Bush's message too simplistic

Beware The Simple Answer. That should be the slogan for this campaign.

In Thursday’s presidential debates, President George W. Bush repeated the same few answers over and over: “Kerry’s a flip-flopper. We should be strong.” Whenever Sen. John Kerry would point out the perfect consistency of his positions or lay out a specific policy to deal with Iran, Sudan or Iraq, Bush would utterly ignore them and keep repeating the same words, as if mere repetition would make them true.

Bush’s simple answer on Iraq and Afghanistan is that it’s good to fight the bad guys. But he ignored the complex reality that we only have so many troops and we should have committed them where they were most needed: Catching Osama bin Laden.

Bush’s simple answer is that we shouldn’t let bin Laden dictate our policies. Of course not, but we need to be smart about how we use force. Not every use of force has the same potential to turn the Arab world against us, which the invasion of Iraq certainly did.

The world’s a complex place and Kerry has proposed complex, realistic policies to deal with them. I’m frightened that, if re-elected, Bush will keep repeating “stay the course, stay the course” as he steers Iraq and America into the abyss. Not because he’s evil, but because he ignores messy reality.

But I’m also certain that American voters are intelligent enough to grasp the complexities of the world and elect the man who can do so.

Ben Stark