NoKo "Anniversary" Mushroom Cloud Spotted By China

Two days ago, spotters in Beijing reported a large mushroom cloud in an area of North Korea where the Kim Jong-Il regime stations missiles, the Associated Press reports:

A large explosion rocked the northern part of North Korea, sending a huge mushroom cloud into the air on an important anniversary of the communist regime, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported Sunday.

Citing an unidentified source in Beijing, Yonhap said the explosion happened on Thursday in Yanggang province near the border with China. The damage and crater left by the explosion in Kim Hyong Jik county was big enough to be noticed by a satellite, the source said.

"We understand that a mushroom-shaped cloud about 2.2 miles to 2.5 miles in diameter was monitored during the explosion," Yonhap quoted an unidentified diplomatic source in Seoul as saying.

The timing of the explosion would indicate that it was no accident. The regime celebrates September 9th as its anniversary and usually finds rather spectacular ways to celebrate. In the twisted world of Kim Jong-Il, an above-ground nuclear detonation would be the best way of singing Happy Birthday To Us while reminding the world that their nuclear ambitions have yet to be sated.

Experts are still trying to confirm the nature and purpose of the explosion. Initial reports give little confidence that it was an innocent accident; the magnitude is described as larger than their catastrophic train explosion earlier this year, which killed 160 people and injured over 1300. That explosion was a mistake -- this one appears to be a message.

Kerry: GOP Racists, Looking To Suppress Black Votes

John Kerry told the Congressional Black Caucus that the Republicans want to suppress the black vote in November, repeating the canard that a million black votes went uncounted in 2000:

"We are not going to stand by and allow another million African American votes to go uncounted in this election," the Democratic presidential nominee told the Congressional Black Caucus. "We are not going to stand by and allow acts of voter suppression, and we're hearing those things again in this election."

Kerry has a team of lawyers to examine possible voting problems to try to prevent a repeat of the 2000 election disputes. He also has said he has thousands of lawyers around the country prepared to monitor the polls on election day.

"What they did in Florida in 2000, some say they may be planning to do this year in battleground states all across this country," Kerry said. "Well, we are here to let them know that we will fight tooth and nail to make sure that this time, every vote is counted and every vote counts."

The fact that Kerry has hired "thousands" of lawyers to do anything about the election should tell you exactly what a Kerry presidency would look like: a sellout to the trial-lawyer lobby, where lawyers go to court to create Kerry's brand of radical legislation that Congress would never approve. Even worse than Kerry's threat to follow Al Gore's precedent of attempting to sue his way to the Oval Office, though, is Kerry's despicable use of the race card and his painting of the GOP as racist. As a member of the GOP, I take that accusation personally, as I believe it was meant.

The Civil Rights Commission reported that African-American voters in Florida were more likely to have spoiled ballots or be denied a vote than other voters, but never quantified the number of voters. It claimed that 14.4% of African-American voters could not successfully vote in the 2000 general election. The total number of African-Americans in Florida for 2000 was 2.3 million. If half were adults, that would make a potential electorate of 1.15 million. Registration rates for African-Americans in 2000 were about 75%, one of the highest rates for all ethnic groups. Voter turnout for this group in 2000 was 61% of this 75%, or about 526,000 votes. If 14.4% of these voters were unsuccessful, that represents just under 76,000 votes -- nothing to sneeze at, to be sure, but a far, far cry from one million votes.

But let's take a look at where these voters were disenfranchised, according to the USCCR. As the nation painfully learned in the aftermath of the 2000 election debacle in Florida, the counties control the ballot preparation and voting procedures in the Sunshine State. In the executive summary of the report, the commission specifically mentions Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties -- all controlled by the same party: Democrats. In fact, 24 of the 25 counties that had the highest ballot-spoilage rates were run by Democrats, not Republicans.

The only state-level function specifically pointed out by the commission was the felon purge list, which has only been confirmed to have kept three eligible voters from casting ballots on Election Day in 2000. In fact, as USCCR member Peter Kirsanow put it in his minority report:

Whites were actually twice as likely as blacks to be erroneously placed on the list. In fact, an exhaustive study by the Miami Herald concluded that "the biggest problem with the felon list was not that it prevented eligible voters from casting ballots, but that it ended up allowing ineligible voters to cast a ballot."* According to the Palm Beach Post, more than 6,500 ineligible felons voted.

Put simply, the "million black voters disenfranchised in Florida" meme is a fraud, an easily debunked one at that if anyone looks at the Census Bureau reports for Florida in 2000. Kerry has decided to cast his lot with the conspiracy theorists and the race-baiters. His use of a hoary urban legend does not speak well of his intelligence, his ethics, or his judgement. Kerry should be ashamed of himself.

Support Pam Wolf And Laugh At Captain Ed's Golf Game

Self-imposed humiliation seems to be a theme for this weekend at Captain's Quarters -- I made myself the focus of your derision in the Caption Contest; Dan Rather swears that documents from 1972 and 1973 with computerized typesetting and talking about pressure coming from retired generals are authentic; and last I looked, John Kerry is still running for president.

Instead of fighting the trend, I'm upping the ante by playing golf on Sunday at a fundraiser for Pam Wolf, the Republican candidate for Minnesota State House in District 51B. For a minimal entry fee -- $30 covers everything, including a small donation for Pam's campaign -- you can play nine holes, get a sleeve of golf balls, have a great lunch, and watch the most hilarious activity you've ever seen: Captain Ed playing golf. We're on the Brightwood Hills Golf Course between 1 - 4 PM Sunday, and you can sign up on Pam's web site.

If you're in the area and you care about keeping the Republican majority in the Minnesota legislature, make sure you swing out to Pam's fundraiser. We'll look forward to having a few laughs and a great time with you!

UPDATE: In case you listened to the Northern Alliance show today, here's the information and the link to the Pam Wolf fundraiser tomorrow. I hope to see you all there!

Caption Contest #26: The Buck Stops Here Edition

It's Friday, so it must be time for another edition of the Captain's Caption Contest! Since I've managed to mess up the timing of the last couple of Caption Contests, I've decided to give John Kerry a rest for this week and take the shots myself. (Besides, his week's going so bad that I don't think we could possibly provide captions that adequately describes the meltdown!) Here's my picture from our hometown newspaper, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, which accompanied this article on my RNC blogging:

In order to pre-empt an entire series of attacks from one of our regular contributors (and to help promote his book again), this week's guest judge will be Steve Filippini. Steve wrote a hilarious book about his experiences as a technician for alarm companies, so get yourself a copy and check it out! As always, put your best caption entries in the comments section -- NO e-mail, please! (E-mailed entries will be recreated in Word to look like 30-year-old memos and given to CBS News to discredit Oliver Willis.) The contest will remain open until 8 pm Sunday, September 12th, at which point the comments will be closed and Steve will pick the winners.

Let the games begin!

BUMP 9/10: Wow, you guys are brutal -- but then again, I have a masochistic streak. And Admiral Emeritus, you're balder than I am ...

BUMP 9/11: Great entries so far -- the Northern Alliance guys were sharpening their pencils, so expect to see some truly brutal entries soon. Keep checking back, and enter as often as you like! ...

CBS Voted Against Ben Barnes Before They Voted For Him

Dan Rather interviewed former Texas legislator and Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes in order to establish that Barnes used undue influence to get George Bush into the Texas Air National Guard. Rather didn't mention the fact that Barnes has been a major contributor to the Democrats and to the Kerry campaign; over the past five years, he has generated almost a half-million dollars for the DNC and John Kerry, as I reported earlier. Rather treated Barnes as a reluctant witness instead of the partisan he is.

However, CBS News did not always treat Barnes with such kid gloves. New Jersey blogger Just Dan notes that as late as June, CBS looked at Barnes more critically as a potential beneficiary of a John Kerry victory:

The Kerry campaign has begun tracking major fundraisers using a Trustee Leader Board, CBS News has learned. While keeping tabs on fundraisers is nothing new, the twist is that the Kerry campaign is tracking donations to the Democratic National Committee, not to the campaign itself. ...

[S]everal donors, who spoke to CBS News on the condition of anonymity, said that the money was being carefully tracked by the Kerry campaign, most likely for recognition should Kerry win the presidency. In a sign of the campaign's involvement, last week's Leader Board memo was sent around by the Kerry campaign itself.

CBS knew that Kerry campaigners had already taken a large interest in keeping track of the big-money contributors, and Beth Lester specifically mentions Barnes:

As of last week, according to information received by CBS News, 20 donors have given and/or raised more than $250,000, enough to earn them the designation of Trustee. Of those, eight have actually raised more than $500K. Those half-millions include Texas lobbyist Ben Barnes, Wall Street financier Stan Shuman, Iranian American PAC Board of Trustees member Hassan Nemazee and Texas lawyer Mark Iola. Eventually, says a source inside the process, the over-$500K raisers will have a special name designation but no moniker has been chosen yet. ...

Although the Kerry campaign's tracking is perfectly legal, Larry Noble of the Center for Responsive Politics notes that tracking donors is a sign that "campaigns, political parties and donors do all understand that this is a system of giving and getting rewards for giving." And, Noble continues, "Kerry, like Bush, plans to acknowledge these people if he wins the election. And that could be in the form of government appointments, ambassordorships, favorable hearings on administration policies."

The possible impropriety between major donors and major appointments is not lost on anyone. After CBS News obtained a copy of the memo, several donors were alerted by the DNC and members of the Kerry campaign. Some of those donors then asked to have their names removed from the list and to remain anonymous to avoid even the appearance of impropriety in the future, said one donor whose name remains on the list.

Whatever else CBS says or doesn't say about Ben Barnes, they cannot claim ignorance about his status as a major contributor to Kerry and the DNC. Dan Rather needs to explain why an issue which CBS felt was important news regarding Barnes' expectations from his heavy contributions did not warrant exploration in the context of his accusations against Kerry's opponent. CBS viewers deserved to have that context presented to them in order to properly weigh Barnes' accusations.

60 Minutes Trolling For Left-Wing Political Groups

CBS has not yet learned its lesson from the Killian forgery debacle, according to CQ reader Retired Military. RM saw the following notice in the Killeen Daily Herald's on-line user forums, which is the newspaper for the community near Fort Hood. Nancy Lessin and Charley Richardson are scouting for 60 Minutes producers, who want to hear any stories they can find that cast the military in a bad light:

Dear Military Families,

We received the email below from Leslie Cockburn, a producer for CBS's 60 Minutes. She is looking into the lack of supplies, equipment, maintenance of vehicles/equipment, etc. in Iraq. If you are interested in contacting her, her email is LCCockburn@aol.com
and her phone number in Washington DC is 202 342 9488.

In Peace and Solidarity,
Nancy Lessin and Charley Richardson,
for Military Families Speak Out
www.mfso.org
www.bringthemhomenow.org

According to this post, Cockburn's objective approach to CBS News investigations are displayed for all to see in an e-mail sent to Lessin's organization, the anti-war Military Families Speak Out. Cockburn starts with a belief and rather than test the hypothesis honestly, Cockburn trolls for only that testimony which will support the CBS position:

As per our conversation, I am producing a 60 Minutes piece (with Kroft) which addresses the following:

In light of our recently passed 416 billion dollar defense appropriations bill, I am disturbed to hear stories of lack of the most basic supplies among the troops in Iraq.

These include out of date weapons, lack of radios, inadequate water supplies, problems with vests, humvees, troops forced to purchase their own equipment etc. I would like to hear from any family
who knows of such problems. I am particularly interested in shortages within the last few months.

I am also interested in maintenance problems...backlogs of repairs on
vehicles and helicopters that may put troops in danger.

In looking at the stories from the field, I am trying to determine whether the Guard is experiencing more difficulties than other forces and also whether these problems continue regardless of promises to fix them.

If any of the families have documentary evidence of problems, photos from the field , home videos and letters etc, I am of course interested.

my [sic] email is LCCockburn@aol.com. (I am based in Washington DC. 202 342 9488)

Many thanks,

Leslie

If you're curious about who MFSO is and who supports them, their Links page should tell you how far to the left MFSO runs. The various groups all lead back to MoveOn.org, Greenpeace, Feminist Majority, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and many other groups that have an explicit anti-Bush strategy. It's very revealing that when CBS looks around for help on a story about the military that their producers look to these sources first.

Using this manner of journalistic ethics, winding up with forged documents and no credible attempt at authentication does not appear to be an exceptional event at CBS. In fact, if this is how the Tiffany Network practices journalism, it would be a wonder if CBS ever presented a true picture on any issue it approaches.

Remembering 9/11

Each generation shares a "Where were you then" moment, an event so awful that its memory sears itself into the collective psyche and the circumstances surrounding one's first awareness of it can be instantly recalled. For my grandparents, that event was Pearl Harbor, and for my parents it was the assassination of John Kennedy. My generation had two within four years of each other -- the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan and the accidental destruction of the space shuttle Challenger.

And yet none of these really quite compares to the impact that 9/11 had on Americans. Perhaps only Pearl Harbor is analogous, but still not quite the same. For the first time in almost 200 years, Americans had suffered massive casualties in an attack on our homeland, something we thought we could defend with our massive Navy and Air Force.

But it wasn't just the attack or the deaths; it was the use of our own commercial aircraft to destroy civilian targets. It was the thought of the people on those planes, who could have been any one of us, trapped as the final witnesses on makeshift guided missiles, unable except in the last instance to understand what their fate would be. It was the people trapped above the flames on the doomed World Trade Center, either jumping or being thrust out by the pressure and the heat of the flames, hoping against hope that their deaths would be somehow less horrific with the 100-story fall than in the firestorm from which they escaped.

Where was I then?

I had arrived at work early as I did at the time, to catch up on my e-mail and voicemail messages and to read a bit of the news before my day started in earnest. Just before 8 am CT, one of my co-workers mentioned to me that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center, and I remembered a story that my father had told me about small aircraft occasionally hitting the Empire State Building when he was a young boy in New York. It wasn't until the second plane hit the second tower that we all realized we were under attack.

Work came to a halt, at least as much as possible in our line of work. I rushed to check on our clients in the WTC and found out that none of them had arrived at work before the attack, and then spent most of the day watching the TV, seeing the images of people fleeing while New York firefighters and police officers ran into the maelstrom. I remember the disbelief we all felt when the towers collapsed, first one and shortly afterwards the other.

I remember the feeling of utter helplessness, momentarily alleviated when we heard about the heroes of Flight 93 who turned their deaths into the only triumph we had that black day. Rumors of the people who died on the planes; was it really possible that Barbara Olson, who we'd all seen on television, died at the Pentagon? What about the producers of Frasier? How many died in the WTC collapse? Ten thousand? Twenty?

In the days to come, more and more of the story fell into place, the helplessness morphed into anger and determination. Determination that we should never forget, and never surrender to the terror. But not that day. All I felt that day was shock, fear, and horror. The terrorists won that day. And I want to make sure that 9/11 remains the only day they can claim.

Washington Times: Killian Memo Signatures Forged

Rowan Scarborough at the Washington Times reports this morning that the signatures on the memos CBS produced to bolster its claim of preferential treatment for George Bush during his National Guard duty are forged:

Eugene P. Hussey, a certified forensic document examiner in Washington state, said yesterday there is another flaw in the CBS memos. Mr. Hussey studied the known signatures of Col. Killian on Air Force documents, and two signatures on documents dated 1972 and 1973 that aired on "60 Minutes" Wednesday night.

"It is my limited opinion that Killian did not sign those documents," Mr. Hussey told The Washington Times. He said he uses the phrase "limited opinion" because he does not have the original documents. He, like other experts interviewed by the press, relied on copies of originals first obtained by CBS.

Dan Rather had earlier tried to pre-empt any debate about the documents by producing the CBS expert who pronounced the documents genuine, Marcel Matley. However, a quick search on both men's names is revealing. Googling Hussey leads to eight links, all to professional document-examiner associations. However, Googling Matley results in at least one instance of Matley's questionable and controversial media pronouncements. Matley's support of another weird conspiracy theory is quoted at Justice For Kurt, a website dedicated to the notion that grunge pioneer Kurt Cobain did not commit suicide but instead was murdered. Matley suggested that Cobain's suicide note is a forgery:

As to the last four lines, there are more than a dozen differences that should give us pause, and we would have to reasonable explain these differences before we can conclude that the same person wrote the four lines that wrote the body of it.

A number of readers also have informed me that Matley served on the commission that determined Vince Foster's suicide note was genuine, although that seemed to me at the time and now to be a reasonable judgement. Far more interesting to me is the ethics of Matley, as described in a very revealing article he wrote titled "The Expert Ambush: How To Hold Off Your Opponent Until The Cavalry Arrives", which advises how to stall and obfuscate when presented with expert testimony damaging to your case. Not only is the article a roadmap for Dan Rather's defense so far, but it also shows that Matley is an experienced partisan who focuses much more on beating his opponent than on getting his testimony right.

So now we have the following discrepancies in the CBS documents:

1. Signatures forged.
2. Pressure allegedly applied is attributed to a command officer who had retired months before the dating of the memo.
3. No letterheads on at least two of the memos.
4. Despite CBS' description of the sourcing for these memos as having come from the personal files of the deceased Jerry Killian, Killian's family insists he kept no personal files.
5. Retired General Bobby Hodges, whom CBS claimed authenticated the material within the memos, now says that CBS lied to him about the documents. He was told that the memos were handwritten in Killian's handwriting. His conclusion that they reflected Killian's sentiments was based on that information, since CBS never showed him the documents. He has now stated he believes them to be forgeries.
6. Killian's family insists that Killian couldn't type well and avoided it whenever possible.
7. Killian's family insists that Killian retained a high opinion of George Bush until Killian died in 1984, and was proud to have been the officer to pin Bush's wings to his chest.
8. The memos vary widely from required Air Force format at the time -- although they come much closer to the more modern Air Force format, first used in the 1990s, suggesting that the creator of the documents only has exposure to recent military procedure. Since Killian died in 1984, he could not possibly have written them.
9. The typography in these memos could only have been done by a typesetting system. While several of the features in the memos could possibly have been created by using various types of typesetting machines in the 1970s, no one has come up with one machine that could do all of them simultaneously in 1972 and 1973, nor explain why a Texas Air National Guard base would own one, or why a reserve Lieutenant Colonel would use one to write memos to his personal files -- especially since the colonel in question hated to type.

Until CBS can answer these questions and produce the original documents for analysis, the logical conclusion is that these documents are clumsy forgeries and were produced by someone looking to smear George Bush. CBS' insistence on protecting its source and refusal to investigate its own actions in publishing this story points to an awareness of journalistic practices that are at best sloppy, and at worst fraudulent.

Rather's Source Says Documents Are A Fraud

Via Instapundit, the CBS meltdown continues. Just hours after Dan Rather told the nation that he personally vouched for the authenticity of the Killian memos due to the preponderance of supporting evidence surrounding them, the "preponderance" told ABC News that he thinks the documents are forged:

Retired Maj. General Hodges, Killian's supervisor at the Grd, tells ABC News that he feels CBS misled him about the documents they uncovered. According to Hodges, CBS told him the documents were "handwritten" and after CBS read him excerpts he said, "well if he wrote them that's what he felt."

Hodges also said he did not see the documents in the 70's and he cannot authenticate the documents or the contents. His personal belief is that the documents have been "computer generated" and are a "fraud".

So now we find out that not only did CBS fail to show the documents to the one witness who could have verified them, but they also told him that the memos were handwritten -- which would have made Hodges more likely to accept them as genuine, since everyone who knew Col. Jerry Killian knew he didn't type. This is what CBS said earlier about how important Hodges was in certifying the documents as genuine:

"This report was not based solely on recovered documents, but rather on a preponderance of evidence, including documents that were provided by unimpeachable sources, interviews with former Texas National Guard officials and individuals who worked closely back in the early 1970s with Colonel Jerry Killian and were well acquainted with his procedures, his character and his thinking," the network said in a statement reported on its Web site.

First the documents came from Killian's personal files, until Killian's family insisted that Killian kept no personal files, and didn't type to boot. Then CBS trotted out Major General Bobby Hodges's testimony that the documents accurately reflected Killian's thinking at the time, which the Killian family also refuted. Now we find out that Hodges never saw the documents, were told they were handwritten, and only said that if CBS had notes in Killian's handwriting then the notes must have reflected Killian's thoughts at the time, which is nothing more than a common-sense statement.

The house that Edward R Murrow built is fast crumbling all around one man: Dan Rather. How much longer will this go on before CBS has enough?

CNN: Dan Rather Provided The Authentication

Power Line notes a rare Dan Rather appearance on CNN, where Rather personally vouched for the authenticity of the Killian memos despite all evidence of their fraudulent nature. He also told CNN viewers that there is no need for any investigation, apparently believing that his own personal credibility can make up for the fact that errors in both content and typography unequivocally demonstrate them to be fakes.

No transcript is available as of yet, although hopefully CNN will provide one soon. However, it moves the question from "how did CBS allow such obvious and poor forgeries to form the heart of their story" to "how long has Dan Rather been able to bypass any editorial control at CBS"? Because Rather, it would seem from this new statement, forced the story on the air without doing any journalistic work to verify the facts, something that even bloggers routinely do before writing. Rather never contacted the Killian family. Rather never had an expert review the documents themselves to authenticate their age and their content to see if both fit with military practice at the time. The only authentication CBS has provided is a statement that the documents were read over the phone to retired Major General Bobby Hodges, who said they fit his recollection of Killian's state of mind at the time ... 30 years ago.

Not only does this reveal a complete lack of journalistic ethics, which fails to surprise long-term Rather watchers, but also a callous disregard for the news organization that made him one of the most powerful media voices in the world. He just embarassed the broadcast organization that has long held itself out as the gold standard for television news, and he's out in front today offering, essentially, the Nixon defense: Rather assures us that he says the documents are genuine and we should just stop asking about them.

Well, they're not. They are demonstrably fraudulent, and if Rather keeps stonewalling on the issue, then CBS has a decision to make. Is saving Dan Rather worth the destruction of their news division's credibility? Does CBS plan to endorse these journalistic standards, where the anchor can simply toss anything onto the screen without any serious vetting? Les Moonves may feel satisfied with that performance, but the shareholders at CBS will think differently when their viewers flock to news providers who do their homework before launching smear campaigns.

CBS released this statement a few minutes ago:

"This report was not based solely on recovered documents, but rather on a preponderance of evidence, including documents that were provided by unimpeachable sources, interviews with former Texas National Guard officials and individuals who worked closely back in the early 1970s with Colonel Jerry Killian and were well acquainted with his procedures, his character and his thinking," the statement read.

"In addition, the documents are backed up not only by independent handwriting and forensic document experts but by sources familiar with their content," the statement continued. "Contrary to some rumors, no internal investigation is underway at CBS News nor is one planned."

Don't expect this to be the last word from CBS. This is merely a stall tactic while they check the weather. If it starts pouring, you can bet that they won't be holding the umbrella over Rather's head for long.

The AP: Self-Contradictory Stories Are Our Specialty (UPDATE)

Matt Kelley writes a story that I first noticed from Threshold -55 (see below) that attempts to cast aspersions on the flight skills of George Bush while also moving the forgery story forward, which provides a textbook case of burying the lede:

George W. Bush began flying a two-seat training jet more frequently and twice required multiple attempts to land a one-seat fighter in the weeks just before he quit flying for the Texas Air National Guard in 1972, his pilot logs show. The logs show Bush flew nine times in T-33 trainers in February and March 1972, including eight times in one week and four of those only as a co-pilot. Bush, then a first lieutenant, flew in T-33s only twice in the previous six months and three times in the year ending July 31, 1971.

The records also show Bush required two passes to land an F-102A fighter on March 12 and April 10, 1972. His last flight as an Air National Guard pilot was on April 16.

So what is Kelley alleging? That Bush was incompetent, or drunk, when flying these jets? What, precisely, does it mean to have made two passes when landing a jet or to get flying time in on a trainer when a pilot is in the National Guard? Fortunately, Kelley himself provides the answer, thirteen paragraphs later:

Former Air National Guard officials contacted by the AP said there could be reasons for the trainer flights and multiple-approach landings which have nothing to do with Bush's pilot skills.

Bush could have flown T-33s so many times because his unit did not have enough F-102A jets available that week, for example, said retired Maj. Gen. Don Shepperd a former head of the Air National Guard. Another former Air National Guard chief, retired Maj. Gen. Paul A. Weaver, said he saw nothing unusual about Bush making more than one landing attempt.

"It doesn't mean anything to have multiple approaches," Weaver said.

So that's it? That's what Kelley considers a lede -- an insinuation of incompetence that he himself discredits well below the jump? I don't know what they're teaching in J-school these days, but they need to rethink their curricula if stories like these result from their education.

Fortunately, the article is not a complete waste of time, as Kelley decided to report some actual news starting around paragraph 4. Kelley reviews the forgery scandal in brief and introduces a new character into the mix -- the personnel chief in Killian's unit, Rufus Martin, who also doubts that Killian ever wrote the CBS memos:

The personnel chief in Killian's unit at the time also said he believes the documents are fake. "They looked to me like forgeries," said Rufus Martin. "I don't think Killian would do that, and I knew him for 17 years." Killian died in 1984.

Independent document examiner Sandra Ramsey Lines said the memos looked like they had been produced on a computer using Microsoft Word software. Lines, a document expert and fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, pointed to a superscript — a smaller, raised "th" in "111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron" — as evidence indicating forgery.

Microsoft Word automatically inserts superscripts in the same style as the two on the memos obtained by CBS, she said.

"I'm virtually certain these were computer generated," Lines said after reviewing copies of the documents at her office in Paradise Valley, Ariz. She produced a nearly identical document using her computer's Microsoft Word software.

So now the personnel chief, who should have seen any paperwork that would have been critical of George Bush, comes forward to testify that Killian never wrote anything like what those memos contained in the seventeen years they worked together. That seems rather damning, and in fact it represents good investigative work by Kelley. If he hadn't led his story with a baseless insinuation which he discredited in almost the same breath, I'd be impressed. As it is, we can add one more document analyst and another TANG voice to the growing chorus that CBS and the Democrats have been smearing George Bush for months now.

UPDATE and bump to top: The AP has significantly altered this story, removing the Rufus Martin element and instead still pushing the notion that flying trainers and making multiple passes is somehow significant. Talk about dumbing a story down; even CBS is covering Rufus Martin, as is CNN.

On the subject of multiple passes, CQ reader Andrew Koenig notes:

It most definitely does mean something to have multiple approaches. There is a technical term for a pilot who never makes multiple approaches: "Deceased."

Going around is an integral part of pilot training. The safe attitude is that every approach is going to end in a go-around unless you can produce an affirmative argument that it is safe to land. Moreover, every pilot will deliberately practice go-arounds.

So if his flight logs never showed any go-arounds, I would say he was either reckless or lying.

I suppose the AP has never heard of touch-and-goes, either. Debacles like this and the one that happened at CBS spring from a deliberate ignorance of military procedures and processes, part and parcel of the liberal bias at the mainstream media outlets. People with familiarity of military paperwork could have spotted the fraud at CBS in a heartbeat; my readers certainly did. The same thing is true about flight procedures and the use of training aircraft.

We have to ask why the AP continues to aggressively pursue the non-story while the biggest embarassment for a major news provider in a generation gets dropped from their coverage.

Taking Penal Privatization A Bit Too Far?

The head of the US Interests Section in Havana has decided to build a replica of a Cuban jail in his back yard as a publicity event to highlight the human-rights abuses of Fidel Castro, apparently sparing no expense for authenticity:

The chief U.S. diplomat in Havana built a model of a Cuban prison cell in his backyard to draw attention to the island's human rights record, drawing fierce criticism from the speaker of Cuba's parliament.

James Cason, head of the U.S. Interests Section here, presented the structure, a model of what he said is a typical solitary holding cell in a Cuban prison, during a small diplomatic reception at his home Wednesday night. ...

A little over six feet high and three feet wide, the holding cell of wood and metal features a drain on the floor for a toilet, a plastic bowl of food, a sheet for a bed and a fake rat.

Cubans stock their jails with fake rats? I've never seen poverty so bad that the rats refuse to stick around. Predictably, the Cubans protested vehemently:

"What he should do is mount an exposition of the holding areas of the base at Guantanamo," Alarcon said, referring to the prison in easternmost Cuba where the U.S. military is holding hundreds of prisoners accused of links to Afghanistan's fallen Taliban regime or the al-Qaida terror network.

Apparently, the Cubans object to our denying our prisoners the right to a fake rat in every cell, but you know how problematic military procurement can get. Cuba can just buy them from China for probably $20 per gross. By the time the Pentagon gets through the entire contracting process, military-approved and union-built American fake rats cost $572.47 apiece -- and then it takes fives years to actually get a deliverable. Besides, the FR-271 "Willard" program got held up in committe while Congress debated whose district got the manufacturing facility.

And to think that Ricardo Alarcon accused our diplomat of "lacking seriousness"!

Is The Chicago Tribune Cleansing Its Archives Of The CBS Scam?

NOTE: This post has been substantially updated -- see below.

The blog Threshold -55 does some crack investigative work on the Chicago Tribune, which appears to be attempting to "disappear" the Killian-memo story from its archives. Beth and Terry explain how the ChiTrib (whose parent, I believe, also owns the LA Times) keys its archives to allow for searches and how that has been manipulated here:

A Threshold -55 examination of the Chicago Tribune website reveals that the newspaper appears to have quietly removed all references to a September 10th front page article that called into question President Bush's military service during Vietnam.

The article, "Questions Raised About Bush Guard Service" has been completely replaced with a new article titled, "Bush Piloted Guard Trainers Before He Quit". The new one tries to paint the President as a poor flyer who frequently required multiple approaches to land his jet.

The removed article makes passing mention of the doubts surrounding the authenticity of the CBS Dan Rather/memo debacle. But in a stunning twist of partisan reporting the Tribune plays down the doubts as they continue their never ending quest to discredit President Bush. Read the Threshold cached copy in full to see the hatchet job in action.

The bias of the AP article or that of the Chicago Tribune is nothing new to readers of Threshold. We wonder if it is possible that the newspaper changed the link to prevent people from making references to the original report. Perhaps the AP article is even too biased for the Tribune.

Eventually people outside the blog world are going to start questioning the credibilty of the major liberal media news outlets. This event will be long overdue.

Beth and Terry demonstrate cleverness and tenacity as they track down the missing and altered stories at the ChiTrib. Read the entire post, and marvel at the foolishness of the newspaper and its complete lack of understanding how publishing to the Internet affects their transparency.

UPDATE: No conspiracy, just the Internet and the difference between AP stories (which the ChiTrib doesn't archive) and their original content (which the ChiTrib archives for seven days), according to the Tribune's rep, Charles Meyerson:

As far as we can tell, Beth and Terry have confused one of chicagotribune.com Web site's updating "pointers," which present whatever AP's editors consider the top stories of the hour (and which therefore have a brief shelf life, and which are not archived), with actual Chicago Tribune newspaper content, which lives on the Web for (typically) seven days.

In this case, the newspaper's Thursday front-page story -- which also led the Web site for hours on Thursday (with a photo of Bush) -- can still easily be found here:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0409090296sep09.story

... or by searching chicagotribune.com for various combination of the words

bush "national guard" memos zeleny silva

(Zeleny and Silva are the co-authors of the story.)

No conspiracy here -- liberal, conservative or otherwise. Just a continued commitment to a continually updated Web site that combines breaking news with the day's print content, hindered by technological limitations that prevent the archiving of absolutely everything AP generates.

So the culprit on the shifting stories is not the Chicago Tribune but the AP, as it edits its feed during the day (I noted that on another story today). My apologies to the Tribune, and a hat tip to Meyerson, and Jim Manno for forwarding me the response.

From Here To Oblivion

John Kerry had enough problems over the last five weeks trying to keep his head above water after suffering an almost unprecedented meltdown in the polls. CBS' embarassment over the forged documents wouldn't have been anything but an albatross around their already-sinking necks anyway, but the Prowler may have added the millstone that takes them to the bottom. Published shortly after midnight and inaccessible at the moment, The American Spectator column claims that the forged documents came directly from the Kerry campaign:

More than six weeks ago, an opposition research staffer for the Democratic National Committee received documents purportedly written by President George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard squadron commander, the late Col. Jerry Killian.

The oppo researcher claimed the source was "a retired military officer." According to a DNC staffer, the documents were seen by both senior staff members at the DNC, as well as the Kerry campaign.

"More than a couple people heard about the papers," says the DNC staffer. "I've heard that they ended up with the Kerry campaign, for them to decide to how to proceed, and presumably they were handed over to 60 Minutes, which used them the other night. But I know
this much. When there was discussion here, there were doubts raised about their authenticity."

This raises all sorts of questions, all of them extremely bad about the Kerry campaign and CBS News. Starting with the latter, it appears that CBS and 60 Minutes simply lied about the sourcing of the documents to its readers. They may not have realized that the documents were forgeries -- they didn't check very hard to find out, though -- but they told their readers and listeners that the documents came from Killian's personal files, which implies that they came to CBS directly from that source. CBS vouched for that chain of custody, knowing that it came from the Kerry campaign, a vital piece of information that its customers could have used initially in determining the veracity of the story.

So what else has CBS aired directly from Kerry's oppo research team without telling us? The most obvious would be CBS' companion interview with Ben Barnes, who claimed to have spoken a few words on Bush's behalf to get him into the TANG. CBS claimed his motivation was to relieve his soul, but failed to mention that Barnes has donated almost a half-million dollars over the past five years to Kerry and the Democrats, and is Kerry's third-largest individual contributor.

But the Kerry campaign has it even worse. Thanks to a barrage of ads from the Swiftvets, Kerry already has suffered damage to his image in voter evaluation of his honesty and integrity. If his campaign passed off forged documents to news organizations to smear George Bush, it will destroy the shreds of his credibility in such a way that he may not even be able to win re-election in his next Senate campaign.

Not only does it paint the entire Democratic party machine from Kerry and Terry McAuliffe down as completely dishonest, but also incredibly incompetent. How long would it have taken to have a document specialist verify the memos, especially given that even the campaign had its doubts? Voters who manage not to be completely put off by the dishonest have to ask themselves whether they want the country run by people this flat-out stupid. And fair or not, the whole mess winds up in John Kerry's lap. It's yet another case of misfiring a grenade, only this time the wounds won't be superficial.

In any case, their oppo research is finished. No one but the lunatic fringe will believe any new negative "bombshells" about George Bush. CBS is also finished for this election cycle in terms of investigative journalism about Bush. They've been revealed as dupes, and partisan dupes at that. Dan Rather may make it to the election, but no one will mourn his retirement shortly afterwards; this will leave a black mark on his record that not only will stain his final days but cause a long-overdue reassessment of his entire career. Expect Bernard Goldberg to have the last laugh.

And expect, over the next few days, for people to insinuate or flat out assert that only Karl Rove, the eeeeevil genius, could have set up the Democrats like this. The Prowler even mentions this as a trial balloon coming from its ABC source:

According to one ABC News employee, some reporters believe that the Kerry campaign as well as the DNC were parties in duping CBS, but a smaller segment believe that both the DNC and the Kerry campaign were duped by Karl Rove, who would have engineered the flap to embarrass the opposition.

Uh, sure. That'll fly among the moonbats, but Rove would hardly have trusted the mainstream media to investigate the documents themselves. It took amateur pundits in the blogosphere to do that, and some of the news outlets still haven't reported the fraud. No, this one belongs completely to the idiots and moral midgets at the Kerry campaign.

Is Dan Rather Really Shell-Shocked?

Drudge reports that CBS has launched an internal investigation into the faked documents that 60 Minutes used to attempt a smear job on George Bush:

CBS NEWS executives have launched an internal investigation into whether its premiere news program 60 MINUTES aired fabricated documents relating to Bush's National Guard service, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned. ...

The source, who asked not to be named, described CBSNEWS anchor and 60 MINUTES correspondent Dan Rather as being privately "shell-shocked" by the increasingly likelihood that the documents in question were fraudulent.

If true, CBS News still has not updated its web site to inform its readers that the documents may be unreliable. If The Dan was truly "shell-shocked", wouldn't he want to pull the story off the Tiffany Network's web site in order to keep a false story from spreading any further? Failing that, he could at least insist that some mention be made of the serious questions about the authenticity of the documents.

None of the above has yet occured, which leads me to believe that The Dan is less shell-shocked, and more likely calculating his vulnerability and who to pitch overboard as the sacrificial goat that saves his skin, if that becomes necessary. He won't pull his story until it becomes obvious that the other media outlets won't give him a pass.

UPDATE: Apparently ABC isn't prepared to carry The Dan's water for him on this one, guaranteeing that Rather will head into a sunset marred by dark, heavy clouds later this year. Nightline should be a must-see tonight.

UPDATE II: The Gray Lady isn't covering up for The Dan, either.

Mainstream Media Notices The Fraud At CBS

Any hope that the mainstream media would protect its own and ignore the obvious forgeries coming from CBS dies on the pages of tomorrow's Washington Post. Michael Dobbs and Mike Allen report that several news agencies hired documents experts who concluded that the documents were likely faked:

After doubts about the documents began circulating on the Internet yesterday morning, The Post contacted several independent experts who said they appeared to have been generated by a word processor. An examination of the documents by The Post shows that they are formatted differently from other Texas Air National Guard documents whose authenticity is not questioned.

William Flynn, a forensic document specialist with 35 years of experience in police crime labs and private practice, said the CBS documents raise suspicions because of their use of proportional spacing techniques. Documents generated by the kind of typewriters that were widely used in 1972 space letters evenly across the page, so that an "i" uses as much space as an "m." In the CBS documents, by contrast, each letter uses a different amount of space.

The fact that the Post checked with experts prompted by Internet speculation -- fueled by Power Line and forums like Bandit's -- shows the growing power of the blogosphere to move the old media. On the other hand, these documents and CBS' explanations for them are so poorly done that it's hard to imagine that any news outlet could ignore it for long. For instance, coming out in much the same manner as her son, Killian's widow blasted CBS, claiming that her late husband never wrote or kept any such memos:

In a telephone interview from her Texas home, Killian's widow, Marjorie Connell, described the records as "a farce," saying she was with her husband until the day he died in 1984 and he did not "keep files." She said her husband considered Bush "an excellent pilot."

"I don't think there were any documents. He was not a paper person," she said, adding that she was "livid" at CBS. A CBS reporter contacted her briefly before Wednesday night's broadcasts, she said, but did not ask her to authenticate the records.

The Post even forced CBS to reveal that the documents were "authenticated" via a phone conversation with retired Major General Bobby W. Hodges, Killian's superior:

A senior CBS official, who asked not to be named because CBS managers did not want to go beyond their official statement, named one of the network's sources as retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges, the immediate superior of the documents' alleged author, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian. He said that a CBS reporter read the documents to Hodges over the phone, and that Hodges replied that "these are the things that Killian had expressed to me at the time."

"These documents represent what Killian not only was putting in memoranda, but was telling other people," the CBS News official said. "Journalistically, we've gone several extra miles."

The official said the network regarded Hodges's comments as "the trump card" on the question of authenticity, as he is a Republican who acknowledged that he did not want to hurt Bush. Hodges, who declined to grant an on-camera interview to CBS, did not respond to messages left on his home answering machine in Texas.

I don't think that anyone doubts that CBS went several extra miles, but in what direction? How does the Tiffany Network account for the fact that the 1973 memos reference purported pressure from an Col. Buck Staudt, who had retired in 1972? Did Hodges and Killian invent a word-processing system to write these memos that escaped the notice of document experts, with an ability to produce type-set documents?

So now we have documents typed in a way that was impossible for the time they were made, sourced from personal files of a dead ex-officer whose family angrily deny he ever had, and authenticated by another ex-officer who never actually saw them. Is this journalism?

UPDATE: Could this be the Robert Hodges from Texas that claims to be a Republican -- the one who donated $250 to Howard Dean?

More Indications That CBS Documents Are Fraudulent

As the documents from CBS get wider dissemination and the questions mount about the typefaces and fonts used, other eyes have noticed other discrepancies. A CQ reader who spent decades in the Air National Guard but who prefers to remain anonymous notices the following problems with the memo purportedly ordering Lt. Bush to submit for a medical exam:

1. The format used in this letter, dated 04 May 1972, which was allegedly prepared/published 16 months prior to Lieutenant Bush’s request for discharge, is completely wrong, as the letter is formatted in a manner that was not used by the Air Force until the very late 1980’s/early 1990’s.

2. The terminology “MEMORANDUM FOR” was never used in the 1970’s.

3. The abbreviations in this letter are incorrectly formatted, in that a period is used after military rank (1st Lt.). According to the Air Force style manual, periods are not used in military rank abbreviations.

4. The abbreviation for Fighter Interceptor Squadron (FIS) includes periods after each capital letter. Again, periods are not used.

5. In paragraph 1, the phrase “not later than” is spelled out, followed by (NLT). NLT was, and is, a widely recognized abbreviation for “not later than” throughout all military services, so the inclusion of “not later than” was not a generally accepted practice and completely unnecessary in a letter from one military member to another.

6. Lt Col Killian’s signature element is incorrect for letters prepared in the 1970’s. This letter uses a three-line signature element, which was normally not used. Three-line signature elements were almost the exclusive domain of colonels and generals in organizations well above the squadron level.

7. Finally, the signature element is placed far to the right, instead of being left justified. The placement of the signature element to the right was not used or directed by Air Force standards until almost 20 years after the date of this letter.

"In summary, I believe the letter used to impugn Lieutenant Bush is an obvious fabrication, prepared on a modern word-processing system by an unscrupulous individual who erroneously used current Air Force formatting protocol instead of the standard letter format directed by Air Force manuals of the 1970’s. Therefore, the letter ordering Lieutenant Bush to report for a flight physical should be discounted in its entirety."

I would also add that this letter shows the same typesetting marks, such as superscripting and the kerning of the proportional font that is impossible to do with a typewriter, that has marked the other documents as forgeries as well.

UPDATE: Donald Sensing has more, including references to Air Force manuals that never existed.

UPDATE II: Dale Franks goes into detail on both Air Force guidelines and typesetting geekery at QandO.

Caption Contest Winners, Finally!

Rule #1: Don't have a Caption Contest that finishes on a travel day. Rule #2: Have e-mail backed up before laptop crashes, taking with it the list of winners. Rule #3 ... well, I'm sure if I look around, I can find Rule #3. Anyway, thanks to Bear's e-mail getting rediscovered on my replacement laptop and the patience of all those who entered, I finally have an opportunity to present you with the winners! Since everyone's probably forgotten the picture from two weeks ago, here's a reminder -- a strangely unsettling reminder:

Here are the winners!

Captain's Award (Watch Your Back 'Cause They'll Turn on You) - Retired Military:

John Kerry on Nov 3rd

"Theresa, does this mean I won't get to ride on Air Force One?"

"Shut up, John. And oh yeah, I filed for divorce, Mr. War Hero."

You Have The Conn #1 (In Touch With Joe Average) - Kris:

"Hey, you! Yeah, you! Jet needs a wash 'n' wax. And pronto, or I'll sic Edwards on you!"

You Have The Conn #2 (Twisting History Into Current Events) - Famousmort:

Senator Kerry, shown here, demonstrates how he won the gold in javelin throw at the 1980 Olympics...

You Have The Conn #3 (Rich Corinthian Let-Her, or Best Star Trek Reference) - Phil Smith:

From hell's heart I stab at thee...For hate's sake... I spit my last breath at thee!

Ahhhhh, who'm I kidding. I need the money.

Report To Sick Bay (You've Been Sick Since The 70s) - JBlake:

[Bear says: The "National Lampoon: That's Not Funny, That's Sick" Award goes to (think of the album cover on this one)]

Hey buddy! Yeah you, sky cap! Max Cleland could use a little help getting out of the cargo hold.

Ubiquitous Hitchcock Cameo Award - Mojo:

"I swear to god, if she makes that damn joke ONE MORE TIME, this is gonna turn into a Hitchcock movie.

SCREE! SCREE! SCREE!...."

Thanks to everyone who entered, and congratulations to the winners! Remember, here at CQ, everyone's a winner -- just some of us have higher winning percentages than others. Comments on this post will remain open, as usual, in order for the winners to gloat, the others to disparage Bear's intellect and/or my parentage, and for any other entries submitted just for the sheer enjoyment of amazing your friends and confounding your enemies.

As I mentioned, your donations continue to flow into the tipjars set up to help me defray the costs of attending the Republican National Convention, and they are much appreciated.

Send me a photograph or an e-mail with a link to a great picture you think should be the subject of our next Caption Contest, and let me know if you'd like to be the guest judge! I'll have another picture for tomorrow -- so be sure to come back then for the next contest.

More Disastrous Polling Results For Kerry At ABC/WaPo

ABC News and the Washington Post have released the results of their latest polling in the presidential race, and they confirm that John Kerry has headed downhill faster than a runaway eighteen-wheeler burning through its brakes. Kerry, who had led by two points after his convention, now trails by nine among likely voters, 52-43, for an eleven-point freefall.

But even more significant than the overall vote result are the underlying polling, which shows how complete Kerry's collapse has been. For instance, 84% of Bush supporters claim to support the President rather than just casting an anti-Kerry vote. Bush's numbers on that question have been remarkably consistent for the past six months. So, too, have Kerry's -- but that should give him no comfort. Only 41% of Kerry's votes are a positive affirmation of his candidacy, while more than half, 55%, plan to vote against Bush rather than for Kerry. And Kerry has dropped fifteen points since 8/1 in his favorability numbers, going from 51% positive to only 36% positive.

Even worse are the issue numbers, where Kerry performed dismally. In ten issues on which ABC/WaPo polled, Kerry only outranks Bush in three, and only one of those outside the margin of error (Helping the Middle Class). Bush tops Kerry on Iraq by sixteen points, and on the overall war on terror by a breathtaking twenty-two points, 57-35. He tops Kerry by ten in taxes (50-40) and, interestingly, Supreme Court nominations, which came up 46-36 with 15% holding no opinion. So much for Bush's judicial nominations being outside the mainstream; this could portend some serious blowback for Democrats in November for their obstinacy in blocking Bush's picks for the federal bench.

On eight character questions, Kerry loses on all of them in the most devastating blow this poll provides. Note the yawning gap on leadership:

Honest and trustworthy: 48-35 Bush
Understands people like us: 44-43 Bush
Strong leader: 58-31 Bush
Make country safer, more secure: 54-35 Bush
Shares my values: 48-40 Bush
Has vision for future: 49-40 Bush
Clear stand on issues: 56-29 Bush
Appealing personality: 53-31 Bush

In a rebuke to the Bush haters and the mainstream media, 52% of the electorate feel that Bush earned re-election on the basis of his first term in office regardless of the candidate opposing him. Against that kind of support, any candidate would have difficulty unseating an incumbent. However, Kerry's abysmal performance in this campaign not only threatens to retain Republican power in the executive, but it could overwhelm Democrats hoping to get a toehold in the Senate as well.

Unless Kerry turns it around -- and the CBS forgery debacle won't help that at all -- his candidacy risks almost every Democrat running below him on the ticket. If the presidential race turns into a McGovern- or Mondale-style rout, the Republicans could gain as many as five seats in the Senate, making judidcial nominations much more likely to pass. The Democrats know this, but have no choice but to try to ride it out.

"Overwhelmed"

Stephen Hayes writes in a column just made public at the Weekly Standard that a group of independent document experts express serious doubts about the authenticity of the memos CBS used as proof of their allegations against the President. Hayes notes that one of the experts is a self-described Kerry supporter who nonetheless says he is "99% sure" that the memos were created well after their dating:

DOCUMENTS CITED Wednesday by 60 Minutes in a widely-publicized expose of George W. Bush's National Guard Service are very likely forgeries, according to several experts on document authenticity and typography. The documents--four memos from Killian to himself or his files written in 1972 and 1973--appear to indicate that Bush refused or ignored orders to have a physical exam required to continue flying. CBS News anchor Dan Rather reported the segment and sourced the documents this way: "60 Minutes has obtained a number of documents we are told were taken from Col. Killian's personal file," he said. The 60 Minutes story served as the basis for follow-up news reports for dozens of news organizations across the country. ...

"These sure look like forgeries," says William Flynn, a forensic document expert widely considered the nation's top analyst of computer-generated documents. ... Several other experts agree. "They look mighty suspicious," says a veteran forensic document expert who asked not to be quoted by name. Richard Polt, a Xavier University philosophy professor who operates a website dedicated to typewriters, says that while he is not an expert on typesetting, the documents "look like typical word-processed documents." ...

Xavier University's Polt, in an email, offers two possible scenarios. "Either these are later transcriptions of earlier documents (which may have been handwritten or typed on a typewriter), or they are crude and amazingly foolish forgeries. I'm a Kerry supporter myself, but I won't let that cloud my objective judgment: I'm 99% sure that these documents were not produced in the early 1970s."

Says Flynn: "This looks pretty much like a hoax at this point in time."

So far, between Hugh Hewitt's on-air interview with Farrell Shiver, Hayes' interview with his panel of experts, and INDC Journal's interview with Dr. Phillip Bouffard, the only people still saying the documents could possibly be authentic is CBS News spokesperson Kelly Edwards. She has avoided commenting directly about the authenticity of the documents but instead insists that the opinions expressed on them matches up with the late Col. Killian's sentiments at the time, according to unnamed sources. By the time Hayes attempted to contact Edwards, though, she declined all comment, saying that CBS had been "overwhelmed" with telephone calls.

"Overwhelmed" -- it's a great description of what this story will do to CBS News credibility if they don't cough up their source soon.

All Hail Power Line -- Thank God We're On The Same Side!

Just wanted to give a shout out to my good friends at Power Line, who have been all over the TANG forgeries sent out by CBS news. Keep checking back on this post as they continue to update it with breaking news on this story. Edward R. Murrow still lives; he just took up residence at Power Line after leaving the Tiffany Network in disgust.

I just took a peek and saw that their post, The Sixty-First Minute, has over 270 Trackback pings. That has to be some kind of a record, doesn't it?

Killian's Son Suspicious Of CBS Documents

The son of the officer who supposedly wrote memos in 1972 and 1973 describing political pressure to make George Bush look good in the TANG says that he has suspicions about the authenticity of the documents:

The authenticity of newly unearthed memos stating that George W. Bush failed to meet standards of the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War was questioned Thursday by the son of the late officer who reportedly wrote the memos. ...

Gary Killian, who served in the Guard with his father and retired as a captain in 1991, said one of the memos, signed by his father, appeared legitimate. But he doubted his father would have written another, unsigned memo which said there was pressure to "sugar coat" Bush's performance review.

"It just wouldn't happen," he said. "The only thing that can happen when you keep secret files like that are bad things. ... No officer in his right mind would write a memo like that."

News reports have said the memos, first obtained by CBS's "60 Minutes II," were found in Jerry Killian's personal records. Gary Killian said his father wasn't in the habit of bringing his work home with him, and that the documents didn't come from the family.

So now we not only have at least two of these documents using typefaces not available until many years after their dates, and only available on computers or expensive typesetting machines, but now Killian's family denies CBS News claims that the documents came from the late officer's personal files. That means the CBS source for the documents had no connection with the Killian family, calling the documents' alleged chain of custody into question as well.

Why is that important? As long as the documents could be traced directly back to Killian and the personal files he retained after his retirement, then the fact that they were unsigned and used no letterhead could be explained away as personal memos for his own use -- the "CYA" affect. Now that Killian's family denies that they were the source, the lack of signatures and identifying headers mean that the documentation could have come from anywhere. They are, in effect, decertified.

Speaking of signatures, the Voice of Reason did a comparison of Killian's signature from a separate document and came up with this graphic:

It doesn't look at all similar, and as Voice of Reason notes, the two abbreviations for Lieutenant Colonel are different. Why would that be?

This fraud will have a dual effect of keeping every news organization from touching the TANG story again, and CBS will have to fire someone with a high profile to save face. Pull up a chair, get yourself some popcorn, and watch the meltdown continue.

Jobless Claims Fall To Lowest Point In Three Years

The Labor Department delivered more good news on the economic front today, announcing that the level of new unemployment claims fell last week to 319,000 -- the lowest level since December 2001:

For the week ending Sept. 4, new applications for unemployment insurance dropped by a seasonally adjusted 44,000 from the previous week to 319,000, the lowest level since July 3, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

The decline of 44,000 was the largest decrease since the week ending Dec. 8, 2001. ... The latest snapshot of the layoffs climate was better than analysts were expecting. They were forecasting a smaller drop of around 17,000 for last week.

"We're getting there. When you look at the underlying trend, the jobs picture is improving," said Richard Yamarone, economist at Argus Research Corp.

Bill Clinton's advice to Kerry to focus on the economy looks more and more like a losing proposition. The economy continues to expand, and as Alan Greenspan noted yesterday, the summer slowdown sprang from a spike in energy costs rather than intrinsic weakness in the American expansion. In fact, economists expect the Fed to bump up interest rates this month to keep the expansion from overheating into inflation, hardly a likely move if the economy suffered the way Kerry depicts.

Kerry has recently focused more on the budget deficit, on which Bush is genuinely vulnerable to some small degree and for which Kerry has displayed remarkably consistent stands -- at least for Kerry, known as a deficit hawk even during the first Clinton term. Unfortunately, two issues work against Kerry on the deficit. First, his proposed federal programs will cost over $2 trillion in additional spending, meaning that his hawkishness on the deficit will have to be accompanied by significant tax hikes or deep slashes in spending, neither of which he's outlined. Second, Kerry keeps forgetting that we are at war, and budget deficits aren't really high up on our priority lists at the moment. They're an issue, but pressing it at the expense of all other issues will only make him appear out of touch.

Kerry finds himself trapped on all other issues by his contradictory positions and opportunism at different points during this election. The only deficit he needs to address is his credibility deficit. Until that gets resolved, nothing else he says will matter.

Who Forged Bush Records?

CBS News and 60 Minutes claims that it has documents from George Bush's TANG service that prove undue influence had been used to get Bush his excellent ratings. As one of the exhibits, CBS produced this internal memo, dated but unsigned and with no letterhead, stating: "Staudt has obviously pressured Hodges more about Bush. I'm having trouble running interference and doing my job. Harris gave me a message today from Grp regarding Bush's OETR and Staudt is pushing to sugar coat it. Bush wasn't here during rating period and I don't have any feedback from 187th in Alabama either."

As Power Line notes and Free Republic first saw, something is terribly amiss with this memo. Take a look at "187th". The suffix is represented in superscript, which in 1973 could only be accomplished with a typesetting device -- which in 1973 would have cost thousands of dollars, making it extremely unlikely to have been used for a simple memo like this. Also, take a look at the apostrophes. Typewriters use straight up-and-down apostrophes rather than curved (same for quote marks), and these are curved.

The only possible conclusion is that the document is forged, and forged fairly recently on a computer. The same is true with this document, again unsigned and without letterhead. Take a look at the apostrophe in "He's" in paragraph 2. It's another curved apostrophe, which again indicates a typesetting machine or computer program.

Someone has some explaining to do. And someone at CBS should be asking their crack investigative journalists how they managed to miss such suspicious material, especially since "memos to file" should be expected to have signatures, names, and some sort of letterhead.

UPDATE: Some commenters have said that they think the IBM Selectric/Executive models had curved single-quote/apostrophe characters. I disagree, having grown up using them. The typewriter only had one key for the single-quote/apostrophe character, and single quote characters often were used to contain text. Had the character curved to the left, the ball would have had to have another quote mark curved back to the right at the same time, for which no key would have been assigned. That's why the quote marks on typewriters always went straight up and down. Curved quote marks and apostrophes could only be produced by typesetting machines -- and computer word processors.

Lullaby For A Kyoto Supporter

Much has been made by George Bush's political opponents about his rejection of the Kyoto accord, limiting the US in greenhouse-gas production, even though the Senate rejected the treaty unanimously during Clinton's term. John Kerry claims it to be one of the primary reasons his favorite country, France, refused to support the US when it came to toppling Saddam Hussein.

It's instructive, then, to see how France's Jacques Chirac demonstrates his personal support for global-warming activism in his daily routine. Is France really committed to implementing controls on the unecessary emissions of greenhouse gases? Perhaps the French people are, but Chirac's support only extends to the limits of his beauty sleep:

The most direct route from Paris to Moscow by aircraft is to fly due east. Unless you are President Chirac, that is.

The French premier likes his sleep so much that, en route to a Black Sea summit with President Putin and Chancellor Schröder, he had his flight diverted by 1,200 miles so that he could have a long sleep. ... On August 31, Chirac was due to fly from Paris to the Black Sea resort of Sochi, to meet the German and Russian premiers.

The only problem was that the flight to the summit would not be of sufficient duration for him to get a full night's sleep.

The answer was simple: the French air force, which operates the presidential Airbus 319, was ordered to tack another 1,200 miles on to its flight so that Mr Chirac could sleep undisturbed.

The result was a trip to Russia that took the plane due west from Paris towards the Channel Islands, over Brest, south towards Nantes, down from Bordeaux to Toulouse, north back to Paris, and then due east to Moscow.

The French populace paid five figures for M. Chirac's scenic tour of the French stratosphere, instead of simply delaying his flight a few more hours so he could sleep on the ground. Last I read, the Airbus flies on hydrocarbon-based fuel, which emits the same greenhouse gases that he bitterly opposes Americans using to do silly things like stimulate our economy.

Nonetheless, here at Captain's Quarters, we hope that M. Chirac got himself a good night's sleep, and that the French one day wake up from theirs.

Islamists Attempt To Throw More Elections

Islamic terrorists have apparently attacked the Australian embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia this morning, killing eight people and again injecting themselves into two election cycles:

At least eight people have been killed and about 100 injured in a massive blast outside the Australian embassy in Indonesia's capital, Jakarta. Jakarta's police chief said a suicide car bomb may have caused the blast, and linked it to bomb expert Azahari Husin. ...

Police chief General Da'i Bachtiar said police believed the explosion was caused by a car bomb, similar to those used to attack the Marriott Hotel last year and the Bali nightclubs in 2002.

Mr Bachtiar said it bore the hallmark of militant Islamic group Jemaah Islamiah (JI), which is widely blamed for both bombings.

The BBC's report notes that not only does this bombing attack one of America's staunch allies in the war on terror but also comes on the eve of elections in both Indonesia and Australia. Indonesians go to the polls on September 20th, less than two weeks from today. While security and terrorism had not been front-line issues for their election, Jemaah Islamiah has long threatened to retaliate for the imprisonment of its leadership following the Bali bombing two years ago. JI wants Indonesians to question whether cooperating with Americans is worth the attention it gets from radical Islamists, although rationally speaking, having nutcases running around with bombs should answer that question rather easily.

Australia's elections come two weeks later on October 9 and this attack probably targeted their election more so than Indonesia. John Howard is locked in a tight race for a return to office; last I looked, he was up by 4 in the home stretch. The Islamofascists want Australians to draw the same conclusions as the Spaniards did in March and vote out those who would enthusiastically defend Western nations against the terrorists. My guess is that the Islamists chose their target poorly. Australians may have lost the rage that resulted from the Bali attack, but this bombing will recall it in full. Plus, not to be too insulting, but Australians aren't Spaniards -- they don't take kindly to lunatics bombing their people. Their likely reaction will not be to withdraw, especially given four weeks to think about it.

Kerry Shrinks The Map

John Kerry's campaign has shrunk the electoral map despite promising for months to come out of the conventions fighting in every area of the country. Their new ad strategy only includes 14 states, possibly adding in another seven next month, according to the AP's political reporters Ron Fournier and Liz Sidoti:

After months of pledging to contest President Bush in every region of the country, Sen. John Kerry and Democrats are limiting television advertising to 14 battleground states as the fall campaign opens.

The shift bumps GOP-leaning Missouri, Colorado, Arizona and several Southern states off the political playing field — at least for now — and gives Bush reason to consider moving money from some of those states to others that historically trend Democratic.

Of course, Kerry's allies in 527s may choose to run ads in the other states, but it's revealing that the campaign has given up on more than half of the country. Either they feel so confident in their position that they don't need to spend money (California and New York, perhaps?) or they consider the cause to be lost and don't want to throw good money after bad.

They have completely abandoned the South, a striking decision considering that Kerry selected John Edwards as his running mate in part to challenge Bush's Southern strength. The only locked-in advertising commitment in the South is in West Virginia, whose union contingent puts it into play, although Bush continues to run strong there, as well as Florida, which is culturally separate from the traditional South. The Democrats have reserved ad time for October in Louisiana and Arkansas, two of the more flexible Southern states, and in Edwards' home state of North Carolina. However, they haven't actually spent the money, so they are not obligated to actually purchase the ads yet.

Why has the Kerry campaign suddenly decided to shrink the field? They have discovered that the Kerry erosion last month has endangered their grip on states that went Gore in 2000 that they cannot afford to lose in 2004. Pennsylvania's 21 electoral votes are leaning Bush again, and Wisconsin (10 EV) looks even worse. They hoped to pick up Ohio, but Bush has resurged in the Buckeye state. They may make pickups in New Hampshire and Nevada, where Bush trails by thin margins, but Bush would gladly trade off the eight electoral votes in those states to pick up the 31 in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The Democrats can talk about strategy and focused attacks, but they set the expectations themselves, claiming to refuse to cede any area of the country to Republicans. Like so many other issues in this campaign, John Kerry manages to be on both sides of his own strategy simultaneously.

Sadr Loses Momentum, Cash After Najaf

Part-time rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, the 21st century reincarnation of Enver Pasha in his military skills, has seen his position erode considerably since his ejection from Najaf and the Imam Ali shrine. The AP's Hamza Hendawi reports that Sadr's once-rabid militia has lost its zeal and the loss of senior members undermines their ability to rebuild:

The erosion of some of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's status showed recently when his supporters gathered outside his office here. They chanted a prayer for their leader but showed none of the zeal that marked similar rituals just weeks ago. ... [T]he mood among al-Sadr's followers has become somber. Gone is the swagger of the men loathed and feared by many people here for bringing death and destruction to one of Islam's holiest cities. ...

Some al-Sadr aides believe joining the mainstream would transform a charismatic movement into just another political party and cost it its appeal.

"We are essentially a social and religious reform movement," said Abbas al-Roabi, a senior al-Sadr follower who said he quit the movement following the Aug. 30 declaration that the Sadrists planned to enter politics.

As I wrote when Sadr backed down and left the mosque, he most certainly lost prestige in that negotiation. Sistani successfully asserted native philosophical control over Shi'ite Iraq, as opposed to Qumian (Iran's Shi'ite philosophical strain) radicalism. In a more practical sense, of course, rebels who continually sue for peace and give up territory -- especially holy ground like the Imam Ali shrine -- do not lead many men in the future.

Even more practically, Sadr's loss of status has led to a more measurable loss of cash flow. While controlling large mosques, Sadr had at his disposal the offerings given to the clerics by the faithful. At the Imam Ali shrine, this was a major source of income for Sadr and his militia, as believers make pilgrimages on a regular basis and usually leave large donations of cash, gold, and jewelry as their tithe.

Nor is that the only source of income for Shi'ite clerics. The mosques collect "taxes" from their regular attendees, which again go directly to the cleric. Sadr used to benefit from this cash source as well, but that has now dried up. His former mentor, Ayatollah Kazim al-Haeri in Iran, now demands that the more radical Shi'a that paid Sadr these taxes instead pay his representatives, which not only hits Sadr's pocketbook but also underscores his Iranian ties.

Sadr does have his power base in Baghdad's Sadr City still left, but the Americans have been targeting that area in order to disarm it while his Mahdi army is demoralized and running low on funds. It appears to be part of a broad effort this month to reduce the areas under insurgent control throughout the Sunni triangle after Sadr's rebellion in the south was broken, and it threatens to leave Sadr even more isolated than before. But without the mosque revenue, Sadr will have difficulties in rebuilding again, and without the authority that Haeri stripped from him, he will find it hard to attract new recruits.

Sadr may be forced into politics to retain any relevancy at all. He proved himself to be an inept if charismatic revolutionary, and a diffident one at that. Perhaps a career on the stump would suit him better.

Now It's Completely Unsourced

Kitty Kelley's only source for her blockbuster allegation of drug use by George W. Bush at Camp David during his father's administration strenuously denied telling Kelley any such thing, according to Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post. Not only does Sharon Bush, W's ex-sister-in-law, deny alleging the drug use but also categorically states that the accusation is false:

Sharon Bush, who is divorced from the president's brother Neil, said in a statement: "I categorically deny that I ever told Kitty Kelley that George W. Bush used cocaine at Camp David or that I ever saw him use cocaine at Camp David. When Kitty Kelley raised drug use at Camp David, I responded by saying something along the lines of, 'Who would say such a thing?'

"Although there have been tensions between me and various members of the Bush family, I cannot allow this falsehood to go unchallenged."

Further, Sharon Bush insists that she understood her interview with Kelley to be off the record, and regrets ever speaking with her -- not an unusual reaction to a Kitty Kelley encounter. It's not like Sharon has an unusual love for the Bushes, either, having long been outspoken in her bitterness for her former in-laws, especially the elder George Bush and her former mother-in-law, Barbara.

Once again, it appears that Kelley simply made up some explosive gossip about the rich and powerful in order to turn a quick buck, like she's done so often in the past. Her only named source just called Kelley a liar and a libeler, and that leaves Kelley with her usual level of named sourcing: none. Having read two of her volumes of sludge -- biographies of Frank Sinatra and Nancy Reagan, neither of whom I hold any particular fondness -- I can say that those who waste their time and credibility holding her charges up as a weapon will rue the loss of both in the coming days and weeks.

Bush-Hitler Comparison Endorsed By Minnesota Democrats

The Bush-Hitler comparisons just keep on coming from the Democrats, who not only have no sense of history but also a tin ear when it comes to attracting centrist voters. The Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, the state's Democratic Party franchise, offered bumper stickers to its faithful at their headquarters with the Nazi theme at the forefront:

A small stack of bumper stickers at the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party caught the eye of a Minnesota Republican Party official who had stopped by to deliver a letter.

"Bush/Cheney -- Most hated world leaders since Hitler," proclaimed the stickers, which also carried the name of a Web site, www.changetheregime.us, according to the Associated Press.

The Democrats denied culpability, but the Republican National Committee issued a statement from Sen. Norm Coleman (Minn.) saying, "Someone needs to tell John Kerry that this is not the way we do things in the American heartland."

After John Glenn's invocation of the Nazi theme last week, we can look forward to a political season full of goosestepping metaphors this fall, apparently, as the Democrats lose their minds and all of what's left of their credibility. What I like best about this story is that the DFL offered these bumper stickers at their own headquarters, and then denied that they had anything to do with them or their dissemination. It reminds me of the old joke about the husband caught in bed with his mistress, continuing to insist that nothing is amiss, telling his wife, "Who are you going to believe -- me or your lying eyes?"

Do the Democrats truly think we're that stupid, or do they just hope we are?

UPDATE: Actually, the stickers weren't at the DFL booth at the fair - they were at their headquarters, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (I've corrected the text above):

Minnesota Republicans have accused DFLers of handing out a bumper sticker from DFL Party headquarters on Tuesday that compares President Bush to Adolf Hitler -- a charge DFLers are denying.

Randy Wanke, communications director for the state Republican Party, said Wednesday that a Republican volunteer walked into DFL Party headquarters on Tuesday afternoon and spied a small stack of bumper stickers that said, "Bush/Cheney -- Most hated world leaders since Hitler." A short time later, he said, the volunteer returned and didn't see the stickers anymore, but requested and was given a single sticker.

Tonya Tennessen, the DFL Party's managing communications director, said Wednesday that about 10 such stickers arrived in the mail from "an organization I've never heard of," called changetheregime.us. The stickers sat on a receptionist's desk "for about two hours until I removed them," Tennessen said. "These are not something we were or are distributing."

Well, not any more, apparently...

For Small Businesses, Kerry's Help Has Never Been On The Way

CQ reader Mike Maerten noticed this analysis from the Small Business Survival Committee over at Townhall.com regarding John Kerry's voting record on small-business issues over the past 10 years. Bear in mind my earlier analysis of National Journal's ratings of John Kerry during the Clinton Administration, where his votes skewed more conservative when Bill Clinton occupied the White House than when Republicans held executive power.

Even during this more conservative period, John Kerry's voting record displays a remarkable hostility to small businesses:

• Of the 101 votes in the U.S. Senate that SBSC has rated since the 103rd Congress Senator Kerry’s record is unsettling. He has voted on the side of small business a mere 13 times out of the 101 votes that SBSC rated during the past decade – giving him a weak 13 percent rating on key small business issues.

• Senator Kerry voted against small business 94 percent of the time on tax-related legislation rated by SBSC. Given 34 different opportunities to support small business on tax issues, Kerry chose to do so on only two occasions.

• Given 30 different opportunities to vote on the side of small business on regulatory initiatives, Kerry chose to vote against small business 25 times.

• SBSC has rated four votes concerning the starting wage, and on every single occasion Kerry voted in favor of the wage hikes and in opposition to small business. ...

• SBSC rated eight votes on health coverage reform issues. These ranged from votes supporting the passage of health savings accounts (HSAs) to allowing self-employed small business owners to deduct their health insurance expenses to help make health coverage more
affordable. Senator Kerry voted against the interest of small business 100 percent of the time.

• Of ten votes rated by SBSC in the area of legal reform, Kerry voted in opposition to small business 90 percent of the time.

In fact, the SBSC could only find one category in which Kerry supported small businesses, and that was voting against corporate welfare programs that put small businesses at competitive disadvantage against larger firms. Otherwise, Kerry voted almost down the line to make life tougher on small-business owners.

Why is this important? Small businesses provide the engine for the economy, and widespread failures of these entrepeneurships will cause the American economy to stumble badly. Small businesses still provide the leading number of jobs for Americans (99%, according to the SBSC), especially new jobs (75%). They generate more than 50% of the GDP of the US. Perhaps even more significantly, the symbolism of small businesses resonates with middle America, which still believes in the American dream of hanging your own shingle out of the door and being your own boss.

For a man who intends to run against George Bush on the economy, Kerry's dismal record of supporting the main component of American dynamism should not go unnoticed by the electorate. Be sure to read the entire SBSC report to learn how a Kerry/Edwards administration would unleash its hostility towards small business. John Kerry not only is wrong on the war, he's bad for the economy as well.

The Hill: Bush Fulfilled Obligations Each Year In TANG

The Kerry campaign and the mainstream media have played up George Bush's Texas Air National Guard service, claiming for months that Bush went AWOL while transferring to Alabama after the Air Force started phasing out the F-102 he flew for years. The Hill, a DC newspaper targeted at the political elite in the nation's capitol and hardly a bastion of conservative thought (although Byron York writes for National Review), has analyzed the new data released by Bush earlier this year, and their analysis shows a much different picture than that painted by Kerry or the media:

The future president joined the Guard in May 1968. Almost immediately, he began an extended period of training. Six weeks of basic training. Fifty-three weeks of flight training. Twenty-one weeks of fighter-interceptor training.

That was 80 weeks to begin with, and there were other training periods thrown in as well. It was full-time work. By the time it was over, Bush had served nearly two years.

Not two years of weekends. Two years.

The National Guard requires its members to accumulate at least 50 points each year of service time in order to meet their obligation. Points are awarded for various kinds of duties, but the points are what matters when determining whether someone gave enough service for each year. The Hill calculates Bush's points for each year of his service (May to May):

1968: 253
1969: 340
1970: 137
1971: 112
1972: 56
1973: 56 (two months, discharged July 1973)

Bush served for five years, four months, but accumulated enough points to have covered 15 years of Guard service (over 750 points). More importantly, Bush served two years of completely active duty and two years of higher-than-normal reserve duty before scaling back, mostly due to his desire to work on Roy Blount's campaign and the phasing out of his aircraft. During his four years actively flying homeland-defense missions, he flew a notoriously cranky aircraft that hardly constituted "milk-run" duty.

Did George Bush see combat? No, a point that George Bush has often made himself. But he didn't join the TANG to be a weekend warrior, at least not for the first four years, which the media and the Kerry campaign skip over when trying to insinuate that Bush was (and is) some sort of coward. Nor does Bush make his TANG service or his youth a central qualification for his candidacy the way that Kerry had almost exclusively focused his campaign credentials on Viet Nam.

The TANG records prove that George Bush met his obligations for his National Guard service and honestly earned his honorable discharge. Now, perhaps, John Kerry will sign a 180 so that we can apply the same level of review to his records to determine if he is being honest about the service he holds out as his primary qualification for the Presidency. (via Instapundit)

Greyhawk Flies To Serve His Country -- And You Can Help

Readers of this blog are familiar with the terrific milblog Mudville Gazette, run by Greyhawk, an active-duty member of our armed forces. Greyhawk founded the Milblog ring and together with his fellow milbloggers provides the blogosphere with the true perspective of the fighting man and woman.

Greyhawk has received new orders and needs a bit of help to keep his excellent blog going. He'll be doing some fundraising to purchase the equipment needed to continue running Mudville Gazette while on his new assignment. He's also running Blogads and some extra traffic will help him with his sales (I second that!). Make sure you drop by and help Greyhawk keep one of the blogosphere's great resources up and running.

Guardian Rants Incoherently On Terror

Talk about missing all the important lessons! The Guardian's Richard Norton-Taylor continues the benighted direction of the London Guardian with this incoherent, self-contradictory rant about how the West is losing the terror war because we aren't paying attention to poverty and illiteracy. And guess who the biggest obstacle to peace is, according to Norton-Taylor:

It is hard not to conclude that one of the greatest obstacles to the kind of better world Blair says he wants - one with less cause for terrorism, even if terrorists will always be around - is the Bush administration, and notably the likes of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. They have consistently dismissed British interests and embarrassed a prime minister who has attached himself so closely to the president with such little reward. ...

We have just witnessed the latest manifestation of the so-called war on terror in the Caucasus. Further east, across the oil-rich Caspian, lies Uzbekistan, where the US turns a blind eye to serious human rights abuses in return for military bases for the same war on terror. They were initially used to attack the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan, where elections are due next month - an event the US has done little to prepare for, wary of upsetting warlords, while leaving responsibility for security to its European Nato allies, which are unwilling or unable to provide.

I agree with Norton-Taylor that we just witnessed a manifestation on the terror war in Beslan, but apparently he drew different conclusions than I did. The mass murder of hundreds of children -- deliberately targeted and tortured prior to their deaths -- proved to me that the Islamist terrorists have no rationality other than their own supremacy. Norton-Taylor, on the other hand, considers this a rational response to establishing military bases in Uzbekistan, one of the crassest political equations I have yet read.

And yet, despite the fact that the US and Britain have liberated 50 million people in the area from two brutally oppressive regimes, by any objective standard, what does Norton-Taylor point to as a leading cause of terrorism? Oppression!

In a telling comment last week, Mai Yamani, of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, described the annual get-together at Oxford University of the Project for Democracy Studies in Arab Countries. The participants, she wrote in the International Herald Tribune, represented the "lost resources of an Arab world that is fast becoming isolated by illiteracy, ignorance, and repression".

A new generation "denied the opportunity to participate in a range of democratic institutions or other vehicles for public self-expression, is finding more dangerous outlets for its passions". Yamani quoted a Saudi researcher at an English university as remarking: "It's easier for a young Arab to blow himself up than sweep outside his house. He doesn't feel he belongs to anything."

Norton-Taylor doesn't realize that he's making Bush's argument for him. Of course that's what causes terrorism, more than poverty; most of the 9/11 attackers came from middle- or upper-class families, and all of them came from an oppressive culture where religion and state blends into one authoritarian rule, and where all ills are blamed on Western culture. Ignorance springs from the chokehold on information flow to the peoples of these countries, which some of them have belatedly learned (Saudi Arabia) can poison one's own well, too.

Norton argues the "neocon" position in his piece in his attempt to refute them. Establishing democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the oppression was the most brutal, will allow Arabs to understand that other possibilities exist other than the autocratic rule of mullahs and kleptocracies that have oppressed them and fed them a steady diet of crackpot conspiracy theories for decades, if not centuries. Only by establishing these models will democracy take hold in the region. The West has tried working cooperatively in the region for decades, only to be rewarded with psychopathic lunatics like Osama and the Beslan child-killers. Obviously, a new tack is needed.

And what does Norton-Taylor suggest -- a full-scale withdrawal from Iraq? Actually, he doesn't suggest anything, but one argument he draws from history argues against premature withdrawal, even though Norton-Taylor has the context all wrong:

Dodge adds pointedly: "In the 20s and 30s, the hegemonic power seeking to recreate Iraq was Britain. The 1920 revolt made the occupation extremely unpopular with the British people and led to a change in government in London. The result was that state-building in Iraq was sacrificed at the altar of British domestic politics."

First, the problem with British state-building in the 20s was that (a) Britain tried to establish a foreigner as a monarch in Iraq, and (b) post-Great War, the British simply didn't have the resources to stick it out long enough to be successful. (America's refusal to accept the Palestinian Mandate after Versailles had quite a bit to do with that resource problem.) The lack of staying power in Southwest Asia led directly to the problems we have faced for decades, and those we face today. In fact, it has been accurately said that Osama wants to fight World War I all over again in an attempt to win back the Ottoman Empire.

Rather than the dire gloom Norton-Taylor presents, his piece actually supports the direction Bush and Blair have taken for reforming the Middle East. His only point seems to be that it hasn't succeeded yet, an attitude that ironically recalls the post-Versailles period. If Norton-Taylor hasn't learned that much from history, he should be careful about invoking it.

Canada To Allow Shari'a?

Fox reports that Canada's obsession with political correctness may wind up endorsing Shari'a law for the nation's Muslim residents:

Two parties in a Canadian civil dispute, like a divorce, can opt to use a religious leader as a mediator, and the mediator's decision is binding. Canadian native tribes, Christians and Jews use this system. ...

But some Canadian Muslim women fear that Muslim law, or Sharia, will be imposed on them in these civil mediations. Critics say Sharia has been used, or abused, to discriminate against women. And some Canadian Muslim women say they will be badgered into accepting decisions from conservative imams acting as mediators.

"They will be oppressed in a sense because they'll be coerced into feeling they need to follow this process of binding arbitration, implementing Sharia. Otherwise they're deemed as blasphemous and labeled by the community and then where else is she to go?" said Iman Zebian, a member of the board of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women.

Somehow, I doubt that Canada will allow Muslim women to be stoned for adultery or gays and lesbians to be dropped from the highest tower, as Shari'a law demands. However, allowing shadows courts to operate in such a manner undermines the confidence in the most basic raison d'etre of government: the protection of its citizens, and in Western democracies, the equal protection of its citizens. How can Canadians ensure that Muslim, or aboriginal, or any other Canadians aren't being exploited by such lay courts?

Canada's sensitivity to the cultures of its immigrant and religious groups may be praiseworthy in theory, but it will prove disastrous in practice. Canada has already been more defined as a nation of competing ethnicities (Quebec is a great example), and allowing these subgroups to establish their own civil courts further undermines Canadian authority and culture.

Perhaps the issue never rose to their attention as long as only Christians and Jews used the system, as Western legal traditions arose from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Shari'a should provide an eye-opener to the dangers of such arrangements to any nation's Western character, a quality that has delivered democracy and respect for human dignity. That tradition is worth retaining and promoting, and it allows members of all faiths to be treated with equal respect and justice. That should be good enough for Canadians, Americans, Europeans, and the entire world.

Kitty Kelley Strikes Out At Newsweek, Time

Muckraking author Kitty Kelley, whose hack jobs on the British royal family, Elvis, and Sinatra have been widely panned, turns her guns loose on her next conservative target, George Bush. Kelley's upcoming book, The Family, reportedly contains salacious revelations about cocaine use by W at Camp David which come from his ex-sister-in-law Sharon, who has long been at odds with the Bush family. The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz reports on the media storm gathering for the book's release:

Kitty Kelley's volume on the Bush family won't be published until next week, but the White House communications director yesterday dismissed the book as "garbage" and a Republican National Committee spokeswoman said journalists should treat it as "fiction." With the author booked for numerous television interviews -- including three straight mornings on NBC's "Today," starting Monday -- "The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty" is certain to generate media attention in the heat of a presidential campaign. ...

Gethers confirmed the accuracy of a report in London's the Mail on Sunday, which said the book contains, among other things, allegations of past drug use by President Bush. One of the sources quoted on that subject is Bush's former sister-in-law, Sharon Bush, who had a bitter divorce from the president's brother Neil.

[Random House VP and Editor Peter] Gethers said Sharon Bush provided "confirmation" to the author but was not the initial source of the allegations. "Just because an ex-wife says it doesn't mean it's not true," he said.

No, but it's a pretty good indication of someone who has an axe to grind, and that doesn't make for very good sourcing. Sharon and Neil's marital woes have long played out on the national stage. For instance, TalkLeft noted a Daily Dish article on Neil and Sharon's divorce back in March, in which Sharon expresses bitterness over the lack of support from the Bushes:

The former President Bush refused Sharon's request for a $467,000 loan to keep her Houston mansion, telling her to find something cheaper. "The divorce is final," the elder Bush wrote, "[and] the best thing for you to do is get on with your life. Close the unhappy chapter with Neil, find a job, and look to the future, not the past."

Sound advice, and perhaps it would have been better for Sharon to have taken it. Apparently, though, Sharon's request now appears like a low-grade extortion attempt, and her recent revelations smack of revenge. Cocaine has long been a focus for Sharon, as the same Daily Dish review of a Vanity Fair article also notices:

After Sharon pulled some hair out of Neil's head, his lawyers accused her of practicing voodoo. But Sharon shot back: "I pulled Neil's hair out because I wanted to get it tested for cocaine, not because of voodoo."

Does this mean she lied? No, not exactly, but it does indicate that (a) she's pretty fast and loose with accusations of cocaine use, and (b) she's not the most stable of people (read the rest of the Daily Dish article for more evidence of that). Since she appears, from all media accounts, to be the only named source for Kelley's accusations -- one more than Kelley usually gets -- this track record calls into question her veracity and her motives.

Newsweek has refused to play along, in a rather stunning development. Normally media outlets will accept books released by major publishers at face value, interviewing the author and addressing any issues on sourcing as part of their reporting. Newsweek took the unusual step of declining to review or report Kelley's work, in part because of her reputation, and in part because the publisher attempted to muzzle Newsweek from conducting their own investigation into Kelley's allegations. Nor are they the only magazine concerned with fact-checking Kelley before publication:

The book did not pass muster at Newsweek, however. Editor Mark Whitaker said his magazine was given an advance copy for a possible story "and we passed. We weren't comfortable with a lot of the reporting. We will write about it if it becomes a phenomenon and looks like it will have some impact on the campaign debate, not to further publicize the reporting in it."

Whitaker said he learned late yesterday that one of his reporters, without his approval, had signed a confidentiality agreement for the advance look at the book. The agreement, he said, would have barred Newsweek from pursuing the allegations without Doubleday's permission. "The publisher was trying to constrain us in any independent reporting we could do on the book, and that's not a condition I or our lawyers would ever agree to," Whitaker said.

Doubleday publicity director David Drake confirmed that the document said "the magazine would agree not to contact any third party to verify information contained in the book without our prior agreement," but said that Newsweek never made such a request. The magazine signaled its intention to go ahead with a piece for Monday, Drake said, and "we have yet to hear from anyone at Newsweek that the magazine reversed its decision. One can't help but speculate that the magazine is bowing to pressure from the White House," although Drake acknowledged he had no evidence of that.

Time Managing Editor Jim Kelly said he had not gotten an advance look at the book but "you obviously would have to fact-check the hell out of it." Excerpting a book "by Kitty Kelley is a problematic proposition," he said. Doubleday says it never offered first serial rights to keep the book's contents from leaking out.

Why would Kelley present such a problem for Time and Newsweek? Because she routinely presents baseless accusations from unnamed sources, and the thin sourcing she does identify usually comes from unstable people with little credibility. Her hack job on Nancy Reagan, in which Kelley implied that Ronald Reagan was a date-rapist and accused Nancy of having an affair with Frank Sinatra (after having written in her Sinatra biography of Sinatra's supposed distaste for Nancy until the 1980s), caused the New York Times to issue a retraction for its coverage of her book:

Kelley has written extensively researched, gossip-filled books on the British royal family -- which are packed with disputed details about their sexual practices -- Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. But none generated a bigger furor than her 1991 biography of Nancy Reagan.

The New York Times, which obtained an advance copy, gave the book front-page display, saying it "could forever shatter" the Reagan myth through "allegations of scandalous sexual behavior" by the "woman who ruled the White House with a Gucci-clad fist." Max Frankel, then the paper's editor, said later that the story had been a mistake, and detractors accused the Times and other news outlets of retailing unconfirmed allegations.

And has Kelley learned from these past debacles? Apparently not, as even her editor notes:

Gethers said Kelley used more unnamed sources in the book than she generally does, but that this doesn't diminish its credibility.

"We either know who the sources are or are extremely confident from what Kitty said that they're genuine," he said. "People are very afraid to go on the record for this book. Kitty is a fearless reporter; even her detractors would acknowledge that. But she's tackling a sitting president of the United States and ex-president of the United States." Potential sources, he said, "are afraid that these people can literally ruin their lives, and ruin them socially in Washington."

The reliance on unnamed sources "doesn't diminish its credibility"? Of course it does! That's why people insist on knowing the accusers, so that their credibility can be assessed. Otherwise, anyone could make up anything about anyone else and no one would be able to tell truth from fiction.

I know that lefty bloggers like Oliver Willis are drooling over the blockbuster allegations and promoting them as Bush's doom. I find it enlightening that they readily accept the word of a disgruntled and unstable ex-wife of Bush's brother and possibly one or more unnamed sources, while they completely disregard over 250 combat veterans who put their names to their testimony in Unfit For Command and backed it up with evidence. The Left has very flexible standards when it comes to credibility these days.

Two Kerry/Edwards Campaigns For Two Americas?

For months, the Kerry campaign has made the claim (stolen from Howard Dean, naturally) that John Kerry will stand up to lobbyists and special interests and fight for the common folk. This claim, as I noted back in January, is patently ridiculous. Even back then, Kerry had taken over $640,000 in special-interest money throughout his career, including $225,000 for his presidential campaign just to that point.

That didn't keep Kerry from assimilating John Edwards' rhetoric on lobbyists and special interests. On their website, Edwards uses his Two Americas theme to rail against lobbyists and their corrupting influence:

We still have two governments in America: one for the insiders, the lobbyists, and the special interests, and then whatever is leftover is for you.

But in the America you and I build together, we will have one government that works for you—not those insiders, not those lobbyists, not those special interests but you. All you have to do is look at that Medicare prescription drug bill.

That's apparently true ... in one of Kerry/Edwards Americas. In the other, as the Washington Post notes, the campaign welcomes the lobbyists they despise, including those from the eeeeeeeevil pharmaceuticals:

In bolstering his inner circle of advisers with veterans from previous Democratic campaigns, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) has also chosen to hire lobbyists with close ties to a wide array of businesses, including drug companies and Microsoft Corp.

Joel P. Johnson, Joe Lockhart, Howard Wolfson and Michael J. Whouley are best known as Democratic insiders. Johnson and Lockhart worked as senior communications aides in the White House of President Bill Clinton. Wolfson was spokesman for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Whouley has played senior roles in Democratic presidential campaigns going back a dozen years.

But until they jumped to the Kerry campaign or the Democratic National Committee (DNC) as part of a recent personnel shake-up, all four also worked for lobbying companies that either explicitly registered as federal lobbyists or assisted corporations with their lobbying efforts. All four have taken leaves of absence to join the campaign.

The new hires add an extra burden to the Kerry campaign, which has often lambasted its opponent, President Bush, for being too close to special interests.

"If Kerry is trying to show he's for lobbying reform and is independent of special interests, this set of personnel changes is not a good thing," said James A. Thurber, a political scientist at American University.

So on whose behalf did their new staffers lobby? Oh, just the Asbestos Study Group, a coalition of corporations looking to cap asbestos-damage lawsuits; oil producers; Microsoft; Nextel; drug companies; and a host of other entities that would set the politically correct into fits of rage under any other circumstances.

It appears that, once again, John Kerry and now John Edwards hold their principles dearly, at least until the any inconvenience whatsoever causes them to throw them overboard.

The Silence Of The Lions As The Lambs Weep

One of the most striking actions of the past few days has been the almost-total silence of the American media on the horrific massacre in Beslan, where over 350 people died, mostly children. Mainstream news media outlets have covered this story only in the most superficial manner; they gave much higher prominence, for instance, to the hurricanes in Florida, which killed 17 and did billions of dollars in damage. The biggest outlets that arguably could commit the most resources to the story have instead glossed over the atrocities committed by the Islamist terrorists, preferring to present the nuances of Russian politics rather than a true picture of the animalistic nature of the Beslan mass murderers.

For instance, in today's coverage -- mere days after the slaughter of the children in Beslan -- the New York Times prefers to review the anger of the victims' families and its potential political impact on Vladimir Putin's career. In fact, Seth Mydans and C. J. Chivers postulate that the bombs went off by accident, rather than credit the cruel motives of the Islamists who forced hundreds of children to sit next to the explosives. The Washington Post waxes poetic with its headline, "The Sky Is Crying," but fails to explain the sadistic methods the terrorists used in subduing and abusing their child-hostages. The Los Angeles Times has several stories readily accessible from their site on the "siege", but again chooses to focus on the Russian response to the terrorists and the hypothesis that the initial explosions were an accident, this time blaming the children for accidentally pulling a wire.

The American media lions all fail to provide the coverage that the foreign press give their readers, who have been aghast at the inhumanity of the Islamist captors. The London Telegraph has provided the clear look at the evil and twisted nature of the lunatics who wanted to "set fire to the Caucasus" to ignite a holy war throughout Asia.

Here is what the American media doesn't want to share with its readership:

"On the first day, the terrorists brought some buckets of water, but then nothing. Nothing to eat or drink. They moved the mothers and small babies upstairs because they said the crying irritated them." ...

"A young child, just a toddler, was crying. His mother was inside and crying out her son's name. But they wouldn't let her come out to him. The man was hysterical. He shouted to stop crying or he would shoot. I could hear him slapping the child. Just the sound - I couldn't see." ...

"The man went crazy, he hit me and tugged the top off the tap so I couldn't drink any more. All around me, people were taking off clothes, peeing on them and trying to suck off the urine. Little children were tearing off the leaves of plants and eating them - they were so hungry.

"One little boy, about seven, stood naked with urine running down his leg. He was stuffing rose petals into his bleeding mouth from one of the bouquets the children had brought for the teachers. He was shouting, 'Mama!' She couldn't hear him. She was dead." ...

"Some people said that the older girls who were dragged into another room were being raped. We could hear cries, but then, so many were screaming and crying, that it was impossible to know." ...

One 15-year-old boy spoke of how the older boys and men were separated and given "chores". "We had to gather the bodies of those who had died when they took the school and throw them out of the windows. Then they wanted us to board them up.

"I carried the body of a little girl and threw it out of the window," he said, tears rolling down his cheeks.

Why don't the American media want their readers to hear the entire story? Because it would remind us that we are at war with Islamist lunatics, and that their reach is global. This story drives home the utter depravity of our enemies, the senseless and sadistic nature of a subculture that has no regard for human life or dignity, who will stop at nothing to get what they desire most -- the power of life and death over as many people as possible.

It is not possible to negotiate with such animals. It is not possible to beat them by waging a "sensitive" war. Old friendships that stand in the way of exterminating these people before they exterminate us are not worthy of consideration. And the mainstream media know this -- and so hide it from you in order to lull you into thinking that this is just another stunt gone awry, that Russia somehow deserved this, that it was just an accident that it actually resulted in deaths.

If that litany sounds familiar, it should; we Americans heard it after 9/11. It's as false now as it was then. Whatever Russia has done in Chechnya, nothing justifies the torture and slaughter of Beslan's children -- nothing.

Like it or not, our generation has been presented with a choice: stand up to the animals who would either enslave or slaughter us, or meekly be led to our own abattoirs. That's what the media desperately downplays, to our peril.

UPDATE: Pennywit adds his thoughts, from a different perspective.

Bush: Kerry Just A Mouthpiece (Updated - Flip/Flop Alert!)

George Bush continued to hammer John Kerry's lack of consistency on the Iraq war, and noticed that Kerry yesterday didn't just change his position -- again -- but stole one from other Democrats:

President Bush said Tuesday that rival John Kerry appropriated the anti-war position of one-time presidential candidate Howard Dean in Kerry's latest criticism of the president on the war in Iraq. On Monday, Kerry described the Iraq war as "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Kerry "woke up yesterday morning with yet another new position, and this one's not even his own; it is that of his one-time rival, Howard Dean," Bush told thousands of supporters at a rally in the Kansas City suburbs.

Bush said Kerry "even used the same words Howard Dean did back when he supposedly disagreed with him ... Senator Kerry flip-flops. We were right to make America safer by removing Saddam Hussein from power."

By George, he's right, but the remarks didn't originate with either Kerry or Dean. As the AP points out, Ted Kennedy spoke out in January of this year, saying that "I continue to be convinced that this is the wrong war at the wrong time." Dean used the phrase in February, during the primaries. Perhaps Kerry felt that no one would remember where the phrase originated by September, and given the number of positions he's taken on the issue, the expectation that it would slide past people was not unreasonable.

It does illuminate the nonentity that Kerry has been, both on the campaign trail and in twenty years in the Senate. He could do little but carry Ted Kennedy's water there for his entire tenure, and even as a presidential candidate he's still Ted's mouthpiece. People often speculate that Kerry is little more than a placeholder for a Hillary Clinton run in 2008, but I think that a much better analysis is that Kerry is a Ted Kennedy proxy, fronting for the man who could never win a general election with his personal history. Kerry's Senate career gives us a strong indication that Kennedy, not Clinton, is the power behind this drone.

UPDATE: William Kristol at the Weekly Standard notes that Dean came under considerable attack for his original statement -- from John Kerry!

But who challenged Dean immediately? John Kerry. On December 16, at Drake University in Iowa, Kerry asserted that "those who doubted whether Iraq or the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein, and those who believe today that we are not safer with his capture, don't have the judgment to be president or the credibility to be elected president."

Kerry was right then.

Amazing. Kerry is so flexible, he should join the circus as a contortionist. (via Kerry Spot)

CompUSA Makes Good, After Minimal Arm-Twisting

Ah, the power of persuasion ... After talking with a manager at the local CompUSA outlet, I convinced them that swapping out my six-week-old lemon of a laptop for a brand-new one would be considered proper customer service, rather than making me wait three weeks while Toshiba searched for the correct parts on the faulty model I brought back.

I just picked up the replacement and am testing it out during my lunch break. So far, so good! Looks like I'm back in business. They even gave me my old hard drive, so my data is still intact. The maintenance agreement even starts fresh. All in all, a satisfactory resolution, and one we could have easily reached yesterday had a manager been on duty.

John Kerry Erases History

Two days ago, I wrote that John Kerry called John McCain (and just about everyone else at the Republican Convention) a liar, based on a press release at his website. A number of you wrote to tell me that the page had disappeared from Kerry's website, but it had mysteriously reappeared by the time I checked on it.

Well, it has disappeared once more, as the Kerry campaign tries to keep its candidate from infuriating the one man who has tempered the criticism from the right in this electoral cycle. McCain, who constantly refers to his friendship with Kerry, might take the gloves off if Kerry impugns his character as he did with the Viet Nam veterans who have campaigned against Kerry. The campaign made a smart move taking down that list, especially since they never bothered to factually refute even one of the 143 statements they listed as lies, half-truths, and/or distortions.

Too bad I cached it here.

UPDATE: While we're at it, let's look at another "lie" that Kerry helpfully points out -- this one at #143, right at the bottom:

Bush Lies About Kerry’s View of Coalition.

143. Bush: “In the midst of war, he has called America's allies, quote, a "coalition of the coerced and the bribed." That would be nations like Great Britain, Poland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, El Salvador, Australia, and others allies that deserve the respect of all Americans, not the scorn of a politician. I respect every soldier, from every country, who serves beside us in the hard work of history. America is grateful, and America will not forget.”

Bush lied, Kerry cried? Not quite. Here's John Kerry from March of this year, as reported by the Des Moines Register:

Kerry said during the speech at the downtown Marriott Hotel that Bush has been impatient, which has cost the U.S. support from its allies. "The greatest position of strength is by exercising the best judgement in the pursuit of diplomacy," he said, "not in some trumped-up, so-called coalition of the bribed, the coerced, the bought and the extorted, but in a genuine coalition."

It seems to me that the only one who's telling lies, half-truths, and mischaracterizations is the Kerry campaign. Their only defense these days is to be offensive, and calling everyone a liar not only is offensive but smacks of desperation as well.

Are We Encouraging Chechen Terrorists?

Vladimir Putin, obviously angry from the massacre in Beslan that left hundreds of children dead at the hands of militant Islamists, lashed out at both the European Union and at the US for refusing to take the Chechen insurgents seriously as terrorists rather than freedom fighters. Regarding American policy, Putin charged that the US encourages the ongoing rebellion by maintaining diplomatic ties to the insurgents:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that mid-level officials in the U.S. government were undermining his country's war on terrorism by supporting Chechen separatists, whom he compared to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. ... But Putin said each time Russia complained to the Bush administration about meetings held between U.S. officials and Chechen separatist representatives, the U.S. response has been "we'll get back to you" or "we reserve the right to talk with anyone we want."

Putin blamed what he called a "Cold War mentality" on the part of some U.S. officials, but likened their demands that Russia negotiate with the Chechen separatists to the U.S. talking to al Qaeda.

These are not "freedom fighters," Putin said. "Would you talk with Osama Bin Laden?" he asked.

I understand the need to walk a fine line with Russia, especially since the promise of a true democracy has faded there since Putin took power. Russia has moved backwards towards autocracy, with far too much power accumulated at the presidency. In fact, in the reaction to Beslan, Putin has acted swiftly to muzzle the media, having the editor of Izvestia dismissed, and rumor even has it that one journalist was poisoned for her critical reporting on Russian policies:

Alarm bells are ringing in Russian media circles after the alleged poisoning of Anna Politkovskaya, one of the most outspoken critics of Vladimir Putin's policy on Chechnya, and the apparent sacking of the editor of Izvestia today. Politkovskaya, who writes for the current affairs magazine Novaya Gazeta, was on her way to the siege in Beslan from Moscow when she collapsed mysteriously.

According to the Moscow Times today, "Politkovskaya was flying from Vnukovo Airport to Rostov-on-Don and fainted on the plane. Immediately after landing, she was taken to a local hospital, where doctors found she had been poisoned, Novaya Gazeta editor Dmitry Muratov told the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists."

Even given all that, if the US is conducting talks with Chechen separatists and giving them asylum, then we need an explanation why we want to negotiate with the same terrorists who held a theater full of hostages in 2002 (129 died in the botched rescue attempt) and the child-killers of Beslan. It seems at least a little inconsistent with our policy of non-negotiation with al-Qaeda and other Islamist terror groups. (Then again, so does our policy of negotiation with the Palestinian Authority.) If the Chechens have a legitimate right to rebel against outside oppression, then surely they would choose a different battleground than elementary schools and theaters. Their target selection reveals them to be no better than Osama and his goons, and we should adjust our foreign policy to reflect this.

The Europeans, at least, have the virtue of consistency in their push to surrender to Islamist aggression:

The European Union expressed solidarity with Russia on Monday, trying to defuse a row after Moscow reacted angrily to a request by the Dutch EU presidency for an explanation for the carnage at Beslan.

French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin qualified this, telling a radio debate France wanted to express solidarity "but also we want to have all the necessary information and we remind Russia every time we meet of the need to respect human rights."

You have to love the EU, demanding that Russia "explain" the carnage caused by terrorists while the families are still burying their dead children. Did they demand that the US "explain" the devastation of 9/11? Probably not, but I wouldn't put it past them.

John Kerry, Campaign Comedian

John Kerry has a huge problem with connecting on a personal level to his audiences. It doesn't come naturally with the Boston Brahmin, and every time he tries to make a special effort, it appears forced and unnatural. Yesterday, in West Virginia, his attempt to joke around with the audience turned downright creepy:

In West Virginia, Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, gave Kerry a rifle as a gift. Kerry, a self-described gun-owner and hunter, quipped: "I thank you for the gift, but I can't take it to the debate with me."

I know that John Kerry doesn't want to assassinate George Bush, but doesn't he think about what he's saying before opening his mouth? Given the level of Bush-hatred and irrationality among the Democrats at the fringe, joking about bringing guns to a debate seems particularly irresponsible this electoral cycle.

If assassination jokes are what tickles Kerry's funny bone, he should keep them to himself. Not only are they in poor taste, but they reveal a strange side to Kerry that has occasionally peeked out during this campaign, in the form of Magic Hats and filmed combat recreations. Personally, I just get the impression that John Kerry is too weird for high public office.

Saddam Trial To Begin 'Within Weeks'

Reuters reported yesterday, to almost no fanfare, that the Iraqi judiciary announced that Saddam Hussein will stand trial within "weeks", after the Iraqi government urged them to expedite the process:

Iraq's toppled leader Saddam Hussein and his top aides will go on trial within weeks, Iraqi Minister of State Kasim Daoud says.

Daoud told a news conference in Kuwait City on Sunday after talks with top officials that "Saddam Hussein and his band will stand trials within a period of weeks."

Asked if the United States will play any role in the trials, he said: "We have barred the Iraqi government from playing a role, how can we allow a foreign faction to have a role in Saddam Hussein's trial? No...Saddam Hussein will be tried by the Iraqi judiciary and it will issue its just sentence against him."

I missed this report yesterday. In fact, in reviewing the news feeds and the websites of the mainstream media, it seems as though the American media yawned at the news. Desert Tusk noticed this before I did, and hypothesizes:

Saddam's trial is huge news. The fact that a former dictator is going on trial is newsworthy enough. Added to that are these facts 1) We deposed him, 2) We're in the middle of rebuilding the country he was in control of, 3)There is going to be a political impact not only in Iraq, but also in the United States. The trial, if this report is true, will take place before the presidential election. Which candidate would be helped by the reminder of what an evil guy Saddam was? The one who says the Iraq war was the right thing to do? Or the one who says, "It's the wrong war, in the wrong place at the wrong time"?

And it's for that reason the media isn't reporting it. Reminding people of Saddam only helps Bush.

So far, that's the only reasonable conclusion I can reach as well. However, if the trial starts before November 2nd, expect all who are silent now to scream at the top of their lungs about the "timing" of it in relation to the election.

Further Analysis Of Kerry's Medals

CQ readers Bandit and Tom "River Rat" Mortenson have completed an extensive analysis of John Kerry's medals during his tour in Viet Nam. Bandit and Mortenson did in-depth research into the qualifications of each award type and the circumstances at each engagement described by Kerry and the other men present at each one. They conclude that all of the medals Kerry received, with the exception of his second Purple Heart, have some taint due to misreporting by Kerry himself.

For instance, they deconstruct the first Purple Heart, which we all covered earlier at Captain's Quarters:

Action: December 2, 1968 while patrolling in a small foam-filled boat, known as a Boston Whaler or "skimmer" that floats silently on a river without its engines running, with three other men in the darkness of early morning. The mission, apparently, was a training patrol in an area that was known for contraband trafficking. Upon approaching the objective point, the crew noticed a sampan crossing the river. As it pulled to shore, Kerry and his fellow crew opened fire, destroying the boat and whatever its cargo might have been. In the confusion, Kerry claims to have received a "stinging piece of heat" in the arm, the result of a tiny piece of shrapnel.

Analysis: Sen. Kerry has insisted that the above action qualifies as combat and that it was one of the most frightening episodes in his life. As with any Purple Heart the basic requirement is that any wound is the result of enemy action, whether direct or indirect. Kerry's website describes it this way: "December 2, 1968: Kerry experiences first intense combat; receives first combat related injury."
The following morning after Kerry's alleged first intense combat engagement, he requested a Purple Heart from his commanding officer, Grant Hibbard (Ret.). This is what Grant Hibbard recalls of the incident:

"While in Cam Rahn Bay, he [Senator Kerry] trained on several 24-hour indoctrination missions and one special skimmer operation with my most senior and trusted Lieutenant [William L. Schachte]. The briefing from some members of that crew the morning after revealed that they had not received any enemy fire, and yet Lt.(jg) Kerry informed me of a wound - he showed me a scratch on his arm and a piece of shrapnel in his hand that appeared to be from one of our own M-79s. It was later reported to me that Lt.(jg) Kerry had fired an M-79, and it had exploded off the adjacent shoreline. I do not recall being advised of any medical treatment, and probably said something like 'Forget it.' He later received a Purple Heart for that scratch, and I have no information as to how or whom."

The question here is was Sen. Kerry's shrapnel wound the result of enemy combat action?

According to Kerry's own description in Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty, the December 2, 1968 incident described above was "a half-assed action that hardly qualified as combat."

Douglas Brinkley also reports in his book on page 189 that soon after Sen. Kerry turned 25 on Dec. 11, 1968, he headed out on his first mission: Kerry had wrote in his notebook, 'A cocky feeling of invincibility accompanied us up the Long Tau shipping channel because we hadn't been shot at yet, and Americans at war who haven't been shot at are allowed to be cocky'. "

Rear Adm. William L. Schachte Jr. has come out and said ”I was absolutely in the skimmer" in the early morning on Dec. 2, 1968, when Lt. (j.g.) John Kerry was involved in an incident which led to his first Purple Heart.

Schachte, who also was then a lieutenant junior grade, said he was in command of the small Boston whaler or skimmer, with Kerry aboard in his first combat mission in the Vietnam War. "Kerry nicked himself with a M-79 (grenade launcher)," Schachte said in a telephone interview from his home in Charleston, S.C. He said, "Kerry requested a Purple Heart."

Adm. Schachte described the use of the skimmer operating very close to shore as a technique that he personally designed to flush enemy forces on the banks of Mekong River so that the larger Swift boats could move in. At about 3 a.m. on Dec. 2, Schachte said, the skimmer -- code-named "Batman" -- fired a hand-held flare. He said that after Kerry's M-16 rifle jammed, the new officer picked up the M-79 and "I heard a 'thunk.' There was no fire from the enemy," he said.
Patrick Runyon was operating the skimmers engineman during this incident has said "I can't say for sure that we got return fire or how [Kerry] got nicked," Runyon is quoted as saying in Unfit for Command. "I couldn't say one way or the other. I know he did get nicked, a scrape on the arm," he added.

It should be noted that another alleged witness to Kerry's actions on December 2, 1968 is William Zaladonis. He was interviewed by NBC's Lisa Myers after Adm. Schachte had come forward in attempts to cast doubt over whether Schachte could have been confused with being with Kerry in the skimmer that night.

Pat Runyon is listed as being in Qui Nhon/Cam Ranh Bay from 10/68 to 3/69 which provides him the opportunity to have been in the right place to have been with Kerry on December 2.

Also to be noted that any skimmer training mission consisted of at least one senior officer and a junior grade with one enlisted man - an engineman. Both Runyon and Zaladonis were enginemen. There wouldn't been no need for two enginemen.

Runyon aids in confirming both Adm. Schachte and Grant Hibbard's account about the absence of any enemy fire while also clearly confirming the absence of any possible explosions from enemy rockets/grenades/mortars that could account for any flying shrapnel that had struck Sen. Kerry. If there were no enemy rocket or grenades explosions than Kerry's shrapnel most likely was the result of firing a M-79 too close.

Conclusion: This is a rather easy and straight forward issue to sort out and judge from a purely military perspective. It doesn't matter who is telling the truth or who isn't about minor recollections. The fact is Sen. Kerry was denied a Purple Heart in the issuing hours of the incident and this speaks volumes on this issue. You have someone who was supposedly wounded who visits his commanding officer -- who has no axe to grind at the time -- who was briefed within hours of the incident and determines no Purple Heart was warranted. Furthermore, Sen. Kerry seeks medical assistance for such an obviously minor wound for the sole purpose to document his insignificant wound so he may further pursue his Purple Heart from his next transfer designation.

Two Examples of injuries or wounds which clearly do not qualify for award of the Purple Heart:

• Accidents, to include explosive, aircraft, vehicular, and other accidental wounding not related to or caused by enemy action.
• Self-inflicted wounds, except when in the heat of battle, and not involving gross negligence.

There is no documented evidence of any enemy encounter at the time of Sen. Kerry's minor wound and the fact Sen. Kerry himself has cast reasonable doubt for any hostile enemy action being encountered. What was presumed to be potential enemy turned out to be non-combatant civilians. The only chance Sen. Kerry has in making a Purple Heart case is if he had been wounded in the heat of battle. But since there was no heated battle with enemy combatants he would lose this line of argument.

Sen. Kerry has released no "after action" report, as one would have been required if there was combat engagement involved.

A Purple Heart normally is not requested but is awarded de facto for a wound inflicted by the enemy - a wound serious enough to require medical attention. The Naval Historical Center keeps all documents connected to such awards to U.S. Navy and Marine personnel.

Typewritten "casualty cards" list the date, location and prognosis of the wound for which the Purple Heart is given, and they are produced by the medical facility that provides medical treatment. There are two such cards for Kerry - for his slight wounds on Feb. 20 and March 13, 1969, but none for his December 1968 claim.

Thus, it can be concluded that Sen. Kerry's Purple Heart for this incident was awarded in error due to material misrepresentation on the part of Sen. Kerry to the U.S. Navy by declaring his wound was the result of enemy action. Sen. Kerry's Purple Heart should be rescinded by the Department of Defense.

Read all of the extensive analysis by Bandit and River Rat at their site. It's lengthy but quite impressive, and it's also difficult to excerpt it and do it justice. I've included the entire text in the extended entry (with their permission) for anyone who wishes to access it for further analysis.

Medal: Silver Star Award, February 28, 1969

Action: On February 28 lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry was serving as Officer in Charge (OINC) of PCF-94 and Officer in Tactical Command of a three-boat mission. As the force approached the target area on the narrow Dong Cung Canal, it is alleged all units came under intense automatic weapons and small arms fire from an entrenched enemy force less than fifty-feet away. It is alleged Kerry attacked a numerically superior force in the face of intense fire that lead to a highly successful mission. His actions were said to be in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service. It is further alleged that LTJG Kerry saved his boats and crews life by killing a enemy Viet Cong guerilla who was preparing to fire a B-40 rocket at Kerry's beached PCF-94 swift boat.

Analysis: A Silver Star is awarded for "conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action," and therefore, any analysis of February 28, 1969 must first determine what actions meet this standard. In 10 U.S.C. 6244 defines the standards for awarding anyone the Silver Star:
(1) Awarded to a person who, while serving in any capacity with the Navy or Marine Corps, is cited for gallantry in action that does not warrant the Medal of Honor or Navy Cross

(a) while engaged in an action against an enemy of the United States;

(b) while engaged in military operations involving conflict with an opposing foreign force; or

(c) while serving with friendly foreign forces engaged in an armed conflict against an opposing armed force in which the United States is not a belligerent party.

(2) The heroic act(s) performed must render the individual conspicuous and well above the standard expected. An accumulation of minor acts of heroism normally does not justify the award, but unusual or exceptional cases will be decided on their merits.

What Kerry Did

There appears to have been two ambush sites that day of February 28; separated by a distance of anywhere from 100 to 800 yards depending on who you ask who were there. The first ambush was an uneventful event according to Coastal Division 11 Command History summary. It has been almost a given fact for years that after first sweep of the first ambush site that both the PCF-23 and PCF-94 traveled together further up the narrow (width of a four lane highway) Dong Cung Canal leaving swift boat PCF-43 commanded by LTJG Droz behind at the first ambush site. At some point the two boats either detected or came under fire from an enemy initiated ambush and at this point Sen. Kerry ordered both boats to beach directly in front of the second ambush.

It cannot be determined if there was in fact any in-coming enemy fire directed at any of the boats during the second ambush (or the first ambush for that matter.) Bill Rood describes it this way: "It happened again, another ambush. And again, Kerry ordered the turn maneuver, and again it worked. As we headed for the riverbank, I remember seeing a loaded B-40 launcher pointed at the boats. It wasn't fired as two men jumped up from their spider holes."

If there was any significant gunfire received from the second ambush than Bill Rood would certainty had pointed this out in his recent recollections of the ambush. Being in such a narrow canal the boats would have suffered damage in any firefight -- especially if the boats were stationary while beached on the shoreline. There are no damage reports released to describe any boat damage from these two ambushes to support any enemy weapons fire against the boats. Because of the lack of any boat damage reports that certainty would have describe the number bullets holes the boats suffered during any of these two ambushes, and the fact no one was ever injured -- it is most likely no enemy fire was encountered during the ambush -- just the visual spotting of two Viet Cong guerillas along the canals banks.

One witness on Bill Rood's PCF-23 boat was a army advisor by the name of Doug Reese (a Kerry supporter), who indicates that the PCF-23 had beached before Sen. Kerry's boat had beached and had already begun sweeping the area with Regional and Popular Forces who were being transported by the PCF-23. It is when Sen. Kerry beached his boat some one hundred yards from the beached PCF-23 does he encounters the famous lone VC soldier with a loaded B-40 rocket launcher. The distance of 100 yards is a rough estimate based upon how far Mr. Reese says he was from Sen. Kerry when Kerry had encountered the VC guerilla with a B-40 rocket.

This account is supported by LTJG Bill Rood who recently had this to say:

"With our troops involved in the sweep of the first ambush site, Richard Lamberson, a member of my crew, and I also went ashore to search the area. I was checking out the inside of the hooch when I heard gunfire nearby....Not long after that, Kerry returned, reporting that he had killed the man he chased behind the hooch. He also had picked up a loaded B-40 rocket launcher, which we took back to our base in An Thoi after the operation."

This is still rather confusing in regards to whether the two boats (PCF-94 and PCF-23) were together when approaching the second ambush site from the first. But from what can be gathered from witness accounts is that indeed both boats traveled together from the first ambush site and at some point PCF-23 beached and begun sweeping the area before Sen. Kerry's PCF-94 had beached. Rood makes it clear where he was when Kerry had allegedly killed the VC soldier as well as Doug Reese who has repeatedly has said over the last two years that he was some 60-80 yards or more from where Kerry had killed the enemy guerilla with a B-40. Reese also goes on to say he walked over to where Sen. Kerry was standing over the dead Viet Cong within ten minutes of the shooting. Reese confirms a leg wound, but no other wounds were visible to him.

Reese also makes it clear that his observation does not rule out the possibility of another wound on the back side of the body, suggesting the dead VC was found lying on his back. In any case, Sen. Kerry and his crew clearly had engaged and killed one Viet Cong guerilla within the immediate area of their swift boat. The question now is whether Sen. Kerry had actually turned his boat into an ambush or simply spotted a guerilla with a rocket launcher along the banks and Kerry's forward M-60 gunner shot him.

Were there any witnesses to Sen. Kerry's tactic of beaching in front of a second ambush? Apparently the only witnesses was Sen. Kerry and his crew since the PCF-23 and those onboard was a distance away and members of the boat already involved in a ground sweep. Did anyone see Sen. Kerry kill the VC guerilla with a rocket launcher? Apparently not, even though the guerilla by all accounts was anywhere from 15 to 30 yards from Kerry's boat.

We do know that Sen. Kerry dealt with an already wounded Viet Cong because his forward gunner, the late Tom Belodeau said, "You know, I shot that guy. He jumped up, he looked right at me, I looked at him. You could tell he was trying to decide whether to shoot or not. I expected the guy on Kerry's boat with the twin 50s to blast him but he couldn't depress the guns far enough. We were up on the bank." Belodeau said he fired at the man, wounding him.

Sen. Kerry himself confirms the VC guerilla had already been wounded when he told the Boston Globe in June of 2003 that "Tommy clipped him, and he started going [down.] I thought it was over."

But apparently the wounded VC did not stay down and as Kerry's first Silver Star citation and Bill Rood suggests, Kerry either followed or shot the the wounded VC when he made it behind a hooch. Did anyone see Kerry kill the wounded guerilla? According to Sen. Kerry during a October 1996 press conference:

"I was never out of sight of Tom Belodeau or Mike Medeiros," Kerry said. "I went straight out from the boat to the path so I had a line of fire. I never went behind the hootch, and this is the first time in 30 years that anybody has suggested otherwise." Problem here is this is exactly what his first Silver Star citation has been suggesting for the last 30 years as it reads:

". . . Without hesitation Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry leaped ashore, pursued the man behind a hootch, and killed him, capturing a B-40 rocket launcher with a round in the chamber."

One of Kerry's crewmembers, Michael Medeiros, who by his own account was running behind Sen. Kerry and the fleeing soldier said at the same press conference that he did not see Sen. Kerry kill him but had no doubt that the senator did so. "The only one that was there was Senator Kerry."

This did not stop Tom Belodeau, who was standing beside Kerry at the same press conference to state: "The soldier that Sen. John Kerry shot was standing on both feet with a loaded rocket launcher, about to fire it on the boat from which (Sen. Kerry) had just left, which still had four men aboard," Belodeau said.

Years later Medeiros would add: "With my adrenaline racing, I started following him off the boat," Michael Medeiros recalls in Douglas Brinkley's book, Tour of Duty. "So I was right behind him. . . . As the VC guerrilla got 20 or 30 meters down the path, just about in front of a lean-to, the (future) senator shot the guy. He had been standing on both feet with a loaded rocket launcher about to fire. He fell over dead."

To add yet another twist to the to the fleeing wounded VC story is from another witness and former Kerry crewmate, Del Sandusky. He told the LA Times on August 8, 2004 that no one had a clear view of the shooting. But "next thing we know, there's Kerry with the B-40 in his hand."

Was Mr. Medeiros simply being rhetorical? It would appear so because both of his accounts are as different as night and day. What does Sen. Kerry have to say about the killing himself? Here is what he told the Boston Globe in June of 2003:

"He [wounded VC guerilla] was running away with a live B-40, and, I thought, poised to turn around and fire it." Globe writer, Michael Kranish, asked whether that meant Kerry shot the guerrilla in the back, Kerry said, "No, absolutely not. He was hurt, other guys were shooting from back, side, back. There is no, there is not a scintilla of question in any person's mind who was there [that] this guy was dangerous, he was a combatant, he had an armed weapon."

Here we have Sen. Kerry being very clear that the guy was running away and not being so clear how he shot him, like whether front or back. From the reading it appears Sen. Kerry wanted to prevent the guy from turning around to get off a last ditch shot off, and thus, really shot him as he was fleeing from behind. This of course this fits with what Doug Reese said when he said he could not observe any obvious wounds from the front side of the dead man other then the leg wound.

One other aspect of this Silver Star controversy needs to be addressed: the tactics employed that day. It has been written that Kerry may have really been awarded for his aggressive tactics of taking the fight right to the enemy. There is nothing inherently wrong with this line of reasoning provided there is some accurate intelligence of enemy strength and positions prior to employing this tactic. Sen. Kerry simply assumed beforehand if the ambushed appeared to not be a serious one they would beach their boat directly in front of the attackers.

In an interview with the New Yorker, Kerry reasoned that if he turned his boats toward the shore he would transform a long, horizontal target into a narrower, vertical one. "It would concentrate both of our machine guns directly on the point of fire and surprise the hell out of them," and it would keep the twenty soldiers each boat was carrying astern out of the line of fire, Kerry recalled.

There is several problems with this line of reasoning for the canals of the Mekong Delta. One is that the canals are too narrow, thus not allowing Kerry to reduce the exposure of his boat by turning into an ambush. Secondly, often ambushes occurred from both banks of a canal or river. You would never want your boat stationary on one bank of a canal so it would be fully exposed to rockets and machine guns from the opposite bank unless you were absolutely sure there were no enemy ambushers hiding behind the opposite bank.

Kerry was lucky that day in that this was a typical 1-4 man enemy ambush where they strike for less than a minute and then flee the scene before the swift boat guns could mow down all the vegetation within sight. This isn't the kind of tactic that would ever be employed because the enemy could easily organize a response to such tactics and end up easily destroying the boats while killing everyone onboard them.

Some might argue that Kerry's commanders were pleased and had sent congratulatory messages. This by itself means absolutely nothing. If it was felt morale was down than commander's would reap praise upon one for tying their own shoe laces. Real praise, like in Fitness Reports, comes in the form of promotion or the recommendation for promotion. Absence of promotion is a sure sign that commander's are not personally excited about you.

Summary of what can be established:

• Sen. Kerry's PCF-94 had beached alone and an estimated one hundred yards plus/minus from Bill Rood's PCF-23 boat.
• There was at least one VC guerilla with a loaded B-40 rocket launcher from where Kerry beached his boat.
• The allege guerilla Sen. Kerry killed was already wounded by Kerry's forward gunner and fleeing.
• The distance of the VC guerilla from Kerry's boat did not provide an opportunity for any chasing on Kerry's part. That is, everything happened in less than a minute because the wounded VC never got much further than 15 yards (Rood says 15 yards and Reese has estimated the distance at anywhere 60 to 100 feet.).
• Unlikely that the boats experienced any serious enemy weapons fire during the second ambush.
• Kerry's tactical plan for responding to the ambush was reckless and foolish.

Conclusion: We can debate the fine details till the end of time but such a debate would add little to what can already be clearly determined: LTJG Kerry did not exhibit any actions that rises to the level of "conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action" on February 28, 1969. LTJG Kerry did not exhibit any tactical actions that would warrant the awarding of a Silver Star.

It would be advisable for the Secretary of the Navy to order an examination of all records related to this event to determine how top brass officials could approve the third highest award in two days and have presented it to LTJG Kerry in only six days. Obviously there was no investigation on part of the Navy (as required) at the time or they would have come to the same obvious conclusion presented here.

Top commanders can award anyone for almost any reason they desire -- Gen. MacArthur awarded Lyndon B. Johnson a Silver Star for simply being an observer on his first and only uneventful bombing flight -- but if such awards are ever seriously challenged than such awards deserve a investigation to insure that the award meets the basic required standards of qualification. If the award is found to be merit less or obtained through deception then the medal deserves to be revoked in order to maintain the integrity of the thousands of other awarded medals that had been held to the same standards for which the medal is authorized to be awarded.

There are cases in which it took thirty years for the Silver Star to be awarded simply because at the time there was only one recorded witness and not the required two. To simply throw a Silver Star at anyone without at least meeting the very basic of basics is a black eye to the entire awarding process and to the thousands of recipients of the Silver Star. The Department of Defense should rescind the awarding of Sen. Kerry's Silver Star on the grounds it was erroneously handed out based upon misrepresentation and the fact LTJG Kerry's actions do not meet the qualifications for the award.

Medal: Bronze Star & Purple Heart No. 3, March 13, 1969

Action: Sen. Kerry's Purple Heart was awarded because he had "suffered shrapnel wounds in his left buttocks and a contusion (minor) on his right forearm when a mine detonated close aboard PCF-94."
Sen. Kerry was awarded the Bronze Star because "while from an exposed position on the bow, his arm bleeding and in pain, with disregard for his personal safety," he pulled a man by the name of James Rassman from a river.

Analysis: The Kerry for President Campaign has released a few official spot reports that were prepared and sent out by LTJG Kerry himself after he had returned from the March 13, 1969. We know it was Sen. Kerry who prepared the spot reports because he was the officer in charge of the four boat TE (Task Element.) Looking at the spot report we find the line that is responsible for the contents: "MARKET TIME SPOT REPORT 13/1/TE 194.5.4.4/1."

The 194.5.4.4/1 identifies the officer in charge of the four boat TE, which would had been LTJG Kerry, who also would have been responsible for all the after-action reporting. It has been mistakenly reported that the initials "JKW" at the bottom of some of the spot reports was evidence that Sen. Kerry was the author. This is false, it is just the initials of who ever had received the report at An Thoi, which in this particular case it was "JKW" who was on duty at the time LTJG Kerry was sending in his spot reports.

CTE command structure works out like this:
CTE 194 = Zumwalt
CTE 194.5 = Hoffman
CTE 194.5.4 = Lonsdale
CTE 194.5.4.4 = Elliott
CTE 194.5.4.4/1 = Kerry because he had Tactical Command of the boats.

There are other available references from Sen. Kerry that confirms he was the author of these spot reports describing the action that had occurred on March 13th. According to the authors of "John F. Kerry", "All events described were checked against official navy records, most in `spot reports' filed by commanders just after action, many of them written by Kerry." Kerry also has told a Senate Committee on April 22, 1971, "...I can recall often sending in the spot reports which we made after each mission.”

Sen. Kerry's spot report for his March 13, 1969 mission can be summarized as follows:

PCFs 3 and 43 proceeded up Bay Hap River to Cai Nuoc district town and embarked 50 RF/PF troops and advisors. PCFs 94 and 51 proceeded up Bay Hap River and joined PCFs 3 and 43. All four units then proceeded up Rach Dong Cung and inserted troops at two locations. One MSF (Mike Strike Force) soldier was killed during this operation from a booby trap. One of the inserted MSFs was involved in a fire fight that lasted over an hour and was broken when troops were extracted. During ground operations troops destroyed 30 sampans, 5 structures and rice bins. It was during the five hour (per Kerry Bronze Star Recommendation) ground support operations that the PCFs would experience small enemy weapons fire several times.

After ground operations all four PCFs returned to Cai Nuoc district town. At 1445 Hours all four PCFs departed Cai Nuoc and proceeded down the Bay Hap River to their LST in the Gulf of Thailand.

It was during this return trip that that a mine detonated under the PCF-3 lifting it 2-3 feet out of the water. The spot report also states two other mine explosions were observed and that the boats received both small and heavy automatic weapons fire from both banks. The spot report for the incident suggests that they took incoming enemy weapons fire for 5000 meters (little over 3 miles.) PCF-94 attempted to assist the stricken PCF-3 and picked up a MSF advisor (Rassman) who fell overboard. Spot report does not say how or from what boat Rassman fell off. PCF-43 took all the wounded to the USCG cutter Spencer for medical attention. PCFs 94, 51 and 43 stayed with the stricken PCF-3 while a Bucket Brigade was brought in to help with the boats flooding. Once the flooding could be eased the PCF-94 then towed the heavily damaged PCF-3 away.

Both Sen. Kerry's Casualty Report and Bronze Star citation make it clear that he suffered shrapnel wounds in his left buttocks from a mine that had detonated close aboard PCF-94. It is this same mine that allegedly knocked Jim Rassman off the boat. However, Kerry's Bronze Star recommendation makes no mention of Kerry receiving a shrapnel wound to his buttocks, only a bruise to his arm.

In Coastal Division 11 Command History only one mine is mentioned and not three. Hand written notation on Sen. Kerry's spot report says "HF encountered plus MINE." It would seem a few had reason to believe there was only one mine involved and not the three Sen. Kerry describes.

We can be certain now that Sen. Kerry did not receive any shrapnel to his buttocks from a mine explosion. Jim Rassman in the Washington Post describes how Sen. Kerry really picked up a tiny piece of metal that day. As they were heading back to the boat, Kerry and Rassman decided to blow up a five-ton rice bin to deny food to the Vietcong. In an interview, Rassman recalled that they climbed on top of the huge pile and dug a hole in the rice. On the count of three, they tossed their grenades into the hole and ran.

Evidently, Kerry did not run fast enough. "He got some frag and pieces of rice in his rear end," Rassman said with a laugh. "It was more embarrassing than painful." At the time, the incident did not seem significant, and Kerry did not mention it to anyone when he got back on the boat. An unsigned "personnel casualty report," however, erroneously implies that Kerry suffered "shrapnel wounds in his left buttocks" later in the day, following the mine explosion incident, when he also received "contusions to his right forearm."

What is troubling about the above is why Jim Rassman never come forward and correct the record of how Sen. Kerry became wounded when he had first hand knowledge that refutes the mine injury claim?
What makes the entire March 13th Bronze Star incident so bizarre is not so much how it is being described today in the press by the people who were there -- but how Sen. Kerry first described the entire incident back in 1998.

Kerry had the following eulogy entered into the Congressional Record on January 28, 1998 (Senate) Page S186-S187:

"There was the time we were carrying Special Forces up a river and a mine exploded under our boat sending it 2 feet into the air. We were receiving incoming rocket and small arms fire and Tommy was returning fire with his M-60 machine gun when it literally broke apart in his hands. He was left holding the pieces unable to fire back while one of the Green Berets walked along the edge of the boat to get Tommy another M-60. As he was doing so, the boat made a high speed turn to starboard and the Green Beret kept going--straight into the river. The entire time while the boat went back to get the Green Beret, Tommy was without a machine gun or a weapon of any kind, but all the time he was hurling the greatest single string of Lowell-Chelmsford curses ever heard at the Viet Cong. He literally had swear words with tracers on them! "

Sen. Kerry makes it clear in his eulogy that it was his boat that directly hit a mine and lifted 2 feet out of the water and that Jim Rassman fell overboard not because of a mine, but because of a high speed turn. Note also that Sen. Kerry never mentions multiple mines and that he suggests that the "entire time while the boat went back" is a indication that Sen. Kerry's boat continued past the ambush for some distance, a scenario supported by another Kerry crewmember below who was on Kerry's boat that day: Michael Medeiros.

Kerry Describes a Non-Typical Ambush

It is rare for river ambushes to last more then one minute. Generally you have 1-4 Viet Cong involved in a ambush who may have wired a under water explosive device to activate when a boat travels either over it or near it. Once the mine is detonated ambusher's may jump up and fire off some AK-47 rounds and rockets and then flee quickly before the boats guns can turn on them. It would be especially rare and unusual for ambusher's to hang around and take pop shot's of someone in murky water being pushed along by the river's flow with the fire power of three swift boats there on the scene.

Sen. Kerry suggests there was a 3 mile gauntlet of enemy weapons fire along the river. If this was true, the Viet Cong would had to have a at least two full size battalions available to them to place along the river. If this was the case there would have been much boat damage and injuries reported from enemy fire.

PCF-94 Damage Report

On March 14, a CASREP was prepared and sent outlining the damage and condition of Kerry's PCF-94 and PCF-3. Only page two describing the PCF-94 damage was released by the Kerry Campaign. The PCF-94 was declared unable to continue Market Patrol due to a host of damage that included steering problems; loss of RPM in both engines and curled and chipped propellers. If the PCF-94 never hit a mine then how was it damaged?

Michael Medeiros, a former Kerry crew member who was there that day provides us with a clue when he recently suggested in a interview with the Washington Post: "When the mine went off, we were still going full speed," he recalled. Medeiros said Kerry's boat raced off down the river, away from the ambush zone.

Del Sandusky, another Kerry crewmate who was on Sen. Kerry's boat that day believes there was never a second mine explosion but more likely a rocket or rocket-propelled grenade, as a mine would have inflicted more damage. Mr. Sandusky is correct about not being a mine explosion, but it wasn't a rocket -- but a obstacle in the river that the boat had run over at high speed as they were fleeing the ambush site. A rocket would not had curled and chipped the boats screws. This explanation explains the boats damage and what some might have mistaken for a mine explosion.

It should be noted that other damage the CASREP describes are non-critical to a swift boat's operation and easily could have been caused weeks earlier during other missions. We know that some forward windows were damaged a day earlier from another ambush according to Coastal Division 11 Command History which describes the damage suffered the day before on March 12 as "minor."

The Rescue

Sen. Kerry's Bronze Star recommendation makes no mention of Sen. Kerry being under enemy small arms fire. Here is how his Bronze Star recommendation describes the rescue: "LTJG KERRY from his exposed position on the bow of the boat, managed to pull RASSMAN aboard despite the painful wound in his right arm."

Jim Rassman claims he was the one who recommended Sen. Kerry for a award, originally recommended Kerry for the Silver Star that later was reduced to a Bronze Star. However, Sen. Kerry's Bronze Star recommendation only lists one eyewitness for the rescue of Jim Rassman: Kerry for President supporter, Del Sandusky.

This is the same Del Sandusky who told CNN NewsNight on May 31, 2004 that "John, shot and bleeding, laid down and pulled up Rassman by his belt."

Conclusion: It has been demonstrated that Sen. Kerry was never wounded in his buttocks by a enemy mine. It has also been demonstrated that Sen. Kerry knowingly filed a false casualty report for himself. Sen. Kerry's Purple Heart for the March 13, 1969 incident was not caused by enemy action, but from a careless act of destroying rice for which one eyewitness thought was more funny than serious.

Sen. Kerry has been shown in one account of the mine incident to have described his boat as directly hitting a mine and being lifted out of the water several feet knowing very well this wasn't possible. The PCF-94 damage report supports the conclusion that Sen. Kerry had run over an under water obstacle as he kept going at full speed after the PCF-3 had struck a mine, and it was this impact that caused the screws to be curled, chipped and what appeared to the crew to have been the result of a mine explosion.

It would appear that Sen. Kerry wanted to use the illusion of a enemy mine explosion to account for shrapnel to his buttocks instead of being self-inflicted.

The entire event as described by Sen. Kerry in his spot reports and by his supporters who was on his boat for the March 13, 1969 incident is exaggerated and riddled with inconsistencies and factually incorrect events. The Department of Defense should rescind the awarding of both Kerry's Purple Heart and the Bronze Star for the March 13th incident due to the above and knowingly making material false statements to the U.S. Navy.

Where Not To Buy A Laptop

I mentioned earlier that my laptop crumbled under the strain of my Republican convention blogging; it started malfunctioning on Saturday evening, which (fortunately) happened after the convention, but still presents me with an incredible inconvenience. Since I just bought the computer on July 29th, I presumed that CompUSA would try to do their best to make this right. Unfortunately, that presumption was incorrect.

I took the Toshiba S126 laptop back to the CompUSA outlet in Bloomington, MN, where I was told that despite the six-week-old status of the laptop, my only option was to send it back to the manufacturer, despite my having purchased a three-year maintenance agreement from CompUSA. I told the CompUSA clerk that I needed my laptop for my business, which requires me to be mobile, and that being without my laptop would create tremendous difficulties for me.

I inquired whether CompUSA could just provide me with a loaner by using my laptop's hard drive (I know the problem is hardware related) during the intervening time that Toshiba needed to replace the motherboard. I was told this:

* Yes, that can be done.
* The manager whose approval would be required decided to go home early.

So CompUSA must routinely allow their stores to go without the supervision required to ensure customer concerns get addressed. I asked if another CompUSA in the area might have their manager on duty. After waiting 10 minutes for the clerk to make the calls, I was told this:

* The nearest store had a manager on duty.
* They did not have a laptop available as a loaner.

Sensing that this was going to be futile, I instructed the clerk to call the manager who decided to go home early to get approval for the loaner. He disappeared for another 10 minutes, and when he returned, he told me this:

* The manager wasn't available.
* He didn't need the manager to authorize the use of a loaner with my hard drive swapped in.
* CompUSA would charge me $100 per week for the use of the "loaner".

I explained that with that pricing, each week would cost me roughly 10% of what I paid for the laptop to begin with. I also expressed my unhappiness with what I felt was terrible customer service, given that CompUSA sold me a defective machine less than six weeks ago. I then asked how long it would take for the computer to get fixed. He told me that it could be as long as three weeks, which meant that my "loaner" would have cost me $300, or about a third of the computer's original price.

But here's the best part --

When I asked why that was, he told me that Toshiba had problems with inventory control, so they didn't know what parts they had on hand at any one time.

So here's my advice to anyone who is looking to buy a computer. Don't buy a Toshiba, because God help you if it requires any parts replacement. And don't buy anything at CompUSA, whose idea of customer service after they take your money is to shrug their shoulders and explain to you in a half-dozen ways why it isn't their problem they sold you a pile of crap.

Tomorrow morning I will call Lee Weissbec at the Bloomington, MN location to find out what exactly they intend to do for me beyond passing the buck. I'll update you as the issue develops.

Gallup, USA Today Show Bush Up Seven Points

In another poll confirming Bush's breakout this week, USA Today shows George Bush leading John Kerry outside the margin of error for the first time in the campaign:

President Bush widened his lead over John Kerry after a combative Republican National Convention deepened questions about the Democratic candidate's leadership, especially on terrorism.

As the campaign enters its last eight weeks, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday shows Bush at 52%, Kerry at 45% and independent candidate Ralph Nader at 1% among likely voters. Before the convention, Bush led Kerry by 2 percentage points.

Just as with the more dramatic Time and Newsweek polls, the real story shows in the poll's internals. Terrorism has moved back to the top of the list of concerns for voters this fall, and Bush has extended his lead over Kerry on that issue by ten full points, to a gap of 27:

But the New York convention has reshaped views of the political landscape and the candidates in ways helpful to the GOP. Views of whether Bush has the personality and leadership qualities to be president improved by 6 points; those of Kerry declined by 14 points.

And the importance of terrorism — the major issue on which Bush has an advantage — surged. Voters now say terrorism is as important as the economy, and more important than the war in Iraq, in determining their vote. The president is preferred by 27 points over his challenger in handling terrorism, up from a 10-point edge last month. By 2-to-1, those surveyed say the chances of a terrorist attack against the USA would be less if Bush rather than Kerry were elected.

The Kerry campaign chalks this up as the result of "ugly and inaccurate speeches" at the Republican convention, part of the Democrats' new strategy to simply cry and pout whenever a Republican opens their mouth. With the exception of Zell Miller, the Republican convention speeches barely mentioned John Kerry, preferring to focus on Bush's track record of accomplishments in his first term. For those who saw and read the speeches at the convention, that dog won't hunt.

Kerry needs to quit painting himself as a victim at every turn. Americans don't elect victims, they elect leaders, and Kerry has yet to figure that out.

More Doublespeak On Iraq

John Kerry, in an appearance today in Pennsylvania, continued to vacillate on his approach to Iraq as supporters forced him to answer questions on the issue at an appearance on Canonsburg. Kerry flipped back to his earlier, fully anti-war position of the primary campaign and eschewed his assertion last month that he would have gone to war against Saddam regardless of the WMD question:

Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry on Monday called the invasion of Iraq "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" and said his goal was to withdraw U.S. troops in his first White House term.

Under pressure from some Democrats to change the subject from national security -- regarded by many as President Bush's strongest issue -- Kerry tried to focus exclusively on the economy and other domestic topics at a neighborhood meeting but supporters raised Iraq.

The Massachusetts senator, who has said he would have voted to give Bush the authority to use force if necessary against Iraq even if he had known at the time that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, has struggled to draw clear contrasts with the president.

Nor did Kerry stop there. He called the contributions of allies such as Britain, Italy, Poland, and South Korea "the phoniest thing I've ever heard," saying that they had "500 troops here and 500 troops there," despite these countries having thousands of troops -- especially Britain, which stations tens of thousands in Iraq and had 40,000 at the beginning of the war fighting alongside America. And yet, he also asserted this:

He denied that he was "Monday morning quarterbacking."

Nowhere does Kerry explain how he would have convinced France and Germany to send troops to Iraq while they pocketed millions from the Oil-For-Food program. This is no mean distinction, either. Kerry keeps insisting that having their cooperation would have legitimized Bush's efforts in Iraq, but never talks about the fact that both countries have been deeply implicated in the UN corruption that fed billions to Saddam Hussein while he paid off officials in both countries with oil futures worth millions of dollars. Nor does Kerry tell audiences how little military support either country could contribute, even had they been inclined to do so.

Kerry continues to argue Iraq from all sides of the debate, providing his own odd version of triangulation. His only consistent statement is his intent to remove American troops at the first opportunity from Iraq, leaving the Iraqis holding the bag against the terrorists in their midst. It's the same cut-and-run strategy that we have employed for a quarter-century in that region and one of the reasons we have the problems with Islamofascists now. The fact that Kerry still does not understand that retreat does not equal victory demonstrates that he learned nothing from his activism in the 1970s and 1980s. He is the wrong candidate for the wrong office at the wrong time.

Addendum: In the AP update, Kerry has apparently abandoned his pledge earlier this summer to have the bulk of American troops home by next summer. This is yet another point of vacillation for Kerry and highlights the fact that he still has not disclosed any comprehensive plan for Iraq or the war on terror. He only campaigns as the Not-Bush and his entire debate consists of nothing but the automatic gainsay of his opponent. As Monty Python once said, that's not an argument -- it's petulance.

Kerry Advisor: Print Press Deliberately Targets Swiftvets

Today's Boston Globe runs a lengthy article about John Kerry's decision to feature his Viet Nam service as the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. Patrick Healy's report uncovers several interesting nuggets from his in-depth research into this ultimately disastrous strategic choice, but none quite so interesting as this assertion by David McKean, a Kerry advisor:

Yet in meetings with Kerry, McKean and other advisers say, they told the Democrat that he had an extraordinary story of heroism to tell Americans. Campaign advisers say they felt sure of two things: Past Vietnam critics like John O'Neill, now a leader of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, would probably resurface, but Kerry and his allies could neutralize the criticism as they had done before.

The attacks on Kerry by the swift boat group, however, have stunned many in the camp and left Kerry frustrated that the media have not dismissed the charges as unsubstantiated. "What has surprised me is the voracity with which they have tried to attack his heroism," McKean said. "I have never seen people lie so egregiously and get away with it. This is as close to McCarthyism as you can get in a campaign. The print press has worked hard to discredit it, but television just replays the charges over and over."

This series of assertions boggles the mind. First, let's recall that the print press' job isn't to discredit critics of Democratic candidates -- it's to search for and report the truth. McKean and the Kerry campaign felt comfortable enough with the print press, however, to assume that they would reliably attack the Swiftvets once they raised their voices (and pens) against Kerry. McKean only rues the fact that the campaign couldn't control television.

Did the print press try to discredit the Swiftvets? Only after ignoring them for weeks failed to stop the story from breaking to the surface.

But let's take another piece of McKean's statement to Healy, the notion that the Swiftvets "lie so egregiously". He then accuses them of McCarthyism, but who exactly is guilty of that charge? So far, the Kerry campaign has been forced to back down from at least three components of its Viet Nam narrative:

* Kerry's 25-year-old Cambodian Christmas fable, which has morphed and split into multiple near-Cambodian experiences with Special Forces/CIA entanglements
* Kerry's stealing of Tedd Peck's engagement on 29 January 1969, which he included in his website timeline
* Kerry's and David Alston's stories about Alston serving with Kerry on the 29 January and 28 February engagements, which Captain's Quarters determined was impossible -- and Alston no longer makes appearances with Kerry in telling those stories

Also, as a result of the scrutiny applied to Kerry's narrative, the following medals that Kerry thrust to the forefront of his campaign are now under question:

* His explanation for his first Purple Heart for the "action" of 2 December conflicts with his own journals, which states on 11 Dec that he had not yet been shot at -- and the application for that award was processed long after the event and through a different chain of command than that under which Kerry served on 2 Dec.

* The Navy has launched an investigation of how Kerry had three separate commendations for one Silver Star, including one signed and supposedly written by John Lehman in the 1980s, while Lehman insists he never saw, wrote, or signed it. The Navy is also investigating how Kerry claimed a combat "V" for the Silver Star, a device that does not apply to that award.

The only factual refutations that have occurred so far apply to John Kerry's narrative, not that of the 250-plus Swiftvets with whom he served. So who's lied to the electorate so far? It doesn't appear to be the Swiftvets, which makes the only "egregious" liar in this campaign John Kerry.

Healy includes more entertaining nuggets in his in-depth look at the Kerry campaign's struggle with the Viet Nam narrative, although their irony escaped Healy. For instance, Healy writes:

Indeed, Kerry hyped his Vietnam service at the kickoff, asking his former crewmates to join him on stage. But campaign aides were frustrated when the media did not embrace the war hero storyline and focused instead on the race with then-front-runner Howard Dean. As Dean gained momentum, Kerry's advisers publicly shrugged off the polls, but one statistic stunned some of them.

"A staggering amount of people still didn't know that John was a Vietnam veteran -- it was extraordinary," McKean said. "We felt like John's story wasn't breaking through, and it was a critical part of who he was and a critical part of the campaign."

Part of the problem was the candidate. Kerry rarely opened up about Vietnam, leaving the glory for his crewmates to share. But he concentrated on overcoming his own Brahmin-bred modesty, advisers said, talking more than ever about how he had "bled for his country" and killed Viet Cong.

Oh, yeah, hardly anyone knew that Kerry was a Viet Nam veteran! His emphasis on his war record had become such a joke that the Opinionjournal blog Best Of The Web had a running gag included in any entry about Kerry: "who, by the way, served in Viet Nam". Besides, Kerry's infamous anti-war stance had long been known as the basis of his public life. Kerry himself was so reticent to talk about his experience that he wrote a letter to the Boston Herald in 1979 comparing it to Apocalypse Now, with the movie coming up short to the danger Kerry experienced -- according to Kerry.

Healy's conclusion, though, reveals the pure political calculation behind the emphasis on Kerry's service record, and it comes from Kerry's own biographer:

Whether this counterassault will put Vietnam squarely back in the win column for the Kerry campaign will become clear in the next eight weeks. Democrats, including advisers to Kerry, remain wary and uncertain, just as the candidate once was about telling his Vietnam story. "Kerry decided to make Vietnam the centerpiece of his campaign for one clear reason: Imagine him without his military record -- he would just be another liberal from Taxachusetts," Brinkley said. "With Vietnam, he could challenge Republicans on their strongest position -- standing with the military and with the American flag. Now you're seeing the negative effects of that."

The Kerry campaign has made his Viet Nam service its front in order to disguise the fact that Kerry has been a complete non-entity for the past twenty years in the Senate, voting over and over again for tax hikes and defense and intelligence cuts. Kerry campaigned for nuclear freezes and against the death penalty while introducing almost no legislation, despite his tenure in the Senate. And now that people have decided to look into the only qualification Kerry himself has offered for his candidacy, his campaign squeals about McCarthyism.

Does anyone trust these people to keep us safe?

At Least He Has Experience With Meltdowns

John Kerry has shaken up his campaign staff after a disastrous August which in two polls has seen him suffer a nineteen-point turnaround, in a year where the electorate supposedly only can shift three or four points overall. However, his new addition to the campaign may raise more eyebrows than confidence in his ability to turn the Kerry campaign around:

Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, under pressure to bring new focus to his campaign, added a veteran political strategist to his travelling campaign entourage, rounding out changes to his senior staff.

Democratic National Committee General Election Manager John Sasso will become the senior campaign staffer aboard the Kerry campaign plane, a key role in the final weeks leading up to the election.

Sasso's résumé includes a stint managing the failed 1988 presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis.

In a campaign that already reminds too many people of the Dukakis disaster -- where the Democrat built a seventeen-point lead, only to throw it away on a tank ride -- adding Sasso will only strengthen the comparisons between Dukakis and his former lieutenant governor. Besides, why select a man who had such a meltdown on his record to rescue Kerry from an identical collapse? Obviously, Sasso couldn't do it with Dukakis, or did I miss the Dukakis Administration?

Otherwise, the rest of the additions and changes reflect a return to Clinton's power base:

* Joe Lockhart is taking over communications and strategy
* Doug Sosnik and Joel Johnson have been added as political advisors

More Clinton aides will undoubtedly jump on board as requested. Meanwhile, CNN reports that Stephanie Cutter, whose hysterical and self-contradictory rants in response to the onlsaught of negative information coming out regarding Kerry, will keep her title but will be functionally demoted to spokesperson instead of running communications. And Mary Beth Cahill, who had been the architect of the Kerry campaign, will also take a back seat to Sasso. No word on her new duties has been released.

Kerry's staff says that these changes are the "normal evolution" of a presidential campaign, but I can't remember the last time the Democrats needed to sack a communications director and campaign manager in the days immediately following a Republican convention. Nor do I recall a pattern of yanking control from the candidate's own longtime staffers in favor of campaigners from a previous administration.

Make no mistake -- despite the spin coming from the Kerry campaign, the Democrats are in full panic mode, and they don't trust John Kerry to lead them out of it. That's why the Clintonistas have taken command of the campaign. And if they don't trust Kerry to lead them through hard times, why should we?

Understanding Slowly Dawns

For years, the US has been explaining that the threat posed by Islamofascist terror was not limited to al-Qaeda or the Taliban, nor bounded by Afghanistan's borders. Our enemy has broad support, fights on many fronts, and has a pan-Islamic goal of eliminating Western civilization and its influence, starting in Southwest Asia but certainly not stopping there. And, we have insisted, one of the main fronts of this new world war has been Israel.

This last lesson has taken the longest to sink in, given the Left's infatuation with the Palestinian cause. They march and holler on behalf of the Palestinians who suffer under occupation, without ever explaining the context of two major wars being launched against Israel through their territory preceding that occupation. And the Left continues to laud Yasser Arafat as a statesman, despite his long track record of terrorism, including the murder of Israeli athletes in Munich at the 1972 Olympics, his direct involvement in the murder of an American ambassador, and his ongoing war against Israelis through bombing civilian targets like pizzerias and cafes.

Even worse, the Europeans shared this dichotomy on terrorism, compartmentalizing al-Qaeda while lauding Arafat. Now, however, it appears that Russia may have had the scales fall from its eyes. The AP reports that Russia appears ready to officially ally with Israel in fighting terror:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Monday that Israel's renewed offer to share its experience of combatting militant groups, in the wake of the Russian school massacre, would give a boost to the fight against global terror.

Speaking to Israeli opposition leader Shimon Peres at the start of a whirlwind day of meetings with officials in Jerusalem, Lavrov said terrorism is one of the biggest challenges facing the international community.

"We appreciate the very strong readiness of the Israeli people to help Russia at this hour and this will certainly strengthen the counterterrorist coalition these days," he said.

Without recognizing that these terror groups operate under a common vision, if not with explicit connections and coordination, it will be impossible to contain and destroy Islamofascist terrorists. One cannot excuse fanatic murderers in one area while trying to exterminate them in another. Hamas, Hezb' Allah, Islamic Jihad, and al-Qaeda all come from the same hatred of freedom and secular government, and Arafat provides the example and political cover they need to survive.

Russia has just received a brutal reminder that Islamofascists have declared a world war against the West, and their rational reaction should serve as a reminder to the rest of the world. We cannot avoid this fight, nor can we afford to make distinctions between different strips of homicidal maniacs.

Kerry Calls McCain A Liar

John Kerry's campaign has now responded to the speakers at the Republican National Conventionby calling them all liars and distorters. Apparently no one is safe from Kerry's poisoned pen, including his first choice for running mate, John McCain. The author of this piece doesn't bother to list opposing arguments or any supporting evidence that the plethora of statements -- their website lists a whopping 143 of them -- are false, misleading, or half-truths, as the title labels them. In fact, they don't even distinguish which is which.

McCain comes under fire for these four statements:

Bush Has Done A Good Job With Our Allies.

10. Senator John McCain: “My friends in the Democratic Party and I'm fortunate to call many of them my friends assure us they share the conviction that winning the war against terrorism is our government's most important obligation. I don't doubt their sincerity. They emphasize that military action alone won't protect us, that this war has many fronts: in courts, financial institutions, in the shadowy world of intelligence, and in diplomacy. They stress that America needs the help of her friends to combat an evil that threatens us all, that our alliances are as important to victory as are our armies. We agree. And, as we've been a good friend to other countries in moments of shared perils, so we have good reason to expect their solidarity with us in this struggle. That is what the President believes. And, thanks to his efforts we have received valuable assistance from many good friends around the globe, even if we have, at times, been disappointed with the reactions of some.”

11. Senator John McCain: “Our President will work with all nations willing to help us defeat this scourge that afflicts us all.”

Bush Did It Right Going to War Against Iraq.

12. Senator John McCain: “However just the cause, we should shed a tear for all that is lost when war claims its wages from us. But there is no avoiding this war. We tried that, and our reluctance cost us dearly. And while this war has many components, we can't make victory on the battlefield harder to achieve so that our diplomacy is easier to conduct.”

13. Senator John McCain: “After years of failed diplomacy and limited military pressure to restrain Saddam Hussein, President Bush made the difficult decision to liberate Iraq. Those who criticize that decision would have us believe that the choice was between a status quo that was well enough left alone and war. But there was no status quo to be left alone."

Let's take a look at each of these in order to find out why Kerry would call his supposed good friend John McCain -- a man who has defended Kerry and spoken only well of him on the campaign trail -- a dishonest liar.

#10: Since most of this statement actually praises the presumed points of agreement between the Democrats and the Republicans, the only part of #10 that Kerry could rationally find objectionable would be the assertion that "thanks to [Bush's] efforts we have received valuable assistance from many good friends around the globe." Why he would object to this statement makes little sense to me at all. Several countries, including Britain, Italy, Poland, South Korea, and a number of other countries have troops stationed in Iraq, and several have suffered casualties as a result. Can we not agree that their assistance has had value? Even if we disagree on whether the three countries who did not agree to support our efforts (France, Germany, and Russia) ever would have agreed under any conditions to end the regime that put millions of dollars into their pockets?

If Kerry has not been made aware that other nations have troops in Iraq, some (Britain, Poland, Italy, South Korea) numbering in the thousands, it speaks poorly about his understanding of the military situation and his expertise on any solutions. Perhaps he should attend more briefings.

#11: “Our President will work with all nations willing to help us defeat this scourge that afflicts us all.” How could this possibly be untrue? Have we turned down any offers to join the coalition? For this to be a lie or a mischaracterization, Kerry would have to assert that George Bush made a habit of turning down countries that begged the US to allow their troops to join ours in Baghdad. What Bush has been unwilling to do is to kowtow to nations that only love us as victims and resent us when we use the same power that kept them free from Soviet domination for two decades to engage the terrorists on their ground rather than ours.

#12: In this case, the Kerry campaign misleads or flat-out lies by placing McCain's quotes in the wrong context, and one would have to conclude that it was purposeful. McCain, in saying "there is no avoiding this war," was speaking about the broader war on terror, not specifically Iraq. However, even if McCain applied this to Iraq, he would still be correct. Those who labor under the delusion that the containment strategies were working have not paid attention to the evidence discovered after the war about arms shipments to Saddam's Iraq through Syria, bought with the billions skimmed off of the Oil-For-Food program. European opposition to the sanctions regime had been increasing for years even though Saddam had defied UN resolutions calling for him to verifiably disarm for twelve years.

With Saddam's record, anyone who thinks that he would suddenly become a rational and moderate leader after the sanctions regime completely fell apart and would abandon his terrorist ties is nothing short of delusional. And if you want any confirmation of that, you could ask John Kerry, who a few weeks ago claimed that he still would have voted to authorize the use of force against Saddam even if he'd known that WMD would not be found.

So who's lying now? It doesn't appear to be John McCain.

#13: At least Kerry uses McCain's quote in the correct context, but it's the same argument as #12. And it gets the same response. If John Kerry doesn't think a re-armed Saddam Hussein presented a danger to US interests in that area and around the globe, then perhaps he can explain what Saddam was doing putting sleeper agents inside the US.

If John Kerry thinks that John McCain is a liar, perhaps in the future he can come up with a better explanation of why, or any explanation at all. This list of unrebutted statements amounts to nothing more than random ad hominem attacks instead of enlightened debate, and the poison of name-calling rather than honest disagreement. The latter is especially egregious considering the lengths to which McCain went in his speech to impute nothing but the best motivations to his political opponents. Kerry is incapable of even returning McCain's graciousness. It provides another look into the character of the Democratic nominee, a character whose uncloaking has led to Kerry's sudden erosion in the polls. (Hat tip: Wolff.)

How Newsday Lied To Me

Last week, Leslie Seifert from Newsday contacted me to request my permission to excerpt my convention blogging in order to give their readers a taste of our coverage. I had anticipated that a few media outlets would want to do this, so the request did not especially surprise me. I wrote back and asked them to send me the excerpt they planned to use, and they selected this:

One of the challenges we faced yesterday was the lack of beverages available at the Garden . . . I assumed that we would have all of the concession stands open, but they seem to be closed . . .

Stepping into the breach to soothe dry throats is Political Grounds, which describes itself as "America's Politically-Incorrect Coffee." They've set up a booth giving away free bottled water and very good cups of coffee to anyone who wants to stop by their booth. Julie also gave me a pound of their coffee, which comes in eight varieties. I selected Osama's Mama, which states that it's "dedicated to our fighting men and women searching those caves for the evil one who brought us the events of 9-11. Only a mother with a foot-long beard could love this guy. Osama, where's your mama?"

As most of you who read my convention blogging already know, this hardly represents the bulk of my work at the RNC, and I grew suspicious that this selection jumped out at Newsday as the most interesting excerpt from my blog. This suspicion led to an e-mail exchange with Leslie Seifert (my responses in italics):

I'm fine with this excerpt, but I'm not sure where you're going with your piece. While I think that post was a bit of fun, I don't think it's necessarily representative of my work at the Convention.

------------

I am trying to give a flavor of different blogs, and I am particularly interested in the ways they added to coverage that you didn't see elsewhere. So I am avoiding using straight political commentary, which is not much different than what you can see anywhere in the media.

-------------

I don't know whether to be flattered or insulted. ;-) I understand. Thank you for the update!

-------------

I hope you'll be flattered; I chose stuff that I thought was interesting and in your case funny. I'm not trying to embarrass anybody.

Well, the Newsday article is out now and you can see for yourself what Newsday and Siefert selected as representative posts from each of the blogs. You can see that political analysis and substantive posts met with Newsday's approval, as long as it made the Republicans look bad. Since Seifert didn't look hard enough for anything critical on my blog -- like my review of Dick Cheney's speech, for instance -- Newsday picked the least substantial post I wrote, one that mostly served as a courtesy to Political Grounds, who provided us with free refreshments throughout the convention.

Looking through the rest of their selections, I can hardly say that they represent the overall tone of the blogging coverage at each blog, but at least they selected something substantial from the others. That's something Seifert specifically assured me that Newsday didn't want. So now Captain's Quarters appears concerned with nothing more than promotional gimmicks, thanks to Seifert's lie.

Roger Simon is even less pleased with the result of Newsday's hack job:

An interesting (but small) example is how I have been distorted. In tomorrow's Newsday there will be a number of quotes from those who blogged at the Republican Convention. While crossing the country yesterday, I received two urgent emails from a gentleman named Seifert from that newspaper. My email box gets rather clogged and, despite dodgy WiFi connections, I could easily have missed them, but I did manage to read them. They asked permission to excerpt my blog, without providing the excerpts they had in mind (a normal and professional thing to do - I would have). I smelled a rat, but gave them permission to do so as a test. And guess what? They chose the most anti-Bush remarks I made, highlighting my firm opposition to the President on the social issues. You would have to read these excerpts very closely to realize that I unequivocally support Bush in the election and would no more vote for John Kerry for President in an era of terrorism than for a protester on Seventh Avenue. (I will provide the Newsday link tomorrow, if it is available.)

After covering media bias and lies for almost a year at CQ, I suppose I should not be surprised to wind up the object of their malpractice now, and truthfully, when I saw the excerpt, I knew something wasn't right. Instead of following my instincts and withdrawing my permission, I trusted Seifert. It won't happen again. (Hat tip to Greyhawk at Mudville Gazette for the information.)

Northern Alliance On The Air Again!

We'll be doing our fourth and final State Fair show today, from noon to 3 pm CT -- in other words, just a couple of minutes! Check us out on our Internet stream if you're not in the local area. We'll be talking homeland security, the election, and other great subjects.

Now Conventions Have Bounces: Democrats

The New York Times takes a look at the Bush momentum coming out of the Republican convention as George Bush goes stumping across Ohio to firm up his support. John Kerry attacked Bush for raising the price of Medicare even though the benefits have been widely expanded, suggesting that Halliburton should pay for the increases without explaining why. And in the meantime, the Kerry campaign suddenly shifted positions on convention bounces, trying to pass off Bush's sudden upsurge as a passing phenomenon:

Fortified by new polls showing him with a clear lead over Senator John Kerry, President Bush talked of economic renewal and tried to blunt Democratic attacks on his economic record as both he and Mr. Kerry campaigned Saturday across northeastern Ohio.

"In order to make sure this economy grows, we've got to make sure we keep your taxes low," Mr. Bush said in Kirtland, Ohio, lampooning Mr. Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, as a big-government liberal "who has already promised over $2 trillion of new federal programs."

"That's a lot, even for a senator from Massachusetts," Mr. Bush said, as the crowd booed.

Mr. Kerry, cruising by bus from Akron to Steubenville, criticized Mr. Bush over job losses and health care as he campaigned in this economically battered state for a second straight day. His aides also released a hard-hitting new advertisement showing Mr. Bush promising on Thursday night at the Republican convention to help the elderly, a day before federal officials announced the biggest-ever dollar increase in Medicare premiums, raising the monthly cost by $11.60, to $78.20. ...

"Let me ask you something: Who are they going to send the bill to?" he said of the Medicare rate increase. "Are they going to send it to Halliburton? Are they going to send it to Ken Lay and Enron? You bet they're not; they're going to send the bill to our senior citizens."

First off, the cost of the Medicare increase will wind up being spread out to all American taxpayers, not just the seniors and disabled who benefit from it. Second, what's wrong with asking people to contribute to their own health insurance? Why should the only people who are exempt from funding this benefit be the ones who actually benefit from it? Associating this with Halliburton only emphasizes the conspiracy-theory lunacy that Kerry has now embraced on the campaign trail, marginalizing him even further with centrists but making the International ANSWER Deaniacs ecstatic with joy.

In the meantime, after weeks of explanations from the Democrats that conventions no longer produce poll bounces, the party line has changed without explanation. Now, Kerry campaign spokespeople assert that they anticipated Bush's eleven-point bounce all along, and Eastasia has always been at war with Oceania:

Tad Devine, a senior strategist for Mr. Kerry, said that he was not surprised by the gains for Mr. Bush in the polls but that he did not expect them to last.

"Typically, incumbent presidents reach a high in terms of the horse race right after their conventions," he said, adding that Mr. Bush's edge should start slipping away quickly.

The Kerry campaign has become quite adept at spinning away the bad news. It's a talent that will be put to good use over the next 60 days if they can't quit talking about Viet Nam and start making sense about issues that matter now.

King Of Clubs Joins Saddam

Reuters reports that Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Saddam's #2 on the military side and long suspected of leading the terrorist insurgency in Iraq, has been captured by Iraqi forces in Tikrit:

The most-wanted Saddam Hussein aide in Iraq, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, was captured in the town of Tikrit on Sunday, Iraq's defense ministry said.

The ministry said Ibrahim was captured by members of Iraq's national guard backed by U.S. forces. Tikrit was Saddam's hometown and one of the powerbases of his regime. ...

The U.S. military has said Ibrahim was directly involved in organizing and funding attacks on U.S. forces since the fall of Saddam. There was a $10 million bounty on his head, and in a deck of cards issued to U.S. troops to help them identify fugitives, Ibrahim was the King of Clubs. ...

Ibrahim was Saddam's number two in the Revolutionary Command Council, and held a senior post on a government committee in charge of northern Iraq when chemical weapons were used against the town of Halabja in 1988, killing thousands of Kurds.

Not only does al-Douri's capture remind us that the operations in Iraq continue to produce results, the fact that forces of the free government of the new Iraq captured him strengthens their prestige. If al-Douri provided any leadership to the terrorists or even just financial support, the Iraqis should be able to roll up even more of the networks. At the very least, with al-Douri captured, their command and control will be severely compromised.

Let's hope that this will generate similar effects as the capture of al-Qaeda's computer-network genius and allow the Iraqis and the Americans to begin rolling up terrorist leadership throughout Iraq.

UPDATE: Well, maybe not:

Iraq's Defense Minister Hazim al-Shalaan said on Sunday reports on the capture of Izzat Ibrahim al Douri, the most wanted Saddam Hussein aide, were baseless.

Fournier: Bush Nears Electoral College Target

In a dramatic reversal highlighting the rapid decline of the John Kerry campaign, the AP's political analyst Ron Fournier reports that George Bush has firmed up at least 237 Electoral College votes at this point in the election:

The race is spread over 19 states, with the fiercest competition in Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, New Mexico and Pennsylvania, according to state polls and interviews with strategists in both parties.

Two months before Election Day, the president has 20 states firmly in his column and eight leaning his way, for a total of 237 electoral votes. It takes 270 to win the White House.

The Democratic challenger has 11 states plus the District of Columbia in hand, with five states leaning his way. That puts Kerry at 211 electoral votes.

Normally, this kind of pre-election tallying would be of little note, except that these results have reversed themselves over the past two weeks. Kerry held an EC lead up to that point, when questions about Kerry's leadership, honesty, and integrity began to find purchase and Kerry disappeared from view. He has not been interviewed by a legitimate media resource since August 1st, when the Swiftboat ads began to find play and the book Unfit For Command went into wide release. At one point this summer, Kerry scolded Bush for not participating in enough press conferences and promised to hold one every month.

It's now been five weeks since Kerry even made himself available to the press. Incumbent presidents can sometimes hide in the Oval Office and try to look busy in order to avoid media scrutiny, but it doesn't look very good; Carter tried it, and look where it got him. Challengers need to be aggressive, not go into hiding, and the public rightly assumes that Kerry disappeared in order to avoid tough questions about his Christmas In Cambodia fables and contradictory testimony from Kerry himself on his combat record, a subject that wouldn't exist had Kerry not wrapped himself in his medals early on as his primary qualification for office.

Fournier puts it another way in another context, but his conclusion also applies to the Invisible Candidate strategy as well:

As he opened the fall campaign by criticizing Bush's economic record, Kerry said Friday, "The president wants you to re-elect him? For what?"

Voters will be asking a similar question: You want us to send an incumbent president into early retirement. For what?

If Kerry can't bring himself to meet the media in order to answer the questions that they and the voters have, why should we trust him with the highest office? Why should we vote for the man who erupts with anger when we dare question the only qualifications he's presented for the office he seeks? Why should we trust our national security to a man who's too afraid to come out and meet with the media? And why should we trust the political party that openly threatens a smear campaign rather than pushes their candidate in front of a microphone to answer for himself?

Kerry can't win this election hiding behind Susan Estrich's skirts like a frightened little boy. If he wants to regain some momentum, he needs to act like a man, answer our questions, and then drop the entire Viet Nam routine and focus on issues that have meaning now.