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Politics : Proof that John Kerry is Unfit for Command -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (1403)	8/19/2004 11:40:55 PM
From: Ann Corrigan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27181

Ballad of the French Berets There ought to be a special word – something German – to describe the feeling of revulsion normal people experience when reading lines like these from a single article on John Kerry by Laura Blumenfeld in the Washington Post: "Kerry's complexity has been an issue since his national debut in 1971." "Kerry likes to quote the French writer Andre Gide: 'Don't try to understand me too quickly.'" "His friend Dan Barbiero said it comes down to Kerry's complexity ..." (Apparently, Kerry's answers on the LSAT were too nuanced and complex for the Harvard Law School admissions committee: Despite all his connections, fancy education and war-protesting, Kerry couldn't get into Harvard Law School and went to Boston College Law School instead. Wait – didn't Kerry throw that famous, game-winning "Hail Mary" pass while playing quarterback for Boston College back in the '80s? Or am I thinking of somebody else? Let's ask Doug Brinkley!) "Flying to his next campaign stop, he chatted about maneuvers to avoid flak in combat." "This was Primal John ... who ran with the bulls at Pamplona and, when trampled, got up, chased the bull, and grabbed for its horns." (I'm almost sure this was a polite reference to John and Teresa's honeymoon night.) The problem with a suck-up press for Democrats is that with no adversary press to call them on it, Democrats develop wilder and wilder Walter Mitty fantasy lives until finally one day, when they are at the zenith of their political careers, someone notices that they're not Irish, they didn't deserve their war medals, 254 swiftboat veterans hate them, and they didn't spend Christmas Eve, 1968, in Cambodia. The Boston Globe biography of Kerry published earlier this year compliantly repeats Kerry's yarn about how he spent Christmas 1968 in Cambodia "despite President Nixon's assurances that there was no combat action in this neutral territory." Only recently did someone point out: (1) Kerry was 55 miles away from the Cambodian border on Christmas 1968 and (2) Nixon wasn't president in 1968. (How did "historian" Doug Brinkley miss that in his biography of Kerry?) The media will spend weeks going through pay stubs for Bush's National Guard service in Alabama in the waning days of war, but if Kerry tells them exotic tales of covert missions into Cambodia directed by Richard Nixon, they don't even bother to fact-check who was president in December 1968. Tom Harkin was shouting this week that Dick Cheney is a "coward," evidently for not fighting in Vietnam like Harkin. Except Harkin didn't fight in Vietnam either! The last time Harkin was bragging about his Vietnam service was in 1984 when he told David Broder of the Washington Post: "I spent five years as a Navy pilot, starting in November of 1962. One year was in Vietnam. I was flying F-4s and F-8s on combat air patrols and photo-reconnaissance support missions." Sen. Barry Goldwater – not the Post – checked with the Defense Department and soon Harkin was forced to admit he had never been in combat in Vietnam, but was based in Japan during the war, ferrying damaged planes from the Saigon airport to Japan for repairs. Oops! Then there was Al Gore who, like Kerry, was in Vietnam just long enough to get photos for his future political campaigns. (Apparently all future Democratic politicians take cameras to war zones.) Gore enlisted in the Army in 1970 in a calculated gambit to help his senator dad in an election year. Young Al was given a cushy job writing for the Stars and Stripes newspaper, a bodyguard, and an exit strategy when Pops lost the election. After five months of this hygienic tour of duty, Little Lord Fauntleroy asked to come home, and before long he was safe and sound and preparing to flunk out of divinity school and then drop out of law school. But over the next 30 years, Gore provided the media with increasingly macho reminiscences of his combat experiences in Vietnam – almost as vivid and stirring as the impassioned account he gave of being a tobacco farmer. "I pulled my turn on the perimeter at night and walked through the elephant grass and I was fired upon." (The Baltimore Sun) "I took my turn regularly on the perimeter in these little firebases out in the boonies. Something would move, we'd fire first and ask questions later." (Vanity Fair) "I was shot at. I spent most of my time in the field." (The Washington Post) I think someone needs to explain to the Democrats that having your picture taken is not what most veterans mean by "being shot at."

To: American Spirit who wrote (1403)	8/20/2004 8:56:29 AM
From: Andrew N. Cothran	Respond to of 27181

Beheading Video, Bondage Photos Neck-and-Neck in Ratings War 05/12/04 CYBERSPACE, Earth The video of Islamic militants beheading bound American Nick Berg is neck-and-neck in a global Internet ratings war with images of American soldiers binding and dominating Iraqi prisoners. A survey of the world's search engines shows that nearly two billion Internet users requested links to the Berg beheading video and the prisoner bondage photos in the last twenty-four hours, revealing a startling trend in the world's appetite for such graphic images. The Berg video received slightly more requests than the bondage photos in the hours just after its release yesterday; but then the bondage photos made a strong comeback overnight, and they are now on pace to become the most viewed images in the history of mankind, surpassing the Apollo moon landings and the last episode of Friends. "People watch the Berg video once, and that's it," explained Internet traffic analyst Chandler Glaze. "But for some reason, they look at the bondage images over and over and over again." A spokesman for the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, who would only identify himself as "Spike," judged the quality of the bondage photos as "mediocre," claiming that the photographers had "no sense of composition or irony whatsoever." But he did suggest that the erotic nature of the photos may be behind their raging popularity. "There aren't enough perverts in the world to account for the popularity of these images on the Internet, or to account for showing them over and over and over again in the mainstream media," Spike argued. "Which means that millions and millions of so-called 'normal' people, right on up to the top, must be attracted to the whole idea of bondage and domination. "You never know," Spike concluded. "It could be anyone." ©2004 RealStupidNews.com