Survey USA has an interesting poll...

Now of course, they all have margins of error and such, but it looks like, if you were to believe in polls, that uneducated people favor Bush and educated people favor Kerry.

That's the numbers.

More problems for Sinclair, Swift Boat Liars, and Bush

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PHILADELPHIA - A Vietnam veteran shown in a documentary criticizing Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites)'s anti-war activities filed a libel lawsuit against the movie's producer Monday, saying the film falsely calls the veteran a fraud and a liar.


Kenneth J. Campbell, now a professor at the University of Delaware, said in the suit that "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal" combines footage of him appearing at a 1971 war protest with narration that claims that many of the supposed veterans who took part in the event were later "discovered as frauds" who "never set foot on the battlefield, or left the comfort of the States, or even served in uniform."


The suit said viewers would be left with the perception that Campbell had lied about his military service.


Campbell attached copies of his military records to the lawsuit, showing that he received a Purple Heart and eight other medals, ribbons and decorations for his service in Vietnam.


Film producer Carlton Sherwood's company, Red White and Blue Productions, did not immediately return a call on Monday seeking comment.


Campbell also threatened legal action against the Sinclair Broadcast Group, an owner of 62 television stations that has announced that it intends to pre-empt regular programming to broadcast "Stolen Honor."

With their stock at a 52 week low, you'd think the folks at Sinclair would be smarter, but then I guess they're not in the reality-based community.

Update: the stock is in free-fall today, losing at one point over 9% of its value (at this moment it's down over 8.5%).

Looks like some folks are getting it. Or giving it, depending on how you look at it.

War Crimes and Atrocities...

We knew about My Lai; we know that "free fire zones" and "destroying villages to save them" were, in fact, war crimes, as John Kerry noted so many years ago.

This post is a placeholder for the Pulitzer Prize winning Toledo Blade series about the war crimes committed by Tiger Force.


Really, if I wanted the kind of denial that the Swift Boat Liars display I'd talk to some ... I keep trying to think of the word, but it seems that the Swift Boat Liars are what I'm trying to paint them as...

Want to reduce abortions? Dump Bush.

Increase availability for contraception and increase social spending. That's the clear message from countries like Belgium and the Netherlands, and with the experience of the good old USA:

When President Bush took office, the nation's abortion rates were at a 24-year low, after a 17.4 percent decline during the 1990s. This was a steady decrease averaging 1.7 percent per year. (The data come from Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life using the Guttmacher Institute's studies.)


Enter George W. Bush in 2001. One would expect the abortion rate to continue its consistent course downward, if not plunge. Instead, the opposite happened.

We found four states that have posted three-year statistics: Kentucky's increased by 3.2 percent from 2000 to 2003. Michigan's increased by 11.3 percent from 2000 to 2003. Pennsylvania's increased by 1.9 percent from 1999 to 2002. Colorado's rates skyrocketed 111 percent. We found 12 additional states that reported statistics for 2001 and 2002. Eight states saw an increase in abortion rates (14.6 percent average increase), and four saw a decrease (4.3 percent average).

Under Bush, the decade-long trend of declining abortion rates appears to have reversed. Given the trends of the 1990s, 52,000 more abortions occurred in the United States in 2002 than would have been expected before this change of direction.

For anyone familiar with why most women have abortions, this is no surprise:

Two-thirds of women who have abortions cite "inability to afford a child" as their primary reason (Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life). In the Bush presidency, unemployment rates increased half again. Not since Herbert Hoover had there been a net loss of jobs during a presidency until the current administration. Average real incomes decreased, and for seven years the minimum wage has not been raised to match inflation. With less income, many prospective mothers fear another mouth to feed.
Half of all women who abort say they do not have a reliable mate. And men who are jobless usually do not marry. In the 16 states, there were 16,392 fewer marriages than the year before, and 7,869 more abortions. As male unemployment increases, marriages fall and abortion rises.

Women worry about health care for themselves and their children. Since 5.2 million more people have no health insurance now than before this presidency -- with women of childbearing age overrepresented in those 5.2 million -- abortion increases.

Something to remember about the polls...

There really are more self-identified Democrats than Republicans this year.

The Democratic Party has achieved a small gain in party affiliation and holds a 33%-29% edge over the GOP in Pew surveys conducted in 2004. This represents a modest shift from the two year period following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, when the Republican Party had drawn virtually even with the Democrats

.

So if you see a poll that has, say, 39% Republicans in it, it's probably bunk. See the Charles Cook- related post below, too.

It's not just Suskind...

link

It does not help that Bush now lives in a positively Nixonian cocoon. He does not read newspapers; he sees television only to watch football; he makes election speeches exclusively at ticket-only events, and his courtiers consciously avoid giving him bad news. When he met John Kerry for their first bout on the debating platform, it was almost a new experience for the President to hear the voice of dissent.

A senior Republican, experienced and wise in the ways of Washington, told me last Friday that he does not necessarily accept that Bush is unstable, but what is clear, he added, is that he is now manifestly unfit to be President.

This, too, is a view that is widely felt, but seldom articulated and then only in private, within the Republican as well as Democratic establishments in Washington. Either way, the choice voters make on Tuesday fortnight should be obvious: whether he is unstable or merely unfit to be President - and I would argue that they amount to much the same - he should speedily be turfed out of office.

Yes indeed- this article- and the Suskind article below (as well as the nice bit from Scowcroft of all people) should assure people that it's time to get a real president.

More on the flu vaccine scandal

The NY Times has an in depth report, that outlines the real problem: the lack of a Federal public health infrastructure, along with the failure of capitalism to create a vaccine that will meet demand.

"We are in the middle of a crisis that could have been averted,'' said Dr. Irwin Redlener, associate dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and director of its national center for disaster preparedness.

In particular, public health experts have long cautioned against the country's dependence on a few vaccine makers, and yet this has become standard practice. There are now only two major manufacturers for the nation's supply of flu vaccine, and at least a half-dozen other vaccines are made by single suppliers. Britain, by contrast, has spread its order for flu vaccines among five suppliers, precisely to avoid the kind of predicament America now faces.

In recent years there have been many significant disruptions of vaccine supplies. Between November 2000 and May 2003, there were shortages of 8 of the 11 vaccines for childhood diseases in the United States, including those for tetanus, diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, mumps and chicken pox. There have been flu vaccine shortages or miscues for four consecutive years...

The heart of the problem, experts say, may be that no one person or agency is in charge of making sure the United States has an adequate vaccine supply. The production, sale and distribution of vaccines, particularly those for flu, are handled almost entirely by pharmaceutical companies.

Influenza = more than 10 9/11's per year in the number of deaths. An outbreak of a deadly pandemic would likely be the equivalent of hundreds of 9/11s.

This is a matter of national security, and the Bush junta has been asleep at the wheel on this, just like they were in August 2001.

Oh, and remember Chiron? Well Bush made a series of misstatements- heck, lies- in the 3rd debate:

F.D.A. officials have said the problems were corrected to their satisfaction, and they let the plant continue to operate. But one question likely to be raised by Congressional investigators is why the British found problems so soon after the agency had deemed them resolved.

Chiron announced on Aug. 26 that during routine testing it had found bacterial contamination in a small number of lots of flu vaccine that should have been sterile, a more serious contamination than what the agency had found a year earlier. It said it would delay shipping vaccine until early October and cut its supply forecast from about 50 million doses to between 46 and 48 million. Both the F.D.A. and its British counterpart, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, were informed.

Chiron began its own investigation and also began holding weekly conference calls with officials at the F.D.A. and the disease control centers to report on its progress.

In written testimony to the House Committee on Government Reform on Oct. 8, Mr. Pien said Chiron had completed its internal investigation on Sept. 27. The results, he said, confirmed that the contamination was limited to the initial lots identified. Indeed, on Sept. 28, a confident Mr. Pien told a Senate committee that Chiron expected to start shipping the vaccine in early October.

But British regulators visited the factory again and on Oct. 5 suspended its license, saying it was not being operated in accordance with regulations on good manufacturing practice. Only after the suspension was the nature of the contamination revealed: it was a type of bacteria called serratia, which, though found in the environment and usually not harmful there, can cause illness if injected into the body, especially in a frail elderly person or someone chronically ill.

Chiron has said it is now under investigation by federal prosecutors in New York and by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The investigations are apparently concerned with whether the company misled investors and federal health authorities about the conditions at its factory. The company, while saying it would cooperate with the investigations, has denied any deception.

"Chiron did not at any time mislead public health stakeholders or the public," Mr. Pien said in written testimony to the House. He added, "The results of Chiron's internal investigations confirmed our belief that our product was safe."

But inspectors from both Britain and the F.D.A. disagreed, saying they could not be confident that Chiron had identified all the sources of contamination. On Friday, health officials in the United States said that none of the vaccine in the plant could be salvaged.

Bush implied in the debate a) the FDA found the UK's vaccine was unsafe (it was actually the Brits who did), b) Chiron was a Brittish company (it's American), and c) that they were going to get vaccine from Canada (the Canadians said they don't have any, and you do the math: they have 18 million people, and we need some 40-50 million doses).


But we know what we're dealing with here, and it's a good idea to get rid of Bush.

Karl Rove is only human

link

Amazing article in the Washington Post about Rove.

Among his mistakes:

1. Underestimating the fundraising abilities of his opponents

2. Fostering the image of Bush as a divider, not a uniter (although I think, based on the NY Times profile, it also suits Bush's nature)- which led a lack of real things getting done in Congress.

3. Not really being able to broaden the base of the Repub party. That's why they have to resort to Swift Boat ads through proxies. It's all they have left.

Well, here comes the flu....

Kerry's on it; not bad, I'd say.

View the commercial here.

Let's see: Bush has got more "Swift Boat Lies," against Kerry, and Kerry's got the draft, the flu vaccine scandal, outsourcing and gas prices against Bush.

And if that 527 really does My Pet Goat, it'll be a landslide for Kerry.

This is going to be good.

Some more October Surprises...

Daily Kos has 4 killer issues for Bush (besides the one below, which I think ought to nail it for Kerry)...well worth reading (includes the flu shot scandal), but I'll concentrate on just one here:

The Draft. It's the Democrats' "October Surprise", and the GOP is scared shitless. It polls through the roof -- suburban women will become single-issue voters on it. They don't want their children sent off to fight Bush's disastrous wars. 18-25 year olds are suddenly realizing their vote means something -- perhaps life and death. As Trapper John notes below, it's so potent an issue, that Ed Gillespie, RNC chair, has threatened Rock the Vote for using it.

Remember, if we have learned anything, it's that people can tolerate war as long as it's someone else doing the dying. The threat of a Draft paints the poor Iraq news in a different light to many voters.

I linked to Trapper John's post on Kos above; what's useful to quote here is Rock the Vote's well-argued reply:

I have some news for you. Just because President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary Rumsfeld, and for that matter Senator Kerry, say that there is not going to be a draft does not make it so. Just because Congress holds a transparently phony vote against the draft does not mean there isn't going to be one. Anyone who thinks that the youth of America are going to take a politician's word on this topic is living on another planet.

By your logic, there should be no debate about anything that you disagree with. There's a place for that kind of sentiment (and your threats), but its not here in our country.

There are questions that the politicians are running away from. How long can we keep 138,000 U.S. troops or more on the ground in Iraq? What if full-scale civil war erupts there, as the CIA has warned is a realistic possibility? Would the next President be faced with a choice of pulling out of Iraq rather than institute a draft? Would women be drafted? What exactly would the draft-age be?

According to the Pentagon's own internal assessment, there are "inadequate total numbers" of troops to meet U.S. security interests. The current issue of Time magazine reports that, "General John Keane, who retired last year as the Army's No. 2 officer, says the continued success of the all-volunteer military is not guaranteed" Keane has told Congress that adding more than 50,000 troops to the Army would require thinking about a return to the draft."

Indeed. As others have also noted, if we have a war of necessity, we WILL have a draft- there are no other alternatives unless people consider surrender an option or unless everybody suddenly really starts to go against the demographic evidence cited above. This is the mess Bush has given us, and no amount of bloviating can mitigate that fact.

I hadn't seriously questioned Bush's sanity. Til now.

Ron Suskind's article on George W. Bush is probably one of the most patriotic things that the NY Times has ever done and courageous too, in its way.

The editorial today also noted that it's kind of odd that Judith Miller's getting heat to reveal sources, but for some reason Robert Novak isn't. Very good point.

But that might be better explained by Suskind's article.

Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.

''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . .

''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.''

But it's deeper that that- it's an absolute faith married to managerial incompetence:

Bush has been called the C.E.O. president, but that's just a catch phrase -- he never ran anything of consequence in the private sector. The M.B.A. president would be more accurate: he did, after all, graduate from Harvard Business School. And some who have worked under him in the White House and know about business have spotted a strange business-school time warp. It's as if a 1975 graduate from H.B.S. -- one who had little chance to season theory with practice during the past few decades of change in corporate America -- has simply been dropped into the most challenging management job in the world.

One aspect of the H.B.S. method, with its emphasis on problems of actual corporations, is sometimes referred to as the ''case cracker'' problem. The case studies are static, generally a snapshot of a troubled company, frozen in time; the various ''solutions'' students proffer, and then defend in class against tough questioning, tend to have very short shelf lives. They promote rigidity, inappropriate surety. This is something H.B.S. graduates, most of whom land at large or midsize firms, learn in their first few years in business. They discover, often to their surprise, that the world is dynamic, it flows and changes, often for no good reason. The key is flexibility, rather than sticking to your guns in a debate, and constant reassessment of shifting realities. In short, thoughtful second-guessing.

George W. Bush, who went off to Texas to be an oil wildcatter, never had a chance to learn these lessons about the power of nuanced, fact-based analysis. The small oil companies he ran tended to lose money; much of their value was as tax shelters. (The investors were often friends of his father's.) Later, with the Texas Rangers baseball team, he would act as an able front man but never really as a boss.

His marriage may have been repaired by the power of faith, but faith was clearly having little impact on his broken career. Faith heals the heart and the spirit, but it doesn't do much for analytical skills. In 1990, a few years after receiving salvation, Bush was still bumping along. Much is apparent from one of the few instances of disinterested testimony to come from this period. It is the voice of David Rubenstein, managing director and cofounder of the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based investment firm that is one of the town's most powerful institutions and a longtime business home for the president's father. In 1989, the catering division of Marriott was taken private and established as Caterair by a group of Carlyle investors. Several old-guard Republicans, including the former Nixon aide Fred Malek, were involved.

Rubenstein described that time to a convention of pension managers in Los Angeles last year, recalling that Malek approached him and said: ''There is a guy who would like to be on the board. He's kind of down on his luck a bit. Needs a job. . . . Needs some board positions.'' Though Rubenstein didn't think George W. Bush, then in his mid-40's, ''added much value,'' he put him on the Caterair board. ''Came to all the meetings,'' Rubenstein told the conventioneers. ''Told a lot of jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of said to him, after about three years: 'You know, I'm not sure this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else. Because I don't think you're adding that much value to the board. You don't know that much about the company.' He said: 'Well, I think I'm getting out of this business anyway. And I don't really like it that much. So I'm probably going to resign from the board.' And I said thanks. Didn't think I'd ever see him again.''

Bush would soon officially resign from Caterair's board. Around this time, Karl Rove set up meetings to discuss Bush's possible candidacy for the governorship of Texas. Six years after that, he was elected leader of the free world and began ''case cracking'' on a dizzying array of subjects, proffering his various solutions, in both foreign and domestic affairs. But the pointed ''defend your position'' queries -- so central to the H.B.S. method and rigorous analysis of all kinds -- were infrequent. Questioning a regional supervisor or V.P. for planning is one thing. Questioning the president of the United States is another.

Still, some couldn't resist. As I reported in ''The Price of Loyalty,'' at the Bush administration's first National Security Council meeting, Bush asked if anyone had ever met Ariel Sharon. Some were uncertain if it was a joke. It wasn't: Bush launched into a riff about briefly meeting Sharon two years before, how he wouldn't ''go by past reputations when it comes to Sharon. . . . I'm going to take him at face value,'' and how the United States should pull out of the Arab-Israeli conflict because ''I don't see much we can do over there at this point.'' Colin Powell, for one, seemed startled. This would reverse 30 years of policy -- since the Nixon administration -- of American engagement. Such a move would unleash Sharon, Powell countered, and tear the delicate fabric of the Mideast in ways that might be irreparable. Bush brushed aside Powell's concerns impatiently. ''Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things.''

Yeah, things are getting cliarified all right.

Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush, was highly critical of the current president's handling of foreign policy in an interview published this week, saying that the current president was "mesmerized" by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, that Iraq was a "failing venture" and that the administration's unilateralist approach had harmed relations between Europe and the United States.

Scowcroft's remarks, reported in London's Financial Times, are unusual coming from a leading Republican less than three weeks before a highly contested election. In the first Bush administration Scowcroft was a mentor to Condoleezza Rice, the current national security adviser, and he is regarded as a close associate of Bush's father.


When asked if he had been quoted correctly, his office responded via e-mail: "He has been and is a supporter of President Bush and thinks he is the best qualified to lead our country."

This is the really eerie thing around Bush: nobody is around him to actually criticize him. "Who cares what you think?" is one of his signature quotes. In short the man does not have the slightest concept of accountability, even to the point of not questioning Bush on whether Sweden had an army or not (which is weird in and of itself- Sweden has a huge defense industry and tightly defended its borders and seas during the Cold War.)

This lack of accountability - on the part of Bush as well as his staff and cabinet, who should have demanded long ago a better method of governming, is reminiscent of, yes, the way Adolf Hitler ran Germany into the ground. Stalin, Stalin, for chrissakes, had a better management system (once the USSR had been invaded, not before).

And of anyone had any doubts as to why 9/11 happened, this is it. Remember the My Pet Goat scene in the classrom? It took 7 minutes for somebody on his staff to do something.

This broadside against Bush is gonna cost him. Big time.

And no amount of distorting what Kerry said will take away from the fact that this is the most dysfunctional administration of my lifetime.

See the "Swiftboat Liars" implode!

here

John O'Neill, who was the pawn for the Nixon White House, dissembles, lies, acts rude, and evades.

Anyone who would try to propagate scurrilous claims from O'Neill, after seeing this is basically got their morals in the sewer.

The peasants confirm the conditions for Kerry's Silver Star- and O'Neill can't even bring himself to admit that. And O'Neill gets caught in lie after lie here. See it.

About those polls:

Charles Cook explains it

Berwyn, Ill.: With unprecedented numbers of newly registered voters all across the country, aren't ALL polls essentially irrelevant?

Charles Cook: Virtually all the polls you are seeing are using random digit dialing, not voter registeration rolls, so theoretically even newly registered voters are being polled. A far bigger problem is that as many as 18 percent of telephone subscribers today have no land lines, and since pollsters are not calling cell phones, almost one in five voters are not being included in poll samples.

Unrelated to your question, my advice to people is to not pay too much attention to any one poll, there is a temptation to cherry pick, to focus on the one or two polls that tell you what you want to see happen the most, and ignore all others as methodologically flawed. I would look at the averages of polls that are published in various places, an average of many polls is most likely to give you a truer picture than any one



Nashville, Tenn.: I've read that some political rleaders think highly of the Zogby poll.

What do you think of Zogby's poll?

Charles Cook: I think that anyone who puts significantly more weight on any one pollster is making a huge mistake. John Zogby is a terrific guy who works very hard and has had some really good years and other years (2002) that weren't so good. There is a web site that has plotted out each of the major national polls on a graph that indicates that Zogby's polls have been a tad more Democratic than most others, just as Fox/Opinion Dynamics tend to be a bit more Republican than the others. Averages are always better, just stick to polls that are done over the telephone (NOT internet) and conducted by real live people, not "push #1 for Bush, #2 for Kerry...) like Rasmussen or Survey USA. They have no idea of they are interviewing nine years old or not.

Amen to that.

It's amazing that some folks rely on one poll (especially those that are biased towards Repubs.)

Republicans for Bush think Civil Liberties are Obscene

link

You can't make this stuff up - but it shows - yet again- that if you want American values in America, you've got to dump the current occupants of the White House, America's House:

CENTRAL POINT, Ore. -- Three Medford school teachers were threatened with arrest and thrown out of the President Bush rally at the Jackson County Fairgrounds Thursday night, after they showed up wearing T-shirts with the slogan "Protect our civil liberties."

All three women said they were carrying valid tickets for the event that they had received from Republican Party headquarters in Medford, which had been distributing event tickets to Bush supporters.


Teacher Janet Voorhies said she simply wanted to bring a message to President Bush, but did not intend to protest.

"I wanted to see if I would be able to make a statement that I feel is important, but not offensive, in a rally for my president," said Voorhies, 48. . .

"We chose this phrase specifically because we didn't think it would be offensive or degrading or obscene," said Tania Tong, 34, a special education teacher.


The women got past the first and second checkpoints and were allowed into the Jackson County fairgrounds, but were asked to leave and then escorted out of the event by campaign officials who allegedly told them their T-shirts were "obscene."...

When Cheney visited Eugene last month, the Register-Guard newspaper reported that Perry Patterson, 54, was cited for criminal trespassing for blurting out the word "No" after Cheney claimed that the Bush administration had made the world safer.

Are we freer today? No. Are we safer today? No. Are we better off today? No.

It's here. They did it. And that about wraps it up for Bush.

TruthandHope.org has made the ad that we've all been waiting for. The is the one that more than nullifies Swift Boat Lies, false indignation about Mary Cheney's sexual identity, nor other assorted lies.

I give you, My Pet Goat.

And it does appear they're really going to air it.

What a relief!

2 "Mainstream" TV Shows Demolish Right-Wing Lies

about Kerry and his war service. The lies that have been told by the so-called "Swift Boat Veterans" are now coming home to roost.

ABC News Nightline went to Vietnam, and the people basically backed up Kerry's and the Navy's account of Kerry's heroic service to this country.

And all John O'Neill could do is sputter about some book.

You don't "balance" the truth with lies. And that's all Bush supporters who attempt to tarnish Kerry's service have at this point. And when speaking about "etiquette," there's nothing more rude than a bald-faced lie, which both the liar and the person being lied to know is a lie. It indicates a fundamental lack of respect. And that's reason in and of itself why Bush - who has refused to denounce the Swift Boat liars- does not deserve any decent person's vote. So, once and for all, here's the truth:

On Feb. 28, 1969, a convoy of three American Swift boats came up the river under the command of Lt. John Kerry, arriving at the village of Tran Thoi. According to Kerry's medal citation, the boats "came under intense automatic weapons and small arms fire from an entrenched enemy force less than 50 feet away. Unhesitatingly, Lieutenant [junior grade] Kerry ordered his boat to attack."

The Swift boats, which were transporting a group of the Americans' South Vietnamese allies, turned into the ambush and beached. According to the after-action report, the South Vietnamese troops stormed ashore, overwhelming the local insurgents.


The fierce firefight at Tran Thoi was just the beginning of the day that has become so central to Kerry's biography. Kerry's boat, PCF 94, and one of the other boats continued upriver. The ABC News team took the same route to the site of the second deadly incident that day.

According to the Navy's official report, following the initial ambush, Kerry's boat and another Swift boat continued up the river to an area where gunshots had been reported.

Less than a kilometer upriver is Nha Vi, a small hamlet. Vo Van Tam, now 54, was a local Viet Cong commander during the war. According to him, the area was a hotbed of guerrilla activity. They had recently been reinforced by a 12-man unit, supplied with small arms and one B-40 rocket launcher. He said the reinforcements had been dispatched from provincial headquarters specifically to target the Swift boats.

According to Vo, there were at least 20 Viet Cong soldiers at Nha Vi there that day. "There were 12 soldiers from the provincial level and eight from the district level," he said.

His wife, Vo Thi Vi, 54, said Feb. 28, 1969, is a day that the villagers of Nha Vi hamlet will never forget. "Everything was destroyed," she said. "There's no houses left. They leveled everything. There was no leaves left. The fighting was very fierce."

According to the citation for Kerry's Silver Star, when the boats approached the hamlet, "a B-40 rocket exploded close aboard PCF 94" — Kerry's boat. He "personally led a landing party ashore in pursuit of the enemy," the citation says, before commending Kerry's "extraordinary daring and personal courage" for "attacking a numerically superior force in the face of intense fire."

That account is disputed by Swift boat veteran John O'Neill, author of "Unfit for Command," who maintains in his book that the statement "is simply false. There was little or no fire."



Different Accounts


Villagers say this is what they saw:

"Firing from over here. Firing from over there. Firing from the boat," Vo Thi Vi told "Nightline."

She was only a couple hundred yards away when a Swift boat turned and approached the shore, she said, adding that the boat was unleashing a barrage of gunfire as it approached.

"I ran," she recalled, "Running fast. … And the Americans came from down there, yelling 'Attack, Attack!' And we ran."

Her husband, Tam, said the man who fired the B-40 rocket was hit in this barrage of gunfire. Then, he said, "he ran about 18 meters before he died, falling dead."


Was the man killed by Kerry or by fire from the Swift boat? It was the heat of battle, Tam said, and he doesn't know exactly how the man with the rocket launcher died. But he knows the man's name — Ba Thanh. He was one of the 12 reinforcements sent to the village by provincial headquarters, and after he died, the firefight continued, according to Tam.

"When the firing started, Ba Thanh was killed," Tam said. "And I led Ba Thanh's comrades, the whole unit, to fight back. And we ran around the back and fought the Americans from behind. We worked with the city soldiers to fire on the American boats."

boat, Kerry "chased VC inland, behind hooch, and shot him while he fled, capturing one B-40 rocket launcher, with round in chamber."

None of the villagers seems to be able to say for a fact that they saw an American chase the man who fired the B-40 into the woods and shoot him. Nobody seems to remember that. But they have no problem remembering Ba Thanh, the man who has been dismissed by Kerry's detractors as "a lone, wounded, fleeing, young Vietcong in a loincloth." (The description comes from "Unfit for Command," by Swift boat veteran John O'Neill.)

"No, this is not correct," Nguyen Thi Tuoi, 77, told ABC News. "He wore a black pajama. He was strong. He was big and strong. He was about 26 or 27."

Tuoi said she didn't see Ba Thanh get shot either, but she and her husband say they were the first to find his body. They say they found him a good distance from his bunker, though she could not confirm that Kerry — or anyone else — had pursued him into the bush.

Her husband, Nguyen Van Ty, in his 80s, had a slightly different account of how Ba Thanh died.
"I didn't see anything because I was hiding from the bullets and the bombs," he said. "It was very fierce and there was shooting everywhere and the leaves were being shredded to pieces. I was afraid to stay up there. I had to hide. And then, when it was over, I saw Ba Thanh was dead. He may have been shot in the chest when he stood up."

He also said the Swift boats were coming under attack from the Viet Cong fighters on shore. "We tried to shoot at the boat," he said, "but we didn't hit anything."

Kerry's citation says he "uncovered an enemy rest and supply area, which was destroyed," but according to the villagers, the Americans missed the military supplies. In fact, Vo Ti Vi said, just a few weeks after the attack, the Viet Cong raided a U.S. base stealing weapons and ammunition. The weapons remain in Nha Vi all these years later, she says, buried under her garden.

Back in Tran Thoi, villager Nguyen Van Khoai said that about six months ago he was visited by an American who described himself as a Swift boat veteran and told him another American from the Swift boats was running for president of the United States. Nguyen said the man was accompanied by a cameraman.

"They say he didn't do anything to deserve the medal," Nguyen said. "The other day, they came and asked me the questions and I said that the recognition for the medal is up to the U.S.A."

He said that, after they met, the Swift Boat veteran and the cameraman turned around and went back down the river. "Nightline" has not been able to identify the men.

His awards should have been the most unassailable part of Kerry's record. But then came those campaign ads from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. "He is lying about his record," said Ensign Al French in one ad.

But John O'Neill, the officer who took over command of Kerry's Swift boat after Kerry left Vietnam, raised some specific questions about the incident for which Kerry received his most significant award, the Silver Star:

"In the Silver Star incident, John Kerry's citation reflects that he charged into a numerically superior force, and into intense fire," O'Neill told ABC News in an August 2004 interview. "But the actual facts are that there was a single kid there who had fired a rocket, who popped up, and John Kerry with his gunboat, with or without a number of troops, depending on who you talk to, plopped in front of the kid. The kid was wounded in the legs by machine gun fire, and as he ran off, John Kerry jumped off the boat and shot the kid in the back."

So apparently Republican operatives tried to get a story from the Vietnamese and couldn't because it wasn't true. And how come they don't tell you this??? (It's called lying by omission.)


PBS's Frontline show was good, too, although they left out many things about Bush's failed business dealings, and the Texas Rangers scandal.

But otherwise, it was fair and balanced. It leaves no doubt that Bush was AWOL.

Hoist by their own steamy, hot lesbian petard...

Well, lots of folks, such as Mossback are in high dudgeon about these words from John Kerry:

"We're all God's children, Bob. And I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she's being who she was, she's being who she was born as.

"I think if you talk to anybody, it's not choice. I've met people who struggled with this for years, people who were in a marriage because they were living a sort of convention, and they struggled
with it."

As usual, their hypocrisy betrays them. After all, Dick Cheney himself made his daughter's sexual preferance an issue earlier, on August 25th:

At a campaign rally in this Mississippi River town, Cheney spoke supportively about gay relationships when asked about his stand on gay marriage.

''Lynne and I have a gay daughter, so it's an issue our family is very familiar with," Cheney told an audience that included his daughter.

''With respect to the question of relationships, my general view is freedom means freedom for everyone . . . People ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to....

Addressing Bush's position on the amendment, Cheney said that despite his preference, ''the president makes policy for the administration. He's made it clear that he does, in fact, support a constitutional amendment on this issue."

IOW, Cheney doesn't give a crap about his daughter as long as he gets to be Vice President.

Nice family vaules, eh?

Great piece on Derrida today in the NY Times

This piece really debunks most of the nonsense that was put forth about deconstruction from both the right and the left:

Mr. Derrida's name is most closely associated with the often cited but rarely understood term "deconstruction." Initially formulated to define a strategy for interpreting sophisticated written and visual works, deconstruction has entered everyday language. When responsibly understood, the implications of deconstruction are quite different from the misleading clichés often used to describe a process of dismantling or taking things apart. The guiding insight of deconstruction is that every structure - be it literary, psychological, social, economic, political or religious - that organizes our experience is constituted and maintained through acts of exclusion. In the process of creating something, something else inevitably gets left out.

These exclusive structures can become repressive - and that repression comes with consequences. In a manner reminiscent of Freud, Mr. Derrida insists that what is repressed does not disappear but always returns to unsettle every construction, no matter how secure it seems. As an Algerian Jew writing in France during the postwar years in the wake of totalitarianism on the right (fascism) as well as the left (Stalinism), Mr. Derrida understood all too well the danger of beliefs and ideologies that divide the world into diametrical opposites: right or left, red or blue, good or evil, for us or against us. He showed how these repressive structures, which grew directly out of the Western intellectual and cultural tradition, threatened to return with devastating consequences. By struggling to find ways to overcome patterns that exclude the differences that make life worth living, he developed a vision that is consistently ethical.

And yet, supporters on the left and critics on the right have misunderstood this vision. Many of Mr. Derrida's most influential followers appropriated his analyses of marginal writers, works and cultures as well as his emphasis on the importance of preserving differences and respecting others to forge an identity politics that divides the world between the very oppositions that it was Mr. Derrida's mission to undo: black and white, men and women, gay and straight. Betraying Mr. Derrida's insights by creating a culture of political correctness, his self-styled supporters fueled the culture wars that have been raging for more than two decades and continue to frame political debate.

To his critics, Mr. Derrida appeared to be a pernicious nihilist who threatened the very foundation of Western society and culture. By insisting that truth and absolute value cannot be known with certainty, his detractors argue, he undercut the very possibility of moral judgment. To follow Mr. Derrida, they maintain, is to start down the slippery slope of skepticism and relativism that inevitably leaves us powerless to act responsibly.

This is an important criticism that requires a careful response. Like Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Mr. Derrida does argue that transparent truth and absolute values elude our grasp. This does not mean, however, that we must forsake the cognitive categories and moral principles without which we cannot live: equality and justice, generosity and friendship. Rather, it is necessary to recognize the unavoidable limitations and inherent contradictions in the ideas and norms that guide our actions, and do so in a way that keeps them open to constant questioning and continual revision. There can be no ethical action without critical reflection.

Read those lines over, dear visitor, if you don't get it. Identity politics is practiced by conservatives and liberals, Christians and Buddhists, agnostics, atheists, Trotskyites, Libertarians, Objectivists, Fascists, Theocrats, and Communists. And "undecideds" too, I might add.

I'd emphasize further that the last sentence in the quote above: if one conciously avoids critical reflection one is ipso facto unethical.


And I'd also emphasize that (and Derrida himself wouldn't disagree) that exclusion at times can become liberating, but it is only in the light of critical reflection that we can tell whether we are liberating or enslaving ourselves. Every choice is an exclusion.

Another quote from the article:

During the last decade of his life, Mr. Derrida became preoccupied with religion and it is in this area that his contribution might well be most significant for our time. He understood that religion is impossible without uncertainty. Whether conceived of as Yahweh, as the father of Jesus Christ, or as Allah, God can never be fully known or adequately represented by imperfect human beings.

And yet, we live in an age when major conflicts are shaped by people who claim to know, for certain, that God is on their side. Mr. Derrida reminded us that religion does not always give clear meaning, purpose and certainty by providing secure foundations. To the contrary, the great religious traditions are profoundly disturbing because they all call certainty and security into question. Belief not tempered by doubt poses a mortal danger. ...

True believers of every stripe - Muslim, Jewish and Christian - cling to beliefs that, Mr. Derrida warns, threaten to tear apart our world.

Fortunately, he also taught us that the alternative to blind belief is not simply unbelief but a different kind of belief - one that embraces uncertainty and enables us to respect others whom we do not understand. In a complex world, wisdom is knowing what we don't know so that we can keep the future open.

And yes, reader, his philosophy is inherently self-referential: even his approach should be questioned, doubted, and experimented.

Another Kerry win...

My only complaint is that Kerry could have exploited the "flu vaccine" question better.

Here's how Kerry should have approached the issue:

1. There's going to be unplanned for events in a presidency. Like 9/11.

2. We're going to restore the nation's public health infrastructure. Here is where he could have sneaked in his health plan, but public health is more than just insuring everyone. It is, in effect, a matter of national security if we cannot get a vaccine distributed quickly and safely to most Americans.


3. He should have looked at Bush when he was from Mars when he said, "tort reform." That's a non-sequitur if ever there was one. (Also, I should note that the FDA wanted to import the vaccine, but the UK wouldn't export it, I understand.) He should have- even if it was piggybacking on another question- mentioned that if this were the 1918 pandemic, it wouldn't be a really good idea for a president not to get a flu vaccine.



On the religious faith issue, Kerry hit the ball out of the park though.

KERRY: I respect their views. I completely respect their views. I am a Catholic. And I grew up learning how to respect those views. But I disagree with them, as do many.

I believe that I can't legislate or transfer to another American citizen my article of faith. What is an article of faith for me is not something that I can legislate on somebody who doesn't share that article of faith.

I believe that choice is a woman's choice. It's between a woman, God and her doctor. And that's why I support that.

Now, I will not allow somebody to come in and change Roe v. Wade.

The president has never said whether or not he would do that. But we know from the people he's tried to appoint to the court he wants to.

I will not. I will defend the right of Roe v. Wade.

Now, with respect to religion, you know, as I said, I grew up a Catholic. I was an altar boy. I know that throughout my life this has made a difference to me.

And as President Kennedy said when he ran for president, he said, I'm not running to be a Catholic president. I'm running to be a president who happens to be Catholic.

My faith affects everything that I do, in truth. There's a great passage of the Bible that says, What does it mean, my brother, to say you have faith if there are no deeds? Faith without works is dead.

And I think that everything you do in public life has to be guided by your faith, affected by your faith, but without transferring it in any official way to other people.

That's why I fight against poverty. That's why I fight to clean up the environment and protect this earth.

That's why I fight for equality and justice. All of those things come out of that fundamental teaching and belief of faith.

But I know this, that President Kennedy in his inaugural address told all of us that here on Earth, God's work must truly be our own. And that's what we have to – I think that's the test of public service.

And I'd have mentioned Belgium and the Netherlands; if conservatives really wanted to stop abortions, they'd want strong public services, and easy access to contraception.

Of course, not being a Catholic, especially a Catholic politician, I can say that.

"Plaintiff found O'REILLY's paranoid rambling...

both strange and alarming.

Well, put a fork in him; he's done.