Here's What's Left

Texans for Truth

They brought it on themselves. The ad starts with the question "Was George Bush AWOL in Alabama?" flashed on the screen. Then Robert Mintz says:

I heard George W. Bush get up there and say, 'I served in the 187th Air National Guard in Montgomery, Alabama.'

I said, 'Really? That was my unit. And I don't remember seeing you there.' So I called my friends and said, 'Did you know that George served in our unit?' 'No, I never saw him there.' It would be impossible to be unseen in a unit of that size.

And ends with the following flashed on the screen: "George Bush has some explaining to do."

Here's what should happen. The Kerry campaign should let the ad run, let the scandal and the back and forth shouting simmer for a while. Then, in a week or two, Kerry should come out and take the moral high ground, and say something like this:

I condemn the content of this ad. I believe that President Bush served honorably in the national guard, and I want to keep my campaign honest. I won't let an outside group do my dirty work, like President Bush is doing, and I call for this ad to be taken off the air. I only with the President would do the same for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad.

I know that probably won't happen, but it would sure be some good press if it did.

-- Michael

Typical

I know this is from yesterday, but I can't help it. Cheney:

It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.

The article goes on:

If Kerry were elected, Cheney said the nation risks falling back into a "pre-9/11 mind-set" that terrorist attacks are criminal acts that require a reactive approach. Instead, he said Bush's offensive approach works to root out terrorists where they plan and train, and pressure countries that harbor terrorists.

And I thought the Republican convention was the worst it was going to get.

Bush/Cheney '04: A vote for Kerry is a vote for Osama!

-- Michael

1001

1001 is the number of United States soldiers who have died in Iraq. Some of them died in combat. Some of them died of wounds received in combat. Some of them died in accidents. But they were all alive a year and a half ago, and now they're all dead.

Imagine yourself, and your 9 best friends. Now imagine that you're dead. That's a lot of people, right? That were once alive, and now are not. Now multiply that by 10. That's a hundred people who have died. That's a lot of people. Now multiply that by 10. A thousand people.

That's the number of people that go to a concert, perhaps. Or that live in a small town in south Georgia. Or that vote in a local election on some obscure issue.

And it's the number of men and women, some young, some not so young, who have died in Iraq. The last few died in a battle in Sadr City in Baghdad, today.

That's all.

-- Michael

Kerry should have said this along time ago.

From a speech today in Racine, WV:

As the president likes to say, there’s nothing complicated about it. It does all come down to one letter -- W. George W. Bush. What do you think that W stands for? That W stands for wrong.[...]

Of all George Bush’s wrong choices, the most catastrophic one is the mess in Iraq. It’s not that I would have done one thing differently in Iraq, I would have done everything differently. It was wrong to rush to war without a plan to win the peace. It was wrong not to build a strong international coalition of our allies. And it was wrong to put our young men and women into harm’s way without the equipment and body armor protect themselves and get the job done.

It was wrong for America to go it alone. And now every American is paying the price. Almost all the casualties are the sons and daughters of America. And nearly 90 percent of the cost is coming out of your pocket. The price-tag so far: $200 billion and rising every day. That’s $200 billion we’re not investing in health care and education That’s $200 billion we’re not investing to make sure no child is left behind. That’s $200 billion we’re not investing in new and better jobs.

That’s $200 billion we’re not investing in homeland security, to protect our airports, our subways, our bridges and tunnels. That’s W and that’s wrong. Wrong choices, wrong direction. In fact, there’s nothing right about it.

Timing

I'm not making any predictions, I'm just pointing out two news articles that I've read, and merely saying that there's something about them that is suspicious to me:

Saddam Trial within weeks, from Reuters

and

Bin Laden capture nearer, official says, from the Chicago Tribune (the new home-town paper for us, I guess. *sniff* we'll miss you AJC), which contains the following sentences:

Asked whether concrete progress had been made in the past two months--when Pakistan arrested dozens of terrorism suspects, including some alleged key Al Qaeda operatives--Black said, "Yes, I would say this."

Black, who briefed a group of Pakistani journalists after talks with officials Friday in Islamabad, said he could not predict exactly when bin Laden and other top Al Qaeda fugitives would be caught.

"What I tell people, I would be surprised but not necessarily shocked if we wake up tomorrow and he's been caught along with all his lieutenants. That can happen because of the programs and infrastructure in place," he told Geo.

It could happen tomorrow? Well, then, it could also happen in a few weeks. And Saddam's trial is supposed to start in a few weeks. Hmmmm... What else is happening in a few weeks? October. It sure would be a surprise if one or both of these things happened in October. What do we call that? When something surprising happens in October? Seems to me there's a name for it...

And why does October matter? I seem to remember that something important is happening at the beginning of the month after October... At the beginning of Novemeber... Anyone care to refresh my memory?

-- Michael

The straw man in action

In what must surely be a sign of the apocalpyse, I agree with everything that Pat Buchanan said about Iraq on Meet the Press today:

MR. PAT BUCHANAN: Certainly, Tim, I believe it is an unnecessary war; it is an unwise war. The United States, by invading that country and taking over its capital, we have inflamed the entire Middle East and Arab and Islamic world. American prestige and support for the president and the United States has never been lower in that part of the world. And Mr. Rumsfeld's question has been answered.

He asked, "Have we been creating more terrorists than we are killing?" When he said that, some 5,000 insurgents were said to be in Baghdad by General Abizaid. The latest count is 20,000. I believe this war itself is creating a pool, a spawning pool out of which Osama bin Laden can draw recruits. I think that there has been nothing that has done more to put Osama bin Laden, if you will, in the mainstream of the Arab cause of nationalism than what appears to the Arabs to be to be a near-imperial adventure by the United States in Iraq.

I bring this up not because the arguments he's making are anything new, and I don't even bring up because I agree with him (a remarkable enough event in itself), but rather to talk about the dialogue that ensued:

Republican National Convention Round-up

I think the best line in John Kerry's response to the Repubs last night was:

Now I know what RNC stands for: Really Not Compassionate

Which is good because it's so awkward and childish sounding ("well, you're really not compassionate! nyah nyah nyah nyah nayh nyah!") -- not things one generally associated with John Kerry. At the end of the night last night, after having consumed a few gin and tonics and some wine (c'mon, it's hard to watch those guys sober), I tried to come up with as many pithy one-line names for the convention as I could:

The Rush Limbaugh convention

The maybe-if-we-repeat-things-they-will-suddenly-become-true convention

The one-issue convention

The fear and loathing convention

The talking points convention

The we-have-to-get-those-commies-er,-terrorists convention

The Russians are coming! convention

The let's-say-the-same-thing-we-said-four-years-ago-and-maybe-no-one-will-notice convention

The I-fucking-hate-that-asshole-Zell-Miller convention

I admit that towards the end it gets a little bit inelegant, but ya know. You can blame it on the juice.

Good Paul

Krugman couldn't have gotten it righter:

"I don't know where George Soros gets his money," one man said. "I don't know where - if it comes from overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from." George Soros, another declared, "wants to spend $75 million defeating George W. Bush because Soros wants to legalize heroin." After all, a third said, Mr. Soros "is a self-admitted atheist; he was a Jew who figured out a way to survive the Holocaust."

They aren't LaRouchies - they're Republicans.

The suggestion that Mr. Soros, who has spent billions promoting democracy around the world, is in the pay of drug cartels came from Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House, whom the Constitution puts two heartbeats from the presidency. After standing by his remarks for several days, Mr. Hastert finally claimed that he was talking about how Mr. Soros spends his money, not where he gets it.

The claim that Mr. Soros's political spending is driven by his desire to legalize heroin came from Newt Gingrich. And the bit about the Holocaust came from Tony Blankley, editorial page editor of The Washington Times, which has become the administration's de facto house organ.

For many months we've been warned by tut-tutting commentators about the evils of irrational "Bush hatred." Pundits eagerly scanned the Democratic convention for the disease; some invented examples when they failed to find it. Then they waited eagerly for outrageous behavior by demonstrators in New York, only to be disappointed again.

There was plenty of hatred in Manhattan, but it was inside, not outside, Madison Square Garden.

Barack Obama, who gave the Democratic keynote address, delivered a message of uplift and hope. Zell Miller, who gave the Republican keynote, declared that political opposition is treason: "Now, at the same time young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats' manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief." And the crowd roared its approval.

Go read the whole thing.

-- Michael

W

I wasn't impressed. Flat delivery, same old stuff. Here it is, if you didn't see it. It was supposed to be about the future, but all I heard was the same things he's already said. I don't think Republicans have real solutions to the problems facing this country.

Another drag on our economy is the current tax code, which is a complicated mess filled with special interest loopholes, saddling our people with more than six billion hours of paperwork and headache every year. The American people deserve and our economic future demands a simpler, fairer, pro-growth system. In a new term, I will lead a bipartisan effort to reform and simplify the federal tax code.

Blah blah blah. I've heard it all before. The real problem facing the American economy is the complexity of the tax code. Not the fact that the government isn't taking in enough revenues because of the Bush tax cut. The real problem is that the tax code is too hard.

I believe in the energy and innovative spirit of America's workers, entrepreneurs, farmers, and ranchers so we unleashed that energy with the largest tax relief in a generation. Because we acted, our economy is growing again, and creating jobs, and nothing will hold us back.

Is there any person with a brain who still believes this stuff? I thought the Reagan administration showed how stupid this kind of economic policy this was.

These changing times can be exciting times of expanded opportunity. And here, you face a choice. My opponent's policies are dramatically different from ours. Senator Kerry opposed Medicare reform and health savings accounts. After supporting my education reforms, he now wants to dilute them. He opposes legal and medical liability reform. He opposed reducing the marriage penalty, opposed doubling the child credit, and opposed lowering income taxes for all who pay them. To be fair, there are some things my opponent is for -- he's proposed more than two trillion dollars in new federal spending so far, and that's a lot, even for a senator from Massachusetts. To pay for that spending, he is running on a platform of increasing taxes ? and that's the kind of promise a politician usually keeps.

His policies of tax and spend, of expanding government rather than expanding opportunity are the policies of the past. We are on the path to the future and we are not turning back.

This is boring. Tax and spend. flip-flopping. Thank God this thing is over.

For what it's worth, Kerry's response was much shorter than Bush's acceptance speech, but it contained some things that were noticeably lacking from the president's speech, and noticeably lacking from the entire 4 day Republican circus.

He's misled America's workers – he told them his economic plan would create 6 million jobs. The truth is we've lost nearly 1.8 million since George Bush took office. He said his plan would create 266,000 jobs in Ohio. Instead Ohio has lost 230,000 jobs since he took office -- 112,000 jobs since the recession ended in November of 2001. Earlier this week, his Labor Secretary even said outsourcing was good for America. I don’t believe that. John and I have a plan that will put an end to tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas and reward companies who create and keep jobs here in America. And we have a plan that will give tax credits to employers who create new jobs – and we’ll eliminate capital gains taxes for those who make long-term investments in their small businesses. We’ll also help small businesses meet the rising costs of health care – costs that keep so many of them from hiring and expanding.

For four years, George Bush has misled America's families – saying he had a health care plan for America. The truth is he's done nothing as 5 million more Americans have lost their health care, bringing the total number to 45 million people without coverage nationwide. In Ohio, 114,000 people have lost their health coverage since bush took office, bringing the total number of Ohioans without coverage to 1.4 million. John and I have a plan to make quality health care affordable for all. Because we believe that your health care is as important as any politician’s in Washington, DC.

Numbers. Yes, Kerry uses numbers. Numbers. Facts. Things that give people a basis to making a decision. What a concept.

-- Michael

The definitive Zell: a theory

I don't want to talk the content of Zell Miller's speech last night, because it was for the most party extremely ugly and needlessly extreme, and I've already talked about some of it. What I want to talk about is why I think Zell Miller is the way he is, and how this is being abused by the national Republican party, and why Miller is such a willing player in this.

One must certainly be suspicious that there's something afoot after the truly crazy interview on "Hardball" last night (you gotta scroll down a bit to find it). It's worth quoting from somewhat extensively: