(West Virginia) Comment About Mrs. Bush Innappropriate, Not True

"I don't know that she's ever had a real job," Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of Sen. John Kerry, said of Laura Bush this week. That says something about both Mrs. Kerry and those involved in her husband's campaign for president.

What it says ought to anger those who toil day in, day out working to educate American children. Mrs. Bush, as most people know, worked for several years as a school teacher, then as a librarian before meeting and marrying her husband, George W. Bush, who went on to become president. Mrs. Kerry is, of course, known for refusing to let the facts stand in the way of her anger at anyone who dares to question her or oppose her husband. The Western Pennsylvanian reporter she told to "shove it" after he asked her a reasonable question a few weeks ago can testify to that.

After it was brought to Mrs. Kerry's attention that she had been wrong, she had this to say: "I had forgotten that Mrs. Bush had worked as a school teacher and librarian, and there couldn't be a more important job than teaching our children."

She "forgot" - and had to be prompted, no doubt by frantic Kerry campaign staffers, that Mrs. Bush had been an educator. We'll leave it to you to decide what that says about Mrs. Kerry's interest in and appreciation for educators.

But Mrs. Kerry's obvious disdain carries another message - that women fortunate enough, sometimes at great financial sacrifice, not to have to work outside the home don't contribute to society. Clearly, Mrs. Kerry was thinking of the years during which Mrs. Bush worked as the mother of two daughters. Mrs. Kerry is wrong, of course, about raising children not being "a real job."

There are many differences between Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Kerry. One is that, despite being offered several opportunities, Mrs. Bush has not been critical in any way of Mrs. Kerry. That, too, says much about the two women.

The editorial staff at the News-Register and Wheeling Intelligencer (afternoon and morning papers, respectively) have been on a roll lately:

Bush Security Strategy Realistic

The Intelligencer

President Bush often describes himself as a "war president." He gained office on an almost exclusively domestic policy agenda, although he also strongly criticized the Clinton foreign policy for its unfocused ambition to engage in "nation building." Sept. 11 changed that. The moment the president famously stood atop the wreckage of the World Trade Center with a bullhorn in hand, vowing vengeance against those responsible for the attack, he became a war president.

Unlike past wars, this one features few defined front lines. The enemy at times seems to be everywhere and nowhere. It has required an entirely different kind of strategy, one that attempts to undermine the enemy's support systems of money and safe havens, and one that preemptively seeks out the enemy before the enemy can attack us.
In many respects the policy of preemption has worked brilliantly. The Taliban were swiftly defeated in Afghanistan and they have been unable to gain much of a defensive foothold. That historically fractious nation has held elections and appears to be on its way to establishing civil society, with security and civil assistance of the United States and its allies.

The al-Qaida organization also has been rolled up like a bad carpet. Most of its leaders have been killed or captured. Because of its dispersed nature and long attack planning timelines, the group remains a threat. But it no longer operates with ease.

Iraq, of course, has been both an extremely successful and problematic campaign. In a world in which organized terrorists actively seek to obtain weapons of mass destruction, it would not have been responsible to leave Saddam Hussein in power. He had the will and the means to develop and deploy such weapons, he had a history of using them, and he had ties to terrorist groups - including giving some of them safe harbor in Iraq.

The evidence now suggests that while Saddam may not have been on the brink of deploying weapons of the mass destructive, he certainly had plans to do so.

In the event, Saddam's forces did not so much fight as evaporate, to return as guerrilla fighters allied with terrorists, determined to prevent Iraq from joining the community of civilized nations. The fight since the initial invasion obviously has been difficult. The Bush administration has made tactical mistakes, some of them quite serious - such as allowing opposition groups for a time to gain relative safe havens. Yet one could look back upon any war and find similar tactical errors amid an overall correct strategy. In late 1944, for example, the war in Europe was not going well at all. Still, the situation on the ground in Iraq is improving daily, thanks in no small part to the establishment of a strong new government.

The questions for voters, however, are not fundamentally of hindsight, but instead whether the national security picture actually changed on Sept. 11 and where we go from here.

Sen. Kerry fails both questions. He seems to have at least one foot firmly planted in a pre-Sept. 11 mindset. He's uncertain about whether the war should be fought as it is. His definition of an ally seems to include precisely three: The corrupt United Nations, the corruptible French and the contemptible Germans. Fundamentally, he has offered little but an inconsistent criticism of Bush's decisions and an insistence that he would "do better" - yet he's left "better" almost entirely undefined. Doubts about Kerry's plans are magnified by the sad fact that during a 30-year political career he has marched lockstep with the left on the wrong side of every significant national security issue, including the end-game of the Cold War and the first Gulf War, and to this day cannot admit his errors.

President Bush appears to have a clearer view of the nature of the conflict. While we may quibble about tactics, his strategy of taking the battle to the enemy before they bring the battle to us again is sound. Voters should expect a second Bush administration to bring the second Iraq campaign to a conclusion, to continue to pursue organized terrorists and to continue to put pressure on regimes that provide comfort to terrorists.

On national security, we prefer the certainty of the Bush strategy, whatever imperfections it may have, to the deep uncertainty that Kerry would bring to the Oval Office.

http://www.news-register.net/edit/story/1022202004_edtbush.asp

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