Month: November 2004

Newsweek has some behind the scenes snippets from the Kerry Campaign, with an overview on the web at yahoo here This one hurts.

Kerry Anger Over Swift Boat Ads. By August, the attack of the Swift Boat veterans was getting to Kerry. He called adviser Tad Devine, who was prepping to appear on “Meet The Press” the next day: “It’s a pack of f—ing lies, what they’re saying about me,” he fairly shouted over the phone. Kerry blamed his advisers for his predicament. (Cahill and Shrum argued responding to the ads would only dignify them.) He had wanted to fight back; they had counseled caution. Even Kerry’s ex-wife, Julia Thorne, was very upset about the ads, she told daughter Vanessa. She could remember how Kerry had suffered in Vietnam; she had seen the scars on his body, heard him cry out at night in his nightmares. She was so agitated about the unfairness of the Swift Boat assault that she told Vanessa she was ready to break her silence, to speak out and personally answer the Swift Boat charges. She changed her mind only when she was reassured that the campaign was about to start fighting back hard.

It is very difficult for a good man to effectively fight great evil — to fight people who are willing to go to any extreme of lies and hate and hurt to achieve what they want.

Clinton Advice Spurned. Looking for a way to pick up swing voters in the Red States, former President Bill Clinton, in a phone call with Kerry, urged the Senator to back local bans on gay marriage. Kerry respectfully listened, then told his aides, “I’m not going to ever do that.”

It is very difficult for a good man to effectively fight evil; for a moral man to effectively fight immorality, especially when that immorality disguises itself as piety and uprightness.

It is true that the Democrats need to learn from this and find ways to unite America with caring, respecting, loving, yes, Christian (in the best sense of the word) liberal values. It is true that the Democrats need to remind the world that liberals have values, indeed, that liberals are the ones who try to make this a society of goodness and love rather than selfishness, intolerance, and hate. It is true that the Democrats have done a crap job for a long time and need to clean up their act.

But for all the self-blame let’s not forget that we are dealing with really vicious, evil, immoral, corrupt, rotten people in the Bush Administration and their allies, and they fought like hell with every dirty trick in the book. They have a major TV network entirely devoted to spreading their lies; they have countless media mouthpieces echoing their lies. People must be forgiven for being fooled by that. John Kerry must be forgiven for having failed in the face of that. We must not absolve the bastards for their bastardliness.

They won by fighting very, very dirty — not just in the Presidential race but all over the map. Democratic incompetence sure helped them, but it alone would not have cost the election. Hell, I bet if there were no Swift Boat Ads we’d have a President Kerry right now, trying to fix Bush’s screwups as best he could, instead of Bush getting ready to make it all worse. And the Swift Boat Ads were nothing but a pack of immoral lies.

It’s doublespeak, it’s antitruth — you look at people who didn’t vote Kerry and they say it was because they couldn’t trust him, because he was a liar — when Bush and his people have lied so thoroughly and so convincingly and so pervasively that people take it for truth. Kerry looks like a liar because he says things that people think to be wrong because the real liars lied about it.

That’s so deeply messed up.

The illiberal, right-wing liars are very good liars and they’ve been practicing for decades. Give a man a break if he was unable to withstand their most concerted assault.

Give a man a break.

The Onion | National Museum Of The Middle Class Opens In Schaumburg, IL

Sorry Everybody — How Can We Make It Up To You?

Bush Reelection Silver Lining #324: Self-Identified Libertarians Who Give a Crap About People Suddenly Realize They Are Actually Liberals

Election 2004, 14: Abandoning Libertarianism

[…] watching the various critiques of the first Bush administration has left me feeling that there is no response that is both distinctively libertarian (that is, basically not justifiable in any other framework) and worth a bucket of warm spit. This is where I break most decisively, I think, with the idea that the big priority is to work for a reduction of state power. I agree that it would be well to have a smaller, much more tightly bounded and governed state. But I also think that the way the state operates matters: the sort of social stability that Hayek describes as crucial for the useful operation of markets calls for honesty, consistency, competence, and other virtues in government. The thing is, making that happen requires serious, detailed engagement with the operations of government. You have to find representatives interested in the subject, and staffers who can do the job right, and there are volunteer positions that gotta be staffed, and oversight, and a whole lot of things that can’t be done by people who are standing aloof casting aspersions on the whole thing. […]

Finally, my vision of…hmm. This is all tangled together. My sense both of what I’d like to see and what I see happening now that alarms and angers me seems increasingly out of whack with libertarian priorities. I’m deeply bothered by the stagnation and backward movements in most people’s incomes, and increasingly repelled by anyone who prattles on about booming economies as those aggregate sums mattered more than real people’s lives. I’ve become persuaded that strong unions are correlated with other things that matter to me, like fewer abusive class-action lawsuits; I don’t know if it’s correlation or causation, but I’m willing to experiment, and if it is correlation, nonetheless, building the conditions for better unions seems likely to also help those other things. I am appalled by the state of health care in America, and feel about the existing system of insurance much like I do about NASA’s manned space program: sure, in theory it could do better (since it has in the past), but it has not and shows no signs of really wanting to improve, and I’ve reached the point of feeling that they’ve had their chance and blown it. Education is in a mess, and the more evidence I see from how vouchers, charter schools, and other alternatives do, the more conflicted it is: each approach can do good, but summed up it’s not enough.

It’s true that the existence of a powerful state makes it possible for the robbing plutocrats to do things they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. But then history shows us that they did quite a lot of harm with weaker state machinery, too. Tyranny and the craving for power find a way, somehow. I simply don’t see any feasible alternative to stopping them, nor to dealing with a lot of other real problems, than the machinery of the state, and the older I get, the less willing I am to watch people I care about suffer in the here and now. People are more real than speculations about what future generations may observe. Possibly not enough libertarians have themselves lived in real deep misery; possibly they just have different temperaments than I do. I don’t feel comfortable on the sidelines of society, and I find that the people who are engaging both through the state and through other means with the stuff that concerns me are, once again, liberal or left-wing.

I have no memory whatsoever of why I put Out of the Darkling Wood in my newsreader or who the author is (I’m sure there’s a gaming connection), but I thought this was very cool.

I’ve found myself repeatedly consoling really miserable liberal friends in instant messages and the like with thoughts about good things that this defeat may do for progressive causes in America and the Democratic party. I’ll add this to the list. There are way too many good smart people out there whose keen minds the American Left needs who have been sucked into Libertarianism, which just strengthens the Right because for all their talk about being orthogonal to the left-right axis on the world’s smallest political quiz, Libertarianism tends to carry a subtle indoctrination towards voting Republican, and the Movement Conservatives love and encourage that. If we get a few of them on our side in reaction to the Bush reelection, in reaction to seeing what 21st-century Republicans are really all about with respect to liberty and wise government, it’s another point of consolation in a dark time.