Integrity in Elections; Bush has None
Vice President Dick Cheney and others continue harping on the same question over and over again even though it has already been answered a dozen times by Senators John Edwards and John Kerry. They (the Republicans) keep repeating the question about why the senators voted against funding the war and they continue to try to imply that the senators were voting against funding the troops. Are they really that stupid? How much of that $87 billion will actually go to supporting U.S. military families? How much is really simply lining the pockets of the already bloated contractors for whom the War in Iraq is already a stunning economic victory.
That funding bill, while it did include a few minimal token gestures of support for the U.S. military and their families was almost entirely about making contracting corporations a whole lot more profitable. All non-corrupt politicians were ethically bound to vote against it. That says something about the level of corruption in our government today. Why will neither Cheney nor Bush allow real questions to be asked in their press conferences? I think it is because they fear this question in front of live cameras:
“How much of the $87 billion funding for the War in Iraq was ear-marked for actually supporting the troops in the U.S. military?”
Facts:
1) Senator John Kerry is a real veteran. He actually volunteered to serve in the U.S. Navy at a time when his nation was at war. How must that make President Bush feel? Frankly, I do NOT fault the president for wanting to avoid that war. At the time people may not have known it, but in hindsight we can see that it was an unjust war, with the U.S. government backing the wrong side (a dictatorship against the people of Vietnam), because a few people in power happened to have economic interests in seeing that dictatorship survive.
2) Senator Kerry figured at least some of the fallacy of the Vietnam War out, and decided to use the political process as laid out in our constitition to try to extract his country from that pointless war. This is NOT a change of heart. He was simply continuing to serve his country. He had simply learned that not all those who serve in political office are really serving the people, so he proceeded to work towards getting us out of a bad war.
3) Senator Kerry has spent the better part of a lifetime since then in public service. He, like Bush and Cheney, happened to be in that class of the few wealthy people in America who can chose ways to serve. He decided to do it in public office.
4) His voting record stands for itself. He has always showed compassion to fellow human beings. He, like every other elected representative, has had to make compromises. Nearly every bill is overloaded with riders, provisos, compromises, limits, and sometimes completely unrelated adjustments to the law. Of course there are things that make sense in nearly each bill, and there are also things that you don’t like in each bill. Weighing those priorities is a nasty job, and all of our elected representatives have volunteered to do that for us. It is a fact that they don’t all read all of each bill all the time. So any time someone points out in a political ad that Senator X voted for bill A, or Senator Y voted against bill B; you should ask yourself: “What are the sponsors of this ad not telling me? What other riders were there, that made this particular bill so offensive, or so provacative to the senator?”
5) So far, John Kerry has not been caught in a lie. Wow, that can’t make the man in the oval office comfortable either… Sun Tsu would suggest that the best way to confront truth is to distract from it. So we know that someone in the Bush campaign has read “The Art of War.”
