Shot In The Dark

Code Puke

Michelle Malkin points us to some old friends of Shot In The Dark, Code Pink:

One of the leading protest groups in NYC is Code Pink, "a women initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement that seeks positive social change through proactive, creative protest and non-violent direct action." They champion military deserters, support mothers who refuse to get c-sections to save the lives of their children, and hate Hummers.

These people are very familiar to us here in Minnesota, of course - partly because of their endless, intellectually-vacuous but physically-paltry opposition to the Minnesota Personal Protection Act.

And partly because, sorry to say, they're tied with the Twin Cities' once-useful Utne Reader.

Of course, opposition to the MPPA is the least of the Pinks' sins:

Benjamin could learn a thing or two about Chavez from her own fellow peace activists. Human Rights Watch has tracked the Chavez regime's threat to press freedom and the murder of opposition leaders here. Militares Democritos covers Chavez's links to al Qaeda and more here. John Perazzo has more background on Code Pink's dictator-loving gals here.

When will the mainstream media expose the lingerie-tossing ladies of Code Pink for what they really are? "Peace activists?" Bull. They're cheerleaders for blood-spattered socialism, waving around their ideological underwear at the feet of Hugo Chavez like groupies at a Wayne Newton concert.

Code Pink, Utne fans, Chavez groupies - what's the diff?

Appropriation

Via Memeorandum, I noticed one of the more irritating traits of the left; they're irritated by Bush "appropriating" 9/11 at the GOP National Convention...

...because they think it's theirs to appropriate.

The blog quotes a GOP delegate from Ohio, and then responds:

"I left God's country," said Leon Mosley of Waterloo, Iowa, co-chairman of his state party. "They could use a bunch of people from Iowa to come here to show New Yorkers what life is all about, what being patriotic is all about, and what country is all about. I'm as confident about Bush being re-elected as I am that eggs are going to be in New York tomorrow morning.''

Kindly go f&&k yourself, Mr Mosley. Please don't simultaneously pimp my home state's tragedy for your own gain while accusing us of being less alive, less patriotic, and less American than you are.

"My home state's tragedy?"

Your home state's tragedy?

Was Pearl Harbor an attack on Hawaii?

Was the signing of the Declaration of Independence a great day for Philadelphia?

No. 9/11 was not a "New York (state or city) tragedy". It was an attack on the US. All of us. New York had the biggest, most ostentatious (to a Moslem fundie) displays of American commerce, but it was built by people from all over, both literally and via the investment markets - which is exactly how it'll be rebuilt.

Americans from all over died there - non-Americans, too. Minnesotans, Dominicans, New Yorkers, North Dakotans, whatever.

9/11 was everyone's loss, just like the war on islamofascist terrorism is everyone's war.

Grabbing and appropriating victimhood is the Democrats' main selling point. Preventing it is the GOP's. That's why we're in New York; we're not wrapping ourselves in 9/11, any more than exhorting people to "remember Pearl Harbor" is chaining yourself to the hulk of the U.S.S. Arizona. We're pointing at Ground Zero, and showing the nation the comparison, between those who go out to find and kill the perps, and those who would wait patiently while the Belgians debate letting us go do it.

Promises, Promises

Mark Gisleson - with whom I've unaccountably agreed to debate via email - left this comment in a thread that started late last week.

Heard this one before?

Got an email today from a reader in a town where the military stores much of their records. Buzz is that they have plenty of Kerry records they're ready to release that have been kept locked up tight.

So along with Kerry's economic plan, his actual plan for the smarter and more sensitive War on Terror, the whereabouts of those 135,000 "moderate moslem" troops that will relieve the US military in Iraq, the identities of the phalanx of foreign leaders that are endorsing him for the election, and those hyperdrive designs from Roswell, we're waiting on "plenty" of "locked up tight" records?

I bet we are. In the same way that Joe Farah is waiting for the records to prove that Bill Clinton really did knowingly caused AIDS-infected blood from Arkansas prisons to donors in Canada in exchange for money to cover up Vince Foster's murder, or whatever it was.

Yes, it certainly is possible that the Navy is sitting on a pile of records that completely back up Kerry's story, and do indeed prove that the SEALS and CIA, desperate to infiltrate agents and firearms into neutral Cambodia, eschewed proven, reliable and genuinely covert methods of infiltration (helicopters, parachutes, and good ol' hiking through the jungle) and sought out a hotshot ninety-day-wonder Yalie JayGee driving a boat with a silhouette like a Winnebago and a noise signature like a Monster Truck, to infiltrate a narrow, easily-interdicted river crossing into contested territory on a completely illegal and extraordilarily sensitive mission.

Of course it's possible! And I'm sure that mysterious email from the "reader" in the "town where military records are stored" is a perfectly reliable source.

No, really! I grew up in a city through which nuclear weapons routinely transited; I have a pal who swears he could build one in his garage. Maybe they should get together.

But just to be safe, I'll await the release of this huge, steaming dump of documents. Any ol' time now. (By the way, Mark - what is this "town" where the military "stores much of its records?" Just the name of the town. For reference sake. You can supply that, right?)

Alternate explanation follows: As the wheels start to come off the Kerry campaign, watch for more of this sort of stuff, the new round of Black Helicopter rumors, only from the left; records hidden, exoneration denied. These will be the Hanging Chads of the 2004 election, if Kerry loses: "Halliburton conspired with the Navy via Bush's old cronies to block the release of double-dog-secret photos that show Kerry and VC the Wonder Dog picking microfilm from Prince Sihanouk's stool as Khmer Rouge ninjas stood mere inches away". It'll be the foul wind beneath the wings of the tinfoil hat brigade until 2008.

Mitch, I hope it bothers you to know that I'm looking forward to their release even more than you are.

Bother me?

I find it mildly yet satisfyingly confirmatory.

I've worked with military records for over fifteen years, helping vets make the transition to civilian employment, and I've got a pretty good idea of what they've been sitting on.

Now, to the best of my knowledge, Mark Gisleson runs a resume-writing service. An honorable trade, that - I've written many a resume for others myself, and it's a significant test of the writer's craft.

But to claim that taking information from a guy's DD214 to write a resume makes one an insider on Defense Department illegal covert operations would be like me claiming the flatulence I got from my last round of gas-station burritos and cheap beer makes me an expert on greenhouse gases. The relationship is tangential, and the exaggeration is Clavinesque.

Or is Mark Gisleson claiming that he, longtime anti-war activist, has had access to highly-classified material? Perhaps he's helped Operation Phoenix SOG operators assume new identities? Perhaps he's an expert in helping highly-sensitive national intelligence assets find jobs in the private sector?

I'm not laughing. Anything is possible. Although some substantiation would go a long way.

You see, I also work with a few former Cambodian refugees, and most of our documentation on that war has been kept under lock and key for over thirty years.

Again with the illogical extension. I work with some Jewish guys. That alone gives me no additional insight into the Nuremburg Laws.

For those of you from outside the Twin Cities - it's hard to go to the grocery store without "working with Cambodian refugees" and their descendants. Cambodians, Lao, Vietnamese and especially H'mong are fixtures in local society. Does writing a resume for some them give one any extra insight into whether John Kerry is lying or not?

I can be convinced, but it might take...I dunno, proof?

You're not going to be one bit happy when those records come out. Not a bit.

Mark Gisleson - DOD insider and clairvoyant.

Show me the paperwork. That, or stand by for pre-boarding on the next black helicopter.

L is for "Love These Blogs"

Almost half done.

Oy. I hope this is working.

La Shawn Barber - Articulate, evangelical, and an always-dead-on analyst.

Little Green Footballs - An inspiration in a lot of ways; Charles Johnson was a liberal of sorts on 9/10. He's known as a mainstay on the conservative blogosphere today. An uncompromising BS detector who serves as a lightning rod (or roach hotel) for a lot of lefty hatemongers, he gives MUCH worse than he gets. And that's a good thing.

Please Don't Hurt Us

Johns Kerry and Edwards will draw a line in the sand.

And if the murdering mullahs in Teheran cross that line - well, the Johns will draw another line, dammit!

Or so says their "plan" to "confront" Iran on their nuke program.

What is it with Democrat administrations and endless tolerance of racist butchers and their megalomania?:

A John F. Kerry administration would propose to Iran that the Islamic state be allowed to keep its nuclear power plants in exchange for giving up the right to retain the nuclear fuel that could be used for bomb-making, Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards said in an interview yesterday.

And this means...?

Edwards said that if Iran failed to take what he called a "great bargain," it would essentially confirm that it is building nuclear weapons under the cover of a supposedly peaceful nuclear power initiative. He said that, if elected, Kerry would ensure that European allies were prepared to join the United States in levying heavy sanctions if Iran rejected the proposal. "If we are engaging with Iranians in an effort to reach this great bargain and if in fact this is a bluff that they are trying to develop nuclear weapons capability, then we know that our European friends will stand with us," Edwards said.

And then they shall impose sanctions a second time! They do not frighten John Kerry, those electric food-trough waterers. Their fathers were hamsters, and their mothers smelled of elderberries...

Well, it's no worse than Kerry's policy...

Brief Metaphysical Tangent

In the mid-seventies, a fairly mediocre guitarist named Frank Marino, who played in a band called Mahogany Rush, was reputed to have claimed to have inherited the soul of Jimi Hendrix. It would have been more accurate to say that he temporarily swiped a bit of Neal Schon's attitude, but I digress.

Yesterday at the Fair during the NARN broadcast, Brian "Saint Paul" Ward spent half an hour covering a passing parade - questioning band members, getting Princess Kay to endorse the show, getting soundly pummeled by Goldy Gopher...

...and it occurred to me that while Saint may not have downloaded anyone else's soul, he certainly has swiped a heaping dollop of the late Don Vogel's broadcast mojo.

O'Rourke on Social Movements

P.J. O'Rourke once noted that you can tell which social movements are the most in vogue; look where all the really babe-o-licious women are.

By that standard, I think Kerry is in trouble. You be the judge.

No Show

Gutless hack Jim Boyd did not take advantage of two days worth of challenges to appear in a fair, balanced public forum at the Northern Alliance Radio Network at the fair this past weekend.

That after publishing this vapid hit piece yesterday in the Strib, following up his defamatory blast of last week.

I'd fisk Boyd - but Powerline has already torn Boyd enough new internal views. Read Powerline's coverage of their ongoing battle with their cowardly nemesis - it's a walk through the disintegration of the dead tree media, and it's fascinating.

Face, Meet Boot. Forever.

Via the Fraters, this except from a letter from MN GOP chair Ron Eibensteiner to Ray Waldron of the MN AFL-CIO:

That is why I was shocked to learn that during John Kerry's visit to the State Fair today union members wearing "Laborers for Kerry" t-shirts physically assaulted two College Republicans.

These two college students were peacefully assembled to express their points of view, which is every American's right. What is even more troubling is the fact that this is not the first time that we have seen these tactics from union officials, and DFL and Kerry campaign supporters.

The interesting thing is not that the assault allegedly happened; if you've followed politics in Minnesota for any length of time, you'll notice that there is a constant stream of incipient violence under the surface with these people:

• In 1991, leftist students attacked pro-Kuwait Liberation demonstrators at the U of M with paint, spit and fists
• Republican lawn signs are vandalized in much of the Twin Cities in a manner that can only be described as systematic and comprehensive
• The local "anarchist" community has a long history of thuggery, from booing Jeanne Kirkpatrick off the stage in 1986 to burning trucks at a local meat wholesaler in 1992
• Now, this

...and others that I'm sure I'm forgetting.

No, the interesting part is how people on the left will try to justify that sort of thing. "We're under attack! We NEED to rough up the smirking fratboys!"

Count on it.

If it had been Republicans roughing up Democrat students...well, you know the drill.

Blame Canada

I'm starting to worry about Canada.

Not all of Canada, really. There are two Canadas; the West, a place that any North Dakotan or Coloradan would recognize, and the East - Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes - which are vying to become part of Europe.

In more ways than one.

Canada has a nascent terror problem:

On September 11th, at Montreal’s now famous Conqaedia University, Muslim students bayed and whooped as the twin towers came down and spent the rest of the day celebrating or brawling with those boorish enough to be offended by their good cheer. Are those students as reliably passive in their anti-Americanism as Christopher Hume? Or would some of them be willing to serve as part of a support network for Islamists? Just small things, you know – providing references, loaning their addresses to applicants for driver’s licenses, etc. And, if you think some of them would, what percentage does it have to be before it becomes significant? Two per cent? Five? Ten?

Right now the Province of Quebec, for reasons best-known to jelly-spined federalists, controls its own immigration policy. That means new Quebecers come mostly from the francophone world – Haiti, Syria, Algeria, French West Africa. Furthermore, about a third of the “refugees” “processed” into Canada hail from terrorist-producing countries and they too tend to gravitate to Montreal, where they can blend into sympathetic local populations a mere half-hour from the US border. I was told by an RCMP guy recently that roughly three-quarters of Canada’s counter-terrorism effort is concentrated on the Montreal area.

What are these people doing?

Maybe lots:

Police found a large stash of weapons and explosives yesterday after an investigation of a suspicious minivan tied up traffic through downtown streets for several hours.

Montreal police sent in a robot to examine several pieces of luggage after SWAT team members in full protective gear investigated the vehicle.

They seized about 15 firearms, including automatic weapons like machine guns, and also found 90-135 kilograms of explosives.

Right.

Now read this:

Police couldn't say what type of explosives were involved, or who they belonged to. "We cannot confirm any organization at this point," said Alston.

Read that, and then go back to Steyn's piece on Quebec's weak, hands-off attitude on refugees from hotbeds of terror.

And then remember that Montreal is just hours from the northeast seaboard.

And then read this piece...:

A captured al-Qaeda operative has told Canadian intelligence investigators that a Montreal man who trained in Afghanistan alongside the 9/11 hijackers was responsible for the crash of an American Airlines flight in New York three years ago.

Canadian Security Intelligence Service agents were told during five days of interviews with the source that Abderraouf Jdey, a Canadian citizen also known as Farouk the Tunisian, had downed the plane with explosives on Nov. 12, 2001..."In discussions, Abu Abdelrahman mentioned AL QAIDA was responsible for the assassination of Massoud, the Northern Alliance leader," the report says. "According to the source, Abu Abdelrahman added that the 12 November 2001 plane crash (btb American Airlines flight 587) in Queens, New York was not an accident as reported in the press but was actually an AL QAIDA operation.

...which I stress still needs some confirmation.

So we have:

• A nation with a province that handles its own immigration, but a national government that both handles national foreign policy and is clogged with socialists that distrust the US
• Terrorists who have always been adept at exploiting weaknesses like Quebec's

So is Montreal to today what Athens was to the eighties?

Posted by Mitch at 07:39 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Jeer The Vote

MTV's "Rock The Vote" has always been the most preening, contemptuous manifestations of the pop culture "elite"'s disdain for the intelligence of American youth.

Since the beginning, RTV has been a simplistic spoon-feeding of Democrat propaganda to the MTV generation. Its events have been carefully calculated to breed the next generation of dutiful followers.

So imagine the shock the establishment must have felt at this:

on Sunday night when John Kerry's daughters were announced to speak at the annual MTV VIDEO MUSIC AWARDS, the MTV youth were expected to welcome his daughter's as pop culture princesses.

Instead, in an era of the unexpected, the daughters of the Democratic candidate were met with cheers -- AND JEERS -- during the live broadcast in Miami.

From the moment Alexandra and Vanessa started speaking, the boos outweighed anything close to cheers, and the reaction turned worse when the daughters asked the VIACOM youth to vote for their father. So shocked by the reaction, the taller of the two daughters tried to 'shhhhhh' her peers to no avail.

The image of Alexandra, looking like a gaunt version of Tracey Nelson in a Halloween episode of Square Pegs, was emblematic of so much of the Kerry campaign; "Pay no attention to the facts behind the curtain. Ignore what you see. Adore us for our self-cultivated legend..."

Democrats getting booed at the MTV VMAs is like Jerry Falwell getting booed at the GOP National Convention.

K is for "Kawabunga, These Blogs Are Cool"

Read on!

Kathy Kinsley - I've long since forgotten why I blogrolled Kinsley. I'm just being honest. It's a good blog though.

Kausfiles - I book him because everyone books him. A journalist, and an interesting one at that. The godfather of the news cycle blog.

Keep and Bear Arms/Operation Self Defense - Another essential clearinghouse of Civilian Self-Defense information and news.

Kim Du Toit - I try to be a reasonable guy. But I have a Michael-Savage-like alter ego that's just dying to get out. Kim Du Toit gives that guy some outlet; unlike so many other rantbloggers, he's also a great writer. And it's not all anger. Plus his pinup photos are frequently stunning, often the highlight of the weekend.

Bear Facts

NZ Bear is publishing a Campaign Truth blog.

Read the details.

Nearly Perfect

It was a truly wonderful weekend.

Friday night, my son had a bunch of his friends sleep over. Everyone had a good time. More importantly, they went to bed at a reasonable hour, which is kind of a new thing for that bunch of boys.

Saturday - went to the MN State Fair. John Wilson of Crazy But Able - a local blog I was not aware of - was there, and posted some photos. The show was a blast. I have a deep, dark, dank secret; I've always loved doing live radio at events like this. I enjoy meeting the audience - where "enjoy" usually means "have a blast", and sometimes "am morbidly amused". The Patriot audience is usually more on the "blast" side of things. Interviewed Mike Nelson, which is always a hoot.

Saturday night - oy, such a time. James Lileks held a to-do at the fabled Jasperwood - a place which I have to confess he does not do justice in his writing. The attendees were a wildly, wonderfully mixed bag; Lileks and his legendary sidekicks the Giant Swede (truly giant) and the Crazy Ute Uke (truly delightfully crazy), http://www.hughhewitt.com">Hugh Hewitt and his majordomo the Generalissimo, Brian "Saint Paul" Ward, the Atomizer and the Elder from Fraters, Cap'n Ed, Scott Johnson of Powerline, Mike Nelson, King Banaian, Minnesota Orchestra principal trumpeter Manny Laureano, AM1280's Long Suffering Jay Larson, and hopefully nobody else - my memory conks out right about there. Great food, top-shelf liquor, cigars I don't mind tasting the next day, and about five hours of the best conversation I've had with a roomful of guys in recent memory.

Today - another decent broadcast from the fair, featuring Laura and Larry from MN Bush/Cheney, and Brian "Saint Paul" Ward doing what was probably half an hour of the funniest live radio I've heard since Tommy Mischke was still the "Phantom Caller", doing live play-by-play of a parade passing the AM1280 booth. Certainly one for our "Best Of" CD. Even the rain, which was threatening all day, held off until about a minute after the broadcast signed off.

Then some more cool stuff.

I haven't had this much fun on a weekend in years.

So back to reality tomorrow!

What's In A Medal

What must it be like to be in John Kerry's campaign today?

You're young, idealistic, probably Ivy-league-educated and pretty dang attractive. You joined the campaign because you wanted to "Make a difference", or as a steppingstone to bigger things. You probably think George Bush is a bumpkin at the very least, worst than Hitler at the worst.

So what's it like to see your leader's every claim about the past that supposedly so distinguished him from Bush not only get put under a microscope by nattering minions of the enemy for which you feel such contempt...

...but see those claims found potentially drastically wanting?

How do you feel when you read your leader saying this:

“The military is a rigorous culture that places a high premium on battlefield accomplishment,” said Sen. John F. Kerry, who received numerous decorations, including a Bronze Star with a "V" pin, as a Navy lieutenant in Vietnam.

“In a sense, there's nothing that says more about your career than when you fought, where you fought and how you fought,” Kerry said.

“If you wind up being less than what you’re pretending to be, there is a major confrontation with value and self-esteem and your sense of how others view you.”

Of Boorda and his apparent violation, Kerry said: “When you are the chief of them all, it has to weigh even more heavily.”

...about an admiral who killed himself after being caught exaggerating medal claims, and then seeing your leader caught in exactly the same exaggeration?

How indeed?

The report is from the Chicago Sun-Times, and Thomas Lipscomb - a guest on the NARN when the first questions about Kerry's record first began popping up, and to my knowledge one of very few dead-tree reporters to have ever treated Kerry's record with any skepticism before bloggers forced him to.

Read the whole piece - but I thought this was the money quote:

One award, three citations

But a third citation exists that appears to be the earliest. And it is not on the Kerry campaign Web site. It was issued by Vice Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, commander of U.S. naval forces in Vietnam. This citation lacks the language in the Hyland citation or that added by the Lehman version, but includes another 170 words in a detailed description of Kerry's attack on a Viet Cong ambush, his killing of an enemy soldier carrying a loaded rocket launcher, as well as military equipment captured and a body count of dead enemy.

Maj. Anthony Milavic, a retired Marine Vietnam veteran, calls the issuance of three citations for the same medal "bizarre." Milavic hosts Milinet, an Internet forum popular with the military community that is intended "to provide a forum in military/political affairs."

Normally in the case of a lost citation, Milavec points out, the awardee simply asked for a copy to be sent to him from his service personnel records office where it remains on file. "I have never heard of multi-citations from three different people for the same medal award," he said. Nor has Burkett: "It is even stranger to have three different descriptions of the awardee's conduct in the citations for the same award."

So far, there are also two varying citations for Kerry's Bronze Star, one by Zumwalt and the other by Lehman as secretary of the Navy, both posted on johnkerry.com.

Kerry's Web site also carries a DD215 form revising his DD214, issued March 12, 2001, which adds four bronze campaign stars to his Vietnam service medal. The campaign stars are issued for participation in any of the 17 Department of Defense named campaigns that extended from 1962 to the cease-fire in 1973.

However, according to the Navy spokesman, Kerry should only have two campaign stars: one for "Counteroffensive, Phase VI," and one for "Tet69, Counteroffensive."

What does Kerry have in response?

Out-of-context quotes from 33-year-old personal conversations.

Diversionary demands for pointless "Debates".

Repeated claims that the Swifties "lied", without showing us actual "lies".

Nothing substantiating anything about Kerry's longtime stories.

And now, evidence that Kerry's lies go deeper than even the Swifties would seem to have claimed.

So you're that Kerry staffer. You've drunk the Koolaid. You've baptized yourself in the river of Bush Hatred.

What are you thinking now?

Fair to Cloudy

The NARN will be appearing live at the Minnesota State Fair today.

It's going to be a great day. First Hour, we've challenged Jim Boyd from the Star Tribune to answer for his inflammatory, ad hominem and frankly hack-fodder attacks on Powerline this past week, and his insistence on having the last word in his ongoing (and losing) debate with Powerline.

Second hour - Mike Nelson of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and many books, will be our guest.

Third hour: Hugh Hewitt and James Lileks will join us at the Patriot Broadcast Center. We'll be talking about the events of the day, but more importantly, the events of this past Thursday night.

Join Elder, John "The Rocket Man" Hinderaker, Captain Ed, Saint Paul, Scott "The Big Trunk" Johnson, and probably more Narnies, as well as your favorite NARN fans and some surprise guest!

Grrrrrr

Comcast - my home internet ISP - screwed up my account terribly. Naturally, it was a day with huuuuuge doin's here at Shot and the Northern Alliance.

Stay tuned.

I Will Gladly Give You the Proof Tuesday if you Shut Up Today

As Ed noted the other day, the WaPo is beating on Kerry's story:

However seared he was, Kerry's spokesmen now say his memory was faulty. When the Swift boat veterans who oppose Kerry presented statements from his commanders and members of his unit denying that his boat entered Cambodia, none of Kerry's shipmates came forward, as they had on other issues, to corroborate his account.

I'm sure Kerry's people think pleading "ooops" will do the trick.

Let me ask you this: If they knew the real truth, would they have to go through the theatrics they're currently doing - sending official ubervictim Max Cleland to Crawford with letters, throwing conniptions about John O'Neil's misstatements or oopses or whatever in 1971?

Some on the left have been saying that Brinkley will settle the whole matter next week, with an article in the New Yorker.

It's going to have to be a doozy.

Now a new official statement from the campaign undercuts Brinkley. It offers a minimal (thus harder to impeach) claim: that Kerry "on one occasion crossed into Cambodia," on an unspecified date. But at least two of the shipmates who are supporting Kerry's campaign (and one who is not) deny their boat ever crossed the border, and their testimony on this score is corroborated by Kerry's own journal, kept while on duty. One passage reproduced in Brinkley's book says: "The banks of the [Rach Giang Thanh River] whistled by as we churned out mile after mile at full speed. On my left were occasional open fields that allowed us a clear view into Cambodia. At some points, the border was only fifty yards away and it then would meander out to several hundred or even as much as a thousand yards away, always making one wonder what lay on the other side." His curiosity was never satisfied, because this entry was from Kerry's final mission.

Ed adds:

John Hurley and the rest of the talking heads that the Kerry campaign has sent out over the past two weeks to debunk the debunking of John Kerry's Excellent Cambodian Adventure/Bogus Journey can't spin out of that one. If he had spent time in Cambodia, he would have known exactly what lay on the other side of the banks, if indeed he ever even got that close to Cambodia in the first place. And the revelation that his later journals were actually written after his return to the States for an abortive book proposal makes this even more odd, since he had already begun his anti-war activities -- and an illegal Cambodian excursion would not only add to his radical street cred, but it would have made a book deal more likely.

This Washington Post opinion piece marks a signal from the mainstream media that they have turned the corner on this issue, thanks in no small part, I'm sure, to Kerry's decision to go nuclear against the Swiftvets. Expect coverage in the news sections to follow and the Kerry collapse to continue in the days ahead.

Now, here's my question: for the past week, the amateur spinmeisters of the left, confronted with the continued disintegration of every defense of Kerry's Kambodian Konkwest, have been forced to plead "there'll be a piece in the New Yorker coming out the week of August 30 that'll answer all your questions".

Assumption: To save Brinkley's academic credibility, he'll have to write something that buttresses his and Kerry's story from Tour of Duty. And yet Muravchik's piece would seem, at the very least, to have made that a very dicey proposition, closing off any gaps in the timeline that Brinkley could have tried to chisel into a hole wide enough to admit Kerry's story.

Posted by Mitch at 07:13 AM | Comments (24) | TrackBack

J is for "Jeepers, You Should Read Them"

Don't sit here - read about the blogs!

Jay Reding - A smart guy and sharp analyst with one of my favorite, Minnesota-based news-cycle blogs. His analysis is always keen, on-point, and frequently arrives at conclusions I don't have the patience to reach.

Joe Gandelman - A rarity on the blogosphere - a genuine reporter; his blog shows it. The guy's got sources, and can really write. As a result, frequently gets the story behind the story. Politically moderate - in genuine way, rather than the coppy-outy way that so many "moderate" blogs are.

Joel Rosenberg - There are lots of good gunblogs out there. Joel may be the one with the very best analysis of RKBA trends - and he's local, which, given the turbulence of Minnesota's concealed-carry situation, is invaluable. Especially until Alfred gets rolling again.

John Scalzi - Another pro blog. Great writer, incisive analyst, never disappoints.

Mantra Watch

So every leftyblogger these days is saying, in nearly perfect unison, that no matter what the truth about Kerry in Vietnam is, they're voting for him because "Bush has been a disastrous president" - but the Swifties are lying, so it doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter if you're talking about big leftyblogs or small ones; the line is always the same, as if they all get their material from the same place.

So tell me: Where's the "failure"? Where are the "lies"?

Name them.

Any time.

Hint: The closest to "failure" Bush comes is when he acts like a liberal; spending, immigration, education.

Hell Hath No Fury

Yesterday, the Swifties rejected the President's call to cease and desist.

Anyone surprised by this, please report to the Intellectual Maintenance department for a replacement clue.

Withdrawing would have proven the Democrat allegations that the Swifties were controlled illegally (under our hopelessly byzantine campaign finance laws) from the White House. It would have given the Dems their "hanging chad" to complain about for four more years.

More importantly, I don't think the Swifties care. This is not mere politics to them, any more than fathers' rights or concealed carry is "just politics" to me.

They're dealing with a man who has cynically hijacked the most wrenching, "searing searing" experience of their lives for political gain (not unheard of) and, if the Swifties' allegations are correct, horrendously abused that prerogative.

I've known a lot of veterans. They're pretty forgiving of things people do in combat; I've heard very few condemn those who, in the middle of a freezing dark night after weeks in a foxhole under shellfire, put a gun to their boot and squeezed the trigger.

But of the things that non-combat people do when it comes to combat? That's often another story.

In the classic Up Front by the late great cartoonist Bill Mauldin, the author explained the scorn the front-line riflemen had for the "garritroopers", the mechanics and typists and truck drivers in the rear areas, who pilfered the field jackets and combat boots meant for front-line guys in order to better look the part of the conquering hero to the local ladies, even though they'd never been shot at.

Marines on Guadalcanal told the contemptuous tale of the "REMF" (That's "Rear Echelon..." er, "...Motley Fellow") colonels who were caught in a latrine during a Japanese shelling, and ran together toward a dugout. After the shelling, they wrote each other up for Silver Star commendations. The story was probably apocryphal, but illustrates the contempt the combat soldier feels for the guys in the rear-area who try to pretend they were really up where the real fighting, and killing and dying, were being done. The club of men who've watched their friends die just outside the reach of the medics, seen their planes spiral into the ground, watched as the parts of the ship their buddies were in broke away and sank, is a very exclusive one, and it doesn't tolerate imposters well.

That lack of tolerance can be shown in trivial ways; I've watched as yahoos started bragging about time spent in a military unit and, under questioning from real veterans about real details about the unit (their job, their post or port, their commander), slink away to howls of derision. And I read, shocked, at the story of Admiral Boorda, former Chief of Naval Operations, who committed suicide in humiliation after being caught with a medal he had not earned.

The Swifties, to a man, earned the right to criticize John Kerry; they came to Vietnam, and either spent their full year in country (sometimes more than once), or were medevacked out to the hospital.

I'm not the one to quibble about Kerry's Silver Star. I'm not the one to pick nits about the details about his three Purple Hearts. I'm not the one to split hairs over the difference between "no fire" and "heavy fire" - to me, one bullet fired within 180 degrees of me is heavy incoming. I'm not the one to question Kerry's judgement calls.

But the Swifties are. And women scorned are nothing compared to veterans who've faced imposters, poseurs and the Cliff Clavins of the world.

Connection?

The left is waddling about smiling like a toddler that made a good pants over this story:

A lawyer for President Bush (news - web sites)'s re-election campaign disclosed Tuesday that he has been providing legal advice for a veterans group that is challenging Democratic Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites)'s account of his Vietnam War service.

Photo
AP Photo

Benjamin Ginsberg's acknowledgment marks the second time in days that an individual associated with the Bush-Cheney campaign has been connected to the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which Kerry accuses of being a front for the Republican incumbent's re-election effort.

The Bush campaign and the veterans' group say there is no coordination.

Which is, I suppose, nothing like this story at all:

Neil Reiff is listed as the contact person for MoveOn.org's 527 organization, as can be seen on the actual form submitted by MoveOn.org to the IRS here (PDF).

But Mr. Reiff seems to have another job. According to his firm's website, he's also the Deputy General Counsel for the Democratic National Committee:

From June, 1993 until May, 1998, Mr. Reiff served as Deputy General Counsel of the Democratic National Committee, and will retain this title in his new firm. In this capacity, Mr. Reiff has been responsible for assisting the DNC General Counsel in all legal matters affecting the national party. Mr. Reiff's major field of expertise is federal and state campaign finance laws. In that regard, Mr. Reiff advises and represents the DNC in all matters before the Federal Election Commission and state election agencies.

Although it is possible that his firm's website is out-of-date and he no longer holds this position, it seems that as recently as April 2004 he was still representing the Democratic Party (in this case, state party organizations) as can be seen in this June 2004 FEC communication addressed to him (PDF). That puts him working for the party in April 2004 -- and since he also submitted IRS forms for MoveOn in both March 2004 (PDF) and June 2004 (PDF), it's clear that he was working for both the Democratic Party and MoveOn's 527 during the same time period.

The reason I held off on publishing this information originally was that after consulting with some of the legal luminaries of the blogosphere, I did not get a clear answer as to whether Mr. Reiff's dual role was truly a conflict from an ethical, legal, or campaign-finance perspective (the consensus was that it didn't seem to be a conflict). And it honestly seems understandable to me that a lawyer might provide legal services to many groups without crossing the "coordination" line which 527's must honor.

But if Mr. Ginsberg is going to be criticized by Kerry's campaign for his dual role, it is only fair to ask the same questions about Mr. Reiff.

True enough.

It would seem - from my non-lawyer perspective, at least, that at first blush that Ginsberg did a good job of ensuring his role stayed within the letter of the law.

Reiff? Well, if Bear is right, we need to look into this.

Projection and Transference

Elder from Fraters sends me this link, entitled Talking Back To Hate Radio.

We at hate radio are always delighted when people talk back - but don't be surprised if we talk back, back.

The author, Mr. Romm, starts:

Going to the Minnesota State Fair was a bit depressing, since I saw at least two smaller radio stations that I'd never heard of that were spewing the most gawd-awful junk. As one blogger, a self-confessed Reaganite Republican, put it: "The Patriot; talk radio for those who think Jason Lewis is too much a G-dless commie."

Hey! He's quoting me!

Although not in the sense of "comprehending what I was talking about...

The US is becoming Iran.

Dittoheads believe lies and they don't believe the truth. Right wingers are anal in defense of their lies. I used to say that "a conservative is someone who was improperly toilet trained". But that doesn't fully explain the pathological loathing of Coulter and others. Perhaps they were raped by their fathers? Counselling would help. Maybe meds. But until then, you have to match their vehemence, if not their scatalogical insults.

They're lying. They know they're lying, otherwise they wouldn't need to hear the lies over and over.

That's right. We're lying liars, big fat liars, and Bush lied and people died - and we're the ones that need constant repitition.

You catch them in a lie -- and you will -- and shove it back at them, and they'll just sit there with a stupid grin on their face as they desperately pretend that their whole worldview hasn't come crashing down on them.

Really?

Mr. Romm; please stop by the NARN booth at the Fair this year; let us have with both barrels (NOTE TO ARDENT, ADAMANT LIBERALS who believe that conservatives were "raped by their fathers": that's a figure of speech). Tell us what you think. Jerk the rug out of under our worldviews! Shatter our illusions! Or try. In any case, I doubt you'll find a stupid grin in the house, except for the one we get when we collectively think in unison "How sweet - fresh rhetorical meat!".

But I digress:

You will never convince them, at least not in one conversation. Facts will not change their mind. You must match their passion on an emotional level. Remember: You're the good guys and, though they hate you, they are not the enemy. Is it worth arguing with people who get all their opinions from Pravda (aka Fox) and hate radio? Up to you.

Hate you?

In the words of that great icon of conservatism, Rick Blaine, "I suppose if I thought about you at all, I wouldn't think much of you". Don't over-inflate your importance in our worldview, Mr. Romm. Because it's rare when arguing with a "liberal", from Peter Beinart down to the crank union snuffy in the cafeteria, that "facts" of any sort are deployed. The "Bush is AWOL" meme was debunked four years ago, yet otherwise-intelligent lefties still chant it like it's a rosary, committed firmly to memory so it can be recited with no thought.

Bushlied, ThisWarIsForHalliburton, theNewJobsAreAllAtWallmart, BushWasAWOL, theSwiftVetsAreLying, LimbaughFoxTheNYPostTalkradioAreAllLyingAllTheTime, TheMediaIsReallyConservative, ConservativesAreFullOfHate, BushIsDumb, ConservativesAreReallyStupid...

Romm continues:

Aside from simply lying, the Taliban wing of the GOP tend to use three different types of verbal gymnastics. When you make a valid, supported criticism [Rare, indeed - Ed.] of Bush or the oily Bush administration they:

1) Change The Subject, preferably to Clinton. They simply can't defent Bush or the neocons, so they just fall back on their standard rants from a decade ago, often with a newer twist; often a lie.
Counter: a) "Don't change the subject, let's stick to Bush." b) "Oh, so you're not even going to TRY to defend Bush!" c) "Geeze, you're soft on crime."

Huh?

2) Use the "Everybody Does It" pseudo defense. Often a variant of the first defense, since their goal is to NOT talk about Bush and start ranting about someone else. They seek to mitigate their own crimes by pointing using others as similar bad examples. Don't let them generalize.
Counter: a) "Everybody does NOT do it, and certainly not to the same extent. You're making a bad analogy and letting some very bad people off the hook for some real crimes." b) "Oh, so you admit Bush IS a crook. Yes, you just compared Bush with people you insist are criminals. That makes him a crook too, right?" c) "You've been whining about other people for a long time, let's deal with the crooks in power now." d) Geeze, you're soft on crime."

I'm beginning to see a pattern here...

3) Lastly, they resort to the "Are You Drunk?" personal attack. Mud slinging can take many forms. They will demonize you (or the person you cite). They don't dare try to counter the facts you've presented. Heck, I don't think they understand the facts against them.
Counter: I've got to admit, when it gets to the schoolyard taunting level, you might as well have fun with them. You're never going to win the argument. They are MUCH better at personal insults than you are, having spent more time listening to professional whiners like Rush and Drudge than they have talking to their family. You can say something like "are YOU on drugs?" or "were you raped by your father?" if you're in the mood for that sort of thing. But you MUST counter their emotional spew. "Oho, now it's personal insults. You're not even going to TRY to argue facts. That says more about you than about me."

...

...er...

...uh...

...Yeah.

Elder? You're yanking my chain, aren't you? This is really a spoof site written by Man from Silver Mountain, isn't it? It's supposed to make liberals look like smug, incoherent, self-satisfied intellectual flyweights, right? The sort of people who out-"ditto" the dittoheads?.

That has to be it. It's just a crude caricature! Not even those dim bulbs from Pandagon are this vacuous!

Almost had me there, Elder! I know - you're a kidder. You kid.

You can use their knee-jerk hatred against them.

During the Shockwave show where I talked with the guy behind the Jason Lewis Anti-Fan Club, I read the How To Write A Letter To The Editor points from a previous Bartcop-E column. And then had a letter published the following week! Good timing on my part, eh?

Why, yes! Goodness knows the Strib never publishes letters from incoherent cranks!

See you at the fair!

And on the off chance that "Mr. Romm" isn't some sort of conservative parody - bring all your "facts". We'll be waiting.

Posted by Mitch at 05:18 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

When Did You Stop Beating Your Wife?

Mark Gisleson at Norwegianity has uncorked another one of his masterpieces of near-comic hyperbole masquerading as analysis, this time in re Powerline's editorial in the Strib, and Jim Boyd's cowardly, content-free response.

He says:

I recently skipped over an op-ed piece that appeared in the Star Tribune because the authors, John H. Hinderaker and Scott W. Johnson (who collectively blog as Powerline), were just too off the wall to acknowledge [They always say that when they're stumped. Ed], even though their “arguments” were appearing in the Strib, the 800-lb. gorilla of Minnesota media. Well I’m glad I didn’t bother deconstructing their specious pro-swiftboatliar claims because the Strib just recanted their largesse in an editorial yesterday (which I missed and just found through Atrios)...Worth the click, and maybe even worth the possible pain in the ass registration process (usually doesn’t kick in until you click on your second Strib link). The Strib editorial crew thoroughly demolishes four main points of swiftboatliar contention. But, more than anything, I would have loved to have heard the phone calls to the Strib higher ups that preceded the decision to “fisk” one of their own op-ed contributors. No need to be shy about real world politics: undoubtedly some DFL heavy hitters (aka advertisers) made some calls.

Oh, but the Powerline boys were ready for this. From a recent post:

The gaping holes in this...er, "reasoning", are self-evident: The Strib's "demolition" demolished nothing.

So Mark "Revolutionary Gonad" Gisleson, a man given to making inflammatory and self-adulatory claims, is venting. No big shock.

But this, however, was a bit of a surprise:

It’s been eight days since Northern Alliance member Mitch Berg accepted my invitation to an online debate. The ball is still in his court. He can pick any topic and fire off his opening salvo whenever he likes just by emailing me at bushdidcoke[at]gisleson.com.

Wow. I must be a real coward, huh?

Except that the conversation too place in its entirety a week ago in the comment thread at Chuck Olsen's Blogumentary site.

Now, I've met Chuck, and he's a fine-enough guy. But I have to confess that Chuck's comment section isn't the best way to get a hold of me - I read Blogumentary only when explicitly provoked to do so, which only usually happens when he's filming friends of mine or showing up at parties we throw. No knock on Chuck, just saying.

So sure; I'll write Mr. Gisleson at "bushdidcoke". And Mr. Gisleson can write me at "kerryisavapidemptysuit" [at the domain] shotinthdark dotto info.

Topic: The Swift Vets are telling the truth, and the Kerry Kampaign is going to have to face the truth that they're working for Cliff Clavin.

I is for "I Read These Guys Lots"

There is no "I" in team.

But there's no "I" in "Blogroll", either. So let's just get to the blogs and quit trying to be cute.

Infinite Monkeys - Why are the Monkeys here? If the Fraters ever mistake Liquid Drano for Bombay Sapphire (which probably explains, in retrospect, why my sink smells so pine-needly) and go to that great Happy Hour in the sky, the Monkeys will be well-placed to fill that niche. We can rest safer at night.

Instapundit - Duh. Instapundit is to blogging what Michael Jordan was to basketball. Although Glenn probably has a better batting average.

Ipse Dixit - Fits into my "smart guys doing good blogs" category.

Iraq Now - A great milblog, written from deep in the heart of the sandbox. A welcome blast of objectivity for when the media gets *me* down.

Paging Laura Ingraham

Alice Cooper slams the ACT anti-Bush tour:

"When I was a kid and my parents started talking about politics, I'd run to my room and put on the Rolling Stones as loud as I could. So when I see all these rock stars up there talking politics, it makes me sick.

"If you're listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal."

I never liked Cooper. Much.

But I'll crank "I'm Eighteen" tonight a little louder, just so the kids wonder what got into Dad.

Another Lie That's Not

Via Ed, we see that Kerry is backing off from one of his Purple Heart claims, admitting that his first Purple Heart was accidentally self-inflicted.

Here are the relevant sections from the Purple Heart issuance criteria:

(8) After 7 December 1941, by weapon fire while directly engaged in armed conflict, regardless of the fire causing the wound.

...

b. A wound for which the award is made must have required treatment by a medical officer.

So - where were those "lies" on the part of the Swifties, again?

Discount On Million-Dollar Wounds?

This is a question. I don't know the answer. I'm hoping someone does.

We are told that John Kerry was sent back to the US after serving four months of his tour of duty because he'd received his third Purple Heart. Let's come back to that in a bit.

The Purple Heart is given out for a variety of wounds. It is
paradoxically a very difficult medal to get, and a very easy one at the same time.

In World War II, troops - especially infantrymen in Europe - stayed in action, almost without a break from when they started until the war ended. The physical and emotional costs on the soldiers, especially the infantry, were enough that the Army instituted the one-year tour of duty during Vietnam. Troops and units were very rarely pulled out of front-line service for any significant time; the men fought with only short breaks until they were killed, went mad from "battle fatigue", or were wounded badly enough to take them out of service.

That "badly enough to get out of infantry" bit is a key qualifier.

Many troops returned to action time and time again after receiving light wounds. In 1990, I edited and ghost-wrote a book of World War II memoirs for a man who fought as a platoon leader - roughly John Kerry's grade - in the bloody, horrible battle of the Huertgenwald, in 1944. After the Huertgen, his unit absorbed replacements and marched straight to the Battle of the Bulge, where the author was struck almost immediately by a mortar-shell fragment that pierced his liver, sending him to the hospital for the next five months. On discharge, he returned to his unit in a full combat capacity; the war ended as he was on his way to rejoin his company. Ambrose's Band of Brothers is full of examples of paratroopers who were wounded, spent time in the hospital, and were returned to action over and over again, to say nothing of the men who endured many, many minor fragment and bullet wounds and never left the line; there are men who came home from World War II with many, many more than three purple hearts, and many more who died getting their third, or fourth, or more.

Wounds that were bad enough to get a soldier sent out of action permanently, but that didn't maim the man too badly to destroy his life, were called "million-dollar wounds". One of those "million dollar" hits was a bullet in the foot.

During World War II, many, many men who reached the point where loyalty to their buddies wasn't enough anymore took that route out of action, quietly putting a bullet through their foot or hand while alone in a foxhole one night, blaming it on a sniper or an accidental discharge. It was illegal - but rarely prosecuted; most of their platoonmates understood why they did it. There were subtler means - getting trench foot in the horrible winter of '44 was easy, and a ticket to hospital for a long stay at the very least.

Combat is the most wrenching experiece there is. It drives men to crave horrible personal injury as a relief from the mortal stress. So, what if you gave those men an option; trading three little wounds for one big one? In an war like Vietnam, manned mostly by draftees, in one of the world's most brutal, ugly climes, which became increasingly unpopular at home as the years went by, you'd think the "million dollar wound" would be a big goal; you'd be right. It was still part of the soldier's vocabulary, according to sources I've read.

So, given those facts, would it make sense to give soldiers a chance to leave action for three *slight* wounds? Did the military give troops the chance to trade three thousand-dollar injuries for a million-dollar wound?

It seems implausible. It seems like the soft of loophole that even the government isn't stupid enough to leave open. I can't find any reference to the "three purple hearts" policy in anything I've ever read. I'll toss it out there; was that policy ever in force in Vietnam?

Riposte

This started as a comment yesterday.

I figured it was worth expanding on.

Jeff Fecke left the comment near the end of a long thread on the latest revelations from the Swifties. Jeff said, in a nutshell:

Kerry's lies, if they are lies, are no worse than Bush's alleged (and many-times disproved) absence without leave from the Air Guard,
• that they are of equally little import to the decision we have to make this fall,
• That Kerry doesn't have to answer the allegatinos against him until Bush answers the Air National Guard allegations (what, again?)
• that there really is no evidence to show of Kerry's supposed career as a black bag operator,
• that most of Unfit for Command has been shown to be a lie
• that I'm avoiding discussion of Kerry's medals because I think the subject is a non-starter

Your comment is wrong on so many levels:

For starters; leaving aside any empirical proof of Bush's presence at AANG drills (I say it's been proven, the left covers its ears and goes "Nya nya"), at no point has the President EVER said "I'm qualified to be your president because I was a crackerjack F102 jock". In March, the Dems were chortling with glee, though - I heard at least one say "Kerry's experience at crisis leadership *dwarfs* the president's" because of Vietnam. So - if significant parts of that experience were made up from whole cloth, what DOES that say about the experience that's been the cornerstone of his career?

And yes, Kerry needs to provide proof of Kerry's presence in Cambodia, NO MATTER WHAT Bush's TANG record was. If the President dropped dead tomorrow of natural causes (calm down, Slash, it's hypothetical), Kerry's alleged lies would still be fully germane.

Corroborable evidence of any mission to Cambodia - documentary, eyewitness, SOMETHING - WILL exist. If the mission ever happened, anyway.

By the way - the left keeps repeating statements that the Swifties "have been caught lying" is, I'll be kind, an exaggeration. There are certain questions of chronology, details remembered wrongly, yadda yadda. In the end, though, the key question is, "Did Kerry exaggerate his war record (putting himself in places and on missions he never went on), his accomplishments (claiming credit for Peck's firefight, exaggerating his medal claims), his sacrifice (the extent of his injuries, and whether the injuries caused him to go home earlier than with other veterans; there was apparently not a consistent "three injuries and you're going home" policy; if there had been, a lot of soldiers who shot themselves in the foot, might not have), and his exposure to action (when he signed up for Swift boats, they were a fairly safe and cushy assignment) and so on. It's on the table because, if true, it's his only qualification for office. If not true...

By the way, I'm not recusing myself from discussing the circumstances behind Kerry's medals because I don't think there's a case; I'm doing it because as a non-Veteran, it's not my place. We have real veterans doing that. It's a great call for the Dem's bluff; after years of bellowing "chickenhawk" every time a Republican sounds off about war, they're faced with a group of guys who have more cojones than 99.9% of the party - and all the chickendoves can do is bleat about political connections, like you're not supposed to have them to voice an opinion!

Finally - it doesn't matter if Kerry was eight miles from Cambodia, eight feet, or eight time zones; being "almost" on an illegal, spook-carrying, gun-running secret mission is like beingt "almost" a virgin; it doesn't count.

In a rational world, we wouldn't need the Swifties to tell us this; By any remotely dispassionate measure, Kerry is an empty suit, vapid Yalie, an Ivy-league silver spooner with no redeeming life experience, a politician of no demonstrable heft, peddling a platform of baked wind, that doesn't deign to go into ANY specifics. All he has is his war record, and if we elect president based on war record then both George HW Bush and Bob Dole would have won in landslides.

John Kerry is no Bob Dole.

G is for "Great Scott, You Should Read These Blogs"

We're up to "G" in the blogroll. I'm envisioning the writer's cramp I'm going to get when I reach "S".

Geek Boy's blog - Pete was the best project manager I ever worked with. His blog is probably unique on my blogroll - it doesn't seem to have an agenda, for starters - but it's an interesing melange of baby pictures, geek inside baseball (there is no code geek who is geekier than Pete) and music.

Geoff Brown - Another TopFive acquaintance whose blog I only very recently discovered. One of the more cogent commentators on the old TopFive mailing list, and his blog is a welcome evolution.

Gunshow Trash - I usually remove blogs that have been inactive more than thirty days. I'm giving Alfred a little extra time, because GST was one of the essential firearms rights blogs around. Alfred Fingulin was a majordomo with Concealed Carry Reform, one of the unsung heroes of the Concealed Carry reform movement, and the classic grassroots campaigner. I hope he gets the blog restarted soon.

Got a Clu

I'd like to welcome our new addition; Clu, a little Golden Retriever puppy that my daughter got for her birthday.

Only nine weeks old, and she already knows more about military history than most Democrats.

Two Lessons

Iraq's soccer team advanced to the semis:

Iraq's footballers beat Australia 1-0 Saturday to reach the semifinals of the Olympic men's tournament, triggering celebratory gunfire in their violence-racked country.

"People where I live (in Iraq) have suffered so much," said Qatar-based midfielder Emad Mohammed, who fired home the winner with a spectacular overhead kick in the 64th minute.

There are two lessons we can learn from this wonderful Cinderella story:

1. Miracles happen.
2. Many jocks are still morons

Campaign Ads

On the one hand, after three weeks, Kerry is finally trying to respond to the Swifties:

The Democratic Party launched a costly round of ads Friday to buttress John Kerry's credentials to be commander in chief as the White House accused the Massachusetts senator of "losing his cool" over attacks on his war record.

"John Kerry is a fighter and he doesn't tolerate lies from others," spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter shot back at President Bush's spokesman.

Undeterred, the anti-Kerry group that provoked the furor distributed a second commercial to the news media and said it would begin airing next week in Nevada and New Mexico. The ad intersperses clips of a youthful Kerry talking about war atrocities during an appearance before Congress in 1971 with images of veterans condemning his testimony.

The Swifties' ad seems to have had the best bang for the buck of any low-budget campaign in political history:

The ad that drew Kerry's angry response on Thursday aired in only three states at a cost of well under $1 million. It features several Vietnam veterans who accuse Kerry of lying about the circumstances surrounding events for which he won his medals. Kerry received three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and a Bronze Star while in Vietnam.

Even so, the Annenberg survey said "more than half the country has heard about or seen" the commercial - the result of widespread coverage on cable television and talk radio as well as the Internet.

Of course, the ad is devastating.

Speaking of ads, I saw the latest series of Kerry spots, the ones bashing the Administration over health insurance and proposing a program eerily similar to the administration's plan.

The wierd part? While the ads show lots of clips of people going about their business over a litany of healthcare problems.

But not only does Kerry's voice never appear in the spots, the footage of Kerry himself is always from a distance, with many other elements in the shot to distract attention from the candidate and his awkward, jerky physical delivery and his lurch-like visage.

What does this tell you about the Kerry campaign's strategery for presenting their candidate?

It's a rhetorical question, but feel free to answer anyway...

Dole on Kerry

Bob Dole, himself a decorated war veteran, addresses Kerry's war service:

Former Sen. Bob Dole, a World War II veteran and 1996 Republican presidential nominee, suggested Kerry apologize for his 1971 testimony to Congress about atrocities U.S. soldiers allegedly committed in Vietnam.

Dole, who has a disabled right arm from war wounds, said Kerry received an early exit from combat for "superficial wounds." He called on the nominee to release all of his Vietnam service records.

Dole told CNN's "Late Edition" that he warned Kerry months ago about going "too far" and that the Democrat may have himself to blame for the current situation, in which polls show him losing support among veterans.

"One day he's saying that we were shooting civilians, cutting off their ears, cutting off their heads, throwing away his medals or his ribbons," Dole said. "The next day he's standing there, `I want to be president because I'm a Vietnam veteran.' Maybe he should apologize to all the other 2.5 million veterans who served. He wasn't the only one in Vietnam."

Dole added: "And here's, you know, a good guy, a good friend. I respect his record. But three Purple Hearts and never bled that I know of. I mean, they're all superficial wounds. Three Purple Hearts and you're out."

The obvioius answer, of course - Dole never served on Kerry's boat.

Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton replied: "It's unfortunate that Senator Dole is making statements that official U.S. Navy (news - web sites) records prove false. This is partisan politics, not the truth."

Kerry's medical and service records were released?

Who knew?

One Step Up, Four Steps Back

Ed notes that William Rood, a former Swift boat commander and current Chicago Tribune editor, is backing part of Kerry's story.

Which is where Kerry's problems begin.

Rood's article (via Ed) notes:

In the book, O'Neill and Corsi said Kerry chased down a "young Viet Cong in a loincloth … clutching a grenade launcher which may or may not have been loaded."

Rood recalled the fleeing Viet Cong was "a grown man, dressed in the kind of garb the VC usually wore." There were other attackers as well, he said, and his boat and Kerry's boat took significant fire.

Ed says:

Rood's description of the events only challenges two assertions made by the Swiftvets: that the VC killed was dressed in a loincloth., and that the beaching of the PCF was an impulsive and foolish tactical move that amounted to grandstanding. Points noted. They still question the awarding of a Silver Star to an engagement that killed one fleeing enemy, which deserved recognition for bravery but probably in normal conditions wouldn't be considered Silver Star material. I'd chalk that up to Pentagon brass looking for good motivational stories than Kerry's legendary talent for self-aggrandisement, even if he did go out the next day to re-create the engagement for his home movie camera.

Rood and the Chicago Tribune has done nothing to put Kerry in Cambodia, or explain why he says Kerry experienced "intense combat" on 2 December while writing on 11 December that he had not yet been shot at, or any of a number of elisions, exaggerations, or outright prevarications that we have documented at Captain's Quarters and elsehwere.

Also - note this bit from Rood's piece:

Ambushes from Viet Cong fighters were common because the noise from boats, powered by twin diesel engines, practically invited gunfire. Ambushes, Rood said, "were a virtual certainty." ...

Perfect for covert, illegal black bag missions, right?

Posted by Mitch at 06:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Now, This...

...looks like great geekeriffic fun.

F is for For Crying Out Loud, Read These Blogs!

Today's blogroll is brought to you by the letter "F".

Free Market Fairy Tales - Hilarious, wry blog by that rarest of critters, a European libertarian.

Freespeech.com - Not the only unabashedly Libertarian fundamentalist blog out there. Just one of the best.

Fresh Bed Goodness - Frequently-hilarious domestic-goddess blog.

Friends of Saddam - A blog dedicated to the Oil For Food scam and its participants, this blog has forced me to change my diet to control my blood pressure.

No Joy In Mudville

Mudville Gazette may be the milblog with the best coverage of Kerry's Swift Boat flap.

I liked this bit:

This remark gets relocated to the main post from the comments:

I remember Kerry surrounding himself with 'veterans' testifying to war crimes, many of those 'veterans' never spent a day wearing Uncle's suit. Others never served a tour in the Southeast Asian War Games, he reported their ravings as fact.

As each of my children went through school I'd have to deal with Mr. Kerry's slander again. That's bad enough, what about the children of the young men who came home in those shiny aluminum caskets? Who told them that Daddy wasn't a rapist? Who told them that Kerry deliberately lied while under oath? One of my sergeants was killed trying to get a batch of children out of the line of fire in some little ville I never knew the name of. According to Kerry that man was a murderer. His children would have been in their early teens in 1971. I wonder how they took that 'testimony'?

I don't need the Swiftee's ad to know that John Kerry is scum. I've lived for thirty-five years with the memory of a lot of fine young men who served with honor and dignity and never grew old. John Kerry may just as well gone to each of those 58,000 graves, called a press conference at each one and when the cameras got rolling, pissed on them.

I saw my first combat death in May of '65. There isn't a month that goes by when one of those still-young men doesn't visit me in my sleep. None of them would forgive me if I were to support that lying sack of shit. I owe them this.

Yea - America has one last chance to piss on it's Vietnam vets this fall.

Well, one of the two Americas does.

Viable

I could probably never win elective office; many of my views would never fit into a seven-second sound bite. For many of them, I'd be insulted if anyone asked me to.

Abortion is one of them.

For a Conservative and a Christian, abortion is still basically a side-issue to me. I'm pro-life, of course, but I'm small-l libertarian enough to think it is basically a person's choice within limits - and big-CC Conservative Christian enough to think those limits should err far on the side of life, and to believe I should use whatever bully pulpit I have to proselytize for life, morality and sexual responsibility.

I figure that if nations like France and Germany - as sundered by dehumanizing socialism on the one hand and two millenia of Catholicism on the other - can reach a compromise that leaves them short of civil war, we certainly can; in Germany, abortions are legal until the 9th week, in France the 7th.

That said, the most repugnant concept in the whole debate is "viability". Fundamenalists insist life is vital at conception. Those who regard abortion as a sacrament believe life is not viable until it's born - and in some cases, later.

As a parent, of course, I know better; a fetus is ot viable until it can pay rent.

But I digress.

Morally, in a perfect world, people would know that a conceived fetus, even without medical care, would have a 3/4 chance of being carried until birth; even before modern obstetrics, infants stood a 2/3 chance of surviving childbirth. So - in that mythical perfect world, before a couple devolved into the throes of passion, they'd realize that they were running some risk, birth control aside, of creating something that nature had equipped us to bring into life, as long as nothing conspired against it.

But the notion of "viability" lingers on, and its onset is debated with "how many angels fit on the head of this pin"-level fervor.

But I wonder how anyone, even the most myopic pro-infanticide zealot, can take the debate seriously with stories like this in plain view?

Of course I know how they can; it's not about the life of the "fetus". To the abortion sacramentalist, the mother - her convenience, lifestyle and, occasionally, health - trumps right and wrong. Ideology trumps nine-ounce miracles.

Exerpts from "Tour of Doody - the Mitch Berg Story"

From Douglas Brinkley's upcoming work of history, "Tour of Doody - the Mitch Berg Story":

Page 175:

...one of the most difficult jobs Berg faced at that time of his life was choosing between the woman he loved, Marisa Tomei, and the woman who was throwing herself at him, Madeline Stowe. The stress was taking its toll, although Berg's public facade remained as unflappable as ever".

More, from Page 269:

"Los Angeles Sheriff 911", the operator answered.

"Hi, I'm calling about OJ Simpson. He's drunk and disorderly and talking about killing his wife".

"Who is this?"

"My name is Mitch Berg...oh, crap, he stole my glove, too!"

Page 301:

The driver of the rented school bus waved to Berg as the 30-odd men sitting in the back watched, idly fingering their retracted box cutters.

"Escuse me, sir", said the driver in a guttural accent. "Could you tell us how to reach the Twin Cities Airport? We need to get to the Northwest counter by 7AM".

Berg thought for a moment. "Take Edgecumbe 'til you get to Highway Five, and take the Five East exit, then drive 'til you see the Airport", Berg responded idly, wondering to himself how he was going to make it to work on time. "Look for the Lindberg Terminal sign".

"Thank you", the man said as a frenzied "Allahu Akbar" erupted from the back of the bus. The bus pulled away.

"Oh, Crap", Berg muttered. "Did I just say Five East or Five West? I hope I didn't send them to Wisconsin, not the airport". But it was too late.

"Dang. I guess they're going to miss their flights". Berg was preoccupied with other problems. The next day, September 12, was the day his design proposal was due, and that weasel sales manager was not helping at all.

Page 195:

So it had come down to this: Days spent crossing the desert since the Night Stalkers' Blackhawk had dropped him in the desert near Nasirieh. Forty hours spent wriggling through the sand and scrub to get into position. And it all came down to this moment.

Berg was in position. As tanks maneuvered through the desert hundreds of miles to the south, and coalition jets screamed overhead, oblivious to the highest-value target in the war in the camouflaged palace below, Mitch Berg was in position for the coup de main of the war - perhaps of military history.

Berg drew a bead on the mustachioed monster, flanked by his sons, Uday and Qusay. Mindful of the Republican Guard that swarmed over the palace compound, Berg whispered into his mic.

"Bagpipe Four. I have Woodtick dialed in. Request permission to engage".

There was a pause while officers at CENTCOM conferred.

Suddenly, a frantic voice squawked over Berg's tiny headset. "Negative, negative, negative, Bagpipe Four. Ultra November negotiations are underway. Say again, the UN is intervening. Abort abort abort!"

"Crap", Berg muttered. He could have shaved either half of Hussein's mustache off with a .308 boat-tailed match-grade round at this range, to say nothing of blowing his brains down his spinal column.

Typical brass at CENTCOM. Friggin' UN.

Now Berg's problem was, how to get out of Saddam's palace complex without getting seen.

"I've been in worse scrapes", he thought, although he couldn't remember any offhand.

Page 562:

Berg addressed the short, nattily-dressed, sunglass-wearing man.

"I think the idea for the show isn't bad. But..."

Berg produced the eyeball of a cow from a small plastic bag in his pocket, and took a bite.

"...I think that making the contestants eat British food doesn't promote the proper..." he paused, lost in thought, then concluded "Fear factor that would make the show really good."

Berg finished the eyeball and ordered a shot of whiskey.

The shorter man took his leave, and walked out to his Audi TT and pulled out his cell phone as he walked.

Page 942:

"I'm thinking about doing a website about NASCAR", the last line of the email read. "I'm going to call it "James' NASCAR Fan Site".

Berg typed quickly "Not bad, but why not think bigger? I bet you could do a decent site on - oh, I dunno, current events, your daughter, architecture, hilarious old ads, Macintoshes, funny stuff, and domestic life. Why not call it..." Berg thought for a moment, "...the Bleat?".

"Tour of Doody" by Douglas Brinkley will be available in bookstores on September 1.

E is for Everyone should Read Them

Today's letter in my blogroll: "E".

Eject! Eject! Eject! - Bill Whittle posts are like Springsteen albums; they come along every four years, he went through a stretch were some of them weren't that good, but he's still a great writer with moments of great inspiration.

Evangelical Outpost - Joe Carter's blog is absolutely essential: intellectually rigorous, funny, dead-on. One of a small (but solid) minority of writers that present evangelical Christianity well.

Exultate Justi - As I mentioned back in "C", I blogroll a lot of sites written by sharp young guys who write good solid blogs that make the occasional brilliant point - I have to, I hope to be one of them. Jared Keller certainly is. He's in a crowded market, but he's always a great read.

Shipmates

Before the Swifties, Ensign Kerry served on the guided-missile frigate/cruiser (it was reclassified at some point in its life) USS Gridley.

Some members of the Gridley's crew have put up a website with their reminiscences of serving with the future Senator.

Some of them are even-handed, but unfavorable in the end - like this from Kerry's Executive Officer (the ship's second-in-command):

There is no question that John Kerry earned his decorations and that he put his life at risk in the service of his country. There is no doubt in my mind, moreover, that he has the intelligence to serve as president. But there is also no doubt in my mind that his anti-war activities while our troops were still fighting, dying and being tortured in filthy Vietnam prisons were despicable.

For that reason, even aside from his anti-defense voting record in the Senate, he is one ex-shipmate that I could never support as commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

Others paint a more nuanced complex picture:

5. The trip to Danang – GRIDLEY went into Danang for briefings before going to Northern SAR. This section is so full of hyperbole that the urge to giggle is almost uncontrollable. “The panic and pressure onboard GRIDLEY, strapping on a .45, wondering if I would have to use it, B-52’s howling overhead”. A B-52 over Danang would have been so high that only contrails would have been visible, cloud cover permitting. David Simons confirmed my recollection that during our brief stay in Danang Harbor, the sky was overcast to the point of being ominous.

More seriously, no one can remember John Kerry going ashore. I was part of the shore party that went to Monkey Mountain. We were taken in a screened in truck (to protect against grenades being tossed in) and made to unload our .45’s. The driver said that he did not want us newbies to shoot anyone by accident.

Neither Commander Kelly nor LCDR Rueckert (Kerry’s immediate boss) can recall approving a trip ashore for Ensign Kerry. The author uses remarks of David Simons IC2 as a lead in to the Danang section. I spoke to David and he has no personal knowledge of Kerry going ashore at all. He did talk to a researcher and made some generic remarks about Danang but had never discussed Danang with Kerry. He recalls arguing with the researcher because he tried to put the words “cowboy” in his mouth, which ended up in the book.

There is no mystery about the “gruesome site of a pile of dead VC.” We saw no sign of anything like this. However, our escort to Monkey Mountain did tell us how the VC bodies were stacked up on the LZ’s after the TET Offensive, which had been several months before. Ensign Kerry would have been told this story by members of the shore party.

If, indeed, he got to the pier, because he was in charge of the motor whaleboat, it certainly would not have been within his purview to wander Danang, eating dog meat and drinking beer in a bar (under arms). It also seems amazing that he had all these observations on Vietnam in such a brief visit.

Very curious.

Of course, we haven't verified any of this, and don't know any of the agendas involved.

More to come.

I Wish...

...that I could think of things like this! on the fly.

Bush Rally Epilogue - Part II

By the way - nobody made anyone sign any loyalty oaths.

I even saw someone in a "Thune' T-shirt.

That's as big as any tent needs to be.

UPDATE: Dave Thune is a DFL city councilman from St. Paul. He's no Bush supporter.

Triage

Setting: Mitch's house, 6AM.

MITCH: So - do I finish these five other pieces? Or do I finish this #$@#% "Public Radio" piece?

More later today.

Bush Rally Epilogue

I've heard a few commenters note that they were underwhelmed by the presence of Ricky Skaggs at yesterday's rally.

Go forth and seek enlightenment.

Back at my first country radio job (KDAK, Carrington ND, 1982), country music was near its creative nadir (and that's in an industry that's usually pretty mediocre, creatively speaking).

There were three artists that broke the unending horror of those years. One was Emmylou Harris, who is wonderful beyond compare.

The other? Ricky Skaggs, whose straight-up bluegrass was a breath of fresh cowflop among the overproduced, almost-pop product that swamped most of the genre at the time. Straight, unabashed hillbilly techno, done by brilliant musicians. Ricky Skaggs plays more instruments than I do, and - here's the kicker - plays them all brilliantly.

The fact that he's playing Bush rallies is just icing on the cake; you could have had Lee Greenwood, for crying out loud.

Quitcherbeefin'. I'm hoping Skaggs plays the next rally.

Public Radio

Back in the early nineties, when I was trying to resuscitate my moribund radio career, I worked as a volunteer in the news department at KFAI Radio. "Fresh Air" is an eclectic community-supported station serving Minneapolis, mainly the West Bank, the funky freakshow of a neighborhood around Cedar and Riverside in Minneapolis.

Of course, at KFAI you could encounter any type of politics you wanted, as long as it was rabidly left. I made a religious point of never talking politics, although that didn't protect me from emnity; there was an all "feminist" show that regarded the presence of males in the building as a borderline sex crime. One of the news reporters, at my "orientation", said "I make sure I put in a healthy dose of my own liberal politics. Just because I can," she said with a knowing wink, the kind you give when you think you're talking to a wholly sympathetic audience.

But it was a fun stint, and I think everyone benefitted; I met some interesting people and got to do some interesting news reporting; they got a guy who could read and chew gum at the same time. There were times, before I got hooked up with the NARN, that I actually missed working there enough to call to enquire about volunteering to do news again (although time never permitted me to follow through).

Now, Minnesota Public Radio wasn't precisely "the enemy" at KFAI, but they weren't friends, either. Bill Kling pretty clearly sought control of all public radio in Minnesota; he clearly regarded every dollar the state or the public spent on KFAI as money that should have gone to him and MPR.

And yet...

KFAI was interesting radio. The quality, even listenability, varied widely. The political agenda of many of the people involved was stultifying. But it actually served a discrete, discernable community, albeit a community that is a bit of a caricature, and they served it well.

I'm a conservative. I oppose most government subsidies - we shouldn't be subsidizing corporations, non-profits or poverty.

But if we leave the right and wrong of subsidizing millionaire "non-profit" executives and their empires out of the question, I have this question: If the state is going to spend money on public broadcasting, which is the better investment: A huge, elaborate, oppressive empire devoted to two streams of programming - mushy-left talk and homogenized classical music - or many smaller stations that directly serve smaller communities? I vote the latter.

This thread, by the way, marks an odd confluence - some agreement with Mark Gisleson of Norwegianity, a blog with whom I've mixed it up in the past, and will in the future.

Although Gisleson says:

Unlike conservative talk shows, Lanpher was a master at letting her guests present and defend their agendas. That’s good radio. And, like any good liberal, Lanpher had on guests from across the political spectrum. I miss her show and Berg’s dislike of Lanpher just makes me miss her more, even though I wish her and Al well over at Air America.

Several replies:

• Many conservative hosts - Medved, Prager, Hewitt, and I'll add the NARN - are better than Lanpher ever was at allowing guests state their case.
• Lanpher was perfectly fine with guests that she agreed with. With overtly conservative guests, she was famously curt and perfunctory.
• In terms of the pure art of speaking and communicating on the air, Lanpher was a joke. She sounded befuddled by all the flashing lights; she was the worst call-handler in the history of talk radio; and despite having the largest staff of any local talk show, she constantly sounded like she was winging it, and winging it badly.

The fact that she was brought in to backstop Franken with some "professionalism" is side-splittingly ironic.

Gisleson also says "Berg, of course, blames liberals" - which seems reasonable, since conservatives have little to like about MPR (although I listen to Keillor and MPR news regularly), and MPR was caught giving mailing lists to Paul Wellstone.

Which prompts an observation. Before I make it, let me make this clear; liberal does not equal bad, and conservative doesn't equal good (for purposes of this statement, anyway).

Why do conservatives dominate the blogosphere, while liberals roam free in the more structured worlds of public radio and institutions like E-Democracy and other moderated discussion facilities? Why do conservatives (at least, fiscal conservatives) dominate among entrepreneurs and small businesses, while liberals dominate big, unionized industries and lament the loss of huge, smokestack enterprises? Why does the left carp about politicians academic credentials ("Reagan only had a BA from an undistinguished college", or as I heard on FrankenNet the other day, "Bush only went to business school when he failed to get into law school", or, on the Garawfulo show, "Condi Rice only graduated from the U of Denver!")?

The same reason "community" is such a buzzword on the left; they seem to feel more comfortable in groups - especially groups that have defined, almost ritualistic boundaries and hierarchies; leaders with bigger, better credentials than you; information from sources that have been vetted and found acceptable (by people with bigger, better credentials than you); politicial discussion in carefully-moderated (some might say politically-sanitized) groups like E-Democracy and highly-overproduced shows like Lanpher's old "Midmorning" and FrankenNet; in the world of blogs, why they tend to write elaborate comments on megablogs like Kos and Atrios rather than start their own blogs; why they prefer work environments with carefully-defined contributions and rewards and hierarchies. As Robert Nozick said in an article I wrote about last year:

chools became the major institution outside of the family to shape the attitudes of young people, and almost all those who later became intellectuals went through schools. There they were successful. They were judged against others and deemed superior. They were praised and rewarded, the teacher's favorites. How could they fail to see themselves as superior? Daily, they experienced differences in facility with ideas, in quick-wittedness. The schools told them, and showed them, they were better...

...The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority "entitled" them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate?

People who tend to the ight are comfortable with the seeming anarchy of the market, the do-it-yourself world of rejecting newspapers for blogs, the roughhouse of talk radio as opposed to the homogenated, phony veneer of intelligence of public radio (which covers no less intellectual dishonesty than Sean Hannity exhibits).

Nothing wrong with that, again - differences aren't bad, they're just differences.

But it does explain, I think, why the public radio audience, and constituency, trends left,.socially and politically. It's just safer.

D is for "Don't Miss"

Today's blogrollcall continues with the letter "D".

Daniel W. Drezner - One of the big heavyweights. Brilliant. Everyone links him.

Dave Barry - He's Dave Freakin' Barry, for crying out loud.

David Warren - Every time I get tired of writing news-cycle stuff, I read Warren's site. He's that rare columnist who tackles the bigger, deeping subjects and ties them to events fluently and clearly. A treasure.

Davids Medienkritik - I read it partly to practice my German, and partly because David is an excellent, consistent critic of the Euro media.

Dean Esmay - Another of those polymath blogs I love so much. Esmay leads me to all sorts of great blogs and stories I don't see elsewhere.

An Afternoon With The President

I saw President Bush at the XCel Energy Center in Saint Paul today, along with the Elder and Saint Paul and Captain Ed, as well as my son Sam, and Drew, the son of Paul from Wog's Blog.

First, some observations. Then, the conclusions.

• I was expecting a horror of lines, searches and metal detectors. In fact, the HUGE lines on Kellog and Seventh moves very fast, and all in all it was a lot easier to see the President than it was to get on an airplane the last time I flew.
• The cops all had gas masks in musette bags belted to their right legs. I'm presuming this was in case tear gas was used - the cops were also warming up their riot gear as we waited in line.
• Laura Ingraham, the MC for the day's event, did not shoot flames from her eyes. She was pretty sharp, however. And I had no idea that she used to clerk for Clarence Thomas!
• We got some amazing...er, not seats. We were in the standing area, on the floor. Good news; we were probably fifty feet from the President. Bad news; we stood there for nearly four hours by the time we were done
• I think Ingraham was amazed at the welcome Senator Coleman got in the building he built; as she started her intro, a deafening chorus of "NOOOOORRRRMs" basically made any introduction moot - and she knew it. Coleman gave basically the same speech he gave at the MNGOP state convention - "the Top Ten Reasons to Vote for George W. Bush". It's a good stump speech, and you an expect to hear it a bunch more in the next 76 days.
• Oh, yeah - I hope someone sends Al Franken a tape of the welome Coleman got. Maybe Franken'll stuff a sandwich in his mouth and stay in New York.
• Randy Kelly is one great person; we're lucky to have him for a mayor. If I were Michael Savage, I'd wish on the air that the mental midget DFLers who are picking him to death in the City Council would choke on tainted clams and die. Fortunately, I'm not Michael Savage, so all I'll do is do the best I can to re-elect him.
• The Secret Service agents were mostly wearing sportcoats, open-necked shirts, and no sunglasses, which surprised me. They did, however, look all business; beyond that, the female agent downstage right during the President's speech was incredibly hot - sort of like a Nia Vardalos who can rip your arm out of its socket, which is a very good thing. If you have contacts on the Secret Service, please pass the word.
• The protesters outside as we left seemed downright disappointing by comparison. One flyeaten little moron stood at the corner of Eagle and Kellogg yelling "Re-elect the fascist!". "Yeah", I yelled. "Bring Back Hussein! Bring Back the Concentration Camps! Bring Back the Rape!". He skulked away in a cloud of patchouli. Perfect end to the day. Little scumbag.

The speech? The President gets knocked for being an inarticulate speaker, and he's no master of the language. But when he relaxes, he has the great political gift of being able to give you the feeling he's connecting with you, individually, throughout the audience. I felt like I made eye contact several times - and I suspect of the 20,000-odd people there a good percentage would say the same thing.

He stated his case the way he does it the best; simply, directly, and without embroidery.

And I'm starting, for the first time, to get the feeling that Bush can win this state; it's for certain that Kerry can't make any assumptions.

Wish list: Next time, the NARN should broadcast live from outside the event.

Classically Torn

WCAL is a little publicly-supported classical music station based in Northfield, MN. It's been a must-listen for a very long time.

Minnesota Public Radio's classical network is to classical music as Chino Latino is to food; bland and homogenized, but it sneaks in a thick dollop of preening arrogance just to show you who's boss. Its selection of music in a word; safe. Really, MPR's classical programming is like the K-Tel Greatest Hits of Classical Music - not many risks, and while not strictly "predictable", it's not big on dishing up surprises, either.

WCAL managed to combine much riskier, more interesting fare with a staff that managed to sound glad to have the opportunity to talk classical music with you.

MPR, naturally, is buying WCAL.

Doug Grow writes:

MPR showed its economic clout and its insatiable appetite again a few days ago with word that it will plunk down $10.1 million to buy WCAL-FM, the classical musical station at St. Olaf College...The monster was chewing up another competitor.

"There was sadness, disappointment, shock, all the things you would expect," said John Gaddo, station manager. "People are seeking to understand the whys."

The whys are hard to understand. Why does MPR need to own this station? Its signal already is crystal clear in areas covered by WCAL. Unlike commercial stations, it doesn't need to show dominance to advertisers.

But Bill Kling, MPR's benevolent dictator, does need to dominate public broadcasting in this state. Every public broadcasting dollar, whether a corporate grant, tax handout or public pledge, that goes to a WCAL is a handout that MPR will never get. And that can't happen.

Grow continues:

Disclaimer time here: MPR is as good as public radio gets. You need only drive across the country, listening to other public radio offerings, to get a renewed appreciation for what is offered here.

No, that's not true.

MPR's news operation is good. As to other programming? Their daytime news-talk programs are overproduced yet feeble. And their classical music system manages to squeeze every iota of life out of serious music. They hired Katherine Lanpher, for the love of pete.

Yet, it's hard to understand how a virtual MPR monopoly in the state is a positive. And it's also hard to understand how MPR, or any public radio operation, has an extra $10.1 million to buy the station down the road.

Fascinating, isn't it? Whenever Republicans talk about cutting state funding to the likes of MPR, people like Doug Grow sharpen their rhetorical talons; the Republicans are carrying the water for Clear Channel! They want to dumb down Minnesota! They want no competition for Rush Limbaugh!.

It's not until Bill Kling's empire starts to eat its own that the likes of Grow pay attention. Which is better than nothing, I suppose.

Kigin says the purchase of WCAL means MPR will be able to be even more diverse. It currently has its news and information outlet (KNOW, 91.1) and its mostly classical station (KSJN, 99.5). WCAL may allow MPR to develop a whole new format because the MPR corporate tent is filled with energetic and creative people, Kigin said.

Let's revisit this statement in a year or two. I bet by this time in 2006, WCAL is a repeater station.

And MPR's corporate tent is even more full of the type of deadwood that regard non-profit jobs as sinecures. That's the opinion of a number of acquaintances over the years who've orked for MPR and survived.

Grow asks:

MPR not only has impact, it obviously has money -- enough to go out and buy up other stations. (Hmmm. Are tax dollars really needed to subsidize such an outfit?)

Bingo, Doug!

So the next time the GOP moves to trim back some of MPR's state funding, will you perhaps not act like we're selling orphans to the Mameluks to buy Michael Savage CDs?

My Northern Alliance partners at Spitbull have a great piece on the subject which you need to go and read now.

C is for "Crazy For These Blogs"

Lot's of "C"'s in the blogroll. I know; I wrote the entire piece for today.

And then it disappeared.

Boy, there are a lot of "C's" in my blogroll...

C y b e r :: E c o l o g y - A great new-cycle blog. I have a lot of great news-cycle bloggers on my blogroll - they all inspire me. CE is one of my favorites.

Cathy in the Wright - Cathy is the best domestic-goddess diaryblogger out there. Whenever I need to know that I"m not the only person flailing at the grind of domestic life and raising kids and the whole "parent" thing, Cathy's blog is where I go to get the wry grin I need before I let the kids out of the closet.

Centerfield - Most sorta-lefty bloggers try to work in some variation on "center" to their title. But Rick Heller is a darned fine writer.

Centrisity - I figure the more linkage I sent to my old pal and neighbor Anoka Flash, the more babysitting I can cadge from him...

cheleblog - Chele's blog always has one "news of the wierd" piece that I just plain need.

Chicago Boyz - Like being trappedin a room with a bunch of really smart poli sci grad students. Only the room is a really cool bar, and the poli sci grad students are not only not assholes, but really cool, even though they still clobber you at darts. A daily read.

Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog - Just what it says - a catalog of civilian self-defense cases. Essential for RKBA supporters.

Cold Fury - Mike Hendrix packs more articulate derision into a sentence than Atrios can muster in a page.

Cold Spring Shops - One of my three favorite edublogs; combines laconic, genteel criticism with great railroad lore - which is really a wonderful combination.

Common Sense and Wonder - It occurs to me that I have a lot of blogs that I can describe as "sharp, articulate, well-written newsblogs". CS'nW is one of them - I read them a couple times a week, and they never disappoint.

Cornfield Commentary - David Hogberg's blog is a inspiration - seeing that one can come from nowhere to become a prominent blog is a much-needed carrot somedays.

Critical Mass - Another favorite edublog, Erin is a wonderfully incisive critic and an incisively wonderful writer.

Tomorrow - the letter "D".

Once And For All

Since the apparent problems with John Kerry's possible fantasy life began leaking into the mainstream media, some Dem flaks have been trying to jump the trend by tossing out an oldie but goodie - Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard.

So, for the last time, the inconvenient truth about Lieutenant Bush, USAF.

Let's dispense with a few myths, for starters:

George W. Bush's military service began in 1968 when he enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard after graduating with a bachelor's degree in history from Yale University. The aircraft that he was ultimately trained to fly was the F-102 Delta Dagger. A number of sources have claimed that Bush sought service in the National Guard to avoid being sent to Vietnam, and that the F-102 was a safe choice because it was an obsolete aircraft that would never see any real combat. However, those perceptions turn out to be incorrect, as will be seen shortly.

One of the misconceptions - that the Air Guard was a cush job:

It is a common misconception that the Air National Guard was a safe place for military duty during the Vietnam War. In actuality, pilots from the 147th Fighter Interceptor Group, as it was called at the time, were actually conducting combat missions in Vietnam when Bush enlisted. In fact, Air Force F-102 squadrons had been stationed in South Vietnam since March 1962. It was during this time that the Kennedy administration began building up a large US military presence in the nation as a deterrent against North Vietnamese invasion.

So he was not a "Draft Dodger" by any rational stretch of the imagination.

F-102 squadrons continued to be stationed in South Vietnam and Thailand throughout most of the Vietnam War. The planes were typically used for fighter defense patrols and as escorts for B-52 bomber raids. While the F-102 had few opportunities to engage in its primary role of air combat, the aircraft was used in the close air support role starting in 1965. Armed with rocket pods, Delta Daggers would make attacks on Viet Cong encampments in an attempt to harass enemy soldiers. Amazingly, some missions were even conducted using the aircraft's heat-seeking air-to-air missiles to lock onto enemy campfires at night. Though these missions were never considered to be serious attacks on enemy activity, F-102 pilots did often report secondary explosions coming from their targets.

Ground attack. Dangerous.

"But wait", the less-giften will insist, "Bush only served in Texas!"

Hang on a minute:

Nevertheless, we have established that the F-102 was serving in combat in Vietnam at the time Bush enlisted to become an F-102 pilot. In fact, Air National Guard pilots from the 147th FIG were routinely rotated to Vietnam for combat duty under a volunteer program called "Palace Alert" from 1968 to 1970. Palace Alert was an Air Force program that sent qualified F-102 pilots from the ANG to bases in Europe or southeast Asia for three to six months of frontline duty. This program was instituted because the Air Force lacked sufficient pilots of its own for duty in Vietnam but was unable to activate ANG units since Presidents Johnson and Nixon had decided not to do so for political reasons. Thanks to Palace Alert, the Air Force was able to transfer much-needed National Guard pilots to Vietnam on a voluntary basis while not activating their squadrons.

Fred Bradley, a friend of Bush's who was also serving in the Texas ANG, reported that he and Bush inquired about participating in the Palace Alert program. However, the two were told by a superior, MAJ Maurice Udell, that they were not yet qualified since they were still in training and did not have the 500 hours of flight experience required. Furthermore, ANG veteran COL William Campenni, who was a fellow pilot in the 111th FIS at the time, told the Washington Times that Palace Alert was winding down and not accepting new applicants.

So Lt. Bush tried to get to Vietnam.

Wow. You'd never know that, listening to the major media.

The point of this discussion is that the military record of George W. Bush deserves a fair treatment. Bush has been criticized for avoiding service in Vietnam, though the evidence proves that the Texas Air National Guard and its F-102 pilots were serving in Vietnam while Bush was in training, and his unit could have been activated for front-line service at any time. Bush has been criticized for using his family influence to obtain his assignment, but the evidence shows that he successfully completed every aspect of the more than two years of training required of him. Bush has been criticized for pursuing a safe and plush position as a fighter pilot, but the evidence indicates the F-102 was a demanding aircraft that claimed the lives of many of its pilots even on routine missions. Bush has also been criticized for deserting the Guard before his enlistment was complete, but the evidence shows he was honorably discharged eight months early because his position was being phased out.

About 800 F102s were built. Over 200 crashed, including a number lost in Vietnam. 70 of their pilots were killed, mostly in training accidents.

So nearly 1 in 10 F102s killed their pilots.

The fact that the Dems have re-exumed this issue - after having it grind to a halt for them last winter - shows the desperation they must be feeling. The story that Larry Flynt is apparently thinking, again, about publishing something about the fabled Bush Abortion, would be more evidence of this.

Heart of Dorkness?

Mudville Gazette hosts the first-ever Kerry Christmas '68 literature contest:

The fog was thick as pea soup as we made our way across the border, but it muffled the sounds of the boat as we entered Cambodia. That was good, because our business there was anything but good.

"I wish you'd take that damn blindfold off." I whispered to the skipper.

"I learned to sail this way, hombre." He replied. His parrot sat silently on his shoulder. The bird spoke three languages but was not using any of them now.

"That bird makes me nervous" told him "if he spouts off in any of those three languages I'll..."

"Four languages." He said, still wearing the blindfold, piloting the river on pure instinct, nerves of steel. "English, French, Italian, and 'bird' - you probably forgot bird." He cut the engine, pulled the mask off. "He's disciplined. He wont squawk. And this is as far as we go. I'm not risking my crew. Or my bird"

"Fair enough, far enough." I said, slipping over the side. Kurtz didn't know it but his time was running short.

"Hey..." the skip whispered as I came up for air, "you forgot your hat."

"Keep it." I said, and pushed for shore.

Very much worth a read.

My New Project

Spam comments are the bane of my blog-writing existence.

I'll be installing MT Blacklist shortly.

Until then, rather than erasing spam comments, I think I'll just

do this to them.

Hey, it makes me feel good.

Audio Separated At Birth

Kevin Rowland, the weaselly, whiny voice behind "Dexy's Midnight Runners" (Come On Eileen),

and

Isaac Brock, the weaselly whiny voice of indie-rock critical raves/dubiously cools Modest Mouse

B is for Blogolicious

Today? The "B" section of my blogrollcall.

Babalu Blog - "an island on the net without a bearded dictator" - a wonderful, blazingly literate, flamingly-anti-Castro blog that feeds my fascination with Cuban culture (pre-, during and post-Castro) with humor and style. I love this blog.

Baldilocks - I read Baldilocks for the same reasons I read Michelle Catalano. Baldilocks is one of my favorite milbloggers.

Belmont Club - Along with Powerline and Captain Ed, Wretchard from the Belmont Club is the essential current events blogger in business today.

Big Dump Truck - I blogrolled Jody, an old friend from Top Five.com, mainly because her goal in life is to get linked from Lileks.

Bogus Gold - Doug's blog reminds me of why I like working in software; so many of the people are such effortless polymaths. BG is a fun, eclectic blog.

Boviosity - Brian - another TopFive homey - is like the David Frost of bloggers; effortlessly eclectic and understatedly hilarious. I'm glad he's back from his hiatus.

brainstorming - Her pithy observations to her dances with roadkill are great - but DC is also just about the best source of great, obscure blogs I've seen.

More tomorrow, probably.

Markers

The Saint from Fraters notes the deafening silence of the media on Kerry's Excellent Adventure:

The mainstream press's lack of coverage of this story has verged on Sergeant Schultz "I see nothing" level comedy. Following the lead of the New York Times and Washington Post, neither of our local newspapers has given much coverage at all to the story. The Star Tribune addressed it yesterday, but only in the context of "campaign salvos" launched by Republicans, not as a news story worthy of coverage on its own merits. This article, by Bob Von Sternberg, characterizes the allegations by Swiftboat Veterans for Truth as a Michael Moore-like attack, inspired by a "long time Kerry nemesis". It also emphasizes John McCain's denouncing of the SVFT ad campaign and dutifully repeats Democratic party's recent attempts to undermine the credibility of Kerry accusers Joe Corsi and George Elliot.

The whole thing makes me wonder; when this thing does finally explode, the media will be picking shards of its credibility out of the drywall for months. They're not stupid - they have to know this.

Why are they doing it?

It's not because the story isn't out there and accessible. And it's not because they're not smart enough to see where this thing can lead.

I wonder: Does the media think that the hit to their credibility is worth taking to do their bit to get Kerry elected?

I have nothing to go by on this - but I can't think of a better explanation.

Surplus Parts

Jeff Fecke at Blog of the Moderate Left serves up a capsule summary of the left's response to the Swifties' expose of John Kerry.

To be fair, Jeff doesn't do any worse in answering the Swifties than any other leftyblogger has done. To be accurage, that is called "damning by faint praise".

So right now in the right hemisphere of the blogosphere, the Biggest...Scandal...Ever! is raging unabated. This is not to be confused with Pantsgate--the Sandy Berger scandal that was the previous Biggest...Scandal...Ever!

So is the idea that we have to pick just one scandal and stay on it until it's resolved before moving on to the next one?

Then we'll be backed up until 2060!

No, this scandal is about the Swift Boat Vets Against Kerry, who have alleged that Kerry:

* Was a bad commander.
* Used minor injuries to get out of Vietnam.
* Wasn't in Cambodia on the exact date he said he was.

Actually, Jeff is trying to minimize a rather important point. It's not about bookkeeping; it's about Kerry making up entire swatches of his wartime bio, for purely political purposes. * Killed a member of the Viet Cong just to watch him die.
* Raped goats.
* Stole women.
* And...a lot of other bad stuff!The giggles are a form of strawman that, again, is no worse than what Josh "ua Micah" Marshall has deployed in terms of reason and logic. Yes, that's more of that damnation with faint praise stuff.

Of course, there are a few holes in the SBVAK story. First off, none of the Swifties served under Lt. Kerry's command.

As has been exhaustively explained, that's not a hole at all, merely a desperate Democrat dodge. Swift boats had crews of six men. They operated in teams of several boats, to mutually support each other. The teams of boats were close-knit because they had to be; if they didn't fight as a well-oiled team, they died.

All of them were angry that Kerry came back and became an anti-war protestor.

And this invalidates their stance exactly how?

A few managed to shred their credibility beyond all recognition: Lt. Comdr. George Elliot (Kerry's CO in Vietnam) praised Kerry in 1996, signed an affadavit that Kerry didn't deserve the Silver star in May of 2004, retracted his affadavit in a Boston Globe interview, then retracted the retraction. So which is it? Who knows?

Who knows? Elliot knows! Jeff - the Kranish "retraction" story was debunked over a week ago.

SBVAK has laid out what seems like a reasoable case, but of course, there were reasonable, well-researched books by Arkansas state troopers showing how Bill Clinton was running cocaine while sleeping with hookers, too.

Strawman. There weren't 250 Arkansas State Troopers, and Clinton didn't leave a thirty year trail of easily verifiable documentary evidence of his perfidy. Those books, like this one, were published under the Regenery imprint--the imprint of Richard Mellon Scaife, the George Soros of the right, if Soros was a meglomaniac who owned media companies.Soros is a megalomaniac who destroys nations, but that's irrelevant.

Who cares who publishes the book? Debate the facts. If you can.

SBVAK is financed by John O'Neill, who was tapped back in the early 70's to be Nixon's foil to Kerry. Building your entire career around destroying one man will tend to lead one to hate that man.

If someone had built his career on the bodies of my fallen comrades, by doing the things that O'Neill and his 200-odd cohorts of all ranks and rates claim, I'd feel a bit peevish about Kerry, too.

His co-author, Jerome Corsi, is a denzien of Free Republic, who has said of "John F*ing Commie Kerry," "After he married TerRAHsa, didn't John Kerry begin practicing Judiasm? He also has paternal grandparents that were Jewish. What religion is John Kerry?"

As entertaining as the ad-hominem sidelines might be, they have nothing to do with the substance of the charges.

So we're not talking about a balanced group leading a calm, reasoned investigation into Sen. Kerry's background. We're talking, instead, about a right-wing hatchet group.

No. We're talking about a group of veterans with bones to pick with John Kerry. Some are Republicans, most have never identified their affiliations, but they have reasons to be upset at Kerry's rank exploitation of their experience.

And why don't we invoke the "You never served" clause here? Nobody who wasn't in 'Nam has any right to question the Swifties!"

As to the financing - they need it to get their voice heard. And their financing comes to a grand total of about $150,000 so far from the likes of Scaife.

Which is not to say it's not money well spent; the Swifties have gotten more traction with their $150K than "Air America" has with its millions from Soros.

Now, Larry Flynt has been making noise about publishing an account that George W. Bush paid a woman to have an abortion back in the '70's. The book, by all accounts, appears well-researched and informative. But it will be dismissed out of hand--and should be. Why? Because Flynt is well-known as a left-wing bomb-thrower, and the book is tainted irrevocably by his invovement.

And because it is very old news (Flynt's been bruiting this book about since 2000), and because the President never built his entire campaign on being abortion-free. But Vietnam is John Kerry's only accomplishment. It was the only meaningful point raised during his convention speech. It is John Kerry!

And, if the Swifties are to be believed (and large parts of their story are coalescing nicely), it is a lie.

So it is with the SBVAK. Their backbone is right-wing bomb-throwers. (You don't pick a freeper to co-author your book if you want balance). Anything that comes out of their organization is instantly suspect, and subject to higher standards of proof than, say, a CNN report.

So invoke that "standard of proof", and disprove the book's points.

You do that by showing, via empirical evidence, that John Kerry was in Cambodia. Ever. By producing a SEAL or a hatless CIA guy who says "The Navy sent a hotshot ninety-day-wonder Yalie in a fifty-foot boat that sounds like a top-fuel dragster deep into neutral territory, right after an international incident involving an inadvertent violation of Cambodian neutrality, on a black-bag operation that neither his biographer nor any of his crewmen ever recalled".

You don't do it by quibbling about Cpt. O'Neill's political pedigree, or Corsi's remarks in a completely unrelated context, or liberal superstitions about big, bad Regnery Books.

This is not to say that SBVAK can't find the truth, just that they're unlikely to.

Really?

Why?

I mean, in terms of objective, empirical evidence?

There's a perfect analogy here: the Bush National Guard records. The Bush National Guard story was circulating since at least 1999. But nothing was pursued until 2004.

Jeff? Where wereyou in 2000? The story was played out all over the media.

And the analogy is lousy, for one key reason: The President never made "I was a fighter pilot" the mainstay of his campaign. Again - without Vietnam, John Kerry would be an assistant commerce commissioner living in Framingham.

Why? Not because of Michael Moore, who popped off about Bush "deserting" in February.

Today, the Swifties are raising this issue, but it isn't going to go anywhere until relatively high-ranking Republicans take up the banner. And that isn't bloodly likely. Thanks to every Democrat's favorite Republican, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), it's politically untenable for the right to jump on board with the Swifties' allegations.

First: McCain never served on Kerry's boat, either. And it's ironic - it's largely McCain's fault that small groups need to go through big baaad 527 groups to be heard at all.

Second: The Trent Lott story was politically untenable, too. For a while.

And so, here we are. The Swift Boat story is already dying, there doesn't appear to be anything that will bring it back. And so the right side of the blogosphere spins and spins, trying desperately to focus on whether John Kerry was in Cambodia, or forty miles east, on December 24, 1968. Anything to avoid focusing on November 2004.

And that is the most cynical bit of DNC spin of the lot; the Democrats probably achieved their tie in 2000 by leaking the bogus "Bush DWI story" the weekend before the election; it's probaby the only thing that kept Gore as close as he got.

This is about November; we don't want a lying weasel like Kerry anywhere near the nuclear football, anywhere close to the reins of power.

Jeff got one other thing wrong: The only reason this story isn't above the fold on page one of every paper in the country - as the "Bush was a Deserter" and "Bush DWI" and "Bush Abortion" stories all were - is because of the active, complete bias of the major, partisan media. If the situation were reversed and it were Bush's credibility being savaged, editorial pages across the nation would have declared his credibility cold and on the slab last Tuesday.

And that is the real story.

Just Words

Patterico has a great exercise on the subtlest form of media bias:

Liberal bias takes many forms. When the alleged bias is the omission or distortion of critical facts, demonstrating the bias is a more straightforward project. But there is a more subtle and far more pervasive bias that is harder to explain to skeptics: a bias based on the wording of a piece. This sort of bias manifests itself in the tone, the word usage, and the perspective of a piece. I am going to attempt to explain this sort of bias today, by showing some of the devices used.

Today the Washington Post prints one of those articles that drive conservatives like me crazy. The article, a front-page news analysis titled Kerry Put On Defensive About Iraq, just drips with sympathy for Kerry. But I don't find any clear misstatements of fact in the piece. The bias is in the way it's worded, starting with the very first paragraph:

Read the whole thing - by which I mean "scroll to the end", where James includes an example of this bias in action.

Then apply what you learn while reading the Strib.

Especially if you're a Democrat.

Presidential Visit

President Bush is coming to town on Wednesday.

Wanna go?

They're giving away tickets at Bush/Cheney headquarters in St. Paul, 1445 Energy Park Drive in Saint Paul.

Tickets are available until 9PM tonight (Sunday), and until they're gone tomorrow.

Get a ticket, and we'll see you there.

UPDATE: Get down there while you can!

The Number Game

Mark Steyn hardly qualifies as a blockade runner - he's usually good - but under the existing conditions, I'm amazed this piece got printed in the Sun-Times.

Money quote:

A handful of Kerry's ''band of brothers'' are traveling around with his campaign. Most of the rest, including a majority of his fellow swift boat commanders and 254 swiftees from Kerry's Coastal Squadron One, are opposed to his candidacy. That is an amazing ratio and, if snot-nosed American media grandees don't think there's a story there, maybe they ought to consider another line of work. To put it in terms they can understand, imagine if Dick Cheney campaigned for the presidency on the basis of his time at Halliburton, and a majority of the Halliburton board and 80 percent of the stockholders declared he was unfit for office. More to the point, on the swift vets' first major allegation -- Christmas in Cambodia -- the Kerry campaign has caved.

There are, of course, three more major allegations, according to the Telegraph:

• Potential lies about at least one of his purple hearts
• Lies about the action that got him his Bronze and Silver Stars.

As Hugh Hewitt constantly reiterates, those of us who've been civilians our whole lives aren't the ones to quibble about things like that.

But the Swifties were there - in every case I'm aware of, they were there much longer than Kerry was. They are the ones to quibble.

And they're one for one so far.

The Gathering Storm

As Ed notes, we seem to need the foreign, especially Brit, press to do our actual journalism for us - at least as far as the Kerry story is concerned.

Fortunately, the conservative London Telegraph is doing exactly that. This summary of the charges against Kerry is more than I've seen in nearly any American publication or broadcast.

Fortunately, Ed is on the case, with this timeline of events related to David Alston.

Kerry supporters; for a group with "no credibility", the Swifties seem to have Kerry's number on some very key questions of veracity. How do you answer them (preferably without using the unsupported phrase "they have no credibility" as primary or sole line of logic)?

Olympically Boring

So far this year, I've not watched one second of the Olympics. I haven't read about it, listened to it - nothing. Don't know who's competing even.

It'd seem I'm not alone:

If you've watched any of the events on television except for swimming, maybe, you've seen the vast stadiums totally empty. The report talks about how they've sold about half of all the tickets available and a women's basketball game yesterday where there were only 300 people in attendance in a stadium which seats 13,000. It's really sad.

But for some unknown reason, the report didn't mention the *price* of the tickets as the principal problem. Look online and you'll see that the price for events are incredibly expensive. €10 being the lowest, €20 being average and for the Men's gymnastics, there are only €120 and €200 seats available. This is ridiculous.

I'm a conservative, but the commercialization of the games is abhorrent. I'm an American nationalist, but the jingoism and America-centeredness of our media coverage boggles me. I've done sports broadcasting and know its difficulties, but the mediocrity of NBC's coverage astounds me.

I may try to miss the whole thing.

A is for Always-Read

Steve Silver had a fun idea; go through the blogs on his blogroll in alphabetical order, and explain what it was that put them there. I figured it's a fine idea, if only because it gives me a chance to clean out my blogroll.

Steve, of course, went into much greater depth than I can - he managed to cite favorite posts from each of his blogrolled blogs. I'm going to be a bit more, er, concise. It should be fun, though.

Well, for me, anyway.

Today, the "A"s.

A Small Victory - Michelle Catalano drew my attention the same way she drew everyone else's - with her superlative collection of 9/11 first-hand stories, perhaps the best collective 9/11 memoir I've seen in any medium. Tart, acerbic, and pretty much on everyone's blogroll anyway.

Allah Is In The House - Un-PC, frequently hilarious, and for all that a very keen observer. Kinda what the Rottweiler would be if he still had his edge.

Andrew Sullivan - The blogfather of half the blogosphere. His monomaniacal fixation on gay marriage has been tedious for the most part - and the absurd extremes it's forced him to (endorsing Kerry?) have been nearly embarassing to read. But when he's on, he's still among the best reads out there.

Tomorrow - "B".

Serving Together

According to Dog Snot Diaries.

By the way - I find it endlessly fascinating that the left giggles about the credibility of guys who served on boats in Kerry's division and squadron - but treats John McCain's defense of Kerry with gospel-seriousness, even though McCain never served on a ship smaller than an aircraft carrier.

(Via Dean)

More Blockade Runners

PoliPundit notes that more newspapers are breaking ranks:

When the Swift Vets' story makes it to the ultra-liberal St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Dallas Morning News and the Seattle Times, you know there's some there there. The piece is poorly researched, but less one-sided than I expected. Even liberal reporters seem to be wondering about just how much of a liar John Kerry is.

UPDATE: And Knight-Ridder seems to have noticed that KERRY LIED about his "searing" memories of being in Cambodia.

Boldly Going...

...where Mitch has not gone before; a report.

But first, some background; we finally landed Keegan's Irish Pub & Restaurant as a sponsor on the Northern Alliance Radio Network. This is huge news; it's my favorite Irish pub in a city that's newly-crowded with 'em; when in Minneapolis and looking to wet your whistle or eat some great Irish/American food, go there. It's a place where "Irish food" is not an oxymoron.

Far from it, indeed - their food is, for me, as big an attraction as their selection of beer (and I said that even before they signed on as sponsors).

Indeed, the boxty - sauteed onions, tomatoes and mushrooms wrapped in a potato pancake - is my big draw at Keegan's. And like most culinary big draws, I have to try to replicate it at home.

So as I typed this, I prepared a big boxty, approximating the restaurant's recipe as closely as I can.

I have just taken it from the pan, slid it onto the plate, and am about to take the first bite.

The review follows in the extended section.

Adequate.

I'll need to work on it. Pancake was too thick, tomatoes not sauteed enough.

But I'm within striking distance!

So the plan of attack is this:

• Perfect the boxty,
• Move on to this.

I could start recipeblogging, at this rate...

Envy

I've always been envious of people who can write this kind of thing at all, much less in one sitting.

I've been trying for two years now to write something like this. It's like fishing, or remodeling my bathroom; no matter how many times I try, no matter how much enthusiasm I have coming into the project, the results are always disappointing (I catch the fish in the bathroom, and wind up with a bucket of moldy tile when I step off the boat).

Ah, well. Good thing someone can...

A Picture Says A Thousand Words

Essential.

(Via Allah Is In The House)

Musical Gunners

Captain Ed notes a problem with the timeline for one of John Kerry's most articulate supporters:

Bingo! Yachtzee! Alston received his serious wounds in that same exact battle that took Peck out of service. On January 29th, Alston was medevaced out to a hospital with head wounds and no records indicate that he ever returned to the unit. Kerry took command of PCF-94 the next day. Alston never served a day under Kerry's command. In fact, Kerry received a replacement, Fred Short, on 28 February as a replacement for Alston.

And in his speech at the Democrat convention, Alston's time with Kerry was the subject:

I know him from a small boat in Vietnam, where we fought and bled together, serving our country. There were six of us aboard PCF-94, a 50-foot, twin-engine craft known as a "Swift Boat." We all came from different walks of life, but all of us-including our skipper, John Kerry-volunteered for combat duty. And combat is what we got.

We usually patrolled the narrow waterways of the Mekong delta, flanked on both sides by thick jungle. As our crewmate Gene Thorson put it, we were a traveling bulls-eye. And we often came under sudden attack from the enemy, hidden in the shadows. Machine-gun fire, rocket-propelled grenades, it all came fast and furious, and Lieutenant Kerry had to make quick, life-or-death decisions for the entire boat.

It's seared in his memory. Seared.

Blogs In Action

Jay Reding.com notes his presence this weekend at the Dakota Blog Conference, a gathering of bloggers from the Dakotas.

We'll be hoping for a phone call from the Northern Alliance's own Rocket Man, the conference's keynote speaker.

I wonder if Hewitt knew what he was unleashing when he started christening alliances like ours and the DBA...

Oy.

It's been a very long day, and I'm not feeling at all well.

More this weekend.

Tune in tomorrow for Laurie Mylroie, Vox Day and so much more!

Peace is Messy

Irritating lefty trope of the week: "Bush Didn't Have A Plan to Win The Peace".

The statement is tripe, of course; nobody ever knows that.

Steven Green in TCS articulates that fact.

One of a wallet full of moneyquotes:

Nobody ever knows what the peace will look like. At Fort Sumter, who could have predicted the KKK, Jim Crow, or Radical Reconstruction? Who knew in August, 1914 that the European War would result in 20 million deaths, Russian Communism, or Nazi Germany? If you can find me the words of some prophet detailing, in 1940, the UN, the Cold War, or even the complete assimilation of western Germany into Western Europe. . . then I'll print this essay on some very heavy paper, and eat it. With aluminum foil as a garnish.

It simply isn't possible to plan for the peace. "No peace plan survives the last battle" is Green's Corollary to von Moltke's dictum that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

So then -- how do we win this Terror War, and what will the peace look like?

Let's tackle the second part first: I don't have any idea how it will end, neither do you. If you meet anyone who claims to know, feel free to laugh at them really hard. So hard, you get a little spit on their face. Sometimes, justice can be small and spiteful -- just ask a meter maid.

When peace comes, it could look like whatever Mecca, Tehran, Damascus, Riyadh, Pyongyang, Cairo, etc., look like after nuclear strikes. Or it could end with the entire Arab and Muslim world looking like the really well-manicured bits of Connecticut. It could even end with a terror strike on America so awful that we sue for peace -- not that we'd get it.

However, just because we don't know where we're going, doesn't mean we can't figure out how to get there.

Which is, of course, a process that Bush started, and that John Kerry wants to abdicate...

...although not in as many words.

Read the whole thing.

The Walls

When I was a kid growing up in North Dakota, we used to drive about an hour south of my hometown, Jamestown. We were heading for the border. We were going to look at The Walls.

We use to heard about The Walls of South Dakota, but going to see them - well, that seemed to bring up some hidden trauma in my parents.

Inside The Walls were South Dakotans - not so different from us North Dakotans (albeit not as smart or attractive) - but they had some handicaps that we couldn't imagine in our worst nightmares.

For starters, many of their leading citizens had, to put it politely, departed controlled flight:

[T]here’s a small group of people — and you know, some of them don’t live in South Dakota, not everybody out there knows that. You know there’s a couple of yahoos in Minneapolis and there’s a guy out in Denver, there’s people from outside the walls of South Dakota who are perpetuating this hate campaign.

Every once in a while, someone would climb over The Walls, or occasionally the North Dakota Navy would find some piteous wretch who'd floated around The Walls and up the Missouri, and bring them in. They were a strange bunch, South Dakotans; many seemed to expect horrible things from the people outside The Walls, "yahoos" they'd been told were frothing with "hate" for them and their Dear Senator, Tom Daschle. Life for them was an endless, nasty, brutish thing - growing spring wheat, making corn mosaics, blasting rock into native American statues, and reading the Argus Leader. They honestly didn't know what to expect outside The Walls, because they'd never been told the truth about what lay outside South Dakota.

Thirty years later, The Walls still stand, and the insane leaders inside The Walls continue peddling their scurrilous propaganda to the huddled masses. And yet a spark still flickers in the South Dakotan heart, yearning to be free, yearning to take their place among the people outside The Walls.

Editor Randall Beck! If you want an end to the "hate", come to this blog! Editor Beck, if you want those yahoos to quit vexing you so, tear down The Walls!

Mistakeproof

For those of you who believe that John Kerry will fight a war without the "mistakes", let's look at a successful war.

And let's count up the mistakes:

• During the first wave of attacks to liberate Europe, Intelligence didn't show that the first wave of defenders were not the despirited cannon-fodder that were expected, but in fact some of the enemy dictator's best troops, awash in combat experience and itching to take a shot at the US invaders.
• Intelligence also didn't show that the US invading force, immediately after the invasion, was going to encounter fearsomely difficult terrain - terrain known to British military planners for hundreds of years.
• Although word never got to the home front, the air campaign leading up to the invasion had been fraught with bloody disasters; at one point, aircrew involved in softening up the defenders had a one in three chance of surviving 25 missions.
• The equipment with which the Army went to war, although much-touted by its own PR, was in many cases disastrously bad; the Sherman tank's guns couldn't penetrate even the side, much less the frontal, armor on any enemy tank; its own armor was thin enough to be punched through by nearly any enemy cannon (and many of their guns could blow all the way through a Sherman), and the tank's internal design was such that a penetrating hit usually led to a gasoline fire that would kill or burn some or all of the crew, or an ammunition explosion that would obliterate them. Even fairly easy advances were accompanied by ghastly casualties among tankers, who usually accepted that five of their own tanks would be lost for every enemy tank knocked out - with 25 dead, wounded or badly-shaken GIs for every knocked-out German tank.
• The infantry were plagued with obsolescent machine guns and hamfisted tactics that led to the deaths of staggering numbers of soldiers.
• Worse, the Army's doctrine called for units to be kept in front-line service continuously; casualties would be replaced by pools of "replacements", fed into the line the same way a business feeds temps and new hires into an office, individually; the assumption was that the unit's surviving "old hands" would teach the newbies the ropes. But that's not how combat veterans work; the replacements were fed into the front-line units in the dark, under fire, to interact with men who'd already survived the ordeal and who disdained, usually, communicating with the new men that experience told them would be dead or wounded soon; the newbies learned or, very very often, died or were maimed. In the meantime, the survivors stayed in action until they were killed, got a "million-dollar wound" that sent them home (or a lighter one that kept them out of action for a while), or went mad with "battle fatigue" from the endless stress of combat. The average Infantry Division suffered over 200% casualties in 14 months.

Those, of course, are incidents from the US campaign in the Second World War in Europe - the "Good War". Mistakes - poor intelligence, bad planning, poor design and obsolescent equipment - killed tens of thousands of American GIs, and nobody-knows-how-many civilians.

And that was a war we won.

John Kerry has trouble with this. Jim Geraghty from
Kerry Spotputs it this way:

I suppose his question was inspired by that press conference a few weeks ago, when reporter after reporter asked Bush if he would admit any mistakes or take the blame for anything that had gone wrong since the invasion of Iraq. Had Bush said anything — "yeah, I wish we had sent a few more troops, and in hindsight, not being able to attack from the north from Turkey meant we didn't attack the Sunni triangle as hard as we would have liked" — then his opponents and the media would have beat him over the head with his comments every day between then and Nov. 2.

Of course mistakes were made in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Coalition operations are executed by human beings, and human beings make mistakes. The point is to avoid as many mistakes as possible and get the job done as quickly and effectively as possible.

I suppose Beers' comment could inspire a new Kerry slogan: "John Kerry: He won't make any mistakes."

The notion that one can fight a war - any kind of war, especially the ephemeral, intelligence-heavy war against stateless terrorists - is absurd.

And yet a substantial part of the electorate can listen to statements like Kerry's with a straight, even a hopeful, face.

Further proof that liberals should be required to pass a test before being allowed to comment on foreign policy and defense.

I may write this test up for distribution soon...

The Gist

Tom Junod, writing in Esquire, gets it:

As easy as it is to say that we can't abide the president because of the gulf between what he espouses and what he actually does , what haunts me is the possibility that we can't abide him because of us—because of the gulf between his will and our willingness. What haunts me is the possibility that we have become so accustomed to ambiguity and inaction in the face of evil that we find his call for decisive action an insult to our sense of nuance and proportion.

The people who dislike George W. Bush have convinced themselves that opposition to his presidency is the most compelling moral issue of the day. Well, it's not. The most compelling moral issue of the day is exactly what he says it is, when he's not saying it's gay marriage. The reason he will be difficult to unseat in November—no matter what his approval ratings are in the summer—is that his opponents operate out of the moral certainty that he is the bad guy and needs to be replaced, while he operates out of the moral certainty that terrorists are the bad guys and need to be defeated. The first will always sound merely convenient when compared with the second. Worse, the gulf between the two kinds of certainty lends credence to the conservative notion that liberals have settled for the conviction that Bush is distasteful as a substitute for conviction—because it's easier than conviction.

And if the majority of this country doesn't get that, then I seriously have to wonder about this country after all.

Senator Cliff Effing Clavin

Jeff Fecke commented yesterday:

I still think that in the end, at worst this is somewhat embarassing for Kerry and then it vanishes into the night.

Certainly if the media has its way, that's exactly what will happen.

But I can't help but remember when I used to work in bars. You can't swing a cat without hitting someone who "used to be in the CIA", or "Is an undercover cop on a stake-out", or whatever. It's a sign of someone who doesn't believe their own story is enough to compel interest and command attention; they have to appropriate someone else's story to feel adequate.

I have no problem if John Kerry has the same syndrome, personally: he can make up time in Cambodia, conjure mythical spooks and special operations and Nixon presidencies out of the ether (like his foreign leaders and allies and moderate moslem soldiers and secret disengagement plans) until Charlie leaves the perimeter.

I just don't want him as president.

Jeff also noted:

It's a Bush/National Guard thing.

Er, no.

Bush never made that up. Unlike John Clavin Kerry, he told the truth.

Things I Miss

In no particular order:

1. Playing in a band. Playing rock and roll on a stage in front of a bunch of comfortably bombed people is one of life's great underrated pleasures. My last gig was at the Turf Club in 1996; it was a night just like this, and it feels like yesteday.
2. Having a crush on someone. I guess I've gotten cynical about things to the point where it just won't happen anymore.
3. Having toddlers in the house. I love what my kids are becoming, but there's something about the first couple of years - more wonder, less trouble. Doesn't seem possible, but it's true.
4. A time when my idea of "stress" was trying to figure out who to ask out.
5. Immersing myself in music. In 1986, my day was as follows; wake up, go to work (at KSTP-AM) at 11AM, come home at 7:30, go down to the basement (where I lived) and sit down at the card table that held my notebooks , my four-track cassette recorder, my drum machine, and an electric organ. I'd write music, program drum parts, and lay down tracks on bass, guitars, keys and vocals until it sounded like a song. I wrote and recorded dozens of songs that summer, some of which I still genuinely enjoy listening to. I doubt I'll ever have the time to do that again, even if I still had the edge as a songwriter.
6. The really good computer games that came out before all the game makers figured everyone wanted some half-a$$ed arcade game. In particular, Red Storm Rising and Sub Command, games that engaged your brain more than your motor skills.

That'll do for now.

Side by Side

I was reading Kos the other day. Someone posted this map, which shows American deaths in action in Iraq by hometown.

There are dots spread fairly evenly and thinly across the Red States, while the dots are clustered around the big cities in the Blue states.

Some gabbling cretin on Kos' site chimed in (I'm paraphrasing, I don't want to g look it up to pull the quote) "so more people in the blue states are dying to keep the red state president in power".

So I decided to figure this out.

I spreadsheet breaking down the dead by state, then the ratio of dead per 100,000 people. And I found...

...that the rate of casualties is nearly identical between red and blue states.

Tropes killed while you wait.

Deafening Silence, Part II

Talk about taking one for the team.

I listened to about two hours of Al Franken, and even half an hour of Janeane Garawfulo, listening for some sign...any response at all, to the Christmas in Cambodia story.

Zip.

Paul Krugman, Robert Smigel and MoDo. They were recycling tropes about Bush's "Seven Minutes" on 9/11 ("I mean, ummmmmmmmmmmmm, Bush could have thcrambled thome planes, thaved the liveth at the, ummmmmmmmmmmm, Pentagon!").

Waiting for orders?

By the way, read the Franken and Garawfulo show blogs. Maybe it's just me, but do you detect a kind of feverishness about all the FrankenNet publications? Like one of my commenters said yesterday - maybe the whole strategery is to forget about facts and just keep whipping the moonbat base into an unholy froth?

As to consequences - as Kos says, "Screw 'em".

I Wuz A SEAL, Ya Know

Remember Jesse Ventura?

I was thinking about ol' meatbrain the other day, in relation to John vietnam Kerry's eternal campaign to vietnam associate himself vietnam in peoples' minds as a Vietnam veteran. The mentions are too frequent, too inappropriate, too constant...

...just like "The Mind's" extremely frequent application of his background as a SEAL to, say, debates on bonding bills.

Which brings us to James' t remark today:

But. But. How did this work, exactly? Did the CIA agent take off his hat as he was hopping off the boat to wade into the jungle? Here, take this, think of me. Or here you go, pal, you lost your hat back there, take mine, I have another. Square this with the narrative: Kerry was bitter as he bobbed in Cambodia, shot at from all sides - so he takes this hat, this extra hat, this spook lid back to barracks, and now it replaces his own hat as the object that spells luck. That sums up his experience. That brings it all back. Not the hat he wore on the boat in combat, but the hat he got from a spook on an illegal mission - that's the good luck object, that's the prized possession.

Work for you?

Maybe; again, I'm just running fiction-writer debugging scripts. If I wrote a novel with a Vietnam vet, I'd use the CIA-hat detail as a sign the character probably spent the war filing reports in San Diego.

Or sitting in Sa Dec editing home movies...

Deafening Silence

The Professor notes that Matt Yglesias is the first of the heavyweight leftybloggers to acknowledge the existence of John Kerry's "Kurtz Khronikles" story:

in my experience these damaging-looking allegations have a way of turning out not to be true, a fact that never seems to get as much coverage as the initial allegation. But it certainly looks bad from here, and I haven't seen a good explanation yet, perhaps because there isn't one. It's a little hard to see what could possibly be the motive for a Kerry lie on this front, which makes it plausible that there's a reasonable explanation, but also a little freaky if there does turn out to be one. Personally, I've never maintained that John Kerry had a George Washington-esque level of honesty (see, e.g., my article about how Kerry is basically lying about his trade policy) so my world won't be shaken to the core if this turns out to be a fib.

Fair enough. Matt can be a sensible guy...

But how sure are we, really, that Kerry wasn't on a covert, illegal cross-border action in Cambodia and that fact isn't reflected in the official record because it was covert and illegal? Or are people who know their 'Nam history well (i.e., not me) quite certain that there were no such actions during the relevant time period?

...and a silly one.

Seriously, anything is possible - big country, little boat.

But Hugh has that answer, from yesterday's interview with one of Kerry's former boatmates:

HH: Now let me start with some basics. I said you served two tours in Vietnam. Can you tell me what years those were?

SG: 1966 to 1967 and then in 1968 and 1969, when I served with Kerry.

HH: What months did you serve with Senator Kerry?

SG: November through January. Here's what I did. I served two months and two weeks of his four month, 12 day tour.

HH: Alright. Why did you leave off in january. What happened in January?

SG: That was my rotation time.

HH: OK. When you were on the boat, did you ever go into Cambodian waters?

SG: Absolutely not. That was a physical impossibility to go inside Cambodian waters.

HH; Why?

SG: They had four or five, at all times, boats, plus they had it wired with wire, they had concrete pylons down so that thee only time they could get through it was at high tide, and that was just so the sampans and the people that trafficked back and forth could get through.

HH: Now you served with him on Christmas Eve 1968, correct?

SG: That is correct.

HH: What did you do on Christmas Eve 1968?

SG: Well, I damn sure wasn't in Cambodia, I'll tell you that.

HH: (Laughter) Do you remember?

SG: We were basically just down in the lower part of the Sa Dec. just patrolling.

So I'll meet Matt halfway; there could, certainly, be a reasonable explanation.

It's just that there are fewer and fewer possibilities, the longer this story drags on.

Credibility

Yesterday while talking about Swift Boat Vets for the Truth, someone commented to the effect that "they never had any credibiliity anyway".

Really?

Why? And says who?

Asked by the Swifties aren't credible, the left pulls out two strawmen: one of the book's coauthors may be a somewhat unsavory character, and many of the men didn't serve on the same boat as Kerry.

In other words, a ad hominem and a non sequitur.

Attacking the critics doesn't answer - or even address - the charges; it merely distracts from the debate (which is, of course, exactly why the Demcrats are doing it).

The other dodge - that only one of the critics served on the same boat - is ludicrous on its face. No Navy vessel - indeed, no military unit of any size - operates on its own, in a vacuum. Not only was a swift crew a team, but the group of boats were as well; each boat supported the other. And the division - the group of groups of swift boats - like all military units in combat, was a close-knit team; reputations travelled fast, especially among the small group of officers and the men that followed them.

So the "they're from different boats" dodge is worse than simple-minded.

Indeed, let's compare credibilities. The lynchpin of John Kerry's credibility on foreign policy is that four months he spent in Vietnam. This is also the key to his credibility on law enforcement, gay marriage, taxation, forestry law and romance, but in any case, it all traces back to those four months, and years he spent as a leftist radical (which leveraged heavily on those four months in Vietnam; do you honestly think John Kerry would have gotten any attention but for the incongruity of being a veteran ultraliberal brahmin?

So if four months in Vietnam is the basis for a whole career's credibility - regardless of stupid decisions made afterward, why not a year's service, like most of the Swifties put in? Or multiple tours, like some of them did? If four months service makes John Kerry credible and above criticism, why don't 12 months make someone three times as credible?

If that year in service doesn't absolve the Swifties' book's co-author Jerome Corsi of a number of inflammatory remarks he's accused of making (which smel out-of-context to me, but let's take them at face value for the moment), it certainly shouldn't absolve Kerry of his crimes - of sweeping the POW/MIA issue under the rug, according to Sidney Schanberg in the Village Voice - should it?

To date, I've seen one piece of "evidence" that the Swifties aren't credible; the earnest howlings of the left that they aren't credible.

I'm awaiting evidence.

Actually, that's not true. I'm not. I'm awaiting John Kerry's coherent answer.

If he wants to be the commander in chief of my country, he'd damn well better cough one up.

Eller

In an era where sports figures have become what movie stars were in another generation - the spoiled, petulant children we watch as much off the field as on - it's good to see Carl Eller make the football hall of fame.

I've never been a Vikings fan; even their "glory days" were boring. I've been a Bears fan since before I knew what football was, and I always will be.

But Eller was something special:

Old Vikings never will forget Eller's 1973 attention-grabbing speech about team effort during halftime in a playoff against Washington. The Vikings were trailing 7-3 when Eller, much to the surprise of everyone in the room, started speaking passionately about how poorly the team had played in the first half. He punctuated his talk by kicking a stand that was holding a chalkboard. The stand collapsed, the chalkboard fell onto the heads of a few teammates. The Vikings played far more enthusiastically in the second half and won the game, 27-20.

And more, from his induction speech:

"What can I do with this great honor?" he asked. "I can use it to help young African-American males to participate fully in this society. I can give a message that will lead them toward the great colleges and universities of our nation, not to prisons and jail cells."

Eller was always the good Viking.

Things That Bore Me

My latest eruption in online spam is for a site pimping "Texas Holdem". It's some sort of poker game.

Which reminds me - the current wave of Poker-mania is easily the most irritating fad since the heyday of Lounge Music, 8-10 years ago.

Note to the new wave of poker fans: hunching over a table pushing huge piles of chips about and acting like you're in an endgame with Boris Spasskii isn't fooling anyone, any more than your martini glasses, cigars and smoking jackets did back in the nineties, or your temporary fling with Sinatra records before that.

The, er, fad among fads, at least adult fads, lately seems to be to defer to the golden age of American adulthood, the fifties; I fear Sammy Davis-style glass eyes may be the next arbiter of fake cool, and it frightens me.

The Real War

Ever since Iraq came on the national radar, the left has been hectoring President Bush for not going after "the real terrorists" - as if Al Quada were the only terrorist organizaton in the world.

Word is, of course, filtering through the mainstream media's embargo - the larger war on terror is going well, albeit in exacty the way the president described in 2001 - in secret. The main successes of this war are happening in the shadows, unknown even to senior members of the government.

And yet the successes - intelligence, military, diplomatic and law-enforcement - are there:

In cooperation with U.S. intelligence agencies, authorities in Pakistan and Britain have detained suspected al-Qaida operatives, while computer files uncovered in Pakistan contained surveillance information of five financial sites in New York, Washington and Newark, N.J. The United States issued a terror alert based on that information.

Townsend said it is not clear how much has been uncovered about a potential plot around the November presidential election. "This certainly looks like it was a piece of it," she told CBS' "Face the Nation."

In addition to the five financial buildings, counterterrorism officials have said other sites have been mentioned as possible targets. Asked whether there have been threats against the Capitol and members of Congress, Townsend said, "Yes, in the past and as part of this continuing threat stream."

No word whether the tanks and artillery and huge columns of vehicles that subdued the Iraqi military were missed in the covert chase through the alleyways, bank accounts and web sites of the likes of Al Quaeda.

Seriously - when the left whines about Iraq "diverting attention from the real war", what do they think - that the V Corps and the First Marine Expeditionary Force (100,000 men, 500-odd tanks, hundreds of pieces of artillery) would have been any use in this sort of operation?

Again - the left should be required to take a test before commenting on matters of national defense.

Bush Lied. People Died.

And apparently tha'ts really OK with John Kerry after all:

Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry said on Monday he would have voted for the congressional resolution authorizing force against Iraq even if he had known then no weapons of mass destruction would be found.

Taking up a challenge from President Bush, whom he will face in the Nov. 2 election, the Massachusetts senator said: "I'll answer it directly. Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it is the right authority for a president to have but I would have used that authority effectively."

More effectively than the fastest, longest armored drive in history?

Oh, never mind. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

This is the scary part:

Speaking to reporters from the Powell's Landing on the rim of the Grand Canyon above a mile-deep drop, Kerry also said reducing U.S. troops in Iraq significantly by next August was "an appropriate goal."

"My goal, my diplomacy, my statesmanship is to get our troops reduced in number and I believe if you do the statesmanship properly, I believe if you do the kind of alliance building that is available to us, that it's appropriate to have a goal of reducing the troops over that period of time," he said.

Limbaugh had a great point today: the "Secret Plan" isnt that hard to figure out at all.

If Kerry wins, and his "peace" with "honor" agenda takes office, then the terrorists will know one thing; there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and it's one year away.

If there's anything that guerrillas like more than fighting major armies, it's not fighting major armies. Laying low for a year, in exchange for greasing the skids on a Kerry-led pullout, is a fast, cheap way to return to power in Iraq. Everyone "wins" (if you ignore freedom-loving Iraqis, as John Kerry, the French, Germans, Russians and large parts of the State Department do); Kerry gets his foreign-policy "win" on the cheap (short-term, anyway), the French and Germans get their client back, the terrorists get to fight the scrubs for all the marbles when the US is gone, and the pan-arabs and islamofascists get to win by default.

Yet another reason John Kerry has to lose.

Wog Is Back...

...from spin-dry, and you need to read him.

So Let Me Get This Straight...

Mark Steyn's latest got me thinking.

That's what the Democrats and their media cheerleaders wanted for John Kerry: a jungle of South Asian Eden, with nothing to mar his joy. All the Massachusetts senator had to do was talk about his four months in Vietnam for two years and somehow tootle along to victory, untroubled and untouchable. Now some guy's marred it, by declaring in this ad that "John Kerry has not been honest" about his time in Vietnam.
Oh, yeah? Sez who? Some neoconservative chickenhawk dilettante National Guardsman?
No. It's an admiral. He also was on a Swift boat in Vietnam, as were the other fellows in the ad, and they're all saying things like "John Kerry betrayed the men and women he served with."

Question: If, according to the likes of Markos "Screw 'Em" Zuniga and many others on the left, it's unacceptable for Republicans who never served in the military to criticize Kerry, who indeed served under fire...

...then should any left-wing pundit who wasn't in combat criticize the Swifties? They served under fire, most of them for much longer than Kerry, after all.

I'm not a liberal, so I can't figure out how to justify that sort of inconsistency. Are any of you lefties able to explain that?

Put Down Your Books, Pick Up A Gun

Remember the Clinton Administration? Clinton dodged the draft - but to the left-wing pundosphere, it was OK; he really belonged at Oxford, and soldiers were all icky anyway.

E.J. Perkins of the Arizona Republic has published a side-by-side comparison of figures in the Clinton and Bush II Administrations, prominent politicians from both parties, former presidents, and, oddly, a limited selection of bloggers.

Suddenly, the left is all about military service:

Next, look at the military records of prominent Democrat politicans and their Republican counterparts. It's not even close. In fact, the entire Republican leadership has either not served, or went AWOL playing pool volleyball with ambitious secretaries.

Kos is wrong, of course; read Perkins' article for yourself, the comparisons are fairly close (and it's worth noting that Dick Gephardt also served in the Air National Guard during Vietnam to boot - I didn't think good working-class Democrats were supposed to have followed that route?)

And as Kos has taken to reminding us fairly regularly since his screw'em gaffe, he served (albeit not in Vietnam):

But I don't mind a reminder to the world that I've actually served my country and wore combat boots. Unlike the vast majority of the chickenshit war-cheerleading wingers.

So, Kos - once and for all, is military service a prerequisite for having an opinion, or not?

Because either Bill Clinton needs to just shut up, or you do.

Oh, by the way - there's something in his comments that I pray some dimwit Democrat tries to run with. More tomorrow.

Driving to Chanhassen

A bit of video (500K download) showing my old commute; this was, if I recall correctly, Highway 5 down by Eden Prairie Center.

No, really, it's not.

(Via Free Market Fairy Tales)

Sterner Stuff

First, the good news: Captain Ed, heretofore not convinced that the Swift Boat Veterans For The Truth campaign was a good idea, has finally come around.

Does America need a President this pusillanimous? At least now we understand the reason Kerry selected John Edwards as his vice-president. I suppose that we can expect trial attorneys to attack anyone who dares criticize John Kerry during a Kerry administration, only those trial attorneys will work for the legal offices of the FBI and US Attorneys General.

At any rate, the Swifties intend to stand their ground, showing a bit more character than anyone at the Kerry/Edwards campaign. I've been forwarded a copy of their legal team's response to Kerry's extortionate threats that they have sent to media outlets in which they've made their ad buys. I'm posting the letter below, placing most of it in the extended entry. I think it aptly demonstrates the specificity of the recollections of more than 200 men who have nothing to gain and everything to lose by coming forward -- except for setting the record straight.

They've made a convert out of me.

Welcome aboard, Cap'n!

Now, the serious part.

The bad news: The Dems - and their pals in the media - are digging into the Clinton playbook: Delay, Deny and Destroy. Kerry's lawyers are trying to strongarm any media that give the swifties any play, the liberal media are circling the, er, boats around their guy, and trying to draw attention away from the substance of their complaints, with irrelevant chatter about their personal politics or, most absurdly, whether each and every member of the group actually served on Kerry's individual boat. The usual dirty tricks apply.

Given the allegations of dishonesty that the Swifties have broached, it was certainly to be expected; the Democrat smear machine has eaten many people.

But I have to think - men that used to face machinegun fire and RPGs in narrow rivers on fiberglass boats might be better able to hold their own in the face of the likes of James Carville than Clinton's old nemeses were.

It's going to be an interesting month.

Sum Of All Fears, Tomboy Edition

It was 13 years ago yesterday that my comeuppance began.

I have always been a very strong-willed, downright stubborn person. Once I settled on a position, any position, then blasting me out of it makes Iwo Jima look like a Luis Palau convention.

I was that way even when I was a little kid. And I remember my mother, bless her heart, yelling at me in frustration when I was eight years old, "Just you wait! Someday, I hope you get a kid just like yourself".

After two days of brutally hard labor, ending in a forceps delivery that foreshadowed years of early-morning get-ready-for-school ordeals, my daughter "Bun" was born, proving my mother right.

And it was right about then that I - the guy that my graduating class voted "least likely to be allowed to have children", began to really understand what happiness really was.

My daughter is the proverbial immovable object, stubborn as the cast of Braveheart, caught right at the age where arrogant punky disaffection collides with PUPPIES PUPPIES PUPPIES, irritated with childhood but clinging to it still.

Which means that room isn't getting any cleaner anytime soon.

Happy birthday (yesterday), D!

The New Enemies List

John "Rocket Man" Hinderaker, at the end of a long post on the creeping political cretinism of so many of our celebrities, says:

We may have to dust off P. J. O'Rourke's Enemies List from the 1980s, and update it.

I was, naturally, way ahead of the game.

It dates from November of 2002, but it still feels ripped from the headlines.

The entries are included in the link below.

Feel free to add more.

Here in Minnesota

• Len and Joe Biernat and Len's wife Christine
  Jax [Joe is a Minneapolis DFL City Councilman who just
  resigned over corruption charges, and brother of Jax'
  husband Len, also a bigtime liberal Minnesota pol. Jax

  is the State Commisioner of Children, Families and Learning -
  "there's an Orwellian title for you, huh?] for making liberal
  sycophancy a family industry"



• Katrina Vanden Huevel-"only Trotsky is
  "progressive" enough for her"


• Rick Kahn [eulogist at the Paul Wellstone memorial and
  rally], "for being the only person in the US who couldn't get
  Jim Ramstad to vote with the Democrats"
• Syl Jones, the [Minneapolis Star/Tribune's afrocentric
  columnist and...] Racism Expert ("whether it's there or not,
  he'll find it"). "Although I guess this will guarantee
  my induction in the VWRC (Vast White Racists Conspiracy").


• Garrison "Mr. Cuddles" Keillor


• John Marty [DFL Senator from the 'burbs who never met an
  issue he couldn't tie "to the children"]
• Andy Dawkins [DFL Rep from St. Paul who led Soliah's crew
  of local waterboys]


• Any Humphrey or Mondale (We have to move on)


• Star Tribune editorial board
• The Minneapolis City Council for looking up to Berkeley


• Kathleen Soliah aka Sarah Jane Olson


• Soliah's benefactor, MN State Senator Sandy Pappas


• The St. Paul School Board - "for giving us a school
  system where a kid can get a condom from any school nurse, but
  can's see a Christmas Tree".
• Common Cause of Minnesota, or carrying the water for the
  Speech Rationing movment


• [MPR "Midmorning" host] Katherine Lanpher.
  "The sneering condescension oozes between the lines of
  everything she says"


• Jessica Lange for bringing her squalid Hollywood politics
  to Stillwater
• There is no way you cannot have Dave Thune the Goon not on the MN list.

• Wes Skoglund "for a decade of lies about the
  law-abiding gun owner"


• Leslie Davis "Of course, I've just
  given him more attention than he deserves"
  
  

   

Nationally:

• Sean Penn


• Dustin Hoffman


• Janine Garofalo (HOW could I hot put her first???)


• Rosie O'Donnell


• Bill Clinton (much more a celebrity than a former
  president)
• Madonna


• Susan Sarandon


• Tim Robbins (even though he's just following Suzy's directions;
  puppets don't have opinions)


• Michael "Fictitious President
  Documentary" Moore
• George Clooney


• Fred Durst (whatever happened to Limp Bizkit, anyway?)


• Adien Brody


• Sheryl Crow


• Julianne Moore
• Marry Francis Berry (The woman is plain nuts)


• James Earl Carter


• Jesse Jackson


• Any Kennedy (See Humphrey and Mondale)
• Dennis Kunnich


• Harry ("I've been in the Banana Boat too long")
  Belefonte


• "Hanoi Jane role models: Mike Thompson of California
  and David Bonior of Michigan"
• Daniel Schorr - "If I hear that nitwit brag one more
  time about being on nixon's enemies list, i'm going to puke".


• Noam Chomsky


• Barbra Streisand


• Alec Baldwin


• The Berkeley City Council for crimes too numerous to
  detail
• Nina Totenberg


• Judy Woodruff


• Dan Rather


• Paul Begala


• James Carville


• Susan Sontag
• The United Nations


• "Any fool that uses the word 'hegemony' or
  any derivative thereof".


• The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)
• Norman Mineta - "see what happens when you let a
  Democrat in a Republican administration?"


• Rep. Maxine Waters (D. CA)


• Sen. Robert Byrd (D. WV)


• Sen. Pat Leahy (D. VT) ( "I am leaving Jim
  Jeffords off my list - it'll be fun watching him flounder in
  oblivion.")
• Arianna Huffington - "For simple being alive. Does
  anyone actually attempt to decipher her nonsense?"


• Sarah Brady - "The reason should be empirically
  obvious. No one does more harm to the Second Amendment in
  America".  I suspect she'd take that as a compliment,
  unfortunately.


• Chuck Schumer - "For having his head up Hillary's
  ass clear to his neck"
• Al Gore -" Dude, you screwed the pooch. Get over
  it and go get a job, loser."


• Susan Sarandon - "She's living on another world
  with completely confused politics".


• Woody
  Harrelson. who told

  the Mirror, a virulently anti-American tabloid: "I have
  one thing to say about the Mirror--it's amazing. The paper's
  stance on the war against terrorism is just right. It's so bold.
  The war against terrorism is terrorism. The whole thing is just
  bullsh--. What you guys have done is very brave."



• Michael Moore ("Just read
  the man")
  


• "Morning Edition" and
  "All Things Considered" - "Basically six
  hours of free Democrat advertising per day."  Perhaps,
  but I'm told Lorna Benson' s a babe, so I'll give ATC a break on
  this one...
• "Anyone who begins a lecture
  on foreign or domestic affairs with the word "Context"
  anywhere in the first ten sentences.


• Rep. Jim Mc Dermott (D-Washington) , "the other
  member of the Baghdad Traitor's Trio"

   

Posted by Mitch at 11:02 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack