Sometimes a yoked ox pulls a plow longer than expected. There's a wealth of news tonight from the Fighting First. Let's start with the New Ulm Journal, located in conservative Brown County. It's also the home of the final National Guard unit in which Tim Walz served before he retired.
From the looks of its article about yesterday's conference call, the New Ulm Journal's reporter may have participated--or, at the very least, paid careful attention to the feed:
Walz criticizes Bush’s handling of war
By RON LARSEN Journal Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — Democrat veterans Tim Walz of Minnesota and Eric Massa of New York joined a former Democratic National Committee chairman in assailing President Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq Wednesday.
Walz, who is seeking the First District Congressional seat now held by Republican Gil Gutknecht, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Massa in claiming the Bush administration, as well as Republicans in both houses of Congress, has failed to keep promises made to America’s veterans to bring them home. The trio spoke during a 25-minute, tele-news conference with reporters.
Massa, who is seeking New York’s 29th Congressional District seat for the first time, said the conduct of the war by the Bush administration has been “an assault upon our soldiers. The president can no longer use the military as a prop for his political goals [in the region].”
The Iraq war has been especially hard upon National Guard soldiers over in Iraq because “four in 10 National Guard soldiers lose income while they’re on active duty,” Walz said.
He claimed that use of the National Guard to help fight the war in Iraq has seriously weakened the nation’s ability to defend itself against aggressors here at home.
“We want National Guard soldiers brought home. We want true national security here at home,” Walz said.
“The Bush administration’s war effort was a failure right from the beginning,” and only by electing Democrats to gain control of one or both houses of Congress can the failure be corrected,” former Democratic National Committee Chairman Don Fowler said.
“I think the facts speak for themselves. It’s very difficult when you’re trying to get a macro image of an entire country, make no mistake about it, when you put an American soldier, sailor or marine on the ground, they’re going to do good work,” Walz said.
“It doesn’t change the fact at the macro level and the facts coming in that there’s an absolute failure of this. I think pointing to when the president said that major combat operations were done, we had less than 19 attacks a day. Now, we’re well over 90,” Walz said.
“The facts are pretty clear. The number of people that are getting killed; the number of attacks on United States forces are pretty clear. For him to say that, once again, it’s simply trying to sell us a war, sell us their theory on this, and if the Democrats are asking for a new course or a new plan on this, we are not supportive of this,” Walz said.
“That’s ridiculous. What we are is we are anti-failure people. What we want to see is this thing fixed.”
The paper also published a letter from a Dakota resident; Dakota is located in the eastern part of the district near Winona.
TO THE EDITOR: According to Congressman Gil Gutknecht’s “Term Limit” pledge in the “Contract with America”, he should not be running for Congress this year. Gil promised to quit Congress after 12 years, but clearly he is violating his promise. He even tried to hide the truth by deleting the mention of this pledge in his own online encyclopedia article, but he was stopped. Then, Gil’s campaign manager told the press that people should get their information from a more reliable source! Of course, Gil was the guy trying to make the online article LESS reliable!
Of course, this all makes sense — Gil Gutknecht has gone right along with George Bush in trumpeting the false reasons for the Iraq invasion. Gil no doubt learned from George that if you repeat a lie, hide the facts, and discredit the people who are telling the truth, that many or most of the people will believe you. After all, 60 percent of Americans still believe that Iraq had a “weapons of mass destruction” program, even after the White House, the CIA, and U.S. military have all admitted that it didn’t exist. Keep up the deception, Gil! You might succeed yet! Not!
JON NICHOLSON
Dakota
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