What will they do?

There comes a time when you have to choose.
The Log Cabin Republicans, the Republican Youth Majority, and the Republicans for Choice want to have it both ways -- they support the Republican Party, so they think the Republican Party should respect them.
Sorry -- ain't gonna happen.
Their "unity plank" was a valiant effort. But the Bush republicans have never listened to anyone's contrary opinion for the last four years, so why would they start now?
You know, in Canada, when provincial courts began giving gay couples the right to marry, it wasn't a frivolous or unreasonable ruling, nor was it judicial activism. The rulings were based firmly on the Canadian Charter of Rights, that gays should be treated equally. Then Chretien and Martin did what real leaders should do -- they took on the task of leading Canadians to accept the basic fairness of those rulings.
Bush could have done the same, he could have famed the issue not as a gay issue but as a rights issue.
He chose not to do that.

Now Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Pataki, and Dick Cheney have a choice to make -- are they going to speak to this convention, or not? Speaking to the convention means they are endorsing the RNC's extremist platform. So are they just 'girlie-men' who will pander to the religious right?

And millions of republicans have a choice to make, too.

Stunts

Great -- the democrats have finally learned how to pull a political stunt with good visuals which will get coverage particularly on TV news.
Sounds to me like they have read and understood Liberal Oasis:
If there's one lesson the Kerry campaign and the rest of us should take from this sorry Swift Boat Liar episode is how lame the media will be this election season. The inability to cut off media oxygen to people who are clearly discredited shows how the media hasn't learned any lessons following its vapid 2000 coverage and its embarrassing Iraq war coverage . . . OK, so the media sucks. Does that mean Kerry's doomed? No. It just means the campaign strategy has to take the media's lameness into account. When the media is almost nothing but a conduit for attacks, and when it levies almost no penalties to attackers, the guy who initiates attacks will get more media love. And it's a hell of a lot better to be regularly delivering attacks to the media, than regularly explaining away attacks. If Kerry tries to just drill messages about jobs, health care and Halliburton, he won't be able to. He'll just be knocked off message over and over. Unless he's applying pressure to Bush by spooling out his own attacks. (Of course, Kerry can distinguish himself by basing his attacks on facts and not distortions.)
Bring it on.

Its's not that difficult, folks

So Atrios points out that some news people are somewhat miffed that Kerry has chosen The Daily Show for an extended interview tonight. He won the TV Critics Association's award as the year's best news and information program, which WP critic Lisa de Moraes reported this way: "We think Stewart was given the TCA Award because his Comedy Central show was the only one early on to ask the tough questions about the decision to invade Iraq . . . Stewart was somewhat baffled by the award -- his show won a TCA award last year for best comedy program. In his taped acceptance speech, he pointed out that his newscast is "fake," "illegitimate" and "unprofessional." Stewart insisted it must be some sort of mistake and said that if his show had an actual fact-checking apparatus, like an real news program, they would check it out."
Actually, its not that difficult to run a professional TV news program -- just be knowledgeable about the background material, anticipate what your guests are likely to say, and be ready to challenge them if need be. Stewart actually does this with just about every guest he had on, even the softball TV-star/movie-star/author-of-the-week interviews. And his gang of "special correspondents" do it too.
And they demand truth, even when their stories are about gay penguins. Thus they invariably pinpoint any stupidities, inconsistencies, evasions and lies which they find in the news stories of the day. Just how hard it is to do that, these days?

More Abu Ghraib

I have tried to think of something clever or insightful to say about this, but I cannot. I guess it stands on its own.
This Washington Post story is truly disgusting --"MPs were using their animals to make juveniles -- as young as 15 years old -- urinate on themselves as part of a competition" and "military intelligence soldiers kept multiple detainees off the record books and hid them from international humanitarian organizations " and "at least one male detainee was sodomized by one of his captors at Abu Ghraib".

Still crazy after all these years

During the Vietnam war, I remember some people, particularly military types, promoting the idea that it was the war protestors who caused America's defeat.
Now, I am not a military historian, but I lived through this war and I do know that's ridiculous -- America could NEVER have won in Vietnam (the French couldn't win it, either). The idea that any combination of firepower and tactics could have defeated North Vietnam is like thinking that Napolean could ever have defeated Russia in the War of 1812, or that Japan could ever have defeated the United States in World War II (I'm sure a real military historian could think of many more apt and perhaps more accurate examples.) History has many examples of wars which could have gone either way -- Germany came incredibly close to taking over all of Europe before the US entered that war, for example -- but Vietnam isn't one of them.
But I have gone through the last 30 years thinking that this blame-the-protestors idea had been completely discredited as last self-serving gasp of an archaic military culture which had afterwards learned to face reality. In fact, it was the war protestors who saw, much sooner than the military, that the Vietnam War was both unwinnable and immoral. They saved thousands of American and Vietnamese lives by getting the war stopped before the military could adopt a desperate and despicable tactic like using an atomic bomb on Hanoi (and even doing that would not have "won" the war).
Seeing the anger emerging now about Kerry's war protests, however, makes me realize that the blame-the protestors revisionism may have been festering all these years, and now infecting a younger generation who don't know what really happened. And if this is so, then it must be addressed.
All the thousands and thousands of Americans who protested that war will need to open the wound again, to speak out again, just like William Rood has now done, to set the record straight and to educate their children and their grandchildren about what really happened over there and also in America.
Oh, that goddammed war.

Cheez Whiz Lovers for Truth

I wonder if a Canadian could form a new group, the Cheez Whiz Lovers for Truth (CWLT). We're going to blast George Bush for the outright lies he keeps telling to the American people.
Here's the proof -- a Philadelphia newspaper now reports that Bush likes his Philly Cheese Steak sandwich WITHOUT CHEEZ WHIZ, when he distinctly told a Pennsylvania group last week "This is the 32nd time I’ve been to your state of Pennsylvania, and, you all know the reason why, don’t you? It’s because I like my cheesesteaks Whiz With."
This bald-faced lie demonstrates Bush's unfitness to lead -- his base appetites are demonstrably unpleasant, unAmerican (though what else would you expect from an alcoholic Yale graduate) and then he lies about it, openly, without shame, just to curry favour with a group of defense-industry workers. And the implications may be even wider -- does he take Cheez Whiz on his broccoli? DOES HE EVEN EAT BROCCOLI? Or does he follow the same disgusting, unhealthy lifestyle as his father, that broccoli-denyer? Clearly, all this needs detailed examination by the major media.
The Columbia Journalism Review has already picked up on it, and Matthew Yglesias is promoting this cause. He writes "Can we all agree to talk about nothing besides why the president lies about cheese and why the media won't cover it for days and days and days until his campaign is finally forced to admit that, yes, the president of the United States is so desperate to be loved that he will lie about cheese and then we can all scream -- "see, he admitted it, he's a liar, a damn dirty cheese-eating liar!" I mean, really, who lies about cheese? Can you trust this man?"
And Americans thought the French were "cheese-eating surrender monkeys".
UPDATE: Cheez Whiz spelling corrected - sorry. I keep trying to spell it with a terminal E - how French is that?

Terrorism scares

Doug Saunders writes a terrific column in today's Globe. He asks "If we won the war on terror, would anyone tell us?"
He describes how terrified people are about terrorism, and for how little reason, as recent research has shown. ". . . terrorism (defined as attacks against civilians by non-state organizations) reached its peak in 1988, and has been on a more or less steady decline since then. . . . Even including those 4,000 deaths [from 9/11], 2001 had a lower terrorist death toll than 1998, or almost any year in the 1980s. If another attack on that scale were to occur later this year, we would still all be safer from terrorism than we have been for much of the past two decades. . . it's clear that the attention from media and governments is working: Terrorism has almost disappeared as a tactic. Former menaces such as Ireland's IRA or Spain's ETA or America's survivalists have been put out of business, through diplomacy or policing or both. The war on terrorism has succeeded.
But we're all scared. "
This rang a chord. Yesterday I was chatting with a co-worker who spent part of her summer holiday in New York. She was visiting family just outside the city during the most recent "orange alert" scare. I was on the verge of saying something about how stupid it was when she began to describe how frightened she and her family had all been, how closely they had been following the news, and how the family debated long and hard about whether she should even go into Manhattan at all -- they all had the impression that they risked imminent death with every minute in the city. In the end, I had the impression that she felt she was lucky to be alive to tell about the experience.
So, of course, I did not make any snarky remarks to her. But her story could have been an example for Saunder's column:
"What is dangerous about these times, in truth, is our fear: Much as hypochondriacs often worry themselves sick, our culture's mass delusion of imminent danger may actually be more damaging than terrorism or murder . . . It is a global version of a well-established municipal phenomenon, known for decades as the crime scare . . . For the past couple of years, [Toronto] newspapers have been filled with front-page stories about "Jamaican crime sprees" and deadly Vietnamese gangs, and TV newscasts have led nightly with endless details about grisly child abductions. It was not hard for many citizens, myself included, to become fearful . . . And then, three weeks ago, a news item appeared, for precisely one day, on the deep inside pages of most newspapers: The violent crime rate in Canada has fallen to its lowest point in 37 years. Canadians have not been this safe since 1967, and in no major city are people safer than in Toronto. There, your chances of being murdered have fallen to 1.9 in 100,000, making it one of the least dangerous cities in the world. . . . Police, ever mindful of budgets, encourage people to believe that . . . extremely rare incidents are part of a growing trend. The people of Toronto recently made the wise decision to sack their police chief, who among other things spent considerable energy trying to persuade people that menaces lurked on every corner. The reality, that violent crime had virtually been wiped out and that the city was probably over-policed, was an unmentionable budgetary taboo. We should consider doing the same for a good number of cabinet ministers, national-police chiefs, intelligence-agency heads and directors of homeland security around the world. They have learned the old crime-scare trick, and are playing it to the hilt, with help from glorified cop-shop hacks often known as national-security reporters. "

And the beat goes on

The press finally appears to be reaching the conclusion that all the emphasis on Vietnam is meant to divert attention away from what is happening in Iraq.
So what IS happening in Iraq? Most of the media are focusing only on the Najaf confrontation, as though the rest of the country is quiet. But Today in Iraq continues to document the chaos, now a year after the UN headquarters bombing.
Here is the list of mayhem and destruction for just the last two days, August 20 and 21 -
Two US Marines killed in fighting in al-Anbar province.
Two US soldiers killed, three wounded by roadside bomb ambush near Samarra.
Two Iraqis killed, four wounded in ambush of US convoy near Baquba.
Thirteen Iraqis killed, 107 wounded in fighting in Baghdad during last 24 hours.
Seventy-seven Iraqis killed, 70 wounded in fighting in Najaf during last 24 hours.
Heavy fighting reported in Kufa.
Dutch patrol ambushed in Samawah; two Iraqis killed.
US Army patrol ambushed near Khalis.
One Polish soldier killed, six wounded by car bomb near Hilla.
Pipeline sabotaged near Kirkuk. Pipeline sabotaged near Amarah.
One US soldier killed, two wounded in Baghdad RPG ambush.
Senior Iraqi police official assassinated near Ramadi.
Bulgarian troops shelled near Karbala.
Three Iraqi policemen killed in bombing at Nasiriyah police station.
Two Polish soldiers killed, five wounded in ambush near Hilla.
Two Iraqis killed, eleven wounded in two US air strikes in Fallujah.

Rood steps up

This is great. A real Swift Boat Captain actually speaks the Truth.
William Rood writes:
The approach of the noisy 50-foot aluminum boats, each driven by two huge 12-cylinder diesels and loaded down with six crew members, troops and gear, was no secret. Ambushes were a virtual certainty, and that day was no exception. The difference was that Kerry, who had tactical command of that particular operation, had talked to Droz and me beforehand about not responding the way the boats usually did to an ambush. We agreed that if we were not crippled by the initial volley and had a clear fix on the location of the ambush, we would turn directly into it, focusing the boats' twin .50-caliber machine guns on the attackers and beaching the boats. We told our crews about the plan. The Viet Cong in the area had come to expect that the heavily loaded boats would lumber on past an ambush, firing at the entrenched attackers, beaching upstream and putting troops ashore to sweep back down on the ambush site. Often, they were long gone by the time the troops got there. The first time we took fire—the usual rockets and automatic weapons—Kerry ordered a "turn 90" and the three boats roared in on the ambush. It worked. We routed the ambush, killing three of the attackers. The troops, led by an Army adviser, jumped off the boats and began a sweep, which killed another half dozen VC, rounded or captured others and found weapons, blast masks and other supplies used to stage ambushes.Meanwhile, Kerry ordered our boat to head upstream with his, leaving Droz's boat at the first site. It happened again, another ambush. And again, Kerry ordered the turn maneuver, and again it worked. As we headed for the riverbank, I remember seeing a loaded B-40 launcher pointed at the boats. It wasn't fired as two men jumped up from their spider holes. We called Droz's boat up to assist us, and Kerry, followed by one member of his crew, jumped ashore and chased a VC behind a hooch—a thatched hut—maybe 15 yards inland from the ambush site. Some who were there that day recall the man being wounded as he ran. Neither I nor Jerry Leeds, our boat's leading petty officer with whom I've checked my recollection of all these events, recalls that, which is no surprise. Recollections of those who go through experiences like that frequently differ.With our troops involved in the sweep of the first ambush site, Richard Lamberson, a member of my crew, and I also went ashore to search the area. I was checking out the inside of the hooch when I heard gunfire nearby. Not long after that, Kerry returned, reporting that he had killed the man he chased behind the hooch. He also had picked up a loaded B-40 rocket launcher, which we took back to our base in An Thoi after the operation. John O'Neill, author of a highly critical account of Kerry's Vietnam service, describes the man Kerry chased as a "teenager" in a "loincloth." I have no idea how old the gunner Kerry chased that day was, but both Leeds and I recall that he was a grown man, dressed in the kind of garb the VC sually wore. The man Kerry chased was not the "lone" attacker at that site, as O'Neill suggests. There were others who fled. There was also firing from the tree line well behind the spider holes and at one point, from the opposite riverbank as well. It was not the work of just one attacker.

South Korea will win it in the end

This is bullshit. The story claims that judging marks cannot be changed or protested. But Sylivia Frechette from Canada was awarded the gold retroactively, following a judging error in the Barcelona games. It took a year before that medal was awarded, and the American who "won" the gold was allowed to keep her medal, too.

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.