Did You Know...

Betsy’s Page notes that college students are receiving alarmist e-mails warning them they may be drafted if President Bush wins re-election. The text reads as follows:

Mandatory draft for boys and girls (ages18-26) starting June 15, 2005

There is pending legislation in the House and Senate, S89 and HR 163,to reinstate mandatory draft for boys and girls (ages18-26) starting June 15, 2005. This plan includes women in the draft, eliminates higher education as a shelter, and makes it difficult to cross into Canada.

The Bush administration is quietly trying to get these bills passed now, while the public’s attention is on the elections. The Bush administration plans to begin mandatory draft in the spring of 2005, just after the 2004 presidential election.

· The Congress has added $28 million to the 2004 selective service system budget to prepare for this military draft that could start as early as June 15, 2005.

· Bush has ordered the Selective Service to report to him by March 31, 2005 on their readiness to implement the draft by June 2005

· The pentagon has quietly begun a public campaign to fill all 10,350 draft board positions and 11,070 appeals board slots nationwide.

Please act on this:

· Tell everyone you know – parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents,
godparents, friends, teachers

· Call and write to your U.S. Senator and your U.S. Representatives and ask them why they aren’t telling their constituents about these bills.

A mother whose daughter received the e-mail at the University of Arizona told me her “daughter said a lot of students are getting the same email and they are believing it and saying they won’t vote for Bush because of it.”

Betsy adds that she saw an MTV Choose or Lose ad using similar scare tactics about the draft. FReepers noticed the same ad. Max Cleland and Howard Dean are also trying to spook the kids to by playing the draft card.

No mention by these fear-mongerers that it has been Democrat Charlie Rangel pushing the draft and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld opposing it. Wouldn’t want to spoil the pre-Halloween frightfest with the truth. Here’s a reality check from military.com. Excerpt:

“A draft? It’s just not going to happen,” said Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services personnel subcommittee, agreed: “There is very little support in Congress for reinstating the draft.”

MISLEADING E-MAIL

Perhaps those comments will help steady the nerves of many Americans apparently rattled by an e-mail that is circulating nationwide. It says that legislation is pending in Congress that would reinstitute the draft for the first time since 1973, starting as early as next spring. It also says that the administration is “quietly trying to get these bills passed now, while the public’s attention is on the elections.”

There is a kernel of truth to the allegation — there is a bill pending that would restart the draft. But the Bush administration opposes it, as do Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and the leadership of both the Democratic and Republican parties in Congress. Everyone remotely in a position to know is quite sure that the bill is going nowhere.

“I don’t know anyone in the executive branch of the government who believes that it would be appropriate or necessary to reinstitute the draft,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in April.

The bill’s primary sponsor is Rep. Charles Rangel, a liberal Democrat from New York who represents Harlem. Even he admitted that his bill won’t pass. He said he introduced it to get people to discuss who is doing the fighting in Iraq…

So tell the kids to wipe their noses and stop worrying about getting drafted.

Not. Gonna. Happen.

Update: Powerline notes that Kerry played the draft card today.