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7/31/04 Connecting Dots Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic candidate for the Presidency of the United States, relies for his hopes on lies and fabrications and misperceptions fostered in the public by a constant barrage of distortions and falsehoods from the media. There is a public perception, and a constant Democratic allegation, that Bush intentionally misled the American people in the run-up to the war in Iraq. But they cannot point to a single intentionally deceptive statement. The famous "sixteen words" from the 2003 State of the Union Address about Iraqi attempts to obtain nuclear materials in Africa have both been reaffirmed in the recent British report examining their intelligence failures, and Joseph P. Wilson, the man who claimed to have refuted them, has been shown to have had little basis for his claim, and shown also probably to have lied blatantly when he said his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, had not recommended him for the mission. Kerry selects statistics that make the economy seem to be weak. He claims on his web site that "1.8 million jobs have been lost." In the fine print, you read that this means 1.8 million "private sector" jobs. In fact, since February of 2001, there has been a net increase of 4.2 million jobs in the whole economy. The net loss in non-farm employment has been reduced to 900,000 already as of June 2004. There are three months remaining before the election and even that number might be wiped out by then. Whatever losses there have been in the private sector, in manufacturing, in non-farm payrolls have been made up in other places: gains in public employment, services, farming occupations add up to a net creation of 4.2 million jobs. Kerry's claims that the new jobs are low-wage jobs and claims that income is down have both been shown false by FactCheck.org, a non-partisan website funded by the Annenberg Foundation. The claim that Bush's tax cuts have not created jobs (making the common assumption that tax policy does significantly affect job growth) cannot be sustained in face of the fact that, since Dec. 2001, the last month before his first tax cut went into effect, there have been as of June 2004 no net losses in non-farm employment (in other words, we have turned around the trend that was well under weigh by then) and a net gain of 5 million jobs overall. Kerry also touts intelligence failures of the Bush Administration as if the Senate and the Clinton Administration had not also failed to solve systemic problems (some of which they created). There is no basis in the findings of all these investigations that can be used to single out the Bush Administration for criticism, and furthermore, the findings show that after 9/11 Bush took steps to ensure that we didn't make the same mistakes again. Unfortunately, and ironically, it is those steps he took that have been used most frequently to criticize his foreign policy. It is time to set the record straight. The 9/11 commission report makes clear that the President made every effort to get good intelligence on Al Qaeda before 9/11, and that afterward he carefully screened the intelligence he got and focused on what he could identify as real rising threats with which he had to deal. As he has recently pointed out, in dealing with Iraq he followed the advice he would be given by the 9/11 commission in its final report, and for that he has been criticized in the interim. The 9/11 commission report criticizes our intelligence community for failing to pick up on a series of uncorroborated, unconvincing, non-specific reports that, if woven together, might have allowed us to avert the 9/11 atrocities. But if the Bush Administration had started detaining and deporting a group of suspected terrorists on the basis of unconfirmed and uncorroborated rumors and reports, the ACLU and the Democrats would have criticized him for compromising human and constitutional rights (as they have in the case of enemy combatants detained at Guantanamo Bay since 9/11). After 9/11, when evaluating intelligence regarding the connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, as well as evidence of the state of his weapons programs and the stockpiles he demonstrably had in the past, the intelligence community was not as reluctant to "connect the dots" as they were prior to 9/11, which is just what the 9/11 commission has now called for us to do. In other words, if we had assumed on the basis of generic notions about how eager Al Qaeda was to harm us, that any suspicious activity was sufficient to justify some kind of preemptive action, we might have prevented 9/11. And now, by assuming on the basis of the generic notion (which is quite accurate) that the Hussein regime would do anything in its power to harm us, that any suspicious or incriminating information we got about Iraq was similarly actionable, we have prevented that regime from doing us any harm. But the liberals and even some conservatives criticize us for not having been overly cautious, as we were prior to 9/11. So John Kerry and the liberals (and everyone else) have to make up their minds: do you want us to act on intelligence reluctantly, as we did prior to 9/11, or do you want to act preemptively on the basis of the best intelligence we have, like we have with Iraq? The answer is simple: He wants to pretend that Bush was wrong before 9/11 because the intelligence community was too reticent, and that he was wrong after 9/11 because it was too aggressive, so that he can pretend he could do better. Then, if he's elected, it won't really matter what the truth was, and he'll just hold on and hope that whatever happens under his "leadership" doesn't make him look like a greater fool than he pretended his predecessor was. The only trouble is, Kerry has willing allies in the media, who will not question the emerging, and false, conventional wisdom that there were intelligence failures before 9/11, and similar failures afterward, and that all of it should be laid at Bush's feet. He may win with his falsehoods, but only because the media and the popular elites who lionize the lying demagogue, Michael Moore, while demonizing an honest man and an honest administration that is committed to doing the right thing even when it isn't popular, want it to be so. Here's hoping that the truth, which is obvious to anyone who cares to seek it out, wins in the end. Modified: 09/10/2004 |
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