Date ►►► October 15, 2005

Bush's Teleconference: the Actual Q&A

In the comments section of an earlier post, AP Response to Bush Teleconference Staged!, I asked, “and what WERE the questions and the answers?” All we have heard from the MSM is speculation about whether the TV conference between President Bush and the toops was "staged," meaning scripted; but we have heard nothing about the conference itself. What did the president and the soldiers say? Does anybody know?

After some digging, I found a transcript. As I read it, I understood why the AP had to divert our attention to the trivial non-issue: once again, the MSM is determined to hide "good news from Iraq."

Since they're not going to tell, here are the actual questions and the answers, with commentary.

The ten American soldiers and one Iraqi soldier who participated in this conference are stationed in Tikrit, overseeing the security of the constitutional referendum vote. The purpose of this conference was for President Bush to learn how ready the Coalition and Iraqi security forces were to ensure security during the election.

After President Bush gave a short speech about how important it is for us to stay the course and bring democracy to Iraq, he began asking questions about pre-election operations: what Coalition forces had been doing, what their strategy was, and what was their assessment of Iraqi Army readiness.

Captain Brent Kennedy, who is responsible for coordinating the security response in the area of operation, responded:

Good morning, Mr. President, from Tikrit. I'm Captain Brent Kennedy. To my right is Sergeant Major Akeel from the 5th Iraqi Army Division. We're working together here with the Iraqis in Task Force Liberty for the upcoming referendum. We're surging an operation, called Operation Saratoga, that includes the securing of over 1,250 polling sites. We're working right alongside with the Iraqis as they lead the way in securing these sites.

Captain Dave Smith added that Iraqi forces have been "conducting battalion and brigade-size operations since April." The local Iraqi military themselves coordinated with other Iraqi forces, such as police and local government agencies, Smith added; the Coalition forces took only a supporting role.

When President Bush asked them to assess the security forces’ readiness, Captain Steven Pratt responded:

The Iraqi army and police services, along with coalition support, have conducted many and multiple exercises and rehearsals. Recently we've conducted a command post exercise in which we brought together these Iraqi security forces with emergency service units, and the joint coordination center, in which we all sat around a model and discussed what each one would do at their specific location and what they would do at the referendum.

It was impressive to me to see the cooperation and the communication that took place among the Iraqi forces. Along with the coalition's backing them, we'll have a very successful and effective referendum vote.

Captain David Williams said that voter registration in North-Central Iraq was up 17 percent. “That’s 400,000 new voters in North-Central Iraq, and 100,000 new voters in the al-Salahuddin province.” He said. Captain Williams said that he spoke to his Iraqi counterpart, who told him the Tikrit locals were “ready and eager to vote in this referendum.”

Considering the extremely high turnout for this election (66%), and the extraordinarily low rate of successful violent attacks by the terrorists, it's clear that the information that Bush got from these soldiers was quite accurate on all counts: they and the Iraqis had done a very good job of securing the polling places... and the Iraqis (even the Sunni) were definitely "ready and eager to vote."

Master Sergeant Corine Lombardo reminded the President that she met him in New York, on November 11th, 2001, at Ground Zero, when he recognized the Rainbow Soldiers -- the 42nd Infantry (Rainbow) Division of the Army National Guard. Bush took the opportunity put the soldiers at ease with a bit of ribbing, saying "I thought you looked familiar."

SERGEANT LOMBARDO: Well, thank you.

THE PRESIDENT: I probably look familiar to you, too.

Sergeant Lombardo praised the improvement in the Iraqi forces over the past 10 months.

We've been working side-by-side, training and equipping 18 Iraqi army battalions [in the Tikrit area]. Since we began our partnership, they have improved greatly, and they continue to develop and grow into sustainable forces. Over the next month, we anticipate seeing at least one-third of those Iraqi forces conducting independent operations.

Coalition forces have captured over 50 terrorists and detained thousands, she added.

Then President asked the only Iraqi participant in the conference, Sergeant Major Akeel, whether he had anything to add:

SERGEANT AKEEL: Good morning, Mr. President. Thank you for everything. Thank very much for everything.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, you're welcome.

SERGEANT AKEEL: I like you. (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I appreciate that.

Finally, First Lieutenant Gregg summed up the situation. I can't improve on his words:

Back in January, when we were preparing for that election, we had to lead the way. We set up the coordination, we made the plan. We're really happy to see, during the preparation for this one, sir, they're doing everything. They're making the plans, they're calling each other, they've got it laid out. So on Saturday, sir, we're going to be beside them, we're going to be there to support them through anything. But we can't wait to share in their success with them on Sunday.

In closing, the commander-in-chief thanked the troops -- not only his own, but the Iraqis as well:

I wish I could be there to see you face-to-face, to thank you personally. It's probably a little early for me to go to Tikrit, but one of these days perhaps the situation will be such that I'll be able to get back to Iraq to not only thank our troops, but to thank those brave Iraqis who are standing strong in the face of these foreign fighters and these radicals that are trying to stop the march of freedom.

Finally, as for what kind of “rehearsal” and “staging” went on before the conference, you should read the account of Sergeant Ron Long of Tennesse who was actually there at the conference.

[W]e were told that we would be speaking with the President of the United States, our Commander-in-Chief, President Bush, so I believe that it would have been totally irresponsible for us NOT to prepare some ideas, facts or comments that we wanted to share with the President.

The MSM knows very well that everyone rehearses before a live TV interview, and this was no exception. Participants had to know who would speak when, who would answer which questions, and practice passing the microphone to avoid "strangling" their neighbors with the microphone cord. They practiced speaking out loudly and clearly, both to be audible to the mikes and also to relieve the anxiety of junior officers and non-coms speaking directly to the commander-in-chief.

But that was as far as it went; nobody has managed to find any example of the White House scripting the soldiers' answers or changing what they wanted to say. It is terribly irresponsible of the mainstream media to hint at some sort of administration conspiracy, particularly by using inuendo and ambiguous phrasing. If that is what the Associated Press and the Washington Post want to charge, they should just do so straightforwardly... if they have any actual evidence, that is.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 15, 2005, at the time of 8:17 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Earle-y to Bed -- and Stay There

Yesterday, on Special Report With Brit Hume, Brian Wilson had the most fascinating report yet on the growing national embarassment: the Persecution and Assassination of Tom DeLay, As Performed By the Inmates of the Travesty County District Attorney's Office, Under the Direction of the Marquis de Earle (with only the most muted apologies to Peter Weiss).

The most important piece of evidence on which Crusading D.A. Ronnie Earle based his multiple attempts to properly indict Rep. DeLay is single a piece of paper. After Earle found that DeLay's political action committee, Texans for a Republican Majority PAC (TRMPAC), sent that now famous $190,000 check to the Republican National State Elections Committee (RNSEC), the only way that Earle could allege "money laundering" was to claim that the transaction was a sham whose only purpose was to disguise "soft" money being funneled indirectly into state campaigns in defiance of Texas law. His only piece of evidence to that effect was that, as the indictment puts it:

[O]n or about the thirteenth day of September, 2002, in Washington D.C., the defendant, James Walter Ellis, did provide the said Terry Nelson with a document that contained the names of several candidates for the Texas House of Representatives that were supported by Texans for a Republican Majority PAC, namely, Todd Baxter, Dwayne Bohac, Glenda Dawson, Dan Flynn, Rick Green, Jack Stick, and Larry Taylor, to whom the defendant, James Walter Ellis, requested and proposed that the Republican National Committee and the Republican National State Elections Committee make political contributions in exchange for the committees' receipt of the proceeds from the aforesaid check, and that contained amounts that the defendant, James Walter Ellis, and Texans for a Republican Majority PAC suggested be contributed to each of the said candidates;

Yesterday, Brian Wilson reports, the Travis County Assistant D.A. was in court, and he was asked to produce this critical document, which had been subpoenaed by the attorneys for Ellis and DeLay.

He was unable to produce "said" document. Not that he didn't produce A document; he simply said he was "unable to authoritatively confirm" that it was in fact THE document mentioned in the indictment. However, he rallied, the document he produced was "factually similar" to the document upon which the entire indictment rested!

Brian Wilson reported that the document contained names of several Texas politicians, some of whom had received money from the RNSEC and some of whom had not. I suppose this is "factually similar" to the actual document they allege existed in that both are pieces of paper, both have words printed on them, and both contain lists of names of prominent Texans. I eagerly await testimony from an eyewitness who claims he saw someone in a conspiratorial meeting... he won't be able to swear it was actually Tom DeLay, but it was surely someone who was "factually similar" to DeLay, in that he was a male and had some funny sort of accent.

I wanted to link to an article about this latest Keystone Kops escapade, but amazingly enough, at this point, I cannot find a single article about this absurdity -- not even on FoxNews.com. Since they actually had video of the incident as it unfolded and discussion with the attorneys right after they came out of the courthouse, I would find it hard to believe it never occurred; but in the mad world of the MSM, even being caught on videotape doesn't mean something really exists: it only exists when one of the media news managers decides it exists. Perhaps I hallucinated the entire thing.

Here we have a story that even the MSM agrees is important: the indictment of the second most powerful man in the House of Representatives. And five years after Ronnie Earle began hounding DeLay, three years after the alleged crime of "money laundering" occurred, at least a year after the D.A.'s office began investigating this particular transaction, and eleven days after obtaining the new, improved indictment from the third grand jury to investigate, we discover that the District Attorney's office doesn't even have the critical piece of evidence that underpins their entire case.

But evidently, that's just not news.

Sad to say, except for those of you who watched Brit Hume last night, "you read it here first."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 15, 2005, at the time of 2:51 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Date ►►► October 14, 2005

New Reason to Support Harriet Miers

I have been pretty much supportive all along, based solely on the grounds that I think it would be bad for the party if she were slammed out of bounds before she even got a hearing. Then I became more strongly attracted to the notion that we really ought always to have at least one justice who isn't a former judge and isn't an "expert" on the Constitution: "convictions make convicts," as Timothy Leary used to say (I mean when he was alive), and experts who spend all their lives studying the writings of other experts in their subject tend to have a very subjective view indeed.

Bush believes Miers is Reaganesque in the sense of having an innate grasp of right and wrong in many circumstances, and I've seen nothing so far from her opponents that persuades me to the contrary. Examples of trivial mistakes or instances of stepping carefully through a landmine are no more persuasive than are the few mistakes Reagan himself made -- such as yanking our "peacekeeping" troops out of Lebanon directly after the Beirut massacre.

But I have just come across evidence that I haven't seen anywhere else... and this now puts me unabashedly in her corner. I now truly hope she will be confirmed.

Major Disclaimer!

I neither confirm nor deny that Patterico at Patterico's Pontifications may or may not have ever blogged on this subject, nor in the case that he has, do I either agree or disagree or even know what he may have said, in the event that he may have said anything about this at all. I am only an egg. I am Sgt. Schultz.

With that out of the way, we may proceed.

I was just reading the Wikipedia biography of Miss Miers, and I came across the following datum that absolutely clinched the decision for me:

Miers graduated from Southern Methodist University with a bachelor's degree in mathematics (1967) and from its law school with a Juris Doctor degree (1970) .

I suspect we have never had a Supreme Court Justice who actually passed classes in differential equations, possibly even partial differential equations -- and five of you reading this know how amazing that would be! -- group theory, Galois Theory, functional analysis, dynamical systems, and probably even mathematical logic. Imagine a justice who understood how to tell a convergent from a divergent infinite series, how to do a LaPlace Transform, and what Fourier Analysis is for! Or even just a justice who is comfortable thinking in N-space.

Harriet Miers has my full and unstinting support (I was about to say unqualified support, but that is too ambiguous).

Yay, team!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 14, 2005, at the time of 5:41 PM | Comments (26) | TrackBack

Browser Bafflement

I try very hard to make Big Lizards as strict XHTML as I can in order that as many browsers as possible be able at least to read it. For example, whenever I post a link that includes dangerous characters ( such as <, >, &, =, and ?) I go through the entire link replacing them with the corresponding HTML character entities (Amazon.com is the most egregious felon in this respect). Note that some entities themselves may not display on older browsers, but I think these work pretty widely -- tell me if they don't!

So I'm distressed when things don't look right in one or another browser. I think the site looks fairly good -- rather, it looks as I intend it to look! -- in recent versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape. Firefox seems to do well (not surprisingly, since I think it and Netscape 8 use the same engine). I have less success with Opera.

And recently, Sachi (who uses a Mac) had a problem with the Mac version of Netscape 7.2. She wasn't picking up changes in comment display wrought by tweaking the stylesheet. At my suggestion, she deleted her cache, and then she was able to see the changes; evidently, Mac NS 7.2 didn't recognize a page being changed merely because the CSS file it linked was changed!

Some things to look for that I occasionally notice in some browsers:

• The lizard-scales background is supposed to go all the way down to the bottom of the page, not stop where the right sidebar stops.
• The parchment background of the sidebar should extend to cover all the links and such in the sidebar; there should be no place where the parchment ends but the words continue.
• The SiteMeter bug should be at the very, very bottom, below everything.
• The graphic navigation bar in the top section should work to link to other pages of the Big Lizards site; if it doesn't, I put a text version at the top of the sidebar.
• Oh, yeah: the sidebar should actually be on the right-hand side -- not below, above, or floating over your living-room coffee table!

So if any of you has a problem viewing Big Lizards properly in any particular browser, first try deleting your browser cache and reloading. If that all-purpose restorative doesn't work, then please let me know via the comments; I don't promise to fix it (it may be unfixable), but I'll look into it and do what my limited understanding of such issues allows me to do.

This is a standing offer; if at any time you have a problem viewing something, please comment to that effect in any post you happen to be reading at the time: I read all comments.

Many thanks!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 14, 2005, at the time of 4:24 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

What Is a Religious Test?

So are conservatives "hypocritical," as E.J. Dionne concludes, for objecting to the Democrats' use of religion to criticize nominees like John Roberts then turning around and using Harriet Miers' religion as a reason to support her now?

The answer is an emphatic No, they are not. There is no hypocrisy involved for the simple reason that those opposing the use of religion before are not the same people as those encouraging its use now.

Dionne falls into the classic liberal trap of seeing groups of people instead of individuals. He writes that "President Bush's supporters" will "play religion up or down, whichever helps them most in a political fight." When Sen. Dick Durbin implied that Roberts might not be acceptable because he was a Catholic, several of Bush's supporters opposed that position on principle:

Durbin had his head taken off. "We have no religious tests for public office in this country," thundered Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), insisting that any inquiry about a potential judge's religious views was "offensive." Fidelis, a conservative Catholic group, declared that "Roberts' religious faith and how he lives that faith as an individual has no bearing and no place in the confirmation process."

But now, Dionne announces in triumph, President Bush himself mentions Miers' evangelical Christianity as a selling point, and several other religious conservatives and conservative groups (not including Fidelis) are pleased by that fact. I suppose the identity-politics of the Democratic Party has confused the columnist... but here on this side of the aisle, we actually believe in individualism. If John Cornyn thinks we shouldn't use religion in any way to consider a judicial nominee's fitness, while James Dobson thinks it's perfectly all right, that quite obviously does not make either of them a hypocrite.

Other examples of possible conservative "hypocrisy":

• Bush supporters think we should round up all illegal immigrants and deport them, but then they turn right around and say we should give them guest-worker status!
• Bush supporters think the government is spending too much money, but then Bush supporters are in favor of a prescription drug benefit for Medicare!
• Bush supporters say that government should keep its hands off people's private lives, but wouldn't you know it? Bush supporters angrily attack Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned laws against "sodomy," as judicial activism!
• Bush supporters say same-sex marriage should be legal because to do otherwise is discrimination -- and then they scream that same-sex marriage should be illegal because traditional marriage is the cornerstone of civilization!

Those wacky, Bush-supporting hypocrites just can't make up their minds. Of course, in each case above, I played the Dionne trick: the first part of each charge referred to a different group of people than the second -- the only point gluing them together being support for George W. Bush's presidency.

The Democratic Party is a patchwork quilt sewn together from a pile of special interests, each of which comprises single-issue voters; it's like a coalition of convenience in a fractious parliamentary system: any deviation on the part of any prominent Democrat from revealed word on any issue is brutally suppressed, because of the panic that advocates for that issue -- taxing the rich, abortion, pulling the troops out of Iraq, same-sex marriage, abortion, Social Security stasis, welfare for everyone, abortion, affirmative action, or abortion -- might pull out of the fragile coalition, causing electoral collapse.

By contrast, the Republican Party is a big tent with room for many divergent opinions. The center-right coalition has proven remarkably stable: libertarian conservatives like California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, social and religious conservatives like William Bennett and James Dobson, spending hawks like the gang at National Review, and projection-of-force neoconservative advocates like Paul Wolfowitz can happily cohabit, arguing specific issues while still agreeing it's more pleasant to be inside the tent spitting out than outside the tent spitting in (LBJ's original saying doesn't use the word "spitting," by the way).

If a specific individual took the Cornyn position before and takes the Dobson position now, then that individual is a hypocrite. But if you want to convince me, then show me the quotation. Until I see one, the case remains unmade.

So what -- you ask, wrenching the discussion back to the title of the post -- about Article VI, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution, which commands:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States. [emphasis added, obviously]

What the heck is a religious test anyway? Come on, the answer should be obvious to everyone except a lawyer: a religious test, as used here, is a law or regulation that says something like "no Catholics shall be appointed to any position in this state government," or "only those professing a belief in God shall be allowed to file for elective office." That is, a religious test is an actual law or regulation that prohibits or requires a particular religious belief for public office. Arguments or even votes for or against a candidate or nominee on the basis of his religion do not constitute religious tests.

Even some of our best conservative and/or Republican thinkers raise this faux issue, alas. I say alas not because I'm religious, which I am not, but because this argument is an attempt to stifle legitimate discussion by invoking non-existent constitutional diktat. For example, Captain Ed writes:

Using religion as a test for a nomination gets us into dangerous territory, not to mention provides more than a dollop of hypocrisy for this administration. We do not want Congress opening a debate on people's religious beliefs and how that affects their approach to the job. It will create a mini-Inquisition on Capitol Hill for each nominee, who will be required to disavow their faith before proceeding to nomination. It's the kind of act that this administration has often decried, and for good reason.

Why would a nominee have to disavow his faith? If Sen. Charles Schumer argues that the nominee's "deeply held personal beliefs" means he cannot fairly judge, the nominee simply responds "I do not believe sincere Christians, Jews, and Moslems should all be disqualified from the bench" -- and Schumer looks like a religious bigot. No disavowal of faith required.

It's perfectly legitimate and appropriate for Sen. Schumer to make that argument; he absolutely has that right. Just as we absolutely have the right to point out to the nation what he is really saying. Considering the depth of religous belief in the United States -- for which I, as an agnostic, say thank God! -- any such argument can only help the Right and hurt the Left. Why stop the Democrats from pursuing political hara-kiri by the death of a thousand self-inflicted paper cuts?

This approach is consistent with the American way -- disparate ideas clashing on the battlefield of freedom of speech, and may the best argument win! Go ahead and argue for Harriet Miers or John Roberts on the basis of faith; don't feel ashamed. And let those who despise faith argue their case. I'm satisified in this case, as in nearly all others, to abide by the democratic process unless clear and explicit rights are to be violated... and of course, nobody has the "right" to be either a judge or a senator.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 14, 2005, at the time of 4:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Scales of Military Justice

On Tuesday the 11th, Special Report With Brit Hume had a truly inspiring interview with Major General Bob Scales, whose assessment of the Iraqi Army was very good news indeed. They made the transcript available the next day, but I've been dilatory in putting it up here.

First the setup. General Scales went to Iraq to evaluate with his own eyes the combat-readiness of the Greater Iraq Army. He had no particular expectations either way, since he had heard both positive and negative assessments.

We were there for six days. We spent time in Baghdad. And then we went up to a place called Taji, which is the headquarters of the Ninth Iraqi Mechanized Division.

We specifically asked not only to see our American men and women but, "Let's just go up north and talk to the Iraqis, look them straight in the eye, and get a sense of their military readiness," not readiness in terms of readiness reporting, you know, how many vehicles have you got, what's your percent filled and all that.

Instead, we wanted to look at things like, you know, their training, their will to win, the courage factor, bonding, and cohesion, and leadership, and all those intangibles that really make an army effective, rather than just, you know, "How are you equipped?" And, frankly, what I saw was very encouraging.

Scales discussed a particular unit he interacted with extensively while there, a self-created mechanized infantry division, I believe (actually, I'm just assuming infantry, since he didn't say armored cavalry). The unit was only partially formed, but already it was patrolling and fighting the Sunni terrorists around Baghdad. Significantly, 75% of the unit comprised combat veterans. And although they had American embeds, they only numbered a dozen -- in a division that already had eight or nine thousand soldiers.

All in all, General Scales said that the Iraqi Army had 117 battalions, of which 80 were currently fighting alongside American forces, sometimes taking the lead (as in Operation Restoring Rights in Tal Afar).

Scales gave a vivid example of the progress that has been made in just a few months:

SCALES: Remember about eight months ago, Bill Cowan was in here talking about the BIAP [Baghdad International Airport] road, you know, the airport road?

HUME: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, the alley of death.

SCALES: Right. I drove the BIAP road, five miles along that road. And it's clear of the enemy. It's full of commerce. And who's protecting it? The Iraqi Sixth Infantry Division.

And in many ways, they're better than we are, in the sense that they're better able to gather intelligence. I mean, they can spot insurgents by their body language and by how they act and the language they use. They can spot foreigners far better than our soldiers can.

And they're better able to engage these terrorists when they find them oftentimes than our own soldiers are. You know, being part of the culture really means a lot when you're fighting an insurgency.

General Scales' final assessment was tremendously upbeat:

The insurgency is on a steady downward trend, mainly because U.S. forces and Iraqi forces have been successful in cleaning out the ratlines.... But I think the greatest hope is Iraq, Iraq units, the regular army, building them up very quickly so that they can take over the fighting and increase the probability of coming out of this OK.... It's happening.

"Cleaning out the ratlines?" Say... I wonder if MG Scales has been reading Big Lizards? Nah; probably just reading something a little more worthwhile, like the Fourth Rail, instead!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 14, 2005, at the time of 5:36 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Date ►►► October 13, 2005

Dawn Breaks Over Iraq - Photos

Black Five has incredible photos of operation River Gate.

We previously blogged about the overall Anbar Campaign here.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 13, 2005, at the time of 6:13 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

AP Response to Bush Teleconference Staged!

UPDATE 18:23: See below.

Now the AP has taken to attacking the president for supposedly "staging" a teleconference with soldiers... because they rehearsed in advance which soldier would answer which question.

Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged
Oct 13, 2005
by Deb Riechmann

WASHINGTON (AP) - It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday's vote on a new Iraqi constitution.

When I first read that paragraph, my Skept-O-Meter™ went off like the Queen Mary's foghorn. What did Ms. Riechmann mean, the questions were "choreographed?" Aren't the questions always choreographed?

During an interview, for example, the interviewer always knows in advance the major questions he will ask, the order he will ask them, and to whom they will be directed (if multiple subjects are being grilled simultaneously). Often the subject also knows, to allow him to do whatever research is necessary to come up with a more detailed answer. Typically, major questions spawn follow-up questions; we have no clue from the AP story whether this happened this time, even though that would reveal much about the charge of being "staged."

So what the heck does Ms. Riechmann mean? How is this different from any other interview situation? Remember, the president is the interviewer, not the subject; he's playing Brit Hume, for a change of pace.

"I'm going to ask somebody to grab those two water bottles against the wall and move them out of the camera shot for me," [Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Allison] Barber said.

A brief rehearsal ensued.

"OK, so let's just walk through this," Barber said. "Captain Kennedy, you answer the first question and you hand the mike to whom?"

"Captain Smith," Kennedy said.

"Captain. Smith? You take the mike and you hand it to whom?" she asked.

"Captain Kennedy," the soldier replied.

And so it went.

Yes... it went, rather than crashed, because the soldiers actually knew in advance the order in which they would speak! They didn't talk over each other or tussle for the microphone. Will Bush's perfidy never stop?

"If the question comes up about partnering - how often do we train with the Iraqi military - who does he go to?" Barber asked.

"That's going to go to Captain Pratt," one of the soldiers said.

"And then if we're going to talk a little bit about the folks in Tikrit - the hometown - and how they're handling the political process, who are we going to give that to?" she asked.

And here at last we have the substance of the charge of "choreographing" the questions: that the soldiers knew in advance which of them was the expert in a particular area -- hence who would actually answer the questions pertaining to that area.

This is what the Associated Press is trying to pass off as another "scandal" in the Bush administration. This barely even counts as a college try; Ms. Riechmann may as well have just used the pre-existing template titled Bush the Lying Liar Version 23.

Does even the Left doubt any longer the bias of the press against this president and against Republicans in general? Or do they just go through the motions occasionally, tossing a bit of tainted, gray meat to their base, more or less as a hobby?

Of course, they had to close with an eyebite from somebody hostile to Bush:

Paul Rieckhoff, director of the New York-based Operation Truth, an advocacy group for U.S. veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, denounced the event as a "carefully scripted publicity stunt." Five of the 10 U.S. troops involved were officers, he said.

"If he wants the real opinions of the troops, he can't do it in a nationally televised teleconference," Rieckhoff said. "He needs to be talking to the boots on the ground and that's not a bunch of captains."

I don't know what branch of the service Mr. Rieckhoff served in (if any), but it's evidently one where junior officers stay at the Pentagon and only privates and non-coms actually venture into the field.

I wonder whether he applies that same scorn to a certain fellow who was a Navy lieutenant in Vietnam, the exact equivalent rank to "captain" in the Army or Marines: Lt. John F. Kerry.

UPDATE: I have now listened to the 4:26 audio that National Public Radio made available (hat tip to Octavius), and contrary to some of the commenters to this post and some lefty blogs, such as This Divided State, there is not one, single instance of anybody "coaching [the soldiers] along the way" (as Bryan at TDS claims).

Allison Barber asks one question and listens to Captain Kennedy's answer; she does not tell him to change anything or give him any feedback whatsoever. She runs through a couple of other questions but doesn't wait for the soldiers to answer.

Let me repeat something I said above, because it may not have sunk in. When you are evaluating verbal acuity or mental quickness, you don't want to reveal the questions in advance; you prefer to watch the subject squirm. But when you want to gather solid information, you do give him the questions in advance, so he will be prepared with complete and accurate answers.

President Bush was not giving these soldiers a pop quiz, for heaven's sake. He wanted to hear what they had to say when they'd had a chance to think about it. And even if every one of them had been given an opportunity to rehearse speaking his answer -- on national TV and before the Commander In Chief -- it is neither "staged" nor "choreographed," except in the most technical meaning of those words, and there is no example at all of "coaching."

These are the real opinions of real soldiers who know what the hell they're talking about. Even if half of them are captains.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 13, 2005, at the time of 5:02 PM | Comments (35) | TrackBack

Comments Listing Style Slightly Changed

I changed the comments listing style slightly: I added a line above each comment identifying the commenter to go along with the line below, and I changed the color of the border (I never liked that blue-gray line, though Big Lizards Red may be a bit strong).

I would appreciate anyone interested in such things to click on the comments to this post -- I'll add a few ersatz comments -- and let me know what you think. This is your chance to get involved in site design!

Please leave comments about the change here; in addition to posting your words of wit and wisdom, you'll create more comments so that people can see how it looks with other commenters' names.

Questions to consider:

1. Is it easier to tell who has left which comment?


2. Is it confusing to see each person's name twice? Would a border without the commenter name be better?


3. Is the border line too bright? Should it be a different, more muted color? Or does it clearly demarcate each comment better than a brownish line would?

By the way, this is the advantage of designing and creating one's own site, rather than relying upon the kindness of subcontractors: I can make changes like this myself whenever I see a need, without having to locate and engage the attention of some other mortal.

Thanks,

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 13, 2005, at the time of 4:05 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

Always My Hero, Cap

This --

Despite the idiotic response from the White House prior to this telecon, I'm inclined to support Miers. I don't believe she'll be a disaster, and I think she'll at least improve on O'Connor. I also don't believe she'll get pushed around, but I have to be honest and say I get that impression more from what Hugh Hewitt and Beldar have argued and presented than anything the White House has bothered to do on their own behalf. I've come to the conclusion that spanking Miers over the clumsiness and incompentence of the White House doesn't make a lot of sense.

-- is about the best summary of how I feel that anyone has yet posted, including myself. Thanks, Captain Ed!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 13, 2005, at the time of 3:10 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Testimonial Tiff

It's been three days since my last post about Harriet Miers, which I think is a reasonable cooling-off period; I will continue talking about the nomination occasionally, as new issues arise -- and of course, one has just arisen, ergo....

The newest charge, and it's remarkably silly, is that she dissed the Federalist Society in 1990, when she was a defendant in a lawsuit against the Dallas City Council, of which she was a member. None of my favorite blogs has jumped on this one so far, happily enough. But I figure it's important to nip it in the bud anyway!

The lawsuit charged, evidently, that there was some racist plot to keep blacks and Hispanics off the city council. I'm not exactly sure of the facts in the case; keep them off how? It's an elected council, isn't it? But they're likely not relevant to this particular charge against Miss Miers. In the course of the trial, she was subpoenaed to testify, and the following exchange occurred (via the Drudge Report; I'll assume throughout that Drudge is accurate):

Q. Ms. Miers, are you a member of any predominantly minority organizations, such as the NAACP, Black Chamber of Commerce, Urban League or any other predominantly minority organizations?

A. Women minorities?

Q. Well, maybe predominantly racial and ethnic minorities?

A. No.

Q. . . . . In your capacity as an at-large member do you think being involved in such organizations might assist you in having a perspective that -- bring a perspective to your job that you don’t have?

A. I attend meetings designed to give me that input. However, I have tried to avoid memberships in organizations that were politically charged with one viewpoint or the other. For example, I wouldn’t belong to the Federalist Society any more than -- I just feel like it’s better to not be involved in organizations that seem to color your view one way or the other for people who are examining you. I did join the Progressive Voters League here in Dallas during the campaign as part of the campaign.

Q. Are you active in the PVL now, do you intend to be?

A. No, I am not.

Q. Do you think the NAACP and Black Chamber of Commerce are in the category of organizations you were talking about?

A. No, I don’t. . . . .

Transcript of Trial, Roy Williams et al. v. City of Dallas, No. CA-3-88-152-R, pages V-46 to V-47 (U.S. Dist. Ct., N.D. Tex. Sept. 11, 1989).

Let's get one point out of the way at the start: Miers joined the Progressive Voters League "during the campaign [for the Dallas city council]," in 1989. At that time, as Ed Gillespie has noted, she was a conservative Democrat, perhaps in the mold of former Georgian Governor Zell Miller.

(A year earlier, she had donated money to Al Gore's first presidential campaign -- back then, Gore was an ardent member -- and charter member -- of the Democratic Leadership Conference, the last attempt to lead the Democratic Party back to sanity on issues such as defense and the economy; he was not then the Rantin' Al that we all know and loathe today.)

I'm not a Texan; but my guess is that back in 1989, in Dallas (where the PVL was still strong), it was probably de rigueur for any Democrat running for local office to join the PVL during the campaign; the conservative Dems would probably just drift away after being elected, as Harriet Miers testifies she did.

So let's get to the meat: the Federalist Society, the NAACP and the Black Chamber of Commerce, and why the first could be considered "politically charged with one viewpoint or the other," while the latter two not.

First, let's just compare what the organizations themselves say. Here is the Dallas Black Chamber of Commerce:

Dallas Black Chamber of Commerce
Founded 1926

The Dallas Black Chamber of Commerce serves as an advocate for the creation, growth and general welfare of African American business in the Dallas community. The Chamber actively promotes the expansion of public/ private sector business opportunities on behalf of its members through referrals, partnerships, seminars, technical assistance and marketing. We continue to focus on economic and business development, education, convention/tourism, special projects and member services.

(The National Black Chamber of Commerce didn't exist at the time of the lawsuit, being founded three years later; but it has a similar mission statement.) This clearly is a business alliance, not an overtly political organization; it may have been hijacked by the Democrats; many such organizations are, though I don't specifically know about this one. But if so, it's an apolitical organization that was hijacked, not "politically charged with one viewpoint or the other" by its very nature.

And here is the NAACP:

Mission Statement

The mission of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is to ensure the political, educational, social and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination....

The principal objectives of the Association shall be:

• To ensure the political, educational, social and economic equality of all citizens
• To achieve equality of rights and eliminate race prejudice among the citizens of the United States
• To remove all barriers of racial discrimination through democratic processes
• To seek enactment and enforcement of federal, state and local laws securing civil rights
• To inform the public of the adverse effects of racial discrimination and to seek its elimination
• To educate persons as to their constitutional rights and to take all lawful action to secure the exercise thereof, and to take any other lawful action in furtherance of these objectives, consistent with the NAACP’s Articles of Incorporation and this Constitution.

Clearly the NAA(L)CP has been hijacked by the screaming radical Left, and was, though to a lesser extent, in 1990. Arguably, the entire political approach of NAACP founding saint W.E.B. DuBois is far too aligned with the politics of aggrievement, much more so that, e.g., his great rival, Booker T. Washington. But Miers is correct that the organization itself is not overtly partisan-political in nature, any more than is the ordinary Chamber of Commerce -- despite the fact that it undeniably leans to the right.

On paper, neither of these two organizations is overtly "politically charged;" the political charge comes from the personalities who run them, not from the structure or mission. Heck, even I could get behind the mission statement of the NAACP -- if only they, themselves could!

By contrast, here is the Federalist Society:

Our Purpose

• Law schools and the legal profession are currently strongly dominated by a form of orthodox liberal ideology which advocates a centralized and uniform society. While some members of the academic community have dissented from these views, by and large they are taught simultaneously with (and indeed as if they were) the law.
• The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order. It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.
• The Society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities. This entails reordering priorities within the legal system to place a premium on individual liberty, traditional values, and the rule of law. It also requires restoring the recognition of the importance of these norms among lawyers, judges, and law professors.
• In working to achieve these goals, the Society has created a conservative and libertarian intellectual network that extends to all levels of the legal community.

The difference is stark. The Federalist Society is specifically and particularly a political-advocacy organization organized against "orthodox liberal ideology" and in support of "a conservative and libertarian intellectual network" within the legal community. In its very nature, it is libertarian-conservative, and it declares liberalism its enemy.

Now, I happen to thoroughly agree with these politics. If I were a joiner, this would be the first organization I would join (the only organization of which I'm an active member is Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, my professional organization). But Miers is absolutely right that the Federalist Society is "politically charged with one viewpoint or the other."

As to whether elected members of a city council should be members of such organizations, I don't see why not; but on the other hand, I was never a conservative Democrat in an increasingly liberal Democratic party, worried about getting reelected, and embroiled in a politically charged lawsuit, as Miers was at that time. At another time and place, she may well have praised the Federalist Society -- and lo and behold, she did exactly that back in April of this year, when she was not under consideration for any judgeship, and indeed no openings on the Supreme Court yet existed: Sandra Day O'Connor did not announce her retirement until July 1st.

So once again, a hurricane in a hatbox. She answered carefully, legally, and correctly under hostile direct examination in a lawsuit back when she was still a conservative Democrat in a way that was calculated not to piss off her constituency any more than necessary. That's all.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 13, 2005, at the time of 3:04 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Dawn Breaks Over Iraq

Dafydd and Sachi conspired on this post.

Bill Roggio's military blog, the Fourth Rail, has several detailed analyses and descriptions of the Anbar Campaign, an overarching military strategy that includes both Iron Fist and River Gate as recent operations. (Hat tip to commenter Terry Gain.) From Recent Operations on the Euphrates:

The current operations must be looked at in the context of the Anbar Campaign, which began in November of 2004 when U.S. and Iraqi forces executed Operation Dawn in Fallujah. Fallujah was al Qaeda’s easternmost headquarters, a safe haven where thousands of terrorists and their insurgent allies operated freely and directed attacks towards the heart of Iraq. Over one thousand terrorists and insurgents were killed and fifteen hundred were captured. Operation Dawn ejected the insurgency from Fallujah, but it was only the beginning of the Anbar Campaign.

The Anbar province is the poinky part in the middle-left (west) of Iraq, roughly hexagonal, which points at Jordan; the northwestern border of Anbar is Syria, and the Euphrates River runs near the northeastern edge. Big city: Ramadi.

The section of Iraq in between the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers comprises Salahuddin, spreading northwest from Baghdad, with the Tigris running northwest through it; big city: Samarra; and Ninevah, almost the very north of Iraq; upper Tigris runs right along the big city here, Mosul.

If we understand an earlier post on the Fourth Rail, the Anbar Campaign focuses on these three provinces... basically, in and around the two rivers and the land between them. This is where we find the "ratlines" connecting Syria in the northwest and the terrorists in the Triangle of Death south of Baghdad; it is through here that al-Qaeda elements in Syria and Syria itself ship jihadis and weapons: this is one of the two areas we must bring under control if we are to defeat the enemy (the other being the South, where Shiite militias receive arms and terrorists from Iran).

Operation Dawn was aptly named, for it began a year-long squeeze-play that first saw a number of search-and-destroy missions and battalion-sized or smaller operations, coupled with air strikes on al-Qaeda safe houses (or not-so-safe houses, to be more accurate); these were punctuated by some very large operations (corps-sized or larger).

The tempo is increasing. From Operation Dawn (Fallujah in November 2004) to River Blitz (Ramadi, Hit, Baghdadi and Hadithah in February 2005) was three months; another quarter-year elapsed before there was a flurry of operations in May. Since then, not a month has passed without multiple operations.

Not only is Operation Anbar squeezing the terrorists farther and farther west, right to the border with Syria, and seizing both banks of the two rivers, it's also the baptism by fire of the Greater Iraqi Army. From Recent Operations:

The Iraqi security forces have taken an increasingly larger role as operations progressed over the summer. They have a strong presence in Fallujah and Habbaniyah, and are beginning to appear in battalion strength in the Euphrates cities of Ramadi, Hit, Haditha and Rawah. In Tal Afar, the Iraqi Army took the lead and outnumbered U.S. troops three to two.

Through the Anbar Campaign, the Iraqi Army and Coalition forces are isolating the terrorists, ripping up their ratlines, driving them back into Syria, and seizing or destroying bridges that are crucial to the enemy being able to maintain his strength and resources. If that's not good news, I don't know what is!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 13, 2005, at the time of 5:15 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Date ►►► October 12, 2005

British Policy Still Clueless

Earlier I wrote that "the [British] lion may be old, but it is not toothless." But I might have written in haste.

Yesterday, the UK Government announced that they will pay for the damage they caused during the September raid to rescue two British soldiers, according to BBC.

The joint statement said: "We regret the incidents that took place in Basra on 19 September 2005 at the Serious Crimes Unit.

"We also regret the casualties on both sides and the material damage to public facilities.

"The British government is prepared to pay valid claims for compensation for casualties and material damage in the well-established manner."

This announcement came after British troops arrested twelve insurgents last Friday without the cooperation of the corrupted Basra police, according to an October 7th AP article.

On September 21st, AP reported that after the September rescue raid, the governor of Basra Province, Mohammed al-Waili, publicly "threatened to end all cooperation with British forces unless Prime Minister Tony Blair's government apologizes for the deadly clash with Iraqi police."

The British government has already issued an apology. But Basra's provincial council continued to demand compensation. From the September 21st AP article:

In a statement, the council demanded Britain apologize to Basra's citizens and police and provide compensation for the families of people killed or wounded in the violence.

Why did the Brits choose to reward the terrorists? They decided they needed the cooperation of the officials in Basra Province; it was extortion, plain and simple. The Basra police are largely terrorists themselves now, thanks to the previous "softly, softly" strategy of Great Britain. We haven't heard much about this growing problem, but it has been brewing for a long time now.

Since the beginning, the British prided themselves in their soft approach in Basra and other areas under their jurisdiction. The relatively peaceful situation seemed to justify this strategy, exemplified by their insistance on wearing cloth berets instead of helmets while on patrol. But beneath the surface, Shia militiamen with strong ties to Iran, including the infamous "Mahdi Army" of Mugtada Sadr, slowly (but not so secretly) have taken over the Basra police. By May of this year, the Basra police chief said only one quarter of his men could be trusted.

According to our correspondent Silverlining, there was a bombing near the Iran border last June that killed three British soldiers. The bomb used was very similar to those that Iran provides to Hezbollah. This prompted the British to bring in their Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR) for investigation.

Silverlining, who has proved to be an accurate source before, speculates that the kidnapped soldiers were SRR members investigating the Iranian connection inside the Basra police, and that they had been directly responsible for arresting two members of Sadr's terrorist army. In the comments to a previous Big Lizards post, Silverlining wrote:

Sheik Ahmed Majid Farttusi and Sayyid Sajjad are believed to be senior leaders in the police mafia at al-Jameat and commanders of a terrorist group receiving funding and weaponry from Iran.

My own speculation is that British soldiers were kidnapped for retaliation as well as for bargaining chips; they were responding to anger on the part of Iran-supported Shia, and they also intended the British histages to be used as bait in a hostage exchange.

With all this going on, what purpose does it serve the British to kow-tow to the Basra provincial council? True, we need their cooperation; but this is equivalent to paying ransom to kidnappers. What was the point of rescuing them in such a dramatic way, if they then turn around and pay for the damages?

The British have fumbled the ball here. The Basra police and the provincial government are totally corrupt. I don’t know if the British can straighten this out on their own; but the more they show weakness, the more British soldiers will be attacked.

Tony Blair insists that Great Britain will not pull out of Iraq, and the British do continue to make arrests. Just yesterday, Defence Secretary John Reid praised the troops involved in the very raid for which Great Britain now pays compensation and apologizes; so all is not lost by any means.

If the UK does indeed prove true and stays the course, then I would have to say that the lion's gums may be getting a bit mushy, but his fangs haven't fallen out quite yet.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 12, 2005, at the time of 6:11 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Date ►►► October 11, 2005

Big Lizards' Commenter Scoops NYT!

Back on October 6th, one of our Japanese commenters, Silverlining, noted in the comments to Were British Soldiers Hostages From the Start? that the militiamen who had infiltrated the Basra police were a gang of thugs called "the Jameat."

Some Iraqi policemen in Basra have been acting like gang, indeed: assassination, murder, smuggling, and extortion. Such gang-like policemen, with connection at ministerial level in Baghdad and allegedly funded by Iran, is allowed to carry on with impunity and remains at large and in uniform.

Specifically, the al-Jameat police headquarters in southwestern Basra is the base for about 200 Iraqi policemen and included units of the Internal Affairs Directorate and Serious Crimes Unit, both heavily implicated in a series of abductions and killings in Basra.

The identical information was featured three days later in this October 9th story in the New York Times, In Basra, Militia in Control After Infiltration of Police.

The most feared institution in Iraq's third-largest city is a shadowy force of 200 to 300 police officers known collectively as the Jameat, who dominate the local police, who are said to murder and torture at will and who answer to the leaders of Basra's sectarian militias.

Do we have the greatest commenters, or what?

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 11, 2005, at the time of 11:47 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

News About "Good News" News

I have created a new top-level category, Good News!... click on that entry in the category list in the sidebar, and you can read all the news that just plain makes you feel good about things, especially our tremendous success in the Iraq War and the Global War On Terrorism. But other issues, too: if Congress finally makes permanent the repeal of the death tax, that will get Good News! as one of its categories, as well.

So now you've got a one-stop shopping center for whatever good-news stories get posted on Big Lizards (mostly by Sachi, of course, since I'm the dour Spockian of the two of us). I reckon that's good news itself!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 11, 2005, at the time of 7:04 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Iraqi Constitution Deal Reached

AP is reporting that at the last minute, the Iraqi assembly has finally reached agreement between all three major ethnic groups, Shia, Kurd, and Sunni, on the new constitution (hat tip to John at Power Line). The agreement is only with one Sunni group -- the Iraqi Islamic Party -- but it's the first crack in the solid wall of Sunni rejectionism.

Iraqis Reach Breakthrough Deal on Charter
Oct 11, 2005, 8:53 PM (ET)
by Lee Keath

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Iraqi negotiators reached a breakthrough deal on the constitution Tuesday, and at least one Sunni Arab party said it would now urge its followers to approve the charter in this weekend's referendum. Suicide bombings and other attacks killed more than 50 people in the insurgent campaign aimed at intimidating voters.

Under the deal, the two sides agreed on a mechanism to consider amending the constitution after it is approved in Saturday's referendum. The next parliament, to be formed in December, will set up a commission to consider amendments, which would later have to be approved by parliament and submitted to another referendum.

The most significant addition only changes how future constitutional amendments will be considered. Sunni leaders are worried that the current federalist constitution gives too much autonomy to Shia and Kurds:

The central addition allows the next parliament, which will be formed in Dec. 15 elections, to form the commission, which will have four months to consider changes to the constitution. The changes would be approved by the entire parliament, then a referendum would be held two months later.

That is no guarantee that Sunnis will be able to make the changes they seek. They are likely to have a stronger representation in the next parliament, but would still face a strong Shiite and Kurdish majority that would likely oppose major changes.

This is indeed great news, assuming the agreement holds at least through Saturday's vote. No matter how hard the terrorists try to frighten the Iraqis out of freedom, the people are determine to have their constitution. Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope rest of the Sunnis will vote "Yes."

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 11, 2005, at the time of 6:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

No, She Didn't

UPDATE: Welcome, readers from InstaPundit, Michelle Malkin, Captain's Quarters, Patterico's Pontifications, JunkYardBlog, California Conservative, UNCoRRELATED, and Media Lies!

UPDATE 11 October 2005 9:29 pm: Before delving into the minutiae of how many miliseconds elapsed between various phrases in Laura Bush's answer, let's all take a step back and look at the big picture. The charge from Michelle Malkin and Captain Ed is, boiled down, that Laura Bush is calling opponents of Miers "sexist." That is, that Mrs. Bush is a liberal.

This is errant nonsense. There is nothing whatsoever in her background that would make us think she is a liberal. In fact, she's likely more conservative than Bush. So please, folks, get a grip. The MSM deliberately misreported this in a way designed to split us further apart... and by golly, it worked! So let's sit down, take a stress pill, and talk this out....

~

This post is not about Harriet Miers; she is merely cosmic background radiation. Rather, I rise as a gentleman to defend the besmirched honor of the First Lady.

Despite the newest charge sweeping the blogosphere, Laura Bush did not call Miers opponents "sexist."

A partial transcript appeared in two Washington Post articles (two completely different articles posted one minute apart); the second article (from Reuters) used that micro-bite, which isn't even an accurate transcription, to drive the headline:

Laura Bush says sexism possible in Miers criticism
by Tabassum Zakaria
Reuters
Tuesday, October 11, 2005; 3:13 PM

COVINGTON, Louisiana (Reuters) - First lady Laura Bush joined her husband in defending his nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday and said it was possible some critics were being sexist in their opposition to Harriet Miers.

"That's possible, I think that's possible," Mrs. Bush said when asked on NBC's "Today Show" whether criticism that Miers lacked intellectual heft were sexist in nature.

The other story used the same flawed transcription:

Asked by host Matt Lauer if sexism might be playing a role in the Miers controversy, she said, "It's possible. I think that's possible. . . . I think people are not looking at her accomplishments."

Alas, two stalwarts of the conservative blogosphere, Michelle Malkin and Captain Ed, relied upon that bad transcript from the epitome of the MSM to drive stories of their own attacking Mrs. Bush. Malkin was typically brief and cutting:

So, the First Lady pulled out the sexism card in her defense of Harriet Miers on NBC's Today Show.

Matt Lauer lapped it up.

Did the White House not inform Mrs. Bush that some of the most vocal criticism and questioning of the nomination comes from conservative women? Or does she buy into the Left's conservative-women-are-self-loathing-traitors-to-their-gender line, too?

I feel a pile-on coming. Not only against Laura Bush, but a dogpile on me for politely disagreeing with Michelle Malkin. But in reality, having just watched the video up on the Today Show's website (which must be viewed using Internet Explorer 6, evidently), I can say that Malkin's take on this is totally wrong and backwards in every respect.

In the first place, Malkin has the order backwards: it was Matt Lauer, not Laura Bush, who "pulled out the sexism card;" Laura Bush never used the term. Second, far from "lap[ing] them up," Lauer never even returned to the question. I listened to the entire segment, and I particularly played the relevant snippet over and over, trying to get every word even when Lauer, Bush, and Laura Bush were talking over each other. Here is my own transcription of that miniscule portion of the fourteen-minute segment; this part starts at 7:58 into the main segment, but you have to sit through a thirty-second commercial first:

Lauer: [to President Bush] You said she’s the most qualified candidate for the job. [points to Laura Bush] Would you agree with that?

Laura Bush: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Lauer: You had pushed for a woman to be the nominee --

Laura Bush: That’s right. And I know Harriet well, I know how accomplished she is, I know how many times she’s broken the glass ceiling herself. She’s a roll model for young women around our country --

Lauer: Some are suggesting --

Laura Bush: Not only that, she is very deliberate and thoughtful and will bring dignity to, uh, wherever she goes. But certainly to the Supreme Court, she will be really excellent.

Lauer: Some are suggesting there’s a little possible sexism in the criticism of Judge [sic] Miers.

Laura Bush: That’s possible. I think --

Lauer: How would you feel about that?

Laura Bush: That’s possible. I think she is so accomplished that... I know, I think that people are not looking at her accomplishments and not realizing that she was the first elected woman to be the head of the Texas Bar Association, for instance, and all the other things. She was the first, uh, woman managing partner of a major law firm. She was the first woman hired by a major law firm, her law firm.

George Bush: My attitude, Matt, is that when people get to know here, they’ll see why I picked her.

Laura Bush: They will. In the confirmation hearings alone, they’ll, they’ll see what she’s like.

What a difference a single interruption makes! In the deceptive version being pedaled by Reuters and the Post, they have Laura say sexism was possible and then repeat it for emphasis: "I think that's possible." This has the subtextual effect of making it appear certain that the First Lady was agreeing with Lauer's question, that critics were motivated by sexism.

But in reality, Lauer asked the question and paused; Mrs. Bush started to answer and was cut off by Lauer, who finished asking the question... so the First Lady, being a trouper, simply re-commenced her same answer. She did not say "that's possible... I think that's possible;" she dismissed the charge with a curt "that's possible," then started a new sentence on a different topic.

[This is the paragraph that some critics, especially Patterico, dispute most. I did not make my determination by timing pauses with a stopwatch; my analysis is based upon the structure of the response itself: she starts to answer, she is interrupted, and when she answers the second time, she quickly shifts away from the question Lauer asked to the (probably memorized) answer she wants to give, about Miers' accomplishments. She is not repeating for emphasis; she is repeating because the boor talked over her answer. -DaH.]

Listening to the audio, it is clear that she was not agreeing with or even emphasizing the point. In fact, she was brushing it off. She said the most non-commital thing it was possible to say: "that's possible." In fact, if anything, she underplayed it; I have absolutely heard criticism that is clearly sexist... I heard a caller on a recent Hugh Hewitt show say that he opposed Miers because every time we let a woman onto the Supreme Court, she rules just based on her feelings. But Laura Bush simply brushed off Lauer's suggestion and launched into a litany of Miers' accomplishments (which I am not here to argue).

(I just know that somebody is going to argue that she nodded her head as she spoke those words; but then, she actually both nods and shakes her head constantly and randomly throughout her segment. She's bobbing, not nodding. I think it's just nervousness, just like her uncomfortable, little laugh. I don't think she enjoys the spotlight at all.)

Captain's Quarters fell into the same MSM honey-trap that nabbed Michelle Malkin.

Instead [of answers], we get attacked for our supposed "sexism", which does more to marginalize conservatives than anything the Democrats have done over the past twenty years -- and it's so demonstrably false that one wonders if the President has decided to torch his party out of a fit of pique. After all, it wasn't our decision to treat the O'Connor seat as a quota fulfillment; that seems to have originated with the First Lady herself, a form of sexism all its own.

Again, Laura Bush did not call critics sexist. She did not even agree with Lauer that they were sexist. Close examination of the transcript -- or simply viewing the segment -- shows that she brushed off the question and instead simply gushed about what she saw as Miers' accomplishments.

Reuters then creatively massaged her words -- by breaking them up in a non-natural way -- to falsely make it appear as though she were lobbing the "sexist" bomb. And two of our most brilliant minds swallowed the bait, hook, line, and curve ball.

[As I noted to Patterico, consider the title of the Reuters story: "Laura Bush says sexism possible in Miers criticism." Did she say that? No, she did not. A more accurate title would have been "Laura Bush fails to kick Matt Lauer in groinal area for suggesting sexism behind Miers criticism." Maybe he deserved it, but that's not exactly the First Lady's job. Though it sure would have made for good television.... -DaH]

For the love of God, Montresor, you must remember that these people do not mean us well. Reuters and the Washington Post are beside themselves with glee at the internecine GOP warfare; it is they, not the White House, who are "pour[ing] more gasoline on the fire," as Captain Ed titled his post. We know the MSM lie and distort, particularly when transcribing oral statements that have a chance of fanning the flames.

In a situation like this, slight differences in wording, or even when someone draws breath after being interrupted, can completely change the meaning of a sentence. We in the 'sphere have a duty to measure six times before we leap. In this case, all it took was a click on a javascript link and the will power to sit through Matt Lauer's insufferable boorishness for a quarter of an hour.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 11, 2005, at the time of 5:41 PM | Comments (36) | TrackBack

Teachers Union Spending Tomorrow's Dues Today

Both Daniel Weintraub, on his Sacramento Bee-blog, and Brit Hume on Fox News Channel report that the California Teachers Association, the state's largest teachers' union -- in fact, at 335,000 members, the largest union in the state, and the local affiliate of the National Education Association (NEA) -- has already blown the $50 million they had budgeted to fight against all four of Governor Schwarzenegger's ballot initiatives:

• Proposition 74 - teacher tenure reform
• Proposition 75 - paycheck protection
• Proposition 76 - limit state spending growth
• Proposition 77 - redistricting reform

(For an example of how unbiased is the union's political use of member dues, come gawk at their web site!)

That $50 million was taken from a union-dues surcharge; it is, of course, precisely the sort of political spending of member dues that would be banned under Proposition 75, paycheck protection. So now that they have spent all the money they could afford, and the initiatives are doing better than ever in the polling, what is the "poor" union to do next?

Simple: since they know they won't be able to spend dues tomorrow, after the initiative passes, they've decided to spend tomorrow's dues today. The CTA is arranging a $40 million line of credit to continue spending every dime of their members' money that they can shake loose, with complete disregard for the political leanings of those teachers.

But it's even worse than that: on Monday's Special Report With Brit Hume, Hume reports that the union has already borrowed as much as $34 million for their previous spending spree:

The group has already spent the $50 million it raised to fight the initiatives — which would make it easier to fire teachers with tenure and increase restrictions on unions using members' dues for political campaigns.

Now, the CTA is asking for an extra $40 million in credit to keep up the fight — on top of $34 million in loans the union is already paying down.

If maths were not your long suit, that works out to $90 million of union dues going to fight against a ballot initiative that would restrict the use of union dues for fighting ballot initiatives! Plus enough previous debt to raise the total debt to $74 million. Now that's what I call painting yourself into a hole!

And be sure to note that the CTA is not only opposing Propositions 74 and 75, which arguably affect teachers, but also 76 (which simply caps state spending growth) and even 77, which changes how the legislature is reapportioned; neither of these two have any direct connection with teachers, schools, students, or education whatsoever.

[Hat tip to Cloud Master for catching a typo in the last paragraph!]

They also support Proposition 79, one of the two prescription-drug price-control initiatives, and Proposition 80, to completely re-regulate the electrical grid. I have a hard time seeing what any of that has to do with teachers, either. The fact that both initiatives are heavily supported by the Democrats in the state legislature (and Schwarzenegger's initiatives are opposed) is the most likely explanation for the CTA's cheerleading.

The message is clear: never argue with a union that buys red ink by the barrel!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 11, 2005, at the time of 4:51 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Thirteen to One

The other day, I read a familiar headline about US troops getting killed in Iraq: “Six Marines Killed in Iraq Bomb Attacks,” the AP article said. If all we read are the MSM headlines, we almost can’t help feeling a sense of dread. It seems like we are losing, and losing badly.

In our two most recent major offensives in Iraq, Iron Fist and River Gate, we first were told that 1,000 US troops were fighting near the Syrian border; then the next thing we heard was that six soldiers were killed in those operations -- nothing in between! We fought; we died. Is that all?

What did we achieve? What did we win in return? Surely our troops did not die for nothing, no matter what Cindy Sheehan says.

The reality is that our troops have done an incredible job, though you have to hunt hard to find this information. Our troops' achievements are routinely buried in the middle of articles, sandwiched in between accounts of roadside bombs and ambushes. From the AP article linked above, fifteen paragraphs into the story:

On Thursday, warplanes dropped four precision-guided bombs on an abandoned three-story hotel seized by militants in the town of Karabilah, near the Syrian border, the focus of the Iron Fist assault. Twenty militants were killed in the bombardment, the military said. Seven more insurgents were killed when planes destroyed three buildings from which gunmen were firing on Marines, and two gunmen were killed in fighting in Karabilah.

The 29 deaths raised the insurgent death toll in Iron Fist to 71. At least six insurgents have been reported killed in River Gate offensive.

Wait a minute. 77 bad guys verses six good guys. That’s a 13 to 1 kill ratio. Isn’t that a remarkably successful operation? Shouldn’t the headline actually be “Iron Fist’s great success,” or “77 terrorists slain,” or something like that? That is the way the very same news agencies would have written the very same articles during World War II or Korea.

Why are we so shy about telling the American people how many terrorists we are killing or capturing? If we only hear about the cost but not the payoff, how in the world will the American people realize that we are winning, and winning big? Ever since the Korean War, the MSM has been determined to spin every engagement as an American loss, no matter what actually happened.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Iraq, Black Five reports that US Army troops raided two houses of terrorists and captured numerous bomb making devices:

How many Army and Marine lives saved does this successful raid represent? You'll never find out by reading the Associated Press.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 11, 2005, at the time of 2:10 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Date ►►► October 10, 2005

Al-Qaeda In Exile

John on Power Line (one of my three favorite blogs!) has a thoughtful and thought-provoking post up about the first stirrings of al-Qaeda in Gaza. He links a Jerusalem Post article that discusses some leaflets recently found in Gaza that are being distributed by a group called "al-Qaida of Jihad in Palestine." As per usual with AQ, the litany of complaint begins rather far back:

"The Muslim nation has been subjected, through various periods, to conspiracies by the infidels," the leaflet said. "[The infidels] have brought down the Islamic Caliphate, dividing the nation into small and weak states. They also managed to dilute the Islamic and character [sic] of the nation."

Since the last time there was an Islamic caliphate that included Gaza was the Ottoman Empire, which collapsed in 1922, I should think both we and even Israel would be off the hook. But you never know.

From 1517 onwards, the Ottoman Sultan was also the Caliph of Islam, and the Ottoman Empire was from 1517 until 1922 (or 1924) synonymous with the Caliphate, the Islamic State.

I wonder if this edition of al-Qaeda is still holding a grudge from the crusades?

John more or less agrees that the nascent al-Qaeda in Gaza may actually be a good thing, finally persuading President Bush that there's no future in the policy of treating the Palestinians and the Israelis in a "more or less even-handed" manner. My own view, expressed oft before -- e.g., Dafydd: Crystal Gaza -- is that the real advantage Israel gained by disengaging from Gaza and to a lesser extent the West Bank was a clearer military order of battle that allows them to respond more freely than if they had thousands of potential hostages they had to protect with tens of thousands of soldiers... soldiers who could be better deployed actually fighting strategic battles.

But I think John's point has equal validity and is just as important. And in any event, John's posts are always worth reading for their own sake, whether one agrees with them or not!

The only odd omission from "Al Qaeda Moving Into Gaza" is that, while discussing how this might force the United States to finally begin treating jihadist terrorism against Israel as we treat jihadist terrorism everywhere else, and how we might have to move into the region in some force, John inexplicably fails to ask how Israel itself will respond: since they're right next door and have shown no particularly reluctance to defend themselves, one might expect they will react even before we do -- and perhaps their response will be so effective that we won't have to send any of our own troops... except perhaps veterans of Iraqi reconstruction projects!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 10, 2005, at the time of 12:47 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Bush Nominates Reagan to the Court!

This will be my last post on Harriet Miers for some days, not because there's not more to say but because I'm tired of talking about it (and I presume most readers are getting more than a little tired of reading about it!)

I was talking with a friend (another Dogface), and he said that he was really annoyed with Bush for (as he put it) telling one of his extremely rare "lies." "What lie was that?" "When he said that he believed Miers was the most qualified person for the Court." "I think Bush actually believes that." "Then," said my friend, "Bush has totally lost it."

And at that moment, I had a Revelation stronger and more sudden than anything I've experience since I quit taking LSD back in the 1980s: I suddenly understood exactly why Bush nominated Harriet Miers instead of (say) J. Michael Luttig.

In my last post, riffing off Captain Ed's Washington Post piece on the taxonomy of the Miers debaters, I talked about the fourth class of conservatives, what I called the Cowboys. These are intelligent but non-intellectual (even anti-intellectual) folks who don't try to articulate their conservativeness... they simply live it. I noted that Bush belongs to this class, rather than to the Loyalist Army, the Rebel Alliance, or the Trench-Dwelling Dogfaces, all of whom at least have pretensions to being intellectuals.

The Cowboys very much distrust intellectuals because they believe those eggheads can talk themselves into believing anything. Case in point: how many extraordinarily intelligent and perspicacious intellectuals managed to talk themselves into believing in Communism, including such later conservative luminaries as Whittaker Chambers, David Horowitz, and about half the founding staff of Bill Buckley's National Review?

(When asked why so many NR editors were ex-Communists, Buckley simply grinned and repeated "EX-Communists!")

In contrast, there is a very special kind of person found almost exclusively among the Cowboys. For want of a better word, I'll call this sort a Gipper. A Gipper (Ronald Reagan is the prototypical example) is a person who doesn't need to logically reason his way to rightness, because he has an instantaneous intuitive understanding of right and wrong.

Despite so many of Reagan's friends and mentors falling for the Communist line, and despite the fact that Reagan was a New-Deal Democrat, Ronald Reagan never once, not even for a moment, had anything but absolute contempt and loathing for Communism and its kid-sister Socialism. He started fighting the Communists in the 1940s, during the war, while even FDR himself was pedaling the line that "Uncle Joe" Stalin was an enlightened, progressive, scientific, and democratic leader.

(Don't believe me about FDR? Rent a copy of the 1943 Warner Brothers movie Mission to Moskow, made by Jack Warner on direct orders from Roosevelt himself and filmed from the diary of FDR's former ambassador to the USSR, Joseph Davies.)

Reagan happened to be an excellent writer, but he never thought of himself as an intellectual. His genius was first in seeing the right, then in being able to explain it in terms that were not only universally understandable but extraordinarily persuasive. Buckley made conservatism respectable, but it took Reagan to make it popular.

Anybody who knew Reagan for any length of time knew that, no matter what compromise he was forced to accept due to circumstances, Reagan would never, ever "drift to the left," "grow in office," or accept the nearly universally held postulate that Socialism was the way of the future, and the New Soviet Man was the future of Mankind.

Since everyone reading this far is probably both intelligent and pretty intellectual, I predict that you're way ahead of me. George Bush knows Harriet Miers extremely well; he clearly believes that she is not only a Cowgirl but also has an uncanny knack for immediately knowing the right thing to do (from Bush's point of view).

George Bush sees Miers as a female Ronald Reagan: to him, she is a Gipper.

The reason he believes that she will never be seduced by intellectual arguments for judicial activism is that she has that eerie ability to cut through the crap and see the true, ignoble self of the Left. And he believes that she knows what is the right thing to do and can articulate it to the other justices in their conferences before they vote. Bush would argue that it's a thousand times more valuable to be able to persuade one or two justices to her way of thinking -- than simply to write a brilliant, erudite, and scathing dissenting opinion, as Antonin Scalia so often does.

He sees her lack of an intellectual paper trail not as a drawback that must be explained but the very reason he trusts her in the first place: Harriet Miers would never have been impressed by the mighty brains who proved in the 1930s that Das Kapital was the blueprint for secular paradise.

I was somewhat subdued by this flash of comprehension. Of course I don't know if Bush is right about Harriet Miers; I don't know the woman. But I now believe he is right about the basic approach -- there should be at least one person on the Court who is not an intellectual and has a natural immunity to the soulless absurdities that intellectuals can so readily rationalize. The Supreme Court needs a Gipper to slap the other justices across the face and say "snap out of it!"

According to Newsmax.com (a source I almost never cite, for obvious reasons), Antonin Scalia himself seems to have come to a strikingly similar opinion:

"There is now nobody with that [non judicial] background after the death of the previous chief," Scalia laments to [CNBC's Maria ] Bartiromo.

"And the reason that's happened, I think, is that the nomination and confirmation process has become so controversial, so politicized that I think a president does not want to give the opposition an easy excuse [to say] 'Well, this person has no judicial experience.'"

Scalia concludes: "I don't think that's a good thing. I think the Byron Whites, the Lewis Powells and the Bill Rehnquists have contributed to the court even though they didn't sit on a lower federal court."

I wouldn't have made such an appointment myself. But then, I'm not a Cowboy.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 10, 2005, at the time of 2:40 AM | Comments (28) | TrackBack

Date ►►► October 9, 2005

Loyalists, Rebels, Dogfaces -- and Cowboys

As usual, Captain Ed absolutely nails the taxonomy of conservatives who are arguing about the nomination of Harriet Miers... but yesterday, he managed to do so in the Washington Post!

"Local boy makes good." Even though I'm based in California and he's one of the Northern Alliance Minnesotans like the Power Liners, he's "local" in the sense that he's a blogger; when a blogger is invited to write an article for the Washington Post, it's a spectacular triumph for the entire blogosphere. Congratulations, Captain Ed, both for the column and also for its placement in the Holy Grail of MSM!

The analysis has the conservatives breaking up into three factions -- the Loyalist Army, the Rebel Alliance, and the Trench-Dwelling Dogfaces.

Ed defines these three categories as (respectively) those who actually defend the Miers nomination itself as a good one, either because of Miers' abilities or because of the strategic nature of her stealth appointment; those who are so opposed to the nomination that they've actually decided to go to war against it, regardless of the consequences to the GOP (or perhaps because some believe that the consequences of letting it go forward would be worse -- more on that anon); while the Dogfaces in the trenches are those like the blokes at Power Line and Captain Ed himself (and like me) who think it a blunder -- but who believe that having a civil war within the party would compound the error into a serious threat to our chances in 2006 and 2008. This makes it so much easier to swiftly characterize various actors, from Hugh Hewitt to Patterico.

Ed gives several examples of bloggers in each of the first two categories, but the Post inexplicably snipped out his examples from the Dogface category, which I'm absolutely convinced must have refereced John and Paul at Power Line as well as... other blogs. (Ed tactfully refrained from answering my rather ham-fisted hints about whether he had mentioned Big Lizards, thus leaving me free to fantasize that I might have been mentioned in the Post, if only the blackguards hadn't snipped the passage. Thanks for not shattering my illusions, Ed!)

The primary argument by the Rebel Alliance is that her confirmation would cause vast numbers of voters to be so depressed or infuriated that they simply sit out the next election, leading to catastrophic losses. With all due respect to the Rebels, I have to say this indicates, well, a rather colossal ego (one which I am certainly prone to myself!): the idea that most everybody else around me shares my priorities.

In reality, most conservatives across the country aren't even aware this battle is raging. They're the undistributed middle from Captain Ed's taxonomy -- I call them the "Cowboys." Alas, this vast class is routinely ignored by the Rebels, who (like many other intellectuals) consider someone's opinion relatively unimportant unless it's articulated in a written court opinion, in a book or article, on television or radio, or in a well-regarded blog.

Cowboys can live in the city or the country. As a group, they are completely untroubled by the nomination of Harriet Miers because they just plain like her (as they just plain like Bush, another Cowboy). These are people who don't philosophize about their conservatism... they simply live it day to day. They form the true core of the Republican Party.

When they vote, they vote on the big core issues: taxes, the Global War on Terrorism, moral issues, ethical issues, regulation, the economy -- not on specific nominations of specific judges (even to the Supreme Court). And they always vote Republican.

They ignore the day-to-day bickering among the chattering classes; they may not be able to intellectually define a conservative, but they know 'em when they see 'em. And they love Harriet Miers because she is one of them. They won't be turned off by this nomination; they don't particularly trust intellectuals anyway... they see them as always able to find some egg-headed justfication for liberalism.

The Cowboys are the reason that confirming Miers is better than destroying her: when they get upset at Republicans (for example, at liberal appeasement by George H. W. Bush), they don't vote for third parties, and they for God's sake would never vote for a Democrat. They simply don't vote.

Miers is one of the Cowboys. She only recently arrived at this position; earlier, she clearly was a moderate. But the Cowboys always welcome sincere converts, and I don't think even Patterico would argue that Miers is not socially and politically conservative now. The Cowboys see Meirs as that nice lady from church who's always the first to volunteer to raise money for Christmas gifts for the troops or toys for poor kids -- the little lady that always makes them feel so good when she smiles and waves and says "howdy!"

The Rebels seem to have fooled themselves into believing that most conservatives are as passionate about the life of the mind as the articulate, highly educated, and very intelligent Rebels themselves are. I have great sympathy for this mistake; I make it myself. But my too-brief stint in the Navy taught me that most intelligent, decent, and moral folks are simply not "intellectuals": they do not spend their life pondering postulates, arguments, and logical conclusions (as, e.g., lawyers must). They don't commit philosophy. Think of John Wayne, the perfect Cowboy.

But the Cowboys might be very much bothered by her rejection, because they hate traitors and losers: if Miers is forced out or defeated by Republican votes, then the Rebels will come across to the Cowboys as disloyal, and the Loyalists will come across as incompetent losers. The Cowboys may well fume, lose interest in voting, and sit out the election.

I do agree with Patterico in one respect. He argues that:

If this nomination is to be stopped, it should be stopped before it ever gets to Judiciary Committee hearings. A withdrawal would be far less embarrassing and damaging than a defeat in the Judiciary Committee, or (less likely) on the Senate floor.

I'm glad to see that Patterico is finally acknowledging that defeating Miers in either the J-Com or on the Senate floor would severely damage the Republican Party. Where we differ is that he believes it's possible that Bush might be persuaded to make Miers softly and suddenly vanish away, doing minimal damage -- whereas I believe Bush's personal loyalty to those close to him who have done him no dirt will prevent him from ever abandoning her... just as he never abandoned Priscilla Owens, Miguel Estrada, or Janice Rogers Brown.

The only way to keep Miers off the Court will be to defeat her, either in committee or on the floor. And as Patterico himself admits, this will damage the party. So count me as a Dogface doggedly defending a Cowboy's Cowboy.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 9, 2005, at the time of 5:28 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

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