SwiftVets.com

[FlyLow]

By Cal Thomas
Tribune Media Services

Last week, Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry returned to Sept. 11, 2001. He criticized President Bush for remaining in an elementary school classroom for seven minutes after the president had been told a plane had struck the second World Trade Center tower.

Kerry said that, had he been president at the time, "I would have told those kids very politely and nicely that the president of the United States had something that he needed to attend to."

Kerry's actual decision-making ability, however, was exposed by Kerry himself July 8 during an appearance on CNN's Larry King Live.

Asked where he was that fateful morning, he said he was in a meeting with Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and Sens. Barbara Boxer and Harry Reid.

"We watched the second plane come into the building," Kerry said. "And we shortly thereafter sat down at the table and then we just realized nobody could think, and then boom, right behind us, we saw the cloud of explosion at the Pentagon" (emphasis mine).

The second plane hit the World Trade Center at 9:03 a.m., and American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m.

According to Kerry, he and his fellow senators sat frozen and indecisive for 34 minutes.

Kerry is dismissive of the president's explanation that he did not wish to seem panicked and so remained seated for seven minutes (while aides were busily trying to acquire more information), yet Kerry admits to not knowing what to do for 34 minutes.

Why does this matter? It wouldn't if Kerry had not brought it up and had he not made a recent statement about his own actions (or in this case inaction) on that terrible day. If one preaches a certain line, one should be expected to practice it.

Then there is Kerry's war record.

Liberal interest groups with ideological ties to Democrats and the Kerry campaign have questioned whether Bush showed up for duty in Alabama as he neared the end of his National Guard service. They first questioned whether that service was an attempt by Bush to avoid going to Vietnam, and they have said Kerry is a war hero because he went to Vietnam and earned several medals, including three Purple Hearts.

This wouldn't matter much either had Kerry not made his Vietnam service central to his campaign for president. He wants voters to believe that his "bravery" earns him leadership points and will make him more thoughtful and more reluctant to go to war than Bush.

Kerry has attached himself to several of his Swift boat comrades who testify to his bravery. But a new book co-written by a Swift boat veteran, John E. O'Neill, and including interviews with other Swift boat veterans asserts that Kerry is lying about some of his claims, including how he sustained his slight wounds. Several of these men are part of a TV commercial in which they say Kerry fabricated his own story for political gain.

In the book, Unfit for Command, O'Neill and co-author Jerome R. Corsi write that Kerry took no enemy fire on the night he sustained a slight injury for which he received one Purple Heart and that the injury was accidental, caused when Kerry fired a grenade launcher at too close a range.

This may end in a "they-said-they said" stalemate, but other actions and statements by Kerry might be worthy of more debate, especially since he doesn't talk about his political career.

That TV commercial by the Swift boat veterans, which Democratic Party lawyers are attempting to persuade TV stations not to run, has been attacked by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. McCain calls the commercial "dishonest and dishonorable."

Yet McCain has criticized Kerry's anti-war activities. In a May 14, 1973, issue of U.S. News & World Report, McCain wrote that testimony by Kerry and others before Sen. J. William Fulbright's Foreign Relations Committee was "the most effective propaganda [that my North Vietnamese captors] had to use against us."

If Kerry did not regularly invoke his Vietnam past, most people would not be focusing on it. What he did or didn't do in Vietnam, what he said and did after coming home, and his reaction to the 9-11 attacks are now issues in play that will help voters decide between a leader they know and a man whose leadership skills ought to be seriously questioned.


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Cal Thomas writes for Tribune Media Services. www.calthomas.com
_________________
EX-Helicopter driver & accomplished liar.
Wars fought, revolutions started, uprisings quelled, revivals organized,
assassinations plotted, governments overthrown, lead gospel singing,
tigers tamed, bars emptied, virgins converted, orgies organized.

[swing votr]

[Son Of The Godfather]

I thank God we didn't have a Dem as POTUS during that fateful day... Especially Kerry.

Can you imagine the Michael Moore movie... Instead of "Fahrenheit 9/11", we might have been subjected to "Kerry & Me"...

"Not wanting to jump to conclusions, the President carefully contemplated his next stategic move for the good of the nation for 34 minutes. He sat calmly with the schoolchildren, reading stories of his service in Viet Nam... and all the while the images of this terrorist act were seared, SEARED into his head."



SOTG
_________________
"Which candidate would enemies of the United States prefer to see in the White House?"

[You GottaBeKidding]

swing votr,

It's my understanding that the SS needed some time to make sure that the route was clear, etc. They'd "vetted" the classroom for the time he was supposed to be there. When he needed to leave early, they needed a little time to make the revisions to the schedule and keep him safe.

[hanna]

I have this "visual" that plays whenever I see the video of President Bush sitting there in that classroom after the guy told him we had been hit. You know how on the internet they have those spinning globes. I see one of those slowly coming down and planting itself on his shoulder. He truly received the weight of the world that day. He takes that responsability seriously. Something Kerry could never understand.