Turnabout?

Some tried to excuse the Swifties' attacks on Kerry as justified since Kerry made his service in Vietnam such a major part of the Democratic National Convention.

Well, the Republicans are now making a big deal about Bush's leadership and courage after 9/11. Does that mean that "scurillous" and "mean-spirited" attacks on those characteristics are now fair game?

William Saletan takes a crack at it.

For the past month, a group of veterans funded by a Bush campaign contributor and advised by a Bush campaign lawyer has attacked the story of John Kerry's heroism in Vietnam. They have argued, contrary to all known contemporaneous records, that Kerry was too brutal in a counterattack that earned him the Silver Star, and that he survived only mines, not bullets, when he rescued a fellow serviceman from a river. President Bush, who joined the National Guard as a young man to avoid Vietnam, has been challenged to denounce the group's charges. He has refused.

Now the Republican National Convention is showcasing Bush's own heroic moment. As John McCain put it last night: "I knew my confidence was well placed when I watched him stand on the rubble of the World Trade Center with his arm around a hero of September 11 and, in our moment of mourning and anger, strengthen our unity and our resolve by promising to right this terrible wrong and to stand up and fight for the values we hold dear."

Pardon me for asking, but where exactly is the heroism in this story? Where, indeed, is the heroism in anything Bush has done before 9/11 or since?

A note of sanity

The Grand Poobah of poll watchers, Ruy Teixeira is back with a detailed analysis of the much talked about LA Times poll that "appeared" to show that the Swifty attacks were working against Kerry. You should read it all, but I would like to hilight two points:

If August had been a slow news month, this trend would almost certainly have been ascribed to an inevitable "coming back down to earth" following the run of positive news coverage Kerry had enjoyed for several months during the spring (the remarkable fundraising success, the popular choice of Edwards, the united, energized Democratic convention). Instead, because the attacks on Kerry’s medals and military service were intensely dramatic and widely covered, many commentators simply assumed that any changes in the opinion polls had to be due to their influence.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth that we heard from Democrats after the release of this poll frankly pissed me off. Anyone who has watched the polls closely for the last few months has seen swings like those shown in the LA Times poll. Yet, because people were looking for some kind of negative effect on Kerry, a perfectly ordinary fluctuation in the LA Times poll was widely interpreted to be that negative effect.

From the Bush campaign's point of view, the magnitude of the swift-boat fiasco becomes clear when it is recognized that a major goal of the August campaign was to put John Kerry on the defensive - to have him stumbling over his words, being pilloried in the press and firing his advisors. Instead (although the issue will now be muted by the theatrics of the Republican convention) it was Bush who was forced onto the defensive by the end of last week while Kerry weathered the attacks with an extraordinarily small decline in the level of his popular support.

The small fluctuation in the LA Times poll is not an indication that the Swifty attacks are working against Kerry. The failure to show a more substantial swing is an indication that the campaign failed in its main objective. Kerry has now demonstrated that he can take the heat of the most scurillous of smears and that he can hit back as hard as he is hit. He has buried the notion that he is just another Dukakis or Gore. And it is because of the Swifty attacks that he was able to do it.

We should all send a note of thanks to John O'Neil and Karl Rove.

Whoa!

Someone has managed to dig up a video of former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes telling people that he got Bush into the National Guard in the 60s and that he isn't proud of it.

Go here for a discussion thread on it on the DailyKos. Here's the video in QuickTime or Windows format.

An alternative to Bush

An interesting suggestion from last night's Kerry meetup: if you know of any Republicans who dislike Bush because of his handling of the economy and/or Iraq, but are unwilling to vote for a pro-choice candidate like Kerry (as they would consider that a sin), then maybe you should suggest they look into Michael Peroutka, the Constitution Party candidate for President. Maybe they might find him an acceptable alternative.

How We Got Here

Jackson Diehl gives us an excellent summary of how the actions of Bush and Rumsfeld to set aside the Geneva Convention's on the treatment of prisoners of war led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

The causal chain is all there: from Bush's February 2002 decision to Rumsfeld's December 2002 authorization of nudity, stress positions and dogs; to the adoption of those methods in Afghanistan and their sanction in Iraq by a commander looking back to Bush's decision; and finally, to their use on detainees by soldiers who reasonably believed they were executing official policy.

So why do the reports' authors deny the role of policy, or its makers? Partly because of the Army's inbred inability to indict its own; partly because of the desire of Rumsfeld's old colleagues, such as Schlesinger, to protect him. But there's another motive, too: a lingering will to defend and preserve the groundbreaking decisions -- those that set aside the Geneva Conventions and allowed harsh interrogation techniques. Schlesinger argues they are needed for the war on terrorism; he and senior Army commanders say they are worried about a "chilling effect" on interrogations and a slackening in intelligence collection.

The buried message of their reports, though, is that the new system is unworkable. Once the rules are bent for one class of prisoner, or one detention facility, or one agency, exceptional practices cannot be easily returned to their bottle -- and the chaos of Abu Ghraib is a predictable result. Just as the Army professionals foresaw, Bush's 2002 decision undermined "U.S. military culture" and its "strict adherence to the law of war." That is the headline the investigators ducked.

The treatment of the prisoner's at Guantanamo is the elephant in the living room of this whole scandal. It is where the problems all began, but no one wants to confront it. The Republicans won't because it would cast them in a bad light. The Democrats won't because they don't want to be accused of being "soft" on terrorism. The establishment media won't because, in their "objective" approach to news coverage, since no one else is talking about it there isn't any "hook" upon which to hang the discussion.

And, since any serious discussion of Abu Ghraib leads inevitably back to the treatment at Guantanamo, and no one wants to talk about the latter, then that creates a strong incentive not to talk about the former.

And thus do we slide down that slippery razor blade to hell.

Given the way this is going ...

... how long before we start hearing suggestions that the Swifties were actually a scam set up by the Kerry campaign in order to make the Bush campaign look bad?

Top Discarded Bush Campaign Slogans

Shamelessly stolen from this DailyKOS diary by jazzmaniac:

• We've Turned The Corner
• We've Turned Another Corner
• Still One More Corner
• We're Driving Around In Circles
• No, I Don't Need To Ask For Directions!

The LA Times has had enough

In an unsigned editorial (meaning it represents the opinion of the editorial staff of the newspaper itself), the LA Times does what no other establishment news organization has been unwilling, call a lie a lie:

In both cases, the candidates are the reason the groups are in business. There is an important difference, though, between the side campaign being run for Kerry and the one for Bush. The pro-Kerry campaign is nasty and personal. The pro-Bush campaign is nasty, personal and false.

No informed person can seriously believe that Kerry fabricated evidence to win his military medals in Vietnam. His main accuser has been exposed as having said the opposite at the time, 35 years ago. Kerry is backed by almost all those who witnessed the events in question, as well as by documentation. His accusers have no evidence except their own dubious word.

Not limited by the conventions of our colleagues in the newsroom, we can say it outright: These charges against John Kerry are false. Or at least, there is no good evidence that they are true. George Bush, if he were a man of principle, would say the same thing.

The editorial is not 100% perfect (MoveOn has been around a lot longer than the Kerry campaign, so saying he is the reason for their existence is wrong), but the LA Times deserves a lot of credit for breaking the taboo against calling a lie a lie.

Bravo!

The Fight Worth Fighting

I'm going to disagree with a considerable number of people out there who are bemoaning the fact that Kerry has to "waste time" addressing the Swift Boat issue when he should be hammering Bush on his weak record.

The core of the problems of this country over the last few years is precisely the political smear machine that the Republicans have perfected during that time. It is that machine that has allowed the cockroaches within the Republican party to subvert our country's institutions from the ground up. If that machine did not exist then those people would never have gotten as close to the levers of power as they have.

The "real" problems of this country will never be corrected as long as that machine is allowed to run rampant through the political landscape. Attacking it and destroying it as a candidate is as vital an action as any Kerry might take as President.

So, no, this is not a fight that is distracting us from the bigger fight. It is the bigger fight.

(This is a repost of an entry from my own blog here)

The two stages of the Swift Boat attack

The following line from the latest MoDowd column clears up something that has been bothering me:

The Kerry camp knows the Swift boat snipers are hurting the Democrat and fears the Bush oppo campaign will soon move from tarnishing Mr. Kerry's war record to dwell on his days as a shaggy-haired antiwar spokesman. The White House must tear down his heroism before it can tear down his patriotism.

The thing that has bothered me is why the Swift Boat crew went first with an ad questioning Kerry's heroism when it is obvious that their real beef with Kerry, the heart of their second ad, was his later testimony before Congress about atrocities in Vietnam. I may be risking apostasy here, but I think the second ad is a much more effective and legitimate attack on Kerry. It is effective because it is not as questionable in its accusations (Kerry did testify about those atrocities). It is legitimate because the question of what went on in Vietnam is not something that should be brushed under the rug and Kerry's comments on the matter did cause many veterans a great degree of pain.

If they had run with just the second ad then the Swifties would be part of a much more legitimate and important debate. So why run first with an accusation that is so bogus on the surface?

Dowd hits on the reason: Kerry's main defense against the second accusation is the very heroism that the first accusation is attempting to destroy. As long as Kerry could hold up the shield of his heroism, claims of unpatriotic behavior on his part would have considerably less impact.

It was thus essential for the Bush campaign to destroy that image of heroism if it were to make the attack on his patriotism effective.

The only defense Kerry has right now is the one he is using: turn the tables on Bush and make his family's history of using scurrilous smears the issue before the damage from the first accusation weakens Kerry's defenses against the second. The web only ad that the campaign released today goes a long way towards doing just that. It uses McCain as a surrogate for Kerry. It reminds people of what Bush has done in the past and it makes it clear that attacks on Kerry's heroism are no better than attacks on McCain's heroism.

If Kerry manages to turn the tables on Bush then the second accusation will be buried even more effectively. Kerry will have not just the shield of his heroism but the very long spear of Bush perfidity as well.

(By the way, the sheer calculated nature of this one-two punch from the Swifties is just another indication that they are more than just some guys who got together to dispute Kerry's history. If that were all they were then they would have gone with just the second ad. The first ad, its execution and its reason for existence, is pure Karl Rove.)

What an idiot!

Check out Keith Olberman's response to Michelle Malkin's outrage at Olberman's outrage over her self-inflicted-wound incident.

For a moment there I thought I owed Michelle Malkin an apology.

Very few people who find themselves criticized on television, or even critically characterized, go out and make the criticism sound worse than it was. Evidently, judging by the fact that the same e-mail appeared a few hundred times in our Countdown inbox today (not similar e-mails; the identical one, with different return addresses), Ms. Malkin is one of the very few.

“How dare you call this woman an idiot?”

That’s apparently what she said, while appearing on Rush Limbaugh’s Entertainment Radio Program today. She certainly wrote it on her blog. To be precise: “his (Chris Matthews’) scurrilous charges were repeated by his MSNBC colleague Keith Olbermann, who called me an ‘idiot.’”

Well, I felt terrible. In my little naïve old-fashioned way, I feel you preserve terms like that exclusively for men. I was preparing a formal apology. Political differences, fault or innocence, are all secondary. There are codes.

Funniest darn thing happened, though. Checked the tape of the show, re-read the blog. I never called Michelle Malkin an “idiot.”

Never used the word.

Second time I referenced her, I did say “this woman, Malkin, who made a fool of herself on this network, about an hour ago…”

So that’s what you’re dealing with here. She’s an author or a journalist or something, and she misquoted the insult to herself.

Olberman didn't say it, but I will: Michelle Malkin really is an idiot.

The Vietnam Divide

The Swift Boat issue is not about about whether Kerry served with distinction. It is about what Kerry did after he served. Some in the veterans community took Kerry's comments about Vietnam War atrocities personally (even though he didn't name them specifically) and have held a grudge against him ever since. The smear artists in the GOP are taking advantage of their (perhaps not entirely unjustified) anger to destroy a political enemy. Once again, they are being used by those to whom they have given the full measure of their loyalty.

Thinking on the deep divides within the veterans community over the question of Vietnam, I can't help but wonder what kind of ill feelings will be left behind by the war in Iraq. Are we going to repeat this same sad scenario 30 years from now when the first Iraq War vet runs for President?

Regarding Chris Mathews

As an aside to the whole Mathews/Malkin incident: I applaud Mathews for acting like a journalist, but I think to many in the blogosphere are taking his performance last night as some kind of indication that he has "turned from the dark side".

Mathews has hot buttons and when someone pushes those hot buttons he does righteous outrage like no ones business. Clinton pushed his hot button with respect to sexual fidelity and Mathews' obvious disgust with Clinton's personal behavior forever tinged his coverage of other Clinton era scandals (aside: I am not discounting the idea that being anti-Clinton also helped Mathew's bottom line). Malkin and the Swifties pushed his hot button with respect to honoring military service and he has reacted with outrage in this case as well. It remains to be seen whether that outrage will seep into his general assessment of the Bush administration in the same way it affected his assessment of Clinton.

There is no "turning from the dark side". Mathews isn't doing this because he likes Kerry more than Bush. I suspect that Mathews still likes Bush more than Kerry as a man, but he may be coming over to the belief that, as a President, Kerry might be the better choice.

There are plenty in the establishment media who are driven by their partisanship. Mathew's psychological makeup is much more complicated than that.

How to take down a smear artist

While thinking about the dustup last night on Hardball between Chris Mathews and Michelle Malkin (Jesse Taylor has an excellent summary of the incident here) it occurred to me that Matthews may have inadvertently hit upon the best way to deal with smear artists.

The essence of most smears is not what is directly said but what is indirectly implied. Malkin does not immediately say that Kerry shot himself in order to win a medal and get out of Vietnam early. Instead she uses the phrase "self-inflicted wound" because it is a term that technically can be construed to include wounds received accidentally from the discharge of ones own weapon. Malkin knows that "self-inflicted wound" is a phrase that implies deliberate action on Kerry's part, but she can weasel out of that implication on that technicality.

She tried to do this on Hardball and did so again on her on blog. However, in most cases, smear artists like Malkin don't need to fall back on the technical construction because they know that many establishment journalists, wanting to be "fair and balanced", will give them the benefit of the doubt on their implication.

What Mathews did last night was to question her on the implication not just once but repeatedly. This was a violation of the rules of punditry as Malkin and other smear artists have come to expect and she was noticeably upset when he broke protocol.

And that is where I think Mathews hit on the best way to deal with smear artists: confront them directly and repeatedly on their implications as if the implications were what they actually said (rather than just implied). Don't get into technical arguments about terms that might allow them wiggle room. Just act as if the implications were what they actually said.

When you do this, two things will happen: (1) the implication will become more clear to the casual audience as it is repeated in a more direct fashion and (2) the smear artist will, as Malkin demonstrated, become flustered in their desperate attempts to restore the smear by implication.

The point is to make clear to the audience what is normally obscured by the smear artist's clever use of the use of implication. It is the implication that is at the heart of the smear, not the direct statements that are the means of delivering the smear. It is that implication that must be brought out into the open and stomped on before it becomes ingrained in the minds of the audience.

That is how you deal with a smear artist.