So, according to Media Matters, Limbaugh is back to his line (helped along by one of the witnesses in the Lynndie England court martial) that the torture of prisoners was “sort of like hazing, a fraternity prank. Sort of like that kind of fun.” He even goes on to describe how he was pulled over by police recently and “was halfway hoping that one of the cops would be Lynndie England, but no such luck.”
It’s funny, that’s the first time I’ve ever agreed with Limbaugh on anything. I too have been hoping that Rush would get taken into custody by a Lynndie England (or maybe one of her little friends like Sgt. Graner or Cpl Joyner.) Oh, how I’d love to see them “haze” him just a little bit — have some “fun” with him.
For all you Dems who might be thinking that Kerry needs to challenge John O’Neill to a duel or something to counter that ad, it really would be the wrong thing for him to do. Especially when he has John McCain out there duelling for him.
Here, you have the Republican Party’s most beloved Vietnam veteran saying publicly, with no holds barred and within the same news cycle that this is a dirty trick and that they president should disavaow any knowledge of it. He even said, “it’s the same deal they did to me.” This is a very effective counter to the ad and the publicity surrounding it, one that carries far more weight with the media than anything Kerry or anyone else could have said.
As Dave Johnson notes over at See The Forest, this toxic smear was entirely predictable. And, as a result, I think that some of those meetings in which Kerry was supposedly trying to convince McCain to be his VP, McCain agreed to cover Kerry’s back on smears against his war record. This was very well coordinated and McCain knew exactly what he needed to say. (The Kerry campaign had his comment blastfaxed instantly.) The media have had to include McCain’s comments all day, diluting the impact of the ad and putting it into perspective.(It is only a $500,000 buy — the point was the free media coverage of it.) Even the neanderthal Limbaugh crowd have some respect for McCain and although they will undoubtedly tout the party line, it won’t have quite the same resonance. The independents and moderate Republicans love the guy. They’ll listen to him. And that is the group of voters Kerry is going after.
McCain is a good Republican, but he isn’t a Stepford Wife. This genuinely pisses him off. Getting him to serve as a spokeman for Kerry against these pricks looks like good politics to me.
Here’s Judy Botox’s framing of the issue. I think it’s exactly the Kerry campaign wanted it framed. You can’t silence these people, but you can spin them for all but the most partisan mouth breathers. Short of taking Limbaugh off the air (and into jail, which I’m totally in favor of) there’s nothing we can do about them. But, manipulating the mainstream press is something we must do if we are going to win.
JUDY WOODRUFF, HOST: Thank you for joining us.
Well, anyone who follows the presidential race knows that John Kerry’s Vietnam military service is a key pillar of his campaign. Kerry often refers to his combat experiences, and veterans who have served with him had staring roles at the Democratic convention.
Now, a group of veterans who oppose Kerry’s White House bid is taking aim at Kerry’s war record. They’ve launched a harsh new TV ad in three battleground states, and it is already drawing fire from members of both parties.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Kerry lied…
WOODRUFF (voice-over): Vet versus vet, as the ghosts of Vietnam invade another wartime election.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: John Kerry lied to get his Bronze Star. I know. I was there. I saw what happened.
WOODRUFF: A new ad from a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth trashing John Kerry’s much heralded military service. They say Kerry lied about his heroics, lied about his injuries, and betrayed his comrades by agitating against the war upon his return to the states.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When the chips were down, you could not count on John Kerry.
WOODRUFF: Tough ad, and it’s facing some tough criticism. For one thing, none of the 13 vets featured in the spot were actually aboard Kerry’s swift boats, though some were on nearby boats. And though it’s not a Bush campaign ad, it is largely funded by top Republican contributors.
All but one of the Democrat’s surviving crewmates, some of whom starred in a pro-Kerry commercial…
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When he pulled me out of the river, he risked his life to save mine.
WOODRUFF: … have rushed to his defense. And so, has one of the nation’s most admired vets, GOP Senator John McCain, who has endorsed the president. McCain denounced the commercial as dishonest and dishonorable, adding, “I think the Bush campaign should specifically denounce the ad.”
A Bush-Cheney spokesman responds that the campaign has never and will never question John Kerry’s service in Vietnam, insisting there’s no connection whatsoever between the reelection effort and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WOODRUFF: Well, as part of his comments criticizing the TV ad, Senator John McCain also mentioned his own experience running against then Governor Bush back in 2000. During that primary season, McCain faced a whisper campaign against his own military service in Vietnam. Referring to the new ad against Kerry, McCain says, “It was the same kind of deal that was pulled on me.”
We’re going to have a debate in just a moment between two Vietnam veterans, one who has endorsed John Kerry, who was with him on his swift boat, another who was part of that anti-Kerry ad we saw just a moment ago.
Then the two guys engaged in a he said/ she said, but the ad had already been discredited as a partisan smear — and McCain quite helpfully reminded everyone that Bush did the same thing in 2000, so the campaign’s protestations of innocence are pretty unbelivable. I think the strategy worked well. (And it worked a lot better than the Berger counterspin which was non-existent.)
I’ll have to watch Tweety and the networks, but I have a feeling that the story will stall out. They fed their slavering beast, but it won’t stick with the swing voters. And we partisans should shove it down Bush’s throat every chance we get.
“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”
American Journalism Review has a very interesting analysis of the media’s coverage of the Abu Ghraib story.
There were stories out there before the pictures, but nobody seemed very interested. The images are what finally woke up the press and even then they were terribly sluggish and slow off the mark. They offer a number of different reasons: intimidation by the administration, lack of resources and access, misplaced post 9/11 “patriotism”, physical danger in Iraq, complaints by conservative readers and others.
One of the things it touches upon but doesn’t really expound on is the fact that most of the sources for these stories, until Joseph Darby’s name became known, were all Iraqis. And, I believe that because of that it was assumed that they were lying. I wrote yesterday about the Center for Constitutional Rights report by the three British prisoners who were released from Guantanamo. I thought for a bit if I should put in some qualifiers about their story because, after all, we only have their word for it. Normally, I would have written something like “even if only half of what they say is true it’s…” I didn’t do that because after a few moments reflection I realized that there was already so much information out there confirming that the US had legally justified torture, had developed systematic torture schemes and had actually perpetrated torture (we’ve all seen the pictures) that the burden of proof was now on the US, not these prisoners. I believed them.
Journalism, however, in its fetish to provide “balance” even when common sense tells you there is no balance, will continue to present these stories with a built in skew to the administration’s side of the story. If it’s covered at all, you have the word of a trio of muslim ex-prisoners against the pentagon. You have the word of petty criminals against the CIA and the Army. Without visual proof, many reporters and many people will simply not take the word of “the enemy” over Americans. Indeed, even with visual proof they find themselves scrambling to excuse behavior that can only be seen as disgusting and sadistic.
And, one cannot ignore the outrageous excess of the news media after 9/11, wallowing in jingoism and signing on to the US “war” effort, no questions asked. In the AJR article I still don’t hear a lot of remorse for having missed the big picture on the torture story. This, despite the fact that the discussion of whether torture should be used was right out and in the open since 9/11. The press was reporting actual incidents of it since December 26, 2002 when Dana Priest and Barton Gellman wrote a story in the Washington Post detailing torture allegations, replete with MP’s “softening up” prisoners beating them and throwing them against walls. When asked why they didn’t follow up, editor Len Downie says,” in part, obviously, because information was not made readily available, and in part because we didn’t always see the tip of the iceberg as clearly as we should have.”
The press not only misses the tips of icebergs these days, they are actively helping to steer the ship into them, cheering and clapping along the way.
This problem with journalism is not simply a problem for the Democratic party. It is a serious national issue that goes beyond politics. The world is more and more fast paced and complicated and we must be able to depend upon at least some parts of the news media to resist the temptation to jump on the entertainment or propaganda bandwagon and see the forest for the trees. These last few years have been a disaster for journalism. And, aside from the predictable mea culpas after the fact, this article and all the others suggest there is little reason to hope that it will change.
Here’s a new one. Apparently somebody has gotten the bright idea to get a hold of voter registration rolls and send in change of address forms to the registrar of voters. When you go to your polling place you find out you’re not on the roll for that precinct. There’s no way to prevent such things and I’m not sure it’s even against the law.
I know that some places have provisional ballots, but it would probably be a good idea to check with the registrar if you don’t receive your sample ballot in the mail. This person lives in a Democratic leaning area in a swing state, but I wouldn’t dream of drawing any conclusions from that.
Update: It appears that this was atually a misunderstanding rather than a dirty trick. There was a time when I would have assumed that when I read it, but no more.
Harold Meyerson has written a fine article in the LA Weekly about the Democrats taking back the flag. Meyerson, it should be noted, is not exactly a flag-waving hawk so this view is representative of something of a sea change. Democrats have truly regained their patriotic voice, extolling real American virtues and strength in ways far more useful than the other side in the wake of 9/11. Republicans used that awful day as an excuse to let go of all civilized restraint. Democrats have seen that awful day as a call to civic duty. We finally got tired of being told that we didn’t love our country.
Meyerson writes:
Coming out of the convention, they march for Kerry, too – and, for many of them, for the first time. They march for him because in his speech, he successfully took the fight to the enemy – not merely suggesting that his own credentials and perspectives would make him a better commander in chief than Bush, but because, in conjunction with a number of speakers who preceded him to the podium, he reclaimed patriotism from the right.
Back in April of 03, before Sleepless in Seattle blogging and after Bush’s midterm “triumph of the will” tour and the invasion of Iraq, I like every other political junkie Democrat was trying to figure out a strategy to win this election. I was convinced then and remain so that the election would be won or lost on the terrorism issue and that patriotism would be the underlying theme. I wasn’t the only one by far, and now it has actually come to fruition. In my opinion, it’s long overdue.
Mindless jingoism is often mistaken for patriotism in this country and that’s wrong. I’m not much of a sentimentalist, but I really am fond of the Bill of Rights and all that flowed from them and I’m sick of right wing morons telling me that I’m not patriotic because I refuse to goosestep to their tune.
I believe that Democrats should give no ground on this. We represent real American values and we have every right to use the traditional language and symbols of patriotism to express that. We are the ones who stand for the constitution and the American system of justice, which we hold so dear that even in times of war we do not waver. We are the ones who believe in the sacred American values of Liberty, Equality, Opportunity and Democracy and we are the ones who work to ensure that every American, not just the privileged, share in them. We are the ones who have faith that America is strong enough to survive any challenge without sacrificing those values. The flag and Sousa and apple pie and love of country are not the exclusive property of the Republican Party; they belong to all Americans. We should take them back.
Or, much better, as the inimitable farmer wrote in the comments section:
So, as Digby is getting at, its now up to liberals to restablish their dominance in the political marketplace. To market a high quality product in a highly visible high quality package. A better deal, more for your money, at a better price. Something that you can plant and it will grow for you. A real live perennial tree of liberty that you can plant in your own back yard. Not a nut tree either. Too many nut trees already. Rather, a big sprawling sugar maple, or a big blue atlas cedar. Or an apple tree, the kind you can make your own fresh pies from for years and years. Mom will love it. Mom and her apple pie tree. Its a patriotic American living thing and it arrives in a traditional hoop bound oak stave barrel half all ready to be planted in Washington DC. Ships in 2004, order today.
So, professional John Kerry character assassin John O’Neill and his cronies are out there with a new ad, condemned by John McCain, claiming that Kerry didn’t deserve his medals — and conveniently rolling out O’Neill’s new book. (Those Republican marketers sure understand synergy.) John O’Neill has always travelled in high Republican circles as a Kerry specialist. He’s been associated with two of the greatest smear artist presidents in Republican history — Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.
I posted this earlier, but it’s due for a repeat. Here’s O’Neill with his mentors, the convicted felon Charles Colson and the pardoned Tricky Dick back in the day:
Colson was Nixon’s point man against Kerry, and he found a weapon in another veteran: John O’Neill. He was a spokesman for Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace, which backed Nixon administration policy in Vietnam, and in turn was supported by the White House.
Fresh out of the Navy like Kerry, O’Neill was angry at Kerry for saying U.S. servicemen in Vietnam routinely committed war crimes. The weekend before the Washington protests, Kerry made the accusations on NBC’s Meet the Press, saying, “I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed, in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones.” And, Kerry claimed, “I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All this is contrary to the laws of warfare.”
John O’Neill hit back at Kerry with administration-orchestrated press appearances of his own, including a news conference that June. O’Neill asked rhetorically, “Shall Mr. Kerry and his little group of one thousand or twelve thousand embittered men be allowed to represent their views as that of all veterans, because they can appear on every news program? I hope not, for the country’s sake.”
After the news conference, O’Neill met with Charles Colson at the White House, where the attack on Kerry was seen as a public relations coup. In a conversation with the president, Haldeman gave the credit to Charles Colson, and raved about John O’Neill:
Haldeman: — crew cut, real sharp looking guy who is more articulate than Kerry. He’s not as eloquent; he isn’t the ham that Kerry is. But he’s more believable. [edit]
Haldeman: This guy now, is gonna, he’s gonna move on Kerry.
The White House encouraged O’Neill to challenge Kerry to a debate. Kerry agreed and before the event, President Nixon called O’Neill into the Oval Office for a pep talk. “It’s a great service to the country,” declared the president.
Nixon: Give it to him, give it to him. And you can do it, because you have a pleasant manner, too, because you’ve got — and I think it’s a great service to the country. [edit]
Nixon: You fellows have been out there. You’ve got to know, seeing the barbarians that we’re up against, you’ve got to know what we’re doing in that horrible swamp that North Vietnam is. You’ve got to know from all our faults of what we have in this country that, that what we’re doing is right. You’ve got to know too, people are critics. Critics of the war, critics of [unint], run America down. [edit] You’ve gotta know that you’re on the winning s-that, that you’re on the right side.
Two weeks later, the veterans squared off on the popular Dick Cavett show:
O’Neill: Mr. Kerry is the type of person who lives and survives only on the war weariness and fears of the American people. This is the same little man who on nationwide television in April spoke of, quote, crimes committed on a day to day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.
Kerry: We believe as veterans who took part in this war we have nothing to gain by coming back here and talking about those things that have happened except to try and point the way to America, to try and say, here is where we went wrong, and we’ve got to change.
Later that year, even as the war continued, Kerry left the increasingly radical Vietnam Veterans Against the War. But the Nixon White House kept after John Kerry. It’s said that when Kerry ran for Congress in 1972, Nixon stayed up late on election night until he knew for sure that Kerry had been defeated.
You can’t have better character references than Haldeman, Colson and Nixon. That association speaks for itself. John O’Neill has done nothing noteworthy in his life except oppose John Kerry. Indeed, he barely exists as a human being being except for his opposition to John Kerry.
And the fact that John Kerry has been keeping Republicans up nights for more than 30 years also speaks for itself. That election Nixon was so worried about was the first and only election John Kerry lost.
Here’s Crusader Codpiece assuring the Iraqi people that “democracy” and American goodness and rightness would ensure justice in the Abu Ghraib matter:
It’s also important for the people of Iraq to know that in a democracy, everything is not perfect, that mistakes are made. But in a democracy, as well, those mistakes will be investigated and people will be brought to justice. We’re an open society. We’re a society that is willing to investigate, fully investigate in this case, what took place in that prison.
That stands in stark contrast to life under Saddam Hussein. His trained torturers were never brought to justice under his regime. There were no investigations about mistreatment of people. There will be investigations. People will be brought to justice.
Here’s reality, from an interesting piece by Philip Carter on Slate:
The Army’s official Inspector General report on Abu Ghraib—in stark contrast to the Taguba report, which found systemic problems with detainee treatment in Iraq, or the reporting of Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, which traced the blame chain from Iraq all the way to Washington—blames a few individuals and leaders for the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Never mind that 94 separate incidents of abuse were uncovered by the report—with most happening at the time and place of capture, not at some central prison locations where a few bad apples happened to work. The Army was “unable to identify system failures that resulted in incidents of abuse.”
It defies both reason and common sense to cite 94 separate incidents of detainee mistreatment, yet determine there were no systemic issues (like training, insufficient troop strength, and unclear legal rules) to fault.
[…]
Instead of promoting responsibility and the rule of law, the Army appears to care more for the Washingtonian principles of damage control and spin.
Meanwhile our vaunted regard for justice, fairness and the rule of law hasn’t kept them from undermining the ruling of the Supreme Court in the Guantanamo cases either:
… the administration announced its intention to deny Guantanamo Bay detainees full access to counsel to prepare their habeas corpus petitions and signaled that it would resume its relentless legal tactics to fight the detainees in the courts on a host of procedural issues. The administration also started to move forward with two sets of legal proceedings—Combatant Status Review Tribunals and military commissions—to adjudicate the status of Gitmo detainees. These hearings purport to benefit the detainees, but may, in fact, end up hurting more than helping them.
[…]
The Justice Department’s lawyers make no attempt to hide this legal strategy. In footnote 14 of their filing before the federal district court in Washington, D.C., in Al-Odah v. United States, the administration’s lawyers explicitly reserve the right to litigate niggling procedural issues, such as whether this is the proper defendant in a habeas corpus action, and the proper location for such suits. There is some irony here, because those are the two grounds the Supreme Court used to kick back the lawsuit by Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen held as an enemy combatant in South Carolina. Even though the Justice Department lost in the other two terrorism cases before the Supreme Court, it now hopes to use the same procedural tactics it used to defeat Padilla’s claim to avoid petitions for habeas corpus from detainees at Guantanamo. The strategy appears the same: deny every right, and fight every claim, for as long as possible, so that interrogations and intelligence collection at Gitmo can continue unimpeded by legal process.
(May I just say here that the legal beagle Talking Dog had this one pegged from the get-go. He said immediately that it would be Padilla that would rule, with the military and the justice department using every niggling procedural rule they could to keep any of these guys from ever seeing the inside of a courtroom.)
Carter finds an interesting (and apt) analogy to the administration’s legal strategy with the reactionaries’ response to the segregation cases. Drag your feet kicking and screaming in every court in the land for as long as you can.
But, he also points out that the bigger issue — if there is a bigger issue than craven immorality — is that it is vitally important the the US demonstrate at least some of what Junior was spouting in that completely insincere interview on Arab TV. That is our alleged committment to the rule of law. There are people in the world, specifically non-radical muslims who are following this story a lot closer than Americans are. This could be a chance to tip them in our direction by showing them something in our system that truly is superior to the autocratic rule under which they currently live.
Instead, we are, once again, playing into bin Laden’s hands. The prisoners at Gitmo are useless for intelligence at this point. It would be so easy for us to simply do the right thing and reap the benefit of showing our system to have some real corrective aspects. But, we won’t under Bush. Like the segregationists, they would rather eat nails than admit they lost.
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The FBI announced Friday that the government has received a new, unsubstantiated terrorist threat against U.S. financial institutions — a threat, sources said, that was to be carried out by al Qaeda operatives.
‘Unspecified terrorists are considering physical attacks against U.S. financial institutions in the Northeast, particularly banks, as part of their campaign against U.S. financial interests,’ the FBI said.
Sources said the information indicated a possible mode of attack was suicide bombing.
The information that led to the alert, the sources said, came from a variety of intelligence sources, including al Qaeda detainees captured as part of the ongoing war against terrorism. Law enforcement learned the information in the last couple of days, the sources said. “
According to this very handy timeline done by Julius, this information didn’t merit a full fledged terror alert at the time. It appears that they like to keep a threat or two in reserve in case they need to change the subject really fast.
