The D Word

Tim Squitieri, writing in USA today, says that reservists are not answering recall orders. "Of the 1,662 ready reservists ordered to report to Fort Jackson, S.C., by Sept. 22," he writes, "only 1,038 had done so, the Army said Monday.. . . The ready reserve is an infrequently used pool of former soldiers who can be called to duty in a national emergency or war. On June 29, the Army announced it would call 5,674 members of its IRR back to active duty this year and next." Take this at face value and we can assume that President Bush isn't thinking about a draft.

At any rate, with all the recent hollering about President Bush re-instating the draft, seems to me that's exactly what will happen if Kerry is elected. In fact, if he does what he claims he'll do, the draft is inevitable.

After all, in his speech on June 3 Kerry said "My first order of business as commander in chief will be to expand
America’s active duty forces. Not to increase the number of soldiers in Iraq, but to add 40,000 new soldiers to prevent and prepare for other possible conflicts."

And where does he plan to get all those troops? He doesn't say. Anad he doesn't say the D word, either. He just says "And this will help relieve the strain on our troops," and adds "it will bring more of our soldiers, guardsmen and reservists back home to their families and get them time for the new training they need."

Maybe a draft is inevitable unless we just pull out and leave Iraq to fate. We know President Bush will stay the course; we're not so sure about Kerry.

Comparisons

Ordinarily I don't give much credibility to the items that cruise the Internet and arrive in my Email box. However, I received this one today and have verified each and every one of the facts through independent research over the past few weeks so I think I'll post it verbatim:

"Every American should know the following:


There were 39 combat related killings
in Iraq during the month of January.....
In the fair city of Detroit there were
35 murders in the month of January.

That's just one American city,
about as deadly as the entire war torn country of Iraq.

When some claim President Bush shouldn't
have started this war, consider the following ...

FDR..
led us into World War II.
Germany never attacked us: Japan did.
From 1941-1945, 450,000 lives were lost,
an average of 112,500 per year.

Truman...
finished that war and started one in Korea,
North Korea never attacked us.
From 1950-1953, 55,000 lives were lost,
an average of 18,334 per year.

John F. Kennedy...
started the Vietnam conflict in 1962.
Vietnam never attacked us.

Johnson...
turned Vietnam into a quagmire.
From 1965-1975, 58,000 lives were lost,
an average of 5,800 per year.

Clinton..
went to war in Bosnia without UN or French consent,
Bosnia never attacked us. (we are STILL there)
He was offered Osama bin Laden's head on a platter
three times and did nothing.
Osama has attacked us on multiple occasions.

In the two years since terrorists attacked us
President Bush has ...
liberated two countries,
crushed the Taliban,
crippled al-Qaida,
put nuclear inspectors in Libya,
Iran and North Korea without firing a shot,
and captured a terrorist who slaughtered
300,000 of his own people.

The Democrats (and media) are complaining
about how long the war is taking, but...
It took less time to take Iraq than it took Janet Reno to take the
Branch Davidian compound.
That was a 51 day operation (against American men, women and children).

We've been looking for evidence of chemical weapons in Iraq for less
time than it took Hillary Clinton to find the Rose Law Firm billing records.

It took less time for the 3rd Infantry Division
and the Marines to destroy the Medina
Republican Guard than it took Ted Kennedy to
call the police after his Oldsmobile
sank at Chappaquiddick.

It took less time to take Iraq than it took to count the votes in Florida!!!!

Our Commander-In-Chief is doing the best job he knows how!
The Military is doing a superb job, given the circumstances!"

Those are the facts. Check them out.

Sandy Berger became National Security Advisor to the White House in 1996. Before that he served as Deputy Assistant to the President (Clinton) for National Security Affairs. His law practice before Clinton was elected, concentrated on international trade and politics. He also served as deputy director of policy planning for the State Department during the Clinton years. Sandy Berger was a man with heavy responsibilities; most recently serving as a political advisor to John Kerry.

Then came the September 11 commission and a visit to the National Archives. There he was given access to classified documents, under the watchful eye of guards. However, on more than one occasion Berger distracted the guards and sent them on spurious missions. He stuffed notes and documents in his shoes and clothing, then left the building.

"When I was informed by the Archives that there were documents missing, I immediately returned everything I had except for a few documents [40 to 50 pages] that I apparently had accidentally discarded," Berger said. Apparently had accidentally discarded????

Later, when questioned, Berger admitted that he hid notes in his jacket and pants in order to sneak them from the Archives. Why did he have to sneak them? If they were his notes they surely would have been cleared by security so they could have been removed openly. Why did Berger not want anyone to see those notes?

According to the 9/11 Commission, Berger had four chances to take action against Al Qaeda: Spring 1998, June 1999, December 1999 and August 2000. Each time, Berger was the main reason action wasn't taken.

In his testimony concerning December 1999 before the Commission, Berger said, "We exerted strong diplomatic and economic pressure on the Taliban to give up Osama bin Laden by withholding recognition of their regime, and threatening to hold them responsible for any future attacks on American interests...We increased efforts to stem money laundering...In 1998 and 1999, President Clinton blocked Al Qaeda financial transactions and froze some $255 million in Taliban assets and shut down the Afghan national airline." In all, his testimony revealed that, indeed, the Clinton administration was well aware of the threat of Bin Laden and the Taliban but it neglected to let the American people in on the secret. And it isn't as if we hadn't already experienced at least one Taliban attack on American soil during the Clinton administration -- the first World Trade Center bombing.

Berger's attorney says his taking the documents was "inadvertent." That simply can't be so if he hid them in his clothes.

Colbert King, writing in the Washington Post in July 2004 says, "Officials familiar with the case told The Post that some documents were missing after Berger's previous visit, so archives staffers coded the papers he was interested in reading to help them detect when other papers disappeared. After one of Berger's visits, one source reported to the Post, those materials had disappeared from the files."

Obviously Sandy Berger has violated some serious Federal security regulations. But even convicting him of that will not answer the question of why? And what documents did he destroy? You can ask him of course, but can you believe the answer? I don't think so.

The Democratic Party needs to do some serious housecleaning to remove people who, like Berger, steal and destroy top security documents. This brings back memories of the Clintons being exonerated on real estate scams, but without full exclosure of missing and shredded documents. And it makes one wonder why John Kerry has been so hesitant about releasing his service records and his wife's financial records. The

Lying as Strategy

"The first and most fundamental mistake was the president's failure to tell the truth to the American people." John Kerry

"The president also failed to level with the American people about what it would take to prevail in Iraq." John Kerry

This is how John Kerry calls President Bush a liar.

But he's wrong -- in fact, since he knows the truth, it looks like Mr. Kerry is lying.

Here's why:
The truth Kerry thinks should have been told to the American people wasn't known as a truth at the time, and is questionable even today. From the time the President went to the UN for help in ousting Hussein to the day of the invasion, Hussein had plenty of time to move weapons to Syria or Iran. Just because we haven't found them (although we did find the portable labs and the fuselages of airplanes where terrorists were trained) doesn't mean they didn't exist. After all, Hussein used them on his own people and fired scuds into Israel in the 1980s-1990s.

Kerry himself told the American people the exact same things the President did. In 1997, speaking on CNN, John Kerry said, "We know we can't count on the French. We know we can't count on the Russians. We know that Iraq is a danger to the United States, and we reserve the right to take pre-emptive action whenever we feel it's in our national interest." That's just one of the many statements he made along those lines in the 1990s and early 2000s. And he voted to give the President the power to go to war without the UN. According to the way he is defining lying, Kerry lied when he said that.

Then there's the charge that the President didn't "level" with the people about what it would take to prevail in Iraq. But he did...again and again President Bush has said this would be a long war and that it will take courage to "stay the course" as he puts it. Of course he didn't give specifics. No one knew what those specifics would be, and at the very beginning the President told us that. The only thing we knew when we went to war is that it would be hard. And that we would persist until we won.

In his speech to a joint session of Congress in 2001, President Bush said, "This war will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion. It will not look like the air war above Kosovo two years ago, where no ground troops were used and not a single American was lost in combat.

"Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism." That's about as honest as you can be about war.

Kerry said today (Sept. 24)"I will finish the war in Iraq.” He doesn't say he will finish the job we started in Iraq; that he will see that the lives already lost will not have been lost in vain. Kerry is a quitter. He demonstrated that in Viet Nam and when he came home from the war.

Merriam Webster defines a lie as "an assertion of something known or believed by the speaker to be untrue with intent to deceive." It's clear that the President believed every word he said about Iraq. The secondary definition is the one Kerry relies on, and that is "something that misleads or deceives," This definition ignores intent and also doesn't consider when the deception occurs. Kerry assumes that any fact or statement that was believed when it was first presented is a lie if new information that fact or statement is determined to be inaccurate later. I don't think that's the traditional understanding of lying. If so, there are an awful lot of liars -- from scientists to teachers. That secondary definition clearly speaks to intent.

Therefore it is painfully clear that Mr. Kerry's strategy of accusing the President of lying is, in itself, a lie.

Kerry Diplomacy

On Wednesday, Sept. 15 Theresa Kerry visited a volunteer center in New York City, watching while they packed supplies bound for disaster relief in the Caribbean. "Clothing is wonderful, but let them go naked for a while, at least the kids," she said. "Water is necessary, and then generators, and then food, and then clothes." Others might put food and water as the top priority but here we see Kerry diplomacy at work.

Then on Thursday, Sept. 23 John Kerry called the Prime Minister of Iraq a liar before Mr. Allawi had even left the country. Belittling the thanks Allawi rendered to the US for sacrificing on behalf of Iraq and its citizens, Kerry said "The prime minister and the president are here obviously to put their best face on the policy." So -- another example of Kerry diplomacy at work.

The USA can't afford Kerry Diplomacy in an already dangerous world.

Kerry's Better World

Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press writes today, "Now the Kerry goals for the final weeks of the campaign start with shifting the media spotlight from Mr. Kerry's long and complex Senate record -- which Republicans have used to attack him as indecisive -- to Mr. Bush's own record as commander in chief. Mr. Kerry needs to move "from Kerry's flip-flops to Bush's flops," as one Democratic adviser puts it."

Kerry is a man caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea. He can't run on his Senate record because it's a rotten one -- shallow and obviously self-aggrandizing. He can't stand on an issue because he's taken at least two sides on each. So he must concentrate on what he considers the President's "flops."

What John Kerry doesn't seem to understand is that the President's "flops" have made differences that are leading millions of people in the Middle East and in America to a better world. Not John Kerry's kind of better world but a truly better one.

The first and most important what he calls the President's "flops" is the war in Iraq. No, we didn't have to rid the world of Saddam Hussein after he played the UN for fools for over a decade; and the obvious conclusion from Kerry's position is that Kerry believes Hussein's reign was a better world. It logically follows then that it was all right for Libya to develop nuclear weapons -- that was Kerry's better world. Thousands of Iraqi citizens are dying in the fight for freedom but millions died for nothing under Hussein. But Mr. Kerry tells us that was a better world. Because we are fighting in Iraq, there is a chance for a democratic society in the Middle East -- but Kerry says it's the wrong war and without that chance we had a better world.

Kerry also thinks the President's education program "No Child Left Behind" (a bi-partisan effort, by the way)is a flop. Never mind that schools that used it are showing progress for the first time in decades. Never mind that the reason some schools never even tried it is that teachers and administrators didn't want to be held accountable. Kerry claims that the President didn't fully fund the program, and yet thousands of dollars lie unclaimed because school districts refused to try it.
Kerry believes in throwing millions of dollars at schools (a tactic that hasn't worked in 50+ years) will make a better world.

According to Pickler, Kerry also said "the president missed an opportunity to get foreign support during two days of diplomacy at the United Nations this week," conveniently forgetting the months of diplomacy leading up to the Iraq War and the many nations that support us and fight beside us today. Kerry seems to think the French are crucial to the welfare of our nation and yet a more-than-casual look at history shows us that other than the American Revolutionary War, the French have caused more American casualties than just about any other nation except Germany.
But Kerry tells us waiting for the French and the Germans to allow us to go to war, even to protect ourselves, would make a better world.

Kerry's problem is that he is and has always been totally narcissistic, from having a cameraman film him in the jungles of Viet Nam to switching (we won't call it flip-flopping) his stand on that war so he could appear before Congress and be interviewed by the media to things as trivial (but revealing) as breaking in the front of a line in Boston and saying to people in line who objected, "Don't you know who I am?"

Everything about John Kerry demonstrates a weak, shallow, selfish, ambitious man who cares only for money and power. And Kerry's "better world" is one of slavery and death for millions and cowardly retreat for a brave and noble nation.

On John Edwards's Definition of Patriotism

The GOP spent ''all of their time and all of their energy trying to tear down a patriot,'' Edwards told a town-hall audience this week in Norristown, Pa. The patriot he was speaking of was his running-mate, John Kerry.

The keyword here is patriot. So what is a patriot? A patriot, according to Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “one who loves his or her country and supports its authority and interests.”

Let’s hold John Kerry up to the mirror of recent history and see how he fares. We will, right off the bat, concede that Kerry wants us to think he loves his country.

Kerry acted like a patriot when he went to war, home movie camera and all. He looked like a patriot when he nominated himself for medals. (Never mind whether or not he actually deserved them – medals were often given out to cheer up demoralized troops).

Where his patriotism begins to falter is when he came home after serving four months.

No, Kerry didn’t act like a someone who loved his country in his testimony to Congress. Kerry said, ““But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the Communists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people.

But the point is they are not a free people now under us. They are not a free people, and we cannot fight communism all over the world, and I think we should have learned that lesson by now....” And, of course, to follow that argument logically, since Kerry says they are not a free people under us, so we should leave them to the communists. That's a defeatist attitude; hardly the words of a patriot.

Throwing his medals into the fire was not the act of a patriot, even if he did hide his and throw someone else's away. That's not the behavior of a patriot.

How right was he, by the way, when he said we couldn't beat the communists? Here were are, 30 years later, having won the Cold War and defeated communism in spite of Mr. Kerry. The lesson we learned (again in spite of Mr. Kerry) was yes, we can fight communism all over the world; we did and we won.

John Kerry said, in that testimony to Congress: “they 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 countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”

He was speaking of his fellow American soldiers, soldiers who were even then captives of the Viet Cong and who were tortured because of those words. Soldiers who had done none of those things. Those words border on treason -- this was not the speech of a patriot. Indeed, if he did the things he said he did, he should have been tried for war crimes. Those are not the acts of a Patriot.

On the other hand, the men who fought and died honorably in the Viet Nam war WERE patriots. They were the men who demonstrated their love of their country.

Patriots say things like, “Give me liberty or give me death.” Or “History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or timid.” Or “God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it.” Those patriots were Patrick Henry, Dwight Eisenhower and Daniel Webster. Patriots are those who say "God bless America" then go to war and give it all they have.

Patriots do not knowingly endanger their comrades-in-arms and coerce others to lie, as one of his supposed comrades says he did.

No, John Kerry is not a Patriot, Mr. Edwards. And if you think he is, you and your definition of patriotism should not be allowed within 100 miles of Washington D.C.

The Non-Issue Issue

George W. Bush joined the National Guard in 1968. He spent six weeks in basic training, then 52 weeks of flight training. After that he took interceptor training and other training, as well, to an accumulated time of 2 years. This was not weekend training but full-time training.

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s the National Guard used a point system to evaluate service. Each member was required to accumulate 50 points a year. From 1968 to 1969, Bush earned 253 points – his total service points at the end of 5 years was 954, equivalent to 19-years service in the National Guard. In 1972 there was a glut of pilots and the military didn't need them any more. Meanwhile, Pres. Bush had already earned his honorable retirement.

Had Kerry served his full tour of duty instead of just 4 months of it in Viet Nam, then returned to support his comrades in the field, he would be truly able to claim honorable service, too. As it is, his claim to military honor is not only superficial, it is downright immoral.

Besides, who cares? William Clinton, a draft dodger and protestor, was elected to the office in spite of the fact that the electorate knew he was all those things and more. They also knew he was a womanizer and had no experience in International affairs. Since Eisenhower's time, when did little things like morality, ethics or experience figure in an American Presidential election?

What if Bush electors vote for Kerry?

The Sept. 9 Kansas City Star reports that Mayor Richie Robb, who is mayor of South Charleston, West Virginia and a Republican, threatens to “vote against Bush in the Electoral College even if Bush carries the state.”
The Republican Party needs to look carefully at the people they send to the Electoral College. Electoral College rules say that the people in each state cast their ballots for the party slate of electors, who they trust will vote for the candidate of their choice.
Rules for selecting electors are pretty flexible. Parties in each state are simply charged with the responsibility of submitting to the State’s chief election official a list of individuals pledged to their candidate for President and equal to the State’s electoral vote. These are usually chosen at State party conventions or chosen by party leaders.
There is no rule that requires electors to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged. There is also no rule that says parties cannot refuse to send an elector they don’t trust.
Mayor Robb said that he protests what he believes are misguided policies. “It’s not likely that I would vote for Kerry,” he says, “But I’m not going to cheerlead us down the primrose path when I know we’re being led in the wrong direction.”
Although he is at least honest about his political opinions, Mayor Robb’s statement is totally irresponsible. The voters of West Virginia depend on him to vote their will, not his. My question now is, “How do we know we can trust Electors to vote the way they are charged by the voters?”

Kerry's Senate Record

This is taking more time than I thought. I'm on a personal crusade to find out exactly what Mr. Kerry did with the 20 years he spent in the Senate. Not only has he refused to make all of his military records, and all of his finances (and yes, if she wants to be First Lady, Mrs. Kerry's Heinz money counts, too) public, it's really hard to find any legislation of value that he sponsored. So far all I've found are recommendations to honor certain people and boats.

Please be patient and check back. I'll make a report on my finding here...soon.