Month: October 2004

Here’s a version of Kerry’s famous Mary Cheney answer from the New York Observer:

“We’re all God’s children. And I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was. She’s being who she was born as. Which is a lesbian. All of us need to feel comfortable being who we are, even if someone happens to be a lesbian, which is what Dick Cheney’s daughter is. Even if a young woman prefers to have sex with other women, like Dick Cheney’s daughter does, she should feel comfortable. Being a lesbian. This really underscores the problem with the American health care system. It’s not working for the American family. And it’s gotten worse under President Bush over the course of the last years. Especially if you’re a lesbian, like Dick Cheney’s daughter. Let’s say you’re a lesbian, like Dick Cheney’s daughter, and you need to see a doctor because your partner – let’s say she’s a bull-dyke – say one of her cats bit you. So you’re a lesbian with a cat bite – I’m sure at some point in her life, Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, was bitten by another lesbian’s cat – maybe they were having a sort of lesbian party …”

Okay, I’m laughing.

BUT WATCH OUT: If you think I’m the only angry homo out there, you’re not up on your heavy metal:

Goddamn, there are plenty of free-thinking, rowdy motherfuckers that are homos. But the bottom line is that over half of them don’t want to be associated with the mundane existence that is being a homo in whatever city they live in. The majority of out gay culture tends to be the stereotypical, fucking ’70s disco-laden, kinda weird, snap-your-fingers-I’m-gay, girly type of bullshit. There are plenty of people out there that don’t even come anywhere near that stereotype. And I happen to be one of them. Personally, all I’m trying to say is: yes, I’m a fucking homo. And I’m a goddamn motherfucker of a metal guitar player with my metal brother, who’s not a fucking homo. Nobody else in the band’s a fucking homo. And this 25% gay band will kick anybody’s ass! I fucking mean it.

One of his songs is called: “It bled like a stuck pig.” I’ve met a few of them myself.

Yep, there’s a catalog. And Rummy looks spiffing.

Here’s the New Republic endorsement.

WHITE CATHOLICS SHIFT: A new poll shows a huge swing toward Kerry among white Catholics. Money quote:

A Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday has Kerry winning among white Catholics 50% – 43% — a huge change from the October 3 poll which had Bush leading 49% to 33%. By comparison, George Bush beat Al Gore among white Catholics by about seven points.

Other polls have picked this up as well – and it seems to have been particularly strong after the debates. Why? Steve Waldman offers some thoughts. My own hunch is that undecided Catholics have been repulsed by the way in which the hierarchy has intervened in this election, and the outrageous notion that voting for one candidate can amount to a sin worthy of confession. Catholics know what is appropriate in politics, they know how they feel about the moral standing of the current hierarchy, and they can vote freely in a secular democracy. I also feel that the overtly evangelical cast of the Bush campaign is off-putting to some. Karl Rove, who made winning white Catholics a critical part of his electoral strategy, may have flunked. But we’ll see on election day, won’t we?

Maybe some of you saw this – Triumph in Spin Alley after the debates. He makes Jon Stewart on Crossfire look like a marriage counselor. Hilarious.

CONSERVATIVES AND THE WAR I: “Conservatives profess to care deeply about the outcome in Iraq, but they sat silently for the last year as the situation there steadily deteriorated. Then they participated in a shameful effort to refocus the country’s attention on what John Kerry did on the rivers of Vietnam 30 years ago, not on what George Bush and his team are doing on the rivers of Babylon today, where some 140,000 American lives are on the line. Is this what it means to be a conservative today?

Had conservatives spoken up loudly a year ago and said what both of Mr. Bush’s senior Iraq envoys, Jay Garner and Paul Bremer, have now said (and what many of us who believed in the importance of Iraq were saying) – that we never had enough troops to control Iraq’s borders, keep the terrorists out, prevent looting and establish authority – the president might have changed course. Instead, they served as a Greek chorus, applauding Mr. Bush’s missteps and mocking anyone who challenged them.

Conservatives have failed their own test of patriotism. In the end, it has been more important for them to defeat liberals than to get Iraq right. Had Democrats been running this war with the incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld & Friends, conservatives would have demanded their heads a year ago – and gotten them.” – Tom Friedman, telling it like it is. I’m guilty as well. I was so intent on winning this war and so keen to see the administration succeed against our enemy that I gave them too many benefits of the doubt. Well, I have tried to reassess. I may be proven wrong. I hope I am. But ignoring reality in a situation as vital as this is not an option.

CONSERVATIVES AND THE WAR II: Here’s an interesting take from Mark Schmitt:

If Bush loses, serious conservatives, with the possible exception of extreme social conservatives, will have to ask themselves what they gained from four years of unfettered power, and ten years of domination of American politics. Government is “bigger” by every measure, and more intrusive. A pet idea, Social Security privatization, was actually discredited by their president’s incompetence. Younger voters are increasingly turned off by the social conservatism, so the movement is not expanding its base. A huge new entitlement was created. The federal role in education expanded. And poor planning and dishonesty over Iraq weakened our defense, our credibility, and made it impossible to set a clear standard for when we would intervene and when not.
All the tax cuts have done is to postpone the day we pay for these things.
And if Bush wins, all this will still be true.

And after four more years of Bush, it will be even truer.

Let’s review where we are. There aren’t even faintly enough U.N. troops to prepare for a legitimate election in January. The reason is the security situation. Will it improve enough by December to goad the U.N. into sending the hundreds of experts to make it work? The odds must be massively against it. The one major obstacle is Falluja, and a successful incursion there seems to be prompting some in the Sunni leadership to threaten to boycott the elections entirely. Could we simply police the elections ourselves? First question: with whom? We don’t even have enough troops to retake Falluja and keep Baghdad from blowing up. And if we did, our troops are now so unpopular they would themselves undermine popular legitimacy for the elections. What is Bush’s answer to this? He simply asserts that elections will take place. That’s it. Say after me: if Bush says it, it must be true. If Bush says it, it must be true. Feel better yet? This is what Republicans have to do every day. Faith, not facts. Faith, not facts. Believe … and you will be healed. All will be healed.

MORE ROBERTSON: Yet more proof that he has said this before:

CHUNG: Because I’m wondering if you believe the United States should invade Iraq without U.N. backing.

ROBERTSON: Connie, I have, over the last year or so, been quite concerned about entering into this war. We should have gone in after him in the Gulf War I.

This thing is fraught with danger. And I think we need to understand that. I told the president that just recently, that we have got to prepare the American people for civilian casualties, for possibly our casualties, for gassing, for various chemical weapons against them.

No reference to Bush’s response there. But this was before the invasion. Look, this isn’t a huge deal. I think it merely shows what we know already: that Bush believed the Iraq war would be a push-over. The president was and is responsible for criminal negligence. And yet some believe he should be given a vote of confidence.

Kerry enablers seem to believe that the quote below is out of context. Well, here’s the full context:

KING: Mount Holly Springs, Pennsylvania — hello.

CALLER: Hello. Yes, I would like to ask the panel why they don’t use napalm or flamethrowers on those tunnels and caves up there in Afghanistan?

KING: Senator Kerry?

CALLER: My golly, I think they could smoke him out.

KING: Senator Kerry?

KERRY: Well, I think it depends on where you are tactically. They may well be doing that at some point in time. But for the moment, what we are doing, I think, is having its impact and it is the best way to protect our troops and sort of minimalize the proximity, if you will. I think we have been doing this pretty effectively and we should continue to do it that way.

KING: Congressman Cunningham, what do you think of that question?

CUNNINGHAM: I think Senator Kerry is right on the mark. To use a flamethrower, you’ve got to get right into the area close in. And plus, it doesn’t penetrate that deep in those tunnels. You’ve got to go in there after him. So I think you have to neutralize that threat. And then you can get him out in a lot of different, various ways including what the gentleman spoke about.

From the whole context of the discussion, it’s clear that they are discussing tactics to get bin Laden. Kerry’s concern is to “minimalize the proximity” of the troops, and he is clearly backing the tactics that the Bush administration had agreed to. Here’s another Kerry quote from the same discussion:

I think our guys are doing a superb job. I think we’ve had, things break for us, the way, one would want them to, but in addition, I think the people you just heard, they are trained, they are ready. I think we have been smart, I think the administration leadership has done it well and we are on right track.

Well, Kerry has changed his mind, as he has every right to. But he supported the administration at the time.

“But for the moment, what we are doing, I think, is having its impact and it is the best way to protect our troops and sort of minimalize the proximity, if you will. I think we have been doing this pretty effectively and we should continue to do it that way.” – John Kerry, discussing the tactic of outsourcing the capture of Osama bin Laden to local warlords at the time. (Hat tip: Mickey.)

It turns out that Pat Robertson told his story about warning the president about casualties before – on the air on Hardball. Here’s the transcript:

CAMPBELL BROWN (Guest host): I want to ask you how you feel about the war in Iraq. And if God is calling this war a disaster, does that mean that he is actually opposed to it?

PAT ROBERTSON: Well, I don’t think God’s opposed to the war, necessarily, but it was a danger sign. I felt very uneasy about it from the very get-go. Whenever I heard about it, I knew it was going to be trouble. I warned the president. I only met with him once. I said, You better prepare the American people for some serious casualties. And he said, Oh, no, our troops are, you know, so well protected, we don’t have to worry about that.

No one in the administration denied it then, did they? And this statement is more convincing than the crude idea that the president predicted “no casualties.” You know what? I believe Robertson. Either Bush believed the casualties would be minimal (and, by any historical standard, they were low in the war phase); or he didn’t and was just spinning a supporter. All this shows is that Bush really did believe the “cakewalk” stuff, and had no inkling of the possibility of an insurgency. (But we knew that already from the aircraft carrier embarrassment.) It also reveals Bush’s gut-instinct as a war-leader: never, ever make war seem hard or difficult or risky. Always talk up the war, because you don’t have the strength to tell the public what the war will really cost and what it really entails. That’s why he’s been so unimpressive when things went wrong. He has no internal mechanism to deal with trouble or failure, except denial, arrogance or an attack on his critics. Just what you need in a commander-in-chief, no?

BUSH AND LIFE: Here’s something I didn’t know: after steady declines under Clinton, abortion rates have been increasing under Bush.

THE LIBERAL HAWK DILEMMA: An interesting survey in the Chicago Tribune. This holds for more libertarian hawks – “eagles” – like me. If our policy mix is one of fiscal conservatism, cultural liberalism and foreign policy hawkishness, then Bush presents an awful problem. He hasn’t only been a reckless spender and borrower, he has moved the GOP into the permanent position of the spend-and-borrow party. On domestic issues, he has simply failed to live up to his promise to be a moderate or a uniter. (When I read my endorsement from 2000, it reads like another candidate altogether.) His social policy is indistinguishable from James Dobson’s. On foreign policy, he grasps the enemy we face; and he has some important achievements. But he’s also clearly screwed up badly. What he will do to the Supreme Court is anyone’s guess. But, on the basis of his first four years, my bet is whomever the religious right wants. Gulp.

There’s been a lot of generally sensible guffawing at Kerry’s promise to win over the French and Russians in the war on terror. But there’s been less attention paid to how Bush has dealt with the U.S.’s most critical ally, Britain. The answer is: terribly. Every time I talk to pro-war British friends, they point out how they feel unconsulted, abused, and generally dissed by this administration. They remember Rumsfeld’s spectacularly stupid remark before the war that the Brits were dispensable; and Bush’s own radioactive personality in Europe means that any British leader who wants to support him must also consider political suicide. Look at what is happening now. A simple redeployment of a few hundred British troops to relieve American troops in Baghdad while they prepare to tackle Falluja has led to parliamentary uproar. (Let’s just leave aside the question of why we have so few troops that the Brits are needed to keep what’s left of order in the capital city.) The lesson is clear: Bush has made any future military alliance with even the Brits a near-impossibility. The British people won’t allow it. The Tories are now anti-Bush; almost the entire Labour party is anti-Bush; the Liberal Democrats are pathologically anti-Bush. And this is the success story of Bush’s diplomacy! Again, the worst thing about this is that it undermines our ability to wage this war in future. When you lose the Brits and half your own country in a vital war, you deserve to be fired as president. I’m sorry, but it’s time the pro-war camp began to deal with this.

REPUBLICANS FOR KERRY: The latest – from Kentucky.

All the time. A new blog dedicated to media corrections.

MARRIAGE IN SCANDINAVIA: The latest and mosty comprehensive refutation of Stanley Kurtz’s notion that gay couples are partly responsible for the “decline” of straight marriage in Scandinavia. The abstract is here. The full PDF file is here.

ANOTHER LEFTY … Doesn’t like “Team America.” Of course, the critique is dressed up as a world-weary NYT-ish attempt to say that the movie’s reliance on sending up movie cliches is a movie cliche. Zzzzz. The truth is: the movie brilliantly sends up right, left and Bruckheimer. The puppet vomit scene is worth your $9 alone. Don’t listen to the whiners.