Kerry More Likely To Reinstate Draft

Of all the upside-down, misreported issues of 2004, the phoniest is the Kerry camp's assertion that a re-elected George W. Bush will bring back the draft. The case is much stronger that John Kerry himself would do so.

Military conscription was abolished more than 30 years ago by Richard Nixon (yes, that's right) after a six-year campaign by Republicans to replace draftees with volunteers attracted to service by decent pay and better living conditions. I know, because my book, "The Wrong Man in Uniform," in 1967, helped launch a movement for reform that borrowed heavily on the ideas of economist Milton Friedman and was led in Congress by a young Illinoisan named Donald Rumsfeld.

Fighting on the other side of the issue were Democrats led by none other than Ted Kennedy. President Johnson's administration had resisted draft reform and Kennedy and company wanted to retain conscription and make it more universal. Since only a small share of each age cohort of young men was needed to serve in the armed forces, Republicans sought to enlist that share with positive incentives while the Democrats proposed to draft everybody for "National Service," a new kind of conscription that could be fulfilled in the military, but also in various government-assigned jobs.

The volunteer military was a political victory by libertarian conservatives against social-engineering liberals, and its success, as nearly all military leaders acknowledge, has been a significant factor in improving the quality and motivation of America's armed forces in the years following the draft-driven (and protested) Vietnam War.

But liberals have never given up the idea of national service. Funded by fat grants from major foundations, a long parade of studies and schemes to introduce the idea has marched forth in a seemingly endless column from think tanks and academia. In the face of the military's own desire never again to rely on coerced recruits, such organizations as the Brookings Institution have proposed instead an ever-expanding realm of paid voluntarism in the social service sector.

President Bush, like his father, has supported voluntary service, too, even with government funds, but nothing like the scope and cost envisioned by such liberals as Kennedy, and now John Kerry. Candidate Kerry wants to enlist a half million people in his plan, many doing "service" for indirect pay, such as schooling grants, that taxpaying citizens perform now, or could perform if compensated.

But always lurking in the background for liberals has been the idea of getting "service" out of everybody and the full awareness that that will entail coercion in the form of conscription someday. Democrats are the main backers of comprehensive national service proposals in Congress and two Democrats, Charles Rangel and Jim McDermott, were the sponsors of the bills on the draft that the House voted down recently.

Meanwhile, the military (despite misreporting to the contrary) continues to meet and exceed its recruiting and re-enlistment quotas, even as the total size of the armed forces has been increased somewhat. Only the National Guard has failed, in August this year, to fully meet its re-enlistment quotas, largely, one suspects, because of recent unanticipated extensions of service in Iraq. The latter is a concern, though temporary, but it does not bear on the case for and against a resumption of a draft. Much more serious threats to enlistments and re-enlistments were experienced in the Clinton years when pay scales and health services were allowed to erode.

If anyone doubts what is going on here, he might simply examine who backs Kerry, and he will find that almost all the longtime advocates of national service (including many who wish to resume a draft) are among them. On the other stand nearly all of us who worked to introduce a volunteer military in the first place and have worked ever since to preserve it.

Polls show that military families will vote for Bush over Kerry by ratios of up to 3 to 1. Among other things, they know who wants a competent professional fighting force and who would allow it to degrade to the point that a draft became necessary.

It is demagogic, therefore, for Kerry to claim that it is Bush who would like to bring back the draft, not him. It is even more reprehensible that Kerry's friends in the media have refused to explain the background on this issue to a generation of voters who are too young not to be gulled by campaign propaganda.

Bruce Chapman, a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau, is president of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute.

:: John Kerry for President - A New Era of National Service ::
Amazing. John Kerry plans to draft High School students. It's on his website: "As part of his 100 day plan to change America, John Kerry will propose a comprehensive service plan that includes requiring mandatory service for high school students and four years of college tuition in exchange for two years of national service."

Kerry Mocks The American Flag - Click for Picture of The New Soldier Cover
General Vo Nguyen Gaip , the Commanding officer of the North Vietnamese Military and Bui Tin who served on the General Staff of the North Vietnam Army and received the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975 both claim that North Vietnam was poised to negotiate a surrender because of the Communist’s military failures during the 1968 Tet Offensive and thereafter. But because of the Anti-War movement in America (led by John Kerry and his lies) they felt that the Demonstrations “gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses."

"Kerry cousin C. Stewart Forbes' company won a $900 million contract from Vietnam after Sen. Kerry pushed to normalize relations.

The media for Kerry -- The Washington Times

http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20041021-100643-8508r

The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com

The media for Kerry
By Diana West
Published October 22, 2004

"Absolutely," most reporters want John Kerry to win the election, declares Newsweek's Evan Thomas, commenting on the media bias he says translates into "maybe" five extra points for the Democratic ticket at the polls. That's down from the 15 points Mr. Thomas first predicted Fourth Estate favor would bestow on Kerry-Edwards, but even five points could tip a race as close as this one.
Which is a chilling thought, but also a golden opportunity. It means that a vote for Bush-Cheney is not only a vote against Kerry-Edwards, but also a vote against Kerry-Edwards-CBS-CNN-New York Times. Are you incensed over Dan Rather's crude attempt to influence the presidential election with a sheaf of pathetic forgeries? Appalled by "Nightline's" Ted Koppel for using dictatorship-vetted sources in communist Vietnam to contradict the testimonies of decorated American veterans? Outraged by ABC's head-office directive to its reporters to go easier on John Kerry than George W. Bush, and not "reflexively and artificially hold both sides 'equally' accountable"? Don't get mad, vote Republican.
The fact is, never before have mainstream media (MSM) organizations, and I mean the hunters and gatherers of news, not its cooks and consumers, sunk so deep in the tank for a Democratic ticket. The election is days away, but vital questions about Mr. Kerry remain not just unanswered in MSM outlets, but unasked. This is evidence of the efficiency with which the only-selectively adversarial media have embraced the role of Democratic star-maker, not newsmaker.
"It's up to Kerry to defend himself, of course," ABC News political director Mark Halperin admits in a "1984"-style directive leaked to the Drudge Report. "But as one of the few news organizations with the skill and strength to help voters evaluate what the candidates are saying ..." -- gee, thanks a lot -- "now is the time for all of us to step up and do that right." And how's that done -- by covering for Mr. Kerry? Given what we still don't know about the candidate after practically incessant blah-blahing, including three debates, this becomes the inescapable conclusion. And I don't just mean de-emphasizing such Kerry facts as his inexplicable failure to attend three-quarters of his public Senate Intelligence Committee hearings. Or failing to ponder the coincidence that Kerry cousin C. Stewart Forbes' company won a $900 million contract from Vietnam after Sen. Kerry pushed to normalize relations.
Here we are, on the brink, possibly, of electing a self-confessed war criminal to the Oval Office -- a man who, as an American officer, parlayed with the enemy, and... nothing. No questions, no stories. No thoughts, no curiosity. We contemplate a new wartime leader whose political epiphany -- the famous Christmas in Cambodia, "seared, seared" into Mr. Kerry's memory -- never happened. Questions, stories in the MSM? Not a one. We consider trusting our very lives to a man who has consistently hewed to the wrong side of history, favoring appeasement and disarmament over democratic principle and strength, but we know nothing of his current thinking on those old positions.
How, for instance, does this American presidential candidate explain his place of honor in a Vietnamese war museum dedicated to an American defeat? Does Mr. Kerry believe the anti-war movement in which he figured so prominently bears any moral responsibility for the mass brutality -- executions, re-education camps, boat people -- that marked Hanoi's victory? Indeed, does Mr. Kerry still believe North Vietnam "liberated" South Vietnam, and that the conflict itself was not a front in the Cold War? We saw valedictory comments from Mr. Kerry on Ronald Reagan's death, but we have no idea whether he still reviles the Reagan years as a "moral blackness." We don't know because no one in the MSM has asked him. This glaring failure makes a mockery of the media. It leaves us gasping for facts. It also explains the volcanic eruption of alternative sources of campaign information like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the newsies of the blogosphere, and a slew of independent ads and documentaries, including "Stolen Honor." Such activity has injected vital blasts of oxygen into otherwise stilted coverage.
But in the land of the free and the free press, we shouldn't have to rely on the unique gumption of, say, a John O'Neill, the Swiftee spokesman who went so far as to write a best-selling book about John Kerry ("Unfit for Command") to publicize crucial information the MSM ignored. I remember well the veritable news blackout on the Swift Boat vets when they first assembled last spring in downtown Washington. The Associated Press didn't even send a correspondent, calling the group's press conference "old news"before it happened.
Whatever the final tally on Election Day, we, the people, need to take a good hard look at the MSM scorecard the day after.

Copyright © 2004 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.

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OK, I hate to stand up for Kerry, but...

KERRY CAN'T REINSTATE THE DRAFT!

"Though neither Kerry nor his campaign 'scare-mail' acknowledge it, no president can require compulsory military service. Our Constitution charges Congress with the responsibility to 'raise and support armies.' Short of a cataclysmic attack on the United States, no Congress is going to vote for conscription -- particularly since it would inevitably force our daughters to fight." --Oliver North

The bottom line is Kerry might get us in so much trouble we'll wish Congress would implement the draft, but he can't do it on his own. If he does, we have a revolution.

In addition, none of this considers how the idea of a draft horrifies the Army, which still had draft-spawned discipline and training problems years after the conscription was over. The last thing they want is a bunch of whiny Michael Moore-ized slackers screwing up their top-notch volunteer military. See the 11 October issue of Newsweek for an article called "Rumors...and that's all they are" that debunks not only the Bush draft rumor, but the idea that there will be any need or desire for it by either President.

We will be in big, big trouble if Kerry gets in, but the trouble will have to be almost unprecedentedly HUGE before Congress will consider a draft.

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