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

To: JDN who wrote (701255)	9/10/2005 3:20:17 PM
From: paret	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Left-wing venom exceeds Katrina's fury By SALIM MANSUR torontosun.com Sat, September 10, 2005 Hurricane Katrina was not quite the Asian tsunami from last December, yet the wreckage left behind where she landed in Louisiana and Mississippi was a reminder of how brittle the human condition is when nature unleashes its fury. We forget -- perhaps forgetfulness saves us our sanity -- how fragile is our civility, which can readily snap when a mighty storm blows. It snapped, just as the winds and water breached the levees protecting New Orleans, revealing for a brief passing moment the lurking beasts of looters and rapists beneath our tamed skins. I was reminded of Shakespeare's Lear, the king unhinged by grief and exposed to the storm around him, who rages, "unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art." Katrina exposed the human fragility of those in her path. But it also exposed the shamelessly crass politics of those who, form a safe distance, insisted on faulting someone, anyone, for nature's rage. Katrina had barely made landfall when Robert Kennedy Jr., (a Democrat) launched the blame game by accusing Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour (a Republican) of responsibility, since he opposed the Kyoto Protocol and thereby contributed to global warming that caused the hurricane. In recent American politics, the lib-left's venom exceeds Katrina's fury. It was unleashed against President George Bush for deliberately failing to provide New Orleans' citizens, mostly black and poor, with federal resources to move to shelter ahead of the hurricane. Al Sharpton, the race-baiting Democrat from New York City, rose to his reputation as he slammed Bush on MSNBC: "I feel that, if it was in another area, with another economic strata and racial makeup, that President Bush would have run out of Crawford a lot quicker and FEMA would have found its way in a lot sooner." Race and resentment lurk beneath the skin of American society for political charlatans to exploit in disregard of facts and circumstances. Katrina's wreckage was plainly evident, but the hyperbole of race-baiters exploiting the agony of victims exceeded even the boundaries of broken civility. Randall Robinson, former president of Transafrica, reported in The Huffington Post online that "black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive." He apparently did not reflect on his words and ask why only "black victims" would turn to cannibalism. Resentment's toxin has so corrupted people who think like Robinson that they readily spit upon the weakest victims just to score points against Bush. When his statement could not be verified, he posted a retraction but no apology. Since the 2000 cliffhanger presidential election, lib-left partisans in American politics have steadily gone berserk in their hatred for Bush. There is no fury in politics like the spitefulness of sore losers. Republicans have won seven of the last 10 presidential elections, control both Houses of the U.S. Congress, and will soon have a commanding majority in the U.S. Supreme Court. The mainstream left-leaning media have also contributedto the Democrats' disorder -- Dan Rather of CBS News, for instance, using documents about Bush's war record that turned out to have been forged (he apologized) -- making the party one that serious Americans are reluctant to take seriously. While Katrina's fury was elemental, the Democrats seem increasingly unhinged by the politics of race and resentment. America's Gulf coast will certainly recover from Katrina. The same cannot be said of the once-formidable party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy recovering soon from the lunacy of those who have made it a frat house of juvenile mudslingers.

To: JDN who wrote (701255)	9/10/2005 9:27:38 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Army Kept Truth of GI's Death From Family By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer news.yahoo.com The Army said Saturday it knew for more than a year after 1st Lt. Kenneth Ballard's death in Iraq in May 2004 that he was not killed in action, as it initially reported. The family was not told the truth until Friday. Ballard's mother, Karen Meredith, of Mountain View, Calif., said in a telephone interview that she is angry and will press for a full explanation. She is a public critic of the war and has attended anti-war protests in Crawford, Texas, outside President Bush's ranch, with grieving mother and peace activist Cindy Sheehan. Meredith said she blames the Army's error on official incompetence, not an intent to cover up the truth. "This news is stunning to me," she said. "People in the Army knew this news for 15 months, and why they couldn't be bothered to tell me the truth when this first happened and to have me go through this pain 15 months later is unconscionable on the part of the Army. It's a betrayal to my son's service," she said. A letter from Army Secretary Francis Harvey was hand-delivered to her Friday in Mountain View. She said Harvey wrote, "I sincerely apologize to you for the unfortunate series of events that resulted in your not being informed." Army officials said the failure to notify the family of the true cause of Ballard's death was an oversight. The military sometimes incorrectly categorizes the cause of war deaths. What is so unusual about the Ballard case is that the error was recognized early but not reported to the family for more than a year. On Memorial Day in 2004, the day after Kenneth Ballard died, the Army informed his family that he had been killed by enemy fire while on a combat mission in the south-central Iraqi city of Najaf. In a casualty announcement from June 1, the Pentagon said Ballard died "during a firefight with insurgents." The Army disclosed on Saturday that Ballard, 26, actually died of wounds from the accidental discharge of a M240 machine gun on his tank after his platoon had returned from battling insurgents in Najaf. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery last Oct. 22. An Army spokesman, Col. Joseph Curtin, said in an interview that separate investigations by the local commander and by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division concluded days after Ballard's death that it was an accident. The tank accidentally backed into a tree and a branch hit the mounted, unmanned machine gun, causing it to fire, Curtin said. Ballard was struck at close range and died of his wounds, he added. For reasons that are not clear, the Army did not correct the public record and inform the family until Friday. Last spring, it was disclosed that the Army had delayed in telling the family of ex-pro football player Pat Tillman that his death in Afghanistan in April 2004 was caused by gunfire from his fellow Rangers and not enemy forces, as the Army initially reported. The Tillman case is being reviewed by the Pentagon inspector general's office. Curtin said the Ballard matter was a regrettable mistake and that Harvey, the Army secretary, has ordered a review of procedures in reporting accidental deaths. "Furthermore, the Army regrets that the initial casualty report from the field was in error as well as the time that it has taken to correct the report and to inform his family," Curtin said in a statement issued Friday night. Ballard was a platoon leader in 2nd Battalion, 37th Armor Regiment, 1st Armored Division. During the Najaf fighting he was attached to a unit of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment. On May 22, approaching the one-year anniversary of her son's death, Meredith wrote in a Web posting, "One year ago you were killed by a snipers bullet. They said you were killed instantly. There is not a minute that goes by that I do not remember answering the phone and hearing I regret to inform you." The 1st Armored Division, which also investigated the death, said in a written statement from its post in Wiesbaden, Germany, on Friday night that investigations had "revealed additional information of the cause" of Ballard's death. It did not mention that the investigations were conducted more than a year ago. ___ On the Net: Defense Department: defenselink.mil Lt. Kenneth Ballard site: ltkenballard.com Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.