A while back I posted what could be described as A liberal’s case for George Bush. At the time, I encouraged any conservatives in the crowd who wanted to engage in a similar exercise on behalf of Kerry to do so. No one took me up on it, but now I see this interesting item in the New York Press by William Bryk: The conservative case against George W. Bush.

Bryk doesn’t make the case for Kerry directly (or even mention Kerry by name), but he definitely goes after Bush. In fact, it seems clear that he’s not engaged in a mere mental exercise; he means it. Granted, some of the reasons he offers are different from the ones I’d offer, but he makes a compelling case all the same. See what you think.

In keeping with the prodigious comment production on my earlier item re: the O’Reilly/Krugman debacle (courtesy lies.com’s #1 googlerank in searches for “o’reilly krugman russert”), here’s the Daily Howler debunking O’Reilly’s bluster in detail: Tail-gunner Bill!

My wife used to work for a record label, and for some reason Ike Turner used to hang out in the parking lot there, working on his car. Which has nothing much to do with the following, but it’s what I thought of when I saw it at McSweeney’s: Ike Turner’s guide to restoring America’s honor.

In light of this whole discussion of O’Reilly beating up on Krugman on Russert’s show, I feel compelled to mention something that, at least for me, occupies the opposite end of the spectrum of political TV (that is, the good end): Jon Stewart’s work on The Daily Show. And in particular, this clip, which I watched when it aired last week, and which was heart-breakingly good, and which is now (yay!) available as a Real Media video clip on ComedyCentral.com: Jon asks Republican Congressman Harry Bonilla to name names. (Hopefully I’ve de-eviled the javascript successfully for you to link directly to the clip. If not, go to the Daily Show page and look for it in the list of “celebrity interviews” on the righthand side.)

Bonilla was part of the Republicans’ “rapid response” team during the Democratic convention; he comes off as the nicest, most decent-seeming guy you’d ever meet. It isn’t shown on the clip, but when the interview began he congratulated Stewart on the recent birth of his son, and gave him a present of a pair of baby-sized cowboy boots with “G.O.P. ROCKS” on the soles. It was really pretty cute; not as sappy as it sounds. Bonilla was positively Clinton-esque in his ability to exude charm; if that had been me up there interviewing him, there would have been no way I could have gone after him for his role in foisting lies upon the public without myself coming off as the world’s biggest asshole.

But not Stewart. He rolled up his sleeves and went to work, matching charm for charm, quip for quip. When the clip begins they’re talking about the oft-repeated Republican charge that Kerry and Edwards are the “first and fourth-most liberal senators.” Kerry tries to get Bonilla to acknowledge where the ranking came from. Bonilla fights him every step of the way, creatively misconstruing Stewart’s questions, talking over him, clouding the issues with a verbal fog machine of reasonable-sounding misdirection, but Stewart stays on-target.

By the end of the clip Stewart has managed to expose Bonilla’s spin-peddling, and worked in his own heartfelt plea for honesty in public debate, all without seeming like a jerk.

It’s really quite amazing. In my personal reality, this clip ranks up there with the Onion’s God angrily clarifies ‘don’t kill’ rule (since walled off behind a for-pay requirement at the Onion’s site, but available several other places via that damn irrepressible Internet) as an example of the kind of humor-as-therapy that keeps me sane in the face of an insane world.

Update: And now, because I was inspired, I’ve transcribed the part of the interview included in the clip, so you can enjoy it even without Real Player. Scroll down, or follow the link below, for that.

(more…)

From the interesting-looking First Draft weblog (found via Michael Froomkin’s Discourse.net) comes this item, in which author Athenae reflects on the energy that Kerry and Edwards seem to be tapping into on the campaign trail: We are many.

During the Second World War, Americans bought war bonds and planted Victory Gardens and saved cooking grease, and maybe all of that was necessary and maybe it wasn’t, but it gave non-military, non-governmental people a way to feel a part of the struggle. It gave them something to do besides sit in their houses, listen to the radio and worry. It gave them a direction for their energy, and it gave them, most of all, the feeling that they had power over world events. Suddenly the war didn’t seem so big anymore, my grandmother told me once, because we were doing something to win it.

For three years now, those of us lucky enough not to have to go to war ourselves have been told by the government that there’s nothing we can do, really. Go on with your lives, Tom Ridge and John Ashcroft tell us, but be very, very afraid. They’re telling us terrorists hate us for stuff we can’t or shouldn’t change, that peace isn’t possible, that the only thing people of good will can do to help matters here at home is to buy, buy, buy.

But shopping doesn’t give people a sense of power over their lives.

If you haven’t seen it yet, this site’s red-state/blue-state map is pretty cool: Current Electoral Vote Predictor 2004.

I guess it’s too early to start counting the Kerry-victory chickens, but it’s fun to look at.

Joshua Micah Marshall offers a very interesting analysis of the logic, or lack thereof, in the neocons’ conflating of Iraq with al Qaeda for War on Terra purposes: Doug Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, had an OpEd…

Winston Smith at Philosoraptor is upset at seeing Bill O’Reilly run roughshod over Paul Krugman on a Tim Russert talkshow: OReilly punks Krugman.

This sounds like one of those “debates” that the creationist crowd occasionally sets up with some university professor on the subject of evolution. Typically, the creationist position is represented by an experienced, practiced participant in such fora, while the natural-selection position is represented by Joe Random PhD, unused to debating. The result is predictable.

Entertainment and honest inquiry aren’t the same thing, just as politics and science aren’t the same thing. You can dress up the one as if it were the other, but that doesn’t change its essential nature. In putting on a program that is news mixed together with entertainment, you have to decide which master to serve. There may have been a time when TV news served the master of journalistic ethics in preference to the master of ratings-driven entertainment, but if so that time has come and gone. Letting a professional blowhard like Bill O’Reilly bully a timid economics professor in the name of determining the truth about their respective political views demonstrates that pretty neatly.

Interesting little email exchange between a non-US scientist and an American physics journal, in which the former declines to review a manuscript for the latter in light of the US role in putting science to evil uses: Interchange of letters between Prof. Daniel Amit and an American scientific journal.

Link courtesy of Radically Inept.

It’s comforting to me that in the midst of all the troubles of the world today, people still find time to engage in stupid stunts. Like this one: Segway across America at 10 MPH.

Matthew Yglesias has this interesting commentary on an email he received from Paul Krugman. It deals with the subject of whether or not it’s really “lying” when Bush says something hypertechnically true that nevertheless creates a false impression. The commentary is really more about the media, and the role they play in reliably conveying the misleading impression to its intended audience, than about Bush, though: Who parses the parsers?

Kevin Drum wants to make sure we know he was talking about Bush’s particular approach to lying since October of last year, too: Classifying the lies.

Anyway, we couldn’t be the obsessed-with-public-figure-mendacity weblog-of-record that we are without acknowledging the discussion. Plus I can get some cheap traffic via the trackback links. So there you go.

John McCain doesn’t like seeing the same stuff that was pulled on him during his 2000 campaign being pulled now on Kerry: McCain condemns anti-Kerry ad.

I realize the Bush folks believe they have to try to neutralize Kerry’s war-hero status, but I honestly think this is going to backfire. In six months’ time, I think we may well be looking back on this as the defining moment of the presidential campaign, when mainstream voters looked at the two sides’ arguments and concluded that it was Kerry, not Bush, they were willing to entrust with the presidency.

Update: For the closest thing I think you’re going to be able to find to an objective debunking of the Swift-boat charges, see this Snopes page: Swift justice. Courtesy of a commenter on Donald Sensing’s piece Swift boat veterans speak out.

I love the scene in My Blue Heaven where Steve Martin’s Todd/Vinnie tells Joan Cusack’s Hannah Stubbs, “‘Oh, really?’ You gotta do better than that; you’re gonna lose the argument.” (Here’s an mp3 file of it, courtesy of WaveCentral.com.)

I think Bush is losing the argument. Since Kerry came out strong on the national security issue at the convention, I’ve been noticing a certain stridency and incoherence in the Bush team’s responses. It’s not any one incident, any one news account of the two sides’ daily campaigning and spinning and counter-spinning, but it just feels to me, in a subtle but real way, that the Bush team is coming up short.

I know the early polls showed only a small Kerry bounce, if any, from the convention. I know the Bush visuals team have been placing him in front of enthusiastic crowds, and he’s been energized and engaged, and has a big media push coming that Kerry, hobbled by post-convention spending limits, can’t match. I know that Bush supporters in the weblog world are finding any number of stories to make them happy about their guy’s chances.

But there’s something there. Maybe it’s that, with the campaign well and truly under way, and non-politically-obsessed people actually paying attention, a new level of scrutiny is being applied to the two campaigns’ daily messages. And people are noticing that while the Kerry team has a consistent, rational-sounding message with supporting arguments, the Bush folks are mostly peddling slogans.

We’ve “turned a corner”? You gotta do better than that; you’re gonna lose the argument.

I love stories like this. After years of complaints from the Feds about violence in TV and Movies, they are asking Hollywood for help in the imagination department, to try and anticipate unusual terrorist attacks.

Here’s a trio of stories about the Abu Ghraib abuses. From Rolling Stone: The secret file of Abu Ghraib. From the Sunday Herald (of somewhere in Scotland; apologies to my ancestors in Callender for being so vague on things Scottish): Iraq’s child prisoners. And from Newsweek: A battle over blame.

There’s not too much that’s new here, if you’ve been following the story. The Rolling Stone piece talks about the additional detail available in the full Taguba report, while the Sunday Herald repeats the stories about child abuse, with a little more on where UNICEF stands on things. The Newsweek piece is news to me; it predicts that the commission Rumsfeld picked to investigate the Abu Ghraib abuses is going to come down pretty hard on the senior Pentagon leadership, including Rumsfeld.

There’s been a lot of talk in certain webloggish circles about the failure of anyone at the Democratic convention to mention the Abu Ghraib abuses. I guess the strategists decided it had the potential to backfire. It wouldn’t have matched the upbeat mood they were going for, and it would have worked against the “we support the military, and won’t hesitate to blow people up when it’s in the national interest” storyline they were pushing.

So they tacitly agreed to join the Republicans in looking the other way. Like a lot of Americans, probably, they chose to avoid the implications of what the Abu Ghraib abuses say about who we are, what we’ve done, and where we’re headed. So go ahead and read the articles linked to above. Or don’t. But if you choose not to, don’t kid yourself. The rest of the world doesn’t have the same incentive to ignore the story. They’re hanging on every word.

Do you hear that sound? That’s the dim, distant echo of our national honor.

I hadn’t seen this graphic before, but now that I have I think it’s really funny. But you might have to be me to think so. Anyway, from Professor Pollkatz: So it begins.

Here’s the counterweight to the piece I posted the other day that spoke of some folks predicting a Bush landslide in November. From Michael of Discourse.net: Election polls and predictions. Michael sees a landslide coming, but the way he figures it, it’s going to be a landslide for Kerry.

As stated previously, an objective analysis of the data cannot support both positions: either the data clearly show an oncoming Bush landslide, an oncoming Kerry landslide, or neither. My own take as of now: Kerry will win by a significant, but not overwhelming, margin. He’ll take all, or nearly all, of the solid-blue states from 2000, will lose all, or nearly all, of the solid-red states from 2000, but will outperform Bush sufficiently in the purple states to make the difference.

I’ve updated my Iraq-Vietnam comparison graphs with the number of US dead for July, 2004. The number was up from the previous month, with 54 US fatalities.

Again, I’m getting these figures from the advanced search tool at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund site, and from Lunaville’s page on Iraq coalition casualties. The figures are for the number of US dead per month, without regard to whether the deaths were combat-related.

The first graph shows the first seventeen months of each war. (Click on any image for a larger version.)

Next, the same chart, with the Vietnam numbers extended out to cover the first four years of the war:

Finally, the chart that gives the US death toll for the entire Vietnam war:

Disclaimer: I’m aware that we have more troops in-theater in Iraq than we had during the corresponding parts of the Vietnam War graph. Vietnam didn’t get numbers of US troops comparable to the number currently in Iraq until shortly after Johnson won the 1964 election, some three-and-a-half years after the starting point of the Vietnam graphs above.

These graphs are not intended to say anything about the relative lethality of the two conflicts. Nor am I trying to make a case that the Iraq war is somehow equivalent to, or worse than, the Vietnam war. I was just curious how the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and these graphs let me see that. You are free to draw your own conclusions.

You can view more discussion of these charts on the following pages, if you’re interested. The graphs are all the same; I just update them in place when the new numbers become available.

• US deaths in Vietnam and Iraq by month
• Iraq war deaths
• November: The cruelest month
• 41 US Iraq war dead in December
• Post-Saddam death toll up slightly
• February death toll down for us, up for them
• Thirteen months in
• Record US deaths in April
• US War Dead in Iraq for May
• US Iraq Deaths Down in June