Jim Lehrer (onlinenewshour@newshour.org) is moderating the first Presidential debate this Thursdsay. This is the issue I'd like him to address (crossposted from my blog):
Is our President uninformed, or lying? If he were my student, it wouldn't matter. He'd flunk.
Bush on Saturday also touted efforts to train Iraqi security forces. He said nearly 100,000 "fully trained and equipped" Iraqi soldiers, police officers and other security personnel were already working and that the Iraqi government was on track to build a force of over 200,000 security personnel by the end of 2005.Documents prepared by Defense Department officials and given to lawmakers showed fewer than 100,000 would be trained by the end of this year. They also showed that of the nearly 90,000 now in the police force, only 8,169 had the full eight-week academy training. It will be July 2006 before the administration's new goal of 135,000 fully trained police is met.
If I ask one of my therapy students questions regarding a client and her answers are that far off? That's a zero. And a meeting in my office. If she does it again? She doesn't stay in my program. That client's life is in her hands and it is her moral and professional obligation to know -- and accurately report -- the details of the client's abilities and disabilities. Our President has the hundreds of thousands of lives in his hands and he either doesn't know about their security, or is lying about it. Why is this acceptable to
anyone?
I wrote Jim Lehrer with a short version of this. It's probable that he isn't going to read individual e-mails and derive his questions from them -- but why not try anyway? It's better than doing nothing.
And by the way, now that Kerry is pulling ads out of Missouri, does that mean that he thinks it's useless for me to travel there and GOTV?