Chad at In The Bullpen and Kevin over at Wizbang have done extensive reporting on this throughout the week. Chad even had an exclusive interview with Troy Jenkins. I’m surprised you didn’t mention or link to either of them.

Posted by: Digger at October 31, 2004 08:09 AM

Alger Hiss?

Posted by: PeterUK at October 31, 2004 08:23 AM

In answer to the headline, “Yes, So What?”.

Either voters have already listened to what the SwiftVets and POWs have said about Kerry’s post-war activities, or they’ve ignored the whole subject of his treachery long ago as irrelevant. ( I don’t like using the word ‘treachery’, it makes me sound like a fruit loop - nonetheless, it’s the most appropriate word to use. Bummer. ).

However, for the record, things like this should be set down permanently. And after the election, regardless of the outcome, further digging needs doing.

But should Kerry get elected, wait till he’s out of office. In wartime, even if the POTUS is the north end of a southbound camel, he should be supported - as long as he doesn’t return to bad habits from his youth. If he does, impeach the bum.

Of course, if Bush got re-elected, then fell off the wagon so he became a drunken incompetent, his posterior should be impeached too.

Sometimes it helps being an Aussie, with no particular stake in the Dem/Rep factional brawl.

FWIW my wife Carmel’s parents took one look at Kerry on the Gogglebox (knowing nothing about him), and their reaction was “Sleazeball”. Their reaction to Bush was “Fair Dinkum (Genuine, the real McCoy, bona fide), but maybe not the brightest bulb on the Christmas Tree”.

Carmel’s parents were astonished that Kerry was quite possibly the next POTUS. They wouldn’t trust him as 3rd-assistant dog-catcher in Oodnadatta. It’s not his crookedness (sometimes an advantage in a politician), it’s that he’s so obviously treacherous. That word again…

Still, it’s your election, not ours. Good luck.

Posted by: aebrain at October 31, 2004 08:53 AM

This topic really doesn’t matter.

ELECTION IS HERE: TIME TO BOTTOM LINE IT

This election is a referendum on Bush. If he’s bad, then it’s time to give the new guy Kerry a chance. If not, then let Bush have four more years.

KEY AREAS OF BUSH RECORD ON A SCALE OF 1 TO 10

BUSH RECORD ON TERRORISM – 2 OUT OF 10:

• BIN LADEN ON THE LOOSE. Why the heck hasn’t public enemy number one been caught yet??? The reason is Bush took his eye off the ball and invaded Iraq before finishing the job of catching bin Laden. To the point, by March 13, 2002 Bush said, according to an official White House transcript “I’ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.” Now the President says he wants bin Laden dead or alive. This is a huge FLIP FLOP on one of the most important issues facing our country.
  
• TERRORISM ON THE RISE. Never before have so many US and foreign troops and citizens died from terrorist attacks in Iraq and elsewhere. And the numbers are increasing. Bush hasn’t focused our military resources in the relentless push that is needed to completely dismantle al Qaeda. As a consequence, now the President admits it’s not a matter of if the next terrorist attack will occur against the US, but when. BOTTOM LINE: BAD JOB FOR BUSH.

BUSH RECORD ON IRAQ – 1 OUT OF 10.

• IRAQ WAS A MISTAKE. The reason Bush rushed us into war – that Iraq supposedly has weapons of mass destruction – was all wrong. Major major major mistake. For that kind of mistake, the buck has got to stop with the President.

• IRAQ IS A MESS THAT IS NOT BEING CLEANED UP. Iraqis can’t travel safely in their own streets. Iraqis avoid being near foreigners because of the risk of attack. Whole sections of Iraq are lawless war zones. Terrorism is increasing each month. Infrastructure is still in shambles. Why is the Iraq situation declining from bad to worse? The reason is we never had a decent plan to secure the peace in that country. Another bad mistake.

• WE TORTURED INNOCENT IRAQIS. We disgraced ourselves. Bush says we are bringing Democracy to Iraq. Then we round up innocent people without adequate proof of wrongdoing, nearly all of whom have since been released, and subject them to bizarre torture aimed at violating their deepest religious mores. Sadly, this is not surprising since Bush has said we are not following the Geneva Convention, which protects our troops and citizens from outrageous conduct such as beheadings. Instead, in doublespeak, Bush’s administration said we are following “the principles of” the Geneva Convention. Even more shocking, no senior administration official such as Rumsfeld has been shown the door.

• DID WE INVADE THE RIGHT COUNTRY? At the same time we were invading Iraq, North Korea already had nuclear weapons and was building more. Iran was busily obtaining nuclear weapons. Lot’s of people are asking if we invaded the right country. Was Iraq really that urgent? Should we have gone into Iran or North Korea? Or nowhere! BOTTOM LINE: BAD CHOICES, BAD JOB FOR BUSH.

BUSH RECORD ON THE ECONOMY: 3 OUT OF 10.

• THE TAX CUT FAILED. Nice tax cut for the rich but it didn’t help the rest of the country. For the first time since Herbert Hoover’s administration, we lost more jobs than we created. Net net more than a million jobs are gone over the past four years. Even over the past several months during the so-called “recovery”, job creation hasn’t even kept up with population growth. Government deficits are out of control and we will be paying for them for years to come.

• TOO MANY AMERICANS ARE STRUGGLING. How are Americans getting by with rising health care and fuel costs? Not with much help from the government. There’s no help in the fuel area. The federal drug program is limited to seniors and is very hard to understand. This is really a drop in the bucket compared to Bush’s failure to make good on his promise to let everyone buy drugs from Canada. The President’s broken promise demonstrates that he holds the interests of big drug companies above those of the public. Drugs in Canada are the same drugs manufactured in the same factories as the drugs we take in the US. Whole communities have been forced to break the law by sponsoring bus trips to Canada to avoid their elderly and sick from becoming impoverished from the astronomical cost of drugs in the US.

BUSH ON SOCIAL ISSUES: 5 OUT OF 10.

• THE PRESIDENT HAS HELD THE LINE BUT IS DIVISIVE. Social issues are what is keeping the President afloat. The country is divided down the middle on social issues. There are reasonable arguments as well as misinformation on both sides of the aisle. It’s a shame Bush couldn’t build more unity, but you can’t blame him entirely for people being put off by his folksy swagger persona.

• OUT OF TOUCH ON STEM CELL RESEARCH. In a recent Annenberg poll in August, 64% favored and 28% disfavored use of embryos to conduct stem cell research. In the abortion debate, it’s a real live fetus lost on the one hand versus no health benefit for the mother. The stem cell debate balances a tiny embryo against health gains for millions of sick people. Bush says he is permitting stem cell research, but according to stem cell researchers, he really isn’t. There are only a few old and sick cell lines that can be used. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of embryos are frozen only to be ultimately discarded because it’s against the law to use them for stem cell research. If Bush gets elected, cures from stem cell research for millions of sick people are at least four more years away, and the US could lose the edge in this promising and potentially profitable field of research.

BOTTOM LINE: Bush’s record is weak. Time to give the new guy a chance. Kerry proved himself capable and Bush’s match during the debates. Many of the people hollering about Kerry should remember all the similar hollering about Clinton, who turned out to do a pretty good job for America. No big wars on Clinton’s watch. A great economy. At least four terrorist attacks averted by the Clinton administration through hard work leading up to the turn of the millennium, whereas the Bush administration ignored similar signs leading up to 9/11. Maybe that’s why bin Laden was so surprised that 9/11 exceeded all his expectations in running flawlessly.

Posted by: JD at October 31, 2004 12:01 PM

Bin Laden on the loose - and a shadow of his former self. Best he can muster is ‘stop it, or I will taunt you agan!’ If he could hit us, he would have. At this point, having his head on a pijke would be good, but he’s at the point of the Monty Python character ‘it’s only a flesh wound!’

The President is correct that we avoid ‘target fixation’ on this one individual. We are fighting an idea, not a man. Capture of kill bin Laden, and the war isn’t over.

Iraq was a logical next step. It fits in with the overarching strategy to spread liberty to the greater Middle East. The fact that Saddam was already at war with us seems lost on a lot of folks. The inspections were not working - an aspect highlighted by the ‘missing explosives’ story, but rarely brought up. The IAEA guys were under mandate to destroy exactly that sort of material - and they let Saddam hold onto it, without so much as a note from Klinger’s mother.

As for ‘the Iraq mess not being cleaned up’ - news flash, sports fans: war is a messy business. Particularly against a shadowy and elusive opponent that will go to the point of suicidal actions, without regard for who is in the area. The wail is that there were no terrorists in Iraq before the war - patently untrue - and that it is now a terrorist recruiting ground. I’d disagree and portray it as a terrorist graveyard. Thousands of them have been sucked in by the opportunity to run down the street with their AK-47s and RPGs after the infidels, only to get mowed down like the morons they really are.

The Preseident’s economic policies have cushioned us from two major body blows to the economy - the bursting of the dot com illusion, and the attacks of 9/11. Make as much hay out of the moaning over the loss of ‘surpluses’ - those were projections based on a mirage. The couple of years that the budget did run ‘in the black’ scarcely made an impact on the national debt. The President’s tax cuts were timely, in that they mitigated some, but not all, of the impact of a recession that was already in full swing when he took over. But it is a nice try to play pin the blame on the incumbent for the collapse of what could be termed basically a numeric Ponzi scheme by the Clinton folks.

The stem cell issue is one of the most annoying red herrings of this campaign. If you fault the President for picking a middle ground that allows research to go ahead, without opening up the federal funding spigot against the deeply held moral concerns of a significant segment of the US population, then you’d probably also not be willing to give him credit for even picking out matching socks in the morning.

Posted by: Wind Rider at October 31, 2004 12:42 PM

Wind Rider - Excellent point, there NEVER was a surplus. NEVER, not even close. Not because of something Bush did wrong or Clinton did right - because the federal government has cooked off the books the totally unfunded $26 trillion liability of Social Security.

Yes, it’s a big number and it can’t be ignored, but it doesn’t keep the feds from pretending it’s not there. Of course, who supposed to cover SS? The milkman? Your 401k?

My guess is the same feds who spent every cent every worker ever pumped into this dry hole. The same people who talk about ‘lock boxes’ and ‘trust funds’ as if they actually existed.

Someone’s got to address this - SOON. What are your bets Kerry will do squat?

Posted by: torpedo_eight at October 31, 2004 10:04 PM