October 13, 2004

Who’s He Kidding? Kerry Pretends not to be a Tax-And-Spend Liberal

The Washington Times shows that Kerry’s claims of fiscal conservativism are nonsense:

...despite the fact that federal education spending under Mr. Bush has increased more than 80 percent, rising from $35 billion in fiscal 2001 to a projected $64 billion in the current fiscal year, Mr. Kerry lamented that the president has “underfunded” education by at least $28 billion. His solution is to propose education “initiatives” costing an additional $207 billion over 10 years. Last year, Mr. Kerry opposed the Medicare prescription-drug plan, not because this self-styled budget hawk objected to the plan’s estimated $400 billion cost over 10 years. Having voted for a Democratic alternative the year before that would have cost 50 percent more, he wanted to spend more, much more.

In fact, Mr. Kerry’s presidential policy agenda just overflows with big-ticket spending items. Last week, for example, the deficit-fighting Concord Coalition released a report complaining that Mr. Kerry’s signature 10-year, $653 billion health-care proposal had so many “back-loaded costs” that it “grows by 50 percent between 2009 and 2014,” a period that conveniently follows his dubious pledge to cut the deficit in half by 2009. Even accepting at face value Mr. Kerry’s claim that his health-care plan would realize $300 billion in savings (a review by the American Enterprise Institute found that its net cost would actually exceed $1.5 trillion over a decade), the Concord Coalition concluded that the Kerry health plan “would assume significant budgetary risk.”

...Contrary to repeated assertions by Mr. Kerry, the Concord Coalition’s analysis concluded that Mr. Bush tax cuts “did not create the long-term [fiscal] problem and rolling them back would not provide a solution, especially if the revenues gained are redirected into costly new programs.”

...It is worth recalling that 10 years ago the Concord Coalition issued a report card criticizing Mr. Kerry’s budget votes, which earned him an “F.” Visibly angry (according to the Boston Globe), Mr. Kerry called the coalition’s scorecard “irresponsible” because it failed to reflect “my support for a 50-cent increase in the gas tax.” Mr. Kerry has since disavowed such a policy. But given his spending proposals and the well-earned recognition he has repeatedly received as the Senate’s most liberal member, how can voters reasonably believe that this tax-and-spend liberal will abandon the philosophy he has enthusiastically embraced for more than three decades?

Christopher Hitchens writes about “The Buried Truth”, a new book by Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, Saddam Hussein’s chief nuclear physicist:

It’s a good coincidence that the Duelfer report appears in the same week as The Bomb In My Garden, a memoir by Saddam Hussein’s chief nuclear physicist. Between them, or taken together, the two bodies of evidence enable two quite different yet quite compatible conclusions. The first is that the Saddam regime was more disarmed than perhaps even its leadership knew. The second is that it would have been very unwise to proceed on any assumption except that of its latent danger.

....Apart from its insight into the workings of the Saddam nuclear project, it provides a haunting account of the atmosphere of sheer evil that permeated every crevice of Iraqi life under the old regime. It is morally impossible to read it and not rejoice at that system’s ignominious and long-overdue removal.

Dr. Obeidi was “interviewed” by many inspectors in the run-up to last year’s war under the same conditions of open blackmail that Saddam had imposed on all his other scientists, and they got no nearer finding out the truth than one would have expected.

Having been forcibly recruited, with his family as hostage, into the Saddam nuclear program, Obeidi describes the hysterical pressure exerted by the crime family that ran Iraq. Almost weeping with fear, scientists were lashed into prostituting their skills in the rush for a usable nuke.

...The subsequent arrival of the inspectors meant that Saddam, despite elaborate deceptions and dummyings (very well-described by Obeidi) was never able to get back up to speed again. His regime also began to suffer from interclan warfare with the defection of the Kamel brothers to Jordan and the further exposure of the Baathist arms racket. However, there was a secret that the Kamel brothers were not able to betray. Under the orders of Qusai Hussein, Dr. Obeidi had buried a huge barrel in his back garden. The barrel contained Iraq’s crowning achievement in perverted physics: the components of an actual centrifuge for the enrichment of uranium. It also contained all the hard-won printed instructions and expertise on the subject. Dr. Obeidi was “interviewed” by many inspectors in the run-up to last year’s war under the same conditions of open blackmail that Saddam had imposed on all his other scientists, and they got no nearer finding out the truth than one would have expected.

His conclusion is that, given an improvement in the economic and political climate, Saddam could and would have done one of two things: reconstitute the program or share it with others. ...We know from the Kay report that, as late as March of last year, Saddam’s envoys were meeting North Korea’s team in Damascus and trying to buy missiles off the shelf. It would never have stopped: this ceaseless ambition to acquire the means of genocide. If anything, we underestimated that aspect of it.

But to John Kerry, all that’s just a nuisance. Let’s get back to the days, says Kerry, when we regarded all that as just a nuisance. Kerry’s strategy: 1) Find sand. 2) Stick head in it. 3) Get nuked. 4) Blame somebody. Thanks, Senator, but no thanks. Sell that snake oil somewhere else.

Conclusion (as I’ve noted before ): if a nation is trying to get you nuked, and your president regards that as a nuisance, you are in big trouble.


Update. See also these articles regarding Kerry’s “nuisance” speech:

Kerry’s Nuisance Approach to Terrorists, Wrongly Assumes that No Nations Support Them.