Saturday, October 02, 2004

 

John Kerry Made At Least 16 Inaccurate Statements During Last Night's Debate


Kerry Inaccurately Claimed Cuts In Homeland Security Funding Caused NYC Subway To Be Closed During The RNC Convention. "In an early exchange about homeland security, Kerry got it wrong when he claimed President Bush's cuts in funding for infrastructure protection was 'why they had to close down the subway in New York when the Republican Convention was there.' The only problem is that no subway service beneath Madison Square Garden was suspended during the convention, even as buses were diverted and gridlock ruled the streets." ("Subway Flub Derails Challenger," The New York Post, 10/1/04)


Kerry Falsely Claimed He Had "Made A Mistake In How" He Talked About His Vote Against The $87 Billion, Despite Previously Saying It Would Be "Irresponsible" To Vote Against Funding For Our Troops. (CBS -- "Face The Nation", 9/14/03)


Kerry Claimed He's "Never, Ever" Used Word "Lying" In Reference To President Bush On Iraq, But In December 2003 Kerry Told A New Hampshire Editorial Board Bush "Lied" About Reasons For Going To War In Iraq And In September 2003 Kerry Said Bush Administration "Lied" And "Misled." (Patrick Healy, "Kerry Camp Lowers N.H. Expectations Behind In Polls, Senator Now Seeks Spot In 'Top Two,'" The Boston Globe, 12/8/03; Sen. John Kerry, Campaign Event, Claremont, NH, 9/20/03)


According To FactCheck.Org, Kerry's "Cost" For The Iraq War Is Off By $80 Billion. ("Distortions And Misstatements At First Presidential Debate," FactCheck.org, 10/1/04, http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=271, Accessed 10/1/04)


According To FactCheck.Org, Kerry "Overstated The Case" On Osama Bin Laden's Alleged Escape At Tora Bora. ("Distortions And Misstatements At First Presidential Debate," FactCheck.org, 10/1/04, http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=271, Accessed 10/1/04)


Kerry Made Assumption The UN Was Willing To Continue Sanctions Against Iraq Despite The Fact They Were Becoming "Increasingly Unpopular With Key Nations." (Glenn Kessler And Walter Pincus, "Few Factual Errors, But Truth Got Stretched At Times," The Washington Post, 10/1/04)


Kerry Misspoke And Said Weapons Of Mass Destruction Were "Crossing The (Iraq) Border Every Single Day." "The AP noted that Kerry misspoke when he said 'we got weapons of mass destruction crossing the (Iraq) border every single day, and they're blowing people up.' Kerry meant terrorists were crossing the border, not nuclear weapons." ("Distortions And Misstatements At First Presidential Debate," FactCheck.org, 10/1/04, http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=271, Accessed 10/1/04)


Kerry Claimed U.S. Soldiers Are "90 Percent Of The Casualties In Iraq," But The Wall Street Journal Puts U.S. Casualties Closer To 50% When You Include Iraqis Helping To Secure Their Own Country. (Editorial, "Our Kerry Iraq Guide," The Wall Street Journal, 9/30/04)


Kerry Falsely Claimed President Bush Diverted Forces From Afghanistan To Iraq; Gen. Tommy Franks Said It's "Absolutely Incorrect" That Resources Were Diverted From Afghanistan. (General Tommy Franks, ABC Radio's "The Sean Hannity Show," 9/21/04)


Kerry Falsely Claimed The Bush Administration Has Not Organized An International Summit To Discuss Iraq. "Reality Check: The administration has, in fact, organized just such a conference, in consultation with Iraqi and other Arab allies. It will be held in Cairo late in November, with the foreign ministers of the G8 countries (i.e. including antiwar countries such as France, Germany and Russia), China, the countries of the Arab League, Turkey and Iran invited to attend. If it goes ahead, it will mark the most significant attempt to forge a political consensus on Iraq since the war." (Tony Karon, "Reality Check: John Kerry," Time.com, http://www.time.com/time/election2004/article/0,18471,703913,00.html, 10/1/04)


Kerry Falsely Claimed The President Is "Cutting The COPS Program," When The Truth Is President Bush Has Already Met And Exceeded The COPS Program's 100,000 Officer Goal By 18 Percent. (http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/Default.asp?Item=1056)


Kerry Claimed Gen. Shinseki Was Retired For Testimony On Iraq When In Fact Shinseki's Retirement Was Announced In April 2002, Long Before He Testified About Potential Conduct Of Iraq War. (Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough, "Inside The Ring," The Washington Times, 4/19/02)


Kerry Misleadingly Claimed He Can Bring More Allies Into Iraq. "Reality Check: It wasn't the President's credibility that kept most of the international community out of Iraq; it was, and is, the policies pursued by the U.S. in Iraq. But Kerry is broadly committed to the same policies. And if, as he says, other countries will participate because they have a stake in the outcome, the presumably they would do so no matter who was President of the United States." (Tony Karon, "Reality Check: John Kerry," Time.com, http://www.time.com/time/election2004/article/0,18471,703913,00.html, 10/1/04)


Kerry Claimed To Have His Own Four-Point Plan For Iraq, But It Mirrors The President's Plan. "Kerry's "plan" is pretty much a checklist of recent initiatives adopted by the Bush Administration." (Tony Karon, "Reality Check: John Kerry," Time.com, http://www.time.com/time/election2004/article/0,18471,703913,00.html, 10/1/04)


Kerry Falsely Stated The Agreement With North Korea Broke Down Because The President Didn't Continue The Clinton Administration's Policy. "Reality Check: While the Yongbon facility was under scrutiny and the fuel rods were sealed, North Korea has since admitted to running a secret parallel uranium-enrichment program to create weapons-grade fissile material in the years following the agreement reached with the Clinton administration, in violation of that agreement." (Tony Karon, "Reality Check: John Kerry," Time.com, http://www.time.com/time/election2004/article/0,18471,703913,00.html, 10/1/04)


Kerry Falsely Claimed The "Reason For Going To War Was Weapons Of Mass Destruction, Not The Removal Of Saddam Hussein," But The 2002 Use Of Force Resolution Kerry Voted For Specifically Recognized Longstanding Regime Change Policy. (Public Law No. 107-243, Signed Into Law 10/16/02

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(The above list originally appeared here).

posted by JR 8:32 PM

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

 

You won't hear about THIS on the evening news!

Last week, on Tuesday, our school had a field trip to see President Bush speak at the Farm Progress Show in Alleman, Iowa. It was even educational ( ! ) to learn about all the security we had to go through at the outdoor event. It was a typical campaign stop for the President. He spoke for 45 minutes, much of his speech was about agriculture because there were many farmers there, along with thousands of other people.

A few days later we learned something very interesting about George W Bush's visit to Iowa. Carson's former teacher had some friends there at the speech, whose son had been killed in Iraq as a Marine last April. The couple's son was named Ben. Ben's parents had blue tickets, which meant they would be standing outside on the ground with the rest of the crowd to hear the speech.

At some point, their tickets were upgraded, and they were given tickets where they could be seated on the stage with the president. About 45 minutes before President Bush came on stage, 2 secret service men asked them to leave the stage, and come inside a white trailer, behind the stage. The parents were told to wait there, and also told that when the door of the trailer opened, they would want to stand up.

When the door opened, there was President Bush. He greeted them warmly, sat down with them at a table, and said, "Tell me all about Ben." The parents told of how Ben knew the all the reasons why he was going into Iraq, and how he was glad to be doing what he, as a Marine, had been called to do. They told of how they had a complete peace about his death, and how they were absolutely certain he was in a much better place now.

After about 20 minutes of conversation, Ben's dad said, "We want to tell you, Mr. President, that my wife and I pray for you every day." Then President Bush said, "Let's pray right now." They gathered hands around the table. Ben's dad opened the prayer and the President closed.

This quiet encounter happened on a day when the President had major campaign stops in Tennessee and Pennsylvania, as well as Iowa. He also made an appearance at the Republican National Convention that evening by satellite. We were amazed to hear of this kind and heartfelt deed, which is one of many that the President does without any reporters present, and a deed that will not likely ever hit the mainstream media. It was a lesson to my children, that a truly great leader is a humble person, one who will go out of his way seek out the hurting, and lastly, a man of prayer who loves and trusts God. I hope that by sharing this, you will see a glimpse of this leader behind a closed door. I hope that we can also ponder, as Ben's parents did even in their sorrow, that God has a plan for our lives, and for our country.

posted by JR 7:07 PM

Monday, September 27, 2004

 

VILLAIN OR VICTIM

He might have left office four years ago, but Bill Clinton would still like to settle some old scores. Here, for the first time, he shares with Australian Journalist of the Year, Peter Wilson, his theory on exactly who tried to get him out of the White House

Bill Clinton is sitting in a London hotel suite, calmly naming the man who set in motion the "vast right-wing conspiracy" to undo his presidency. It is more than 12 years since Clinton was first sworn in as president by United States Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and more than six years since Hillary Clinton first went public with her famous conspiracy theory - that the official inquiries and shadowy dirt-digging exercises that ended up exposing her husband's affair with Monica Lewinsky were the work of right-wing ideologues. Neither Clinton has ever named a conspirator-in-chief.

But now, during an interview intended to promote his autobiography, "My Life", a more relaxed ex-president is discussing what he calls, "the right-wing coup". As well as the well-known man who got the ball rolling on the campaign to drive him from office - "a very partisan Republican" with his own history of opposing civil rights, who knew exactly what he was doing when he set the dogs loose on Clinton.

The aim of that hunt, Clinton says, was nothing less than to overturn the results of the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections, and the culprit eventually played a key role in stealing the 2000 election for George W Bush.

An aide sits quietly in a chair behind me, overseeing our interview, and as Clinton starts to talk more passionately about evidence that he says indicates the person in question might have held racist views, the aide suddenly clears his throat, then coughs loudly - the only such interruption of our entire interview.

It might have been coincidence, but when I later listen to the tape of the interview, I hear the former president hesitate when he hears the cough, pause for a second and then choose his words more carefully. And no wonder. The man he was blaming was William Rehnquist, the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, who twice swore Clinton in as president. This was a remarkable attack by a former president on the superpower's highest judge.....

Clinton's greatest anger is reserved for the judges who appointed Starr in the first place. Laws passed after the watergate scandal gave the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court the power to appoint a three-judge panel which in turn appoints special prosecutors with enormous powers to investigate a presidency. In appointing that panel, the chief justice is supposed to avoid political activists and is specifically directed by the relevant Act to give preference to senior or retired judges. But William Rehnquist, a 79-year-old conservative lawyer appointed from within the Nixon administration and promoted to chief justice by Reagan, first removed the moderate Republican who was head of the panel and in mid-1994 overlooked a dozen more senior judges to appoint the relatively inexperienced David Sentelle, 50, as chairman. To say that Sentelle is a politically partisan judge is like saying Bill Clinton votes Democrat.

In August 1994, Justice Sentelle's panel sacked Robert Fiske, a Republican prosecutor who had been appointed by Clinton's attorney-general, Janet Reno, to look into the Whitewater corruption allegations. Reno had been involved in appointing Fiske only because Congress had allowed the law authorising Sentelle's panel to temporarily lapse.

Fiske was moving to wrap up his inquiries and had already angered some hardline Republicans by ruling that Clinton's friend and aide, Vince Foster, had committed suicide the previous year and had not been murdered, as Clinton-haters such as the radio host Rush Limbaugh and televangelist Jerry Falwell had claimed. Sentelle replaced Fiske, an experienced and respected prosecutor, with Starr, a highly partisan Republican lawyer and former judge who had never prosecuted a single criminal case and, incredibly, had earlier offered to work for free to help Paula Jones sue Clinton for alleged sexual harassment.

Clinton argues persuasively that Starr - "an ultraconservative guy" - should never have been given, or accepted, the job. "He was plainly conflicted - he had already tried to get into the Paula Jones case and he had no business doing it [becoming prosecutor].

"There is a reason he was put in there, to do what he did - at a minimum to take the inquiry beyond the 1996 election. And to do whatever could be done to try to sink our ship and reverse the results of two presidential elections. He can deny that all he wants but it is true. It was just a dragnet, and if I gave you $70 million and told you to go and investigate one of your competitors, you would find somebody who did something wrong.

"But I don't hold him accountable for what he did - he was part of a larger movement and he was just doing what he thought he was hired to do, which is the reason that the other guy was replaced. Fiske was too fast and too fair, even though he was a Republican," Clinton says.

In his book, Clinton accuses the Rehnquist court of stealing the 2000 election by halting vote-counting in Florida for three days when George Bush was ahead in the count, and then ruling by a 5-4 majority to forbid further counting that might have given victory to a11 Gore. Calling it "one of the worst decisions the Supreme Court ever made", Clinton wrote that "five Republican judges stripped thousands of their fellow Americans of their votes, just because they could".

When I suggest that he is clearly no fan of Justice Rehnquist, Clinton goes further: "Yeah, well he knew what he was doing [in appointing Sentelle]. Five former presidents of the American Bar Association, including two Republicans, criticised Starr's appointment in the first place." Clinton, now clearly on a subject that still rankles, goes on to develop his conspiracy theory further, citing historical precedent all the way back to the Nixon White House....

When told about Clinton's comments on Rehnquist, Stephen Hess, an expert on presidential politics at the centre-left Brookings Institution in Washington, says it is "an extraordinary thing for any president or former president to say about a chief justice". "Ex-presidents typically become instant elder statesmen and don't spend their time settling old scores," Hess says. "It clearly shows a real animus, a deep-seated animosity towards the Chief Justice, who is conservative but is generally not considered to be a partisan person in that way."

Neal Katyal, a professor of law at Washington's Georgetown University, agrees it is "strikingly unusual" for a former president to accuse a chief justice of such unethical behaviour. "The problem is that this system of appointing special prosecutors makes the chief justice a political figure and creates terrible temptations for judges, and an opportunity for presidents to blame their problems on the judges."

Hess says one of the most remarkable things about Clinton's comments is his allegation that Rehnquist held racist views. "I think playing the race card like that is disturbing - it is unattractive of Clinton and unfair to Rehnquist."

And yet racism is a crucial part of Clinton's explanation of why his enemies came after him so relentlessly. "Black people all over America knew that the drive to impeach me was being led by riaht-wing white southerners who had never lifted a finger for civil rights," he claims in "My Life".

Author Toni Morrison famously called him "our first black president" because of his relationship with black America, and he has even been inducted to the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame. But racism is still an extraordinary explanation, I suggest, for the hunting of a president who was, to put it bluntly, white.....

For the man who so often persuaded millions of Americans to see things his way, this will be one of the hardest sells of all - convincing people that the hunting of his presidency was not really about his own grubby meetings with a young intern, but about a witch-hunt by an unethical prosecutor, and the deliberate abuse of the highest judicial office in the land.

The above are excerpts from an article that appeared in "The Weekend Australian Magazine" of September 11th, 2004. A letter to the same publication published in its issue of 25th. had the following comment:


I thoroughly enjoyed the juxtaposition of Dr Robert Hare's psychopathic theory with your article on Clinton. Hare suggests a psychopath has "a lack of empathy or guilt, a desire to manipulate, to blame others and to be callous and calculating without necessarily resorting to criminal behaviour". Clinton has shown little empathy with or guilt over the affairs that led to his impeachment. He has consistently manipulated his lovers and the public and now tries to blame his problems on a right-wing conspiracy.

Stephanie Hamilton Ardross, WA


The summary of Hare's theory referred to is also given hereunder:


WORKER BERSERKER

They say you need a bit of "the mongrel" in you if you want to succeed in business, but ruthless corporate climbers be warned: you could be a potential psychopath. That's the conclusion of a world-renowned expert in psychopathy, Dr Robert Hare, of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Based on 20 years of research, he claims that about one per cent of the general population - and 25 per cent of the prison population - has psychopathic tendencies. The psychopath thrives in today's hyper-competitive business world, Hare suggests. No, we're not talking about the types who have more human body parts than chicken wings in their freezer - but those whose traits include a lack of empathy or guilt, a desire to
manipulate and back-stab, to blame and bully others, to be callous and calculating - without necessarily resorting to criminal behaviour. Indeed, this corporate psychopath may be lurking in the next cubicle.

The psychopaths who wind up in prison are merely the "failed" variety, according to Hare, the predators who let their powerful cravings get the better of them because they are either not smart or disciplined enough to control them. All psychopaths - or sociopaths, as they are more euphemistically known these days - share a spectrum of characteristics. Many are highly charismatic, but save their phoney charm for those higher up the food chain or who are useful to them in some way.

Psychopaths brim with the very qualities most of us envy: an untroubled conscience, boundless self-confidence and a propensity to cajole, even if they have the soul of Satan.

Psychopathic behaviour can be identified across all professions, from stockbrokers to heart specialists, according to Hare. But in case you suddenly suspect that you might be working with or for a psychopath, bear in mind it's a recognised medical syndrome - anti-social personality disorder - diagnosed from a long list of different criteria including habitual lying and deceit, and an absolute lack of remorse for decisions that hurt co-workers.

In short, beneath that highly successful facade you have to be a really nasty piece of work to make it as a true workplace psychopath.

posted by JR 4:05 PM