Without Anesthesia... where the evil Dr. Ugly S. Truth dissects PARTISAN deception and media slant the Old School Way.
Saturday, 28 August 2004
It's the character thing, Stupid, er, Ambassador Holbrooke Mood: incredulous Topic: Dumb Ambassador Tricks
Quoted from the Washington Post's op-ed pages:
"Our Second Civil War
By Richard Holbrooke Saturday, August 28, 2004; Page A25
"Americans under 40 can be excused if they think that the presidential campaign went a bit nuts recently. After all, why has campaign coverage been dominated by a war that ended 29 years ago, even as a dozen Americans were dying and more than 130,000 fighting in Iraq?"
It's the character issue, STUPID!
Kerry - lied about other people to build a political career, - he killed civilians to look good for the history books, - and he lied about his country in order to make it possible for Southeast Asian dictators to murder 1.5 million people after the United States left the region. John Kerry was the Khmer Rouge's best friend.
It's our turn to shout, spam USENET, and wave placards with the simple message:
KERRY LIED, PEOPLE DIED! KERRY LIED, PEOPLE DIED!
Kerry's lack of a conscience got a million and a half people killed. More than died in Iraq.
Ambassador Holbrooke, your side of the (gasp!!!) "Second Civil War" is the side that doesn't care about character, integrity, or our country or Kerry would have gotten the same reception George Wallace got when he tried to run Democratic in 1968.
To quote Joseph Welch at the Army-McCarthy hearings, (imagine theatrical vocal flourishes and vacuum tube noise in the background),
"Sir, have - you - no - shame?"
And the answer is, Ambassador Holbrooke, that your party has none at all. The leadership of the national Democratic Party are unprincipled hypocrites who will stop at nothing to put one of their sort into the White House.
Russia and Greece Try and Fail to stop US athletes; Saints Cyril and Methodius Puke Mood: celebratory Now Playing: the National Anthem of the United States of America Topic: Take THAT, you...
Despite two separate attempts on the part of Greek and Russian rooting sections to bring unending shame upon the Olympics, American athletes prevailed (fancy talk for "they kicked some serious ass.")
You'd think the Russians would have taken the hint from Fate, seeing how the Cold War turned out, huh?
"Shawn Crawford led an American sweep of Olympic medals in the 200 metres in Athens, ignoring the jeers of a hostile crowd livid that their local hero was not on the starting line after missing a doping test.
The packed 75,000 crowd at the Olympic Stadium began chanting "Kenteris, Kenteris!" and "Hellas, Hellas!", holding up the start of the race by about five minutes.
Costas Kenteris, Greece's 2000 Olympic champion in the event, withdrew from the Games after missing a drugs test in mysterious circumstances the day before the opening ceremony."
Showing that logic is no longer the Greek national long suit, the Greeks booed three young men who hadn't done a damn thing wrong except be American and NOT disqualify themselves from competing by failing to show for their doping tests, the way the local favorite Kenteris did repeatedly.
Result: we won, they lost. Get used to it, Hellas.
Before that, the Russians (and doubtless some Greeks who stumbled in from the 24/7 Hate America First Ouzo Fest) tried the same stunt at the men's horizontal bar final; thirteen thousand frenzied jerks raised such a fuss over their boy Alexei Nemov of the Russian team that the event's chief official, Adrian Stoica, "emphatically urged" Canadian judge Chris Grabowecky to increase his score of Nemov's performance - and Grabowecky caved in to the request.
After this, the crowd decided to boo and shout while Paul Hamm competed for the men's high bar event - and to Alexei Nemov's eternal credit, he came over at Hamm's request to try to calm the crowd down; the crowd wasn't having any of that "sportsmanship" crap, and the shaken Hamm went home with a Silver.
Fortunately, he still had his Gold in the Men's All-Around Gymnastics, and he and his twin brother Marvin also went home with Silvers from the team all-around.
Now I suppose the "Blame America First" crowd's crack Excuses For People and Countries Who Screw Us Over Laboratory is working overtime to explain how this fits in with the great Olympic Tradition.
Already, we have an early Quisling System report from the Tacoma, WA News-Tribune's Scott McGrath "Poor Paul Hamm - he had a shot at immortality"on how Paul Hamm "blew it" for not handing his Gold over to the South Korean Yang Tae-young who may or may not have deserved it after a scoring table mistake - one which the South Korean's coaches failed to appeal in time to change the award decision.
Experts looking at the video tape have seen both unawarded points and previously unremarked errors in Yang's performance. Unfortunately, this helps neither Paul Hamm nor Yang Tae-young; Hamm has since been asked to decide whether or not he deserves one of his life-long goals - a decision NOT in his job description as Olympic athlete, while Yang will always wonder whether his performance in 2004 would have gotten him a Gold if his coaches and the judges had been paying attention.
Bruno Grande of the FIG gymnastics regulatory body (any European can tell you why that particular acronym is so appropriate this year - their version of "unintentional truth") basically wimped out of any organizational claim to integrity by saying - in spoken words, and everything - that they weren't going to decide to award the Gold to the South Korean even though their assessment of the situation showed he'd earned the medal - then for the hard part, pantomimed - I wish I were kidding, but the man pantomimed an official communication - the act of removing the medal from around his neck and said that this is what Hamm should have done.
So the Blame America Firsters are saying it's Paul Hamm's fault that no one, not one person responsible for deciding who earned the Gold Medal in the Men's All Around Gymnastics Event this year had the necessary integrity to do anything but draw a fat paycheck. ___
It's a real "Oops" for the Blame America Firsters that the Greeks, who have been being built up as noble successors to the Athenians of old and the other Hellenic idealists who gave us the Olympics by the world and US press, turned out to be among the least well-behaved national delegations at the Olympics.
And the call that Russia was finally going to be ready to play in the big leagues, sportsmanship-wise, well, that was probably wrong, too. The Russian fans definitely did not deserve their country's athletes - who, by contrast, are uniformly a class act both in performance and sportsmanship.
This isn't a chauvinistic slap at the Greeks and Russians as Greeks and Russians.
The Greeks are supposed to have given us democracy, although I think the Swiss/Helvetii's Neanderthal forebears may have given it to us much earlier, based on the anthropological and historical evidence. Then again, my wife and kids say that even stronger evidence - including a striking visual similarity to that poor fellow they dug out of the Tyrolean Alps in the early 1990s - indicates that I, myself, am a Neanderthal, and I have never been a Democrat.
There are a whole lot of other things the Greeks gave us, such as ill-conceived, generations-long wars of conquest (I'm thinking Athens-Syracuse and Sparta-Everyone Else In The Neighborhood) that I'm not going to talk about.
And doubtless the bleachers got a little raucous when (say) Delos gave Athens a good shellacking in the discus, but the number of writers who have described the original Olympics as being a more-or-less sportsmanlike business over a span of centuries leaves little room for doubt that what we've seen in this Olympics is an aberration.
Now, the Russians don't have the direct historical connection to the Olympic tradition that the Greeks do, but they owe their very alphabet and the precursor to their language to a couple of Orthodox monks named Cyril and Methodius. Methodius was apparently standing behind the door when the alphabet for half of Eastern Europe's modern languages was named, as we now call it the "Cyrillic" alphabet. But they were both canonized as saints, so I suppose the important bases were touched.
We don't know how Saints Cyril and Methodius felt about what would, to them, have been the ancient Greek Olympics. Perhaps they, using the wonderfully contracting lens of hindsight, lumped it in with the Paganism and other horrible things the ancient Greeks did before Christ, His Disciples, and Roman Imperial converts - on each side of the Empire - became available to explain matters to the rest of central Europe.
But in Heaven, I'm sure that they are doing the saintly equivalent of puking when they consider what their compatriots and/or cultural beneficiaries are doing in Athens, at the Olympic Center right now.
If the dearly departed were eligible to represent their countries in the Olympics this year, Greece would at least have taken Gold and Silver in the 1000-meter Horizontal Hurl.
Can we please get Jimmy Carter to p-off the Russians again so they boycott the next Olympics? Maybe foment another Amur River border crisis in 2008? I know old James Earl's got yet another foreign policy fiasco in him before he dies... the way he helped us get taken to the cleaners by the North Koreans in the 1990s was prime, disastrous Carter magic.
"Critics have rebutted O'Neill and Corsi's accusations and charged that the campaign surrounding the book is orchestrated by President Bush's people. They dismiss O'Neill as a Republican stooge, citing his donations to GOP candidates and his law firm's ties to Republicans.
But Gerry Birnberg, chairman of the Harris County Democratic Committee in Houston, has known O'Neill more than 20 years, and while he believes O'Neill is wrong about Kerry, he does not see a Republican plot. O'Neill simply "has intense personal antipathy" for Kerry, he says.
Things Kerry did and said in 1971 "stick in John's craw," he says.
Both Kerry and O'Neill were decorated in Vietnam - the Navy says O'Neill received three Bronze Stars - and both commanded swiftboat No. 94 at different times.
But Kerry is a product of Yale; O'Neill, of the U.S. Naval Academy, where his father (a retired rear admiral), two brothers and 15 other relatives had graduated. Kerry spent 10 months in Vietnam, including six on a frigate offshore; O'Neill was there for 18.
Returning from Vietnam, Kerry got an early discharge to run for Congress and joined the anti-war movement. O'Neill came back to work for the Naval Reserve Officers' Training Corps at the College of Holy Cross.
Hospitalized for an injury exacerbated in Vietnam, O'Neill watched Kerry tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the war was foolhardy and recount stories by other veterans about how they had "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads."
O'Neill believed in the war effort, thought immediate withdrawal would abandon prisoners of war and was outraged by Kerry's war crime reports.
When the Foreign Relations Committee didn't respond to his offer to rebut Kerry (blogger note: my emphasis), he contacted Bruce Kesler, an ex-Marine who had written a New York Times op-ed piece supporting the war.
Kesler invited him to a Washington news conference for the new Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace.
He was "a young guy like ourselves, very sweet and straight, a Midwestern sort of guy ... ," Kesler recalls. "He had one suit, which was going out of style even then, a blue-and-white seersucker. And he wore white socks."
That day, O'Neill gave a speech that drew notice from the Nixon administration, alarmed by Kerry's increasing star power.
Kerry "was very articulate, a credible leader of the opposition. He forced us to create a counterfoil," Nixon aide Chuck Colson once said, reported Joe Klein in The New Yorker. "We found a vet named John O'Neill and formed a group called Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. We had O'Neill meet the president, and we did everything we could do to boost his group."
Kesler and O'Neill deny the White House instigated their effort. Kesler says Nixon might have exploited his group but didn't create or fund it.
O'Neill visited Nixon for an hour. He remembers they talked of Vietnam, Kerry and politics. He also recalls Nixon's awkward pause when O'Neill said he supported Hubert Humphrey in 1968.
Tapes show he told Nixon that he had been in Cambodia with his swiftboat - though he has since denied it, and has called Kerry's claims of being in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968 "complete lies."
Two weeks after meeting Nixon, O'Neill debated Kerry on "The Dick Cavett Show."
"You obviously are quite good on the polished rhetoric, but I did serve in the same place you did ... and I never saw anything," O'Neill said, "and I would like you to tell me about the war crimes you saw committed there, and also why you didn't do something about them."
Kerry insisted there were violations of the Geneva Conventions and said O'Neill's group should be named "Vietnam Veterans for a Continued War."
After a speaking tour and appearance at the 1972 Republican National Convention, O'Neill entered the University of Texas law school, graduated first in his class and clerked for Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist. He married, had two kids and practiced law, often pressing security fraud cases against brokerages.
He describes his political involvement as minimal. He says he voted for Al Gore in 2000, has given $7,000 to Republicans in recent years but also $20,000 to Democratic candidates for Houston mayor and councilman.
But at age 58, he joined the effort to derail the candidacy of the man he debated at age 25. Others in what became Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had been researching Kerry's record since January; O'Neill and Corsi wrote their book in May and June.
Rolled out with hard-hitting television spots, the book has 650,000 copies in print.
For the second time, O'Neill is being pilloried as a puppet of a Republican president. He is again in a debate involving Vietnam, a war that ended in 1975 and yet may never end.
"I hope that's not true," he says. "I hope we can all forget about it." _______
But not, Mr. O'Neill, until we settle John Kerry's nasty hash once and for all (politically speaking - I hope that one day he retires to France or some other country, and has all the nuance, socialisme et fromage he can choke down).
We don't need Kerry's sort in the White House, because as a Cajun I can say with no fear of contradiction that Hanoi John is also plein de merde.
Thanks for standing up and doing the right thing, especially knowing that the band of hypocrites whose baton the Democratic Party waves will bend every effort to smear your reputation.
When John Kerry Snivels, People Listen.... Mood: irritated Topic: CBS is 2/3 BS Poor, poor John Kerry
Poor, poor John Kerry.
He killed people or made "mistakes of war" (the Uniform Code of
Military Justice has another term - "Improper Hazarding," and allows the death penalty for it if it was wilfully done, maybe to help build a reputation for ferocity in battle....) that killed
people in Vietnam.
Then, Kerry decided to start his political career by collecting stories of
people like him after HIS war ended, and told the Senate (under oath, mind you)
that EVERY American soldier did the things he said he and his buddies at the
"Winter Soldier Investigation" did.
?
He flew to France just before the Paris Peace Talks to meet with
the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong (see photo - left, where else - to see John
Forbes Kerry posing in front of the flag he served then).
Now some of the people Kerry lied about want to kick him a new ass -
politically speaking, I'm sure, so please, Secret Service, don't arrest
them.? They're just thinking what just
under half of the country is.
?
Among Kerry's original "Band of Brothers," others actually liked
him, traveling across the country to help Kerry win election to the Senate.
Perhaps it occurred to those men who are now campaigning against
Kerry - "Holy crap! If this guy actually gets elected President, he
may just wind up lying about the guys we have over there now and the ones we're
sending over this Fall - the way he lied about us before the
Senate!"
The commute to Capitol Hill would sure be shorter this time, wouldn't it?
But President Kerry wouldn't even have to make that trip - Lou Dobbs,
Molly Ivins, Dan Rather, Bill Moyers, Maureen Dowd, the Peters (Arnett and
Jennings), Chris Matthews, and all the other Spin Doctors of Sauron would
flock to the White House to hear their Lord and Master tell the world how he
was pulling US forces out of the Middle East because "they were sacrificing their lives for a big nothing," or perhaps because they had done Bad Things (like the stuff Kerry said he had done in Vietnam) to the Iraqi people while trying to impose democracy - an alien concept much inferior to what they had under Saddam Hussein, according to the Molly Ivinses of the world - on them.
Then, with a roar of hooves striking tile and concrete, the Ringwraiths of the
Working Press would scuttle back to their keyboards or a-waiting news cameras to tell us all the Truth from Him Whose Past they covered up during the
2004 election, and at Whose feet they continue to grovel.
How does this letter to the editor selection stuff work? Mood: not sure Topic: the Denver media and me
The editor of the weekend op-ed section at the The Denver Post, "Open Forum," asked readers for "your thoughts on Medicaid and other health-cost issues" after running not one, but two columns on the front page of his section in the Sunday Post on why Colorado Medicaid doesn't pick up the tab for dental care and chiropractic treatments among other services which are on the Medicaid menu in other states, but not here.
At ten-ish this morning, I got a call from a nice young lady from the Post asking whether I wanted my letter to run in their newspaper. I missed being able to take the call in person owing to acute, very late-stage post-prandial indisposition, but have it on voice mail. I can't say this enough, she was as nice as she could be.
Then, I got the following Email from the editor of the weekend op-ed section of The Denver Post at 4:43 pm (all times I used are US/Canadian Mountain Time, GMT-07:00) this afternoon:
"Thanks for this submission. It's not something we can use at this time, but we appreciate your thinking of The Post.
Todd Editor Assistant Editorial Page Editor, The Denver Post teditor@denverpost.com (303) 820-1650 1560 Broadway, Denver, Colorado 80202
-----Original Message----- From: Vance P. Frickey [mailto:vfrickey@omitted on this blog because I'm not a moron.com] Sent: Sunday, August 22, 2004 3:54 PM To: openforum@denverpost.com Subject: Colorado Medicaid and why we can't fund it all...
Mr. Todd Editor, Perpsectives Editor The Denver Post
Dear Editor:
The cost of medical care is out of control in Colorado and everywhere else in the US because we don't have medical tort reform - but we do have a healthy, multi-billion dollar national industry of suing doctors, hospitals and drug companies.
This reduces both the effectiveness of Medicaid funding in Colorado and its availability. Every dollar diverted from provision of medical care to the pockets of trial lawyers contracts the economy, prolonging the recession and reducing tax revenues.
Two of the reasons why Colorado can't afford to fund Medicaid as completely as other states are the same reasons Senator John Edwards and other trial lawyers practice here in the US and not in Canada:
First, Canada has the sort of medical tort reform that John Kerry, John Edwards, and other Democrats in the United States Senate oppose. Trial lawyers liked the Democratic Party so much, they bought it.
Second, filing nuisance lawsuits in Canada is a losing game, financially. In Canada, when someone brings such a lawsuit and loses, they pay their opponents' reasonable legal costs and their own.
Vance P. Frickey, Denver
(Please do not publish my street address or telephone number, as the Democratic Party has FAR too many activists who are unfortunately prone to personal violence and harassment against their opponents, and we'd prefer not to lose another house cat.)
home address: (omitted on this blog because I'm not a moron)
day/evening time phone number: (omitted on this blog because, etc, etc)
Before editing this letter for ANY reason, please advise me of intended changes by Email to vfrickey@(omitted on this blog.com)."
Now, I went all the way to comply with the requirements set forth on the second page of the weekend op-ed section for people who want to state their opinion.
I gave my home address and phone number to people I don't know from Adam, and on whose favored Presidential and vice-Presidential candidate I may have just placed partial blame for the rape of our medical health industry by Kerry and Edwards' major Senatorial clients... but I wanted my say on the topic.
My word processor tells me that there were fewer than 200 words in the piece between "Dear Editor" and "Vance P. Frickey, Denver," inclusive, as specified in the editor's instructions.
I did ask the editor to inform me beforehand if he intended to edit my letter for "length, grammar or inaccuracy. ____
I want to be very careful here. I don't know the editor of the "Perspective" section of the Denver Post from Adam's cat. I have no idea whatsoever of his political leanings, personal beliefs, or professional standing, nor any interest in them apart from whether they affect the views allowed to be presented in Denver's largest newspaper.
But I think we should look at what's on last Sunday's "Perspectives" section, just on the off chance that we can learn something about how the process of selecting letters to the editor works at the Denver Post....
Last Sunday's "Perspectives" topic was "The Race for the United States Senate: Pete Coors vs. Ken Salazar"
The letters which made the cut (quoted in their entirety, the authors' names omitted):
Letter #1
"Republican Senate candidate Pete Coors says we should we should elect him to the U.S. Senate because the Senate has too many lawyers and he's businessman, not a lawyer.
"Actually, the Senate has too many white, male millionaires who know next to nothing about how most Americans really live.
"Besides, we already have a white, male businessman who knows next to nothing as president. For crying out loud, why would we want to compound our error by sending another such character to Washington?"
letter #2
"Re: 'Abortion coverage finding spotlight, Aug. 18 business news story'.
"Pete Coors compares face jobs and breast implants with abortion. It is no wonder he is opposed to abortion if he has no better understanding than that. Who is going to raise those kids, Pete? Are you going to guarantee them the basics required to have a reasonably healthy, happy life? When calling abortion a "voluntary medical procedure," one should first think of the alternative, that is, the risk of raising an unhealthy child because there aren't enough resources for his or her needs. I call that a necessary medical procedure. It is a rare woman who is faced with a pregnancy and does not think about all those things before deciding what must be done."
letter #3
"Re:'Hopefuls sidestep religion,' and 'Bishops plant seeds on the political field,' Aug. 16 news stories.
"Your articles were interesting, but incomplete. The Senate candidates and the bishops also need to address the issues of U.S. policy regarding transubstantiation, the assumption of the Virgin, and the infallibility of the Pope.
"We don't want any surprises after the election, so let's get this all out in the open now!"
letter #4
"Bob Schaeffer campaigned for the Republican Senate nomination with the full backing of the Christian conservatives and repeatedly referenced his faith in God. However, after the primary election, Pete Coors thanked God a few times for his victory over Schaeffer, so apparently God was really on his side, although she may not have tipped her hand to Schaeffer. Finally, in an interview with the Denver Post, Ken Salazar states that the November election is 'in God's hands.' How is one God going to select so many candidates clamoring for her support?"
Is it just me, or is there a theme, a sameness among the letters (apart from the fact that they were all in the 80 to 130-word range)? Perhaps a slight clustering of the political data points leftward?
Or am I just suffering from sour grapes at not being invited to clutter up the "Perspectives" section of the Denver Post with what appears to be a missing reader perspective?
I mean, if this were Boulder and not metropolitan Denver (I live in Diana DeGetteville, myself), I'd buy last Sunday's spectrum of opinions as representative of the community's views.
But somehow I don't think the "let's kill unborn babies because they might grow up poor" letter is representative of how most Denverites think. Neither is all the smarting-off in which two of the lucky selectees for publication indulged about a God in Whom I and most of my neighbors believe in strongly.
I think all the people whose letters Todd Editor chose for publication deserve to be heard, just as much as the rest of us in Denver. But these people sound as though they all hang out at the same Starbucks, which means we readers of the Denver Post are getting not "Perspectives," but one "Perspective" - two, tops.
If these letter writers' perspectives are an accurate reflection of how people in this town think, Denver would be a much different town than the one my friends, my wife and I see every day.
Maybe the Denver Post is trying to gain street cred among big-city daily newspapers by running a weekend science fiction feature in its op-ed section - to complement Molly Ivins' fantasy column.
Lately, Molly Ivins seems to be writing about some parallel universe in which Kerry hadn't tried to parlay his war record into support among veterans, only to make them remember that he called them rapists and murderers back in his Viet-Cong flag-loving, working for the North Vietnamese as a Congressional lobbyist and giving them crucial pointers during the Paris Peace Talks days. Here's a tip, Molly - get a BIG advance if you want to slap hard covers around your collected Ravings for Kerry.
Now what about CBS, Michael Moore and Moveon.org? Mood: incredulous Topic: Kerry's Lies and Spin Now what about CBS, Michael Moore and Moveon
I can't believe that the Bush campaign caved to John Kerry on the Swift Boat ads issue.
The Swift Boat Veterans for Justice's John O'Neill deserves every bit as much freedom of speech as Kerry's Paul O'Neill, but John Forbes Kerry believes in freedom of speech only for those who agree with him - and according to recent polls, most Americans are or will soon be on John Kerry's s-list (I am, of course, alluding to the Sullan Proscriptions, for those who were preparing to be offended).
What a splendid Presidential candidate the Democrats have found - John Forbes Kerry doesn't even respect the Bill of Rights!
Kerry's disregard for the Constitutional rights of others is not surprising. Consider who Kerry worked for after leaving the Navy - Kerry was unstinting in his labor for the Viet Cong and North Vietnam, and I think sometimes Kerry yearns for Ho Chi Minh's and Pol Pot's ability to silence people who said bad things about them.
By contrast, the President did not demand the silence of the former Treasury Secretary and confirmed thief of classified documents Paul O'Neill who, along with Richard Clarke and Joe Wilson - Kerry's other Political Hacks for Injustice - was a huckster for the Democratic Party on CBS's 60 Minutes - an alleged "television news magazine" which has been more of a political windshield flyer for the Democrats this last few years.
No whack-o conspiracy theories about Kerry, no "he knows all about it,
they're doing his dirty work for him" whining from George W. Bush
regarding the "60 Minutes Book Plug of the Week Club" Liars
for Kerry.
No, it takes a cynical, lying mountebank like John Kerry to talk about a
shadowy conspiracy on the President's part when Kerry himself has all that soft money from his boss John Edwards, and Edwards' bosses the personal-injury lawsuit industry, more soft money from the weird Bush-hating cult Moveon.org and even more soft money from the Bush-hating Hungarian multi-millionaire George Soros.
Soros, between destabilizing the British economy by currency manipulation and propping up dictators in former Soviet republics, has sworn to defeat George Bush. Soros runs a close second to Kim Jong-Il as the real-life inspiration for "Dr. Evil" in the Austin Powers movies.
And through the magic of unrestricted soft funds, John Forbes Kerry, the supposed great patriot, is now George Soros'
bought-and-paid-for "Mr. Biggles," just as Kerry was the Viet Cong's, Pathet Lao's, Khmer Rouge's and North Vietnam's hand-puppet throughout the early 1970s.
John Kerry has worked harder for shadowy foreigners who kill their political dissidents than he has for other Americans all his life - even while taking a salary as a United States Senator, he was a reliable anchorman for Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista leftist terror regime of the 1980s.
Why haven't the usually super-inquisitive investigative journalists of the big television networks and major-market, high-circulation daily newspapers (the New York Times and Los Angeles Times) looked into John Forbes Kerry's career as an apologist and lobbyist for Stalinists whose idea of political discourse is small-arms fire directed into the backs of their opponents' heads?
Is it even remotely possible that if it had been Bush and not Kerry in that situation that this story would have gone unreported?
Given
- Senator Kerry's lifelong affection for murdering totalitarian scum, and
- Kerry having been talent-scouted by George Soros as one more dirtbag Soros can manipulate,
I ask again - why does any American want John Kerry, lifelong admirer of and apologist for murdering dictators, as President?
I don't see the value in caving in to John Kerry on anything,
especially something as potentially damaging to Kerry as his Swift Boat record - and which Kerry could neutralize simply by unsealing his Navy records - something he has repeatedly declined to do. If the Swifties are wrong about Kerry, wouldn't the records resolve that issue.
If people want to circulate snapshots of John Kerry on his Swift Boat in
flagrante delicto with a Border Collie, the Bush campaign should fold
their arms and chuckle the way Kerry and his people giggle when Michael Moore
emits one of his episodes of cinematic flatus about the President.
We who oppose the election of John Kerry as President should try to give new
depth and meaning to the term schadenfreude when someone else tees off
on John Kerry. When the would-be Whiner of the Free World asks us to intervene
with people who want to tar and feather him on the Evening News, our response
should be "We got your nuance right here, Hanoi John."
George Bush, who doesn't ask the (as Al Franken calls them) Lying Liars who Lie
about him on Kerry's behalf to shut up, has NO business providing damage
control - even half-half hearted damning with faint, almost undetectable praise
for Kerry's rapidly disintegrating reputation for bravery in Vietnam, after the
Swift Boat Veterans for Justice put a hole under Kerry's water line.
Kerry and the Democrats probably can't actually prove Paul O'Neill and the Swift Boat Veterans for Justice wrong. If they could, wouldn't we be seeing any such proof (such as Kerry's Naval records) for three solid months on the CBS Evening News and Bill Moyers' NOW? So far, all we're seeing is Dan Rather ripping his eyebrow tendons while emoting on John Kerry's behalf about those horrible men who served with John Kerry in Vietnam.
No, more likely, Kerry's war record doesn't line up with the way it really happened, so Kerry accuses the President of exactly the sort of "dirty work" Democrats and their allies in the media have been pulling on Bush since before 2000!This, of course, is hypocrisy on the part of the national leftist press - and thus, I suppose, not news.
60 Minutes, part (along with Dan Rather) of the BS in CBS, lies for Kerry again! Mood: irritated Topic: CBS is 2/3 BS In another example of what Winston Churchill called being "economical
with the truth," 60 Minutes' Morley Safer and his bosses
In another example of what Winston Churchill called being
"economical with the truth," 60 Minutes' Morley Safer and his bosses at CBS
News launched another broadside of lies against the Bush Administration, this
time in favor of bootlegging drugs in from overseas.
?
Of course, they didn't call it that; nor did Morley Safer or
his tame interviewees get into why prescription medications are so
expensive here in the US and cheap just next door in Canada. ?
?
While leading with the factoid that the US is alone among
major nations in not having government-controlled drug prices, 60 Minutes
did NOT say that the US is also alone or nearly so among major nations in not limiting
the amount of money a clever lawyer can bilk out of a personal injury or
medical malpractice lawsuit - a much more objectionable form of profiteering, because
it drives every American's medical bills sky-high.?
?
That might have steered a little unwelcome light toward
Senators John Kerry and John Edwards, the Democratic Party's candidates for
President and Vice-President of the United States this year, and regular
prot?g?s of CBS News.? CBS wants these
men to get elected, and has covered up and distorted and lied to make that
happen.? John Kerry and John Edwards don't
care if we pay too much for medical care in this country, because it makes
their friends the trial lawyers of America rich when that happens.? CBS doesn't care about us, either, or they
would have done a 60 Minutes special on that, instead.
?
When Morley Safer told us that the drug manufacturers had
given (gasp!) $45 million out in political contributions since 1989,
I wish my wife had had a camera handy, because I did a spit-take. ?In the world that Senator John Edwards
moves around in, $45 million over fifteen years - three million dollars a year
- is chump change. ??Morley Safer didn't tell us that, perhaps in
the interest of his own job security.
?
As we'll see a little later on, just in the
2003-2004 Presidential primaries, the other trial lawyers of America gave
almost five million dollars to Senator John Edwards in hopes of
getting one of their own into the White House - and to keep it easy to milk
billions of dollars every year out of the health industry in this country in excessive
personal injury lawsuits, pushing drug prices and other health care costs
through the roof and making them unaffordable to many Americans.
?
To paraphrase the Democrats' latest evening news-time attack
ad, John Kerry and John Edwards DO know that health-care premiums have
increased four times as much as wages in this country - they made that happen
by fighting medical tort reform in the Senate, making sure most Americans won't
get a fair shake on health care costs. ?
?
It's too important to Kerry and Edwards to keep a large part
of most Americans' health-care expenses flowing into the pockets of the trial lawyers
of America. ??But that's another story
you won't see from the hypocrites at 60 Minutes.? Kerry and Edwards don't care about the poor
people of America or Americans with severe health problems, and neither does
CBS News.
?
CBS head Leslie Moonves and Fortunate Son, er, Senator John
Kerry have their limousines, after all, and all the personal power to which most
people could aspire. ??Leslie Moonves or
John Kerry won't go broke over medical bills, and unlike us, they don't have
to decide between making a health insurance co-pay or paying some other
bill.? The greed of trial lawyers and
the protection they enjoy from Democratic Senators like Kerry and Edwards just
doesn't reach up to hurt the Moonveses, Kerrys and Edwardses of the world.
?
Even if he wanted to report on that story, Morley
Safer couldn't, because he'd be fired immediately.? His employer CBS News is fully committed to slanting the news
until it's vertical and facing left - if that's what it will take to get the
Democrats back in the White House this year. Actual reporting on the news has
been sidelined at CBS in favor of pushing out vicious political propaganda.
Even the thin veneer of journalistic ethics has been ripped away fron the
operations of CBS News now.
?
Quoting from the informational website triallawyersinc.com's
"THE BEST FRIENDS MONEY CAN BUY - Trial Lawyers, Inc. floods the political
process with cash":
?
?"The Association of
Trial Lawyers of America - the "home office" of Trial Lawyers Inc - routinely
ranks among the top five PACs in federal campaign donations, leaning strongly
to Democrats. In 2002, ATLA was the third most generous PAC, contributing $2.8
million; 89% of that money went to Democrats, making ATLA the largest PAC
contributor to the Democratic party.
?
ATLA's PAC contributions are merely the tip of the iceberg
when it comes to Trial Lawyers, Inc.'s political influence. Through individual
and soft money contributions, as well as PAC donations, the lawsuit industry
has surpassed all others in political giving in every electoral cycle since
1990.
?
Several leaders of Trial Lawyers, Inc. are regulars on
top-donor lists: in the 2002 electoral cycle, members of Williams & Bailey,
one of the largest personal-injury firms in Texas, gave $2.4 million to federal
campaigns; securities class action giant Milberg Weiss gave $1.4 million; Baron
& Budd, headed by former ATLA president and asbestos class action lawyer
Fred Baron, accounted for $1.1 million; and prominent asbestos and tobacco
litigator Peter Angelos's firm gave $1.9 million. Each of these firms' members
gave at least 99% of their contributions to Democrats."
?
"All told, the litigation industry has contributed $470
million to federal campaigns since 1990." (my emphasis.? Also note, the original article, complete
with footnoted references to documents supporting each statement and amount of
political contributions to the Democratic Party, can be read at http://www.triallawyersinc.com/html/part10.html#notes):
?
You can see why I was startled at Morley Safer's horrible
revelation - I was stunned that the drug industry was giving so little
to political campaigns when it had so much at stake - such as ensuring that the
same Federal Law is actually enforced that CBS News advocates we break in its
partisan, slanted coverage of the pharmaceutical industry.
?
The real question is whether what the website I quoted calls
"Trial Lawyers, Inc," having cut itself in for a huge piece of the
pharmaceutical and medical industries revenue stream by its pursuit of high,
unrestricted malpractice and drug company liability awards, can now use its
mammoth influence over Congress - and if Kerry/Edwards win, the White House -
to bankrupt medicine and the pharmaceutical industry in this country.?
?
It's not Kerry and Edwards' problem if our health system
GOES BROKE - Kerry and Edwards will be able to go to Bethesda or Walter Reed
Medical Centers regardless, because they're SENATORS.
?
Over the border in Canada, the drug companies don't have to
worry about a billion-dollar litigation industry, because under Canadian law,
Trial Lawyers, Inc. wouldn't make out so well. In Canada, medical malpractice
awards are capped and nuisance lawsuits penalized strongly by what our lawyers
call the "British rules" system in which someone who brings a lawsuit which has
no merit (like the majority of the lawsuits solicited by those annoying
television ads) must pay not only his share of the court costs but his
opponents' share as well. Over the border, John Edwards would still be both
poor (or at least not rich) and honest.
Epitomizing Trial Lawyers, Inc.'s drive for political
influence is the career of U.S. Senator John Edwards (D-NC), a former personal-injury
lawyer. Campaigning for the Senate in 1998, Edwards received more than half his
total outside contributions from his friends in the lawsuit industry. Edwards
has in turn enthusiastically supported key provisions backed by Trial Lawyers,
Inc., including helping to defeat proposed limitations on personal-injury
lawsuits in the event of a terrorist attack and seeking to make it easier to
sue health maintenance organizations.
?
Although Edwards's 2004 presidential run seems thus far to
be floundering, his campaign certainly opened eyes to the political power of
Trial Lawyers, Inc.: by the end of the first quarter of 2003, Edwards topped
all 2004 Democratic presidential hopefuls in fund-raising--with almost
two-thirds of the $7.4 million he had raised coming from trial lawyers, their
families, and their staffs. As noted by the Wall Street Journal, "even
political professionals seem[ed] stunned by the degree to which his candidacy
ha[d] become a wholly owned financial subsidiary of the national tort bar."
?
That was the Wall Street Journal calling Edwards'
failed Presidential bid "a wholly owned financial subsidiary of the national
tort bar," not me.
?
But you have to wonder why John "It's My World, You're Just
the Taxpayer" Kerry chose such a strong former contender as his running mate -
unless this was a matter of getting those same contributions for his own
campaign. John Forbes Kerry may be the latest corporate acquisition of Trial
Lawyers, Inc.; his White House their most valuable wholly-owned subsidiary.
?
All the drug companies want is to be able to pass on the
incredible cost of selling medicine in this country thanks to the Democratic
candidate for Vice President of the United States and his errand-boy John
Kerry.
?
And for that, this Sunday night they were attacked again by
CBS News and its usual cast of not-quite-authoritiative authorities - a former
editor of The New England Journal of Medicine with a new book to plug (60
Minutes and Oprah Winfrey need to talk about combining their product lines);
an Indiana Congressman - a decent man in whose district I once lived, as it
turns out - who has trouble understanding why the Federal Government would do
such a darn fool thing as enforce Federal law - as it is required to do until
Congress changes the law - and why the drug companies need to get the money
back looted from them by the Johns (Kerry and Edwards) and Trial Lawyers, Inc.
?
Fortunately, the Olympics were on at the same time, so
relief was a channel-surf away.
The Democratic Party's Medical Specialty, and How It Keeps People From Being Able To Afford Medical Care. Mood: incredulous
(More things Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Mara Liaison, Bill Moyers, Eleanor Clift and Lou Dobbs are Too Unprofessional to Tell You - Assuming that their Profession IS Journalism and Not a Much Older One.... )
Most of my adult life, I've worked in various facets of the health industry, from providing security and enforcing the law in publicly-owned hospitals that catered to poor people (as a commissioned police officer), to maintaining, testing and repairing medical equipment, to editing medical journal articles and presenting scientific poster presentations at medical conventions, to writing software to determine the safety and effectiveness of new drugs for the pharmaceutical industry here in the United States and overseas.
My education included three years of biomedical engineering at Louisiana Tech and several years' extensive informal occupational exposure to why medical devices, medicines and medical care cost so much.
It was after several years of the informal stage of my medical education, such as it is, that I discovered the hidden medical specialty which increases the cost of medical care at almost every turn for the average American - the absence of medical tort reform and the multi-billion dollar business of suing doctors, hospitals and drug companies.
Every medication you take, every medical device - from the stick-on bandages in your medicine cabinet to the CT scanner in your local hospital, and every second of medical care you receive has a hidden but massive added cost - in some cases, a cost higher than either the cost of providing the medical service or the profit involved to the provider - the cost of malpractice insurance. Sometimes you're paying trial lawyers more than you're paying your doctor, your hospital, or your pharmacist.
The big newspapers, the evening television news programs and Democratic Party attack ads which pay for the evening television news programs lately (journalistic ethics - WHAT journalistic ethics?) won't tell you this, so I have to - the reason every new prescription medicine costs so very much less in Canada than here in the United States is the same reason vice-Presidential candidate Senator John Edwards practices law here in the US and not in Canada.
First of all, Canada has had exactly the sort of medical tort reform that John Kerry, John Edwards, and their Democratic Party colleagues in the United States Senate have kept us from having for years.
Recent Democratic television attack ads - the ones that have dumpy, average Joe-looking Americans griping about how George W. Bush doesn't seem to know about how ordinary Americans can't afford health care - don't mention the fact that trial lawyers like Senator John Edwards DO know that ordinary Americans can't afford health care, because THEIR multi-million dollar personal fortunes depend on it.
Every time you co-pay fifty or a hundred dollars to see a obstetrician/gynecologist or your cancer specialist, Senator and Kerry's running mate John Edwards and his buddies get a cut of that through very, very high malpractice insurance premiums that just never stop escalating.
Be sure to thank the national Democratic Party, the sock puppet through which medical malpractice trial lawyers speak, if the high-risk medical specialty YOU need isn't available where you live.
Second, John Edwards would not have been able to make millions of dollars as a lawyer suing doctors, hospitals, drug companies and their insurance companies in Canada because filing nuisance lawsuits there is a losing game, financially.
Every time Senator and Kerry running mate John Edwards brought such a lawsuit that lacked merit and lost, under Canadian rules for such litigation he and his partners would have had to pay their would-be victims' reasonable legal costs in addition to their own.
THIS is the story that Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Lou Dobbs and the rest of the Intellectually Dishonest Crew keep NOT reporting - that Canadian drug prices are so low because they don't include the Abusive Lawsuit Premium tacked on to American drug prices by Senators John Kerry and John Edwards and Edwards' multi-millionaire trial lawyer colleagues.
They just keep ignoring this story, and it's a big story, too, because it involves political corruption on the heroic, Tammany Hall scale - United States Senators from the Democratic Party holding Americans with health problems down to be mugged by trial lawyers. Why won't Dan Rather and Lou Dobbs tell us about this?
Could it be because the epic, decades-long assault of trial lawyers on the financial health of Americans and their health-care system, in turn, serves the Democratic Party's urgent needs by creating a base of angry voters who don't know that they are being used to impose the same sort of incompetent (and a health care system like Canada's with six-month waiting periods for CT scans is incompetent by any standard) nationalized health-care that is breaking down from Canada to Germany on... us?
All the national Democrats need to do is lie convincingly to enrich themselves and their trial lawyer bosses, and since Tammany Hall, they've shown they at least know how to do THAT. Lying because you're been paid under the table to - and to win elections - has been a Democratic Party growth business since the birth of the United States.
It's time for Dan Rather, Lou Dobbs and company to grow consciences when reporting on this issue.
Just don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen, because the resulting ambulance ride from where you're sitting to a competent American hospital with state-of-the-art equipment, CT scanners with NO waiting list, and real standards of professional practice may not be covered by your health insurance because of rising malpractice litigation-related costs.
Thank you, John Kerry, John Edwards and friends. Oh, and thank YOU, Dan Rather, Lou Dobbs and company. (I know, that's redundant.... )
From the people who manage to ignore war crimes when rich liberal Yalies commit them... Guide for the Politically Correct and Morally Inept, document revision 8.31.2004 (absolute, COSMIC TOP SECRET security classification press embargo until November 15th, 2004): Classes of Vietnam Veterans Allowed to Boast of Having Killed Civilians Through Improper Hazarding of their Naval Commands, Grandstanding with Future Political Careers in Mind or Other Military Incompetence:
It's still just John Kerry, although applications are being taken for the 2008 Presidential Campaign.
New Provision - Classes of Officers Serving in the Vietnam Era Allowed to Criticize John Kerry's War Record:
Senator John McCain (R, AZ, alternate weekdays) is now the only Veteran of the Vietnam Conflict allowed to criticize what John Kerry did in Vietnam.
List Revision - Public Personalities Who Killed Southeast Asian Civilians and Can Still Be Lionized by the Press:
(retained, change is that this entry is now under permanent and retroactive press embargo under penalty of death and/or social ostracism at all the better restaurants and Ivy League schools):
Both JFKs -
John Forbes Kerry - ref. the Winter Soldier Investigation testimony before the US Senate Foreign Relations Commitee.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy - ref. assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem under CIA guidance during Kennedy Administration.
(temporarily dropped until political and historical rehabilitation on November 15th, 2004, cc: US Departments of State and Education, NEA, AFT, balance of BIGOT list classified):
Ho Chi Minh, General Vo Nguyen Giap, Pol Pot, the Pathet Lao, Viet Cong, the Khmer Rouge, the North Vietnamese, Soviet and Chinese Politburos....
incredulous
celebratory
irritated
not sure