Month: May 2001

Tony Blair refused to concede that he was basically in favor of President Bush’s National Missile Defense plan – when he was in the House of Commons yesterday. But his spin-meister, Alistair Campbell, subsequently told the press that the British government backs Bush. Why the discrepancy? Blair heads an anti-American party in which he is strangely isolated. So he mumbles in Parliament and sends his spinners out to explain to the public what he really feels. I’m with Thatcher on this one. She has immediately endorsed NMD, despite having once been a skeptic, and told Blair to stop “shilly-shallying” and to champion Bush’s “bold vision” at every international forum. God, I miss her.

“And of course I adore the charismatic Babylonian harlot who gets her pestilent comeuppance at the hands of mother nature.” Is anyone else you know capable of a sentence like that? The ‘of course’ clinches it.

When the Village Voice says Jesse Jackson is doomed, he almost certainly is. Check out the gripping letter from the pastor who invited Jackson to repent and got a spin-operation instead. Check out Rod Dreher’s cursory look through Jackson’s amended tax returns as well. If a lone Dreher can find that much, imagine what a team of investigative reporters from a major paper could do? Above all, check out the upcoming Sixty Minutes investigation into Jackson’s Africa trips. The buzz is bigger than the Kerrey horror.

Two more keys to the Kerrey puzzle which are worth mulling over. Vietnam was a horrible and chaotic conflict in which many men may have done immoral things. But charges of war-crimes are brought even in less chaotic circumstances. The military researcher and Vietnam vet, B.G. Burkett, has pointed out, for example, that in the last eleven months of World War II, a thousand G.I.s were tried for capital crimes against civilians, 443 were condemned to death and 96 were executed. If we were strict in enforcing the rules of a just war then, why should we simply ignore important evidence of war-crimes today? Secondly, Jake Weisberg makes a good point about the Clintonian nature of Kerrey’s fellow SEALs’ statement backing up their now-famous commander. The statement “repeatedly notes,” Weisberg observes, “”We took fire and we returned fire.” This in no way answers the charge that the killing of women and children was intentional. “No order was given or received to execute innocent women, old men and children as has been described by some,” the statement says. “… Our actions were in response to a dangerous situation that we know for certain could have resulted in our deaths. … We were young men then and did what we thought was right and necessary.”” Not a very convincing denial to me.

I must be the only person alive who’s a friend of both Matt Drudge and Sid Blumenthal. (That may end when I post this item). But I have to say that, however awful Matt’s mistake in making unfounded allegations about Sid several years ago, he corrected them swiftly, apologized, and did all he could do to rectify the damage. Sid’s subsequent lawsuit was therefore nothing but over-kill and intimidation – backed by the Clinton White House and its many loathsome cronies. When Sid started deposing journalist after journalist in a surreal paranoid fantasy, intimidation became lunacy. He did the wrong thing in getting in, but the right thing in getting out. It seems to me that his settlement of the lawsuit is a clear vindication for Matt – and good news for everyone else trying to forge good, risk-taking journalism on the web. Mistakes, which we all make, should be broadcast and corrected swiftly and openly. The human beings who make them should not be hounded through the courts, when they have done all they can to correct the error. When the person doing the hounding is a journalist himself, he owes the profession something of an apology.

“The tax cut agreed to yesterday continues to pose a threat to federal resources” – The New York Times today. “Federal resources?” Now what would they be? Oh, I remember now. Look in your wallet. (If you find a similar example of liberal or conservative blather, send it my way, will ya?)

INVESTIGATE: One reason I’m a believer in a free press is that every now and again, the truth will out. It doesn’t take many voices to prompt an inquiry, and after Gregory Vistica’s riveting account, I think an official military inquiry into Bob Kerrey’s alleged war crimes is not just advisable but essential. Mike Kelly argues for it today; The New Republic is going to take on Kerrey editorially this week; the best b.s. sniffers around – John Leo, Mickey Kaus – have mouthed off. For good measure, what’s stopping the Times from calling for a military investigation? The inquiry would best be staffed by professional war-crime sleuths and Vietnam vets. Two possible members would be Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, a Vietnam vet who was one of the few to stand up against the evil at My Lai. Another possibility is Vietnam vet and former Nebraska state senator, John DeCamp. Both DeCamp and Thompson served and seem able to distinguish between legitimate military actions and war-crimes. Both have called for an investigation. They should get their request, even though the clubby Senate seems intent on protecting its own.

AMPLIFICATION DEPT: Several readers from Nebraska have alerted me to the fact that former Nebraska state senator John DeCamp almost certainly may be too volatile or political a figure to serve on an independent inquiry. He also has a prickly history with Kerrey. So scrap that specific suggestion. But the notion of a Vietnam vet from the heartland with some political credibility is still a good one. Let the search begin.

SIMPLE QUESTION: Do you think if any evidence had emerged of, say, Oliver North’s possible war-crimes in Vietnam – in identical terms – that Newsweek would have spiked the story? I guess that one answers itself.

MULTIPLE CHOICE: The key Kerrey questions, it seems to me, are a) in a fire-fight, most civilians would instinctively seek cover randomly in shelters. So why did a group convene in the middle of a village in the middle of a shoot-out? b) why were there no survivors? c) in a chaotic, night-time fire-fight, why were none of Kerrey’s men killed or even wounded? d) where is the evidence that Kerrey’s men were attacked at all? e) what motive does Gerhard Klann have to implicate himself in cold-blooded murder if not to tell the truth?

WHILE I’M AT IT: Let me deal with two dumb recent arguments. The first is William Safire’s who, despite glaring holes in Kerrey’s account, asserts that because every other Navy SEAL backs Kerrey (after they all convened for a meeting) then Kerrey should be given the benefit of the doubt. Please. Every single member of that unit has an obvious motive to forget, fib, or duck. They should be questioned separately. Secondly, James Webb’s abhorrent piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (abhorrent because he attributes “arrogance” to anyone concerned about possible war-crimes) contains an obvious fallacy. He cites a military radio transmission that has an unidentified Vietnamese man asked for retribution for the massacre shortly afterwards. Webb cites the transcript as backing Kerrey’s argument that he was facing Viet Cong forces. The transcript reads: “Thus far it appears 24 people were killed. 13 were women and children and one old man. 11 were unidentified and assumed to be VC.” But it’s pretty clear that this is the military’s view, not the Vietnamese protestor’s. And any civilians who didn’t move out of the contested hamlets in that time and place were automatically labeled VC by the military. So the only real point of Webb’s radio transcript is that 11 victims were unidentified males. Advantage: Vistica. (Thanks to my readers for keeping me posted on many aspects of this).

LET THE SUNSTEIN IN: Law professor Cass Sunstein had an op-ed I complained about last Thursday in the New York Times calling, in his best independent, academic tone, for Democratic resistance to all of George W. Bush’s judicial nominees. Yesterday, the Times reported that “Forty-two of the Senate’s 50 Democrats attended a private retreat this weekend in Farmington, Pa., where a principal topic was forging a unified party strategy to combat the White House on judicial nominees. The senators listened to a panel composed of . . . Prof. Cass M. Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School . . .” Don’t you think Sunstein’s blatant partisanship is something the Times might have alerted its readers about before publishing his fatuous op-ed?

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “The village Kerrey entered that fateful night fell into McNamara’s territory of the doomed; does it matter whether those illiterate peasants ended up the hapless victims of McNamara’s napalm or a Navy SEAL’s razor-sharp knife? The difference is that Kerrey was forced to witness the pain while McNamara, the Ford Co. auto executive-turned-deskside-warrior, was not.” – Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times. Forced to witness the pain? Of his victims?