Democrats play loose with facts

Daily Breeze (Torrance, CA) ^ | 09/25/2002 | Stan Katten

[hauerf]

With the midterm election less than two months away, the Democrats have turned on their demagoging spigot full force — same old accusations with some new assaults on the economy, the president and vice president. It is amazing that they can keep straight faces as they mouth these “party-line” untruths and distortions and that anyone believes them.

Though the Democrats have been wailing for the last three or four national elections that the “Republicans are going to cancel Medicare and destroy Social Security,” neither has happened and neither will. (To try to do so would be political suicide.)

They have tried to blame everything in sight, such as the Enron scandal, on the Bush administration without much success. In their latest attempted ambush, Democrats are demanding congressional approval before the president can take any action against Iraq, claiming there is insufficient information on the threat. They overlook 16 U.N. resolutions, all ignored by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, and past congressional support for former President Clinton’s action against Iraq (however weak) in 1998.

Sen. Tom Daschle and company prefer to play politics with national security.

President Bush’s Sept. 12 U.N. General Assembly address laid out in great detail Hussein’s history of attacking his neighbors, using chemical weapons, breaking every aspect of the Gulf War surrender agreement, and playing hide-and-seek with and then expelling U.N. weapons inspectors. Hussein continues his attempts to build biological and nuclear weapons.

Reactions to the Bush speech from Western European allies were positive. Yet Daschle and hard-line Democrats, together with Iraqi officials, are about the only ones still in doubt or denial. Now Democrats who have been screaming for congressional debate on Iraq have decided there really is no hurry (meaning the politics turned unfavorable), so Daschle wants to defer debate until after the election.

Earlier, the Democratic whipping boy, Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, delivered his “sermon” at a DNC meeting in Las Vegas. He blamed the Bush administration for everything from the president’s ethics to the stock market downturn, the recession and faltering recovery, corporate fraud and deficit. He carefully forgot to mention the necessity to rebuild a military and intelligence apparatus debilitated by the Clinton-Gore administration and apparently never heard of the war on terrorism or the need to increase spending on homeland security. But don’t bother the Democrats with the facts.

According to Al Gore, all our economic problems are due to the Bush administration because he and Clinton handed Bush the strongest economy in 50 years. The facts are that the economy began to contract and the stock market began to slide in mid-2000, well before Bush took office. But don’t bother the Democrats with the facts.

Daschle asked how Bush could foster more corporate honesty when he practiced these same deceptions and insider trading himself. Well-known since the first of several investigations when George Bush Sr. was president, Bush did neither. But don’t bother the Democrats with the facts.

Dick Cheney, who resigned as president of Halliburton to campaign for vice president, is accused of selling his stock before the fortunes of the company turned sour and of being CEO when the company booked uncollected project overruns and overstating earnings. The facts are that Cheney had to divest himself of potential conflicts of interest before taking office, and Halliburton’s handling of overruns was exactly what the Internal Revenue Service requires of the construction industry. But don’t bother the Democrats with the facts.

Democrats and their media supporters claim the Bush administration has no economic policies, and the country is adrift. The facts are that the Bush administration and the Republicans pushed through a large tax cut in 2001 that many economists say provided needed impetus to the recovery and continue to push for speeding up the cuts, stretched out over seven years by Democrats, and making permanent the cuts that revert to 2000 rates in 2010.

Bush spoke favorably about increasing allowable capital-loss tax deductions, eliminating double taxation on dividends and making permanent the elimination of the marriage penalty and death tax. He has been using his bully pulpit most of the year to talk up the economy and the stock market, which is about all a president can do, other than propose legislation. But don’t bother the Democrats with the facts.

After decrying the forecast federal deficit because of the alleged Bush mismanagement and tax cut, the Senate Democrats passed a huge farm giveaway bill, loaded the defense bill with all manner of pork and wanted to pass a Medicare prescription drug universal benefit costing about $650 billion through 2010. But don’t bother the Democrats with the facts.

Paraphrasing the old adage, when elections approach, Democrats’ memories go blank and their fancy turns to fiction and demagoguery. Hopefully, American voters’ memories are much better and they can discriminate between fiction and facts.

Stan Katten is a former RAND Corp. analyst and a free-lance writer in San Pedro.

[The G Man]

Weapons of Mass Deception

[solo gringo]

Demodummy never change IMHO we need to put all of them in the unemployment lines.