

* When presidents fail to make hard choices, those who serve must make them instead. Soldiers must choose whether to stay with their families or to stay in the armed forces at all. Sending our military on vague, aimless, and endless missions rapidly saps morale. Even the highest morale is eventually undermined by back-to-back deployments, poor pay, shortages of spare parts and equipment, inadequate training, and rapidly declining readiness.



* Nor should the intelligence community be made the scapegoat for political misjudgments. A Republican administration working with the Congress will respect the needs and quiet sacrifices of these public servants as it strengthens America’s intelligence and counter-intelligence capabilities and reorients them toward the dangers of the future.



* The rule of law, the very foundation for a free society, has been under assault, not only by criminals from the ground up, but also from the top down. An administration that lives by evasion, coverup, stonewalling, and duplicity has given us a totally discredited Department of Justice.

In the course of reading the 2000 GOP Platform in preparing the prior post , there were several passages that seemed worth noting:Independently, Anonymous Liberal astutely recalls that in 2003, CBS caved to pressure by refusing to broadcast The Reagans, as a result of protests from right-wing bloggers and other ideologues (who had not seen the film) that it was insufficiently reverent of Ronald Reagan and took liberties in documenting events in his life. A.L. draws all the right lessons by comparing that episode to the controversy over Path to 9/11.