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usmc4669
03-14-04, 04:17 PM
John Kerry had just pumped up a huge crowd in downtown West Palm Beach, promising to make the state a battleground for his quest to oust President Bush, when a local television journalist posed the question that any candidate with Florida ambitions should expect:

What will you do about Cuba?

As the presumptive Democratic nominee, Kerry was ready with the bravado appropriate for a challenger who knows that every answer carries magnified importance in the state that put President Bush into office by just 537 votes.

''I'm pretty tough on Castro, because I think he's running one of the last vestiges of a Stalinist secret police government in the world,'' Kerry told WPLG-ABC 10 reporter Michael Putney in an interview to be aired at 11:30 this morning.

Then, reaching back eight years to one of the more significant efforts to toughen sanctions on the communist island, Kerry volunteered: ``And I voted for the Helms-Burton legislation to be tough on companies that deal with him.''

It seemed the correct answer in a year in which Democratic strategists think they can make a play for at least a portion of the important Cuban-American vote -- as they did in 1996 when more than three in 10 backed President Clinton's reelection after he signed the sanctions measure written by Sen. Jesse Helms and Rep. Dan Burton.

There is only one problem: Kerry voted against it.

Is he pulling a Mickley Mouse on us again?

namgrunt
03-15-04, 01:12 AM
Too bad the reporter didn't have that voting record information at the tip of his or her fingers. Of course, I'm presuming the TV reporter was being honest and objective, and that the facts were checked before the film crew showed up at the rally.

Semper Fi!

usmc4669
03-15-04, 08:52 AM
BY MICHAEL PUTNEY

mputney@local10.com


Hollywood, 8:45 a.m. About 200 people are lined up outside the Martin Luther King Community Center. A like number are already inside, buzzing over the imminent arrival of John Kerry. We're in a black neighborhood, but most of the people here are white. Virtually all the blacks in the auditorium are artfully seated on risers behind where the candidate will stand so they'll be seen in all the TV shots. It's political theater, and they're the principal props.

usmc4669
03-15-04, 09:21 AM
BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

letters@charleskrauthammer.com


Look. I know it is shooting French in a barrel. But when yet another insufferable penseur -- first Chirac, then de Villepin, now the editor of Le Monde -- starts lecturing Americans on how they ought to conduct themselves in the world, the rules of decorum are suspended.

In an article in The Wall Street Journal, Jean-Marie Colombani, who wrote the famous Sept. 12, 2001, Le Monde editorial We are all Americans, gives us the usual more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger lament about America's sins: We loved you on Sept. 11. We were all with you in Afghanistan. But, oh, what have you done in Iraq?

This requires some parsing. We loved you on Sept. 11 means: We like Americans when they are victims, on their knees and bleeding. We just don't like it when they get off the floor -- without checking with us first.

Colombani glories in Europe's post-Sept. 11 ''solidarity'' with America: ``Let us remember here the involvement of French and German soldiers, among other European nationalities, in the operations launched in Afghanistan to . . . free the Afghans.''

Come again? The French arrived in Mazar-e Sharif after it fell -- or as military analyst Jay Leno put it, ''to serve as advisors to the Taliban on how to surrender properly.'' Afghanistan was liberated by America acting practically unilaterally, with an even smaller coalition than that in Iraq -- Britain and Australia, with the rest of the world holding America's coat.