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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Orcastraiter who wrote (10055)	3/26/2004 12:25:21 PM
From: JakeStraw	Respond to of 81568

Scary, Scary John Kerry By Josh Frank Finally a reason to get excited, as we now have before us an electable candidate worthy of taking on George W. Bush and his coterie of neoconservatives next November. Well, at least that's what the scared liberals out there would have us believe. But John Kerry is neither electable nor exciting. He is a Zionist sympathizer who supports Bush's "road map for peace" in Israel and Palestine, as well as a corporate neoliberal, who voted in support of NAFTA, normalized free-trade with China, and the U.S.'s $17.9 billion dollar "aid" package to the IMF. Not to mention Kerry is also a proclaimed War Criminal, where he participated in bloody swift boat patrol missions on the Mekong Delta near Cambodia in Vietnam. And as he put it in to Crosby Noyes of the Washington Evening Star upon his return in 1971, "[During those missions] I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50 caliber machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare, all of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions." However, Kerry's defenders still claim that at least he's better than George W. Bush. Under a selective microscope perhaps, but by and large Kerry and Bush see eye to eye on critical issues of our times. For instance, Kerry criticizes Bush for not having enough troops in Iraq and says he will increase the U.S. count by 40,000 within his first 100 days in office (this statement came prior to Spain's announcement that it will be pulling out its 1,300 troops by the end of June). Kerry also chastises Bush for abusing his authority by invading Iraq, but defends his vote authorizing unilateral force and says, "I can pledge to the American people: I will never conduct a war or start a war because we want to." Looks like he'll just vote for one instead. Back in 1998 Senator Kerry voted along with Dennis Kucinich in support of Clinton's Iraq Liberation Act, which has served as political leverage for Bush's Iraq "regime change." And one year after that horrid display Kerry voted in favor of allowing U.S. air strikes against Yugoslavia, which gave General Wesley Clark the green light to bomb, as William Blum put it, with "an almost sadistic fanaticism." Well at least Kerry is an environmentalist though, right? Not exactly. Despite John Kerry's cozy relationship with ghoulish green organizations like the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters, he should not be mistaken for a friend of nature. Kerry does not support the Kyoto Protocol, and as he told Grist Magazine in an interview last year, "[The Kyoto agreement] doesn't ask enough of developing nations, the nations that are going to be producing much greater emissions and which we need to get on the right course now through technology transfer." Somebody should mention to Senator Kerry that currently, despite the U.S. accounting for only 4% of the world's population, we still emit over a quarter of the globe's CO2. But no, Kerry won't call on the U.S. to set an example to developing countries. That would be asking too much of the U.S. And just last year Kerry decided not to cast a vote against a portion of Bush's chainsaw Forest Plan (HR 1904), which authorized $760 million to thin out dense national forests under the pretext of increasing ecosystem health. This, combined with his support for Fast Track legislation, bombing of Afghanistan, and chemical fumigation in Colombia to counter coca and opium production — provides us with a clear indication that not only is Kerry not an environmentalist, he's also not that good at pretending to be. So how about Kerry on the home front? Let's see, although Kerry did oppose Clinton's 1996 Effective Death Penalty Act, he embraced Attorney General Ashcroft's Patriot Act and the expansion of that egregious bill into Patriot Act II as well as the Homeland Security bill. He also decided not to vote against Bush's Tax Cuts for the wealthy, and as Public Citizen notes, Kerry has missed 10 crucial Senate votes while campaigning for the presidency, including an amendment to prevent energy market manipulation, a medical negligence bill, and a vital fuel efficiency amendment. So what is all the fuss about? Call it the real life version of "Fear Factor," where soft-shelled liberals are forced to swallow empty hopes that John Kerry can save them from the clutches of Bush's wrath. Time will tell whether or not swing voters see any real difference between Kerry and our sitting president. And as Kerry continuously fails to challenge the U.S.'s global Empire or its domestic fractures back home, he will continue to fail the American people — not to mention the rest of the world. pressaction.com

To: Orcastraiter who wrote (10055)	3/26/2004 12:27:37 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Respond to of 81568

Exactly, Orca. In rush to defend White House, Rice trips over own words Walter Pincus, Dana Milbank, Washington Post Friday, March 26, 2004 Washington -- This week's testimony and media blitz by former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke has returned unwanted attention to his former boss, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. The refusal by President Bush's top security aide to testify publicly before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks elicited rebukes by commission members as they held open hearings this week. Thomas Kean, the former New Jersey governor Bush named to be chairman of the commission, said: "I think this administration shot itself in the foot by not letting her testify in public." At the same time, some of Rice's rebuttals of Clarke's broadside against Bush, which she delivered in a flurry of media interviews and statements rather than in testimony, contradicted other administration officials and her own previous statements. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage contradicted Rice's claim that the White House had a strategy before Sept. 11 for military operations against al Qaeda and the Taliban. The CIA contradicted Rice's earlier assertion that Bush had requested a CIA briefing in the summer of 2001 because of elevated terrorist threats. And Rice's assertion this week that Bush had told her on Sept. 16, 2001, that "Iraq is to the side" appeared to be contradicted by an order signed by Bush on Sept. 17 directing the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq. Rice, in turn, has contradicted Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion that Clarke was "out of the loop" and his intimation that Clarke had been demoted. Rice has also given various conflicting accounts. She criticized Clarke for being the architect of failed Clinton administration policies, but also said she had retained Clarke so the Bush administration could continue to pursue Clinton's terrorism policies. National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack defended many of Rice's assertions, saying that she had been more consistent than Clarke. Rice so far has refused to provide testimony under oath to the commission that could possibly resolve the contradictions. Wednesday night, she told reporters, "I would like nothing better in a sense than to be able to go up and do this, but I have a responsibility to maintain what is a long-standing constitutional separation between the executive and the legislative branch." The White House, reacting to the public relations difficulties caused by the refusal to allow Rice's testimony, asked the commission Thursday to give Rice another opportunity to speak privately with panel members to address "mischaracterizations of Dr. Rice's statements and positions." Democratic commission member Richard Ben-Veniste disclosed this week that Rice had asked, in her private meetings with the commission, to revise a statement she made publicly that "I don't think anybody could have predicted that those people could have taken an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center ... that they would try to use an airplane as a missile." Rice told the commission that she had misspoken; the commission has received information that prior to Sept. 11, U.S. intelligence agencies, and Clarke, had talked about terrorists using airplanes as missiles. In an op-ed essay Monday in the Washington Post, Rice wrote that "through the spring and summer of 2001, the national security team developed a strategy to eliminate" al Qaeda that included "sufficient military options to remove the Taliban regime" including the use of ground forces. But Armitage, testifying this week as the White House representative, said the military part was not in the plan before Sept. 11. "I think that was amended after the horror of 9/11," he said. McCormack said Rice's statement was accurate because the team had discussed including orders for such military plans to be drawn up. In the same article, Rice belittled Clarke's proposals by writing: "The president wanted more than a laundry list of ideas simply to contain al Qaeda or 'roll back' the threat. Once in office, we quickly began crafting a comprehensive new strategy to 'eliminate' the al Qaeda network." Rice asserted that while Clarke and others provided ideas, "No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration." That same day, she said most of Clarke's ideas "had been already tried or rejected in the Clinton administration." But in her interview with NBC two days later, Rice appeared to take a different view of Clarke's proposals. "He sent us a set of ideas that would perhaps help to roll back al Qaeda over a three- to five-year period; we acted on those ideas very quickly. And what's very interesting is that ... Dick Clarke now says that we ignored his ideas, or we didn't follow them up." sfgate.com