Tim Blair

BE REASONABLE

Stand by for Reason magazine's Republican Convention weblog, featuring Matt Welch, me, chart-topping Latino dance sensation Julian Sanchez, and random others.

Of course, it would've been easier to simply hire Lewis Lapham (he's already attended the convention) but Reason are sticklers when it comes to that old time-and-space continuum, so here we are. First posts, due later today, should deal with the fun anti-Bush march currently in progress.

(That's if Blog Team-Leader Welch ever returns from his adventures of last evening. Saturday night in New York City, and what does Welch do? He goes to Hoboken, New Jersey. I haven't heard from him since.)

ELECTIONS EVERYWHERE

October 9 has always been a happy day with lots to celebrate, but this year Australians will have to interrupt their Che Guevara is Dead! parties so we can vote for the leader of our nation.

Who's going to win - the sickly, often hospitalised candidate or his vibrant, healthy opponent? Nobody knows! The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age seem to think Mark Latham is favourite, which probably means he'll lose.

And here's another reason to bet on John Howard, who I think will win by a narrow margin -- although I'd be ecstatic with a Latham victory, simply for the entertainment it could provide. Then again, Latham might govern quite rationally; and he can always rely on his mother, Simon Crean, to help:

It’s the way Mark Latham keeps misremembering his boyhood that shows us what makes him dangerous. Take his recent speech to Labor's national conference.

"When I was young, my mum used to tell me there were two types of people in our street -- the slackers and the hard workers," he thundered.

In fact, his mum thought we were all either no-hopers or hard workers, as Latham explained in the draft of speech.

But then his shadow treasurer, Simon Crean, checked the draft, took out his red pencil and turned all those no-hopers into slackers -- presumably because he knew Labor delegates hate such judgmental language.

And that's what Latham ended reading out -- Crean's version of what Latham's mother said, and not the truth.

Today's editorial in The Australian summarises the election's main issues, and here's a useful shorthand guide to the Australian election process (minus all the stuff about ritual scarification, which we prefer to keep secret).

UPDATE. Melbourne blogger Alan Anderson breaks in to the SMH's op-ed pages! Excellent.

SWIFT RESPONSE

"Kerry had momentum," sobs some stupid kid, "and now it's gone, all because of a Rove-engineered lie." There, there, little one. The ways of grown-ups are a mystery to you. Speaking of lies, here's the latest spam from the Kerry campaign:

Dear Friend,

Five days ago, we asked you to sign a petition demanding that George Bush call an end to the smear campaign and get back to the issues. Your voices were heard: 400,000 of you have already signed, with tens of thousands more signing each day. Thank you for making it clear that this election deserves a discussion of the issues, and not slander and character assassination.

As reader John D. points out, somebody forgot to inform the Kerry-friendly Portland Oregonian about this no-smear policy. The newspaper has dredged up news of a ten-year-old affair to discredit Swift Boat vet Alfred French:

Clackamas County prosecutor Alfred French, who called Sen. John Kerry a liar in a political commercial, acknowledged Thursday that he lied to his boss when confronted about an extramarital affair with a colleague.

Hours later, the Clackamas County district attorney's office said French had been placed on a 30-day paid leave while it conducts an investigation into his conduct.

French's former boss, James O'Leary, said he asked French about the rumored affair with a secretary about 10 years ago, but French denied it. O'Leary said he would have fired French if he'd admitted the relationship because it violated office policy.

French, who said he served in the same military unit with Kerry for two months in 1969, has come under intense scrutiny in the past week as the anti-Kerry ad has become a central issue in the presidential campaign. Suddenly, the well-respected Oregon prosecutor found himself the target of questions about his own credibility and the truthfulness of his statements against Kerry.

I wonder if French would have been a target if he'd been one of the few Swiftees who support Kerry.

(DU link via LGF)

MAP OF THE GODS

The Kerry campaign has produced a wonderful map illustrating the links between the Swift Boat Dissenters and their Halliburton-financed neocon enablers within the Bush Reich House. Please post links in comments to your own Photoshopped versions of this map, possibly including the whereabouts of John Kerry's Magical Forbidden Mekong Super Hat of Thunder.

UPDATE. Mark Steyn:

My sense is that the Swiftvets have changed the dynamics of the race. With the candidate's retro braggadocio on ice for the foreseeable future, the Kerry campaign late on Friday revived that old favourite, the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, releasing a flow chart full of multi-coloured arrows showing that Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison is a "close friend" of Merrie Spaeth, a public relations consultant to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Yawn.

UPDATE II. Dorkafork and Evil Pundit get with the Photoshoppy action.

MARCH UPDATE

Can't think of anything to wear at Sunday's big NYC protest? Try this!

Meanwhile, a reader disguised as a wealthy Manhattan elitist plans to take part in the march and file a report afterwards, either to this site or to Reason's convention blog. These guys may figure prominently.

(Commies for Kerry link via the excellent Dawn Eden, one of a whole bunch of quality onliners met last night, including Elizabeth Spiers, Maccers, Oklahoma delegate Michael Bates, Nick Denton, and Wonkette -- in actual human non-cartoon form.)

HIDDEN CAT STOCKPILES

Trouble has erupted at Barney the dog's official White House site, where Bush operatives are accused of suppressing Willie the cat:

Trish, from Portage, IN, writes: I have never seen the Cats Picture. I have no idea whats hes or she name is. Show more of the Cat. I am a Cat Lover.

Jimmy Orr, White House Internet Director: We have featured Willie the Cat twice (when we ran out of Barney photos). Willie is elusive and far harder to capture on film (kind of like the Loch Ness monster).

There's your WMD mystery solved. This administration has problems locating a housecat, much less anything buried in canisters in the desert.

LIBERAL TOLERANCE WATCH

At least they've stopped calling it Flyover Country:

Piraro suggests breaking up the country into Eastern America, Western America and "everything in the middle can be Dumbistan. They can outlaw condoms, sex education -- anything they want."

EVERYBODY CHANT

Sorry for the lack of posts lately; I've been working on my costume and sign for Sunday's big peace rally in New York, and it's taken me days to dry out the palm leaves so I could make a proper conical hat. And don't even start me on the difficulties of finding a suitable Ao Dai in this place!

I'm going as a Vietnamese peasant, with a sign reading: "John Kerry Shot My Dad".

NEWS BRIEFLETS

• Andrew Bolt notes the sheeplike qualities of Australian writers, and mentions in passing this historic literary gathering.

• Stand back as Currency Lad greets a new publication from Australia's old left, featuring an odious crybaby column from "the half Don Lane, half Richard Neville freak" Julian Nimio.

• This will make Naomi Klein happy. Charles Simmins scans the latest US census figures, and turns up some interesting stats: "The female to male earnings ratio is down for 2003, but the ratios for all three years of the Bush Administration are much higher than at any other time in history, with 2002 being the record year. The 2003 ratio of 75.5% is still much higher than the previous high, before Bush, in 1998 of 74.2%."

• "It looks like the swift boat ad is working." intones the left-leaning Electoral-Vote.com. "Kerry is now dropping in the state polls as well as in the national polls."

• And from Byron York: "A new Gallup poll provides what might be the best measure so far of the effect the Swift Boat controversy is having on Sen. John Kerry's presidential candidacy. The poll, conducted August 23-25, shows Kerry's unfavorable rating at its highest point since Gallup began measuring Kerry's performance in February 1999."

• Robert Corr discovers that the Sydney Morning Herald is publishing a secret blog, authored by Kingstonite headcase Antony Loewenstein. It's been running for a few weeks now, but has no link from the main SMH page (or from the opinion page, or anywhere that I can see). Why does the SMH launch something like this and tell nobody about it?

MOQERY

Hey, Paul McGeough! Got a great story for you, pal! It looks like Ayad Allawi is now working for Moqtada al-Sadr!

In other Moqtard news, Norman Geras reports that Naomi Klein is completely fine with the Moqster's innovative reform plans. As Norm points out: "He's only a theocrat, after all, who wants to turn Iraq into a theocracy like Iran; he's not of the Republican Party."

COMMENTERS "FUNNY", "SHARP" - GUARDIAN

The Guardian's John Sutherland turns out to be a good sport. He writes:

There is so much daily traffic on your website, you may not remember a hilarious trashing of a piece of mine in the Guardian, a few months ago. I found it by the masochistic device of googling "Sutherland"+"idiot". A depressing number of hits.

The head comment and email string are very funny and I certainly made some blush-making errors (breasts and all that). The "fundagelism" essay, isn't, I have to confess, a column of which I feel proudest. At least, not now. They all look good when you first see them in print.

The email barbs are very sharp. I wish they had been directed somewhere else.

I'm sorry not to have reacted earlier. We won't agree on opinion but I'll
certainly follow the action on your site with interest.

Yours,

John Sutherland

'NAM REMINDER AVOIDED

Acting on Ken Layne's wise advice - "the last thing you want to do is remind people every day that John Kerry fought in Vietnam" - Mark Steyn persists in reminding people that John Kerry didn't fight in Cambodia. Few others are eager to pursue this story, however:

Would it be too much to expect so-called political journalists to investigate Kerry's Cambodian stories? You know, the way they did when the comparatively minor question arose of whether Bush was AWOL from his National Guard base three decades ago. Boy, The New York Times loved that one:

February 4: "Military Service Becomes Issue in Bush-Kerry Race"

February 11: "The President's Guard Service"

February 13: "Seeking Memories of Bush at an Alabama Air Base"

February 15: "Still the Question: What Did You Do in the War?"

As the Times put it, "Mr. Bush himself also made the issue of military service fair game by posturing as a swashbuckling pilot when welcoming a carrier home from Iraq."

Well, the other feller made his military service fair game by posturing as a swashbuckling Swift Boat lieutenant to the exclusion of the other 59 years and eight months of his life. The story now is not John Kerry's weird secret-agent fantasies but the media's willingness to act as elite guardians of them. They're his real "band of brothers," happy to fish him out of their water, even if their credibility sinks in the process.

Meanwhile, Kerry had this to say about the Bush administration's failings during an appearance on The Daily Show:

We angered everybody in the world.

Sure, it was just a throwaway line during a lame interview ... but a comment like that is just creepy.