Month: September 2004

You know what? This document was not created in 1973. Maybe it’s a transcription, but that’s Times New Roman, and those are curly apostrophes, and there’s just no way. Also, it’s a lousy CYA memo, since it’s just claims with no backing evidence.

CBS needs to provide an evidence trail for those memos, or give up on their authenticity.

Says Hugh Hewitt:

… the weakness of Kerrry as a candidate is obvious from the fact that it has now been 38 days since Kerry sat down on camera with a major figure from American journalism for an in-depth interview that would be certain to bring up Kerry’s whoppers about his Vietnam service.

I see. And the last Bush on-camera interview with a major figure from American journalism was… when? Larry King, on August 12th? So that’d be 26 days ago or so.

We now know the official difference between weak candidates and strong candidates. If you don’t do interviews for 26 days, that’s OK — but if you go 12 days further, well, that’s weakness.

Judicial Watch has requested an investigation of Kerry’s activities after his release from active duty; namely, his discussions with delegations from North Vietnam in Paris. They’ve also joined the howling pack that would like to prove that Kerry’s medals weren’t earned. I don’t particularly feel the need to waste my time debunking these myths — you’ll note that it is not illegal for servicemen to speak with officials of foreign governments, and while it is illegal for them to negotiate with such officials, it’s hard to figure out how an ordinary citizen on inactive duty would have the power to negotiate anything. What I would like to do is discuss the claims that Judicial Watch is “non-partisan.”

The Judicial Watch case page lists 110 separate cases. Of those cases, 70 involve Democrats. 42 of those involve Bill or Hillary Clinton. Another 6 of them were filed at the right time to be directed against the Clinton Administration, but there’s not enough detail to be sure.

14 of them involve Republicans. 19 of them aren’t directly related to either political party. There are several cases involving Democrats which were filed during the Bush Administration. There are no cases involving Republicans filed during the Clinton Administration.

So while I applaud any group, partisan or non, that spends a lot of time filing lawsuits to make government agencies follow through on FOIA requests, I do think that Judicial Watch might want to stop pretending that it doesn’t have any political leanings.

Show up at a Bush event with a Kerry/Edwards T-shirt: get thrown out.

Show up at a Kerry event with a Bush/Cheney T-shirt: nobody cares.

Same person, same day, same state.

Edit: er, different state. Just very close.

Once again, it’s the politics of fear. This time, it’s Zell Miller talking about how desperately afraid he is.

And like you, I ask: Which leader is it today that has the vision, the willpower and, yes, the backbone to best protect my family?

The clear answer to that question has placed me in this hall with you tonight. For my family is more important than my party.

There is but one man to whom I am willing to entrust their future, and that man’s name is George W. Bush.

And that sounds very noble, at first, if you don’t think about it too hard. It sounds like a man who’s making hard choices. But it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, really, does it? He’s saying that he will do anything, including turning on the Democratic Party that gave him a Senate seat, in order to keep his family from harm. (Miller was appointed by the Democratic Governor of Georgia to fill a vacant seat; he owes his current seat to his former party rather than to the voters.) He doesn’t care what it takes; he wants his family safe. At any cost. He’s chosen safety over freedom.

And yeah, it sounds noble. Unless, maybe, you think about the families who have paid the price to protect Zell Miller. A thousand Americans dead; 6,500 Americans wounded. So what he’s saying is that he trusts Bush to keep his kids safe, at the cost of sending someone else’s children to Iraq — and he’s too numbed by danger to remember that Iraq was never a threat to his children. That Iraq had no WMD. That Iraq was controlled by sanctions.

This is what fear breeds: men who will do anything, however immoral or unwise, to keep their families safe.