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Politics : THE 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (1055)	2/15/2004 4:57:34 PM
From: calgal	Respond to of 2164

Dynamic new voting force By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Readers of this column will remember, as apparently political scientists and pundits have not, that in the rancorous months before the Democratic primaries got under way I identified the one dynamic new political constituency that would decide the winner. In years gone by, the dynamic constituency was the youth vote. And there was the year of the women's vote. This year as we watched Dr. Howard Dean gain the role of front-runner, the veins in his neck bursting, his face an angry gnarl of sneers and grimaces, it became obvious the dynamic new force in the Democratic primary was the moron vote. That is to say the angry, stupid, political neurotic who has proceeded into middle age convinced the world is against him/her. These indignant morons saw Dr. Howard Dean tear off his suit coat, roll up his sleeves, approach the microphone as though he were about to chew on it, and they beheld Deliverance — Deliverance from all the woe and perfidy that has held them back, given them lower-back pain, caused the seat of their pants to split the night they attended the professional wrestling match, brought George W. Bush to the throne. Of course, Dr. Howard Dean's ascendancy could not last. His anger was directed too widely. He threatened the Democratic hierarchy and even Terence McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee and winner of three purple hearts, six silver stars, and the Campfire Girls' Award for a Clean Tent. Suddenly materials were being leaked from Dr. Howard Dean's past, the most significant being his mid-1990s letter to President Bill Clinton. That letter along with other leaked materials fatally weakened the front-runner's hold on the moron vote. What is significant about that letter is that it clearly revealed the origin of all the other leaked materials, to wit, the Clintons. They through their fund-raising, their popularity with the Democratic rank and file, and their hand-picked chairman, the highly decorated war hero Mr. McAuliffe, control the party. Dr. Howard Dean's reckless claims to "clean house" alarmed them. They recognized that with the new money and new dopes he was bringing into the party, he posed a threat to Hillary's presidential ambitions. Hence all those leaks emanating from Clinton servitors, particularly from the camp of Gen. Wesley Clark, the Clintons' stalking horse and yet another Democratic war hero. Now Sen. John Pierre Kerry is the front-runner, and he has developed a fine ploy for corralling the moron vote. He and Mr. McAuliffe have stirred up this controversy about how frequently President Bush attended National Guard meetings three decades ago. And they have transformed their entire party into the most heroic congeries of patriots and GI Joes ever seen on Earth. The morons are entranced. When Mr. Kerry first decided to make an issue of his Vietnam service, surely there must have been a cautious adviser around to remind him of all the luridly compromising evidence on his record, evidence showing him to be a deeply flawed war hero. Anyone who remembers young John Kerry's prominence in antiwar and anti-American activities would caution him against making an issue of the easy-going George W. Bush's past. Yet Mr. Kerry is playing to the moron vote. He knows they need to be enflamed. Thus he has manured the military record of a guy who flew F-102s and whose flight instructor ranked him "in the top 5 percent of pilots I knew." Retired Col. Maurice H. Udell also ranked the president in the top 1 percent in the "thinking department." Will the evidence that the president served dutifully and was discharged honorably damage Mr. Kerry's candidacy? It certainly will not hurt him with the moron vote. It will not even hurt him if his public record on Vietnam and national security in general becomes an issue. In 1971, this antiwar veteran told Congress our Army in Vietnam was committing "war crimes on a day-to-day basis" that included rape, torture and murder "reminiscent of Genghis Khan." Now he calls Vietnam veterans his "band of brothers." Nor will Mr. Kerry be hurt by his 1992 statement that "we do not need to divide America over who served and how" in Vietnam. (He was defending Bill Clinton, a draft dodger.) The moron vote is unmoved by evidence. What might hurt Mr. Kerry is if the Republicans demand of him what the Democrats have demanded of Mr. Bush — a review of his government records. The review of the president's records reveals he was paid for all his Texas Air National Guard Service pursuant to his honorable discharge. Now the Democrats want to see his Internal Revenue Service records from that period. Fine, but it is time for the Republicans to demand public disclosure of Mr. Kerry's government records — whether held by the military, the FBI or intelligence service — with respect to his activities in the antiwar movement and for that matter with respect to his active duty. He brought the matter up, after all. R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is the editor in chief of the American Spectator, a contributing editor to the New York Sun, and an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute. His "Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House" has just been published by Regnery Publishing.

To: calgal who wrote (1055)	2/15/2004 4:59:04 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2164

Diana West The real news is AWOL newsandopinion.com \| "By G-d, this is suffocation!" That's the quotation of the week — if not the new year. This exclamation, first reported in The New York Times, expresses the raw frustration of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born terror-master believed to be operating in Iraq and long thought to have been a Saddam Hussein-harbored link to Al Qaeda. His frustration is the result of American success in Iraq. In a document intercepted last month by U.S. officials, the man believed to be Zarqawi bemoans U.S. resolve — America "has no intention of leaving, no matter how many wounded nor how bloody it becomes" — and U.S. progress in building an Iraqi security force. "The problem is," he writes, "you end up having an army and police connected by lineage, blood and appearance. When the Americans withdraw ... they get replaced by these agents who are intimately linked to the people of this region." His conclusion? "The Americans will continue to control from their bases, but the sons of the land will be the authority. This is the democracy. We will have no pretexts." No "pretexts" for violence and anarchy, that is. Which, to the average terrorist with a totalitarian dream, is a cataclysm. Zarqawi goes on to ask Al Qaeda leaders for immediate aid in fomenting war between Iraq's Shiites and Sunnis — which probably bodes a terrible intensification of terror-bombings in Iraq — before Americans transfer sovereignty to Iraqis in June. As the Times reports, "With some exasperation, the author writes: 'We can pack and leave and look for another land, just like what happened in so many lands of jihad. Our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence increases.'" The dramatic story broke this week, but the only "news" around seemed to concern the Vietnam War — specifically, the details about the president's National Guard service, and, as Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe likes to say, "the medals on John Kerry's chest." From White House briefing transcripts, for example, I counted only one question about the Al Qaeda memo and well over 100 questions and interjections about the president's Guard record. Why the focus on Vietnam? Part of the reason is that John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee, is asking the American people to judge him as a Vietnam War hero; a multi-medal-winner; a man who, as he frequently reminds us, knows "something about aircraft carriers for real." (This is a dig at President Bush's visit to the USS Abraham Lincoln at the end of the military campaign in Iraq.) "If George Bush wants to make this election about national security," Kerry has said, "I have three words for him he'll understand. Bring. It. On." (This is supposed to be a dig at what Bush told Baathist holdouts and Islamic radicals who strike at coalition forces hoping to drive the United States from Iraq. "Bring 'em on," Bush told the terrorists attempting to derail Iraqi peace and democracy — tough talk to terrorists that is an odd choice for parody by any presidential candidate.) President Bush, meanwhile, as a former Air National Guardsman, is neither war hero nor medal-winner. He flew F-102s over the Gulf of Mexico, and does not, therefore, know what John Kerry knows about aircraft carriers. But he isn't basing his presidential appeal on his military record. Bush — who, quite spectacularly, has been named one of the three great "grand strategists" in American history in a forthcoming book by eminent Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis — is running for re-election as a battle-tested war president whose war — our war — is far from over. That doesn't mean Vietnam shouldn't have its place in this campaign. For, just as Kerry has a record as a naval officer that is universally praised, he has a record as an antiwar activist that is widely despised. A leading voice in the notorious appeasement group Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), which frequently demonstrated under communist banners even as American servicemen were under fire, Kerry should now be called upon to defend that record or to apologize for it. What does Kerry say now about having defamed American servicemen before Congress in 1971? About participating in "Hanoi" Jane Fonda-financed stunts and protests? About North Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap's 1985 assertion that without the antiwar efforts of such organizations as VVAW, Hanoi would have surrendered? And what does he have to say about the tens of thousands of executions, the torture and the re-education camps that the North Vietnamese inflicted on South Vietnam after the American withdrawal? It's time to focus on the real news.