Tuesday, October 26, 2004

All the News That Fits

Senator Kerry continues to add more whoppers to his already impressive repertoire. In addition to his prevarications about secret Bush plans to reinstate the draft, suppress the black vote, and take away social security, to name just a few of his recent flights of fancy, he has added two new fictional claims. He insists now that prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom he met with the members of the U.N. Security Council and held in-depth discussions with them on the crisis, a claim that the representatives of the relevant nations have flatly denied, and he is also currently resurrecting a bit of phony news from the spring of 2003 and presenting it not only as if it is a recent development but also as if it were true.

In fact, it's neither. The allegation he's making is that 380 tons of high explosives were looted from a storage facility in Iraq and that this shows the incompetence of George Bush as Commander in Chief. Actually what it shows is the desperation of the left in general and Kerry in particular to find anything with which they can bamboozle the ignorant to get them to vote for the Democrats.

The fact is that when our troops first arrived at the facility on their march to Baghdad in May 2003 the munitions had already been removed (See Kerry Spot for the details). These explosives, which had been identified by the I.A.E.A. and sealed prior to the invasion, were not there when we arrived. Saddam had probably trucked it to Syria before the outbreak of hostilities. How this reflects on the competency of the president is something Senator Kerry has not yet explained.

Kerry, of course, wants the voters to think that the looting occured after the facility was under our control, but there's no evidence to support this and lots of evidence against. There's also a huge logistical problem involved in trying to move that much material under the noses of the American military. Captain's Quarters has the math involved in undertaking such a heist.

A worse aspect of this is not just that Kerry continues to fault our troops and the President for the missing ordinance, but that the New York Times dusts this story off right before the election in order to discredit Bush.

That's dishonest enough, but there's even worse. CBS, the network that aired Dan Rather's fatuous forgeries a few weeks ago in an attempt to make Bush look like he'd disobeyed orders while serving in the National Guard, was planning to run the story on the missing explosives on October 31st so that the Republicans wouldn't have time to respond to it.

If anyone has demonstrated incompetence in these last months it has been John Kerry and his allies in the liberal media who have shown that they are utterly incapable of telling the truth. They keep trying, like Wile E. Coyote, to destroy the road runner, only to have their stupid lies repeatedly blow up in their faces.

Why anyone trusts either the paper of Jayson Blair, the network of Dan Rather, or the candidate these media outlets endorse to provide them with the truth is perhaps a question only a psychiatrist can answer.