President Bush is the only real choice Tuesday

Kerry has co-opted conservative policies, but why vote for the imitation when the original is an option?

Date published: 10/31/2004

AS AMERICA closes in on what may very well be another hotly contested presi- dential election, voters might want to ponder the following--and all too familiar--excerpt taken from a major American news publication:

"The troops returning home are worried. 'We've lost the peace,' men tell you. 'We can't make it stick.' A tour of the beaten-up cities in Iraq six months after victory is a mighty sobering experience for anyone. Iraqis, friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American. You try to explain to these Iraqis that they expected too much. They answer that they had a right to, that after the last war, America was the hope of the world. Never has American prestige in Iraq been lower. 'Have you no statesmen in America?' they ask. We have swept away Saddam, but a great many Iraqis feel that the cure is worse than the disease."

Sounds like what you've seen and heard in dozens of newspapers and TV shows, right? Well not exactly. The above quote comes from an article written by one of America's great novelists, John Dos Passos, and it appeared in Life magazine on Jan. 7, 1946.

And as the alert reader may have already suspected from the italicized words in the quote, I took the liberty of substituting Iraq for Europe, and Saddam for Hitler. Plus ca change, plus c'est la même chose!

Harry S. Truman was president when this issue of Life slipped into America's mailboxes, and the article reflected just a small dose of the battering criticism he was then receiving from his many critics who claimed he mishandled the peace.

But the worst was yet to come. Over the next few years, our erstwhile ally in war--the Soviet Union--conducted a communist jihad in Europe that led to the partitioning of Germany, the isolation of Berlin, and the Soviet colonization of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, plus an ugly and violent civil war in Greece, and then in Korea. Could the challenges confronting America get any worse?

Notwithstanding expert opinion of the day, historians now look back on that postwar era as one of America's finest hours, and meeting that heroic challenge ranks Truman among our great presidents.

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Date published: 10/31/2004