[vacets-gen] Lies, Damned Lies, and Convention Speeches

[Tin Le]

http://slate.msn.com/id/2106119/

Lies, Damned Lies, and Convention Speeches
Setting Kerry's record rightâ~@~Tagain.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, Sept. 2, 2004, at 11:50 AM PT



Half-truths and embellishments are one thing; they're common at
political conventions, vital flourishes for a theatrical air. Lies are
another thing, and last night's Republican convention was soaked in
them.

In the case of Sen. Zell Miller's keynote address
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/politics/campaign/01TEXT-MILLER.html>
, "lies" might be too strong a word. Clearly not a bright man, Miller
dutifully recited the talking points that his Republican National
Committee handlers had typed up for him, though perhaps in a more
hysterical tone than anyone might have anticipated. (His stumbled
rantings in the interviews afterward, on CNN and MSNBC, brought to mind
the flat-Earthers who used to be guests on The Joe Pyne Show.) Can a
puppet tell lies? Perhaps not.

Still, it is worth setting the record straight. The main falsehood, we
have gone over before (click here <http://slate.msn.com/id/2096127/>
for the details), but it keeps getting repeated, so here we go again: It
is the claim that John Kerry, during his 20 years in the Senate, voted
to kill the M-1 tank, the Apache helicopter; the F-14, F-16, and F-18
jet fighters; and just about every other weapon system that has kept our
nation free and strong.

Here, one more time, is the truth of the matter: Kerry did not vote to
kill these weapons, in part because none of these weapons ever came up
for a vote, either on the Senate floor or in any of Kerry's committees.

This myth took hold last February in a press release put out by the RNC.
Those who bothered to look up the fine-print footnotes discovered that
they referred to votes on two defense appropriations bills, one in 1990,
the other in 1995. Kerry voted against both bills, as did 15 other
senators, including five Republicans. The RNC took those bills,
cherry-picked some of the weapons systems contained therein, and implied
that Kerry voted against those weapons. By the same logic, they could
have claimed that Kerry voted to disband the entire U.S. armed forces;
but that would have raised suspicions and thus compelled more reporters
to read the document more closely.

What makes this dishonesty not merely a lie, but a damned lie, is that 
back when Kerry cast these votes, Dick Cheney [who was the secretary of 
defense for George W. Bush's father] was truly slashing the military 
budget. Here was Secretary Cheney, testifying before the Senate Armed 
Services Committee on Jan. 31, 1992:

 	Overall, since I've been Secretary, we will have taken the
five-year defense program down by well over $300 billion. That's the
peace dividend. â~@¦ And now we're adding to that another $50 billion â~@¦ of
so-called peace dividend.

Cheney then lit into the Democratic-controlled Congress for not cutting
weapons systems enough:

 	Congress has let me cancel a few programs. But you've squabbled
and sometimes bickered and horse-traded and ended up forcing me to spend
money on weapons that don't fill a vital need in these times of tight
budgets and new requirements. â~@¦ You've directed me to buy more M1s,
F14s, and F16sâ~@~Tall great systems â~@¦ but we have enough of them.

I'm not accusing Cheney of being a girly man on defense. As he notes,
the Cold War had just ended; deficits were spiraling; the nation could
afford to cut back. But some pro-Kerry equivalent of Arnold
Schwarzenegger or Zell Miller could make that charge with as much
validity as theyâ~@~Tand Cheneyâ~@~Tmake it against Kerry.

In other words, it's not just that Cheney and those around him are
lying; it's not even just that they know they're lying; it's that they
knowâ~@~Tor at least Cheney knowsâ~@~Tthat the same lie could be said about him.
That's what makes it a damned lie.

Before moving on to Cheney's speech, we should pause to note two truly
weird passages in Zell's address. My favorite:

 	Today, at the same time young Americans are dying in the sands
of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart
and made weaker because of a Democrat's manic obsession to bring down
our commander in chief.

A "manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief"? Most people
call this a "presidential election." Someone should tell Zell they
happen every four years; he can look it up in that same place where he
did the research on Kerry's voting record ("I've got more documents," he
said on CNN, waving two pieces of paper that he'd taken from his coat
pocket, "than in the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library
combined.")

The other oddball remark: "Nothing makes me madder than someone calling
American troops occupiers rather than liberators." Huge applause line,
but is he kidding? The U.S. troops in Iraq are occupiers. Even Bush has
said so. If he doesn't understand this, then he doesn't understand what
our problems are.

Cheney
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/politics/campaign/01TEXT-CHENEY.html>
followed Zell, and couldn't help but begin with â~@¦ not a lie, but
certainly a howler: "People tell me Sen. Edwards got picked for his good
looks, his sex appeal, his charm, and his great hair. [Pause] I said,
'How do you think I got the job?' "

Funny, apparently self-deprecating line, but does anybody remember how
he did get the job? Bush had asked Cheney to conduct the search for a
vice presidential candidate, and he came up with himself. He got the job
because he picked himself.

Later in the speech, Cheney made this comment: "Four years ago, some
said the world had grown calm, and many assumed that the United States
was invulnerable to danger. That thought might have been comforting; it
was also false."

Who are these people who thought this? The implication is that it was
the Democrats who preceded Bush and Cheney. But it was Bill Clinton's
administration that stopped the millennium attack on LAX. It was
Clinton's national security adviser who told Condoleezza Rice, during
the transition period, that she'd be spending more time on al-Qaida that
on any other issue. It was Rice who didn't call the first Cabinet
meeting on al-Qaida until just days before Sept. 11. It was Bush's
attorney general who told a Justice Department assistant that he didn't
want to hear anything more about counterterrorism. It was Bush who spent
40 percent of his time out of town in his first eight months of office,
while his CIA director and National Security Council terrorism
specialists ran around with their "hair on fire," trying to get
higher-ups to heed their warnings of an imminent attack.

"President Bush does not deal in empty threats and halfway measures,"
Cheney said. What is an empty threat if not the warnings Bush gave the
North Koreans to stop building a nuclear arsenal? What is a halfway
measure if not Bush's decision to topple the Taliban yet leave
Afghanistan to the warlords and the poppy farmers; to bust up al-Qaida's
training camps yet fail to capture Osama Bin Laden (whose name has
virtually gone unmentioned at this convention); to topple the Iraqi
regime yet plan nothing for the aftermath?

"Time and again Sen. Kerry has made the wrong call on national
security," Cheney said. The first example he cited of these wrong calls:
"Sen. Kerry began his political career by saying he would like to see
our troops deployed 'only at the directive of the United Nations.' "
Yes, Kerry did say thisâ~@~Tin 1971, to the Harvard Crimson. He has long
since recanted it. Is there evidence that George W. Bush said anything
remarkable, whether wise or naive, in his 20s?

The second example of Kerry's wrong calls: "During the 1980s, Sen. Kerry
opposed Ronald Reagan's major defense initiative that brought victory in
the Cold War." We've been over thisâ~@~Tunless Cheney is talking about the
Strategic Defense Initiative, aka the "star wars" missile-defense plan.
It may be true that SDI played some role
<http://www.slate.com/id/2102081>  in prompting the Soviet Union's
conciliation, though it was at best a minor roleâ~@~Tand wouldn't have been
even that, had it not been for Mikhail Gorbachev. But two more points
should be made. First, lots of lawmakers opposed SDI; almost no
scientist thought it would work, especially as Reagan conceived it (a
shield that would shoot down all nuclear missiles and therefore render
nukes "impotent and obsolete"). Second, Kerry voted not to kill SDI, but
to limit its funding.

"Even in the post-9/11 period," Cheney continued, "Sen. Kerry doesn't
appear to understand how the world has changed. He talks about leading a
'more sensitive war on terror,' as though al-Qaida will be impressed
with our softer side." A big laugh line, as it was when Cheney first
uttered it on Aug. 12 before a group of veterans. But Cheney knows this
is nonsense. Here's the full Kerry quote
<http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/08/12/cheney.kerry/> , from an
address to journalists on Aug. 5: "I believe I can fight a more
effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more
sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings
them to our side."

In context, it's clear that "sensitive," a word that has several
definitions, is not meant as a synonym for "soft." And Cheney, who is
not a stupid man, knows this.

"He declared at the Democratic Convention," Cheney said of Kerry, "that
he will forcefully defend America after we have been attacked. My fellow
Americans, we have already been attacked." Where in Kerry's speech did
he say this? Nowhere.

"Sen. Kerry denounces American action when other countries don't
approve," Cheney continued, "as if the whole object of our foreign
policy were to please a few persistent countries." No, that's not it.
Kerry thinks that other countries should go along with our actionsâ~@~Tthat
a president must work hard at diplomacy to get them to go along with
usâ~@~Tbecause going it alone often leads to failure. Cheney should ask his
old colleague Brent Scowcroft or his old boss W's father about this. Or
he should simply go to Iraq and see what unilateralism has wrought.

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2106119/