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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: unclewest who wrote (56675)	7/28/2004 11:13:44 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 793958

I do believe that the Muslim extremists have the entire US Government tied in knots right now. You'll get no argument from me on that one. Unfortunately most of the effort is defensive and will never win a battle. I take your point about defense vs. offense. I would suggest though that we're allocating too much to both of them. The only way to get knot-free is to overcome the fear and get some rational perspective. John Kerry, a man with a history of fleeing from battle, proposes to place our security in the hands of the UN and the uncooperative allies of Germany and France. That's just hype and dogma. I don't know about you, but Kerry's proposal scares me and I'm not afraid of anything. What proposal is that? What you suggest above? He proposed that? I don't think so. There's hardly any daylight between what Bush would do and what Kerry would do. Sure, Bush would be more inclined to take the offensive, but he won't be able to do so in a massive way over the next four years because we're already overextended so his inclination hardly matters. That's rather like the Dems and universal health care. They can propose until they're blue in the face but if they don't have the wherewithal to follow through, which they don't, it's moot. We have to be able to be able to distinguish between the rhetoric and what can be feasibly done. Whoever is president will have limited choices. The terrorists have limited choices, too. They may have motive in spades but their opportunity is limited and their means is close to nil. We need to focus on keeping their means in check and on obviating their motive. We can do that without tying ourselves up in knots. I believe we are involved in what could easily become a massive and bloody war of survival. The proliferation of WMDs makes that an overnight possibility. I suppose it could. Any conflict in the age of nuclear proliferation could. If we get zapped, it could just as easily be from some enemy we haven't identified yet. That old "failure of imagination" at work. The 15 million Muslim militant extremists do not share your time frame. They willingly welcome and embrace death if their own demise will make even a tiny contribution to the greater goal of killing all of us. UW, this reminds me global warming. We have true believers who would compromise our life style and prosperity now and into the future to counter something that is generations away if ever. I'd prefer to put some effort into R&D, into taking reasonable steps over the long haul to obviate a bad outcome, and plugging the obvious holes as we find them rather than betting the farm that the scariest Muslim scenario will play out. I don't see much daylight between the ecowarriors and the hawks. They're just under the spell of different religions.

To: unclewest who wrote (56675)	7/28/2004 1:12:46 PM
From: John Carragher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793958

A bombshell new book written by the man who took over John Kerry's Swift Boat charges: Kerry reenacted combat scenes for film while in Vietnam! The footage is at the center of a growing controversy in Boston. The official convention video introducing Kerry is directed by Steven Spielberg protégé James Smoll. MORE Smoll was given hours of Kerry's homemade 8 millimeter film to incorporate into the convention short, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned. "Kerry carried a home movie camera to record his exploits for later viewing," charges a naval officer in the upcoming book UNFIT FOR COMMAND. "Kerry would revisit ambush locations for reenacting combat scenes where he would portray the hero, catching it all on film. Kerry would take movies of himself walking around in combat gear, sometimes dressed as an infantryman walking resolutely through the terrain. He even filmed mock interviews of himself narrating his exploits. A joke circulated among Swiftees was that Kerry left Vietnam early not because he received three Purple Hearts, but because he had recorded enough film of himself to take home for his planned political campaigns." UNFIT FOR COMMAND will be unleashed next month by REGNERY. [It ranked #1,318 on the AMAZON hitparade Wednesday morning.] The films shot by Kerry's own Super 8 millimeter hand-held movie camera have the grainy quality of home movies. MORE The BOSTON GLOBE reported in 1996 that the Kerry home movies "reveal something indelible about the man who shot them - the tall, thin, handsome Naval officer seen striding through the reeds in flak jacket and helmet, holding aloft the captured B-40 rocket. The young man so unconscious of risk in the heat of battle, yet so focused on his future ambitions that he would reenact the moment for film. It is as if he had cast himself in the sequel to the experience of his hero, John F. Kennedy, on the PT-109." "John was thinking Camelot when he shot that film, absolutely," says Thomas Vallely, a fellow veteran and one of Kerry's closest political advisers and friends. NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author Lt. Col. Robert "Buzz" Patterson in his new book RECKLESS DISREGARD, details one of the claimed Kerry reenactments for film: "On February 28, 1969, now in charge of PCF 94, Kerry came under fire from an enemy location on the shore. The crew's gunner returned fire, hitting and wounding the lone gunman. Kerry directed the boat to charge the enemy position. Beaching his boat, Kerry jumped off, chased the wounded insurgent behind a thatched hutch, and killed him. Kerry and his crew returned within days, armed with a Super 8 video camera he had purchased at the post exchange at Cam Ranh Bay, and reenacted the skirmish on film."