New York’s 9th Congressional District Special Election Tells Us Much Going in to 2012

   Today, some of the last waves of the 2010 midterm elections are about to sweep ashore the American political landscape. And much like the original tidal wave of victory that the G.O.P. rode to some of the largest gains of congressional seats in history, this last wave is expected to bring surprises with yet another Republican gain.

In Nevada voters in the second district will be filling the vacancy created by Joe Heller’s appointment to the U.S. Senate following Senator John Ensign’s May resignation. In that special election Republican Mark Amodei looks to be a slam dunk in what was once considered a tight race for Republicans to retain the seat, but is now considered an impossibility for Democrats to pick up.

But the real story of the day is shaping up to be the special election in New York’s 9^th congressional district. There, residents of a district which is comprised of portions of Brooklyn and Queens will be electing a successor to disgraced liberal Anthony Weiner who resigned after lying about sending sexually explicit photo’s of himself over the internet. The district has been held by Democrats for nearly a century and it has not even been considered competitive at any point in the last forty years.

Yet while Republicans have not exactly had great success in special elections to fill vacant congressional seats in New York state, NY-9 seems ready to make up for that.

Over the past two years, special congressional elections that the G.O.P. should have won with relative ease, were lost to Democrats due to poorly managed campaigns and a series of assorted Party related political anomalies and blunders. In May, New York’s Upstate 26th Congressional District should have gone Republican but instead was won by Democrat, Kathy Hochul.

In 2009, Republicans lost another Upstate New York congressional seat that they should have retained.

After nominating a disastrous candidate in liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava and seeing a strong Conservative Party candidate take to the field, Democrat Bill Owen won a seat that had been in Republicans for over 100 years.

But today’s special in NY-9 is a case that is quite different. This election is being fought not in the Republican friendly upper portion of the vast Empire State, it is being fought in the Democrat stronghold of two of New York City boroughs.

The ninth spans sections of Brooklyn and Queens and is a middle and lower middle class, blue collar district heavily comprised of Jewish and Italian-American voters as well as union members. It is a district that is ideally suited for liberal candidates, like the man who previously held the seat……Anthony Weiner. Yet despite its Democrat friendly makeup, NY-9 is in the midst of casting what can only be described as a protest vote that is about to elect businessman Bob Turner over long serving liberal Assemblyman David Weprin.

While Turner’s victory is not a sure thing, polls and the prevailing winds indicate that he is a likely winner.

According to the most recent Public Policy Polling survey the race stands as follows:

• Bob Turner (R) 47%
• David Weprin (D) 41%
• Christopher Hoeppner (S) 4%
• Undecided 7%

But the story here is not merely that a Republican is about to take a seat away from Democrats that hasn’t been in G.O.P. since the 1920’s, but rather that traditional Democrat constituencies are showing their dissatisfaction with President Obama and are sending a protest vote. That story is explained by a deeper look at the most recent PPP poll of the 9^th district. Republican Bob Turner has the support of as much as 29% of the Democrat vote, while Democrat David Weprin has only a 58% share. Right there you can see that things are out of whack. Democrats in New York City typically back their Party nominee in numbers approaching 80% or more.

When it comes to Republicans,Bob Turner is receiving 83% of the Republican vote and a mere 10% support Weprin.

But some of the most startling and important stats come from the districts heavy Jewish population and those voters who consider themselves to be independent.

Those results are as follows:

Among Jewish Voters

• Bob Turner (R) 56%
• David Weprin (D) 39%
• Christopher Hoeppner (S) 2%
• Undecided 4%

Among Independents

• Bob Turner (R) 58%
• David Weprin (D) 26%
• Christopher Hoeppner (S) 7%
• Undecided 10%

But perhaps the biggest story of all here is that this election is really not between Turner and Weprin at all. As it turns out the vote is between two sentiments,………………. are you happy with the way things are going a dn our President’s leadership, or are you dissatisfied by President Obama and his liberal policies?

The answer to that question is that voters are pissed at the President. And Democrat politicos know it. That is one reason why President Obama’s name is hardly mentioned by the Democrat candidates campaign but it is often brought by Republicans who are labeling Weprin as a rubberstamp for Obama’s failed policies. The reasons for that are made quite clear with the following additional Public Policy Polling data from the same poll that shows Turner ahead of Weprin.

Do you approve or disapprove of President Barack Obama’s job performance?

• Approve 31%
• Disapprove 56%

Among Men

• Approve 27%
• Disapprove 63%

Among Women

• Approve 35%
• Disapprove 49%

Among Jewish Voters

• Approve 26%
• Disapprove 62%

Do you approve or disapprove of Barack Obama’s leadership on Israel?

• Approve 30%
• Disapprove 54%

Among Democrats

• Approve 42%
• Disapprove 40%

Among Republicans

• Approve 13%
• Disapprove 78%

Among Independents

• Approve 13%
• Disapprove 66%

Among Jewish Voters

• Approve 22%
• Disapprove 68%

How important was the issue of Israel in deciding who to vote for Congress: very important, somewhat important, or not all that important?

• Very important 37%
• Somewhat important 32%
• Not all that important 29%
• Among Jewish Voters
• Very important 58%
• Somewhat important 30%
• Not all that important 11%

To make matters worse, in 2008 President Obama won the 9^th C.D. with 55% of the vote to John McCain’s 44% but when asked about the 2012 presidential election, President Obama is obviously in trouble.

2012 Presidential Election

• Mitt Romney 46%
• Barack Obama 42%
• Barack Obama 44%
• Rick Perry 43%

Among Jewish Voters

• Mitt Romney 52%
• Barack Obama 38%
• Rick Perry 47%
• Barack Obama 43%

The voters of New York’s 9^th Congressional District have not suddenly changed ideologies and gone from believing that government doesn’t do enough to believing that it does too much. They remain largely supportive of Democrat policies but the sentiment among voters here is that President Obama isn’t working and his policies are failing us. As such, they are taking their frustrations out on David Weprin. That is just one of the reasons why Democrats have not brought President Obama into this district. Apparently, they have learned from the 2010 special election to replace Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate. In that race President Obama was brought in to energize the base and motivate independent Massachusetts voters to turn out and vote for liberal Martha Coakley. As it turned out, they instead stayed home while the rest of angry electorate came out to support Republican Scott Brown and reject Barack Obama.

Now as we head into the 2012 election, NY-9 is showing us that if anything, that sentiment which swept Scott Brown into office has not changed and may have in fact built even more momentum.

Republican Bob Turner can still lose this race. Special elections usually come down to the Get Out the Vote operation and in that area, Weprin and Democrats have that aspect of the election wrapped up. With quite robust Democrat organization abilities as compared to the meager Republican organization in new York City, combined with the assistance of organized efforts by unions, the Weprin campaign can out organize the Turner campaign. But at the same time anger is a strong motivational tool and the voters of the 9^thare angry at President Obama. That could make it so that there are very few voters for Democrat GOTV efforts to make sure go to the polls.

Normally Liberal Friendly Northeast Is Not Looking So Friendly To Democrats in 2010

    Throughout its recent history, the Northeast has not generally been friendly to Republicans but in recent years it has been downright unfriendly to them, and in Congress, Northeastern Republicans are now almost extinct.

Comprised of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and the six New England states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont, the Northeast sends a combined total of 83 representatives to Congress, or about 20% of the total representation that the country has in the House of Representatives. Of those 83, only 13 are Republican. States like Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island have not even a single Republican representing them in the House.

It was not always that way.

Much more political parody did once exist, but over the course of the last two decades, all parody was lost. Coincidentally, this decrease in Republican representation correlated with a decreasing growth of population in the Northeast. The region has been losing many residents to the South and to the West and as a result, not only are their fewer Republican representatives in that corner of the country, with less population, there are fewer congressional districts as well.

Between the 1980, 1990 and 2000 censuses, states like New York lost 10 congressional districts. In 1980 they lost five seats, in 1990 they lost three more and in 2000 they lost another two. The declining growth of population took the Empire State from 39 seats in 1980 to 29 seats in 2010.

New York was the hardest hit but most all the of the Northeast lost seats. New Jersey has lost 2 seats and Pennsylvania saw a decline of 6 seats.

Now with the region already having one of its lowest ever percentages of representation in the Capitol, after the 2010 census figures come out, they are expected to lose even more representation.

But another change may also be sweeping the region.

As resentment towards the Democrat controlled government increases, the anger is even seeping into the normally liberal friendly Northeast.

In states like Pennsylvania, not only are Republicans likely to maintain their hold on the six seats they currently occupy, but they are on the verge of picking as many as six new Republican seats. While in New York, in addition to the paltry two Republican seats that are in their column now, they are looking at picking up as many as 8 new Republican seats.

But the gains are not limited to the states with the largest delegations.

Rhode Island which has two seats could see a seat change in the district currently held by Senator Ted Kennedy’s son, Patrick.

After representing his Rhode Island district, now for eight terms, Patrick Kennedy woke up one morning to a WPRI-News 12 poll that stated the results showed him to be in for the race of his life with only 35% of the voters saying that they would vote for Patrick Kennedy again.

Since then, Patrick Kennedy has announced that he is retiring and not running for a ninth term in Congress.

South of the Ocean State, Connecticut is spicing things up with more than just nutmeg as they find two seats heavily in play and likely to swing in favor of Republicans. And North of the Ocean State, the Bay State of Massachusetts which sent a wave change sweeping through the nation after Republican Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat, they may elect two new Republicans to Congress.

Of the two congressional seats occupied by Democrats in the Granite State, New Hampshire voters are looking to likely replace incumbent Democratic Carol Shea-Porter and pick up the Democrat seat that is being vacated by Congressman Paul Hodes, who is seeking the US Senate seat that is held by retiring Republican Senator Judd Gregg.

In New Jersey, one seat looks likely to change hands and go to the G.O.P. but as many as two more could follow.

The changing face of the congressional makeup of the Northeast is a powerful sign of things to come nationally. It is the strongest region for Democrats in the country but in the 2010 midterm elections it will produce some of the weakest results possible for Democrats. They are results that put the fear of God into them when they look at Republican strongholds such as the South and the West.

Add to that bad numbers and lagging prospects in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states and what you have is a Democrat Party that is running for cover. Unfortunately for them, it looks like the leader of their Party, President Barack Obama, won’t be able to provide that cover. In fact, it would seem that he is why they need it in the first place. Just ask Creigh Deeds of Virginia, Jon Corzine of New Jersey and Martha Coakley of Massachusetts. All of them used Barry in their campaigns but now after sound defeats at the hands of the voters, they will all probably be among the first to tell you that if you want any chance of winning, keep the President as far away as possible.

A Real Kennedy Legacy: JFK On Taxes

    This is for all liberal Democrats.

It is for all those who contend that Ted Kennedy and his legacy is in the great tradition of Camelot and the legacy first started by his brother John F. Kennedy. This message is for all of you who believe in the greatness that was JFK and for all of you who try to use supply-side-economics as a disparaging phrase and claim that Ronald Reagan was an unsuitable President of the time.

It is a post that highlights the words of J.F.K. and proves that all of you who joke about tax cuts for anyone who is not below poverty line being inappropriate are ridiculous people with no sense of history or grasp of the economic reality which America is now at the crossroads of.

If you liked JFK and still think kindly of him but have a problem with supply-side economics than you are either a hypocrite or just a tool of liberal propagandist who try to rewrite history and deny the truth.

The video that I am about to introduce to you uses phrases like “a tax cut creating more jobs and income and eventually more revenue”. It introduces references to taxation that state lower taxes “will create more jobs and more spending and more customers and more growth for an expanding U.S. economy”. All of which are statements and facts that are lost on the current ruling regime in Washington, D.C..

These are not my words or the words of Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich or Ronald Reagan . They are the words of John Fitzgerald Kennedy as he spoke of attempts to cut off deficit spending and avoid a recession.

They are the words of a Kennedy who believed in a government that did not make decisions for Americans but rather made it possible for Americans to afford to make their own decisions.

The words spoken in the video below are the words of a Democrat that is far removed from the contemporary policies of the modern day Democrat Party. Yet the Democrat who spoke these words is hailed as one of our greatest Presidents by many who call themselves Democrats today. But despite their praise and respect for JFK, they seek to canonize his youngest brother who spent decades opposing the stated beliefs of the iconic JFK.

And the same people who praise President Kennedy also praise President Obama even though every single economic policy that he seeks to enact runs counter to the economic beliefs of the Kennedy who was President.

So I ask you, please spend the next two minutes listening to a man whose legacy has proven to be everlasting and think for a moment about how far today’s Democrat leaders have come from the legendary leaders that they had in the forefront of their party only a few decades ago.

 

Kennedy Wants Partisan Appointment To Fill His Senate Seat

As we all have come to know, sadly, Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts is suffering from brain cancer.

This is not something that warrants any response which falls short of our prayers for the Senator’s ability to overcome his cancer and not endure any suffering and pain as he deals with it.

Regardless of my admitted disdain for Senator Kennedy’s personal and political record, his health is not a matter to joke about. Compassion must rule in times like this and it is not to be played politics with.

At least that is what I believe.

Senator Kennedy however does not think so.

Faced with his own mortality and being forced to miss most of this legislative session due to his illness, the seven term senator now seeks to play politics and leave that as his final legacy.

Fearful that the senate seat he has safely held for Democrats for over 47 years might become occupied by a Republican once his body is removed from it, Senator Kennedy has written Democrat Massachusetts state legislative leaders and Democrat Governor Deval Patrick and asked that they enact legislation which would change the state’s existing laws which forces a special election to be held to fill any vacancies.

Currently, upon the creation of a vacancy, a special election must be called within five months and the winner of that election fills out the remainder of the unexpired term of the office in question.

Strangely, Massachusetts use to have a system which allowed the Governor to appoint someone to fill vacancies. But in 2004 when Massachusetts Senator John Kerry became the Democrat nominee for President, Ted Kennedy spearheaded an effort to change that to the current statutes that require a special election to fill out unexpired terms.

At the time, Kennedy was concerned that if Kerry was elected President, upon being sworn into office, Kerry’s senate seat would be vacant and the existing laws would have allowed the Governor of Massachusettes to appoint someone to replace Kerry in the Senate.

In 2004 that Governor was Mitt Romney, a Republican.

So with pure partisanship coursing through his veins, Ted Kennedy fought to have the law changed and adopt the current special election requirement. Back then he justified it as good government, an example of true democracy that allowed the people to choose their representative.

The law was changed and Ted Kennedy’s partisan sentiments were eased knowing that once elected President, John Kerry would not be replaced in the senate with the choice made by a Republican Governor.

Only thing is John Kerry failed to win the presidency so the hullabaloo Kennedy made was for naught.

But five years later it is not Kerry’s senate that is in question. It is Teddy’s own seat that there are concerns over. Five years later and Massachusetts also now has a Democrat governor. So Kennedy has flipped-flopped on what he once saw as good government policy and wants to change the law back so that the Governor fills vacancies instead of the people doing that in a special election.

Two things come to mind here. First, as I always assert, Democrats are hypocrites. They demonstrate it every chance they get and Ted Kennedy’s sudden change of mind on this issue helps to reflect that determination.

The other thing that comes to mind is this. If the liberal lion of the senate is so concerned about who will occupy his seat after him and the service that person will provide to the people of his state, why does he not resign now? After all, his condition has already left Massachusetts at a disadvantage. Senator Kennedy has missed countless votes and is incapable of maintaining a full and productive schedule.

I have heard people use the phrase “over my dead my body” but never quite as literally as Ted Kennedy whose dead body will literally have to be removed from his senate seat before it is vacated.

The man has been in the U.S. Senate for longer than my own age. He has been there for more than 47 years, more than the lifetime of many, and now while unable to fully serve the people of his state, he still refuses to retire.

For all of you have a problem with “professional politicians” Ted Kennedy is your poster boy.

But put aside, for a moment, his addiction to power and think about this.

Does Ted Kennedy really want this drive to change the way Massachusetts fills vacancies to be one of his last demonstrations of public service? Does he really want to cap off his career with a self promoting, partisan maneuver that seeks to consolidate partisan political power?

I would hope that in the closing days of my life, my last breaths would convey and promote a message more noble than a call for some slick and sleazy political maneuver.

It is sad to see a man so representative of the Democrat Party act so hypocritically and insincerely as the curtain gets drawn on the twilight of his career. It is sad that as one of his final acts, Ted Kennedy chooses to be manipulative and partisan rather than sincere and patriotic.

Public service is a wonderful thing. Too bad Ted Kennedy is demonstrating characteristics that give it a bad name. It is too bad that he seeks to leave public office by making it seem like a game rather than a respectful effort.

Renewable Energy Is Great, But Not Here. Somewhere Else Though

     I believe that a vast majority of Americans understand the need to move towards a utilization of sound, economic, renewable energy sources. Most of us understand the downside to our current oil based economy. We understand the foreign affairs implications and environmental impacts.

Knowing that, most Americans hold out the desire for a day when clean, efficient and plentiful natural alternatives can become the primary source of energy.

Such is a goal that both presidential candidates outlined in their individual campaigns. It is also an issue which you will be hard pressed to find opposition to on either side of the political aisle.

Accept for some of those sitting on the left side of the aisle.

When it comes to energy and alternatives to oil, some of your most liberal legislators stand in the way.

When a wind farm was proposed off the coast of Cape Cod, its most famous resident, Senator Ted Kennedy, opposed it. The plan would have disrupted the view from and aesthetics of the coastal Kennedy compound.

For the longest time Kennedy was one of the greatest examples of liberal hypocrisy concerning the lefts environmental activism and their plight for clean and efficient energy.

Then of course there came the largest hypocrite of them all.

Al Gore.

The man ran around the world ands crisscrossed America consuming more fuel and wasting more energy than the entirety of a small business sector in New England. Than while living in his own luxurious Tennessee family compound it was discovered that his own home used almost three times the amount of energy than the average home and lacked many of the energy efficiency standards that he himself promoted.

While producing a movie to exaggerate the effects of global warming and motivate people through fear and an overly dramatic hypothesis, he lived a life and undertook an effort that helped leave behind a carbon footprint the size of more than a hundred average American families.

For all his produced environmental waste, he received both an Oscar and a Nobel prize.

Now we have President Obama promising to bring America into an era of energy independence and efficiency.

The problem is that while he promises to get America out of tough economic times by fueling the economy with vast expenditures on renewable energy sources, he is doing little to help us get through the transition to that time. Little is being said or done regarding safe and sound domestic oil drilling and little is being done to make conversions to alternative fuel and energy sources more affordable.

I will give President Obama a break though. His complete energy program has not yet unfolded and it should be dealt with, on its merits, as it is developed.

But even if that plan happens to be a good one, how much help will it get in implementing it?

On the Presidents own side of the aisle, there exists a “Not In My Backyard” (NIMBY) attitude that does not help the cause for environmentally safe and sound energy that utilizes the riches of nature to our advantage.

First, Ted Kennedy opposed the use of wind for energy and now The Golden State’s Senator Dianne Feinstein opposes the use of solar energy.

Of course neither mind the use of solar or wind power technology somewhere other than in the states they represent. In fact they are big proponents of it………….in someone else’s state though.

This new hypocritical point of view reared its ugly head after nineteen companies submitted applications that would lead to the construction of solar and wind power farms amidst 500,000 acres of the desolate Mojave Desert.

In response to this advance, Senator Feinstein is crafting legislation that would turn the region into a national monument and allow for only existing uses in the area to continue while preventing any future utilization of the land.

Much of the land in question was purchased by the government between 1999 and 2004 from the former Sante Fe and Southern Pacific Railroad. The deal was arranged by a group called The Wildlands Conservancy which helped to raise $40 million dollar for the purchase deal.

In a letter to the Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar the senator writes “I urge you to direct the Bureau of Land Management to suspend any further consideration of leases to develop former railroad lands for renewable energy or for any other purpose.”

The impetus behind this demand is the conservancy’s fear that these energy projects will greatly harm the region’s desert tortoise population.

Now, I am animal lover. I am a professional breeder and shower of cats with a Cat Fanciers Association and Cat Fanciers Federation registered cattery. I have also shown and handled dogs for my mother who, along with her own cattery, is the owner of an American Kennel Club registered kennel and a breeder and handler of dogs.

I grew up with cats, dogs, fish, exotic animals and was also one of the few kids in Brooklyn to have had a horse, which was maintained at a stable that was just blocks from where I lived. I can still remember how while other people were walking their dogs in Canarsie’s Seaview Park I was riding a horse in it.

I love all kinds of animals. I understand that they too have, if not the same, than at least a sense of emotion that is similar to us. They experience pain and pleasure. They can be happy or sad, bored or excited. I am empathetic to animals and at times I prefer the companionship of some of my pets to some people. They are not arrogant and judgmental. They are not bigoted and hard to please.

So no, I am not the heartless conservative that the left would like to use in their arguments to support their radical agendas. I do not want to see the eradication of the desert tortoise or any other tortoise, rabbit, owl, wildcat or creature crucial in the chain of our ecosystem.

However, I also do not see how scientific advances can’t help to accommodate the need for coexistence on the face of the earth.

But if coexistence between us and the desert tortoise is impossible, are environmentalists saying that the desert tortoise’s existence is more important than our own?

Are they claiming that the utilization of sun and wind to get off of our environmentally damaging reliance on oil should be halted in areas like the West?

Do they feel that the damaging effects on our environment, due to the use of fossil fuels, is more beneficial to the long term health of the desert tortoise?

We are talking about the use of the sun and the wind. Few places are sunnier or windier than the Mojave Desert. Few places are more suitable for the implementation of wind and solar energy solutions to California’s increasing energy crisis.

Yet again, another liberal environmentalist who berates us all for not advancing the cause for, and implementation of strategies that are environmentally safe and energy efficient, becomes one of the first to get in the way of that very same cause.

It is counterproductive and hypocritical.

It is also sad.

One of the best ways to lead is by example but unfortunately there are very few true leaders in the United States senate. That is made increasingly apparent by the actions of people like former Senate President and Vice President Al Gore who asks us to live one way then subsequently lives another way. It is made more and more evident by Senators like Kennedy and Feinstein who promote a national agenda to get us off of fossil fuels but oppose options that could help us to do so when it comes to their own states.

At a press conference, Vice President Joe Biden announced that he is surprised at how quickly global warming is happening. Then one of his aides pulled him aside and explained that it was just springtime.

With Hindsight, Armchair Generals Still Say Saddam Should Have Been Spared

    There are those who, till even this day, base their entire political being on the claim that the war in Iraq was wrong and had no legitimate foundation behind it . Some even join with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and claim that we lost the war.

These isolationists and leftists maintain, that there was absolutely no reason for the United States to focus any military attention on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the days, months and even years after 9/11.

With creative flair, they refer to 9/11 as a ploy and claim that supporters of Operation Iraqi Freedom simply used 9/11 as an excuse. Others delve deeper and extrapolate that the true reason behind the overthrow of Hussein was a corporate conspiracy spearheaded by oil interests led by Haliburton. Others say it was a family matter that involved the revenge of one presidential son of another President who Saddam once tried to assassinate.

Putting aside theoretical liberal reasoning for Republican support of the Iraqi war and their tendency to believe that Republicans do not care about the lives of those who carry the war out, what these people fail to realize and comprehend are facts. They fail to accept the reality of the time.

Most basic to the reality that they deny is the fact that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was the policy of the United States since 1991. Initially we urged the people of Iraq to do it. Unfortunately those we hoped to do so, such as the Kurds, are also the people we left hanging and they paid dearly for it.

In 1995, under President Clinton, the C.I.A. organized a covert coup to topple Saddam Hussein. It failed.

Three years later, still acknowledging the threat that Saddam Hussein posed, in 1998, President Clinton signed into law a congressionally approved bill called The Iraqi Liberation Act.

Through it all, Democrats and Republicans alike agreed on few things other than the fact that an Iraq led by Saddam Hussein was an Iraq that threatened American interests, Mid East peace and international security.

Other small factors included things like cease fire agreements and United Nations resolutions.

After the original Gulf War, Saddam signed treaties promising to stop the production and procurement of WMD‘s. He made a commitment to permit UN weapons inspectors to verify that he was not in breach of these treaties and he was also not allowed to oppose our enforcement of U.S. no-fly zones. Yet for the twelve years after the Gulf War, Saddam repeatedly violated the terms of the cease fire agreement that he had with the U.S.. Additionally, he denied weapons inspectors proper access to establishing proper inspections. He also repeatedly shot our aircrafts in the no-fly zones and violated seventeen Security Council resolutions regarding weapons development and procurement.

I would contend, that if the American word is to mean something in the world, we should have removed Saddam immediately following the very first time he violated the cease fire agreement that we had with him. That would have eliminated his threat back in late 1991. But we didn’t.

I would contend that we had reason to topple Saddam after he defied the very first UN resolution regarding inspections. But we didn’t.

Instead we allowed him to skirt the terms that were established to contain him and render his ability to be a threat ineffectual.

It wasn’t until after 9/11 that America realized that the risks we faced were great and the threats that exist are serious.

Up until 9/11, aside from shooting back on an Iraqi jet that fired at us outside of an established no-fly zone in Iraq, a failed C.I.A. backed coup, a continuous string of disregard for UN violations and inability to enforce proper weapons inspections and a signed congressional act calling for the liberation of Iraq, we did little more than provide lip service to the agreed fact that Saddam Hussein was a danger and needed to be eliminated.

President Bill Clinton said on February 4, 1998, “One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line”

On December 16, 1998 high liberal lord Al Gore said, “If you allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, how many people is he going to kill with such weapons? He’s already demonstrated a willingness to use these weapons”.

Around this same time, based on information collected by the Clinton administration, long before anyone could even accuse the Bush administration of falsifying facts, Nancy Pelosi said ” Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of WMD technology which is a threat to countries in the region and has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process”.

According to liberal lion, Ted Kennedy in an interview on October 6, 2002…….”Saddam Hussein is a dangerous figure. He’s got dangerous weapons”.

Shortly after that, Democrat Senator Robert Byrd stated ”The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked upon on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capabilities”

Before his campaign for the presidency of the United States was official, a previous liberal standard bearer of today’s liberal Democrat party, John Kerry said, ” 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. And now he is miscalculating America’s response to his continued deceit and consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction….So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real”

It was rather obvious that Saddam needed to go and that fact never changed. Years later, even after there being no weapons of mass destruction found, other evidence of sinister intentions does exist. The discovery of over 500 degraded missile casings designed to carry deadly chemicals actually supports such conclusions.

Then there exists the evidence of what Saddam was known to actually be doing.

Leading Iraqi inspectors and figures with the International Atomic Energy Agency stated “there was evidence that the Iraqis continued research and development “right up until the end” to improve their ability to produce ricin. “They were mostly researching better methods for weaponization,”

They add “Iraq did make an effort to restart its nuclear weapons program in 2000 and 2001, but that the evidence suggested that the program was rudimentary at best and would have taken years to rebuild, after being largely abandoned in the 1990’s….”

All of this points to the fact that there was little disagreement regarding Saddam Hussein between both Democrats and Republicans and there was little to distinguish any difference between the Bush administration or the Clinton administration when it came to Iraq.

All except for one.

After the devastating results of 9/11 materialized, the administration of President George W. Bush decided to take action. President Bush decided that lip service was no longer a good enough strategy when it came to eliminating threats.

That explanation produces a knee-jerk reply from the left and isolationists. To that, like Pavlov’s dog, they jump to their feet and scream “but Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 or terrorists”.

An oversimplification of events might make their stale reply seem rational but a scratch of the surface of that shallow argument reveals the truth, which those who make that claim, refuse to accept.

Although there has been no connection between the 19 terrorists who participated in the hijacking of the airplanes that produced 9/11, there is no denying that they were terrorists and as a result, on September 20th, 2001, President Bush declared a War On Terror and in a speech to the nation he said, “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.…”

Keeping that in mind, even though none of the 19, 9/11 hijackers came through Iraq, there is no doubt that, through Saddam Hussein, Iraq was a safe haven for terrorists with a so-called “global reach”. The list of terrorists that fall into this category includes, but is not limited to:

Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the conspirators in the 1993
Khala Khadr al-Salahat, who created the bomb for the Libyans that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland
Abu Abas, mastermind of the October 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking and murder of Leon Klinghoffer
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, formerly a director of an al Qaeda training base in Afghanistan before he reentered the insurgency that followed the post Saddam days of Iraq”.

Given those names alone, bringing the overthrow of Saddam Hussein into the War On Terror was, and still remains, a legitimate part of the greater battle.

After 9/11, to have ignored Iraq and allowed Saddam to continue to rule with impunity would have been an irresponsible continuation of doing nothing more than offering dire warnings about what could happen and presenting legislation symbolic of what we should do to prevent it from coming to fruition.

In its wake, armchair generals, with more hindsight than foresight, took to calling this front misguided and a diversion. Yet what diversion was created? A diversion which attracted other terrorists to take up arms and flee to Iraq like flies to flypaper.?

Some will falsely claim that our efforts in Iraq gave opportunity to a resurgence of Taliban forces in Afghanistan. They will falsely claim that our decision to fight in Iraq put us in the position of fighting two different failed wars.

Those who make such claims are not just wrong, they are lying.

First of all, neither war has been lost. The coming fulfillment of our goals in Iraq has enabled President Obama to continue the same policy set in motion by the previous administration. Secondly does anyone believe for a minute that our efforts in Afghanistan would be any further ahead than they are now, had Saddam Hussein still been an active protagonist in the region?

Given his history, his continued intentions, ever present risk and consistent defiance of the international community and agreements with the U.S., no effective attempts to combat terrorism beyond mere words, could have been undertaken without neutralizing and removing Saddam Hussein from the equation. After more than a year of trying to achieve that goal through diplomacy, force was resorted to. That was a decision Saddam Hussein made. The opportunity to avoid military action was always there for him and he was the one to reject it.

In the end the United States had two choices. Either finally do something about Saddam Hussein and eliminate the threat he posed and the proliferation of terrorism that he afforded opportunity to, or, once and for all put action behind our words and eliminate the threat and reduce the risks that we spoke so much about for over a decade.

In a post 9/11 government our government chose to act. Rather than risk having to react to another disastrous terrorist plot that claimed more innocent lives, we chose to prevent it.

The benefit of that decision is immeasurable, at least to us. We will never be able to count the lives spared by the removal of Saddam Hussein. We will not know how many future surprise attacks were prevented from occurring but what we do know is that there will be no more assisted or arranged terrorist or state sponsored attacks by Saddam.

We do know that a beachhead for democracy is developing in the heartland of intolerance in the Middle East. We do know that millions of Iraqi are now tasting freedom and for the first time in generations are living either in less fear or no fear. We do know that in addition to all the previous facts which gave reason to removing Saddam Hussein, others existed as well. Such as his support of Palestinian suicide bombers and his prompting of two regional wars. But in addition to that, Hussein’s oppression and extermination of his own people is justification in and of itself. Such humanitarian reasoning justified our actions in places like Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Haiti during the Clinton years. Why that alone is not enough cause for our actions in Iraq is an example of liberal hypocrisy.

Yet till this day, there are those who try to paint our actions as irresponsible, imperialistic forays of greedy, misguided political folly. They try to claim the Republican party who nominated a President that carried this action out is a party that has lost sight of its purpose.

Well to them I make it clear that the Republican party has not lost sight of our purpose, our beliefs or of what is important. The decision to include Iraq in the War on Terror is one that we stand by today as steadfast as we did on the day that Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched.

We are proud of the fact that Republicans finally achieved what, for too long, many only spoke about. We are proud to not excuse away the abuses of Saddam Hussein and ignore his treaty and cease fire violations. We are proud of the fact today, we are not having to add Saddam into an already complicated enough risk equation that involves Iran, North Korea, China, an erratic Russia and the still existing sources Islamic radicalism and terrorism.

Utopian romantics may try to argue how better off we would be had we ignored the facts and allowed Saddam Hussein to remain a player. They will calculate the immediate financial cost of the war and claim it to be the source of our great economic debt. In doing so, what they leave out of their equation is the long term cost that we would still be paying to continue countering Saddam Hussein. They also leave out the price we would be paying as it relates to the lives at risk or lost had Saddam continued with his ambitions.

What these deniers of truth fail to do is acknowledge the fact that America can no longer simply talk about what needs to be done to protect ourselves. We must do things to protect ourselves. What these liberal leaning, apologists for jihad refuse to do is admit that they would have been the first to crucify a Republican President had he not prevented Saddam Hussein from successfully enabling or carrying out any other terrorist related event. But we did, so now their need to point fingers of blame to anyone but themselves causes them to point blame, not at he who made such events possible, but at he who made them less likely.

Such people may continue to call opposition to their denial of facts extremists and they may try to evangelize their message by exploiting those whose lives were lost in the War On Terror but they do so at the risk of taking responsibility for the next terrorist attack that their ways fail to thwart.

TALIBAN TV GUIDE

6.00 G-Had TV. Morning prayers.
8.30 Talitubbies. Talitubbies say “Ah-ah”. Dipsy and Tinky-Winky repair a Stinger missile launcher.
9.00 Shouts of Praise. More prayers.
11.00 Jihad’s Army. The Kandahar-on-Sea battalion repulse another attack by evil, imperialist, Zionist backed infidels.
12.00 Ready, Steady, Jihad! Celebrities make lethal devices out of everyday objects.
12.30 Panoramadan. The programme reports on Americas attempts to take over the world.
13.30 Xena: Modestly dressed Housewife. Xena stays at home and does some cooking.
14.00 Only Fools and Camels. Dhal-Boy offloads some Chinese rocket launchers to Hamas.
14.30 Green Peter. The total of Kalashnikovs bought by the milk bottle top appeal is revealed.
15.00 Madrasah Challenge. Two more Islamic colleges meet. Bambah Kaskhain asks the questions.’Starter for ten, no praying.’
15.30 I Love 629. A look back at the events of the year, including the Prophet’s entry into Mecca, and the destruction of pagan idols.
16.00 Question Time. Members of the public face questions from political and religious leaders.
17.00 Koranation Street. Deirdrie faces execution by stoning for adultery.
17.30 Middle-East Enders. The entire cast is jailed for unislamic behaviour.
18.00 Holiday. The team go on pilgrimage to Mecca. Again.
18.30 Top of the Prophets. Will the Koran be No.1 for the 63,728th week running?
19.00 Who wants to be a Mujahadin? Mahmoud Tarran asks the questions.
Will contestants phone a mullah, go ‘inshallah’, or ask the Islamic council?
20.00 FILM: Shariah’s Angels. The three burkha-clad sleuths go undercover to expose an evil scheme to educate women.
21.30 Big Brother. Who will be taken out of the house and executed this week?
22.30 Shahs in their Eyes. More hopefuls imitate famous destroyers of the infidel.
23.30 They think it’s Allah over. Quiz culminating in the ‘don’t feel it the Mullah’ round.
0.00 When Imams attack. Amusing footage shot secretly in mosques. The filmers were also secretly shot.
00.30 a.m. The West Bank Show. Arts programme looking at anti-Israel graffiti art in the occupied territories.
01.30 Bhuffi the Infidel Slayer. 
02.00 A book at bedtime. The Koran. Again.

98 YEARS AGO TODAY, RONALD REAGAN WAS BORN

On this day, 98 years ago, Ronald Wilson Reagan was born.

From the beginning days of his life and throughout his Hollywood career  no one would have imagined Ronald Reagan to be a future President. But fate is much like the American spirit.  It is surprising.

Our spirit is endless and it is the thing stories are made of. Our great American spirit keeps us going and keeps us moving forward despite any and all obstacles.

The American spirit was what gave birth to Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

Down and out economically, with double digit inflation and unemployment rates, our nation was in the doldrums. Domestically our financial situation was dire and in an ever declining downward spiral..

Internationally we were in the midst of a Cold War game riddled with Soviet deceit and imperialism. Cuba was in the midst of the Marielle boat lift and Castro was casting tens of thousands of his island nation’s  worst criminals and criminally insane citizenry to our shores.

In the Middle East, fellow American citizens were held hostage as Islamic extremists took control of oil rich Iran and overran our embassy.

We were a people struggling to stay above water while losing jobs, losing money and losing our ability to secure freedom and defend it from communism. We were in disarray and each time we tried to pull ourselves out of the misery index we were in, things got worse. Unemployment would rise a bit more, production would go down and taxes would go up. It seemed hopeless and then on April 24^th, 1980 we woke up to the horrific news of a botched attempt at getting our hostages out of Iraq.

In a covert operation, above the sands of the Middle East , helicopters being used in the rescue mission crashed, wounding four American servicemen and killing eight. The mission was aborted and it seemed that America was doomed to depression and failure.

As the year progressed, so did the election for President.  A weak and tarnished President Carter even found himself in a rare challenge for re-nomination by his own Democrat party.

Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy tried to take Carter to task but by the time the Democrat’s national convention took place, it was clear that President Carter would be running for election as their standard bearer.

Republicans had their own race and in it was Ronald Reagan.

Four years earlier Ronald Reagan gave another sitting President a run for the nomination when he challenged President Gerald Ford for the Republican presidential nomination.  Although it started off competitive, Ford did prevail but it set the stage for Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Although George Herbert Walker Bush initially took the wind out of Ronald Reagan’s sails, Reagan ultimately captured the G.O.P. nomination.

Along the way he also captured the attention and imagination of the nation.

At a time when we were down and seemingly out, Ronald Reagan spoke of an America that stood up for itself and stood up to our enemies. He spoke about an America that was once the greatest force for freedom the world ever knew but was now relegated to being held hostage to the whims of the rest of the world and vulnerable to an expansion of communism.

He spoke as to how it should and could be different. He made Americans realize that our people were not doomed, we were simply held back. Held back by of all things, government. Our government, a government consumed by misguided thinking, and a misguided philosophy.

Through debates and speeches and the poor results of Jimmy Carter’s liberal leadership, Ronald Reagan convinced people that they were not the problem, their government was. He convinced them that it was our government’s lack of will to stand up to Soviet aggression which was responsibile for its spread into places like Afghanistan.

He convinced people that it was government’s demonstrated lack of backbone which made our citizens susceptible to Mid East hostage taking.

Throughout the campaign Ronald Reagan allowed people to see that it was our governments overregulation of us which killed job markets, reduced income, raised prices, denied effective educations to our children and perpetuated policies of urban decay. He made people understand that it was government which was in our way and that with government out of the way, the American people, and our inherent entrepreneurial spirit, would lift us out of the days of malaise and into a better America, a more secure America, an America that we all knew we could be.

At a time when our spirits were down, like a cheerleader doing cartwheels with the band blaring and the crowd cheering , Ronald Reagan lifted our spirits and out of the lifting of our spirits was born his presidency.

On Election Day Jimmy Carter won the District of Columbia, and the states of Minnesota, West Virginia, Rhode Island, Maryland and Hawaii.  His homestate of Georgia, which he once governed, even turned its back on Carter

Ronald Reagan won the 45 remaining states in the union including the state he once governed, California.

With 489 electoral votes, to Jimmy Carter‘s 49 electoral votes, Ronald Wilson Reagan became the 4oth President of the United States and so began the “Reagan Era” With its beginning came an immediate sense that things were going to get better.

As I watched President-Elect Reagan raise his right hand to take the oath of office, the television network had placed a ticking clock on the lower right hand of the screen. As Reagan began to utter the words to his oath of office, the clock ticked away and just after Reagan was sworn in as President, the clock passed 12 P.M. and it was official. Our Americans hostages were out of Iranian airspace and beginning their journey home. The fear of what a forceful President might do to those involved in holding our citizens hostage was enough to end the standoff.

444 days after having their freedom taken away, it was restored and just like those hostages, America was about to embark upon a journey that would rekindle our spirits, raise our hopes and restore our standing in the world.

It was not easy. Liberals chastised Ronald Reagan every step of the way. They called him a war monger and said he was old and out of touch. They even equated him to the devil.

Some claimed that he was the devil.

They said that his name, Ronald Wilson Reagan, was proof , because just like the numbers representing the devil, 6 6 6, each of the three monikers used in Reagan’s full name were comprised of 6 letters.

The outlandish charges, and innuendoes never dampened the spirit of Reagan.

In regards to criticism of his age, he replied “Thomas Jefferson once said, ‘We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.’ And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.”

When it came to his aggressive stance against the Soviet Union and the arms build up that he stood for, Reagan said “Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.”

President Reagan signing the historic Tax Reform Act of 1986 with members of Congress and White House staff present on the south lawn. 10/22/86

Time and time again Reagan knew what to say, how to say it and when to say it.

When his message didn’t persuade Congress his way, he took his case to the people, won them over and called them into action to win their representatives over.

When Reagan took to the airwaves his message created a political army of active citizens who in turn influenced their representatives. It was a process that crossed party lines and even involved Democrat voters. The tens of millions of Democrats involved in this political army became known as Reagan Democrats and Reagan Democrats were everywhere from New York to Michigan and Florida to Texas, Minnesota, California and everywhere in between.

As the Reagan revolution took hold, our economy steadied and grew, inflation dropped, our military was rebuilt, our influence increased and our spirit was restored.  America became a hopeful place once again.

It was not immune from darkness but we knew that no matter what came our way, we could endure and that our best days were still ahead of us.

We also knew that we could not just simply expect everything to come up roses.

Ronald Reagan made us understand that we had to stand up to aggression and that we could not sit idly by and let the enemies of freedom run amuck.  Nor could we let the Soviet Union’s actions go unanswered.

It wasn’t always easy.

In 1983 America deployed peace keeping forces to help stabilize a war torn Lebanon.

After being expelled from Jordan, members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization took refuge there. What ensued was a constant clash of Christian and Muslim militias.

In 1982 Israel tried to eliminate the PLO and invaded Lebanon to take them on. A cease fire was eventually agreed to and part of that agreement included a peace keeping force involving Italy, France Great Britain and the United States.

For our involvement, today section 59 of Arlington National Cemetery  is lined with 21 of the bodies of the 241 U.S. service members who were killed in their barracks by a suicide bomber.

On the 23^rd day of October, 1983 we shed the blood of some of America’s first victims of middle east terrorism.

It was a day that would never be forgotten by the administration and it set in motion a posture that would not allow terrorist action against America to go unanswered.

In 1986 ,after a terrorist bomb in a Berlin nightclub killed two American soldiers was traced back to Libya, President Reagan ordered the bombing of Libya’s capital, Tripoli and the Libyan city of Benghazi.

On the Soviet front, President Reagan brought communism to it’s knees.

His aggressive arms build up forced the “evil empire” into escalating the Cold War to a level that they could not sustain. While this tit for tat game raged on, a rapid succession of deaths at the Kremlin saw the Soviets first lose long serving Communist leader Leonid Breznev in 1982.

Then, two years later Yuri Andropov suddenly died.

Less than one year after Andrpov dropped off, his successor, Constantine Chernenko kicked the bucket.

Following Chernenko’s demise, the old guard decided to turn to someone from a younger generation. Someone who might be able to hold on to life and office for more than a matter of months.

They turned to Mikhail Gorbachev.

Gorbachev knew his nation could no longer sustain itself by trying to keep up with Ronald Reagan’s arms build up. So he began to enter into meaningful negotiations, which along with Gorbachev’s national reforms of perestroika and glasnost, led to an end of Cold War hostilities and ultimately the collapse of the Soviet Union as we once knew it.

Through it all Ronald Reagan reinvigorated America, put it back on track, spared us from a possible apocalyptic clash between superpowers and helped bring about the end of the Cold War and defeat the evil empire .

But his legacy goes beyond victory over a nemesis. His legacy included a rethinking of the way nations had to confront war.

During his second term Reagan made a request that would revolutionize our approach to nuclear threats. It also was a major factor in the Soviet”s inability to keep pace with the U.S. in the Cold war.

He said “I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”

That statement led to SDI, the strategic defense initiative. Some came to ridicule it by calling it star wars because, at the time, it seemed unrealistic to shoot down missiles before they hit us.

Back then, it may have seemed unrealistic but what once was Ronald Reagan’s thought, is quickly becoming today’s reality.

President Reagan speaking at a White House ceremony for Medical Students from St. George's School of Medicine in Grenada on south lawn. 11/7/83.

There were several other enduring aspects to the Reagan years.

For instance the Reagan Doctrine.

That ideological policy eliminated the isolationist thinking which prohibited the United States from taking an active roll in eliminating communism.  As we did in Grenada, under Reagan.  

He understood that we need to challenge our enemies before our enemies become too strong for us to stop.

That is a lesson we learned back then but seem to have a problem accepting today.

There were more long lasting, positive effects such as Reagan’s military build up which gave us the ability to properly defend ourselves and to deter aggression aimed at us. But the greatest legacy of Ronald Reagan is probably the lesson he taught us when he made it clear that the American people were not the problem, government was the problem.

He once said “Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”

Reagan knew that government had a purpose, and he knew that a government that goes beyond its purpose is a government that is destined to fail its people. And although he did restore our faith in government and the presidency after Jimmy Carter, he helped to restore our faith in something even more important than that, ourselves and our great American spirit.

From his surviving an assasin’s bullets to his speech calling for Mr. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” at the foot of the Berlin Wall, Ronald Reagan was a true world leader and he was ours.  He was an American original and he has helped to keep America strong in so many different ways.

His ability to  restore America to its greatness and to leave us with a blueprint for future success is a gift almost as great as freedom itself and just as a fine wine improves with age, so too will his legacy as history unfolds.

“Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”

~Ronald Reagan

FAREWELL PRESIDENT BUSH – THANK YOU FOR SERVING WELL

There remain only a few hours left in the presidency of  George W. Bush. For eight years he has given us his best. There were some low points but there were fewer than the media and liberals would have you believe.

Katrina was a low point but even that, President Bush really can’t take all the blame for himself . But for liberals, President Bush was there scapegoat.

Hurricane Katrina ravaged Mississippi every bit as much as it did Louisiana, yet Mississippi, under the leadership of Republican Governor Haley Barbour, did not encounter the same long duration of recovery or mishandled evacuations that  Louisiana  did.

Mississippi’s local leaders did not decide to park their buses on low lying surfaces as did New Orleans’ Democrat Mayor, Ray Nagin.

No, Mississippi’s first line of defense in natural disasters, their local governments, the governments closest to the people, came through and were every bit as prepared as they told the federal government that they were. Not so in New Orleans though.

But a liberal bias from the media helped to make Hurricane Katrina President Bush’s fault.

Shortly after the events of Hurricane Katrina many left leaning conspiracy theorists also claimed that Hurricane Katrina and a few of its devastating predecessors were the product of Japan where the Japanese government was inventing a new weapon that increased the intensity of tropical storms into category 5 hurricanes and directed them to land masses that they targeted.

Many of the same people who made this claim gave blame to George Bush. That should tell you something.

Although Katrina may not have been Bush’s fault, the recovery effort in Louisiana does get blamed on him and to a degree that is acceptable. But I guess, on the other side of the coin, the successfully rapid recovery in Mississippi warrants some credit for President Bush?

Putting aside the blame game of Hurricane Katrina, there are two things that when grading this presidency, bring his average down.

The first is his delay in approving the surge that his own Secretary of State urged for a year before he finally accepted it.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice  had been advocating for more troops in Iraq. It was a strategy called “clear, hold and build”. It was also the same strategy that Senator John McCain called for.

Clear, hold and build was successfully used by Col. H.R. McMaster in the Iraqi city of Tal Afar. The strategy called for door to door operations that cleared insurgents from the city along with an ongoing troop presence in each neighborhood that was cleared. Once this was achieved residents felt secure, and U.S. troops were able to begin rebuilding there. Wherever this strategy was conducted, it worked. The resurgents were gone and our continued presence there, prevented them from returning. As a result, citizens no longer lived in fear and life began to flow unimpeded by terror and violence. To carry out clear, hold and build, more troops were required. But increasing the number of troops was not something the administration wanted to advocate for. Although it was required in order to successfully carry out clear, hold, build the administration was afraid of the reaction to such a call.

The President flinched in this area. It was one of the few instances where he allowed public perception to make him second guess his policy judgment. After Viet Nam, we should have learned that if you are going to enter into a fight, throw everything you have into it from the onset. Otherwise don’t get into the fight.

In the case of Iraq, we held back. Had we went along with the surge from the beginning, we would have avoided the upsurge in violence that led to the waning of support for the war effort.

The other area of deep negative impact on this administration was the financial collapse that brought on the current economic crisis.

President Bush does not get blamed for causing the collapse, but it happened under his watch and it should not have.

The President, through his advisers, should have seen this coming and helped to avoid it.

He should have aggressively turned back some of the policies which led to the overextended loan practices which ultimately tied up loans and the markets.

Many of the policies that brought us to this point were from Bill Clinton’s administration.

Clinton‘s National Homeowners Strategy was a financial scheme that promoted insanely low down payments and coerced lenders into giving mortgage loans to first-time buyers with unstable financing and incomes.

It was a way to increase home ownership. That is an admirable motive but as usual, the liberal mentality, forced government to do that which it should not have done. Essentially, the Clinton era initiatives that forced government action on private sector interests led to the need for government to take over FannieMae and FreddieMac. This is not to say that private sector greed and bad business practices did not add to the wrong minded government policy, it did, but what happened here is that government solutions to one problem, created another . Now, ironically, the government which helped to create this problem is having to solve it
.
As for George Bush, this all came to a head under his watch. For that he must be blamed.

So we have the recovery effort in Louisiana, delaying the surge in Iraq and not avoiding the economic crises that we are in, all helping to lower the average of this administrations grade.

I have two more things to add though.

One is immigration.

On immigration President Bush was most inept. On this issue his positions were no where near appropriate for the leader of a sovereign nation.

The Presidents refusal to accept that illegal immigrants are participating in illegal conduct that needs to be prosecuted was a horribly blundered policy and it is one that has not helped to solve our border security problem or alleviate the continued problem of illegal immigration.

The other issue I hold against President Bush is his administrations inability to articulate their cause in a way that appealed to the people convincingly.

The administration had been doing quite well in it’s first two years when the voice of the President came from then White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. Once Ari Fleischer left and Scott McClellan entered the picture, the White House lost any sway with the press or the public.

This President was great with messages when we were in crisis and he had the people’s attention, but in between crisis his message was jumbled and unconvincing. That, for this administration, was half of the battle and after Fleischer left they lost it.

On the upside President Bush has many, much wrongly maligned, initiatives to help bring his grade up.

Their was his “Faith Based Initiative” which allowed government to accept the involvement of religious institutions in helping out. Faith based initiatives were no longer penalized or denied by the federal government because of religion. It was something long over due in America, especially in an America where religion is not to persecuted against.

There was “No Child Left Behind”.

This policy was one which had universal support except for some extremist fringe players and teachers union.. But not willing to give credit where credit was due, liberals charged that President Bush backed out of his No Child Left Behind policy by under funding it.

Truth be told, federal education spending is at record levels so that argument doesn’t swim.

There are many other policies such as the Medicare prescription drug benefit, enacted in 2003. It triggered competition between drug companies and wound up costing less than expected.

The Bush tax policy is also to his credit. He didn’t ask for lips to read on this issue, he simply created no new taxes and when he did not reduce them he held the line on them. I only wish he could have added drastic spending cuts to that.

Another high point in this administration was the appointment of two supreme court justices, one being the chief justice.

The appointments of  John Roberts  and  Sam Alito  were remarkably good choices. Neither had any judicial or personal blemishes and neither see the role of the judiciary to be one that makes law but rather interprets it. Add to that their relative youthful ages and the Roberts and Alito appointments to the bench will have a profound on our great nation for decades to come.

The next greatest achievement of the administration was twofold. It involves The War On Terror and Iraq.

Despite charges that Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism, the two are entwined together as violent threats.

Pre-Saddam Hussein Iraq did not send to us the pilots that took nearly 3,000 Americans in one day but it had intentions just as dire.

Saddam did not have any tangible links to 9/11 but he did have links to terrorist, including several who dabbled with Al Quaeda and he did continuously break and defy the cease fire agreement that he signed after the first Gulf War. Combine that with the fact that everyone from  Bill Clinton  and  Al Gore  to  John Kerry  and  Ted Kennedy  swore that Saddam was a threat and you had every reason in the world to eliminate Saddam Hussein.

After 9/11 George W. Bush realized that we must eliminate threats before they eliminate us and so he took out the threat known as Saddam Hussein.  In doing so not is democracy being brought to the Middle East but the power and richness of freedom is being delivered to a people that have long since forgotten what independence offers.

Add to that that you can say what you want, but we no longer have to worry about any threat Saddam intended, and for that I thank the President.

I also Thank him for the second part of this  War On Terror  effort.   Under his watch not another single attack occurred on mainland territory since 9/11.

Now if you want to blame Katrina on Bush because it happened during his watch you must also credit him for there being no more attacks under his watch. And when you think about, more attacks occurred under Bill Clinton then George Bush, so I thank President Bush for that as well.

The final most valuable thing brought to life under President Bush goes back to exactly four years ago.

In his inaugural address , after being sworn in for the second time, President Bush stated:

“America has need of idealism and courage, because we have essential work at home – the unfinished work of American freedom. In a world moving toward liberty, we are determined to show the meaning and promise of liberty.”

He went on to articulate a policy that directed the United States to end tyranny in the world as we know it.

Now some may have seen that as a declaration of war by him but most read it the right way.

He went on to say………“We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right. America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.”

“All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.:”

The speech has since been forgotten by most but it has not been forgotten by me and hopefully President Barack Obama will also remember it..

In its entirety, the address presented the essence of what it means to be an American and it captured the most important role that America must play in this world as its current, last remaining superpower.

For me it Bush’s second inaugural address was the foundation for our greatest doctrine ever, the doctrine to achieve and true freedom and peace.

When you have the time, click here and read the speech. You will be moved and you will understand our place in this world.

The bottom line…….

President Bush is a good man and was a good President. He will not go down in history ranked along side of Washington or Lincoln nor will he be lumped together with Franklin Pierce or Jimmy Carter.

Ultimately, I believe George W. Bush warrants a B-.

Many on the left will now assault me for giving that grade but I base George Bush’s presidency on the truth of reality not on the lies and distortions that they have spent the last eight years perpetuating and when you add that to the retrospect of history, I believe George W. Bush’s name  will slowly rise to its proper placement among American presidents.

That is something that will take time.

As President Bush recently put it, “they’re still debating and writing about how good or bad George Washington was, so I assume the same will happen to me”.

Once upon a time, in a village, a man appeared and announced to the villagers…

… that he would buy monkeys for $10 each.

The villagers seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest, and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10 and as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort.

He further announced that he would now buy at $20. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.

Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms.

The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so little that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it!

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on behalf of him.

In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers. ‘Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each.’

The villagers rounded up with all their savings and bought all the monkeys.

Then they never saw the man nor his assistant, only monkeys everywhere!

Now you have a better understanding of how the stock market works.

Submitted by Dick, Williamsport, Md.

 

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