. We may have had enough troops in Afghanistan to secure the vital areas and jam up Tora Bora. But we didn't have the logistical capability to move and supply those troops there in those numbers. Operation Anaconda also revealed some serious deficiencies in the capabilities of our troops at such high altitudes.

Originally posted by Berzerker

The Taliban not only still exist, our guy in Kabul is claiming he needs their help to secure the country. What does that tell you? Oh yeah, and what's his name is probably dancing back and forth across the Afghan-Pakistan border. Now, if you want to limit the "brilliance" to the actual military offensive to remove people, yes, brilliant. But politics got in the way just like every war since WWII...

I agree that we should be doing more in the years since.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by Ned


Bush?

That was an attack on Tommy Franks. Bush could not reply because he would look cheap passing the buck to this great general.

I don't know who was covering it, but one of the networks had Tommy Franks on. He clearly argued that the whole Tora Bora piece mentioned twice by Kerry was disingenuous. His point was Kerry passses off UBL as being in Tora Bora as an article of faith when in reality, Franks had him pegged at the same time as possibly being in multiple locations. Tora Bora was by no means a given.

[Ned]

Ogie, that Tora Bora attack was right out of Michael Moore's movie. It is more of a cheap shot because the attack was not on Bush himself but on his commanding General Franks.

Earlier this week, Ted Kennedy actually said that Bush deliberately let Osama bin Laden escape Tora Bora. Ted Kennedy, of course, got his "facts" from that gross, overweight, loudmouthed, mother-f*****g, Michael Moore.

[Imran Siddiqui]

I don't know who was covering it, but one of the networks had Tommy Franks on.

It was CNN. They had Franks for Bush and Clark for Kerry offer the views of two different generals on the election.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Elok
On reflection, I'm not sure if Kerry "won" actively so much as by sitting there and watching Bush hang himself. Kerry didn't really attack, but Bush nattered on the same responses to different questions and it made him look pretty daft to me.

MrFun's penance shall be decided later, so as to not unduly influence the election.

I think there is a consensus that Kerry won the style points. This is at times more important that who made his substantive points better.

[The diplomat]

Did anyone notice that twice kerry said that we failed to secure Iraq's nuclear facilities? What facilities was he talking about? I thought Iraq no longer had a nuclear program.

Overall, Bush did a good job of staying on message and delivering his main argument clearly. But Bush should have responded more to Kerry's attacks. Kerry's claim that we outsourced the attack on Tora Bora was not accurate. Bush should have responded to that by explaining that we did have special forces heavily involved in Tora Bora but we also involved native fighters because it is their land, they know the terrain best.