EDWARDS is on with tweety.........rerun

Fellow Edwards Supporters, unite!
:kick:

He slices and dices his support for the war more than anybody. That does not look good at all. Edwards has lost a few points in my book.

I wanted to watch this. My office tv only gets CNN.

to be a foregone conclusion. This does not indicate much faith for your candidate. If he can't beat Dean he probably can't beat Bush.

You seem to believe he can't beat Dean. Freudian slips are so unwittingly revealing, aren't they? ;-) (*ahem* BTW, your slip is showing--heh heh)

Julie

Kerry is pretty consistent, I think. But Edwards's clarity on this issue makes Kerry seem confused by comparison.

which I don't believe.

Clear on Iraq from the beginning, took heat in California, Dean lied about him equivocating there and had to write an apology. He has been clear about his stand on abortion (not all candidates can claim that) and he never concocted a story about incest and abortion. He has been clear and consistent about the middle class tax cuts, which several key candidates oppose.
If you are writing that he has lost points in your book, it's not because he wasn't clear, it was because he was and you never liked him to begin with. Really tired of this game-playing. If we can't be honest here, why the heck are we Democrats?

Well said.

Read the transcript.

Edwards asserts that he has his own reasons for going to war that weren't based on the "intellegence." tTe intellegence was misleading he says, but he didn't listen to it. Instead, he says he had his own reasons for supporting war:

"As I said before, I think what happened here is, for over a decade, there is strong, powerful evidence, which I still believe is true, that Saddam Hussein had been trying to get nuclear capability."

He claims to repudiate the Bush policy of pre-emptive war and makes the case for his vote on the IWR by saying that we should always be ready to defend the safety of America. Yet, when pressed to explain how America was at risk, he comes up empty. Instead he lameley tries to assert that America was at risk because Iraq was a threat to the middle east. In his own words:

"And I think that with Saddam Hussein, they’ve got nuclear capability, it would have changed the dynamic in that part of the world entirely. And as a result, would have created a threat to the American people. So that’s what I think the threat was."

Yet, when pressed:

MATTHEWS: Do you feel now that you have evidence in your hands that he was on the verge of getting nuclear weapons?

EDWARDS: No, I wouldn’t go that far.

In other words, pre-emptive war not to protect from an immenet threat to America, but to head off a possible threat down the road. I guess, in that regard, Edwards is clear. Now, I recognize that some people believe in that -- even some democrats. I don't. I reject the notion that we should go to war to damp down the possibility of some future threat.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3131295/

What's so hard to understand about Edwards, Clinton, Blumenthal and Gore all saying that Hussein was a serious threat? What's hard about understanding that the adminstration provided tons of very legitimate evidence? What's hard to understand about the administration deliberately playing up the intentionally inserted bad evidence in order to get Democrats mad so that they turn away from good candidates and encourage them to nominate someone who'll be easy to defeat like Howard Dean?

Also, after that last quote you cite, doesn't Edwards go on to describe Hussein's decade long program to acquire a nuclear weapons program? Doesn't Gregg Pallast talk about this in The Best Democracy Money Can Buy?

This isn't hard stuff to understand.

The bottom line distinction, even if I stipulate to everything you claim in Edwards' defense is, Edwards believed that it was now time for war. I did not.

vote on IWR. Every sensible Democrat felt the same way. Clinton would have voted that way. Dean, I'm sure, would have voted that way if he were a senator.

I really don't understand why this isn't super clear to everyone:


MATTHEWS: Do you feel now that you have evidence in your hands that he was on the verge of getting nuclear weapons?

EDWARDS: No, I wouldn’t go that far.

MATTHES: What would you say?

EDWARDS: What I would say is there’s a decade long pattern of an effort to get nuclear capability, from the former Soviet Union, trying to get access to scientists...

MATTHEWS: What about Africa?

EDWARDS: ... trying to get-No. I don’t think so. At least not from the evidence.

MATTHEWS: Were you misled by the president in the State of the Union address on the argument that Saddam Hussein was trying get uranium from Niger?

EDWARDS: I guess the answer to that is no.

I did not put a lot of stock in that.

MATTHEWS: But you didn’t believe-But you weren’t misled?

EDWARDS: No, I was not misled because I didn’t put a lot of stock in to it begin with.

As I said before, I think what happened here is, for over a decade, there is strong, powerful evidence, which I still believe is true, that Saddam Hussein had been trying to get nuclear capability. Either from North Korea, from the former Soviet Union, getting access to scientists, trying to get access to raw fissile material. I don’t-that I don’t have any question about.

Okay, assume that Edwards was convinced by some evidence other than the Bush lies, as he claims. He acknowledges that the threat was not one of immenence, but of a possibility. The question that lingers then is, why war? As our entry into Iraq has demonstrated, Saddam had not come anywhere close to fulfilling the capability that Edwards feared he might exercise. What is apparent is that sanctions, inspections and no-fly zones had been effective in averting the very threat Edwards offers as justification for war. So, once again, what was the supreme compelling reason that made war necessary? Edwards offers no answer.

And why he voted up is pretty clear from that interview.

Clinton said he would have voted up on that resolution.

I'm not sure that I trust that we've "demonstrated" anything with the invasion. I don't think Bush would want to find anything until after Dean is nominated. Anyway, like Clinton says, you can't vote "no" on the IWR just because you don't believe your intelligence, without having any good reason not to believe it.

Why isn't this clear? It's clear to me.

Clear that Edwards did not believe the intellegence that purported to show Saddam as an immenent threat. Clear that Edwards observed a pattern of Saddam being a bad guy. Clear that Edwards decided now was the time for war because Saddam may have become an eventual direct threat. Clear that Saddam was far from becoming that threat. Yes, it's clear indeed.

Edwards says there was good evidence and bad evidence. That's what those quotes say.

Again, Edwards never thought it was "time for war." He says quite CLEARLY that it was time for an up vote on the IWR and that the Bush administration went out of their way to create the impression they'd behave responsibily.

I have little doubt that 90% of the people who will read this exchance between you and I will understand what Edwards's clear position on this is.

on your 90% assesment.

agrees with many of my own beliefs.

He did well with the tweeter!

:pals:

I suspect so.

I rather like him myself, and wonder why he has not done better.

He speaks well and makes a strong case for his candidacy, but seems to be stuck in the lower ranks--i do not understand why.

As far as him campaign goes, it seems to me that he is intentionally staying below the radar. At this time, it seems his campaign is targeting the small towns in the early primary states. While Dean, Clark, Kerry and Lieberman are taking shots at each other, damaging each other, Edwards just keeps on slipping around talking to the PEOPLE, and getting his message out to as many people as he can. It remains to be seen if his strategy will work.

How has his fundraising been doing?

Honestly, I hear so little about him here or on the telly.

he'd be the favorite.

Over at the Edwards web site they said that traffic increased 860 percent right after the 60 minutes interview last week.

interview will continue to generate interest in this candidate.

It is a real player version on the lower right frame of the home page
Does this information need its own thread? Everyone should see this piece and see why this is the candidate who will beat Bush.

I can not seem to remember the guy's first name.

Anyway... he seems like a nice guy who made a bad mistake voting for IWR. He also seems unfinished some how. He really should have waited to run in 2012.