Skip to main content

put gasoline on the fire

The White House pressed Senator John Kerry Wednesdayto apologize for a comment Republicans say was disrespectful of U.S. fighting forces in Iraq.saying he "put gasoline on the fire" of an already sizzling midterm election campaign. "Sen. Kerry may have botched the line, but what he said was insulting to the troops, and what he ought to say is, 'Look, I botched the line, but I'm sorry for giving offense,' " press secretary Tony Snow said on CBS's "The Early Show."


"We're not the one who whipped this up into a big issue. Sen. Kerry did so yesterday," said Snow, appearing the day after President Bush and Kerry traded their harshest accusations since the 2004 presidential race. Bush accused the Massachusetts Democrat of troop-bashing and Kerry called the president's men hacks who are "willing to lie" to gloss over problems with the war policy.The fiery exchange evoked memories of 2004,injecting more adrenaline into what has been a taut midterm election fight between Republicans trying to cling to control of Congress and Democrats striving to win it back.What triggered it was Kerry's comment, to a group of California students on Monday, that people unable to succeed in the U.S. educational system would likely "get stuck in Iraq."As Republicans demanded that Kerry apologize, a Democratic congressional candidate in a close race in Iowa canceled a campaign event with Kerry, saying the senator's comments were inappropriate. And Kerry canceled an appearance for a Democratic candidate in Minnesota.Bush, campaigning in Georgia, said Kerry's statement was "insulting and it is shameful."


Kerry, who is considering another run for the White House in 2008, told a hastily called news conference, "I apologize to no one for my criticism of the president and of his broken policy."But he also said the comment was "a botched joke about the president and the president's people, not about the troops ... and they know that's what I was talking about."A Kerry spokeswoman, Amy Brundage, said later that the senator's prepared text had called for him to say: "Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush."The Bush-Kerry flare-up was becoming an issue in other races as well: In Washington state, Mike McGavick, a Republican trying to unseat Sen. Maria Cantwell (news, bio, voting record), charged that she was trying to avoid commenting on the issue."Sen. Cantwell is Sen. Kerry's host in our state," McGavick said in a statement. "She has evaded comment time and time again in this campaign. Not this time."Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record) said Wednesday he wasn't sure "how you could construe" Kerry's comment as a joke. Calling Kerry "my friend," the Arizona Republican said,"I've found that if it is just a botched joke then apologize and move on.""As it stands, he owes an apology to the men and women who are serving in Iraq out of patriotism and love of country, not because of any academic deficiencies, " McCain said on ABC's "Good Morning America.

Image hosted by Webshots.com
by advokatku


"Unsubstantiated allegations about Kerry's Vietnam War heroism from a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth figured prominently in the 2004 Kerry-Bush race.In Iowa, a spokesman for Democratic congressional candidate Bruce Braley said Braley had decided independently to cancel an event with Kerry scheduled for Thursday. Braley, who is running against Republican Mike Whalen in the state's 1st District, said in a statement that the White House and Kerry should stop bickering and focus on how to change course in Iraq.In Minnesota, Meredith Salsbery, a spokeswoman for Tim Walz, the Democratic candidate in the 1st congressional district, said Kerry canceled an appearance with Walz slated for Wednesday in Mankato. "He wants to make sure the campaign is about the issues we've been talking about the last two years," she said of Kerry's decision. "It's important to him that we are able to do that."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

child sex workers in Bandung

A policeman, right, watches over two masseuses and their customers during a raid on suspected prostitution activities at a hotel in Changchun, in northeast China's Jilin province The Bandung authority is at loss to uncover cases of covert prostitution involving junior and senior high school students, whose number continues to rise in the West Java capital. Eli, a sex worker advocacy program mentor from the Rumah Cemara Group in Bandung, said it was hard to provide advocacy to teenagers involved in covert prostitution since most were not receptive. The number of those involved in covert prostitution is believed to be higher compared to commercial sex on the streets, she added. Eli has been providing support to more than 200 housewives and child sex workers over the past two years, around 20 of who are senior high school students between the ages of 15 and 16. "They are psychologically unstable at those ages. They are hard to handle due to their strong motivation to ea
Post a Comment
Read more

Bricklaying in Aceh

Refleksi: http://www.thejakartapost.com/detaileditorial.asp?fileid= 20070405. F07&irec= 6 Bricklaying in Aceh I was looking back the other day at a letter in the British newspaper The Times as written by Professor H. H. Turner in January 1925, who was challenging the government's statement that a good British bricklayer would lay 500 bricks per day which made him the best in the world.The professor claimed to have found one bricklayer who dealt with 2000 bricks in eight hours and another one who laid 890 bricks in just one hour -- one presumes the brickie ran out of steam after a while. It made me wonder just how many bricks were being laid in Aceh province, bearing in mind the climatic differences between gloomy old England and sun-drenched Indonesia. The heat factor alone could well in fact reduce the work rate by up to fifty percent, and then of course there are the incentive factors of salary and working conditions. An English bricklayer in 1925 would have earned about one
Post a Comment
Read more

Debate Islam in Indonesia

http://www.thejakar taglobe.com/ opinion/interloc utors-of- indonesian- islam/560447 Interlocutors of Indonesian Islam Ahmad Najib Burhani | December 08, 2012 A few months ago, the Japanese anthropologist Mitsuo Nakamura told me that studying Nahdlatul Ulama as an organization was beyond the imagination of any American scholar from the 1950s to the ’70s. But he is not the only academic to have noticed this. George McT. Kahin of Cornell University stated the same thing. Even NU-expert Martin van Bruinessen was not expecting to study NU as his primary focus when he came to Indonesia for the first time in the 1980s.   During the early decades of Indonesian independence, NU was relatively unorganized and its management was largely based on the authority of religious teachers ( kyai ). Of course there were a number of scholars who studied NU-affiliated religious schools ( pesantren ) and its kyai, but not NU as an organization.   Even though NU was one of the winners o
Post a Comment
Read more