Kerry said today that his first choice as Secretary of Defense would be John McCain. Nice move — it’s less threatening to the Democratic base than McCain as VP, and it’s less damaging in 2008 when McCain runs for President in his own right. It also still brings a lot of the advantages that McCain as VP brings. This could also be a trial balloon to move the McCain as VP idea forward. We’ll see how McCain reacts. Good move on Kerry’s part either way.
Want to see unedited photos directly from the cameras of American soldiers in Iraq? Check ‘em out (original), from the people who brought you Yet Another Friendster Clone and Am I Hot Or Not. Via Clay Shirky (original), who points out that information cannot be contained in the digital era.
Compare and contrast: “Are we going too soft in Iraq? Some people think so. It seems that way to me, too, though I’m reluctant to make a judgment at this distance. But in my lifetime, at least, the United States has generally erred by not being violent enough, rather than by being too brutal.” That’s Glenn Reynolds, April 30th, 2004. “It was American soldiers serving as military police at Abu Ghraib who took these pictures (original). The investigation started when one soldier got them from a friend, and gave them to his commanders. 60 Minutes II has a dozen of these pictures, and there are many more – pictures that show Americans, men and women in military uniforms, posing with naked Iraqi prisoners. ...
t.rev is cranking out some excellent stuff in the comment thread below. In a war, you have a large set of actors and a much larger set of actions taken by said actors. Some actions will be heroic, some will be atrocities, many will be just grim violence, and the vast majority will be mind-numbingly tedious. Some actions will be essentially unobserved (no one will survive them), most will be observed by a handful, and a tiny fraction will be observed and communicated on a wider scale. ...
Remember: commemorating Pat Tillman and his death is OK. Commemorating soldiers who didn’t give up millions of dollars to fight is wrong. Also, photographs of anonymous coffins are an invasion of privacy in some fashion that does not apply when you’re talking about former NFL players. Finally, the people of America must be protected at all costs from the evil liberal media, which wishes to use the deaths of soldiers in Iraq for political gain. The people of America, sadly, are not capable of thinking for themselves. They are so damned emotional that the liberal media can play any tune it likes on their heartstrings. ...
Arlen Specter won the Pennsylvania primary (original) over Pat Toomey by a very narrow margin. This is a loss for the hard right wing of the Republican Party. It may or may not translate into a boost for the Democratic Senate candidate; 48% of those who voted against Specter said they wouldn’t vote for him in the general election, but a lot of those people are going to come back to the fold. ...
Fifty years from now, the caricatures of Islamic extremism denoted by the term “Islamofascist” is going to look about as bad as the caricature of Japanese militarism displayed in this poster (original) and this poster (original). The parallel extends in all kinds of directions, in my book.
A while back I mentioned the anti-immigration attempt to take over the Sierra Club. Followup: the white supremacists lost (original). Good times.
I was irked that John Kerry wasn’t releasing his military records, but he fixed that. The difference between Bush’s definition of releasing and Kerry’s definition of releasing (original) is pretty substantial. Kerry put his military records up as PDFs on his web site, and anyone can see them. Bush showed his records to reporters and gave some of them 20 minutes to review some medical exams. In all fairness, I don’t see Kerry’s military medical records on his web site, and I think they should be there. I still believe there’s a difference between handing your records out to a small group of reporters and making them available online for anyone to see. Someone at the Kerry campaign gets the Internet.
In Pennsylvania, Pat Toomey (original) is running against Arlen Specter in the Republican Senatorial primary. Toomey is a hard-right conservative who currently serves in the House of Representatives. Specter is a center-conservative Senator who fails many hard-right litmus tests, most noticably by being one of the handful of prominent Republicans who supports abortion rights. Both Bush and Rick Santorum have endorsed Specter. This is one of those wedge issues — Bush’s hard-right supporters can’t be pleased that he endorsed someone so centrist, particularly since he differs with the Republican Party on such a hot button issue. Run, Roy, run!