It’s interesting to see John Kerry and Terry McAuliffe questioning Bush’s status as commander in chief, falsely claiming that he was allegedly AWOL from the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War while other Democrat candidates allow their surrogates to repeat this instead of standing up and telling them, “You’re wrong.”

But they just let it go and say that they have a right to have their opinions and that Mr. Bush has to answer this charge. Well Mr. Bush answered this slander in the 2000 elections. So did George magazine, which did a brilliant job of investigating this whole matter on Oct. 10, 2000. They – and the New York Times as well – found the charge to be bogus – that the president indeed did serve his time. Yes, he did take time off to get involved in a senate campaign in Alabama but then made up the time and was given an honorable discharge – something they don’t give to people who haven’t lived up to their obligations.

Now they’re bringing this discredited story back up again because they want to play up Kerry’s war record which was a fabulous one where he performed heroically. But they don’t want to discuss his record after the war which is a dismal and shameful one.

After getting an early discharge from the Navy, he joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, worked with Hanoi Jane Fonda and became a leader of the anti-Vietnam War, pro-Hanoi movement, spreading vicious lies about U.S. soldiers then fighting and dying in Vietnam.

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on April 23, 1971, Kerry said that U.S. servicemen had “personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.”

According to Vietnam Veterans against John Kerry, “Kerry’s betrayal of American prisoners of war, his blatant disrespect for the families of our missing in action, Vietnam veterans, the military, his support for communist Vietnam and his waffling over the issue of use of force in Iraq … cannot be relied on to protect the best interests of the United States.”

They are right, and his voting record proves it. The fact is that we could not fight a war if it was John Kerry’s military because we wouldn’t have the military machinery to fight these wars – the Apaches, the Bradleys, the B1s, the B2s, the F14s the F15s – we wouldn’t have a military to fight a modern war. But Kerry and his fellow Democrats want to shift the emphasis away from his shameful conduct in his post-war activities and his anti-defense voting record onto the same bogus issue of the President’s Air National Guard service the Democrats tried and failed to make stick back in 2000.

What’s maddening is that the media know the truth but you’d never know it from what they report. They’re letting Kerry and McAuliffe and their fellow Democrats get away with peddling what they know is a big fat lie.

Look at it this way. Suppose the Republicans were to compare Kerry’s activities when as a war hero he came home and turned on his country to those of another genuine war hero who also turned on his country after heroically serving it.

Can you imagine how the media would react if the Republicans were to compare the turncoat hero’s record to John Kerry’s, a war hero who also turned on his country and gave aid and comfort to the enemy.

If they so much as mentioned the name of Benedict Arnold – the wounded hero of the Battles of Freeman’s Farm and Saratoga that destroyed a British army and eventually helped win the Revolutionary War, and then betrayed his country – in the same breath with John Kerry, the media would go crazy. They would rightly say that it would be a vicious slander. But no Republican would even think of doing such a vicious and slanderous thing.

Just as it is now a vicious and slanderous lie to suggest that George W. Bush, the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces served less than honorably while in the Air National Guard thirty years ago.

Mike Reagan, the eldest son of President Ronald Reagan, is heard on more than 200 talk radio stations nationally as part of the Radio America Network. Comments to mereagan@hotmail.com

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(c)2004 Mike Reagan.

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