- As election day draws near, the tone of the campaign
rhetoric grows ever more nasty. The current whack being flung at GW by
surrogates of the Vice President is that Bush is not ready for prime time
presidency.
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- If this is a veiled attempt to assail George W. Bush
on foreign policy grounds, the gall of Al Gore and his cohorts is, once
again, astounding in its breadth and scope. At the very same time that
suggestions about Bush's experience are dangled before the public in hopes
that the uncommitted will bite, a showdown is taking place between the
White House and three House committee chairmen. Apparently, the Clinton
administration has failed to provide documents on Vice President Al Gore's
pair of secret deals with the former Russian Prime Minister. Déjà
vu anyone?
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- Three representatives, Ben Gilman of the House International
Relations Committee, Floyd Spence of the House Armed Services Committee
and Porter Goss of the House Intelligence Committee, have laid down an
ultimatum. If documents surrounding the secret agreements are not turned
over, they will be subpoenaed.
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- Now those famed inventors of the play dough lexicon and
the silly putty Constitution have carried their defense strategy to gargantuan
heights of absurdity. The allegations are that Al Gore brokered a deal
which allowed Russia to sell conventional weapons to Iran sanction-free,
that Al Gore gave his blessing to Russia's transfer of nuclear technology
to Iran, and that Al Gore kept this information secret from Congress. The
Clinton/Gore administration has come up with two reasons why Al Gore's
alleged conduct in creating international agreements was actually acceptable.
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- First, a statute that Gore supposedly violated was one
that, coincidentally, he also co-authored. It referred to "advanced"
conventional weapons. The administration claims that the weapons transferred
to Iran, which included the most sophisticated kind of diesel powered submarine,
wake-homing torpedoes, fighter-bombers and antiballistic missile systems,
were not advanced enough to be considered advanced.
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- Second, the administration contends that Al Gore's secret
pacts with the former Russian Prime Minister are not really agreements.
Rather, they are "understandings."
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- In interpreting the Constitution through the lens of
original intent as exercised for the first one hundred and fifty years
of our nation's existence, we see that agreements, pacts or understandings
which bind two nations together are called treaties. The Constitution
requires that, prior to implementation, treaties must be ratified by the
Senate with a two-thirds super majority.
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- As commander-in-chief, the president's power does encompass
some limited international agreements. These types of agreements are a
close cousin to executive orders and have been referred to historically
as executive agreements. In an urgent situation the president has the
power to negotiate a cease-fire or grant a pardon. But the Constitution
does not explicitly provide any independent power to the executive branch
to make international agreements on its own.
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- Unfortunately, this seems to be the territory into which
the Vice President strayed when he agreed that Russia would not have to
pay the required sanctions for selling weapons to Iran. Mr. Gore apparently
decided to go even further. He added a second agreement to keep secret
Russia's scheme to transfer nuclear technology to Iran under the pretext
that Iran intended to build nuclear power plants.
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- These actions in which the Vice President has allegedly
engaged are not only illegal in their violation of the Constitution and
their breach of three specific statutes, they appear to signify tremendously
poor judgement.
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- Although the Vice President tries to distance himself
from Bill Clinton, they are conjoined twins when it comes to their lack
of veracity. They are of but one mind that is seemingly missing a core
component. Al Gore presents the same inherent defect as Clinton, that
misbegotten ability to contrive laughter, feign tragedy, concoct tales,
reinvent self, dodge responsibility and twist truth, all eerily familiar
indicators of a figure with no moral center.
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- Positive international relations cannot be properly sustained
without a moral foundation. A situational ethics approach will inevitably
lead to the kind of international diplomacy that condones terrorism. The
Clinton White House may try to defend Al Gore by stonewalling but, fortuitously,
the behavior of the Vice President in dealing with Russia provides a timely
window into the soul of the man who is asking to be the leader of the free
world.
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- For Dr. Hirsen's Bio, http://www.newsmax.com/bios/
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