BeldarBlog

Politicians' secrets: Ryan versus Kerry

As teased on Thursday, this post begins with glamor photographs of two beautiful women.  Bear with me, though — I have a serious point to make here, one that I've actually been pondering for a couple of months.

After divorcing Julia Thorne, Sen. John Kerry famously dated Morgan Fairchild — pictured above on the left — as well as movie and TV celebrities Michelle Phillips, Catherine Oxenberg, and Dana Delany.

Former Illinois Republican senate nominee Jack Ryan used to be married to TV celebrity Jeri Ryan — pictured above on the right.  As CNN reported on June 22nd,

Several Chicago media organizations had sued for release of documents relating to the Ryans' divorce, saying the public interest outweighed their concerns about privacy and the possible effect on their now 9-year-old son. Friday, a judge in Los Angeles, where their divorce was litigated, agreed to unseal portions of more than 360 pages of documents, although large parts remained blacked out.

The unsealed court documents included allegations made by Ms. Ryan during their divorce — denied by her ex-husband — "that [while married,] he took her to sex clubs and asked her to engage in sexual activity in front of other patrons."  Mr. Ryan promptly withdrew from the Illinois senate race.

Last August, one of my readers emailed me with this damned good question:

What I was wondering is if the media could pry open sealed divorce records then why can't they force open the undisclosed military records of John Kerry?  Is there a particular legal difference that allows for the one and not the other or is it just lazyness/bias on the media's part?

As a lawyer, I have a good answer to this question.  As a citizen, I don't.

*******

My lawyerly answer:

Ms. Ryan's allegations were made as part of, and filed under seal among the court papers in, her and her ex-husband's divorce and child custody proceedings.  There's normally a strong presumption that all court proceedings, including the paperwork on which they're based, should be open to public view.  That presumption is oftentimes overcome, however, in intensely personal family court proceedings.  In sealing the portions of the court file that included Ms. Ryan's allegations, the California family court judge quite properly, in my opinion, concluded that the certain embarrassment not only of the divorce litigants, but of their minor son, amply overcame that presumption.  But what a trial court can do, it often can later undo — and that's what happened here, when the family court granted the media's request to unseal the records.

Sen. Kerry's military records, by contrast, are private not by virtue of a court order, but by dictate of various federal privacy statutes.  There is no beginning presumption that individuals' military records ought to be part of the public record.  Moreover, there is no general procedure — comparable to the application made by the sensation-hungry media in the Ryan matter — that puts into the hands of a single decisionmaker, like the California judge, the power to make a subjective weighing of the "public's right to know" against the individual's right to privacy.  The statutes that give the public, including the media, their rights in some circumstances to secure the release of government-held information — chief among them the Freedom of Information Act — contain broad exceptions that mandate government nondisclosure of military records like Sen. Kerry's, notwithstanding the fact that he's voluntarily thrust himself into the public eye.

Again speaking not just as a lawyer, but also as a divorced father, I'm frankly appalled by the California judge's decision in the Ryan matter — which came over the opposition of both of the divorced spouses.  I wish that they'd appealed the order.  But although I think the judge made the wrong decision, there's no doubt, as a legal matter, that it was a question which was within his power to decide (subject to appellate review).

*******

My answer as a citizen:

The only difference between these two situations is that the mainstream media — perhaps reflecting their perceptions of raw public appetite, or perhaps reflecting political bias, or both — have shown absolutely no serious interest in pressuring Sen. Kerry to release his own secret records.  While it's true that the law offers no parallel procedure to that used by the media to secure the release of the Ryan divorce records, as a practical matter of real-world politics, there can be no doubt that if the mainstream media had seriously tried to do so, it could have created sufficient pressure to compel Sen. Kerry to sign Standard Form 180 and thereby waive his statutory privacy rights.

One can argue, I suppose, about whether Jack Ryan's private marital relationship with his ex-wife was a legitimate matter of public interest, given his candidacy for public office.  I think it was not, no more than the details of John Kerry's break-up with Julia Thorne are particularly material to his fitness to be President — and the mainstream media, and even the overwhelming bulk of "new media" (cable, bloggers, talk radio hosts) have appropriately given Sen. Kerry a complete pass on that subject. 

But no one can seriously argue that Sen. Kerry's military record — including the mysterious circumstances of his discharge — are insufficiently related to his fitness to be Commander in Chief.  Sen. Kerry himself acknowledged the public's legitimate interest in his military record by posting carefully selected documents on his website.  But he's brazenly stonewalled efforts by the SwiftVets and others from outside the mainstream media to pressure him into releasing all of his records.  And the mainstream media have not only let him get away with that, they've allowed it to go largely uncommented upon.

*******

Sex sells newspapers and attracts TV viewers; indeed, with deliberate cynicism, I began this post with eyecatching pictures of two beautiful women to catch your attention, gentle readers.  And perhaps if Sen. Kerry had taken Morgan Fairchild with him to meet with Viet Cong representative Madame Binh in Paris, the mainstream media would have done its job.  But in this election cycle, they very clearly have not. 

Digging into Jack and Jeri Ryan's marital sex life ought to embarrass the mainstream media.  But failing to dig into John Kerry's military records ought to embarrass them more.  If John Kerry is elected, he will take office with unplumbed secrets that directly relate to his fitness to be President, and that the mainstream media have willfully and consistently ignored.  And that pernicious conspiracy of silence, friends and neighbors, is a long-term threat to our democracy that won't be eliminated or even much affected by Tuesday's poll results.  It's a problem that in fact we can't reasonably expect our elected officials to solve.  It can only be solved by an outraged American public — one that's mad as hell at the mainstream media, and that won't put up with it anymore.

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Update (Sun Oct 31 @ 9:00pm):  Pajama Journal and Captain's Quarters have noted that NBC News is engaging in selective editing to conceal Sen. Kerry's flustered admission on Thursday that not all of his records are public.  Nacht und nebel — the embarrassing admission is just "disappeared."

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Update (Sun Oct 31 @ 9:24pm):  A reader emails me to point out, correctly, that I've overgeneralized, or perhaps implicitly used an overly narrow definition of "mainstream media" without making that clear.  There are indeed newspaper and TV reporters who've done their best to dig into Sen. Kerry's military records, and others who've highlighted his refusal to release them all, and I commend them for their efforts.  My broadside criticism is directed at the top of the MSM pyramid, whose efforts have been fitful at best, and well short of the sort of persistent efforts that would put any real pressure on Sen. Kerry to end his stonewall.

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Update (Sun Oct 31 @ 10:08pm):  Hindrocket at Power Line argues that NBC's editing out Kerry's admission was likely innocent, but that the mainstream media's real cover-up of Sen. Kerry's military record was "by never — ever — asking him the basic question: 'Why won't you make all of your military records public?'"  I certainly agree with the latter conclusion.

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Update (Mon Nov 1 @ 12:20am):  This new post is an expansion on my 9:24pm update from earlier tonight.  Please share your own nominations to the "Swimming against the mainstream" honor roll for mainstream media reporters!

PA Gov. Ed Rendell suffers psychotic delusions on Fox News

This is a perfect example of the foolish argument that was the subject of my post yesterday entitled "An argument with which I have no patience, from fools I will not suffer gladly: 'We're making more terrorists!'" — except it's worse, because it takes the argument one step further to assert that it's specifically George W. Bush who's responsible for terrorism:

A new videotape message from terror mastermind Osama bin Laden was meant to help President Bush win re-election, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell said Sunday.

"It's obvious to me that bin Laden is trying to help George Bush, because George Bush is the best recruiter that al-Qaida has," Rendell told "Fox News Sunday."

"George Bush is so disliked in the Arab world that we're creating terrorists every single day — more terrorists than we can even come close to killing," the Democrat said.

"More terrorists than we can even come close to killing"?  The last I heard, despite Sen. Kerry's vote against the $87 billion appropriation, our troops haven't run short of ammunition. 

Governor Rendell, your worldview may be divided into two portions — pro-Bush and anti-Bush — but that ain't what's motivating the radical Islamic extremists.  They're genuinely omnipartisan in their hatred of all things American. 

Fox News host Chris Wallace should have whipped out a Nerf bat and whacked Gov. Rendell in the ear.  But of course, he couldn't do that.  Mr. Wallace had to pretend that Gov. Rendell isn't a barking-mad moonbat; Mr. Wallace's job requires him to suffer fools graciously, if not gladly.  Gov. Rendell, after all, is a respected leader of the Democratic Party and a key advisor to its presidential nominee.

Can anyone imagine a prominent Republican governor and Dewey adviser saying on Halloween 1944,  with utter seriousness, "Franklin Roosevelt is the best recruiter that the Nazis have"?  I can't.  That would have been political suicide; such a hypothetical governor in 1944 would have been run out of office within hours, his political career ended. 

But I'm delighted to see from Google News that Gov. Rendell's statement, as quoted above by AP, is being picked up and widely republished in Pennsylvania's newspaper and TV station websites.  American voters — in Pennsylvania and elsewhere — aren't obliged to suffer fools gladly, or at all.

Begging for a snarky caption

You are getting sleepy.  You are getting very, very sleepy.

But you can probably still come up with a better caption than either Reuters or I have, cantcha?

Musings on the significance of ailing despots elsewhere to the American election

The small town where I grew up — Lamesa, population around 12,000, situated half-way between Lubbock and Midland in the flat cotton-farming country of west Texas — had a single high school.  For its size, Lamesa High School had a pretty good band (my own main extracurricular activity — yes, I was a band geek, a trumpet player) and choir, a pretty good football team (state quarterfinals my junior year) and baseball team, and a fine basketball team (state champs my senior year).  But we had no debate team at all until, during the fall of my junior year in 1973, one of my classmates and his year-older girlfriend (who later went to Harvard Law) decided to start one, pretty much as a lark.  They talked me into attending one competition with them, in the even smaller Texas panhandle town of Dimmitt, and signed me up for some sort of extemporaneous speaking event in which I was to make a short speech based on an assigned-on-the-spot topic of current public interest.

As it turned out, my topic was a person I'd never heard of before — some guy named "Yasser Arafat."  It would be an understatement to say that in Lamesa, most of us weren't well tuned in to the chronic problems of the Middle East.  Although we had a mix of white, black, and latino students, I think there may have been, at most, maybe two or three Jewish families in the town (none with high school aged kids), and we had absolutely nobody from any Middle Eastern ethnicity.  My geopolitical consciousness  expanded abruptly a couple of years later when I hit UT-Austin — where my first three dorm suitemates were two Jewish kids from San Antonio and a devout Muslim from Algeria (all three of whom could at least agree that I was the hick among them).  But in high school, I was only vaguely aware that Israel had just fought a couple of wars against its Arab enemies; I couldn't have found Syria or Jordan on a map; and I hadn't a clue what a "Palestinian" was, beyond the fact that "Palestine" was a country I vaguely remembered hearing about in Sunday school.  And there I was, given about a fifteen minute head start to come up with a speech about some guy, whose name I wasn't sure how to pronounce, who was the head of something called the "Palestinian Liberation Organization."

But I had a file box full of recent Newsweeks and U.S. News & World Reports, so I cobbled together some sort of talk — I think I titled it "Yasser Arafat — Man in the Middle of the Action" (or that may have been the specified topic title, I can't recall) — and to my own immense surprise and that of my friends and more experienced competitors, I ended up winning that event at the competition.  This small accident of personal history then, as it turned out, sensitized me to the name "Yasser Arafat," and caused me to pay somewhat more attention to the man over the following years than I otherwise likely would have.

Arafat's story, of course, turned out to be every bit as violent as his terrorist background would have suggested, but also became marked by greed and cowardice and pettiness.  And now, on the cusp of an American presidential election, Arafat is ailing and marginalized.  The long-stalled Middle East peace process, such as it is, frankly waits for him to die.

*******

The likelihood that Arafat will survive the next American President's term is poor.  Fidel Castro, another tin-pot despot outrun by history around him, is another whose failing health bodes well for freedom in a country whose size, population, and geographical proximity and historical ties to the US make it impossible for us to ignore.  The odds seem pretty good that our next President will have exceptional opportunities — triggered not by a CIA-inspired coup but by the slow hand of nature's grim reaper — to promote democracy in a new Palestinian state, Cuba, and perhaps other places besides Afghanistan and Iraq.  One hopes that this can be done without needing to use military force; but as always in matters diplomatic, our influence will be stronger than otherwise by virtue of our military might and the perception that we are not paralyzed against using it when we deem it appropriate.

There is a profound worldwide trend toward democracy — in fits and starts, and not without setbacks, but profound nonetheless.  Since 9/11, most Americans understand intuitively — and Pres. Bush has made the case logically and plainly — that our own long-term security depends on promoting democracy and assisting this trend.  And in places like the Middle East and Cuba, there may be sudden new opportunities — not of our own direct making, but of the grim reaper's — that will require a confident and bold and steady American involvement.

With that in mind, friends and neighbors, I ask you to look again at Sen. John Kerry's consistent record throughout his adult life.  I submit that you'll find no evidence there that he views America as a model to be emulated or a force for constructive change.  Instead, you'll find timidity, reflexive self-doubt, and the sort of extreme moral relativism that permits despots to pursue their bloody, repressive ways without much fear of political or economic consequences, and no fear whatsoever of military consequences.  Oh, sure, if we can "pass the global test," if we can get unanimous concurrence from NATO or the U.N., if his much beloved "summit conferences" produce action rather than stalemate, then a President Kerry might engage America.  (Or he might not — viz, the Gulf War.)  But how likely is that to happen?  And what historic opportunities — like those arising from the deaths-by-natural-causes of an Arafat or a Castro — will he squander?

No guts, no glory.  Dubya has guts, and he recognizes — as Kerry doesn't — that our own security requires us to take risks and to refuse to be bound by fuming vetoes cast by other interested nations whose interests may differ quite sharply from America's.  No one in the world — friend, foe, or in between — will mistake an America led by George W. Bush for a paper tiger; and no one in the world will doubt that an America led by John F. Kerry is exactly that.

NYT's margin of permissible untruthfulness

TO:	N.Z. Bear
FROM:	The New York Times
DATE:	Friday, October 29, 2004 1:38 PM

You're right that we screwed up in citing your website for the proposition that the hard-left website known as dKos receives a half-million separate individual viewers daily.  And you're right, of course, that the real number of separate individuals is certainly way, way less than that.  But we're the New York Times, and this fits our agenda.  So to hell with the truth and anyone like you who cares about it — we're not gonna print a correction.  We can get away with telling this much of a baldfaced lie, and there's nothing you can do about it.  Because we're the New York Times, and you — you're just a bear, probably in pajamas.  Nyah-nyah-nyah!

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No, that's not quite a direct quote.  But it's pretty close.  Follow the link to Mr. Bear's website to get the details.  I know that each and every one of my own million separate readers will agree with me that this is outrageous — and that Kos won't.  (Hat-tip InstaPundit.)

BeldarBlog hits one million Sitemeter page views

Woohoo!  A few minutes ago I took this screencap from my Sitemeter stats:

(The 67,485 pre-March 10, 2004 — when I installed the Sitemeter tracking software into my blog pages — is from my hosting service TypePad's own statistics screen, which measures hits in some slightly different way than Sitemeter's "page views" and "visits.")

This is certainly an appropriate occasion to again thank the various bloggers and (much more rare) mainstream media writers who've seen fit to link and discuss my posts on BeldarBlog; the Blogad advertisers (both of them!) and supporters who've thrown a buck or two into my Tip Jar (mostly symbolic but nevertheless much appreciated and highly motivational); and most of all, those of you who've visited to read my longwinded rants and musings.  [Insert heartfelt and gushing Sally Fields-at-the-Oscars impression here.]

I quite expect my traffic to crater after the election, and I'm reconciled to that prospect.  (Heavens forbid a long legal battle over the election results — which would probably be great for my blog traffic, but severely taxing on my mental health!)  But I'm still thrilled to pass this milestone today.  I think it's time for me to find a good bottle of California champagne to celebrate!  Any recommendations?

An argument with which I have no patience, from fools I will not suffer gladly: "We're making more terrorists!"

In my practice of law, it often pays me to suffer fools gladly.  Sometimes they're my clients — fools quite often find themselves in an astonishingly urgent need of good legal help, as it turns out —  and it literally pays me to suffer them patiently, and I'm certainly glad to be paid for it. 

But in politics, however, I'm not so motivated.  And I find myself set off into a short rant this fine fall afternoon by the stupidest argument I've seen floating around lately — one which, to my absolute amazement, I've heard advanced by a few normally very intelligent people as seriously as "scientists" once argued that decaying food spontaneously transmutes itself into flies, or that liver cancer is a sign of excessive quantities of bilious humors in the host's body.

"By invading Iraq," they say, "President Bush has caused more terrorists."  For example, I just saw a  blogad pimping a new book with a blurb from a WaPo review by Richard Clarke that gushes, "[Jonathan] Randal makes a convincing case that the U.S. war on Iraq has needlessly extended the lifetime and ferocity of this generation of terrorists as never before."  I haven't read Mr. Randal's book, and neither do I plan to waste the time or money to do so, because I already understand his "convincing case," and I know what it amounts to:

Rubbish and balderdash. 

Radical Islamic extremists are not like poison ivy — "don't scratch it, it'll only get worse!"  The necessary premise of this argument is, "If we'd only — (choose one or more) — (a) let them alone, (b) treat them with due respect, (c) allow them to drive Israel into the sea, then they wouldn't keep flying airplanes into our buildings, blowing up school busses, kidnapping and beheading civilians, etc."

These folks won't be happy until my two daughters are in burqas and they and I together are under the watchful eyes of thought-and-conduct police who'll correct any deviation from their approved path.  They won't be happy until our civilization is destroyed and replaced with one that they've dictated.

Does it make them angrier when we thwart their plans by liberating and bringing democracy to places like Afghanistan and Iraq?  You're damn right it does.  Does it make them so angry that they stream into enclaves of their fellow terrorists there to fight our military forces?  Damn straight, and bully for that!  That most definitely doesn't "[extend] the lifetime and ferocity of this generation of terrorists" — it puts them directly into the sights of the most effective and lethal military forces on the planet.  As remarked by one of our soldiers of the fayhadeen irregulars who were charging our M1-A1s and Bradleys while firing off light machine guns from the tops of Toyota pickup trucks during the brief toppling of Saddam's armies last year — with inevitable and spectacular failure as the result — "It's the perfect war, because they want to die, and we're glad to give them their wish."

If what we were doing in Iraq was the forcible conversion of Muslims to Christianity and the extinguishment of their own culture, then yes, we could be "breeding more terrorists," just as if we deliberately salted rotting meat with fly eggs we'd be breeding maggots and flies.  But I categorically reject — as racist and bigoted and shortsighted and wrong — the necessary presumption of the "we're making more terrorists" arguers that establishing democracy and freedom equate to that.  If a radical, democracy- and liberty-hating man is capable of being energized into action — into killing and terrorizing — by our spread of democracy and liberty, then by all means let's give him the impetus to pick up his AK-47 and put himself onto the active battleground of our choice, and then let's kill him there.

Are there some numbers of "potential terrorists" who will, through propaganda and hate-filled rhetoric, be persuaded that our establishment of democracy and liberty in Afghanistan and Iraq are instead anti-Islamic?  Yes, certainly — just as there were Japanese soldiers in World War II who sincerely believed they were fighting to thwart Western attempts to unseat their emperor (instead of Western attempts to interfere with their establishment of a brutal, repressive, and exploitative "Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere"); if they survived the war, they eventually revised their views, which is why the American embassy in Tokyo isn't beseiged by Japanese fanatics blowing themselves up while shouting "Long live the Emperor!"  That our enemies can use our actions in the meantime — any actions, for even our most passive course of promoting liberty and democracy will not satisfy them — to make converts of the gullible is unfortunate, but fundamentally (pun intended) beyond our control. 

And by far the most effective way of minimizing and, ultimately, eliminating (in one way or the other) the sincere-but-confused terrorist converts will be to finish the jobs that we started in those countries when we toppled their governing regimes.  Cutting and running will do the opposite — it will not only betray the less gullible and freedom- and liberty-loving Muslims (and others) in those countries, but encourage our enemies into believing that we are weak and easily defeated, and worse, lend credence to the deliberately misleading arguments of our enemies that our real motivations were to promote Christianity or serve the Jews of Israel or steal their oil wealth (or whatever).

So if you're all worked up into making this particular argument in my presence, don't be surprised if I snort derisively and wander off to do something more productive — say, clipping my fingernails or cleaning my toilets — instead of debating it with you at length.  You're a fool, and unless you're also a client (and I don't argue politics with my clients anyway), I have no obligation to suffer your foolishness gladly.

Osama bin Laden's invitation to Pres. Kerry to negotiate a truce

O American people, I am speaking to tell you about the ideal way to avoid another Manhattan, about war and its causes and results....

Your security is not in the hands of [Democratic presidential candidate John F.] Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands, and each state that does not harm our security will remain safe.

So says Osama bin Laden to the American public.  The very perceptive and eloquent Wretchard of Belmont Club has this to say about bin Laden's tape (boldface in original):

It is important to notice what he has stopped saying in this speech. He has stopped talking about the restoration of the Global Caliphate. There is no more mention of the return of Andalusia. There is no more anticipation that Islam will sweep the world. He is no longer boasting that Americans run at the slightest wounds; that they are more cowardly than the Russians. He is not talking about future operations to swathe the world in fire but dwelling on past glories. He is basically saying if you leave us alone we will leave you alone. Though it is couched in his customary orbicular phraseology he is basically asking for time out.

I agree.  But I respectfully disagree, in part, with Wretchard that "[t]he American answer to Osama's proposal will be given on Election Day."  Yes, if Pres. Bush is re-elected, bin Laden will have his answer.  But I don't think that bin Laden's tape is primarily an attempt to influence the course of the American election next Tuesday.  Rather, I think it's a very clear attempt to begin negotiations with a Kerry administration for a "cease-fire" in the Global War on Terror.

Of course, I don't believe for an instant that bin Laden's sincere.  Only a blithering fool would trust him.  But only a blithering fool would —

• have listened to the North Vietnamese/Viet Cong's "seven-point peace plan" during the Vietnam War, and have taken it at face value and endorsed it as the course that America should follow. 

• have believed Daniel Ortega's promises to reform his communist government in Nicaragua if only America would stop funding the contras. 

• have believed that a nuclear freeze and sharp cutbacks in America's military and intellligence programs would placate the Soviet Union and win the Cold War. 

• have believed that diplomacy would have gotten Saddam out of Kuwait in the last decade, or out of power in his own country in this one.   

• believe that North Korea will respond more favorably to unilateral negotiations with  the United States than to combined pressure in six-way talks that also involve South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia.

One such blithering fool may be elected President of the United States on Tuesday.  And Osama bin Laden — like Madame Binh, Daniel Ortega, a succession of Soviet dictators, Saddam, and Kim Jong Il before him — has already begun his sly attempts to manipulate that candidate.  So it is that this blithering fool's personal history of enthusiastically swallowing just this kind of bait, hook, line, and sinker — and then trying to base America's course upon it — scares me far more than anything Osama bin Laden could ever say.

Rumor mill buzzing on Kerry's discharge status

Update (Sat Oct. 30 @ 12:50am): This rumor hasn't yet panned out, as acknowledged by its original source, and may or may not ever pan out; see Update #3 below if you want the details.  I'm leaving the original text of this post in the extended entry/archive version, marked with strikethroughs.

If the rumor is not true, of course, it could be definitively proved so were Sen. Kerry to sign Standard Form 180.  That probably isn't going to happen, at least not before the election.  One remains free to draw whatever inferences one thinks are justified based on Sen. Kerry's refusal, but they are, at best, only inferences — in this context, guesses.  — Beldar

-----[original post and numbered updates follow]-----

My email inbox is brimming. 

Yes, I'm aware that there are rumors buzzing about a breaking big story on Sen. Kerry's Navy discharge, about which I last wrote in a post entitled "Was Kerry's original discharge less than honorable?" on October 13th.  My conclusion then was that records analyzed by reporter Thomas Lipscomb in a New York Sun article could support the hypothesis that Sen. Kerry received something other than a full-fledged honorable discharge.  But as you'll see if you read my comments thread, there were lots of contrary arguments as well.  And as I recognized in my last update to that post, there was at least one other plausible contrary inference from the records — equally speculative — that could have explained what seemed to be an odd statutory reference in a page from Kerry's records displayed on his campaign website.

The immediate source of the rumors is a [since-pulled —  see updates below] post by "NavyChief" on the SwiftVets site (but their server is likely to be overwhelmed shortly):

Okay, folks.

We got it finally. We have the Former Secretary of the Navy who stated, "Yes, Kerry did receive an Other Than Honorable Discharge".

Stay tuned for more...

Now to MAKE THE MEDIA AND CONGRESS LISTEN!

Go my brothers and sisters -- spread the news to everyone!!!!

- Chief

PoliPundit, Power Line, and Redstate all have threads up, plus check the Trackback link from Power Line and also the Trackbacks to my post here.

I have no inside info at this point, although I would not be surprised if, as PoliPundit's post suggests, this rumor may refer to something about to be published by Mr. Lipscomb.  I know he's been continuing to work on the story, but I don't know any details. 

I repeat that these are, at this stage, rumors, and I humbly request that anyone linking this post make clear that such is my present opinion. 

Based on my past experience with him and reading of his work, though, like many others, I've found NavyChief — a retired Navy Chief Petty Officer and father of five named Troy Jenkins from San Antonio, who's included (at about the 3-minute, 55-second mark) in the fourth of the SwiftVets' "mini-documentaries" released yesterday, entitled "No Man Left Behind (Pt. 1)" — to be a diligent, bright, and knowledgeable fellow.  Like all of us, he's human, and he's occasionally stumbled in his digging through Kerry's records, but when he's done so, he's acknowledged it quickly.  His new post on the SwiftVets site certainly indicates, however, that this is more than an inference drawn from records — and instead a former Navy Secretary, speaking, one would presume, from personal knowledge.  (See also this very provocative post, from a blogger I'm unacquainted with and hence cannot vouch for even by reputation.)

As they say ... "developing."  If this falls through, I'll be among the first to concede that point.  If it pans out, I admit that I'll be tickled pink.

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Update #1 (Fri Oct 29 @ 2:35pm):  The original thread on the SwiftVets forum has been pulled.  Make of that what you will; I don't know what to make of it, but it would seem to be equally consistent with either (1) a glitch in the story that casts doubt upon it or (2) a desire to release the story in a less haphazard fashion.

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Update #2 (Fri Oct 29 @ 2:52pm):  This thread suggests that NavyChief's post was pulled because it represented his personal statement rather than something that the SwiftVets organization is yet ready to be identified with:

We have been advised that material was recently posted to this forum referencing the nature of John Kerry's discharge from the military service. That material has been deleted from this forum.

Please be advised that posts made to this forum express the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Swift Vets and POWs for Truth.

That strikes me as prudent at this point, regardless of whether the rumor turns out to be well-founded or not.  This is still just a rumor.

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Update #3 (Sat Oct 30 @ 12:50am):  From a post on the SwiftVets forums from NavyChief:

New information has developed on Kerry's Discharge. We have been proven correct in our assertions, however without the proper folks coming forward this will not be public until after the elections.

- Chief

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Update #4 (Sat Oct 30 @ 3:18am):  D'oh!  A sharp-eyed reader emailed me to note that the link just above is a very old one going back to Thursday, Oct. 28th.  Mea culpa maxima.  I'm not sure what the current status of efforts/research is, but we still seem to be somewhere in the rumors stage.

Lessons from Afghanistan already forgotten

One factor working against Pres. Bush's reelection is the American public's notoriously short attention span and lack of historical perspective.  But Charles Krauthammer hasn't forgotten Afghanistan:

Within days of Sept. 11, the clueless airhead president that inhabits Michael Moore's films and Tina Brown's dinner parties had done this: forced Pakistan into alliance with us, isolated the Taliban, secured military cooperation from Afghanistan's northern neighbors, and authorized a radical war plan involving just a handful of Americans on the ground, using high technology and local militias to utterly rout the Taliban.

President Bush put in place a military campaign that did in two months what everyone had said was impossible: defeat an entrenched, fanatical, ruthless regime in a territory that had forced the great British and Soviet empires into ignominious retreat. Bush followed that by creating in less than three years a fledgling pro-American democracy in a land that had no history of democratic culture and was just emerging from 25 years of civil war.

Bush could have rested on his laurels, left Saddam "in his box," and probably cruised to reelection — if he was motivated by polls and personal gain.  If he'd done so, Sen. Kerry doubtless would be carping now that the Bush administration was ignoring the grave and gathering threat in Iraq.  But what conclusions can we draw about their relative fitness to lead the Global War on Terrorism just from Afghanistan?  Concludes Mr. Krauthammer,

This election comes down to a choice between one man's evolution and the other man's resolution. With his endlessly repeated Tora Bora charges, Kerry has made Afghanistan a major campaign issue. So be it. Whom do you want as president? The man who conceived the Afghan campaign, carried it through without flinching when it was being called a "quagmire" during its second week and has seen it through to Afghanistan's transition to democracy? Or the retroactive genius, who always knows what needs to be done after it has already happened — who would have done "everything" differently in Iraq, yet in Afghanistan would have replicated Bush's every correct, courageous, radical and risky decision — except one. Which, of course, he would have done differently. He says. Now.

John Kerry, neatly summed up in three words, nine letters, two punctuation marks:  "He says.  Now."