DAN BLA^thER

Ah, the wonders of the internet. On Wednesday night, Dan Rather goes on the air to report that Bush got into the National Guard because of his influential family, disobeyed a direct order and did not meet his obligations to the National Guard. The "family influence" claim was based on the statements of Ben Barnes, former Texas Lieutentant Governor. The rest of the claims were based on the now infamous documents obtained by CBS News. The documents were authenticated by Marcel Matley, a document expert, and by Major General (retired) Hodges, the (immediate?) superior of the author of the documents, who was himself Bush's superior officer.

Within twenty four hours, serious questions had been raised concerning all of the new witnesses and new documents trumpeted by Rather. The questions were so serious that Rather felt the need, on Friday evening, to attempt to rebut them on the air.

And by Saturday evening, Rather's rebuttal had been shredded.

His document expert, who supposedly authenticated the documents, formed his opinion after having viewed copies, since that was all CBS had. But that same expert wrote in 2002 that "... modern copiers and computer printers are so good that they permit easy fabrication of quality forgeries. From a copy, the document examiner cannot authenticate the unseen original but may well be able to determine that the unseen original is false. Further, a definite finding of authenticity for a signature is not possible from a photocopy, while a definite finding of falsity is possible." (Emphasis added.) General Hodges stated that CBS had misled him by telling him that the documents had been handwritten, and that all he had said was that if Killian (the supposed author) had written it, then that was how Killian felt about the matter.

The original criticisms of the documents (the use of New Times Roman; the proportional spacing; the centering and superscript) were hardly affected at all by the rebuttal. If you are old enough to remember Watergate, the infamous 18 minute gap in one of the Nixon tapes was explained away by partisans as having been accidentally caused by Nixon's secretary (Rose Mary Woods) performing a complicated stretch across three quarters of her large desk to answer her phone without taking her foot off a floor switch. The explanation was ridiculed as the "Rose Mary Stretch."

Well, the explanation of how Colonel Killian could have produced the documents contemporaneously with their dates had the same ring to it as the Rose Mary Stretch.

He would have to have had a high end IBM typewriter, the IBM Selectric Composer. In the Texas Air National Guard? Right.

He would have had to stop typing, rummage in his desk for another type ball having a smaller typeface, replace the existing type ball with the new one, futz with the paper, and type "th".

He would have had to reverse the process to get back to 12 point New Times Roman.

He would have had to do this several times in the course of one short document.

He would have had to type out and carefully measure the length of each line in the caption for centering purposes and start typing at the proper point on each line on a fresh paper.

I don't understand how there could be any questions about it. It could have happened. It did happen. Of course that's what a man who, according to both his widow and his son, didn't like to type would do!

And new faults were found (the terminology used in the memos was not in use at the time the memos were supposedly written; the signature block was wrong; the caption was wrong; the person said to be exerting pressure to sugarcoat Bush's evaluation had retired 18 months before date of the the memo; both Colonel Killian's son and his widow said he never took notes or kept memos, didn't write like that and admired Bush, even travelling to another base to pin his wings on him and meet Bush the elder; the son also questioned one of the signatures).

Additional document experts have offered opinions contrary to that of Mr. Matley (not to mention Matley's prior article saying that what he had done could not be done).

Rather's first new witness (Barnes) was recalled to have earlier stated exactly the opposite of what he was now claiming and revealed (by his daughter, no less) to have a motive of hyping his upcoming book.

And General Hodges, the witness apparently thought to be the "trump card," recanted, so to speak, as noted above.

I think the documents are forgeries. I think Matley's "authentication" of the documents is complete bullshit (and so does Matley, at least as of 2002) I think Barnes is a terrible witness for the "influence" claim, and that Hodges is a non-witness at best.

But I don't think Rather intentionally trumpeted forged documents and biased, misleading witnesses. I think he fervently wants Bush to lose the election because that's what he thinks needs to happen in order for things to improve in the world, and he allowed that desire to blind him to the multiple, egregious and obvious flaws in the report.

His actions subsequent to the initial report, however, are something different altogether. As Nixon learned, its not the original problem that will kill you, its the coverup. Rather's Friday night rebuttal was pathetic. "Some typewriters" had the superscripted th option in the early seventies? Well, at least one did that used New Times Roman, but for God's sake man:

Who would write a memo and stick it in a file on the off chance that the subject of the memo would be running for reelection 30 freakin years later?

Where were these witnesses and documents in 2000?

Rather's claim that everyone else's document analysis is wrong because they are looking at copies of copies of faxes of copies begs the question: Should not CBS then release the actual documents that Matley was looking at, rather than just copies of them? Why won't it, and why won't they tell us where they got the documents from? If the documents are in fact forgeries, surely they owe no obligation to protect the source that embarrassed them. And since releasing the documents and documenting their provenance appears to be the only way to salvage the claims made by CBS, why won't they do so?

If there are two ways to produce the documents, one taking a whole bunch of time and effort using the Rose Mary Woods Stretch-like procedure outlined above and one taking minutes using nothing but MS Word and maybe Photoshop, does not Occam's Razor tell us that forgery is the more likely explanation?

Why would Colonel Killian keep an official order for Lt. Bush to report for a physical exam in his "personal file?" Why does his widow say that Colonel Killian did not keep such things?

In his rebuttal, Rather said he would report only "definitive evidence" contrary to his story. The various items listed above are not definitive evidence. They are strong evidence. They are, in my opinion, far more than a preponderance of the evidence. But they are not definitive. But then almost nothing could be definitive this long after the fact. The problem here is Rather's disingenous use of the standard of proof required for rebuttal evidence. The evidence for the original story turns out to be flimsy at best, and Rather thinks that only "definitive" evidence countering it is worthy of being reported?

Airing the original story was a mistake. Sticking to it in the face of the volume, nature and quality of the criticism levelled against it is a much, much bigger mistake. It is the type of mistake that ends careers.

Can Rather survive the ridicule? CBS News is already in last place for news among the three broadcast networks. The damage done to their flagship 60 Minutes franchise is massive and will grow larger as people start to ask what did Dan know and when did he know it and as clippies continue to be created and circulated on the net.

NOTE: I normally try hard to credit sources on my posts. In this case, there were just too many. All, repeat, all of the above facts were discovered by others and reported elsewhere on the internet in blogs, mainstream sites, newspapers such as the Washington Post, the Seattle Times, etc. Most of the analysis was done first elsewhere as well, but not, I think, all in one place. My apologies. Today's ration of free ice cream does not include sourcing references. I'll try to do better tomorrow.

 
BUSH IS NO LIBERTARIAN

Andrew Sullivan comments (Reaganites versus Bush) on a Salon piece by Doug Bandow.

Bandow:

Quite simply, the president, despite his well-choreographed posturing, does not represent traditional conservatism -- a commitment to individual liberty, limited government, constitutional restraint and fiscal responsibility. Rather, Bush routinely puts power before principle.

Granted, Bush is no small government or libertarian Republican. Does Bandow expect Kerry to govern better or more conservatively on other issues than Bush?

Kerry is proposing just as much or more new spending as Bush is. The other difference is that Kerry wants to raise taxes to pay for it. Both are big government spenders. The difference is that Kerry is a tad more responsible than Bush (but not more conservative) with his fig leaf "tax increase on the wealthiest."

As previously confessed, however, the war is what matters to me. Kerry would retire into defensive positions and respond militarily only after an attack. Bush, on the other hand, asks, why wait for them? Why concede the initiative to them? You know they're coming.

Neither strategy is perfect. Execution of either of them would be (is) difficult. To my, eye, there are many fewer problems with Bush's approach. It at least has a chance of preventing further attacks on US soil. Kerry's approach has no such chance.

On most social and numerous economic issues, I'm with Sullivan. I like balanced budgets and small government that isn't peeking into my bedroom or trying to run my local school (not to mention my life). But that does not mean that most Americans or even most Republicans are. Why does it matter that the deficit is $400 Billion plus versus whatever Kerry's numbers show if:

We tell the ghost of Osama that he is free to do everything he needs to in order to prepare another 9/11 attack (with a cost in the trillions) with no military interference from us; and

We will voluntarily limit our military options to responding to such an attack?

That doesn't make us better people than Osama (since we already are). It will make some of us just as dead as he probably is.

Sullivan:

One wonders why this kind of piece isn't published by the Weekly Standard or National Review.

Me too, but I also wonder why that kind of piece is passed over by people like the NYT and WaPo and 60 minutes in favor of anti-Bush exposes on his 35 year old service record in the National Guard.

Regardless of who wins the Presidency this time around (and either candidate can still win, despite the current euphoria among Bush supporters), the real loser in this election is going to be the media establishment.

 
ONLY ON CNN

CNN reports on the failure of the Genesis capsule:

Genesis capsule plunging and tumbling out of control toward the Utah desert wasn't how the mission was supposed to end

Up to this point, the mission had been a success.

There an old, old joke about a guy (variously reported to be Irish, Polish, German, whoever happened to be the but of jokes at the time) who jumps out of a window on the 50th floor of a skyscraper. He is heard to say as he passes the 5th floor on his way down, "So far, so good."

 
REPORTING FOR DUTY IN THE FREE FLOATING CADRE

From Instapundit, who notes that Edward Wasserman, a professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee, is not too keen on having his facts checked by others (go to www.bugmenot.com to avoid registration hassles):

News is a messy and elusive form of information. Journalism is crude, tentative and fumbling, always involving compromise, and there's a healthy measure of give-and-take in the process.

But anybody who enters the profession makes a core commitment to do his or her best to determine and tell the truth. And that commitment is now under assault.

Let's read that again, shall we? Anyone who becomes a professional journalist makes a "core commitment" to "do his or her best" to "determine and tell the truth".

Really? If that's true, then this is the best the profession can offer us? 60 Minutes as a Kerry infomercial? Hundreds, if not thousands of stories on Bush failing to meet the requirements of service in the Air National Guard and dead silence on Kerry's oft-repeated, and now admitted fairy tales about spending Christmas in Cambodia? The best efforts of the profession to determine and tell the truth include an AP report that insults me and every other Bush supporter by falsely claiming that the audience at a Bush rally booed when told Clinton was in the hospital? That's as good as it gets, Mr. Wasserman? I don't think so. I think they can and will do better, if pushed to do so. But not according to Wasserman. He thinks that any criticism of a professional journalist by a non-journalist is bullying and intellectual extortion.

The attack doesn't come from ideologically committed journalists and commentators who put together reports clearly selected and spun-dry to sell a political line. As long as such writers retain some minimal respect for fact, the transparency of their motives may even work to enrich the variety of information and interpretations available to all.

Again: Really? Minimal respect for fact is the best journalists as a whole can do? According to a professor of journalism ethics? Not a healthy respect, not a reverence for fact, but minimal respect. I guess that the AP story about the crowd booing the announcement of Clinton's heart surgery at a Bush rally had a "minimal respect for fact." I will concede that the reporter's respect for fact was minimal. So minimal that I couldn't see it.

And transparent motives? Transparent to whom? Did I miss it when the New York Times started printing their reporters' "motives" along with their bylines? Tell me where the motives of the authors of the NYT's initial reportage of the Swift Boat Vets controversy were made "transparent". Was it before or after the 65th paragraph when they finally got around to saying that the Christmas in Cambodia story was the only Swift Boat accusation that Kerry had "not yet put to rest"? Put to rest? Kerry had not only not put it to rest, he had admitted it to be true. So where are the motives of the reporters in that story made transparent and how is it possible that such misreporting "work[s] to enrich the variety of information and interpretations available to all"?

To the contrary, such efforts work to decrease the information and decrease interpretations available, not to increase them.

The more compelling danger concerns news organizations in the so-called mainstream. These are the country's best-staffed and most influential news organizations, and they're losing their nerve.

Good! I certainly hope its true. The media (with some notable exceptions) has become quite brazen about what they are doing.

I understand why. It's hard now even to write for publication without being aware of just how thoroughly what you say is going to be inspected for any trace of undesirable political tilt and denounced by a free-floating cadre of rightist warriors.

Ah, the vast right wing conspiracy raises its ugly head. Journalists apparently need to be protected from people who, for one reason or another, get annoyed with something written by said journalist who may or may not:

Have made a "core commitment to determine and tell the truth"

Have lived up to that commitment

Have a minimal respect for fact.

Then, horror of horrors, this unpaid (and thus presumably unprofessional) cretin actually has the gall to criticize (yes! criticize!) his betters. What nerve! That they are more than occasionally right matters not one whit. That they are sometimes (even frequently) wrong is what counts.

According to Wasserman, only professional journalists with minimal respect for fact are to be forgiven their mistakes (without ever having confessed same). According to Wasserman, only professional journalists, with their core commitment to determine and report the truth, can allow their political agenda to affect their reporting. Wasserman apparently believes that the fact that some (most? all?) criticism of the effect of a journalist's political agenda on his reporting is itself politically motivated disqualifies it as criticism.

If that's apparent to me as a mere columnist, I can only imagine the current mind-set of supervising editors: If we give prominence to this story of carnage in Iraq, will we be accused of anti-administration bias? And - here it gets interesting - will we therefore owe our readers an offsetting story, perhaps an inspirational tale of Marines teaching young Iraqis how to play softball?

That's right, Mr. Wasserman! The only good thing that isn't being reported from Iraq is free softball lessons!

Soft stories like Marines teaching Iraqis how to play ball is Wasserman's straw man. He needs a reality check:

How many stories were there in the last week about US casualties?

Compare that to how many stories there were in the last six months about Iraqi construction projects (what's being built, where, for how much, who is building it, when will it be done, what will it mean for the locale and the nation). The only person I have seen doing stories like that is Arther Chrenkoff, and the only place I have seen it is on his blog and the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal.

How many stories were there in the last month about whether Bush's service in the Air National Guard met all the requirements?

Compare that to how many stories there were about Kerry's time in Vietnam and whether all of the claims he makes about his service are true.

Look, I know that no single press organzation can report everything. The entire Western media probably can't report everything. In know that bad news sells newspapers ("good news is no news, no news is bad news and bad news is good news"). But Wasserman's complaint about having to report (literally) softball feel-good news to "offset" other stories that don't play well on one end of the political spectrum is nonsense. Balancing one story with another doesn't work. That isn't journalism. But refusing to report stories because they don't play well on the end of the political spectrum the reporter or his paper inhabits doesn't work and isn't journalism, either.

Now, both stories may well be integral to the news. If so, both should be told. The problem arises when the pressure to tell the softball story comes not from a principled desire to deliver a factual account that is broadly emblematic of significant happenings in Iraq, but from a gutless attempt to buy off a hostile and suspicious fragment of the audience base.

What about when the refusal to deliver a factual account of a story comes from a desire (transparent or otherwise) to end the adminstration of a president? That refusal can be characterized in one of only two ways: it is either a gutless attempt to avoid losing (eg: by buying off) readers on the "correct" end of the political spectrum (which is Wasserman's spin), or its a brazen attempt to manipulate the election (which is mine). There are no other possibilities. But as long as the press is not goring Wasserman's political ox, he seems to be OK with either of them.

News then becomes a negotiation - not a negotiation among discordant pictures of reality, as it always is, but an abject negotiation with a loud and bullying sliver of the audience. News of great significance becomes not an honest attempt to reflect genuinely contradictory realities, but a daily bargaining session with an increasingly factionalized public, a corrupted process in which elements of the news become offerings - payments really - in a kind of intellectual extortion.

Once again, Mr. Wasserman nails it. People who, like me, have tired of hearing the received wisdom of the media are bullies, forcing the media to cover the stories we want in the way we want by extortion. That's why there are no complaints about bias in the medi....

Oh. Sorry.

If, as Wasserman claims, the extortion comes from a "sliver" of the intended audience, why not tell them what they can do with their complaints and bullying and extortion? After all, journalism is a business. If your business is being dramatically and negatively affected by bullying attempts at extortion emanating from a sliver of your customers, simply walk away from the extortionists.

What does Wasserman propose? Does he want me to let his fellow professionals with a "minimal respect for fact" continue to try to change my mind on the sly, by slanting their news stories to fit their political views? Should we just step back and let the professionals handle it? After all, aren't those professionals nobly trying to educate this poor, deluded, right wing troglodyte? I think Wassserman's conclusion comes down to "Shut up, he explained."

Columnists are supposed to write opinion pieces, as are editorial writers. The reporters who write for the news pages are not. Period. Minimal respect for fact and supposedly transparent motives does not transform an op-ed piece into a news report. If I want to read political commentary, I know where to go. The problem is becoming one of where to go to get news without the political commentary.

The performance of this country's finest news organizations in the run-up to the Iraq invasion of March 2003 will be remembered as a disgrace. To be sure, it was an angry, fearful time, when independent-minded reporting might not have been heard above the drumbeats of patriotism and war. But it's hard to read the hand-wringing confessionals from news organizations that now realize that they got the prewar story wrong without concluding that the real problem was they were afraid to tell the truth.

Leave aside Wasserman's unsupported claim that the "drumbeat of patriotism and war" somehow obscured "independent minded" journalism. The performance of the country's finest news organizations in the run-up to the War in Afghanistan was also a disgrace. Do you remember the "brutal Afghan winter" that was going to freeze both GIs and helicopters in their tracks? I do. Do you remember the stories about how Afghanistan hadn't been conquered since Alexander? I do.

And in the runup to the war in Iraq, I also remember reports about how the Iraqi sanctions were killing hundreds of children a month. And I remember reports about how there would be tens of thousands of US casualties (mostly from the weapons of mass destruction which the article claimed three paragraphs previously did not exist).

And the performance of this country's finest news organizations in the run-up to the election has been a disgrace. Shameless spinning for Kerry and equally shameless Bush bashing are both being fobbed off on the public as news.

My point is that the failures of professional journalists are not limited to the run-up to the war in Iraq. Moreover, Wasserman's (wholly unsupported) conclusion that those failures are occuring because the journalists are afraid to report is nonsense. Hard hitting reporters who can actually back up their conclusions with documented facts are lavishly rewarded in our society. Pulitzers and movie deals were awarded to Woodward and Bernstein. Book deals, fame, lecture tours all await the reporter who breaks an important story.

The absolute pinnacle of the reporting world is the New York Times. If you make it to the Times, you've arrived, professionally speaking. But in the past several years, the Gray Lady has suffered Jayson Blair's fabricated stories, and Howell Raines quixotic jihad against the Masters Tournament, both of which masqueraded as news. The trend has continued with both war and political reporting. Professional journalism is rapidly becoming an oxymoron.

No, journalism has not suffered due journalists' fears, but their stupidity and contempt. Their failure to realize that they no longer control access to the raw data in the age of information is stupid. And their inability to realize that their readers can actually hold a thought for more than the few minutes it takes to read the current stories is nothing short of contemptuous.

Resisting undue outside influence is part of what news professionals do. But it's hard enough to get the story right, without holding it hostage to an open-ended negotiation with zealots who believe they already know what the story is.

But Wasserman does not want journalists to resist outside influence. He wants to eliminate criticism of journalists altogether, so that no more "abject negotiation with a loud and bullying sliver of the audience" need happen.

The criticism of journalists by non-journalists is not the problem here. The problem is that the "zealots who believe they already know what the story is" are, more often than not, the supposedly professional journalists.

With minimal respect for fact.

 
THE SOUL OF WIT

What took me sixteen hundred words to say, Mark Steyn says in less than one hundred:

Last week, apropos the Islamists' impressive mound of Israeli, Nepalese and Russian corpses, Kofi Annan's office issued the following statement: "The secretary-general strongly condemns all hostage-takings and killings of innocent civilians."

Or, as Cole Porter wrote in Friendship: "If they ever put a bullet through your brain, I'll complain."
That's the UN policy on Sudan. Americans don't want it to be the policy in the war on terror. That's why they'll stick with Bush.

D'oh!

 
NO COMMENT

Every once in a while, you come across something that requires no comment. This time it was in Ozblogger Tim Blair's comments:

It's amazing to me that the "left" (how outmoded and meaningless these distinctions are) have evolved into the most uptight, anti-rational, superstitious and piously moralistic bunch since the Puritans walked the wild forests of America (though I hesitate to make the comparison, since the Puritans accomplished great things).

There's more. Go read it.

 
NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME

I started to scan through the usual bazillion short entries on Instapundit and there at the top was a post about a Kerry press release which supposedly calls John McCain a liar. That would be especially stupid, and Kerry never struck me as that dumb. He's wrong about things that matter to me, but I never considered him stupid. So I followed the link to Tom Maguire at Just One Minute to see for myself. Maguire's post contains a snippet of McCain's convention speech but no explanation of what lying lies McCain lied about. There's a link to the press release, but not the release itself. The link to the press release comes back "page not found" on JohnKerry.com. Confused, I followed Maguire's link to PowerLine to see if I could find the press release or a working link to it there. Same problem.

So I tried JohnKerry.com. I looked in the press releases for September and August. The title of the release described by both Maguire and PowerLine was "The 2004 GOP Convention: Four Days Filled With Lies, Mischaracterizations, Distortions, And Half-Truths." No such release.

Then I searched the Kerry site for that phrase and got three hits:

SEARCH RESULTS 1 - 3 of 3 total results for "The 2004 GOP Convention: Four Days Filled With Lies, Mischaracterizations, Distortions, And Half-Truths."

John Kerry for President - Press Releases: September Archive
...The 2004 GOP Convention: Four Days Filled With Lies, Mischaracterizations, Distortions, And Half-Truths Kerry Statement on Allegations Made in Senator Bob Graham’s New Book “Intelligence Matters” 4 Fanning Out Across the...
http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/releases/archive/september.html

John Kerry for President - Official Web Site
...The 2004 GOP Convention: Four Days Filled With Lies, Mischaracterizations, Distortions, And Half-Truths Akron, OH September 4 - Huge crowds greet John Kerry in Ohio. Springfield, OH September 3 - Kerry and Edwards kick off a...
http://www.johnkerry.com/index.html

John Kerry for President - Agenda
...The 2004 GOP Convention: Four Days Filled With Lies, Mischaracterizations, Distortions, And Half-Truths New Kerry Ad Exposes Bush Misleading on Medicare Fanning Out Across the Heartland, Kerry, Edwards and Family Outline Plan...
http://www.johnkerry.com/issues/

Sort By Date | Hide Summaries

Of course, none of those is the press release in question. Hell, none of them is a press release. None has the title described above and none refer to McCain or even the Republican convention.

Back to Maguire at Just One Minute. Various commenters indicate that release has just disappeared. Rob Bernard has what he says is the actual release copied in toto onto his his site. And there it is. A laundry list of statements from the convention, including four snippets from McCain's speech (items 10 through 13). The release contains no specifics. It just repeats something someone said and, by implication from the title of the release, I suppose, claims the cited statement to be it to be a "Lie, Mischaracterization, Distortion, or Half-Truth."

The material on Bernard's site contains the same snippet appearing on Just One Minute, so its a safe bet that Bernard's cut and paste is in fact Kerry's press release. So Kerry did say that McCain lied, mischaracterized, etc. at four different points in his convention speech. That is incredibly stupid, having run ads featuring McCain only a couple of weeks ago.

But the problem here goes well beyond calling McCain a liar/mischaracterizer/distorter/half-truther.

First, the Kerry campaign tried to disappear the press release. They didn't retract it. They didn't say. "Some staffer was compiling a list of things and hit the wrong button mistakenly posting his list to the website" or something similar. They tried to unring the bell. Did they really think they could do that? I'm positive that they've heard of the internet. Don't they think people read the things on their site?

And second, the press release compares poorly to a 5th grader's first book report. It does not point out what the supposed lies, etc., are. The reader is left to guess. Only the most partisan of Democrats could possibly take it seriously, and rumor has it that they are all on Kerry's bandwagon already.

Note to Kerry: Preaching to the choir convinces not one wavering soul in the congregation. And you still need to convince more people in the congregation.

 
CONFESSIONS OF A SINGLE ISSUE VOTER

Andrew Sullivan has indicated repeatedly, forcefully and eloquently that he cannot vote for Bush. He will be voting for Kerry. This is based entirely on his concern with gay rights, especially single sex marriages.

Even though I agree with him on the issue, I think he's wrong to base his vote on that, because Kerry won't be much better than Bush on the issue and because, as painful as it is, all Sullivan has to do to win is wait. But that's his prerogative, and, in any event, it's not the point of this post. My point is that for years, I thought single issue voters (think abortion) were foolishly giving their votes to people with whom they disagreed on most things in order to elect someone to champion/oppose a single cause about which they were passionate. It seemed to me that they were unnecessarily restricting their choices and marginalizing themselves by ignoring every position but one of every politician for every office.

Until, that is, I became a single issue voter.

No matter how bad the economy really is or how bad it gets, no matter what else happens, the only conceivable issue for me in this election is the (misnamed) War on Terror. Which of the two choices realistically available to me, Bush or Kerry, will do a better job of prosecuting that war?

My take: Bush wins hands down on that issue.

Initially, Bush, along with the rest of the country, especially including its leaders of every political stripe, failed to recognize the size and immediacy of the threat. But since 9/11, Bush's performance on this issue has been both outstanding and far better than I think Kerry's would have been.

Kerry faults Bush for the lack of allies. That's nonsense, and Kerry is smart enough to know it (and also smart enough not to acknowledge that it's nonsense). Do we have enough allies? We do not and we never will. There is probably no such thing as "enough" allies. But Kerry is not complaining that we don't have enough allies. His real complaint is that we don't have the right ones: France and Germany.

Basically everyone agrees that taking out the Taliban in Afghanistan was the right thing to do. The disagreement revolves around Iraq. Should we have deposed Saddam, and was it related to 9/11? The answer, in both cases, is yes. The allied action in Iraq is related to the War on Terror in the same way that the allied landing in North Africa was related to the defeat of Germany in WWII. The best description of the strategy involved was written about a year ago by Steven denBeste. (Come back, Steven. Please. Pretty please. The sooner the better.)

Bush's acceptance speech at the convention tracks denBeste's outline closely. Iraq is intended to be a beachhead for liberal democracy in the Middle East, and

"[f]ree societies in the Middle East will be hopeful societies, which no longer feed resentments and breed violence for export. Free governments in the Middle East will fight terrorists instead of harboring them, and that helps us keep the peace."

What Bush failed to note is that democracies historically simply do not attack one another.

While I am quite sure that France and Germany were invited to join the "coalition of the willing," including either or both of those countries as allies in the war in Iraq would have required wholesale changes in the strategy and tactics used by the coalition. Inviting a partner who can make no realistic military contribution and who will, as the price for his cooperation, impose demands which make the implementation of your strategy impossible is just plain dumb, regardless of the economic or political support that might be provided.

Kerry's other major complaint is that Bush has damaged our relationship with those two major European powers. Have our European alliances been damaged by the disagreement over Iraq? Well, yes and no. There is damage, and it is substantial, but I think that the disagreement over Iraq was only the immediate cause. There were underlying disagreements which predated Iraq and even 9/11 which were eventually going to erupt anyway, resulting in much the same amount and type of damage.

Kerry also criticizes Bush for "misleading" us into Iraq. That's Demo-speak for failing to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And yes, that was a massive intelligence failure that occurred worldwide, including in France and Germany. Does the fact that others made the same mistake as the CIA (for which both Bush and Clinton bear the responsibility) excuse the CIA's failure? Not at all. But it does establish beyond any doubt that the CIA (and therefore both Bush and Clinton) had reasonable grounds to make the determination they did. Intelligence is never perfect. Sometimes its just plain wrong. This may be one of those times. Or maybe the damn things are sitting in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, waiting to be smuggled into Israel.

Weapons of mass destruction were one of a number of reasons to go into Iraq. They were never the only reason, as Kerry recognized when he said that he would also have gone into Iraq, even if he knew that he would find no WMD.

So much for Kerry's complaints about Bush. What would Kerry actually do, if elected? We don't really know. He says he would do what Bush is doing, but more effectively. He says he would get the cooperation of our traditional allies (code words for France and Germany). And he says he would begin to draw down US forces in Iraq within six months.

What does "more effectively" mean and how would Kerry accomplish it? We don't know. We don't know because he hasn't told us.

What cooperation does he think he can get from France and Germany that Bush can't? We don't know. We don't know because he hasn't told us.

Draw down our forces in Iraq starting in six months? It's always a bad idea to tell the other side in a conflict when you will be leaving, especially if the date you pick is not in the distant future. All they have to do to win is hunker down and wait, then come out to play after we've gone. They know damn well that if we leave, we won't come back. So we better not leave until the job is done. Really done. That means more than just the absence acts of of terror for a short period. It means dead or incarcerated terrorists. Lots of them. It means a functioning government and a functioning economy. It probably means permanent bases in Iraq for the foreseeable future. It did in Germany. And Japan. And Greece. And Turkey. Those four countries were the beneficiaries of a serious US military presence for decades during the Cold War, and that military presence was a huge factor in winning the Cold War.

And then you have Kerry's statements during the primaries about the coalition of the bribed and coerced. What a stupid way to treat the people who are doing what you want them to do (who are sometimes also known as "allies"). Is that how he intends to get France and Germany on board? Will he reward them as he rewards our current allies, by denigrating their contribution and their integrity (not to mention our own integrity)? Forget the insult to our friends. Does Kerry believe that calling our allies bribed and coerced is a "more effective" way to build a coalition?

Top all that off with Kerry's Senate testimony upon his return from Vietnam. Yes it was a long time ago. Yes, he was a much younger man. I will give him the benefit of the doubt and not conclude that he was grandstanding by repeating allegations that he did not then believe to be true. But my question is this: If Kerry once believed that our armed forces were routinely engaged in rape, mutilation, torture and other atrocities consituting war crimes, does he still believe that those things happened in Vietnam on the scale he described to the Senate and with the (at least tacit) consent of "all levels of command?" If so, the Swift Boat Vets are absolutely right, he is utterly unfit for command. If not, he must say so, and hold the nuance, please. Yes or no will do.

Bush's recent statement that the war cannot be won was foolish. We can win. We must win. We will win. (I know. I know. That's what Kerry said.) I don't think that "winning" means that there will be no more terrorism in the world. A warped mind, a bag of fertilizer and some fuel oil are all that is necessary to commit an act of terror, and all three ingredients are abundant throughout the world. I think that winning means that fewer terrorists exist, and that those terrorists that do exist are local, lacking the ability to strike beyond their own locale as they did on 9/11. To me, winning means that terrorists have no umbrella groups like al Qaeda to provide financial and logistic support.

It is only speculation, but I think Bush was really talking about what winning will look like. There won't be surrender documents signed on the USS Missouri. Winning the War on Terror will bear more resemblance to the end of the Cold War: a gradual decrease in the frequency and severity of terrorist incidents, followed (and in some cases, preceded) by seemingly abrupt political changes towards liberal democracy in the Middle East and parts of Asia. I think we won't realize we have won for at least several years after we have, in fact, won.

Whatever he meant by that statement, Bush beats Kerry like a retarded mule on the only issue for me this fall.

(Kudos to Pervasive Light for the retarded mule imagery.)

 
STILL MORE "BAD" NEWS

CNN's breaking news banner says Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri (the King of Clubs in the infamous deck of cards) has been captured. If it is possible to link to the banner, I don't know how to do it, but CNN's home page is here.

My money says that before the end of the day, someone will question the timing of the capture. The only question in my mind is how closely associated with the Kerry campaign that someone will be.

This is bad news for Kerry in at least three ways:

It's yet another reminder (as if we needed one after the Russian Schoolhouse massacre) that we're in a war.

It's an indication of progress in that war.

Along with the Clinton bypass surgery and the story from Russia, it will suck still more oxygen out of the press coverage that Kerry desparately needs.

It's a shame, really, that Kerry needs bad news from Iraq and the economy in order to succeed.

But he does. And, for the moment, Kerry is (thankfully) doing very poorly.

Update: CNN is now saying that there is "confusion" about the story, that the Iraqis are denying they have al-Duri and that the Pentagon is "expressing doubt."