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Which Kerry Do You Like?
Source ListMeister
Date 04/01/28/12:11

WHICH KERRY DO YOU LIKE?

RICH LOWRY, NATIONAL REVIEW - Today's Kerry excoriates Attorney General
John Ashcroft for violating American civil liberties with his evil tool,
the Patriot Act. "We are a nation of laws and liberties, not of a knock
in the night," Kerry huffs. "So it is time to end the era of John
Ashcroft. That starts with replacing the Patriot Act with a new law that
protects our people and our liberties at the same time." Maybe Kerry
should have thought about that before voting for the Patriot Act in 2001
- since laws and liberties are pretty important and all.

Back before he had to worry about competing with one Howard Brush Dean,
Kerry was positively delighted by the Patriot Act. "It reflects," he
said on the Senate floor, "an enormous amount of hard work by the
members of the Senate Banking Committee and the Senate Judiciary
Committee. I congratulate them and thank them for that work." While
supportive of "sunset" provisions in the bill, Kerry pronounced himself
"pleased at the compromise we have reached on the anti-terrorism
legislation." These are not the words of a man about to help inaugurate
an era of brown-shirt law enforcement.

John Kerry, A.D. (After Dean), attacks President Bush's No Child Left
Behind Act as "one-size-fits-all testing mania." Worse, according to
Kerry, "By signing the No Child Left Behind Act and then breaking his
promise by not giving schools the resources to help meet new standards,
George Bush has undermined public education and left millions of
children behind." The funding charge is a canard - overall spending on
education under Bush is up 65 percent - but it gives Kerry a way to join
the Dean-led assault on the act, which he voted for - enthusiastically.

"This is groundbreaking legislation," John Kerry, B.D. (Before Dean),
gushed on the Senate floor, "that enhances the federal government's
commitment to our nation's public education system ... and embraces many
of the principles and programs that I believe are critical to improving
the public education system." He didn't just support the bill, he took
credit for it: "Last year I worked with 10 of my Democratic colleagues
to introduce legislation that would help break the stalemate and move
beyond the tired, partisan debates of the past. Our education proposal
became the foundation of the bill before us today."

As for the North American Free Trade Agreement, the target of Dean and
other liberal critics, Kerry promises to "fix it." The agreement
supposedly doesn't do enough to keep Mexico from employing low-wage
workers, thus encouraging jobs to leave the United States and depressing
wages here. True to form, he used to love the trade deal. "NAFTA is not
the problem," he explained in 1993. "Job loss is taking place without
NAFTA."

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