Was listening to the White House press conference on the way to work. Someone said “Mr. President, you may not have had a chance to hear this, but it appears Yasser Arafat has passed away. What are your thoughts?”
Now, this turns out to be inaccurate, but at the time my reaction was a mix of “Holy $#!7” and “Maybe the Israeli/Palestinian peace process can get somewhere now.” It’s sad, but I’ve come to the conclusion that Arafat is perhaps the Palestinians’ biggest obstacle to peace, and they don’t see it. (Although now that I think about it, an interesting parallel can be made over here: no matter how clear it is that Bush is likely to keep us at war, people still voted for him in droves.) Perhaps Arafat being ill and out of the region will help other Palestinian leaders work towards a peace settlement. At least W has figured out by now that resolving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is important. If he’d caught onto that at the beginning of his first term, instead of virtually abandoning the region, things might be a lot less messy today.
Meanwhile, Bush has again promised to be a “uniter, not a divider,” (as if that held last time) and is calling for the support of Kerry voters. Peter David put it this way: “I assure you I will give Bush as much of a chance as the GOP gave Clinton.” Here’s a hint: there are reasons we voted against you. Look into them, attempt to compromise, and maybe you’ll get people supporting some of your policies. Ignore them and you’ll just see more anger.
Depending on how they are handled, I can get behind things like fighting the AIDS epidemic, reigniting the space program, even simplifying the tax code. But there’s no way I’ll support your overwhelmingly conservative social agenda, there’s no way I’ll support poorly-planned unilateral preemptive strikes based on flawed intelligence, and there’s no way I’ll support financing the nation on the credit card model. People are worried enough about individual Americans living in debt up to their eyeballs, but it goes all the way to the top. (Fiscal responsibility? Sure, I’d like to see some.)