Category: Politics

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.

When someone sets a pipe bomb off at a biotech lab doing stem cell research? That’s what I would call terrorism. This is a company that’s trying to find a cure for diabetes, and someone hates them enough to try and kill people. I am so tired of this hatred for science.

Kerry continues to be not-Dukakis. The following quote is from Ben Barnes, former Lieutenant Governor of Texas.

Let’s talk a minute about John Kerry and George Bush and I know them both. And I’m not name dropping to say I know ‘em both. I got a young man named George W. Bush in the National Guard when I was Lt. Gov. of Texas and I’m not necessarily proud of that. But I did it. And I got a lot of other people into the National Guard because I thought that was what people should do, when you’re in office you helped a lot of rich people. And I walked through the Vietnam Memorial the other day and I looked at the names of the people that died in Vietnam and I became more ashamed of myself than I have ever been because it was the worst thing that I did was that I helped a lot of wealthy supporters and a lot of people who had family names of importance get into the National Guard and I’m very sorry about that and I’m very ashamed and I apologize to you as voters of Texas.

Here’s the video.

The kicker? This clip is reportedly from a June 8th rally. Kerry’s been sitting on this until the Swift Boat Vets started smearing, because it’s most effective when it stands in contrast to Kerry’s service in Vietnam. Of course, Barnes is a Democrat, and thus partisan, but that hardly means he’s lying and it doesn’t mean this won’t be effective.

CNN:

President Bush wants to work with Sen. John McCain to take legal action against “shadowy” outside groups that have been spending millions of dollars on ads criticizing the president and Democratic rival Sen. John Kerry, the White House said Thursday.

Pesky free speech. What are you gonna do?

The thing is, Bush doesn’t get credit for the moral argument against 527s. It is possible to argue that 527s are bad because they tilt the political playing field towards the people with the most money, which of course they do. However, Bush has demonstrated that he doesn’t care about that principle, insofar as he opted out of the public financing system in the primaries. If he cared about an even playing field, he wouldn’t have done that. The same applies to the schedule of the RNC; it’s unusually late so that Bush has more time to spend the money he’s already collected before public financing laws kick in.

So he can’t legitimately argue that he’s doing this to create an even playing field. The only explanation left is that he doesn’t want people to be able to speak out against politicians. Or, I suppose, that he only minds a tilted playing field when it’s tilted against him.

From time to time, people talk about Mitt Romney running for President of the United States. For those uncertain, Mitt Romney is the Republican Governor of Massachusetts; he also ran the fairly successful (if you ignore the scandals) Salt Lake City Olympics a few years back. He is a Mormon.

(Yes, Massachusetts has a Republican Mormon Governor. Please don’t let that shake your belief that Massachusetts is some kind of a Communist protectorate, though; it’s always fun watching people underestimate Massachusetts and its politicians.)

Anyway, as occurs with all successful Massachusetts politicians, people are talking about Romney as a potential candidate for President a few years down the line. This strikes me as a wonderful possibility, not so much because I want to see Mitt running this country but because I think his candidacy could strike some of the fracture lines in the Republican coalition. I think it would be fun watching the conservative Christian faction within the party grappling with a Romney candidacy, let alone a Romney nomination.

So this is a thumbs up for a Romney run. You heard it here first. Alas, the guy’s probably smart enough to know he’d go the way of Orrin Hatch.

Jere dug up a fascinating piece describing the contents of a laptop formerly used by Al Qaeda. I sorta hope the journalist made sure the government had a copy of the hard drive while he was investigating, but either way, it’s a great article.

Kerry’s advocating a neighborhood watch program to keep an eye out for terrorists. This wasn’t so palatable back when it was Ashcroft’s idea, and it isn’t so palatable now.

This is a follow up to my earlier post on Jim McCarthy and Off Wing Opinion, in light of further contemplation on my part and Eric’s post-mortem post.

On reflection, I’m pretty comfortable saying that there are potential issues here. Blogs may not be newspapers, but allow me to quote Jim on using blogs for PR:

“Blogs opened up a new front. It was a process of germination. The plan was to construct ideas with the media that would act as a filter so they would read subsequent pieces of information with the lens that you created.”

So it’s pretty hard not to believe that Jim uses blogs as a means of instilling his ideas in the media, since he’s on record as using them that way. And we know that Title IX reform is an idea he’s paid to push. Jim’s blogging on Off Wing Opinion benefits his clients. Now, is this a conflict of interest? From an ethical standpoint, no, unless you think that Jim has an ethical obligation to separate his blogging from his business. I may expect that, but where do those expectations come from? Nobody but myself.

But what about the practical aspects? At the core, the concept of conflict of interest is a practical one. We avoid them so that we never have to say “Hm, but what would he say if he wasn’t getting paid to say that?” When we avoid conflicts of interest, we strengthen our own arguments. When I read (say) Daily Kos, I am always aware that Markos Moulitsas has worked as a paid Democratic consultant — so there’s gonna be some bias there. Similarily, from an objective standpoint, I have to wonder the same thing about Jim’s posts.

Now! All that said, Jim did not make any secret of his previous involvement in Title IX reform, and he was up front about it when I asked. Implying otherwise was wrong and I am embarassed that I gave into my tendency to shoot without thinking. God bless the Internet for making it easy to forget that other people are people. To the degree that there’s a conflict of interest, it was disclosed up front. I would have liked it if Jim had mentioned that he works for the guy he interviewed, but that’s water under the bridge.

The other important thing I forgot is that Eric is a mensch. I trust Eric’s judgement, and I believe him when he says that he asked Jim to blog because he respects Jim’s expertise on the subject. Since I trust Eric, I should be willing to accept that Title IX reform is a subject that would be important to Jim whether or not he was getting paid to care about it. If I look at Jim’s track record — which includes the Religious Freedom Act of 1994, that legalized the use of peyote in Indian religious ceremonies — I see a guy who’s a fervent libertarian in a way that I can respect and appreciate.

Long post short: I don’t think I’d have asked Jim to guest blog if I were in Eric’s shoes, because I prefer to steer very clear of conflict of interest issues. However, I don’t think that Eric made a mistake asking Jim to guest blog. I shot from the hip, spoke too soon, and regret some but not all of what I said.

An Iraqi judge warrant was issued for Ahmed Chalabi’s arrest today, on charges of counterfeiting. A warrant was also issued for his nephew, Salem Chalabi, for murder.

There are two basic possibilities here. One: Ahmed Chalabi is guilty, in which case it’s about time we started admitting that the guy behind a lot of our evidence against Iraq is a liar and a crook. Those Iraqi defectors? He found them. He made up the meeting between Muhammad Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague. He may have been slipping information to Iran. He made up wacky stories about Saddam. He had the New York Times in his back pocket. Talk about a brilliant con man…

Or maybe he’s just being abused by crooked judges, in which case — if Iraq is the kind of country in which that sort of thing can happen openly — we’ve already come perilous close to failure. Take your choice.

This clip is pretty surreal. A Fox news host is quizzing Disney’s president about the new Disney computer for kids, and he takes a sudden right turn into attacking him for sponsoring Gay Days at the theme parks. That’s what I call good clean utterly insane fun.