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

To: LindyBill who wrote (59634)	8/11/2004 10:29:19 PM
From: Andrew N. Cothran	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793765

L.A. Times Tries to Invent Conspiracy With Perry's Donation to Swift Boat Veterans Wednesday, August 11. 2004 When leftist billionaires such as George Soros, Stephen Bing, Peter Lewis and Ron Burkle donate to 527s and other groups trying to defeat President Bush, the media make, maybe, a passing reference to their Democratic Party ties. For the most part, these donors are simply portrayed as "philanthropists." Story Continues Below But when a wealthy conservative Republican donates to help the president, every donation he ever made and every Republican connection he ever had must be unearthed and splashed across the news. After all, there must be a vast right-wing conspiracy at work. Take, for instance, Texas homebuilder Robert J. "Bob" Perry, who donated $100,000 to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which is countering John Kerry’s claims about the Vietnam War. This weekend, the Los Angeles Times - the same paper that tried to destroy candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger but refused to report Gray Davis' history of violence against women - conducted a full investigation of Perry's donations. As it turns out, Perry, 71, who lives in the suburbs of Houston, has also helped fund a number of GOP candidates in the area, the Times fretted. The paper says so far he's given some $5 million to political candidates. "And the vast majority of those people have never laid eyes on him," Court Koenning, executive director of the Republican Party in Harris County, told the paper. You might think that a person giving such sums of money to political candidates and causes might want a little more attention. Perry doesn't, however. He "is reticent and guarded, and remains something of a mystery in Texas," complained the Times. (Translation: Perry doesn’t give interviews to biased media.) Swift Boat Veterans for Truth received a $100,000 check from Perry, about two-thirds of the money the group had in its account as of June 30, financial documents reviewed by the Times revealed. In all, said other reports, the group had $158,750. The Bush campaign says it isn't tied to the group, and there is no evidence of any ties. But the Times and others are trying to show a vast conspiracy between Perry, the candidates he has donated to (such as President Bush), and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. By the way, Perry has also donated to Democrats. The Republican Party is not the only major party to get "outside" help from wealthy donors. Soros, for example, has given more than $15 million to leftist and Democrat causes. Nor does Perry’s $100,000 donation compare with that of Bruce Springsteen and other rockers who are raising $44 million for Kerry.

To: LindyBill who wrote (59634)	8/11/2004 10:32:57 PM
From: Andrew N. Cothran	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793765

Bush's Mocking Drowns Out Kerry's Explanation of Iraq Vote By DAVID E. SANGER Published: August 12, 2004 WASHINGTON, Aug. 11 - For five days now, as the long-distance arguments between President Bush and Senator John Kerry have focused on the wisdom of invading Iraq, Mr. Kerry has struggled to convince his audiences that his vote to authorize the president to use military force was a far, far cry from voting for a declaration of war. So far, his aides and advisers concede, he has failed to get his message across, as Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have mocked his efforts as "a new nuance" that amount to more examples of the senator's waffling. Mr. Kerry's problems began last week when President Bush challenged him for a yes-or-no answer on a critical campaign issue: If Mr. Kerry knew more than a year ago what he knows today about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, would he still have voted to authorize the use of military force to oust Saddam Hussein? As Mr. Bush surely knew, it is a question that can upset the difficult balance Mr. Kerry must strike. He has to portray himself as tough and competent enough to be commander in chief, yet appeal to the faction of Democrats that hates the war and eggs him on to call Mr. Bush a liar. It is a problem that has dogged Mr. Kerry since he walked through the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire, and suffered the barbs of Vermont's former governor, Howard Dean, who made Mr. Kerry's vote to authorize action an issue. Now Mr. Bush has taken up where Dr. Dean left off. "Kerry has always had this vulnerability of looking flip-floppy on the issue and Bush is using this very shrewdly," said Walter Russell Mead, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations. He added "Being silent on the question makes him look evasive, and saying something, anything, gets him in trouble with one side of his party or another." Mr. Kerry's friends concede the first rounds have gone to the president - "it's frustrating as hell," Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware said on Wednesday - but Mr. Bush has his own problems, since the argument re-ignites the question of whether he rushed to war without a plan about what to do next. It is an issue on which Mr. Bush can still sound defensive. On Wednesday in Albuquerque, he responded to Mr. Kerry's suggestion that the United States could begin pulling troops out of Iraq next year by saying, "I know what I'm doing when it comes to winning this war, and I'm not going to be sending mixed signals" by discussing pullouts. Mr. Bush also reaffirmed his stance on the war when he challenged Mr. Kerry. "We did the right thing,'' the president said on Friday, "and the world is better off for it." Across the weekend, the Kerry campaign debated how Mr. Kerry should respond. "There were a lot of ideas," said one official, "from silence, to throwing the question back in the president's face." But the decision, in the end, was Mr. Kerry's. He chose to take the bait on Monday at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Asked by a reporter, he said he would have voted for the resolution - even in the absence of evidence of weapons of mass destruction - before adding his usual explanation that he would have subsequently handled everything leading up to the war differently. Mr. Bush, sensing he had ensnared Mr. Kerry, stuck in the knife on Tuesday, telling a rally in Panama City, Fla., that "he now agrees it was the right decision to go into Iraq." The Kerry camp says that interpretation of Mr. Kerry's words completely distorted the difference between a vote to authorize war and a decision to commit troops to the battlefield. Mr. Kerry's answer is being second-guessed among his supporters, some of whom argued that he should have been more wary of the trap. "I wish he had simply said no president in his right mind would ask the Senate to go to war against a country that didn't have weapons that pose an imminent threat," said one of Mr. Kerry's Congressional colleagues and occasional advisers. Senator Biden argued that Mr. Kerry is being "asked to explain Bush's failure through his own vote. I saw a headline that said 'Kerry Would Have Gone to War.' That's bull. He wouldn't have. Not the way Bush did. But that wasn't the choice at the time - the choice was looking for a way to hold Saddam accountable."