Character And Leadership
By Charles Cole (10/28/04)
The debates are over. Except for a final round of political ads on TV, just about everything about the presidential candidates has been said and re-said. So, what have we learned about the challenger, Mr. Kerry?
We now know that John Kerry says he supports our troops. He adamantly refuses to personally refute the Swift Boat Veterans’ claims as to the effects of his 1971 Senate testimony on the morale of our fighting men in South Vietnam or on the level of physical pain inflicted by the North Vietnamese on our POWs in Hanoi. The limited polling that has been done among active duty and reserve component forces shows that our troops support President Bush by a 4-1 margin. Perhaps they see something which Kerry’s supporters cannot – a man devoid of genuine convictions who will say or do anything to further his personal political career, even at the risk of endangering their lives!
We know that John Kerry says that he will vigorously defend America against the “real” terrorists. But he has consistently resisted every effort at America’s directly confronting evil – be that in the erstwhile Soviet Union, or in Saddam’s Iraq. He voted with Ted Kennedy and other leftwing extremists who resisted Ronald Reagan’s every move to defend us against Soviet expansionism and attempts at world domination. He even voted against the coalition’s effort to dislodge Saddam Hussein’s military from Kuwait in 1990. Although he voted to give the president the authority to use military force in 2003, he now says that President Bush involved America in the “wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place”. He supported the feckless UN weapons inspectors in their useless activities to enforce the sixteen impotent UN resolutions designed to hold Saddam at bay and keep WMD out of the hands of this proven mass murderer.
We know that John Kerry says that he is personally opposed to abortion, but he has voted consistently against laws to ban brutal infanticide in the form of partial birth abortion, claiming that these laws fail to protect “health of the mother”. Based on congressional testimony given by medical experts, we know that this “issue” is a red herring, since there is absolutely no health problem in a late term pregnancy which cannot be remedied by a C section, saving the baby and protecting the mother.
We recently learned that John Kerry will not hesitate to manipulate facts, contort events, and openly lie to attack the President. He continues to repeat clearly false “reports” about tons and tons of “missing explosives” in Iraq, implying that this cache suddenly disappeared from under our nose just weeks ago. The facts which he withholds from his claims are that our troops (the ones he claims to “support”) have captured and destroyed thousands of tons of such explosives. Moreover, the site to which this “report” alludes contained no explosives over 18 months ago when it was captured by our advancing forces, as correctly reported by NBC embedded reporters who went into Iraq with our troops!
In fact, the New York Times and CBS inadvertently uncovered a situation which, to their great chagrin, proves Mr. Bush’s pre-war claims as to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. It now turns out that Hussein did have thousands of tons of high explosives – all of which could have been used in terror attacks around the world, had we not intervened and seized these materials! Furthermore, this “expose” has now exposed the total fallacy of the internationalists who wanted us to continue negotiating and otherwise frittering away precious time, allowing the UN to “solve” this problem, when, in fact, this silliness allowed Saddam to move tons of explosives out of our reach. And, if Hussein was able to use this ridiculous delay in 2002 to hide or move explosives, is it not inferable that he also used this “time out” to move stores of WMD (much smaller and easier to conceal) out of Iraq and into, say, Syria for safe keeping and ultimate use against our troops and innocent civilians around the world?
The only rational conclusion for even partially objective observers is that John F. Kerry (for all his glib verbal skills and debating ability ) is a duplicitous, hypocritical, and unscrupulous manipulator and deceiver. To elect him to the presidency at this crucial time in our country’s history – fraught with very real dangers threatening the very existence of our nation and of civilization as we know it – would be folly beyond description! Caveat emptor, American voter! Be very, very careful. The lives of your children and grandchildren may well be at stake.
(Printer friendly version) Email: Charles Cole
