June 2008 Archives

Swift boat veterans — especially those who had nothing to do with the group that attacked Senator John Kerry’s military record in the 2004 election — want their good name back, and the good names of the men not lucky enough to come home alive.

The New York Times. Why couldn't these guys have stood up for the truth when it counted in 2004?

Republican commentators are clucking because Barack Obama has decided not to relinquish a huge small-donor contribution advantage by accepting public funds. I guess they really do think he is a patsy who has learned nothing from Willie Horton and the Swift Boaters. The Right is once again priming its well-oiled attack machine, but do not think that the Democrats are planning to bring a knife to a gun fight this time.

1. Eight (years) is not enough!
2. We cannot let gays destroy the institution of marriage between a man and a woman.
3. The alternative is a Muslim-loving, Jew-baiting, tree-hugging, terrorist-sympathizing surrender monkey and hater of our red-blooded American way of life in the tradition of the givers-up of the Panama Canal.
4. Oil companies need sustainable bottom lines.
5. Drug addicted corporate thieves need a model for rehab.
6. First wives need a model for keeping out of the way in return for medical care.
7. Spending money you don't have beats raising taxes any day.
8. Only people rich enough to deserve a house will be able to afford one.
9. We need our children to learn more about Intelligent Design.
10. If the war goes on for the next hundred years, the poor and the Arabs will kill each other off.

Via Think Left, Live Right.

In an ironic bid to curtail freedom of the press and fair use, the Associated Press has been threatening bloggers for quoting from AP stories. Fierce public reaction has given the media giant and its hired legal guns pause, at least for the moment.

Strange how Carol McCain has been airbrushed from John McCain's biography just as thoroughly as ex-Kremlin leaders were airbrushed from Soviet group portraits. But perhaps not so strange when one considers that McCain apparently belongs to the New Gingrich school of Republican family values.

A sampling of the 851 comments on the New York Times' analysis of why Clinton lost suggests that the War is still very much on Democrats' minds.

Frank Rich on why Obama can take it all.

Fired up? Ready to go.

Update: All right, I guess I am not the only one to whom the comparison occurred.

The New York Times reports on how Pakistan's lawyers are confronting its generals, and the United States is backing the generals.

Reflecting on the op-ed of the quintessential chicken-hawk William Kristol, who sat out the Vietnam War at Harvard, in which he criticizes Barack Obama for not listing the military as a form of national service, I am inclined to think that maybe we as a culture have gotten it wrong all these years. Being a soldier is a dirty, dangerous, and, yes, necessary job. For that, our troops deserve our respect and support. So do our garbagemen, sewer cleaners, cannery workers, meat packers, fishermen, and coal miners — but we do not make speeches and give out medals to them, even when they die horrible deaths in the line of duty. If, like the ancient Chinese, we exalted scholarship over warmaking; if we regarded gutting men as no more romantic than gutting fish, if we refused to allow the bright shining lie of the parade ground to obscure the truth of the trenches, then perhaps we would be taking a step away from war. When we truly come to view war as an ugly necessity rather than a glorious high-tech adventure, then perhaps we will be ready to shoulder the awesome responsibility of life and death that our military wields.