Category: 2004 US Election

CJR Campaign Desk Home:

Here’s the pull-quote verbatim:

‘I was on Mr. Kerry’s boat in Vietnam. He doesn’t deserve to be commander in chief.’

We understand the appeal that passage had to an editor. It’s a memorable quote. It would be even more memorable if it were something O’Neill wrote.

But it isn’t. Those words are nowhere to be found in the accompanying article.

What O’Neill does write is that, while he was “on” the same boat that Kerry commanded, he wasn’t there when Kerry was. As he makes clear, he in fact was shipped in to succeed Kerry as commander of the boat once Kerry was removed from the combat zone.

I glanced at the article and was able to spot one fact error — Kerry didn’t request early departure, from all accounts I’ve read: he was moved out of the theater, as noted by CJR, after his third Purple Heart.

The quote gives the clear impression the writer served with Kerry, while the facts indicate otherwise. What else did he — or the editorial staff at the Wall Street Journal — misstate?

For every injunction I see against Kerry campaigning on his war record, there are as many attacks on his peace activism and undermining his conduct in the war.

<update> mattgunn.com:

A newly formed group called “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” has called upon John Kerry to release all his Vietnam service records. They also say Kerry is “unfit to be commander-in-chief.”

A little background on who’s behind the efforts to discredit Kerry: President Nixon, from beyond the grave?

errands today, once again with NPR as my co-pilot. I heard some of “To the point” [listen: Iraq and the Propaganda War] and was subjected to of the most ludicrous, embarrassing (for the speaker, not me), and idiotic comments I have ever heard. One Cliff Kincaid, from Accuracy in Media, claimed that the media (I cringe when I hear that) is exploiting the images of torture and humiliation in Saddam Hussein’s old prison for political gain. That didn’t gain any traction, so then he compared it to college sports hazing or pranks.

Eventually, his argument consisted of blaming the news outfits for publishing the pictures and defending any actions with “there’s a war on.” The soldiers involved are not to blame, their commanders likewise: it’s the reporters who revealed the facts who are the villains. He also attacked Al Jazeera as a biased news source, since it was obviously pro-Arab and therefore anti-American (being pro-truth doesn’t enter into it).

The publisher of Harper’s magazine was also on the program and explained that far from exploiting the news, US media companies were under-reporting and self-censoring. The numbers of dead civilians far outweighs the number of uniformed casualties, but they are never mentioned.

Here’s what AIM claims as its mission statement:

Accuracy In Media – Mission Statement:
Accuracy In Media is a non-profit, grassroots citizens watchdog of the news media that critiques botched and bungled news stories and sets the record straight on important issues that have received slanted coverage.

He ended up ranting about Sen Kerry having admitted to war crimes of his own during his Vietnam service, but no specifics. I got the sense the host was trying to just get through the program without further incident.

Now check out their front page and tell me they don’t have an agenda.

I didn’t think I was the first to spot this.

== Free Culture / Typos ==:

page 133, fourth-to-last line: “…the balance would pass into the pubic domain…” ought to be “public domain.”

At my last job, we had to re-run a whole set of glossy promo pieces for the same missing ‘l.’ I realize that both words are in the dictionary and this simple typo would pass the spell-checker’s scrutiny. But if you know you never used the word ‘pubic’ it might make sense to look for it. It’s an easy mistake to make, is all I’m sayin’.

So far, it’s a good read. I think it’s worth reading to learn the debt we and the ‘creative’ types of recent years owe to what some now call piracy.

Kevin Drum buries the myth of the CEO president.

The Washington Monthly:

[ . . . ] weak CEOs are unwilling to recognize bad news and perform unpleasant tasks to fix it — tasks like confronting poorly performing subordinates or firing people. Good CEOs suck in their guts and do it anyway.

George Bush is, fundamentally, a mediocre CEO, the kind of insulated leader who’s convinced that his instincts are all he needs. Unfortunately, like many failed CEOs before him, he’s about to learn that being sure you’re right isn’t the same thing as actually being right.

We had an experienced CEO at the Treasury but he was guilty of the unpardonable sin of thinking for himself. The only other executive type I’m aware of is the veep and his record of public vs private sector experience is mixed, to say the least.

Jane of the Deep North mentioned an art exhibit of hand-made creatures, life-like (to a point) but assembled from found materials, aka junk.

more details: the Deep North

Continue reading “Imaginary zoology”

I was recently asked what it takes to become a writer. Three things, I answered: first, one must cultivate incompetence at almost every other form of profitable work. This must be accompanied, second, by a haughty contempt for all the forms of work that one has established one cannot do. To these two must be joined, third, the nuttiness to believe that other people can be made to care about your opinions and views and be charmed by the way you state them. Incompetence, contempt, lunacy—once you have these in place, you are set to go.

This is like looking in a mirror and seeing one’s reflection for the first time.

I finally picked up iLife 04 today and took a look at GarageBand. It looks to be a lot of fun, but alas, the fun will have to wait until I get more horsepower. my iBook lacks an audio in, so I can either dink around on the trackpad or buy the keyboard/controller I saw at the Apple Store. But then I find that a mere 800 MHz laptop is just not enough machine.

It wouldn’t even install on my old B&W G3. I’m going to work around it by copying an archive of the app to it, but I suspect it will be a waste of time.

So I’m shopping for G4 upgrades to see if I can make it work somehow.
Continue reading “not enough horsepower for GarageBand”

Some background: the vice president booked a speaking engagement at the same college where Winston Churchill gave his “Iron Curtain” speech, ostensibly to make what his campaign staff called “a major foreign policy statement.” Turns out to have been a stump speech, attacking the Democrats’ presumptive nominee such that the president of the college, a retired brigadier general and decorated veteran of Korea and Vietnam, felt compelled to apologize to the faculty and students for the speech’s content.

TheState.com: Your guide to news, sports, jobs, homes, cars:

[Westminster College President Fletcher] Lamkin said he was not expecting a speech minus any mention of presidential politics during an election year, but that the second half “was all about politics and a political stump speech and in that respect it was disappointing.”

In the e-mail, Lamkin said that “in the interest of balance and fairness and integrity, we will strongly encourage Senator Kerry to take advantage of this venue to make his views known as well.”

Kerry spokesman Bill Burton said the campaign had received Lamkin’s e-mail and would consider a visit to Westminster, which is located in the center of a presidential battleground state.

So instead of cloaking themselves in Churchill’s statesmanlike mantle, they open themselves for a widely-publicized rebuttal in a key state. If stupidity was painful, these clowns would be incapacitated.

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: April 25, 2004 – May 01, 2004 Archives:

George W. Bush has faced three opponents (McCain, Gore and Kerry) since he came onto the national political stage — each served in Vietnam, though each under very different circumstances. He’s had his lieutenants attack the service of each one.

So here we have the same pattern again — no different. The president wants to challenge John Kerry’s military service. So he gets Karen to do it for him. You can get tripped in the chutzpah of this because this not only throws light on an earlier period when the president couldn’t fight his own fights, it repeats the pattern.

It seems risky to attack a soldier for their service, especially one with multiple decorations or one whose sacrifices are obvious (John Kerry, Robert Kerrey, Max Cleland): it’s not like a Purple Heart is a winning Lotto ticket. And it seems even less sensible when the attacker has managed to avoid putting themselves in a harm’s way.

On the other hand, attacking those who initiated a war and made the decision to send young men and women to their deaths is not just sensible but should be required if we are to consider ourselves a free people.

I think it’s wise for the Kerry campaign to let the documents do their talking on this, but I hope to see this issue come up in a debate, when it’s just the candidates, no handlers, no family retainers.

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: April 25, 2004 – May 01, 2004 Archives

Interesting discussion about why so many people — voters — still believe in the myths of a Saddam Hussein/Osama bin Laden connection, the stores of terror weapons in Iraq, etc.

Juan Cole takes the academic approach and looks at this as epistemology in action. I don’t think that’s necessarily relevant.

It seemed to me I had encountered this before, as cognitive dissonance:

According to cognitive dissonance theory, there is a tendency for individuals to seek consistency among their cognitions (i.e., beliefs, opinions). When there is an inconsistency between attitudes or behaviors (dissonance), something must change to eliminate the dissonance. In the case of a discrepancy between attitudes and behavior, it is most likely that the attitude will change to accommodate the behavior.

If you give up on something as essential as Iraq war, what other beliefs will have to be examined? As these things go, wars are not terribly subtle: if someone can get that wrong, what more refined elements of statecraft might have been fumbled?

I sympathize with anyone who is still clinging to the increasingly threadbare justification for the war, the patriot act, and the other assorted affronts to the founders’ legacy. I just hope they let go and get hold of the truth before their beliefs unravel completely.