Dialog on Kerry & Vietnam (Round 1)

[J's comments in red; mine in black.]

Here's a letter to National Review today by a Vietnam vet, documenting the sort of effect I expect the second Swift Vet ad (and the Kerry campaign's indignant response to the same) to have:

"Last night on a talk show…the Kerry spokesman said that the atrocities in Vietnam are well documented matters of record, and Kerry had every right to talk about them in 1972. My blood began to boil again.

"As a military lawyer, I knew of the atrocities being committed by Marines in Vietnam. The atrocities were isolated incidents, and they were punished by every level of command at the time and before it became trendy for the media to sensationalize the crimes. They are matters of record because the perpetrators were court martialed, and you can read about them in the court martial reports.

"Kerry's characterization of Vietnam atrocities as being widespread on a daily basis with the knowledge of all levels of command is a lie.

"The Kerry machine’s sending spokesmen out to attest to widespread atrocities in Vietnam multiplies the insult. Not only should Kerry apologize, but every spokesman from the nameless man I saw last night to James Carville should apologize. Until they do, I will support the Swiftvets with my money and with my voice."

Kerry represents a lot of warriors of his generation who fought out of duty and for the honor that young men have fought for since Homer, and like so many of them, from Thucydides to the WWI poet Wilfred Owen, he decided in the the belly of the beast, after having himself killed other men, that the cause was not worth the price, and that he and his comrades were, not by choice, but by the policies, strategies, and tactics imposed upon them, being reduced to something less than honorable soldiers.

I have a very different and less noble picture of Kerry: Ambitious young man with JFK fixation enlists in military and requests Swift boat duty (cf. Kennedy's PT boat) -- not especially hazardous duty at the time he requests it, but a change in policy under Adm. Zumwalt makes it so by the time he assumes it. He pushes for recognition of minor injuries as justifying a purple heart and ships out after four months rather than stay his full tour (unlike the majority of those thrice decorated).

And W. is superior in this respect how?

Returning stateside he runs for office and fails, then noting that the antiwar movement is picking up steam in the Democratic party he works with VVAW and publicly accuses the military of making war crimes the policy in Vietnam -- having never brought any atrocities to the attention of commanding officers when he was in theater.

I certainly don't blame anyone for not bringing atrocities to the attention of commanding officers while serving. I can't imagine what the pressures must have been. And the loyalty in combat is to one's own, has to be. It took a while for many vets to sort out their feelings about what they had seen and done. But what about the SBVT who had 30 years to sort out their feelings about what Kerry had done in combat, relinquish their own medals, and tell the "truth"? Why did it take them so long to get the story right, even contradicting their earlier accounts? Does that bother you as much as the several-month delay of a young man fresh from combat?

[Kerry] trades on his Vietnam experience for 30 years to oppose US action abroad. Preparing for a presidential run he votes to give the president authority to invade Iraq when the polls favor this, but when Dean surges in 2003 with an antiwar campaign, he votes against funding the troops he voted to send there. Trumpets those he served with in Vietnam as the best witnesses to his character but tries to silence those who raise questions about him. The man's an upwardly mobile tone-deaf windsock, if you'll pardon the mixed metaphor.

Here is Kerry's own explanation of why he voted for giving the president authority and against the funding bill:

"Before the war started, I repeatedly called on the President to build a genuine coalition to reduce the military and financial burden on the United States, to go to war only as a last resort, and to have a plan to win the peace. I voted to give him the authority to go to war only when he promised me and other members in Congress that he would do these things. He broke those promises."

Only 12 senators voted against the funding bill, so there was never any chance of our troops going into combat without proper equipment (not that they would have in any case), and Kerry maintained that his vote was a protest against the way Bush was running the war. Now this turned out to be a political mistake for him, but it doesn't make him a windsock. If he had really been a windsock he would have voted for the funding bill like most Dems did, because that's the way the political wind was blowing. Even if there is some credence to the Dean explanation, so what? Are we really to believe that the former Winter Soldier mouthpiece only pretended to oppose the way the president was handling the war?

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You may disagree that the Vietnam war was misguided, you may disagree with Nixon's decision to pull us out, you may disagree that tactics involving "free-fire zones," "body-count," "search and destroy missions" (and what was informally called "the mere gook rule" which thousands of soldiers knew and which held that "if it's dead and Vietnamese, it's V.C.") predisposed soldiers to brutality, but you can't blame Kerry for voicing his opinion--which was the opinion of thousands of other vets--in the way he did so in his 1971 speech. And if you go back and read Kerry's speech, you'll see that his tone is clearly respectful of the men he served with, even the ones who committed atrocities. Now if this is not an example of ethical oratory, in what specific way does it fail?

Jane Fonda's "Winter Soldier Investigation" was not exactly a model of rigor in standards of evidence, and Kerry' s testimony endorsed it without reserve as a truthful account of what happened in Vietnam. But according to the Wikipedia article you forwarded below, "Sen. Mark Hatfield of Oregon entered the Winter Soldier transcripts into the Congressional Record and asked the commandant of the Marine Corps for an investigation of the Marines that testified. Investigators were unable to confirm or refute the claimed atrocities, but identified one organizer (Al Hubbard) as never being in combat. Guenter Lewy in America in Vietnam says 'The results of this investigation, carried out by the Naval Investigative Service are interesting and revealing ... Many of the veterans, although assured that they would not be questioned about atrocities they might have committed personally, refused to be interviewed. One of the active members of the VVAW told investigators that the leadership had directed the entire membership not to cooperate with military authorities.'"

Kerry testified that his band of brothers were responsible for "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." I don't see how one manages a respectful comparison of one's countrymen with Genghis Khan, as he went on to do. He also said:

"We can not consider ourselves America's best men when we are ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia." [In fact in surveys a significant majority of Vietnam vets say they are proud of their service there.]

First, I see no contradiction between being "ashamed" of things one has been called on to do, and being proud of one's service, of having fulfilled one's duty. Let's also recognize here that by using "we" kerry implicates himself. He owns the atrocity, so to speak. Are we to believe by this use of "we" that Kerry admits to personally raping, torturing, murdering, to every crime he will detail? Not at all. And it's just as clear that he's not claiming, through his rhetorical use of "we," that all soldiers participated in all manner of atrocities.

I can understand someone saying, like the SBVT, "John Kerry does not speak for me." Kerry put himself into the position of mouthpiece for the Vietnam vet, and that takes us into the problem of who can speak for whom. But if one objects that "John Kerry does not speak for us," where "us" means Vietnam vet generic, then that is also a statement that puts the person doing the stating in the position of mouthpiece for the Vietnam vet. The "us" that the SBVT invoke seems to waver between the "us" very specifically and legally implied in the stack of affidavits, and Vietman vet generic. Either way, it's hard for me to fault them (the issue of their dubious combat stories is another matter). Who rightfully speaks for the Vietnam vet? John Kerry or John O'Neill? Lt. Col. Harold Moore in "We Were Soldiers" or Oliver Stone in "Platoon"? It seems to me that they must all take their turn. I'll just notice here that Kerry's speech took more courage than that of the SBVT.

"We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. [This famous quote by the way was a fabrication by Peter Arnett; the soldier recalls saying, ""It was a shame the town was destroyed," -- and it was the VC that destroyed it, not American forces; for Arnett's reliability, try googling for "Tailwind."] We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum. We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals."

Yes the quote was specious, we've all known that for a while. but nothing hinges here on the where the quote came from--it was already becoming part of the vocabulary of the anti-war movement by then, and Kerry doesn't even attempt to attribute it or to quote it verbatim.

" ...The bodies which were once used by a President for statistics to prove that we were winning that war [have now been] used as evidence against a man [Lt. William Calley, charged in the My Lai massacre] who followed orders and who interpreted those orders no differently than hundreds of other men in Vietnam."

True statement. And very generous in attributing the best motives possible to a man involved in a massacre.

"We are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions, in the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, the killing of prisoners, accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam."

Again, he condemns the "accepted policy" not the man / men.

"A lot of guys, 60, 80 percent stay stoned 24 hours a day just to get through the Vietnam"

He's guessing at the percentage of course, but most every Vietnam vet I have known stayed stoned over there. An acquaintance of mine last week showed me a picture album of her dad in Vietnam. He and his buddies were smoking joints for the camera in several pics. Of course many had developed the habit before they were conscripted. But mass drug use in Vietnam is a reality that shouldn't be swept under the rug, and it doesn't disrespect the soldiers or vets to point it out.

"I hope no one ever speaks so respectfully about me!"

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As far as whether Kerry's claims about atrocities are true, I had thought they were now common knowledge, beyond controversy except among a few on the far Right. And I still think this is the case. When you boil it down the only people who want to continue to deny these are 1) Fox News, 2) a handful of bitter veterans, 3) a handful of prominent conservative journalists and bloggers. The swing voters that the Swiftys' ad is targeted at probably don't have an informed opinion on the topic. Did most Vietnam vets commit atrocities? Obviously, and thankfully, no. Did hundreds do so? Definitely. Thousands? Probably. Does this make them monsters? No, not most of them. They were decent Americans put into extrordinary circumstances for which they were not trained. Obviously, most of the men and women at Abu Ghraib, who were not trained for what was handed them, are decent Americans. Most probably did nothing wrong; a handful were monsters; and a not insignificant number of them were corrupted by lack of preparadness, fear, stress, and fatigue.

It's still a bit early to be definitive about Abu Ghraib, but I'm not prepared to exonerate anybody who engaged in sexual humiliation or caused serious injury to prisoners; the attitude of the grunts towards such is suggested by the fact that the people in the photos are referred to as "the seven morons who lost the war." Most reporting on this that I've seen (as well as grandstanding by senators) has confused the deplorable conduct that has resulted in courts martial with the measures appropriate for interrogation of persons suspected of being combatants (and there is of course uncertainty involved in determining who is a credible suspect, since the terrorists and insurgents don't wear a uniform -- much the same situation as the military faced in Vietnam). I'd note that the Schlesinger report finds that "No approved procedures called for or allowed the kinds of abuse that in fact occurred [at Abu Ghraib]. There is no evidence of a policy of abuse promulgated by senior officials or military authorities."

Well, the Schlesinger report also stated this:

"The abuses were not just the failure of some individuals to follow known standards, and they are more than the failure of a few leaders to enforce proper discipline.... There is both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels."

This is delicately put, including in the way it states in the negative "more than the failure of a few." Would that mean "the failure of many?" Schlessinger himself, a former Secretary of Defense, is a Republican who supported the invasion of Iraq, and was authorized to investigate Abu Ghraib by Rumsfeld. What chance was there that he would conclude there was a "policy of abuse." Appointed by Rumsfeld and he would issue a report that would cost Rumsfeld his job? Fat chance.

In October 2003, the guard to prisoner ratio was 90 to 7,000. That's 1 guard per 78 prisoners, not even close to the ratio of American civilian prisons (California state prisons are about 1 to 10). And these soldiers were not trained prison guards. If that isn't a command decision that set up the conditions for abuse, I don't know what is. And the "policy" of treating al-Qaida prisoners as something other than prisoners of war is responsible for abuses at Guantanamo. Even the Supremes have rebuked Bush's policy of holding prisoners incommunicado.

So we have bad command decisions, bad policy, and indeed, a White House that violated the constitution. Abuse resulted.

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The Owens piece in NR online, in which I have already pointed out one flaw, is wrong about the Winter Soldiers testimony. I hate to "link dump" but here are several sources (1, 2, 3, 4) on the two books which Owens cites as well as stories on Vietnam atrocities in general.

You're mistaken about the consensus. The Toledo Blade series may show only that members of a unit can successfully conspire in committing atrocities and conceal the evidence long enough that it becomes difficult to assure a conviction; it probably also shows that in 1975 nobody in the Pentagon was interested in reliving Vietnam. But it tells us NOTHING about what official policy was in the theater in 1967-8, when the atrocities were committed, Here is the verdict on the larger question from the Blade story itself: "Academics have long disputed just how many unknown atrocities occurred in Vietnam, but most scholars [NB -- not just conservative pundits, bloggers, and guys who really should be writing on Romans] agree that the majority of soldiers in Vietnam did not commit war crimes. And no other single event of the war has surfaced to compare to the 4 1/2-hour rampage that occurred in the cluster of villages commonly known as My Lai." QED for me.

I've noted above that the Wikipedia article also indicates that the notion that atrocities were military policy in Vietnam is credibly disputed. All the Village Voice piece does is link the Toledo Blade story to tactics used in Vietnam, which are not themselves violations of international law nor evidence of systematic disregard of the same (see quotes from Lewy's history below). Moreover, the Voice is to the New Republic as Pat Buchanan's magazine (whatever it's called) is to National Review, and I'd respectfully suggest that anyone taking it and VVAW as objective sources of information stands outside the mainstream. If you'd like to join us here within hailing distance of the political center you might begin by looking at the following (note the publishers, and the Times's favorable verdict on Lind --these aren't Rupert Murdoch put-up jobs):

I don't think anything in that Village Voice article was outside the mainstream debate. As you say yourself, it links the Toledo Blade story to tactics used in Vietnam, mostly through referring to the work of historian Christian Appy, who has taught at Harvard and MIT. Appy's work is not beyond controversy, but it's hardly outside the mainstream. What the VV piece mostly does is link the Blade story to reports of atrocities in Iraq, citing the Washington Post, New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Guardian. Again (you might argue the Guardian), hardly outside the mainstream. Indeed, what in the VV piece specifically IS outside the mainstream? Okay, so the VV itself is. That's not much of a refutation of the piece, which, if you'll look at again, doesn't contain any claims out of hailing distance of the center.

[Source #1] Guenter Lewy's America in Vietnam (Oxford University Press) -- the history cited in the Wikipedia article you forwarded. Chaps. 7–11 treat of atrocities, war crimes, and the justice of the war's conduct. From an exhaustive survey of the evidence, Lewy concludes that "The American record in Vietnam with regard to observance of the law of war is not a succession of war crimes and does not support charges of a systematic and willful violation of existing agreements for standards of human decency in time of war" (p. 268); "VC terror was not a selective political weapon employed against a few corrupt officals but in fact cost the lives of many thousands of innocent people.

The American counterinsurgency effort, on the other hand, while often carried out in a self-defeating manner, generally did not violate international law, did not seek to destroy the civilian population as a matter of deliberate policy, and did not cause civilian casualties in proportions uniquely different from other wars of this century" (p. 305); "Some [NB] soldiers began to adopte the so-called 'mere-gook' rule. . . . Callousness toward the Vietnamese was also caused by the writings and pronouncements of many American journalists and politicians, who, while seeking to end the American involvement, for years exaggerated the faults of the South Vietnamese government and nation and gradually created an image of people not worth defending, if not altogether worthless, . . . though the acceptance of the 'mere-gook' rule has probably been exaggerated.

For each misdeed . . . unbiased observers in Vietnam could see examples of friendship and generosity. Individual American soldiers, and sometimes entire units, adopted orphans and other children and engaged in various aid programs" (p. 310); "The argument that certain 'tactical field policies,' as for example the stress on body count, created an atmosphere conducive to atrocities was certainly valid. Yet despite the pressure for a high enemy casualty toll most soldiers in Vietnam did not kill prisoners or intentionally shoot unarmed villagers. Violations of the law of war in this regard were committed by individuals in violation of existing policy" (p. 315); re: the approximately 200 Army and Marine courts martial of servicemen charged with homicide, rape, and other serious crimes against Vietnamese victims,"the rate of acquittal in the case of Army courts-martial was below that of American domestic cases, while in the Marine Corps the rate was about the same . . .

[T]he conclusion of an Army lawyer would therefore appear to be justified: 'If courts-martial behave pretty much like American juries . . . I find no corroboration for the existence of a "mere-gook" rule in the performance of American courts-martial'" (pp. 351-2).

This is from a Chicago Tribune article that questions a crucial Lewy source. And it makes the point that if any Winter Soldier testimony could have been proved false, the Nixon administration had every reason to ferret out the real truth. It concludes, sort of agnostically, that we can't know the full extent of the atrocities (I'm comfortable with some sort of agnosticism here, but I would continue to maintain that the policies, purposes, and conditions in Vietnam were more insidious than in previous American wars, and that in this light Kerry's speech is ethical):

'Kerry and other Vietnam Veterans Against the War members "were very careful to double-check" the accuracy of soldiers' accounts at the Detroit event, because prominent war opponents such as author Mark Lane had been heavily criticized for relying on spurious evidence of atrocities, said University of Waterloo history professor Andrew Hunt. "Kerry was involved in that. They really did their work."

Voices of Winter Soldiers

One by one, the veterans at the hotel stated their names and ranks, and, although they risked prosecution and personal shame, described immoral acts they had committed or seen firsthand.

Former interrogator Nathan Hale, a specialist 5th class with the Americal Division, testified that he was told by his captain to use any means necessary, including rifle butts and knives, to elicit information from prisoners.

Kenneth Ruth, a former E-4 in the 1st Cavalry Air Division, showed a slide of an interrogator yanking a rope tied to a prisoner's testicles.

There were also numerous accounts of rape.

The Nixon White House quickly launched an effort to undermine the testimony.

"The men that participated in the pseudo-atrocity hearings in Detroit will be checked out to ascertain if they are genuine Viet Nam combat veterans," White House counsel Charles Colson wrote in a memo.

But in the end, authorities offered no public challenge to the veracity of the allegations.

It was not until seven years later that the testimony was challenged, in conservative writer Guenter Lewy's 1978 book "America in Vietnam."

Lewy wrote that he had examined a Naval Investigative Service file that seriously discredited several of the Detroit veterans. Some were revealed by Navy investigators to have falsified their identities and weren't even in Vietnam, Lewy wrote.

Government officials today cannot verify that Naval Investigative Service report's existence.

"We have not been able to confirm the existence of this report, but it's also possible that such records could have been destroyed or misplaced," said Naval Criminal Investigative Service public affairs specialist Paul O'Donnell.

"I don't think Lewy is interested in presenting any of [the Winter Soldier testimony] as truthful," said University of Richmond history professor Ernest Bolt. "He has an angle on the war as a whole."

Bolt said it is impossible to tell whether Lewy fairly characterized the naval investigative report because no other historian had seen it. "He's using the points of their investigation that fit his purposes," Bolt said.

Oakton professor Stacewicz said it is possible that several imposters did testify among the 150 or so veterans in Detroit: "Could a couple of people have slipped through? Possibly. But does that impugn everybody else? Not in my view."

Truth can be elusive.

How prevalent were the atrocities described by the veterans in Detroit? The number is unknowable, historians say.

"They are the kinds of events that by their nature are unreported," Solis said.'

I'll conclude here with what veteran Sgt. William Doyle told ABC News last year about Tiger Force: "Murder was not uncommon. It was more or less the rule of the day." When he was asked if he was afraid he might be put on trial all these years later he said, "I could get found not guilty on temporary insanity on any one of them, because there's no way you can be in that situation and not be temporarily insane." Exactly.

[Source #2] Michael Lind's Vietnam: The Necessary War includes a chapter on "Vietnam and the Folklore of the Antiwar Movement" (pp. 140–185), in which according to the favorable review that ran in the New York Times (20 October 1999) Lind is "devastatingly hard on the antiwar left, whose arguments he slices up with a keen analytical razor"; see also pp. 245-250, which rebut the charges that Vietnam was a uniquely cruel war, as regards both infantry and the bombing campaign.

[Source #3] Norman Podhoretz's Why We Were in Vietnam (Simon & Schuster), chap. 5, notes in the course of a well-written defense of the justice of the action notes that "the proportion of civilian deaths was much lower in Vietnam than in Korea and roughly the same as in World War II" (p. 192).

I can't look at these neocon books in time to keep the debate hot. The two claims you present are interesting, but alone they are not enough to sway me. And even if they were true, they would not be enough. In addition to hippies and many regular grunts, a lot of top brass thought the Vietnam War was misguided. Here's an account from the Political Science Quarterly (v.101, #41):

"[Generals] Ridgway, Shoup, Gavin and other military leaders -- including Air Force General Lauris Norstad; Army Generals William Wallace Ford and Robert L. Hughes; Marine Generals Hugh Hester and Samuel G. Griffith; Rear Admiral Arnold True; and Marine Colonels William Corson and James Donovan (and there are more) -- testified before congressional committees, wrote books and articles, appeared on television and radio programs, and made the front page of American newspapers, always with the message that the Vietnam War was a political, strategic and moral blunder from which the United States should quickly disengage. As a group, the military brass who spoke out against the war gained the attention of millions of Americans, played an important role in the national debate over Vietnam, and . . . were arguably the most respected and influential military figures of their time."

Generals and other top officers speaking up publicly about how we are in a wrongheaded war? Sound familiar?

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Of course I can understand why the Bushies want to attack Kerry on his record of service and subsequent activism, since a recent Pew poll found that of those who know that Kerry won 3 purple hearts, a majority say they will vote for him. [Disclaimer: I can't find this poll online. I surfed past it last night but now I can't find it again. So I'll leave it in but stand open for correction.] The Bushies are panicked, and they should be. The whole Swifty campaign, with it's bitter, lugubrious heroes and contradictory testimonies, smells of desperation--desperation aided by old wounds and vetted by a bank of trusty old Republican lawyers who know how to take it to the edge of legality and let it hang there. Fine. That's the game. Let's call it the 527 game. The Bushies are losing. I lived in Ohio for three years until a few weeks ago, and I can tell you firsthand that those no-nonsense Ohioans are fed up with Bush's arrogance and with neo-con hubris. And the way Bush brandishes his Christian fundamentalism, while effective with southerners, doesn't play well at all with midwesterners. The Repubs in Florida better disenfranchise and / or scare as many black voters away from the polls as they can, because Ohio ain't voting for Bush this time.

Your last sentence is fever-swamp stuff, Dave. You should look at the dissenting report from the the US Commission on Civil Rights' investigation of Florida 2000 which documents the questionable process and analysis that race ideologue Mary Francis Berry's Democratically stacked commission to accuse . . . somebody in Florida of denying blacks their voting rights; her report is the only peg there is to hang that contention on, and it won't hold. (I have a pdf of the dissent if you'd like to see it.)

From the summary of the report:

Perhaps the most dramatic undercount in this election was the nonexistent ballots of the countless unknown eligible voters, who were wrongfully purged from the voter registration rolls, turned away from the polls, and by various other means prevented from exercising the franchise. While statistical data, reinforced by credible anecdotal evidence, point to widespread disenfranchisement and denial of voting rights, it is impossible to determine the extent of the disenfranchisement or to provide an adequate remedy to the persons whose voices were silenced in this historic election by a pattern and practice of injustice, ineptitude and inefficiency. [my italics]

And the commission found that before the election, and even during, “state and county officials were aware of several key factors that ultimately contributed to the disenfranchisement of qualified voters.”

The commission concluded there was no "conclusive evidence" of conspiracy, but that Florida violated the Voting Rights Act nonetheless, and wrongly disenfranchised eligible black voters more than whites by 10 to 1.

The commission also found that state officials new that their method for achieving voter roll purges were based on an "error-laden strategy" and that state officials knew that eligible voters would be falsely identified as felons. The report notes that the state hired DataBase Technologies to generate the lists, and that a senior vice president of DataBase warned state officials that the method the state implemented would create a large number of "false positives."

And from more recent voting scandals in Florida, here's something from a recent op-ed piece from Bob Herbert of the NYT:

"The state's "felon purge" list had to be abandoned by Glenda Hood, the secretary of state (and, yes, former mayor of Orlando), after it became known that the flawed list would target blacks but not Hispanics, who are more likely in Florida to vote Republican. The list also contained the names of thousands of people, most of them black, who should not have been on the list at all.

Ms. Hood, handpicked by Governor Bush to succeed the notorious Katherine Harris as secretary of state, was forced to admit that the felons list was a mess. She said the problems were unintentional. What clearly was intentional was the desire of Ms. Hood and Governor Bush to keep the list secret. It was disclosed only as a result of lawsuits filed under Florida's admirable sunshine law."

Here we are in '04 with a secret purge list. The US Commission on Civil Rights report didn't seem to reform those negligent Florida officials at all. In fact their methods have gotten even more flawed--now they have been forced to abandon a system that disenfranchised blacks but not eligible hispanics. Hispanics in Florida being Republican voters mostly, kind of makes you want to go hmmm....

And then there's the issue of Florida officials' ongoing attempt to root out voter fraud in Orlando by sending state troupers into the homes of elderly black voters there, even after a Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation, reviewed by the Florida Division of Elections, found no evidence of fraud.

Fever-swamp stuff? If you think certain Repub officials in Florida haven't targeted black voters I've got some Florida swampland I'd like to sell you....

If the R's only gained power by fraud, how do you explain the historic gains by the party in power in 2002, including the comfortable re-election of Jeb Bush in Florida, whom Terry McAuliffe targeted for defeat and whom on your scenario an angry electorate should have bounced from the governor's mansion as payback for his role in stealing the White House for his brother.

I think that has to do with being the brother of a popular wartime president whose approval ratings were exceptionally high at the time. And well, the majority wanted Jeb to continue being their governor. I don't see conspiracies in every Democratic defeat--only where there's evidence.

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What on earth is illegal about the Swift Boat enterprise? Free speech means that I get to say what I think should be said politically -- EVEN IF IT'S UNTRUE (as it's not at all clear to me that the Swift Boat charges are -- on the two points I noted yesterday that Kerry has conceded, it's clear that he's been wrong and has corrected the record only under the pressure of the ads). Then my opponent is free to point out where I'm wrong, and the voters get to decide who's on the level. And if (for the sake of argument) the Swiftie campaign is illegal, then you'd agree that the 527's that have filled the air with anti-Bush ads for a year and have a revolving door employment policy vis-à-is Kerry's campaign are illegal, too?

Nothing is illegal about it. I said that they took it to the "edge of legality." What I meant by that was that they got help people who were involved in and around Bush's campaign without actually coordinating their efforts with the campaign. Attorney Benjamin Ginsberg and Air Force Col. Ken Cordier, both associated with the SBVT, have both resigned after it was revealed that had ties to the Bush campaign.

I have no problem with the SBVT from a legal perspective. As I said, let the 527 games begin. And not that this is material, but I remember when MoveOnPac was a grassroots movement that I and other friends supported through their website. I know it's a monster now, but it didn't start as one and it still relies on grassroots support to a great extent. SBVT was founded and financed from the top at the start.

I think you're dead wrong that Bush welcomes the Swifties' attacks on Kerry's service, though he is presently benefiting from it; Bush does not want to compare notes on what he and Kerry were doing in 1968, and there is of course no evidence of coordination with the campaign (the "people know people" business goes about 10X for Kerry and moveon.org). On the other hand, while still condemning the advertising by Swifties and all 527's, the Bush campaign has now (in a letter on their web site) criticized Kerry's 1971 anti-war activities. If the Swifties were a stealth arm of the Bush campaign, this would rather blow the stealth, no?

I just can't believe that Bush doesn't welcome the attack. If it goes badly for him he may regret it, but this was a carefully thought through strategy, however risky, that sprang from the brains of the people who brought us Willie Horton and the Dukakis-in-a-tank bobblehead. I think the Repubs are willing to take the risk, as I said earlier, because they are desperate.

I also think you're quite mistaken about which campaign is in despair. Kerry came off his convention with no bounce. Historically he ought to be up by 10 points if he wants to depose the incumbent, but instead he's dead even; in fact, he's behind in the LA Times poll announced this morning, 49-46, with Bush claiming 15% of Democratic voters and Kerry only 3% of Republicans -- and which candidate has the problem broadening his appeal beyond his base? Meanwhile, the only rationale we've been offered for Kerry's candidacy (aside from "Bush lied!") is now under serious challenge -- as Dole put it in the quote that didn't get play, "Instead of talking about his Senate record, which is thin, he's talking about his war record, which is confused."

Maybe we'll agree on this. Kerry's problem is he's a liberal who prevaricates because he fears he must follow Clintonian triangulation to win, but he's not good at it yet. And he knows his own voting record is not consistently New Democrat. Okay, now for the part we probably disagree about. It was easy for Bush to mouth platitudes about being a "compassionate conservative" in 2000, as you know, because he didn't have to pin it to much of anything substantial. His record as governor was so nondescript, taking his cue as he did from Bullock who set the agenda, that he didn't have a long and distinct record on military policy (obviously nothing here), taxes, healthcare, etc., that could be subjected to scrutiny. And his education initiatives, which he did trumpet, were in such an early stage of implementation when he ran for president that it was impossible to judge him by the results of that.

Kerry's response to the Swift Vet challenge was a pathetic attempt at pre-emptive legal action (continuing today, with the ludicrous request to Ashcroft open a criminal investigation) and he's been avoiding reporters since the first ad hit -- sounds like desperation to me! With the second Swiftie ad, it's now going to come into focus how thoroughly (and, it appears, opportunistically) Kerry trashed his band of brothers in 1971.

Granted, it was a ludicrous request. But I don't think it's desperation. It could turn in to that (don't think it will) but it's more like shock. Desperation takes time to build. We'll see how it plays out.