Dick Cheney might have said to John Edwards, "I've met Dan Quayle, I know Dan Quayle, and Senator, you are no Dan Quayle." And he wasn't, either. Edwards, representing the Democratic ticket, did a pretty good, non-Quaylish job last night of facing up to Cheney in the only debate between vice presidential candidates of this election year.
Cheney did have a deft planned zinger up his sleeve, actually akin to Lloyd Bentsen's famous put-down of Bush I's running mate being "no Jack Kennedy." "Senator, you have a record in the Senate that's not very distinguished," Cheney told Edwards, who looked almost as embarrassed as Quayle looked all those years ago. Cheney continued that Edwards had "one of the worst attendance records in the United States Senate" and then delivered the coup de grace.
Citing his own service as president of the Senate, Cheney told Edwards, "The first time I ever met you was when you walked on this stage tonight." Now there was a zinger likely to stay zung. Edwards had no effective comeback.
Edwards, who at times resembles Cliff Robertson playing a candidate in an old Hollywood movie, managed to score verbal whacks of his own. Cheney looked uncomfortably vulnerable when Edwards brought up Halliburton, the scandal-ridden company of which Cheney once was CEO and which now holds a lucrative, exclusive contract for certain supplies to troops in Iraq.
Reeling off incriminating charges about Halliburton, Edwards looked pleased with himself -- something he does very, very often, come to think of it. Flustered, if only a little, Cheney complained that the charges would take more than the allotted 30 seconds to answer. Skillful moderator Gwen Ifill of PBS -- on her toes even while sitting down -- said firmly, "Well, that's all you've got." Cheney did not mount an eloquent defense, to put it mildly; he just resorted to legalese: "There's no substance to the charges."
Obviously a man of wit and intelligence, Cheney, like President Bush last week, maintained a kind of annoyed posture throughout the debate, as though all this were beneath him and the Bush-Cheney administration had nothing to answer for and no one to answer to. If he thought going in that he could flick Edwards off like a pesky fly, however, he was mistaken. Edwards was composed and clearly ready. He has bad habits, though -- including blankly repeating old charges against Bush and Cheney, rather than amplifying or elaborating on them, throwing the audience some new bones to chew on. But his technique has its head-banging effectiveness anyway.
Both candidates waltzed around the delicate and incendiary topic of same-sex marriages. Edwards made a point of noting that Cheney and his wife, Lynne, have a gay daughter while perhaps disingenuously praising his courage in being supportive of her -- and this was not long after Edwards sustained the attack on his Senate attendance record. Both candidates ended up pretty much agreeing that gays and lesbians deserve rights and respect, yet backed off supporting federal legislation guaranteeing them the right to marry.
Cheney did look embarrassed by his boss's proposal to amend the Constitution so as to make same-sex marriages impossible, but this sounds like one of those expedient election-year promises that will somehow fall by the wayside very quickly as a second Bush-Cheney term -- if any -- gets underway.
The debate was like a tea party for pit bulls. Cheney's snide remarks were generally more potent than anything Edwards could come up with, but Cheney has a way of emitting them without appearing vicious or reckless about it. He has that sly Bob Hope grinning sneer so well lampooned by Darrell Hammond on "Saturday Night Live."
Edwards did too much jotting and too much posing as the Dynamic Young Candidate, although at 51 he's not as young as he looks. He was so programmed that he didn't respond spontaneously enough to some of Cheney's charges; there was no passion in his umbrage. After Edwards pointed out the oft-quoted statistic that 90 percent of the coalition casualties in Iraq were U.S. troops -- this is supposedly a joint effort with other nations -- Cheney went into a modulated tantrum in which he claimed that Edwards had somehow just dismissed the contributions of Iraqis fighting with the United States in their own country.
This was clearly a rhetorical trick designed to obscure the point Edwards was making and to accuse him of demeaning the Iraqis at the same time. Cheney thus handed Edwards an opportunity for some good old theatrical high-dudgeon along the lines of "Senator, I deeply resent your complete misrepresentation of what I was saying." But Edwards ignored the accusation and went back to rehashing programmed campaign points.
The debate, televised live from Cleveland, was more spirited than Sen. John Kerry's trouncing of Bush last week, but the best debate may be the next one, a Bush-Kerry rematch airing Friday, since it will use a "town hall" format in which actual people, not just journalists, get to ask questions of the presidential contenders. Based on what happened last week, Bush must be getting awfully nervous as that night approaches, and Kerry's only big risk is letting himself be too cocky.
At any rate, it should be the best TV show of any of the debates so far.
By Joan Vennochi, Globe Columnist / October 6, 2004
DON'T LET today's headlines get in the way of yesterday's arguments for war with Iraq. Dick Cheney stuck to that principle during last night's debate with Democratic challenger John Edwards. The vice president's overall debate strategy appeared to be very simple: Say it calmly, say it with authority, and hope that people in battleground states continue to believe Bush-Cheney can fix what Democrats refer to as the "mess in Iraq" -- while forgetting that Bush-Cheney created it. Cheney did not win the charm contest, but neither did he lose the debate.
Moderator Gwen Ifill hit Cheney hard with her first question, asking Cheney to respond to the report that Paul Bremer, the former administrator of the American-led government in Iraq, is now saying that the United States never deployed enough troops in Iraq. She also pressed Cheney to defend his continued assertion of a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
Cheney ducked the first part of the question, calmly defended the post-9/11 attack on Iraq and solemnly declared, "I would recommend exactly the same course of action."
It is becoming clear that these face-offs are no laughing matter for the Republican ticket. Last night in Cleveland, it was Cheney's turn to look annoyed and unhappy as he faced questions about Iraq, criticism of Halliburton, the defense contracting company he once headed, and Edwards's repeated assertion that there is no connection between the attacks of 9/11 and Saddam Hussein.
Like George W. Bush during last week's debate with challenger John Kerry, Cheney was on the defensive for much of his 90 minute face-off with Edwards. But unlike Bush, Cheney did not struggle for words, and he also got off some attacks of his own. Edwards, a trial lawyer by profession, is a tenacious advocate for Kerry and the ticket, but his bright, shiny face is something of a liability up against Uncle Dick.
Cheney was effective when he said "a little tough talk in the midst of a campaign or during a debate cannot obscure a record of being on the wrong side," on issues of national defense. Again, later, he said to Edwards, "your rhetoric would be a lot more credible if you had a record to back it up."
Edwards repeatedly brought up Halliburton, the company Cheney once headed as CEO and the no-bid contracts it has won from the US government.
Cheney called the attacks a smokescreen and then went after Edwards for his attendance record in the Senate, saying that Edwards's hometown newspaper calls him "Senator Gone." Edwards said Cheney was distorting his record but did not specify how.
Asked to defend his relatively thin resume, Edwards said voters want three things from their president and vice president -- to know they will keep them safe, have good judgment, and tell them the truth. "A long resume does not equal good judgment," said Edwards.
And now, back to Bush.
Joan Vennochi's e-mail address is vennochi@globe.com.
One of the key disputes in the debate between Democratic Sen. John Edwards and Vice President Dick Cheney focused on whether Cheney has incorrectly suggested that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.
"I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11," Cheney said during the debate. "But there's clearly an established Iraqi track record with terror."
That doesn't exactly mesh with what Cheney has said, or at least implied, on the campaign trail. There he often cites Saddam's "long-established" ties to al-Qaida — the organization responsible for the attacks — while mentioning the former dictator's production and use of chemical weapons, support for the families of suicide bombers and defiance of various U.N. resolutions.
Cheney's subtle assertion of a Sept. 11 link comes despite the findings of a bipartisan commission that investigated the attacks, which said it found no evidence of a "collaborative relationship" between Saddam and the terrorist organization led by Osama bin Laden.
The commission's staff has said it found "no credible evidence" that Iraq had cooperated with al-Qaida in targeting the United States.
On another Iraq-related point, Edwards attacked Cheney for the administration's decision to give billions of dollars in new contracts to the vice president's former company, Halliburton.
But congressional auditors recently reviewed those contracts and concluded U.S. officials met legal guidelines in awarding the business without competition — in part because Halliburton was the only company capable of doing some of the work.
By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist / October 6, 2004 LOS ANGELES
GIVEN NO chance to play grandpa, Dick Cheney was the grump. Hunkered down and grimmacing through his answers, the vice president must have lived up to Republican strategists' greatest fears.
He was unable for vast parts of last night's debate to look directly at moderator Gwen Ifill, let alone look America straight in the eye. On a night the Republicans needed Cheney to deliver gravitas, he often appeared as if weighted by lead. He sunk into a tie with John Edwards.
Republicans desperate to forget President Bush's surliness in his first debate with John Kerry undoubtedly cackle this morning that Cheney's seriousness was a virtue against an animated but far less experienced John Edwards. To be sure, Cheney awoke long enough to get in some solid stingers on Edwards.
Cheney also said if the Kerry-Edwards ticket could not stand up to Howard Dean in adopting Dean's antiwar stance, who could they stand up to?
Cheney said that Edwards was so absent from the Senate that the first time he met him was in last night's debate. That last comment was pretty close to a Lloyd Bentsen, you're-no-John-Kennedy moment.
But Bentsen's memorable line did not win the presidency for Michael Dukakis, and Cheney's line will not win for Bush. A tie was not what the Republicans needed. Edwards set the tone for the night by saying directly to Cheney, "You are still not being straight with the American people."
Edwards further set the agenda by saying: "And it's not just me that sees the mess in Iraq. There are Republican leaders, like John McCain, like Richard Lugar, like Chuck Hagel, who have said Iraq is a mess and it's getting worse. And when they were asked why, Richard Lugar said because of the incompetence of the administration."
That sent Cheney's head into a downward spiral, having to explain all night an invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, his links to the war profiteer Halliburton and why America has lost so many jobs in the Bush administration.
The only time Cheney came out of the spiral was when Edwards gave him the chance, complimenting Cheney's support of his gay daughter.
Then Edwards sent Cheney back into his shell, rattling off Cheney's congressional votes against Head Start, banning plastic weapons, Meals on Wheels for seniors, the Martin Luther King holiday, and a resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela.
Edwards hurt himself and prevented himself from winning outright by being too programmed and by reciting Kerry's lines, to the point of saying Kerry's name twice on a question that he was not supposed to mention Kerry's name. But it was far more memorable to see how Cheney, arguably one of the most secretive vice presidents in the nation's history, was literally and physically crumpled.
Having spent 3 3/4 years constructing his shell, he is now incapable of breaking out of it, even on a night when it was crucial to do so. He may have stopped the slide in the polls after Bush's first debate, but his tie with Edwards means the presidential race remains a tie until Bush and Kerry meet again.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.
Rapid-fire verbal assaults served both debaters well
Vice President Dick Cheney likely helped his ticket recover from last week's wobbly performance. And Democrat John Edwards turned up the heat on the White House over Iraq.
By LESLEY CLARK Miami Herald
Posted on Wed, Oct. 06, 2004
A persistent, serious Dick Cheney set out Tuesday night to right President Bush's ship, but Democratic rival John Edwards hit right back, accusing the administration of misleading the public.
Proving a cooler communicator than his boss was at last week's presidential debate, the vice president delivered Tuesday a measured defense for the war in Iraq during a tense, rapid-fire exchange with rival John Edwards, who immediately pounced on mounting evidence that some of the administration's rationale for going to war was wrong.
Cheney tartly fended off the criticism, insisting the administration was right to go to war, as he set out to excoriate Democrat John Kerry for a propensity to change his mind, baldly suggesting the Democrats don't have the credibility to keep the nation safe.
''Whatever political pressure of the moment requires, that's where you're at,'' Cheney said to Edwards, who, with trial-lawyer savvy honed building courtroom cases, held his own against the deliberate and methodical Cheney.
CONTRAST IN STYLES
The vice president, a Sunday-morning talk show veteran, looked almost pained at the start of the debate, but quickly warmed to the attack. At several points Cheney, setting himself up as the stable veteran, chuckled as he took shots at Edwards' limited government experience and presidential ambitions.
But the affable Edwards, a grin frequently on his face, was at his best during a two-minute closing as he sought to portray the administration as out of touch, looking into the cameras as he likened his millworker father's struggles to that of ordinary Americans.
And with a disarming smile, Edwards from the outset aimed cutting and confrontational remarks at what Democrats think is Bush's soft spot: New reports that call to question the administration's argument for going to war.
''Mr. Vice President, there is no connection between the attacks of September 11th and Saddam Hussein,'' Edwards said in the opening minutes of the 90-minute back-and-forth. ``Mr. Vice President, you are still not being straight with the American people.''
If the last debate was notable for Bush's peeved look, Tuesday's was notable for the early rancor and conflicting styles as the two men clashed on the personal and the political.
Even though the two were sitting down -- a talk-show format the Kerry campaign said would benefit the taciturn Cheney -- tensions ran high as the two traded criticism over unemployment, Iraq and even their own voting records.
Though vice-presidential debates are usually of little consequence -- voters assume their chosen candidate hasn't selected someone not fit for office -- strategists suggested the vice-presidential debate could be critical because of Bush's laggard performance Thursday at the University of Miami, a showing that allowed Kerry to catch up to the president in national polls.
By putting in a credible performance Tuesday -- and getting in a few zingers -- Cheney sets it up for his boss to go up against Kerry in their second face-to-face Friday night.
''If they couldn't stand up to the pressure that Howard Dean represented, how can they stand up to al Qaeda?'' Cheney said, suggesting that Kerry voted against an $87 billion funding package to equip the troops and support reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to take the steam out of then-Democratic rival Howard Dean's antiwar sails.
RECORDS SCRUTINIZED
Though the debate was largely about their bosses, neither pulled any punches in going after each other, Cheney at one point assailing the first-termer's Senate record as ``not very distinguished.''
Noting that as Senate president he's in the chambers most Tuesdays, Cheney said to Edwards, ''The first time I ever met you is when you walked onto the stage tonight.'' (The Associated Press reported that in fact the two had met at least twice before.)
Edwards didn't miss a beat, smilingly ticking off a list of legislation he said Cheney had voted against as a member of Congress. ''He voted against funding meals on wheels,'' Edwards said with a look of mock horror.
Herald staff writers Beth Reinhard and Marc Caputo contributed to this report.
Cheney, Edwards met twice despite vice president's statement
LIZ SIDOTI Associated Press
Posted on Wed, Oct. 06, 2004
CLEVELAND - Vice President Dick Cheney said Tuesday that the debate against Democratic Sen. John Edwards marked the first time the two had met. In fact, the two had met twice previously.
"Now, in my capacity as vice president, I am the president of Senate, the presiding officer. I'm up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they're in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight," Cheney told Edwards during the debate.
In February 2001, the vice president thanked Edwards by name at a Senate prayer breakfast. Edwards aides also said the two met when the first-term North Carolina senator accompanied Elizabeth Dole to her swearing-in by Cheney as a North Carolina senator in January 2003.
Edwards didn't forget. The Democratic vice presidential nominee noted the discrepancy at a post-debate rally in a Cleveland park and used it as an example of Cheney "still not being straight with the American people."
"The vice president said that the first time I met Sen. Edwards was tonight when we walked on the stage. I guess he forgot the time we sat next to each other for a couple hours about three years ago. I guess he forgot the time we met at the swearing in of another senator. So, my wife Elizabeth reminded him on the stage," Edwards said as the crowd roared.
According to Edwards staff, Cheney replied, "Oh, yeah."
"She reminded him about the truth," Edwards told the crowd, "and come November, we're going to remind him that the American people do not want four more years of George W. Bush."
Cheney made the remark in accusing Edwards of frequent absences from Senate votes.
A photo shows the vice president next to the senator at a prayer breakfast in 2001.
By Peter Wallsten Times Staff Writer
October 6, 2004
WASHINGTON — It was perhaps the most surprising tidbit of new information during the debate — that Vice President Dick Cheney had never met Sen. John Edwards until Tuesday night.
Except it wasn't true.
"I'm up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they're in session," Cheney said to Edwards. "The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight."
It seems, however, the vice president's memory was a little off. Or maybe Edwards didn't leave much of an impression.
Less than two hours after the debate ended, aides to Edwards and Sen. John F. Kerry distributed a photograph from the Feb. 1, 2001, National Prayer Breakfast showing Edwards and Cheney standing side by side.
"Congressman Watts, Sen. Edwards, friends from across America and distinguished visitors to our country from all over the world, Lynne and I are honored to be with you all this morning," Cheney said, according to a transcript.
Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt described the prayer breakfast photo as evidence of an "inconsequential meeting."
Kerry-Edwards aides also pointed to news articles from January 2003, when Edwards escorted the newly elected senator from North Carolina, Elizabeth Hanford Dole, onto the Senate floor for her swearing-in by Cheney.
Although Cheney is the Senate's presiding officer, he actually sits in the chamber only on rare occasions, such as to break a tie vote and to swear in new senators.
He does attend the GOP senators' weekly luncheons to discuss party strategy. But only Republicans attend, and Cheney usually breezes into the building, goes to the meeting, then leaves without hobnobbing with Democrats.
In fact, Cheney was teased by Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) for only associating with Republicans when, in an encounter on the Senate floor, Cheney cursed at Leahy.
A Cheney aide said after the debate that the vice president simply didn't remember meeting Edwards prior to Tuesday night — and that he certainly had never seen the North Carolinian on the Senate floor.
Times staff writer Janet Hook contributed to this report.
Analysis: Candidates can't hide contempt for the other side
Marc Sandalow, Washington Bureau Chief
Wednesday, October 6, 2004 Page A - 1
Washington -- Had Dick Cheney or John Edwards stood on their chairs and shouted "liar, liar pants on fire,'' it might have surprised viewers, but it would not have changed the tenor of Tuesday's night's debate.
Reflecting the intensity and tightness of the campaign a month before election day, the candidates challenged not only each other's positions but the very legitimacy of their statements on matters ranging from why the U.S. went to war in Iraq to which Americans deserve a tax cut.
Fact checkers will need time to sort through the substance of their disagreements, but millions of viewers could immediately take away something more basic: that the 2004 election is being fought between two sides who neither like nor trust each other.
Just how much a vice presidential debate will affect the outcome on Nov. 2 depends on the remaining two debates and events that no one can predict. But in the first presidential election after a contest that was decided by 537 votes, it was clear that neither side was going to yield any ground.
Edwards set the tone of the contentious debate in his opening response, when he turned to Cheney, who had just defended the administration's position on Iraq, and said: "Mr. Vice President, you are still not being straight with the American people.''
The arguments were not new. Cheney said that invading Iraq was necessary to defend America after Sept. 11, 2001, that taxes would rise in a John Kerry administration and that there is no sign of conviction in the Kerry-Edwards ticket.
"Your rhetoric would be much tougher if you had a record to back it up,'' Cheney said at one point.
"I couldn't figure out why that happened initially,'' Cheney said of Kerry's and Edwards' support for a resolution to authorize the use of force in October 2002 and then their criticisms of the war a year later. "And then I looked and figured out that what was happening was Howard Dean was making major progress in the Democratic primaries, running away with the primaries based on an anti-war record.
"So, they in effect decided they would cast an anti-war vote, and they voted against the troops. Now, if they couldn't stand up to the pressures that Howard Dean represented, how can we expect them to stand up to al Qaeda?'' Cheney said.
Edwards insisted that the upbeat scenarios put forward by Cheney on Iraq and the U.S. economy were dishonest and out of line with what most Americans can see with their own eyes.
"The reality, you and George Bush continue to tell people, first, that things are going well in Iraq. The American people don't need us to explain this to them. They see it over the television every single day."
Edwards accused Cheney of making misleading claims that the former ruler of Iraq had ties with al Qaeda, telling Cheney: "Mr. Vice President, there is no connection between the attacks of September 11th and Saddam Hussein."
Cheney insisted that he had never made such a claim and had instead only linked al Qaeda to Iraq. It is true that Cheney has never blamed Saddam Hussein for the Sept. 11 attack, but he has repeatedly suggested a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda, and asserted that attacking Iraq will strike a blow to the terrorists who "quote from whatever you were just reading from ...''
"What we did in Iraq was exactly the right thing to do," Cheney said, arguing that Iraq was "the most likely nexus between terrorists and weapons of mass destruction.''
"Your rhetoric would be much tougher if you had a record to back it up,'' Cheney admonished Edwards at one point.
Beyond the familiar messages, each candidate displayed a contempt for the other side that is rarely seen in a face-to-face confrontation. While both kept their tempers in check, and neither openly grimaced or smirked as President Bush did in his debate last week, it was clear that Edwards -- who practiced the art of debate for 20 years as a trial attorney -- got under Cheney's skin.
"It's hard to know where to start with all those innocencies there,'' said Cheney, who did not flash a visible smile through the first hour of the debate.
In the course of a 98-minute debate, the candidates attacked each other's credibility regarding the progress toward free elections in Iraq, the connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, the amount of money being spent on the war, the consistency of the Democrat's position on the war, the propriety of Halliburton's no-bid contracts, the virtues of tax cuts, and each candidate's voting record in Congress.
Cheney and Edwards found just two things they agreed on: that lawyers file too many lawsuits, and that decisions about same-sex marriage ought to be left to the states.
Though both candidates wore dark blazers and red ties, with pins on their lapels, their manner could hardly have been more different.
Cheney appeared stern and somber, while Edwards flashed his trademark smile and was far more critical than he was during scores of Democratic forums during the primaries.
Edwards brought up Halliburton exactly 26 minutes into the debate, which prompted Cheney to respond that Edwards had a spotty record of attending Senate votes.
In a scolding tone, Cheney told Edwards that as president of the Senate he is at the Capitol nearly every week.
"The first time I've ever met you is when you walked on that stage tonight."
Edwards retorted that as a member of Congress, Cheney had voted against Head Start, against banning plastic guns, against Meals on Wheels, and against making Martin Luther King Jr. Day a federal holiday.
"I'm surprised you'd bring up the record,'' he said.
The tone softened 60 minutes into the debate, when Edwards said he respected Cheney's devotion to his family, including his openly gay daughter. Cheney thanked Edwards for the comment.
By Thomas Oliphant, Globe Columnist / October 6, 2004 CLEVELAND
THE COUNTRY doesn't need Dick Cheney any more. After his 90 minutes on the stage last night, it is clear he is no longer an essential person in politics and government. What he brings to the table are liabilities.
In debate against an opponent with the dangerously attractive attribute of freshness, Cheney paled -- literally. He's not special, it turns out. He doesn't know anything special, he hasn't done anything special, and for the future he doesn't offer anything special.
Cheney is now just another vice president who has had his hour on the stage without really mattering or making a difference. Four years ago, he had a glow of the Wizard of Oz about him, filling an obvious hole in his running mate's background; last night, Cheney was just the grumpy old man behind the curtain.
In presidential campaigns, that is the key to the veeps. They matter if they add something major, help solve a big problem, or provide the second element of a coalition. They are usually more important on the way into office than after they've been there, and last night was no exception.
In 2000, with George W. Bush running against an experienced, accomplished vice president, Cheney turned out to be important to the know-little Texas governor's election. His debate performance against Al Gore's running mate, Senator Joe Lieberman, provided the added element of reassurance that the one-time conservative congressman from Wyoming and defense secretary seemed a decent fellow who could help govern the country.
Cheney ceased to have that status a long time ago. Now he has to deal with the accumulating credibility detritus of his incumbency. Just this week, he ran into disclosures from an increasingly angry and bitter intelligence community that he suppressed requests for more troops in Iraq, couldn't even persuade Donald Rumsfeld about ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and probably also suppressed dissenting opinions about the significance of those famous aluminum tubes that never ended up being used in Iraq's nonexistent nuclear weapons program.
Cheney went into office with the typical benefit of the doubt. Now, more people in polls express unfavorable views about him than favorable ones. As he showed last night, the only way he can deal with questions about his repeated misleading of the public on matters of war and peace is by ignoring the questions and launching into another effort to make Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda seem part of the same coalition and then questioning the patriotism of all who criticize him. It can seem like decent television, but in fact it undermines his president politically as much as it helps rally the Republican base.
John Edwards had the political discipline to resist the temptation to behave with Cheney's off-putting nastiness, restricting himself to one powerful recitation of the vice president's long record of extreme right-wing position on race relations and education. He helps John Kerry politically, but what was important last night was that he helped demonstrate that Cheney isn't a big player anymore, that Edwards can play on the same stage, and therefore that the country is free to change leaders next month.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.
While the rest of the TV commentariat declared the Edwards-Cheney duel a draw, Chris Matthews and his MSNBC crew threw their arms around the gruff old veep.
By Eric Boehlert
Oct. 6, 2004 / So what debate was the crew at MSNBC watching Tuesday night?
Following the vice-presidential faceoff, which most observers declared a draw, giving Cheney points for articulating an Iraq strategy in a way President Bush failed to do last week, and Edwards credit for holding his own against the much more experienced veep, the MSNBC team of pundits, led by "Hardball" host Chris Matthews, immediately declared the debate a knockout for Cheney.
The Cheney group hug began before Edwards had even exited the debate stage in Cleveland, with NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell declaring, "Dick Cheney did awfully well in putting John Edwards in his place." MSNBC host and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough, who didn't flinch in naming Sen. John Kerry the debate winner last week, declared, "There's no doubt about it, Edwards got obliterated by Dick Cheney." (Perhaps he was trying to appease his right-wing fans who, he later remarked, flayed him alive for giving the debate to Kerry last week.) Newsweek's managing editor Jon Meachem chimed in that Edwards seemed like "Kerry-lite," while host Matthews skewered Edwards in a strangely personal way, reminiscent of the way Matthews hounded President Bill Clinton throughout the impeachment process.
"I don't think this well-rehearsed and well-briefed senator from North Carolina was ready for the assault," said Matthews, who insisted, "Dick Cheney was loaded for bear tonight. He went looking for squirrel and he found squirrel" in the form of Edwards. He later suggested Edwards often looked stunned, as if he'd been "slapped" by Cheney's devastating debating technique. Matthews also demanded to know if the "liberal press" would admit "Cheney won."
Yet nowhere else on the television landscape -- not even on Fox News -- was Cheney crowned the winner. Most pundits saw the debate as an obvious draw:
-- ABC News political director Mark Halperin told PBS's Charlie Rose the debate was a "nonevent because it didn't change the dynamic."
-- Surveying fellow journalists covering the debate, CNN's Judy Woodruff, host of "Inside Politics," reported, "Their opinion is this debate was close to a draw." She added, "If Dick Cheney was hoping to put away John Edwards, he didn't do that tonight."
-- David Gergen, who has counseled both Democratic and Republican administrations, agreed that the debate was a standoff, telling CNN's Larry King that "it ran out of electricity about halfway through. It began to drag."
-- Fox News' Bill Kristol said, "Cheney clearly won the first half on national security. I think Edwards won the second half" on domestic issues. Kristol argued the first half was more important.
-- "I can imagine Democratic living rooms, cheering every time Edwards punched. And Republican living rooms when Cheney punched," said ABC News' George Stephanopoulos. "But I don't think either candidate did much to sway voters on the fence."
ABC News' instant poll found more viewers thought Cheney won the debate, by a margin of 43 to 35. But as ABC anchor Peter Jennings noted, the poll was weighted heavily toward Republican respondents because the network found more Republicans watched the debate.
CBS ran a scientific survey of 200 uncommitted voters nationwide, which found Edwards won the debate by a clear margin, 41-29. The CBS survey found Cheney suffered a dramatic gender gap among women voters.
None of that seemed to matter inside the MSNBC echo chamber. Matthews and his crew had their story line -- Cheney won big! -- and they were sticking with it, with Matthews even wondering out loud if the choice of Edwards for V.P. "casts doubt on the judgment of John Kerry," and whether Edwards may "not be ready to be vice president of the United States."
Which again raises the question: What debate was Matthews watching, and what did Edwards ever do to him?
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About the writer Eric Boehlert is a senior writer at Salon.
"But let's look at what we know about Mr. Zarqawi. We know he was running a terrorist camp, training terrorists in Afghanistan prior to 9/11. We know that when we went into Afghanistan that he then migrated to Baghdad. He set up shop in Baghdad, where he oversaw the poisons facility up at Kermal (ph), where the terrorists were developing ricin and other deadly substances to use."
"We know he's still in Baghdad today. He is responsible for most of the major car bombings that have killed or maimed thousands of people. He's the one you will see on the evening news beheading hostages. He is, without question, a bad guy. He is, without question, a terrorist. He was, in fact, in Baghdad before the war, and he's in Baghdad now after the war."
"The fact of the matter is that this is exactly the kind of track record we've seen over the years. We have to deal with Zarqawi by taking him out, and that's exactly what we'll do."
There will be quite a bit of fact-checking of tonight's debate between Dick Cheney and John Edwards -- but the vice president probably didn't expect the corrections to begin with a conversation with Elizabeth Edwards on the stage in Cleveland directly after the debate.
During the debate, Cheney, trying to make the point that Edwards missed votes and was hardly ever in Washington, said: "You've got one of the worst attendance records in the United States Senate. Now, in my capacity as vice president, I am the president of the Senate, the presiding officer. I'm up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they're in session." And he ended with this zinger: "The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight."
Some pundits were very impressed, apparently, with this line from Cheney. Andrea Mitchell went on "Hardball" and said she thought Cheney did "awfully well at, first of all, putting John Edwards in his place, saying that I have been presiding over the Senate and I didn't meet you until tonight. Talking about his not having been on the job was pretty devastating." Except, it's not true.
CBS "instapoll" results, from 200 undecided voters nationwide:
"Who won?"
Edwards: 42 percent
Cheney: 29 percent
tie: 29 percent
"Debate improved your opinion of the candidate?"
Cheney: 29 percent, opinion improved
Edwards: 58 percent, opinion improved
And perhaps the most telling statistic of the quick survey, in light of moderator Gwen Ifill's question to Edwards regarding his qualifications to be within a "heartbeat" of the top job: 24 percent of the undecided voters polled by CBS apparently said that they were "scared" of the idea of Dick Cheney as president.
-- Mark Follman
[20:08 PDT, Oct. 5, 2004]
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The pre-debate sit & spin
With the presidential debate not scheduled to start until 9 p.m. Eastern time, hundreds of reporters who would be well into the cocktail hour back home find themselves stuck in Cleveland, waiting to watch the show on TV just like everybody else. Time moves very slowly.
You can kill a lot of it just wading through security. Reporters won't get anywhere near the candidates -- the press will watch the debate in a gymnasium next to the debate hall -- but the Secret Service apparently considers the Tad Devines and Karl Roves of the world worthy of full bomb-sniffing-dog protection. We came through with Fox's Chris Wallace, who passed the time by talking with an acquaintance -- not us -- about last week's presidential debate. Wallace said he was surprised that Bush wasn't better prepared for charges that he "fucked up" Iraq; he said folks in the Bush-Cheney campaign had assured him that they'd spent time hurling "insults" at the president, just so he could practice reacting by not reacting.
Inside the gym, Cheney advisor Mary Matalin spent a chunk of her afternoon pre-spinning NBC's David Gregory. CNN's Jeff Greenfield hung for a few minutes with Ben Ginsberg, the Bush campaign lawyer who resigned in August when it was revealed that he was also advising the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Ginsberg is here to spin, but only unofficially, of course. Upstairs at the gym, in a makeshift bar and grill where Anheuser-Busch plied reporters with free food, free beer and commemorative mugs, Time's Joe Klein got triple-teamed by Kerry-Edwards spinners Joe Lockhart, David Ginsberg and Jennifer Palmieri.
Outside the food hall, Sean Hannity posed for photos with some fans. His partner, Alan Colmes, wandered around the gym with his sunglasses on. Their fair-and-balanced colleagues were a little more businesslike. Shepard Smith stomped around looking pissed off, as he seems to do a lot at these things. Maybe it's his makeup; for all the Drudge-speak about John Kerry's orangey glow, Mr. Smith has looked positively pumpkinesque of late. The same can't be said for his colleague Carl Cameron. Fox's No. 1 fiction writer [ http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2004/10/01/fox_fake/inde... ] looked tan, rested and ready as he noodled about his laptop Tuesday afternoon. His nails were perfect.
-- Tim Grieve
[16:04 PDT, Oct. 5, 2004]
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A "sensitive situation"
Work in a war zone as a foreign correspondent, risk your life, and tell the truth about what you see, and you just might end up a problem employee at the center of a "sensitive situation" in your newsroom -- as Wall Street Journal reporter Farnaz Fassihi has become after a private e-mail she wrote about the deteriorating conditions in Iraq spread around the globe. You may remember Fassihi's missive [ http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/001161.html ], which was linked on several blogs and was the subject of news stories, but if not, here's an excerpt:
"Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest. Forget about the reasons that lured me to this job: a chance to see the world, explore the exotic, meet new people in far away lands, discover their ways and tell stories that could make a difference."
"Little by little, day-by-day, being based in Iraq has defied all those reasons. I am house bound. I leave when I have a very good reason to and a scheduled interview. I avoid going to people's homes and never walk in the streets. I can't go grocery shopping any more, can't eat in restaurants, can't strike a conversation with strangers, can't look for stories, can't drive in any thing but a full armored car, can't go to scenes of breaking news stories, can't be stuck in traffic, can't speak English outside, can't take a road trip, can't say I'm an American, can't linger at checkpoints, can't be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling. And can't and can't. There has been one too many close calls, including a car bomb so near our house that it blew out all the windows. So now my most pressing concern every day is not to write a kick-ass story but to stay alive and make sure our Iraqi employees stay alive. In Baghdad I am a security personnel first, a reporter second."
As Editor & Publisher [ http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000653017 ] notes, Fassihi is now taking a "scheduled vacation" -- but whether she'll continue reporting for the Journal from Iraq after that is apparently still up in the air. "Barney Calame, deputy managing editor, declined to speak at length, but confirmed 'it's a very sensitive situation and it is one we are trying to make sure we all understand. Paul (Steiger) is involved and we are deciding on it collaboratively.' This raises the questions: Why is the situation 'sensitive,' and what do Journal editors have to decide about it?"
E&P goes on to point out, via a Hartford Courant report that queried other Baghdad-based reporters, that Fassihi's assessment, although intended for private distribution and not as a Journal-sanctioned report on the war, was an eloquent inside look at the reality in Baghdad.
"Alex Berenson, just back from Iraq for The New York Times, told Halloran that the Fassihi e-mail was 'entirely accurate in its description of reporting conditions.' Thanassi Cambanis, still in Iraq for The Boston Globe, described the risk of 'being carjacked, murdered, kidnapped or blown up.' Chicago Tribune reporter Colin McMahon, also in Baghdad, said, 'I spoke with a woman yesterday and I wanted to go to her house and interview her, and she said, 'No, I don't want an American seen coming to my house.'"
"[Courant reporter Liz Halloran] also asked what the reporters thought of charges that they were ignoring the 'good news' from Iraq. 'To write about a re-painting of a school when three car bombs go off killing how many dozens would be irresponsible journalism, I think,' Cambanis said. Asked the Times' Berenson: 'What good news are we supposed to be reporting when the murder rate in Baghdad has gone up 20-fold or more since we entered the city last year, and when we can't even walk the streets?'"
Does Fassihi deserve to lose her beat -- or do Americans deserve to know what's actually happening on the ground in Iraq, even if it clashes with the administration's rosy pronouncements?
-- Geraldine Sealey
[14:51 PDT, Oct. 5, 2004]
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Did Cheney break the law on 9/11?
For months the Bush administration fiercely resisted having the president and vice president testify before the 9/11 Commission. It was only under intense public pressure that the two leaders eventually agreed to do so -- and then only under the conditions that they would testify jointly, would not speak to the commission under oath, and that there would be no written material or transcript allowed from the session.
It was clearly the behavior of leaders who aimed to keep an airtight grip on the narrative of their minute-by-minute actions on that fateful day. A new report in Vanity Fair magazine reveals why Bush and Cheney may have wanted to remain in firm control of their story.
In its November issue (obtained by War Room), the magazine reports that after Bush and Cheney's all but hermetically sealed session with the 9/11 Commission, some of the bipartisan investigators remained highly skeptical of the duo's testimony that Cheney cleared his order with the president on 9/11 to have U.S. fighter jets shoot down hijacked civilian aircraft.
"Some members of the 9/11 commission and its staff are convinced that Cheney acted on his own -- before receiving the president's approval -- which would mean he broke the chain of command and, by exceeding his constitutional powers, acted unlawfully," the story says. "The final report of the 9/11 commission stops just short of saying that the conversation with the president before Cheney gave the order never happened ... the report goes as far as to say 'there is no documentary evidence for this call ...' Only after Cheney twice issued a shootdown order is there clear evidence that he called Bush and received authorization to order fighter jets to shoot down hijacked aircraft."
As one commission member told Vanity Fair on condition of anonymity, the panel was concerned about how to handle the politically explosive issue: "We purposely did not reach a conclusion. We just laid it out. Some people may read what we wrote and conclude the authorization call had not preceded the [shootdown] order. People can come to their own conclusion. We didn't want to be in the position of saying the president and the vice president were lying to us."
Bob Kerrey, the former Democratic senator from Nebraska and an outspoken member of the 9/11 commission, said: "We don't see that it happened the way he [Cheney] recalled it."
And one commissioner told the magazine (also anonymously) that the panel's members simply did not buy Cheney's account. "We tried to work out language that allows the reader to get that," he said, "without saying the vice president did not tell the truth."
Indeed, as the article further details, the bipartisan panel was forced to perform some linguistic acrobatics on the issue, after the White House applied intense pressure:
"A series of staff statements issued by the commission, as well as the final report, were first sent to the White House for review. The draft of staff statement No. 17, dealing with the shootdown, brought an angry letter from [White House counsel Alberto] Gonzales, objecting to the wording. Cheney also telephoned both [9/11 Commission leaders Thomas] Kean and [Lee] Hamilton, complaining vociferously about the language.
"Philip Zelikow, the commission's executive director, confirmed that changes were made, and approved by the commissioners, in both the staff statement and the final report after the White House letter was received and Cheney made his phone calls. But Zelikow said 'our fundamental judgment' had not changed. 'Which is the President and Vice President have offered an account. Their account could be true but we can't find corroborating documentary evidence to prove conclusively that it is true.'"
Such corroborating evidence of an earlier call to the president, the article adds, could not be found in two different sets of personal notes kept by Lynne Cheney and Lewis "Scooter" Libby -- both of whom accompanied the vice president in the secure bunker under the White House that morning -- nor in seven different phone logs kept by various White House operations, from the Secret Service to the White House Military Office.
-- Mark Follman
[14:07 PDT, Oct. 5, 2004]
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Mr. Vice President, meet Sen. Patrick Leahy
The pre-debate mind games have begun.
The Kerry-Edwards camp announced its list of surrogates and spinners for tonight's debate earlier today. Among them: Sen. Patrick Leahy. Now, Leahy hasn't played a central role in the Kerry campaign to date, but he'll be front and center tonight -- well, in the second row of the debate hall, at least -- to serve as a visual reminder of the injudicious language the vice president used in June on the Senate floor. You may remember the event: Cheney and Leahy got to talking, Leahy mentioned a company called Halliburton, and Cheney told Leahy to "fuck himself."
Sources in the Kerry-Edwards campaign told us that the Republicans have lodged a complaint. It wasn't immediately clear whether the complaint was lodged with the Commission on Presidential Debates or just with Kerry's debate negotiators. Either way, what is clear is that the Leahy appearance has gotten under somebody's skin. And the Democrats aren't done yet. Just a few minutes ago, the Democratic National Committee distributed Halliburton hospitality bags to the press corps. The contents included a small box of Tide -- a reminder of how a Halliburton subsidiary charged the military $100 for a 15-pound bag of laundry -- and "your very own no-bid contract."
We couldn't track down anybody from the Bush-Cheney campaign to comment, but we did find Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie roaming the press center just outside the debate hall. He didn't have the talking points, at least not yet. Asked about Leahy's appearance, he said: "I don't know what the rules are, but aren't senators allowed to come?"
-- Tim Grieve
[13:31 PDT, Oct. 5, 2004]
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In the polls
After the first presidential debate Gallup and Newsweek came up with somewhat different national poll results, but they reflected the same trend: Kerry gained between 7 and 9 points in both surveys. But five new polls released late yesterday and today are mucking up the waters again, with a range of results from The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Pew Research Center, the American Research Group and Zogby.
On one side of the spectrum is the Pew poll, which gives a 7-point lead to Bush. On the other is American Research Group, giving a 3-point lead to Kerry. The others fall somewhere in between, but don't clump in a way that would indicate that either the Pew or the ARG poll is an outlier.
The polls are slightly more conclusive when it comes to identifying whether Kerry has made gains: None of the seven polls show Kerry having lost support since the debate, though how much he gained ranges from zero to nine points.
The following are the 3-way race results of all seven polls conducted since the debate, in the order of greatest Kerry lead to greatest Bush lead, and followed by the number of points that Kerry has gained since each poll's last survey:
ARG -- (K47--B44), Kerry gains 2
Newsweek -- (K47--B45) Kerry gains 7
New York Times -- (K47--B47) Kerry gains 9
Zogby (Likely Voters) -- (K43--B46) no change
Gallup -- (K47--B49) Kerry gains 9
Wash Post/ABC -- (K45--B50) Kerry gains 1
Pew Research Center -- (K41--B48) Kerry gains 1
Averaging all seven gives Bush a lead of less than 2 points. And on average, Kerry has made a 4-point gain in each poll. Beyond that, you'll have to draw your own conclusions.
-- Jeff Horwitz
[12:04 PDT, Oct. 5, 2004]
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Shocking incompetence -- or worse
The New York Times editorial board [ http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/opinion/05tue1.html ] raises an important point this morning about the implications of the paper's report last Sunday that showed how President Bush's pre-war claim that Saddam Hussein was on the brink of developing a nuclear bomb, based on the theory that Hussein was using aluminum tubes to make nuclear bomb fuel, had already been debunked by experts within the U.S. government and also from the International Atomic Energy Agency before Bush informed the American people of the supposed threat. Either Condoleezza Rice knew the nuke theory was wrong, and not only let Bush scare the American people with it during his State of the Union address but stated it publicly herself -- or she didn't know the available intelligence on this critical issue. And if she didn't, then, why didn't she? Although the buck ultimately stops with Bush, it's clear that Rice -- and Powell and Cheney, too -- failed miserably at their jobs, with great consequence.
From the editorial:
"It's shocking that with all this information readily available, Secretary of State Colin Powell still went before the United Nations to repeat the bogus claims, an appearance that gravely damaged his reputation. It's even more disturbing that Vice President Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, had not only failed to keep the president from misleading the American people, but had also become the chief proponents of the 'mushroom cloud' rhetoric."
"Ms. Rice had access to all the reports debunking the [aluminum tubes to make nukes] theory when she first talked about it publicly in September 2002. Yet last Sunday, Ms. Rice said that while she had been aware of a 'dispute' about the tubes, she had not specifically known what it was about until after she had told the world that Saddam was building the bomb."
"Ms. Rice's spokesman, Sean McCormack, said it was not her job to question intelligence reports or 'to referee disputes in the intelligence community.' But even with that curious job disclaimer, it's no comfort to think that the national security adviser wouldn't have bothered to inform herself about such a major issue before speaking publicly. The national security adviser has no more important responsibility than making sure that the president gets the best advice on life-and-death issues like the war."
"If Ms. Rice did her job and told Mr. Bush how ludicrous the case was for an Iraqi nuclear program, then Mr. Bush terribly misled the public. If not, she should have resigned for allowing her boss to start a war on the basis of bad information and an incompetent analysis."
-- Geraldine Sealey
[07:53 PDT, Oct. 5, 2004]
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Bremer, Rummy give Kerry fodder
John Kerry has fresh ammunition against George W. Bush in Paul Bremer's remarks, published on the front page of the Washington Post [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7053-2004Oct4.html ] this morning, criticizing the administration for poor planning in Iraq. The former U.S. administrator in pre-handover Iraq says a lack of adequate forces and failure to prevent the violence and looting early on hampered the occupation.
"We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," Bremer said, according to the Post. "We never had enough troops on the ground." The Post points out that "Bremer's comments were striking because they echoed contentions of many administration critics, including Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry, who argue that the U.S. government failed to plan adequately to maintain security in Iraq after the invasion. Bremer has generally defended the U.S. approach in Iraq but in recent weeks has begun to criticize the administration for tactical and policy shortfalls."
According to the pool report from the Kerry bus, Kerry adviser and spokesman Mike McCurry hopped aboard to tell reporters that Kerry would seize on Bremer's comments at this morning's town hall campaign event. "Bremer? I think you're going to hear a little bit about his comments today...," McCurry said. And hinting at the White House's reputation for punishing those who dare cross it, McCurry said: "We're going to hit it before the administration makes him eat his words later today."
Knight-Ridder [ http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/nation/9836114.htm ]: CIA report ordered by Dick Cheney "undercuts the White House's claim that Saddam Hussein maintained ties to al-Qaida, saying there's no conclusive evidence that the regime harbored Osama bin Laden associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi."
Washington Post [ http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/nation/9836114.htm ]: Et tu Paul Bremer? Former U.S. official who governed Iraq after invasion says administration made major mistakes not deploying enough troops and not containing violence and looting after Saddam Hussein's fall.
-- Geraldine Sealey
[06:34 PDT, Oct. 5, 2004]
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Department of pork barrel security
If jihad should happen to explode onto the vast plains of Wyoming, folks in that sparse prairie state will be seven times better equipped to defend themselves than the denizens of New York City would be facing another attack. That is, if federal anti-terrorism spending under the Bush administration is any indication.
Veteran Washington Post reporter and presidential debate watcher Morton Mintz has put together a list of questions [ http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/debatequestions6.html ] for the four campaign debates now underway, and while there is no indication that any of his questions will be used, he has one that would be particularly apropos for the sitting veep on Tuesday night.
"The administration's latest distribution of funds to localities for anti-terrorism preparations," writes Mintz, "gives New York State $5.47 per person, or $2.30 below the national average. Wyoming gets $38.31 per person, or $30.54 above the national average. In fact, New York gets less than any state other than California, which is also far below the national average.
"Why are seven times more security dollars, on a per capita basis, going to Wyoming, a remote prairie state with a population of a half-million that happens to be home to Vice President Cheney, than to New York, where thousands died in a terrorist attack on its -- and the nation's -- largest city, population 8 million?"
Of course, the per-capita breakdown belies the smaller overall sum allotted to Cheney's home state, but with the Bush government facing record deficits and slashing funding for the nation's front-line protectors [ http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room//index.html#va_cuts ], one would think that every dollar would count. At least the livestock can rest easy.
-- Mark Follman
[15:34 PDT, Oct. 4, 2004]
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Dept. of "This just in… "
"Oct. 4, 2004, WASHINGTON (AP) -- In the presidential campaign's closing weeks, Democrats are bracing for an 'October Surprise,' an event so dramatic it could influence the election's outcome. The capture of Osama bin Laden, for instance."
"In reference to Scalia Describes 'Dangerous' Trend: The Sept. 29 news story 'Scalia Describes 'Dangerous' Trend' misquoted Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as saying that 'I even take the position that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.' In fact, Scalia said, 'I even accept for the sake of argument that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.'"
War Room cited the original Scalia comment as published in the Crimson as a "quote of the day," but sadly, it turns out that what he actually said wasn't quite as juicy. We're still not sure we would want to listen to Scalia talk about orgies under any circumstances, though.
-- Geraldine Sealey
[13:00 PDT, Oct. 4, 2004]
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Bush repays Purple Hearts with red tape nightmare
As President Bush acknowledged 11 times during last Thursday's presidential debate, the U.S. war effort in Iraq is "hard work." Perilous might have been a better way to say it: From the start of the war through August, more than 13,800 U.S. Army personnel alone have been wounded or become sick and have been evacuated from Iraq, according to military watchdog Global Security.org [ http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_casualties.htm ]. That doesn't include the number of soldiers injured during a combat-heavy September, nor does it include the number of U.S. Marines wounded in the fierce fighting in Fallujah and elsewhere throughout the war. (The Marine Corps keeps a much tighter lid on casualty figures than the Army.)
But while the Bush administration has put hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers in harm's way in Iraq, it is cutting funding for the already beleaguered support services for U.S. veterans damaged in war zones.
"The disability benefits and health care systems that provide services for about 5 million American veterans have been overloaded for decades and have a current backlog of more than 300,000 claims. And because they were mobilized to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly 150,000 National Guard and reservist veterans had become eligible for health care and benefits as of Aug. 1. That number is rising. At the same time, President Bush's budget for 2005 calls for cutting the Department of Veterans Affairs staff that handles benefits claims, and some veterans report long waits for benefits and confusing claims decisions.
"'I love the military; that was my life. But I don't believe they're taking care of me now,' said Staff Sgt. Gene Westbrook, 35, of Lawton, Okla. Paralyzed in a mortar attack near Baghdad in April, he has received no disability benefits because his paperwork is missing. He is supporting his wife and three children on his regular military pay of $2,800 a month as he awaits a ruling on whether he will receive $6,500 a month from the VA for his disability."
Through the end of April 2004 -- the most recent accounting the VA could provide, according to the Post -- nearly 10, 000 claims by U.S. veterans of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for service-related disabilities have yet to be processed. During fighting in Sadr City in April, Westbrook was hit by mortar shrapnel, severing his spine; he is now paralyzed from the chest down, has limited movement in his right arm and battles constant infections. Though he praised the way the Army has treated him since his injury, including providing excellent medical care, he told the Post that he's struggled to make it on his regular pay since he returned to the U.S. on July 14.
"'They're supposed to expedite the process, and they have not done that,' he said, adding that officers in his Army unit have been trying in vain to help. Charities have been set up in his honor to help defray costs. 'It's very draining, because I don't know what to do, and my family is asking when we'll get the money,' he said. 'It's the hardest part about this whole thing.'"
The administration is facing a nightmare budget deficit nurtured on its watch -- but is cutting funding for veterans' programs during a war with no end in sight really the way the Bush team wants to deal with the fiscal quagmire? (Would it qualify as "hard work" to divert some of the president's tax cuts favoring the wealthy to VA funding?)
Meanwhile, there is another troubling way in which the plight of vets makes Iraq look increasingly like Vietnam redux: Post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health concerns are expected to become a "dominant issue," VA Secretary Anthony J. Principi told the Post. Added David Autry, a spokesman for Disabled American Veterans: "The system is already strained, and it's going to get strained even worse. It's not a rosy picture at all, and they can't possibly hope to say they're going to provide timely benefits to the new folks if they can't provide timely care to the people already in the system."
-- Mark Follman
[12:34 PDT, Oct. 4, 2004]
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In the polls
Two new polls show John Kerry charging ahead after his strong performance in last week's debate: A Newsweek poll [ http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/micro_stories.pl?ACCT=617800&TICK=NEWS&STORY=/www/story/10... ] of registered voters puts the Kerry-Edwards ticket up 47-45 in a three-way race (Nader still scratches out two percent in the three-way; without him it's 49-46, Kerry over Bush). And while Gallup [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/content/default.aspx?ci=13240&pg=2 ] still gives Bush a two-point lead among the registered voters it sampled, Kerry has made up a lot of ground: Gallup's poll from the week before put Bush in the lead 53-42 -- now it's a slim 49-47 lead in Bush's favor (well within the margin of error).
Newsweek was among those criticized after the Republican Convention for a sampling that included more Republican than Democratic voters. With the latest poll that's changed; Democrats sampled outnumbered Republicans 38-33. Larry Husick, project manager for the Newsweek poll, attributes that fluctuation to some voters' tendency to identify with party momentum. "If you asked how many people were Cardinals fans at the beginning of the season you might get eight percent," he tells War Room. "But if the Cardinals win that season, it might be 15 percent by the end."
Not surprisingly, the Newsweek poll concludes that Kerry's debate performance (perhaps combined with Bush's lack of one) made him a lot more likeable. With Kerry's favorability rating around 35 percent last month, the Drudge report equated the senator's public profile with that of a fallen Martha Stewart, as well as Joseph McCarthy and Herbert Hoover. It makes one wonder who Drudge would compare Bush to today, with more voters having "a favorable impression" of Kerry (52-40) than President Bush (49-46).
Even so, while the majority of voters Newsweek surveyed gave Kerry the lead overall and like him more, they still don't think he's a winner. Asked who was more likely to win in November, 55 percent said Bush, and only 29 percent said Kerry.
Finally, the Newsweek poll suggests that, with Friday's debate on the economy approaching, voters are a lot more open to John Kerry's economic plan than that of the incumbent. Fifty-two percent trust Kerry to successfully handle the economy, while only 39 percent trust Bush to do the same.
It's striking that nearly all of the tightest races are in states that are unabashedly Republican. The conventional wisdom was that the retirement of five southern Democratic Senators and the nomination of a northeastern Democrat would add up to a Republican Senate windfall. Part of the Dems' strategy appears to be distancing themselves from their own presidential nominee. Tom Daschle's campaign in South Dakota has run commercials showing the senate minority leader embracing President Bush, while Inez Tenenbaum's campaign slogan, "An independent voice for South Carolina," may only be a slightly more subtle way of saying "I'm not with John Kerry."
-- Jeff Horwitz
[11:34 PDT, Oct. 4, 2004]
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Who among us does not like making up quotes?
Avid New York Times readers probably recognize this quote from the paper of record's campaign coverage: "Who among us does not like NASCAR?"; or perhaps, "Who among us does not love NASCAR?" The paper has attributed some iteration of the quote to John Kerry in several opinion columns and news stories since March, always to make the point that try as he might, John Kerry just doesn't get the common, NASCAR-loving man, and when he tries to adopt a regular-guy persona, the result is laughably unconvincing.
Here are a few examples from the Times:
Maureen Dowd, March 18, 2004: Even when he puts on that barn jacket over his expensive suit to look less lockjaw -- and says things like, "Who among us doesn't like Nascar?" -- he can come across like Mr. Collins, Elizabeth Bennet's pretentious cousin in "Pride and Prejudice."
Sheryl Gay Stolberg, July 30, 2004: To anyone who has listened to Mr. Kerry extemporize at length -- who among us can forget his "Who among us doesn't like Nascar?" remark? -- the thought of the Brahmin from Boston disdaining speechwriters and trying humor seemed odd, shall we say, for the most important address of his career.
Frank Rich, Sept. 5, 2004: Mr. Kerry, having joined the macho game with Mr. Bush on the president's own cheesy terms, is hardly innocent in his own diminishment. From the get-go he's tried to match his opponent in stupid male tricks. If Mr. Bush clears brush in Crawford, then Mr. Kerry rides a Harley-Davidson onto Jay Leno's set. When the Democrat asks "Who among us does not love Nascar?" ..he is asking to be ridiculed as an ''International Man of Mystery."
And to show how ingrained the NASCAR quote has become in the Times' coverage of the Democratic candidate, the headline "Who Among Us Does Not Love Windsurfing?" was used (without further explanation within the story – because at this point, who needed it?) in a Sept. 5, 2004 piece that questioned Kerry's choice of recreational sports [ http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/weekinreview/05bigp.html?ex=1097035200&en=2f2f862bf612b132&... ].
A couple of weeks ago, a handful of liberal bloggers, including Atrios [ http://www.atrios.blogspot.com/2004_09_19_atrios_archive.html#109569934223732927 ] and Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler [ http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh092104.shtml ], questioned the accuracy of the Kerry quote. A Nexis search (we did one too) found that the "who among us" remark curiously seemed to originate with a Maureen Dowd column. Letters were sent to the Times public editor (we sent one, too). A search was on for some proof that Kerry actually said this. Well, it turns out he never did say it -- that's right, Kerry never made a statement that has now become 2004 campaign legend at the New York Times.
Bob Somerby has the story [ http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh100204.shtml ]: "We finally have the full information. Yes, Maureen Dowd invented that fake NASCAR quote -- the comical 'quote' from pretentious old Kerry."
-- Geraldine Sealey
[09:58 PDT, Oct. 4, 2004]
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Traditional GOP blocs question Bush in Fla.
Two newspaper articles, two historically-reliable Republican voting blocs Bush is having trouble with in Florida:
"On Sunday night, a surprising new ethnic thread wove itself into Florida's ever-complicated political fabric: the frustrated Arab American. Business owners, physicians, lawyers and others -- furious over the Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 policies that many believe unfairly target Muslims and Arab Americans in the government's quest to root out terrorists -- huddled in a hotel ballroom across the street from Disney World to demonstrate how much they wanted a change in the White House. The meeting, intended to be a bipartisan affair sponsored by the Washington-based Arab American Institute, turned into a cheering session for Democratic nominee Sen. John F. Kerry -- illustrating a dramatic shift in a traditionally Republican group 'I thought Bush was another Ronald Reagan on a small scale for what he believed in,' said Ashley Ansara, president of a clinical research company in Orlando. 'I found out he's no Reagan. Not even close.' He said this would be the first presidential election since he moved to the U.S. in 1973 that he wouldn't be voting Republican."
"Although President Bush is expected to win the majority of South Florida's Cuban-American vote, many Cuban-Americans have increasingly criticized his administration. That could be a problem for Bush, who by some estimates won about 80 percent of the Cuban vote in 2000. Any erosion of that support could be significant, since the 2000 presidential election was decided by just 537 votes."
"The turning point for Pezon, who met his wife about three years ago in Cuba and married her last year, was the recent policy that restricts Cuban-Americans to one family visit every three years. Before the change, Cubans could go once a year without a Treasury license, and each year Pezon received permission for additional visits. Because he thinks the Bush administration's policy is too harsh, Pezon is pinning his hopes on Kerry's promises to allow 'principled travel' to the island. 'If your mom is in Cuba and she's dying of some illness, you can't go,' Pezon said. 'Suppose your wife was having a child, you can't go. Life's not black and white, but the law now is like that.'"
-- Geraldine Sealey
[06:32 PDT, Oct. 4, 2004]
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Monday's must-reads
New York Times [ http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/04/politics/campaign/04vote.html?hp ]: Deadlines are fast approaching or have already passed in most states -- and the data show new voters are registering in droves. " ... How many of the newly registered will vote is a matter of some debate. But it is clear the pace is particularly high in urban areas of swing states, where independent Democratic groups and community organizations have been running a huge voter registration campaign for just over a year."
IHT [ http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=541735.html ]: New polls show John Kerry was widely viewed as the winner of the first presidential debate, and Bush's aides and surrogates set out on the Sunday shows to attack Kerry and attempt to slow his momentum.
Washington Post [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4587-2004Oct3.html ]: Conventional wisdom was that Tuesday's Cheney-Edwards debate would be merely an entertaining sideshow, but it takes on a new significance with pressure on Cheney to boost his ticket after Bush's less than stellar debate performance.
AFP [ http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20041003/ts_alt_afp/us_vote ]: "Already scrambling to make up ground lost after last week's debate, US President George W. Bush's campaign was forced further on the defensive by a report that the White House knew before invading Iraq that key intelligence on the country's alleged nuclear weapons program was questionable."
The Bush-Cheney campaign has never been shy about misrepresenting John Kerry's views. At the Republican National Convention, for instance, Zell Miller claimed that Kerry "has made it clear that he would use military force only if approved by the United Nations. " It's a reference to a quote from an interview Kerry gave to the Harvard Crimson 35 years ago -- and hence just as accurate as saying that George W. Bush "has made it clear that he likes to get drunk every night."
But even by the slippery standards of the Bush-Cheney camp, the president's latest misrepresentation about a Kerry position shows a remarkable willingness to veer from the truth. On the campaign trial this weekend, Bush has lambasted Kerry for what the Republicans call Kerry's "'global test' doctrine." In Ohio Saturday, Bush said: "In the debate, Senator Kerry said something revealing when he laid out the Kerry doctrine. He said -- he said that America has to pass a global test before we can use American troops to defend ourselves."
Only that's not what Kerry said. At Thursday night's debate, Kerry said that an American president "always has the right, and always has had the right, for pre-emptive strike." He said that he would never "cede away" the right "to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America." But, Kerry said, "you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reason."
Hear that, George? You've got to be able to "prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons." That's called the past tense -- as in, act now and ask questions later. What Kerry said -- what Kerry plainly meant -- was that the United States was free to take pre-emptive action if there was a legitimate reason for doing so, a reason so powerful that the world would understand.
Former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke held a conference call with reporters Saturday to set the record straight, but it shouldn't have been necessary. A few hours beforehand, the Bush-Cheney campaign sent around an email highlighting Bush's attack on Kerry. It included Bush's quotes from Ohio, followed immediately by the words Kerry actually said during the debate. One of these things was not like the other, but the Bush-Cheney campaign apparently thought no one would notice.
-- Tim Grieve
[11:57 PDT, Oct. 2, 2004]
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Fox News gives Kerry extreme makeover!
By now you've probably heard about the fake story that "chief political correspondent" Carl Cameron peddled on Fox News' Web site this morning -- you know, the one that had John Kerry making girlish (French?) pronouncements about his "manicures" and "pedicures." Josh Marshall [ http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_09_26.php#003556 ] is all over it. Fox has since pulled the piece and apologized, citing "fatigue and bad judgment," for quoting Kerry as saying the following:
"Women should like me! I do manicures."
"Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!"
"I'm metrosexual — [Bush's] a cowboy."
Note to pro-Bush bloggers: We're not sure exactly how many days without sleep it takes to read those lines as authentic -- but probably at least a couple more than it takes to determine whether they were churned out with a typewriter from the 1970s.
-- Mark Follman
[16:01 PDT, Oct. 1, 2004]
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White House message control on Iraq
In a story [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60725-2004Sep29.html ] yesterday -- likely buried by all the media coverage of the presidential debate -- the Washington Post reported that the Bush administration is redoubling its efforts to control and put a positive spin on public perception of the situation in Iraq. They're concentrating on Americans who are working the front lines:
"The Bush administration, battling negative perceptions of the Iraq war, is sending Iraqi Americans to deliver what the Pentagon calls 'good news' about Iraq to U.S. military bases, and has curtailed distribution of reports showing increasing violence in that country.
"Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's office has sent commanders of U.S. military facilities a five-page memorandum titled 'Guidance to Commanders.' The Pentagon, the memo says, is sponsoring a group of Iraqi Americans and former officials from the Coalition Provisional Authority to speak at military bases throughout the United States starting Friday to provide 'a first-hand account' of events in Iraq. The Iraqi Americans and the CPA officials worked on establishing the interim Iraqi government. The Iraqi Americans 'feel strongly that the benefits of the coalition efforts have not been fully reported,' the memo says.
"USAID said this week that it will restrict distribution of reports by contractor Kroll Security International showing that the number of daily attacks by insurgents in Iraq has increased. On Monday, a day after The Washington Post published a front-page story saying that 'the Kroll reports suggest a broad and intensifying campaign of insurgent violence,' a USAID official sent an e-mail to congressional aides stating: 'This is the last Kroll report to come in. After the WPost story, they shut it down in order to regroup. I'll let you know when it restarts.'"
And while President Bush chastised John Kerry during the debate Thursday about the notion that interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is some form of "puppet" leader, the Post reports that the Bush team in fact had a heavy hand in crafting a speech that Allawi gave during his recent visit to Washington.
"The unusual public-relations effort by the Pentagon and the U.S. Agency for International Development comes as details have emerged showing the U.S. government and a representative of President Bush's reelection campaign had been heavily involved in drafting the speech given to Congress last week by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. Combined, they indicate that the federal government is working assiduously to improve Americans' opinions about the Iraq conflict -- a key element of Bush's reelection message."
Bush administration spokesman Scott McClellan denied any White House involvement in the Allawi speech, according to the Post, "but administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the prime minister was coached and aided by the U.S. government, its allies and friends of the administration. Among them was Dan Senor, former spokesman for the CPA who has more recently represented the Bush campaign in media appearances. Senor, who has denied writing the speech, sent Allawi recommended phrases. He also helped Allawi rehearse in New York last week, officials said. Senor declined to comment."
-- Mark Follman
[15:33 PDT, Oct. 1, 2004]
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The "busting" of A.Q. Khan and other tall tales
When President Bush patted himself on the back last night for "busting" the "A.Q. Khan network," many of the 55 million Americans watching -- most of whom probably never heard of Mr. Khan -- probably thought that sounded pretty darn good. But who is this A. Q. Khan, and has his network been "brought to justice," as Bush claimed? Hardly.
Abdul Qadeer Khan, also known as the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, was pardoned by Pervez Musharraf after admitting he gave nuclear technology to other countries, including North Korea and Iran. Bush, who said last night that nuclear proliferation "in the hands of a terrorist" enemy was the greatest threat to our national security supported the pardon of A.Q. Khan [ http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/02/05/pakistan.nuclear/ ], even though he admittedly proliferated nuclear technology right into the hands of the last two nations standing in Bush's Axis of Evil.
Not only has Khan been pardoned, the Washington Post reports [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63944-2004Sep30.html ] that "not a single person involved in his network has been prosecuted anywhere." And just today, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency complained to the BBC [ http://www.dawn.com/2004/10/01/top1.htm ] that Pakistan won't even let the UN watchdog agency interview Khan.
Bush repeated his bogus claim that three-quarters of al-Qaida leadership have been "brought to justice." As we pointed out last month [ http://archive.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/09/09/zawahiri/ ] (he says this one a lot), a 9/11 commission member said of this line, it "sounds like it was pulled out of somebody's orifice."
The Progress Report [ http://www.progressreport.org/ ] has the goods on several Bush misstatements, quoting other news sources:
-- MISSTATING THE RATIONALE FOR WAR IN IRAQ: Bush tried to rebut Kerry about the prewar need for more patience on Iraq, saying diplomacy wouldn't have persuaded Saddam to disarm. Writes the Boston Globe, "It was almost as though the president has forgotten that no stockpiles of forbidden weapons have been found in Iraq."
-- MISSTATING VOTER REGISTRATION SUCCESS IN AFGHANISTAN: Bush stated, "10 million people have registered to vote in Afghanistan." The problem: most sources agree there aren't even 10 million eligible voters in the country ...
-- MISSTATING NORTH KOREA DIPLOMACY: Bush inexplicably claimed Kerry's proposal to have direct talks with North Korea would end the six-nation diplomacy that the administration has pursued over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions, claiming it would also "drive away China, a key player in the negotiations." He was unable to explain this charge, however."
-- MISSTATING NUCLEAR NONPROLIFERATION EFFORTS: Last night, Bush said he'd increased spending by "about 35 percent" on nonproliferation efforts since he took office. The Washington Post points out that in his first budget, "he proposed a 13 percent cut -- about $116 million -- and much of the increases since then have been added by Congress."
"Bush glossed over significant problems with US reconstruction efforts in Iraq when he claimed that the US is 'spending money' and that 100,000 Iraqi security forces have been trained. And Kerry overstated the case when he said Bush allowed Osama bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora by "outsourcing" fighting to Afghans. Bush misquoted Kerry, distorting his position on withdrawing troops from Iraq. And Kerry said the Iraq war has cost $200 billion, when the cost so far is actually just over $120 billion."
But a number of conservatives are calling it like they saw it -- and it ain't pretty for their man.
Jay Nordlinger [ http://www.nationalreview.com/nordlinger/nordlinger200410010114.asp ], managing editor of the right-wing flagship National Review magazine, wrote up his thoughts immediately following the debate, without talking to anyone else or listening to other commentary. He said that an effective, relaxed Kerry "spoke clearly, and at a nice pace," while Bush, "a little desperate," pulled a Dan Quayle. (Ouch.) Here is part of his take on the president's quagmire in Coral Gables:
"I thought Kerry did very, very well; and I thought Bush did poorly -- much worse than he is capable of doing. Listen: If I were just a normal guy -- not Joe Political Junkie -- I would vote for Kerry. On the basis of that debate, I would. If I were just a normal, fairly conservative, war-supporting guy: I would vote for Kerry.
"Kerry went right to the alliances. He emphasized the importance of such relationships. At least you can't accuse him of succumbing to Republican mockery on the subject, of shucking this core conviction of his. Bush, throughout the evening, as Kerry spoke, had that pursed and annoyed look. I think it must have driven many people crazy. ...
"Bush said, 'We're makin' progress' a hundred times -- that seemed a little desperate. He also said 'mixed messages' a hundred times -- I was wishing that he would mix his message. He said, 'It's hard work,' or, 'It's tough,' a hundred times. In fact, Bush reminded me of Dan Quayle in the 1988 debate, when the Hoosier repeated a couple of talking points over and over, to some chuckles from the audience.
"Staying on message is one thing; robotic repetition -- when there are oceans of material available -- is another… I hate to say it, but often Bush gave the appearance of being what his critics charge he is: callow, jejune, unserious. And remember -- talk about repetition! -- I concede this as someone who loves the man.
"Bush was weary -- harmfully weary, I think. He let a million opportunities go by."
(Did we say, ouch?) Read Nordlinger's entire lengthy analysis -- it's honest, and it's brutal.
And how about those critical women voters? "Bush blew an opportunity," was the assessment of Janice Shaw Crouse [ http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/crouse200410010856.asp ], spokesperson for the Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee:
"Bush was inexplicably unfocused; he lacked energy and seemed distracted. He didn't seem prepared. He struggled to talk knowledgeably about his record -- his clearly outstanding record. Bush virtually sleepwalked through the debates, only occasionally mustering up the passion to hammer home his points.
"The president allowed John Kerry to set the agenda and ended up on the defensive. He simply needed to be presidential and stand on his record; instead he repeatedly answered his opponent and bowed to Kerry's agenda. …
"The net outcome is that Kerry exceeded expectations; he skillfully, if not honestly, addressed all the accusations against him. Bush did not live up to expectations; he did not even seem presidential. The Bush campaign had hoped to seal the election with the first debate; instead, it is going to be a long road to November 2."
While the mainstream media trips over itself today to be "fair" in its post-debate assessments, at least some conservatives know reality TV when they see it: "The Bush Blowout" has been cancelled.
-- Mark Follman
[11:48 PDT, Oct. 1, 2004]
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"Faces of frustration"
Before last night's debate, we wrote a post suggesting [ http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2004/09/30/debate_rules/... ] (we were only half-serious at the time, we will admit) that with all of the tight rules and regs surrounding the forum, the networks' decision to ditch the debate commission rules and show renegade "cutaway shots" of whichever candidate wasn't speaking could actually make the whole thing more interesting ... well, it did. George W. Bush seemed to learn nothing from the treatment Al Gore got four years ago when he sighed and fidgeted during his opponent's answers. Now, Bush is the one getting gored for smirking, blinking, and appearing agitated while Kerry spoke.
Last night after the debate, the pundits almost instantly set in on Bush's apparent "smirking," as Wolf Blitzer said. As ABC's The Note pointed out this morning, three Florida (swing state!) newspapers noted Bush's facial expressions in their lead debate coverage, with the Jacksonville paper [ http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/100104/met_16790590.shtml ] saying "Bush appeared to grimace or sigh sometimes at Kerry's rips on his record." And Knight-Ridder's Ron Hutcheson [ http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002051070_debateanal01.html ] wrote that Bush "frowned, pursed his lips and bit the inside of his cheek as Kerry attacked the president's performance in office again and again." The New York Times' Alessandra Stanley wrote [ http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/01/politics/campaign/01teevee.html?adxnnl=1&oref=login&adxnnl... ]: "The cameras demonstrated that Mr. Bush cannot hear criticism without frowning, blinking and squirming (he even sighed once). They showed that Mr. Kerry can control his anger and stay cool but that he cannot suppress his inner overeager A student, flashing a bleach-white smile and nodding hungrily at each question."
And Democrats have spliced all of Bush's shifting and smirking into a video montage called "Faces of Frustration [ http://www.democrats.org/ ]."
Reaction to Bush's clear discomfort last night is certainly not at fever pitch, not the overarching media storyline Gore's sighing was in 2000 (although Saturday Night Live hasn't had its way with Bush's smirks yet) but it's got to be enough to bug the bejeezus out of Bush's staff who took pains to prevent this very thing from happening -- to prevent us from seeing Bush when he thinks the cameras aren't on.
-- Geraldine Sealey
[10:23 PDT, Oct. 1, 2004]
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Archived War Room:[F6 note -- links appear at this location on the page; use link below]
The vice president declines to refute Edwards during the debate.
By Chris Suellentrop Posted Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2004, at 12:50 AM PT
CLEVELAND—Does Dick Cheney know that he told voters watching the vice presidential debate to go to GeorgeSoros.com? In response to a series of attacks from John Edwards on Cheney's tenure as CEO of Halliburton, the vice president said that Kerry and Edwards "know the charges are false. They know that if you go, for example, to factcheck.com, an independent Web site sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania, you can get the specific details with respect to Halliburton." One problem with Cheney's rebuttal: He misspoke. He meant to say "factcheck.org.," rather than ".com." George Soros capitalized on Cheney's error, snatched up the URL, and now if you type "factcheck.com [ http://www.factcheck.com/ ]" into your browser, you get redirected to a page titled, "Why we must not re-elect President Bush: a personal message from George Soros."
But maybe Cheney was lucky to have misspoken, because there was a larger problem with his response: It isn't true. Well, it is true that factcheck.org provides "specific details [ http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=261 ] with respect to Halliburton," but those details have nothing to do with the charges Edwards made. The Democratic running mate said that Halliburton, while Cheney was CEO, "did business with sworn enemies of the United States, paid millions of dollars in fines for providing false financial information, it's under investigation for bribing foreign officials." All factcheck.org rebuts is a different charge, that Cheney collected $2 million from Halliburton "as vice president." It turns out that Cheney collected a good chunk of that money as vice president-elect, including nearly $1.5 million on Jan. 18, 2001, two days before his inauguration.
After the debate, Bush campaign communications director Nicole Devenish repeats Cheney's statement and directs reporters to factcheck.org for the details. I've already been to factcheck.org, I tell her, and it says nothing about what Edwards said, about trading with the enemy, about bribing foreign officials, about providing false financial information. She tells me to go to debatefacts.com [ http://www.debatefacts.com/ ], the Bush-Cheney rapid-response Web site. The answers are all there.
Except they're not. "The Facts [ http://www.georgewbush.com/debatefacts/Debate.aspx?stamp=10/5/2004%2011:20:52%20PM ]" page at the Bush-Cheney debate site doesn't get Edwards' claims correctly either: "Edwards' Claim: The Department Of Defense's Contracting Process In Iraq Is Rife With Cronyism And Secrecy," it says. Did Edwards claim that? I thought he said Cheney traded with the enemy, bribed foreign officials, and provided false financial information. On those charges, the Bush-Cheney campaign has no answers, at least not tonight.
The exchange on "factcheck.com" was the debate writ small in many ways: Edwards would make a charge, and Cheney would have no answer for it. In debate, that's called a "dropped argument." Cheney left arguments all over the floor. Three times, when offered a chance to respond to something Edwards had said, Cheney declined, leaving Edwards' critique to stand on its own. Edwards went through a long list of votes that Cheney made as a congressman: against Head Start, against banning plastic weapons that can pass through metal detectors, against Meals on Wheels, against the Department of Education, against Martin Luther King Day, against the release of Nelson Mandela. What else was he against, longer recess? Cheney declined to defend or explain a single one of his votes. On gay marriage, Edwards said the constitutional amendment proposed by the president was unnecessary, divisive, and an attempt to distract the country from important issues such as health care, jobs, and Iraq. Cheney declined to refute any of Edwards' points, and instead thanked him for his kind words about his family. On homeland security, Edwards said the administration has failed to create a unified terrorist watch list, and it foolishly screens the passengers on airplanes but not their cargo. We need to be not just "strong and aggressive" but also "smart," he said. Cheney's response: to decline a chance to respond, which is the same as ceding the point.
When Cheney did have an answer, it was often a misleading one, just like factcheck.com. On one occasion, Cheney said the Kerry-Edwards tax plan would raise taxes on 900,000 small businesses, and he said that was a bad idea because small businesses create 7 out of 10 jobs in America. But the two statements have nothing to do with each other. Those 900,000 small businesses—double the real number that would be affected, according to CNN—don't create 70 percent of the nation's jobs. On another occasion, Cheney criticized Kerry for supporting defense cuts that Cheney supported as secretary of defense during the first Bush administration. Other statements were simply false, rather than merely deceptive or misleading. For example, Cheney said he had never asserted a connection between 9/11 and Iraq. That's not true. Cheney said he had never met Edwards before. That's not true.
Edwards didn't have a perfect debate. Cheney defended himself and the administration capably during the opening questions about Iraq and the war on terror, and I was disappointed when Edwards failed to give an answer to Cheney's criticism that he and Kerry have no plan to deal with state sponsors of terror. And Edwards got mauled when Cheney said Edwards, by saying that 90 percent of the casualties in Iraq were American, was saying that the deaths of Iraqi soldiers fighting with the U.S. "shouldn't count."
We're halfway through the debates, and I think that each side still has one big question that it hasn't answered. Kerry and Edwards haven't given an adequate explanation of how they would approach states that sponsor terrorism and harbor terrorism. If Iraq was the wrong country to focus on, what was the right country? Just Afghanistan? Or do they support a broader Bob Graham-style war against Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist organizations? If regime change isn't the right policy for dealing with state sponsors of terror, what is? Would a Kerry-Edwards administration wage a "war on terror," or just a war on al-Qaida?
The question for Bush and Cheney is the same, but from the opposite side. Where does their war stop? When does it end? How do we measure victory? Most important, what is their answer to a question that Edwards posed and Cheney ignored: "There are 60 countries who have members of al-Qaida in them. How many of those countries are we going to invade?"
Chris Suellentrop is Slate's deputy Washington bureau chief. You can e-mail him at suellentrop@slate.com.
The failure of the press to ask basic questions about the accuracy of comments made during last night's debate gave Vice President Cheney a significant advantage because, as it turns out, much of what he said doesn't pass the sniff test.
Cheney: "Now, in my capacity as vice president, I am the president of Senate, the presiding officer. I'm up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they're in session."
Dick Cheney was absent as presiding officer of the Senate all but 2 times since taking office in 2001.
Click here for the list of presiding officers and the dates they have filled in for Cheney since 2001 [ http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/10/6/11163/2940 ].. Observant readers will note that Cheney has not actually presided at the Senate since 2002.
"The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight."
Addressing the National Prayer Breakast, Cheney said: "Thank you. Thank you very much. Congressman Watts, Senator Edwards, friends from across America and distinguished visitors to our country from all over the world, Lynne and I honored to be with you all this morning." [FDCH Political Transcripts, Cheney Remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast, 2/1/01]
Cheney: "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11"
"If we're successful in Iraq, if we can stand up a good representative government in Iraq, that secures the region so that it never again becomes a threat to its neighbors or to the United States, so it's not pursuing weapons of mass destruction, so that it's not a safe haven for terrorists, now we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11." Dick Cheney, Meet the Press, 11/14/03
Cheney: "You made the comment that the Gulf War coalition in '91 was far stronger than this. No. We had 34 countries then; we've got 30 today. We've got troops beside us."
The coalition troop strength of non-American forces in the 1991 Gulf War was roughly 150,000. Non-American coalition forces currently account for less than 20,000 of the current deployment of troops in Iraq. The American taxpayer is responsible for $200 billion in costs for the current war in Iraq, in 1991, the American taxpayer paid less than $8 billion.
Cheney: "The reason they keep mentioning Halliburton is because they're trying to throw up a smokescreen. They know the charges are false.
"They know that if you go, for example, to factcheck.com (sic), an independent Web site sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania, you can get the specific details with respect to Halliburton.
"It's an effort that they've made repeatedly to try to confuse the voters and to raise questions, but there's no substance to the charges."
From Today's FactCheck.org Dispatch:
Cheney got our domain name wrong -- calling us "FactCheck.com" -- and wrongly implied that we had rebutted allegations Edwards was making about what Cheney had done as chief executive officer of Halliburton.
In fact, we did post an article pointing out that Cheney hasn't profited personally while in office from Halliburton's Iraq contracts, as falsely implied by a Kerry TV ad. But Edwards was talking about Cheney's responsibility for earlier Halliburton troubles. And in fact, Edwards was mostly right.
Cheney: "About 900,000 small businesses will be hit if you do, in fact, do what they want to do with the top bracket."
"900,000 is an inflated figure that results from counting every high-income individual who reports even $1 of business income as a "small business owner." Even Cheney and his wife Lynne would qualify as a "small business owner" under that definition because Mrs. Cheney reports income as a "consultant" from fees she collects as a corporate board member, even though she had no employees and the business income is only 3.5% of the total income reported on their 2003 tax returns." FactCheck.org
Cheney: "The president has been deeply concerned about (AIDS). He has moved and proposed and gotten through the Congress authorization for $15 billion to help in the international effort"
"The $15-billion figure was to be spread over five years -- and when it came to asking for money to be actually appropriated and spent Bush sought only $2 billion for the fiscal year that just ended." FactCheck.org
Cheney: "The Kerry record on taxes is one basically of voting for a large number of tax increases -- 98 times in the United States Senate."
"Of the 98 votes "for tax increases," 43 would not actually have increased taxes. They were for budget bills to set target levels for spending and taxes in the coming fiscal years. The Bush campaign also exploits the complexity of the parliamentary voting system to pad the number. Most of the 98 votes were on procedural measures, such as votes to end debate or votes on amendments, and not on passage of the measure itself. More than once, the 98-vote total counts half a dozen votes or more on on a single bill." - FactCheck.org
Conclusion: There are liars, damned liars, and then there is Dick Cheney.
Vice President Dick Cheney answers a question during the vice presidential debate in Cleveland Tuesday night.
Poked and prodded by his younger opponent, Old Dick lets loose clouds of steam and ash but doesn't blow.
By Joyce McGreevy
Oct. 6, 2004 / The man known as "only a heartbeat and a jumpstart" away from the presidency called Democratic Sen. John Edwards to account for his impertinent truth-telling Tuesday evening in a debate at Case Western University.
Conceding the point, Edwards recognized Dick Cheney's most notable and enduring campaign strategy, saying, "Mr. Vice President, you are still not being straight with the American people."
Throughout the 90-minute debate, Cheney drew on his long experience, carpet-bombing the proceedings with magnificent mendacity. Whether claiming never to have met John Edwards or denying that he had frequently made a false connection between Iraq and September 11, the front end of the Cheney-Bush racehorse was out to show that he could have his yellowcake and delete it too.
Cheney also proved himself the expert at directing many answers under the table, the better to highlight his preferred location for making deals. At other times the vice president, who suffers from prolonged lack of exposure to all known light sources, folded himself neatly into his own skin while simultaneously executing an upward glower, a downward bite, and a sideways utterance. This left Edwards, the political neophyte, with no choice but to look the American people square in the eye and speak plainly. Indeed, Edwards looked every inch a Portrait of the Senator as a Young Man to Cheney’s older, more developed Portrait of Dorian Gray.
The debate, which took place in what now ranks as the most impoverished city in the nation, as well as the state that has lost nearly a quarter of a million jobs under Bush and Cheney, and which has had 37 soldiers killed in Iraq, asked the difficult question: which presidency might better serve America? Queried on this point in a national poll, several unemployed, impoverished, hungry, beaten-down, undecideds -- who had been intimidated by elections officials, held up for $7.4 trillion dollars, had their children carried away by flying monkeys, and seen Karl Rove in a bi-plane skywriting the words, “Surrender, Democrats” -- said that they were “still not sure." A few ventured that they would have a better understanding of the facts once somebody had hit them on the head with a large billboard emblazoned with the words “Soylent Green is . . . . People!"
For the most part, Cheney was eager to discuss the benefits of staying the course in the war on global terrorism, which, of all the wars he’s loved before, is clearly his favorite. Brushing aside the fact that, thanks to the administration’s rush to divert military resources to Iraq, Afghanistan is a drug-dealing, warlord-ridden killing ground with a growing number of hiding places for Osama bin Laden, Cheney offered voters his most optimistic vision of the future yet -- namely, that one day, this too could become another El Salvador.
“El Salvador is a whale of a lot better because we held free elections," gushed the vice president, rising up from the depths of his own drivel with a firm slab of blubber clenched between his pearly whites. “The power of that concept is enormous," he gnashed gnawingly, "and it will apply in Afghanistan. And it will apply as well in Iraq. Void where prohibited in Ohio or Florida. This offer not good to anyone who has not signed the loyalty oath."
As Edwards repeatedly poked at Cheney’s murmuring continuum of schlock and jaw, the vice president continued to rumble, letting loose clouds of steam and ash that, according to scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, were visible from 200 miles away.
Yet it was the Veep of Creep who managed to provoke Edwards, prompting the senator to herald Cheney’s undeniably strong voting record. As Edwards acknowledged, “When [Cheney] was one of 435 members of the United States House, he was one of 10 to vote against Head Start, one of four to vote against banning plastic weapons that can pass through metal detectors. He voted against the Department of Education. He voted against funding for Meals on Wheels for seniors. He voted against a holiday for Martin Luther King. He voted against a resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa."
To be fair, Edwards failed to point out that Cheney did vote in favor of making “Go f**k yourself" the official bumper sticker of Reggie the Voter Rig.
Still, there were indications that Cheney might actually be tiring of working a double shift in the Rove-al Office. At one point, in response to Edwards’ comments about Halliburton, now under several criminal investigations arising from activities that occurred during Cheney's tenure as CEO, the vice president encouraged anyone interested in getting "specific details" to visit www.factcheck.com, a site funded by Democratic philanthropist George Soros. Visitors to the site were greeted with compelling testimony entitled “President Bush is endangering our safety, hurting our vital interests, and undermining American values. Plus, he’s got Texas toast between his ears."
Which may explain a curious silence on Cheney’s part. Twice Edwards mentioned Kerry in response to the one question for which moderator Gwen Ifill asked that there be no reference to either man’s running mate. And while Edwards mentioned Kerry by name dozens of times in the course of the debate. Cheney, for reasons unknown to anyone not yet born, took great pains to avoid mentioning Bush at all. (Memo to Bush: And you thought Kerry forgetting Poland was significant.)
He did, however, give a shout-out to “some precinct committeemen in Iowa” to emphasize that he couldn’t care less what such people thought about him. It was one of just many heart-stopping moments when Big Dick took out his true feelings for the American people and waved it in their faces.
Edwards closed with a message of hope for a weary nation that misses its loved ones, its jobs, its democracy, and the days when “Dumb and Dumber” was a movie, not foreign and domestic policies. Ever the statesman, Cheney assured voters that a Kerry victory might lead to terrorists bringing a nuclear bomb into a major American city and killing hundreds of thousands of people. Whether this would disrupt e-Bay access, a key economic indicator according to Cheney, he did not say.
Afterward, Edwards posed for photographs with his children while Cheney made haste to rejoin the children of the night. Asked about Cheney’s whereabouts, Defense Secretary Donald “Did I Know Anything? And If So When Did I Know It?” Rumsfeld commented, “He has migrated in the most amazing way.”
Pressed as to whether Cheney might have stopped off somewhere to pick up an ounce of credibility and then returned home to help Bush finish his homework, Rumsfeld looked thoughtful. "To my knowledge," he said, “I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two."
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About the writer Joyce McGreevy is a Salon columnist.
The vice president's fantasy of world domination via control of oil stems from his formative years in the shadow Cold War.
By James K. Galbraith
Oct. 5, 2004 / History's final verdict on George W. Bush may well be to dismiss him as a frontman who was not quite up to his job. But nothing like that will be said of Dick Cheney. Cheney is undeniably intelligent, powerful and shrewd -- a force to be reckoned with, even though he has operated mainly in the shadows.
The key to understanding Cheney is that he is a throwback -- to a brand of strategic thinking that bedeviled the Cold War. He is part of the legacy that runs back to Generals Curtis LeMay and Thomas Power of the Strategic Air Command in the late 1950s. The two tenets of this legacy are absolutely consistent: 1) Overestimate the enemy and govern through fear, and 2) hit the enemy before it can hit you. In four words: "missile gap" and "first strike."
That school never quite seized control of American strategic policy while the Soviet Union existed, though it came close on several occasions, including the Cuban missile crisis. It often won budget and political battles through trickery, such as the CIA Team B exercise of the early 1980s, which led to the "Star Wars" missile defense program. But the first strike never happened. In the end cooler and wiser heads, from Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson through Nixon and Reagan, always saw the advantages of working with Soviet leaders to prevent war.
Economic competition with the Soviet bloc followed the logic of warfare. The Soviet Union represented an alternative industrial system, capable of absorbing the world's oil, gold, uranium and other strategic resources. Denying it access to key supplies -- oil in the Middle East, gold in South Africa, uranium in Zaire -- was the cornerstone of covert strategy in those years, dictating many ugly political choices. This too formed Cheney. It helps explain why, as late as 1986, he opposed a congressional resolution pressing for the release of Nelson Mandela from his South African prison.
The larger economic balance of the Cold War was a third element in Cheney's upbringing. With the non-Communist industrial countries, the United States cut a simple bargain. We provided security -- including naval control of the oceans and a nuclear umbrella over Europe and Japan. They in turn tolerated a dollar-based world financial system, permitting the United States to live far above its productive powers. America's perpetual trade deficits were balanced, in simple terms, by the bomb and the fleet.
Ten years after the Soviet Union collapsed, the shadowy hard men of the Cold War finally came into uncontested power in the United States. And to our tragic cost, they brought unchanged thinking to a radically different world. The puzzle was how to force the new reality into the old frame. Their solution? To re-create in the minds of the public a world that would resemble, as much as possible, the dangerous but politically familiar one in which they had been formed.
Before Sept. 11, 2001, Bush and Cheney were searching for an enemy that could generate an appropriate level of fear. North Korea was an early candidate. Bush in his first days refused to support South Korea's "sunshine initiative" for improving relations with North Korea and used the supposed North Korean missile threat as the prime lever behind Cheney's key military priority at that time, missile defense. Reality, however, intruded: Kim Jong-Il could not fill Stalin's shoes. So China got a tryout too, with much tub-thumping about a supposedly growing threat to Taiwan. But then came the EP-3 incident, when a U.S. Navy spy plane was forced to land on Hainan Island, and the Chinese interned the crew and dissected the aircraft. This seems to have persuaded Team Cheney that Team China was apt to make them look like fools.
Sept. 11 put all of this into the background.
Although the "global war on terror" was rooted in a real event, it was conducted in a way fundamentally oriented to the political opportunities this event created rather than the actual dangers it revealed. Thus the administration's neglect of port security, the squeeze on first responders, the negligence at Tora Bora in Afghanistan, the flippant attitude toward the nuclear risks in Russian stockpiles and Pakistani labs. Thus the pathetic system of colored alerts and the roundup and detention of irrelevant people, not a single one of whom has been convicted of a terrorism-related offense in the three years since.
Rule through fear remains an essential part of Cheney's message; he reiterates it every day on the stump. But three years after Sept. 11, the message no longer resonates. It has come to sound, to most Americans, like an excuse for failure in every other sphere. And overseas, the clash of civilizations has never worked as a cry for the mobilization of the West. The major European states are not conned, and neither is Japan. They have much more experience of political terror than we do -- and they realize that the job of rolling up the terror networks belongs, for the most part, to the national and international police. For this reason, the global bargain that held up the dollar through the Cold War is imperiled. You can be sure that Cheney has no idea how to restore it.
Cheney's actual conduct in Iraq recaptures almost exactly the two operational doctrines of the shadow Cold War. It is now obvious that his strategic vision centers on physical control of the world's oil. And his justification for the attack on Iraq, delivered on Aug. 26, 2002, was a pure statement of the hidden doctrine of the first strike.
Maps of Iraq's oil fields and lists of foreign companies doing business there were found in the archives of Cheney's Energy Task Force. What does this prove? First, that the task force was not solely concerned with domestic energy policy and regulation, as it was said to be. It was, at least in part, a forum for considering the control of global oil. At worst, the maps and lists constitute prima facie evidence that the conquest of Iraq was on the corporate agenda from the beginning of the Bush years.
But why? What advantage would the United States get from boots on the ground in the oil fields? It may seem a naive question, but it is not.
It is theoretically possible that Cheney supported an invasion of Iraq purely for corporate gain -- to secure reserves for Big Oil and services contracts for Halliburton and Bechtel. I don't believe this. At least, I don't believe the evidence is yet sufficient to convict. But it will be interesting to get to the moment -- early in the next administration, let's presume -- when the Energy Task Force archives can be fully examined and we can know for sure.
It's more likely, though, that Cheney simply applied the doctrine of resource control with which he grew up to the world that exists today -- without asking what it means in the new global economy.
Today, there is only one major Communist country -- the People's Republic of China. But 25 years after it began economic reforms, China is thoroughly integrated into the dollar world. Does China have a problem getting oil? Not at all. Nor will it so long as Chinese goods sell on American markets and oil can be bought with dollars.
So who is benefiting from our expenditure of blood and treasure on Iraq's oil fields? So long as the strategy works, anyone with whom we do business. Including China, of course, even though not a single People's Liberation Army soldier need ever set foot away from Chinese soil.
The problem is, the strategy is failing. The effort to control the oil fields is leading, very rapidly, to increasing oil prices, a permanent volatility of supply and an inflationary slowdown in economic activity both in the United States and abroad.
The implications are simple. We can live with any security system that permits oil to come to market in an orderly way. Even though none of the Middle East oil regimes is security safe, the West can, and does, buy oil from Iran. It could, and did, buy oil from Saddam Hussein. It buys oil from the Saudis, despite their misuse of some of the revenues to finance a global network of terror. Security issues are raised by each of these cases. But the security risks can't be dealt with by physical occupation of oil fields.
Obviously, Cheney doesn't get this at all.
So let's return to that Aug. 26, 2002, speech, in which Cheney sought to justify a military invasion of Iraq on grounds of America's national security. His speech emphasized the threat posed by Saddam to the United States stemming from his pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons; his concealment of that pursuit; his persistent plotting to foil and frustrate U.N. inspectors; and his appalling record of regional aggression, against Iran and then against Kuwait. Cheney wrapped these factors into a frightening bundle of conclusions:
"Should all of Saddam Hussein's aggressive ambitions be realized, the implications would be enormous, for the Middle East, for the United States, and for the peace of the world. The whole range of weapons of mass destruction then would rest in the hands of a dictator who has already shown his willingness to use such weapons, and has done so, both in his war with Iran and against his own people. Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and seated atop 10 percent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies, directly threaten America's friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail."
According to Cheney, Saddam was an ambitious, aggressive, dangerous man with access to vast wealth and technical capacities, including WMD. There was the threat that he would someday soon choke off our access -- and that of our friends and allies -- to the oil on which we rely, defending his position with "nuclear blackmail." Therefore, Cheney concluded, the United States must act, lest by waiting it find itself helpless against the man and the weapons he might soon control.
The threat to our supply of oil was, on the surface, an impressive argument -- by far the leading edge of the Bush administration's case for war. But Cheney and others did not ask the obvious question: To whom would Saddam sell his oil, if not on the world market? The alternative customer -- the Soviet empire -- was no longer in existence! Would he hold it in the ground and starve?
As we now know, the supposed facts that Cheney advanced were not true, and should have been suspect at the time. But the underlying principle did not depend on whether his combination of psychological inference, history and current information was correct, for Cheney believed we were entitled to act on presumption and inference. Cheney held -- and holds today -- that America's responsibility is to assume the worst, and to act today to prevent the worst, on the off-chance that the assumption might be correct.
This is the meaning of the declaration -- at the outset of the Aug. 26 speech, at West Point and elsewhere by Bush -- that the "old doctrines of security do not apply." Cheney clarified:
"In the days of the Cold War, we were able to manage the threat with strategies of deterrence and containment. But it's a lot tougher to deter enemies who have no country to defend. And containment is not possible when dictators obtain weapons of mass destruction, and are prepared to share them with terrorists who intend to inflict catastrophic casualties on the United States."
The claim that "containment is not possible when dictators obtain weapons of mass destruction" was false on its face. What about the Soviet Union? That country, governed by dictators, had many such weapons. And yet it was contained with great success for four decades. The Soviet Union collapsed in the end without inflicting so much as a single external casualty from any of these weapons. Nor did the Soviets ever contemplate sharing agents of mass destruction with terrorists, despite manifold Western fantasies (and James Bond movies) to that effect.
But Cheney's assertion, though nonsensical as stated, was not inconsistent with his core beliefs. He had always rejected the doctrines of deterrence and containment -- even as they applied to the Soviet Union. His position in 2002 was not a new one, crafted by strategists thinking afresh about the world after the Cold War. It was, instead, a direct return to the fantasy of world domination, powered by the atomic monopoly, that took hold in American military minds in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and that threatened the security and survival of the world for 20 years after that.
Preventive self-defense is nothing else than the most dangerous subterranean tendency of Cold War bombardiers LeMay and Power, who favored an unprovoked first strike against the Soviet Union. It is the doctrine rightly ridiculed in "Dr. Strangelove," resurrected and brought to you live in the nightmare we call Iraq.
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About the writer James K. Galbraith is Salon's economics correspondent. He teaches at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
By Thomas Oliphant, Globe Columnist / October 7, 2004
THE BIG moment, like so many Dick Cheney moments in recent years, turned out to be a flat-out falsehood.
From the audience, I could sense that after a poor, defensive start, the once-steady and reassuring vice president, who threw his credibility into the trash can during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, was building to a memorized zinger from his Wyoming practice sessions because he was using uncharacteristically political language and completely dodging the issue presented in the debate's ninth question - about the endless Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
After John Edwards had demonstrated his command of the issue in his own response, Cheney responded by attacking, of all things, Edwards's attendance record in the Senate, reciting his handlers' catchy name for him, Senator Gone, and then, after a dramatic pause, concluding: ''The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.''
Off camera, Cheney grinned smugly in self-congratulation.
Today, however, he is explaining all the occasions in and out of the Senate when the two were in fact together - many of them recited with great glee to a cheering crowd by Elizabeth Edwards at a post-debate rally. The great, planned moment for Cheney turned out to be on a par with weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein's nonrole in the 9/11 attacks, Iraq's nonties to Iraq, and the millions of Iraqis waiting to welcome the invading Americans.
Cheney's falsehood was in total contrast to the counter-attack Edwards used after the vice president's defining moment had passed. If you want to talk records, he obliged by listing some of Cheney's most bizarre decisions as a member of the House of Representatives: one of 10 members (out of 435) to vote against Head Start, one of four to oppose banning plastic weapons designed to fool metal detectors, against money for the Meals on Wheels program for senior citizens, against a federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King, and against a resolution calling for the release of then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela.
The reason behind Cheney's dramatic misstatement of an easily verifiable fact is revealing. It helps explain why Cheney's performance overall may have been helpful to George Bush in its appeal to already rabid Republicans, but why Edwards's was more helpful to John Kerry in its stronger appeal to the undecided or still-persuadable.
In the preceding exchange Edwards had the temerity to raise the issue that drives Cheney nuts - Halliburton, the continuously in-trouble conglomerate Cheney used to run and still gets lucrative deferred compensation from.
Unlike Cheney, Edwards is not spending today explaining any falsehoods.
Despite the desires by some Democrats for a Halliburton festival in the debate, Edwards brought it up only twice, each time as a counter-attack. And each time he displayed the attention to detail that used to characterize Cheney until he took office.
The first mention followed another memorized zinger from Cheney. This one concerned last year's famous $87 billion appropriation to partially fund the escalating costs of the mess in Iraq. Out of the blue, Cheney claimed to have discovered that the only reason Edwards and Kerry voted against the final version of the measure was because Howard Dean was doing well in the polls at the time.
Edwards cited more specific, and verifiable concerns. One of them happened to be the fact that nearly half the $20 billion portion of the bill targeted for ''reconstruction'' was a $7.5 billion, no-bid contract for Halliburton.
The second mention came in response to a fudged Cheney answer to a question from moderator Gwen Ifill noting his opposition while he was Halliburton CEO to US sanctions against terrorism-supporting, nuclear weapons-developing Iran.
Cheney fudged the issue by ''explaining'' that his opposition was to unilateral sanctions, not the current, international penalties Iran faces that may even be increased. That answer failed to note that as CEO Cheney made no such distinction in his crusade against policies that restricted Halliburton's international business.
Edwards took advantage of the opening. He said he and Kerry opposed the current, no-bid, problem-plagued deal with Halliburton for several reasons. He said that for accounting practices while Cheney was CEO the company paid millions of dollars in fines. That is accurate ($7.5 million to be precise).
Edwards said that the company did business with Libya and Iran while they were ''sworn enemies'' of the United States. That is accurate.
He said Halliburton is under federal investigation for allegedly bribing foreign officials during that period. That is accurate.
And he said that Halliburton has been granted a highly unusual exemption from the normal practice of withholding partial payment under existing contracts to companies that are under formal investigation. That is also accurate.
I am always diligent about disclosing the fact that my daughter works for the Kerry-Edwards campaign, but for five years before she made that career move I had noticed something about John Edwards that is much more relevant to Tuesday evening's debate. In all my dealings with him since he ran for the Senate in 1998, I have never once had to begin a paragraph with those damning words: Edwards later explained.
As he was famously while a lawyer, he is fanatically meticulous in his preparation and research into issues. That, much more than his sunny disposition, is why he so clearly belonged on that stage here.
I haven't the slightest idea which ticket will win next month, but Edwards helped Kerry far more than Cheney helped Bush in their debate here.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.
43.6 million tuned in to watch Edwards, Cheney have it out
10:39 PM CDT on Wednesday, October 6, 2004
By ED BARK / The Dallas Morning News
The veep candidates proved to be VIPs with viewers.
Despite going against a baseball playoff game, Tuesday's debate between Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. John Edwards drew a major league crowd of 43.6 million viewers. That easily surpassed the 29 million for 2000's lone vice presidential faceoff between Mr. Cheney and Sen. Joe Lieberman.
Cheney-Edwards also had more viewers than four of the five presidential debates in 1996 and 2000. Only 2000's first encounter between George W. Bush and Al Gore had a higher TV turnout, with 46.6 million viewers.
Nielsen Media Research ratings for Tuesday night's debate represent the combined audience on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News Channel, CNN and MSNBC.
NBC led the way in the broadcast network competition with 11.5 million viewers, followed by ABC (10.3 million) and CBS (9.2 million). In the cable universe, Fox News Channel's debate audience (7.8 million) nearly matched the 8.5 million viewers tuned to the Fox broadcast network's New York Yankees-Minnesota Twins playoff game. CNN had 3.3 million viewers, and MSNBC, 1.5 million.
PBS, which isn't represented in Nielsen's measurements, said in a separate news release that it drew 3.3 million viewers for its coverage of the vice presidential debate.
The vice presidential record-holder is 1984's George Bush-Geraldine Ferraro faceoff, which had 56.7 million viewers.
Robust ratings for Cheney-Edwards mirror the heightened interest in this year's campaign. Last week's debate between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry had 62.5 million viewers, handily outdrawing the first Bush-Gore matchup in 2000.
E-mail ebark@dallasnews.com
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POLLS ON VP CANDIDATES
A look at what voters thought of the debate between Dick Cheney and John Edwards, and how the candidates are viewed generally:
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ABC NEWS
Who won the debate?
Cheney, 43%
Edwards, 35%
Tie, 19%
The poll of 509 registered voters who watched the vice presidential debate was taken Tuesday and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.
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DEMOCRACY CORPS
Who won the debate?
Cheney, 40%
Edwards, 37%
Neither, 15%
The poll of 1,000 likely voters was taken Tuesday and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
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FOX NEWS-OPINION DYNAMICS
Whom would you feel more comfortable with if he had to step in and serve as president?
Cheney, 44%
Edwards, 43%
The poll of 1,000 likely voters was taken Sunday to Monday and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Cheney gives off authoritative patina, unlike the president; too bad the facts don't bear him out
Marie Cocco
October 7, 2004
Give that man a bonus.
The chief operating officer did exactly what he was hired to do in the vice presidential debate. Dick Cheney emerged as the president's right-hand president.
Cheney was authoritative where President George W. Bush, in his own debate against John Kerry, was awkward. He was capable of marshaling arguments that had somehow escaped the president's recall. The vice president was calm where Bush was cranky. Cheney was steady and paternal, where Bush was stubborn and adolescent.
Cheney is a better Bush than Bush.
Now we see how it has come to pass that so much power seeped from the Oval Office to the vice president's suite. There is nothing you can successfully argue Cheney out of - his authoritative demeanor is a shield too thick to penetrate. Even with the toughest, most persistent facts.
Take the fact that there is no connection between the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq. This simply does not pierce Cheney's ideological or intellectual armor.
He opened the debate with a masterfully deceptive discourse in which he again linked the two. Cheney wound through all sorts of verbal cul-desacs like saying that after 9/11, "we had to go after the terrorists wherever we might find them." He finished up where he really wanted to be, on this point: The vice president asserted that Saddam Hussein had an "established relationship with al-Qaida," and former CIA director George Tenet had said so.
Can it be? No it can't.
The CIA has found what virtually everyone else who looked into this assertion has concluded: That though there were occasional contacts over many years between the Iraqi regime and terrorists linked to al-Qaida, these never jelled into a cooperative relationship. The independent 9/11 Commission concurs.
Having come right out and made the link once again, Cheney then performed a remarkable pivot for a man of his size. When John Edwards called foul on the deception, Cheney claimed injury: "The senator has got his facts wrong," he sneered. "I have not suggested that there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11."
Well, yes he did - not only in the debate but in a remarkable run of television interviews and campaign speeches where he recycled theories that have long been debunked. We are, though, supposed to accept Cheney's assuredness as a sign of his veracity.
So it will indeed be a hoot to see what happens when the late-night comics get a crack at Cheney's attack on Edwards' skimpy senate record. "In my capacity as vice president, I am the president of the Senate and the presiding officer," Cheney said. "I'm up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they're in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight."
The blow landed squarely, and with force. Edwards sat in stunned silence. Now, though, pictures have surfaced of the pair together at a prayer breakfast, where Cheney sat next to Edwards. They also participated together in the swearing-in ceremony of North Carolina's Republican senator, Elizabeth Dole.
This is the sort of folderol that got Al Gore in trouble four years ago - all that gobbledygook about him mixing up when, and with whom, he'd visited disaster victims. Somehow the 2000 Bush campaign turned the mistake into a character flaw, incontrovertible evidence that Gore was unfit.
Now Cheney has topped this with his bare lie about never having met Edwards. Will it have the same impact?
In a way, I wish it wouldn't. The nation is at war abroad and struggles at home with fear of another terrorist attack. Millions are strained by an economy that is moving forward too slowly to lift them up. The gravity of this election has been underscored by the remarkable substantiveness of the first two debates.
Silliness about Tuesday luncheons at the Capitol - they are, by the way, partisan gatherings where no member ventures to the other side's redoubt - should not really figure in. Except as an emblem of the larger and more serious problem.
The people have been deceived about matters that really do count. About the nature of the Iraqi threat before we invaded. About the number of troops needed. About the nature of the insurgency. About whether we can afford another tax cut at home.
The vice president speaks with great authority on these subjects. Unfortunately, the record shows him to be authoritatively wrong.
Marie Cocco is a nationally syndicated columnist and member of Newsday's editorial board. Her e-mail address is cocco@newsday.com.
EVEN TO viewers prepared for it, the contrast between Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. John Edwards as they sat side by side at their roundtable debate Tuesday night was startling.
Mr. Cheney, 63, often seemed like a grumpy old man who has seen it all and done it all, and could barely contain his contempt for a challenger he sought to dismiss as a naive newcomer and empty suit.
For his part, Mr. Edwards, 51, obligingly took on the role of presumptuous pup, brandishing a fresh haircut that shaved more years off his deceptively youthful appearance and a terrier-like determination to match the Bush administration's chief hachet man blow for blow.
So potent was the picture it may have been possible to watch with the sound turned off and still come to the same conclusions about the No. 2 men on the ticket who used their only debate encounter to spar on territory sometimes a bit too dicey for the presidential candidates to tread.
And yet, for those who did listen, the 90-minute sit-down highlighted the strengths, values and priorities each team brings to the fundamental task of making decisions on behalf of their countrymen.
A recurring theme of the painfully contrived setting -- designed according to Mr. Cheney's preferences -- was that the election four weeks from now turns on the question of judgment.
From the perspective of his more than four decades of government service, the vice president sought to portray Mr. Edwards and Democratic nominee John Kerry as ditherers who simply tack to the political winds because they both voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq but are now critical of how President Bush has managed the conflict.
"You've not been consistent," Mr. Cheney told his opponent, "and there's no indication at all that John Kerry has the conviction to successfully carry through on the war on terror."
But Mr. Edwards fired back again and again that the Bush administration was ignoring or distorting the facts about how badly things are going in Iraq to avoid acknowledging its mistakes.
"It's very clear that a long résumé does not equal good judgment," he observed.
Mr. Edwards also laid what is likely to be the groundwork for the remaining two debates between the presidential contenders: the assertion that while national security may be the most important issue of this campaign, it is not the only important issue.
The vice president mostly punted on questions about job losses, poverty, the deficit and health care costs, choosing to zing the senator for missing votes during the campaign or to raise the specter of terror.
That won't be good enough for the top of the ticket. If Mr. Bush offers simply more of the same for the next four years, it's hard to believe a majority of Americans would choose that course.
As Brit Hume pointed out at a convivial cocktail party last week, a lady blessed with my quality jewelry and shapely figure would be safer in an alley of Fallujah than on the sidewalks of Cleveland (or, if my memory serves, the couch in the Governor's office in Sacramento). As such, I decided to play it safe and stay home to watch last night's Cheney/Edwards debate with Jesus -- but only after exacting a rather reluctant promise from Him not to hurl invective and popcorn at my new plasma TV every time the cameras turned on our wonderful Vice President.
Being so inexplicably liberal (with His "turn the other cheek" peacenik pacifism and, even more galling to us Republicans, His "give all your tax-sheltered money to the poor" socialism), much to my temperately conveyed annoyance, Jesus volunteered a rather stinging appraisal of Mr. Cheney's brave disinclination to become a slave to facts. To which I sardonically responded, "What a friend you have in exegesis!" After several painful minutes of hearing Jesus spouting lib nonsense, I resorted to a little trick I picked up from Peggy Noonan at a dinner party where she was seated at the place of dishonor -- between two Demoncrats. (You know I never gossip except to save a soul or a conversation, but word had it that our hostess was retaliating for Peggy making a clumsy play for her husband after three refusals and five Cutty Sarks.) At the first sign of insight, I put my fingers in both ears, smiled beguilingly and said with patrician cadence (although, unlike New Jersey's Peggy, mine was real), "La la la la la I CAN'T HEAR YOU JESUS! La la la la la" until I wore the Almighty into a satisfactory, if somewhat sullen, silence.
One thing, however, that both Jesus and I agreed upon (other than trailer parks being absolutely ideal venues for tornadoes), is that it is clear that Mr. Edwards does not enjoy Mr. Bush's relationship with Mr. Cheney. That is, Edwards is neither cowered by Cheney's simmering glower nor obedient to his rather optimistic regard for the tensile strength of veracity. But let's face it: in a country where even reality shows are scripted, when it comes to virtues that are verbally touted on the condition that they not be actually practiced, only chastity outranks honesty.
So I don't know why people are scoffing at Mr. Cheney for stating that he never tied Iraq to 9/11, he'd never met John Edwards or that things are going swimmingly in Iraq. Yes, to those obsessed with facts, such statements would appear to be brazen lies. But it is like I always say to myself when filling out that rudely inquisitive "age" box on forms: If you repeat a lie, it becomes your truth. And if you repeat a lie often enough, you become a Republican.
I know we say we do, but do we really want honest people in the White House? I think this War on Terra calls for a more crafty approach. After all, liars are inherently sneaky people who stand a better chance of getting into the minds of unscrupulous terrorists than those fettered by either niggling fact checkers or conscience. In fact, if I were William Bennett I'd wager that when it comes to anticipating what an angry, politically extreme zealot might think of next, Mr. Cheney can draw more information from his most benign daydream than the CIA and FBI could ever hope to get out of a roomful of DeVry graduates trying to learn Arabic from watching Uday Hussein's confiscated girl-on-goat porn.
But a mental agility that renders reality more flexible wasn't the only inspired tactic brought to the table by Mr. Cheney last night. While Mr. Bush's "Ah, he forgot Poland" injection last week was a rather winning Don Knotts impression, it did seem to risk underscoring that, except for one person in England (who, fortunately for us, just happens to answer the phone at 10 Downing Street), America has been put on the "do not call" list by any country with a checking account, much less an army. Indeed, under Mr. Bush's "you're either with us or I never liked you anyway" approach to foreign policy, we have become so universally unpopular among that catty clique of diplomatic suitors, we are left looking somewhat like the lonely jerk who had to take his mom to the high school prom -- only to have her leave with our flask of Canadian Club for a access road motel with the yearbook editor. So, I was pleased to hear Mr. Cheney announce last night that the newest, if not most willing, members of America's exclusive coalition, if only for the convenience of already being there, are the Iraqis themselves. I guess instead of leveling with foreign countries to win allies, we are simply going to level foreign countries.
Dear Sister-in-Christ Ann Coulter, who has single-handedly proved that a steady diet of crap will lead to emaciation cheaper than meth and quicker than Atkins, thinks we need to bring Christian love to the people of the Middle East and/or kill them. Between us, apart from being uncertain if Ann is a wickedly devious liberal performance artist or -- less inventively – simply mentally ill, I'm having second thoughts about this whole "bringing democracy to Iraq" raison d'etre. As hostess gifts go, this one may turn out to be tantamount to bringing a bottle of vodka to Liza Minnelli's. You just never know what crazy thing will happen next.
While the general notion of giving all of a nation's citizens the power of voting seems appealing in theory, it might be a good idea for the U.S. Supreme Court to test the concept in Florida first. Besides, a newly wrought Iraq may turn into a Pyrrhic victory for Americans in the long run if the majority of people use their new voice to take to the streets and scream "death to the infidels," a stress-releasing activity more popular in Islamic countries than even yoga. Indeed, once the Iraqis are subjected to the torment of relentless, mendacious political ads from all parties that will inevitably interrupt their new Islamic-style reality TV (beheadings), the cries of "Death to the Great Satan" may grow slightly more strident and heartfelt.
With this in mind, I prefer Islamic terrorists and their possible protégés to be under the thumb of a deeply religious dictator who doesn't want to do anything that might jeopardize his ability to get a visa to visit the Bellagio in Las Vegas twice a year. Furthermore, if our goal is to make the Middle East more like America, why go to the trouble of boxing up the mountain and sending it to Mohamed? It would be less costly simply to allow something that also has few allies -- time -- to make the two regions of the World more similar. After all, if the United States has four more years of our handsome President and continues with our commendable trends of governmental intrusion, curtailed freedom, misinformation, vote suppression and religious fanaticism, I have a feeling we will be just like Iran in no time.
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