Michael R. Gordon, in the NYT (Feb. 16, 2004):

... If [John Kerry] becomes president, his own military record and his familiarity with military culture will enhance his standing and facilitate his relations with the military, from four-star officers to the lowliest recruit.

Because Bill Clinton lacked that insight and credentials, some former Clinton administration officials say, he found it difficult to order the military into Bosnia and make other decisions that were unpopular at the Pentagon. He had to coax the military along. A President Kerry, on the other hand, could be expected have more confidence in dealing with military leaders and military issues and in exercising civilian control of important decisions.

A more central question, however, is whether it is necessary to be in the military and to be shot at in order to be a good president. Eliot A. Cohen, a military historian and the author of"Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime," a book that makes a strong case for assertive civilian control in wartime, says there are some impressive counterexamples.

"Look at the Civil War," Mr. Cohen told me."Jefferson Davis was a West Point graduate, a colonel and a combat veteran, and he was a lousy commander in chief. Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer who had served one month in the militia during a small Indian war, and he was a superb commander in chief. Franklin Roosevelt was a great commander in chief and had no military service. The qualities you look for in a commander in chief do not necessarily correlate with prior military service."

Lawrence J. Korb, a former official in the Reagan Pentagon and now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank, differs."Operational experience is a plus for someone to be commander in chief," he says."Eisenhower was able to stand up to the military and keep the defense budget from exploding."

The issue has somewhat different implications for President Bush than Senator Kerry. Politically, the focus on Mr. Bush's service in the Texas Air Guard is not to the president's advantage, though he has virtually invited scrutiny by reveling in his role as a former military man, wearing flight jackets and, in a famous episode he would possibly now like to forget, flying in a warplane to the carrier Abraham Lincoln in May to proclaim that major combat operations in Iraq were over. One could not have asked for a more vivid example of how prior service in the armed forces does not necessarily lead to prescient judgments on military affairs.

George W. Bush's own military record during Vietnam also brings up the issue of shared sacrifice as the casualties from Iraq continue to add up on his presidential watch. But Mr. Bush did serve honorably in the military and found a pursuit that required discipline and entailed risk: flying a fighter jet.

My own view is that military experience, like experience in business or government, can be useful preparation for a political leader but should be considered neither a requirement nor a bellwether. In fact, because of the end of conscription and the establishment of the all-volunteer force, it may become an increasingly rare item on politicians' resumes.

John Perazzo, in frontpagemag.com (Feb. 17, 2004):

When analysts look back on the moments that catapulted Sen. John Kerry to frontrunner status in his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination, they will acknowledge that one of the biggest turns of the campaign occurred on January 25. On that day, Kerry campaign strategists whisked Jim Rassmann from Florence, Oregon, straight to Iowa for an emotional, “surprise” public reunion with Kerry. As Rassmann's fellow soldier in the Vietnam War, Kerry saved Rassmann's life by dodging a hail of enemy gunfire to drag him out of a river and carry him to safety. As John Hurley, director of the Veterans for Kerry campaign, acknowledges, Rassmann's appearance with Kerry gave the senator an enormous boost. “It was just thrilling to get [Rassmann's] phone call out of the blue,” Hurley said. “Normally I'm a calm guy, but I was dancing and shrieking.”

Kerry has made frequent references to his military background, depicting himself as a proud American who served his nation honorably during the Vietnam War. However, what most people do not realize is when Kerry returned from combat, he became a key figure in the early-1970s, anti-American and pro-Hanoi movement personified by Jane Fonda. Like so many of those protesters, Kerry publicly maligned American soldiers, and went on to become a prominent organizer for one of America's most radical appeasement groups, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). He developed close ties with celebrated activists like Fonda and Ramsey Clark, the radical Attorney General who served under President Lyndon Johnson. (Clark went on to head the pro-North Korean International Action Center.) Kerry also supported a document known as the “People's Peace Treaty,” which was reportedly composed in Communist East Germany and contained nine points – all of them extracted from a list of Viet Cong conditions for ending the war.

By participating in VVAW demonstrations, Kerry marched alongside many revolutionary Communists. Exploiting his presence at such rallies, the Communist publication Daily World prominently published photographs of Kerry addressing anti-war protestors, some of whom were carrying banners with portraits of Communist Party leader Angela Davis. Openly organized by known Communists, these rallies were typified by what the December 12, 1971, Herald Traveler called an “abundance of Vietcong flags, clenched fists raised in the air, and placards plainly bearing legends in support of China, Cuba, the USSR, North Korea and the Hanoi government.”

In early 1971, Kerry organized one of the most confrontational anti-war protests of the period, in which nearly 1,000 purported Vietnam veterans gathered on Washington, D.C.'s Mall for what they termed “a limited incursion into the country of Congress.” As part of a carefully orchestrated buildup toward that demonstration, Kerry had recently testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, claiming to have personally heard U.S. soldiers boast about having raped, dismembered, tortured, poisoned and randomly executed innocent civilians – sometimes even razing entire villages in a manner reminiscent of Ghenghis Khan. During that same time period, Kerry charged that American-perpetrated war crimes in Vietnam were the norm, not the exception – and were carried out with the full awareness and blessing of officers at all levels of American military command.

Today, many American veterans and their families deem Kerry's past public excoriation of U.S. troops as unforgivable acts bordering on treason. As a result, veterans have formed several groups opposing Kerry's presidential ambitions. The root cause of their anti-Kerry sentiment is summarized by the publication U.S. Veteran Dispatch , which notes that Kerry's aforementioned testimony “occurred while some of his fellow Vietnam veterans were known by the world to be enduring terrible suffering as prisoners of war in North Vietnamese prisons.” Indeed, Senator John McCain has stated that his North Vietnamese captors had used reports of Kerry-led protests to taunt him and his fellow prisoners. Retired General George S. Patton III angrily charged that Kerry's actions were giving “aid and comfort to the enemy.”

One anti-Kerry group, Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry (VVAJK), recently formed a national coalition with two other groups: Vietnamese-Americans for Human Rights in Vietnam (VAHRV), and Vietnamese-Americans Against John Kerry (VAAJK). “We represent hundreds of thousand of American veterans,” says VVAJK founder said Ted Sampley, “who do not want to see John Kerry anywhere near the Oval Office.” A formal VVAJK statement reads, “As a national leader of VVAW, Kerry campaigned against the effort of the United States to contain the spread of Communism. He used the blood of servicemen still in the field for his own political advancement by claiming that their blood was being shed unnecessarily or in vain . . . Under Kerry's leadership, VVAW members mocked the uniform of United States soldiers by wearing tattered fatigues marked with pro-communist graffiti. They dishonored America by marching in demonstrations under the flag of the Viet Cong enemy.” In a similar spirit, VAAJK member Dan Tran says, “On behalf of tens of thousands of Vietnamese-Americans, we are determined to demonstrate against Senator Kerry all across this nation . . . John Kerry aided and abetted the Communist government in Hanoi and has hindered any human rights progress in Vietnam.”

As chairman of the Select Senate Committee on POW/MIA (Prisoners Of War/Missing In Action) Affairs, which was created in 1991 to determine whether any American POWs or MIAs were still alive in Vietnam, Kerry doggedly pushed the panel to conclude all Americans were dead. According to U.S. Veteran Dispatch , “[N]o one in the United States Senate pushed harder to bury the POW/MIA issue, the last obstacle preventing normalization of relations with Hanoi, than John Forbes Kerry.” Controversy erupted in December 1992, however, when, according to the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, “Hanoi announced that it had awarded Colliers International, a Boston-based real estate company, an exclusive deal to develop its commercial real estate potentially worth billions. Stuart Forbes, the CEO of Colliers, is [John] Kerry's cousin.”

Kerry's career in the U.S. Senate began in 1984. Since then – and notwithstanding his efforts to portray himself as a political moderate – he has established a long record of support for a wide array of left-wing causes, ideologies, and associated pieces of legislation. Among the most significant features of this record are the votes he has cast with regard to national defense and security issues. During his Senate career, Kerry has voted for at least seven major reductions in defense and military spending. Even after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing by Islamic terrorists, he voted to cut intelligence spending by $1.5 billion for the five years prior to 2001. In 1996 he voted to slash defense spending by $6.5 billion.

However, Kerry has been a big spender on non-defense projects, having earned a lifetime rating of only 26 percent from the organization Citizens Against Government Waste. Over the years, Kerry has voted against a Balanced Budget Amendment at least five times, and against lowering overall government spending at least three times. In 2001, he voted against President Bush's $1.35 trillion tax cut package, marking at least the tenth anti-tax relief vote of his Senate career. By contrast, Kerry voted in favor of President Clinton's 1993 tax hike, which was the largest tax increase in American history. In fact, Kerry recently called for “a return to the fiscal responsibility we gave this country in 1993 when we passed the Deficit Reduction Act.” Kerry's consistent pattern of voting in favor of high taxes has earned him a meager 25.2 percent rating from the National Taxpayers Union (NTU) for the period of 1985-2001. Similarly, the group Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) gives him a paltry 12.5 percent rating for the years 1999-2002. The issue of taxation, of course, has enormous implications for entrepreneurs and small businesses. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce gives Kerry a 36 percent rating for the years 1985-2001, and the National Federation of Independent Business rates him a pathetic 21.4 percent for the years 1997-2001.

Kerry's positions on most political and social issues are consistently leftist. In 2000, he voted to expand federal hate-crime protections to include such categories as gender, sexual orientation, and disabilities. He has consistently voted in favor of Affirmative Action and set-asides in employment and contracting. With regard to environmental issues, he consistently supports the positions of radical leftist groups like the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), which has endorsed him for the 2004 presidential election. During the past six years, the LCV has approved of 95 percent of Kerry's votes on environmental matters. According to the Capital Research Center, which rates the political leanings of nonprofit organizations, this group's rating places it at the extreme Left of the political spectrum.

Kerry has voted in favor of federal funding for abortions, and against requiring parental notification for minors' abortions. On at least three occasions he has voted against proposed bans of partial-birth abortions. While Kerry has earned a Zero-percent rating from the National Right To Life Committee, his National Abortion And Reproductive Rights League rating is consistently 100 percent, year after year.

With regard to criminal justice, Kerry opposes the death penalty “because I think it's applied unfairly.” After 9/11, however, he conveniently changed his tune. Said the senator,"I am for the death penalty for terrorists because terrorists have declared war on [our] country. I support killing people who declare war on our country.” But this is a new position for Kerry, who, between 1989 and 1993, voted at least three times to exempt terrorists from the death penalty, on grounds that anti-death penalty nations would refuse to extradite suspected terrorists to the United States.

As Michael Dukakis' Lieutenant Governor from 1983-1985, Kerry supported a furlough program for hundreds of Massachusetts' inmates, a program that many critics deemed too lenient toward criminals. In a case that garnered national attention during the 1988 presidential debates between Mr. Dukakis and George H.W. Bush, a prisoner named Willie Horton brutally raped a woman while he was free on such a furlough.

Though Kerry characterizes himself as a political moderate, his voting record is, in fact, every bit as far-Left as that of his fellow Massachusetts senator, the candidly left-wing Ted Kennedy. According to Congressional Quarterly , over the course of Kerry's Senate career, he has sided with Kennedy fully 94 percent of the time for key votes. In a number of different years – 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1998, 1999, and 2001 – that figure stood at 100 percent. Kerry's lifetime Vote Rating from the leftist group Americans For Democratic Action (ADA) is 93 percent. Senator Kennedy's ADA rating is a slightly lower 88 percent; that is, a avowedly leftist group states that John Kerry's voting record is to the Left of Ted Kennedy's. By contrast, Kerry's lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union (ACU) stands at just 5 percent – the third lowest figure in the entire Senate, higher only than the ACU ratings for Ted Kennedy and Barbara Boxer. The ACU ratings for some other notable Democrats are: 13 percent apiece for Richard Gephardt, Hillary Clinton, and Tom Daschle; 14 percent for John Edwards; 15 percent for Dennis Kucinich; and 19 percent for Joe Lieberman. Senator John Breaux, one of the upper chamber's few moderate Democrats, has a 46 percent ACU rating.

Kerry's stated positions on various major political issues have, on numerous occasions, been inconsistent and contradictory. For instance, he fiercely condemns the Patriot Act as the slippery slope toward a police state, and excoriates Attorney General John Ashcroft for violating Americans' civil liberties. “We are a nation of laws and liberties, not of a knock in the night,” says Kerry. “So it is time to end the era of John Ashcroft. That starts with replacing the Patriot Act with a new law that protects our people and our liberties at the same time.” But in 2001, Kerry in fact voted for the Patriot Act – parts of which he himself originally wrote. He said at the time that he was “pleased at the compromise we have reached on the anti-terrorism legislation as a whole.” “It reflects,” he said on the Senate floor, “an enormous amount of hard work by the members of the Senate Banking Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee. I congratulate them and thank them for that work.”

In 1991, Kerry voted against authorizing the use of force in the Persian Gulf. Yet he now claims that he fully supported Operation Desert Storm, but voted against it only because he wanted the first President Bush “to take a couple more months to build the support of the nation.” At the dawn of that war, Kerry warned that the elder Bush's “unilateral” action constituted a “rush to war” that might lead to “another generation of amputees, paraplegics, burn victims.” “Is the liberation of Kuwait so imperative that all those risks are worthwhile at this moment?” he asked rhetorically. Eleven days later, he wrote a letter to a constituent explaining that he opposed military action and preferred to give economic sanctions “more time to work.” Nine days after that, however, he wrote to the same constituent and said that he “strongly and unequivocally supported President Bush's response to the crisis.”

More recently, Kerry has exhibited similar shifts in his stated stance on the 2003 Iraq war. Amid his blistering criticisms of President George W. Bush's foreign policy, Kerry has said, “We did not empower the president to do regime change.” Yet in fact, Kerry supported an October 2002 Senate resolution that specifically cited regime change as a goal. That resolution, which passed by a 77-to-23 margin, authorized President Bush to attack Iraq if Saddam Hussein refused to abide by UN mandates. Kerry had similarly voted to make regime change a U.S. objective back in 1998.

Throughout 2003 and into 2004, Kerry has condemned what he calls President Bush's needless “rush to war” against Iraq. But in October 2002 Kerry himself addressed the Senate with a stern speech declaring Iraq “capable of quickly producing [and] weaponizing” biological agents that could be delivered against “the United States itself.” In a January 23, 2003, foreign policy speech at Georgetown University, Kerry stated, “Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime. He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation. He miscalculated an eight-year war with Iran. He miscalculated the invasion of Kuwait. He miscalculated America's response to that act of naked aggression. He miscalculated the result of setting oilrigs on fire. He miscalculated the impact of sending scuds into Israel and trying to assassinate an American President. He miscalculated his own military strength. He miscalculated the Arab world's response to his misconduct. And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction.”

Despite his consistently leftist stance on the issues, John Kerry has staked out public positions all over the political map since the early 1970s. But one thing has remained troublingly consistent: He prefers to hide his three decades of left-wing activism from the American public. We hope the American people will not be so easily fooled.

 

Lou Dubose, in LA Weekly (Feb. 13-19, 2004):

So President Bush went mano a mano with Tim Russert on Meet the Press and put to rest the claim that he went AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard. He was serving in the state of Alabama while working on a congressional campaign of one his father's buddies in 1972. Bush said he left the Guard eight months early because he was accepted into Harvard Business School's MBA program and “worked it out with the military.”

The AWOL claim had been resurrected when filmmaker-author Michael Moore called Bush a deserter. Then Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe started talking up a debate by suggesting that when war hero John Kerry stands next to George Bush, he is next “to a man who was AWOL in the Alabama National Guard.” Bush issued a “bring 'em on” challenge, urging reporters to take a hard look at his service record. The records the White House hastily released Monday are still full of holes.

Rather than only asking how a young George W. got out of the National Guard, we ought to ask how he got in when 350 American men were dying each week in Vietnam and 100,000 were on National Guard waiting lists across the country. For years the talk in Austin political circles had Bush using his father's stroke as a Republican congressman from Houston to secure one of two or three rare open billets in an Air National Guard Unit — after scoring in the 25th percentile on the standard test given to flight-program candidates. There was also the story of a political contribution conveyed to the Democratic speaker of the Texas House to secure a slot for Bush. When Bush moved into the Governor's Mansion, the stories dried up — as did two of the sources who circulated them in Austin bars frequented by the state's political cognoscenti.

But there's something about the risk of perjury in federal court that focuses the mind on the truth. In 1999, the former Democratic speaker of the House who secured Bush's spot in the Texas Air National Guard was a witness in a lawsuit involving two seemingly unrelated subjects: the Texas lottery and George W. Bush's military service. The story the former Texas politician told doesn't square with what Bush père et fils told reporters at the same time. But neither of the Bushes told his version of the story under oath after a hard-ass federal judge (who recently jailed a former Democratic attorney general for lying in his courtroom) ordered a deposition.

Ben Barnes did.

Barnes was a Texas power politician from the other side of the state and the other side of the tracks from the River Oaks neighborhood that elected the senior Bush to Congress in the 1960s. He was a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman from Brownwood (a.k.a. Deadwood), Texas, elected to the Statehouse when he was 22. Three years later, he was elected speaker. By the time he was 30, he won his first statewide election and was the youngest lieutenant governor in the history of the state. Lyndon Johnson compared him to Thomas Jefferson and predicted he would be the next Texan elected president. The Texas Monthly called him the Golden Boy of Texas politics. He was a young man at the top of his game. Then a bank-stock scandal in the early-'70s got in the way of his next career move, and he came in third in the 1972 Democratic primary election for governor. (Republicans at the time were irrelevant.) He was never charged in the stock-fraud case that sent his successor in the Speaker's Office to prison. But the throw-the-bastards-out election of 1972 ended Ben Barnes' career. Or so it seemed.

By 1998, Barnes was on top again, as a millionaire lobbyist working for GTech, the company operating public lotteries in 37 states. But lottery revenues were plummeting, and lottery-
commission chair Harriet Miers (who was also Bush's personal lawyer and once was paid $19,000 to look into the National Guard story for a gubernatorial campaign) re-bid GTech's contract. GTech sued, threatened to shut down the Texas lottery for a year, and hired a new lobbyist — after providing Barnes a $23 million severance package. Miers fired one lottery director who sued and settled. Then the second lottery director fired by Miers filed suit. He claimed he was taking the fall for GTech, which, he alleged, kept its contract and bought out Barnes because he had the story on Bush.

So in 1999, as George W. Bush was running for president, Barnes and the Bush military record were going to court. Barnes told his story in a five-hour deposition and then told the reporters what he had told the court. As speaker of the Texas House, he would sometimes find slots in the National Guard for the fortunate sons of friends and supporters. It had already been reported that two of his aides would take the names of the lucky young men who won the legislative lottery over to the commandant of the Guard, who would find space for them. In 1969, a Houston oil-service company executive called on Barnes and asked him to get George W. Bush into the National Guard.

Sid Adger was a Houston-centric whom the boys at the Petroleum Club called “The King.” He was the vice president of an oil-field mud company, a former Air Force and Pan American Airlines pilot, a hunting guide for petro-politicians from Texas and Louisiana, and a friend of George H.W. Bush. He lived in the same neighborhood as the Bush family. His children attended the same private schools as the Bush kids. He belonged to the same downtown social clubs. Poppy Bush loved “The King,” the first President Bush's secretary told the Dallas Morning News .

Shortly before George W. Bush graduated from Yale, Adger called on Speaker of the House Barnes and asked him to get the son of then-Congressman George H.W. Bush into the Air National Guard. It was a commonplace story: A young man of privilege ends up in a National Guard unit that looks like a polo team without horses. Senator Lloyd Bentsen's son was there, as was a relative of Nixon Treasury Secretary John Connally, along with the Adger kids (but not in the flying unit.) There were even a couple of Dallas Cowboys. (Despite the many prospects, a clumsy recruiting effort attempted to turn our high-flying F-102 pilot into the Guard's anti-drug poster boy. “George Walker Bush is one member of the younger generation who doesn't get his kicks from pot or hashish or speed,” reads a 1970 Guard press release. “Oh, he gets high, all right. But not from narcotics.” The Reefer Madness tone of the ad suggests just how out of touch the Guard's PR shop was. As does the content, considering the persistent rumors about Bush's cocaine use.)

A history of service to country in a country-club Guard unit was acceptable while Bush was managing partner of the Texas Rangers and governor of Texas. But it was a problem for a presidential candidate. And the problem would only get worse if it looked like he got preferential treatment. Long before Bush announced he was a candidate, he sent Commerce Secretary Donnie Evans to Austin to find out what Barnes might say if reporters asked. Evans was one of W. Bush's oil-field cronies from Midland, where the two men had found Jesus together in an intense, all-male, Bible-study group. He was also the finance director for Bush's presidential campaign.

“The Bushies got to Barnes first,” an Austin political consultant told me at the time. Barnes put Evans' fears to rest, and Governor Bush personally thanked the former speaker: “Dear Ben: Don Evans reported your conversation. Thank you for your candor and for killing the rumor about you and dad ever discussing my status. Like you, he never remembered any conversation. I appreciate your help.” (The simple syntax in the September 1998 note obtained by The Washington Post is signature-mark G.W. Bush.)

In 1999, Barnes reluctantly gave his deposition (which was sealed when the case was settled), telling lawyers the story of Adger asking him 30 years earlier to help the son of a Republican congressman get into the National Guard. Barnes also provided reporters a brief summary of what he had said under oath.

The Bush campaign claimed their hands were clean because there was no direct appeal from the Bushes. Again, the story was advanced through the queer syntax of George W. Bush. “All I know is that anybody named George Bush did not ask him for help,” Governor Bush said at the time. His father wasn't so cocksure, saying he was “almost positive” he hadn't discussed his son's draft status with Adger. Then both Bushes began to argue that Adger's appeal to Barnes was done without their “knowledge or consent.” Adger wasn't talking because he had died three years earlier.

Wayne Perryman, an inner city minister in Seattle and the author of Unfounded Loyalty, in an editorial circulating on the Internet (Feb. 2004):

Most people are either a Democrat by design, or a Democrat by deception. That is either they were well aware the racist history of the Democrat Party and still chose to be Democrat, or they were deceived into thinking that the Democratic Party is a party that sincerely cared about Black people.

History reveals that every piece of racist legislation that was ever passed and every racist terrorist attack that was ever inflicted on African Americans, was initiated by the members of the Democratic Party. From the formation of the Democratic Party in 1792 to the Civil Rights movement of 1960's, Congressional records show the Democrat Party passed no specific laws to help Blacks, every law that they introduced into Congress was designed to hurt blacks in 1894 Repeal Act. The chronicles of history shows that during the past 160 years the Democratic Party legislated Jim Crows laws, Black Codes and a multitude of other laws at the state and federal level to deny African Americans their rights as citizens.

History reveals that the Republican Party was formed in 1854 to abolish slavery and challenge other racist legislative acts initiated by the Democratic Party.

Some called it the Civil War, others called it the War Between the States, but to the African Americans at that time, it was the War Between the Democrats and the Republicans over slavery. The Democrats gave their lives to expand it, Republican gave their lives to ban it.

During the Senate debates on the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, it was revealed that members of the Democratic Party formed many terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan to murder and intimidate African Americans voters. The Ku Klux Klan Act was a bill introduced by a Republican Congress to stop Klan Activities. Senate debates revealed that the Klan was the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.

History reveals that Democrats lynched, burned, mutilated and murdered thousands of blacks and completely destroyed entire towns and communities occupied by middle class Blacks, including Rosewood, Florida, the Greenwood District in Tulsa Oklahoma, and Wilmington, North Carolina to name a few.

After the Civil War, Democrats murdered several hundred black elected officials (in the South) to regain control of the southern government. All of the elected officials up to 1935 were Republicans. As of 2004, the Democrat Party (the oldest political party in America) has never elected a black man to the United States Senate, the Republicans have elected three.

History reveals that it was Thaddeus Stevens, a Radical Republican that introduced legislation to give African Americans the so-called 40 acres and a mule and Democrats overwhelmingly voted against the bill. Today many white Democrats are opposed to paying African Americans trillions of dollars in Reparation Pay, money that should be paid by the Democratic Party.

History reveals that it was Abolitionists and Radical Republicans such as Henry L. Morehouse and General Oliver Howard that started many of the traditional Black colleges, while Democrats fought to keep them closed. Many of our traditional Black colleges are named after white Republicans.

Congressional records show it was Democrats that strongly opposed the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. These three Amendments were introduced by Republicans to abolish slavery, give citizenship to all African Americans born in the United States and, give Blacks the right to vote.

Congressional records show that Democrats were opposed to passing the following laws that were introduced by Republicans to achieve civil rights for African Americans:

Civil Rights Act 1866
Reconstruction Act of 1867
Freedman Bureau Extension Act of 1866
Enforcement Act of 1870
Force Act of 1871
Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871
Civil Rights Act of 1875
Civil Rights Act of 1957
Civil Rights Act of 1960

And during the 60's many Democrats fought hard to defeat the

1964 Civil Rights Act
1965 Voting Rights Acts
1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act

Court records shows that it was the Democrats that supported the Dred Scott Decision. The decision classified Blacks and property rather than people. It was also the racist Jim Crow practices initiated by Democrats that brought about the two landmark cases of Plessy v Ferguson and Brown v. The Board of Education.

At the turn of the century (1900), Southern Democrats continued to oppress African Americans by placing thousands in hard-core prison labor camps. According to most historians, the prison camps were far worst than slavery. The prisoners were required to work from 10-14 hours a day, six to seven days a week in temperatures that exceeded 100 degrees and in temperatures that fell well below zero. The camps provided free labor for building railroads, mining coal-mines and for draining snake and alligator invested swamps and rivers. Blacks were transported from one project to another in rolling cages similar to the ones used to transfer circus animals. One fourth of the prison populations were children ages 6 to 18. Young Cy Williams age 12, was sentenced to 20 years for stealing a horse that he was too small to ride. Eight-year old Will Evans was sentenced to 2 years of hard labor for taking some change from a store counter and six-year old Mary Gay was sentenced to 30 days for taking a hat. While authorities sent whites to jail for the same offenses, they sent blacks to the prison camps with much longer sentences. Thousands died from malaria, frost bites, heat strokes, shackle poisoning, others were buried alive in collapsing mines, or blown to pieces in tunnel explosions, and still others drowned in swamps or were beaten and shot to death. Every southern black citizen was a potential prisoner for any alleged small offense, including violating evening curfews. Through the prison camp system, southern owners of railroads, mines and farms had an unlimited source of free labor. The black prisoners played a major role the South's economic development. Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative, said, in his opinion, "the prison camps were a new form of slavery, but far more inhumane."

History reveals that it was three white persons that opposed the Democrat's racist practices who started the NAACP.

Dr. Martin Luther King, several Civil Rights leaders and many historians reported that during the first two years of his administration, President John F. Kennedy ignored Dr. King's request for Civil Rights. The chronicles of history reveal that it was only after television coverage of riots and several demonstrations did President Kennedy feel a need to introduce the 1963 Civil Rights Act. At that time, experts believe the nation was headed toward a major race war.

History reveals that it was Democratic Attorney General, Robert Kennedy that approved the secret wire taps on Dr, Martin Luther King Jr., and it was Democratic President Lyndon Johnson that referred to Dr. King as " that nigger preacher." Senator Byrd referred to Dr. King as a "trouble maker" who causes trouble and then runs like a "coward," when trouble breaks out.

Over the strong objections of racist Republican Senator Jessie Helms, Republican President Ronald Reagan, signed into law, a bill to make Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. Several Republican Senators convinced President Reagan this was the right thing to do.

Congressional records show after signing the 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act and issuing Executive Order 11478, Richard Nixon, a Republican, that started what we know as Affirmative Action.

On December 15, 1994, federal Judge David V. Kenyon issued a court order to the Clinton Administration in the Case of Fairchild v Robert Reich Secretary of Labor (#CV92-5765 Kn). The order demanded that Secretary Reich and the Clinton Administration force 100 west coast shipping to develop an Affirmative Action plan to stop discrimination against, African Americans, Hispanics, Female and Disabled Workers. Female employees were being sexually harrassed, Hispanic were being denied promotions and training, Disable Workers were being laid off, and African Americans were being force to work in an environment where they had job classification called " Nigger Jobs." Clinton left office six years later and never complied with the court order. The companies still do not have an Affirmative Action Plan.

President Clinton sent 20, 000 troops to protect the white citizens of Europe's Bosnia, but sent no troops to Africa's Rwanda to protect the black citizens there. Consequently over 800,000 Africans were massacre

During the 2003 Democratic Primary debates, the Rev. Al Sharpton, said the Democrat take the black vote for granted and treat African American like a mistress. They [Democrats} will take us to the dance, but they don't want to take us home to meet mama."

On December 3, 2002, President Clinton spoke to Democratic Leadership Council in New York regarding the future of the Democratic Party and how they could retake the White House. At no time did he address Civil Rights issues for blacks or doing things to improve the conditions of African Americans. His only reference to Civil Rights was Civil Rights for Gays. His only reference to improving communities was his recommendation to revisit the Marshall Plan to re-build communities in other countries. His entire speech was aired on C-Span.

After exclusively giving the Democrats their votes for the past 25 years, the average African American cannot point to one piece of civil rights legislation sponsored solely by the Democratic Party that was specifically designed to eradicate the unique problems that African Americans face today. Congressional records show that all previous legislation (since 1964) had strong bi-partisan support, even though some Democrats debated and voted against these laws.

After reviewing all of the evidence, many believe America would have never experienced racism to the degree that it has, had not the Democrats promoted it through:

Racist Legislation
Terrorist Organizations
Negative Media Communications
Bias Education
Relentless Intimidation
And Flawed Adjudication.

The racism established and promoted by members of the Democratic Party affected and infected the entire nation from 1856 with the Dred Scott decision, to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case. But they never offered or issued an apology.

Today both parties must remember their past. The Democrats must remember the terrible things they did to Blacks and apologize and the Republicans must remember the terrific things they did for Blacks and re-commit to complete the work that their predecessors started and died for.

Daniel Henninger, in the WSJ (feb. 13, 2004):

The Democrats, from day one of Terry McAuliffe's year-long nomination rondo, wanted a liberal who would be cast in their own likeness. They never wanted a moderate like Joe Lieberman, a Democrat trying to come to grips with the new political century--its security dangers, efficient global markets and a ragged domestic culture. Mr. Lieberman and those who share his views are secondary Democrats. They don't count. The Democrats who pick the winners in their party's primaries also choose its political course. They are the Primary Democrats. To oppose George W. Bush and his politics, the Primary Democrats want a candidate shaped as they were shaped in the late 1960s and the hard political battles they waged in the succeeding 30 years.

The Primary Democrats danced a few rounds with Howard Dean, whose rage-at-the-machine temperament recalled their own best memories way back when. They have since settled on John Kerry, and properly so. John Kerry, in his person and career, exists today as the embodiment of Democratic Party politics from 1968 to this moment. For Primary Democrats, he is their perfect vessel.

These Democrats opposed the Vietnam War, and like Mr. Kerry, that event serves as sextant in their political journey. Primary Democrats regard their active and successful opposition to Vietnam as moral affirmation of their world view, which holds, more as a matter of belief than principle, that any American foreign policy not of their making is too aggressive, morally suspect and wholly wrong.

It doesn't matter that the iconic president bearing Mr. Kerry's initials (as a young man, Mr. Kerry dated Jackie Kennedy's half-sister, Janet Auchincloss) sent the U.S. into Vietnam on a flying carpet of moral certainty. Or that the political commitment to repulse communism in Vietnam, a commitment that troubled Mr. Kerry as he departed in 1968 for heroic service in the war and revulsed him when he left, was set by Lyndon Baines Johnson. Primary Democrats, for reasons that await the tools of psychoanalysis, believe Vietnam was"Nixon's war." After winning Iowa's caucuses, Mr. Kerry volunteered,"I stood up and fought against Richard Nixon's war in Vietnam."

The Republican Nixon's too-ardent anticommunism, they came to believe, was the provenance for Ronald Reagan's wrongful spending on the communist"threat." So it followed that Primary Democrats would then resist Ronald Reagan on Grenada, Nicaragua and installing Pershing missiles in Europe. As senator, Mr. Kerry held hearings into Ollie North and the Iran-Contra connection. In the same Iowa interview just last month, Mr. Kerry described that effort in the words used in the 1980s by all Primary Democrats:"I stood up and fought against Ronald Reagan's illegal war in Central America."

John Kerry was present at the creation of the moral and intellectual voyage of post-1960s Democrats. He helped map its course. He testified in 1971 against the Vietnam War as a young veteran before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He appeared as an antiwar spokesman on"60 Minutes" and"The Dick Cavett Show." John Kerry was a celebrity among Primary Democrats as Bill Clinton never was during this important period. As a Southern governor, Mr. Clinton learned about the inevitable left-right compromises of public policy in ways that rarely tainted the austere ideological experience of Mr. Kerry in the liberal northeast and Washington. (This may well disadvantage Mr. Kerry in the election.)

We have in George Bush a president for whom the formative event of his political life is not Vietnam and the years after but September 11, a catastrophic attack on American soil by an organized global enemy. With his doctrine of pre-emption for threats to U.S. security, his destruction of the Taliban and overthrow of the Hussein regime in Iraq, Mr. Bush has largely broken free of the political period that shaped John Kerry's career. Mr. Bush argues that he is dealing with a world and enemy that has not previously existed. But with Iraq, 30 years of Primary Democratic belief instinctively reappears as resistance, led again by John Kerry. If George Bush's sense of right purpose flows directly from September 11, 2001, so too does many Democrats' from what John Kerry was doing and thinking in 1968 in the Mekong Delta.

Mr. Bush would do well, if he has not already, to revisit the histories of this period. Through the years that John Kerry was personally helping form--and represent--the cognitive gestalt of modern Democratic voters, Mr. Bush was in business. But the Democrats who came to maturity around 1968 spent those years deepening their beliefs and baptizing younger adherents, who filled the streets of San Francisco and elsewhere to oppose"George Bush's illegal war in Iraq."

Noemie Emery, in the Weekly Standard (Feb. 9, 2004):

CLOSE YOUR EYES on some days, and you can almost believe it: You're back somewhere in the mid-1980s, 1984 to be precise. At least from the Democrats' side of the aisle. There it all is: The Republican president denounced as a dunce and a dangerous cowboy; the left on a tear against corporations and tax cuts; and the vast, murky war against a dangerous enemy, which Republicans think of as a crusade against evil and Democrats think is a sham. Magically, the three intervening elections--1992, 1996, and 2000--appear to have vanished, as have their protagonists: Bill Clinton is gone, as is the George W. Bush of 2000, gone in the moment he learned, on live cameras, that tower number two had been hit. We are back now in Reagan country, with deep divisions, big issues, deep feelings, big wars. And quite a few things are familiar. This is the way they equate.

l. THE PRESIDENT. Now, as in those days, there is a Republican president, a man of the West, detested in Europe and deeply despised by the base of the Democrats, who are driven to distraction by his mere presence. He is looked down on by them as a dupe or dullard, and portrayed, as Richard Wirthlin, Reagan's favorite pollster, once put it, as "dumb, dangerous, and a distorter of facts." Reagan was described also, by professional crony Clark Clifford, as an "amiable dunce." Bush should be so fortunate as to have the word amiable invoked in this way by his foes. Instead, he is widely regarded by liberals as swaggering, arrogant, clueless, vindictive, and mean. Opinion differs as to whether he is an evil political mastermind, surrounded by similar knaves and connivers, or merely an empty suit dressed up and guided by others (in which case the "evil genius" description is used to describe his counselor Karl Rove).

Despite all of this, or perhaps owing to it, Bush is nonetheless liked by the rest of the country, which gives him high marks for his leaderly qualities. Leadership and national security are his best issues. His weakest one seems to be the environment. Although his beloved ranch is run on the greenest of principles, the greens turn him down three to one. Repeatedly, they claim he has poisoned the air, poisoned the water, and is feeding small children a diet of arsenic. For these reasons, and others, they long to destroy him, and are united with the rest of the left in this great cause. "Ronald Reagan has provided all the unity we need," Gary Hart said at the 1984 Democratic convention. "Not one of us is going to sit this campaign out. You have made the stakes too high." But not high enough to impress most Americans, who remained less than outraged by the president.

Deep tranches of rage did not produce general anger with Reagan. Thus far, they have failed to do so with Bush....

Frida Ghitis, author of The End of Revolution: a Changing World in the Age of Live Television, in the LAT (Feb. 11 2004):

Just about the time that the White House announced plans for an investigation into faulty Iraq intelligence, my Cambodian friend Phead took me to visit one of the monuments to the victims of his nation's genocide. On the way to see the collection of human bones and skulls gathered from the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, I asked Phead what he thought about the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Phead, like other survivors of this country's almost incomprehensible tragedy, has plenty of reason to abhor war -- and to resent and distrust the United States. After all, Washington's Vietnam adventure provided the ferment for the Cambodian civil war that in the 1970s propelled to power the deranged regime of Pol Pot.

The U.S. had carpet-bombed Cambodia in an effort to root out Vietnamese fighters and their supply lines. By some accounts, the bombings killed more than 200,000 villagers. To this day, the scattering of unexploded American ordnance -- along with millions of land mines left by an assortment of armies -- continues to take limbs and lives.

In this atmosphere of chaos Pol Pot came to power, and in less than four years the Paris-educated leader and his followers pursued a Maoist utopia that pushed this country into a nightmare of terror, hunger and death. Other countries contributed to decades of bloodshed in Cambodia, but the main culprit was the demented Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge followers.....

Stopping the killing in Iraq has now become the argument of choice for defenders of that war. Politicians and historians will continue to debate the true reasons behind Washington's decision to target Hussein's regime. Standing in Cambodia's killing fields, what seems inexcusable is doing nothing to stop genocide.

The U.S. track record on stopping mass murders remains unimpressive. The U.S. -- and the rest of the world -- has looked the other way while hundreds of thousands were killed, most recently in places like Rwanda and Sudan.

The experience of Cambodia -- and Iraq -- points to the need for a clear policy spelling out what is to be done when a twisted dictator sets out to destroy his own people.

Michael Dobbs, a Washington Post reporter and the author of Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America (2004), in the Post (Feb. 8, 2004):

There are few more difficult issues for a democracy than how it metes out justice to its enemies in time of war. Over the coming weeks and months, as the Supreme Court hears a series of challenges to the Bush administration's proposed use of military commissions to try suspected terrorists, we will become spectators to an extraordinary constitutional drama.

For a preview of how the action is likely to unfold, consider what happened the last time the play was performed, 62 years ago. The setting: wartime Washington. The leading characters: a president determined to make an example out of a group of captured saboteurs; a gritty, Army-appointed defense lawyer intent on doing the best he can for his unpopular clients; nine Supreme Court justices struggling to balance the competing demands of law and war. These characters -- like their modern-day counterparts -- epitomized the American justice system to the rest of the world, and history has delivered a mixed verdict on their performance.

I became fascinated with the case of the Nazi saboteurs (who traveled to America by U-boat with the aim of blowing up factories, bridges and department stores) at about the time the planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. The more I delved into the archives, the more I was struck by the parallels between then and now. When President Bush decided, two months after 9/11, to emulate President Franklin D. Roosevelt and establish military tribunals for alleged al Qaeda operatives, history appeared to be repeating itself....

There are differences, of course. Unlike the well-trained killers who destroyed the World Trade Center and fought with U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the Nazi saboteurs were the gang that couldn't shoot straight. They were captured, on American soil, before they got around to blowing anything up. Furthermore, the war on terrorism is a much more nebulous kind of war than World War II, which had a clear goal and clear enemies, whose ideological appeal faded with their physical overthrow. World War II ended when Hitler was defeated; the war on terrorism could go on forever.

But when it comes to the way we deal with captured foes, the similarities are evident enough to ask whether military commissions are compatible with American ideas of justice. As the Pentagon gears up for military tribunals at our Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba, and defense lawyers rehearse the arguments they will make before the Supreme Court at the end of March, it is as if everybody is slipping into pre-assigned roles. In some cases, the actors are reading from the very same text as their World War II predecessors.

The most obvious example of this phenomenon: the rules of procedure for the modern-day military commissions, which were copied almost verbatim from those that Roosevelt established for trying the Nazi saboteurs. The tribunals will consist of seven members. A two-thirds vote is sufficient to secure a verdict. The tribunals will not be required to abide by the cumbersome rules of evidence that are a feature of civilian trials, or even military courts martial. Instead, the presiding officer can admit any evidence that, in his opinion, has "probative value to a reasonable person." (A bow to political correctness: In 1942, the phrase was "a reasonable man.") The appeals process is reduced to a review by the president or the secretary of defense.

Click here to continue reading this article.

Economist Hal Varian, in the NYT (Feb. 12, 2004):

PRODUCTIVITY growth took a breather last quarter, slowing to 2.7 percent, after the previous quarter's torrid 9.5 percent growth. Still, by historical standards, 2.7 percent is a respectable number.

From 1948 to 1973, productivity grew at close to 3 percent annually, doubling the living standard in that period. Then came the dark age of productivity growth: from 1974 to 1994, it averaged only 1.4 percent a year. From 1995 to 2000, we had something of a productivity renaissance, with growth climbing to more than 2.5 percent a year.

When the economy started to slow down in 2000, many economists expected productivity growth to fall back under 2 percent. But contrary to these expectations, productivity has continued to grow strongly.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of productivity growth for the long-run health of the economy. Over the years, virtually all economic progress has come from productivity growth. An increase of half a percent a year can make a huge difference over 20 or 30 years.

So it's pretty important to understand why productivity growth declined so sharply in the 70's and rebounded so strongly in the 90's.

Unfortunately, there is no consensus about why productivity growth slowed in the first place, though there is no shortage of theories. Various factors, including the 1973 oil price shock, the baby boomers' entry into the labor market, an increase in regulation and a slowdown in technological innovation seem to have played a role.

But there is an emerging consensus about why productivity growth surged again in the mid-90's: most economists say information technology played a major role.