Molly Ivins | Trying to find facts within the GOP fiction

The wire services are reporting that we just lost seven Marines in Fallujah.

To use Linda Ellerbee's line, "And so it goes ..."

The way it does not go is as claimed last week at the Republican convention. I feel like the janitor in that photo of Madison Square Garden after the party, facing a sea of garbage that needs to be collected and thrown out. Even after several days and with alert bloggers to help, it's hard to catch all the lies.

The number of things John Kerry is supposed to have said that he never said was the largest category.

• Kerry never said we need to have a "sensitive war." (Bonus points if you can find Bush's references to our need for more sensitivity.)

• Kerry never said we need other countries' permission to go to war.

• Kerry has never failed to "support our troops in combat."

• The whole list of defense programs Kerry supposedly voted against mostly came out of one vote against a huge defense package in 1990 -- he supported a smaller package, as did then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney at the time. I especially like the inclusion of the Apache helicopter in the list of weapons opposed by Kerry -- that's the one that kept crashing.

• The United States has not gained jobs under George Bush. The net job loss is 1.1 million jobs, according to the Bush Department of Labor.

• Special bonus points for the novel charge by Cheney that Kerry wants to "show al-Qaida our softer side." Showing real imagination there.

Then we have what can most kindly be called differences of interpretation.

Well, last week's news was not all about lies. This investigation of alleged spying for Israel out of Douglas Feith's office has now broadened to include Harold Rhode, also of Feith's office, David Wurmser of Dick Cheney's office and Richard Perle of the Defense Policy Board.

I am indebted to several bloggers for the reminder that Gen. Tommy Franks, according to Bob Woodward, once called Feith "the dumbest (expletive) guy on the planet."

Perle had an especially bad week, having been blasted to smithereens by the new report on the Hollinger Inc. media debacle, in which Lord Conrad Black and Perle both engaged in looting the company.

Let me put in a word of caution here about any so-called "spy charges."

Recall that we have a bad habit of charging people who are quite innocent (Wen Ho Lee) and missing those who are quite guilty (Aldrich Ames and the FBI's Robert Hanssen).

In fact, what we're looking at across the board is evidence of massive incompetence. Turns out the Justice Department can't even prosecute terrorists straight. It has always seemed to me a bad idea to put a party full of people who are against government in principle ("Government is not the solution, government is the problem") in charge of running it.

They just don't seem to do a very good job.

In case you hadn't noticed, we have gone from massive surplus to massive deficit, and the only people who really benefited were the richest 1 percent of Americans. That leaves the other 99 percent of us worse off than we were four years ago.

I really had to take a deep breath after Bush declared that he wants to "get government on your side." Where has he been for the last four years?

Almost every program he mentioned, saying he wanted to build them up, he has already cut, including job training. And I am truly dazzled by "the noive of him" in claiming that No Child Left Behind, which is massively underfunded, has somehow mysteriously become a great success. If you believe that, have I got a bridge for you.

His peculiar contention that our policy in Iraq is a triumph is close to bizarre.

What we have there is dangerous chaos. Does anyone honestly think this occupation is going well?

I thought the saddest theme was about how Sept. 11 had united us -- and then, for reasons never explained (except by Zell Miller at his worst), half the country and most of the rest of the world just sort of drifted away.

How could that have happened?

Could George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have had anything to do with it? For example, did they tell us a lot of things that aren't true? Republicans seemed to find it all a great mystery.

Helpful hint to Cheney: Oratorically speaking, when the call-and-response segment of your speech consists of getting your audience to boo, you are probably not on a positive track.

3 Comments:

Bob said...: I think Molly's comments should be the content of a major ad campaign. full page in New York Times, USA Today, major newspapers in swing states and TV and Radio ads. kerry needs to make an all out full course press. We have to get the attention of the nation. it is urgent!!!!!!; 9:40 AM
Anonymous said...: If the election were held today, John Kerry would lose by between 88 and 120 electoral votes. The reason is simple: The central vulnerability of this president -- the central issue of this campaign -- is the Iraq war. And Kerry has nothing left to say.
Why? Because, until now, he has said everything conceivable regarding Iraq. Having taken every possible position on the war, there is nothing he can say now that is even remotely credible. If he had simply admitted that he had made a mistake in supporting the war, he might have become an antiwar candidate. But having taken a dozen positions, he has nowhere to go.
He now calls Iraq "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." But, of course, he voted to authorize the war. And shortly after the fall of Baghdad he emphatically repeated his approval of the war: "It was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein. And when the president made the decision, I supported him."
When Don Imus asked him this week, "Do you think there are any circumstances we should have gone to war in Iraq, any?" Kerry responded: "Not under the current circumstances, no. There are none that I see. I voted based on weapons of mass destruction. The president distorted that." But just last month he said that even if he had known then what he knows now, he would have voted for the war resolution.
Is Iraq part of the war on terrorism or a cynical distraction from it? "And everything [Bush] did in Iraq, he's going to try to persuade people it has to do with terror, even though everybody here knows that it has nothing whatsoever to do with al Qaeda and everything to do with an agenda that they had preset, determined."
That was April 2004. Of course, shortly after Sept. 11, Kerry was saying the opposite. "I think we clearly have to keep the pressure on terrorism globally," he said in December 2001. "This doesn't end with Afghanistan by any imagination. . . . Terrorism is a global menace. It's a scourge. And it is absolutely vital that we continue [with], for instance, Saddam Hussein."
So then Hussein was part of the war on terrorism -- a "for instance" in fighting "terrorism globally." Kerry temporarily returned to that position last week when he marked the 1,000th American death in Iraq by saying the troops have "given their lives on behalf of their country, on behalf of freedom, in the war on terror."
How did Kerry get to this point of total meltdown? He started out his political career voting his conscience on national security issues. During the 1980s he was a consistent, dovish liberal Democrat: pro-nuclear freeze, anti-Star Wars, against the Reagan defense buildup, against the war in Nicaragua. And then he joined the overwhelming majority of his party in voting against the Persian Gulf War.
That turned out to be a mistake. And Kerry suffered for it. The very next year he had to watch as Al Gore, who got the Gulf War right, was chosen for the 1992 Democratic ticket, a spot for which Kerry had been on the short list.
Kerry learned his political lesson. Or thought he did. So when the Iraq war came around, he did not want to be caught on the wrong side of another success. He voted yes.
But then things went wrong both for the war and for him. What did he do? With Howard Dean rocketing toward the Democratic nomination, Kerry played to his deeply antiwar party by voting against the $87 billion to fund the occupation.
Two months later, with Saddam Hussein caught and the war looking better, Kerry maneuvered again, slamming Dean with: "Those who doubted whether Iraq or the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein, and those who believe today that we are not safer with his capture, don't have the judgment to be president or the credibility to be elected president."
Kerry is now back to the "wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," a line lifted from Dean himself. So we are not better off with Hussein deposed after all.
These dizzying contradictions -- so glaring, so public, so frequent -- have gone beyond undermining anything Kerry can now say on Iraq. They have been transmuted into a character issue. When Kerry went off windsurfing during the Republican convention, Jay Leno noted that even Kerry's hobbies depend on wind direction. Kerry on the war has become an object not only of derision but of irreconcilable suspicion. What kind of man, aspiring to the presidency, does not know his own mind about the most serious issue of our time?; 5:46 AM
Anonymous said...: I am an Independent I voted for Clinton 1st time but not the second. I voted for Al Gore. I cannot vote for Kerry. I was wondering where some of your comments come from, after reading quiet a bit from this site, I can only come to the conclusion that most of you must have gotten memos from the Martins or maybe further out in space. I know you swear they are real. I started in the Pennsylvania National Guard that did not keep me out of the action. I am a Vietnam veteran, the things I do know and have seen is that what is put on paper in a report is seldom the way things really happened. I have seen it first hand. Have done it to a lesser degree.

The surfer; 7:51 PM