Politics
stcynic | October 11, 2004One thing that absolutely drives non-partisans insane about our political system is watching the way the parties distort what the other side says in order to make a false argument. This is something that the Bush campaign, in particular, are turning into an art form of stupidity these days. We've already seen two textbook examples of this tactic. In early August, Kerry said the following:
I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side and lives up to American…
tlambert | October 10, 2004 The warbloggers have been attempting to spin the result of the election here to their advantage. Cori Dauber claims that the election "was a referendum on Australia's participation in Iraq", and Glenn Reynolds claims that it was "in no small part as a referendum on the war". They link to stories that provide no support for their claims and indeed undercut them by reporting that Howard did not even mention Iraq in his victory speech. No, the election was not about Iraq---it was hardly an issue.
They also continue to make hysterical attacks on…
stcynic | October 9, 2004Well, I managed to stay up and watch the whole thing. Here are my thoughts on it:
First, it needs to be said that the only thing that matters is how the undecided voters viewed it. The polls are showing a consistent dead heat 3 weeks before the election, with about 10% undecided. Those are the people who will decide the election and the debates will be a big part of making up their minds, for better or worse. In most cases, it won't be the answers given that sways them, it will more likely be just a vague feeling they have about the two candidates that makes them feel more comfortable having…
tlambert | October 8, 2004 For reasons similar to those given by Tim Dunlop, Jason Soon and John Quiggin, I'll be voting Labor in the election today. Not that it makes a difference, since I live in Kingsford Smith, a safe Labor seat.
I hope that I'm wrong, but I don't think that Labor will manage to win the election. I expect that there will be a small swing against the government, but that their vote will hold up in the marginal seats where the government has been raining money down, and they will hold onto to enough seats to stay in power.
Update: Howard has been returned, as I…
stcynic | October 7, 2004We're all used to lies from politicians, so used to them that most of us barely react at all when we come across a new one. But one thing that fascinates me is someone lying boldly, that is, lying when it's so easy to find the truth and when they know that lots of people will in fact find it. One perfect recent example of this is Jerry Falwell's lie that his ministry had never lost their tax exempt status at any time. He said that on national television knowing full well that it was a lie and that, in fact, it was a matter of public record and that the resulting IRS fine had been announced in…
stcynic | October 6, 2004There has been a lot of talk about a military draft lately, for a lot of reasons. Many observers and analysts are saying that if Bush is reelected and he continues the foreign policy path he has started, there is going to have to be a draft. He has repeatedly denied that, and the only movement in Congress to reinstate the draft has come from Democrat Charles Rangel, who says he did so to prompt a public debate on shared sacrifice. But the fact still remains that the American military is drastically overstretched at this point, with simultaneous deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan in addition…
stcynic | October 5, 2004One of the most astonishing things about the Bush administration, in my view, is how many former officials have come out and criticized things the administration has done, and how little impact it has had politically. This can partially be chalked up to an uninformed populace, of course, but also to the Bush team's ability to destroy those people in the public eye. Now let's add a couple more to the list. First, it's newly retired Lt. Col. Anthony Christino, former Pentagon military intelligence officer. The Observer reports:
Prisoner interrogations at Guantánamo Bay, the controversial US…
stcynic | October 5, 2004Jon Rowe has an article up about the revelation that Alan Keyes has a lesbian daughter. I told him the other day that I was probably going to address this at some point, and I fully expected to do what I usually do, which is mock Keyes for his constant public poses of self-righteousness. But now that I'm sitting down to write it, I feel only sadness. I feel sad for Maya Keyes, for being who she is and having the intolerant father that she has. I can't really bring myself to make political hay out of what must be an emotionally traumatic situation for her and it saddens me that she will now be…
stcynic | October 4, 2004I came across this interview with Christopher Hitchens and I'd like to post a few excerpts from it. I've long had a fascination with Hitchens. His collection of essays, For the Sake of Argument, is one of my favorites, and I quite enjoy his wit. My earliest memory of him was seeing him on the CNN show Crossfire fairly regularly, where he was a master of the quintessentially British putdown. I particularly recall him going after a conservative guest in the mid-80s on that show, leading to this exchange:
"Do you know the phrase 'the global village'?"
"Yes"
Do you know the phrase 'the village…
tlambert | October 1, 2004 I see that the Sydney Morning Herald is now publishing funky conspiracy theories. Alan Anderson informs us that Kyoto is nothing but a Euro-commie plot:
Of course, everyone who is familiar with the Kyoto Protocol knows what it really is: a brazen attempt by the EU to compensate for its competitive disadvantage (the result of socialist economic policies) by hobbling the United States economy.
I like the way Anderson uses the "everyone who is familiar with X knows" locution to avoid offering any actual arguments or evidence in support of his…
stcynic | October 1, 2004I'm leaving in a couple hours to judge a debate tournament for the first time in over a decade, so I won't be around to post anything new until Sunday. I thought I'd put down a few thoughts about last night's presidential debate before I left.
As predicted, there was very little substance. Lots of vague "I have a plan to do X" and "We're going to do Y" statements without any real detail. The only direct clash of detailed policy differences was over North Korea. Bush wants multilateral talks, Kerry wants bilateral talks and Bush claims that bilateral talks would rule out the involvement of…
stcynic | September 30, 2004My thanks to Timothy Sandefur, who just emailed me a link to this post by Stuart Buck about Cheney's statement that if Kerry is elected there will be another terrorist attack. I hammered Cheney pretty hard over that, not because of the statement itself, which is fair comment (obviously both sides want to make the argument that the other side's policies will leave us less safe), but because he backpeddled and claimed that he was just saying that if Kerry was in office, he wouldn't respond as well as Bush. But as it turns out, the quote from Cheney that was widely reported was taken out of…
tlambert | September 29, 2004 I don't think I've ever written a "go and read this post" post, but go and read this post. Please.
stcynic | September 29, 2004Someone suggested that I should write something about the upcoming presidential debates that draws on my background as a debate judge, coach and theorist (yes, there is actually such a thing as debate theory and I've actually published on it). It brought to mind 1988, when I was in college and coaching a high school debate team, and the Detroit News asked me and a couple of other coaches to evaluate the Bush the Elder vs. Michael Dukakis debates. I said much the same thing then as I do now, which is that they're really not debates at all. At very best, they are little more than simultaneous…
tlambert | September 28, 2004 The Power Line blog informs us that the Kerry campaign has mounted a "terrorist attack on Australia":
"We all know that Kerry's sister is over in Australia telling the Aussies to vote for their [leftist] candidate if they want to be safer from terrorist attacks; that they need to pull their troops out of Iraq, and not help the U.S. (because that's why they will be, and have been attacked). So, how is this NOT a soft terrorist attack on Australia from the Kerry campaign? She goes over there, and with words instead of bombs, terrorizes the…
stcynic | September 23, 2004Juan Cole, the historian from the University of Michigan, has an excellent blog that I don't read nearly often enough. This piece is really quite brilliant, as he asks the question, if America were like Iraq, what would it be like? As President Bush goes around the country sounding like Baghdad Bob (insurgents? There are no insurgents here, only the glorious American military heroes invited here to join us for dinner in our Eden-like paradise), telling people not to listen to those "pessimists" who think that it's a problem that we no longer have control of central Baghdad much less the rest…
stcynic | September 22, 2004Ask the average American their theory on why we "lost" in Vietnam and you are likely to get this answer or some variation of it: "We didn't let the military fight the war, the war was fought by politicians. If we'd let the military do their job, we would have won." This notion has become thoroughly ingrained in our national memory, despite (or perhaps because of?) being completely wrongheaded. One wonders if, in the future, we will see that this is in fact the perfect explanation for what has happened in Iraq. The examples are numerous.
In the buildup for the war, as I mentioned recently,…
stcynic | September 20, 2004In a follow up to my last post, where I mentioned that Bush deliberately delayed an appointment to the FEC in order to insure that the FEC regulations implementing the BCRA were weakened, I looked it up to make sure I was correct. I was. See if you can reconcile these facts:
A. Bush just went to court to get a federal judge to force the FEC to ban campaign advertisements being bought by so-called 527 organizations.
B. Bush's press secretary says that the President thought that he had already banned such advertisements when he signed the BCRA:
The President has condemned all of this kind of…
stcynic | September 20, 2004I am often heard complaining that reporters, by and large, are lapdogs, not watchdogs. They sit there day after day, press conference after press conference, and dutifully report what they're told without ever bothering to tell you what they know and we all should know - that what we're being told is nonsense. I am always baffled seeing transcripts of press conferences where a politician or a candidate says something that is an exaggeration, a lie or just plain batshit crazy, and not one of the reporters in attendance bothers to say anything about it. No follow up questions; no attempt to pin…
stcynic | September 18, 2004If this story is true....wow. That's all I can say. Wow.
My 21-year old daughter disappeared from NYC last Tuesday afternoon when walking with friends through a park where no protest was being held -- and was held prisoner -- without being charged -- by the NYPD for three days. The first day and night she spent in an unsafe and inhumane facility at Pier 57 ("Little Guantanamo") provided by the Republican Party.
Yes, it was managed by the Republican National Committee. It was leased by the RNC to hold political dissenters who disagreed with the Bush administration. The second two days, my…