Residual Forces

Part of being a BPOU chair is dealing first hand with the people on a grassroots level. Sometimes its fun, sometimes not. Its a lot like blogging in a way, when you touch a nerve, with someone they swarm you it.

SD51GOP just sent out a fundraising letter. I was very worried that my underappreciated Project ARORA would my local level, and I even received a call from an aleged supporter who was going to switch parties. So far, the checks are slowly rolling in. $10 here, $50 there. No big donors, but we never expected it. I hope we at least cover the cost of the mailing, or we’re in for a bad year. We wanted to raise enough money to hand out flags to kids at the parades this summer.

I’ve gotten a couple of people asking to be removed from our list. For any one who has ever done mailings, you know that mailing lists are terribly flawed. The Republican Party is in a flux and so are their lists, and that has really hindered BPOUs. My BPOU tried to send to the same lists as we have before, but when you’re dealing with 4000 addresses, its hard to be dead on.

This is an email I received from one person. Uneditted, but name with held for privacy

As if I don’t get enough junk mail already, last week in my mailbox I get your repuklican propaganda crap. Don’t insult me on your form letter by calling me a fellow republican. I’m a member of the middle class, precisely, the people under attack from the Greedy Old Party. One of the worst things to happen to this country was having that dunderhead Bush cheating his way into reelection last fall, our children and grandchildren will be paying for his mismanagement for years to come. I hope Don Betzold and Connie Bernardy win reelection by a landslide this fall. Yes we do want a democrat to take Tim Pawlenty’s place this fall. I am ashamed to say I voted for him during the last election. Since he doesn’t want to repeal tax cuts for his wealthy friends, all he can come up with is cutting education, cutting health insurance for poor people and this ridiculous casino idea, it’s definitely time for a change in leadership in Minnesota. And you know where you can stick those flags. It’s unbelievable how the Republicans have hijacked Patriotism. The same group that started an unprovoked war with undermanned and under armed troops and then tried to cut their benefits and have no idea when they’ll be coming home as there is no exit strategy from Iraq, are trying to tell us we are unpatriotic.
Please don’t ever send (or call) me any of this junk mail again.

Where to begin. I am a memeber of the middle class. Everyone I know in local Republican Politics is in the middle class. The claim that only uber rich are in the “greedy old party” is laughable. Talk about greed, its the Dems who are preoccupied with taking things away from people, income, rights, and freedoms, solely toplease themselves. That’s greed!

And just how did Bush cheat his way in last fall? I have heard of documented facts of Democrats cheating. There’s Washington and Wisconsin to name a few. How did Bush cheat? I want to know. I hate the fact that it is so easy to cheat on election day, so if there was more evidence than some one who owns something contributed more to Bush than Kerry, let’s hear it, and fix it.

Bernardy is a DFL House Rep, and Betzold is my DFL Senator. She did not mention my GOP House Rep Westerberg. Maybe she’s not all that involved. The comments on Pawlenty are somewhat invalid. He did not raise anyones’ taxes, BUT he took a pledge not to. So you were ill informed when you voted for him as you claimed. You should have known a head of time he wouldn’t. He hasn’t cut education spending. It is going up and up and up. Saying it is a cut, doesn’t make it a cut. He is proposing cuts in MNCare, but the cuts have not been inplimented yet, so stop acting like they were done on day one of his administration. I agree on the casino, ridiculous, but I bet we agree for different reasons.

The GOP hasn’t hijacked patriotism. We are trying to spread it. Trying to instill a sense of pride into the next generation. I’d personally rather see a kid waving a flag, than burning one. As for the war. Unprovoked, how?

• 17 UN Security Council Resolutions violated in 12 years by Iraq
• Attempted assaignation of a former US President
• Genocide
• Systematic Starvation
• Bribery on a scale never seen before
• Past history of himself lashing out at his neighbors
• Every single inteligience agency in the world saying he had WMD and sought to get more
• And oh yeah, those terrorist training camps in northern Iraq

That’s just a few off the top of my head. Should we have waited longer? Maybe alowed more kids to be improsoned, murdered, tortured? The amount of terrorist support that is flowing into Iraq from other terrorist sponsored states should be proof enough that Saddam was a terrorist supporter. Undermaned and underarmed? If there were not enough troops, how did we conquer Saddam in 20 days and capture him in months? How come I hear reports from troopers that say they don’t want all that armor on them or their truck. It gets in the way. And should we have had 500,000 troops standing around as targets? That’s exactly what more troops would mean. Doubling the troop size is doubling the target for the terrorists. Do you know what the major problem of the first Gulf War was? It was that there were too many troops to keep supplied. If there were more troops this time, there would have had to be even more supply units, and as we know, they are not battlehardened troops, so we would have had even more casualties and prisoners taken. The initial invasion would have been drastically slower, and even more of Saddam’s loyalists could have melted away, only to return as the insurgentsterrorists later. Exit strategy. Not knowing how you’re going to end a war is not a valid excuse to not fight it. Did we know the exit strategy in WW2? Civil War? Gulf War 1? Kosovo, BTW, we’re still there!

I admit, that the GOP is not perfect. They have made some mistakes over the past few years. But I caution everybody who’s getting that flip-floppy feeling, and ready to pin a tail on to stop and think. To quote Bush:

A list of complaints is not a plan.

List the things you don’t like that the GOP has done. Then list what the Dems will do in respect to each and every item you listed. I’ve been paying attention to the Dem leaders, and I haven’t seen any credible agenda formulated. They love to bitch and moan, but they don’t have an alternative. Just what will the Dems do about the war on terror? What is their plan to keep America safe? I want to know. My life, your life, every Americans life is at stake, I want to know everything that can be done, and try every option.

But the Dems don’t have plans do they. Alls they have is trying to make the GOP look bad. The GOP is admitting that the government is broken, and coming up with ideas that might fix it. The Dems are only trying to stop the GOP. They are not offering alternative ideas. So if you do vote for the Dems next time, ask yourself what are you voting for? Is it spite? Revenge?