Swift Boat Liars Backtracking

A short time ago, Texas's own T. Boone Pickens at a wealthy conservative get-together said he would give $1 million if anyone demonstrated the Swift Boat Veteran's allegations were untrue. Never one to pass up an easy million dollars Senator John Kerry said I'll take that offer.

Furiously backtracking, T. Boone is now attaching contingencies to the offer. To illustrate the extent of his ignorance about this subject among other new demands is that Kerry release all of his service records from 1971-1978. Kerry honorably served in the Navy from 1966-1970.

Continuing their record of enthusiastically applauding ignorance, the rightwingnut blogs are blasting the media for ignoring the challenge until Kerry accepted it.

PS, can I have a chunk of that million? Or at least get eRiposte a piece?

Kerry's medals and the real witnesses. More on the Swift Boat Liars.

From an Op-Ed by Veterans:

As was shamefully done previously against decorated veterans like John McCain and Max Cleland, extreme right-wing groups such as the so-called 'Swift-Boat Veterans for Truth' are again spreading lies meant to discredit a decorated veteran. A veteran who volunteered for combat, who was brave enough not only to withstand the rigors of battle but then the equally difficult struggle to speak the truth about wars inevitable dark side: savagery, stupidity, recklessness, maiming, and death. These are the truths of every war -- those necessary and those avoidable; those just and those unjust.

"The slander about John Kerry's Purple Hearts and courage in command is fallacious at best and spuriously shameful. More, the attacks against Kerry's post-discharge protest of Vietnam represent a concerted attempt to prevent others from speaking the necessary truth of their experience by those too cowardly to admit their own share in our flawed humanity...

Houstonian John O'Neil gets tapped to often do the Republican dirty work against Kerry, first for the Nixon White House, later for the Bush. Another Houstonian, Perry of Perry Homes, paid to set up the Swift Boat Liars and provided millions of their funding.

When voters go to the polls in November, McMahon said, they won't be choosing between John Kerry and "Unfit for Command" author John O'Neill; they'll be choosing between Kerry and Bush. "The choice is between a guy who volunteered to serve, went to war, fought on the front line, took enemy fire, was highly decorated, and saved the life of at least one of the troops -- and a guy who did everything he could to avoid service, jumped over 500 people to get into the National Guard, didn't show up for service in Alabama, and can't prove he was there."

Like many other Democrats, McMahon is incredulous that -- in light of Bush's record -- Vietnam service is even an issue in the campaign. "It seems to me that the president has an awful lot of explaining to do, particularly because he can't produce a single person, he can't remember where he lived, he can't remember who he hug out with, the folks he went drinking with, the bars he hung out in, and we're expected to take seriously their allegations about how many bullets were flying one day in Vietnam?"

Wayne Slater isn't surprised at all. Slater, the veteran Dallas Morning News reporter who coauthored "Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential," said Tuesday that the Swift Boat Veterans attack was entirely predictable. Slater has watched Karl Rove work for nearly two decades, and he said the "mark of Rove" in a campaign is always the same: Aim nasty attacks right at your opponent's strength, but keep your own fingerprints off them.

John Kerry was first a hero in Vietnam, where he volunteered to go instead of a safe birth at sea, and then taking on Nixon and the Republicans at home. How many people who believe the Swift Boat Liars even realize that all of the people who served on the Swift Boats during the disputed battles support Kerry?

Tags: Swift Boat Liars, John Kerry, T Boone Pickens, John O'Neill

Swift Boat 2004 vs. 'Swift Boat' 2008

The mass media has been using the phrase swift-boated recently without explaining that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were completely discredited liars. Eric Boehlert of Media Matters:

They manufactured nearly every claim they made about Kerry. They lied about documents; they lied about eyewitnesses. And they lied about their partisan leanings and connections....

There's just no way to liken [recent spin groups] with the Swift Boat Vets and their wholesale manufacturing of dates, quotes, events, and documentation.

It was a huge mistake for Kerry and his media people to not completely and utterly demolish the claims, leaving it up to smaller independent media and inside stories in newspapers to publish the truth about the Swift Boat Liars. The mass media and the Kerry campaign did not even notice the slandering attacks broadcast over Christian and rural television stations as 30-minute infomercials. Rural America did and believed these retired men in uniform calling Kerry a traitor who prolonged the war and aided the torture of POWs as they were not shown to be the liars they were.

That directly cost Kerry the election, when half the country is told you are a traitor by retired men in uniform and you ignore the attack.

I could go on and on about the lies from the Swift Boat Liars, led by our local attorney Liar-in-Chief and financed by our local Republican kingmaker, but the comprehensive lists of their lies are out there on the Internet if you know where to look.

Tags: swift boat liars, Kerry, 2004, 2008, SCLM

Letters about Kerry in Vietnam, Comments about Bush at Home

TWO LONG LETTERS I WILL PRINT IN FULL

This one came to me by email:

'Swift Boat Vets' evoke Nixon's ghost
By JOE BANGERT

The first weekend of the month marked both the 40th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the 30th anniversary of the disgraceful resignation of a very slippery GOP president named Nixon. And now Nixon's ghost appears in the current smear job by the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth against my good friend, longtime comrade and fellow Vietnam War veteran, John Kerry.

This group is deflecting criticism of George Bush's bellicose presidency by lies, lies and more damnable lies. Unleashed by Karl Rove and company, this attack ship of fools is having its third cruise around the truth in a futile attempt to besmirch Kerry's military service record. These GOP attack dogs now need to be muzzled by the truth.

Some of these attackers are veterans of the black propaganda used against such prior targets as Sen. John McCain, whom they called "The Manchurian Candidate" in 2000. Then in 2002 they turned their sights on Sen. Max Cleland, a triple-amputee veteran of the Vietnam War whose patriotism they attacked - and got away with it. Sen. McCain called these attacks on Kerry "dishonest and dishonorable" and called on George Bush to condemn their ad. Regrettably, George Bush has refused to do so. So who are these men who insist they are "not affiliated with any party"?

A report filed July 15 with the IRS shows initial funding for the group came from Houston home builder Bob R. Perry. Perry is a staunch GOP fund-raiser and donor of millions of dollars in Texas to the GOP, especially to the president's campaign as well as that of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Last year Perry gave $600,000 to 23 GOP candidates for the Texas Legislature, helping lift the GOP to its first takeover of the Texas House since Reconstruction. Perry gave $100,000 of the $158,750 received by the Swift Boat group.

The group has launched ads in key states, stating falsely that its members served with Kerry and "know him," and calling his combat valor into question. Lt. j.g. John Kerry served on three vessels, including two swift boats - PCF-94 and PCF-44. Each boat had a six-man crew - so the total universe of Kerry's real wartime comrades consisted of a band of a dozen brothers.

Tom Belodeau of Massachusetts, a close friend of John's,is now dead.

All remaining members of the crews in No. 94 and No. 44 are onboard the Kerry-Edwards campaign. Not one of these Swift Boat Veterans for Truth actually served with Kerry at all! Here is the Nixonian flashback, to 1971: John O'Neill, a Vietnam veteran and author of the soon-to-be-released book attacking Kerry's Vietnam service, did not serve on a swift boat at the same time as Kerry. Kerry was back home in the United States by the time O'Neill took command of his first unit. But back in 1971, Richard Nixon needed to counter anti-war groups such as Vietnam Veterans Against the War, of which Kerry and I were members. He tasked Chuck Colson (of Watergate infamy) to form an attack group against Kerry, led by the young John O'Neill. Yes, this is an old, bitter fight.

The main round of Kerry v. O'Neill occurred in June 1971 on the "Dick Cavett Show." O'Neill spent most of his airtime attacking Kerry's patriotism for criticizing the Vietnam War, rather than discussing the issues of war and peace. A newly released tape of Nixon's conversation with Kissinger, his national security adviser, reminded us that we had another corrupt GOP war president who sacrificed American lives by extending a war for the sake of his own campaign. Nixon said three months before the 1972 election: "South Vietnam probably can never even survive anyway. ... We also have to realize that winning an election is terribly important. It's terribly important this year."

So the war that John O'Neill defended on Cavett's show and that George W. Bush supported but chose not to serve on active duty comes down to not telling the truth to the American people. Nixon drew out the Vietnam War for political expediency. Thousands more died or were wounded by lies. O'Neill was rewarded for his efforts by receiving a clerkship to Nixon's favorite Supreme Court justice, William Rehnquist, and became a law partner with Lezar Harold, a former speechwriter for Nixon.

So now we have President George W. Bush, who lied about how a perceived threat in Iraq would harm us. And now we have the media trumpeting the war, with thousands of young Americans wounded and almost a thousand dead - for political expediency. Just as in Vietnam, the war is being eclipsed by other stories and the news of its dead and wounded fall farther back in the newspaper pages.

We who have personally known John Kerry and all of his crew members stand up for our country and urge Democrats, independents and Republicans to dump Bush in November. Our best bet is to hire the vet. Semper fidelis, John Kerry.

Joe Bangert of Brewster is a Veteran for Kerry.

This one was printed in the New York Times:

The View From the Boat
By JUDITH DROZ KEYES

On Feb. 28, 1969, my husband was the commander of one of three Swift boats traveling the Dong Cung in Vietnam to carry troops and supplies upriver. The events of that day, and what happened almost two weeks later on another Swift boat patrol, have become a source of controversy in the presidential campaign, with a group of veterans saying that John Kerry did not deserve the medals he won for what he did then. I know my husband thought otherwise.

The other two commanders - John Kerry and William Rood, an editor at The Chicago Tribune - have written of the courage they witnessed on Feb. 28. My husband, Lt. j.g. Donald Droz, who grew up in a small Missouri town and was a 1966 graduate of the United States Naval Academy, wrote to me about it in a letter dated March 6, 1969:

"I had quite a morning... Admiral [Elmo] Zumwalt, Commander Naval Forces Vietnam, flew to An Thoi from Saigon ... for a special awards presentation. To make a somewhat long story short, PCF's 23, 94 and 43 conducted an operation February 28th which we pulled off rather spectacularly. Anyway, for my part, I was awarded the Bronze Star Medal with Combat 'V.' I don't mean to blow my own horn, but I really am pleased with the award, and it is a rather significant medal. I'll bring the citation with me to Hawaii."

Don did bring the citation to Hawaii a few weeks later, and I traveled from our home in Pennsylvania with our infant daughter, Tracy, to meet him for his R&R. But before that meeting, Don and John Kerry and others were involved in another battle, on March 13. Don did not write to me about that battle. But he did tell me about it during our five days together in Hawaii - when he met our daughter for the first time, and held her for what turned out to be the last time.

In Hawaii, Don mostly talked about the future: how he wanted to come home, go to graduate school and then become involved in public service. But he also talked about Vietnam: about how much respect all the "Swifties" had for one another. I remember him saying that John Kerry was heading home, deservedly so, and that he admired his bravery and planned to see him that summer.

Don also talked about how hard it was to be in a situation where no one knew what was around the next bend or what the "rules" were or who was friend and who was foe. He told me he was convinced that what the United States was doing in Vietnam was pointless or worse and that, when he got home, he intended to speak out against it. But he was clear - and I have always understood - that he was criticizing the war itself and those who were deciding how to wage it, not those who were putting their lives on the line to do their duty honestly and bravely.

Those who had the courage to fight in Vietnam and, when they returned home, to tell of the reality of what they saw deserve our admiration. I am certain my husband would have been as appalled as I am at the spectacle of some veterans questioning others' service.

Don died on April 12, 1969, just two weeks after we said goodbye in Hawaii and two months before he would have come home. Ever since, I have felt a special obligation to speak the truth as I know he would have done.

Judith Droz Keyes, a lawyer, was a delegate to the 2004 Democratic convention.

Former Lt. Governor Ben Barnes on George Bush

"Let's talk a minute about John Kerry and George Bush, and I know them both. And I'm not name dropping, saying I know them both. See I got...I got a young man named George W. Bush into the National Guard when I was the Lt. Governor of Texas, and I'm not necessarily proud of that. (audience laughs)

"But, But I did it, and I got a lot of other people into the National Guard because I thought that's what people should do when you're in office and you helped a lot of rich people.

"And I walked to the Vietnam Memorial wall the other day and I looked at the names of the people that died in Vietnam, and I became more ashamed of myself than I've ever been because it's the worst thing I did was help a lot of wealthy supporters, and a lot of people who had family names of importance get into the National Guard. And I'm very sorry about that, and I'm ashamed. And I apologize to you, the voters of Texas. (Applause)"

Atrios transcibed a speech Barnes made to some Texas Democrats. The Houston Chronicle ran a shortened version of an AP article and I won't even bother linking to it. Here is the longer AP article.

Swift Boat Liar Ordered Men to Fire Upon Unarmed Fisherman

Swift Boat Veteran Bill Means speaks out

Roy F. "Latch" Hoffman, one of the co-founders of the pro-George W. Bush group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, had publicly criticized Kerry, a former Swift boat commander, for having brought back stories about alleged war crimes by U.S. forces -- often carried out, Kerry said in 1971, "with the full awareness of officers at all levels."

Seemed to him, Means said, his own Swift boat crew had come close to committing a war crime themselves one day. A senior officer, hitching a ride up the coast aboard their Swift boat, had ordered the crew to fire on a small group of unarmed Vietnamese fishermen working their nets in unrestricted waters, Means said. The boat's commanding officer had refused to comply. The officer who ordered this possible war crime - Captain Hoffman.

Election Challenges and Social Security and other Links

Berkeley City Council First Known City To Call For National Election Investigation
Cites Curtis Sworn Testimony Of Creating Fraud Software For GOP Official

Krugman On Social Security Systems
Based on other countries privatization neither saves money nor protects the elderly from poverty

Kerry Campaign Finally Demands Ohio Investigation

More developing stories at Raw Story

74% of Bush voters favor gay marriage or civil unions
68% of liberals cite faith and morals as important in deciding their vote, more than moderates

Conservatives Bilk Public on Medicare, Cash In With Drug Industry

DLC: Democrats Loving Corporations
The Democratic Leadership Council's addiction to contributions from Philip Morris, Texaco, and Merck is proof enough that its "centrism" is really a naked corporate agenda.

Molly Ivins - The Reality-Based Environment
Bush denying global warming is another of his delusions.

"I see fear in his eyes"
Some in GOP see DeLay leaving soon

Tom "The Hammer" DeLay as the most corrupt politician in Washington.

Chomsky: My guess is that the Bush administration planners will not call for a draft.

Young Democrats Want Control
Those who no longer believe in the Democrats as the Reform Party must cede control to new blood is the part I believe in. A lot of quotes from the weak New Democrat Lieberman wing.

Swift Boat Liars to Continue

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth raised $27.2 million, Franke said, most of it
in a three-month period starting in July. Texas home builder Robert Perry, a
longtime GOP contributor, gave the group $4 million.

In one measure of success, a poll in 12 battleground states taken on
election night by a Republican polling firm found that the swift boat veterans'
ads were far more recognizable and had more impact than ads of pro-Kerry groups.

A sign of things to come? Thune Campaign paid two Anti-Daschle bloggers

Comsky on the Election:

I don’t think that the Kerry campaign even tried to include the opinions of most of the population, including those who voted for Kerry. People will vote their class interests when they see some credible political force that might represent those interests. That’s not Kerry or the DLC.

Breaking News - CIA's secret prison within a prison at Gitmo

Brad Blog Too stays on top of the Ohio and Florida vote problems He has the same problems I have with blogspot sometimes swallowing posts.

Electors pass resolution demanding national vote investigation Buried in last paragraph.

Factchecking the Swift Boat Veterans For Lies

Non-partisan FactCheck.org checks the Republican-funded Group Ads that attacks Kerry's war record.

The group seems to have a problem with the truth.

Perry of Perry Homes, the $3-million dollar contributor to the GOP in Texas, provides most of the funding for this group.

The public leader O'Neill is a big time GOP player who repeated lies and says he is an independent. His votes he claims to cast for Democrats aren't checkable but he only votes in Republican primaries and has contributed many thousands to Republicans he says he didn't vote for. He has contributed zero to Democrats. He was personally recruited by Nixon's hatchet man to take down Kerry in the 70's.

Their doctor who says he examined Kerry didn't. Their other Swift Boat commander who says Kerry did not come under enemy fire own heroism citation was for performing heroicly in the same incident in which all boats came under enemy fire.

All of these are veterans still bitterly divided over the Vietnam War which Kerry came back and opposed and they didn't.

The co-founder of the group claimed that McCain was a mentally unstable Manchurian candidate reprogrammed by the KGB.

The co-author of their book is a loud-mouth bigot against Arabs, Catholics, and Democrats.

The Swift Boat media spokemen is a well-known GOP "communications operative" from Dallas.

Tea Bag Protests Flop - Engineered by the Gang Who Brought You Swift Boat and Ayers Is a Terrorist Lies

The fizzled Tea Bag protests, getting even conservative criticism, are getting more mysterious as Playboy, of all places, discovers the links between organizers. The wealthy fanatics turn out to be those who also promulgated the Swift Boat Liars and the more stupid of the attacks on Obama and his "terrorist" friends. They also registered the central domain name ChicagoTeaParty.com back in August, which is just weird or revealing of long range planning.

There is a response by one of those named in the Playboy article but it leaves more questions than answers. He agrees with the unsavory background of some of the organizers but he himself is an Independent who voted for Obama and who is upset about the huge financial institution bailouts and not as much the piddling help for foreclosure victims. (I agree with him about the obscene financial institution bailouts.)

Was the rant that started the tea parties even real or part of a plot? John Cole thinks the fact there are groups and people with lots of money ready to pounce on Obama and the Democrats over any controversy is not worthy of being called a conspiracy.

For more on the anti-government organizations that the Koch family wealth supports follow the link to Source Watch. The Koch and Scaife foundations are similar in their influence and orientation.

You might ask some of these people profiled in the New York Times who have gone from highly paid high status jobs to low wage grunts how they feel about Scaife and Koch capitalism.

I met someone who has gone from triple-digit income as a database architect to homeless unemployment with the mental and physical stress that causes. More of my friends are skipping our restaurant meetings because of unemployment or severe underemployment.

There are even right-wing bloggers, whose websites I expect to close this year, who started their blogs full time after their jobs were outsourced. Do you think they may start to realize that they were fighting the wrong battles for the wrong side or have they drunk too much of the deranged anti-Democratic, pro-"free market" kool-aid?

The GOP abandoned the "free market" decades ago for crony capitalism. A recent book, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, makes the argument that Democrats should join them.

Libertarians make the reverse argument: that we should all just realize that government is evil and rich capitalists actually promote liberty. Talk about drinking the kool-aid.

How Bad Is He? by Sidney Blumenthal

Incredibly bad, worse then Nixon and Wilson and John Adams, even with their crimes against vocal opponents.

Traditional Republicans emerged among Bush's most penetrating critics, from O'Neill to Wilkerson, from Zinni to Clarke. They were not hostile to Bush when he entered office; on the contrary, they were willing and eager to serve under him. They observed first-hand, more than opponents on the outside, the radical changes Bush was making within the government. As Republicans, more than Democrats, they understood which traditions of their own were being traduced....

Near the end of the campaign, a senior White House aide explained the "faith-based" school of political thought to reporter Ron Suskind, who wrote in the New York Times Magazine: "The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

The method described by the Bush aide was an updated version of the insight of the philosopher Francis Bacon, who, in 1625, wrote in his essay "Of Vaine-Glory": "For Lies are sufficient to breed Opinion, and Opinion brings on Substance."

The "separate realities" of Bush and Kerry supporters studied by the University of Maryland extended to the facts of their military records, controversies about which became decisive events in the campaign and case studies in the manipulation of information. Bush had numerous mysterious discrepancies in his Vietnam era service in the Texas Air National Guard, especially being absent without leave for a year. It is indisputable that he never actually completed his service. How he entered his unit through special preference and under what circumstances he was discharged without having finished his requirements was the subject of an investigation by CBS's "60 Minutes." The program's use of documents that could not be authenticated, though various witnesses confirmed the underlying facts, aroused an intense attack from Republican activists and the White House, and the entire exposé was discredited because of the journalistic lapse.

The Bush White House had anticipated the potential scandal in his military background, particularly in contrast to the record of Senator Kerry, who was a genuine war hero, awarded the Silver Star, Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. In order to undermine Kerry's strong point and defend Bush's weak one, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was created, funded and its public relations handled by Bush allies, and led by one John O'Neill, who had been selected by the Nixon White House to hector Kerry during the Vietnam era. The group accused Kerry of having falsely earned his medals and subsequently lied about his war experiences. Though the Navy officially affirmed his right to his medals and those who served directly with him upheld his account, the Swift Boat Veterans were granted extensive media attention as if their fabrications were a valid point of view that must be heard. On cable television especially, and on CNN in particular, a perverse form of objectivity prevailed in which the news organization abdicated establishing the facts and allowed defamation to be presented as though it was just one reasonable side of a debate.

Tags: Bush, lies

Why the Swift Boat Liars Hoax Still Matters!

The GOP strategists see it as a very successful model operation on attacking an opponent on his strength and saw that the media rolled over and cooperated with it. The real Democratic lesson is to fight back hard and fast against opponent lies - particularly on your character. i think several recent Democratic victories and near victories have been aggressive Democratic campaigns that attacked the opponents policies and swiftly responded to opposition attacks.

Tags: 2004, Kerry, Swift+Boat, liars, veterans

Democratic Activists Preparing For Nasty Fight

If it is a tabloid war they want the Bush campaign is going to get it.

A book is coming out by a popular author detailing Bush troubles with drugs, alcohol, women, and unwanted pregnancies.

It is common knowledge around Washington that Bush has started drinking again and he and Cheney have had past drinking problems.

The AWOL charge will not go away and is coming out again in a big way.

Kerry wanted to respond immediately to the Swift Boat Lies but was persuaded it was a lie and everyone knew it. Because he didn't respond it was allowed to grow and has cast doubts on his believability. Never again. Kerry is assembling his come from behind team and activists who have also gotten tired of the do-nothing Democratic leadership will come out swinging independently.

A taste of this can be found in Kleiman's pick up of Susan Estrich's goes nuclear.

Activist Democrats are angry. As one who lived through an August like this, 16 years ago - replete with rumors that were lies, which the Bush campaign claimed they had nothing to do with and later admitted they had planted - I'm angry, too. I've been to this movie. Lies move numbers.

Remember the one about Dukakis suffering from depression after he lost the governorship? We lost six points over that lie, planted by George W.'s close friend and colleague in the 1988 campaign, Lee Atwater. Or how about the one about Kitty Dukakis burning a flag at an anti-war demonstration, another out-and-out lie, which the Bush campaign denied having anything to do with, except that it turned out to have come from a United States senator via the Republican National Committee? Atwater later apologized to me for that, too, on his deathbed. Did I mention that Lee's wife is connected to the woman running the Swift Boat campaign?

What do you do, Democrats keep asking each other.

The answer is not pretty, but everyone knows what it is.

The trouble with Democrats, traditionally, is that we're not mean enough. Too much is at stake to play by Dukakis' rules and lose again. That is the conclusion Democrats have reached. So watch out. Millions of dollars will be on the table. And there are plenty of choices for what to spend it on.

Blog post of the year nomination

I was reviewing some links and I found a leading contender for blog post of the year. I don't think I even posted the link, it was on a page of links in a folder I labeled "What I've been reading" which I'm pretty sure I never posted. I just converted the folder from favorites to html and then I believe I found it didn't post well in Blogger.

Whiskey Bar: My Back Page - What the Left Needs and why I stopped for awhile. Excerpts:

What happened, roughly, is this: Last summer I got off a boat after a week of intensive Internet detox therapy, and decided there weren't enough good reasons to keep the bar open and more than enough reasons, both personal and professional, to shut it down, at least for a good long while.

I could cite the usual suspects job, family, health, sanity but the real trip wire was coming out of radio silence and finding both the blogosphere and what we had then not yet learned to call the "MSM" immersed to the tops of their pointy little heads in the Swift Boat Veterans for Lies campaign -- last year's version of the vegetative patient story; the patient, in that particular case, being American democracy.

Now this was only a few weeks after I had concluded, rather rashly, that it would be virtually impossible for the Rove machine to pump its usual tanker load of slime all over John Kerry's war record, based simply on the word of a brigade of Jane Fonda haters led by a Nixon-era retread who has made destroying Kerry his lifelong personal ambition. Surely, I argued, such an absurd ploy wouldn't get beyond the usual right-wing echo chamber pots and would quickly be dumped in the same sewer of right-wing delusions that holds the murdered corpse of Vince Foster.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. . . oh my yes. It is amusing to recall what a naive idealist I was back then. What I hadn't learned was that the eyes of brain-dead people, like your average MSM journalist, will still track the movement of shiny objects when they are waved in front of their faces. Involuntary reflexes. Lower brain stem activity. The Rovians understood this perfectly well, even if I didn't. So it didn't take them long to organize a full-scale chorus of media vegetables, all making vaguely articulate grunts and other mouth noises about Cambodia, the Christmas of 1968, purple hearts, after-action reports, etc.

And that's when it hit me -- as if, to quote Col. Kurtz, I'd been shot in the forehead with a diamond -- that Kerry was almost certainly going to lose the election, that the American people really were going to ratify torture and murder as instruments of state policy, and that all the facts and all the rational arguments and all the moral outrage in the world weren't going to persuade them otherwise.

What I finally had to confront was the fact that truth alone is impotent in the face of modern propaganda techniques as developed, field tested, refined and deployed by Madison Avenue, the Pentagon, the think tanks, the marketing departments of major corporations, the communications departments of major research universities, etc. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the peculiar vulnerability of historical truth (which means political truth) is that it isn't inherently more plausible than outright lies, since the facts could always have been otherwise. And in a world where the airwaves are overloaded 24/7 with the mindless babbling of complete idiots, it isn't very hard to make inconvenient facts disappear, or create new pseudofacts that reinforce whatever bias or cultural affinity you want to cultivate particularly if the audience is already disposed to prefer your reassuring lies to discomforting truths told by strangers.

The Boxer

All this, I suppose, is just another way of saying that people hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest (li la li). But the implications for me at the time were pretty clear: What the progressive left, not to mention the Democratic Party, needed weren't dogged investigative reporters or eloquent bloggers or wiser candidates, what it needed were more skilled corporate propagandists, more trained information warfare specialists and more cunning, ruthless PR manipulators.

I don't know how to do those things and wouldn't want to do them even if I could. No matter what Horowitz says, agit-prop isn't my line. What I write, I mean, and I say it because I want to communicate something -- to touch people, make them think, make them angry, make them laugh or because I want to express my own thoughts (usually with an attitude).

I don't write to advance a party line or anyone else's ideological agenda. I have my own line and my own agenda, which only partially overlaps with any political party that I'm aware of. I may be a man of the left (albeit with increasingly libertarian . . . let's call it plainly: anti-fascist leanings) but I'm no "movement leftist" (that's a contradiction in terms these days anyway.)

But if the truth does not set any one free, there's not much point raging against the machine not unless you enjoy being enraged all the time. On balance, there didn't seem much point in keeping Whiskey Bar open, given that writing is hard, time-consuming work, and nobody was paying me to blog. (Yes, many readers had given me money to help cover expenses, but after more than 1,500 posts in a year and a half of blogging, I figured most of them had already gotten their money's worth, and then some.) ....

The Salvadoran Option

And who knows? I might have done it -- if some unidentified intelligence officials hadn’t started boasting to reporters about their role in “founding and financing” the Salvadoran death squads of the early 1980s....

Hooked Again

But as I've noted before, blogging is a strange drug. When you're clean, it's not too hard to stay clean. But once you start using the stuff again . . . man, the monkey can get his claws in your back pretty damn fast. So one post led to another, and then another. And, well, pretty soon I was back freebasing.

Much more where that came from.

Perhaps this has a special resonance for me now as I have been reading stories of people in their own (translated) words of why they joined the National Socialist party. Why Hitler Came to Power. This was an underappreciated gem of a sociology study published in 1938 and based on 600 autobiographies of German Nazi activists written in 1934. It doesn't have enough hard cross-tabbed data for a great study but it makes up for it in the real unvarnished voices of people turning away from democracy.

The book made me realize that the current GOP is not the Nazi party. Many of the leaders and activists have just tapped into some of the same powerful techniques. We are not Germany in the 30's, the Republicans aren't pure fascists. I keep telling myself that.

Interesting billmon mentions one of my favorite songs.

In the clearing stands a boxer,
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of ev'ry glove that laid him down
And cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame,
"I am leaving, I am leaving."
But the fighter still remains

Lie la lie, lie la lie lie lie lie lie. Lie la lie, lie la lie lie lie lie lie, lie lie lie lie lie....

Tags: Fascism, GOP, Nazi, blog, Whiskey Bar, Boxer

One of Houston's own Swift Boat Lying Frat Boys

Is still spinning lies. It is a version of this lie.

On Obama's Speech

Some comments, video and links.

The media reaction and constant replays of Obama's pastor is the Dean scream and the Swift Boat Liars all over again.

Burka is right, Obama should have handled the Wright problem a year ago.

PoliMom says watch it.

If you're busy, here's a video highlight from the speech.

"There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

"And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

"She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

"She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

"Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother's problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn't. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

"Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he's there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, 'I am here because of Ashley.'

"'I'm here because of Ashley.' By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

"But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins."

Government by the ignorant, for the angry and by the hateful

I seem to be discouraged about this country again. You can read some reasons here - especially for the comments.

How stupid can voters be? I think the answer is they re-elected Bush and fell for the Swift Boat Liars. Try turning on to talk radio in Houston or almost anywhere in Texas. How much is the hateful lies a symptom and how much a cause?

Houston's Bob Perry Places His Bet

Bob Perry of Perry Homes is financing anti-Huckabee ads in Iowa.

It is interesting watching the money wing of the GOP tear down it's majority base's candidate from the religious wing. It took them forever to chose but chosen they have. The AP has the story:

The Club for Growth is spending $175,000 to continue running ads in Iowa that highlight tax increases adopted in Arkansas when Huckabee was governor. During the past three weeks, the group has spent $550,000 to criticize Huckabee's economic policies.

According to Federal Election Commission records, ClubForGrowth.net received $200,000 this month from Bob Perry, a Houston homebuilder who in 2004 pumped nearly $4.5 million into the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth to pay for unsubstantiated ads that questioned Kerry's Vietnam service.

Perry contributed $2,300, the maximum allowed, to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who is Huckabee's top rival in Iowa. Romney has been running his own ads against Huckabee, criticizing his record on immigration and taxes.

Just from conversations Huckabee looks like he is becoming the Texas favorite. Perry and the other millionaires must figure they have to kneecap him now before he gets too unstoppable.

Tags: Bob Perry, Club for Growth, , Huckabee, GOP, 2008, Iowa

Texas Round-Up 19

It's Monday, and that means it's time for the pre-Thanksgiving edition of the Texas Progressive Alliance's Weekly Blog Round-Up. This week's round-up is compiled by Vince from Capitol Annex.

The Texas Cloverleaf examines the ongoing feud between TxDOT and NTTA -- this time the funding for the Hwy 161 project Dallas County may face its wrath. To toll or not to toll? That is TxDOT's question.

Hal at Half Empty wants to ask John Cornyn just one question: "When are you going to stop flip flopping on a border wall?"

XicanoPwr reports on the noose found hanging from a scaffolding on separate occasions over at the Exxon Mobil facility in Baytown, TX.

NYTexan at Bluebloggin discovers that some things will just never go away. Tom DeLay Will Launch Activist Group. Two stellar citizens, Tom DeLay and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell have teamed up to promote the Coalition for a Conservative Majority (CCM).

Kay Granger pretends to care about the environment by sponsoring an Energy Expo but TXsharon at Bluedaze points to her ZERO score on environmentally friendly votes and begs to differ.

Harris County election officials adjusted the vote at 1:30 a.m. Wednesday morning, after Tuesday's final election results had been released to the media. The Democratic Party's observer, a long-time voting rights activist, was stunned to watch it happen. What does this mean for the integrity of electronic voting in all of Texas? PDiddie at Brains and Eggs has questions without answers.

John Coby at Bay Area Houston reminds us that Texas is #1 in sucking with tuition for Texas University up by 63% since deregulation in 2003. The high cost of college tuition deregulation. Tuition increases again.

CouldBeTrue at South Texas Chisme complains that Texas keeps money meant for hospitals in 'state funds'. You can hear the Republicans yammering for another tax cut.

Muse wonders why Tom DeLay can't seem to stay away from Fort Bend County when he is supposed to be a Virginia resident. His new Coalition for a Conservative Majority kicks off there and has Ken Blackwell as its chair. Yeah, that Ken Blackwell. SOS in Ohio during the 2004 elections.

Mayor McSleaze at McBlogger asks What part of "interfaith" was not clear? in his post detailing the actions of Hyde Park Baptist Church.

Why can't Rudy Giuliani talk about baseball any more without pandering? Off the Kuff takes a look at his latest shenanigans.

Vince at Capitol Annex explores Texas Congressman Ron Paul's "surge" in the polls and in online contributions and wonders why his Republican supporters haven't bothered to examine his terrible record on behalf of the middle class in Texas.

WhosPlayin brings back the Texas Dim Bulb Award for Cracker-Barrell Craddick.

On The TexasBlue, David Gurney explores the total absence of integrity displayed by the Religious Right's endorsements of Giuliani and Thompson.

Easter Lemming watched the Pasadena mayor's race candidate forum in some amazement: How often do you hear a Texas candidate say: "He's just told me the position pays $102,000. I had no idea. If I had known that, I would have put out more yard signs." And Easter Lemming gets the candidate reply in the comments.

Texas Toad of North Texas Liberal explains why the Chicken Pickens of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth owes Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., a sum of $1 million.

Tags: Texas, bloggers, liberal news, progressives, blogs

Iraq Marine Vet speaks out

I'm sick and tired of this patriotic, nationalistic and fascist crap. I stood through a memorial service today for a young Marine that was killed in Iraq back in April. During this memorial a number of people spoke about the guy and about his sacrifice for the country. How do you justify 'sacrificing' your life for a war which is not only illegal, but is being prosecuted to the extent where the only thing keeping us there is one man's power, and his ego. A recent Marine Corps intelligence report that was leaked said that the war in the al-Anbar province is unwinnable. It said that there was nothing we could do to win the hearts and minds, or the military operations in that area. So I wonder, why are we still there?

- Philip Martin has been a Marine for 2 years. He is in the infantry (a "grunt"), and spent 7 months in the al-Anbar province of Iraq. He went on more than 180 combat patrols in and outside of the city of Fallujah, where he was hit with 2 IEDs (luckily never injured) and was involved in a number of firefights. He is currently stationed in Twentynine Palms, CA, and due to return to Iraq for a second deployment in April 2007. He is 21-years-old. - Recommended by Shockwave at Daily Kos. Read Bob Johnson there for the neocon "new" Domino Theory.

UPDATE - By coincidence, I received a reply from another Marine - this one refighting old wars. Bruce N. Kessler in a written column believes the Shiite Iraqi Interior Ministry denials over the AP's 3 reports of 6 Sunni men at prayer burned to death by Shiite militia. Right before my decision to depart from conservative blogs for three weeks, I emailed him asking him why? He had nothing meaningful to say in the reply except for amusingly claiming the AP was providing faux news and not Fox and asked where my standards were. He never stated a source or standard for his belief.

A quick Google, which I hadn't before, finds he was a recruit in the Nixon White House campaign to counter the hippies and the majority of the American people opposing Nixon's war plans. He claims he, and not John O'Neill, was the founder of the anti-Kerry group Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace in 1971, the precursor to today's Swift Boat Liars. In May 1970 he wrote a letter to TIME magazine supporting Nixon's illegal expansion of the war into Cambodia while others were calling for Nixon's impeachment.

For a lot of conservatives, Iraq was going to be the chance to defeat the hippies from the Vietnam War and do a war right. Oops. There is a strong smell of napalm and deja vu in the air.

Tags: Iraq, soldiers

Bob Perry's Dirty Robo-Callers, Dirty Ads

Even in states where they are illegal, Bob Perry is funding push-poll robo-calls with a loose grasp of the truth but a keen eye for what smears. This is part of his strategic massive effort using several techniques aimed at helping the GOP retain power in Washington. Media Transparency notes:

This electoral season Perry has already contributed at least $8 million to a host of Republican congressional candidates around the country. According to Congressional Quarterly's PoliticalMoneyLine, which tracks how money is spent in politics, Perry is ranked the No. 1 donor this year. (For more on Perry's donations, see CampaignMoney.com, which describes itself as "a unique website that lets you see for yourself the hidden world of American political campaigns.")

In mid-October, the Houston Chronicle reported that Perry had given $2 million to Americans for Honesty on Issues, "a new group that is buying television ads aimed at helping Republicans facing tight House races in Iowa, Colorado, Indiana, Arizona, North Carolina, Kentucky and New Mexico, according to the group's latest report to the Federal Election Commission."

Americans for Honesty on Issues "is spending more than $1 million on...ads, which accuse Democratic candidates of carpetbagging, coddling illegal immigrants, being soft on crime and advocating cutting off money for troops in Iraq," the New York Times' John Broder reported earlier this month.

The groups that Perry is funding are -- like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth -- "527s", "named after a provision in the federal tax code," the Chronicle's Kristen Mack pointed out. "Donations Perry and others make to those groups are not subject to the same limits as donations directly benefiting federal candidates or political parties."

Bob Perry has been a powerful force in Texas politics and has become one nationally using tactics straight out of his friend Karl Rove's dirty politics course. Perry has given over $1 million to partisan Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott. I have complained before about the fake 527 charities that aren't bound by campaign contribution laws, many campaign laws at all, and provide their contributors a tax break for their expenditures.

“It will be hard enough to restore decorum, calm and logic to our elective process without people like Bob Perry throwing a match in the ammo room of politics...." - Charleston Gazette, WV

Perry's FreeEats.com has just been found guilty of violating anti-robo calling laws in Indiana.

According to a press release from the Indiana Attorney General, the robocalling group "acknowledged to the court that it maintains a database of 1.7 million Indiana phone numbers and that its calling system may dial each number as many as three times." Using a real live person to make those calls would cost them $2 million more, they complained. A recent IRS disclosure by the Economic Freedom Fund shows that the Indiana calls didn't cost them much at all -- there's a single expenditure for $29,000 on surveys for both Indiana and Georgia.

Tags: Bob Perry, Texas, national, smear campaigns, big money, GOP, 527

UPDATED - Clear Lake Perry Puts $5 Million in Anti-Democratic Commercials

The more dangerous bastard Perry is now funding a Swift Boat campaign against all Democrats. He even gets a tax break for this as these are supposedly educational ads not concerned with politics.

Can we in Texas elect David Van Os and throw Perry in jail for abusing charitable foundations for political purposes?

What else does millions of dollars in charitable giving buy? Smearing robo-push polls. Regular campaign donations cannot be taken off your income taxes but until someone prosecutes - these can.

Tags: Bob Perry, 527 organizations, fake charities

Polluted Airwaves

I thought it was very strange that I saw not one media report on Scaife's NewsMax repackage of The Swift Boat Liars report. This ran as a 30 minute infomercial on PAX ABC/Family Network stations right before the Presidential election.

What a thing to show on TV. Especially on family channels. 30 minutes of unrestrained Republican hatemongers, often wearing their old military uniforms, calling John Kerry a traitor who lengthened the war and promoted the torture of American POWs.

I suppose it is that none of the liberal media normally watch this network with its strong rural family Christian viewership that prevented this from being noticed or commented on.

The infomercial appeared to be a condensed version of the program Sinclair Network was going to air distilled to 30 minutes of hate speech. Every 5-10 minutes a written pitch superimposed to buy the video for $5 made it an infomercial. Is this the way around campaign watchdogs, disguise 30 minutes of propaganda as an infomercial? Can liberals start buying up infomercial time and attack GOP public officials claiming it is to sell videos?

Scaife has always been a pioneer in vicious attacks. He spent tens of millions of dollars investigating Clinton and promoting wild charges hoping something would shake loose. Eventually something did.

Maybe this time he took a clue from the Perot's campaign 30 minute ad blocks.

Running infomercials directly at a target audience on a media the metropolitan press doesn't see - brilliant. No wonder there was the massive rural voter rejection of Kerry. Kerry was branded a traitor and no one in the media or his campaign noticed. Rural people and families and Christian noticed. Kerry had a record low percentage of the rural county vote.

This was right before the 2004 election, over a year ago, but it still bugs me.

Tags: Scaife, NewsMax, infomercial, political ads, hate speech, Rove, 2004, campaign