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billroperOk, that's a lie. I have other things that I should be doing and I'll return to them in just a minute.
However, if you want to watch the new ad from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, all you have to do is click on the link above. It'll take sixty seconds of your time, after which you'll be able to say that you actually bothered to watch the thing that you're talking about -- whether you're for it, against it, or just want to be informed about what's being said.
(Hey, I watched the ad on the Moveon.org site that compared Bush to Hitler.)
However, if you want to watch the new ad from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, all you have to do is click on the link above. It'll take sixty seconds of your time, after which you'll be able to say that you actually bothered to watch the thing that you're talking about -- whether you're for it, against it, or just want to be informed about what's being said.
(Hey, I watched the ad on the Moveon.org site that compared Bush to Hitler.)
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Date: 2004-08-20 08:01 pm (UTC)(I've read the transcript, which quite honestly is how I like to get all my television, but I would like to see it.)
B
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Date: 2004-08-20 08:11 pm (UTC)I'm running IE with Custom settings that say (among other things):
File and font downloads are enabled. I will run ActiveX controls, but I won't download them (and haven't). The Microsoft VM Java permissions are set to "High safety".
Any of those look likely?
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Date: 2004-08-20 09:38 pm (UTC)I missed this the first time. "Hey, I watched the ad on the Moveon.org site that compared Bush to Hitler." That one I missed. The Moveon people were right to pull that thing down as soon as they got wind of it, but as a result most people never saw it. But a clip from it got into a bizarre web-only Bush ad. Not the same, I know.
B
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Date: 2004-08-20 08:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-20 08:14 pm (UTC)The interesting point was from the POW who said that he had undergone torture for refusing to make statements like (not-yet-Senator-at-the-time) Kerry made in front of Congress. I'll want to see how that plays out.
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Date: 2004-08-20 08:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-20 08:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-20 09:04 pm (UTC)My take on all of this (with the complete set of what Kerry said, not just quotes screwed around with in order) is on my journal (http://marmotgraphics.com/jim/journal/2004/08/journal_081104.html), and I quote myself:
"What Kerry was saying is that the political leadership of the country - LBJ, his aides and McNamara, and later Nixon and Kissinger - led this country down the primrose path. It sacrificed a lot of lives to political expediency. It counted Vietcong bodies and ignored the suffering of the vets in hospitals, recovering from charges into impossible situations for transient goals. It turned a generation into hamburger for politics' sake and their sense of manhood. It set things up so that people would end up in the Abu Ghraibs and the My Lai sort of situations and tell people that those wogs out there deserved no consideration as human beings because we need to show them what for.
He didn't say all vets were like that. He didn't blame the vets. He said that they were admitting that they sometimes did shameful things when they were put into impossible situations. He blamed the guys at the top, and the real thing that those swift boat vets are pissed at Kerry about is that he 'slammed the war and our fighting men,' and the only part of that that is true is the part about the war itself. "
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Date: 2004-08-20 08:50 pm (UTC)Just to prevent the propagation of mis-implication, Moveon didn't produce or air that ad. It was submitted as part of a contest, was seen only by those who sought it out on the net, and has since been removed.
BTW, have you seen F 9/11 yet?
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Date: 2004-08-20 08:59 pm (UTC)I haven't seen F 9/11, since this would involve a substantial investment of time and actually having to pay for it. I have, however, read a number of detailed reviews, both pro and con.
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Date: 2004-08-20 09:07 pm (UTC)Hours.
I'll send you the five bucks.
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Date: 2004-08-20 09:13 pm (UTC)Also, it would probably have the same effect on my blood pressure as you would have from spending two hours in a room with "A Message from Karl Rove". I don't know if Dr. Bob would approve... :)
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Date: 2004-08-20 09:40 pm (UTC)B
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Date: 2004-08-20 09:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-20 09:51 pm (UTC)B
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Date: 2004-08-20 09:54 pm (UTC)(As he rips the case statement back apart and starts typing in more formulas for the code to execute later.)
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Date: 2004-08-20 09:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-20 09:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-20 09:48 pm (UTC)What I saw in the advertisement was Kerry telling the truth as he saw it. I am not an expert on history, but I suspect that his quoted statements were demonstrably true. Breakdowns in discipline ("fragging"), the My Lai massacre, indiscriminate carpet bombing, all the things that I remember from the daily news of the time. I do know that the one about ruining the Vietnamese countryside was certainly true. Remember Agent Orange? All this history lends credence to his statements of the time. If anything he said was patently false, I would expect the advertisement to directly rebut the quoted testimony. But there's nothing of that. Perhaps they are counting on people like me to have "happy forgets," as my sweet old grandmother used to phrase it.
What I also saw in the political ad, besides emotional appeals, is what is known as "the fallacy of false generalization:" It is also demonstrably true that not all soldiers in Vietnam were parties or witnesses to any or all of the actions Kerry averred in the quotations. For one thing Vietnam is a big place, and it was an awful place.
So we have a counterpoint of unhappy Vietnam veterans generalizing Kerry's statements to apply to them in particular. Their experiences very well may have varied from Kerry's; but it doesn't mean that both sets of experiences weren't true.
But to imply that Kerry's quoted statements were false from such an argument reflects more on the veterans' situations and thinking than on Kerry's. Many people need to think that their lives have or had especial meaning, and fall prey to those who will puff up this need for importance. Those who do it for ulterior ends should be shamed. And I feel sad for those who are victims.
Too, as a matter of training, the military molds soldiers to think in a particular way as they enter the armed forces, and it is an attitude which many veterans hold to themselves for the rest of their lives. The "all for one, one for all" thinking is a major strength of veteran soldiers, a survival trait in battle and part of the essence of their comradeship.
But the "we're all in it together" belief is also a weakness when hard truths must be stated. Kerry broke with this mindset, and perhaps his "vice" was really a virtue. Did it help shorten a stalemated war that took the lives of over 58,000 American soldiers (and who knows how many lives of southeast Asians), not to mention all those maimed or otherwise had their lives destroyed? Did he allow Vietnam to return to being a nation outside the great sweep of world history, and which became irrelevant to the dispositions of the great issues of the 20th century. (You'll note that Vietnam has diplomatic relations with the U. S., and trade with that country approaches a billion dollars a year, and communism as an economic system is crumbling. If all that is the result of a lost war, why wasn't it "lost" more quickly?)
Kerry's independence of action, and its example to encourage people to take new hard looks at policies that failed, was remarkable and praiseworthy.
It is a quality for which Kerry should be elected, not damned.
What I do conclude from watching the advertisment is this application: the truth can set you free; but if you have been misled, and perhaps self-deluded, like these veterans have been for so long, the truth can also break your heart.
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Date: 2004-08-20 09:54 pm (UTC)B
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Date: 2004-08-20 09:57 pm (UTC)There's probably a lot more that could be said about this, but I really need to get this program fixed up. (Yes, I know and I have a marvelous proof that won't fit in the margin...)
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Date: 2004-08-20 10:02 pm (UTC)Good luck (and good night).
B
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Date: 2004-08-21 04:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-21 04:47 pm (UTC)B
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Date: 2004-08-21 01:29 pm (UTC)May I ask why?
K.
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Date: 2004-08-21 05:50 pm (UTC)But that's not on point to the question. I mildly favor Bush because I think that, by and large, he's done about as well as he could do, given the problems that he's been handed and the amount of political polarization that existed before he even took office, given the closeness of the last election.
The economy: I remember discussing politics with folks before the last election and reaching the consensus that whoever got elected was screwed, because they were about to inherit a recession and get blamed for it. If you paid much attention to all of the leading indicators from June 2000 on, it was clear that the bubble had popped. Tax cuts are pretty classical Keynesian economics in that case. While I think that some of the scheduled-to-expire-in-2010 tax cuts need to be undone -- and I have at least one liberal friend who argues vehemently against me when I suggest that reinstating some form of estate tax is a reasonable idea -- I'm not by any means convinced that Kerry's tax plan is an improvement on the current situation.
Social Security: I have been watching (and writing about!) this demographic disaster since 1980. As a tail-end Baby Boomer, I have (excuse the pun) a vested interest in it. My general impression is that the Democrats will continue to say "We're all fine here" until the train runs off a cliff. The Republicans are, at least, trying to explore ideas that would let me get some return on the taxes that I have paid. I have long thought that if something weren't done about it, anyone who saved for their retirement would discover that they were "means-tested" to the point where they wouldn't be paid Social Security. I was not surprised to hear Kerry suggest using means testing to prevent anyone who had too much money from getting more back from Social Security than they had paid in taxes over the years. It doesn't mean that I have to like it.
(Continued on next rock)
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Date: 2004-08-21 05:50 pm (UTC)I've been reading two year old Time magazines on the exercycle in the morning. Recently, I read a quote from Hans Blix dating to about May 2002, noting that there was a lot of new activity in satellite photos of sites where the Iraqis had formerly conducted banned weapons programs. There was apparently a lot of intelligence, going back to the Clinton administration, that made the entire world think that Hussein had WMDs. When the weapons inspectors went back into the country, Hussein acted like a man with WMDs, conducting shell games with the inspectors. (As opposed to countries like Ukraine, which led inspectors to nuclear weapons and said, "Please take these away.")
Maybe we didn't need to invade Iraq at the moment that we did. But it certainly looked like a good idea at the time. Especially with the amount of smoke that is developing around the "Oil for Food" program that suggests that one of the reasons we were having difficulty getting support from France, Germany, and Russia was that influential people there were making a lot of money off of illegal kickbacks that allowed Hussein to divert the funds from humanitarian purposes to his own devices.
And, of course, there is no way to prove that Gaddafi's decision to disarm was related to our invasion of Iraq. It certainly smells right to me, though. (And -- in yet another failure of intelligence -- Libya seems to have had a much more advanced nuclear program than we thought they did. I guess it's a good thing that they were shut down.)
Then there's Homeland Security. God help me, could anyone have picked a worse name for that function? Understand that I agree with Bruce that many of the things we are doing or thinking about doing in the name of security are not good ideas. I'm just not strongly convinced that either party, in this position, wouldn't do some stupid things in the interest of being seen doing something.
One of the arguments used when the Patriot Act passed was that then current law allowed these measures to be used against drug dealers but not against terrorists. Now, the salient argument is "Why was it ok to use these measures against drug dealers?", but I just don't hear either party getting around to making that argument either.
Some of the things that the Patriot Act allows seem to be good ideas -- for instance, that a wiretap should be able to follow an individual around in this day of disposable cellular phones instead of being tagged to a single line. Others, I'm sure, are pretty bad ideas, although the one that has provoked the most outrage -- library records -- doesn't worry me as much as the possibility that some nitwit judge will decide that Ranma 1/2 is child pornography after raiding my house. But I digress...
Now, am I happy about the budget deficit? No. Or about how the occupation of Iraq is going? Nope, not real thrilled about that either. (Although the retrospective argument that we shouldn't have disbanded the Iraqi army -- which, yes, was probably a mistake -- causes me to imagine the reaction from some quarters if we hadn't done so. De-Baathification was the equivalent of De-Nazification after World War II. It just didn't work as well.)
(One rock to go...)
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Date: 2004-08-21 05:51 pm (UTC)*sheesh* It reminds me of nothing other than the sheer vitriol that a different group of people spewed at Clinton. Now, while I didn't much like Clinton, I'll admit that he did a reasonable job as President.
So the reason you see me writing posts defending Bush is because I'm doing it as a counter-balance to my friends who will hack and slash against him in ways that I don't consider reasonable. Trust me, it's not out of blind loyalty.
(Aside: I like those tactics about as well as I like the RASFF conceit where some folks there refer to the "War on Some Drugs". Now, I actually agree that our drug laws are moronic and that the best solution to the "War on Drugs" would be to emulate Nixon, declare victory, and pull out. But the whole thing ticks me off, because playing at being cute is not the way to convince the people you need to convince! All it does is wave a red flag at the undecided to let them know that you've decided to be blindly partisan about it and they can ignore you.)
Ok, this is a much longer response than I'd intended and I still have a lot of work to do. (Which is why I'm at work on Saturday.)
But let me say that Kerry worries me. Not in the way that Gore scared me. (Gore, I felt, was extremely bright and extremely wrong on a number of critical issues, which made me consider him dangerous.) My perception of Kerry, based on what's he's emphasized in his speeches, is that he's likely to be a more moderate President than Gore would have been.
But this article actually worries me. It's a pretty favorable article, all things considered. But read to the end, with the bit about the hat that he carries in his briefcase.
That's a little creepy. At least, I think so.
It might not stop me from voting for him. But at the moment, I'm leaning toward Bush.
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Date: 2004-08-23 02:08 pm (UTC)