QandO

August 21, 2004

Weekly QandO Roundup
Posted by Jon Henke

Some highlights from this past week on QandO. Check the excerpts for...well, excerpts. Follow the links to read the posts.

Also, don't forget to keep track of the right-hand sidebar, which always contains a link to the Weekly QandO Roundup from the past week, as well as elections markets, frequently updated headlines and quick links to interesting things we've read.
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* Is this a flip or a flop? (McQ) - I've looked at nuclear waste from both sides now, from candidate and Senator, and still somehow, it's my positions I can't recall...

On August 11th as reported by the Washington Post, John Kerry told Nevadans that "Yooka" Mtn. was a bad deal and if he were elected he'd take care of it:
[...]
One assumes he's since learned how to pronounce the mountain's name, but it may explain why he apparently forgot that in 1999 he and 3 other Senators asked for the movement of nuclear waste to Yucca Mtn. be accelerated...

* Once upon a time, with Paul Krugman (Jon Henke) - What Paul Krugman used to write, before there was a Bush to be defeated.

It's quite interesting to read what Paul Krugman--who really is a very accomplished, credible economist--wrote back in the 1990s, before his worm turned from Academic/Economist to Pundit/Demagogue. In fact, a great deal of what he wrote at the time would seem quite applicable today....the sort of thing he would be teaching his readers if he weren't so hell-bent on policiticking for Anybody But Bush. So, let's review some of Paul Krugman's knowledge, when there wasn't a political agenda clouding his economics....

* The Man with the Hat (Jon Henke & Dale Franks) - Photgraphic evidence of the Secret Agent with whom John Kerry may have been travelling.

Following up on the investigative work of Hugh Hewwitt and a number of others, I think we've reached a breakthrough on the identity of the secret agent travelling with John Kerry deep into Cambodia.

Here, he is pictured "near Cambodia".

* A LAckluster Defense (Dale Franks) - Dale reviews Michelle Malkins new book.

While doing my best to protect my virgin eyes from being sullied by anyone else's thoughts about the book, I still had a rough idea about what it would contain. I expected a lengthy history of the decisions leading up to the internment of Japanese aliens and Japanese-Americans, written to counter the prevailing PC orthodoxy that the internment was motivated solely by racism. From that history, I expected an extrapolation of the decisions of 1942, and their relevance to the war on terror today.

Now that I've read it, I can confirm that it is all that, and less.

* Profiling and Security (Dale Franks) - Profiling is, apparently, only bad when it's a matter of life and death.

One of the silliest sights imagineable can be seen on any busy weekday at the security screening area of any metropolitan airport. Aged grandpas or young, blond businesswomen are routinely pulled out of line and given the third degree, as if America was facing a deadly onslaught of elderly WWII veterans, or predatory marketing VPs.

Of course, the plain and simple truth is that it wasn't octegenarian D-Day vets who were flying planes into skyscrapers on 911. But the eagle-eyed TSA airport security personnel are required to pretend that it was, or, at least, that it could be the next time.

What makes all the uproar over profiling even more silly is that the groups who are so voiciferously against profiling for security purposes, are all for it whenever there's a buck to be made from other types of profiling, like, say, college admissions.

* Here's what has to be changed to defeat Islamic terrorists (McQ) - The "you are what you eat" theory of terrorism-prevention: until we change their intellectual diet, we can't hope to change their social order.

MEMRI has an article on its website which it has translated into english.

The article's title?

'The Jews Slaughtering Non-Jews, Draining their Blood, and Using it for Talmudic Religious Rituals'
[...]
This is the state of scholarhip among Islamic Middle Eastern countries. This is the type of article which is common in the government controlled press of these countries.

Is it any wonder that if the reading diet consists only of this sort of horrific pseudo-scholarship with no chance of reading a differening opinion or contradictory facts, that Islamic terrorists have little trouble recruiting new members?

Regardless of Iraq, this is the truth of what the west faces. In this article they're pointed toward the Jews. But if you doubt Christians and westerners aren't discussed with the same level of 'scholarship", I'd say you were sadly mistaken.

* Betrayal (Dale Franks) - Dale is, in my opinion, one of the most effective, enjoyable ranters in the 'sphere. And this is a rant. So, I'm saying this is worth reading.

Also, in the real world, which is, apparently, the one Mr. Scheer doesn't inhabit, the average voter has...uh...questions about the Democratic Party's trustworthiness when it comes to national security. Now, maybe that isn't a problem with Mr. Scheer, who is of the Jimmy Carter school, i.e., there's no problem that can't be solved with a unilateral American retreat. But, for most voters, who happen to think that we've got a fairly decent country here, weakness on national security is, in wartime, the kiss of death to a candidate.

So, I expect the real reason why Mr. Scheer is so mad at Mr. Kerry, is because he wanted a presidential candidate of the Jimmy Carter School, too. Instead, what he got was John Wayne Kerry, complete with combat service, medals, secret trips to Cambodia, amazing kung-fu grip and, oh yes, a magic hat.

* Nice timing, after all.... (Jon Henke) - Bush Administration announces terrorists may be targetting X. Liberal bloggers accuse Bush Administration of, essentially, faking it for the publicity. Terrorists with plans to attack X are caught. Time to point and laugh at the liberal bloggers!

Planned attacks on financial centers in New York, Washington and New Jersey. Why does that sound familiar?

Oh. Right. I remember. That's the threat that....[various liberal bloggers] .... were telling us was an example of the Bush administration using the threat warnings for political advantage, rather than to warn of genuine, current threats.

Oops.

Thanks for not "playing politics" with our national security, guys.

* Its not about duty, its about honor (McQ and Dale Franks) - "Kerry acted in a dishonorable way in 1971 when he trashed his comrades. He dishonred his service, he dishonored his comrades, he dishonored his nation. And vets of that war can't and won't forget that."

Most of the left and Kerry apologists don't seem to understand: its not about duty, its about honor.

Kerry performed his duty. No one disputes that. He was there. That's not the debate. That's not the argument.

McSweeny is wrong when he says "duty" is enough. It would be if Kerry's campaign for the presidency didn't use his "valor" as a central part of his qualifications for the job. It would be if Kerry were to say "I served in Vietnam" and leave it at that. It would be had Kerry come home and quietly gone about his life. It would be if he didn't insist the men he'd served with and who were still in combat at the time, were war criminals.

Duty would have been enough if Kerry had just done his and kept quiet about it.

* Developing... (Jon Henke) - Still unrefuted--so, of course, still unreported--holes in Kerry's story.

Captain Ed points to a story about Kerry's personal journal, in which he claims he has not been shot at....a week after the event for which he received his first purple heart....
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* Beldar--who is getting blogrolled--finds some discrepancies between the official story Kerry is telling now, and the story John Kerry told previously....
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Meet the newest member of the Republican Smear Machine....John Kerry!

* Withdrawing from the world (Dale Franks) - Both in troop deployment and foriegn policy, our allies should be determined by our interests....not the reverse.

Asmus conveniently forgets why we sent all those troops over there in the first place. There used to be this evil empire called the Soviet Union, the key phrase in that sentence being "used to be".

When Truman created NATO, and committed the United States to defending South Korea, there was an expansionist, international communist movement to defeat and subjugate the Free World.

No, really, there's books about it and everything.

Creating NATO, and keeping hundreds of thousands of US troops in Europe was a necessary corollary to the policy of containment. There were, after all, 45 Soviet Army divisions sitting in East Germany, ready to swoop down through the Fulda Gap into Western Europe. Preventing that was a prime goal of not only Truman, but seven successive presidents as well.

But, in case Mr. Asmus hasn't noticed, the USSR collapsed more than a decade ago, the Warsaw Pact dissolved, and the only remaining major communist state is rather busy at the moment putting new KFCs and McDonald's on every street corner, getting the cell phones to work right in Shanghai, and espousing the hip, new, "Wealth is Good" brand of communism.

* NeoLibertarianism (Jon Henke) - You say "Fusionism", I say "Neolibertarianism"....either way, it's the pragmatic path for libertarians.

While I'd prefer Silber bow to my pressure and call himself a Neolibertarian--and others might question the utility of asking a libertarian to be a comformist--I think Silber makes three good points to back up his assertion that there is room for a "Fusionist" coalition....

1. "The extremes cannot hold."
2. "The center has changed."
3. "Liberalism has become more authoritarian."

All three, I think, have merit, and there seems a clear opportunity for pragmatic libertarians to make mainstream in-roads. Of course, for that to happen, libertarians need to get a lot better at politics. They care a great deal about their own particular principles. They don't really care that much about being elected. And then they whine a great deal when they find themselves without any serious political power.

* Troop realignment: Pro/con (McQ) - "Neither the inner-German border nor the USSR exist anymore, and its time we acknowledged that and realigned for the new threat."

The argument that we ought to keep 100,000 Americans in foreign lands to "help strengthen our alliances" is nonsense. The only nation we've ever had at our side in all our modern wars, Australia, has remained our staunch ally without thousands of American troops hanging out there. If our alliances are so fragile that we have to keep our allies "friendly" by stationing troops there (and subsidizing their economy) then we need to rethink them anyway.

* The Thurlow "inconsistency" explained (McQ) - Rassmann apparently was the source of the initial reports of "enemy small arms fire"....and, right or wrong, it's reasonable to assume that he believes that was the case.

Actually the Thurlow "inconsistency" probably has a very reasonable explanation. Why is "enemy small arms fire" mentioned in Thurlow's citation when he and the other Swift Boat Vets claim that in reality there was none?

Because Jim Rassmann says there was, and Jim Rassmann wrote the citation for John Kerry's award:

* The Birth--and, perhaps, death?--of an Anti-Kerry Ad (Jon Henke)

NYT/Swiftees-My turn (McQ)

- Our three takes on the New York Times/Swift Boat Veterans story.

Having read both [Jon and Dale's posts] and the NYT article, I have to tell you that while I think the points Jon raises are valid and interesting, I mostly agree with Dale that this isn’t at all that damaging to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s case, primarily because it really doesn’t address most of their points. Are there some inconsistencies? Yes, obviously. Is that a surprise? Well not to me, but apparently to the NYT. But only the inconsistencies on the SBVT side are of interest to the NYT… not the Kerry side.

Secondly, it doesn’t address any of the points brought up in “Unfit for Command” concerning Kerry’s activities after he left Vietnam. It is those activities which form the nut of why these guys think Kerry’s not fit to command.

* Matthews v. Malkin (Dale Franks) - A criticism of both Michelle Malkin and Chris Matthews.

Malkin is factually incorrect. The Swiftvets do not allege that Mr. Kerry intentionally shot himself. The allegation is that Mr. Kerry fired a grenade, and caught a piece of shrapnel from his grenade when it blew up. That is "self-inflicted", but it is not intentional. It is merely one of those bracing "learning experiences" that military life is prone to deliver.

In reading the transcript, however, it seems to me that Ms. Malkin is trying to imply otherwise, and Mr. Matthews was right to pound her like a piece of cheap veal. Either she was simply wrong about the facts, or she was deliberately trying to leave a false impression through her use of language. Either way, her arguments were incorrect.

* More Problems for the Swift Boat Vets (Jon Henke and Dale Franks) - Two problems for the Swift Boat Veterans--and a dissenting opinion from Beldar on one of them.

In not differentiating between the few who were engaging in these acts and the vast majority of honorable soldiers, Kerry was irresponsible. I can certainly understand veterans who hold that against him. But he also didn't specifically state that those war crimes were practiced by all soldiers. That was an inference by others, and not an implication by Kerry.

Was he wrong? I think he was wrong to do it in the way he did....but what he said--excepting the later-disproven testimony--was not necessarily incorrect.

The Swift Boat Veterans are putting themselves in a precarious place, criticizing John Kerry for, essentially, blowing the whistle on war-crimes. One could see John Kerry standing side-by-side with Sergeant Joseph Darby to turn that negative into a perceived positive rather quickly.

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