Kerry’s Pfffft! Factor
Joan Swirsky
Wednesday, Apr. 07, 2004
After pulling out all stops to gain momentum in the race for the White House, Kerry & Co. are like kids who hope that their inflated balloons will stick to the ceiling, only to find them losing air and drifting downward.
At this point, they must be doubling their Prozac and Zantac and wondering what else they can do to stop President Bush’s re-election next November. So far, they’ve only accomplished the Pfffft! Factor.
Paul O’Neill, former treasury secretary under President Bush, took a stab at discrediting the president who fired him by publishing a book that, today, isn’t even on the radar screen. Pfffft!
Nine warring Democratic candidates managed to stifle their antagonism toward one another during the primaries – the better to bash the president – but the one who remains, John Kerry, has already been recognized as the most flip-flopping elected official in American history on every crucial domestic and foreign-policy issue that has faced our country. Pfffft!
Richard Clarke, the terrorism “expert” who served eight years under the Clinton administration – during which time al-Qaida repeatedly attacked the U.S. both at home and abroad – recently published a book asserting that the Bush administration, which he served for only seven and a half months (and from which he was demoted), was to blame for 9/11. It’s no surprise that his testimony before the 9/11 Commission, riddled as it was with contradictions and unverifiable accusations, has resulted in polls that show that the public overwhelmingly believes his efforts were nothing more than a book-selling gimmick. Pfffft!
Kerry blamed rising gas prices on the president, until Bush’s exquisite diplomacy resulted in the Saudis going public to say they wouldn’t allow a crisis to develop this summer. Pfffft!
Kerry continues to advocate for the United Nations’ “help” in Iraq, ignoring the fact that the U.N. ran away from Iraq and is now mired in a financial scandal of global proportions vis-à-vis its Iraqi Oil-for-Food program, administrated by Kofi Annan and his son, who have been accused of graft, bribery and selling shiploads of crude oil to line their own pockets to the tune of $10 billion. Pfffft!
Democrats, this month, launched a liberal radio talk show, “Air America” (displacing in New York the solitary African-American format station) – only to have Ralph Nader, among others, rename it “Hot Air America.” Pfffft!
Kerry & Co. have relied on ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN to spin their 24/7 leftist message, which the TV stations – totally sacrificing their claim to journalistic objectivity and nonpartisanship – have slavishly complied with. But this has resulted in what communications experts now say is a national distrust of the “mainstream media.” Pfffft!
Kerry has relentlessly scorned the president’s tax cuts, predicting doom and gloom for our country’s future. But this month economic experts on both sides of the aisle admitted that the president’s tax cuts have resulted in the fastest growth in 20 years and at least six straight months of job gains; the escalation of manufacturing production to a two-decade high; unemployment claims dropping significantly and almost 95 percent of the working population prospering!
Since last August, nearly 795,000 jobs – 308,000 this month – were added to the workforce and, contrary to the centerpiece of Kerry’s campaign (“Bush’s tax cuts are for the rich”), the Congressional Budget Office reported taxes on the wealthy have risen over time and that the Bush tax cut in 2001 barely kept them from rising further. Also, the poor paid half as much of the federal tax burden in 2001 as they did in 1984, those in the middle paid about a third less, but the rich paid about 50 percent more! Big Pfffft!
Kerry has railed endlessly against the sins of corporations like Enron, which flourished, unregulated, during the Clinton years. Now he blames them on “The Republican Machine,” while failing to mention that in 1995 he supported a law protecting those companies from liability. Pfffft!
Kerry has excoriated the president about his free trade policy (international agreements with no qualifications) but ignored the fact that he, himself, voted for NAFTA and every other free trade policy. But in his cynical campaign for president, he has conveniently changed his tune – again – to support increased protectionism and what the president has accurately called “isolationism.” Pfffft!
Democrats have fought fiercely against the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, arrogantly believing that the public supports their stand for abortion-on-demand because, in their minds, embryos and fetuses are not babies. But, again, the president and the Congress who backed him prevailed and he signed this Act into law this month, to the everlasting horror of “Catholic” John Kerry, who voted against it.
Right, Mr. Kerry, the murdered nine-months-in-utero baby Conner Peterson was not, according to you, either a baby or a victim of a violent crime! A shameful Pfffft!
Kerry and his fellow leftists have accused the president of exploiting the war on terror, steadfastly refusing to acknowledge that the overthrow of the murderous tyrant Saddam Hussein – who developed and used weapons of mass destruction and rape rooms and buried his dissenters in mass graves – was a good thing for our country and the entire world.
But when the public supported our commander in chief, Kerry thought it fitting to drag out his own military record, hoping – mistakenly – that the public would forget that he discarded his medals, slandered his fellow soldiers upon returning from Vietnam, and went on to vote against every military and intelligence budget during his 19-year tenure in the Senate. Pfffft!
Finally, the Democrats believed that if they got behind Kerry – who none of them imagined during the primary campaign would actually be the presidential candidate – they could muster their extreme-left “base,” attract moderates and disaffected Republicans and libertarians, convert the undecideds and use moneybags like George Soros and Teresa Heinz-Kerry to circumvent the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law – which Sen. Kerry voted for!
But a challenge to this hypocrisy is now underfoot as their opponents have appealed to the Federal Election Commission to charge Kerry & Co. with an "illegal conspiracy" and operating an illegal slush fund. Pffft!
Altogether, Kerry & Co. have mastered the Pfffft! Factor – a go-nowhere, air-out-of-the-balloon strategy. This is because Kerry embodies the retro mentality of the ’60s: Fulminating rage at the powers that be and the same blindness to the reality of evil that he demonstrated when he slandered his Vietnam War compatriots and in so doing gave aid and comfort to our Communist North Vietnamese enemies.
His “nuanced,” insulated-by-wealth vision of life lies in stark contrast to what most Americans believe: that a very smart, ruthlessly cruel and malevolently calculating enemy is dedicated to wiping us off the face the earth.
In contrast to the Pffft! Factor world of John Kerry – reconstructed and then deconstructed and then reconstructed again, practically on a daily basis – it is to the everlasting good fortune of the American people that President Bush lives in the real world that celebrates America’s strength and that he is taking every measure to protect it. |
