Category: Politics

Jim Lehrer: “And if any of you audience people yak during the debate, I am going to come down there and whip your ass.”

Or something like that.

One reason I’m fairly confident Kerry will win: he has the best ground game. I’ve been assuming that get out the vote efforts were a major component of the DNC’s strategy this election for a few reasons; most obviously, I’ve just seen a lot of activity oriented towards getting people to the polls this year. More importantly, though, I watched John Kerry win in Iowa because of an absolutely perfect get out the vote operation run by Michael Whouley. Any campaign with Whouley at the center is going to be one that has a good ground game, regardless of anything else.

The really significant thing about the “chaos” in the Kerry campaign last month was not Joe Lockhart’s arrival. The media gets very excited about every Clinton signing, so it was nice for them to be able to run stories about the Clintonistas taking over the campaign — Lockhart was Clinton’s press secretary. The real news, however, was that John Sasso, another experienced Massachusetts political operative, joined the campaign. That made it possible for Michael Whouley to go over to the DNC to be their General Election Manager.

And who’s outsourcing a lot of their get out the vote effort to 527s? The DNC, which now has the best ground game in the business. If Kerry loses this election, it will not be because of poor voter turnout.

Followup: the Navy turned down Judicial Watch’s request for an investigation of Kerry’s medals. This came after an examination of the available evidence.

Not that this will convince anyone, but Lt. Col. Killian’s secretary says she didn’t believe in the CBS documents. She says, as has been hypothesized, that she would have typed the documents for him and that she doesn’t remember doing so. She was very specific about the typewriters she had available.

She also verified the content of the memos, and said that they accurately reflected Killian’s opinions about Bush.

This all jibes pretty well with the theory that Bill Burkett was the source of the memos. He believes he saw Bush’s records being purged back in 1997. He’s highly pissed off about the whole thing. I’m ready to believe that he made a stupid mistake, and that he recreated (or perhaps simply retyped) memos that summarize how Killian felt at the time.

This explains why the memos mesh with what is painfully obvious: Bush didn’t take his National Guard service too seriously, and he was willing to pull strings to make it easier on himself. It also explains the amazing coincidence that the line breaks in the memos fall exactly where Microsoft Word’s default line wrap algorithm would put them. I’ve liked the “forgeries based on real documents” explanation for a while, so perhaps I’m biased, but I think the Dallas News story linked above illuminates the entire thing quite nicely.

This line from a CNN story on the explosion in North Korea amused me: “The White House insists diplomacy is still the best strategy, although officials say the president never takes military action off the table.”

So I have this image of aides patiently explaining that Canada has been an ally for a long long time, and that it really doesn’t make sense to invade them just because they won’t send troops to Iraq, and Bush is looking all stalwart and determined. “I just don’t think we should take military action off the table. You never know.”

One cannot help but feel somewhat apprehensive about reports of a mushroom cloud over North Korea. I would feel less apprehensive if it hadn’t occurred on the anniversary of North Korea’s foundation, which is apparently used as an opportunity to stage patriotic and inspiring events.

Can’t help it; I’m still not feeling all that much safer now that Saddam’s out of power. I know I’m meant to feel like Bush has done a wonderful thing, but the problem is… it only takes one bomb in the hands of a madman. Doesn’t matter if the bomb comes from a mythical weapons program in Iraq or a real weapons program in North Korea, except in the peskily practical sense that you can’t get a nuclear weapon out of a mythical weapons program.

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.