Category: Politics

I have it on relatively good authority that tomorrow’s (18 August 2004) edition of Willamette Week will feature the French-hating Sen. Gordon Smith as “Rogue of the Week.”

Previous entries on our state’s junior senator and his comments (which weren’t in the Oregonian but appeared in the LA Times) during a conference call for the Bush campaign on Thursday:

Later, Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) accused Kerry of advocating socialism within the United States and appeasement overseas.

I wrote a letter to Sen. Smith, as a constituent of his who happens to be of Franco-American origin, expressing my disgust at his bigotry of convenience and one to the Oregonian wondering why they hadn’t reported the remarks. Last night, I ran across Rodger A. Payne’s research into Smith’s own French ties (or should I say collaboration?), including a trip to Normandy for the D-Day commemoration just two months ago. Payne points out that Smith’s head shape isn’t terribly different from Kerry’s, the rest is an example of the level of hypocrisy even Republicans who paint themselves as moderates will stoop to.

More of the Times article:

“It’s not John Kerry’s fault that he looks French,” Smith told reporters on the conference call arranged by the Bush campaign.

“But it is his fault that he wants to pursue policies that have us act like the French. He advocates all kinds of additional socialism at home, appeasement abroad, and what that means is weakness for the future.”

Some Republicans have referred jokingly to Kerry’s ability to speak French and his physical appearance, but rarely has the reference found its way onto the campaign trail.

Sent by email today (13 August):

Senator Smith:

I take no small offense in your remark in a conference call yesterday (August 12), and reported in the Los Angeles Times that “It’s not John Kerry’s fault that he looks French.” What, exactly, is that supposed to mean?

I know, it’s one of the Republican talking points that are so easy for people to repeat. But it wasn’t funny when one of the White House PR flacks floated it months ago and it’s really not funny now, after six months or so have passed.

My ancestry includes a line that goes back to the Mayflower. But other parts of my family tree extend into eastern Canada — yes, French Canada. One of my grandfathers had the fairly common French surname of Danton, so I figure I probably look a little French myself.

Some of the earliest European explorers of this great nation were French, and if you’ve done some travelling, perhaps you might have noticed that the center portion of the United States includes a lot of “French-sounding” places: Joliet, Des Moines, Versailles, Eau Claire, La Salle, Louisiana. Not all of the “French” people went away.

The reason it’s not funny is that you didn’t mean it as a joke, it was meant to disparage your fellow senator. Some of the Republican party’s base doesn’t like the French stand on the Iraq war, so it’s a cheap and easy shot. But how low do you want to sink? If someone from the Bush campaign told you that one of Kerry’s ancestors was African-American, would you have said he looks “a little bit black?” Maybe they couldn’t push you quite that far. Perhaps you could just imply that he looks “sort of Arab,” or “kind of gay.” They’re already pushing that line, save it for next time.

Last August, more than eleven thousand mostly elderly French citizens died in a heat wave, and some people in the U.S. were actually laughing at that tragedy, because of the anti-French frenzy the administration whipped up. You’re simply perpetuating that type of hate.

You and everyone else who has indulged in this type of name-calling owe Sen. Kerry an apology for participating in it. More importantly, you owe every descendent of French immigrants to this country a public apology for your pathetic implication that there was any “fault” with Kerry looking French. As if you could tell by looking at him.

A little note to the Oregonian‘s public editor about Oregon Senator Gordon Smith, who participated in a conference call organized by the Bush campaign yesterday :

I’m surprised that Gordon Smith has been so much off your radar lately. He turns up for a single innocuous line in today’s article by Harry Esteve and Edward Walsh, but you have to go to the Los Angeles Times for more of his conference call from August 12, where he accuses John Kerry of appeasement and socialism, and repeats the talking point “It’s not John Kerry’s fault that he looks French.” The Times goes on to say:

“Some Republicans have referred jokingly to Kerry’s ability to speak French and his physical appearance, but rarely has the reference found its way onto the campaign trail.”

It’s a(nother) sad day when you have to go outside the state to find out what our own politicians are doing and saying.

A little over ten years ago, during a period when the Oregonian‘s advertising motto was “If it matters to Oregonians, it’s in theOregonian,” the Washington Post was the paper to break the story of Sen. Bob Packwood’s [R-OR] sexual harassment problems that ended up driving him out of the Senate. Wags then made the change to “If it matters to Oregonians, it’s in theWashington Post.” More recently, they were in such a hurry to beat the local newsweekly to print about former Gov. Neil Goldschmidt’s thirty year cover-up of having sex with a 14-year-old girl (while he was mayor of Portland) that they accepted his account of the case and used the word “affair” in their headlines.

Kerry’s live on all four stations (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX) here in Portland.

An unsigned Oregonian editorial today about the potential jailing of TIME Magazine’s Matthew Cooper had Dad riled up this afternoon. In an otherwise fairly reasonable evaluation of the balance between the need of a journalist to protect confidential sources and the government to conduct an investigation, it has this to say about the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame:

Conspiracists speculate that someone leaked the woman’s name, ruining her career, to get revenge on her husband, a former ambassador who publicly criticized the Bush administration.

Is it just conspiracists who believe that? Does the Big O have an alternative theory? One that involves a White House office full of monkeys, typewriters, and an extremely odd coincidence?

Regarding John Kerry’s opinion of what he would have done if he’d been in Bush’s position when given the news of the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center, Condoleeza Rice said on Meet the Press Sunday:

DR. RICE:  My reaction is that anyone who thinks they would have known exactly what they would have done under those circumstances–I just can’t imagine that you would say something like that.  The president of the United States was confronted with one of the greatest tragedies that had befallen the United States in our 200-plus years of history.  He decided on the spot that he was not going to alarm the third-graders.  He was not going to alarm the American people.  He was going to proceed in a calm way.

Forget the part about alarming the American people. They weren’t watching live pictures of Bush on a classroom visit, they were watching a catastrophe unfold in front of their eyes, which is most likely what Bush’s handlers at the school were doing. That’s a creepy thought, isn’t it? The first impulse of every adult in the country who was awake and could get to a TV was to find out what was going on; Bush didn’t do that.

Rice and others have presented the options that day as Bush’s choice of staying the scheduled course versus freaking out and running from the room. In that light, I present an edited version of a Fahrenheit 9/11 transcript, substituting another, more immediate threat for the WTC attacks.

NARRATOR: As the attack took place, Mr. Bush was on his way to an elementary school in Florida. When informed of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center, where terrorists had struck just eight years prior, a grease fire that had broken out in the school’s kitchen, Mr. Bush decided to go ahead with this photo opportunity.

(Bush walking in, pictures flashing, he’s smiling)

NARRATOR: When the second plane hit the tower, When initial attempts to extinguish the fire had failed, his Chief of Staff entered the classroom and told Mr. Bush the nation is under attack the fire was spreading throughout the school. (familiar scene of Andy Card leaning in, Bush grimacing, biting his lip) Not knowing what to do, with no one telling him what to do, and no Secret Service rushing in to take him to safety, Mr. Bush just sat there and continued to read ‘My Pet Goat’ with the children. (Bush looks visibly concerned… clock ticks away in the corner of the screen) Nearly seven minutes passed with nobody doing anything.

Would anyone have thought that was a good idea? Would the prudent thing in the case of a fire be to sit there for seven minutes? Not to “alarm” the children? I think most intelligent people would have taken Kerry’s path. And maybe glanced at the TV.

Like many other long-time National Public Radio listeners, I’ve been both troubled and puzzled by the apparent loss of its journalistic integrity over the past few years. While it’s been long pilloried by conservatives as a part of the “elite liberal media,” a recent study from Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting indicates that Republican government sources had a 3 to 2 advantage over Democrats, and that representatives from “right of center” think tanks outnumbered “left of center” representatives by 4 to 1.

So it was with some dismay but not complete surprise that I encountered Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon’s take on Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11 in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, July 27.

Simon takes Moore to task for the same laundry list of reasons that have been coughed up on TV, radio talk shows, and the Internet. He’s a liar. He’s not a journalist. The movie isn’t a documentary.

The first paragraph of Simon’s article ends by comparing Moore to Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Jack Kelly, all writers who filed completely fabricated stories. Simon is dead wrong in placing Moore with that particular trio, and as someone who ostensibly deals with news, he ought to be able to discern between what he later accuses Moore of and the type of total creation of someone like Stephen Glass.

Simon continues: “Trying to track the unproven innuendoes and conspiracies in a Michael Moore film or book is as futile as trying to count the flatulence jokes in one by Adam Sandler.” How droll. You’d think that if you were going to write an article to WSJ about how intellectually dishonest someone’s filmmaking is, that you might at least try to count them. Simon instead uses the next three paragraphs to set the stage, citing Moore’s penchant for stretching the truth, invoking the ghost of Pauline Kael’s review of “Roger and Me”, and making innuendos like Moore “prefers innuendo to fact.”

Good to know that Simon can read Moore’s mind, that means he must be telling us what Moore really believes, not just what he thinks Moore believes.

Simon launches into his article with this codwhalloper: “The main premise of Mr. Moore’s recent work is that both Presidents Bush have been what amounts to Manchurian Candidates of the Saudi royal family. Mr. Moore suggests (he depends so much on innuendo that a simple, declarative verb like ‘says’ is usually impossible) the Saudi government, having soured on their pawns for unstated reasons, launched the attacks of Sept. 11.”

Speaking of innuendo (a word Simon falls back on a number of times in the article), note the words “Moore’s recent work” above. Simon opens the door for himself to talk not about Fahrenheit 9/11 but the book Dude, Where’s My Country? He goes on to discuss a question Moore poses in Chapter 1 of the book, asking why — since bin Laden and most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis — Saudi Arabia hasn’t been held responsible. Simon, two paragraphs after castigating Moore for “editing with poetic license rather than accuracy,” strips out the comparison Moore makes other countries: “If fifteen of the nineteen hijackers had been North Korean, and they had killed 3,000 people, do you think the headline the next day might read ‘NORTH KOREA ATTACKS UNITED STATES'”?

In his book, Moore questions whether simple flight school training would have been enough to enable someone to fly a commercial airliner at more than 500mph into a relatively low-lying building like the Pentagon. Simon cites the wording of Moore’s query without apparently giving a second thought to it himself. It might be an important piece of data to know, whether the Saudi royal family was involved or not.

Simon’s elucidation of the “main premise” of Dude and F911 is a gross misstatement. Neither claims that George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush is a puppet of the Saud family (assuming Simon’s got that The Manchurian Candidate reference correct). There are well-documented ties between the Bush and Saud families for several decades, however. They’ve operated in the oil business and the governments of their respective countries for three or more generations. The countries themselves are tightly bound by oil and money.

Irregardless of that fact, Moore’s point in the passage of his book that Simon cites was that there are thousands of Saudi princes and that some of them are far more in tune with the goals of Osama bin Laden than with America, the Bush family, or even the ruling members of the Sauds. A trip to the history shelf might reacquaint Simon with the various wars fought in Europe right up to World War I, mostly between countries ruled by people who were related to each other.

Perhaps Simon can’t perceive how the Bush and Saud families might have long-standing ties that influence their decisions about how to run the countries that they govern, but those ties have been well-documented in books like Craig Unger’s “House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties” and Kevin Phillips’s “American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush.” Two days after Simon’s article was published, John Kerry’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention contained this line: “I want an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation – not the Saudi royal family.”

The linchpin of most anti-F911 opinion is repeated in Simon’s article.

Central to Mr. Moore’s indictment of the current President Bush is his charge that the U.S. government secretly assisted the evacuation of bin Laden family members from the U.S. in the hours following the Sept. 11 attacks, when all other flights nationwide were grounded. He supports this with grainy images of indecipherable documents.

But on our show on Saturday [January 24, 2004], Richard Clarke, the government’s former counter-terrorism adviser and no apologist for the Bush administration, told us that he had authorized those flights, but only after air travel had been restored and all the Saudis had been questioned. “I think Moore’s making a mountain of a molehill,” he said. Moreover, said Mr. Clarke, “He never interviewed me.” Instead, Mr. Moore had simply lifted a clip from an ABC interview. Perhaps Mr. Moore just didn’t want to get an answer that he didn’t want to hear. (See how useful innuendoes can be?)

Indeed. Although this analysis doesn’t actually refute anything Moore says. The government did assist the evacuation of bin Laden family members and Saudi royals during the days between the time airspace was locked down on September 11 and the point three days later at which a flight was allowed to carry them out of the country. Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador, specifically asked for help to get them out of the country for their safety, at the request of King Fahd, as reported by both The New York Times and CBS back in September 2001, and shown in the Larry King interview with Bandar in F911 right after Moore mentions the flights. Was it special treatment? Arabs and Muslims without ties to the Saudi upper class have been held incommunicado for extremely long periods in the three years since September 11 without charges against them. Brandon Mayfield, a Portland, Oregon lawyer and Muslim convert was recently held for three weeks as a material witness in the Madrid bombing even though Spanish police had told U.S. authorities that their fingerprint identification was incorrect. These news reports aren’t exactly hard to find. Yet somehow, Simon believes that, in the two days after three thousand people had been killed, the same agencies somehow managed to determine that nearly one hundred and fifty foreign nationals had absolutely no knowledge that might be of interest to the investigation of the attacks — whether they were personally involved in al Qaeda or not — and to do so without some sort of special instructions.

Despite the fact that they’ve been vilifying Richard Clarke as a turncoat for the past several months, Moore’s critics have been quick to turn to his signature on the authorization of the Saudi evacuation flights, and Simon’s analysis follows that line. In his rush to disprove Moore’s point, though, Simon even manages to mischaracterize and misquote Clarke’s interview on his own program.

In the quote from Simon’s article above, he talks about how Clarke had authorized Saudi travel only after flights had resumed and interviews had been conducted. He quotes Clarke as saying “He never interviewed me.” Below is a transcript of the segment of Clarke’s interview where F911 and Moore are discussed (between 4:10 and 5:10 in the clip)

Scott Simon: Mr. Clarke, let me ask you a nuts and bolts question that came up at the press conference. Those flights of Saudi nationals out of the United States including members of the bin Laden family that took place after air traffic was resumed, they were authorized by you, is that correct?

Richard Clarke: They were authorized by me after the FBI said it was alright with them.

Simon: So, you were, you know this is a major point in Michael Moore’s film, Fahrenheit 9/11, you were interviewed at length for that film, did you tell that to Mr. Moore in that film?

Clarke: I wasn’t interviewed for that film. What the Moore people did was take interviews that I gave on ABC News and just put them into the film. I’ve never met Moore or his people. And I think he’s made a mountain out of a molehill with regard to the Saudis getting out of the country. As the commission report says, the FBI to this day has no desire to talk to those people who left the country on those flights. They knew a lot about them in advance and they knew they had nothing to do with terrorism.

Typically, when you put quotes around something like “He never interviewed me,” you’re directly quoting your subject, not paraphrasing. Clarke never mentions any interviews of Saudis. Oddly, Simon appears to have the impression that Clarke was interviewed by Moore for the film. Clarke’s longest on-screen time is a Q&A session with ABC’s Charles Gibson, who is unmistakably not Michael Moore. Most other interview footage in the film is assembled from third-party sources, a common-enough practice for documentaries covering historical events. Why did Simon even bring the matter up? Has he seen the film?

More specifically, why is the fact that Clarke authorized these flights supposed to make it OK? Clarke says it’s no big deal, but then he’s the person whose name is on the document; he’s got some personal interest in whether it looks like a stupid move or not. There are plenty of reasons it might have been a better move to sequester the Saudis for their safety, but not to let them go immediately, particularly given the recalcitrance the government has shown in investigations of other terrorist acts like the bombing of Khobar Towers.

Simon continues on in a scattershot approach, acknowledging the distressing scene of a woman crying in front of her family’s house but ultimately dismissing it:

But reporters who were taken around to see the sites of civilian deaths during the bombing of Baghdad also observed that some of those errant bombs were fired by Iraqi anti-aircraft crews. Mr. Moore doesn’t let the audience know when and where this bomb was dropped, or otherwise try to identify the culprit of the tragedy.

Simon seems to think that the only bombing done took place prior to George Bush’s announcement of “Mission Accomplished” over a year ago. Coalition planes are still dropping bombs on Iraq. There are no longer working anti-aircraft guns (as opposed to shoulder-fired missiles). No, Moore doesn’t identify the specific event, but considering that hundreds of civilians were killed in pacification attempts (including bombings) after the deaths of four American contractors in April in Fallujah alone, it hardly matters. Simon should know this, he interviewed Patrick Graham, a freelance journalist who visited Fallujah in the spring and wrote an article for Harper’s.

Mr. Moore tries hard to identify himself with U.S. troops and their concerns. But he spends an awful lot of effort depicting them as dupes and brutes. At one point in “Fahrenheit 9/11,” someone off-camera prods a U.S. soldier into singing a favorite hip-hop song with profane lyrics. Mr. Moore then runs the soldier’s voice over combat footage, to make it seem as if the soldier were insensitively singing along with the destruction.

Music is one of the oldest forms of communication, according to PBS’s Song of the Earth with David Attenborough, and it has a strong emotional component. Song has been used in one form or another during battle for probably thousands of years, to promote group solidarity or strike fear in the enemy. One of the most stirring scenes in Apocalypse Now is where helicopters attack a village while “Ride of the Valkyries” blasts over speakers mounted by the crews. It’s one of the most famous scenes. In June, papers (including The New York Daily News) reported that hundreds of U.S. troops in Ramadi psyched themselves up by listening to “Ride” before they went on raids to round up suspected Iraqi guerillas. Is so foreign to Simon’s ken that soldiers might choose to listen to something and perhaps sing along while they’re in combat, whether it’s to keep their fear at bay, to take their mind off what they’re actually doing, because they’re keyed up and it helps them keep their head, or just because they listen to music in a tank the same way someone driving along the highway might? Why wouldn’t a soldier sing “insensitively” during combat? Can you sensitively shoot people?

It’s difficult to know what Simon’s point is. He claims Moore is “more McCarthy than Murrow,” but McCarthy was never able to back up any of his claims with actual facts. Moore’s movie may be flawed in many ways, but it’s more factually-based than Simon gives it credit for, and in many ways it’s more factual than Simon’s own analysis.

Assuming that the nefarious liberal plan to elect John Kerry through the vote of the people manages to overcome the nefarious conservative plan to slander/steal/whatever George Bush another four years in office, there are going to be a whole bunch of presidential pardons coming down the pike between election day and the inaugural (assuming, of course, that happens). The scope of those pardons is the topic of a whole other question, but we’re taking your bets now on the timing.

With 49 respondents, these were the results:

When George Bush loses the election, when will the pardons come?

17 (34%): The day before the inaugural.
3 (6%): At New Year’s.
8 (16%): For Christmas.
14 (28%): In mid-December, after Bush’s hand stops shaking from his post-election bender.
1 (2%): With the Thanksgiving turkey.
5 (10%): The day after the election.
1 (2%): There will be no need for pardons. For whatever reason.

Once I stopped convulsing from laughter at the thought of The New Republic offering anyone advice about fact-checking — of all things — I tried to decipher exactly what false claim they felt Michael Moore had made in Fahrenheit 9/11 (“Counterfactual”, July 19, 2004).

In the film, a Secret Service patrol officer shows up while Moore and Craig Unger are filming in front of the Saudi embassy in Washington. In response to an inquiry by Moore, the officer says the Secret Service doesn’t usually guard foreign embassies. TNR‘s Notebook column quotes a Service spokesman saying that part of the agency’s charge since 1970 has been to protect diplomatic missions in D.C., then claims Moore’s film is inaccurate because he leaves viewers with the wrong impression.

Whose fault is that? Moore asks an impromptu question of the officer during the filming of an interview with Unger, the officer answers. That much is clearly factual. Perhaps the officer didn’t know the correct answer, but the accuracy of the officer’s answer isn’t something Moore is responsible for. Even if Moore suspected that the Secret Service would show up, even if he knew that diplomatic missions in D.C. were under Service protection, unless he told the officer to give an incorrect answer, he’s no more responsible for the veracity of this “fact” than any interviewer whose subject states something inaccurate. Moore didn’t make the claim, he showed the officer making the claim.

In a corrolary, as a part of this week’s Moore-bashing at TNR, Gregg Easterbrook’s column “Out of Order” takes Moore to task for claiming in Bowling for Columbine that a plaque on a B-52 at the Air Force Academy celebrated killing Vietnamese people. Easterbrook links to a Moore debunking site which quotes the plaque as saying that the B-52 is one of two credited with a MIG kill. Apart from the fact that the “picture” of the plaque that Easterbrook claims is on the web page is certainly not readable (or visible) in the picture of the plane, he fails to mention that the plaque quote does say the MIG was shot down “during ‘Linebacker II’ action on Christmas Eve, 1972.” Perhaps Easterbrook thinks “Linebacker II” was some sort of aerial football scrimmage, but in actuality it was an eleven day bombing campaign in North Vietnam that consisted of 3,000 sorties and 40,000 tons of bombs. Easterbrook can quibble that the plaque wasn’t meant to celebrate the bombing campaign, but the B-52 wasn’t exactly just flying lazily over the green fields of home when it was attacked by the mean, mean MIG.

It’s a shame that TNR‘s thirst for the facts comes so late in the game. If the same obsession for detail they seem to have unleashed on F9/11 had been turned to the administration’s claims of Iraq’s capabilities for the development of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, perhaps they wouldn’t have appeared so gullible over the past couple of years.

Oregonian readers already saw this Sunday morning’s paper, but there are parallels between this incident and the national media that I though might be interesting to a wider audience here.

On July 6, the Oregonian, one of the largest-circulation papers west of the Rockies, published a laudatory profile of Army Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman in the Sports section. Sassaman, 41, was a high-school football star in Aloha, Oregon in the late 1970s, and quarterbacked a Cherry Bowl win for West Point’s football team in 1984.

Opening with a bit of his speech to a local church group, the 1,500-word article described how Sassaman ran the Iraqi city of Balad — 40 miles north of Baghdad — as a commander of First Battalion, Eighth Infantry; how he won two Bronze Stars, and dealt with the death of two of his soldiers. The tone of the article was very upbeat, although some might have had doubts when they saw phrases like “He commandeered a 54-inch television set, and on Saturdays everybody watched American college football.” or this paragraph:

“The sheiks and imams would complain when I made decisions they didn’t like,” Sassaman said. “I told them, ‘Next time you guys let a tyrant run the country, don’t wait for a 41-year-old Judeo-Christian white guy to make your decisions for you.

One little thing that didn’t get mentioned by Sassaman to the Oregonian reporters or picked up in their “research” was this little gem, reported on the wire services the week before:

U.S. Soldiers Charged in Iraqi Drowning Death

The Army charged three soldiers with manslaughter and a fourth with assault in connection with an incident last January in which they forced two Iraqi detainees to jump into the Tigris River.

…

Documents released by the Army name several superior officers, including the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman, as unindicted co-conspirators. Sassaman has been one of the highest-profile young officers in the Army for years because he quarterbacked West Point’s football team to its first bowl game, the 1984 Cherry Bowl against Michigan State University.

…

When questioned about the incident, Saville and the others told military investigators that they had released the two Iraqis and seen them walking away, the Army said. Saville and Perkins also conspired with Sassaman, their battalion commander, Capt. Matthew Cunningham, their company commander, and one other officer to impede the criminal investigation, the Army said.

…

The Oregonian‘s Public Editor, Michael Arrieta-Walden, published a column July 11 stating:

…

When reporting the story, Norm Maves Jr. reviewed past stories in The Oregonian and checked the Google search engine for information about Sassaman. He said he did not find any stories that described the reprimand in his two searches, including one the day before the story appeared. My Google search this week yielded at least one in The Washington Post on April 5 and one in The Washington Post and other newspapers July 3.

…

And they say bloggers aren’t fact-checked or edited.

[Thanks to my father, David Plant, for noticing this and bringing it to my attention before the Oregonian managed to get around to it.]