ConservaPundit

Did you know that the Libertarians had a candidate in 2004?

08.31.04 (1:35 am)   [edit]
His name is Badnarik, and boy does he have some wacky positions. Since this election is primarily about Iraq and the war on terror, it would be prudent to examine what the hell Badnarik thinks about them:

From Michael Badnarik's website-- http://www.badnarik.org/Issue...

What does he think about Iraq and the war on terror?

Badnarki: As your president, one of my first tasks will be to begin the orderly process of bringing our troops home as quickly as can safely be accomplished.

[i] as if that won't encourage Islamic terrorism.....[/i]

People in the Middle East do not hate us for our freedom. They do not hate us for our lifestyle. They hate us because we have spent many years attempting to force them to emulate our lifestyle.

[i]Not true...they hate us because we are not Islamic or Marxist. Iran, for example, was an extreme ally of the USSR when it was "democratically" elected (much like the recent Chavez election). We didn't try to "enforce" our "lifestyle" upon Iran-- we merely tried to stop the spread of the Marxism/Islamism ideology.

The U.S. government also helped Libyan Col. Qaddafi come to power, propped up the Saudi monarchy and the Egyptian regime, and gave assistance to Osama bin Laden.

[i]Context goes a long way with trying to prove something, but Badrarki doesn't really care. He's almost a liberal. We gave assistance to those who opposed the USSR in Afghanistan. OBL was one of them. Most of those that opposed OBL were also trained under the direction of the CIA. Badnarik's point implodes...[/i]

It was because of American troops in Saudi Arabia, lethal sanctions on Iraq, support for states in serious violation of International Law, and siding with Israel in its dispute with the Palestinians to the tune of more than $3 billion per year in taxpayers' funds that terrorist leaders were able to recruit those individuals who caused 3,000 Americans to pay the ultimate price on September 11, 2001.

[i]Ah, how nice it is to use OBL's reasoning for exploitation of a cause! Of course, Saudi Arabia asked us for assistance, and the sanctions in Iraq were justified by the world. As far as the US' "support for states in violation on International Law", find me a nation that isn't. Finally, Badnarik's claim that we our siding with Israel in its "dispute with the Palestinians to the tune of more than $3 billion per year in taxpayers' funds" fails to recognize that we give Egypt almost as much money in order to pacify both Israel and Egypt (Camp David accords). Also, we continually give more of our taxpayer money to the Palestinians and the UN. If you want to find fault with that, fault Jimmy Carter, Democrat, not George Bush, and at least be truthful about context.

Libertarians apparently are no more trufthful in their support of their candidate for president than the Dems are. Although the difference is that the Libertarians will be holding their convention at a NY area White Castle restaurant, both parties fall short, way short, of being honest about context and history.

Europe slips further behind US in economic competetiveness

08.30.04 (11:31 pm)   [edit]
If you want to know what our economy will look like under a Kerry regime, look no furher than the modern-day EU.

From Bloomberg-- http://quote.bloomberg.com/ap...

[b]Europe Slips Further Behind U.S. in Economic Competitiveness[/b]

Aug. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Europe is slipping further behind the U.S. in competitiveness as the leaders of Germany, France and Italy, weakened by election setbacks, fail to take advantage of the economic recovery to reduce taxes and over-regulation.

After lagging U.S. growth through the 1990s, European Union leaders embarked in Lisbon in 2000 on a plan to turn the bloc into what they called in a joint statement ``the world's most competitive knowledge-based economy'' by 2010. Europe has outgrown the U.S. only once since then, in 2001. The EU predicts growth of 1.7 percent for 2004, compared with an expected 4.2 percent for the U.S. For 2005, the EU expects the economy to grow 2.3 percent, lagging the expected 3.2 percent growth rate in the U.S.

President George W. Bush, who is set to win nomination for a second term at this week's Republican National Convention in New York, is campaigning on an economy that has added 1.24 million jobs so far this year and a jobless rate that fell to 5.5 percent in July. European unemployment was unchanged at a 3 1/2-year high of 9 percent in June, the latest available figure.

``Unless EU governments start doing their homework, we will never be able to compete with the U.S.,'' said Reinhard Kudiss, an economist at the BDI association of German industry in Berlin, which represents 107,000 companies including Siemens AG and DaimlerChrysler AG. ``Foreign investors will judge us by the pace of change and we can't afford any more years of standstill.''

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's plans for cuts in jobless benefits to curb spending are meeting weekly street protests. France's employers are hamstrung by a 35-hour workweek. Italy, Europe's most indebted nation, has promised tax cuts without saying how it will pay for them.

`Gap Won't Narrow'

``If we keep going forward like this, the gap won't narrow: it will grow,'' Rocco Buttiglione, Italy's European Affairs Minister who will become EU Justice Commissioner in November, said in a telephone interview in Rome. ``There has to be a strong political will to make reforms and invest in the future.''

Since the beginning of 1999, when the euro was introduced, the Dow Jones Average has risen 11 percent. Europe's Dow Jones Stoxx 50 Index has lost 20 percent in the period.

Europe's economic growth unexpectedly slowed to 0.5 percent in the second quarter, as a pickup in exports failed to stoke job creation and consumer spending.

``Governments simply have no choice but to move ahead with economic changes if they are serious about growth,'' said Thomas Mayer, chief European economist at Deutsche Bank AG in London, in a telephone interview. ``In the meantime, companies remain focused on export dealings. That's what you do when economic conditions at home aren't good enough.''

Election Losses

The parties of Schroeder, 60, French President Jacques Chirac, 71, and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, 67, lost support in European elections on June 13. Schroeder's Social Democrats scored their worst result in a nationwide election since World War II, polling 23.2 percent, as voters protested the jobless rate and the cuts in benefits.

In France, Chirac's allies won 37.4 percent, lagging the Socialist-led opposition with 41.6 percent. Support for Berlusconi's Forza Italia fell to 21 percent, eight percentage points lower than in the 2001 general elections, weakening his grip on power as coalition partners demanded more say over policies including a pensions law and plans to cut taxes.

Germany, the continent's largest economy, abounds with reasons why Western Europe is losing the competition for investment and jobs to the U.S., China and India -- and the low-tax Eastern European countries that, after entering the European Union in May, are competing right on Germany's doorstep.

Labor Costs

German labor costs are six times the Eastern European level, according to a report published on August 24 by the Cologne-based IW research institute. A corporate tax rate of 37 percent is almost twice that of neighboring Slovakia, which now makes more cars per person than any other Eastern country.

For German corporate standard-bearers such as Siemens and DaimlerChrysler, the only expansion is abroad. With German unemployment at 10.6 percent, the most workers can hope for is to keep their jobs. Munich-based Siemens won an extension of the work week at two phone factories to 40 hours from 35 hours at no extra pay after threatening to cut 2,000 jobs there.

Schroeder's law reducing jobless benefits from January 2005, the first cuts in unemployment welfare since World War II, prompted thousands to take part in Monday demonstrations throughout August in east German cities including Leipzig and Berlin. Protesters threw eggs at the chancellor during an Aug. 24 visit to the eastern city of Wittenberge.

Support for Schroeder's Social Democrats was 24 percent in a survey by polling company Infratest-Dimap published August 29, compared with 38.5 percent in elections two years ago. The poll of 2,500 voters carried a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.

`Overdue' Welfare Cuts

The cuts in unemployment benefits ``are highly overdue,'' Norbert Quinkert, the head of Motorola Inc.'s German unit, said in an interview. ``They will raise the pressure on the jobless to take up work. The government must not let up in those efforts.''

``Lobby groups, especially labor unions, still exert too much influence, so that companies' investment plans often get clouded by unnecessary haggling,'' said Quinkert, whose company employs 3,500 people in Germany. He said he gets frustrated with the slowness of decision-making in Europe: ``In the U.S. decisions are simply taken more quickly,'' he said.

Schroeder said on July 10 that he will focus on putting into practice laws already passed, rather than trying to win support for more cuts in welfare or an overhaul of labor restrictions.

German industry says that's not good enough.

``Schroeder's welfare cuts can only mark the beginning of more far-reaching changes,'' said Kudiss at the BDI. ``New laws on other burning issues -- for instance health, pensions and even taxes are just as important.''

Domestic Demand

As the government puts off further action, there is little to breathe life into domestic demand, which contracted in the second quarter as exports drove economic growth. German business confidence dropped for a third month in four in August as record oil prices threaten to further hurt consumer spending.

``The economic outlook for Germany, then, is pretty grim,'' said Carl Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, New York. ``German companies producing goods and services for the domestic market will remain in trouble.''

In France, unemployment rose to 9.9 percent in June. Chirac's government says a law reducing the statutory work week to 35 hours from 39 hours has curbed households' purchasing power, hurt government finances and driven some companies to relocate abroad.

France's Work Week

Even so, Chirac said last month he won't revoke the legislation introduced by the Socialist government that preceded his. Instead, he plans to encourage labor unions and business federations to come to their own arrangements as he seeks to prevent companies from moving jobs abroad.

``We need less taxes and more freedom for employers so that they can negotiate labor rules with their employees,'' said Jean- Francois Roubaud, head of France's largest federation for small and medium-size companies, in a telephone interview in Paris. ``We have too many taxes, too many labor restrictions and France is over- regulated.''

Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has called for changes to the law and plans steps to narrow a budget deficit that the government predicts will exceed the EU's limit of 3 percent of gross domestic product for a third year in 2004, after reaching a seven-year high of 4.1 percent of GDP last year. He may leave his post to run Chirac's party in November.

``Sarkozy's departure would slow down reforms, because he's tenacious, popular, and has strongly spoken in favor of freezing spending and trimming the deficit,'' said Maryse Pogodzinski, an economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in Paris.

Tax Disadvantage

France's corporate tax rate is 35 percent, compared with a median rate of 19 percent among the eight Eastern European countries that joined the EU on May 1.

``The tax pressure on companies and individuals who make money is so heavy that there is no incentive to invest,'' said Yves Bouget, founder and chairman of HF Company, France's No. 1 maker of automated appliances including interphones and remote control devices for television sets.

``The government needs to reduce taxes on profit,'' said Bouget, whose company is based south of Paris in Esvres sur Indre and has units in Spain, Italy, Belgium and Poland. ``One shouldn't be surprised if the French economy doesn't create value or growth.''

Berlusconi's Pledge

In Italy, Berlusconi has resorted to more confidence votes this year than in any other since coming to power in 2001 in order to get laws through parliament. In July, he called a confidence vote to pass a bill aimed at curbing the most expensive state-run pension system in the EU. He has so far failed to deliver on a three-year-old campaign pledge to cut income taxes.

His government is also stalling on a new corporate governance law promised after the bankruptcy of Parmalat Finanziaria SpA, the country's biggest food company. Threats by his coalition partners to pull out of the government led to the July 3 resignation of Berlusconi's finance minister and ally, Giulio Tremonti.

``Berlusconi's in a very weak position at the moment and is struggling to hold his government together, never mind passing any important legislation,'' said Alessandro Truppia, chief economist at Aletti Gestielle Sgr in Milan.

``All he cares about now is getting tax cuts through because he knows that if he doesn't he's killed his chances at re- election,'' Truppia said. ``The problem is that it's going to be a huge strain on the treasury's purse-strings. With the economy still weak and the debt being what it is, cutting taxes now seems very, very difficult.''

To contact the reporters on this story: James G. Neuger at jneuger@bloomberg.net and Andreas Cremer at acremer@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Catherine Hickley
at chickley@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: August 29, 2004 19:25 EDT

Reducto Reviews NFL 2k5 and Red Dead Revolver

08.30.04 (10:50 pm)   [edit]
For my 29th birthday recently I received two X-Box games, Red Dead Revolver and NFL 2k5. I never play my X-Box, as I don't have the time, and my game collection consisted of NFL 2k3 and NCAA 2k3, so I am not by nature a "gamer". But I do enjoy playing the X-Box when I have time. And while Red Dead Revolver promises more than it delivers, I've found that, by far, NFL 2k5 keeps me playing my old X-Box more and more.

"Red Dead Revolver" seems like an interesting concept: you are a bounty hunter in the Old West bringing criminals to justice and finding out the "mystery of your past", which means finding who murdered your family. But the story unravels in a ridiculously fast fashion and, coupled with cartoonish graphics,the game morphs into just another shoot-em-up game. As a huge fan of westerns and history, this game was the one I had expected the most from.

By the same token, I expected little from NFL 2K5. Football is my favorite sport. I played it in high school and follow it religiously. I've "been there, done that" with football video games. I expected the status quo from football video-games, but with NFL 2k5 I was pleasantly surprised. For one, the price of the game, $19.99, cannot be beat. Secondly, Sega has turned this game into the best football game ever produced.

Incorporating a "VIP" system, a kind of artificial intelligence that learns your tendencies when you play, you can play against yourself or VIPs from those you know. It's the closest thing to mimicking human play that has ever been presented in a video game platform.

Secondly, the graphics are unbeatable. The players look like the real players, they move like the real players, and they act like the real players. With halftime and postgame highlights by Chris Berman, and Sportscenter after each week of play, the look and feel is very realistic. Though I've always had a problem with the anticlimatic way Sega celebrates your SuperBowl win, this game still beats anything EA Sports' "Madden" franchise has produced.

Also, I like the fact that you can customize the NFL divisions. I always hated it that the Miami Dolphins were in the AFC East, or that the Cowboys were in the NFC East. You can rectify that :-) ...

Anyway, those are my game reviews. "Red Dead Revolver" = C+ . "NFL 2k5"= A ++ .

Kerry, the first self-confessed war criminal to be nominated for prez-- HE opened wounds of Vietnam

08.30.04 (9:51 pm)   [edit]
From the Chicago Sun-Times

[b]Who's to blame for nation's Vietnam wounds? Kerry[/b]
August 29, 2004
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Every serious nation, in the course of history, loses a war here and there. You hope it's there rather than here -- somewhere far away, a small conflict in a distant land, not central to your country's sense of itself. During America's ''Vietnam era,'' Britain grappled with a number of nasty colonial struggles. Some they won -- Malaya -- and others they lost -- Aden -- or, at any rate, concluded that the cost of achieving whatever it was they wanted to achieve was no longer worth it.

No parallels are exact, but the symbolism of the transfer of power in Aden (on the Arabian coast) is not dissimilar to the fall of Saigon. On Nov. 29, 1967, the Union Jack was lowered over the city, and the high commissioner, his staff and all her majesty's forces left. On Nov. 30, the People's Republic of South Yemen was proclaimed -- the only avowedly Marxist state in Arabia. A couple of years earlier, the penultimate high commissioner, Sir Richard Turnbull, had remarked bleakly to Denis Healey, the British Defense secretary, that the British empire would be remembered for only two things: ''the popularization of Association Football [soccer] and the term 'f-- off.' "

Sir Richard was being a little hard on his fellow imperialists, but those two legacies of empire are useful ways of looking at the situation when the natives are restless and you're a long way from home: Faraway disputes you're stuck in the middle of aren't played by the rules of Association Football, and it's important to know when to "f-- off.'' Aden had been British since 1839: that's 130 years, or 10 times as long as America was mixed up in Vietnam. And yet in the end the British shrugged it off. Just one of those things, old boy. Can't be helped. As the last high commissioner inspected his troops at Khormaksar Airport on that final day, the band of the Royal Marines played not ''Land Of Home And Glory'' or ''Rule, Britannia'' but a Cockney novelty pop song, ''Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be,'' as a jaunty reflection on the vicissitudes of fate.

So when John McCain sternly warns the swift boat veterans of ''reopening the wounds of Vietnam,'' it's worth asking: Why is Vietnam a ''wound'' and why won't it heal? The answer: not because it was a military or strategic defeat but because it was a national trauma. And whose fault is that?

Well, you can't pin it all on one person, but, if you had to, Lt. John F. Kerry would stand a better shot at taking the solo trophy than almost anyone. The ''wounds'' McCain complains of aren't from losing Vietnam, but from the manner in which it was lost. Today Sen. Kerry says he's proud of his anti-war activism, but that's not what it was. Every war has pacifists and conscientious objectors and even disenchanted veterans, but there's simply no precedent for what John Kerry did: a man who put his combat credentials to the service of smearing his country's entire armed forces as rapists, decapitators and baby killers. That's the ''wound,'' Sen. McCain. That's why a crummy little war on the other side of the world still festers. That's why the band didn't play ''Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be'' and move on to the next item of business. Because Kerry didn't just call for U.S. withdrawal, he impugned the honor of every man he served with.

In his testimony to Congress in 1971, Kerry asserted a scale of routine war crimes unparalleled in American history -- his ''band of brothers'' (as he now calls them) ''personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads . . . razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.'' Almost all these claims were unsupported. Indeed, the only specific example of a U.S. war criminal that Kerry gave was himself. As he said on ''Meet The Press'' in April 1971, ''Yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I used 50-caliber machineguns, which we were granted and ordered to use.''

Really? And when was that? On your top-secret Christmas Eve mission in Cambodia? If they'd taken him at his word, when the senator said ''I'm John Kerry reporting for duty,'' the delegates at the Democratic Convention should have dived for cover.

But they didn't. So Kerry is now the first self-confessed war criminal in the history of the Republic to be nominated for president. Normally this would be considered an electoral plus only in the more cynical banana republics. But the Democrats seemed to think they could run an anti-war anti-hero as a war hero and nobody would mind. As we now know, a lot of people -- a lot of veterans -- do mind, very much. They understand that, whether or not he ever mowed down civilians with his 50-caliber machinegun, Kerry is responsible for a lot of wounds closer to home.

In the usual course of events, Kerry's terrible judgment in the '70s would render him unelectable. Instead, over two decades he morphed into a respectably dull run-of-the-mill pompous senatorial windbag. Had he run for president in the '90s or 2000, he might even have pulled it off. But the Democrats turned to him this time because the tortured contradictions of his resume suited an anti-war party that didn't dare run as such. Ever since the first cries of ''Quagmire!'' back in the early days of the Afghan liberation in 2001, the left have been trying to Vietnamize the war on terror. They failed in that, but they succeeded in the Vietnamization of the election campaign, and that's turned out just swell, hasn't it? Remember that formulation a lot of Democrats were using last year? They oppose the war but ''of course'' they support our troops. Kerry's campaign is a walking illustration of the deficiencies of that straddle: When you divorce the heroism of soldiering from the justice of the cause, what's left but a hollow braggart?

The Vietnamese government used Kerry's 1971 testimony as evidence of American war crimes as recently as two months ago. In Aden, Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be, but in Hanoi Kerry's psychodrama-queen performance is a gift that keeps on giving. It would be a shame if they understood him more clearly than the American people do.

Defeated over his Vietnam service, Kerry returns to that old chestnut, "vast right-wing conspiracy"

08.30.04 (9:45 pm)   [edit]
From Mark Steyn-- http://www.marksteyn.com

[b]Something tells me Bush holds all the aces[/b]
(Filed: 29/08/2004)

At the beginning of the year, Thomas Lifson, who was at Harvard Business School with George W Bush, made an interesting observation about the President. He notes that young George "was a very avid and skillful poker player" when he was a Business Administration student and that "one of the secrets of a successful poker player is to encourage your opponent to bet a lot of chips on a losing hand. This is a pattern of behavior one sees repeatedly in George W Bush's political career".


Indeed one does. In the months following Mr Lifson's observation, the President sat back, as John Kerry's consultants, the Iowa caucus voters, the Democratic Party at large, and the media convinced themselves that the one card that trumps Bush's leadership in the war on terror was Kerry's four months in Vietnam, and bet everything on it. They have just lost that hand.

Kerry is in seclusion, unable to expose himself to any but the most sycophantic interviewers, and getting whumped by hundreds upon hundreds of fellow Swift boat veterans, plus former POWs, plus retired admirals, over every aspect of his brief stay in the Mekong Delta.

The Senator put his money on the wrong war. After a couple of entertaining weeks of the aggrieved Swiftees driving down his poll numbers in battleground states, it seems a shame to interrupt the implosion of the Kerry campaign for the Republican convention. But I'm sure the seared Senator is grateful for the intermission, and for the rest of us the next week affords a rare opportunity in this election campaign to catch up with the issues of the current millennium before the inept Kerry resumes bogging us down in his personal Vietnam quagmire again.

My sense is that the Swiftvets have changed the dynamics of the race. With the candidate's retro braggadocio on ice for the foreseeable future, the Kerry campaign late on Friday revived that old favourite, the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, releasing a flow chart full of multi-coloured arrows showing that Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison is a "close friend" of Merrie Spaeth, a public relations consultant to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Yawn.

The fact is, even if Kerry was a Republican, these Swift boat guys would be hounding him. In a culture where "ABB" is now media shorthand for "Anyone But Bush", you would think the press would recognise these fellows for what they are: the ABK constituency.

Meanwhile, "Bush hatred" - another losing hand the Democrats put too many chips on - has peaked, and any saggy nudists or trust-fund anarchists who succeed in pulling off some camera-worthy stunt in Manhattan this week will only be boosting the President.

"BUSH LIED!!!!!!" is likewise a bust, given generally non-damaging official reports on 9/11, Abu Ghraib, etc, and that it's Kerry who's having to modify his claims on an almost daily basis, whether over his secret Christmas mission to Cambodia (false) and the question of whether his first Purple Heart was improperly awarded for a self-inflicted wound (true). As for Iraq, ever since the transfer of sovereignty that's all but off the radar.

So unlike the touchy Kerry - threatening lawsuits, calling for bans and smearing his fellow vets as "Republican liars" - just by staying cool the President has let his many detractors exhaust the political capital of their obsessions.

Bush isn't a great orator but he can rise to the occasion, and I expect he will this week, with an optimistic forward-looking speech that stands in contrast to Senator Kerry's weird up-the-Mekong-without-a-p addle routine. Bush's speech will also have jokes.

He tells jokes pretty well, though he could do with easing up on the old self-satisfied smirk after the punchline. But smirk-accompanied jokes are still better than Kerry, who had no jokes at all except a leaden clunker about the destiny-freighted detail of having been born in a hospital's "west wing" - wouldja believe it? and how many wings does a hospital have anyway? and doesn't this communicate Kerry's sense of entitlement rather than his sense of humour - formal confirmation that he believes he was literally born to be president?

As to the serious bits, I would be surprised if Bush mentions Iran or North Korea specifically, though it's likely both will require his attention early next year. But he will talk up successes in the war and remind us that, if we don't win it, the best prescription-drugs plan in the world isn't going to make much difference.

The Bush-haters are right about him: he is a radical President, just not in the cartoon manner they believe. So it will be interesting to hear what he has to say about tax reform and Social Security - two areas where he's got big ambitions. The rest of the week will be a soft-focus infomercial just like the Democratic Convention, but the Republican speakers - Rudy Giuliani, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John McCain and dissident Democrat Senator Zell Miller - make a much stronger line-up than the old lions on display in Boston - Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, Bill and Hill, effective speakers all but strictly for the true believers. Rudy, Arnie and co have far more cross-party appeal.

The media will point out that this is a crock, it's a fraud, it's a travesty of a farrago: the Republicans are putting their social moderates out front, and burying all the hatchet-faced Right-wing meanies. And the critics have a point to this extent: reaching out to swing voters is a sham in that there don't seem to be any but the most statistically insignificant number of swing voters to reach out to.

In this election, it's more important to make sure none of your party's base vote stays home. The problem for Kerry is that Bush's base includes alienated Democrats. Al Gore lost in 2000 because he had no appeal to white rural males. That's what cost him his own state of Tennessee, among others.

Does anyone seriously think Kerry appeals to white rural males? A poll in The Los Angeles Times shows that 3 per cent of Republicans are voting for Kerry, but 15 per cent of Democrats - mainly "conservative Democrats" - are planning to vote for Bush. A crucial sliver of Democrats seem to recoil from Kerry the way effete elite Europeans recoil from Bush. Unfortunately the former, unlike the latter, can vote.

So the most likely outcome this November is an increased Republican majority in the House, a couple of extra Senate seats, and a second term for Bush. I might be wrong. Anything is possible. But the reluctance of the British press to admit the possibility that Bush isn't a loser suggests that they too have over-invested in John Kerry's very weak hand.

NY Cop on liberal protestors- "It's like fuggin' 9/11 never happened"

08.30.04 (9:34 pm)   [edit]
Courtesy of Roger Simon-- http://www.rogerlsimon.com/

On Compassionate Liberalism

08.30.04 (9:25 pm)   [edit]
Blogger Therealspartacus, in lieu of thinking, has taken to cutting and pasting the lowest form of political commentary, the political cartoon. He recently posted a cartoon showing "Compassionate Conservatism", a phrase coined by Bush in 2000 only because the Left had radicalized and mishaped what "Conservatism" is, as a teddy bear hanging by a noose. Such simple A+B= C formulations used to be something Therealspartacus attempted, with some success, to be above.

But that was before he showed us who he really was.

All this coming from a guy who believes that babies have absolutely no rights to be born. That they are property and at some arbitrary time in the future (determined by other humans) can be deemed "independent". This coming from a guy who, with all the religious faith he can muster, attacks anyone who expresses faith in a being higher than himself.

But let's take a look at what Liberal compassion is:

Compassionate Liberalism:

1)Oppressive tax rates, meaning you work harder and harder for less money. Where do the taxes go?

2) Huge bureacracies that favor the elite, and government programs that lock the poor in their own misery. Public school systems that go nowhere. Medical plans that go bankrupt. Now [i]that's[/i] compassion.

3)No rights whatsoever-- freedom of speech is limited to what is approved by the Elite. The 2nd amendment? Yeah, right. The will of the people is usurped by the Judicial Branch which is simpatico with the Elite.

Want more compassion?

4)An anti-defense, unrealistic mindset that brings us terror attacks on our own soil. That allows for our enemies to steal or unethically purchase our most sensitive nuclear and space technology. Useless treates built on a bedrock of "dialogue" that, through the magic of moral equivalence, dangerously bring the world ever close to the brink of all-out nuclear war.

5)Baby murder on demand.

6)Killing of the weak, on demand (not only babies, but the elderly and disabled).

7)A loss of moral direction, resulting in a sexual "revolution" that has ruined untold lives and destroyed families, increasing poverty and crime.

8)An example of responsibility-free living. We are all "victims", and we need others to fund our lives. Are we fat? Poor? Uneducated? Well, of course we need others to subsidize our lifestyles (tax money!) because we don't believe in doing it ourselves.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

BONUS: If Therealspartacus wants to go off on his little bugaboo, Iraq, I hasten to remind him, and the legion of left-wing nutties out there, that Iraq became what it was, including the notion of WMD, through the governance of a Democratic presidential administration. George Tenet was a CIA hire, his conclusions, and the world's conclusions, came during the "leadership" of a Democratic president. We lingered in Iraq precisely because of compassionate liberalism (of sanctons, of talk, of foot-dragging).

You can make the same case for the rise of OBL and Al Qaeda.

Compassionate liberalism-- not compassionate, but deadly.

The myth of the Arab claim to Palestine

08.30.04 (11:08 am)   [edit]
From Frontpage Magazine--

[b]How Strong Is the Arab Claim to Palestine?[/b]
By Lawrence Auster
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 30, 2004

There is a myth hanging over all discussion of the Palestinian problem: the myth that this land was "Arab" land taken from its native inhabitants by invading Jews. Whatever may be the correct solution to the problems of the Middle East, let's get a few things straight:

§ As a strictly legal matter, the Jews didn't take Palestine from the Arabs; they took it from the British, who exercised sovereign authority in Palestine under a League of Nations mandate for thirty years prior to Israel's declaration of independence in 1948. And the British don't want it back.

§ If you consider the British illegitimate usurpers, fine. In that case, this territory is not Arab land but Turkish land, a province of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years until the British wrested it from them during the Great War in 1917. And the Turks don't want it back.

§ If you look back earlier in history than the Ottoman Turks, who took over Palestine over in 1517, you find it under the sovereignty of the yet another empire not indigenous to Palestine: the Mamluks, who were Turkish and Circassian slave-soldiers headquartered in Egypt. And the Mamluks don't even exist any more, so they can't want it back.

So, going back 800 years, there's no particularly clear chain of title that makes Israel's title to the land inferior to that of any of the previous owners. Who were, continuing backward:

§ The Mamluks, already mentioned, who in 1250 took Palestine over from:

§ The Ayyubi dynasty, the descendants of Saladin, the Kurdish Muslim leader who in 1187 took Jerusalem and most of Palestine from:

§ The European Christian Crusaders, who in 1099 conquered Palestine from:

§ The Seljuk Turks, who ruled Palestine in the name of:

§ The Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad, which in 750 took over the sovereignty of the entire Near East from:

§ The Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus, which in 661 inherited control of the Islamic lands from

§ The Arabs of Arabia, who in the first flush of Islamic expansion conquered Palestine in 638 from:

§ The Byzantines, who (nice people—perhaps it should go to them?) didn't conquer the Levant, but, upon the division of the Roman Empire in 395, inherited Palestine from:

§ The Romans, who in 63 B.C. took it over from:

§ The last Jewish kingdom, which during the Maccabean rebellion from 168 to 140 B.C. won control of the land from:

§ The Hellenistic Greeks, who under Alexander the Great in 333 B.C. conquered the Near East from:

§ The Persian empire, which under Cyrus the Great in 639 B.C. freed Jerusalem and Judah from:

§ The Babylonian empire, which under Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C. took Jerusalem and Judah from:

§ The Jews, meaning the people of the Kingdom of Judah, who, in their earlier incarnation as the Israelites, seized the land in the 12th and 13th centuries B.C. from:

§ The Canaanites, who had inhabited the land for thousands of years before they were dispossessed by the Israelites.

As the foregoing suggests, any Arab claim to sovereignty based on inherited historical control will not stand up. Arabs are not native to Palestine, but are native to Arabia, which is called Arab-ia for the breathtakingly simple reason that it is the historic home of the Arabs. The terroritories comprising all other "Arab" states outside the Arabian peninsula—including Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria, as well as the entity now formally under the Palestinian Authority—were originally non-Arab nations that were conquered by the Muslim Arabs when they spread out from the Arabian peninsula in the first great wave of jihad in the 7th century, defeating, mass-murdering, enslaving, dispossessing, converting, or reducing to the lowly status of dhimmitude millions of Christians and Jews and destroying their ancient and flourishing civilizations. Prior to being Christian, of course, these lands had even more ancient histories. Pharaonic Egypt, for example, was not an Arab country through its 3,000 year history.

The recent assertion by the Palestinian Arabs that they are descended from the ancient Canaanites whom the ancient Hebrews displaced is absurd in light of the archeological evidence. There is no record of the Canaanites surviving their destruction in ancient times. History records literally hundreds of ancient peoples that no longer exist. The Arab claim to be descended from Canaanites is an invention that came after the 1964 founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the same crew who today deny that there was ever a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Prior to 1964 there was no "Palestinian" people and no "Palestinian" claim to Palestine; the Arab nations who sought to overrun and destroy Israel in 1948 planned to divide up the territory amongst themselves. Let us also remember that prior to the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the name "Palestinian" referred to the Jews of Palestine.

In any case, today's "Palestine," meaning the West Bank and Gaza, is, like most of the world, inhabited by people who are not descendants of the first human society to inhabit that territory. This is true not only of recently settled countries like the United States and Argentina, where European settlers took the land from the indigenous inhabitants several hundred years ago, but also of ancient nations like Japan, whose current Mongoloid inhabitants displaced a primitive people, the Ainu, aeons ago. Major "native" tribes of South Africa, like the Zulu, are actually invaders from the north who arrived in the 17th century. India's caste system reflects waves of fair-skinned Aryan invaders who arrived in that country in the second millennium B.C. One could go on and on.

The only nations that have perfect continuity between their earliest known human inhabitants and their populations of the present day are Iceland, parts of China, and a few Pacific islands. The Chinese case is complicated by the fact that the great antiquity of Chinese civilization has largely erased the traces of whatever societies preceded it, making it difficult to reconstruct to what extent the expanding proto-Chinese displaced (or absorbed) the prehistoric peoples of that region. History is very sketchy in regard to the genealogies of ancient peoples. The upshot is that "aboriginalism"—the proposition that the closest descendants of the original inhabitants of a territory are the rightful owners—is not tenable in the real world. It is not clear that it would be a desirable idea even if it were tenable. Would human civilization really be better off if there had been no China, no Japan, no Greece, no Rome, no France, no England, no Ireland, no United States?

[b]Back to the Arabs[/b]

I have no problem recognizing the legitimacy of the Arabs' tenure in Palestine when they had it, from 638 to 1099, a period of 461 years out of a history lasting 5,000 years. They took Palestine by military conquest, and they lost it by conquest, to the Christian Crusaders in 1099. Of course, military occupation by itself does not determine which party rightly has sovereignty in a given territory. Can it not be said that the Arabs have sovereign rights, if not to all of Israel, then at least to the West Bank, by virtue of their majority residency in that region from the early Middle Ages to the present?

To answer that question, let's look again at the historical record. Prior to 1947, as we've discussed, Palestine was administered by the British under the Palestine Mandate, the ultimate purpose of which, according to the Balfour Declaration, was the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. In 1924 the British divided the Palestine Mandate into an Arabs-only territory east of the Jordan, which became the Kingdom of Trans-Jordan, and a greatly reduced Palestine Mandate territory west of the Jordan, which was inhabited by both Arabs and Jews.

Given the fact that the Jews and Arabs were unable to coexist in one state, there had to be two states. At the same time, there were no natural borders separating the two peoples, in the way that, for example, the Brenner Pass has historically marked the division between Latin and Germanic Europe. Since the Jewish population was concentrated near the coast, the Jewish state had to start at the coast and go some distance inland. Exactly where it should have stopped, and where the Arab state should have begun, was a practical question that could have been settled in any number of peaceful ways, almost all of which the Jews would have accepted. The Jews' willingness to compromise on territory was demonstrated not only by their acquiescence in the UN's 1947 partition plan, which gave them a state with squiggly, indefensible borders, but even by their earlier acceptance of the 1937 Peel Commission partition plan, which gave them nothing more than a part of the Galilee and a tiny strip along the coast. Yet the Arab nations, refusing to accept any Jewish sovereignty in Palestine even if it was the size of a postage stamp, unanimously rejected the 1937 Peel plan, and nine years later they violently rejected the UN's partition plan as well. When the Arabs resorted to arms in order to wipe out the Jews and destroy the Jewish state, they accepted the verdict of arms. They lost that verdict in 1948, and they lost it again in 1967, when Jordan, which had annexed the West Bank in 1948 (without any objections from Palestinian Arabs that their sovereign nationhood was being violated), attacked Israel from the West Bank during the Six Day War despite Israel's urgent pleas that it stay out of the conflict. Israel in self-defense then captured the West Bank. The Arabs thus have no grounds to complain either about Israel's existence (achieved in '48) or about its expanded sovereignty from the river to the sea (achieved in '67).

The Arabs have roiled the world for decades with their furious protest that their land has been "stolen" from them. One might take seriously such a statement if it came from a pacifist people such as the Tibetans, who had quietly inhabited their land for ages before it was seized by the Communist Chinese in 1950. The claim is laughable coming from the Arabs, who in the early Middle Ages conquered and reduced to slavery and penury ancient peoples and civilizations stretching from the borders of Persia to the Atlantic; who in 1947 rejected an Arab state in Palestine alongside a Jewish state and sought to obliterate the nascent Jewish state; who never called for a distinct Palestinian Arab state until the creation of the terrorist PLO in 1964—sixteen years after the founding of the state of Israel; and who to this moment continue to seek Israel's destruction, an object that would be enormously advanced by the creation of the Arab state they demand. The Arab claim to sovereign rights west of the Jordan is only humored today because of a fatal combination of world need for Arab oil, leftist Political Correctness that has cast the Israelis as "oppressors," and, of course, good old Jew-hatred.


Lawrence Auster is the author of Erasing America: The Politics of the Borderless Nation. He offers his traditionalist conservative perspective at View from the Right.

Flipside unhinged

08.30.04 (3:33 am)   [edit]
I posted an article about John Kerry and how for some reason he decided to make his four months in Vietnam the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. This guy was a US Senator for 19 years, but apparently that record is [i]worse[/i] than his false war-crimes accusations toward his "band of brothers", the same vets he now wants to exploit for his political goals.

Enter tblogger flipside down, who:

1) Posted a John Kerry quote


[i]“Our military families have the right to expect real leadership of the armed forces from the Commander-in-Chief. They have a right to competitive pay and quality housing, decent health care and dental care. Quality education for their children. First rate training. The best possible weaponry and state-of-the-art equipment. They have a right to timely deployment information. And they have a right to know that, in the event of tragedy, help will be there to care and provide for their families and for them.” - John Kerry[/i]

That's a pretty good quote, but Kerry simply doesn't believe it. Or did someone else vote against basic funding for our troops in Iraq? Or does someone else have an anti-military, anti-vet voting record in the Senate? Or does someone else have a Vietnam era legacy of anti-vet, anti-military activism? If John Kerry had his way, as he said in an interview, he'd hand over our military to the UN.

The record shows that Kerry offered the above quote to try and gain swing voters. It doesn't reflect reality. Too bad flipside hasn't caught on yet.

2)Said:

[i]bringing down the WTC towers wasn't enough? now you want to smear Boston and it's Irish people on top of the French? You guys are running out of groups....oh yeah let's see you've already smeared vets, american POW's, lawyers, liberals, dissenters, protestors, anyone who wont "pledge" their vote, anyone who doesn't listen to Rush etc. etc. etc.[/i]

Um, oh. And Conservatives are the extremists? For the record, the US government's ignoring terrorism for 25 plus years, including Bill Clinton's refusal to fight Al Qaeda and capture Osama bin Laden, that, my friend, brought the towers down. I don't remember the columnist smearing the Irish-- and I wouldn't because I have Irish blood in me and beecause I don't believe in hating others based on ethnicity.

That is quite different than the Democrats. They love to hate based on sexual orientation, ethnicity, and gender. Instead of believing in equality, they lock black people into government programs, they exacerbate the plight of the poor, they make being a white male almost punishable by death. No, flipside, the Democrats are the masters at class and race exploitation. Their ancestors were the original southern slave owners in the US, and their heart lies in the western European elite.

POWs? It was John F'ing Kerry who wanted to close the books on POWs and MIAs in Vietnam. Lawyers? They are more responsible for the rise in health care than almost anyone else. Dissenters? Nothing wrong with dissent at all. But a 2 hour propaganda film full of lies and slander is not dissent-- it is an abuse of the first amendment (I'm talking, of course, about "Farenheit 9/11"). Vets? Bush didn't call Vietnam vet baby killers. Bush didn't protest the war and endanger the lives of said vets. Protestors? Nothing wrong with that, either, provided they tell the truth when they decide to attack.

Flipside is in monumental ignorance of reality. Somebody help him, please.

Who is the Kerry camp genius who thought Vietnam would be the ticket?

08.30.04 (12:32 am)   [edit]
From the Usual Suspects-- http://www.free-times.com/Usu...

[b]John Kerry: Not So Swift[/b]
Michael Graham

"Injustice is relatively easy to bear. What stings is justice." — H.L. Mencken

Listening to John Kerry complain about the scrutiny his Vietnam record is getting is like Pamela Anderson complaining about the fact that guys keep staring at her breasts. What the hell did you expect?

When you turn the Democratic National Convention into a four-day screening of Apocalypse Now — complete with the candidate's own home movies; when you stride to the podium with a crisp salute and a "reporting for duty"; when your political entourage has more military uniforms in it than the coatroom of a Subic Bay bordello; in short, when you base much of your campaign for president on two tours of duty in 'Nam — you, sir, have no right to complain that your opponents are too obsessed with the past.

If there were ever a candidate who is getting exactly the campaign treatment he deserves, that man is John F. Kerry.

What I, a former GOP political flak and campaign lackey, can't figure out is what genius in the Democratic Party looked at John Kerry and said, "Yeah, Vietnam — that's the ticket!" Why not get Scott Peterson to run for attorney general as the pro-life candidate?

There are people in American public life for whom Vietnam would be a worse campaign issue than it is for John Kerry. Jane Fonda, former members of the Kent State National Guard, Lt. William Calley of My Lai …

That's about it.

But for John Kerry, whose weakness as a candidate is the perception (fair or otherwise) that he is a typical Massachusetts liberal, it's hard to think of an issue better suited to cement that perception than a campaign reminding people that he launched his political career as a long-haired, ribbon-throwing, fist-shaking, Fonda-friendly peacenik.

There are plenty of veterans who still haven't forgiven Kerry for his wartime denunciations of American soldiers and their "atrocities" while men still fought in Vietnam. They haven't forgotten that some of those soldiers were being beaten and tortured in North Vietnamese prisons, where John Kerry's own congressional testimony attacking the military was read to these prisoners by their Communist captors.

But most voters didn't serve in Vietnam. Quite of few of them don't even remember it. These voters just want to vote for a guy who they perceive as "one of us," a candidate who they believe shares their basic view of America.

In 2000, Southerner Al Gore became perceived as "one of them" in a majority of states from West Virginia to New Mexico — including his home state of Tennessee — and it cost him the election. For the Boston Brahmin millionaire Sen. John "Heinz" Kerry and his world-citizen wife, the core challenge for the campaign has always been how to make "one of us" out of a Massachusetts liberal with a voting record to the left of Ted Kennedy.

Campaigning on Kerry's military service certainly makes him more relatable to Mr. and Mrs. Typical American. However, it also makes Kerry's record as an anti-war activist relevant, too. This was always the Achilles heel, calf, thigh and lower torso of the Kerry "war hero" strategy. Do you really want Mr. and Mrs. Typical flipping through photo albums of John Kerry hanging out with hippies and throwing away the ribbons from his medals?

Enter Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, just a few dozen men with less than $1 million in TV ads who have set the perfect trap for Kerry and his media allies. For a year, Kerry's anti-war antics were largely ignored by the networks and the newspapers. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth wisely launched their first assault against Kerry's "war hero" record instead, giving the Kerry campaign and the lapdog press a target they couldn't resist, as no members of the group served on Kerry's boat and some have changed their stories. Kerry and the press corps dived right into a "he said/she said" battle that could only be fought to a draw.

That's when Swift Boat Veterans for Truth opened fire with the big guns: Kerry's words and deeds after he returned home from Vietnam.

We may never know who was or wasn't shooting when John Kerry was wounded in Vietnam, but the words "atrocities," "human genitals" and "cut off heads" are a matter of public record. Kerry's book, The New Soldier, written with the now-discredited leftist organization "Vietnam Veterans Against the War," is available on Amazon.com (albeit for $798). The web site does not, alas, have a photo of the book's cover featuring an upside down American flag.

Because John Kerry's record as an opportunistic, anti-war political activist is not obscured by the fog of war, it is the only story the press can cover from Vietnam with any confidence. And more importantly, with any relevance.

If the Kerry campaign were about his plans for a different approach in Iraq, then Kerry's days as a "Hanoi Jane" lefty would be ancient history. If Kerry were running as a "lion of the Senate" and his 20-year voting record, then the '70s would be, like, far out, man.

But for the saluting Vietnam vet whose campaign theme is "I defended America as a young man and I will do the same as president," John Kerry's days as a peacenik fighting against the establishment are the here and now. Thanks to John Kerry, a Jane Fonda, anti-war liberal isn't who he was. It's who he is.

The Kerry campaign may long for the day when their candidate was just another Massachusetts liberal.

DoD employee with ties to Wolfowitz at center of Israeli spy investigation

08.30.04 (12:19 am)   [edit]
From the LA Times--

THE WORLD
[b]Report on Iran Key to Spying Inquiry
Investigators are looking closely at Pentagon policy analyst Larry Franklin's relationships with advocates for Israel.[/b]
By Mark Mazzetti and Richard B. Schmitt, Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON — The man at the center of an FBI investigation into possible Israeli espionage in Washington is a career Pentagon employee, a colonel in the Air Force reserves and a national security analyst who at the end of the Cold War taught himself Farsi and refashioned himself as an expert on Iran, officials said Saturday.

The FBI is trying to determine whether he is also a spy.

U.S. officials confirmed Saturday that the target of the investigation was Larry Franklin, the Pentagon's top Iran policy analyst and a confidant of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith, who, as undersecretary for policy, was the Pentagon's third-ranking official.

The FBI is trying to ascertain whether Franklin turned over a draft presidential directive on policy toward Iran last year to two people affiliated with the Washington-based American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which may have given the information to Israel.

Officials are concerned because the directive was still being debated by U.S. policymakers at the time, possibly putting the Israeli government in a position to influence the final document, officials said. U.S. policy toward Iran is vital to Israel, which is gravely concerned about the expanding nuclear capability of the country run by Shiite Muslim clerics.

The probe, which is being handled by the FBI's counter- espionage division, might not result in espionage charges against Franklin.

Instead, the Pentagon analyst could be charged with lesser offenses such as improper disclosure or mishandling of classified information. Or he could be exonerated.

A U.S. official with knowledge of the case expressed doubts Saturday that Franklin's alleged actions rose to the level of espionage. Instead, he said it was more likely that Franklin, who maintains close ties with Israeli officials, passed documents to Israel without knowing the seriousness of his actions.

"From everything I've seen, the guy's not a spy," the official said. "The guy's an idiot."

According to the official, the closeness of the U.S. relationship with Israel means that top officials of the two nations often share sensitive information. Nevertheless, Franklin should have known what information was and was not permissible to be shared, he said.

"We knew this guy had the relationship for a while, and he shared some stuff beyond what he should be sharing," the official said.

Franklin did not respond to phone messages Saturday seeking comment.

Sources said that Franklin, a longtime official with the Defense Intelligence Agency, three years ago joined the Pentagon's Office of Near East and South Asian Affairs, the group charged with developing the Pentagon's policy for the Middle East. The office is run by William J. Luti, who in turn reports to Feith.

Since joining Luti's office, Franklin has been the Pentagon's leading Iran policy analyst, a job that took on greater importance after President Bush included Iran in his "axis of evil" and his appointees at the Pentagon advocated a hard line toward Iran.

As a member of the Air Force reserves, Franklin is assigned to a DIA reserve unit based in Washington.

A Pentagon statement released Friday characterized Franklin as a "desk officer" with no significant influence on U.S. policy. Yet some who have worked with him offer a different picture, saying he was very influential in high-level Pentagon policy debates.

"You're not talking about someone toiling away in the bowels of the U.S. government," said a former Pentagon official who worked for Feith until last year and spoke on condition of anonymity.

"Franklin was the go-to guy on Iran issues for Wolfowitz and Feith."

In addition, the former official characterized Franklin as an ideological ally of Wolfowitz, Feith and Luti. The three men were among the Bush administration's leading advocates of war with Iraq, and the Middle East policy office and the Office of Special Plans, both of which reported to Luti, produced analyses bolstering the U.S. case against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

"Their analysis wasn't whether we should invade Iraq, but whether we should do it on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday," the former official said.

FBI investigators fear that Franklin — given his influential position and high-level security clearance — may have been in a position to compromise government information about Iraq and the U.S. war effort.

Sometime after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Franklin took a secret trip to Rome with Harold Rhode, another civilian official in the Pentagon, to meet with Iranian dissidents who reportedly promised to provide information to them that would aid the U.S.-declared war on terrorism.

One of the dissidents the pair spoke to was Manucher Ghorbanifar, an arms dealer and former Iranian spy who was a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s.

The White House blessed the trip. Yet when news of the meeting leaked two years later, officials said they had not known that Ghorbanifar would be among the dissidents Franklin and Rhode met.

According to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, that meeting and a subsequent one between Rhode and Ghorbanifar "went nowhere."

Michael Ledeen, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington who specializes in Mideast affairs, arranged the contacts between the Pentagon officials and the Iranian dissidents, which he said led to American lives being saved in Afghanistan.

Asked Saturday for comment on the investigation, Ledeen said he expected the FBI probe to yield nothing incriminating about Franklin, whom Ledeen has known for years.

"I don't believe Larry Franklin would ever do anything improper with classified information," said Ledeen, who worked as a consultant to the National Security Council and the State and Defense departments during the administration of Ronald Reagan.

Ledeen said the information Franklin was suspected of transferring was well known among foreign policy observers. The U.S. had not developed a coherent Iran policy, he said, and the divergent views of various administration officials were publicly known and available.

"There is no American policy on Iran," Ledeen said. "What is he telling them? What can there possibly be that is classified about American policy on Iran that we do not know about from the public debate?"

Franklin and Rhode also have close ties with Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress was the dissident organization most favored by Pentagon officials during Hussein's rule.

Chalabi met often with top officials at the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office to advocate regime change in Iraq.

Chalabi himself has been investigated by American officials in connection with the transmission of U.S. secrets to Iran. It is unclear whether the investigations into Franklin and Chalabi are connected.

If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.

The Democrats' patriotism problem

08.29.04 (11:38 pm)   [edit]
From OpinionJournal.com--

[b]The Democrats' Patriotism Problem
Whining about imagined attacks is not a winning approach.[/b]
BY JAMES TARANTO
Monday, August 30, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

NEW YORK--President Bush may or may not get a "bounce" out of his convention here this week, but one suspects John Kerry is grateful for a respite after weeks of pounding by Vietnam veterans angry over his past antiwar activities and his present war-hero braggadocio. Before we turn our sights to the festivities at Madison Square Garden, it's worth pausing to consider how the Democrats ended up in this mess. Why did they nominate a candidate whose almost obsessive invocation of Vietnam made it all but inevitable that this decades-old war would become a central issue in the campaign?

The answer, simply put, is that the Democratic Party has a problem with patriotism, a problem that Mr. Kerry's status as a decorated Vietnam veteran was supposed to obviate.

To say that the Democrats have a problem with patriotism is not to say that they are unpatriotic. But they are awfully defensive about their patriotism. "Of course the vice president is questioning my patriotism," Michael Dukakis fumed during a 1988 presidential debate. "And I resent it." After Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia lost his 2002 re-election bid, it became part of Democratic (and journalistic) folklore that he owed his ouster to GOP attacks on his patriotism. And last month in Boston, Mr. Kerry declared: "We have an important message for those who question the patriotism of Americans who offer a better direction for our country. . . . We are here to affirm that when Americans stand up and speak their minds and say America can do better, that is not a challenge to patriotism; it is the heart and soul of patriotism."

In fact, these men had been criticized by their GOP opponents not over patriotism but over policy: Gov. Dukakis's veto of a Pledge of Allegiance bill, Sen. Cleland's vote against creating the Homeland Security Department over the absence of union privileges for workers in the new agency, and Sen. Kerry's 19-year record on defense, especially his vote last year against funding the military and reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Surely it is fair for any politician to take issue with his opponent's official acts. And if those acts were motivated by something other than antipathy toward America--as any fair-minded observer must presume they were--they could have been defended on their merits. Instead, Democrats themselves raised the issue of patriotism by defensively denying that they lacked it. A cardinal rule of political communication is never to repeat an accusation in the course of denying it ("I am not a crook"). These candidates "repeated" a charge no one had even made.

Contrast this with the way Republicans responded during the primary season when Democrats did question their patriotism. "I'm tired of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney and a bunch of people who went out of their way to avoid their chance to serve [in the military] when they had the chance," Mr. Kerry declared in April. Earlier, Wesley Clark refused to renounce a supporter's claim that Mr. Bush was a "deserter." And Howard Dean flatly stated: "John Ashcroft is not a patriot."

Republicans didn't care--and why should they? No one seriously believes Messrs. Ashcroft, Bush, Cheney and Rove are unpatriotic. When Messrs. Clark, Dean and Kerry question their opponents' patriotism, it has some mild shock value but carries no real sting, like a child trying out a naughty word he's just learned.

So why do Democrats feel so vulnerable on the issue of patriotism? This question takes us back to the 1960s and, yes, Vietnam. That war, which a Democratic president escalated, split the party, costing it the presidency in 1968. By 1972 the countercultural left was firmly established as a part of the Democratic coalition--and it remains so. A significant and vocal minority of the party, that is, believes that America is imperialistic, racist, militaristic, oppressive, etc. These views aren't necessarily unpatriotic; it is possible to love one's country and also be a harsh critic of it. But if dissent can be patriotic, assent is far less complicatedly so.

That's especially true during wartime, when domestic disunity can aid the enemy. Several men who were prisoners of war in Vietnam have said their communist captors used tapes and transcripts of Mr. Kerry's antiwar testimony in an effort to demoralize them during interrogation sessions. These days, overseas opponents of America's war effort cite the agitprop movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" as if it were authoritative--and the Democrats treated the maker of that film as a hero at their convention, where he was an honored guest of Jimmy Carter.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, it seemed possible that the antiwar counterculture was a thing of the past. But old habits die hard, and for the most part the Democratic left soon returned to its Sept. 10 mindset. Democrats nominated John Kerry, respected on the left for his antiwar agitation, on the theory that his war-hero pose would establish his patriotism and be sufficient to compensate for his lack of a muscular foreign policy.

Instead it has raised questions about his character. One veteran quoted in "Unfit for Command" puts the matter pungently: "In 1971-72, for almost 18 months, he stood before the television audiences and claimed that the 500,000 men and women in Vietnam, and in combat, were all villains--there were no heroes. In 2004, one hero from the Vietnam War has appeared, running for president of the United States and commander in chief. It just galls one to think about it."

The Democrats' problem goes deeper than their flawed nominee. Just as in 1968, they are a party divided on questions of war and peace. This didn't matter during the seemingly placid 1990s, but today it puts them at a severe disadvantage. It's difficult to see how they can overcome it.

It should be clear by now, though, that whining about imagined attacks on patriotism is not a winning approach. If it were, Michael Dukakis would be a former president and Max Cleland would not be a former senator.

[i]Mr. Taranto is editor of OpinionJournal.com and co-editor, with Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, of "Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House" (Wall Street Journal Books, 2004), available from the OpinionJournal bookstore.[/i]

Oops, now Kerry camp says his first Purple Heart may have been self-inflicted

08.29.04 (11:35 pm)   [edit]

A campaign built on lies is a house of cards.  And if Bush had made a quarter of the claims Kerry has made and voted the way in the Senate he has, the Left would be hounding on Bush even more.  We hear all of this crap about Bush being a deceiver, but time and again it is the Kerry campaign that not only lies repeatedly, but has the gall to think they can get away with it.

The irony is that the one big lie the left accuses BUsh of, Iraq and WMD, was a "lie" that the entire world believed and a lie that was the foundation of US government policy in the 1990s.  In short, if it was a lie, it was the biggest conspiracy of our time, orchestrated by the previous administration and the UN.  No one believes that, so how can seemingly rational folks accuse the President of lying or "misleading"?  Bush was justified to go into war, and everyone, including Kerry, Clinton, and the UN, thought so.

If there was bad intelligence we only point back to the man running the CIA, George Tenet who was, by the way, a Clinton appointee in the mid-1990s.  Bush's big sin may have been keeping him on, but if you want to blame someone for Iraq, blame the previous administration.

From MassNews.org --

 

KERRY CAMPAIGN BACKTRACKS ON FIRST PURPLE HEART AWARD Campaign Says May Have Been Self-Inflicted     & nbsp; Washington—In a reversal of their staunch defense of John Kerry's military service record, Kerry campaign officials were quoted by Fox News saying that it was indeed possible that John Kerry's first Purple Heart commendation was the result of an, unintentional, self-inflicted wound."      "GARRETT: And questions keep coming. For example, Kerry received a Purple Heart for wounds suffered on December 2, 1968. But in Kerry's own journal written nine days later, he writes he and his crew, quote, "hadn't been shot at yet," unquote. Kerry's campaign has said it is possible this first Purple Heart was awarded for an unintentional self-inflicted wound -- Brit." (Special Report with Brit Hume Aug.23, 2004)     & nbsp; A recent television ad from Swift Boat Veterans for Truth featured Doctor Lewis Letson who treated Kerry for his minor injury and Grant Hibbard who served as John Kerry's direct commander on the mission where he claimed his medal. Both men say Kerry did not deserve the medal given the fact that Kerry received a very minor wound requiring no more than band-aid treatment and because the wound was not a direct result of hostile fire, a requirement for a Purple Heart commendation.      "When Grant Hibbard and Doctor Letson appeared in our ad, they were attacked and vilified by the Kerry campaign but now we see news reports saying the Kerry campaign is now sheepishly acknowledging that what we said was true," said Admiral Hoffmann, founder of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. "John Kerry's own journal reinforces the fact that neither Kerry nor his crew had seen hostile enemy action. John Kerry's first Purple Heart medal is based on fiction."     & nbsp; Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is calling on the Kerry campaign to apologize to Grant Hibbard and Doctor Letson as the men did nothing more than come forward to speak the truth about the situation involving John Kerry's first Purple Heart medal.     & nbsp; This is not the only incident in which Kerry campaign officials have changed their story concerning Kerry's prestigious war medals. The incident on the Bay Hap River in which Kerry received his third Purple Heart and Bronze Star has also been the subject of considerable waffling by Kerry officials.      & nbsp; During the Democratic National Convention, Kerry used the Bay Hap River incident to suggest that he alone returned to rescue Jim Rassmann—a Special Forces solider—who was on Kerry's boat and was tossed into the river.  Kerry described this incident to the American people as "No man left behind."      However Kerry officials were forced to acknowledge that Kerry's boat actually left the scene when another swift boat—operating on the other side of the river—was damaged by an underwater mine.  Kerry officials now admit that Kerry's boat returned after several minutes to pull Rassmann from the water while three other swift boats remained on site to render assistance to the injured crew of the one damaged boat.  Campaign officials once claimed that Kerry returned to the scene under withering hostile fire to rescue Rassmann after all the other swift boats left.  But other accounts from eyewitnesses of that day confirm that the other boats stayed on site and that Kerry returned to the scene, facing no enemy fire, only seconds before another swift boat was preparing to retrieve Mr. Rassmann from the water.      "John Kerry's stories are falling apart," added Hoffmann. His statements don't even match up with his own journal entries.  We are going to continue telling the truth about John Kerry's military service record so that the American people can make their own decisions about John Kerry's qualifications to be the next Commander in Chief." Direct media inquiries to media@swiftvets.com

Copyright 2004 ©All Rights Reserved MassNews.com® P.O. Box 5882 Holliston, MA  01746 781-237-2772

 

Predictable Distortion of Climate Change

08.29.04 (11:27 pm)   [edit]

From the Green Earth Society--

Predictable Distortion
of Climate Change

Princeton University’s Stephen W. Pacala and colleague Robert H. Socolow plausibly argue in a recent Science article that emissions of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere through human activities could be significantly reduced if existing technologies were increasingly adopted. The problem is people have to want to use the technologies today, the technologies have to work, and they have to be affordable.
    & nbsp;Consider owners of hybrid automobiles. Their major complaint, according the J.D. Power and Associates, is that the cars don’t get nearly the fuel economy that is advertised. That makes it difficult for owners to justify the car’s comparably higher price tag. While Honda’s (fundamentally) two-seater Insight seems to be an exception, it employs so many additional energy-saving technologies — such as the frameless-all aluminum construction that reduces its weight to 1800 pounds — that it’s become a money-loser for the manufacturer.
    & nbsp;Pacala and Soclow argue that carbon dioxide emissions will skyrocket and the planet will warm unless there is forced adoption of hybrids and many other technologies that people are coming to abhor (like the sight of and noise blight from unreliable windmill-generated electricity that got Prince Charles’ goat, recently).
    & nbsp;According to Juliet Eilperin writing in the August 16, 2004 edition of The Washington Post:

If governments fail to act, Socolow said, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will triple in 50 years. “Keeping it below a doubling is a heroic task,” he said.

    & nbsp;Before people began burning fossil fuels to release the energy that powers life as we know it, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was about 280 parts per million. It’s now about 375 ppm — an increase of about 34 percent. Twenty-five years ago the concentration was around 330 ppm, or 18 percent above background. In other words, Socolow is telling Eilperin (apparently with a straight face) that the 16 percent rise in the last twenty-five years will morph into a 300 percent rise in the next fifty “if governments fail to act.” This is nonsensical! To triple the 280 ppm background by 2053, the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration must increase 1.65 percent per year.
    & nbsp;According to data compiled by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the amount of carbon dioxide emissions per capita has been dropping worldwide since the 1980s and population (all those “capita”) isn’t increasing at nearly the rate predicted twenty-five years ago. In 1980, the United Nations predicted a global population of 15 billion by 2050. Their most recent estimate is nine billion. They’ve reduced their population prediction 40 percent. As companies have competed to produce and deploy more efficient technologies (principally in developed countries) the rate of increase in the atmospheric CO2 concentration has remained much smaller than the required 1.65 percent per year. In fact, it has changed very little. Over the period for which we have accurate records (1958 to present) the increase has fluctuated between 0.4% per year and 0.45%.
    & nbsp;Socolow’s gloomy prediction is rooted in the naïve assumption that this percentage will quadruple despite decades of constancy because increased world population will pursue “an American lifestyle.” But world population has grown at 60 percent of the rate it was “supposed” to even as people adopt something akin to an American lifestyle. People are consuming less energy per capita or per dollar economic output than they used to. Americans produce a constant dollar’s worth of GDP using 60 percent of the energy it took twenty-five years ago to the same end. Meanwhile, citizens of the world either are buying or emulating our more efficient power-production technologies. And this has happened over the course of our love affair with gas-guzzling SUVs.
    & nbsp;How will these trends suddenly reverse? Efficient electrical technologies are coursing their way through world markets not because they combat global warming but because people desire cheap energy, which leads to an obvious question: In light of such facts, why does Socolow make the statement he does to a newspaper of the Post’s stature?
    & nbsp;The scientific community has a financial incentive to spout gloom and doom because doing so generates oodles of money from a sugar daddy named Uncle Sam. No one can leverage billions of dollars out of the Federal Treasury unless they’re going to research worst-case scenarios (the current annual outlay for “global change” research is $4 billion). The political process kicks in and takes credit for saving the body politic from certain destruction while the media’s addiction to “if it bleeds, it leads” stories leads to unquestioning publicity of research that promises to stem the flow.
    & nbsp;The scientific peer review is constitutionally incapable of breaking this cycle. To achieve expert-reviewer status, a scientist must have conducted oodles of federally-funded research. What rational person would choose to derail this gravy train? Research papers that argue against the end-of-the-world scenarios are difficult to shepherd through to publication even as problems with submissions touting apocalyptic scenarios either are glossed over or ignored.
    & nbsp;All of this guarantees we’ll be hearing screams of climate bloody murder for a long time to come. It’s simply economics interacting with politics. The result is unquestioning publication of absolute nonsense.

References
Pacala, S., Socolow, R., 2004. Stabilization wedges: solving the climate problem for the next 50 years with current technologies. Science, 305., 968-972.

Kerry campaign sez there is no link between it and 527s....facts speak otherwise

08.28.04 (8:19 am)   [edit]

A fine graphic from BlogsforBush which you can see larger here-- http://www.blogsforbush.com/mt/archives/infograph icfull.html" title="http://www.blogsforbush.com/mt/archives/infograph icfull.html" target="_blank"http://www.blogsforbush.com/m...

The not-so-swift mainstream media: how they were forced to cover a story they hated

08.28.04 (7:59 am)   [edit]
From the Weekly Standard--

[b]The Not-So-Swift Mainstream Media
From the September 6, 2004 issue: And how they were forced to cover a story they hated.[/b]
by Jonathan V. Last
08/28/2004 12:03:00 AM


DURING THE AUGUST 19 edition of PBS's NewsHour, Tom Oliphant unspooled. "The standard of clear and convincing evidence--and it's easy when you leave out the exculpatory stuff--is what keeps this story in the tabloids," the Boston Globe columnist sputtered, "because it does not meet basic standards." "This story" (shades of "that woman") is the story of the Swift boat veterans who have raised a number of troubling allegations against John Kerry. Sitting across from John O'Neill, coauthor of Unfit for Command and John Kerry's successor as commander of PCF-94 in Vietnam, Oliphant did a fair imitation of Al Gore--sighing, harumphing, and exhaling loudly--whenever O'Neill spoke.

"'Almost conclusive' doesn't cut it in the parts of journalism where I live," Oliphant lectured O'Neill, who graduated first in a class of 554 from the University of Texas Law School and clerked for U.S. Supreme Court justice William Rehnquist. "You haven't come within a country mile of meeting first-grade journalistic standards for accuracy." Watching the media's reaction to the Swift boat controversy, it's clear that many journalists agree with Oliphant.

Two days later, Adam Nagourney paused in the middle of a news story in the New York Times to worry about how campaigns should deal with attacks "in this era when so much unsubstantiated or even false information can reach the public through so many different forums, be it blogs or talk-show radio." In an article in Editor & Publisher, Alison Mitchell, the deputy national editor at the Times, admitted, "I'm not sure that in an era of no-cable television we would even have looked into [the Swift boat story]." James O'Shea, managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, went further: "There are too many places for people to get information. I don't think newspapers can be the gatekeepers anymore--to say this is wrong and we will ignore it. Now we have to say this is wrong and here is why."

There are many reasons why the mainstream media don't like the Swift boat story, but chief among them is that they've been strong-armed into covering it by the "new" media: talk-radio, cable television, and Internet blogs.

The Swift boat story first surfaced on May 4, when an op-ed by John O'Neill ran in the Wall Street Journal, in print and online, and the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, to which O'Neill belongs, held a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The event received scant notice by traditional media. CBS News mentioned it briefly and tried to tie the group to Bush. The Washington Post and New York Times had short items about it, as did the Boston Globe. The most in-depth coverage came from the Fox News Channel. On the May 4 edition of Special Report, Carl Cameron reported on the press conference, aired some of the Swifties' allegations, and then reported that certain of these veterans--Grant Hibbard and George Elliott--had previously supported John Kerry, immediately casting doubt on them.

The story went away for a while, but was always lurking in dark corners of the Internet, on websites like KerryHaters.blogspot.com. And clearly the big media weren't blind to it. "There are a few who served with him who dispute his record and question his leadership," Peter Jennings noted during an ABC News broadcast on July 29. "We'll hear from them in the weeks ahead," he continued, moving abruptly on to a pretaped package on Kerry's Vietnam heroism.

The next big break for the Swifties came on August 4, with the release of their first TV ad. Fox News covered the ad closely. The next night Hannity & Colmes featured members of the Swift boat group as well as veterans who supported Kerry.

That same day some print media outlets covered the ad buy, but not the substance of the ad's allegations. On television, only one broadcast network mentioned the spot: CBS spent two sentences on the "harsh" ad, in order to air John McCain's denunciation of it.

On August 6, NBC also reported on the "harsh" ad, but only as a way of segueing into a segment on "527 groups," independent political organizations funded with soft money. On MSNBC, Keith Olbermann mentioned O'Neill's forthcoming Unfit for Command. Since it's published by the conservative house Regnery, Olbermann reported, "you now bring in the whole mystical right-wing conspiracy jazz." The night before, Olbermann had repeatedly referred to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as "Swift Boat Veterans for Bush."

But the big news on August 6 was that Regnery allowed people to download the "Christmas in Cambodia" section of O'Neill's book. While Olbermann and others were worrying about mystical jazz, the new media swung into action. Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Reynolds, Powerline, and other bloggers immediately began investigating the book's allegations. The blog JustOneMinute was the first to find the 1986 "seared--seared" speech in which Kerry described his memory of being in Cambodia in December 1968. On August 8, Reynolds took his digital camera to the University of Tennessee law library and photographed the section of the Congressional Record with the Kerry speech, further verifying the chapter's central claim. That same weekend, Al Hunt talked about the Swift boat ad on CNN's Capital Gang, calling it "some of the sleaziest lies I've ever seen in politics."

Over the next 11 days, an interesting dynamic took hold: Talk-radio and the blog world covered the Cambodia story obsessively. They reported on border crossings during Vietnam and the differences between Swift boats and PBRs. They also found two other instances of Kerry's talking about his Christmas in Cambodia. Spurred on by the blogs, Fox led the August 9 Special Report with a Carl Cameron story on Kerry's Cambodia discrepancy.

All the while, traditional print and broadcast media tried hard to ignore the story--even as Kerry officially changed his position on his presence in Cambodia. Then on August 19, Kerry went public with his counter assault against Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and suddenly the story was news. The numbers are fairly striking: Before August 19, the New York Times and Washington Post had each mentioned Swift Boat Veterans for Truth just 8 times; the Los Angeles Times 7 times; the Boston Globe 4 times. The broadcast networks did far less. According to the indefatigable Media Research Center, before Kerry went public, ABC, CBS, and NBC together had done a total of 9 stories on the Swifties. For comparison, as of August 19 these networks had done 75 stories on the accusation that Bush had been AWOL from the National Guard.

After Kerry, the deluge. On August 24, the Washington Post ran three op-eds and an editorial on the Swifties; other papers expanded their coverage as well. But, curiously, they didn't try to play catch-up with the new media in ascertaining the veracity of the Swifties' claims. Instead, they pursued (or rather, repeated) the charge Kerry made: that Bush was behind Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. It was a touch surreal--as it would have been if Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe's criticism of Bush's National Guard record had prompted the media to investigate Terry McAuliffe.

But even here, it seemed their hearts weren't in it. In Time magazine, Joe Klein called the whole affair "incendiary nonsense." As the Los Angeles Times observed in an editorial, "Whether the Bush campaign is tied to the Swift boat campaign in the technical, legal sense that triggers the wrath of the campaign-spending reform law is not a very interesting question." As last week wore on, the coverage continued to ignore the specifics of the allegations against Kerry and began to concentrate on the dangers of the new media. In the New York Times, Alessandra Stanley warned that in the seedy world of cable news, "facts, half-truths and passionately tendentious opinions get tumbled together on screen like laundry in an industrial dryer--without the softeners of fact-checking or reflection." It is perhaps impolite to note that it took the Times nearly four months to catch up with the reporting Carl Cameron did in the beginning of May.

STILL, the baying of the Times and the rest of the old media is a sign of capitulation. Against their will, the best-funded and most prestigious journalists in America have been forced to cover a story they want no part of--or at the very least, they've been compelled to explain why they aren't covering it. How did this happen? Analyzing how the Swift boat veterans had injected their story into the mainstream media, Adam Nagourney blamed summer. The Swift boat ad buys, he wrote, had "become the subject of television news shows . . . because the advertisements and [Unfit for Command] were released in August, a slow month when news outlets are hungry for any kind of news."

But Nagourney has it exactly backwards: Even though it was August, network television and most cable news shows stayed away from the Swift boat story for as long as they possibly could.

Instead, James O'Shea is right. An informal network--the new media--has arisen that has the power to push stories into the old media. The combination of talk radio, a publishing house, blogs, and Fox News has given conservatives a voice independent of the old media.

It's unclear which of these was most critical for bringing the Swift boat story out into the open. Without Unfit for Command, the story would never have had a focal point with readily checkable facts. Talk radio kept the story alive on a daily basis. The blogs served as fact-checkers vetting the story, at least some aspects of it, for credibility and chewing it over enough so that producers and editors who read the blogs could approach it without worrying they were being snookered by black-helicopter nuts. Despite all that, however, no other medium has the reach of television, which is still the only way to move a story from a relatively small audience of news-obsessives to the general public.

Yet the blogosphere has had a particular interest in taking credit for making the Swift boat story pop. Blogs from Instapundit to The Belmont Club to Powerline were reveling in the demise of the old media and heaping scorn upon professional journalists. "I have been both a lawyer/law professor for two decades and a television/radio/print journalist for 15 years of those 20," Hugh Hewitt blogged. "It takes a great deal more intelligence and discipline to be the former than to be the latter, which is why the former usually pays a lot more than the latter. It is no surprise to me, then, when lawyers/law professors like those at Powerline and Instapundit prove to be far more adept at exposing the 'Christmas-in-Cambodia' lie and other Kerry absurdities than old-school journalists."

John Hinderaker, one of the bloggers behind Powerline, summed up the mood of the blogosphere by comparing journalism with brain surgery: "A bunch of amateurs, no matter how smart and enthusiastic, could never outperform professional neurosurgeons, because they lack the specialized training and experience necessary for that field," he said. "But what qualifications, exactly, does it take to be a journalist? What can they do that we can't? Nothing."

Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard.

© Copyright 2004, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

Carter was bad enough. Why is America endorsing Venezuela's shady election?

08.28.04 (5:07 am)   [edit]
Editorial from the WSJ--

[b]Hugo, Jimmy and Colin
Carter was bad enough. Why is America endorsing Venezuela's shady election?[/b]
Saturday, August 28, 2004 12:01 a.m.

Last week's recall victory by Venezuelan strongman President Hugo Chávez is likely to create long-term trouble for American interests in the Western Hemisphere. So it's all the more disconcerting to hear the U.S. State Department anoint what was anything but a fair and transparent election.

On Monday, a Foggy Bottom spokesman declared that, "In order to address those charges of election fraud, an audit was conducted. The audit found that--did not find any basis to call into doubt the results of the elections."

As "audits" go, however, this was akin to Arthur Andersen scrubbing Enron. The sample for the audit was selected by the National Electoral Council (CNE), which is controlled by Mr. Chávez, and was too small to be considered statistically reliable.

On referendum day, there was no open audit at the polling stations to reconcile the paper ballots to the electronic voting machines, as the opposition requested, because Mr. Chávez would not allow it. There was also no closed-door audit with all of the National Electoral Council members present because the Chávez-controlled Council did not allow it. There was no inspection of the electronic voting machines immediately after the vote because Mr. Chávez would not allow it. And there was no impartial impounding of the election data--paper or digital--because . . . you get the idea.

We also know that Mr. Chávez sharply limited the number of international observers allowed into the country, something that hasn't been done (outside of Cuba) in Latin America since Manual Noriega used it as a way to steal elections in Panama in 1989. The European Union refused to send observers because Mr. Chávez so severely limited the size of the team and its ability to move about.

That didn't stop Jimmy Carter from bringing an inspection team--sharply reduced in size per Mr. Chávez's demands--and the former U.S. President has played a crucial role in blessing the results, as he wrote in a letter to us on Tuesday. So it's worth noting the reasons that Mr. Carter cites for his conclusions, as he recorded in his trip report on his Web site.

"We heard a litany of catastrophic predictions about cheating, intimidation, and actual violence planned by the government for election day," Mr. Carter writes. Yet he saw no cause for concern because "we reported on the assurances we had received from CNE and the military, which answered most of their concerns." He finally signed off on the outcome after he said he was invited "to witness the disclosure of the first electronic tabulation." Mr. Carter's logic seems to be that he could judge the election to be fair more or less because Mr. Chávez's military and election council told him it was fair.

Mr. Carter never did a full audit of the vote, which differed dramatically from exit polling and featured hundreds of polling places with voting machines tallying the same number of yes votes--a phenomenon that independent statisticians find highly improbable. Nevertheless, after he "confirm[ed] the legitimacy of the CNE returns," Mr. Carter also discloses on his Web site, he "called Secretary of State Colin Powell to report our authentication of results, and he promised to issue a statement from Washington endorsing our findings." Which the State Department proceeded to do.

Our liberal friends keep lecturing us to accept the Chávez result, since anti-American politicians do sometimes win free elections. But this recall was hardly as transparent as, say, Germany's election of Gerhard Schroeder in 2002. Mr. Chávez has a record of abusing the rule of law to gather ever-greater political control. He has allied himself with Mr. Castro and is promoting instability throughout the region. A Bush Administration that is fighting for free elections in Iraq ought to have higher democratic standards here in the Western Hemisphere.

Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

F A R E N H E I T 1 9 7 1

08.28.04 (4:41 am)   [edit]
From The Weekly Standard--

[b]Fahrenheit 1971
From the September 6, 2004 issue: The radicalism of the young John Kerry.[/b]
by Mackubin Thomas Owens
09/06/2004, Volume 009, Issue 48

[i]We will not quickly join those who march on Veterans' Day waving small flags, calling to memory those thousands who died for the "greater glory of the United States." We will not accept the rhetoric. We will not readily join the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars--in fact, we will find it hard to join anything at all and when we do, we will demand relevancy such as other organizations have recently been unable to provide. We will not take solace from the creation of monuments or the naming of parks after a select few of the thousands of dead Americans and Vietnamese. We will not uphold the traditions which decorously memorialize that which was base and grim. . . . We are asking America to turn from false glory, hollow victory, fabricated foreign threats, fear which threatens us as a nation, shallow pride which feeds of fear.[/i]

John F. Kerry
Epilogue to The New Soldier (1971)

WHEN THE VIETNAM VETERANS' MEMORIAL was unveiled in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, there was a great deal of talk about "healing" the divisions of the Vietnam war. The controversy generated by the anti-Kerry book Unfit for Command and ads run by an organization called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth criticizing John Kerry's record in Vietnam and his actions after he returned indicates that there is still a lot of "healing" to do. Indeed, the divisions over the Vietnam war may well never heal as long as those who fought it and those who protested it are still alive. This is because the very act of remembering Vietnam places one in the midst of a culture war.

On the one side in this culture war are those who believe that Vietnam wasn't very different from other wars. The cause was just, but it was as affected by ambiguities as any other war, including World War II. In the end, the U.S. defeat was the result of strategic failure, not moral failure. Those who fought it were doing their duty as they saw it, just as their fathers and grandfathers had done theirs when the times demanded it of them.

On the other side are those for whom the Vietnam war represented the very essence of evil. The United States had no business fighting this war and could never have won it. It was not like other wars. All it did was wreck lives, American and Vietnamese. It was one continuous atrocity. War crimes were par for the course. Those who fought it were different from those who fought the "good war." They returned home psychologically if not physically crippled--homeless, drug addicted, and likely to commit suicide.

Some on the anti-Vietnam side have moderated their views in light of what happened in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia. They stipulate that they were wrong about communism. The cost of American defeat was high, especially to the South Vietnamese and Cambodians. The price of South Vietnam's "liberation" was, in addition to Saigon's war dead, a minimum of 100,000 summary executions at the hands of the Communist liberators, a million and a half "boat people," a like number of individuals sentenced to "reeducation camps," genocide in Cambodia, and a perceived shift in the "correlation of forces" that encouraged Soviet adventurism throughout the 1970s. But as Mickey Kaus admitted in an essay that appeared in Slate in May 2001 amid the furor over whether the killing of certain civilians by men under the command of former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey amounted to a war crime, those who had moderated their antiwar views still wanted to be honored for their "idealism": "The Thanh Phong story," Kaus wrote, "reminds us that avoiding serving in Vietnam had an honorable and realistic ethical basis (in addition to its realistic selfish basis)."

But others on the anti-Vietnam side of the culture war continue to take their bearings, either directly or indirectly, from the hard-core opinion of those who believe that the Vietnam war represented all that is evil about America--capitalistic exploitation, racism, and imperialism. Noam Chomsky and H. Bruce Franklin exemplify this view. As the latter writes in "The Vietnam War and the Culture Wars," Vietnam, far from being "an aberration, some kind of wayward 'mistake' by a nation long leading the world's march to progress," instead "typified the nation's history from colonial settler regime to global empire." Indeed, for Franklin, the Vietnam war was the culmination of the 600-year-old European crusade to oppress people of color throughout the globe--thus the mass murderer Lt. William Calley (My Lai) was only the latest manifestation of the spirit of that earlier mass murderer, Christopher Columbus.

During his presidential campaign, John Kerry has sought to portray himself as a member of the first group--a veteran proud of his service in Vietnam. In his remarks on July 25 at the Democratic National Convention, Kerry said, "We [veterans] fought for this nation because we loved it. . . . I defended this country as a young man and I will defend it as president." But this sentiment is completely at odds with his infamous testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971, wherein he said he and those he spoke for were "ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia. . . . And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom . . . is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy."

The fact is that most Americans have no idea how radical Kerry's views on Vietnam were. His April 1971 Senate testimony (reprinted in full on pages 9-12) could have been written by Chomsky or Franklin. But the larger reality is even more troubling.

In his indispensable America in Vietnam, Guenter Lewy notes the establishment of a veritable war-crimes industry, supported by the Soviet Union, as early as 1965. As Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former Romanian intelligence chief, has recounted, the Soviets set up permanent international organizations--including the International War Crimes Tribunal and the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam--"to aid or to conduct operations to help Americans dodge the draft or defect, to demoralize its army with anti-American propaganda, to conduct protests, demonstrations, and boycotts, and to sanction anyone connected with the war."

Pacepa claims to have been responsible for fabricating stories about U.S. atrocities in Vietnam and "flacking" them to Western news organizations. Lewy writes that "the Communists made skillful use of their worldwide propaganda apparatus . . . and they found many Western intellectuals only too willing to accept every conceivable allegation of [American] wrongdoing at face value." The Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), a small, radical group that never exceeded a membership of 7,000 (including John Kerry) from a pool of nearly 3 million Vietnam (and 9 million Vietnam-era) veterans, essentially "Americanized" Soviet propaganda. When he testified before the Senate in 1971, Kerry was merely repeating charges that had been making the rounds since 1965.

Kerry also claimed that containing communism was no reason to fight in Vietnam.

[i]In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. . . . I want to relate to you the feeling that many of the men who have returned to this country express because we are probably angriest about all that we were told about Vietnam and about the mystical war against communism.

We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.

We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy.[/i]

Perhaps this perspective explains the fact that John Kerry, as he proudly told the Senate, met with the North Vietnamese and Vietcong delegations in Paris in May 1970. According to his testimony, he discussed the peace proposals advanced by the North Vietnamese--especially the eight points of Madame Binh. This all took place while Americans were still fighting and dying in Vietnam. Shortly before Kerry's Senate testimony, other representatives of the VVAW met with the North Vietnamese and VC delegations in Paris.

MANY OF KERRY'S DEFENDERS contend that anti-Kerry veterans have no right to criticize his speaking out against the war, especially in view of his service in that war. But it is not his protests against the war that anger veterans so much as his method of doing so. In a recent NPR editorial, James Webb, a genuine hero of the Vietnam war (Navy Cross), the author of Fields of Fire, the best novel about Vietnam, and secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration, observed:

[i]For most veterans it was not that Kerry was against the war, but that he used his military credentials to denigrate the service of a whole generation of veterans. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War was a very small, highly radical organization. Their stories of atrocious conduct, repeated in lurid detail by Kerry before the Congress, represented not the typical experience of the American soldier, but its ugly extreme. That the articulate, urbane Kerry would validate such allegations helped to make life hell for many Vietnam veterans, for a very long time.[/i]

There were many individuals who returned from Vietnam troubled about the war. Some were critical of U.S. strategy, operations, and tactics in Vietnam. Others came to believe the war was wrong on moral grounds. But most did not slander their comrades using language that mirrored Soviet or Vietnamese Communist propaganda. Most did not consort with the enemy in a time of war. It was possible to oppose the war without doing what Kerry did.

Look at a contemporary example. On the one hand, there are those whose criticism of Iraq is fueled by a visceral hatred for the American polity. For these critics, the war in Iraq is all about oil and Halliburton, just one more manifestation of American imperialism--Bush is Hitler and the United States is "Amerikkka." This is the perspective of Michael Moore, Ramsey Clark, and MoveOn.org.

On the other hand, there are many thoughtful people who oppose U.S. policy in Iraq. This group includes individuals I greatly admire and whose judgment I would rarely gainsay, such as the aforementioned Jim Webb (a good friend) and retired Marine general Anthony Zinni, former commander of Central Command. Both criticize the policy and strategy decisions of the Bush administration and express concern about the risks associated with these policies. They don't employ the language of the Bush-haters to denounce the United States for conducting an immoral and unjust war.

Kerry's actions after Vietnam are reminiscent of Michael Moore and MoveOn.org today. It was not enough for him merely to criticize U.S. policy in Vietnam. He and his friends in the VVAW were obliged by their radicalism to go after the United States itself.

Kerry could have defused much of the controversy regarding his postwar activities had he simply apologized for his remarks. But he insists on having it both ways: war hero and courageous war protester. The closest he has come was to respond in April 2004 on Meet the Press to Tim Russert's query about the testimony by saying, "I'm not going to quibble, you know, 35 years later that I might not have phrased things more artfully at times."

I will not question Kerry's record in Vietnam. But his actions after the war are a different matter. After all, his radical views regarding Vietnam are not simply of historical interest. As the Wall Street Journal recently observed, Kerry's denunciation of the United States in 1971 "presaged a career in which he has always been quick to attack the moral and military purposes of American policy--in Central America, against the Soviet Union, and of course during the current Iraq war that he initially voted for."

[i]Mackubin Thomas Owens is professor of national security at the Naval War College. He led a Marine infantry platoon in Vietnam in 1968-69.[/i]

© Copyright 2004, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

Low-level Pentagon employee investigated for spying for Israel

08.28.04 (4:27 am)   [edit]
Let's get something straight about Israel. I support their right to exist. I support their right to defend themselves. But Israel, like every other nation, is not above legitimate criticism. And, they are capable of doing nasty things (and have). Like with nuclear spying against the US, I would not be surprised if they had arranged an espionage setup with lower-level employees in the Pentagon. Iran is the major threat to Israel right now, but they apparently don't trust the US enough as an ally to work with us on that threat.

I would also not be surprised if there are low-level pro-Israel hawks at DoD that may have initiated this event, either.

[b]FBI Probes if Official Spied for Israel[/b]
By CURT ANDERSON, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - In a spy investigation that could strain U.S.-Israeli relations and muddy the Bush administration's Middle East policy, the FBI (news - web sites) is investigating whether a Pentagon (news - web sites) analyst fed to Israel secret materials about White House deliberations on Iran.

No arrests have been made, said two federal law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation. A third law enforcement official, also speaking anonymously, said an arrest in the case could come as early as next week.

The officials refused to identify the Pentagon employee under investigation but said the person is an analyst in the office of Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, the Pentagon's No. 3 official.

The link to Feith's office also could prove politically sensitive for the Bush administration.

Feith is an influential aide to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld who works on sensitive policy issues including U.S. policy toward Iraq (news - web sites) and Iran. Feith's office includes a cadre assigned specifically to work on Iran.

He also oversaw the Pentagon's defunct Office of Special Plans, which critics said fed policy-makers uncorroborated prewar intelligence on President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s Iraq, especially involving purported ties with the al-Qaida terror network. Pentagon officials have said the office was a small operation that provided fresh analysis on existing intelligence.

The Pentagon said in a statement that the investigation involves an employee at "the desk officer level, who was not in a position to have significant influence over U.S. policy. Nor could a foreign power be in a position to influence U.S. policy through this individual."

One of the law enforcement officials said the person was not in a policy-making position but had access to extremely sensitive information about U.S. policy toward Iran.

The investigation centers on whether the Pentagon analyst passed secrets about Bush administration policy on Iran to the main pro-Israeli lobbying group in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which then was said to have given the secrets to the Israeli government, one official said. Both AIPAC and Israel deny the allegations.

President Bush has identified Iran as part of an "axis of evil," along with North Korea and the Iraqi government deposed by the U.S.-led invasion last year.

Yet his administration has battled internally over how hard a line to take toward Iran. The State Department generally has advocated more moderate positions, while more conservative officials in the Defense Department and some at the White House's National Security Council have advocated tougher policies.

Israel, one of the United States' strongest allies, has worked behind its conservative prime minister, Ariel Sharon (news - web sites), to push the Bush administration toward more toughness against Iran. The Israeli tactics have raised questions whether inside information may have been used to try to influence U.S. policy.

David Siegel, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said: "We categorically deny these allegations. They are completely false and outrageous."

AIPAC said in a statement that the lobbying group was "fully cooperating with the governmental authorities and will continue to do so."

It said any allegation of criminal conduct by the group or its employees was "baseless and false," adding that it "would not condone or tolerate for a second any violation of U.S. law or interests."

Pentagon officials refused to comment, referring all questions to the Justice Department.

The Pentagon investigation has included wiretapping and surveillance and searches of the suspected Pentagon employee's computer, the law enforcement officials said.

Israel and Iran have been in an increasingly harsh war of words in recent months. Senior Israeli officials have left open the possibility of an Israeli attack on suspected Iranian nuclear weapons development sites.

In response, Iran threatened last week to destroy Israel's Dimona reactor should Israel carry out such an attack.

In 1981, Israel destroyed a nuclear facility in Iraq after becoming suspicious that Saddam was developing a nuclear weapons capability.

Rep. Ike Skelton (news, bio, voting record) of Missouri, top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said he received information about the investigation before news of it became public Friday and was "deeply concerned and angered."

"This is a very, very serious allegation, and we just can't tolerate anything like this at all," Skelton said.

Despite the close U.S.-Israeli relations, this is not the first allegation of spying on Israel's behalf.

Jonathan Pollard, a former naval intelligence officer, was convicted of giving top-secret documents to Israel in the mid-1980s. He continues to be a point of contention in U.S.-Israeli relations. The Israeli government has repeatedly pressed for his release, but intelligence officials have called the information he passed to the Israelis highly damaging.

Pollard was caught in Washington in November 1985, and was arrested after unsuccessfully seeking refuge at the Israeli Embassy.

Kerry demoralized, killed vets with his lies, including POWs

08.27.04 (2:39 pm)   [edit]
I don't think those who have politicized the Swiftvet criticisms (which are actually criticizing Kerry's professional politicization of the Vietnam war) understand a)how divided of a time the late 1960s/early 1970s was, b)How the left-wing incluenced the outcome of the Vietnam war, and c)How Kerry and his ilk with their lies ruined a generation of human beings. Being spit on and called a murderer on coming home after somehow surviving a year or more in Democrat Lyndon Johnson's war is not something you can forget.

And for someone like Kerry to turn that around and try to embrace the vets he helped ruin is more than justification for the non-partisan, intensely personal, Swiftvet criticism.

From townhall--

[b]Bring it on, John[/b]
Oliver North
August 27, 2004

"Of course, the president keeps telling people he would never question my service to our country. Instead, he watches as a Republican-funded attack group does just that. Well, if he wants to have a debate about our service in Vietnam, here is my answer: 'Bring it on.'" -- Sen. John Kerry

Dear John,

As usual, you have it wrong. You don't have a beef with President George Bush about your war record. He's been exceedingly generous about your military service. Your complaint is with the 2.5 million of us who served honorably in a war that ended 29 years ago and which you, not the president, made the centerpiece of this campaign.

I talk to a lot of vets, John, and this really isn't about your medals or how you got them. Like you, I have a Silver Star and a Bronze Star. I only have two Purple Hearts, though. I turned down the others so that I could stay with the Marines in my rifle platoon. But I think you might agree with me, though I've never heard you say it, that the officers always got more medals than they earned and the youngsters we led never got as many medals as they deserved.

This really isn't about how early you came home from that war, either, John. There have always been guys in every war who want to go home. There are also lots of guys, like those in my rifle platoon in Vietnam, who did a full 13 months in the field. And there are, thankfully, lots of young Americans today in Iraq and Afghanistan who volunteered to return to war because, as one of them told me in Ramadi a few weeks ago, "the job isn't finished."

Nor is this about whether you were in Cambodia on Christmas Eve, 1968. Heck John, people get lost going on vacation. If you got lost, just say so. Your campaign has admitted that you now know that you really weren't in Cambodia that night and that Richard Nixon wasn't really president when you thought he was. Now would be a good time to explain to us how you could have all that bogus stuff "seared" into your memory -- especially since you want to have your finger on our nation's nuclear trigger.

But that's not really the problem, either. The trouble you're having, John, isn't about your medals or coming home early or getting lost -- or even Richard Nixon. The issue is what you did to us when you came home, John.

When you got home, you co-founded Vietnam Veterans Against the War and wrote "The New Soldier," which denounced those of us who served -- and were still serving -- on the battlefields of a thankless war. Worst of all, John, you then accused me -- and all of us who served in Vietnam -- of committing terrible crimes and atrocities.

On April 22, 1971, under oath, you told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that you had knowledge that American troops "had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam." And you admitted on television that "yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed."

And for good measure you stated, "(America is) more guilty than any other body, of violations of (the) Geneva Conventions ... the torture of prisoners, the killing of prisoners."

Your "antiwar" statements and activities were painful for those of us carrying the scars of Vietnam and trying to move on with our lives. And for those who were still there, it was even more hurtful. But those who suffered the most from what you said and did were the hundreds of American prisoners of war being held by Hanoi. Here's what some of them endured because of you, John:

Capt. James Warner had already spent four years in Vietnamese custody when he was handed a copy of your testimony by his captors. Warner says that for his captors, your statements "were proof I deserved to be punished." He wasn't released until March 14, 1973.

Maj. Kenneth Cordier, an Air Force pilot who was in Vietnamese custody for 2,284 days, says his captors "repeated incessantly" your one-liner about being "the last man to die" for a lost cause. Cordier was released March 4, 1973.

Navy Lt. Paul Galanti says your accusations "were as demoralizing as solitary (confinement) ... and a prime reason the war dragged on." He remained in North Vietnamese hands until February 12, 1973.

John, did you think they would forget? When Tim Russert asked about your claim that you and others in Vietnam committed "atrocities," instead of standing by your sworn testimony, you confessed that your words "were a bit over the top." Does that mean you lied under oath? Or does it mean you are a war criminal? You can't have this one both ways, John. Either way, you're not fit to be a prison guard at Abu Ghraib, much less commander in chief.

One last thing, John. In 1988, Jane Fonda said: "I would like to say something ... to men who were in Vietnam, who I hurt, or whose pain I caused to deepen because of things that I said or did. I was trying to help end the killing and the war, but there were times when I was thoughtless and careless about it and I'm ... very sorry that I hurt them. And I want to apologize to them and their families."

Even Jane Fonda apologized. Will you, John?

Oliver North is a nationally syndicated columnist, host of the Fox News Channel's War Stories and founder and honorary chairman of Freedom Alliance.

©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

The truth about Kerry's McGovern-ish foreign policy leaking out...

08.27.04 (2:20 pm)   [edit]
From NRO--

August 27, 2004, 8:56 a.m.
[b]The Dangerous Secret
...is what Kerry believes now, not what he did then.[/b]

With a real war going on right now in Iraq, why are we arguing about what happened 35 years ago in Vietnam? Here are two answers to that question:

1. Knowing President Bush has no positive achievements to run on, and desperate to prevent revelations under a Kerry presidency of the cooked intelligence and profiteering behind the disastrous Iraq war, the Republican attack machine has orchestrated a professional hit job on John Kerry's character and military record. The story of Kerry's wartime heroism puts the Vietnam-era cowardice of the president and vice president to shame. In doing so, the Kerry story exposes Bush's sham connection between "tough" foreign policy and patriotism. So to win the election, there was no choice for Bush but to destroy Kerry's reputation — by any means necessary.

2. Knowing that a post-9/11 America will never elect a president with his McGovernite views, John Kerry has deliberately obfuscated his beliefs on war and foreign policy (as he obfuscates nearly all his liberal views). To distract from his dovish Senate voting record and its origins in his radical antiwar activism, Kerry organized the Democratic convention around his Vietnam exploits. Kerry's fellow veterans had been stewing for years over the fact that he'd thrown away his medals and built a political career by accusing them of atrocities. The thought that Kerry might now become president by actually bragging about his medals, and his plucky band of brothers, was too much for them to take. With the help of the blogosphere, these vets are now forcing the truth about John Kerry's dovish views onto a liberal media that would rather change the subject.

The outcome of this election may have much to do with which of these two explanations Americans judge to be closer to the truth. I vote for number two. And it's the last bit — about Kerry's dovish foreign-policy views — that really counts. Up until now, both sides in this battle have treated the dispute over Kerry's war record as a question of personal character. And that it is. But the issue here goes far beyond character: The Swift-boat battle is a surrogate for the honest debate about war and foreign policy that John Kerry has so far avoided.

If Kerry had said the war in Iraq was a mistake — that he'd been misled by faulty intelligence into casting a misguided vote for force — this country would now be having a serious discussion about the issue that truly divides us. Nearly all the delegates to the Democratic Convention opposed the war in Iraq; it was almost comical to see them applauding Kerry's show of military bravado. Yet their enthusiasm was only partly feigned: What excited the delegates was the idea that they'd found a dove like themselves who could nonetheless turn aside accusations of lack of patriotism or weakness on defense.

The truth, however, will out. Kerry knew perfectly well that the country as a whole was not on board with his views — or his party's views — on war and foreign policy. So he used his Swift-boat story to send a symbolic message that would appeal in different ways to different constituencies. To the country as a whole, the Swift-boat show would say that Kerry was not just another Democratic foreign-policy wimp. But to the party base — which knew Kerry's history — the Swift-boat story said something else. When Kerry promised he'd apply the lessons he'd learned in Vietnam combat to the war on terror, the Democratic delegates understood exactly what lessons he was talking about.

After all, Kerry had been speaking for years about the lessons of Vietnam. That's what the Cambodia controversy is really about. Kerry's claim that Christmas in Cambodia was seared into his memory was made as part of a Senate speech in opposition to aid to the Nicaraguan contras. Just as President Nixon had denied that the war would expand to Cambodia, said Kerry, President Reagan was lying about the dangers of escalation in Nicaragua. Kerry knew, because he'd been in Cambodia at the very moment Nixon had denied our involvement.

So Kerry's Cambodia story tells us something important about his foreign policy views — regardless of whether he actually spent Christmas there. The Cambodia story has always been treated by Kerry as a defining moment in his life — a moment that connects the lessons of Vietnam to the foreign-policy views of a mature Senator. The Cambodia story was the ultimate symbol of everything from Kerry's opposition to military weapons systems, to his vote against aid to the contras, to his vote against the first Iraq war.

Let's say Kerry's Cambodia story is true. Some might argue that we should be very cautious about using the Vietnam experience as a template for other, different foreign-policy challenges. Others might say the real lesson of Kerry's story is that the United States should never allow its soldiers to be attacked with impunity from behind another country's border. That we should openly take a war wherever it has to go in order to protect our soldiers and win. That we sometimes have no choice but to launch covert attacks on enemies who hide behind a non-combatant state. Of course, with al Qaeda hiding in Pakistan — and a raft of other states that find it difficult to openly admit American troops — we face a similar problem today.

It matters a great deal to know that John Kerry's political life has been thoroughly shaped by his dovish response to attacks on American troops from an enemy hiding in a formally non-combatant country. And it's all the more striking to think that Kerry might have invented or exaggerated his story — even turning it into the central symbol of his political career — just to make his peacenik point. If the American people were to come to understand how deeply Kerry's Vietnam experience has shaped his mature politics, I don't believe they would want him to be commander-in-chief in a post-9/11 world.

But is it fair to take a candidate's views on Vietnam as a surrogate for his views on the war on terror? In this case, it is. Consider Paul Krugman's op-ed in Tuesday's New York Times. The view I presented at the beginning of this piece — option 1 — was Krugman's: After laying into the Bush administration, he goes on to praise Kerry for heroically telling the truth about the supposedly pervasive viciousness and criminality of his fellow soldiers. As far as Krugman is concerned, Abu Ghraib shows that the atrocities of Vietnam are repeating themselves in Iraq. In fact, Krugman's whole point is that Iraq is a replay of Vietnam — "a war sold on false pretenses that creates more enemies than it kills." And Krugman's views are not unusual.

It's certainly possible to believe that Vietnam and Iraq are very different wars. But the fact of the matter is that a huge chunk of the Democratic base opposes the war in Iraq because it sees Iraq as a repeat of Vietnam. And until he started hiding his views behind a smokescreen of incoherent pronouncements and military symbolism, John Kerry also saw American foreign policy — as did his dovish Democratic brethren — through the lens of anti-Vietnam radicalism. Having recently done everything in his power to disguise this fact, Kerry's symbolic machinations have backfired, bringing into the open the very truth they were meant to suppress.

The mainstream media do not want to talk about the connection between John Kerry's Vietnam experience and his views on war and foreign policy. They would prefer to keep the focus on Kerry's war-hero record, and off Kerry's testimony about the supposed viciousness and criminality of his fellow soldiers — and of American foreign policy in general. Yet this is what has enraged the Swift-boat veterans; this is what much of their book takes up; and this is what their second advertisement has singled out. The mainstream media know that if the American people were to truly understand how Kerry's Vietnam experience shaped his views, and what he said and did to protest that war, they would not want him as commander-in-chief. That — and not the details of Kerry's wounds or travels — is the real secret that threatens to be exposed by the Swift-boat controversy.

Of course, the specific accusations that John Kerry has lied about his service in Vietnam have to be addressed. The Cambodia story, for one, seems mistaken. No doubt Kerry was near Cambodia on Christmas Eve; he might even have been shot at by South Vietnamese when in the vicinity of Cambodia. But his story does depend on actually having been in Cambodia, and he seems not to have been there. What's telling is the lack of support from even his friendly crewmates, and Kerry's own prevarications. The Washington Post (no friend of Kerry's critics) has called Kerry's conflicting statements on the Cambodia mission troubling. Given all this, I don't see how the accusations of Kerry's critics can be dismissed as a smear. Most of the evidence on one important issue is already in their favor.

I do find it hard to begrudge Senator Kerry his wounds and his medals. He may have thrown them away (or have done so symbolically, using someone else's medals). Yet Kerry was in Vietnam and in harm's way. Did he deserve every medal he got there? I care about that a great deal less than I care about how Kerry's Vietnam experience shaped his later life and views. But having been demeaned and dishonored by Kerry, some of his fellow veterans obviously feel differently. That is more than understandable.

The editorial page of the Washington Post has called for Kerry to release his military records and wartime journals. This would seem to be the right thing to do, and may help to clear things up. It is Senator Kerry's right to withhold those records; if he had not already chosen to show his biographer, Douglas Brinkley, his journals, I would say that Kerry's privacy should be respected, despite the accusations. But having chosen to use his private journals for a campaign biography, it's tough now to keep them from the public, given the fact that Kerry's account has come into question. And of course, it was Kerry who chose to highlight his wartime past in the first place.

The Swift-boat controversy is not an ancient molehill turned into a mountain. It's how we're stumbling toward a debate that the Democrats don't want to have — but that everyone knows exists anyway. The real issue here is Kerry's views on war and foreign policy. Kerry is a McGovernite — a long-time member in good standing of his party's dovish wing. Kerry has hidden that fact, but now the truth is slipping out. When Kerry tried to transform his original radicalism into a hawkish parable, those who knew him better rebelled. The ensuing mess has forced the story of who John Kerry is, and always has been, into the public's focus. Whatever secrets his journals and military files may hold, the secret of John Kerry's actual views on war and foreign policy is the more dangerous one — for him, and for us.

The McCain myth- Bush did not question war record in 2000

08.27.04 (2:11 pm)   [edit]
[b]The McCain myth[/b]
Rich Lowry
August 26, 2004

It is supposed to be a devastating critique of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that John McCain doesn't like their ads. But should we be surprised? McCain knows no party. Instead, together with Kerry supporter Max Cleland, the Arizona senator makes for the smallest caucus in American politics -- Thin-Skinned Vietnam War Veterans Adored by the Media (TSVWVAM).

A Kerry ad (now taken off the air) featured a clip from McCain at a 2000 debate in South Carolina excoriating Bush for abiding attacks on his service. It seems devastating, unless you know the context. McCain was furious -- a not-infrequent condition for the Arizona maverick -- that a Bush supporter who is a veteran had stood next to Bush at a rally and complained about McCain's Senate voting record. It wasn't an attack on McCain's service. But both members of TSVWVAM have the same inability to distinguish between criticisms of their records and themselves personally.

"He has always opposed all the legislation," the pro-Bush vet said, "be it Agent Orange or Gulf War health care, or frankly the POW/MIA issue." You don't have to subscribe to every particular of this litany to consider it firmly in-bounds. A McCain vote in 1999 against a Department of Veterans Affairs spending bill, for instance, angered some vets, as did his work to normalize relations with Vietnam. Veterans of Foreign Wars gave McCain a 75 percent favorable rating in 1998, respectable but lower than other senators who scored in the 80 percent to 100 percent range. In 1995, McCain scored a mere 27 percent. So it's not as though his legislative record was beyond reproach.

Journalist Byron York has debunked the other "McCain was smeared in South Carolina" charge. McCain mainly alleged that the Bush campaign was calling voters in a dirty "push poll" and telling them, "McCain is a cheat and a liar and a fraud." McCain's charge was based on the testimony of one 14-year-old boy. The Bush campaign released the script of the advocacy calls it was making, and the script said only, "Don't be misled by McCain's negative tactics." Asked by the Los Angeles Times to provide voters who had received the smear calls, the McCain campaign unearthed only six. According to the Times, of the voters it could reach, "three described questions that, while negative, appear to have been part of a legitimate poll. Another said she heard no negative information at all."

McCain lost in South Carolina because he was too liberal for Republican primary voters and his campaign was considered too negative after he compared Bush's honesty to Bill Clinton's. A Washington Post columnist recently complained in outraged tones that the Bush campaign in South Carolina was "questioning the conservative credentials" of McCain. Horrors! That is at least an accurate depiction of what happened, but hardly an outrage.

McCain got out in front of the Swift Boat controversy, immediately calling the first ad "dishonest and dishonorable," thus making TSVWVAM unanimous. McCain so pronounced himself before he possibly could have known the truth about the allegations, since he wasn't there in the Mekong Delta and no substantive reporting had yet been done on the charges. Why does one set of Vietnam veterans, those backing Kerry, automatically trump another set of Vietnam veterans, those critical of Kerry?

Well, on almost any issue not directly related to the war on terror, McCain can be expected to come down on the side not of the conservatives, the liberals, the Republicans or the Democrats, but of the journalistic clerisy. Determine what the conventional wisdom of the press is (in this case that the Swift Boat vets are discreditable), and there John McCain will be, standing like a stone wall.

John Kerry is happy to exploit McCain's position. Never mind that Kerry's Swift Boat counterattack is based on two charges that are flatly untrue: that Bush smeared McCain in 2000 and that he is behind the Swift Boat ads now. That is apparently beneath the notice of TSVWVAM and their sycophants in the press.

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review, a Townhall.com member group, and author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.

©2004 King Features Syndicate

Swiftvets: Bush can't stop us from telling the truth about Kerry

08.27.04 (2:07 pm)   [edit]
For the SCP, including therealspartacus.......

From the WSJ--

[b]We're Not GOP Shills
President Bush can't stop us from telling the truth about John Kerry.[/b]

BY JOHN O'NEILL
Friday, August 27, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

We formed Swift Boat Veterans For Truth for one purpose: to present to the American public our conclusion that John Kerry is not fit to be commander in chief. We are organized as a "527 group" with Adm. Roy Hoffmann at the helm, our leader today as he was some 35 years ago when we served under him in Coastal Squadron One in Vietnam. [b]Our membership is transparent and shown on our Web site, www.swiftvets.com, currently including more than 250 Swiftees. We have 17 of the 23 officers who served with Mr. Kerry, most of his chain of command, and most sailors. We have more than 60 winners of real Purple Hearts. No one has a better right than we do to speak to the matters involving our unit.[/b]

Are we controlled by the Bush-Cheney campaign? Absolutely not. [b]The Swift boat veterans who joined our group come in all political flavors: independents, Republicans, Democrats and other more subtle variations. Had another person been the presidential candidate of the Democrats, our group never would have formed. Had Mr. Kerry been the Republican candidate, each of us would still be here.[/b]

We do not take direction from the White House or the president's re-election committee, and our efforts would continue even if President Bush were to ask us directly to stop.

Why have we come forward? As explained in "Unfit For Command," [b]Mr. Kerry grossly exaggerated and lied about his abbreviated four-month tour in Vietnam. He disgraced all legitimate Vietnam War heroes when he falsely testified to Congress that we were war criminals, daily engaged in atrocities that had the full approval of all levels in the chain of command. So, once Mr. Kerry decided to apply for the commander in chief's job with a war-hero résumé, we felt compelled to come forward to explain why he is "unfit for command."[/b]

We have faced assaults on our character, motives, personal backgrounds and honesty. We are told that Mr. Kerry's camp has prepared attack dossiers on the members of our organization. [b]I have been charged with being a Republican shill. But for more than 30 years, I have been non-political, and have voted for as many Democrats as Republicans. In truth, I consider myself a political independent, regardless of how John Kerry and his supporters try to characterize me.[/b]

The Kerry-Edwards camp has threatened TV stations with libel suits should they choose to run our ads. Mr. Kerry has filed a complaint with the FEC, seeking to silence us.

How many different ways will John Kerry devise to ask President Bush to condemn our ads and squash our book? [b]Why, Mr. Kerry, are our charges as a 527 group unacceptable to you, while the pronouncements from 527 groups favorable to you are considered acceptable, regardless of stridency and veracity? And we do not have a George Soros, willing to drop millions into our modest group. We control our message. To date, we have received $2 million from 30,000 Americans who have donated an average of around $64.[/b]

Mr. Kerry, we ask you not to repeat the same mistake you made when you returned from war: Please stop maligning your fellow veterans. Dealing with us should be easy. Just answer our charges. Produce your Vietnam journal and notes, and execute Standard Form 180 so the American people can see your complete military record--not just the few forms you put on your website or show to campaign biographers.

[i]Mr. O'Neill, author of "Unfit For Command" (Regnery, 2004), is a member of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.[/i]

Kerry could have healed the wounds of Vietnam. Instead, he exploited them.

08.26.04 (10:45 am)   [edit]
A don't miss column from The Wall Street Journal-- http://www.opinionjournal.com...

254 Swiftvets say Kerry is a fraud. 14 say he isn't.....doesn't that say something?

08.26.04 (4:41 am)   [edit]
An excellent Ann Coulter column--

[b]Admitted war criminal cries foul[/b]
Ann Coulter
August 26, 2004

There are several methods of evaluating the claims of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, 254 of whom have signed a letter saying John Kerry is not fit to be commander in chief.

There is the Bill O'Reilly method, which is to abandon independent thinking and simply come out in the middle, irrespective of where the two sides are. In response to Newt Gingrich's remark that the Swift Boat Veterans' independent ads were "the conservative movement's answer to Michael Moore," O'Reilly said, "I don't want either of them."

In Nazi Germany, O'Reilly would have condemned both Hitler's death camps and the Warsaw ghetto uprising. In Bill O'Reilly's world, King Solomon would have actually cut the disputed baby in half.

The O'Reilly method of analysis works well about once a century. The last time was when Hitler invaded Russia in 1941.

Then there is the Chris Matthews method, which is to decide in advance that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are the lowest form of human life imaginable and then publicly excoriate them for consuming oxygen.

Matthews employs a logical calculus known as "begging the question," which goes something like this:

1. John Kerry claims to be a great war hero.

2. Maybe so, but legitimate questions have been raised about his combat record.

3. How can you say that about a great war hero like John Kerry?

When John O'Neill, author of "Unfit for Command," went on "Hardball," Matthews accused O'Neill of being a Republican operative and demanded that O'Neill detail for "Hardball's" six remaining viewers his voting history for the past 20 years in mind-numbing detail. (Completely destroying his case against Kerry, in 1988, O'Neill voted for George Herbert Walker Bush!) Apparently voting for a Republican presidential candidate 15 years ago is a credibility-destroyer, whereas being a former member of the White House staff under Jimmy Carter, as Chris Matthews is, enhances one's credibility.

Normally an interview on a newly released book consists of the author being asked questions about his book and the author answering the questions. With O'Neill, Matthews interviewed himself.

Also, erstwhile war protester John Hurley was interviewed along with O'Neill about "Unfit for Command." The fact that Hurley (1) didn't write the book, and (2) is a paid Kerry campaign worker raises no credibility issues. A colleague of Kerry's in Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Hurley's contribution to the interview about a book he didn't write consisted of his piping in periodically with insightful comments about O'Neill, such as "his book and his organization is built on lies and distortions."

O'Neill's contribution to a discussion about his own book consisted mostly of meaningless sentence fragments:

O'Neill: I don't believe that ... (MATTHEWS INTERRUPTION)

O'Neill: Well, I'm not here to ... (MATTHEWS INTERRUPTION)

O'Neill: I think he is millions of steps behind, because he went over ... (MATTHEWS INTERRUPTION)

O'Neill: His first Purple ... (MATTHEWS INTERRUPTION)

O'Neill: Well, the first ... (MATTHEWS INTERRUPTION)

O'Neill: You're right. I'm saying ... (MATTHEWS INTERRUPTION)

O'Neill: Well, wait just a second. What you've done is ... (MATTHEWS INTERRUPTION)

O'Neill: First of all ... (MATTHEWS INTERRUPTION)

Finally, O'Neill proposed that he be allowed to answer questions and Matthews erupted with an indignant speech notable mostly for being slightly longer than anything O'Neill ever got to say:

Matthews: "One of the oldest tricks on this show is for somebody to come on the show after talking for 20 minutes and say they haven't had the chance to talk. I'll be glad to clock you, John, on how many minutes you spoke on the show. So don't try that old trick. It is a particularly conservative trick, OK? So let's move on here."

Let's review the transcript!

Total words by book author John O'Neill: approximately 1,150. (Complete sentences devoid of Matthews interruptions: about 2.)

Total words by paid Kerry flack Hurley: approximately 950.

Total words by Matthews, excluding host prattle ("Welcome back to 'Hardball'!"): approximately 2,290.

At least Matthews didn't physically throw O'Neill off his set as he did Michelle Malkin a few nights later while she tried in vain to discuss her new book. The lion-hearted Matthews reserves that level of rudeness only for girls. (Now that I think about it, compared to the average Democrat male, maybe John Kerry is manly.)

In lieu of the O'Reilly method (randomly coming out in "the middle" of every issue) or the Matthews method (deciding, ab initio, that any criticism of Kerry could come only from bottom-feeding, politically motivated whores), there is still another method of evaluating the evidence, which is to evaluate the evidence.

For starters, 254 swiftboat veterans say Kerry is a fraud; 14 say he's a hero. Partisan considerations aside, which would be more difficult to do: Get 14 liars to keep a secret, or get 254 liars to do so? As a student of recent history, I defer to any registered Democrat on this question.

Of course, the 14 in Kerry's camp are not necessarily lying, being bribed, or hoping for a position in the Kerry administration – possibilities the media will never raise, I note. But we're talking about 35-year-old memories here; 254 memories to 14 memories is what we used to call "evidence."

Why don't we just give both sides some swiftboats, a few machine guns and lots of ammo, put them on a river somewhere, and let them settle this whole thing like gentlemen once and for all?

Ann Coulter is host of AnnCoulter.org, a Townhall.com member group.

©2004 Universal Press Syndicate

2 separate reports vindicate Bush, Rumsfeld on Abu Ghraib and prison abuse-- will Dems apologize?

08.26.04 (4:32 am)   [edit]
Editorial from the WSJ--

[b]A Rumsfeld Vindication
Abu Ghraib reports blow apart allegation of a "culture of permissiveness."[/b]
Thursday, August 26, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

Since Operation Enduring Freedom began in October 2001, the U.S. has handled about 50,000 detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and other venues of the war on terror. Among those, about 300 allegations of abuse have arisen. And as of this month 155 investigations have resulted in 66 substantiated cases of mistreatment. Only about a third of those cases were related to interrogation, while another third happened at the point of capture, "frequently under uncertain, dangerous and violent circumstances."

So notes Tuesday's report from the Independent Panel to Review DOD Detention Operations, empowered in May by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and chaired by former Pentagon chief James Schlesinger. The report offers invaluable perspective on the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib and is devastating to those who've sought to pin blame on an alleged culture of lawlessness going all the way to the top of the Bush Administration. John Kerry must be even more disoriented by the Swift boat story than he appears if he thinks now's the time to call for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation.

"The behavior of our troops is so much better than it was in World War II," Mr. Schlesinger told us yesterday, by way of comparison. Of the Abu Ghraib photos, he added, "It is preposterous that what these pictures show is we were prepared to use torture to get information," as Senator Ted Kennedy and others have alleged. Rather, Mr. Schlesinger characterized the photographed Abu Ghraib abuses as "free-lance activities on the part of the night shift," echoing the testimony we've heard so far during the courts martial for the accused.

The Schlesinger report does place blame higher up the chain of command--including some with ex-theater commander Ricardo Sanchez--but for inadequate supervision of the detention facility and adapting too slowly to the Iraqi insurgency. Another report released yesterday by the U.S. Army and Major General George Fay likewise exonerates the military chain of command of policies that could be interpreted as sanctioning abuse, though it does say that an intelligence unit at Abu Ghraib was involved in abuses separate from those involving the now-famous Maryland National Guardsmen.

That distinction is critical, and the Schlesinger report emphasizes the latter "were not part of authorized interrogations nor were they even directed at intelligence targets." Looking at mistreatment both at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, the report says that "No approved procedures called for or allowed the kinds of abuse that in fact occurred. There is no evidence of a policy of abuse promulgated by senior officials or military authorities."

Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed, for one, would seem to owe some apologies. In a May hearing he accused Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman Peter Pace, and the rest of the Pentagon of sanctioning war crimes. Also owing apologies are all those journalists who applauded his demagogy as some kind of gotcha moment, and who threw around words like "torture" so glibly.

Worse than being wrong, these accusations have endangered the lives of soldiers by forcing a retreat in interrogation techniques so severe that it's hampering the U.S. ability to fight the counterinsurgency in Iraq. "We can't even use basic police interrogations tactics that they use in the States," a Marine officer is quoted as saying in a Journal news article yesterday by Greg Jaffe and David S. Cloud.

Administration critics have had to seize on the fact that the Schlesinger report shows attempts in 2003 to transfer some coercive interrogation techniques from Afghanistan and Guantanamo to Iraq. In the former, the U.S. policy was that the Geneva Convention protections for POWs did not apply, while in Iraq they did. But in fact the timeline shows the military chain of command operating as it should to clear up confusion over what was permissible.

The Schlesinger report also shines a well-deserved spotlight on the International Committee of the Red Cross. It notes that much of the ICRC criticism used to bludgeon the Pentagon stems--as we've noted in this column--from a radical interpretation of the laws of war under which "interrogation operations would not be allowed," and which "would deprive the U.S. of an indispensable source of intelligence in the war on terrorism."

In particular, the ICRC is rapped for insisting that the U.S. adhere to a controversial document known as Protocol 1, which the U.S. long ago explicitly rejected and which would grant terrorists and other non-uniformed combatants all the privileges of normal prisoners of war. The ICRC, the report says, promulgates this standard dishonestly "under the guise of customary international law."

The report suggests that the ICRC can still play a valuable role as "an early warning indicator of possible abuse," but that "the ICRC, no less than the Defense Department, needs to adapt itself to the new realities of conflict, which are far different from the Western European environment from which the ICRC's interpretation of the Geneva Conventions was drawn." We wonder if the journalists who've lived off Red Cross leaks will report this rebuke.

The Schlesinger and Fay reports obviously haven't satisfied some critics, who are furiously spinning them for political advantage even though their accusations about alleged command failure have shifted drastically from "condoning torture" to poor supervision and planning. Some others are dismissing them altogether as a whitewash.

But Mr. Schlesinger and his fellow panelists, having already had long and distinguished careers, have no motivation to risk their own reputations for Mr. Rumsfeld's. They have produced what's to date the definitive assessment of what went wrong, and the bottom line could hardly be more clear: While the Abu Ghraib abuses deserve to be punished, like other wartime excesses, the allegations that they had anything to do with so-called "torture memos" and a Pentagon "culture of permissiveness" are nothing but a political smear.

Whaddya know, yet another Kerrry flip-flop on Iraq

08.25.04 (8:01 am)   [edit]
Let me ask you all a question: how could Kerry still be struggling to "clarify" his position s? Isn't this the schmuck that calls Bush a failure of leadership? The guy who says he has a "plan" for everything? The guy is still trying to figure out what the hell he stands for.

Translation: this guy has no principles, he has no morals. He takes different issues on a minute by minute basis solely on the chances it will help his poll numbers.

For all of the left-wing scrutiny of Bush's verbal gaffes and seeming contradictions, the nutjobs on the left and at the SCP (Smirking Chimp Posse) are noticeably silent on Kerry's multiple stances (pro/against abortion, pro/against outsourcing, pro/against Iraq, pro/against Vietnam, etc.)

By the way, I saw in a speech today where Kerry blamed Bush for failing to get body armor to the troops. Interesting, because Kerry voted against the 87 billion that provided body armor for said troops.

You gotta love this guy.

Note: Kerry doesn't let anyone say anything that he would/wouldn't support without his approval. The Kerry camp was asked the question about doing things differently if he knew what he "knows" now because Kerry has lambasted Bush and WMD (which, note to spartacus, did, and probably still do, exist-- there is greater proof to their existence than to their non-existence). Trying to win the swing states, Kerry lied yet again, trying to keep in line with is macho war hero persona (which I guess isn't absurd when a Leftie does it). When the line tanked, here comes Rubin saying he misspoke. This happens a lot. Sounds like the Kerry campaign couldn't manage its way out of a wet sack. Wonder why that is...

From the L.A. Times--

[b]Advisor Retracts Remark on Kerry Supporting War
James Rubin says he misstated the senator's position in a statement cited by Bush backers as echoing the president's.[/b]
By Ronald Brownstein, Times Staff Writer
08-25-04

WASHINGTON — A top foreign policy advisor to Sen. John F. Kerry on Tuesday retracted a comment that had been cited by President Bush and his supporters to claim that Kerry backed the decision to invade Iraq.

In a statement to The Times, James P. Rubin said he was wrong when he recently said that as president, Kerry "in all probability" would also have invaded Iraq if weapons inspections broke down and the United Nations explicitly authorized war.

"I never should have said the phrase 'in all probability' Kerry would have launched a military attack because that's not Kerry's position and he's never said it," Rubin said in the statement.

His retraction was another example of the struggle by Kerry and his campaign to clarify his position on Iraq and how it differs from Bush's. For months, Bush and his supporters have accused the Democratic presidential nominee of sending conflicting signals on Iraq and trying to blur his position to appeal to both prowar and antiwar voters.

Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for Bush's reelection campaign, said the statement by Rubin, an assistant secretary of state for public affairs during the Clinton administration, was "more in a long line of confusing statements by John Kerry and his advisors" about the war in Iraq.

"There's a reason why a guy as smart as Jamie Rubin is confused about John Kerry's position: it's because John Kerry has changed it on an almost weekly basis," Schmidt said.

Rubin revised his remark after it figured prominently in a debate on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday between senior Kerry advisor Tad Devine and Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman.

Mehlman argued that Rubin's comments meant Kerry and Bush "agreed about sending our troops to war."

Campaign sources said Rubin issued his retraction after discussing the issue with Kerry.

Kerry has consistently argued that Bush moved too quickly to war. But the Massachusetts senator has not explicitly answered whether, and under what circumstances, he might have used force against Iraq.

In an interview, Rubin said, "it is not knowable" whether a President Kerry ultimately would have invaded Iraq, because he would have handled each step along the way so differently than Bush.

Rubin's initial comment came after Bush added a section to his campaign speech defending his decision to invade Iraq and challenging Kerry to say whether as president he would have done the same.

On Aug. 8, the Washington Post quoted Rubin as saying that Kerry still would have voted in October 2002 to provide Bush the authority to invade Iraq, even if it had been clear then that U.S.-led coalition forces would not find weapons of mass destruction. The Post also quoted Rubin as saying that as president Kerry "in all probability" would have launched a military attack by now against Iraq.

Rubin did not dispute the accuracy of the quote. But he said that he offered that assessment only as Kerry's possible response to a long list of hypothetical conditions — such as if inspections had broken down, if the U.N. had explicitly authorized military force and if a broad coalition had been assembled.

The comment immediately caused consternation within the Kerry camp, with other top foreign policy advisors privately calling it a mistake.

Kerry, in comments the day after Rubin's remarks appeared, affirmed that even knowing all he does now, he still would have voted to provide Bush with the authority to go to war. But Kerry pointedly did not repeat Rubin's contention that "in all probability" he would have invaded Iraq as president.

Bush pointed to Kerry's words as an endorsement of his decision. "My opponent has found a new nuance," Bush said. "He now agrees it was the right decision to go into Iraq."

Kerry and his aides rejected that interpretation. They said his vote in 2002 was meant to strengthen Bush's hand in building an international coalition and pressuring the U.N. to resume weapons inspections inside Iraq, not necessarily to endorse a decision to invade.

Rubin said Tuesday: "Giving the president the authority to pursue a policy of force and diplomacy to hold [then-Iraqi President]Saddam Hussein accountable, to enforce compliance with U.N. resolutions, was not and never should have been taken as a blank check to go to war the way George Bush went to war."

Schmidt said that argument was "disingenuous" because Congress realized the 2002 vote was an authorization for war.

Dems prey on ignorance, use draft rumor to get Kerry votes

08.25.04 (5:06 am)   [edit]
From PowerLine blog--

[b]Dems Use Draft Rumor to Scare Young People[/b]

One important story that has flown under the major-media radar is the peddling by Democrats of the claim that the Bush administration has a secret plan to re-institute the military draft. That rumor is being spread to try to scare young voters into supporting John Kerry.

The Democrats' draft-rumor effort has now gone mainstream-- http://www.foxnews.com/story/...,2933,129903,00.html ; the South Carolina Democratic Party has sent out a mailing that claims young voters are faced with induction if they don't vote for John Kerry:

[i] The first page of the mailing shows a draft notice with orders to report to a military induction center. The next shows a helicopter with troops in the foreground beneath a headline that says "Officials in Washington are calling for more troops in Iraq." Below, the mailing asks "Which form would you rather fill out?" [/i]

It is hard to think of a more despicable campaign tactic. It hardly needs to be said that neither the Bush administration nor any other foreseeable administration has the slightest desire to re-institute the draft. The thought sends shudders down the spines of professional military men; America's all-volunteer army is without a doubt the best military force ever assembled. No one I know of supports the draft, except for Fritz Hollings, the Democratic Senator from--ironically enough--South Carolina. He introduced a bill to that effect. Not only did the Hollings proposal go nowhere; he couldn't even find a co-sponsor.

Democrats sometimes get upset when we say that they prey on ignorance. But this contemptible tactic is a perfect example of what we mean.

Posted by Hindrocket at 03:33 PM

Vetting free speech not a swift idea-- 527s ok, if they criticize without lying

08.25.04 (4:25 am)   [edit]
[b]Vetting free speech not such a swift idea[/b]
Jonah Goldberg

August 25, 2004

The Swift Boat Vets for Truth have started a tragic, stupid argument.

Oh, I don't mean the factual debate about John Kerry's war record. I'm referring to the argument over what sort of speech should be permitted during an election campaign.

As for the steady bleeding the Kerry campaign has suffered over the Swift Boat controversy itself, let's just say it was a self-inflicted wound. No president in recent memory has more explicitly run as a war hero. In fact, until recently, you rarely heard a presidential contender bragging about his war record, because pretty much every major politician had served in uniform.

John Kerry is different. Because the Democrats have been perceived, rightly, as weak on defense in general, and because Kerry in particular has been among America's most dovish senators, his campaign thought it necessary to treat his 20 years in the Senate as an asterisk and his four months in Vietnam as his "record." The Democratic Convention, which everyone hailed as brilliantly scripted by the Kerry campaign, made Kerry's Vietnam service the focal point of everything. His biographical film barely mentioned his political career, and his speech began with Kerry saluting and declaring that he was "reporting for duty."

But now Kerry says that his service is off-limits to criticism and inquiry. What nonsense.

It's even more absurd considering that Kerry's campaign and the DNC have said repeatedly that Bush and Cheney don't have the right to criticize even Kerry's legislative record because they didn't serve in Vietnam. Several times, when Republicans attacked Kerry's dovish positions on the MX missile, B-1 bomber and Tomahawk missile, the Kerry campaign immediately accused the GOP of "questioning" Kerry's patriotism and "re-opening the wounds" of Vietnam.

So now it is Vietnam vets - indeed, men who served in the same waters and in the same unit as Kerry - who are raising questions about Kerry's service, and we are told that they have no right to do so, either. Remember, half of the Swifties' case against Kerry has to do with what he said when he returned from Vietnam - about participating in, witnessing, and otherwise having knowledge of horrendous "routine" war crimes committed by American forces in Vietnam. And they have no right to call him to account?

I don't buy the "you can't judge if you weren't there" argument, whether it's touted by people on the left or the right. But since the Democrats have invested so much in it this year, it's particularly galling for them to say that 17 of Kerry's 23 fellow swift boat officers have no right to speak. If they don't, who does?

And speaking of rights, nowhere is this argument dumber than where it crosses paths with the First Amendment. The Kerry campaign wants the book "Unfit For Command" pulled from the shelves. The Bush Campaign has been bullied into "condemning" all 527s - the "independent" political organizations that have spent nearly $250 million since 2003. Of course, the Kerry campaign and the largely supportive media establishment think Bush should condemn only the Swift Vets. They don't think Moveon.org, America Coming Together and all of the lavishly funded "independent" liberal interest groups need much condemning at all.

Howard Dean says President Bush should "apologize to the American people" for breaking the law because an unpaid volunteer to a Bush campaign advisory committee appears as one of the talking heads in one of the Swift Boat ads. Of course, the Bush campaign has disavowed any ties, but the media starts from the presupposition that Bush is lying.

Meanwhile, America Coming Together has hired John Kerry's former campaign manager, Jim Jordan. Moveon.org has been embraced by the Democrats in myriad ways for years now. Mr. and Mrs. Kerry have even participated personally in events funded by MoveOn.org.

But all of that is just the usual cocktail of media double standards and hypocrisy typical of presidential election years. What is so thoroughly absurd and tragic is how we've come to accept as the "enlightened" position in America that political speech needs to be regulated as much as the instructions on prescription drugs. These 527s are the inevitable consequence of the fact that Americans who don't have the opportunity to appear on television or write columns for newspapers want to have a voice in politics. They're also the result of the fact that very rich people - like George Soros - can always find a way to be heard. Campaign finance "reform" holds that only "legitimate" voices can be heard in a democracy, which should be repugnant to the crowd that usually waxes pious about First Amendment rights.

Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" is surely as dishonest as anything the Swift vets can be alleged to have made up. Why not try to ban Moore from making movies?

The notion that, politically or legally, only some people have the "right" to say something during an election runs completely counter to the core intent of the First Amendment. But, hey, what right do I have to say that?

Jonah Goldberg is editor of National Review Online, a Townhall.com member group.

©2004 Tribune Media Services

A stunning NY Times column from Marine in Najaf

08.23.04 (9:17 pm)   [edit]
May God bless us, always.

[b]Over Najaf, Fighting for Des Moines[/b]
By GLEN G. BUTLER
Published: August 23, 2004

Najaf, Iraq — I'm an average American who grew up watching "Brady Bunch" reruns, playing dodge ball and listening to Van Halen. I love the Longhorns and the Eagles. I'm you; your neighbor; the kid you used to go sledding with but who took a different career path in college. Now, I'm a Marine helicopter pilot who has spent the last two weeks heavily engaged with enemy forces here. I'm writing this between missions, without much time or care to polish, so please look to the heart of these thoughts and not their structure.

I got in country a little more than a month ago, eager to do my part here for the global war on terror and still get home in one piece. I'm a mid-grade officer, so I probably have a better-than-average understanding of the complexity of the situation, but I make no claims to see the bigger picture or offer any strategic solutions. Two years of my military training were spent in Quantico, Va., classrooms. I've read Sun Tzu several times; I've flipped through Mao's Little Red Book and debated over Thucydides; I've analyzed Henry Kissinger's "Diplomacy" and Clausewitz's "On War"; and I've walked the battlefields of Antietam, Belleau Wood, Majuba and Isandlwana.

I've also studied a little about the culture I'm deep in the middle of, know a bit about the caliph, about the five pillars and about Allah, but know I don't know enough. I am also a believer in our cause - I put that up front just so there isn't any question of my motivation.

We marines are proudly apolitical, yet stereotypically right-wing conservative. I'm both. And I'd be here with my fellow devildogs, fighting just as hard, whether John Kerry or George W. Bush or Ralph Nader were our commander-in-chief, until we're told to go home.

The other day I attended a memorial service for an old acquaintance, Lt. Col. David (Rhino) Greene. He was killed July 28 while flying his AH-1W Cobra over the eastern edge of Ramadi. His squadron was composed of reservists: "old guys" like me who had been around a little while. But unlike me, these guys had gotten out of active duty to pursue other careers and spend more time with their families. Now, they were leading the charge against the Iraqi insurgency.

The night after the service, I sat around in an impromptu gathering of $10 beach chairs in the sand, watching the sunset and smoking some of Rhino's cigars with friends I hadn't seen in almost a decade. I listened in awe as they told me about their Falluja April, about how they had all cheated death, been shot down, again and again. We talked about the war, pretending to know all the answers, and we traded stories about home, bragged about our wives and kids.

We also talked about the magic bullet that ended Rhino's life. It could have been shot by a sniper who had slipped in over the Iranian border, or maybe it came from the AK-47 of a rebellious Iraqi teenager who viewed shooting at Yankee helicopters the same way mischievous American kids might view throwing rocks at cars. No matter, the single round pierced his neck, and within seconds a good man was dead, leaving his wife a widow and his two children fatherless. I won't soon forget that day, but it was quickly overshadowed by events to come, as I was thrust into the heat of battle in my own little slice of Mesopotamia.

On Aug. 5, after a few days of building intensity, war erupted in Najaf (again). When we had first come to Iraq, we were told our mission would be to conduct so-called SASO, or Security and Stability Operations, and to train the Iraqi military and police to do their jobs so we could go home. Obviously, the security part of SASO is still the emphasis, but our unit's area of operations had been very quiet for months, so most of us weren't expecting a fight so soon.

That changed rapidly when marines responded to requests for assistance from the Iraqi forces in Najaf battling Moktada al-Sadr's militia, who had attacked local police stations. Our helicopters were called on the scene to provide close air support, and soon one of them was shot down. That was when this war became real for me.

Since then my squadron has been providing continuous support for our engaged Marine brothers on the ground, by this point slugging it out hand-to-hand in the city's ancient Muslim cemetery. The Imam Ali shrine in Najaf is the burial place of the prophet Muhammad's son-in-law, and is one of the most revered sites in Shiite Islam. The cemetery to its north is gigantic, filled with New Orleans-style crypts and mausoleums. We had been warned it was an "exclusion zone" when we got here, that the local authorities had asked us to not go in there or fly overhead, even though we knew the bad guys were using this area to hide weapons, make improvised explosive devices, and plan against us. Being the culturally sensitive force we are, we agreed - until Aug. 5. Suddenly, I was conducting support missions over the marines' heads in the graveyard, dodging anti-aircraft artillery and rocket-propelled grenades and preparing to be shot down, too. My perspective broadened rapidly.

At first there were no news media in Najaf; now, I assume, it's getting crowded, although the authorities have restricted access after a group of journalists "embedded" with the Mahdi Militia muddied the problem and jeopardized others' safety. I haven't had time to catch much CNN or Fox News, and although I've seen a few headlines forwarded to me by friends, I don't think the world is seeing the complete picture.

I want to emphasize that our military is using every means possible to minimize damage to historical, religious and civilian structures, and is going out of its way to protect the innocent. I have not shot one round without good cause, whether it be in response to machine gun fire aimed at me or mortars shot at soldiers and marines on the ground.

The battle has been surreal, focused largely in the cemetery, where families continue burying their dead even as I swoop in low overhead to make sure they aren't sneaking in behind our forces' flanks, or pulling a surface-to-air missile out of the coffin. Children continue playing soccer in the dirt fields next door, and locals wave to us as we fly over their rooftops in preparation for gun runs into the enemy's positions.

Sure, some of those people might be waving just to make sure we don't shoot them, but I think the majority are on our side. I've learned that this enemy is not just a mass of angry Iraqis who want us to leave their country, as some would have you believe. The forces we're fighting around Iraq are a conglomeration of renegade Shiites, former Baathists, Iranians, Syrians, terrorists with ties to Ansar al-Islam and Al Qaeda, petty criminals, destitute citizens looking for excitement or money, and yes, even a few frustrated Iraqis who worry about Wal-Mart culture infringing on their neighborhood.

But I see the others who are on our side, appreciate us risking our lives, and know we're in the right. The Iraqi soldiers who are fighting alongside us are motivated to take their country back. I've not been deluded into thinking that we came here to free the Iraqis. That is indeed the icing on the cake, but I came here to prevent the still active "grave and gathering threat" from congealing into something we wouldn't be able to stop.

Weapons of mass destruction or no, I'm glad that we ended the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. My brother and other American jet pilots risked their lives for years patrolling the "no fly zone" (and occasionally making page A-12 in the newspaper if they dropped a bomb on a threatening missile battery). The former dictator's attempt to assassinate George H. W. Bush, use of chemical weapons on his own people, and invasion of a neighboring country are just a few of the other reasons I believe we should have acted sooner. He eventually would have had the means to cause America great harm - no doubt in my mind.

The pre-emptive doctrine of the current administration will continue to be debated long after I'm gone, but one fact stands for itself: America has not been hit with another catastrophic attack since 9/11. I firmly believe that our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq are major reasons that we've had it so good at home. Building a "fortress America" is not only impractical, it's impossible. Prudent homeland security measures are vital, to be sure, but attacking the source of the threat remains essential.

Now we are on the verge of victory or defeat in Iraq. Success depends not only on battlefield superiority, but also on the trust and confidence of the American people. I've read some articles recently that call for cutting back our military presence in Iraq and moving our troops to the peripheries of most cities. Such advice is well-intentioned but wrong - it would soon lead to a total withdrawal. Our goal needs to be a safe Iraq, free of militias and terrorists; if we simply pull back and run, then the region will pose an even greater threat than it did before the invasion. I also fear if we do not win this battle here and now, my 7-year-old son might find himself here in 10 or 11 years, fighting the same enemies and their sons.

When critics of the war say their advocacy is on behalf of those of us risking our lives here, it's a type of false patriotism. I believe that when Americans say they "support our troops," it should include supporting our mission, not just sending us care packages. They don't have to believe in the cause as I do; but they should not denigrate it. That only aids the enemy in defeating us strategically.

Michael Moore recently asked Bill O'Reilly if he would sacrifice his son for Falluja. A clever rhetorical device, but it's the wrong question: this war is about Des Moines, not Falluja. This country is breeding and attracting militants who are all eager to grab box cutters, dirty bombs, suicide vests or biological weapons, and then come fight us in Chicago, Santa Monica or Long Island. Falluja, in fact, was very close to becoming a city our forces could have controlled, and then given new schools and sewers and hospitals, before we pulled back in the spring. Now, essentially ignored, it has become a Taliban-like state of Islamic extremism, a terrorist safe haven. We must not let the same fate befall Najaf or Ramadi or the rest of Iraq.

No, I would not sacrifice myself, my parents would not sacrifice me, and President Bush would not sacrifice a single marine or soldier simply for Falluja. Rather, that symbolic city is but one step toward a free and democratic Iraq, which is one step closer to a more safe and secure America.

I miss my family, my friends and my country, but right now there is nowhere else I'd rather be. I am a United States Marine.

[i]Glen G. Butler is a major in the Marines.[/i]

Longshot needs to understand what "the passion" is

08.23.04 (8:48 pm)   [edit]
Longshot says in a recent post-- http://www.tblog.com/template...

[i]This beats the heck out of Gibson’s violent enactment of the passion. I always did like Paul Harvey. Pay it Forward gives us “the rest of the story” much better than Gibson’s account. It also demonstrates the purpose for which Christ suffered in a much more personal and tangible way. It wasn’t a great movie, but it was a great message![/i]

1)Haley Joel Osment (sp) didn't reenact that passion. He starred in a secular movie about altruism.2 )"The Passion" deals with the passion of Jesus Christ, the last hours of his life. The last hours of his life were very, very, brutal. Roman crucifixions always were.

"The Passion" makes it clear why Christ suffered, both physically and mentally. The movie was made because people fail to understand the sacrifice. It's not a perfect movie, but it comes very close. And it is much better than "Pay it Forward".

Longshot should buy a copy of "The Passion" when it comes out on August 31 and actually watch it.

How amazing! Every Kerry critic a liar, cheat, fraud, Hitler, etc....

08.23.04 (8:39 pm)   [edit]
You know that the Smirking CHimp Posse are a bunch of religious zealots because a)they dodge the substance of the issues at hand and b)call anyone who dare disagree with their candidates/gods as liars, cheats, and frauds.

It never fails. The vast majority of John Kerry's C.O.s and "band of brothers" question Kerry's military service,and guess what? The charges aren't investigated, or even refuted, but they are all called part of a "vast right-wing conspiracy". The charges have existed against Kerry for 30 years; all a Bush supporter did was fund their television ads. And, of course, the t.v. ads wouldn't have had to be made if the liberal press hadn't of ignored the Swiftvets' criticisms.

Bob Dole, who never questioned anyone's patriotism even when he should have (1996 election, Clinton), who never questioned anyone's war servicee (except, well, see above), said nothing that couldn't be refuted by Kerry and his supporters with proper evidence. But [i]instead[/i] we have these supporters do the real dirty work of politics-- smear Dole's character.

It's much like Bill Clinton's perjury. The Left is still trying to make that something it is not (lying about sex). The Left refuses to address the charges.

These are the same guys who found it no big deal in 1992 that Clinton was a war protestor and dodged the draft yet just got done crucifying President Bush for his National Guard record-- a record in which he never campaigned on and was honest about.

Ah, yes, honesty-- isn't that one of the Kerry "values" he always trumpets?

Some clarity on the new overtime regulations

08.23.04 (8:28 pm)   [edit]
Long, well-researched articles from the Heritage foundation that clarify the new Bush overtime regulations-- the first of its kind in a half-century or more.

[b]"Who Benefits From the New Overtime Regulations"[/b]-- http://www.heritage.org/Resea...

[b]Modernizing Overtime Regulations to Benefit Employers and Employees"[/b]-- http://www.heritage.org/Resea...

Dole tells it like it is, as Kerry's "war crimes" libel comes back to haunt him

08.23.04 (8:21 pm)   [edit]
Today's Wall Street Journal Editorial plus an article on Bob Dole's stunning words for Kerry (Dole never spoke out so forcefully, a reason why he lost in 1996-- clearly, US vets have had it with Kerry's exploitation of them). The bottom line on Kerry and Vietnam? If you pick a fight, finish it.

Kerry's allegiance is not with the Vietnam veterans. He high-tailed it out of Vietnam, while many, many vets stayed on long after their third, or fourth, or fifth Purple Heart, , and allied himself with the enemy, even getting his portrait in a Vietnam "Heroes" museum (which is still there). Kerry can't have it both ways. To deflect attention from his uber-liberal,anti-militar y Senate record, he declared himself G.I. Joe, and now that he's being rightly scrutinized for that as well, he has to attack those who justly condemn his libel and record.

What did Gore say in 2000? A Tiger can't change its stripes? John Kerry must face that truth about himself. He is a repugnant anti-military, liberal, elitist Senator willing to make any promise for sheer power. The sadness of it all is that he makes Bush looks so good-- at least we know what Bush stands for. Bush has f-ed up monumentally, but he at least loves his country.

[b]Vietnam Boomerang
John Kerry's "war crimes" libel returns to haunt him.[/b]
Tuesday, August 24, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

[b][i]The issue here, as I have heard it raised, is was he present and active on duty in Alabama at the times he was supposed to be. . . . Just because you get an honorable discharge does not in fact answer that question.[/i][/b]
--John Kerry, questioning President Bush's
military-service record, February 8, 2004.

A good rule in politics is that anyone who picks a fight ought to be prepared to finish it. But having first questioned Mr. Bush's war service, and then made Vietnam the core of his own campaign for President, Mr. Kerry now cries No mas! because other Vietnam vets are assailing his behavior before and after that war. And, by the way, Mr. Bush is supposedly honor bound to repudiate them.

We've tried to avoid the medals-and-ribbons fight ourselves, except to warn Mr. Kerry that he was courting precisely such scrutiny ("Kerry's Medals Strategy," February 9). But now that the Senator is demanding that the Federal Election Commission stifle his opponents' free speech, this one is too rich to ignore.

What did Mr. Kerry expect, anyway? That claiming to be a hero himself while accusing other veterans of "war crimes"--as he did back in 1971 and has refused to take back ever since--would somehow go unanswered? That when he raised the subject of one of America's most contentious modern events, no one would meet him at the barricades? Mr. Kerry brought the whole thing up; why is it Mr. Bush's obligation now to shut it down?

Simply because some rich Bush-backers are funding Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is hardly an adequate answer. Some rich Kerry-backers are spending far more to attack Mr. Bush's record, and the Senator was only too happy to slipstream behind Michael Moore's smear that Mr. Bush was a Vietnam-era "deserter."

In any case, anyone who spends five minutes reading the Swift Boat Veterans' book ("Unfit for Command") will quickly realize that their attack has nothing to do with Mr. Bush. This is all about Mr. Kerry and what the veterans believe was his blood libel against their service when he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the spring of 1971 that all American soldiers had committed war crimes as a matter of official policy. "Crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command" were among his incendiary words.

Mr. Kerry has never offered proof of those charges, yet he has never retracted them either. At his recent coronation in Boston he managed the oxymoronic feat of celebrating both his own war-fighting valor and his antiwar activities when he returned home. This is why the Swifties are so incensed, and this is why no less than World War II veteran Bob Dole joined the fray on the weekend to ask that Mr. Kerry apologize for his unproven accusations.

As Bill Lannom of Grinnell, Iowa, one of the Swifties, told the Washington Post last week: "He's telling untruths about us and his character. He's talking about atrocities that didn't happen. And then he's using that same experience to promote himself. He can't have it both ways."

We don't pretend to know the truth about how Mr. Kerry won his medals. There's no doubt that he pulled Jim Rassmann from the water (as Mr. Rassmann described recently in The Wall Street Journal), and that he put himself in harm's way and deserves respect for it. There's also little doubt that he has exaggerated some of his exploits--especially that Christmas in Cambodia sojourn we now know never happened--even to the strange extent of restaging events while in Vietnam so he could film them for political posterity. Modesty is not one of his virtues, in contrast to Mr. Dole and other modern veteran candidates (George McGovern, George H.W. Bush) who did not flaunt their noble service. But whatever doubts still exist could probably be put to rest if Mr. Kerry simply released all of his service records.

[b]The "war crimes" canard isn't so easily handled, however. It relates directly to our current effort in Iraq, where U.S. constancy is as much an issue now as it was in Vietnam. Mr. Kerry's denunciation of the U.S. at that time presaged a career in which he has always been quick to attack the moral and military purposes of American policy--in Central America, against the Soviet Union, and of course during the current Iraq War that he initially voted for. It's certainly fair to wonder if Mr. Kerry will have the fortitude to fight to victory in Iraq if he does win in November. Or will he call for retreat the way he and so many other liberals did when Vietnam became difficult?

The irony here is that a main reason Mr. Kerry has focused so much on Vietnam is to avoid debating Iraq and the rest of his long record in the Senate. He wants Americans to believe that a four-month wartime biography is credential enough to be commander-in-chief. But a candidate who runs on biography can't merely pick the months of his life that he likes--any more than a candidate who makes Vietnam the heart of his campaign can confine the resulting debate to his personal home video.[/b]

From the New York Post--

[b]JOHN A VIET CON: DOLE[/b]
By IAN BISHOP
BOB DOLE
Says Kerry "never bled."

August 23, 2004 -- WASHINGTON — Disabled World War II hero and former presidential candidate Bob Dole demanded yesterday that John Kerry apologize for insulting Vietnam vets — and ripped him because he collected "three Purple Hearts and never bled."

Dole's bombshell rebuke came after a group of anti-Kerry vets shot holes in his war-hero record claims in TV ads — and the Kerry campaign ripped the riled vets as GOP operatives.

[b]Dole lashed out at Kerry for disparaging Vietnam vets in 1971, when Kerry said U.S. troops raped civilians, cut off ears and razed villages.[/b]

"Maybe he should apologize to all the other 2.5 million veterans who served," Dole said. [b]"He wasn't the only one in Vietnam."[/b]

Dole — whose right arm is limp from wounds suffered as an infantry officer on the front lines in Italy more than a half-century ago — lambasted Kerry as undeserving of the Purple Hearts.

"And as far as I know, he's never spent one day in the hospital," Dole said.

[b]"I don't think he draws any disability pay. He doesn't have any disability. And boasting about three Purple Hearts when you think of some of the people who really got shot up in Vietnam."[/b]

Dole, a former Kansas senator, [b]said Kerry brought the attack ads on by hyping his Vietnam service.[/b]

"I said months ago, 'John, don't go too far,' " Dole said. "And I think he's got himself into this wicket now where he can't extricate himself because not every one of these people can be Republican liars."

Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton said, "It's unfortunate that Sen. Dole is making statements that official U.S. Navy records prove false. This is partisan politics, not the truth."

In another development, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, whose two ads blasting Kerry's war record have rocked the presidential campaign, deny Democrats' claims that they're props for the GOP.

[b]"Our message is our message and no one tells us what to say," Swift Boat vet Van Odell said on "Fox News Sunday."[/b]

A CBS poll shows Kerry's support among veterans has dropped 10 points since the group began advertising.

Kerry launched a new ad yesterday — after his first damage-control ad last week did little to raise his poll numbers.

The new ad features President Bush and John McCain, with a narrator saying, "Bush smeared John McCain four years ago. Now, he's doing it to John Kerry."

That spot, which implies that the Bush campaign is behind the Swift Boat ads, is designed to make it appear that McCain is bashing Bush. McCain heads Bush's re-election bid in Arizona and has asked Kerry not to use him in the Democratic ads.

The Bush campaign criticized the ad as "false and libelous."

Meanwhile, Kerry spent a profitable Saturday in the Hamptons, raising at least $2.5 million for the Democratic National Committee at three events.

Some 750 guests showed up for the main event, a $1,000-a-head fund-raiser at the home of venture capitalist Alan Patricof.

Kerry told the celebrity-studded crowd that his opponents are going after him personally "because in the last months, they have seen me climbing in America's understanding that I know how to fight a smarter and more effective war [on terror]."

Later in the day, Kerry headed to the home of "Sex and the City" creator Darren Star, who co-hosted a $25,000-per- person dinner. Some 250 guests turned out.

Kerry was a no-show for the third event, which took place at a local restaurant.

Additional reporting by Bridget Harrison and Dan Kadison

Kerry and Swiftvets: dodge the charges, claim that Bush is behind their ads

08.22.04 (4:44 am)   [edit]
Democrats are so fucking awesome. They talk tough, but they don't have the cojones to actually "bring it on." It was not long ago that Kerry, using his petty four months in Vietnam as a crutch, told Bush to "bring it on." President Bush has attacked Kerry's record in the Senate. When the Swiftvets, a group of vets that served with Kerry that has zero to do with Bush (unlike George Soros and the Democrats), question Kerry's claims (questions Kerry allowed everyone to make because HE MADE HIS VIETNAM SERVICE THE CENTERPIECE OF HIS CAMPAIGN), Kerry claims that this is a Bush dirty trick and demands to the President that he stop.

And of course the media willingly believes, without bothering to scrutinize, Kerry's Bush-Swiftvets claims. The Washington Post claims that the Swiftboats are being funded by "big money", which is completely appalling since George Soros himself has donated about 20 million dollars to MoveOn.org and dozens of other 527s the Democrats started to defeat Bush. Swiftvet television ads are funded by one Texas man who, as a US citizen, should be allowed to exercize his first amendment rights.

I just want to know why it was a big deal whether or not Bush was "AWOL" in the National Guard, and it means nothing that John Kerry, the man who claims a higher morality than Bush, is being accused by 80% of the men he served with, that he was a fraud who not only didn't earn his medals, but more importantly lied about his "band of brothers". Does anyone on the Left want to offer up that nugget?

So anyway, here we go with the usual bullshit. If you don't know by now, here's a quick study: the Democrats create a baseless charge (like Bush behind Swiftvets ads). This baseless charge is repeated ad nauseaum by the Democrats and their mainstream media. It receives no scrutiny. This charge becomes an assumed truth. You can do this for what Bush "said" regarding Iraq, Iraq and Niger, and many other things. All Democrats have to do is lie and lie and lie about something (like Bush saying Iraq was an imminent threat) and it becomes its own truth.

Kerry demanding that Bush stop the "attacks" on his record (which he opened up for scrutiny!) creates the impression that Bush is behind the attacks. The implication is intentional.

It cannot be that Americans have valid questions about the motivations of a guy who spent the better part of his life protesting the very Vietnam war he now embraces and voted against the military's weapons systems, no. It has to be a vast Republican conspiracy!

Article-- "Kerry urges Bush to Demand Attacks Stop"-- http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...

Kerry "Catholics" say Bush is the "Anti-Christ"

08.21.04 (6:54 am)   [edit]
When you make Ralph Nader look like a conservative, you know your party has lost it.

From the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights--

August 11, 2004

[b]KERRY CATHOLICS SAY BUSH IS THE “ANTI-CHRIST”[/b]

Catholic League president William Donohue commented today on the remarks made about President George W. Bush that are featured on the website of Catholics for Kerry 04:

“The home page of Catholics for Kerry 04 prominently lists comments by Wayne Madsden, who says, ‘George W. Bush’s blood lust, his repeated commitment to Christian beliefs and his constant references to ‘evil doers,’ in the eyes of many devout Catholic leaders, bear all the hallmarks of the one warned about in the Book of Revelations—the anti-Christ.’ He also charges that Bush ‘couples his political fanaticism with a neo-Christian blood cult.’

“This is the language of a demagogue, and it has no legitimate role to play in presidential politics. It is important to note that it is not the position of the Catholic League that the Kerry camp should be held responsible for this group of wacko Catholics. But at the same time, it shows how hypocritical the operatives in the Kerry camp really are.

“For example, it is reported by the Associated Press today that Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton is demanding that President Bush ‘condemn’ a book about John Kerry’s alleged fraudulent behavior in Vietnam, Unfit for Command. Why? Simply because one of authors made anti-Catholic remarks in a chat room last year (for which he has apologized).

“Now according to the logic of the Kerry campaign, it would seem only proper that John Kerry should condemn Catholics for Kerry 04: surely the nexus is tighter in this case than in the chat room quip. Indeed, this Catholic-Kerry website provides a direct link to ‘Contribute to Kerry Online,’ the official donation section of the Kerry-Edwards website.


“The subject of religion has been giving Kerry and the Dems fits lately. We hope their recent discovery of anti-Catholicism, however strained, suggests a new beginning. They can start by hiring a new religious outreach person who doesn’t cavort with anti-Catholics.”

The Catholic League is the nation's largest Catholic civil rights organization. It defends individual Catholics and the institutional Church from defamation and discrimination.

Vets still bitter at talk of Kerry and his war-crimes accusations

08.21.04 (4:36 am)   [edit]
From the Washington Post--

[b]Some Veterans Still Bitter at Talk of Crimes[/b]
[i]Senator's Activism Made A Lasting Impression[/i]
By Josh White and Brian Faler
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 21, 2004; Page A01

William Ferris was confined to a bed in a military hospital, his severed sciatic nerve reminding him of the attack on his Navy Swift boat in a Vietnamese river. A shot from a recoilless rifle had pierced the boat's pilothouse and then Ferris's body, leaving him in constant agony.

But it was what appeared on Ferris's television that really pained him. John F. Kerry, a decorated fellow Swift boat driver, was testifying before Congress about atrocities in Vietnam, throwing his medals away, speaking at antiwar rallies. Ferris, who was trying to rehabilitate himself back to active duty, felt betrayed.

"I was livid," Ferris, 57, of Long Island, N.Y., said yesterday, recalling how his dislike for the presidential candidate began in the early 1970s. "I said to myself at the time, this is someone who is using his experience for his own purposes, and this was long before he ever ran for office. I thought he was using, actually manipulating, what he had done in Vietnam. Just like he's doing now."

Ferris is one of 250 Swift boat veterans who in May signed an open letter to the Massachusetts senator asking for full disclosure of his military records, specifically focusing on events during a four-month tour in Vietnam for which Kerry was awarded medals for bravery in combat. The veterans group -- Swift Boat Veterans for Truth -- has criticized Kerry for using his military experience as a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, arguing that the Democrat has exaggerated his experiences at war for political gain.

"I thought he was just another hot dog just trying to build his reputation," said Wayland Holloway of Searcy, Ark., who says he crossed paths with Kerry in 1969, one day before the future presidential candidate pulled Jim Rassmann from a river. "The first time I met John Kerry, frankly, I thought he was a very disingenuous person."

But while the group appears to be rooted in Republican politics and big money, several veterans who signed the letter said in interviews yesterday that they are casually into politics and generally are not convinced that Kerry is lying, but they do not like the candidate because of his polarizing speeches in the 1970s.

James Zumwalt, who attended the group's first news conference in May, said he joined the group solely to set the record straight about the allegations of war crimes included in "Tour of Duty," a Douglas Brinkley book about Kerry's Vietnam service. Now, Zumwalt says, "I kind of have mixed feelings" about the tone of the group's attacks. "I would not try to question the awards given to him or his service."

Many of the veterans, scattered across the country, learned about the anti-Kerry group through friends, at reunions for Swift boat vets or on the Internet, and most have limited their involvement to signing the single letter to Kerry. Some say they voted for Al Gore in the last election but are still deeply hurt by what Kerry did when he returned from battle.

Kenneth Knipple of Erie, Mich., who served three years in Vietnam, backed Gore in 2000 but joined the anti-Kerry movement after leaning about it from a fellow vet. "For him to be wounded that many times and lie as many times as he did, I don't want him to be president," said Knipple, who served on Swift boats, but never with Kerry.

"I wasn't there at the time that happened," said Tony Gisclair, a veteran from Poplarville, Miss., who signed the letter, referring to Kerry's combat in Vietnam. "But look at what the man said about us when he came back."

Tony Snesko, a veteran in Washington, D.C., said he was "devastated" by Kerry's antiwar efforts, prompting him to sign on to the group's anti-Kerry message.

Snesko said to see Kerry elected would give credence to the senator's claims that those who fought in Vietnam were reckless baby-killers: "At the point that he might possibly take over this country as president -- it would validate everything that he said about us and would make it appear true."

The effort has gained momentum in the past month, as the veterans group began airing a controversial television commercial questioning Kerry's version of his service and asking him to disclose his military records. The Kerry camp has been attacking Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, calling it a front for President Bush's reelection efforts.

The May 4 letter arose out of a broader effort coordinated by a longtime Kerry foe and Republican supporter, Texas lawyer John E. O'Neill, also a Swift boat veteran. At the behest of the Nixon White House in 1971, O'Neill debated Kerry on television about the war.

O'Neill, who co-wrote "Unfit for Command," an anti-Kerry book published this week, gathered other Swift boat veterans to start the group and allowed word to spread. The group's core membership -- which has met three times and has had several conference calls -- includes a seven-member steering committee and about 10 other members.

"We really got this thing going in the hopes the Democratic Party would listen to us and perhaps nominate someone else," said Bill Lannom of Grinnell, Iowa, whom O'Neill recruited onto the steering committee. Lannom bristles at the thought of Kerry being elected to the presidency. "He's lying, and he's betraying us," Lannom said. "He's telling untruths about us and his character. He's talking about atrocities that didn't happen. And then he's using that same experience to promote himself. He can't have it both ways."

Unlike casual participants, the most committed members say they are driven by desire to expose Kerry as a fraud who doctored his record to win medals and an early release from Vietnam. But they are a minority in the larger group.

John L. Kipp of Brown County, Ind., said he learned about the letter to Kerry while surfing the Web and added his signature because he does not believe that Kerry is telling the whole truth. Kipp, who commanded a Swift boat in Vietnam, doubts that Kerry would have left his boat to attack an enemy, as he has asserted. "It really bothered me when he started to ballyhoo his war record," said Kipp, 62. "You don't turn on your comrades and say these terrible, awful things that I know I had never seen. There's something about keeping faith with those you served with."

Don Hammer, a veteran from Bloomington, Ill., said he admires Kerry. Hammer also said he believes Kerry was within his rights to speak out against the war. But still, Hammer has questions. "My goal is to tell Mr. Kerry to open up his service record," he said. "I don't know what happened. Nobody else knows what happened."

Staff writer Jim VandeHei and research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

The Bloody Shirt is Back

08.21.04 (4:26 am)   [edit]
[b]The Bloody Shirt Is Back[/b]
From the August 30, 2004 issue: Did you know John Kerry served in Vietnam?
by Fred Barnes
08/30/2004, Volume 009, Issue 47

THERE'S NEVER BEEN a presidential campaign like John Kerry's. Never has a presidential nominee made his own experience in a war the centerpiece of his campaign for the White House. In 1960, John F. Kennedy didn't hide his World War II record as commander of PT-109, but he didn't talk it up either. When asked about being a hero, he mocked the idea and said it stemmed from having his boat shot out from under him. John McCain's experience as a POW in Vietnam was well known when he ran for the Republican nomination in 2000. But he rarely mentioned it, except to note that his longest place of residence was Hanoi. Kerry is different. His speeches, TV ads, interviews, the entire Democratic convention--all have dwelled on his four months in Vietnam and the five medals he was awarded.

And there's still another unique aspect. Never has a presidential nominee run on the basis of his role in a war he opposed. Dwight Eisenhower, Teddy Roosevelt, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and the five ex-Union officers in the Civil War who became president benefited politically from their participation and leadership in a war. Most of them, in fact, were famous for their wartime service. Kerry, by contrast, became famous as a war protester, as the leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, who charged that war crimes were being committed by American troops in Vietnam on a daily basis. Now Kerry has stood the Vietnam issue on its head. He insists it's his war record that shows he would be a strong president.

Why is Kerry leaning so heavily on his performance in Vietnam? It's a bulwark against attacks on his weak record on defense and national security as a U.S. senator since 1985. In an era of terrorist attacks, his votes to cut intelligence spending, indeed his overall dovishness, are liabilities. So the theme of nearly every speaker at the Democratic convention in July was that Kerry's Vietnam service, not his Senate record, reflects the kind of president he would be. "I defended this country as a young man and I will defend it as president," Kerry declared.

The two convention speeches leading up to Kerry's were delivered by Vietnam vets, and during Kerry's speech, a group of his former Swift boat crewmates stood behind him. "I thought I was watching the VFW convention," quipped Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. Former senator Max Cleland, a triple amputee, was quick to tell the delegates that Kerry had earned "a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts." Retired General Wesley Clark talked up Kerry's moments in combat. "John Kerry has heard the thump of enemy mortars," Clark said. "He's seen the flash of the tracers. . . . He proved his physical courage under fire."

Has a candidate's having heard "the thump" of mortars or seen the "flash of tracers" ever before been used as grounds for election? Not in recent memory anyway. Harry Truman was an artillery officer in World War I, but his campaign didn't highlight that in his tough election battle in 1948. "You didn't get Kennedy saying, 'I have served and I have shrapnel in me,'" says Fred Greenstein, a presidential scholar and professor emeritus at Princeton. "Kennedy was too classy a guy to say that." (A Kerry campaign commercial says Kerry still has shrapnel in his leg.) George Bush senior, running for president in 1988 and 1992, didn't discuss his World War II service in the Pacific. Nor did Eisenhower rely on his war experience. "He didn't have to say 'I know about war,'" says Greenstein. "Everybody knew he knew about war."

Truman, Kennedy, Bush, and Eisenhower stressed other issues. Truman thrashed the "do-nothing Congress." Kennedy deplored a "missile gap" and exuded optimism about America. Bush ran as Ronald Reagan's heir but "kinder and gentler." Eisenhower promised to go to Korea and to clean up the mess in Washington. Kerry, however, "has made his four months of military service a key part, a mantra, a touchstone," says Greenstein. Since 1904, when presidential candidates began active campaigning, Kerry "is probably distinctive in the extent to which he makes reference to it."

That's putting it mildly. Kerry's campaign is also distinctive in the modern political era in using his Vietnam record to shut down criticism. Vice President Dick Cheney zinged Kerry recently for advocating a "more sensitive war on terror." At a rally in Flint, Michigan, Kerry's running mate, John Edwards, accused Cheney of distorting Kerry's words. Then he added this: "He's talking about a man who still carries shrapnel in his body. He's talking about a man who spilled his blood for the United States of America." Democratic senator Tom Harkin went further, calling Cheney a "coward" for not having joined the military or served in Vietnam.

This tactic is not new. It's called "waving the bloody shirt" and was quite common in presidential campaigns in the post-Civil War years--but not since then. In those days, presidential nominees didn't campaign personally. But Republicans urged people to "vote the way you shot." Presidential expert Al Felzenberg cites another Republican slogan: "Every [dead] Union soldier was downed by a Democrat." In 1868, Ulysses S. Grant's Democratic foe, Horatio Seymour, was accused of southern sympathies. Even when Democrats nominated General Winfield Scott Hancock in 1880, Republicans charged he represented "a Solid South against the soldiers and sailors of the patriotic North."

The Kerry campaign now treats President Bush the way Republicans dealt with Democratic presidential nominee Grover Cleveland in 1884. Republicans pointed out Cleveland hadn't served in the Civil War. At a Kerry campaign press conference last week, Clark characterized the two candidates this way: "One man volunteered to serve his country. He volunteered to go to Vietnam. He volunteered a third time to command a Swift boat in one of the most dangerous activities in the war. The other man scrambled and used his family's influence to get out of hearing a shot fired in anger."

There's a problem in comparing the Kerry and Bush war records. Kerry needs to play up his in an effort to show he would be a tough commander in chief. Meanwhile, Bush's record as a National Guard fighter pilot is not particularly relevant. He has been commander in chief for more than three years, allowing voters to judge him on his actual performance rather than on military records more than three decades old.

The Kerry fixation on his Vietnam record turns out to be more risky than expected. His claims about his war experience have become a matter for scrutiny, though not by the Bush reelection campaign as far as we know. Instead, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has charged Kerry with lying about his record in Vietnam or exaggerating it. The Kerry campaign can't dismiss the group as men who ducked Vietnam duty. The anti-Kerry veterans stayed in Vietnam for full 12-month tours, longer than Kerry did. Many were in the same unit as Kerry. Their criticism of Kerry is over specific incidents that require a specific response. Being forced to defend his war record wasn't part of Kerry's campaign plan.

Is Kerry's strategy working? We'll get an initial reading soon when polls measure whether the attacks by the Swift Boat Veterans, both on Kerry's war record and his antiwar protesting, have had an effect. The real test comes this fall when voters will be paying more attention and Kerry's Senate record on national security will be under discussion. Has Kerry's Vietnam episode inoculated him? Presidential historian Forrest McDonald doesn't think so. "He's grasping at straws," McDonald says. Maybe so.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

© Copyright 2004, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

SwiftVets don't support Bush, and only formed because media ignored them

08.21.04 (4:23 am)   [edit]
From the Washington Times:

[i]The newspapers reported that donors to the Bush campaign also contributed to the Swift Boat veterans, and identified one of them as Bob Perry, a Texan who has contributed to Republican campaigns in Texas and who contributed $100,000 to the Swift Boat veterans.

Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said the accusation is "frivolous" and said Mr. Kerry's campaign has engaged in coordination with liberal-leaning groups.

The veterans say there is no connection.

"I don't support George Bush," said Van O'Dell, one of the men who served on a boat that patrolled alongside Mr. Kerry's boat and appeared in the first commercial. "I've voted for more Democrats than I have Republicans in my life."

Retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffmann, one of the leaders of the group, said in a telephone interview yesterday that the group had to turn to TV commercials because it couldn't get national press attention.

"We were absolutely shut out of the popular television -- that is NBC, ABC and so forth," he said. "This was our only recourse -- to purchase and prepare to advertise."[/i]

So is Kerry's spokesman saying he lied in '71 testimony?

08.21.04 (4:19 am)   [edit]
In response to the 2nd Swiftvets ad, Chad Clanton, a Kerry spokesman, said:

"[The ad]takes Kerry's testimony out of context, editing what he said to distort the facts. He testified as a 27-year-old Vietnam veteran. He opposed a war that, at that point, cost over 44,000 lives of the 58,245 names that are on the Vietnam Memorial wall. It says a lot that the president refuses to condemn this smear."

If you want to read the entire Kerry quote, you'll find that the editing in the ad didn't matter one bit. Kerry simply accused his band of brothers of war crimes. [i]While they were still fighting[/i]. That's the context, sport. The context then is the same as it is now: this was about Vietnam and what was going on then. Is Clanton saying that because Kerry was 27 years old he had an excuse to lie?

It sure seems like it.

POWs died because of Kerry. THey had to listen to Kerry's own words echo through the prison cells. Kerry's prove war-crimes lies helped demoralize, kill, and ruin the lives of our troops. But that's OK because he was 27?

And are we supposed to be sympathetic because Kerry opposed the Vietnam war? A lot of people can be against something. Those that are against a war and use facts to be against it are honorable. Those that are against a war and lie to be against it are Democrats, Leftists. That is not honorable. Remember: the Left achieves power by any means necessary.

But if Kerry thinks this is a smear against him, why is he silent on MoveOn.org ads showing children working in factories in a Bush country? Why is he silent when we have 527s calling Bush a liar (using edited quotes that make him say things he doesn't say)? Why, oh why, doesn't he condemn "Farenheit 9/11", a left-wing film that has 59 major deceits in it? Why, oh why, doesn't he condemn those who say Bush is "sacrificing" the youth of America instead of calling them the "heart and soul" of America?

If you support John Kerry for president you are as mean, narrow-minded, and zealous as he is. You have no regard for facts and you believe that a lie is just a means to an end.

John Kerry is a coward, not a "fighter"

08.21.04 (3:58 am)   [edit]
John Kerry has filed a lawsuit with the FEC based on his claim that the Swiftvets, an organization complied of 80% of the vets Kerry served with, private citizens who believe Kerry is unfit for president, is tied to president Bush because the man who has made their television ads, Bob Perry, knew Bush when he was governor.

Tell me: how this is any different than Kerry's ex-campaign manager making anti-Bush ads?

It is amusing to watch Kerry deflect attention from the charges made against him by the Swiftbets. Instead of addressing the charges, Kerry has past vets and former Bush, Sr. staffers promote Kerry's "leadership" while trying to shut the vets up by filing a lawsuit. Awe...how American, right?

Kerry's avoidance of the charges made by his peers in Vietnam merely makes their truthfulness all the more likely. John Kerry says "bring it on" to Bush, but it was Bush who hasn't sued left-wing 527s. It was Bush who released his military records. The accusations against Kerry are huge, for the question the centerpiece of his campaign. Instead of hiding behind the skirts of his cronies, why doesn't Kerry actually "bring it on" and release his records?

Why can't he prove the Swiftvets wrong?

Democrats are biggest donors-by far- to 527s

08.21.04 (3:44 am)   [edit]
From Powerline--

[b]Rich Democrats Dominate Donations[/b]

Now that John Kerry and the Democrats have started denouncing section 527 committees, it's worth pointing out that of the twenty-five largest contributors to 527's, only one -- that's right, one -- is a Republican-- http://www.opensecrets.org/52... The top two donors are Peter Lewis ($14,030,000) and George Soros ($12,600,000). Altogether, the 24 Democrats contributed $56,693,000. The lone Republican donated $1,020,000.

Courtesy of Little Green Footballs-- http://littlegreenfootbal ls.c... .
Posted by Hindrocket at 11:37 PM

POWs Join Swift Boat Vets in Criticism of Kerry

08.20.04 (8:30 am)   [edit]

Check out the absolutely devastating video here: http://humaneventsonline.com.edgesuite.net/unfit_video2.html" title="http://humaneventsonline.com.edgesuite.net/unfit_video2.html" target="_blank"http://humaneventsonline.com....

Remember that Kerry called these vets murderers, and now he wants to exploit them again.

The rich are actually paying more taxes since the Bush tax cuts

08.20.04 (7:18 am)   [edit]
From National Review--

August 19, 2004, 12:01 p.m.
[b]Killing the Class-Warfare Argument
The rich are paying more taxes since the Bush tax cuts.[/b]
--Stephen Moore

One of the inconvenient facts for the foes of the Bush tax cuts is that the percentage of total taxes paid by the rich rose after the economic stimulus plan was put into effect. This consequence of the Bush tax cuts is highly damaging to the case by the Bush-haters that his tax cuts disproportionately benefit Halliburton executives and Bill Gates. Moreover, the Bush tax cuts took some 2 million low-income taxpayers off the tax roles entirely, so it’s hard to argue that working families didn’t get a financial benefit.

But the Left continues to work as best it can around these facts. The Kerry-Edwards campaign is now touting a new study by the Congressional Budget Office which purportedly finds that last year’s tax cut was tilted to the rich. There’s just one problem with this class-warfare whine: It just isn’t true.

What the CBO report did conclude was that the total tax share by the richest 1 percent declined modestly from 2001 to 2004. But that wasn’t because of the tax cut. It was because of the recession. When the economy contracts and incomes fall as they did in 2001 and 2002, tax payments by the wealthy fall the fastest. This is because of the progressive rate structure of the income tax. In other words, if everyone’s income falls by 10 percent, the overall percentage of taxes paid by the wealthy falls, because they pay a higher marginal tax rate.

What this means is that the best way to get the rich to pay more taxes is to incentivize their incomes to rise. For every extra dollar the rich person earns, about 30 to 40 cents goes into the government coffers. And since the Bush tax cuts have helped put the economy back on track, as evidenced by the 4.5 percent real growth rate of the economy since May 2003, the share of taxes paid by the rich has started to rise again.

Those who actually read the CBO study will discover that it confirms exactly this point. From 2001 to 2004 incomes have fallen sharply for the highest income groups. IRS data shows that in 2002, taxable income fell by about 4.3 percent, with declines steepest among the highest income groups. In 2002, income fell for the second year in a row. Prior to 2000, annual incomes hadn’t fallen since 1953. The New York Times recently reported that income fell 63 percent from 2000 to 2002 for the highest income bracket. When the rich make less; so does the government. So why do members of the Left hate the rich so much? Without them, there would be no money to finance the government.

A recent report from the Treasury Department confirms that the rich are paying a bigger share of taxes than they would if the Bush tax cuts hadn’t passed. The Treasury estimates that the top 1 percent of earners will pay about 32.3 percent of taxes this year, which is the same as the CBO estimate. The Treasury also estimates, however, that absent the tax cuts, the top 1 percent would be paying only 30.5 percent of taxes, down 10 percent from 2001.

The Treasury data confirm that the real impact of the tax cuts on the rich has been precisely the opposite of what the CBO study suggests. By resuscitating the economy and spurring a turnaround in income growth, the tax cuts have increased the share paid by the rich. Real income growth has increased significantly since the 2003 tax cuts were passed, increasing at faster than a 6 percent rate in the first two quarters of 2004. With the economy now growing more quickly, we can expect the tax shares paid by high-income groups to increase.

There is another reason to suspect that as the Bush tax cuts continue to kick in, they will increase tax payments by the wealthy. People are much more likely to work harder, engage in entrepreneurial activity, and make investments when the government is confiscating less of the monetary rewards for these activities. When you tax something, you get less of it.

This is obvious to most people. It’s why we tax socially undesirable activities like smoking and drinking. It’s why we fine people for traffic violations. Similarly, when we tax income, people tend to have less of it — either from working less or spending their time, effort, and money on tax-avoidance schemes. JFK understood this, writing that “Middle and higher-income families are both consumers and investors — and the present rates not only check consumption but discourage investment, and encourage the diversion of funds and effort into activities aimed more at the avoidance of taxes than the efficient production of goods.”

Those who argue that the Bush tax cuts were a “give-away” to the rich assume that incomes grow at a constant rate, regardless of how heavily they are taxed. That is the fallacy of the recent CBO study. The report concedes: “Our analysis does not account for incomes changing in response to the tax cuts.” It’s like assuming that you’re not going to take off any weight if you stop eating hot fudge sundaes with whipped cream and cherries on top. This is the same whimsical logic that compelled the tax accountants on Capitol Hill to famously estimate that a 100 percent income-tax rate would bring in billions of dollars in federal revenue.

One final point: The CBO study confirms that the rich carry the bulk of the tax burden on their shoulders. The CBO estimate says that the share of income taxes paid by the richest 20 percent of earners fell from 82.5 percent to 82.1 percent in 2004. The report also states that the top 10 percent of earners will pay “only” 66.7 percent of 2004 taxes, with the top 1 percent paying 32.3 percent. Fully 80 percent of Americans pay less than 18 percent of total income taxes. Not even Al Sharpton could look at this data and say the rich are getting a free ride.

How much exactly does the Kerry-Edwards team want the rich to pay? Seventy percent? Eighty percent? One hundred percent? Does the Left want rich people like Barbara Streisand, George Soros, Teresa Heinz, and Ted Kennedy to pay all the taxes? Hey, now there’s an idea . . .

— Stephen Moore is president of the Club for Growth. Phil Kerpen is a research assistant at the Club for Growth.

Chris Matthews: Ignorant Slimeball

08.20.04 (4:48 am)   [edit]
From Michelle Malkin's blogsite ( http://www.michellemalkin.com... )--

[b]AMBUSH JOURNALISM...OR MY EVENING WITH CAVEMAN CHRIS MATTHEWS[/b]
By Michelle Malkin · August 20, 2004 02:34 AM

Here's a peek behind the cable TV curtain. It's not pretty.

So, my publicist arranges for me to go on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews on Thursday night to talk about my recent columns on the FBI and national security profiling and my new book. Despite the show's basement ratings, we figure it's a good opportunity to reach out to a new audience. FOX News, with whom I have a contract, has generously allowed me to appear on some competing networks to talk about the book. Thursday was the second to the last day that I could make such appearances.

A few hours before the show, a producer calls to tell me I will be on for two segments--the first topic will be the Swift Boat Veterans, the second topic will be related to the book. Fine. This is the news business. I understand the need to go with the flow and cover the hot issues of the day. I am prepared to discuss both topics.

In a pre-interview, the producer goes over general questions about Kerry's response to the Swift Boat vets, whether the charges will be an issue in the presidential debates, and the basic themes of my book and its implications for the current War on Terror. I am originally scheduled to be on with the Washington Post's Dana Milbank. This was scratched and I am informed at the last minute that the other guest will be former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown.

As I am seated at the table with Matthews, who I am meeting for the first time, he cracks a joke--and not in a well-meaning way--about how I look. (There are quite a few people who are hung up on this.) "Are you sure you are old enough to be on the show? What are you? 28?" I grit my teeth. He badgers me again with the same question. I politely answer his question and supply my age.

(I wonder how Matthews' wife, the respected TV journalist Kathleen Matthews, who hosts a show about working women, would react if informed about her husband's treatment of a fellow female journalist. I've been in the business a dozen years and would be happy to talk to Mrs. Matthews about my firsthand experience with Neanderthal chauvinism in the workplace.)

Needless to say, things went downhill, fast and loud, from there.

1) Matthews introduces me, says we'll get to the subject of my book "in a minute," and launches into a spiel about how Bush should order the Swift Boat Vets to stop running their ads. Matthews intentionally mischaracterizes me as "speaking on behalf of the Bush campaign," when he knew full well I was there (with special permission from FOX News) to talk about my book, which he had sitting right next to him on the table and which he had chatted with me briefly about before the start of the segment. I correct him. He does not acknowledge his error.

2) When I tried to make a point about how the mainstream media ought to subject John Kerry to as much skull-pounding interrogation as private citizens such as Swift Boat Vet Larry Thurlow had endured from Matthews and the Washington Post, Matthews cut me off and snorted that he had never been thought of as "mainstream." Yeah, keep snorting.

3) In response to Matthews' claim that the Swift Boat Vets campaign was orchestrated by the White House, I noted that the Boston Globe--hardly a hothouse of GOP operatives--had raised many of the same questions about Kerry's war record as the Swift Boat Vets had. No response from Matthews.

4) Willie Brown expresses exasperation over Swift Boat Vets' questions about Kerry's wounds. He says: "There are questions about the shrapnel wounds. So what else is there? How much he got shot? How deep? How much shrapnel does he have?

Note that I didn't bring the subject of shrapnel. (Got that, Keith Olbermann?) Willie Brown raised the issue.

Here is how I responded verbatim:

"Well yeah. Why don't people ask him more specific questions about the shrapnel in his leg? There are legitimate questions about whether or not it was a self-inflicted wound."

Matthews frantically stuffed words down my mouth when I raised these allegations made in Unfit for Command that Kerry's wounds might have been self-inflicted. In his ill-informed and ideologically warped mind, this transmogrified into me accusing Kerry of "shooting himself on purpose" to get an award.

I repeated that the allegations involved whether the injuries were "self inflicted wounds." I DID NOT SAY HE SHOT HIMSELF ON PURPOSE and Chris Matthews knows it.

Only someone who had not read Unfit for Command would interpret what I was saying the way Matthews did. The book raises questions by vets, many of whom were with Kerry, about whether there was or wasn't enemy fire during the Dec. 1968 incident that led to his first Purple Heart (Patrick Runyon is quoted in a Boston Globe account on p. 35 saying "I can't say for sure that we got return fire or how [Kerry] got nicked. I couldn't say one way or the other. I know he did get nicked, a scrape on the arm.") and whether the injury came from a self-inflicted wound after he caught a tiny piece of shrapnel when he fired a grenade from his M-79 grenade launcher too close (p. 36); whether or not there was "intense rocket and rifle fire" during the Feb. 1969 incident that led to his second Purple Heart (Rocky Hildreth, officer of an accompanying boat on Dam Doi Canal that day, says there was no "intense rocket and rifle fire" on p. 78); and whether the shrapnel wound in his buttocks, which Kerry says he sustained in March 1969 and led to the awarding of his third Purple Heart, was the result of a mine explosion while on a mission or from a wound from his own grenade that he set off too close to a stock of rice he was trying to destroy (p. 87). See also pages 30-31. I was trying to get to these points, but Matthews would not let me finish a sentence.

Well, guess what? This foaming jerk Matthews, who called me irresponsible and kicked me off the show admitted that a) he himself had not read the damned book, b) he was not interested in asking Kerry about the specific doubts raised by vets about his wounds, and c) he had not and would not question Kerry about these specific allegations.

"Are you saying he shot himself on purpose?" Matthews hammered. I repeated myself again clearly that I was referring to the allegations about self-inflicted wounds in the book. When I tried to explain that the vets who were with Kerry had cast a lot of doubt on whether enemy fire occurred during the first two incidents, Matthews cut me off again. "Why did you say that?" he badgered. Because, I said, I was talking about what was in the book, which he had admitted he hadn't read.

"Don't you wonder?" I asked.

"No, I don't," he bellowed. "It's never occurred to me."

With that, I was kicked off the second segment.

As the show broke for commercials, Matthews scrambled for his producers to see if what he said was true. And I'm irresponsible? One staffer ran to the office where I had left my copy of the book, and handed it to Matthews, who--for the first time, apparently--started flipping through it. I asked for my book back and politely said thank you. After I left, he trashed me again on the air and his scurrilous charges were repeated by his MSNBC colleague Keith Olbermann, who called me an "idiot."

I am used to playing hardball. I expect it. I am used to ad hominem attacks. I get more in a day than most of these wussies have received in their lifetimes. But what happened last night was pure slimeball and the unfair, unbalanced, and unhinged purveyors of journalism, or whatever it is they call what they do at MSNBC, should be ashamed.

What I take away from all this is that the Democrat Party waterboys in the media are in full desperation mode. I have now witnessed firsthand and up close (Matthews' spittle nearly hit me in the face) how the pressure from alternative media sources--the blogosphere, conservative Internet forums, talk radio, Regnery Publishing, FOX News, etc. --is driving these people absolutely batty.

Keep bringing it on.

***

By the way, the full MSNBC Hardball transcript is here. Matthews and Olbermann's blog bloviations are here. Olbermann expresses incredulity that I was simply reporting what the Swift Boat Vets' book says, rather than spouting off in a half-baked manner:

Ms. Malkin wouldn’t even go so far as to attribute the suspicion to herself. It was in the book.

Olbermann, alleged journalist, is smearing me because I agreed to discuss and analyze claims made by the authors of Unfit for Command and actually referred to what was in the book--rather than cluelessly spew uninformed opinions about the book a la Chris Matthews (of whom Olbermann drools, "never prouder of you, Chris.") Parroting Matthews' conspiratorial line, Olbermann ignorantly suggests that I am following orders from the Swift Boat Vets to "steer the Kerry-Shot-Himself flotsam into the mainstream media." I suggest he talk to the producer, Dominic Bellone, who booked me about the circumstances of my appearance on the show and ask whether I was dispatched by the Bush campaign or Swift Boat Vets operatives or anyone else associated with the vets' book.

The feedback e-mail for Hardball is hardball@msnbc.com.

Chris Matthews' phone number is listed in the Spring 2004 News Media Yellow Book as 202-885-4600.

***

Just wanted to end with what I think was the most significant exchange on the show involving Wille Brown, who made a stunning admission from a fellow Democrat about John Kerry's core deficiencies:

BROWN: John Kerry is the kind of a guy who is always laid back. He is always been dealing with people who were gentle, who were in every way respectful, who have a sense of dignity about themselves and a sense of honor. John Kerry may not be fit for the terrible battles and wars of the world of politics.

He may be absolutely perfect as a president. But in term of a candidate, he probably has a series of imperfection that‘s may be fatal in his successful, in his pursuit of a successful candidacy. That‘s not to take anything away from his integrity. He should have been doing exactly what he‘s doing today. He should have been doing that from day one.

MATTHEWS: Do you think Massachusetts politics is softball?

BROWN: I think Massachusetts politics is always been very respectful of the other person‘s view and very committed to the idea they don‘t want to seem negative and they don‘t want to be criticized for an absence of integrity.

MALKIN: He is a boy in the bubble, Chris. And...

MATTHEWS: What does that mean?

MALKIN: He hasn‘t been subjected to this kind of heat. And as Willie Brown is suggesting, if he can‘t stand the heat from his fellow veterans, do we really want to trust him to stand up to Islamic extremists?

Why Kerry's Vietnam record matters

08.20.04 (4:29 am)   [edit]
When George Bush runs ads showing how John Kerry as a Senator voted against every single significant military system, supported gutting our intel services after the first WTC attack, and is an ardent supporter of 1 trillion dollars in new taxes and government spending, Lefties decry them as "negative" "attack" ads. Yet they say the same thing when citizens get together and run ads showing how Kerry lied about his experiences in Vietnam, from the small things like Purple Hearts and Bronze Stars to the major things like accusing his "band of brothers" of war crimes.

Apparently, any sort of criticism against Kerry is a "negative" "attack" ad. This from the folks who ardently believe that Bush is Hitler, and that Michael Moore and George Soros don't lie and smear.

But John Kerry's Vietnam service matters-- big time. Why? Eschewing his Senate record, Kerry decided to run on the four months, just four months, he served in Vietnam. That's one. Kerry knows that his Senate record is nothing but a failure of leadership, an appalling anti-military display. Leaning on the same vets he helped a generation hate in the '60s and '70s is all he has left.

Secondly, by relying on his Vietnam experience, Kerry is trying to portray himself as a leader. As someone that can be trusted. But this is a guy who, the record shows, has four positions for the same topic. Who voted to authorize war with Iraq but then refused to fund them. Who lied in front of congress, in his speeches, and in his book about his experiences in Vietnam. For example: John Kerry, friends, was never in Cambodia. This is ironclad (and Nixon wasn't president then, either).

Kerry's Vietnam record-- from his conduct in battle (running away, shooting the defeated in the back), to his medals that he relies so much on now (forgetting that he "threw" them away when he was a war protester), to his war-crimes smear against the 20 year olds he served with, all smack of a failure of leadership, of a man obsessed with opportunity, not principles.

Kerry is in a catch-22. The men he called murderers, private citizens, aren't going to take it anymore. What a country we live in where billionaire foreigner George Soros can use his money to finance the MoveOn "Bush is Hitler" ads with absolutely no criticism, but private citizens who actually spent time with Kerry can't criticize his war record.

The solution to all of this is clear: release the records. Bush had to release his. The entire country went nuts over Bush being so-called "AWOL" from the guard, and now Kerry's record is off-limits? Kerry made his service the cornerstone of his campaign. As Americans we have a right to criticize that record.

We have a right to shine the unprecedented scrutiny thrust upon president Bush onto Kerry. That is if we are honest about finding the truth.

Swiftvets: Kerry wrote Bronze Star report, including noting "enemy fire"

08.19.04 (10:35 am)   [edit]
If these charges are baseless, why not simply release the military records and shut the Swiftboat vets up? The fact that Kerry is dodging a response and making ad hominem attacks tells us that he can't dispute these charges.

From Swiftvets.com-- http://www.swiftvets.com/

For Immediate Release August 19, 2004

[b]Statement By Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Member Larry Thurlow[/b]

I am convinced that the language used in my citation for a Bronze Star [b]was language taken directly from John Kerry's report which falsely described the action on the Bay Hap River as action that saw small arms fire and automatic weapons fire from both banks of the river.[/b]

To this day, I can say without a doubt in my mind, along with other accounts from my shipmates-[b]there was no hostile enemy fire directed at my boat or at any of the five boats operating on the river that day.[/b]

I submitted no paperwork for a medal nor did I file an after action report describing the incident. [b]To my knowledge, John Kerry was the only officer who filed a report describing his version of the incidents that occurred on the river that day.[/b]

It was not until I had left the Navy-approximately three months after I left the service-that I was notified that I was to receive a citation for my actions on that day.

[b]I believed then as I believe now that I received my Bronze Star for my efforts to rescue the injured crewmen from swift boat number three and to conduct damage control to prevent that boat from sinking. My boat and several other swift boats went to the aid of our fellow swift boat sailors whose craft was adrift and taking on water. We provided immediate rescue and damage control to prevent boat three from sinking and to offer immediate protection and comfort to the injured crew.[/b]

After the mine exploded, [b][i]leaving swift boat three dead in the water, John Kerry's boat, which was on the opposite side of the river, fled the scene. US Army Special Forces officer Jim Rassmann, who was on Kerry's boat at the time, fell off the boat and into the water. [/b][/i]Kerry's boat returned several minutes later-[b]under no hail of enemy gunfire[/b]-to retrieve Rassmann from the river only seconds before another boat was going to pick him up.

[b][u]Kerry campaign spokespersons have conflicting accounts of this incident-the latest one being that Kerry's boat did leave but only briefly and returned under withering enemy fire to rescue Mr. Rassmann. However, none of the other boats on the river that day reported enemy fire nor was anyone wounded by small arms action. The only damage on that day was done to boat three-a result of the underwater mine. None of the other swift boats received damage from enemy gunfire.[/b][/u]

And in a new development, Kerry campaign officials are now finally acknowledging that while Kerry's boat left the scene, none of the other boats on the river ever left the damaged swift boat. [b]This is a direct contradiction to previous accounts made by Jim Rassmann in the Oregonian newspaper and a direct contradiction to the "No Man Left Behind" theme during the Democratic National Convention.[/b]

These ever changing accounts of the Bay Hap River incident by Kerry campaign officials leave me asking one question. If no one ever left the scene of the Bay Hap River incident, how could anyone be left behind?

[b]Statement by Navy Veteran Van Odell, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,[/b]

in Rebuttal to Michael Dobbs, Washington Post, August 19, 2004

A courageous, soft spoken man of the Midwest, Larry Thurlow has a heart bigger than the great plains and a commitment to truth and honesty that is boundless. He is under attack, because John Kerry is feeling the heat of truth at the hands of this honest man and others like him.

The Kerry Campaign is attacking the truthfulness of this man and the Bronze Star he so richly deserves for his actions on March 13, 1969. I was there. I saw what happened.

The mine's detonation lifted PCF-3 completely out of the water just yards ahead of me. All boats commenced suppression fire in case enemy small arms fire ensued. None did.

All boats came to the aid of PCF-3, except one: John Kerry's boat. [b]Kerry fled.[/b]

Larry Thurlow piloted his boat straight toward the mine-damaged PCF-3 from which thick, black smoke billowed. He jumped aboard and personally led damage control operations that saved the boat and rescue operations that saved the lives of badly wounded men. Larry's leadership was in the highest traditions of the naval service. His leadership allowed the other men and boats of the mission to exit the river safely. This single act of meritorious service, the chief requirement of the Bronze Star, should be honored, not ridiculed, by the Kerry campaign and its allies in the mainstream media.

[b]To reiterate, only one enemy weapon was deployed that day the command-detonated submerged mine that disabled PCF-3.[/b] Larry Thurlow's citation contained references to enemy small arms and automatic weapons fire, because [b]that was the language chosen by John Kerry who penned the spot report on the action that day[/b]. There was no enemy small arms and automatic weapons fire” received that day. John Kerry's report was fiction a hoax on the entire chain of command. Larry Thurlow's heroism and meritorious service, however, is real.

To me Larry is one of the heroes of our country. He is a man who served his country when called and who returned home to be a productive citizen. Larry and men like him are the strong backbone of our society. I am proud to have served with him.

[b]Below is a statement from John O'Neill responding to Senator John Kerry's August 19, 2004, attack on The Swift Boat Veteran's for Truth. [/b]

Mr. O'Neill is the author of Unfit for Command.

-----

The Navy did not send Republicans or Democrats to the island of An Thoi. We are responding and dealing with something that is deeply personal - our own record and the record of our unit in Vietnam. [b]These are issues Senator Kerry raised and we regret that he uses ad hominem attacks instead of dealing with the actual facts. He is doing that because he cannot deal with the truth.[/b]

[b]For example, for 35 years he said he claimed that one of the turning points of his life was spending Christmas Eve and Christmas illegally in Cambodia, libeling our commanders and our nation with accusations of war crimes. That is a totally false statement because he was no where near Cambodia on Christmas Eve and Christmas day. The Kerry campaign continues to flip flop on the Cambodia issue.

In addition, Senator Kerry closed the Democratic National Convention with a story in which he claimed that five of the boats fled on March 13 after a mine went off and he came back. His campaign is now admitting that he fled and the rest stayed.[/b]

[b][u]Attacking our organization does not respond to the facts that occurred in Vietnam. Senator Kerry says that he has learned to charge into an ambush in connection with this, instead he is fleeing down the river from the facts.[/b][/u]

If only Dems scrutinized themselves like they do an anti-Kerry Swiftboat vet

08.19.04 (9:03 am)   [edit]

US loses goodwill of Iraq Shia, and it goes to Sadr, Iraq

08.19.04 (8:34 am)   [edit]

Dems have long history of pretending to be real men

08.19.04 (4:28 am)   [edit]
[b]Ballad of the French Berets[/b]
Ann Coulter
August 19, 2004

There ought to be a special word – something German – to describe the feeling of revulsion normal people experience when reading lines like these from a single article on John Kerry by Laura Blumenfeld in the Washington Post:

* "Kerry's complexity has been an issue since his national debut in 1971."

* "Kerry likes to quote the French writer Andre Gide: 'Don't try to understand me too quickly.'"

* "His friend Dan Barbiero said it comes down to Kerry's complexity ..."

(Apparently, Kerry's answers on the LSAT were too nuanced and complex for the Harvard Law School admissions committee: Despite all his connections, fancy education and war-protesting, Kerry couldn't get into Harvard Law School and went to Boston College Law School instead. Wait – didn't Kerry throw that famous, game-winning "Hail Mary" pass while playing quarterback for Boston College back in the '80s? Or am I thinking of somebody else? Let's ask Doug Brinkley!)

* "Flying to his next campaign stop, he chatted about maneuvers to avoid flak in combat."

* "This was Primal John ... who ran with the bulls at Pamplona and, when trampled, got up, chased the bull, and grabbed for its horns."

(I'm almost sure this was a polite reference to John and Teresa's honeymoon night.)

The problem with a suck-up press for Democrats is that with no adversary press to call them on it, Democrats develop wilder and wilder Walter Mitty fantasy lives until finally one day, when they are at the zenith of their political careers, someone notices that they're not Irish, they didn't deserve their war medals, 254 swiftboat veterans hate them, and they didn't spend Christmas Eve, 1968, in Cambodia. (Or that they are white-trash serial molesters and unrepentant rapists who somehow talked their way into an Arkansas governorship.)

The Boston Globe biography of Kerry published earlier this year compliantly repeats Kerry's yarn about how he spent Christmas 1968 in Cambodia "despite President Nixon's assurances that there was no combat action in this neutral territory."

Only recently did someone point out: (1) Kerry was 55 miles away from the Cambodian border on Christmas 1968 and (2) Nixon wasn't president in 1968. (How did "historian" Doug Brinkley miss that in his biography of Kerry?)

The media will spend weeks going through pay stubs for Bush's National Guard service in Alabama in the waning days of war, but if Kerry tells them exotic tales of covert missions into Cambodia directed by Richard Nixon, they don't even bother to fact-check who was president in December 1968.

Tom Harkin, Crazed Moron, was shouting this week that Dick Cheney is a "coward," evidently for not fighting in Vietnam like Harkin. Except Harkin didn't fight in Vietnam either! The last time Harkin was bragging about his Vietnam service was in 1984 when he told David Broder of the Washington Post: "I spent five years as a Navy pilot, starting in November of 1962. One year was in Vietnam. I was flying F-4s and F-8s on combat air patrols and photo-reconnaissance support missions."

Sen. Barry Goldwater – not the Post – checked with the Defense Department and soon Harkin was forced to admit he had never been in combat in Vietnam, but was based in Japan during the war, ferrying damaged planes from the Saigon airport to Japan for repairs. Oops!

Then there was Al Gore who, like Kerry, was in Vietnam just long enough to get photos for his future political campaigns. (Apparently all future Democratic politicians take cameras to war zones.)

Gore enlisted in the Army in 1970 in a calculated gambit to help his senator dad in an election year. Young Al was given a cushy job writing for the Stars and Stripes newspaper, a bodyguard, and an exit strategy when Pops lost the election. After five months of this hygienic tour of duty, Little Lord Fauntleroy asked to come home, and before long he was safe and sound and preparing to flunk out of divinity school and then drop out of law school.

But over the next 30 years, Gore provided the media with increasingly macho reminiscences of his combat experiences in Vietnam – almost as vivid and stirring as the impassioned account he gave of being a tobacco farmer.

* "I pulled my turn on the perimeter at night and walked through the elephant grass and I was fired upon." (The Baltimore Sun)

* "I took my turn regularly on the perimeter in these little firebases out in the boonies. Something would move, we'd fire first and ask questions later." (Vanity Fair)

* "I was shot at. I spent most of my time in the field." (The Washington Post)

I think someone needs to explain to the Democrats that having your picture taken is not what most veterans mean by "being shot at."

During World War II, then-congressman Lyndon Johnson went on a single flight – as an observer – for which he was awarded the Silver Star by Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Only recently has it been exposed that the medal was a complete fraud, probably awarded by MacArthur to curry favor with a congressman.

At the time, no one in the press bothered to investigate why Johnson was the only member of the crew to receive any sort of decoration for the 13-minute flight that never came under enemy fire – and on which Johnson was merely an "observer." For the rest of his life Johnson got away with wearing what historian David Halberstam called "the least deserved and most proudly displayed Silver Star in military history."

Johnson told harrowing tales of his uneventful 13-minute flight, boasting that the men had called him "Raider Johnson." One time he harangued a congressman on foreign aid, saying: "I know foreign aid is unpopular, but I didn't want to go to the Pacific in '41 after Pearl Harbor, but I did. I didn't want to let those Japs shoot at me ... but I did."

The sole surviving member of the crew, Ret. Staff Sgt. Bob Marshall, U.S. Army, a gunner on the plane, disputed Johnson's story about being attacked by Japanese Zeros: "No way. No, that story was made up ... we had never seen a Zero. It was never attacked. There was nothing."

If only talk radio and cable TV had been around in the '60s, we'd be able to hear James Carville call Bob Marshall a liar and watch the Democratic National Committee threaten to sue any TV station that aired his story.

Ann Coulter is host of AnnCoulter.org, a Townhall.com member group.

©2004 Universal Press Syndicate

Networks Gave 75 Stories to Bush “AWOL” Charge, 9 to Claims Kerry Embellished War Record

08.19.04 (4:22 am)   [edit]
From the Media Research Center-- http://www.mediaresearch.org/...

[b]ABC, CBS & NBC Gave 75 Stories to Bush “AWOL” Charge, 9 to Claims Kerry Embellished War Record[/b]
TV Gives No Respect to Swift
Boat Vets for Truth

Back in February, the three broadcast networks were obsessed with the story of President Bush’s National Guard service. But in May, when John Kerry’s former Navy colleagues from Vietnam went to the National Press Club to charge that Kerry’s tales of heroism as a Swift Boat commander were highly exaggerated, those same networks acted as if their job was to bury the news, not report it.

Back on May 4, ABC and NBC ignored the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s press conference, while CBS’s Byron Pitts claimed the veterans had merely “unleashed decades of bitterness.” His Evening News story ignored Kerry’s record, but challenged his critics: “If you think this is just a concerned group of veterans, think again.”

Even though the Swift Vets have now published a book, Unfit for Command, and sponsored a TV ad, the networks still aren’t investigating their charges. MRC analysts examined ABC, CBS and NBC’s morning and evening news shows. They found 75 stories this year questioning Bush’s National Guard service, but only nine detailing any of the Swift Vets’ anti-Kerry charges, an eight-to-one disparity. But the networks’ double standard runs far deeper than the amount of coverage:

• Partisanship: The “AWOL” story got its legs February 1 when Democratic boss Terry McAuliffe appeared on ABC’s This Week to declare how he wants a debate in which “John Kerry, a war hero with a chest full of medals, is standing next to George Bush, a man who was AWOL in the Alabama National Guard,” and reporters began badgering the White House to prove McAuliffe’s charges false. But the hint of a GOP connection to the Swift Vets has reporters holding their noses. The first mention of the Swift Vets on NBC Nightly News came on August 6 when Andrea Mitchell complained the groups’ anti-Kerry “ad is paid for by Bush contributors using a loophole in the McCain- Feingold law.” Mitchell’s story did not examine the vets’ charges against Kerry, just complained about the fact that they could get them on TV.

• Evidence. Reporters put the onus on Bush to prove the critics wrong. “Given the absence of any witnesses who could fill in those gaps and corroborate the President’s recollection,“ ABC’s Terry Moran insisted on February 10, “the issue is not going to go away.” CBS was even more demanding (see box).

But holes in Kerry’s record aren’t treated as suspicious. On the issue of Kerry’s first wound in 1968, then-Coastal Division 14 Commander Grant Hibbard says Kerry came to his office asking for a Purple Heart for what amounted to a scratch. As recounted in Unfit for Command (page 38), “I told Kerry to ‘forget it.’ There was no hostile fire, the injury was self-inflicted for all I knew, besides it was nothing more than a scratch. Kerry wasn’t getting a Purple Heart recommendation from me.” But when the issue became news in April, the networks made it a one-day story, even though the records Kerry released failed to include the paperwork supporting the Purple Heart award.

• Enthusiasm. On February 10, White House reporters badgered Press Secretary Scott McClellan for 30 minutes, demanding detailed proof that everything Bush said in the past was true. But the networks now call the Swift Vets’ ad “ugly,” and reporters’ demand is for Bush to condemn it, not Kerry to factually rebut it.

— Rich Noyes

205th Intel brigade, Pappas, MPs, but no high ranking officials, at fault in Abu Ghraib abuses

08.19.04 (4:01 am)   [edit]
From MSNBC--

[b]More U.S. forces tied to Abu Ghraib abuse
Army report clears top brass, implicates intelligence troops[/b]
Reuters
Updated: 6:00 p.m. ET Aug. 18, 2004

WASHINGTON - A new U.S. Army report clears top U.S. military brass in Iraq of abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison but implicates 20 or more intelligence troops in the scandal, defense officials said Wednesday.

The investigation report, expected to be sent to Congress next week, recommends discipline against the military intelligence troops ranging from administrative reduction in rank and loss of pay to further investigation that could lead to military trials, one of the officials told Reuters.

The officials, who asked not to be identified, gave no further details, but said most of the troops implicated in the intelligence probe, launched by Army Maj. Gen. George Fay in April, were from the U.S. 205th Military Intelligence Brigade that was assigned to Abu Ghraib when the abuses occurred.

“I think it will find that military police weren’t the only ones doing anything wrong,” said one defense official of the abuse and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners that sparked fury in the Arab world and international condemnation.

Military police already charged

Seven U.S. military police reservists from the 372nd Military Police Company were earlier accused of humiliating and in some cases beating and photographing Iraqi prisoners at the infamous facility near Baghdad, once used as a torture chamber by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Some of those military police guards allege that they were acting under orders from military intelligence to ”soften up” prisoners for interrogation.

Col. Thomas Pappas, who was commander of the 205th Intelligence Brigade, has already received a letter of reprimand for failing to ensure that his troops protected the rights of prisoners guaranteed under the Geneva Conventions.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top defense officials have promised to leave no stone unturned in several investigations into the U.S. abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gen. John Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was the top U.S. military officer in Iraq at the time of the abuse, told Congress earlier that they did not find out about the abuse until this year when a military policeman revealed the problem at the prison.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who commanded the 800th Military Police Brigade in Iraq late last year, has also received a letter of reprimand and been suspended from her post. She is protesting that suspension.

Lawyers defending military police suspects in the Abu Ghraib scandal have argued that the courts should take into account the psychological impact on suspects of working long hours in grim conditions at the big prison.
Copyright 2004 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5...

A Day in the Life of Najaf's Police Chief

08.18.04 (4:42 am)   [edit]
Chilling quote:

"...more and more Iraqis are signing up for the Mahdi's Army, hoping to become martyrs in a country where young men facing high unemployment have few options."

That's proof positive that the longer we legitimize Sadr and his army, the worse we make it for Iraq and the US. Enough is enough. We need to disband the army by destroying it.

As far as employment goes, that is increasing. Rome wasn't built in a day. Neither will Iraq.

[b]A Day in the Life of Najaf's Police Chief[/b]
By Michael Georgy
The Washington Times | August 18, 2004

Militants had just kidnapped and dragged his ailing 80-year-old father through the streets. They also beat his brothers until they collapsed. Forty of his men were killed and several were beheaded.

It's tough being the police chief of Najaf — the Iraqi city that is sacred to millions of Shi'ites and a battleground pitting Shi'ite militia against U.S. Marines and Iraqi police and national guardsmen.

"They told me that I could go in the place of my father," said Chief Ghalib al-Jezairy who is high on the militant hit list. As he spoke late Monday night his father was still being held.

The stress and exhaustion showed on the face of the man who is trying to keep morale high in a police force facing thousands of supporters of firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Many are holed up inside the sacred Imam Ali shrine in anticipation of a major U.S. offensive.

But they still have time to roam the streets, some hoping to fire assault rifles or rocket-propelled grenades at Iraqi police officers, who say they are in dire need of more flak jackets and heavier weapons.

"What they did to my father was inhuman. He is a dying old man. They beat my brothers until they fainted," Chief al-Jezairy told reporters as the sound of mortars being fired could be heard in a nearby cemetery that has turned into a battle zone.

They beheaded one of his relatives and Sheik al-Sadr's Mahdi's Army militants have gouged out the eyes of some of his officers and boiled them in water, he said.

"Do Iraqi police behead people?" he asked. "This is barbaric. They enter people's homes, and they kill the relatives of policemen.

"Thirty minutes ago, someone else was slaughtered," he said at the concrete Najaf police station where a fresh batch of detained men were being processed.

The police lot was occupied by impounded buses used by the Mahdi's Army, a militia bent on removing U.S. forces from Najaf and the rest of Iraq and ousting their Iraqi allies.

High barricades of earth-filled bags attached to wire mesh are used to try and keep the Mahdi's Army and suicide bombers out of the station. The smell of munitions cordite was still fresh in the air hours after a nearby attack.

Hundreds from the police force have been killed across Iraq in bombings, shootings and beheadings. The police force has been struggling with security along with other Iraqi forces since the Americans granted sovereignty to Iraq on June 28.

Few police cars are seen far away from the station.

"Many police have been beheaded and burned," Chief al-Jezairy said of a force that is on the receiving end of every size of mortar bomb and armor-piercing grenades, as well as machine-gun fire.

A few days ago the police captured about 300 militants. But more and more Iraqis are signing up for the Mahdi's Army, hoping to become martyrs in a country where young men facing high unemployment have few options.

Israeli cave linked to John the Baptist

08.17.04 (8:47 am)   [edit]
 

Mon Aug 16, 7:28 PM ET

By KARIN LAUB, Associated Press Writer

KIBBUTZ TZUBA, Israel - Archaeologists think they've found a cave where John the Baptist baptized many of his followers — basing their theory on thousands of shards from ritual jugs, a stone used for foot cleansing and wall carvings telling the story of the biblical preacher.

 

Mon Aug 16,11:59 AM ET

Only a few artifacts linked to New Testament figures have ever been found in the Holy Land, and the cave is potentially a major discovery in biblical archaeology.

"John the Baptist, who was just a figure from the Gospels, now comes to life," British archaeologist Shimon Gibson said during an exclusive tour of the cave given to The Associated Press.

But some scholars said Gibson's finds aren't enough to support his theory, and one colleague said that short of an inscription with John's name in the cave, there could never be conclusive proof of his presence there.

John, a distant relative of Jesus — their mothers were kin, according to the Bible — was a fiery preacher with a message of repentance and a considerable following.

Tradition says he was born in the village of Ein Kerem, which today is part of modern Jerusalem. Just 2.5 miles away, on the land of Kibbutz Tzuba, a communal farm, the cave lies hidden in a limestone hill — 24 yards long, four yards deep and four yards wide.

It was carved by the Israelites in the Iron Age, sometime between 800 B.C. and 500 B.C, the scientists said. It apparently was used from the start as a ritual immersion pool, preceding the Jewish tradition of the ritual bath.

Over the centuries, the cave filled with mud and sediment, leaving only a tiny opening that was hidden by trees and bushes. Yet in recent years, it had occasional visitors — Reuven Kalifon, an immigrant from Cleveland who teaches Hebrew at the kibbutz, took his students spelunking.

They would crawl through the narrow slit at the mouth of the cave, all the way to the back wall, though they saw nothing but dirt and walls. In December 1999, Kalifon asked Gibson, a friend, to take a closer look.

Gibson, who has excavated in the Holy Land for more than 30 years, moved a few boulders near the walls and laid bare a crude carving of a head. Excited, he organized a full-fledged excavation.

Over the next five years, Gibson and his team, including volunteers from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, cleared out layers of soil, picking up about 250,000 shards from small jugs apparently used in purification rituals.

The explorers uncovered 28 steps leading to the bottom of the cave. On the right, a niche is carved into the wall — typical of those used in Jewish ritual baths for discarding the clothes before immersion. Near the end of the stairs, the team found an oval stone with a foot-shaped indentation — about a shoe size 11. Just above, a soapdish-like niche apparently held ritual oil that would flow through a small channel onto the believer's right foot.

On the water-covered floor of the cave, stones and boulders were moved aside by the worshippers and a middle path was filled with gravel, said Egon Lass, an archaeological consultant at Wheaton College, near Chicago, who also worked on the dig.

Crude images were carved on the walls, near the ceiling, and Gibson said they tell the story of John's life.

One is the figure of the man Gibson spotted on his first visit to the cave. The man appears to have an unruly head of hair and wears a tunic with dots, apparently meant to suggest an animal hide. He grasps a staff and holds up his other hand in a gesture of proclamation.

James Tabor, a Bible scholar from the University of North Carolina, said there is little doubt this is John himself. The Gospels say that John was a member of the Nazarites, a sect whose followers didn't cut their hair, and that he adopted the dress of the ancient prophets, including a garment woven of camel's hair.

On the opposite wall is a carving of a face that could be meant to symbolize John's severed head. The preacher had his head cut off by Herod Antipas after he dared take the ruler to task over an illicit affair.

But the images are from the Byzantine era, apparently carved by monks who associated the site with John, following local folklore, Gibson and Tabor said.

"Unfortunately, we didn't find any inscriptions" that would conclusively link the cave to John, Tabor said.

Still, Gibson, who heads the Jerusalem Archaeological Field Unit, a private research group, argues that the finds and the proximity of John's hometown are strong evidence the cave was used by the preacher.

"All these elements are coming together and fill in the picture of the life and times of John the Baptist," said Gibson, who has written a book about the dig, "The Cave of John the Baptist," to be published this week.

Stephen Pfann, a Bible scholar and president of the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem, said Gibson has provided a plausible explanation for the unusual finds, but further study is needed. "It is inviting more scholars to come in and give alternative explanations, if they can," he said.

Gibson said he has left about a third of the cave untouched for other archaeologists to explore.

Tabor said no one could ever say for certain that John the Baptist used the cave. However, he said, the cave could help bring to life an important part of the New Testament.

"We actually have a geographical location near Ein Kerem now, at which water purification rites were conducted that go back to the first century and connects them to the traditions of John the Baptist," he said.

The "I am a gay American" defense

08.17.04 (8:38 am)   [edit]
[b]The 'I am a gay American' defense[/b]
Dennis Prager
August 17, 2004

New Jersey Governor James McGreevey's resignation statement was brilliant.

Threatened with a sexual harassment lawsuit by his alleged male lover, having appointed him, a thoroughly unqualified man, as homeland security advisor at a time when America, in particular, the New York metropolitan area, is threatened with horrific terror and with any number of other instances of corruption already revealed and more likely to come out, Governor McGreevey saw the future and realized he had to resign from office.

But the way he did it was a masterstroke. He turned opprobrium into compassion.

He did it with one sentence. "I am a gay American."

On the face of it, it is irrelevant to whatever wrongs he may have committed against his state, his wife or his religion. But he did so because he knew that it would immediately deflect attention from his actions to his sexual orientation.

And then he would receive at least as much understanding and compassion as condemnation.
Why?

Because the moment he announced he was gay, people assumed that he did what he did because a homophobic society forced him, a homosexual, to live a fraudulent heterosexual life.

Who then could blame him? If society forced you, dear heterosexual male reader, to live with a man all your life and deny yourself the physical love of a woman, wouldn't you, too, eventually crack under the pressure and make love to a woman?

That is how at least half the country thinks about McGreevey now: "Well, he was wrong, and sure, he shouldn't have given that man a six-figure-a-year job advising the governor of New Jersey on the life and death issue of security, but let's be decent here. The guy's gay, and he's been living with a woman all his adult life."

Moreover, the country -- or at least its liberal half, which includes the leading news media -- has a different standard for homosexual and heterosexual sins. Heterosexual men who have many partners are condemned as womanizers; homosexual men who have many partners are largely ignored. There are no "manizers."

When Massachusetts gay congressman Barney Frank confirmed, as reported by the Washington Post, "that he paid Stephen Gobie for sex, hired him with personal funds as an aide and wrote letters on congressional stationery on his behalf to Virginia probation officials," and that Gobie ran a gay prostitution service from Congressman Frank's apartment, it meant nothing to his voters or to most of the country. Imagine, on the other hand, if a heterosexual politician had such a relationship with a call girl who ran a prostitution ring from his home. The man would have been forced to resign in a week.

So, Governor McGreevey knew exactly what he was doing when he announced, "I am a gay American." In addition to eliciting compassion, he was appealing to the double standard the country holds on behalf of gays -- and striking a blow for same-sex marriage. That is why, as the New York Times reported on its front page, McGreevey's "precisely worded bombshell line -- 'I am a gay American' -- was strategically devised with the help of a national gay rights organization the governor had consulted."

What makes the assertion even more manipulative is that it may not even be true.

The odds are that the governor is not homosexual but bisexual.

On the assumption that having been married twice he has had sex with at least two women, and on numerous occasions, it is quite likely that he was able to perform sexually with them -- presumably in a way that did not arouse their suspicions.

How is this to be explained? Aren't we repeatedly told by gay spokesmen that a homosexual man can no more enjoy sex with a woman than a heterosexual man can enjoy sex with a man?

Either this assertion is false or Governor McGreevey is not "a gay American."

The odds are therefore overwhelming that Governor McGreevey is a bisexual who prefers men.

But if he had announced he was bisexual, he would have received far less sympathy, because unlike homosexuals, bisexuals do have a choice.

We have come a long way from society unfairly condemning homosexuals' perennial fear of blackmail to a time when announcing one is a homosexual is a sympathy-gaining tactic.

And for those who believe that society unfairly pressures men to marry women, I suggest asking Mr. McGreevey this: "If you could do it all over again, would you have never made love to a woman, never married and never had the two daughters you have?"

Yes, society pressures men into marriage, and admittedly, some men, not only gays, should not marry. But without that pressure, far fewer men would marry. Just as McGreevey may have always preferred sex with men, most heterosexual men married to a woman would prefer sex with a succession of women to sex with only one. Marriage demands of all men that their sexual nature not be fully expressed. It does so for society's sake, for the sake of children, for women's sakes, and, yes, ultimately for men's sakes as well. Admittedly, such an idea is foreign to those who believe that sexual self-realization is the highest personal value.

No politician should have to resign from office because he committed an infidelity. But gay politicians should be held to the same standards as straight ones. Otherwise, "I am a gay American" will continue be a great defense, even when it may not even be true.

©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Hussein's men on Syrian border helped remove banned materials-- Washington Times

08.16.04 (5:42 am)   [edit]
Check out this Washington Times article today--

[b]Saddam agents on Syria border helped move banned materials[/b]
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Saddam Hussein periodically removed guards on the Syrian border and replaced them with his own intelligence agents who supervised the movement of banned materials between the two countries, U.S. investigators have discovered.

The recent discovery by the Bush administration's Iraq Survey Group (ISG) is fueling speculation, but is not proof, that the Iraqi dictator moved prohibited weapons of mass destruction (WMD) into Syria before the March 2003 invasion by a U.S.-led coalition.

Two defense sources told The Washington Times that the ISG has interviewed Iraqis who told of Saddam's system of dispatching his trusted Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) to the border, where they would send border inspectors away.

The shift was followed by the movement of trucks in and out of Syria suspected of carrying materials banned by U.N. sanctions. Once the shipments were made, the agents would leave and the regular border guards would resume their posts.

"If you leave it to border guards, then the border guards could stop the trucks and extract their 10 percent, just like the mob would do," said a Pentagon official who asked not to be named. "Saddam's family was controlling the black market, and it was a good opportunity for them to make money."

Sources said Saddam and his family grew rich from this black market and personally dispatched his dreaded intelligence service to the border to make sure the shipments got through.

The ISG is a 1,400-member team organized by the Pentagon and CIA to hunt for Saddam's suspected stockpiles of WMD, such as chemical and biological agents. So far, the search has failed to find such stockpiles, which were the main reason for President Bush ordering the invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam.

But there is evidence of unusually heavy truck traffic into Syria in the days before the attack, and with it, speculation that some of the trucks contained the banned weapons.

"Of course, it's always suspicious," the Pentagon official said.

The source said the ISG has confirmed the practice of IIS agents going to the border. Investigators also have heard from Iraqi sources that this maneuver was done days before the war at a time of brisk cross-border movements.

That particular part of the disclosures has not been positively confirmed, the officials said, although it dovetails with Saddam's system of switching guards at a time when contraband was shipped.

The United States spotted the heavy truck traffic via satellite imagery before the war. But spy cameras cannot look through truck canopies, and the ISG has not been able to determine whether any weapons were sent to Syria for hiding.

In an interview in October, retired Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper Jr., who heads the U.S. agency that processes and analyzes satellite imagery, said he thinks that Saddam's underlings hid banned weapons of mass destruction before the war.

"I think personally that those below the senior leadership saw what was coming, and I think they went to some extraordinary lengths to dispose of the evidence," said Gen. Clapper, who heads the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. "I'll call it an 'educated hunch.' "

He added, "I think probably in the few months running up prior to the onset of combat that I think there was probably an intensive effort to disperse into private homes, move documentation and materials out of the country. I think there are any number of things that they would have done."

Of activity on the Syrian border, Gen. Clapper said, "There is no question that there was a lot of traffic, increase in traffic up to the immediate onset of combat and certainly during Iraqi Freedom. ... The obvious conclusion one draws is the sudden upturn, uptick in traffic which may have been people leaving the scene, fleeing Iraq and unquestionably, I'm sure, material as well."

He also said, "Based on what we saw prior to the onset of hostilities, we certainly felt there were indications of WMD activity. ... Actually knowing what is going on inside a building is quite a different thing than, say, this facility may well be a place where there may be WMD."

The Iraq Survey Group, which periodically briefs senior officials and Congress, is due to deliver its next report in September. In addition to interviewing hundreds of Iraqis, the ISG has collected and cataloged millions of pages of documents, not all of which have been fully examined.

Although Syria and Iraq competed for influence in the region, they shared the same Ba'athist socialist ideology and maintained close ties at certain government levels. The United States accused Syria during the war of harboring some of Saddam's inner circle.

Longshot's challenge

08.16.04 (1:57 am)   [edit]
Longshot issued a challenge to conservative Christians.

[i]I’d like to issue a challenge to conservative Christians. A term that I consider an oxymoron! If you want to promote Bush as your candidate, explain how he promotes a vision of the world that is consonant with the values and ideals of Jesus! Quit bashing Kerry and the Dems. There are hypocrites and rich folks (Why is marrying a rich woman is such a bad thing?) in both parties.
Bet you can’t come up with 10 solid “Christian” reasons for Bush! You can’t bash Kerry. Not being Kerry has already been taken! For the slower among you—seems that Kerry not being Bush is a major Democratic platform.[/i]

Kerry not being Bush [i]was[/i] the Democratic party's only platform. BUt since that tanked, and since John Kerry has absolutely no plan for [i]anything[/i], Kerry has chosen to campaign not on the 19 years he spent selling America down the river, but on the four months he spent in Vietnam (which he also has lied about). That, after the convention, is the only platform the Democrats have. ANd it isn't working.

But Longshot offered a challenge wanting me to explain how Bush promotes a vision of a world that reflects Christian morality. Here we go:

1)Bush is against abortion.

2)Bush is against euthanasia.

3)Bush is against embryonic stem-cell research/cloning.

4)Bush believes in defending the weak from tyranny (9/11 victims, Afghanees living under tyranny, Iraqis living under tyranny). He liberated two oppressed peoples that the world, including most of the left, ignored. THey have the opportunity now to grasp the freedom Bush gave to them. Jesus Christ's sacrifice for humanity redeemed mankind, but we, ultimately, have to save ourselves. George Bush, in a similar way, freed Iraq and Afghanistan, but they, ultimately, have to decide whether or not they want to be free. Because that takes personal sacrifice.

5)Bush believes in democracy, and freedom is the basis of Christian belief.

6)Bush believes in the existence of good and evil, and seeks to be on the side of good.

7)Bush believes in helping people prosper by giving them their hard-earned money back by cutting
the taxes that the federal government believes it has a right to.

8)Bush believes in diversity. He has the most ethnically diverse administration in US history.

9)Bush encourages charitable giving. He believes that faith-based charities in America have an important place and function and seeks to fund them. He has also pledge 15 billion to Africa to help fight AIDS. I note that Clinton offered a platry 200+ million. I note that John Kerry hasn't even addressed the issue.

10)Bush has increased spending on education and health-care by the largest amounts in decades. While I think this is a bad approach to solving the problems the US has in education and health-care, his heart is in the right place.

11)Bush, despite objections from a lot of people, has decided to give amnesty to illegal aliens. The Pope applauded that move. And though I am personally against that move, and though some of the loonies might question Bush's motives, the end result is a free pass to America for folks who came here illegally. A ticket to paradise.

12)Bush believes in the community of nations doing the right things to help others. Only Bush wanted to enforce UN resolutions against Iraq, resolutions that the UN had exploited to its own corrupt shell game. Only Bush has wanted to get tough with Iran, North Korea, and Sudan. The UN doesn't care if Iran gets nukes, it doesn't care if North Korea starves its people, or that the Sudanese government practices genocide. Only Bush cares about a just Middle East peace, a peace that recognizes Islamic terrorism as the cause instead of an effect. Only Bush cares about eliminating threats to religious freedom by these groups.

13)Bush believes in the individual.

***

I can go on, but I'll stop for now.

Puerto Rico stuns USA basketball in Olympics, and here's why

08.15.04 (11:45 pm)   [edit]
I'm not a guy who buys into conspiracies. They are always just a little too convenient, a little too tidy. They cover everything. If you're (hopefully not) a member of the Democratic party, conspiracy-spinning crumbles your base and makes you look like a bunch of religious fanatic. It's too easy to believe in conspiracies.

But....

The US basketball team, 109-2 in the Olympics, and undefeated in Olympic play since the pros were added, got beat by Puerto Rico. [i]Puerto Rico[/i]. And it wasn't even a close game, 92-73. While I understand that basketball is now an international sport, and that, like the US economy, other nations are catching up, the supposedly best players in the world shouldn't get blown out by a bunch of nobodies.

Which is where the conspiracy part comes in.

It is true that the NBA players playing for USA are young, arrogant, and undisciplined. They believe they are the best, so they don't prepare well for the adversary, and adversary that, thanks to internationalization, may have one or two NBA players on the roster itself. They are the stereotypical ugly Americans, feeling that they are the best by birth. They've become sloppy with the fudamentals. They don't understand how greatness has to be worked at and preserved.

Nevertheless, these NBA players are also proud. They don't want to get humilitated in front of the world. In the past, USA basketball wouldn't lose because of their pride or, if they did, it wasn't by blowout. This current "Dream Team" doesn't seem to care if it wins or loses.

And that's it, right there. To these young, insanely rich professionals volunteering their time for their country, winning in the Olympics, which means a whole hell of a lot to the rest of the world, means zero. I believe they've all decided that they're not going to try very hard in this Olympics in deferrence to their health and their fat contracts. That would go right in line with the greedy, undisciplined, thug mess that the NBA has already turned into, right?

And you know, there is a lot of truth, sadly, to that sentiment. What are the Olympics but just merely a showcase for nationalism? A chance to beat up on the US? The Dream Team's failures might be the biggest proof yet that it is the rest of the world, and not the US, that embraces nationalism. The US appears to be just a place to go to make money for awhile. It has crumbled from the inside out.

We can expect other countries to get their shots in at us-- deserved or not-- because, at least in international sports like soccer and basketball-- the US is, or has become, a has -been.

Dr. Kerry and his cure for Alzheimer's

08.15.04 (11:11 pm)   [edit]
[b]Meet Dr. Kerry and his cure for Alzheimer's[/b]
Paul Greenberg
August 16, 2004

Teresa Heinz Kerry isn't the only spouse in this year's presidential race who can let fly. Quiet, ladylike Laura Bush seems to have finally had it with John Kerry's playing doctor. Specifically, his repeating the words Stem Cell Research like a magic spell that'll cure Alzheimer's and maybe every other ill the flesh is heir to.

Dr. Kerry recites his mantra like a magician saying Abracadabra! What he doesn't emphasize is that he's advocating experimentation on human embryos.

It all got to be too much for our usually quiet-spoken, every-hair-in-place First Lady, who suddenly morphed into Scrappy Wife of Presidential Candidate. "That's so ridiculous," Laura Bush told an AP reporter.

And it is. No reputable scientist I've ever heard of (as opposed to Dr. Kerry) is claiming that experimenting with human embryos is going to cure Alzheimer's.

That's because Alzheimer's seems to be a deterioration of the brain in general rather than some localized, cellular disorder that would benefit by an injection of stem cells.

Or as Rick Weiss put it in the Washington Post, some abstract knowledge might be gained by such research, but "stem-cell experts confess . that of all the diseases that may someday be cured by embryonic stem-cell treatments, Alzheimer's is among the least likely to benefit."

To pretend otherwise may be good election-year politics, but it's also a cruel hoax. To quote Laura Bush: "I hope that stem-cell research will yield cures and therapies for a myriad of illnesses. But I know that embryonic stem-cell research is very preliminary, and the implication that cures for Alzheimer's are around the corner is just not right, and it's really not fair to the people who are watching a loved one suffer from this disease." As her late father did.

John Kerry tends to glide over the word embryonic when he speaks of stem-cell research, which allows him to leave the impression that this administration has not funded stem-cell research in general. Although it has-to a greater extent than any previous one. It's just drawn the line on experiments involving living human embryos.

The difference between George W. Bush's approach and Senator Kerry's is that the president has taken seriously the ethical problems raised by this kind of experimentation.

The president, after conferring with scientists and ethicists, and appointing a distinguished panel to discuss the ethics of such research, came up with a compromise he clearly hoped would both respect human life and improve it-by setting aside 78 embryonic stem-cell lines already in existence for research. But only about 15 of them have proved available for federally funded research, and the limits may have to be expanded.

Naturally, with all its restrictions, this approach displeased both those who think nothing of destroying human life for scientific purposes and those of us who have the gravest reservations about using stem-cell lines that have been derived even from others' destruction of human life.

Whatever one thinks of the course George W. Bush chose, he took the ethical problem seriously. John Kerry just brushes it aside. What th' heck, these embryos might be thrown away anyway, so let's use 'em!

When it comes to the ethical questions posed by embryonic stem-cell research, John Kerry simply dismisses them: "It is entirely within ethical bounds to do embryonic stem-cell research without violating one's beliefs at all about what life is and what matters."

To the senator, this stage of human life just doesn't matter. It's not a developing human being but just a microscopic ball of cells that we can use. (Never mind that we've all been just that at one point.)

Senator Kerry also seems indifferent to the likelihood that government funding for stem-cell research would soon enough lead to highly profitable embryo farms in order to supply the demand for human building blocks. For this debate isn't just about life and death, medical science and false hopes, but commerce.

Hey, it's an election year, and a presidential candidate needs every emotional issue he can exploit. Even if, like this one, it has to be simplified beyond any reasonable resemblance to science. There are a lot of desperate people out there eager for cures, and they vote.

John Kerry has co-opted those scientists who, seeing either profit or career advancement in embryonic stem-cell research, have failed to speak out about the profound questions, life-and-death questions, such experimentation raises. They've let the senator get away with pretending that embryonic stem-cell research is some kind of magic wand he can wave over Alzheimer's and make it disappear. To quote clear-eyed Laura Bush, that's ridiculous.

©2004 Tribune Media Services

Democrats peddle their own unique truth, get license to lie

08.15.04 (5:11 am)   [edit]

Democrats peddle their own unique truth

August 15, 2004

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

"My truth is that I am a gay American,'' announced Gov. James McGreevey to the people of New Jersey last Thursday.

That's such an exquisitely contemporary formulation: ''my'' truth. Once upon a time, there was only ''the'' truth. Now everyone gets his own -- or, as the governor put it, ''One has to look deeply into the mirror of one's soul and decide one's unique truth in the world.'' For Jim McGreevey, his truth is that he's a gay American; for others in the Garden State, the truth about McGreevey is that he's a corrupt sexual harasser who put his lover on the state payroll in a critical homeland security post, and whose I-am-what-I-am confessional is a tactical feint that distracts the media sob sisters from the fact that, as his final service to the Democratic Party, he's resigned in such a way as to deny the people an early vote on his successor.

We'll see whose truth prevails in the fullness of time.

In politics, it's helpful if whatever ''unique truth'' the consultants have run past the focus groups bears at least a passing relationship to the real, actual truth -- not the whole truth, but at least a grain of it. That was what was so ingenious about Bill Clinton's ''60 Minutes'' appearance in 1992. He didn't come clean -- he was, as usual, full of it -- but he set in motion his designated ''unique truth'' -- flawed but human. It was designed to get him past Gennifer, but it wound up also getting him past Paula, Monica, Kathleen, Juanita. . . . Whatever goods you got on him, it fit ''his truth'' as he sold it to us on CBS that day. As his attorney Cheryl Mills put it during the impeachment trial, Bill Clinton, along with Jefferson, Kennedy and Martin Luther King, ''made human errors, but they struggled to do humanity good . . .''

Which brings us to John Kerry. What is his unique truth? In 1986, on the floor of the United States Senate, he said:

''I remember Christmas of 1968, sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there, the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory, which is seared -- seared -- in me.''

Though the seared senator peddled this searing memory for a quarter-century, it had evidently been seared into him pretty haphazardly. It turns out at Christmas 1968 he wasn't in Cambodia but was instead 55 miles away at Sa Dec, South Vietnam. So the Kerry campaign's begun riffling hurriedly through its Sears Rowback catalog for more or less watertight back-pedaling of the story: They now say that ''many times he was on or near the Cambodian border,'' which is true in the sense that 80 percent of Canadians live on or near the American border. But most folks in Vancouver don't claim to be living in the Greater Seattle area.

Earlier, senior Kerry spokesman Michael Meehan told ABC News: ''The Mekong Delta consists of the border between Cambodia and Vietnam, so on Christmas Eve in 1968, he was in fact on patrol ... in the Mekong Delta between Cambodia and Vietnam.'' For a crowd of ostentatious multilateralists, they can't seem to hold the map the right way up: The Mekong River isn't the border between Cambodia and Vietnam; it cuts through the heart of Cambodia and then runs through Vietnam to the sea.

But this question isn't about geographical degrees of latitude so much as psychological ones. Here's the real reason Lt. Kerry wasn't spending Dec. 24, 1968, on a secret mission in Cambodia: On the previous day, Dec. 23, the U.S. government finally secured the release, after a five-month diplomatic stand-off, of 11 Americans whose U.S. Army utility landing craft had made a navigational error and strayed into Cambodian waters. Prince Sihanouk had rejected U.S. apologies and threatened to try the men under Cambodian law. It's unlikely, 24 hours after their release, anyone in Washington was thinking, ''Hey, we need to send that hotshot Kerry in there.''

So what are we to make of Sen. Kerry's self-seared 30-year-old false memory of Christmas in Cambodia with its vast accumulation of precise details? Of being shot at by the Khmer Rouge (unlikely in 1968) and of South Vietnamese troops drunkenly celebrating Christmas (as only devout Buddhists know how)?

It's not about dates and places. For Kerry, his Yuletide mission was an epiphany: the moment when he realized his government was lying to the people about what was going on. This is the turning point, the moment that set the young Kerry on the path from brave young war volunteer to fierce anti-war activist.

And it turns out it's total bunk.

Thirty-five years on, having no appealing campaign themes, the senator decides to run for president on his biography. But for the last 20 years he's been a legislative non-entity. Before that, he was accusing his brave band of brothers of mutilation, rape and torture. He spent his early life at Swiss finishing school and his later life living off his wife's inheritance from her first husband. So, biography-wise, that leaves four months in Vietnam, which he talks about non-stop. That 1986 Senate speech is typical: It was supposed to be about Reagan policy in Central America, but like so many Kerry speeches and interviews somehow it winds up with yet another self-aggrandizing trip down memory lane.

A handful of Kerry's ''band of brothers'' are traveling around with his campaign. Most of the rest, including a majority of his fellow swift boat commanders and 254 swiftees from Kerry's Coastal Squadron One, are opposed to his candidacy. That is an amazing ratio and, if snot-nosed American media grandees don't think there's a story there, maybe they ought to consider another line of work. To put it in terms they can understand, imagine if Dick Cheney campaigned for the presidency on the basis of his time at Halliburton, and a majority of the Halliburton board and 80 percent of the stockholders declared he was unfit for office. More to the point, on the swift vets' first major allegation -- Christmas in Cambodia -- the Kerry campaign has caved.

Who is John Kerry? What is his ''unique truth?'' Consider this vignette from New Hampshire primary season as retailed in a recent 8,000-word yawneroo puff piece in the New Yorker:

'' 'He'll often thrash around in the night,' the filmmaker George Butler, who is one of Kerry's oldest friends, told me. 'He smashed up a lamp in my house in New Hampshire, in the bedroom where he was staying. Most Vietnam veterans go through this.'''

''Most?'' Whether or not John Kerry ever entered Cambodia, he seems unable, psychologically, to exit it.

Today's Feel-Good Photo

08.15.04 (5:00 am)   [edit]

From Powerline Blog--

The AP caption reads: "Members of the Iraqi delegation pose with members of the United States' delegation during the Opening Ceremony of the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Friday, Aug. 13, 2004. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)." (Courtesy of Franco Aleman and Barcepundit in English.)

Hurricane Charley merely a plot by neocons to spread fear, enrich construction companies

08.14.04 (6:11 am)   [edit]
Hurricane Charlie is just a little too convenient for President Bush, isn't it?

First of all, this occurs right at the height of the Najaff standoff. Where CNN had its cameras on the fighting in Iraq, [i]now[/i] it has its cameras pointed at devastated trailer parks. Presto chango, right?

Secondly, it was in Bush's interest to strike Florida with a hurricane. Number one, he's pissed off that he had to steal Florida's votes in 2000 because no one would vote for him down there. Bush sent this hurricane as a warning to Florida residents and a prompt to vote for him this fall. Number two, Bush is a capitalist pig who, although far poorer than John Kerry, has deep "big construction" contacts. How does he profit off of this? Why, he has his brother Jeb, [i]who just happens to be Florida's governor[/i], receive kickbacks from favored companies. It's all so clear now!

Does this sound absurd? It is no more absurd than the bunk that comes from the Left about Bush. The Left believes Bush is some sort of warlock organizing the largest conspiracy in world history while at the same time calling him a dolt. They think he created the war on terror to benefit "big oil" and Halliburton, when terrorists were at war with us for decades.

Can Bush influence the weather? For some Lefties, you bet. After all, he is pure, supernatural, evil. Right?

Caught in a lie about Christmas in Cambodia, Kerry relies on historian Brinkley to.. lie again

08.13.04 (7:25 am)   [edit]
So John Kerry lies about being in Christmas in Cambodia in 1968 (which would have been illegal, making Nixon look to be a bastard, even though Nixon wasn't even president), and caught, Kerry biographer, the "historian" Douglas Brinkley, steps up to the plate to claim that Kerry was part of black ops.

Now I wonder, with Kerry trying to pretend to be a man and be some larger-than-life G.I. Joe in order to gain some modicum of credibility on national defense (while ignoring his anti-defense Senate record), and with Kerry's ability to "tell all" about Vietnam, why didn't he tell the world (in his book, on the campaign trail, whenever he mentioned his Vietnam experience) that he was in black ops?

Why didn't Brinkley mention these black ops in his lavish biography of Kerry?

Evidence, anyone? Will we have some peasant in Cambodia trotted out to explain how JF Kerry "saved his life" on one of his black ops runs?

Another lie. It's amazing how useful lies are to the Left when they are no longer regarded as shameful.

Get the full disgusting story here (with links to news articles) at Captain's Quarters blog-- http://www.captainsquartersbl...

Why is it news that Bush refuses to condemn attack ads and not news when Kerry isn't even asked?

08.13.04 (5:17 am)   [edit]
While reading this article, remember this:

1)Swiftboats vets are not mentioned as having served with Kerry, although the article does make a note of the fact that a couple of vets touring with Kerry served with him. This presents the Swiftboats as outsiders, when they most certainly were not.

2)Swiftboats vets have a meticulously researched and credible book out now that documents Kerry's cowardly war service. And remember that Kerry's Vietnam service can be questioned because Kerry prefers to campaign on it (instead of his sorry 19 years as an anti-military Senator).

3)Kerry has never been asked to denounce MoveOn.org and similar ads that paint Bush as Hitler, and it's not even news to ask him. For liberals, MoveOn has every right to exercize their first amendment rights, but all hell breaks loose when some Kerry critics (critics that are by no means conservative), who just happened to serve with Kerry in Vietnam and suffered afterwards with his accusations of war crimes against them [in order to cash in on the anti-war movement and make himself a star], [i]do the same thing[/i].

Perhaps the major reason there is so much outrage at the Swifties is that their accusations are true.

[b]Bush Declines to Condemn Attack Ads on Kerry[/b]
Fri Aug 13,12:34 AM ET

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - President Bush (news - web sites) praised John Kerry (news - web sites)'s military service as honorable on Thursday but declined to condemn ads from Vietnam veterans who questioned the Massachusetts senator's military record.

"Senator Kerry is justifiably proud of his record in Vietnam and he should be," Bush said on the CNN television talk show, "Larry King Live." He referred to Kerry's Vietnam tour as "noble service."

A group calling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has accused Kerry of misrepresenting his Vietnam War record. The group has released an ad and a book attacking the Democratic presidential candidate.

Their accusations are at odds with the glowing portrait of Kerry painted by the veterans who served with him when he was a Navy swift boat commander. Kerry was decorated with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts.

Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record) of Arizona, a Republican who also served in Vietnam, has urged the White House to denounce the ads. Although McCain and Kerry are friends, McCain is supporting Bush's re-election and campaigned with him this week.

While declining to condemn the ads, Bush said the broader issue was independent groups known as "527s" that fall outside the boundaries of campaign finance laws and can spend unlimited amounts of money on attack ads.

"They've said some bad things about me. I guess they're saying bad things about him. And what I think we ought to do is not have them on the air," Bush said.

The Bush campaign has been upset by attack ads from liberal groups such as Moveon.org.

Also in the interview, the president defended his lengthy pause in a Florida classroom when he was first told of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

"Well, I had just been told by (White House Chief of Staff) Andrew Card that America was under attack. And I was collecting my thoughts," Bush said. "I think what's important is how I reacted when I realized America was under attack. It didn't take me long to figure out we were at war."

Why are we legitimizing the Sadr-Shiite rebellion in Iraq?

08.13.04 (5:09 am)   [edit]
By now it is routine. Firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr stirs up rebellion in Najaf, flees to a shrine that he knows the US won't hit and, after being deprived of movment, power,etc., after left with nowhere to go, says he will disband his militia or works on a truce. Then, when the US and Iraqis trust him at his work, he kicks up dust again.

Currently we are negotiating a "truce" with him.

Forgive me here, but this is a load of horseshit. We have the firepower to kill him and squash the rebellion flat-out. Just like with Fallujah. Every time we trust them, every time we take them at their word, hell, every time we even talk of a "truce" (putting them as our equal), we just legitimize these thugs and terrorists and encourage their behavior.

Flatten the Najaf mosque. Flatten Sadr and his men. Flatten Fallujah. That's the only way we're going to get rid of them.

The future of Iraq is in peril because Iraq has forgotten its terrible past, and the US has forgotten the lessons of 9/11.

"Iraq says Sadr in Najaf Talks"- http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...

The truth behind the most common canards of the "Bush Lied" crowd

08.13.04 (4:50 am)   [edit]
[b]A Litany of Leftist Lies[/b]
By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 13, 2004

Perhaps the least surprising moment of the recent Democratic National Convention—other than Michael Moore’s red carpet treatment—came when Ted Kennedy labeled Bush administration officials “false patriots.” Over the past several months, the “Liberal Lion” has done everything but accuse the President of treason, stating, among other things, that Operation Iraqi Freedom was fought “under false pretenses,” and that the plan to rid Iraq of Saddam was “cooked up in Texas” and sold with “lie after lie after lie.” Freeing Muslims from a murderous sociopath, Massachusetts' second most liberal Senator has bellowed, was “one of the worst blunders in the history of U.S. foreign policy.”

Listening to Kennedy and his Democratic cronies, one would never guess that deposing Saddam Hussein used to be a bipartisan concern. From the moment the Clinton administration signed the 1998 Iraqi Liberation Act, which codified “transition to democracy in Iraq” as official policy, to the October 2002 vote authorizing the president to use force against Iraq—a vote backed by 29 Democratic senators and 126 Democratic representatives—the necessity of regime change in Iraq was a rare point of agreement between the two parties.

But in the heat of this year’s presidential campaign, that principle has become disposable. Kennedy’s wanton demagoguery reflects the chief article of faith of the Left, that the justifications for war—especially Iraq’s pursuit of WMD’s and the Baa’thist regime’s ties to terrorism—are no longer defensible.

They couldn't be more wrong.

Lie #1: President Bush intentionally misled the nation when he stated that Saddam had sought yellowcake uranium in Niger.

This was the first major accusation levied at the Bush administration by the Left in order to undermine the President’s—and the War’s—credibility. Following the disclosure last summer that some of the documents the administration had used as evidence of the Iraq-Niger link were forgeries, the liberal media insisted that charges made by the President during his January 2003 State of the Union address—in which he said Iraq sought to buy enriched uranium from Niger—had been thoroughly refuted. News articles, like a July story in CNN.com, casually refer to it as that “since-discredited line.” Democratic critics have also seized on Bush’s “16 words” to question the administration’s underlying credibility on the Iraq war. Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has recently said, “The misleading statement about African uranium is not an isolated issue.” That British intelligence services firmly stand by their assertion of the Iraq-Niger connection has not swayed liberal detractors like Levin at all. As recent reports make plain, however, the connection was very real.

The popular disbelief in that connection owes much to the utterances of former Ambassador Joe Wilson. After a February 2002 visit to Niger, during which Wilson investigated reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program using uranium from Africa (often at poolside), Wilson made a great show of publicly rejecting the link. In Wilson’s version of events, Saddam Hussein did not seek to purchase yellowcake uranium in Niger, nor did he have a nuclear weapons program to speak of. The flap over who revealed the identity of Wilson’s wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame (besides Plame herself), only lent credence to Wilson’s claims that Iraq posed no threat whatsoever.

As for Wilson’s much-publicized charges—that his trip resoundingly dashed any theory that Iraq sought uranium from Niger, and that the Bush administration doctored intelligence findings to bolster its case for war—they threw serious doubts on the administration’s allegation that Iraq purchased Niger uranium. When the administration retreated from the connection amid a critical storm, Wilson’s was taken as the last word on the subject.

That is, until the release of the bipartisan-prepared 9/11 Commission Report. That bipartisan report exposed Joe Wilson as a liar on multiple fronts, and the Niger uranium story took on new life. The committee noted Wilson’s original findings were highly suspect. Wilson had maintained that the Niger intelligence was based on forged documents, a conclusion he defended by claiming that “the dates were wrong and the names were wrong” on the documents he saw. The Senate committee also saw signs of fraud. “Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the ‘dates were wrong and the names were wrong’ when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports,” the report stated. Wilson hadn’t seen the reports for a very simple reason: they were not available until eight months after his intelligence trip to Niger.

And the report was not finished yet. Debunking Wilson's allegation that CIA analysts pressed the White House to excise the 16 words relating to the Iraq-Niger link that made it into President Bush's address, the report went on to cite several credible pieces of intelligence affirming the link, including reports from a foreign service and the U.S. Navy about uranium from Niger headed for Iraq and stored in a warehouse in Benin. (This revelation went unnoticed by the Democratic National Committee; on its website, the DNC still contends the Bush administration intentionally overrode CIA objections to the uranium line, claiming that the “Bush Administration Knew Claim Was False.”)

But not all media outlets are so mendacious. The Financial Times, having waged an editorial campaign against the Iraq war, set the record straight. FT quoted senior European intelligence officials to the effect that illicit sales of uranium from Niger had been negotiated with five states during the three years before the U.S.-led war in 2003. One of those states was Iraq. The magazine also reported that three European intelligence services suspected Niger was skirting UN sanctions to illicitly traffic in uranium between 1999 and 2001: “Human intelligence gathered in Italy and Africa more than three years before the Iraq war had shown Niger officials referring to possible illicit uranium deals with at least five countries, including Iraq,” the Times noted. And, just this week the UK Butler Report further finds reporting on attempts to obtain uranium Niger as credible and accurate:

We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government’s dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well-founded. By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that: The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought sign cant quantities of uranium from Africa was well-founded.

Some critics have claimed the mere possession of uranium “yellowcake,” without the ability to convert it fissile material, would not qualify Iraq as an imminent threat. (See Lie #2.) But it is not at all clear that Iraq lacked this ability. Indeed, there were some in Iraq with this nuclear know-how. According to a July Reuters report, after recovering 1.8 tons of uranium stolen from a UN facility last year, an IAEA team discovered that some 90 pounds of the uranium had been enriched to 2.6 percent uranium-235—a level of enrichment that would make it a likely ingredient for a dirty bomb. Further enrichment would have turned the uranium into a full-fledged nuclear weapon. Little wonder, then, that a U.S. team last week acted to remove the recovered uranium from the country.

Lie #2: “Bush claimed Iraq was an imminent threat.”

Opponents charge the Bush administration with trumping up the case for war by casting Iraq as an “imminent threat.” Claims Rep. Dennis Kucinich, “This administration led this nation into a war based on a pretext that Iraq was an imminent threat, which it was not.” Sen. Robert Byrd seconds this assessment, saying, “(Bush) presented an imminent threat to the United States.” The Center for American Progress, headed by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, has carried on a determined campaign to prove that the administration did in fact use the phrase, “imminent threat” to make the case for war. The closest the leftist think-tank came to conclusive evidence was a February 10, 2003. remark by White House spokesman Scott McClellan: “This is about an imminent threat.” But while the quote is reproduced faithfully, its context is not. A review of the press conference transcript shows McClellan’s comment was directed to a specific question—about Turkey, not Iraq.

In fact, White House officials took great pains to stress that Saddam Hussein’s regime must not be allowed to become an imminent threat. The president’s 2003 State of the Union Address accented this very point. “Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent,” Bush said. “Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late.”

Not surprisingly, the war’s critics, generally eager to use the administration’s words against it, have shied away from referencing the president’s address. Thus, the myth of the “imminent threat” faces no imminent threat. Just last Friday, Detroit Free Press liberal columnist Brian Dickerson groused that “Iraq has failed to live up to its billing as an imminent threat to U.S. security.” Lost on Dickerson is the fact that it was never billed as one—and that, thanks to the intervention of coalition forces, it never will be.

Lie #3: “Saddam had no ties to al-Qaeda.”

According to the antiwar Left, Iraq was “the wrong war at the wrong time,” an exercise in oil-driven greed by the Bush administration rather than a vital facet of the War on Terror. Indeed, the antiwar Left and their political partisans in the Democratic Party deny that Saddam Hussein had any connections to al-Qaeda or to terrorism in general. Here is what they fail to mention: for years, Saddam’s regime offered $25,000 in blood money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Saddam harbored prominent terrorist figures like Abu Nidal, responsible for the deaths of American citizens, and Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi who helped hatch the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. He also sponsored Ansar al-Islam, the al-Qaeda spin-off group headquartered in northern Iraq. And these troubling ties do not begin to cover Saddam’s extensive links to terrorism.

In his new book, The Connection, author Stephen Hayes culls countless sources, including Iraqi intelligence documents, confessions of Iraqi intelligence personnel, intercepted telephone conversations, allegations of counterterrorism officials in the Clinton administration, and even satellite photographs, to make a convincing case for connections between Saddam and terrorists, in particular al-Qaeda. At a minimum, Hayes lays out a cogent argument that those who dismiss the al-Qaeda/Saddam link outright are advancing little more than partisan interests.

Significantly, Hayes’ case was buoyed last week by the release of the 9/11 Commission report. While the commission’s interim report had flatly dismissed any “collaborative relationship” between Iraq and al-Qaeda, the commission’s final report was far more circumspect, stressing that it found no evidence only of a “collaborative operational relationship.” (It should be noted that the Bush administration never claimed Saddam Hussein had any hand in planning the 9/11 attacks.) But the 9/11 Commission has shown that Iraqi officials had contacts with Osama bin Laden’s aides throughout the ‘90s. These meetings, the report says, were “apparently arranged through Bin Laden's Egyptian deputy, Zawahiri, who had ties of his own to the Iraqis.” The report goes on to note that the Iraq/al-Qaeda relationship climaxed in 1999, when, during a brief falling out between the Taliban and bin Laden, Iraqi leaders offered the terror kingpin safe haven in Iraq. Confident of more generous patronage from the Taliban, Osama declined the offer; but the commission report makes clear that in their mutual hatred of the United States, Iraq and al-Qaeda found a binding theme. As for the theory, widely embraced by the war’s opponents, that Iraq’s Ba’athist secularism militated against a collaborative relationship with Islamic fundamentalists, the commission’s rich findings suggest that this is a singularly inadequate explanation of Iraq and al-Qaeda’s history.

Another interesting aspect of the antiwar Left’s stance on Iraq is that in opposing the war, they have taken the odd tactic of posturing as ultra-hawks—for every war except Iraq. “Make war on al-Qaeda,” they argue, “not Saddam.” Indeed, they claim Iraq has “diverted” resources from the real War on Terrorism, which they claim to support. Innumerable reports of terrorists swarming to Iraq to battle U.S. troops give the lie to the diversion theory. From accounts that the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah has funneled mujahedeen through porous Syrian borders, to intelligence intercepts establishing the presence of Iranian and Saudi jihadists, to the bloody handiwork of Jordanian al-Qaeda operative Abu Musad al-Zarqawi, it’s increasingly apparent that Iraq is at present the main front in the War on Terrorism. Not that the war’s opponents see it this way. “One of the silliest arguments for the invasion,” writes Reason magazine managing editor Jesse Walker, a libertarian critic of the war, “held that our presence in Iraq was a ‘flypaper’ attracting the world's terrorists to one distant spot.” Who claimed this would be a side benefit of the invasion? Walker cannot produce a shred of evidence to support this proposition. It would be more reasonable to conclude that “silliness” is a quality best embodied by those of the war’s critics who, like Walker, willfully ignore the terrorist presence in Iraq.

Lie #4: “Operation Iraqi Freedom has increased the terrorist threat to the United States”

If the rhetoric of some Democrats is to be believed, even after Saddam Hussein’s ouster, the United States is no safer than it was on September 12, 2001. As Sen. John D. Rockefeller recently put it, “Our standing in the world has never been lower. We have fostered a deep hatred of America in the Muslim world, and that will grow. As a direct consequence, our nation is more vulnerable today than ever before.” Likewise, presidential candidate Howard Dean famously claimed America was “less safe” after the capture of Saddam Hussein.

Even omitting the momentous fact that there has been no attack on American soil since 9/11, a possibility few envisioned in the aftermath of that day, Rockefeller’s assessment strains credulity. The diminishing fortunes of al-Qaeda are a case in point. Since ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2002, which dispossessed al-Qaeda of its strategic base of operations and training grounds, the United States has conducted a stunningly successful crackdown on Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization. Scores of top al-Qaeda military planners – including strategists behind the 9/11 attacks like Ramzi Binalshib – have been killed. Some 3,400 al-Qaeda operatives in more than 90 countries have been detained. The terrorist group’s ability to mount attacks has been crippled. At the same time, the United States has steadfastly worked with Middle Eastern governments to frustrate terrorist financing by cracking down on terror-aligned charities and to snuff out Islamic extremism by shuttering extremist madrassahs. This cooperation, even where it is limited, is nothing short of historic. On the domestic front, meanwhile, legislation like the Patriot Act has jolted an ossified intelligence bureaucracy, allowing for unprecedented levels of cooperation in intelligence gathering between federal, state and local law enforcement. Consequently, U.S. officials have had great success breaking up al-Qaeda-aligned terrorist cells.

In light of these results, to maintain that the United States today faces a greater terrorism threat is not merely an insult to reason—it is a slight to the impressive achievements of American troops, the cooperation of our allies, and the concerted efforts of our police and intelligence officers.

Lie #5: “There were no WMDs in Iraq.”

According to The Nation's David Corn, Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction make up “one of the administration’s Big Lies of the war on Iraq.” Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin goes further, asserting that American soldiers sent to rid Iraq of WMDs have been killed for a lie: “George Bush told lies and they died.” The fashionable leftist bumper sticker parrots that theme: “GW Lied; GI’s Died.”

For Corn, Breslin and the rest of Left, these claims are becoming harder and harder to sustain. They require, for instance, glossing over last month’s report that Polish troops in Iraq uncovered warheads believed to contain Sarin or mustard gas, exploding the notion that Saddam’s regime had fully dispensed of its chemical weapons. Later tests revealed the truth was graver yet: the warheads contained Cyclosarin, an agent far more toxic than Sarin.

These are not the only chemical weapons thus far found in Iraq. Hans Blix, the former UN weapons inspector who opposed military intervention, has conceded that in the run-up to the war, his inspection team found 16 Iraqi warheads marked for use with Sarin. Meantime, the Iraq Survey Group, an outfit tasked with searching for WMD, has confirmed that a roadside bomb detonated in May near a U.S. military convoy was also packed with Sarin nerve agent. That bomb, reports the ISG, is one 550, for which Saddam Hussein failed to account prior to the war.

Sarin bombs count among a class of ordnance the Ba’athist regime claimed to have destroyed before the 1991 Gulf War. United Nations decrees like Resolution 1441 had also called on Iraq to surrender such weapons to UN monitors. But inspector David Kay and his WMD task force have confirmed the Iraqi regime violated 1441 with impunity, regularly finding new ways to sidestep its provisions. Saddam’s enduring evasiveness, coupled with an aggressive last-ditch bid to cover up its militaristic aims by barring international inspectors from sensitive sites, kept inspectors from discovering Iraq’s three illegal missile programs (among many others).

Still more proof that the Iraqi regime was actively engaged in dodging international censure while working secretly to retain its WMD capabilities comes in the form of hidden weapons depots recently uncovered by officials in Iraq. Already, officials have revealed some 8,700 such weapons depots; recent estimates place their inventory between 650,000 and 1 million tons of arms. New weapons depots continue to be uncovered. Each of these programs was aimed at building missiles with a range of more than 93 miles. Clearly, prewar Iraq had designs on the region at large. Indeed, banned weapons components are even showing up overseas.

There should be no mistake: Absent a military campaign to depose Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s WMDs would have remained permanently elusive. So long as the Iraqi regime carried on its shell game of supposedly destroying its weapons arsenals while offering zero evidence that it had done so, a full disclosure would have remained the impossible goal of the international community...until Hussein chose to visit them upon his neighbors, or offered them to terrorists willing to explode them in our midst.

Many on the Left claim that, although Iraq had some raw nuclear material, they had no meaningful program. The evidence shows, on the contrary, that Saddam was knee-deep in nuclear trafficking. In the months prior to the war, Iraq shelled out $10 million to North Korea for medium-range Nodong missile technology, before U.S. pressure caused the North Koreans to back off from the sale. A company led by the cousin of Syrian strongman Bashar Assad proved more successful: For three years prior to Saddam’s ouster, the company smuggled millions of dollars of sophisticated arms and equipment into Iraq. At least one such arms shipment was completed with the aid of the Syrian government—a rank violation of a UN arms embargo.

Unquestionably, a great deal more remains to be said about Iraq’s WMD capabilities. It bears noting, however, that exposing these capabilities and halting their construction made up only one part of a far more comprehensive case for war. There was also the humanitarian issue. Here we have some consensus: Even most of the war’s critics allow that freeing Iraqis from the tyranny and systematic torture of the Saddam Hussein regime was, of course, a good thing…only war was the wrong way to secure their freedom, they insist. Yet these critics have yet to put forward a pacifist solution to abbreviating Saddam’s 30-year reign and sealing the mass graves that had already claimed 300,000 Iraqis. Quiet, too, are the once-prominent champions of UN sanctions, those declarations which failed to moderate Saddam Hussein while prolonging the suffering of the Iraqi people and providing convenient recruitment propaganda for the likes of Osama bin Laden. Add to this list Saddam Hussein’s unabashed anti-Americanism, and his proven ties to terrorism, and you have a compelling case for regime-change.

Lie #6: “We have no allies in our war on Iraq.”

The war’s Democratic opponents also claim our efforts in Iraq are insufficiently multilateral. Even so, their charge that the Bush administration is guilty of “go-it-alone” arrogance rings false: the U.S. has successfully rallied plenty of support for its mission to establish a stable and free Iraq. Three-dozen countries are currently contributing military forces to the country, and several creditor nations have forgiven Iraqi debt and pledged reconstruction funds. Nonetheless, it remains the case that the aging regimes of Western Europe have not been pulling their weight in the war against terrorism, most likely due to their deep economic ties to Iraq. For example, how do the Democrats propose to get France—a staunch ally and shameless enabler of the Saddam regime and certainly no friend of the U.S.—to support our efforts in Iraq? Particularly when the French government has stated repeatedly that it would not support military action against Iraq under any conditions (a stance due no doubt to the fact that members of the Chirac government resided for years on Saddam’s payroll)?

The “multilateral” approach to rogue states, so idealized by critics of the Iraq war, has been a consummate failure. One is hard-pressed to draw any other conclusion from the Washington’s policy toward Iran. Bowing to pressure, the Bush administration sought to check the Islamic Republic’s zeal for WMD’s by adopting the very strategy that, according to the critical consensus, it ought to have used in Iraq: toning down its “axis-of-evil” rhetoric, backing a European Union initiative to resolve the nuclear issue peacefully, and deferring to French and German diplomats at every turn.

The result, confirmed by last week’s 9/11 Commission report, is that Iran is now more dangerous than ever. Nine months of indulgent diplomacy has allowed the Tehran regime to acquire enriched uranium and further its nuclear program, threaten American allies like Israel with nuclear annihilation, sharpen its anti-Americanism, and sponsor an array of terrorist groups, from Hezbollah and al-Qaeda to jihadist mercenaries in Iraq.

Now, as the urgency of dealing with Iran intensifies, the administration finds itself weakened by the relentless propaganda assault on its tough-minded tack in Iraq. The Left’s attacks have rendered President Bush unable to respond militarily to Islamic nuclear aggression, should he need to do so. Thus, while Democrats like Robert Byrd accuse the Bush administration of basing the Iraq war on “a house of cards, built on deceit,” Iran diligently develops its nuclear program. If the Democratic Party has repeatedly failed to prove that the Bush administration lied about Iraq, they can nevertheless claim credit for this dubious achievement. In their burning desire to discredit the Iraq War effort for crass and fleeting political advantage, they have given the mullahs their best hope of realizing their nuclear dreams.

The media bias: obsess over false Bush AWOL charges, ignore credible Kerry-Vietnam accusations

08.13.04 (4:45 am)   [edit]
[b]War stories[/b]
Neal Boortz
August 13, 2004

The mask is off. Further denials are useless. After the events of the past seven days the ingrained leftist, pro-Democratic Party bias of the nation’s mainstream media has been fully exposed. All it took was for a certain Vietnam veteran to write a book daring to question the war hero status of Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry. Media lips are now drawn into a permanent snarl; the knives are out and the scent of blood is in the air. Circle the wagons and may the effort to protect the Democratic candidate proceed.

[b]To make this scenario as clear as possible, I ask you to remember one basic difference between George Bush and John Kerry. George Bush is not running on his record of military service during the Vietnam War. John Kerry is. John Kerry is not running on the basis of his recent service as an elected official. George Bush is.[/b]

Now … turn back the calendar to earlier this year. George Bush was asking the voters of this country to reelect him on the basis of his previous four years as president and commander in chief. Suddenly Democratic detractors come forward with questions about Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard over 30 years ago. Democratic sycophants were using words like “AWOL” and demanding investigations. Blood had been thrown in the water with the media sharks and the White House press briefings immediately turned ugly. Reporters wanted details – all of the details – of Bush’s National Guard service. They wanted pay records, dental records, medical records, flight records and statements from fellow guardsmen confirming Bush’s participation. The AWOL word had been used and it was George Bush’s job to provide all of the information necessary to prove that it wasn’t so.

If you think back I’ll wager you can’t remember one single story from any of the alphabets (ABC, NBC, etc.) questioning the motives or the honesty of the people who brought the AWOL charges. Their motives were assumed to be worthy and pure. It was the president on the spot, not the detractors.

Now … let’s turn the calendar pages to early August, 2004. A group of Vietnam veterans step forward with some questions and charges about John Kerry’s record of service in Vietnam, the very record that John has presented to the American people as the sole and exclusive reason (save for their hatred of George Bush) that he should be the 44th President of the United States. If the media’s treatment of the George Bush AWOL charges were a guide, we would expect to see an immediate feeding frenzy from the mainstream media. Demands would be made of the Kerry campaign that records, documents and any and all other available evidence be presented to prove Kerry’s claims of heroism.

The Kerry campaign would be handling multiple demands from The New York Times, the Boston Globe, ABC, NBC and the rest of the locusts for all of the medical records pertaining to Kerry’s second and third Purple Hearts. Apologies would be demanded of the Democratic and Kerry lawyers who referred to Dr. Louis Letson, the physician who applied the band aid to Kerry’s first Purple Heart wound as a “phony” physician. Maureen Dowd would be opining about obscene Republican operatives daring to question the medical credentials of a man who undoubtedly had saved far more lives in Vietnam than John Kerry. Obviously, it hasn’t happened exactly that way. We haven’t heard one objective reporter asking Kerry to defend his lawyer’s name-calling. Change the fact situation just a tad. Have Dr. Letson make a statement supporting Kerry’s claims, and have a Bush lawyer refer to him as a “phony” physician. I don’t have to tell you how outraged the media would be, do I? I didn’t think so.

And what of the people supporting Kerry’s detractors? One columnist referred to a Houston homebuilder who had made a donation to the Swift Boat veterans as a “mysterious Republican moneyman.” Mysterious? A Texas homebuilder is mysterious? I think a Hungarian financier who finances Moveon.org and The Media Fund, both Kerry surrogates, might qualify as mysterious, but has anyone seen dark hints about the money behind these organizations?

If anyone else out there has a plan to write a book exposing liberal media bias in America, they should consider applying their efforts to another cause. The media is doing all too good a job of exposing itself.

Neal Boortz is a lawyer and nationally syndicated radio talk show host.

©2004 Neal Boortz

Kerry supports the war again!

08.12.04 (5:20 am)   [edit]
[b]Kerry: Yep, I'm Back to Pro-War[/b]
By Joel Mowbray
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 12, 2004

Continuing his quest to be more all over the map than the Grateful Dead in the band's heyday, John Kerry has offered yet another new position on the
Iraq war. He’s for it—for now.

Uttering words no sane person ever predicted would pass through his lips, Kerry started his statement with, “I’ll answer it directly.” (Editor’s note: That quote is authentic. We couldn’t believe it either.)

President Bush had challenged his opponent to announce whether or not he would still authorize the war knowing what we know today. The rest of Kerry's response? “Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it is the right authority for a president to have but I would have used that authority effectively.”

What does that mean, to use “authority effectively”? Is Saddam not sitting in a cell right now? Are not the Iraqi people free? Is Iraq not on the verge of its first-ever free election? Is there a more effective way to win a war?

For those keeping score at home, it has been a dizzying past few weeks. At the convention, he seemed to be against the war. But at least he was definitely a Vietnam vet.

Warming up for the big day, Kerry tested out a number of themes, some pro- and some anti-war. Speaking to the NAACP, Kerry blasted Bush for “needlessly going it alone” and even suggested that the war was fought over oil. The very next day, he appeared to endorse both unilateralism and preemptive strikes, though each pledge was married to carefully crafted caveats.

In Boston, Kerry talked tough about his willingness to defend America—he’s a Vietnam vet, didn’t you hear?—yet he dragged out his tired staple, “We’ll never go to war because we want to; we’ll only go to war because we have to,” and even trotted out the “going to war over oil” bit for good measure.

No need to delve into the full history of his hemming and hawing—from the voting to authorize war yet voting against funding the rebuilding afterward—as the record is fairly well-established at this point.

Some might predict that Kerry’s newfound hard-line position might mean that Iraq is now off the table. Well, it is for Kerry, but certainly not for Bush.

The President has one consistent position—albeit one that is not always clearly articulated—yet Kerry has so many that he needs to reach into his hat on any given night to see which previously stated stance he should embrace. Unless he chooses to manufacture a new one, as he did this week.

Kerry’s conundrum is that he has negligible pro-Kerry support. He has anti-Bush voters. That’s enough to keep him in the game, but that alone cannot—and will not—push him across the finish line come November.

Depending on which pollster you believe, somewhere between 42-46% of Americans absolutely, positively, will-not-under-any-circum stances, even if their heads were in a vise, vote for Bush. That’s a sizeable base with which to start. And it would seem that Kerry only needs to pick up a few points to win, and could even position himself for a romp.

Unfortunately for Kerry, he’s barely known by the electorate, yet at least 40% of voters could never pull the lever for him. But even if that figure were much lower, Kerry would still be in trouble.

Just ask Bob Dole.

Going up against a man who had already been responsible for a still-to-increase cottage industry of Regnery books and who had two years earlier been the main cause of his party losing control of Congress after 40 years, Dole should have been if great shape. Clinton was hated by the right, and Dole was an affable chap who never really riled any “anti-” sentiment.

Trouble is, Dole didn’t spark much sentiment of any kind.

And the Massachusetts liberal is, to borrow a phrase, “literally in the same boat.”

Proving that money cannot buy everything, the billionaire’s spouse has an utter lack of either humor or charm. Without a personality to attract supporters, Kerry is forced to garner votes through his policy positions. Which is where things get sticky.

Where does Kerry stand on Iraq? Depends on the day. On the overall war on terror, he spouts pleasant-sounding platitudes about getting more international cooperation and making better use of intelligence. But how? Not once has Kerry laid out a clear blueprint, nor should anyone expect one.

Counterintuitively, Kerry is worse for the wear for not having clawed his way to a primary victory. He was not battle-tested in the sense of scrapping for support through good old-fashioned stump speeches and street fighting. He won because he was the best-organized candidate who didn’t implode.

Kerry came out of the primaries a survivor, not a winner. And unless Bush crashes—spectacularly� �in the next three months, Kerry won’t be one in November, either.

Joel Mowbray (mail@joelmowbray.com) is author of Dangerous Diplomacy: How the State Department Threatens America’s Security.

Major assasination will trigger next round of Al Qaeda attacks-- US intelligence

08.11.04 (4:50 am)   [edit]
From the Washington Times--

[b]Bin Laden hints major assassination[/b]
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

U.S. intelligence officials say a high-profile political assassination, triggered by the public release of a new message from Osama bin Laden, will lead off the next major al Qaeda terrorist attack, The Washington Times has learned.

The assassination plan is among new details of al Qaeda plots disclosed by U.S. officials familiar with intelligence reports who, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the killing could be carried out against a U.S. or foreign leader either in the United States or abroad.

The officials mentioned Saudi Arabia and Yemen, two nations that are working with the United States in the battle against al Qaeda, as likely locales for the opening assassination.

The planning for the attacks to follow involves "multiple targets in multiple venues" across the United States, one official said.

The new details of al Qaeda's plans were found on a laptop computer belonging to arrested al Qaeda operative Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan of Pakistan.

"We're talking about planning at the screwdriver level," one official said. "It is very detailed."

Khan was arrested July 13 in Lahore, Pakistan, along with Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian who was indicted in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa and was on the FBI's list of most-wanted terrorists.

U.S. and allied counterterrorism officials are pursuing leads on other terrorists based on the data from Khan's seized laptop. At least one arrest in Britain has been made so far, and others are expected, the officials said.

Additionally, U.S. intelligence officials said they think that several al Qaeda terrorists already in the United States are part of the plot, although their identities and locations are not known.

The targets, in addition to the financial institutions in New York, Washington and Newark, N.J., that have been the subject of public warnings, include such economic-related targets as oil and gas facilities with a view toward disrupting the November election.

"The goal of the next attack is twofold: to damage the U.S. economy and to undermine the U.S. election," the official said. "The view of al Qaeda is 'anybody but Bush.' "

The officials also said the terrorist group has begun using female members for preattack surveillance and possibly as suicide bombers, thinking that women will have an easier time getting past security checkpoints at airports, borders and ports.

The al Qaeda attack plans call for bombings using trucks and cars, and hijacked aircraft, including commercial airliners and helicopters.

"There is a particular concern that chemical trucks will be used," one official said.

Regarding the new bin Laden message, the officials said there are intelligence reports, some of them sketchy, that a new tape from the al Qaeda leader will surface soon.

In the past, video and audio messages by bin Laden or his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, were broadcast days or weeks before an attack, the officials said.

"The message likely will be the signal for the attack to be launched," one official said.

A second U.S. official said one intelligence agency was aware of unconfirmed reports of a new bin Laden tape.

"There may be such a tape, but it hasn't surfaced and we haven't seen it," this official said.

Bin Laden last released a taped message in April. The CIA said that the audiotape probably was the voice of bin Laden and that the mention of the March 11 Madrid train bombings shows that the tape was current.

That tape offered a "truce" for any European state that pledged to stop attacking Muslims and end cooperation with the United States.

Contrary to what some Democratic critics of the Bush administration have said, intelligence officials said the new details of al Qaeda planning were obtained from the Khan laptop. The terrorist group was in the process of updating older attack plans, the officials said.

On Aug. 2, the Bush administration raised the terrorism threat level from "elevated" to "high" for five finance-related sites in the District, New York and New Jersey, based on the intelligence in Khan's computer, as well as other intelligence.

Frances Townsend, a White House homeland-security adviser, said Sunday that the government has received a steady "stream" of intelligence indicating that an al Qaeda attack is planned.

"What we know now that we didn't know six months ago is that they've done a good deal of planning and surveillance work to accomplish that goal," she said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

Having anti-American Europe monitor US elections is a monumental insult

08.10.04 (2:14 am)   [edit]
[b]Guess Who's Coming to the Election?[/b]
By Joel Mowbray
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 10, 2004

With all the attention focused on Alan Keyes crashing an election where he doesn’t belong, comparably little has been paid to a potentially far more troubling election participant: international monitors “observing” our November elections.

In a news story that could not have been better crafted by The Onion the Bush administration has formally invited the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), of which the U.S. is a member, to observe this fall’s election.

Though the OSCE delegation has no authority to do anything substantive, the very idea that international monitors have any business being in the U.S. is insulting. Any organization comprised of member nations such as France and Germany who saw no evil in Saddam’s tyranny and continue turning a blind eye to Arafat’s iron fist clearly lacks the moral compass to pass judgment on any nation, let alone the United States.

Is the U.S. system perfect? No. But is it the best in the world? No question.

Nowhere in the world do voters have as much information at their fingertips: four all-news cable outlets, three broadcast network newscasts, three or more local news telecasts, one or more local talk radio stations, local and national newspapers, hundreds of magazines, thousands of web sites and web logs, and countless knuckleheads (including this one) ready to share their opinions with anyone who will listen.

That’s real democracy. Casting ballots is merely the capstone to freedom. We don’t need international monitors to tell us that America has the greatest foundation of freedom in the world.

We live in a country where someone of meager means can use a dingy computer to start a blog and influence voters, maybe by the dozens, or maybe by the thousands. We live in a country where someone with something to say can reach hundreds or even millions by calling up a talk radio host or writing a letter to the editor.

We live in a country where a billionaire born in Hungary is allowed to have inordinate influence in our elections. But he’s no wizard behind the curtain—thanks to a free press, Americans are well-aware of George Soros’ efforts. If they don’t mind and decide to side with Soros, then oh well. That’s freedom.

None of which is to say that there is no room for improvement. Long before Florida’s chads hung in the balance, America has had “procedural” issues on election day.

Chicago’s Daley-driven machine is legendary for its uncanny ability to raise the dead on the first Tuesday of every November. Just outside of Chicago, two suburban GOP strongholds, Chicago Heights and Cicero, have received unwanted attention in recent years for their own election chicanery. That’s just in one 30-mile radius.

International observers, however, are not going to investigate real ballot stuffing or have anywhere near the manpower to do anything beyond a cursory overview of polling practices at a handful of precincts.

The OSCE presence this November, though, is eagerly anticipated by many disgruntled leftist members of Congress, none more so than Barbara Lee (D-CA). Lee last month had spearheaded a Congressional Black Caucus request that the United Nations send a squadron of observers.

While not getting a dream team from the body that bestows equal moral legitimacy to Kim Jong-Il as George W. Bush, Lee nonetheless expressed pleasure at the invite to the OSCE: “I am pleased that the State Department responded by acting on this need for international monitors.”

Lee, you see, knows that the 2000 elections were a sham; Michael Moore told her so. The heavyweight filmmaker’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” made her realize that “the 2000 presidential elections were rife with deception and fraud.”

The conspiratorial Congresswoman and Moore share something else in common: each one opposed the war in Afghanistan. Lee, a woman with greater fondness for Fidel Castro than George W. Bush, was the lone “no” vote when Congress authorized war in the immediate aftermath of September 11.

Sending international monitors to the U.S. is akin to Moore’s propaganda piece showing Iraqi children laughing and playing in Baghdad during Saddam’s ruthless reign, conveniently ignoring images of Saddam’s torture chambers, rape rooms, and hundreds of thousands of mass graves.

Even after the liberation of 23 million Iraqis, more than a billion still live under the thumb of tyranny, yet people purportedly concerned with freedom and human rights have decided to monitor elections in the country that best exemplifies both.

Come to think of it, maybe an inviting an OSCE delegation isn’t so crazy after all—as long as they follow one simple instruction: watch and learn.
Joel Mowbray is author of Dangerous Diplomacy: How the State Department Threatens America’s Security.

What about Kerry's material possessions? Does he even go to church?

08.10.04 (2:07 am)   [edit]
It cracks me up, always, that Liberals feel that they can always glorify the fact that they don't have any Christian values whatsoever. There has been a news story going around about a preacher who urged a congregation in which the wealthy Bush family was seated to ditch their material possessions. Lefties think this is ironic, beccause Bush is rich, or they think that this was a special message for Bush, showing their complete ignorance on what Christianity preaches.

I guess they are completely in the dark about the fact that John Kerry is many times richer than Bush and claims to be a great Catholic. In fact, John Kerry is worth, thanks to his quickie divorce from his previous wife and children and his subsequent marriage to the Heinz company, over a billion dollars. Bush's worth is chump change to him.

John Kerry doesn't even go to a Catholic church. He goes to a Paulist "Reform" Center in Boston, which, sadly, is a place where Catholics who hate the Church go to profane Christ (with the blessing of the left-wing Boston diocese's Bishop). Kerry believes in abortion and the discarding of embryos. Yet most Catholics will vote for him merely because he calls himself a Catholic.

Bush acts more like a Christian, even with his wealth, than Kerry ever has. He is against abortion, embryonic stem-cell destruction, is for faith-based initiatives, and is the first president to pledge bilions to help Africans with AIDS. He also goes to church every week. Isn't this why we're told by these same nuts that Bush is too fundamentalist? How can Bush be a hypocrite un-Christian and a Christian fundamentalist? Lefties can't explain it.

The bottom line? The Left has no leg to stand on when it attacks Bush's wealth. The Democratic party is the part of the elitists. John Kerry is the richest presidential candidate in history. John Edwards is the richest VP candidate in history. Both have claimed to embrace the "values" of mainstream America-- which are profoundly Christian-- but show that they don't. The Left is being funded by billionaire George Soros who repeatedly lies and claims to "hate" the president.

How is any of that Christian?

So go ahead, Lefties, be proud that you're un-Christian while you try and get the Christian vote. But don't for a minute pretend some moral high-ground for the common man. It doesn't exist.

Swiftboats Vets book meticulously researched, passionate, credible-- unlike Farenheit 9/11

08.09.04 (11:30 am)   [edit]
"Farenheit 9/11" is a classic propaganda film, based on myth, which uses half-truths to create a monster of falsity. This film is embraced by the Left as the sum of all of their insane conspiracy theories. They believe it on faith to be 100% accurate.

"Unfit for Command" is a book written by former swiftboat veterans who served with JF Kerry. As Robert Novak reviews (linked below), the writers of the book are hardly Bush supporters, and have had no contact with the White House. They are just regular people expressing their first amendment rights.

Instead of abusing them, which is what insanely rich, liberal, elitist fat-asses like Michael Moore does.

Lefties are getting all emotional (and conspiratorial) over a book based on more facts than your average critique, yet have exalted "Farenheit 9/11" and its flawed theories (see 9/11 Commission final report for starters) as iron-clad fact.

Oh well. Here's the review-- http://www.townhall.com/colum...

13 Dems get their way: foreign org. to monitor US election

08.09.04 (9:55 am)   [edit]

This is called setting the stage for the mother of all lawsuits-- election 2004.  If Bush wins-- by any margin-- you will have the Dems trying to steal it.  If Kerry wins, not a word will be said.

It's a sad day when we gut our sovereignty to countries we gave democracy to so they can help ensure a Kerry victory. 

There are lots of sources for this story.   This one comes from WorldNet Daily--

Bush invites foreigners
to monitor U.S. election
Administration yields to 13 congressmen
who requested U.N. observers for 2004 vote

---

Posted: August 7, 2004
3:52 p.m. Eastern
© 2004 WorldNe tDaily.com

WASHINGTON – When 13 Democratic members of the U.S. Congress asked United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to send election monitors to the U.S. this fall, the move outraged many Republicans and other proponents of national sovereignty.

When those same 13 Democratic members of Congress were turned down by Annan, they took their request to Secretary of State Colin Powell – again to the shock of many Republicans and those who warn about foreign entanglements.

Yesterday, those 13 Democratic House members got their surprising answer from the State Department – the administration will indeed invite foreign election monitors to observe the U.S. elections in November.

Assistant Secretary of State Paul V. Kelly, who handles legislative affairs for the department, affirmed the invitation this week in a letter to the 13 House members. They had requested U.N. monitors for this year's elections in an effort to avoid the charges of voting irregularities that plagued the 2000 election, the closest in history.

Now, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the largest regional organization in the world with 55 participating nations, will monitor the U.S. election on Nov. 2. Members include Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Spain and the United States.

"OSCE members, including the United States, agreed in 1990 in Copenhagen to allow fellow members to observe elections in one another's countries," Kelly wrote. "Consistent with this commitment, the United States has already invited the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) to observe the November 2, 2004, presidential elections."

The congressional initiative was spearheaded by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas. She asked Powell to make an official request that the U.N. provide observers for the Nov. 2 elections in the United States to "ensure free and fair elections."

Previously, the 13 Democratic congressmen, led by Johnson, sent a letter July 8 to the U.N. general secretary requesting the presence of U.N. representatives in every county of the country during the voting process and any vote recount afterwards.

The U.N. immediately responded that such a request could not be accepted unless it came from the U.S. government. Otherwise, a spokesman said, it could be considered"intervention in a country's sovereignty."

"As legislators, we should guarantee the American people that our country will not experience another nightmare like the 2000 presidential elections," the members of Congress said in their letter to Annan.

Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson

In her letter to Powell, Johnson expressed grave concerns regarding electoral system reforms that were not undertaken after the 2000 election.

Recalling the contentious Florida vote count in 2000, the lawmakers urged the U.N. to "ensure free and fair elections in America."

"As lawmakers, we must assure the people of America that our nation will not experience the nightmare of the 2000 presidential election," Johnson said in the letter. "This is the first step in making sure that history does not repeat itself."

Meanwhile, Rep. Corrine Brown, a Florida Democrat, announced that the Democratic Institutions and Human Rights Office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has confirmed that it will be present in the United States – specifically, in Florida – on Election Day.

However, state election authorities in Florida have already announced that such observers are not to be allowed access to the voting process and, in any case, they would have to remain at a distance of more than 50 feet from the polls.

Besides Johnson, the congressional signers to the original U.N. letters included Julia Carson of Indiana, Jerrold Nadler, Edolphus Towns, Joseph Crowley and Carolyn B. Maloney, all of New York, Raul Grijalva of Arizona, Corrine Brown of Florida, Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, Danny K. Davis of Illinois, and Michael M. Honda and Barbara Lee of California.

Earlier stories:

Renewed push for U.N. to monitor U.S. vote

The congressmen who want U.N. observers in U.S. vote

U.N. observers requested for U.S. election

Vietnam is one of the world's most oppressive places, thanks in part to Kerry's policies

08.09.04 (3:52 am)   [edit]
[b]Vietnam...Today[/b]
By Jeff Jacoby
Townhall.com | August 9, 2004

With the presidential race generating so much talk of John Kerry's Vietnam record, one could almost forget that "Vietnam" is not just the name of a war that ended 30 years ago. It is also the name of a country of 82 million human beings -- men, women, and children who live under one of the most repressive dictatorships on Earth. Whatever political value there may be in recalling the Vietnam of years gone by, it is the people of Vietnam today who desperately need our attention.

"Vietnam is one of the most tightly controlled societies in the world," reports Freedom House, the well-known human rights monitor. "The regime jails or harasses most dissidents, controls all media, sharply restricts religious freedom, and prevents Vietnamese from setting up independent political, labor, or religious groups."

Late last month, for example, the regime sentenced Nguyen Dan Que, a 62-year-old physician, to 30 months in prison for the crime of "abusing democratic freedoms." Translation: He wrote essays condemning government censorship and posted them on the internet.

This wasn't Que's first encounter with communist justice. He was arrested in 1990 after publicly calling for free elections and multiparty democracy. The government charged him with sedition and sentenced him to 20 years imprisonment. In 1998, after being released as part of a general amnesty, he was invited to leave the country. When he refused to go into exile, he was placed under house arrest, deprived of his telephone and computer, and barred from resuming his medical work. But Que would not be intimidated, and continued to speak out for freedom. Now he is behind bars again.

Prodemocracy activists are not the only victims of Vietnam's one-party dictatorship. For years the regime has persecuted the indigenous highland tribes known as Montagnards, singling them out for religious repression -- most are devout Christians -- and confiscating their ancestral lands. In April, when some Montagnards staged a peaceful protest to demand religious freedom, the government reacted with a violent crackdown. Hundreds of Montagnards were beaten by police and by ethnic Vietnamese armed with clubs and metal rods.

"They beat the demonstrators, including children," one eyewitness told Human Rights Watch. "People's arms and legs were broken, their skulls cracked. Children were separated from their parents. Near Ea Knir bridge, two people were killed. . . . Fire trucks came. . . . They pushed the tractors in the river, even with people still riding on them." Other witnesses told of protesters being blinded with tear gas, then handcuffed, taken away, and never seen again. Some Montagnards were tortured. Human Rights Watch mentions two who were tied up and hung over a fire until their limbs were scorched.

Few Americans have made an issue of Vietnam's harsh denial of political and religious liberty. One who has is Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, an outspoken defender of human rights worldwide and author of a bill linking growth in US aid to Vietnam to "substantial progress" in Vietnam's human rights record. Smith's bill, the Vietnam Human Rights Act, passed the House by an overwhelming 410-1 vote in 2001. But it never got a hearing or a vote in the Senate, where it was blocked by the then-chairman of the East Asian and Pacific Affairs subcommittee -- John Kerry.

Last month the House again passed Smith's bill, this time by a vote of 323 to 45. As in 2001, says Smith, the message of the bill is that "human rights are central -- they are at the core of our relationship with governments and the people they purport to represent."

Predictably, the vote sent Hanoi into high dudgeon, and it denounced Smith's legislation as "a gross interference into Vietnam's internal affairs." In truth, the bill would amount to little more than a slap on the wrist. It would have no effect on the roughly $40 million in foreign aid currently going to Vietnam every year. Only *increases* in that aid would be blocked, and only if they were earmarked for non-humanitarian purposes.

Opponents of the bill, like Kerry and Senator John McCain of Arizona, insist that the carrot of "engagement" will do more to nurture human rights in Vietnam than the stick of sanctions.

But that claim has been proven false by the experience of the last three years, Smith argues. Vietnam's treatment of dissidents and religious minorities has gotten worse, not better, since diplomatic and trade relations with the United States were normalized in 2001. The Vietnam Human Rights Act "would be law right now if it hadn't been for Kerry," Smith says, "and some of those dissidents would be out of prison." By blocking the sanctions bill three years ago, Kerry ensured only that Hanoi's repression would continue unabated.

Will he block it again this year? The Kerry campaign hadn't replied to an inquiry as of late Friday, and Smith claims no inside knowledge. "But I know this much," he said the other day. "The best and brightest and bravest people in Vietnam are in prison, persecuted by the government for their opinions or their faith. And you don't do people who are suffering immeasurable cruelty any kindness by aiding a dictatorship."

Rock stars for Kerry-- Rock of hatred

08.09.04 (3:47 am)   [edit]
[b]Rock of Hatred[/b]
By Marc Levin
Washington Times | August 9, 2004

Liberal-leaning artists, includingBruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, R.E.M. and the Dixie Chicks, have announced that they will tour under the banner "Vote for Change" with the express purpose of replacing President Bush with Sen. John Kerry. Musicians are free to donate their talents to any political cause, but there are several pitfalls they should avoid.

The first and most obvious is to avoid being disrespectful to our country, our current president and our men and women in uniform.

In April 2003, Eddie Vedder, the lead singer of Pearl Jam, impaled a mask of Mr. Bush at the group's Denver concert.

At the July 8 Kerry-Edwards fund-raiser that brought in $7.5 million for the Democratic ticket, John Mellencamp sang his new ditty "Texas Bandido," which intones, "He's just another cheap thug that sacrifices our young."

Perhaps the nastiest anti-Bush material appears on the new albums from roots-rocker Steve Earle and singer-songwriter Rickie Lee Jones. Mr. Earle's latest album "The Revolution StartsNow"includes "Condi, Condi" in which National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice is depicted as nothing more than a sexual object for Mr. Bush. Written from Mr. Bush's perspective, this shameful song drones, "Skank for me, Condi. Show me what you got." Skank means "one who is disgustingly foul or filthy and often considered sexually promiscuous."

Onhernewalbum "Evening of My Best Day," Rickie Lee Jones penned the song "Ugly Man" about Mr. Bush. Her shallow lyrics include, "He's an ugly man, he always was an ugly man. He grew up to be like his father, an ugly man."

Last year, Miss Jones told the Guardian newspaper: "I think 9/11 gave this generation an identity, and its identity is potentially fascist. My skin crawls when I think of the first week after 9/11. I was looking out of the window and there were people marching down the street carrying flags. It reminded me of spontaneous, angry Nazis and I thought, 'Oh, man, we are in a lot of trouble'. There's a whole bunch of people who have flags hanging from their cars and who are mistaking fascism for patriotism."

Such paranoia about domestic fascism is ironic when those who so much as questioned the Taliban or Saddam Hussein were imprisoned or killed. The Baltimore Sun reported July 7 that poets silenced under Saddam are finally having their creative voices heard.

Although Miss Jones said she wouldn't murder Mr. Bush herself, she added, "But would I feel sorry if someone killed him? No, I wouldn't." Similarly, British artist Morrissey at a concert in Ireland announced the death of Ronald Reagan and said he wished Mr. Bush had died instead.

In addition to tempering their rhetoric and taming their paranoia, musicians must not be so arrogant as to believe that they should be immune from criticism for their political exhortations. Mr. Earle stated, "You're supposed to be able to say anything about anything ... We're supposed to be able to do that without being criticized or intimidated."

Linda Ronstadt, who was booted from a casino July 17 after using her concert to praise Michael Moore's film "Fahrenheit 9-11," also lashed out at her critics. She later revealed the limits of her own tolerance, complaining, "It's a real conflict for me when I go to a concert and find out somebody in the audience is a Republican or fundamental[ist] Christian. It can cloud my enjoyment. I'd rather not know."

Mr. Earle and Miss Ronstadt are entitled to express their views, but it is hypocritical and arrogant of them to demand that others refrain from criticizing them. Artists who have made millions from fans of all political views must be willing to pay the price for injecting politics into their performances.

Other pitfalls also confront musicians who veer deeply into politics. Most artists are idealists, but politics is dominated by shades of gray and littered with compromises. For example, most artists on the "Vote for Change" tour are largely motivated by opposition to the Iraq war, but Mr. Kerry and his running mate, Sen. John Edwards, both voted for it.

Ultimately, this gap between pure idealism and political reality explains why the most socially powerful music speaks in universal terms like Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind," John Lennon's "Imagine" and, more recently, many of Mr. Springsteen's September 11-inspired compositions on "The Rising." By contrast, the trite and trashy tunes bashing Mr. Bush seem destined to have little lasting impact.

Many argue that government involvement in religion imperils religious institutions as much as government. Similarly, the crass use of music to accomplish specific, partisan political ends may do as much damage to the quality of modern music as it does to the tenor of America's political debate.

Marc Levin, a practicing attorney, is President of the American Freedom Center, a conservative, Austin,TX-based public policy institute. He can be reached at mrmarclv@aol.com.

Iran's nuclear program is the next step to a second holocaust

08.09.04 (3:42 am)   [edit]
[b]Mullah-nnihilation?[/b ]
By Reza Bayegan
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 9, 2004

The Associated Press reported on July 27 that in defiance of any international monitoring of its program, Iran had broken seals put on its equipment by the IAEA, the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency. On the same day in London, The Times warned that Iran was only “months away” from having the capability to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb. With the American officials disclosing that last February IAEA inspectors found P-2 centrifuge parts, which are more suited to making weapons than the P-1 parts that Iran has confirmed it possesses,[1] there can be little doubt about the mullah's intentions.

Obviously, a nuclear-armed Tehran would be cataclysmic for the democratic world (particularly the state of Israel). What is less apparent are the devastating effects of such an eventuality on Iran's own culture and civilization. The Islamic bomb would give a great boost to Arab and religious extremism, while at the same time dealing a severe blow to the hopes of salvaging a Persian Iran whose cultural references sharply differ from its Arab neighbors.

Granted basic human freedoms and relieved from the frenzy fomented by the Ayatollahs, there can be no question that the allegiance of the majority of Iranian citizens is to values and sentiments represented by cities like Shiraz and Isphahan, rather than Mecca and Jerusalem.

Getting their hands on the nuclear bomb would help the clerical rulers plunge Iran yet deeper into regional conflicts where, by nature, it does not really belong. As Reuel Marc Gerecht has argued, obtaining nuclear weapons fits in well with the “grand objective of the Iranian mullahs to use them as leverage to enhance their security and sphere of influence throughout the Middle East.”

Reaching nuclear capability will give a freer hand to the fanatical regime to further undermine the country's national identity. It will strengthen those repressive forces that have been assaulting the human rights and cultural independence of Iranian citizens since the inception of the revolution. In other words, what is a dream for the ruling clergy, can only translate into a hideous nightmare for the Iranian nation.

At the heart of the nuclear issue lies the dual purpose of sworn animosity of the Islamic Republic against the state of Israel on the one hand, and the mullahs wish to perpetuate their illegitimate rule on the other. The vast resources of Iranian natural wealth, instead being directed to alleviate poverty within the country and invested in badly needed development projects, are poured into the coffers of Lebanese and Palestinian militia groups and used for arming and financing terrorist operations around the globe.

The anti-Jewish campaign of the Islamic Republic is utterly repugnant to the attitude Iranians have adopted towards the nation of Israel throughout their long history. It was deeply ironic last month when UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) listed the tomb of Cyrus the Great in Pasargadae as a world heritage site. At a time when Iran is known as a member of the Axis of Evil, and the most active sponsor of international terrorism, the image of Iranian heritage that the world honors and commemorates is of a country whose founding monarch put together the first human rights declaration, the articles of which guaranteed the right of religious practice in general, and the freedom of Jewish people in particular.

The ill-will towards the Jews therefore goes hand in hand with the hatred today’s clerical regime displays against the continuity of Iranian national values and traditions. Let us not forget that scores of Iranians are arrested every year for observing festivals that date back to the pre-Islamic period. The hostility of the mullahs towards Israel, as Roger Howard has stated, is “directed not only towards Israeli policies but, in many cases, towards the rights of the Jewish state to exist at all.”[2]

Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, has time and again asserted that the only way to solve the Middle East crisis “is to destroy the Zionist regime.” The most effective way to accomplish such a result is by a nuclear bomb. Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani the powerful ex-President does not make any bones about such deadly projects. Reassuring his audience about the dangers of nuclear confrontation with the Jewish state, he tells them that comparing with the “devastation” of Israel by a nuclear bomb, a retaliation (that is if they are still there to retaliate) will only cause a scattered “damage” to the far greater population of the Islamic world.[3]

On the face of such open threats to its security, Israel has every right to a preemptive strike. Prime Minister Sharon has declared that it will constitute a state of war for any country hostile to Israel to acquire a nuclear bomb. As a matter of fact, the state of war between the Islamic Republic and the state of Israel has existed for a long time, albeit unilaterally. The mullahs pay $50,000 to the family of every suicide bomber attacking Israeli targets. This figure is twice the amount offered by Saddam Hussein for such terrorist attacks. A considerable chunk of the budget of the country is allocated for killing Jews inside Israel – and throughout the world. The bombing of the Jewish Center in the capital of Argentina in July 1994, which resulted in the death of 85 people and the injury of more than 200, is only one instance of this ongoing war. The high officials of the clerical regime who masterminded this carnage spent $10 million only to bribe the Argentinian officials to keep quiet about the Iranian role in this attack.[4]

The efforts of the Islamic Republic against Israeli interests are only matched by the government's relentless persecution of the Iranian people. The Islamic Republic remains at the top of the list of violators of Amnesty International and other international human rights agencies. The mullahs’ obsession with the Arab-Israeli issue has been exploited to justify internal repression. Portraying the Islamic faith as in danger of annihilation by American “imperialism” and Israeli Zionism, the mullahs trample on the rights of individual Iranians in the name of saving Islam and securing the freedom of the Palestinian people.

Like other empty rhetoric of the regime, the support for the “Palestinian struggle” however has been regarded by the Iranian population as political cant devoid of any reality. Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1979 creation of a “Ghods Day,” rallying in support of the Palestinian cause to “liberate Jerusalem,” was odd and alien to Iranian sensibility. Roger Howard, attending rallies held on the Ghods Day, managed to talk to students on university campuses, who tell him in private that Arab-Israeli dispute is “nothing to do with us.” He writes:

In mid-June 2003, students held a series of large rallies at Tehran University that called not only for more democracy in Iran but also for the government to “forget about Palestine and think of us.”

The “liberation of Jerusalem” and the extermination of Israeli Jews has been an aspiration for Iran's revolutionary fascists and the Islamic-Marxists urban guerrillas who were shut off from the reality of Iranian worldview in training camps sponsored by Yasser Arafat and Muammar al-Qaddafi. Their mission was to fight the Shah and impose a mindset on Iranians that was totally incongruous with their country’s tolerant culture and long established humanitarian tradition.

The failure of their relentless propaganda is evident in the way Iranians turn to Israeli radio for reliable news and trustworthy information. Traveling in Iran in 1999, I was amazed that a local official in Hamadan, who was frequently mouthing the government's line about the Zionist enemy, took me to his orchard and proudly showed off his walnut tree. “It is the very best,” he said. “It has been brought in from Israel you know.” The very best of Israel has also been imported from Iran: Israeli President Moshe Katsav and the Defense Minister Lt. General Shaul Mofaz were both born in Iran.

This strong affinity with between the two nations has enabled the Israelis to look beyond the crimes of the present regime and exercise great military restraint towards Iran. This restraint should continue until all other peaceful options are probed and exhausted. An Israeli attack on Iranian soil, albeit on selected military and nuclear targets, would be used by the mullahs as welcomed propaganda to rally the national sentiments at a time when Iranians are most united in their hatred of the Islamic regime. It should be kept in mind that the destruction of the regime’s nuclear facilities will only serve as a temporary patch on a dangerous infection. What Iran desperately needs is an opportunity to emerge from the long nightmare of the clerical tyranny.

This can happen with the mobilization of international efforts to isolate the mullahs and strengthen internal forces truly representative of Iran’s cultural heritage and national identity. To search for those forces we need to go no further than the most popular Iranian national figure today: Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah of Iran, who leads a political campaign from his exile in the United States to hold a free and fair national referendum on the political future of his country. He represents the modern voice of a cultural tradition that is distinctly Iranian in its broadmindedness and humanity. His campaign which embraces all political groups and unites Iranians under one democratic agenda is not only the best means of stopping the terrorist regime in Tehran to threaten the world with nuclear weapons, but its success will be the most effective preemptive strike at the heart of the forces of violence and instability in the region of Middle East.

ENDNOTES:

1. “Iran denies uranium centrifuge is part of plan to build a nuclear bomb,” Paul Harris, The Observer. August 1, 2004.
2. Iran in crisis? Nuclear Ambitions and American Response. Roger Howard. (Zed Books, 2004).
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

Liberals gunning for "assault" weapons

08.09.04 (3:37 am)   [edit]
I am only linking to this article, though I will add something the column doesn't. A problem with the liberal crusade against "assault" weapons is not only that it is a misnomer, affecting about 50% of gun owners, but also that it reflects not only a foot in the door, but half a body, in the larger crusade-- a total ban on guns.

We live in a nation where liberals reserve the right to [i]add[/i] words to the constitution, giving us a right to kill babies, a right to ban religious observance in government, and so on. But regarding our second amendment, the words that exist are taken away, interpreted as irrelevant or part of some ancient context that doesn't currently apply.

If it is true that the second amendment is "irrelevant" and "outdated", the proper response is to amend the constitution. Like the gay marriage issue, however, liberals know that they cannot push their agenda through legal means, so it is paramount for them to stock the judicial branch with their own zealots who will bypass the will of the people with their special interpretations that are almost always unconstitutional anyway.

Anyway, here's the article "Liberals gunning for "assault" weapons"-- http://www.townhall.com/colum...

Abortion, not AIDS, is greatest human rights tragedy of our time

08.09.04 (3:28 am)   [edit]
[b]The greatest human rights tragedy of our time[/b]
Mike S. Adams
August 9, 2004

Last Sunday, I was listening to a sermon by a preacher who was visiting our church just before going to Africa to minister to those suffering from AIDS. He described the horrific epidemic that has been ravishing the continent for years as follows: “It is the greatest human rights tragedy of our time.”

Citing the prospect of 40 million orphans in Africa by the year 2010, he pled with the congregation to demonstrate real faith in God by acting to help end the suffering of those infected with the deadly AIDS virus. His message, interwoven with the New Testament story of Lazarus and the rich man, was quite powerful. I pray that in the end it will also prove effective. Decent people simply cannot ignore what this disease has been doing, particularly to those in sub-Saharan Africa, in recent years.

But as bad as the AIDS epidemic is, it is only the second greatest human rights tragedy of our time. The first is abortion.

Even if we accept as true our visiting preacher’s statistic concerning the prospect of 40 million orphans (he claimed NPR as his source) on one continent by 2010, that does not come close to the number of abortions that will have been performed by that year in the United States alone. In fact, we have already had over 45 million abortions in the U.S. since the Roe decision. That is more than the total number of AIDS deaths throughout the world since the disease was first detected.

When I think about the tragedies of AIDS and abortion, I wonder why so many pro-choice “humanitarians” who want to end the AIDS epidemic are fighting so hard to preserve the legality of abortion. Indeed, I have often heard liberals say that those who are not in favor of international AIDS relief are “racists.” This accusation is linked to the indisputable fact that those of African descent are disproportionately infected with the disease.

But what about the fact that abortions are grossly disproportionately performed on African American babies in the United States? What is the real reason why many of those who are fighting against AIDS because of the fact that it gravely threatens the African population, are fighting just as vigorously to preserve abortion despite the fact that it gravely threatens the African American population?

The answer to this obvious contradiction is simple. It is not stupidity or ignorance of the facts. It is basic human selfishness.

Many people who rightly support a world war on AIDS do so, not because of their concern for others, but because of concern for themselves. They see the existence of AIDS as a threat to their sexual freedom. And that is why they fight to preserve abortion. They see the non-existence of abortion as a threat to their sexual freedom. Their problem is not intellectual. It is a basic issue of self-control, which lies at the heart of many human tragedies.

And that is why, as great as he was, C.S. Lewis was incorrect when he said that “The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins.” Our decisions about sexual morality can affect our decisions about much more important issues. These seemingly minor transgressions can produce a callous indifference to the plight of the unborn.

But what we need is more than a lecture on sexual morality. We need a unified effort to end the two greatest human rights tragedies of our time, which are unquestionably the twin epidemics of abortion and AIDS. And more than anything, we need a president who is committed to ending both of these tragedies.

In that sense, George W. Bush may be the greatest humanitarian of our time. And some might call him our first black president.

Mike S. Adams (www.DrAdams.org) is the author of “Welcome to the Ivory Tower of Babel.”.

©2004 Mike S. Adams

The choice on trade in 2004

08.09.04 (3:23 am)   [edit]
[b]The choice on trade[/b]
Michael Barone

August 9, 2004

Amid all the coverage of the Democratic National Convention, and of the fact that John Kerry seems to have gotten little or no bounce from it, slight attention has been given to the most important development in trade policy over the past four years. That is the Aug. 1 agreement at the World Trade Organization talks in Geneva on a framework for advancing the Doha Round of negotiations.

The Doha Round was launched in November 2001 but seemed at an impasse at last September's WTO meeting in Cancun when Latin American, African and Asian nations rejected the approach of the United States and the European Union. The WTO rules require consensus, which seemed to be impossible.

But in Geneva a consensus emerged. The United States and the EU agreed to eliminate agricultural export subsidies and to make a "substantial reduction," starting with a 20 percent cut, in domestic farm supports. Developing countries, led by Brazil and India, agreed to lower barriers to manufactured goods and to services. This is not a final agreement, which everyone agrees cannot be reached by the original deadline of this December. But there is a good chance of a deal by the December 2005 meetings in Hong Kong.

This is a potential win-win situation. Consumers and taxpayers in the United States, the EU and Japan would be relieved of the cost of farm subsidies. Manufacturers and service providers in those countries would get access to markets from which they are barred. Big agricultural producers like Brazil and India would get access to First World markets, and the struggling poor nations of the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa would be able to sell their farm products and thus get a jump-start in economic growth. The major losers, relatively few in number, would be subsidized farmers in the developed countries, who may have other opportunities in advanced economies.

But the shape of a final deal depends on further negotiations over a host of details -- and on the American presidential election. France is already squawking that the EU is selling out its lavishly subsidized farmers, and some U.S. farm state politicians are also voicing objections. Japanese politicians love to protect their rice farmers. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, working with the EU's Pascal Lamy, has skillfully put together the pieces after the debacle at Cancun, and at the same time he has negotiated bilateral trade agreements with Australia, Morocco, Thailand, Colombia and other nations -- a clear reminder to developing countries that the United States could concentrate on such deals and render the WTO irrelevant.

If George W. Bush is re-elected, Zoellick would presumably continue on his course. One problem is the 2002 farm bill, which increased subsidies. That bill was signed by Bush, reluctantly, as the best he could get at a time when the agriculture committees were headed by Republican Rep. Larry Combest, from a cotton-farming Texas district, and Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin, from corn-growing Iowa.

But Combest has retired and been replaced by Bob Goodlatte, a free-marketeer from a non- subsidy-crop district in Virginia. The Senate committee remains pro-subsidy, but Bush, if re-elected, will have more leverage in conference committee deliberations when the farm bill comes up in 2006 than he did in 2002.

John Kerry seems likely to take a different approach. He had no immediate comment on the Geneva agreement, which is fair enough -- this is a complex issue, and he hasn't had much chance to ponder it on the campaign trail. But at the Boston convention he reiterated his support for "fair trade." That's code for the approach favored by labor unions, which insist that trade agreements must have labor and environmental protections that go beyond what most developing countries will agree to. Details matter: Zoellick says that he has negotiated for labor and environmental standards, but not for those as stringent as the unions want.

Of course it is possible that a President Kerry may take the approach taken by Senator Kerry before his campaign, when he voted for all trade agreements to come before him. More likely is that a Kerry-appointed trade representative would have a harder time reaching agreement than Zoellick, because he would be seeking more concessions. And it's possible that Kerry would simply downplay the negotiations if only to preserve farm subsidies at roughly current levels.

There was little difference on trade between the major party candidates in the 1992 and 1996 elections, and not very much in 2000. But this time the nation has a pretty clear choice on trade.

Michael Barone is a senior writer for U.S.News & World Report and principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics.

©2004 Creators Syndicate

Why the American election is seen as a referendum on Europe's future

08.08.04 (6:40 pm)   [edit]

"Kerry must win, you see, so we can be friends again." You hear things like this these days in Europe. George Bush's campaign staffers may tease about John Kerry's French connections, his Europhile mannerisms, and his unguarded boasts that the Continent is pulling for him, but such caricatures are closer to the truth than even the Republican operatives suspect.

Europeans casually talk of the Kerry rapprochement to come, as if in their magnanimity they have given us one last chance to return to sobriety. They exude a bold confidence, even to strangers, that the brightened prospects of the Democratic challenger are proof that America has seen the European light and therefore, of course, Mr. Kerry must win. Never has Europe been so emotionally involved in an American election--and never to their peril have they read us so wrong.

Michael Moore is offered up as proof of grassroots American unhappiness with the president. Was he not perched in an exalted seat at the Democratic convention? Completely lost on Europeans is that Mr. Moore, for all his notoriety, is still a cult figure. An icon among the Moveon.org crowd, and when used gingerly a good weapon of the Democratic Party, he is still otherwise a polarizing figure disliked by the majority of America that votes. As the list of cinematic distortions in his recent film grows, "Fahrenheit 9/11" increasingly will be relegated to the genre of crass propaganda once mastered by the far more gifted Leni Riefenstahl in her similarly slanted "political documentary," "Triumph of Will."

More serious Europeans point out that the anger of our seasoned ex-diplomats and retired generals is further evidence that Americans are tired of Mr. Bush's unilateralism. Of course, out-of-work diplomats are keen to find fault with their successors. And few American administrations have proved as controversial in refashioning American foreign policy as have the blunt-speaking George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. All are fat targets after radically altering America's prior relationships with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Libya, dividing Europe into Old and New, questioning the role of American troops in NATO and in South Korea, and parting with Yasser Arafat. Yet all these sensationalized developments were long overdue, and precisely for that reason they may well become institutionalized, so much so that even a Kerry victory can do little to overturn.

Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira Heinz Kerry is a big hit in Europe, as if a native of colonial Mozambique has unique insight into the pathologies of the American experience. But as the summer wears on, fairly or unfairly, this force-multiplier of her husband's Europeanism is beginning to grate like some character out of a Henry James novel--reflecting our own unease with the predictable mixture of acquired fortune, haute culture and aristocratic disdain. The private luxury jet and save-the-planet environmentalism go down in Fresno about as well as "Shove it" buttresses her sermon on the need for a new "civility." Ms. Kerry's gratuitous use of "un-American," both on "60 Minutes" and again to a persistent journalist, reflects a complete ignorance of the considerable baggage that such a cheap epithet carries in the collective American memory.

Despite the lectures, Americans find Europe itself a vast sea of contradictions. The French write and talk obsessively about Anglo-American adventurism in Iraq. Yet with an easy two-day drive an American can visit more than 50,000 British and American dead soldiers, resting at places like Hamm, St. Avold, Epinal, Omaha Beach, Ranville and Bayeux. The irony seems lost that the recently much-maligned Anglo-Saxon muscularity that ended Baathist Iraq is the logical successor to the same unapologetic partnership of Churchill and Roosevelt that once interfered in continental Europe to save it from its own indigenous fascism.

In this regard, blinkered European Union utopianism is thematic in its post-1960s World War II museums. Guides, videos and brochures remonstrate, often in self-righteous indignation, about the follies of war, violence and racism. Only at American and British cemeteries, in contrast, does one receive a different view of what the SS Panzers were really up to--and how they were stopped. Words like courage, sacrifice and duty are chiseled on the architraves of granite pavilions. Like mute stone totems, they look out over thousands of white crosses. In this context, the well-meaning, but entirely impotent European efforts at curbing genocide in the Sudan or the nuclearization of Iran make one doubt the vaunted new efficacy of "soft power"--triangulation always predicated on the threat of real American hard force in the shadows.

Europeans talk of the Kerrys' environmentalism in tired references to the American reluctance to sign the Kyoto accords, a flawed treaty that no Democratic president could defend and few Democratic senators would ratify. In the meantime, one sees an occasional train rush alongside the Rhine spewing from its lavatories raw human waste onto the tracks. Mammoth nuclear plants dot the French countryside. Restaurants are so smoke-filled that the pâté takes on the flavor of Gauloise, and tipsy afternoon drivers emerge from upscale restaurants with three or four glasses of wine under their belts to swerve on antiquated roads. Tourists take cheap shots that they fear being cooked alive in an August Paris flat or being buried in rubble at de Gaulle airport.

McDonald's is prominent among the stylish cafés of Luxembourg. Dubbed-in "Friends" and "Jerry Springer" blare from hotel televisions. Bare navels, Ray-Bans, pierced everything, and baggy jeans suggest a studied effort to emulate the look of Venice Beach. For a bewildered American, the key in squaring the anti-American rhetoric with the Valley Girl reality is simply to understand Western Europeans as elite Americans. Their upscale leisured culture is not much different from Malibu, Austin and Dupont Circle, that likewise excuse their crass submission to popular American tastes through the de rigueur slurs about the "corporations," "Bush-Cheney," and "Halliburton." Perhaps this notion that Europe itself has become a cultural appendage of the U.S. explains why it views our upcoming election as a referendum on its own future as well.

None of these paradoxes is new. Yet the European meddling in this particular presidential election is. Less talked about is that the image of an allied Europe has been shattered here at home. And all the retired NATO brass and Council on Foreign Relations grandees are finding it hard to put the pieces back together again. The American public now wants to be told exactly why thousands in their undermanned military are stationed in a continent larger and richer than our own without conventional enemies on its borders. If Europeans think it is nonsensical to connect Iraq with our own post 9/11 security, then Americans believe it is far more absurd to envision an American-led NATO patrolling their skies and roads 15 years after a nearby hostile empire collapsed--especially when NATO turns out to be as isolationist as America is expected to be engaged abroad.

The election of John Kerry would probably not reverse either the current policy in Iraq or the ongoing reappraisal of our foreign relations. The European fixation with the upcoming election and rabid hatred of George Bush instead may backfire here at home; indeed, even now European animus acerbates our own growing unease with what we read and see abroad. As never before the Europeans have unabashedly called for the defeat of an incumbent American president in the next election.

They better hope that George Bush loses.

Mr. Hanson, a military historian, is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.

Swiftboats offer devastating response to Kerry's jack-booted lawsuit threats

08.08.04 (7:44 am)   [edit]
Freedom of speech is just like Jimmytherigteous' new job-- it's
"awesome". If you're a Democrat, at least. If you happen to be conservative, your freedom of speech is limited to the threat of lawsuit by liberals who don't like [i]your[/i] freedom of speech.

Hence, we can have MoveOn.org ads callin Bush Hitler, a warmonger, a man who stole an election that Al Gore actually tried to steal, or we can have Michael Moore films that call Bush a murderer who, without facts but plenty of made up material to support the claim, went to war for oil (and let 9/11 happen for oil). That's all gravy to the left, because it's "free speech". But a group of Vietnam veterans that served with John Kerry, many of whom are nowhere near Republican, call John Kerry on his decades of lies about the war, and that morphs into "hate speech" that needs to be muzzled with a lawsuit.

George Soros, a true capitalist pig who pledged to do "whatever it takes" to bring down Bush , is funding the rhetoric on the Left. The Swiftboats for Truth are merely trying to show the truth about the man who called them baby killers thirty-plus years ago. Amazing.

In response to the cowardly, oh-so-Democratic, Kerry lawsuit threat, the Swiftboats have offered this unassailable reply to TV station managers nation-wide:

Taken from Captain's Quarters blog--http://www.captainsquartersbl...

Dear Station Manager:

The purpose of this letter is to present some of the factual support for the advertisement "Any Questions?" produced and used by Swift Boat Veterans For Truth ("Swiftvets"), an organization properly registered under Internal Revenue Code § 527, and which has filed all required reports. [b]Swiftvets is an organization led by Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann, USN (retired), Commander of all Swift boats in Vietnam during the period of John Kerry's four-month abbreviated tour in Swift boats between late November 1968 and mid-March 1969. A list of the 254 members may be found on www.swiftvets.com. A large majority of those who served with John Kerry in Swift boats in Vietnam and whose location is known have joined the organization. Thus, for example, sixteen of the twenty-three surviving officers who served in Coastal Division 11 with Kerry (the place where Kerry spent most of his time) have joined the organization, together with most of Kerry's Vietnam commanders and 254 sailors from Coastal Squadron One, ranging from Vice-Admirals to Seamen.[/b]

The purpose of Swiftvets is to present the truth about John Kerry's post-Vietnam charges of war crimes and John Kerry's own Vietnam record. Swiftvets is uniquely positioned to do so since it includes most of the locatable sailors and officers who served with John Kerry in Vietnam.

[b]John Kerry has made his Vietnam record the central focus of his presidential candidacy, depicting purported Vietnam events in nearly $100 million in advertising. Copies of ads such as "Lifetime" and "No Man Left Behind" may be found on Kerry's website. Kerry's authorized campaign biography, Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, by Douglas Brinkley (New York: HarperCollins, 2004) ("Tour"), centers on his short Vietnam tour and contains Kerry's account of these events. Additional accounts by Kerry of his Vietnam experience may be found on his website.[/b]

(Blogger's note: this means Kerry brought this scrutiny upon himself)

The Advertisement

A true and correct transcript of the advertisement entitled "Any Questions?" is attached as Exhibit 1. Affidavits are attached (as Exhibits 2 through 14) from each participant in the advertisement, except from John Edwards, the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee, whose often-repeated invitation to learn about John Kerry by speaking to the men who served with him begins the advertisement. The filmed comment of Senator Edwards has been made so many times as to be general knowledge.

As described in the attached affidavits, Al French (Exhibit 2), Bob Elder (Exhibit 3), Jack Chenoweth (Exhibit 7), Larry Thurlow (Exhibit 10), and Bob Hildreth (Exhibit 14) were all officers in charge of Swift boats in Vietnam in Coastal Division 11 with John Kerry. Coastal Division 11 was a small naval unit with about one hundred sailors and fifteen or sixteen boats which operated in groups of two to six boats. Each of these boat officers operated directly with John Kerry on numerous occasions. Van Odell (Exhibit 6) is a retired Navy enlisted man who also served in Coastal Division 11 on the Chenoweth boat, a few yards from John Kerry during Kerry's March 13, 1969 Bronze Star action.

Captain George Elliott, USN (retired), (Exhibit 4) was John Kerry's direct commander in Coastal Division 11, while Captain Adrian Lonsdale, USCG (retired), (Exhibit 9) was Kerry's administrative commander. Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann, USN (retired), (Exhibit 8) commanded all Swift boats (including Kerry's) in Vietnam. Each of these commanders interacted on numerous occasions with Kerry and, for example, are discussed for many pages in Kerry's own authorized book, Tour.

Dr. Louis Letson (Exhibit 5) was the doctor in Cam Rahn Bay who treated Kerry's first Purple Heart "wound," while Commander Grant Hibbard (Exhibit 11) was John Kerry's commander at Coastal Division 14 where Kerry claimed to have suffered the wound. Finally, Joe Ponder (Exhibit 13) and Shelton White (Exhibit 12) are veterans of Coastal Division 11 who were badly wounded near the Song Bo De River where Kerry served most of his short tour.

[b]The Kerry campaign has utilized a revolving group of eight veterans from Coastal Division 11 (none of whom served with Kerry as much as two months). In stark contrast to this small stable of supporters, the veterans on "Any Questions?" have intimate knowledge of John Kerry or (in the case of Ponder and White) of the falsehood and injury of his false war crimes charges.[/b] Although many more of the over 250 signers of the Swiftvets' letter served directly with John Kerry, it would be hard to locate people with more detailed and first-hand knowledge of John Kerry's short Vietnam stay than those in the advertisement. They are well-suited to respond with first-hand knowledge to Edward's invitation. Their sworn affidavits are attached (in order of appearance in the advertisement) as Exhibits 2 through 14.

[b]Kerry's obtaining of three Purple Hearts permitted him to leave Vietnam some 243 days short of the normal one-year tour.[/b] See Exhibit 20, Thrice Wounded Reassignment. Whether or not he fraudulently obtained these awards (the Purple Heart being among the most sacred of all awards) is critical to his true Vietnam story.

A. March 13, 1969: "No Man Left Behind" Incident

Attached as Exhibit 15 is Kerry's account of "no man left behind" where, in Tour of Duty, Kerry repeats his now-familiar story of returning, wounded by an underwater mine, to recover a Special Forces soldier, Jim Rassman, in a hail of fire pulling Rassman from the water with his bleeding arm. Tour, at 313-17. The story of Kerry's return to save Rassman, under fire and wounded from the mine, has been told in many millions of dollars of Kerry advertising. See Kerry website; see also, e.g., Kerry's full-page advertisement in The New York Times, which is attached as Exhibit 16.

Kerry's after-action report for that day is featured on his website. See Exhibit 17. KJW identifies the report as Kerry's. Likewise, Kerry reported his shrapnel wounds to the Navy in an injury report:

"LTJG Kerry suffered shrapnel wounds in his left buttocks and contusions on his right forearm when a mine detonated close aboard PCF-94."

Exhibit 18. Exhibit 17 likewise identifies Kerry's "injuries" as contusion right forearm (minor) (i.e., a small bruise) and a shrapnel wound left buttocks.

The regulations for the Purple Heart are attached as Exhibit 19 and, of course, exclude accidental injury and self-inflicted wounds (except non-negligent wounds in the heat of battle). [b]Although Kerry's "minor" bruise could never entitle him to a Purple Heart, Kerry's reported shrapnel wound to his "buttocks" (although minor according to the treating physician) from an enemy mine would have entitled him to such an award (had he not been lying about its origin). [u]Receiving the third Purple Heart, within three days Kerry had requested reassignment from Vietnam on the basis of three Purple Hearts -- some 243 days early. See Exhibit 20.[/b][/u]

(i) The Purple Heart Lie

Kerry's third Purple Heart was his ticket home. It also was much of the basis of his Bronze Star, repeating "his bleeding arm" and shrapnel wound from the mine story. [b]The problem is that his operating report was a total lie since Kerry's shrapnel wound "in the buttocks" came not from a mine at all as he falsely reported, but at his own hand. Larry Thurlow, an officer on shore with Kerry that day, recounts that Kerry's shrapnel wound came not from any mine, but from a self-inflicted wound when Kerry (with no enemy to be seen) threw a concussion grenade into a rice pile and stayed too close.[/b] See Exhibit 10, ¶ 3. This "brown rice" incident with rice/shrapnel lodged in Kerry from his own grenade is also recounted by James Rassman, a Kerry supporter and "the no man left behind" on page 105 of John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography By The Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best, by Michael Kranish, Brian C. Mooney, and Nina J. Easton (New York: Public Affairs, 2004) (the "Kranish book"). See Exhibit 21.

Most surprisingly, John Kerry himself (while falsely reporting to the Navy and public that he suffered a shrapnel wound from a mine explosion so as to get a third Purple Heart and go home) [b]reflected in his own journal that his buttocks' wound came, not from any mine but, rather, from a grenade tossed into a rice cache by himself or friendly troops (in the absence of any enemy fire). "I got a piece of small grenade in my ass from one of the rice bin explosions."[/b] Exhibit 15, Tour, at 313; see also Exhibit 15, Tour, at 317. "Kerry . . . also had the bits of shrapnel and rice extracted from his backside." [b]See also the sworn statement of participants that there was no hostile fire (Exhibits 6, 7, and 10). It also should be noted that the rice extracted from Kerry's backside could hardly be the result of an underwater mine, as Kerry claimed in his operating report.[/b]

The conclusion is inescapable: that Kerry lied by reporting to the Navy that he had been wounded by shrapnel in his backside from an enemy mine when in reality he negligently wounded himself and then lied about the wound in order to secure a third Purple Heart and a quick trip home.

(ii) The Bronze Star Lie

As recounted in the attached affidavits of three on-scene participants (and verified by many others present) Kerry's operating report, Bronze Star story, and subsequent "no man left behind" story [b]are a total hoax on the Navy and the nation. As recounted in the affidavits of Van Odell (Exhibit 6), Jack Chenoweth (Exhibit 7), and Larry Thurlow (Exhibit 10) (and verified by every other officer present and many others), a mine went off under PCF 3 -- some yards from Kerry's boat. The force of the explosion disabled PCF 3 and knocked several sailors, dazed, into the water. [u]All boats, except one, closed to rescue the sailors and defend the disabled boat. [i]That boat -- Kerry's boat -- fled the scene. After a short period, it was evident to all on the scene that there was no additional hostile fire.[/i][/b][/u] Thurlow began the daring rescue of disabled PCF 3, while Chenoweth began to pluck dazed survivors of PCF 3 from the water. [b]Midway through the process, after it was apparent that there was no hostile fire, Kerry finally returned, picking up Rassman who was only a few yards from Chenoweth's boat which was also going to pick Rassman up.[u] Each of the affiants (and many other Swiftees on the scene that day) are certain that Kerry has wholly lied about the incident. Consider this: How could the disabled PCF abandon the scene of the mine? Why did Kerry have to "return" to the scene?[/u]

Kerry's account of this action, which was used to secure the Bronze Star and a third Purple Heart, is an extraordinary example of fraud. Kerry describes "boats rcd heavy A/W and S/A from both banks. Fire continued for about 5000 meters." Exhibit 17. In other words, the boats went through a double gauntlet at about 50 yards distance that was 3.2 miles long (comparable to Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg on two sides), and yet none of the other boats within feet of Kerry's boat heard a shot or suffered an injury after the PCF 3 mine explosion, except for John Kerry's buttocks rice wound of earlier origin.

Clearly, Van Odell is right when he says, "John Kerry lied to get his Bronze Star . . . I know. I was there. I saw what happened." As Jack Chenoweth swore, "his account of what happened and what actually happened are the difference between night and day." [b]Most poignantly, Larry Thurlow, whose brave actions saved the PCF 3 boat that day after Kerry fled, has the right to say, "When the chips were down, you could not count on John Kerry."[/b]

B. December 2, 1968 Purple Heart

On February 28, 1969, John Kerry received his first Purple Heart for an incident three months earlier, on or about December 2, 1968. Kerry's account of the incident is contained in Tour of Duty, pages 147 and 148 (Exhibit 23). [b]Kerry claims to have been with two crewmen, Zaldonis and Runyon. See Exhibit 23. Neither Kerry, Zaldonis, nor Runyon claim to have seen any hostile fire. See Exhibit 24 (Kranish book, pp. 72-73). A Purple Heart cannot be given for a self-inflicted wound under the attached regulations.[/b]

Unmentioned in Kerry's Tour Of Duty version are the actual surrounding facts. Kerry, Lieutenant William Schachte, USN, and an enlisted man were on the whaler. Seeing movement from an unknown source, the sailors opened fire on the movement. There was no hostile fire. [b][u]When Kerry's rifle jammed, he picked up an M-79 grenade launcher and fired a grenade at a nearby object. This sprayed the boat with shrapnel from Kerry's own grenade, a tiny piece of which embedded in Kerry's arm.[/u][/b]

[b]Kerry managed to keep the tiny fragment embedded until he saw Dr. Louis Letson.[/b] Dr. Letson's affidavit is attached as Exhibit 5. When Letson inquired why Kerry was there, Kerry said that he had been wounded by hostile fire. [b]The accompanying crewmen indicated that Kerry was the new "JFK" and that he had actually wounded himself with an M-79. Letson removed the tiny fragment with tweezers and placed a band aid over the tiny scratch. The tiny fragment removed by Letson appeared to be an M-79 fragment, as described by the personnel accompanying Kerry.[/b]

The next morning Kerry showed up at Division Commander Grant Hibbard's office. Hibbard had already spoken to Schachte and conducted an investigation. Hibbard's affidavit is attached as Exhibit 11. [b]Hibbard's investigation revealed that Kerry's "rose thorn" scratch had been self-inflicted in the absence of hostile fire. Hibbard, therefore, booted Kerry out of his office and denied the Purple Heart.

Some three months later, cf. Exhibit 22, after all personnel actually familiar with the events of December 2, 1969 had left Vietnam, Kerry somehow managed to obtain a Purple Heart for the December 2, 1968 event from an officer with no connection to Coastal Division 14 or knowledge of the December 2, 1968 event or of Commander Hibbard's prior turn down of the Purple Heart request.[/b] [b][i][u]All normal documentation supporting a Purple Heart is missing. There is absolutely no casualty report (i.e., spot report) or hostile fire report or after-action report in the Navy's files to support this "Purple Heart" because there was no casualty, hostile fire, or action on which to report. The sole document relied upon by Kerry is a record showing the band aid and tweezers treatment by Dr. Letson recorded by deceased corpsman, Jess Carreon.[/b][/u][/i]

There are no witnesses who claim to have seen hostile fire -- necessary for a Purple Heart (even a rose thorn Purple Heart) -- that day. [b]At least three witnesses, Dr. Letson (who spoke to the participants and removed the M-79 fragment), Lt. Bill Schachte (on the boat), and Cmdr. Grant Hibbard (whose investigation revealed Kerry's application for a Purple Heart to be fraudulent), are able to testify directly or based upon contemporaneous investigation that Kerry's first Purple Heart was a fraud.[/b] Thus, [b]Lewis Letson's statement that "I know John Kerry is lying about a first Purple Heart" is conclusively established by the evidence. Like the third Purple Heart, Kerry's first Purple Heart was essential to his quick trip home.[/b]

C. Christmas In Cambodia

If there is a consistent[1] repeated story by John Kerry about his Vietnam experience, it is his story about how he and his boat spent Christmas Eve and Christmas of 1968 illegally present in Cambodia and, listening to President Nixon's contrary assurances, developed "a deep mistrust of U.S. government pronouncements." See Exhibit 24, Kranish book, p. 84. [b]The point of his story was that his government and his commanders were lying about Kerry's presence in Cambodia on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. During a critical debate on the floor of the United States Senate on March 27, 1986, Senator John Kerry said:

"Mr. President, I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia.[/b]

I have that memory which is seared -- seared -- in me . . . ."

Exhibit 25, Congressional Record - Senate of March 27, 1986, page 3594.

By way of further example, Kerry wrote an article for the Boston Herald on October 14, 1979:

"I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real."

See Exhibit 26.

The Christmas in Cambodia story of John Kerry was repeated as recently as July 7, 2004 by Michael Kranish, a principal biographer of Kerry from The Boston Globe. On the Hannity & Colmes television show, Kranish indicated that Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia was a critical turning point in Kerry's life.

[b]The story is a total preposterous fabrication by Kerry. Exhibit 8 is an affidavit by the Commander of the Swift boats in Vietnam, Admiral Roy Hoffmann, stating that Kerry's claim to be in Cambodia for Christmas Eve and Christmas of 1968 is a total lie. If necessary, similar affidavits are available from the entire chain of command. [u]In reality, Kerry was at Sa Dec -- easily locatable on any map more than fifty miles from Cambodia.[/u] Kerry himself inadvertently admits that he was in Sa Dec for Christmas Eve and Christmas and not in Cambodia, as he had stated for so many years on the Senate Floor, in the newspapers, and elsewhere. Exhibit 27, Tour, pp. 213-219. Sa Dec is hardly "close" to the Cambodian border. In reality, far from being ordered secretly to Cambodia, Kerry spent a pleasant night at Sa Dec with "visions of sugar plums" dancing in his head. Exhibit 27, p. 219. At Sa Dec where the Swift boat patrol area ended, there were many miles of other boats (PBR's) leading to the Cambodian border. There were also gunboats on the border to prevent any crossing. If Kerry tried to get through, he would have been arrested. Obviously, Kerry has hardly been honest about his service in Vietnam.[/b]

D. War Crimes

Returning to the United States, [b]Kerry made speeches charging that U.S. forces in Vietnam were "like the army of Genghis Khan," that "crimes were committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of all levels of command," and that our officers in Coastal Division were like Lieutenant Calley. Kerry met on least two occasions with the North Vietnamese in Paris and is, in fact, honored as a hero in the war museum in Ho Chi Minh City. See pictures on WinterSoldier.com and SwiftVets.com. Joe Ponder is a widely quoted disabled vet from Coastal Division 11 who saw no war crimes but knows that Kerry dishonored our unit. Exhibit 13. Shelton White, a badly wounded Coastal Division 11 veteran, likewise saw no war crimes and remembers Kerry's betrayal. Exhibit 12.[/b]

Conclusion

As set forth at length, there is not only a reasonable factual basis for the statements in the ad; they are virtually conclusively established by the documentation.

Thank you for your kind consideration. Please do not hesitate to call me if you have any questions.
Very truly yours,

Original signed by John E. O'Neill

The column of the year. A must read.

08.06.04 (6:25 am)   [edit]
From National Review Online--

August 06, 2004, 8:37 a.m.
[b]A Return to Childhood
The new immaturity.[/b]
-- Victor Davis Hanson

I would never have imagined that journalists, academics, actors, artists, and the intelligentsia in general would have so opposed the end of dictatorship and promotion of democracy abroad. And who would have thought that Vietnam would become the source for Democratic nostalgia, rather than the usual recrimination? Did anyone think the appointment of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, promises of $15 billion in grants to combat AIDS in Africa, and lectures to the politically powerful Arab world to cease the genocide of black Sudanese would earn George Bush slurs evoking the Taliban, the old Confederacy, and fascism? Have we become children who live in a world of bedtime stories, afraid to face the cruel truth around us?

POOR US — WE ARE ALL ALONE?

It is disturbing to see John Kerry insist that America has lost its friends and, through imbecilic diplomacy or worse, alienated those abroad. The world I see would beg to differ. Emigrants strive to reach American shores more often than all other destinations combined. Globalization is now synonymous with Americanization itself. The world's preference for American food, music, travel, popular culture, fashion, and entertainment all suggest a dynamism in the United States found nowhere else.

One third of the planet — India and China — has evolved from being impoverished and bitter neutrals or outright enemies into capitalist powerhouses dependent on American free trade and outsourced jobs. If we used to argue in the 1940s about whether millions of dollars in U.S. grain aid really did any good in feeding the starving of China and India, we can all agree now that American liberality in letting consumer goods in and jobs out has done more for the world's hungry millions than a century of American gift-giving.

Without $12 billion a year in remittances from illegal aliens in the United States and American tourists south of the border, the economy of Mexico would be in ruins. For all his party's juvenile rhetoric, Vicente Fox realizes that America is about as liberal and humane to Mexicans who head north as his country is harsh and cruel to Latin Americans who cross its own borders from the south.

European elites, it is true, are angry at the United States. But that pique is more a result of projection and scapegoating rising from its own problems, not ours — as it struggles with demographic crises, unassimilated immigrants, impotence abroad, an embarrassing desire for free American protection despite concomitant resentment and envy, and a growing realization that while the world talks up the EU, when it has real problems, it goes to Washington.

In this regard, Greece is a metaphor for the entire ambivalence of the continent. It now worries about Arab terrorists in Athens, despite courting Middle East dictators for decades. It castigates the U.S. for bothering an Islamic Iraq, but Greeks lauded Milosevic in support of his Orthodox crusade against Albanian and Kosovar Muslims. A few years ago we were booed by Athenians for trying to save Muslims in the Balkans, and now we are even more vehemently trashed for allegedly killing them. Thousands publicly hissed at the U.S. in the immediate aftermath of 9/11; yet American sailors openly patrol the Greek coastline while Special Forces not so openly help train Olympic security officers. Add it all up and there is one constant: Greece (like Europe) really does count on the U.S. as much as it counts on never having to say that publicly.

There are dozens of countries participating in the reconstruction of Iraq, perhaps more than were willing to get on board in Serbia to oust Milosevic. The Arab world's anger at the United States — not evidenced by a precipitous decline in immigration to Detroit or new alliances with France — arises out of hurt and shame. We choose to prefer a democratic Israel to its own autocratic tribalism. Yet Middle Easterners privately know that should they adopt democracy they would win equal treatment from Washington. And they also grasp that to do such a revolutionary Western thing, they would have to embrace religious tolerance, gender equality, free speech, and an end to the pathologies of the Arab Street. And so they are stuck with the nagging truth that the Middle East will have to become more like the West — rather than the West like traditional Arab society — for real friendship to emerge.

POOR US — WHY DO THEY HATE US

The best way to sum up this now popular leftist analysis of the rage of Islamic fascists and their sometime supporters in the Middle East would be simply to imagine a different America, in, say, January 1941.

So envision a Vice President Henry Wallace lecturing the American people on its failure to win the hearts and minds of European youth. He perhaps would say something like, "What have we Americans done wrong to lose millions of Spaniards, Italians, Germans, and Japanese, who turn their back on democracy and prefer fascism?"

Roosevelt then might expound further, "Look at the world! We don't have an ally anywhere but Britain. What have we done to earn the animus of most of Europe that has either joined Hitler or would prefer to be neutral? Why is all of Eastern Europe against us? Whether Communist or fascist, Russian or German, the common enemy is either the United States or England. All Stalin and Hitler can agree on is shared dislike of America. Why? Even Mexico and South America feel more affinity for Germany than for the U.S."

Then a congressional board of inquiry could issue a finding that America had failed to give proper aid to Europe during the depression. It could suggest further that we are isolationists and self-absorbed. More thoughtful senators, the intellectual precursors of a Patty Murray perhaps, could rail that whereas Hitler built autobahns, we lent out high-interest loans to those who were already struggling.

All such browbeating would have an element of truth in it, but, of course, in its totality remain an outright lie: Hitler, like bin Laden and his epigones, was the problem, not us. The only difference is that our grandparents knew that and we don't.

YES, WE REALLY CAN HAVE IT BOTH WAYS

The best evidence of the new childishness is its persistence in self-contradiction. Thus, Howard Dean hints that the recently elevated alerts might be politically motivated terrorist hype — even as John Kerry insists that we haven't done enough to stop the fascists from planning our destruction.

Similarly, the Iraq war was at times necessary, completely uncalled for, poorly planned, nevertheless worthy of staying the course in, and more still — depending on the particular level of support voiced for the war in the polls of the week. The New York Times in April decries brutal American force in Fallujah, only by summer to scoff that our forbearance there had created a terrorist heaven.

The modern Left was created on the premise that Vietnam was both a strategic mistake and a moral catastrophe — and now has come full circle in praising men like John Kerry, Max Cleland, and Wesley Clark for their combat service. Are they heroes of a noble cause that to win deserved more support at home? Are they tragic fighters whose bravery was not properly appreciated? Or are they participants in what John Kerry once assured the American people was an illegal war in which soldiers routinely committed war atrocities? All or none?

THE WAR MADE IT WORSE FOR US?

This is a favorite canard of New York Times and Washington Post columnists who resent the inconvenience of security measures in their digs, and the attention such vigilance diverts from Mr. Kerry's message. This story I think runs something like this. After 9/11, instead of pursuing the culprits through the proper domain of law enforcement, Mr. Bush embarked on two wars. Thus, we are now plagued with a series of terror alerts in a manner that did not follow the first World Trade Center bombing of 1993. Then rightly we indicted the culprits, arrested them, put them on trial — and went back to our afternoon nap.

Put aside the idea of magnitude — the singularity of 3,000 dead, a city block leveled, and a trillion dollars in lost revenue — as well as the fact that the 1990s appeasement led to constant harvesting of American diplomats, soldiers, and tourists abroad.

Instead, focus on the sheer historical ignorance of such sentiments. The tardy decision to fight back — whether in Britain in 1939 or the United States in 1941 — always carries with it the acceptance of greater short-term bloodletting and chaos in hopes of long-term security. Churchill was applauded for ending Chamberlain's appeasement — and then nearly was sacked after Dunkirk, Singapore, and Tobruk defeats that all could have been avoided by submissively "dialoguing" with a Hitler or Tojo.

Pearl Harbor was not immediately followed by victory at Midway, but rather first the shame and violence of Wake Island and the fall of the Philippines. Certainly, there was more, not less, killing inherent in America's defiant decision on December 8, 1941.

So yes, Pakistan is beset by nearly daily assassination attempts and terror is ubiquitous now in Saudi Arabia. But this chaos is not because of George Bush, but rather because George Bush, unlike all previous presidents, at last pressured those autocratic governments to cease their bribery and tacit support of terrorism.

Fascists don't like it when erstwhile sponsors switch sides. In the same manner, once bin Laden & Co. learned that the U.S. was at last serious in eradicating their terrorist sanctuaries, they accelerated their killing, rightly convinced that there was a real war on now, in which there would soon be real winners and losers — and losing meant the end of all the progress that they achieved in the last two decades.

Why do we embrace these flawed concepts and exhibit such wild swings of mood and logic?

In a word, we have devolved into an infantile society in which our technological successes have wrongly suggested that we can alter the nature of man to our whims and pleasures — just like a child who expects instant gratification from his parents. In a culture where affluence and leisure are seen as birthrights, war, sacrifice, or even the mental fatigue about worrying over such things wear on us. So we construct, in a deductive and anti-empirical way, a play universe that better suits us.

In that regard, for the moment George Bush is a godsend. His drawl, Christianity, tough talk, ramrod straight strut — all that and more become the locus of our fears: French and Germans on the warpath? They must have been Bushwhacked, not angry that their subsidized utopia — from a short work week, looming pension catastrophe, and no national defense — is eroding.

Bombs going off in Manhattan or stuck in a tunnel while cops search every truck? Either way, Bush is the problem. Either he foolishly went into Iraq and let down our guard, or he is trying to scare us into believing that a nonexistent terrorist is under every bed. The television still blares about suicide bombers and repugnant thugs tormenting bound hostages? Surely Bush set them off. The proper response? Presto! Elect a less confrontational John Kerry, and thus cease a long, difficult war to defeat and to discredit all who would embrace such odious ideas.

Liberal civilizations often tire of eternal vigilance and in the midst of peacetime affluence work themselves into mass hysteria when challenged. Such is the picture we receive of the Athenian assembly around 340 B.C. when Demosthenes desperately warned that Philip was not a national liberator. Few thought Hannibal really would cross the Ebro. Churchill in the 1930s wasn't listened to very much — after the Somme, who wanted lectures about deterrence? Ronald Reagan's earlier prescience about the Soviet threat in the post-Vietnam era prompted Hollywood to turn out cheap TV movies warning of Reagan-inspired nuclear winters.

We too are reverting to our childhood and thus are in the same weird mood preferring fantasies and stories to reality. The Democrats know it. And so the unifying theme of their otherwise contradictory messages is that we can return to the infantile delusions of September 10, and not the crisis-filled adult world of post-September 11 that now confronts George W. Bush.

— Victor Davis Hanson, an NRO contributor, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of The Soul of Battle and Carnage and Culture, among other books. His website is www.victorhanson.com.

The bottom line: for Iraq to be free, terrorists, militias cannot exist

08.06.04 (5:04 am)   [edit]
Muqtada al-Sadr apparently doesn't get it. He was granted "amnesty" by the Iraqi government out of a sign of respect. But Iraq has one army-- the Iraqi army. It does not need or want Sadr's militia, and therefore it will be disbanded.

Recently Iraqi forces accompanied by US troops surrounded Sadr's HQ. This gave Sadr's troops an excuse to fight. And that's what they're doing. Sadr says the American troops started the current violence, but this is false. The existence of the militia itself is an act of aggression to Iraq and a threat to national security. In short, it is Sadr that has started the current conflict. US troops are there to help Iraqi forces.

Will Sadr get away with his militia? Let's hope not. If the militia won't disband, they should be destroyed. Most Iraqis realize that Sadr's army- along with the terrorists blowing up Iraq-- are only hurting Iraqis. They despize them.

News article-- "US Troops, Al-Sadr Militants Clash"-- http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...

So billionaire George Soros can finance 527s, but Kerry critics can't?

08.06.04 (4:37 am)   [edit]
So Swiftboat Veterans for the Truth, a group of folks who served with Kerry in Vietnam (note , moronic lefties, that "served with" does not necessarily mean "on the same boat"), think Kerry is a liar and a war criminal himself who got out of Vietnam ASAP and then lied about the "band of brothers" he served with. They make a damn convincing argument too, one that Kerry only denies with threats of lawsuits.

Oh well. Lefties use 527s to call Bush Hitler (have you seen the MoveOn attack ads?), and then, naturally, when one single anti-Kerry 527 ad pops up, Kerry, et al. threaten a lawsuit. You wanna talk libel? Lies? Slander? Try "Farenheit 9/11", the mother of all propaganda films.

But we were told that this was all about the "first amendment". Ah, yes. Lefties can lie and make things up. They can misconstrue, they can imply, they can make quotes out of thin air. They can deny the facts. That is fine. But then some veterans who aren't even conservative but [i]were[/i]destroyed by Kerry's own false accusations decide to call Kerry on the facts, and they are painted as they liars.

I'd like to see a lawsuit by Kerry. The guy who has the entire left-wing pulling water and lying about the president for him can't stand it when he brings this Vietnam scrutiny upon himself. If you remember, it was Kerry in 1992 who said that a candidate's Vietnam service didn't matter. He passionately defended Clinton. Now in 2004, it means everything. It is the only thing. What about Medicare? Jobs? A plan for Iraq? " I SERVED IN VIETNAM!"

Kerry brought all of this scrutiny about his service upon himself. It's sad that his service is the only thing he has to stand on (which helps explain why he can't stand it when his service is exposed as a fraud).

On a larger scale, though, there shouldn't even be 527 ads. 527 ads are exploitive of a loophole in CFR laws. There shouldn't be any laws about how to run a campaign. It's not like lefties would honor them anyway and, more than that, the laws restrict freedom of speech.

But the left should get over it.

Albany, NY terror suspects first discovered in Northern Iraq

08.06.04 (4:24 am)   [edit]
We're still waiting for Kerry criticism on what Bush did wrong.

From the NY Post--

[b]MOSQUER AND 'COMMANDER'[/b]
By IAN BISHOP and KENNETH LOVETT

August 6, 2004 -- The leader of an Albany mosque busted yesterday on terror charges tied to the purchase of a shoulder-fired missile was listed as "The Commander" in an address book carried by a terrorist in Iraq, The Post has learned.

A government official said U.S. troops who raided a terror training camp run by the Ansar al-Islam group in northern Iraq last summer discovered the address book among other documents.

It contained personal information about Yassin Aref, the 34-year-old Albany imam arrested yesterday along with another mosque leader, the official said.

"His name, address and telephone number in Albany were all in the book," the official said. "His title [in the book] is 'The Commander.' "

Aref, along with Mohammed Hossain, 49, a Bangladeshi native and founder of the Masjid As-Salam mosque in Albany, were charged after an elaborate yearlong sting operation in which the pair allegedly took part in what they believed was a money-laundering scheme connected to the purchase of shoulder-fired missiles.

Aref's links to the radical Muslim group Ansar al-Islam gives a chilling glimpse into the world of al Qaeda operatives living in the United States.

The group has been tied to Osama bin Laden's terror network and has been declared a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department.

Critics question Kerry's convenient faith and family values

08.05.04 (4:44 am)   [edit]
[b]Critics Question Kerry's Convenient Faith and Family Values[/b]
By Jenni Parker
August 2, 2004

(AgapePress) - A spokeswoman for Concerned Women for America's Legislative Action Committee (CWALAC) is criticizing Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry for "masquerading" beneath the cloak of faith and family values. Meanwhile, a Catholic spokesman suggests the candidate may be pulling that cloak on or off at his own convenience.

After attending Kerry's speech at the Democratic National Convention last week, Dr. Janice Shaw Crouse of CWALAC said she was appalled that the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate had the nerve to "publicly pretend to value faith and family" when his voting pattern "screams hypocrisy." She says Kerry's constituents need only inspect the Massachusetts senator's voting record to determine his true values.

Crouse believes most American voters would be shocked to learn to what so-called values Kerry has adhered during his legislative tenure. For instance, she points out, "In spite of Kerry's claim to believe that 'life begins at conception,' he voted at least six times against banning partial birth abortion, a procedure that takes human life as late as the third trimester of a pregnancy."

And, the CWA spokeswoman adds, despite Kerry's claim that he championed victims' rights and made prosecuting violence against women a priority, in 2004 he voted against the Unborn Victims of Violence Act -- legislation that criminalizes harming or killing an unborn baby in an assault on a pregnant woman.

Also, Crouse notes, in the Democratic nominee's acceptance speech, he criticized the religious beliefs of others while touting his own: "I don't wear my religion on my sleeve," Kerry said, "but faith has given me values and hope to live by."

But Crouse feels such words are repeatedly proved empty by the liberal senator's actions, such as his past choices regarding unborn victims of violence and partial birth abortion, and his continued support for embryonic stem cell research. "Once again," she observes, "we see that whatever 'values' Senator Kerry has chosen to live by produce strange results."

Crouse says President Bush's beliefs apparently guide him to value human life, while Kerry's beliefs obviously lead him to support things like the harvesting of human embryos and the creation of life for the purpose of being destroyed, supposedly in the name of scientific advancement. But Crouse says Kerry's support for embryonic stem cell research requires another kind of faith -- "blind hope," since ESCR has never resulted in a single cure for disease.

Catholic leader troubled by Kerry's two Americas

Another person who found the appeals to faith in Kerry's acceptance speech questionable is William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. He says at one time people of faith constituted the heart and soul of both the Republican and Democratic parties, but Kerry's speech underscored how things have changed.

Noting Kerry's words, "...we welcome people of faith. America is not us and them," Donohue points out that the candidate, while apparently condemning conservatives for using religion as a political wedge, is doing that very thing himself. Meanwhile, even as he denounces the religious rhetoric of the Christian right, the liberal senator's own faith seems to have become a major emphasis in his speeches and campaign ads lately.

Donohue notes that Kerry has never really detailed how religion has influenced his life up till now. Nevertheless, the senator's campaign has begun running TV ads that emphasize his supposed religious commitment, revealing that Kerry was an altar boy, considered becoming a priest, and wore a rosary around his neck during his service in Vietnam. And recently, Kerry told CNN's Larry King that his religion is "the bedrock" of his life. However, some of those closest to Kerry in the past contradict the notion that he was ever any more than nominally Catholic.

This leads Donohue to wonder whether the presidential hopeful is "playing politics with his religion." He notes that during Kerry's first marriage to the non-Catholic Julia Thorne, the supposedly devout Kerry never insisted that his children be raised in the Roman Catholic faith. That, like the Democratic politician's stance on abortion, is in direct contradiction to the Church's teachings -- as was his second marriage. Kerry wed Teresa Heinz before getting an annulment of his previous marriage.

In any case, Donohue says Kerry's speech at the Democratic National Convention was problematic -- and not only because of his sudden, pragmatic emphasis on faith and family values. The Catholic pro-family leader feels the Democrat's unconscious separation of America into two camps -- "the 'us' and the 'them,'" may be even more troubling.

In describing that dichotomy, Donohue contends Kerry "literally aligned the most active Democrats with the faithless and then tagged the faithful as outsiders." Now, the Catholic League president says, all the Democratic presidential candidate has to do is explain this to the 90 percent of Americans who believe in God.

2004 AgapePress all rights reserved.

Third suspect confirmed terror threat, Times admits NEW info major factor in threat

08.05.04 (4:30 am)   [edit]
I've already posted an LA Times link stating that old info plus new Al Qaeda info was responsible for the terror alert over the past weekend, but some lefties insist it was only based on old info, making it seem that this is somehow a political move by Bush. So I've published these two articles that also reflect reality. Please read, Lefties.

It's amazing. Our government is synthesizing intelligence, is preventing attacks, is doing what it is supposed to do. But it is not good enough. Because the government is conservative there has to be an ulterior motive. What a load of bunk.

I'm sure John Kerry would do it better, though. That's his basic plan for everything-- I'll do it better!

2 articles, first from today:

[b]Suspect Confirmed Terror Threat, Feds Say[/b]
By TED BRIDIS, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration learned from a third person, separate from two prisoners identified this week, that al-Qaida was plotting to attack American financial buildings, officials said.

The information from the third person was "another new stream of intelligence" that supported the White House decision to issue a terror warning on Sunday, the officials said.

The information arrived days before the public alert, as officials were reviewing reams of recently obtained documents and photographs that showed surveillance of five buildings in New York City, New Jersey and Washington carried out years earlier by al-Qaida.

"Old information isn't irrelevant information — particularly with this kind of enemy," Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said Wednesday in Nashville, Tenn.

The information corroborating al-Qaida's intentions to carry out attacks against U.S. financial buildings came from someone other than two men recently captured in Pakistan, said a senior Justice Department (news - web sites) official, speaking on condition of anonymity. It was unclear whether the person was a prisoner or informant.

Information from the two captives — a young militant familiar with computers and a man indicted for the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa in 1998 — had provided the bulk of the intelligence that led to Sunday's warnings.

The corroborating information did not specify targets in the United States or say when an attack might be planned, the official said. But it so closely tracked the other intelligence that U.S. financial buildings had already been under surveillance by al-Qaida that it contributed to the decision to issue the public warnings.

"Coupled with general threat reporting, coupled with other pieces of information, then all of the sudden you say to yourself, 'This is a time when we have to talk to America about the threat.' And that's exactly what we did," Ridge said.

A U.S. counterterrorism official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the surveillance information last week was married with "very recent and current activity" from al-Qaida, blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, indicating the group's interest in attacking this year. This information, which includes debriefings and other means of gathering information, is causing the administration serious concern, the official said.

"A bunch of things came together at the same time," Frances Townsend, the White House Homeland Security adviser, said in an interview Wednesday with National Public Radio. She said the corroborating information came from "a very sensitive ongoing investigation in another part of the world."

The FBI (news - web sites) is monitoring al-Qaida operatives and others associated with Islamic terror groups inside the United States, although these people have not been directly linked to the threat against financial buildings, the Justice Department official said. These people include financiers for Ansar al-Islam, a group linked to al-Qaida, the official said.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan declined to describe in detail what he called "another new stream of intelligence," saying it might endanger continuing intelligence operations. He criticized as an "irresponsible suggestion" any criticism that the administration had issued a terror warning for political purposes.

"When you connect all these streams of intelligence, it paints an alarming picture," McClellan told reporters aboard Air Force One during a campaign flight to Iowa.

Ridge and other senior administration officials spent parts of Wednesday defending the warnings, which came on the heels of the Democratic National Convention and drew attention from the presidential campaign of nominee John Kerry (news - web sites).

"I categorically state that the none of the terror threats are politically motivated," Ridge said.

In New York, Treasury Secretary John Snow said suggestions that terror alerts were manipulated were "pure, unadulterated nonsense." Snow toured the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (news - web sites) and praised traders for their resilience in the face of such warnings.

Also Wednesday, intelligence officials told Congress their organizations have made strides since the 2001 terror attacks and cautioned lawmakers against moving too far or fast in the name of intelligence reform. CIA (news - web sites) Deputy Director Jami Miscik and other top CIA, FBI and State Department officials appeared in a rare public hearing, and told Congress any changes should be based on intelligence work today, not on problems that existed before September 2001.

Associated Press writers Katherine Pfleger Shrader in Washington, Matt Gouras in Nashville and Kendra Locke in New York contributed to this report.

And from yesterday's NY Times:

August 4, 2004
[b]New Qaeda Activity Is Said to Be Major Factor in Alert[/b]
By DOUGLAS JEHL and RICHARD W. STEVENSON

ASHINGTON, Aug. 3 - Senior government officials said Tuesday that new intelligence pointing to a current threat of a terrorist attack on financial targets in New York and possibly in Washington - not just information about surveillance on specific buildings over the years - was a major factor in the decision over the weekend to raise the terrorism alert level.

The officials said the separate stream of intelligence, which they had not previously disclosed, reached the White House only late last week and was part of a flow that the officials said had prompted them to act urgently in the last few days.

The officials disclosed the information a day after the Bush administration acknowledged for the first time that much of the surveillance activity cited last weekend by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to justify the latest, specific warnings had been at least three years old. At the same time, the White House offered a vigorous defense of its decision to heighten the alert in Manhattan, Newark and Washington, with officials saying there was still good reason for alarm.

"I think it's wrong and plain irresponsible to suggest that it was based on old information,'' Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said of the heightened warning as President Bush traveled to Dallas on a campaign swing.

In an appearance in New York, Mr. Ridge responded forcefully to a question about whether election-year politics had played a part in determining how and when the intelligence was released.

"We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security,'' Mr. Ridge said.

He added: "The detail, the sophistication, the thoroughness of this information, if you had access to it, you'd say we did the right thing. Government should let the public know about situations like this. It's not about politics. It's about confidence in government telling you when they get the information.''

In addition to the surveillance activity, detailed in reports uncovered late last week from computer disks in Pakistan, a senior intelligence official said that "very current and recent activity on the part of Al Qaeda'' has left little doubt that "Al Qaeda is moving toward the execution stage of attacks here in the homeland.''

The language used by senior administration officials on Tuesday in warning of a possible attack was at least as strong as that Mr. Ridge used in announcing the alert on Sunday, and much stronger than the language used on Monday, when the officials acknowledged that the reconnaissance reports dated back to the period surrounding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Among other things, one official disclosed on Tuesday that one intelligence report had pointed to a possible attack "in August or September.''

That shifting tone may prove frustrating to the public, providing little guidance for assessing the gravity of threat information whose details remain shrouded in intelligence reports not available to anyone outside the highest ranks of the government.

A senior White House official who mentioned the new stream of intelligence in an interview refused to say anything more about its source or content. The official said it had not been publicly disclosed out of concern that such a step could compromise intelligence and law enforcement operations in the United States and around the world. Officials would not describe those operations but said they were meant to disrupt a possible plot.

But senior federal intelligence and law enforcement officials also described the intelligence as important. They said it had reached the White House last Friday and strongly reinforced the sense of alarm prompted by the separate flow of information that was arriving at the same time via the Central Intelligence Agency from Pakistan and that was based on information culled from seized computer disks that contained detailed case reports of reconnaissance conducted on buildings in Manhattan, Newark and Washington in 2000 and 2001.

In providing new details about those case reports, senior government officials described them for the first time as discrete documents, each at least 20 pages long and devoted to a particular target, and perhaps most intriguingly, they said, written in "perfect English.''

The author of the reports was "obviously someone who has lived an extensive period of time in the West, exceptionally professional, exceptionally meticulous,'' a senior intelligence official said in a telephone interview. "Anyone who thinks that these terrorists are a bunch of ne'er-do-wells, if 9/11 didn't convince them, these case reports would convince them.''

Though the case reports do appear to have been completed before the Sept. 11 attacks, as Bush administration officials first acknowledged on Monday, some of the computer files appear to have been updated or accessed more recently. One was a file modified in January and including a photograph of a building, a senior White House official said. The official also said there was reason to believe that people associated with Al Qaeda who are still at large would have had access to the reports.

The officials would not identify the building that appears in the recently modified file, except to say that it was not one of the five that have been named. Those five are the New York Stock Exchange and the Citigroup Center in Manhattan, the Prudential building in Newark and the headquarters of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington.

The officials also acknowledged that they had not been able to assess the significance of the fact that the computer file had been modifie