The Dish

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.

Here’s the first email that actually does provide an argument about Mary Cheney and Kerry’s aside that does not hinge on hostility toward or embarrassment about homosexuals:

You choose who you marry (straight or gay, sanctioned or not). You don’t choose who your kids are with respect to items of their personality they can’t control (and this is your position on homo/hetero-sexuality). The problem with Kerry mentioning Mary Cheney’s sexual preference is that he is trying to score a political point against the father (and Bush) about a predisposition that the Veep’s child has, one over which Cheney has no control. You don’t use a child’s status/talents/mental acquity/etc against a parent. That simple proposition is something all parents recognize and this is why the reaction against Kerry is so strong on this point and so bi-partisanly strong.
This is the same lesson you learn as a parent (straight or gay) standing on a little league baseball field watching kids (some talented, some not) learning to play baseball. You don’t then turn on the parent and use the talent (good or bad) of the kid to score points in some argument you may be having with the parent.
And if you do, you will be shunned by all the other parents. Which is just what is happening to Kerry.

My only quibble here is that in the actual context of the question, Kerry wasn’t scoring a direct political point against Bush. He was responding to an open-ended question about whether being gay is a choice. Now that has consequences, of course. But if you live in a world where mentioning someone’s lesbianism is no big deal (and Kerry does), I can see why he wouldn’t see it that way. And that’s why almost no gay people have complained about this. Very few had any reaction to the comment. I didn’t even notice it till the emails started coming in – all from straight people. That’s because I live in a world where homosexuality is a non-issue. But many others – especially Republican parents – still do. And their worst nightmare, sadly, is a gay child. That’s why they leaped to Cheney’s defense. Their sympathies are with him. Mine are also with him – but with the millions of gay kids and citizens out there as well, people who are the target of his administration.

Are the Kerry people still allowing the loopy Teresa to give uncontrolled interviews? Are they out of their minds? Or does she have that much control over her husband and the campaign? She’s a walking gaffe.

Here are the ads for marriage equality on MTV. I’m pretty sure they will make zero difference in the campaign to protect gay couples from the onslaught they’re now facing. As I find on college campuses, the debate is largely over among the young. But I enjoyed them. And they’re hipper than almost anything else I’ve seen in this political season.

Gregg Easterbrook passes on an imaginary post-modern football encounter:

Coach: How could you throw that crazy pass? Didn’t you see the safety?

Quarterback: I did see the safety, but then I thought, how do I know the safety really exists? My eyes perceive a safety and he seems to be covering the receiver, but this might only be from my frame of reference. Someone in the stands might perceive the safety to be covering another receiver, or no one at all. Who am I to say that my perception is correct and theirs is wrong? Then I thought, maybe the safety does exist! But the taboo against throwing into double coverage is just an oppressive ideology used by the dominant hegemony to maintain the imperialist power structure. So you see, I had to make the throw in order to liberate myself.

Philosophy, courtesy of NFL.com.

WHOPPER OF THE WEEK: This from Howie Kurtz’s “Reliable Sources”:

KURTZ: But you’re a reporter, do you want Kerry to win?

DANA MILBANK: In one sense only, and that is his vacation spot is in Nantucket and in Idaho, and it’s not in Waco. So in that sense, absolutely.

As a reporter, Milbank can insist he’s unbiased. But as a human being, he’s full of it.

INSTA-BIAS?: Now, even Howie Kurtz is writing about Glenn Reynolds’ bias. Glenn is perfectly entitled to be as opinionated as he wants. He doesn’t claim to be a news service. Yes, if you read him, you wouldn’t be able to understand why there is even a debate about the management of the war in Iraq. But you can read me if you want to do that (and not many Bush-supporters want to hear a word about it). The only issue here is two-fold. Glenn is such a huge clearing house for blogs that he has become, willy-nilly, a kind of blog-service, and so people complain when he only links to pro-Bush sites or opinions. But since Glenn regularly tells people not to rely on him alone, he’s completely in the clear. But secondly, I do think there is an issue of intellectual transparency here. I was a strong backer of the war in Iraq and still am. But precisely because of that, I feel compelled to grapple with the obvious difficulties that have ensued. I feel I missed certain important things, was deluded on a couple of important points (WMDs, for example, and Bush’s competence in general), and now I’m making amends, of a sort. It’s not pretty and I’ve been slammed and ridiculed for this. I’ve lost thousands of readers. But I cannot see I have much of a choice. Bush’s failures are so glaring you have to put blinders on to ignore them. But Glenn carries on as if nothing that major has gone awry, and sometimes as if the only reason there are problems in Iraq is that the media is biased. When he does mention Bush’s failings, he rarely elaborates. That’s disappointing, although, it’s still his prerogative. And he has managed to retain a far more even keel than my sometimes overly-emotional posts have been able to. I envy that. But that’s him; and this is me; and the blogosphere has plenty of space for all of us.

Here’s a useful guide to where the Independents are leaning. Surprising to me is the fact that in Florida, Kerry has a minuscule lead but has a 19 point lead among independents. That must worry Bush. North Carolina and Colorado seem close too, as Kerry hater/voter Mickey Kaus has noticed, with strong independent support for Kerry. There are no Kerry-leaning states where the undecideds are leaning Bush.