John LeBoutillier
Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2005

Why wasn’t this done two years ago, when we invaded – and before thousands of Iranian and Syrian and al-Qaida subversives streamed across the border to destabilize Iraq?

And why is this measure only ‘temporary’? Why isn’t this move permanent? Why not ‘lock down’ Iraq and purge all the illegals?

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2. Ukraine. almost a month after the re-vote of their presidential election, the loser is still stalling and delaying the transition and inaugural of the winner, Viktor Yuschenko, the pro-Western candidate who took on the Russian influence and beat them. Russian President Vladimir Putin has yet to congratulate Yuschenko.

Am hearing disturbing reports of coming trouble in the Ukraine from a belligerent Russia. Was recently told: “It ain’t over there by a mile. Trouble is coming.”

And let’s remember that someone – the KGB maybe – poisoned Yuschenko in August with dioxin. Why is it hard for us to believe that Putin is so power-mad that he would try underhanded tactics to keep the Ukraine in Russia’s political orbit?

Putin is a KGB officer. That agency – using Bulgarian cut-outs – arranged the 1981 shooting of the pope when he was causing all sorts of trouble for the Soviet regime behind the Iron Curtain.

And just last year, in Georgia, the Russians were involved in fraudulent elections that, like Ukraine, were overturned in the face of huge popular discontent.

Watch the coming weeks as Big Trouble may develop in the Ukraine.

That election story is decidedly not over.

3. Social Security Reform. a boring issue that is already causing a stir. President Bush is spending a lot of his newly won political capital on this issue – especially on the ‘privatization’ aspect.

He is going to have trouble on this from some Republicans. We know the Democrats will oppose him, but – unlike Iraq – this time many Republicans may end up opposing some of the proposed reforms. We’ll see over the next few months.

It is Medicare that is really in trouble and needs urgent reform. So why aren’t we talking about fixing that?

4. Brad Pitt-Jennifer Aniston Breakup. What took so long?

5. Howard Dean is favored to be the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Big, big mistake for the Dems. Presidential candidates should not be party chairmen; someone with a selfless attitude toward the party needs to try to rebuild a totally defunct party. (Not that I care what they do.)

6. The Democrats aren’t really a factor anymore. They are so hard-core left wing that they have missed out on the steadily right-ward direction of the country over the past 37 years.

7. CBS News plans a new type of evening newscast. Yeah, sure! The same guys are running CBS News. Are we to believe that suddenly they are going to dump their bias and air objective news? I think not.

8. Iran the next target? Well, this is convoluted; Iran is the capital of fundamentalist Islam and declared war on us on November 4, 1979, when they seized our embassy and the now-famous 53 hostages.

This President Bush has grossly miscalculated our Middle Eastern strategy. We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars, exhausted our military and squandered much of our national credibility on Iraq – while Iran has been our biggest enemy.

Iran is about to begin to pay us back by taking over a big part of Iraq through the very elections we created.

What a tragedy.

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