Arnold: He's getting them riled up. "Don't be economic girlie-men!"
The guy's chock-full of confidence and charisma. I don't know how on the level he is, but it's fun watching him rule the crowd.
The twins: Jenna will never be described as "demure".
She doesn't have to be as proper as her mom, but I think she might just lift her top if you throw her some Mardi Gras beads.
Laura: She did a great job. She was there to help people know her husband better and tell why they should vote for him, and she succeeded with charm and grace to spare. It helped that it didn't take her 21 minutes before finally mentioning her husband.
George didn't need heiresses to get him where he wanted to go, just a nice librarian. Give that fellow credit for marrying wisely.
Great photo-captioning on Yahoo from the AFP:
Delegates wearing elephant hats, the Republican party symbol, confer with one another at Madison Square Garden in New York City on the first day of the Republican National Convention. Religious conservatives have triumphed in their bitter ideological struggle within the party and imposed tough stands against abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research.
The part I put in bold is in every caption. Even silly elephant hat ones.
UPDATE:
Someone with better sense has done some cleaning, but missed some spots.
The Swifties have a new ad coming out today, just in time for the big American Legion meeting.
UPDATE:
You can view the new ad here.
Yikes! The Protest Warriors were out and about doing their thing in NYC.
Hats off to these guys. I could never do what they're doing, as I would not want to get pummeled.
(Via FR.)
McCain's speech was awesome. Somebody get that boy the VP slot.
UPDATE:
I'm lovin' Rudy's too. Somebody get that boy a VP slot as well.
Will France change its laws to appease terrorists? The world waits.
When I was a kid, I had such a crush on Neal Smith, the drummer in the Alice Cooper group. My very first concert was one in Dania for their Billion Dollar Babies tour. What's Neal up to these days? Still rockin'? Yep.
He's the Rockin' Realtor.
Over 25,000,000 records SOLD! Over $25,000,000 in real estate SOLD!
Glad you survived the Rock and Roll Wars, Neal, and didn't choke on your vomit like an eejit.
A group called the Mainstream Coalition is monitoring churches:
According to McKnight, the Coalition asked for volunteers willing to worship in a church other than their own. This was with the idea of reporting back to the Coalition about any activities they felt were crossing the lines-such as actual endorsement of candidates -- an activity prohibited by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Do you think they'll be dropping a dime on this one?
Speaking to worshipers at Riverside Church in upper Manhattan on the eve of the Republican National Convention, Clinton swiped at President George W. Bush for his response to ads attacking Sen. John Kerry's war record and criticized the administration on everything from the environment, drug benefits for seniors to what he said were tax cuts at the expense of education and security. "Sometimes I think our friends on the other side have become the people of the nine commandments," he said, accusing Republicans of ignoring the truth. He also assailed the religious right for turning "all those who disagree with them into two-dimensional cartoons." Speaking after an hour-long service, he said that the minister's sermon in Riverside Church "stands in stark contrast to the other party about to convene here, putting on their once-every-four-years compassionate face."
I never knew looking at a helmet could disrupt the circuits in my brain.
Finally a big write-up on spy Susan Lindauer. It's a fun read about a very nutty lady.
(Via FR.)
---------------
In the morning of March 11, 2004, Susan Lindauer woke to find five F.B.I. agents at her front door. After reading her her rights, the agents took Lindauer from her home in Takoma Park, Md., to the F.B.I. field office in Baltimore, where she was charged with having acted as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government and otherwise having elevated the interests of a foreign country above her allegiance to the United States. ''The only visible sign of stress is that I'm chain-smoking,'' she said when I met with her recently. Forty-one and free on bail, she wore a red cotton shirt, shapeless khaki pants and battered white leather sneakers. With her casual manner, she could pass for an ordinary resident of Takoma Park, where ''War Is Not the Answer'' signs are available free at the local co-op.
Seated on the shady porch of her tumbledown cottage, overlooking a purple azalea bush, Lindauer was alternately pensive and bubbly as she talked about her encounter with the F.B.I. On her knees, she balanced a photo album, which contained photographs of her wild years in Alaska, where she grew up, and her time as an undergraduate at Smith College, where she majored in economics. She showed me pictures of her mother, Jackie, who died of cancer after Susan graduated from college, and her father, John, an academic economist who once ran on the Republican ticket for governor of Alaska. The youthful beauty of Susan's features in her early photographs has been transfigured over time into a middle-aged balance of beatitude and stubbornness. When she gets angry, a storm cloud passes over her face. When the storm cloud breaks, her expression becomes even and calm, like that of a child who has freshly emerged from a bath.
Having grown up in a household in which public policy was frequently the stuff of dinner-table conversation and impassioned family arguments, Lindauer wanted to help change the world. The way she chose to do so, however, was not by signing petitions or marching in demonstrations, but by engaging in the kinds of clandestine encounters that you read about in spy novels -- meeting foreign diplomats, passing along secret messages and engaging in other activities that would eventually lead to her arrest. ''I'm what they call a useful idiot,'' she said with a laugh. According to the federal charges filed against her by the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, Lindauer repeatedly violated U.S. law beginning in 1999 by meeting with Iraqi diplomats at the Iraqi Mission to the United Nations in New York and with agents of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi Intelligence Service (I.I.S.). She was also indicted for accepting money from the Iraqis and traveling to Baghdad, where she met with Iraqi intelligence agents, in violation of federal law. ''From on or about Feb. 23, 2002, through on or about March 7, 2002,'' the indictment charged, ''Susan Lindauer, aka 'Symbol Susan,' met with several I.I.S. officers in Iraq, including at the Al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad, and received cash payments of approximately $5,000.00.'' The press was quick to identify Lindauer as an Iraqi spy.
''I'm an antiwar activist, and I'm innocent,'' Lindauer told WBAL-TV as she was led to a car outside the F.B.I. field office in Baltimore. ''I did more to stop terrorism in this country than anybody else.'' In a moment of crisis, it seemed, having just been fingerprinted and charged with betraying her country, Lindauer was acting the way a person might act in a dream, blurting out the constituent parts of her fractured reality into a waiting microphone.
The substance of the government's case against Susan Lindauer is contained in the indictment. Both the F.B.I. and the U.S. attorney's office declined to comment on the case, and no date has been set for the trial. While Lindauer was not accused of espionage, as initial reports of her arrest suggested, the government did charge her with a serious crime, even if the charge itself may seem like a technicality. By failing to register herself formally as a lobbyist and by supposedly following instructions from Iraqi diplomats and intelligence agents at the United Nations, the government charged, Lindauer had been acting as ''an unregistered agent of a foreign government,'' a violation of federal law that is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Lindauer acknowledges that the meetings detailed in the federal indictment took place, but denies acting as an agent of Iraq or any other country.
On paper, at least, there is little to distinguish Lindauer from hundreds of other bright young people who come to Washington in the hope of making a difference. She graduated from Smith in 1985 and then went to the London School of Economics, where she earned a master's degree and developed an interest in the Arab world. In 1990, she went to Washington, where she briefly worked as a journalist and then as a press secretary for liberal Democrats in the House and Senate, including Ron Wyden and Carol Moseley Braun. None of her jobs lasted more than a year. Her most recent job on Capitol Hill, as a press secretary for Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, ended in May 2002.
Writing press releases often seemed less important to Lindauer than her own one-woman campaign to advance the cause of nonviolence in the Muslim world. Lindauer's highly individual brand of politics combined passions that were commonly identified with opposite poles of the political spectrum during the 90's. While she opposed sanctions on Libya and Iraq, she was also eager to awaken the West to the gathering threat posed by Middle Eastern terrorist organizations. In pursuit of her ideals, she says, she began traveling to New York as often as twice a week, meeting with diplomats from Muslim countries, including Yemen and Malaysia, as well as representatives of Libya and Iraq. Her aim, as she explained it, was to function as a handholder and cheerleader, an unofficial go-between who could help break the cycle of isolation, paranoia and suffering created by sanctions.
''U.S. intelligence knew what I was doing,'' she said when I asked her about the precise nature of her contacts with the Libyans and the Iraqis. ''You see, the thing is, it's very hard to have these relationships, and so, when you have them, there are people who are very interested in the fact that you have them, who also want something from them, too.''
To demonstrate her commitment to nonviolence, Lindauer also shared with me portions of the evidentiary material contained on a stack of compact disks turned over to her by the government. The evidence against her, which includes wiretapped conversations with friends, neighbors, foreign diplomats and fellow activists, is currently in the hands of her new court-appointed attorney, who was not representing Lindauer at the time I spoke to her. Among the documents Lindauer showed me was a transcript of a telephone conversation with Muthanna al-Hanooti, the president of Focus on American and Arab Interests and Relations, a nonprofit organization in Southfield, Mich., dated July 30, 2003, two days before the Arab-American activist made one of his frequent trips to Iraq. During the call, Lindauer praised al-Hanooti for being a ''man who believes in peace'' and exhorted him to ''stay with God -- just stay with God.'' As the conversation continued, al-Hanooti seemed to hover between impatience and boredom. ''Other people are doing bad things, and they may try to use you as cover for bad things,'' Lindauer said. ''So don't let them.''
''It's a very delicate balance, as you know,'' al-Hanooti replied. ''But, ah, we'll do our best, you know. We'll do our best.''
That transcript, and others she gave me, support Lindauer's contention that she is opposed to violence. There were also other conversations the F.B.I. recorded that seem to suggest that Lindauer had other motivations for pursuing the work she did. ''He does not know about my visions -- he will never know about my visions, O.K.?'' she said, speaking to an undercover F.B.I. agent about another acquaintance. ''You're probably the only person you're going to meet other than my closest friend at the Iraqi Embassy who knows these things, O.K.? So don't ever talk about it with anyone.''
Susan Lindauer said she started making visits to the Libyan Mission to the United Nations in 1995 and started meeting with Iraqis at the United Nations in 1996. The F.B.I. first began tapping Lindauer's phone and intercepting her e-mail in July 2002, she said. A year and a half earlier, Lindauer contacted Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, with letters containing what purported to be secret diplomatic communiques from the government of Iraq to the incoming Bush administration. Lindauer reached out to Card, she explained, because he is a distant cousin on her father's side of the family. She said she believed that the fate of the world depended on the sensitive communications she dropped on the doorstep of his house in suburban Virginia.
One of Lindauer's earliest notes was left at Card's home on Dec. 23, 2000, a decade after sanctions were imposed on Iraq and a month before George W. Bush took office. Along with some of the transcripts of her wiretapped conversations, Lindauer gave me this letter to support her contention that she was working as a ''back channel'' between the governments of Iraq and the United States. The letter was addressed to Vice President-elect Cheney, and in it Lindauer presented the fruits of what she described as a private Nov. 26, 2000, meeting with Saeed Hasan, then the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations.
''Ambassador Hasan has asked me to communicate to you that Iraq most vigorously wishes to restore healthy, peaceful relations with the United States, including economic and cultural ties,'' Lindauer wrote. ''At our meeting, Ambassador Hasan demonstrated a pragmatic understanding that the United States requires the reinstatement of weapons monitoring in order to lift the sanctions.'' Ambassador Hasan, she said, had ''also emphasized that Iraq is ready to guarantee critical advantages for U.S. corporations at all levels.''
It is possible that Lindauer's account is delusional. It is also possible that Lindauer's account is accurate. Iraq certainly tried to use other back channels to try to reach U.S. officials, including a Lebanese-American businessman, Imad Hage, who conveyed messages to Richard Perle in the run-up to the war. For her part, Lindauer says that she was unaware that her activities required her to register as a lobbyist -- a formality that, to her mind, seemed quite absurd. ''Everything that I did that was quote 'lobbying,''' she said, ''I was giving to the chief of staff of the White House.''
The winding path that led Lindauer to the door of the Iraqi Mission to the United Nations began in November 1993 at a diner in Virginia, where she met a friend of her father's, a woman who worked as the chief of staff for a Republican member of Congress. Worried that Lindauer was lonely, her father's friend brought another lonely guest, Paul Hoven, a gentle Army veteran who had piloted attack helicopters in combat in Vietnam. He was interested in spies and spying.
'''You guys say you're peace activists,''' Lindauer recalled Hoven telling her that night. '''You say you're liberal do-gooders. What exactly are you doing? You do nothing. You're not active. You're passive.' And that conversation was probably one of the most important dinner conversations of my life.''
It was Hoven who gave Lindauer the nickname Snowflake, which was quick to catch on among an informal circle of Capitol Hill staff members and intelligence-community enthusiasts who gathered every Thursday night at a Hunan restaurant across the street from the Heritage Foundation. ''I'm the one who named her Snowflake, because she's from Alaska and she's nuts,'' Hoven told me. In addition to feeling sorry for Lindauer, he was taken with her unusual mind. ''She seems to have the ability to take unrelated facts and string them together, to the point where you're left with, Gee, it probably happened that way.'' For her part, Lindauer says that she enjoyed leading a double life, working for liberals during the day and hanging out with conservatives interested in counterterrorism at night.
Not long after their first dinner, Hoven introduced Lindauer to his friend Dr. Richard Fuisz, a globe-trotting Virginia-based businessman whom Lindauer described to me as ''my contact in the C.I.A.''
Lindauer's first meeting with Fuisz plunged her into a thicket of conflicting theories about the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The government blamed Libya for the bombing, and Libya later agreed to pay $2.7 billion to the families of the victims. There were others in the Washington intelligence community who said they believed that the real culprit was the terrorist Ahmed Jabril, who was based in Syria. Lindauer says that Fuisz told her at that first meeting that he knew who was responsible for the bombing. ''Dr. Fuisz has said that he can confirm absolutely that no Libyan national was involved in planning or executing the bombing of Pan Am 103,'' she later wrote in an account of their initial meeting. ''If the government would let me,'' she quoted Fuisz as saying, ''I could identify the men behind this attack today. I was investigating on the ground, and I know.''
Several months after she first met with Fuisz, Lindauer met with Libyan diplomats in New York in order to share with them the story she claims she got from Fuisz. She says she hoped her story would clear Libya of responsibility for the attack.
Lindauer's decision to drive to New York and visit the Libyans, she says, was also motivated in part by her deep personal faith in God, ''the all-powerful, all-encompassing spirit'' that she had known since she was a child. After adolescent years of drug use and casual sex, she says, she found God again during the weekends she spent at the Victory Bible Camp in Alaska. The God she found there was not partial to any religious philosophy.
''God is not a man,'' Lindauer explained. ''God is this supreme, magnificent force, intelligent, gorgeous beyond any description. If you've seen Alaska, you've seen the face of God.''
Tucked away behind a mixed-use town house development, Kosmos Pharma, Richard Fuisz's place of business, is part of a Pynchonesque landscape in Northern Virginia where anonymous front offices and brass nameplates give few clues as to the actual nature of the businesses within. When I showed up at his office, Fuisz graciously invited me inside to talk.
A dark-haired, handsome man with a soigne charm, Fuisz, 64, who went to Georgetown Medical School and did postgraduate work in medicine at Harvard, was trained as a psychiatrist and has more than 200 patents listed under his name. According to its Web site, Kosmos Pharma specializes in making oral-drug-delivery systems. He has also run a modeling agency for Russian women and worked briefly in the White House under Lyndon Johnson. During the 70's and 80's, he says, he did business around the world -- in the Middle East, the Eastern bloc, the Soviet Union.
Citing unnamed sources, The Sunday Herald, a Scottish newspaper, reported in 2000 that Fuisz had been the C.I.A.'s most important agent in Damascus during the 80's. ''This is not an issue I can confirm or deny,'' Fuisz told The Herald. ''I am not allowed to speak about these issues. In fact, I can't even explain why I can't speak about these issues.''
Fuisz confirmed that he saw Lindauer about once a week on avearage between 1994 and 2001 and that she would drop by to talk to him about her personal life as well as about her contacts with the Libyans and the Iraqis. He agreed to talk to me about Lindauer after requesting that his son, Joe, a lawyer, be present for our conversation.
''Susan, to me, is one of those people who drift into your life,'' Fuisz said, after offering me a seat on his couch. ''She would drift into the office fairly often, or call. Usually those weren't just social calls. Those were calls about what she was doing, or trying to do,'' Fuisz explained. ''In the early years, her activism generally took an approach which was Arabist, but Arabist from the standpoint of trying to lift sanctions, so that children would do better, and trying to get medicines into countries -- principally I'm talking about Iraq and Libya.''
After Sept. 11, 2001, Lindauer was no longer a welcome visitor to his office. ''Susan, in her discussions, went from benign, in my opinion, to malignant,'' he said. ''These discussions changed and now involved a very strong seditious bent.''
Fuisz did not comment on the specifics of the conversations that Lindauer claimed to have had with Middle Eastern diplomats or whether he passed on the specifics of those conversations to anyone else. But he, like others who have known Lindauer over the years, had clearly thought long and hard about the perplexing geometry of her mind.
''I'd put it this way,'' Fuisz explained, cupping his palms like a collector presenting a rare species for inspection. ''She's daft enough that we could be sitting here, like we are now, and she might see a parrot fly in the window, flap its wings and land right here on the table,'' he said. ''But she's also smart enough not to necessarily say anything about it.''
When I asked whether, in his opinion, Lindauer could have been recruited by an intelligence service, he paused for a long time before he responded. ''I would say that's a hard question to answer. If you're looking at it from the standpoint of an intelligent intelligence agency, absolutely not. She'd be the worst person you could ever recruit. If you're looking at it from the standpoint of my knowledge of Mideast intelligence services, are they dumb enough to recruit her, the answer is yes.''
To understand Lindauer's unlikely walk-on role in the history of the Iraq war, it is necessary to reverse your normal angle of vision and to imagine how she might have looked through the eyes of the diplomats and intelligence operatives who staffed the Iraqi Mission to the United Nations under Saddam Hussein. While Lindauer may have struck Ambassador Hasan and other Iraqi diplomats as strange, she had solid credentials to recommend her. An aide to congressmen and senators who held a graduate degree from the London School of Economics, she was also the cousin of the White House chief of staff.
Lindauer's letters on behalf of the Iraqis, which she sent to Bush financial backers, including Ken Lay, urging them to support the lifting of sanctions, were written in clear, confident prose. But there were also other letters whose odd details suggested that the Iraqis might have been more discerning in their choice of secret emissary.
''I am deeply proud of my expertise on international conflict resolution, and my regrettably extraordinary gift for counterterrorism,'' Lindauer wrote in a letter addressed to President-elect Bush on Dec. 22, 2000. ''I have identified a dozen bombings before they happened with a high degree of accuracy and a number of assassination attempts on world leaders.''
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Lindauer became a frequent visitor to the Iraqi Mission in New York. During a Sept. 18, 2001, trip to the mission, she had what she described in a letter to Card, the White House chief of staff, as a ''short, tense'' conversation with Hasan's successor, Ambassador Mohammad Al-Douri, in the embassy foyer. ''There's starting to be talk in Washington about Iraq's possible involvement in this attack,'' Lindauer told Card she said to Al-Douri.
''It is not possible,'' Al-Douri is said to have replied. ''It is the Mossad who says this.'' The ambassador, she wrote, sounded ''abrupt and confident and stern.'' When Lindauer warned him not to do anything that would jeopardize the lifting of sanctions, the ambassador seemed surprised.
''Of course!'' she recalled him as saying. ''We are ready for talks at any time.''
In that same letter, she described coming back to New York to ''receive a communication from Baghdad addressed to me'' -- a message saying that the panic-stricken Iraqis were willing to ''meet any American official in a covert or incovert manner to discuss the common issues.''
In October 2001, according to the federal indictment, she met with officers of Iraqi intelligence in New York. On Dec. 2, Lindauer wrote to Card again, to convey further news: The Iraqis were willing to permit the return of weapons inspectors and offered other concessions. ''These are not intended to limit the universe of possibilities, Andy,'' she wrote.
The picture that emerges from Lindauer's letters is of Iraqi diplomats trying to feel their way through a fog. It is hard to judge what any of her messages from the Iraqi Foreign Ministry might mean, however, since they could be read only through the haze of Lindauer's naive and self-aggrandizing personality. In February 2002, soon after President Bush delivered his State of the Union address naming Iraq part of an ''axis of evil,'' the Iraqis invited Lindauer to Baghdad.
''It was beautiful,'' she said of Al Rashid Hotel, where she stayed between her meetings with Iraqi officials. ''I had a suite, so it was very nice.''
She wouldn't tell me who she met with or why, but she did describe what it felt like to be inside the room in which the meetings took place. ''When I first got there, I had the sense that -- I don't know how to put this, this is a very weird thing, it's like your imagination-working-kind-of-thing,'' she explained. ''I was in a room, and there were these mirrors, and I had this sense of Saddam Hussein being on the opposite side of the mirror looking in at me. Now I'm not saying that Saddam Hussein actually was there, but I had this very strong sense of presence, which was unlike anything I'd ever felt before, that was scrutinizing me up and down, ripping me apart. It was palpable.''
After Lindauer's visit to Baghdad, there were no more secret messages from Iraq for Andrew Card.
John Lindauer, Susan's younger brother, is used to his sister's unlikely stories -- about dating Arab arms dealers and late-night attempts on her life and her contacts with the C.I.A. A Harvard graduate, and now a successful commercial and music-video director in Los Angeles, he says he thinks that a strain of playacting and deception runs in his family. One of his most powerful childhood memories, he told me, is of watching his father, then 38, grow a mustache and dye his hair gray before being interviewed for the job of chancellor of the University of Alaska at Anchorage. ''Weaving a story to make contact with you, and making you want to be interested in that person, is not a cry for help,'' he said. ''It's just a way of reaching out to say: Remember me. I'm with you. Be interested in me.''
One conversation John had with his sister in the summer of 2001 stuck in his mind for a different reason. ''So she goes, 'Listen, the gulf war isn't over,''' he told me over dinner at a sushi place on the Sunset Strip. '''There are plans in effect right now. They will be raining down on us from the skies.''' His sister told him that Lower Manhattan would be destroyed. ''And I was like, Yeah, whatever,'' he continued. When he woke up six weeks later to the news that two planes had crashed into the twin towers, and watched as ash settled on the window ledge of his sublet in Brooklyn, he had a dislocating sense of having his reality replaced by Susan's strange world -- an experience he would have again when he learned that his sister had been arrested by the F.B.I.
Parke Godfrey, a close friend of Lindauer's for the last 15 years, is a professor of computer science at York University in Ontario. He says that Lindauer warned him not to take a job at N.Y.U. the summer before the Sept. 11 attacks. That Lindauer's outlandish predictions actually came true, Godfrey suggests, further encouraged the exalted sense of personal mission that brought her to Washington in the first place.
''Susan is perfectly capable, in certain ways, to live a reasonable life, to take care of herself, to get around, and at any localized time, sitting at dinner, she's completely coherent,'' he said, skirting the blunt layman's question of whether his friend is playing with all her marbles. ''It's in these longer-term views of memory, in what she remembers, in how she's pieced the world together, that she functions unlike the way anyone else does,'' Godfrey concluded. ''It's not the same mental model that you and I use.''
"There is now a jihad,'' Susan Lindauer told me, rocking peacefully back and forth in her chair overlooking her untamed garden. ''Tragically, stupidly, we started it. We launched the first attack, which was unrighteous, and vicious and sadistic, and we are going to pay for this mistake. I think the Islamic world now is going to burn.''
Sipping lemonade on her front porch in Takoma Park, I found myself sharing her paranoid landscape, observing a beige car pass by her house four times in the space of two hours, as the birds twittered in the trees and Lindauer's girlish voice detailed ''the horrific abuses, the sexual torture'' being visited on innocent Iraqis by coalition troops. That is why, she explained, in June 2003 she met with an F.B.I. agent posing as a Libyan intelligence officer who, according to the indictment, purported to be ''seeking to support resistance groups in postwar Iraq.'' Lindauer said that in those meetings she was seeking financial backing for a lawsuit against the United States and British governments for crimes she claimed they committed during the occupation of Iraq. She continued to exchange e-mail with the undercover agent until she was arrested.
On my way back home to New York from Washington, I found a cellphone message from Ken Lisaius, a White House spokesman. While Andrew Card declined to speak to me directly about his cousin's letters, Lisaius said, Card did have a statement that might answer at least some of my remaining questions about Lindauer's case.
''This was a very sad and personal incident involving a distant relative of Andy Card,'' Lisaius said in the carefully calibrated cadence that is meant to assure worried citizens that the world remains a more or less rational place, no matter how weird the circumstances. ''He in turn reported various attempts by her to contact him to appropriate officials, and he has cooperated fully with appropriate officials on this matter.''
So, you've been jonesing for a detailed side-by-side comparison of John Kerry's Silver Star citations? Somebody must have read your mind.
I'm not terribly interested in the medal situation, because from my own service I gathered, perhaps incorrectly, but I doubt it, that bigwigs get more medals in general; but this did catch my eye. I just find it odd that there would be revisions in the first place. How do you even go about getting your citation rewritten? Repeatedly? This is just plain weird.
Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader addresses a question during a news conference at the International Sunport in Albuquerque, N.M., Saturday, August 28, 2004.
"Go bug John Kerry, and leave me alone."
-Kerry biographer Douglas Brinkley, after denying Kerry's claim that he is contractually bound to show his papers only to Brinkley.
Since the tale of John Kerry's doggy mascot has resurfaced, I'd like to bring to your attention the other special pets Kerry had with him Vietnam.
The Weekly Standard is telling how the mainstream media was forced to cover a story they didn't want to. Also, be sure to check out Prestopundit for all your related Christmas in Cambodia needs.
Blogs of War has all the latest info on the Israeli spy in the Secretary of Defense's office.
Spying on us in time of war? If true, this one needs to hang.
UPDATE:
Comments like this are ridiculous and I hope I don't see many more like them:
For Goodness SAke... The whole world is against Israel... and if Hillary Clinton gets back in the whitehouse or others like her they will embrace Arafat again..
Israel MUST HAVE as many spies as they can.. It should be overlooked by us, especially us who understand their perdicument.....
Sondra K has posted a comment she received from a Vietnam vet. If you haven't read it yet, you'll want to do so. It's quite a fine piece of writing.
(Via On The Third Hand.)
UPDATE:
Since the author, Peter, has posted here, I've decided to repost his comment in full:
There is a reason that some of those veterans turned their backs to Kerry and that many others sat with arms folded, refusing even polite applause. A reason that non veterans can, perhaps, know intellectually but not feel in their guts.
Like all veterans of all wars, regardless of branch of service or duty stations, we all lost friends there. Some of those we lost were closer than brothers. Unlike other wars in our history we didn't go over together and come home together, our individual wars ended individually.
--------------------------
There is a reason that some of those veterans turned their backs to Kerry and that many others sat with arms folded, refusing even polite applause. A reason that non veterans can, perhaps, know intellectually but not feel in their guts.
Like all veterans of all wars, regardless of branch of service or duty stations, we all lost friends there. Some of those we lost were closer than brothers. Unlike other wars in our history we didn't go over together and come home together, our individual wars ended individually.
Unlike other wars we came home branded by a large segment of our society as war criminals, by another segment as losers. Then, as most of us were already home, one of our own officers branded us all, including the dead that we were just beginning to mourn, as war criminals, murderers and rapists.
We later discovered that many of those that he was quoting as witnesses to our 'crimes' had not spent one day in uniform. Others had never served in Viet Nam. None of them, not a single one, would testify under oath, even if granted immunity. Yet our 'crimes' became part of the common knowlege. Our children were given that testimony as fact in their history classes. We all knew soldiers, sailors,airmen and Marines that had died, leaving children behind, we know that those children were taught those same lies as fact. Who sat with those children as we did with ours, explaining that those were lies told for political gain?
It's bad enough that we couldn't mourn our dead then. Now we see the same man that stood over the open graves of our brothers and pissed on their bodies is back. This time he's dug up those bodies and is standing on them to give himself the stature for high office.
I am no famous war hero, just one of the two and a half million guys who wore Uncle's suit for awhile in a place where the same truck would splash red mud on your trousers and throw a cloud of dust on your face at the same time. My service was entirely undistinguished but I stood shoulder to shoulder with some genuine heros. Those heros came home in shiney aluminum caskets, they cannot speak for themselves. I hope someone more famous and more eloquent will speak for them soon. Until they do I can only say that not only is John Kerry not fit to command the young men and women that inherited the uniforms but he is not fit to speak of my comrades, much less speak for them. I shall say this as long as I have a breath left in my body.
This isn't about George Bush or who has a Senate majority for me. It isn't about politics. It's about a bunch of young men who never grew old. It's about the families of some 58,000 men who cannot answer the slander that this War Hee-row has never retracted.
I tried to answer that slander in 1971, I had no one to hear my voice. No way to reach anyone but my family. I have that way now, if only commenting on other people's forums.
It isn't about me. It isn't even about politics. It's about restoring the honor to the 58,000 names carved in black granite.
As many of you who read this blog have gathered, I have a long-standing grudge against Vietnam War protesters and the media's love affair with them. A few year's ago in the magazine of my professional association (of which I am not a member), I got treated to an archive pic of them protesting the war. They were proud of it then, and they're proud of it now. Each raindrop swears it didn't cause the flood, and there are not many former protesters who accept responsibility for the damage their actions did to our troops, the Vietnamese people, and our country.
While my father was serving two tours in Vietnam, John Kerry was comparing him and other veterans to Ghengis Khan. Now that Kerry's running for president, he want to wrap himself in the cloak of military service, with no repudiation of his former actions. He's not sorry for his antiwar actions, and he doesn't understand why people would have a problem with that.
I'm sorry, though. I'm sorry that when my dad came home I asked him if he'd done the things that people like John Kerry had tarred all the troops with doing. He didn't need that, and didn't deserve it.
Jeff Jacoby did a good job of describing my own feelings on the hypocrisy of the Kerry candidacy:
He came to prominence as a radical opponent of the war in Vietnam, yet now he runs for president on the strength of his service in that war. He portrayed the men who fought there as unspeakable savages, yet now he surrounds himself with Vietnam vets at every turn. He lent respectability to those who demanded that America cut and run, that it abandon a beleaguered ally, that it drop "the mystical war against communism." Yet now he insists that he would be a tough and vigilant commander-in-chief, one who would never disrespect allies, one in whose hands the security of the United States would be safe.
Even after 33 years, Kerry's 1971 testimony, and his refusal to either repudiate or corroborate it, remains unsettling -- and relevant. For the Swift Boat vets, this fight may be personal. But all of us have a stake in its outcome.
Here's something silly to start out a Friday: tons of pics of people doing the Lynndie. This is almost as good as fingerbutts.
(Via Spoons.)
Susan Sarandon's good buddy has et his last cheeseburger.
As a card-carrying member of the VRWC, I'll post a link to the third Swiftie ad.
The first one is still my fave.
The ads are getting the message out there, though, and next week's big American Legion meeting should be a real barn-burner.
The memorial for Broward Sheriff's Detective Todd Fatta was amazing. BSO did a great job.
For those of you who don't know what happened, Detective Fatta was murdered by the boyfriend of a convicted pedophile as the detective was attempting to serve a warrant to search the house for more child pornography.
The man is now claiming AIDS dementia as a defense.
RIP Detective Fatta.
The website Stolenhonor.com is up and running early. It has clips of former POWs airing their views on the candidacy of John Kerry, with more to come. Check it out.
UPDATE:
The documentary "Stolen Honor" is now viewable online.
I tried to scoop Dead Man Eating today on the last meal of murderer Jasen Busby in Texas, but it was not to be. DME is just too fast on the draw.
This is the first time I've seen a last meal that had catfish. Woot!
Speaking of catfish:
James Allridge III is scheduled for execution on Thursday for the 1985 robbery and murder of a Fort Worth, Texas, convenience store clerk. Allridge has been pen pals for several years with actress Susan Sarandon, who visited him in July.
Country Store has a wrap up on Kerry's Kid™, Max Cleland; meanwhile James Taranto uses Kerry's own words to clue us in on his background in using crippled vets for media stunts:
"I called the media. . . . I said, 'If I take some crippled veterans down to the White House and we chain ourselves to the gates, will we get coverage?' 'Oh, yes, we will cover that.' " -- John Kerry, testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 22, 1971
"Kerry is sending to Crawford former Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia, a frequent companion of Kerry's on the campaign trail and a fellow Vietnam War veteran who lost three limbs during the war. Cleland . . . will try to deliver a letter protesting the [Swift Boat Veterans for Truth] ads to [President] Bush at his heavily guarded ranch, Kerry aides said."--Reuters, Aug. 25, 2004
More POWs are getting a lick in:
Sen. John Kerry's anti-war activism following his service in Vietnam is coming under attack by former U.S. prisoners of war and their families, who are launching a Web site and documentary that will likely further fuel election campaign rancor, sources told UPI Tuesday.
The Web site, "Stolenhonor.com" could be online as early as Thursday night or Friday and will feature comments and statements about Kerry, the Democratic Party's nominee for president, by former inmates of North Vietnam's infamous "Hanoi Hilton" prison complex, Ken Cordier said.
I wonder if Kerry will be baffled as to why these guys are against him too?
UPDATE:
The documentary "Stolen Honor" is now viewable online.
Here's Duane at something called "The Festival of Life". He was sure festive enough.
Wail on, Skydog!
Howard Dean is in town stumping for a couple of local pols. I have no idea why he'd care. Perhaps he misses the limelight. I've been waiting for him to get fat and grow a beard now that he has no job. One thing hasn't changed, though - give the guy a podium and he's ready to rant:
"The president needs to apologize to John Kerry and to every veteran in America," Dean said. "I hope he shows a little of the spine that Sen. Kerry showed 30 years ago in Vietnam."
Dean showed some spine himself. He walked into his physical with an x-ray of it to get a deferment, then spent the war skiing. Let's have a white feather for Howard, for old time's sake.
"...I wasn't talking about the swifties, I was talking about all the rest of the veterans."
-John Kerry, on being told that the Swift Boat Veterans are against him because he accused them of war crimes.
(Via Blogs of War.)
UPDATE:
Kerry's bragging about how he'd mastered the fine art of diplomacy has Ace wondering how come he can't bring the Swifties to the table.
From "Bring it on!" to "Stop! You're hurting me!" Good stuff from the WSJ:
What did Mr. Kerry expect, anyway? That claiming to be a hero himself while accusing other veterans of "war crimes"--as he did back in 1971 and has refused to take back ever since--would somehow go unanswered? That when he raised the subject of one of America's most contentious modern events, no one would meet him at the barricades?
....
The irony here is that a main reason Mr. Kerry has focused so much on Vietnam is to avoid debating Iraq and the rest of his long record in the Senate. He wants Americans to believe that a four-month wartime biography is credential enough to be commander-in-chief. But a candidate who runs on biography can't merely pick the months of his life that he likes--any more than a candidate who makes Vietnam the heart of his campaign can confine the resulting debate to his personal home video.
--------------
Vietnam Boomerang
John Kerry's "war crimes" libel returns to haunt him.
Tuesday, August 24, 2004 12:01 a.m.
The issue here, as I have heard it raised, is was he present and active on duty in Alabama at the times he was supposed to be. . . . Just because you get an honorable discharge does not in fact answer that question.
--John Kerry, questioning President Bush's
military-service record, February 8, 2004.
A good rule in politics is that anyone who picks a fight ought to be prepared to finish it. But having first questioned Mr. Bush's war service, and then made Vietnam the core of his own campaign for President, Mr. Kerry now cries No mas! because other Vietnam vets are assailing his behavior before and after that war. And, by the way, Mr. Bush is supposedly honor bound to repudiate them.
We've tried to avoid the medals-and-ribbons fight ourselves, except to warn Mr. Kerry that he was courting precisely such scrutiny ("Kerry's Medals Strategy," February 9). But now that the Senator is demanding that the Federal Election Commission stifle his opponents' free speech, this one is too rich to ignore.
What did Mr. Kerry expect, anyway? That claiming to be a hero himself while accusing other veterans of "war crimes"--as he did back in 1971 and has refused to take back ever since--would somehow go unanswered? That when he raised the subject of one of America's most contentious modern events, no one would meet him at the barricades? Mr. Kerry brought the whole thing up; why is it Mr. Bush's obligation now to shut it down?
Simply because some rich Bush-backers are funding Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is hardly an adequate answer. Some rich Kerry-backers are spending far more to attack Mr. Bush's record, and the Senator was only too happy to slipstream behind Michael Moore's smear that Mr. Bush was a Vietnam-era "deserter."
In any case, anyone who spends five minutes reading the Swift Boat Veterans' book ("Unfit for Command") will quickly realize that their attack has nothing to do with Mr. Bush. This is all about Mr. Kerry and what the veterans believe was his blood libel against their service when he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the spring of 1971 that all American soldiers had committed war crimes as a matter of official policy. "Crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command" were among his incendiary words.
Mr. Kerry has never offered proof of those charges, yet he has never retracted them either. At his recent coronation in Boston he managed the oxymoronic feat of celebrating both his own war-fighting valor and his antiwar activities when he returned home. This is why the Swifties are so incensed, and this is why no less than World War II veteran Bob Dole joined the fray on the weekend to ask that Mr. Kerry apologize for his unproven accusations.
As Bill Lannom of Grinnell, Iowa, one of the Swifties, told the Washington Post last week: "He's telling untruths about us and his character. He's talking about atrocities that didn't happen. And then he's using that same experience to promote himself. He can't have it both ways."
We don't pretend to know the truth about how Mr. Kerry won his medals. There's no doubt that he pulled Jim Rassmann from the water (as Mr. Rassmann described recently in The Wall Street Journal), and that he put himself in harm's way and deserves respect for it. There's also little doubt that he has exaggerated some of his exploits--especially that Christmas in Cambodia sojourn we now know never happened--even to the strange extent of restaging events while in Vietnam so he could film them for political posterity. Modesty is not one of his virtues, in contrast to Mr. Dole and other modern veteran candidates (George McGovern, George H.W. Bush) who did not flaunt their noble service. But whatever doubts still exist could probably be put to rest if Mr. Kerry simply released all of his service records.
The "war crimes" canard isn't so easily handled, however. It relates directly to our current effort in Iraq, where U.S. constancy is as much an issue now as it was in Vietnam. Mr. Kerry's denunciation of the U.S. at that time presaged a career in which he has always been quick to attack the moral and military purposes of American policy--in Central America, against the Soviet Union, and of course during the current Iraq War that he initially voted for. It's certainly fair to wonder if Mr. Kerry will have the fortitude to fight to victory in Iraq if he does win in November. Or will he call for retreat the way he and so many other liberals did when Vietnam became difficult?
The irony here is that a main reason Mr. Kerry has focused so much on Vietnam is to avoid debating Iraq and the rest of his long record in the Senate. He wants Americans to believe that a four-month wartime biography is credential enough to be commander-in-chief. But a candidate who runs on biography can't merely pick the months of his life that he likes--any more than a candidate who makes Vietnam the heart of his campaign can confine the resulting debate to his personal home video.
Blogs of War is reporting that there are rumors that Georgia Senator Zell Miller will officially switch parties. I hope he doesn't. He's a reminder to all that Southern Democrats like myself used to be plentiful once upon a time, before the party was taken over by extremists.
Stay a Blue Dog, Zell.
John O'Sullivan of the Chicago Sun-Times gives a very interesting tutorial on how to glean information from our newspapers just like the people of the Soviet Union used to do with theirs:
Vladimir Bukovsky, the great anti-Soviet dissident, once reproved me for quoting the old joke about the two main official Soviet newspapers: ''There's no truth in Pravda [Truth] and no news in Izvestia [News].'' He pointed out that you could learn a great deal of truthful news from both papers if you read them with proper care.
They often denounced ''anti-Soviet lies.'' These lies had never been reported by them. Nor were they lies. And their exposure was the first that readers had been told of them. By reading the denunciation carefully, however, intelligent readers could decipher what the original story must have been.
I've been seeing a lot of non-reportage of the Swift Boat charges, followed by editorials denouncing "anti-Kerry lies". That's not how it went with the Fahrenheit 9-11 story.
The Washington Post now has five editorials on the Swift Boat issue, a topic they only touched in their news pages to dismiss. For that one editorial that is not a denunciation of the Swift Boaters, they should be grateful. It's the only thing that saves them from being a Yakov Smirnoff joke.
What the Washington Post didn't find newsworthy enough to run investigative articles on, they now find themselves forced to run multiple editorials on:
Most of the debate between the former shipmates who swear by John Kerry and the group of other Swift boat veterans who are attacking his military record focuses on matters that few of us have the experience or the moral standing to judge. But one issue, having nothing to do with medals, wounds or bravery under fire, goes to the heart of Kerry's qualifications for the presidency and is therefore something that each of us must consider. That is Kerry's apparently fabricated claim that he fought in Cambodia.
...
But Kerry has repeated his Cambodia tale throughout his adult life. He has claimed that the epiphany he had that Christmas of 1968 was about truthfulness. "One of the things that most struck me about Vietnam was how people were lied to," he explained in a subsequent interview. If -- as seems almost surely the case -- Kerry himself has lied about what he did in Vietnam, and has done so not merely to spice his biography but to influence national policy, then he is surely not the kind of man we want as our president.
--------------------------
Kerry's Cambodia Whopper
By Joshua Muravchik
Tuesday, August 24, 2004; Page A17
Most of the debate between the former shipmates who swear by John Kerry and the group of other Swift boat veterans who are attacking his military record focuses on matters that few of us have the experience or the moral standing to judge. But one issue, having nothing to do with medals, wounds or bravery under fire, goes to the heart of Kerry's qualifications for the presidency and is therefore something that each of us must consider. That is Kerry's apparently fabricated claim that he fought in Cambodia.
It is an assertion he made first, insofar as the written record reveals, in 1979 in a letter to the Boston Herald. Since then he has repeated it on at least eight occasions during Senate debate or in news interviews, most recently to The Post this year (an interview posted on Kerry's Web site). The most dramatic iteration came on the floor of the Senate in 1986, when he made it the centerpiece of a carefully prepared 20-minute oration against aid to the Nicaraguan contras.
Kerry argued that contra aid could put the United States on the path to deeper involvement despite denials by the Reagan administration of any such intent. Kerry began by reading out similar denials regarding Vietnam from presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Then he offered this devastating riposte:
"I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared -- seared -- in me."
However seared he was, Kerry's spokesmen now say his memory was faulty. When the Swift boat veterans who oppose Kerry presented statements from his commanders and members of his unit denying that his boat entered Cambodia, none of Kerry's shipmates came forward, as they had on other issues, to corroborate his account. Two weeks ago Kerry's spokesmen began to backtrack. First, one campaign aide explained that Kerry had patrolled the Mekong Delta somewhere "between" Cambodia and Vietnam. But there is no between; there is a border. Then another spokesman told reporters that Kerry had been "near Cambodia." But the point of Kerry's 1986 speech was that he personally had taken part in a secret and illegal war in a neutral country. That was only true if he was "in Cambodia," as he had often said he was. If he was merely "near," then his deliberate misstatement falsified the entire speech.
Next, the campaign leaked a new version through the medium of historian Douglas Brinkley, author of "Tour of Duty," a laudatory book on Kerry's military service. Last week Brinkley told the London Telegraph that while Kerry had been 50 miles from the border on Christmas, he "went into Cambodian waters three or four times in January and February 1969 on clandestine missions." Oddly, though, while Brinkley devotes nearly 100 pages of his book to Kerry's activities that January and February, pinpointing the locations of various battles and often placing Kerry near Cambodia, he nowhere mentions Kerry's crossing into Cambodia, an inconceivable omission if it were true.
Now a new official statement from the campaign undercuts Brinkley. It offers a minimal (thus harder to impeach) claim: that Kerry "on one occasion crossed into Cambodia," on an unspecified date. But at least two of the shipmates who are supporting Kerry's campaign (and one who is not) deny their boat ever crossed the border, and their testimony on this score is corroborated by Kerry's own journal, kept while on duty. One passage reproduced in Brinkley's book says: "The banks of the [Rach Giang Thanh River] whistled by as we churned out mile after mile at full speed. On my left were occasional open fields that allowed us a clear view into Cambodia. At some points, the border was only fifty yards away and it then would meander out to several hundred or even as much as a thousand yards away, always making one wonder what lay on the other side." His curiosity was never satisfied, because this entry was from Kerry's final mission.
After his discharge, Kerry became the leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Once, he presented to Congress the accounts by his VVAW comrades of having "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires . . . to human genitals . . . razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan . . . poisoned foodstocks." Later it was shown that many of the stories on which Kerry based this testimony were false, some told by impostors who had stolen the identities of real GIs, but Kerry himself was not implicated in the fraud. And his own over-the-top generalization that such "crimes [were] committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command" could be charged up to youthfulness and the fevers of the times.
But Kerry has repeated his Cambodia tale throughout his adult life. He has claimed that the epiphany he had that Christmas of 1968 was about truthfulness. "One of the things that most struck me about Vietnam was how people were lied to," he explained in a subsequent interview. If -- as seems almost surely the case -- Kerry himself has lied about what he did in Vietnam, and has done so not merely to spice his biography but to influence national policy, then he is surely not the kind of man we want as our president.
Bob Dole giddily re-enacts what he calls his "Russell County Haymaker".
Investor's Business Daily has some interesting questions for Senator Kerry that they'd like answered.
Also, Bob Dole's comments have opened the floodgates on the "Christmas in Cambodia" story and put it in every paper in the country.
Dole's Viagra must have kicked in, 'cause he's got a li'l something-something for Kerry on this Vietnam deal.
My folks got their electricity back last night. All is well for the Cracker family. We are very fortunate people.
Others didn't fare as well. There are 141,000 displaced people in SW Florida alone.
The Fort Myers News Press gives a look back at an eventful week, and tells the tales of some of those who struggle in the aftermath of Hurricane Charley.
I love Florida right down to my bones. My greatest appreciation to all of you who sent something to help either the two-legged or four-legged creatures here whose lives were disrupted by this disaster. There are still so many living in dire situations. Those who haven't donated to the Hurricane Charley Relief Effort, please do so.
''One day he's saying that we were shooting civilians, cutting off their ears, cutting off their heads, throwing away his medals or his ribbons. The next day he's standing there, `I want to be president because I'm a Vietnam veteran.' "
Bob Dole has plenty more to say about John Kerry.
Dole sounds a whole lot like my dad did this morning when I asked him his opinion of Kerry. Except Dole didn't say that in all of the pics of John Kerry in Vietnam, he looks like he'd just come from taking a crap in the woods.
Dad speaks in colorful Southern expressions, some of which I don't fully understand. Like that one, for example.
In any case, both agree that Kerry makes medals look cheap, and that he owes an apology to Vietnam veterans for his actions after he came home.
(Via Ace.)
This pretty much sums it up for me. Kerry hurt a lot of people to get where he is and now they're trying to make him answer for it. It doesn't get any simpler than that.
Is it personal? You betcha:
War veterans Jere Hill, middle, from Warham, Mass., and Robert Gibson, right, from Lexington, Ky., stand with their backs turned during Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's speech at the 105th Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Cincinnati on Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2004.
So why are the Swift Vets after Kerry? Is it really because they - having served in his vicinity during combat in Vietnam - believe he's unfit for command, as a recent book penned by one of them suggests?
Hardly. They're out to get Kerry not because of his war record, but because of his post-war performance.
Kerry came home from Vietnam and testified before Congress that his American brothers in arms - not a few, but many of them - were war criminals. Painting with a broad brush, he said U.S. soldiers, sailors and airmen serving in Vietnam routinely committed atrocities against civilians. And many Vietnam vets will never forgive him.
Some of that testimony recently has been called into question. For instance, Kerry recounted spending Christmas of 1968 serving illegally inside Cambodia, but records show he wasn't within 50 miles of that country, an inconsistency his opponents say supports their case against Kerry's official records and his medals.
So it's tough to feel too sorry for Kerry today as the Swift Boat Vets launch their full-frontal assault on his candidacy. Kerry's 1970s testimony before Congress - in which he accused his fellow Americans of randomly shooting civilians and beheading Vietnamese, among other horrors - endeared him to the political left in the tumultuous early 1970s. It served him well as he became a liberal Northeastern politician. It paved the way to what he is today, Democratic candidate for president.
And now, it might be the biggest obstacle he must clear on his way to winning that office.
For many Americans, especially veterans, it seems John Kerry has a lot of explaining to do.
A Lycan-American prepares for the 100-meter.
Ted Kennedy joins Laura Bush in wishing the President four more years.
Or maybe he's ordering four boilermakers. Hard to say.
The Swiftboaters' new ad focuses on what effect John Kerry's words and actions as an anti-war activist had on the POWs and other Vietnam vets. Former POWs Cordier and Galanti were very effective, but I wish that each time they were shown that they had been re-identified as POWs. Yes, I know that's not how it's done: identify once and not thereafter, but when the last man spoke, I couldn't remember if that was former POW Galanti, or the non-POW wounded vet, Joe Ponder. I think they should have focused solely on the POWs, and used another ad to talk about Kerry's denigration of Vietnam veterans in general. The POWs are the heavy artillery and make the poor wounded vet look like a pop-gun.
It's a very good ad. I just felt the impact was diffused a bit by the presence of a non-POW.
(Via Ace.)
UPDATE:
The Kerry Campaign has filed a complaint with the FEC against the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Also, yesterday it was reported Kerry manager Chad Clanton had contacted booksellers demanding they remove the Swiftboaters' book "Unfit For Command." For a group that a few months ago couldn't get a major news outlet to come to their press conference, they sure have become target number one for the Kerry Campaign.
I smell fear.
Senator Kerry's coming to visit SW Florida today to view the hurricane damage. It'd be better if he just donated the price of one his haircuts to hurricane relief.
What's he going to do here? Promise people no more hurricanes? The only help he has the power to give would be convincing Teresa to break out the checkbook. If his visiting will accomplish that, then he's welcome.
Radio's made a big comeback in these parts as of late. What would people have done without battery-operated radios? With a lot of ingenuity, Kix-Country radio in Charlotte County became info-central while operating without a working phone line. I'm hearing lots of stories of ham radio operators using their trunking system to allow police and fire department nets to work when the cell towers fell, and here too they were integral in helping the radio station. (For the Herald articles use floridacracker61ATyahoo.com/cracker.)
The National Guard has been a big hit, but we knew they would be. These guys do a little bit of everything, including being on hug-duty 24/7.
Here's an interesting fact: Southern Baptists have the third-largest disaster relief agency in the country and most of the hot meals given out by the Red Cross and the Salvation Army for Hurricane Charley were cooked by the Southern Baptist Kitchens. Nice teamwork, guys.
Finally, remember the work the Humane Society is doing for the animals in distress in SW Florida and give accordingly, please:
Veterinarian Welch Agnew, of Dunedin, Fla., and the Pinellas County Animal Services, center, gives a stray puppy some medication as Melissa Forberg, of Defuniak Springs, Fla., assists after it was dropped at the animal rescue facilty D.A.R.T. Tuesday afternoon Aug. 17, 2004 in Punta Gorda, Fla. The facility takes in animals that were found wandering the area, or by families displaced by the effects of Hurricane Charley.
I see a lot of weekly caption contests around, but someone really should start a weekly link whore contest. Every time I see a post like "Hey, Joe at X Blog wants to know if you like vanilla ice cream! Go tell him!", I yell "Bingo!", but get no prize. How disappointing.
Someone please start one because I've got some nominations.
Vanessa Vicente, 3, of Deep Creek shows cookies she just received with her lunch from a Salvation Army food truck to her brother 6-year-old Justin after going through the line with their Granddad John Rothged of Punta Gorda.
Kerry's campaign tour heads to the Hamptons this weekend, yet he's still weeks away and hundreds of miles up a river that snaked through the war like a main circuit cable plugged straight into Kurtz.
The horror. The horror.
Carbon monoxide poisoning is the illness of the week at SW Regional Medical Center. So far 60 people have been treated there for it since Charley hit, with some fatalities and many, many close calls like this one:
Stacee Young, 24, woke up dizzy and befuddled in her Cape Coral home at 4 a.m. Saturday and knew something was wrong.
She woke up her roommate, Susan Crawford, 27, and they stumbled their way toward the generator, humming loudly inside the women’s garage.
Crawford never made it. She passed out just as she got to the gas-powered machine, collapsing onto the hot metal and sustaining burns that kept her in intensive care for days.
Young, losing consciousness several times, managed to call 911 and save three dogs and two birds before fainting outside in a ditch, her sister, Dana Miller, 29, said.
There have been two additional deaths in North Fort Myers due to Charley and the lack of electricity, with a man dying in a fire caused by candles and another man dying from heat stress.
Hopefully all power will be restored in Lee, with the exception of the islands, by this weekend.
The Sun-Sentinel has a terrific and well-written article on the electricity Haves and Have-Nots. It's very capricious: one side of the road may have power and the other not. Some of the Have-Nots are getting cranky:
Hurricane Charley has even divided families into Haves and Have-Nots. Jacqueline Silvera, 48, and her mother, who lives next door, never lost their electricity in Pine Hills. Her older sister, who lives in Apopka, did.
Silvera was cool and air conditioned. Her sister was hot and cranky.
"Everything was a problem. Everything ticked her off," Silvera said.
When her mother suggested the older sister come stay with her, the sister refused.
"She chose not to, so I said maybe she was enjoying her pity party," Silvera said.
Sisters! I bet they'll be hashing that one out for the next twenty years.
Here's the latest death toll and the circumstances for each fatality. Lee County had a North Fort Myers man crushed by a banyan tree and a Pine Island man killed by carbon monoxide from his generator.
Reader Erh has sent a link to amazing aerial photos of Charley's visit. Thanks, Erh.
There's going to be a protest in Altamonte Springs about the lack of Red Cross there. I figured something like this was coming. When I see a picture of a family in Fort Ogden with a caption saying something like "Places in Florida you don't see on the Travel Channel" and articles explaining that Florida has a "heartland", etc., I thought that it looked like the relief efforts were going to be concentrated in the larger population centers and that the rural areas might get the short end of the stick, or at least feel that way. That's one reason I was glad to see a kid like Zachary Howlett being led to go to Wauchula, which is off the beaten track. That being said, I don't know if these Altamonte Springs folk have a legitimate gripe or if they're just being cranky.
By the way, where do people think we keep our huge cattle and citrus industries? Up some South Beach tourist's butt? Don't answer- it was purely rhetorical.
And emphasizing that a man's home is his castle, a kind of nervous-looking Charlotte County man:
Whenever there's a disaster, the Humane Society of the United States sends out its disaster response teams. With formal agreements with FEMA and the Red Cross, these teams come from all over, and since Saturday they have been in SW Florida working with state and local agencies for hurricane relief efforts for animals.
The Suncoast Humane Society has been designated their staging area for companion animal disaster relief for Hurricane Charley.
You can donate either to the HS-US disaster fund, or directly to the SHS disaster fund. Either way, all you animal lovers, please give something.
Drenched in sweat, Zachary Howlett, of Lakeland, Florida, hands out pet food at a food and donations site in Wauchula, Florida, along U.S. Route 17, Monday, Aug. 16, 2004. After watching the devastation wreaked along Route 17 by Hurricane Charley on television, Howlett went door-to-door in his hometown to raise $220 overnight. He then bought food and supplies, and asked his father to drive him to Wauchula so he could pass it out himself.
Duane, Eric Clapton, and Carl Radle at what could be Derek & the Dominos' 12/1/70 Tampa show.
Wail on, Skydog!
(Photo ID via Finsky.)
For today's laugh, a case of mistaken identity, and Mexico chips in for SW Florida's recovery:
Mexico’s consul general from Miami toured Pine Island, Cape Coral and Fort Myers on Tuesday to view storm damage.
At the 160-lot Pink Citrus Trailer Park in Bokeelia, where many residents are workers from Mexico, Jorge Lomonaco encouraged some people and intimidated others.
A resident identified only as Leticia boldly approached him in hope that he was from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. For her, the consular general was the next best thing.
Through an interpreter, she said she was glad Lomonaco had come to see the damage “with his own eyes.”
His surprise visit left park supervisor Ellie Carrier trembling and near tears after his 10-person group, including press from Miami, entered her office.
“They came in to confront, not to talk,” Carrier said. “They didn’t bring water or ice. They brought nothing but the press.”
Lomonaco said he was able to donate some clothing his office had gathered in Miami.
I've gained a new-found appreciation of the mainstream media. They consider a Category-4 hurricane wreaking destruction on a large chunk of the State of Florida and its inhabitants to be big news.
They're not the ones acting like Hurricane Charley is so last Friday.
Who'll win the Golden Bloggy for coverage of Jessica Cutler?
An appetizer, not a meal for a good reason.
My sister's house now has electricity and my parents are staying there nights until the power is restored at their own home. My brother's wife and youngest daughter went to stay with the wife's mother in Sarasota. Only my brother is still sitting in the dark. Compared to others, we are blessed. My father feels so bad for the people in Arcadia and Punta Gorda. None of my folk were hurt, none of their houses ruined. Once they all have electricity, they'll be on Nob Hill.
This little five-year-old Arcadia boy's being charged with bringing his family drinking water reminded me of little boys in Pakistan and India doing the same.
Thank God his situation is only temporary. A tale to tell his grandchildren.
Thank you, FEMA, Governor Bush, and all the thousands of workers and volunteers putting in 18-hour days to get things put to rights.
So far 30 people in Lee have been poisoned and another one has died from carbon monoxide from their generators.
90,000 Lee Countians are still without power, but they're hoping to have all the lights back on by the end of the week.
Nearly 800,000 Floridians total are still without power.
The morning laugh is the guy getting stun-gunned for trying to break through the police barricade onto the Fort Myers Beach bridge. He got some personal electricity.
Mars may need women, but Lee County needs ICE:
Country Store finds the best stuff:
"The same news media that demanded George W. Bush release his National Guard records — and went over them with a microscope — have shown an appalling lack of interest in John Kerry's military service."
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Where's my colleagues' interest in Kerry's war records?
Even when he's caught in a lie, media aren't scrutinizing him same way they did Bush
By LEE CEARNAL
The same news media that demanded George W. Bush release his National Guard records — and went over them with a microscope — have shown an appalling lack of interest in John Kerry's military service. And as it turns out, there are far more legitimate questions about the latter than the former.
Kerry has made his four months and 11 days in Vietnam the central theme of his presidential campaign. This is entirely understandable given his 20 years as the Senate's leading dove. He needs the cover that Vietnam can give him.
Just last week, one of his more fatuous claims came a cropper. Beginning in 1979, with an op-ed for the Boston Herald, Kerry has claimed repeatedly that he spent Christmas Eve of 1968 on a secret — and illegal — mission in Cambodia aboard his swift boat.
"On more than one occasion, I, like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, took my patrol boat into Cambodia. In fact, I remember spending Christmas Day of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real. But nowhere in Apocalypse Now did I sense that kind of absurdity."
He repeated the story again in 1986, on the Senate floor: "I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared — seared — in me."
He added a fantastic detail in a 2003 Washington Post profile: "A close associate hints: There's a secret compartment in Kerry's briefcase. He carries the black attaché everywhere. Asked about it on several occasions, Kerry brushed it aside. Finally, trapped in an interview, he exhaled and clicked open his case.
" 'Who told you?' he demanded as he reached inside. 'My friends don't know about this.'
"The hat was a little mildewy. The green camouflage was fading, the seams fraying.
" 'My good luck hat,' Kerry said, happy to see it. 'Given to me by a CIA guy as we went in for a special mission in Cambodia.'
"Kerry put on the hat, pulling the brim over his forehead. His blue button-down shirt and tie clashed with the camouflage. He pointed his finger and raised his thumb, creating an imaginary gun. He looked silly, yet suddenly his campaign message was clear: Citizen-soldier. Linking patriotism to public service. It wasn't complex after all; it was Kerry.
"He smiled and aimed his finger: 'Pow.' "
This story was repeated early this year, in the fawning biography written by a Boston Globe reporter. Problem is, it's not true. His own crewmates say they were not in Cambodia on Christmas Eve. Even Kerry's own diary entry for that day says he was at his base in Sa Dec, 55 miles from the Cambodian border. In his biography of Kerry, Douglas Brinkly quoted the relevant passage: "Visions of sugarplums really do dance through your head and you think of stockings and snow and roast chestnuts and fires with birch logs and all that is good and warm and real. It's Christmas Eve."
With their man caught in a lie, Kerry's handlers last week floated a new version — he was near Cambodia.
"During John Kerry's service in Vietnam, many times he was on or near the Cambodian border and on one occasion crossed into Cambodia at the request of members of a special operations group operating out of Ha Tien.
"On Dec. 24, 1968, Lt. John Kerry and his crew were on patrol in the watery borders between Vietnam and Cambodia deep in enemy territory. In the early afternoon, Kerry's boat, PCF-44, was at Sa Dec and then headed north to the Cambodian border. There, Kerry and his crew along with two other boats were ambushed, taking fire from both sides of the river, and after the firefight were fired upon again. Later that evening during their night patrol they came under friendly fire. . . .
"Kerry's was not the only United States riverboat to respond and inadvertently or responsibly cross the border. In fact, it was this reality that led President Nixon to later invade Cambodia itself in 1970."
This won't fly either.
"Watery borders between Vietnam and Cambodia?" The Mekong River does not form a border between Vietnam and Cambodia.
"Inadvertently?" Strange, considering that his memory of that Christmas Eve 1968 was "seared" into his memory — including the fact that Nixon was lying about U.S. forces' presence there, even though Nixon didn't even take office until mid-January.
There is no evidence whatsoever that Kerry ventured into Cambodia during his abbreviated tour in Vietnam. No orders, no after-action reports, no confirmation from others, nothing.
To have been caught in Cambodia would have been an international embarrassment and a court-martial offense. The border was clearly marked with warnings signs and patrolled by a PT boat to ensure that no allied boats crossed it. (Yes, allied special-ops forces were operating in Cambodia. But they were not inserted there by something as obvious and slow-moving as a swift boat. They were ferried in by helicopter.)
As to the truth of this tale, there is only Kerry's word, which the press seems quite willing to take, to the extent of not reporting on the controversy at all. It is not a trivial matter. Kerry has pimped the story repeatedly in an effort to paint himself as a stand-up eyewitness to events that were both illegal and, in his view, immoral.
And that's not the only issue that reporters are curiously incurious about. At least one of Kerry's Purple Hearts has been challenged by his unit's medical officer, who notes that the wound was barely visible and was treated with a Band-Aid. Some questions should also be asked about his Silver Star: Should shooting a wounded, fleeing Viet Cong in the back — as justifiable as it was as an act of war — be worthy of the nation's third-highest award for courage?
To those of you who say such questions are unseemly, consider that John Kerry's principal claim on the presidency is that he served four months and 11 days in Vietnam. OK, fine. Let's examine the records — all the records, which, unlike Bush and contrary to popular perception, Kerry has not released — and have a debate. We would be if it were George W. Bush. The media would see to it.
Of the 127 sewage lift stations in Ft. Myers, only 12 are working, and those are on generator power. They'd cleaned the system out right before the hurricane, so right now it's storing everything like a big septic tank. A giant, humongous septic tank.
They've prioritized restoring the power to the lift stations. Good idea.
They got my mom's phone semi-working today, even though the phone box is laying on the ground in the backyard with the wires underneath a neighbor's fallen tree. They ran wires right to it and will worry about getting all the wires back up on the phone poles later. Yay, Southern Bell.
She says she is acutely traumatized and that all the old people like her will soon start dropping like flies. Did I ever mention my mother is a tad on the dramatic side? She said this storm was worse than the Labor Day Hurricane in the Keys, (Mom! That one killed hundreds of those WWI veterans working on the railroad!) and that it was worse than the Lake Okeechobee Hurricane. (Mom! That one killed 2,000 people!) "Well," she said, "there are visible victims and invisible victims." I finally got her to acknowledge that these other storms racked up a whole lot more "visible victims".
As for my brother's much longed-for ice:
The most critical relief — water, ice and food — did not begin to reach the worst-hit areas until Sunday, delayed by lack of communication with local officials, problems finding accessible places to put it, and traffic jams on I-75. A police escort finally had to be arranged.
Complaints about the scarcity of those supplies were "anecdotal" and isolated, Lt. Gov. Toni Jennings said Monday morning.
And here's someone who needs to be removed from office:
The governor's office said that though for a time it was unable to reach Charlotte County Elections Supervisor Judy Anderson, she was not missing and sent word she is safe.
"She is taking care of family," said state spokeswoman Alia Faraj.
Uh-huh. She's an officer of the County and is required to report for work the same as anybody else. She's one of the big dogs, earning big bucks: don't let her shirk her duties. Now she decides to go back home and be the little woman? To paraphrase Kenny Rogers: "You picked a fine time to leave work, Lucille."
On a happier note. Here's a guy to be grateful for. This is lineman Keith Allen, from Lawrenceville, Georgia, with Pike Electric Inc. Thank you, Keith, and all those other linemen for coming down to help. Y'all are some good men:
Pine Island is next to North Fort Myers. When I was growing up, they called us rednecks and we called them mulletheads. (From the fish, not the haircut.) When my sister'd fuss at her husband, he'd tell her to stop acting like some mullethead's wife. This Pine Islander's home was undamaged, though his neighbors' homes were. He just really wants someone to make his day. How belligerent. If this sign were in a yard in North Fort Myers, however, I would say it's a symbol of grit, community, and fighting spirit.
SW Florida is a heavily Republican area. The only thing that would harm President Bush there were if he hadn't come. So, he got a very good reception:
He talked to one group almost 30 minutes, asking who stayed and who left, and what they needed. When he left, it was to chants of “four more years.”
He and Jeb both did a really good job. You can see they're both very compassionate people, natural leaders, and go-to guys when bad things happen. Jeb may very well be the President himself one day.
President Bush pats a Punta Gorda resident on the back as he walks past.
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Remarks by President Bush in Punta Gorda
President Bush flew to Southwest Florida Sunday morning to inspect areas decimated by Hurricane Charley. Here is the text of his remarks during his stop in Punta Gorda, the epicenter of the damage:
You know the job of the federal government and the state government is to surge resources as quickly as possible to disaster areas. And that's exactly what's happening now. We choppered over and saw the devastation of this area. A lot of people's lives are turned upside down. We've got ice and water moving in, trailers for people to live in are moving in. The state is providing security so that people can have peace of mind that their neighborhoods will be safe. There's a lot of compassion moving in the area; the Red Cross is here.
What I'm telling you is that there's a lot of help moving into this part of the world -- it's going to take a while to rebuild it. But the government's job is to help people help rebuild their lives, and that's what's happening.
The coordination between the federal government and the state government and the local government is really important. I think it's excellent now. The governor can speak to that, if you like. But it's really important that when we say we're going to do something, that it actually happens. And that's what we're following through on now.
Afterward, he answered a few questions from local media:
Q: Can you tell us about some of the people who you spoke with and what they told you?
PRESIDENT: Well, I've got -- you know, these good folks here, this is this man's house here. His parents were uprooted from where they were living. They came here to spend the night. And that's what you're beginning to see. You're beginning to see neighbors helping neighbors. A lot of people who have been dislocated are staying with a friend or a neighbor. You know, out of these catastrophes the spirit of America really shines, and that spirit is neighbor helping neighbor. So that's the lesson here. The fellow down the street came out OK; he had taken precautions necessary. Nearly everybody here that I've talked to had evacuated, as the state asked them to do and, therefore, the loss of life was minimized -- still, too many people lost their lives, but, nevertheless, it was not as significant as it could have been. We're here, obviously, in a residential neighborhood where people's lives have been destroyed. They're beginning to worry about insurance claims and the state is organized to handle insurance claims. The key is just to make sure that they expedite the services which are available as quickly as possible.
Q: There was some consternation after Andrew that the federal aid didn't arrive soon enough. Can you promise that there will be a more expeditious response this time?
PRESIDENT: It's happening now. ... We're moving a lot of aid very quickly and, again, you can ask the governor whether or not he's satisfied with how fast the aid is moving. All I can tell you is that FEMA was on the ground yesterday morning and there's a lot of supplies surging this way.
Q: Have you gotten an updated tally of the cost of the damage?
PRESIDENT: Not yet. Jeb estimated billions. We'll see.
Q: Mr. President, some people are going to say that there's a political component to your rapid visit to Florida.
PRESIDENT: Yes, and if I didn't come they would have said, 'He should have been here more rapidly.' ''
Q: What about what happened in '92 with Hurricane Andrew? That was obviously in August of a presidential [election].
PRESIDENT: That was then, this is now. And the government is set up to respond very quickly and we are.
Q: Was there a lesson learned back then, though?
PRESIDENT: The lesson is, Respond quickly. And we are responding quickly. And we're surging equipment. And the coordination between the federal government and the state government is excellent. And the Homeland Security Department is doing its job. FEMA Director Brown is doing an excellent job. You can talk to the governor, he can give you a sense from the state perspective. But from the federal perspective, I was notified that they're going to move as quickly as possible, and they are. A lot of stuff is coming.
The big problem is ice. My brother is questioning why since Tampa is full of ice, that they can't haul it down the two-hour trip so that there could be ice at Publix. He is resigned to just waiting it all out until the power comes back on Wednesday or so. People are getting cranky.
My mother woke him up at 8:00 this morning telling him to fix her a cup of coffee. He got out his last half-bag of self-lighting charcoal to fire up the grill. I bet he shook the bag at her. She said "Just use a couple of them." He explained to her it doesn't work that way. He got the water warm enough for coffee, she drank it and left. I told him to check on Mom and Dad to make sure they're fine. He said, "Believe me, if they weren't fine they'd be over here." I do believe he's right.
My niece was driving from Fort Myers back up to school in North Carolina and stopped in Ocala. While she was gassing up, she saw a convoy of about 90 trucks heading to SW Florida. She said it brought tears to her eyes.
Some more good news is that Florida Power & Light will match any donation to the Red Cross for Florida, up to 250k. We always said you could give your life's blood to the mosquitos or FPL. It's nice to see they're giving something back.
Some people find looting the mini-market to be a great stress-reliever.
Others view shooting looters as being an excellent form of emotional catharthis.
A brisk walk in the fresh air to discourage looters improves your feeling of well-being.
Bicycling helps the brain produce stress-relieving endorphins, but this man is emphasizing that bicycles aren't free.
