No contest: Re-elect George W. Bush
10/29/2004
We’ve never been inclined to put much stock in Sen. JohnF. Kerry’s plan for transforming the economy into a cornucopia that magically yields millions upon millions of high-paying jobs. Kerry’s plan essentially revolves around higher tax rates on the upper-income brackets, more stringent regulation of business and more lavish government spending. Exactly such a plan already has been put to the test elsewhere, namely Europe. The result:a Euro-region average unemployment rate of 9 percent, with even higher unemployment rates in France (9.9 percent) and Germany (10.7 percent). America’s economy puts those numbers to shame, as do ournation’s GDP growth rates. Our unemployment rate today, 5.4 percent, compares favorably with the average for the 1980s (5.8 percent) and 1990s (6.2 percent). These are remarkable figures considering that the nation was dealt a devastating economic blow in the 9/11 assault and forced into a costly new homeland security effort and a war on international terrorism.
But were we inclined to put any stock in Kerry’s economic plan, this thought would still give us pause in pondering our vote: Prosperity is irrelevant if you’re not free and-- above all else-- alive to partake of it. It is on the fundamental, bedrock issue of terrorism/homeland security that Kerry most miserably flunks the test of leadership. And in doing so, he also flunks the test of character.
On terrorism/homeland security, the Kerry campaign has consisted of a marathon of mixed signals and, yes, flip-flops. The only consistent thread running through the Kerry campaign has been its propensity to indulge in willfully dishonest, cheap-shot Bush-bashing. This the Kerry campaign has done to mollify, or pander to, the Democratic Party’s increasingly strident anti-America wing, the Michael Moore faction that’s driven such stalwart Democrats as former New York City Mayor Ed Koch and Georgia Sen. Zell Miller into the Bush/Cheney camp.
Kerry’s Republican detractors have tended to bash the Massachusetts senator for his liberal mindset. But liberalism is a legitimate political philosophy (if, in our view, a sometimes misguided one). What disturbs us far more about Kerry than his reputed liberalism is that he has shown himself under the pressure of this presidential campaign to lack the courage of his previously stated convictions. When Howard Dean’s intemperate anti-war fulminations proved to be a hot-selling item in the early Democratic primaries, Kerry jettisoned his own more moderate views and adopted Dean’s. As a long-standing member of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, Kerry had been a loud voice warning repeatedly of the Saddam Hussein threat and calling repeatedly for strong-- and if necessary, unilateral -- military action to address that threat. But when those views turned out to be politically incorrect within his party, he in effect hit the delete key to erase his own previous speeches, op-eds and interviews. In those remarks he had warned of the serious threat the Saddam regime posed in the Middle East in light of international intelligence assessments that the volatile dictator possessed weapons of mass destruction. Kerry now opportunistically adds his voice to the chorus of partisan Bush-bashers charging that the president exaggerated or flat-out lied to "mislead" American into war. In this regard, the Kerry campaign and its news media cheering section also have hit the delete key to erase a salient passage of recent history: that the removal of the Saddam regime became an official U.S. policy goal under a measure signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
We simply don’t know yet whether Saddam Hussein actually possessed stockpiles of WMD. That stockpiles haven’t been found is not proof they never existed. But we do know from the Iraq Survey Group’s recent report, based on interrogations of Saddam’s henchmen and examination of regime documents, that the dictator had a WMD program in place and planned to reactivate it at the first opportunity. So the pre-flip-flopping John Kerry was correct when he warned, in remarks throughout the late 1990s, that Saddam was a threat because he had the means to manufacture WMD and the proven inclination to use such weapons.
To fully appreciate the scurrilous disingenuousness of Kerry’s current rhetoric on the subject, consider this Kerry remark on CNN’s "Crossfire" program in 1997:"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 U.S., and we reserve the right to take pre-emptive action whenever we feel it’s in our national interest."
The Kerry campaign has been a chronicle of second-guessing on our military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq to root out and destroy hotbeds of terrorism. A favorite bit of Kerry Monday morning quaterbacking, for example, is his campaign spiel that the Bush administration botched the effort to capture Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan by "outsourcing" the assignment to Northern Alliance forces, enabling the terror kingpin to slip through his encirclement atTora Bora. Contrast this rhetoric with Kerry’s comments at the time (Dec. 14, 2001) in a televised interview on this very issue. "I think we have been smart," he said. "I think the administration’s leadership has done it well. We are on the right track." Kerry then added: "I think we have been doing this pretty effectively. We should continue to do it that way."
Thus Kerry’s name seems unlikely ever to be mentioned in the same breath as tough presidents who were steadfast-- politically unpopular though it sometimes proved to be -- in standing their groundagainstmenaces that threatened this nation’s security. Names such asFranklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and the earlier George Bush come to mind.So does the name of the current president, George W. Bush. Certainly President Bush’s leadership has not been without errors. Nor was the leadership of any of the presidents just cited.That’s the nature of leadership.It involves calculated risks and, inevitably,mistakes and unanticipated setbacks. In a time of great peril, George W. Bush has stepped forward to provide, certainly not perfect leadership, but steady, unwavering leadership and, overall, effective leadership.We therefore urge -- strongly urge -- his re-election.
-- The Trentonian
©The Trentonian 2004 |
