Category: Politics

Do Republicans honestly think that Conyers would extend them the same slap-on-the-wrist? The same John Conyers that tried to influence the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1973 to delay their “advice and consent” of Vice-President appointee Ford until the Congress could impeach President Nixon and then seize the White House with the Democrat Speaker of the House, effectively reversing the 1972 election. 

In the same postion, and given the opportunity, John Conyers would hand any Republican their ass. I give Conyers two weeks before he returns to his slimey ways.

According to a Wall Street Journal story by Jackie Calmes, John Edwards is planning on running his presidential campaign on his “Two Americas” theme of Edwards’ failed 2004 campaign. It didn’t work for him then and it won’t work for him now. Claiming that there are 37 million Americans living below the completely arbitrary and artificial poverty line, Edwards propses to lift those 37 million out of poverty over the next 30 years, 1/3 every decade. Sounds like a real warm and fuzzy plan doesn’t it?

How many of those 37 million will be alive after thirty years? How many more people will have been born or lost jobs or otherwise fallen into poverty? Is that 37 million really a static number? And poverty is such an arbitrary expression. What is poor in Washington, DC isn’t all that poor in the rural areas so how can bureaucrats in Washington set a single number as a one-size-fits-all barometer for poverty?

But what’s really funny is his plan to raise the poor up;

His “Working Society” agenda would mean a higher federal minimum wage, reduced taxes for low-income workers, universal health care, and one million new housing vouchers for working families, to help them find homes in neighborhoods with better schools.

First, raising the minimum wage; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2005 only 1.8 million workers made minimum wage and less than 800,000 are over the age of 25. That seems to be a drop in the bucket out those 37 million poor people doesn’t it?

Reduce taxes on the poor; President Bush cut taxes on the poorest workers in 2001 when he lowered the lowest marginal tax bracket from 15% to 10% and he lowered the annual income requirements for people who have to pay taxes which moved thousands more off the tax rolls. But of course, Edwards is talking about raising the Earned Income Credit and paying poor back the money they pay into Social Security, but he doesn’t want to say that out loud where the labor unions could hear him.

Universal health care is a non-starter. We have universal healthcare already. Anybody been turned away from a hospital because they haven’t bought health insurance?

Housing vouchers so the poor can move to better neighborhoods? So who will live in those neighborhoods that the poor abandon? Is Edwards going to force the rich to move to those neighborhoods and send their kids to underperforming schools? Kind of like putting the cart before the horse isn’t it?

Actually, it’s all just populist drivel. Edwards thinks his time worn, bogus antecdotes about “Two Americas” can win him the election, when all it might do is win him his party’s nomination. Conservatives are too smart to buy into his “progressive” guilt trip policy.

Last night, watching the various news programs, I noticed that Democrats were taking the opportunity at one last swat at President Nixon while eulogizing President Ford. It seems every compliment of the 38th President was accompanied by criticism of the 37th.

Then this morning, I find this at Captain’s Quarters and a link to the WaPo Woodward interview from more than two years ago;

“I don’t think I would have gone to war,” [Ford] said a little more than a year after President Bush launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford’s own administration.

Aside from the fact that the Washington Post printing this before President Ford’s body is cold is the journalistic equivalent of ambulance chasing, I’m pretty sure Mr. Ford wouldn’t have gone to war either.

Anyone who remembers the Reagan campaign of 1980 remembers that Republicans called themselves neoconservatives back then (before the term was hijacked by the Left six years ago to mean something entirely different) because the Reagan Revolution was about returning to the values of the Party. The previous three Republican Presidents had acted more like Democrats than Republicans.

President Eisenhower continued massive spending policies of the prior twenty gluttonous Democrat years, Nixon had his idiot “wage and price freezes” and Ford had his “Whip Inflation Now” campaign of beating inflation by wearing shiny buttons (see Powerline). Nixon and Ford bought into the detente lie as foreign policy. So the 1980 campaign was about getting back to the basics of being Conservative (which attracted me from the Conservative Party of New York State).

Carter had played like a Conservative in the 1976 campaign and that’s why President Ford lost. Carter promised to keep the Panama Canal and to stop Soviet expansion. He promised to slash taxes and cut government - of course, he lied on all counts. We all remember his Playboy interview where he touted his religion while admitting he’d “lusted in his heart” for women other than his wife – playing to both sides.

So I’m pretty sure President Ford wouldn’t have gone to war in Iraq, either. But that’s not a plus. I’m pretty sure that’s a lot easier to sit on the sidelines and criticize the players than it is to play the game. 

And here’s another Democrat drive-by from the Queen of drive-bys, Cindy Sheehan, brought to you by Flopping Aces. Apparently, she claims that if Ford hadn’t pardoned Nixon, our current President wouldn’t have attacked Saddam Hussein. Funny how everything is about her, huh?

According to a Washington Times story, Senator Joseph “Can you notice my hair plugs” Biden will bock troop level increases in Iraq;

 …he will try to block President Bush from sending an additional 30,000 troops to Iraq, calling it “the absolute wrong strategy.”
    Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware plans three straight weeks of congressional hearings on Iraq policy next month in hopes of persuading the president to abandon a plan he is thought to be seriously considering.
    “We’ve already broken Iraq. We’re about to break the United States military” by sending more troops, said Mr. Biden, who is seeking the 2008 presidential nomination.

So what does he know? When is the last time Biden made a correct call on any foreign policy we’ve conducted during his Senatorial tenure? And if his advice is so critical, why is he waiting until next month to propose this grand strategy of his? Joe, sit down and shut up. Let the grown ups win the war.

I guess everyone knows President Ford died last night at the age of 93. Everyone seems to be blogging about his presidency this morning like Captain’s Quarters, Flopping Aces, Michelle Malkin, etc. So I thought to take the time to pay my own respects.

President Ford is the only Republican President that I haven’t voted for, since, to my endless shame, I voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976 when I was 21. I saw him in person once from afar. When I was a brand-spanking-new private fresh out of jump school, my company, B Co. 1/75th Infantry was selected to march in the 200th Birthday of the Army celebration at Fort Benning, GA on June 14, 1975. We were training at Fort Bragg, NC and jerked out of the field, issued new camoflage uniforms and loaded into aircraft at Pope AFB and kicked out over Friar Field. Watching his brand new Ranger Battalion jump was President Ford. The next day, spit-polished we passed while he reviewed the newly-minted elite unit.

In my bookcase, I have forty-or-so first edition, signed books that I’ve collected over the years by various authors that range from fiction authors to Presidents. In fact, I have at least one book by every Republican President since Mr. Nixon. Among them is a signed copy of Mr. Ford’s “Humor and the Presidency” – I spent a lot of money on that one in an auction because to me, it embodied Mr. Ford. Since the book will last alot longer than I will, I wanted whoever gets my collection eventually knows that President Ford, despite everything that he faced in his short, accidental tenure, he was still able to laugh at himself, and laugh with everyone around him.

God bless you, President Ford.

Finally, something that stunned me today while reading James Taranto’s Best of the Web Today. He unearthed an op/ed from the NY Times’ Kelly M. Greenhill from last February. How I missed this, I’ll never know;

Four decades ago, during the Vietnam War, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara created Project 100,000, a program intended to help the approximately 300,000 men who annually failed the Armed Forces Qualification Test for reasons of aptitude. The idea behind Mr. McNamara’s scheme was that the military would annually absorb 100,000 of the country’s “subterranean poor” — people who would otherwise be rejected.

Using a variety of “educational and medical techniques,” the Pentagon would “salvage” these Category IV recruits first for military careers and later for more productive roles in society. Project 100,000 recruits — known as New Standards Men — would then return to civilian life with new skills and aptitudes that would allow them to “reverse the downward spiral of human decay.”

Mr. McNamara further concluded that the best way to demonstrate that the induction of New Standards Men would prove beneficial was to keep their status hidden from their commanders. In other words, Project 100,000 was a blind experiment run on the military amid the escalation of hostilities in Southeast Asia.

Despite the skepticism of the military leadership and objections from some of Mr. McNamara’s own advisers, the first New Standards Men began entering service in October 1966. By the time of the Tet offensive in 1968, approximately 150,000 had been inducted.

The test results;

In the program’s first three years, nearly half of the Army’s and well over 50 percent of the Marines’ New Standards Men were assigned to combat specialties. The results were not surprising: a Project 100,000 recruit who entered the Marine Corps in 1968 was two and a half times more likely to die in combat than his higher-aptitude compatriots. After all, they tended to be the ones in the line of fire.

I guess that’s where John Kerry, John Murtha and Charles Rangel got their experience in combat.

So the President concedes a minimum wage hike to Democrats to show them he’s willing to work with them. And he throws in a tax break for small businesses, who would be hit hardest by paying their unskilled, entry-level employees more money. Only seems reasonable doesn’t it? Since, according to the Democrats for the last six years, politics is compromise.

Nope not for Ted Kennedy. He wants a “clean bill” that “doesn’t have any baggage” Clean? Baggage? Clean wouldn’t include a tax cut for small businesses who would bear the greatest burden of a minimum wage hike? Baggage like incentives to dissuade employers from slashing their entry-level jobs?

Kennedy misrepresents the demographics of minimum wage earners when he claims that they have been paid the low minimum wage for 10 years. Anyone who is still making minimum wage at the same job for the last ten years has bigger problems than a pittance pay raise.

Back on October 21st, I exploded the myth of the minimum wage earner using the Labor Statistics Bureau’ numbers. Less than 1% of American workers make minimum wage. More than half of minimum wage earners are under the age of 25. And half of minimum wage workers are in the food service industry and earn tips over-and-above their basic salary.

But since when has Ted Kennedy ever paid attention to the truth?

On the Sunday shows, AP reports three leading Democrats’ statements on increasing troop levels;

“If the commanders on the ground said this is just for a short period of time, we’ll go along with that,” said Reid, D-Nev., citing a time frame such as two months to three months. But a period of 18 months to 24 months would be too long, he said.

“The American people will not allow this war to go on as it has. It simply is a war that will not be won militarily. It can only be won politically,” Reid said.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said that if it were a short-term increase, “won’t our adversaries simply adjust their tactics, wait us out and wait until we reduce again? So I think you’d have to ask very serious questions about the utility of this.”

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said, “I respect Harry Reid on it, but that’s not where I am.”

The first statement from Reid is the most revealing – Democrats still mistrust what the commanders on the ground tell them. Reid is essentially saying that as long as commanders agree with him, they’re making sound tactical decisions.

Don’t they remember commanders telling Defense Secretary Les Aspen that they needed armor in Somalia to protect our own troops? Because the Clinton Administration decided to disregard what commanders recommended and decided instead to make the politically expedient decision to not send armor to Somalia, 18 Rangers and Delta Force troops died (one of whom-Tim “Griz” Martin-had been a friend of mine since Basic Training). 

The Democrats still think that they make better tacticians than people who’ve done the job their entire lives. They still think that tactical decisions can be made by fat, balding morons from behind their desks in Washington. They still think that Lyndon Johnson picking targets for bombers was a good idea.

If they’re not willing to give our commanders what they need, when they need it, then I’m all for a pullout of our troops right now. If Democrats think they can pick and choose what tactical decisions our commanders make have merit, why subject our troops to their fickle whims?

We’re already dealing with a traitorous media fighting an information war against our troops, along with John Kerry undermining our National Security (see Flopping Aces and Little Green Footballs for the backstory) why do they need a fifth column of politicians cutting off their logistics, replacements, reinforcements and resupply based on a two-faced popular opinion poll?

Either Congress puts it’s full faith allegiance behind the troops or we pull them out everywhere and let Congress deal with the resulting attacks on our interests worldwide. Either the Democrats grow a backbone, or our armed forces stop trying to protect their pasty, wide hides.