Matt Margolis

The Red Sox are going to the World Series….

So, is John Kerry going to tie this into his next campaign speech? Probably. Considering he’s such a big fan, he’s the only Sox fan who remembers “Manny Ortez” playing for the team.

This morning I watched the beginning of Meet The Press, featuring Bush’s campaign manager Ken Mehlman, and Kerry’s senior strategist Bob Shrum.

One of the things that repeatedly bothers me about the Kerry campaign is their pre-9/11 mindset, and Bob Shrum made no effort to hide that mindset today.

Recycling lines we’ve heard John Kerry saying recently on the campaign trail, Bob Shrum suggested that the war in Iraq was a diversion from the “real war on terror,” that Osama bin Laden was let go in Tora Bora, and that we’re basically not going after the ones who attacked us.

Great rhetoric Mr. Shrum, I’m sure it gets your partisan crowds going wild, but all far from the truth.

For starters, Retired General Tommy Franks, who planned both the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq, has explain that John Kerry’s assertions are false. I do not know how many times Tommy Franks has to explain this, but clearly it has not penetrated the Kerry campaign yet. Franks has explained what happened in Tora Bora, from the fact that U.S. troops were there, and the job was not “left to Afghan warlords” and that there was no intelligence that said Osama bin Laden was definitely there, in fact various sources of intel suggested bin Laden was in a number of places.

Not that the Kerry campaign cares that it continues to lie to the American people.

Regardless, Shrum made the point that Saddam didn’t attack us, and that the 9/11 Commission said there was no connection between Saddam and 9/11. Shrum made a juvenile remark to Ken Mehlman that perhaps only he, President Bush and Vice-President Cheney haven’t read the 9/11 Commission’s final report.

For one thing, the 9/11 Commission Report goes into much detail about various connections between Saddam’s regime and Al Qaeda. I have a variety of pages of my copy of the 9/11 Commission Report flagged that go into these known connections, should the Kerry campaign be interested in actually reading them.

What is most disturbing about this attitude by the Kerry campaign is that it reflects a pre-9/11 mindset. Kerry and his campaign surrogates have made it clear that they think any terrorist who did not attack us on 9/11 is not worth going after. That’s why you see them carefully choosing the language they speak of the issue of Iraq, Al Qaeda and 9/11.

When you hear a Kerry campaign person or Kerry himself talk about the connections, they will always say there was no connection “between Saddam and 9/11“. They do not say “between Saddam and al Qaeda.”

Why not? Because the connections between Saddam and al Qaeda are numerous and documented. But John Kerry doesn’t care about that.

I’d like to ask John Kerry why he thinks connections to Al Qaeda do not merit action on our part?
I’d like to ask John Kerry why he thinks the only terrorists in the world who want to kill us are Al Qaeda.

George W. Bush on September 11, 2001 said, “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” On September 20, 2001, Bush told our country “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”

John Kerry clearly thinks the war on terror begins and ends solely with Al Qaeda, if not just Osama bin Laden himself. He does not see the big picture. The capture or killing of Osama bin Laden will not end terrorism throughout the world. The war on terror is a global effort, fought on many fronts in many nations. John Kerry sees the war on terror as being about just one man, or just one group, in just one country.

If John Kerry wants to fight a limited war on terror focusing on just one person, then good for him, but he can’t think we’re going to let him be our Commander-in-Chief with that attitude.

John Kerry pre-9/11 mindset will be the worst possible setback to the war on terror, yet his campaign regularly chooses to remind the country of their dangerous attitude. On November 2nd, they’ll Americans reject that attitude, and vote for George W. Bush, who wants to eliminate all terrorism, not just a small part of it.

Of course, George W. Bush actually sees terrorism as a real threat, not just a “nuisance” like John Kerry does.

A Blogs For Bush reader has informed me of something quite interesting about a story John Kerry told last night at the debate.

When asked about what he’s learned from the strong women in his life, Kerry made a point to shift his answer from discussing Teresa and his daughters to telling a story about his late mother:

Can I say, if I could just say a word about a woman that you didn’t ask about, but my mom passed away a couple years ago, just before I was deciding to run, and she was in the hospital and I went in to talk to her and tell her what I was thinking of doing. And she looked at me from her hospital bed and she just looked at me and she said, “Remember, integrity, integrity, integrity.” Those are the three words that she left me with.

Did that at all sound familiar to you? It did to me, but I couldn’t figure it out… Well, here’s why it is familiar.

Vietnam veteran John Rassman, who joined Kerry on the campaign trail earlier this year, said something remarkably similar … or should I say identical:

After serving with John Kerry, a veteran says Kerry is better suited to serve in the White House. Jim Rassman was in Eau Claire on Tuesday to campaign for Kerry. Rassman says Kerry saved his life when he pulled him out of a river during a battle in Vietnam. Rassman says he voted for Bush in 2000, but says he doesn’t plan to back the President this time around. “There are three character traits John has that George Bush does not have and they are integrity, integrity, integrity. I trust John Kerry implicitly. I don’t trust a thing George Bush tells me,” said Rassman.

Is John Kerry so lacking in integrity that he actually borroed Rassman’s quote and falsely attribute it to his own dying mother to make a political statement?

Is there anything John Kerry won’t do to influence voters?

New Jersey, once solid Democrat territory, is in play this election, and the Bush campaign is prepared to fight for its electoral votes this election.

The campaign of President Bush has identified New Jersey as a target of “opport
unity” for Republicans after polls showed Bush and Kerry in a close race in the state, though the senator from Massachusetts holds a slim lead.

“We’re doing well here,” Cheney said to cheers at a rally in Medford. “The signs are good here in New Jersey.”

Bush and Cheney lost New Jersey by double-digits in 2000 and the state has gone Democratic in the past three presidential elections.

But the Bush campaign hopes to capitalize on its advantage in statewide polls on the issue of terrorism. New Jersey lost nearly 700 residents in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Democrats dismissed Cheney’s visit as a feint aimed at drawing Kerry’s attention and resources away from the real battleground states.

That’s interesting. Democrats are miffed that they actually have to fight to keep New Jersey in the blue? The Kerry campaign may scoff at the idea that Bush and Cheney could carry the state, but recent visits to the New Jersey by Edwards suggests they know they have to defend New Jersey in order to keep it in their column. Clearly they aren’t happy having to spend valuable time and money defending a state that has been safe territory for their party in the past.

Jonathan over at Blogs For Bush has pointed out that while John Kerry says “the rich” should pay their fair share of taxes, Kerry himself has used loopholes to pay as little in taxes as possible.

Jason notes that John Kerry’s pledge to not raise taxes on people who make less than $200,000 was broken by his own proposed tax policy.

John Kerry’s perception of the war on terror has gotten increasingly disturbing throughout this campaign. He told us during his acceptance speech at the DNC he’d only hit the terrorists after were attacked. Now, he’s equating terrorism to prostitution and illegal gambling:

”We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance,” Kerry said. ”As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”

Terrorism a “nuisance”? Fighting terror is like fighting prostitution and illegal gambling?

Reality check for John Kerry: Terrorism is a real threat to our country, it is not a simple “nuisance” and it never will be. Clearly, John Kerry thinks that eventually we’ll just get to the point where we can just deal with the existence of terrorism and not eradicate it. How can John Kerry compare terrorists to a “nuisance” like gambling and prostitution?

Sorry Mr. Kerry, most Americans want us to fight the war on terror to win it, not reduce it to levels where we simply become complacent about it.

John Kerry thinks that terrorism is more a law enforcement issue, not a military operation.

John Kerry does not understand the threat to our country.
John Kerry does not plan to eliminate terrorism; he just wants to reduce it.
John Kerry is satisfied with terrorism being a mere “nuisance”… whatever that means.
John Kerry does not realize he’s running to be our Commander-In-Chief, not our chief prosecutor.

Make no mistake, John Kerry is the wrong person to lead the war on terror.

One of John Kerry’s major arguments on the economy has been obliterated by a recent study released today that states, “Fears that an exodus of white-collar jobs to India and other low-wage economies will lead to massive employment losses in rich countries such as the United States and Britain are not backed up by the facts.”

In a working paper for the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research, two International Monetary Fund staffers discover no evidence that job growth in Britain is slower in those sectors with a quicker pace of service outsourcing.

They also find no link between job losses and outsourcing in the United States because outsourcing, by boosting firms’ efficiency, creates enough new jobs to offset the initial losses.

IMF researchers Mary Amiti and Shang-Jin Wei say that “the risk of service outsourcing dramatically reducing job growth in the advanced economies has been greatly exaggerated.” The findings of this latest study concur with other assesments by analysts, “including Diana Farrell of McKinsey Global Institute in San Francisco and Catherine Mann of the Institute for International Economics in Washington.”

In fact, the report also says that the United States benefits from jobs that insourced into the country:

In balance-of-payments statistics, outsourced services count as imports. In the United States, such imports of computing and business services have roughly doubled since 1993 thanks to the growth of fast, cheap telecommunications but were still only 0.4 percent of gross domestic product in 2003.
…
“In sum, the notion that large industrialized countries outsource more intensely than other economies is not supported by the trade data,” Amiti and Wei write.

Amit and Wei also say that “the presumption that global service trade is dominated by lopsided one-way outsourcing from developed countries to developing countries is not supported by the data.”

This report absolutely destroys Kerry’s claims that outsourcing has hurt our economy.

But will John Kerry stop telling his lies? Doubtful. Last month when Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao tried to bring out the facts on outsourcing, John Kerry said, “I have no idea how they [the Bush Administration] could say that.”

Maybe because the facts all prove that John Kerry’s position on outsourcing is erroneous. The only outsourcing that has been bad for America has been John Kerry’s outsourcing of the truth. Kerry continually lies to the American people about our economy, and he is sure to continue to ignore the facts.

Saturday in Ohio, Bush blasted what will now be known as the Kerry Doctrine:

“In the debate Senator Kerry said something revealing when he laid out the Kerry Doctrine. He said America has to pass a ‘global test’ before we can use American troops to defend ourselves. … Senator Kerry’s approach to foreign policy would give foreign governments veto power over our own national security decisions. I take a different view. When our country is in danger, the President’s job is not to take an international poll. The President’s job is to defend America. I work every day with our friends and allies for the sake of freedom and peace, but our national security decisions must be made in the Oval Office, not foreign capitals.”

Who do you want leading the war on terror? Bush with the doctrine of preemption, or Kerry with his permission slip policies?

Click the image to download a large JPG version showing exactly what the Kerry Doctrine means. Or click here for the PDF version.