Libertarian Leanings

Stolen Honor

Well now, isn't the shoe on the other foot. Filmmaker Carlton Sherwood has released a documentary, "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal," and Democrats are up in arms. In the film former Vietnam POWs describe the impact of Kerry's anti-war activities on them while they were prisoners.

In Sherwood's film, released in early September on the Internet, former Vietnam War prisoners of war allege that Kerry's antiwar activities after he returned home as a decorated Navy veteran prolonged their own ordeal for two years by boosting the morale of their captors.

The film will be shown during the closing days of the Presidential campaign by Sinclair Broadcasting Group, Inc, owner of 62 TV stations, many in the battlegrond states of Florida and Ohio.

As one would expect, Democrats are in full attack mode. Those paragons of integrity, Diane Feinstein, Patrick Leahey, and Edward Kennedy were among 18 Senators who signed a letter requesting an investigation by the FCC.

But Andrew Schwartzman, a public interest lawyer who runs the Media Access Project, said the Sinclair broadcast was unlikely to violate major tenets of communications law.

"It never runs afoul of communications law to carry a program," he said. "What's wrong is if they run a program determinedly one-sided and they don't give the other guy a fair shake." Schwartzman said the FCC's equal time provisions wouldn't apply, because they are meant to give each candidate equal appearances on a station, not allow a rebuttal to a negative appearance (although Sinclair has offered Kerry a chance to appear).

Meanwhile the Democratic National Committee said it would file a complaint Tuesday with the Federal Election Commission, charging Sinclair with making an illegal in-kind campaign contribution by running the film. Oddly enough, the article written by Los Angeles Times reporter Elizabeth Jensen makes no mention of Michael Moore and "Fahrenheit 9/11", about which reviewer Jonathan Rosenbaum had this to say:

But whether or not Fahrenheit 9/11 might qualify as a masterpiece matters less now than whether it can help remove Bush from office...

No doubt, the airing of Stolen Honor will be taken as justification by the likes of Dan Rather and Mark Halperin to come up with something to counter. Perhaps 60 Minutes will pick up its dropped item.

Update 10/14: In an curious turn I discovered that the Manchester Union Leader, where I found this story, has dropped it - nowhere to be found. I've updated my link to point to the LA Times where the story apparently originated. Also a correction: In this post I originally had Elizabeth Jensen as a New York Times reporter, but I discovered as I searched elsewhere for the story, that she's with the LA Times. I think the Union Leader had her as NYT, which may have something to do with why the story is not online with the Leader any more.

All time Caption Contest Winner

From time to time Captain's Quarters holds a caption contest. Last Friday this shot, Kerry hiking a football I'm guessing, was the one to caption, and this is my choice for the funniest caption - maybe even the funniest caption ever. And it was the very first comment!

"Hey guys! I got my thumb out!"

Advantage Bush

Tonight's debate went to Bush. Several times Kerry accused Bush of rushing to war without the right coalition. This is something that will eventually come back to bite him because it shows him to be more of a follower than a leader. In contrast, Bush was the commander in chief. He said he knows he's made decisions that people don't like, but that he made them because they were the right decisions. Kerry has made his latest guess on which way the parade is headed and is now running like mad trying to get around to the front of it. The debate has made that pretty clear.

Bought and paid for

Today's New York Post editorial focuses on the report of chief U.S. weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, and what it revealed about the long range plans of Saddam Hussein.

It tells the tale of how Saddam Hussein, clinging to power, enlisted top U.N. officials to help him bribe leaders of those European nations so dear to John Kerry's heart into ending tough economic sanctions against Iraq.

[...]

Saddam's "evolving strategy," says Duelfer, "centered on breaking free of U.N. sanctions in order to liberate his economy from the economic stranglehold, so he could continue to pursue his political and personal objectives."

To do that, he resolved to divide the five permanent Security Council members. The United States and Great Britain were unapproachable — so instead he set about buying off the governments of France, China and Russia.

The Post does not present a ringing endorsement of the Kerry-Edwards position on the war on terror.

Waiting for U.N. "sanctions" to do the job — as John Kerry and John Edwards now say they favored — would have been foolish.

Also in the Post Andrew Apostolou, director of research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, describes U.N. corruption in a column entitled Coalition of the Bribed.

All Saddam needed was more time — a few more years of Oil-for-Food, and the sanctions would have vanished in all but name. With his Coalition of the Bribed providing diplomatic cover and vital supplies, he could have re-started WMD production whenever it suited him.

Kerry and Edwards will continue to peddle the fiction that Saddam Hussein was contained and that there was no threat. I remain convinced that if Kerry is elected he will shut down the war on terror and turn it into a domestic law enforcement issue as soon as he feels he can do it without damaging himself politically.

Sarmad is back

Iraqi blogger Sarmad is back posting at Road of a Nation after a lengthy hiatus. When I'd check in from time to time I'd find his August 14th post, nothing else all through September. At first I worried that something had happened to him, and as time went on with no new posts I became convinced it had. Something has happened, but he's back. Sunday, he had this to say,

Hi every one…

Hope every one is good,and I thank all the peoples who were concern on me ,and asking all the time. Thank you all ,and forgive me ,for not posting or answering any one email ,I was through very difficult situation ,and the was so many troubles I been through. I got many threats , if I keep writing they will kill me and my family.

And on Wednesday,

Damn you terrorists...

Yes, damn you, you sick pathetic people -- if you deserve to be called people -- damn you pieces of shit, damn you for what you are doing. What are you trying to do? Killing and killing and murdering and kidnapping destroys families' lives, killing children, and for what?

[...]

Iraq is our, Iraq is my, country; Iraq is mine, I will never leave it, we will never give up, we will stand against you, we will do anything we can, we will build, we will learn, we will live, we will dream. This is what we will do. I know what you want to do instead:- you want to kill, and kidnap, and make our lives miserable, and to take our lovers. But we will never, ever, let you to do that, we will stand against you, with all that we've got, and with all of our good friends who will stand to help us. We will be the spotlight on your dark life and darkness, we will be the knife in your heart, if you have one...

Something happened to Sarmad.

Middle class tax cuts

An article in Reason titled "You May Already Be A Winner" and subtitled "Who really benefits from the Bush tax cuts?" (link via Pejman), complete with charts, contradicts Kerry's incessant claim that tax cuts have helped the rich at the expense of everybody else, particularly the middle class. According to Nick Gillespie and Mike Snell, one of whom says he won't be voting for W, the tax cuts gave people in the $50,000 to $75,000 income range anywhere from $775 to $2692 in added disposable income. That's per year. The authors say,

These calculations suggest that, contrary to John Kerry and other critics, the Bush income tax cuts have in fact put real money in the pockets of typical American families.

I've had conversations with folks who have told me that the middle class got no benefit from the tax cuts. We didn't need the Reason article to tells us that's not true, so when you get to specifics as to why they say middle class is getting the shaft, it turns out to be about Social Security. The way the argument goes when you press somebody on it, is that because of the President's misguided policies, deficits will cause the economy to tank and Social Security to go belly up, and the middle class is going to wind up having to pay for all of it. Really. I'm not making this up. That's the argument.

But the fact is, everybody got a tax cut, and disposable income went up. Arguments to the contrary depend on some other factor, allegedly caused by dastardly administration policy. This time Social Security has to fail in order for a case to be made that an across the board tax cut is really a tax hike for lower income taxpayers. It's the old story "figures don't lie but liars figure."

Global Test

It occurs to me that the Kerry's “global test” is not about why or how we've gone to war. A history of Kerry votes in favor of the use of force comes down to two. The first was in Bosnia in 1995, the second in Iraq 2003. In his Senate career there has been only one president of Kerry's own party, Bill Clinton. When Clinton proposed action in Bosnia, Kerry supported him. In all instances except one, when a Republican was in the White House, Kerry opposed the use of military force. And even in the case of the one – Iraq – Kerry was really opposed. It just wasn’t in his political interest to say so.

Cheney vs. Edwards

Cheney mopped the floor tonight. Here's the Cheney quote that perfectly captures the Kerry-Edwards position. If a moving target can be called a position.

And with respect to this particular operation, we've seen a situation in which, first, they voted to commit the troops, to send them to war, John Edwards and John Kerry, then they came back and when the question was whether or not you provide them with the resources they needed — body armor, spare parts, ammunition — they voted against it.

I couldn't figure out why that happened initially. And then I looked and figured out that what was happening was Howard Dean was making major progress in the Democratic primaries, running away with the primaries based on an anti-war record. So they, in effect, decided they would cast an anti-war vote and they voted against the troops.

Now if they couldn't stand up to the pressures that Howard Dean represented, how can we expect them to stand up to Al Qaida?

He was devastating.

Beautifully Articulated Incoherence

Kerry performed beautifully in the debate the other night. He was relaxed and polished, and he delivered his lines perfectly. It’s apparent that he put in a lot of time preparing and it paid off in his performance. Unfortunately, the performance masked the absence of substance. His debating skills looked much better on the screen the other night, than on the printed page the next morning. It was an exercise in well articulated incoherence. He said,

I know I can do a better job in Iraq. I have a plan to have a summit with all of the allies, something this president has not yet achieved, not yet been able to do to bring people to the table.

It's a recurring theme of his, that he would be better at building alliances, but what we have for evidence of his diplomatic skill are his disparaging remarks directed at the allies who have stood with us. He calls them a "fraudulent" coalition of the "bribed and the coerced." For more evidence we get his accusations that the Iraqi interim Prime Minister gave a misleading overly optimistic assessment of conditions in Iraq, while at the same time he allowed his campaign manager to call the Prime Minister a puppet with President Bush pulling the strings. This is his idea of diplomatic prowess?

His craving for international appoval surfaced again and again. It appeared most glaringly when he talked about having to pass a "global test" before he would take action as commander in chief. He is like a socialite whose standing rests on being invited to the right parties. His entire opposition to the war in Iraq now rests solely on an absence of approval from the right countries.

SEN. KERRY: I wasn't misleading when I said he was a threat. Nor was I misleading on the day that the president decided to go to war when I said that he had made a mistake in not building strong alliances, and that I would have preferred that he did more diplomacy. I've had one position, one consistent position: that Saddam Hussein was a threat; there was a right way to disarm him, and a wrong way. And the president chose the wrong way.

First, this is quite a climb down from earlier statements of his that claim Bush misled us into war. It used to be about weapons of mass destruction and cooked intelligence, but he's had to concede that he's seen the same intelligence and his vote in favor of our use of force is based on it. Now that he agrees that it was right to use military force to disarm Iraq, he claims that diplomacy had not been exhausted. Translation: France did not grant permission, therefore Kerry was opposed.

Both Bush and Kerry said the single-most serious threat to the national security of the United States is the possibility of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists. Kerry went on to say:

Right now, the president is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to research bunker-busting nuclear weapons. The United States is pursuing a new set of nuclear weapons. It doesn't make sense. You talk about mixed messages, we're telling other people, you can't have nuclear weapons, but we're pursuing a new nuclear weapon that we might even contemplate using. Not this president. I'm going to shut that program down, and we're going to make it clear to the world, we're serious about containing nuclear proliferation.

His intention "to shut that program down" affirms those core beliefs that are at the root of his 20 years of Senate opposition to defense projects, and it contradicts his promises from the stump for a stronger America. What's worse, by saying that U.S. weapons research will send a mixed message, he confers legitimacy on the terrorists, as if he intends to negotiate disarmament with them. Does he think the terrorists will be won over by American unilateral disarmament? What exactly does he have in mind, nuclear test ban treaties with terrorists?

Kerry put on a masterful performance. He was always on the attack and he always had an answer. But he can't escape who he is. His tough talk on the campaign trail and in the debate is not supported by his record of votes in the Senate. A closer scrutiny of the debate transcript argues that his actions as commander in chief will reflect the Senate record, not the campaign rhetoric.