The Opinionated Bastard

Reconciling Kerry with the swift vets is pretty simple.

In Vietnam war movies, there's always the gung-ho 2nd lieutenant who goes around shooting everything that moves, and who's always trying to get medals. In the Army, that guy probably would have gotten fragged, or his sergeants would have just ignored him.

In Kerry's case, he was in the Navy, so after putting up with his crazy antics for 4 months, they figured out a way to ship him home. People aren't perfect, and every service has ways to deal with an officer who's a bit whacked.

At some point after being sent home, he must of realized what he had been doing in Vietnam, and Kerry decided that the atrocities he committed weren't his fault, but rather the fault of his commanding officers, and the government who sent him there. Pretty typical behavior for a very young man: "its not my fault".

So he joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and started testifying about the "atrocities our soldiers were committing in Vietnam". Never mind that he was really testifying about atrocities he'd committed...

This angered his ex-compatriots no end. Here they have some nut who's committing atrocities, so they get rid of him, and he proceeds to go home and tell the world, and tar them with the same brush. From their point of view the "soldiers committing atrocities" was Kerry himself, and they got rid of him, so they were the good guys, and he the bad guy. So having Kerry portraying himself as the "bad guy who learned to be a good guy and warn about all the other bad guys" was especially galling. Especially later on as he got deeper into VVAW and started to fudge the truth. Nixon sent me to Cambodia in 1968 using his magic time travel powers!

So now its 33 years later, and Kerry runs for president, pretty much on the platform: I was granted mystical powers in Vietnam. It doesn't surprise me that these swift vets have come forward, and that they are so vehement. It doesn't surprise me either that the Kerry campaign hasn't responded directly. Kerry has admitted to committing atrocities in Vietnam, but I'm a crazed killer doesn't seem like much of a political platform.

Whether its important what Kerry was like 33 years ago is a different question. Personally, while all this is interesting, I find it much more telling that Kerry criticized Bush for finishing reading to the schoolchildren for 7 minutes on 9/11. Given that on the same day Kerry sat dumbstruck for 40 minutes, one has to wonder at his abilities today: clearly he had less presence of mind then Bush on that day, and he has less memory today.

Markdown is this useful plugin for MoveableType blogs (i.e., this one) that lets me write in more or less plain text, but then goes on to produce nice looking HTML.

Theory Vs. Practice

For instance, that header was made by underlining the title.

That’s the theory anyways, I’m testing it now. I’ve been using Textile for awhile now, but Markdown seems better because:

1. The raw text looks readable.
2. Yet it can pull out things like numbered lists
3. By just noticing the leading number entry

Or you can use asterixs to produce:

• unnumbered
• lists

Which is pretty cool. I’ll be using the

blockquote feature a lot, since its nice to be able to quote other sites.

The other coolness is that ecto supports it, where it didn’t support Textile which is what I was using before. Or rather, it supported it in that I could use it, but it didn’t support previewing with it, which it does now according to this

My wife surprised me during the convention. After listening to Teresa’s speech, she said she would no longer be voting for Kerry. She’s a Reagan Democrat, but she thinks Teresa has no class, and the speech cinched it for her. If Teresa had been willing to stay in the background, great. But since she insisted on making this lame speech, my wife thinks that Teresa would consider herself to be co-president. She didn’t mind Hillary so much because she considered Hillary to be sharper.

Surprised me. She still won’t be voting for Bush, because she’s adamantly pro-choice though.

I know that the conventional wisdom is that its a bad thing because it makes it harder for 3rd party candidates to matter, but I’m not sure that’s true.

1. In a battleground state, a third party candidate can have a magnified effect.

2. In a “safe” state, voters can feel free to vote for a 3rd party candidate without wasting their vote. That seems like it would be an effective recruiting tool for someone like Nader, because if you live in California say, its ok, to vote for Nader because Kerry will probably take that state anyways.

I’ll be writing for awhile about why I’m supporting Bush in this election, and trying to talk about both his good and bad points. This first part is about Iraq, because I consider that the most important issue this election. I probably won’t be talking about Kerry much, because he seems to be running on the I’m not Bush platform. That doesn’t impress me, Joseph Stalin isn’t Bush either, that doesn’t mean I’d vote for him if I was upset at Bush (which I’m not).

To me, the number one issue this election is the war in Iraq. To me, this issue breaks down into four parts:

• The decision to enter Iraq in the first place. Grade: A
• Building Worldwide Support. Grade: C-
• Winning the War. Grade: A+
• Planning for the Peace. Grade: A
• Winning the Peace. Grade: B
• Going the distance. Grade: A

I’ll cover each of these in detail.

My wife was driving from our house in Flagstaff to Laughlin, Nevada to pick up our nephew (he comes and visits with us every summer). She got as far as Bellemont when about a quarter mile up the road, she saw a bunch of people breaking and a bunch of green barrels rolling across the road.

The nuclear train had just jumped the tracks.

All I know so far. She’s back now (not radioactive as far as I can tell. :-) ), she’ll probably go out tomorrow instead, nothing on the news about it so far.

So my wife tells me that while they didn’t call it a “nuclear” train, it was the presence of green barrels with red radiation symbols marked on them that freaked out some of her fellow travelers and had them start running away.

The police came quickly with bullhorns and evacuated the area, because they were worried about “radiation”.

I haven’t found any mention of it yet on any of the AZ DOT sites:

AZ511

Looking for “green nuclear barrels” on Google didn’t turn up anything, I wonder how waste or other radioactive stuff is transported?

I-40 has been reopened. When I called DPS (the AZ version of the Highway Patrol), they said that there was a hazmat problem, but that they’ve cleaned it up.

I wonder if it was a truck instead of a train?

Couldn’t find anywhere that lists hazmat reports for Arizona on the internet though.

Come to think of it, that’s most days.

So Bush announced that we’ve figured out that Russia isn’t going to invade West Germany any more, probably because:

1. The Cold War ended 13 years ago.
2. West Germany doesn’t even exist any more.

That is, he announced he’s going to move about 70,000 troops from where they are in Europe back to the US. Basically, it costs us a lot of money to have bases in Europe that make less and less sense every year.

So this should be a no-brainer, right? Clinton or Bush Sr. should have done this years ago. Instead, we have these political flacks talking about how its a bad idea. And by political flack, I mean Retired General Wesley Clark.

One of the things that bugs me the most about the Kerry campaign is that they just don’t seem to know how to pick their battles. Why are they arguing about this? All Bush has to say is “Well, none of the people at the Pentagon seem to be worried about Russia invading Germany anytime soon, so it was time to reduce our presence in Europe.” If he does that, or more likely, if his proxy does that, it will just be yet another time I’ve seen the Kerry campaign make an issue of something Bush does that is obviously the right thing.

Plus, to be perfectly honest, its time the EU nations started providing for more of their own defense instead of mooching off us so much. Bush probably can’t say that publicly, but the line about us not being worried about the Soviet Union, since it no longer exists, is just too obvious.

Ok, so Kerry took too much LSD in 1968, and just thought he was in Cambodia.

Everyone happy now?

Here are some sites that have much better military analysis then the news media. One of the reasons I’m supporting GWB in this election is that I’ve found that the people who do that sort of analysis on TV are terrible. These guys aren’t. They’re not a pretty boy given a briefing on terrorism, they’re guys who have been doing this for real for a long time.

GlobalSecurity.org This is the place to go if you want the sort of no-nonsense analysis you’d expect a cigar-chomping Tom Clancy character to provide.

Strategy Page These guys know their stuff when it comes to military strategy.

A European asked me the other day if the US was heading towards fascism. I said that while the Democratic party wanted to write laws to make everyone nice, and the Republican party wanted to write laws to make everyone good, that by playing one off against the other, the population had been doing ok.

I know that the conventional wisdom is that the Republicans are evil fascists while the Democrats are civil libertarians, its just not true. Both parties believe that their curtailing of individual freedoms is ok, but the other guys isn’t. Both parties are wrong.

In my not at all humble opinion. It bugs me just as much when the Democrats mess with the second amendment as when the Republicans mess with the first.

Then of course, you have Democrats who mess with all of them, like John Kerry.

Read what Reason magazine has to say: John Kerry’s Monstrous Record on Civil Liberties

First read this

Does it seem to anyone else that the Democrats have lost their sense of humor? Lighten up guys…

We actually misnamed the war on terror. It ought to be the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world._

That would be that Struggle against IEWDNBIFSWHTUTAAWTTTSCOFTFW.

I don’t always believe anything any campaign says, but when factcheck.org an independent de-spin site says Bush nailed Kerry, you know he’s been nailed. Here they are backing up Bush’s claim that Kerry missed 75% of the Senate Intelligence Committee meetings: full thing: excerpt:

A Bush-Cheney ‘04 ad released Aug. 13 accuses Kerry of being absent for 76% of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s public hearings during the time he served there. The Kerry campaign calls the ad “misleading,” so we checked, and Bush is right.

Yow!

Here’s the script for the ad:

Intel

Announcer: John Kerry promises…

Kerry: I will immediately reform the intelligence system.

Announcer: Oh really…as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee Senator Kerry was absent for 76 percent of the committee’s public hearings.

In the year after the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Kerry was absent for every single one.

That same year he proposed slashing America’s intelligence budget by 6 billion dollars.

There’s what Kerry says and then there’s what Kerry does.

This is the same ad that the Kerry campaign “rebutted” by saying that John Kerry was Vice-Chairman of the committee when it was actually Bob Kerrey.

Kerry: up the Mekong without a clue

They believe their own talking points. They love to say stuff like Bush was AWOL when he wasn’t. My reaction is always anger, because I think they’re intentionally lying. After all, that’s how the spin game is played. You blow a fact out of proportion, and you use it to beat the opposition over the head with it.

But I just realized that they fervently believe their own talking points. That’s one of the reasons they hate Bush so much. One of their spinmeisters twists something out of proportion, and then they all repeat it as the gospel truth like little robots. So then we end up with prominent Democrats repeating ridiculous stuff about Bush. So ex-President Carter slams bush for being AWOL when he wasn’t. Since Carter truly believes Bush was AWOL, naturally he thinks Bush is Evil with a capital E. In practice, Bush has been much like Clinton in many ways, but none of the Democrats know that, because they’ve all been brainwashed by their own spinmeisters.

Now of course, Republicans play the spin game too, but they seem to either be better at briefing their people, or perhaps they’re just better at spinning. Maybe its just too easy to spin Kerry since he seems to love both sides of every argument. When ever I get some “de-spin” from spinsanity or factcheck.org they always say something like “Well, the Republicans are exaggerating”. When its a Kerry spin, it seems like they say he was just wrong. Thing is, these sites tend to be kind of anti-Bush!

Here’s some samples from FactCheck.org:

Bush Nails Kerry’s Poor Attendance at Intelligence Committee Hearings

Bush says Kerry missed 76% of public hearings. He could have missed even more.

Media Fund Ad Misquotes Bush

Pro-Kerry group’s ad claims “Bush says he’s going to help companies outsource jobs.” But Bush never said that.

Kerry’s Dubious Economics

He says new jobs are paying $9,000 less than the old ones. That’s not a fact.

Which explains a lot about this election. I’ve been annoyed for awhile, because while Bush is far from perfect, all I saw the Democrats talking about seemed to be bogus charges instead of anything of substance.

Now I realize. They’re talking about this stupid stuff because they don’t know most of these charges aren’t true.

And I’m supposed to trust these people to run the country? Not!

Here’s the best coverage I’ve found.

Seems like Bush served in the National Guard, did his training, and was never AWOL. He was on active duty a total of 25 months, over 6 and a half years.

Quote: “Looks like perfect drill attendance to me.”

But not in any detail The problem though is that the way he did it, he sounds like a bit of a whiner.

It will be interesting to see if Bush responds to Kerry, since Kerry seems to be trying to make this a Bush/Kerry thing instead of a Kerry/Swift Vets thing. That’s not surprising, since Kerry loses if he has to go toe to toe with such a small group. He’ll either diminish in stature by doing so, or look like a bully. By complaining to Bush, he surrenders the initiative to Bush. I suspect that Bush will just deny the connection, and repeat that he condemns all 527 ads, that they’ve attacked him as well. That will make Kerry look even more whiny.

In reality though, its the Democrats with moveon.org that get the most benefit from 527s. It seems to me that Kerry’s a bit a of whiner if he’s complaining about what the Republicans can do with $100,000 vs. moveon.org’s $30M.

Kerry should have planned ahead better on this issue when he decided to make Vietnam the centerpiece of his campaign. This organization was around before the DNC, so it can’t have come as much of a surprise when this stuff broke open. They were saying the same stuff 2 months ago they’re saying now. The fact that all this caught the campaign by surprise to my mind says quite a lot about Kerry’s ability as a leader, and that’s the most damning of all. Kerry has to realize that his Vietnam service won’t sit well with some number of Americans, and his anti-war rhetoric won’t sit well with some others.

If he had done something since then, we’d all have something more interesting to talk about.

I’ve seen a lot of hysterical stuff around about how the Bush administration is going to “steal your vote” unless the populace insists on having paper records…

Which just bugs me. Paper in itself is not going to prove that a voters vote has been correctly recorded. A computer can display one thing, print a second thing, and record a third.

While paper is invaluable in testing, it becomes a more complex issue in actual voting, because now you have 60,000,000 pieces of paper to deal with. Which means machine counting of those pieces of paper, which brings us back to square one…

It turns out that voting is a very complex problem. Voting has to be:

1. Secret
2. Anonymous
3. Verified.
4. Easy.

Out of 1, 2, and 3, any two of these would be easy, but doing all 3 is pretty complex. #4 is important because we don’t want to disenfranchise people who are slightly computerphobic, or just elderly. Right now, the EAC (Electoral Action Commission) is concentrating on #4, while they are relying on an IEEE commission to deal with 1-3.

Now verification is a new requirement, that we never had before. If you think about it, no one at any previous polling place gave you any garuntees that your vote was recorded. You just trusted the polling place workers to do their job. With electronic voting, some sort of verification seems necessary, but insisting on paper isn’t going to help solve the real problems with electronic voting, and it won’t ensure that votes get verified.

I think the new voting systems deserve a lot of attention, but they require someone to dig in and really understand the issues involved, not just report hysterically about votes being stolen. Once you dig in, you’ll find that voting is actually a pretty complex process, and anytime you add computers to a complex process, things get complicated quickly.

Adding verification to the mix makes it even more complicated. You want people to be able to double check that their vote was correctly recorded, but you also want to ensure that they can’t then turn around and use that to prove that they voted for so-and-so, or people can buy votes.

My take on this whole issue is that people are thinking too simplistically. For example, if I went to vote, if that vote was transmitted a third party like the ACLU, and I had someway to confirm that, I’d be happy with that. Once I left the voting place, the ACLU would then refuse any confirmation requests for me, which would preserve the secrecy requirement. Of course, each vote would be transmitted to multiple people, like the Democratic and Republican parties, CNN, etc.

Perhaps I could even confirm it over my cell phone, laptop computer, whatever. There would be lots of different ways.

And none of that would involve paper.

No, because 4 years ago was before 9/11, so thats a stupid question.

Am I better off now then I was on 9/12? Yes.

Before his 4 months in Vietnam, Kerry served on the U.S.S. Gridley. Here’s some statements from two people who served with him:

U.S.S.Gridley

His commander thought he was a fine officer, but he also strongly dislikes his anti-war activities, which seems fair. Another gentleman feels he exaggerates his experiences, which has been pretty much proven true by others.

While I couldn’t find the “Unfit for Command” book at Barnes & Noble yesterday, the human events online people sent me another free chapter. This one talks about his Senate testimony and vents about the “Winter Soldier” stuff that Kerry was involved in.

Its pretty obvious from reading the swift boat vets website that what they’re mad about is not so much the medal flap as his testimony against Vietnam soldiers as war criminals.

Reading about the Winter Soldier stuff though, it strikes me.

The SwiftVets, having been accused of war crimes by Kerry have done the reverse to him…lots of allegations by people without doing background interviews and such.

I don’t know what the truth is here. I wish Kerry talked more about his record, and less about his 4 magical months in Vietnam.

However, as you sow, so shall you reap, and Kerry pissed off these guys 33 years ago, and they’re striking back. I don’t know what it means, but I’m not sure Kerry going toe to toe with them is a good idea.

So I read both the Bush and Kerry campaign blogs, and comment on both.

I’ve been trying not to be a troll on the Kerry blog, and just criticize how they’ve responded to things, not criticize the candidate.

Seems I just got banned? When I tried to comment on the campaign response to the latest Swift Vets ad on this thread

I found out I’m no longer allowed to post comments.

Which is interesting, because I’ve found that I’ve been blocked from commenting.

Here’s what I was going to post in the comment:

Kerry did speak out against the war, and some veterans resent him for it. In a word, “Duh”.

However, I don’t think that this sort of stuff is the appropriate response:

http://blog.johnkerry.com/rapidresponse/archives/002518.html

Seems to me that this response is just as bad as the swift vets ad. Calling people republican partisans because they gave money to a political party? That doesn’t mean they’re lying…if it does, I guess there are just as many lying Democrats…

However, what has Kerry done since 1971? That’s the campaign issue.

Its interesting that the Swift Vets website allows dissenters and from what I’ve read in their forums, tries to convince them, while Kerry (and no doubt Bush too) just kick them off.

The strident left is annoying me.

Read it Here It shows that none of the accounts agree 100% which is pretty interesting. Fog of war and all that, some of what Kerry says doesn't jive with the physical evidence and some of what the other guys say doesn't jive either.

You know, I don't 100% agree with the swift vets. But if I had been a POW and my captors had played tapes of Kerry testifying in Congress as part of torturing me, I'd probably hate his guts. If 35 years later, he'd come up to me and said "Well, I was young, and stupid", I'd duly consider it, and then I'd still hate his guts. If I wasn't a Republican before, I would become one after they nominated Kerry.

So ultimately, Kerry brought this on himself. It was his decision to run on his war record and not what he'd been doing since then. I thought it was a stupid decision when I saw him salute during the DNC, and so none of this surprises me in the least.

Here are some fun quotes for you:

John Kerry on 8/6:

“Had I been reading to children and had my top aide whispered in my ear, ‘America is under attack,’ I would have told those kids very politely and nicely that the president of the United States had something that he needed to attend to — and I would have attended to it.”

_John Kerry on 7/8: _

“And as I came in, Barbara Boxer and Harry Reid were standing there, and we watched the second plane come in to the building. And we shortly thereafter sat down at the table and then we just realized nobody could think, and then boom, right behind us, we saw the cloud of explosion at the Pentagon.”

There were 40 minutes between the 2nd plane and the Pentagon attack.

Teresa Kerry:

“I think the president behaved correctly in terms of being quiet amidst stunning news like that in a classroom of kids,” she told the host of MSNBC’s “Hardball With Chris Matthews” during an interview before the Democratic National Convention last month. “You know, what can you do? It takes you a couple of minutes to digest what you have just heard. And then he was … not in his White House and in his office with all of his people. He was in the school in Florida.”

The real significance of the 7/40 minute thing is that Kerry criticized Bush for 7 minutes, when he was stunned for 40. So that shows a rather convenient memory, and it doesn’t demonstrate a lot of competence that he goes on “attack” on an issue where he’s even more vulnerable. In a word, “Doh!”.

Though it seems to be a trend, Kerry’s campaign seems to be only minimally competent.

Perhaps they were just having technical difficulties.

From Carly Fiona of HP

Perhaps we should call globalization “Privately funded foreign aid, that actually works.”

Kerry calls for Rumsfeld to resign:

“Yesterday, the Schlesinger panel released their report which found that much of the responsibility for setting the conditions for the abuse at Abu Ghraib can be attributed to failures at highest levels of our government. Today the Fay report will be released and will recommend punitive action for those in our military who were directly involved.

Er, actually, the report said that most of the responsibility was the fault of the guard and supervisors of the prison, but that the Pentagon should have done a better job of managing in the first place.

“But what is missing from all these reports is accountability from the senior civilian leaders in the Pentagon and in the White House. From the bottom of the chain of command all the way to the top, there needs to be accountability. The Schlesinger report makes clear that Secretary Rumsfeld was responsible for setting a climate where these types of abuses could occur.

Er, no, it actually didn’t go all the way to Rumsfeld. As the civilian head, he’s not supposed to be messing with operational details. ScrappleFace has the funny version of this.

“By failing to plan to win the peace, by failing to make sure our troops received the proper training, equipment, reinforcement and command guidance, and by failing to take corrective actions once all of this became apparent, Secretary Rumsfeld did not demonstrate the leadership required from a Secretary of Defense.

Well, he fired the person in charge the prison, and started the investigation that brought up all these charges.

“That is why today I am calling on Secretary Rumsfeld to resign effective immediately. In addition, I call on the President to appoint an independent investigation to review the entire decision making process that led to these abuses and provide a comprehensive set of reforms so that we can ensure that this never happens again.

Did anyone here read “Plan of Attack”?

One of the things I like about Rumsfeld is that he is constantly questioning himself and the Pentagon. While Woodward’s thesis was that Rumsfeld made it “too easy” to go to war, I didn’t see that. What I saw was the ideal Secretary of War (we haven’t had a Secretary of Defense since 9/11): Someone who brought the military around to the diplomatic and political realities. He pushed the Pentagon to give the President real options. The original plan which read like a 1950 invasion plan: bomb the shit out of the Iraqis until they surrender. There would have been 100,000 civilian casualties, easy.

So while 150 prisoners may have been abused, its also true that it was the Pentagon that independently found out it was going on and shut it down. Meanwhile, because Rumsfeld pushed the Pentagon out of their comfort zone, thousands of Iraqi lives were saved vs. the original battle plan.

If you fired everyone who made a mistake, there would be no one working. Rumsfeld’s job is to be the bad cop to Powell’s good cop. That is, don’t mess with the US or we’ll sick Rumsfeld on you!

The Bush/Cheney campaign feels that one of the best ways to beat Kerry is to provide a feed of his acceptance speech for the nomination

Look for:

Americans have a clear choice in November. See the first installment of John Kerry: In His Own Words.

View it Here

Its a photo essay showing how women in Iran deal with the religious restrictions.

Women always know how to look pretty. :-)

So Kerry sent Max Cleland (lost 3 limbs in Vietnam) to Texas to try to pull Bush into the Swift Vets quagmire by delivering him a letter. (Yes, I’m using the Q-word intentionally)

Here’s Kerry’s side.

Here’s Bush’s response

Here’s my take: I really have no idea about the SBVT thing. Kerry’s been caught in some misstatements, and correlating all the information, its pretty clear that there’s a reason for the term “Fog of War”. Some of Kerry’s eyewitness accounts don’t agree with the official Naval records any more then the SVBT accounts. In fact, it seems like the official accounts are the least accurate of any of them.

However, I think its a new low to send a cripple to do your fighting for you. Kerry needs to call a press conference, not send Cleland on secret missions to Cambodia er, Texas.

So I tried to comment on this thread:

Cleland and Rassmann Go to Crawford

And I was allowed to comment. I refreshed the thread to look for responses to my comment, and found out it had gotten deleted.

I was wondering why everything was so pro-Kerry on his blog in such a divided election. I’ve been trying to criticize only the conduct of the campaign, but I guess Kerry only wants to preach to the choir.

So I’m allowed to post to the Kerry blog, but no one is allowed to read it?

Nope, I guess I got removed again. I got this after I tried to post a followup to a couple of responses.

You have been prevented from posting by the Administrator. Please contact the Blog administrator for details.

To be fair, the Bush blog doesn’t have any commenting at all, vs. the Kerry blog which has flip-flop blogging. :-)

read scrappleface

My #1 complaint about Bush is that he has the cowboy thing that you don’t talk, you do. That’s a good rule in life, but as president, part of the job is talking up why you do things, and he doesn’t do enough of that.

Ignoring Kerry and doing a positive campaign would be great.

One of the reasons I started blogging was because I signed up for email transcripts of press conferences by the State Department and Military a year before the Iraq war, and I was stunned by the distortions of the media.

So while I’m not taking any position on whether Rumsfeld is right or wrong in this case, I think that its worth reading what he actually said, instead of having it spoon fed to you by the media. So here is a transcript as emailed to me by the DOD.

Just watched the feed from cspan from yesterday’s RNC convention. What strikes me the strongest is that they clearly don’t believe in any sort of moral relativism. Terrorism is evil, we’re good.

Which in my opinion is a good thing. Terrorism is evil, and civilians should never be intentionally targeted by anyone.

Here’s the feed