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Jim,
.......
Statement by John O'Neill on "Nightline"
While I have a tremendous
amount of respect for Ted Koppel and ABC News I was appalled to learn that ABC
News would go to the length of traveling to Vietnam to interview three Viet Cong
communists in yet a third attempt by ABC to corroborate John Kerry's version of
the events that took place on February 28th, 1969.
I would only ask the
American people: "Who do you trust more, three members of a communist regime
that tortured and killed our American troops or a group of more than 280 highly
decorated American veterans, who proudly served their country and are now
responsible members of their respective communities?"
The number of
veterans who support John Kerry's accounts of his military service would not
fill one Swift Boat. But instead of sitting down to interview some of the 280
plus members of our Swift Boat organization, ABC News chose to travel to Vietnam
taking extraordinary and highly suspect steps to find someone to corroborate
John Kerry's story.
ABC News Nightline has now dedicated three separate
programs to this one incident while ignoring John Kerry's now discredited Senate
testimony that he spent Christmas in Cambodia, his receiving a purple heart
after all three of the officers required to approve such an issuance rejected
his application, or his constantly changing account of the circumstances
surrounding his remaining medal, a bronze star.
Further, one has to
wonder why ABC News will not address the serious questions as to why John Kerry
only received an honorable discharge through the act of then President Carter,
seven years after his discharge, and had to have all of his military citations
reissued, on the same day, when he became a United States Senator in 1985. And,
finally, why has Nightline found it of no interest to permit any POWs to come on
their program to explain why they believe John Kerry betrayed their nation,
caused them to be incarcerated for an additional two years and caused them
tremendous additional hardship and suffering.
-- John O'Neill
Don't let what you cannot do interfere with what
you can do!
Billy
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, October 21, 2004 3:14
PM
Subject: [QUAD-L] FW: A
washingtonpost.com article
An Edwards
Outrage
By Charles Krauthammer
After the second presidential debate, in which John Kerry used the
word
"plan" 24 times, I said on television that Kerry has a plan for
everything
except curing psoriasis. I should have known there is no
parodying Kerry's
pandering. It turned out days later that the Kerry
campaign has a plan --
nay, a promise -- to cure paralysis. What is the
plan? Vote for
Kerry.
This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in
Newton, Iowa: "If we do
the work that we can do in this country, the work
that we will do when
John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve
are going to
walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk
again."
In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a
more loathsome
display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad.
Deliberately,
for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically
afflicted
is despicable.
Where does one begin to
deconstruct this outrage?
First, the inability of the
human spinal cord to regenerate is one of
the great mysteries of biology.
The answer is not remotely around the
corner. It could take a generation to
unravel. To imply, as Edwards did,
that it is imminent if only you elect
the right politicians is
scandalous.
Second, if the
cure for spinal cord injury comes, we have no idea
where it will come from.
There are many lines of inquiry. Stem cell
research is just one of many
possibilities, and a very speculative one
at that. For 30 years I have
heard promises of miracle cures for
paralysis (including my own, suffered
as a medical student). The last
fad, fetal tissue transplants, was thought
to be a sure thing. Nothing
came of it.
As a doctor by
training, I've known better than to believe the hype --
and have tried in
my own counseling of people with new spinal cord
injuries to place
the possibility of cure in abeyance. I advise instead
to concentrate on
making a life (and a very good life it can be) with
the hand one is dealt.
The greatest enemies of this advice have been the
snake-oil salesmen
promising a miracle around the corner. I never
expected a candidate for
vice president to be one of them.
Third, the implication
that Christopher Reeve was prevented from
getting out of his wheelchair by
the Bush stem cell policies is a
travesty.
George Bush
is the first president to approve federal funding for stem
cell research.
There are 22 lines of stem cells now available, up from
one just two years
ago. As Leon Kass, head of the President's Council on
Bioethics, has
written, there are 3,500 shipments of stem cells waiting
for anybody who
wants them.
Edwards and Kerry constantly talk of a Bush
"ban" on stem cell
research. This is false. There is no ban. You want to
study stem cells?
You get them from the companies that have the cells and
apply to the
National Institutes of Health for the federal
funding.
In his Aug. 7 radio address to the nation, Kerry
referred not once but
four times to the "ban" on stem cell research
instituted by Bush. At the
time, Reeve was alive, so not available for
posthumous exploitation. But
Ronald Reagan was available, having recently
died of Alzheimer's.
So what does Kerry do? He begins his
radio address with the
disgraceful claim that the stem cell "ban" is
standing in the way of an
Alzheimer's cure.
This is an
outright lie. The President's Council on Bioethics, on
which I sit, had one
of the world's foremost experts on Alzheimer's,
Dennis Selkoe from Harvard,
give us a lecture on the newest and most
promising approaches to solving
the Alzheimer's mystery. Selkoe reported
remarkable progress in using
biochemicals to clear the "plaque" deposits
in the brain that lead to
Alzheimer's. He ended his presentation without
the phrase "stem cells"
having passed his lips.
So much for the miracle cure.
Ronald D.G. McKay, a stem cell
researcher at NIH, has admitted publicly
that stem cells as an
Alzheimer's cure are a fiction, but that "people need
a fairy tale."
Kerry and Edwards certainly do. They are shamelessly
exploiting this
fairy tale, having no doubt been told by their pollsters
that stem cells
play well politically for them.
Politicians have long promised a chicken in every pot. It is part of
the
game. It is one thing to promise ethanol subsidies here, dairy
price
controls there. But to exploit the desperate hopes of desperate
people
with the promise of Christ-like cures is beyond the
pale.
There is no apologizing for Edwards's remark. It is
too revealing.
There is absolutely nothing the man will not say to get
elected.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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