Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

What The White Men Want

Apparently most white guys are so egotistical that they think they could be president and so they want a president who is just as stupid as they are. People were offended by the title of Michael Moore’s book, but the truth hurts.

George W. Bush has it down: the “bring ’em on” macho sensibility, the public swagger, even the quick-draw High Noon cowboy stride. Call it the testosterone factor. It’s one reason Bush has maintained a strong appeal to white men throughout his presidency, especially in the South and Southwest.

[…]

“Part of it is a Republican thing,” says Rutgers political scientist Ross Baker, “but a good part of it is a Bush thing. For guys who drank and loafed their way through college, he’s a familiar figure.” And, it turns out, a popular one. In his early years, Bush was a likable party animal, seemingly committed to a lifestyle of making wisecracks, chasing women, and guzzling brew. He says he reformed two decades ago, giving up alcohol and becoming a born-again Christian. As president, he has come across in an equally comfortable way to white men–as a strong commander in chief and a conservative who seeks to return honor and responsibility to public life.

What works for most white men (as opposed, for example, to African-American men, who evaluate the president in starkly different terms) is Bush’s reputation as an “average guy,” says a senior White House official–the opposite of what California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger famously calls “girlie men.” Baker says Bush “has a down-to-earth quality that men find appealing. You know he won’t slip off to a quiet place and strum a six-string guitar.” And his support among white males has helped Bush open up a 52-to-43 percent lead over Kerry among likely voters, according to that Washington Post /ABC News poll.[bullshit ed.]

Vacillating. No Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of white male voters since Jimmy Carter in 1976. That’s partly because the party’s candidates have come across as vacillating on military issues and lenient on social concerns like crime and federal “giveaways” to the poor. Al Gore got only 36 percent of the white male vote in 2000; Bush pulled 60 percent. Bush now has about 57 percent support among white men to Kerry’s 39, according to GOP pollster Ed Goeas, and Bush appears to be gaining momentum on issues most important to those voters, such as making America safe and waging the war in Iraq Bush leads Kerry by 8 points among single white men and by 20 points among married white men, according to recent polling.

Adding to Kerry’s problems, if the Democratic challenger tries to court the white male vote too aggressively, he risks alienating white single women and minorities who are turned off by Bush’s macho tendencies. Joe Lockhart, former White House spokesman for Bill Clinton and now a Kerry adviser, says, “If you want the easiest way to define the Bush doctrine, it’s what I call the testosterone presidency. They’ve worked very hard making him look like Gary Cooper in High Noon. Why? Men have testosterone. Does that make good policy? No, of course not.”

But Bush advisers say the president’s big advantage in attracting the “white-guy vote” is that he can just be himself. Bush, like those in this core constituency, likes to watch sports on television, enjoys fishing, doesn’t take himself too seriously, and doesn’t express himself well. White males like to see themselves in what White House officials call Bush’s “moral clarity,” his attitude toward the war on terrorism, and his espousal of conservative values, such as opposition to gay marriage.

“Bush has his flaws,” says Ted Stout, 39, who runs a bus company in Scranton, Pa., where Bush and Kerry made stops after their respective conventions. “But there’s no question that when he says he’s going to do something, he does it. That’s what I like about him.” Stout, waiting to bowl on league night at Scranton’s Southside Bowl, adds: “He might seem a little dull-witted, but he’s an average person. He makes the right decisions when he needs to.”

Sporty. “We can’t be girlie men” about the war on terror, says Michael Bidwell, a 38-year-old Republican dining at Scranton’s Stadium Club with three male coworkers. “We need to go after terrorism. Terrorism isn’t going to go away, and we can’t put a blanket over it.” Bidwell says he has a son and a daughter serving in the Middle East and adds: “I don’t want to see them over there on a mission that’s not finished.” Steve Pasternak, a retired utility worker standing among “Sportsmen for Bush” signs at a pro-Bush rally in Johnstown, Pa., says he will vote for the president “because he thinks like sportsmen do. He’s a hunter going after the people who need to be hunted.”

Kerry has made a bid for white males by calling attention to his record as a Vietnam War combat hero. The Democratic nominee has also been emphasizing Bush’s poor record on job creation and improving the economy.

But so far, none of this has made much difference. “I’d rather vote for action than inaction,” says David Thorn, a 30-year-old communications representative from Overland Park, Kan., who sat in the dark-paneled comfort of O’Dowd’s Little Dublin, a bar in Kansas City’s upscale Plaza district. “And I’d rather stand for something than nothing. John Kerry doesn’t seem to stand for anything.” That’s not an enviable position to be in with the election less than two months away.

God, that’s depressing.

However, there is some good news. The GOP pollster who says that Bush has 57 percent of white males to Kerry’s 39% is full of shit. (Why this guy is the only one quoted for this article is anybody’s guess, but fair and balanced it ain’t.) This article by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira explains why. Iraq.

The Kennebunkport Project

Here’s Kitty:

While the Camp David coke party is getting the headlines, Kelley’s book is filled with many other tawdry stories about the Bush dynasty. Here is a family that looks ‘like “The Donna Reed Show,” and then you see it’s “The Sopranos,” Kelley tells Salon in the interview below. As Kelley tells it, the dynasty had respectable origins — in the form of family patriarch Prescott Bush, the distinguished, moderate Republican senator from Connecticut — but rapidly slid into cynical opportunism, skulduggery, and a mean-spirited sense of entitlement. The first President Bush is presented as a weak yes man, driven not by political vision but a savage preppy spirit of competition instilled in him by his whirlwind of a mother.

But it is his wife, Barbara (whom the ex-wife of White House counsel C. Boyden Gray calls “bull-dyke tough”), and their eldest son, George, who are the true pieces of work in Kelley’s book, a mother and son team brimming with such spite and ambition they would give the ruthless duo in “The Manchurian Candidate” the shivers. In one of the creepier passages of the book, a family gathering from hell at Kennebunkport, Maine, Barbara is shown mercilessly baiting her dry-drunk son, then governor of Texas, as a teetotaling “Chosen One,” while he keeps pleading to skip the cocktails and put on the feed bag, and his elderly father “drools over [TV newswoman] Paula Zahn’s legs.”

Isn’t it time the president came clean about his dysfunctionaL family?

Sticky Blogs

Chris Bowers at MYDD has a very interesting post about the right vs left Blogosphere. In the interest of not being too sticky, I will not discuss it, I will simply recommend that you go and read it.

Sharon’s Revenge

I don’t know how many people saw Kitty Kelley this morning on the Today Show, but it was interesting. She’ll be on a couple more days so tune in if you get up early. This morning Sharon Bush was on to refute the claims that she told Kelley that Junior was doing cocaine at Camp David during the 80’s.

She was pretty weak, mainly because she just couldn’t resist trashing the family about how they were treating her during the divorce. It was clear that she harbored enough resentment that she could have easily spilled the beans on little George during a contentious divorce case. It’s possible she lied but you’d think she would have come up with one that would be more current if she wanted to stick it to him. Regardless, it seemed clear to me that Kelley accurately quoted her. Here’s the publisher’s response to Bush’s appearance on the show:

Statement by Doubleday Regarding Kitty Kelley:

NEW YORK, Sept. 13 /PRNewswire/ — The following is a statement by

Doubleday regarding Kitty Kelley:

In an appearance on the Today Show on Monday, September 13, 2004, Sharon Bush repeated a denial she made earlier last week. After telling Kitty Kelley that she had knowledge of President George W. Bush “doing cocaine” at Camp David — “not once, but many times,” Mrs. Bush now denies that statement.

This denial has already been utterly discredited by a third party to the meeting at which Mrs. Bush made the statements. Doubleday and Kitty Kelley, author of “The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty,” firmly uphold the accuracy and veracity of reporting on this topic. Further, Doubleday and Ms. Kelley affirm that Mrs. Bush was read her comments on the day following the meeting in a telephone conversation, lasting over an hour, that was witnessed by Random House Vice President Peter Gethers — that those comments included her remarks on cocaine use at Camp David — and that she once again agreed that these comments were true.

The following are undisputable facts:

— Mrs. Bush confirmed that she was aware of cocaine use by President George W. Bush at Camp David when his father was President

— Mrs. Bush confirmed that such usage occurred on more than one occasion

— Mrs. Bush knew that Ms. Kelley planned on using this information in her book and was read the exact quotes that would be utilized

— Mrs. Bush continued to have a good relationship with Kitty Kelley — long after the meeting in April at which she confirmed the cocaine report

— Mrs. Bush called Ms. Kelley in May, 2004 after which there was a friendly correspondence.

Additionally, Today Show host Matt Lauer and Mrs. Bush suggested that Kitty Kelley had a “relationship” with Lou Colasuonno, a public relations executive who witnessed the April 1, 2003 lunch meeting between Kitty Kelley and Sharon Bush. Kitty Kelley had never met or spoken with Mr. Colasuonno prior to April 1, 2003. Kitty Kelley has never had and does not have any personal, social or financial relationship with Mr. Colasuonno.

Knowing the way Kelley operates, there are probably a few hidden bombshells that will come out over the next few days. Has anyone heard anything?

Free To Be Unemployed

For those who wonder if I am right in saying in my post below that your boss can fire you for your political beliefs, yes she can.

It seems reasonable to ask what business Michael Italie’s political convictions were to his employer. But when the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union looked into Italie’s case, it discovered, as Pastrana evidently had, that Goodwill was on strong legal footing. “There is no legal case to be brought,” explains Miami chapter president Lida Rodriguez-Taseff. “The law is pretty clear that a private employer can fire someone based on their political speech even when that political speech does not affect the terms and conditions of employment.” A public employer would be prevented from firing someone based on political speech (because that would constitute the government itself suppressing free speech). Rodriguez-Taseff briefly held out some hope that Goodwill could be challenged based on its government contracts. Apparently, though, the case law isn’t favorable for government contractors, either. Italie told Chatterbox that every lawyer he’s spoken with has told him essentially the same thing. Everyone who isn’t a lawyer, Italie said, is outraged. Chatterbox tested this hypothesis by describing Italie’s case to Ronald Radosh, the virulently anti-Communist writer. “Everybody has a right to run for mayor on the SWP ticket,” Radosh said. “That’s a clear-cut infringement of civil liberties.”

The irony is that one can make (and many have made) the case that people like Michael Italie shouldn’t be permitted to hold jobs in government, where at least in theory they have the power to subvert the U.S. system. Yet it is in government where Italie would be protected. In the private sector, where Italie is entirely harmless, he enjoys no protection at all.

If you refuse to swear fealty to your leige’s politics, you can be kicked out on your ass. If you wanna eat, keep your mouth shut. Freedom of speech only goes so far. Creepy, isn’t it?

Manly Men And Their STRONG STRENGTHLYNESS™

Gary Farber helped me to figure out why I’ve been having disturbing dreams of bouncing a tennis racket off of Scott McClellan’s face every night:

KERRY, BUSH’S STRONG STRENGTHLYNESS™, AND NORTH KOREA.

Yesterday:

On Sunday night, Scott McClellan, the president’s press secretary, told of Mr. Kerry’s comments, said: “Senator Kerry wants to return to the failed policies of the previous administration, where the U.S. was duped. We’ve been down that road before and we have no intention of letting it happen again.”

We are instead far better off with the failed policies of the current administration! Look how much safer we are, today, from the threat of North Korea achieving nuclear weapons, thanks to the Strength™ of the Bush Administration!

It’s just that simple. Anything else is just rhetoric.

Truly has there ever been a more arrogant administration? This, apparently, is a real step forward:

A mushroom cloud that towered over a remote corner of North Korea last Thursday was a result of a huge blast to prepare earthworks for a hydroelectric dam, the North said Monday.

Bill Rammell, a British Foreign Office official, met with Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun of North Korea to discuss the incident, according to a BBC correspondent in Pyongyang.”It was no nuclear explosion or an accident,” Rammell quoted Paek as saying. “It was a deliberate, controlled detonation to demolish a mountain in the far north. The Press Association of Britain gave similar details about the explosion in a pool report, and Xinhua, China’s press agency, quoted a North Korean Foreign Ministry official with the same explanation. In a pool report received by Reuters in London, Rammell noted that he had asked permission for “our ambassador and other ambassadors to be allowed to visit the scene of the explosion.” “I am very pleased the North Koreans have agreed to the request,” he said. North Korea’s neighbors, China, Russia and South Korea, have reported no increased radiation releases.

But five days after seismic detectors picked up the blast, there were as many questions unanswered Monday as after the train explosion on April 22 that leveled a railroad station and killed 171 people shortly after the passage of a train carrying Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s dictator, whose father was Kim Il Sung, the nation’s founder. If the government planned to blast apart a mountain on Thursday, the 56th anniversary of the founding of North Korea, why do it in the middle of night, when no heroic propaganda videos could be made?

The date was purely a coincidence, I’m sure. Clearly, the reality is that Kim Jong Il is so afraid of Crusader Codpiece that he is trying to get the American people to vote for his good friend John Kerry who will let him have all the nuclear bombs he wants. At least Senator Roberts thinks so:

SEN. PAT ROBERTS (R), KANSAS: It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if Kim Jong Il would think in some deranged way that if he had some kind of a test that that would affect the election. I don’t know if that’s the case, but that could be one of the conjecturing that is going on in the intelligence assessment.

BLITZER: What would be his motive in trying to affect the U.S. election, Senator Roberts?

ROBERTS: Oh, just to cause, you know, more concern in regards to possible terrorist attack, and they would then be the eighth nation that would have the kind of nuclear capability and what we’re working against.

We were able to convince Libya to, you know, go the other way; same thing with Pakistan; same thing with other countries. But it’s very hard to predict what Kim Jong Il will do. He’s just not very predictable.

BLITZER: Before we move on, are you suggesting he would like to see President Bush defeated?

ROBERTS: Well, I think that’s probably the case. I’m not going to go out on a limb and say he’s endorsing — or anybody that would want any kind of endorsement from Kim Jong Il.

I’m just thinking in terms of what he is up to, we have to very closely monitor it. And I’m saying the intelligence is mixed, and we’ll continue that monitoring.

Yeah, he’s obviously very afraid of Junior. That’s why he’s building nuclear weapons right in front of the whole world while John Bolton ineffectually shakes his tiny fist and Lil’ George pulls his proverbial pud. This is working out really well. I sure hope Bush gets elected. Maybe we can have a full fledged nuclear war. That’ll teach ’em who’s boss.

Can You Believe It?

The World’s Shortest Blog’s bounty is up to $2,060.00! A thousand here and a thousand there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

Isn’t it time for the president to come clean about how many times he’s been arrested?

Speaking of which, has anyone ever asked him why he had his drivers license number changed in the early 90’s?

There Ought To be Limits To Freedom

Via Salon:

Moulton woman says she lost job for sporting Kerry sticker on car:

MOULTON — Lynne Gobbell never imagined the cost of a John Kerry-John Edwards bumper sticker could run so high.

Lynne Gobbell said her boss fired her last week because of the Kerry-Edwards campaign sticker on the back of her car.

Gobbell of Moulton didn’t pay a cent for the sticker that she proudly displays on the rear windshield of her Chevrolet Lumina, but said it cost her job at a local factory after it angered her boss, Phil Gaddis.

[…]

“We were going back to work from break, and my manager told me that Phil said to remove the sticker off my car or I was fired,” she said. “I told him that Phil couldn’t tell me who to vote for. He said, ‘Go tell him.’ ”

She went to Gaddis’ office, knocked on the door and entered on his orders.

“Phil and another man who works there were there,” she said. “I asked him if he said to remove the sticker and he said, ‘Yes, I did.’ I told him he couldn’t tell me who to vote for. When I told him that, he told me, ‘I own this place.’ I told him he still couldn’t tell me who to vote for.”

Gobbell said Gaddis told her to “get out of here.”

“I asked him if I was fired and he told me he was thinking about it,” she said. “I said, ‘Well, am I fired?’ He hollered and said, ‘Get out of here and shut the door.’ ”

She said her manager was standing in another room and she asked him if that meant for her to go back to work or go home. The manager told her to go back to work, but he came back a few minutes later and said, ” ‘I reckon you’re fired. You could either work for him or John Kerry,’ ” Gobbell said.

“I took off my gloves and threw them in the garbage and left,” Gobbell said.

Though she is unemployed and uncertain if she will get her job back, Gobbell said, she doesn’t regret her decision to keep the sticker on her windshield.

“I would like to find another job, but I would take that job back because I need to work,” she said. “It upset me and made me mad that he could put a letter in my check expressing his (political) opinion, but I can’t put something on my car expressing mine.”

She was referring to a flier that she said Gaddis placed in employee envelopes to remind them of the positive impact that President Bush’s policies have had on them. An employee at the plant who would not identify himself confirmed the contents of the letter.

Gobbell provided a copy of the flier. It says:

“Just so you will know, because of the Bush tax (cut):

I was able to buy the new Hammer Mill

I was able to finance our receivables

I was able to get the new CAT skid steer

I was able to get the wire cutter

I was able to give you a job”

It further says:

“You got the benefit of the Bush tax cut. Everyone did.”

It’s perfectly legal for an employee to express his or her political view. It’s perfectly legal for an employer to express his or her political view.

And it is also perfectly legal for that employer to fire that employee for expressing his or her political view.

Kind of harkens back to the glory days of the feudal system, doesn’t it?

It’s All They’ve Got

The Political Animal is absolutely correct about what this election is really all about. Whether we like it or not, national security is the issue on which this election is going to be won or lost. And Democrats have been at a disadvantage on this issue for the last forty years which is why, despite the fact that the country agrees with us on virtually every other important issue, (and knows that Bush has been a disaster even on national security) it is an article of faith with many people that Republicans are better at defending the country. I believe that John Kerry, of all the primary candidates (except Clark who ran explicitly on that issue) understood that this election would be played on Republican turf and positioned himself to challenge Bush there. And that, in combination with the fact that there were no WMD and Iraq is looking more and more like a total disaster, is why we are tied instead of behind. If Iraq had turned out well, I never believed that there was any chance the Democrat would win.

I have said before and I will repeat, we can and must discuss other issues and in swing states particularly, there is nothing wrong with hitting hard on the economy and other domestic concerns. But, the sub-text of everything in this election has to do with each candidate proving that he is tough enough to beat the terrorists and handle any new threats that come up. If you do an ad about medicare reform, it must show Kerry being tough and calling Bush weak. If you do one about education, again, Kerry tough, Bush weak. The Democrats must show that they will give as good as they get, that they aren’t afraid and that they will go after anyone who challenges their willingness to fight. No matter what the actual subject of discussion, the sub-text is who can keep America safe from terrorists and since Democrats operate at a disadvantage on that issue, we have the higher bar to meet.

Kevin notes that Clinton won at a time when national security was not a major concern. (I agree. If Clinton were running for the first time today, I don’t think he’d have a chance.) He wisely used that period to lay to rest the shibboleth about Democrats being too irresponsible to manage the economy. He was largely successful in realigning the public’s view on that a fact which has only been reinforced by Junior’s fiscal nightmare. (They’ll keep trotting out their “tax and spend” mantra but it just doesn’t have the punch it once had.) Now, we face the other propaganda set piece that the Republicans successfully sold the public for the last forty years, which is the defense issue. Like Clinton and the economy, Kerry is challenging them on their field of battle and is promoting a better and more rational approach to national security. But, it’s tough sledding, just as it was for Clinton, to change public perceptions after a notion has been inculcated in the national sub-conscious for a generation.

This is also why I have to laugh at this notion that Rove has gone after Kerry’s strength by attacking him on national security. It’s bullshit. Any Republican would have done that and they all have since 1960. When we won, it was largely in response to external events that changed the landscape temporarily (assasination, Watergate, end of the cold war.) As long as there was an external threat, the Republicans built in their advantage through relentless propaganda.

But, this is a cautionary tale that we should be very careful to look at with eyes wide open. Forty years ago, as now, the problem of convincing the public that we are tough enough to meet the threats of our time is only the first step. The real problem will be when we win and have to fend off the constant attacks from the right that we are appeasing the enemy. This was an ongoing problem during the cold war and it was how we ended up with a Democratic president escalating a war simply because he was hamstrung by the right wing’s obsession with communism. He didn’t believe in the war:

It looks to me like we’re getting into another Korea. It just worries the hell out of me. I don’t see what we can ever hope to get out of there with, once we’re committed. I believe that the Chinese Communists are coming into it. I don’t think that we can fight them 10,000 miles away from home. … I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think that we can get out. It’s just the biggest damned mess that I ever saw.

But the political reality was daunting. Robert Sheer explained like this:

Why did Johnson commit to such a disastrous course? He clearly did not share the hubris of his advisors, led by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (who later recanted), that the war could be won. Nor could those advisors convince him that winning a war against one of the poorest nations on earth mattered to U.S. security.

But he did agree that the status quo in Vietnam was untenable; the choice was withdrawal or escalation. And he chose the latter because to do otherwise would endanger his chances for victory in the election that fall. “The Republicans are going to make a political issue out of it,” warned Georgia Sen. Richard Russell, the president’s longtime political confidant. “It’s the only issue that they’ve got,” Johnson replied.

In particular, Johnson was concerned that Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, would return to take a place on the GOP ticket, probably as the vice presidential candidate, and use weakness on Vietnam against Johnson. “Now, one of our big problems, the biggest, between us, and I don’t want this repeated to anybody, is Lodge,” Johnson told Russell. “He ain’t worth a damn . . . and he can’t work with anybody . . . so it’s just a helluva mess.”

Russell agreed, adding that in dealing with the Vietnamese, Lodge “thinks he’s dealing with barbarian tribes out there and that he’s the emperor and he’s going to tell them what to do, and there’s no doubt that, in my mind, that he had old Diem killed out there himself.” Of the killing of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, Johnson responded, “That was a tragic mistake.” But he didn’t dare remove Lodge because “he’d be back home campaigning against us on this issue every day.”

So in the end, Johnson sent half a million troops to Vietnam and carpet-bombed the country with more explosives than were used during World War II because he wanted to deprive the Republicans of their one issue and feared even Congress would turn against him if he withdrew: “Well, they’d impeach a president that would run out, wouldn’t they?” he asked Russell.

They impeach presidents for a lot less than that these days.

Kerry is, I believe, uniquely qualified to deal with this difficult issue and reposition the democrats on national security as Clinton did on economics. His personal knowledge of the Vietnam problem and the experience of dealing with the Washington power structure for the last twenty years prepared him for the political battle that lies ahead on Iraq and terrorism. But, it is going to be tremendously difficult to deal with the Republicans on these issues.

As Johnson said forty years ago, “It’s the only issue they’ve got.”

UPDATE: Since I linked to Drum’s piece, I should make it clear that I generally agree Michael Tomasky’s take on why Democrats’ fealty to the notion that elections are won on issues as opposed to “character” (I would call it personality) is losing us elections. (“Republicans understand the world, and Democrats do not,” is, however, a statement I don’t think is precise or wise. The out of context possibilities are frightening.) I don’t think that Drum and Tomasky really disagree with one another, either — what Kevin calls an “issue” (national security) Tomasky would call “character.”

Republicans certainly use national security as a character point — tough, uncompromising and aggressive vs being weak, vascillating and fearful — to beat us over the head. The reason that people trust republicans more than Democrats on the issue is not because of their superior 10 point plans, but because they trust them to have the character and temperament to fight and win. They have been taught to think the opposiote of Democrats.

Big Improvement

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 12 – In a series of tightly sequenced attacks, at least 25 Iraqis were killed by suicide car bombings and a barrage of missile and mortar fire in several neighborhoods across Baghdad on Sunday.

The attacks were the most widespread in months, seeming to demonstrate the growing power of the insurgency and heightening the sense of uncertainty and chaos in the capital at a time when American forces have already ceded control to insurgents in a number of cities outside of Baghdad.

[…]

American forces appear to be facing a guerrilla insurgency that is more sophisticated and more widespread than ever before. Last month, attacks on American forces reached their highest level since the war began, an average of 87 per day.

In a Sunday appearance on the NBC News program “Meet The Press,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell acknowledged that the United States faced a “difficult time” in Iraq but had a plan to “bring it under control” before nationwide elections scheduled for January.

“It’s not an impossible task,” he said.

The violence, which began before dawn, all but paralyzed this country’s capital city, where portions of several central highways were closed, and traffic slowed to a crawl.

[…]

After the attack, fighters and gleeful onlookers scaled the burning armored vehicle, said Hassan Lazim, assistant security director at nearby Karkh Hospital who said he saw the scene. Reuters reported that several young men had hung a black banner of the Unity and Jihad militant group, believed to be linked to Al Qaeda, on the barrel of the Bradley’s main gun.

Helicopters that flew in to protect the Bradley were then fired on from the ground and fired back, the military said in a statement, adding that the aircraft then destroyed the armored vehicle as well. The helicopters “fired upon the anti-Iraqi forces and the Bradley, preventing the loss of sensitive equipment and weapons.” The military stressed that the helicopters had not fired indiscriminately into the crowd, but said, “An unknown number of insurgents and Iraq civilians were wounded or killed in the incident.”

[…]

In the fighting before and after the attack on the Bradley, 13 people were killed and 61 were wounded, the Iraqi Health Ministry said. A journalist for the Arabiya television network and a 12-year-old girl were among the dead, hospital officials said.

Al Arabiya showed dramatic footage that followed the journalist, Mazen al-Tumeizi, as he stumbled away from the scene of the airstrikes, yelling, “I’m dying, I’m dying!” More than 20 journalists have been killed here since the beginning of the American invasion.

“We can say there were innocent people who died,” said Sabah Abud, head of emergency room statistics at Yarmouk Hospital, which received most of those wounded on Sunday.

There’s more to the story and it’s all bad. I don’t know how much more of the “freedom” these poor Iraqis can take.