Best of the Web Today - September 20, 2004
By JAMES TARANTO
Who's Alienating Our Allies?
Inasmuch as John Kerry has anything at all to say about Iraq, it is that as president he would somehow expand the U.S.-led alliance by winning over unspecified "foreign leaders" who are supposedly his confidantes. But look how the Kerry campaign treats America's actual allies. The candidate himself has insulted them by calling them "a fraudulent coalition" and "a coalition of the coerced and the bribed."
But it gets even worse. Check out this report from the Weekend Australian newspaper:
John Kerry's campaign has warned Australians that the Howard Government's support for the US in Iraq has made them a bigger target for international terrorists.
Diana Kerry, younger sister of the Democrat presidential candidate, told The Weekend Australian that the Bali bombing and the recent attack on the Australian embassy in Jakarta clearly showed the danger to Australians had increased.
"Australia has kept faith with the US and we are endangering the Australians now by this wanton disregard for international law and multilateral channels," she said, referring to the invasion of Iraq.
Asked if she believed the terrorist threat to Australians was now greater because of the support for Republican George W. Bush, Ms Kerry said: "The most recent attack was on the Australian embassy in Jakarta--I would have to say that."
Ms Kerry, who taught school in Indonesia for 15 years until 2000, is heading a campaign called Americans Overseas for Kerry which aims to secure the votes of Americans abroad--including the more than 100,000 living in Australia.
Well, first of all, let's give Diana Kerry a history lesson. The Bali bombing occurred in October 2002, five months before the liberation of Iraq began. Back then, Diana's brother supported the liberation of Iraq; this was before he opposed it before supporting it and then later opposing it again, etc.
In any case, here we have Diana Kerry, campaigning on her brother's behalf, telling America's staunchest ally that the way to be safe from terrorism is to betray America. Does John Kerry agree?
'Bush Is Like Saddam Hussein'
The Phoenixville (Pa.) News reports that at an event sponsored by the Phoenixville Democratic Committee, Michael Berg, father of terrorism victim Nick Berg, made the case for John Kerry:
"I challenge anyone deep in your hearts to realize that Kerry isn't like Bush," said Berg. "Bush is like Saddam Hussein. Bush condones rape and murder, and does it with a wink of an eye. Bush says he does it in the name of economic policy.
"John Kerry decried rape, murder and genocide while he was in Vietnam. If you think John Kerry will end this war too soon, I say 'too soon for what?' It'll save our sons and daughters.
"I can't afford a third party vote. This time, there is only one issue, justice in foreign policy. Vote for John Kerry--I'm going to."
Kerry's supporters are beginning to make Howard Dean seem sane by comparison.
Being John Kerry
With 43 days until the election, the Boston Globe reports that the Kerry campaign is trying to figure out how to make a silk purse out of a haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way served in Vietnam:
This week, Kerry will also take steps to address what advisers call "the likability factor"--trying to raise voters' comfort level with Kerry on a personal level. A Pew Research Center poll released Thursday suggested that Bush edged out Kerry when voters were asked which man was "down to earth," "honest and truthful," and "willing to take a stand, even if unpopular." Asked who was the stronger leader, voters favored Bush by a margin of 57 percent to 30 percent.
Kerry will appear on the "Late Show with David Letterman" tonight and "Live with Regis and Kelly" tomorrow, and this weekend taped a segment of the daytime show "Dr. Phil" that will air early next month. But the greatest opportunity to up the likability quotient will probably come in the debates, advisers said. Kerry plans to seclude himself with aides next weekend at his wife's home near Pittsburgh to prepare for the first debate, tentatively scheduled in Miami on Sept. 30.
"We have to reach a comfort level with the American people--they have to view John with a certain level of respect, an appreciation of his own strength, values, and character, a feeling that they can trust this person for the next four years," said the senior adviser in Kerry's inner circle. "I don't know how you do all that. It's an evolving process. But we need to do it quickly."
The New York Times' Bob Herbert weighs in with this advice:
The best candidates offer the electorate not just something, but someone, to believe in. Describing the aftermath of Harry Truman's remarkable triumph over Thomas E. Dewey in 1948, the biographer David McCullough wrote:
"To such staunch Truman loyalists as Sam Rayburn and George Marshall, to the weary White House staff workers who had been with him all the way, there was never any question as to why Truman won. He had done it by being himself, never forgetting who he was, and by getting to the people in his own fashion." . . .
John Kerry needs to make a stronger emotional connection with voters, and he won't be able to do that without revealing more of what he truly feels and believe--in other words, more of himself. . . .
Leadership at times requires great courage. John Kerry has not yet closed the deal with voters who are dissatisfied with President Bush. He may find, in the final weeks of this campaign, that the most important quality he can draw upon is the courage to be himself.
Just be yourself! With that kind of incisive, original thinking, it's no wonder Herbert has a column on the op-ed page of the New York Times.
Uh, but one question: Who does Herbert think Kerry has been being all these months? Certainly not Harry Truman, who by being himself was able to be Harry Truman. Even if Kerry takes Herbert's advice and decides to be himself, he'll still be John Kerry. The only way Kerry might be able to achieve "likability" is through a transplant, and Bill Clinton isn't about to have his chest cracked open twice in one month.
The Bully Pulpit
"We've got 66 days to go, and I'm in a fighting mood."--John Kerry, Aug. 28
"Let me tell you something, these folks have got me in fighting mood."--John Kerry, Sept. 18
"Politics in Gainesville turned rough and tumble Thursday night when, police say, a social behavior sciences instructor--a Democrat--punched the chairman of the Alachua County Republican Executive Committee in the face."--Gainesville (Fla.) Sun, Sept. 18
Rather Embarrassed
It looks as though Dan Rather's 60 minutes of fame are up; the CBS anchor today was forced to eat his Word. "CBS News on Monday said it regretted broadcasting a story about President Bush's military service based on documents whose authenticity is in doubt, saying the source of the material had misled the network," CBS itself reports:
In a statement, CBS said former Texas Guard official Bill Burkett "has acknowledged that he provided the now-disputed documents" and "admits that he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source."
CBS clearly wanted to believe Burkett's story was true; the Washington Post quotes Josh Howard, a "60 Minutes" executive, as saying that because the White House did not challenge the authenticity of the fake documents, "we completely abandoned the process of authenticating the documents. Obviously, looking back on it, that was a mistake. We stopped questioning ourselves. I suppose you could say we let our guard down." (It's nice to see that CBS executives can crack wise about letting their "guard" down even as their credibility is taking such a hit.)
But you'd think CBS would have been skeptical about these "documents," given what a fevered partisan Burkett is. Check out this rant he published on OnlineJournal.com Aug. 25 ([sic]s in original):
George W. Bush, you may be the president [sic]. But I know that you lied.
I know from your files that we have now reassembled, the fact that you did not fulfill your oath, taken when you were commissioned to "obey the orders of the officers appointed over you". I know that you not only lied to the American people in 1994, but have lied consistently since then. . . .
This is all bad enough, but to continuously lie to the American people for years is outrageous. One can easily see how this "slick Willie" act of falsity could potentially carry over into policy, such as weapons of mass destruction, an attack on Iraq, the price of a prescription drug program, your close insider working relationship with Ken Lay at Enron, or Vice President [sic] Cheney's personal relationships and dealings with Halliburton. Mr. Bush, you've forgotten what the truth is. You have attended so many of your own "closed town hall" meetings, that you've begun to believe the briefing cards of those hand-selected people in attendance.
The "CBS Evening News" plans to air a Rather interview with Burkett tonight. The Washington Post reports that "in e-mail messages to a Yahoo discussion group for Texas Democrats, Burkett laid out a rationale for using what he termed 'down and dirty' tactics against Bush":
He said that he had passed his ideas to the Democratic National Committee but that the DNC seemed "afraid to do what I suggest." . . .
In an Aug. 21 posting, Burkett referred to a conversation with former senator Max Cleland (D-Ga.) about the need to counteract Republican tactics: "I asked if they wanted to counterattack or ride this to ground and outlast it, not spending any money. He said counterattack. So I gave them the information to do it with. But none of them have called me back."
Can this be characterized as a Democratic dirty trick? So far, the evidence is pretty thin--though it's far more than sufficient if one were to apply the New York Times "web of connections" standard, which the Kerry campaign has adopted as its own.
That Was Then, This Is Now
From an interview with Dan Rather, published by Broadcasting & Cable on Aug. 30:
Is the media doing a good job covering the 2004 election? Or is there too much attention on the Swift Boat flap?
I would like us to concentrate more on issues and less on campaign process. But there is always a tendency to go with what's sensational. Also, we're human, and humans keep making the same mistakes. In the end, what difference does it make what one candidate or the other did or didn't do during the Vietnam War? In some ways, that war is as distant as the Napoleonic campaigns. What's far more import is this: Do they have an exit strategy for Iraq? If so, what is it? How will they address the national deficit? And what are the chances their plans will work?
When John Kerry was under attack over Vietnam, Rather pooh-poohed the idea that a candidate's Vietnam record was relevant, and never mind that Kerry sought to build his whole campaign around his war-hero legend. But nine days later, Rather broadcast old news about President Bush's National Guard service as if it were the story of a lifetime (which we suppose it was, though not in the way he'd expected).
Under such circumstances, is it unreasonable to harbor suspicions of partisan bias?
Et Tu, Kerry?
The Harvard Crimson reports on a quip John Kerry made at a Saturday fund-raiser: " 'It was fun to meet with a prominent Texan who tells the truth,' he said of Phil McGraw, the television psychologist from President George W. Bush's home state." Dan Rather must really be in trouble when even John Kerry is taking potshots at him.
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Reuters: Don't Edit Our Slant!
The Reuters "news" service, a pioneer in fake-but-accurate journalism, is crying foul because editors at CanWest, a Canadian newspaper chain, have been inserting the word terrorist into Reuters stories about terrorists, the Canadian Broadcast Corp. reports:
The global managing editor for Reuters, David Schlesinger, called such changes unacceptable. He said CanWest had crossed a line from editing for style to editing the substance and slant of news from the Middle East.
"If they want to put their own judgment into it, they're free to do that, but then they shouldn't say that it's by a Reuters reporter," said Schlesinger.
Reuters' slant must not be edited! Except, of course, when it's Reuters doing the slanting. Remember the story of Deanna Wrenn, the Charleston, W.Va., stringer whose dispatch on Jessica Lynch the "news" service turned into an anti-American screed? "I asked Reuters to remove my byline," she said. "They didn't."
L'effetto Roe
Reader Michael Barone, whose encyclopedic knowledge of politics transcends national boundaries, writes to tell us that Ellen Goodman was even more wrong than we gave her credit for in Friday's column:
You rightly pounced on Goodman's assertion that Italy was proof that there is no Roe effect. You cited the fact that Italy has a center-right government.
You could go further. There is proof, in the Italian election statistics, that young people vote more center-right than their elders. The voting age for the Camera dei Deputati (Chamber of Deputies, the lower house) is 18, but the voting age for the Senato (the upper house) is 25. From my reporting on the Italian elections of April 1996 and May 2001--someone has to go over there and cover them, and the weather in Italy in April and May is not uncongenial--I found that the center-right got higher percentages for the Camera dei Deputati than for the Senato.
Reader Chris Nye reports that he's encountered Goodmanlike denial:
I have attempted to enlighten numerous pro-choice friends about the Roe effect. Even though my own views on abortion are decidedly middle-of-the-road, I find the statistical evidence you have presented over the years on this subject to be entirely persuasive.
Somewhat remarkably, though, most abortion-rights zealots refuse to acknowledge any validity of this at all. It's as if they don't want to concede that there could possibly be any downside whatsoever to hundreds of thousands of abortions performed every year.
They very much remind me of the tobacco companies' response in the 1970s and '80s to the overwhelming evidence of the dangers of cigarette smoking. They both respond to statistical evidence indicating strong correlations with anecdotal evidence that proves nothing. "I know lots of young liberals who have conservative parents" is the intellectual equivalent of "My grandfather is 95 years old and he still smokes three packs a day."
Meanwhile, columnist Nat Hentoff, a pro-life liberal, takes note of the Roe effect:
Using the figures of the Alan Guttmacher Institute (which is affiliated with Planned Parenthood) through the year 2000, the National Right to Life Committee estimates "1,312,990 abortions for 2001-03; and factoring in a possible 3 percent undercount (that) AGI estimates for its own figures, the total number of abortions performed in the U.S. from 1973 to 2003 equals 44,670,812."
One can argue whether those are exact figures, but clearly, many millions of unborn Americans will not be voting this year. Conceivably, if it's a close election, enough of them might have been voters for Mr. Kerry to decide the Electoral College vote.
That "conceivably" is a nice touch.
Kate Michelman, Call Your Office!
From an Associated Press dispatch on storm damage in North Carolina:
Four people were killed Friday in Macon County, in the southwest corner of the state, said Rob Brisley with the state Office of Emergency Management. A toddler, an unborn child and two adults died when a wall of water smashed a community of 30 homes to bits.
Clearly Rob Brisley is an antichoice fanatic. Why else would he call a fetus an "unborn child" and include it in a count of "people" who were "killed"? This sets a dangerous precedent. Can a return to the days of back-alley abortions be far behind? |
