George Bush's Record...John Kerry's Broken Record
Ron Marr, 02/12/04
In the waning days of the 2000 presidential election, it was "suddenly" leaked to the press that George W Bush once had a drunken driving arrest. Of course the Gore campaign took no responsibility for this unproved revelation, and subsequently proceeded to mention it at every opportunity. That the facts proved inconclusive didn't stop either the Democrats or the liberal media from spreading the allegation with abandon.
Why? That's easy. Liberals know that many voters are incapable of independent thought. They know many voters are more influenced by hints of impropriety than they are by facts.
Liberals know, if you repeat a lie often enough, the sheep among us will start to believe. Sheep, you see, will run at the first rumor of a fire in the pasture. They don't actually have to smell the smoke or see the flames. The Democratic power base has long played on this reality, and thus consistently aim their message to the lowest common denominator. They operate on the premise that rumor is better than truth, that fears are more useful than facts.
Thus it should come as no surprise that the DNC is now bleating from the rooftops that, 30 odd years ago, President Bush did not properly fulfill his National Guard requirements. It's a crock. Bush had it pretty easy in the National Guard, avoiding a tour in Vietnam, but he played by the rules of the time. He availed himself of an option, plain and simple. He did serve, and that the Democrats are attempting to defile that service as "not good enough" should be an affront to not only any person who ever served or had family in the military, but as well an insult to anyone with a brain.
But the Democrats are trying to turn Bush's relatively easy stint of service into a "scandal." They claim he was "AWOL," that strings were pulled. They do this because John Kerry, his likely opponent, did serve with merit in Vietnam. It is nothing but distraction from real issues, an attempt to undermine Bush's credibility and character by comparison.
It's amusing that Democrats avoided this issue in the 2000 election. They knew, back then, that to toss such a faulty grenade would have caused them embarrassment. Bill Clinton was still in office; he avoided the war altogether. Al Gore went to Vietnam, but spent his brief time there, by all reports, functioning as a pampered journalist with full time bodyguards.
Be that as it may, the big issue is that politicians feel the need to retreat several decades in search of dubious dirt. Why don't they go further? Maybe we could reveal, live with Peter Jennings, that during his kindergarten days John Kerry once pushed a girl and stole her Etch-a-Sketch. Perhaps the New York Times could inform us that, during his first six months of life, George Bush was at times incontinent? Such would only be slightly less ridiculous, in terms of defining character and conduct, than the nonsense with which we are currently inundated.
I said this during the 2000 campaign and I'll say it again. Yes, we should be proud of war heroes. However, what they did and believed then is not nearly as important as what they have done and believed in more recent times. Being a war hero does not automatically qualify one to be Commander in Chief. I became very tired of hearing Republican John McCain speak endlessly of his years in a Viet Cong prison camp, always qualifying his remarks with how his years spent in a Viet Cong prison camp weren't germane to his election. I get equally tired of Democrat John Kerry wrapping himself in the flag and, after delineating his heroics time and again, ending his speeches with how his courage or service is not an issue and thus he won't speak about it.
I'd rather look at facts. Kerry has the most liberal voting record in the Senate. He is the hand-picked candidate of the Kennedy clan. He changes his opinions with the wind, dependent upon his audience. Hey, if you want old dirt, just go back to Kerry's 1970 interview with the Harvard Crimson.
"I'm an internationalist," Kerry said. "I'd like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations."
And therein lies the danger of dredging up ancient history. Kerry said those words in his youth, and as any intelligent person well knows, beliefs can change drastically via age and experience. What John Kerry said in his twenties does not matter. What he believes now, what his voting record shows, is of far greater import
Right now, in 2004, I'd love to know if John Kerry still believes that the military interests of the United States of America should be subservient to the whims of the United Nations.
That's far more relevant to our future than whether George Bush missed a few weekend drills in Alabama.
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