Kerry needs to respond and quick to the RNC propaganda machine's latest lies about Kerry attempting to cut the intelligence budget. Kaplan at Slate wrote an excellent article the other day that could help him do just that:
Bush Insults Kerry's Intelligence
The president's latest attack is even more dishonest than the last.
<snip>
On the same day that Kerry's bill was read on the Senate floor, two of his colleagues—Democrat Bob Kerrey and Republican Arlen Specter—introduced a similar measure. Their bill would have cut the budget of the National Reconnaissance Office, the division of the U.S. intelligence community in charge of spy satellites.
According to that day's Congressional Record, Specter said he was offering an amendment "to address concerns about financial practices and management" at the NRO. Specifically, "the NRO has accumulated more than $1 billion in unspent funds without informing the Pentagon, CIA, or Congress." He called this accumulation "one more example of how intelligence agencies sometimes use their secret status to avoid accountability."
The Kerrey-Specter bill proposed to cut the NRO's budget "to reflect the availability of funds … that have accumulated in the carry-forward accounts" from previous years. Another co-sponsor of the bill, Sen. Richard Bryan, D–Nev., noted that these "carry-forward accounts" amounted to "more than $1.5 billion."
This was the same $1.5 billion that John Kerry was proposing to cut—over a five-year period—in his bill. It had nothing to do with intelligence, terrorism, or anything of substance. It was a motion to rescind money that had been handed out but never spent.
<snip>
Kerry's campaign office has thus far been a bit off-the-mark in responding to Bush's outlandish charges. A Kerry spokesman, Chad Clanton, is quoted in today's Times as saying that the senator had "voted against a proposed billion-dollar bloat in the intelligence budget because it was essentially a slush fund for defense contractors." Not quite. The NRO had a slush fund, but not for "defense contractors." It's difficult to correct the distortions of a 10-second sound bite. Usually, it takes a minute or so to set the record straight, and that's too long for the networks. But this one should have been easy. How about something like:
"Sen. Kerry was merely trying to return unspent money to the taxpayers. Shame on President Bush for twisting a simple bookkeeping adjustment to make it look like an act of treachery."(I had to snip so much of this article. It's well worth an entire read. I also hope the Kerry camp gets this nipped in the bud and exposes the Bush camp for the LIARS they are.)
http://slate.msn.com/id/2096874/
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