Sunday, August 29, 2004
And While Were Talking About Smears...
Smears that turn out to be true, that is.
Doubtless you've all heard about, and possibly even actually heard, the confession of Ben Barnes, a former Lt. Governor of Texas that he personally got George W. Bush into the Texas Air National Guard, jumping Dubya ahead of an astonishingly large number of applicants who were in line ahead of him, thus providing him protection from the draft and service in VietNam.
Barnes has been on the record since the late nineties that he received a call and then made a call in the late sixties on behalf of Bush-fils, and yet only two weeks ago, Howard Kurtz on CNN took MoveOn.org to task for its commercial that said Bush used family connections to avoid Vietnam in the face of there being absolutely no concrete evidence to support the claim. Apparently, Kurtz's search for evidence went no further than his own desk.
Well, our own adorable Molly Ivins has had this story for years; if any of our leading reporters and pundits had bothered to actually read her highly readable "Shrub," written with Lou Dubose, they might have been more ready to ask questions about Mr. Bush's presentation of himself. Just think of the way the press covered every nasty whisper about Clinton during the '92 campaign, compared with their complete indifference to vetting Mr. Bush's past. I'm probably being unfair, after all, it was surely a Herculean task to keep track of all those serial exaggerations of Al Gore.
Molly fills in the details in her latest column, which you can find here. The first quoted paragraph is Molly's summary of a recent USA Today "rehash" of the state of play on the question of Bush's TANG service; the second is her own elaboration.
The column starts with the SwiftVets and Ben Ginsberg and ends with all the pre-war pro-war pundits who are changing their minds. (Do Tom Friedman and David Brooks really belong in this group?) Molly rightly insists that the only value that should be attached to the Swift Boat Veterans Determined to Slander John Kerry is as a media case study in how a smear works. The question is, is this one succeeding? Will any of the new war doubters stand up against a smear that is clearly meant not merely to destroy Kerry, personally and politically, but also to shorten the length of time that Bush has to confront issues like Iraq?
Digby has a wonderfully hopeful post about the Swift Boat smear; it includes quotes from a soothing and persuasive examination by Donkey Rising of recent poll results which have been universally interpreted everywhere else as indicating the smear has worked to damage Kerry. I hope they're both right. I have some doubts, to be explored in a later post.
I am sure that Digby's right when he says Kerry deserves some respect from those of us who want to see him elected. He's handled this massive extraordinary personal assault fairly well. Do we ever stop to realize that these men, and women, who run for office, who are, dare I say it, politicians, are also human beings. Imagine what it must feel like to be the subject of this kind of slander. If Kerry was anything else besides a candidate for the presidency, he would probably have authorized a good lawyer to file a suit against O'Neill & co for exactly that, slander. But that is almost impossible for a political candidate, and don't think the Ben Ginsberg's of the world don't know it. And if you think it's easy to defend yourself outside a courtroom against a well-financed smear with only an impotent SCLM to stand up for truth, read the comments thread to Digby's post.
Another Digby must read is this critical analysis of how Rove operates when he's going after an opponent, which obliterates the popular notion that he boldly strikes at a rival candidate's strength, an idea as Digby notes, whose source is Rove.
But how does doing that work for Rove's candidate?
Exactly right. I hope John Kerry has at least one staff member who does nothing but read left of center blogs to cull them for brilliant insights like this one of Digby's, as well as brilliant tactical, strategic and rhetorical suggestions, to be discussed in a separate post.
How different our electoral politics might be if a columnist like Fareed Zakaria, when something as odious as this Swift Boaters smear happens, were to stand up and reject it definitively, in however many Newsweek columns it takes to make the price of pursuing the smear for Republican partisans too high measured in public disdain, and to do so not on behalf of Kerry's candidacy, on behalf of the genuine discussion about Iraq, for instance, this country so desperately needs.
UPDATE: Alert reader Jeff notes in a comment that Barnes was not Lt. Governor when he accomodated Bush Jr into TANG, but was Speaker of the Texas House and worries that Barnes might have made an inadvertant slip in the video in which he expresses his remorse, thus giving Bush partisans a basis to debunk. I think it more likely they'll simply ignore the whole thing. Their modus vivendi is essentially deny, deny, deny, project, project, project.
Doubtless you've all heard about, and possibly even actually heard, the confession of Ben Barnes, a former Lt. Governor of Texas that he personally got George W. Bush into the Texas Air National Guard, jumping Dubya ahead of an astonishingly large number of applicants who were in line ahead of him, thus providing him protection from the draft and service in VietNam.
Barnes has been on the record since the late nineties that he received a call and then made a call in the late sixties on behalf of Bush-fils, and yet only two weeks ago, Howard Kurtz on CNN took MoveOn.org to task for its commercial that said Bush used family connections to avoid Vietnam in the face of there being absolutely no concrete evidence to support the claim. Apparently, Kurtz's search for evidence went no further than his own desk.
Well, our own adorable Molly Ivins has had this story for years; if any of our leading reporters and pundits had bothered to actually read her highly readable "Shrub," written with Lou Dubose, they might have been more ready to ask questions about Mr. Bush's presentation of himself. Just think of the way the press covered every nasty whisper about Clinton during the '92 campaign, compared with their complete indifference to vetting Mr. Bush's past. I'm probably being unfair, after all, it was surely a Herculean task to keep track of all those serial exaggerations of Al Gore.
Molly fills in the details in her latest column, which you can find here. The first quoted paragraph is Molly's summary of a recent USA Today "rehash" of the state of play on the question of Bush's TANG service; the second is her own elaboration.
A third question from USAT -- did Bush receive preferential treatment in getting into the Guard and getting a coveted pilot slot -- is a non-question. Of course he did. It was the peak of the Vietnam War, and there was waiting list of over 100,000 men to get into the Air National Guard. A friend of Daddy Bush named Sid Adger called the then-lieutenant governor of Texas, Ben Barnes, and asked him to get Rep. Bush's son George into the section of the Texas Guard known as the "champagne unit."
Adger was a prominent Houston businessman who belonged to the same clubs as Poppy, sent his kids to the same schools and had sons in the champagne unit. The son of former Texas Gov. John Connally had joined, the son of Sen. Lloyd Bentsen joined, as did some players for the Dallas Cowboys.
Barnes called Brig. Gen. James Rose of the Guard and recommended Bush for a pilot position. Bush got a direct commission and was assigned one of the last two pilot slots in the state after scoring the absolute numerical minimum (25) on the qualifying test. For years, Bush claimed a friend whose name he didn't remember had told him of an opening in the Guard, that he applied through regular channels and was accepted.
The column starts with the SwiftVets and Ben Ginsberg and ends with all the pre-war pro-war pundits who are changing their minds. (Do Tom Friedman and David Brooks really belong in this group?) Molly rightly insists that the only value that should be attached to the Swift Boat Veterans Determined to Slander John Kerry is as a media case study in how a smear works. The question is, is this one succeeding? Will any of the new war doubters stand up against a smear that is clearly meant not merely to destroy Kerry, personally and politically, but also to shorten the length of time that Bush has to confront issues like Iraq?
Digby has a wonderfully hopeful post about the Swift Boat smear; it includes quotes from a soothing and persuasive examination by Donkey Rising of recent poll results which have been universally interpreted everywhere else as indicating the smear has worked to damage Kerry. I hope they're both right. I have some doubts, to be explored in a later post.
I am sure that Digby's right when he says Kerry deserves some respect from those of us who want to see him elected. He's handled this massive extraordinary personal assault fairly well. Do we ever stop to realize that these men, and women, who run for office, who are, dare I say it, politicians, are also human beings. Imagine what it must feel like to be the subject of this kind of slander. If Kerry was anything else besides a candidate for the presidency, he would probably have authorized a good lawyer to file a suit against O'Neill & co for exactly that, slander. But that is almost impossible for a political candidate, and don't think the Ben Ginsberg's of the world don't know it. And if you think it's easy to defend yourself outside a courtroom against a well-financed smear with only an impotent SCLM to stand up for truth, read the comments thread to Digby's post.
Another Digby must read is this critical analysis of how Rove operates when he's going after an opponent, which obliterates the popular notion that he boldly strikes at a rival candidate's strength, an idea as Digby notes, whose source is Rove.
Rove has developed a campaign of projection in which he tars his opponents with his own candidates' weaknesses and then attacks them. He attacks Kerry for phony heroism thirty years ago when just last year his own candidate had himself filmed in a little costume prancing around on an aircraft carrier pretending he'd won a war that had only begun.
But how does doing that work for Rove's candidate?
But, by tarring Kerry with using war as a PR stunt for his own personal gain, people can process the uncomfortable feelings they are experiencing about Iraq as not really being caused by Junior, but by his rival who is the real shallow opportunist who only pretends to be a man of proven leadership and experience.
(edit)
He's projected Bush's weaknesses on to Kerry and then gone after them ruthlessly. It makes it very difficult to then turn the attack back on Bush because it's been co-opted. It's another example of the Republican epistomological relativism that's driving everybody up the wall.
(edit)
What is interesting about Rove is that his way of dealing with his own candidates' even more glaring deficiencies is to build a Kerry straw man in Bush's exact image and then set it afire.
Exactly right. I hope John Kerry has at least one staff member who does nothing but read left of center blogs to cull them for brilliant insights like this one of Digby's, as well as brilliant tactical, strategic and rhetorical suggestions, to be discussed in a separate post.
How different our electoral politics might be if a columnist like Fareed Zakaria, when something as odious as this Swift Boaters smear happens, were to stand up and reject it definitively, in however many Newsweek columns it takes to make the price of pursuing the smear for Republican partisans too high measured in public disdain, and to do so not on behalf of Kerry's candidacy, on behalf of the genuine discussion about Iraq, for instance, this country so desperately needs.
UPDATE: Alert reader Jeff notes in a comment that Barnes was not Lt. Governor when he accomodated Bush Jr into TANG, but was Speaker of the Texas House and worries that Barnes might have made an inadvertant slip in the video in which he expresses his remorse, thus giving Bush partisans a basis to debunk. I think it more likely they'll simply ignore the whole thing. Their modus vivendi is essentially deny, deny, deny, project, project, project.
