I just tuned in an just about or entirely missed the party.You challenged us that conservatives were getting powerhungry, setting power above principle. And for that reason, becoming idolatrous towards GWB.
My response to that is that I partly believe it of myself. Bush has done some egregious things like signing the anti-first amendment "campaign finance reform" law which the SCOTUS has announced its intention to attempt to enforce. And yet I favor reelection of the Bush-Cheney ticket, even tho as I mentioned last week, Cheney gored my own personal ox severely and in the process hurt the government imho.
I almost never get to vote for a candidate, tho - the alternative is almost always so bad that my analysis process stops with the answer to the question, "how do we keep this creep the Democrats have nominated out of power?" And that situation has been getting worse in recent elections.
I took a few ROTC courses back in college but otherwise was never in the military, so I can hardly take the position that people who did not serve in the military are second class citizens - altho that was in fact the attitude of veterans of WWII, my parents' generation. But I do draw a distinction between not serving in the military - as for instance John Edwards never did - and putting on a demonstration of contempt for military valor as Clinton and Kerry have a history of doing.
It is now the position, apparently, of the Democratic Party that Vietnam veterans did not face expressions of contempt from college-age Democrats when they got back to "the world." But that was hardly the story line I saw reported at the time, and some FReepers will tell you that they ran a gauntlet of jeers and/or were spit on in just such a manner when they returned in uniform.
It was entirely bad enough when "I loathe the military" Clinton was nominated and elected. And named a Secretary of Defense whose main virtue lay in the honor he showed in resigning when he had proved his own incompetence to himself. John Kerry's record of lying about our troops caused abuse of our returning veterans to happen, and Senator Kerry's nomination is a disgrace. If he wins election to the presidency it will feel like a vioation.
In order to score a cheap shot on GWB, Kerry has insulted all National Guard servicemen, past and present - and I simply find that contemptible, coming from the man who led the baby boom Democrats to open rebellion against the very idea of honorable military service.
It's normal for politicians to have some part of their career which they don't particularly want to highlight; we aren't talking candidates for cannonization here. But whereas GWB doesn't point with great pride to his past association with demon rum but stands on the past ten years of service as governor of Texas and President, Lieutenant Kerry assays to run to the right of GWB on security, and glosses over all but four months of his entire career! If he wins on that platform it will be the first time in history that someone was elected as a war hero president because he was a Lieutenant! Surely JFK must have said something about his career in the Senate!
But I have fallen into the trap Kerry has set, by discussing the military records of people exclusively. The thing which has IMHO poisoned the political air in the past decade is the fact that Mr. Clinton started his tenure with an act (whether of omission or commission he has stonewalled, but no matter - he alone was responsible for it) which would have gotten any modern Republican impeached and convicted. I speak of Craig Livinstone's "filegate" - such an egregious offense that Rep. Lantos mentioned suicide, and the Clinton Administration pretended that Mr. Livingstone had just invited himself into the White House and taken up residence as security chief there.
Frankly, I would expect a political party to suffer really bad PR in the election after it had produced such mal/non feasance in the nation's highest office. Rather I would expect it, if I had not learned to view the Democratic Party as an adjunct of the PR machine known as "objective" journalism. And to understand that as such it always has the propaganda wind at its back. A man named "Daley" can fly into Florida from Chicago and announce that the candidate of his party actually won the election in Florida - and nobody laughs. If Daley had actually known the actual vote count, it could only be because he had broken a law - but that statement was somehow not treated as a scandal.
Democratic presidential candidates are getting worse.
- Kennedy ran to the right of Nixon (and Eisenhower), but delivered the Bay of Pigs fiasco which actually made me feel sick to my stomach at the time.
- Johnson sent hundreds of thousands of troops to Vietnam, and mismanaged them so badly that his Vietnam policy was defeated politically by the left in the United States by the time he in effect resigned in 1968. Johnson also set in motion the fabulously expensive boondoggle (as it can be shown in retrospect to be) known as the "Great Society" program.
- Carter inherited a bad foreign policy and domestic situation. By 1981 Iran was not an important ally but a serious enemy, and the economy of the time makes a mockery of claims of "the worst economy in 50 years" applied to any other administration.
- Clinton inherited an apparently problem-free situation, and in the context of history delivered an essentially frivolous administration. It turns out that history was not over, after all.
- John Kerry's political career began when he threw those symbols of valor over the White House fence, and Kerry was a leader in making the Democratic Party the "dove" party whose biggest foreign policy idea was opposition to anticommunism, and he is known for little other than being a reliable anti-military/anti-intel vote in the Senate. And he favors tax hikes even now. IOW, he is the antiReagan. Considering that Reagan cleaned up the Augean Stables inherited and aggravated by Carter:
that is a pretty difficult record to run on - and Kerry does not in fact run on it. Instead he puts up a smoke and mirrors act which essentially boils down to the conceit that he is America's only war hero.
- inflation
- stagnation
- the energy crisis
- the Cold War
That is an astonishing political platform for someone who:
What is most astonishing of all about it is the personal horn-blowing Senator Kerry's campaign entails. Traditionally war heroes, having seen comrades take risks and get killed for their trouble - and/or never be awarded medals for their valorous actions - are diffident about boasting of their own heroism. Yet having gotten an early out not only from Vietnam but from the Navy itself, Kerry criticizes Bush for having joined the ANG and for having opted out of the ANG when structural changes in the ANG obsoleted his training shortly before his commitment expired. And Kerry has never praised the valor of any other American warrior apart from his own immediate comrades who were praising him.
- supported the election and reelection of Bill Clinton running against noted WWII combat veterans.
- nominates military naif John Edwards to be VP in his administration.
- boasts only 4 months in theater and did not voluntarily return to it, boasts no more than 5 medals, and boasts only the rank of Lieutenant.
Kerry has essentially created a big, black, sticky, ugly mess - and staked his entire campaign on having that function as a tar baby because it has to be attacked. If Republican politicians make their classic mistake of defending themselves, this might work. But if Bush generalizes it as the attack on all Guardsmen that it implicitly is, it is just a stink pile lying there.
There hasn't been a good Democratic Secretary of Defense in most people's lifetime. Best Clinton could do was to name a Republican after Les Aspin self-destructed; Carter's SecDef has nothing to boast of but a pile of trashed aircraft in the Iranian desert - and the only other post-Truman SecDef was Robert (Vietnam) McNamara. If Kerry runs as a warrior yet nominates Edwards as his VP candidate, what manner of SecDef are we to expect of any Kerry administration?!?