The Democrats [should] affirm that they are still the pro-choice party, but then also say what most Americans believe: that the abortion rate in America is much too high for a good, healthy society that respects both women and children. They could make a serious public commitment to actually do something about significantly reducing the abortion rate. Abortion is historically used as a symbolic issue in campaigns, and then forgotten when the election is over. Republicans win elections on the basis of their anti-abortion position, and then proceed to ignore the issue (and the nation’s abortion rate, highest in the industrial world) by doing nothing to reduce the number of abortions.

Democrats could vow to change that by uniting both pro-choice and pro-life constituencies around goals that could become the basis for some new common ground, i.e. really targeting the problems of teen pregnancy and adoption reform—so critical to reducing abortion—while offering real support and meaningful alternatives for women at greater risk for unwanted pregnancies, especially low-income women.

More Here.

As a member of the Manhattan intelligentsia, novelist Tom Wolfe seems a lonely defender of George Bush's conservative values. But, he tells Ed Vulliamy, he's bewildered by a sex-mad society and tired of being lectured to at dinner parties. So is he voting for Dubya tomorrow? He's not quite telling.

Monday November 1, 2004
The Guardian

Tom Wolfe casts his gaze across America at this election time, with eyes that change mood in a nanosecond, with a flicker. For the most part, they exude an amused elegance befitting the hallmark white suit and dandy-ish two-tone brogues. But then the look suddenly changes, to become scalpel-sharp, mischievous, seizing upon some detail. It is a metamorphosis which begins to explain, perhaps, how this softly-spoken, immaculately-mannered gentleman journalist from the South can write with such voracity about the grime and sediment which inhabits American society and the human soul.

Certainly the view is stirring from the place to which he retreats to write, and where we meet: his outrageously beautiful Manhattan apartment taking up the 14th floor of a block on the Upper East Side, with sweeping views over a Central Park drenched in autumnal sunshine. A grand piano sits in the corner, painted in what Wolfe calls "cocktail lounge navy blue". Shelves are stacked with books on 19th-century, modern and Dutch art. In what he calls his office, next to the sitting room, is a huge, handsome and ornate bureau on which sits handwriting instruments and two panama hats.

From this desk, and the pen of arguably America's greatest current writer - author of the 1987 epic Bonfire of the Vanities and much more besides - there now comes a third major novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, to be published next week, on the other side of election day. Wolfe set out, for the first time, to write the book on a computer, but gave up in favour of his usual typewriter. "Then I jammed my finger badly," he says, "and took up pen and paper. This may turn out to be the last book ever written that way."

A new Tom Wolfe novel is always a literary event: where will he go next? The answer this time is an elite, imaginary Ivy League university, Dupont College, for a book about libido off the leash, and about the cult of what Wolfe calls "the bad comedy" of college sports - athletes taken on by centres of academic excellence for their bodies, not their brains.

The novel - researched, as usual, down to the last expletive - concerns a young world speaking "fuck patois", loaded with creatine and cocaine, numbed by PlayStation 3, and charged by alcohol, the "vile spleen" of rap and, above all, ubiquitous sex between the heirs and heiresses to privilege in America. Most intriguingly, in this week of all weeks in American history, the book affords a gateway towards explaining Wolfe's boldly delivered, tantalising, remark: "I have sympathy with what George Bush is trying to do, although obviously the excursion [into Iraq] is not going well."

Four years ago, Wolfe wrote an essay to mark the millennium called Hooking Up, about what he called "feverish emphasis on sex and sexiness". In a way, the new novel is a literary fruition of the essay. The excess and decadence at Dupont College are seen through the eyes of his heroine, Charlotte Simmons, who arrives a diligent virgin from the hills of North Carolina, on a full scholarship. She is initially intimidated and appalled, but eventually conquers her fear to partake, indeed to star, in the jock beanfeast.

"I personally would be shocked out of my pants if I was at college now," confides Wolfe, who spent four years trawling the campuses for raw material. The book, he says, is "about sex as it interacts with social status. And I have tried to make the sex un-erotic. I will have failed if anyone gets the least bit excited. So much of modern sex is un-erotic, if erotic means flight of fancy or romantic build-up. Sex now is so easy to consummate - it is a pressure that affects everybody, girls more than boys, I think."

As he notes, the America which votes tomorrow is a country riven over morality like never before. On the flip side of the culture of ubiquitous sex is that of puritan Christianity, as harnessed in no small part by Bush. "Yes, there is this puritanism," says Wolfe, "and I suppose we are talking here about what you might call the religious right. But I don't think these people are left or right, they are just religious, and if you are religious, you observe certain strictures on sexual activity - you are against the mainstream, morally speaking. And I do have sympathy with them, yes, though I am not religious. I am simply in awe of it all; the openness of sex. In the 60s they talked about a sexual revolution, but it has become a sexual carnival."

No writer has chronicled the full American curve over four decades quite like Wolfe. He has been at this, unswervingly, since 1965, when he published a curio about pop culture called The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. His breakthrough came in 1968 with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, his chronicle of Ken Kesey's LSD-gobbling Merry Pranksters. "If I have been judged to be right wing," he says, "I think this is because of the things I have mocked. It started with Radical Chic [published in 1970, about a fundraising party for the Black Panthers organised by Leonard Bernstein]. I was denounced because people thought I had jeopardised all progressive causes. But my impulse was not political, it was simply the absurdity of the occasion. Then I wrote The Painted Word, about modern art, and was denounced as reactionary. In fact, it is just a history, although a rather loaded one. Then came The Right Stuff [his account of America's first astronauts], after which my relative enthusiasm for Nasa was another sign of perfidy."

He is "proud", he says, "that I do not think any political motivation can be detected in my long books. My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of Les Miserables, in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not - and was not interested in - telling a lie. You can call it honesty, or you can call it ego, but there it is. There is no motivation higher than being a good writer."

In his manifesto of 1973 on The New Journalism, Wolfe advocated a "journalistic or perhaps documentary novel". He re-invoked the idea four years ago by way of retort to a fusillade of criticism - an exchange which scandalised New York society - levelled against his last novel, A Man In Full, from no less than Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Irving. The new book is in itself a counter to that outburst.

Wolfe's lambent success in documenting ambition, drunkenness, sloth and meanness in his own country has taken him from his native Virginia to New York which he wrote about in Bonfire of the Vanities, pitching the super-rich "Masters of the Universe" in high finance against the real world of the Bronx. But even as the author of the quintessential New York novel, Wolfe feels estranged in the city, as he surveys America during the final days of the election campaign. Estranged not from the subjects of his scrutiny, the "Masters of the Universe", but rather from the liberal elite.

"Here is an example of the situation in America," he says: "Tina Brown wrote in her column that she was at a dinner where a group of media heavyweights were discussing, during dessert, what they could do to stop Bush. Then a waiter announces that he is from the suburbs, and will vote for Bush. And ... Tina's reaction is: 'How can we persuade these people not to vote for Bush?' I draw the opposite lesson: that Tina and her circle in the media do not have a clue about the rest of the United States. You are considered twisted and retarded if you support Bush in this election. I have never come across a candidate who is so reviled. Reagan was sniggered it, but this is personal, real hatred.

"Indeed, I was at a similar dinner, listening to the same conversation, and said: 'If all else fails, you can vote for Bush.' People looked at me as if I had just said: 'Oh, I forgot to tell you, I am a child molester.' I would vote for Bush if for no other reason than to be at the airport waving off all the people who say they are going to London if he wins again. Someone has got to stay behind."

Where does it come from, this endorsement of the most conservative administration within living memory? Of this president who champions the right and the rich, who has taken America into the mire of war, and seeks re-election tomorrow? Wolfe's eyes resume the expression of detached Southern elegance.

"I think support for Bush is about not wanting to be led by East-coast pretensions. It is about not wanting to be led by people who are forever trying to force their twisted sense of morality onto us, which is a non-morality. That is constantly done, and there is real resentment. Support for Bush is about resentment in the so-called 'red states' - a confusing term to Guardian readers, I agree - which here means, literally, middle America. I come from one of those states myself, Virginia. It's the same resentment, indeed, as that against your own newspaper when it sent emails targeting individuals in an American county." Wolfe laughs as he chastises. "No one cares to have outsiders or foreigners butting into their affairs. I'm sure that even many of those Iraqis who were cheering the fall of Saddam now object to our being there. As I said, I do not think the excursion is going well."

And John Kerry? "He is a man no one should worry about, because he has no beliefs at all. He is not going to introduce some manic radical plan, because he is poll-driven, and it is therefore impossible to know where or for what he stands."

As far as Wolfe is concerned, "the great changes in America came with the second world war, since which time I have not seen much shift in what Americans fundamentally believe. Apart from the fact that as recently as the 1970s, Nelson Rockefeller shocked people by leaving his wife of 30 years, while now celebrities routinely have children outside marriage, the mayor of New York leaves his wife for his lover and no one blinks. But a large number of people have remained religious, and it is a divided country - do not forget that Al Gore nearly won the last election. The country is split right along party lines."

And there has been a complete climate change in the nation which elected Bill Clinton twice, to that which may confer the same honour on George Bush tomorrow. This, says Wolfe, began not with the election of Bush, but on the morning of September 11 2001.

None of us who were in New York that day will ever forget it, and Wolfe is no exception. "I was sitting in my office when someone called to tell me two light planes had collided with the World Trade Centre. I turned on my television, before long there was this procession of people of all kinds, walking up the street. What I remember most was the silence of that crowd; there was no sound.

"That day told us that here was a different kind of enemy. I honestly think that America and the Bush administration felt that something extreme had to be done. But I do not think that the Americans have become a warlike people; it is rare in American history to set about empire-building - acquiring territory and slaves. I've never met an American who wanted to build an empire. And while the invasion of Afghanistan was something that had to be done, I am stunned that Iraq was invaded."

Wolfe is by no means afraid to offend the political right - "I'm gratified if you find me to be hard on them too," he says. He also anticipates that "conservatives will not like this new novel because I refuse to take the impact of political correctness seriously - I think PC has probably had a good effect because it is now bad manners to use racial epithets."

So what is it about his liberal neighbours and fellow diners in his adoptive New York that Wolfe cannot abide? "I cannot stand the lock-step among everyone in my particular world. They all do the same thing, without variation. It gets so boring. There is something in me that particularly wants it registered that I am not one of them."

Parting cordially, it seems strange that such an effervescent maverick, such a jester at the court of all power - all vanity, indeed - should so wholeheartedly endorse the power machine behind George Bush. And so an obvious thought occurs: perhaps Wolfe is jester at the court of New York too. Would he really be happier away from New York, out on the plains, in the "red states" where everyone at dinner parties votes for Bush? Wolfe's eyes revert to that mischievous glint, and he allows himself a smile. "I do think," he admits, apparently speaking for himself, his country and his president, "that if you are not having a fight with somebody, then you are not sure whether you are alive when you wake up in the morning."

Professor Hizkias Assefa is an Eritrean and specialist in conflict resolution and transformation, using the traditional social science model but also employing methods from psychology and theology.  He founded a conflict resolution institute in Kenya and teaches in the US. His perspective on "the war on terror":

For those with low self-esteem, an incompatible behaviour of another could be seen as immensely threatening and therefore calls for massive aggression. For others with healthy self esteem, and with a capacity to discern the impact of their behaviour on others, the same event might be viewed as less threatening and something that calls for a problem solving response. A United States under different leadership would probably have responded to the Iraq situation through international inspection instead of a declaration of war. A more enlightened American leadership would have fought the War on Terror by working to bring more justice in the globe than by unleashing more violence and state terror that risks being more of the same. It would have been, in the long run, more effective, durable and also cheaper".

New York Times
October 17, 2004

John Kerry for President

Senator John Kerry goes toward the election with a base that is built more on opposition to George W. Bush than loyalty to his own candidacy. But over the last year we have come to know Mr. Kerry as more than just an alternative to the status quo. We like what we've seen. He has qualities that could be the basis for a great chief executive, not just a modest improvement on the incumbent.

We have been impressed with Mr. Kerry's wide knowledge and clear thinking - something that became more apparent once he was reined in by that two-minute debate light. He is blessedly willing to re-evaluate decisions when conditions change. And while Mr. Kerry's service in Vietnam was first over-promoted and then over-pilloried, his entire life has been devoted to public service, from the war to a series of elected offices. He strikes us, above all, as a man with a strong moral core.

There is no denying that this race is mainly about Mr. Bush's disastrous tenure. Nearly four years ago, after the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency, Mr. Bush came into office amid popular expectation that he would acknowledge his lack of a mandate by sticking close to the center. Instead, he turned the government over to the radical right.

Mr. Bush installed John Ashcroft, a favorite of the far right with a history of insensitivity to civil liberties, as attorney general. He sent the Senate one ideological, activist judicial nominee after another. He moved quickly to implement a far-reaching anti-choice agenda including censorship of government Web sites and a clampdown on embryonic stem cell research. He threw the government's weight against efforts by the University of Michigan to give minority students an edge in admission, as it did for students from rural areas or the offspring of alumni.

When the nation fell into recession, the president remained fixated not on generating jobs but rather on fighting the right wing's war against taxing the wealthy. As a result, money that could have been used to strengthen Social Security evaporated, as did the chance to provide adequate funding for programs the president himself had backed. No Child Left Behind, his signature domestic program, imposed higher standards on local school systems without providing enough money to meet them.

If Mr. Bush had wanted to make a mark on an issue on which Republicans and Democrats have long made common cause, he could have picked the environment. Christie Whitman, the former New Jersey governor chosen to run the Environmental Protection Agency, came from that bipartisan tradition. Yet she left after three years of futile struggle against the ideologues and industry lobbyists Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had installed in every other important environmental post. The result has been a systematic weakening of regulatory safeguards across the entire spectrum of environmental issues, from clean air to wilderness protection.

The president who lost the popular vote got a real mandate on Sept. 11, 2001. With the grieving country united behind him, Mr. Bush had an unparalleled opportunity to ask for almost any shared sacrifice. The only limit was his imagination.

He asked for another tax cut and the war against Iraq.

The president's refusal to drop his tax-cutting agenda when the nation was gearing up for war is perhaps the most shocking example of his inability to change his priorities in the face of drastically altered circumstances. Mr. Bush did not just starve the government of the money it needed for his own education initiative or the Medicare drug bill. He also made tax cuts a higher priority than doing what was needed for America's security; 90 percent of the cargo unloaded every day in the nation's ports still goes uninspected.

Along with the invasion of Afghanistan, which had near unanimous international and domestic support, Mr. Bush and his attorney general put in place a strategy for a domestic antiterror war that had all the hallmarks of the administration's normal method of doing business: a Nixonian obsession with secrecy, disrespect for civil liberties and inept management.

American citizens were detained for long periods without access to lawyers or family members. Immigrants were rounded up and forced to languish in what the Justice Department's own inspector general found were often "unduly harsh" conditions. Men captured in the Afghan war were held incommunicado with no right to challenge their confinement. The Justice Department became a cheerleader for skirting decades-old international laws and treaties forbidding the brutal treatment of prisoners taken during wartime.

Mr. Ashcroft appeared on TV time and again to announce sensational arrests of people who turned out to be either innocent, harmless braggarts or extremely low-level sympathizers of Osama bin Laden who, while perhaps wishing to do something terrible, lacked the means. The Justice Department cannot claim one major successful terrorism prosecution, and has squandered much of the trust and patience the American people freely gave in 2001. Other nations, perceiving that the vast bulk of the prisoners held for so long at Guantánamo Bay came from the same line of ineffectual incompetents or unlucky innocents, and seeing the awful photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, were shocked that the nation that was supposed to be setting the world standard for human rights could behave that way.

Like the tax cuts, Mr. Bush's obsession with Saddam Hussein seemed closer to zealotry than mere policy. He sold the war to the American people, and to Congress, as an antiterrorist campaign even though Iraq had no known working relationship with Al Qaeda. His most frightening allegation was that Saddam Hussein was close to getting nuclear weapons. It was based on two pieces of evidence. One was a story about attempts to purchase critical materials from Niger, and it was the product of rumor and forgery. The other evidence, the purchase of aluminum tubes that the administration said were meant for a nuclear centrifuge, was concocted by one low-level analyst and had been thoroughly debunked by administration investigators and international vetting. Top members of the administration knew this, but the selling went on anyway. None of the president's chief advisers have ever been held accountable for their misrepresentations to the American people or for their mismanagement of the war that followed.

The international outrage over the American invasion is now joined by a sense of disdain for the incompetence of the effort. Moderate Arab leaders who have attempted to introduce a modicum of democracy are tainted by their connection to an administration that is now radioactive in the Muslim world. Heads of rogue states, including Iran and North Korea, have been taught decisively that the best protection against a pre-emptive American strike is to acquire nuclear weapons themselves.

We have specific fears about what would happen in a second Bush term, particularly regarding the Supreme Court. The record so far gives us plenty of cause for worry. Thanks to Mr. Bush, Jay Bybee, the author of an infamous Justice Department memo justifying the use of torture as an interrogation technique, is now a federal appeals court judge. Another Bush selection, J. Leon Holmes, a federal judge in Arkansas, has written that wives must be subordinate to their husbands and compared abortion rights activists to Nazis.

Mr. Bush remains enamored of tax cuts but he has never stopped Republican lawmakers from passing massive spending, even for projects he dislikes, like increased farm aid.

If he wins re-election, domestic and foreign financial markets will know the fiscal recklessness will continue. Along with record trade imbalances, that increases the chances of a financial crisis, like an uncontrolled decline of the dollar, and higher long-term interest rates.

The Bush White House has always given us the worst aspects of the American right without any of the advantages. We get the radical goals but not the efficient management. The Department of Education's handling of the No Child Left Behind Act has been heavily politicized and inept. The Department of Homeland Security is famous for its useless alerts and its inability to distribute antiterrorism aid according to actual threats. Without providing enough troops to properly secure Iraq, the administration has managed to so strain the resources of our armed forces that the nation is unprepared to respond to a crisis anywhere else in the world.

Mr. Kerry has the capacity to do far, far better. He has a willingness - sorely missing in Washington these days - to reach across the aisle. We are relieved that he is a strong defender of civil rights, that he would remove unnecessary restrictions on stem cell research and that he understands the concept of separation of church and state. We appreciate his sensible plan to provide health coverage for most of the people who currently do without.

Mr. Kerry has an aggressive and in some cases innovative package of ideas about energy, aimed at addressing global warming and oil dependency. He is a longtime advocate of deficit reduction. In the Senate, he worked with John McCain in restoring relations between the United States and Vietnam, and led investigations of the way the international financial system has been gamed to permit the laundering of drug and terror money. He has always understood that America's appropriate role in world affairs is as leader of a willing community of nations, not in my-way-or-the-highway domination.

We look back on the past four years with hearts nearly breaking, both for the lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities so casually wasted. Time and again, history invited George W. Bush to play a heroic role, and time and again he chose the wrong course. We believe that with John Kerry as president, the nation will do better.

Voting for president is a leap of faith. A candidate can explain his positions in minute detail and wind up governing with a hostile Congress that refuses to let him deliver. A disaster can upend the best-laid plans. All citizens can do is mix guesswork and hope, examining what the candidates have done in the past, their apparent priorities and their general character. It's on those three grounds that we enthusiastically endorse John Kerry for president.

I tell ya, the guy's breaking records every day.
-- Ed.

Tom Englehardt has overseen the publishing in English of the work of Mexican political cartoonist "El Fisgón" (aka, Rafael Barajas). Now he's invited him to write about our president, and concludes that "all evidence suggests that George Bush has stolen his ruling style from old-fashioned Mexican politicians:"
Mexican political culture has very defined features and the President of the United States has absorbed them all: The classical Mexican political boss usually inherits his power from his father. The typical Mexican cacique has a love for guns as well as an inclination toward violence and cruelty; he despises legality and intellectual activity, has a personal history of alcoholism and dissipation, lies systematically, and declares himself a faithful servant of God. (Did we miss anything?)

According to Mexican tradition, politicians always reach their positions thanks to a fraudulent electoral process and then surround themselves with a clique which uses its power to conduct "business" on a staggering scale while in office. The Florida electoral thievery and Halliburton's Iraq contract are classic examples of Mexican corruption.

More here courtesy David Holiday.

Without a Doubt -- New York Times
By RON SUSKIND

Published: October 17, 2004

Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.

''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . ."

More HERE.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.  He served as a special assistant to President Reagan and was a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He's got THIS to say.

How many members of the Bush Administration are needed to replace a light bulb?

The answer is 10

1. One to deny that a light bulb needs to be changed.

2. One to attack the patriotism of anyone who says the light bulb needs to be changed

3. One to blame Clinton for burning out the light bulb.

4. One to tell the nations of the world that they are either: "For changing the light bulb or for darkness"

5. One to give a billion dollar no-bid contract to Halliburton for the new light bulb.

6. One to arrange a photograph of Bush, dressed as a janitor, standing on a stepladder under the banner "Light Bulb Change Accomplished"

7. One administration insider to resign and write a book documenting in detail how Bush was literally "in the dark"

8. One to viciously smear #7

9. One surrogate to campaign on TV and at rallies on how George Bush has had a strong ligh bulb-changing policy all along.

10. And finally, one to confuse Americans about the difference between screwing a light bulb and screwing the country.

How many Bush administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?

None. There’s nothing wrong with that light bulb. There is no need to change anything. We made the right decision and nothing has happened to change our minds. People who criticize this light bulb now, just because it doesn’t work anymore, supported us when we first screwed it in, and when these flip-floppers insist on saying that it is burned out, they are merely giving aid and encouragement to the Forces of Darkness.

Courtesy John Cleese

A case could be made that this will be the last election in which military service in Vietnam has any political currency. For the record, it's worth noting who really served among the heavyweights in each of the major political parties. There are some surprises here. Be sure to read to the end where the TV pundits who jabber about military service have their military credentials exposed.

Democrats

• Richard Gephardt: Air National Guard, 1965-71.
  
• David Bonior: Staff Sgt., Air Force 1968-72.
  
• Tom Daschle: 1st Lt., Air Force SAC 1969-72.
  
• Al Gore : enlisted Aug. 1969; sent to Vietnam Jan. 1971 as an army journalist in 20th Engineer Brigade.
  
• Bob Kerrey: Lt. j.g. Navy 1966-69; Medal of Honor, Vietnam.
  
• Daniel Inouye: Army 1943-'47; Medal of Honor, WWII.
  
• John Kerry: Lt., Navy 1966-70; Silver Star, Bronze Star with Combat V Purple Hearts.
  
• John Edwards: did not serve.
  
• Charles Rangel: Staff Sgt., Army 1948-52; Bronze Star, Korea.
  
• Max Cleland: Captain, Army 1965-68; Silver Star & Bronze Star,Vietnam.
  
• Ted Kennedy: Army, 1951-1953.
  
• Tom Harkin: Lt., Navy, 1962-67; Naval Reserve, 1968-74.
  
• Jack Reed: Army Ranger, 1971-1979; Captain, Army Reserve 1979-91.
  
• Fritz Hollings: Army officer in WWII, receiving the Bronze Star and seven campaign ribbons.
  
• Leonard Boswell: Lt. Col., Army 1956-76; Vietnam, DFCs, Bronze Stars, and Soldier's Medal.
  
• Pete Peterson: Air Force Captain, POW. Purple Heart, Silver Star and Legion of Merit.
  Mike Thompson: Staff sergeant, 173rd Airborne, Purple Heart.
  
• Bill McBride: Candidate for Fla. Governor. Marine in Vietnam; Bronze Star with Combat V.
  
• Gray Davis: Army Captain in Vietnam, Bronze Star.
  
• Pete Stark: Air Force 1955-57
  
• Chuck Robb: Vietnam
  
• Howell Heflin: Silver Star
  
• George McGovern: Bomber pilot, many missions. Silver Star & DFC during WWII.
  
• Bill Clinton: Avoided service. with student deferments. Entered draft
  but received 311.
  
• Jimmy Carter: Annapolis grad. Seven years in the Navy.
  
• Walter Mondale: Army 1951-1953
  
• John Glenn: WWII and Korea; six DFCs and Air Medal with 18 Clusters.
  
• Tom Lantos: Said to have served in Hungar ian underground in WWII. Saved by Raoul Wallenberg.
  
• Wesley Clark: U.S. Army, 1966-2000, West Point, Vietnam, Purple Heart, Silver Star. Retired 4-star general.
  
• John Dingell: WWII vet
  
• John Conyers: Army 1950-57, Korea
  

Republicans

• Dennis Hastert: did not serve.
  
• Tom Delay: did not serve.
  
• House Whiip Roy Blunt: did not serve.
  
• Bill Frist: did not serve.
  
• Rudy Giuliani: did not serve.
  
• George Pataki: did not serve.
  
• Mitch McConnell: did not serve.
  
• Rick Santorum: did not serve.
  
• Trent Lott: did not serve.
  
• Dick Cheney: did not serve. Had "other priorities." Several deferments, the last for wife's pregnancy.
  
• John Ashcroft: did not serve. Seven deferments to teach business.
  
• Jeb Bush: did not serve.
  
• Karl Rove: did not serve.
  
• Saxby Chambliss: did not serve. "Bad knee." The man who attacked Max Cleland's patriotism.
  
• Paul Wolfowitz: did not serve.
  
• Vin Weber: did not serve.
  
• Richard Perle: did not serve.
  
• Douglas Feith: did not serve.
  
• Eliot Abrams: did not serve.
  
• Richard Shelby: did not serve.
  
• Jon Kyl: did not serve.
  
• Tim Hutchison: did not serve.
  
• Christopher Cox: did not serve.
  
• Newt Gingrich: did not serve.
  
• Donald Rumsfeld: served in Navy (1954-57) as aviator and flight instructor.
  
• George W. Bush: six-year Nat'l Guard commitment (in four years); questions about his service remain.
  
• Ronald Reagan: made war propaganda movies.
  
• Gerald Ford: Navy, WWII
  
• Phil Gra mm: did not serve.
  
• John McCain: Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross.
  
• Bob Dole: Army officer WWII.
  
• Chuck Hagel: two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star, Vietnam.
  
• Duke Cunningham: nominated for Medal of Honor, Navy Cross, Silver Stars, Air Medals, Purple Hearts.
  
• Jeff Sessions: Army Reserves, 1973-1986
  
• JC Watts: did not serve.
  
• Lindsey Graham: National Guard lawyer.
  
• G.H.W. Bush: Pilot in WWII. Shot down by the Japanese.
  
• Tom Ridge: Bronze Star for Valor in Vietnam.
  
• Antonin Scalia: did not serve.
  
• Clarence Thomas: did not serve
  

Pundits & Preachers

• Sean Hannity: did not serve.
  
• Rush Limbaugh: did not serve (4-F with a 'pilonidal cyst.')
  
• Bill O'Reilly: did not serve.
  
• Michael Savage: did not serve.
  
• George Will: did not serve.
  
• Chris Matthews: did not serve.
  
• Paul Gigot: did not serve.
  
• Bill Bennett: did not serve.
  
• Pat Buchanan: did not serve.
  
• Bill Kristol: did not serve.
  
• Kenneth Starr: did not serve.
  
• Michael Medved: did not serve.