Category: Politics

From CNN.com:

Ty Hensley says his family’s pain will last for generations.

Ty is the brother of Jack Hensley, one of the American contractors beheaded in Iraq this week. And he’s perfectly right, his brother’s death will almost certainly be remembered by members of the Hensley family for a long time to come.

What boggles my mind is that people in general — I’m not talking about the Hensleys here — can’t seem to make the connection between their own experience of grief and that of the relatives of the thousands of civilians in Iraq who have been killed since America invaded. For all the talk of how “tribalism” affects Iraq’s political and social situation, the US isn’t all that far removed from that same tribalism. Considering that tribal ties are largely extended family relationships, that’s not entirely a bad thing, but it is a bad thing when the tribal thirst for revenge gets in the way of rational thought.

Those people whose tribal sympathies for the Hensleys’ loss will then advocate for further punitive action against Iraqis — regardless of civilian casualties, as happened in Fallujah earlier this year — forget that the memory of those deaths will be causing pain that will last for generations, as well.

As someone who’s been interested in typography for twenty years and computers for nearly thirty, the debate over whether the memos CBS used as a part of their story last week on the failure of George Bush to fulfill his Air National Guard duties has been incredibly frustrating. I’ve worked scanners; the one thing to remember about scans of anything is that no two scans are ever identical. Nor are documents that are scanned ever aligned perfectly; the orthogonal pixel grid tends to break up the letterforms of smaller characters. People who claim that they can get a “perfect” match between an electronically-produced image and one that has been scanned from a printout are just flat-out lying.

But one of the more ludicrous arguments I’ve been hearing is that there’s no possible way that the Texas ANG office could possibly have had something like the IBM Selectric Composer model that might easily have produced the documents in question. On “The Al Franken Show” today, a caller brought up that line of “reasoning,” saying that the machine would have cost $25,000 or more in today’s dollars, as if that definitively proved there was no way you’d find one in Texas.

Personally, I don’t know why the TANG office would have had a Composer, it’s sort of overkill for an office environment, but realistically, why wouldn’t an organization that was flying a number of military jets worth many millions of dollars and all of the attendent support equipment have had a piece of expensive office equipment?

In his essay “Cult of Death,” New York Times columnist David Brooks decries “the massacre of innocents” and expresses his concern for “thousands of people destroyed while going about the daily activities of life.” The cult, he says, “attaches itself to a political cause but parasitically strangles it.”

Brooks is talking about people killed by terrorists in “New York, Madrid, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Baghdad and Bali.” He left out Washington, D.C., as so many people do. Those numbers do, indeed, add up to thousands of deaths.

Brooks neglects to mention, however, the other cult of death. Brooks accuses others of ignoring the human toll of terrorism, but he himself suffers from some sort of “mental diversion” about the fact that the death toll for Iraqi civilians since the war began — estimated at well over 10,000 — eclipses the number of people worldwide killed by terrorists in the past three years.

It’s a difficult fact to face, but it’s something that supporters of the current tactics in Iraq that include firing high-volume munitions into populated cities like Fallujah and Najaf should admit to themselves, before their own cause is parasitically strangled.

From the CBS website, the caption reads:

“Democratic Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia gives the keynote address at the Republican National Convention Wednesday in New York.  (Photo: AP)”

Jawohl! I can’t find a similar angle for a separated-at-birth matchup of you-know-who, and the Photoshopping of this particular photo I will leave to others.

Y’know, Zell made a big deal of his being a Marine Wednesday night. Does anyone know if he actually ever saw combat anywhere? His web site bio (in the process of shilling mercilessly for his books) mentions that he joined the Marines in August of 1953, after dropping out of Emory and ending up in the drunk tank. It says he spent three years in the service, at NTS and Camp Lejeune. The Korean War armistice was signed the month before he joined up, there’s no mention of an overseas posting in his bio. Curious, no?

In an August 21st story on NPR’s All Things Considered titled “Ad Fight Bogs Down White House Race,” host Jennifer Ludden asks Washington Post staff writer Jim VandeHei if John Kerry’s campaign should have expected attacks on his war record because it was highlighted during the Democratic convention at the end of July. (It takes place between 3:30 and 4:45 in the RealMedia stream of the story.)

LUDDEN: Well, as you said, Kerry has highlighted his service from the beginning of his campaign, it was a hallmark of his speech at the convention. Should he in some way have expected this?

VANDEHEI: I’m sure they did but I don’t think they thought it would have this much effect. They assumed they had sort of put this stuff to rest. It came up in his Senate campaigns in the ’90s. It came up earlier in this campaign and he felt like he dealt with it and that the public would sort of side with him on this. So, this, this one’s really caught him by surprise and there’s a lot of people out there who say it’s not fair game, that we’ve got all these big pressing issues, we have Iraq, we have terrorism, we have job loss, we have health care, that those are the issues we should be talking about. On the other hand, by using his entire convention to promote himself as the candidate who served in war, who can even lead the country in war again, he kind of opened himself up to this.

For either Ludden or VandeHei to pretend that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign is a response to anything that happened at the Democratic convention is a result of willfull blindness to reality. The book produced by the group, “Unfit for Command,” was released on August 15th, less than four weeks after the beginning of the convention, which doesn’t leave much time for conducting interviews, writing, editing, printing, or distributing the book. It was obviously under production before the convention.

More specifically, VandeHei, who’s been covering the presidential race for well over a year, has no excuse for not knowing that the SBVT group was formed months before the convention. Its creation and goals were announced widely in the press, including VandeHei’s own newspaper: on May 5th, in a story titled “Veterans Group Criticizes Kerry’s War Record” by Paul Farhi. That’s about as unambiguous as “Bin Laden Determined to Strike In U.S.”

Why then, did Ludden and VendeHei pretend that the SBVT ads have anything to do with the convention? Do they really think books, ad campaigns, and groups spring from nothingness in a matter of days? Does VandeHei not read his own newspaper? Why are they talking about this subject when they so obviously have no conception of the history of the the campaign or, if they do, they can’t be bothered to recall it accurately?

One of the primary themes of the people disputing John Kerry’s war record appears to be that he was involved in actively manufactuing a reputation as a hero, so that he could come back and begin a career in politics. This was exemplified by Thursday night’s Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC.

Larry Thurlow, one of the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” said:

It became apparent early on that John Kerry had a master plan that went far beyond the service in the swift boats, and because of the fact that he was trying to engineer a record, so to speak, for himself, he was not a trustworthy member of a very tightly-knit unit that counted on each other at every second.

It’s a point he repeated several times, although he could not provide any evidence that such a plan existed. Michelle Malkin, a later guest on the show, intimated that Kerry may have inflicted some of the wounds that led to his Purple Hearts, an allegation that’s been made elsewhere, as well.

If that was Kerry’s plan though, why the heck did he come back and get involved with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War? Testifying about war atrocities? Associating himself with the anti-war movement? That seems like a pretty risky strategy.

Sort of like trying to wound yourself with a grenade, or volunteering for service in Vietnam to get some ribbons.

Scott McClellan’s been saying for the past week that there’s nothing the White House can do about stopping the Swift Boat smear campaign against John Kerry.

If George W. Bush can’t even get his supporters to do what he supposedly wants, how can anyone expect him to run the country?

While doing some research on the Republican attempt to “foreignize” John Kerry, I ran across an old Rush Limbaugh transcript (courtesy of So Far, So Left) that pointed me to the quote below; Rush actually managed to get the gist of the quote correct! This is from the Boston Herald‘s Joe Battenfield, on 23 April 2003, as reproduced in The Hotline newsletter from The National Journal Group (shout out to pay-as-you-go LexisNexis).

You’ve got to love Theresa Heinz Kerry for cutting right to the chase:

The New York Times also quoted an unnamed Bush adviser
handing Kerry “what is probably the ultimate postwar political
putdown”: “He looks French.” Kerry responded by saying: “It
means the White House has started the politics of personal
destruction.” He added: “It’s funny. I laughed about it.”
“Minutes after Kerry sped off” to a speech in NH, Teresa Heinz
Kerry compared the comment to an insult by “kids in the
playground.” Heinz Kerry: “They’ll probably say he’s French,
he’s Jewish … he’s a monkey. I just find it sad.” She added:
“They (WH officials) probably don’t even speak French”
(Battenfield, Boston Herald, 4/23). Asked if she thought “the
comment impugned her husband’s masculinity or patriotism,” Heinz
Kerry said: “They can’t take him on patriotism; that they can’t
do. And I guess if they want to call the French ‘not manly,’ I
don’t know, but they have to do with the French on that.”

Following up on the week-long story of Gordon Smith calling John Kerry a foreign-looking, appeasing, homeland-weakening, socialist, the Oregonian today published an article on Smith where he walks the fence between the fact that he’s denigrating France and that he used to own a fleet of European sports cars, chaired the Senate Subcommittee on European Affairs, and is a member of the congressional French Caucus.

OK, I admit, I’ve been busy writing letters about Sen. Gordon Smith’s [R-OR] remarks during a Bush campaign conference call that “It’s not John Kerry’s fault that he looks French.”

Today’s issue of the Portland newsweekly Willamette Week picks Smith as their “Rogue of the Week” for his comments.

The daily newspaper, the Oregonian has both a letter to the editor and a column by David Sarasohn

…

And several months ago, a high-ranking White House official told The New York Times, on background, that Kerry “looked French.” (This showed the value of high-level intelligence; up to then, people had thought Kerry looked sort of like a horse.) Helping out, Commerce Secretary Don Evans, a friend of Bush’s, called Kerry “a fellow of a different political stripe who looks French.”

Nobody was sure exactly what it meant, but soon Fox News — the public address system of the Bush administration –was reporting, “Some say Kerry looks French.”

It wasn’t clear whether that meant Charles de Gaulle or Catherine Deneuve, but the word was out.

…

Besides, while Smith may not look French — not like Brigitte Bardot or any of the Three Musketeers — he is clearly the most Continental dresser in all of Umatilla County, with a serious weakness for French cuffs.

Or as he probably calls them now, Freedom cuffs.

“It was a humorous comment in part,” explains Smith, who says he’s a member of the French Caucus and insists that he looks French himself.

Humorous. Yeah. Substitute “black,” “gay,” or “Jewish” for “French” and laugh your head off, Sen. Smith.