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How ugly will it get? (pg. 2)
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| MisterOpus1 |
I've been vigorously debating this particular topic in a local forum. In the grand scheme of things, I've mentioned ad nauseum that both Kerry and Bush's war record are non-issues at hand. There are some more pressing issues that we should all take into consideration, but unfortunately mudslinging and smear tactics tend to take center stage every time.
I also want to say that as much as this smearing against Kerry is being encouraged and enhanced by the media, perhaps it is the media itself that we should really examine. It's pretty apparent that a slew of books and films have come out against Bush, and perhaps the media only felt it fair to have a "balanced" attack against Kerry as well. While the media's intentions may be good at its apparent desire to look "balanced", their logic can be inherently flawed if we truly examine and scrutinize the underlying issues being raised either for/against Bush or Kerry.
I also would like to further mention that while Kerry's military record is under close scrutiny here, I can't help but laugh at the conservative mouthpieces, and the general media for that matter, for failing to recognize the simple comparison between Bush's background vs. Kerry's. Indeed, there was a time when Bush had his military record touted before the 2000 election, only to have questions raised about its authenticity. Of course those questions surfaced back up last February thanks in large part to Michael Moore's loud mouth antics, but unfortunately for Bush serious gaps in his record remain. Despite Bush's antics and press releases, there's still a gaping 3-5 month whole in his military service record that has yet to be explained. Furthermore, little has been mentioned on the fact that Bush somehow hopped over a number of Texas Guard enlistees, despite his miserable 25th percentile performance on his entrance exam.
Bush had his original records moved to the Pentagon, which has kept a tight lid on the months in question. Of course by law, there are copies of those Guard records being held in the state capital in Austin, but Bush has refused access to those records. It has taken a FOIA request by the AP Press to get access of those records, and I highly doubt access will be granted before the election.
There are some undeniable facts about Kerry's record when comparing it Bush's. Kerry did enlist into the Navy after college, Bush retreated to the Texas Air Guard where it was highly known as a safe-place for the affluent and individuals who had friends and relatives in high places (such as Bush's father). Kerry requested to be sent to Vietnam, Bush requested NOT to be sent to Vietnam at all.
That being said, there have been some noted criticisms about Kerry's record. First, the comment of Kerry within a few miles of the Cambodian border at Christmas in 1968 - I think this is probably the one criticism that holds the most water against Kerry. In searching all the blogs so far I have yet to see a strong refutation of this contradiction. Kerry's superior officers had him stationed approx. 55 miles off the Cambodian border, yet Kerry had insisted in his biography that he was 5 miles off. A slip of an extra number "5" perhaps? Or was he perhaps disobeying orders and being a renegade? Or perhaps, even more sinister, he was under covert orders to be in that position, and his high ranking officers can not discuss such classified information?
The problem is we don't know. On the surface it appears like a little embellishment on Kerry's part, something that many Vietnam veterans tend to fall under with their own version of events over the years. Nevertheless, in the grand scheme of charges trumped up on Kerry by the Swifties, this is a pimple on a dinosaur's ass.
Both Occ and I have defended Kerry against these charges by the Swifties in another thread, and I certainly don't want to rehash those arguments again. For the most part, the Swifties do have serious credibility problems of their own, as they have been shown to have contradictory statements about Kerry in the past. Their motives are highly suspect as well, given the fact that they are primarily financially supported by 3 Texas GOP backers, and have had ties to the same groups and tactics that have smeared McCain's record for the 2000 Republican primaries. McCain is all too familiar with these tactics, and it was impossible for him to crawl out of the wall of smear against him. This is a very successful tactic - smear first, set the false images into the swing voters' psyche, and allow the truth ever so slowly come out later, often too little too late.
But moreover, their credibility difficulties stem from the fact that not one were ever on Kerry's boat, and their version of events seriously conflict not just with Kerry's, but with the eyewitness accounts of Kerry's crewmates, the man he saved (a registered Republican), and the Navy archives itself. They are going to forever run into this problem as the days and months roll by, but I do not sense this will halt their smear boat motion in the slightest. Politics always becomes extremely dirty come election season, and this group certainly makes no exception.
The only new information I wish to bring to attention are 3 websites.
1. A good summary of the majority of charges by the Swifties against Kerry, and a long refutation of each of those charges:
http://www.eriposte.com/media/liars_inc/swiftboat.htm#1
2. The latest from factcheck.org (non-partisan, in case you're wondering) on Elliott's flip-flopping problems and affidavits:
http://www.factcheck.org/miscreports.aspx?docid=232
3. Drudge continuing to push the false report on Kranish with Kerry/Edwards' campaign:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200408100001
That should be enough to chew on for now. I will state as complete anectodal evidence that my father-in-law, a staunch Republican and Korean War Veteran, was completely turned off by this group, and was very disheartened by Bush's refusal to condemn the ad and its group specifically. He's not quite sure if it will pull his vote away from Bush, but he has begun to consider the Libertarian candidate more seriously now. I imagine that a similar effect will occur with a good portion of the swing voters, though anything is possible at this point. |
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| ogvh5150 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Matt
but alas,
Kerry is the lesser of two evils. |
John Kerry is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.
I will now play Solitaire.
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| imokruok |
I love this pic. "Aaahh! Teresa! I'm a fraud! I can't take it anymore! Goodbye cruel world!"
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| smokeape |
Four months with 5 medals while serving on a boat in Vietnam as a lieutenant doesn't equate Kerry with a United States President serving 3 years fighting a global war on terror. Bush might have been in the Air National Guard, but at least he didn't publicly side with the traitor whore Jane Fonda peace radicals who put our troops in more jeopardy and harm than if he just shut his f*cking face up. The little glory boy never voted for the Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicle, or Apache Attack Helicopter. So he's no favorite of the military by a long stretch. Thank god the Democrats have no one of greater stature to unseat Bush, or I would say no better candidate available to take the challenge in their measly ranks.
Lol!
[[[smoke]]] |
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| MisterOpus1 |
Deja vu?
| quote: | Originally posted by smokeape
Four months with 5 medals while serving on a boat in Vietnam as a lieutenant doesn't equate Kerry with a United States President serving 3 years fighting a global war on terror. Bush might have been in the Air National Guard, but at least he didn't publicly side with the traitor whore Jane Fonda peace radicals who put our troops in more jeopardy and harm than if he just shut his f*cking face up. The little glory boy never voted for the Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicle, or Apache Attack Helicopter. So he's no favorite of the military by a long stretch. Thank god the Democrats have no one of greater stature to unseat Bush, or I would say no better candidate available to take the challenge in their measly ranks.
Lol!
[[[smoke]]] |
I'm just wondering, smokeape, do you conservatives ever bother to read anything outside your basic republican newsletters and propaganda right-wing media sources?
Because if you did, you would understand that Kerry voted for those cuts back in the early and mid '90's as a result of the downsizing the military due to the end of the Cold War era. Kerry, just like a number of dems. AND republicans, was wanting fiscal responsibility and deficit reduction.
Now I know those words "fiscal responsibility", and "deficit reduction" may sound a little foreign to you, esp. in these times of Junior Bush and his GOP Congressional cronies spending and borrowing money like there's no tomorrow, but back then it was a nice means of balancing the budget put forth by a (*gasp*) Democratic president.
But back to the issue of Kerry, if you have a problem with his proposals, you should REALLY have a problem with the REAL culprit behind cutting military spending post-Cold War era: Bush Sr. He was the one who proposed ceasing further production of B-2 bombers and MX missiles, and would cut military spending by 30 percent over several years in his 1992 SOU address:
http://www.c-span.org/executive/tra...admin&year=1992
I am wondering if you would, by chance, indulge yourself into reading some non-partisan material on the subject:
http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=147
Kerry's record, in fact, shows a great deal of support for our military since '97, so I really don't think this is very strong argument against him. In fact, the argument falls flat on its face, once you put things into proper context.
Oh and speaking of gutting the military, have you checked out some background info. on your VP?:
| quote: | It is true that when Kerry first ran for the Senate in 1984 he did call specifically for canceling the AH-64 Apache helicopter, but once elected he opposed mainly such strategic weapons as Trident nuclear missiles and space-based anti-ballistic systems. And Richard Cheney himself, who is now Vice President but who then was Secretary of Defense, also proposed canceling the Apache helicopter program five years after Kerry did. As Cheney told the House Armed Services Committee on Aug. 13, 1989:
Cheney: The Army, as I indicated in my earlier testimony, recommended to me that we keep a robust Apache helicopter program going forward, AH-64; . . . I forced the Army to make choices. I said, "You can't have all three. We don't have the money for all three." So I recommended that we cancel the AH-64 program two years out. That would save $1.6 billion in procurement and $200 million in spares over the next five years.
Two years later Cheney's Pentagon budget also proposed elimination of further production of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle as well. It was among 81 Pentagon programs targeted for termination, including the F-14 and F-16 aircraft. "Cheney decided the military already has enough of these weapons," the Boston Globe reported at the time.
Does that make Cheney an opponent of "weapons vital to winning the war on terror?" Of course not. But by the Bush campaign's logic, Cheney himself would be vulnerable to just such a charge, and so would Bush's father, who was president at the time.
http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=177 |
But wait, there's more on Cheney - check out his proposal in 1993:
| quote: | In his budget proposal for FY 1993, Cheney asked for termination of the B-2 program at 20 aircraft, cancellation of the Midgetman, and limitations on advanced cruise missile purchases. When introducing this budget, Cheney complained that Congress had directed Defense to buy weapons it did not want, including the V-22, M-1 tanks, and F-14 and F-16 aircraft, and required it to maintain some unneeded reserve forces. His plan outlined about $50 billion less over the next 5 years than in 1991.
Source: DefenseLink.mil, “SecDef Histories” Jan 1, 1997 |
So why aren't you criticizing Cheney, Bush Sr., and every other fiscally responsible Republican who also wanted to cut military spending in the early/mid-90's? |
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| occrider |
Snopes also looked at that silly claim.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/weapons.asp
What are you doing using non-partisan sources?? Just you wait till I tell your friends at american progressive. Looks like you need to upgrade your foil to the newest technology. You know they have non-stick foil now? It's awesome as hell. |
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| Shakka |
| quote: | Originally posted by occrider
Snopes also looked at that silly claim.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/weapons.asp
Looks like you need to upgrade your foil to the newest technology. You know they have non-stick foil now? It's awesome as hell. |
Is that the Teflon coated kind? |
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| occrider |
| quote: | Originally posted by Shakka
Is that the Teflon coated kind? |
I dunno what it is but my chicken floats around on it like it's on butter. One can only imagine the mind control reflection capabilities it has.
Damn, I haven't gone on fact check for a while, but I got to hand it to them ... when they research something they go balls out and research the out of it. They completely tore up the swiftboat ads with sources I hadn't even seen before.
http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=231 |
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| MisterOpus1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by occrider
Snopes also looked at that silly claim.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/weapons.asp
What are you doing using non-partisan sources?? Just you wait till I tell your friends at american progressive. Looks like you need to upgrade your foil to the newest technology. You know they have non-stick foil now? It's awesome as hell. |
You say one word to my progressive buddies, Dick, and I'll expose your wife for writing her wild, sexy, lesbian-lovin', controversal book!:
| quote: | Lynne Cheney's Wild, Wild West
Patt Morrison
August 11, 2004
It's one weird summer when the nation's favorite beach reading inclines to bestsellers by Bill Clinton, the 9/11 commission, John Dean and Tommy Franks … real page-turners.
But then there's another book, written by another well-known political figure, and it's a doozy. Throughout its pages are fornication (the heroine with her late sister's husband), incest (half brother knocks up half sister), adultery (the heroine, with her first husband's friend), contraception (by the wed and the unwed) and lesbian couplings (the heroine's sister and an older woman). And incidentally, lynchings, dogicide, cattle theft and robber-baronism.
The book was published 23 years ago, before the author's husband became one of the nation's most influential politicians, and before the author became a Valkyrie in the culture wars. And the author is … aha, you thought I was going to say Hillary Clinton, didn't you?
It's Lynne Cheney, wife of the Republican vice president. The book is a frontier novel of the 19th century called "Sisters." It's hot, it's sexy and it's out of print.
I could find only 11 copies in all of the nation's public libraries, mostly in red states: four in Wyoming, Cheney's home state, and one each in North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Kansas, Virginia, and Kern County, Calif.
On the Internet, the original 1981 $2.50 Signet paperback has an asking price of $2,999.95 to $25,000, the latter more than the cost of a first edition of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." I have "Sisters." I can't reveal my sources, but my hot copy is now in a secure, undisclosed location. (Thanks, Mom.)
A proposal this spring to reissue the book was deep-sixed by Cheney, whose lawyer explained it wasn't her best work. It doesn't show up in her White House website biography. During the 2000 campaign, she told the New York Times she hoped the book would start "flying off the shelves." Now she doesn't want it to fly at all. What a flip-flopper.
Naturally, demand is in inverse proportion to availability. In March, the New York Theatre Workshop staged a performance of choice scenes. The snicker factor is obvious, with passages like "Let us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men," and "Eve and Eve, loving one another" in "a passionate, loving intimacy." So is the hypocrisy potential, when both Cheneys and their lesbian younger daughter are laboring to reelect a man who regards Adam-and-Steve nuptials as the death knell for civilization.
The book as a whole, though, is even more radical. "This is a very feminist book," said Elaine Showalter. She's a Princeton English professor emeritus who ran across "Sisters" at a Paris bookstall about a dozen years ago and wrote about it for a scholarly publication. I reached her on vacation, which I hoped was being financed by a five-figure sale of that long-ago copy, but wouldn't you know it — she'd sold it some years ago for $25.
"I couldn't believe it was Lynne Cheney," Showalter told me. "At that point she was head of the National Endowment for the Humanities. I've had many not personal but institutional dealings with her; she had a reputation as being pretty tough on women's history and feminist criticism."
Showalter thought the book did a "wonderful job" of dramatizing "the role of women in the West … she'd clearly read [the historical research] and wrote sympathetically. It's about women breaking away from the dollhouse and striking out on their own." If Cheney ever did allow a reprint, Showalter would probably be delighted to write a jacket blurb.
Cheney, who earned a PhD in literature — that's one of the liberal arts — set the book in 1886 Wyoming, a rough paradise where women got the vote in 1869 and used it. When the territory was invited to become a state in a nation that barred women from voting, Wyoming thumbed its nose at Congress — "We may stay out of the Union 100 years, but we will come in with our women" — and kept state suffrage. The West led the way for women, and Wyoming led the West. Soon Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Washington gave women the vote; so, in 1911, did California.
The cover describes the heroine as "beautiful, strong-willed," which is book-jacket code for an uppity woman about to be tamed by some man. Not this time. The lesbianism, the adultery, the contraception would offend some Bush voters, but it's the frank, uncensorious feminism that's really astonishing. Cheney's women do what has to be done. No divine bolt splits the heavens to punish lesbians and fornicators. Life happens.
I found myself thinking that, in some ways, Lynne Cheney's 19th century Wyoming sounds like a better place for women than George W. Bush's dream for 21st century America.
In Lynne Cheney's Wyoming, the heroine doesn't feel she has to be a powerhouse in private and a dimpled simp in public. "I'm not caught up in that kind of hypocrisy," she says. "I've spent my life facing it down."
In Lynne Cheney's Wyoming, the heroine debates with the governor and drops an opera house chandelier on a man trying to kill her.
In Lynne Cheney's Wyoming, a woman might even tell a tormentor to "shove it," and earn a frontier "you go, girl" for saying so.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion...,3757755.column |
Oops, guess I already did. Sorry, Dick.
I gave up on my hat. Too many damn wholes, leaks, and it just wouldn't fit right. I really think the foil-hat makers deliberately made my hat faulty and the wrong size, though I can't prove that just yet. It's one of my myriad of conspiracies I've fumbled across lately, and just in time for election season!
Oh, in addition to factcheck, here's a good debunking of the Smear Boat chapter dealing with Kerry's 1st Purple Heart:
http://www.fearofclowns.com/text/ke...heart_debunked/
This, BTW, is a damn great conspiracy against Kerry! Too bad it's not on my list, however. |
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| occrider |
| quote: |
Throughout its pages are fornication (the heroine with her late sister's husband), incest (half brother knocks up half sister), adultery (the heroine, with her first husband's friend), contraception (by the wed and the unwed) and lesbian couplings (the heroine's sister and an older woman). And incidentally, lynchings, dogicide, cattle theft and robber-baronism.
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Holy crap that sounds like my kind of reading! I definitely don't read enough books with dogicide in them. |
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| Yoepus |
| quote: | Originally posted by occrider
Holy crap that sounds like my kind of reading! I definitely don't read enough books with dogicide in them. |
personally, I'm most looking foward to the chapter with cattle theft!
Who do I write my 25k check to? |
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| Reverend_Trance |
Why does Kerry hold back the release of his military records? If he published them this Vietnam credibility situation would be over.
Go Bush!!!! |
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