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Sunday, August 22, 2004

Powers of discernment

As a public service, this blog is offering a counterpoint to its “Swift Boat Vets and Bay City Rollers” post (immediately below).  The following is a reply on behalf of Swift Boat Believers with Perfectly Good Judgment About Such Things.

We appreciate the opportunity to provide a countervailing point of view on this wild-eyed far-left blog.  For it appears that John Kerry is, at the very least, a serial exaggerator.  All credible sources now agree that he could not possibly have been in Cambodia in December 1968, and that he was in fact there in January and February of 1969 instead.  Clearly, he is unfit to lead.

In other news, there has been a terrific breakthrough for the Bush team.  Documentary evidence now proves that George Bush actually served in the United States Air Force, just as he claimed in 1978 and again in 1999.

From the Houston Chronicle, July 14, 1999:

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.”

Many thanks to a blogger named Digby for providing this final nail in Kerry’s coffin.  Even the liberal media will now be forced to agree that Kerry’s credibility is a serious problem, and that these men, speaking on Kerry’s behalf, should be ashamed of themselves.

We now return you to the lunatic rantings of some Stalinist college professor with a weird French name.

Posted by Michael on 08/22 at 10:02 AM
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Of Swift Boat Vets and Bay City Rollers

Richard Yeselson of Washington, D.C., writes:

As much attention as the Swift Boat liars controversy is now receiving, I don’t think the media or even Kerry yet understands or acknowledges how pernicious and relatively unprecedented it is. The term “McCarthyism” has been so overused in American politics that we have lost our moorings to its original intent, as it were. But this is, I believe, one of those rare occasions where the term fits, i.e. baseless charges impugning an individual’s patriotism, but, more specifically, depicting the individual as a member of a decadent intellectual elite that deceitfully sapped the nation’s martial spirit in its struggle against the Communist enemy (we can substitute other enemies going forward, e.g. Islamic terrorists, but, historically, of course, beginning in the Weimar era, the charge is linked to communism). 

In the modern era of American politics, i.e. since, say, the New Deal (I’m not talking about the 19th century, when candidates were always accusing each other of fathering children with baboons, or whatever) I don’t think-- and I’m happy to stand corrected if wrong-- that a major party candidate for president has been assaulted by a per se defamatory attack on his character and personal history.  We have seen such attacks at a lower level of the political food chain, e.g. Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas, and we have seen inflammatory, yet vague accusations, e.g. conservatives labeling FDR a “class traitor” or even wacky charges against Ike by the John Birch Society, and we have seen grotesque distortions of positions that candidates have taken, or public policies that they have been associated with, e.g. the daisy picking atomic bomb commercial of LBJ’s vs. Goldwater, the Willie Horton and pledge of allegiance controversies used by Bush I vs. Dukakis.  Even the attacks on Clinton, while hysterical, don’t fit the model for a whole host of reasons-- they do not address the betrayal of the nation charge, except tangentially going back to Clinton’s sixties activism, and they do not in wholesale fashion, invent Clinton’s history-- he really is a legendary horndog.

But I’m pretty certain that swift boat is unique:  a systematic, coordinated effort both to create an Orwellian (or Marcusean, if you prefer) counter-narrative-- not to a presidential candidate’s political record, but to his copiously documented biography-- combined with, essentially, an accusation of treason and betrayal of the nation’s military by a head-up-his-ass intellectual (one charge these guys have leveled against Kerry is that he wasted precious poundage in his gear bag with his typewriter, with which he could weirdly be found writing stuff, as the rest of the soldiers hung out together). Whether Bush’s surrogates actually ok’d it is not the point (I think Kerry makes a mistake by overly focusing on Bush/Rove’s explicit involvement)-- I very much doubt they did.  But, until the president forcefully denounces what is being done on his behalf, the effect is all the same, and greatly appreciated by the president and his supporters.

This really is, to use another lazily overused term, the Big Lie.  Kerry should literally ask Bush whether “he has no shame, at long last has he no shame”?  For once, the evocation is precise and just.

Readers of this here little blog will know that I agree with most of this, of course, and that’s why Richard’s letter is today’s discussion item.  I think the question of Bush/Rove involvement is a crucial one, and that Kerry made no mistake in taking the case directly to the top, but otherwise, this seems entirely right to me-- the Swift Boat ads really are unprecedented.  People keep citing the Willie Horton ad in 1988, but the Willie Horton ad was a model of probity compared to this stuff:  after all, Massachusetts really did have a weekend furlough program (though it was not unique in this respect, and though Dukakis didn’t initiate it), and Willie Horton really did take one of those weekends to assault Clifford Barnes and rape his fianc?©.  Yep, it was Atwaterian race-baiting, no question, but it did not rest entirely on a string of lies.  By contrast, the first Swift Boat ad is a fraud-- and I do mean that in the legal sense-- from start to finish.  It isn’t even plausibly protected by the First Amendment, quite apart from its violations of modern campaign ethics.

But calling the Swift Boat Vets “McCarthyite” won’t work, for the very reasons Yeselson mentions above:  the term has become completely de-referentialized thanks to its long service in the PC wars, during which conservatives denounced everything from campus sexual-assault codes to AIDS Awareness ribbons (real examples, folks!  not made up!) as indices of a “new McCarthyism,” more virulent and powerful than the “old” version.  (Surely you remember the thousands of moderate and conservative faculty members who were fired for not wearing those AIDS ribbons.) So I’d like to shift the focus for a moment, to a secondary matter.

I don’t think we should spend too much energy being outraged by right-wing attack dogs.  Right-wing attack dogs are . . . well, right-wing attack dogs.  They do what they do.  The only thing to remember about them is that you shouldn’t take them home, not even if they follow you and beg for food.  Remember the story of what happened to the “liberal” journalist in the PC wars:  one day in 1991 he came across a right-wing attack dog who was nosing around the dumpsters in the back of the American Enterprise Institute, barking about all this crazy deconstruction and radical feminism that leftist professors were foisting on unsuspecting American undergraduates.  “Gee, I hate deconstruction and radical feminism too,” thought the liberal journalist.  “This right-wing attack dog doesn’t seem so bad.” So he brought the dog home, gave him a big, ten-thousand-word spread in the Atlantic Monthly, a regular spot on a half-hour cable “opinion” show, and a plate of leftover steak scraps.  “I’ll call him ‘Fluffy,’” said the liberal journalist.  But imagine the journalist’s surprise a few days later, when his dog Fluffy began barking that liberal journalists were “traitorous scum”!  “But I fed you and gave you a home,” said the liberal journalist, mortally wounded.  “Yeah,” replied Fluffy, “but what did you expect?  Come on-- I’m a right-wing attack dog.” Granted, John O’Neill and Roy Hoffmann are rabid, whereas Fluffy was merely nasty.  But they’re all dangerous in the end, and they do what they do.

Instead, let’s think for a moment about all the people, from the Tennessee law professor to the Townhall regulars to the Slate columnist to the bear-with-the-ecosystem, who’ve looked at the Swift Boat Vet ad and said, “you know, this is very powerful stuff here-- it could really spell trouble for Kerry!” And these folks haven’t been too guarded about their endorsements, either; it’s not like they’ve protected themselves with qualifying clauses like, “I think this is over the line, but” or “I can’t speak to the merits of the case myself, but.” No, they’ve looked at a fraudulent, defamatory campaign ad and they’ve bought the whole thing.  Even worse, they’ve promoted it as legitimate political speech.  Sometimes, as in the case of the law professor, they’ve defended themselves with arguments so stupid that their mere utterance sucks all the oxygen out of the room:  Kerry brought this on himself by harping on his Vietnam service-- and that means that now anyone can lie about him! Or, following the GOP talking points more closely, they’ve argued that the 527s are to blame, even though there’s only one libelous ad at issue here:  we’ll stop lying about Kerry if MoveOn will stop saying true things about Bush!

But whatever their rationale, these people have demonstrated a quality of judgment more often associated with the Looney Tunes characters to whom Mel Blanc gave life in lines like, “which way did he go, George, which way did he go.” To get a sense of just how bad their judgment is, you have to imagine a Kaus or a Reynolds poring over the words of a group of people whose current accounts of Kerry’s wartime conduct are contradicted not only by an extensive documentary record but also by their own previous accounts, then turning to the camera and saying, “duuuhhheyy, Thurlow now says he didn’t deserve his medal either because Kerry probably wrote up the papers awarding it to him, uhh, duuuhhheyy, that sounds logical.”

Or, if that pop-culture reference is too dated (Warner Brothers shut down its seven-minute animation shop in 1964, I believe), think instead of some of the feather-haired people you knew in 1975 who bought up all the Bay City Rollers merchandise they could get their hands on, on the grounds that these guys were going to be even bigger than the Beatles.  I know, it seems too innocuous an analogy-- after all, the Bay City Rollers never (to my knowledge) put together any fraudulent and libelous campaign ads.  But the important thing here is to point out that the Swifties’ enablers have really, really lousy judgment.  Ludicrously, embarrassingly bad.  The kind of judgment that simply gets you laughed out of any discussion in which there are people who know what they’re talking about.  And it really wouldn’t hurt to laugh them out:  if we get any more outraged by this nonsense-- or by Marc Racicot barking about how Kerry’s eloquent response was actually “wild-eyed” (though I have to say that “Marc Racicot” sounds like an effete French name to me, and though I don’t want to sound Kausian about this, I’ve heard that some people who know reliable sources in certain circles can credibly vouch for the possibility that Racicot may have been stinking drunk when he said it)-- we’ll forget that the best way to deal with ridiculously foolish people is to reveal them as the ridiculously foolish people they are.

So I’m suggesting we think of this as a way of keeping track of commentators who have such ludicrously bad judgment that they need never be taken seriously again, and who can be laughed out of the room pretty much whenever they open their mouths.  You know, sort of the way I think of Joe Lieberman on moral issues, only with regard to bloggers and journalists.  Let’s just lump these good people in with the kind of speechwriters who speak of the “reasonable assumption” that God commanded dolphins to guide Elian Gonzalez to Florida.

OK, now I’m going to brace myself for a raft of emails from the Bay City Roller Fans for Justice, telling me that “Money Honey” was actually a more technically challenging and innovative song than “I Feel Fine” and that “Saturday Night” marked a musical maturity that leaves Rubber Soul and Revolver in the dust.  To those Bay City Roller fans I say, bring it on.

Posted by Michael on 08/22 at 07:33 AM
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Thursday, August 19, 2004

Kerry throws Bush and the Vets to the ice

Well, not exactly.  In fact, he didn’t even mention hockey once-- the sport’s too furrin, I guess.  He actually opened with “more than thirty years ago, I learned an important lesson-- when you’re under attack, the best thing to do is turn your boat into the attacker. That’s what I intend to do today.” This suggests he’s been reading Kenneth Baer’s timely advice ("as Kerry discovered more than three decades ago, sometimes the only way to survive an attack is to steer straight into enemy fire") rather than mine.  But I suppose that’s all right.  What’s important is the thought.  And it’s a good thought.

More than thirty years ago, I learned an important lesson-- when you’re under attack, the best thing to do is turn your boat into the attacker. That’s what I intend to do today.

Over the last week or so, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has been attacking me. Of course, this group isn’t interested in the truth-- and they’re not telling the truth. They didn’t even exist until I won the nomination for president.

But here’s what you really need to know about them.  They’re funded by hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Republican contributor out of Texas. They’re a front for the Bush campaign. And the fact that the President won’t denounce what they’re up to tells you everything you need to know-- he wants them to do his dirty work.

I like that part.  Now that’s why Kerry denounced moveon’s reply ad, folks-- so that he could take the case directly to Mr. Bush.

Thirty years ago, official Navy reports documented my service in Vietnam and awarded me the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. Thirty years ago, this was the plain truth. It still is. And I still carry the shrapnel in my leg from a wound in Vietnam.

As firefighters you risk your lives everyday. You know what it’s like to see the truth in the moment. You’re proud of what you’ve done-- and so am I.

And that’s why I hold Life and Death in my hands like a savage gift . . . no, wait, he didn’t say that.  Sorry.  I got carried away.

Of course, the President keeps telling people he would never question my service to our country. Instead, he watches as a Republican-funded attack group does just that. Well, if he wants to have a debate about our service in Vietnam, here is my answer: “Bring it on.”

Oh, not “bring it on” again.  But I like the touch of “our service in Vietnam.” That would be a really short debate.  Sort of like a “debate” about how many Senators’ lives “we” saved by using the Heimlich maneuver.

I’m not going to let anyone question my commitment to defending America-- then, now, or ever.  And I’m not going to let anyone attack the sacrifice and courage of the men who saw battle with me.

That was what we wanted to hear, big John.  And remember, George Bush has to wear high heels just to look you directly in the eye.

And let me make this commitment today:  their lies about my record will not stop me from fighting for jobs, health care, and our security? the issues that really matter to the American people.

The situation in Iraq is a mess. That is the President’s responsibility and he owes the American people an answer.

Good, now we’ve moved away from answering hypothetical questions about that ludicrous Senate vote two years ago, and we’re saying direct things about Iraq with simple syntax.  Kerry’s staff really are reading the lefty blogs, aren’t they?  Good for them.

America is on track to lose more jobs than it’s gained under George Bush and he supports a tax code that rewards companies for shipping jobs overseas.  He owes the American people an answer.

Health care costs have exploded out of control. The President has done nothing and he owes the American people an answer.

The middle class is paying a bigger share of America’s tax burden. The President needs to answer to the American people why that is fair.

Unfortunately, those in the White House are coming from a different place than you and I.  They see things a little differently than you and I.  They tell us that today, when it comes to the issues that matter most, we’re getting the job done.

Great.  Now say it again, fifty or sixty times, in Ohio, Missouri, Wisconsin, Colorado, New Mexico, and-- just to keep up the forechecking-- Virginia and Tennessee.

Thanks to Atrios for the link and the heads-up.

ADDENDUM:  Those of you interested more in matters of Kerry’s statecraft than in the hurlyburly of rhetorical posturing are kindly invited to read this timely item by David Sirota and Jonathan Baskin.  On Kerry’s takedown of BCCI, which involved the big guy throwing an entire financial institution to the ice.

Posted by Michael on 08/19 at 07:30 AM
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Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Holding Life and Death in his hands like a savage gift

Busy with other matters today, but I thought some of my regular readers might enjoy this inspired piece of prose.  Go ahead and take a deep breath of whatever it is Ken Layne’s been inspired by.

Teaser:

Look at you people with this Vietnam boat nonsense. Every day, you’re pounding home the fact that Kerry fought in Vietnam. You jackasses started this stuff so early-- with the “Oh he protested the war” and the Jane Fonda photoshops-- that the Kerry people turned the whole Democratic convention into a celebration of the Vietnam War. Nobody even remembers being against Vietnam anymore. The next Vietnam movie will be a buddy comedy starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, and all they’re going to do is kill Charlie and win medals and dance with beautiful girls. It’ll make $300 million on the opening weekend. They’re going to tear down that bummer memorial in Washington and put up a 1,000-foot statue of a smiling American soldier proudly standing on a stack of golden skulls. You morons have made Vietnam the Democrats’ favorite memory and greatest victory. Then you scream hooray when a gang of addled old Nixon bagmen show up in a teevee commercial to bitch about Kerry fighting in Vietnam, and once again the normal people with lives only remember, again, that Kerry fought in Vietnam and Bush didn’t.

Vietnam as the Democrats’ favorite memory and greatest victory . . . no, I don’t think that can be improved upon.  Next time I come in on a 2-on-1, I’m passing the puck over to Ken Layne.

Posted by Michael on 08/18 at 09:38 AM
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Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Upping the anti

Over at Political Animal, Kevin Drum lets Jonah Goldberg off way too easy:

BUSH HATERS....Jonah Goldberg, in the middle of a post about Clinton haters and the people who hate them, says this:

“The Bush-haters ó who are just as extreme and nasty as the Clinton-haters were, and in many ways more so....”

Tell you what, Jonah. As soon as the most popular liberal editorial page in the country accuses George Bush of murdering one of his aides, maybe I’ll give your argument a hearing. And as soon as one of the most influential liberal interest groups in the country starts distributing hundreds of thousands of videos suggesting that George Bush ran a coke ring out of Austin, then I’ll really perk up. And when Senate Democrats spend $70 million investigating the Valerie Plame affair ó compared to the current $0 ó and end up bringing impeachment charges against George Bush, then you’ll have me. You’ll really have me.

But until then, sell it somewhere else. Michael Moore calling Bush a liar and a moron just isn’t in the same league as what your side did to Bill Clinton, and nobody who was sentient during the 90s can find the contrary suggestion anything but laughable.

Well, Kevin, I’m with you in spirit here, but actually, the cherubic Child of Lucianne has to meet a few more conditions before he really has you.  First, he has to find members of a major liberal organization at their annual convention, selling and wearing buttons and bumper stickers asking where Lee Harvey Oswald is now that we need him, just the way the Christian Coalition did in the mid-1990s.  Then he has to find a prominent Democratic senator-- say, Barbara Boxer-- saying that George Bush will “need a bodyguard” if he ever visits California, just the way Jesse Helms threatened Clinton in North Carolina.

And then he has to go around the country, from Arkansas to Washington, D.C. cleaning up after his mom.  That should take him a while.

UPDATE:  So much for my memories of 1994.  The major Oswald-yearning that year wasn’t at the Christian Coalition convention, but at the Virginia state Republican party convention (see comments).  Assuming you draw the distinction, which Pete Hamill suggested we don’t really need to do:  “The Christian Coalition commandeers the Republican state convention in Virginia, and among the slogans on the wall is one that says ‘Where is Lee Harvey Oswald when America really needs him?’” “Endgame,” Esquire, December 1994.  See also Sid Blumenthal’s account of the convention in the July 18, 1994 New Yorker:

Most booths did a brisk business in buttons, which expressed just a few simple themes: “There Are Americans And There Are Liberals”; “AIDS Abortion Euthanasia-- Don’t Liberals Just Kill Ya”; “Sodom and Gomorrah Had Gays in the Military”; “Clinton Doesn’t Inhale-- He Sucks”; “Real Men Are Not Called Hillary”; “If the Clintons Divorce, Who Gets the House?”;
“President Clinton: ‘You Can Play with the Dog, but Leave My Pussy Alone!’” and “Where Is Lee Harvey Oswald When America Really Needs Him?” One booth displayed a T-shirt reading “Justice for Clinton.” It featured a picture of an aborted fetus.

Remember, this wasn’t just a bunch of lunatics calling in to G. Gordon Liddy’s talk show.  It was the Republican Party of Virginia.

Over to you, Jonah.

Posted by Michael on 08/17 at 04:31 AM
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Monday, August 16, 2004

Vote for me and I will fight to ensure that you can never vote for me again

Alert reader Antonio Ceraso of State College, Pennsylvania brings the following better-than-satire story to my attention (and isn’t it great that this Internet can bring together people who only see each other a couple times a month?):

Keyes Wants to End Election of Senators

Sat Aug 14, 7:14 PM ET
By MIKE ROBINSON, Associated Press Writer

CHICAGO - Alan Keyes said he would like to end the system under which the people elect U.S. senators and return to pre-1913 practice in which senators were chosen by state legislatures.

The Republican Senate candidate in Illinois, asked about past comments on the election process, said Friday the constitutional amendment that provided for popular election of senators upset the balance between the people and the states.

“The balance is utterly destroyed when the senators are directly elected because the state government as such no longer plays any role in the deliberations at the federal level,” Keyes said at a taping of WBBM Newsradio’s “At Issue” program.

He said it was one of the reasons “there has been a steady deleterious erosion of the sovereign role of the states.”

Keyes’ Democratic rival, state Sen. Barack Obama of Chicago, issued a statement saying he supports popular election of U.S. senators.

“I certainly trust the people of Illinois to choose who they want to represent them in the U.S. Senate,” he said. “That is the very basis of our democracy.”

Keyes said he did not consider repealing the 17th Amendment a high priority.

“But if I ever see an opportunity in politics to promote it, I will,” he said.

So let’s take a moment out from venting at the collective insanities of the Swift Boat Vets and the idea of anyone’s wartime service being challenged on behalf of the deserter-in-chief and his sneering, sniveling, cowardly vice president.  Instead, let’s think with a smile and a nice cold beer of Barack Obama and his campaign managers, who surely must have the easiest jobs in the country in this election season.

Remember, Keyes also supports the repeal of Amendments I, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, XIV, XVI, and especially XIX, and now that I think of it, I’m not sure where he stands on the whole Third Amendment quartering-of-soldiers-in-houses-without-the-consent-of-the-owner controversy.  If I were on the Obama team, I’d begin drafting statements in support of those amendments now, to save time in October when I’d want to begin planning the victory party.

This one’s going to be fun.  Thanks, Illinois GOP!  We needed that.

Posted by Michael on 08/16 at 05:16 PM
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