From: emmett@kpc.com (Emmett Kilgariff)
Subject: Re: Perot speaks
Organization: Kubota Pacific Computer Corporation, Santa Clara, CA
Date: Sat, 11 Apr 1992 19:28:50 GMT

In article <peercy.702938428@dopey.crhc.uiuc.edu> peercy@crhc.uiuc.edu (Mike Peercy) writes:
>I am absolutely astounded at the ferocity of the defenses of Perot I
>see.  Granted, the original Monitor article was highlighted with bias
>and conclusion-drawing, but I think the defenses I've seen here are even
>more revealing of how far away from a Constitutional republic Perot's
>vision is.
>
>Perot is not Hitler.  No one suggested he was Hitler.  He was suggested to
>be Mussolini ("Make the trains run on time."), but I think this would be
>the worst case.  At best, though, he's a tyrant from the days of Greek
>democracy.

	Actually, many people have suggested on the net that he's another
Hitler, in actuality, his plans, currently are so vague, he reminds me
of Bush in 1988.

>
>The man talks entirely in metaphor and allegory; and that is very scary,
>for it calls for action for the sake of action.  And some of the stories
>he's telling have no solution other than terribly unconstitutional and
>otherwise rights-abrogating actions.
>
>I must admit, when I saw him on 60 Minutes, I liked Perot a lot.  But
>when you get right down to it, he makes no actual suggestions, while the
>things he talks about have no clear solutions but tyrranical application
>of government.

	If all you saw was the fluff-piece on 60-minutes, I could see how
you'd make that assumption. He has made some suggestions, most of which
which would not require a tyrranical application of government ( charging
Europe and Japan for defense, reducing the number of priveledges the
Congress and Executive branch enjoy, means-testing social security, 
not pursuing NAFTA, using pilot programs to test implementations before
using them on the entire populations, and more). Granted, most of these
aren't extremely novel ideas, but they're specific suggestions, and  hardly 
tyrannical.

>
>But, a more detailed response to Mr. Fierro's post (I've added few lines,
>if you fear the length of the article):
>
>fierro@uts.amdahl.com (Doug Fierro) writes:
>
>| GA.JRG@forsythe.stanford.edu (June Genis) writes:
>| >Christian Science Monitor, scheduled to run 4/7/92
>| >
>| >Op-Ed Column on Ross Perot
>| >
>| >By Williamson M. Evers
>
>|   I have read the C-SPAN transcript that Evers makes refrence to 
>| throughout his article, and he has read a lot into Perot's speech.
>
>| Perot merely wants the people to be more informed on the issues, and have
>| a hands-on attitute when it comes to making decisions.
>
>|   I don't see anything wrong with this- in fact I think it will cause
>| more people to become active in this country's political process, and
>| apparently that scares the shit out of some people.
>
>It scares me that this suddenly gives you a one-voiced media, with that
>voice being the government.  Imagine a nation where the _USA Today_ was
>not only the paper-of-record, but was the primary source of news and
>political opinion for the populace.

It scares me that this idea, which, so far, has been described in one
paragraph, is being extrapolated to the worst possible implementation.
Granted, there's a great opportunity, if the National Town Hall is 
implemented poorly, it would be a propaganda weapon. Hell, a little
fraud in the vote getting, and the government get  whatever results it
wants. But if implemented correclty, and this would require alot of 
work,  and laws as strict as voting laws, it could be a fanstastic 
improvement over the current system.
	By the way, why doesn't anybody ever speculate about fraud
 in polling data?

>
>|   Well, let's see what he really said at his most recent speech:
>
>| -----
>|      We spend over $400 billion a year on education including colleges, yet we
>|      rank at the bottom of the industrialized world in terms of academic 
>|      achievement.  We have the largest number of functional illiterates in the 
>|      industrialized world.  We spend, but, see, we've got all these things 
>|      that don't work for us.  We spend a lot on education that doesn't work.  
>
>|    [...]
>|      Our educational system has to be the finest in the world.  We know what
>|      needs to be done.  Let's stop reading to children in school.  Let's stop 
>|      having two-day summits for governors that don't amount to anything, and 
>|      let's get down to blocking and tackling and fixing it now because you 
>|      won't have the benefits for 15 to 20 years.  Every day is precious, and 
>|      we just talk about it.
>| -----
>
>I don't see a suggestion here at all.  What I do see is more empty rhetoric
>than Bush throws out on his most prolific and angry days.
>
	But perot has actually done something to improve the Texas educational
system. On Donahue, he stated that preparing children for school (similar to 
Head start, i think) made a great difference in the way the children performed.
One of his big problems is, that since he's not even a candidate, and since
he's only spoken on these issues a few times, there's not a real wealth of
information about his views at the present. If it were October 1992, I'd say
this is a problem. But it's not, so I'll wait and see.


>
>| >     *on young people who dare to evade compulsory national
>| >service, building roads or emptying bedpans for the federal
>| >government (Perot told Nick Thimmesch in an interview published in
>| >the April 1983 Saturday Evening Post that the U.S. government
>| >should make it a "requirement" that "every 18-year-old" young man
>| >or woman should do one to two years of such work),
>
>| We already require compulsory national registration of males 18-25 for the
>| selective service.  A lot of other countries have a draft, and we
>| currently don't.  Compulsory national service would not be something
>| new to this country.  And such an act would require approval of the
>| people anyway.
>
>Oh.  That's nice.  The people who watch "Perot at 6" and then vote at 7.
>That's what's saving us from involuntary servitude to the government?

	Strange, I work from January to May in involuntary servitude to
the government. After that, my taxes are paid off. The compulsory service
idea is similar to Clinton's, but taken to a further extreme.


	My biggest complaint about the "PEROT SPEAKS" article, was that
in a couple of pages, there were very few quotes, and only a couple of
full sentances. It should have been titled "Evers Speaks of Perot". 
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc