Paul Galanti, hero; John Kerry-Heinz, traitor

Kerry's Legacy:
No One Who Has Aided the Enemy Deserves to Become President

(All emphasis ours)

Being a prisoner of war in Vietnam had some high points but many more low ones. The worst days physically were behind us in 1970, 1971, and 1972. After Ho Chi Minh died in 1969, the routine torturing of POWs for propaganda purposes pretty much stopped. Our captors panicked in November, 1970, following the daring raid on a closed POW camp at Son Tai 20 miles west of Hanoi - and moved all of us into the huge Hoa Lo prison in central Hanoi. We finally were permitted a semblance of societal life after years in solitary and/or stuffed into tiny windowless cells with two or three other POWs.

Our morale - at least in the cells in which I lived during this time - while not so idyllic as those portrayed in the farcical "Hogan's Heroes," was tolerable compared with the dark ages of 1965-1969.

The peace talks in Paris had been plodding along since March, 1968, following the Communists' total drubbing in the 1968 Tet Offensive. Most of us expected a break in the talks after the election of Richard Nixon; it appeared there might be movement.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident, the springboard for President Johnson's launching of attacks against Communist North Vietnam, lay four years in the past. The Communists, however, were buying time. They were helped by a misinformed public in the U.S. - pressured on one side by a war that had dragged on seemingly forever and on the other by Americans whose primary interest was not the success of their government.

The Communists were without leverage over the United States during this time - except for those POWs who basically were being held hostage to pressure Uncle Sam. The Tet Offensive had been a terrible defeat for freedom's enemies. But increasingly we prisoners of war sensed, from our captors' demeanor and reading between the lines of propaganda broadcasts, a sinister force surfacing. Americans whom the Communists - the enemy - were calling "comrades" were rallying to their side. From the point of view of our captors, in America anarchy was reigning supreme.

After being shown photos of radical demonstrations, most of us were told the Communists never could defeat us on the battlefield but their allies - allies - in our country would win the battle for them in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. And it appeared to be going in their direction. The interrogators would show photos of demonstrators looking like gypsies and carrying outrageous signs that were unheard of in the mid-'60s before most of us had been captured.

And then in 1971 we started hearing about "Vietnam Veterans Against the War," whose leader was a former Naval officer. From various sources I've since learned that the most senior leader of VVAW was LTJG John Kerry, a U.S. Naval Reserve officer. Kerry claimed Vietnam was "ravaged equally by American bombs and search-and-destroy missions as well as by Viet Cong terrorism . . . ." Hunh? Hadn't I been shot down because we were required to fly close to the targets to minimize civilian casualties?

Asked for a recommendation as to possible courses of action for Congress to pursue, Kerry said he had spoken to representatives from Hanoi and from the PRG (Viet Cong) at the Paris peace talks, and mentioned his support for "Madame Binh's points." At that time Madam Nguyen Thi Binh was the Viet Cong foreign minister. These meetings took place in the spring of 1970, apparently before Kerry joined the VVAW. Hunh? It's illegal for U.S. citizens to do this, much less commissioned officers.

Kerry was the most prominent leader in the VVAW, but many of the others in it were phonies who fabricated atrocities and war stories to convince the American public the average GI Joe was a psychopath.

That's the reason Kerry's band of brothers has deserted him. I do not know a single Vietnam combat veteran who agrees with what John Kerry did in 1970 through 1972 in his self-aggrandizing crawl to a political career.

But the worst was when Kerry, clad in store-bought camouflage and festooned with his decorations, told the world he and his comrades routinely had committed war crimes while ravaging the countryside like Genghis Khan.

It was a terrible lie, but it reinforced what the leaders of the peacenik movement had been saying for several years. It was the antithesis of what our government had been reporting. And it was simultaneously the worst betrayal of the United States to those of us who had been spectating for so many years in enemy territory.

It was very simple to us. Kerry sold out his shipmates from the Swift Boats. He sold out every one of us in Hanoi - and likely extended our stay there (for which we all offer him ever so many thanks) - by concocting the lies he now calls "a little over the top." And he continues to fabricate stories to cover up a lackluster career in the Senate. When I heard a tape of Kerry's Boston accent complaining about our forces "ravaging the countryside like Genghis Khan," I had my only flashback to the large cell in Hoa Lo where I first had heard it when Hanoi Hannah - North Vietnam's woman propagandist - was bragging about Kerry's "Winter Soldiers" and the testimony of this Naval officer before a committee of the U.S. Senate.

Kerry's legacy isn't that he has the same initials as John Fitzgerald Kennedy or that he motored around the rivers of South Vietnam in a small boat for four months before asking to leave the war early. His legacy is more along the lines of Benedict Arnold's. The only difference is that Benedict Arnold was a successful soldier before he committed treason. I doubt Benedict Arnold would have much success running for President today. Are we to believe that someone who aided the enemy in time of war is worthy of becoming President?

I don't think so, and neither do many people I know. We have a war to fight. It's going to take a long time. Kerry is not the one to take us through it.
-more-

Vile, loathsome, ugly, empty "man", that John Kerry-Heinz. Gigolo, faux intellectual, pompous perfumed ponce. Foppish dandy. "Not a good man". Useful idiot. Traitor. Fool. Craven opportunist. Botoxed, spray-on tanned, tooth-bleached nancy boy poofter. Supporter of infanticide except when he doesn't.

And those are his better points.

Un-f-cking fit for command.

Watching the Red Sox "Rolling Rally" on ESPN News.

If you get this channel -- it is so much better than SportsCenter on standard ESPN ... no one trying to be funny, phat or angling for a cable show of his own ... just highlights and commentary ...

Anyhow, seeing the players -- grown men and millionaires all -- acting as giddy as we did when we won a game when we were nine -- reminds us of why we love sports so much.

There was an interview at Copley (Square?) with a bunch of young fans, obviously university students ... reminded me of that bit in "Spinal Tap" where Ian is consoling the band about being cancelled in Boston: "I wouldn't worry about it. Not a big college town."

Aren't you folks on the Angry Left just a teensy bit embarassed ...

... that Usama parroted your talking points? Does the term "useful idiots" mean anything to you?

bin Laden takes break from boinking sheep to endorse (sort of) Kerry

Teacher

Pupil

Excerpts of Bin Laden's Video Statement

To the American people, my talk to you is about the best way to avoid another Manhattan,[The Ponderosa: Good. We hate Vermouth.] about the war, its reasons and its consequences .. I tell you: security is an important element of human life,[The Ponderosa: Thank you, Ben Franklin] and free people do not give up their security. Unlike what Bush says that we hate freedom, let him tell us why didn't we attack Sweden, for example.[The Ponderosa: He certainly knows how to appeal to Leftist illogic. To her credit, Sweden produces a ton of great heavy metal, particularly melodic death metal. Otherwise, she is effete and lazy.]

It is known that those who hate freedom do not have dignified souls, like those of the 19 blessed ones.[The Ponderosa: Dignified, perhaps, but currently roasting in the Fires of Gehenna] We fought you because we are free[The Ponderosa: No Arab Muslim is free] ... and want to regain freedom for our nation. As you undermine our security we undermine yours.

---

Even as you enter the fourth year after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush is still misleading and deluding you and hiding the real reason from you.[The Ponderosa: Here comes the Moore/Chomsky pap ... wait for it Infidels ... wait for it!] Consequently, there are still reasons to repeat what happened. I will tell you about the reasons behind these attacks and will tell you the truth about the moments during which the decision was made, for you to contemplate.[The Ponderosa: Contemplate the Men of The Ponderosa pooping on the Quran]

God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the towers, but after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance toward our people in Palestine and Lebanon[The Ponderosa: Suicide bombers ... Model Mohammedans all!], this came to my mind. The incidents that affected me directly go back to 1982 and afterward, when America allowed Israelis to invade Lebanon, with the help of the American 6th Fleet. [The Ponderosa: Are you listening, Jewish Democrats? By the way, this doesn't explain why the Jihadists are waging war all across the planet]

In these tough moments, many things raged inside me that are hard to describe[The Ponderosa: It's called SATAN, Baal, Beelzebub, Lucifer ... ], but they resulted in a strong feeling against injustice and a strong determination to punish the unjust.[The Ponderosa: Touching ... ]

While I was looking at those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it sparked in my mind that the tyrant should be punished with the same and that we should destroy towers in America, so that it tastes what we taste and would be deterred from killing our children and women.[The Ponderosa: Looks like that backfired ... ]


---

We did not find it difficult to deal with Bush and his administration, because it is similar to regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half are ruled by the sons of kings and presidents. We have a long experience with them. Both types include many who are full of arrogance and greed.[The Ponderosa: Michael Moore definitely wrote this part]

This resemblance became clear in the Bush the father's visits to the region. ... He wound up being impressed by the royal and military regimes and envied them for staying decades in their positions and embezzling the nation's money with no supervision.[The Ponderosa: More Moore]

He passed on tyranny and oppression to his son, and they called it the PATRIOT act[The Ponderosa: He's reading the MoveOn.org Manifesto!], under the pretext of fighting terror. Bush the father did well in placing his sons as governors and did not forget to pass on the expertise in fraud from the leaders of the (Mideast) region to Florida [The Ponderosa: Throws a bone to The Lunatic Algore] to use it in critical moments.

---

We had agreed with the general emir Mohammed Atta, God bless his soul[The Ponderosa: More likely He damned it], to carry out all operations within 20 minutes before Bush and his administration noticed. It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the American armed forces will leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone.[The Ponderosa: Don't know what this means]

It appeared to him (Bush) that a little girl's talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God.[The Ponderosa: Michael Moore should be embarassed by this, but we know better]

---

Your security is not in the hands of Kerry, Bush or al-Qaida. Your security is in your own hands. Any state that does not mess with our security has naturally guaranteed its own security..[The Ponderosa: In other words, give us Israel. Sorry, no go, Goat Boy. By the way, when Arafat dies, bin Laden will be the ugliest man on Earth! ]

Awright, so he doesn't explicitly endorse Kerry, but read between the lines ... he wants America to change course ... it's four days before a presidential election ... we know Bush is not going to soften up ... not too tough to discern the underlying threat: Defeat Bush or else.

Guess we'll see on Tuesday whether we're the U.S.A. or Spain.

No word yet whether Moore gets royalties for crafting parts of bin Laden's tirade.

Some ask if we question Kerry-Heinz's patriotism

Flashback ...

When President Bill Clinton referred to the United States as "the indispensable nation" during his second inaugural address in 1997, and then as other U.S. officials picked up the term, Sen. John F. Kerry recoiled. He turned to his longtime foreign policy aide Nancy Stetson to ask, "Why are we adopting such an arrogant, obnoxious tone?"

...

Yes, we question his patriotism. T'ain't easy making Boy Clinton look like Patrick Henry!

So, Kerry-Heinz wants to talk about military incompetence?

Let's flash back to the last time Commander McBragg was in charge ...

'Sampan incident' belies heroic image

John Kerry invented a "war hero" persona in his private journals and in the home movies he filmed and staged in Vietnam. Playing the lead role, he developed a past intended to advance his future political ambitions.

In reality, Kerry was regarded by his Navy peers as reckless with human life. Although Douglas Brinkley's biography "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War" recalls that Kerry used the call sign "Square Jaw" for a short time, it doesn't mention the sign he actually used for most of his four months in Vietnam: "Boston Strangler."

Kerry portrays himself as a Swift Boat officer constantly protesting to his superiors about criminal war policies and inappropriate tactics. In reality, while Kerry constantly complained about the location of assignments to his peers, he hardly ever said a word of protest or spoke out in objection to any superior officer.

Kerry, who skippered two Swift Boats in the Mekong Delta from Dec. 6, 1968, to March 17, 1969, often sported a home-movie camera to record his exploits for later viewing. Fellow "Swiftees" report that Kerry would revisit ambush locations for re-enacting combat scenes where he would portray the hero.

Kerry would take movies of himself in combat gear, sometimes dressed as an infantryman walking resolutely through the terrain. He even filmed mock interviews of himself narrating his exploits.

A joke circulated among Swiftees was that Kerry left Vietnam early not because he received three Purple Hearts, but because he had recorded enough film of himself to take home for his planned political campaigns.

Only after returning home did Kerry argue publicly that war crimes were committed on a daily basis at the direction of all levels of command. He compared his superior officers to Lt. William Calley of My Lai infamy. Kerry's accusations typically relied on impostors who concocted incidents that, when investigated, proved to be exaggerations or fabrications.

On the other hand, the propriety of Kerry's own conduct in Vietnam was and is the subject of serious question.

"Kerry seemed to believe that there were no rules in a free-fire zone, and you were supposed to kill everyone," Swift Boat veteran William E. Franke of Coastal Division 11 told us. "I didn't see it that way. I will tell you in all candor that the only baby killer I knew in Vietnam was John F. Kerry."[Emphasis ours]

The evidence shows John Kerry was a ruthless operator in the field, with little regard for life. One example is the sampan incident in An Thoi in January 1969.

Kerry's account
Kerry recounts that the Swift Boat under his command, PCF 44, and another, PCF 21, were patrolling a shallow channel on a pitch-black night and continually running aground.

For "Tour of Duty" (William Morrow, 2004), Brinkley drew his account from Kerry's journals and subsequent explanations, noting that "neither Swift's search or boarding lights were working properly."

" 'Many minutes of silent patrolling had gone by when one of the men yelled, "Sampan off the port bow," Kerry wrote [in his journal]. 'Everybody froze, and we slowed the engines quickly. But the sampan was already by us and wasn't stopping. It was past curfew, and nothing was allowed in the river. I told the gunner to fire a few warning shots, and in the confusion, all guns opened up. We moved in on the sampan and taking one of the battle lanterns off the bulkhead, shone it on the silhouette of the craft that was now dead in the water.' "

Critical in this account is Kerry's statement that he ordered the gunner to fire "a few warning shots." Brinkley records Kerry's self-justification of the action, one of many versions Kerry would subsequently offer to make the actions he took seem part of standard operating procedure:

"Technically, the two PCFs had done nothing wrong," Brinkley wrote. "The sampan, operating past curfew, was undeniably in a free-fire zone; what's more, there had been more than a few instances of sampans trying to get close enough to U.S. Navy vessels to toss bombs into their pilothouses."

In other words, Kerry is trying to establish that opening fire on the sampan (a flat-bottomed Chinese skiff propelled by oars) was justified — a pre-emptive attack in self-defense. For Kerry, it was critical to maintain that his actions were taken according to Navy policy; otherwise, he had no defense. A Nuremberg defense — "just following orders" — was and is Kerry's chosen line.

Kerry then admitted the civilian casualties he caused, according to the Brinkley biography:

"But knowing that they were following official Navy policy didn't make it any easier to deal with what the crews saw next. 'The light revealed a woman standing in the stern of the sampan with a child of perhaps two years or less in her arms,' Kerry wrote. 'Neither [was] harmed. We asked her where the men from the stern were, as one of the gunners was sure that he had seen someone moving back there. She gesticulated wildly, and I could see traces of blood on the engine mounting. It was obvious that they had been blown overboard.

"'Then somebody said there was a body up front, and we moved in closer to see the limbs of a small child limp on the stacks of rice. She had already covered it, and when one of the men asked me if I wanted it uncovered I said no, realizing that the face would stay with me for the rest of my life and that it was better not to know whether there was a smile or a grimace or whether it was a girl or boy.' "

Boston Globe's find
Coastal Division 11 personnel recall at least two different explanations given for the action by Kerry, in addition to his excuses that it was the crew's fault and that it was a free-fire zone.

Kerry has suggested that, under the rice on the sampan, there might have been a bomb that could have been thrown into the Swift Boat had Kerry allowed the sampan to move close enough.

Additionally, Kerry has suggested that the Viet Cong used women and children to cover their actions and that there could have been Viet Cong in the boat ready to fire on them when they got closer. Another of Kerry's suggestions was that the woman might have been hiding weapons in the sunken boat.

These are strange explanations, since Kerry also says in the Brinkley biography that during his "entire stint in Vietnam, he never found a single piece of contraband" on the hundreds of vessels he searched.

Critically important is the fact that Kerry filed a phony after-action operational report concealing the fact that a child had been killed during the attack on the sampan and inventing a fleeing squad of Viet Cong. The operational report is one of the important missing documents that Kerry neglects to make public on his campaign Web site.

The book written by three Boston Globe reporters, "John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography" (PublicAffairs Reports, 2004), cites a Navy report of "a similar-sounding incident."

"In any case, while Kerry said in a 2003 interview that he wasn't sure when the boy in the sampan was killed, a Navy report says a similar-sounding incident took place on Jan. 20, 1969. The crew of No. 44 'took sampan under fire, returned to capture 1 woman and a small child, one enemy KIA [Killed in Action] ... believe four occupants fled to beach or possible KIA.' "

Kerry was the skipper of PCF 44 at the time. The Kerry campaign was sent a copy of the report, but did not respond when the Boston Globe asked if it matched Kerry's memory of the night the child was killed.

The Globe reporters, who unknowingly uncovered a critical piece of evidence, were skeptical there could have been two such incidents.

Eyewitness account
Gunner Steve Gardner sat above Kerry on the double .50-caliber mount that night in January 1969.

PCF 44, engines shut off, lay in ambush near the western mouth of the Cua Lon River. The boat's own generator was operating and its radar was on, with Kerry supposedly in the pilothouse monitoring the radar.

Although the radar was easily capable of picking up the sampan early, Kerry gave no warning to the crew and did not come out of the pilothouse. Instead, first an engine noise and then a sampan suddenly appeared in front of the boat — still no Kerry.

The PCF lights were thrown on — still no Kerry. The sampan was ordered to stop by the young gunner, Gardner — still no Kerry.

According to Gardner, there was no order to fire warning shots, as Kerry claimed. Indeed, there was no Kerry until it was over.[Emphasis ours] When an occupant of the sampan appeared to Gardner to reach for or hold a weapon, he opened up (as did others), killing the father and, unintentionally, a child.

Then Kerry finally appeared; he ordered the crew to cease-fire and then threatened them with courts-martial.

'Bone of contention'
Steve Gardner is the sole crewman not swayed by Kerry during his many post-Vietnam years of solicitation aimed at gaining the support of his own crew.

Today, Gardner asks: "How can Kerry possibly be commander in chief when he couldn't competently command a six-man crew?"[Emphasis ours]

Gardner, a two-tour Swift Boat sailor who sat five feet behind Kerry in Vietnam and who saw many officers during his two years, judges Kerry to be by far the worst.

"Kerry was erratic," Gardner said in an interview June 19. "He hardly ever did what he was supposed to do. His command decisions put us in more peril then he should have. But mostly he just ran. When John Kerry looked out the bow of the boat and he saw tracer fire coming after him, he'd turn and run."[Emphasis ours]

Gardner added: "When he should have been fighting, calling in air support, he was hightailing it. That's always been my bone of contention with Kerry — his decision-making capabilities. That's what takes him out of contention as far as I'm concerned."

[The Ponderosa: We're tired of putting stuff in bold ... it should all be bold, upper case ... and COMMON KNOWLEDGE ... more proof of MSM incompetence]

Kerry's failure to pick up the sampan on radar is hard to understand. Harder still to understand is his absence as the officer in charge during the critical part of the episode.

The fog of war can obscure anyone's vision, but there would certainly have been an inquiry at An Thoi to determine what happened and how a small child could have been inadvertently killed. The inquiry would have focused on why the sampan was not detected early and why normal measures like a flare or small-caliber warning shot were not used.

Gardner irks Kerry
To be fair, it is likely the purpose of such an inquiry would not be to fix blame on anyone, but to avoid future miscalculation.
And the major questions would have been: Where was Kerry? Why was there no warning? Why was a gunner's mate making the critical life-and-death decision instead of the officer in charge? Why the different accounts by Kerry?
Kerry avoided any problem by filing an after-action report in which the dead child simply disappeared from the record and was replaced by a fleeing squad of Viet Cong, some likely killed.

According to Gardner, Kerry threatened to court-martial those involved, even though the crew believed they had seen weapons on the sampan. Gardner strongly believes that the sight of potential weapons justified the firing.
In their biography, the Globe reporters note that Kerry supporters have tried to discredit Gardner and dismiss his criticism of Kerry. In March, Gardner was quoted publicly for the first time about his views on Kerry, in the Globe and on Time magazine's Web site.

In the Time article, written by Kerry biographer Brinkley, Kerry was quoted as reacting strongly to Gardner's criticism, saying that Gardner had "made up" stories. Brinkley dismissed Gardner, a supporter of President Bush, as being motivated by "one word: politics." Kerry said he couldn't remember the court-martial threat.
Gardner denied that politics had anything to do with his comments. "Absolutely not," he said, saying he kept his feelings about Kerry to himself for 35 years and responded only when a Globe reporter tracked him down.

Kerry's report
Cmdr. George M. Elliott of Coastal Division 11 never knew of the small child's death because all he received from Kerry was the false report, which found its way up the chain of command.

The Commander Coastal Surveillance Force Vietnam (CTF 115) Quarterly Evaluation Report of March 29, 1969, states: " ... 20 January PCFs 21 and 44 operating in An Xuyen Province ... engaged the enemy with a resultant GDA of one VC KIA (BC) [body count], four VC KIA (EST) and two VC CIA."

This is Kerry's victory: killing in action (KIA) five imaginary Viet Cong, capturing in action (CIA) two Viet Cong (an exaggeration of the mother and baby who were actually rescued from the sampan) and simply omitting the dead child from the body count (BC) and the estimate (EST).

Roy F. Hoffmann, then commander of Coastal Surveillance Force Vietnam, CTF 115, received Kerry's false report of probably killing five Viet Cong and capturing two others. Hoffman sent Kerry a congratulatory message.

Upon learning of what Kerry actually had done, Hoffmann, who retired as a rear admiral, recently expressed his contempt for Kerry as a liar, false warrior and fraud.

"I do not believe John Kerry is fit to be commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States," Hoffman said in May. "This is not a political issue. It is a matter of his judgment, truthfulness, reliability, loyalty and trust — all absolute tenets of command."

Despite Kerry's written report, rumors of the sampan incident on the Cua Lon River circulated for years.

The vivid memory of the small, bloody sampan haunts Franke, a Silver Star recipient and veteran of many battles.

"Absent clear indications of danger, Swift Boat crews simply did not open fire upon such boats," Franke wrote us in March. "Rather, the vessel would be boarded, searched and let go with a warning."

Yet in "Tour of Duty," Kerry, according to one of his own accounts, appears to have lost control of his boat after crazily ordering that "warning shots" be fired at a small sampan with heavy .50-caliber weapons, instead of the numerous small-caliber weapons on board.

And according to the biography written by the Globe reporters, Kerry simply butchers a small sampan in a free-fire zone because it would have been dangerous to approach.

'Fire discipline'
Thomas W. Wright, another Swift Boat commander in Coastal Division 11, said Kerry "was not a good combat commander."

Wright said he had such "serious problems" working with Kerry that he finally objected to going on patrol with Kerry. Elliott granted Wright's request that Kerry no longer be assigned to operations under his command.

Wright remembers that Kerry would disappear without warning on multiboat operations. He recalls that Kerry's boat had poor fire discipline and would open fire without prior clearance or apparent reason.

"John Kerry's leadership and operational style were different from mine," Wright said in a written statement in April. "I can see how his crew thought he was a hero, but it seemed like he was a hero fighting out of situations he shouldn't have been in to begin with. I had a lot of trouble getting him to follow orders.

"You had to be right, and you had to have fire discipline. You couldn't blame something on the rules of engagement."

George Bates, another officer in Coastal Division 11, participated in numerous operations with Kerry from January 1969 to March 1969.

In Bates' view, Kerry was a coward who overreacted with deadly force when he felt threatened. Bates, a retired Navy captain, believed that Kerry treated the South Vietnamese in an almost criminal manner.

Bates is haunted by a particular patrol with Kerry on the Song Bo De River in early 1969. With Kerry in the lead, their Swift Boats approached a small hamlet with three to four grass huts. Pigs and chickens were milling around.

As the boats drew closer, the villagers fled. There were no political symbols or flags in evidence. It was obvious to Bates that existing policies, decency and good sense required the boats simply to move on.

Instead, Kerry beached his boat. Upon his command, numerous small animals were slaughtered by heavy-caliber machine guns. Acting more like a pirate than a naval officer, Kerry disembarked and ran around with a Zippo lighter, burning up the entire hamlet.

Bates was appalled by the hypocrisy of Kerry's quick shift to the role of a peace activist condemning war crimes upon his return home. Even today, Bates describes Kerry as a man without a conscience.

A fraud
Whether one believes Kerry's or Gardner's version of the sampan debacle, Kerry's boat was ultimately responsible. The fishing vessel could not possibly have escaped given the vast disparity in speed between sampans and Swift Boats.
No discussion of the incident can be found on Kerry's campaign Web site, nor is there any official document of it among those Navy service records that Kerry has made public.

Gardner's testimony and the quarterly report quoted above both indicate Kerry's PCF 44 picked up the surviving woman and her baby, whom Kerry's after-action report described as captured Viet Cong. Yet no record indicates what became of the woman or the child when Kerry's boat returned to shore.

The squad of four fleeing Viet Cong existed only in Kerry's imagination and in his written report. It does not exist in Brinkley's "Tour of Duty," or in Kerry's statements to Boston Globe reporter Michael Kranish, or in Kerry's secret journal, or in any recollection of anyone.

Kerry's victory exists only in Kerry's mind. Nonetheless, he succeeded in pulling off this fraud until the recent comparison of records.

-more-

Despite hurricanes, energy prices, GDP grew 3.7% in Q3

GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT: THIRD QUARTER 2004 (ADVANCE)


Now, we realize we didn't attend poncey Swiss prep schools, but by our calculations, that's nearly 4% year-over-year GDP growth. Won't someone PLEASE raise taxes on the rich?!?

Why is this election even close?

Coalition of the bribed

Oil for Food bribery means sanctions against Iraq were doomed to fail

Out on the campaign trail, John Kerry continues to diminish our allies in Iraq and decry President Bush for "rushing" to war without U.N. Security Council approval. But we hope his would-be Secretaries of State, Biden and Holbrooke, are paying attention in private to revelations about the crumbling sanctions regime they would have had us continue and the related corruption in the U.N.'s Oil for Food program.

These folks are in for a rude awakening if they really think Old Europe will be rushing to help a President Kerry in Iraq, or that the United Nations is competent and trustworthy enough to manage their foreign policy projects.

...

This meant the Iraq dictator could reward his friends and political allies with oil at below market prices and goods contracts at inflated ones. In the middle of the program, he also started demanding kickbacks on the contracts to add to the stream of unmonitored revenue he was already getting from oil smuggling.

...

High-level officials of Saddam's regime have told investigators that oil and goods contracts were always awarded with an eye to helping Saddam politically, particularly to promote the lifting of the sanctions. The Volcker data bears this out. Iraq's top customer was Russia, whose firms bought $19.2 billion worth of Iraq oil and exported $3.3 billion in humanitarian goods. Fellow Security Council member France was a distant but significant second, at $4.4 billion and $2.9 billion respectively. China is also high on the list.

...

Against this backdrop, it is impossible to take Secretary-General Annan seriously when he calls it "inconceivable" that this could have affected the Security Council's handling of Iraq. "I don't think the Russian or the French or the Chinese government would allow [themselves] to be bought," he said recently. But even in the unlikely event that they weren't too worried about the possible financial losses, they surely never wanted this information to see the light of day.


...

Now, let's step back and put this all in context--the context offered by Mr. Duelfer's report. The news there isn't that there appear to have been no large stockpiles of WMD in Iraq at the time of the March 2003 invasion. That's been clear for more than a year. Rather, the news is that we now know straight from Saddam himself, his scientists, and his fellow high-level detainees that Saddam intended to restart his weapons program the second U.N. sanctions were lifted. And we now know that he would never have unambiguously come clean on his WMD programs because he wanted his enemies (especially the U.S. and Iran) to believe he had them.

In other words, had the weapons inspections been allowed to continue, as Mr. Kerry says he wanted, a U.S. President would have eventually faced the same uncertainties and the same agonizing choice that Mr. Bush did when he decided to commit the U.S. to war.[Emphasis ours] Remember, too, that the final round of inspections was won only with a build-up of U.S. troops in the Gulf, and that a decision to accept as satisfactory the desultory cooperation that Saddam gave these inspectors would have meant overwhelming international pressure for immediate lifting of all sanctions.

There were reasonable arguments against having gone into Iraq. But in light of this latest evidence, the arguments Mr. Kerry and his team have been making--that more inspections might have yielded something, and that the real coalition of the bribed at the Security Council might ever have supported force--don't pass the laugh test, never mind the global one. [Emphasis ours]

-more-

In a non-Bizarro world, this story would be leading the news every night ... we don't at all wonder why it doesn't: it would put the kibosh on Kerry-Heinz's stated foreign policy paradigm, the much and rightfully maligned "global test".

Perhaps after the election the MSM will find an interest in this.

This is what we mean by "aid and comfort to the enemy"

Iraq - An armed group claimed in a video Thursday to have obtained a large amount of explosives missing from a munitions depot facility in Iraq (news - web sites) and threatened to use them against foreign troops.

A group calling itself Al-Islam's Army Brigades, Al-Karar Brigade, said it had coordinated with officers and soldiers of "the American intelligence" to obtain a "huge amount of the explosives that were in the al-Qaqaa facility."

The claim couldn't be independently verified. The speaker was surrounded by masked, armed men standing in front of a black banner with the group's name on it in the tape obtained by Associated Press Television News.

"We promise God and the Iraqi people that we will use it against the occupation forces and those who cooperate with them in the event of these forces threatening any Iraqi city," the man added.
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The melon-headed fop pulls these unfounded charges out of his perfumed ass and the Jihadists, wise to the ways of our media, jump on it. Guy's a total prick.


Jihadist for Kerry

Congrats Red Sox and fans

Enjoy it -- you all deserve it ... fantastic run from 0-3 to 4-0 ... this is a special team.

If this is true, Botox Boy is finished

Russia tied to Iraq's missing arms

Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation, The Washington Times has learned.

John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.

"The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units," Mr. Shaw said. "Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units."

Mr. Shaw, who was in charge of cataloging the tons of conventional arms provided to Iraq by foreign suppliers, said he recently obtained reliable information on the arms-dispersal program from two European intelligence services that have detailed knowledge of the Russian-Iraqi weapons collaboration.

Most of Saddam's most powerful arms were systematically separated from other arms like mortars, bombs and rockets, and sent to Syria and Lebanon, and possibly to Iran, he said.

The Russian involvement in helping disperse Saddam's weapons, including some 380 tons of RDX and HMX, is still being investigated, Mr. Shaw said.

The RDX and HMX, which are used to manufacture high-explosive and nuclear weapons, are probably of Russian origin, he said.

...

Defense officials said the Russians can provide information on what happened to the Iraqi weapons and explosives that were transported out of the country. Officials believe the Russians also can explain what happened to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs.


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IF this is accurate ... the al Qaqaa(sp.?) demagoguery, the "global test" ... The World's Ugliest Gigolo is done ... actually, maybe not. Enough people want free stuff that they are willing to overlook something like this ...

Rumsfeld refutes Kerry-Heinz lies on Al Qaqaa, Tora Bora, Shinseki and "no plan to win the peace"

Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with Bill Cunningham, 700 WLW-AM Cincinnati, Ohio

Q: Donald Rumsfeld, welcome to “The Bill Cunningham Show.”

SEC. RUMSFELD: Thank you, Bill. I’m delighted to be on “The Bill Cunningham Show.”

Q: Well, you know, I have the good fortune, I guess, of living in a so-called battleground state. And every day on television, on radio, I hear all about the failures in Iraq. It’s a terrible mission. American beheadings almost every week and that it’s a total disaster. Dick Cheney says it was a success. You’re the man, you’re Rumsfeld, you’re a great American. Up to this point, has Iraq been a success or a failure or somewhere in between?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Well, it isn’t over, but 25 million people have been liberated. The schools are open, the hospitals are open, the clinics are open, they have an economy that’s growing at a good clip. They did not have their oil wells set afire. Their infrastructure is basically intact. Their electricity is up higher than it was pre-war. The security forces among the Iraqis have gone from zero to something like 112,000 Iraqis. And they are out there helping to provide security for their country.

And with all that, the fact is that there are still terrorists – foreign terrorists –there are still foreign regime elements and former Baathists who want to take back the country. And it is a struggle that’s taking place between extremists who want to chop off people’s heads and tell everyone how they must live their lives and moderates who want to allow the people in that country to prosper and grow and have opportunities and have elections next January.

Q: Right. Yesterday, Donald, your good friends at The New York Times reported that 380 tons of high-degree munitions have been stolen or otherwise ripped off from Al Qaqaa weapons facility and it was big news. John Kerry screaming and hollering about you and Georgie Bush and Dick Cheney being a bunch of bumbling incompetents. And then NBC News came out last night with Miklaszewski and said they embedded with the 82nd Airborne and the explosives were already missing when the American troops arrived on or about April 10, 2003. Which is it: Are you a bumbling incompetent or…

SEC. RUMSFELD: [Laughs]

Q: …is Jim Miklaszewski telling the truth?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Well, here’s the situation. By our count, we have destroyed over 240,000 tons of weapons. And we have captured another 160,000 for a total of over 400,000… (the 160,000) are in line to be destroyed. There are hundreds of weapons sites that exist in that country that we’ve either emptied or guarded. And what’s going on now is a detailed investigation of precisely this situation. Although clearly, the Iraqi Survey Group investigated hundreds of sites in Iraq looking for weapons and clearly there were people there who believe that in many instances Saddam Hussein took weapons out of weapons sites and put them in – we found them in hospitals, we found them in schools, we found them all across that country, buried in some instances. Their goal – if you think about it, go back to the museum. Do you remember when the museum – everyone said the museum was looted?

Q: Fifty thousand pieces are missing.

SEC. RUMSFELD: Yeah.

Q: From the valley of Umm (sp).

SEC. RUMSFELD: It turns out that I talked to a person who’d been to the museum two weeks before the war started and he said it was almost empty at that moment. Clearly, the curators had gone in and taken much of that and put it into a safe place. There was talk about $1 billion being stolen from the…

Q: From the bank.

SEC. RUMSFELD: … Central Bank. In fact, we found I think it was $600 million of it in various locations. And the idea that it was looted was just wrong. It was moved by Saddam Hussein’s people.

Q: Well, do you think The New York Times and the U.N. ’s going to keep dropping a dime on you guys until next Tuesday, whether it’s Sanchez’s memo last week and now it’s the 380 tons which, by the way, mathematically is less than 1/10th of 1 percent of what you’re talking about 400,000 is as to 380 is less than 1/10th of 1 percent. Is The New York Times and the U.N. going to keep dropping the dime on you guys until Election Day?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Well, the president has asked Colin Powell and Don Rumsfeld to not get into politics, but every once in awhile, I drive by the National Archives and on the front of it it says, ‘The past is prologue.’

Q: [Laughs] A couple of other issues here in the battleground states. One is I keep hearing in John Kerry’s coming to Ohio repeatedly. He’s been all over Missouri and Michigan about Gen. Shinseki, who I’m sure is a great guy, that you retired him early because you, Donald Rumsfeld was hearing things from Shinseki about 400,000 troops that you didn’t want hear, that you kicked him out and you fired him. Is that true? Does that have substance?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Anyone who says that has had literally dozens of opportunities to learn that that is a flat lie. Gen. Shinseki served his entire full four-year term. He never said 400,000. He was pressed in a congressional hearing and he said he guessed it would take about as many to secure the country post combat, as it would to take the country in the first instance and he estimated something possibly as many as several hundred thousand. It is just mythology that is going on here. I don’t know – it’s obvious whose interest it serves. But Gen. Franks decided how many forces were needed and he is the one who made that decision and I supported him in it and I believe he made the right decision.

Q: Senator John Kerry said that you, Rumsfeld, basically outsourced the ability to capture UBL to the Afghan warlords and to the Pakistanis, that we had him trapped in Tora Bora and but for the outsourcing by Rumsfeld, Bush and Cheney, we would have captured UBL, would you give wings to those lies or not?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Well, first of all, the intelligence community did not then know where Osama bin Laden was and does not today know where UBL is. I think that one way to look at – put it in context is this – the Soviet Union took 2[00,000 or 300,000 troops, I believe, and attempted to subdue Afghanistan and they lost the war. We had less than 20,000 and we won. The Taliban are gone, the al Qaeda are out of there. They’ve had an election. They have a constitution. Women voted. The people voted for the first time in the history of that country. It was a breathtaking accomplishment. And for anyone to be running around flyspecking what took place in Afghanistan, when we just had this brilliant, unbelievable historic election…and that country is on a path of 23 million people liberated, on a path towards being respectful to its various diverse elements, is beyond comprehension.

Q: Now, lastly, another issue is percolating like a pot of hot coffee and that is that you, Rumsfeld, did not plan for the peace, it was a great military effort, a great war, but you spent all your time taking down the fourth-largest standing army in the world, the Republican Guard – the elite Republican Guard – and didn’t plan properly for the peace, allowed the looting to take place, things of that character. Would you respond to those charges of the radical leftists?

SEC. RUMSFELD: [Laughs] This is quite a program you’ve got here. I’m just getting them all served up. And let me see, what would I have to say about that? The war plan and the postwar plan were both good ones. The postwar plan that you raised the question about was designed to see that they were not able to destroy their oil wells, that they were not able to blow up their bridges, that they did not have massive humanitarian crisis with internally displaced people and refugees and food crisis and that the war was conducted in a speedy way, so that it would not run the risk of destabilizing neighboring countries. All of those were accomplished. And the reality is that any plan then is dealing with an enemy with a brain. And so they adapt and then we adapt to that and it is a truth that it requires continuously adapting what we’re doing – our tactics and our strategies – to meet the problems on the ground, the security problem on the ground. And that’s what our military leaders are doing out there and they’re doing an absolutely superb job and if the parents and loved ones of men and women in uniform are listening, I hope they’re proud of those people because everyone’s a volunteer. Every one of them is over there because they raised their hand and asked to be sent and they’re doing a world-class job for this country and the Iraqi people have a good crack at making it and having a free system in the months and years ahead.

This is great stuff, but, aside from the Al Qaqaa crap, why couldn't these have been answered in the debates, when 70 million people were paying attention?

Worst economy since Big Bang continues ...

Fed Reports Economic Growth Is Continuing

New Home Sales Surge, Durable Goods Up


Won't someone PLEASE raise my taxes?!

Coming to a Battleground State near you: The Kerry-Heinz 2004 Aid and Comfort Tour

Kerry Blames Bush for Attacks on 'Our Kids'

Sen. John F. Kerry on Tuesday told American voters that "our kids [U.S. troops] are being shot at from weapons stolen from the ammo dumps that this president didn't think were important enough to guard."

There is no proof that weapons taken from Iraq's al-Qaqaa compound have been used against U.S. troops, although that's the suggestion raised by the New York Times and CBS -- and seized on by the Kerry campaign.

The New York Times reported Monday that 380 tons of high explosives vanished from an Iraq military compound, but other reports say no one has been able to pin down when the HMX and RDX disappeared -- or who took them -- or whether those explosives have in fact been used against U.S. troops.

...

Kerry-Heinz is shamelessly using an unproven (though thoroughly and widely debunked, particularly by military blogger Belmont Club) story floated by a disgruntled UN hack and offered as a gift-in-kind from the NY Slimes to the Kerry campaign to save his moribund candidacy. In so doing, he is not only smearing GWB, but the men and women who are serving us in Iraq and their commanders.

But what's even more execrable, is the invitation it sends to the enemy to ratchet up the violence against our troops prior to the election:

Leaders and supporters of the anti-U.S. insurgency say their attacks in recent weeks have a clear objective: The greater the violence, the greater the chances that President Bush will be defeated on Tuesday and the Americans will go home.

"If the U.S. Army suffered numerous humiliating losses, [Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John] Kerry would emerge as the superman of the American people," said Mohammad Amin Bashar, a leader of the Muslim Scholars Association, a hard-line clerical group that vocally supports the resistance.

...

Abu Jalal, answering questions submitted to him through the Iraqi journalist, devised a simple formula for how his group's attacks on American soldiers draw votes from Mr. Bush. "They say there are 1,100 dead soldiers. That means 1,100 families hold grudges against Bush and hate him. There are 6,000 families whose sons were injured who hate Bush and will not re-elect him."

...

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Why not just paint a big targets on the backs of our people? The message he's sending to the terrorists is "Want us outta there? Aim here!"

Of course, this is not the first time in his career that the Botoxed Bolshevik has, from the safety of our shores, incited violence against U.S. troops as the men of "Stolen Honor" will attest.

Pathetic that this poncey fop values his electoral success over the safety of our soldiers and the success of their mission. Cue Lynne Cheney: "This is not a good man".

Once a traitor, always a traitor!

Honor Thief

"Stolen Honor" available for FREE

We watched this over the weekend. Granted, we already despised Kerry for his traitorous post-Nam activities whereby he built a political career at the expense of his "band of brothers" and millions who were slaughtered or imprisoned when we abandoned the South Vietnamese. Seeing the men who were tortured by the Viet Cong tell of hearing Kerry's words played to them in an effort to get them to confess to "war crimes", observing the pain and betrayal they still feel, knowing Kerry stands by his actions and has never apologized only validated what we already knew: to quote Lynne Cheney, "This is not a good man."

Fortunately for Kerry, he has been given a free pass by the MSM during the campaign -- nary a question has been asked about his carefree days of treason, to say nothing of his 20 counterproductive years in the Senate.

We believe, however, that enough people understand as we do, that this man is unfit for command.

NY Times explosive "story" as phony as Kerry's face!

UPDATED 1235

Original Item

Report: Explosives already gone when U.S. troops arrived:
NBC News says its crew was embedded with soldiers at time

The mystery surrounding the disappearance of 380 tons of powerful explosives from a storage depot in Iraq has taken a new twist, after a network embedded with the U.S. military during the invasion of Iraq reported that the material had already vanished by the time American troops arrived.

NBC News reported that on April 10, 2003, its crew was embedded with the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division when troops arrived at the Al Qaqaa storage facility south of Baghdad.

While the troops found large stockpiles of conventional explosives, they did not find HMX or RDX, the types of powerful explosives that reportedly went missing, according to NBC.

The International Atomic Energy Agency revealed Monday that it had been told two weeks ago by the Iraqi government that 380 tons of HMX and RDX disappeared from Al Qaqaa after Saddam Hussein's government fell.

In a letter to the IAEA dated October 10, Iraq's director of planning, Mohammed Abbas, said the material disappeared sometime after Saddam's regime fell in April 2003, which he attributed to "the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security."

Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003. According to NBC, troops from the 101st Airborne arrived the next day to find that the material was already gone.

...

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From NRO's Cliff May :

BOMB-GATE [Cliff May]
Sent to me by a source in the government: “The Iraqi explosives story is a fraud. These weapons were not there when US troops went to this site in 2003. The IAEA and its head, the anti-American Mohammed El Baradei, leaked a false letter on this issue to the media to embarrass the Bush administration. The US is trying to deny El Baradei a second term and we have been on his case for missing the Libyan nuclear weapons program and for weakness on the Iranian nuclear weapons program.”

(For the record, I don’t reveal my sources so if that means I end up sharing a cell at Sing-sing with Judy Miller, so be it.)

Well, well. Just as we posited yesterday, what we have here is a non-story with a scary headline, peddled by an international hack with an axe to grind, presented as a "gift-in-kind" from the NY Slimes to the Kerry campaign.

Just as he'd previously done with the Bob Woodward/secret oil deal "report" a few months ago, Kerry shot his mouth off without bothering to get all the facts (perhaps erroneously assuming the Slimes would have already done a Nexis search!). Is this the sort of cool-headed reaction we could expect from a President Kerry-Heinz?

It will be interesting to see if the media coverage of this debunking of the Slimes' story is anywhere near as sonorous as was the reporting of the original "story".

We have been observing politics for over three decades, since, as five yeard olds, we witnessed filthy hippies, drugged-addled freaks and anti-American Ho Chi Mihn lovers (friends of John Kerry) burning the flag and working for the defeat of the US in Vietnam.

Never before have we seen the deck stacked so high for an incumbent president seeking re-election: Not Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984 nor Clinton in 1996 (being a Democrat means the MSM will discredit the claims of the kooks and conspiracy mongers, not promulgate them).

Let's enumerate the various enemies (domestic only) that have unloaded everything in their arsenal against GWB: The Hollywood, recording industry, entertainment triumverate -- Kerry's "heart and soul" of America --, academia (elementary, secondary and higher ed), major news outlets outside of the Wall Street Journal Editorial page and Fox News, the porn industry, billionaire crackpot currency manipulators, book publishers -- we know we're leaving someone out. Top that off with massive voter fraud and what you will have when this president wins a week from today is a miracle rivaling the Botox -- er, Bosox rally from 3 games down to beat the Yankees.

If that miracle occurs, it will because Bush has a secret weapon -- the great mass of the electorate that does not live in NYC and LA -- the sensible and wise denizens of "flyover" country, where men don't get manicures and women want a leader whose first duty is to protect their children, not assuage the dented egos of Old Europe.

Related:
Pentagon responds to missing-explosives report

Report: Explosives already gone when U.S. troops arrived
NBC News says its crew was embedded with soldiers at time

UPDATE 1235

Looks like there's a CBS/"60 Minutes [of Bush bashing]" element to this "story" ... CBS wanted to hold sham report till it was too late to debunk!
60 MINS PLANNED BUSH MISSING EXPLOSIVES STORY FOR ELECTION EVE

News of missing explosives in Iraq -- first reported in April 2003 -- was being resurrected for a 60 MINUTES election eve broadcast designed to knock the Bush administration into a crises mode.

Jeff Fager, executive producer of the Sunday edition of 60 MINUTES, said in a statement that "our plan was to run the story on October 31, but it became clear that it wouldn't hold..."

Elizabeth Jensen at the LOS ANGELES TIMES details on Tuesday how CBS NEWS and 60 MINUTES lost the story [which repackaged previously reported information on a large cache of explosives missing in Iraq, first published and broadcast in 2003].[Emphasis ours]

The story instead debuted in the NYT. The paper slugged the story about missing explosives from April 2003 as "exclusive."
...
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"NY Slimes" repackages old story in attempt to resuscitate failing Kerry campaign

UPDATED

Original Item
NY Slimes

...

But apparently, little was done. A senior Bush administration official said that during the initial race to Baghdad, American forces "went through the bunkers, but saw no materials bearing the I.A.E.A. seal."(emphasis ours) It is unclear whether troops ever returned.

...

... um, shouldn't this be the end of the story?

A wonderful "contribution-in-kind" from the Times to the DNC. Bury the crux of the story under a 2,000 word stockpile of speculation and surmise but give the Kerry campaign a juicy headline to turn into a talking point for it's flagging campaign.

UPDATE


Pentagon says its unclear if explosives disappeared after Iraq site fell under US control

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A Pentagon spokesman said it was unclear whether 380 tons of high explosives reported missing from a weapons facility in Iraq disappeared before or after it fell under control of US forces.

The Iraqi government this month reported the disappearance of 380 tons of HMX and RDX explosives to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which had monitored the explosives before the war because they could be used as a trigger for nuclear devices.

"This is a first report. We do not know when -- if those weapons did exist at that facility -- they were last seen, and under whose control they were last in," Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita said.

"It's very possible -- certainly it's plausible -- that it was the Saddam Hussein regime that last had control of these things," he told AFP.

DiRita said US forces visited the Al-Qaqaa site several times after the US invasion of Iraq as part of a US-led search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and related material.

But he said it is unclear whether the missing explosives were at the site during those visits.

"The forces searched 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings at the facility. Some explosive material was discovered, none of it carried IAEA seals. They did find stuff there. They probably secured it or destroyed it," he said.

DiRita said Iraq was swimming in weapons and ammunition after the war. More than 500 weapons sites were identified after the war, and some 200,000 tons of ammunition have been destroyed by US forces.

"I'm told they (US forces) made several visits to that facility looking for WMD related (material), and obviously we need to learn more about exactly what it is they saw there," he said.

"There have been these reports that there is evidence this place has been looted. But I think that's something to be very careful about. That place was not in anybody's control but Saddam Hussein's from the beginning of the war until sometime in April," he said.

"It's just really difficult to say with any kind of certainty what happened to those weapons, and who were the last people who had control of them. But I think it's at least arguable that the last person who had control of them was the Saddam Hussein regime," he said.

So, as we had earlier conjectured, the Times essentially tossed Kerry a softball, giving him an opportunity to drone on about "competence" (and exactly when has he exhibited any?), lack of a "plan" and other supercillious nonsense.

He needs to learn that you can't believe everything you read in the Slimes.

Kerry-Heinz lied about meeting with "all" members of UNSC

Security Council members deny meeting Kerry

U.N. ambassadors from several nations are disputing assertions by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry that he met for hours with all members of the U.N. Security Council just a week before voting in October 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

An investigation by The Washington Times reveals that while the candidate did talk for an unspecified period to at least a few members of the panel, no such meeting, as described by Mr. Kerry on a number of occasions over the past year, ever occurred.

At the second presidential debate earlier this month, Mr. Kerry said he was more attuned to international concerns on Iraq than President Bush, citing his meeting with the entire Security Council.

"This president hasn't listened. I went to meet with the members of the Security Council in the week before we voted. I went to New York. I talked to all of them, to find out how serious they were about really holding Saddam Hussein accountable," Mr. Kerry said of the Iraqi dictator.

Speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in December 2003, Mr. Kerry explained that he understood the "real readiness" of the United Nations to "take this seriously" because he met "with the entire Security Council, and we spent a couple of hours talking about what they saw as the path to a united front in order to be able to deal with Saddam Hussein."

But of the five ambassadors on the Security Council in 2002 who were reached directly for comment, four said they had never met Mr. Kerry. The four also said that no one who worked for their countries' U.N. missions had met with Mr. Kerry either.

...

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Every time Kerry and Edwards open their mouths ....

Atlas shrugs ...

"Disenfranchisement" myth lives on

The Florida Lie
A paranoid urban legend returns

It's already starting. Democrats are pumping up the volume on behalf of an insidious lie: Evil forces deliberately disenfranchised black voters in 2000, especially in Florida, and are already doing it again this year.

John Kerry has said, "Never again will a million African-Americans be denied the right to exercise their vote." Jimmy Carter — who never hesitates to smear the country whose highest office he once occupied — has made similar noises. Hyperbolic Democratic honcho Terry McAuliffe will travel next week with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who never miss an opportunity to tell black audiences that the age of Jim Crow is still here when it comes to disenfranchisement.

The Kerry salvo about a million black voters is a wild extrapolation based on the falsehood that in 2000 blacks were disenfranchised in Florida and then assuming proportional numbers were disenfranchised in every other state. The million number is highly convenient since it is the threshold for a sound bite really to bite. Kerry, for instance, will never say on the stump that the economy has lost a net 600,000 total jobs during the past four years, sticking instead with a statistic that keeps the figure over a million.

What happened in Florida in 2000 is some voters spoiled their ballots, voting for two candidates or not making a discernible mark on their ballot. This happens in every election, but these mistakes were magnified in Florida because of the scrutiny that came with Bush's 500-vote margin. Peter Kirsanow, a Republican member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and a one-man truth squad about the Florida controversy, estimates the rate of spoilage in Florida at roughly 3 percent.

That is similar to the 2.6 percent rate in 1996, when Democrats failed to scream about disenfranchisement. The spoilage rate in heavily Democratic Chicago in 2000 was almost 6 percent, double that of Florida. The sad fact is, according to Kirsanow, ballots tend to be spoiled more in low-income areas (white or black), areas where many people haven't graduated high school, and areas where there are a large number of first-time voters.

Democrats took this sociological datum, which applies everywhere around the country, and spun from it a conspiracy theory in Florida — blacks were kept from voting, "disenfranchised." The first problem with this feverish notion is that the county supervisors who conduct the elections and would have had to do all the disenfranchising in the black areas with high rates of spoilage were almost all Democrats.

The more specific allegations of attempts to disenfranchise blacks are paranoid urban legend. No one has produced any evidence of the dogs and hoses some activists have said were used to keep blacks from the polls — and if Bull Connor had really been loose in Florida, people would have noticed. Another allegation involves the so-called "felon purge list," which was meant to keep felons from voting. It had significant errors and hindered some legitimate voters at the polls, but the list wasn't a deliberate racist act. According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 42 percent of the people on the list were black. But 48 percent of convicted felons in Florida are black. It turned out that roughly 6,000 felons correctly on the list were allowed to vote illegally anyway.

Kerry et al. want to play on the primal fears of black voters, convincing them that the American electoral system is fundamentally corrupt. The 2004 election has, therefore, achieved the status of being pre-stolen — if Bush wins, he ipso facto stole it. A Democratic National Committee manual instructs activists, in the true spirit of Florida 2000, to allege voter intimidation even in the absence of evidence. Right on cue, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference has floated wispy tales of the harassment of black voters in Florida.(emphasis ours)

All of this is so tawdry. But nothing is beneath hucksters who know that the positive merits of Kerry are so uninspiring that they have to resort to gutter tactics to try to get him elected, lying to black voters in the process.

Ah, the legacy of Al Gore ... never again will an election be settled on Election Day thanks to the DNC's 2000 gambit: send in the lawyers, the race baiters and Richard Daley, very nearly steal an election, then, with the complicity of the MSM, promulgate the notion that the election was stolen from you.

Disseminating the disenfranchisement (which has been defined down to so little as asking a voter to prove he is who he claims to be) lie serves three ends for the Left: mobilize the black vote, render a Bush victory "illegitimate" and divert attention from the voter fraud scams they have thrived on for decades.

As pathetic as this is, we understand their desperation. Socialism has lost its allure and their candidate is not trusted to wage the war against Jihadistan.



Related:
The Myth of the Disenfranchised: It's not the government's fault if you can't properly fill out a ballot.

Florida Forever: The political urban legend that facts won't kill.(A Ponderosa favorite)