To: letters@kcstar.com
Subject: The "Flip Flopper"
Date: 09/01/04

Thank heavens we don't have a spineless "flip flopper" for President like
that guy, John Kerry. I remember how George W. Bush told the American people
that he knew just when and how to commit our troops to war. He said, "When
America uses force in the world, the cause must be just, the goal must be
clear, and the victory must be overwhelming." Glowing words.

Recently the President has been attacking John Kerry, for his "indecisive"
vote on the "surprising" request for an additional 87 billion to pay for the
reconstruction in Iraq. Kerry told the Senate that he would only support
the additional reconstruction spending if the richest people in America would
pay for it over ten years instead of taking a massive tax cut that was clearly
crippling our economy and driving us into debt. When that Senate vote failed,
John Kerry said that he couldn't ethically support borrowing additional
billions from our children in order to pay corrupt companies like Halliburton
to rebuild what our army had just destroyed. We had ignored world opinion and
preemptively attacked a country under false pretenses, killing thousands of
innocent civilians. President Bush had promised to let the U.N. vote before
going to war, remember? He said it on T.V. He said something really dramatic
like, "Lets see where folks stand on this issue." Or maybe it was "Put their
cards on the table." Or perhaps, "show their hands."

Now some might call John Kerry's refusal to steal more money from Social
Security and borrow from our children to be "standing on principle" regardless
of the political backlash, because the war was still popular at that time,
but George W. Bush just calls it "flip flopping".

Now "Dubya" is obviously no "flip flopper". After all, he says we can't win
the war against terrorism on Monday and then on Tuesday he says, well, you
misunderstood him. We can win it, make no mistake. And as mentioned before,
he says he would only commit American troops to fight in a war with a clear
objective. But... precisely what is our clear objective in Iraq?

Did we invade Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein from attacking the U.S. again?
He never attacked us in the first place. That was Osama Bin Laden, remember?
It was a whole other country!

Or, did we preemptively declare war on Iraq in order to eliminate those
massive stockpiles of nuclear and biological weapons? But Bush knew before we
went to war that the evidence was flimsy if not fabricated. We could have
waited for the U.N. inspectors to finish their job, and they asked us to.
But we didn't. Keep in mind that the last time that Saddam Hussein actually
used those WMD, there was another George Bush in the White House, it was
mustard gas that he against his own people, and back then he was our ally.

So, did we invade Iraq in order to prevent torture in evil places like that
Abu Ghraib prison? Apparently not, since four U.S. generals' careers are now
ruined because of the torture our own soldiers and military intelligence
committed there.

Maybe George W. Bush "flip flopped" on his stance about when it was OK to
commit troops for "nation building". We don't have a clear objective and he
had admitted that he doesn't know how the war can be won.

Now there are car bombings in Afghanistan and there's daily combat in Iraq.
Almost nothing seems to have been accomplished and we are more at risk now
than we were before attacking Iraq. Believing otherwise is to ignore the
overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The Bush campaign has only one option
if they want to stay in office another four years. They must call John Kerry
a "flip flopper" and use character attacks and whispering campaigns to destroy
his credibility. They must successfully shift the media focus away from our
exploding deficit spending and crumbling economy, growing signs of global
warming, White House involvement in corporate corruption and the images of
our dead and wounded soldiers returning home from an ill-conceived and unjust
war. They'll just keep calling John Kerry a "flip flopper" and other names
and maybe it will work long enough to get them past the election.

Good luck.

Bill Underwood