Who do you think would agonize more over instituting a military draft? Draft-dodger "President" Bush, whose family connections saved his precious rich white ass from having to go to Vietnam by getting him into the Texas Air National Guard -- from which he went AWOL -- or President Kerry, who volunteered to fight in Vietnam? "The best way to avoid a draft is to vote for me," Bush proclaimed today, and while no doubt he's a fucking expert on how to avoid a draft, in the early 1970s he was interested in protecting his own ass from the draft. Throughout his entire life Bush has gladly watched others go off to war for him, first in Vietnam and now in Iraq.
Draft under Bush a real possibility
A guest on Air America Radio (I don't remember his name) recently pointed out how the corporately controlled mainstream media love to be "fair and balanced" by reporting one of George W. Bush's many whoppers and then -- to be "fair and balanced" -- including a relatively minor inaccuracy of John Kerry's.
Usually, Kerry's inaccuracy is nothing compared to Bush's Great Big Fucking Lie, but apparently the reporter and/or the editor or editors are petrified that if they run a story only about Bush's Great Big Fucking Lie, Bush-lovin' AmeriNazis will pitch a fit about "liberal media bias." (They're probably right, but let the fucking fascists who are posing as patriots pitch their fucking fit.)
Here is an example of the phenomenon that the Air America Radio guest was talking about, a story from The Los Angeles Times today titled "Bush, Kerry Both Employ Fear to Get the Job Done":
SHEBOYGAN, Wis. -- With the campaign for president reaching the closing-argument stage, Republicans called Sen. John F. Kerry the most liberal candidate for president in history, while Kerry said President Bush's inept prosecution of the war in Iraq had left the "great potential" for a military draft.
The attempt by both sides [yesterday] to suggest that the other would put the country on risky ground seemed to fulfill what both sides had predicted: a harsh conclusion to an extremely close race.
Those messages promised to get plenty of airplay in the final 17 days of the campaign....
Kerry criticized Bush's military planning and raised the specter of a draft in an interview published [yesterday] by The Des Moines Register.
"With George Bush, the plan for Iraq is more of the same and the great potential of a draft," the Democratic nominee said.
Republicans accused the senator of "fear-mongering" for political gain, noting that the president had promised not to institute a draft. But Kerry spokesman Mike McCurry stood by the statement.
"The inevitable consequence of bearing the burden solely for protecting our vital interests and not working with our close allies," McCurry said, "is that you stretch the force almost to the point where you've got to do something."
The spokesman denied that Kerry was suggesting Bush had a "secret plan" for reinstituting the draft. But Kerry has been keeping the issue alive since he first raised it Sept. 22 at a town hall meeting in West Palm Beach, Fla.
A woman at the forum asked about rumors that the draft was coming back.
"If George Bush were to be re-elected, given the way he has gone about this war and given his avoidance of responsibility in North Korea and Iran and other places, it is possible," Kerry said.
He went on to pledge to "not reinstate the draft unless the United States of America faced the kind the global attack or conflagration where everybody in America understood through an open, democratic process we needed to defend this nation in that means."
Voting officials have noted the high number of young people registering to vote, and some experts have speculated that fear of the draft could be driving those numbers.
"If you go and talk to any college kid on any campus, or report out what people are nervous about, you run into this," McCurry told reporters [yesterday]. "I mean, we get asked this all the time… This is something people are very worried about."
In an effort to dispel concerns of a draft, Republicans in the House of Representatives last week hastily arranged to have the idea voted down, which it did overwhelmingly, 402 to 2.
It was not only Kerry who was sowing doubts, as the Republican National Committee launched a new attack ad about the senator from Massachusetts.
A narrator in the 30-second spot calls Kerry "the most liberal man in the Senate. The most liberal person to ever run for president." He goes on to say Kerry has voted to cut military and intelligence agencies.
"We live in a dangerous world that requires strong and steady leadership," the ad concludes. "John Kerry is a risky choice for America, a risk we cannot take."
The new GOP ad cites no evidence to back up the contention that Kerry is more liberal than every other presidential contender in the nation's history. Bush previously has cited a magazine analysis that said Kerry had the most liberal Senate voting record in 2003, although the results of that analysis may have been skewed because Kerry missed many votes as he campaigned for president.
Although Kerry is generally in the Senate's liberal wing, he has cast several significant votes on trade, balanced budgets, welfare and other matters that indicate a centrist streak. He voted to cut military and intelligence programs at various points in his career -- along with some Republicans at the end of the Cold War -- but also supported defense and intelligence bills far more often than not.
Kerry's campaign [yesterday] called the liberal label "misleading and disingenuous."
"John Kerry opposed his party to vote for deficit reduction, supported landmark welfare reform, supports middle-class tax cuts, led the fight to put 100,000 cops on the street and supports increasing our military," the campaign said in a statement....
Note that Kerry is right: If the warmongering-for-war-profiteers BushCheneyCorp gets another four years in the White House, a military draft is possible.
Do you think for two seconds that the members of the Bush regime -- who didn't give a fuck that Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore by more than half a million votes in 2000, and who then went on to prosecute a bogus invasion of Iraq against the world's wishes in March 2003 -- would lose a wink of sleep if they reneged on Bush's current campaign promise that there will not be a draft in his second term if he gets a second term?
"We will not have a draft. No matter what my opponent tries to tell people and scare them, we will have an all-volunteer army," Bush promised today.
If Bush is not outright lying, which is his usual mode, then at the minimum he is making a campaign promise that he cannot possibly know that he can keep.
As Kerry points out in the L.A. Times article, in extreme cases of war, such as a world war, the draft might be necessary. Unless Bush knows right now exactly what's going to happen in the world during the next four years, there is no way in hell that he can promise that he would never institute the draft.
And which scenario is more likely? President Kerry has to institute the draft because of a world war, or "President" Bush, in his second term, because he has decided to involve the United States of America in yet another bogus war of choice -- because hey, he's termed out and he and his henchpeople figure that they really can do whatever the fuck they want to do now -- overextends the U.S. military and thus institutes the draft?
Who do you think would think twice or thrice about instituting the draft? President Kerry, who volunteered to go to Vietnam and saw the horrors there and who was injured there in combat? Or "President" Bush, whose politician papa got his precious rich white ass into the Texas Air National Guard above the 500 others who were above him on the waiting list so that he wouldn't have to go to Vietnam -- and who then went AWOL even from the Texas Air National Guard?
So the L.A. Times article, in an apparent attempt to be "fair and balanced," equates the BushCheneyCorp "re"-election campaign's baseless, unsupported notion that Kerry is "a risky choice for America" -- along with its tired, meaningless "liberal" label (the Republicans really need to get some new material) -- with Kerry's very correct assertion that if Bush gets another term, a military draft is possible. With its headline alone -- "Bush, Kerry Both Employ Fear to Get the Job Done" -- the L.A. Times, which is usually much better than this, makes its false comparison.
The Times grievously fails its readers by leading them to believe that Kerry's accurate assessment that a military draft is a possibility in a second Bush term is the equivalent to the Bush regime "re"-election team's juvenile, hackneyed use of the word "liberal" as a put-down.
That's neither fair nor balanced. Nor accurate.
P.S. Demonstrating that the phenomenon I described above exists, today The Washington Post also ran a "fair and balanced" story on Kerry and Bush titled "Bush and Kerry Address Voters' Anxieties on Stump":
XENIA, Ohio, Oct. 16 -- The presidential candidates spread messages of anxiety in Ohio and Florida [today], as John F. Kerry accused President Bush of putting American lives at risk by failing to prevent the flu vaccine shortage and as Bush again said that his Democratic opponent cannot be trusted to protect the country from terrorists.
Speaking at a packed rally in a high school gym here, Kerry told Ohioans that Bush is to blame for the loss of half the nation's expected vaccine inventory for this flu season. He said the administration has forced health officials to make life-and-death decisions in dispensing dangerously tight supplies.
"We've got people standing in lines for hours on end -- some of them in their seventies and eighties -- hoping to be among the lucky ones," Kerry told the largely partisan crowd. "And every day, our health care workers struggle to make what could be life-or-death decisions as to who is going to get a shot." The Kerry campaign also released a new TV ad trumpeting this warning.
In Sunrise, Fla., meanwhile, Bush noted that this weekend marks the first anniversary of Kerry's vote against $87 billion for military and reconstruction spending in Iraq and Afghanistan -- a reminder of what the GOP calls the Democratic candidate's shifting positions on ousting Saddam Hussein. "In a time of great threat to our country, at a time of a great challenge in the world, the commander in chief must stand on principle, not the shifting sands of political convenience," Bush said.
With three new national polls, including a Washington Post tracking poll showing Bush making gains but the race still virtually tied, the two candidates have zeroed in on these two populous states as the most important battlegrounds for Nov. 2. Florida is the bigger prize, with 27 electoral votes, or 10 percent of what is needed to win the election; Ohio, historically a reliable GOP state, has 20 electoral votes. But that state has serious unemployment problems that make it too close to call.
Polls show that both candidates have a chance of winning Ohio and Florida. If one of the candidates captures both, he will likely win the White House, political strategists from both parties say.
After the rally here, Kerry took a winding bus tour of Ohio, stopping at a pumpkin patch in Jeffersonville, picking up a hunting license in Buchanan, attending a Roman Catholic Mass at St. Mary's church in Chillicothe and concluding his day at a family farm in Wakefield in the foothills of Appalachia.
Throughout the day, Kerry continued to batter Bush over the economy -- a stark reminder of how Kerry's political strategy differs greatly from Bush's focus on national security concerns. Showing a recent front-page story in a local newspaper quoting Treasury Secretary John W. Snow as saying job losses are a "myth," Kerry said the president is oblivious to reality. "Mr. President, the people who have lost jobs on your watch are not 'myths.' They are our neighbors; they are middle-class Americans," he said.
The only new twist in Kerry's speech was his attack on Bush over this season's flu vaccine, an issue grabbing headlines in newspapers across the country.
The government announced less than two weeks ago that nearly half of the country's anticipated supply -- 46 million to 48 million doses -- was contaminated, and rendered unusable, at a plant in Britain. During last week's final presidential debate, Bush said healthy Americans should forgo shots for the flu, which kills an estimated 36,000 Americans each year, to help ease the shortage. Neither Bush nor Kerry has received a flu shot this season.
According to Kerry, Bush was first tipped off about the impending crisis three years ago but refused to act. "It's just business as usual with George W. Bush: You got to ignore it, deny it, then try to hide it, and then say you would do it the same way," he said. Various groups have warned of potential shortages for years; British officials say the U.S. government was warned in mid-September of possible disruptions at the Liverpool plant.
The cause of the public health crisis is much more complicated, some experts say. Most pharmaceutical companies refuse to manufacture the flu vaccine because sales are unpredictable, profits are often minimal and costly consumer lawsuits are always possible. The United States once had multiple sources of the vaccine, but today the country has only two major suppliers, leaving Americans vulnerable to dangerous disruptions like the current one....
At the rally, Kerry offered little detail as to how he would prevent future shortages, other than promising a new strategy. The Democratic nominee had not addressed the flu vaccine issue as a presidential candidate until the shortage was announced on Oct. 5, according to Stephanie Cutter, a Kerry spokeswoman. Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), Kerry's running mate, spoke in December 2003 about the importance of maintaining adequate supplies....
Bush continued his aggressive appeal to his most conservative supporters, using the word "liberal" four times at a rally outside Fort Lauderdale, where his star-spangled campaign bus, with red and blue lights flashing, pulled into a darkened arena.
A Washington Post poll shows the candidates even in Florida, where early voting will begin on Monday. Bush made three stops there [today], and planned four more stops on Monday and Tuesday in hopes of winning the state by more than his 537-vote margin in 2000. The president was accompanied at each stop by first lady Laura Bush and by his younger brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who said he was "proud of my commander in chief, and my brother."
Edwards was in suburban Miami [today], kicking off the Democratic ticket's 12-city, five-day tour of the state. At a rally in Miami Gardens, he stepped up his rhetoric, saying that Republicans will be "up to their old tricks" and potentially engage in voter fraud to win the state's 27 electoral votes.
"We know what's coming. Republicans are already up to it," Edwards said to the largely black crowd, prompting a wave of boos. Edwards was responding to news reports here that suggested that Jeb Bush ignored advice to abandon a flawed election voter list before it went out to county election offices, even after he was warned by state officials that some voters, mostly black, could be disenfranchised.
Again, the flu vaccine shortage is a serious, real issue, but because the Post lumps it together with the Bush campaign's tired rhetoric that Kerry can't be a good commander in chief (this coming from the commander in chief who presided over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal) -- and slaps the headline "Bush and Kerry Address Voters' Anxieties on Stump" on it -- the importance of the flu vaccine shortage is lost, because, under the reporters' interpretation of events, the story becomes just about presidential candidates trying to spook voters. Because the Post reporters were so damned bent on being "fair and balanced," they deemed both Bush and Kerry fear-mongers -- whether that is the case or not.
5:35:47 PM 
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