Presidential Race ctd 9

1. Kerry Admits He Lied About His Records:
   a) John Kerry made an interesting admission last night on NBC Nightly News in an interview with Tom Brokaw. Despite having claimed for months that he had released all of his military records, Kerry admitted last night that he'd lied about it (emphasis mine):
   Brokaw: Someone has analyzed the President's military aptitude tests and yours, and concluded that he has a higher IQ than you do.
   Kerry: That's great. More power. I don't know how they've done it, because my record is not public. So I don't know where you're getting that from.
   b) Kerry has responded repeatedly that all of his records have been made available at his website. For instance, here's Kerry on Don Imus on September 15th:
   IMUS: A Freedom of Information Act request by "The Washington Post" regarding your military records produced six pages of information, while a spokesman for the Navy Personnel Command said there were at least 100 pages of information available, but he was not authorized to release them. Why can't we see this stuff?
   KERRY: We've posted my military records that they sent to me, or were posted on my Web site. You can go to my Web site, and all my -- you know, the documents are there.
   IMUS: So is -- everything's available?
   KERRY: To the best of my knowledge. I think some of the medical stuff may still be out there. We're trying to get it.
   c) Kerry was also explicitly unequivocal on "Hardball" last April when discussing Bush's military records, before the Swiftvets began their public campign showing how much Kerry had deceived people about the nature of his service: KERRY: He ought to answer that question.
   MATTHEWS: Why?
   KERRY: Because I‘ve answered the questions. I released all my military records. Mr. Gillespie thought it was important enough to go travel to another state, make a big speech, demand that I release my records. I did. Everything. All of it. Including my officer fitness reports. (captainsquartersblog)
2. Navy Secretary Kerry received other than honorable discharge (polipundit)
3. Kerry's Military Discharge. What's Kerry Hiding? (humaneventsonline)
4. On the dismaying egregiousness of John Kerry: And the liberal Marty Peretz, editor of the liberal New Republic magazine, says this about the egregiously liberal John Kerry: "There seems to be some personal anxiety underlying almost everything Kerry thinks about U.S. foreign policy. He craves the approval of Europeans, as if he were some American 'arriviste' right out of a Henry James novel. (Ross Mackenzie, Townhall)
5. Kerry's serial LIES (Mark Alexander, Townhall)
6. THE PENTAGON BRIEFING: I was only able to catch part of the Pentagon briefing, but the earliest story on it is here. Short version: Major Austin Pearson said a team from the 3rd Infantry Division took about 250 tons of munititions and military material from the Al-Qaqaa munitions base soon after Saddam Hussein's regime fell last year. (kerryspot, nationalreview)
7. IAEA Seals In ABC Report Don't Match Missing Explosives (captainsquartersblog)
8. VITAL CONTEXT IN MISSING EXPLOSIVES STORY (nationalreview)
9. Munitions Issue Dwarfs the Big Picture: There is something truly absurd about focusing on 377 tons of rather ordinary explosives, regardless of what actually happened at al Qaqaa," Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in an assessment yesterday. "The munitions at al Qaqaa were at most around 0.06 percent of the total." (Washington Post)
10. Kerry's Afghan Amnesia: Easy? In 2001, we had nothing there. What had the Clinton administration left in place? No plausible military plan. Virtually no intelligence. No local infrastructure. No neighboring bases. The Afghan Northern Alliance was fractured and weak. And Pakistan was actively supporting the bad guys.
    Within days of Sept. 11, the clueless airhead president that inhabits Michael Moore's films and Tina Brown's dinner parties had done this: forced Pakistan into alliance with us, isolated the Taliban, secured military cooperation from Afghanistan's northern neighbors, and authorized a radical war plan involving just a handful of Americans on the ground, using high technology and local militias to utterly rout the Taliban.
    This is all barely remembered and barely noted. Most amazing of all, John Kerry has managed to transform our Afghan venture into a failure -- a botched operation in which Bush let Osama bin Laden get away because he "outsourced" bin Laden's capture to "warlords" in the battle of Tora Bora.
    Outsourced? The entire Afghan war was outsourced. How does Kerry think we won it? How did Mazar-e Sharif, Kabul and Kandahar fall? Stormed by thousands of American GIs? They fell to the "warlords" we had enlisted, supported and directed. It was their militias that overran the Taliban.
    "Outsourcing" is a demagogue's way of saying "using allies." (Isn't Kerry's Iraq solution to "outsource" the problem to the "allies" and the United Nations?) And in Afghanistan it meant the very best allies: locals who had a far better chance of knowing which cave to storm without getting blown up. (Krauthammer, Washington Post)
11. Saddam's killing fields and death penalty opponents: TNR's Marty Peretz (freedomstruth)
12. Cape Cod Times endorses Bush (capecodonline.com)
13. Germany's largest newspaper Bild endorses Bush (medienkritik.typepad)
14. Donald Rumsfeld writes: No Draft ! (Nationalreview)
15. Victor Davis Hanson: Willpower: In short, the more sophisticated, the more technological, the more hyped and televised war becomes, the more pundits and strategists warn us about "fourth-generational," "asymmetrical," "irregular," and "new dimensional" conflict, the more we simply forget the unchanging requisite of the will to win that trumps all other considerations. John Kerry has no more secret a plan than George Bush — because there is no secret way to pacify Iraq other than to kill the killers, humiliate their cause through defeat, and give the credit of the victory, along with material aid and the promise of autonomous freedom, to moderate Iraqis. Victory on the battlefield — not the mysterious diplomacy of "wise men," or German and French sanction, or Arab League support — alone will allow Iraq an opportunity for humane government. (nationalreview)
16. Kerry - just like hunting Vietcong: In the final days of the campaign, John Kerry is desperately attempting to make the case that he, not President Bush, can better defend the United States in the global war against radical Islam and its terrorist tactics. One of Mr. Kerry's most extraordinary attacks came last weekend in Colorado, where he told a Pueblo audience, "With the same energy... I put into going after the Viet Cong and trying to win for our country, I pledge to you I will hunt down and capture or kill the terrorists before they harm us." (Kudlow, Washington Times)

Other

• Does Arafat have AIDS? (David Frum, Nationalreview)
• NEA Gave Over A Million To Kerry, Faces IRS Audit: The National Education Association has been busy this election cycle, the Washington Times reports. The teachers union has spent over a million dollars in direct support for John Kerry and $2.78 million supporting Democrats overall, prompting the IRS to investigate its tax-exempt status:
  The National Education Association (NEA) pumped more than $1 million into 67 mailings for the Kerry-Edwards presidential ticket and against President Bush in the past four months, Federal Election Commission reports show.
  Twenty-one NEA mailings in behalf of the Kerry campaign, produced by an Arlington firm whose clients include the Democratic Party, went out to hundreds of thousands of public school employees across the country this month at a cost of $468,333. The union paid for all the mailings from its general operating budget, not its political action committee, the reports show.
  Now that presents two problems. First, using the same production firm as the DNC indicates possible collusion (termed "illegal coordination" by McCain-Feingold) in advocacy efforts. Second and more to the point for the IRS, spending the money out of the NEA's general budget instead of its political-action committee violates campaign-finance regulating the influence of corporations and unions, I believe. (captainsquartersblog)
• Leftist cant at CSU-Long Beach: What passes for an appropriate paper topic in Professor Clifton Snider's English 100 course at California State University, Long Beach? Mr. Snider offers his students 56 suggestions on his university Web site (www.csulb.edu/%7Ecsnider/argument.html). Our favorite is No. 52: "What evidence do we have that Bush and his cronies lied to the American people and the world in promoting the war with Iraq?" A close second is No. 41: "George W. Bush's time in the National Guard presents important questions about the character of a man who has sent hundreds of Americans to their deaths in war and killed and maimed untold thousands of others." Discuss. (washington times)