Hullabaloo

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

 
Jacuzzi Cases

Man, Junior must be fuming that yet another one of those hated 527's is coming online with $10 million for more of those ads he'd really like to see stopped:

Group plans anti-Edwards ads

WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) -- A business-backed group plans to join the campaign fray in coming weeks by running ads in key swing states that are expected to attack Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards for his pre-Senate career as a trial lawyer.

The new group, called "The November Fund," is co-chaired by Craig Fuller, who served as chief of staff to the president's father, George H.W. Bush, when he was vice president, and Bill Brock, a former Republican senator.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a key sponsor of The November Fund, which is organized as a so-called 527 group. Such groups are prohibited by law from coordinating activities with presidential campaign staffs or political parties.

The New York Times reported the Chamber and other groups plan to spend $10 million on ads attacking trial lawyers, including Edwards.

John Kerry's selection of Edwards as his running mate on the Democratic ticket enraged some business leaders who have identified abusive lawsuits as a top priority for legislative reform.

"The impact of the trial bar's influence on the legal, legislative, regulatory and economic decisions of an administration is impossible to calculate," said Chamber President Tom Donohue, in a written statement announcing the formation of The November Fund.

Edwards has never disavowed the battles with businesses that were hallmarks of career as a trial lawyer in North Carolina. The candidate, who proudly describes himself as the "son of a mill worker," says he became a lawyer in order to stand up for ordinary people against powerful interests -- a theme that has echoed through his campaigns for public office.

Yes, the Chamber is non-partisan in the same the way the swift boat liars are independent. I'm sure Bush will be right out there condemning all vague "shadowy groups" again while Karl pulls all ten million dollars worth of strings from behind the curtain.

Maybe the trial lawyers need to get a little 527 of their own up and run a few ads featuring some of Edwards' clients -- the ones in the wheelchairs or missing body parts due to corporate cravenness.




digby 8/24/2004 11:52:00 PM |

 
Tricky Timing

I urge everyone to read this Liberal Oasis piece on smears. Smears are the most difficult tactic to combat in any campaign and it has been made even harder by the scandal junkies of cable TV and talk radio. There is no formula.

Fighting Smears

Maureen Dowd, like many backseat campaign managers, has never had to defend against a smear campaign.

Addressing a smear is one of the hardest, trickiest, most delicate things in politics.

Condemn it too early, you raise its profile and spread it places where it hadn't been heard yet, and may never had been heard.

Wait too long, and it becomes perceived truth.

And there's no textbook timeframe how long to wait, because every smear's trajectory and potency is different.

Managing the timing is art, not science.

Those like Maureen Dowd -- who said on Sunday that Kerry seemed to be "caught off guard" by the Swift Boat Liar attack, because he waited to respond -- don't know what they're talking about.

Kerry surely knew this was coming.

Similar attacks began in February of this year. And he has successfully fought off such attacks in past campaigns, with the help of fellow vets.

Kerry was on guard. He simply was patient, trying to sense if the smear was gaining traction.

And he wanted to stick to his post-convention plan, touring battleground states, driving his messages from his acceptance speech, completing his introduction to the public.

Read the rest, it's great.

I would just add that I think the "Kerry waitied too long" CW that's forming is a media driven excuse that lets them off the hook. They know that they are responsible for allowing these assholes to be taken seriously at all and instead of taking responsibility for failing at their job they are blaming the victim. It's an old story with these guys. "Oh he should have fought back a week earlier." Well, if the press were in the business of journalism instead of bloodsport entertainment, they would have investigated these guys before they gave them hours and hours of airtime to spread their filthy little psychodrama all of over airwaves. The people who waited too long were the journalists.

Don't fall for the hype. I heard all these talking heads today going on and on about how this has hurt Kerry and yet they have no evidence to back that up, other than their own guilt.

It reminds me of an earlier time when every single pundit idiot in washington predicted for month after month after month that Clinton was going down. They were just positive of it. "Any day now," they said, "the American people are going to reject this deplorable behavior." The screeched at the highest decibels on every cable show 24/7. Each new revelation was the smoking gun that was going to end his presidency. The 1998 election was supposed to be a deathblow.

And month after month after month more than 60% of the American people continued to support Clinton and the '98 election was a blow out for the Democrats.

Don't believe anything these people say about what "the American people" think. They are celebrities who have as much contact and understanding of everyday Americans as Madonna does. Wait for real data. We'll know soon enough.








digby 8/24/2004 10:32:00 PM |

 
Profiles In Courage

If anyone is wondering why Tweety has turned back into Bush's bitch, here's why:

You might notice something missing from Hardball With Chris Matthews soon: Republicans. " Hardball may seem more like badminton during the Republican National Convention," threatens a GOP insider. What's up? The GOP thinks Matthews has gone over to Sen. John Kerry 's side and is too critical of the Bush campaign's editing of a Hardball interview with Kerry posted on the party's negative site, www.kerryoniraq.com. As payback, they've stopped urging Republicans to appear on the show. Hardball executive producer Tammy Haddad dismisses charges Matthews is biased: "We beat everybody up." So far, nobody from the White House has told her of the show's being blackballed.

Yeah. Uh huh. That must be why he's claiming now that Kerry said "all Americans are Lt. Calley's" in his Senate testimony in '72 and it would explain why tonight he suddenly feels that Kerry should follow the president's lead and condemn all the 527 ads. He got manly for a minute or two and challenged little LuLu but then he got a spanking and turned into a good boy again.




digby 8/24/2004 09:31:00 PM |

 
Everybody Look What's Goin' Down

The clash between Vietnam veterans over Sen. John Kerry and critics of his war record heated up several degrees Monday as a group of vets called on a Clackamas County deputy prosecutor to resign.

"He's hurt a lot, a lot of people," Don Stewart, one of the organizers of a rally on the Main Street steps of the county courthouse, said of Alfred French. "It opens up a lot of wounds. . . . This is personal."

Stewart of Oregon City and Don Kirsch of Canby drew about 45 people to a rally to criticize French, a senior deputy district attorney who said in an affidavit that Kerry lied about his service record. French later admitted his sworn statements were based on the accounts of others.

French's comments have been used in anti-Kerry ads by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group of Vietnam veterans who have said the Democratic presidential candidate lied about or exaggerated his actions during Swift boat river duty in 1969.

[...]

During the rally, Stewart read a letter he and Kirsch wrote in which they tell French he should resign because he has lost the trust of county residents.

"We question your fitness to serve as an enforcer of the law after swearing to facts in a legal affidavit that you do not know to be true," they wrote.

[...]

Kirsch said French has a right to criticize Kerry "as a concerned veteran" but should not have signed a sworn statement based on secondhand information. "He's told lies and hearsay evidence," Kirsch said.

French did not return a telephone message asking for comment.

Thanks to Hesiod for keeping us informed and enlightened even from self-imposed exile.




digby 8/24/2004 12:00:00 PM |

 

I haven't completely absorbed the implications of this article yet (thanks to Davis X Machina for the tip) but it is fascinating and everyone should read it. This guy has the most original view of the Republican mystique I've ever read and something about it tells me he is right on the money. Frank Wilhoit, if you're out there, this one's for you:

This is America, not Denmark. In this country, tens of millions of people choose to watch FoxNews not simply because Americans are credulous idiots or at the behest of some right-wing corporate cabal, but because average Americans respect viciousness. They are attracted to viciousness for a lot of reasons. In part, it reminds them of their bosses, whom they secretly adore. Americans hate themselves for the way they behave in public, always smiling and nodding their heads with accompanying really's and uh-huhs to show that they're listening to the other person, never having the guts to say what they really feel. So they vicariously scream and bully others into submission through right-wing surrogate-brutes. Spending time watching Sean Hannity is enough for your average American white male to feel less cowardly than he really is.

The left won't accept this awful truth about the American soul, a beast that they believe they can fix "if only the people knew the Truth."

But what if the Truth is that Americans don't want to know the Truth? What if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the chance—and not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest, dumbest and meanest lies? What if Americans are not a likeable people? The left's wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle America's rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The Republicans know Americans better than the left. They know that it's not so much Goering's famous "bigger lie" that works here, but the dumber the lie, the more they want to hear it repeated.

And this leads to another truth that the left still has trouble understanding: Millions of Americans, particularly white males, don't vote for what's in their so-called best interests. Thomas Frank recently attacked this riddle in his new book What's the Matter with Kansas? but he fails to answer his own question. He can't, in fact, because his is a flawed premise. Frank, who is at his best when he's just vicious, still clings to the comforting theory that Middle Americans are being duped by an evil corporate-political machine that subtly but masterfully manipulates the psychological levers of cultural backlash, implying that if average Americans were left to their own devices, they would somehow make entirely rational, enlightened choices and elect sensible New Deal Democrats every time. This puts Frank in a bind he never quite gets out of. Like all lefties, he is incapable of taking his ruthless analysis beyond a certain point.

The reason is simple. The underlying major premise of humanist-leftist ideology states that people are intrinsically sympathetic. If people are defiantly mean and craven, the humanist-left structure falters. "Why the fuck should I bother fighting for Middle Americans," they ask, "if they're just as loathsome, in their own petty way, as their exploiters, with whom they actively collaborate?"

Rather than grapple with that dilemma, the left pretends it doesn't exist. This is why they will forever struggle to understand the one overriding mystery of why so many working- and middle-class white males vote against their own best interests.

I CAN TELL YOU WHY. They do so out of spite.

I urge you to read the whole thing. It is the most entertaining piece of political analysis I've read in quite a long time. And, really, what other explanation can there be for Rush Limbaugh?




digby 8/24/2004 11:14:00 AM |

 
Why It Matters

I keep hearing that John Kerry has has brought the character assassination on himself by playing up Vietnam in his campaign. The assessment seems to be that if he hadn't made a big deal out of it the Swift boat Borgias wouldn't have felt the need to come forward. This is, of course, nonsense. If he hadn't brought up his service they would have said he was trying to hide it. This was always in the cards. The Swift Boat Borgias hate John Kerry because he said that Americans committed atrocities in Vietnam and they have never been able to forgive him for agitating against a war they felt proud to have fought.

This is an understandable human reaction. They have never been able to come to terms with that war and what it meant and as a result they have projected all of their emotional confusion about their own actions, their government's perfidy and their country's ambigious relationship to the troops into a single focus on the anti-war protestors as the symbol of all that hurt them. It's beyond my ken to try to convince a bunch of 60ish year old men that they are wrong on this. This issue will dog my generation to our graves.

However, the media isn't really talking about any of that when it says that John Kerry asked for it. It is saying that Vietnam is irrelevant and that by bringing it up he brought all this distraction upon himself. This could not be more wrong. Because of Bush's Big Adventure in Iraq, all of this has become much more than a point of symbolism. It has become crucial to our understanding of what is happening right now.

Although the details differ, essentially we are once again engaged in a misbegotten war in which the goal is amorphous and for which the public feels ambigious. It is the result of a foolish grand geopolitical strategy not self defense and it has American troops embroiled in a complicated foreign battlefield in which we are viewed by all sides with suspicion if not outright hatred. People are dying everyday and nobody quite understands why. The pressure is building.

That at the hands of the Vietnam generation itself, we have found ourselves in this situation again is mind-boggling. And it is a testament to the "suspended in amber" nature of the hawkish mindset that it has happened.

The baby boom generation is incapable of governing if we don't choose among them people who have grappled honestly with the crucible of their lives. And that crucible was Vietnam. George W. Bush and his cronies have never done this. Neither have the Swift Boaters. These people have not faced up to what our country did in that war and as a result we are looking at another war based upon similarly bad assumptions and we are in the process of repeating many of the same mistakes.

Here is a sad case in point. I think most of us have heard that Joseph Darby, the man who blew the whistle on the Abu Ghraib torture, is now in protective custody. Back in his hometown his family was shunned while they held parades for those who committed the torture. He received death threats.

But, I don't know how many people know that this is a sad sequel to the story of Hugh C. Thompson, a helicopter pilot in 1968 who rescued a group of civilians during the My lai massacre and was fired on by his own countrymen. Then as now, right wing politicians were "outraged at the outrage."

He was a 24-year-old pilot flying over the Vietnamese jungle on March 16, 1968. The crew's objective: draw Viet Cong fire from My Lai, so helicopter gunships could swoop in and take out the enemy gunners.

Thompson spotted gunfire but found no enemy fighters. He saw only American troops, who were forcing Vietnamese civilians into a ditch, then opening fire.

Thompson landed his helicopter to block the Americans, then instructed his gunner to open fire on the soldiers if they tried to harm any more villagers. Thompson and two other chopper pilots airlifted villagers to safety, and he reported the slaughter to superiors.

"We saw something going wrong, so we did the right thing and we reported it right then," Thompson said.

The Vietnamese government estimated that more than 500 were killed.

Army Lt. William Calley Jr. was convicted in a 1971 court-martial and received a life sentence for the My Lai massacre. President Nixon reduced the sentence, and Calley served three years of house arrest.

Thompson received the prestigious Soldier's Medal -- 30 years after the fact.

His acts are now considered heroic. But for years Thompson suffered snubs and worse from those in and out of the military who considered his actions unpatriotic.

Fellow servicemen refused to speak with him. He received death threats, and walked out his door to find animal carcasses on his porch. He recalled a congressman angrily saying that Thompson himself was the only serviceman who should be punished because of My Lai.

Today, West Point considers Thompson and his story essential to educating its cadets.

"Hugh Thompson is a great example of individual responsibility," said Col. Tom Kolditz, head of the Army academy's behavioral sciences and leadership department. "He took initiative, he took action, to establish institutional values in a situation where they were not operating."

36 years later we have what is being called another "breakdown in discipline" at Abu Ghraib. As with My Lai, the upper chain of command will not be held liable. Once again there is documentary evidence of war crimes. And, here in the USA, once again, you have the hawks defending the war criminals against those who stand up to it.

This is unfolding before our very eyes in Iraq. It isn't some abstract argument about war stories and faux heroism and who admitted to war crimes a generation ago. This is now.

If there was ever a time that a decorated Vietnam veteran who came home with the knowlege that the war was wrong and fought to end it, was called for to lead this country, it is now. This is not a distraction and it is not beside the point. It is the very essence of the debate in this election.

John Kerry may be the single most qualified man in the entire nation to be president at this moment in history.




digby 8/24/2004 10:44:00 AM |

 
Send Me

I just want to let everyone know that I am volunteering today as the public relations rep for the Drunken Stateside Sons of Privilege for Plausible Deniability. I understand them, I believe in their cause and I want to help them in any way I can. I wasn't there on those nights so long ago but I know many who would like to have been and I believe them.

I am an independent who has never had any interest in politics before so I come forward today purely out of patriotism. I have no connection whatsoever to the Kerry Campaign despite the fact that my blog is listed on their site. For now. I will not remember it ever having been there ---- unless you refresh my memory.

God bless America.



digby 8/24/2004 09:04:00 AM |

 
These Charges Are False

Compare the following to the bucket of warm spit that chickenshit Fred Hiatt published today in which he remains "troubled" (thanks Karen Hughes, that's just the word I was looking for!) by the fact that Kerry has been imprecise about the exact longitude and latitude of his trek across the Cambodian border on the Mekong River around Christmas 1968. (Psssst. I hear Vince Foster was there too.)

Here you have what is fast becoming the best editorial page in the country, run by Michael Kinsley. This is what editorials are for:

These Charges Are False ...

It's one thing for the presidential campaign to get nasty but quite another for it to engage in fabrication.

August 24, 2004

The technique President Bush is using against John F. Kerry was perfected by his father against Michael Dukakis in 1988, though its roots go back at least to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. It is: Bring a charge, however bogus. Make the charge simple: Dukakis "vetoed the Pledge of Allegiance"; Bill Clinton "raised taxes 128 times"; "there are [pick a number] Communists in the State Department." But make sure the supporting details are complicated and blurry enough to prevent easy refutation.

Then sit back and let the media do your work for you. Journalists have to report the charges, usually feel obliged to report the rebuttal, and often even attempt an analysis or assessment. But the canons of the profession prevent most journalists from saying outright: These charges are false. As a result, the voters are left with a general sense that there is some controversy over Dukakis' patriotism or Kerry's service in Vietnam. And they have been distracted from thinking about real issues (like the war going on now) by these laboratory concoctions.

It must be infuriating to the victims of this process to be given conflicting advice about how to deal with it from the same campaign press corps that keeps it going. The press has been telling Kerry: (a) Don't let charges sit around unanswered; and (b) stick to your issues: Don't let the other guy choose the turf.

At the moment, Kerry is being punished by the media for taking advice (b) and failing to take advice (a). There was plenty of talk on TV about what Kerry's failure to strike back said about whether he had the backbone for the job of president — and even when he did strike back, he was accused of not doing it soon enough. But what does Bush's acquiescence in the use of this issue say about whether he has the simple decency for the job of president?

Whether the Bush campaign is tied to the Swift boat campaign in the technical, legal sense that triggers the wrath of the campaign-spending reform law is not a very interesting question. The ridiculously named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is being funded by conservative groups that interlock with Bush's world in various ways, just as MoveOn.org, which is running nasty ads about Bush's avoidance of service in Vietnam, is part of Kerry's general milieu.

More important, either man could shut down the groups working on his behalf if he wanted to. Kerry has denounced the MoveOn ads, with what degree of sincerity we can't know. Bush on Monday — finally — called for all ads by independent groups on both sides to be halted. He also said Kerry had "served admirably" in Vietnam. But he declined an invitation to condemn the Swift boat effort.

In both cases, the candidates are the reason the groups are in business. There is an important difference, though, between the side campaign being run for Kerry and the one for Bush. The pro-Kerry campaign is nasty and personal. The pro-Bush campaign is nasty, personal and false.

No informed person can seriously believe that Kerry fabricated evidence to win his military medals in Vietnam. His main accuser has been exposed as having said the opposite at the time, 35 years ago. Kerry is backed by almost all those who witnessed the events in question, as well as by documentation. His accusers have no evidence except their own dubious word.

Not limited by the conventions of our colleagues in the newsroom, we can say it outright: These charges against John Kerry are false. Or at least, there is no good evidence that they are true. George Bush, if he were a man of principle, would say the same thing.

Yep. There's negative campaigning and then there is character assassination, smears and dirty tricks. That the press is having such a difficult time sorting out the difference is one of the central problems with our country today. Indeed, it's killing us.




digby 8/24/2004 09:04:00 AM |

 
No Connection

An Army investigation into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal has found that military police dogs were used to frighten detained Iraqi teenagers as part of a sadistic game, one of many details in the forthcoming report that were provoking expressions of concern and disgust among Army officers briefed on the findings.

Earlier reports and photographs from the prison have indicated that unmuzzled military police dogs were used to intimidate detainees at Abu Ghraib, something the dog handlers have told investigators was sanctioned by top military intelligence officers there. But the new report, according to Pentagon sources, will show that MPs were using their animals to make juveniles -- as young as 15 years old -- urinate on themselves as part of a competition.

"There were two MP dog handlers who did use dogs to threaten kids detained at Abu Ghraib," said an Army officer familiar with the report, one of two investigations on detainee abuse scheduled for release this week. "It has nothing to do with interrogation. It was just them on their own being weird."

Bad apples rolling around all over the place. Nothing to do with interrogaton. It was just a couple of guys being weird:

Abu Ghraib memo says 'gloves are coming off'

In the months before the scandal broke over photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners, an intelligence supervisor at Abu Ghraib prison sent a memo to interrogators telling them "the gloves are coming off," regarding the treatment of detainees, a lawyer for one of the accused soldiers said yesterday.

Paul Bergrin, a lawyer for Javal S. Davis, who is scheduled to appear in court here today, said he received a copy of the memo from "clandestine sources" in the intelligence community and planned to introduce it into evidence today. Its authenticity could not be independently confirmed.

The memo appears to be the first known document to support contentions by several soldiers charged in the case that they were merely following directions from intelligence officers bent on "softening up" detainees for interrogation.

I keep hearing that John Kerry erroneously claimed that some soldiers committed war crimes in Vietnam under orders from superiors. That's impossible. This is America. We don't do that sort of thing.




digby 8/24/2004 12:19:00 AM |

Monday, August 23, 2004

 
Off Message

President Bush said on Monday that political advertisements run by a broad swath of independent groups should be stopped, including a television advertisement attacking Senator John Kerry's war record. But the White House quickly moved to insist that Mr. Bush had not meant in any way to single out the advertisement run by veterans opposed to Mr. Kerry.

I wrote earlier that the press doesn't understand what Bush is doing. He is supposed to simply condemn the ad with a wink and a nod because the CW is that the 527's give both campaigns a freebie on deniability. They can hardly bear it that he isn't following their script, so today they jumped on it when he went off his own message and they practically shoved the words in his mouth.

But, Bush does not want to condemn this ad and for good reason. If he did some of his staunchest supporters would think he was a pussy --- and that's the essence of what is going on here. Bush has to tear down veterans because he isn't one, but he can't do it himself. Bush just cracked under mildly difficult questioning and blurted out something he didn't mean to say.

Lawrence O'Donnell had an interesting analysis of this dynamic on Olberman last Friday that I think is interesting:

OLBERMANN: Let‘s talk response tactics, first. One of his crew mates from Vietnam said today that Kerry had been way too much of a gentleman and should have come out swinging earlier. Should he have?

O‘DONNELL: He could not tactically, in the presidential campaign, do it that way, Keith. I actually think both campaigns have handled this perfectly in their ways. What Kerry had to wait for is he had to wait for a linkage to President Bush. It would be unworthy of the nominee, the candidate, to be attacking somebody named John O‘Neill or someone involved in the Swift Boat controversy who no one in the country had ever heard of. John Kerry can only mount attacks against his opponent, George Bush, so what he needed was John McCain to come out and condemn the ads, which John McCain did, and then he needed John McCain to ask the president to condemn the ads, and then he needed, very much needed, the president not to condemn the ads, which the president did not do. Which by the way, parenthetically was a wise tactic for the president and his campaign.

Once that had occurred, Kerry needed one more thing. He needed to condemn an ad himself. And so, MoveOn.org provided that opportunity by doing an ad that was negative on President Bush‘s Vietnam non-military service in the National Guard. John Kerry, the nominee, then immediately condemns the Bush ad. That gives him an opportunity, within 48 hours of that, to call on President Bush to denounce the ad against John Kerry.

He could not have done that until he had all those ducks in a row. And then he also needed the investigative journalism that the “New York Times” and the “L.A. Times” and others have done to create a sensation, at least, of linkage to the Bush world and then blame the ad on President Bush.

John Kerry needed every one of those elements to be in place before he could level his attack and have it aimed specifically at one person, George Bush, his opponent.

OLBERMANN: And as the Kerry camp obviously tries to make this debate less about his service, what strategically does the president do next, A, to prevent that, B, to not look like he wrote the commercial and somebody‘s just been laundering the attack for him?

O‘DONNELL: It‘s very, very difficult to get a president to respond to anything. You see tonight, are footages of the president‘s spokesman responding to what Senator Kerry said. That‘s why the Kerry language now is getting more and more intense. They are trying to smoke out President Bush. They are trying to force it to the point where the traveling White House press corps must ask President Bush to respond to this.

President Bush really doesn‘t want to tactically, and tactically really should not, because the question to President Bush now that the Kerry campaign is trying to frame is, why don‘t you condemn the ads? President Bush doesn‘t want to condemn the ads because he then is, in effect, condemning a certain group of Vietnam veterans. He‘s not one of them, himself a Vietnam veteran, so it‘s difficult for him to do. He‘s also now doing better with veterans in polling in the current situation.

So, the best thing for President Bush to do is simply to say “I don‘t criticize John Kerry‘s record” and leave it at that and he‘s going to be forced on this question of “are you going to condemn it” and he‘s just going to have to continue to say no.

O'Donnell doesn't comment on one of the elements of the counterattack --- Bush's history of dirty campaigning beginning to come back to haunt him. That's the other side of the story. The NY Times story continues:

The president spoke on a day when Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, in another indication of its web of ties to the Republican Party, acknowledged that a woman who helped set it up and works for it is an officer of the Majority Leader's Fund, a political action committee affiliated with the former House majority leader Dick Armey of Texas.

The name of the woman, Susan Arceneaux, is given as the contact person on the post office box that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth lists as its address. She is treasurer of the Majority Leader's Fund. Records show that like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group receives significant financing from Bob Perry, a Texan who has long supported Mr. Bush, and his company, as well as Sam and Charles Wyly, prominent Texas Republican donors. Sam Wyly, under the name "Republicans for Clean Air,'' took out advertisements in 2000 criticizing the environmental record of Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.

Mr. Perry has donated $200,000 to the Swift boat group, records show, and Merrie Spaeth, a Republican strategist who has been advising the Swift boat group, was a spokeswoman for Sam Wyly's advertising campaign in 2000.

Every day of the tit for tat is risky for both sides. But, I tend to think that Kerry losing the veterans is a lot less fatal than Bush losing the independents who don't like dirty campaigning. We'll see.




digby 8/23/2004 11:16:00 PM |

 
Huh?

Great moments in headlines written with a straight face ... or, the never ending decline of CNN. Right now -- 5:59 PM -- CNN headline: "Bush urges Kerry to condemn attack ads."

Can you believe it? Not only is that completely ridiculous, but Bush didn't really even condemn the ad himself. He went off message for a second under the extremely unusual experience of the press putting the tiniest bit of pressure on him. Please. Does this really sound like he's condemning that ad?

QUESTION: But why won't you denounce the charges that your supporters are making against Kerry?

BUSH: I'm denouncing all the stuff being on TV, all the 527s. That's what I've said.

I said this kind of unregulated soft money is wrong for the process. And I asked Senator Kerry to join me in getting rid of all that kind of soft money, not only on TV, but to use for other purposes as well.

I, frankly, thought we'd gotten rid of that when I signed the McCain-Feingold bill. I thought we were going to once and for all get rid of a system where people could just pour tons of money in and not be held to account for the advertising.

And so, I'm disappointed with all those kinds of ads.

QUESTION: This doesn't have anything to do with other 527 ads. You've been accused of mounting a smear campaign.

Do you think Senator Kerry lied about his war record?

BUSH: I think Senator Kerry served admirably and he ought to be proud of his record.

But the question is who best to lead the country in the war on terror? Who can handle the responsibilities of the commander in chief? Who's got a clear vision of the risks that the country faces?

QUESTION: Some Republicans such as Bob Dole and some Republican donors such as Bob Perry have contributed and endorsed the message of those 527 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads.

QUESTION: When you say that you want to stop all...

BUSH: All of them.

QUESTION: So, I mean...

BUSH: That means that ad, every other ad.

QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE)

BUSH: Absolutely. I don't think we ought to have 527s.

I can't be more plain about it. And I wish -- I hope my opponent joins me in saying -- condemning these activities of the 527s. It's -- I think they're bad for the system. That's why I signed the bill, McCain-Feingold.

I've been disappointed that for the first, you know, six months of this year, 527s were just pouring tons of money -- billionaires writing checks. And, you know, I spoke out against them early. I tried to get others to speak out against them as well. And I just don't -- I think they're bad for the system.

Note to press corpse: If you would have tried to get Bush off his robotic message on real issues with even a smidgen of this energy these last three years, we might not have large numbers of people being blown up in Iraq as we speak. Sleep well tonight.




digby 8/23/2004 06:08:00 PM |

 
Un Danseur de Chippendales

Christopher Hitchens thinks that John Kerry shouldn't have released that picture of himself and William Rood in Vietnam because the fact that he is carrying a rocket launcher makes him look like a "complete poseur." That's french for phony.

If that was phony, what then could possibly be the french word for this:







digby 8/23/2004 03:30:00 PM |

 
Overstimulated

Pierce:

To embroider a phrase from Mr. J, I weep for my profession when I see that God is just.

It has been made abundantly clear -- most recently, by Mr. Rood of the Chicago Tribune and by the invaluable Joe Galloway of Knight-Ridder -- that these Swift Boat characters are dealing in public lies. The day before, it was the NYT. The day before that, the Washington Post. We've had people outed as Republican operatives, disparaging war wounds they never saw, asserting as fact things they never witnessed, and ultimately calumnizing their own heroism. By all standard measures, this story should be over, and these people consigned to that same Phantom Zone where was dispatched that poor guy who wrote "Fortunate Son" in 2000. Can any fair person maintain that John O'Neill and the rest of the Chuck Colson Flotilla have any more credibility at this point than poor Hatfield had?

However, they live.

Why?

Television.

The print media, God love it, has done so thorough a debunking of these guys that you'd expect to hear a couple of them on Art Bell's program late one night. But because the "issue" and the "controversy" make good television theater, they must be kept alive. Which is why, the next time you see, say, Norah O'Donnell, down by the phony barn on the phony ranch, and she tells you how remarkable it is that the ads are "having an effect" despite the fact that the actual buy was so low, you should feel free to excuse yourself and go vomit in the corner. The original ad contained substantially less truth than the Hitler Diaries, but it was run anyway, over and over again, in news pieces about the "issue" and on argument shows dealing with the "controversy." In other words, television news gave up a substantial portion of its "news hole" this week to information that the people running the news operations had to know were demonstrable lies.

This is what you get. This is what you get when you get bullied by Mr. Murdoch's toy network into running an interview in which a woman makes unsubstantiated charges of rape against a sitting president, and this is what you get when you get played like a tin piano by a decades-long dirty-tricks campaign that culminated in an impeachment, and you couldn't report on the former because you were in the tank to the people bringing the latter. This is what you get when you loan your hard-won credibility to hacks and charlatans. This is what happens when you sell your craft out to celebrity, when being good on television is more important than being good at your job, when unconscionable slander is reckoned as genius because it moves the Nielsen needle. This is what happens when sneering schoolyard invective is reckoned to be actual talent because it comes with a Q rating. (Have a nice day, Tucker.) This is what happens when you run scared. Truth, literally, comes to matter not at all.

And, come Friday, with the Swift Boat ad in tatters in most major newspapers, what did HARDBALL do? It ran a segment attempting to rehabilitate the credibility of Michelle Malkin, a complete fake whose new book on the internment of Japanese-Americans has been stomped into a mudhole by the scholars who have done the real work on her topic, and who had come on the very same program the night before and made an idiot of herself. And who was adjudged to be worthy of being on national television to defend her?

John Fund.

It is to weep.

I don't know about the print guys either, Charles, but maybe they just act this way when they go on TV:

DANA MILBANK, WASHINGTON POST: Oh, sure. I mean, I think we've been completely used in this by both sides. Just a few dollars, really, being spent in terms of the overall campaign war. In one of these cases, we're talking about an ad that hasn't even run yet, and then we're also talking about a response ad that Kerry put out on the Internet, which they basically spent nothing for, but it's getting attention on all the networks.

So we're completely allowing this whole issue to dominate the news. I mean, part of that's just that it's being August and there's not a lot else going on before the convention.

Yes. The Kerry people are ruthlessly using the poor media to get out their message rebutting the attacks that the poor media was so willing to shill for the Bush administration.

You know, I think this may not actually be a matter of lack of character or conscience. I think it may be more like a medical problem. They can't help themselves. They jones for action and the Repubicans know how to give it to them. Blood in the water makes them high. They aren't journalists, they just pretend to be. They are junkies, hooked on trivia, stimulation and scandal. They enable these tabloid smear tactics because the corporations provide them with their works and the Republicans give them their fix. They cover for their addiction to GOP nasty by finding false comparisons between the two parties so that the public won't cut them off from their source.

The press desperately needs an intervention.





digby 8/23/2004 01:42:00 PM |

 
It's Self-defense

The swift boat veterans who hate John Kerry have all come forward to tell the story of his Machiavelian ability to fraudulently, and in concert with large numbers of naval officers all the way up the chain of command, gain for himself a spotless record of heroism and valor during Vietnam.

John Kerry claims that this is a dirty trick on behalf of the Bush administration. But, what he fails to mention is that this was merely justifiable retaliation for a sickening smear set forth by some very ugly undercover Democrat operatives who some months ago went on the shadowy National Public Radio to call into question president Bush's heroism in Operation Blount during his valorous stint in the National Guard.

Those days were frought with stress and pain for all concerned. Who knew who was the enemy and who was not? People had taken to the streets in Washington DC, while the battle raged in far flug locales. It was men like Lt. George W Bush who manned the front lines, taking the heat to protect democracy. Why should his supreme sacrifice for his country be fair game for those who would stoop to destroy the reputation of an American hero for mere political gain? Is nothing sacred?


Via Brad DeLong

This campaign season, there have been questions about whether George W. Bush fulfilled his obligations to the National Guard as a young lieutenant in the early 1970s. For weeks, reporters scoured Alabama in search of pilots or anyone who might have remembered seeing Mr. Bush at the time he was serving in the National Guard there. There is one place in Alabama where Mr. Bush was present nearly every day: the headquarters in Montgomery of US Senate candidate Winton "Red" Blount. President Bush has always said that working for Blount was the reason he transferred to the Alabama Air National Guard. NPR's Wade Goodwyn has this report about Mr. Bush's time on that campaign.

WADE GOODWYN reporting:

In 1972, Baba Groom was a smart, funny young woman smack-dab in the middle of an exciting US Senate campaign. Groom was Republican Red Blount's scheduler, and in that job, she was the hub in the campaign wheel. Ask her about the handsome young man from Texas, and she remembers him 32 years later like it was yesterday.

Ms. BABA GROOM (Former Campaign Worker): He would wear khaki trousers and some old jacket. He was always ready to go out on the road. On the phone, you could hear his accent. It was a Texas accent. But he just melded with everybody.

GOODWYN: The candidate Mr. Bush was working for, Red Blount, had gotten rich in Alabama in the construction business. Prominent Southern Republicans were something of a rare breed in those days. Blount's support of the party led him to be appointed Richard Nixon's postmaster general. In Washington, Blount became friends and tennis partners with Mr. Bush's father, then Congressman Bush. That was how 26-year-old Lieutenant Bush came to Montgomery, at his father's urging . . . It was Mr. Bush's job to organize the Republican county chairpersons in the 67 Alabama counties. Back in 1972 in the Deep South, many rural counties didn't have much in the way of official Republican Party apparatus. But throughout Alabama, there were Republicans and Democrats who wanted to help Red Blount. It was the young Texan's job to find out what each county leader needed in the way of campaign supplies and get those supplies to them. Groom says this job helped Mr. Bush understand how even in a statewide Senate campaign, politics are local.

. . . Murph Archibald is Red Blount's nephew by marriage, and in 1972, he was coming off a 15-month tour in Vietnam in the infantry. Archibald says that in a campaign full of dedicated workers, Mr. Bush was not one of them.

Mr. MURPH ARCHIBALD (Nephew of Red Blount): Well, I was coming in early in the morning and leaving in mid-evenings. Ordinarily, George would come in around noon; he would ordinarily leave around 5:30 or 6:00 in the evening.

GOODWYN: Archibald says that two months before the election, in September of '72, Red Blount's campaign manager came to him and asked that he quietly take over Mr. Bush's job because the campaign materials were not getting out to the counties.

Mr. ARCHIBALD: George certainly didn't seem to have any concerns about my taking over this work with the campaign workers there. My overall impression was that he didn't seem as interested in the campaign as the other people who were working at the state headquarters.

GOODWYN: Murph Archibald says that at first, he didn't know that Mr. Bush was serving in the Air National Guard. After he found out from somebody else, Archibald attempted to talk to Mr. Bush about it. The president was a lieutenant and Archibald had been a lieutenant, too; he figured they had something to talk about.

Mr. ARCHIBALD: George didn't have any interest at all in talking about the military. In fact, when I broached the subject with him, he simply changed the subject. He wasn't unpleasant about it, but he just changed the subject and wouldn't talk about it.

GOODWYN: Far from Texas and Washington, DC, Mr. Bush enjoyed his freedom. He dated a beautiful young woman working on the campaign. He went out in the evenings and had a good time. In fact, he left the house he rented in such disrepair--with damage to the walls and a chandelier destroyed--that the Montgomery family who owned it still grumble about the unpaid repair bill. Archibald says Mr. Bush would come into the office and, in a friendly way, offer up stories about the drinking he'd done the night before, kind of as a conversation starter.

Mr. ARCHIBALD: People have different ways of starting the days in any office. They're going to talk about their kids, they're going to talk about football, they're going to talk about the weather. And this was simply his opening gambit; he would start talking about that he had been out late the night before drinking.

GOODWYN: Archibald says the frequency with which Mr. Bush discussed the subject was off-putting to him.

Mr. ARCHIBALD: I mean, at that time, I was 28; George would have been 25 or 26. And I thought it was really unusual that someone in their mid-20s would initiate conversations, particularly in the context of something as serious as a US senatorial campaign, by talking about their drinking the night before. I thought it unusual and, frankly, inappropriate.

GOODWYN: According to Archibald, Mr. Bush would also sometimes tell stories about his days at Yale in New Haven, and how whenever he got pulled over for erratic driving, he was let go after the officers discovered he was the grandson of a Connecticut US senator. Archibald, a middle-class Alabama boy--who, by the way, is now a registered Democrat--didn't like that story.

Mr. ARCHIBALD: He told us whenever he was stopped, as soon as the law enforcement found out that he was the grandson of Prescott Bush, they would let him go. And he would always laugh about that. "

digby 8/23/2004 12:32:00 PM |

Sunday, August 22, 2004

 
The Action Is The Juice

Lambert's got a barn burning post up today that's well worth reading. But I take issue with one of the central points of his thesis which basically comes down to the a belief that the Democrats only have themsleves to blame for the political situation we are now in. I disagree. It's not because of self-inflicted wounds --- it's because we are dealing with a particular brand of thuggish assassin that is difficult to reconcile with democracy.

Clinton was being hounded about all kinds of trumped up garbage long before Monica came into the picture. He would have been tarred as the corrupt whitewater, chinese espionage, lincoln bedroom hippie whether he gave himself that "self-inflicted" blowjob or not. And he fought back like a champ but it doesn't matter when you are dealing with people who have no use for truth or reality. You don't have to actually do anything with these people. They'll just make shit up. Smear tactics, which are by definition untrue, are the most lethal tool in the character assassins' arsenal and the Republicans are worse than the Borgias when it comes to using them.

I don't mean to be too critical, but I think it is a serious misreading of the challenge we face to put the blame for the state of our politics on the alleged shortcomings of our own leaders. We are at a big disadvantage in this game because we have at least a modicum of decency and while I agree that we very likely are going to have to give that up, I don't think it's a failure of nerve to at least have tried to keep our political system from totally turning into a sewer. The path on which we are now forced to go is one that is bound to taint all of us. I'm not sorry we have taken it reluctantly.

But, I am very nervous that if this attitude remains, and it is quite widespread, we are going to see Democrats once again making the Republican case for them when Kerry gets in office by joining the chorus and calling him "french" for trying to govern in an extremely hostile environment.

This is where we go wrong. If Bush has proven anything, it's that we are in an era in which actual ideology and policy, even power --- even winning --- isn't the point to the Republicans. They are about the fight. It's the game, the argument, the battle. They get off on the political combat. For them, the action is the juice, win or lose. (And one of the reasons they've been so successful at co-opting the media is because the media thrives on the same juice.)

Just fighting back isn't going to solve that problem. Indeed, over the long haul, it's likely to result in failure if that's all we do. They love fighting a lot more than we do. And losing doesn't dull their bloodlust, it engages it. We need to think of a more sophisticated battle plan.

Off the top of my head, the first one to come to mind is divide and conquer. Perhaps it's time we formed a religious group that is anti-abortion and for school prayer, but is adamantly against corporate materialism. Or a libertarian GOP front group that wants to purge the party of the religious right. Perhaps if we could set off a civil war among the Republicans we could cure them of their love of political battle. Civil wars often do. But, that's just an idea. Whatever we do, I think hand to hand combat and bomb throwing is a loser for us over time. It just feeds them.

I don't dispute that appeals to reason have been exhausted. And I don't say that Kerry shouldn't fight by any means necessary in this election. It's vitally important that we get institutional power out of their hands. (Indeed, many may secretly want us to. The fight is not as satisfying when you hold all the power and we have become quite adept at cleaning up their messes.)

But, blaming ourselves for the state of play or deluding ourselves into thinking it's just a matter of "being tough" is to misunderstand what we are facing. It's a primitive force with post-modern tools in its hands and we'd better start looking at this thing for what it is instead of seeing ourselves as simply inept. Winning won't change anything. As long as the fight continues, they are getting exactly what they want.




digby 8/22/2004 01:23:00 PM |

 
Good Day

Everybody should feel a tiny bit better about the swift boat smear --- for this morning, at least. Here are the headlines as of this morning on the Google News site.

Bush campaign fires adviser on veterans issues

Bush Campaign Aide Resigns Amid Controversy Over Campaign Ads

Kerry returns fire over Vietnam

Bush drops adviser tied to group

Swift Boat member skips rally over fliers at Bush campaign office

Kerry Camp Tries to Thwart Negative Swift Boat Ads

Kerry, Dodging Charges Over Vietnam, Returns Fire

Veteran backs Kerry on Vietnam

First-Hand Account Backs Up Kerry on Vietnam War Controversy

Vietnam vet backs Kerry's war deeds

Hatred drives anti-Kerry claims

Big Backing For Kerry In Ad Wars

Kerry: Slo-Mo on Swifties

Ad Fight Bogs Down White House Race

Tribune editor says critics got it wrong

Kerry calls on Bush to stop personal attacks

Swift boat vet goes public to back Kerry

Another war veteran backs Kerry's story

Kerry fires back over Vietnam charges

Bush Campaign Drops Swift Boat Ad Figure

Witness confirms that Kerry rescued soldier under fire

Participant in mission, documents support Kerry's war claim

Vietnam veteran comes to Kerry's defence

Bronze Star battle stokes hot tempers

Anti-Kerry ads have GOP links


For today at least, it's advantage Kerry. But, it's just a tiny skirmish in a bigger battle.

It is possible that we are seeing a little ropa-a-dope here in which Kerry takes some blows throughout the dog days of August when he has little money to spend on his own. He appears to be building a case against Bush's dirty campaign tactics. Over and over again for the next week heading into the convention, I suspect he will step up the calls for Bush to stop the madness. They'll refuse. The bored and predictable media will hopefully be asking all these GOP conventioneers if they disavow the ads, so the issue of dirty tricks and Republican funding stays on the front burner. Then on September 1st as they head out of their NYC lovefest,and the country is really paying attention, Kerry hits them right between the eyes.

He explains to the press that he tried and tried to be reasonable. He asked them politely to stop the smears and the dirty tricks. They wouldn't listen. The Bush campaign has no one to blame but themselves. He had no choice.

It's a metaphor for mature leadership.

But who the hell knows? A presidential campaign is a seat of the pants operation that has to be able to change from day to day as circumstances require. They calibrate this stuff carefully according to polling and focus groups in important regions. They may find that Bush is falling behind in which case there is no reason to nuclear. If, however, this smear operation really erodes Kery's support among undecideds (the base is with him no matter what) then I think we'll see some ads directly attacking Bush on his leadership.

I would love to see that, but only if it helps the cause. Emotional satisfaction is nice but ultimately irrelevant. Fighting back does not mean flailing about aimlessly, it means landing blows. And sometimes that means waiting for the right opening.

But, if it comes down to showing Junior reading "My Pet Goat" then I say let-er-rip. That's the essense of the choice in this election and it's at the bottom of Rove's plan to tear down Kerry's war record and his senate career and the snotty asides about "frenchness." This election is really about the underlying discomfort many people feel with Bush's leadership. If it ends up that Kerry has to spell this out to the idiot swing voters in Ohio in no uncertain terms then that's what he'll do.

Combatting smears is very, very difficult. It is almost impossible, as a matter of fact, when you have a compliant media that wants to be "fair and balanced" to the point where they would give Hitler equal time to make his case against the jews.

Everybody acts like there is some magic formula and there just isn't. You slog through it by the the force of your own strength and talent like Clinton did, you try to change the subject or you go completely nuclear on the other guy. That's it. All three strategies have big risks attached. There is no easy way out and even if it works, people rarely appreciate you for it.

When Howard Dean said to a shocked and appalled Candy Crowley at the Democratic convention that this wa going to be the dirtiest campaign in history, he was right. But, there's more to fighting a smear than simply fighting dirty. You have to fight better and smarter. That's the challenge. Over these next two months we're going to see if Kerry has the right stuff. This is where the game really begins.

One More Thing:

There are two sites that are tracking the swift boat story very thoroughly and in different ways:

Bookmark eriposte and Daily Beast for the full compendium. And I think we can continue to help by sending this stuff to the media and getting it disseminated through the big message boards like DU, Smirking Chimp, Bartcop etc.





digby 8/22/2004 11:58:00 AM |

 
Dole-ful Loser

That despicable old fuck Bob Dole is on Blitzer complaining about Kerry's purple hearts and backing up the Swift Boat liars.

What gall:

IMAGINE IF supporters of Bill Clinton had tried in 1996 to besmirch the military record of his opponent, Bob Dole. After all, Dole was given a Purple Heart for a leg scratch probably caused, according to one biographer, when a hand grenade thrown by one of his own men bounced off a tree. And while the serious injuries Dole sustained later surely came from German fire, did the episode demonstrate heroism on Dole's part or a reckless move that ended up killing his radioman and endangering the sergeant who dragged Dole off the field?

I had developed a ittle fondness for the scumbag over the past few years because he seemed kind of a doddering anachronism that reminded me of the old school Republican assholes. But, I stupidly forgot that he was one of the original hatchet men, the Prince of Fucking Darkness during the 70's and he's still in form today.

Damn, every single time I get the least bit sentimental and let down my guard on one of these wingnuts they remind me that none of them have any goddamned shame.




digby 8/22/2004 10:08:00 AM |

 
Drop A Dime On LuLu

Can Michele Malkin be any more stupid? I don't actually think it's possible:

Blogger Rusty Shackleford highlights American hackers who took down a website apparently owned and operated by Abu al Zarqawi.

Rusty comments:

The CIA/FBI are making a major mistake allowing these sites to be kept up. The reason? This is war. In a war you take away propaganda outlets from the enemy. Yes, they may help us track down al Qaeda elements, but that is just the point. Tracking down and arresting al Qaeda is a police function. Treating the War on Terror as a police matter is Clintonesque and is what got us 9/11. We need to shut all these sites down. They are valuable tools for the enemy...

He adds that the hackers, who identified themselves as "TeaMz UsA," missed a page on Zarqawi's site:

Unfortunately the crew at 'TeaMz UsA' missed a page. I have the URL and am more than glad to share it with any hacker who thinks they can take down the page. Just e-mail me anonymously at mypetjawa-at-yahoo-dot-com. Calling all hackers with a little free time this Sunday afternoon...

Yeah. I want to trust Malkin and the 101st keyboarders to take charge of counter terrorism.

I don't suppose it occurred to any of these morons that the CIA and the FBI may have had a reason for leaving these web sites up and running? I think they might expect a little visit. Malkin should get one too. You are supposed to report terrorist activities to the authorities, not take the law in your own hands. In fact, it's a crime and a big one.

Via Catch






digby 8/22/2004 10:04:00 AM |

 
Compelled To Speak Out

As with Mr. Rood yesterday, via Susie, I see we have another eyewitness coming forward and disputing the swift boat lies.

Dear Editor,

This letter is in response to the new attacks on John Kerry's war record by a group calling itself the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth." As for most veterans of any war and as people who know me will testify, it is not easy for me to talk about my experiences in Vietnam. However, because of these new ads and, I understand, a new book recently published by an old Charles Colson "Enemies List" hit man, I feel compelled to speak out. Unfortunately, the veterans featured in these attacks are being used by extreme right wing Bush supporters to spread their lies and malign John Kerry.

I feel that most of these veterans who are joining this attack are against Kerry for what he did after he was home from the war than for what he did in the war. If they are against him for his stance against the Vietnam War, that certainly is their right, but to spread lies and malicious innuendos about his time on the rivers of Vietnam is not morally right and does a disservice not only to Kerry, but to all those who served and were wounded or died in that war. The people who are using these veterans for their own means obviously do not care about that. They did the same thing to Senator John McCain and Congressman Max Cleland in 2000 with no remorse or care for the consequences.

To me what is worse is that by their silence, the current administration has not, with any real meaning, disavowed itself or distanced itself in anyway from any of these scurrilous attacks, past or present. I feel that this truly shows the Bush administration for what they really are and ultimately, who is truly responsible for these attacks.

Since I happened to be along on one of the "excursions" where the boats that we were on were attacked and after which Lt. Kerry was cited for valor, I thought it appropriate to give my recollection of that event. This happened on March 13, 1969. I was assigned as Psychological Operation Officer for the Swift Boat group out of An Thoi, Vietnam, from January 1969 to October 1969. As such, I was on No. 43 boat, skippered by Don Droz who was later that year killed by enemy fire. We were second in line while exiting the river and going through the opening in a fish trap when a mine blew up under the No. 3 boat directly in front of us and we started taking small arms fire from the beach. Almost immediately, another mine went off somewhere behind us. All boats, except the one hit, immediately wheeled toward the beach that most of the fire came from (a tactic devised by Lt. Kerry, I later learned) and commenced showering the beaches with so much lead, that it could probably be now mined there. The noise was of course, deafening.

Three things that are forever pictured in my mind since that day over 30 years ago are: (1) The No. 3, 50-foot long, Swift boat getting huge, huge air; John Kerry thought it was about two feet. (He was farther away from it than I). I think it was at least four feet and probably closer to six feet; (2) All the boats turning left and letting loose at the same time like a deadly, choreographed dance and; (3) A few minutes later, John Kerry bending over his boat picking up one of the rangers that we were ferrying from out of the water. All the time we were taking small arms fire from the beach; although because of our fusillade into the jungle, I don't think it was very accurate, thank God. Anyone who doesn't think that we were being fired upon must have been on a different river.

The picture I have in my mind of Kerry bending over from his boat picking some hapless guy out of the river while all hell was breaking loose around us, is a picture based on fact and it cannot be disputed or changed. It's a piece of history drawn in my mind that cannot be redrawn. Sorry, "Swift Boats Veterans for the Truth"- that is the truth.

To say that John Kerry or any of us were on that river to intentionally collect Purple Hearts really does every soldier and sailor, past and present, a disservice. We were going up those rivers (with an ongoing casualty rate of 86 percent at the time) on the orders of the same people who approved of Kerry's medals and who are now joining in the attacks against Kerry. Unbelievable.

I would hope that the American public sees these evil extreme right wing attacks for what they really are and also pray that the veterans being used by these unpatriotic right wing extremist political operatives will divorce themselves immediately from them and speak to the real issues as to why they oppose John Kerry. I just don't understand how anyone can align themselves with those who intentionally and gleefully painted a decorated triple amputee (Max Cleland) from Vietnam as unpatriotic. I think that this is the most disastrous, un-American thing that can be done to our servicemen and women, especially now with another unending war going on. Your ends cannot possibly justify these means. Come on!

Jim Russell

Vietnam veteran,

USN (1966-71)

I forwarded this to the usual suspects in the media and Michael Dodd at the Washington Post.

The thing about this testimony, and that of Rood yesterday, is that these people were on the scene. One of the most underreported aspect of this whole slime has been that the only "eye witnesses" have been discredited by their own past statements and every piece of the record. All the other testimony is "I believe my buddies" hearsay.




digby 8/22/2004 09:49:00 AM |

 
Shifting the Debate

Blitzer led with the Cordier resignation (whom he calls an "advisor") this morning on Late Edition which means that the controversy seems to have shifted a bit to Bush's dirty tricks and the FEC complaint and away from Kerry's alleged Machiavellian ability to get the Navy to corrupt itself at every level. Russert was all over the dirty campaigning angle this morning.

If Kerry can get the debate on to that turf he will have accomplished what he needed to do. So far today, it's working. I'm not seeing the POW ad and I'm hearing an awful lot about rich Texas donors and McCain in 2000 and patterns of deceit.

One day at a time.




digby 8/22/2004 09:11:00 AM |

Saturday, August 21, 2004

 
Friendly Reminder on a Saturday Night (thank you too, Julia)

This is why the Swift Boat Liars have been mobilized:

Bush on Bush

"I'm saying to myself, 'What do I want to do?' I think I don't want to be an infantry guy as a private in Vietnam. What I do decide to want to do is learn to fly."

Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, 1989

"I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes."

Dallas Morning News, Feb. 25, 1990

"I don't want to play like I was somebody out there marching when I wasn't. It was either Canada or the service. ... Somebody said the Guard was looking for pilots. All I know is, there weren't that many people trying to be pilots."

Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Nov. 29, 1998

The Few, the Proud, the Chickenhawk




digby 8/21/2004 10:01:00 PM |

 
Who Us?

CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - A Vietnam veteran who worked with President Bush (news - web sites)'s campaign has left over his appearance in a commercial by a group challenging Democratic candidate John Kerry (news - web sites)'s war record, a campaign spokesman said on Saturday.

Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said Ken Cordier was a Bush supporter during the 2000 election and served as a member of his a steering committee to help reach out to veterans during this election.

"Col. Cordier did not inform the campaign of his involvement in the advertisement being run by (Swift Boat Veterans for Truth)," Schmidt said. "Because of his involvement with this 527 (group), Col. Cordier will no longer participate" in the steering committee.

The disclosure of Cordier's involvement came one day after White House spokesman Scott McClellan and Bush campaign chairman Marc Racicot denied the campaign coordinated with the group on the ads, which claim that Kerry lied about his Vietnam War service.

Kerry has called the ads inaccurate and accused the group of being a front for the Bush campaign. On Friday the Kerry campaign filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (news - web sites) seeking to force the ads' withdrawal.

New advertisements by the group are set to debut next week in states where Kerry has touted his military service. Kerry won several medals and his record is often contrasted with Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard during the war.

McClellan has refused to specifically condemn the ads and instead has urged Kerry to join Bush in calling for an end to all commercials funded by unrestricted donations.

U.S. advocacy groups can collect vast sums of money to run their own political advertisements but are barred from coordinating their activities with campaigns or political parties.

"There seems to be an increasing amount of evidence that the Bush campaign is behind this," Kerry campaign spokesman Phil Singer said. "So it's no surprise that the president refuses to condemn these scurrilous ads."

No kidding.

Update:

I like CNN's headline better:

Bush adviser quits after appearing in swift boat ad

Kerry has accused group of illegally working with campaign

Saturday, August 21, 2004 Posted: 11:43 PM EDT (0343 GMT)


ROANOKE, Virginia (CNN) -- A volunteer adviser has quit President Bush's re-election campaign after appearing in a veterans group's television commercial blasting Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's involvement in the Vietnam-era antiwar movement.

A Bush campaign statement said it did not know that retired Air Force Col. Ken Cordier had appeared in an ad by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The Kerry campaign has accused the group of illegally working with the Bush campaign.

digby 8/21/2004 08:00:00 PM |

 
Shhhhh

The RNC lawyers seem to have forgotten to tell their local patriots to ixnay on the wift-boat-say on their official sites,too:

Patriotboy has a screenshot of the Collier County Republican Central Committee soliciting funds for the Swift Boat Liars.

Uh, and it's still on their web site right now at 3:45 PDT on August 21, 2004. Check it out.

The last google cache they have is for August 10th, but they were featuring the book "Unfit For Command" and the Swift Boat ad ready for viewing right up front then, too.




digby 8/21/2004 03:52:00 PM |

 
Twisted

In the post below, I highlighted something that I haven't seen anyone comment upon. This ex-POW, Kenneth Cordier, a man who has held other POW's to account for accepting early release from the North Vietnamese as traitors, is the subject of a letter to the editor in the Dallas Morning News as follows:

"Last month, a lone bagpiper marched to the tune of "Amazing Grace" as silence fell over the distinguished guests, choir, color guard and the veterans and families who came to dedicate the Irving Veteran's Memorial Park honoring those who gave "the last full measure of devotion" to their nation.

Unfortunately, one of the invested [sic] guests, retired Air Force Col. Ken Cordier, a decorated former Vietnam POW and experienced speaker, chose to politicize this solemn event. In an attempt at levity, he defended the pulling of ladies' panties over the faces of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. interrogators at Abu Ghraib as preferable to beheading. His inappropriate, Limbaughistic comments detracted from the reverence and purpose of this event.

Richard A. Widener, Irving”

[THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS, 6/13/04]

Of all the people to make mock of the depravity visited upon those prisoners at Abu Ghraib, a former POW is the last one I'd expect to see doing it. I wonder if he will find it so amusing when our guys are imprisoned and sexually humiliated in the future. I suppose he will counsel the prisoners and their families to comfort themselves with the fact that "at least it wasn't a beheading."

30 year old bitterness and rage is a very ugly thing and I think we are seeing how it can warp some people into a twisted version of their former selves. In some ways these guys are to be pitied. That war messed them up so badly they apparently lost their humanity.




digby 8/21/2004 11:54:00 AM |

Friday, August 20, 2004

 
Update 8/21:

The cache has now updated to today. Here's a link to the screen capture of the August 19 page. Thousands of others have archived it as well. In fact, I'm reliably told that Olberman showed it on his show this evening. As Cokie Roberts memorably said "It's out there."

Nothing To See Here

I wonder if its appropriate for Ken Cordier, a member of the Veterans For Bush-Cheney '04 steering committee to appear in the new "unaffiliated" "independent" 527 Swift Boat Liars For Bush ad?

Of course you will only see his name if you google the cached version (linked above) of the page on the Bush-Cheney web site. Oddly, the current page doesn't list his name.

Now I'm certain this fine gentleman who has chosen to sell out his good name and reputation by joining a filthy smear operaton like Scumbag Liars For Bush would never coordinate with the campaign just because he also served as one of the Vice-Chairs Of Veterans For Bush-Cheney National Coalition in the 2000 camapign (pdf) and then was named to Bush's VA-POW advisory committee.

But some might think it doesn't look quite kosher. In fact, some might think it looks downright illegal.

Update:

The campaign is already on to this and has sent out the following press release. What they didn't have, however, was this Google cache which shows that Cordier was listed as a member of the Bush-Cheney campaign until August 19th. (And, by the way, in case it's escaped anyone's notice, Mr Cordier has a Frenchman in the woodpile.)

Public records reveal that two of the people in the new "Swift Boat Veterans for Bush" television ad are Republican activists, as the fact sheet below shows. This is just more proof that Bush's Republican allies are the ones behind this disgraceful smear of John Kerry's military record. It's pretty clear what's going on here. It's no wonder the Bush campaign refuses to condemn this smear.

KENNETH CORDIER

PARTISAN: Another Texas Republican Donor


CORDIER, KENNETH
DALLAS,TX 75208
US AIR FORCE/RETIRED COLONEL
3/2/2001
$1,000
Republican Party of Dallas County

CORDIER, KENNETHW MR
DALLAS,TX 75225
SELF EMPLOYED
2/27/2002
$238
RNC/Repub National State Elections Cmte

CORDIER, KENT
DALLAS,TX 75206
RETIRED
6/30/2000
$1,000
Hutchison, Kay Bailey




2001-06-05
REPUBLICAN PARTY OF TEXAS
CORDIER, KEN

1
$100
[followthemoney.org]



PARTISAN: “Despised” LBJ
“The procession ended just before the 1968 presidential election when the United States stopped its bombing campaign. ‘I remember that was the worst day of my life’ because the POWs' treatment worsened and they felt forgotten by their government, Col. Cordier said. He "despised" Lyndon Johnson for his war policies.” [Dallas Morning News, 11/10/03]


PARTISAN: Bush Administration Ties
He is a member of a Bush administration advisory panel on veterans’ issues.

[“VA Announces Membership of POW Advisory Committee,” PR Newswire, 4/17/02;


PARTISAN: Open About His Conservative Political Views
“Col. Cordier (pronounced core-dee-AY) still wears his conservatism on his sleeve and doesn't hold back in his appraisals of more liberal approaches “[Dallas Morning News, 11/10/03]

JUDGEMENT: Defending Abu Gharib Abuses?
” Inappropriate remarks: Last month, a lone bagpiper marched to the tune of "Amazing Grace" as silence fell over the distinguished guests, choir, color guard and the veterans and families who came to dedicate the Irving Veteran's Memorial Park honoring those who gave "the last full measure of devotion" to their nation. Unfortunately, one of the invested guests, retired Air Force Col. Ken Cordier, a decorated former Vietnam POW and experienced speaker, chose to politicize this solemn event. In an attempt at levity, he defended the pulling of ladies' panties over the faces of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. interrogators at Abu Ghraib as preferable to beheading. His inappropriate, Limbaughistic comments detracted from the reverence and purpose of this event. Richard A. Widener, Irving” [THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS, 6/13/04]



JUDGEMENT: Said Fellow POW Was “A Traitor”
Talking about POWs who were released early: “According to Cordier, Low ‘is a traitor to the other prisoners of war" for accepting premature release on July 18, 1968.’” [Air Force Times, 11/3/03]


INCONSISTENCY: Doesn’t Remember Kerry Being Invoked In Vietnam
“Cordier, now living in Texas, doesn't recall Kerry's name specifically being used in interrogations, propaganda broadcasts by Hanoi Hannah (Radio Vietnam) or during "attitude checks" -- political indoctrination sessions -- since Kerry was then not a household name. But he said he does remember the North Vietnamese using the so-called Winter Soldier investigations and photographs of war veterans, both real and imposters, throwing military medals over the White House fence.” [UPI, 8/3/04]


PARTISAN: Questioned Normalization Under Clinton And Wished Bush Would Win
“Said he questioned the president's motives and the appropriateness of the visit at this time. He predicts that the next administration, which he presumes will be headed by Texas Gov. George W. Bush, will engage more in "carrot and stick diplomacy" with the Vietnamese government, offering "generous rewards" for concessions” [Dallas Morning News, 11/19/00]

PAUL GALANTI

JUDGEMENT: Wanted To Ban Draft Dodgers From Public Colleges
“A House of Delegates committee yesterday killed a bill sponsored by Del. Warren E. Barry (R-Fairfax) that would have directed Virginia's state colleges not to admit any young man who failed to register for the draft. Barry appeared before the Education Committee along with a former Navy flier, Paul Galanti of Richmond, who had spent seven years as a North Vietnamese prisoner of war, but the panel nonetheless killed his idea for the second year in a row, this time by a vote of 12 to 8.” [Washington Post, 2/5/83]



JUDGEMENT: Called Conservative Christians “Sheep”
"They probably called their little followers. They vote on that one issue. They call them sheep. That's exactly what they are." -Paul Galanti, McCain's Virginia campaign co-chairman, on the backlash by Virginia's conservative Christian voters after McCain's attacks Monday on the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson. AP, 2/29/00



JUDGEMENT: Insulting Disabled Vets?
“Life has a way of throwing curve balls and John [Hager] got beaned by one when he acquired polio as an adult and lost the use of his legs. He would have been forgiven for tossing in the towel, drifting over to the VA hospital and spending the rest of his life feeling sorry for himself.” [Richmond Times Dispatch, 6/2/01]



JUDGEMENT: On Critics Of The Vietnam War: “Communist Sympathizers”
“It caused me to question anything I hear from Communists or their many sympathizers or copycats or dupes in America who tended then - and still tend - to distort the truth for their personal gain, or even (gasp) to lie if that will achieve the desired end.” [Richmond Times Dispatch, 6/17/01]



PARTISAN: Carter-Basher
“I had a great final three years in the Navy despite the devastation Carter's policies had wrought on the military. My last Navy year was under one of the finest-ever Commanders-in-Chief, who led the country out of Jimmy Carter's unlamented and self-caused "malaise."” [Richmond Times Dispatch, 6/17/01]

digby 8/20/2004 08:31:00 PM |

 
TBOGG

It just doesn't get any better than this:

Well it was a meeting of the minds (loosely speaking) on Rush today when the drug-addled, tripled divorced, didn't-go-to-Vietnam-because-of-a-pimple-on-his-fat-ass Rush Limbaugh had Michelle "If I wanted to be publicly humiliated I would have signed on for a bukkake video instead of going on Hardball" Malkin on.

Jesus, I'm cryin' here.




digby 8/20/2004 07:14:00 PM |

 
Where Do They Come Up With This Stuff?

After Malkin's little meltdown on Hardball last night, we all ought to forward old Chris this exchange from August 13th.

Q On behalf of Vietnam veterans -- and I served six tours over there -- we do support the President. I only have one concern, and that's on the Purple Heart, and that is, is that there are over 200,000 Vietnam vets that died from Agent Orange and were never -- no Purple Heart has ever been awarded to a Vietnam veteran because of Agent Orange because it's never been changed in the regulations. Yet, we've got a candidate for President out here with two self-inflicted scratches, and I take that as an insult. (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you for your service. Six tours? Whew. That's a lot of tours. Let's see, who've we got here? You got a question?

If Chris wonders where the smear about self inflicted wounds is coming from he should probably ask the people who pre-screen the questions at the GOP only "Ask Bush" events. Obviously, they will have the names.

Funny, the president doesn't seem too concerned about this toxic swill being bandied about in his presence. In fact, he says "he appreciates it."





digby 8/20/2004 03:08:00 PM |

 
Another One Down (and one more)

Via Pacific Views:

A Clackamas County prosecutor and decorated Vietnam veteran who appears in an ad attacking Democratic presidential contender John F. Kerry's war record said he did not witness the events in question and is relying on the accounts of his friends who served with the senator.

The 60-second ad, which aired for seven days this month in Ohio, West Virginia and Wisconsin, features 13 Vietnam veterans, including Alfred French, 58, a senior deputy district attorney in Clackamas County.

In the ad, French says: "I served with John Kerry. . . . He is lying about his record."

[...]

French, in an interview Thursday, said Kerry lied about the circumstances that led to one of his Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. Kerry received a Bronze Star, a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts commanding a Swift boat in Vietnam.

French said he is relying on the accounts of three other veterans who were friends of his at the time. A fourth veteran with whom French was acquainted corroborated their accounts.

"I was not a witness to these events but my friends were," said French, who was awarded two Bronze Stars during the war. "I believe these people. These are people I served with."

One of the men is Larry Thurlow, a leader of the veterans group and one of Kerry's most vocal critics. Thurlow, who served alongside Kerry, has disputed Kerry's claim that the senator's boat was under fire in March 1969 when he pulled Lt. Jim Rassmann out of the water.

But according to Thurlow's military records, obtained this week by The Washington Post, the five-boat flotilla was under enemy fire that day.

French -- relying on friends' accounts -- said Rassmann would have been picked up by another boat if Kerry had not helped. And French said any shots that were fired came from U.S. soldiers providing cover as Rassmann and two others were rescued.

"It's not like he wouldn't have been saved if Kerry had not been there," French said. "I don't believe they were under any fire when that happened. None of the other boats were damaged."

He said Rassmann's rescue did not merit a special honor.

"Somebody fell off your boat and you go back and pick him up," French said. "It's not worthy of a Bronze Star in my opinion."

Rassmann, who lives in Florence and is campaigning for Kerry, said the ad is motivated in part by some veterans' anger over Kerry's antiwar stance upon returning home -- a charge French acknowledges. Rassmann said the group's claims are completely false.

"To come back 35 years later and conjure up fabricated stories is the lowest form of politics," said Rassmann, who said he does not know French.

"I honor these guys for their service," Rassmann said. "I know they were very courageous, along with John Kerry, and it saddens me that they are all at one another's throats."

French, a registered Republican, said he was reluctant at first to take part in the ad but ultimately "decided it was something I needed to do."

French said his one-year tour of duty in Vietnam overlapped Kerry's by two months. He said they served together in the same unit in January and February 1969. He said he did not know Kerry well during that time.

This scumbag not only lied about "serving" with John Kerry, he wasn't even anywhere around and is just repeating his friends lies.

And, I'm hoping that somebody is working hard to verify where that asshole William Schachte really was on the day he claimed he was on Kerry's skimmer and nobody on the boat remembers him being there. It's probable that we'll later find out that he was actually on R&R in Bangkok on that day but he later heard from a friend of a friend who channeled a Vietnamese fisherman that Kerry cynically launched a grenade in his skivvies so he could run for president in 30 years.

This has now entered the realm of the absurd. These guys have thrown themselves into the sewer for that petulant little cheerleader. Jesus.




digby 8/20/2004 02:31:00 PM |

 
He Volunteered For Combat

Here's a little anecdote on a Friday morning from the neighborhood Starbucks that I think illustrates a little bit of the Scumbags For Truth dilemma.

Overheard argument (and I swear it isn't one of those taxicab confessions.)

Why would those guys lie about Kerry?

Because he said that soldiers committed atrocities in Vietnam.

Well he did and it was a shitty thing to do.

Yeah, well at least he fought instead of having his rich daddy get him into the guard.

The argument developed into a back and forth about Bush going AWOL, Kerry running from enemy fire etc, until it ended up with "Who the hell does Bush think he is?" Say what you want about Kerry, but he volunteered for combat and Bush didn't, end of story" and the other guy blathering on for a while about Jane Fonda.

According to the Annenberg Center Survey (pdf) released today the ad's effect seems to track pretty closely along the partisan divide, so I'm not sure whether we've seen any erosion in support (despite what people are saying):

Respondents who saw or heard about the ad are split about its believability. Forty-six percent find the ad very or somewhat believable and 49 percent find the ad very or somewhat un-believable. Beliefs about the believability of the advertisement are strongly associated with partisan inclinations. Seventy percent of those with favorable opinions ofBush find the advertisement somewhat or very believable while 19 percent of those with favorable opinions of Kerry find it believable. Independent voters are nearly evenly split over whether they find the ad believable; 44 percent find the ad somewhat or very believable while 49 percent find the ad somewhat or very unbelievable.

But, there's another side to this and one that wasn't addressed in this survey. It's the other side of that argument I heard in Starbucks this morning. As David Gergen said on Hardball last night, it's a bit inexplicable that Bush would want Kerry's service back on the front page of the news in any capacity because it inevitably highlights the contrast between his own actions and Kerry's. You have to wonder if Lee Atwater were alive if he wouldn't have proposed this smear as a whisper campaign instead of a Willie Horton style feed-the-mediawhores special. Bush Sr wasn't vulnerable on the crime issue like Dukakis was so he could afford to go nuclear. Over the long haul, keeping Vietnam on the front burner is not necessarily a winner for Junior. When Kerry said yesterday, "Well, if he wants to have a debate about our service in Vietnam, here is my answer: Bring it on," that's what he was talking about.

That "he volunteered for combat" argument is hard for Bush to rebut. It's simple and appeals to the common sense of average Americans. (And believe me, there isn't a person in the country who doesn't associate Bush with the attack. Most people believe in their gut that the campaigns are behind the ads whether they are or not.)

I'm not suggesting that this smear is good for Kerry, but I am suggesting that it doesn't necessarily help Bush all that much with undecideds and may end up hurting him a little. (The GOP talk radio neanderthals will believe anything they're told, so they are not worth worrying about at the moment.)

Rove probably feels he has no choice but to tear down Kerry's heroism because Junior is extremely weak on every issue but terrorism so he has to run on his alleged cojones to grab the undecideds. (The "compassionate, uniter divider" side of his agenda is a total joke and everybody knows it.) But, it's a dicey proposition. Regardless of whether people know the details of Bush going AWOL in the Guard, or even if they've heard about it, it is indisputable that he went in the Guard instead of volunteering for combat as Kerry did. That is the bottom line contrast and it doesn't reflect well on him to attack Kerry's war record because of it.

Kerry and his surrogates continuing to tie the attack to big Texas Republican money closely associated with Bush is an important element because Bush is doing something here that doesn't make sense. One of the perverse advantages of the 527's is to be able to claim that they are independent and don't represent your view while they stick it to your opponent. It makes the media very suspicious when you don't follow the pre-ordained script and Bush is not following the script on this. That makes the media skeptical.

It's very interesting that Rove has adopted this odd hedging routine instead of taking the high road freebie offered by the 527 "independence." The best explanation is that he's worried about offending his base or his Texas contributors if he explicitly condemns the ad. And that is a sign of weakness. If that is right then Kerry is correct to hammer on Bush having these people do his dirty work for him. It puts him in a box.

I'll repeat what I've said here too many times before. The operative motivation in a smear is not to convince people. It's to "get it out there" and raise doubts. There's almost nothing you can do when people are determined to smear you like this to completely contain the damage. Once it's out there it's out there. And in that sense, they have succeeded very well.

However, there is an interesting example of how a smear can be fought to a standstill (although with your reputation forever shredded.) That is the method by which Clinton fought the Monica frenzy. He turned it into an attack on Ken Starr. And it largely worked because people instinctively recoil at the idea of nosy creeps like Starr rifling through other people's underwear drawers.

There are elements of the same thing here if the Democrats can correctly keep the frame where they want it to be. A man who maneuvered his way out of Vietnam is now ruthlessly tearing down the war record of one who volunteered for combat. That just doesn't sit well --- it breaks the unwritten rules we have about military service. Just as with the Starr counter attack, the rabid GOP base will become even more agitated and wild. But, the majority of the country will likely begin to see through the smokescreen to what is really going on. And it could end up hurting Bush more than Kerry.

It's probably also why the Scumbags are now pushing this idea that Kerry "planned" to go to Nam and shoot himself three times and phony up his medals for political purposes. This absurd notion will be pushed to contrast with the all-American Bush, who honestly served in the Guard rather than do something so dishonest. Apparently, this idea has been out in the ether for some time. I quoted a Navy wife a couple of weeks ago saying it: "He was just planning to run for president, right from the beginning, that's what I think," said Margaret Leonie Dent, the wife of a Navy retiree. "They say his wounds were paper cuts. Just look at the man. He looks French for God's sake."

The sad thing, of course, is that Kerry will never have his reputation back and at a time when Vietnam veterans were finally beginning to receive their due for their service a bunch of self righteous, petty old men stepped in to cast doubts on them all over again. Nice bunch of patriots selling out their brothers toward the end of their lives to protest a man they claim sold them out when they were young. By any means necessary I guess.

I am e-mailing the following quote to members of the press today. And, I think that all talking heads should have it on a 3x5 card and repeat it everytime they face a swift boat liar or one of their mouthpieces. Everybody needs to be reminded of what the real contrast is here. It's not between Kerry the hero vs Kerry the alleged liar, but rather, the combat volunteer vs the chickenhawk smear artist.

“I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes." George W. Bush on why he joined the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, 1990.

digby 8/20/2004 09:36:00 AM |

Thursday, August 19, 2004

 
I Won't Be Ignored, John

Predictably, Judicial Watch gets in on the Scumbags for Truth action. I think there's an excellent chance that the Navy is going to implicate itself in a massive, systemwide fraud, don't you?

The only question I have about all this is when the charges of Kerry fucking Vietnamese child hookers comes in? No ginned up GOP smear campaign is worth its salt unless it features some juicy, voyeuristic tittilation so that Ann Coulter and Lucianne Goldberg can cackle and drool, screeching "pervert, pervert" over and over again. C'mon, there just have to be some faded tapes or fuzzy pictures of something somewhere. A bastard child he abandoned in a rice paddy? A non-stop orgy on his swift boat with the band of brothers? Let's get with it people.




digby 8/19/2004 10:50:00 PM |

 
Man With A Past

Kevin Drum says, in regard to the catholic advisor who resigned from Bush's campaign today when it was revealed that he had a little problem in his past with drinking and screwing underage girls:

"It sure sounds like an awful lot of people have known about Hudson's background for a long time."

As it happens, one of the commenters to my post on this subject from earlier today had this to say:

I could NOT BE HAPPIER to learn that Deal Hudson has finally been hoist up on the petard of his shady past. He was a visiting professor at NYU while he was at Fordham, and I was one of his students there. He regularly invited his female students out for after-class margaritas. He would get very drunk and sloppy. It was clear to me then that he would have been open for any sexual turn the evening might have taken (although I failed to provide that turn signal). He was irresponsible in the ways that alcoholics are irresponsible: missing deadlines for recommendations, blowing off independent study projects, borrowing things and continually forgetting to return them despite numerous reminders. I heard about the Fordham incident and wasn't surprised, but boy was I shocked when I saw his elevation to presidential adviser. I figured it would blow up in his face, and I shed no tears to see that it has.

This guy was in charge of Catholic outreach for the Bush campaign. It appears he had quite a history of reaching out ... and grabbing young girls.




digby 8/19/2004 09:07:00 PM |

 
Razzie Winner 2004

The next salvo in the cinematic campaign war of 2004 is "The Big Picture," a documentary film attacking John Kerry sponsored by David Bossie's Citizens United, the right-wing group that unsuccessfully sued to stop national advertising of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11."

[...]

An outline of the "The Big Picture" obtained by Salon suggests that the Citizens United documentary will offer not only a staunch defense of Bush but also an aggressive attack on Kerry, including a recitation of various smears having to do with his medal-winning military history put forward lately by the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The outline portrays the Democratic nominee as the preferred candidate of such "foreign leaders" as Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong Il and the Nicaraguan Sandinista Party, and as an "appeaser" of European powers deemed corrupt and hostile to U.S. interests -- especially France. Virtually all the world's other nations are solidly behind Bush and the war in Iraq, according to the outline, which labors to disprove allegations that Bush "lied" about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaida.

This (undoubtedly hilarious) piece of shit is directed by Lionel Chetwynd, the D List director who did that Showtime 9/11 movie starting Timothy Bottoms featuring that unforgettable line: "I'm not gonna let some tinhorn terrorist chase me outta town. Now get me back to Washington!"

Hints of the Citizens United film project first emerged in early July, when Bossie warned what he and his organization would do if the Federal Election Commission dismissed their "Fahrenheit 9/11" complaint. "Citizens United becomes a documentary factory," he told the New York Post. "We'll make documentaries and we'll show ads for them. I'm in the production business ... I can put together a documentary very, very quickly."

The structure of the film, assuming that it follows the outline obtained by Salon, will be a methodical and ham-handed refutation of the "Anybody but Bush" arguments attributed to Moore, from the issue of the "stolen" 2000 election to the debate over the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks. The true villains in all those controversies, it claims, are Democrats Bill Clinton, Al Gore and, of course, John Kerry.

Among the familiar personalities mentioned as possibly appearing in the film are Solicitor General Ted Olson and his late wife Barbara; actor and former Sen. Fred Thompson, who has appeared in a previous Citizens United ad; syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer; former CIA director James Woolsey; and Florida Rep. Porter Goss, recently nominated as the next CIA director. (A less familiar interview subject, apparently named Ivan Pedanski, is cited as a source on Iraq's disappearing weapons of mass destruction; he would say that the "stuff [is] buried in the ground in Syria.")

An earlier version of the script outline, titled "Initial Notes," promised a more vicious and possibly more comical film. Among the anti-Bush canards mentioned there but omitted from the later outline is that "Bush is a moron." It argues that the president cannot be both a moron and a "devious mastermind attempting to spread US hegemony worldwide" -- and claims that "Bush did well at Yale."

That version of the script indicated the film's second half would be devoted to "deconstructing John Kerry" -- beginning with the character assault mounted by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and mocking him as the "Knight of the Woeful Countenance." It also makes the false assertion that Kerry "never went on to post-grad work" after Yale. (Researchers hired by Bossie presumably will discover that Kerry graduated from Boston College law school in 1976.)

This makes me feel happy. Aside from all the possible legal problems that Conason mentions in the piece, this is simply pathetic. Say what you will about Michael Moore, but he is a professional documentary filmmaker with a very unique and very succesful directorial style. His film has done extremely well, not just because it's a liberal polemic, but because it's extremely entertaining and well structured.

Bossie's good at low life bottom feeding, but Oscar level filmmaking may just be a bit above his touch. (It certainly is above Chetwynd's touch.) I have a feeling that this is going to be hilariously embarrassing.




digby 8/19/2004 08:13:00 PM |

 
Docs At The Hazing

It is a sick culture that would think nothing of medical personnel who would design, implement and enable torture, especially in a country we were ostensibly liberating from exactly that kind of treatment. That not one came forward to report any of it says something very troubling about how we define morality and ethics in this country. Let's not forget that these people are from the same nation that spent more than a year and tens of millions of dollars in the pursuit of a leader who allegedly lied about an extramarital affair.

I don't want to hear another word from the religious zealots on the right, including their mascot, our God anointed president, about good and evil until they stand up and explain why they aren't screaming bloody murder about American doctors reviving prisoners who've been beaten unconscious so that they can be beaten again.

I have a good idea what Jesus would think of such a disguisting act, but I'm not so sure about our self-appointed morality police here in the US of A.

Doctors working for the U.S. military in Iraq collaborated with interrogators in the abuse of detainees at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, profoundly breaching medical ethics and human rights, a bioethicist charges in The Lancet medical journal.

In a scathing analysis of the behavior of military doctors, nurses and medics, University of Minnesota professor Steven Miles calls for a reform of military medicine and an official investigation into the role played by physicians and other medical staff in the torture scandal.

He cites evidence that doctors or medics falsified death certificates to cover up homicides, hid evidence of beatings and revived a prisoner so he could be further tortured. No reports of abuses were initiated by medical personnel until the official investigation into Abu Ghraib began, he found.

"The medical system collaborated with designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations," Miles said in this week's edition of Lancet. "Army officials stated that a physician and a psychiatrist helped design, approve and monitor interrogations at Abu Ghraib."

The analysis does not shed light on how many doctors were involved or how widespread the problem of medical complicity was, aspects that Miles said he is now investigating.

A U.S. military spokesman said the incidents recounted by Miles came primarily from the Pentagon's own investigation of the abuses.

It's clear that nobody but the grunts in the pictures will suffer any consequences, not even for the systematic depraved indifference to the suffering of those prisoners. We're giving a fine lesson in western justice to the Iraqis. No wonder they are so happy to have us there.




digby 8/19/2004 04:59:00 PM |

 
Frame Up

I like this. Kerry's campaign is going after Regnery, saying that they should withdraw the book because it is a hoax.

The Kerry campaign has told Salon that the publisher of "Unfit for Command," the book that is at the center of the attack on Kerry's military record by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, is retailing a hoax and should consider withdrawing it from bookstores. "No publisher should want to be selling a book with proven falsehoods in them, especially falsehoods that are meant to smear the military service of an American veteran," said Kerry campaign spokesman Chad Clanton. "If I were them, I'd be ducking under my desk wondering what to do. This is a serious problem."

Now, Regnery will do no such thing, of course. But, the frame is obvious.

Bush supporters insisted that James Hatfield's book Fortunate Son, be pulled because of what they claimed were false assertions of George W. Bush's alleged cocaine use. The editor in chief of St. Martin's Press, Robert B. Wallace, resigned over the controversy. Surely, this swift boat book, based upon one proven lie after another, should be dealt with the same way.

Some on the other side will point out that Hatfield's book was eventually withdrawn not because of its allegations that George W. Bush had used cocaine but because the author had been convicted of hiring a hit man on his boss. But if the character of the author is the prevailing question, then it cannot be ignored that one of the authors of Unfit For Duty has recently admitted to writing a long litany of noxious swill including references to the pope and little boys, Islam as a satanic religion and Katie Couric as "Little Katie Communist of the NBC Today Show" Indeed, it seems that this author believes that many in the media are communists. Is that the kind of author a publisher should stand behind when the facts in the book are called into question?

St. Martin's Press withdrew their controversial book when the character of its author was revealed to be suspect and the charges of George W. Bush's cocaine use in 1972 were refuted by a man in Texas. Now, we have a similar situation in which the character of the author of Unfit For Duty has been called into question and numerous facts contained within the book have been fully exposed as false, most recently in an article today in the Washington Post. Regnery Publishing, despite its Republican ties, should do the right thing and withdraw this book.

(And while they're at it they should condemn William Regnery's new all white dating service. (Thanks Oliver.)






digby 8/19/2004 01:18:00 PM |

 
Zig Zag

First, Susie reminds me that it's the mighty Clenis's birthday --- so happy birthday to the Big Dog. You're looking better every day.

She also alerted me to the fact that Zell Miller is going to nominate Bush at the convention.

Isn't this gilding the lily just a little bit? I'm not sure that those elusive swing voters are going to be all that impressed with a guy who is openly and obviously stabbing his own party in the back with singular relish. It's not the way stand up guys behave. You quit your party before you go this far.

I think they just overplayed the "Zell" card, but it depends on how the media play it. I'm fairly sure they'll present it some sort of metaphor for the deep discontent within the Democratic party and the "loss" of the south. Demo talking heads had better be prepared with some zippy zingers about good ole Zig Zag Zell.




digby 8/19/2004 11:48:00 AM |

 
Good Job

I know that bashing the Democratic establishment is good fun, but I think today we should show them some love. Their hardball approach to the Nader problem has been excellent. They are working on the ground in all these states making it tremendously difficult for the Republicans to get Nader on the ballot.

It isn't pretty and I'm sorry it came to this, but the stakes are too high and it had to be done. The Democratic party deserves some praise for learning from the past and getting people all over the country to do the tiresome, nitty gritty work involved in fighting this covert GOP operation.




digby 8/19/2004 09:37:00 AM |

 
Another One Bites The Dust

May I just say how comforting it is to know that this man has been advising George W. Bush on how to court Catholic voters. Who says that having ever more religion in public life won't improve the moral climate?






digby 8/19/2004 09:13:00 AM |

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

 
Making Her Bones

I love Dahlia Lithwick (really) and I'm greatly looking forward to her next column in which she takes the right wing to task for calling Kerry a delicate, effete "frenchman" who isn't a Real Man. I imagine she'll agree that's bad because it makes them look like crude barbarians who think that all Democrats who might vote for him are cowardly and effeminate. I'm sure it will be excellent.



Update: I think Yglesias has the right of it. Just because it might not be a good strategy to run against Bush the moron, doesn't mean that Bush is not a moron. (Stirling Newberry also has an interesting riff on pundits dumbing down arguments.)

John Kerry is not running his campaign saying that Bush is too stupid to be president. But that does not make it wrong that vast hoardes of average Americans know that what they are seeing on their television screens is a dullard of the highest order. It is simple reality. The man speaks in gibberish. He behaves with emotional immaturity. He betrays a sophomoric insensitivity ("please don't kill me") and a lack of gravitas that is frightening ("History? Who knows, we'll all be dead.")

Lithwick seems to be tut-tutting the regular folks like those who sent ads to MoveOn or fans of Michael Moore who have the bad manners to point out the turd in the punchbowl --- or bloggers like me. But, what she is really doing is speaking out in favor of the sort of cognitive dissonence that has become the hallmark of the other side. "You can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes."

Perhaps Bush isn't really a puerile dumbshit but merely a great actor. But, what I see is what I see. And standing before me as president of the United States appears to be an intellectually deficient and childish man by any standard, much less that which we would normally hold for a president.

Maybe John Kerry can't say it because some idiot swing voter thinks voting means he gets to drink beer with president and he'd prefer to be towel snapped by Bush than Kerry. I understand that. But, that doesn't mean it isn't true.




digby 8/18/2004 10:50:00 PM |

 
Falling On His Tiny Little Sword

You've got to hand it to the Scumbags for Truth. They smear Kerry's war record because they don't like his VVAW activity, then they smear the navy because it's the only explanation as to how all these glowing fitness reports and commendations could be given to a coward and now they are even smearing themselves. These guys will do anything, even sully their own war records, in their quest to get Kerry.

And, like the good Republicans they are, they then sniffle like little girls about how unfair it is that they are getting the same treatment they so enthusiastically mete out to to others.

Last month, Thurlow swore in an affidavit that Kerry was "not under fire" when he fished Lt. James Rassmann out of the water. He described Kerry's Bronze Star citation, which says that all units involved came under "small arms and automatic weapons fire," as "totally fabricated."

"I never heard a shot," Thurlow said in his affidavit, which was released by Swift Boats Veterans for Truth. The group claims the backing of more than 250 Vietnam veterans, including a majority of Kerry's fellow boat commanders.

A document recommending Thurlow for the Bronze Star noted that all his actions "took place under constant enemy small arms fire which LTJG THURLOW completely ignored in providing immediate assistance" to the disabled boat and its crew. The citation states that all other units in the flotilla also came under fire.

"It's like a Hollywood presentation here, which wasn't the case," Thurlow said last night after being read the full text of his Bronze Star citation. "My personal feeling was always that I got the award for coming to the rescue of the boat that was mined. This casts doubt on anybody's awards. It is sickening and disgusting."

Thurlow said he would consider his award "fraudulent" if coming under enemy fire was the basis for it. "I am here to state that we weren't under fire," he said. He speculated that Kerry could have been the source of at least some of the language used in the citation.

In a telephone interview Tuesday evening after he attended a Swift Boat Veterans strategy session in an Arlington hotel, Thurlow said he lost his Bronze Star citation more than 20 years ago. He said he was unwilling to authorize release of his military records because he feared attempts by the Kerry campaign to discredit him and other anti-Kerry veterans.

The Post filed an independent request for the documents with the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, which is the central repository for veterans' records. The documents were faxed to The Post by officials at the records center.

So this idiot is actually saying now that his own bronze star for the same action that Kerry received his, unbeknownst to him, was given to him fraudulently and Kerry is probably the guy who perpetrated the fraud. This guy is one step away from the mentality of a suicide bomber --- right down to the whining victimhood.

Let's add up the discredited Scumbags, shall we?

Nixon hatchetman O'Neill gets caught in serveral lies about his recent Republican ties --- makes complete fool of himself trying to claim that half of the money he gave to the GOP was actually given by someone with a similar name.

Jerome Corsi is revealed as an insane Freeper bigot.

George Elliott can't decide from day to day which affidavit about Kerry's silver star is correct and makes the strong point that his own documentary evidence of 30 years ago was likely wrong because he can't think of a reason why these guys would lie 30 years later.

Now we have Thurlow.

These guys are a joke and the mainstream press needs to do its job and hammer on this. The campaigns are caught in a he said/she said that cannot properly put this to bed. Good for the Post for following up this story.



One little note about the Deborah Orin's New York Post story today about the success of the Scumbags for Truth ad. This "study" she and the mediatools like Scarborough are crowing about was a national on-line poll. It did not survey the voters in the 3 battleground states who saw the ad, but rather asked a group of pre-selected voters to view the ad and register their response. If you go to the web-site it appears to be part of an on-line political survey experiment.

According to Orin:

The Swift Vets study used 1,275 participants, including 371 independents, who watched ads and registered their reaction at every second using technology normally used to rate product ads. Half viewed the Swift Vets ad and the other half saw a pro-Kerry ad based on his convention speech, which was rated less persuasive.

[...]

The ad planted doubts in the minds of 27 percent of independent voters who planned to vote for Kerry or leaned pro-Kerry. After seeing it, they were no longer sure they'd back him, the study found.

It could be significant that the ad has the potential to affect 27% of pro Kerry independents. But,the ad only had a 500K buy in three swing states so it's unlikely that that many people have actually seen it in its entirety. If people have seen the ad on the news, they have also heard at least something of the other side of the story.

The bottom line is that in the future, it's possible that if a lot of independent voters who are leaning for Kerry see this ad, and never watch the news, a third of them might develop doubts right after seeing it. That's assuming that this online survey measures anything valid in the first place.

I think the endless mediawhore flogging is the real threat. But, I doubt there's much anyone can do about it. It's now a war of attrition. Kerry's reputation will always be scarred but the funny thing is that this little campaign is taking down his critics reputations too. John Kerry is not only a Vietnam veteran, he's a political veteran too. Whoever is left standing on election day will win this last chapter of the Vietnam saga and I'd put money on him. He's got a lot thicker skin than these guys.







digby 8/18/2004 08:28:00 PM |

 
Undercover Operation

All of you convention bloggers may want to program you Palm Pilots to be at Robert F. Wagner Park on September 1st at 6 pm. The Axis of Eve Coalition will be staging a very special protest.

More than 100 women will participate in the mass flash, which will showcase the group's provocative line of protest panties emblazoned with such sexy admonitions as "give bush the finger," "expose bush" and "weapon of mass seduction.

That ought to scare Gary Bauer right out of town.

For those who like their politics to be very personal the "panties with a purpose" are available here.




digby 8/18/2004 07:54:00 PM |

 
Campaign Finance Epiphany

I love how Bush has suddenly adopted McCain-Feingold as one of his signature issues.He's just appalled that these "shadowy" groups are undermining his fine achievement.

Q There's a new ad by MoveOn.org that talks about -- that criticizes Bush's record in the National Guard. What's your response to that, and what do you say to Harkin, who called Cheney a coward for not serving?

MR. McCLELLAN: We have been on the receiving end of more than $62 million in negative political attacks from these shadowy groups that are funded by unregulated soft money. And the President has condemned all of the ads and activity going on by these shadowy groups. We've called on Senator Kerry to join us and call for an end to all of this unregulated soft money activity. And so we continue to call on him to join us in condemning all these ads and calling for an end to all of this activity.

[...]

The President thought he got rid of all of this unregulated soft money activity when he signed the bipartisan campaign finance reforms into law. And so it's another example of -- the senator's latest comments are another example of him saying one thing and doing another.

It makes you wonder why he signed the bill in private, allowed Mitch McConnell to promptly sue to overturn it and didn't even ask McCain to attend the ceremony. And his shock at these "shadowy groups" is especially rich considering that one of his primary objections to the bill was the limitation on issue ads and unregulated soft money by individuals.

Without any fanfare, U.S. President George W. Bush signed the campaign finance overhaul bill into law in the Oval Office Wednesday morning before heading off for fund-raising events in South Carolina and Georgia, the White House announced.

[...]

"The president believes the legislation, while far from perfect, will improve our current finance system," said White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer.

As expected, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia challenging the constitutionality of the new law.

McConnell's legal team, led by former Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and First Amendment expert Floyd Abrams, plans to argue that the new law violates the First Amendment's protection of free speech and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment because it restricts the political speech of political parties and interest groups, but not the news media.

Bush also has reservations

In his written statement, President Bush praised provisions in the measure that ban unions and corporations from making unregulated contributions to political parties and the provisions raising the decade-old limit on individual giving.

The Bush statement also says that while the bill goes "a long way toward fixing some of the most pressing problems in campaign finance," the measure also has flaws.

In particular, the president wrote that he continues to object to the ban on unlimited contributions by individuals to political parties in connection with federal elections.

"The president believes the individual freedom to participate in elections should be expanded, not diminished," Fleischer said.

He said the president also has reservations about the limitations on issue advertising. The bill bans unions and corporations from using "soft money" to broadcast what are known as "issue ads" that mention a federal candidate within 60 days of a general election and 30 days of a primary. Hard-money issue ads may run up to the election.

Fleischer said because of his concerns, Bush chose to sign the bill privately in the Oval Office as opposed to hosting a public signing ceremony at the White House.

Fleischer said it was the president's view that a South Lawn ceremony "would not have the aura of consistency...befitting with his beliefs in the bill in its totality."

His newfound concern for unregulated money in politics is quite touching. Who says he hasn't grown in the job?








digby 8/18/2004 06:50:00 PM |

 
Dear Roger Simon,

I wonder if you realize that your words on Meet the Press saying "'sensitive' is the kind of word a French candidate for president would use" were played several times by Rush Limbaugh on August 16 as evidence of Kerry's essential "frenchness."

While many of you in the press corps obviously find this "french" appellation hilarious, I'm sure you are also aware that this term is being used as a Republican code word in this campaign for cowardly and effeminate. As such, even though I know it is hard to keep from sharing those side-splitting one liners with the public, it might be more ethical to refrain from using these manufactured Republican punchlines. Of course, I'm assuming that you don't wish to be used by a propagandist like Limbaugh to push GOP talking points. Perhaps I assume too much.

Sincerely,


digby




digby 8/18/2004 03:56:00 PM |

 
Journalism

Lou Dobbs just had that con artist scumbag David Bossie on his show taking the Democrats to task for their "unprecedented" negative ad campaign comparing Bush to Hitler for over a year and a half.

And, in a most satisfying fashion, David Axelrod responded that Bossie was the guy who ran the Willie Horton ad, ran the 1992 ad with doctored tapes of Gennifer Flowers and was fired from the House for doctoring the Web Hubbell tapes.

Dobbs was shocked that Axelrod was personally attacking little Davy and interrupted. Bossie then decried negative advertising again.




digby 8/18/2004 03:30:00 PM |

 
Paging Doctor Parker

Doctor Nosy Parker

A judge ruled the state can suspend the driver's license of a man who lost his driving privileges after his doctor reported to police that he drank a six- pack of beer a day. But the judge also said Keith Emerich may obtain restricted driving privileges as long as he uses a device that tests his blood-alcohol content before starting his car. Emerich, 44, a printing company employee, was notified in April he would lose his license, about two months after he disclosed his drinking habit to doctors treating him for an irregular heartbeat.

Be very careful what you tell people, even your doctor. There is no evidence from this story that this guy was ever driving drunk. He might have downed all six of those beers after work and never left his house which, the last I heard, was still legal.

This is where my libertarian leftist tendencies come in to play. Fuck a bunch of moralistic assholes trying to tell people how they should live, in the name of "public safety." Cops, bureaucrats, do-gooders and religious zealots (and apparently doctors, now) are the very last people on the planet who should have the power to invade your private life because they are the very first in line to do it whenever they get the chance.

This is the preemption doctrine writ small.




digby 8/18/2004 02:59:00 PM |

 
What's Whiz This?

Campaign Desk highlights one of the typically egregious Inside Politics bitch fests about Kerry and Bush's relative machismo as illustrated by how they eat a Cheese steak.

I have one question for all of you Philly homeboys and girls. Unlike Kerry who ordered the wrong kind of cheese and proved he was a eunuch, Bush apparently showed that he had a giant dick by saying:

"A lot of people are wondering why I'm coming so much," he said. "It ought to be obvious to you. I like my cheese steak 'Whiz with.'"

I understand that this means he prefers it with Cheez Whiz. But, do real men have to order it "Whiz with" or are you a french pansy if you say "with Whiz?"




digby 8/18/2004 02:17:00 PM |

 
Why'd He Bother?

Be careful of these folks who travel around the country making all these big promises, and say, oh, don't worry, we'll pay for it by taxing the rich. You know how that goes. The rich hires accountants and lawyers and you get stuck with the bill. But we're not going to let him raise your taxes.

I don't get it. If "the rich" hire accountants and lawyers to avoid paying taxes, why in the hell did Bush bother to lower their tax rates twice in the last three years? He could have saved himself a lot of grief if he'd just let the rich do what they always do instead of changing the tax code in ways that made it appear that he was granting them a favor. (And think of the economic stimulus all those extra billable hours would have created --- and from the private sector, too!)

Are people actually buying this nonsense or is it some kind of a focus group glitch?






digby 8/18/2004 10:37:00 AM |

 
The Expert

President Bush reaffirmed his administration's commitment to building an antimissile system, accusing opponents of the program of "living in the past."

Although Bush did not mention his Democratic rival by name on Tuesday, his speech here at a Boeing Co. plant included a thinly veiled attack on John F. Kerry's stance on missile defense. "I think those who oppose this ballistic missile system don't understand the threats of the 21st century," he told 1,400 cheering Boeing employees and supporters.

The guy who invaded a country on the basis of its huge scary cache of unconventional weapons only to find it didn't even have one is lecturing people about understanding the threats of the 21st century.

digby 8/18/2004 02:41:00 AM |

 
Poison Stinger

Key Evidence Cast in Doubt on a Claim of Terrorism

Federal prosecutors acknowledged possible flaws yesterday in a major piece of evidence used in their case against two leaders of an Albany mosque on charges that they supported terrorism.

[...]

Prosecutors said they were given information from the Defense Department that a notebook with Mr. Aref's name and address had been found in what they said was a terrorist training camp in the western Iraqi desert near the Syrian border. They also said that a word in the notebook, written in Arabic, had referred to Mr. Aref as "commander."

As it turns out, the word is Kurdish, albeit written using the Arabic alphabet, and the translation may be incorrect. "Commander" could be translated as "brother," according to federal prosecutors.

Nijyar Shemdin, the United States representative for the Kurdistan Regional Government in Washington, reviewed a copy of the page at the request of The New York Times and said he did not see how a translation would have come up with the word "commander."

Mr. Shemdin said that Mr. Aref is referred to with the common honorific, "kak," which could mean brother or mister, depending on the level of formality.

[...]

In court last week, Mr. Kindlon did not have access to the note, and he expressed frustration at having to rebut the clearly ominous implications of the word "commander."

[...]

The judge gave the prosecution seven days to give the defense a copy of the note. The prosecutors asked the Defense Department for a copy, which they received and had the F.B.I. translate independently. That brought the discrepancy to light.

Mr. Kindlon said his client would seek a new bail hearing.

He said that Mr. Aref, a Kurd, had three brothers in northern Iraq and that there was no independent verification that the note had been found in a terrorist training camp. According to court documents, United States soldiers found the document on June 12, 2003, near the town of Rawah.

The sting operation being conducted in Albany was already underway then and was not tied to the discovery of the note, according to court documents.


[...]

However, many of the conversations between the informant and the men were in Urdu, as well as in Arabic and English, and Mr. Kindlon said there might be problems with the translations of those meetings, as well.

In court documents, the government provided only snippets of the conversations already translated.

This case is another one of those travesties in the making, you can tell. It's a bullshit sting that apparently relies on mistranslated notes the DOD conveniently found in a "terrorist training camp" in Iraq after the sting had already been initiated.

Evidently, they've caught all the active terrorists so they are now busy entrapping random people as a test of their loyalty. Good to know.




digby 8/18/2004 02:09:00 AM |

 
Deep Breath

Josh Marshall has posted an analysis by Charlie Cook that I had also planned to write about which shows that the electoral college count is still tilted slightly to Bush. He says:

A veteran politics watcher like Cook can see through that smoke and take into account the poor quality in some polls and deeper trends at work in given states. For that reason, I put a lot of stock in Cook's opinion.

I've also always found Cook to be very astute and his analysis makes wonder if we Democrats aren't in the middle of another one of those fugue states in which we start having visions of landslides and certain winners without any data to back it up. Cook writes:

In adding up all the electoral votes that are in the safe and lean columns for each candidate, President Bush has a tight 211 to 207 lead in the Electoral College. Bush also has 120 votes in the toss up column. However, if you pushed each of the 10 toss up states to Kerry -- who seems to be ahead by a slight margin -- he would come out on top.

I am feeling optimistic about this election, but I don't see where everyone is getting the idea that it's a done deal. As much as I'd like it to be so, I still see a race that's neck and neck where anything could happen.

The crowds on the ground are very encouraging and you can't dismiss that. But, I don't think there's any doubt that the Democratic base is riled up this time and so it's not all that surprising to me that more people would show up at rallies. And, we really can't measure the Bush rallies by the same yardstick since they are completely scripted and controlled media events. We don't know if his crowds would be just as large if he opened them up.

I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade and I hope just as fervently as anyone that we win in a huge landslide. But, I'm not seeing any reliable evidence of this so-called new CW that it's "Kerry's to lose." It's still tied.




digby 8/18/2004 01:34:00 AM |

 
Lame

Before everybody gets all upset that Kerry condemned the MoveOn ad, think about it for a minute.

Personally, I think it's too late for this ad --- the story was already losing its momentum in the mainstream media. Editorials called Bush out. Even O'Reilly was condemning the swiftboaters. The timing is off.

Mostly, I agree with Chris Bowers at MYDD that the ad itself sucks (particularly in comparison with the SBVT ad.) I think they could have alluded to the Bush guard stuff with visuals and saved the righteously indignant VO to address the swiftboat smear. A little subtlety is called for if you are taking a position from the high road while you are sticking a shiv in someone's belly.

But, it's done and since our side demanded that Bush condemn his ad, Kerry has little choice now but to stand with McCain and condemn the MoveOn ad and and try to make Junior look bad by comparison. Kerry refused to distance himself from Admiral Turner and General Clark who are out there as attack dogs every day on the issue, (and explicitly bringing up the Guard) so he's not making the subject off limits.

Bush may end up looking slimy for being the only one who refuses to explicitly condemn these ads, and maybe just getting the Guard thing out there again in contrast to Kerry's record is what they are really after. If the ad had been a little bit more clever, that might have worked better. I think the best that can be hoped is that the whole subject looks so muddy now with flying charges and counter charges that people discount the whole thing as politics, no harm no foul to either side.

I honestly think the way to attack back would have been to let the swiftless do their thing and then brutally call into question Bush's behavior on 9/11. You want to go nuclear on these guys, that's the way to do it. My Pet Goat, baby. That's the soft white underbelly.




digby 8/18/2004 01:18:00 AM |

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

 
Judy In Disguise

Judith Miller got another subpoena in the Plame case over the week-end.

Strange, yes? She was, as we know, very well conected on the neocon WMD beat, wasn't she? The question in my mind is if she was the chicken or the egg.




digby 8/17/2004 04:08:00 PM |

 
Exit Poll Strategy

If the media wanted to make up in some small way for their transgressions in blindly helping Bushco send this country to war based on a neocon wet dream, they should follow the advice of Paul Krugman and finance several different competing exit polling operations for this election.

If the election is anything less than a landslide on either side, the skepticism about touch screen voting machines will hinder any president's claim to legitimacy. Now, Junior and his kool-aid drinkers don't really care about that because he found that he could pretty much do anything he wanted without it, but it's crucial to preserve our democracy, nonetheless.

The Georgia election in 2002 is a good example of what might happen in a number of places if good exit polling isn't done that validates the returns. The state showed two very surprising upsets that none of the polls had predicted. Going into the election they'd all had Senator Cleland winning by 2 to 5 points and he lost by 7. In the governor's race the swing was 16 points from the last polls to election day; Barnes had been up by 9 points and he lost by 7.

These things happen and it may very well have been a result of a last minute GOP surge. But, there is also some good evidence that the e-voting machines in Georgia were tampered with. We will never know the truth of that.

This time people on both sides are bound to question the results of these new e-voting machines if the returns show a close race. There will be no paper trail in most of them and the legitimacy of many winners is likely to be in question if there's no data to suport the tally. Exit polls are one way to do that.

The media should spend some money and get this done, not for predictive purposes on election night, but to validate the actual election returns. Otherwise we are going to be in tin foil hat territory for a long time to come. It's the least they can do.

Here are the Exit Poll Results for the 2000 election. You might want to bookmark it as we will start seeing more comprehensive polls over the next couple of months and it's interesting to see where the shifts, if any, are taking place.




digby 8/17/2004 03:40:00 PM |

 
Thanks For Nothing

E.J. Dionne says:

[Kerry] needs a much better defense of that Iraq vote of his. It really isn't so hard. When Bush went to Congress in the fall of 2002 for authorization to go to war in Iraq, he did so after saying he was going to the United Nations to seek international support for a war against Saddam Hussein.

Yes, the congressional resolution empowering Bush to wage war was far broader than it should have been. But when push came to shove, Kerry decided to take the chance in voting "yes" to strengthen Bush's hand in negotiating with the United Nations. That seeking U.N. support was never really a Bush priority and that he botched the postwar planning is the president's problem, not Kerry's. Why can't Kerry keep it that simple?

Does anyone in their right mind think that is simple? Has E.J. ever heard what Kerry really said? Jesus, by comparison he sounds like Forest Gump compared to that wonky blather:

Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for a president to have, but I would have used that authority, as I have said throughout this campaign, effectively. I would have done this very differently from the way President Bush has.

Now maybe there is a simpler way to say this but it sure isn't Dionne's meandering bullshit.

Look, this is a difficult issue for Kerry, there's no doubt about it. I was very disappointed in him for voting for the resolution because this was entirely predictable. From a tactical standpoint, it was never clear to me why these guys thought that they could win a presidential election by supporting Bush on Iraq. If the war was perceived as a success, Bush would probably be unbeatable. It is because the war has been such a strategic disaster that he's as vulnerable as he is. This, to me, was the only scenario in which we could win in '04 and therefore, it was always the smart move politically (much less morally) for Democrats to oppose that goddamned war --- and hammer on terrorism, the real threat, hard.

At the end of the day, the Bush people might want to rethink bringing this up everyday. Iraq is Bush's albatross, not Kerry's, no matter how hard they try to hang it around his neck. That big old elephant sitting over in the corner is holding a sign that says "where are the WMD?"

As for the much desired "bumper sticker explanation" that even Dionne can understand, The Howler suggests this:

I voted to give President Bush the authority. Then President Bush f*cked it up

Works for me.




digby 8/17/2004 12:47:00 PM |

 
Dangerous Ally

On July 30, the day after Senator John Kerry's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, CNN Crossfire host Tucker Carlson stated, "His [Kerry's] plan for Iraq, such as it is, is to have other people, dark skinned foreigners, from the Middle East fight our war for us. He said it last night in his speech. I watched his speech.

I heard that comment and I wondered what Carlson had been smoking. But I now realize that he was simply indulging in the usual right wing projection:

Few people likely paid attention last week when former President Clinton accused the Bush administration of contracting out U.S. security and the hunt for Osama bin Laden to Pakistan in its zeal to wage war in Iraq. In an interview with Canadian television, Clinton asked, "Why did we put our No. 1 security threat in the hands of the Pakistanis, with us playing the supporting role, and put all our military resources into Iraq -- which was I think at best our No. 5 security threat?" Clinton also observed, "We will never know if we could have gotten him [bin Laden] because we didn't make it a priority."

One consequence of the decision to subcontract the hunt for members of al-Qaida to Pakistan is that the terrorists appear to be regrouping. The Washington Post, quoting senior U.S. and Pakistani officials, reported "new evidence" on Aug. 14 that suggests "that Al-Qaeda is battered but not beaten, and that a motley collection of old hands and recent recruits has formed a nucleus in Pakistan that is pushing forward with plans for attacks in the United States."

Despite Pakistan's past role in propping up the repressive Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the Bush administration -- in one of its least transparent foreign alliances -- continues to rely on Pakistani military and intelligence services to deliver bin Laden. Since much of the give-and-take in this relationship is covert, it is unclear exactly what is or is not taking place.

Pakistan sells nuclear and missile technology to Iran and North Korea and its internal political situation is so complex that probably half of the army and most of its intelligence service are sympathetic to al Qaeda. Yet we are depending upon that country to handle the most sensitive intelligence matters pertaining to islamic terrorism while we fiddle around in Iraq for no good reason.

The Bush Doctrine of "if you feed a terrorist, talk to a terrorist, or harbor a terrorist means you're a terrorist" applies in every aspect to Pakistan. The country is a military dictatorship in which the general in charge suspends the constitution on a regular basis. The country is a powderkeg in a region that is a powderkeg. And yet we have put the real central front in the war on terrorism in their hands.

I know we had to keep them close, but our dependence on them has always seemed to me to be exceedingly dicey. As many commentators have pointed out recently, it's created a dilemma for both countries in that Pakistan is motivated to keep dribbling out al Qaeda from time to time while never actually netting anything definitive or seriously meaningful because to do so would mean the end of huge amounts of American money and support. Crack diplomacy at work, once again.

One can't help but wonder every day, for a hundred different reasons, what we could have acomplished in narrowing the threat of Islamic radicalism if we had focused our best and the best of all of our allies on that problem. It certainly would have been preferable to having Pakistan take the lead on al Qaeda while we fought a completely unnecessary war elsewhere.

It all comes back to the delusionary belief among Bush's advisors, even after 9/11, that islamic radicalism is not as great a threat as rogue states. This fundamental error has almost driven us off a cliff and will definitely do so in the next four years if these people remain in power.




digby 8/17/2004 02:03:00 AM |

Monday, August 16, 2004

 
Bist meshugeh?

Ryan Lizza tells us that aside from blacks, Hispanics and catholics, Rove hasn't managed to bring in any Jews either.

A poll out today by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research confirms that Bush has made no inroads [among Jews.] The numbers look almost identical to what VNS exit polls found in 2000. Here are the highlights:


Senator Kerry maintains a very strong lead over President Bush within the Jewish community. Senator Kerry leads President Bush by a margin of 75 percent to 22 percent. Senator Kerry's lead is as strong as the American Jewish vote was in 2000 for then-Vice President Gore over then-Governor Bush; respondents voted in 2000 for Gore over Bush by a margin of 76 percent to 21 percent.

[...]

** President Bush is deeply unpopular among American Jews. President Bush is seen as favorable by only 20 percent of respondents; a stunning 73 percent see him unfavorably. Conversely, Senator Kerry is seen as favorable by 59 percent of the respondents, while only 27 percent view him unfavorably.

This doesn't surprise me. Members of groups in this country who have historically been discriminated against by nativist whites and waspy elitists have good bullshit detectors. They are the last people in this country who would be fooled by this GOP flim-flam.

Rove thought they could back Ariel Sharon and American Jews would just follow Junior off a cliff. I think he spent a little too much time with the radical fundamentalists. American Jews aren't cult members. They are cosmopolitan Americans who think for themselves and have a very long tradition of respect for liberalism and intellectualism, neither of which are concepts that Bush understands, much less stands for.

So, after three years in office and a one time 90% approval rating, Bush has wrapped up the fundamentalist and CEO vote. Quite an achievement.




digby 8/16/2004 07:51:00 PM |

 
Don't Go There

Kevin Drum does a masterful takedown of Jonah Goldberg's ridiculous assertion that the "Bush haters" are more extreme and nasty than the Clinton haters were. He reminds him of the murder charges from the WSJ editorial page, the videos about cocaine running in Arkansas and, of course, the $70 mil spent chasing Clinton's mighty member.

But, he is too polite (and I'm not) to mention that Jonah's dear mother was the shrill, shrieking harpy from hell who committed a litany of heinous and disgusting acts during the era and "secured her footnote in American political history as Linda Tripp's accomplice, delightedly hawking a story to the equally spiteful New York Press about Clinton "finger-fucking" his daughter Chelsea."

Now, when Michael Moore or MoveOn come out with sewage like that we can talk. Until then, Lucianne's little boy ought to shut the fuck up about Clinton-haters and Bush-haters. It's not exactly a topic that benefits the family name.




digby 8/16/2004 04:25:00 PM |

 
Darby's Nightmare

When it was revealed that Joseph Darby came forward about the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, many of his friends and neighbors turned on him and his family. I'm sure they all were listening to Rush and Sean who told them it was just "blowing off steam" and Senator Inhofe who said he was "outraged by the outrage." This is the president's base, the heart and soul of wingnut America:

Each day, she [wife, Bernadette Darby] would catch another snippet of the hostility brewing around her. There was the candlelight vigil in Cumberland, Maryland, to show support for the disgraced soldiers, including the ones who did the torturing, about a hundred supporters standing in the pounding rain, as if beating and sodomizing prisoners were some kind of patriotic duty. Or the 200 people who gathered one night in Hyndman, Pennsylvania, waving American flags to honor Sivits, the first soldier tried in the scandal. They posted a sign in Hyndman. It said JEREMY SIVITS, OUR HOMETOWN HERO. And the mayor told reporters that even though Sivits would sometimes do "a little devilish thing," on the whole he was "a wonderful kid."

Where were the signs for Joe? Bernadette had to wonder. Where was his vigil? Where was his happy mayor? Where were his calls of support? Down at the gas station, Clay overheard some guys say that Joe was "walking around with a bull's-eye on his head," just casually, just like, oh, everybody knows Joe's dead. Some of Bernadette's family even let her know that other members of the family were against her now, that they couldn't support a traitor. The more Bernadette heard, the more paranoid she became. How serious was this? Her nerves were so fried from the media onslaught that she couldn't be sure what was serious and what was just talk. Had those cops really ignored Maxine because they were against Joe? And if so, what else would they ignore?

[...]

When they got to Bernadette's apartment in Corriganville, they went inside, and the cats rushed to Bernadette, and she held them in her arms and talked to them while Maxine and Clay tried to give her space.

And then the phone rang.

It was a major from the U.S. Army, and he was coming over. Within a few minutes, everything began to shift around Bernadette, and it was hard to tell what was happening. She found herself in the passenger seat of an unmarked government vehicle, speeding down the highway to some unknown destination, Clay's truck right behind her with Maxine and the kids packed inside, the whole group snatched up by military protective custody without any prior warning or even a clear idea of why. Bernadette called Virginia and said, "We're in protective custody now. I don't know where we're going, but we'll call you when we get there."

Mrs. Darby hadn't heard from her husband, but he'd been taken into protective custody himself, sometime before. The military knew that his life was in danger.

You know, I don't know how much more of this Bush administration-style honor and integrity this country can take.



digby 8/16/2004 02:36:00 PM |

 
Spoonfed Gibberish

Some Deep Thoughts from our president on the campaign trail in New Mexico:

I understand the limitations of government. I understand that government is not a loving organization. (Laughter.) But government can stand side-by-side with loving organizations to help improve the lives of people from all walks of life.

And there is nothing I love more than a fabulous, loving organization. As long as they're not too sensitive. I'm against that.

The only reason I ask is that people have got to understand when you hear the tax relief encouraged investment, investment means you're purchasing something, and somebody has to make that which you purchase and sell that which you purchase. And that's how the economy works.

And people have got to understand that when you fall down and go boom it means you're no longer standing. And that's how gravity works.

It's one thing to have justice; it's another thing to go overboard with justice, because people start to lose work.

Especially my close personal friends and political contributors.

I think a healthy society is one in which people own something. If you own something you have a stake in the future of your country.

And if you don't you are a fucking loser who has no stake in the future so just go die.

You can't have a hopeful society if you're not allowed to express your opinion or worship freely.

And you can't attend or speak at this rally unless you agree to express the opinions we want you to express.

You see, it's a different kind of war. It's a different kind of war. We cannot hope for the best anymore. In the old days, we could, because we thought oceans would protect us. It wasn't all that long ago that we thought we were safe from harm's way.

Well, except for the thousands of Soviet ICBM's that were aimed at every American city for almost 50 years, that is.

Q: We are praying for righteous leaders in Washington and throughout our country, because we know that it's time for America to get back to its moral roots that our founders put in place for us when this country was founded. And it is time for the people in this country to realize and to call out for righteous leaders. That is our right as God's children. And we are doing that...And you will be in the White House.

God isn't fooled by George W. Bush like you are. Don't count on it.




digby 8/16/2004 01:19:00 PM |

 
Faultlines

Here's an interesting article in TNR by Clay Risen about restiveness in the Chamber of Commerce, particularly the small business side, over its goosestepping adherance to the GOP line.

...at the same time the Chamber was drifting to the right, the interests of its larger members began to diverge from those of its small-business constituency. Several fissures have emerged. For one, the rise of offshore manufacturing means that smaller firms, which tend to be at the bottom of the supply chain, have been forced to cut costs significantly or lose out to overseas competition. "They are more and more being told that their prices have to look like what the big guys are getting from China," says Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. "If they're not poised to do that, they lose out." Meanwhile, chains like Wal-Mart are pricing small retailers out of the market, offering more products at lower cost. And because they buy primarily from other multinationals (who can supply large quantities of cheap products) small manufacturers are getting squeezed as well. But because big business invariably has more money to contribute, its influence in setting the Chamber's priorities means that the needs of smaller firms have been largely ignored. "For small businesses, their adversary used to be government regulation," says Marks. "Now it's big business."

For these guys, paying taxes is the least of their problems. They are concerned about health insurance inflation and low educational standards and a whole host of other things, while the Chamber is blathering on rellentlessly about tort reform. And, their biggest threat is the rapaciousness of the corporate oligarchy. The way it's going the new ownership society is going to have a few successful owners and a whole mess of untermenchen serving them. (But, don't worry, they'll be able to save five dollars a week in their 401K's, so they'll be "owners" too.)

The story of how the Chamber became Tom Delay's bitch is also quite interesting. It's pretty much the story of how the GOP whips its own if it steps out of line. It's not really a big tent; it's a big S&M parlor:

The Chamber was initially supportive of Clinton's plan; William Archey, its chief lobbyist, and Robert Patricelli, chair of the Chamber's Health Committee, even met regularly with the administration to iron out key points of disagreement. The Chamber, as Patricelli said at the time, saw Clinton's managed-competition proposal as a reasonable solution to what it considered a crippling problem for businesses. But Republicans feared that a health care win would solidify Democratic dominance in Washington, and so they began browbeating the business lobby into opposing the plan. In late 1993, Ohio Congressman John Boehner told Archey and Chamber President Richard Lesher that it was "the Chamber's duty to categorically oppose everything that Clinton was in favor of." Republicans made public statements about the Chamber becoming "irrelevant," and a klatch of conservatives--such as Boehner and Georgia Senator Paul Coverdell, along with lobbyist Grover Norquist's "Wednesday Group" of anti-Clinton, anti-health-care-reform lobbyists--hinted that unless the group changed its tune, they would retaliate, perhaps by telling constituents to quit the Chamber or by creating a competing organization more sympathetic to the right.

If Junior doesn't manage to eke out another dubious "victory", it's going to be interesting to see some of these fault lines break. The problem with humiliating people by forcing them to pledge fealty against their will is that they don't mean it. They'll stab you in the back the first chance they get. The GOP fight over "who lost the permanent majority" will be a lot of fun to watch.




digby 8/16/2004 10:29:00 AM |

 
(Brain) Size Matters

I've been waiting to read this article for three long years. Bravo Yglesias.

This emperor has no clothes thing has been the single most frustrating thing about the Bush presidency. He is not smart enough for the job of president and he has been incompetent because of it, over and over again. The man isn't up to the task intellectually and doesn't have the temperament to privately trust someone else (like his father perhaps) to be the arbiter of disagreements among his advisors when he doesn't understand the issues. Neither did he have the experience or instinct to effectively manage people to create consensus on their own.

You could argue that the family values that Yglesias says are not necessary in a president are actually emblematic of other desirable character traits like loyalty or honesty. (I wouldn't.) But, what you cannot do is say that intelligence is not an issue and you cannot say that it isn't an issue of primary importance. Obviously, the job of leader of the free world is complicated and one of the requirements is that you be able to understand it.

When Republicans tell me that it doesn't matter if Junior is intelligent I ask them if they think it matters if a doctor is intelligent or a judge or a general and if they think the job of president requires any less of a brain than those jobs do. Then picture George W. Bush doing any of them.




digby 8/16/2004 08:41:00 AM |

Sunday, August 15, 2004

 
He's Quite A Little Man

Killing Goliath alerts us to the reliably reactionary Walter Scott's Personality Parade® today:

Q. George W. Bush has occupied the White House for almost four years, yet little is known of his personal preferences. Can you fill in the blanks? -- J. Brinkley, Los Angeles, Calif.

A. He's a man of simple tastes whose favorite foods are peanut butter (creamy, not chunky) and jelly sandwiches and Fritos. According to Ronald Kessler's A Matter of Character: Inside the White House of George W. Bush, just out, the health-conscious President brings his own treadmill and nonallergenic pillows on long trips.

The audacity of presenting this election as a choice between an effete French pussy and macho manly man is mind-bending.

Clearly, this election is a choice between a 60 year old man and a five year old boy.




digby 8/15/2004 11:20:00 AM |

 
Nuclear Advertising

Atrios has a fun example of a possible nuclear attack ad the Dems might have at the ready if Bush continues down the low road using 9/11 fearmongering to sell his floundering presidency.

Here's one I'd like to see:

George W. Bush: I can't imagine the great agony of a mom or a dad having to make the decision about which child to pick up first on September the 11th. We cannot hesitate, we cannot yield, we must do everything in our power to bring an enemy to justice before they hurt us again. (from TV ad)

VOICEOVER: Here's what the families of the victims of 9/11 think about George W. Bush.

WOMAN: My husband was killed in the WTC

WOMAN: My father was killed in the WTC

SUSIE ELLIOT, Firefighter husband died in the WTC. : George Bush has not been honest about what happened on September 11th.

ALISON FRENCH, Father died in the Pentagon: He is lying about his record.

CINDY LETSON: Son killed in the WTC : I know that George Bush is lying about 9/11, because I saw the video where he froze up and couldn't figure out what to do when he was told about the attack.

BETSY ODELL, Son killed in the WTC: George Bush lied when he said he did everything he could. I know. I've read the 9/11 report.

DINA CHENOWETH, Husband killed in the WTC: It took us pressuring him for months to even agree to a commission to investigate what went wrong.

MARY HOFFMAN, Son and daughter-in-law killed on Flight 93: George Bush didn't want people to know that he had received explicit warning for months and did absolutely nothing.

KATHY LONSDALE, Sister of brother killed in the Pentagon: He lacks the capacity to lead.

KATIE THURLOW, Husband and son killed on flight 93: When the chips were down, you could not count on George W. Bush.

DEBBIE ELDER, Husband killed in the WTC: George W. Bush is no leader.

ANGELA HIBBARD, Daughter killed in the WTC: He betrayed us. He lied before the american people.

SHELBY WHITE, Husband killed in the WTC: George W. Bush has betrayed all the men and women who died on September the 11th.

BRENDA PONDER, Husband killed at the Pentagon: He dishonored his country. He most certainly did.

JANE HILDRETH: Wife of firefighter killed in the WTC: I watched George W. Bush try to cover up his administration's actions leading to 9/11. George W. Bush cannot be trusted.

VO: 9/11 Widows for Truth is responsible for the content of this advertisement.

digby 8/15/2004 09:57:00 AM |

Saturday, August 14, 2004

 
Offensive PR

Atrios and Bob Sommerby and others have been critical of Kerry's campaign press operation lately, particularly the fact that the surrogates and pundits aren't well prepared.

I'm often in the uncomfortable position of sounding like an apologist for the Democratic establishment because I don't think it's right to call them immoral or cowardly when the legislative or political strategy is more complicated than immediately obvious or when it is simply a failed tactic not a mark of poor character. I believe that the entire culture has been brainwashed to one extent or another by relentless right wing attacks against liberalism. But, I'm all for real constructive criticism and this is an example.

Our pundits and surrogates are often unprepared, poor public performers and they always have been. I have never felt that we had the same energy or the same charismatic self assurance that the other side does and it hurts us in the modern media climate. I often think that much of what we Democrats see as failure in our politicians is really failure in our pundits and spokespeople. We don't have the message discipline that they do, particularly when we are on the defensive. And when we do, far too often we use it incorrectly, in my view, by clumsily inserting it into situations in which it's clearly inappropriate and looks like a dodge. There are times when you simply have to be prepared to make an argument. Not to mention that our talking points sound about as interesting as reading the letters H through J in the Yellow Pages. We need a better PR operation desperately.

I do take issue with one thing that Sommerby says, however. He chastizes the Kerry campaign for putting out press releases in which they do not say specifically what they are rebutting. But, there is an old truism in public relations -- you don't repeat the charges against you. The press releases are sent to the media under certain headings that make it clear what they are rebutting and the press then uses the words in the release in their story about whatever the charge was. But, it's never considered smart to have your opponents words come out of your own mouth. It's just another way to get the charge out there. None of that is to say that I think Kerry's rebuttals have been particularly effective either. It's just that refusing to reiterate the charges is not the reason.

One thing they should do immediately is put out an order that the words "out of context" should never be uttered as a rebuttal again. Those words no longer have meaning in plain English. You might as well be screaming "no fair!" or putting fingers in your ears and humming the star spangled banner. It's wasted breath. They need to reiterate specifically what they meant, not just say that the Republicans are taking it "out of context." Indeed, sometimes it can work to your advantage by giving you an opportunity to lay your charge out more explicitly. For instance, on the "sensitivity" thing:

"John Kerry was saying that we need to end the bumbling Bush diplomacy that has recklessly alienated too many of our our allies. The stakes in the war on terror are much too high for such clumsy mistakes."

Frankly, I don't know why the Democrats don't make better use of their natural constituency in the entertainment business. Those people know everything there is to know about selling "people" to people and they have been in the business of PR even longer than the business base of the GOP. There is much the Dems can learn about the marketing of politics from them.

It's a part of the big modernization project that the Democrats simply have to keep working on. This is the new politics and we're way behind.




digby 8/14/2004 12:31:00 PM |

 
Misguided

Bob Kerrey writes a nice op-ed today in the Washington Post in which he lays out an excellent case for why Kerry will make a good commander in chief, regardless of his Vietnam service --- his longstanding committment to veterans.

He opens with a point that is quite obvious and should be hammered home:

The former Navy personnel who are attempting to discredit Sen. John Kerry's record of service in Vietnam are doing so to argue that he is unqualified to be commander in chief. Most appear to be angry with him on account of his opposition to the Vietnam War, not his service in it. They have done a better job of damaging the reputation of the U.S. Navy than they have of damaging John Kerry.

Yes indeed. Unfortunately, being Bob Kerrey, he is congenitally unable to keep himself from from pretending to be a "maverick," even when it makes no sense, so he ends up with this:

I was going to end this by calling on President Bush to join McCain in calling for the cessation of this misguided effort to discredit Kerry's service in Vietnam. But fair is fair. There are just as many misguided ads running against President Bush today by these "527" organizations. Unless our campaign finance laws are changed again, U.S. voters are just going to have to figure this one out on their own.

Oh, he must be talking about the misguided 527 ad in which a bunch of businesspeople who hate George W. Bush because of his politics imply that he personally bilked millions from small investors in one of his business ventures back in the 80's. They say they worked with him, but actually they were just working in Texas at the same time. And even though they have no direct knowledge that he did it, and there is no record of it anywhere, they are sure he must have because he believes in tort reform and a couple of Democratic plaintiff's lawyers who've had it in for him for years say it's so. They've all come forward now for the first time because they believe in our system and they don't think a fraud and a cheat should be trusted with the US treasury. Oh yes, and it's financed by Barbra Streisand and Siegfried and Roy, who paid for similar ads calling Bush a pedophile back in 2000. The main spokeman is the man Bush beat for head cheerleader at Andover.

I haven't actually seen that ad nor have I seen the accompanying media frenzy in which the mediawhores bring on the former cheerleader to claim repeatedly that "many people saw him taking the money right out of grandma Millies purse", while Bush's spokespeople struggle to get them to explain why there is not one shred of documentary evidence to back up the claims and not one person who said anything at the time. I'm sure I just missed it when I went out for groceries.

Yes, the Democrats also just make stuff up out of whole cloth. Both sides should be ashamed of themselves. Bob Kerrey is certainly right about that.




digby 8/14/2004 11:44:00 AM |

Friday, August 13, 2004

 
Coffee, Tea or Moron

Jesse comments on the single stupidest interview of the year. Even George W. Bush isn't as stupid as these people. Read the latest on Little Annie Fannie's adventures in the sky.




digby 8/13/2004 07:14:00 PM |

 
Fredo and Sonny Combined --- The Worst Of All Possible Worlds


This is the man they support because the other guy protested the war after he came back from Vietnam:

“I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes." George W. Bush on why he joined the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, 1990.

Campaign '94: George W. Bush /As operative for his father, loyaltywas the foremost watchword

By CRAGG HINES, Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau
Staff

WASHINGTON -- Soon after the 1988 election, a handful of intensely loyal Bush supporters began to divvy up the spoils of victory.

The sole task of the partisans on the so-called "silent committee" was to decide who had been politically dedicated enough to the new president to merit top federal jobs. Leading the small group was George W. Bush , the winner's eldest son.

At one session, the well-connected chairman advanced the prospect of an acquaintance, Dallas catalog king Roger Horchow, to be chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, a juicy federal plum.

The choice struck some in the group as inappropriate. Why Horchow, they asked?

"Because he gave money to my father" was Bush 's matter-of-fact reply, a participant in the meeting recalled.

But a quick cross-check of the records indicated that Horchow also contributed to the Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis .

"It didn't take any more," the participant recalled. "George W. said, "That's it.' "

Friend or not, Horchow ceased to be a candidate.

The younger Bush 's leadership of the committee and his response to Horchow's bet-covering demonstrate the role he took in his father's political life -- a behind-the-scenes operative who displayed and demanded unquestioned loyalty to the older Bush .

"Loyalty to his father was all," said Chase Untermeyer, a longtime aide to President Bush and now a vice president of the Houston-based computer firm Compaq.

Even the few times the actions of the younger Bush made their way into the headlines, his role remained unchanged.

It was George W. Bush who finally told White House chief of staff John Sununu that, after months of controversy, it was time to go. When Sununu sought to rally conservative support to remain on the job, word of the first son's mission was leaked to reporters -- to increase pressure on Sununu to move on.

That Sununu failed to understand the message was coming from the president -- and no appeal was possible -- indicates how badly he failed a Bush -style political IQ test.

The incident, in late 1991, also illustrates how George W. could operate as a second pair of political eyes and ears for his father.

Rich Bond, a Bush campaign operative for more than a decade, recalls getting a letter from President Bush as old-line supporters were getting restless about the lack of planning for the 1992 race. The note said George W. soon would be in touch to discuss politics.

"I unloaded" when George W. called, Bond said. "I told him what an idiot I thought John Sununu was."

Bond wasn't the only one with that view.

George W. delivered the message from supporters to his father and, once the president had made up his mind, passed the verdict to Sununu.

To some folks with extensive ties to the Bush family, George W. was also sometimes a messenger for his mother. Barbara Bush carefully cultivated her role as national grandmother and rarely wanted her fingerprints on any political hatchet work. But both she and her oldest son have long, exacting political memories, friends agree. And, one added, George W. and his mother "were a lot harder nosed about things than (the president) was."

"She can smell a phony a mile away," the younger Bush once said of his mother, whom he admiringly referred to as "the silver fox."

The run-in with Sununu was not the first time the younger Bush had tangled with a chief of staff to his father.

A number of Bush insiders believe George W. helped to block Craig Fuller, Bush 's chief of staff as vice president, from moving to that job in the White House. The younger Bush believed Fuller, a California Reaganite, was inattentive to the Bush family and longtime associates.

"He wouldn't return a damn phone call," is how Richard Ben Cramer, in "What It Takes," his mammoth look at presidential politics, sums up George W.'s antipathy to Fuller.

Cramer also recounts an incident while Bush was vice president in which staff members occupied seats at an Astros game his father was attending that George W. believed should have been for him, his wife and his daughters.

It took Bobby Holt, a Bush family friend from Midland, to explain the misstep to Fuller.

Holt told Fuller he had ticked George W. off, and that he should not mess with the family -- only Holt used more earthy phrasing.

George W. was reportedly instrumental in recruiting David Bates, the Houstonian who eventually became a senior White House official, to join his father's vice presidential staff so that, as one insider put it, "the old Bush network was not cut out by Fuller."

In 1980, the younger Bush was active in -- but not central to -- his father's bid for the Republican presidential nomination and then his race as Ronald Reagan's running mate.

By the 1988 campaign, George W. had assumed a major role in his father's presidential campaign, operating directly out of the Washington headquarters.

"He was brought in as the disciplinarian among a staff that was seen as talented but self-promotional," said an experienced operative with daily exposure to the Bush campaign.

"You had a lot of egos there," the source said, mentioning ad chief Roger Ailes, campaign manager Lee Atwater and chairman James A. Baker III. George W. "was the only person there who didn't have another agenda other than what was best for his father."

"I don't want to overstate his role," the source said. "It wasn't like he was the brains of the operation, but he was a figure to be reckoned with."

Charles Black, a key Bush campaign consultant, said George W. could render an instant judgment on how his father would react to a proposed tactic.

"He knew his father like a book," Black said. "He could say this is George Bush and this is not."

Peter Teeley, Bush 's vice presidential press secretary, credited George W. with "doing a lot of things the prima donnas (in the campaign) didn't want to do," including public appearances that were guaranteed to generate zero news coverage.

After the election, on the "silent committee," recalled a participant, "he had exactly the right standard -- who was active (in the campaign) and who was play-acting. He has a great ability to see through guff."

According to several accounts, by the time of the 1992 campaign, George W. was more assertive -- and not always in a constructive way.

"He was a much more humble fellow in 1988," said a longtime Bush activist. In 1992, "he had an answer to almost everything."

Perhaps it was because he sensed the campaign -- and his father -- were faring so poorly.

In his last hurrah for his father, George W. acted as "a court of appeals for things that were going wrong," said Marlin Fitzwater, Bush 's press secretary.

"Things didn't always change," Fitzwater said, "nor did (George W.) assume he had the power to change them."

But the younger Bush was unquestionably influential throughout the failing effort, insiders agree.

"The president believed in him and knew George would tell him the hard truth," Fitzwater said.

Gee, how surprising. When Junior became "influential" his daddy lost, big time. Everything the man touches turns to shit.

A Bush sampler, 1978-94

Selected soundbites from George W. Bush :

"There's no such thing as being too closely aligned to the oil business in West Texas."

-- Running for Congress, 1978.

"Some people say I'm trying to run on my father's name. Anyone who knows me knows I can stand on my own feet."

-- Running for Congress, 1978.

"Being the vice president's son isn't important. I don't even know who Walter Mondale's children are."

-- On being the vice president's son, 1980.

"I was the loyalty thermometer."

-- On his role in his father's 1988 presidential campaign.

"Being the president's son puts you in the limelight. While in the limelight, you might as well sell tickets."

-- On his job with the Texas Rangers, 1989.

"I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes."

-- On why he joined the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, 1990.

"I made my arguments and went down in flames. History will prove me right."

-- On his vote, as the Rangers managing partner, against realignment of baseball's major leagues into three divisions each. The club was the only one of the 28 major league franchises to oppose the move, 1993.

"When all those people in Austin say, "He ain't never done anything,' well, this is it."

-- On The Ballpark at Arlington, the publicly financed stadium built for the Texas Rangers baseball club, 1993.

Thanks to Jeremy


digby 8/13/2004 06:45:00 PM |

 
Mouthbreathers:

There is new pool videotape of this exchange.

Down the sidewalk, other Bush supporters 'Go, George Bush; Go, George Bush.'

One yelled, "who rules? Bush rules!" Another yelled, "you can't take our president" and "Kerry's wife is not American."

The wife, THK, came over and shook hands with at least three Bush types. The pooler asked two of them what she said, but found their answers less than credible.

A third Bush supporter--Michael Guidero, 27, a college student from Eugene--reported: 'She said she was glad we were here, and she was glad we have a view to speak.'

Guidero had told THK earlier: 'Thank you for being a good sport with us."

digby 8/13/2004 02:53:00 PM |

 
The Stink Of Desperation

Here's a snapshot on the state of the race right this minute. It's easy to miss the bigger picture when you're rooting around in the mud with the barbarians:

Bush Campaign Steps Up Attacks as Kerry Gains in Polls

Republicans on Thursday leveled some of their most aggressive attacks yet against Sen. John F. Kerry, as a series of polls suggested the Democratic presidential nominee had gained slight leads in some battleground states and the economy continued to weigh on President Bush's prospects.

The most scathing critique came from Vice President Dick Cheney, who jumped on Kerry's recent assertion that he would lead a "sensitive" war on terrorism.

[...]

"A sensitive war will not destroy the evil men who killed 3,000 Americans and who seek the chemical, nuclear and biological weapons to kill hundreds of thousands more," Cheney told an audience of veterans and law enforcement officials in Dayton, Ohio.

"The men who beheaded Daniel Pearl and Paul Johnson will not be impressed by our sensitivity," Cheney added, referring to the American journalist and contractor slain by terrorists.

Later, Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) accused Kerry of advocating socialism within the United States and appeasement overseas.

"It's not John Kerry's fault that he looks French," Smith told reporters on the conference call arranged by the Bush campaign.

"But it is his fault that he wants to pursue policies that have us act like the French. He advocates all kinds of additional socialism at home, appeasement abroad, and what that means is weakness for the future."

Some Republicans have referred jokingly to Kerry's ability to speak French and his physical appearance, but rarely has the reference found its way onto the campaign trail.

Cheney's comments reflected an escalation in the tone of attacks, coming a day after the president himself mocked Kerry for remarks this week that he would have voted to authorize the war in Iraq even if he had known that there were no weapons of mass destruction.

Polls show that voters trust Kerry more than Bush on domestic concerns such as healthcare and the economy, but the Democrat continues to struggle to explain his position on the war in Iraq and how he would wage the overall war on terrorism.

[...]

This week, under pressure from Bush, Kerry said he would vote again for the Iraq invasion — even though no weapons of mass destruction had been found.

He insisted that it was not a vote on war and that he would have used the president's authority to go to war differently than Bush. The president accused Kerry of trying to find a nuance that did not exist.

On Thursday, Cheney pounced on Kerry's comments to minority journalists last week that the war on terrorism should be sensitive — referring, aides said later, to relations with allies.

In his campaign speech, Kerry tells crowds he would fight "a more effective, smarter and better war on terror," as well as one that was more sensitive.

Kerry initially declined to engage in any back-and-forth with Cheney. But later, at an evening rally outside Medford, Ore., the decorated Vietnam War veteran offered a thinly veiled reminder that his chief critic Thursday received several deferments to avoid military service.

"I defended our country as a young man, when others chose not to," Kerry said, appending that last phrase to a stock line in his campaign speech. "And I will defend it as president of the United States."

For the most part, the Kerry campaign left the response to Cheney to campaign surrogates, many of them former military brass — and all of whom vouched for Kerry's credentials by noting his service in Vietnam.

Retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, a former primary rival of Kerry's, called Cheney's remarks a "cheap shot" and ridiculed the vice president and Bush for their lack of military service.

"Neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney has ever heard a shot fired in anger, never worried whether he'd ever see his family again, or seen the destruction caused by the weapons he's wielded," Clark said. "The losses of war are permanent. The consequences are unpredictable."

The Bush campaign's focus on the war comes as new polls suggest the president is sliding a bit in election battleground states while Kerry may be riding a delayed bounce from his nominating convention — putting added pressure on Bush to perform well at the Republican National Convention from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2.

A new Quinnipiac University poll of Florida voters released Thursday gave Kerry a 47%-41% lead over Bush, with independent Ralph Nader netting 4% in the state. Without Nader, Kerry leads 49% to 41%.

The poll, conducted Aug. 5-10, surveyed 1,094 registered voters in the state with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The same poll in late June found a dead heat.

Another survey, conducted Aug. 4-10 in Michigan by EPIC-MRA, gave Kerry a 7-percentage-point lead, 49% to 42%.

New polls released this week by American Research Group showed the Democrat with leads in Ohio and New Hampshire — two battleground states won by Bush in 2000.

Democratic strategists pointed to the poll numbers to explain the escalating words from their opponents.

"There's no need to go that hard, that negative, this early — unless you're in panic mode," a senior Kerry strategist said.

Republicans, however, said Thursday that all was well.

"I'd still rather be us than them," said John Sowinski, a Republican political consultant in Florida.

That's pretty weak for an incumbent who once stood over 90% in the polls.

I think everybody needs to gird themselves for an full on assault for the next two months and if we win, an enraged right wing like nothing we've ever seen before. (Gordon Smith, for christ's sake?) It's going to be virtually impossible to govern, but Kerry is going to have to find a way to do it.




digby 8/13/2004 02:08:00 PM |

 
"Postcards from The Edge" just didn't quite work

Can anyone doubt that this is the result of a Peggy Noonan and Karen Hughes slumber party that featured a little too much cheap wine and "Meryl Streep Week" on Oxygen Network?

"The Sophie's Choice Ad"

I'm George W. Bush and I approve this message. My most solemn duty is to lead our nation to protect ourselves. I can't imagine the great agony of a mom or a dad having to make the decision about which child to pick up first on September the 11th. We cannot hesitate, we cannot yield, we must do everything in our power to bring an enemy to justice before they hurt us again.

Bunuelesque maudlin-yet-macho is a bold new direction in campaign advertising. I'm actually looking forward to seeing more of what the dynamic duo of Nooner and Hughes can come up with.


I have one question. Is he asking which child they should pick up from the ground after they've been blown up or pick up from school or what? Sophie had to choose which child to save from being gassed in a concentration camp and, you know, that could be what they're talking about too if Michelle Malkin has her way. Whatever it is, we can feel "comforted" that George W. Bush will save the babies from the Nazis on September 11th and that's all that matters.

I'm really looking forward to what they come up with after the "Betty Broderick Marathon" on Lifetime. Woah nellie.






digby 8/13/2004 10:24:00 AM |

 
See What Sticks

I haven't read the Spinsanity guys's new book, so I don't know the entirety of this thesis, but one of the authors, Bryan Keefer, said last night on Jon Stewart that one of the media manipulation techniques used successfully by the Republicans is to throw so much spin into the mix that the media isn't capable of sorting it all out properly.

I think that lets the press corps off too easily --- it is after all, their job to sort this stuff out and they are far too willing to adopt the easiest, most "entertaining" (to them) line. But, there is some truth to the idea that if you overwhelm the media with talking points and spin and propaganda the specifics start to sound like white noise and all you are left with is some basic, emotional understanding that something is wrong or right.

It seems to me that what they really do is throw absolutely everything out there and then hammer on whatever seems to stick with the media, which is often a rather snobbish, sophomoric narrative that casts the media in a superior role in terms of cool, status or morality. It worked with Clinton and it's probably going to work with Kerry if he wins.

The question many of us have to start asking is how do you counter this effectively? Clinton survived by dint of his personal charisma and star power as well as the fact that his presidency was remarkably successful in a period of relative peace and prosperity. Kerry is a different animal facing a very different set of challenges. I believe that, as Dave Johnson at See The Forest predicts here the right will go completely insane -- in my view, mostly because that asterisk next to Junior's name is the coda to their fantasy of a "permanent conservative majority" -- so they will go beyond even what we've seen before.

So, what do you think that Democrats should do to counter the slurs, character assassination and organized obstruction that President Kerry will inevitably face? And how can we better manage the media this time out?




digby 8/13/2004 10:06:00 AM |

 
Snark Attack

Readers, I think today might be a good day to write some e-mails.

LiberalOasis drew my attention to an impending bitchfest in the media over Kerry's "sensitive" comment and maybe we should try to nip it in the bud this time.

This is an RNC special of the "Al Gore invented the internet" style. Jim Nicholson probably phoned it in himself. It's the exact kind of high school kewl kid humor that sends the mediawhores into fits of laughter as they repeat it ad nauseum.

As I wrote earlier this week, Karen Tumulty in Time magazine illustrated how the word "french" has turned into a Republican code word for faggot, and how this "sensitive" talking point is being used to show Kerry's essential "frenchness" not only by Dick Cheney, but by the press itself. It's about to go hurtling out of control and the nasty little bitches of the press corps are the ones who are making it happen.

Liberal Oasis:

ABC's The Note, surely speaking for the entire snarky political press corps called Kerry's statement:

…the silliest thing John Kerry has said about national security since his "I actually voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it" classic.

No doubt that gave the green light for the rest of the press corps to paint Kerry the loser in this skirmish.

Remember, all of these skirmishes, from swift boat liars to "sensitive" to "flipflopping" are being done to paint John kerry as an effete pussy in contrast to the horse fearing, Pet Goat reading, cheerleader.

I don't know if it is possible to shame the little tarts by showing them that they are being Dick Cheney's bitches, but it's worth a try. Read LO's compendium of Bush admnistration officials saying the word "sensitive" in relatin to the WOT and then perhaps send an e-mail to a couple of journalists to let them know you know that this is an RNC talking point --- perhaps they didn't realize this and that they should use caution in helping the RNC spin Kerry just because they think this is funny, yada yada yada.

It's worth a try.

Update: You've got to read Charles Pierce on this.

Oh, and do send along a link to this fabulous web site. Talk about French!





digby 8/13/2004 08:18:00 AM |

Thursday, August 12, 2004

 
He Fights

Yet another coward for Kerry:

General Wesley Clark, USA (ret) released the following statement today in response to Vice President Dick Cheney’s attacks on John Kerry:

“I spent almost all of my adult life in uniform serving this great nation in the United States Army. I have led American soldiers into battle and led an international coalition in the Balkans where diplomacy, backed by force, was the winning formula.

“George W. Bush failed to learn the lessons from his predecessor or history. His ideologues who control American foreign policy have squandered much of our credibility with our allies and failed to achieve victory in the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. They gambled with a go it alone policy and our soldiers are paying with their lives.

“Today we Americans are shouldering the overwhelming costs of rebuilding Iraq without sufficient help from our allies. The administration’s incompetence in protecting our security effectively is rightfully a key issue in this campaign

“Today, Dick Cheney took the lowest road in politics -- it was a cheap shot unworthy of the office of Vice President.

“The truth is that this administration has over-relied on the military in the war against terror – if we are to win, we must use all the means at our disposal – diplomacy, international law, economic development, law enforcement, and only as a last resort, military force.

“But then, maybe that’s to be expected. Neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney has ever heard a shot fired in anger. Never worried whether he’d ever see his family again or seen the destruction caused by the weapons he’s wielded. The losses of war are permanent. The consequences are unpredictable. That’s why John Kerry has always said force should be a last resort.

“John Kerry understands the risk and sacrifice that American soldiers undertake every day, in a personal way that neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney ever will. John Kerry has the physical courage, tested in combat, to hunt down and kill our enemies. He also has the moral courage and humility to avoid the arrogance, which has doomed this administration. John Kerry will make us safer at home and restore our credibility around the world.”

Oh yeah. This one's crazy. Never mind.



thanks Armando


digby 8/12/2004 08:03:00 PM |

 
SupahStahs

Try to curb your excitement, folks. The RNC has announced its list of performers and celebrities:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Contemporary Christian musician Michael W. Smith and country music performers the Gatlin Brothers will entertain delegates at the Republican National Convention in New York City that starts Aug. 30, party officials said.

More than a half-dozen musical acts announced by the party range from country to classical to blues.

Bill Harris, chief executive of the Republican National Convention, described the group as the first to join the convention. Republicans say they will announce more performers in the coming days.

The performers to be officially announced Thursday include:

-Michael W. Smith, one of the top stars in contemporary Christian music who has occasionally crossed over to the pop charts.

-The Gatlin Brothers, who have been performing for four decades in country music and had a string of hits in the 1970s and 1980s. They cut back on nationwide touring in 1992.

-Daniel Rodriguez, a former New York City policeman and tenor who became well known singing a capella versions of "God Bless America" and the national anthem after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

-Sara Evans, one of the promising young performers in country music who has had a number of hits on the country charts. In 1998, she had a hit album "No Place That Far" and the title song on the album became her first No. 1 hit.

Other entertainers at the convention include Dana Glover, a young performer, who sang on the soundtrack for the movie "Shrek," veteran actor Ron Silver, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, co-host of daytime talk show "The View" and surfer-turned-singer Daize Shayne.

Man, just think of the electricity in Madison Square Garden when that much star power comes together in one place. Wow.

If you'd like to read something really funny, check out this cached freeper thread (since removed) of all the "DNC" celebrities they should boycot. By the time you get to the end of a very, very long list, this is what they are left with:

"I'm thinking about doing a GOP list of Celebs that we should support pretty soon."

Gonna be a short list:

Mel Gibson
Charlton Heston

and maybe:
Bruce Willis (though I heard he was at the People for the American Way dinner the other night - but he was also recently in Iraq)
&
Tom Selleck (did ads for National Review, but was lib on some public policies)
&
Kelsey Grammer (gave $$ to republicans or something, but not overt)
&
Dixie Carter (old chick from Designing Woman - she has made some favorible comments)
&
Kevin Costner (campaigned with Bush 1 - but went nuts for the environment)
&
ARNOLD - of course!

And now they have Ron Silver (on foreign policy, but he doesn't agree with their social agenda)

The good news for them is that popular culture is way out of fashion in this country, expecially among the young. Nobody's watching TV or going to movies or listening to music. The hip new thing is continuous prayer and barbershop quartets, so it's sure to be a very exciting show.




digby 8/12/2004 06:50:00 PM |

 
This Is How They Stay So Rich

C'Mon, they've only got a couple of hundred mil to work with, people. You thought they paid the expenses when they hold their Republican only campaign rallies? Think again.

LA CROSSE, Wis. (AP) - The Bush-Cheney campaign has paid La Crosse $7,822 for part of the city's expenses from President George W. Bush's May 7 rally, a newspaper reported.

But other Wisconsin communities that billed the campaign for expenses from Bush's visit that day have not been fully reimbursed, the La Crosse Tribune reported.

Prairie du Chien, for example, has not received the $12,249 it billed for Bush's visit.

"When I talked with the Bush/Cheney headquarters, they suggested they were not liable, and we should bill the Secret Service," said Mayor Cheryl Mader. "I do not anticipate that we will be getting any payment."


La Crosse, Prairie du Chien and Viroqua were among several communities Bush visited during his May 7 tour of the Mississippi River farmlands in Iowa and Wisconsin. He touted his tax cuts and touched on issues such as the invasion of Iraq.

The communities spent thousands of dollars in providing security for the president.

La Crosse Common Council voted to charge the Bush-Cheney campaign $7,822, rather than the entire bill of more than $60,000.

Dubuque billed the campaign $10,217, but received $1,400 paid at the time of the visit, said Jean Nachtman, assistant finance director.

Yes, Let the "Secret Service" pay for those Republican campaign events that only Republicans are allowed to get in to. I assume the "Secret Service" is also only using Republican tax dollars.





digby 8/12/2004 05:22:00 PM |

 
You Can Look It Up

Houston Chronicle, 7/14/99

FORT WORTH - In literature for his failed 1978 congressional campaign, George W. Bush said he served in the Air Force, a claim his presidential campaign says is legitimate based on time he spent training and on alert while a member of the Texas Air National Guard.

Asked Tuesday at an appearance in New Jersey whether he was justified in claiming Air Force service, Bush replied: "I think so, yes. I was in the Air Force for over 600 days."

But the Air Force says once a guardsman always a guardsman, even if called to active duty for training or another temporary assignment.

The Republican presidential front-runner already has faced questions about whether he received preferential treatment when he joined the Guard during the Vietnam War. His father, former President Bush, was a congressman at the time.

A pullout ad from the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal on May 4, 1978, shows a huge picture of Bush with a "Bush for Congress" logo on the front. On the back, a synopsis of his career says he served "in the U.S. Air Force and the Texas Air National Guard where he piloted the F-102 aircraft."

We know he didn't ever get called to active duty, now don't we? Anybody have a problem with him advertising himself as serving in the air force? I didn't think so.

Thanks to Peanut's amazing sleuthing skills.


digby 8/12/2004 04:11:00 PM |

 
Back To Reality

Brief reminder from the Poorman:

As I gather the standard of evidence for charges against the military service of your political opponents is essentially non-existant, let's review Dear Leader's service record.

A) As Atrios notes, all his recent troubles began when he lied about his military service in his autobiography. He claimed that he served out his term as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard (TANG). This is a lie. He received a transfer to Alabama, at some point after April 1972, after which point the record becomes murky.

B) The story of his "service" after April 1972 is summarized here by Walter V. Robinson of The Boston Globe:

Although he was trained as a fighter pilot, Bush ceased flying in April 1972, little more than two years after he finished flight school and two years before his six-year enlistment was to end, when he was allowed to transfer to an Alabama Air Guard unit. The records contain no evidence that Bush performed any military duty in Alabama. His Alabama unit commander, in an interview, said Bush never appeared for duty. In August 1972, Bush was suspended from flight status for failing to take his annual flight physical.

In May 1973, Bush's two superior officers in Houston wrote that they could not perform his annual evaluation, because he had "not been observed at this unit" during the preceding 12 months. The two officers, one of them a friend of Bush and both now dead, wrote that they believed Bush had been fulfilling his commitment at the Alabama unit.

There's more at the link, but this does put it quite starkly.

Just keep in mind that the swift boat smear is being done to obscure the fact that our great wartime leader couldn't even fulfill his pathetic little obligation to guard the Alamo during the Vietnam war, which is emblematic of his terrible handling of the war in Iraq and the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. Character will out. That's all it is. And that all of these so-called patriots are willing to smear a man who volunteered and actually served in order to cover for this sad little fellow who never spent a minute outside the cozy comfort of his daddy's protection says a lot more about them than it does about Kerry.

There were many honorable ways to behave during the Vietnam era. There were those who believed in the war and volunteered to fight it. There were those who were drafted and went as a matter of duty. There were those who fought the war, came to believe it was wrong and came back to change the policy. And there were those who believed it was wrong and refused to participate. All of those people stood up for what they believed in and did their duty as they saw it.

There was one group,however, who supported the war but didn't stand up for their beliefs --- refusing to take the heat that being a citizen, particularly a young man, in those days required. They played the system. Many of them "had other priorities" using every possible excuse, all the while vociferously backing the war effort --- as long as someone else fought it. And, the worst of this group were the privileged who supported the war but merely pretended to fight it by having their connections pull strings to get them into safe stateside duty that they could later claim amounted to "service." They would have pictures of themselves looking handsome in their uniforms. And they could swagger around with their buddies and drop casual hints for the rest of their lives about their days in the military. But even those phonies at least actually completed the minimal requirements to claim such affiliation.

It is very rare to find someone who finagled their way into the guard ahead of people who'd been waiting longer, had the government spend huge sums of money training him to be a pilot, quit flying less than two years later of his own accord and then dropped out of sight many months before his duty was fulfilled. It's even rarer to find someone like this declared a fine figure of a man who served his country well --- particularly when there are so many who actually did.

It is a very sad thing to see military men stoop to the level of smearing a combat veteran in a desperate bid to get a fey little richboy legitimately elected. I never thought I'd see the day they would debase their own service and that of all their comrades in order to play cheap partisan politics on behalf of such a man. As one who grew up in a military family, it makes me sick to see it.




digby 8/12/2004 12:20:00 PM |

Wednesday, August 11, 2004

 
Slick Smear

You know, I'll be interested to read the swiftboat liars book because from what I read here the statements from all these guys don't say much of anything about Kerry's war record. When they say he's "unfit" it's because they are pissed about his anti-war activities.

This smear is slick. All these right wing vets get filmed saying "he's unfit to be commander in chief" without providing any details. They don't say specifically why, but you are left with the clear impression that 200+ Vietnam vets think Kerry's lying about his record at best and that he's a coward at worst. In reality, they just hate his politics. But, it won't make any difference, because you have Rush and Sean and John O'Neill and Ted Sampley all the rest filling in the blanks and none of these guys are rushing to elaborate on what they are really talking about. (Lots of honor and integrity in this crowd.)

I think the way to frame this issue is that these men are smearing the United States Military by saying that all those glowing reports and medal recommendations were lies. Is Kerry the only one about whom they believe all these officers lied or were there others who recieved medals and commendations who didn't deserve them? Do they think this kind of thing is this still going on today? It may force some of these men to come out and admit what they are really saying.

They obviously hate Kerry's guts with a passion, and probably hate Democrats with a passion too. But, I'm not sure they'll hold up if they're accused of denigrating the military, which is what they actually are doing. I think, if pressed, they may want to explain that when they say he's "unfit" they are talking about Kerry's antiwar activity, not his combat experience.

And, that's a very old argument that means absolutely nothing. Which is why they've decided to smear instead of taking Kerry on for what they really hate him for.




digby 8/11/2004 07:46:00 PM |

 
Lower Than Low

The redoubtable Hesiod, in the comments below, wonders why nobody has unearthed the story of George H. W. Bush Sr's 1988 brush with controversy over his navy heroics in WWII. Apparently, there were some fellow aviators --- not on his own plane mind you (ahem) --- who claimed that he bailed prematurely on two of his comrades on the Barbara II and got them killed.

I only bring this up because it's interesting that even though a man came forward to make these charges in an August 12, 1988 NY Post story by Allan Wolper and Al Ellenberg, called "The Day Bush Bailed Out," the Democrats didn't then use it as a line of attack to destroy Bush Sr's reputation. In fact, the story died down quite quickly. Had they chosen to smear him, there was enough mud around to make it ugly. They didn't.

And, it's not as if Bush Sr. didn't run on his war record. In fact, CNN is currently helping his son run on it too. In every campaign it was front and center. But, in all the years of running against George Bush our side never stooped to questioning his bravery or integrity in the Big One.

But somebody did. His name is Ted Sampley, Godfather of the Swift Boat Liars. If you'd like to read all about Bush Sr's alleged cowardice in WWII, here it is, from the chief veteran smear artist himself. Seems he has problems with a lot of war heroes.

I have often said that Junior is a bad son. I can't think of anything worse than standing with the scum who smeared your own father's war record. Unless you hate your father, which it seems he does.

It's going to take a Shakespeare to do justice to this sick little story.

Update: Here's da word on Ted Sampley






digby 8/11/2004 03:55:00 PM |

 
The Choice

One the one hand you have the fellow who sits and read childrens books when he's told that the country is under attack and on the other you have the fellow who rushes in to save lives over and over again.

Former U.S. Sen. Chic Hecht of Nevada is a staunch Republican, but he thanks his lucky stars for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

On July 12, 1988, Hecht was attending a weekly Republican luncheon when a piece of apple lodged firmly in his throat.

Hecht stumbled out of the room, thinking he might vomit but not wanting to do it in front of his colleagues. Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., thumped his back, but Hecht quickly passed out in the hallway.

Just then, Kerry stepped off an elevator, rushed to Hecht's side and gave him the Heimlich maneuver -- four times.

The lifesaving incident made international news, and Dr. Henry Heimlich, who invented the maneuver in 1974, called Hecht to say that had Kerry intervened just 30 seconds later Hecht might have been in a vegetative state for life.

"This man gave me my life," the 75-year-old Hecht said Thursday.

Hecht said he was amazed that Kerry acted so quickly -- some people were assuming that he was having a heart attack.

"He knew exactly what to do," he said. "But a lot of people know what to do. They just don't size up the situation immediately."

I hadn't heard about this one and I don't think most other people have either.

Let's just say some people are a little bit more quick and decisive under pressure than others.

Ask yourself which person you'd rather have running the country in dangerous times.




digby 8/11/2004 02:54:00 PM |

 
Nothing Is Sacred

I don't mean for this to become McCain week here on Hullabaloo, but I can't let this pass. It's just that it's always a sad day to find that people on my own side can be just as fucked up and full of shit as the Republicans. Here we have a lefty who is calling McCain a coward in Vietnam:

Well...Unfortunately, McCain is just one more bad example in the pantheon of power-hungry white guys who are leading the country right now. Follow with me.

[...]

Let's start with his tenure as a prisoner of war. McCain was a naval fighter pilot during the Vietnam conflict, at the same time that his father was in charge of all American forces in Europe. When JM was shot down in 1967, he was captured, enduring some fairly bad injuries at the time of capture. However, almost immediately following his imprisonment, McCain started talking to his captors in exchange for medical treatment. BY HIS OWN ADMISSION (link) in an article he wrote for US News and World Report, McCain talked not only to North Vietnamese interrogators, but also to European and Asian reporters about bombings of civilian targets, combat air operations, and his own status within the military.

There's no doubt that the Vietnamese who held JM knew of his high-value status, and used him as a public-relations tool, but that doesn't relieve JM from his obligations as a soldier. The military Code of Conduct bars prisoners of war from using either their status or military knowledge to benefit from privileges or for reduced discomfort. In fact, the CoC makes it perfectly clear that you should never allow yourself to become a POW, and if it happens anyway, you are never allowed to cooperate with the enemy. Now, understanding that all human beings do have a breaking point at which they will no longer be able to control themselves, it would be understandable to see someone breaking down and babbling nonsense in order to get one's captors to stop a torture session. But McCain admitted that it took only FOUR DAYS for him to trade information for medical care. As the Virgin Mary said, 'Come again?'

The link he refers to above is to one of Ted Sampley's propaganda pieces. In fact, McCain's own words are here and they're not quite what old Ted said they were.

They beat McCain senseless on the floor of a cell for those four days, denying him care for his crushed and infected leg and arm. When he realized he was going to die without medical care he said he'd talk. They said never mind, thinking he was a goner. It was only when they found out that he was an admiral's son that they got him some medical care.

As for whether anyone is "allowed" to cooperate with the enemy, I'll just let the POW's speak for themselves on this:

BAUGH: You're always sitting either on the floor or on a stool or concrete block or something low. The interrogator is always behind a table that's covered with cloth of some kind, white or blue or something. And he sits above you and he's always looking down at you asking you questions and they want to know what the targets are for tomorrow, next week, next month. You don't know. You really don't know. But he doesn't -- he's going to have to have an answer of some kind. Now the back of the room comes the -- the torture. And he's a -- he's a big guy that knows what he's doing. And he starts locking your elbows up with ropes and tying your wrists together and bending you.

FER: They tied me in knots uh, with this nylon strap cutting off the circulation to my arms and my wrists and the pain is getting very great. And so uh, I gave out a great big holler and I said okay, okay, okay. I'll tell you what you want to know. I says you know, you've been trained, you've been raised to be a -- a real -- a tough resister. This is embarrassing. You have given in John Fer, you have given in in a very short period of time. Now it wasn't that bad uh, and so when he said what's your unit again, I said uh, I can't tell you that. Well he got very upset and he said something very sternly to this guy and he really tied me up this time and really cinched it down tight uh, when the pain got so great this time, they didn't come back right away.

BAUGH: There's a point where you've completely had it. Where you lose control of your bowels, you throw up, uh, you'll sell your mother down the river uh, in a heart beat. And there's a point everybody reaches that you decide I've had it. I've got to do something to get out of this program. And like me like most everybody we started telling them stories. We made up targets. I had em bombing footbridges in China over creeks which I knew weren't real targets.

MCMANUS: The beatings were going to occur for a specified period of time almost regardless of what happened. Again, it was to establish uh, the rules of the game. They were in control. That they were the masters. Uh, uh, and -- and you were subservient to them and you'd better be careful.

BURROUGHS: They wanted propaganda. They wanted us to denounce our leaders. They wanted us to denounce capitalism. They wanted us to praise Ho Chi Minh. They wanted us to praise the communist initiative. They would put the standard communist glowing terms on every little thing that happened.

MCMANUS: They did a lot of beatings but beatings are easy. Uh, the -- the body responds to a beating very well you know, for that point where your body can't take it anymore, it just shuts down and you go unconscious. So I mean there's very little a person truthfully can do to you by beating you. Uh, but the -- the ropes were -- they were scary because they you know, you'd been put in a position whereby if you did something, you'd choke yourself.

MCGRATH: I was in terrible, terrible pain. They were using the rope trick. The Vietnamese -- we called it the Vietnamese rope trick and that was to take the arms behind your back, tie your hands together, tie them up real tight and then rotate your arms behind and over your shoulder until your shoulders dislocate. Well this one is already broken and dislocated so that was easy. And I remember this one starting over the top and I can remember the cracking and breaking and my elbow also dislocated. I was in terrible pain. Trying to scream. Wishing I could die. I finally said I can't live. I can't live another day. And no -- no food, no water, no sleep uh, twenty four hours a day of this and I started talking. And I broke what we call breaking, I broke past name, rank, serial number.

RISNER: Some guys had been hurt, they'd been tortured. They were scared. Now think of this for a moment. Although we had pretty much the cream of the crop as pilots, they had to be highly educated and highly motivated to get there. Now how do you train? Well still you've got -- you got uh, a variation in humanity. One guy told me, he said I can't even stand unpleasantness let alone being tortured. He said in the court, when the interrogator pounds the desk he said it just shrivels me up inside. What if you have a man that's claustrophobic and they put him in a black cell. He's going to lose it. He's going to go crazy probably.

DENTON: I put out the word Roll back, bounce back. That was the first time that was initiated. It was very important to last us the rest of the time. You could be tortured to give something, but then you don't just lie back and continue to give them things as they just gradually exploit you. You stop and don't give them anything, you make them torture you again and again and give them as little as you can the next time. In other words, they never advance their indoctrination of you to the object they wanted was you become a slave without torture to do anything they want to help their cause.

STUTZ: I really thought before I was shot down and when I was first shot down that I was the toughest fighter pilot in the world. That I was John Wayne uh, Superman all of them rolled up into one and by God, they couldn't break me. I was one tough son of a gun. Uh, I found out real fast how weak I was. Uh, pain may cleanse but by God, it also hurts. And uh, and I'm telling you, when your shoulders rotate in the sockets and you're hanging there and -- and you cry and you -- you bleed and you pray and you scream and when you scream, all they do is pick up a dirty rag and stick it in your mouth so they don't have to listen to you, and the thing that affects you, at least me, affected me the most was, God, I don't want to die here and nobody even know it.

The Vietnamese knew that John McCain's father was an admiral and they were willing to let him go early as a PR stunt. He declined and ended up spending more than five years in that hellhole. Today he cannot raise his arms above his head because his shoulders were dislocated so many times. And unless you consider "material comfort" to mean that the torture stopped for a little while then McCain never got any material comfort and neither did anyone else. Read this transcript if you want to know what hell really is.

Goddamn this makes me mad. You can hate John McCain all you want for being a right wing asshole, but it is insulting to humankind to denigrate the physical and psychological courage those guys showed under pressure we can't even imagine. Our condemnation of the torture at Abu Ghraib or Gitmo is righteous and true because we can see ourselves in that horrible situation and have empathy for it. Yes, even terrorists and Republicans feel pain.

Jesus, this country is so incredibly fucked up.




digby 8/11/2004 12:13:00 PM |

 
War Of Junior's Ear

Cemetery Fight Haunts Some U.S. Troops :

NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 10 -- Bats flapped out of crypts, startling soldiers creeping through the cemetery with guns up. Graves opened beneath their combat boots. And an old enemy displayed a new professionalism, darting in clearly practiced moves between tombstone and mausoleum to stalk the Americans from above ground and below.

In the battle to control one of the world's largest graveyards, U.S. Marines and soldiers say they are coping with a lot, including lingering regret. The vast cemetery in Najaf is sacred to Shiite Muslims, perhaps 2 million of whom lie buried in miles of desert adjoining the shrine of Imam Ali, son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad.

Soldiers involved in the fighting described how many of the most recent graves are marked by photos, which crumble when U.S. forces shell the cemetery walls to reach the militiamen hiding within.

'Wives, daughters, husbands,' said Sgt. Hector Guzman, 28, of the 1st Cavalry Division's 5th Regiment. 'You just know you're destroying that tomb.'
The Houston native shook his head. 'It doesn't feel right sometimes."

"We feel bad that we're destroying, that we're desecrating graves and such," added Staff Sgt. Thomas Gentry, 29, of Altoona, Pa. "That's not what we want to do."

What the reinforced U.S. force in southern Iraq wants to do, commanders say, is destroy the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to Moqtada Sadr, the militant Shiite cleric. The militia has bedeviled the U.S.-led occupation force in Iraq since October, when its largely impoverished, disaffected young gunmen first ambushed a U.S. patrol in a Baghdad slum. A far larger, sustained uprising in April and May undid much of the occupation's effort to establish security in Shiite-populated central and southern Iraq.

The current engagement, which began Thursday with another ambush, is billed by all sides as the final showdown.

Sadr this week brushed aside overtures from Iraq's interim government and vowed to fight to his last drop of blood. Iraqi officials, who consult closely with the U.S. commanders of the 160,000 foreign troops in Iraq, said the door was closed on negotiations.

[...]

Avoiding damage to the shrine -- and the outcry that surely would follow from the world's Muslims -- is a U.S. objective so well known that the gold-domed mosque has become a refuge and staging ground for the guerrillas, U.S. officers said.

"There's nothing good that can come of it," said an Army operations officer, laying out the possible outcome of any strike on the mosque. "We win, we lose. We lose, we lose."

The cemetery was deemed less sacrosanct, however. Marines first followed militia fighters into it on Thursday morning after being ambushed while moving to reinforce the main Iraqi police station in Najaf, which had come under siege by several hundred militiamen.

The battle for the graveyard went on for 36 hours. In the end, the Marines counted four of their own dead and more than 300 militiamen. But veterans of the battle said the lopsided casualty count -- disputed by Sadr's officials -- did no justice to the weirdness of fighting on a sweeping landscape that venerates death.

Now, we have this:

NAJAF, Aug. 10 -- Solemn-faced U.S. Marines and soldiers prepared for what was expected to be a decisive battle for the holiest city in Iraq, but as darkness fell Wednesday an armored column preparing to venture deep into Najaf turned away from the main gate as the U.S. commander announced a delay.

"Preparations to do the offensive are taking longer than originally anticipated," said Maj. David Holahan, executive officer of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Najaf. "We never said when we would do it."

Commanders were awaiting final approval from Iraq's political leaders -- notably the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi -- for a combat operation aimed at clearing militia fighters from the city of 600,000.

As discussions continued, the supreme leader of neighboring Iran warned that American combat operations in Najaf constitute "one of the darkest crimes of humanity."

"The United States is slaughtering the people of one of the holiest Islamic cities and the Muslim world and the Iraqi nation will not stand by," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in an address broadcast on Iranian state television, according to the official government news agency.

Najaf is home to the shrine of Imam Ali, which the militias have turned into a firing base off limits to U.S. forces. The site holds the remains of the most revered figure to Shiite Muslims, who constitute a majority in both Iraq and Iran, a theocracy where Khamenei holds ultimate power.

"These crimes are a dark blemish which will never be wiped from the face of America. They commit these crimes and shamelessly talk of democracy," the ayatollah said. "Shame has no place in their vocabulary."

The Iranian leader spoke as U.S. Marines and soldiers busied themselves cleaning weapons, refitting equipment and loading ammunition, food and -- most important in the extreme desert heat -- water and ice into the armored vehicles that could soon carry them to a decisive final battle with the militia holding Iraq's holiest city.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. This has got to rank up there with the most absurd of absurd wars that have ever been fought. More and more this looks like another War of Jenkins Ear.




digby 8/11/2004 11:11:00 AM |

 
What Gives?

Can someone explain to me why this story continues to get very little play? I don't get it. The administration blew the cover of an al Qaeda mole for political purposes and it just goes nowhere.

Aside from the usual "mediawhore, mediawhore" explanation, does anyone have any serious ideas as to why this is? This strikes me as curious even for our benighted press corp. It's a hell of a story and one which I would think even the infotainment crew would be unable to resist. Is there something more to this that isn't readily apparent?




digby 8/11/2004 10:27:00 AM |

 
Stem Cell-a-vision

Man, Kerry just can't win with some people

Lord Saletan runs a regular series condemning Kerry for his "caveats and curliques" and then turns around and blasts him for not explaining stem cell research in scientific detail when he's on the stump. You see, Kerry is much too verbose when he isn't and much too simplistic when he is and it's all just so very unseemly.

Apparently his lordship just remembered the culture war and is appalled that the Democrats are fighting back with an issue on which most of the country agrees. Republicans can use terms like "the culture of life" and "partial birth" abortion as a club but if Kerry uses the stem cell issue as a proxy for the efficacy of science in ordinary people's lives he's a demagogue.

The fact is that this issue captures one of the main differences between the two parties and it's one that has some real salience with the people. If there's one thing that Americans have always believed in, it's scientific progress. And there is an undercurrent of discontent out there that the right wing is imposing a religious agenda that is impeding that progress --- specifically medical progress which is something in which we all have a personal stake.

I'm sorry that his lordship disapproves of using this issue to illustrate the medieval view toward science the fundamentalist right are forcing on the country, but that's just tough. He's the one who has made a fetish about Kerry's overly complex rhetoric and now he complains when he hits a real emotional chord. His lordship is very difficult to please.




digby 8/11/2004 10:09:00 AM |

 
Useful ...

I just want to make a small point about John McCain. While I too find his support for Bush somewhat vomitous, I don't see any reason to throw the baby out with the bath water.

John McCain is useful to us. He may be campaigning for Bush but he is much more of a pain in his ass than an asset. He represents a certain independent constituency that is just as likely to break our way as Bush's, even with McCain's tepid endorsement of Junior --- particularly if the Bush people refuse to condemn things like that Farah article yesterday. I think we should wrap our arms around John McCain for the duration of this election even as he throws his arms around Bush. Sowing mistrust between the two camps is good politics and it accrues to our favor.

I've never been a big fan of McCain. He's much too conservative for me and I'd never vote for him even though he has a certain fearless quality that is unique in the Republican party these days. But, he's not the Republican Zell Miller. His supporting Bush doesn't surprise me in the least. I'm sure he considers it his duty to his party. But, he's enough of a thorn in Bush's side -- like calling for him to condemn the Scumbags ad -- that he actually helps Kerry more than Bush. Hate him if you will, he's a conservative Republican, after all -- but he's our conservative Republican.




digby 8/11/2004 08:51:00 AM |

Tuesday, August 10, 2004

 
Perfidious Putz

Via Suburban Guerrilla I see that Lil' Rodney Turncoat just doesn't understand why so many Democrats are upset by what he did. Imagine that:

BATON ROUGE, La. - A party-switching Louisiana congressman said Tuesday he's surprised and "hurt" by Democrats' reactions to his defection to the Republicans — and vowed to return nearly $90,000 given to him by members of his old party.

"I'm somewhat puzzled as to how much hoopla this has created," Rep. Rodney Alexander said in a conference call with reporters Tuesday.


[...]

Party leaders and officials have called him a "traitor," "confused" and a "coward," with the last charge stinging, Alexander said Tuesday.

"It hurt like the dickens," the first-term congressman said. "I wasn't a coward. That took a lot of courage to do that."

His explanation of the switch has shifted somewhat.

On Friday, he declared: "I'm ashamed of some of the things the Democratic Party stands for."

On Tuesday, he suggested a political calculation was at the root of his decision. He said he had become worried about "erosion" in his base of support, after another Democrat, a politically unknown black woman, qualified to run against him.

Alexander insisted no deals had been made with GOP leaders for making the change.

"I did not have contact with any of the leadership prior to making that decision on Friday," he said. "I didn't even tell my own children."

I'm sure he hurts like the dickens allright. It takes a lot of courage to be Tom DeLay's bitch.

One of his old colleagues didn't seem terribly impressed with Lil Rod's behavior:

House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (MD) released the following statement today regarding Rodney Alexander's last- minute party switch: "Rodney Alexander's action of filing for re-election on Wednesday, August 4th as a Democrat and some 48 hours later, just before the deadline for filing was to close, filing for re-election as a Republican, was an act of perfidy.

"Perfidy is defined as 'a deliberate breach of faith; a calculated violation of trust; treachery.'

"It was an act of a person without honor or integrity. In my 24 years in Congress, I cannot recall a more deceitful, more calculated, more treacherous violation of trust, which Congressman Alexander sought and which he received, than what he has done over the past few days and months.

[...]

"A man of honor, as many before him have done, would have changed his party affiliation well before the filing deadline. He would have had the courage to face a challenger and defend the failed policies promoted by his new party. He would have had the courage to explain why he has joined a party whose policies have left behind so many of the children and families he now represents and seeks to continue to represent.

"Congressman Alexander chose instead, through stealth and misrepresentation, to avoid the honorable course of action. He has let his constituents down. He has let his party down. He has let his colleagues down. But in the final analysis he has let his reputation and his conscience down even more.

Alexander probably would have won the seat anyway no matter what party he belonged to. He didn't really need to cheat but I have little doubt that DeLay demanded it of him as a show of loyalty. In order to be one of the boys you have to prove how deep in the mud you're willing to grovel. It's more of that bullyboy hazing that Republicans love so much. It's what they do instead of going to war.






digby 8/10/2004 07:22:00 PM |

 
Preachers and Patriots

When the curtain goes up on the Republican National Convention on Aug. 30, the supporting cast will include gospel- and country-music performers, elaborate videos, and celebrities doing what they can to help market President Bush's ideas and vision for America, one of the convention's organizers said yesterday.

But the convention will present not only politicians and celebrities on each of its four days. People from around the country have been invited to offer an invocation or benediction or to make some other short statement, said Frank Breeden, the convention's director of entertainment, who called this aspect of the program "Preachers and Patriots."

The Republicans are hoping that their convention, in New York, can help give their candidate the significant bounce in the polls that eluded the Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry, after the convention in Boston. And so the party hired Mr. Breeden, a former president of the Gospel Music Association renowned in the Christian music industry, to help produce a show that carefully weaves the party's political message with a mix of music, star power and patriotic symbolism.

Republicans have generally been tight-lipped about convention details, but in an interview, Mr. Breeden gave some clues about what to expect. He said he has worked since November to help recruit celebrities to perform, give press interviews, attend parties or be otherwise visible at Madison Square Garden.

The goal, Mr. Breeden said, is to help market the party's political ideas.

"Entertainment plays more of a prominent role in marketing messages today than ever before," Mr. Breeden said in a telephone interview. And he said that the convention organizers wanted to employ those tools in selling their political philosophy: "Just like Cadillac uses Led Zeppelin to market its ideas."

Just like the GOP uses Jesus to market its ideas.

He said yesterday that he expected the convention to be heavy with gospel, country and Broadway music, and with patriotic music. He said there would be several renditions of the national anthem as well. And he said there would be a stage band made up entirely of some of the most sought-after studio musicians in New York City. Everyone is being paid union wages, he said.

Mr. Breeden said that during his months of work on the convention, he had run up against some obstacles that were surprising and others that he had expected.

After a career in the entertainment industry, Mr. Breeden said he knew well that many of the most outspoken performers do not support the Bush administration. "For whatever reason, on the Democratic side of things, the celebrities who have an affinity with that party tend to be more activist-oriented and tend to get headlines," he said.

Maybe that's because the "Republican side of things" is always trying to censor them. It's a right wing specialty.

If people like tent revival type entertainment, it looks like they're going to get plenty of it. Praise the Lord and pass the moonshine for Bush. The culture war must go on.




digby 8/10/2004 03:25:00 PM |

 
I Yam What I Yam

Everybody chuckled at the Bush's third grade answer to "what does sovereignty mean in the 21st century" but he had another howler at that UNITY meeting:

ROLAND MARTIN: Mr. President, you remarked in your remarks you said that 8 million people in Afghanistan registered to vote, and as you said, exercised their God-given right to vote.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Right.

ROLAND MARTIN: That may be a right from God, but it's not guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. In 2000, an estimated 2 million people, half African American had their votes discounted from Florida and Cook County, Illinois, to other cities. Some on it-- That cuts into other questions. Are you going to order Attorney General John Ashcroft to send federal election monitors to Florida and other southern states and in this age of new constitutional amendments, will you endorse a constitutional amendment guaranteeing every American the right to vote in federal elections?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yes. First of all, look, I can understand why African Americans in particular -- you know, are worried about being able to vote since the vote had been denied for so long in the south in particular. I understand that. This administration wants everybody to vote. Now, I -- best thing we did was to pass the Helping America Vote Act with over -- I think it's $3 billion of help to states and local governments to make sure that the voting process is fair. I -- you know, it's not just the south. By the way, the voting process needs help all over the country to make sure that everybody's vote counts and everybody's vote matters. I understand that. That's why I was happy to work with the congress to achieve this important piece of legislation. Just don't focus on Florida. I have to talk to the governor down there to make sure it works.

But it's the whole country that needs voter registration files need to be updated. The machines need to work. And that's why there's $3 billion in the budget to help, Roland. Obviously, everybody ought to have a vote. What was your other question?

ROLAND MARTIN: Should we put it -- guarantee it in the constitution.

PRESIDENT BUSH: I'll consider it. I'll consider it. What's your second question? R You said it should be guaranteed in Iraq, why not America?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, it's not guaranteed in Iraq. People have to show up to vote in the first place. The thing about democracy is people need to step up and decide to participate in the first place. There's no guarantees people are going to vote. They should be allowed to vote, but the problem we have in our society is too many people choose not to vote. We have a duty in the political process, and you have a duty as journalists to encourage people to register to vote, to do their duty. I'm not saying that -- I’m saying that people are choosing. It's not guaranteed they're going to. That's part of the problem that we have in America. Not enough people do vote. You have a duty on your radio stations on your TV stations, to encourage people to register to vote. I have a duty to call them out to vote. Of course, I’m going to try to call them out to vote for me.

The right to vote is not guaranteed unless everybody votes. Jesus H. Christ.

And, I don't know about you, but I feel much better about Florida knowing that the president is going to talk to his brother to make sure it "works."

Has there ever been a more stupid president? I don't see how it's possible. You can easily see how much more difficult he would have had it if he'd been forced to face a skeptical press more often. How lucky he was to have to only answer to the celebrity press corp instead of real journalists. Too bad about the country, though.




digby 8/10/2004 02:13:00 PM |

 
The Manchurian McCain

Via Julia, I see that the scumbags have levelled their repulsive guns at McCain again, presumably because he has been so effective a blunting the swiftboat ad's charges. He had to know he'd come under fire from these crazies, but they aren't even trying to hide it, now. This article literally accuses McCain of cowardice and treason:

Why would John McCain characterize the SWIFT Boat vets commercial about John Kerry as "dishonest and dishonorable"?

Why would he ask President Bush to denounce it?

Why would he say something similar was "pulled" on him when he seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2000?

Americans are supposed to respect Sen. John McCain because he is a war hero. But is he? And why is he so determined to defend John Kerry's dishonorable activities during and after the Vietnam War?

Now let me begin by saying McCain suffered greatly during his five years of captivity in the "Hanoi Hilton." But his horrific experiences do not entitle him to stretch the truth about his captivity at the hands of North Vietnamese Communists, nor to deceive Americans about his bravery and heroism.

When the Navy pilot was shot down over a lake near Hanoi, his captors did not know who he was – John McCain, son of the admiral in charge of the Pacific fleet. McCain was seriously injured in his ejection and in need of medical attention. In exchange for what passes as first-class care in Vietnam, McCain talked. He told the North Vietnamese about his father. He told them about the chain of command. He described himself as one of the "very best pilots" in the Navy.

Such behavior by a POW is strictly frowned upon in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the military code of conduct.

"OK," you say, "McCain should be given a pass for this because he was badly hurt. Wasn't his behavior at the Hanoi Hilton honorable after he recovered from his wounds?"

No, not exactly. While serving as a POW, McCain was one of the captives who agreed to be used for propaganda purposes by the enemy. In fact, some argue that an interview he gave to a communist publication – detailing an accident aboard his ship, problems with low morale among U.S. servicemen, the chain of command in the U.S. Navy and other pertinent information – went far beyond mere propaganda and crossed the line into disclosing military intelligence secrets.

On June 5, 1969, the Washington Post carried a story titled, "Reds Say PW Songbird is Pilot Son of Admiral." The article states that, "Hanoi has aired a broadcast in which the pilot son of United States Commander in the Pacific, Adm. John McCain, purportedly admits to having bombed civilian targets in North Vietnam and praises medical treatment he has received since being taken prisoner."

Worse yet, many years later, when both John McCain and John Kerry were serving in the U.S. Senate, they teamed up to betray the families of the POWs and MIAs in favor of sucking up to the murderous Communist Vietnamese regime.

More than any other two men in America, McCain and Kerry orchestrated the cover-up of what became of our Vietnam POWs and MIAs.

[...]

One wonders what McCain's reward might be? What was in the cover-up for him? Why has he become an apologist for John Kerry's despicable and dishonorable record in Vietnam and, worse, his actions afterward?

Maybe it's just something about the character of John McCain. Maybe birds of a feather just flock together. Maybe this is why you should take anything McCain says about Kerry with a grain of salt.

I think somebody needs to ask the Swift Boat Veterans for Bush is they agree with this assessment. After all, this is another scathing indictment of the US Navy. Apparently McCain was a traitor and instead of being tried he was awarded medals and became a US Senator. There is something terribly wrong with the US Military to let this happen.

I'm beginning to understand why so many gawd fearing Republicans refused to join up. Who can blame them? They just didn't want to be associated with the likes of the traitorous Kerry and McCain and all the officers and comrades who covered up for them all these years.

How many losers like McCain and Kerry are serving now, do you think?





digby 8/10/2004 12:41:00 PM |

 
Postmodern Heroics

Josh Marshall points out an egregiously incorrect column by Deborah Orin in which she not only claims that John O'Neill served with Kerry, but that Kerry was actually known by his comrades as an outright coward who had "very little nerve for facing serious combat." This takes the charge to a new level. It's not just that he got medals he didn't deserve but that he actively avoided dangerous situations in order to save his own skin. I wonder how long it will before someone accuses him of fragging.

It has struck me lately what a terrible indictment of the military these charges are and how once again the Republicans have absolutely no limits in terms of how fully they are willing to trash the American institutions they allegedly love in order to win. What these people are saying is that the US Navy awarded some of its highest medals for bravery to a coward. The many officers who signed those glowing fitness reports and awarded those citations are either liars or they are incompetent. The word of his shipmates, even the man whose life he saved, are worth nothing. You can't believe military documentary evidence. It was all bullshit, every last piece of it.

And because of this it can now be said that all medals awarded for bravery are suspect. A superior military record is no longer a recommendation. Who can ever believe the government on this issue, now? If they were willing to reward the undeserving Kerry, for reasons about which we can only speculate, then obviously the entire system for awarding valor in combat is corrupt.

There used to be some things that Americans could count on. Having a certain reverence for combat medals was one of them, regardless of political party. It was something you just didn't fuck with, certainly not openly. We've always known that the good old boy network existed, that "connected" guys got better assignments and that in the Vietnam era, strings could get pulled to get into the guard or get stationed in Germany or something. But, even in the worst dark days of the conflict, I don't remember anybody saying that medals were being handed out to cowards. And people said a lot of terrible things about the military in those days.

Once again, we are seeing that the baby boomer Vietnam generation (of which I am on the later side) continues to play out its little psychodrama. During the sixties, the young liberals had disdain for the military. Now, in flaccid middle age, it's the conservatives who are taking it apart. Our excuse was that we were young and passionate and stemmed from an honest belief that the government was lying to us. And it was. We grew out of the idea that the military itself was a corrupt institution, but we have paid a political price for more than thirty years for taking that attitude. And that price was exacted by the very same people who are now essentially accusing the military of extreme dishonesty. Irony doesn't begin to cover this.

The conservative attack on the military is, on the other hand, so small minded, so parochial. For puny, partisan reasons they are accusing the military of widespread corruption --- merely to excuse the behavior of their less than stellar candidate. In order to save that worthless little child-man, they are basically telling the American people that the US Navy rewards cowards and covers it up. They do not care that they are setting the stage for people to think that heroic deeds in combat have no concrete meaning. GOP Post modern politics rescues the cipher and further degrades our democracy.

Too bad for the men and women who are risking their necks as we speak for Junior's Big Adventure. Any act of bravery on which the military might bestow a medal is now subject to interpretation. Nothing is sacred to these people.



Update:

If anyone cares to see how totally corrupt the Navy must have been, Eriposte has the full scoop. Dozens of officers would have had to lie or have been completely incompetent for all these charges to be true. Not the least of whom are some of the Swift boat vets themselves who said very different things at the time.





digby 8/10/2004 11:42:00 AM |

 
Watch Your Backs, Spooks

Porter Goss, Junior's choice for CIA director, is a loyal guy, but it isn't you he's loyal to.

Goss says CIA leak not worthy of committee action

Rep. Porter Goss said Thursday that the uproar over allegations that White House officials purposely identified a covert CIA agent appears largely political and doesn't yet merit an investigation by the House Select Committee on Intelligence, which he chairs.

Goss, who was a CIA agent himself from the early 1960s to 1971, said he takes such leaks seriously, but he distinguished between a willful violation of federal law and an inadvertent disclosure.

Goss also said no one from the intelligence agencies has raised the issue with him since syndicated columnist Robert Novak identified the agent in a column July 14.

"I would say there's a much larger dose of partisan politics going on right now than there is worry about national security," said Goss, R-Sanibel. "But I would never take lightly a serious allegation backed up by evidence that there was a willful -- and I emphasize willful, inadvertent is something else -- willful disclosure, and I haven't seen any evidence."

Goss said he would act if he did have evidence of that sort.

"Somebody sends me a blue dress and some DNA, I'll have an investigation," Goss said.

Let's just say that when push comes to shove, old Porter is a partisan Republican first and a guardian of the CIA second. Be warned.

I'm assuming that he will be confirmed with no problem. Miller and Lieberman and probably a few other Democrats will vote for him.

But, President Kerry is going to have to turn around and fire him. He has to because this guy will stab him in the back the first chance he gets:

Critics say Goss's political antics reveal a partisan streak that compromises his ability to be a fair and diplomatic CIA chief. Most recently, he interrupted debate on the House intelligence authorization bill by displaying a sign with a 1977 quote from John Kerry that called for cuts to the intelligence budget.

Kerry cannot have someone like this working for him in such a sensitive job. I would assume that the Republicans are very well aware of this fact. This may be only the first of numerous landmines that are being laid in case of a Kerry victory.





digby 8/10/2004 10:03:00 AM |

Monday, August 09, 2004

 
Scottie's Little Helpers

Via the Stakeholder, we get this exchange from the Gaggle:

Q Let me follow up with a second question. How damaging was the revelation of the deepest mole that we've ever had in al Qaeda? The publication of that man's name by The New York Times -- how damaging is that to our war on terror?

MR. McCLELLAN: I'm sorry -- which specific instance are you referring to?

Q The New York Times published the name of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, who was described by intelligence officials as the only deep mole we've ever had within al Qaeda.

MR. McCLELLAN: I'm not sure where it was published, first. Obviously, it was published recently -- the capture of this individual. It is important that we recognize that sometimes there are ongoing operations underway. And as we move forward on capturing or bringing to justice al Qaeda members, we need to keep that in mind. And sometimes we aren't able to go into as much detail we would like to because of those ongoing operations. And I think everybody has a responsibility to keep that in mind.

Q Scott --

MR. McCLELLAN: Go ahead, Terry.

Q Do you think The New York Times shouldn't have published the name?

MR. McCLELLAN: Go ahead, Terry.

Q Senator Kerry has been making light, or making fun of the President saying 'we've turned the corner, and we're not going back,' given the fact that the job growth has been weak, and the energy prices are rising. Is that something that the President is not going to say anymore? Is he reconsidering that, given that the jobs are --

Can someone please explain to me why "Terry" just went on with his prepared question instead of following up what should be something of interest to the entire press corp? It sure sounded to me as if Flounder was trying to spin it to look as if the press was at fault for pressuring the admnistration to provide evidence that it's terror warnings were on the level.

"Terry" (Moran?), instead of forcing Flounder to explain what he meant by that just barrelled on with his canned question.

This happens all the time at press conferences and happens just as often in one on one interviews. The journalists do not seem to be following the give and take. In the one on one's you see Judy and Wolf and Little Russ just sitting there with glazed eyes obviously waiting for the interview subject to end his rambling so they can get to the next question.

I've sometimes wondered if the TV journalists are distracted by the producer in their earpieces, but that doesn't explain why "Terry" and his ilk just let opportunities to follow up go by as in that gaggle today. Are these people so egotistical that they can't allow themselves to be seen aiding and abetting a competitor?

The press corp are a bunch of braying sheep when the GOP blastfax comes in, but they can't operate in tandem to put the pressure on Flounder a little bit --- even when the subject concerns their very own selves. What a sad comment.




digby 8/09/2004 06:23:00 PM |

 
Neocon Resurrections

From the "they have always been wrong about everything" files, Lawrence Korb writes that "Team B" should be benched. No kidding.

His piece in the week-end's LA Times very succinctly tells you everything you need to know about the failed track record of the neocons. Truly, they have always been wrong about everything and most often they are spectacularly wrong.

He brings up one specific little bit of history that I've written about before, as have others, but it bears repeating because of what is now happening in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In 1981, after the publication of Clare Sterling's book, "The Terror Network," which argued that global terrorists were actually pawns of the Soviets, leading hard-liners asked the CIA to look into the relationship between Soviets and terrorist organizations. The agency concluded that although there was evidence that the Soviets had assisted groups such as the Palestine Liberation Organization with weapons and training, there was no evidence that the Soviets encouraged or approved these groups' terrorist acts. However, hard-liners like Secretary of State Alexander Haig, CIA Chief William Casey and Policy Planning Director Wolfowitz rejected the draft as a naive, exculpatory brief and had the draft retooled to assert that the Soviets were heavily involved in supporting "revolutionary violence worldwide."

This book was the beginning, middle and end of the neocons understanding of terrorism. It fit in perfectly with their black and white worldview of good and evil nation states. From that point on they could not see "terrorism" as anything but a weapon in the hands of totalitarian dictators.

This explains their absurd and stubborn belief that 9/11 simply had to have been perpetrated by Saddam and their ongoing certainty that "rogue" states remain a greater threat than islamic radicalism joining forces with a weakened failed state. As always, they simply refuse to give up their bedrock belief system in light of the evidence right before their eyes.

It's true that they have been discredited recently, but I would not start writing the epitaph just yet. Their worldview is bipartisanly seductive, placing the US at the center of righteous democratic progress against the tyrant. And, for all its starry-eyed idealism it requires no interference in unpleasant and unheroic matters like Sudan. Likewise, Iraq and Afghanistan can be seen in their minds as successes --- the terrible rogue state was vanquished and the totalitarian dictator was punished. Failed states aren't a threat.

Except, of course, they are. And they are a very messy and dangerous problem. We really should not be in the business of creating even more of them, but it's looking more and more as if that's exactly what we've done. And in the age of islamic radicalism that was a stupid, stupid thing to do.

Neoconservatism is like a vampire cult. It is very difficult to kill. Being discredited means nothing to them. It's happened time and time again and yet they keep coming back. They must have a stake drawn through the heart of their failed world view and I don't know what it will take to make that happen. Indeed, they are re-forming as we speak into the Committee For The Present Danger Redux.

James Woolsey, a former CIA director, is chairman of the group, which he says in its third incarnation aims to combat what he calls "a totalitarian movement masquerading as a religion."

[...]

The past struggle against communism differed in some ways from the current war against Islamist terrorism. But America's freedom and security, which each has aimed to undermine, are exactly the same.

Don't throw away your garlic just yet. They are still out there.




digby 8/09/2004 05:52:00 PM |

 
Coming Forward

Man, they're coming out of the woodwork.

Last Wednesday we had the Scumbags For Truth, followed quickly by the Alabama Mail Room Veterans for Bush on Friday. Today we find the sickening truth behind that alleged hamster "rescue" from the Swift Boat Veterinarians For Truth.

Bush-Cheney 2004 is playing for keeps.




digby 8/09/2004 04:53:00 PM |

 
Rice Puddinghead

Josh Marshall pointed out Condi's rather strained definition of "backround" in the Khan matter. But, she made another whopper that I, at least, haven't heard anyone mention:

BLITZER:Let's talk about some of the people who have been picked up, mostly in Pakistan, over the last few weeks. In mid-July, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan. There is some suggestion that by releasing his identity here in the United States, you compromised a Pakistani intelligence sting operation, because he was effectively being used by the Pakistanis to try to find other al Qaeda operatives. Is that true?

RICE: Well, I don't know what might have been going on in Pakistan. I will say this, that we did not, of course, publicly disclose his name. One of them...

Was she claiming that the mole operation that Kahn was working on, and with which the British were actively involved, was some sort of independent Pakistani op? Her statement suggests that even though we had received Khan's laptop and all the surveillance information and were screaming "run for your lives" at the top of our lungs, the Pakistanis had secretly turned Khan and had an ongoing operation of which she was unaware.

Sure. That makes sense. On the other hand, considering her job performance thus far, it's quite possible that she wouldn't have known "what might have been going on in Pakistan." Seems her plate is full just drilling Crusader Codpiece on the meaning of the word "sovereignty." She doesn't have a lot of time on her hands for details.




digby 8/09/2004 04:25:00 PM |

 
I Won't Say It

Jobs with Little Mental Challenge May Up Alzheimer's

People who spent most of their lives in jobs that involve little brain work appear more likely to eventually develop Alzheimer's disease, according to new study findings released Monday.

digby 8/09/2004 04:00:00 PM |

 
J'Accuse:

I just wanted to share with you another example of the media unquestioningly adopting bitchy, Republican snark to the detriment of...well, everyone.

Here's Karen Tumulty in Time:

Bush strategists dismiss those gains by Kerry as a postconvention blip and predict they will soon be erased by what voters see of the Democratic Senator now that he is back in the fray. The real Kerry, they snickered, is the one who asserted last week that he could fight "a more sensitive war on terror" -- a statement that couldn't have sounded more dainty if he had uttered it in French."

Sentient people know that Kerry wasn't calling for an encounter session with Mullah Omar. But, nonetheless, I'm sure that there are many stupid people who believe that the word sensitive translates into sissy. Waddaya gonna do? I don't condemn Tumulty for relaying the GOP operative's quote. It's real and it is one of their talking points. However, most people do not know that the quote is taken out of context and readers would have benefitted from knowing that. Perhaps an editor trimmed it for space. Fine. Shitty journalism, but no surprise.

Here's where she really goes in the tank. She follows with her own words "a statement that couln't have been more dainty if he had uttered it in French." Those exact words could have been written by Tom DeLay. She has just issued a copyrighted GOP bumper sticker in her own voice.

Although it would come as a hell of a surprise to Napoleon, Voltaire and Balzac, the french language is now synonymous with "dainty" and to be "French" now means coward in Republican circles. The press finds this simply hilarious. But, lets not kid ourselves. The "french" appellation is merely a new word for "faggot" and everybody knows it. And that's exactly what Karl Rove wants people to think about John Kerry. In fact, they are planning their convention around this theme.

There is no amount of political correctness in the world that can stop bigots from creating insider code words to descibe the untermenschen they collectively loathe. And the modern Republicans have an especially sophomoric approach to this that seems to appeal mightily to the media. Maybe it's the "band trip" quality of the campaign trail, but the press seems unable to resist adopting the snarky high school level barbs that the republicans are so good at dishing out. It's all part of the right's "derisive humor" technique, something that is completely obvious to anyone who is paying attention and which they readily admit to using. (See every Bob Sommerby post on the 2000 election.)

So, Karen Tumulty thinks the "french" thing is just adorable. She probably got a little case of the giggles when she wrote it and that's just great for her. But, she is peddling GOP propaganda and everytime she and her snotty little cohorts do this they inject the body politic with toxic Republican bigotry.




digby 8/09/2004 03:05:00 PM |

Sunday, August 08, 2004

 
Glory Days

Atrios has linked to a freeper thread (since pulled) in which the Borg collectively loses its mind and decides to take to the streets over the idea that somebody's going to call in the UN to monitor elections.

I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago. This is no accident. They are merely doing what they are programmed to do. It comes directly from none other than their favorite leprechaun of the un-dead, Newtie himself:

One GOP lawmaker told The Hill that Gingrich encouraged Republicans to pick issues such as school prayer, strengthening work requirements for welfare recipients and barring the United Nations from monitoring U.S. elections, which all polled at higher than an 80 percent rating.

“There’s a consensus developing among activists that new issues are emerging where [the polling] is decidedly with us,” the lawmaker said. “We can show a contrast.”

Gingrich spelled out his views at a meeting last week organized by House GOP Conference Chairwoman Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio), the fourth-ranking member of the GOP House leadership.

Lawmakers who attended Wednesday’s session expressed excitement about Gingrich’s policy proposals and political tactics.

Rep. Phil English, a Republican who represents Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge’s old district in northwestern Pennsylvania, said: “It is extremely useful in depicting Kerry’s position on the political spectrum to raise issues like welfare reform where he’s been on the far-left extreme.”

He added, “We have a very good wedge issue. … It’s worth asking why he is part of a rear-guard action blocking the permanency of welfare reform. Is he not out of touch with cultural issues of the rest of the country?”

I hear they are also thinking of creating a fresh, exciting ten point plan on these cultural wedge issues to put through in the first hundred days. They might call it "The Contract With America." I think it's a winner.




digby 8/08/2004 10:21:00 PM |

 
Pundit Deficiency

I'm sure we've all read this fascinating little piece on the "side-by-side" military records of prominent Republicans, Democrats and journalists, thanks to Atrios. One part is particularly telling, in a way the writer never intended:

Here is the list of journalists and pundits called "nonpartisan and right of center":

David Brooks, NY Times columnist
William F. Buckley, National Review
Pat Buchanan, MSNBC commentator
Ann Coulter, writer & commentator
Lou Dobbs, CNN News anchor
Paul Gigot, Wall Street Journal editor
Sean Hannity, Hannity & Colmes host
Brit Hume, Fox News anchor
Rush Limbaugh, Radio talk show host
Bill O'Reilly, O'Reilly Factor host
Michael Savage, Radio talk show host
William Safire, NY Times columnist
George Will, Washington Post columnist

Who of these are non-partisan, I wonder? Being generous, I'll say that Hume and Dobbs work to maintain at least the appearance of objectivity. The rest are all openly partisan and eight of them (out of thirteen) are rabid, red meat Republicans.

If you were to ask informed Republicans if they trusted the straight journalists listed above and if they generally agreed with the others' views, they would probably say yes. If there would be a problem it would be because a few moderate Republicans might not feel comfortable identifying themselves with the extreme rhetoric of the Limbaughs, Coulters and Savages. In other words, the worst any Republican would say about this list is that many of the people on it are too extreme, not that they are too partisan. And most would say these people fairly represent their views.

Now look at the list of journalists and pundits called nonpartisan and left of center:

Wolf Bilzter, CNN News anchor
Tom Brokaw, NBC News anchor
Alan Colmes, Hannity & Colmes host
Al Franken, Political satirist
Thomas Friedman, NY Times columnist
Jim Lehrer, PBS News Hour anchor
Bill Maher, HBO, political satirist
Chris Matthews, Hardball host
Michael Moore, Political satirist, filmmaker
Dan Rather, CBS News Anchor
Tim Russert, Meet the Press host
Jon Stewart, Daily Show host
George Stephanopoulos, ABC This Week host

Out of these only Colmes, Franken, Maher, Moore and Stewart, five out of thirteen, can be called rabid left wing Democrats and that is a serious stretch with all but the ineffectual Colmes and Franken. Of these, only Colmes has made his career as a liberal talking head. These others are free agents who've signed on for the season.

Matthews, Russert and Stephanopoulos have past ties to Democrats, but work hard to prove their "objective" credibility, mostly by being harder on Democrats than Republicans. This is the exact opposite of the Republican pundits (like Scarborough and Buchanan) who maintain their partisan ties quite openly. However, being much, much too generous I'll put them in the category with Brooks, Safire and Will above because we can never convince a Republican that they are non-partisans no matter how many Democrats they run out of town on a rail to prove otherwise.

Friedman is a bi-partisan wonk type who is only on the list because he writes about foreign policy. He could have gone on either list.

But, Blitzer, Brokaw, Lehrer, and Rather are non-partisan journalists of the type completely missing from the "right of center" list above. They do not, by job description, offer their opinions, as both Hume and Dobbs often do on their programs and certainly not in the way Matthews, Russert, Buchanan, Gigot, Will and Buckley do.

Informed Democrats look at this list and see five entertainers who speak the truth, three pundits trying very hard to get Republicans to see them as objective and five buckets of lukewarm spit who are easily played by the right wing. Unlike the Republicans whose only complaint (among a minority of voters) would be that the list is too right wing, the problem for us is that most of the left of center list isn't left at all.

This list clearly shows the huge deficit we face in the punditocrisy. They have a full employment act for full time partisan screamers, talking heads and screeching pens. We have to depend on Alan Colmes, Jim Lehrer and Wolf Blitzer.





digby 8/08/2004 07:15:00 PM |

 
Little Known Fact

For assholes like the Fox Allstars who claim that Kerry only spent four months in Vietnam and that makes him a pussy, it should be known that while it is true he only spent four months getting shot at and saving lives and winning medals for bravery in swift boats -- he had previously done a full tour onboard the USS Gridley stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin. Swift boat duty was his second tour.


Never post and run. Typos corrected.
digby 8/08/2004 01:17:00 PM |

Saturday, August 07, 2004

 
Dear Jodi,

Nice work. You are such a dear. You make my job easy.

Love,

Karl



P.S. I'm especially grateful that you didn't mention that we're using the "lost years in the Senate" as a major talking point in the campaign. Your article made our coordinated campaign rap on Kerry's accomplishments sound downright reasonable. And the long part at the end where you framed "Vietnam" and "son of a millworker" as running away from their records instead of positive character shorthand was just perfect.

Thanks again.




digby 8/07/2004 10:42:00 PM |

 
Welcome To Iraq Mr Negroponte

Bet you feel right at home.




digby 8/07/2004 10:16:00 PM |

 
Tautology For Dummies

Via Brad DeLong: "

Q Good morning. My name is Mark Trahant. I'm the editorial page editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a member of the Native American Journalist Association. (Applause.) Most school kids learn about the government in the context of city, county, state and federal. And, of course, tribal governments are not part of that at all. Mr. President, you've been a governor and a President, so you have a unique experience, looking at it from two directions. What do you think tribal sovereignty means in the 21st century, and how do we resolve conflicts between tribes and the federal and the state governments?

THE PRESIDENT: Tribal sovereignty means that, it's sovereign. You're a -- you've been given sovereignty, and you're viewed as a sovereign entity. And, therefore, the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between sovereign entities.

help us.




digby 8/07/2004 07:54:00 PM |

 
So Much For Humint

Unmasking of Qaeda Mole a U.S. Security Blunder-Experts

The revelation that a mole within al Qaeda was exposed after Washington launched its "orange alert" this month has shocked security experts, who say the outing of the source may have set back the war on terror.

[...]


"The whole thing smacks of either incompetence or worse," said Tim Ripley, a security expert who writes for Jane's Defense publications. "You have to ask: what are they doing compromising a deep mole within al Qaeda, when it's so difficult to get these guys in there in the first place?

"It goes against all the rules of counter-espionage, counter-terrorism, running agents and so forth. It's not exactly cloak and dagger undercover work if it's on the front pages every time there's a development, is it?"

A source such as Khan -- cooperating with the authorities while staying in active contact with trusting al Qaeda agents -- would be among the most prized assets imaginable, he said.

"Running agents within a terrorist organization is the Holy Grail of intelligence agencies. And to have it blown is a major setback which negates months and years of work, which may be difficult to recover."

Rolf Tophoven, head of the Institute for Terrorism Research and Security Policy in Essen, Germany, said allowing Khan's name to become public was "very unclever."

"If it is correct, then I would say its another debacle of the American intelligence community. Maybe other serious sources could have been detected or guys could have been captured in the future" if Khan's identity had been protected, he said.

Britain, which has dealt with Irish bombing campaigns for decades, has a policy of announcing security alerts only under narrow circumstances, when authorities have specific advice they can give the public to take action that will make them safer.

Home Secretary David Blunkett, responsible for Britain's anti-terrorism policy, said in a statement on Friday there was "a difference between alerting the public to a specific threat and alarming people unnecessarily by passing on information indiscriminately."

Kevin Rosser, security expert at the London-based consultancy Control Risks Group, said an inherent risk in public alerts is that secret sources will be compromised.

"When these public announcements are made they have to be supported with some evidence, and in addition to creating public anxiety and fatigue you can risk revealing sources and methods of sensitive operations," he said.

This alert was such obvious bullshit. Laura Bush going to sit amongst the targets on Monday is really all you need to know. Scaring the hell out of everybody is bad enough. But, now it turns out they blew a chance to infiltrate an actual al Qaeda cell and figure out what current plots might be going on.

I do have to take issue with one comment that Kevin Drum made in this post. I don't think there's any excuse for this, least of all that the critics of the administration "panicked" them into making a mistake. This is national security during a hotly contested presidential race. It's part of the job description. If Bill Clinton could deal with the "wag the dog" nonsense while he was being impeached, I think these guys should be able to keep their fucking mouths shut when Howard Dean gives them a hard time on CNN. They are supposed to be able to handle the pressure. If they can't, that's a big problem that has nothing to do with the critics and everything to do with them.

Update: If this is true, then this was a major blunder:

A Pakistani man whose arrest led the authorities to uncover the terrorist reconnaissance of financial institutions in the United States was also communicating with people believed to be behind a potential plot to disrupt the fall elections, a senior intelligence official said on Saturday.

The arrest last month of the man, Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, has prompted an investigation in the United States, Britain and other countries to locate those behind the surveillance operations. Now the authorities say they believe his arrest is helping unravel the earlier threat to carry out an attack this year inside the United States.

[...]

Still frustrating investigators is the uncertainty about whether the surveillance in 2000 and 2001 was part of ongoing plot. So far, the officials said, no clear evidence has been obtained that indicates whether the plot was ever abandoned.

Increasingly however, the authorities suspect that the Qaeda figures known to be involved in the surveillance were active members of the terrorist network and operated in a clandestine manner suggesting that they wanted to carry out attacks inside the United States.

Investigators are counting on people already in custody, or others whom they hope to apprehend, to help solve the mystery of whether the plot is still active.

It might have been nice to keep Khan working as a mole for a while so they could catch the guys who were planning more terrorist attacks, don't you think?

Why, you'd almost think they didn't want to stop terorist attacks from disrupting the election.



digby 8/07/2004 07:16:00 PM |

 
Gitmo Horror Part II

Last week I wrote about the first person accounts of torture and other inhumane treatment in Guantanamo contained in a report(pdf) by the Center for Constitutional Rights. More information is coming to light and it squares with what the three freed British citizens said.

First, it's quite clear that prisoners are routinely beaten and abused when captured in Afghanistan. Often these prisoners have been sold by various tribes and factions (reportedly for $5,000) to US forces. From that point on, these prisoners are considered terrorists with no human rights. The prisoners who are then sent to Guantanamo are subjected to harsh mental torture, much of it specifically tailored to each prisoner by way of psychiatric medical evaluations. There is evidence that this mental torture results in more false confessions than any useable intelligence. In fact, some people allege that there has been next to no useable intelligence drawn from the prisoners in Gitmo. Instead, according to the three Britons, it seems to have become something of a training camp for new interrogators who use the prisoners there to practice their craft. An article called "Guantanamo Bay on Trial" in the January edition of Vanity Fair (no link) bears these claims out.

"...from a military standpoint, intelligence officials with extensive experience in counterterrorism claim that Gitmo's intelligence value is relatively low, and much of the information obtained there unreliable. Vanity Fair has established that none of the al-Qaeda leaders captured since September 11, 2001, has ever been held at GuantAnamo Bay. Sixty-four detainees innocent of any terrorist connection have already been released, and officials admit there may be many more to come. The method of interrogation now in use at Gitmo-a formal system of escalating bribes in return for confessions-is almost certain to produce bogus testimony, experts say, and the camp's interrogators are mostly young and inexperienced.

[...]

General Miller makes it clear that he does not have access to staff of this caliber. Seven out of 10 of the interrogators working in his "joint interrogation group" are reservists, and they come to Camp Delta straight from a 25-day course at Fort Huachuca. "They're all young people, but they're really committed to winning the mission," Miller says. "Intelligence is a young person's game-you've got to be flexible."

Some seasoned intelligence officials disagree. "Generally, the new hires apprentice in the booths with more experienced guys," says one. "I certainly know of no one at Gitmo having the opportunity or the luxury to be able to prepare an interview for three months." Another had met some of Miller's interrogators. "They were rookies, and none were too keen on the process down there," he says. They knew that any seemingly insignificant tidbit might later turn out to be important, but in general "they just didn't feel that the process was going anywhere fast.

This article in the Seattle Post Intelligencer reveals the details of yet another prisoner's experience in Guantanamo from papers recently unsealed by a Seattle Federal Court:

Recently declassified documents in a Seattle federal court describe the extreme isolation of an alleged al-Qaida member at a U.S. military prison that experts say constitutes torture and war crimes.

The documents, unsealed yesterday at the request of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and others, include U.S. Navy lawyer Charles Swift's firsthand observation at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison of the conditions of solitary confinement of his client, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a 34-year-old Yemeni who acknowledges chauffeuring Osama bin Laden at his Afghan farm.

The court documents describing the alleged mistreatment of Hamdan are part of a lawsuit challenging his detention, the conditions of detention and his prolonged isolation in solitary confinement.

[...]

In 2001, as U.S. forces were fighting in Afghanistan, Hamdan says Afghan fighters captured him, hogtied him with electrical wire and sold him to American forces for $5,000. Once in U.S. custody, Hamdan maintains that American officials in Afghanistan:

Beat him with fists and feet.

Forced him to sit motionless on benches for days.

Dressed him only in overalls in subfreezing temperatures.

Showed him a gun and threaten him with death, torture and imprisonment.

After six months, he was flown to Guantanamo. There, his life got worse.

Hamdan told Lt. Cmdr. Swift that the eight months of solitary confinement at Guantanamo "was worse than anything he had experienced in Afghanistan ... and that he was going crazy."

"I have not been permitted to see the sun or hear other people outside .... or talk with other people. I am alone except for a guard," Hamdan said last February in a court affidavit that was first sealed, then made classified in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

"One month is like a year here, and I have considered pleading guilty in order to get out of here," Hamdan said after two months in solitary.

Now -- six months later -- even the guard is gone. A video camera mounted on a wall now monitors Hamdan, according to Swift's statement.

Experts on torture and international law said yesterday that -- if true -- the death threats and solitary confinement described in court documents constitute war crimes, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. They say the allegations also represent violations of the U.N. Convention Against Torture as well as U.S. law.

And several international legal scholars said that criminal responsibility is not limited to those who committed the torture and can implicate the entire chain of command up to the president of the United States if they knew or should have known about the violations.

The stories coming out of Gitmo are remarkably consistent. This is not an unusual case. Indeed, the attempted suicide rate down there is astronomical, but after this was publicized, in a typical Bushian move, they have decided to simply give attempted suicidee another, less disturbing, name. From the Vanity Fair article:

In the camp's acute ward, a young man lies chained to his bed, being fed protein-and-vitamin mush through a stomach tube inserted via a nostril. "He's refused to eat 148 consecutive meals," says Dr. Louis Louk, a naval surgeon from Florida. "In my opinion, he's a spoiled brat, like a small child who stomps his feet when he doesn't get his way." Why is he shackled? "I don't want any of my guys to be assaulted or hurt," he says.

By the end of September 2003, the official number of suicide attempts by inmates was 32, but the rate has declined recently-not because the detainees have stopped trying to hang themselves but because their attempts have been reclassified. Gitmo has apparently spawned numerous cases of a rare condition: "manipulative self-injurious behavior," or S.I.B. That, says chief surgeon Captain Stephen Edmondson, means "the individual's state of mind is such that they did not sincerely want to end their own life." Instead, they supposedly thought they could get better treatment, perhaps even obtain release. In the last six months, there have been 40 such incidents.

Daryl Matthews, professor of forensic psychiatry at the University of Hawaii, was asked by the Pentagon to spend a week at GuantAnamo investigating detainees' mental health and the treatments available. Unlike reporters-who must agree in writing not to speak to prisoners-Professor Matthews spoke with the inmates for many hours.

Manipulative self-injurious behavior "is not a psychiatric classification," he says, and the Pentagon should not be using it. "It is dangerous to try to divide 'serious' attempts at suicide from mere gestures, and a psychiatrist needs to make a proper diagnosis in each and every case." At Gitmo, Dr. Matthews says, the "huge cultural gulf" between camp staff and prisoners makes this difficult, if not impossible.

There is a lot of evidence in the three Briton's testimony that this is a huge problem. Being English, they were much more able to deal with guards and interrogators and yet they were driven to a false confessions. But,in addition to the torture, there is a huge shortage of adequate translators and many different languages being spoken (Apparently, there has even been a contingent of Chinese from the northern border who were handed over to the Chinese government, their fate unknown. One can only imagine.) Many of these guys are living an isolated, Kafkaesque nightmare.

Here's the nut. Prisoners in Guantanamo were taken into custody under extremely questionable circumstances and assumed to be terrorists with no further recourse. This was done (again via VF) because:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says Gitmo plays not one but three vital roles in what the Pentagon calls the gwot, or global war on terror. First, it keeps terrorists "off the streets," until death if necessary. Second, it turns them into sources of intelligence. Finally, with the first special "military commission" tribunals set to begin at Gitmo early in 2004, it lets America bring the perpetrators of terrible crimes to justice-in accordance, says Rumsfeld, "with the traditions of fairness and justice under law, on which this nation was founded, the very principles that the terrorists seek to attack and destroy."

We know that in the first case, many of these people were not terrorists yet they are being subjected to horrifyingly inhumane treatment indefinitely. The three Britons being the ones most able to tell their stories to westerners, confirm this. There have been more than 60 others released back to their home countries after having been through this. We don't know how many more are still inside.

In the second case, there has been little intelligence value in their interogations, not just because they aren't actually terrorists, but because even if they were, they've been out of the loop now for years. In fact, we know that there have been no high value terrorists ever held in Guantanamo. They are being water-boarded at discreet facilities elsewhere in the gulag.

In the third case, these sham military tribunals, the nature of which military lawyers themselves are appalled at, really mean that hundreds of innocent men are going to spend the rest of their lives in prison and for the forseeable future undergo mental torture that can only be described as criminal. At the least, the administration is intent upon dragging its feet for years, if necessary, to keep them from ever seeing the light of a real courtroom.

I don't know what the Kerry admnistration will do about this, but I think it's fair to say that they are going to be under tremendous pressure to appear "tough" on terrorism by the enraged firebreathers on the right who are already gearing up to engage in their own special form of political torture should they lose. Counter pressure is going to be needed.




digby 8/07/2004 04:54:00 PM |

 
Hypocrite, Thy Name Is Shelby

With all the noise surrounding the Marc Rich pardon at the end of Clinton's term, there was another pardon that the Republicans were extremely exercised about. It was surrounding Clinton's pardon, at the behest of civil libertarians, of a man named Samuel L. Morison, who had been convicted of leaking a classified picture of a soviet ship to Janes Weekly in 1984. Certain Republicans in congress were appalled by this pardon, one of the most vocal of which was Richard Shelby.

Pardoning the only government official ever convicted of leaking classified information, the intelligence chairmen [Porter Goss and Richard Shelby] said, would do nothing to stop a torrent of media leaks in Washington. Indeed, Shelby said the pardon only underscores the need for new legislation explicitly criminalizing leaks.

In fact, he used it as an excuse to reintroduce the "Shelby Amendment" which Clinton had vetoed the year before. Richard Shelby, you see, has had an ongoing obsession about leaks and has been trying to pass laws for years that would make leaking all classified information, whether knowingly or unknowingly, a criminal offense with serious jail time.

According to the St Petersburg Times:

Shelby's bill would make it a felony punishable by a fine or up to three years in prison for a current or retired government employee to disclose "properly classified information" to unauthorized people. Under current law, a government employee could not be convicted unless the information related directly to national defense and the leaker knew that disclosure would hurt the interests of the United States.

When he vetoed the bill, Clinton said it would impede the normal activities of government. His advisers argued that current law is sufficient but is not always enforced. The news organizations fear the tougher law would result in subpoenas being issued to journalists who published leaked information.

It should be noted that this bill was not universally supported by Republicans. There were quite a few in the libertarian camp who opposed it.

"This legislation contains a provision that will create--make no mistake about it, with not one day of hearings, without one moment of public debate, without one witness--an official secrets act," Rep. Robert L. Barr Jr. (R-Ga).

[...]

"It has profound First Amendment implications, and goes to the very heart of the ability of the public to remain informed about matters of critical public interest, which often relate to governmental misdeeds," they [Henry Hyde and John Conyers] wrote. "Moreover, since the Executive Branch asserts unilateral authority to define what information should be classified, this extension would grant the administration a blank check to criminalize any leaking they do not like."

Shelby, however, was adamant that the amendment was not designed to prosecute the press, but rather government officials who leak information:

"I can assure this body that in passing [the anti-leak provision], no member of the Select Committee on Intelligence intended that it be used as an excuse for investigating the press," Shelby said in Senate debate.

Clinton vetoed the bill and then pardoned Morison leaving Shelby frothing at the mouth and ready to reintroduce it upon Bush's inauguration. Strangely, however, just days before 9/11 when he was to convene hearings on the matter, Ashcroft evidently asked him to shelve them until the Justice Department could evaluate the legislation. Like a good soldier, he did. Then came 9/11. Nothing more was heard until the summer of 2002, when Newsmax published this article on July 27, 2002, which they then deleted on August 1st. The Memory Hole retrieved it from the ether:

Whether the classified information is National Security Agency encrypted message intercepts of pre-Sept. 11 chatter, war plans for the invasion of Iraq, or the fact that U.S. intelligence was tracking Osama bin Laden's wireless phone calls, leaks have more than Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney in an uproar.

[...]

"I hope we get a test case, soon, that will pit the government's need to prosecute those who leak its classified documents against the guarantees of free speech. I'm betting the government will win," Bruce said to an audience this week at Washington's Institute of World Politics

[...]

"I helped pushed legislation for years to make it easier to prosecute people who willfully and knowingly leak classified information," Shelby recently told CBS News.

"President Clinton vetoed that bill several years ago. It might be the time to try to bring it back. I've talked to the White House before about this. The attorney general, John Ashcroft, is working --- now he's got a task force working with some of us in the Senate to try to come up with some acceptable legislation. Maybe this fall ..."

The Newsmax article above was published on July 27, 2002 and removed on August 1st. There was never any formal explanation. It may be a coincidence, but it's noteworthy that on June 19th, 2002 someone leaked some extremely sensitive classified information about NSA encrypted intercepts to the media. This information was so sensitive that it caused Dick Cheney and George W. Bush to get very angry and call for members of the intelligence committee to cooperate with a Justice Department investigation into the matter. At the time, Democrats controlled the Senate and Bob Graham was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Richard Shelby was the leaker. But, he didn't exactly step forward and take responsibility. By September, he began to find himself at odds with both Porter Goss and Bob Graham over how they were conducting the investigation into the 9/11 attacks. In light of what we now know he did, his behavior at that time looks quite suspicious. One might even think he was obstructing the investigation:

Shelby accused Graham and Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, of overstepping their authority in keeping information provided by the FBI from other lawmakers and the two committees' permanent staff. The information has been given to key staffers hired to conduct the joint committees' inquiry.

"I must insist that we end this policy of withholding crucial information from members and our staff," Shelby said. "We must not conduct investigations out of the full view of our members."

[...]

While Shelby supported Graham's and Goss' call for an FBI probe into leaks which may have come from the joint committee, he has differed with them over the FBI's methods. Shelby has protested the possibility that lawmakers might be subjected to lie detector tests to determine if they were the source of the reports.

Although the FBI has not asked for such tests, Graham has said he thinks lawmakers should voluntarily comply.

From what Graham said, the information being offered by the FBI was not necessarily connected to Shelby, but Shelby certainly did seem nervous that he wasn't privy to what it was. And it was a big turnaround for him to suddenly decry the use of polygraphs:

"I don't know who among us would take a lie detector test," says Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.). "They're not even admissible in court." Shelby's reticence was an about-face from his stance two years ago, when he spearheaded the expansion of the Department of Energy's polygraph program as the only effective way of tracking down moles.

CBS reported:

Shelby said leaders of the inquiry realize they made a mistake in asking the FBI to investigate the leaks.

"Here we are investigating the FBI for huge failures and now we're asking them to investigate us," he said.

He said it also violates the government's separation of powers.

"You know the Senate and, I assume the House, has always investigated their own," he said.

The FBI eventually decided not to prosecute but rather turn it over to the Republican controlled ethics committee. Shelby defends himself by saying:

"My position on this issue is clear and well-known: At no time during my career as a United States Senator and, more particularly, at no time during my service as Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have I ever knowingly compromised classified information.

If that's his reasoning, then he owes his current freedom to none other than the hated Bill Clinton. If the Shelby Amendment had been signed into law, it wouldn't matter if he "knowingly" leaked the information or not, he'd be looking at a possible three year stint in a federal prison. (And, if he were a Democrat, he'd already have been forced to resign.)

He is no longer on the Intelligence Committee (they are rotated after eight years) and now serves as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee where his commitment to principle and accountability are once again being tested as he finds himself implicated in the Tom Delay Westar Scandal.

Richard Shelby is neither ashamed or embarrassed by his blatant hypocrisy and lack of candor. Indeed, when the leak story broke, he got right back on his favorite hobby horse and began railing against unauthorized leaks as if this never happened. Just today, a Boston Globe headline says Senator blasts investigators for naming him as leak:

Shelby's office said, in a statement released yesterday by his spokeswoman, Virginia Davis, "It bears noting that this story represents a grotesque abuse of a public trust on the part of law enforcement.

"For someone in law enforcement to express one-sided, personal views anonymously to the media while the investigation itself is still underway and while the matter is pending before the Senate Ethics Committee is unprofessional and grossly unfair," Shelby's statement said.

Sometimes, you just have to step back and admire the sheer audacity of these guys.




digby 8/07/2004 10:24:00 AM |

Friday, August 06, 2004

 
It Must Be Habit Forming

Some people might consider this to be a serious breach of national security, but since nobody will get to say the words, "in his pants" or "in his socks" 7,432 times an hour it's not likely to be much of a story. Besides, he's an al Qaeda double agent which means that Republicans got all confused thinking he was a Democrat. You can't blame them for that.

U.S. officials providing justification for anti-terrorism alerts revealed details about a Pakistani secret agent, and confirmed his name while he was working under cover in a sting operation, Pakistani sources said on Friday.

A Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, who was arrested in Lahore secretly last month, had been actively cooperating with intelligence agents to help catch al Qaeda operatives when his name appeared in U.S. newspapers.

``After his capture he admitted being an al Qaeda member and agreed to send e-mails to his contacts,'' a Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters. ``He sent encoded e-mails and received encoded replies. He's a great hacker and even the U.S. agents said he was a computer whiz.''

``He was cooperating with interrogators on Sunday and Monday and sent e-mails on both days,'' the source said.

The New York Times published a story on Monday saying U.S. officials had disclosed that a man arrested secretly in Pakistan was the source of the bulk of information leading to the security alerts.

The newspaper named him as Khan, although it did not say how it had learned his name. U.S. officials subsequently confirmed the name to other news organizations on Monday morning. None of the reports mentioned that Khan was working under cover at the time, helping to catch al Qaeda suspects.

Hey, the polls are tanking, it was obvious by Monday morning that Ridge was pumping up the volume for politcal reasons, so you can't blame the administration for blowing the cover of an active al Qaeda double agent. If that's what it takes, that's what it takes. They have an election to win, people.




digby 8/06/2004 09:34:00 PM |

Thursday, August 05, 2004

 
Bizarro World Dick

Has anyone ever been as consistently wrong as Dick Morris? From uggabugga:

In the New York Post, Dick Morris writes about why Kerry didn't get a bounce (or much of one) out of the convention. Here, is the last paragraph in his essay: (emphasis added)

Voters want a president with brains, not just guts, and all they saw was a warrior telling his old tales on Thursday night. And it wasn't enough.

What can you say to this? I honestly believe that Clinton got the best of him by simply doing the opposite of whatever he recomended. It's pretty much foolproof.




digby 8/05/2004 11:43:00 PM |

 
FlipFlopping Away

Sommerby must be happy. The Kerry campaign has adopted his fine riff on the $87 billion bullshit.

For Immediate Release

August 5, 2004
BUSH THREATENED TO VETO THE $87 BILLION BEFORE HE USED IT AS A POLITICAL CUDGEL

Kerry spokesman Phil Singer said: George Bush can't be straight about his own record, let alone anyone else's. The fact is that George Bush twice threatened to veto this bill over the fact that it provided funding to veterans and reservists. As a combat veteran, John Kerry knows that you don't give a President a blank check to continue a failed policy, especially when our security and the lives of our men and women in uniform are at stake.

BUSH THREATENED TO VETO $87 BILLION SUPPLEMENTAL OVER ADDITIONAL FUNDING FOR RESERVISTS AND VETERANS. As part of the $87 billion emergency supplemental appropriations for security and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003, the Senate passed an amendment that provided an additional $1.3 billion for improved medical benefits for reservists and veterans. OMB Director Josh Bolten wrote to the Congressional Appropriations' Committees, stating, "The Administration strongly opposes these provisions, including Senate provisions that would allocate an additional $1.3 billion for VA medical care and the provision that would expand benefits under the TRICARE Program. ...If this provision is not removed, the President's senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill." [Foxnews.com, 10/21/03, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,100777,00.html; BVA legislative bulletin, http://www.bva.org/aut03bulletin/l_update.html; CQ, 10/20/03]


BUSH THREATENED TO VETO $87 BILLION PACKAGE ON ISSUE OF ALLOCATING GRANTS OR LOANS TO IRAQIS. "Key senators reversed course yesterday and voted to make an $18.4 billion reconstruction package for Iraq entirely in the form of grants rather than loans, as House-Senate negotiators worked their way through President Bush's $87 billion request for military and rebuilding operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The 16 to 13 vote represented a significant victory for Bush, who had threatened to veto the bill if Congress insisted on making Iraq repay some of the money." [Wash Post, 10/30/03]

I'd love to see this in an ad. No mention of the lies and spin the Bush campaign has been telling about Kerry on this $87 bil, just this. In fact, I wonder if it might not be an effective campaign tactic overall to simply start calling Bush a flip-flopper as Atrios has been doing. We stole "help is on the way", why not this? Freak 'em out.






digby 8/05/2004 11:20:00 PM |

 
Be Careful What You Ask For

So, according to Media Matters, Limbaugh is back to his line (helped along by one of the witnesses in the Lynndie England court martial) that the torture of prisoners was "sort of like hazing, a fraternity prank. Sort of like that kind of fun." He even goes on to describe how he was pulled over by police recently and "was halfway hoping that one of the cops would be Lynndie England, but no such luck."

It's funny, that's the first time I've ever agreed with Limbaugh on anything. I too have been hoping that Rush would get taken into custody by a Lynndie England (or maybe one of her little friends like Sgt. Graner or Cpl Joyner.) Oh, how I'd love to see them "haze" him just a little bit --- have some "fun" with him.

He's gonna love prison.




digby 8/05/2004 04:56:00 PM |

 
Counterpunch

For all you Dems who might be thinking that Kerry needs to challenge John O'Neill to a duel or something to counter that ad, it really would be the wrong thing for him to do. Especially when he has John McCain out there duelling for him.

Here, you have the Republican Party's most beloved Vietnam veteran saying publicly, with no holds barred and within the same news cycle that this is a dirty trick and that they president should disavaow any knowledge of it. He even said, "it's the same deal they did to me." This is a very effective counter to the ad and the publicity surrounding it, one that carries far more weight with the media than anything Kerry or anyone else could have said.

As Dave Johnson notes over at See The Forest, this toxic smear was entirely predictable. And, as a result, I think that some of those meetings in which Kerry was supposedly trying to convince McCain to be his VP, McCain agreed to cover Kerry's back on smears against his war record. This was very well coordinated and McCain knew exactly what he needed to say. (The Kerry campaign had his comment blastfaxed instantly.) The media have had to include McCain's comments all day, diluting the impact of the ad and putting it into perspective.(It is only a $500,000 buy --- the point was the free media coverage of it.) Even the neanderthal Limbaugh crowd have some respect for McCain and although they will undoubtedly tout the party line, it won't have quite the same resonance. The independents and moderate Republicans love the guy. They'll listen to him. And that is the group of voters Kerry is going after.

McCain is a good Republican, but he isn't a Stepford Wife. This genuinely pisses him off. Getting him to serve as a spokeman for Kerry against these pricks looks like good politics to me.


Media Matters has the full debunking.

Update:

Here's Judy Botox's framing of the issue. I think it's exactly the Kerry campaign wanted it framed. You can't silence these people, but you can spin them for all but the most partisan mouth breathers. Short of taking Limbaugh off the air (and into jail, which I'm totally in favor of) there's nothing we can do about them. But, manipulating the mainstream press is something we must do if we are going to win.

JUDY WOODRUFF, HOST: Thank you for joining us.

Well, anyone who follows the presidential race knows that John Kerry's Vietnam military service is a key pillar of his campaign. Kerry often refers to his combat experiences, and veterans who have served with him had staring roles at the Democratic convention.

Now, a group of veterans who oppose Kerry's White House bid is taking aim at Kerry's war record. They've launched a harsh new TV ad in three battleground states, and it is already drawing fire from members of both parties.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Kerry lied...

WOODRUFF (voice-over): Vet versus vet, as the ghosts of Vietnam invade another wartime election.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: John Kerry lied to get his Bronze Star. I know. I was there. I saw what happened.

WOODRUFF: A new ad from a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth trashing John Kerry's much heralded military service. They say Kerry lied about his heroics, lied about his injuries, and betrayed his comrades by agitating against the war upon his return to the states.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When the chips were down, you could not count on John Kerry.

WOODRUFF: Tough ad, and it's facing some tough criticism. For one thing, none of the 13 vets featured in the spot were actually aboard Kerry's swift boats, though some were on nearby boats. And though it's not a Bush campaign ad, it is largely funded by top Republican contributors.

All but one of the Democrat's surviving crewmates, some of whom starred in a pro-Kerry commercial...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When he pulled me out of the river, he risked his life to save mine.

WOODRUFF: ... have rushed to his defense. And so, has one of the nation's most admired vets, GOP Senator John McCain, who has endorsed the president. McCain denounced the commercial as dishonest and dishonorable, adding, "I think the Bush campaign should specifically denounce the ad."

A Bush-Cheney spokesman responds that the campaign has never and will never question John Kerry's service in Vietnam, insisting there's no connection whatsoever between the reelection effort and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WOODRUFF: Well, as part of his comments criticizing the TV ad, Senator John McCain also mentioned his own experience running against then Governor Bush back in 2000. During that primary season, McCain faced a whisper campaign against his own military service in Vietnam. Referring to the new ad against Kerry, McCain says, "It was the same kind of deal that was pulled on me."

We're going to have a debate in just a moment between two Vietnam veterans, one who has endorsed John Kerry, who was with him on his swift boat, another who was part of that anti-Kerry ad we saw just a moment ago.

Then the two guys engaged in a he said/ she said, but the ad had already been discredited as a partisan smear --- and McCain quite helpfully reminded everyone that Bush did the same thing in 2000, so the campaign's protestations of innocence are pretty unbelivable. I think the strategy worked well. (And it worked a lot better than the Berger counterspin which was non-existent.)

I'll have to watch Tweety and the networks, but I have a feeling that the story will stall out. They fed their slavering beast, but it won't stick with the swing voters. And we partisans should shove it down Bush's throat every chance we get.

Why does he hate veterans and war heroes so much?





digby 8/05/2004 01:51:00 PM |

 
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Crusader Codpiece:

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."




digby 8/05/2004 12:50:00 PM |

 
Journalistic Malfeasance

American Journalism Review has a very interesting analysis of the media's coverage of the Abu Ghraib story.

There were stories out there before the pictures, but nobody seemed very interested. The images are what finally woke up the press and even then they were terribly sluggish and slow off the mark. They offer a number of different reasons: intimidation by the administration, lack of resources and access, misplaced post 9/11 "patriotism", physical danger in Iraq, complaints by conservative readers and others.

One of the things it touches upon but doesn't really expound on is the fact that most of the sources for these stories, until Joseph Darby's name became known, were all Iraqis. And, I believe that because of that it was assumed that they were lying. I wrote yesterday about the Center for Constitutional Rights report by the three British prisoners who were released from Guantanamo. I thought for a bit if I should put in some qualifiers about their story because, after all, we only have their word for it. Normally, I would have written something like "even if only half of what they say is true it's..." I didn't do that because after a few moments reflection I realized that there was already so much information out there confirming that the US had legally justified torture, had developed systematic torture schemes and had actually perpetrated torture (we've all seen the pictures) that the burden of proof was now on the US, not these prisoners. I believed them.

Journalism, however, in its fetish to provide "balance" even when common sense tells you there is no balance, will continue to present these stories with a built in skew to the administration's side of the story. If it's covered at all, you have the word of a trio of muslim ex-prisoners against the pentagon. You have the word of petty criminals against the CIA and the Army. Without visual proof, many reporters and many people will simply not take the word of "the enemy" over Americans. Indeed, even with visual proof they find themselves scrambling to excuse behavior that can only be seen as disgusting and sadistic.

And, one cannot ignore the outrageous excess of the news media after 9/11, wallowing in jingoism and signing on to the US "war" effort, no questions asked. In the AJR article I still don't hear a lot of remorse for having missed the big picture on the torture story. This, despite the fact that the discussion of whether torture should be used was right out and in the open since 9/11. The press was reporting actual incidents of it since December 26, 2002 when Dana Priest and Barton Gellman wrote a story in the Washington Post detailing torture allegations, replete with MP's "softening up" prisoners beating them and throwing them against walls. When asked why they didn't follow up, editor Len Downie says," in part, obviously, because information was not made readily available, and in part because we didn't always see the tip of the iceberg as clearly as we should have."

The press not only misses the tips of icebergs these days, they are actively helping to steer the ship into them, cheering and clapping along the way.

This problem with journalism is not simply a problem for the Democratic party. It is a serious national issue that goes beyond politics. The world is more and more fast paced and complicated and we must be able to depend upon at least some parts of the news media to resist the temptation to jump on the entertainment or propaganda bandwagon and see the forest for the trees. These last few years have been a disaster for journalism. And, aside from the predictable mea culpas after the fact, this article and all the others suggest there is little reason to hope that it will change.




digby 8/05/2004 12:26:00 PM |

 
Disenfranchisement By P.O. Box

Here's a new one. Apparently somebody has gotten the bright idea to get a hold of voter registration rolls and send in change of address forms to the registrar of voters. When you go to your polling place you find out you're not on the roll for that precinct. There's no way to prevent such things and I'm not sure it's even against the law.

I know that some places have provisional ballots, but it would probably be a good idea to check with the registrar if you don't receive your sample ballot in the mail. This person lives in a Democratic leaning area in a swing state, but I wouldn't dream of drawing any conclusions from that.


Update: It appears that this was atually a misunderstanding rather than a dirty trick. There was a time when I would have assumed that when I read it, but no more.





digby 8/05/2004 11:16:00 AM |

 
Rallying 'Round The Flag

Harold Meyerson has written a fine article in the LA Weekly about the Democrats taking back the flag. Meyerson, it should be noted, is not exactly a flag-waving hawk so this view is representative of something of a sea change. Democrats have truly regained their patriotic voice, extolling real American virtues and strength in ways far more useful than the other side in the wake of 9/11. Republicans used that awful day as an excuse to let go of all civilized restraint. Democrats have seen that awful day as a call to civic duty. We finally got tired of being told that we didn't love our country.

Meyerson writes:

Coming out of the convention, they march for Kerry, too - and, for many of them, for the first time. They march for him because in his speech, he successfully took the fight to the enemy - not merely suggesting that his own credentials and perspectives would make him a better commander in chief than Bush, but because, in conjunction with a number of speakers who preceded him to the podium, he reclaimed patriotism from the right.

Back in April of 03, before Sleepless in Seattle blogging and after Bush's midterm "triumph of the will" tour and the invasion of Iraq, I like every other political junkie Democrat was trying to figure out a strategy to win this election. I was convinced then and remain so that the election would be won or lost on the terrorism issue and that patriotism would be the underlying theme. I wasn't the only one by far, and now it has actually come to fruition. In my opinion, it's long overdue.

Mindless jingoism is often mistaken for patriotism in this country and that's wrong. I'm not much of a sentimentalist, but I really am fond of the Bill of Rights and all that flowed from them and I'm sick of right wing morons telling me that I'm not patriotic because I refuse to goosestep to their tune.

I wrote back then:

I believe that Democrats should give no ground on this. We represent real American values and we have every right to use the traditional language and symbols of patriotism to express that. We are the ones who stand for the constitution and the American system of justice, which we hold so dear that even in times of war we do not waver. We are the ones who believe in the sacred American values of Liberty, Equality, Opportunity and Democracy and we are the ones who work to ensure that every American, not just the privileged, share in them. We are the ones who have faith that America is strong enough to survive any challenge without sacrificing those values. The flag and Sousa and apple pie and love of country are not the exclusive property of the Republican Party; they belong to all Americans. We should take them back.

Or, much better, as the inimitable farmer wrote in the comments section:

So, as Digby is getting at, its now up to liberals to restablish their dominance in the political marketplace. To market a high quality product in a highly visible high quality package. A better deal, more for your money, at a better price. Something that you can plant and it will grow for you. A real live perennial tree of liberty that you can plant in your own back yard. Not a nut tree either. Too many nut trees already. Rather, a big sprawling sugar maple, or a big blue atlas cedar. Or an apple tree, the kind you can make your own fresh pies from for years and years. Mom will love it. Mom and her apple pie tree. Its a patriotic American living thing and it arrives in a traditional hoop bound oak stave barrel half all ready to be planted in Washington DC. Ships in 2004, order today.

In stock now. Tell a friend.




digby 8/05/2004 10:49:00 AM |

 
Scumbags For Truth Redux

So, professional John Kerry character assassin John O'Neill and his cronies are out there with a new ad, condemned by John McCain, claiming that Kerry didn't deserve his medals --- and conveniently rolling out O'Neill's new book. (Those Republican marketers sure understand synergy.) John O'Neill has always travelled in high Republican circles as a Kerry specialist. He's been associated with two of the greatest smear artist presidents in Republican history --- Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.

I posted this earlier, but it's due for a repeat. Here's O'Neill with his mentors, the convicted felon Charles Colson and the pardoned Tricky Dick back in the day:

Colson was Nixon’s point man against Kerry, and he found a weapon in another veteran: John O’Neill. He was a spokesman for Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace, which backed Nixon administration policy in Vietnam, and in turn was supported by the White House.

Fresh out of the Navy like Kerry, O’Neill was angry at Kerry for saying U.S. servicemen in Vietnam routinely committed war crimes. The weekend before the Washington protests, Kerry made the accusations on NBC’s Meet the Press, saying, "I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed, in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones." And, Kerry claimed, "I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All this is contrary to the laws of warfare."

John O’Neill hit back at Kerry with administration-orchestrated press appearances of his own, including a news conference that June. O’Neill asked rhetorically, "Shall Mr. Kerry and his little group of one thousand or twelve thousand embittered men be allowed to represent their views as that of all veterans, because they can appear on every news program? I hope not, for the country’s sake."

After the news conference, O’Neill met with Charles Colson at the White House, where the attack on Kerry was seen as a public relations coup. In a conversation with the president, Haldeman gave the credit to Charles Colson, and raved about John O’Neill:

Haldeman: -- crew cut, real sharp looking guy who is more articulate than Kerry. He’s not as eloquent; he isn’t the ham that Kerry is. But he’s more believable. [edit]

Haldeman: This guy now, is gonna, he’s gonna move on Kerry.

The White House encouraged O’Neill to challenge Kerry to a debate. Kerry agreed and before the event, President Nixon called O’Neill into the Oval Office for a pep talk. "It’s a great service to the country," declared the president.

Nixon: Give it to him, give it to him. And you can do it, because you have a pleasant manner, too, because you’ve got -- and I think it’s a great service to the country. [edit]

Nixon: You fellows have been out there. You’ve got to know, seeing the barbarians that we’re up against, you’ve got to know what we’re doing in that horrible swamp that North Vietnam is. You’ve got to know from all our faults of what we have in this country that, that what we’re doing is right. You’ve got to know too, people are critics. Critics of the war, critics of [unint], run America down. [edit] You’ve gotta know that you’re on the winning s-that, that you’re on the right side.

Two weeks later, the veterans squared off on the popular Dick Cavett show:

O’Neill: Mr. Kerry is the type of person who lives and survives only on the war weariness and fears of the American people. This is the same little man who on nationwide television in April spoke of, quote, crimes committed on a day to day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.

Kerry: We believe as veterans who took part in this war we have nothing to gain by coming back here and talking about those things that have happened except to try and point the way to America, to try and say, here is where we went wrong, and we’ve got to change.

Later that year, even as the war continued, Kerry left the increasingly radical Vietnam Veterans Against the War. But the Nixon White House kept after John Kerry. It’s said that when Kerry ran for Congress in 1972, Nixon stayed up late on election night until he knew for sure that Kerry had been defeated.

You can't have better character references than Haldeman, Colson and Nixon. That association speaks for itself. John O'Neill has done nothing noteworthy in his life except oppose John Kerry. Indeed, he barely exists as a human being being except for his opposition to John Kerry.

And the fact that John Kerry has been keeping Republicans up nights for more than 30 years also speaks for itself. That election Nixon was so worried about was the first and only election John Kerry lost.




digby 8/05/2004 09:40:00 AM |

Wednesday, August 04, 2004

 
So Much For Justice

Here's Crusader Codpiece assuring the Iraqi people that "democracy" and American goodness and rightness would ensure justice in the Abu Ghraib matter:

It's also important for the people of Iraq to know that in a democracy, everything is not perfect, that mistakes are made. But in a democracy, as well, those mistakes will be investigated and people will be brought to justice. We're an open society. We're a society that is willing to investigate, fully investigate in this case, what took place in that prison.

That stands in stark contrast to life under Saddam Hussein. His trained torturers were never brought to justice under his regime. There were no investigations about mistreatment of people. There will be investigations. People will be brought to justice.

Here's reality, from an interesting piece by Philip Carter on Slate:

The Army's official Inspector General report on Abu Ghraib—in stark contrast to the Taguba report, which found systemic problems with detainee treatment in Iraq, or the reporting of Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, which traced the blame chain from Iraq all the way to Washington—blames a few individuals and leaders for the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Never mind that 94 separate incidents of abuse were uncovered by the report—with most happening at the time and place of capture, not at some central prison locations where a few bad apples happened to work. The Army was "unable to identify system failures that resulted in incidents of abuse."


It defies both reason and common sense to cite 94 separate incidents of detainee mistreatment, yet determine there were no systemic issues (like training, insufficient troop strength, and unclear legal rules) to fault.

[...]

Instead of promoting responsibility and the rule of law, the Army appears to care more for the Washingtonian principles of damage control and spin.

Meanwhile our vaunted regard for justice, fairness and the rule of law hasn't kept them from undermining the ruling of the Supreme Court in the Guantanamo cases either:

... the administration announced its intention to deny Guantanamo Bay detainees full access to counsel to prepare their habeas corpus petitions and signaled that it would resume its relentless legal tactics to fight the detainees in the courts on a host of procedural issues. The administration also started to move forward with two sets of legal proceedings—Combatant Status Review Tribunals and military commissions—to adjudicate the status of Gitmo detainees. These hearings purport to benefit the detainees, but may, in fact, end up hurting more than helping them.

[...]

The Justice Department's lawyers make no attempt to hide this legal strategy. In footnote 14 of their filing before the federal district court in Washington, D.C., in Al-Odah v. United States, the administration's lawyers explicitly reserve the right to litigate niggling procedural issues, such as whether this is the proper defendant in a habeas corpus action, and the proper location for such suits. There is some irony here, because those are the two grounds the Supreme Court used to kick back the lawsuit by Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen held as an enemy combatant in South Carolina. Even though the Justice Department lost in the other two terrorism cases before the Supreme Court, it now hopes to use the same procedural tactics it used to defeat Padilla's claim to avoid petitions for habeas corpus from detainees at Guantanamo. The strategy appears the same: deny every right, and fight every claim, for as long as possible, so that interrogations and intelligence collection at Gitmo can continue unimpeded by legal process.

(May I just say here that the legal beagle Talking Dog had this one pegged from the get-go. He said immediately that it would be Padilla that would rule, with the military and the justice department using every niggling procedural rule they could to keep any of these guys from ever seeing the inside of a courtroom.)

Carter finds an interesting (and apt) analogy to the administration's legal strategy with the reactionaries' response to the segregation cases. Drag your feet kicking and screaming in every court in the land for as long as you can.

But, he also points out that the bigger issue --- if there is a bigger issue than craven immorality --- is that it is vitally important the the US demonstrate at least some of what Junior was spouting in that completely insincere interview on Arab TV. That is our alleged committment to the rule of law. There are people in the world, specifically non-radical muslims who are following this story a lot closer than Americans are. This could be a chance to tip them in our direction by showing them something in our system that truly is superior to the autocratic rule under which they currently live.

Instead, we are, once again, playing into bin Laden's hands. The prisoners at Gitmo are useless for intelligence at this point. It would be so easy for us to simply do the right thing and reap the benefit of showing our system to have some real corrective aspects. But, we won't under Bush. Like the segregationists, they would rather eat nails than admit they lost.




digby 8/04/2004 07:05:00 PM |

 
"New" Information?

Does anyone notice anything unusual about this?:

Sources: al Qaeda linked to bank threat
April 20, 2002 Posted: 6:15 AM EDT (1015 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The FBI announced Friday that the government has received a new, unsubstantiated terrorist threat against U.S. financial institutions -- a threat, sources said, that was to be carried out by al Qaeda operatives.

'Unspecified terrorists are considering physical attacks against U.S. financial institutions in the Northeast, particularly banks, as part of their campaign against U.S. financial interests,' the FBI said.
Sources said the information indicated a possible mode of attack was suicide bombing.

The information that led to the alert, the sources said, came from a variety of intelligence sources, including al Qaeda detainees captured as part of the ongoing war against terrorism. Law enforcement learned the information in the last couple of days, the sources said. "

According to this very handy timeline done by Julius, this information didn't merit a full fledged terror alert at the time. It appears that they like to keep a threat or two in reserve in case they need to change the subject really fast.

Article via Buzzflash




digby 8/04/2004 06:32:00 PM |

 
"...Where The Sun Don't What?"

digby 8/04/2004 05:47:00 PM |

 
The Horrors of Gitmo

This (pdf) report from the Center for Constitutional Rights regarding the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo will make your hair stand on end. The Abu Ghraib torture photos are terrible and shocking, but this is so systematic, so methodical so Kafkaesque that it makes you wonder if this country can redeem itself. It is only a matter of scale that differentiates this camp from the gulags and the concentration camps of the twentieth century.

It is a long detailed account by three of the British prisoners who were held for more than two years and have since been released and are back home, free and presumably not considered dangerous since they were released by the authorities within 24 hours of landing. The story of their treatment, most particularly the cold and calculating, relentless mental torture combined with harsh conditions and regular bouts of physical abuse is difficult to read.

During the whole time that we were in Guantanamo, we were at a high level of fear. When we first got there the level was sky-high. At the beginning we were terrified that we might be killed at any minute. The guards would say to us "we could kill you at any time." They would say "the world doesn't know you're here, nobody knows you're here, all they know is that you're missing and we could kill you and no one would know". After time passed, that level of fear came down somewhat but never vanished. It was always there. We were in a situation where there was no one we could complain to and not only could they do anything to any of us but we could see them doing it to other detainees. All the time we thought that we would never get out. Most especially if we were in isolation there would be a constant fear of what was happening and what was going to happen. If it hadn't been for the Arabs knowing by the position of the sun when to pray, we wouldn't have known even that. We didn't know the time. We know the dates we do know because we counted for ourselves and some soldiers would tell us enough to let us slightly keep track, otherwise there was no way and there was never meant to be any way.

These men had already been through that horrible shipping container massacre in Afghanistan. Then they were held at Bagram and Kandahar, where their treatment was unspeakably harsh and cruel. (This, of course, is where certain "contractors" are alleged to have beaten prisoners to death.) By the time they got to Gitmo, they had already been brutalized.

Now, if one were to have some sort of sympathy for the soldiers in Afghanistan who were gathering up "Taliban" and "al Qaeda" with virtually no knowledge of the country, the terrain or the various tribal and political feuds that went on there, you could say that they,at least,expected that Guantanamo would sort out the real bad guys from the innocent guys. That never happened. Apparently, it was assumed that if they put you on a plane for Gitmo you were a terrorist, period.

That's why, as an American, it is also difficult to face the fact that nobody down there had the first clue about what they were doing in terms of interrogations and intelligence. It sounds as if every third rate intel guy from the FBI to MI5 to the CIA to Navy intelligence got a crack at these guys, basically asking them stupid useless questions over and over again, all the while torturing them until they falsely implicated themselves. Then the cycle would begin again. Millions of dollars and man hours have been wasted on useless intelligence gathering turning the entire project into a self perpetuating cycle of sadism and insane ass covering. It is a disgrace.

I am not surprised to learn that much of the truly malignant psychological torture was brought to the camp by artillery officer in charge of sadism, General Geoffrey D. Ripper who is, as we speak, streamlining the torture operations in Iraq so as not to be so sloppy and obvious. He did a fine job of that in Guantanamo. The ERF goon squad was a particularly nice touch.

"We had the impression that at the beginning things were not carefully planned but a point came at which you could notice things changing. That appeared to be after General Miller around the end of 2002. That is when short-shackling started, loud music playing in interrogation, shaving beards and hair, putting people in cells naked, taking away people's "comfort" items, the introduction of levels, moving some people every two hours depriving them of sleep, the use of A/C air. Isolation was always there. "Intel" blocks came in with General Miller. Before when people were put into isolation they would seem to stay for not more than a month. After he came, people would be kept there for months and months and months. We didn't hear anybody talking about being sexually humiliated or subjected to sexual provocation before General Miller came. After that we did. Although sexual provocation, molestation did not happen to us, we are sure that it happened to others. It did not come about at first that people came back and told about it. They didn't. What happened was that one detainee came back from interrogation crying and confided in another what had happened. That detainee in turn thought that it was so shocking he told others and then other detainees revealed that it had happened to them but they had been too ashamed to admit to it. It therefore came to the knowledge of everyone in the camp that this was happening to some people. It was clear to us that this was happening to the people who'd been brought up most strictly as Muslims. It seemed to happen most to people in Camps 2 and 3, the "intel" people, ie the people of most interest to the interrogators. In addition, military police also told us about some of the things that were going on. They would tell us just rather like news or something to talk about. This was something that was happening in the camp. It seemed to us that a lot of the MPs couldn't themselves believe it was happening.

One of the things that becomes clear in this is that they carefully used each prisoner's weak points to get them to confess. Sexual humiliation was not considered useful with these British guys, they used isolation and mind games on them. Others, it seemed, responded to pain. The torture was very individualized. (At Abu Ghraib, after Miller passed on the techniques, they let things get out of hand and Lynndie and the gang started to have "fun" with the sexual sadism. But, there is little doubt that the whole system came from Miller.)

These three guys were very lucky that they came from a country that was closely allied with the US and had some favors to call in. They'd been forced to confess to being in a video with bin Laden even though two of them were in British police custody at the time the video was filmed and the other was working in an electronics store in his home town of Tipton. (They were fingered as being the ones in the video by one of the many mentally ill prisoners in the camp who have been driven around the bend by the conditions there.) British Intelligence found the proof that they were nowhere near bin Laden at the time which explains why these allegedly vicious terrorists who had been held in appalling conditions for years were allowed to just get off the plane from Gitmo and walk right back into Britain as free citizens. The poor damned Afghans, Pakistanis,Africans and Chinese(?) who've been sold to the Americans by various members of the northern Alliance and others for CIA money aren't so lucky.

I urge you to read the whole thing even though it's quite long. It details stories, some of which we've heard from other sources, of prisoners being forcibly injected with unknown substances, denial of urgent medical treatment, brutal beatings, sexual humiliation and psychological torture that is beyond outrageous.

These men were never charged with a crime. Indeed, they never even fought against the United States. Even in the worst cases of prison abuses in America before the reform movement of the 1930's, prisoners had at least had a chance to appear before a hanging judge before they were locked up in "the hole."

I am sick that this happened in my country's name. The men who signed the orders allowing this, Don Rumsfeld and George W. Bush, are war criminals.


Update:

Moral Malpractice

Via TalkLeft and Body and Soul, I am glad to see that the New England Journal of Medicine has weighed in the rather stunning spectacle of doctors, medics and nurses participating in or overlooking torture. I wrote about this a couple of times in the past. It was right there in the papers.

At Gitmo psychiatrists willingly gave the interrogators access to the medical files which they used in very special ways to torture the prisoners with their own worst fears.



digby 8/04/2004 03:56:00 PM |

 
So, What's The Problem?

Karzai Courts Former Taliban Officials

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is seeking the support of former Taliban officials in an effort to stabilize the democratic process. The U.S.-backed Karzai has been fighting insurgents, some of them Taliban, since he took office.

Hey, maybe he can get bin Laden to help him with his campaign. I hear he's quite an excellent planner.






digby 8/04/2004 10:35:00 AM |

 
Logical Conclusion

I know that rules of logic have been suspended for the duration, but this continues to drive me so nuts that I can't help but mention it from time to time.

Josh Marshall posts a quote from Tommy Franks:

With respect to WMD, ... I've had a couple reporters ask me the same question, 'Do you think that since we didn't find this WMD, do you think it's a mistake?' And I look and hopefully give a wry smile and say "Do you think it would be better to have left this regime to build it?" I think we are far better served that the regime of Saddam Hussein no longer stands in Iraq.

Here's the thing. Logically then, we have the right to invade and occupy any country in the world, since the criteria are simply that someone might someday build weapons of mass destruction and use them against us. In other words, this is like some comic book recipe for taking over the world. We could justify taking over Canada tomorrow under this doctrine, or New Zealand or Brazil. Who knows who might, maybe, could be thinking about someday, perhaps, down the road building something we don't like right this very minute? Japan? France? (of course) South Korea? Not to mention the ones we supposedly know are doing it, Iran and North Korea. And, if we add up the list of those which have populations that now hate our guts and fear that we are going around the bend, you have virtualy the entire world on the list.

I don't mind it so much when typical Joe spouts this line because he may not have thought it through and it has a certain emotional resonance. Even Republicans saying it is at least understandable because they are covering their asses. But, members of the officer corp of the US Military should never say such things. Ever. It's Strangelovian in the extreme. Maybe he's just covering for his pal, Junior, but there are many better (if still lousy) reasons to justify the invasion than that Saddam might have built weapons in the future so we had to take him out on March 16, 2003 and not a day later.




digby 8/04/2004 09:05:00 AM |

Tuesday, August 03, 2004

 
Patriot Police

You know, I had always thought that the secret service was one of the elite police forces --- together, professional, the best of the best. And then I read
this story over on Kos today about the Sikh who was harrassed during the convention, apparently because the secret service is too fucking stupid to know the difference between Sikhs and Muslims.

That is on top of this story from last week by Tim Grieve in Salon that made me feel like hurling when I read it:

Inside the Fleet Center, the working press sits at tables that flank the convention stage. Except during major speeches, the reporters -- like the delegates themselves -- seldom pay much attention to what's happening on the stage. They talk among themselves, burn through their cell phone batteries and write pieces on their laptops.

That's what we were doing Thursday afternoon when a Secret Service agent had another idea. "Excuse me sir," his voice boomed from behind us. "It's the presentation of the colors, and I think it's important enough for you to stand up."

The agent had noticed -- we had not -- that the American flag was being presented in the still half-empty convention hall. We acknowledged his right to his opinion, then we returned to our work. At that point, the agent ordered us to stand -- ostensibly so he could confirm that our press credentials were valid. We complied with the order, then turned on our tape recorder and asked if he was actually ordering us to stand for the flag.

"No sir, I'm not. I'm looking at your deal," he said. "I'm ordering you because I want to see your credentials, and you're going to stand here until the flag is over with."

What's your name? "I'm Chad Reagan, and I'm checking your credentials, out of the New York field office. I'm checking your credentials."

Because we're working during the presentation of the flag?

"No sir, because I'm wondering who you are."

We told him that we worked for Salon.

"Great," he said, "I'm checking your credentials."

Nearby officials from the Congressional Periodical Press Gallery instantly confirmed the validity of our credentials. We asked the agent if he always orders people to stand for the flag, and whether Secret Service policy either authorized or required him to do so.

"I served for six months in the United States Marine Corps overseas, sir, so I like it when people stand. The reason I came over here was to credential you. You can think what you want, but the reason I came over here was to credential you. And I'll stick to that. I'm allowed to credential anyone I want. That is Secret Service policy."

But you told us to stand for the flag, right?

"No sir, I didn't tell you. I said that I think it's important enough to stand, and then I said, 'Let me see your credentials.' There's a difference."

Totally unprofessional, totally out of line and totally unamerican. When exactly did the Secret Service become the guardians of patriotism?

This is one of those things that unnerves me about all of our new police forces and homeland security services and domestic intelligence agencies. More cops flexing their muscle and less safety overall. Police states aren't planned, they evolve. We are in the midst of one of those evolutions.




digby 8/03/2004 05:59:00 PM |

 
Character Flaws

Here's a very interesting interview with journalist Philip Gourevitch of The New Yorker. He has many fine insights into the way the press covers politics and also the way the parties manipulate the press. But, he said one thing in particular that I think is important:

[Another] big mistake I think the press makes: They call anything that isn't a strict policy issue "character," when often it's personality. There's a big difference. Character has to do with things like honesty and integrity and honor. I don't think anybody can, for instance, begin to look at both [candidates'] records and say Bush's character, or let's say his service during the Vietnam war, or his sobriety, his business record, his way of sort of being really quite indifferent about all sorts of things, that these are character issues where he comes off looking great. He has a winning personality, apparently, with a lot of people. Kerry, on the other had, his character may be conflicted in places but his problem is a personality problem.

Character is a very strong word. It suggests a kind of fundamental quality of the soul, of the sensibility, it's almost like the stuff somebody's made of. If you say this guy has a character problem, it doesn't mean he's hard to like. I've interviewed war criminals and mass murders, and they're often exceedingly charming ... So charm and character or personality and character are separate things, and I think the press probably conflates them in a way that is not useful or is misleading...

Actually, "character" is a patented GOP spin point that is used against Democrats and for Republicans. (As such, it is entirely unsurprising that the press has adopted it wholesale without ever giving it a second thought.) It is a central tenet of the GOP attack machine to disparage Democrats' tolerance, openness to new ideas and our more complex worldview as showing a lack of character. We are shallow, cowardly, insubstantial, craven, lacking in integrity and morals. That's what the flip-flop charge is all about. "John Kerry has no principles" --- a character flaw.

As Gourevitch says, the idea of character goes to a "fundamental quality of the soul, the stuff's somebody's made of." People take these things very seriously in evaluating others. Those words matter. And, unfortunately, we Democrats have often adopted the same exact language to goad our own politicians into action, which helps to validate their charge against us.

It also leads us astray. Very often what is merely a bad strategic call is seen as cowardice or a failed tactic is regarded as cravenness when, in fact, the politicians who supported them may have been ineffective, not for lack of character but for lack of good ideas or flawed execution. Brave people can fail. And more importantly, if you don't deal with the actual problem you can't properly correct it.

It is always fair to criticize our politicians when they make mistakes and when they fail. We aren't a cult. But the least we can do is not blindly adopt Republican jargon and categorize every political failure as a lack of character when, in fact, the failure may stem from something else entirely.

I will say again for the thousandth time that whenever Democrats find themselves saying something about a fellow Democrat that they can imagine Rush or Hannity saying on their radio shows, they should stop and think again. They are playing on Republican turf and it does us absolutely no good.




digby 8/03/2004 02:10:00 PM |

 
Pathetic

I got ten nine of ten on this Campaign Desk trivia quiz. (I didn't know the real name of Washingtonienne.)

I obviously need to get a life.




digby 8/03/2004 01:27:00 PM |

 
Goon Show

I couldn't help but notice the ages of the "goons" who tried to drown out Kerry with airhorns in Milwaukee yesterday:

About 30 Bush supporters chanted loudly during the speeches by Kerry and his wife, sometimes setting off air horns. The pro-Bush group was on the Kilbourn Ave. sidewalk overlooking Pere Marquette Park, almost a full block from the stage, but it could be heard throughout the park, including on stage.

Tom Lange, 18, of Waukesha said he was setting off an air horn during Kerry's remarks because "we want them to hear us and not hear what he has to say."

Lange said it's "probably not nice, but it's my beliefs."

Michael Gaspar, 18, of Waukesha used a bullhorn frequently before and during the rally to welcome Kerry supporters "to Bush-Cheney country" and to spur on the Bush supporters.

Asked why he was leading the Bush volunteers in loud chants while Kerry was speaking, he said, "I'm doing this to show my support for President George W. Bush."

"I have the right to speak also," he said. "I'm just attempting to get my voice heard."

It immediately reminded me of an article recently posted by David Niewert called "Hate Among the Young.":

One of the most troubling aspects of the recent resurgence of white-supremacist ideology and its attendant hate crimes is the reality that young people -- especially young males -- are now the primary target of recruitment by hate groups.

Even if they never join such groups (which is most often the case), young men are targeted by white-supremacist ideologues specifically because they know they are likely to act out on the belief system spread by the rhetoric they engender, which is often picked up and used by non-members who are nonetheless sympathetic. Hate groups carefully tailor their messages to appeal to young men's sensibilities, running the gamut from inflaming urban and suburban racial tensions in high schools to promoting so-called "racist rock."

I'm not saying that these kids in Milwaukee are white supremecists. But, they are young politically aware right wingers who are using thuggish tactics. The bridge between those two points is shorter than anywhere else on the political spectrum.

This actually validates one of Niewert's observations about how the tactics of the hate groups and militia's are being adopted and absorbed into mainstream Republican culture. It stands to reason that young punks like these would be at the forefront.

Goon is exactly the right word for them and I would expect that we are only seeing the beginning. There is now an entire generation raised with Rush Limbaugh shouting in their ears. Eliminationist rhetoric is mother's milk to these kids.




digby 8/03/2004 12:42:00 PM |

 
The Politics Of Image and Derision

White House and Bush campaign officials have long said that the details matter far less than the pictures and sounds of Mr. Bush talking in any way about his campaign against terrorism, which polls show is still his strongest card against Mr. Kerry.

This is the kind of thing that should be ground out by every single Democrat on radio, television and print. The White House believes that the details matter far less than the pictures and sounds of Junior "talking in any way" about terrorism. Pointing this out --- and the loyalty oaths demanded of the crowds, the faux backdrops, the refusal to hold press conferences and explain their policies, could go a long way toward educating the public about what phonies they are.

We haven't done this and as a result, Karl Rove's dictum about politics being "TV with the sound turned off" remains absolutely true. Unless half the country has ingested so much lead that their IQ's have been cut in half, there is no other explanation as to why people see this dancing monkey as a great leader. It's the images.

The other side of this formula, of course, is their rapier attacks against the Democrats. The Bush campaign has said that its convention will use humor and derision to criticize John Kerry. Josh Marshall points out that this propensity for ridicule seems to be built into the right's DNA.

Republicans are very good at this. And it can be a tool that is deceptively difficult to respond to or combat. Effective mockery is 'sticky', hard to shake off, hard to parry. And it appeals to people's appetite for fun and humor.

Indeed, it's not just contemporary Republicans who have a knack for this. There seems to be something intrinsic to the reactionary or right-leaning mentality that gravitates toward this method of political combat. Think of the Tory pamphleteers and essayists of the 18th century in Great Britain or others of a more recent vintage in the US.

I think this is because the right is essentially authoritarian
and group derision is one of the most powerful weapons in the bully's arsenal. Frat boys, Heathers, street gangs, insider cliques of all kinds use it to terrorize the loners and coerce fealty from those who don't want to be a target. Indeed, forcing others to join in the cruelty is the actual point. I've loathed and resisted this dynamic my whole life. It may be the single most important reason I am a Democrat. I just can't stand those assholes.

But, it is a very powerful social force that asserts itself in various ways from childhood into old age. Right now, we seem to be in one of those periodic cultural eras in which these kinds of adolescent, anti-intellectual social types come to the fore. (There is no greater example than the president himself --- "Fuck Saddam, we're takin' 'im out.") It's hard to fight in this environment and while I am all for ridiculing them right back, I'm afraid that most liberals are never going to have quite the flair for it that they do. We have way more genuinely funny guys and gals deflating the hypocricies of our times, but the bullies have that nasty coercive streak that really gives this stuff its punch. "Laugh, you pussies, unless you want a piece of this."

I spent a lot of time interacting with activist Republicans in years gone by and you'd be surprised at how lame we leftys generally are at this game. The bullies have spent their entire lives eating reasoned arguments and pleas for civility for breakfast. Still, I think it's a good idea for us to keep at it. They really hate being made fun of. Even if most of us can't strike that perfect, snarly bitchy tone in our mockery we can still bother them with it.

Unfortunately, however, in the long run the Democratic party really can't indulge very much in these high school games because the fate of the world depends upon somebody rising above this immaturity. For all of our fractiousness and various feints left, right and center, we are the grown up party. Gawdhelpus.


Update: Sommerby has more on this topic in today's column. And for the record, I agree with him about Garofolo on Hannity. I love her, but she was unprepared. The "biggest liberal in the senate" line is entirely predictable and she should have had the facts at hand, a ready diversionary feint or some kind of a snarky takedown. This isn't really a complaint just about her. The Democrats often don't seem as armed for combat as the Republicans even when they know very well what the RNC talking points are going to be. Garofolo is a very sharp cookie but she needs some help. Gawd knows the GOP helps its talking heads with staff and oppo researchers and clip services up to here. If Janeane and others are going to be voices for the Democrats in the media they need some back-up.




digby 8/03/2004 11:09:00 AM |

 
Downhome With The Family

Tristero says that the American delegation to the Olympics, headed by Bush Sr, Barbara and the twins, will be staying on the family yacht -- "all 300 feet of it."

Yep, that "Heart and Soul" of America, good ole boy Texas shit-kicker preznit of ours ain't no Frenchman.




digby 8/03/2004 09:41:00 AM |

 
Whoops

Angry Bear catches me being much too generous to the Bush administraton. (I'm as shocked as you are.)

In my post below I said that Bush hadn't technically lied when he claimed that "some must think that you can negotiate with them, you can talk sense with them, you can hope that they change." I said he could claim that he was referring to Phillippine president Arroyo or the Egyptians or even Reagan.

It turns out that he was responding to a specific question about Kerry:

Q Mr. President, thank you. All of this as you know is coming in the context of the presidential election campaign. Your opponent has made a couple of charges that I would like your response to. One, essentially saying that three years after the 9/11 attacks, to go about the business of rehauling the intelligence community is too long. Second, there's been a suggestion from the Kerry camp today that this administration is actually responsible for fueling the recruitment of al Qaeda through some of its policies, particularly -- they didn't say this directly -- but the war in Iraq. Your response?

So, the president was referring directly to Kerry, who has never said anything about negotiating or appeasing terrorists, quite the opposite.

The president of the United States is a lying sack of shit. I knew that. My bad.




digby 8/03/2004 12:32:00 AM |

 
All Hail The King

Once again, my friends, thank your deity of choice for Paul Krugman.

He's the one mainstream columnist who gets the zeitgeist of the blogpsphere. We owe him a great deal. He inhabits a very important piece of journalistic real estate and he's singing our song.



digby 8/03/2004 12:02:00 AM |

Monday, August 02, 2004

 
Following Orders

This is a depressing story. I grew up in a Navy family and this sounds about right. Takes me back to 1972 it does:

"The problem is, a lot of the chiefs don't make any secret of the fact that Bush is their man," said Wendy Layton, program director at the USO center just outside the Mayport Naval Station here. "A lot of these young people feel pressured to register a certain way and vote a certain way."

The officers may not say so while on registration duty, she added, but enlistees say they usually don't have to.

"I knew they wanted me to register Republican, and when I came out of the NEX, I just sort of avoided the [registration] table," said Navy Seaman Charles Gillis, 22, who was invited by officers to register a few weeks ago but declined. He is undecided and still not registered.

[...]

In the Navy's part of this town, it is fair to say that no non-Republican would feel welcome. Walk into American Legion Post 316 any night and it is crowded with retired Navy enlistees and their wives who for the most part revere Bush. They not only revere him, they take umbrage at any perceived suggestion of disloyalty, a standard met in the eyes of the group one recent night by the mere presence of a reporter.

"Out! Take your notebook and get out of here!" said a battery of voices when I entered, though they relented when others at the bar spoke up for the rights of the free press - a value held as dearly, apparently, as fealty.

Their general rap on Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, a decorated Navy veteran of Vietnam, was that Kerry didn't deserve his Silver Star, or his Bronze Star, or his three Purple Hearts; that these decorations were somehow obtained by political calculation. "He was just planning to run for president, right from the beginning, that's what I think," said Margaret Leonie Dent, the wife of a Navy retiree. "They say his wounds were paper cuts. Just look at the man. He looks French for God's sake."

Tell it to Mark Racicot and Tom DeLay, you pathetic ignoramus.

I'm getting awfully tired of the Borg.




digby 8/02/2004 11:45:00 PM |

 
Glad You Brought That Up

Here's what the paper of record has on its front page right now:

Polls Show Some Gains for Kerry, but Race Is Tight
By ADAM NAGOURNEY 11:58 PM ET

Polls showed the smallest postconvention bounce for a challenger since George McGovern was nominated in 1972.

Frank Luntz himself couldn't have spun it better.






digby 8/02/2004 09:10:00 PM |

 
September Surprise?

Robert Kuttner outlines Kerry's challenges going into the election and I agree with him when he says:

The country has grave doubts about Bush's leadership. But everything I know about politics tells me that Election Night 2004 will be another nail-biter.

He discusses certain well-trod issues like the damning electoral math, the increasingly obstructive nature of the press and this month's money disadvantage. But, he brings up something I, at least, hadn't heard before and it's something that Bush can easily arrange:

Well placed sources say that Bush's client government in Baghdad will put Saddam Hussein on trial, conveniently, in September. (It took years to prepare the Milosevic trial, but the efficient Iraqis will display Saddam in time for the US election.)

Saddam's outrages will be paraded on live American TV, reinforcing the idea that the Iraq war, no matter what the misrepresentations and blunders, was justified. Of course, nobody is debating whether Saddam was a vicious tyrant. The issue is whether America should have rushed to war on false information, without allies, and without a competent plan for the aftermath. Still, a September show trial will be a Bush propaganda coup.

It could be enough of a pageant to get the whores all excited and wearing their little flag pins again. It puts Iraq into play in a positive way --- here's our victory for freedom and democracy. His little puppet Allawi will be happy to comply, I have no doubt.

The best we could hope for in this scenario would be for Saddam's prostate to act up. Dear gawd.








digby 8/02/2004 09:05:00 PM |

 
Outrage!

Much of the information that led the authorities to raise the terror alert at several large financial institutions in the New York City and Washington areas was three or four years old, intelligence and law enforcement officials said on Monday. They reported that they had not yet found concrete evidence that a terror plot or preparatory surveillance operations were still under way.

[...]

"You could say that the bulk of this information is old, but we know that Al Qaeda collects, collects, collects until they're comfortable,'' said one senior government official. "Only then do they carry out an operation. And there are signs that some of this may have been updated or may be more recent.''

Frances Fragos Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser, said on Monday in an interview on PBS that surveillance reports, apparently collected by Qaeda operatives had been "gathered in 2000 and 2001.'' But she added that information may have been updated as recently as January.

The comments of government officials on Monday seemed softer in tone than the warning issued the day before. On Sunday, officials were circumspect in discussing when the surveillance of the financial institutions had occurred, and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge cited the quantity of intelligence from "multiple reporting streams'' that he said was "alarming in both the amount and specificity of the information.''

That tears it. The drama of that announcement yesterday was just short of "Run for your lives!" Ridge gave a Bush campaign speech in the middle of it. And, the information was gathered before 9/11, fergawdsake. Al Qaeda doesn't have to attack, Bush is getting the same results all by himself.

I can't believe that I still had some faith in the integrity of this government. Jesus H. Christ, you really cannot believe anything these people say. Nada.


Update: Atrios has Judy Botox reading the RNC talking points about Howard Dean's totally off the wall suggestion that Ridge's announcement was, shall we say, politically convenient. Maybe the hair-do just takes so long that she doesn't have time to do anything but regurgitate Republican talking points. They make it so convenient, faxing it right to her in easy to read format and all. (And they're so wickedly delicious.)

On the other hand, she's been doing exactly the same thing for at least six years. But no matter how much she tries to be as "edgy" (read: wingnutty) as FOXNews they still beat her in the ratings. She's a trooper, though. She won't give up until she's Neil Cavuto's bitch.




digby 8/02/2004 08:29:00 PM |

 
Straw Man For President

Salon's War Room notes that Junior and Uncle Dick are going around saying that the Democrats want to negotiate with al-Qaeda.

"See, evidently some must think that you can negotiate with them, you can talk sense with them, you can hope that they change," President Bush said during his Rose Garden appearance Monday morning. Vice President Cheney, speaking at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, warned that al Qaida "is not a foe we can reason with, or negotiate with, or appease. This is . . . an enemy that we must vanquish."

[...]

Where did the Bush-Cheney machine get the idea that Kerry would negotiate with or appease terrorists? CNN's Judy Woodruff put that question to White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett Monday. He responded by changing the subject to the "explaining" Kerry must do about his votes on the Iraq war.

In the old days presidents were forced to face the press once in a while and the press would ask them questions like this and demand specific answers until they got something resembling an explanation. Today, we have "press availabilities" with functionaries who answer questions that haven't been asked and the press just nods and moves on.

The president and vice president are not outright lying, of course. They said "some must think." They didn't name John Kerry. Indeed, they could very well be talking about their coalition of the willing friend and colleague Phillippines President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo who negotiated with "terrorists" in Iraq against the United States's wishes just a week or so ago. Or they could be referring to our allies the Jordanian and Egyptian governments who've both been accused of negotiating with Iraqi insurgents in recent cases. And as the Salon article pointed out, they could even be talking about Ronald Reagan who also negotiated with terrorists and even sold them weapons (not that he recalled doing it.)

So they can say that it is not fair to condemn them for accusing John Kerry when there are so many other possible ways to interpret their words. They can't help it if Americans automatically assume that they are talking about that Democrat pussy. That's his problem.

To tell you the truth, I don't know quite what to make of this. They have always operated as the "you can believe me or you can believe your lyin' eyes" administration, but I think they are relying a little bit too much here on hate radio and outmoded stereotypes to carry swing voters. Nobody who saw Kerry's speech the other night could possibly believe that he said anything about negotiating with terrorists. I'm not sure anyone who hasn't been totally brainwashed by Limbaugh would believe this. This is right wing red meat politics and it's a bit strange to see them shoring up their base this blatantly from the Rose Garden, especially as they try to make their run to the middle.

I'm really beginning to wonder if they haven't arranged to manipulate the voting machines in a couple of the battleground states. It's hard to see how they win with only their committed firebreathers and that really seems to be their strategy.




digby 8/02/2004 06:52:00 PM |