Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

He Volunteered For Combat

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

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

Why would those guys lie about Kerry?

Because he said that soldiers committed atrocities in Vietnam.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am e-mailing the following quote to members of the press today. And, I think that all talking heads should have it on a 3×5 card and repeat it everytime they face a swift boat liar or one of their mouthpieces. Everybody needs to be reminded of what the real contrast is here. It’s not between Kerry the hero vs Kerry the alleged liar, but rather, the combat volunteer vs the chickenhawk smear artist.

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

I Won’t Be Ignored, John

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

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

Man With A Past

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

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

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

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

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

Razzie Winner 2004

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Docs At The Hazing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frame Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zig Zag

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

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

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

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

Good Job

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

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

Another One Bites The Dust

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

Making Her Bones

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

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

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

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

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

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