Michael Moore's third column is a real downer. He wants Bush to apologize to every parent of every soldier killed in Iraq.

I'd like to hear Clinton apologize to the American people for the years that he spent pursuing ineffective ways of capturing Bin Laden. I'd like to hear Kerry apologize to the millions of veterans he defamed and to the Vietnamese boat people. I'd like to hear Al Gore apologize for insisting that he had won the election no matter how many recounts said otherwise. I'd like to hear Moore apologize for claiming that we invaded Afghanistan for no other reason than for an oil company to build a gas pipeline. It might even be appropriate for Bush's father, G.H.W.Bush to apologize for leaving Saddam in power, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions.

But for George. W. Bush and Iraq, I don't think that an apology in needed. Saddam and his sons killed a lot of people, Iraqi and others. The sanctions that kept Saddam from re-arming caused the death of somewhere between 300,000 and 3,000,000 Iraqis.

Democrats seem to place a very high value on American lives and a very low value on foreigners. A national leader should always put his own people first but there are limits. For every American who died since the liberation of Iraq, thirty or more Iraqis died during the sanctions. What percentage would make Michael Moore happy - 40-1, 50-1, 1,000-1? This happened in Kosovo. In order to prevent any American casualties, the bombers stayed so high that some bombs missed their mark. Personally, I would prefer that one or two Americans died than have a cluster bomb explode in the middle of a busy open-air market killing dozens.

Michael Moore wants Bush to apologize because Americans died in Iraq. Who will apologize to Iraq for the number of Iraqis dead since the end of the Gulf War?

We were expecting Iraq to cheer us as liberators but they were too wary. They trusted us in 1991 and we deserted them. Kerry has said that he will desert them again by this time next year if the uprising is still going on and he can't talk the French into dying in our place.

The terrorists in Iraq watch TV. They know what Kerry will do. This encourages them just as it did North Viet Nam.

Will Kerry apologize for this?

The Kerry campaign added a bunch of new staffers, most of them from the Clinton administration. The Kerry campaign is trying to put a good face on this but you don't reorganize a winning team.

The Kerry campaign has been saying for weeks that they have the election sewn up, that the undecideds will all vote against the status quo. Now they are getting worried. They should be. Up to this point, Kerry campaign didn't have a message, just a service record. The Republicans spent the night defining Kerry's Senate record. With two months left, it's pretty late to invent a message, or even make their candidate likeable. (Note the Zogby poll in which only 16% find Kerry personally likeable.)

Did her really say that? This is an entry from Kerry's rapid response team (emphasis added).

Bush Distorts Kerry’s Position. While the Bush campaign continues to distort Kerry’s position, Kerry in fact believes that now would be a dangerous time to pull troops out of nuclear-armed North Korea and further fray our alliances in Europe at a time when we need them more then ever. Bush and Cheney themselves have pointed to the need to keep our troops in the Korean Peninsula.

We have troops in North Korea?

Seriously, I've said it before, pulling troops out of Korea is a good idea. The South Koreans are protesting our continued presence. There are too few troops to do any good. The only reason that they are there is as a sacrifice - if they are killed by the North Koreans then we can justify a full-fledged counter attack. Is this what Kerry is for? Is this still an option when Korea might be able to nuke Japan or even the US?

It makes even more sense to pull troops out of Germany. They were there to stop or slow an invasion of western Europe by the USSR using East Germany as a staging ground. Since the USSR and East Germany no longer exists, what are we doing there? (Besides sending money to Germany that could be going to American businesses?)

Here's something I missed when writing about Michael Moore's 2nd column.

Thousands of Republicans turned to me chanting "Four more years." I thought,
"That's strange, Republicans are usually good at math, but they're off by a few
dozen months. Bush only has two months left." So I held up two fingers to
correct their miscalculation. But that just drove them into more of a
frenzy.

Maybe they can count better than Mike. Even if Bush loses, he has four more months and a couple of weeks (inauguration is January 20, 2005).

Islamic radicals in Russia have seized a school full of children and are holding them hostage. You probably already heard that but it bears repeating. They are holding 400 people, half of them school children. I don't care what you politics are, this is wrong.

Michael Moore has his second column posted at USAToday. His column was about McCain's attack on Moore himself. Moore says:

So it was Monday night, as I sat in the press section unbeknownst to Sen. McCain when he switched from pro-war convention speaker to film critic. Out of nowhere, he began to attack my movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, calling me a "disingenuous filmmaker." The problem is, he hasn't seen the movie, a fact he later admitted to Chris Matthews on MSNBC.

Here's what McCain had to say about Moore:

And certainly not a disingenuous film maker who would have us believe that Saddam's Iraq was an oasis of peace when in fact it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture chambers, mass graves and prisons that destroyed the lives of the small children held inside their walls.

That's it. One sentence. Of course, in Moore's inflated self-view, he probably heard this as a half-hour attack. Moore spends his entire column attacking back. He continues:

Some of the 20 million who have seen the film must have wondered, "Did I miss that scene? I knew I shouldn't have gone out for those Goobers." All I can imagine McCain was referring to was a brief cutaway just as President Bush announces the commencement of the bombing of Baghdad on March 19, 2003.

Possibly Moore forgot the contents of his own movie. It may have been brief but it made an impression. First there was a scene of children flying kites in Baghdad. A bit later a voice-over said this:

>NARRATOR: On March 19, 2003, George W. Bush and the United States military invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq. A nation that had never attacked the United States. A nation that had never threatened to attack the United States. A nation that had never murdered a single American citizen.

Boy, that sure sounds to me like what McCain was talking about.

Once again, Moore forgot that he is supposed to be writing a humorous column. He just rants on for a bit.

Here is an interesting link. It is a flyer that the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War distributed in the 1970s. This was the group that Kerry founded. This is another example of Kerry insisting that anyone who served in the war is dirty.

Word is that the newest SwiftVets ad will be about Kerry throwing away his medals. This would be the same medals that he has been brandishing for the last eight months.

Bashing Viet Nam veterans. A new talking point against Bush is that his operatives have defamed the records of three Viet Nam veterans in the last four years.

How about Kerry's record on this? His operatives and the press have defamed 250+ members of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as liars.

Most recently, Rear Admiral Schachte said that he was there when Kerry won his first Purple Heart and there was no return fire. The Kerry campaign dug up that (like a majority of veterans), Schachte has donated moderate sums of money to the Bush campaign ($1,000 in 2000 and 2004). He is also associated with Blank Rome, a lobbying firm that won a $40 million contract last February. Plus, the chairman of the RNC is associated with the Blank Rome office in Washington, DC.

The connection to Blank Rome isn't as solid as Kerry's supporters make it out to be. Blank Rome's office says that he has retired although their web site still lists him as "of council".

The Kerry campaign has said, "It's amazing what a $40 million government contract can do for your memory."

So the Kerry campaign is reduced to saying that a decorated Viet Nam vet. Accepted a bribe in the form of a federal contract to lie about Kerry's record.

If that isn't enough, remember, in 1971 Kerry defamed all Viet Nam veterans by saying before Congress that atrocities were being performed on a daily basis.

Al Jazeera ran an article denouncing the kidnapping of the French journalists. It turns out that it is all the fault of the US.

However, the statement held the United States and its occupation army
"responsible for fostering an atmosphere of anarchy and chaos in Iraq" which
makes "these repugnant acts inevitable".

Surprised to see Michael Moore at the Republican National Convention? He was there with press credentials from USAToday. In order to give both sides a voice, they hired columnists from the opposing side to write humorous pieces during the conventions.

Mike turned in his first column. It isn't funny. It isn't even amusing. He has two points. First he says that the Republicans are not in hostile territory. I hope that the protest groups read this. Some of them wanted to shut down the city because Republicans are so foreign to NYC.

For his other point, he wandered around and asked people (not necessarily delegates) a couple of questions. From this he concluded:

Hanging out around the convention, I've encountered a number of the Republican
faithful who aren't delegates. They warm up to me when they don't find horns or
a tail. Talking to them, I discover they're like many people who call themselves
Republicans but aren't really Republicans. At least not in the radical-right way
that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and Co. have defined
Republicans.

This is misleading (A Michael Moore trademark). What he really means is that they are not radical-right in the way that he has defined Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, and Co. We see this in his leading questions:

I asked one man who told me he was a "proud Republican," "Do you think we need
strong laws to protect our air and water?"

"Well, sure," he said. "Who doesn't?"

I asked whether women should have equal rights, including the same pay as men.

"Absolutely," he replied.

"Would you discriminate against someone because he or she is gay?"

"Um, no." The pause — I get that a lot when I ask this question — is usually because the average good-hearted person instantly thinks about a gay family member or friend.

There's a name for these Republicans: RINOs or Republican In Name Only. They possess a liberal, open mind and don't believe in creating a worse life for anyone else.

What Michael has done here is exaggerate the Republican's actual positions into extreme yes/no questions. I suspect that he would have gotten very different answers had he asked,

"Are you in favor of making current environmental laws much stronger and more intrusive even if there is no proven link with improved health?"

"Do you think that an outside agency should regulate wages in order to promote fairness between dissimilar jobs?" (or "Do you think that someone who has taken a couple of years off for personal reasons should get the same pay as someone who has worked continuously?"

"Are you in favor of gay marriage?"

If Michael had asked these revised questions to the people attending the DNC, he probably would have concluded that they were Democrat in Name Only.

Cute rhetorical trick isn't it?

Here's another one:

Let me also say I admire your resolve. You're true believers. Even though only a
third of the country defines itself as "Republican," you control the White
House, Congress, Supreme Court and most state governments.

The trick here is in the third sentence. 40+% of the country identifies itself as Republican. That's more than 1/3. It is also more than identify themselves as Democrat. "Control" is a loaded word, also. Around 2/3s of the state governments are Republican. Congress is around 52%-48% Republican and the Supreme Court is 5-4 conservative on many issues. That's pretty consistent with the population spread.

One might ask how the Democrats ended up controlling the White House and both houses of Congress in 1992 with fewer members that the Republicans?

His resolution:

The Republican Party's leadership knows America is not only filled with RINOs,
but most Americans are much more liberal than the delegates gathered in New
York. The Republicans know it. That's why this week we're seeing gay-loving
Rudy Giuliani, gun-hating Michael Bloomberg and abortion-rights advocate Arnold
Schwarzenegger.

And you think that the DNC delegates weren't more liberal than the average American?

After years of demonizing Republicans, Michael rubbed shoulders with them and found out that they are regular folks. Many people would question their long-held beliefs. Not Michael. He decided that these people aren't really Republicans.

I think that it is a measure of why the Republicans have had so much success that Mike can ask this question. Name an anti-abortion Democrat? A pro-gun one? An anti-gay one (ok, there are some anti-gay black Democrats)?

The Democrats insist on a level of ideological purity that the Republicans reject. Yes, there are Republicans who dislike all three of these speakers because of their views but they are still in the party. Can you imagine a Democrat who rejects a central party precept being a speaker at the DNC? You don't even have to imagine, just look at the speakers. The closest was Obama who implied that he was against racial quotas (time will tell if this was empty rhetoric).

Over at TechCentralStation, they predicted that the press would do exactly what Moore did - write a storyline before the convention event started.

My colleague and TCS host James K. Glassman recently highlighted two other
Laphams in a convention preview. Glassman pointed out that the establishment media will portray "Republicans like yahoos and religious fanatics." But what about those high-profile Republicans who share some establishment media values? For example, convention speakers Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rudy Giuliani are pro-choice. And John McCain buys into green dogma on global warming and favors restrictions on political speech. For these Republicans, the media will roll out another Lapham to round out the picture. As Glassman puts it, they'll be "portrayed in the media as weird anomalies." (As if on cue, NBC's Tom Brokaw included in his Sunday broadcast the Lapham that the GOP was engaged in a "con game" by having Schwarzenegger, McCain and Giuliani speak.)

More on the Kerry daughters. According to other blogs, the Bush twins were there, too but got silence instead of boos. There was cheering for the Kerry girls but you could hear the boos, also. Considering that cheers are louder than boos...

Watch is here.

CNN says it was the Bush girls who were booed. This is contradicted here.

The French have discovered that there are no non-combatants in the war on terrorism. This is a quandary for them. The headscarf rule shouldn't be worth anyone's life but if they give in then who knows what the next demand will be. This is why it was so bad for the Philippines to give in a few weeks ago. Once you let violent people know how easy it is to hold hostages then this becomes their primary weapon.

In 1999, one of G.H.W.Bush's first problems was how to deal with hostages being held in Lebanon. Bush stationed warships off the coast and announced that he would start shelling the city if the hostages were not released by noon. It worked.

In an interview this morning, President Bush admitted that we might never win the war on terrorism. He was correct and his critics have been saying this since he first coined the term. Like the war on drugs and the war on crime, it is an open-ended conflict with no organized opponent to surrender. It was a nuanced statement, the sort of thing that Bush is supposed to be too stupid to say.

Edwards has already picked up on it, proclaiming that he and Kerry will win the war on terrorism. I guess that he doesn't do nuance.

On Nightline tonight, Ted Kopel ended up defending Bush against the Democrats. Who would have thought it?

There was an article in the Columbus Dispatch over the weekend about how the average Egyptian hates us. (no links - you have to be a paid subscriber.)

To summarize, in the 1990s 70+% of Egyptians hated us. Now 99% of them do and it is all Bush's fault.

It is interesting reading an article like this and finding the glaring omission. It's like a hidden picture puzzle.

What we are told is that the images of Israel subjugating the Palestinians is inflammatory. They blame us for everything that Sharon and Israel does. It is all Bush's fault for allowing this.

So what is missing here? Have you spotted it? It's subtle.

Al Jazeera! In the last four years, there has been explosive growth in satellite dishes in the Arab world. They are tuning in to Al Jazeera by the millions. And Al Jazeera has a huge pro-Palestinian, anti-USA slant. Their web site currently has a special report on how Israel is about to have the USA bomb Iran's nuclear reactors in order to preserve Israel's nuclear monopoly.

Those images that they see of Palestinians? They are all being watched on Al Jazeera.

This would be true no matter who was President.

See? Just like a puzzle, once you see the hidden piece it is obvious.

In case you think that Al Jazeera is neutral, check out this feature story.

Having succeeded in getting the United States to invade and occupy Iraq, Israel is now making efforts to instigate the Bush administration to deal with the "Iranian threat".

According to the Drudge Report, the Kerry daughters were booed as well as cheered on the MTV awards. When they asked people to vote for their father the boos were louder than the cheers. Interesting since the youth vote is usually considered to be disproportionately liberal and MTV's audience is supposed to be even further to the left. This is the whole point of the drives to increase young-voter turn-out. Maybe conventional wisdom hasn't been updated since Viet Nam. Note - the same thing happened to Michael Moore during his 2003 acceptance speech for his Oscar.

While web-surfing last night I saw an argument that a Bush lose would help the conservatives. No matter what the ABBers say, Bush is largely a tax-break and spend, moderate instead of a limited government Reaganite. The theory is that four years out of power during the Carter days caused Republicans to regroup under Reagan.

There are several problems with this theory. The biggest is that being out of power makes a party settle. Eight year out under Clinton and the Republicans settled on Bush even though his reputation in 2000 was as a moderate. Twelve years out of power and the Democrats settled for Clinton, also a moderate. The biggest qualification for the current Democratic challenger was not "Do I represent the party", it was "Do I stand the best chance of beating Bush?" That is how Kerry got the nomination.

So, if Bush loses, the next candidate will be even more moderate.

Speaking of Kerry, how many people actually know where he stands on the issues? Most Kerry supporters think that he thinks the same as they do. Test yourself. Is Kerry for or against the following issues:

1. Troops in Iraq
2. Global Warming
3. Off-shoring of workers
4. Bush's tax breaks
5. Preemptive wars

Answers:

1. For it. He would like to see more foreign troops in Iraq but he is on record as being against a pull-out even if we don't get and foreign help.
2. For it (against Kyoto). His energy policy calls for cheaper oil prices. This means more emissions. He also wants to burn more coal and natural gas.
3. For it as long as there are no tax advantages.
4. For them for most of the population. This is one of Kerry's nuanced views since he wants to repeal them for people making more than $200,000 and give even more to people making less than that. Many of his other proposals would help the "rich"
5. For them although he would ask for more foreign (French and German) support.

(All answers either taken from Kerry's web site or from direct interviews with the candidate.)

So what are we left with? The ABB conviction that even if Kerry makes the same choices as George Bush, things would somehow turn out better because Kerry isn't Bush.

It's not JibJab.com but it's close. Check out Moore/Bush.

The Chicago Sun/Times has been looking onto Kerry's records. It gets confusing. There are all sorts of irregularities. One of them is the "V" designation for his Silver Star.

B.G. Burkett, a Vietnam veteran himself, received the highest award the Army gives to a civilian, the Distinguished Civilian Service Award, for his book Stolen Valor. Burkett pored through thousands of military service records, uncovering phony claims of awards and fake claims of military service. "I've run across several claims for Silver Stars with combat V's, but they were all in fake records," he said

.

Then there is the fact that there are three citations for the award.

Maj. Anthony Milavic, a retired Marine Vietnam veteran, calls the issuance of three citations for the same medal "bizarre." Milavic hosts Milinet, an Internet forum popular with the military community that is intended "to provide a forum in military/political affairs."

Normally in the case of a lost citation, Milavec points out, the awardee simply asked for a copy to be sent to him from his service personnel records office where it remains on file. "I have never heard of multi-citations from three different people for the same medal award," he said. Nor has Burkett: "It is even stranger to have three different descriptions of the awardee's conduct in the citations for the same award."

The last of these citations raises its own questions.

Former Navy Secretary John Lehman has no idea where a Silver Star citation displayed on Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's campaign Web site came from, he said Friday. The citation appears over Lehman's signature.

"It is a total mystery to me. I never saw it. I never signed it. I never approved it. And the additional language it contains was not written by me," he said.

That's what Kerry gets for running on his war record from 35 years ago in an unpopular war instead of running on his senate record.

Of course, his senate record has a problem, also. For most of 2003 and 2004, he has been AWOL from the senate. He didn't resign from the senate but he has been bush campaigning. The result is that he has only made a few (I think it is two) votes this year. That led to this counter-protest.

The Veterans for Kerry were met by another veterans group calling themselves Veterans for Working Senators who are protesting Kerry's poor attendance record in his day job. According to this Berkshire Eagle report the Veterans for Working Senators complaint boils down to:

"We have no reason to question your [Kerry's] service in the jungles of Vietnam. But we have many questions about your service in the jungles of Washington, D.C.," the letter stated. "To use a military term, you have been absent without leave from the halls of Congress. Even worse, you have continued to accept your full salary for what amounts to a no-show job."

Is the Electoral College a good thing or a bad thing? The Weekly Standard has some interesting points on this.

That belongs to the late Martin Diamond, whose classic work on the keep-it side, The Electoral College and the American Idea of Democracy, is excerpted here. This brilliant essay, first published in 1977, reminds us that, like the U.S. Senate, the Electoral College embodies the federalist principle by which the American states were successfully united after the failure of the Articles of Confederation. The effect of the Electoral College is not to make us less democratic, but to make federal as well. Here's how Diamond puts it:

"In fact, presidential elections are already just about as democratic as they can be. We already have one man, one vote--but in the states. Elections are as freely and democratically contested as elections can be--but in the states. Victory always goes democratically to the winner of the raw popular vote--but in the states. The label given to the proposed reform--"direct popular election"--is a misnomer: the elections have already become as directly popular as they can be--but in the states. Despite all their democratic rhetoric, the reformers do not propose to make our presidential elections more directly democratic; they only propose to make them more directly national, by entirely removing the states from the electoral process. Democracy thus is not the question regarding the electoral college; federalism is. Should our presidential elections remain in part federally democratic, or should we make them completely nationally democratic?

"Whatever we decide, then, democracy itself is not at stake in our decision, only the prudential question of how to channel and organize the popular will."

After 2000, the practical wisdom of avoiding election of the president in one vast national district ought to be obvious. In 2000, state boundaries acted as firewalls, containing the uncertainty in one state. Imagine a virtual tie on a national scale--a nation-sized Florida. Lawyers for the parties would have every incentive to leap into action demanding recounts in thousands, or tens of thousands, of precincts across the land, with no sure result in sight.

Think about who is complaining and why. Would they really think it was a travesty if Gore had won the Electoral College and Bush has won the popular vote? In early November, many pollsters expected this to happen and Gore had already being asked if he would consider his election valid even if he did not win a majority of the popular vote.

Probably if the results had been switched, MoveOn would be running ads about how the Electoral College saved us from Bush and should be preserved (and the Republicans would have spent the last four years muttering).

A few thoughts on Eric Alterman. I know, picking on the deranged isn't nice but I'm going to do it anyway.

First, he announced today that he is going to quit reading his emails. His assistant will do this and pass the nice ones along to Eric. I can understand him not wanting to see the abusive ones but that also implies that intelligent critiques of his work will also get weeded out. Alterman is building a happy bubble around himself.

Here is what he had to say yesterday:

It’s amazing and a bit disgusting that our election seems to be turning on
a war that took place thirty years ago in which the man who served honorably
both in the war and in the anti-war movement is on the defensive against the man
who supported the war but took a pass on any service or sacrifice it might have
involved, but there it is. Given that we have no choice but to engage the
issue, let’s think about it for a moment and see if we can isolate the kinds of
decisions that faced young men in those dark days when American leaders—as they
are doing today—unjustly sent America’s youth to pay for their own folly and
ignorance.

Recall that only privileged Americans had a choice as to whether
to fight in Vietnam. The sons of poor and working-class people did not
have access to educational deferments and hence were unceremoniously sent to the
firing line. Given that, here are a few categories of the choices faced
and the choices made, in what I judge to be descending order of moral fortitude.

Yes, it is amazing and disgusting that Viet Nam has become such a hot topic for today's election. I blame the Democrats for this.

First, Michael Moore dredged up Bush's "missing months" in the Guard. This had already been investigated in 2000 but the press is still bringing it up. There's nothing there but they keep hoping.

Next, the Democrats nominated a candidate on the basis of four months spent in Viet Nam 35 years ago. Kerry didn't run on his record as a senator or an anti-war protester. He ran on his record as a war hero. That makes both his actual war record and his anti-war record fair game.

The newest pro-Kerry attacks talk about Bush being a coward for not serving. Alterman touches on this:

Contradicting one’s alleged convictions in the service of protecting one’s
posterior

Supported the war, preferred to let others fight and die for it (George W.
Bush, Dick Cheney)

This seems to me to be the least defensible position imaginable. Bush
and Cheney both used their privileged positions to protect themselves; Cheney
says he did it because he had “other priorities.” Bush says he did it
because he wanted to “better himself” by learning to fly planes. Whether
he deserted his post or not—and I think he did-- it is incontrovertible that he
wasted the government’s million dollar investment in his training by allowing
his qualifications to lapse while he was still supposed to be on active
duty. (And what if during this period, the Guard was actually needed,
if say, Oklahoma had invaded Texas?)

So, Bush's actions are indefensible even though he took a legal and acceptable alternative to service in Viet Nam. The same for Cheney. Neither one is fit to serve office because they didn't volunteer to go to Viet Nam 30+ years ago.

It doesn't matter how well Bush has done as a war president or how thin Kerry's accomplishments during his four terms in the Senate are. All that matters is what they did during Viet Nam.

Then there is this:

Category A: Exhibiting the strength of one’s moral convictions.

Supported the war and served in Vietnam (John Kerry, John
McCain)
Opposed the war and served in Vietnam because it would have been
unfair to force someone less fortunate to take one’s place (Al Gore)

Opposed the war and dedicated oneself to anti-war movement at some
personal risk, including conscientious objection. (This position is not as
dangerous as serving in a war, but it is nevertheless just as moral. The war was
evil. Putting oneself at legal and physical risk as many did to try to end
this evil strikes me as an unimpeachable moral position, though given America’s
political culture, it would also be untenable for any contemporary presidential
candidate to hold.)

Alterman doesn't say it here but he counts Kerry in this group twice. Once for going and once for protesting. (As an aside, I should point out that Gore didn't volunteer to save some poor slob from the draft, he was trying to save his father's reelection and he knew that he wouldn't be in combat.)

Kerry is not so solidly in the first group as Alterman paints him. According to his own biography, he volunteered for swift boat duty when he thought that it would be close enough to the action to help his resume but still safely away from the front ranks. He was livid when the swift boats were re-assigned and he go out as fast as he could.

It is Kerry's actions as a protester that really got the debate going. After reading the list of charges he makes against the servicemen in Viet Nam, you wonder why anyone would blame Bush for not volunteering to go. Kerry never retracted those statements but his current campaign ignores them instead.

Had Kerry renounced his anti-war rhetoric last year the SwiftVets probably would never have formed. Kerry is running now on a record he rejected in 1971. It is only fair to puncture a few holes in his inflated picture of himself.

Again, if Kerry had offered anything except his war record it would hardly be an issue. Instead he sold himself as someone qualified to lead the war on terrorism because he spent a few weeks in a shooting war 35 years ago.

I miss Dean. At least he seemed to have a little substance.

And a final thought:

Recall that only privileged Americans had a choice as to whether to fight in
Vietnam. The sons of poor and working-class people did not have access to
educational deferments and hence were unceremoniously sent to the firing line.

This is untrue. I knew a lot of working-class people who went to college just to avoid the draft. None of these people were rich or privileged. They got scholarships and took out student loans.

Also, everyone who served with Kerry volunteered. The draft was only for the Army and Marines. (Although some people volunteered for the Navy and Air Force just before they could be drafted.)

Lowered expectations. Near the end of his appearance on the Daily Show, Kerry said this:

Well, that's the test of debates. I mean, look, the President has won every debate he's ever had. People need to understand that. He beat Ann Richards. He beat Al Gore. So he's a good debater. And debates are sort of formulaic.

I know that it has been months since Iowa and New Hampshire but still... Kerry won those states on three points:

1. I'm a Viet Nam war hero.
2. Wouldn't you love seeing me debate George Bush?
3. Bring it on!

That was it, the sum of his early campaign. Now he is warning us that Bush will win the debate. What happened?

Funny how two people can look at the same data and come up with different conclusions. Eric Alterman looks at a site called the Slant-O-meter sees that Fox has more critical coverage of Kerry than Bush and sees evidence of a right-wing slime-machine. I look at the rest of the chart which shows that the big three networks are far more critical of Bush than Kerry and I see evidence that the mainstream media is biased against Bush. NBC is especially bad about it, much more pronounced than Fox.

Adeimantus writes that we have a domestic truce on Viet Nam which Kerry violated. It is worth while examining how this truce came about.

The following is based on my own personal recollections. I grew up during Viet Nam and was registered for the draft when the war ended.

In the early days of the war it was just that - a war. People were drafted or enlisted. Some of them went to Viet Nam. It was dangerous. If they came back safely then they were veterans - someone who gained a little respect for having served his country and survived.

This didn't really change until reports of wartime atrocities started getting out. At first these seemed like isolated incidents but more kept coming out. Added to this was the testimony of people like John Kerry saying that atrocities comparable with Gengus Khan were being committed daily. The impression was that everyone who fought in the war was dirty. Added to this was reports of delayed stress and flashbacks.

The surest way to discredit a war is to discredit the people fighting it. Why continue the war if we were sending a generation over to either be killed or to be corrupted?

I don't know how many vets were actually called baby-killers but that was the impression we had of them. This continued until the late 1970s through the mid-1980s.

Eventually things changed. The anti-war activists had been telling us that North Viet Nam was better than South Viet Nam and that things would be fine if we just got out of the war. After the fall of Saigon they couldn't keep saying that. North Viet Nam turned out to be more ruthless than anyone dreamed. Most of the activists admitted that they had been wrong. A few even admitted that war against North Viet Nam had been a good thing, after all.

Jane Fonda never apologized, though. John Kerry never apologized, either.

Then came Rambo. It was the 1980s, Reagan was president and we had a movie hero running through the swamps of Viet Nam killing Viet Cong and Russians (who sounded German). By then we knew that the North Vietnamese had not beaten us. We had beaten ourselves. The Vietnamese knew what was happening in America. They knew that they would win if they just kept fighting long enough.

The national mood changed. A record called "19" became a hit. The title came from the average age of American combat troops in Viet Nam. It pointed out that the veterans had never gotten a parade.

The new feeling about Viet Nam was that we would have won it if our troops had been allowed to "finish the job".

That is where the truce on Viet Nam came from:

(1) Those who participated in the war, with the exception of anyone at or
above the rank of general officer, are entitled to public honor for their
service.

(2) Those who actively opposed the war, with the exception of the most
extreme Jane Fonda-types, are not to be branded as cowards or traitors to their
country.

There were a few minor violations of the truce. Dan Quayle had joined the National Guard and Bill Clinton had joined the ROTC then dropped out as soon as he knew he was unlikely to be drafted.

In 2000, Al Gore tried to make an issue of his service vs. Bush's. Gore probably hurt himself with this since he portrayed himself as having been in combat. In actuality, he was a Army reporter covering a construction crew that was never on the front lines. He also had a short tour of service and it was obvious that his father had pulled strings.

Bush, of course, took the Guard route. The fact that he was a pilot while Gore was a reporter might have helped Bush a bit. Stories about Bush being AWOL came and went without being a major factor.

Then came Kerry.

The second part of the truce applies here - Kerry is in the Jane Fonda class of war protesters. He hung out with her, he organized major protests, he testified before Congress, he even made Nixon's enemies list.

You would think that he would be running on this. Here was his chance. He was a warrior-turned-protester-turned politician. You would think that he could use this unique synthesis to find an anti-war platform that would have captured the nomination.

It didn't happen. Instead he ignored his protester days and ran as a decorated veteran. He was too busy trying to run against Bush's strength as a war president that he erased half of his own war-time history.

That's what got the SwiftVets upset. In 1971 he said terrible things about them. Without retracting his statements before Congress he is running as one of them.

Kerry's defenders point out that atrocities (are we still using that word?) like the ones listed by Kerry actually happened.

Yes, but were they the rule or the exception? Kerry said that they happened daily and implied that everyone did them.

Kerry often tries to be on all sides of an issue. He was a veteran but he threw his medals away except he still has them and is proud of them. He was in Viet Nam and served heroically except he played the system to end his tour of duty eight months early and to get medals for exaggerated events.

Reasons to vote for Bush

Competence. The Clinton years were one stumble after another. His only major piece of legislation, health care, died. Files vanished only to show up in secure quarters. Bimbos kept giving new stories about their affair after another. Even in his final hours, Clinton filtched some White House furniture and pardoned friends of donors.

None of this happened with Bush. With the exception of Iraq, he had rough spots but no real stumbles. Some people have attributed this to the Vice-President but Bush is more than Cheney's sock puppet.

A frequent criticism of Bush is that his administration is too unilateral. This is false. Look at his approach to Korea, Iran, and Libya. If anything, he has been too multilateral.

He is also frequently criticized for being too ideological but that is not reflected in the budget. If anything, he is too much of a centrist. A real Reagan Republican would have been cutting the budget instead of letting it grow. Bush's centrist beliefs leave him too soft-hearted to make any needed cuts.

This and his reluctance to fire anyone are his main failings as a President. At least a few heads should have rolled by now for something.

Bush's pre-9/11 response to bin Laden was a good one. Instead of following Clinton's ineffective attempts to assassinate bin Laden, Bush asked for an entirely new approach. 9/11 happened before he got it but even Richard Clark admitted that the policies he was pushing would not have averted 9/11.

The War on Terror. Afghanistan was Russia's Viet Nam. The same thing was supposed to have happened to us. It didn't because Bush insisted on new ideas. There are tradeoffs. We conquered Afghanistan in a few weeks because we used limited ground troops and depended on local allies. This might have helped bin Laden escape. On the other hand, if we had gone in with overwhelming force, we might still be fighting. The Russians showed us what sort of invasion doesn't work.

As for Iraq, I firmly believe that war with Saddam was inevitable. According to the Kay report, Saddam had some weapons programs but they had been ineffective because of the sanctions. If we had not invaded, pressure from France, Germany, and Russia would have lifted the sanctions. Saddam would have re-armed and attacked one of his neighbors and we would have been drawn into the conflict again. The difference being that there would have been WMDs and possibly nukes.

Also, their past history shows that bin Laden might well have moved to Iraq and set up shop if the sanctions had been lifted. Bin Laden was dangerous enough in the hills of Afghanistan. The prospect of him headquartered in a country with active WMD programs is what spurred the invasion of Iraq in the first place.

Are we safer for this? Probably. Al Qaida went from a large, wealthy organization with central planning to small, loosely connected cells. This type of organization can set off a car bomb but now hijack multiple planes and ram them into buildings.

Clarity. You know where you and the rest of the world stand with Bush. This ticks off a lot of people but it really is important in a leader. At the same time, Bush is not inflexible. His policy on embryonic stem cell research represents a compromise between his own belief that life begins at conception and the life-saving promise of new research. His policies for the reconstruction of Iraq have been modified and are pretty close to Kerry's original proposal.

Honesty. Reporters have been trying but no one has caught the Bush administration telling an outright lie. Iraq may not have been producing WMDs but there was every reason to think that they were. Such luminaries as Senators Clinton, Kennedy, and Kerry all assured the country that Saddam was producing WMDs. The 9/11 Commission said that there was reason to believe that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake uranium.

Personality. If I was invited to Bush's ranch, we'd probably get along. we wouldn't have a lot in common - he is into sports and they bore me. Still, he comes across as a regular guy. He had some problems in his past and he overcame them. He is trying to do what he thinks is best for the country.


Reasons to vote against Kerry

Personality. It has been a running joke for months - Kerry makes Al Gore look animated. Every time he makes personal appearances he goes down in the polls.

Even more than George Bush, Jerry was born rich and privledged (although not as rich as the people he was with). He does not seem to have made any deep friendships in high school or college and he still seems uncomfortable around people. You suspect that a dinner with him would be uncomfortable but you know that it will never happen - you just aren't the right type of people.

Honesty. In his acceptance speech, Kerry told the country how important it is to have a President who does not lie to the American people. Ten years earlier, Kerry stood on the Senate floor and lied about his experiences in Cambodia in order to give himself the moral high ground in a debate.

Leadership. Kerry commanded a swift boat because he had a college degree. He didn't like it and got out after serving 1/3 of his tour of duty. He has not been a particularly memorable senator either. He did not introduce any major legislation and he skipped most of the meetings on the Senate Intelligence Committee. The only time he showed any real leadership was 33 years ago when he organized anti-war demonstrations. The Kerry campaign is now down-playing that period in his life.

Kerry has been talking about being president since the 1960s. It seems like he has passed up a lot of chances to demonstrate leadership.

Nuance. Kerry is too nuanced. The most famous quote is "Actually I voted for that bill before I voted against it." This describes his entire life. He is a war hero turned protester turned war hero again. He made a big show of throwing away his medals except they were someone else's medals. He kept his and displayed them proudly later in his career.

This is reflected little things, also. The huge SUV parked in his driveway isn't his, it's the "family's". He has called for energy independence but he has a boat that burns two gallons per mile.

His supporters say that he is nuanced and sees multiple shades of gray for everything. While this might be a fine attribute in a senator, it makes for a poor commander and chief.

Reagan was not very nuanced. At his death he was remembered by both sides as being a great president whose moral clarity won the war on communism.

Kerry's ambivalence is unlikely to win the war on terrorism. We lost Viet Nam because he and other anti-war protesters made it clear to the Viet Cong. That all they had to do was to keep fighting and we would eventually give up and pull out. Kerry's election will send the same message to Islamic militants - that America doesn't have the heart for a protracted conflict.

Let's be honest about Kerry's platform. It is barely formed. He talks about a middle-class tax cut and an upper-class tax hike plus fiscal responsibility. None of this will happen. Even if Kerry wins, the Republicans will still control one or both houses of Congress. Kerry does not have the leadership skills to pass legislation through a hostile Congress and there is no momentum to his platform.

Some conservatives like this prospect. With the President and Congress at each other's throats, no new spending is likely to pass. They are hoping for Bush's defeat just to bottle up Washington. For the rest of us, the Kerry administration is likely to be a repeat of the Carter administration. Do we really want four more years of malaise?

I commented last week about how difficult it would be for Kerry to counter the 2nd SwiftVet's ad. He has not managed to. His attempts have boiled down to:

• The testimony was taken out of context, he was only relaying what others had told him. This doesn't work since no one forced him to relate those stories. Just the opposite, he chose them himself.
• Bush should condemn the SwiftVets. This approach backfired. Bush denounced all 527 ads and a few networks are admitting that the anti-Bush groups have spent around 30 times as much money as the pro-Bush groups.
• We should be talking about the issues like jobs, education, and medical coverage. Notice that he skips over terrorism. Bush didn't. When he condemned the 527s he said that the main issue is who can lead the war against terrorism.

The furor over the first ad continues. Very few people have seen the ad on TV (I never did) but everyone has heard about it. It is pretty well established by now that Kerry lied about being in Cambodia. Now his campaign has admitted that his first Purple Heart was not earned.

If finally happened - someone asked Kerry in front of a camera if he was ever in Cambodia. Too bad it was Jon Stewart and Kerry didn't answer.

"I'm sorry," Stewart said. "Were you or were you not in Cambodia?"Stewart and
Kerry then leaned in and stared each other down before Stewart asked about other
things Kerry's opponents are saying.

The Smoking Room has more on Kerry's appearance.

The SwiftVets have a new ad. The Democrats won't like this one any better but there is no way that they can call it a pack of lies. It is footage of Kerry testifying before the Senate about war crimes in Viet Nam with cuts to POWs saying how much this hurt them.

The Dems will cry foul again but the SwiftVets are just rubbing their nose in their own candidate's past.

We keep hearing about the Republican slime machine. Why doesn't anyone talk about the Democrat's slime squad? They've been working overtime. First the NYT has a piece finding connections between the SwiftVets and Bush. It then gets picked up by other news outlets as a big story.

Here's a couple of tidbits from MSNBC.COM

The veterans' group behind the controversial TV ads that question Sen. John
Kerry’s Vietnam war record has extensive ties to President Bush and his family,
other high-profile Texas politicians and Bush’s chief political aide — ties that
have raised questions about possible illegal coordination between Bush’s
re-election campaign and the group.

But later on in the story comes the kicker (emphasis added):

“Out of desperation, the Bush campaign has picked the wrong fight with the wrong
veteran,” said Jim Jordan, former Kerry campaign manager who now runs an outside group airing ads against Bush.

Kerry's former campaign manager runs a 527 and he complains about ties between Bush and the SwiftVets?

For that matter, why is it so sinister that conservatives have pushed the SwiftVets? Anti-Bush 527s have gotten many times the money as pro-Bush ones. I bet that George Soros has given money to lots of liberal causes before.

The double standard here is amazing. The SwiftVets are being portrayed as underhanded for getting a fraction of the financing that the anti-Bush groups have gotten.

What about truth? I heard someone on Nightline say that the anti-Bush ads are truthful but the SwiftVet ad is full of lies.

Look at the two ads running currently. One run by the MediaFund says that Bush is in favor of off-shoring jobs which he never said. It also implies that Bush created tax breaks for companies that off-shore. In fact, these tax breaks are decades old. The other which is run by MoveOn uses big graphics saying "GROUNDED" and "MISSING" while describing Bush's time in the Guard.

There is enugh truth in the SwiftVets' story to get the Kerry campaign to admit that Christmas in Cambodia never happened. If the press dug into Kerry the way that they are digging into the SwiftVets, who knows what else they will find?

The anti-war left agrees with me about base closures and bringing the troops home. Some points that we both make:

Well, let's see: if North Korea really does have nuclear weapons, and would, as
many believe, launch a preemptive strike against U.S. and South Korean forces on
the peninsula if they thought an invasion was imminent, what good would those
12,000 GIs do? Most would perish in the first few hours of such a conflagration,
but Kerry has no problem with incinerating them on the altar of his ambition:
anything to score some political points off of George W. Bush.

...

The network of American military bases ringing the globe represents one of
the biggest international welfare schemes, ever, on several levels. It's true,
as Chalmers Johnson points out in The
Sorrows of Empire, that these bases impose a plethora of social costs on
their often unwilling hosts: particularly in Asia, where American arrogance in
Japan and South Korea provoked mass protests and calls for closing the
bases.

And here are some points I missed:

I would also point out that the plan, which calls for repositioning U.S. troops
in Poland, Romania, and (ugh!) Uzbekistan, is really an expansion of our military presence.

U.S. troops are not abandoning Western Europe. Looked at in purely geographical terms, they are merely spreading Eastward, toward the War Party's main target of the moment: the Middle East. But also much closer to Russia, which is another obvious but curiously overlooked aspect of the Eastward Ho plan.

There is, in short, a valid critique of the realignment strategy on which the
repositioning proposal is based. But Kerry is not making it. His surprising
inversion of the old partisan polarity on this issue certainly confuses his
supporters, particularly the Anybody But Bush (ABB) contingent. But for instant
enlightenment, all you have to do is drink deeply of Kerry's Kool-Aid. Philip H. Gordon, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, must have downed a giant draught, because there he is in the Los Angeles Times bibbling to Brownstein:

"During the Cold War, bringing troops home was a
dovish thing to do. Now, it's hawkish."

Kerry's criticism shows that he has no understanding of how warfare has changed:
he poses the question of whether to retain our overseas bases not in a strategic
framework, but in terms of forging political ties with our allies:

"With al-Qaeda operating in 60 countries, we need closer alliances in every part of
the world to fight and win the war on terrorism. So, as president, I will be a
commander in chief who renews our alliances based on shared interests and a
common vision for a safer world. For more than 50 years, our allies have joined
with us to say: the future doesn't belong to fear; it belongs to
freedom."

But what Kerry misses completely is that every American base, in Al
Qaeda's war against the U.S., is a potential target. It's all well and good to
deny that the future belongs to fear, but somebody ought to tell that to the
voters of Spain, who never supported the invasion of Iraq and were not about to
put their lives on the line for the sake of George W. Bush's foreign policy. If
Kerry somehow believes they will make an exception for him, he is very much
mistaken.

As Chalmers Johnson pointed out in a commentary on Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now!" radio program, the Kerry/Wesley Clark critique of the realignment – that it somehow "compromises" the war on terrorism – is largely irrelevant. Military bases are of little use in the struggle against shadowy terrorist cells dispersed worldwide.

I know that the country is pretty polarized, but this is going over the top.

Gary Boston and Jeff Adler of http://www.shutitdownnyc.com/ are approaching Broadway performers, particularly gay men, and asking them not to perform on September 1, when convention delegates have been given tickets to eight shows, including 42nd Street, Aïday, Bombay Dreams, and The Phantom of the Opera.

They also want shops, restaurants, and even room service shut down on Sept. 1.

So now people are to be denied basic services and entertainment because of the beliefs expressed by some members of their party. This goes way beyond booing an entertainer or firing an spokeswoman who publicly compared the President to her pubic hair.

The Daily Show for the 18th opened with an attack on the Swift Boat Veterans. I can't say that Jon Stewart made fun of them - no one laughed - but he made it clear that he was disgusted with them.

Over on Nightline, they debated Kerry's strategy of attacking Bush over the Swift Boat ads. I think that Kerry's and MoveOn's strategy will be inefective. We already know that Bush went into the Guard instead of the Navy. I don't think that new attacks over this will affect swing voters.

Besides, they were probably hoping to save the Guard vs. Navy attacks for closer to the election.

Nader probably will make it onto the Ohio ballot. He turned in more than twice as many signatures as he needed.

MooreWatch has been looking into the "seven minutes". It turns out that the Memory Hole has a copy of the seven minutes in Quicktime format. The Memory Hole is very anti-Bush. They want him to have rushed out of the building as quickly as possible. After all, terrorists in hijacked airliners might have been zeroing in on him at that moment and he was endangering the children by being close to them. There is a logical disconnect here. Unless the terrorists had a homing transmitter planted on Bush, they would not know that he had left the building. They were worried about being able to hit the White House which never moves.

Besides, until the Pentagon was hit it was assumed that there were only the two airliners. Communication between air traffic control and the Feds was all screwed up.

Anyway, it turns out that the "seven minutes" were only five minutes. Moore lied (a film editor always knows how long a clip is).

Moorewatch points out that the Secret Service were already on alert because someone had tried to see the President, claiming that a Secret Service agent who does not exist authorized it.

Given that the country was under attack, the worst thing the President could do would be to charge out of a building without waiting for the Secret Service to give an "all clear". You might not like whatching the President, waiting in a classroom until he got the ok that it was safe to leave but that is how it works.

The same thing happened when he got to Air Force One. Richard Clark told him not to come back to DC until the skies were clear.

At some point in the day, Bush must have had to use the bathroom. It is a biological fact. If Moore had footage of that he would have shown it with a snide voice-over. Moore takes things out of context and gives them a different spin.

The Swift Boat Veterans are finally getting real coverage on Nightline. Instead of dismissing them as Republican operatives and moving on, they are showing soundbites from the Swiftees. Nightline is still slanting the story for Kerry but it is no longer one-sided. They even showed part of the ad with the doctor saying that Kerry lied.

The process of denying the story is spreading it further. People who never heard anything except that a bunch of people who did not serve under Kerry are now hearing what the Swiftees have to say.

Kerry is attacking it which gives it some backhanded credibility. He is also having to spend money when he was hoping to save his own war chest, allowing the 527s to pick up the slack.

All of this will probably affect Kerry's campaign going into the general election. So far he has depended on his service record. That is now tainted and he has not come up with much else.