BeldarBlog

Net growth in Drezner household labor pool

My congratulations to the Dan Drezner family on their new arrival, Lauren!  I'm sure he's cross-charted the additional expenditures, long-term trends in the Drezner household labor pool, and marginal incremental utils involved in this acquisition.  May his negative forecasts prove exaggerated, his positive forecasts understated, and his and his spouse's coefficient of contented parentivity ever exhibit a strongly positive delta!

Kranish book makes awful first impression

I'm genuinely trying to withhold judgment, but even before I got to the pages with regular numbers, I'm having serious doubts about Michael Kranish et al.'s John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography by the Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best.  At page xxvi in the Introduction (boldface mine):

Do these actions reflect the conflicts of a powerful intellect, of a man who appreciates nuance in policy and deeds but sometimes has trouble translating it to a mass audience?  Do his statements and votes on military force reflect the natural caution of a man who was severely wounded in combat, who watched men under his command die, who lost five of his best friends in a war that ended in U.S. withdrawal? ...

I'm wondering if maybe this book is actually about former Sen. Bob Kerrey.  I'm almost certain that John Kerry wasn't ever "severely wounded" because I Google-searched his campaign website for that phrase and got zero hits.  Maybe he was "severely wounded," and just didn't tell anyone on his campaign staff, d'ya think?  I'm in suspense — must resist the urge to skip ahead in the book to find out whether he survived or not!

(Google search is so much fun!  It tells us that "bandaid," for instance, does appear one time — but it's something about Bush's "bandaid solutions" to economic problems.  No hits for "ouchie," "boo-boo," "kiss it and make it better," "Ghengis Khan," "Hanoi Hilton," "Jane Fonda," "cabana boy," "diddler," "Boston Strangler," or "do you know who I am," either.  Twenty-six hits for "Purple Heart," though, which would be approximately 26 more than the stitches Kerry's severe wounds required; zero hits for "stitches" or "stitch."  But "Vietnam" pulls 236 hits — hey, did you know Kerry served in Vietnam?  "Combat" gets 165 hits; "veteran" scores 164; "courage" pulls up 106; "swift boat" draws 71; "brave" and "decorated" tie at 50; "medal" pops up 34 hits; and "hero" draws a modest 24.  "Gridley" bottoms out at 11; man, those guys have such a right to feel slighted.) 

And I'm pretty sure that if Kerry'd had a crewman die in his arms, Doug Brinkley would have already written the major motion picture movie script and Spielberg would have rushed it into production. 

But we'll see, we'll see.  Maybe by chapter three, I'll have it figured out.

Salute to Chief Justice Thomas R. Phillips

Yesterday was the final day of service on the Texas Supreme Court for Chief Justice Thomas R. Phillips.

I had the pleasure of practicing (albeit only very briefly) with Chief Justice Phillips just before he took the bench of the 280th District Court of Harris County.  I was pleased to handle the Fifth Circuit appeal of a First Amendment case that he'd won in the trial court as a practicing lawyer, and later appeared in his court on behalf of the plaintiff in a case that had my all-time favorite case-name, The Who v. John Doe (which I've been meaning to blog about since last September).

When he was appointed to the Texas Supreme Court in 1988, Chief Justice Phillips was the youngest Chief Justice since Texas joined the Union, and his re-elections in 1988, 1990, 1996, and 2002 were well deserved.  It's not an overstatement to say that Tom Phillips led the Texas Supreme Court out of national disrepute, and although he has generally been known as a "judicial conservative," he's earned praise from both sides of the political aisle for his thoughtfulness and lack of dogmatism.  In the State Bar of Texas 2002 Judicial Poll, for example, Chief Justice Phillips outpolled the combined votes for his two opponents by more than a two-to-one margin and received the most votes of any of 53 appellate judges who were rated.

Chief Justice Phillips' resignation from the Court was entirely his own decision — I believe he could have been re-elected for as long as he cared to run — and I know he'll be missed by his colleagues.  But I'm sure he'll enjoy and prosper in his new position as a distinguished visiting professor at South Texas College of Law, and I would not be surprised to see him again pick up the cudgels as a trial lawyer some time in the not-too-distant future.

I've never known or seen a finer judge, a finer lawyer, or a finer man, and I thank him for his service to our state and our profession.  (Hat-tip to Howard Bashman.)

Mainstream media decidedly undecided about undecideds

In Saturday's WaPo:  "Speech Fails to Sway These Undecideds."

In Saturday's LAT:  "Convention Helps Bush Gain Undecided Voters."

Update:  AllahPundit has a bit of gripping photojournalism relating to this news, which I've stolen borrowed humbly republished at my own bandwidth expense here:

WaPo's Dobbs stumbles farther off the track

Michael Dobbs is really disappointing me.  Saturday's WaPo contains his article entitled "Democrat Says He Helped Bush Into Guard to Score Points," which contains absolutely no news (boldface mine):

A former senior politician from Texas has told close friends that he recommended George W. Bush for a pilot's slot in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War because he was eager to "collect chits" from an influential political family.

The reported comments by former Texas lieutenant governor Ben Barnes add fuel to a long-running controversy over how Bush got a slot in an outfit known as the "Champagne Unit" because it included so many sons of prominent Texans. Friends said that Barnes had recorded an interview for the CBS program "60 Minutes" that will address the question of whether Bush pulled strings to evade being sent to Vietnam.

Barnes, a longtime Democrat who works as a lobbyist and political consultant in Austin, has said that he is now "very ashamed" of helping "a lot of people who had family names of importance get in the National Guard." He made the statement during a meeting with John F. Kerry supporters in Austin on May 27, a video of which is now circulating on the Internet.

Friends said Barnes will expand on the remarks in his interview with "60 Minutes" while taking care not to contradict sworn testimony from 1999, in which he said that no member of the Bush family had directly asked him for help. Barnes was unavailable for comment yesterday....

Barnes is now telling friends that he understood that [Houston businessman Sidney] Adger was making his request on behalf of the Bush family, even though Barnes has no memory of Adger explicitly saying he was.  Barnes based his understanding on the knowledge that Adger was extremely close to the Bush family and Barnes's feeling that Adger would not have acted without the family's consent.

News flash:  Big-time Texas favor-trader did an unsought favor for the Bush family!  Stop the presses!  WaPo has second-hand information that Ben Barnes is about to give a "60 Minutes" interview in which he says the same thing he said in 1999, only now he's got ... a guess based on a "feeling"!  Barnes says he was willing, even eager, to pull strings without the presumed beneficiaries having requested or even known about it — yet his guess and his feeling are good enough to negate the possibility that Adger might have been doing the same?

Mr. Dobbs sure gives up easily, it seems:

At the time, Barnes was speaker of the Texas House of Representatives and in close touch with the head of the Texas Air National Guard, Brig. Gen. James Rose. Adger and Rose are dead.

Hey, if we're going to go on Ben Barnes' guess about his feeling, wouldn't a séance for Gen. Rose and Mr. Adger be in order as well?

Mr. Dobbs, recycling five-year-old news isn't going to win you any Pulitzer Prizes.  Busting through a presidential candidate's cover-up and stonewalling might.  Are we going to have to ask you to sign the newspaper equivalent of Standard Form 180, whatever that may be, to find out whether your editors have ordered you to ignore the "mystery" that you wrote about only two weeks ago?

Thanks, Gen. Franks, for thanking our coalition partners

I'm not sure whether anyone else at the Republican National Convention made this same point or not, but I was extremely pleased to hear Gen. Tommy Franks deliver these lines:

And we have not been in this fight alone. President Bush has built the largest coalition in the history of the world — nations united together against terrorism.

Some have ridiculed the contributions made by our allies, but I can tell you that every contribution from every nation is important.

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking our Coalition partners for being there when America and the world needed them most.

The only thing that could have made this better would have been a more explicit reference to Sen. Kerry calling the allies who've joined us in Iraq a "fraudulent coalition" and, even worse, "some trumped-up, so-called coalition of the bribed, the coerced, the bought and the extorted."  This latter wasn't an off-the-cuff remark, but a carefully crafted — even word-smithed — insult.  I don't know how Sen. Kerry failed to throw in, for good measure, that all of their mothers wear army boots with heels rounded at the back.  I suppose Sen. Kerry can deliver such barbs in several different languages to give them their full effect — and doubtless his unblushing bride could translate them into a few more. 

On second thought, I suppose that Gen. Franks had the taste, decency, and diplomacy not to repeat these insults even for the purpose of condemning their maker.  But I continue to wonder how Sen. Kerry expects to do such a fabulously better job of international diplomacy than Dubya when Kerry's gone out of his way to insult the countries that, by definition, have been our most steadfast allies.  Tony Blair might have the manners to pretend not to have noticed — but I'm sure he did, as did the leaders, and people, of a great many other countries whose soldiers are putting it on the line every day along with our own forces in Iraq.

Update (Sat Sep 4 @ 8:30am):  I just watched my videotape from Thursday night of Dubya's acceptance speech, and I'll swear he was reading my mind, even if he left out "bought and extorted" from the Kerry quote. 

As a result of that speech, there are some tough hombres from El Salvador who are nodding their close-shaved heads and slapping palms with their brothers in uniform and shouting — well, whatever their equivalent for "Hoo-ah!" is.  Their mothers are saying, "That's my son he was talking about!  My son, he's been fighting for freedom!"  In some small town you or I have never heard of in Italy, there's someone who maybe has had second or third thoughts about her country's support of the Coalition in the past, but who is telling her husband over breakfast this morning, "That needed to be said, what the President said ... and did you hear, did you hear, what that Kerry called us?"  An icy Heineken or three will be hoisted in Rotterdam for the President of the United States; an icy vodka shot glass or four will pound down empty atop a Gdansk tabletop, and the words "Reagan" and "Bush" will be heard. 

And Tony Blair will have his poker face on, but I'll bet you when he watched the speech, he nodded and pointed his finger at the screen and thought, maybe even said under his breath, something inscrutably British and definitely approving about cowboys and honor and friendship.

Clinton's upcoming surgery

A writer for the Associated Press, and perhaps others in the mainstream media, very much wanted the partisan Republican crowd to boo when President Bush announced during a rally today that former President Bill Clinton has been hospitalized for heart bypass surgery, so they could then chastise Dubya for failing to chastise the crowd.  It didn't happen that way, but that's the way the AP — initially — wrote its story, which of course spread like wildfire through the mainstream media.

I share the astonishment and dismay of the folks at Power Line, who've exposed this episode in detail.

I disagree with Mr. Clinton's politics; I do not admire his ethics; I think he was a disastrous President in many respects.  I continue to admire his intelligence and energy, however, and to marvel at his unsurpassed skills as a politician.  I genuinely regret that, unfortunately, there will inevitably be distasteful and snarky remarks from some on the righthand side of the political aisle about his current hospitalization.  There won't be any on this blog, including in its comments (as best I can patrol them; and that includes links to or quotes from snarky remarks elsewhere, which I frankly don't care to further publicize).

I sincerely join President Bush — and the crowd that in fact didn't boo, but clapped and cheered in agreement when President Bush expressed his good wishes — in adding my own best wishes that President Clinton may have a full and speedy recovery.  (Hat-tip to Swimming Through the Spin for the audio link.)

Kerry apparently signed Form 180 for Brinkley, but Brinkley is cooperating in the cover-up

I had always assumed that Sen. Kerry had himself provided his biographer Douglas Brinkley with Kerry's official military records that were already in Sen. Kerry's hands.  But in reviewing Brinkley's citations and references for ToD, I came upon this statement at page 520 of his "Acknowledgements" section (boldface mine):

Also with Kerry's permission, I obtained his Navy records and have used them as a reliable source.

I don't know any other way to interpret this than to presume that Kerry signed, and gave to Brinkley for Brinkley's submission to the DoD, Standard Form 180.  Brinkley's wording — "I obtained" — indicates that he submitted the form and that the results were sent directly to him by the DoD.

If so, I believe that a strong argument can be made that by authorizing the DoD to release these confidential materials directly at the request, and into the hands of, one historian, Kerry thereby waived any and all rights to insist that he has a privilege to prevent their release to other interested members of the press, the academic community of historians, and the public.  Brinkley's not Kerry's lawyer, wife, priest, or otherwise in a position such that sharing privileged information with him might not constitute a waiver.  [Important Note: as discussed in an update below, I haven't been able to find caselaw under the Privacy Act of 1974 to support this broad waiver argument, and it may well be incorrect.]

The public disclosure of these records via Standard Form 180 is precisely what the SwiftVets have been demanding since May 2004.  WaPo's Michael Dobbs has pointed out Kerry's refusal to release these records — although he didn't use the perfectly apt phrases "cover-up" or "stonewall" — in the same August 22nd article that Kerry's sympathizers in the media claim to have "knocked down" the SwiftVets' claims:

Some of the mystery surrounding exactly what happened on the Bay Hap River in March 1969 could be resolved by the full release of all relevant records and personal diaries. Much information is available from the Web sites of the Kerry campaign and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and the Navy archives. But both the Kerry and anti-Kerry camps continue to deny or ignore requests for other relevant documents, including Kerry's personal reminiscences (shared only with biographer Brinkley), the boat log of PCF-94 compiled by Medeiros (shared only with Brinkley) and the Chenoweth diary.

Although Kerry campaign officials insist that they have published Kerry's full military records on their Web site (with the exception of medical records shown briefly to reporters earlier this year), they have not permitted independent access to his original Navy records. A Freedom of Information Act request by The Post for Kerry's records produced six pages of information. A spokesman for the Navy Personnel Command, Mike McClellan, said he was not authorized to release the full file, which consists of at least a hundred pages.

Brinkley insists — both in ToD's Author's Note (at page xiii) and in its Acknowledgements (at page 520) — that Kerry "had no editorial control" over Brinkley's book manuscript or the entire biography project.  Fine.  If that's so, and if Brinkley didn't obtain Kerry's military records from Kerry as part of the personal archives subject to Kerry's exclusive control and subject to some sort of contractual restriction that would bind Brinkley, then nothing prevents Brinkley from handing them over to WaPo's Dobbs or any other reporter (or blogger, or SwiftVet). 

Nothing, that is, except a partisan desire to help Kerry succeed in his cover-up.

---------------

Update (Fri Sep 3 @ 11pm):  My working assumption in writing this post is that the Privacy Act of 1974, 5 U.S.C. § 552a, is what creates Sen. Kerry's right to maintain the privacy of his military records.  This is similar to, but not quite the same as, common law rights to assert privileges against compelled disclosure (for instance, attorney-client).  Although I have a good familiarity with privileges and the ways in which they may be deliberately and inadvertantly waived, I'm not an expert on the Privacy Act.  Hence the qualification of my suggestion above that a "strong argument" can be made that if Kerry authorized Brinkley to receive his military records with Form 180, he's waived his right to continue to insist upon those records' privacy.  I'm doing some digging in the caselaw to see if this precise issue has come up under the Privacy Act, and may update this post, or start a new post, depending on what I find.

Update (Fri Sep 3 @ 11:50pm):  The relevant portion of the statute is 5 U.S.C. § 552a(b), which provides:

No agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains, unless disclosure of the record would be [followed by a number of exceptions that don't appear to apply].

The question is whether Kerry's prior written consent for DoD to disclose Kerry's records directly to Brinkley would operate as a broad waiver and, in effect, consent for DoD to disclose Kerry's records to anyone else who might later ask.  Alas, and somewhat to my surprise, I cannot find a case in the annotations to the statute that's directly on point in either direction.  But given the prohibitory language of the statute as it applies to government agencies — and, frankly, given the purposes of the statute — it may be too great a stretch to argue that "consent for anyone equals consent for everyone."  This may indeed be a situation where a statutory privacy right differs from a common-law privilege.  I've deleted the phrase "thereby waiving confidentiality" from the original title of this post.  Mea culpa; I plead guilty to probably going off half-baked on the broad waiver argument.

My other main point in this post, however, I think is still valid.  On its face, once Brinkley has the records, nothing in the Privacy Act would appear to prevent him from making whatever further distribution of them he chooses.  {return to text}

Kerry brought the Belodeau Eulogy to Brinkley's specific attention

Yes, I admit that I'm obsessed with the Belodeau Eulogy, having previously posted about it on August 17, August 26, and most recently, on August 31, 2004.  But I keep stumbling upon indications that Kerry biographer Douglas Brinkley — and indeed, Kerry himself — also regard the Belodeau Eulogy as particularly significant.

From the Epilogue chapter of Brinkley's Tour of Duty:  John Kerry and the Vietnam War, at page 436 (boldface mine):

Late in the summer of 2003 the fifty-nine-year-old junior U.S. senator from Massachusetts, John Kerry, sat at a desk in the study of his house high atop Boston's Beacon Hill, riffling through his Vietnam War files.  He was searching for the long statement he had written for a memorial service held for an old Swift boat crewman who died in 1997.  Kerry and Chelmsford native Thomas Belodeau had become friends serving together in Vietnam aboard PCF-94....  Belodeau had been the first of the Swift's mates to pass away.  "I'm sorry he's not around for Charleston [referring to Kerry's official announcement of his 2004 presidential campaign, planned for September 2, 2003, with the historic U.S.S. Yorktown as a backdrop]," Kerry said softly.  "He'll be with us in spirit, though."

My guess is that this passage is taken from Brinkley's interview with Kerry on June 30, 2003, as referenced in the list on page 466 of ToD; the next listed interview isn't until September 8, after the Charleston event.  Perhaps Prof. Brinkley thinks of June 30 as being "late in the summer" in the same general sense that Chuck Hagel of Nebraska is described at page 453 as "Kerry's fellow Democratic Senator."  Perhaps it's in that same general sense that the water-jet-propelled Patrol Boats (River), or PBRs, that are pictured at the bottom of ToD's ninth picture page (between text pages 274 and 275) are described by Brinkley as a "Swift boat [i.e., PCF] convoy." 

Mid summer or late summer; PCFs or PBRs; Republican or Democrat; Rassmann falling overboard due to a sharp turn or due to a nearby mine blast — details, details, who cares about the details when you've got a candidate to help elect?

I'm left wondering exactly why Kerry was searching for a copy of his Belodeau Eulogy in the midst of one of Brinkley's brief twelve total hours of personal interviews (per the Author's Note on page xiii).  Apparently, out of all the materials in his archives, Kerry thought the Belodeau Eulogy was important enough to bring to Brinkley's direct attention — although perhaps it didn't occur to Kerry that if a copy wasn't readily at hand in his desk, he could also find it online from the Congressional Record for January 28, 1999 (first page and second page in .pdf format).

We know that eventually, Brinkley somehow found a copy of the Belodeau Eulogy, because Brinkley quoted directly and extensively from it at page 264 in Chapter Twelve of ToD, as I wrote in my August 31 post.  Shortly after writing that post, I found another direct quote from the Belodeau Eulogy later in Chapter Twelve of ToD (at page 267):

New Englander Tommy Belodeau felt an immediate kinship with his new lieutenant based on simple regional pride.  "The crew didn't have to prove themselves to me," Kerry explained in retrospect.  "I had to earn my spurs with them.  When the chief petty officer, Del Sandusky — known as Sky — finally gave me the seal of enlisted man's approval, Tommy was the first to enthusiastically say: 'I told you so, Sky — he's from Massachusetts!'"

Brinkley actually omitted the words "who came from Illinois to be with Tom today" after the phrase "known as Sky," and did so without indicating the omission through an ellipsis, but otherwise that's another direct quote. 

Although he clearly used the Belodeau Eulogy as a primary source for two direct quotes in Chapter Twelve, as I noted in my earlier post, Brinkley did not include it in his listed sources for that chapter in his unnumbered Notes section at the conclusion of the book (pp. 483-84).  And neither does the Belodeau Eulogy appear in the Notes for the Epilogue chapter (pp. 495-97).  Elsewhere in the Notes for various chapters in ToD, Brinkley at least mentions in general terms the unpublished source materials upon which he's drawn — for instance, for Chapter Eight he writes (at page 479), "Kerry's journals and correspondence for the crux of this chapter," and for Chapter Nine he writes (at page 480), "Again Kerry's war journals form the backbone of this chapter." 

But in contrast to, say, Kerry's letters to his parents or his journal writings, the Belodeau Eulogy was originally delivered in a public setting, and was subsequently, deliberately, published by Kerry in the Congressional Record, both in print form and in a searchable online database.  And yet the Belodeau Eulogy is nowhere listed in ToD's Selected Bibliography.  As Alice cried from Wonderland, "Curiouser and curiouser!"

Roy Rogers, Rambo, and Rassmann: What happened to Belodeau's weapon on 13Mar69, and what replacement was Rassmann bringing him?

I may be late in noticing this quote from Jim Rassmann in an August 19th press release on Kerry's campaign website (ellipsis in original; boldface mine):

"The [enemy] fire was strong enough to knock out Tommy Belodeau’s machine gun.…  I was in the middle of the firefight," Rassmann has said of the false claims that there was no fire that day and that other boats rescued people from the water.  "There was one person in the water that day and that was me, anyone who is telling you otherwise is giving you a lie."

This is almost certainly nonsense.

Let's give Mr. Rassmann a large benefit of the doubt when he said there was only "one person in the water that day."  Perhaps he meant in his immediate area, excluding the injured crewmen who'd been blown off Lt. Pees' PCF 3 and those like Larry Thurlow who jumped into the water to rescue them.

But I haven't been able to find any reference in Mr. Rassmann's other statements about the "firefight" — for example, his August 10 WSJ op-ed, or his quotations in Michael Dobbs' August 22 WaPo article, or his quotations in Jeff Barnard's January 24 AP article — that are consistent with Mr. Rassmann's assertion in this press release that enemy fire "[knocked] out" Belodeau's M-60 machine gun on the bow of PCF 94.  In the Dobbs article, for example, we read (boldface mine):

Almost simultaneously [with the explosion of the mine under Pees' PCF 3], Kerry's forward gunner, Tommy Belodeau, began screaming for a replacement for his machine gun, which had jammed. Rassmann grabbed an M-16 and worked his way sideways along the deck, which was only seven inches wide in places.

The Barnard article is silent as to what happened to Belodeau's M-60, but says (boldface mine):

Rassmann recalls sidling along the deck next to the pilot house, a rifle in each hand, intending to give one to the bow gunner [Belodeau], when a second mine detonated, launching him into the water....

In the Belodeau Eulogy, Sen. Kerry doesn't claim that Belodeau's gun was knocked out by enemy fire, although Kerry said there (boldface mine):

We were receiving incoming rocket and small arms fire and Tommy was returning fire with his M-60 machine gun when it literally broke apart in his hands.  He was left holding the pieces unable to fire back while one of the Green Berets [Rassmann] walked along the edge of the boat to get Tommy another M-60.  As he was doing so, the boat made a high-speed turn to starboard and the Green Beret kept going — straight into the river....

Now this contains its own inprobabilities.  While an M-60 could be carried and fired by one man — think Rambo — it's a heavy weapon that was often mounted on a jeep, helicopter, or boat (as Belodeau's M-60 probably was), or else used with its own bipod:

 

It seems rather more likely that Rassmann was carrying an M-16 assault rifle in each hand — his own, plus a spare to give to Belodeau — than that he was lugging his own M-16 plus another M-60 for Belodeau.

Moreover, it seems rather more likely that Belodeau's M-60 jammed, or even that it broke apart from its own vibrations, than that it was shot apart in his hands by VC fire from the riverbanks — managing to hit only Belodeau's weapon, without hitting him, or anyone else, or the boat, would be a trick worthy of Roy Rogers on his best day.

So what does it say about Rassmann's credibility that he relies on trick-shooting VC to try to justify his claims of being under enemy fire?