Saturday, August 21, 2004

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.)

Friday, August 20, 2004

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.

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

George Bush's America

Lies in Iraq (link courtesy mathew)

But there is one other thing that I haven't mentioned yet that is also beyond a doubt. No matter what happened on that bridge, the soldiers were ordered to lie about it. And they were ordered to lie about it not just by their team leader, but by the entire leadership of their unit, from their company commander all the way up to their battalion commander.

How do we know this? Because at the Article 32 hearing only 2 weeks ago, their commanders, under grant of immunity, said so.

So, let's get this straight: military commanders receive immunity for ordering those under their command to lie in order for them to testify against the soldiers that they ordered to lie? That's what it sounds like.

Recommendation

The makers of OutFoxed are out with a video rebuttal of Bill O'Reilly's appearance with Paul Krugman on Tim Russert's show (Quicktime, 14Mb)..

Michael Moore, gadfly

Michael Moore to release two new books before election day. One will be a companion book to Fahrenheit 9/11. The other will be a collection of letters written to Moore from U.S. troops called "Will They Ever Trust Us Again?"

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

I'm back!

Just got back into town. Catching up on all I missed. More later.