Dubya Tells Crowd U.S. Should Not Have Quit the Vietnam War

Dubya told the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars that if he had been in charge instead of those paisley-mod-podged pansies Nixon & Kissinger, the United States would not have stopped fighting the Vietnam War.

His audience, of whom we can expect many would have been maimed or killed had today’s Dubya been in charge at the time, apparently having grown soft since their service days, were unable to roust themselves to frag the speaker.

Dubya brought this up in the course of comparing the Vietnam War with the Iraq War (I kid you not), his logic being that the reason the former has such a bad reputation is that we stopped fighting it, and he doesn’t intend to repeat that terrible error this time.

The Democrats, baffled once again by Dubya’s masterful rhetorical ju-jitsu, immediately reacted by disparaging any comparison between the Iraq War and the Vietnam War.

“President Bush’s attempt to compare the war in Iraq to past military conflicts in East Asia ignores the fundamental difference between the two,” [Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid] said. “Our nation was misled by the Bush administration in an effort to gain support for the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, leading to one of the worst foreign policy blunders in our history.”

Iraq’s prime minister, Ngô Đình al-Maliki, was unavailable for comment.

Pundit James J. “He’s Still Alive?” Kilpatrick comments on Dan Jenkins’s Supreme Court petition (in which he hopes to get the Court to recognize a 9th Amendment right to conscientious objection to military taxation). I mention it, but can’t recommend it. Having gone over the same territory , Kilpatrick’s op-ed strikes me as confused, superficial, and uninformative (though I more-or-less come to the same conclusion, which is that Jenkins’s argument is a long-shot).

According to Tax Info Blog:

The IRS has announced that employees can defer from their paychecks pre-tax the cost of individual health insurance. That is, the employer health exclusion does not simply apply to employer-sponsored plans. Employers can either directly-reimburse employees for part or all of the plan cost, or can allow the employees to take a pre-tax deduction from their paycheck.

To read the proposed language, click here.

About eight million Americans file a federal income tax return even though they don’t have to. This, according to a new report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

Fifteen percent of these were people who neither paid taxes during the year nor qualified for a refund at the end of the year, but did not make enough income to be required to file. The other 85% were people who were filing in order to obtain a refund of taxes that had been withheld from their paychecks, but who would have qualified to stop this tax withholding and then would have had no need to file (nor any obligation).

There are about 6.8 million Americans who are having money withheld from their paychecks and sent to the federal government by mistake. They do not owe any federal income tax, and will get it all back if they file a return at the end of the year. But what they should do is to file a new W-4 declaring themselves exempt from withholding. There’s no good reason for anyone to give the U.S. Treasury an interest-free loan.