Vietnam

People who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.
No one younger than I am -- 55 -- actually remembers the Vietnam War -- or, as one of my American professors called it, "That goddamn war".
It was not the neat war of fronts and uniformed enemies nor was it a moral war of evil enemies and innocent civilians. It was a quagmire from the beginning, and it just got worse the longer the Americans stayed.
John Kerry was absolutely right to tell Congress that Vietnam was turning too many young Americans into murderous torturers and killers -- which is exactly what Iraq has been doing to American soldiers, too.
Perhaps the soldiers who left Vietnam in the mid-60s did not see as much of this as the soldiers there later -- but as things deteriorated, more and more South Vietnamese people embraced the cause of the North and became insurgents, and the conditions under which Americans were serving became truly vile.
Yale University psychologist Robert Lipton described it this way in The Winter Soldier Investigation of 1971

There's a quality of atrocity in this war that goes beyond that of other wars in that the war itself is fought as a series of atrocities. There is no distinction between an enemy whom one can justifiably fire at and people whom one murders in less than military situations. It's all thrown together so that every day the distinction between every day activities and atrocities is almost nil. Now if one carries this sense of atrocity with one, one carries the sense of descent into evil. This is very strong in Vietnam vets. It's also strong in the rest of society, and this is what we mean by the primitive or brutalized behavior that there has been so much talk about. I think that this brutalization and the patterns that occur in the war again have to do with the nature of the
war we are fighting and the people we've chosen to make our enemies.
This has to do with the atrocities characterizing the war, as often happens in a counterinsurgency of war, we intervene in a civil war or in a revolution in a far-away alien place that you don't understand historically or psychologically, but also with the technological disparity. It's of great psychological significance that Americans go around with such enormous fire power in a technologically under-developed country and develop a kind of uneasy sense of power around their technological fire power, which they then use very loosely, and often with the spirit of a hunter, as we've again heard much about. In all this way, I would stress very strongly, the GI in Vietnam becomes both victim and executioner.

Hardblogger

gets it. This MSNBC project started during the Demcratic convention, and at the time I wondered whether the reporters and commentators contributing to it would actually use it as a blog -- where personal opinions combine with thoughtful analysis to project a uniquely "personal" view -- or just as promos for their upcoming shows.
Well, I think they are getting it. Hardblogger tonight contains the kind of unique perspective from Obermann and Matthews that illuminates their remarkable interviews today. Even the comments are pretty good. Keep it up, guys.

Hamsters for Kerry

I love it -- check it out. And I am adding their link to my list. Thanks, tsuredzuregusa.

"I voted to support the president and he fucked it up"

The new Shorter Kerry line -- "I voted to support the president and he fucked it up."
Ah, yes -- and there's the line for all of America.
They tried so hard to support Bush after 9/11, they needed a leader so badly that they made up a leader-myth mirage and cloaked it around Bush.
How easy would it have been for him to win this election? Just a reasonable modicum of competence, that's all the American people wanted -- some focused funding for education and health care, a little effort at job creation, some restraint on greedy tax cuts, maintaining a reasonable level of environmental protection, supporting a few upgraded benefits for the troops, and a foreign policy that worked earnestly and seriously, even if ineffectively, to resolve the Israel-Palestinian mess.
The media has given the republicans this inflated reputation as being super-competent, precision, shock-and-awe campaigners.
But their campaign so far is a joke -- low-turnout events clumsily staged and scripted, cobbled-together "announcements" that do not amount to anything (like the "bringing the troops home" announcement, but not from where people are shooting at them, and its not happening for years, anyway).
Cheney is supposed to be this big-time "attack dog" but his attacks are junior-high juvenile (ooh, ooh, teach -- he said "Sensitive"!) and Bush is supposed to be this "great communicator" but just babbles on and on and uses the same tired jokes over and over (and he doesn't know what "sovereignty" means). And the Swift Boat ads have surpassed even the Willie Horton ads for dishonesty, leaving Bush with no cover for the cowardice of hiw own so-called military career and for his 9/11 freeze frame.
Coming in the fall will be a series of ads showing why republicans are switching to Kerry -- the trickle will, I think, become a deluge.

Those who live by the sword . . .

. . . die by the sword.
One of the vets who accuses Kerry of lying about the Bronze Star incident himself is lying about what he went through that day. Thurlow now says there was no enemy fire on the day that he and Kerry both won Bronze Stars -- well, the citation for his award says there was lots of enemy fire.
So either everyone was lying about everything 35 years ago -- or Thurlow's 15 minutes are OVER.
UPDATE: A class act -- Kerry has asked MoveOn to stop broadcasting its ads that describe Bush's contribution to the Vietnam War . Kerry said "This should be a campaign of issues, not insults." The only problem for the republicans, though, is that the issues are all against them, so all they have is insults.

Rally numbers

Has anyone added up how many people have attended the Kerry/Edwards rallies?
It must be in the hundreds of thousands by now.

Not with a bang

So, the FBI is now protecting America by investigating American protesters.
The New York Times reports F.B.I. Goes Knocking for Political Troublemakers . This activity is authorized, apparently, by a legal opinion from the Justice Department -- you remember them, don't you -- the people who brought you Abu Gharib?
Most chilling is this anecdote:
. . . three young men in Missouri said they were trailed by federal agents for several days and subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury last month, forcing them to cancel their trip to Boston to take part in a protest there that same day . . . All three have taken part in past protests over American foreign policy and in planning meetings for convention demonstrations. [Ms. Lieberman, their lawyer} said two of them were arrested before on misdemeanor charges for what she described as minor civil disobedience at protests. Prosecutors have now informed the men that they are targets of a domestic terrorism investigation, Ms. Lieberman said, but have not disclosed the basis for their suspicions. "They won't tell me," she said.
Its the refrain of the Hollow Men - this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.

Dueling deficits? Not really.

Here's another headline for the Bush Headline Project.
The New York Times headlines its story "Styles similar in Bush and Kerry duel on deficit numbers"
The idea here is to promote the view that Kerry would be no better at handling the economy than Bush has been. So therefore, you might as well vote for Bush because he's so strong on terror.
But lets not actually have a detailed comparison of the numbers and projections, no. Instead, lets just have a series of contradictory and meaningless quotes from the two campaigns.
This is what passes in the US major media these days as 'exploring the issues.'
The head of the Concord Coalition is quoted in the article as saying "It's unclear to me that either candidate is better" but what the coalition also said in July is much more detailed and more critical of Bush: "The President’s budget claims to cut the deficit in half over five years but omits the likely cost of ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, assumes a freeze on non-security appropriations and pretends that relief from the growing alternative minimum tax will be temporary. Moreover, its 5-year window ignores the 10-year revenue loss of making the President’s tax cuts permanent. In Congress, deficit reduction talk has produced actions that only make it more difficult to close the gap. "
The article fails to include this telling detail. What it does say, in paragraph 17 is this: "Compared with Mr. Bush's plans, Mr. Kerry's proposals would amount to an increase in taxes. But the full panoply of Mr. Kerry's proposals would lead to tax cuts totaling $425 billion over 10 years, which would rank him as one of the biggest tax-cutters in history." Without any further explanation, this paragraph doesn't make any sense, particularly in the context of the article and its headline. The media script is that republicans cut taxes while democrats raise them -- so lets not ever have a headline or a story which contradicts that script.

They're starting to get it

Finally, the US media is starting to understand that the Iraq war is unwinnable -- Fred Kaplan's article in Slate entitled "No Way Out. Is there any hope of avoiding catastrophe in Iraq?" will be the first of a series of articles we will see over the next two months.
This is exactly what Dean and Kerry and the left-wing bloggers and the rest of the democrats saw a year ago, even two years ago. For Dean, it made him an anti-war candidate.
Kerry, a more strategic thinkier, realized that the American economic position and interests in the Middle East required a more complicated posture now than the simpler anti-war Vietnam approach of 30 years ago -- see my "Kerry-think" post from last weekend on how he would try to handle this mess.
The US could afford an ignominious end to Vietnam -- the whole idea of that war, remember, was to protect South Vietnam from North Vietnam and hence prevent big bad old China from taking over southeast Asia. But by the time America plucked its last soldier off the embassy roof, it was clear that China had enough trouble just running its own country, never mind Vietnam.
Abandoning Iraq, however, would destabilize both Israel and oil interests. (Yes, I know, I know, they made their bed and maybe they should have to lie in it -- but the world doesn't need another Arab/Israeli war now, particularly with the American army in the middle.)
Kaplan starts with the same dilemna that Kerry saw:
"There might be nothing we can do to build a path to a stable, secure, let alone democratic regime. And there's no way we can just pull out without plunging the country, the region, and possibly beyond into still deeper disaster."
And then Kaplan finds himself going in Kerry's direction:
". . . with the right mix of incentives, Russia and France might be persuaded to send troops. One key would be to play on their commercial ambitions. Give both countries—and any others—favored status to bid on vital contracts. Iraq's oil reserves alone might prove tempting. The other key would be to turn over the occupation, including its military command, to an outside entity: NATO, the European Union, the United Nations, the Arab League—anything, as long as the general in charge is not an American."
Kaplan concludes ". . . the best we can hope for, at this point, is an Iraq that doesn't blow up and take the region with it. The dismaying, frightening thing is how imponderably difficult it will be simply to avoid catastrophe."
Once again, Kerry has been ahead of the curve.

More up is downism

No wonder the Bush administration wants more of its judicial appointments to go through -- the courts have been the only place which has stopped its rampant pro-business regulatory changes which have been proceeding at a furious pace and without any particular respect for public input or safety, apparently.
Is anyone surprised?

Blowing up the money

One of the problems old-time bank robbers used to have was blowing up the money -- using so much explosive to blow open a safe that they destroyed both the safe and the money in it.
This is what the US is now doing in Iraq -- the fighting in Najaf is a no-win situation for the US military, for Iraq's so-called government, and for the Bush administration.
Half of the new Iraq government just resigned over the US attacks on Najaf and Kut. And, as they did in Fallujah in April, perhaps US commanders in the field are having second thoughts again about the impossible situation their troops are in, with the New York Times reporting they appear to be stopping their advance again
Now Cheney is trying to ridicule Kerry for using the word "sensitive" in describing how he would deal with the war on terror. Well, as the Daily Show demonstrated, Bush himself has also used this word in the past to describe how the US should be acting. Not, of course, that the Pentagon has behaved with any actual sensitivity toward Iraq, so maybe it doesn't count.

Teflon Kerry

One of the attributes of a winning politician is his ability to fall on both sides of an issue, to the extent that both sides can think he is supporting their view? This ability, properly used, creates a "teflon" politician -- one to whom bad news does not stick. It drives opponents crazy, because there is nothing they can get a handle on. Reagan had it, and so did Clinton. Bush has tried to develop it, but with the usual clumsy incompetence of his administration has too often revealed the ventriloquist behind the curtain.
Well, it looks like John Kerry has developed this ability as well.
Here is arch-right-winger Glenn Reynolds actually supporting Kerry for his Iraq war stance and his stem cell research stance -- its stunning, amazing, that Reynolds would actually think Kerry supports the Iraq war. But its a tribute to how slippery Kerry has become on this issue, refusing to give his opponents a handle for attacks -- Bush was reduced to the ridiculous posture of "blasting" Kerry for a vote which actually supported Bush's own position!
Keep it up, John.

The hand is quicker than the eye

The New York Times nails it in this editorial Sidestepping reform at the CIA By naming a new CIA director now, Bush is trying to pull off a bit of hocus-pocus, whisking the focus of Congress and the country away from the 9.11 commission recommendations. It will be interesting to see whether the commission members and Congress will be bamboozled.

Cat on board

This Cat pounces on pilot mid-flight is hilarious.
Though I'm glad I wasn't sitting forward.

The Son also rises

Ron Reagan writes The Case Against George W. Bush in September's Esquire magazine.
Politicians will stretch the truth. They'll exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have taken "normal" mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on.
Reagan is particularly mad about the constant lying:
All administrations will dissemble, distort, or outright lie when their backs are against the wall, when honesty begins to look like political suicide. But this administration seems to lie reflexively, as if it were simply the easiest option for busy folks with a lot on their minds. While the big lies are more damning and of immeasurably greater import to the nation, it is the small, unnecessary prevarications that may be diagnostic. Who lies when they don't have to? When the simple truth, though perhaps embarrassing in the short run, is nevertheless in one's long-term self-interest? Why would a president whose calling card is his alleged rock-solid integrity waste his chief asset for penny-ante stakes? Habit, perhaps. Or an inability to admit even small mistakes.
The article includes what the democrats should be codifying and calling The List: not just Iraq, but also climate change, energy policies, security failures, no child left behind underfunding, medicare bungling -- and Reagan also notes all of the people now against Bush - scientists, diplomats, generals. Its an impressive list.
I wonder whether anyone at the republican convention will dare to mention Reagan's legacy.