Democrats: Kerry Dragging Anchor On House Races

The Washington Post reports that Democrats are increasingly frustrated with the performance of John Kerry, and now expect to fall far short of their goal of recapturing the House in November:

Democrats' hopes of regaining the House majority this fall -- never bright at best -- appear increasingly dim, in part because of Sen. John F. Kerry's lackluster campaign performance over the past six weeks, numerous analysts say.

In late July, as upbeat Democrats held their convention in Boston, party leaders said they had capable, well-financed House candidates poised in several states to exploit a nationwide trend that seemed just around the corner. "Democrats can win the House back if this breeze, this movement for a change, continues," said Rep. Robert T. Matsui (Calif.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Since then, however, Republicans conducted a sharp-edged convention in New York, Kerry was slow to respond to attacks on his character and policies, and many of the Democrats' most promising House challengers seemed frozen in place.

When the Massachusetts senator appeared to gain momentum entering and exiting the Boston convention, "the theory was it would all seep down to the House races," said Amy Walter, who tracks House contests for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. "But it hasn't happened." Among top Democrats, she said, "you just don't hear that same level of enthusiasm you did a month ago."

This is the price the Democrats will pay for hastily selecting a candidate through an artificially rushed primary season. The Democrats purposefully "front-loaded" the primary elections in order to compress the time their candidates would have to attack one another so as not to seriously wound the winner. For much of the pre-primary run-up, the winner looked to be Howard Dean, but when he imploded and Kerry stole his message, Democrats rushed to his banner.

Unfortunately, after having pushed him into the ticket in record time -- he had been scoring in single digits six weeks before Iowa -- the Democrats have discovered that John Kerry is a terrible campaigner on the national stage, where Ted Kennedy's aura does nothing to protect him. Even if he inspired the base, he could create enthusiasm that would reach down the ticket and boost Democrats across the country. Recent polling shows that not only has Kerry never really inspired the hard-core party members, but that the little enthusiasm he generated has slipped significantly over the past month.

All signs point to an electoral disaster for the left this year. Democrats have begun to realize their folly. If it comes to pass, expect the Democrats to tear their party apart, and the Deaniacs should be the ones ejected from the leadership. Whether that happens depends on if the Democrats recover their senses after November.

"I Gave It To Them"

Bill Burkett made an admission even further than that of his op-ed piece on August 25th, when he stated that he had "reassembled" the files he claimed were destroyed in 1997. The AP reports that four days before that publication, Burkett sent an e-mail to his Yahoo group that describes his contact with the Democratic campaign:

The retired Guard official, Bill Burkett, said in an Aug. 21 e-mail to a list of Texas Democrats that after getting through "seven layers of bureaucratic kids" in the Democrat's campaign, he talked with former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland about information that would counter criticism of Kerry's Vietnam War service. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the e-mail Saturday.

"I asked if they wanted to counterattack or ride this to ground and outlast it, not spending any money. (Cleland) said counterattack. So I gave them the information to do it with," Burkett wrote.

Burkett, who lives just outside of Abilene, wrote that no one at the Kerry campaign called him back.

And yet, within two weeks, the forgeries were faxed from the Abilene Kinko's that Burkett patronized to a waiting 60 Minutes production team at CBS. That's an amazing series of coincidences ...

The Road Less Graveled

(A down home message for Dan Rather in the colorful Texas idiom he so loves, from a CQ reader in the Lone Star State. UPDATE: Thanks to Leaddog, I'll note that this appeared in American Thinker, a great blog, which Russ forgot to mention ...)

Y’all know what we all been thinkin’ out here in Texas, Dan, since you started all this foolishness? We think y’all been pissin’ down our necks an’ tellin’ us it’s rain for so long that you boys done got to believin’ it yourselves. Heck, we think maybe you been back East so long you got yourself thinkin’ us folks out here couldn’t hit sand if we fell off our horses; couldn’t hit water if we fell outta the boat. Danged if you ain’t been treatin’ us like you think we got squirrels swimmin’ in our gene pools or sumthin.’ You need to remind yourself that a tree don’t ever get too big for a short dog to lift his leg on, Dan.

Bout them documents bein’ genuine; well, hells-bells, Danny Boy, Grannie’s glasses are so thick, when she looks at a bare wall she see’s folks wavin’ at her, an’ even she can tell them memos are bout as phony as hips on a rattlesnake. We’re startin’ to think your brain done got harder than a woodpecker’s lips if you can’t see that. As far as that story bout George an’ his National Guard duty, looks to us like you’re tryin’ to put wheels on a cow an’ call it a dairy truck. Then you go pokin’ up her butt hopin’ you’re gonna find ice cream. Besides, ever time you durn fools put that picture of young George in his flyboy outfit on the TeeVee, ol’ Jane Fonda loses another herd of her Vagina Voters. Hell, Charlene says that sweet boy’s purtier than my new tangerine metalflake bass boat.

Well, Danny, you still ain’t lost all your redneck habits; you boys took one pickup load to the dump an’ come back with two. Dadgummit, Dan, where you gittin’ all this stuff? You been callin’ some kinda mystery numbers that ol’ boy, whatsisname, Kenneth, is bringin’ you offa bathroom walls at truck stops? Somethin’ you oughta be worryin’ about, Danny Boy: you know how the boys say when you go on a hunt always make sure to save a round for your huntin’ guide? Like if he don’t find nuthin’ else for you to shoot? You suppose any a them rich, fancy-shmancy, New York dudes you work for ever been on a hunt and heard that, Dan, hmmm?

You know how you always been fond a sayin’ you feel like a long tailed cat in a room full a rockin’ chairs? Well, seems to us like you’re startin’ to look more like the ground floor tenant in a two-story outhouse. Yeah, for sure you ain’t lookin’ like the tallest hog at the trough no more. Why, we bet you got yourself wired so tight right now that if we stuck a chunk a coal up your butt it’d come out a diamond in about five minutes. Last time we seen you on TeeVee your smile looked like Charlene’s little ol’ chihuahua dog that time he bit down on one a them ol’ yeller-jacket wasps; you know, kinda like that look a feller gets when he squats with his spurs on.

An’ about your boss, that city slicker fella, Johnnie Klein, the one said somethin’ bout all us sittin’ out here in our long johns? Well we’re gonna give him some advice so good he can take it out back an’ bury it in a Mason jar. You see, the fact is, Danny Boy, now that all us earthworms is gittin’ guns, you big birds is gonna have to be more careful bout where you’re peckin.’ Somebody needs to tell that dude, Klein, that his cage may still be turnin’ but his squirrel’s done died. Course, maybe the boy can’t help hisself; it might run in the family, you know, generic. We heard tell when he was born his ol’ momma carried the little feller around upside down for a whole year wonderin’ why he only had one eye.

Yeah them ol’ boys up there at Power Line done gone an’ slapped you dudes nekkid an’ hid your clothes. Them blogger cats watched you fellers jump in that ol’ litter box an’ they just flat covered you up, quicker ‘n slicker than WD 40 on a doorknob. Yeah you boys done gone skinny dippin’ in a pond full a snappin’ turtles. Looks like them broadcastin’ geniuses at CBS done let them yeller-dog Democrats talk you inta sellin’ your mule so you could buy a plow. When you crawled into the sack with little Miss McCauliffe you done got yourself a real ugly bed partner there, Dan, like a real three-bagger, I mean. You know the drill: one bag over her head, one over yours and one over the dog’s so’s at least he’ll have some respect for you come mornin.’

Before all y’all up there at CBS go tryin’ to saddle up another hog for a quarter horse race, you need to think about this: us ol’ boys out here know a keyboard ain’t where you hang the pickup keys and a byte ain’t what Bubba’s pit bull did to Cousin Billy; we know modem ain’t what we did when the weeds got up to the porch and digital ain’t countin’ on our fingers, least not any more. Yeah, we done got ourselves a dog in this fight, a bloggin’ pit bull, Dan Boy, an’ he’s justa slobberin’ for another big ol’ bite of Liberal blubber butt. Didn’t your ol’ daddy ever tell you that you ain’t never gonna be the brightest bulb on the tree if you go huntin’ bobcats with a BB gun?

But cheer up, Dan, maybe one a these days all you pointy-headed, liberal, media fellers will see the light. Course, seein’s where y’all seem to be keepin’ them pointy heads, it’ll prob’ly be one a them there things the doctors use.

Whatcha call ‘em, proctoscopes?

Russ Vaughn

A Texan

P.S. Charlene says to tell you don’t even think about comin’ back to Texas. Way folks out here feel, you’d have to tie a pork chop around your neck just to get a dog to play with you. Well, and maybe Mollie Ivins.

Will Tim Robbins And Susan Sarandon Condemn This?

A chill wind blows through America, threatening freedom of speech and the independence of the media. Is John Ashcroft to blame? No ... this time it appears CBS has decided to crack down on the criticism coming from its affiliates who have been less than pleased with the level of journalistic integrity at 60 Minutes and with Dan Rather's performance. The AP reports that a radio talk-show host has been fired for his outspoken criticism of The Dan:

A radio talk-show host said Saturday he has been fired for criticizing CBS newsman Dan Rather's handling of challenges to the authenticity of memos about President Bush's National Guard service.

"On the talk show that I host, or hosted, I said I felt Rather should either retire or be forced out over this," said Brian Maloney, whose weekly "The Brian Maloney Show" aired for three years on KIRO-AM Radio, a CBS affiliate here.

Maloney says he made that statement on his Sept. 12 program. He was fired Friday, he said.

Let's get this straight. The First Amendment protectors at CBS feel just fine in broadcasting forgeries to smear a sitting President during an election cycle, but they have a problem if their affiliates go on air to criticize them for doing so? Apparently, Dan Rather can attack Republicans at will, but Black Rock brooks no such impertinence from its own staff or from its on-air personalities.

Hypocrisy, thy initials are C-B-S.

France Behind Forged Niger Documentation

The Italian spy who passed on forged documents to American and British intelligence services has confirmed that he did so on orders and under the pay of France, the London Telegraph reports in tomorrow's edition:

The Italian businessman at the centre of a furious row between France and Italy over whose intelligence service was to blame for bogus documents suggesting Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy material for nuclear bombs has admitted that he was in the pay of France. ...

His admission to investigating magistrates in Rome on Friday apparently confirms suggestions that - by commissioning "Giacomo" to procure and circulate documents - France was responsible for some of the information later used by Britain and the United States to promote the case for war with Iraq.

Italian diplomats have claimed that, by disseminating bogus documents stating that Iraq was trying to buy low-grade "yellowcake" uranium from Niger, France was trying to "set up" Britain and America in the hope that when the mistake was revealed it would undermine the case for war, which it wanted to prevent.

Not only did France actively attempt to undermine support for our insistence that the UN finally enforce the sixteen ultimata issued to Iraq from the Security Council, we now have confirmation that France conducted a disinformation campaign against the British and the US. While some domestic politicians like John Kerry and John Edwards continue to insist that France is an American ally, the obvious conclusion of this episode is that France does not see itself as a friend to the US.

Indeed, disinformation operations are specifically designed to confuse and damage an opponent's intelligence services, placing them at a disadvantage against their enemies. Any time another country targets the US for such tactics, it puts American citizens at risk and when successful weakens our national security. But especially after 9/11, such activity cannot be seen as the actions of a friend, even an envious or concerned friend. Deliberate disinformation campaigns during wartime make clear that the aggressor considers themselves an antagonist to the US, if not a complete enemy.

Why would France do somthing this stupid and clumsy? After all, if France wanted to convince the US and Britain that war was unnecessary, creating evidence of Saddam's hunt for WMD material would hardly convince George Bush to stand down -- and Jacques Chirac knows this. No, Chirac had bigger fish to fry. Part of his motivation may have been personal, targeting Bush politically in order to cripple his support at home. That would be bad enough, having the French meddling in our electoral processes. However, it's no secret that the French have been casting the EU as a foil to American power, and blinding our intelligence services with a disinformation campaign advances Chirac's vision of France as a competing superpower.

The American electorate should pay close attention to this incident, especially those who may feel sympathetic to John Kerry's blatherings about deferring to our "friends" on issues of national security. Friends do not engage in disinformation campaigns while we face attacks from Islamofascist terrorists. Allies do not meddle in our elections. Kerry's blindness on this issue underscores how dangerous a Kerry presidency would be for our national security.

Caption Contest #27: Final Sprint Edition

It's Friday, so it must be time for another Captain's Caption Contest! The contest has been a long-running feaure on CQ now, but not as long-running as this presidential campaign has been. Of course, some people got off to a quicker start than others. Here's one who looks like he missed the starter's gun and has some distance to make up:

Guest judging the contest this week will be Gerry from Daly Thoughts, a terrific blog. As always, put your best caption entries in the comments section -- NO e-mail, please! (E-mailed entries will be scanned the Abilene Kinko's, faxed to CBS News, and used to slander Harold Stassen.) The contest will remain open until 6 PM Sunday, September 19th, at which point the comments will be closed and Gerry will pick the winners.

Let the games begin!

BUMP 9/18: Hey, don't forget to tune us in on the Northern Alliance Radio Network, which starts at noon CT ...

In John Kerry's (Fictional) Naval Tradition

David Strom from the Taxpayers League has his own blog along with his wife Margaret, Our House, which combines the best of political analysis and personal reflections, along with a good deal of garden photo-blogging. Taxpayers League sponsors our Internet stream, of course, and also has its own radio show on the stream three hours before ours.

Today, David has a bit of fun with John Kerry, finding a parallel to Kerry in literature -- and the character is even a famous Navy commander! I kid you not. Just don't forget your steel ball bearings ...

Putting Their Money Where Their Mouth Is

Today's New York Post notes that CBS News staffers seem to be a liitle predisposed towards Democrats. In reviewing the political contributions made by Tiffany Network news division employees, the overwhelming majority of funds went to the Democrats:

WITH Dan Rather and CBS under fire for broadcasting what seem to be fake National Guard documents in a story slamming President George W. Bush, PoliticalMoneyLine.com probed the political contributions made by CBS News staffers. Turns out that Rather's minions are overwhelmingly Democratic. CBS News-ers have donated $17,050 to federal candidates and political action committees since 1982. Of that amount, $10,800 was for Democrats and the DNC; $3,500 went to Lenora Fulani's wacky New Alliance Party; and only $2,750 went to the GOP. The biggest individual recipient was Fulani, who received $3,500 from a CBS News staffer back in the 1980s. The second highest was Sen. Hillary Clinton, who took in $2,250 from three CBS News employees. Among the CBS contributors: the late Charles Kuralt, who gave $1,000 to Harvey Gantt for Senate in 1996; David Garfinkle of "60 Minutes," who gave $1,000 to Bill Bradley's presidential campaign; and "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft, who gave $300 to Ham Fish, Jr.'s race for Congress in 1994.

These numbers are very similar to those I reported over two months ago. Interestingly, CBS' parent Viacom split its donations 62-38 for the Democrats. Without CBS, it may have wound up almost even.

Kristof Gets It Wrong

Nicholas Kristof purports to take an objective look at the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth claims in an op-ed for today's New York Times, but instead mostly just mouths the Kerry campaign's obfuscations instead. Kristof starts by taking aim at the easiest target for Kerry's counterclaims -- his supposed volunteerism for hazardous duty, a claim contradicted by Kerry's own words in a 1996 interview:

Did Mr. Kerry volunteer for dangerous duty? Not as much as his campaign would like you to believe. The Kerry Web site declares, "As he was graduating from Yale, John Kerry volunteered to serve in Vietnam - because, as he later said, 'It was the right thing to do.' "

In fact, as Mr. Kerry was about to graduate from Yale, he was inquiring about getting an educational deferment to study in Europe. When that got nowhere, he volunteered for the Navy, which was much less likely to involve danger in Vietnam than other services. After a year on a ship in the ocean, Mr. Kerry volunteered for Swift boats, but at that time they were used only in Vietnam's coastal waters. A short time later, the Swift boats were assigned exceptionally dangerous duties up Vietnamese rivers.

Kristof also admits that Kerry is a serial exaggerator and also partially concedes the fiction of Kerry's Cambodian Christmas, but with a Kristofian spin:

Others who served with him confirm that on Christmas Eve 1968 (not Christmas Day) he got very close to the border, and possibly even strayed across it. But it doesn't seem to have been, as Mr. Kerry has suggested, a deliberate incursion into Cambodia.

No one who served on Kerry's boat asserts that he ever got close to Cambodia on Christmas Eve, 1968. Three of the men reported that the closest they got to Cambodia was Sa Dec, which is 55 miles from the Cambodian border. Even Kerry's own contemporaneous journals confirm that.

Beyond this, Kristof takes his arguments from Kerry HQ. For instance, there is this passage:

Some who served on other boats have called Mr. Kerry a hypochondriac self-promoter. But every enlisted man who was with Mr. Kerry on various boats when he won Purple Hearts and Silver and Bronze Stars says he deserved them. All praise his courage and back his candidacy.

That's just a lie. Stephen Gardner, the enlisted man who served with him the longest on the Swiftboats, contradicts most of what Kerry has to say about his command on PCF-44 and is one of the Swiftvets opposing his candidacy. If Kristof did any kind of investigation into these issues, it would be impossible to miss Gardner; he's appeared on numerous radio and television shows, and is heavily quoted by Swiftvets in support of their claims. Either Kristof is completely incompetent or is fronting for the Kerry campaign.

Did Mr. Kerry deserve his Bronze Star? Yes. The Swift Boat Veterans claim that he was not facing enemy fire when he rescued a Green Beret, Jim Rassmann, but that is contradicted by those were there, like William Rood and Mr. Rassmann (a Republican). In fact, Mr. Rassmann recommended Mr. Kerry for a Silver Star.

There were a lot more people "who were there" than Rood and Rassman; this incident involved seveal boats operating in close proximity on a small river. Rassman was under water for most of the action, such as it was. The only one not aboard PCF-94 who asserts that there was enemy fire after the mine explosion threw Rassman overboard. Everyone else involved has testified that the only fire came from the PCFs, initiating suppression fire at both banks in case the explosion was an ambush instead of a mine. The other PCF OinCs also say that Kerry's PCF bugged out, only coming back for Rassman once it was clear that no engaging fire was forthcoming.

I note that Kristof has not addressed any of the Swiftvets' claims about Kerry's post-Vietnam activities, either. I guess that Kristof can only provide a finite amount of spin after all.

UPDATE: I mixed up Rood's engagements. Rood wasn't there for the Bronze Star engagement. That leaves ... er ... no one but the guys on PCF-94, who understandably might be inclined to support Kerry's version of events. Hat tips to several readers who corrected me on this point.

Another Burkett-Kerry Connection?

As Dan Rather might put it, a strong preponderance of evidence points to Bill Burkett as the culprit behind the forgeries that CBS used to smear George Bush. His lawyer, David Van Os, turns out to be a powerful man in the Texas Democratic Party, as Power Line shows us this morning. Here's a partial list of Van Os' accomplishments from his resume:

* Travis County Democratic Precinct Chairman
* Travis County Democratic Party Chairman
* Bexar County Democratic Precinct Chairman

Another interesting item on Van Os' CV is the final entry, where he notes his assistance in Palm Beach County, Florida, in Democratic efforts for the recounts in the 2000 Presidential election. No doubt that Van Os is well-known for his 30-year party-building work, and as he has now run for the Texas Supreme Court twice (including his current campaign), he has built a strong level of support within Democratic Party leadership.

So how does such a well-connected man within Democratic circles wind up as Burkett's mouthpiece? I can understand why Burkett would want Van Os as his attorney, but why would Van Os want a fringe fire-breather like Burkett as a client, especially this close to his own election? Having any connection to Burkett will likely be fatal to Van Os' hopes for November in Texas.

Could it be to give Burkett a connection to the Democrats that would be protected by attorney-client privelege? Is Van Os involved in Burkett's dirty-tricks campaign while running for the Texas Supreme Court? One thing is certain: his relationship with Burkett allows the long-time Bush hater easy access to the highest levels of the Democratic Party, and if Burkett followed Max Cleland's advice, Van Os' relationship would have made it quite easy for Burkett to be received at Kerry's campaign headquarters.

CBS Confirms Bush Lead Over Kerry

CBS must hate to report this, but their latest poll confirms the earlier Gallup polling that George Bush has opened a significant lead over John Kerry, 50-41:

The contest between President George W. Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry looks much as it did in a CBS News Poll conducted last week, after the Republican convention. Bush’s post-convention bounce remains intact, if even slightly larger in this poll; Bush now leads Kerry 50 percent to 41 percent among registered voters, giving the President a 9-point margin.

In the so-called battleground states, Bush's lead balloons to an astronomical fourteen points as John Kerry can't even break the 40 level:

Voters in 18 battleground states favor Bush over Kerry by 53 percent to 39 percent.

"Battleground" in this case may start looking like Sherman's march to the sea. What did CBS find out about Kerry's meltdown? One reason is that Bush has solid support from his base; only 7 percent of Republicans plan to vote for Kerry, but 20% of professed liberals are crossing over for Bush. His voters are considerably less enthusiastic than Bush's; only 40% of those choosing Kerry say they "strongly favor" him, as opposed to 63% of Bush voters. Attacking Bush hasn't helped, either, as voters have noticed the aggressive campaigning -- and have dropped their support during the same period.

And as Kerry has focused on terrorism, his numbers have steeply declined against Bush on that issue. Bush has always led Kerry on confidence in fighting terrorism but a month ago the gap was only 11 points, 43-32. Now Bush leads by twenty-four points, 50-26. Not only that, but more than half of all people now believe that deposing Saddam was the right thing to do (54%), despite Kerry insisting the past two weeks that it was the "wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time". Kerry has completely misread the American electorate.

However, the most interesting part of the CBS poll, as always, is at the end. CBS routinely oversamples Democrats without adequately adjusting the poll results, which has led to some outlier projections in the past. Not this time -- and this may be bad long-term news for the Democrats that goes far beyond losing the White House again:

In most CBS News polls, Democrats outnumber Republicans among registered voters. Personal identification with a party can change (temporarily or permanently) with events and voting preferences. In many states voters do not register with a party, and individual identification is a matter of choice. In this poll, where the Republicans hold a significant lead in voter preference and more voters hold negative views about Democratic nominee John Kerry, when voters are asked about their partisan identification at the end of the questionnaire, more identify themselves as Republicans. 36 percent say they are Republican, 32 percent Democrats. The percentage that identifies themselves as Democrats in this poll is lower than it has been in CBS News Polls conducted earlier in the year.

Kerry may be driving people away from the party, not just for this election, but for good.

The Cleland-Burkett-Kerry Campaign Connection?

Michael Dobbs pushes the Rathergate story even farther forward in tomorrow's Washington Post, in the first indication that the Kerry campaign may have been explicitly involved in the Killian forgeries:

The former Texas National Guard officer suspected of providing CBS News with possibly forged records on President Bush's military service called on Democratic activists to wage "war" against Republican "dirty tricks" in a series of Internet postings in which he also used phrases similar to several employed in the disputed documents. ...

In e-mail messages to a Yahoo discussion group for Texas Democrats over the past few months, Burkett laid out a rationale for using what he termed "down and dirty" tactics against Bush. He said he had passed his ideas to the Democratic National Committee but that the DNC seemed "afraid to do what I suggest."

In another message, dated Sept. 4, Burkett hinted he might have had advance knowledge of some details in an explosive segment that aired Sept. 8 on the CBS News program "60 Minutes."

More and more evidence has come out that Burkett was the culprit behind the forgeries. His proximity to the Kinko's that faxed them to CBS (and their computers, which could have produced them), his claim to have "reassembled" Bush's record, and his postings on the Internet groups he frequents all point to the fanatical ex-Guardsman.

However, Dobbs notes a new revelation at the end of the article which links Bill Burkett to Max Cleland, of all people -- and an idea where Burkett went with his proposed smear campaign:

In an Aug. 21 posting, Burkett referred to a conversation with former senator Max Cleland (D-Ga.) about the need to counteract Republican tactics: "I asked if they wanted to counterattack or ride this to ground and outlast it, not spending any money. He said counterattack. So I gave them the information to do it with. But none of them have called me back."

Cleland confirmed that he had a two- or three-minute conversation by cell phone with a Texan named Burkett in mid-August while he was on a car ride. He remembers Burkett saying that he had "valuable" information about Bush, and asking what he should with it. "I told him to contact the [Kerry] campaign," Cleland said. "You get this information tens of times a day, and you don't know if it is legit or not."

On August 21, after pushing his idea for a dirty-tricks campaign to the DNC with little success, Burkett asks Cleland where he can take derogatory material on George Bush -- and Cleland directs him to the Kerry campaign by his own admission, a revelation in itself. (You'll note that Cleland isn't bright enough to suggest Moveon.org, which would have protected his candidate.)

On August 25th, Burkett publishes his Online Journal piece, warning Bush that Burkett had "reassembled" Bush's Guard files.

By September 4, he's posting messages that more information is waiting to come out against Bush after the Barnes interview, and the forgeries are on their way or already in the hands of CBS.

It looks like Cleland's advice worked, didn't it? If I had subpoena power, I would check Burkett's phone records to see if he contacted the Kerry campaign during the period between the Cleland contact and the date on the faxes. This appears to be moving towards a very ugly conclusion -- that someone in the Kerry campaign has some involvement in perpetrating a fraud intended to pervert an election.

I think the Congressional hearings may be a good idea now. In fact, an FBI investigation may be an even better idea.

UPDATE: More from the New York Times.

ABC News Drives New Nail In CBS' Coffin

ABC News finally located retired National Guard colonel Walter Staudt and interviewed him this afternoon. Andrew Heyward will wish that Dan Rather and the CBS News crew had taken the time to do the same before running with the Killian forgeries:

The man cited in media reports as having allegedly pressured others in the Texas Air National Guard to help George W. Bush is speaking out, telling ABC News in an exclusive interview that he never sought special treatment for Bush.

Retired Col. Walter Staudt, who was brigadier general of Bush's unit in Texas, interviewed Bush for the Guard position and retired in March 1972. He was mentioned in one of the memos allegedly written by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian as having pressured Killian to assist Bush, though Bush supposedly was not meeting Guard standards.

"I never pressured anybody about George Bush because I had no reason to," Staudt told ABC News in his first interview since the documents were made public.

Staudt denies ever having any contact with politicians or anyone else before swearing George Bush into the TANG. He insists that George Bush got into the National Guard the same way everyone else did. Nor was Staudt ever contacted after his retirement about Bush or his performance in the TANG; Staudt had no involvement in TANG operations at all, once retired.

So Dan Rather, Andrew Hayward, Terry McAuliffe, and a host of other Democrats want George Bush to answer the content of these forgeries -- and yet they never bothered to check if the content was even accurate. All they have for sources are an eighty-six-year-old Bush-hating secretary talking about her boss' state of mind from thirty years ago, and a serial hoaxer with a huge axe to grind against both the Guard and George Bush. Every one of their experts have backpedaled on authenticating the documents, and even one of their two sources they have left has called them fakes.

I'm Captain Ed, and this is was CBS. (Hat tip to readers Michael and Denis)

At The Front: No Doom And Gloom Here

Longtime CQ reader Bob Stakel forwards me a message from his neice's husband, a Major in the Marine Corps who cannot understand why the American media keeps painting such a gloomy picture of their work. I've copied it, unedited, for CQ readers:

A thought from Iraq – “Doom & Gloom about Iraq’s future….I don’t see it from where I’m sitting.”

[For those of you who haven’t gotten my “Thoughts” before, I’m a Major in the USMC on the Multi-National Corps staff in Baghdad. The analysts and pundits who don’t see what I see on a daily basis, in my opinion, have very little credibility to talk about the situation – especially if they have yet to set foot in Iraq. Everything Americans believe about Iraq is simply perception filtered through one’s latent prejudices until you are face-to-face with reality. If you haven’t seen, or don’t remember, the John Wayne movie, The Green Berets, you should watch it this weekend. Pay special attention to the character of the reporter, Mr. Beckwith. His experience is directly related to the situation here. You’ll have a different perspective on Iraq after the movie is over.]

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

The US media is abuzz today with the news of an intelligence report that is very negative about the prospects for Iraq’s future. CNN’s website says, “[The] National Intelligence Estimate was sent to the White House in July with a classified warning predicting the best case for Iraq was ‘tenuous stability’ and the worst case was civil war.” That report, along with the car bombings and kidnappings in Baghdad in the past couple days are being portrayed in the media as more proof of absolute chaos and the intransigence of the insurgency.

From where I sit, at the Operational Headquarters in Baghdad, that just isn’t the case. Let’s lay out some background, first about the “National Intelligence Estimate.” The most glaring issue with its relevance is the fact that it was delivered to the White House in July. That means that the information that was used to derive the intelligence was gathered in the Spring – in the immediate aftermath of the April battle for Fallujah, and other events. The report doesn’t cover what has happened in July or August, let alone September.

The naysayers will point to the recent battles in Najaf and draw parallels between that and what happened in Fallujah in April. They aren’t even close. The bad guys did us a HUGE favor by gathering together in one place and trying to make a stand. It allowed us to focus on them and defeat them. Make no mistake, Al Sadr’s troops were thoroughly smashed. The estimated enemy killed in action is huge. Before the battles, the residents of the city were afraid to walk the streets. Al Sadr’s enforcers would seize people and bring them to his Islamic court where sentence was passed for religious or other violations. Long before the battles people were looking for their lost loved ones who had been taken to “court” and never seen again. Now Najafians can and do walk their streets in safety. Commerce has returned and the city is being rebuilt. Iraqi security forces and US troops are welcomed and smiled upon. That city was liberated again. It was not like Fallujah – the bad guys lost and are in hiding or dead.

You may not have even heard about the city of Samarra. Two weeks ago, that Sunni Triangle city was a “No-go” area for US troops. But guess what? The locals got sick of living in fear from the insurgents and foreign fighters that were there and let them know they weren’t welcome. They stopped hosting them in their houses and the mayor of the town brokered a deal with the US commander to return Iraqi government sovereignty to the city without a fight. The people saw what was on the horizon and decided they didn’t want their city looking like Fallujah in April or Najaf in August.

Boom, boom, just like that two major “hot spots” cool down in rapid succession. Does that mean that those towns are completely pacified? No. What it does mean is that we are learning how to do this the right way. The US commander in Samarra saw an opportunity and took it – probably the biggest victory of his military career and nary a shot was fired in anger. Things will still happen in those cities, and you can be sure that the bad guys really want to take them back. Those achievements, more than anything else in my opinion, account for the surge in violence in recent days – especially the violence directed at Iraqis by the insurgents. Both in Najaf and Samarra ordinary people stepped out and took sides with the Iraqi government against the insurgents, and the bad guys are hopping mad. They are trying to instill fear once again. The worst thing we could do now is pull back and let that scum back into people’s homes and lives.

So, you may hear analysts and prognosticators on CNN, ABC and the like in the next few days talking about how bleak the situation is here in Iraq, but from where I sit, it’s looking significantly better now than when I got here. The momentum is moving in our favor, and all Americans need to know that, so please, please, pass this on to those who care and will pass it on to others. It is very demoralizing for us here in uniform to read & hear such negativity in our press. It is fodder for our enemies to use against us and against the vast majority of Iraqis who want their new government to succeed. It causes the American public to start thinking about the acceptability of “cutting our losses” and pulling out, which would be devastating for Iraq for generations to come, and Muslim militants would claim a huge victory, causing us to have to continue to fight them elsewhere (remember, in war “Away” games are always preferable to “Home” games). Reports like that also cause Iraqis begin to fear that we will pull out before we finish the job, and thus less willing to openly support their interim government and US/Coalition activities. We are realizing significant progress here – not propaganda progress, but real strides are being made. It’s terrible to see our national morale, and support for what we’re doing here, jeopardized by sensationalized stories hyped by media giants whose #1 priority is advertising income followed closely by their political agenda; getting the story straight falls much further down on their priority scale, as Dan Rather and CBS News have so aptly demonstrated in the last week.

Boston Globe: Where Editorials Too Stupid For The NYT Go To Die

Rarely if ever have I read an editorial which managed to pack more intellectual dishonesty and partisan spin as the one that the Boston Globe runs in today's edition. The Globe attempts to take the position that everyone should drop the talk about what happened thirty years ago, but then betrays its own position as an anatgonist in that particular catfight. Each paragraph is chock-filled with Terry McAuliffe spin and ignorance in equal measure:

UNLESS THE documents used by "60 Minutes" in a broadcast on President Bush's National Guard service were fabricated by a campaign operative, they are part of a story relating to the news judgment at CBS and have little to do with presidential politics.

Well, it wouldn't, except that the Kerry campaign, McAuliffe, Tom Harkin, Tom Daschle, and a slew of Democrats rushed to jump onto the story and demand "answers" to the allegations that arose from the use of the forged memos. In fact, some still think that Bush owes them an answer based on false documentation!

Even if they are genuine, the documents don't add much to what is known. While some of the details remain uncertain, it is clear that during the Vietnam War, President Bush took advantage of his family connections to obtain a slot in the Texas Air National Guard, became certified as a jet pilot, later missed a number of meetings and other obligations, lost his National Guard pilot's license, and was honorably discharged.

Whew! Where to start? No, it hasn't been established by anyone other than mega-donor Ben Barnes that anyone pulled strings (for a Congressman?) to get W into the Guard. On the other hand, a number of Guard officers at the time continue to point out that there were plenty of openings available for anyone willing to sign a six-year commitment to be a pilot. The rolls were wide open for that. No one needed to pull strings to get into the Guard. All you had to do is qualify, which Bush did on his own.

Nor did he miss his other obligations. His released documentation shows he earned the necesary points for his obligations in each review year.

With Senator John Kerry, while some details are also in dispute, abundant documentation makes it clear that Kerry volunteered for hazardous duty in Vietnam, returned after an abbreviated tour in which he was wounded three times, and performed with true heroism twice, earning the Silver Star and Bronze Star he was awarded.

No, it's not clear that all of that took place. First, it's not clear he volunteered for hazardous duty; by his own 1996 account, he only volunteered for Swift-boat duty because he thought they would continue to patrol only off the coast of Vietnam. By other accounts, he grew surly and rebellious when the program shifted to the rivers, which made the PCFs more vulnerable to attack. Nor does is the Bronze Star incident free of controversy, as we have recounted on this blog in detail. However, what is clear is that Kerry served under combat, and was the only Swift Boat officer ever to serve a truncated tour without being seriously injured.

To the extent that this 30-year-old history matters to any voters, these are the facts. But this election should focus on more-immediate issues. We hope strongly that the campaign turns to the wide differences of policy and vision that separate the candidates. Let's get on with it.

The sooner papers like the Boston Globe start printing the truth rather than Terry McAuliffe's conspiracy theories, the sooner that will be. Had the Democrats focused on current issues rather than slandering Bush's service starting in February -- as the Globe does today -- then we wouldn't have to read dim-bulb editorials like this one.

Kerry/Edwards Supporters Assault 3-Year-Old Girl (UPDATE: Scam??)

NOTE: This post has a significant update - scroll to bottom ...

I knew that the campaign was getting nasty, but a group of Kerry/Edwards supporters hit a new low today when they grabbed a Bush sign from a three-year-old girl and tore it up in front of her. You can see her reaction here, as well as the glee and hatred on the faces of her assailants:

The AP caption is the only reporting so far on the incident:

Three-year-old Sophia Parlock cries while seated on the shoulders of her father after having her Bush-Cheney sign torn up by Kerry-Edwards supporters on Thursday, Sept. 16, 2004, at the Tri-State Airport in Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards made a brief stop at the airport as he concluded his two-day bus tour to locations in West Virginia and Ohio.

Bandit sent this over to me, rightfully disgusted about anyone who would attack a three-year-old over a political sign she held. I completely agree. I also think that her father is an idiot for putting his daughter in that situation.

UPDATE: Did I say her father was an idiot? Make that a serially dishonest idiot. Rising Hegemon calls Shenanigans and has the proof:

Charleston (WV) Daily Mail, August 27, 1996, Page 3C

Phil Parlock's experience was less calm.

The Huntington man said he was knocked to the ground by a Clinton supporter when he tried to display a sign that read "Remember Vince Foster," the deputy White House counsel who committed suicide in a Washington, D.C., park. His death has become the subject of much debate among Clinton opponents.

Charleston (WV) Daily Mail, October 28, 2000, pg. 1A:

Phil Parlock didn't expect to need all 12 of the Bush-Cheney signs he and his son Louis smuggled in their socks and pockets into the rally for Vice President Al Gore.

But each time they raised a sign, someone would grab it out of their hands, the two Huntington residents said. And sometimes it got physical.

"I expected some people to take our signs," said Louis, 12. "But I did not expect people to practically attack us."

Maybe the Parlocks just have a lot of bad luck, or perhaps all Democrats become rabid when the Purlocks come into view. The problem, as Attaturk notes, is determining who's a Democrat and who's a Purlock. Take a look at this picture of the Parlocks:

See the young man on the right with his hand on his brother's shoulder? Doesn't he bear a striking resemblance to the man holding a piece of the girl's sign?

Perhaps the Parlocks should retire from family politics after this...

UPDATE: I know the union apologized for this incident this morning, but in all fairness, I doubt they thought this was staged, and it had already hit the national news. I suspect they won't bother to retract the apology, but if they'd waited a few hours, it probably wouldn't have gone out.

I love the LGF guys, but this one smells pretty bad, folks. Even if Attaturk can't prove the union man is Parlock's son, the family history of victimization at Democratic rallies looks awfully suspicious, as does bringing a 3-year-old to an oppo rally. I wouldn't waste my time trying to push this one forward. Let's show Dan Rather how self-correction works in the blogosphere.

LAST UPDATE: Because this is such a non-story. Look, you guys have posted some great comments here, even though most of you disagree with me. I'm cool with that. I'm still suspicious.

Mr. Parlock has two sons fighting for his country and another about to enter, so obviously he's doing something right with his boys. But let's look at the history here. This is the third presidential election cycle where he's brought his family to oppo rallies and got attacked, and managed to get his name in the news all three times. Now, it's his right to attend Democratic events and protest, and if he's assaulted, then the thugs should be tossed in jail for a while to teach them a lesson. But doesn't anyone find this all just a bit convenient that he and his family get attacked every election cycle and get themselves in the papers every time?

Secondly, if all of that was on the level, why would he bring his three-year-old to an oppo rally -- and hand her a Bush/Cheney sign? My granddaughter is her age, and I sure as hell wouldn't put her in that kind of situation. I wouldn't put my 20-year-old son in that situation.

In fact, I think (as a couple of you stated) that showing up for oppo rallies is rather stupid and self-defeating. If I wanted to do something constructive with that time and effort, I'd haul my butt down to the GOP headquarters and make calls, register voters, and do things that win elections. I suspect the Parlocks love the cameras, and that also makes me suspicious.

I still think the man holding the sign looks like Parlock's son, but I will concede that I can't prove it. I wish the rest of us could concede that the Parlocks are hardly the victims they were portrayed to be, given their history of provocative behavior.

If you want to be convinced that some Democrats are jerks, there are better stories to follow, like the smear campaigns being coordinated by the DNC against George Bush. I'm sticking with those.

Houston Chronicle: Burkett A Well-Known Crank

In an article sure to raise blood pressure among CBS and Viacom executives, the Houston Chronicle reports that Bill Burkett -- the main suspect in the forgery scam that CBS propogated -- has a long history of false accusations against George Bush:

Bill Burkett, who has emerged as a possible CBS source for disputed memos about President Bush's Guard service, has a long history of making charges against Bush and the Texas National Guard.

But Burkett's allegations have changed over the years, and have been dismissed as baseless by former Guard colleagues, state legislators and others.

Even Burkett has admitted some of his allegations are false.

If that last sentence isn't bad enough, Michael Hedges provides the background on those charges which Burkett has yet to acknowledge as false:

In an article Burkett wrote for the Internet last year he compared Bush to Hitler and Napoleon as one of "the three small men" who sought to rule through tyranny. "Three small men who wanted to conquer and vanquish," Burkett wrote. Burkett confirmed authorship of that article in the February Chronicle interview.

Some of Burkett's friends and associates say they don't know whether he is the CBS source. ...

During Bush's first White House run in 2000, Burkett told reporters he overheard both ends of a phone conversation between former Texas Guard commander Gen. Daniel James III and Bush's one-time Texas chief of staff, Joe Allbaugh, that he said occurred in the summer of 1997. That was similar to what he told Hunter's committee, the lawmaker recalled.

But that claim changed earlier this year.

In February, Burkett said he witnessed documents from Bush's records in a garbage can at a Guard base in Austin.

"My eyes fixed on the first page," he said in an interview in February. "It had Bush, George W. Lt1. What I did next still bothers me. I browsed through the top five or six pages." ...

Texas Guard officials said no Texas Air Guard records had ever been stored at the facility Burkett named.

And what about the Killian documentation? After all, as I reported yesterday, Burkett wrote on August 25th that he had "reassembled" Bush's Guard file. But earlier, the Chronicle notes that Burkett had looked for anything Killian had written about Bush and come up empty:

One month ago, in an essay posted on a progressive Web site, Burkett theorized that Killian would have been a likely person to know more about Bush's service. But, he conceded, "I have found no documentation from LTC Killian's hand or staff that indicate that this unit was involved in any complicit way to ... cover for the failures of 1Lt. Bush ... " Burkett went on to say, "On the contrary, LTC Killian's remarks are rare."

For someone who has had no trouble making things up before, going to Kinko's and attempting to create Killian "documentation" is hardly a leap -- it fits directly into the man's character. Further, he had the motive and the track record of conducting smears against George Bush.

All of this, it seems, should have been readily discovered by CBS had they attempted to vet Bill Burkett as a source. Of course, Rather also could have vetted Ben Barnes, his other primary source for the preferential-treatment story, to find out that he'd delivered a half-million dollars to the Democrats over the past five years and almost $75,000 to Kerry in this cycle. His own network had run a feature on Ben Barnes and his expectations for delivering big money to Kerry, back in June of this year!

This goes beyond mere incompetence. This string of lunatics and operatives on which Rather and CBS relied demonstrates a willful refusal to practice standard journalistic verification on sourcing as well as a deliberate attempt to mislead its viewers on the background of the people behind this smear. If it wants to keep CBS News alive, Viacom has to wrest control from Andrew Heyward and his gang of idiots before they take the rest of the network with them down the drain.

Hospiblogging, Part XXVII

The First Mate has another procedure to endure today, a rather routine event in the CQ household these days. I've pirated a wireless connection and working on a few blog details while keeping an eye on the e-mail.

I have a great story to tell you about the First Mate. One of our running arguments, as is the case with so many other couples, is about the climate of the house. My wife has a very narrow degree of comfort, as it turns out, which can be a problem in Minnesota. She gets cold when the indoor temperature falls below 72, and warm when it rises above 74 -- about which I tease her unmercifully. For my part, as long as frost isn't forming on the bannister and the plumbing doesn't sweat with condensation, I'm happy.

This morning, she told me it was too cold in the house, so I checked the thermostat; sure enough, it was 72 degrees. Now, my wife is convinced that I have painted this number on the digital readout or somehow have hacked the computer chip so that it always reads 72. All morning long, we have been teasing each other about the weather and the temperature and having way too much fun for people in the hospital. We've had the nurses laughing all morning about this (and taking her side, natch), even when she went down to Radiology for the procedure.

Once we were in the room, which actually was a bit chilly, we continued to banter back and forth about this. I also noticed that the staff had some pretty good 60's music on the stereo (which they always have going during their procedures). After a few minutes, I realized what album was playing on the CD:

The soundtrack to the movie, The Big Chill.

I'm still laughing my tucchus off in the lobby, let me tell you.

Duelfer Report: Saddam Intended To Reconstitute WMD Programs

The New York Times reports today on the final summation of American arms inspector Charles Duelfer, who concludes that Saddam Hussein had no significant stocks of WMD but had every intention of producing them as soon as UN sanctions were weakened or removed:

A new report on Iraq's illicit weapons program is expected to conclude that Saddam Hussein's government had a clear intent to produce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons if United Nations sanctions were lifted, government officials said Thursday. But, like earlier reports, it finds no evidence that Iraq had begun any large-scale program for weapons production by the time of the American invasion last year, the officials said.

The most specific evidence of an illicit weapons program, the officials said, has been uncovered in clandestine labs operated by the Iraqi Intelligence Service, which could have produced small quantities of lethal chemical and biological agents, though probably for use in assassinations, not to inflict mass casualties.

Duelfer's report promises something for everyone; a bone for the Left, which they will use to beat George Bush over what they continue to insist was his only "justification" for toppling Hussein. The GOP stalwarts can and will argue that Duelfer's report also demonstrates the futility of trying to wait out Saddam and his boys through twelve years of economic sanctions. This has more implications than just electoral, but I'll get to that in a second.

The nonexistence of WMD has been a fairly well-known quantity in the election so far, trumpeted by the Democrats every chance they get. However, Kerry has squandered whatever political capital it could possibly bring, thanks to a series of vacillating positions on Iraq that has left everyone scratching their heads. After beating up Howard Dean on Saddam and WMD early in the campaign -- and remembering that up until his primary season efforts tanked he was a moderate hawk on Saddam and WMD -- he suddenly stole Dean's position during his late-winter surge.

Since he's locked up the nomination, though, he couldn't be more opaque if he painted himself Navy blue. Even his friend and supporter Don Imus expressed frustration this week about Kerry's inability to take a coherent position on Iraq. Just after the Democratic convention, in a clumsy attempt to triangulate the Iraq issue, he claimed he would have invaded even if he had known no WMD existed -- which negates the entire argument against Bush.

On the other hand, this report confirms what Bush had said all along -- that once the so-called "containment" strategy fell apart, Saddam would immediately begin producing WMD without restraint, weapons that would certainly have been produced with the US and Israel as intended targets. Syria had broken the embargo, as the LA Times reported this spring, and France, Germany, and Russia had pressured the UN to drop sanctions for years, until 9/11. The sanctions regime had lost all enthusiasm among the Security Council nations except the US and UK, and as we found out after toppling Saddam, it had not kept the three aforementions nations from arms trading with Saddam in any circumstance. Containment was dead.

Nor were economic sanctions hurting Saddam -- just the opposite, it gave Hussein an opportunity to line his pockets on a scale unimagined for its breadth and short period of opportunity. As much as $10 billion disappeared in the Oil-For-Food program, and as Claudia Rosett reports today, some of that went to people with strong links to terrorism in general and al-Qaeda in particular. With that track record, would Saddam have stopped his cooperation at cash, or would he have been just as generous with his reconstituted WMD arsenal in two or three years?

More to the point: would you bet your childrens' lives on his benificence?

That question is why Kerry fails as a leader during an era of Islamofascist terror. He fails because he refuses to make a decision on that question. He dithers while the clock ticks away. People may not always agree with George Bush -- I don't always agree with him -- but he makes decisions. After a year on the campaign trail, Kerry still hasn't reached a decision on the most important policy issue of the election, and worse, he's actively tried to pass himself off on both sides of it. Post-9/11, Americans understand the danger of dithering, and Kerry's polls reflect the price.

Saddam-AQ Link Through UNSCAM?

Claudia Rosett, who has dedicated the past year of her life to the UN Oil-For-Food scandal, has uncovered some interesting financial connections between Saddam Hussein and known al-Qaeda associates through Saddam's business contracts. Rosett and George Russell report for Fox News that documents uncovered by the Iraq war and the UNSCAM investigations show deliberate overpayments to companies run by AQ operatives:

Now, buried in some of the United Nation’s own confidential documents, clues can be seen that underscore the possibility of just such a Saddam-Al Qaeda link — clues leading to a locked door in this Swiss lakeside resort. Next to that door, a festive sign spells out in gold letters under a green flag that this is the office of MIGA, the Malaysian Swiss Gulf and African Chamber. Registered here 20 years ago as a society to promote business between the Gulf States and Asia, Europe and Africa, MIGA is a company that the United Nations and the U.S. government says has served as a hub of Al Qaeda finance: A terrorist chamber of commerce. ...

[B]oth MIGA and its chief founder and longtime president, Ahmed Idris Nasreddin, landed on the U.N. watchlist of entities and individuals belonging to, or affiliated with Al Qaeda. Nasreddin is a member of the terror-linked Muslim Brotherhood.

Nasreddin’s longtime business partner, Egyptian-born Youssef Nada, also of the Muslim Brotherhood, likewise appears on the U.N.’s Al Qaeda watchlist, as do a slew of both Nasreddin’s and Nada’s enterprises. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill in August 2002 described Nada and Nasreddin as “supporters of terrorism” involved in “an extensive financial network providing support to Al Qaeda and other terrorist-related organizations.” ...

MIGA had other founders as well. One of them, who does not appear on the U.N. terror list, is an Arab businessman now in his early 60s, Abdul Rahman Hayel Saeed. Described by an acquaintance as urbane, polite and fluent in English, Hayel Saeed was born into one of Yemen’s most prominent business clans, owners of a family-held global conglomerate based in the Yemeni capital of Taiz and named for its founding patriarch: the Hayel Saeed Anam Group of Companies, or HSA. ...

Abdul Rahman Hayel Saeed sits on the HSA board of directors, and ranks high in the management — he is currently running HSA’s regional office in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In MIGA, Hayel Saeed holds a prominent spot, as one of four co-founders who back in 1984 delegated power of attorney to the terrorist-linked Nasreddin, giving him authority to run the company.

Swiss registry documents show that Hayel Saeed has never resigned from MIGA, nor revoked that power of attorney. Queried about this link to MIGA, neither Hayel Saeed nor the HSA Group’s chairman of the board, Ali Mohammed Saeed, has made any response.

All of this builds the support structure for Rosett to show how the money flowed from Saddam Hussein to HSA, and then outward with HSA's close ties to MIGA and the terrorists within that organization:

For reasons still unknown, Saddam clearly smiled upon the HSA Group. Not only does HSA account for the bulk of all Saddam’s business with Yemen, but dozens of deals that appear in the United Nation’s generic public records to originate elsewhere were in fact signed with HSA companies in countries such as Egypt, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Within that HSA empire, one company in particular stands out: A trading house called Pacific Interlink, based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Abdul Rahman Hayel Saeed also sits on Pacific Interlink’s board of directors. ...

Just after Saddam fell, the DCMA, together with the U.S. Defense Contract Audit Agency, looked at the terms of 759 sample contracts out of the tens of thousands of deals done by Saddam’s regime under oil-for-food. In that sample, Pacific Interlink pops up as a purveyor of $20 million worth of palm oil to Saddam, via a contract approved by the United Nations under oil-for-food in mid-2001. By DCMA estimates, Saddam overpaid Pacific Interlink on that contract, to the tune of about 15 percent above market price, which would work out to some $3 million in funds diverted from relief on that deal alone.

If similar arrangements went on within other Pacific Interlink oil-for-food contracts, which totaled close to a quarter of a billion dollars, then even at the more modest rate of what has been widely described as Saddam’s typical 10 percent over-pricing scam, that would suggest well over $20 million diverted from relief.

If so, where did it go? The question is vitally important, because much of the money grafted out of oil-for-food by Saddam remains unaccounted for.

Both HSA’s and MIGA’s offices overlap in locations that are hubs of normal commerce, but also served as hotspots of Al Qaeda meetings and finance, such as Dubai (where Hayel Saeed reportedly ran an HSA company, Frimex, in the late 1990s) or Kuala Lumpur (where some of the Sept. 11 hijackers gathered for a planning conference in January 2000). Pacific Interlink boasts offices or agents in places thick with terror networks, such as Algeria, Sudan, and Syria. MIGA, on its Lugano sign, lists offices in places such as Italy, Turkey, Syria, Nigeria and Kuwait, and both HSA and MIGA list offices in Morocco, Malaysia and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where Hayel Saeed is now based.

We all wondered when the UNSCAM story broke if the billions of dollars that Saddam drew out of the system eventually wound up in the pockets of Osama bin Laden. It appears that Saddam structured his deals to allow it, and deliberately chose partners with those kinds of connections.

Rosett continues her series of reports tomorrow. Stay tuned.

NYT Corrections Reveal Burkett Lawyer's Oddball Views

The New York Times runs a series of corrections on its Rathergate coverage in today's edition that makes a reader wonder what exactly they got right. They blow a quote and can't fact-check George Herbert Walker Bush's resume, even though the guy turned out to hold a fairly significant job later on. (See: White House, 1989-1993.)

But what I find interesting is the quote they blew. David Van Os represents Bill Burkett and also is running for the Texas Supreme Court. Here's what Van Os has to say about forgery:

Mr. Van Os posed a hypothetical chain of events in which someone - not Mr. Burkett, he said - reconstructed documents that the preparer believed existed in 1972 or 1973. Mr. Van Os then asked "what difference would even that make" to the "factual reality of where was George W. Bush at the times in question and what was he doing?"

I hope the ACLU is paying attention in Texas, because it appears that Mr. Van Os has no concept of the "fruit from the poisoned tree" philosophy of evidence review. When someone in Van Os' court for either criminal or civil cases attempts to use fraudulent evidence, does Van Os really allow its consideration in determining "factual reality"? Suppose the First Mate wanted to divorce me in Van Os' court, and she photoshopped a picture of me in bed with, oh, Charlize Theron to "prove" my infidelity. (Ya gotta dream big.) Would Van Os knowingly accept that faked photograph as proof because it fits in with the "factual reality" of my cheating ... just because the FM "believes" that's what happened?

If that's an example of the Van Os legal mind, then he and Burkett deserve each other, and Texans should choose almost anyone else for their Supreme Court opening.

Gallup Poll: Bush Up 13 Among Likely Voters

The AP report from yesterday was only one point off. USA Today reports that a new Gallup poll taken in the aftermath of Rathergate has Bush leading among registered voters by eight points and among likely voters by thirteen:

President Bush has surged to a 13-point lead over Sen. John Kerry among likely voters, a new Gallup Poll shows. The 55%-42% match-up is the first statistically significant edge either candidate has held this year. Among registered voters, Bush is ahead 52%-44%.

The boost Bush received from the Republican convention has increased rather than dissipated, reshaping a race that for months has been nearly tied. Kerry is facing warnings from Democrats that his campaign is seriously off-track.

Gallup finds a statistically significant lead in both categories, which I believe is the first poll to show that so far this year for either candidate. Note that other polls that showed a drift back to the middle took their samples from last week, before Rathergate exploded onto the scene. I think that the forged memos have caused some of the centrists and independents to step away from the Kerry campaign, and until CBS comes clean on its sourcing, their stonewalling will continue to leave the impression that they're covering for someone significant to the campaign.

The methodology seems pretty solid, as one would expect from Gallup. The overall sample was over a thousand adults, whittled down to 935 registered voters and 767 likely voters. USA Today doesn't provide much information on internals, such as issues and leadership questions. Gallup's own report has more detail.

In the ten days since the last Gallup poll, Bush has gained 3 points among likely voters and 4 among registered voters. Interestingly, Bush's biggest gain has come from younger voters (18-49), where he has turned a one-point disadvantage last month into a thirteen-point advantage now. Bush even leads among seniors, turning a five-point deficit into a slim one-point edge. He increased his lead by the same amount among men and women, erasing the gender gap on which Democrats count.

The Democrats will scoff at this and call the results an outlier, but given the mainstream methodology, it's hard to laugh off a Gallup poll. The Democrats are in real trouble, and while Donna Brazile's quote about party "backbenchers" being the only ones pushing the panic button may be the official position, the flood of new "advisors" into the Kerry campaign tells a different story. The Democrats now know that they have nominated perhaps the worst candidate since George McGovern. And according to Gallup, so do the voters.

Burkett: I 'Reassembled' Bush Guard Files

Bill Burkett, the man suspected to be the source of the forged Killian memos, wrote a scathing editorial piece for Online Journal as an open letter to George Bush, explicitly calling him a "liar" several times. More to the point of the recent controversy, Burkett made a startling assertion in the body of this op-ed piece:

George W. Bush, you may be the president [sic]. But I know that you lied.

I know from your files that we have now reassembled, the fact that you did not fulfill your oath, taken when you were commissioned to "obey the orders of the officers appointed over you". I know that you not only lied to the American people in 1994, but have lied consistently since then. Mr. Bush, not every serviceman except you is incompetent. When you failed to show up as ordered for duty, they simply recorded the truth. And the truth was, they didn't think you were especially important enough to jeopardize their own careers to cover for your absence by fraudulently counting you as present in any piece of documentation when you clearly were not present.

Now Mr. Bush, we have finally confirmed the truth concerning your failure to complete your minimum satisfactory drill participation in 1972 and 1973.

Burkett said on August 25th of this year that he had "reassembled" Bush's TANG file and specifically called out the years 1972 and 1973 - the same years that the Killian forgeries were purportedly written. As Bandit notes in his discovery of this hateful rant, he repeatedly talks about "orders" and being "ordered" to attend specific drills or tasks, which again the forged memos also reflected.

So we have Burkett writing this rant on August 25 -- and within two weeks, the memos are faxed to CBS from a Kinko's 21 miles away from Burkett's home. It appears very clear that Burkett "reassembled" the memos and passed them off to CBS as genuine, and that CBS simply took his word for it despite Burkett's history as a Bush-hater and his discredited testimony regarding document-shredding at the TANG offices in Texas.

Now that we have an admission, if not a confession, from Burkett, will CBS finally come clean about its sourcing?

UPDATE: For more -- lots more -- on Burkett, start with PrestoPundit and work outwards.

UPDATE and BUMP: J_Crater makes a good point in the comments. During Marian Knox's interview with the CBS show 60 Minutes II, she asserts that the memos contained "words in there that belong to the Army, not the Air Guard. We never used those terms."

Of course, Bill Burkett was a Lt. Colonel in the Army ... not the Air Force. Could this be another reason why the memos sounded so incorrect to our Air Force sources -- and why CBS left that quote out of the online version of Knox's appearance? Are they still trying to keep people from pinpointing Bill Burkett as their main source for this story, with all the excess baggage he brings?

UPDATE AGAIN: Sylvia Moreno attempts to rehabilitate Burkett in tomorrow's Washington Post. I've helpfully included Burkett's words in italics to illustrate Moreno's futile effort:

For half a dozen years, Bill Burkett has lived a pretty uneventful life in this tiny West Texas town. He and his wife are regulars at the Whistle Stop Cafe, ordering bacon cheeseburgers with jalapenos and fries or the pork chop special on Mondays. He "visits," as people like to say in these parts, with other ranchers over coffee at the Callahan County Farmer's Co-Op. And like other polite locals, he drops in on the local elected officials to introduce himself.

He is, by most accounts, a nice man who, in an overwhelmingly Republican-voting area, might be seen as somewhat eccentric for his Democratic bias.

This past February, I was again questioned nationally concerning what I had seen and heard in May and June of 1997 regarding the cleansing of the personal military records of one 1st Lt. George W. Bush. These were specific events that I reported immediately and in a later letter to several state legislators in Texas, including state Senator Gonzalo Barrientos, in June 1998, in which I submitted my firsthand eyewitness account. I was then questioned under oath by five or six Department of Defense lawyers during the first week of January 2002 and I also submitted a sworn affidavit, again repeating the same facts in my civil case of whistleblower retaliation and retribution against me by Col. William Goodwin, Col. Jackie Taliaferro and Col. Archie Meador. Also last February, I did swear, when asked by Chris Mathews on MSNBCs Hardball, the response of the White House and Bush has always been that the 'system' of commanders, clerks and record keepers were remiss.

[Factcheck.org, a non-partisan watchdog group that monitors political claims, completely debunks everything Burkett has ever said, under oath or not, about the file-cleansing he supposedly witnessed. Burkett has no credibility, even if he does eat at the Whistle Stop Cafe.]

"He's very bright; he's not a hayseed," said Royse Kerr, chairman of the Taylor County Democratic Club, which last spring invited Burkett to speak to the members about the "state of politics in America."

And your command profile, Mr. Bush, is that the grunts are like beetles and snails to you. You talk a good line, but they are always at fault for your problems. It was that way when you flew at the 111th. ... Your command profile, sir, is that you are a liar. ... This is all bad enough, but to continuously lie to the American people for years is outrageous. One can easily see how this "slick Willie" act of falsity could potentially carry over into policy, such as weapons of mass destruction, an attack on Iraq, the price of a prescription drug program, your close insider working relationship with Ken Lay at Enron, or Vice President [sic] Cheney's personal relationships and dealings with Halliburton.

Haigler said Burkett had received several death threats since his name surfaced as a possible source for "60 Minutes." "There's just a lot of crazies out here, but Bill Burkett is not one of them. And if the issue is whether Bill Burkett concocted a bunch of records, that makes me want to throw up," Haigler said.

I know from your files that we have now reassembled, the fact that you did not fulfill your oath, taken when you were commissioned to "obey the orders of the officers appointed over you".

How did he "reassemble" files he claimed were destroyed in Texas, while they actually were in Colorado? Haigler and Burkett want us to believe that Burkett saw the files being destroyed in Texas when they were in Colorado in 1997, but that somehow they survived this destruction that occurred before Burkett's eyes and magically reconstructed themselves into Burkett's hands last month.

Perhaps he pulled them out of John Kerry's magic hat.

Can you believe that CBS based their entire story on the lunatic ravings of Bill Burkett? Unfortunately, having seen how they work, I can.

Are The Taiwanese Running A Spy Ring In US?

The possibility that the Taiwanese may have an espionage system in the United States has increased, as a career officer in the State Department faces up to five years in prison for illegal travel and contact in Taiwan:

A former top-level State Department official illegally took a secret, unauthorized trip to Taiwan last year and met with Taiwanese intelligence officers, according to a criminal complaint.

Donald W. Keyser, a 30-year veteran at the State Department, was charged Wednesday with deliberately concealing from his superiors that he took a four-day trip to Taiwan last September. Federal law requires an individual with Keyser's security clearances to report all foreign travel.

Keyser would not have been permitted to travel to Taiwan on official business because the United States and Taiwan do not have formal diplomatic relations, according to court papers. ...

FBI agents monitoring Keyser's activity in recent months found that he frequently met two Taiwanese intelligence officers, including the officer he met in Taiwan, at Washington-area restaurants, where they would exchange papers.

FBI agents stopped the two Taiwanese officials after a Sept. 4 lunch meeting in Alexandria, and found one of the officers carrying a six-page document titled "Discussion Topics." State Department analysts who reviewed the document said some of its contents were derived from material to which Keyser had access while at the State Department, according to the complaint.

In fact, federal law makes it clear that anyone with any kind of security clearance has to get permission to travel abroad, especially to certain countries. The security agency with jurisdiction must be notified before departure and immediately after return for briefing and debriefing, respectively. Everyone with a security clearance gets reminded of these requirements at least one time a year during security reviews. Someone who has been around for 30 years in sensitive areas cannot possibly be ignorant of these rules, even for "sight-seeing" tours.

Nor is this the first time Keyser has run afoul of security procedures:

In 2000, Keyser was disciplined and reassigned by then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as part of an investigation into a missing laptop computer that contained classified information.

The AP gives no word as to the type of classified information that the missing laptop held. Anyone want to guess it had something to do with an island nearby China?

Kerry Rewrote History In 1971 Testimony

CQ reader Cwiregrass e-mailed me with an intriguing perspective on John Kerry's Senate testimony in 1971. While we all know that Kerry testified that American soldiers and their command routinely participated in atrocities, accusing the US of "murdering" 200,000 Vietnamese every year, what we missed was an early example of Kerry's penchant for rewriting history. In another foreshadowing of Kerry's campaign style, anti-war activist Kerry transferred a sentiment from Great Society Democrat Lyndon Johnson to centrist Republican Richard Nixon.

John Kerry testified to the Committee on Foreign Relations of the U. S. Senate on April 22, 1971 accusing U. S troops of Vietnam of war "crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command," The entire official transcript of this hearing is available on C-Span.

In addition to this infamous unsubstantiated war-crime statement, with great certainty Kerry also testified that Republican President Nixon had the following impure and egotistical motive for justifying an increased buildup of troops in the Vietnam War, which resulted in more casualties:

Mr. Kerry: …Someone has to dies [sic] so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."

The truth is, this particular justification for escalating the Vietnam war was made by a Democrat, President L. B. Johnson.

Some say that Kerry could not possibly have known that Johnson said this before Nixon, that it only came out after Johnson's White House tapes were released and transcribed. However, multiple sources had heard it directly from LBJ on a number of occasions. It was hardly a state secret. Mr. John A. McCone, former Director of the CIA, 1961-65, under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, emphasized this quote as a major part of President Johnson’s rationale for the troop buildup in Vietnam. This position is referenced in his interview by Harry Kreisler on 4-21-88, as part of the Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley.

Reflections on a Life in Government Service: Conversation with John A. McCone

[Harry Kreisler] What did Johnson tell you?

[John McCone] President Johnson's attitude was very much different from mine. He felt that he had a war on his hands, and he had to win. As he told me personally, not once but a number of times, "I'm not going to be the first American president to lose a war."

Mr. Kerrry’s habit of rewriting history to support his political ambitions, not only in this false Senate Testimony, but also in the exaggeration of his role in Vietnam during the three months that he was in a combat zone, is troubling.

These combat exaggerations are enumerated and documented in the just released, well researched, best-selling book Unfit for Command, which was written by Swift Boat Officer John E. O’Neill and author Jerome R. Corsi, who received his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Mr. Kerry’s habit of rewriting history to further his political ambitions is disturbing to the American public.

UPDATE: Fixed typo on dates, hat tip to Infidel. (But I swear Johnson sent me to Nicaragua in 1987!)

AP: Gallup Shows Bush Up By 14

Via the Ace of Spades, the AP reports -- buried so far in another story that you need an exhumation order to find it -- that Gallup will announce tomorrow that Bush now leads Kerry nationally by 14 points:

A new poll from the Pew Research Center said the "bounce" that seemed to propel Bush to a lead just after the Republican convention had disappeared. But he was ahead by double digits in another survey.

The Pew poll found the race at 46-46 among registered voters, and 47-46 Bush among likely voters. A Gallup poll being released Friday has Bush up 54-40 in a three-way matchup, with Ralph Nader at 3 percent.

We'll see what Gallup's methodology is tomorrow so we can determine how seriously to take this latest result. Having a pollster with Gallup's stature come out with a fourteen-point gap in mid-September has to rock the Democrats, who have been caught up, Pauline Kael style, in their own Bush-hating rhetoric. Suddenly their candidate has fallen to the bedrock of their support at 40%, meaning that he is now attracting virtually no independents and moderates.

Interesting, though, that the AP chose to bury that information in the nineteenth paragraph of an analysis of the political fallout from the Iraq War.

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Could New York Really Be In Play?

Yesterday's news that Bush edged ahead of Kerry in New Jersey, a Democratic stronghold, shocked election observers (via Kerry Spot). However, today's Albany (NY) Times-Union notes an even more ominous turn for Kerry's campaign:

Republican President George Bush has gained significantly on challenger John Kerry in Democrat-dominated New York, according to two statewide polls released Wednesday.

Bush trails Kerry 47-41 among registered voters, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. An Aug. 13 poll showed Bush at 35 percent to Kerry's 53. A Marist College poll of registered voters found Kerry leading Bush 48-40 -- a far cry from an April poll that put Kerry ahead 13 points.

Democrats outnumber Republicans in New York by a 5-3 advantage. That would translate to 62-38 on a party-line vote. Apparently, the Republican convention and the Kerry meltdown in August has put the Empire State back in play, as Bush has wooed Democrats to cross the aisle in significant numbers and away from John Kerry.

Kerry still leads outside the margins of error in both polls, but all of a sudden, New York needs a lot more attention -- and money -- than previously thought. And since these polls measured registered voters instead of likely voters, Kerry's lead is likely to be narrower than even these poll results show. The more money and attention the Democrats have to pour into New York, of course, the less they can spend elsewhere, and right now the bleeding looks pretty bad all the way around.

All along, we have considered the coasts to be a lock for John Kerry, especially the critical states of California and New York. If Kerry can't hold a lead in ultraliberal New York, the Democrats may be looking at a tremendous electoral disaster, one that will swamp out their candidates up and down the ticket in November.

Kerry Embodies Change!

The AP's Nedra Pickler writes an unintentionally hilarious analysis of the Kerry campaign bi-weekly attempt to recast itself, this time in what Pickler and the campaign says is a new direction ... Bush Lies:

Kerry has less than seven weeks to take over the lead in the presidential race. Democrats hope a major shift will come from the debates, but his strategy in the meantime is based less on building himself up than on tearing down the president.

Bush has enjoyed a lead of about 5 or 6 percentage points in national polls since the Republican National Convention, which portrayed Kerry as a vacillating opportunist. Democrats remained largely positive during their convention five weeks earlier, but now are trying to make the case that Bush has not been honest in his life and his leadership.

"It's time we had a president who tells the American people the truth," Kerry said in Ohio. "It's that simple."

Stop it, Nedra, you're killing me! It's difficult to know where to begin fisking Pickler on this article. Describing the Democratic convention as "largely positive" outside of a sourced quote is as good as anyplace else. Outside of Barack Obama, who focused on himself, the entire convention consisted of attacks on Bush's record while revealing nothing about John Kerry's agenda. Al Sharpton went off-message for ten minutes and attacked Bush's character. Other than that, the fighting remained fair, but hardly positive, largely or otherwise.

Now the Democrats want to roll out the personal attacks on George Bush and his character, amply demonstrated by the CBS hit piece based on forgeries this past week, instead of focusing on their own message. And this is new? Have I not sat through a year of Democrats intoning from the podiums how Bush lied and misled them? That's been Kerry's standard response on Iraq from the time he was in the single digits against Howard Dean up to the Imus show interview yesterday.

Next up, the Democrats will claim that George Bush was a lousy businessman who only made money because of his daddy. No, seriously -- that's what's coming next:

So far, the DNC's effort has been focused on accusing Bush of using family connections to get into the National Guard during the Vietnam War, then skipping his duty. DNC strategist Howard Wolfson said the campaign has helped drive down the president's credibility ratings and next will raise questions about Bush's business career.

"This is someone whose career in business was the product of special favors not available to the average person," Wolfson said.

Did George Bush open a business during his first term in office? This isn't a new direction, this is the same stuff that Al Gore threw at Bush in the last election, and that the Democrats tried in Texas twice. They're 0-3, but maybe they think the law of averages are with them. It's become a sickness, this Bush-hatred, a mental pathology. One proverb defines mental illness as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome at some point.

The hilarity continues when Pickler describes the Democratic disappointment with a lack of reaction from voters on their campaign of irrelevancies:

Some Democrats are growing frustrated that voters don't seem to be turning against Bush in greater numbers.

Here's the key: George Bush has been president for four years. People already know how he handles the office. His past is no longer needed as an indicator of the unknown, because he's already a known quantity -- a point that Democrats still haven't learned. You won't convince straddlers to change horses until you show them that the new horse is demonstrably better than the one they already know. All Kerry's doing is playing to his base; he won't convince anyone with this new effort, only reinforce the Bush-haters who have already lined up behing Kerry.

Does America want to be led by a group of people so clueless that they can't even grasp that simple concept?

But Pickler saves the best for last, quoting Democratic consultant Donna Brazile in a most unintentional Freudian slip regarding her candidate:

"He got body slammed at the convention and it hurt him," said Brazile, who managed Democrat Al Gore's campaign in 2000. "A lot of people are still interested in change in this country. Kerry just has to say, `I'm the change, I'm the change.'"

No kidding -- Kerry provides change on a daily basis! Finally, a campaign theme that actually fits the candidate. Kerry is like Midwest weather ... if you don't like his policies, just wait five minutes. It's nice to see someone from the other side finally acknowledge and embrace it.

Kerry's Economic Plan

John Kerry penned his economic plan for the pages of the Wall Street Journal, which made it available through Opinionjournal.com this morning (free registration required). The plan focuses on a series of targeted tax credits intended to bolster his standing among specific demographics, while promising class war on the top 2% of American earners -- who already pay over half of all revenues from income tax.

Kerry starts out by trying to convince his readers that the economic expansion currently under way, fueled by the Bush tax cuts, is the worst in 50 years by focusing on job growth. However, the expansion itself as measured by GDP (the normal measurement) actually is the best in 20 years, almost outstripping the Reagan expansion in 1984. Even job growth, a lagging indicator, has improved remarkably this year, although buffeted by a summer of skyrocketing energy prices. One reason that Kerry can claim job growth as a problem is a continued reliance on the payroll statistics rather than the household survey, which shows a major shift towards self-employment and small business start-ups, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics payroll survey routinely underreports. That's the reason the unemployment rate has dropped to a level lower than the average during the Clinton administration.

But that's just the introduction. The plan itself raises eyebrows for the assumptions it makes and the parts it seems to be missing. For instance, Kerry claims that the government incentivizes outsourcing by providing $12 billion for jobs exportation, which he plans to close off. He will then cut corporate taxes by 5%, which he says will result in a tax cut for 99% of all corporations. But in a multitrillion-dollar economy, most of it generated by "corporations", $12 billion in revenue could not possibly sustain a 5% tax cut. Revenue to government is over $2 trillion per year, and if you say that half of it comes from corporations (which is probably a conservative estimate), then $12 billion is 1.2% of what corporations pay now.

Kerry moves on to middle-class taxes and health care, which is where the wheels come off the wagon. Kerry claims that he will expand the tax cut to the middle class by scaling back Bush's tax cuts while returning the money in the form of credits for health care, child care, and college tuition. But those aren't middle-class tax cuts, those are government grants to selected constituencies -- and represent another path to an even more complicated tax system as well. Kerry chooses paternalism over simply allowing the middle class to keep their own money up front. Besides, what if you don't have children? What if your children are out of college, or don't plan to go? You will subsidize everyone else's tuition with the money Kerry takes back out of your check.

His outlook on health care is similarly distorted. Rather than enact significant tort reform to lower costs to the health-care segment, Kerry instead talks about providing government assistance for "catastrophic costs" and promises that it will lower premiums by 10%. But that's just a shell game; the money will be paid by the taxpayers instead of the insurance companies, but either way the patient gets screwed. Nor does he explain how premiums will fall by that amount -- he just tells us it will.

Kerry says he will oppose frivolous lawsuits by forcing plaintiffs to accept non-binding mediation, a laughable solution that only provides lawyers more billing time. Non-binding mediation means nothing in terms of attack lawsuits. Do you suppose for a moment that an attorney looking to cash in the legal equivalent of Lotto will voluntarily accept a mediator's decision that comes up empty for him? He also promises to "oppose" unjustified punitive damage awards, but that's simply another empty gesture. Who doesn't oppose unjustified punitive damage awards? It's like saying that you oppose robbery. Kerry, however, refuses to make the systemic changes needed to eliminate such awards.

Kerry also continues a canard regarding stem-cell research that should invite skepticism about his plan's grounding in reality. He claims he will end the "ban" on stem-cell research. However, no such ban exists. Anyone can do any kind of stem-cell research they desire. What Bush did was to deny federal funding to any embryonic stem-cell research on lines not already in existence in 2001. The fact that more embryonic stem-cell research is not being done is not because it's banned, it's because it's less promising than other lines of stem-cell research, such as those involving umbilical or adult stem cells. Kerry's attitude seems to be consistent with his overall philosophy of government supremacy -- if the government doesn't do it, it doesn't exist.

Kerry saves his final point for his strongest case: deficit reduction. If Kerry's Senate record and rhetoric can be said to be consistent on anything, deficit reduction would be the only issue that comes to mind. However, Kerry's idea of deficit reduction is increasing revenues, not shrinking government, which the rest of his essay amply demonstrates. While George Bush may have been a poor performer on the deficit -- keeping in mind that we are at war, had a devastating terror attack that cost billions in damage and lost revenue, and struggled with a recession for much of his term -- his party represents more of the shrinking-government school than Kerry's Great Society aspirations.

Our current deficit represents about 4% of our GDP, which historically puts it above average but far from the highest we've seen over the past 20 years. It's a concern, but it shouldn't cause a panic. And all methods of deficit reduction are not equal, as the 1990s demonstrated. The dirty little secret of the 1990s was that the budget balanced itself based on the wild growth provided by the dot-com bubble and some questionable accounting practices that wound up causing a mini-crash on Wall Street. Government spending did not decrease, nor did the rate of increase slow down appreciably. Yet, Kerry insists that the only way to balance the budget now is to raise taxes -- or as he puts it, eliminate the tax cuts that have already been put in place. That's why his final statement about returning to the "fiscal sanity" of the 1990s is so ironic, and so concerning.

In the end, Kerry's economic plan consists of nothing but warmed-over populism, a few bones tossed to the middle class while tightening central control on our economy, an approach which we have learned over the past century does not work. And Kerry's essay begs one last, overriding question: if Kerry thinks all of this will help America, why didn't he do anything about it as Senator?

Marie Antoinette Of The 21st Century

The Post recently did a spin piece on Teresa Heinz Kerry, arguing that the Kerry campaign unfairly kept her under wraps. Unfortunately for both Kerrys, it turns out that the Post was incorrect:

Teresa Heinz Kerry, encouraging volunteers as they busily packed supplies Wednesday for hurricane relief efforts in the Caribbean, said she was concerned the effort was too focused on sending clothes instead of essentials like water and electric generators.

"Clothing is wonderful, but let them go naked for a while, at least the kids," said Heinz Kerry, the wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. "Water is necessary, and then generators, and then food, and then clothes."

At least this isn't "Shove it" or "Asses of Evil", but it's just as foolish. Who tells people that have just gone through a hurricane that clothing isn't important? Maybe Teresa likes running around naked, but for people who have lost everything in a storm, being lectured on the need to accept further humiliation because of Mrs. Kerry's priorities won't convince them that nude is where it's at. It's strikingly similar to "Let them eat cake," another phrase popularized by a rich and powerful spouse to a dithering monarch.

It wasn't malicious, to be sure ... but it wasn't bright, either. (Hat tip: Bill Schumm.)

Trolling For Kooks At Kinko's

Michael Dobbs continues his excellent work on Rathergate for the Washington Post, breaking the news that the Killian memos came from a Kinko's in Abilene -- just a half-hour drive from an old and disturbed nemesis of George Bush, Bill Burkett:

Documents allegedly written by a deceased officer that raised questions about President Bush's service with the Texas Air National Guard bore markings showing they had been faxed to CBS News from a Kinko's copy shop in Abilene, Tex., according to another former Guard officer who was shown the records by the network. ...

There is only one Kinko's in Abilene, and it is 21 miles from the Baird, Tex., home of retired Texas National Guard officer Bill Burkett, who has been named by several news outlets as a possible source for the documents.

Robert Strong, who was one of three people interviewed by "60 minutes," said he was shown copies of the documents by CBS anchor Dan Rather and producer Mary Mapes on Sept. 5, three days before the broadcast. He said at least one of the documents bore a faxed header indicating it had been sent from a Kinko's in Abilene.

Houston, I think we have liftoff! And as one of my e-mailers commented, someone should tell the Kinko's staff at the Abilene location not to erase their hard drives. Kinko's rents time on PCs, and they all have Microsoft Word on them. It wouldn't take any time at all to have typed up the four memos -- and the files may still exist on the computer drives.

Caption Contest Winners!

So, this time I put myself as the big victim of the Caption Contest, and I learned a little something about CQ's readers.

You guys are brutal.

No wonder I like you!

Now that Steve has returned from his two days in training for his job, he's ready to pick the winners of last week's contest. Just to remind everyone of the sex machine at the heart of this effort, here's the picture you all pilloried:

Here are the winners!

Captain's Award (Good News/Bad News Dept.) - Warren Meyer:

To: Cialis customer support

I am writing because of the warning on your site. It has been well over 4 hours since I took your product and I still cannot stand up without embarassment...

You Have The Conn #1 (Perfect Timing) - Dan The Man:

Okay, that looks good. Now all I need is Rather's email address.

BBWHWAAAAHWHAAAA!

You Have The Conn #2 (Nice Nice Baby) - Somsy:

Vanilla Ice of the Blogosphere shunned by hardcore blogheads.

You Have The Conn #3 (The Real Life) - Tropean:

"Is it spelled Paris like the city?"

Report to Sick Bay (If It's Not Close ...) - The Elder:

Ohhh...(sigh) Hugh's butt is simply sublime in those
wrinkle free Dockers.

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 Steve'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.

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!

The Promised CBS Update At 5 PM EDT

UPDATE, 6:15 ET:

UPDATE, 6:30 ET:

UPDATE, 6:40 ET: Okay, CBS didn't release this on their own website, but Drudge got it instead, from CBS News division President Andrew Heyward:

We established to our satisfaction that the memos were accurate or we would not have put them on television. There was a great deal of coroborating [sic] evidence from people in a position to know. Having said that, given all the questions about them, we believe we should redouble our efforts to answer those questions, so that's what we are doing.

As Instapundit and Kerryspot have both noted, Heyward not only misspelled "corroborated" (and they sat on this for six-and-a-half hours?), but they pronounce the memos "accurate" and not "authentic".

The message: We presented America with fraudulent materials, for which Dan Rather personally vouched. Having spent the past four days desperately seeking anyone to back us up, we've now given up, but you should still believe us when we tell you that these forgeries accurately support our smear on George Bush. The search for better forgeries will continue.

If it took Heyward six extra hours to come up with this, Viacom needs to find someone who has a clue and a dictionary to run its news division.

Here's a question: if CBS really has all of this "coroborating" evidence on hand, why not show it? Why was Dan Rather out chatting up Marian Knox this afternoon if their story was as well-sourced as Heyward claims? If the memos are "accurate", why does one of them describe pressure being applied on Killian and Hodges by a general who had retired 18 months before the date of the memo? How did the memos get created if all Knox had in the TANG office was a manual Olympia and a standard Selectric, neither of which could do the proportional spacing and kerning evident in the memos?

Who gave the memos to CBS News?

Until Heyward and CBS News answers these questions, they haven't "coroborated" anything. They're also no longer a news organization; they're the Nixon White House, defending the 18-minute gap on the tapes. They're toast.

CBS Lays An Egg

Fox News reported that CBS would be making a statement today at noon ET regarding the forgery fiasco that Dan Rather brought upon the Tiffany Network. If this is their response to the demands for accountability coming from new media and old, then CBS has more problems than just Dan Rather. CBS continues to insist that the memos are genuine, laughably both relying on and disputing the same statement by the octogenarian former secretary of Jerry Killian to authenticate the documents:

CBS News continued to defend the legitimacy of its recent story about President Bush's Vietnam-era service in the Texas Air National Guard, even as two experts it hired to examine records CBS used told ABC they could not vouch for their veracity.

Meanwhile, a former secretary in the guard said Tuesday she believed the documents in question were fake, although they accurately reflected the thoughts of one of Mr. Bush's commanders.

The updated CBS report covers most of the new evidence and testimony unearthed in the past few days, including a fairly in-depth analysis of what its experts told ABC News. In disputing Emily Will and Linda James, CBS now says that they only had a peripheral role, echoing a statement given to ABC News yesterday. It also notes that Marcel Matley, the handwriting analyst that they claim authenticated all four memos, has backed away from his earlier statements and now acknowledges he only saw one document.

In fact, the only new piece to the CBS update is their inclusion of Marian Carr Knox, Killian's former secretary, who has said that she believes the documents CBS used are forgeries, but that their content matches her 30-year-old recollection of Killian's state of mind:

Killian's former secretary, 86-year-old Marian Carr Knox, also questioned the documents in an interview with The Dallas Morning News.

"These are not real," Knox said in a story posted Tuesday on the newspaper's Web site. "They're not what I typed, and I would have typed them for him."

Knox told the newspaper she did not recall typing the memos, but that they echoed Killian's views on Mr. Bush. She said he retained memos for a personal "cover his back" file he kept in a locked drawer of his desk, but she was not sure what happened to them when he died in 1984.

CBS added this statement today in response to Knox's appearance:

CBS News spokeswoman Sandra Genelius said CBS did not believe Knox was a documents expert and that the network believes the documents are genuine.

"It is notable that she confirms the content of the documents, which was the primary focus of our story in the first place," Genelius said.

So in one statement, CBS embraces Knox -- who professes to hate George Bush and called him "unfit for office" in an earlier interview, which CBS neglects to mention -- for confirming the content of the memos at the same time it rejects her testimony about the memos themselves because she is not a "documents expert." Is CBS claiming, then, that she's lying about not typing the memos herself? She said in her earlier interview that she did the necessary typing for Jerry Killian, which makes sense given the Killian family's insistence that Killian didn't type out notes. If she's lying about that, then why should we believe her testimony regarding Killian's state of mind?

Now, according to the CBS report itself, the entire story rests on authentication from Ben Barnes and Marian Knox, since all of their other named experts have bailed. Barnes is a major contributor to the Democratic Party, one of the top moneymen for Kerry's campaign, a fact that CBS still fails to include in its reports. The equally partisan Knox has flat-out called the documents fraudulent and only offers hearsay recollections about the thoughts of a man from thirty years ago, long dead now and whose family insists felt exactly the opposite about George Bush.

And CBS still has no explanation for all of the content issues, such as incorrect dates for the due date on Bush's exam or how a general who had long since retired could possibly pressure anyone to upgrade the evaluation of a reserve lieutenant, or why he would care.

These people need help.

NY Post Verifies Silver Star After-Action Report

Deborah Orin -- one of this blog's favorite columnists -- verifies the after-action report from John Kerry's Silver Star action which I reviewed earlier this week:

A newly surfaced document from John Kerry's Navy record says he shot a lone, wounded enemy who was running away in the incident that led to his Silver Star, his highest military decoration.

Members of the anti-Kerry Swift Boat Veterans for Truth say the report vindicates their claim that Kerry didn't show the kind of valor that merits a Silver Star. The after-action report was obtained from the Navy archives by syndicated TV commentator Mark Hyman of "The Point." A Navy official confirmed its authenticity.

This report came from Bandit's review of previously overlooked documents at the Naval Archives, which the intrepid CQ contributor is still reviewing. Expect more revelations if Bandit's track record holds up, and hopefully I can help get the word out.

The Swiftvets claim vindication, and certainly this proved Kerry wrong again; the VC was wounded when Kerry chased him down. I don't like to get into qualitative arguments regarding the issuance of certain medals over others, as a civilian. The Swiftvets can argue that point without any help from me. Some have argued that chasing down a wounded enemy and killing him is a war crime, but I think that's ludicrous. He was armed with a rocket launcher by all accounts, and in a war zone he's fair game no matter which way he ran.

My issue with the Silver Star is the number of times this story has changed, both from Kerry's lips and in the extraordinary three separate citations issued for the one medal over more than 15 years. Perhaps Kerry deserved a lesser commendation, perhaps he deserved the MOH, but it's indisputable that he's repeatedly puffed up this tale and changed it repeatedly to enhance his own reputation. That, to me, is the real issue.

Kedwards Campaign Shrieks ... Again

The Kerry/Edwards campaign has a bad case of Vietnamitis -- no matter what the issue or the debate, they find a way to throw in Vietnam as their rebuttal, usually in a hysterical shriek that could serve as a parody in and of itself. The latest example of these non-sequitur responses came from Dick Cheney's speech yesterday, in which he reminded people of the many positions John Kerry has taken on the Iraq war:

Vice President Dick Cheney turned Sen. John Kerry's own words against him Tuesday while criticizing the Democrat for calling the war in Iraq "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." In an echo of a charge President Bush leveled at Kerry last week, Cheney contended that Kerry's position was held early in the primary campaign by Democratic presidential rival Howard Dean.

"Sen. Kerry said, and I quote, '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,'" Cheney said.

"In the spirit of bipartisanship, that's one position of Sen. Kerry's that I do agree with," he said.

Like it or not, that's political debate, and pointing out inconsistencies in an opponent's publicly stated positions is not only fair game, but very germane to the election. In response, one would normally expect the Kerry campaign to present examples of Cheney or Bush switching positions or a clarification of the nuance behind the seeming contradiction that Cheney points out. One would expect that kind of response from adults. This is what we get from the shrill adolescents at the Kerry/Edwards campaign:

Mark Kitchens, a spokesman for the Kerry-Edwards campaign, called Cheney's criticism an insult.

"Cheney's attacks come from a man who took five deferments from Vietnam and are disingenuous at best. His attacks are an insult to all of us who have ever worn the uniform," Kitchens said. "George Bush and Dick Cheney like to blame others for their failures but they fail to see that the buck stops at their desks at the White House."

For a campaign which has seen its Viet Nam strategy completely crash and burn, they don't seem to learn much. And if all we ever hear from Kerry on policy issues -- and Iraq is a pretty important policy issue right now -- is that Cheney had five deferments back in the 60s, this may wind up being the dullest landslide victory in American history. The hysterical insults being tossed at every turn by the Democrats may crank up the International ANSWER set, but it's going to turn off the centrists who like to vote for adults in November.

Besides, the Vice-Presidential debate's going to sound like a night with your teenager, at this rate:

Moderator: What is your policy on free trade?

Cheney: We believe that free trade is a liberating influence and that respect for property rights allows for the establishment of democracy.

Edwards: Five deferments!

M: That's not what I asked --

E: I only got one, but he got five! It's not fair!

M: Senator, if I could interject --

E: I swear, this is so stupid. Five deferments!

M: Could you stop trying to change the subject, please?

E: Well, I'm just saying, it's not fair.

It sounds like the entire Kerry/Edwards campaign could use a time-out. Let's hope some grown-ups arrive to put the babies to bed sometime soon.

UPDATE: Yes, Edwards also got a student deferment during Viet Nam. I've added a link.

Bush's Lambeau Leap?

Jam VanderHei looks to an incident in Green Bay last month, which I noted at the time, to explain Kerry's sudden erosion in Wisconsin and elsewhere. VanderHei explores the underlying issues of Kerry's phoniness on the campaign trail, revealed in his error-filled invocations of sports references, and how the Bush campaign has taken advantage of it with voters:

At a campaign event last month, the Democratic presidential nominee called it Lambert Field -- a slip of the tongue carried on television, in papers throughout the state and on ESPN's Web site.

That's akin to calling the Yankees the Yankers or the Chicago Bulls the Bells. This is a place where Packers jackets often outnumber sports coats in church and thousands of fans wear a big chunk of yellow foam cheese atop their head with the pride of a new parent. President Bush's warning to terrorists is apropos to the passions of Packers fans -- you are either with 'em or against 'em.

"I got some advice for him," Bush told Wisconsinites a few days after the Lambert gaffe. "If someone offers you a cheesehead, don't say you want some wine, just put it on your head and take a seat at Lambeau Field." Vice President Cheney made the obligatory pilgrimage to Green Bay last week to pile on. "I thought after John Kerry's visit here I'd visit Lambert Field," Cheney told a crowd at a Republican fundraising dinner Thursday night. Then he went in for the kill. "The next thing is he'll be convinced Vince Lombardi is a foreign leader."

It's all pretty funny, but it points to a character deficit on Kerry's part -- trying constantly to be something he's not. He made a similar but more foolish mistake in Michigan last month when he praised Ohio State Buckeye football to an audience of Wolverine fans. Apparently, Kerry wanted to leave the impression that he's just a football-lovin' reg'lar guy, but the Michigan attendees were not impressed. Stunned at first, they began to boo Kerry until he was advised where the campaign stop was, gave a mumbled statement about Michigan's great football tradition, and quickly moved away from sports talk.

VanderHei links that performance with Kerry's nosedive in Wisconsin, where he's coughed up eight points to Bush in a state Al Gore (barely) carried in 2000. Again, VanderHei may use a humorous approach, but he's serious about the issue of authenticity. Voters have pegged Kerry as a big phony, in part because of silly incidents like this. Not only did Kerry fail to get the names correct, he did so while claiming to be a big fan of the sports teams. In fact, it's not just being phony that's an issue here, it's a lack of preparation indicating that Kerry could care less about whether he gets it right or not.

The Packer fans are known for their tight relationship with their team. At a time when player safety has been a concern for NFL officials, the Packers created the Lambeau Leap, where players jump into the throngs of adoring fans whenever they score a touchdown. Kerry's fumbles on sports and unmasking as a phony may have given Bush the electoral equivalent of a Lambeau Leap.

Viet Nam Vet: Kerry Pressured Me To Lie In 1971

Fox News picks up on a story that was first uncovered by Bandit and River Rat last month. Steve Pitkin, a Viet Nam veteran who testified to wartime atrocities in John Kerry's Winter Soldier investigation, now claims in a sworn affadavit that Kerry and other WS leaders pressured him to lie about war crimes in order to further their cause:

Steven Pitkin, an Army combat veteran, told FOX News that Kerry coached him and others to say they had witnessed war crimes, even after Pitkin told Kerry that he had not.

"Before they started the camera, they told me, 'We need you to speak about the atrocities that happened over there.' The whole company line that I initially came out and said, I was coached to say that over and over again," Pitkin said.

Pitkin's new statements present a problem for Kerry, if true. Kerry has recently tried blowing off his Senate testimony in 1971 accusing Viet Nam veterans of widespread and systematic atrocities and murders by claiming that he was nothing but a message boy. His claim to have done nothing more than report the results of the testimony doesn't fly with anyone who's read the transcript and heard the recording. If Pitkin's story is correct, it will further cement the growing Kerry reputation of dishonesty and opportunism.

David Thorne, one of Kerry's closest confidantes and a member of the Winter Soldier leadership, flatly denies that allegation. He'd better hope that denial can stand up. I always treat retractions of sworn testimony with a healthy dose of skepticism -- after all, Pitkin took a long time unburdening himself -- but the Winter Soldier claims were so outrageous and have been so repeatedly debunked that Pitkin's explanation makes a lot more sense than any offered by Thorne or Kerry.

CBS Reporter: We Have The Burden Of Proof

Drudge links to a Sioux City (IA) Journal interview with Bob Schieffer, host of the CBS show Face the Nation and their longtime Washington correspondent. Schieffer distances himself from both Rather and his network by acknowledging that CBS has to either prove the memos are genuine or withdraw their story:

CBS News' Bob Schieffer said Tuesday he hopes the network does more reporting to definitively prove the authenticity of memos 60 Minutes II received about President Bush's service in the Air National Guard.

"I think we have to find some way to show our viewers they are not forgeries," Schieffer, CBS' chief Washington correspondent and host of the network's "Face the Nation," said at a news conference in Sioux City. "I don't know how we're going to do that without violating the confidentiality of sources."

I believe this is the first attributed source within the Tiffany Network to acknowledge on the record that CBS has any kind of a problem with the Killian memos. Schieffer isn't just any source, either. He's a long-term on-air reporter with CBS and claims to be in daily contact with Dan Rather during this fiasco.

He also told the Journal that Rather really believes these to be genuine, a somewhat laughable contention after the revelations on ABC last night about disregarding their own experts' opinions that the memos were fakes. Maybe that's what Rather's telling Schieffer; it's certainly the party line at CBS, and it's what they're still feeding the public. Obviously, Schieffer isn't completely sold on their veracity, even if he's still sold on Rather's.

He also dismissed the idea that the memos came from Republican operatives looking to destroy Dan Rather, but acknowledged that the CBS reticence about the sourcing could indicate that the memos came from Bush opponents:

Though Schieffer discounted suggestions that Rather received fraudulent documents, he acknowledged the source could have been a Bush opponent.

"People ask me, 'Do I think somebody was trying to set up Dan Rather?' I say, "No that's completely out of the question," said Schieffer, who addressed the Siouxland Chamber of Commerce's annual dinner/meeting Tuesday night. "Would somebody do this in an effort to smear George Bush? That may be so. We're in the middle of a political campaign, and this would not be the first campaign where somebody on one side slipped something to a reporter because he feels it would hurt the guy on the other side."

Schieffer is obviously torn between loyalty to his employer and friend on one hand, and objective reality on the other. The memos are obvious forgeries, with numerous typographical, style, and content errors. CBS' insistence on their authenticity only makes everyone involved look either stupid or venal, and the 'stupid' option rapidly dissipated after the ABC report last night. The only way for CBS to clear itself of this disaster is for people like Schieffer to assert themselves and to insist that the network start behaving like a news organization again rather than the Nixon White House. This interview may be the start of that process.

Die Welt: Syria Used Chemical Weapons In Darfur

Channel News Asia reports that tomorrow's edition of the German paper Die Welt will publish allegations that Syria used chemical weapons in Darfur:

Syria tested chemical weapons on civilians in Sudan's troubled western Darfur region in June and killed dozens of people.

The German daily Die Welt newspaper, in an advance release of its Wednesday edition, citing unnamed western security sources, said that injuries apparently caused by chemical arms were found on the bodies of the victims. ...

Die Welt said the sources had indicated that the weapons tests were undertaken following a military exercise between Syria and Sudan. Syrian officers were reported to have met in May with Sudanese military leaders in a Khartoum suburb to discuss the possibility of improving cooperation between their armies.

According to Die Welt, the Syrians had suggested close cooperation on developing chemical weapons, and it was proposed that the arms be tested on the rebel SPLA, the Sudan People's Liberation Army, in the south.

So we have another Ba'athist regime using chemical weapons to put down a civil war. Anyone want to guess where they got the weapons? Because this happened in May, several months after Saddam Hussein was captured, it doesn't take much imagination to picture Bashir Assad's calculations. With Saddam and his regime gone, those Iraqi weapons came in awfully handy. It makes that al-Qaeda attempt at using a chemical-weapons bomb in Jordan look less like a fluke, doesn't it?

But no one in that area has WMD capability ... Bush lied, after all. Just ask the people of Darfur. (via The Corner)

UPDATE: Here is a translation of the Die Welt article by CQ reader Chuck Bearden:

Syria tests chemical weapons on Sudanese
Intelligence services: dozens of victims

by Jacques Schuster
[translated by Chuck Bearden]

Berlin - Syrian units employed chemical weapons against the black
African population of Darfur in June of this year. The action, in
which dozens of people were killed, was carried out with the
agreement of the Sudanese government. Western intelligence services
have reached this conclusion. They are supported by eyewitness
reports that have been published in various Arab media outlets.

According to the documents of western intelligence agencies in
possession of die Welt, Syrian officers met in May of this year with
representatives of the Sudanese army in a suburb of Khartoum. Their
conversations dealt with how to expand military cooperation.
According to intelligence information, the Syrian delegation offered
Sudan closer cooperation with respect to chemical warfare. According
to the sources, it was suggested that the effects of chemical weapons
be investigated on rebels of the Sudan People's Libaration Army (SPLA).

Because Khartoum was engaged in peace negotiations with the rebels in
May, the Sudanese delegation apparently recommended testing the
weapons on the black African population. To that end, at least five
airplanes of the Syrian civilian airline Syrian Arab Airlines flew
from Damascus to Khartoum, carrying specialists from the Syrian
academy for chemical warfare with technical equipment on board.

It cannot be precisely determined when the use [of the chemical
weapons] in Darfur began. However, in an article on the Arabic
website "Ilaf" from August 2, Sudanese eyewitnesses tell of strange
goings-on in Khartoum's Al-Fashr Hospital. In June, dozens of frozen
corpses were quite suddenly brought to the hospital. They displayed
mysterious injuries over their whole bodies. After a short time,
Sudanese soldiers blocked off a wing of the hospital. If one is to
believe the witnesses, access was thereafter permitted only to an
unknown team of Syrian doctors. After [some] days, Sudanese forces
removed the bodies.

Military experts have for some time possessed information about
Sudanese-Syrian cooperation in the area of chemical weapons research.
Reports continue to surface from Syrian opposition figures of
chemical weapons tests on prisoners.

ABC: CBS Ignored Experts It Hired On Documents

ABC Evening News continues to chase down its competitor, CBS, on the Killian forgeries. Tonight, they broadcast an expose that alleges that CBS ignored the advice of several document experts who tried to warn them that the Killian memos were faked:

ABC's Brian Ross interviewed the two experts who CBS hired to validate the National Guard documents and reports they ignored concerns they raised prior to the CBS News broadcast. "I did not feel that they wanted to investigate it very deeply," Emily Will told Ross. "I did not authenticate anything and I don't want it to be misunderstood that I did," Linda James told Ross. Ross reports 2 experts told ABC News today that even the most advanced typewriter available in 1972 could not have produced the documents.

Up to now, we assumed that CBS ran with the forgeries not out of malice as much as avarice and ignorance. Now that view may turn out to have been too charitable. Far from failing to properly vet the documents, CBS knowingly moved forward with these forgeries, only stopping long enough to shop for a couple of supporting opinions from people who turned out to be unqualified to authenticate them.

This goes far beyond journalistic malpractice and could go as far as libel (or slander). Dan Rather and CBS knowingly broadcast a story they knew to be based on documents that could not be authenticated and were most likely forgeries, advice they received from their own experts.

Instead of attempting to verify the documents with the family, CBS ran to broadcast the material, knowing that it would smear a candidate for President. Verification would have been fairly easy; CBS knew where the family lived and had tracked down one of Killian's superior officers. CBS could have held the story for a few more days while they brought the documents to these witnesses for further verification. Rather than follow normal journalistic practice, they misled General Hodges by telling him the memos were handwritten and never bothered to ask the Killian family at all.

Why?

Dan Rather has had a longstanding beef with the Bush family, going back to at least the 1988 interview in which the elder George Bush gave Rather an on-camera tongue-lashing. His political affiliations have been no secret either, appearing at a Democratic fundraiser with his daughter, who has been active in the Texas state party. It's likely that Rather had a much lower threshold for evidence when it came to the Bush family; certainly, he seems to have a lower threshold for Republicans in general.

This is why Rather can base his entire story on a man who has raised a half-million dollars for the Democrats, almost a fifth of it this year on Kerry's behalf, and a handful of memos that he knows to be true whether they're forgeries or not. He knows it because George Bush is a Republican, and Rather is a partisan hack.

Now, some of you may read the above and say, "Gee, Captain, that's just a bit harsh. How can you say all that?" (Some of you may be getting the rope to hang 'em, too.) I say that because there is no other explanation. Had Rather just been snookered -- as I said earlier, it happens to everyone -- Rather would have reacted intelligently and rationally, inviting more research and updating his readers on the progress.

Instead, Rather has acted like a cornered animal; he insisted that he didn't need to prove anything to his critics, who were "political partisans". CBS went out looking for more experts to support them and came up with a couple more, who have since wilted under the scrutiny that the media and the blogosphere has accorded this story. Rather and CBS then tried to pass the entire burden of proof onto his audience, saying that the mere possibility that a typesetting machine existed was good enough -- ignoring several content errors that have also pegged the Killian memos as fakes. Now he's stonewalling, hoping it blows over.

Does an innocent man react thusly? No. He deliberately published the memos, arrogantly believing that the Tiffany Network and the great Dan Rather would never be challenged. His unchecked hubris has brought him low, and now we must ask ourselves this question: how often has he held his audience in such low esteem? What other questionably-sourced stories has he and CBS fed us over the years and decades?

If CBS wants to rescue any measure of its credibility, it needs to jettison Rather and anyone else in the decision-making chain that allowed their own experts to be ignored, putting a fraudulent smear campaign on CBS broadcast stations intended to deliberately skew a presidential election. Lacking this response, the only rational choice America has is to tune out CBS. Not just Dan Rather, not just 60 Minutes, not just prime time, but every single television show on CBS.

It's not just the partisanship -- it's the serial dishonesty that has to be excised from the mainstream media. The only way that will happen is if they feel the damage in their pocketbooks. (Hat tip: Hugh Hewitt)

UPDATE: The Elder at Fraters Libertas posted a list of CBS sponsors, complete with e-mail addresses and telephone numbers. Let's get busy.

UPDATE II: ABC has posted an update of its broadcast story on its web page, and it's much worse than I ever thought:

Emily Will, a veteran document examiner from North Carolina, told ABC News she saw problems right away with the one document CBS hired her to check the weekend before the broadcast.

"I found five significant differences in the questioned handwriting, and I found problems with the printing itself as to whether it could have been produced by a typewriter," she said.

Will says she sent the CBS producer an e-mail message about her concerns and strongly urged the network the night before the broadcast not to use the documents.

She sent it by e-mail, meaning that she documented the transmission -- and CBS didn't even blink its eye.

A second document examiner hired by CBS News, Linda James of Plano, Texas, also told ABC News she had concerns about the documents and could not authenticate them.

"I did not authenticate anything and I don't want it to be misunderstood that I did," James said. "And that's why I have come forth to talk about it because I don't want anybody to think I did authenticate these documents."

CBS's response? The two women played a "peripheral role", deferring to another expert who reviewed all four documents -- presumably the one CBS stuck in front of the camera, Marcel Matley. However, Matley is a handwriting analyst, and by Matley's own admission, he only reviewed one document. Why would true document analysts 'defer' to a handwriting analyst for document authentication? Answer: they wouldn't. CBS did all the deferring, and it wasn't to Marcel Matley. It was to Dan Rather.

CBS owes all of us an explanation of where they got those forgeries. Somehow, I think it will lead back to either the DNC or one of the main 527s supporting them. That's why CBS has circled the wagons around the sorry and pathetic figure of Dan Rather.

When will Viacom stockholders finally insist on grown-up supervision at Black Rock?

UPDATE III: Jaws are dropping all over the blogosphere on this one, including Patterico, Instapundit, and Power Line (whose jaw drops cost you at least $800 per billing hour).

I know we all have argued that the media has an intrinsic leftist bias. I don't think any of us expected to see a major broadcaster with a penchant for deliberately hoaxing its audience in order to promote its left-wing agenda and candidate.

Another Clintonista Comes Aboard Hair France

The John Kerry campaign announced another addition to its advisory staff -- Mike McCurry, the former Clinton press secretary whose tenure preceded Joe Lockhart's, another recent addition. In a petty cruelty, Kerry's increasingly overshadowed and overmatched communications director Stephanie Cutter made the announcement:

Sen. John Kerry on Tuesday added Bill Clinton's former press secretary, Mike McCurry, to his campaign, picking up yet another adviser who worked for the two-time Democratic presidential winner. McCurry will travel with Kerry as a non-paid senior adviser for the final weeks of the campaign.

One senior Kerry aide said McCurry will help keep the candidate's comments focused on his daily message. Another said his role will be to make sure the traveling press corps knows what Kerry is doing and why. Either way, the hiring is an acknowledgment that Kerry and his team have failed to communicate a concise, persuasive argument. McCurry starts Wednesday.

It would appear to me that these were the same tasks for which they selected Joe Lockhart, and the same duties that Cutter should have had as communication director. Does Kerry really need that many minders in order to stay on message? Do they plan on tackling him at the knees if he starts to mention Iraq or Viet Nam again? During the Reagan administration, Democrats sneered at Reagan and his "handlers", but they're hiring them by the score in Boston these days.

Of course, when your favorable ratings plummet 18 points in five weeks and land you somewhere below Martha Stewart and Vladimir Putin, you have serious problems. However, communications is hardly the issue, as Kerry himself has demonstrated by holing himself up since the convention and refusing to be interviewed until this week. After chiding George Bush for not holding enough press conferences as President (which must be anathema to the vain Bostonian), Kerry has refused to take a live question from any mainstream reporter, preferring to take questions only from Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and MTV. For someone this reticent, one press secretary really ought to be enough, and even at that it would only have to be a part-time job.

But congratulations to Mr. McCurry anyway on his new position. Let us know when you can induce your new client to come out from behind the sofa.

Addendum: In all fairness, Drudge cut off the list from the Washington Post's Dana Milbank before the end. Kerry did outpoll such luminaries as Pete Rose, Rush Limbaugh, Joseph McCarthy (barely), and O. J. Simpson.

IAEA Dithers

After the US finally started talking tough about Iran's nuclear research and development and the EU stiffened its own backbone this past week, the focus shifted to the International Atomic Energy Agency for completion of its investigation and inspection of Iranian nuclear efforts. The West seems to agree in principle to a deadline of October 31 for Iranian compliance with its non-proliferation responsibilities.

The IAEA, on the other hand, argues that deadlines are meaningless altogether, revealing the uselessness of the agency and its head, Mohammed ElBaradei, in combating proliferation and its connections to terrorism:

The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said Tuesday that he cannot guarantee his probe of Iran's suspect nuclear activities will be complete by November, the deadline sought by the United States and its European allies.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, also repeated that his investigation has not definitely established whether Iran is trying to make nuclear weapons — as Washington asserts.

"We haven't seen any concrete proof that there is a weapons program," he told reporters. "Can we say everything is peaceful? Obviously we are not at that stage." ... While ElBaradei said it was up to the board to decide whether to set a deadline, "we cannot just say there is a magic date."

"There is no artificial deadline where I can say, 'in November everything will be completed,'" he said.

Well, after two years, when do we get some answers? This is exactly like the Iraqi weapons "inspections", which were originally designed to ensure and document compliance, not turn international bureaucrats into a bunch of Barnaby Jones wannabes. Instead of reporting the lack of transparency and cooperation and putting the effort back into the hands of the negotiators, the agency instead argues for a perpetual inspection regime that will find nothing and do nothing.

We've had ample evidence of Iranian violations of the treaty, and all indications are that the Iranians are well on their way to constructing a nuclear weapon. Even the IAEA has said that Iran has been playing games with the inspectors; France admits that Iran has cheated the system; hell, even Iran admitted it lied to the IAEA about violations. How many more provocations will it take for ElBaradei to write his report?

ElBaradei and the reliance on bureaucracts outside the loop of any responsibility is symptomatic of the world's response to terror and nuclear blackmail. The prevailing wisdom seems to be to do just enough to be seen doing something while giving lifetime jobs to anyone who is willing to never reach a conclusion. It's the same strategy that led to the twelve-year Iraqi quagmire, and all it does is postpone the inevitable. These days, and especially in Iran, the time wasted by the West is put to good use by the fanatics.

Stalemates never hold, and only those who are willing to take action wind up gaining the edge. Iran has been the only party in this multilateral chicken dance with the willingness to act, encouraged by the West's dithering. The time for vacillation has long since passed, and if ElBaradei and the IAEA can't figure out how to set a deadline, then their usefulness is at an end.

Whiskey Alert!

For all you Whiskey fans out there, I've just heard from my globetrotting partner in crime here at Captain's Quarters. She's established herself in a new, undisclosed location and getting caught up with her Internet connection. We should hear from her as early as this weekend ... and believe me, no one will be happier than me!

Going After The Senility Vote

The Washington Post takes a look at a little-discussed phenomenon and explores the ethical and Constitutional implications of the senile voter. Shankar Vendantam uses some disturbing anecdotal evidence to make the point that, in a population skewing older, more voters may simply be incapable of casting a ballot and are vulnerable to manipulation:

Florida neurologist Marc Swerdloff was taken aback when one of his patients with advanced dementia voted in the 2000 presidential election. The man thought it was 1942 and Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. The patient's wife revealed that she had escorted her husband into the booth.

"I said 'Did he pick?' and she said 'No, I picked for him,' " Swerdloff said. "I felt bad. She essentially voted twice" in the Florida election, which gave George W. Bush a 537-vote victory and the White House.

Vedantam indulges in some poor structural composition; the patient's wife didn't cause the 537-vote victory by filing a ballot for her husband, but the point is still an interesting one. In a close election, a few hundred votes cast under circumstances such as these could decide a state's electoral votes. While it makes for clever jokes about the quality of the outcome (insert tired Bush-intelligence punchline here), it raises difficult questions about the capability of voters, and government's duty to protect the franchise for all citizens.

With 4.5 million Americans suffering from Alzheimer's, and even more suffering from other kinds of dementia, the field is wide open for abuse. Well-meaning family and friends helping Grandma to vote, though, is not the big concern, and Vedantam buries the lede somewhat by focusing on the personal anecdote first. Later on, the article finally mentions what amounts to disgusting exploitation by special-interest groups as they target this population for their wheel-out-the-vote drive:

Germaine L. Odenheimer, a neurologist and geriatrician, recalled seeing activists from the League of Women Voters coming through the VA nursing home in Gainesville, Fla., and registering residents to vote. "A large portion of the residents were demented," said Odenheimer, who now works at the University of Oklahoma. She said she asked activists from the nonpartisan group how they judged which patients were mentally competent. "I never had a satisfactory answer," she said. ...

In California, for example, Democrats are suing the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Menlo Park for preventing activists from talking to residents and homeless veterans. Lawyer Scott Rafferty, a member of presidential candidate John F. Kerry's steering committee, said he was turned away on the grounds that residents have dementia.

Rafferty said that most of the residents were of sound mind -- and that most were Democrats. He charged the Bush administration with suppressing Democratic turnout. The Department of Veterans Affairs said it was protecting patients and was required by law to keep out partisan activity.

Although the efforts are limited to left-leaning groups such as the League of Women Voters and the Democrats now, that will change if this continues to go unnoticed. It's one thing for the infirm to maintain their eligibility and their families to assist them in the manner in which they honestly feel the patient would choose. Having political groups descend on these patients like vultures on a dying beast should disgust anyone with a modicum of decency.

Pinch Decries Debate Tone While Going Hyperbolic

The New York Times' publisher, Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger, whined to a Kansas State University audience about the tone of public debate yesterday, saying that news organizations attempting to provide objective coverage face unprecedented cynicism:

The publisher of The New York Times complained Monday about what he called a cheapening of the public debate but said he thinks news organizations can improve the situation.

Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., speaking at Kansas State University, said newspapers and broadcast stations that try to give unbiased information face increased skepticism and even cynicism from the public.

Cynicism? You don't say! Sulzberger mentions the Jayson Blair scandal, in which a favored reporter took advantage of a lack of leadership in the newsroom to file a string of fictional reports despite numerous indications of his fraudulent behavior. But Pinch must be suffering from massive self-delusion if he thinks that Jayson Blair is the root of the public's mistrust of the Gray Lady. Anyone can get fleeced by a skilled con man -- it's the routine editorial positions at the Times that has reduced its credibility to near-CBS levels.

For instance, when Ambassador Joe Wilson accused the Bush administration of lying about Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium in Niger, the New York Times couldn't give Wilson enough coverage. In a study by the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, the Times published 70 articles about him, his claims, and the supposed martyrdom of him and his wife, who was outed by Robert Novak as a CIA agent in explanation of how an anti-Bush partisan landed the job to check out Niger in the first place. As I noted in July, after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that Iraq had indeed attempted to buy uranium from Niger, based in part on Wilson's own report of testimony from the Nigerian Prime Minister, and that Wilson' wife had indeed played a role in getting him the job, the Times coincidentally lost interest in Joe Wilson. Pinch's "paper of record" published only three -- three -- stories on Wilson's collapse. Considering that Wilson had been stumping for John Kerry at the time, the veracity of his foreign-affairs team should have been of great interest to an "objective" news outlet.

70-3, Pinch. That, by the way, was the best score that Kurtz could find in the mainstream news media. Even Kurtz's own paper scored a pathetic 96-2. CBS, by the way, tossed a shutout on Joe Wilson, 30-0, and have yet to cover the fact that Wilson lied about Niger and about his wife's influence in getting him that assignment. That, and not Howell Raines' naivete, is why the public has become deeply cynical of the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media.

But that's not all Pinch had to say. He doesn't like the tone of the current political debate, either:

Sulzberger, publisher of The Times since 1992 and chairman of The New York Times Co. since 1997, expressed concern about what he said was the growing shrillness of political debate. ...

Some, he said, view news as little more than another form of reality programming. He criticized talk radio for too often having a "trial by insult format," television programs that provide little more than "barroom chatter" and authors who increase book sales by becoming more shrill in their writing.

"We are starting to pay a high social price for this form of cheap entertainment," he said. "This results in younger generations being less interested in the news."

Let's not forget that this comes from the man who keeps Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert, and Paul Krugman gainfully employed as the shrill partisan hacks on his own editorial board. But even the unsigned, "house" editorials hardly add to a reasoned understanding. As an example, take a gander at this article on the Bush administration's request for review of an endangered-species designation for the marbled murrelet, and the strident and hysterical tone of the editorial:

The Bush administration has from time to time found it convenient to distort science to serve political ends. The result is a purposeful confusion of scientific protocols in which "sound science" becomes whatever the administration says it is. ... This administration seems to make no accommodation for anything besides humans' economic desires. Any creature in the way may find itself legislated, litigated or regulated out of existence.

Regular readers of the Times recognize this as the predominant tone of the newspaper's editorial section, which comes directly under the authority of the publisher and his managing editor. Complaining to students in Manhattan, Kansas about the tone that his own newspaper helps to set, both directly and with the columnists it continues to employ, provides an example of hypocrisy and whining that ill befits someone who holds themselves out as an example of the "unbiased" media. Newspaperman, cover thyself -- and then perhaps we'll take you more seriously.

UPDATE: Manhattan, KS, not Kansas City, is the home of KSU. My apologies to the Little Apple!

Garbo Speaks! The Generalissimo Blogs!

Hey, our favorite radio producer has finally decided to hang a shingle for himself in the blogosphere. Make way for Duane's new blog, Radioblogger, which is off to an auspicious start.

Duane advises to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," but in Duane's case, that's poor advice. I've blogrolled him and you'll want to check him out on a regular basis.

UPDATE: Don't forget about our other favorite radio guy, too.

UPDATE II: Fixed the link to Chumley's site, now that he has gone pro with his hosting ...

Washington Post: CBS Is Toast

Michael Dobbs and Howard Kurtz continue the Washington Post's tough look at the Killian forgeries promoted by CBS and Dan Rather as "authentic", even as late as today, as both their typography and their content clearly show them to be fraudulent. Now their expert witness has recanted his support, leaving Rather twisting in the wind:

The lead expert retained by CBS News to examine disputed memos from President Bush's former squadron commander in the National Guard said yesterday that he examined only the late officer's signature and made no attempt to authenticate the documents themselves.

"There's no way that I, as a document expert, can authenticate them," Marcel Matley said in a telephone interview from San Francisco. The main reason, he said, is that they are "copies" that are "far removed" from the originals.

That makes two "experts" cited by CBS and Rather who have backpedaled furiously in the face of the meltdown. Retired General Bobby Hodges didn't just backpedal, he said that CBS misled him about the memos in the first place. Matley, who has no love for George Bush, originally defended the documents, and then backed up to the position that he had only authenticated the signature on one memo. Now he's backing all the way to Square One, admitting that authentication would be impossible without the originals.

Nor do Dobbs and Kurtz stop with the CBS "experts", willing and unwilling, jumping off the ship. The Post devastates another recent addition to CBS' "expert" staff:

In its broadcast last night, CBS News produced a new expert, Bill Glennon, an information technology consultant. He said that IBM electric typewriters in use in 1972 could produce superscripts and proportional spacing similar to those used in the disputed documents. Any argument to the contrary is "an out-and-out lie," Glennon said in a telephone interview. But Glennon said he is not a document expert, could not vouch for the memos' authenticity and only examined them online because CBS did not give him copies when asked to visit the network's offices.

Thomas Phinney, program manager for fonts for the Adobe company in Seattle, which helped to develop the modern Times New Roman font, disputed Glennon's statement to CBS. He said "fairly extensive testing" had convinced him that the fonts and formatting used in the CBS documents could not have been produced by the most sophisticated IBM typewriters in use in 1972, including the Selectric and the Executive. He said the two systems used fonts of different widths.

You know that CBS is drowning when it relies on an "expert" with no credentials as a document analyst who refuses to authenticate the memos because he only saw them on line. Dobbs and Kurtz demonstrate proper journalistic technique by asking someone with professional background in the field to review the data, and they get a much different answer:

A detailed comparison by The Washington Post of memos obtained by CBS News with authenticated documents on Bush's National Guard service reveals dozens of inconsistencies, ranging from conflicting military terminology to different word-processing techniques.

The analysis shows that half a dozen Killian memos released earlier by the military were written with a standard typewriter using different formatting techniques from those characteristic of computer-generated documents. CBS's Killian memos bear numerous signs that are more consistent with modern-day word-processing programs, particularly Microsoft Word.

"I am personally 100 percent sure that they are fake," said Joseph M. Newcomer, author of several books on Windows programming, who worked on electronic typesetting techniques in the early 1970s. Newcomer said he had produced virtually exact replicas of the CBS documents using Microsoft Word formatting and the Times New Roman font.

All of which led CBS to do some backpedaling of its own:

CBS executives have pointed to Matley as their lead expert on whether the memos are genuine, and included him in a "CBS Evening News" defense of the story Friday. Matley said he spent five to eight hours examining the memos. "I knew I could not prove them authentic just from my expertise," he said. "I can't say either way from my expertise, the narrow, narrow little field of my expertise."

In looking at the photocopies, he said, "I really felt we could not definitively say which font this is." But, he said, "I didn't see anything that would definitively tell me these are not authentic."

Asked about Matley's comments, CBS spokeswoman Sandy Genelius said: "In the end, the gist is that it's inconclusive. People are coming down on both sides, which is to be expected when you're dealing with copies of documents."

They have moved from issuing absolute affirmations of the documents to declaring the evidence "inconclusive" within the past 48 hours. The walls are crumbling at the siege of CBS, and within two or three days, we may see a white flag and the public offering of Dan Rather's behind as a peace offering. After all the intellectually dishonest posturing, nothing less will do.

Badgers For Bush

USA Today reports that Wisconsin has started to tip towards George Bush, who has opened an eight-point lead in a state Al Gore carried by a hair in 2000, according to a new USAT/CNN/Gallup poll:

President Bush has widened his lead over Democrat John Kerry in the battleground state of Wisconsin, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll shows. ... The newest poll should hearten Republicans. President Bush holds a lead of 8 percentage points among likely voters and a lead of 4 points among the larger group of registered voters.

The week before the Republican National Convention in New York City, Bush held a 3-percentage point lead over his challenger Kerry. Now, that lead has ballooned to 8 points.

His edge is within the poll's margin of error. But the momentum in the state in Bush's direction — and the fact he has gotten over the 50% threshold — is troubling to Democrats. They figure Kerry probably must hold Wisconsin if he is to win the election.

Actually, only the registered-voter lead is within the margin of error; the more reliable likely-voter result MOE is 5 points. And USA Today misstates the Bush RV lead; the results show him ahead, 50-45, the outside edge of the MOE.

Quite simply, losing Wisconsin is probably fatal to Kerry's election chances. Due to reapportionment, Bush already has a seventeen-vote lead in the Electoral College if he just hangs onto the states he won the last time. Taking Wisconsin's 10 electoral votes from Kerry gives a commanding lead and requires Kerry to take more than one state from Bush. Not only that, but losing Wisconsin indicates that the entire Upper Midwest may have gone soft on Kerry, especially Minnesota, which has been running dead even for the past couple of weeks. The erosion of support and enthusiasm for the Kerry campaign continues, and unless Kerry can do something spectacular, the momentum may result in an across-the-board beating the Democrats can hardly afford after a similar result in 2002.

Silver Star Spot Report Surfaces

The spot report for John Kerry's Silver Star action has resurfaced at Bandit's Hideout, and it affirms the story told by the Swiftvets while contradicting the later two versions of his citation. Bandit, who has done yeoman work on Kerry's Viet Nam narrative, has posted scans of the two-page document from Newscentral.tv.

Fox News reports that this spot-action report was written by Kerry himself, ironically, since it supports the Swiftvet version of events for the engagement. I've transcribed the relevant portion here:

...While troops conducted sweep, PCF 94 and 23 movefauimkiver [sic] towards area from which Army advisor reported gunshots. PCF 43 remained at original ambush site to provide support for troops. PCF 94 and 23 proceeded to VQ 984831 and then turned to return to PCF 43 location. At VQ 984830 a B-40 rocket exploded in water close aboard PCF 94 blowing out window frame. Both units received heavy small arms fire and OTC aga [sic] called units to turn into fire and charge ambush site. PCF 43 was [redact] and moved immediately to assist. PCF 94 beached in center of ambush in front of small path when VC sprung [sic] up from bunker 10 feet from unit. Man ran with weapon towards hootch. Forward M-60 gunner wounded man in leg. OinC [Kerry] jumped ashore and gave pursuit while other units saturated area with fire and beached placing assault parties ashore. OinC of PCF 94 chased VC inland behind hootch and shot him while he fled capturing one B-40 rocket launcher with round in chamber. ... [description of other units' actions]

While PCF 43 provide [sic] mortar support, PCF 94 and 23 assault parties reconned to VQ 985835 where 3 VC where [sic] observed running from them out of firing range. Assault party could not five pursuit [sic] due to proximity of mortar rounds passing overhead.

Compare this narrative, written immediately after the action, with that given in the Hyland citation. The latter describes conditions that are non-existent in the spot report. For instance, the "numerically superior forces" description doesn't gibe with the information on the first page, which states that each PCF had 30 RFPF troops aboard. They disembarked at VQ984831 and PCF 43 stayed with them while 94 and 23 went upriver and returned to an adjacent spot (VQ984830) where they were ambushed. The only count of VC given were the one man Kerry killed, 3 KIA from an earlier ambush (which the 90 RFPF handled), and two VC who ran off out of firing range after Kerry ran behind the hootch.

This report also contradicts Kerry's contention that the VC was uninjured when he jumped off the boat and chased him down. The report makes clear that the forward gunner shot him with the M-60 in the leg before Kerry jumped out of the PCF. Despite his earlier denial, Kerry did run behind the hootch to kill the VC, out of sight of his crew.

In the Lehman citation, the dead VC behind the hootch disappears completely, although the "numerically superior forces" reappear, even though the only numbers given hardly match the contingents of the three PCFs in the area, let alone the RFPFs ashore in the adjacent area.

When you look at the action on the spot report, it reflects well on the young Lieutenant Kerry. Although it's difficult to see how this action should have resulted in a Silver Star, it would seem a commendation of some sort would be appropriate. It's all of the exaggeration, lies, and paperwork alterations after the fact that calls Kerry's character into serious question.

Dan Rather: Lower-Case 'L' Means We Win

Ratherbiased.com has an instant transcript of Dan Rather's latest evasion of the charges that he used forgeries in a crude attempt to smear George Bush. After noting, finally, that not all of the critics of the documents are "political partisans", Rather latches onto a very arcane defense in order to establish their authenticity:

Rather: Richard katz, a software designer found other indications in the documents. He noticed the lower case l is used in documents instead of the actual numeral one. That would be difficult to reproduce on the computer today.

If you were doing this a week ago or a month ago on a normal laser jet printer, it wouldn't work. The font wouldn't be available to you.

Really? I could also note that the Selectric had a number 1 as well as the lower-case l, unlike some other typewriters of the time. If you think that authenticates the documents, then consider the non-typographical issues in them:

1. CBS says the documents came from Killian's personal files, which Killian's family says he never kept.
2. CBS "authenticated" these documents with retired General Bobby Hodges by telephone, who now says he was misled and the documents are probably forged.
3. One of the documents -- the "CYA" memo -- references improper influence by a general who had retired 18 months before the memo's date.
4. None of the memos use standard format for the Air Force or Air National Guard at the time.
5. Colonel Killian didn't like to type, and would be unlikely to have typed any personal notes, to file or anywhere else, again according to his family and to the personnel director (Rufus Martin) with whom he worked during Bush's TANG period.

There are so many holes in these documents that trying to plug them with a 1 or an l is laughable. Rather continues to fiddle while CBS burns. (And do you see any difference between the two here? I'm not using any exotic font for my blog!)

US Finally Pushes IAEA To The UN On Iranian Nukes

After two years of allowing the EU-3 to vacillate on Iranian defiance of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the US has decided to push the Internation Atomic Energy Agency to take Iranian violations to the UN Security Council, where serious economic and military sanctions could result:

Buoyed by growing European support, the United States lobbied the U.N. atomic watchdog agency Monday to send Iran before the U.N. Security Council for refusing to freeze work that can produce nuclear weapons.

A European diplomat said Washington had revised a resolution originally drafted by France, Germany and Britain, adding an Oct. 31 deadline and toughening language meant to force Iran to dispel all suspicions it is trying to make nuclear arms in violation of treaty commitments.

The draft, summarized by the diplomat for The Associated Press, demands "complete, immediate and unrestricted access" to all sites and information requested by the International Atomic Energy Agency in its probe into Iran's nearly 2-decade-long clandestine nuclear program.

This ultimatum is long overdue. The Iranians have been able to thumb their noses at the EU-3 (Britain, Germany, and France) for the past two years while they continue to produce uranium and build their program. Despite the discovery of thousands more centrifuges than would be needed for a civil nuclear-energy program -- in a country with huge oil reserves -- both the IAEA have demonstrated little more than empty threats and tepid appeasements to the Iranians. (They still offered more backbone than John Edwards, who offered to sell them nuclear fuel if they promised not to make weapons out of it.)

Such vacillation only encourages the enemies of freedom, the terrorists and the regimes that support them, most definitely and primarily including the Iranians. Why we have allowed the Europeans to present this weak defense of the West for as long as did mystifies me. We should have pushed the IAEA to move a year ago, and then again earlier this year when we found out about their continuing nuclear-fuel enrichment. Our reluctance to take the lead on disarmament of this radical mullahcracy gives an impression of weakness and fear, which is exactly the wrong impression to give the Islamofascists.

The EU-3 have done enough damage. It's time for them to join the US and start taking definitive steps towards concluding this problem. Only when that happens will the Iranian mullahs take the West seriously.

Putin Moves To Consolidate Power In Russia

In a move that has been widely anticipated, Russian President Vladimir Putin made sweeping changes to the Russian electoral system, citing the massacre in Beslan to excuse the emergency action:

The Kremlin leader, speaking in the wake of the hostage crisis in Beslan, told top officials he wanted a new election law to limit the number of political parties and to have full control over nominating regional leaders. ...

The president later issued a decree giving the government two weeks to draft proposals to deal with emergencies and a month to prepare "appropriate measures on foreseeing and preventing terrorism in any form."

In acting to limit the number of political parties and to force all seats in the Duma to be elected directly from their lists, Putin hopes to contain any radical elements from blocking his legislative programs and causing any disruption in his executive power. It also will have a chilling effect on those parties that are left on the "approved" list, knowing that Putin's displeasure at their policies may put them at risk for decertification.

In addition, Putin wants to have executive approval over nominations for regional governors, a move that will increase Putin's influence even more than his new restrictions on the Duma. The plan recalls the party-line control of the Soviet era, where only "approved" candidates appeared on ballots and always ran unopposed for their positions.

Without a doubt, Putin wants to use Beslan to increase his personal power at the expense of Russian rights to self-determination. But will it help Putin battle against terrorism? It seems rather doubtful. After all, just as in the US, the days after the terrible and cruel crimes against the children of Beslan would undoubtedly have seen the Duma cheerfully approving whatever funding would be necessary to strengthen Russian counterterrorism and military forces in order to avoid another such massacre. After such an attack, it doesn't take a dictator to rally the people -- I would argue that dictatorships actually impede such a response rather than help.

In the end, it looks like Beslan will give Putin the excuse to push to his eventual destination just that much faster than before. Spain may have been the first terrorist victory, and the Phillipines the second, but Russia may be the first time their action resulted in the loss of liberty that they hate. Despite Putin's call to work closely with the US on counterterrorism -- assistance that will pay off very well in the years to come -- I can't help but think that Russia will wind up paying a much steeper and more permanent price than Beslan.

Typography Questions About Silver Star Citations

Now that the entire blogosphere has had a crash course on typography and word processing, CQ reader Jeff C. spotted something interesting at the John Kerry campaign web site. Kerry's campaign has made available two of the three separate citations for the single Silver Star for his engagement of 28 February 1969, the Hyland and Lehman citations (the Zumwalt citation is not provided).

Take a look at the first citation in the scan, which is the older Hyland citation. Two odd observations jump out at me. First, the entire citation is typed in italics, which strikes me as strange, for military use. The second oddity, though, is the fact that this document is also typed in a proportional font with fairly obvious kerning. For a demonstration of how that differs from a standard typewriter product, simply look at the Lehman citation on the second page of the PDF, which uses a non-proportional font.

As an example of kerning in the Hyland citation, look at the fourth line, "Officer In Charge". The two 'f' characters occupy parts of each others' space. Line one has the words "gallantry" and "intrepidity", where both 'y' characters loop under the preceding letter. In fact, that's true for every 'y' in the text. Line seven, the word "fire" has the 'f' character loop over the 'i'. Typewriters do not do kerning, as has been discussed in regards to the forged Killian memos. Note also the perfect centering of the header, the word "Citation", and the signature line in the Hyland citation, as opposed to the Lehman citation.

It would indicate to me that the citation had to be sent out to a print shop for typesetting in order to produce the document as presented by John Kerry. And perhaps that was normal, but then why in the 1980s when Lehman supposedly signed off on a new version of the citation (Lehman denies it, and the Navy is investigating) did they revert back to a lower quality of print? The existence of three separate citations for one award has already raised eyebrows, and with the original Zumwalt citation not included, could the second Hyland citation be fraudulent, as is suspected of the third Lehman citation?

If any of my military readers can shine light onto this question, please leave the information in the comments, and I'll update this post. After the forgeries that CBS used to slam the President this week, any odd printed material from the Kerry campaign certainly will attract suspicion now. All of this speculation on Kerry's records could be avoided if Kerry would just sign a Form 180 and release his file for public review, of course, but perhaps this is one of the reasons why he's refused thus far.

UPDATE: The thrust of the commentary is that professional typesetting may well have been fairly commonplace for citations. At least one faithful reader, McG, wants me to drop the subject as it may detract from other inquiries into the Killian forgeries. I'm just asking the questions, though -- and thankful for the answers.

CQ reader Jon S, who spent some of his Navy career in the 1990s working on citations, says that it was commonplace to write the citation in a word processor and then shoot them out to a Laserjet for the official print, and in the 1980s that process would have used a daisy-wheel printer, accounting for the typewriter-style look on Lehman's citation. He feels that the two citations are probably aboveboard, at least regarding the printing.

If anyone has experience with 1970s citations and printing procedures, I'd love to hear from you.

UPDATE II: As one of the comments points out, the original Zumwalt citation is available on Kerry's site here (pages 7 & 8). Again, I'm struck by the printing differences between the Zumwalt citation and the Hyland citation. This time, when you look at the Zumwalt version, the text has obviously been typed. The "Citation" heading is centered just as in the Hyland citation, but the signature block is off-center to the right, like the Lehman citation. It's also not fully justified like the later two citations. It's likely these differences are innocent, but the military usually has very consistent formats in which to create documents (as a former tech writer for a defense contractor, I can tell you that from personal experience).

Is the Hyland citation bogus? I'd conclude probably not (at least, it probably came from Hyland) from your feedback thus far, but after the Killian forgeries, I'd be hard pressed to put anything past the Kerry campaign, especially given the highly unusual circumstances of the multiple citations and the Lehman denial.

Democrat 527 Paints Kerry As "Metro"?

As I've been reading the on-line newspapers, especially the New York Times, I've been seeing an ad campaign for something called Retro vs Metro. The ads feature a bad picture of George Bush with the label Retro, and a smiling John Kerry with the label Metro. The first impression this ad gives is that Kerry has co-opted yet another part of Howard Dean's campaign and declared himself a 'metrosexual', or at least a Democratic 527 has done that for him. Another ad laughably asks, "Smarter bombs or smarter kids?", apparently unaware that the two are not mutually exclusive.

I looked more into the website and discovered Retrovsmetro.org, a smug, self-congratulatory site that scorns religious expression unless it's superficial, and advances the most bigoted impressions of rural and suburban America as anything you're likely to read anywhere. Here's what the creators have to say about Retro America:

On the Retro side of the cultural divide are those who, in response to their conservative religious beliefs, are pro-life and support prayer in the schools, the display of Christian symbols in public facilities, and publicly funded religious social services. The Republicans who represent them in Congress vote for constitutional amendments to ban flag burning, declare the U.S. a Christian nation, allow tax-exempt religious organizations (but not other nonprofits) to engage in partisan politics, and favor limitations on the First Amendment to combat speech and symbols they perceive as pornographic or unpatriotic. Retro representatives support subsidies to oil, mining and agriculture, but they are opposed to women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, affirmative action, welfare, organized labor, and taxes of any kind.

These are “God, Family, and Flag” folks politically dominated by rural, conservative, white, Fundamentalist Christian populations. Retro America is not the land of co-habiting, unmarried, hetero, or same-sex couples, or of the young seeking cultural excitement in the large Metro cities.

On the other hand, here is how they describe the sweetness-and-light Metro side of America:

On the Metro side of the cultural divide are religious moderates and seculars, Democrats, and moderate Republicans who are committed to excellence in education and science, who want the arts to flourish; who are accepting of differences in ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation; and who want a clear division between church and state. These moderates are in favor of women’s, gay, and workers’ rights. ...

Metro America values inclusion, respects science and social discourse, and promotes policies designed to provide physical, economic and social security for all families, both the 20 percent of the “old traditional families” and the 80 percent of the “new traditional families.” If America is ever to be a true United States, it must embrace these Metro values of inclusion and respect.

Ah, yes, all of the inclusiveness obviously falls on the side of the Metros -- the same people who brought us campus speech codes, the same people who were seen screaming and assaulting Republican delegates in New York City (the very heart of Metro America!), the ones who set up false dichotomies between national security and education. Metro America is so inclusive that they feel the only way that America can be "true" will be to force everyone to think the way they do.

Maybe this is another Karl Rove effort ...

UPDATE: The Washington Post notices the silliness.

Shooting Par For Pam

Yesterday I had the pleasure to spend the afternoon with the terrific folks behind Pam Wolf's run for the Minnesota state House in District 51B, playing golf at her fundraiser. Despite my golf handicap -- which is my complete lack of talent for the game -- I even managed to make par. (On one hole.) Pam, I found out, is not just a schoolteacher but also a golf instructor. I asked her for a few tips and she said, "Vote Republican." Great advice, especially this year!

You couldn't ask for a nicer day to play golf or a nicer group of people to walk a course. Pam's campaign manager, Brian, was my partner for the tournament, and fortunately both of us had the same attitude towards winning. Afterwards, everyone had hamburgers and hotdogs, and chatted about Pam's district, the issues involved, the seeming disappearance of her opponent (Connie Bernardi), and the Vikings, who wound up winning 35-17 in their home opener.

If you missed out, you can still help Pam out by donating to her campaign at her web site. She's facing a tough race, but Pam is very optimistic about her chances with all of the support she's been given. She even has a PayPal account all set up for donations right from her website. Let's help send a fresh voice to the capitol and help the Republicans maintain their majority in the House.

New Smear, Same As The Old Smear, Only Lamer

Matt Drudge reports that the Democrats have prepared a new smear on George Bush regarding his National Guard service that is not only pathetic and laughable, but also reveals the incredible ignorance of the military of Bush's opponents:

Faster than a CBS eye can blink, dogged Dems are set to take to the airwaves anew hoping to keep questions about President Bush's National Guard duty in play, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

Candidate Kerry apparently has rejected former President Clinton's advice not to get further locked in a 2004 Vietnam quagmire.

"George W. Bush's campaign literature claimed that he 'served in the U.S. Air Force.' The only problem? He didn't," slams a new DNC press release set for distribution. ... "George Bush has a clear pattern of lying about his military service," DNC Communications Director Jano Cabrera blasts in the new release. "From 1978 to the present day, George Bush has refused to tell voters the truth about his service. It's time for the President to come clean."

"Flyers distributed to Texas voters during Bush's failed Congressional race say 'he served in the U.S. Air Force and the Texas Air National Guard.' But according to Air Force officials, Air National Guardsmen are not counted as members of the active-duty Air Force."

If you can imagine anyone responding to anything so unbelievably petty, then you must be related to James Carville. Otherwise, all this kind of attack does is to reveal the desperation of John Kerry and the Democrats.

Besides which, it's dead wrong, just like the Killian forgeries, only this time no one committed felonies to create the smear. CQ stalwart Bandit, himself a former military man, discovered this among George Bush's National Guard records at USA Today. Take a look through pages 8, 9, 10, and 24, for starters. George Bush received his commission from the Air Force reserves and his promotion from 2nd Lt to 1st Lt was given by the Air Force. That would indicate that George Bush indeed was serving in the Air Force while flying in the Air National Guard.

Who do the Democrats think was in charge of the Air National Guard, anyway? The FAA? If they know this little about our armed services, they should never be put in charge of them. And if they're reaching for such picayune and pathetic distinctions, it demonstrates that they have nothing left to offer the American electorate. They've admitted that John Kerry is an empty suit and all they care about is regaining power.

The only way to ensure that this crowd gets completely discredited is to punish the Democratic Party up and down the entire ticket in November. If you think forgery is a swell thing, of course, vote Democratic. But if you want these twisted and bitter souls to be exiled once and for all from American politics -- the Susan Estriches, Al Gores, James Carvilles, and all that gang of haters -- then do whatever you can to ensure their party's defeat at every level this year.

When You Start Losing R.W. Apple ...

The New York Times runs an amazingly balanced analysis from the notoriously partisan R. W. Apple, who usually only comes second to Robert Fisk in blogosphere disdain for his slanted pieces. Today, however, even Apple can't work his magic for John Kerry in a look at how badly the Democrat has stumbled in Ohio, where according to Apple, all indicators point to a great opportunity for Kerry:

Everything seemed to be in place for a powerful run by Senator John Kerry in Ohio in the stretch drive after Labor Day. Al Gore lost the state by 175,000 votes in 2000, despite having pulled all his advertising early in October. Ohio has shed 250,000 jobs since George W. Bush became president. Rocked by scandals and an unpopular tax increase, the statehouse Republicans, from Gov. Bob Taft down the line, have been in unaccustomed disarray for weeks.

At the end of last month, the Census Bureau reported that Cleveland, with a poverty rate of 31.3 percent, led the country in that most dubious category, and this month American deaths in Iraq topped 1,000. Both developments might have given a leg up in the campaign to Mr. Kerry, a critic of Mr. Bush's economic policy and his conduct of the war. Yet Mr. Kerry seems to be falling back.

Ahead by six percentage points in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll in mid-July, Mr. Kerry trailed by nine points in a similar survey taken Sept. 3 through Sept. 7, immediately after the Republican convention. Kerry aides said the second poll had been taken too soon after the convention to be meaningful, but its results mirrored the impression of many savvy Ohio political figures.

Democrats (and Republicans) in Ohio have reached the same conclusion as other nationwide: Kerry is an inept candidate and a potential disaster for the party. While they're doing their best to float his campaign back to the surface, the truth is that Democrats have little enthusiasm for the jet-set candidate:

Gerald Austin of Cleveland, a leading Ohio campaign consultant for more than 30 years, said that former President Bill Clinton could run a better campaign than Mr. Kerry's "even when he was under ether." Mr. Austin said that Mr. Kerry had been too slow to respond to Republican attacks on his military record.

"I smell the same New England genius that I smelled in the Dukakis campaign in 1988," Mr. Austin added. "Kerry wants to run as a man of the people, and where do they put him for photo opportunities? Snowboarding in Sun Valley, shooting skeet in the Ohio valley, and windsurfing off that great working-class vacation paradise, Nantucket. Democrats - at least Ohio Democrats - play softball and touch football."

The Dukakis comparison keeps coming up, but others have pointed out a key difference between Kerry and his former boss: Dukakis stuck to his positions, no matter how out-of-the-mainstream they were. Kerry, on the other hand, has drifted all over the political map, trying to figure out who he is, matching perfectly his 20-year Senate career of being a complete empty suit. The willingness of Democrats to go on record -- and of Apple to write this article -- demonstrates how frustrated his party has become with the Kerry candidacy.

Russia Moves Towards US After Terrorist Attacks

Russia, reeling from a flurry of terrorist attacks that have left hundreds dead, signalled today that it intends to pursue closer ties to the US rather than Europe based on anti-terrorism priorities, according to Reuters:

Russia will revamp its security forces and seek international cooperation to hunt militants in the wake of a school siege which killed more than 300 people nine days ago, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said Sunday. ...

He added that the United States was best placed to understand Russia's situation because it had also been the target of major attacks, and he said he had discussed the issue with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld twice this week.

"In this sense it seems easier to find grounds for an understanding with the United States than with some European states," Ivanov said.

France and the Netherlands angered Russia by asking for an explanation of what had happened at the school siege in the North Ossetian town of Beslan, where children, women, men and their captors died in a maelstrom of explosions and gunfire.

This move was not unexpected. In the aftermath of the terrible Beslan siege and slaughter, the Russian people have demanded more security and a forward strategy against terrorists. The Europeans, led by France and the Netherlands in this case, continue to focus on the victims as the cause of terrorism, just as they do with the US. Putin belatedly has seen that mainland Europe will wind up being nothing more than an appeasing gadfly on the issue, and the only significant partners that take terrorism seriously will be the US and the UK.

This should give an indication to the American electorate that serious people do not worry about engaging an isolationist and corrupt France on counterterrorism. Those who argue the opposite in our own country may mean well, but they lack significant understanding of France and its worth to combating Islamic terrorists. The French are simply too overwhelmed by its growing Muslim minority to help out in any way.

Caught In The Act Of Not Being AWOL!

The Decatur Daily (Alabama) published an interview this morning with former Air Force Sgt. James Copeland, who insists that he saw George W. Bush doing his required drills at Dannelly Air National Guard Base in Montgomery, AL during the period CBS and Democrats claim he was AWOL:

Copeland, who lives in Hartselle, retired from the Air Force on Jan. 31, 1980. He was the disbursement accounting supervisor, a full-time position, for Dannelly Air National Guard Base in Montgomery from Oct. 28, 1971, to Oct. 27, 1975. His office was less than 100 yards from the hangar where Bush performed drills.

Rumors say Bush went AWOL while assisting Winton "Red" Blount in an unsuccessful campaign for U.S. Senate focus on 1972 and 1973.

Copeland, 65, remembers meeting Bush on two occasions. He does not remember the precise dates. On one occasion, Copeland said, Bush and Lt. Col. John "Bill" Calhoun came to Copeland's office with a question about Bush's pay. Copeland is not sure, but he believes the question had to do with where to mail Bush's checks.

Copeland also backs up previous AANG witness Lt. Col. John Calhoun, who earlier this year verified Bush's service in Alabama:

Copeland stressed that Calhoun's account of Bush's service in Montgomery would be accurate because Calhoun was in a position to work with Bush during every drill. Calhoun told The Associated Press last week that he saw Bush every drill time, which was one weekend each month.

Not only was Calhoun in a position to know of Bush's service, Copeland said, but Calhoun "was an ethical and honest officer."

And the Decatur Daily, in a demonstration of actual investigative journalism that the spoiled brats at CBS could only envy, actually looked around for witnesses at the Winton Blount campaign to see if Bush missed any campaign events because of his National Guard duties. Bingo!

Joe Holcombe, 71, of Joppa worked with Bush on the Blount campaign. He told THE DAILY last week that he remembers Bush missing at least one campaign meeting because of his National Guard drills.

Perhaps when the story of the 2004 campaign is written for history, the only one noted as the loser will be the candidate who didn't get into the White House. However, those of us who lived through it will recall that the biggest losers of all were the mainstream media outlets who rabidly pursued their partisan agendas, chasing after unsourced myths and promoting obvious forgeries to support their agenda, while ignoring over 250 combat veterans who went on record and supplied evidence regarding the malfeasance of their preferred candidate.

I'd call it Bonfire of the Vanities is the name hadn't already been taken. Perhaps we'll just call it The Year Of The Fallen Masks. (Hat tip: Amelia.)

WaPo Tries Rehabilitating Teresa Heinz Kerry

Evelyn Nieves tries her best to rebuild the reputation of Teresa Heinz Kerry in today's Washington Post, offering laughable defenses for her erratic behavior during the campaign. While reading her article, you can almost feel the breeze coming from Nieves's spin:

Teresa Heinz Kerry was talking, and so the entire room at the St. Moritz restaurant was dead silent, the back rows leaning forward as if the floor itself were tilted.

This held for nearly an hour, the whole time Heinz Kerry spoke. Her voice was so soft that pity the person who coughed. People would turn to the offending noisemaker with faces that said "shush -- or leave."

Nieves uses this speech on health-care proposals to paint a picture of an audience enraptured by Teresa's "wonkish" speech. However, a much better explanation is that Heinz Kerry is a poor public speaker, a quality that has not gone unnoticed before, and that the restaurant failed to provide adequate amplification.

Nieves complains that this event drew little attention from the media, while her comments later that day wound up being rebroadcast from coast to coast:

The event received little notice. But a comment Heinz Kerry made later that afternoon to a Lancaster newspaper sure did. "Only an idiot wouldn't like this," she told the newspaper, speaking of Kerry's health care plan. "Of course, there are idiots."

Apparently, Nieves is unfamiliar with the concept of news. When a candidate's wife reads a speech to the faithful, written by the campaign -- the speechwriter was wonkish, not Mrs. Kerry -- and delivered with little evident skill, that isn't news, it's a campaign press release. Local reporters who know people at the restaurant report it in the next day's newspaper. When said spouse makes ad-lib insults towards people who disagree with her, that's news. If John Kerry had said the same thing, he would have received the same amount of attention.

Nieves describes the tension in the Democratic Party over Mrs. Kerry's unscripted moments, when she gets crass and combative. Instead of actually analyzing the negative impact that Mrs. Kerry has made on her husband's campaign, Nieves acts as an apologist for Mrs. Kerry. For instance, in the infamous "shove it" incident, Nieves' attempt to provide context leaves out the most important part:

That public knows a woman who told a columnist before the Democratic National Convention to "shove it." (Though many people may still not know that the columnist writes for a Pittsburgh newspaper owned by conservative Richard Mellon Scaife, who not only spent millions of dollars trying to discredit the Clintons but also spent years attacking Heinz Kerry's late, first husband, Sen. John Heinz (Pa.) -- a Republican -- whom Scaife found too liberal.)

What Nieves fails to tell her readers, preferring to give the Democratic talking points on this, is that Teresa had just called Republicans "un-American" in an ad-libbed part of her speech. Tapes of the event clearly demonstrate this, and the reporter (Colin McNickle) from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review wanted her to explain what she meant by it. Mrs. Kerry denied saying it -- she lied -- and when the reporter asked a follow-up question, she accused him of lying and told him to "shove it".

Nor is that the only time she's embarassed the campaign. Nieves mentions the "four more years in Hell" statement a few days later, which the Bush-haters eat up but which make Mrs. Kerry look classless when reported. Nieves fails to mention the "Asses Of Evil" button with the names of Bush, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condi Rice on them to attendees at a fundraiser during the primaries.

Instead, Nieves focuses on several of Mrs. Kerry's smaller, more controlled campaign appearances and argues that she should be let off her leash. One presumes that the Kerry campaign may think they've been bitten once too often to follow Nieves' advice. They'll let the Post's spin play with the readers, but they have learned their lesson over the past few weeks. John Kerry has enough problems right now without letting Teresa attract press coverage for all the wrong reasons.

UPDATE: Reader Todd G. e-mails me this comment regarding the St. Moritz:

I work across the street from the St. Moritz restaurant in Harrisburg, and forget amplificion. It's a small place with a jazz type atmosphere. If your voice couldn't fill that room, you're in trouble.

LA Times: Democrats In Disarray

The Los Angeles Times is the latest mainstream news media source to write about the breakdown of direction in the John Kerry campaign. Matea Gold and Mark Barabak report that panic is rising among Democrats in their candidate's inability to stay on message and the split among his senior advisors that has created a strategy of vacillation:

Even as he fights to regain momentum in the presidential race, Sen. John F. Kerry faces a debate among advisors over the tone and content of his message, according to insiders and other Democrats familiar with the campaign's discussions. ...

Advisors to Kerry dismiss suggestions their internal debates have hamstrung the campaign, calling them "routine discussions." They maintain that the "fundamentals" of the White House race remain in their favor, arguing that Bush's lukewarm approval ratings and the nation's slow economic recovery create an environment in which Kerry can quickly gain ground.

The Kerry campaign ignores the upswing in George Bush's approval ratings and the rapid erosion of Kerry's internal numbers in poll after poll, at least publicly. The months of vacillation -- in content, not just tone -- have made an impression on voters of a candidate who doesn't stand for anything, which is why polling on key leadership qualities has plummeted for Kerry.

Gold and Marabak try their best to remain upbeat, continually balancing inside word of the internal control struggles of the campaign with the official "everything's just peachy" missives of the Democrats' public-relations people. But adding in the Clintonistas at this late stage not only reflects a growing discontent with the previous direction of the campaign, but the retention of the old staff has made overall control difficult to determine. Gold and Matea note this concern from their sources:

Some Democrats professed delight at the arrival of the Clinton crew.

"They bring seasoning, they bring great creativity and the experience of rapid response" to GOP attacks, said Art Torres, chairman of the California Democratic Party.

But others expressed concern that yet another set of advisors would further bog Kerry down in internal debates and turf warfare.

"These are talented people he's brought on," said one Democratic strategist, a veteran of presidential campaigns who spoke on condition of anonymity and did not wish to be identified criticizing the candidate. "But unless their jobs are clearly demarcated, that can be a problem."

Democratic insiders say it remains unclear who is ultimately responsible for the campaign's daily message, which is crucial to helping Kerry project a consistent vision.

What no one talks about in this article, or indeed to anyone on the record, is how the flaws in the candidate himself seem to have become those of the campaign. The vacillation and the direction shifts noted in the article don't come from the ether, after all. John Kerry has reinvented himself almost every week since the beginning of the year to try to maximize his political attractiveness.

He started off 2004 excoriating Howard Dean for questioning the need to topple Saddam Hussein, and has since switched his position several times over, trying to keep the Deaniacs on board while he reaches out to centrists who saw Hussein as one of America's greatest threats abroad. He attacked Bush's National Guard service in April, after Democrats like Terry McAuliffe and Sherrod Brown started doing it in February, but then begged Bush to call off the Swiftvets last month. He made his entire convention speech about his four months in Viet Nam while ignoring his twenty years of lackluster service in the Senate.

He voted for the $87 billion, before he voted against it.

Democrats can talk all they want about lack of strategic control, the opposing camps of the Clintonistas vs the Bostonians, and Kerry's message drift into Iraq when they want him to focus on domestic policy. But the true vulnerability is that the Democrats have simply fielded one of their worst candidates in decades, and only the bitter Bush hatred that they take every opportunity to stoke has kept them anywhere close in this race.

Nader Getting Nuttier

Frustration rarely brings out the best in people. Many times, the stress causes people to get more extreme and lose context for their issues. That's about the only charitable explanation I can make for Ralph Nader's remarks yesterday in remembrance of 9/11, in which he not only asserted that the US has no enemies but that terrorism is overrated:

Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader told supporters Saturday that a far larger number of Americans die each year from poverty, hunger, pollution, dangerous jobs or poor access to high-quality health care than terrorism.

"Who weeps for these people?" Nader asked before remarking that it would take a press release from al-Qaida to get Democrats and Republicans to pay attention to the nation's social ills.

Nader met with about 175 supporters in a Philadelphia church as many Americans observed the third anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Despite those attacks, Nader said, the United States has "no major enemy" in the world to fight and called on the major political parties to "end the politics of fear."

So Ralph Nader, rather than acknowledge the terrible destruction and senseless mass murder that occured three years ago, Nader wanted to talk about social programs. Okay, fine, but that seems just a bit tone-deaf. But to say that America has no major enemy just three years after 9/11 suggests a significant disconnect from reality. This isn't even the European approach, where they acknowledge the enemy but think appeasement might actually work, now that they've had 66 years to refine the approach.

Nader's speech yesterday equates to looking at Ground Zero in Manhattan and determining that the cause of the 3,000 murders was faulty building design. We regularly chastise John Kerry for waffling towards taking a law-enforcement approach to terrorism, but Nader ups the ante: he would treat it as an OSHA case. Perhaps the Kerry campaign should reconsider Nader's value to their candidate and quit blocking his attempts to make the ballot in each state, because right now, Nader makes Kerry look resolute.

Rather's Band Of Bloggers

Allah has a picture up that expresses Dan Rather's isolation after the document-forgery debacle that he brought on himself and CBS. Thank Allah for Photoshop and his delicious sense of humor, and while you're at it, give up a Spasebo to The Commissar, who made the image clickable.

UPDATE: Yeah, my Russian is almost non-existent. That's why I originally said "goodbye" rather than "thank you" to the Commissar. I fixed it now.