One Curse Down, One To Go October 28, 2004February 27, 2017 I know nothing about baseball, but I know a thing or two about Zeitgeists, and you cannot tell me the Boston Red Sox sweep of the World Series – for the first time since 1918 (not to mention the failure of the Detroit News to endorse a Republican for the first time in 150 years) – doesn’t portend a Kerry win Tuesday. Kerry is going to win, and that’s going to be a good thing for the job market and the stock market, for our place in the world, for the world’s environment, for your health and the health of your loved ones – and these are not small things. (Or easy things. I am not suggesting they will all happen right away; but we will be headed back onto a more positive long-term path.) But the war! The war! Can Democrats lead America in war? Ask the Germans if FDR was a pushover. Ask the Japanese if Truman was weak. Ask the former Soviets if JFK allowed missiles in Cuba. Ask the Vietnamese if LBJ shrank from the fight. (Maybe he should have, but he sure didn’t.) Ask Slobodan Milosovich if Bill Clinton was ineffective in Serbia. So for those of my esteemed readers who think only President Bush can do a good job for us – that the Clinton/Gore years were a trough of despond between the terrific years of Bush 41 and Bush 43 – I say, take heart! John Kerry and the 4,000 people he brings with him to Washington are going to do a good job in challenging times . . . made all the more challenging by some terrible decisions by his predecessor. My knees ache from stepping up onto this soap box so often in recent months. But hang in there – it’s almost over. The fat lady approaches her dressing room door. Meanwhile . . . Bush Stifles Global Warming Evidence, Scientist Alleges By CHUCK SCHOFFNER, AP IOWA CITY, Iowa (Oct. 26) – The Bush administration is trying to stifle scientific evidence of the dangers of global warming in an effort to keep the public uninformed, a NASA scientist said Tuesday night. “In my more than three decades in government, I have never seen anything approaching the degree to which information flow from scientists to the public has been screened and controlled as it is now,” James E. Hansen told a University of Iowa audience. Hansen is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and has twice briefed a task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney on global warming. Hansen said the administration wants to hear only scientific results that “fit predetermined, inflexible positions.” Evidence that would raise concerns about the dangers of climate change is often dismissed as not being of sufficient interest to the public. “This, I believe, is a recipe for environmental disaster.” And the count of newspapers abandoning Bush has now risen to 45, versus just six that have switched from Gore to Bush. The Washington Post notes that the Detroit News has endorsed the Republican candidate in every election since Ulysses S. Grant – but not this year. It notes that the Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s editorial board voted 5-2 to endorse Kerry – but that the owner over-ruled the editors, allowing them only to go so far as to endorse neither candidate. The list of lifelong Republicans – like Dwight Eisenhower’s son John – who are publicly resolving to vote Democrat for the first time in their lives is long. BUT KERRY VOTES WRONG ON SO MANY THINGS! No, by and large he doesn’t. The other side just takes it out of context. (The famous $87 billion may be the best example – as discussed here some weeks ago. Of course he and the other senators who voted nay would quickly have righted the situation had the bill failed. Indeed, he voted for it before he voted against it – the famous line. But the ‘against’ vote was when the Bush folks refused to nick rich Americans slightly for part of the cost, choosing instead to borrow the entire sum from our children. That is what he was voting against. As well he should have.) A more recent example from the Bush ads is dealt short shrift in this dispatch from The Daily Mislead: BUSH MISLEADS ON INTELLIGENCE FUNDING In a new campaign advertisement, President Bush accuses Sen. John Kerry, “after the first terrorist attack on America,” of voting to “slash America’s intelligence operations” with cuts “so deep they would have weakened America’s defenses.”1 The accusations made in the ad are false and misleading. First, the vote in question did not occur, as the ad suggests, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The vote took place in 1994, a year after a truck bomb went off in a parking garage beneath one of the World Trade Center towers.2 For several years prior to 9/11, John Kerry supported increases in intelligence funding.3 Also, Kerry never supported “slashing” the intelligence budget. In 1994, as part of an effort to balance the budget, he supported a provision that would have cut the intelligence budget by $5 billion over five years.4 This amounts to about a 3.7 percent reduction. Moreover, the implication that Kerry’s vote disqualifies him from being in charge of intelligence operations is disingenuous. Porter Goss – who Bush appointed to lead the Central Intelligence Agency – supported far more significant reductions in intelligence resources. In 1995, Goss sponsored a bill that would have cut the staff at the CIA by 20 percent over five years.5 Sources: 1“Bush-Cheney ’04 Launches New Television Advertisement, ‘Wolves’,” GeorgeWBush.com, 10/22/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1275811&l=64657. 2“Would Kerry Throw Us To The Wolves?,” FactCheck.org, 10/23/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1275811&l=64658. 3Ibid., http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1275811&l=64658. 4Ibid., http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1275811&l=64658. 5“Goss Backed ’95 Bill to Slash Intelligence,” Washington Post, 08/24/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1275811&l=64659. Not to say we don’t do some of this. But in the words of James Carville, all the way back in 1992, but just as true today (and quoted here more than once): ‘We say 1+1=3. They say 1+1 = 3,000. The press says, ‘They’re both lying.”