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Politics : John Kerry for President Free speach thread NON-CENSORED -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (231)	10/28/2004 5:48:31 PM
From: StockDung	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1449

Kerry Pushes Missing Iraqi Weapons Story Despite Hard Proof By Melissa Charbonneau White House Correspondent October 28, 2004 CBN.com – WASHINGTON - Those missing explosives in Iraq continue to dominate the presidential campaign. Sen. John Kerry is using the disappearance as proof of President Bush's blundering. The President is hitting back, as the weapons story begins to unravel. Both candidates are courting voters in the Buckeye State, with President Bush looking to keep the 20 electoral votes that Ohio gave him in the 2000 election. He is also making stops in Michigan, a state he lost to Al Gore. Kerry is campaigning in another Gore state, playing to his base in Wisconsin. He is accusing the President of a "growing scandal," saying that Bush failed to protect explosives at the al Qaqaa Arms Dump in Iraq. Kerry said, "Instead of coming clean with the American people, the Bush administration has blamed the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the U.S. military, and even the media itself. And all the while, the White House took no responsibility for creating the situation where these weapons could [be] missing in the first place. " Kerry's latest ad claims Bush’s blunder puts American soldiers at risk. But two of Kerry’s own foreign policy advisers are not backing him up, with one admitting that no one knows the truth about the missing arms, and another saying it is possible that “the explosives had been moved before U.S. troops arrived. " The President says an investigation is ongoing and Kerry’s charges are part of a pattern of saying anything for his own political advantage. Bush said, "Now the senator is making wild charges about missing explosives, when his top foreign policy advisors admits, ‘we do not know the facts.’ A political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your Commander-in-Chief." The Washington Times reports that Russian forces moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons to Syria before the U.S. military operation. A Pentagon undersecretary said, "Russian troops almost certainly removed the high explosive material from the al-Qaqaa facility before the war started." And an ABC News report says the amount of missing explosives may have been far less than originally reported. International Atomic Energy Agency documents that show 138 tons of the missing explosives may have been removed from the arms dump long before the U.S. launched its attack. The Bush Administration points out that Kerry is not mentioning the 400,000 tons of munitions that the coalition seized or destroyed in Iraq. That is more than a thousand times the amount Kerry says disappeared, weapons Bush says would still be in hands of Saddam Hussein if the U.S. had not removed the Iraqi leader.

To: American Spirit who wrote (231)	10/28/2004 5:49:46 PM
From: StockDung	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1449

Kerry Should Admit His Mistake, RNC Says By Susan Jones CNSNews.com Morning Editor October 28, 2004 (CNSNews.com) - Maybe it's time for John Kerry to admit some mistakes of his own, the Republican National Committee suggested in a daily memo to broadcasters. Sen. Kerry's recent attacks on President Bush -- over missing explosives in Iraq -- are based on disputed data, the RNC noted on Thursday. It noted that there are growing doubts about information leaked to the New York Times and CBS News -- including the amount of explosives that disappeared from Iraq's al Qaqaa munitions depot. ABC News reported Wednesday night there may have been only three tons of RDX at the al Qaqaa facility -- not the 141 tons mentioned in reports that Kerry has seized upon. The New York Times (with CBS) reported Monday that 380 tons of HMX and RDX had disappeared -- supposedly because U.S. troops failed to secure the explosives that were known to be at the al-Qaqaa facility. The Kerry campaign holds Bush accountable -- without knowing whether the explosives were even there when U.S. troops arrived at al-Qaqaa. Subsequent reports suggest that Saddam may have removed the explosives -- maybe with the help of the Russians -- in the run-up to the war. "It looks like the leaked info serving as the basis for Kerry's 'wild charge' doesn't hold water," the RNC release said. Moreover, Ambassador Paul Bremer, who headed the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, reminded Fox News on Wednesday that he was in Iraq when Baghdad fell. According to Bremer, removing a huge amount of explosives from al-Qaqaa at that time "would have required a great deal of organization...It is not something you do overnight with a few looters. The insurgency was not organized. It was not organized until late in the summer. And secondly, I was on the ground there. There was no traffic on the streets." The RNC also points to an April 3, 2003, CBS News report, which said that a search of the al-Qaqaa facility -- by the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division -- "turned up no high explosives like the ones Kerry accuses the president and U.S. troops of losing, although CBS said the 3rd ID did find "nerve agent antidote and Arabic documents on how to engage in chemical warfare." "Is there anything at all that supports John Kerry's wild claim on those Iraqi explosives?" the RNC asked. "People on the ground say it was almost impossible to truck-out tons of explosives once the fighting began. The leaked documents providing the launch pad for Kerry's attack are highly suspect. Our troops were at the site two weeks after the war began and found WMD evidence, but no explosives." In recent days, Kerry and his campaign repeatedly have called on President Bush to "admit his mistakes."

To: American Spirit who wrote (231)	10/28/2004 6:00:48 PM
From: StockDung	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1449

John Kerry Is No Ronald Reagan The Democratic senator says that he wants to follow in the footsteps of President Reagan. Fat chance. by Phil Anderson 10/28/2004 4:00:00 PM DURING THE FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE on September 30, John Kerry invoked the name of Ronald Reagan to criticize President George W. Bush's policy on Iraq. Kerry claimed that, like Reagan, he would work with our allies and the international community on foreign affairs, instead of acting unilaterally. As that preposterous comparison underlined, Kerry has proven himself to be a politician who will say anything to get elected. His wild-eyed reaction this week to the missing explosives of Al Qaqaa is just the most recent example of his making rash statements in the service of personal ambition. It is reminiscent of his original anti-war activism, when he launched his political career by rushing home from his four months of duty in Vietnam to denounce American troops with language he himself would later admit was "over the top." Already, the facts on the Al Qaqaa flap are coming into focus, and they are far from the indictment of George W. Bush that Kerry so rashly asserted. Instead, it's becoming increasingly clear that the supposedly looted explosives were no longer at the Iraqi facility when U.S. troops arrived in the area. Kerry at a minimum has been the gullible participant in a U.N.-to New York Times-to CBS News-to Kerry campaign bank shot. At worst, he is a knowing opportunist who will ignore the reputation of our troops to get himself elected. And this is the candidate who claimed in the first debate that he would "follow in the footsteps" of President Reagan? During the Cold War, Senator Kerry fought against Reagan's efforts to strengthen our military at every turn. During his 1984 campaign for the U.S. Senate, Kerry claimed that "the Reagan Administration has no rational plan for our military. Instead, it acts on misinformed assumptions about the strength of the Soviet military and a presumed window of vulnerability, which we now know not to exist." Kerry went on to call for $45 billion to $53 billion of cuts from the Reagan defense budget, including the elimination of the MX missile, the B-1 bomber, the national missile defense system, and the F-14 fighter jets. These weapons programs proved to be pivotal in Reagan's efforts to bring the Soviet Union to its knees. And Kerry proved himself to be naïve on the critical national security issue of his early years in Washington. Unlike Senator Kerry, President Reagan was a man of firm conviction. As documented in the critically acclaimed film, In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed, Ronald Reagan took politically courageous stands and did not waver because he had a vision of where he wanted to lead the nation. In a time when most of the liberal intelligentsia was arguing for the appeasement of the Soviet Union, President Reagan made the tough decisions necessary for America to win the Cold War. He was called a warmonger and worse. In 1988, Senator Kerry characterized the Reagan era as a period of "moral darkness." However, history now shows that his stubbornness and singled minded focus to defeat the beast of Communism freed millions of people. In contrast, John Kerry is a career liberal, who voted to authorize the war in Iraq, switched course when criticized by antiwar candidate Howard Dean, and has spent the rest of his campaign offering tortured explanations of an Iraq position that is still murky by any objective analysis. In the waning days of the 2004 presidential campaign, America finds herself at a crossroad. The threat from terrorist organizations and rogue nations that want to obtain weapons of mass destruction is a serious challenge that rivals the challenge presented by Soviet aggression in the 1980's. President Bush has laid out a clear approach for dealing with terrorism. Like President Reagan, he is leading with strength and confronting our adversaries, instead of hoping that they will not attack us first. John Kerry has spent considerable time and money trying to convince the American people he is not weak on national security issues. But he's had a hard time escaping the record he has amassed during his two decade tenure in Washington. Kerry has voted 38 times to cut the defense budget. He has voted 12 times against providing our military men and women with pay increases. He voted against providing our troops with $87 billion to carry out their mission in Iraq. He voted to cut $7.5 billion from the intelligence budget a year after the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. And in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Kerry voted six times against establishing a Department of Homeland Security. Americans for Peace Through Strength, a pro-defense advocacy organization, is running a television commercial to educate the public about Kerry's reckless record of voting for deep cuts in America's defense and homeland security capabilities. "It was never my intention to get involved in the political contest," said Stephen K. Bannon, the writer/director of In The Face Of Evil," who also directed our television commercial, "but, I have been outraged at John Kerry's comparing himself to Ronald Reagan, whose policies Kerry consistently fought during Reagan's presidency while Kerry was a junior senator in the 1980s." Kerry is in fact the polar opposite of Ronald Reagan, and the American people should not entrust him with the responsibility of being commander-in-chief during this critical time in our nation's history. The second Tuesday of November will be the 15th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Wall fell because Ronald Reagan was willing to be unpopular and right, instead of popular and wrong. Bush shares this critical trait in a leader. Similarly, Bush, like Reagan, understands that it is much more important to win the war than to end it. Let's hope that Americans choose a leader on the first Tuesday of this month that honors the anniversary of the second Tuesday and honors the sacrifices of our military. Phil Anderson is the executive director of Americans for Peace Through Strength, a 527 organization dedicated to educating the American people about the importance of a strong national defense.