The Unsatisfied Mind

Solid Leadership

From the Guardian (reported everywhere, but the Guardian has the right flava):

George Bush admitted yesterday the war on terror could not be won, as the Republican party convention, designed to showcase the president as a resolute leader at a time of national peril, was launched in New York.

The White House rushed to limit the potential damage as Democrats seized on the remarks as a sign of defeatism. A spokesman for the president said he was simply pointing out the unconventional nature of the conflict.

However, the timing of the remarks could not have been worse for the president, coming on a day that the party had lined up two of its biggest names - Rudy Giuliani, the ex-mayor who led New York through the September 11 trauma, and John McCain, a Vietnam war hero - to pay tribute to his qualities as a wartime leader.

Asked on NBC television whether America could win its "war on terror", the president replied: "I don't think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that the - those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."

The comments represented a break from earlier determined predictions of victory, and drew an immediate Democratic response.

"After months of listening to the Republicans base their campaign on their singular ability to win the war on terror, the president now says we can't win the war on terrorism," John Edwards, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, said. "This is no time to declare defeat - it won't be easy and it won't be quick, but we have a comprehensive long-term plan to make America safer. And that's a difference."

Resolute leadership during wartime, or something. And tonight, McCain said with a straight face that, while Kerry was on honest, competent leader who could succeed as President, W. should be reelected because of his character during 9/11.

Remember, that character included a deer-in-the-headlights meltdown while reading "My Pet Goat" as New York burned. And then he lied about it.

And yet, I have relatives who are going to vote for Fuckwit because "he is not going to raise taxes on the middle class" like Kerry. Yes, these single-issue voters make half a million a year.

Michael Kinsley

Time Magazine, today.

Posted Sunday, August 29, 2004
What do we know about George W. Bush that we didn't know four years ago, when most of us voted for someone else? We ought to know a lot more. Never has anyone become President of the United States less pretested by life. And never has any President been tested so dramatically so soon after taking office.

He was born at the intersection of two elites—the Eastern Wasp establishment and the Texas oiligarchy. He gimme'd his way through America's top educational institutions. In his 40s, he was still a kid, hanging around his father's White House with not much to do. A decade later, without actually winning the most votes, he was President himself. The average gas-station attendant struggled harder to get where he or she is than did George W. Bush. Then came Sept. 11.

The heroic saga writes itself, with help from Shakespeare's Henry V and the life story of Harry Truman. This small man, this wastrel youth, finds himself leading his nation as it faces one of its greatest challenges. And in the fire of great events, he finds the fire of greatness within himself. Take it away, Peggy Noonan.

It's a swell story line, but it won't wash. Against a backdrop of great events, even a mediocrity can seem great for a while. After Sept. 11, there was certainly a great flurry of activity. War on terrorism was declared. An actual war was started in Iraq and still goes on. A Department of Homeland Security was founded. Various American freedoms have been suspended. More than $100 billion has been spent. At the rate things are going, the toll of American lives lost responding to 9/11 may exceed the toll of 9/11 itself. The toll of innocent foreigners is higher already.

But what has it all amounted to? As the most powerful nation in the world, we have managed to track down and kill a few members of al-Qaeda. No more airliners have been flown into skyscrapers in the three years since 9/11, but then that was true in the three years before 9/11 as well. Are we safer from terrorism than we were before?

The only honest answer is, Who knows?

You may approve or disapprove of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but it is clear beyond dispute that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. By turning the world in general and the young people of the Muslim world in particular against us, the decision to respond to al-Qaeda by toppling Saddam Hussein could have made future terrorism more likely, not less.

Subtract the war on terror, including Iraq, and the Bush presidency looks small indeed. Buying short-term prosperity by goosing the economy with heavy borrowing is no trick at all, yet it's not clear that Bush has pulled off even this (except the borrowing). His party has controlled Congress for most of his term. Aside from the traditional Republican wealth-friendly tax cut, can you name a single major successful legislative initiative? O.K., prescription drugs for seniors. Starting in 2006. If it works, which many experts doubt.

And what have these four years taught us about Bush as a person? Some fortunate folks whose lives do not require struggle have used the gift of ease to become better people: wiser than if they had had bills and laundry cluttering their minds, kinder and gentler—in the famous formulation of George Bush the Elder—than if they had needed sharp elbows to get somewhere. Bush the Younger never seemed noble in this way. But as we got to know him in 2000, the ease of his life had seemed to make him affable, undogmatic and pleasantly underinvested in anything as vulgar as an agenda. And then there was all that amiable chatter about "compassionate conservatism." The forecast was for a laconic, moderate presidency.

How wrong this was. Bush's obvious lack of interest in policy issues makes him more dogmatic, not less so. Intellectual laziness stiffens the backbone as much as ideological fervor does. Hand him his position on an issue, and he can cross it off his list. Bush's intellectual defenders compare him to Ronald Reagan, who was simpleminded (they say) in the best sense. Reagan whittled down the world's complexities into a few simple truths. But Reagan pondered those complexities on his way to simplicity. He stopped thinking only after a fair amount of thought. Bush's advisers deliver ideas to him like a pizza. His stove has never been lit. And four years have not illuminated the meaning of compassionate conservatism. It remains an insult to conservatives and a mystery to everybody else. On every big social issue that has arisen during his term (gay marriage, for example, and stem-cell research), Bush has been steadfast in taking the hard-conservative line.

The Wasp graciousness, the good-ole-boy affability, even the obviously sincere religious conviction run about a quarter-inch deep.

In four years, this small man had two historic opportunities to reach for greatness, to lead this country to a new and better place, and he passed up both. The first was when the Democrats patriotically bowed to a Supreme Court decision they believed to be wrong, if not corrupt, so that the U.S. could avoid a further constitutional crisis. What a moment for bipartisanship! Maybe put more than a token Democrat in the Cabinet? Not a chance.

George W. Bush's second opportunity came on Sept. 11, 2001. Past grievances suddenly seemed petty, current disagreements seemed irrelevant, and, even among Bush's opponents, desperate hope replaced sullen doubts that our nation's leader would be up to the task. Bush got this gift from the opposition—the suspension of dislike and disbelief—without doing anything to deserve it. He could have asked for and got anything he wanted in the weeks and months after 9/11.

And he decided to invade Iraq.

For once, George W. Bush was tested. And he flunked.

From Daily Kos:

This was written so well, I blatently stole it:

Bush has been president for four years, yet we have had to suffer the following "intelligence failures":

• 9/11. Ashcroft de-emphasizes anti-terrorist activities in order to satiate his anti-pornography obsession. Bush completely ignores a document titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike the United States" and promptly went on a month-long vacation.

• Plame Affair. The administration outs the CIA's top nuclear non-proliferation official in bid to discredit administration critic.

• Saddam's WMD. Bush and Cheney make clear they want evidence, regardless the truth. They create a shadow intelligence inside the Pentagon to independently assess intelligence when CIA doesn't offer the expected "truth".

• Saddam's WMD, Part II. Colin Powell makes an ass of himself at Security Council when he tries to prove Saddam's evil intent, and proves nothing more than that Iraq has warehouses and trucks.

• Chalabi. The Pentagon's top choice for Iraq's post-war leadership lets Iran know we have cracked their communication code. Once upon a time we could listen in to one of the Axil of Evil's most guarded communications, including communications with terrorist groups like Hizbollah. Now we cannot. An intelligence failure of epic proportions.

• Administration outs Al Qaida mole. We finally turn one of Bin Laden's baddies, and the administration outs him days later to justify terror alert. Terror alert turns out to be unjustifiable anyway, based on years-old info.

Ouch. This is one brutal failure after another, and aside from 9-11, the rest are ALL the fault of the politicians in the Bush Administration.

And the damage is not all done:

An FBI probe into the handling of highly classified material by Pentagon civilians is broader than previously reported, and goes well beyond allegations that a single mid-level analyst gave a top-secret Iran policy document to Israel, three sources familiar with the investigation said Saturday.

The probe, which has been going on for more than two years, also has focused on other civilians in the Secretary of Defense's office, said the sources, who spoke on condition they not be identified, but who have first-hand knowledge of the subject.

In addition, one said, FBI investigators in recent weeks have conducted interviews to determine whether Pentagon officials gave highly classified U.S. intelligence to a leading Iraqi exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, which may in turn have passed it on to Iran. INC leader Ahmed Chalabi has denied his group was involved in any wrongdoing.

The linkage, if any, between the two leak investigations, remains unclear.

But they both center on the office of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's No. 3 official.

Feith's office, which oversees policy matters, has been the source of numerous controversies over the last three years. His office had close ties to Chalabi and was responsible for post-war Iraq planning that the administration has now acknowledged was inadequate. Before the war, Feith and his aides pushed the now-discredited theory that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaida [...]

That analyst, Larry Franklin, works for Feith's deputy, William Luti, and served as an important - albeit low-profile - advisor on Iran issues to Feith and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

No equivalency

From Businessweek online. As powerfully straightforward as it can be said.

Flinging the Foul Mud of Vietnam

John Kerry returned a hero. The smears his political enemies are now flinging mark them -- not him -- as beneath contempt

By Thane Peterson

The next time the nation gets into a war, why would any American with an interest in national service show up to fight? When did the U.S. come to blithely accept the tarring for political gain of honorably discharged combat veterans? Obviously, I'm talking about the attacks on John Kerry by a bunch of angry, Bush-backing Vietnam-war vets who claim the Democratic candidate doesn't deserve all of the medals, which include Bronze and Silver Stars and three Purple Hearts, that he won in combat in Vietnam.

But I'm also talking about the attacks on Republican Senator and former prisoner of war John McCain -- a genuine hero by anyone's definition -- during his South Carolina primary battle against George W. Bush for the 2000 Presidential nomination. And the relentless assaults on the patriotism of Democrat Max Cleland by Republican Saxby Chambliss, who defeated Cleland for one of Georgia's Senate seats in 2002. If you want proof of Cleland's patriotism, all you need to know is that he lost three limbs in Vietnam.

It's time for Bush in particular -- and Americans in general -- to get on the right side of this issue once and for all. No moral equivalency exists between Kerry and Bush on the issue of service in Vietnam. Kerry served in combat. He was shot at. Not Bush. If you don't think it's important for a President to have served in combat, fine, make your choice on other grounds. But if you do, Kerry is your man, at least on this one issue (see BW Online, 8/23/04, "Why Kerry's War Record Matters").

REPUBLICAN RECOMMENDATION. Nine of the ten Swift-boat comrades who served on Kerry's boat have showed up at his side to campaign for him and defend him. They're the ones with the most direct knowledge of what happened and they confirm that Kerry deserved the Bronze Star for his leadership during a skirmish on March 13, 1969.

So does Jim Rassmann, the retired Los Angeles County cop who introduced Kerry at the Democratic Convention. Rassmann is a Republican, for gosh sakes. He came forward on his own and offered to campaign for Kerry, whom he credits with saving his life that day. Rassman also recommended Kerry for the Silver Star, one of the nation's highest honors for bravery under fire and the highest medal Kerry won.

Crewmen on the three Swift boats involved in an attack Kerry led on Feb. 28, 1969, also support Kerry's version of events. That's the day Kerry won the Silver Star, one of the nation's highest honors for bravery under fire and the highest medal Kerry was awarded.

The latest to come forward is Willam R. Rood, a Chicago Tribune editor who commanded one of the other boats, broke a 35-year silence when he published a first-person account on Aug. 22 supporting Kerry's version. "What matters most to me," Rood wrote, "is that this is hurting crewmen who are not public figures and who deserved to be honored for what they did."

"FOG OF WAR"? Contrast that with George Bush, who few witnesses can recall having seen during a long stretch of his National Guard duty during the Vietnam War. News organizations have done plenty of digging into the past to determine whether Bush used personal influence to get himself into that National Guard assignment. It's hard to say for certain. But no poor people were in that unit. The only ones in it were people with pull.

Why the so-called called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth -- only one of whom served on the same vessel with Kerry -- have decided to attack their fellow vet is a bit hard to decipher, too. I suppose it could partly be an honest difference of opinion. Maybe the "fog of war" led vets to have different memories of the same events.

But the critics' main motivation is clear from statements they themselves have repeatedly made: They remain angry that Kerry protested the war when he returned the U.S. and, specifically, that he accused his fellow soldiers of having committed atrocities in Vietnam.

MUDDYING THE WATER. Unfortunately, soldiers -- including American soldiers -- commit atrocities in all wars. That was true even of the so-called Greatest Generation in World War II, it was true in Korea and Vietnam, and it's undoubtedly true in the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Denying that is to deny the reality of war. And failing to face the harsh realities of war is what makes it so easy for the U.S. to slide into nasty, unnecessary conflicts -- like Vietnam and the Iraq War now.

Americans should never go to war except in the full knowledge that it's going to wreak terrible pain on the enemy, the civilian populations involved, and our own troops. That doesn't make the service of those who served honorably any less honorable. But anyone who denies that some American soldiers committed atrocities in Vietnam is kidding themselves. You can quibble over the exact words Kerry used and whether he should have said them when he did, but in broad terms he spoke the truth.

The purpose of the attacks against Kerry, however, isn't to get at the truth. It's a media campaign, with TV ads intended to create a vague, negative impression where none existed. The people behind the ads know that by any realistic assessment of the facts, Kerry has a major advantage over Bush when it comes to their respective military records. They want to muddy the waters to reduce Kerry's advantage. It's amazing that such bald-faced tactics can gain any traction with voters.

NO EQUIVALENCY. The critics know that if they can just manufacture the appearance of controversy, most reporters -- in the name of "balancing" their stories -- will play along. Attacks on Bush, such as an ad funded by the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org that questioned Bush's military record, have been given equal weight with the vets' attack ads in some stories.

The Bush campaign and editorial writers are calling on Kerry to distance himself from the MoveOn ads in the same breath that the Kerry campaign and editorialists are asking Bush to renounce the Swift-boat vets' ads. Kerry has repudiated the MoveOn ad (after some prodding from McCain).

But sorry, my fellow journalists, there's no equivalency here. MoveOn is an avowedly partisan group that openly opposes Bush. The Swift-boat vets tried to cover their political tracks while claiming inside knowledge about Kerry most of them clearly don't have. And several of them have flip-flopped from publicly praising Kerry to attacking him.

A nation has to honor its war veterans whatever their political party, while remaining realistic about the horrors of war. If some Americans do otherwise, all Americans are shamed. McCain has also called on Bush to denounce the attacks on Kerry and condemn that kind of low-life negative campaigning. It's time the President complied in no uncertain terms, and it's time he meant it.

Olympic basketball

On a completely different topic, I watched two quarters of the men's basketball game against Lithuania. We lost, by the way, and dropped to 2-2 in the tournament.

The talking heads on ESPN are complaining about defense, or lack thereof, but the real problem that I saw was the mid-range jumper. With a 20' three point arc, these players should be draining 50% (on the better international teams, it seems like they are). Further, with the zone defense and key configuration, game should be easy for us: penetrate to get to the line (or the easy layup), or kick it out to the shooters for easy threes.

From what I saw, we have it half right. But the other half seems to be unattainable.

I saw our players get to the line at least seven or eight times in the first half. However, I did not see our players make a single jumpshot (well, I did see one). On the other hand, I can't recall seeing the Lithuanian team miss a three.

It is shooting, people. The US team has none, and the international teams preach it.

Not to beat a quickly dying dead horse...

But this is the Washington Post, Sunday Edition:

Swift Boat Accounts Incomplete And Flawed
Clashes Roil Kerry Campaign

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 22, 2004; Page A01

When John F. Kerry rescued James Rassmann from the Bay Hap River in the jungles of Vietnam in March 1969, neither man could possibly have imagined that the episode would become a much-disputed focus of an American presidential campaign 35 years later.

-snip-

Two best-selling books have formed the basis for public discussion of the events of March 13, 1969, as a result of which Kerry won a Bronze Star and his third Purple Heart. The fullest account of Kerry's experience in Vietnam is "Tour of Duty" by prominent presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. It was written with Kerry's cooperation and with exclusive access to his diaries and other writings about the Vietnam War. "Unfit for Command," by John E. O'Neill, who succeeded Kerry as commander of his Swift boat, and Jerome R. Corsi, lays out a detailed attack on Kerry's record.

The Post's research shows that both accounts contain significant flaws and factual errors. This reconstruction of the climactic day in Kerry's military career is based on more than two dozen interviews with former crewmates and officers who served with him, as well as research in the Naval Historical Center here, where the Swift boat records are preserved. Kerry himself was the only surviving skipper on the river then who declined a request for an interview.

-snip-

The anti-Kerry veterans began mobilizing earlier this year, following publication of the Brinkley biography and the nationwide publicity given to Kerry's emotional reunion with Rassmann. Many of the veterans were contacted personally by Hoffmann, a gung-ho naval officer compared unflatteringly in "Tour of Duty" with the out-of-control lieutenant colonel in the movie "Apocalypse Now" who talked about how he loved "the smell of napalm in the morning."

Hoffmann, who was already angry with Kerry for his antiwar activities on his return from Vietnam, said in an interview that he was "appalled" to find out from reading "Tour of Duty" that Kerry was "considered to be a Navy hero." "I thought there was a tremendous amount of gross exaggeration in the book, and in some places downright lies. So I started contacting some of my former shipmates," he said.

One of the men Hoffmann contacted was O'Neill, a longtime Kerry critic who debated Kerry on television in 1971. O'Neill put Hoffmann in touch with some wealthy Republican Party contributors. One of O'Neill's contacts was Texas millionaire Bob Perry, who has contributed $200,000 to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Perry has also contributed to the Bush campaign.

-snip-

"I think that Kerry's behavior was abominable," said Pees, the commander of the boat that hit the mine. "His actions after the war were particularly disgusting. He distorted the truth when he talked about atrocities.

It is understandable that some veterans would be upset with Kerry, but note in the quote above that they are complaining about what he did after he returned from war. Further, what did Kerry exactly say about the atrocities? What distortions did he make? Was he describing his fellow soldiers, or describing the eyewitness reports of many, many others?

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago, in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit--the emotions in the room, and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

They told stories that, at times, they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam,in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country (emphasis mine).

Kerry is accusing no one of anything. He is describing testimony from over 150 other soldiers who testified that they themselves admitted to participating in these atrocities. They, not Kerry, implicated themselves. They told the investigation in Detroit what they had done.

Read that again, and try to think of the Swiftboat dipshits as anything other than a lying smear attack against a proven American hero.

If you didn't know better....

You would say that this was said within the last month, not 33 years ago. From Atrios:

John Kerry, April 1971

Thank you very much, Senator Fulbright, Senator Javits, Senator Symington and Senator Pell.



I would like to say for the record, and also for the men sitting behind me who are also wearing the uniforms and their medals, that my sitting here is really symbolic. I am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of a group of 1,000, which is a small representation of a very much larger group of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to sit at this table, they would be here and have the same kind of testimony. I would simply like to speak in general terms. I apologize if my statement is general because I received notification [only] yesterday that you would hear me, and, I am afraid, because of the injunction I was up most of the night and haven't had a great deal of chance to prepare.

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago, in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit--the emotions in the room, and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

They told stories that, at times, they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam,in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

We call this investigation the Winter Soldier Investigation. The term "winter soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine's in 1776, when he spoke of the "sunshine patriots," and "summertime soldiers" who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.

We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel, because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.

I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped.

As a veteran and one who felt this anger, I would like to talk about it. We are angry because we feel we have been used it the worst fashion by the administration of this country.

In 1970, at West Point, Vice President Agnew said, "some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedom which most of those misfits abuse," and this was used as a rallying point for our effort in Vietnam.

But for us, as boys in Asia whom the country was supposed to support, his statement is a terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion. Hence the anger of some of the men who are here in Washington today. It is a distortion because we in no way consider ourselves the best men of this country, because those he calls misfits were standing up for us in a way that nobody else in this country dared to, because so many who have died would have returned to this country to join the misfits in their efforts to ask for an immediate withdrawal from South Vietnam, because so many of those best men have returned as quadriplegics and amputees, and they lie forgotten in Veterans' Administration hospitals in this country which fly the flag which so many have chosen as their own personal symbol. And we cannot consider ourselves America's best men when we are ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia.

In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.

We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but, also, we found that the Vietnamese, whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image, were hard-put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.

We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American.

We found also that, all too often, American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search-and-destroy missions as well as by Viet Cong terrorism, - and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong.

We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai, and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.

We learned the meaning of free-fire zones--shooting anything that moves--and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.

We watched the United States falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while, month after month, we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings" with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using, were we fighting in the European theater. We watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and, after losing one platoon, or two platoons, they marched away to leave the hill for reoccupation by the North Vietnamese. We watched pride allow the most unimportant battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point, and so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 81s and Fire Base 6s, and so many others.

Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of "Vietnamizing" the Vietnamese.

Each day, to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam, someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."

We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying, as human beings, to communicate to people in this country--the question of racism, which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions, such as the use of weapons: the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war, when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free-fire zones; harassment-interdiction fire, search-and-destroy missions; the bombings; the torture of prisoners; all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything.

An American Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation of Alcatraz put it to me very succinctly: He told me how, as a boy on an Indian reservation, he had watched television, and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the Indians, and then suddenly one day he stopped in Vietnam and he said, "my God, I am doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people," and he stopped. And that is what we are trying to say, that we think this thing has to end.

We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick, and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The Marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country....

We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done, and all that they can do by this denial, is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission: To search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war; to pacify our own hearts; to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so, when, thirty years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned, and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

Hopefully, he won't mind that I grabbed the entire thing. It's important enough that everyone read this.

I would love to see how Rush and the rest of the Right can spin this. Unlike now, we have 30 years of evidence and hindsight saying that Kerry was right. I guarantee that 30 years from now, we will talk about Iraq in the same way that we talk about Vietnam now.

Spreading the good word....

Michelle Malkin, full melt down. See it in its entireity. Watch her eyes as she lies through her teeth, and watch Matthews absolutely destroy her credibility. Listen to the other participant laugh at her.

From Oliver Willis:

Michelle Malkin decided to make *hit up and say that John Kerry shot himself to get a medal in Vietnam, because he knew with his psychic powers that he'd be running for president 35+ years later. Michelle must have forgotten that she wasn't on Fox or some Heritage foundation shindig because Chris Matthews smacked it down so hard you could actually feel it comin' through your tv screen.

Malkin was on to discuss her new book (I won't link it here), which has been totally and completely refutted here. Of course, she immediately headed to safer grounds.

It seems I am writing this at the end of most of my posts, but...

What an idiot.

Everything you need to know about the Swiftboat Tools for Bush:

From Reuters:

Military records back John Kerry's account of his service in Vietnam and have backed at least two of his accusers into a corner.

Kerry this week was forced to defend himself against accusations by a group of fellow Navy veterans of Vietnam that he was a liar and a coward. The charges were made in a book and in an attack ad that polls show have chipped away at Kerry's standing with veterans in three critical states - West Virginia, Wisconsin and Ohio.

The long-ago Vietnam War has suddenly become a central issue in the presidential campaign. The attacks by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have called into account Kerry's conduct during the war, when he volunteered for one of the most dangerous duties - the so-called Brown Water Navy, which regularly penetrated Viet Cong-controlled territory via the maze of waterways in the sodden Mekong Delta.

Although the 15 veterans featured in the attack ad all state "I served with John Kerry," none of them served on the same boat with him. Those who did, such as retired Chief Petty Officer Del Sandusky, 60, of Clearwater, Fla., praise Kerry for his leadership and credit him with keeping them alive to make it home.

"We are really upset at this stuff," Sandusky told Knight Ridder. "They are calling us all liars. They dishonor us and they dishonor all those who died over there. They are getting awfully desperate. Last year many of them were on board with us. Now they are telling outrageous lies."

Kerry has said that members of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth lied when they said he inflated his role in various combat actions in the Mekong Delta in 1968 and 1969 and had manipulated the award of three Purple Heart medals for wounds and Bronze and Silver Star medals for valor in combat.

Kerry released a stack of his military records - including after-action reports, citations for his medals, boat battle damage reports and his officer efficiency reports. These records - and the military records of at least one of his accusers - cast serious doubt on some of the more inflammatory charges raised by the group.

It didn't help the cause of the Swift Boat Veterans group that some of them, including their leader, retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffman, were on the record praising Kerry for his service in Vietnam.

-Snip-

The bulk of the funding for the Swift Boat veterans' group comes from wealthy Texas Republicans.

I have purposely not given attention to this story, as those of us who are following the Republican smear machine closely had already seen the evidence against these idiots.

Digby updates us on who is backing the Swiftboat group, relationships and money:

I wonder if its appropriate for Ken Cordier, a member of the Veterans For Bush-Cheney '04 steering committee to appear in the new "unaffiliated" "independent" 527 Swift Boat Liars For Bush ad?

Of course you will only see his name if you google the cached version (linked above) of the page on the Bush-Cheney web site. Oddly, the current page doesn't list his name.

Now I'm certain this fine gentleman who has chosen to sell out his good name and reputation by joining a filthy smear operaton like Scumbag Liars For Bush would never coordinate with the campaign just because he also served as one of the Vice-Chairs Of Veterans For Bush-Cheney National Coalition in the 2000 camapign (pdf) and then was named to Bush's VA-POW advisory committee.

But some might think it doesn't look quite kosher. In fact, some might think it looks downright illegal.

Update:

The campaign is already on to this and has sent out the following press release. What they didn't have, however, was this Google cache which shows that Cordier was listed as a member of the Bush-Cheney campaign until August 19th.

It looks like this smear campaign has about run its course, with what seems to be very little damage to Kerry. For Bush, on the other hand, this may be the start of some really bad press.

Again, from Digby:

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.

The Swiftboat Liars for Bush have been thoroughly discredited, and Bush has a black eye. Doesn't get much better than than that.

Finally, you might have noticed a bunch of new links on the right side of the site. I recommend all of these, and read them every day. Hulabaloo is Digsby's blog.

Blogger puked...

I seem to have lost the latest post to UM. It was a discussion of another Republican, holier-than-thou morality-monger who got busted with a naked woman in a sleazy hotel. The woman owed him money. It goes way deeper, as the layers get peeled off. From the Washington Post:

KALISPELL, Mont. -- Until he was arrested this year in his underwear in a motel room with a nearly naked young woman who was behind in her payments to his finance company, no businessman in this town was more respected than Richard A. Dasen Sr.

He had won the "Great Chief" award, the highest honor a local business leader can receive from the Chamber of Commerce. A nominating letter for the award described him as "the epitome of the reason we all want to live in the Kalispell area."

Dasen was an energetic force in the construction of a hospital, a ski resort and a large hotel that established this northwest Montana town of 15,000 as a player in the convention business of the Rocky Mountain West. He was impressively energetic, too, in charitable and social causes, serving as a church elder, helping teenagers finish high school and volunteering his time to Christian Financial Counseling, which helped people manage debts.

Since his arrest in February in a sting operation at a cut-rate local motel, police have unearthed a side of Dasen's life that, while impressively energetic, is decidedly less civic-minded.

Dasen, 62, who is married with grown children and several grandchildren, has allegedly told police that over the past decade he paid more than $1 million to have sex with a large number of young women, many of whom were in legal trouble, addicted to drugs and in debt to him, according to court documents.

When police asked Dasen how many of these women there had been, he said there had been too many to count.

Dasen apparently lost count, too, police say, of how much money he paid all these women.

Investigators counting his checks -- he paid by check, in amounts of $1,000 to $6,000 per encounter, sometimes as much as $130,000 a month -- now estimate that Dasen spent at least $5 million, said Charles Harball, the city attorney.

-snip-

So far, Dasen has been charged with rape for allegedly paying a 15-year-old girl for sex. The age of consent in Montana is 16. He has also been charged with two felony counts of promoting prostitution. He has pleaded not guilty to all the charges, and his attorney, George Best, declined to comment on any aspect of the case.

A trial on the rape and prostitution charges is scheduled for early next year, and law enforcement officials say that they are continuing an investigation into any accounting and tax irregularities concerning Dasen.

Then there is the matter of Dasen's DNA, which the state crime lab says was detected on a semen-stained bedspread in Room 233 of the Kalispell Motel 6 -- the room in which Darlene Wilcock, 26, was found strangled in April of last year. No one has been arrested in her death.

A law enforcement official familiar with the woman's autopsy report said that semen from two men was found on her body, neither of them Dasen.

The discovery of Dasen's semen at the crime scene, this official said, may simply be a coincidence, the kind of thing that can happen to a man who often has sex in motel rooms where bedspreads are rarely washed. A number of women have told police that they had sex with Dasen in the Motel 6.

Many of the women Dasen allegedly paid for sex met him when they came to Christian Financial Counseling for help in consolidating and managing their debts. Dasen ran the nonprofit organization and also owns a private finance firm, Budget Finance.

Detectives have interviewed about 40 of these women, and many of them have said that Dasen "used their indebtedness to him to coerce them to have sex," Kalispell Police Chief Frank Garner said.

If Dasen was "not satisfied with the sexual services that he was receiving, it was common for [him] to arrange for repossession of vehicles that he has purchased or funded for those females, through his finance company," according to a confidential informant's statement to police that is quoted in court documents.

Not much to comment on here, other than the usual existence of hypocracy in the Republican Right. Speaks for itself, really.

Proof in the pudding

You should really go look at the pictures posted on Kos. Look at the differences between the candidates. Read about how Bush and Kerry differ in their inclusion of people. Read how the W campaign excludes those who do not toe the party line.

Do everything you can to get these frauds out of office.

Imagine that

From the NYTimes, via Washington Monthly:

Fully one-third of President Bush's tax cuts in the last three years have gone to people with the top 1 percent of income, who have earned an average of $1.2 million annually, according to a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to be published Friday.

The report calculated that households with incomes in that top 1 percent were receiving an average tax cut of $78,460 this year, while households in the middle 20 percent of earnings - averaging about $57,000 a year - were getting an average cut of only $1,090.

The new estimates confirm what independent tax analysts have long said: that Mr. Bush's tax cuts have been heavily skewed to the very wealthiest taxpayers. Those are also the people, however, who pay a disproportionate share of federal income taxes.

The calculations, which were requested by Congressional Democrats, are all but certain to intensify a central debate between Mr. Bush and Senator John F. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee.

Mr. Bush has argued that the tax cuts provided crucial support to the economy at a time when it was mired in a recession and reeling from the effects of a stock market collapse, terrorist attacks and corporate scandals.

Mr. Kerry has argued that the cuts were tilted so much in favor of the wealthy that they provided relatively little stimulus to the economy and set the stage for record budget deficits. Since 2001, the federal budget has deteriorated from a surplus of more than $100 billion to a deficit expected to exceed $400 billion in 2004.

Well, we now know for sure what the democrats have been saying all along: the tax cut was a gift to the rich, to the detriment of our country.

While you are hating Bush, make sure to hate DeLay. He is as much a part of this as the administration.

Just returned from Richard Morrison speech

My wife and I went to the local democrat group meeting tonite, and Richard Morrison (opponent of Tom DeLay, of whom I have blogged before) spoke. Great guy, trial lawyer, positive, everything good about what democracy stands for. True Texan. Wore a seersucker suit, gave a pretty good stump speech, and did about an hour of Q and A.

Here are some recent numbers that were posted on Daily Kos, that actually got discussed at the meeting. Interestingly, Morrison did not know that the poll had been taken by the DCCC until after the numbers were posted.

Garin Heart Young for the DCCC (D). 6/30-7/1. MoE 5%. (No trend lines.)

DeLay (R) 50 (46% without leaners)
Morrison (D) 36

Name recognition

DeLay 94
Morrison 68

Job Approval rating (excellent/good)

Bush 59
DeLay 48

Character ratings for DeLay (very/fairly well)

"Being honest" 44
"Staying in touch with the people" 44
"Putting people before the special interests" 39

Partisan Preference

Republican 50
Democrat 30

(From Kos) It's clear that DeLay's district is heavy Republican, but it's worth noting how DeLay is running much poorer than Bush. Also, the "special interests" charge is potentially devastating, as DeLay's various scandals, Rep. Chris Bell's ethics complaint, and the criminal investigation into DeLay's redistricting process get heavy press in the district.

If Richard Morrison can continue his strong fundraising performance, there's a chance the DCCC might dip their toes into this race. No Democratic organization will want to fund a traditional media campaign for this district (in Houston's media market, it would cost about $3-4 million), but a strong grassroots effort could tap into resentment over DeLay's redistricting gambit while capitalizing on the Hammer's obvious addiction to special corporate interests.

The best thing about the evening? The passion. People are very worked up. And this is in one of the richest neighborhoods in Houston.

You know, stranger things have happened, but I think Morrison can win this thing. And if he does, then the last of the three idiots of the Republican Revolution (Armey, Newt, and DeLay) are out.

We then get our country back.

Dear Leader, implosion edition

These are the indicators that W. is feeling the pressure. From Dailypress.com:

Bush also said high taxes on the rich are a failed strategy because "the really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway."

Asked about that comment, Jonathan Beeton, spokesman for Kerry's campaign in Virginia, said "George Bush can speak with authority about really rich people. ... That's his base, so I'm sure he knows what he's talking about. But that doesn't make it right."

In general, Democrats said, the fact that the Bush campaign stopped in Virginia during a recent campaign swing that has also covered the traditional battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin shows weakness in Virginia.

"It seems he wouldn't come to Virginia unless he had a reason," said Virginia Democratic Party Chairman Kerry Donley. "He's seeing his support slip away, and he wants to stop the bleeding early."

This gaffe follows one of the best examples ever recorded of W. showing us how really uninformed and unintelligent he is (I'm pulling this from Brad DeLong' s website, where he quotes Unfogged):

Bob of Unfogged writes:

Unfogged: Clueless Posted by Bob on 08.06.04. At the UNITY: Journalists of Color Convention:

Q Good morning. My name is Mark Trahant. I'm the editorial page editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a member of the Native American Journalist Association. (Applause.) Most school kids learn about the government in the context of city, county, state and federal. And, of course, tribal governments are not part of that at all. Mr. President, you've been a governor and a President, so you have a unique experience, looking at it from two directions. What do you think tribal sovereignty means in the 21st century, and how do we resolve conflicts between tribes and the federal and the state governments?

THE PRESIDENT: Tribal sovereignty means that, it's sovereign. You're a -- you've been given sovereignty, and you're viewed as a sovereign entity. And, therefore, the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between sovereign entities.

Now, the federal government has got a responsibility on matters like education and security to help, and health care. And it's a solemn duty. And from this perspective, we must continue to uphold that duty. I think that one of the most promising areas of all is to help with economic development. And that means helping people understand what it means to start a business. That's why the Small Business Administration has increased loans. It means, obviously, encouraging capital flows. But none of that will happen unless the education systems flourish and are strong, and that's why I told you we've spent $1.1 billion in the reconstruction of Native American schools. (Applause.)

What impresses me about this is how much Bush's answer sounds exactly like the answers you read on the short-essay exams of students who are so unprepared that the question itself makes no sense to them. Classic strategy: scratch around with a few jargony tautologies, and then change the subject to something unrelated but on which the student feels solid. End with something the professor has obviously been pushing.

Q Describe the role that osmotic potential plays in carbohydrate transport in the phloem.

STUDENT: Carbohydrate transport is very important so that carbohydrates in the phloem can be moved to different parts of the plant. Osmotic potential is important because it is what causes osmosis, which is how water moves from hypertonic to hypotonic.

Carbohydrates are composed of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in the proportions 1 C, 2 H, 1 O. Sugars and starches are carbohydrates, and they are high in energy. Glucose is a carbohydrate which is converted by glycolysis into ATP. That is why carbohydrates must be transported in plants. Carbohydrate transport, like other plant characteristics, is a remarkably complex product of natural selection. (Applause.)

But it seems reporters are easier graders than I am.

Hilarity aside, I hope you can see how truly unintelligent he is. He has no idea, nay, has never given thought to how Native American sovereignty affects US-Native American relations.

Also, if you have heard the sound bite, the crowd laughs. In his face. Not in a ha-ha, jokey way, but in a derisive, emperor-with-no-clothes-on way. They know that W. is full of it, and is unfit to lead. From NY Daily News (via Daily Kos):

It was a tough crowd, no doubt, made up of professional journalists of color from all over the U.S. who gathered last week in the nation's capital to attend Unity 2004. With more than 7,500 registrants, Unity 2004 was, by far, the largest journalistic convention ever in the U.S.

The President and his campaign people were, or course, aware of the fact that whatever was said in the gigantic Washington Convention Center ballroom would resonate well beyond its walls. Actually, they - like Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry, who addressed the convention the day before - knew it would be news across the country.

That is why it was surprising, disconcerting and even a little frightening to listen to his opening remarks, punctuated by a strange syntax and mysterious logic.

"You can't read a newspaper if you can't read," the President said at one point when he spoke about the success his administration has had in teaching children how to read. When responding to a question posed by a Native American journalist on what he thought about the sovereignty of the Indian tribes in the U.S., Bush could only respond with something like "sovereignty is well ... sovereignty, and if you have sovereignty you are sovereign." Say what?

Conversely, Kerry, who visited Unity the day before, seemed to benefit from his appearance. After the requisite couple of lines about his support for diversity in the newsroom (Bush did the same thing), he proceeded to deliver introductory remarks that made him look self-assured and knowledgeable on the issues. He even looked comfortable in front of such a difficult crowd.

While people were disconcerted by Bush's weak performance, they seemed to have found a new appreciation for Kerry's credentials for the presidency after his appearance. That morning, declaring that health care was everybody's right, the Massachusetts senator promised to send a health care bill to Congress the first day of his presidency if he wins the election.

He also said that, in recognition of the fact that the U.S. is "and always has been" a nation of immigrants, he would submit an immigration reform bill within the first 100 days of his term that would stress family reunification and provide avenues for legalization.

But nothing was better received by the audience than his promise that - opposite to what happened in 2000 when many black voters were deprived of their right to vote - in November he would make sure that all of them were counted.

"The harsh fact now is that in the last election, more than 1 million African-Americans were disenfranchised in one of the most tainted elections in history," Kerry said. "We have to see to it in November that every vote counts and every vote is counted."

Surprisingly - and a little embarrassingly - many in the audience, in behavior little suited for professional journalists, chose to turn Kerry's visit into a love fest, even rewarding him with a standing ovation.

Yet in this particular Bush-Kerry match, the unanimous decision has to go to the challenger, who looked even more presidential after Bush's bumbling performance the next day.

Yet nearly 50% of our country will vote for him in the next election.

Finally, the noose is tightening.....

From Reuters:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Halliburton Co. (HAL.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and several top executives intentionally engaged in "serial accounting fraud" from 1998 to 2001, including when it was led by Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a new filing in a shareholder class-action lawsuit against the company.

The filing accuses Houston-based Halliburton, the world's No. 2 oilfield services company, of systematic accounting misdeeds far more wide-ranging than those charged in a recent civil lawsuit by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Cheney was not named as a defendant in either proceeding.

-SNIP-

The filing contends that Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root engineering and construction unit inflated results through artificially boosting revenue or understating expenses.

One employee said supervisors told her to do "whatever it took to make (projects) come back to plan," or profitability, the filing said.

We have always known the Cheney was and is a criminal. It looks like we are finally going to get some proof.

And, just recently, the Bushies screamed from the top of the mountain that Cheney would never be dropped from the ticket.

I just heard something else dropping. And it sounds like a shoe.

From Michael Savage, one of the most popular Right Wing Wingnuts on Radio:

This is from mediamatters.org, a media watchdog group dedicated to exposing the lies and outright hate of the Right.

Savage's rant was a response to a letter sent by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission to the San Francisco Police Officers' Association in which "the commission chastised the association for promoting tickets to its membership offered by radio station KNEW to the 'Michael Savage Uncensored' event this past May," according to an August 2 article by mensnewsdaily.com.

From the August 3 nationally syndicated broadcast of Savage Nation:

[T]he San Francisco Human Rights Commission, hold your nose-- When you hear the words "Human Rights Commission," you know what you're dealing with. Think of the worst people in America, they're the ones who go on to human rights commissions. They're neo-fascists in the guise of human rights activists. They wanna tell you what you can think, what you can't think. Who you can listen to, who you can read -- they're stinkers. They're communist or Nazis or both. ... So they're attacking the San Francisco Police Officer's Association, because the San Francisco Police Officer's Association received free tickets to my event, Michael Savage Uncensored. ... Now I'm extremely popular, but the San Francisco Human Rights Commission thinks that their Nazi background gives them an opportunity to say that I'm a hateful person because they don't like what I say about homosexuals. ... When you hear "human rights," think gays. When you hear "human rights," think only one thing: someone who wants to rape your son. And you'll get it just right. OK, you got it, right? When you hear "human rights," think only someone who wants to molest your son, and send you to jail if you defend him. Write that down, make a note of it. So anyway, let's get back to the serious stuff here.

On our trip across the western US this summer, there were many times when the only stations that we could pick up were AM brodcasts of Savage, Limbaugh, and the local conservative kooks out in the sticks. It was amazing. In 4 days of listening, we heard not a single fact from any of these pundits. Attacks were either personal or Ad Homs, or were points made with previously discredited evidence.

Mediamatters.org is an attempt to expose the hatred, bigotry, and downright insanity of the extreme right. I think they are doing their work admirably. Just like Rush on ESPN, all you have to do is expose these people to the mainstream for a few minutes, and everyone will immediately know what kind of hateful idiots they are.

Selective exposure is a human characteristic defined as a propensity to avoid information or people who profess ideas different from your own. I believe one of the reason that the extreme Right radio has existed for so long is precisely because most people just avoid it. It is very easy to avoid AM radio anymore, and, except for the ESPN fiasco, these wingnuts just don't get on TV. Of course, with FOX news, this mentality is starting to establish a foothold there as well.

People, we have to expose others to the wingnut Right's hateful message. If people only knew what these idiots were saying, the wingnuts would be run out of town. Please, send your friends to mediamatters.org so that they can see for themselves.

On the other hand, it is trivially easy to debunk and destroy the arguments of the Right, because they are completely based on lies and half-truths. Any number of Blogs and other media outlets spend their time and money exposing the Right, so that we don't have to. All we have to do is learn the truth for ourselves, and head out to battle.

This is important, so I'm posting it here

This is really important, bear with me (I am worried that this won't be picked up by the bigger bloggers, but I'm guessing that it will be, because it is REALLY important).

For the last 2 weeks, republican strategists have told everyone that the only place that they can attack John Kerry without spin is his Senate record. Essentally, they want to be able to say that his Senate career was undistinguished, and that he was not effective in passing bills.

That attack went up in flames today. From Daily Kos (in a rough form, but the transcript will be available this evening/tomorrow morning):

Donna Brazille hits it OUT OF THE PARK

by JeffLieber
Wed Aug 4th, 2004 at 17:31:49 GMT

(From the diaries -- kos)

I'm waiting on the transcript, but a moment ago Donna Brazille killed the "John Kerry was an indistinguished as a Senator" meme.

In the "rapid fire" section of Crossfire she said the following to a Republican Strategist...

"Dick Cheney was in the house for over a decade. How many bills did he pass?"

The Republican Strategist paused, looked physically ill, then tried to change the subject by saying "Well, he was aknowledged as a leader."

There was laughter in the crowd.

But Brazille didn't let him go. She leaned forward and very calmly told the truth.

"2 bills".

2 bills for Cheney. 57 for Kerry.

The last defense is dead. It really is all over for W and his band of idiot cronies.

Regean Jr. Rips Shrub a new one

Read it. All of it. Digest it.

Some choice qoutes

Politicians will stretch the truth. They'll exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have taken "normal" mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on.

None of this, needless to say, guarantees Bush a one-term presidency. The far-right wing of the country—nearly one third of us by some estimates—continues to regard all who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid (liberals, rationalists, Europeans, et cetera) as agents of Satan. Bush could show up on video canoodling with Paris Hilton and still bank their vote. Right-wing talking heads continue painting anyone who fails to genuflect deeply enough as a "hater," and therefore a nut job, probably a crypto-Islamist car bomber. But these protestations have taken on a hysterical, almost comically desperate tone. It's one thing to get trashed by Michael Moore. But when Nobel laureates, a vast majority of the scientific community, and a host of current and former diplomats, intelligence operatives, and military officials line up against you, it becomes increasingly difficult to characterize the opposition as fringe wackos.

Does anyone really favor an administration that so shamelessly lies? One that so tenaciously clings to secrecy, not to protect the American people, but to protect itself? That so willfully misrepresents its true aims and so knowingly misleads the people from whom it derives its power? I simply cannot think so. And to come to the same conclusion does not make you guilty of swallowing some liberal critique of the Bush presidency, because that's not what this is. This is the critique of a person who thinks that lying at the top levels of his government is abhorrent. Call it the honest guy's critique of George W. Bush.

Please, read this. Send everyone you know to this site, and have them read it. This is not spin, this is not a distortion.

If this man is president for four more years, our country will come to an end as we know it.

Gregg Easterbrook, full moron

Well, another slate writer loses all respect. Quoted from Brad DeLong:

*Sigh* Gregg Easterbrook trashes physicist Stephen Hawking:

The New Republic Online: Expert Tease: So Stephen Hawking now says he was completely wrong about black holes--they don't crush reality out of existence, and they aren't doorways to alternate universes.... It would be tempting to say that Hawking was able to become internationally famous while saying kooky things because today physicists have the status once held by medieval priests: People don't challenge their mumbo-jumbo. Or perhaps Hawking was able to get away with saying kooky things because knowledge of science is so poor: Book critics and the television newscasters who interviewed him assumed the mumbo-jumbo must make sense and felt insecure about simply saying, "Time moving in reverse, what claptrap." For years the science community has been quietly uneasy about Hawking's high profile, since he's gotten away with asserting considerable nonsense and then defending himself by waving equations. At least he has finally confessed, and presumably in the future will be more circumspect. Unless time begins to run backward, in which case he's already been circumspect, but will, as he grows younger, start shooting from the hip....

Goes on to ridicule the Big-Bang theory for violating the "common-sense test":

What came before the Big Bang? Cosmologists hate this question, but it's haunting nonetheless. There must have been some prior condition. Big Bang theorists pretty much contend that all the material of the entire universe sprang from a point with no content and no dimensions. "Negative energy" or "vacuum density" and other mumbo-jumbo terms are employed to justify this, but purported explanations of how entire galaxies could emanate from nowhere don't do especially well on the common-sense test. Maybe there was a Big Bang, but until cosmologists can offer some depiction of the prior condition, the line of thought is suspect.

In the process demonstrating that he has no clue about either general relativity or electromagnetism:

That gravity exists is indisputable, and the equations by which it functions have been so precisely refined that NASA can guide space probes moving amid the outer planets. But the what of gravity--how it works--is a total unknown. When the apple falls toward the ground, no force, wave, or other carrier of attraction can be detected operating between the two. Many carriers of various kinds of electromagnetic radiation have been identified, such as the photons that mediate light; whatever mediates gravity continues to defy detection. Einstein speculated that the mass of every object causes space-time to curve, and then less massive objects roll downward on the curvature, and that's where gravity comes from. But wait, even if space is curved by mass, why do objects roll down the curvature--what pulls them? Your guess is as good as the next PhD's.

First, in general relativity objects don't "roll downward" on the curvature. Objects that are not pushed by the strong or the electroweak force move through curved space along that space's "straight lines"--i.e., they follow the shortest distance between any two points--according to the (relativistic version of) Newton's First Law of Motion: a body in uniform motion will continue in uniform motion. Nothing is needed to pull them--unless, of course, you think that it is a deep and profound mystery that your car rolling down the road continues to move when you take your foot off the gas (what pulls it!?).

There is more in the article, go read it.

What a moron.