Here's What's Left

Bush lost the first debate

Bush looked confused. He often fumbled. At one point he confused Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden. Here is the transcript.

Here are a few things. First of all, Bush told a blatant lie:

I was hoping diplomacy would work. I understand the serious consequences of committing our troops into harm's way.

It's the hardest decision a president makes. So I went to the United Nations. I didn't need anybody to tell me to go to the United Nations. I decided to go there myself.

And I went there hoping that, once and for all, the free world would act in concert to get Saddam Hussein to listen to our demands. They passed the resolution that said, "Disclose, disarm, or face serious consequences." I believe, when an international body speaks, it must mean what it says.

Saddam Hussein had no intention of disarming. Why should he? He had 16 other resolutions and nothing took place. As a matter of fact, my opponent talks about inspectors. The facts are that he was systematically deceiving the inspectors.

That wasn't going to work. That's kind of a pre-September 10th mentality, the hope that somehow resolutions and failed inspections would make this world a more peaceful place.

Well, I suppose this might be technically true, that Saddam had no intention of disarming. But it seems, at least in normal usage, in order to disarm, one has to be armed in the first place. And Saddam was not armed.

Debate Matters: Bush v. Kerry

I don't want to spend a lot of time on the debates, though I imagine I probably will end up doing so, because they're mostly a dog and pony show in which no one really learns much about where the candidates stand (when do people learn this these days? do they ever?). But here are a few preliminary thoughts:

If there is one thing that Kerry should do in this debate, it's dispell once and for all the notion that he's a flip-flopper. And I don't think that it's actually that hard to do, but I think it requires the right kind of answer. So if he is asked, for example, "Sen. Kerry, many people accuse you of flip-flopping on your position on the Iraq war; what is your response to those people," Kerry should say:

Well, Jim, my position is the same as is when I first voted to authorize the president to use force. There are two words that you've heard about me throughout this campaign: "nuance" and "complexity." Now, it's certainly true that I like to examine the nuances and complexities of different issues. But my position on Iraq is not nuanced and it's not complex. It's simple and straightforward.

I voted to give the president the authority to use force because he promised to use this authority as leverage with the international community; he promised to go to war as a last resort, and only with a real coalition. Unfortunately, he broke all of those promises, and abused his authority. So I have spoken out against his mishandling of the situation since then. That's not complex, it's simple and straightforward. And it hasn't changed. This idea that my position is nuanced is ridiculous. It's a position based on the facts, and it couldn't be easier to understand.

Say you have a teenager who you let borrow the car for the evening. You might give your consent to letting him use the car. If he then wrecks the car, and you get angry at him, that doesn't mean you're being an inconsistent parent. It means you're being responsible. In the same way, my position on Iraq is simple and straightforward, and it is the responsible position to hold.

Fox News and Stoned Slackers

This one's too good to pass up. Don't know if you saw Bill O'Reilly's interview with Comedy Central's "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart the other day. But in it, the following dialogue ensued:

O'REILLY: You know what's really frightening?

STEWART: You've been reading my diary.

O'REILLY: You actually have an influence on this presidential election. That is scary.

STEWART: If that were so, that would be quite frightening.

O'REILLY: But it is. It's true. I mean, you've got stoned slackers watching your dopey show every night, OK, and they can vote.

STEWART: Yeah.

O'REILLY: You can't stop them.

STEWART: Yeah, I just don't know how motivated they would be, these stoned slackers.

Someone had the bright idea to give people who watch late night comedy shows a quiz on political issues. Not only are "The Daily Show" viewers more likely to be more politically informed than those who watch Leno or Letterman, but, as CNN put it:

"Daily Show" viewers know more about election issues than people who regularly read newspapers or watch television news, according to the National Annenberg Election Survey.

CNN continues:

It [comedy central] also trotted out stats from Nielsen Media Research to show that Stewart's viewers are not only smart, but more educated than O'Reilly's.

"Daily Show" viewers are 78 percent more likely than the average adult to have four or more years of college education, while O'Reilly's audience is only 24 percent more likely to have that much schooling.

Plus, the network noted, "Daily Show" viewers are 26 percent more likely to have a household income more than $100,000, while O'Reilly's audience is only 11 percent more likely to make that much money.

So the guy watching Stewart may not only be smart, but may also be rich.

The intentional misnomer "Faux News" has never been more appropriate.

-- Michael

Election mechanics and voter disenfranchisement

I've read two worrisome things in the past few days. One is an op-ed by former President Jimmy Carter in the WaPo the other day, entitled "Still Seeking a Fair Florida Vote":

After the debacle in Florida four years ago, former president Gerald Ford and I were asked to lead a blue-ribbon commission to recommend changes in the American electoral process. After months of concerted effort by a dedicated and bipartisan group of experts, we presented unanimous recommendations to the president and Congress. The government responded with the Help America Vote Act of October 2002. Unfortunately, however, many of the act's key provisions have not been implemented because of inadequate funding or political disputes.

But here's the zinger:

The Carter Center has monitored more than 50 elections, all of them held under contentious, troubled or dangerous conditions. When I describe these activities, either in the United States or in foreign forums, the almost inevitable questions are: "Why don't you observe the election in Florida?" and "How do you explain the serious problems with elections there?"

The answer to the first question is that we can monitor only about five elections each year, and meeting crucial needs in other nations is our top priority. (Our most recent ones were in Venezuela and Indonesia, and the next will be in Mozambique.) A partial answer to the other question is that some basic international requirements for a fair election are missing in Florida.

The United States, the world's beacon of democracy, and a country that is willing to invade others in the name of instilling democracy, is missing "basic international requirements" for its own presidential election in one of the largest states. And this is said by a person who should know something about this stuff, having made his a significant portion of his post-presidential career about monitoring elections in foreign countries.

The Straw Man gains strength

I think I'm going to continue to document cases of intelligent people on the right saying stupid things. The other day, I wrote about David Brooks, who had said:

The president's case is that the world is safer with Saddam out of power, and that we should stay as long as it takes to help Iraqis move to democracy. Kerry's case is that the world would be safer if we'd left Saddam

Now, it's William Safire, who yesterday on Meet the Press said,

And I think that is the clear difference between the candidates this year. Kerry wants out and to turn things over to the U.N., and Bush wants to win.

This is where parroting conventional wisdom gets you... into a distorted view of both candidates. Saying that Bush wants to win seems to imply that Kerry doesn't. I hope that RNC check is on its way, Bill. To her credit, Doris Kearns Goodwin responded:

MS. GOODWIN: I don't think that's fair. I mean, I think that what Kerry is trying to say is that because Bush has not been willing to acknowledge mistakes over time, because he hasn't been willing to look at what worked and what didn't work because of that stubborn drivingness forward, there's no chance for the situation to change and turn over there. And perhaps if a new president gets in that's willing to look at what happened, what went wrong, you can't be in a position of saying, "We're just going to get out." He's not really saying that. If he does, he's not going to win. But I think what he's saying is that we need the kind of leadership that can absorb what went wrong, change it and make a fresh start.

Which, at the very least, is a more accurate characterization of Kerry's view.

Bill Safire is just the latest of the conservative pundits to fall, though. No one was surprised with Robert Kagan or Newt Gingrich knowly lied about Kerry's position on the war, and of course everyone expected the Bush campaign to say that Kerry flip-flops no matter what the truth is. But when David Brooks and now Bill Safire, two men I disagree with, but who have generally consistent and intellectually honest views, start lying so irresponsibly, that shows there must be something wrong. I think the Fox News syndrome has finally gotten to the last responsible Republicans left.

-- Michael

Civilian casualties

There is a new Knight Ridder article called "Iraqi Civilian Casualties Mounting." This is the first news article that I've seen in a long time in which the headline actually understates the case significantly. To wit:

Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis - most of them civilians - as attacks by insurgents, according to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry and obtained exclusively by Knight Ridder.

According to the ministry, the interim Iraqi government recorded 3,487 Iraqi deaths in 15 of the country's 18 provinces from April 5 - when the ministry began compiling the data - until Sept. 19. Of those, 328 were women and children. Another 13,720 Iraqis were injured, the ministry said.

While most of the dead are believed to be civilians, the data include an unknown number of police and Iraqi national guardsmen. Many Iraqi deaths, especially of insurgents, are never reported, so the actual number of Iraqis killed in fighting could be significantly higher.

During the same period, 432 American soldiers were killed.

Iraqi officials said the statistics proved that U.S. airstrikes intended for insurgents also were killing large numbers of innocent civilians. Some say these casualties are undermining popular acceptance of the American-backed interim government.

Whatever side you're on of the war debate, this is very disturbing.

Yet more evidence that there's no liberal media

I find this to be incredibly irresponsible of CBS. Here's the AP story, ironically, on CBS News:

CBS News has shelved a "60 Minutes" report on the rationale for war in Iraq because it would be "inappropriate" to air it so close to the presidential election, the network said on Saturday.

The report on weapons of mass destruction was set to air on Sept. 8 but was put off in favor of a story on President Bush's National Guard service. The Guard story was discredited because it relied on documents impugning Bush's service that were apparently fake.

CBS News spokeswoman Kelli Edwards would not elaborate on why the timing of the Iraq report was considered inappropriate.

The NYTimes adds:

The CBS statement followed a report in the online edition of Newsweek that described the frustration of CBS News reporters and producers who said the network had concluded that it could not legitimately criticize the president because of the questions about the National Guard report.

According to the Newsweek report, the "60 Minutes" segment was to have detailed how the administration relied on false documents when it said Iraq had tried to buy a lightly processed form of uranium, known as yellowcake, from Niger. The administration later acknowledged that the information was incorrect and that the documents were most likely fake.

The Newsweek article said the segment was to have included the first on-camera interview with Elisabetta Burba, the Italian journalist who was given the fake documents and who provided them to a United States Embassy for verification. The documents were sent to Washington, where some officials embraced them as firm evidence that Iraq was aggressively trying to make nuclear weapons.

Personally, I find this course of action to be cowardly and disgusting. Furthermore, it should dispell any remaining notions that anyone has the CBS is a liberal station, but of course people will keep saying that. If CBS were actually, liberal, or even just reponsible, wouldn't they air the report anyway? If they were liberal and were seeking to harm the president, wouldn't they just go right ahead and air the report anyway? Isn't that what Hannity and Limbaugh do? When they lie about something, or become addicted to illegal drugs, they keep shamelessly plugging their side, don't they? If CBS were liberal, wouldn't they do the same thing?

But more than anything else, this reveals a lack of journalistic integrity. Here is some information that might be useful for the public in making their decision about who to vote for this November. And a major news network has consciously decided to withhold that information until after the election. The forged documents scandal appears to be an honest, albeit sloppy and egregious, mistake. Consciously bowing to political pressure in deciding which stories to run or not to run, though, is the very depth of cravenness. I have lost a lot respect for CBS News.

And, of course, it's bad marketing as well. The nutty right-wing is going to say CBS is the liberal media no matter how many facts contradict them. And now the left-wing, as well as non-partisans who are interested in journalism with integrity, are mad at CBS because they caved to the right. They lost the rest of their audience.

Americablog has a good idea. Write CBS and tell them you're pissed.

-- Michael

Have you no shame, Mr. President?

This is stupid (Bush on Kerry's remarks on Iraqi PM Allawi):

This great man came to our country to talk about how he's risking his life for a free Iraq, which helps America, and Senator Kerry held a press conference and questioned Prime Minister Allawi's credibility. You can't lead this country if your ally in Iraq feels like you question his credibility. The message ought to be to the Iraqi people: 'We support you.' The message ought to be loud and clear: 'We'll stand with you if you do the hard work.'

I'm sorry, but this sort of grandstanding really makes me mad. Is there any person out there that has any doubt that PM Allawi's visit to the US Thursday, and his speech, were anything other than partisan politics at its worst? The Iraqi prime minister visiting a little more than a month before the election. Just a coincidence, right? If you doubt that it was orchestrated, let's compare some phrases:

Allawi saying, "there are fanatics who seek to impose a perverted vision of Islam in which the face of Allah cannot be seen," reminds me very much of when Condolezza Rice said "people
who murder and maim and in fact pervert Islam."

He can't possibly mean what he says

Let's pick apart some of the Republican rhetoric on Iraq that we've been hearing over the past few days. And let's start with an easy one. Here's from the Press Conference held by Bush with Prime Minister Allawi of Iraq yesterday:

Q Mr. President, you say today that the work in Iraq is tough and will remain tough. And, yet, you travel this country and a central theme of your campaign is that America is safer because of the invasion of Iraq. Can you understand why Americans may not believe you?

PRESIDENT BUSH: No. Anybody who says that we are safer with Saddam Hussein in power is wrong. We went into Iraq because Saddam Hussein defied the demands of the free world. We went into Iraq after diplomacy had failed. And we went into Iraq because I understand after September the 11th we must take threats seriously, before they come to hurt us.

I don't have much to about that, because it's hard to really argue with it, in this sense: I understand why Bush thinks the way he does. I listen to what he says, hear his perspective and his (only occasional) arguments, and then I decide that he is wrong. President Bush, however, doesn't understand why it is that I don't believe that America is safer because of the invasion of Iraq. What does it say about a president that doesn't understand the perspective of a citizen who disagrees with him? I thought he was supposed to be "a uniter not a divider"?

More conservative distortions of John Kerry's Iraq policy

Josh Marshall has already posted very intelligently on this, but I have a few things to add. Yesterday, as we all know, Kerry gave his best and clearest speech on Iraq so far. But the conservative straw man-producing machine has already started on it. David Brook's column today contains several notable distortions of what Kerry said:

Finally, Kerry declared that it is time to get out, beginning next summer. The message is that if Kerry is elected, the entire momentum of U.S. policy will be toward getting American troops out of Iraq as quickly as possible and shifting responsibility for Iraq onto other countries.

Actually, Kerry didn't say anything even vaguely like that [UPDATE/CORRECTION: he did say something vaguely like it, a qualified version starting with the word "if"; see comments below for elaboration]. Brooks doesn't cite a quotation, because there is no quotation to cite, because that's not what Kerry said. (Would that it have been what he said.) The quotation he does cite is this:

The crucial passage in the speech was this one: "The principles that should guide American policy in Iraq now and in the future are clear: we must make Iraq the world's responsibility, because the world has a stake in the outcome and others should share the burden." From a U.S. responsibility, Iraq will become the world's responsibility.