From National Review Online:
Honor Reclaimed
POWs have their say.
by Kate O'Beirne
If the powerful documentary featuring highly decorated Vietnam POWs recounting how Lt.(jg) John Kerry's antiwar activity affected them was seen by the huge audience it deserves, Massachusetts's junior senator wouldn't get elected to a sanitation commission. In Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal, 13 POWs, whose cries of pain, defiance, and despair went unheard during their hellish captivity, share their stories about the betrayal they felt when a fellow officer claimed American forces were guilty of widespread war crimes. Over 30 years ago, antiwar veterans (both faux and real) basked in the media spotlight; now proud veterans who endured their slanders, along with years of cruelty and abuse, are having their say. These indisputable heroes include two Medal of Honor winners, one of whom explains, "This is an effort that was long in coming, but would not have come about if not for the Democratic candidate 'reporting for duty.'"
The 45-minute film opens with scenes of the dank cells at the Hanoi Hilton where the oppressive silence would only be broken by "cries of pain." One POW recalls the intense pain of the torture they suffered, explaining that "the rope was the worst." Following one such session, designed to win a confession of war crimes, another explains that for days afterward he was unable to move his body from his shoulders down. Ken Cordier, held for over six years, explains that they would be brutally manacled until they "screamed loud and long enough" to be released in exchange for information and confessions. Any injury was specifically targeted in order to break the captives more quickly. Tapes of Jane Fonda accusing them of being war criminals were played in their cells.
Mary Jane McManus had eloped in Hawaii and was married for three days when her husband Kevin returned to Vietnam to complete his tour. She didn't see him again for almost six years. While she kept her lonely vigil, she witnessed the charges being leveled by John Kerry and others. She couldn't fathom that anyone would believe American troops were capable of routinely committing atrocities, because "they were our husbands, and sons and brothers."
James Warner, held for over five years, recalls being made to stand motionless inside a small chalked circle on the floor. He lasted for 97 hours, during which he had a view of the camp's front gate. He saw the author Mary McCarthy and Tom Hayden enter the camp. His mother attended the Winter Soldier hearings and issued a statement criticizing the war, which his captors shared with him along with statements by John Kerry. He explains that Kerry met with his mother and sister and thinks it was a "contemptible act" to take advantage of a "grieving old lady and manipulate her grief to promote your own political agenda." He adds, "He burned up his Band of Brothers membership card when he did that."
When John Kerry was the prized spokesman for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), there were 700 American POWs in Vietnam. Many of those involved in this documentary, funded by $200,000 in donations from Pennsylvania veterans, believe that antiwar activists encouraged their captors to hold out because the "war would be lost in the streets of America." They point out that the immediate withdrawal of troops demanded by the VVAW would have abandoned them to whatever fate their captors chose when they were no longer bargaining chips in a negotiated end to the war.
Paul Galanti, who flew 97 combat missions before being shot down on June 17, 1966, spent over six and a half years as a POW. Referring to the Winter Soldier hearings that have been thoroughly debunked, Galanti says that John Kerry "should have known those guys he was with were frauds." The film includes a short clip from the Winter Soldier hearings that drew chuckles from the audience. An alleged veteran is having his memory refreshed about an alleged atrocity he was having trouble recalling. Galanti reminds the audience that "the cruelties of My Lai were exposed by the soldiers there."
Leo Thorsness, who was awarded the Medal of Honor, talks about the strict rules of engagement governing pilots flying over North Vietnam, ruefully noting that as a result the enemy had "plenty of chances to shoot us down."
Colonel George "Bud" Day, who also won the Medal of Honor and is considered one of the most decorated veterans of the last century, recalls being outraged to learn that veterans were warned not to wear their uniforms when they returned home. The film depicts protesters waving signs reading, "No Parades for Murderers" and "See Nixon's War Criminals" in front of veterans. "Right to this day we still have not recovered our good name," Day angrily declares. He charges that John Kerry wants them to forget the role he played in blackening the name of all Vietnam veterans. "I can never forget," he says.
The documentary is available on the Stolen Honor website. Its producer, Carlton Sherwood, a Pulitzer Prize wining journalist and Marine Vietnam veteran, points out that "there is no fog of war here" given the public testimony of John Kerry. He explains that the motivation is "deeply personal" rather than political.
An Army Vietnam veteran recently told me, "When John Kerry loses, it will be the parade we never had." They've earned it.
Saturday, September 11, 2004
From The American Conservative:
New Era of Big Government
By Bob Barr
Book Review: The Bush Betrayal, James Bovard, Palgrave-Macmillan, 330 pages
If someone described for you a national incident involving unprecedented loss of life, poor government planning, the failure to hold any government official accountable for mistakes, and Congress responding to the crisis by throwing money at the problem, chances are you’d conclude they were speaking about the causes and aftermath of 9/11. Actually, they could just as well be describing the siege and invasion of the Branch Davidian Compound at Waco, Texas, in 1993, during President Bill Clinton’s first term.
Now, if that same person were to ask you which recent president’s term in office was characterized by support for the so-called assault weapon ban, a huge increase in deficit spending, bigger budgets for virtually every domestic program—including Americorps and the National Endowment for the Arts—and signing into law a massive increase in federal government regulation of political speech, whose administration would you suspect they were describing? That of Democrat Bill Clinton? Nope. They’d be talking about the first term of Republican President George W. Bush.
The fact is, the records of these two presidents, Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican George W. Bush, are much more alike than either man would likely feel comfortable admitting. With Bill Clinton, a record of Big Government and lack of accountability, which is precisely what we witnessed from 1993 to 2001, was pretty much what most of us expected; we got what we deserved when we elected him president. With George W. Bush, however, what we have gotten is not what we bargained for—that is if we hoped for a president committed, as Bush said he was during the 2000 campaign, to smaller and more accountable government. Has America been betrayed by President George W. Bush? In his most recent book, The Bush Betrayal, James Bovard poses and then answers this question with a resounding “yes.”
Coming out as it does in the immediate aftermath of the extensive, if still incomplete, post-mortem of the 9/11 disaster, and while American troops and civilians are still dying in the dust of Iraq, there may be a tendency to minimize Bovard’s book by considering it as simply an analysis of the Bush administration’s sleight-of-hand in getting us involved with a war in Iraq. To be sure, the author does take the current administration to task for the basis on which the war in Iraq was predicated and on which it continues to be prosecuted; Bovard labels this Bush’s “greatest abuse of power” (a characterization with which I disagree—not that it isn’t an abuse of power, but it isn’t the worst one).
The importance of Bovard’s book, which, incidentally, follows and builds upon his outstanding 2003 volume, Terrorism and Tyrrany, goes far beyond an analysis of the Iraqi War or even the response by this administration to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The importance of The Bush Betrayal lies in the author’s impeccably researched exposition of what may very well be the central theme underlying modern politics in America: despite promises, regardless of rhetoric, and irrespective of party label, once a politician is in power, what We the People get—and which we’ve got in the current administration—is, in Bovard’s words, “Washington business as usual.”
Bovard lays out a convincing case. With the thoroughly researched and footnoted style that has become his forte, and with the heavy doses of relevant anecdotes and dry humor that have become his trademarks, the author has compiled a virtual almanac of American political abuse. And while it’s not a pretty picture he paints, we ignore Jim Bovard’s work at the risk of being repeatedly seduced—“betrayed”—by the siren songs of presidential candidates of both parties.
Each administration, it seems, must have a central theme around which its policies and actions revolve, and which provides a constant excuse for or explanation of why it does what it does. Who can forget the constant invocations by the Clintons that whatever the former president or his administration did, it was “for the children”? For the current administration of George W. Bush, any program, policy, or power grab—domestic or foreign—is justified because it furthers the War on Terror. Both the current and the immediately past administrations have fallen back on this ploy whenever criticized or attacked for their actions. After all, rather than bother to defend their actions as consistent with a core philosophy, it is much easier simply to label critics as “extreme” by claiming that if they are opposed to something the president or his employees are doing or have done, then by definition those critics must be against children or don’t support fighting terrorism. Shibboleths make such handy shields.
It truly is amazing, when you stop to think about it—as Bovard in his latest book forces us to do—that virtually everything the Bush administration has done to expand government power or expenditures is justified as being essential to winning “the war against terrorism.” Propping up farmers through outdated and expensive subsidies? Helps fight terrorism. Subsidies to sugar producers in order to keep prices of American sugar uncompetitively high? Necessary to fight terrorism. Tobacco subsidies? Ditto. How about a plan to have the government pay the way for lower-income home buyers who haven’t been able to save the money or qualify for loans to make their own down payments? A ridiculous and economically disastrous program, to be sure, but it’s worth the price to the Bush administration because—you guessed it—it creates stronger communities, which in turn are essential to improving America’s ability to fight terrorism. Hallelujah, and pass the collection plate!
Foreign aid to corrupt regimes and bloated international bureaucracies is extolled because it helps fight terrorism abroad. Don’t mind the fact that some of the terrorists who succeeded on 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, two countries that have received more U.S. aid and business investments than all but a handful of other countries.
It is not only Americans as taxpayers who are being forced to accept a broad range of increases in federal spending as the price the Bush administration extracts for pursuing its policies. Americans as targets of federal law-enforcement power are being made to pay a heavy price as well. The powers of the federal government—and, indirectly, state and local government, which often emulate their federal big brother—to snoop, surveil, search, and secretly arrest people with no more “reasonable suspicion” than a vague notion of “preventing terrorism,” have reached not just unprecedented, but frightening levels. And James Bovard shines the light on them all. From Attorney General John Ashcroft’s notion of “ordered liberty,” to Solicitor General Ted Olson’s argument to the Supreme Court that virtually anything President Bush wants to do is justified on the basis of his self-defined and overarching “constitutional authority to protect the nation,” Bovard opens his readers’ eyes to the still ongoing expansion of federal power during this administration’s watch.
But to me, the most devastating act of the Bush administration—which constituted such a fundamental betrayal of the First Amendment’s guarantee of our freedom to speak, petition, and assemble that it takes your breath away—was the president’s signing of the so-called Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in 2003. James Bovard pulls no punches in laying out just how devastating to freedom this law—upheld in all its major parts by the Supreme Court, despite eloquent dissents by Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia—truly is. Not only is the law deeply and fundamentally contrary to our constitutional liberties, but the president and Republican congressional leaders knew it was unconstitutional when they allowed it to be brought to the floor, voted on, and signed by a Republican president. Yet they did it anyway. In so doing, they betrayed us and the Constitution, and they did it in the full light of day.
To rub salt in the constitutional wounds the campaign law created, the Bush administration has cynically employed it in recent months in an effort to silence criticism of its policies.
Perhaps the clearest evidence of how detached this administration is from the constitutional underpinnings that used to hold presidents at arm’s length from near-absolute power is a quote unearthed by Bovard and included in the closing chapter of The Bush Betrayal. In April of this year, at a news conference, Bush described himself as “the ultimate decision-maker for this country.” As Bovard correctly notes, of course, Bush is at most the decision-maker for the executive branch of the government; the people are the ultimate decision-makers for America. Our Founding Fathers knew that. Generations of Americans understood that. Previous presidents recognized that. Sadly, that constitutionally based and historically sound perspective, which is the cornerstone of what America should stand for, appears not to be a component of the current administration’s thinking. And that is a betrayal.
_______________________________________________
Former Congressman Bob Barr (R-Ga., 1995-2003) is the author of The Meaning of Is: The Squandered Impeachment and Wasted Legacy of William Jefferson Clinton.
New Era of Big Government
By Bob Barr
Book Review: The Bush Betrayal, James Bovard, Palgrave-Macmillan, 330 pages
If someone described for you a national incident involving unprecedented loss of life, poor government planning, the failure to hold any government official accountable for mistakes, and Congress responding to the crisis by throwing money at the problem, chances are you’d conclude they were speaking about the causes and aftermath of 9/11. Actually, they could just as well be describing the siege and invasion of the Branch Davidian Compound at Waco, Texas, in 1993, during President Bill Clinton’s first term.
Now, if that same person were to ask you which recent president’s term in office was characterized by support for the so-called assault weapon ban, a huge increase in deficit spending, bigger budgets for virtually every domestic program—including Americorps and the National Endowment for the Arts—and signing into law a massive increase in federal government regulation of political speech, whose administration would you suspect they were describing? That of Democrat Bill Clinton? Nope. They’d be talking about the first term of Republican President George W. Bush.
The fact is, the records of these two presidents, Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican George W. Bush, are much more alike than either man would likely feel comfortable admitting. With Bill Clinton, a record of Big Government and lack of accountability, which is precisely what we witnessed from 1993 to 2001, was pretty much what most of us expected; we got what we deserved when we elected him president. With George W. Bush, however, what we have gotten is not what we bargained for—that is if we hoped for a president committed, as Bush said he was during the 2000 campaign, to smaller and more accountable government. Has America been betrayed by President George W. Bush? In his most recent book, The Bush Betrayal, James Bovard poses and then answers this question with a resounding “yes.”
Coming out as it does in the immediate aftermath of the extensive, if still incomplete, post-mortem of the 9/11 disaster, and while American troops and civilians are still dying in the dust of Iraq, there may be a tendency to minimize Bovard’s book by considering it as simply an analysis of the Bush administration’s sleight-of-hand in getting us involved with a war in Iraq. To be sure, the author does take the current administration to task for the basis on which the war in Iraq was predicated and on which it continues to be prosecuted; Bovard labels this Bush’s “greatest abuse of power” (a characterization with which I disagree—not that it isn’t an abuse of power, but it isn’t the worst one).
The importance of Bovard’s book, which, incidentally, follows and builds upon his outstanding 2003 volume, Terrorism and Tyrrany, goes far beyond an analysis of the Iraqi War or even the response by this administration to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The importance of The Bush Betrayal lies in the author’s impeccably researched exposition of what may very well be the central theme underlying modern politics in America: despite promises, regardless of rhetoric, and irrespective of party label, once a politician is in power, what We the People get—and which we’ve got in the current administration—is, in Bovard’s words, “Washington business as usual.”
Bovard lays out a convincing case. With the thoroughly researched and footnoted style that has become his forte, and with the heavy doses of relevant anecdotes and dry humor that have become his trademarks, the author has compiled a virtual almanac of American political abuse. And while it’s not a pretty picture he paints, we ignore Jim Bovard’s work at the risk of being repeatedly seduced—“betrayed”—by the siren songs of presidential candidates of both parties.
Each administration, it seems, must have a central theme around which its policies and actions revolve, and which provides a constant excuse for or explanation of why it does what it does. Who can forget the constant invocations by the Clintons that whatever the former president or his administration did, it was “for the children”? For the current administration of George W. Bush, any program, policy, or power grab—domestic or foreign—is justified because it furthers the War on Terror. Both the current and the immediately past administrations have fallen back on this ploy whenever criticized or attacked for their actions. After all, rather than bother to defend their actions as consistent with a core philosophy, it is much easier simply to label critics as “extreme” by claiming that if they are opposed to something the president or his employees are doing or have done, then by definition those critics must be against children or don’t support fighting terrorism. Shibboleths make such handy shields.
It truly is amazing, when you stop to think about it—as Bovard in his latest book forces us to do—that virtually everything the Bush administration has done to expand government power or expenditures is justified as being essential to winning “the war against terrorism.” Propping up farmers through outdated and expensive subsidies? Helps fight terrorism. Subsidies to sugar producers in order to keep prices of American sugar uncompetitively high? Necessary to fight terrorism. Tobacco subsidies? Ditto. How about a plan to have the government pay the way for lower-income home buyers who haven’t been able to save the money or qualify for loans to make their own down payments? A ridiculous and economically disastrous program, to be sure, but it’s worth the price to the Bush administration because—you guessed it—it creates stronger communities, which in turn are essential to improving America’s ability to fight terrorism. Hallelujah, and pass the collection plate!
Foreign aid to corrupt regimes and bloated international bureaucracies is extolled because it helps fight terrorism abroad. Don’t mind the fact that some of the terrorists who succeeded on 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, two countries that have received more U.S. aid and business investments than all but a handful of other countries.
It is not only Americans as taxpayers who are being forced to accept a broad range of increases in federal spending as the price the Bush administration extracts for pursuing its policies. Americans as targets of federal law-enforcement power are being made to pay a heavy price as well. The powers of the federal government—and, indirectly, state and local government, which often emulate their federal big brother—to snoop, surveil, search, and secretly arrest people with no more “reasonable suspicion” than a vague notion of “preventing terrorism,” have reached not just unprecedented, but frightening levels. And James Bovard shines the light on them all. From Attorney General John Ashcroft’s notion of “ordered liberty,” to Solicitor General Ted Olson’s argument to the Supreme Court that virtually anything President Bush wants to do is justified on the basis of his self-defined and overarching “constitutional authority to protect the nation,” Bovard opens his readers’ eyes to the still ongoing expansion of federal power during this administration’s watch.
But to me, the most devastating act of the Bush administration—which constituted such a fundamental betrayal of the First Amendment’s guarantee of our freedom to speak, petition, and assemble that it takes your breath away—was the president’s signing of the so-called Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in 2003. James Bovard pulls no punches in laying out just how devastating to freedom this law—upheld in all its major parts by the Supreme Court, despite eloquent dissents by Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia—truly is. Not only is the law deeply and fundamentally contrary to our constitutional liberties, but the president and Republican congressional leaders knew it was unconstitutional when they allowed it to be brought to the floor, voted on, and signed by a Republican president. Yet they did it anyway. In so doing, they betrayed us and the Constitution, and they did it in the full light of day.
To rub salt in the constitutional wounds the campaign law created, the Bush administration has cynically employed it in recent months in an effort to silence criticism of its policies.
Perhaps the clearest evidence of how detached this administration is from the constitutional underpinnings that used to hold presidents at arm’s length from near-absolute power is a quote unearthed by Bovard and included in the closing chapter of The Bush Betrayal. In April of this year, at a news conference, Bush described himself as “the ultimate decision-maker for this country.” As Bovard correctly notes, of course, Bush is at most the decision-maker for the executive branch of the government; the people are the ultimate decision-makers for America. Our Founding Fathers knew that. Generations of Americans understood that. Previous presidents recognized that. Sadly, that constitutionally based and historically sound perspective, which is the cornerstone of what America should stand for, appears not to be a component of the current administration’s thinking. And that is a betrayal.
_______________________________________________
Former Congressman Bob Barr (R-Ga., 1995-2003) is the author of The Meaning of Is: The Squandered Impeachment and Wasted Legacy of William Jefferson Clinton.
Terry Teachout: Anniversary
A few weeks after 9/11, I wrote an essay for Crisis about where I was and what I did that day. This is part of it.
* * *
"Get up, son," my mother said, tapping softly on the door of the bedroom of my childhood home in Missouri. "An airplane hit the World Trade Center." I came awake a split-second later, my head full of memories. For years, I had wondered when the long arm of terrorism would strike again at New York. I thought of a sunny Saturday morning back when I was living in an apartment house on a hill north of the city. A small earthquake shook the building as I lay sleeping, and the groaning of the old walls woke me. I heard a soft whir through the open window, the rustle of the leaves on the shaken trees. It’s a car bomb, I told myself, unable for one stunned moment to conceive of any other possibility.
All these thoughts flew through my mind in the time it took me to pull on my pants. Then I trotted to the living room, there to behold the coming of the new age.
It came, as St. Paul told us it would, in the twinkling of an eye, and now we were all changed. Even as I slept, I had unknowingly acquired a new identity: I awoke to find myself a stranded man, unable to return to New York to share whatever its fate might be. Of course I had it easy, far more so than most of the thousands of other Americans who had been caught short on that bright Tuesday morning. Some of them were in the air, others in strange hotel rooms, but I was holed up with my mother in the small town where I had spent the first eighteen years of my life. My brother and his family lived just three blocks away. As exiles go, mine was to be both comforting and comfortable—and brief. But it was an exile all the same, and with every passing minute it grew harder to endure.
Merely to write those last few words is an unfamiliar sensation. To be an adopted New Yorker is to know innumerable people who visit their families as infrequently as they can, who live in New York because it is as far away from the scenes of their childhood as it can possibly be. Some have broken with their parents, others with their past, a few with themselves, if such a thing is possible (which I doubt). I am not one of them. Long before I first heard it, I knew the truth of the old Jewish saying, "Anywhere you go, there you are." Even though I now eat sushi and happily give directions to mystified tourists searching in vain for Times Square or the Empire State Building, I have never tried to be anyone other than my small-town self, or to be from anywhere other than Smalltown, U.S.A. I left a quarter-century ago to make my way in the world, but I always come back once or twice a year, if not more. New York is where I live: it is not my home.
So, at any rate, I had thought. But as I sat transfixed before the television, watching the scenes of now-imaginable horror repeated incessantly, first from one camera angle, then another, I knew I wanted above all things to fly to the city whose tallest buildings had been raped by faceless worshippers of a god who does not exist, a god who smiles complacently on evil and calls it good. Then came the now-conceivable news that Manhattan had been cut off from the mainland—all bridges were closed, all subways stopped, all planes grounded—and I knew I had finally cast off the last mooring from my home port and set sail for parts unknown, suspended between the beloved past and the invisible future.
For two days, phone service to Manhattan was hit or miss, mostly the latter, and I couldn’t even get a busy signal for anybody south of Fourteenth Street: a shrill mechanical voice always told me to call back later. My laptop computer was in New York—I’d finished a book the week before and had gone to Missouri determined to do no more work for a few days—so e-mail was out of the question. All I could do was gape at the TV, which I did for hours on end, and pray, which I did not without ceasing but in half-articulate spurts that gushed out on the rare occasions when I was able to tear my eyes and mind away from the unfolding story. Then, one by one, the dead phones came back to life, and by Friday I knew that all the people to whom I was close were alive. That was the day when the National Cathedral in Washington was filled with the sounds of prayer and music—the first day I was able to weep.
Five days after the World Trade Center crumbled to dust, my brief exile ended and I flew back to the place that I now knew to be my earthly home. As the plane descended, breaking the cloudless, transparent air, I gazed with terror and awe on the sight of lower Manhattan, into which a huge black hole had been burned, and heard in my mind’s ear an old camp-meeting hymn that Merle Travis used to sing: I am a pilgrim and a stranger/Traveling through this wearisome land/I got a home in that yonder city, good Lord/And it’s not, not made by hand.
That Thursday, I went to Lincoln Center to hear the New York Philharmonic perform Brahms’ German Requiem in memory of the dead of September 11. Manhattan was gray—a slate-gray, solidly overcast sky that spat rain off and on all afternoon. By early evening, the air was heavy with humidity, the worst possible weather for a musical performance: strings go limp, singers go flat. Broadway was clotted with yellow taxis, none of them vacant, many flying small American flags. I arrived a little before seven, together with hundreds of other people, virtually all dressed in black or gray. Huge flags hung from the balconies of the New York State Theatre, the Metropolitan Opera House, and Avery Fisher Hall, the three houses that frame the plaza. The lobby was full of hastily printed signs reading ALL BAGS WILL BE SUBJECT TO SEARCH and long lines at the security checkpoints through which we had to pass in order to reach the escalators. One woman was carrying a shopping bag that contained a cardboard box. "What’s in the box?" asked the guard, noncommittally. "Two bottles of wine," she replied. Then he broke out in a huge smile. "No drinking in the aisles!" he told her, wagging his finger, and we all laughed.
Inside the auditorium, every seat was full save for those occupied by the TV cameras broadcasting the performance. The lights went down, and out of of an unquiet hush the first notes of the first movement materialized so softly that for a moment, I wasn’t quite sure the orchestra had started to play. New Yorkers are the noisiest audiences in the world, and I heard a modest amount of coughing, as well as a single cell phone that went off midway through the second movement, spreading a quick ripple of dismay. For the most part, though, the only thing I could hear in the pauses was the sound of people softly crying. The young woman sitting next to me had never heard the German Requiem before, and she was overcome by the way in which Brahms set the familiar Bible verses, now made so freshly poignant by our still-raw memories of the week just past: Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted…Lord, teach me that there must be an end of me…The souls of the righteous are in God’s hand, and no pain touches them…For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come…O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Afterward, she told me, "I imagined that all those voices were angels rising out of the towers as they collapsed."
At the end, Kurt Masur, the conductor, lowered his hands slowly. The stillness that followed seemed to last for minutes, though it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. No one clapped—no one would have dared. Then Masur stepped down from the podium and joined hands with the soloists, and they vanished into the wings without a word.
A few weeks after 9/11, I wrote an essay for Crisis about where I was and what I did that day. This is part of it.
* * *
"Get up, son," my mother said, tapping softly on the door of the bedroom of my childhood home in Missouri. "An airplane hit the World Trade Center." I came awake a split-second later, my head full of memories. For years, I had wondered when the long arm of terrorism would strike again at New York. I thought of a sunny Saturday morning back when I was living in an apartment house on a hill north of the city. A small earthquake shook the building as I lay sleeping, and the groaning of the old walls woke me. I heard a soft whir through the open window, the rustle of the leaves on the shaken trees. It’s a car bomb, I told myself, unable for one stunned moment to conceive of any other possibility.
All these thoughts flew through my mind in the time it took me to pull on my pants. Then I trotted to the living room, there to behold the coming of the new age.
It came, as St. Paul told us it would, in the twinkling of an eye, and now we were all changed. Even as I slept, I had unknowingly acquired a new identity: I awoke to find myself a stranded man, unable to return to New York to share whatever its fate might be. Of course I had it easy, far more so than most of the thousands of other Americans who had been caught short on that bright Tuesday morning. Some of them were in the air, others in strange hotel rooms, but I was holed up with my mother in the small town where I had spent the first eighteen years of my life. My brother and his family lived just three blocks away. As exiles go, mine was to be both comforting and comfortable—and brief. But it was an exile all the same, and with every passing minute it grew harder to endure.
Merely to write those last few words is an unfamiliar sensation. To be an adopted New Yorker is to know innumerable people who visit their families as infrequently as they can, who live in New York because it is as far away from the scenes of their childhood as it can possibly be. Some have broken with their parents, others with their past, a few with themselves, if such a thing is possible (which I doubt). I am not one of them. Long before I first heard it, I knew the truth of the old Jewish saying, "Anywhere you go, there you are." Even though I now eat sushi and happily give directions to mystified tourists searching in vain for Times Square or the Empire State Building, I have never tried to be anyone other than my small-town self, or to be from anywhere other than Smalltown, U.S.A. I left a quarter-century ago to make my way in the world, but I always come back once or twice a year, if not more. New York is where I live: it is not my home.
So, at any rate, I had thought. But as I sat transfixed before the television, watching the scenes of now-imaginable horror repeated incessantly, first from one camera angle, then another, I knew I wanted above all things to fly to the city whose tallest buildings had been raped by faceless worshippers of a god who does not exist, a god who smiles complacently on evil and calls it good. Then came the now-conceivable news that Manhattan had been cut off from the mainland—all bridges were closed, all subways stopped, all planes grounded—and I knew I had finally cast off the last mooring from my home port and set sail for parts unknown, suspended between the beloved past and the invisible future.
For two days, phone service to Manhattan was hit or miss, mostly the latter, and I couldn’t even get a busy signal for anybody south of Fourteenth Street: a shrill mechanical voice always told me to call back later. My laptop computer was in New York—I’d finished a book the week before and had gone to Missouri determined to do no more work for a few days—so e-mail was out of the question. All I could do was gape at the TV, which I did for hours on end, and pray, which I did not without ceasing but in half-articulate spurts that gushed out on the rare occasions when I was able to tear my eyes and mind away from the unfolding story. Then, one by one, the dead phones came back to life, and by Friday I knew that all the people to whom I was close were alive. That was the day when the National Cathedral in Washington was filled with the sounds of prayer and music—the first day I was able to weep.
Five days after the World Trade Center crumbled to dust, my brief exile ended and I flew back to the place that I now knew to be my earthly home. As the plane descended, breaking the cloudless, transparent air, I gazed with terror and awe on the sight of lower Manhattan, into which a huge black hole had been burned, and heard in my mind’s ear an old camp-meeting hymn that Merle Travis used to sing: I am a pilgrim and a stranger/Traveling through this wearisome land/I got a home in that yonder city, good Lord/And it’s not, not made by hand.
That Thursday, I went to Lincoln Center to hear the New York Philharmonic perform Brahms’ German Requiem in memory of the dead of September 11. Manhattan was gray—a slate-gray, solidly overcast sky that spat rain off and on all afternoon. By early evening, the air was heavy with humidity, the worst possible weather for a musical performance: strings go limp, singers go flat. Broadway was clotted with yellow taxis, none of them vacant, many flying small American flags. I arrived a little before seven, together with hundreds of other people, virtually all dressed in black or gray. Huge flags hung from the balconies of the New York State Theatre, the Metropolitan Opera House, and Avery Fisher Hall, the three houses that frame the plaza. The lobby was full of hastily printed signs reading ALL BAGS WILL BE SUBJECT TO SEARCH and long lines at the security checkpoints through which we had to pass in order to reach the escalators. One woman was carrying a shopping bag that contained a cardboard box. "What’s in the box?" asked the guard, noncommittally. "Two bottles of wine," she replied. Then he broke out in a huge smile. "No drinking in the aisles!" he told her, wagging his finger, and we all laughed.
Inside the auditorium, every seat was full save for those occupied by the TV cameras broadcasting the performance. The lights went down, and out of of an unquiet hush the first notes of the first movement materialized so softly that for a moment, I wasn’t quite sure the orchestra had started to play. New Yorkers are the noisiest audiences in the world, and I heard a modest amount of coughing, as well as a single cell phone that went off midway through the second movement, spreading a quick ripple of dismay. For the most part, though, the only thing I could hear in the pauses was the sound of people softly crying. The young woman sitting next to me had never heard the German Requiem before, and she was overcome by the way in which Brahms set the familiar Bible verses, now made so freshly poignant by our still-raw memories of the week just past: Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted…Lord, teach me that there must be an end of me…The souls of the righteous are in God’s hand, and no pain touches them…For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come…O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Afterward, she told me, "I imagined that all those voices were angels rising out of the towers as they collapsed."
At the end, Kurt Masur, the conductor, lowered his hands slowly. The stillness that followed seemed to last for minutes, though it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. No one clapped—no one would have dared. Then Masur stepped down from the podium and joined hands with the soloists, and they vanished into the wings without a word.
James Lileks on 9/11
When I was a kid I was terrified of the End of the World. Kids heard things; older kids who’d read that ridiculous end-times tract, “The Late Great Planet Earth” said it foretold a struggle between the “bear” and the “eagle” and we all knew what that meant. One summer at Bible Camp I asked one of the pastors if this bear-eagle end-of-the-world stuff was true, and he said “we know not the day or the time.” You know, I thought, but you just won’t tell us.
It was 1968. On the night before the last day of camp, a counselor named Charlie Brown interrupted our sunset meeting by the shores of White Bear Lake to tell us the news: Russia had launched their missiles and they would destroy America before the night was out. It was time to get right with God.
Silence; crickets; small sobs. I’m sure no one thought much about Jesus right then. We thought about Mom and Dad and Spot and our room, where we really, really wanted to be right now, with the familiar smell of the goldfish bowl, and -
Charlie Brown guided us through some prayers. We all said Amen, and I’m sure for some it was the least heartfelt Amen we’d ever said. Then Charlie Brown said he had made up the story. Russia hadn’t launched the missiles. But what if they had? Were we right with Jesus?
Back at the barracks we were quiet and unnerved. No one wanted to go to sleep. No one wanted to talk, either. Finally John Larson, the bunkhouse bully, broke the silence. He was the mean kid. He was the one who tormented me at home, and had bothered me at camp. Nelson Muntz without the charm. John Larson expressed his simple wish to stab Charlie Brown in the stomach.
A dozen little Lutheran campers nodded in the dark: ya sure, you betcha.
I’ve thought about Charlie Brown’s clueless cruelty whenever I think of summer camp. It’s a good story; give me an audience and five minutes and I can spin quite the yarn. I don’t know what effect he had on my fear of the Apocalypse, but for decades afterwards I got that bright silver sluice of dread in my gut whenever international tensions “flared up” or US-USSR relations were “frayed.” The very words in the headlines made me feel slightly sick, and pitched back to the shores of the lake, sitting on that long painted bench. My future was an either-or thing. Either some stupid event destroys the world . . . or not. Stick around and find out which.
Now I am resigned, in advance, to the loss of an American city by a nuclear weapon. The End of the World now looks like a comic-book premise, a Heston-movie conceit. We feared it would all be gone in a day, our world upended like an Etch-A-Sketch. What we never considered was a long, slow war, a conflict that burned and sputtered, skittered from one spot on the map to the other. The old wars were simple: the other side had accents, uniforms, nations, cruel habits and urbane sneers. The old wars took years. The old wars were in black and white. The old wars were monophonic, scored by Max Steiner, released by Warner Brothers, and the only proof they really happened at all was the small battered box in the back of Dad’s sock drawer, the box that held some oddly colored metal bars. The next war would be horrible, total, and short.
Two years ago today I was convinced that every presumption I had about the future was wrong. This war, I feared, would be horrible, total, and long.
Two years later I take a certain grim comfort in some people’s disinterest in the war; if you’d told me two years ago that people would be piling on the President and bitching about slow progress in Iraq, I would have known in a second that the nation hadn’t suffered another attack. When the precise location of Madonna’s tongue is big news, you can bet the hospitals aren’t full of smallpox victims. Of course some people are impatient with those who still recall the shock of 9/11; the same people were crowding the message boards of internet sites on the afternoon of the attacks, eager to blame everyone but the hijackers. They hate this nation. In their hearts, they hate humanity. They would rather cheer the perfect devils than come to the aid of a compromised angel. They can talk for hours about how wrong it was to kill babies, busboys, businessmen, receptionists, janitors, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers - and then they lean towards you, eyes wide, and they say the fatal word:
But.
And then you realize that the eulogy is just a preface. All that concern for the dead is nothing more than the knuckle-cracking of an organist who’s going to play an E minor chord until we all agree we had it coming.
I’ve no doubt that if Seattle or Boston or Manhattan goes up in a bright white flash there will be those who blame it all on Bush. We squandered the world’s good will. We threw away the opportunity to atone, and lashed out. Really? You want to see lashing out? Imagine Kabul and Mecca and Baghdad and Tehran on 9/14 crowned with mushroom clouds: that’s lashing out. Imagine the President in the National Cathedral castigating Islam instead of sitting next to an Imam who's giving a homily. Mosques burned, oil fields occupied, smart bombs slamming into Syrian palaces. We could have gone full Roman on anyone we wanted, but we didn’t. And we won’t.
Which is why this war will be long.
The world will not end. It will roll around in its orbit until Sol expires of famine or indigestion. In the end we’re all ash anyway - but even as ash, we matter. The picture at the top of this page is a sliver taken from a 9/11 camera feed. It’s the cloud that rolled through lower Manhatttan when the towers fell. Paper, steel, furniture, plastic, people. The man who took the picture inhaled the dust of the dead. Somewhere lodged in the lung of a New Yorker is an atom that once belonged to a man who went to work two years ago and never came back. His widow dreads today, because people will be coming and calling, and she’ll have to insist that she’s okay. It's hard but last year was harder. The kids will be sad and distant, but they take their cues from her, and they sense that it's hard - but that last year was harder. But what really kills her, really really kills her, is knowing that the youngest one doesn’t remember daddy at all anymore. And she's the one who has his eyes.
Two years in; the rest of our lives to go.
When I was a kid I was terrified of the End of the World. Kids heard things; older kids who’d read that ridiculous end-times tract, “The Late Great Planet Earth” said it foretold a struggle between the “bear” and the “eagle” and we all knew what that meant. One summer at Bible Camp I asked one of the pastors if this bear-eagle end-of-the-world stuff was true, and he said “we know not the day or the time.” You know, I thought, but you just won’t tell us.
It was 1968. On the night before the last day of camp, a counselor named Charlie Brown interrupted our sunset meeting by the shores of White Bear Lake to tell us the news: Russia had launched their missiles and they would destroy America before the night was out. It was time to get right with God.
Silence; crickets; small sobs. I’m sure no one thought much about Jesus right then. We thought about Mom and Dad and Spot and our room, where we really, really wanted to be right now, with the familiar smell of the goldfish bowl, and -
Charlie Brown guided us through some prayers. We all said Amen, and I’m sure for some it was the least heartfelt Amen we’d ever said. Then Charlie Brown said he had made up the story. Russia hadn’t launched the missiles. But what if they had? Were we right with Jesus?
Back at the barracks we were quiet and unnerved. No one wanted to go to sleep. No one wanted to talk, either. Finally John Larson, the bunkhouse bully, broke the silence. He was the mean kid. He was the one who tormented me at home, and had bothered me at camp. Nelson Muntz without the charm. John Larson expressed his simple wish to stab Charlie Brown in the stomach.
A dozen little Lutheran campers nodded in the dark: ya sure, you betcha.
I’ve thought about Charlie Brown’s clueless cruelty whenever I think of summer camp. It’s a good story; give me an audience and five minutes and I can spin quite the yarn. I don’t know what effect he had on my fear of the Apocalypse, but for decades afterwards I got that bright silver sluice of dread in my gut whenever international tensions “flared up” or US-USSR relations were “frayed.” The very words in the headlines made me feel slightly sick, and pitched back to the shores of the lake, sitting on that long painted bench. My future was an either-or thing. Either some stupid event destroys the world . . . or not. Stick around and find out which.
Now I am resigned, in advance, to the loss of an American city by a nuclear weapon. The End of the World now looks like a comic-book premise, a Heston-movie conceit. We feared it would all be gone in a day, our world upended like an Etch-A-Sketch. What we never considered was a long, slow war, a conflict that burned and sputtered, skittered from one spot on the map to the other. The old wars were simple: the other side had accents, uniforms, nations, cruel habits and urbane sneers. The old wars took years. The old wars were in black and white. The old wars were monophonic, scored by Max Steiner, released by Warner Brothers, and the only proof they really happened at all was the small battered box in the back of Dad’s sock drawer, the box that held some oddly colored metal bars. The next war would be horrible, total, and short.
Two years ago today I was convinced that every presumption I had about the future was wrong. This war, I feared, would be horrible, total, and long.
Two years later I take a certain grim comfort in some people’s disinterest in the war; if you’d told me two years ago that people would be piling on the President and bitching about slow progress in Iraq, I would have known in a second that the nation hadn’t suffered another attack. When the precise location of Madonna’s tongue is big news, you can bet the hospitals aren’t full of smallpox victims. Of course some people are impatient with those who still recall the shock of 9/11; the same people were crowding the message boards of internet sites on the afternoon of the attacks, eager to blame everyone but the hijackers. They hate this nation. In their hearts, they hate humanity. They would rather cheer the perfect devils than come to the aid of a compromised angel. They can talk for hours about how wrong it was to kill babies, busboys, businessmen, receptionists, janitors, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers - and then they lean towards you, eyes wide, and they say the fatal word:
But.
And then you realize that the eulogy is just a preface. All that concern for the dead is nothing more than the knuckle-cracking of an organist who’s going to play an E minor chord until we all agree we had it coming.
I’ve no doubt that if Seattle or Boston or Manhattan goes up in a bright white flash there will be those who blame it all on Bush. We squandered the world’s good will. We threw away the opportunity to atone, and lashed out. Really? You want to see lashing out? Imagine Kabul and Mecca and Baghdad and Tehran on 9/14 crowned with mushroom clouds: that’s lashing out. Imagine the President in the National Cathedral castigating Islam instead of sitting next to an Imam who's giving a homily. Mosques burned, oil fields occupied, smart bombs slamming into Syrian palaces. We could have gone full Roman on anyone we wanted, but we didn’t. And we won’t.
Which is why this war will be long.
The world will not end. It will roll around in its orbit until Sol expires of famine or indigestion. In the end we’re all ash anyway - but even as ash, we matter. The picture at the top of this page is a sliver taken from a 9/11 camera feed. It’s the cloud that rolled through lower Manhatttan when the towers fell. Paper, steel, furniture, plastic, people. The man who took the picture inhaled the dust of the dead. Somewhere lodged in the lung of a New Yorker is an atom that once belonged to a man who went to work two years ago and never came back. His widow dreads today, because people will be coming and calling, and she’ll have to insist that she’s okay. It's hard but last year was harder. The kids will be sad and distant, but they take their cues from her, and they sense that it's hard - but that last year was harder. But what really kills her, really really kills her, is knowing that the youngest one doesn’t remember daddy at all anymore. And she's the one who has his eyes.
Two years in; the rest of our lives to go.
CBS falls for Kerry campaign's fake memo
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
A few weeks ago, Thomas Oliphant of the Boston Globe was on PBS' ''Newshour'' explaining why the hundreds of swift boat veterans' allegations against John Kerry's conduct in Vietnam was unworthy of his attention. "The standard of clear and convincing evidence," he said, talking to Swiftvet John O'Neill as if he were a backward fourth-grader, ''is what keeps this story in the tabloids -- because it does not meet basic standards.''
Last week, we got a good idea of what Thomas Oliphant's ''basic standards'' are. Dan Rather and the elderly gentlemen at ''60 Minutes'' were all atwitter because they'd come into possession of some hitherto undiscovered memos relating to whether George W. Bush failed to show up for his physical in the War of 1812. The media had been flogging this dead horse all spring, but these newly ''discovered'' memos had jump-started the old nag just enough to get him on his knees long enough for the media to flog him all over again.
Unfortunately for CBS, Dan Rather's hairdresser sucks up so much of the budget that there was nothing left for any fact-checking, so the ''60 Minutes'' crew rushed on air with a damning National Guard memo conveniently called ''CYA'' that Bush's commanding officer had written to himself 32 years ago. ''This was too hot not to push,'' one producer told the American Spectator. Hundreds of living Swiftvets who've signed affidavits and are prepared to testify on camera -- that's way too cold to push; we'd want to fact-check that one thoroughly, till, say, midway through John Kerry's second term. But a handful of memos by one dead guy slipped to us by a Kerry campaign operative -- that meets ''basic standards'' and we gotta get it out there right away.
The only problem was the memo. Amazingly, this guy at the Air National Guard base, Lt. Col. Killian, had the only typewriter in Texas in 1973 using a prototype version of the default letter writing program of Microsoft Word, complete with the tiny little superscript thingy that automatically changes July 4th to July 4th. To do that on most 1973 typewriters, you had to unscrew the keys, grab a hammer and give them a couple of thwacks to make the ''t'' and ''h'' squish up all tiny, and even think it looked a bit wonky. You'd think having such a unique typewriter Killian would have used a less easily traceable model for his devastating ''CYA'' memo. Also, he might have chosen a font other than Times New Roman, designed for the Times of London in the 1930s and not licensed to Microsoft by Rupert Murdoch (the Times' owner) until the 1980s.
Killian is no longer around to confirm his extraordinary Magic Typewriter, but his son denied the stuff was written by his dad, and his widow said her late husband never typed. So, on the one hand, we have hundreds of living veterans with chapter and verse on Kerry's fantasy Christmas in Cambodia, and, on the other hand, we have a guy who's been dead 20 years but is still capable of operating Windows XP. It took the savvy chappies at the Powerline Web site and Charles Johnson of ''Little Green Footballs'' about 20 minutes to spot the eerily 2004 look of the 1972 memo, and various Internet wallahs spent the rest of the day tracking down the country's leading typewriter identification experts.
Bombarded with accusations that CBS had fallen for an obvious hoax, Dan turned to his trusty Smith-Corona and bashed out a few e-mails: ''For the umpteenth time,'' he said angrily, ''this is the kind of sleaze I had to put up with when they scoffed at 'What's the frequency, Kenneth?' "
Are Dan Rather and ''60 Minutes'' a bunch of patsies suckered by the Kerry campaign? Not exactly. According to the American Spectator, ''The CBS producer said that some alarm bells went off last week when the signatures and initials of Killian on the documents in hand did not match up with other documents available on the public record, but producers chose to move ahead with the story.''
Hey, why not? Who's gonna spot it? If CBS says it's so, that's good enough for Thomas Oliphant's Boston Globe, the New York Times and the Washington Post, all of whom rushed the story onto their front pages because it met their ''basic standards.'' On Friday morning, Paul Krugman, the New York Times' excitable economist, filed a column called, ''The Dishonesty Thing,'' and for one moment I thought he was about to upbraid CBS for rushing on air with their laughably fake memos. But no, he was droning on about how the National Guard story demonstrated George W. Bush's ''pattern of lies: his assertions that he fulfilled his obligations when he obviously didn't ..."
The tragedy for Rather, Oliphant, Krugman and Co. is that even if the memos were authentic nobody would care. Their boy Kerry had a crummy August not because he didn't hammer Bush for being AWOL in the Spanish-American War but because the senator's AWOL in the present war. Big Media are trashing their own reputations in service to a man who can never win.
After the 2002 election, I wrote, ''Remind me never to complain about 'liberal media bias' again. Right now, liberal media bias is conspiring to assist the Democrats to sleepwalk over the cliff.''
The media and the Democrats sustain each other's make-believe land. Dan Rather tells his staff, ''Kerry's told me there's nothing to this Swiftvet thing.'' Kerry tells his, ''Rather's assured me this Swiftvet story's going nowhere.''
George W. Bush ought to wake up every morning and thank the Lord the media aren't on his side.
Remember the Hitler Diaries? They turned up in the '80s. Only problem is they weren't by Hitler. But by then various prestige publications had paid a fortune to serialize them. Among them was the Sunday Times of London, owned by Murdoch, who wasn't happy. He called the editor, Frank Giles, into his office, and said, ''Frank, I'm promoting you to editor emeritus.''
''I've always wondered,'' murmured Frank, ''what 'editor emeritus' means.''
''The 'e-' means you've been given the elbow and the '-meritus' means you bloody deserve it,'' said Murdoch.
I have a feeling after November CBS News will be promoting Dan Rather to editor emeritus.
Either that, or next week's ''60 Minutes'' -- ''Exclusive! Handwriting Expert Says Bush Wrote The Hitler Diaries!'' -- will have much better fact-checking.
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
A few weeks ago, Thomas Oliphant of the Boston Globe was on PBS' ''Newshour'' explaining why the hundreds of swift boat veterans' allegations against John Kerry's conduct in Vietnam was unworthy of his attention. "The standard of clear and convincing evidence," he said, talking to Swiftvet John O'Neill as if he were a backward fourth-grader, ''is what keeps this story in the tabloids -- because it does not meet basic standards.''
Last week, we got a good idea of what Thomas Oliphant's ''basic standards'' are. Dan Rather and the elderly gentlemen at ''60 Minutes'' were all atwitter because they'd come into possession of some hitherto undiscovered memos relating to whether George W. Bush failed to show up for his physical in the War of 1812. The media had been flogging this dead horse all spring, but these newly ''discovered'' memos had jump-started the old nag just enough to get him on his knees long enough for the media to flog him all over again.
Unfortunately for CBS, Dan Rather's hairdresser sucks up so much of the budget that there was nothing left for any fact-checking, so the ''60 Minutes'' crew rushed on air with a damning National Guard memo conveniently called ''CYA'' that Bush's commanding officer had written to himself 32 years ago. ''This was too hot not to push,'' one producer told the American Spectator. Hundreds of living Swiftvets who've signed affidavits and are prepared to testify on camera -- that's way too cold to push; we'd want to fact-check that one thoroughly, till, say, midway through John Kerry's second term. But a handful of memos by one dead guy slipped to us by a Kerry campaign operative -- that meets ''basic standards'' and we gotta get it out there right away.
The only problem was the memo. Amazingly, this guy at the Air National Guard base, Lt. Col. Killian, had the only typewriter in Texas in 1973 using a prototype version of the default letter writing program of Microsoft Word, complete with the tiny little superscript thingy that automatically changes July 4th to July 4th. To do that on most 1973 typewriters, you had to unscrew the keys, grab a hammer and give them a couple of thwacks to make the ''t'' and ''h'' squish up all tiny, and even think it looked a bit wonky. You'd think having such a unique typewriter Killian would have used a less easily traceable model for his devastating ''CYA'' memo. Also, he might have chosen a font other than Times New Roman, designed for the Times of London in the 1930s and not licensed to Microsoft by Rupert Murdoch (the Times' owner) until the 1980s.
Killian is no longer around to confirm his extraordinary Magic Typewriter, but his son denied the stuff was written by his dad, and his widow said her late husband never typed. So, on the one hand, we have hundreds of living veterans with chapter and verse on Kerry's fantasy Christmas in Cambodia, and, on the other hand, we have a guy who's been dead 20 years but is still capable of operating Windows XP. It took the savvy chappies at the Powerline Web site and Charles Johnson of ''Little Green Footballs'' about 20 minutes to spot the eerily 2004 look of the 1972 memo, and various Internet wallahs spent the rest of the day tracking down the country's leading typewriter identification experts.
Bombarded with accusations that CBS had fallen for an obvious hoax, Dan turned to his trusty Smith-Corona and bashed out a few e-mails: ''For the umpteenth time,'' he said angrily, ''this is the kind of sleaze I had to put up with when they scoffed at 'What's the frequency, Kenneth?' "
Are Dan Rather and ''60 Minutes'' a bunch of patsies suckered by the Kerry campaign? Not exactly. According to the American Spectator, ''The CBS producer said that some alarm bells went off last week when the signatures and initials of Killian on the documents in hand did not match up with other documents available on the public record, but producers chose to move ahead with the story.''
Hey, why not? Who's gonna spot it? If CBS says it's so, that's good enough for Thomas Oliphant's Boston Globe, the New York Times and the Washington Post, all of whom rushed the story onto their front pages because it met their ''basic standards.'' On Friday morning, Paul Krugman, the New York Times' excitable economist, filed a column called, ''The Dishonesty Thing,'' and for one moment I thought he was about to upbraid CBS for rushing on air with their laughably fake memos. But no, he was droning on about how the National Guard story demonstrated George W. Bush's ''pattern of lies: his assertions that he fulfilled his obligations when he obviously didn't ..."
The tragedy for Rather, Oliphant, Krugman and Co. is that even if the memos were authentic nobody would care. Their boy Kerry had a crummy August not because he didn't hammer Bush for being AWOL in the Spanish-American War but because the senator's AWOL in the present war. Big Media are trashing their own reputations in service to a man who can never win.
After the 2002 election, I wrote, ''Remind me never to complain about 'liberal media bias' again. Right now, liberal media bias is conspiring to assist the Democrats to sleepwalk over the cliff.''
The media and the Democrats sustain each other's make-believe land. Dan Rather tells his staff, ''Kerry's told me there's nothing to this Swiftvet thing.'' Kerry tells his, ''Rather's assured me this Swiftvet story's going nowhere.''
George W. Bush ought to wake up every morning and thank the Lord the media aren't on his side.
Remember the Hitler Diaries? They turned up in the '80s. Only problem is they weren't by Hitler. But by then various prestige publications had paid a fortune to serialize them. Among them was the Sunday Times of London, owned by Murdoch, who wasn't happy. He called the editor, Frank Giles, into his office, and said, ''Frank, I'm promoting you to editor emeritus.''
''I've always wondered,'' murmured Frank, ''what 'editor emeritus' means.''
''The 'e-' means you've been given the elbow and the '-meritus' means you bloody deserve it,'' said Murdoch.
I have a feeling after November CBS News will be promoting Dan Rather to editor emeritus.
Either that, or next week's ''60 Minutes'' -- ''Exclusive! Handwriting Expert Says Bush Wrote The Hitler Diaries!'' -- will have much better fact-checking.
Friday, September 10, 2004
From The Wall Street Journal. Some of the best writing this side of Mark Steyn.
WRITTEN ON WATER
Three Years On
We still haven't learned the lessons of 9/11.
BY MARK HELPRIN
Three years after September 11, where do we stand?
Out of fear and confusion we have hesitated to name the enemy. We proceed as if we are fighting disparate criminals united by coincidence, rather than the vanguard of militant Islam, united by ideology, sentiment, doctrine, and practice, its partisans drawn from Morocco to the Philippines, Chechnya to the Sudan, a vast swath of the earth that, in regard to the elemental beliefs that fuel jihad, is as homogeneous as Denmark.
Too timid to admit to a clash of civilizations even as it occurs, we failed to declare the war, thus forfeiting clarity of intent and the unambiguous consent of the American people. This was a sure way, as in the Vietnam era, to divide the country and prolong the battle.
We failed not only to prepare for war but to provision for it after it had begun, disallowing a military buildup, much less the wartime transformation of the economy. In the First World War our elected representatives decisively resolved that "to bring the conflict to a successful termination all the resources of the country are hereby pledged by the Congress of the United States." In the Revolutionary War we as a people pledged our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
What is different now of course is that we are combating neither the British Empire nor Imperial Germany, but an opponent who is fundamentally weak militarily, economically, and, in the long run, ideologically. Still, he has by his near mastery of terrorism and asymmetrical warfare necessitated that we mobilize as if we were in fact fighting a great empire. And yet we have not done so, expending not even the average of 5.7% of GDP we devoted to defense in the peacetime years of the period 1940-2000, but, currently, only 3.6%--as if we were not at war, as if the military technological "revolution" could overcome insurgencies or occupy populous countries, as if China's armed forces were not ascending, as if our territory were invulnerable, and as if terrorism, as some used to think and some still do, can simply be managed.
We have followed a confusion of war aims that seem to report after the fact what we have done rather than to direct what we do. We could, by threatening the existence of Middle Eastern regimes, which live to hold power, enforce our insistence that the Arab world eradicate the terrorists within its midst. Instead, we have embarked upon the messianic transformation of an entire region, indeed an entire civilization, in response to our inability to pacify even a single one of its countries. As long as our war aims stray from the disciplined, justifiable, and attainable objective of self-defense, we will be courting failure.
Our strategy has been deeply inadequate especially in light of the fact that we have refused to build up our forces even as our aims have expanded to the point of absurdity. We might have based in northern Saudi Arabia within easy range of the key regimes that succor terrorism, free to coerce their cooperation by putting their survival in question. Our remounted infantry would have been refreshed, reinforced, properly supported, unaffected by insurgency, and ready to strike. The paradigm would have shifted from conquer, occupy, fail, and withdraw--to strike, return, and re-energize. At the same time, we would not have solicited challenges, as we do now, from anyone who sees that although we may be occupying Iraq, Iraq is also occupying us.
We have abstained from mounting an effective civil defense. Only a fraction of a fraction of our wealth would be required to control the borders of and entry to our sovereign territory, and not that much more to discover, produce, and stockpile effective immunizations, antidotes, and treatments in regard to biological and chemical warfare. Thirty years ago the entire country had been immunized against smallpox. Now, no one is, and the attempt to cover a minuscule part of the population failed miserably and was abandoned. Not only does this state of affairs leave us vulnerable to a smallpox epidemic, it stimulates the terrorists to bring one about. So with civil aviation, which, despite the wreckage and tragedy of September 11, is protected in an inefficient, irresponsible, and desultory fashion.
We have watched the division of the country into two ineffective camps, something that is especially apparent in an electoral season. On the one hand is John Kerry, a humorless Boston scold, in appearance the love child of Abraham Lincoln and Bette Midler, who recites slogans that he understands but does not believe. And on the other is the president, proud of his aversion to making an argument for his own case, in appearance a denizen of the Pleistocene, who recites slogans that he believes but does not understand.
At this point the American people, who most of the time are wiser than the experts or politicians who briefly take the helm, may already have decided to reinstall the president despite his shortcomings. If this is so, it is because Sen. Kerry's main motive power has come from those who are foolish enough to exult in the crude and baseless propaganda of a freakish Leni Riefenstahl wannabe (too heavy), and because, in what may have been his campaign's defining moment, Sen. Kerry stated that he learned a long time ago that when under attack you turn your boat toward the enemy. And yet it is clear from his record, his character, and his present policy that this is precisely what he would not do. Nor, though it is exactly what the country should do, is it at all what his most enthusiastic partisans or the base of the Democratic Party would want him to do.
He and they have adopted simultaneously two opposing propositions and embraced two opposing tendencies, which they then present to the electorate as if there is no contradiction. They do not feel acutely, as others do, the dissonance of their positions, because they truly believe in only the less martial of the two.
Although they cannot state why the American, British, Spanish, and Australian invasion of Iraq was any more or less unilateral or multilateral than France, Germany, and Belgium working to derail that invasion, or deny that they admire Britain for standing alone, unilaterally, in 1940, or that the multilateral Axis invasion of Greece was wrong, or that they themselves urge unilateral American action to stop genocide in Africa, they use these words fervently and without logic. They may believe that this is their subtlety, but it is nothing more than confusion and a stylish capitulation to the French, who unfortunately are perfectly willing to capitulate to Islamic terrorism as long as France has purchased its own safety, as of old.
Given the lack of movement in the war and poverty of choice in leadership, Americans looked to a commission. Like the senescent Ottomans we waited and waited as the seasons passed, and were presented neither with swelling armies, well defended borders, nor a string of victories. Although the bravest commissioners of said commission fought to tell us that we are indeed in a clash of civilizations, even they, appointed by their respective parties, did not state the simple unvarnished truth that for 20 years administrations both Republican and Democratic have ignored or misread the evidence concerning terrorism and must be judged negligent and culpable.
The president could have said this, and in doing so clarified the course ahead and won the trust of the people. The commission could have said it simply and directly, but did not. Instead, it offered the labored and nearly impertinent conclusion that the way to prevail in this war is to rearrange the organizational table of the intelligence agencies. Many of its reforms are questionable on their face, most would have merely a neutral effect on the substance of intelligence, and the emphasis is mistaken. Like those who want to fight the war by funding fire departments--knife attacks are not defeated by bandages, and the Battle of Britain was not won by the London Fire Brigades--the commission looked upon one aspect as if it were the essential element, which it is not.
The more good intelligence the better, but because the enemy moves in small groupings he will on occasion, as intelligence is not perfect, elude it. That is why difficult, expensive, inefficient, and general defensive screens are necessary, and why we cannot rely only on pinpoint intelligence even if it is both fashionable and economical. In stressing intelligence, the commission slights elements of equal or greater importance that led to September 11 in the first place. Had the airport screeners been competent, had cockpit doors been reinforced, had the borders been properly controlled, the thousands who were lost that day, and who are loved, would still be alive.
Neither the commission, the president, nor the Democratic nominee has a clear vision of how to fight and defend in this war. Partly this is because so many Americans do not yet feel, as some day they may, the gravity of what we are facing.
Three years on, that is where we stand: our strategy shiftless, reactive, irrelevantly grandiose; our war aims undefined; our preparations insufficient; our civil defense neglected; our polity divided into support for either a hapless and incompetent administration that in a parliamentary system would have been turned out long ago, or an opposition so used to appeasement of America's rivals, critics, and enemies that they cannot even do a credible job of pretending to be resolute.
Mr. Helprin is a novelist, a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.
From Tech Central Station:
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Blogs v. 60 Minutes
By Jay Currie
The CBS news program Sixty Minutes II ran a story on September 8th bringing to light a set of memos which purported to show that when President Bush was in the National Guard he failed to obey orders. Liberal blogger Josh Marshall framed this revelation thusly:
"But aside from orders that contravene the laws of war, the Geneva Conventions or the US constitution, I don't think an officer or an enlisted man is allowed to disobey an order just because he comes up with some logic by which he decides the order doesn't really make sense. An order is an order, right?"
The memos were supposed to have been written in the early 1970's by a Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian. Who is, as it happens, died in 1984.
Here's what CBS says about the documents:
"… 60 Minutes has obtained a number of documents we are told were taken from Col. Killian's personal file. Among them, a never-before-seen memorandum from May 1972, where Killian writes that Lt. Bush called him to talk about 'how he can get out of coming to drill from now through November.'"
According to the CBS report, Lt. Bush tells his commander "he is working on a campaign in Alabama…. and may not have time to take his physical." According to the report, Killian adds that he thinks Lt. Bush has gone over his head, and is "talking to someone upstairs."
60 Minutes says it consulted a handwriting analyst and document expert "who believes the material is authentic."
The CBS story, echoed in the New York Times and the Boston Globe went on to suggest Bush directly disobeyed orders to have an annual physical and, as a result, was grounded.
Pretty damning stuff. Just one problem -- there is mounting evidence collected by the blogosphere that the documents were forgeries. And not very good forgeries at that.
A lot of bloggers are designers and computer geeks. People who pay attention to things like proportional spacing, kerning, superscript text and the other features of modern word processing. Guess what? A letter by letter comparison of one of the purported memos with a version typed in Microsoft Word by Charles Johnson at the blog Little Green Footballs reveals:
"The spacing is not just similar -- it is identical in every respect. Notice that the date lines up perfectly, all the line breaks are in the same places, all letters line up with the same letters above and below, and the kerning is exactly the same. And I did not change a single thing from Word's defaults; margins, type size, tab stops, etc. are all using the default settings. The one difference (the "th" in "187th" is slightly lower) is probably due to a slight difference between the Mac and PC versions of the Times New Roman font, or it could be an artifact of whatever process was used to artificially "age" the document. (Update: I printed the document and the "th" matches perfectly in the printed version. It's a difference between screen and printer fonts.)"
To hammer his point home Johnson superimposes the purported memo with his Microsoft Word, typed today version. Literally 1:1, not even fuzzy, not a letter out of place.
For really detailed analysis, Powerline readers get right to the kerning:
"The type in the document is KERNED. Kerning is the typesetter's art of spacing various letters in such a manner that they are 'grouped' for better readability. Word processors do this automatically. NO TYPEWRITER CAN PHYSICALLY DO THIS.
"To explain: the letter 'O' is curved on the outside. A letter such as 'T' has indented space under its cross bar. On a typewriter if one types an 'O' next to a 'T' then both letters remain separated by their physical space. When you type the same letters on a computer next to each other the are automatically 'kerned' or 'grouped' so that their individual spaces actually overlap. e. g., TO. As one can readily see the curvature of the 'O' nestles neatly under the cross bar of the 'T'. Two good kerning examples in the alleged memo are the word 'my' in the second line where 'm' and 'y' are neatly kerned and also the word 'not' in the fourth line where the 'o' and 't' overlap empty space. A typewriter doesn't 'know' what particular letter is next to another and can't make those types of aesthetic adjustments."
The Weekly Standard published a story with comments from a number of typography experts all of which suggest the memos are a hoax. Radio host and blogger Hugh Hewitt interviews a document examination expert and, unsurprisingly, on point after point the expert is convinced the memos are forgeries.
Most importantly, because it breaks out of the blogosphere, the Associated Press is now on the story, albeit from a different angle:
"Gary Killian, who served in the Guard with his father and retired as a captain in 1991, said one of the memos, signed by his father, appeared legitimate. But he doubted his father would have written another, unsigned memo which said there was pressure to 'sugar coat' Bush's performance review.
"'It just wouldn't happen,' he said. 'The only thing that can happen when you keep secret files like that are bad things. ... No officer in his right mind would write a memo like that.'"
One day. That was all it took for the ranks of citizen journalists to swarm and then thoroughly discredit a story which ran in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and on a network news magazine.
From the Kerry perspective a scandal involving forged documents is a disaster. Kerry had yesterday to get in front of the story and he missed that boat. Instead of being able to stay on message and trying to beat down the post convention pulse which has sent Bush several points ahead in various opinion polls, Kerry is likely to face questions about who was responsible for the forgeries. While it would be astonishing if anyone inside the Kerry organization had a hand in them, it is a question that will be asked. Moreover, the spectacle of Kerry announcing that his campaign organization and the Democratic Party had nothing to do with issuing those documents will occupy several critical news cycles and focus attention on character -- exactly where Kerry does not want to be.
From the perspective of the establishment media, this, too, is a disaster. CBS will have to explain: where did the documents come from? What were the bona fides of the source? Who was the source? Which expert looked at the documents? How closely?
Those are the starter questions. The more basic question is how could a rabble of bloggers, in one day, provide hard core proof of forgery when major news organizations took those documents at face value? Most fundamental of all, why did the New York Times, the Boston Globe and CBS allow themselves to be used for such a transparent attempt to slander President Bush? Out in the blogosphere there are a swarm of people rooting for the answers.
Jay Currie is a Galiano writer whose writing and blog is at www.reviewing.blogspot.com.
Font Size:
Blogs v. 60 Minutes
By Jay Currie
The CBS news program Sixty Minutes II ran a story on September 8th bringing to light a set of memos which purported to show that when President Bush was in the National Guard he failed to obey orders. Liberal blogger Josh Marshall framed this revelation thusly:
"But aside from orders that contravene the laws of war, the Geneva Conventions or the US constitution, I don't think an officer or an enlisted man is allowed to disobey an order just because he comes up with some logic by which he decides the order doesn't really make sense. An order is an order, right?"
The memos were supposed to have been written in the early 1970's by a Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian. Who is, as it happens, died in 1984.
Here's what CBS says about the documents:
"… 60 Minutes has obtained a number of documents we are told were taken from Col. Killian's personal file. Among them, a never-before-seen memorandum from May 1972, where Killian writes that Lt. Bush called him to talk about 'how he can get out of coming to drill from now through November.'"
According to the CBS report, Lt. Bush tells his commander "he is working on a campaign in Alabama…. and may not have time to take his physical." According to the report, Killian adds that he thinks Lt. Bush has gone over his head, and is "talking to someone upstairs."
60 Minutes says it consulted a handwriting analyst and document expert "who believes the material is authentic."
The CBS story, echoed in the New York Times and the Boston Globe went on to suggest Bush directly disobeyed orders to have an annual physical and, as a result, was grounded.
Pretty damning stuff. Just one problem -- there is mounting evidence collected by the blogosphere that the documents were forgeries. And not very good forgeries at that.
A lot of bloggers are designers and computer geeks. People who pay attention to things like proportional spacing, kerning, superscript text and the other features of modern word processing. Guess what? A letter by letter comparison of one of the purported memos with a version typed in Microsoft Word by Charles Johnson at the blog Little Green Footballs reveals:
"The spacing is not just similar -- it is identical in every respect. Notice that the date lines up perfectly, all the line breaks are in the same places, all letters line up with the same letters above and below, and the kerning is exactly the same. And I did not change a single thing from Word's defaults; margins, type size, tab stops, etc. are all using the default settings. The one difference (the "th" in "187th" is slightly lower) is probably due to a slight difference between the Mac and PC versions of the Times New Roman font, or it could be an artifact of whatever process was used to artificially "age" the document. (Update: I printed the document and the "th" matches perfectly in the printed version. It's a difference between screen and printer fonts.)"
To hammer his point home Johnson superimposes the purported memo with his Microsoft Word, typed today version. Literally 1:1, not even fuzzy, not a letter out of place.
For really detailed analysis, Powerline readers get right to the kerning:
"The type in the document is KERNED. Kerning is the typesetter's art of spacing various letters in such a manner that they are 'grouped' for better readability. Word processors do this automatically. NO TYPEWRITER CAN PHYSICALLY DO THIS.
"To explain: the letter 'O' is curved on the outside. A letter such as 'T' has indented space under its cross bar. On a typewriter if one types an 'O' next to a 'T' then both letters remain separated by their physical space. When you type the same letters on a computer next to each other the are automatically 'kerned' or 'grouped' so that their individual spaces actually overlap. e. g., TO. As one can readily see the curvature of the 'O' nestles neatly under the cross bar of the 'T'. Two good kerning examples in the alleged memo are the word 'my' in the second line where 'm' and 'y' are neatly kerned and also the word 'not' in the fourth line where the 'o' and 't' overlap empty space. A typewriter doesn't 'know' what particular letter is next to another and can't make those types of aesthetic adjustments."
The Weekly Standard published a story with comments from a number of typography experts all of which suggest the memos are a hoax. Radio host and blogger Hugh Hewitt interviews a document examination expert and, unsurprisingly, on point after point the expert is convinced the memos are forgeries.
Most importantly, because it breaks out of the blogosphere, the Associated Press is now on the story, albeit from a different angle:
"Gary Killian, who served in the Guard with his father and retired as a captain in 1991, said one of the memos, signed by his father, appeared legitimate. But he doubted his father would have written another, unsigned memo which said there was pressure to 'sugar coat' Bush's performance review.
"'It just wouldn't happen,' he said. 'The only thing that can happen when you keep secret files like that are bad things. ... No officer in his right mind would write a memo like that.'"
One day. That was all it took for the ranks of citizen journalists to swarm and then thoroughly discredit a story which ran in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and on a network news magazine.
From the Kerry perspective a scandal involving forged documents is a disaster. Kerry had yesterday to get in front of the story and he missed that boat. Instead of being able to stay on message and trying to beat down the post convention pulse which has sent Bush several points ahead in various opinion polls, Kerry is likely to face questions about who was responsible for the forgeries. While it would be astonishing if anyone inside the Kerry organization had a hand in them, it is a question that will be asked. Moreover, the spectacle of Kerry announcing that his campaign organization and the Democratic Party had nothing to do with issuing those documents will occupy several critical news cycles and focus attention on character -- exactly where Kerry does not want to be.
From the perspective of the establishment media, this, too, is a disaster. CBS will have to explain: where did the documents come from? What were the bona fides of the source? Who was the source? Which expert looked at the documents? How closely?
Those are the starter questions. The more basic question is how could a rabble of bloggers, in one day, provide hard core proof of forgery when major news organizations took those documents at face value? Most fundamental of all, why did the New York Times, the Boston Globe and CBS allow themselves to be used for such a transparent attempt to slander President Bush? Out in the blogosphere there are a swarm of people rooting for the answers.
Jay Currie is a Galiano writer whose writing and blog is at www.reviewing.blogspot.com.
From The Spectator.co.uk
We still don’t get it
Mark Steyn says that three years after 9/11 the West remains in denial over Islamic terrorism
‘He is sedated,’ said Bill Clinton’s heart surgeon on Tuesday. ‘But he is arousable.’ I’ve never doubted it.
That seems as appropriate a thought as any with which to consider the state of the new war three years on. Like former President Clinton, much of the West is sedated. But is it arousable? On the eve of this week’s anniversary, hundreds of children were murdered in their schoolhouse by terrorists. Terrible. But even more terrible was the reaction of what passes for the civilised world, the reluctance to confront the truth of what had occurred. The perpetrators were ‘separatists’, according to the Christian Science Monitor — what, you mean like my fellow Quebeckers? They were ‘commandoes’, according to Agence France-Presse — you mean like the SAS?
‘We have been confronted with a deep human tragedy,’ said the Dutch foreign minister Ben Bot, speaking for the European Union. ‘I am appalled that a school and its pupils are being used for political ends,’ said Unesco’s director-general Koichiro Matsuura. A ‘tragedy’? ‘Political ends’?
Five days after the slaughter, the New York Times finally got around to using the I-word, and then only in paragraph 24: ‘While the extent of international support may be debated, the attacks bear some trappings of Islamic militancy. Officials here in Beslan said they had found notebooks with Arabic writing, and witnesses reported hearing Arabic exhortations, though the attackers mostly spoke Russian.’
Any Arabic exhortation in particular? Only the slogan of the age, ‘Allahu Akbar’. Nothing to worry about, folks. They may kill kids, but they’re just ‘separatists’, ‘radicals’, ‘activists’. No connection with any events you may have heard about in Madrid, Istanbul, Bali, Tel Aviv or New York. The approved tone in polite society is that of my Telegraph colleague Adam Nicolson: keep it tasteful, keep it elegant, lots of exquisitely honed overwritten allusions — each dead child was ‘a Pietà , the archetype of pity. Each is a Cordelia carried on at the end of Act V...’. Lovely stuff, may even be an award in it. But not a word about the killers or a hint of their identity. Only a limpid, passive sadness. Nicolson is sedated but, unlike Clinton, not arousable.
Three years after September 11, the Islamist death cult is the love whose name no one dare speak. And, if you can’t even bring yourself to identify your enemy, are you likely to defeat him? Can you even know him? He seems to know us pretty well. He understands the pressures he can bring to bear on Spain, and the Philippines, and France, too. He’s come to appreciate the self-imposed constraints under which his enemy fights — the legalisms, the political correctness, the deference to ineffectual multilateralism. He’s revolted by the infidels’ decadence but he has to admit it’s enormously helpful: the useful idiots of the pro-gay, pro-feminist Left are far more idiotic and far more useful to him than they ever were to Stalin. He’s figured out that while pluralistic open democracy might be a debased system of government next to Sharia, it has its moments: he had no idea that quite so many Westerners so loathed their own governments and, if not their own, then certainly America’s. And he never thought that, even in America, while one party is at war, the other party is at war with the very idea that there is a war. And even the party committed to war presides over a lethargic unreformed bureaucracy, large chunks of which are determined to obstruct it.
So, despite the loss of the Afghan training camps and Saddam and the Taleban and three quarters of al-Qa’eda’s leadership, it hasn’t been a bad three years: the enemy has learnt the limits of the West’s resolve, and all he has to do is put a bit of thought into exploiting it in the years ahead. A nuclear Iran will certainly help.
By contrast, what have we learned? According to the Associated Press, last Sunday, at the Bercy stadium in Paris, Madonna dedicated her performance of ‘Imagine’ to what the AP reporter was still calling ‘the Russian hostage crisis’, even though by then the ‘crisis’ was over, as were the lives of the hostages. Madonna ‘urged fans to think about what happened in Russia and Lennon’s lyrics’. Okay:
‘Imagine there’s no heaven It’s easy if you try ...’
Not what I would want to hear if my kid had just been shot dead by a terrorist. More importantly, if Madonna is advocating global secularism as the answer to terrorism, she’s backing a loser. For the fellows pulling the martyrdom routines, heaven is a brothel. In Madonna terms, it’s ‘Like A Virgin’ times 72. It’s the jackpot, it’s winning the lottery. Telling the guy it’s a fraud and your crappy life in Egypt or Saudi Arabia is all there is doesn’t seem likely to work. Doesn’t it make more sense to try to move him into buying the idea of heaven as a lot of fluffy clouds where we sit around twanging harps all day rather than attempting to shunt him all the way over into instant radical post-Christian atheism?
This isn’t a theoretical proposition. Last year a senior Dutch cabinet minister talked me through some very interesting findings apropos his own country’s Islamic population. The grandchildren of Muslims who arrived in Holland in the Seventies are often more militantly Islamist and unassimilated than their grandparents. Raised in a society as close as one can find to the sappy nihilism of Lennon’s lyric, they decided it had no appeal for them. I mocked the singing of ‘Imagine’ on some 9/11 all-star memorial gala in the fall of 2001, yet here it is again, irrelevant, dated, but indestructible as ever. Singing ‘Imagine’ is a sure sign of a failure to imagine.
That’s really the heart of it: the failure of what Osama bin Laden saw as a soft pampered West to imagine that it can ever all come to an end. Three years ago, for the cover of our September 11 issue, Heath drew us a defiant Statue of Liberty, her torch held high above the headline ‘The West Must Fight Back.’ Nice idea, but it didn’t quite work out like that. 9/11 was not ‘the day that changed the world’ but instead the day that revealed how much the world had already changed. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, ‘the West’, for example, had lacked sufficient sense of common purpose to ‘fight back’.
It’s fashionable now to employ some false distinction between Afghanistan and Iraq — the good war and the Texas cowboy’s Halliburton land grab. But ‘the West’ was never committed even to Afghanistan. A few months ago, I had the honour of participating in the US Naval Academy’s annual foreign affairs conference in Annapolis. After I’d made a few breezy generalisations about the pitiful performance of America’s so-called allies, an indignant French naval cadet stood up to insist that, au contraire, Paris had made a significant contribution to the war in Afghanistan. Why, it had dispatched the ultimate symbol of Gallic prestige, the nuclear (and, indeed, toxic) aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle.
It seemed cruel to point out that Afghanistan is a land-locked country, and that dispatching a stricken carrier with a few reconnaissance aircraft to the general vicinity of the Indian Ocean is not perhaps the most robust commitment to the war effort. It seemed crueller to point out that the Charles de Gaulle was dispatched in late December 2002, a month after the fall of Kabul. In other words, the French had waited till the war was over before making a contribution to it. That’s America’s post-modern ‘alliance’.
In the US, some observers thought it would be different once Europe got hit. On the day of the Madrid bombing, John Ellis, a Bush cousin and a shrewd commentator, declared confidently: ‘Every member state of the EU understands that Madrid is Rome is Berlin is Amsterdam is Paris is London is New York.’ All wrong. Within 72 hours of the atrocity, voters sent a tough message to the Islamists: ‘We apologise for catching your eye.’ Whether or not Madrid is Rome, Berlin, etc., it certainly isn’t New York. At least in the two and a half years between 9/11 and 3/11, there was always the possibility of Europe stiffening itself. Now America lives with the certainty that it won’t, and can’t, until it’s too late.
This war will go on for some decades, and by the end of it Madrid will be Rome will be Berlin will be Amsterdam will be Paris, but none of them will be as we now know them. As I’ve said here before, by 2030 Europe will be Eurabia — at least semi-Islamified, with Muslim lobby groups transformed into Muslim political parties, with their own representatives serving in coalitions with bewildered Continental multiculturalists. (The recent by-elections in the Midlands, with the Friends of al-Aqsa Committee summoning the candidates to a tribunal in order to see who could outpander the others, is only an interim phase.) In the last three decades, Europe has taken in (officially) some 20 million Muslims (officially) — or the equivalent of the populations of three EU countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark). Once you look at it like that, why should they have less say in the corridors of Euro-power than Ben Bot or Bertie Ahern? Imagine France with a 20 per cent Muslim bloc and then consider the likelihood of French forces fighting alongside the US ever again.
In her lame apologia for last week’s kiddie-killers, the Guardian’s Isabel Hilton rhapsodised about ‘asymmetrical warfare’ — how else could the poor wee insurgents/ activists/whatever fight back against overwhelmingly superior force? But these days who’s really ‘superior’? An old-fashioned European army — Belgium’s, say — is incapable of projecting itself to Saudi Arabia; but a terrorist group in Saudi Arabia, through routine innovations like email, cell phones and automated bank machines, can easily project itself to Belgium. What did 9/11 cost its perpetrators? Flight lessons would be below $5,000 depending on how impatient the hijackers were (as Zac Moussaoui told his instructors, he didn’t need to learn how to land); boxcutters cost a couple of bucks; add in a few rental cars and motels, and that’s it. For around $150,000, 19 not especially talented terrorists killed more than 3,000 people and caused immediate economic damage of $27 billion, with the final tab yet to be calculated.
That’s what I call asymmetrical. Now imagine nuclear technology, which long ago slipped the bunkers of the great powers. If you’re a quiet-lifer like the Spaniards, who do you talk to to head off catastrophe? There isn’t an ‘al-Qa’eda’ in the sense of an organisation one can enter into formal peace talks with, as Mo Mowlam advises. There are local terror groups sharing the same aims and methods from Algeria to Indonesia and, like crime families, they all know who to go to if they happen to find themselves in Chechnya, or Kosovo, or Sudan, or Colombia. And there are freelance acts of mayhem committed by chaps who wake up one morning and hear the call of the jihad — the British shoebomber and the Washington sniper both fall into this category. Not all Muslims are al-Qa’eda supporters, but they don’t have to be. If just 1 per cent is generally sympathetic, that’s enough for a vast global support network.
More to the point, keep an eye on that big picture. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 per cent of the world’s population to just over 20 per cent, and the population of Muslim nations increased from about 15 per cent to 20 per cent. 1970 isn’t that long ago. It’s when John Lennon wrote ‘Imagine’, which our pop stars seem to think is still pretty cool. But while they’re droning the same old dirge, everything else has moved on.
Two years ago I said that the terrorists blew apart the ‘polite fictions’ of the September 10 world. A lot of people have devoted a lot of energy to trying to reconstruct them. But it can’t be done. The old world has gone, and if Madonna wants to preserve the kind of pluralist society that enables her to be photographed naked with her bottom hanging over a wall and get a bestselling book out of it, she’s going to have to choose sides and fight for it. Imagine that.
We still don’t get it
Mark Steyn says that three years after 9/11 the West remains in denial over Islamic terrorism
‘He is sedated,’ said Bill Clinton’s heart surgeon on Tuesday. ‘But he is arousable.’ I’ve never doubted it.
That seems as appropriate a thought as any with which to consider the state of the new war three years on. Like former President Clinton, much of the West is sedated. But is it arousable? On the eve of this week’s anniversary, hundreds of children were murdered in their schoolhouse by terrorists. Terrible. But even more terrible was the reaction of what passes for the civilised world, the reluctance to confront the truth of what had occurred. The perpetrators were ‘separatists’, according to the Christian Science Monitor — what, you mean like my fellow Quebeckers? They were ‘commandoes’, according to Agence France-Presse — you mean like the SAS?
‘We have been confronted with a deep human tragedy,’ said the Dutch foreign minister Ben Bot, speaking for the European Union. ‘I am appalled that a school and its pupils are being used for political ends,’ said Unesco’s director-general Koichiro Matsuura. A ‘tragedy’? ‘Political ends’?
Five days after the slaughter, the New York Times finally got around to using the I-word, and then only in paragraph 24: ‘While the extent of international support may be debated, the attacks bear some trappings of Islamic militancy. Officials here in Beslan said they had found notebooks with Arabic writing, and witnesses reported hearing Arabic exhortations, though the attackers mostly spoke Russian.’
Any Arabic exhortation in particular? Only the slogan of the age, ‘Allahu Akbar’. Nothing to worry about, folks. They may kill kids, but they’re just ‘separatists’, ‘radicals’, ‘activists’. No connection with any events you may have heard about in Madrid, Istanbul, Bali, Tel Aviv or New York. The approved tone in polite society is that of my Telegraph colleague Adam Nicolson: keep it tasteful, keep it elegant, lots of exquisitely honed overwritten allusions — each dead child was ‘a Pietà , the archetype of pity. Each is a Cordelia carried on at the end of Act V...’. Lovely stuff, may even be an award in it. But not a word about the killers or a hint of their identity. Only a limpid, passive sadness. Nicolson is sedated but, unlike Clinton, not arousable.
Three years after September 11, the Islamist death cult is the love whose name no one dare speak. And, if you can’t even bring yourself to identify your enemy, are you likely to defeat him? Can you even know him? He seems to know us pretty well. He understands the pressures he can bring to bear on Spain, and the Philippines, and France, too. He’s come to appreciate the self-imposed constraints under which his enemy fights — the legalisms, the political correctness, the deference to ineffectual multilateralism. He’s revolted by the infidels’ decadence but he has to admit it’s enormously helpful: the useful idiots of the pro-gay, pro-feminist Left are far more idiotic and far more useful to him than they ever were to Stalin. He’s figured out that while pluralistic open democracy might be a debased system of government next to Sharia, it has its moments: he had no idea that quite so many Westerners so loathed their own governments and, if not their own, then certainly America’s. And he never thought that, even in America, while one party is at war, the other party is at war with the very idea that there is a war. And even the party committed to war presides over a lethargic unreformed bureaucracy, large chunks of which are determined to obstruct it.
So, despite the loss of the Afghan training camps and Saddam and the Taleban and three quarters of al-Qa’eda’s leadership, it hasn’t been a bad three years: the enemy has learnt the limits of the West’s resolve, and all he has to do is put a bit of thought into exploiting it in the years ahead. A nuclear Iran will certainly help.
By contrast, what have we learned? According to the Associated Press, last Sunday, at the Bercy stadium in Paris, Madonna dedicated her performance of ‘Imagine’ to what the AP reporter was still calling ‘the Russian hostage crisis’, even though by then the ‘crisis’ was over, as were the lives of the hostages. Madonna ‘urged fans to think about what happened in Russia and Lennon’s lyrics’. Okay:
‘Imagine there’s no heaven It’s easy if you try ...’
Not what I would want to hear if my kid had just been shot dead by a terrorist. More importantly, if Madonna is advocating global secularism as the answer to terrorism, she’s backing a loser. For the fellows pulling the martyrdom routines, heaven is a brothel. In Madonna terms, it’s ‘Like A Virgin’ times 72. It’s the jackpot, it’s winning the lottery. Telling the guy it’s a fraud and your crappy life in Egypt or Saudi Arabia is all there is doesn’t seem likely to work. Doesn’t it make more sense to try to move him into buying the idea of heaven as a lot of fluffy clouds where we sit around twanging harps all day rather than attempting to shunt him all the way over into instant radical post-Christian atheism?
This isn’t a theoretical proposition. Last year a senior Dutch cabinet minister talked me through some very interesting findings apropos his own country’s Islamic population. The grandchildren of Muslims who arrived in Holland in the Seventies are often more militantly Islamist and unassimilated than their grandparents. Raised in a society as close as one can find to the sappy nihilism of Lennon’s lyric, they decided it had no appeal for them. I mocked the singing of ‘Imagine’ on some 9/11 all-star memorial gala in the fall of 2001, yet here it is again, irrelevant, dated, but indestructible as ever. Singing ‘Imagine’ is a sure sign of a failure to imagine.
That’s really the heart of it: the failure of what Osama bin Laden saw as a soft pampered West to imagine that it can ever all come to an end. Three years ago, for the cover of our September 11 issue, Heath drew us a defiant Statue of Liberty, her torch held high above the headline ‘The West Must Fight Back.’ Nice idea, but it didn’t quite work out like that. 9/11 was not ‘the day that changed the world’ but instead the day that revealed how much the world had already changed. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, ‘the West’, for example, had lacked sufficient sense of common purpose to ‘fight back’.
It’s fashionable now to employ some false distinction between Afghanistan and Iraq — the good war and the Texas cowboy’s Halliburton land grab. But ‘the West’ was never committed even to Afghanistan. A few months ago, I had the honour of participating in the US Naval Academy’s annual foreign affairs conference in Annapolis. After I’d made a few breezy generalisations about the pitiful performance of America’s so-called allies, an indignant French naval cadet stood up to insist that, au contraire, Paris had made a significant contribution to the war in Afghanistan. Why, it had dispatched the ultimate symbol of Gallic prestige, the nuclear (and, indeed, toxic) aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle.
It seemed cruel to point out that Afghanistan is a land-locked country, and that dispatching a stricken carrier with a few reconnaissance aircraft to the general vicinity of the Indian Ocean is not perhaps the most robust commitment to the war effort. It seemed crueller to point out that the Charles de Gaulle was dispatched in late December 2002, a month after the fall of Kabul. In other words, the French had waited till the war was over before making a contribution to it. That’s America’s post-modern ‘alliance’.
In the US, some observers thought it would be different once Europe got hit. On the day of the Madrid bombing, John Ellis, a Bush cousin and a shrewd commentator, declared confidently: ‘Every member state of the EU understands that Madrid is Rome is Berlin is Amsterdam is Paris is London is New York.’ All wrong. Within 72 hours of the atrocity, voters sent a tough message to the Islamists: ‘We apologise for catching your eye.’ Whether or not Madrid is Rome, Berlin, etc., it certainly isn’t New York. At least in the two and a half years between 9/11 and 3/11, there was always the possibility of Europe stiffening itself. Now America lives with the certainty that it won’t, and can’t, until it’s too late.
This war will go on for some decades, and by the end of it Madrid will be Rome will be Berlin will be Amsterdam will be Paris, but none of them will be as we now know them. As I’ve said here before, by 2030 Europe will be Eurabia — at least semi-Islamified, with Muslim lobby groups transformed into Muslim political parties, with their own representatives serving in coalitions with bewildered Continental multiculturalists. (The recent by-elections in the Midlands, with the Friends of al-Aqsa Committee summoning the candidates to a tribunal in order to see who could outpander the others, is only an interim phase.) In the last three decades, Europe has taken in (officially) some 20 million Muslims (officially) — or the equivalent of the populations of three EU countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark). Once you look at it like that, why should they have less say in the corridors of Euro-power than Ben Bot or Bertie Ahern? Imagine France with a 20 per cent Muslim bloc and then consider the likelihood of French forces fighting alongside the US ever again.
In her lame apologia for last week’s kiddie-killers, the Guardian’s Isabel Hilton rhapsodised about ‘asymmetrical warfare’ — how else could the poor wee insurgents/ activists/whatever fight back against overwhelmingly superior force? But these days who’s really ‘superior’? An old-fashioned European army — Belgium’s, say — is incapable of projecting itself to Saudi Arabia; but a terrorist group in Saudi Arabia, through routine innovations like email, cell phones and automated bank machines, can easily project itself to Belgium. What did 9/11 cost its perpetrators? Flight lessons would be below $5,000 depending on how impatient the hijackers were (as Zac Moussaoui told his instructors, he didn’t need to learn how to land); boxcutters cost a couple of bucks; add in a few rental cars and motels, and that’s it. For around $150,000, 19 not especially talented terrorists killed more than 3,000 people and caused immediate economic damage of $27 billion, with the final tab yet to be calculated.
That’s what I call asymmetrical. Now imagine nuclear technology, which long ago slipped the bunkers of the great powers. If you’re a quiet-lifer like the Spaniards, who do you talk to to head off catastrophe? There isn’t an ‘al-Qa’eda’ in the sense of an organisation one can enter into formal peace talks with, as Mo Mowlam advises. There are local terror groups sharing the same aims and methods from Algeria to Indonesia and, like crime families, they all know who to go to if they happen to find themselves in Chechnya, or Kosovo, or Sudan, or Colombia. And there are freelance acts of mayhem committed by chaps who wake up one morning and hear the call of the jihad — the British shoebomber and the Washington sniper both fall into this category. Not all Muslims are al-Qa’eda supporters, but they don’t have to be. If just 1 per cent is generally sympathetic, that’s enough for a vast global support network.
More to the point, keep an eye on that big picture. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 per cent of the world’s population to just over 20 per cent, and the population of Muslim nations increased from about 15 per cent to 20 per cent. 1970 isn’t that long ago. It’s when John Lennon wrote ‘Imagine’, which our pop stars seem to think is still pretty cool. But while they’re droning the same old dirge, everything else has moved on.
Two years ago I said that the terrorists blew apart the ‘polite fictions’ of the September 10 world. A lot of people have devoted a lot of energy to trying to reconstruct them. But it can’t be done. The old world has gone, and if Madonna wants to preserve the kind of pluralist society that enables her to be photographed naked with her bottom hanging over a wall and get a bestselling book out of it, she’s going to have to choose sides and fight for it. Imagine that.
Remember 9/11: Stop sanitizing the killers
by Michelle Malkin
The third anniversary of Sept. 11 is upon us. We remain at war -- and the media remain in denial.
How many times have you picked up a newspaper and read about terrorist attacks perpetrated not by Muslim terrorists, but by generic "militants" or "guerrillas" or "rebels" or, as Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes noted the Pakistan Times called them, "activists"?
Contrast the media whitewashing of our Islamofascist enemies with the press coverage of the Waco, Texas, siege in 1993 -- which constantly reminded us that David Koresh and his Branch Davidian followers were members of a "peculiar religious sect" (New York Times, March 3, 1993) and "a group of religious zealots with a known propensity for violence" (Washington Post, March 2, 1993) who were steeped in a "culture of Christian extremism" (San Francisco Chronicle, April 20, 1993).
A Nexis search of the terms "Branch Davidian" and "religious" and "cult" in The New York Times for the year 1993 yielded 151 hits. The vast majority of these references were in headlines and news articles, as opposed to editorials, letters or book reviews. A Nexis search of the terms "al Qaeda" and "religious" and "cult" in The New York Times for the year 2004 yielded just one article -- a magazine piece in March.
The mainstream media pounded President Bush for trying to explain that the War on Terror is unwinnable in a conventional sense. The mainstream press itself proves the president's point every time its reporters disguise the deadly fanatical nature of our opponents in this global war. How are we to win a war against blood-spattered enemies whom our own free press continues to protect through politically correct sanitization?
It wasn't no-name militants or wayward guerrillas who have butchered, beheaded and slaughtered thousands of innocents over the last three years alone. Anniversary reality check:
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Russia stabbed babies to death, shot toddlers in the back, forced children to eat rose petals and drink their own urine, raped teenage girls, executed their teachers and blew themselves up in a crowded school gymnasium. Death toll: 338.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Spain detonated bombs on four commuter trains during Madrid's rush hour. Death toll: 190.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Bali blew up a beach resort with an electronically triggered bomb at one bar and a car bomb hidden in a van at another nightclub filled with young Western tourists on holiday. Death toll: 202.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Pakistan kidnapped and beheaded American journalist Daniel Pearl.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Saudi Arabia kidnapped and beheaded American engineer Paul Johnson.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Iraq kidnapped and beheaded American independent contractor Nick Berg.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Iraq kidnapped and executed Italian security guard Fabrizio Quattrocchi.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in the Philippines kidnapped and killed American missionary Martin Burnham.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Israel engineered near-simultaneous suicide attacks on two buses, killing at least 15 people.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Morocco waged suicide bombing attacks in Casablanca.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Turkey bombed synagogues and the British consulate.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in America hijacked and incinerated three planes full of men, women and children, trapped pregnant women and firefighters in smoke-filled stairways, and forced office workers to leap 99 stories to their deaths after saying final prayers from the ledges of the World Trade Center on a peaceful September morning. Death toll: 3,000.
They tell us to "never forget." First, let's stop misremembering.
by Michelle Malkin
The third anniversary of Sept. 11 is upon us. We remain at war -- and the media remain in denial.
How many times have you picked up a newspaper and read about terrorist attacks perpetrated not by Muslim terrorists, but by generic "militants" or "guerrillas" or "rebels" or, as Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes noted the Pakistan Times called them, "activists"?
Contrast the media whitewashing of our Islamofascist enemies with the press coverage of the Waco, Texas, siege in 1993 -- which constantly reminded us that David Koresh and his Branch Davidian followers were members of a "peculiar religious sect" (New York Times, March 3, 1993) and "a group of religious zealots with a known propensity for violence" (Washington Post, March 2, 1993) who were steeped in a "culture of Christian extremism" (San Francisco Chronicle, April 20, 1993).
A Nexis search of the terms "Branch Davidian" and "religious" and "cult" in The New York Times for the year 1993 yielded 151 hits. The vast majority of these references were in headlines and news articles, as opposed to editorials, letters or book reviews. A Nexis search of the terms "al Qaeda" and "religious" and "cult" in The New York Times for the year 2004 yielded just one article -- a magazine piece in March.
The mainstream media pounded President Bush for trying to explain that the War on Terror is unwinnable in a conventional sense. The mainstream press itself proves the president's point every time its reporters disguise the deadly fanatical nature of our opponents in this global war. How are we to win a war against blood-spattered enemies whom our own free press continues to protect through politically correct sanitization?
It wasn't no-name militants or wayward guerrillas who have butchered, beheaded and slaughtered thousands of innocents over the last three years alone. Anniversary reality check:
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Russia stabbed babies to death, shot toddlers in the back, forced children to eat rose petals and drink their own urine, raped teenage girls, executed their teachers and blew themselves up in a crowded school gymnasium. Death toll: 338.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Spain detonated bombs on four commuter trains during Madrid's rush hour. Death toll: 190.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Bali blew up a beach resort with an electronically triggered bomb at one bar and a car bomb hidden in a van at another nightclub filled with young Western tourists on holiday. Death toll: 202.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Pakistan kidnapped and beheaded American journalist Daniel Pearl.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Saudi Arabia kidnapped and beheaded American engineer Paul Johnson.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Iraq kidnapped and beheaded American independent contractor Nick Berg.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Iraq kidnapped and executed Italian security guard Fabrizio Quattrocchi.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in the Philippines kidnapped and killed American missionary Martin Burnham.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Israel engineered near-simultaneous suicide attacks on two buses, killing at least 15 people.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Morocco waged suicide bombing attacks in Casablanca.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Turkey bombed synagogues and the British consulate.
In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in America hijacked and incinerated three planes full of men, women and children, trapped pregnant women and firefighters in smoke-filled stairways, and forced office workers to leap 99 stories to their deaths after saying final prayers from the ledges of the World Trade Center on a peaceful September morning. Death toll: 3,000.
They tell us to "never forget." First, let's stop misremembering.
Thursday, September 09, 2004
From Investor's Business Daily
En Guard
Campaign '04: Our commander-in-chief has served honorably in the only war that counts in this election — the war on terror.
In the aftermath of polls showing President Bush with a double-digit lead, the Boston Globe, CBS Evening News and "60 Minutes II," as well as a 527 group called "Texans for Truth," have resurrected the issue of Bush's National Guard service.
"New information," according to Terry McAuliffe, head of the Democratic National Committee, shows the president "did not serve honorably."
Questions about Bush's military service may have been relevant in 2000, when he was first seeking the office of commander-in-chief. But he has been commander-in-chief for more than 3 1/2 years. And in that capacity he has served quite honorably indeed.
America's parents are more worried about whether their school will become the next Beslan, not whether Bush fulfilled every jot and tittle of his Guard obligation, which he did, or whether this person or that remembers seeing him.
It is understandable that on the third anniversary of 9-11 the Kerry campaign does not want us to focus on the fact that in those three years no American has died in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. No planes have been hijacked. No trains have exploded. No hotels have blown up. No schoolchildren have been massacred.
This is not by coincidence.
Speaking of coincidence, has anyone noticed this barrage began shortly after Kerry spoke with Bill Clinton, another man who "did not serve" in Vietnam, and after the Kerry campaign brought on board former Clinton attack dogs James Carville and Paul Begala?
Not long ago liberals like John Kerry thought it was splendid to have as president a legitimate draft-dodger who "loathed" the military and spent his Vietnam years pondering his "political viability" while he smoked pot without inhaling at Oxford.
Over the term of the Vietnam War, 8.7 million served on active duty, of which 2.7 million served in Vietnam and surrounding waters and airspace. About 6 million "did not serve" in Vietnam.
But nobody questions the service of those who manned the missile silos in North Dakota, who sat in tanks in Germany watching the Fulda Gap, or maintained their planes at airfields in England.
This absurd characterization of Bush as "missing in action" is a gratuitous slap in the face to the 2 million men who served in the Guard from 1964 to 1975, and millions more before and since Vietnam.
Only his unit's return to continental air defense before Bush finished flight training made it unlikely he would fly in combat.
The F-102 Bush flew was designed primarily for defense against the then-still-viable threat of Soviet bombers. Units charged with this task were the best of the best. They avoided nothing.
Bush's flight instructor, retired Col. Maurice H. Udell, is quoted as saying, "I would rank him in the top 5% of pilots I knew."
Ironically, the F-16s that escorted Air Force One to safety on 9-11 were from Bush's old unit. Before that day, Guard squadrons were America's sole homeland air defense, and only Guard fighters were scrambled to protect us that fateful day.
To this day, it is Guard fighters that scramble to escort errant aircraft. The Guard pilots who flew then and fly now were never "missing in action." Hail to the commander-in-chief.
En Guard
Campaign '04: Our commander-in-chief has served honorably in the only war that counts in this election — the war on terror.
In the aftermath of polls showing President Bush with a double-digit lead, the Boston Globe, CBS Evening News and "60 Minutes II," as well as a 527 group called "Texans for Truth," have resurrected the issue of Bush's National Guard service.
"New information," according to Terry McAuliffe, head of the Democratic National Committee, shows the president "did not serve honorably."
Questions about Bush's military service may have been relevant in 2000, when he was first seeking the office of commander-in-chief. But he has been commander-in-chief for more than 3 1/2 years. And in that capacity he has served quite honorably indeed.
America's parents are more worried about whether their school will become the next Beslan, not whether Bush fulfilled every jot and tittle of his Guard obligation, which he did, or whether this person or that remembers seeing him.
It is understandable that on the third anniversary of 9-11 the Kerry campaign does not want us to focus on the fact that in those three years no American has died in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. No planes have been hijacked. No trains have exploded. No hotels have blown up. No schoolchildren have been massacred.
This is not by coincidence.
Speaking of coincidence, has anyone noticed this barrage began shortly after Kerry spoke with Bill Clinton, another man who "did not serve" in Vietnam, and after the Kerry campaign brought on board former Clinton attack dogs James Carville and Paul Begala?
Not long ago liberals like John Kerry thought it was splendid to have as president a legitimate draft-dodger who "loathed" the military and spent his Vietnam years pondering his "political viability" while he smoked pot without inhaling at Oxford.
Over the term of the Vietnam War, 8.7 million served on active duty, of which 2.7 million served in Vietnam and surrounding waters and airspace. About 6 million "did not serve" in Vietnam.
But nobody questions the service of those who manned the missile silos in North Dakota, who sat in tanks in Germany watching the Fulda Gap, or maintained their planes at airfields in England.
This absurd characterization of Bush as "missing in action" is a gratuitous slap in the face to the 2 million men who served in the Guard from 1964 to 1975, and millions more before and since Vietnam.
Only his unit's return to continental air defense before Bush finished flight training made it unlikely he would fly in combat.
The F-102 Bush flew was designed primarily for defense against the then-still-viable threat of Soviet bombers. Units charged with this task were the best of the best. They avoided nothing.
Bush's flight instructor, retired Col. Maurice H. Udell, is quoted as saying, "I would rank him in the top 5% of pilots I knew."
Ironically, the F-16s that escorted Air Force One to safety on 9-11 were from Bush's old unit. Before that day, Guard squadrons were America's sole homeland air defense, and only Guard fighters were scrambled to protect us that fateful day.
To this day, it is Guard fighters that scramble to escort errant aircraft. The Guard pilots who flew then and fly now were never "missing in action." Hail to the commander-in-chief.
From The Weekly Standard. More evidence, if any is needed, about the way the blogosphere is changing the way we receive news.
Is It a Hoax?
Experts weigh in on the 60 Minutes documents. Says one: "I'm a Kerry supporter myself, but . . . I'm 99% sure that these documents were not produced in the early 1970s."
by Stephen F. Hayes
DOCUMENTS CITED Wednesday by 60 Minutes in a widely-publicized expose of George W. Bush's National Guard Service are very likely forgeries, according to several experts on document authenticity and typography. The documents--four memos from Killian to himself or his files written in 1972 and 1973--appear to indicate that Bush refused or ignored orders to have a physical exam required to continue flying. CBS News anchor Dan Rather reported the segment and sourced the documents this way: "60 Minutes has obtained a number of documents we are told were taken from Col. Killian's personal file," he said. The 60 Minutes story served as the basis for follow-up news reports for dozens of news organizations across the country. The memos were almost immediately questioned in the blog world, with blog Power Line leading the charge.
And according to several forensic document experts contacted by THE WEEKLY STANDARD say the Killian memos appear to be forgeries. Although it is nearly impossible to establish with certainty the authenticity of documents without a careful examination of the originals, several irregularities in the Killian memos suggest that CBS may have been the victim of a hoax.
"These sure look like forgeries," says William Flynn, a forensic document expert widely considered the nation's top analyst of computer-generated documents. Flynn looked at copies of the documents posted on the CBS News website. Flynn says, "I would say it looks very likely that these documents could not have existed" in the early 1970s, when they were allegedly written.
Several other experts agree. "They look mighty suspicious," says a veteran forensic document expert who asked not to be quoted by name. Richard Polt, a Xavier University philosophy professor who operates a website dedicated to typewriters, says that while he is not an expert on typesetting, the documents "look like typical word-processed documents."
There are several reasons these experts are skeptical of the authenticity of the Killian memos. First the typographic spacing is proportional, as is routine with professional typesetting and computer typography, not monospace, as was common in typewriters in the 1970s. (In proportional type, thin letters like "i" and "l" are spaced closer together than thick letters like "W" and "M". In monospace, all the letter widths are the same.)
Second, the font appears to be identical to the Times New Roman font that is the default typeface in Microsoft Word and other modern word processing programs. According to Flynn, the font is not listed in the Haas Atlas--the definitive encyclopedia of typewriter type fonts.
Third, the apostrophes are curlicues of the sort produced by word processors on personal computers, not the straight vertical hashmarks typical of typewriters. Finally, in some references to Bush's unit--the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron--the "th" is a superscript in a smaller size than the other type. Again, this is typical (and often done automatically) in modern word processing programs. Although several experts allow that such a rendering might have been theoretically possible in the early 1970s, it would have been highly unlikely. Superscripts produced on typewriters--the numbers preceding footnotes in term papers, for example--were almost always in the same size as the regular type.
So can we say with absolute certainty that the documents were forged? Not yet. Xavier University's Polt, in an email, offers two possible scenarios. "Either these are later transcriptions of earlier documents (which may have been handwritten or typed on a typewriter), or they are crude and amazingly foolish forgeries. I'm a Kerry supporter myself, but I won't let that cloud my objective judgment: I'm 99% sure that these documents were not produced in the early 1970s."
Says Flynn: "This looks pretty much like a hoax at this point in time."
CBS, in a statement Thursday afternoon, said it stands by the story. The network claims that its own document expert concluded the memos were authentic. There are several things CBS could do to clear up any confusion:
(1) Provide the name of the expert who authenticated the documents for Sixty Minutes.
(2) Provide the original documents to outside experts--William Flynn, Gerald Reynolds, and Peter Tytell seem to be the consensus top three in the United States--for further analysis.
(3) Provide more information on the source of the documents.
(A spokeswoman for CBS, Kelly Edwards, said she was overwhelmed with phone calls and did not respond to specific requests for comment.)
Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
Is It a Hoax?
Experts weigh in on the 60 Minutes documents. Says one: "I'm a Kerry supporter myself, but . . . I'm 99% sure that these documents were not produced in the early 1970s."
by Stephen F. Hayes
DOCUMENTS CITED Wednesday by 60 Minutes in a widely-publicized expose of George W. Bush's National Guard Service are very likely forgeries, according to several experts on document authenticity and typography. The documents--four memos from Killian to himself or his files written in 1972 and 1973--appear to indicate that Bush refused or ignored orders to have a physical exam required to continue flying. CBS News anchor Dan Rather reported the segment and sourced the documents this way: "60 Minutes has obtained a number of documents we are told were taken from Col. Killian's personal file," he said. The 60 Minutes story served as the basis for follow-up news reports for dozens of news organizations across the country. The memos were almost immediately questioned in the blog world, with blog Power Line leading the charge.
And according to several forensic document experts contacted by THE WEEKLY STANDARD say the Killian memos appear to be forgeries. Although it is nearly impossible to establish with certainty the authenticity of documents without a careful examination of the originals, several irregularities in the Killian memos suggest that CBS may have been the victim of a hoax.
"These sure look like forgeries," says William Flynn, a forensic document expert widely considered the nation's top analyst of computer-generated documents. Flynn looked at copies of the documents posted on the CBS News website. Flynn says, "I would say it looks very likely that these documents could not have existed" in the early 1970s, when they were allegedly written.
Several other experts agree. "They look mighty suspicious," says a veteran forensic document expert who asked not to be quoted by name. Richard Polt, a Xavier University philosophy professor who operates a website dedicated to typewriters, says that while he is not an expert on typesetting, the documents "look like typical word-processed documents."
There are several reasons these experts are skeptical of the authenticity of the Killian memos. First the typographic spacing is proportional, as is routine with professional typesetting and computer typography, not monospace, as was common in typewriters in the 1970s. (In proportional type, thin letters like "i" and "l" are spaced closer together than thick letters like "W" and "M". In monospace, all the letter widths are the same.)
Second, the font appears to be identical to the Times New Roman font that is the default typeface in Microsoft Word and other modern word processing programs. According to Flynn, the font is not listed in the Haas Atlas--the definitive encyclopedia of typewriter type fonts.
Third, the apostrophes are curlicues of the sort produced by word processors on personal computers, not the straight vertical hashmarks typical of typewriters. Finally, in some references to Bush's unit--the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron--the "th" is a superscript in a smaller size than the other type. Again, this is typical (and often done automatically) in modern word processing programs. Although several experts allow that such a rendering might have been theoretically possible in the early 1970s, it would have been highly unlikely. Superscripts produced on typewriters--the numbers preceding footnotes in term papers, for example--were almost always in the same size as the regular type.
So can we say with absolute certainty that the documents were forged? Not yet. Xavier University's Polt, in an email, offers two possible scenarios. "Either these are later transcriptions of earlier documents (which may have been handwritten or typed on a typewriter), or they are crude and amazingly foolish forgeries. I'm a Kerry supporter myself, but I won't let that cloud my objective judgment: I'm 99% sure that these documents were not produced in the early 1970s."
Says Flynn: "This looks pretty much like a hoax at this point in time."
CBS, in a statement Thursday afternoon, said it stands by the story. The network claims that its own document expert concluded the memos were authentic. There are several things CBS could do to clear up any confusion:
(1) Provide the name of the expert who authenticated the documents for Sixty Minutes.
(2) Provide the original documents to outside experts--William Flynn, Gerald Reynolds, and Peter Tytell seem to be the consensus top three in the United States--for further analysis.
(3) Provide more information on the source of the documents.
(A spokeswoman for CBS, Kelly Edwards, said she was overwhelmed with phone calls and did not respond to specific requests for comment.)
Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
From The New York Post:
BEYOND THE BUSH BOUNCE
BY DICK MORRIS
September 9, 2004 -- PRESIDENT Bush enters Sep tember with a remarkable double-digit lead as a result of one of the most successful conventions in recent years. The key to the GOP success was, of course, its focus on terrorism, reminding Americans what a dangerous world we inhabit. The Republicans also moved to the center, featuring pro-choice and socially moderate orators like Rudy Giuliani, Sen. Zell Miller and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The Democrats don't understand the need to move to the center. Bob Shrum, Kerry's — and Ted Kennedy's — key strategist, makes his living by appealing to the party's base. The addition of James Carville and Paul Begala to the team just reinforces the tendency to tack to the left, embracing an economic populism that resonates with 40 percent of the voters but leaves the rest cold.
After all, when Clinton needed to win 43 percent of the vote to get elected in 1992 against Bush, as Ross Perot split the Republican vote, he relied on Carville and Begala. But when he needed to win half the voters in the 1996 campaign, as Perot's appeal diminished, they were nowhere to be seen.
Carville and Begala will likely focus on "the economy, stupid," which is a needed correction for Kerry — whose current strategy of trying to beat Bush on terrorism brings to mind Winston Churchill's characterization of fighting a land war in Asia against Japan in World War II: "Going into the water to fight the shark."
But in its focus on the economy, the Kerry team is likely to lose sight of one basic problem: In running against a bad economy, it is helpful if the economy is bad. With an unemployment rate approaching 5 percent, they'll have a hard time making the case.
The decision to bring in Carville and Begala also begs a more fundamental question: Do they want Kerry to win?
Both men are primarily loyal to the Clintons — Bill and Hillary. Clearly, the former president would like the former first lady to be president in 2008. And a Kerry victory would stand in the way.
An axiom of politics is that generally you want your campaign advisers to hope that you win — and Carville and Begala may not pass that standard.
Bush's post convention bounce is likely to linger until the debates. He will get another boost this weekend as we mark the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, reminding Americans, once more, how important it is to keep Bush at the helm.
How big is Bush's lead? Don't believe the surveys that show it in the 5- to 7-point range. Believe the surveys of Time and Newsweek, which show a lead in excess of 10 points.
The difference is because pollsters disagree about whether or not to weight their results to keep constant the ratio of Republicans, Democrats and Independents in their sample. Some polling firms treat party affiliation as a demographic constant and, when they find that their sample has too many Republicans, they weight down each Republican interview and assign an extra weight to each Democratic response.
But other polling firms — and I — disagree. We feel that political party is not a demographic, like gender or race or age. If the survey finds more Republicans than usual, we think it's because the country has become more Republican, so we treat the result as a indicator of national mood, not of statistical error.
Time and Newsweek both picked up major moves toward the GOP in the wake of the convention. Likely the other firms did too, but they treated the finding as a mistake and weighed down the Republican interviews, making the race appear to be closer than it really is.
The debates are likely to help Bush, since Kerry's supporters are so divided on the war and on terrorism. Almost whatever Kerry says is likely to lose him a share of his voters. For example, 37 percent of his supporters told the Rasmussen Poll that they want America to give priority to making democracy work in Iraq, while 54 percent want Kerry to emphasize troop withdrawal. So when Kerry said Monday that he'd prioritize bringing the troops home, his comments appealed to the majority of his voters but alienated more than a third of them. The debates are fraught with such traps.
So look for September to be a good Bush month. But, in October, Kerry will close at least part of the gap. Democrats always do.
BEYOND THE BUSH BOUNCE
BY DICK MORRIS
September 9, 2004 -- PRESIDENT Bush enters Sep tember with a remarkable double-digit lead as a result of one of the most successful conventions in recent years. The key to the GOP success was, of course, its focus on terrorism, reminding Americans what a dangerous world we inhabit. The Republicans also moved to the center, featuring pro-choice and socially moderate orators like Rudy Giuliani, Sen. Zell Miller and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The Democrats don't understand the need to move to the center. Bob Shrum, Kerry's — and Ted Kennedy's — key strategist, makes his living by appealing to the party's base. The addition of James Carville and Paul Begala to the team just reinforces the tendency to tack to the left, embracing an economic populism that resonates with 40 percent of the voters but leaves the rest cold.
After all, when Clinton needed to win 43 percent of the vote to get elected in 1992 against Bush, as Ross Perot split the Republican vote, he relied on Carville and Begala. But when he needed to win half the voters in the 1996 campaign, as Perot's appeal diminished, they were nowhere to be seen.
Carville and Begala will likely focus on "the economy, stupid," which is a needed correction for Kerry — whose current strategy of trying to beat Bush on terrorism brings to mind Winston Churchill's characterization of fighting a land war in Asia against Japan in World War II: "Going into the water to fight the shark."
But in its focus on the economy, the Kerry team is likely to lose sight of one basic problem: In running against a bad economy, it is helpful if the economy is bad. With an unemployment rate approaching 5 percent, they'll have a hard time making the case.
The decision to bring in Carville and Begala also begs a more fundamental question: Do they want Kerry to win?
Both men are primarily loyal to the Clintons — Bill and Hillary. Clearly, the former president would like the former first lady to be president in 2008. And a Kerry victory would stand in the way.
An axiom of politics is that generally you want your campaign advisers to hope that you win — and Carville and Begala may not pass that standard.
Bush's post convention bounce is likely to linger until the debates. He will get another boost this weekend as we mark the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, reminding Americans, once more, how important it is to keep Bush at the helm.
How big is Bush's lead? Don't believe the surveys that show it in the 5- to 7-point range. Believe the surveys of Time and Newsweek, which show a lead in excess of 10 points.
The difference is because pollsters disagree about whether or not to weight their results to keep constant the ratio of Republicans, Democrats and Independents in their sample. Some polling firms treat party affiliation as a demographic constant and, when they find that their sample has too many Republicans, they weight down each Republican interview and assign an extra weight to each Democratic response.
But other polling firms — and I — disagree. We feel that political party is not a demographic, like gender or race or age. If the survey finds more Republicans than usual, we think it's because the country has become more Republican, so we treat the result as a indicator of national mood, not of statistical error.
Time and Newsweek both picked up major moves toward the GOP in the wake of the convention. Likely the other firms did too, but they treated the finding as a mistake and weighed down the Republican interviews, making the race appear to be closer than it really is.
The debates are likely to help Bush, since Kerry's supporters are so divided on the war and on terrorism. Almost whatever Kerry says is likely to lose him a share of his voters. For example, 37 percent of his supporters told the Rasmussen Poll that they want America to give priority to making democracy work in Iraq, while 54 percent want Kerry to emphasize troop withdrawal. So when Kerry said Monday that he'd prioritize bringing the troops home, his comments appealed to the majority of his voters but alienated more than a third of them. The debates are fraught with such traps.
So look for September to be a good Bush month. But, in October, Kerry will close at least part of the gap. Democrats always do.
John Kerry, Patriot?
By Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer
The people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. -- St. Matthew 15:8
The American phrase “lip service” is derived from this Biblical quotation. It connotes insincerity, or “expressed with the lips, but not acted upon or believed.” Although the current democrat presidential campaign has been rife with lip service on countless subjects, among the most objectionable—often reverentially uttered, mantra-like, not just by democrats, but by reporters, TV talking heads, and, regrettably, even prominent Republicans—is that John Kerry is a “patriot.”
Even the slightest doubt expressed about Kerry’s patriotism will evoke vigorous denial that runs the gamut from raised eyebrows to utter disdain to uncontrollable wrath. As we saw when Kerry appeared at a late-night Ohio rally following the close of the Republican Convention, he is stung even by a non-attack: “They have attacked my patriotism!” Kerry bellowed.
Alas, they had not.
It is one thing for President Bush and Vice President Cheney to remain above the fray on this issue. But former prisoner of war John McCain knows better, the savvy former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, should know better, and democrat Senator Zell Miller, in a fiery oration denouncing Kerry’s senatorial voting record, at least implied that he knew better.
Before independent-minded members of either party, let alone the sought-after bloc of “undecideds,” make up their minds about John Kerry’s alleged patriotism, let them first ponder this definition: A “patriot” is “a person who loves and loyally or zealously supports his own country.” (Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language).
Then let them test that definition, as we have, against some damning facts:
*
A patriot does not flee when comrades are in danger, no matter what the perceived threat.
A patriot does not fake or exaggerate minor wounds in order to garner medals.
A patriot does not “somehow” obtain three different citations for a single medal, the latter two sanitizing the first.
A patriot does not bail out from a one-year combat assignment after only four months, by taking advantage of a loophole in an obscure regulation, leaving his “brothers” to face the enemy.
*
A patriot does not appear before a committee of the United States Senate looking like a cartoon version of a Vietnam veteran, wearing ribbons on unkept fatigues.
A patriot does not give ghost-written testimony to that senate committee, attacking his country.
A patriot does not take an oath before that senate committee, and then proceed to lie through his teeth.
A patriot does not use his televised testimony before that senate committee to accuse American troops—including those still in the field.
A patriot does not hand our communist enemies such anti-American propaganda, which can be—and was—then used as a tool in the torture of American prisoners of war.
A patriot does not falsely accuse himself of committing war crimes in order to make a political-theater statement against the Vietnam War.
A patriot does not associate with potential murderers, conspiring to assassinate American political leaders.
A patriot does not make common cause with traitors like Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden and Ramsey Clark, and other America-haters who give aid and comfort to our nation’s enemies.
A patriot does not march around the Capitol of the United States of America carrying an upside down American flag.
A patriot does not, during wartime, organize and participate in a sham investigation of American “war crimes” (Winter Soldier Investigation)— paid for by Jane Fonda and designed to spout communist propaganda and undermine and embarrass our military.
A patriot does not organize and participate in antiwar protests, nor march under the communist Vietnamese flag, and defile military medals by throwing them away—especially while Americans are in combat.
A patriot does not act as spokesman for an organization that is a front for the very enemy that the United States of America is fighting.
A patriot does not associate with an organization (Vietnam Veterans Against the War) admittedly in bed with the Communist Party USA.
A patriot does not write a book with a cover that desecrates the American flag, and contents that disparage his country.
A patriot does not, while still a member of the United States Navy, fraternize in Paris with communist enemies whose troops, at that very moment, are killing Americans and torturing American prisoners of war.
A patriot does not urge acceptance of the Vietnamese communists’ proposal to end the war—on their terms, not ours.
*
A patriot does not vote against virtually every piece of national security and related legislation—laws that would make our country stronger and safer.
A patriot does not refuse to appropriate funds to support American forces, fighting for their country in Iraq.
*
A patriot does not attempt to suppress a book critical of his military service by putting pressure on its publisher and on booksellers.
A patriot does not unleash his lawyers on TV station managers, threatening them with legal and administrative action should they air advertisements critical of his military service.
A patriot does not allow colleagues and supporters to call the President of the United States a liar, and much worse—particularly in time of war.
A patriot does not denigrate legitimate draft deferments once granted the Vice President of the United States, who later served in Congress, then as Chief-of-Staff to a President, and later as Secretary of Defense during wartime.
A patriot does not silently accept his photograph being displayed in the Vietnam communists’ “War Crimes Museum,” along with others who helped the Vietnamese communists win the war.
A patriot is not willing to surrender American sovereignty to the United Nations under the guise of “multilateralism.”
A patriot does not refuse to make all of his military records public, especially in the face of a loud public clamor.
A patriot does not allow his Silver Star medal to be falsely embellished with a Combat “V” that is unauthorized and possibly illegal.
A patriot does not denigrate America’s National Guard and Reserve forces, who throughout this nation’s history have performed with distinction in our defense.
A patriot does not promise a more “sensitive” War on Terrorism, no matter how “politically correct” that notion may be.
A patriot does not wrap himself in the American flag for political advantage, after spending a mere three months in a combat zone.
*
When one adds up these facts, one has every right to conclude, as we have, that John Kerry has never been, and is not now, a patriot—and more: that to say otherwise, is merely to pay lip service.
John Kerry, Patriot?
By Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer
The people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. -- St. Matthew 15:8
The American phrase “lip service” is derived from this Biblical quotation. It connotes insincerity, or “expressed with the lips, but not acted upon or believed.” Although the current democrat presidential campaign has been rife with lip service on countless subjects, among the most objectionable—often reverentially uttered, mantra-like, not just by democrats, but by reporters, TV talking heads, and, regrettably, even prominent Republicans—is that John Kerry is a “patriot.”
Even the slightest doubt expressed about Kerry’s patriotism will evoke vigorous denial that runs the gamut from raised eyebrows to utter disdain to uncontrollable wrath. As we saw when Kerry appeared at a late-night Ohio rally following the close of the Republican Convention, he is stung even by a non-attack: “They have attacked my patriotism!” Kerry bellowed.
Alas, they had not.
It is one thing for President Bush and Vice President Cheney to remain above the fray on this issue. But former prisoner of war John McCain knows better, the savvy former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, should know better, and democrat Senator Zell Miller, in a fiery oration denouncing Kerry’s senatorial voting record, at least implied that he knew better.
Before independent-minded members of either party, let alone the sought-after bloc of “undecideds,” make up their minds about John Kerry’s alleged patriotism, let them first ponder this definition: A “patriot” is “a person who loves and loyally or zealously supports his own country.” (Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language).
Then let them test that definition, as we have, against some damning facts:
*
A patriot does not flee when comrades are in danger, no matter what the perceived threat.
A patriot does not fake or exaggerate minor wounds in order to garner medals.
A patriot does not “somehow” obtain three different citations for a single medal, the latter two sanitizing the first.
A patriot does not bail out from a one-year combat assignment after only four months, by taking advantage of a loophole in an obscure regulation, leaving his “brothers” to face the enemy.
*
A patriot does not appear before a committee of the United States Senate looking like a cartoon version of a Vietnam veteran, wearing ribbons on unkept fatigues.
A patriot does not give ghost-written testimony to that senate committee, attacking his country.
A patriot does not take an oath before that senate committee, and then proceed to lie through his teeth.
A patriot does not use his televised testimony before that senate committee to accuse American troops—including those still in the field.
A patriot does not hand our communist enemies such anti-American propaganda, which can be—and was—then used as a tool in the torture of American prisoners of war.
A patriot does not falsely accuse himself of committing war crimes in order to make a political-theater statement against the Vietnam War.
A patriot does not associate with potential murderers, conspiring to assassinate American political leaders.
A patriot does not make common cause with traitors like Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden and Ramsey Clark, and other America-haters who give aid and comfort to our nation’s enemies.
A patriot does not march around the Capitol of the United States of America carrying an upside down American flag.
A patriot does not, during wartime, organize and participate in a sham investigation of American “war crimes” (Winter Soldier Investigation)— paid for by Jane Fonda and designed to spout communist propaganda and undermine and embarrass our military.
A patriot does not organize and participate in antiwar protests, nor march under the communist Vietnamese flag, and defile military medals by throwing them away—especially while Americans are in combat.
A patriot does not act as spokesman for an organization that is a front for the very enemy that the United States of America is fighting.
A patriot does not associate with an organization (Vietnam Veterans Against the War) admittedly in bed with the Communist Party USA.
A patriot does not write a book with a cover that desecrates the American flag, and contents that disparage his country.
A patriot does not, while still a member of the United States Navy, fraternize in Paris with communist enemies whose troops, at that very moment, are killing Americans and torturing American prisoners of war.
A patriot does not urge acceptance of the Vietnamese communists’ proposal to end the war—on their terms, not ours.
*
A patriot does not vote against virtually every piece of national security and related legislation—laws that would make our country stronger and safer.
A patriot does not refuse to appropriate funds to support American forces, fighting for their country in Iraq.
*
A patriot does not attempt to suppress a book critical of his military service by putting pressure on its publisher and on booksellers.
A patriot does not unleash his lawyers on TV station managers, threatening them with legal and administrative action should they air advertisements critical of his military service.
A patriot does not allow colleagues and supporters to call the President of the United States a liar, and much worse—particularly in time of war.
A patriot does not denigrate legitimate draft deferments once granted the Vice President of the United States, who later served in Congress, then as Chief-of-Staff to a President, and later as Secretary of Defense during wartime.
A patriot does not silently accept his photograph being displayed in the Vietnam communists’ “War Crimes Museum,” along with others who helped the Vietnamese communists win the war.
A patriot is not willing to surrender American sovereignty to the United Nations under the guise of “multilateralism.”
A patriot does not refuse to make all of his military records public, especially in the face of a loud public clamor.
A patriot does not allow his Silver Star medal to be falsely embellished with a Combat “V” that is unauthorized and possibly illegal.
A patriot does not denigrate America’s National Guard and Reserve forces, who throughout this nation’s history have performed with distinction in our defense.
A patriot does not promise a more “sensitive” War on Terrorism, no matter how “politically correct” that notion may be.
A patriot does not wrap himself in the American flag for political advantage, after spending a mere three months in a combat zone.
*
When one adds up these facts, one has every right to conclude, as we have, that John Kerry has never been, and is not now, a patriot—and more: that to say otherwise, is merely to pay lip service.
By Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer
The people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. -- St. Matthew 15:8
The American phrase “lip service” is derived from this Biblical quotation. It connotes insincerity, or “expressed with the lips, but not acted upon or believed.” Although the current democrat presidential campaign has been rife with lip service on countless subjects, among the most objectionable—often reverentially uttered, mantra-like, not just by democrats, but by reporters, TV talking heads, and, regrettably, even prominent Republicans—is that John Kerry is a “patriot.”
Even the slightest doubt expressed about Kerry’s patriotism will evoke vigorous denial that runs the gamut from raised eyebrows to utter disdain to uncontrollable wrath. As we saw when Kerry appeared at a late-night Ohio rally following the close of the Republican Convention, he is stung even by a non-attack: “They have attacked my patriotism!” Kerry bellowed.
Alas, they had not.
It is one thing for President Bush and Vice President Cheney to remain above the fray on this issue. But former prisoner of war John McCain knows better, the savvy former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, should know better, and democrat Senator Zell Miller, in a fiery oration denouncing Kerry’s senatorial voting record, at least implied that he knew better.
Before independent-minded members of either party, let alone the sought-after bloc of “undecideds,” make up their minds about John Kerry’s alleged patriotism, let them first ponder this definition: A “patriot” is “a person who loves and loyally or zealously supports his own country.” (Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language).
Then let them test that definition, as we have, against some damning facts:
*
A patriot does not flee when comrades are in danger, no matter what the perceived threat.
A patriot does not fake or exaggerate minor wounds in order to garner medals.
A patriot does not “somehow” obtain three different citations for a single medal, the latter two sanitizing the first.
A patriot does not bail out from a one-year combat assignment after only four months, by taking advantage of a loophole in an obscure regulation, leaving his “brothers” to face the enemy.
*
A patriot does not appear before a committee of the United States Senate looking like a cartoon version of a Vietnam veteran, wearing ribbons on unkept fatigues.
A patriot does not give ghost-written testimony to that senate committee, attacking his country.
A patriot does not take an oath before that senate committee, and then proceed to lie through his teeth.
A patriot does not use his televised testimony before that senate committee to accuse American troops—including those still in the field.
A patriot does not hand our communist enemies such anti-American propaganda, which can be—and was—then used as a tool in the torture of American prisoners of war.
A patriot does not falsely accuse himself of committing war crimes in order to make a political-theater statement against the Vietnam War.
A patriot does not associate with potential murderers, conspiring to assassinate American political leaders.
A patriot does not make common cause with traitors like Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden and Ramsey Clark, and other America-haters who give aid and comfort to our nation’s enemies.
A patriot does not march around the Capitol of the United States of America carrying an upside down American flag.
A patriot does not, during wartime, organize and participate in a sham investigation of American “war crimes” (Winter Soldier Investigation)— paid for by Jane Fonda and designed to spout communist propaganda and undermine and embarrass our military.
A patriot does not organize and participate in antiwar protests, nor march under the communist Vietnamese flag, and defile military medals by throwing them away—especially while Americans are in combat.
A patriot does not act as spokesman for an organization that is a front for the very enemy that the United States of America is fighting.
A patriot does not associate with an organization (Vietnam Veterans Against the War) admittedly in bed with the Communist Party USA.
A patriot does not write a book with a cover that desecrates the American flag, and contents that disparage his country.
A patriot does not, while still a member of the United States Navy, fraternize in Paris with communist enemies whose troops, at that very moment, are killing Americans and torturing American prisoners of war.
A patriot does not urge acceptance of the Vietnamese communists’ proposal to end the war—on their terms, not ours.
*
A patriot does not vote against virtually every piece of national security and related legislation—laws that would make our country stronger and safer.
A patriot does not refuse to appropriate funds to support American forces, fighting for their country in Iraq.
*
A patriot does not attempt to suppress a book critical of his military service by putting pressure on its publisher and on booksellers.
A patriot does not unleash his lawyers on TV station managers, threatening them with legal and administrative action should they air advertisements critical of his military service.
A patriot does not allow colleagues and supporters to call the President of the United States a liar, and much worse—particularly in time of war.
A patriot does not denigrate legitimate draft deferments once granted the Vice President of the United States, who later served in Congress, then as Chief-of-Staff to a President, and later as Secretary of Defense during wartime.
A patriot does not silently accept his photograph being displayed in the Vietnam communists’ “War Crimes Museum,” along with others who helped the Vietnamese communists win the war.
A patriot is not willing to surrender American sovereignty to the United Nations under the guise of “multilateralism.”
A patriot does not refuse to make all of his military records public, especially in the face of a loud public clamor.
A patriot does not allow his Silver Star medal to be falsely embellished with a Combat “V” that is unauthorized and possibly illegal.
A patriot does not denigrate America’s National Guard and Reserve forces, who throughout this nation’s history have performed with distinction in our defense.
A patriot does not promise a more “sensitive” War on Terrorism, no matter how “politically correct” that notion may be.
A patriot does not wrap himself in the American flag for political advantage, after spending a mere three months in a combat zone.
*
When one adds up these facts, one has every right to conclude, as we have, that John Kerry has never been, and is not now, a patriot—and more: that to say otherwise, is merely to pay lip service.
John Kerry, Patriot?
By Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer
The people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. -- St. Matthew 15:8
The American phrase “lip service” is derived from this Biblical quotation. It connotes insincerity, or “expressed with the lips, but not acted upon or believed.” Although the current democrat presidential campaign has been rife with lip service on countless subjects, among the most objectionable—often reverentially uttered, mantra-like, not just by democrats, but by reporters, TV talking heads, and, regrettably, even prominent Republicans—is that John Kerry is a “patriot.”
Even the slightest doubt expressed about Kerry’s patriotism will evoke vigorous denial that runs the gamut from raised eyebrows to utter disdain to uncontrollable wrath. As we saw when Kerry appeared at a late-night Ohio rally following the close of the Republican Convention, he is stung even by a non-attack: “They have attacked my patriotism!” Kerry bellowed.
Alas, they had not.
It is one thing for President Bush and Vice President Cheney to remain above the fray on this issue. But former prisoner of war John McCain knows better, the savvy former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, should know better, and democrat Senator Zell Miller, in a fiery oration denouncing Kerry’s senatorial voting record, at least implied that he knew better.
Before independent-minded members of either party, let alone the sought-after bloc of “undecideds,” make up their minds about John Kerry’s alleged patriotism, let them first ponder this definition: A “patriot” is “a person who loves and loyally or zealously supports his own country.” (Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language).
Then let them test that definition, as we have, against some damning facts:
*
A patriot does not flee when comrades are in danger, no matter what the perceived threat.
A patriot does not fake or exaggerate minor wounds in order to garner medals.
A patriot does not “somehow” obtain three different citations for a single medal, the latter two sanitizing the first.
A patriot does not bail out from a one-year combat assignment after only four months, by taking advantage of a loophole in an obscure regulation, leaving his “brothers” to face the enemy.
*
A patriot does not appear before a committee of the United States Senate looking like a cartoon version of a Vietnam veteran, wearing ribbons on unkept fatigues.
A patriot does not give ghost-written testimony to that senate committee, attacking his country.
A patriot does not take an oath before that senate committee, and then proceed to lie through his teeth.
A patriot does not use his televised testimony before that senate committee to accuse American troops—including those still in the field.
A patriot does not hand our communist enemies such anti-American propaganda, which can be—and was—then used as a tool in the torture of American prisoners of war.
A patriot does not falsely accuse himself of committing war crimes in order to make a political-theater statement against the Vietnam War.
A patriot does not associate with potential murderers, conspiring to assassinate American political leaders.
A patriot does not make common cause with traitors like Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden and Ramsey Clark, and other America-haters who give aid and comfort to our nation’s enemies.
A patriot does not march around the Capitol of the United States of America carrying an upside down American flag.
A patriot does not, during wartime, organize and participate in a sham investigation of American “war crimes” (Winter Soldier Investigation)— paid for by Jane Fonda and designed to spout communist propaganda and undermine and embarrass our military.
A patriot does not organize and participate in antiwar protests, nor march under the communist Vietnamese flag, and defile military medals by throwing them away—especially while Americans are in combat.
A patriot does not act as spokesman for an organization that is a front for the very enemy that the United States of America is fighting.
A patriot does not associate with an organization (Vietnam Veterans Against the War) admittedly in bed with the Communist Party USA.
A patriot does not write a book with a cover that desecrates the American flag, and contents that disparage his country.
A patriot does not, while still a member of the United States Navy, fraternize in Paris with communist enemies whose troops, at that very moment, are killing Americans and torturing American prisoners of war.
A patriot does not urge acceptance of the Vietnamese communists’ proposal to end the war—on their terms, not ours.
*
A patriot does not vote against virtually every piece of national security and related legislation—laws that would make our country stronger and safer.
A patriot does not refuse to appropriate funds to support American forces, fighting for their country in Iraq.
*
A patriot does not attempt to suppress a book critical of his military service by putting pressure on its publisher and on booksellers.
A patriot does not unleash his lawyers on TV station managers, threatening them with legal and administrative action should they air advertisements critical of his military service.
A patriot does not allow colleagues and supporters to call the President of the United States a liar, and much worse—particularly in time of war.
A patriot does not denigrate legitimate draft deferments once granted the Vice President of the United States, who later served in Congress, then as Chief-of-Staff to a President, and later as Secretary of Defense during wartime.
A patriot does not silently accept his photograph being displayed in the Vietnam communists’ “War Crimes Museum,” along with others who helped the Vietnamese communists win the war.
A patriot is not willing to surrender American sovereignty to the United Nations under the guise of “multilateralism.”
A patriot does not refuse to make all of his military records public, especially in the face of a loud public clamor.
A patriot does not allow his Silver Star medal to be falsely embellished with a Combat “V” that is unauthorized and possibly illegal.
A patriot does not denigrate America’s National Guard and Reserve forces, who throughout this nation’s history have performed with distinction in our defense.
A patriot does not promise a more “sensitive” War on Terrorism, no matter how “politically correct” that notion may be.
A patriot does not wrap himself in the American flag for political advantage, after spending a mere three months in a combat zone.
*
When one adds up these facts, one has every right to conclude, as we have, that John Kerry has never been, and is not now, a patriot—and more: that to say otherwise, is merely to pay lip service.
Bush’s National Guard years
Before you fall for Dems’ spin, here are the facts
by Byron York
What do you really know about George W. Bush’s time in the Air National Guard?
That he didn’t show up for duty in Alabama? That he missed a physical? That his daddy got him in?
News coverage of the president’s years in the Guard has tended to focus on one brief portion of that time — to the exclusion of virtually everything else. So just for the record, here, in full, is what Bush did:
The future president joined the Guard in May 1968. Almost immediately, he began an extended period of training. Six weeks of basic training. Fifty-three weeks of flight training. Twenty-one weeks of fighter-interceptor training.
That was 80 weeks to begin with, and there were other training periods thrown in as well. It was full-time work. By the time it was over, Bush had served nearly two years.
Not two years of weekends. Two years.
After training, Bush kept flying, racking up hundreds of hours in F-102 jets. As he did, he accumulated points toward his National Guard service requirements. At the time, guardsmen were required to accumulate a minimum of 50 points to meet their yearly obligation.
According to records released earlier this year, Bush earned 253 points in his first year, May 1968 to May 1969 (since he joined in May 1968, his service thereafter was measured on a May-to-May basis).
Bush earned 340 points in 1969-1970. He earned 137 points in 1970-1971. And he earned 112 points in 1971-1972. The numbers indicate that in his first four years, Bush not only showed up, he showed up a lot. Did you know that?
That brings the story to May 1972 — the time that has been the focus of so many news reports — when Bush “deserted” (according to anti-Bush filmmaker Michael Moore) or went “AWOL” (according to Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee).
Bush asked for permission to go to Alabama to work on a Senate campaign. His superior officers said OK. Requests like that weren’t unusual, says retired Col. William Campenni, who flew with Bush in 1970 and 1971.
“In 1972, there was an enormous glut of pilots,” Campenni says. “The Vietnam War was winding down, and the Air Force was putting pilots in desk jobs. In ’72 or ’73, if you were a pilot, active or Guard, and you had an obligation and wanted to get out, no problem. In fact, you were helping them solve their problem.”
So Bush stopped flying. From May 1972 to May 1973, he earned just 56 points — not much, but enough to meet his requirement.
Then, in 1973, as Bush made plans to leave the Guard and go to Harvard Business School, he again started showing up frequently.
In June and July of 1973, he accumulated 56 points, enough to meet the minimum requirement for the 1973-1974 year.
Then, at his request, he was given permission to go. Bush received an honorable discharge after serving five years, four months and five days of his original six-year commitment. By that time, however, he had accumulated enough points in each year to cover six years of service.
During his service, Bush received high marks as a pilot.
A 1970 evaluation said Bush “clearly stands out as a top notch fighter interceptor pilot” and was “a natural leader whom his contemporaries look to for leadership.”
A 1971 evaluation called Bush “an exceptionally fine young officer and pilot” who “continually flies intercept missions with the unit to increase his proficiency even further.” And a 1972 evaluation called Bush “an exceptional fighter interceptor pilot and officer.”
Now, it is only natural that news reports questioning Bush’s service — in The Boston Globe and The New York Times, on CBS and in other outlets — would come out now. Democrats are spitting mad over attacks on John Kerry’s record by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
And, as it is with Kerry, it’s reasonable to look at a candidate’s entire record, including his military service — or lack of it. Voters are perfectly able to decide whether it’s important or not in November.
The Kerry camp blames Bush for the Swift boat veterans’ attack, but anyone who has spent much time talking to the Swifties gets the sense that they are doing it entirely for their own reasons.
And it should be noted in passing that Kerry has personally questioned Bush’s service, while Bush has not personally questioned Kerry’s.
In April — before the Swift boat veterans had said a word — Kerry said Bush “has yet to explain to America whether or not, and tell the truth, about whether he showed up for duty.” Earlier, Kerry said, “Just because you get an honorable discharge does not, in fact, answer that question.”
Now, after the Swift boat episode, the spotlight has returned to Bush.
That’s fine. We should know as much as we can.
And perhaps someday Kerry will release more of his military records as well.
Byron York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: byork@thehill.com
Before you fall for Dems’ spin, here are the facts
by Byron York
What do you really know about George W. Bush’s time in the Air National Guard?
That he didn’t show up for duty in Alabama? That he missed a physical? That his daddy got him in?
News coverage of the president’s years in the Guard has tended to focus on one brief portion of that time — to the exclusion of virtually everything else. So just for the record, here, in full, is what Bush did:
The future president joined the Guard in May 1968. Almost immediately, he began an extended period of training. Six weeks of basic training. Fifty-three weeks of flight training. Twenty-one weeks of fighter-interceptor training.
That was 80 weeks to begin with, and there were other training periods thrown in as well. It was full-time work. By the time it was over, Bush had served nearly two years.
Not two years of weekends. Two years.
After training, Bush kept flying, racking up hundreds of hours in F-102 jets. As he did, he accumulated points toward his National Guard service requirements. At the time, guardsmen were required to accumulate a minimum of 50 points to meet their yearly obligation.
According to records released earlier this year, Bush earned 253 points in his first year, May 1968 to May 1969 (since he joined in May 1968, his service thereafter was measured on a May-to-May basis).
Bush earned 340 points in 1969-1970. He earned 137 points in 1970-1971. And he earned 112 points in 1971-1972. The numbers indicate that in his first four years, Bush not only showed up, he showed up a lot. Did you know that?
That brings the story to May 1972 — the time that has been the focus of so many news reports — when Bush “deserted” (according to anti-Bush filmmaker Michael Moore) or went “AWOL” (according to Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee).
Bush asked for permission to go to Alabama to work on a Senate campaign. His superior officers said OK. Requests like that weren’t unusual, says retired Col. William Campenni, who flew with Bush in 1970 and 1971.
“In 1972, there was an enormous glut of pilots,” Campenni says. “The Vietnam War was winding down, and the Air Force was putting pilots in desk jobs. In ’72 or ’73, if you were a pilot, active or Guard, and you had an obligation and wanted to get out, no problem. In fact, you were helping them solve their problem.”
So Bush stopped flying. From May 1972 to May 1973, he earned just 56 points — not much, but enough to meet his requirement.
Then, in 1973, as Bush made plans to leave the Guard and go to Harvard Business School, he again started showing up frequently.
In June and July of 1973, he accumulated 56 points, enough to meet the minimum requirement for the 1973-1974 year.
Then, at his request, he was given permission to go. Bush received an honorable discharge after serving five years, four months and five days of his original six-year commitment. By that time, however, he had accumulated enough points in each year to cover six years of service.
During his service, Bush received high marks as a pilot.
A 1970 evaluation said Bush “clearly stands out as a top notch fighter interceptor pilot” and was “a natural leader whom his contemporaries look to for leadership.”
A 1971 evaluation called Bush “an exceptionally fine young officer and pilot” who “continually flies intercept missions with the unit to increase his proficiency even further.” And a 1972 evaluation called Bush “an exceptional fighter interceptor pilot and officer.”
Now, it is only natural that news reports questioning Bush’s service — in The Boston Globe and The New York Times, on CBS and in other outlets — would come out now. Democrats are spitting mad over attacks on John Kerry’s record by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
And, as it is with Kerry, it’s reasonable to look at a candidate’s entire record, including his military service — or lack of it. Voters are perfectly able to decide whether it’s important or not in November.
The Kerry camp blames Bush for the Swift boat veterans’ attack, but anyone who has spent much time talking to the Swifties gets the sense that they are doing it entirely for their own reasons.
And it should be noted in passing that Kerry has personally questioned Bush’s service, while Bush has not personally questioned Kerry’s.
In April — before the Swift boat veterans had said a word — Kerry said Bush “has yet to explain to America whether or not, and tell the truth, about whether he showed up for duty.” Earlier, Kerry said, “Just because you get an honorable discharge does not, in fact, answer that question.”
Now, after the Swift boat episode, the spotlight has returned to Bush.
That’s fine. We should know as much as we can.
And perhaps someday Kerry will release more of his military records as well.
Byron York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: byork@thehill.com
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