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Tommy Duncan
09-07-2004, 12:49 PM
www.naplesnews.com/npdn/p...59,00.html (http://www.naplesnews.com/npdn/pe_columnists/article/0,2071,NPDN_14960_3164359,00.html)

Miller not a McCarthyite

By JAY AMBROSE, Scripps Howard News Service
September 7, 2004

Zell Miller, whose speech at the Republican National Convention tread less than lightly on the sensibilities of leftist Democrats, is being stomped on himself. Because he accused the left of playing divisive, blame-the-United States games during a time of peril, the left is accusing him of being like that dread figure of yesteryear, Joe McCarthy.

It's a stretch. Sen. McCarthy pretended in the '50s to have a list of Communists in our government when he had no such thing. There were in fact Communists in government, but McCarthy had no secret information about them. He was aiming to achieve political fortune through demagoguery.

Miller — a man at the conclusion of his career — said he was questioning no one's patriotism. The issue for him was judgment, as he clearly stated. He identified some dismaying leftist tactics and didn't do so bad a job, either, of showing how John Kerry has been an anti-defense dove during much of his 20 years in the Senate.

Miller scored points, in my view, when he spoke of the "manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief." If you listen for two minutes to what many of the Democrats and their supporters are saying, you cannot deny that the wish to get Bush out of office reaches far beyond the ordinary election-year desire of one party to defeat the other. There is a get-the-president vitriol in the land unlike anything I can remember since the peaceniks of the '60s used to chant, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"

Kerry is not above the disreputable sort of Bush-bashing. He has repeatedly said — as speakers at the Democratic National Convention repeatedly said — that Bush misled the country into the war in Iraq. It is a vile charge, making Bush out to be someone who would deceive us into blood-letting sacrifice. And it is a charge that doesn't stand up.

The lie Bush supposedly told is that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But it is irrefutable that American intelligence agencies, along with other top intelligence agencies around the world, said prior to the war that Saddam Hussein had these weapons. Before the war, Saddam was offered a chance to allow complete, unhindered inspections to prove his regime was free of such weapons, and didn't do it. This chance proffered to Saddam served as a double-check, and if Saddam decided rationality should take second place to pride, you can hardly blame Bush for that.

The trump in this argument is that Kerry, who had access to intelligence reports, himself used language as forceful as Bush's in saying that Saddam had such weapons. What's more, Kerry has also said he would vote to authorize the war again, even knowing everything he knows today. Why? Unless he is lying about his real convictions, he must believe that Saddam did pose a danger that could require force to quell.

Miller got a special cheer in Madison Square Garden when he said that Kerry "would let Paris decide when America needs defending." The Miller line is justified by Kerry's ongoing rant that the administration proceeded in the Iraqi war without being sufficiently multilateral. Kerry is out of touch with reality. France, for instance, would never agree to that war. President Jacques Chirac was trying to work profitable deals with Saddam. The only way to have had France as an ally on the issue of Iraq would have been for the United States to have said that we would do what France wanted.

Miller told us about all the vital weapons systems Kerry has voted against. My suspicion is that the chief reason Kerry has so emphasized his service in Vietnam has been to divert attention from his record as someone aligned with a radical antiwar group after he came home, as a devotee of the nuclear freeze, as a supporter of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and as an opponent of the first Gulf War.

I will agree to this much of the critics' charges against Miller: He was hyperbolic on a couple of issues, as politicians tend to be, and he painted with too broad a brush. You can legitimately disagree with him that bipartisanship on the war in Iraq is as transparently needed as it was during World War II or the Cold War. But his speech did not add up to McCarthyism. McCarthyism is more nearly what leftists do in calling political opponents McCarthyites because they think the easy way to deal with them is to take aim with nasty labels.


(Jay Ambrose is director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard Newspapers and can be reached at [email protected] )