JunkYardBlog

KERRY GIVES UP ON VIETNAM, WILL TRY PLAN B

The spin here is priceless:

Despite losing ground in polls, Kerry believes he has cleared the national security hurdle with most voters and plans to focus mostly on health care and the economy leading up to Nov. 2, Lockhart said. This sets the stage for the two presidential campaigns to compete on vastly different battlegrounds: Bush, staking his reelection on his ability to lead the war on terrorism; Kerry, promising more available health care and better education in exchange for higher taxes on the rich.

New strategy for Lt Kerry: Quit while you're behind, pretend you won, send the shocked, wounded and depressed troops to an empty battlefield and scream, "Bring! It! On!"

UPDATE: Now we know why Kerry is suddenly willing to surrender his memories of Vietnam to the Swiftvets and bloggers. Turns out the United States Navy is hot on the trail of Kerry's medals fraud.

Mr. Kerry’s campaign Web site, which may be viewed at www.johnkerry.com, lists a Silver Star with a Combat V on his DD214. This form issued by the Department of Defense summarizes a serviceman’s career. It is always signed and authenticated as accurate by the individual, in this case Mr. Kerry. But according to a Navy spokesman it is “incorrect.”The Navy has never issued a Combat V at any time for the Silver Star.

This is a serious issue. The chief admiral of the Navy, Jeremy Michael Boorda, committed suicide over questions raised about his right to wear a Combat V by Newsweek magazine in 1996. Boorda stated in his suicide note to his sailors that the questions raised about those he wore caused him to take his life. And that was only a Bronze Star, not the Navy’s third highest decoration.

At the time, Mr. Kerry told the Boston Globe that Boorda’s conduct was “sufficient to question [Boorda’s] leadership position.…If you wind up being less than what you’re pretending to be, there is a major confrontation with value and self-esteem and your sense of how others view you.”

The Navy also questioned the listing on Mr. Kerry’s Web site of a DD215 form listing four bronze campaign stars for his service in Vietnam. According to its records, the Navy credits Mr. Kerry with two campaigns.That is sufficient for the wearing of the Vietnam Service Medal for one campaign bearing one campaign star for the additional campaign — not four.

Perhaps most puzzling of all is Mr. Kerry’s display of a citation for his Star signed in 1986 by the Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman. Mr. Lehman, who recently completed his service on the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, finds this “[a] total mystery. I never saw it. I never signed it. I never approved it. And the additional language it contains was not written by me.”

They do say people usually get caught by authorities when they can't help bragging about their exploits.

MORE: Now the Navy Inspector General's office has prompted the Sec. of the Navy to open a formal probe of Kerry's Vietnam decorations.

MILLER TIME

I was reading Gods of War by John Toland when Zell Miller took the podium tonight. About a minute into the speech, I had to put the book down and listen. It was as though Zell grabbed my brain, which the book had put on Bataan in June 1942, and forced it to pay undivided attention to him.

What a speech! He reeled off a pack of one-liners that will resonate from now to November, and coming from a lifelong Democrat the whole vibe he conjured up has to make a major impact across America. It has to.

I watched ABC's coverage of the convention, and it was obvious that Peter Jennings was not happy with much of anything. As Miller strode to the mic, Jennings prefaced the speech thusly: "Remember, ladies and gentlemen, that whatever Miller says about his own party, he is retiring." The emphasis was in the original, and it was intended as a jab at the turncoat shooting at his political brothers in arms on the way out.

Unfortunately for Jennings, there is also a second meaning that I think is the truth: That freed from the constraints of party politics, Zell would speak his mind tonight. And boy, did he!

After the speech, Jennings and George Stephanopolous of Clintonista fame took a few seconds to point out Miller's age and to opine that his speech was intended as red meat only for the Republicans in attendance at the Garden. Nothing could be further from the truth. Miller's very appearance was a signal to the Reagan Democrats that their true home is not with Kerry and Kennedy and Edwards and Pelosi, but with Bush and Cheney and McCain and Ahnuld and even Koch and Miller. I have no doubt that Miller made a huge impact tonight, and across the line deep into blue territory. There was a distant sound on the breeze as Miller spoke, and it was the sound of chairs scraping across the deck of Kerry's own private Titanic.

I didn't catch much of Cheney, but don't really feel like I missed much. Don't get me wrong, I'm a Cheney fan and have been for a long time. I think the way the Democrats have turned his impeccable career in public service into some kind of Darth Vader motif is shameful and disgraceful. But I pretty much knew what Cheney would say and how he would say it. He would be calm, and cut Kerry apart with surgical lasers. He would depict enough gravitas for a medium sized country, and he would lay out a solid case for four more years of Bush. No surprise.

But Miller! He made me proud to be an American, proud to have served in the Air Force, proud to be a Republican and proud to keep on supporting the war on jihad and the man leading us in that war. Mission accomplished, indeed.

MORE: InstaPundit notes that Jennings and Snuffalupaguss looked unhappy at the end of festivities tonight. I bet. Those two tried peeing all over Zell Miller only to find themselves up against a 90 mile per hour headwind.

You'd be pretty unhappy if that happened to you, no?

UPDATE: John McCain tried peeing all over Zell right after the speech as well. Thursday morning talk is that female voters went ga-ga over Zell's righteous alpha male indignation on behalf of America's women and children. This wasn't the fake anger and manufactured outrage of leftist Dems. Women must now see how John Kerry would leave their families high and dry -- and eventually (dirty) nuked.

Bill Clinton only had a bimbo eruption to deal with in his campaign, but John Kerry now has to deal with an alpha male detonation from Swiftvets, GOP convention speakers and even old-school Democrats. Big difference. He and his media goons at MSNBC can't beat up on these guys. Meanwhile, Kerry is out windsurfing in his daisy-covered shorts. No recent sighting of the daisy zipper-pull though. John Kerry and daisies are like Yasser Arafat and baby wipes.

--Chris

TERRORISTS ON THE OFFENSIVE IN RUSSIA

I the past week or so, terrorists have downed two planes (in what may have been an attempt to kill Vladimir Putin) and carried out a car bombing in Russia.

Now they're holding about 200 school children hostage, and threatening to kill them.

I've been expecting just such at attack for a long time. Just not in Russia. I expected it here, based on seized al Qaeda training tapes I wrote about a while ago. There will be more attacks like this one, with ever more gruesome violence against the innocent, until we wipe out the jihadi scourge.

But why Russia? Why now? I don't know. Maybe it's easier for al Qaeda-trained Chechen terrorists to slip in there than to infiltrate young Arab males into here, where we even rightly bust people for videotaping landmarks and bridges. But the situation is worth keeping our eyes on.

(via Spoons, who needs to keep his eye on the big picture)

MORE: The Russians have added troops to guard nuclear sites on the heels of the school hostage situation. Logic and Sanity is updating frequently, and from Russian news services.

MICHAEL MOORE HATES AMERICA

Check out the new trailer for the upcoming documentary. It'll be interesting to see if conservatives in major cities can do as well as liberals in flocking to see the movie when it's in limited release. If so, it can get distribution into the heartland and continue to show that documentaries can be successful. But if the Academy continues to give Oscars to inferior Michael Moore propaganda films that distort reality it could put a wet blanket on the genre. It's like an artificial digitized landscape winning the world's top photography prize. Or, you might even say, it's like the NY Times' Walter Duranty winning a Pulitzer.

IN ASHCROFT'S AMERIKKKA

Prosecutorial bungling leads the US government to request that several high-profile terror convictions get tossed out.

The department's decision came after a monthslong internal investigation uncovered several pieces of evidence that prosecutors failed to turn over to defense lawyers before the trial last year. The probe exposed deep differences within the government over the course of the case and the quality of the prosecution's evidence.

The internal investigation of prosecutorial misconduct found enough problems that there is "no reasonable prospect of winning," the government conceded, drawing back from a case once hailed by the Bush administration as a major victory in the war on terror.

Yes, this is a black eye for the prosecutors involved. But the problems were discovered by an internal investigation. I'm sure the left will use this case as another bloody shirt against Ashcroft and Bush, but the fact is the government cleaned its house here.

Can you imagine such an investigation and such an outcome in, say, Saddam's Iraq or the Iranian mullahcracy or pretty much anywhere outside the West or Westernized (i.e. Japan and South Korea) countries? In countries where they hang 16-year-old girls for being promiscuous?

I don't think so.

SMEARING ZELL

The RNC has Zell Miller on tap for tonight. Georgian Doug Payton takes a look at the Senator the Democrats would rather smear than listen to:

Last night, while I was channel-surfing looking for the best conventioncoverage, I hit a channel showing Zell Mill speaking to a political convention, but after a while it was obvious that this was not the 2004 Republican National Convention. It also had underneath the video a website, (www.ListenToThisVoice.com. I went there this morning to see what was there, and it's a site accepting donations for the Democrat Party of Georgia. They feature 3 clips of Zell's speech to the 1992 Democratic National Convention. In it he blasts George Bush, who he says "just doesn't get it." Now, if you don't read the dim fine print, you might not realize he's talking about the first George Bush, especially when they make a "then and now" contrast. He's trying to make the case that health care and the failing economy are things the elder Bush doesn't understand and won't take care of as the "then" side. For the "now" side, they have one quote: "I am for President George W. Bush because he is the right man at the right place at the right time."

This is a very interesting non sequiter, on two levels no less. They're
comparing Zell's response to two different presidents, and on different issues.
Miller's quote is obviously referring to the point in history that George W.
Bush found himself on 9/11, and on that point Miller is particularly harsh in
criticism of liberal Democrats.

Read the rest. I agree with Payton's take on lotteries and the way states have misled the public about the uses of lottery proceeds and so forth, but like Payton that doesn't temper my enthusiasm for having Miller (who brought the lottery to Georgia) address the Convention tonight. I'm sure it's forcing Terry MacAuliffe to stay within arm's reach of a case of Maalox, and that's reason enough for me to enjoy the spectacle.

FRANKS FOR BUSH

Gen. Tommy Franks endorses President Bush for re-election.

He may also weigh in on Kerry's 1971 testimony. That will be interesting.

DIBS ON THE CARCASS OF DOUG BRINKLEY'S CREDIBILITY

Back when the Swifties first stormed John F. Kerry's campaign, the JYB made one lone unique contribution to the fray. We wondered what kind of historian must Douglas Brinkley, author of the Kerry hagiography Tour of Duty, must be to have missed all the controversial angles to Kerry's brief but storied career as a SWIFT boat commander. We wondered what the Cambodia dustup would do to his career as a historian. We wondered, though we didn't write it at the time, why so many historians of late have been caught in varying degrees of scholastic undress, and why so many of those historians have been leftwingers.

Courtesy Beldar, we can now see the outlines of the end of Brinkley's credibility. You should read the whole thing to get the flavor and depth of Brinkley's--I don't know whether to call it deception, fraud or incompetence yet--but here's a solid money graph:

[T]o find that Brinkley had the starkly different version of the Rassmann resuce that Kerry told in the Belodeau Eulogy actually in his hands — and that Brinkley ignored it! — simply stuns me. This is simply not something one can blame on an incompetent editor or typesetting gremlins.

To recap, Kerry has told contradictory versions of the Rassman rescue, the action that won him the Bronze Star. Brinkley had both versions of that story in hand when he wrote Tour of Duty, yet failed to account for the discrepancies in any way. At best, it's sloppy work, and at worst (the angle I'm inclined to take) Brinkley is helping Kerry pave over all the smarmier twists in his military record. That like so much else we're learning about Kerry's career, Tour of Duty is an elaborate fraud.

(thanks to Chris)

NIGHT 2

Arnold was awesome. Just the right mix of humor and seriousness, good nods to Nixon (!) and Reagan. Mentioned the win in the Cold War and fearing Soviet troops as a boy in Austria. Extremely well done. There will be calls to allow immigrants to become President. I'll oppose those calls, but who'll listen to me?

The Twins--eh, they're young. Easy on the eyes if a bit hard on the other senses. Their section should've been shorter.

Laura Bush was just what we expect--a very pretty lady who speaks well and sounds as authentic as she is. I love the West Texas accent. She wears it well and reminds me of home.

Overall, a good night. Maryland Lt Gov Michael Steele looked pretty good during the few minutes I caught of him speaking. Watch for him in the future: He's a black Reaganite conservative and edging toward political rock star status, and working along with a very tough Governor Bob Ehrlich here in Maryland. Both Steele and Ehrlich could be Republican threats for higher office, and both would be pretty good choices from what I've seen from them so far.

Randomly generated thought: The power of incumbency was evident tonight and has been all week. Kerry's convention was mostly about his four months in Vietnam 35 years ago; this convention is about what George W. Bush has been doing as president since taking office in 2001. Today's accomplishments vs yesterdays role in a lost war. Bush should get a healthy bounce out of this week as long as the Twins prove to be the worst of the show.

SHAKEUP IN THE KERRY CAMP

While John F. Kerry windsurfs for the millionth time this year, his campaign melts down. What to do? Shake things up. Let's take a look at the new faces:

Joining the Kerry-Edwards campaign: Senior Advisor Joe Lockhart; Director of Rapid Response Joel Johnson; Senior Advisor for National Security Affairs Dr. Susan Rice; Policy Advisor on Israel and the Middle East former Congressman Mel Levine; Elizabeth Edwards Chief of Staff Lori Denham and Elizabeth Edwards Communication Director Karen Finney.

Joe Lockhart--the Clinton administration official most often described as "hapless." Susan Rice--wasn't she at the center of the Clinton administration's failed lack of policies in Africa? Wasn't she the one who helped put the kibosh on the Sudanese offers to hand over bin Laden? Why yes, she is. This new team is supposed to reassure America that Kerry is serious about the war? They're among the least competent of the Clinton bunch, and that's saying something.

The rest are people I've never heard of or are joining the staff of Elizabeth Edwards. Unless Kerry is expecting Big Things from his running mate's wife, I'd say they're not likely to have much impact on the race.

Truth is, if the Dems want a shakeup they need to look a bit higher up in the campaign. Torch, anyone?

MORE: Latest focus groups on Kerry: "He betrayed this country!" Kerry can thank Al Gore for bringing up the subject. Now voters are trying to figure out which candidate is the real traitor.

THE WOUNDS OF VIETNAM

Mark Steyn:

So when John McCain sternly warns the swift boat veterans of ''reopening the wounds of Vietnam,'' it's worth asking: Why is Vietnam a ''wound'' and why won't it heal? The answer: not because it was a military or strategic defeat but because it was a national trauma. And whose fault is that?

Well, you can't pin it all on one person, but, if you had to, Lt. John F. Kerry would stand a better shot at taking the solo trophy than almost anyone. The ''wounds'' McCain complains of aren't from losing Vietnam, but from the manner in which it was lost. Today Sen. Kerry says he's proud of his anti-war activism, but that's not what it was. Every war has pacifists and conscientious objectors and even disenchanted veterans, but there's simply no precedent for what John Kerry did: a man who put his combat credentials to the service of smearing his country's entire armed forces as rapists, decapitators and baby killers. That's the ''wound,'' Sen. McCain. That's why a crummy little war on the other side of the world still festers. That's why the band didn't play ''Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be'' and move on to the next item of business. Because Kerry didn't just call for U.S. withdrawal, he impugned the honor of every man he served with.

Exactly right. That's why there is a group, independent of anything Bush is doing or wants done, of Vietnam veterans who have undertaken one last mission for the nation, and put themselves on the line one last time for the republic. That mission is to stop the man who smeared them, and who more than any other protestor made Vietnam a festering wound that won't heal, and who used his honors to assist our enemies to victory.

Making his experience in that war the centerpiece of his candidacy was probably the single stupidest tactical mistake a major candidate has ever committed. Unless you count Kerry's own confession in 1971 to committing war crimes himself:

If they'd taken him at his word, when the senator said ''I'm John Kerry reporting for duty,'' the delegates at the Democratic Convention should have dived for cover.

But they didn't. So Kerry is now the first self-confessed war criminal in the history of the Republic to be nominated for president. Normally this would be considered an electoral plus only in the more cynical banana republics. But the Democrats seemed to think they could run an anti-war anti-hero as a war hero and nobody would mind. As we now know, a lot of people -- a lot of veterans -- do mind, very much. They understand that, whether or not he ever mowed down civilians with his 50-caliber machinegun, Kerry is responsible for a lot of wounds closer to home.

In the usual course of events, Kerry's terrible judgment in the '70s would render him unelectable. Instead, over two decades he morphed into a respectably dull run-of-the-mill pompous senatorial windbag. Had he run for president in the '90s or 2000, he might even have pulled it off. But the Democrats turned to him this time because the tortured contradictions of his resume suited an anti-war party that didn't dare run as such. Ever since the first cries of ''Quagmire!'' back in the early days of the Afghan liberation in 2001, the left have been trying to Vietnamize the war on terror. They failed in that, but they succeeded in the Vietnamization of the election campaign, and that's turned out just swell, hasn't it? Remember that formulation a lot of Democrats were using last year? They oppose the war but ''of course'' they support our troops. Kerry's campaign is a walking illustration of the deficiencies of that straddle: When you divorce the heroism of soldiering from the justice of the cause, what's left but a hollow braggart?

Indeed.

MORE: This is the sort of thing that the Swifties and the POWs rightly detest about John Kerry's anti-war antics. It was published by his group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

"DIRECT ACTION"

The anarchists may be planning something big in New York today.

THE CONVENTION

I caught most of McCain's speech; thought he was great. The jab at Michael Moore was particularly effective in setting up the difference between the parties. One party takes national security seriously, the other runs to a fudgeball of a film maker with serious mental problems. You make the call.

Go here for a fairly definitive roundup of what was said and done last night.

I was mostly working on non-blog stuff and watching football last night. The 'Boys took down the Titans. Testaverde looked surprisingly mobile and shockingly accurate. He only threw to the other team once (that I saw, anyway), and the receivers and backs looked solid. Keyshawn and Vinny definitely looked like a dangerous combo, and the line gave the QBs better than adequate protection. The D could've looked better, but it's playing without Darren Woodson so you'd have to expect some weakness. Overall, the Cowboys looked like they should be competitive this year in the NFC East, which could turn out to be the toughest division in football.

DAVID BRODER TO THE BABY BOOMERS:

Just die already so the rest of us can get some peace and quiet about #$#@% Vietnam!

(via National Center)

OH, THAT LIBERAL MEDIA...

In my brief career as a radio news director, I'd get probably a solid half-dozen press releases on the average day. They would be from all sorts of people and groups about all sorts of things. Sometimes I'd use them to build a news story, and sometimes I wouldn't. It depended on lots of things--the depth of the news that day, the source of the release, how well the release was written, whether or not I could verify anything the release claimed to be true or false.

But one thing I never, ever did was write up a rebuttal to the release and send it off to those who had written it. I just never had the time or the inclination.

A Reuters editor recently had both the time and the impassioned inclination. It was a supremely arrogant and dumb move:

A Reuters news service editor sent an e-mail to a pro-life group last week, criticizing the group's stance on abortion as well as its support of the Bush administration. The angry email has prompted the pro-life group to question the editor's journalistic integrity.

According to the National Right to Life Committee, the email came "out of the blue" from Todd Eastham, a news editor for Reuters. Eastham was responding to a press release that the National Right to Life Committee sent to hundreds of news outlets after a federal judge in New York struck down a ban on partial birth abortion.

Eastham's email read as follows: "What's your plan for parenting & educating all the unwanted children you people want to bring into the world? Who will pay for policing our streets & maintaining the prisons needed to contain them when you, their parents & the system fail them? Oh, sorry. All that money has been earmarked to pay off the Bush deficit. Give me a frigging break, will you?"

That's a news editor, not an opinion columnist, writing there folks. You don't suppose his opinions ever cloud his editorial judgement, do you? When he edits stories about the abortion issue, or when he edits material about the Bush administration or its policies?

Nah. Couldn't be.

I QUESTION THE TIMING

The press reports on a spy scandal involving a mid-level policy wonk and the Israelis--on the eve of the GOP convention.