Glittering Eye is attempting a Taxonomy of positions on the War on Terror, and he has a further expansion here. Good luck to him.
My own take: I do not care who is in charge, Democrat or Republican. I do not care which party holds the Congress, Democrat or Republican. If Bush wins I will support him, as I always have. If Kerry wins, I will support him as best I can, with cogent, specific criticisms and always under the assumption that he is doing his very best for the nation even if I sometimes think I'd do things differently if I were in charge. I will assume I don't know everything, and that he's doing his best and, even if I campaign against him, will assume that he is an honorable man, and that he is not a "liar" simply because I might sometimes disagree wtih him.
And when I want him to do something differently, I will be very specific about what I think that is. For that's what patriots do in times of war.
And what do I want? An expansion of human rights around the world, of democracy around the world, and of freedom around the world. I believe an activist, interventionist foreign policy is at this point in human history the only way to accomplish that--and that if we don't do it, far more people will die in America, in the West, and in the world in general than they will otherwise.
I am with you. I appreciate you. I know you are absolutely right.
I have only one request and I am coming to you because you represent our free press in a most honorable way. You withstand those that disagree with you and keep marching forward.
Please show the efforts of our men and women protecting our borders they do not make the 5:00 or 10:00 news like they should.
Dean:
Your post highlights some questions that have been troubling me lately. Do we owe our President the benefit of the doubt particularly in foreign policy matters? My knee-jerk inclination is to say "Yes" to this but I can't say I have a ready answer to it. If our answer is "Yes", what should we think of those who absolutely refuse to do this? If we answer "No", what should we think of those willing to give the President the benefit of the doubt?
To be honest, Dave, I think all elected officials are owed the benefit of the doubt.
But Presidents in particular need it. Because the realities of diplomacy are such that they cannot always state openly what they are doing or what their thinking is. That's just diplomatic reality, because all too often you're playing a game where if you say openly what you're doing, you've already lost.
One of my favorite examples involves the Polish Solidarity movement. In the 1980s the Reagan administration gave a lot of public support for it, but apparently only with rhetoric. Some years after Reagan left office and after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was revealed that the Reagan administration had given large chunks of cash, radio equipment, photocopiers and fax machines, and intelligence from the CIA to them. But had they revealed that in public at the time, it would have destroyed the Solidarity movement.
A thing we also have to remember is that most of what our government does in foreign affairs, it does regardless of who's in the White House.
So yes, you give whoever's in charge the benefit of the doubt, you presume they're doing their best to do the right things. Skepticism is fine, asking reasonable questions is fine, but sometimes you also have to assume that some questions cannot be answered directly.
Interesting taxonomy or spectrum. I don't want to launch into another angry rant, so suffice it to say that my own position on the War on Islam's Terror (the "Religion of Peace") is slightly to the Right, i.e., more hawkish, of that articulated so well by Kim du Toit, by Arnold Harris, or by Leonard Peikoff. In other words, I'm possibly slightly to the Right of General Horemheb or maybe even Ashur-bani-pal.