Eric Alterman has a tip for a story for those of you who are covering the convention with actual credentials:
Possible Actual News Alert: Is the Republican Party in violation of the US military’s rules on the participation in party politics by active duty military?
It sure looks that way. The RNC convention week is boasting that it has 144 active duty military delegates at the convention or three percent of the total. That information can be found here.
Meanwhile, according to DOD Directive 1344.10, which can be found here this is a violation of the code of military conduct. It explicitly says:
A member on active duty shall not
…
Participate in partisan political management, campaigns, or conventions (unless attending a convention as a spectator when not in uniform).
But the Republican Party itself is claiming that the active duty personnel are not spectators but delegates. What’s going on here? Why are the Republicans encouraging our soldiers to violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice and its stated rules of political engagement? And why for goodness sakes, aren’t these rules being enforced? Hey MSNBC.com, can we put a reporter or two on this story please?
I doubt that MSNBC has time to follow up what with all the primping and the ass kissing they are having to do. But, perhaps one of those writers for liberal magazines who are wandering around aimlessly looking for internet access could just do the story and then file it from their hotel room. It sounds like a good one to me.
It looks as if the Kerry campaign and I are on the same wavelength regarding Bush’s statement that he “miscalculated” the conditions ensuring from the “catastrophic success” of the invasion of Iraq. I wrote a couple of days ago:
I think Junior just made a tactical error. Kerry and every other Democrat appearing in the media should wrap that statement around his neck. This is a trap if they want to spring it…he’s now simultaneously admitted that he screwed up big time on the single most important issue a president ever faces, while also saying that he has no intention of trying to figure out what went wrong. That is the worst of all possible worlds. It’s best not to have to admit screwing up something as important as war planning but if you do you simply have to make the case that learned from the experience and you won’t do it again. He didn’t do that. Iraq is a massive failure and the president has just opened the door to his own culpability on that.
From various press information I’ve received today, it looks like we can expect to hear the word “miscalulate” about 763,000 times in the next few weeks.
As I wrote in the earlier piece, one of the nice side effects of this particular claim is that somebody told Bush that he needed to admit to making a mistake — I think because they knew that his bumbling inability to think of anything he could have done better was going to be used against him. If Kerry succeeds in wrapping Bush’s admission that he screwed up the iraq war around his neck, then somebody in Junior’s inner circle is going to pay. I’m betting it was Karen.
Shhh. Don’t tell anybody, but apparently they weren’t serving kool-aid at Andrew Sullivan’s vacation spot this last month and he’s come back to work detoxed and rehabbed.
If you read all of his posts for today, you’ll see that he has had an epiphany on a range of issues surrounding George W. Bush and the ascendent fundamentalist wing in the GOP and he is saying some things that moderate Republicans might just listen to. Perhaps it just that Bush finally went too far with the FMA, but I think it’s more than that. I think he’s speaking for a number of Republicans who have awakened from their trauma after 9/11 and are seeing that their leader is a fraud. I don’t know if any of them will vote for Kerry, but I think there’s a chance that at least some of them will find that they “forgot” to vote this fall. To non Limbaugh cultists of all political stripes who have been paying attention, Bush’s leadership is alarmingly bad. So bad that even one who was previously dazzled by Bush’s warrior image have realized that he’s incompetent. Sullivan says:
Waging war requires both determination and effectiveness. Bush has a lot more of the former than the latter. And, if we want to avoid more Abu Ghraibs, that counts.
Well, that’s if you think we should avoid “catastrophic success” such as that which has unfolded in Iraq. It appears that Sullivan agrees. Regardless of his past political errors, he’s a wonderfully talented writer and as far as I’m concerned if he’s belatedly realized that the GOP is in the hands of incompetents and radical fundamentalist extremists, it’s better late than never. He’s one of the right’s sharpest tacks and they will have lost a valuable commodity if he finally rejects them. His posts today on everything from Rumsfeld to the Swift Boat Liars aren’t going to get him any love at the RNC, I can tell you that.
Aug 23-26th Poll by the Annenberg Center for Public Policy shows a plurality of Americans – 46% – believe President Bush was behind the ads attacking John Kerry’s military record while only 37% believe the Bush campaign’s denials.
Day by day tracking of the percentage of voters who were influenced by the accusations and came to doubt that Kerry deserved his medals showed that from August 10-15 the percentage of doubters hovered in the low 20’s, then rose between August 16-22 (reaching almost 30% on August 18th) and then returned back down to the low 20’s between August 20-25.
It appears that the smear itself didn’t take. But, of course, you have to take into account the time and effort spent refuting it was time and effort that could have been better spent elsewhere, so it’s not a simple case of no harm no foul.
The most important thing is that Kerry survived a near death experience and the old saying “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is more true than ever. This is what we will have to look forward to for the next four years after he’s elected. We might as well get used to it.
I guess I’m not really understanding one particular beef some have with the protests in New York. Both Yglesias and Klein are disturbed by the inchoate nature of the march yesterday, what with the different agendas being present and nobody looking quite alike and focused. And, they are right, of course. The different groups protesting have many different issues that motivate them. But, it seems to me that in this case particularly, there is one thing they they all agree upon and it is the reason they are protesting when and where they are protesting. They all agree that George W Bush should not be reelected, which I think is a pretty damned good common cause.
I realize that protests are to some degree an act of self-expression but it’s a big mistake to discount that as an important part of the political process. Human beings are not all motivated by wonkish intellectual policy discussion. For a lot of people politics is an emotional and social committment. Walking down the street with 100,000 other people who believe in the same goal (if not the reasons behind it) can provide a powerful and exciting feeling of shared purpose.
We liberals need more of that sort of thing. The right has its anger and its sense of victimization to motivate it on that emotional level. Protests like that in NYC signify for liberals a sense of shared belief and goals with people with whom you might never cross paths. For many of us, that’s the motivating passion behind our politics. Inclusion, equality, free speech etc. We need to demonstrate that once in a while in order to sustain our committment to the process. Otherwise it’s all dry, cerebral talk talk talk — which I may love and those of you who read this blog may love — but simply doesn’t animate the human social part of politics for many people.
Are they meaningful as policy statements or effective organizing tools? Probably not. But as a motivating tool for grassroots politics I think they are invaluable. For a lot of people around this country yesterday, seeing the streets lined with people protesting the presidency of George W. Bush on the eve of his convention at the site of 9/11 was an inspiring moment of solidarity. That’s a good thing.
Update: For a most thorough and enjoyable first person report on the protest check out Roy Edroso at Alicublog:
The participants provided lively footage. A ring of Philadelphians clad in black and pink led some anti-Bush cheers. One of them wore a shirt that read, “When I say Gender, you say Fuck.” That remains my favorite shirt of the day (though the plaintive “I Still Hate George W. Bush” is up there, too). Even a few of the park bums got in on the act; “Bush gotta go, Bush gotta go,” repeated a scrawny man shuffling around with a framed Saturday Evening Post cover under his arm.
[…]
The crowd was getting bunched up round 25th Street and some of the organizers sprang into action to regulate the flow — young, mostly female, red bandanas tied on their arms, they linked hands across the avenue and held the pace. Very neatly done. If you want to know why moderates march with fringe groups, it’s because the fringe groups know their shit.
Now, that’s interesting. For even more fun, read his rundown of the right wing blogospheric apoplexy at the protests. These brave, macho wingnuts sound suspiciously like my grandmother — “those ruffian protesters are so disheveled and unkempt!” The freepers do not disappoint, either. Read the whole thing.
Has anyone ever trashed his reputation as a journalist more thoroughly than Robert Novak? It turns out that his son is the publicist for Regnery, publisher of Unfit For Command, but that was information Novak didn’t find relevant enough to mention when he scored an exclusive interview with the ghostly Admiral Schachte — you know, the guy who nobody remembers being the fourth guy in a three man crew on the day Kerry got wounded?
Novak’s son is the publicist for the publisher of a controversial book and Novak writes a fawning and unskeptical interview with one of the prime sources and Novak relies on his sterling reputation as a journalist to cover himself. Except, of course, his reputation as a journalist is in tatters.
But, Al Hunt seemed to think that there was even more to the story. He pretty much called Novak an outright liar on CNN over the week-end and it’s pretty clear he is right. The two guys besides Kerry on that skimmer, Zaladonis and Runyan, have told everyone the exact same story. They don’t remember Schachte ever being on that boat and they remember being under fire. It is only to Bob Novak that they are supposed to have said that there was no fire.
NOVAK: I interviewed Admiral Schachte this week. He is a former deputy judge advocate general of the Navy, a very distinguished man. He said he was definitely in the boat that night. John Kerry says he wasn’t in the boat. I believe Admiral Schachte. I checked with a couple of other officers who were there at that time. They say it is inconceivable that on his maiden mission, Lieutenant Kerry would have been sent off in that boat alone, that this — using this Boston whaler or skimmer was Lieutenant Schachte’s own idea. He was in all the missions on the Boston whaler, and I — and he is — and the idea that Kerry said nobody who was ever on a boat on him was ever critical of him is wrong because I believe Schachte was there.
SHIELDS: Yet the enlisted man who was on the boat, and everybody agrees was on the boat, says he wasn’t on the boat.
Al Hunt?
HUNT: Well, Mark, let’s leave John Kerry and let’s leave Schachte aside for a minute. I talked to those two enlisted men today. I talked to Pat Runyon and Bill Zaladonis. They both were on that boat December 2, 1968. They say there is no way that the admiral could have been on that boat. And they describe in vivid detail that night. They say it was a small, 14-foot boat with an outboard motor, that, in fact, with their weapons and other material, that four people would have been a really, really tight fit. They took orders from John Kerry. They remember — Zaladonis remembers Kerry saying, Shoot over here, rather than over here, when they were in a firefight. And Runyon remembers him telling him to, Start the boat. Let’s get the hell out of here. Zaladonis remembers when Kerry was hit, and they just say it’s absolutely impossible to — you wouldn’t have had two officers on a little boat like that on that kind of a mission.
Moreover, Schachte has changed his story. A year ago, he talked to Michael Kranish of “The Boston Globe,” and he said that there was a firefight. He didn’t say he was in the boat. He said Kerry was hit — quote, “hit” — though it wasn’t very serious. Now he says there wasn’t a firefight and it was a self-inflicted wound. Moreover, he went and he said that he — when he saw Kerry 20 years later in Washington, he was with a top aide with — of Fritz (UNINTELLIGIBLE) Ashley Thripp (ph). Ashley Thripp I talked to today and said, No way. I wasn’t there.
So I think that — I think the admiral is either mistaken or he’s lying.
[…]
NOVAK: Let me stick to this — this Schachte thing for just — just a moment. In the first place, I also interviewed those two guys, Runyon and Zaladoris (SIC), and they both said they both doubted there was any enemy fire. I don’t know if you didn’t ask them that question. But they told me they didn’t believe there was any enemy fire. That — that’s just a factual thing.
No. 2, I really do believe that — I’ve talked to other officers, and they say that this Boston whaler, this skimmer, usually had — almost always had two officers in it. Only has room for three, right. They usually had two officers and an enlisted man in the back. So there was a — I think these two men are probably good men. I think they’re the ones that are confused.
[…]
HUNT: Bob invoked my name and said I — you know, didn’t know if I asked them — I did ask them the question. They both very clearly say there was a firefight. They describe it in detail. They describe firing at people that night. And Zaladonis — by the way, you have his name wrong. His name is Zaladonis, Bob. You know, if you called him, you ought to get his name right — describes when Kerry was hit. They both say that, Mark, and I challenge anyone to call them, and they’ll tell him.
NOVAK: They both — they both told me they didn’t believe there was any fire coming from the enemy on that boat.
HUNT: And they also told…
NOVAK: Now, maybe they’ve changed their story!
Novak, like so many Republicans in this era, has completely lost his honor both as a journalist and a citizen. This man is not a journalist, he is a GOP propagandist and should not be afforded the same kind of shield offered to real journalists in protecting their sources. The profession should shun this guy. By allowing him to evoke that shield in the Plame case, they are likely to lose it all together.
Atrios points out that the GOP theme is “Bush’s Leadership” and wonders if a 500k ad buy of “My Pet Goat” would garner three solid weeks of cable blather.
I think it would gather some and I honestly thing it would be a smart thing to do. The Republicans would go nuts — and that is what would fuel the controversy — but it’s him in that video and there’s no denying it. It is a devastating answer to his claims of being a brave man of action in a crisis and would deflate his convention bubble right quick.
Whatever they do, I’m hoping that the Kerry campaign is prepared to metaphorically stalk across the ring and slam Bush right in the nose on the day after the convention and change that storyline immediately.
The long awaited first installment of the Washington Monthly article by Marshall, Rozen and Glastris is online. It is looking more and more as if we have another rogue element that’s been working out of DOD and I have to assume, some part of the White House. The many interconnecting webs seem to lead to and through the forged Niger documents, Chalabi, “Clean Break” and Valerie Plame. It’s got the earmarks of a John LeCarre novel and if it weren’t so incredibly dangerous it would be amusing.
The article is entitled “Iran Contra II” and that is apt for more reasons than the recurring roles of Mr Ghorbanifar and Mr Ledeen. Once again we see a marked “impatience” with the unfortunately cumbersome working of democratic government. That this may have happened for the second time in twenty years featuring many of the same people is a pretty clear indication that letting bygones be bygones will not do when dealing with this sort of traitorous, undemocratic behavior. The stakes are a hell of a lot higher now that they ae crashing airplanes into NYC skyscrapers. If there is an immediate lesson to be gleaned by the people, perhaps the simplest is that when you have a stupid and easily manipulated man at the head of the government, his minions and courtiers spend all their time jockeying for position and finding shortcuts to get their way. If Kerry happens to win he really must bite the bullet and see that this is investigated and people are brought up on charges. It’s completely unbelievable that these same players came back into government and ran their game all over again. Unbelievable.
If anyone is unfamiliar with the braintrust that is at the center of this little scheme, Michael Ledeen, here’s a little taste of the man’s brilliance. I’m sure you’ll agree that he is just the sort of guy you want running a secret back channel foreign policy in the middle of a national security crisis:
From March 10,2003:
Assume, for a moment, that the French and the Germans aren’t thwarting us out of pique, but by design, long-term design. Then look at the world again, and see if there’s evidence of such a design.
Like everyone else, the French and the Germans saw that the defeat of the Soviet Empire projected the United States into the rare, almost unique position of a global hyperpower, a country so strong in every measurable element that no other nation could possibly resist its will. The “new Europe” had been designed to carve out a limited autonomy for the old continent, a balance-point between the Americans and the Soviets. But once the Soviets were gone, and the Red Army melted down, the European Union was reduced to a combination theme park and free-trade zone. Some foolish American professors and doltish politicians might say — and even believe — that henceforth “power” would be defined in economic terms, and that military power would no longer count. But cynical Europeans know better.
They dreaded the establishment of an American empire, and they sought for a way to bring it down.
If you were the French president or the German chancellor, you might well have done the same.
How could it be done? No military operation could possibly defeat the United States, and no direct economic challenge could hope to succeed. That left politics and culture. And here there was a chance to turn America’s vaunted openness at home and toleration abroad against the United States. So the French and the Germans struck a deal with radical Islam and with radical Arabs: You go after the United States, and we’ll do everything we can to protect you, and we will do everything we can to weaken the Americans.
The Franco-German strategy was based on using Arab and Islamic extremism and terrorism as the weapon of choice, and the United Nations as the straitjacket for blocking a decisive response from the United States.
It makes me feel all cozy knowing that a guy like this and his compatriots have been meddling in mid-east policy apparently in concert with a rogue element in the Pentagon for the last three years.
ONLY A FEW years ago, it seemed the slightest suggestion of malfea- sance by a presidential administration — allegations of tampering with a minor administrative office, say, or indications that a cabinet secretary might have understated the amount of money given to a former girlfriend — could trigger a formidable response from the other two branches of government: grand juries, special prosecutors, endless congressional hearings, even impeachment proceedings. Some of that auditing, especially during the Clinton administration, went too far. Yet now the country faces a frightening inversion of the problem. Though there is strong evidence of faulty and even criminal behavior by senior military commanders and members of President Bush’s cabinet in the handling of foreign detainees, neither Congress nor the justice system is taking adequate steps to hold those officials accountable.
[…]
When the prisoner abuse allegations first became public in May, many members of Congress, including several senior Republicans, vowed to pursue the evidence up the chain of command and not to allow low-ranking reservists to be prosecuted while more senior officials escaped sanction. Yet, as matters now stand, Mr. Rumsfeld, Gen. Sanchez and other senior officials are poised to execute just such an escape. When the scandal began, these leaders told Congress they were prepared to accept responsibility for the wrongdoing. As it turns out, they didn’t mean that in any substantive respect. Their dodge shames not only them but the legal and legislative bodies charged with enforcing accountability.
Whoda thunk? And after they’ve been so zealous in investigating all the other crimes and scandals of the George W. Bush administration. Why, I’d almost think that Republicans (and their accomplices in the press) used their power to harrass and intimidate Clinton with phony, partisan scandalmongering and are now using it to cover for their Republican president’s criminal malfeasance and massive policy failures. No, that can’t be. That travel office scandal was a threat to the republic. This torturing of muslim prisoners in an age of islamic radicalism and terrorism is nothing by comparison — not to mention all the espionage, intelligence failures and negligent military planning. My mistake.
While it’s gratifying that the Washington Post may coming down from it’s self administered three year acid trip, it continues to amaze me that the paper of Ben Bradlee has concluded that it is a powerless little institution that has no influence on the way that politics are conducted in this country. It certainly appears that they have come to believe that investigative reporting means regurgitating partisan smears and reporting the results of official government investigations. Jesus, if these guys were in charge during Watergate we’d be dedicating the Nixon Memorial on the mall right now.
Is it reasonable to believe that nobody in the entire military establishment understands that this whitewash is seriously counterproductive to the security interests of the United States considering the pesky little issue we have with Muslim hearts and minds and people blowing up buildings and all? I just bet some enterprising reporter could find a few people who might think these bogus “investigations” are a mistake. After all, the guys most likely to suffer from this total disregard for international law regarding the treatment of prisoners are those in the military.
I’m think it may be time to give Kerry a little r-e-s-p-e-c-t. Donkey Rising analyzes the LA Times poll and all the others that have recently been released in the wake of the swift boat smear:
In short, the four major polls conducted since August 20th do not reveal any consistent or substantial pro-Bush swing such as would be expected from a successful attack on John Kerry’s war record and character during the week and a half before. Instead, the only generalization that can be made from looking at a broader group of over 20 polls of registered and likely voters since the beginning of August is of a slight and gradual shrinkage of about 3 or 4% in Kerry’s lead.
If August had been a slow news month, this trend would almost certainly have been ascribed to an inevitable “coming back down to earth” following the run of positive news coverage Kerry had enjoyed for several months during the spring (the remarkable fundraising success, the popular choice of Edwards, the united, energized Democratic convention). Instead, because the attacks on Kerry’s medals and military service were intensely dramatic and widely covered, many commentators simply assumed that any changes in the opinion polls had to be due to their influence.
[…]
…there was never any realistic possibility that Kerry would hold onto the support of many of these voters [who remain angry at the anti-war movement] even after his quite effective performance at the Democratic convention. All the Bush campaign needed to do was to make sure that these voters were made aware of Kerry’s significant role in the anti-war movement of the early 1970’s.
This is what the LA Times poll essentially found. In July, 32% agreed that “By protesting the war in Vietnam, John Kerry demonstrated a judgment and belief that is inappropriate in a president”. By late August, this had risen to 37%. Similarly, 26% of the sample (and 31% of the men) agreed that Kerry’s anti-war protests made them less likely to vote for him. The voters among whom the LA Times survey found Kerry loosing ground in August were married, less educated, self-described conservatives, owning a gun and living in a rural area — a demographic profile that also describes the cultural environment of many U.S. veterans.
Had the Bush campaign been satisfied with simply harvesting these sympathetic voters, they probably could have done so with even a relatively honest and low-key series of commercials. Instead, however, they hoped that, with the help of their surrogates, they could achieve an even more ambitious goal – to impugn Kerry’s valor, honesty and character through attacks on his wartime record of bravery and heroism.
The essence of this strategy was not only to directly damage Kerry’s image and reputation, but to trap him into choosing between “taking the high road” and not responding to the attacks (which could then be spun to make him look weak and indecisive) or to provoke him into an ill-tempered, aggressive response (for which he could then be criticized as negative, partisan, bitter and shrill).
But the Bush campaign made a profound miscalculation. In the L.A. Times survey, only 18% of the voters had been convinced that “Kerry misrepresented his war record and does not deserve his war medals” while 58% said Kerry “fought honorably and does deserve” them. Independent voters sided with Kerry 5 to 1. Even men and self-described conservatives – groups that are normally quite pro-Bush – strongly supported Kerry, by 59 to 19 for men and 42 to 29 for conservatives. Other polls, such as the Fox/Opinion Dynamics and Annenberg Center for Public Policy survey found similar attitudes. In the Fox poll, even most veterans held, by 50% to 21% that Kerry deserved his purple hearts.
Moreover, Americans did not buy Bush’s transparent attempts to pretend his campaign was not involved with the smear. The Gallup poll showed that more Americans think Bush is responsible for the commercials (50%) then do not (44%) and 56% think he should specifically denounce them while only 32% think he should not. An August 26 Annenberg Center survey found very similar attitudes.
It was this failure to convince the American people of the charges against Kerry that set the stage for the growing backlash against the Bush campaign – the investigative reports and editorial statements in newspapers across the country, the resignations of two Bush officials when their links to the smear campaign were exposed, and then Bush’s disingenuous and finally humiliating series of statements and clarifications.
From the Bush campaign’s point of view, the magnitude of the swift-boat fiasco becomes clear when it is recognized that a major goal of the August campaign was to put John Kerry on the defensive – to have him stumbling over his words, being pilloried in the press and firing his advisors. Instead (although the issue will now be muted by the theatrics of the Republican convention) it was Bush who was forced onto the defensive by the end of last week while Kerry weathered the attacks with an extraordinarily small decline in the level of his popular support.
I agree with this and am coming very close to calling this one a win for Kerry. I’d like to see a couple more polls before the RNC gets started and the dynamic becomes too muddy to know what the hell went on, but it sure looks to me as if Kerry may have survived a very serious atack and actually inflicted some damage on Bush. The narrative now has Bush as a dirty campaigner in the election and it’s going to much harder for him to launch another filthy smear. That’s big.
The “swift boat smear” is now in the annals of all time low down character assassination attempts. If Kerry really has prevailed then I am going to feel much more sanguine about this election and perhaps even more importantly, his chances of actually getting something done. Political instincts are the key and he’s showing me he’s got some.