Military continues to meet recruitment goals

The Washington Times reported:

The U.S. Army, which has done some of the toughest and longest fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, has met its recruiting and retention goals for active-duty soldiers in the fiscal year that ends today.

The Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps also achieved those goals at a time when the 1.4-million-person armed forces is under intense deployment pressures because of the global war on terrorism.

On the retention front, both the Guard and Army reserves will miss targets slightly — by 1 percent and 3 percent, respectively, the Army projects.

But overall, the Army brass say they are pleased at 100 percent-plus retention rates for enlisted active-duty soldiers, especially in its 10 active-combat divisions, which have seen some of the bloodiest combat in Iraq cities such as Najaf, Baghdad and Sammara. The goal of retaining 56,100 will be exceeded by about 800 soldiers.

On new recruits heading to basic training, the target of 77,000 was exceeded 10 days ago by a margin of 47 inductees.

It goes completely against the conventional wisdom. But it's true," said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon. "We understand that we need to continue to show good leadership and focus resources to get citizens to enlist and to re-enlist. But we're doing it."

Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry and other party members have contended that the war is putting so much stress on the force that President Bush will be forced to reinstitute the draft — a scenario denied by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

This is just more data showing that the U.S. military—just like all decent Americans—are energized to take deadly force to the terrorists.

The only people who are trying to bring back the draft are cranks like our reprehensible representative from Harlem Charley Rangel. Glen reprinted letter from the father of a Marine:

Our 22 year old son is a US Marine, SpOps. His Btn just returned from the al Anbar region of Iraq. They have the unfortunate distinction of having taken the most casualties of any Coalition unit in Iraq (33 KIA 200+ WIA, sent home). However, they - in the proud tradition of US Marines, and specifically the 7th Marine Regiment - killed over 3,000 of the enemy bringing peace to the region o which they were assigned. They took on an area where there was murderous terrorist activity on a daily basis and today, it's as safe as most of Philly.
I can guarantee you, because I had this conversation with Josh and with his comrades-in-arms, they DO NOT WANT conscripted kids with them. At home, hey are the finest men this country has to offer. Polite, generous and even lightly patriotic. At work they are the worst enemy of people who attack the S. They are committed to what they do. They don't need whining, snotty children clinging to mommy's apron who they would have to babysit.

So, please contact Rep. Rangel and the other Democrats who put forth this legislation. Tell them to withdraw it - not that it has a snowball's chance in Baghdad of passing anyway. And please, don't fear for your sons. My son and his friends, WILLINGLY sleeping in holes in the sand and eating MRE's will make sure you and your sons can all sleep well in your soft beds after a quiet dinner.

Michael Becker
Phoenix, AZ
very proud father of LCpl Josh. The best man we know...

All that I can add to that is: simper fi

Ex-Gitmo detainee vows to fight Russia

Yup, our catch-n-release policy at Gitmo is just working swell:

A Danish man who was released from U.S. military detention in Guantanamo Bay told a television interviewer he plans to travel to Chechnya and join Islamic militants fighting Russian forces.

In a live interview with the DR-1 television channel Wednesday night, Slimane Hadj Abderrahmane said he planned to go into hiding and then "try to find a way to Chechnya."

As a condition of his release from Guantanamo in February, Abderrahmane pledged to refrain from warfare. Of the pledge, he said, "They can use it as toilet paper over there in the United States." (emphasis mine --johnh)

Then the Danes compound the problem by refusing to nab this jihadist and send him back to the U.S. so we can stick him back in gitmo until he dies of old age:

Although lawmakers criticized the remarks as out of bounds [ya think?] and said they amounted to incitement to violence, they did not violate any Danish laws.

However, certain Danes are making the right noises:

Danish Justice Minister Lene Espersen said Abderrahmane's comments represented "a new situation that the law enforcement authorities must reconsider."

Pia Kjaersgaard, the leader of the Danish People's Party, said Abderrahmane's behavior was "completely grotesque" and urged the government to hand him over to the U.S. authorities.

Another lawmaker, Elisabeth Arnold of the centrist Radical Party, said he represented "a risk."

A risk? Gee...you might be right! Has anyone else noticed that in Europe it is the parties with "Radical" in their name that make the most sense?

The U.S. rescued the European countries during WW II. And then we did more to protect Western Europe from the USSR during the Cold War (i.e., WW III) than the Europeans did to protect themselves. They owe us. If they cannot be relied on to lock-up a self-avowed jihadist for the duration of this war against terrorist they should at least return him to the U.S. for safekeeping.

Then again, I guess it is too much to expect counties that cannot be bothered to defend themselves in WW III to do anything material for the “ally” that defended them during WW II and WW III

Then again, seeing how Denmark couldn’t be bothered to defend herself during WW II and WW III perhaps it is wishful thinking to expect her to do anything material for her old “ally” in the War against Terrorists (i.e., WW IV).

Is John Kerry thinking about Denmark when he claims that he will get allies who will join the U.S. in Iraq? Hah! Those Botox injections must have damaged the part of John Kerry’s brain that distinguishes reality from delusions. I prediect—if the requisite miracle occurs and the American people of have a collective fit of stupidity on election day—that the only thing that President Kerry will get out of Denmark is the finger.

Credits: lucianne

How Bush blew one of Bill O’Reilly's questions

Bill O’Reilly has just broadcast the first installment of his interview with President Bush. During this interview O’Reilly asked a question that Bush should have not only knocked out of the park but also could have used to disembowel Ted Kennedy, John Kerry and the quagmire-callers in the Democrat elite.

The context of the question pertained to the conflict between the goals of an Iraqi national election in January 05 and the ongoing guerrilla war waged by the insurgents.

O’REILLY: But can they vote when people are being blown up,

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yeah.

O’REILLY: And these guys are threatening them, then they vote,

PRESIDENT BUSH: That's when you're supposed to vote. You’ve got to stand tough with these terrorists. You cannot allow the terrorists to dictate whether or not a society can be free or not. Do you remember what happened in Afghanistan when the Taliban pulled the four women off the bus and killed them because they had voter registration cards? I think there had been about three million Afghan citizens who had registered at this point in time. A lot of people said, well, the elections look like they’ve got to be over in Afghanistan, because the Taliban is, too violent to allow the elections to go forward. Today ten million citizens, [OVERLAPPING VOICES] in that country have registered to vote, forty percent of whom are women, which is a powerful statistic.

O’REILLY: The South Vietnamese didn't fight for their freedom, which is why they don’t have it today.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yeah.

Me: OBJECTION! Assertion had bogus premise!

Judge: Please state the bogus premise. (Where’d he come from? –ed)

Me: O’Reilly’s aside incorrectly implied that South Vietnamese valor was the primary cause of North Vietnam’s victory.

Judge: Objection sustained. Please bloviate about the actual cause of North Vietnam’s victory.

Me: With pleasure.

By 1975, the year of North Vietnam’s victory over South Vietnam, the U.S. had withdrawn from South Vietnam. The U.S. was still an ally of South Vietnam and was committed by treaty to provide both supplies and support—including air power—to help South Vietnam to defend itself from North Vietnamese aggression.

In August 1973 US Congress passed the Case-Church Amendment which prohibited US naval forces from sailing on the seas surrounding, US ground forces from operating on the land of, and US air forces from flying in the air over, South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Case–Church was in effect an unconditional guarantee, by the US Congress to the North Vietnamese communists, that the United States would no longer oppose their efforts to conquer South Vietnam. This act effectively nullified the Paris Peace Agreements. The communists had won on the floors of the US Congress what they couldn’t win in either negotiations or on the battlefield.

Senator Edward Kennedy—true to form—was unsatisfied with merely selling-out our ally to the North Vietnamese. Senator Kennedy further compromised our ally’s ability to defend itself by forcing the U.S. to welch on critical military support promised to South Vietnam by passing a $266 million cut in supplemental spending for Vietnam.

North Vietnam, on the other hand, was well supplied and financed by two of the U.S.’ superpower enemies: the USSR and Mainland China. In 1975 North Vietnam assaulted South Vietnam; not with a guerilla army but with a conventional army. The North Vietnamese army, which was made up of seventeen conventional divisions and supported by a host of regular army logistical support units, overran South Vietnam. This totally conventional force (armed, equipped, trained and supplied by Red China and the Soviet Union), spearheaded by 700 Soviet tanks—burning Soviet fuel and firing Soviet ammunition—launched a cross border, frontal attack on South Vietnam and conquered it in the same manner as Hitler conquered most of Europe in WW II.

The South Vietnamese had only 352 US supplied tanks and—due to US Congressional action— South Vietnam was critically short of fuel, ammunition and spare parts.

O’Reilly’s assertion that the South Vietnams didn’t fight is false: South Vietnam’s 18^th division destroyed three North Vietnamese divisions before being overrun by six North Vietnamese divisions later. The 18^th division fought effectively in spite of the handicaps imposed by congressional Democrats.

South Vietnam fell. The Case-Church Amendment, which prohibited the U.S. from supporting South Vietnam while doing nothing to discourage the USSR and China from supporting North Vietnam, sealed its fate.

The irony is that this Warsaw pact style army was exactly the type of army that the U.S. trained, equipped and organized to defeat. The only thing that prevented the U.S. army from saving South Vietnam from communist aggression—and inflicting yet another crushing defeat on North Vietnam—were the congressional democrats led by Ted Kennedy.


Judge (impatiently): Please bring your statements to a conclusion.

Me: In conclusion, it was the Democrat controlled congress—rather than South Vietnam willingness to fight— is the primary cause of our loss in South Vietnam.

Consequently O’Reilly’s assertion,which Bush inexplicably—and unfortunately—verbally concurred with, is false.

The only obvious parallel between Vietnam and Iraq occurred when Senator Edward Kennedy— the same Senator Kennedy who contributed to our loss in South Vietnam by deliberately under funding her defense—also voted against the $87 billion required to support our troops in Iraq.

Bush should have disputed O’Reilly’s assertion and assigned responsibility for South Vietnam’s defeat to the Democrat controlled 93^rd congress (i.e., the congress that was in session in 1973). He should have then described Senator Kennedy’s 1973 pro-enemy activism and equated it—and its logical consequences—to our current struggle in Iraq.


Postscript:

This post is heavily based on Vietnam: Looking Back - At The Facts by K. G. Sears, Ph.D.

I endeavored to find the congressional roll call votes on the 1973 Case-Church amendment that sealed South Vietnam’s fate. My intent was to unequivocally assign responsibility for our defeat in Vietnam to the McGovernite wing of the Democratic party. I was unsuccessful because—as far as I can determine—online records of congressional roll call votes before 1981 are unavailable. I’m asking anyone who knows how to how to access these records to email me on where I can find them.

Everybody run, Kerry's got his gun

Well Kerry has done it again; he’s been busted for fabricating Vietnam fables.

Here’s the Washington Times account of Kerry being asked about “his favorite gun”:

In interviews appearing in the October issue of Outdoor Life, Kerry and President George Bush were asked to name their favorite guns.

"My favorite gun is the M-16 that saved my life and that of my crew in Vietnam," Kerry told the magazine. "I don't own one of those now, but one of my reminders of my service is a Communist Chinese assault rifle." [Emphasis mine—johnh]

And now John Kerry issues a “clarification” where he blames any human error on his staff:

Senator John Kerry’s campaign said yesterday that Mr. Kerry did not own a Chinese assault rifle, as he was quoted as saying in Outdoor Life magazine, but a single-bolt-action military rifle, blaming aides who filled out the magazine's questionnaire on his behalf for the error. [Emphasis mine—johnh]

What is it with John Kerry and these fables he tells about himself?

A blindingly obvious point: his detailed statement ("I don't own one of those now, but one of my reminders of my service is a Communist Chinese assault rifle.") is quoted.

Quotes are used to indicate verbatim recitation of a person’s statement or of a passage from a printed text. The quoted text in the Washington Times article indicate that Kerry spoke these exact words.

Kerry’s defense—that this story was invented by aides as they filled out Ourdoor Life’s questionnaire—is a marvel of absurdity. Who, exactly, does he expect to swallow that ridiculous lie?

Let’s pretend for a moment that I accept the premise that his alibi is true. Where in the world would his aides get the idea that Kerry had retained a Chinese AK 47 as a souvenir? Has Kerry been telling his staff whoppers about Vietnam again? This is how Kerry inflicted the “magic hat” fiasco on himself. If this is the case then it shows that Kerry is capable of repeating the same idiotic—and costly—mistake. Great confidence builder, dude.

I suspect that Kerry will deny that he gets his kicks fabricating cheap fables and fantasies for his staff. OK, then in that case Kerry would have us believe that his staff—whom we must assume are fervent Kerry supporters—would believe that inserting yet another Vietnam whopper into the media’s bloodstream would be so helpful for his campaign that they deliberately invented one for him.

Yeah, right. By now Kerry and Vietnam has become such a bleeding wound that his staff would do anything to avoid bringing this subject up. And he can forget the “It was just a typo” defense; like that ever works.

Also, what’s up with Kerry blaming everything that goes wrong in his life on everybody but himself? He is getting eerie.

Dan's purple heart

Just got this one from pat.



 

Thanks Pat!

Sullivan’s moral relativism

Grrrrr…. What is it about Andrew Sullivan and his need to generate moral relativism between the U.S. and Saddam Hussein? In this post he approvingly quotes the following article, which appeared in the Australian newspaper The Age:

The anti-war website Iraqbodycount.net estimates that between 11,487 and 13,458 Iraqis have been killed since the start of the war. Added to that are 1049 coalition deaths listed. That is a staggering 14,507 deaths since March 19 last year - a horrendous average of 28.5 people, real human beings, a day for the 509 days.

How could this ever be justified? Wouldn't Iraq have been better off without this?

It is estimated that Saddam killed between 500,000 and 1 million of his own people in the 13 years since the Gulf War, not including the effects of the sanctions. The lower number averages out to be 105 a day.

Assuming Saddam had stayed in power, as the anti-war movement would have had, and assuming his regime did not fundamentally change, Saddam could have killed between 53,445 and 106,890 innocent people in the same 509 days.

In other words, the war probably cost between 38,938 and 92,383 fewer lives than the so-called peace would have cost.

Sullivan then manages to simultaneously be morally correct and a moral midget in the same breath:

Couldn't agree more. It's just that using the standard of Saddam Hussein is not exactly morally reassuring about our current conduct.

WTF? Why does Sullivan feel the need to equate Saddam’s decades-long political homicide against the Iraq people with the deaths—whether by collateral damage, the killing of Iraqi jihadists or the killing of the Baathist holdouts—by our military?

I know that Sullivan understands that Saddam’s political homicide was an integral part of Saddam’s policy.

I also know Sullivan understands that the U.S.’ policy is—as much as practical—to avoid causing civilian causalities. Put another way, this contrast shows that the U.S.’ policy is the reverse of Saddam’s and I know Sullivan must understand this.

I also know that Sullivan understands that most of the Iraqis killed were insurgents; that they were killed in combat and could have avoided death by simply not taking up arms against the U.S.

So why—given all of these blindingly obvious distinctions between the U.S. and Saddam—does Sullivan feel then need to disparage the number of Iraqis who were saved from being tortured to death by Saddam by insinuating that the deaths that have since occurred are somehow equivalent?

I Love a Mystery

UPDATE:

Fort Worth Star-Telegram withdraws the details regarding the allegation that Joe Lockhart requested copies of the memos from Bill Burkett. This blows up most of INDC's analysis.

(sigh) When am I ever going to learn to follow the 48 hour rule?


UPDATE:

Bill at INDC Journal has an updated timeline.

Bill noted:

UPDATE: Let me explain my read on why Burkett said something that contradicts Lockhart:

First of all, he's clearly incompetent (look at the forgeries) and probably unstable, and he probably never saw or perhaps absorbed Lockhart's quote. In his clumsy read of the situation, he thinks that he's protecting Lockhart by implying that he wouldn't give them the documents. This does two things:

1. Enhances Burkett's sense of self-importance in the narrative; the Kerry campaign wanted his help.


2. In Burkett's mind, it insulates the Dems from the charge of forgery.

If the Dems couldn't get their hands on the documents, then they have no responsibility for awareness that they were forgeries; but what Burkett may not realize is the fact that Cleland and Lockhart already went on the record with a denial about any knowledge of or conversation about the documents.

We all knew that the denial of any conversation about the documents was bullshit, of course, but now we have one of the parties, no matter how incredible, on record to back up part of the suspicion.

Bill quotes commenter "Prakk" on a thread at The Politburo Diktat:

This is ENDGAME. True or false Burkett just moved the piece on the board that forces the issue.

Well, I don't know about this being the ENDGAME. I do agree that this just reopened a can of worms that the Dems were on the verge of recanning.

I'm looking forward to seeing just how far this goes


-- Original Post --

Ra^therBogusGate has some interesting legs. The fact that the forged National Guard memos were produced using Microsoft Word simply isn’t in doubt so any late breaking tidbits of information pertaining to proportional spacing and so on just isn’t that interesting to me any more.

On the other hand, the action of various players _CBS (particularly Mary Mapes and the big boy himself, Dan), the Kerry campaign and the carpet chewing Bill Burkett, led myself and others to suspect some degree of collusion.

Now Clarice Feldman of the American Thinker has posted an intriguing timeline that taught me a number of new things about this story.

It’s interesting reading. Feldman observes the uncanny manner in which a number of organizations—all of which deny communicating with each other—managed to fly in close formation. Coincidently, members of said formation also happened to carry out certain actions within a tight period of time. Careful observers will, of course, be amazed to learn that every single action couldn’t have been better timed to inflict maximum damage to President Bush’s reelection campaign if they had been deliberately been organized to do so.

And the sum of every one of these carefully uncoordinated actions might have changed the course of the 2004 election if, of course, if the “memos” that all of these actions totally depended on weren’t revealed to be foraged. (Ooops!)

So now, boys and girls, it seems that we might have a real-life mystery on our hands. Cursory examination of Feldman’s timeline suggests that a number of players in both the MSM and the Kerry campaign were in collusion in an effort to torpedo Bush’s reelection.

One question that, I think, is fairly easily answered is Why now? Why not launch this 72 hours before Election Day, just the way Bush’s DUI was outted in 2000 election?

That now doesn’t seem like a half-bad idea, particularly after seeing how quickly this entire thing became unraveled. Anyway, Anne Coulter pointed out that the MSM didn’t wait until three days before the election because they COULDN’T wait that long. If the MSM waited that long then—at the rate that John Kerry’s campaign is self-destructing—there wouldn’t be any Kerry’s campaign left to save. Here’s Coulter:

CBS was attempting to manipulate a presidential election in wartime. What if CBS had used better forgeries? What if – like Bush's 30-year-old DUI charge – the media had waited 72 hours before the election to air this character assassination?
There is one reason CBS couldn't wait until just before the election to put these forgeries on the air: It would be too late. Kerry was crashing and burning – because of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. (Funny that the Swift Boat veterans haven't been able to get on Kerry PR agency CBS News.)

I think I’ll let Ann have the last word.

Novak's antiwar activism

For whatever reason, Robert Novak has doubted the advisability of both the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his September 20, 2004 article Getting out of Iraq Novak simply states that the Bush administration has already decided to bug out of Iraq as soon as the election is over.

If I didn’t know Novak’s work better—or if I trusted him to accurately describe the Bush administration’s intentions—then I might panic. After all, abandoning the battlefield and leaving your enemy in control of it is just a means for deliberately losing. You don’t own the battlespace and your enemies do; just like in Vietnam.

Fortunately, in my experience—at least with respect to the military aspects of the war on terrorists—Novak has shown himself to be unreliable. This is not a new phenomenon; David Frum has previously noted that Novak espoused defeatism when writing about the U.S. war effort:

Robert Novak … on September 17, 2001, predicting that any campaign in Afghanistan would be a futile slaughter: "The CIA, in its present state, is viewed by its Capitol Hill overseers as incapable of targeting bin Laden. That leads to an irresistible impulse to satisfy Americans by pulverizing Afghanistan."

The article that Frum is referring to, Novak’s September 17, 2001 article Frustrated war fever ,deserves to be read at in its entirety. In this article Novak got a number of things wrong.

Novak asserted that the U.S. intended on “carpet bombing” Afghanistan. This weird assertion—which Novak attributed to a Pentagon source—seems designed to discredit the Bush administration as having a transparently dysfunctional strategy. Further, our military has avoided indiscriminant bombing during Gulf War I and the Vietnam War. If we didn’t neither Baghdad nor Hanoi would have survived. What gave Novak the idea that were going to be more barbaric and why now?

In any case, Novak was completely wrong. The Afghanistan campaign was most noteworthy for a relatively bloodless campaign that mostly relied on elite Special Forces and precision guided weapons; the reverse of indiscriminant “carpet bombing”.

pessimistic regarding Bush’s efforts to transform Pakistan into an ally.

… but so far emphasis on courting Pakistan suggests an attempted anti-Taliban front. The results have been less than satisfying. Pakistan, spurned by Washington in recent years, has been friendly but not willing to grant fly-over rights to U.S. warplanes

Of course Bush has shown himself to be very successful at bring Pakistan around to our side. Novak was wrong about that too.

Novak sneered at the Bush administration’s purported shallow thinking

Will bombing empty terrorist camps in Afghanistan and leveling its battle-scarred capital really inhibit religious fanatics eager to embark on suicide missions? That is the question pondered by worried officials who understand the complexity of this crisis for America.

Here Novak is wrong on several levels.

Regarding Will bombing empty terrorist camps in Afghanistan : Who exactly did Novak think was running the White House, Clinton? And exactly who—outside the Clinton administration—ever proposed that bombing empty terrorist camps would accomplish anything?

Regarding leveling [Afghanistan's] battle-scarred capital : our precision-guided munitions avoided unnecessary damage in Kabul and elsewhere.

Regarding whether bombing [would] really inhibit religious fanatics eager to embark on suicide missions : well I doubt that anyone in the Bush administration every said that bombing would “inhibit” jihadists. They did say, however, that removing the Taliban also removes the regime that gave al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan; which also remove this sanctuary as one of the means for conduction terror operations against the U.S.

OK, I think that this is sufficient to show that

• Novak is viscerally opposed to the military aspects Bush’s anti-terrorism policy. He doesn’t want us in either Iraq or Afghanistan.


• That Novak sometimes doesn’t have a clue as to what the Bush administration will do militarily


• Novak is just plain loopy when he speaks to this subject.

Now back to Novak’s September 20th article that suggests that the Bush administration is preparing for the mother of all bug outs. In summary, I don’t think that the Bush administration is thinking this way. I think that his article is just Novak’s means for offering his own wishful thinking as purported administration thinking.

Why would Novak do this? Well, I will have to speculate in order to answer this one. My take is that this article is sort of freelance trial balloon that Novak’s floating with the intent of building a pro-bugout consensus. Anyone who is inclined—or is becoming inclined—to advocate bugging out will feel slightly bolder about speaking their mind if they read that the White House is planning on bugging out anyway.

Of course any folks that become vocal pro-bugout activists will be joining Novak’s side of the argument. All that Novak ever intended to do was smoke-out the pro-bugout bloc and—he hoped—to demonstrate that the pro-bugout bloc is larger than conventional wisdom suspected. And if Novak hits the jackpot and reveals that this bloc is a majority then this will hasten the erosion of the war’s political support.

However, on the other hand, if there is no more support for bugging out than was apparent before then this article is nothing more than another quickly forgotten trial balloon. Novak will feel no pain either way.

Update: Andrew Sullivan has different THOUGHTS ON NOVAK

The question lingers: why would anyone in the administration want to leak to Robert Novak that Bush is contemplating a quickish exit from Iraq? An obvious thought is that the leak comes from someone diametrically opposed to such a stance. An admission of any plan of that kind would demoralize the president's supporters (and war supporters) and probably prompt a question in the debates or upcoming news conferences. The president might then be forced to dismiss such an idea, boxing himself into the neoconservative position before the election. Tada! You scotch the withdrawal idea by raising it. The beauty of this is that it uses that anti-war curmudgeon, Novak, to bolster the president's resolve.

Iraqi blogger Ali nearly came unglued when he saw Novak's article. Hit tip Glen.

calling Karl Rove...

Infidel Cowboy blogged:

...Kerry's good friends at MoveOn ... are running an ad showing a defeated American soldier. Maybe Bush should make a follow up ad where that soldier is captured and forced to listen to Kerry telling the world that he is a war criminal. " (Emphasis mine–johnh )

What an excellent idea! I can think of nothing else that would make clear the full extent of Kerry misconduct during the Vietnam War. The immediacy of hearing Kerry’s forty year-old words ago used in the context of a war that we’re fully involved in would make today’s citizens—many who were unborn at that time—understand how outrageous, how disgraceful, and how contemptible his assault on our cherished soldiers was.

RatherBogus

And this just in from Lucianne:

I'm getting to like this train wreck more each day.

The Pajamahadeen

The Black Republican is piling on the "guys in pajamas" comment with the best graphic (so far):

via Luciane

Update:

Welcome to my humble rightie blog, Kossaks! It's a pleasure having you over.

Bill Clinton == Fred Sanford?

I have largely accepted Dick Morris’ theory that the Clintons do not want Kerry to win in 04 because they want a clear field for Hillary in 08. In my view this is completely consistent with the both of the Clintons’ demonstrated behavior.

The political problem for the Clintons is, of course, that they cannot be seen to be undermining Kerry; after all you cannot command loyalty if you have a reputation for being treacherous.

I was already suspicious of the timing of Bill Clinton’s “chest pains”. For one thing, the doctor-patient relationship makes this sort of situation particularly easy for Bill Clinton to manipulate. The first factor is that Bill Clinton is an inhibited liar. (Please excuse me if I emphasis the obvious but I’m just explicitly listing my considerations.) The second factor is the doctor-patient relationship means the Bill Clinton’s doctors cannot divulge any information that Bill wants withheld. The third factor is that Bill Clinton has never released his medical records; this means that nobody other than his doctors can be sure about his medical history.

This means that Bill has particularly wide latitude to lie about the details and circumstances of his heart condition and be confident that his doctors will not blow his story.

Reason.com just posted an interesting article that is completely consistent with Dick Morris’ theory.

Once again Bill Clinton's personal dramas have taken center stage away from whatever the Democratic Party had planned. The drawback for John Kerry is not so much what Clinton can or cannot do on the campaign trial for the Democratic ticket; that was always of dubious value. What matters is that Clinton's heart surgery managed to dominate the news cycle just as the Republican convention was ending and Kerry seemed poised to offer a rebuttal.

Clinton's health and Hillary's somber pre-op statements led newscasts and soaked up valuable front-page space. Kerry was pushed to the background in almost every instance. …it has made it that much harder for Kerry to recover and go on the offensive as he clearly plans to do.

Unfortunately for Kerry, there is at least one more round of stories to fall out of the Clinton heart woes. Once it is clear that the former president will indeed recover, it will then be permissible to ask how a man with eight years of the world's best health care suddenly developed a 90 percent blockage of a vital artery. In the absence of a plausible explanation to the contrary, the simplest answer is that the blockage is not, in fact, new and instead dates to the Clinton's time in the White House, where it was kept quiet.

If so, if might be a while before Kerry can get a word in edgewise.

Well, I sure have no way to prove this either true or false. An additional indicator that Morris’ theory is correct might occur if Clinton has recurring chest-pain episodes anytime Kerry begins looking like he might begin closing back in on Bush.

Of course it will be too obvious if Clinton grabs his chest like Fred Sanford and yells “I’m coming to join you, Honey!”

Cheers,