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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (198703)	8/27/2004 4:08:22 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575192

<font color=brown>I guess there is no loyalty among thieves. If the GOP dislikes McCain so much, why did they demand he campaign with Bush, and more importantly, given their opinions of him, why did McCain comply? <font color=black> ****************************************************** August 27, 2004, 2:09 p.m. The McCain Myth** Bush didn’t smear the Arizona senator in 2000. He legitimately questioned his record. It is supposed to be a devastating critique of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that John McCain doesn't like their ads. But should we be surprised? McCain knows no party. Instead, together with Kerry supporter Max Cleland, the Arizona senator makes for the smallest caucus in American politics — Thin-Skinned Vietnam War Veterans Adored by the Media (TSVWVAM). A Kerry ad (now taken off the air) featured a clip from McCain at a 2000 debate in South Carolina excoriating Bush for abiding attacks on his service. It seems devastating, unless you know the context. McCain was furious — a not-infrequent condition for the Arizona maverick — that a Bush supporter who is a veteran had stood next to Bush at a rally and complained about McCain's Senate voting record. It wasn't an attack on McCain's service. But both members of TSVWVAM have the same inability to distinguish between criticisms of their records and themselves personally. "He has always opposed all the legislation," the pro-Bush vet said, "be it Agent Orange or Gulf War health care, or frankly the POW/MIA issue." You don't have to subscribe to every particular of this litany to consider it firmly in-bounds. A McCain vote in 1999 against a Department of Veterans Affairs spending bill, for instance, angered some vets, as did his work to normalize relations with Vietnam. Veterans of Foreign Wars gave McCain a 75 percent favorable rating in 1998, respectable but lower than other senators who scored in the 80 percent to 100 percent range. In 1995, McCain scored a mere 27 percent. So it's not as though his legislative record was beyond reproach. National Review's own Byron York has debunked the other "McCain was smeared in South Carolina" charge. McCain mainly alleged that the Bush campaign was calling voters in a dirty "push poll" and telling them, "McCain is a cheat and a liar and a fraud." McCain's charge was based on the testimony of one 14-year-old boy. The Bush campaign released the script of the advocacy calls it was making, and the script said only, "Don't be misled by McCain's negative tactics." Asked by the Los Angeles Times to provide voters who had received the smear calls, the McCain campaign unearthed only six. According to the Times, of the voters it could reach, "three described questions that, while negative, appear to have been part of a legitimate poll. Another said she heard no negative information at all." McCain lost in South Carolina because he was too liberal for Republican primary voters and his campaign was considered too negative after he compared Bush's honesty to Bill Clinton's. A Washington Post columnist recently complained in outraged tones that the Bush campaign in South Carolina was "questioning the conservative credentials" of McCain. Horrors! That is at least an accurate depiction of what happened, but hardly an outrage. McCain got out in front of the Swift Boat controversy, immediately calling the first ad "dishonest and dishonorable," thus making TSVWVAM unanimous. McCain so pronounced himself before he possibly could have known the truth about the allegations, since he wasn't there in the Mekong Delta and no substantive reporting had yet been done on the charges. Why does one set of Vietnam veterans, those backing Kerry, automatically trump another set of Vietnam veterans, those critical of Kerry? Well, on almost any issue not directly related to the war on terror, McCain can be expected to come down on the side not of the conservatives, the liberals, the Republicans, or the Democrats, but of the journalistic clerisy. Determine what the conventional wisdom of the press is (in this case that the Swift Boat vets are discreditable), and there John McCain will be, standing like a stone wall. John Kerry is happy to exploit McCain's position. Never mind that Kerry's Swift Boat counterattack is based on two charges that are flatly untrue: that Bush smeared McCain in 2000 and that he is behind the Swift Boat ads now. That is apparently beneath the notice of TSVWVAM and their sycophants in the press. — Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years. (c) 2004 by King Features Syndicate The latest: The McCain Myth 08/27 A $136,000 Link 08/25 A Swift Blow 08/24 Suing the OB-GYNs 08/20 Previous Articles The Clinton Legacy Bill and Hillary Clinton don't want you to read this book. Buy it through NR WFB: Gruesome and Constitutional 08/27 2:29 p.m. Lowry: The McCain Myth 08/27 2:09 p.m. Owens: A Tangled Web 08/27 12:53 p.m. Carney: No Dollar Left Behind 08/27 12:45 p.m. York: Kerry and Swift Boats: A Damage Report 08/27 9:29 a.m. Kudlow: The Clinton-Hastert Wedge 08/27 9:09 a.m. BuzzCharts: Wages of Spin 08/27 9:08 a.m. Graham: Taxing Times for Democrats 08/27 8:58 a.m. Kurtz: The Dangerous Secret 08/27 8:56 a.m. Moore: Grapes of Wrath 08/27 8:53 a.m. Wallison: Quiz Show 08/27 8:52 a.m. Marshall: Four Million 08/27 8:44 a.m. VDH: The Fog of Battle 08/27 8:43 a.m. Looking for a story? Click here nationalreview.com

To: Road Walker who wrote (198703)	8/27/2004 4:43:57 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1575192

Bush’s Sleeper Cells By Eleanor Clift Newsweek Updated: 3:50 p.m. ET Aug. 27, 2004Aug. 27 - Karl Rove makes Chuck Colson look like a girly man. Colson didn’t have the audacity to go after John Kerry’s military record when President Nixon was looking for dirt on antiwar leaders. After researching Kerry’s medals, Colson, who now heads a prison ministry program, backed off. “Maybe Chuck knew he was going to find Jesus back then because he had a degree of shame,” says a senior staffer to a Senate Republican. The Kerry campaign thinks it has succeeded in discrediting the scurrilous attack on Kerry’s military service, but Rove got what he wanted. Instead of talking about a failed war in Iraq and a new report that shows 1.3 million more Americans living in poverty, we’re debating what happened in the Mekong Delta in 1968. The strategy “came straight from the West Wing,” says the GOP staffer. “Nobody should be confused.” Asked to explain, this Republican says Rove is smart enough to keep technical distance. But all it takes is a well-placed wink to activate a web of Bush family hit men, confidantes and deep-pocket donors. “They know what to do—it’s like sleeper cells that get activated,” he says, likening the players to “political terrorists.” They sprang into action in 2000 when Bush was running in the primaries against John McCain. After getting beat in New Hampshire by McCain, Bush’s first event was at Bob Jones University in South Carolina. Standing next to Bush on the stage was a veteran who went right at McCain, questioning his Vietnam service while Bush remained silent. A whisper campaign told voters that McCain had a black child. (The McCains have an adopted daughter from Bangladesh.) McCain lost the primary; the veteran became a Bush administration appointee. The charges advanced by the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth would never hold up in a court of law. These men would have us believe, contrary to Navy records and countless eye witnesses, that Kerry did not act heroically and had a grand plan to manipulate medals from the military. Too bad Bob Dole got hauled into this mess. Once known principally as a GOP hatchet man, Dole had rehabbed himself over the years to war hero and sardonic wit. Then over the weekend he said all Swift Boat Veterans for Truth can’t be Republican liars. It’s the old where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire routine. Why would Dole allow himself to be used like that? He must have forgotten how Bush’s father provoked him during the 1988 GOP primaries with sleazy allegations. When Vice President Bush approached him on the Senate floor, Dole blurted out, “Quit lying about my record.” The remark helped sink Dole’s chance for the nomination. My Republican mole on Capitol Hill says the green light has gone out to Republicans to do whatever it takes to get Bush elected. “This is the way we hold onto power,” he says with disgust. Pollster John Zogby’s survey of battleground states taken last week as the Swift Boat controversy raged shows no fundamental change in the race. “It’s running its course, and it may boomerang,” he says of the attack on Kerry’s heroism. The fact that the sleeper network has gone nuclear is evidence of Bush’s weakness, not his strength, says Zogby. “If [the Bush team] weren’t seeing serious damage, they wouldn’t be hitting so hard so early. The president is on the ropes; there’s no other way of looking at it.” A lot of Vietnam vets will never forgive Kerry for accusing them of committing atrocities. Kerry has conceded some hyperbole in his 1971 Senate testimony, but didn’t the Toledo Blade win a Pulitzer this year for uncovering Vietnam-era atrocities? Have we forgotten about the My Lai massacre and Zippo lighters burning down hooches? Maybe a few masochists want to debate whether Vietnam was a noble cause, but 58,000 of our soldiers died. The war was a waste whether you were on the right or the left. Kerry leveled most of his criticism at political leaders who didn’t tell the truth, and who sanctioned “search and destroy” missions that invited war crimes. By the time Kerry testified in 1971, 44,000 American soldiers were already dead. The war had almost no popular support, yet another 14,000 lives would be lost. The irony is that Kerry does have courage—the very quality this smarmy campaign seeks to denigrate. The rap on him is that he is slow to battle, that it takes a near-death experience to get him fully engaged. By assailing his heroism, the GOP may have done Kerry a favor. Maybe they’ve awakened a sleeping giant. msnbc.msn.com

To: Road Walker who wrote (198703)	8/30/2004 6:37:38 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575192

re: Bush doesn't "get a free pass" if a subset of news organizations isn't very skeptical about his claims in one area of one issue for a certain period of time. Bush would have gotten a free pass if all news and opinions sources accepted his version of the story, on all subsets of all issues all the time. And that's just about what happened in post-9/11 America. No it isn't, unless you mean in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Howard Dean had the guts to break that taboo, Thank God. Bush was harshly criticized long before Howard Dean had his moment in the spotlight. Tim