BeldarBlog

NYPost gossips about possible Kerry defamation lawsuit against SwiftVets

Reader and frequent commenter "Raving Atheist" emailed me a link to a very amusing blurb written by Richard Johnson in the New York Post's "Page Six" column entitled "Kerry Fit to Sue 'Unfit' Author," which begins:

Liberal loser John Kerry might be planning to strike back at John O'Neill, the "Unfit for Command" author who claims some of the credit for Kerry's defeat, sources say.

In the book, published by Regnery not long before the election, O'Neill — who, like Kerry, commanded swift boats in Vietnam — attacked Kerry's war record and branded him a traitor.

(Another reader thoughtfully emailed me with this link to a NewsMax write-up on Johnson's blurb, but it doesn't add much to the NYPost's own gossip.)

I first wrote on the topic of the Kerry campaign's threats of a defamation lawsuit last August 11th, when The New Republic's Kenneth Baer argued (in an article that's now been moved to TNR's subscription-archive, but that I quoted extensively) that such a lawsuit would be well-founded. For reasons both legal and factual, I rather strongly disagreed, and for reasons entirely political, I thought that such a lawsuit would not possibly be filed during the campaign season. Nothing that happened later during the SwiftVets vs. Kerry saga in any way changed any of my original opinions as to the lack of legal and factual bases for such a lawsuit. But Mr. Johnson's unnamed source apparently thinks that the political dynamics no longer would prohibit such a case from being filed:

Now, "the Kerry camp is thinking about filing a libel lawsuit against Regnery and O'Neill," a source close to the candidate's inner circle tells PAGE SIX. "I don't know if they will actually go forward, but consideration is serious. If Kerry plans on running again in 2008 — and I'm hearing he will — it would make sense that he'd file the suit."

Kerry's rep, David Wade, said he hadn't heard about any proposed lawsuit, but promised to look into it.

Let's just say I'm not holding my breath waiting for this lawsuit to be filed. Nor, I strongly suspect, is SwiftVets' spokesman John O'Neill. According to Mr. Johnson's blurb,

O'Neill, who charged that Kerry faked his wounds and won his medals under false pretenses, says he won't write another book if Kerry runs in 2008, but will definitely campaign against him again.

That's actually a substantial overstatement of the SwiftVets' allegations — they never claimed that Kerry "faked his wounds." They did claim, however, that all three of Sen. Kerry's Purple Heart wounds (or four, if you count the bruised elbow) were trivial, and that two of the three Purple Hearts were undeserved because they resulted not from enemy action, nor even from someone else's "friendly fire" while there was incoming enemy fire, but rather from Kerry's own unintentional carelessness (on one occasion while firing a M-79 grenade launcher and on another when using a hand grenade to scatter a rice pile thought to be a Viet Cong food cache).

Regardless, however, if these or the SwiftVets' larger set of allegations were altogether false and groundless, they could have been exploded with a stroke of Sen. Kerry's pen on a Standard Form 180 — during his just-past campaign. The undisclosed military records still being withheld by the Navy Department, Sen. Kerry's and a crewman's wartime journals, and other documents that Sen. Kerry successfully stonewalled throughout the campaign would all become grist for the pretrial discovery mill in the early stages of any defamation case he ever files, however. I remain confident in my previous inference that if those documents were uniformly flattering to and supportive of Sen. Kerry, we'd have long since seen them, and in my further inference that because they aren't, we never will.

Beldar continues to confidently predict: Ain't gonna be no defamation lawsuit. If there is, I'll gladly eat Sen. Kerry's lucky CIA hat.

NYT's confusion on the basic concepts of government

According to an article in Monday's New York Times entitled "Southern Democrats' Decline Is Eroding the Political Center," those damn dumb conservative Texans have shot off one of Dubya's toes (boldface added):

This [dwindling in the number of remaining conservative southern Democrats] could also have important implications for Mr. Bush's domestic agenda. He needs bipartisan support to achieve major changes in Social Security, for example, but two Democrats considered most likely to work across party lines for entitlement "reform" will not be there: Mr. Breaux and Mr. Stenholm. Some Democrats on Capitol Hill said last week that the Republicans, who campaigned hard against Mr. Stenholm, had perversely cost themselves a potential ally.

Oh, dangnabbit! How will Denny Hastert and Tom DeLay ever get Nancy Pelosi and Lloyd Doggett and Sheila Jackson-Lee to vote for Dubya's programs now that Charlie Stenholm's not around to sweet-talk them into it?

Feh. The fact of the matter is that Charlie Stenholm couldn't sweet-talk any hard-left Dems into anything — past, present, or future. The real world doesn't work that way now, if it ever did. And on the few issues in which remaining "moderate" or so-called "conservative" Democrats in the House could be persuaded to vote with Dubya and the Republicans in the last term, they'll be just as persuadable again without Stenholm as a "bridge." As for his own vote, Stenholm sometimes, but far from reliably — whether because of his own views, or because his constituency was indeed solidly conservative — would vote with the Republicans. His successor, Randy Neugebauer, campaigned as both a conservative and a Republican who'd methodically support his party and its candidate for President.  This was a straightfoward case of voting for someone straightforward.

If there were any realistic chance that in the foreseeable future, the bulk of the Democratic Party might swing back toward the center — if there were a chance that it might regain control of the House, and if its moderate and so-called conservative elements were then in a position to actually dictate the Democratic Party's positions — then an old warhorse like Stenholm might have been a useful ally for Dubya and the Republicans. But that ain't gonna happen anytime soon, friends and neighbors, and the folks like Pelosi who actually do run the show within the currrent Democratic Party are no more sorry to see Stenholm leave than Tom DeLay is.

The fact of the matter is that the voters of Stenholm's district — as redrawn in 2003 to eliminate the gerrymandered advantages that kept him in office despite the state's growing Republican trend — replaced an unreliable conservative who was member of the minority party's increasingly irrelevant fringe with a reliable conservative who's a mainstream member of the majority party. They may drive pickup trucks in a cherry-red state, but as I see it, they seem to have a better handle on this "democracy" thing than the brilliant political reporters of the New York Times — who clearly think that political gamesmanship and duplicity is business as usual, and that straightforwardness is "perverse."

"Star-Search Palestine": Do we want to encourage another drama queen to succeed Arafat?

Does anyone know off-hand if NYT op-ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman has kids? Friedman consistently amuses me by the way he turns "moderation" into "mush-headedness." His column today starts off fairly enough by noting that "any honest history of Yasir Arafat will judge him on his voids, not his visions." But he concludes with this bit of cluelessness:

If only President Bush called in Colin Powell and said: "Colin, neither of us have much to show by way of diplomacy for the last four years. I want you to get on an airplane and go out to the Middle East. I want you to sit down with Israelis and Palestinians and forge a framework for a secure Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and progress toward a secure peace in the West Bank, and I don't want you to come back home until you've got that. Only this time I will stand with you.

"As long as you're out there, I will not let Rummy or Cheney fire any more arrows into your back. So get going. It's time for you to stop sulking over at Foggy Bottom and time for me to make a psychological breakthrough with the Arab world that can also help us succeed in Iraq — by making it easier for Arabs and Muslims to stand with us. I don't want to see you back here until you've put our words into deeds."

Any parent who's had any success dealing with his or her kids knows that there's a difference between discipline and drama. Drama — including that generated by family summits ("Tell me how you were feeling, Molly, when you decided to slam your textbook into your brother Adam's left ear?") — can and often does encourage more of the misbehavior you're trying to discourage.

One of the key reasons that Yasser Arafat got away for so long having done so little constructive (and indeed, with having continued to do that which was incredibly destructive) was that American Presidents, European leaders, the Nobel Peace Prize committee, et al. continually put him into the dramatic spotlight. They treated him with a dignity he'd never earned and respect for which he'd consistently proved himself unworthy. They gave him ample incentive to continue misbehaving, and until Dubya's administration, they never included being ignored and isolated and marginalized as among the permissible range of diplomatic options.

I hope that genuine leaders will emerge to represent the Palestinian people. I believe that quiet, behind-the-scenes diplomacy from the United States — emphatically not conducted in summits with Colin Powell in front of CNN's and al-Jazeera's TV cameras — may materially assist in that prospect. Inviting the Palestinians to promote a new drama queen to take Arafat's place, however — defining "success" primarily in terms of what America and Israel do (or whether Cheney and Rumsfeld are being properly supportive of Powell, for pete's sake), and thereby allowing thugs like Arafat to "succeed" by doing nothing more than frustrating everyone's hopes — is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Competition for Dubya's presidential library doesn't include Yale

"Bill Clinton is a rock star," said Skip Rutherford, head of Clinton's nonprofit foundation that built the $165 million library and continues his post-presidential AIDS-fighting and racial reconciliation initiatives. "He is Elvis."

His drawing power will be on full display this week, when the current and former U.S. presidents, foreign leaders and celebrities are expected to be among 30,000 invited guests gathered on the library lawn, overlooking the Arkansas River in downtown Little Rock.

Thus CNN reports the opening of Bill Clinton's new presidential library in his home state of Arkansas. But today's Houston Chronicle includes an AP story, entitled "Five vie to land library," on the competition among cities and universities to host the presidential library of his successor, George W. Bush:

Bush has not chosen a site, and those plans "will be announced at some point," said White House spokesman Taylor Gross.

The cities and educational institutions that are listed in the AP story as competing for the Bush-43 article are —

• Baylor University: In Waco; the Baptist university is about 30 miles east of Bush's Crawford ranch.
• Southern Methodist University: In Dallas; the alma mater of first lady Laura Bush.
• University of Texas at Austin: Where Laura Bush earned her master's degree, the alma mater of one of the couple's twin daughters and the home of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum.
• Texas A&M University: In College Station; home to the presidential library of Bush's father.
• Texas Tech University: In Lubbock, 110 miles north of Bush's childhood home in Midland.
• Midland College: Near Bush's childhood home.
• City of Arlington: Where Bush was managing partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team before he was elected governor.

Counting Clinton's, there are twelve existing presidential libraries scattered around the country. A considerable amount of ego gratification and a certain amount of political pork-barrelling is involved in these institutions. But each successive administration generates its own increasingly massively sized archives of paperwork and other materials that become legitimate grist for historians, and some sort of accessible and responsible repository must be set up for them, so I'm not much offended by their being distributed outside of Washington.

Certainly when I was a student from 1975-1980, I enjoyed the broad sloping lawns and tasteful fountains and plazas of the LBJ Library because they were adjacent to my three other primary campus hang-outs at UT-Austin — Townes Hall (home of Texas Law School), the Music Building-East (home of the Longhorn Band), and Memorial Stadium. I recall some snickering over the LBJ Library being sited at UT-Austin because it was not LBJ's alma mater; but LBJ certainly had family ties to Austin and had long chosen to underplay his own nearby alma mater (then Southwest Texas State Teachers College, now Texas State University-San Marcos). Neither, of course, did Bush-41 ever attend Texas A&M or live in College Station, Texas, where his library is sited; the University of Houston might have made more historical sense, given that G.H.W. Bush lived and lives in Houston and once represented one of its congressional districts, but A&M is bigger and has vastly more political clout.

Putting JFK's library at Harvard was, I suppose, a comparatively easy and apt decision. Unremarkable too, I suppose, were the decisions to put Hoover's in West Branch, Iowa; FDR's in Hyde Park, New York; Truman's in Independence, Missouri; Ike's in Abeline, Kansas; Gerry Ford's in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Carter's in Atlanta, Georgia; Reagan's in Simi Valley, California; and Clinton's in Little Rock.

Conspicuously absent from the list of existing sites for presidential libraries, however — and from any mention as a serious candidate for Dubya's — is the college or law school alma mater of our last three presidents: Yale University of New Haven, Connecticut. Shunned by Elvis, and shocked by the still-smoldering wreck of alumnus John F. Kerry's presidential campaign, Yale no doubt continues to keep its powder dry and await a grateful presidential alumnus acceptable to its blue-state values.

Indeed, a childish part of me wishes Dubya would choose Yale out of spite — for such it would have to be, and so it would be perceived and received. I imagine tasteful marble plinths, imported from the Texas hill country, each supporting a polished brass spittoon tastefully underwritten by Skoal Tobacco — and perhaps an ivy-covered "Mandate Monument" in the center of footpaths under shade trees for the perpetual protesters.

Realistically, though, there's no chance that George W. Bush's presidential library will be sited anywhere outside Texas, and my guess is that Baylor and Waco probably have the inside track. That'll leave the Yalies plenty of opportunity for self-righteous smirking, and everyone will be happy.

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Update (Sun Nov 14 @ 2:15pm): Prof. Bainbridge quotes a few archly choice lines from The Economist about the Clinton Library.

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Update (Mon Nov 15 @ 9:40pm):  My commenters below have exposed and corrected my mistaken assumptions about the locations and university affiliations of some of the presidential libraries listed above.  Mea culpa, and thanks as always to them for their courtesy,  diligence, and shared knowledge.