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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (397315)	4/23/2003 12:25:36 PM
From: PROLIFE	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

you mean it would be great if Kerry uses all of HER big ketchup money. No way he raises enough on his own. Kennedy....er...I mean Kerry(sorry, but since they are one and same I get confused on which to talk about)is just a one party state liberal. and the only reason you are worried about PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH, your president, is because you are still a sore loser pinhead. Kerry does not even acknowledge that you are alive....you are just a lonely thread spammer, much like bladdur.

To: American Spirit who wrote (397315)	4/23/2003 12:40:21 PM
From: PROLIFE	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Return of the San Francisco Democrats Terence Jeffrey URL:http://www.townhall.com/columnists/terencejeffrey/tj20030423.shtml April 23, 2003 It ought to be a maxim of Democratic strategy: Never send your presidential candidate to San Francisco. Walter Mondale floundered there in 1984. Now it might be Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry's turn. Nineteen years ago, San Francisco hosted the Democratic convention that nominated Mondale. His acceptance speech included a whining plea to replace President Reagan's policy of countering Soviet aggression with a renewed policy of appeasement. "Every other president talked with the Soviets and negotiated arms control," Mondale told a crowd led by Mario Cuomo and Jesse Jackson. "Why has this administration failed? Why haven't they tried? Why can't they understand the cry of Americans and human beings for sense and sanity in control of these god-awful weapons? Why? Why?" At the Republican convention in Dallas, U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, a Democratic hawk, gave Mondale what for. "When the Soviet Union walked out of arms control negotiations, and refused even to discuss the issues," said Kirkpatrick, "the San Francisco Democrats didn't blame Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States. But then, they always blame America first." "The San Francisco Democrats," she said, " . . . behaved less like a dove or a hawk than like an ostrich -- convinced it could shut out the world by hiding its head in the sand." Kirkpatrick's imagery stuck: San Francisco Democrats were the Party of Appeasement. Kerry, the current Democratic frontrunner, had a San Francisco moment just before the war. A decorated Vietnam veteran, Kerry had earlier adopted optimal positioning for a Democratic nominee. He blamed President Bush for failing to restore a boom economy, but voted to authorize Bush to use force against Iraq. "By standing with the president," said Kerry, "Congress will demonstrate that our nation is united in its determination to take away Saddam Hussein's deadly arsenal, by peaceful means if we can, by force if we must." But a room full of San Franciscans was too great a temptation for Kerry. In a March 13 speech to the Commonwealth Club, he avoided direct discussion of the impending war. But while advocating alternative energy sources, he let loose this applause line: "In the decades to come we should not ever have to have young Americans sent to any part of the world to defend and die for America's gluttony on fossil fuel." Excuse me? Was Kerry inferring the war he voted for was about oil? In a question period, the moderator tried to pin him down: Did Kerry regret voting for war? "What I regret," he said, "is the United States of America, the strongest military power on the face of this planet, has not had diplomacy that matches it. In fact it has had some of the weakest diplomacy that we have ever seen in the history of the conduct of this nation. As I wrote in The New York Times in September, and I maintain it today, and I say this based on my experience in Vietnam and consistent with what I learned there about fighting a war without legitimacy and without the consent of the people: You want consent and you want legitimacy. And that means you must exhaust remedies and build the notion that it is indeed not just a spoken-word last resort, but it is in fact a last resort. The United States of America should never go to war because it wants to go to war, we should go to war because we have to go to war, and that is not clear to people in this country today." If Kerry is now a San Francisco Democrat, this sounds like the French position. Kerry's logic: 1) "legitimacy" depended not on the vote he made in Congress, but on the vote France and its allies refused to make in the United Nations, 2) diplomacy failed not because of the intransigence of France and its allies but because the argument that persuaded Kerry himself to vote for war was rightfully deemed unsatisfactory by these foreign powers, and 3) the war was not a "last resort" even though Saddam Hussein refused to disarm peacefully when 250,000 U.S. troops stood at his border. These arguments might keep Chirac in the Elysee Palace, but they won't return a Democrat to the White House. ©2003 Creators Syndicate

To: American Spirit who wrote (397315)	4/23/2003 2:12:09 PM
From: Glenn Petersen	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769667

Kerry may make GOP wealth a campaign issue Democrat contender says he won't rule out using his own funds boston.com By Glen Johnson, Globe Staff, 4/23/2003 If Republicans forge ahead with plans to spend $200 million or more on President Bush's reelection campaign, Senator John F. Kerry would make it a campaign issue and would not rule out tapping his personal wealth to compensate, he said yesterday. The Democratic presidential contender, who recently reported $8 million cash on hand in his campaign kitty, said that if the Republicans double the amount they spent on their 2000 campaign, it would confirm the party as the handmaiden to the wealthiest Americans. ''I believe the Republican Party has already proven that it is prepared to bargain off, auction off, use the political process to service their special interests,'' the Massachusetts senator said after an Earth Day speech at the Vine Street Community Center in Roxbury. ''If they want to spend $200 million from their very wealthy and specialized interests, I think that would become a major issue about the kind of government we have in this country and where we're going.'' While Kerry's personal wealth is limited, his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, has a family fortune that has been assessed as worth $550 million or more. Federal election law makes it unlikely she could transfer the bulk of that money to Kerry, but in the past, both he and his wife have said they would consider tapping the reserve if either one was attacked personally in a campaign. As recently as last month, Kerry restated his interest in financing his own campaign. Asked yesterday whether he might give more consideration to that idea in light of a report about the Bush administration's reelection plans, the senator said haltingly: ''I'm going to, as I've said all along, I'm going to reserve, I don't have any special plans right now.'' The New York Times reported yesterday that Bush advisers are quietly preparing the president's reelection campaign. In line with other recent reports, the newspaper said the effort would be spearheaded by the president's top political adviser, senior counselor Karl Rove, and financed with $200 million or more in campaign donations. Such a figure would double the $100 million Bush spent winning the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, and Kerry said yesterday he believed even the $200 million goal would be exceeded. Both the Republican and Democratic nominees are slated to get $75 million apiece from the federal treasury to finance their general election campaigns after they are formally nominated at their party conventions during the summer of 2004. Quoting unnamed advisers, the Times said the Bush campaign considers Kerry the most likely to win the Democratic nomination from the current field of nine candidates. The Bush team also believes Kerry is vulnerable because of his Northeastern roots and patrician air. ''He looks French,'' the newspaper quoted one adviser as saying, without elaboration. Kerry said he laughed when he read the comment, adding: ''It means that the White House has started the personal politics of destruction, that's what it means, but it's fine. His wife, a former Republican, was less charitable, saying: ''It's like kids on a playground, and they don't know what to say because they don't have the thought process defined or the language. They call each other names; they know how to say those. But adults should explain what they mean.'' Asked whether she thought the comment impugned her husband's masculinity or patriotism, since France opposed the war effort in Iraq, Heinz Kerry said: ''They can't take him on on patriotism; that they can't do. And I guess if they want to call the French `not manly,' I don't know, but they have to deal with the French on that.'' Kerry's speech was preceded by a roundtable discussion in which 14 Roxbury residents and area political activists discussed a variety of health problems they attributed to the concentration of pollution sources in their neighborhood. Klare Allen of Roxbury held up a map showing that eight of the city's nine trash-transfer stations are in the neighborhood. Many of the parents and some of the children in the group complained of asthma. ''Until I went to Washington, I had never had asthma in my life,'' Kerry said in response. He said pollution in the city has prompted him to use an inhaler like those used by some of Roxbury residents. In an interview afterward, Kerry clarified his remark by explaining that he used an Albuterol inhaler for common springtime allergies, but his condition is not serious enough to limit his physical activity. ''I rarely use it; I haven't used it in months,'' he said. Glen Johnson can be reached at johnson@globe.com. This story ran on page A3 of the Boston Globe on 4/23/2003. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.