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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: redfish who wrote (609452)	8/24/2004 12:28:29 PM
From: PROLIFE	Respond to of 769670

Hollywood Kerry's Fiction Mike Gallagher Tuesday, Aug. 24, 2004 I have a wild idea for a Hollywood movie: an American presidential candidate decides his record as a U.S. Senator won't impress voters so he embarks upon an ambitious plan - tell anyone who will listen how he was a Vietnam War hero some 35 years ago. Now this guy has to be relentless. When ESPN asks him about prayer in college football games, he has to relate that to his war experience. As he strides to his political convention's podium, he needs to salute and say, "Reporting for duty!" Heck, if someone asks him what time it is, he needs to say, "As a Vietnam War hero, I can honestly tell you that it's fifteen minutes past ten.." For a while, the plan works. People don't seem to be bothered by this odd strategy. Then, storm clouds appear. Many of the veterans he served with don't think he's a hero at all. In fact, they can't stand the guy and know he'd be a disastrous president. So they band together, band of brothers that they are, and they create some TV commercials that say just that, that this candidate is an opportunistic, showboating, grandstanding bag of wind. Suddenly, Americans are starting to realize that this candidate isn't everything he's cracked up to be. They learned more about Vietnam than they ever dreamed possible. They remembered how much they despised what Jane Fonda did to America and found out that the candidate is Jane Fonda in a pinstriped suit. They read his quotes from his testimony when he came home from Vietnam and the terrible things he said about other soldiers. They heard about his book, "The New Soldier" which featured an upside-down American flag being manhandled by a bunch of freaks on the cover. They came to the conclusion that this man was one of the worst candidates the Democratic Party had ever produced. They figured out that the only reason he tried to shove his Vietnam experience in everyone's face was because he had a lousy record as a Senator. And they gave the incumbent President four more years in a dramatic, landslide re-election. Okay, so my mythical screenplay about John Kerry is only true up to the part of the November election. We'll have to wait and see if Americans do the right thing on November 2nd. But everything else is chapter and verse what the 2004 campaign represents. John Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, are howling like enraged madmen over the now-famous "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" ads. Guess they don't like what they hear, that a number of veterans who served with Kerry don't think much of his pomposity, his bragging of Vietnam and how he believes that experience would make him a great president. Kerry and Edwards are calling on President Bush to "denounce" the ads. Funny, I don't remember anyone calling on Kerry/Edwards to "denounce" Michael Moore's cheap shot of a movie, "Fahrenheit 9/11." I have no recollection of any public cries for Kerry/Edwards to "denounce" Al Franken and his liberal talk radio network over their daily drum beat of personal attacks on President Bush. In fact, I don't recall a single example of Republicans whining about the non-stop barrage of endless and mindless assaults by the radical left. We just take it and know that truth is on our side. Well, truth is on the side of the Swift Boat Veterans, too. John Kerry can try and run from his anti-American histrionics when he emerged as a leading anti-war protester, but he can't hide from it. He can pretend that his three Purple Hearts over four months somehow make him better than any other living veteran, but he can't ignore the simple reality check by Senator Bob Dole, who wondered about Kerry's "superficial" wounds. The real life moral of this story is that John Kerry's arrogant attempt to shamelessly exploit his Vietnam service is coming back to bite him in the rear end, and it's a lot more painful to him than the rice that lodged there in Vietnam. And that's no Hollywood work of fiction. Now let's just hope for the happy ending.