Germaine to the original point, one of Bush's TV commercials says (among other things) that Kerry voted against body armor. A 1% truth twisted into a pretty disgusting, opportunistic lie. Kerry voted against the $87,000,000,000 re-up that Bush asked Congress for, which contained a line item about body armor, along with God knows how many other line items (much of it aimed at enriching Halliburton). Kerry knew the appropriation had more than enough votes to pass, so he voted "No" as a protest against the way Bush was handling the war. But a really disgusting truth of the matter is that, at the start of the war, when the troops were first sent into Iraq, many of them did not have adequate body armor, some, none at all. Part of the $87,000,000,000 appropriation was to supply the troops with the equipment they should have had before the war began.

You can be damned sure that if this war had been started on Kerry's watch, it would have been
1. absolutely necessary, not the whim of a bunch of neo-con imperialists, and
2. the troops sure as hell would have been properly equipped.

Having been in the military and having been shot at (and wounded), Kerry would never have let anything like this happen.

Don Firth