Posted on 09/11/2004 2:50:41 AM PDT by kattracks
Senator Zell Miller (D-GA), an ex Marine, is angry that the party he spent a lifetime helping to build has gone so far to the left that it is barely recognizable. Miller attacked the Democratic nominee, Senator John Kerry (D-MA), in terms that no Republican would dare to do.
He gave a litany of the weapons systems that Kerry voted against in his two decades in the United States Senate.
The Kerry apologists, who were all over the media the morning after the Miller speech, tried to suggest that when a Senator votes against a bill containing a weapons system it may be because he has some other problem with the bill that has nothing to do with the weapons system.
Therefore, you see, Senator Kerry really isn't against all of those weapons after all. You have to understand these votes in context, so they told us.
Nice try. However, my Internet angel Alex Mulkern unearthed a campaign flyer from Lt. Governor John Kerry's campaign for the United States Senate in 1984. It is priceless. In this flyer, Kerry says of the Reagan defense buildup "the biggest defense buildup since World War II has not given us a better defense. Americans feel threatened by the prospect of war."
Kerry goes on to say, \ldblquote...our national priorities become more and more distorted as the share of our country's resources devoted to human needs diminishes."
Then Kerry suggests there is a better alternative. He lists weapons system after weapons system that he would cancel and the amount of money that would be "saved" by canceling them. Among those which would have been put on the chopping block back in 1984 are as follows:
The MX Missile. Cancel. Savings: $5 Billion.
The B-1 Bomber. Cancel. Savings: $8 Billion
Anti-satellite system. Cancel. Savings: $99 Million
Star Wars. Cancel. Savings: $1.3 Billion
Tomahawk Missile. Reduce by 50%. Savings: $294 Million
AH-64 Helicopter. Cancel. Savings: $1.4 Billion
Division Air Defense. Cancel. Savings: $638 Million
The Patriot Air Defense Missile. Cancel. Savings: $1.1 Billion
Aegis Air Defense. Cancel. Savings: $400 Million
Battleship reactivation. Cancel. Savings: $453 Million
AV 88 vertical take off and landing plane. Cancel. Savings: $1.0 Billion
F-15 fighter aircraft. Cancel. Savings: $2.3 Billion
F-14A fighter aircraft. Cancel. Savings: $1.0 Billion
F-14B fighter aircraft. Cancel. Savings: $286 Million
Phoenix air-to-air missile. Cancel: Savings: $431 Million
Sparrow air-to-air missile. Cancel. Savings: $264 Million
So there you have it. Did Zell Miller exaggerate? Before John Kerry was even elected Senator he was calling for the elimination of some of the most effective weapons systems we have.
Kerry said in this flyer: "If we don't need the MX and the B-1 or these other weapons systems, there is no excuse for casting even one vote for unnecessary weapons of destruction and as your Senator I never will"
He got that right. This was back in 1984. Mikhail Gorbachev had just come to power. It was Gorbachev and his generals who concluded that they could not keep up with weapons development in the USA, especially the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars), and that is one of the reasons that the Soviets threw in the towel.
Imagine, 20 years later, if the Kerry view had prevailed, we would still be facing a menacing super power known as the Soviet Union. If the Soviets didn't have to compete with all of those sophisticated weapons systems, they would be fighting on to this day. The Baltics would still be Soviet Republics, as would Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia. The Berlin Wall would likely still be up. Poland and the satellite nations would not be free. Get the picture?
Zell Miller, in his litany of weapons systems which Senator Kerry voted against, said he did by no means exhaust the list. He said the list went on and on. True enough because in the past couple of decades we have developed many more systems which Senator Kerry could be against -- weapons systems which have made this nation the only remaining super power.
I am not one who believes in giving the Pentagon everything it wishes. The Pentagon is a bureaucratic structure just as much as Health and Human Services is. There is as much waste and abuse in the Pentagon as there is in other areas of government.
Had Senator Kerry gone after waste and duplication and other areas of misfeasance in the Pentagon he might well have served his nation well. But in opposing every weapons system we have produced since the middle 1980s, Senator Kerry displays a glaring weakness -- one which is fair game as we get into the serious part of the campaign.
No wonder the Democrats are now trying to say that Senator Miller is mentally unbalanced. They can't have voters examine what Kerry said. If they do they will find the weakness Zell Miller spoke about and they may well come to the same conclusion the Senator has come to, namely the protection of his family comes before his political party.
(Paul M. Weyrich is chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.)
Copyright 2004, Free Congress Foundation
hanoi john is STILL trying to GUT the military... he wants to cut $50B in 5 years for Missile defense.
That might be his one redeeming grace. But if he attends Senate committee meetings so irregularly, would he almost surely be as bad about attending his own Cabinet meetings as President? And how about press conferences, where he actually takes questions and responds with a coherent answer?
The Presidency is not a part-time job.
God bless Paul Weyrich (I miss his old TV network).
God bless Paul Weyrich (I miss his old TV network).
Good find.
I thought there were no "ex"-Marines, until Dan Blather came along.
DECONSTRUCTING ZELL MILLER
here is a difference between hate speech and the awful truth, between irrational anger and righteous indignation, between a Ted Kennedy or a Howard Dean or an Al Gore or a Nancy Pelosi or a John Kerry or a clinton (either, one for the price of two, I say)... and a Zell Miller. But listening to the Kerry-DNC talking points today, one would never know it. In his keynote address to the Republican National Convention last night, a righteously indignant Zell Miller told the awful truth. He told the awful truth about his party, the Democratic Party. He told the awful truth about his party's presidential candidate, John Kerry. He told the awful truth that goes to the core of John Kerry's and the Democratic Party's utter unfitness to lead America, especially now, in these perilous and determinative times. And he backed up the awful truth with reams of facts and rational argument. ZELL'S ZUGZWANG John Kerry and the Left responded not with facts and rational argument, but with the only move they know, the only move left to them. Character assassination. They had to discredit Zell Miller... and fast. Media lackeys from Pinch to Chris big-mouthed the following Kerry-DNC talking points before the Kerry corpse was even coifed. (Strike that metaphor. The problem, as we now, (post-Cristophe, post-botox, post-eyework) see, was never "haggard." "Haggard" is electable. (See LBJ.) "Cadaveric" is not, at least not outside of Hawaii. And Kerry's dissonant new "do," like the mortician's careful coif, only enhanced the funereal gloom. One has to wonder if Shrum was brought in (dispatched?) to praise Kerry... or to bury him....) Anyway, back to the matter at hand, the Kerry-DNC talking points. They are listed below in ascending order of rectitude of intention. (Et tu, Brute?)
NOTE TO EVERYONE ELSE: By conflating the two charges--judgment and patriotism-- John Kerry and the Left expose their guilty knowledge of same. And it doesn't matter whether it was done with Machiavellian calculation or out of simple naiveté. Seditious rhetoric and expressions of legitimate differences of opinion are not mutually exclusive constructs, David Gergen notwithstanding. But because the Left's wartime rhetoric about Bush is abusive, undermining, irrational, and ultimately empty, it can only be sedition.
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