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.
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.
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?
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
