IT’S HELL BEING A LIBERAL BLOGGER THESE DAYS: First I’m smeared by Fox News. Then, when I dare to respond, I’m savaged by pro-lifers making Moby-like false allegations. And now I discover that I’m on Orrin Hatch’s hit list! It’s “fear and smear” all over the place!

Hatch I can handle, though, as I’ve got secret copies of his efforts at recording rap music. Trust me, he doesn’t want those to become public. . . .

UPDATE: Boy, you can’t spoof anything without upsetting someone. A reader warns me that I’m developing “Andrew Sullivan disease” and writes:

You’re beginning to worry me. First, don’t automatically assume that EVERYONE at Fox is “right wing.” That is clearly not the case. In fact, I doubt that anyone “right wing” would have any interest in slighting your Kerry fisking. It doesn’t make sense and only sounds like you want to cover yourself with a mantle of faux glory. Like, er, Kerry.

Secondly, that’s what you call being “savaged”? If a pro-lifer is Christian, he won’t swear or make an ad hominem attack, although he may misunderstand and disapprove. Put on your big boy pants.

Lastly, I love your work. But here’s the best piece of advice you’ll get: it’s not about you. Limit your persecution comments and self-promoting photos.

Er, okay. But the “faux-glory” Kerry persecution point was, well, the whole point actually.

And I thought the photo was more “self-deprecating” than “self-promoting.” I mean, I don’t exactly look like Dylan McDermott there, you know . . . .

VARIFRANK: I will blog no more about John Kerry forever. He explains why.

RON BAILEY WRITES on Transhumanism and its critics. Excellent piece:

In his Foreign Policy article, Fukuyama identifies transhumanism as “a strange liberation movement” that wants “nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints.” Sounds ominous, no? But wait a minute, isn’t human history (and prehistory) all about liberating more and more people from their biological constraints? After all, it’s not as though most of us still live in our species’ “natural state” as Pleistocene hunter-gatherers.

Human liberation from our biological constraints began when an ancestor first sharpened a stick and used it to kill an animal for food. Further liberation from biological constraints followed with fire, the wheel, domesticating animals, agriculture, metallurgy, city building, textiles, information storage by means of writing, the internal combustion engine, electric power generation, antibiotics, vaccines, transplants, and contraception. In a sense, the goal toward which humanity has been striving for millennia has been to liberate ourselves from more and more of our ancestors’ biological constraints.

Indeed.

MY COLUMN ON DISASTER PREPAREDNESS YESTERDAY inspired this column by Tim Worstall today.

AT LEAST WE’RE NOT ARGUING ABOUT KOREA: Heh.

BLOGS YOU SHOULD BE READING: N.Z. Bear is all over the 527 issue — just keep scrolling. And Michael Demmons is worth checking out, too.

Plus, the Wall Street Journal has published this annotated guide (with pictures!) to the bloggers who’ll be covering the Republican convention.

THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION, of course, is that they need to know when to set the time machine for. . . .

GLENN FISHBINE EMAILS:

You know, the drifting percentage of undecideds, mostly those who can neither read nor write, will determine the outcome of this election based on their mood on November 2nd. Those of us with strong opinions, pro or con, will not be swayed further in this partisan contest of hype, distortion and obfuscation. :)

I think it’s time for something completely different. It’s time for a shameless plug for my new book! You may have nostalgia for the 50’s, you may have grown long hair in the 60’s, and you may have spent time in a Rehab clinic in the ’70s, but how many have true nostalgia for WMD?

You’ve got to admire his positive spirit.

UNSCAM UPDATE: European banks charged with laundering Saddam’s money. I suspect that this is just an opener.

DON’T MAKE BOB DOLE ANGRY: You won’t like Bob Dole when he’s angry:

So this time you’ve got a candidate named John Kerry who had a good record in Vietnam, came back from the service, denounced the war, in effect, trashed the Americans who were still fighting there. Went before a Senate committee in April of 1971, threw away his ribbons or his medals or whatever and now is standing before the American people and saying you’ve got to elect me because I’m this Vietnam hero.

And it’s kind of hard to reconcile all of these things. So it does sort of bring up focus that I don’t think we’ve had in the past. . . .

But this is after we’d had somebody called Vice President Cheney a coward. They’ve called Bush “a deserter” that he was AWOL, that he’s condoned torture, that he’s condoned poisoning of pregnant women. I mean, all these nasty, nasty, over-the-top attacks.

And they spent $65 million trying to defame President Bush. I told John Kerry on the telephone the next day. I said, “John, President Bush is my guy. And when I see all the people dumping on him, and all the misstatements and—and untruths, it kind of riles me up a little.” So maybe I expressed that on Sunday.

And he’s angry.

UPDATE: Fred Boness disagrees: “Hey! Bob Dole is beautiful when he’s angry, assuming of course that he’s angry at someone else.”

Bob Dole, beautiful? It’s in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

ACTUAL, NON-JIGGLE Olympic-blogging.

SOME PERSPECTIVE ON THE KERRY-CAMBODIA STORY: Reader Charles Ligo emails:

Perhaps it’s because John Kerry provides a – er – “target-rich environment”, but I’ve noticed you are devoting a larger than normal percentage of your blog to politics.

Not that I’m complaining – – –

Well, I’d rather be blogging about something else. Of course, I’ve felt that way since September 11, 2001 . . . .

And I am pretty tired of blogging about Kerry, and the election (like Steven Den Beste, I was tired of this election in November of 2003), and if Kerry had more, um, definition I’d probably write about him a lot less. But let’s recap. Kerry said he was in Cambodia on Christmas, 1968. It has turned out, as even his campaign has admitted, not to be true.

This tells us something that we already kind of knew, that Kerry was way too willing to exaggerate his military experience for political ends. That’s not a cardinal sin, perhaps, but as Mickey Kaus pointed out yesterday, it’s a bigger deal when the guy gives you so little else to work with. I’m inclined to agree with Lawrence Kaplan (pay-only, but quoted here), about the limited relevance of military service to the Presidency. And I certainly agree with Andrew Sullivan that “The truth is: Biden and Lieberman and Edwards and even Obama were more ressuring on the war than Kerry was.” And since that’s my single issue, in a way the Cambodia story is not that important a question, since the answer looks pretty clear regardless. Heck, even the LBJ angle might cut in Kerry’s favor from my perspective — perhaps his desire to look macho will keep him from doing what I fear, and Democrats hope, he’ll do on the war.

But the press — and this, to me, is the most interesting and disturbing part of the story — has been shamelessly covering for Kerry, first by ignoring the story, then by spinning it, and now by confusing it.

A few years ago — maybe even a few months ago — I would have looked at a story like this and, if it never got much major play, would have assumed that there was nothing to it. Now I know better. (Question: Was the press more professional decades ago, or was it just harder to tell when they cheated?)

This seems like a big deal to me.

As for the election, well. . . . That’s a big deal, too, but actually a lesser deal. The thing is, I agree with Andrew Sullivan that Kerry looks like he’d be bad on the war. But, to be fair, you never know. If in 2000 I had known what was to come, but had known only what I knew about George W. Bush back then, I probably would have supported Al Gore as a more experienced, capable wartime leader. That — as Gore’s post-2000 behavior has shown — would likely have been a serious mistake. Bush rose to the challenge despite a not-especially-distinguished prior history. That should make me humble.

As N.Z. Bear put it:

Bush is no prize. But he’s the devil we know, and a devil who, for all his flaws, takes seriously the threat facing our nation and appears to be trying to do something about it. With Bush, I expect I will have four more years to quibble with and argue about his tactics in the conduct of this war. With Kerry, once the campaign was over, I fear I’d have a difficult time convincing him there was a war at all.

I think that’s right. But I could be wrong (and I hope I am). I’ve been wrong about a lot of Presidents (though usually in the direction of disappointment, not underestimation!). And my experience with hardfought faculty hiring decisions is that, while I’m usually right in my assessments of who’s good and who’s not, I’m wrong often enough to not treat any one of them as a live-or-die decision. (But unlike academic hiring decisions, we can’t declare the candidates inadequate and put off filling the slot until next year. And the stakes are somewhat higher.)

Just as who controlled the Senate in 2002 wasn’t the most important thing in the world, who wins the White House in 2004 isn’t either, except perhaps to those involved. But if the institutional press is, as Evan Thomas suggested, capable of delivering a 15% margin to its preferred candidate, enough to decide almost any election, and if they’re willing to go to almost any lengths in delivering that margin, well, then, we’ve got a serious problem. (And we don’t, really, have a democracy.) To me (and to others) that’s a bigger deal than Bush v. Kerry, but it’s certainly illustrated by the Kerry issues of the last few months.

Claudia Rosett is, unfortunately, probably right that we’ll soon go back to talking about war and terror — and that’s worse, just as going from talk about Gary Condit to talk of Al Qaeda was worse, in September of 2001. But I hope that people will remember what’s been demonstrated here, in interpreting the press reports of those, more horrific, events.

UPDATE: For more on the media, read this column by Stephen Green.

I’M DEEPLY SKEPTICAL OF THESE CLAIMS ABOUT KERRY AND CHINA from Judicial Watch. The gist is that:

Among the documents released is an investigative outline dated March 27, 1998, that details the FBI’s “proposed areas of inquiry” into the actions of Democratic fund-raiser Johnny Chung, including questioning him about meetings Sen. Kerry set up with China Aerospace executives and about a fund-raising event for the senator in Los Angeles. The other document, dated Aug. 24, 1998, requests a polygraph of Chung, mentioning that he laundered contributions for the Clinton/Gore ’96 election campaign and for Sen. Kerry. The documents are heavily redacted, and Judicial Watch is appealing the FBI’s decision to keep secret portions of the documents.

This is all very preliminary stuff that is a long way from any kind of proof, or even evidence. And fund-raisers — and meetings with foreign companies — are a normal part of any Senator’s work. This seems like more of the same China stuff that I dismissed a while back.

I THOUGHT IT WAS TOMORROW, but you can hear the audio of Eric Muller and Michelle Malkin debating her new book from WHYY by following this link.

DARFUR UPDATE: iAbolish, the anti-slavery outfit, is sponsoring a rally against the Sudan genocide, at the UN in September. I hope it’s well-attended, and well-covered.

OKAY, THIS HISTORY-INVENTION STUFF IS GETTING SCARY:

John Kerry speaking at a Martin Luther King day celebration in Virginia last year said, quote, “I remember well April 1968, I was serving in Vietnam. A place of violence. When the news reports brought home to me and my crew mates the violence back home and the tragic news that one of the bullets flying that terrible spring took the life of Dr. King.” That date, of Dr. King’s death, was April 4, 1968. According to kerry’s website, it was not until November 17, 1968, that he reported for duty in Vietnam.

Sheesh. This was so unbelievable that I looked for the transcript, which seems to be here. [LATER: Same speech here.] Kerry’s website says he was on the Gridley when King died. (It shows Feb 10, 1968 as when he “requests duty in Vietnam,” but he’s still on the Gridley when it “sets sail” for the U.S. in May). Does that count as “in Vietnam?” Seems like a stretch to me.

UPDATE: A reader says that people who served on the Gridley got Vietnam service medals. (Read this ship’s history for more on what they did.) Meanwhile, Jon Henke emails:

I think it’s fair to assume that the Gridley was “in Vietnam” in a sense. But, I think his statement should have been more precise.

Here’s a more accurate statement, for kicks and grins:
______________________
“I remember well April, 1968 – I was serving in…well, I was serving fairly near Vietnam–a place of violence…or, at least, that’s what I heard in the news reports, which, let me tell you, is scary stuff to hear about from a hundred or so miles away–when the news reports brought home to me and my crewmates stories of the violence back home.

I wasn’t there, either, but it’s like I was. I mean, what with hearing about it on the news reports like that violence in Vietnam, where I almost was.”
______________________

– – -The above parody is for humorous purposes only, to be taken in the same manner in which Kerry’s original statement was intended. A “not literally, but you know what I mean” sort of thing.

Got it. And I’d score this as a stretch, since the image he was trying to provide was a bit different, but not a lie. And as always, the question is — what would the press be doing if a Republican said stuff like this?

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader with relevant experience agrees that Kerry deserves the benefit of the doubt here:

I am no fan of John Kerry. Far from it.

I know and have served with some of the Swift Vets who have undertaken the effort to get Kerry’s embellishments of his Swift boat days and his later anti-war service made part of the public debate. They are straight talkers who have good reason to be offended by his behavior and by his misrepresentations. I trust them and support their efforts.

On the other hand, I have no problem with the statement that Kerry served two tours in Vietnam – one while serving in the USS Gridley and one with the Swift boats. . . .

Not every Viet Nam vet was a ground combat soldier and the war was not fought completely on land or on the rivers. On shore, off shore, in the air— it was the same war and it was a team effort and it didn’t matter where you were. The military awarded Vietnam Service and Vietnam Campaign medals for service ashore and In the waters adjacent to Vietnam.

To take a contrary view is to diminish the dedicated and sometimes extremely dangerous service of a substantial number of sailors at sea who served well and honorably for months at a time during the war. They earned their Vietnam service and campaign medals.

So cut Kerry some slack on this minor point. There are plenty of other – and much larger -targets of opportunity.

Mark Tempest
Captain, USNR (retired)
Served off Vietnam in USS Pyro (AE-24) 1972

Fair enough. And we’ve gotten to the bottom of this story in under an hour, thanks to the miracle of the blogosphere!

MORE: Or maybe not. Now I’m getting email the other way. Here’s one from my Vietnam-Marine colleague Tom Plank:

Service off shore of Vietnam deserves credit and honor (and Kerry is due that). But to say that “I remember well April 1968, I was serving in Vietnam. A place of violence.” and not point out that one was serving on a ship in the waters off Vietnam is rank dishonesty.

I spent a few days on a ship off the shore in Vietnam and spent months in the “rear” in Da Nang and in the “bush” southwest of Da Nang. There is a big difference between steaming off shore and even serving in the rear, where a trip to the PX or to downtown Da Nang might be an occasion for an ambush.

I do not not cut Kerry slack on this. A out-right lie. If he had left out Vietnam, his statement would have been noble. All of us 50+ folks remember MLK’s death and we were appalled, even before some of us went to Vietnam.

Well, there’s room to disagree on all things Kerry-related, apparently.

LAST UPDATE: Capt. Tempest, reading the above, emails: “Tough audience!” Always. And Philip Carter, who served on the Gridley and maintains the history website linked above, emails:

This is another example of Kerry writing for dramatic effect. It would have been more appropriate for him to say that he was in the South China Sea or the Gulf of Tonkin. We were on Northern SAR duty off of North Vietnam, standing by to rescue downed pilots. We did stop in Danang on the way to station, which spawned a whole other fantasy in TOUR OF DUTY. The book is replete with exaggerated references like this.

While service in the Gulf had its dangers, it does not equate to a tour incountry even though GRIDLEY experienced combat and dead and wounded in the previous tour in 1967. Kerry was not onboard then, being in school on the West Coast.

As I said, I score this one as a stretch, though not actually a lie.

BAND OF BROTHERS: Heh.

A LETTER TO KERRY: Ouch! I’ll bet he’s regretting that “bring it on” language. Read the whole thing, and note the Medal of Honor recipients among the signatories. (Click “read more” to read it).

UPDATE: Related irony. I think the actual letter is better, though.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Soxblog has an analysis of the Cleland trip. And interestingly, the list of those signing the letter to Bush includes Tom Harkin.

Seems like a bad choice to me.

(more…)

CAMBODIA UPDATE: John Cole notes that John O’Neill says he was in Cambodia on a Swift Boat. He says this hurts O’Neill’s credibility.

Does this suggest that Kerry might have been there? Maybe it would, if the Kerry campaign hadn’t already admitted that he wasn’t.

But it’s worth noting that O’Neill was in Vietnam longer than Kerry:

After a year on the Woodpecker, O’Neill transferred to the Swift boats in the spring of 1969, serving on them until the summer of 1970. His boat was fired on many times as it patrolled the Cambodian border, as well as the Uminh and Namcan forests in southern Vietnam. In the Swifts, says O’Neill, the average length of service was twelve months; John Kerry was in for four.

Why does that matter? Because he was serving (as Kerry was not) during the Cambodia incursion of 1970, which began on April 29 and lasted two months. (Nixon didn’t deny that operation; it was official, and large, and well-publicized, and presumably pre-existing barriers at the border would have been removed.) But Kerry was long gone by then.

As I say, I don’t see how O’Neill’s presence in Cambodia at some later date — and it had to be later because O’Neill wasn’t in the area yet at Christmastime of 1968 — can possibly make a difference regarding Kerry’s Christmas claims, which are reproduced below for convenience. (And go here to see Kerry’s “five miles inside Cambodia” claim.) Especially given that the Kerry campaign has already retreated from the claim that Kerry was in Cambodia in Christmas of 1968. But maybe I’m missing something. And O’Neill, of course, should explain what’s going on.

By the way, has anyone looked to see if President Nixon (who of course wasn’t President until January 20, 1969) ever denied that we had U.S. forces in Cambodia during the time that Kerry was serving in Vietnam?

UPDATE: Okay, O’Neill has responded. (I’d know that if I weren’t boycotting Fox because of it’s right-wing smear campaign against InstaPundit!) Here’s the key bit from CNN suggesting an inconsistency on O’Neill’s part:

O’Neill said no one could cross the border by river and he claimed in an audio tape that his publicist played to CNN that he, himself, had never been to Cambodia either. But in 1971, O’Neill said precisely the opposite to then President Richard Nixon.

O’NEILL: I was in Cambodia, sir. I worked along the border on the water.

NIXON: In a swift boat?

O’NEILL: Yes, sir.

So that would undercut the “nobody could cross” bit, right? Now here’s what O’Neill said on Hannity & Colmes:

O’NEILL: Alan, yes, they are, Alan. It’s two different places, Alan. One place is along the Mekong River, right in the heart of the delta. The second place is on the west coast of Cambodia at a place called Ha Tien, where the boundary is right along that border.

Where Kerry was in Christmas of 1968 was on this river, the Mekong River. We got about 40 or 50 miles from the border. That’s as close as we ran.

Later, Kerry went, and I went, to a place called Bernique’s Creek — that was our nickname for it — at Ha Tien. That was a canal system that ran close to the border, but that wasn’t at Christmas for Kerry. That was later for him.

So it’s two separate places, Alan, and the story is correct.

Unless there’s more to this story, I don’t think it undercuts O’Neill’s credibility — and it certainly doesn’t support Kerry’s Christmastime claims at all.

In fact, the whole thing seems to bear out Ann Althouse’s prediction that the Kerry Campaign’s strategy would be to try to create a “swirly mass of confusion” to deflect these charges. It’s unfortunate that Big Media folks are falling for it. Er, or helping it along.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mark Manyen emails: “How about we all agree we shouldn’t vote for ANYONE that falsely claims to have been in Cambodia between 1968 and 1972?”

Works for me.

I’M NOTICING A DISTINCT THEME in the Olympic blog-coverage. Maybe it’s just the blogs I read. . . .

I was, by the way, on NPR’s Day to Day program today, talking about Olympic blogging. Follow the link for audio.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK — and working well. I sent my passport off for renewal on Thursday, and got it back today. Nice work!

UPDATE: More praise for the State Department here. And reader Steve Schonebaum reports a similar experience: “Speaking of passports, mine came within 2 weeks of submitting the forms. Impressive. (I didn’t just get a renewal – mine had expired.)”

It’s always nice when people get this stuff right.

SOFT DRINKS AND OBESITY: Todd Zywicki does the math and says that claims of a connection are drastically overstated.

Add this to Jeff Jarvis’s anecdotal evidence and I guess there’s room for doubt. . . .

THE SLANT-O-METER?

HERE’S MORE on the crashed Russian planes, one of which sent out a hijack signal.

There’s also speculation that these hijackings were the signal to Al Qaeda terrorists elsewhere to commence the next wave of attacks. Speculation is all I’d call it, but it’s possible. It’s certainly a reason for people to be extra vigilant.

UPDATE: More here, from the sometimes-right Debka. Make of it what you will.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Some thoughts on the Russian government’s response so far, and what the U.S. government should learn from it.

THIS SEEMS LIKE NEWS:

John Kerry’s own wartime journal is raising questions about whether he deserved the first of three Purple Hearts, which permitted him to go home after 4½ months of combat. . . .

Mr. Kerry has claimed that he faced his “first intense combat” that day, returned fire, and received his “first combat related injury.”

A journal entry Mr. Kerry wrote Dec. 11, however, raises questions about what really happened nine days earlier.

“A cocky feeling of invincibility accompanied us up the Long Tau shipping channel because we hadn’t been shot at yet, and Americans at war who haven’t been shot at are allowed to be cocky,” wrote Mr. Kerry, according the book “Tour of Duty” by friendly biographer Douglas Brinkley.

If enemy fire was not involved in that or any other incident, according to the Military Order of the Purple Heart, no medal should be awarded.

Maybe one of the reporters traveling with him will ask about this, and about Cambodia, now that The Daily Show has given them permission to address the subject. Certainly this answer seems a bit squishy:

A Kerry campaign official, speaking on background, told The Washington Times yesterday that the “we” in the passage from Mr. Kerry’s journal refers to “the crew on Kerry’s first swift boat, operating as a crew” rather than Mr. Kerry himself.

“John Kerry didn’t yet have his own boat or crew on December 2,” according to the aide. “Other members of the crew had been in Vietnam for some time and had been shot at and Kerry knew that at the time. However, the crew had not yet been fired on while they served together on PCF 44 under Lieutenant Kerry.”

Mr. Kerry’s campaign could not say definitively whether he did receive enemy fire that day.

Presumably, Kerry could.

UPDATE: Greyhawk emails:

I wouldn’t make too much of that quote – when I first saw it (many days ago) I thought immediately he was referring to the crew as a whole – it is a military frame of reference. I would say “we were inexperienced” refering to any new team I led, even if every member of the team had significant experience individually.

On the other hand – Kerry certainly hasn’t exhibited much ‘team player’ mentality before. But I’d give him this one.

Er, okay — though do people have to have been shot at as a team to lose the feeling of invincibility? Still, as I’ve said before, the medals issue is largely a distraction.

But — as I’ve also said before — Kerry could clear this up by doing what everyone from me to the editors of the Washington Post have called on him to do: release his records. By failing to do that, he raises questions about everything, and they’re clearly questions that his campaign can’t answer.

Greyhawk has posted further thoughts here.