Just finished Natan Sharanky’s “The Case of Democracy”
Natan Sharansky was a Soviet dissident who fought for the rights of Jews, particulary Jewish immigrant, against his Soviet oppressors. He was jailed for seven years but eventually prevailed. Currently he lives in Israel. Sharansky argues in “The Case for Democracy” that all oppressed people yearn for freedom. He makes a compelling historical and moral case that American foreign policy should link relations with tyrants to how they treat their own people — just as Reagan did with the Soviet Union. Such linkage, Sharansky argues, will allow potential dissidents who will work to lessen the oppression to emerge. This book makes a compelling moral case for reform through an activist foreign policy by America and other free nations by a man who possesses the moral authority to make it.
Tuesday 04 Jan 2005 | Jacobse | Books |
Perhaps the greatest failure by Leftist so-called human rights activists is not holding accountable those in Soviet Russia responsible for the GULAG system of slave labor and death camps. But, of course, what can one expect when Leftists view the Soviet Hammer and Sickle as a fashion accessory, which one can purchase here, here or here, rather than as it should be seen, which is as a symbol of hate and oppression equivalent to the Nazi Swastika.
Most often the left is tyranny’s loudest apologist.
Are you serious? Republican Presidents have been perfectly content to work with tyrants, as long as they helped America achieve our geopolitical goals.
Remember we helped General Pinochet assassinate Chile’s democratically elected President Allende, and then looked the other way as he rounded up thousands of political prisoners and shot them in the Santiago Soccer Stadium. We sent aid and assistance to the thuggish right wing government in El Salvador that sent gunmen to shoot down Bishop Oscar Romero as he celebrated the Eucharist. Ronald Reagan provided aid and intellegence to Saddam Hussein in his war against Iraq even after he had killed over 5,00 Kurds with poison gas. There is a famous photo of Donald Rumsfelt shaking hands with saddam a few months after the gassing.
Today, in exchange for military bases in Uzbekistan we are aiding the regime of dictator Islam Karim who has been known to boil his political opponents alive. http://www.thememoryhole.org/pol/us-and-uz.htm
Collaborating With Tyrants for Purely Temporary and Pragmatic Reasons (Stalin in WWI) vs. Advancing a Totalitarian Political Systems All Over the World.
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Dean Scourtes writes:
Are you serious? Republican Presidents have been perfectly content to work with tyrants, as long as they helped America achieve our geopolitical goals.
Remember we helped General Pinochet assassinate Chile?s democratically elected President Allende, and then looked the other way as he rounded up thousands of political prisoners and shot them in the Santiago Soccer Stadium. We sent aid and assistance to the thuggish right wing government in El Salvador that sent gunmen to shoot down Bishop Oscar Romero as he celebrated the Eucharist. Ronald Reagan provided aid and intellegence to Saddam Hussein in his war against Iraq even after he had killed over 5,00 Kurds with poison gas. There is a famous photo of Donald Rumsfelt shaking hands with saddam a few months after the gassing.
Today, in exchange for military bases in Uzbekistan we are aiding the regime of dictator Islam Karim who has been known to boil his political opponents alive. http://www.thememoryhole.org/pol/us-and-uz.htm
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Missourian replies:
Let us assume for the sake of argument that all of the factual allegations contained in Dean’s note are true. Please note that I don’t agree with the factual allegations but I want to go somewhere else with the debate.
First, Planet Earth is full of tyrants and we can’t, as yet, leave the Earth. We cannot cut off relations with all of the tyrannical governments in the world, because we would be left dealing with only about 40 governments out of 180. Sometimes, we have to collaborate with tyrants. No one seriously questions the wisdom of taking Stalin as a ally against Hitler. The United States did what it needed to do to stop Hitler. This was embraced by people all over the political spectrum. This did not implicate the United States in the crimes of Stalin.
Similarly, the United Nations is full of tyrants and crooks, yet, the Left claims a moral superiority for the United Nations and urges us to collaborate with them.
Second, when the Left embraced the Soviet Union AFTER WWII, it did not do so for purely pragmatic reasons, such a Roosevelt did DURING WWWII. The Left endorsed the political ideology of the Soviet Union. In the book Useful Idiots, Mona Charen details the manner in which the Left served the political and diplomatic goals of the Soviet Union in the United States and all over the world during the 1950’s and 1960’s.
As I noted sometime earlier, Ukrainians have been trying to get the New York Times to hold Walter Duranty accountable for his service as Stalin’s mouthpiece. Walter Duranty was the Moscos correspondent for the New York Times during the Stalin era and he knowingly and actively collaborated with Stalin to suppress international coverage of the starvation campaign against the Ukrainians. The New York Times, to this day, refuses to return the Pulitzer Price won by Duranty under these dubious circumstances.
The Left still actively works to undermine the reputation of the Founding Fathers and to discredit American patriotism as jingoism. They are very busy with this today. Kerry is in Iraq cheerleading the opposition to Bush and thereby the opposition to American policy.
Kerry does what he does best.
Kerry has traveled to Iraq. He is using his presence there to launch an attack on American policy in Iraq at the very time that American soldiers are fighting. As a Senator he has tremendous power and access to the inner workings of government. He is fully capable of raising objections to our policy from INSIDE THE SENATE CHAMBERS IN CLOSED DOOR MEETINGS. This occurs all the time. Senators who are members of sensitive committees concerning the military and national security have tremendous power. Their objections are given weight because they are on committees that approve legislation and appropriate money.
For Kerry to use a public forum to criticize the war, WHEN HE HAS ONE OF THE MOST EFFECTIVE AND POWERFUL PRIVATE MEANS TO CORRECT WAR POLICY, means that he is working to discredit Bush through discrediting America which will advance his pipe dream of winning the election next time. He cares about his political career, not good war policy.
Kerry is doing to Iraq what he did to Viet Nam. He is using the war as a springboard for his political advancement. ONly this time he has even less excuse. An ordinary citizen has no other option but to speak out publicly regarding any disagreement with the conduct of the war. A Senator has tremendous power to make changes inside the Senate. This public display by Kerry is solely for his personal political advancement.
LEFTIST BIAS AS A MEANS OF SUPRESSING NEWS
The heart of the conservative complaint against the media is not that the media are liberal. The complaint is that the liberals had created an intellectual monopoly for people who think just as they think, they then used this intellectual monopoly to filter the news and to suppress the news.
The best examples is Walter Duranty. Walter Duranty was the New York Times journalist assigned to Moscow during the Stalin years. During Duranty’s tenure Stalin starved to death 10 million Ukrainians. After the fall of the Soviet Union internal Soviet documents made clear that Duranty knew of these programs. Duranty screened news about the Unkrainian starvation, he didn’t want to hurt Stalin’s standing in the world.
American’s had very few sources of news from the Soviet Union. Travel was strictly limited and the Soviet’s did not allow a free press. Duranty had tremendous power as the lead journalist for the New York Times. He could shape American opinion towards the Soviet Union through his writings. There was precious little other sources of news avaiable.
The complaint again, is not BIAS per se, but the creation of an intellectual monopoly, and the suppression of news.
The fact that Sean Hannity is a conservative commentator and interviewer is not a problem. He doesn’t hide it and he invites liberals to debate him.
It would be a problem if Sean Hannity had the power to appoint every professional journalist in America on broadcast and cable and newspapers and if he appointed only people who saw the world his way. Lastly, if he concealed his plan and claimed total professional objectivity, then, he would be committing the dishonesty that the liberal press has engaged in for decades.
No 4. Missourian I find it amazing that you can fill so few paragraphs with so many maliciously false statements.
First, who are you talking about when you say that the LEFT in the US supported Stalin after WWII: a few fringe groups, or the entire Democratic party? Because the Democratic party, under President Harry Truman quickly moved to oppose Stalin after WWII. That is what the Marshall Plan was all about, remember? It was Truman, for example who provided Greece with the millions in aid needed to defeat the Communists during their Civil War.
Second, Kerry is NOT “in Iraq cheerleading the opposition to Bush and thereby the opposition to American policy”. He is there supporting our troops and today endorsed the President’s position that the elections scheduled ffor the end of January should go on.
The cultural Left has always supported Stalinism. The Democratic party didn’t support a leftist foreign policy (Democratic presidents through Kennedy would sound like today’s Republicans) until after the McGovern candidacy. (This is also when they lurched leftward on social issues.) IOW, the Democrats adopted the policies of the left only after their failure in Viet Nam.
(Keep in mind though, that by supporting Truman you implicitly undermine the progressivism that informs so much of your other views. Truman, IOW, would have repudiated liberal progressivism.)
Note 6. I agree with Missourian. I have no problem with a leftward slant in news reporting. Let’s just dispense with the fiction that the slant is “objective.” The decline of the Old Media and the rise of New Media is probably one of the healthier developments for political debate in a long time. Sure it’s more raucous. But I’ll take the raucousness over a three network dominance any day. Does anyone really believe the fraud perpetrated by CBS would have been uncovered by any other Old Media outlet?
The gold standard for news reporting is a network like the BBC, which does not lean or tilt toward any ideology, but adheres only to the highest standards of journalism and objective reporting.
Because an informed citizenry is necessary for a democracy to function correctly, an ideologically neutral and impartial press, serving as a “fifth estate”, is essential. When the press stops serving as a neutral observer and “watchdog” of the political process and becomes a partisan player in that process instead, our democracy suffers as result.
Unfortunately the trend towards concentrated corporate control of media outlets has accelerated this negative trend. From a marketing standpoint a more narrow, but more loyal viewership has more value to advertisers than a broader but shallower viewership, so that a news reporting approach aimed at pleasing and not offending a more politically homogenous market niche develops.
The sin of Dan Rather and CBS was not not fraud, but shoddy journalism. The facts of the story they reported were essentially true, but the specific evidence they presented to support those facts was not authenticated properly and turned out to have been fabricated. Rather would have been guilty of fraud if he had knowingly used a document he knew to be false. Instead he let himself get duped.
Dean’s Gold Standard: BBC lied and twisted facts concerning Dr. Kelly according to Judge Hutton
Dean writes:
The gold standard for news reporting is a network like the BBC, which does not lean or tilt toward any ideology, but adheres only to the highest standards of journalism and objective reporting.
Missourian replies:
Dean perhaps you should review the events surrounding the suicide of David Kelly, one of the biggest scandals in British History. Just last year the BBC sponsored and repeated several times, blatantly false reporting. It through the government into an uproar and prompted an investigation by Lord Hutton which roundly chastised the individual reporter, his editors and the entire BBC.
Here is a citation to a CNN summary: http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/01/28/hutton.blair/
Judge Hutton found the BBC had LIED about critically important national defense and national security information with the aim of discrediting the government of Tony Blair because the staff of the BBC opposed the Iraq war. THEY LIED. THEY LIED TO PROMOTE THE FOREIGN POLICY THEY PREFERRED.
Given the enormity of the afordementioned scandal, the international reverberations, it is beyond me how anyone can suggest that the BBC is the “gold standard” of anything except static electricity.
Also worthy of remembrance is the female BBC reporter who wept on camera at the death of Yassar Arafat. Arafat who ordered the violent death of so many innocents and brought terror to a new low in the 21st Century.
No I have lived long enough to know that there does not exist any individual human being or any collection of human beings which does not need oversight and accountibility. I find it offensive in the greatest degree that society would attempt to choose some journalistic high priests (the BBC?)who can be trusted to select for me what I will be permitted to read about politics.
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Dean writes:
Because an informed citizenry is necessary for a democracy to function correctly, an ideologically neutral and impartial press, serving as a ?fifth estate”, is essential. When the press stops serving as a neutral observer and ?watchdog? of the political process and becomes a partisan player in that process instead, our democracy suffers as result.
Missourian replies:
There never has been an ideologically neutral press in any country on this planet within recorded history. The Founding Fathers did not envisage a “neutral” press. They envisaged exactly what they had, a wildly opinionated and disputive press abounding in debates from all angles. The United States Constitution is founded on the idea that there is a “marketplace of ideas” where many voices are heard. By the way the idea between “marketplace” is not mercantile, it is a reference to the fact that colonists frequently went to the open air markets and chatted with their friends to find out the news. People met in the physical marketplace to discuss ideas. Obviously, this was a totally unregulated experience where anyone who wished to express an opinion or assert a fact as true could do so. No one was the designated “high priest” of news who would filter reality for the rest of the town.
Ideas compete and those that hold up under honest and open debate win the day. The idea that anyone would give their brains over to the BBC or anyone else runs counter to the approach of the Founders. Every group of humans has its own view of the world. The BBC was caught very clearly massaging the facts to push its political agenda.
Pul—–leeeeez. Shall we dispense with the idea of some sancrosanct institution that we all bow down to as “impartial.” I am much more happy with a wide variety of newspapers, TV stations, columnists, commentators, and reporters.The American people can sort it all out, we don’t need to be spoon fed reality by a journalistic priesthood.
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Dean writes
Unfortunately the trend towards concentrated corporate control of media outlets has accelerated this negative trend. From a marketing standpoint a more narrow, but more loyal viewership has more value to advertisers than a broader but shallower viewership, so that a news reporting approach aimed at pleasing and not offending a more politically homogenous market niche develops.
Missourian replies:
RING A BELL, I AGREE WITH DEAN. I, like Dean, also oppose concentrated control of media outlets. However, there is a saving grace. The nature of the internet is such that it is nearly impossible for anyone to control. Block my transmission along one route and I can retransmit along 10,000 alternate routes. Catch me if you can, censor!! Thereby concerned as I am about media concentration, I am somewhat reassured that the internet breaks intellectual monopolies of all kinds.
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Dean writes:
The sin of Dan Rather and CBS was not not fraud, but shoddy journalism. The facts of the story they reported were essentially true, but the specific evidence they presented to support those facts was not authenticated properly and turned out to have been fabricated. Rather would have been guilty of fraud if he had knowingly used a document he knew to be false. Instead he let himself get duped.
Missourian replies:
The sin of Dan Rather was:
A) knowing fraud
B) collusion with a political party to use fraudulent materials to influence a federal election.
Dan Rather hired several document specialists to review the materials before publication. One document specialist, hired by Rather himself, told Rather directly that the documents were fake. He proceeded anyway. Rather has no defense.
As a former prosecutor, I would give a year’s pay for just a chance to bring a criminal prosecution against that old fraud Dan. May he some day get his defendant’s day in court.
Mary Mapes, is another rascal. She facilitated contact between the author of the documents and the Democrat party and co-ordinated there release with a Democrat party campaign theme called “Fortunate Son.” [Guess Kerry is the Fortunate Husband!!!]
If the facts of the story were “essentially true” why could they not prove it by legitimate documents? Please don’t mention that secretary. Rather never supplied the audience with the names of six other very reputable adults who refuted the secretary. He slanted the story to the every end to save his journalistic behind. Bush had given the press his Form 180 long age. This allowed the press access to every military document pertaining to Bush. Kerry never did sign a Form 180. Kerry was challenged by over 125 members of the armed forces including his entire chain of command. He never disclosed his true history.
If Rather had not been subject to the scrutiny of the non-traditional press, the blogosphere, Rather would have gotten away with it.
Let me see if I understand this: “the facts of the story were essentially true” even though the evidence supporting those facts “turns out to have been fabricated.” In the red state I’m from we call this illogical.
Fr. Hans writes: “Let me see if I understand this: �the facts of the story were essentially true� even though the evidence supporting those facts �turns out to have been fabricated.� In the red state I�m from we call this illogical.”
CBS interviewed the woman who was the personal secretary to the reserve commander in question. (Sorry, I can’t remember the names.) She affirmed that the documents were not prepared by her (thus were false), but also that the content of the documents reflected the commander’s thoughts about the situation with then Lt. Bush. — which she knew because she was secretary to the base commander.
But the woman’s testimony, like the documents, wasn’t verified either. The commander’s family said she was not telling the truth. CBS ran her interview too if I recall correctly.
Why Turning a Blind Eye to Illegal Immigration is not Christian (or Kosher for that matter)
Query: What do we do after we degrade the rule of law? Mobs? Despots? Rule of the most brutish? Take your pick. Condoning illegality penalizes those willing to abide by the rule of law.
Going Underground: America’s Shadow Economy
By Jim McTague
Baron’s | January 6, 2005
America has two economies, and one is flourishing at the expense of the other. First, there’s the legitimate economy, in which craftsmen are licensed and employers and employees pay taxes. Then there’s the fast-growing underground economy, where millions of nannies, construction workers and others are paid off-the-books, their incomes largely untaxed. The best guess as to the size of the output of this shadow economy is about $970 billion, or nearly 9% that of the real economy. It should soon pass $1 trillion.
What is largely fueling the underground economy, experts say, is the nation’s swelling ranks of low-wage illegal immigrants. The government puts this population at 8.5 million, but that may represent a serious undercount.
Robert Justich, a senior managing director at Bear Stearns Asset Management in New York, makes a persuasive case in a forthcoming paper, “The Underground Labor Force Is Rising to the Surface,” that illegal immigrants actually number 18 million to 20 million. If true, the economic implications are profound and could help shape debates slated in Washington this year over both immigration policies and tax reform.
Measuring the size of the underground economy is, of course, more art than science, since most of its denizens seek to remain anonymous. But convincing anecdotal evidence and a number of credible academic studies suggest that it is expanding briskly — probably by an average of 5.6% a year since the early 1990s, edging out the real economy.
In the process, the underground economy is undermining the effectiveness of the Internal Revenue Service, which is highly dependent on employees’ withholding taxes. If the IRS could collect all the taxes it says that it is owed from the underground economy in a given year, then the current budget deficit would disappear overnight. And if the IRS could collect these taxes every year, then the nation would have surpluses as far as the eye can see.
The IRS has estimated that its tax gap — the estimated amount of taxes owed minus the amount collected — is around $311 billion in any given year. The agency will produce a new estimate in 2005, and it could be as high as $400 billion, says former IRS Commissioner Donald Alexander. Now a lawyer in Washington, he cites a rise in private contracting and the opportunities it affords for not reporting income.
The gap number measures only a portion of the underground economy. Because the number is extrapolated from audited returns, it makes no allowances for criminal enterprises that report no income, and it even fails to capture some garden varieties of non-reporting. The unreported wages of illegal immigrants alone could be costing the government another $50 billion a year, says Justich.
Growth of the underground economy is partly a result of corporate downsizing, which has forced many former employees to go out on their own.
“We have had an 85% taxpayer compliance rate,” says Nina Olson, the IRS’s taxpayer advocate. “I expect the number to decline,” because the portion of employees subject to withholding is on the wane. Such employees are 99% compliant with tax laws, she says, but in the 21st-century economy, “More and more people are being treated as independent contractors. We are losing people from the withholding environment.”
Entrepreneurs often are stymied by the complexity of estimating their taxes and making quarterly payments, which leads to mistakes or out-and-out avoidance. The growth of online commerce may be exacerbating the situation.
There were over 40 million regular users of eBay alone in 2003, up from 23 million in 2002. The sellers are responsible for paying taxes. Some of them set up a business and get a taxpayer ID number; others don’t. (An eBay spokesman says the company isn’t a tax adviser — it’s up to members to report their taxes.)
Most unsettling to IRS bureaucrats, taxpayers as a group appear to have become less honest. Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik is the latest poster boy for the phenomenon. He had to drop his bid to become secretary of homeland security because he failed to pay Social Security taxes for his children’s illegal-immigrant nanny.
Kerik is hardly alone: Any homeowner who has been offered two prices by a handyman or a gardener — a higher one for a payment by check, a lower one for all cash — knows how quickly the savings can add up. In one twist on off-the-books business, the New York Times recently reported on a rise in mechanics who repair cars at curbside for untraceable cash payments. They are not in want of customers. In some cities, including Boston, owners of battered cars get similar offers from itinerant body-repair “experts.”
In speeches, IRS Commissioner Mark Everson is fond of citing a survey by his agency showing that the number of Americans who consider tax-cheating acceptable rose from 11% in 1999 to 17% in 2003.
Former Commissioner Alexander, who ran the agency during the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations, said he urged Congress to pass a law making customers responsible for withholding some taxes on services provided by carpenters, plumbers and other self-employed contractors. Customers would have had to hold back 5% of the cost of services and forward it to the IRS, but Congress failed to embrace the measure.
Result: The underground economy has kept growing nearly unchecked. Academics accept the work of Austrian Friedrich Schneider as the best estimate of the underground economy’s size. Using data on currency flows and the consumption of electricity, he guessed that in 1996 it was about 8.8% of the nation’s gross domestic product. This estimate was made before the flood of immigration from South America, so it might be conservative if used today, when the nation’s GDP stands at $11 trillion.
To be sure, the U.S. underground economy, as a percentage of GDP, is smaller than those of some other countries. In a 2000 paper in a publication of the Independent Institute, a nonprofit research organization, Schneider found that Greece, as of 1998, had the largest underground economy, at 29% of its GDP, followed by Italy at 27.8% and Spain at 23.4%. Countries with high tax burdens and high social security costs lead the list.
But the sheer growth of the underground economy in the U.S. is cause for concern. If Justich’s estimate of illegal immigrant workers is correct, the underground economy may now be growing at a markedly faster rate than the legitimate economy. Justich, working with Bear Stearns colleague Betty Ng, an emerging- markets economist, says he’s found evidence of a larger illegal immigrant population by analyzing data on construction and on remittances sent from the U.S. to Mexico and other countries. He also had conversations with over 100 immigrants from Mexico, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Guinea, China and Tibet. And he interviewed local business owners, real-estate sales people and police.
Justich, a veteran securities analyst, currently specializes in fixed-income strategies at Bear Stearns Asset Management, which oversees some $29 billion in investments. He began digging into the underground economy because of its broad ramifications for the real economy. In his spare time, he has been exploring the immigrant communities of northern New Jersey for his work as executive producer of a documentary film about immigrants and the importance of their former national anthems in their lives.
From all this, Justich concludes that Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s estimates of productivity gains are overly rosy. “The productivity miracle may be slightly overstated because they are counting the output of millions of illegal immigrants but not counting the input,” he says. Likewise, long-term budget projections could be overstating the potential growth of the legitimate U.S. economy or underestimating the need for high illegal immigrant flows to hit the forecast growth targets.
Ideas like that could well become food for thought for House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas of California. He wants to push ahead with tax reform this year, including the creation of a national sales tax and reduction of income taxes. In theory, a sales tax would capture the underground economy, since all wage earners have to spend money to live.
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Investigating Dan Rather
From Powerline:
More than three months after they were appointed to investigate the peddling of fake documents on President Bush’s National Guard service by 60 Minutes, Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi are expected to release their report tomorrow. I have no doubt there will be a report; I have no idea whether there was actually an investigation.
There is a story to be told here: a story about how CBS coordinated its attack on President Bush with the Democratic National Committee; a story about how fake documents were put into the hands of a mentally ill, obsessively anti-Bush crank named Bill Burkett; a story about how Burkett (if he can be believed) not only got the documents into the hands of 60 Minutes, but also into the hands of the Kerry campaign, via Max Cleland; a story about how left-wing CBS producer Mary Mapes pursued the Bush National Guard “story” for five years, beginning when he was Governor of Texas, without finding anything worth reporting until the fake documents came along; a story about how 60 Minutes was warned that the documents appeared to be fakes, but published them anyway; a story about how CBS relied on interviews with people who had neither met President Bush nor seen the documents, like Robert Strong, but carefully avoided talking to the key witnesses who actually had knowledge of relevant events, like Gen. “Buck” Staudt. Whom, by the way, they carelessly slandered in their broadcast.
But I doubt whether Thornburgh and Boccardi will tell that story. To conduct this investigation, you needed an investigator. An old-fashioned investigator who would go to Texas, track down Bill Burkett, and persuade him to talk. Who would immerse himself in the corrupt politics of Travis County, Texas, and pursue leads on who created the forgeries. Who would demand to see Mary Mapes’ telephone records for the last two years, and track down every number she called. Who would make witnesses like Max Cleland either answer questions, or go on record as refusing to talk. Who would, in short, investigate.
CBS didn’t employ an investigator. They employed a couple of distinguished 70-year-old gentlemen: exactly the wrong sort of people. Maybe Thornburgh and Boccardi had the sense to hire investigators, but I doubt it. My guess is that their “investigation” consisted essentially of interviewing CBS employees. At one point, I saw a news item where they proudly announced that they had talked to 36 CBS employees. Wow. What they needed to do was forget about CBS for a while, and go to Texas. If they only talked to CBS people, they would inevitably come away with the impression that 60 Minutes was well-intentioned but regrettably failed to be sufficiently critical of the documents’ authenticity, and therefore fell for a possible hoax.
I say “possible” because I doubt that the Thornburgh/Boccardi report will draw any conclusion about the documents’ falsity. I suspect that they will be agnostic about the documents, much as Mr. Pein was in his recent Columbia Journalism Review article. If I’m right, the report will be useless.
The fundamental question here is whether CBS was the victim of a hoax, or the perpetrator of a hoax. It has been our view for a long time that Rather and his colleagues were perpetrators, not victims, in part because the documents were such obvious fakes that it strains credulity to suppose that they were actually fooled. When you read the Thornburgy/Boccardi report, keep that question constantly in mind: victim, or perpetrator?
There are lots of problems with CBS’s effort to portray itself as the victim of a hoax, but perhaps the most intractable is Dan Rather’s personal vouching for the documents. Trust me, he said to America. I know they’re authentic. They came from an unimpeachable source. That takes CBS out of the category of victim, and into the category of perpetrator.
As a trial lawyer, there are lots of witnesses I’d love to cross-examine and lots of questions I’d love to ask. On Hugh Hewitt’s show tonight, I said that the first one would be of Dan Rather: On what basis did you personally guarantee that the documents were authentic? What source did you describe as “unimpeachable”? Why? If the source was Bill Burkett, it is hard to imagine anyone more impeachable. Maybe Rather was just lying, trying to brazen it out until after the election, so that his last “contribution” would be the election of John Kerry. Or maybe–this is my own idea, just a wild hunch–the source that Rather thought was “unimpeachable” was Max Cleland. But, of course, he couldn’t admit this afterward, as the story unravelled, because his paramount concern was not to admit the coordination between CBS and the Kerry campaign.
If Thornburgh and Boccardi didn’t ask these questions, and if the answers aren’t clearly laid out in their report, what they did wasn’t an investigation. It was a cover-up.
Enough speculation. Tomorrow, the report–and we’ll let you know what we think of it.
Fr. Hans writes: “But the woman�s testimony, like the documents, wasn�t verified either. The commander�s family said she was not telling the truth. CBS ran her interview too if I recall correctly.”
She worked for the Texas ANG for over 20 years. Why would the family know the details of what happened at his workplace? The only way you could verify her remarks is whether they are consistent with everything else we know about Bush. And they are.
“Another former Texas National Guard officer, Richard Via, also said that the documents were fakes but that their content reflected questions about Bush that were discussed at the time in the hangar at Ellington Air Force Base, where he had a desk next to Killian’s.”
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/president/
2004-09-14-memos-forgeries_x.htm
So you have not one, but two people who actually worked with the person in question who say that the content of the documents reflected the situation.
In addition the *undisputed* facts of the case are that Bush jumped to the head of the line, received a million dollars of pilot training, didn’t bother to take a flight physical, and transferred to Alabama, where no one remembers him ever showing up for any training. People do, however, remember his drinking.
Of course, all of this stuff is only of interest to people in the “reality-based” community. So feel free to ignore it and talk about Dan Rather instead. The big issue is Dan Rather’s bias. Who gives a damn if the commander-in-chief ditched his military service.
Missourian writes: “Trust me, he said to America. I know they’re authentic.”
So the Bush administration can be mistaken about thousands of weapons of mass destruction — even saying that they knew with “certainty” and “without a doubt” — but the really big issue is Dan Rather.
Good, glad to see that your priorities are straight.
Arguing that the facts of a fraud are still true means that facts don’t matter.
Fr. Hans writes: “Arguing that the facts of a fraud are still true means that facts don’t matter.”
I don’t see it that way at all, because there are other facts to consider. There are two people who worked with Bush’s commander who say that the content of the documents was largely correct. Also, when the White House press secretary was asked about the documents during a press conference this is what he said:
“Q Scott, on the National Guard documents on “60 Minutes,” the First Lady says she believes these are forgeries. The RNC has accused the Democratic Party of being the source of these documents. Knowing then what you know now, would you still have released those documents when you did?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, that’s a hypothetical question, John. We received those documents from a major news organization. We had every reason to believe that they were authentic at that time. And in keeping with the spirit of releasing documents and being open about all the documents that we have, we made those documents available to everybody else so you could look at them yourselves. Since that time there have been a number of questions that have been raised about these documents and their authenticity. There continue to be questions raised. Those are serious issues; they ought to be looked into fully.
The one thing that is not under question is the timing of these orchestrated attacks by the Democrats on the President’s service. These are old, recycled attacks, and the Democrats have made it clear that they intend to try to tear down the President and throw the kitchen sink at us because they can’t run on John Kerry’s record, and because they see him falling behind in the polls. And that’s what this is about.
Q Does the President agree with the First Lady that these are forgeries? And does he agree with the Republican Party in that the Democrats are the source of the forgeries?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, Mrs. Bush was expressing her view. The view of the White House is that these are serious questions that have been raised and they ought to be looked into. Many media organizations are looking into them as we speak. They’re interviewing additional experts. They have raised additional questions about it, and those are serious questions that ought to be looked into fully.”
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/09/20040915-3.html#4
So it’s interesting that even the White House didn’t say that the content wasn’t true. It’s clear that not even Bush could dispute the documents based on content alone. If Bush knew that he was never ordered to take a flight physical all the press secretary would have had to say was “the president was never ordered to take a flight physical; thus we know that that memo is not authentic.” But again, based on content alone they didn’t know if the documents were authentic or not.
And it is undisputed that he never did take the physical. There is not even any question about that. So you have that fact, the remarks of two people who worked with the commander, and the inability of the White House to dispute the authenticity of the documents based on content.
The content of documents always “look” true when a fraud is perpetrated. That’s why it’s called fraud. Further, reticence towards documents suddenly appearing thirty years after the fact ought not to be construed as tacit admission that they are true. It strikes the me the cautiousness displayed was appropriate.
Frankly, I think Kerry supporters were grasping at straws because of the Swift Boat testimony. CBS and other Democratic operatives made a Herculean effort to discredit Bush in order to neutralize the Swift Boat sting, but in the end they failed because there was nothing there. The American public didn’t buy it. Fortunately the blog brigade was around to expose it.
Well, even if one chooses to disbelieve every source that has raised serious doubts about Bush’s service record, one needs only to reflect upon Laura Bush’s (where did that “Pickles” nickname come from, anyhow) statement that the CBS records were “probably” forged. Probably? An interesting choice of words. If your own wife isn’t certain about your record, who is?
Note 21. Sources need substantiation. You examine the evidence a source offers to substantiate his claim and if the evidence if fraudulent, the source is discredited.
Reading nuances into the term “probably” can indicate bias, but bias isn’t evidence.
Where did I write that? Note 17
Both Dan Rather and Iraq are important questions. Both deserve discussion. Discussing Dan Rather doesn’t undercut anybody’s right to discuss Iraq.
Dan Rather is important because he was one of the three leading television journalists in this country. For decades Americans have gotten most of their news from TV. For decades that meant that most Americans have gotten most of their news from Tom, Peter and Dan. The manner in which CBS and Dan acquires, vets and publishes news stories is critically important to the quality of political debate in this country.
In journalism, as in many other occupations, all you have is your credibility. People have assumed that material broadcast by CBS met basic standards of credibility. People have assumed that sources were checked out from several angles. People have assumed that Mary Mapes wasn’t desperately looking for any shoddy garbage to foist on the public for the purpose of advancing her personal political goal of unseating George W. Bush.
It is called political corruption of an allegedly neutral journalist who has claimed the high moral ground for decades.
Historical facts without historical context are misleading. Missourian’s historical analysis if much more accurate than Dean’s attempt to use isolated historical facts to support ones current position (a form of anachronism)and a favorite tatic of the left. Truman was the most nuclear aggressive President we have ever had. Not only did he drop the bombs on Japan, he threatened Stalin with nukes on a regular basis (giving impetus to the arms race). He did this despite having a State Department that even then was infiltrated with communist sympathizers. McCarthy was essentially correct in his belief, wildly incorrect in the way he attempted to remedy the situation.
Given the current state of military superiority that we enjoy, he might very well have decided to nuke both Afghanistan and Iraq had he been President today. Certainly, he would support few, if any, of the policies and the methods so near and dear to Dean?s heart.
I just found out that I will be writing the review of Sharansky’s book for Townhall.com. Stayed tuned.