musings

Oh For Fuck's Sake

From an NBC interview with Kerry:

Brokaw: "If you had been President, Saddam Hussein would be in power."

Kerry: "Not necessarily."

Brokaw: "You said you wouldn't go to war against him."

Kerry: "That's not true. Because under the inspection process, Saddam Hussein was required to destroy those kinds of materials and weapons."

Brokaw: "But he wasn't destroying them."

Kerry: "That's what you have inspectors for. That's why I voted for the threat of force, because he only does things when you have a legitimate threat of force. It's irresponsible to suggest that if I were President, he wouldn't be gone. He might be gone, because if he hadn't complied, we might have had to go to war, but if we did, we would have gone with allies, so the American people weren't carrying the entire burden. And the entire world would understand why we did it."

Kerry is the KING of maybe I would, maybe I woiuld not. It's all about the maybe. Gray. He hadn't complied for a decade, what makes you think he was going to comply. His whole reason for being was thumbing his nose at the US. He knew that Bush wasn't fucking around and he still waited it out. To think he would be "more scared" by Kerry is ridiculous.

Just once, I would like Kerry to give a straight yes or no answer to a question. Just once. I am reminded of the Jon Stewart clip where Kerry is shown talking about which of his daughters is most like him:

"Well, sometimes it's this one, sometimes it's the other one."

Cut back to Stewart with his head on the table, hands around his ears shaking.

A Liberal for Bush

Much like Ed Koch, this really sums up how I feel in this election. I myself probably agree with a few more domestic policies than the person authoring this blog, but the core message sums up exactly how I feel right now.

al Qaeda supports Kerry

ABCNews has turned over to the US Government a tape from al Qaeda that the US is now busy trying to authenticate.

In it, the message claims that an attack bigger than 9/11 will:

"The streets will run with blood," and "America will mourn in silence" because they will be unable to count the number of the dead. Further claims: America has brought this on itself for electing George Bush who has made war on Islam by destroying the Taliban and making war on Al Qaeda.

So either they feel Kerry wouldn't have gone to war with them (a mistake, because any US President would have had to...hell, I don't like Kerry and I think he would have gone after al Qaeda), or they really feel that Bush is a problem for them.

I like that they don't like Bush. I want them fearing the US. They should fear us. Like the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor in WWII, al Qaeda woke a sleeping giant by taking out the towers.

Dave Winer & The President

So today I was reading Dave Winers' blog, as I do every day, and something caught my eye:

Now, to be perfectly straight, I don't think I could support a re-elected George Bush.

THAT, right there, is what it's all about. At least Dave is honest about it, but it's why right and left have such issues in this country. If Kerry is elected, do I hope he does a good job, and will I support him in doing it? Of course. Does it mean I will agree with all of his policies? Not a chance in hell, but at the end of the day, he's the President. I thought Clinton did the right thing in Kosovo, and I think Bush did the right thing in Iraq. I wish someone would do something about Africa (because the UN will not -- we know that already).

There is a small part of me that wants Kerry to win just to see how the world treats him, especially the countries that have been helping us in Iraq (the ones he called the bribed, not a real coalition, etc.). What if those countries bail out of Iraq and leave him holding the bag because of his rhetoric?

The dirty secret of this election, IMO, is this: people supported Bush up until it became election time. Senators who were with him, even Hawkish on Iraq (nee -- Kerry), slowly peeled away because they can't be praising the President and convince people to vote for themselves at the same time. It wouldn't make sense, so they HAVE to slam the President, no matter what. They want to win. This is why Zell is pissy: he thinks the war is more important than the individuals.

I still challenge my Kerry supporting friends to go back to the primaries and watch Kerry in those debates. He was a hawk. He disagreed completely with Dean. After he won, he took on the Dean message.

That should bother you.

Slate

Anyone want to guess why it seems that Slate is left leaning? How about reading this?

60 Minutes

My friend Leslie has challenged my using Drudge as a source for the below. So, to be fair and balanced, I will now do the same story as below, but as told by the LA Times, hardly a Republican Mouthpiece.

Elizabeth Jensen, quotes:

Jeff Fager, executive producer of the Sunday edition of "60 Minutes," said in a statement that "our plan was to run the story on [Oct.] 31, but it became clear that it wouldn't hold, so the decision was made for the Times to run it."

CBS has a chip on its shoulder right now and is desparate to nail this President. Releasing a story like this 2 days before an election would be great for them, but they didn't get to do it. If we go back in time, it happened with the Iran-Contra indictment in 1992, with the DUI claim in 2000, and now this.

At least they are consistent.

Loving the Media

I'm watching the media this week, tracking to see how things get reported, any sudden stories that smack the President, etc. We had the NYTimes story about the bombs yesterday, which was widely reported. What wasn't widely reported is that NBC had a reporter embedded with the unit that took that base three weeks into the conflict and the explosives in question were not found there. Why wasn't this widely reported? You tell me.

The media shows every bad thing in Iraq, but absolutely NOTHING good. Only Fox shows the school openings, etc. CBS had the forging documents thing. ABC had Mark Halperin telling his people to hold Bush more accountable than Kerry for their respective records. CBS had the aforementioned munitions story, and was planning on putting it out right before election day. Jennings said last week that he was concerned that people expect them to be objective.

Tell me there is not a media bias. The media does NOT want Bush in office for 4 more years. They will do whatever they can to make it so. Expect more stories this week that will try to swing the vote. The head of Newsweek said this week that he believes the bias will add at least 5 points to Kerry this election.

Update: this sort of crap really gets my blood boiling. Sources are coming out that the IAEA put out this letter to get the media to go after Bush because Bush does not support Mohammed El Baradei, the head of the IAEA for a second term. And from Drudge comes this:

News of missing explosives in Iraq — first reported in April 2003 — was being resurrected for a 60 MINUTES election eve broadcast designed to knock the Bush administration into a crisis mode.

Jeff Fager, executive producer of the Sunday edition of 60 MINUTES, said in a statement that “our plan was to run the story on October 31.”

Elizabeth Jensen at the LOS ANGELES TIMES details on Tuesday how CBS NEWS and 60 MINUTES lost the story [which repackaged previously reported information on a large cache of explosives missing in Iraq, first published and broadcast in 2003].

The story instead debuted in the NYT. The paper slugged the story about missing explosives from April 2003 as “exclusive.”

An NBCNEWS crew embedded with troops moved in to secure the Al-Qaqaa weapons facility on April 10, 2003, one day after the liberation of Iraq. According to NBCNEWS, the explosives were already missing when the American troops arrived.

It is not clear who exactly shopped an election eve repackaging of the missing explosives story.

The LA TIMES claims: The source on the story first went to 60 MINUTES but also expressed interest in working with the NY TIMES... “The tip was received last Wednesday.”

CBSNEWS’ plan to unleash the story just 24 hours before election day had one senior Bush official outraged.

“Darn, I wanted to see the forged documents to show how this was somehow covered up,” the Bush source, who asked not to be named, mocked, recalling last months CBS airing of fraudulent Bush national guard letters.

People are funny

This weekend, I went to a meeting in Sammamish about a Level III offender that had moved into our area. It was a classic.

I arrive at the Sammamish Library and am immediately presented with a problem: the police booked a TINY room and a ton of people showed up. So the police immediately had to tell half the group to go away. I managed to get into the room.

An aside before I get to the meat: Amy and I had watched some program about 2 weeks ago on PBS about cops, and they had a scene with a cop trying to meet with people in the community about a rapist on the loose. Chaos, mayhem, people yelling at the cops -- all of this I thought was over dramatized in this fictional account. I was wrong.

People constantly interrupted the detective talking to us with pretty silly questions, comments, and requests to her to hurry up. She was interrupted probably once every 5 minutes in a 2 hour meeting. When people finally were presented with a fact that this level III offender was, in fact, put in jail in 1985 for raping a grown woman, then let out, then again in 1987 for raping a 13 year old girl, then let out, then in 2001 he raped a boy (11), but the boy was a family member and this would have been three strikes, so the family pressured the boy to not testify -- so he got a lower crime....when people were presented this, they acted SHOCKED, SHOCKED by the fact that their duly elected officials had not made these crimes higher in the food chain. (example: how can you rape a 13 year old girl and get out in 2 years? how does that happen?)

Then they were further SHOCKED, SHOCKED to discover that their local police are understaffed and can't maintain patrols, nor are they required to patrol more when they know a level III offender is in the area.

Overall, it was rather sad and amusing. If people paid more attention to their local politics and how it affects their lives, and less on who sits in the White House, perhaps things would make more sense to them. But they don't. Most people don't even know who their state rep is.

President Kerry

I'm fairly certain at this point that GWB will not win this election. Too much is going against him. I fully expect over the next week that every piece of bad news that can come out of Iraq will come out. The media is going to have a field day. Last election, it was the DUI thing, and I expect this year will be no different. Some bombshell will come out, some big event that is bad, and Bush will sink because of it.

There is little upside that could happen this week aside from UBL being killed or captured. So, I will be stuffing my mattress with money and wait for my taxes to go up under a new President Kerry. Sorry mom, no new house for you!

Israel

An interesting commentary about how Kerry's foreign policy, which he refuses to detail, could very well be based on sacrificing Israel to gain allies.