And like you, I ask which leader is
it today that has the vision, the willpower and, yes, the backbone to best
protect my family?
The clear answer to that question has placed me in this hall with you
tonight. For my family is more important than my party. There is but one man to
whom I am willing to entrust their future and that man's name is George Bush.
In the summer of 1940, I was an 8-year-old boy living in a remote little
Appalachian valley. Our country was not yet at war, but even we children knew
that there were some crazy men across the ocean who would kill us if they could.
President Roosevelt, in his speech that summer, told America "all private
plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public
danger."
In 1940, Wendell Wilkie was the Republican nominee. And there is no better
example of someone repealing their "private plans" than this good man.
He gave Roosevelt the critical support he needed for a peacetime draft, an
unpopular idea at the time. And he made it clear that he would rather lose the
election than make national security a partisan campaign issue.
Shortly before Wilkie died, he told a friend, that if he could write his own
epitaph and had to choose between "here lies a president" or
"here lies one who contributed to saving freedom," he would prefer the
latter. Where are such statesmen today? Where is the bipartisanship in this
country when we need it most?
Now, while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of
Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the
Democrat's manic obsession to bring down our Commander in Chief.
What has happened to the party I've spent my life working in? I can remember
when Democrats believed that it was the duty of America to fight for freedom
over tyranny. It was Democratic President Harry Truman who pushed the Red Army
out of Iran, who came to the aid of Greece when Communists threatened to
overthrow it, who stared down the Soviet blockade of West Berlin by flying in
supplies and saving the city.
Time after time in our history, in the face of great danger, Democrats and
Republicans worked together to ensure that freedom would not falter. But not
today.
Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today's
Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator. And nothing
makes this Marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather
than liberators.
Tell that to the one-half of Europe that was freed because Franklin Roosevelt
led an army of liberators, not occupiers.
Tell that to the lower half of the Korean Peninsula that is free because Dwight
Eisenhower commanded an army of liberators, not occupiers.
Tell that to the half a billion men, women and children who are free today from
the Baltics to the Crimea, from Poland to Siberia, because Ronald Reagan rebuilt
a military of liberators, not occupiers.
Never in the history of the world has any soldier sacrificed more for the
freedom and liberty of total strangers than the American soldier. And, our
soldiers don't just give freedom abroad, they preserve it for us here at home.
For it has been said so truthfully that it is the soldier, not the reporter, who
has given us the freedom of the press.
It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.
It is the soldier, not the agitator, who has given us the freedom to protest.
It is the soldier who salutes the flag, serves beneath the flag, whose coffin is
draped by the flag, who gives that protester the freedom to abuse and burn that
flag.
No one should dare to even think about being the Commander in Chief of this
country if he doesn't believe with all his heart that our soldiers are
liberators abroad and defenders of freedom at home.
But don't waste your breath telling that to the leaders of my party today. In
their warped way of thinking America is the problem, not the solution.
They don't believe there is any real danger in the world except that which
America brings upon itself through our clumsy and misguided foreign policy.
It is not their patriotism — it is their judgment that has been so sorely
lacking. They claimed Carter's pacifism would lead to peace. They were wrong.
They claimed Reagan's defense buildup would lead to war. They were wrong.
And, no pair has been more wrong, more loudly, more often than the two Senators
from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry.
Together, Kennedy/Kerry have opposed the very weapons system that won the
Cold War and that is now winning the War on Terror.
Listing all the weapon systems that Senator Kerry tried his best to shut down
sounds like an auctioneer selling off our national security but Americans need
to know the facts.
The B-1 bomber, that Senator Kerry opposed, dropped 40 percent of the bombs in
the first six months of Operation Enduring Freedom.
The B-2 bomber, that Senator Kerry opposed, delivered air strikes against the
Taliban in Afghanistan and Hussein's command post in Iraq.
The F-14A Tomcats, that Senator Kerry opposed, shot down Khadifi's Libyan MIGs
over the Gulf of Sidra.
The modernized F-14D, that Senator Kerry opposed, delivered missile strikes
against Tora Bora.
The Apache helicopter, that Senator Kerry opposed, took out those Republican
Guard tanks in Kuwait in the Gulf War.
The F-15 Eagles, that Senator Kerry opposed, flew cover over our Nation's
Capital and this very city after 9/11.
I could go on and on and on: against the Patriot Missile that shot down Saddam
Hussein's scud missiles over Israel; against the Aegis air-defense cruiser;
against the Strategic Defense Initiative; against the Trident missile; against,
against, against.
This is the man who wants to be the Commander in Chief of our U.S. Armed Forces?
U.S. forces armed with what? Spitballs?
Twenty years of votes can tell you much more about a man than twenty weeks of
campaign rhetoric.
Campaign talk tells people who you want them to think you are. How you vote
tells people who you really are deep inside.
Senator Kerry has made it clear that he would use military force only if
approved by the United Nations.
Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending. I want Bush to
decide.
John Kerry, who says he doesn't like outsourcing, wants to outsource our
national security.
That's the most dangerous outsourcing of all. This politician wants to be
leader of the free world.
Free for how long?
For more than 20 years, on every one of the great issues of freedom and
security, John Kerry has been more wrong, more weak and more wobbly than any
other national figure.
As a war protester, Kerry blamed our military.
As a Senator, he voted to weaken our military. And nothing shows that more
sadly and more clearly than his vote this year to deny protective armor for our
troops in harms way, far away.
George Bush understands that we need new strategies to meet new threats.
John Kerry wants to re-fight yesterday's war. George Bush believes we have to
fight today's war and be ready for tomorrow's challenges. George Bush is
committed to providing the kind of forces it takes to root out terrorists.
No matter what spider hole they may hide in or what rock they crawl under.
George Bush wants to grab terrorists by the throat and not let them go to get a
better grip.
From John Kerry, they get a "yes-no-maybe" bowl of mush that can only
encourage our enemies and confuse our friends.
I first got to know George Bush when we served as governors together. I admire
this man. I am moved by the respect he shows the first lady, his unabashed love
for his parents and his daughters, and the fact that he is unashamed of his
belief that God is not indifferent to America.
I can identify with someone who has lived that line in "Amazing
Grace," "Was blind, but now I see," and I like the fact that he's
the same man on Saturday night that he is on Sunday morning.
He is not a slick talker but he is a straight shooter and, where I come from,
deeds mean a lot more than words.
I have knocked on the door of this man's soul and found someone home, a
God-fearing man with a good heart and a spine of tempered steel.
The man I trust to protect my most precious possession: my family.
This election will change forever the course of history, and that's not any
history. It's our family's history.
The only question is how. The answer lies with each of us. And, like many
generations before us, we've got some hard choosing to do.
Right now the world just cannot afford an indecisive America. Fainthearted
self-indulgence will put at risk all we care about in this world.
In this hour of danger our President has had the courage to stand up. And
this Democrat is proud to stand up with him.
Thank you.
God Bless this great country and God Bless George W. Bush.
Anything to get elected
Charles Krauthammer
October 15, 2004
WASHINGTON -- After the second presidential debate, in which John Kerry
used the word ``plan" 24 times, I said on television that Kerry has a plan
for everything except curing psoriasis. I should have known there is no
parodying Kerry's pandering. It turned out days later that the Kerry campaign
has a plan -- nay, a promise -- to cure paralysis. What is the plan? Vote
for Kerry.
I'm not making this up. I couldn't. This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in
Newton, Iowa: ``If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that
we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going
to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.''
In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of
demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately raising for personal
gain false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable.
Where does one begin to deconstruct this outrage?
First, the inability of the human spinal cord to regenerate is one of the great
mysteries of biology. The answer is not remotely around the corner. It could
take a generation to unravel. To imply, as Edwards did, that it is imminent if
only you elect the right politicians is scandalous.
Second, if the cure for spinal cord injury comes, we have no idea where it will
come from. There are many lines of inquiry. Stem cell research is just one of
many possibilities, and a very speculative one at that. For 30 years I have
heard promises of miracle cures for paralysis (including my own, suffered as a
medical student). The last fad, fetal tissue transplants, was thought to be a
sure thing. Nothing came of it.
As a doctor by training, I've known better than to believe the hype -- and have
tried in my own counseling of the newly spinal-cord injured to place the
possibility of cure in abeyance. I advise instead to concentrate on making a
life (and a very good life it can be) with the hand one is dealt. The greatest
enemy of this advice has been the snake-oil salesmen promising a miracle around
the corner. I never expected a candidate for vice president to be one of them.
Third, the implication that Christopher Reeve was prevented from getting out of
his wheelchair by the Bush stem cell policies is a travesty.
Bush is the first president to approve federal funding for stem cell research.
There are 22 lines of stem cells now available, up from one just two years ago.
As Dr. Leon Kass, head of the President's Council on Bioethics, has written,
there are 3,500 shipments of stem cells waiting for anybody who wants them.
Edwards and Kerry constantly talk of a Bush ``ban'' on stem cell research. This
is false. There is no ban. You want to study stem cells? You get them from the
companies that have the cells and apply to the National Institutes of Health for
the federal funding.
In his Aug. 7 radio address to the nation, John Kerry referred not once but four
times to the ``ban'' on stem cell research instituted by Bush. At the time,
Christopher Reeve was alive, so not available for posthumous exploitation. But
Ronald Reagan was available, having recently died of Alzheimer's.
So what does Kerry do? He begins his radio address with the disgraceful claim
that the stem cell ``ban'' is standing in the way of an Alzheimer's cure.
This is an outright lie. The President's Council on Bioethics, on which I sit,
had one of the world's foremost experts on Alzheimer's, Dr. Dennis Selkoe from
Harvard, give us a lecture on the newest and most promising approaches to
solving the Alzheimer's mystery. Selkoe reported remarkable progress in
biochemically clearing the ``plaque'' deposits in the brain that lead to
Alzheimer's. He ended his presentation without the phrase ``stem cells'' having
crossed his lips.
So much for the miracle cure. Ronald D.G. McKay, a stem cell researcher at NIH,
has admitted publicly that stem cells as an Alzheimer's cure are a fiction, but
that ``people need a fairy tale.'' Kerry and Edwards certainly do. They are
shamelessly exploiting this fairy tale, having no doubt been told by their
pollsters that stem cells play well politically for them.
Politicians have long promised a chicken in every pot. It is part of the game.
It is one thing to promise ethanol subsidies here, dairy price controls there.
But to exploit the desperate hopes of desperate people with the promise of
Christ-like cures is beyond the pale.
There is no apologizing for Edwards' remark. It is too revealing. There is
absolutely nothing the man will not say to get elected.