BUSH VOLUNTEERED FOR VIETNAM — yeah, we’re living in Bizarro world.

UPDATE: More thoughts from Russell Wardlow. And I didn’t realize it — somehow CBS missed the story, I guess — but the Bush-volunteered story actually came out in February.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Shockingly, this was even reported in Newsweek:

The standard rap against Bush is that he was ducking combat by joining the Guard. Actually, the Texas Air Guard had a program called Palace Alert that allowed pilots to volunteer for flight time in Vietnam. Three of Bush’s fellow pilots—Udell, Woodfin and Fred Bradley—recalled to NEWSWEEK that Bush inquired with the base commander about signing up for Palace Alert. He was told no; he had too few flying hours at the time and his plane, the F-102, was by then deemed obsolete for air combat.

Funny that this hasn’t gotten more attention. Does anyone read Newsweek?

RATHERGATE UPDATE: Bill at INDCJournal has an interview with Bob Schieffer. Who says bloggers don’t do original reporting? (It’s worth noting, as some otherwise-good histories of RatherGate haven’t, that he was also the first to bring in an outside forensic expert to evaluate the CBS documents.)

UPDATE: Bill Adams and The American Thinker have more on the latest CBS developments.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here, too.

NATO: A “FRAUDULENT ALLIANCE?” Germany is pulling out of a joint training exercise because of a Ralph Peters column? Peters’ reply is on-target:

Called for comment at home in northern Virginia, Peters said, “It’s perfectly all right for the Germans to call President Bush a Nazi, it’s perfectly all right for the Germans to criticize everything about America, to lionize [“Fahrenheit 911” director] Michael Moore and treat our soldiers as second-class human beings … but they want to try and censor the American media.”

Peters said the German decision was disappointing but not surprising.

“I think the fact that they’re pulling out is the best imaginable indicator of how weak our alliance is, how meaningless Germany’s contribution is,” said Peters. “If they pull out because they can’t stand one 800-word opinion piece in an American newspaper, how could we possibly expect them to stand by us in a violent crisis?”

We’ve already learned how much we can expect from them in that regard, I’m afraid.

UPDATE: Reader Eric Lundberg emails:

While sharing Medienkritik’s general disgust with the German double-standard regarding criticism, I think it is pertinent that the reason the German general pulled out of the exercise is that Ralph Peter’s is scheduled to be a featured speaker at the event (according to the September 24 “Stars & Stripes”). That said, I can’t imagine the U.S. Army being as thin-skinned.

Good point.

JOANNE JACOBS is thanking Dan Rather and Big Media generally for subsidizing her work on more worthy, but less salable, topics. Or something like that.

THIS DOESN’T SEEM ALL THAT TRAGIC, TO ME:

A car bomb in the Syrian capital, Damascus, has killed a senior member of Palestinian militant group Hamas. Izz El-Deen Sheikh Khalil died after the bomb exploded in his car, completely destroying it.

Perhaps some of the Iranian mullahs who are supporting Sadr might be next? I don’t know, but when you put it together with this story it gets interesting:

An Arab state provided Israel with valuable intelligence on the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and its leadership overseas, the London-based Arabic daily al-Hayat reported Friday.

According to the newspaper, an intelligence agency belonging to an Arab state supplied Israel with intelligence on Hamas leaders living in Beirut, Damascus, Tehran and Khartoum at the request of Mossad head Meir Dagan.

Hmm. Meanwhile, in a gratifying, but probably unrelated, development we have this report:

KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) – Paramilitary police may have killed a suspected top al-Qaida operative Sunday in a four-hour gunbattle during a raid on a house in southern Pakistan that led to the arrest of two other men, a senior Pakistani intelligence official said.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the dead man was thought to be Amjad Hussain Farooqi, who was wanted for his alleged role in the kidnapping and beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002.

Other intelligence officials said earlier that the raid was launched after police received a tip that Farooqi was hiding in the house.

He will not be missed.

THIS SEEMS LIKE GOOD NEWS:

America has mounted a covert operation to safeguard Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and prevent warheads from falling under the control of rogue commanders or Islamist terrorists.

Teams of American specialists, deployed in Pakistan’s most sensitive military sites, have formulated launch codes to prevent the unauthorised use of nuclear missiles.

“They are sending their experts to our nuclear sites to roll back our nuclear programme and declare Pakistan a rogue state,” said Munawar Hassan, deputy leader of Jamaat-I-Islami, the main Islamist party. “Pervaiz Musharraf is playing into the hands of the US. He is not our ruler, he is serving the interests of America.”

America’s involvement in compiling missile codes raises the possibility that it might be able to prevent Pakistan from launching its nuclear weapons.

I don’t see a downside to this, and I hope things are as reported.

GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS offers thoughts on what’s going on in Iraq. Very much worth reading.

HEY, MAYBE HE BELONGED IN GUANTANAMO AFTER ALL:

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – Afghan security forces killed a senior Taliban commander and two of his comrades in a raid in southern Afghanistan, an official said Sunday.

Maulvi Abdul Ghaffar, reportedly a former inmate at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, died in a gunbattle Saturday night in Pishi, a village in the southern province of Uruzgan, said Jan Mohammed Khan, governor of Uruzgan.

Just possibly, anyway.

BELDAR IS CHALLENGING THE MEDIA to demonstrate that the SwiftVet charges have been “debunked.”

IN THE MAIL: Actually, a couple of weeks ago, but it seems worth mentioning now in the wake of RatherGate: Richard Viguerie, et al., America’s Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Power. Based on a quick look, it’s not bad (and there’s lots of interesting stuff on book publishing, talk radio, and direct mail as well as the Internet), but I still think that Joe Trippi’s book is the best overall in terms of recent Internet-and-politics works.

HE’S NO WIMP:

U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama suggested Friday that the United States one day might have to launch surgical missile strikes into Iran and Pakistan to keep extremists from getting control of nuclear bombs. . . .

Obama said that violent Islamic extremists are a vastly different brand of foe than was the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and they must be treated differently.

“With the Soviet Union, you did get the sense that they were operating on a model that we could comprehend in terms of, they don’t want to be blown up, we don’t want to be blown up, so you do game theory and calculate ways to contain,” Obama said. “I think there are certain elements within the Islamic world right now that don’t make those same calculations.

I wonder if the Times will start calling him a conservative?

DARFUR UPDATE:

Many refugees in Sudan’s wartorn Darfur region still live in a climate of fear and are reluctant to return home as they do not trust the government to protect them, according to the United Nation’s (UN) human rights chief.

“The stories we heard in all three states of Darfur convey an acute sense of insecurity,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour said.

Many refugees “continue to live in a climate of fear”.

An estimated 50,000 people have died and 1.4 million have been displaced in Sudan’s western Darfur region where UN officials say pro-government Janjaweed militias have carried out a scorched earth campaign of ethnic cleansing against non-Arab minorities.

The Arab News, on the other hand, says this is just more Crusader-talk.

THE NEW YORK TIMES PICKS UP on the story of Kerry’s Chinese assault weapon:

In interviews appearing in the October issue of Outdoor Life, Mr. Kerry and President Bush were asked whether they were gun owners, and, if so, to identify their favorite gun. . . .

“My favorite gun is the M-16 that saved my life and that of my crew in Vietnam,” Mr. Kerry told the magazine. “I don’t own one of those now, but one of my reminders of my service is a Communist Chinese assault rifle.”

Mr. Kerry’s campaign would not say what model rifle Mr. Kerry was referring to, where he got it and when, or how many guns he owned. A spokesman for the senator, Michael Meehan, said Mr. Kerry was a registered gun owner in Massachusetts. On Thursday morning, Mr. Meehan said he had not been able to ask Mr. Kerry about the rifle because of Mr. Kerry’s hoarse voice; he did not respond to further inquiries.

He’s got laryngitis! Go away!

Call me crazy, but stuff like this isn’t going to help with the Kerry rebranding effort.

A BUNCH OF PEOPLE ARE EMAILING ME about this article on political bloggers in today’s New York Times magazine.

Yeah, it calls me a “conservative,” but I’ve just about given up fighting that since to so many people “conservative” is just a synonym for “supports the war.” (Me and Mark Hatfield! And Barack Obama!).

I think it’s a pretty good article. Some people are unhappy that it focuses on the lefty bloggers, but that was the intent of the piece from the get-go, and it’s been underway for a while — I had a long conversation with the reporter a few weeks back — and it’s not as if folks like me and Andrew Sullivan and Mickey Kaus haven’t had our time in the media spotlight.

UPDATE: A different perspective on the blogosphere here, from The Independent. And, weirdly, the Kos crowd seems to regard the New York Times piece as a “hatchet job against left-wing bloggers.”

There’s no pleasing some people.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Joshua Rovine emails:

One theory is that not only is Obama a conservative for suggesting the need to get rid of Iranian nukes, as you suggested, but maybe he is a nefarious neoconservative who, like his fellow Jews, cares only about helping Israel. Oops, he isn’t Jewish. Oh well.

Hey, me neither. Another thing that Barack and I have in common!

Meanwhile Paul Seyferth emails:

I would call you a sober liberal, sort of a “classic liberal” with your shoes off and your pant legs rolled up. It’s not your fault the Left made a muck of everything.

I do think that nominating Kerry was a mistake. And I suspect that it’ll be an even bigger one if he wins, since he has no real base of support beyond the “anybody but Bush” crowd.

But though I think Kerry is probably beyond the point of credibly reassuring me on the war, I invite him to move left and join me in open support for gay marriage, drug legalization, and abortion rights without any of that “personally opposed but still in favor” weaseling.

MORE: Hugh Hewitt thinks the Times is trying to bring in blogger reinforcements:

It is a vast cry for help, a plea for reinforcements. The bloggers are inside the citadel, so call in the allied bloggers.

On the other hand a more — or maybe just differently — cynical reader thinks this is all about excuse-making, arguing that they’re setting up the lefty bloggers for blame when Kerry loses. First Dean, then Kerry: It’s all those lefty bloggers’ fault! I suspect that in both cases, this is looking too deeply for agendas. But I could be wrong.

More thoughts here. And here, too.

And Yclipse says that the Times misunderstands the nature of the blogosphere.

CINEMOCRACY writes that I’m not paying enough attention to aesthetics:

Reynolds is missing an essential part of the debate – he doesn’t appear to embrace the realities of the political image, unless he’s exposing media bias or scorning Hollywood. We find this is odd, because Reynolds is a photographer by hobby, and there is no other art form that is more tuned towards selecting something from the real world and manipulating its qualities (framing, contrast, pose, etc.) in an image designed by the artist to inspire in a desired effect.

That’s probably true. So let me look at one aesthetic aspect of this campaign — the bumper stickers. I think it’s important, and so does John Kerry!

[H]e spent four weeks mulling the design of his campaign logo, consulting associates about what font it should use and whether it should include an American flag. (It does.)

So what hath Kerry wrought? I think it’s a winner:

It’s got a very nice retro-look, somehow reminiscent of the New Frontiers era. Smart move, since that’s the last time a Democrat ran convincingly as strong on national defense, and there’s that whole JFK-parallel thing going, too. The flag was a nice addition, and certainly strengthens that effect.

It’s especially notable by comparison to this earlier Kerry logo, which by contrast reeks of the 1970s, a far less fortunate association:

The Bush/Cheney material is more middle of the road. Their main bumpersticker seems to me to invoke a 1980s feel — a sly Reagan allusion, perhaps?

Not stunning, but serviceable.

This one is more elegant:

Understated, and suitable for people who fear vandalism, which is apparently a problem.

Kerry’s firsthand attention to political semiotics is impressive, and unusual in a leader. What this bodes for the campaign, or reveals about the candidates, is less clear, though one suspects that President Bush has taken a more, er, delegative approach to questions of design

IT’S NOT A HURRICANE — it’s an opportunity to market your blog!

MICKEY KAUS passed through town, headed toward L.A. in the sleek Kausmobile. We had sushi and talked about blogs; the Insta-Daughter enlightened him on The Sims.

I haven’t done a cross-country drive in a while, and I envy him. More journalists should emulate Kaus and do these drives. Or maybe Kaus is emulating Daniel Waterhouse, from The System of the World:

‘Twere pointless, as well as self-important, to rush to London, so long as he was on the island, and able to reach the city on short notice. Better to take his time and to see that island, so that he would better understand how things were . . . Through the windows of Mr. Threader’s carriage he was viewing a country almost as strange to him as Japan. It was not only England’s unwonted peace and prosperity that made it strange to him. Too, it was that he was viewing places that Puritans and Professors did not get invited to. Since Daniel had never seen those places, he tended to forget they existed, and so discount the importance of the people who lived in them.”

Even in the 18th Century they had the equivalent of Flyover Country — and the people who were smart enough not to skip it.

MARK STEYN ON THE PRESS:

They’re six feet from Iraq’s head of government and they’ve got not a question for him. They’ve got no interest in Iraq except insofar as they can use the issue to depress sufficient numbers of swing voters in Florida and Ohio.

Who’s living in the fantasyland here? Huge forces are at play in a world of rapid change. As the prime minister said, ”We Iraqis will stand by you, America, in a war larger than either of our nations.” But the gentlemen of the press can barely stifle their ennui. Say what you like about the old left, but at least they were outward-looking and internationalist. This new crowd — Democrats and media alike — are stunted and parochial, their horizons shriveling more every day.

Indeed.

THE INSTA-DAUGHTER bought The Sims 2 today, and so far gives it a mixed review. She’s not crazy about the 3D aspect, and she seems to find the user interface harder to navigate than the old Sims. That may change with time, though. It looks pretty cool to me, but I haven’t actually played it, just looked over her shoulder.

I’VE SAID BEFORE that I think it was a mistake for Kerry to brand himself as “The Vietnam Candidate.” But this column by Colbert King explains why it’s playing so badly:

Those who dismiss critics of John Kerry’s Vietnam service as just a bunch of right-wing Republicans out to advance George W. Bush’s cause don’t know what they are talking about — or they are engaged in wishful thinking. . . . The column also criticized “Unfit for Command” for smearing Kerry, a decorated former naval officer, as disloyal because of his antiwar activities. Writing as a former Army officer, I concluded: “Speaking for myself, it is enough that he served.”

A number of readers agreed with that conclusion. Many more, however, most of them angry veterans, did not. Most striking was the fact that those who identified themselves seemed to span the political spectrum, with one even describing himself as a Howard Dean Democrat.

Two weeks later, another e-mail arrived on the same topic. It was from a Howard University classmate, a friend of 47 years, former assistant secretary of the Air Force Rodney Coleman. A Democrat. . . .

“When Kerry made those critical statements of the war,” Coleman wrote, “my parents, God bless them, went ballistic about their son going in harm’s way. My military colleagues in the fellows program who had been there and were shot up were incensed that a so-called military man would engage in such insubordinate actions. At the time Kerry made those unfortunate remarks, America had POWs and MIAs, among them my friend, Colonel Fred Cherry, the longest-held black POW of the Vietnam War. How could a true American fighting man throw away his medals, while thousands he fought alongside of were in the midst of another example of man’s inhumanity to man?”

Read the whole thing.

DARFUR UPDATE: David Brooks observes:

Confronted with the murder of 50,000 in Sudan, we eschewed all that nasty old unilateralism, all that hegemonic, imperialist, go-it-alone, neocon, empire, coalition-of-the-coerced stuff. Our response to this crisis would be so exquisitely multilateral, meticulously consultative, collegially cooperative and ally-friendly that it would make John Kerry swoon and a million editorialists nod in sage approval.

And so we Americans mustered our outrage at the massacres in Darfur and went to the United Nations. And calls were issued and exhortations were made and platitudes spread like béarnaise. The great hum of diplomacy signaled that the global community was whirring into action.

Meanwhile helicopter gunships were strafing children in Darfur.

Read the whole thing, which is just damning.

KERRY’S FINAL, FATAL MISTAKE? “Kerry will never dig himself out of this one, I think. And any time he makes his old favorite argument that he is much better suited for interaction with our allies, his Allawi blunder will be thrown in his face.”

POWER LINE notes that the AP is at it again.

UPDATE: That was quick. AP has changed the headline and the story. It’s nice that they fix these things when people point them out, but it’s telling that the first iteration seems to involve such a partisan anti-Bush spin.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails:

Doesn’t this remind you of the sneaky TV lawyers who ask a loaded question which they KNOW will thrown out upon objection?

Then, the judge intones, ” The jury will disregard…” but the damage is done. And wasn’t that the whole point of the question? CAN the jury simple forget they ever heard?

The blogosphere now sits in the judge’s role, yet, the damage is done. Thousands of news sites received the damaging title and used it. Bah!

But the witness’s credibility is damaged. Especially if you read what Power Line has discovered about the reporter in question.

MORE: A reader notes that the reporter didn’t write the headline (they never do), which is true enough, and worth stressing. But she did write the story.

JAY ROSEN HAS THOUGHTS on whether CBS News has a political future.

PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW how I’m liking the new Neal Stephenson book, The System of the World. I’m about 2/3 of the way through it now, and enjoying it very much. The opening is a bit windy, but the action is now well underway, featuring such delights as Isaac Newton and Daniel Waterhouse trying to defuse a ticking bomb only to . . . well, that would be telling.