MORE ON TOM HARKIN: “One would think that the post-1991 Tom Harkin would know better by now than to assail anyone else’s Vietnam record. As for our media colleagues, is it too much to ask that they finally take notice of which party is responsible for keeping Vietnam front and center in our Presidential campaigns?”

Earlier Harkin posts here and here.

OKAY, ENOUGH ABOUT VIETNAM: Let’s talk about something more recent. Here’s the latest from the Annenberg outfit, FactCheck.org:

A Bush-Cheney ’04 ad released Aug. 13 accuses Kerry of being absent for 76% of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s public hearings during the time he served there. The Kerry campaign calls the ad “misleading,” so we checked, and Bush is right.

Official records show Kerry not present for at least 76% of public hearings held during his eight years on the panel, and possibly 78% (the record of one hearing is ambiguous).

Kerry points out that most meetings of the Intelligence Committee are closed and attendance records of those meetings aren’t public, hinting that his attendance might have been better at the non-public proceedings. But Kerry could ask that his attendance records be made public, and hasn’t.

Aides also claimed repeatedly that Kerry had been vice chairman of the intelligence committee, but that was Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, not John Kerry. . . .

If anything, the ad understates Kerry’s lack of attendance.

Ouch. Maybe that’s why he wants to talk about Vietnam. (Here’s a link to the ad.)

UPDATE: Reader Hunter McDaniel emails:

The “misleading” aspect of the Bush ad isn’t whether the attendance numbers are accurate – they probably are. Rather it is the implicit assumption that the public hearings are a valuable use of a Senator’s time and that attendance is a direct measure of a Senator’s effectiveness. Maybe, maybe not. In my limited viewing of C-SPAN I see mostly grandstanding and posturing which isn’t a very good use of ANYONE’s time.

If I were a reporter, I might also ask what the attendance records of other committee members were for comparison. And how are the attendance records kept – what happens when a Senator comes for the first 30 minutes, goes out to a speaking engagement, and comes back for the wrap-up?

Attendance/voting records are a favorite target of negative ads from both parties. I generally blow them off as meaningless.

Hmm. Could be, and the general point is certainly valid. But what makes the commercial effective is this: First, we’re at war, and this is the Intelligence Committee that Kerry’s been AWOL from, not Agriculture. Second, Kerry’s talking about how he’ll make intelligence reform a top priority if elected, but this makes it look as if he hasn’t made it a priority before. And besides, “grandstanding and posturing” is pretty much a Senator’s job description, right? If we can’t talk about that, what’s left? Vietnam?

UPDATE: Reader Bradly Roger Bettin emails:

The argument (“Public hearings are for posturing”) would have more power if Kerry authorized a release of the attendance records from the closed sessions of the Intelligence Committee during his tenure as a member.

If, for example, Kerry’s attendance at the closed sessions was 98%, then it’d support the claim that he was there for the important stuff, but just wasn’t interested in the posturing which goes on at public hearings.

To date, though, Kerry hasn’t authorized release of the attendance records, which suggests he doesn’t believe they’d help him. And the hints dropped by those who have reason to know what’s in them suggest his attendance at the closed sessions isn’t good either.

That Kerry wanted to cut funding for intelligence by draconian amounts suggests he didn’t see much use for the intelligence community back then – and it wouldn’t be surprised to see that sort of scorn show up in his Intelligence Committee attendance.

As the Annenberg folks note, he could have released these (just as, I’ll note, he could release his military records) but he didn’t, suggesting that whatever’s in them won’t help his position.

WEBLOGS IN THE CLASSROOM: Interesting.

SEVERAL READERS want to know why, when I’m pointing out Kerry’s heavy reliance on Vietnam stories, I don’t comment on Bush’s carrier landing.

Actually, I was quite critical of it at the time, writing:

The jet-pilot arrival, on the other hand, rang false. The whole leader-who-flies-jets thing seems, somehow, Third World to me. People say that it’ll make great campaign footage in 2004, but I actually doubt it — or at least, I think it will backfire if they do too much of this. The President is commander-in-chief, but he’s a civilian leader, and Americans want him to be one.

I still think that (even though Jeff Jarvis said I was off base at the time), and even though John Kerry seems to feel otherwise, too.

UPDATE: Reader C. Kanige emails: “The Bush Bashers have a field day (you too) about the Bush carrier landing. What I remember is the joy exhibited by the sailors on the boat at that time. It really seemed worth it all. Take a look at the tape and then disparage it. I don’t think you can.”

I’m a “Bush Basher” now? Someone tell Oliver Willis!

JUDICIAL WATCH JUMPS IN: Beldar comments.

HURRICANEBLOGGING: Stacy Tabb rounds up some striking pictures of damage from Charley.

THE SUBSTANDARD is a new blog by Jonathan Last et al.

I’VE BEEN NOMINATED for a World Technology Award. And of course, the real honor is being nominated.

MORE ON THE SAUDI MONEY TRAIL:

The collision of Saudi missionary work and suspicions of terrorist financing in San Diego illustrates the perils and provocations of a multibillion-dollar effort by Saudi Arabia to spread its religion around the world. Mohamed worked on the front lines of that effort, a campaign to transform what outsiders call “Wahhabism,” once a marginal and puritanical brand of Islam with few followers outside the Arabian Peninsula, into the dominant doctrine in the Islamic world. The campaign has created a vast infrastructure of both government-supported and private charities that at times has been exploited by violent jihadists — among them Osama bin Laden.

Yes, and the Bush Administration’s greatest vulnerability is that it hasn’t done enough about this.

WHAT’S REALLY INTERESTING about this Kerry cartoon from the Charlotte Observer is that it assumes the reader’s knowledge of a story that’s gotten, even today, very little coverage from the traditional media (including, based on a site search, the Observer itself). I think this says something significant about how people get news nowadays. (See the update to this post for why I think that’s important.)

UPDATE: Roger Simon has further thoughts.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Frederick Turner:

The “mainstream press” may be in the process of squandering a precious resource that its leaders no longer have the institutional memory to recognize as the source of its legitimacy and its living. In the last few years — essentially since 9/11 plunged us into a new world, a new agenda, that the press did not understand — the major organs of civilized journalism, once trusted by the billion most effective people on the planet, have given away their credibility upon a trifle.

Indeed. Read the whole thing.

BUT WHAT ABOUT MY JOB, Mr. Warmonger, sir? Amusing German reactions to the base-closing decision. (“Given Mr. Bsirske’s strident opposition to the Iraq war, the Bush administration and the US military, one would have thought that he and his union would have been overjoyed at the prospect of thousands of ‘imperial hegemons’ withdrawing from Germany. In fact, the opposite is true.”)

UPDATE: Heh.

SOME QUESTIONS FOR DOUG BRINKLEY that he ought to be able to answer.

SOME SORT OF BIZARRE TESTOSTERONE MELTDOWN: Discussed over at GlennReynolds.com.

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO GET THE POST LOOKING AT MILITARY RECORDS? A story that’s bad for Kerry’s critics, I guess. No mention at all of the Cambodia story, though, in which Kerry’s critics have been proved right (as even the Kerry campaign has admitted) — and which the Post has ignored.

UPDATE: Charles Austin notices something unusual here:

Isn’t it interesting that in the case of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the “correction” appears on page one above the fold, while the original news was buried on page 19.

Something of a reversal there. There are those who email me to say that focusing on this stuff isn’t the best way to get Bush re-elected. Fine, maybe so — but getting Bush re-elected isn’t what I’m about. I like him better than Kerry, true, but he has people paid to get him re-elected, and I’m not one of them. (And given their silence on this issue, maybe talking about it is a bad move for Bush.) But this story seems to me to be absolutely fascinating in that it reveals just how in the tank for the Democrats the mainstream media are, and how little the vaunted Cronkitean claims of objectivity and research and factual accuracy really mean when the chips are down. What’s more, lots of people are noticing.

To me, that’s a bigger deal than the underlying issue or even, in some ways, the election itself. Elections come and go, politicians come and go, and pretty much all of them turn out to be disappointments one way or another. But the “Fourth Estate” is a big part of the unelected Permanent Government that in many ways does more to run the country than the politicians. And it’s unravelling before our very eyes, which I think is the biggest story of the election so far. (More thoughts in the updates here.)

ANOTHER UPDATE: Related thoughts from Robert Clayton Dean here and here.

TOM HARKIN UPDATE: A 1991 Wall Street Journal article about his invented Vietnam service (mentioned below) is now available on the web.

UPDATE: Interestingly, despite being debunked over a decade ago, Harkin appears to still be peddling the bogus Vietnam story. At least, this CNN report from his endorsement of Howard Dean calls him “A Navy veteran who served in Vietnam.” And I didn’t realize it, but Harkin’s charges against Cheney are actually recycled from 2000.

DON’T MISS THIS WEEK’S 100th CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES: Who knows — you might find a blog you like better than this one!

MORE CLAIMS OF VOTE FRAUD IN VENEZUELA, in the International Herald Tribune. (Via Stromata).

OUCH: This doesn’t help. But where’s Helen Thomas in this picture?

PINCHED: Now Kerry’s war stories are being attacked from the left. I don’t think much of these guys, but you can’t dismiss them as Republican shills! And presumably, their stuff is subject to outside validation, if anyone bothers. (Sorry — my lunch hour is over. . . .) [LATER: Does this count? Left and right agree, anyway.]

Meanwhile, Helen Thomas is calling him a warmonger, though in typical Helen Thomas fashion she’s utterly clueless:

Kerry is mistaken on a key point. Under the U.S. Constitution, the president does not have that sole right to declare war. Despite its mindless default, that right still belongs to Congress.

Yes, and that’s why Kerry said he voted to give Bush that authority. See, that’s what Congress does when it declares war. Sheesh. Read the stuff you quote, Helen.

Now I’m defending John Kerry against Helen Thomas. What is this, the Bizarro-blogosphere?

UGLY AMERICANS: Yep.

UPDATE: Related thoughts here.

I MEANT TO LINK to yesterday’s New York Times story on charter schools, er, yesterday, but as you may have noticed blogging was somewhat limited. Anyway, now Mickey Kaus has a long post on it. He’s not impressed.

ONE OF MY READERS faces a moral quandary.

TOM HARKIN, FAKE WAR HERO: In an update to an earlier post, I noted some comments by Donald Sensing about Sen. Tom Harkin, most recently seen attacking the patriotism of Dick Cheney. Sensing observed: “Harkin himself claimed to have battled Mig fighters over North Vietnam while a Navy pilot. He was a pilot, but never went to Vietnam.”

A reader emailed to say that he didn’t think Sensing’s sourcing was good enough for a charge of that magnitude. It seemed to me that I remembered some Harkin truth-stretching from back then, and I trust Sensing, but in keeping with Walter Cronkite’s warnings about poorly sourced stories on the Internet, I decided to do some research at lunchtime. In a book called Stolen Valor : How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History, I found this passage, which is considerably worse for Harkin than Sensing’s short summary. I’m reproducing it as an image for the benefit of doubters.

I also found an article from the Wall Street Journal, entitled “Harkin Presidential Bid Marred by Instances In Which Candidate Appears to Stretch Truth,” dated December 26, 1991, p. A12. (Sorry — I got this via WESTLAW so I can’t post a link, but the WESTLAW page number is 1991 WL-WSJ 578809.) [LATER: It’s now available for free on the Web, thanks to James Taranto.] It supports the above. Here’s an excerpt:

In 1979, Mr. Harkin, then a congressman, participated in a round-table discussion arranged by the Congressional Vietnam Veterans’ Caucus. “I spent five years as a Navy pilot, starting in November of 1962,” Mr. Harkin said at that meeting, in words that were later quoted in a book, Changing of the Guard, by Washington Post political writer David Broder. “One year was in Vietnam. I was flying F-4s and F-8s on combat air patrols and photo-reconnaisance support missions. I did no bombing.”

That clearly is not an accurate picture of his Navy service. Though Mr. Harkin stresses he is proud of his Navy record — “I put my ass on the line day after day” — he concedes now he never flew combat air patrols in Vietnam. . . .

Mr. Harkin’s Navy record shows his only decoration is the National Defense Service Medal, awarded to everyone on active service during those years. He did not receive either the Vietnam Service medal or the Vietnam Campaign medal, the decorations given to everyone who served in the Southeast Asia theater. “We didn’t get them for what we did,” Mr. Harkin says. “It’s never bothered me.”

Two things bother me about this. One is that Harkin seems a rather odd choice for the Democrats as an attack dog. As Sensing notes, what are they thinking?

The other is that I managed to do this research over my lunch hour, but it doesn’t seem to be noted in the press treatment of Harkin’s charges by the people who get, you know, paid to do this stuff. (Take that, Walter!) And it would seem that when Harkin — who didn’t serve in Vietnam combat but who lied about it, and whose actual military service seems rather similar to Bush’s — calls Dick Cheney a “coward” because he didn’t serve in Vietnam, well, it ought to be worth mentioning. Shouldn’t it be?

Instead, CNN calls Harkin a “former Navy fighter pilot,” (though it at least gets the details of his service correct).

Calling Harkin “a Senator who, like President Bush, flew fighter jets during the Vietnam era without seeing combat but who, unlike President Bush, lied about it,” would be more accurate, but it would kind of change the story. Wonder why nobody looked into this? Or, if they knew, bothered to note it?

As with the Kerry Christmas-in-Cambodia story, this is probably more significant for what it tells us about the sorry state of political journalism this campaign season than for what it tells us about the speaker.

UPDATE: Roger Simon has more thoughts on today’s political journalism, and Harkin.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Daniel Moore observes:

The blogosphere has clearly shown the world that there are a whole host of stories that old media doesn’t cover out of sheer laziness and that any quick look for actual facts can contradict many stories that, say, political candidates put out and then [are] taken as fact by the media. Newspaper reporters used to know this – and they used to look for those facts. They used to check sources. They used to search for the truth in a way that would make any skeptic proud. But now they just read the press releases and change a word here or there.

It sure seems that way, sometimes, on some stories.

MORE: Reader Greg Swenson emails: “I was infuriated about Harkin’s comments because I too did some coffee break Googling and found the same notes regarding the Senator’s exaggerations of his service after I recalled the earlier incident. I’m a goddamn salesman and even I (underlined with emphasis) could fact check Harkin’s ass. Why can’t these blow-dried prima donnas news types do it?” Beats me. Guess they don’t want to. “Gulf War Veteran” Bryan Preston has more.

STILL MORE: Well, glory be — somebody did notice this. Reader Jim Adair emails: “Last night on Brit Hume’s Fox News show, Hume mentioned the Harkin attack on Cheney and also mentioned that Harkin had overly expressed his service contribution during a presidential bid. Fair AND balanced!” [LATER: Here’s a link to the transcript: scroll to the bottom.]

Sean Hackbarth writes: “I’m sensing a pattern.” This seems to be getting rather a lot of attention now.

Michael Drout, journalist-turned-professor, explains why journalists don’t want to look for facts anymore:

Based on my experience at J-school, I can generalize a couple things about journalists around my age that could explain some of the problems. First, nearly all of us were in J-school not because we wanted to be reporters, but because we wanted to write. . . . Thus reporters are ripe for the temptation of press-releases: and most press-release-writing flacks are people with journalism degrees who know exactly how to write a release so that the reporter can edit out obvious promotion but still buy the overall spin.

Second, almost all of the J-school program at Stanford was spent trying to get us to think about the implications of journalism, the politics of reporting, the influence of journalists, etc.

He concludes:

I think this is a long-term big problem for Journalism, the profession. It has been eating its seed corn for a decade or more, and so much of its cultural authority is used up. This can be good, in that it reduces the influence of unaccountable institutions, like the big daily papers. But it’s also bad, because once everyone stops believing the newspapers, you have a huge problem of vetting and evaluating information.

Indeed.

FINALLY: Reader Dennis Preiser emails:

All of the talk about lazy journalism, etc., etc. is not the “real deal” in Harkin’s story or any other story. The point that should be made is that the only stories that are not pursued with zeal by the MSM are the ones that benefit George W. Bush. There is absolutely no other factor of import involved. It’s nothing but bias, pure and simple. Period.

Well, they did seem to work a lot harder on the AWOL claims. . . .

JIM DUNNIGAN WRITES on why Intelligence Czars don’t work.

DARFUR UPDATE: Dave Kopel, et al., have some thoughts on what’s wrong and what to do, along with some more general observations regarding the international community’s response to genocide.

Rajan Rishyakaran, by the way, has another link-rich roundup of news relating to Darfur.