Another Joins Up

The Albuquerque Tribune (circulation: 16,713) endorsed Bush in 2000. This year it's all Kerry, baby!


The United States has lost its way under President Bush, who too often has failed on both foreign and domestic fronts. Worse, he has been unable to unite a deeply divided nation.

Bush, whom The Tribune endorsed in 2000, has offered simplistic slogans to complex problems, while Kerry sees complicated problems and offers the promise of appropriate solutions - complex or not.

The reality is the world is not a simple place, seldom black or white, and Kerry knows that intuitively. He understands the gray, the nuance - and that easy-bake solutions like nuclear weapons, Navy carriers and conservative or liberal platitudes usually don't apply or work.

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From the war in Iraq and the acidic sections of the Patriot Act to global warming and national energy policy, Bush's foreign and domestic policies have been based on secrecy, fear, distortion and misinformation.

For these reasons, we urge independent and undecided voters in particular to double-check what Bush says against what he has done. Bush continues to insult American intelligence with his:

Mistaken and unreal views of the war in Iraq, with its mounting costs in American and Iraqi lives, money and good will.

Failure to focus U.S. military might on pursuing our real enemy, the terrorists.

Willingness to compromise American freedoms, in contrast to a resistance to develop and implement safeguards to protect our people, borders, ports and infrastructure from future terror attacks.

Unabashed flip-flop of the conservative fiscal ideal, turning a balanced federal budget - indeed, a huge surplus - into the largest deficit in U.S. history.

Unrelenting attack on 30 years of environmental promise to benefit political friends in the fossil fuel and utility industries.

Willingness to accept a $422 billion federal deficit, a ballooning $7.42 trillion national debt and grossly unfair tax cuts.

These all come at the expense of ordinary, hard-working, taxpaying Americans - and our children's children, who will be stuck paying the bill.