In the most breathtakingly brain-dead example of pot-calling-the-kettle-black I’ve seen yet in the Kerry/Swift Boat Vets brouhaha, this editorial accuses the Swift Boat Vets and President Bush (whom he is apparently unable to separate in the space available in his mind) of two primary things:

1. flip-flopping
2. fudging events in the past for political gain

And to top it off, sort of a rhetorical flourish, I suppose, to show that he knew he was on top of his game, he says:

If it is war-time recollections we must rely on, this handful of Vietnam veterans condemning Kerry is way outnumbered by veterans who were there.

Lessee…250+ Swifties in the SBV camp, less than a dozen in the Kerry camp…carry the 2…

I’m reminded of Colin Fahey’s noble attempt to get every question wrong on the SAT.

Mark Cuban has a blog. I’m excited; I think Mark is a tremendously interesting guy to watch (and I’m a Mavs fan, though I’m crushed that Steve Nash is gone. What was Mark thinking?).

Anyway, he has a terrific entry on how to improve the utterly, inexcusably miserable performance of TeamUSA in the 2004 Olympics. Of course, he’s got an earlier one on why the NBA is screwing up sending its players to the Olympics in the first place. Two things Mark is not short of: 1) ideas, and 2) comments.

I couldn’t help being reminded of Michael Moore and his fellow shrill Bush-bashers at Moveon.org when I read North Korea’s latest bluster:

North Korea called President George W. Bush an imbecile and a tyrant who puts Hitler in the shade, unleashing a stream of insults Monday that seemed to rule out any serious progress on nuclear disarmament talks before the American elections in November.

Of course, perhaps I’m just misreading them. The article goes on to quote a “former U.S. diplomat,” one Kenneth Quinones: “The North Koreans made it very clear, politely, that they want Mr. Kerry to win the election.” Man, I shoulda paid attention in diplomat class…

Mark Steyn goes on the rampage against Mssr. Kerry in this Telegraph piece.

Probably my favorite quote, though there are so many good ones to choose from, is this:

I said a couple of weeks back that John Kerry was too strange to be President, and a week or two earlier that he was too stuck-up to be President. Since I’m on an alliterative roll, let me add that he’s too stupid to be President. What sort of idiot would make the centrepiece of his presidential campaign four months of proud service in a war he’s best known for opposing?

Mark, as usual, says a lot of stuff I’d like to say, only better than I’d think to say it.

Adeimantus weighs in with an extremely thoughtful post on “the domestic truce” on Vietnam. This is not a quick, light read, but it’s well, well worth the time. Highly recommended, the kind of thing that makes you think, no matter what you think.

Ed Cone has pretty much nailed what modern political “discussions” sound like. This is especially true when candidates are beating each other up over differences so small that their mothers might not could tell them apart (the only races that can compare to presidential ones for nastiness have got to be small-town mayoral ones).

Anyway, this is too funny. A small sample to whet your appetite:

I am right, and you are wrong.

You are not just wrong, you and those like you are intellectually insufficient and morally suspect. Why do you hate our country? Think of the children. God said to tell you that he is not pleased.

Stop interrupting me while I’m shouting. Feel the crushing weight of my arguments, which are built on logic and constructed from facts that are sturdy and sound. You just whine about how you feel.

Your information is flawed because it came from a source I know to be aligned with the forces of darkness. I am able to parse the media and edit what I see for bias and spin, while you are a gullible sap who believes everything you see on the TV or read in that wholly discredited rag you just quoted.

Gotta love that.

After somebody there “looked under the couch” and “found Cambodia” (as Slings and Arrows memorably puts it), the Washington Post got curious. They have dragged it out from under there and shone a big spotlight on the whole Swift Vets/Kerry conflict. (Use bugmenot.com to get past the login, but you may have to skip the first 3 or 4 logins it offers; they’ve already been reconfigured or disabled.)

Honestly, perhaps I’m missing something, but this is a great article. It’s not great because it parrots my personal idea of things; in fact, it sheds some light I didn’t find particularly pleasant here and there. It’s great because it sheds light that nobody involved will find particularly pleasant: it just sheds light, indiscriminately, and doesn’t care whose rat is spotlighted.

Establishing the facts 35 years later is complicated not merely by fading memories and sometimes ambiguous archival evidence, but also by the bitterly partisan nature of the presidential campaign.

An investigation by The Washington Post into what happened that day suggests that neither side has been entirely forthcoming, and that each has withheld information from the public record.

There’s lots and lots of grist for the mill in here. Looks like the WP was busy digging while the NYT was busy spinning. There are lots more questions to be asked and answered, but the chorus is getting louder.

Tobias covers it all has a great list of books Kerry doesn’t want banned.

National Review has helpfully posted the transcript of John Kerry’s April 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It’s an occasionally interesting exercise in brown-nosing and carefully scripted compliments and insults (the former between committee members and Kerry, the latter mostly tossed at Nixon and his administration).

As other people have pointed out, it’s also a shameless of example of a young man not just willing, but eager to malign and destroy the lives and honor of his fellow soldiers, in order to feed his very personal appetite for power and attention.

But I found it a curious spectacle to read John Kerry, circa 1971, complaining of media blackout.

See if any of this sounds familiar. After pointing out the difficulty of competing with “vested power” and “those bodies which have the funds and the ability to lobby” (citing as specific examples the AMA and the American Legion), Kerry said:

There is one other body that has tremendous power in this country, which is a favorite topic of Vice President Agnew and I would take some agreement with him. That would be the fourth estate. The press. I think the very reason that we veterans are here today is the result partially of our inability to get our story out through the legitimate channels.

That is to say, for instance, I held a press conference here in Washington, D.C., some weeks ago with General Shoup, with General Hester, with the mother of a prisoner of war, the wife of a man who was killed, the mother of a soldier who was killed, and with a bilateral amputee, all representing the so-called silence majority, the silent so-called majority which the President used to perpetuate the war, and because it was a press conference and an antiwar conference and people simply exposing ideas we had no electronic media there.

I called the media afterward and asked them why and the answer was, from one of the networks, it doesn’t have to be identified, “because, is, new business is really partly entertainment business visually, you see, and a press conference like that is not visual.”

Of course, we don’t have the position of power to get our ideas out. I said, “If I take some crippled veterans down to the White House and we chain ourselves to the gates, will we get coverage?” “Oh, yes, we will cover that.”

So you are reduced to a position where the only way you can get your ideas out is to stage events, because had we not staged the events, with all due respect, Senator, and I really appreciate the fact that I am here obviously, and I know you are committed to this, but with all due respect I probably wouldn’t be sitting at this table. You see this is the problem.

Indeed, Mr. Kerry. Indeed it is. And so it remains, or tries to. The difference is that today, *you’re* the Senator trying to hide, trying to drown out the raggedy “little people” making a fuss outside the gates, and the Internet, the independent press, the independent media (talk
radio, Fox News, the WSJ, and our beloved bloggers) are circumventing the same wall of silence that you decried back then. But now that you’re part of that establishment, now that you married into some “funds and power to lobby,” your response is to try to shut them up in any way
you can.

But as Dean Esmay memorably said, “The Internet has detected the mainstream media as a form of censorship and simply routed around them” (updating the inimitable Barlow).

Inspired by Minion’s brilliant Does your candidate stink? (complete with nose-holding graph), I was inspired to try to turn Google to my own nefarious research purpose.

Since the cracks in the wall of media silence on Kerry’s Cambodia winter wonderland are starting to spread (see my other two posts from this morning), I thought I’d see whether the erstwhile “Paper of Record”, the NY Times, had discovered there was a story here yet.

The total count of mentions of “Christmas” and “Cambodia”? Zero. Well, what about “Swift Vets for Truth”? Surely they’re “in the news”? Total count: Zero.

By way of comparison, let’s check out “Bush National Guard Service” at the Gray Lady. Total count: 491.

Nope, nothing to see here. Move along, that’s right. We’ll let you know when there’s something to report. Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain (of media blackout). Bias? What bias?

For those of you unfamiliar with the Atlanta Constitution-Journal, it’s not exactly a bastion of conservative thought. However, even their woodpile is not ideologically pure. Associate editorial page editor Jim Wooten writes this excellent piece on the SwiftVets/Kerry fracas (use bugmenot if you need a login). He points out that, whatever you think of Vietnam, or Kerry, or ugly political fights, the men making the allegations have earned the right to be heard:

Does it matter? It does to those he accused of committing atrocities.

The nation may be done with Vietnam, content to treat the era as a campaign backdrop, with no further interest in whether the atrocities Kerry alleges were commonplace.

But the two groups — the swift-boat veterans and other Vietnam veterans who feel wronged by his characterizations — have earned the right not to be dismissed as cranks and partisans, at least until they are fully heard.

While you’re there, you might also check out another great piece of his from a few days ago. Two tidbits from this one should whet your appetite (or inflame your spleen, I don’t know):

Kerry’s election as president of the United States would be the third humiliation of those who chose to serve in Vietnam.

This really isn’t about Bush — and the Bush campaign would be ill-advised to become involved in any way whatsoever.

It’s about Kerry and, in a real sense, it’s about the anti-war left that surfaces again in mobilizing opposition to the war in Iraq. Only 3 percent of the delegates who nominated Kerry agree that war in Iraq was worth the loss of life and cost to this country; 93 percent thought it was not.

Wow, shows how much I know. Who knew a guy this smart was hiding out in the Atlanta C-J editorial offices?

The Wall Street Journal editorial page criticizes Kerry’s Christmas fantasy from ‘68 in a piece by Robert Pollock (try bugmenot.com if the registration hassle bugs you). His comments on the fairy-tale Cambodian holiday itself are good, but it’s disappointing that he feels it necessary to trivialize the contentions of the Swifties (though to be fair, he attempts to dump Rasmussen and the other of Kerry’s hired “band” into the “doesn’t matter” bin with them). He writes:

Both sides strike me as sincere, but eyewitness accounts of fast-moving and stressful situations like combat are too unreliable for there to be much hope of getting at the “truth” here.

I have my own ideas about the two sides’ relevant sincerity, but his comments about eyewitness accounts of combat are true. And were they relevant to the most serious of the allegations in Unfit for Command, then I’d agree with him. But the (continuing) problem for those who wish to pretend that the book’s allegations are somehow beneath them is that they are not disputes over what happened in “fast-mosting and stressful situations like combat”, but rather accusations that stories of combat and stress were invented in order to (1) bolster a young radical power-seeker’s dossier for his planned political career, and (2) to get that same young anti-war radical a quick ticket back home to greener pastures.

In short, this ain’t about conflicting accounts of who shot who in the midst of a pitched battle; they’re very well-document allegations of cold-blooded fraud perpetrated over a period of months in a variety of eerily similar non-”situations”. And we can’t ignore that. You, me, everybody in the U.S., deserves an answer.

That griping aside, it’s still delightful to see the WSJ raise its hoary head and notice that the stench is becoming unbearable in Denmark (so to speak), and that its source seems to be the very heart of the Kerry campaign.

The ever-vigilant Hong Kong police have finally broken a notorious ring of gamblers. The desperados were apprehended running a vicious, gladiator-style staged-combat ring. They used captive critters as combatants, pitting them in a series of fights to the death, all for the warped pleasure of the greedy, bloodthirsty spectators.

The poor innocent critters thus liberated? Crickets. Can’t make this stuff up…

Missouri has taken the remarkable step of taking a partial sales tax holiday. From Aug. 13-15, clothing, school supplies, and some computers will be exempt from sales tax.

That is so cool. It’s just fantastic to see state governments showing a little creativity and verve, not to mention real concern for, and help for, its citizens.

It’s curious, though, how everyone pretty much understands with crystalline clarity how a sales tax “holiday” can be expected to dramatically goose sales during that period. I.e., higher taxes on anything decrease it, less taxes increase it. This is true for income, for sales, for pretty much everything. If breathing were taxed, we’d hold our breath when we could. So why is this so hard to understand in larger context? Somehow, I suspect it’s not that hard to understand. I suspect that it’s just too easy to use for political points for the basic economics to make much of a difference at all.

Still, huzzah for Mizzou! It’s almost enough to make me want to move (for the weekend).

Well, well. Reports are that petulant Islamo-brat Sadr will ‘accept’ UN troops. Excuse me? “Accept”? Who’s running Iraq, anyway?

This is yet another in an endless string of reasons why it’s stupid, stupid, stupid to coddle infantile proto-tyrants like this pup. Cease fire? Sure, give him some time to regroup and recruit. I love mypetjawa’s take on this:

Fool me once: shame on you. Fool me twice: shame on me. Fool me forty-seven times: business as usual at the State Department.

The message to Sadr and his ilk is clear enough: Cause enough trouble, throw enough temper tantrums, threaten to break enough “important” sites, and generally rouse enough rabble, and you’ll (sooner or later) be rewarded with news coverage, then attributed with “influence”, and eventually you might get to run your own fiefdom. Yeah, that’s how to fight terrorism.

Anyway, the always-clueless-but-never-in-doubt Time magazine tries to tell us that it’s all about Sadr’s unexpected political power. You can just tell the writer’s fingers were just itching to throw in a few ‘quagmire’s, just for old time’s sake.

But the only reason Sadr is still a problem is because Sadr is not dead or captured (yet). Here’s hoping the situation is rectified before it gets further rectum-fied.

You may have heard that John Kerry has been telling a story that he was sitting in a boat upriver in Cambodia on Christmas Eve in 1968. In fact, he testified on the Senate floor in 1986:

I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, [...] I have that memory which is seared–seared–in me[...]“

He told the Boston Herald this version in 1979:

“I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas.”

The versions vary, and seem to get more fantastic with time.

But still, a couple of thoughts remain in my little brain that I haven’t seen elsewhere, so I must share with you. First, what rhetorical purpose did Kerry’s dramatic flourish, “seared [pause for impact] seared in my brain” serve? Its purpose is the same as typical playground asseverations: “Cross my heart, and hope to die!”; “Man, I was so scared, I’ll never forget it!”; “You gotta believe me!” It’s a bald attempt to gain credility in support of obviously tall tales. It’s an assertion that, above and beyond normal statements of fact, this one is really, honest-to-goodness the God’s-own-TRUTH of the matter. “Trust me, I wouldn’t lie and I’m definitely not wrong,” it assures.

Of course, while playground tall tales are quickly forgotten, Senate testimony and carefully crafted campaign legend is not. To handle those things, one has to send out campaign flunkies to float the new story, then trot out one’s pet hagiographer to “amend” the record. I wonder, do they give Brinkley some quiet time with the Congressional Record and some liquid paper?

Anyway, point the second is this – Kerry says not only that he was upriver on a boat in Cambodia, but that he was being shot at. And not only shot at, but shot at by the Khmer Rouge, the N. Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and drunken South Vietnamese soldiers celebrating Christmas (a curious venue for holiday fun for South Vietnamese, and a curious holiday to celebrate, since Vietnam is overwhelmingly Buddhist, from what I have read). How he identified these combatants from his gunboat under fire in the middle of the river is not clear.

At any rate, this was surely an epic conflict, as we now have combatants from 5 different groups meeting in a firefight over John Kerry’s gunboat. In this version, there was even mortar fire.

Given that this may or may not have been a secret CIA insertion mission (code-name “Lucky Hat”), it was a miserable failure if they were drawing fire from 4 different combat units, representing 4 discrete political entities.

At the very least, it’s curious that Kerry remains the only Swift boat captain or passenger to recall this, or any other, Swift boat foray into the fiercely contested border rivers of Cambodia, where fierce fighting obviously raged. Mightn’t such experiences have been seared — seared on the brains of somebody else with him on Christmas Eve, 1968? Or January, 1969? Or whenever his current spin doctors finally decide to place it?

But that’s the trouble with a lie: it just keeps growing and twisting until one day you find it’s wrapped so tight around your ankles that you fall flat on your face.

Now that the idea of replacing the IRS seems to be (at least temporarily) gaining some political currency – witness the usually-timid Dennis Hastert coming out full-bore for its demise – I confess to some trepidation. I’m a long-time fan of the Flat Tax, in one form or another.

I won’t go into a long diatribe about the reasons here, but a short summary is in order.

1. A flat tax is simple. A single tax rate, due on all income, with hardly any deductions, would let us do away with the IRS, as well as tax courts, tax attorneys, tax accountants, tax shelters, and the roughly kazillion dollars or so each year that honest taxpayers spend trying to conform to the byzantine tax laws, not to mention the massive costs of tax avoidance.
2. A flat tax is fair. If you make more, you pay more; if you make less, you pay less; if you make the same, you pay the same. End of story. Anything else is not fairness, it’s redistribution, and thus not fair in any sense except perhaps a misguided attempt to right cosmic “wrongs”.
3. A flat tax is predictable, and that’s perhaps the most important single factor for the creation and maintenance of wealth (for everybody). It’s incredible the amount of activity which goes on or is held up due to perceptions of “coming changes” in tax laws. Rid us of that, make the field flat and level, and leave it that way, and business and personal income will skyrocket.

OK, enough of that. So what’s got me nervous at the newfound enthusiasm for rolling back the IRS? In short, replacing it with something worse. Not “worse” in the sense of “more Orwellian and oppressive and intrusive”, but “worse” in the sense of “giving pretty much free reign to the unlimited appetite of government for more, More, MORE money to spend”. The differences between a VAT and a national sales tax are vast. In fact, in spite of the apparent similarity of the VAT and NST, a flat income tax and a national sales tax are much more similar (and benign) than a VAT for a simple reason – they’re obvious.

Think about it like this – when you buy a soft drink at the convenience store, how much tax do you pay? 8% maybe? A dime? You have an idea, and if you’re paying the slightest attention, you can know to within a penny or two how much of your total purchase cost went to the taxman.

Now tell me, quick, quick, how much of your last tank full of gas went to the tax man? Any idea? 8%? 10%? 15%? In some states, the cumulative taxes make up more than half the cost of a gallon of gasoline. Did you realize that? Probably not, except for that one guy in Sheboygan who’s obsessed with this sort of thing. That’s because any time a gov’t agency with jurisdiction needs more money, they can pretty easily crank up the tax on gasoline by, say, 1/10th of a percent. And no one has to be all upset about it. But at least in my state (Alabama), any attempt to increase income taxes (and usually sales taxes) has to go to a vote, and they usually lose (and some people think Alabamians are backward – ha!).

There’s the difference – VATs grow quietly, easily, (mostly) silently, like a cancer, consuming ever more and more of your money, making it go less and less far, pushing up prices without pushing up profits that companies can use to raise wages to match. So once again, the only conceivable winners are the bureaucrats who want to spend it, and the leaches on gov’t who want it spent on them.

Care to hazard a guess which of these three (flat income tax, national sales tax, “value”-added tax) the Left will begin to push with all their might if it begins to look like the IRS might really go the way of the dodo? (Hint: it won’t be the two that make it harder to raise taxes and grow government). (Second Hint: It’s the same one most popular in the E.U.)

Here’s hoping the rest of us are paying attention, and don’t get seduced by the lovely idea of eliminating the hated IRS, and end up replacing it with something more insidious, an invisible Tax Cancer like the VAT.

Is President Bush preparing to seriously throw down the gauntlet to race-based preference pimps in education? Perhaps I’m far too optimistic, and am simply taken in by a bit of fiery but meaningless campaign rhetoric. But I was struck by what the President said in a recent speech in Pennsylvania, buried though it was down deep in mid-speech. In speaking of his “no child left behind”, he said (emphasis mine):

We came to office three-and-a-half years ago, too many children were being shuffled from grade to grade, year after year, without learning the basics. We’re now challenging what I call the soft bigotry of low expectations. We’re raising the bar. We’re insisting on higher standards. (Applause.) We believe in accountability. We believe in local control of schools. We believe in empowering parents. (Applause.)

To that, let me add a hearty bit of thunderous applause from here, too. At least, for the words. Just how much he’ll be able or willing to do, between an obstructionist opposition party, deeply entrenched and well-financed special interest groups (every ‘_EA’ teachers’ union from sea to shining sea) and an incredible spineless timidity in his own party remains to be seen.

But still, these are bracing and courageous words to illuminate what he means by “no child left behind”. (I confess that phrase makes me cringe, being a bit of platitudinous campaign candy, meaningless in itself, flotsam bobbing in a contextless rhetorical sea). But it takes real guts to say what he’s saying here. Which, in case you just woke up and aren’t quite clear yet, is that real racism is to expect less of a child because he or she is non-white, than to expect the same. That hardly seems revolutionary, but it flies in the face of the entire poverty-pimp/hobbled-black myth structure (to borrow a phrase from the remarkable Ken Hamblin), and shows further that GWB is indeed very clear on both the problem and the stakes.

So hats off, Mr. President. Now, can you get that past the RNC, much less the DNC? Time will tell.