<font color=brown> Ugly, ugly, ugly..........its a good thing you have each other to like!<font color=black>
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Cheney assumes familiar role
Bush turns to him to denounce Kerry
By Anne E. Kornblut, Globe Staff | April 27, 2004
FULTON, Mo.-- After spending $50 million in a single month and airing a raft of negative political ads against John F. Kerry, Bush campaign advisers returned to a familiar weapon yesterday: Vice President Dick Cheney, who launched a new round of coordinated attacks on the senator's national security record.
Cheney delivered his remarks in typically understated style, reading in a monotone voice from a prepared text. Only a few of his accusations were new -- that, for example, Kerry had voted in 1984 against certain weapons systems, a message mirrored in a blitz of Bush campaign ads unveiled in 18 battleground states yesterday.
But Cheney's speech dominated the political debate -- spurring Democrats to respond even before he spoke -- and starkly contrasted the decidedly less partisan talk President Bush gave in Minnesota about broadband taxation and hydrogen cell technology.
''Beyond his struggle to maintain a position on Iraq, Senator Kerry's record raises serious doubts about his understanding of the broader struggle against terror, of which Iraq is only one front," Cheney told the audience at Westminster College. He said the Massachusetts senator has ''yet to outline any serious plan for winning the war on terror," accused him of ''inconsistencies and changing rationales," and said he has ''given us ample grounds to doubt the judgment and attitude he brings to bear on vital issues of national security."
The speech was met with widespread applause, but afterward, Westminster College's president, Fletcher M. Lamkin, sent out an e-mail to the college community expressing his displeasure with the tone. He said he had no advance warning about the tenor of the speech.
''Frankly, I must admit that I was surprised and disappointed that Mr. Cheney chose to step off the high ground and resort to Kerry-bashing for a large portion of his speech," the e-mail read. ''We had only been told the speech would be about foreign policy, including issues in Iraq."
An announcement on the school website about Cheney's visit quotes Lamkin as saying the vice president's office called unsolicited a few days beforehand to offer the speech.
Democrats, outraged, pointed to numerous times when Cheney had proposed cutting defense spending, including comments by then-Representative Cheney in 1984 that President Reagan should cut defense spending because the deficit had grown so large. ''Dick Cheney took audacity to a new level today by going after John Kerry for positions that Dick Cheney himself has taken," Phil Singer, a Kerry spokesman, said. ''The vice president's shameful remarks about a war hero like John who risked his life trying to save the lives of others make it clear that the Bush campaign has no problem stomping the truth."
Before Cheney spoke, the Democratic National Committee chairman, Terry McAuliffe, held his own event, demanding that Cheney ''call off the Republican attack dogs" and dubbing the vice president the ''attack dog in chief."
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boston.com |
