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washingtonpost.com Dean Assails Bush on Defense Rival Cites Combat Pay, Veterans' Health Benefits By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, December 1, 2003; Page A06 MERRIMACK, N.H., Nov. 30 -- Howard Dean launched a full-throated attack on President Bush's foreign policy acumen Sunday, saying Bush has "no understanding of defense," is conducting diplomacy by "petulance" and lacks "the backbone to stand up against the Saudis." Amid a crush of well wishers seeking autographs at a high school here, Dean said of Bush: "I think he's made us weaker. He doesn't understand what it takes to defend this country, that...

The garbler from Chicago is warbling on Veterans Day. Jesse Jackson, in an op-ed piece in the Chicago Sun Times today, accuses President Bush of trying to hide the dead from the war in Iraq, accuses the Bush administration of not caring about America's casualties, and says that the White House is "willing to turn soldiers into props to be highlighted or discarded at will." Jackson said that senior administration officials do not attend the funerals of those killed in Iraq so they can hide the risks in order to sell the war. He mentions that Jessica Lynch disputes the...

  I am outraged. Our enemies have stooped to a new low. Last night, on the eve of Veteran's Day, no less, they have compared our Commander-in-Chief, President Bush, to the Nazis. Have they no shame?   As a supporter of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), I am asking for your immediate help to counter this outrageous, inflammatory personal attack on President George W. Bush. It was reported this morning in the Washington Post how left-wing billionaire George Soros is using his vast fortune to unseat President Bush. "On Monday, he and a partner committed up to $5...

Remember Mike Spann? He was the CIA agent who became the first U.S. combat fatality in Afghanistan. He died in a prison uprising. He was there interviewing members of the Taliban to get information that would save American lives later. It is called intelligence. The United States does not use torture to gather it, nor should it. That would be the easy way. The United States, like Tina Turner singing "Proud Mary," does not do things nice and easy. We are a nation of laws, not men. A whole slew of laws in the 1970s made the job of men...

WASHINGTON — Rep. Charles Rangel, a caustic critic of the military effort in Iraq, labeled Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld “an embarrassment” on Wednesday and called for his resignation. “It’s time that he does the American people a service by resigning,” Rangel said, arguing that Rumsfeld has shown he has no strategy for securing postwar Iraq. “He has no plan,” said Rangel, D-N.Y., a Korean War veteran. “When you have a problem as we do in Iraq,” Rangel said, “you want somebody that does better than acknowledging there’s a problem. Heck, anybody can do that. I can get a kid...

<p>A memo circulated among Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence shows the committee's minority plotting to use classified information against the White House in next year's presidential campaign.</p> <p>The document, obtained and disclosed by nationally syndicated radio host Sean Hannity Tuesday afternoon, suggests that the top priority among senior Democrats entrusted with guarding the nation's security is instead driving the Bush administration from power based on claims it exaggerated intelligence on the threat posed by Iraq.</p>

Just hours after being informed on Sunday that more than a dozen U.S. soldiers had been killed when their helicopter was shot down in Iraq, presidential hopeful Gen. Wesley Clark was making political hay over the tragedy, telling a California audience that President Bush should be held accountable. "On a day in which 15 more Americans were killed in a tragic escalation of the war there is still no success strategy, there is no plan, there is no leadership," Gen. Clark complained. "Where is the leadership? Where is the accountability?" The New York Sun reports that Clark told the...

It is one thing to criticize the president’s foreign policy in principle - to be opposed, because of one's deeply held beliefs, to the president’s actions to invade Iraq. It is quite another to criticize the president’s foreign policy simply to obtain political power. Unfortunately, for all Americans, the Democratic Party critics of President Bush’s invasion of Iraq - and many other critics of the war - are motivated by politics, not principle. This is revealed by the hypocrisy of their condemnations.Democrat Senate minority leader Tom Daschle echoed the sentiments of many antiwar protesters by objecting to military action in...

And that's the way it is, folks. The ever-disgusting Democrat Ted Kennedy voted against President Bush's funding request for our operation in Iraq. He wasn't alone. John Edwards and John Kerry were right there with him, opposing Bush's $87 billion funding request for the continuation of our efforts in Iraq. Wesley Clark and Howard Dean say that they would have opposed the funding if they had a vote. Kennedy, Kerry, Edwards and every other politician who voted against this funding request was sending messages to our troops in Iraq, their families at home, Saddam Hussein and his supporters, Islamic terrorists...

AID AND COMFORT TO TERRORISTS On ABC This Week, John Kerry has gone from Loyal Opposition to Domestic backer of Iraqi Terrorist Groups. What Kerry said on Sunday is nothing more than a Green Light to terrorist groups to intensify their fight in Iraq. John Kerry is supplying Aid and Comfort to the enemy! Make no mistake about this point. He has put many American solders in harms way by his disgusting and dangerous rhetoric. Kerry says: "I'm asserting very clearly that they misled America," "I think the president and Vice President Cheney should be apologizing to America.” “We have...

DemocRATic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites) said on Sunday President Bush (news - web sites) and Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) should apologize for misleading the American people about the war in Iraq (news - web sites) and called the international fighting force there a "fraud." Kerry criticized Bush and Cheney for justifying the war, in part, by saying Iraq was "on the road" to building nuclear weapons, which the senator said has been proven not to be true. He also slammed the administration for not working adequately with the international community to...

FRONTLINE traces the roots of the Iraqi war back to the days immediately following September 11, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered the creation of a special intelligence operation to quietly begin looking for evidence that would justify the war. The intelligence reports soon became a part of a continuing struggle between civilians in the Pentagon on one side and the CIA, State Department, and uniformed military on the other-a struggle that would lead to inadequate planning for the aftermath of the war, continuing violence, and mounting political problems for the president.

I half-heard someone on MSNBC’s “Abrams Report” last night saying that there are 6 million reasons to vote against Arnold, those 6 million reasons, of course, being the victims of the Holocaust. This has to rank as one of the stupidest and most unfair comments of the recall. Here is a New York Times report today, giving fuller context to Arnold’s comment. As far as I can tell, Arnold’s view is a very crude version of that of John Luckas in The Hitler of History. In any case, he’s not a Nazi. Here’s the Times bit. The Butler referred to...

Hallmark rights of a democratic and open society are freedom of speech and a free press. So important are these rights that they are enumerated, guaranteed, and protected in the First Amendment to the US Constitution: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Freedom of speech is not only necessary but also vital to the health of the body politic. The fair...

(CNSNews.com) - Facing mounting criticism of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, supporters of the president hit back Wednesday, calling on congressional critics to state what they would have done differently after the 9/11 attacks. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) scolded Democrats, who he said "want to return to the weak and the indecisive foreign policy of their Cold War past. "There was a time when Democrats like John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt spoke with moral clarity about evil in the world and the responsibility of the United States to fight that evil with all the strength of a...

Dick Gephardt's disgraceful rhetoric underscores perfectly why Washington politicians rarely become Presidents. As Retired General H. Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 9/11, has said, "Sometimes people in a position of power lose perspective on right and wrong." Unfortunately, Congressman Gephardt is one of those who has lost perspective on right vs. wrong. He is so intent on winning the Democratic primary, that he has forgotten the effect his words have, not just on those serving overseas, but on our enemies as well. It is one thing for the Congressman to disagree with President Bush's stance...

The custom among many has long been to ignore, where feasible, the mental belchings of the senior senator from Massachusetts on the theory that, ah, what's the use? What can anybody do anyway about Teddy Kennedy -- a figure large, literally, on the Washington scene and endowed with a supernaturally powerful surname? Then comes Kennedy's poisonous claim that President Bush hoaxed us on Iraq. How do you ignore this stuff? You have to talk about it and, more depressingly, about what it means. "There was no imminent threat," Kennedy told the Associated Press. "This was made up in Texas, announced...

From Foxnews, about Ted Kennedy's comments: "These comments are obviously for political gain and are as disgusting as they are false," House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas told reporters Tuesday. "Unfortunately, Kennedy's brand of hate speech has become mainstream in the Democratic Party -- is so incoherent and hateful that frankly, I think they belong on the [Jerry] Springer show rather than C-SPAN."

<p>WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans organized a counterattack Tuesday on Sen. Ted Kennedy (search), just days after the Democrat claimed in a press interview that the Bush administration had made up the threat from Iraq for political points and bribed international leaders to go along with the Iraq war.</p>

<p>August 27, 2003 -- Rep. Jerry Nadler's over-the-top attack on the White House this past weekend may make his fellow ultra-liberal Democrats feel all warm and toasty, but the congressman has done his nation, his city and his constituents a substantial disservice.</p>