Author: Bryant

The cynical may enjoy being proven right by thirty-odd Fox News memos. It is blatantly clear that Fox News thinks of itself as the conservative defender of truth against the marauding liberal news media.

We have good perp walk video of Eric Rudolph which we should use. We should NOT assume that anyone who supported or helped Eric Rudolph is a racist. No one’s in favor of murder or bombing of public places. But feelings in North Carolina may just be more complicated than the NY Times can conceive.

There’s a not really that subtle difference between saying that Rudolph’s supporters had complex motivations and saying that they made a mistake. One excuses supporting a terrorist, and one does not. Consider this statement: “No one’s in favor of murder or bombing of public places. But feelings in Palestine may just be more complicated than Fox News can conceive.” Somehow I can’t imagine Fox News taking that tack.

Newsweek reports that the Department of Homeland Security is looking into ways to postpone the November Presidential election in the case of an Al Qaeda attack.

But the success of March’s Madrid railway bombings in influencing the Spanish elections—as well as intercepted “chatter” among Qaeda operatives—has led analysts to conclude “they want to interfere with the elections,” says one official.

Forcing a delay in elections is every bit as much interference, if not more so, as an attack which causes people to change their vote. This is so obvious that I have trouble believing that it’s escaped the Bush administration.

Soaries, a Bush appointee who two years ago was an unsuccessful GOP candidate for Congress, wants Ridge to seek emergency legislation from Congress empowering his agency to make such a call. Homeland officials say that as drastic as such proposals sound, they are taking them seriously—along with other possible contingency plans in the event of an election-eve or Election Day attack.

Contingency plans are good. Legislation that could delay the election is bad. Sure, if something happens to LA the day of the election, it would be good to hold the results until the voters of Los Angeles can vote — but it does not make sense to keep the entire country from voting in a situation where they could reasonably get to the polls.

Gosh, that’s unfortunate. Some of Bush’s service records were destroyed in 1996 and 1997. By accident.

This should be easy enough to resolve; since Bush wasn’t the only guy whose records were lost, one assumes that there’d be an official record of the accident. Perhaps even a postmortem. Memos. That sort of thing.

Except that I can’t help noticing that Lt. Colonel Bill Burkett said, in February of this year, that members of George Bush’s staff purged the National Guard files in 1997. Damned confluence of dates. Now, the records that Burkett says were destroyed were not the records that the Defense Department just admitted to destroying accidentally, so this is not exactly a smoking gun. I think the time period is still suggestive, however. If you believe Burkett, it’s not a stretch to suspect that the Texas Air National Guard was not the only organization willing to clean up Bush’s records.

Anyhow, the next step is getting a look at the memos from 1997 which discuss the accident.

Then, in Rwanda. Now, in Sudan. This is pretty much for me so that I don’t forget to read these regularly.

On a semi-detached, attempting dispassionate note, the Rwanda blog is a new twist on the Pepys and Sei Shonagon blogs: historical events retold in the blog — dare I say it? — medium. I think it works.