Archive for 2004


I BLAME BARNEY. Hey, if Bert could be evil, why not? . . . .

THOSE TRICKY REPUBLICANS: A strategy to lock down the Senate, co-authored by my law school classmate Michael Paulsen. I think, though, that it’s about as likely as this scenario was. . . .

BOOKBLOGGING: I enjoyed Steve Stirling’s new book, Dies the Fire, which takes place as a sort of flipside to his Island in the Sea of Time books. Though it was a bit disturbing as I drove past the Society for Creative Anachronism guys on Cherokee Boulevard and envisioned them as the inheritors of the earth.

But heck, we could do worse.

LARRY DIAMOND offers a lengthy critique of Bush Administration policy in Iraq.

If Kerry had an Iraq policy that made sense, perhaps he could be making hay out of this. In fact, I want to offer a clipping from a parallel universe, one much like our own except for a different John Kerry campaign strategy:

EAST HAMPTON, NY (IP) — Democratic Presidential nomineee John Kerry laughs when told that most voters don’t realize that he served in Vietnam, winning three purple hearts, a bronze star, and a silver star.

“Why should they? That’s several wars ago,” Kerry laughs. “Old stuff. I’d much rather people be talking about my detailed plan to rebuild Iraq, using an oil trust mechanism that would give the Iraqi people a stake in reconstruction. That’s why I focused on that in my acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention. What was I going to do, rehash events from 35 years ago?”

Kerry’s friends say that, like other veterans, he’s been known to tell a few tall tales about his service over beers with others who served, but that he seldom talks about his combat experience otherwise. “He’s put that behind him,” says his wife Teresa. “And he thinks it would be unbecoming to make a big deal about his service when others, like [Senator] John McCain or [former P.O.W.] Paul Galanti went through so much more.”

“I would have invaded Iraq regardless of the WMD issue,” Kerry observes. “Saddam Hussein was a threat, and a menace to his own people. And a free, democratic Iraq will be the first step toward addressing the ‘root cause’ of terrorism — despotic Arab regimes that spew hatred to distract their people from their own tyranny. But as I said last year, the reconstruction needed more resources. That was why I voted for the $87 billion in reconstruction money, but urged the Bush Administration to ask for more, to do it right.”

Kerry also takes a dim view of leftist filmmaker Michael Moore. “I think that his film ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ was scurrilous and dangerous to the morale of our troops. That’s why I asked that he be excluded from the Democratic Convention, despite Jimmy Carter’s wishes. And that’s why he wasn’t seen there. In a time of war, we don’t need guys like that. We can win this campaign based on our ideas, not propaganda films. That’s also why I told Chris Matthews to ‘stuff it’ when he tried to make an issue out of President Bush’s National Guard service.”

Kerry’s detailed plans for Iraq, and for carrying the war on terror to Al Qaeda and its backers elsewhere, seem to have left the Bush Administration floundering. Sources close to the Bush campaign say that some Bush operatives are considering an attack on Kerry’s Vietnam record, but many are skeptical. “I don’t think that’ll work,” says cyber-pundit Glenn Reynolds, who calls Kerry’s Iraq plan promising. “Most voters have no idea Kerry was even in Vietnam. He never talks about it, so where’s the traction? It’s ancient history.”

Others are even harsher. “They can’t attack the message,” says Matthew Yglesias of The American Prospect, a liberal publication. “So they’re attacking the messenger. That’s because they don’t want to talk about Kerry’s real accomplishments, the ones Kerry touted at the Convention, like his role in busting BCCI, the terrorists’ money laundry. Kerry’s talking about that, and his plans for Iraq, and they’re talking about Vietnam? Who cares about that? Pathetic.”

I’d actually prefer that parallel universe.

UPDATE: Tom Carr observes: “The Kerry ‘Parallel Universe’ wouldn’t be so parallel if you replaced all the instances of Kerry w/Lieberman…including on the ballots. *sigh*”

Yeah. And reader Dave Schuler emails: “You’ll make me weep. Why can’t our reality be more like that beautiful fantasy?”

Beats me. Because Kerry couldn’t have gotten the nomination if he’d sounded like Lieberman?

ANOTHER UPDATE: N.Z. Bear comments on this scenario.

MORE: Chris Lawrence: ” Left unpondered is whether or not ‘parallel Kerry’ has one of those cool-looking goatees like Spock did in ‘Mirror, Mirror.’” Yeah, definitely.

THINGS ARE REALLY HEATING UP: “Former Republican Sen. Bob Dole suggested Sunday that John Kerry apologize for past testimony before Congress about alleged atrocities during the Vietnam War and joined critics of the Democratic presidential candidate who say he received an early exit from combat for ‘superficial wounds.’ Dole also called on Kerry to release all the records of his service in Vietnam.”

That would be the easiest way to resolve these things. I wonder if Pat Oliphant will produce a cartoon about Bob Dole now.

UPDATE: Ann Althouse notes that Kerry should have seen this coming:

What is to stop this story from being the central story of the Presidential campaign? . . . It’s distressing that the candidate did not take this foreseeable problem seriously. Dole’s remarks today (on “Late Edition”) included the fact that he warned Kerry that he was going “too far” with his use of Vietnam. How could the Kerry people have blinded themselves to the risks they were taking?

Groupthink.

LOST-CATBLOGGING

SOUP NAZIS:

Arsonists set fire to a Jewish soup kitchen in central Paris early on Sunday morning and daubed Nazi symbols on the building, police said, in the latest anti-Semitic act in France.

But not the funny kind. (Via Eugene David).

MICHAEL BARONE’S LATEST COLUMN looks at the Christmas in Cambodia story: “This month the Kerry Campaign abandoned one claim that John Kerry had made for years about his Vietnam War service and put another into question. The claim that has been dropped: that Kerry was in Cambodia at Christmastime in 1968.”

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY WRITES:

John Kerry says he’ll fight claims he lied about or exaggerated his service in Vietnam. The best way to fight such charges would be to stop calling people names and start providing some answers.

He’ll have to show that the charges by a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are false. That’s a tall order. The allegations are numerous, well documented and quite serious. . . .

After all, it was Kerry himself — with the smart salute and “reporting for duty” opening of his convention speech — who made his military service the keystone of his campaign. And it is Kerry who has repeatedly compared himself favorably with President Bush on that score.

In so doing, he’s all but ignored his undistinguished 20-year career in the U.S. Senate and his decade as an anti-war activist.

Fair enough. Now we have questions about Vietnam. . . .

If Kerry thinks he’s being slandered, he should answer with facts —not with insults, threats and lawsuits.

We have questions, senator. We’re ready for your answers.

Read the whole thing. Kerry’s campaign would be well-advised to follow this advice, instead of acting as if they’ve got something to hide.

ON MY WAY INTO THE OFFICE today, I passed a big crowd waving signs. Was it an anti-war protest? I wondered. If so, it would have been the biggest one so far by a substantial margin. But something about the crowd looked . . . not quite right for that.

On closer inspection, it was a big sorority event. So begins the year.

FIRST THEY IGNORE YOU. Then they attack you. Then you win.

THE RIGHT-WING ASSAULT MACHINE has been after Kerry for a while, it would seem. Who knew its tentacles extended so far? . . .

UPDATE: My God, they’ve been after him since the beginning!

A NEW ERA: Thomas Lifson responds to Adam Nagourney. (Via Roger Simon). It’s worth reading this column by John Leo from U.S. News, too. Best bit: “When the Los Angeles Times finally decided to notice the story, it had an obvious problem: How should it report news it had ignored for 11 days?”

UPDATE: Varifrank wonders why the press is suddenly so angry. “As long ago as last December, the press was laughing at John Kerry and his chances to win the nomination. Now, they seem deeply offended that President Bush has even decided to run for re-election. Where it gets really weird is to watch the same people who were deriding Kerry just a year ago, [who] now are willing to ‘go to the mattresses’ for him.”

THIS PAT OLIPHANT CARTOON is pretty awful, considering that one of the guys it’s aimed at spent nearly 7 years as a North Vietnamese P.O.W.

UPDATE: Reader James V. Somers thinks that Kerry’s defenders are losing it:

Things like the revolting Oliphant cartoon you link to, as well as Maureen Dowd’s hysterical screed this morning attacking the Swift Vets as, inter alia, “sleazoids”, suggest that Kerry’s Big Media allies may overplay a mediocre hand in defending him.

Though you sometimes wouldn’t know it from listening to those who criticize the Swift Vets, they served in combat too, just like John Kerry, and in many cases for longer periods of time and under even more difficult circumstances (like being a POW for seven years). Flamethrower attacks like Oliphant’s will go over well with liberal-leaning journalists and diehard Blue-Staters, because those people take it as received wisdom that the Vietnam War was an immoral excess of American Imperialism, and thus the only soldiers from it who should be admired are those who later opposed it. Such people, as Oliphant’s cartoon suggests, view the other Vietnam vets as just a bunch of illiterate drunks – probably from Red States – who spent the war either cleaning latrines or committing war crimes. But such an attitude could backfire badly with average people in battleground states. The Democrats and their allies need to remember that just because George Bush didn’t fight in Vietnam, it doesn’t mean that Kerry’s critics didn’t.

Indeed.

THIS PIECE in the Chicago Tribune doesn’t seem to add all that much considering how it was being spun. William Rood, who served with Kerry, weighs in strongly on the Silver Star medal debate, in Kerry’s favor. But as I’ve mentioned before, the medals are something of a distraction.

Did Kerry deserve the Silver Star? Ultimately, that’s a subjective decision that is unlikely to be resolved 35 years later. If it turns out that Kerry put himself in for the Purple Heart, that will be embarrassing for him, but that’s not addressed here. (We’ll find out, of course, if Kerry ever releases the records, something that he seems rather reluctant to do). But although putting himself in for a medal would make Kerry look self-serving, it’s only an embarrassment. As for the rest, well, it’s degenerated into a he-said / he-said argument that suits the spinmeisters.

Meanwhile, Cambodia isn’t mentioned — but of course, the Kerry campaign has already admitted that the Christmas-in-Cambodia story is false. It would provide a bit more perspective, though, if the Tribune noted that he’d been caught out on that one.

And, of course, none of this bears on Kerry’s post-war activities. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: This story from tomorrow’s Washington Post illustrates the problem with the medals:

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 that day who declined a request for an interview.

Things like this aren’t readily susceptible of resolution. But it’s interesting that these questions are getting much more attention than the Cambodia story, which was susceptible of resolution and which was in fact resolved — in a fashion that showed that Kerry wasn’t telling the truth.

And there’s another paragraph from the Post that’s worth noting:

Although Kerry campaign officials insist that they have published Kerry’s full military records on their Web site (with the exception of medical records shown briefly to reporters earlier this year), they have not permitted independent access to his original Navy records. A Freedom of Information Act request by The Post for Kerry’s records produced six pages of information. A spokesman for the Navy Personnel Command, Mike McClellan, said he was not authorized to release the full file, which consists of at least a hundred pages.

Kerry could clear this stuff up by releasing the records, and he ought to. There’s also some embarrassment for Douglas Brinkley:

In “Tour of Duty,” these thoughts are attributed to a “diary” kept by Kerry. But the endnotes to Brinkley’s book say that Kerry “did not keep diaries in these weeks in February and March 1969 when the fighting was most intense.” In the acknowledgments to his book, Brinkley suggests that he took at least some of the passages from an unfinished book proposal Kerry prepared sometime after November 1971, more than two years after he had returned home from Vietnam.

In his book, Brinkley writes that a skipper who remains friendly to Kerry, Skip Barker, took part in the March 13 raid. But there is no documentary evidence of Barker’s participation. Barker could not be reached for comment.

Brinkley, who is director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans, did not reply to messages left with his office, publisher and cell phone. The Kerry campaign has refused to make available Kerry’s journals and other writings to The Washington Post, saying the senator remains bound by an exclusivity agreement with Brinkley. A Kerry spokesman, Michael Meehan, said he did not know when Kerry wrote down his reminiscences.

Releasing everything would do a lot to clear this up. (And Hugh Hewitt notes that Kerry promised to release all this stuff months ago, but hasn’t.) Refusing to simply fuels suspicion — logically enough — that it’s being held back for a reason. More comments on the Post story here, noting that it’s more supportive of the Swift Boat Vets’ story than the headline would suggest.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Ed Clark notes that although we’re talking about the past, we’ve actually learned rather a lot about the Kerry of today:

While I’m glad the vets are finally getting their chance to be heard, it’s not the Vietnam stories that bother me. It’s Kerry’s reaction to the books and ads. This is showing his character today, not in the past, and it’s not pretty.

For almost a year there have been attack ads against Bush. Bush displayed much more character by not demanding that the books and movies and ads that have been attacking him be banned the way Kerry is trying to do. Bush stood up for the rights of even those who opposed him and lied about him.

Kerry tries to silence any opposition, in much the same way as portrayed in Fahrenheit 451 (the original book). That is frightening!

And to make matters worse, the mainstream media is in collusion with him.

Yes, the notion that the answer to speech is more speech doesn’t seem to have found a home at the Kerry campaign. Or, as Mickey Kaus noted, at The New York Times.

More on the Tribune story here, and read this too.

THANKS TO EVERYONE who inquired about the health of the Insta-Mother-in-Law. The Insta-Wife was over there this afternoon and reports that she’s doing much better.

WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT VIETNAM? Because, as Matt Welch writes, Kerry’s war policy is all Vietnam and no Iraq:

Ever since the Democratic Convention in Boston last month, the John-John ticket has been grumbling about having to fend off accusations that would-be president John Kerry previously fudged vivid details of his war record in Vietnam and (most controversially) Cambodia. There is indeed considerable merit to the notion that a nation at war should be focusing on 2004 instead of 1968, but if Kerry’s convention performance was any guide, his go-to selling point for taking the reigns of the “war on terror” is the fact that he was piloting swift-boats up the Mekong back when Osama bin Laden was busy trying to grow his first beard. . . .

“How to handle Iraq is the most important question facing the president,” wrote a disappointed Matthew Yglesias of the liberal American Prospect magazine, just after Kerry finished, “and he just punted.”

But he was in Vietnam!

THIS KERRY SERVICE TIMELINE from the Associated Press in the Boston Globe says Kerry was honorably discharged in 1970, and then joined the anti-war movement:

January 1970: Kerry requests discharge. He is honorably discharged, and later joins Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

But that’s wrong:

Kerry was transfered to the Naval Reserves in 1970, and Honorably Discharged in 1978. There was no two year service gap, despite the impression given by his press releases.

But not all of his press releases. In fact, it’s made quite clear in this July release from the Kerry campaign:

Kerry volunteered for the United States Navy after college and served from 1966 through 1970 rising to the rank of Lieutenant, Junior Grade. Afterwards, Kerry continued his military service in the United States Naval Reserves through 1978.

(Same here, too: “John Kerry Enlisted in the U.S. Navy; November 1968 through March 1969, Served in Vietnam; 1970-1978, Served in U.S. Navy Reserves.”) In other words, when Kerry was protesting the war and holding private meetings with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong representatives in Paris, he was still a Naval officer in the reserves. The folks at AP and the Globe might not think that matters, but they ought to report this so that people can make up their own minds — and they ought to get it right. Especially when the correct information is right on the Kerry website, and when their fellow journalists are accusing blogs of sloppiness. . . .

UPDATE: Reader Larry Ferguson emails: “Maybe the official US Navy document on John Kerry’s website listing Kerry’s service dates in the Navy (including the reserve) does not rise to Tom Oliphant’s level of verification for use in journalism.”

Heh.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A military perspective on this stuff, at The Mudville Gazette.

I MISSED IT, but Eugene Volokh was on Air America radio last night, talking about gun control. He has posts on his appearance here and here.

UNLIKE THE STORY OF THE MEDALS, this will be harder to spin:

William Ferris was confined to a bed in a military hospital, his severed sciatic nerve reminding him of the attack on his Navy Swift boat in a Vietnamese river. A shot from a recoilless rifle had pierced the boat’s pilothouse and then Ferris’s body, leaving him in constant agony.

But it was what appeared on Ferris’s television that really pained him. John F. Kerry, a decorated fellow Swift boat driver, was testifying before Congress about atrocities in Vietnam, throwing his medals away, speaking at antiwar rallies. Ferris, who was trying to rehabilitate himself back to active duty, felt betrayed.

“I was livid,” Ferris, 57, of Long Island, N.Y., said yesterday, recalling how his dislike for the presidential candidate began in the early 1970s. “I said to myself at the time, this is someone who is using his experience for his own purposes, and this was long before he ever ran for office. I thought he was using, actually manipulating, what he had done in Vietnam. Just like he’s doing now.” . . .

“I wasn’t there at the time that happened,” said Tony Gisclair, a veteran from Poplarville, Miss., who signed the letter, referring to Kerry’s combat in Vietnam. “But look at what the man said about us when he came back.”

Tony Snesko, a veteran in Washington, D.C., said he was “devastated” by Kerry’s antiwar efforts, prompting him to sign on to the group’s anti-Kerry message.

Kerry’s postwar conduct is all a matter of public record, and as Tom Maguire has already noted, the Kerry campaign isn’t in a position to fault those who are unhappy with having their military service besmirched. That Kerry was still a Naval officer while doing so only makes the charges more potent, though — as Maguire also notes — the press has been slow to pick up on that point.