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September 19, 2004
Weekly QandO Roundup
Posted by Jon Henke
A Weekly Best-Of-QandO, with links to, and excerpts of, our most important posts from the past week. [though, I'm largely leaving out the somewhat dated RatherGate stuff]
And don't forget the new QandO site, and the new QandO blog. More functional, more involved....and soon, more features, too.
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* Exit Interview (Jon Henke) - A book review of "Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography" by William F. Buckley Jr.
One doesn't have to read very far into Miles Gone By to discover that Buckley's intentions are far more "Literary" than "Autobiography". Certainly, the book is an autobiography, inasmuch as its stories come from his undoubtedly fascinating life. But, rather than creating a chronological, original tale of his own life, Buckley has compiled essays--written at various stages in his literary career--which give something approaching snapshots of his life, rather than a complete portrait.
This has its up and down sides.
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* Quarterly Services Survey (Jon Henke) Papa's got a brand new....er, economic indicator. The first Quarterly Services survey indicates growth in the services sector.
With typewriters and physical examinations from 1972 dominating the headlines, some other important news has been unfortunately neglected. As I noted last week the Census Department has released "first new economic indicator from the Census Bureau since the 1960s". [first announced Wednesday, Sept 8th]
You may recall that the Daily Mislead hysterically called the forthcoming indicator "the latest in a series of actions by the White House to doctor or eliminate longstanding and nonpartisan economic data collection methods."
Well, it's called the "Quarterly Services Survey (QSS)", and it measures the service sector industries, "which account for nearly 55 percent of the nation’s economic activity". It's hard to see why the Daily Mislead is opposed to a measurement of the Service Sector of our economy, but one suspects it may have more to do with partisanship than with data.
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* Democrats ignore "first law of holes"... (McQ) "... when you're in one quit digging." And the Democrats are in one....so, it's hard to see why they still want to make this election about Bush's National Guard Service. Because that's working out sooo well for them, so far.
Bush "wasn't in the Airforce?"
My guess is, and I don't have the time to dig it up, but other bloggers will, that when he went to flight school he was federalized and put under Air Force orders for those two years. Most likely it was a requirement. That would certainly qualify for having served "in the Air Force". Additionally ANG assets are considered to be reserve assets of, you guessed it, the Air Force. So if you're flying Air Force assigned air defense missions as an interceptor pilot, even as a part of the TANG, you are probably all right if you claim to have served in the Air Force. Any claim to the contrary might be seen as silly and stupid. But then we're talking about the DNC here.
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* "Is there any betrayal that we wouldn't support?" (Jon Henke) - Let's be honest - Kerry might be uninspiring, but we're not all that excited about Bush, either.
I'll let you in on another secret. Senator Kerry isn't the only candidate in this race who a large section of his own party would be happy to replace.
While bloggers like to say that Kerry is the "Anybody But Bush" candidate, I'd argue that Bush is--for conservatives and libertarians, anyway--the "Anybody but a Democrat" candidate.
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Indeed, beyond his hawkish approach to the war on terror, I simply cannot think of much that I like about Bush. And even his approach to the war on terror suffers from frequently poor implementation, and even poorer rhetoric. (though, with Bush as the candidate, I suppose the latter might be a bit unavoidable)
And yet, John Kerry is worse in every way. And the Libertarian candidate is even stranger than usual.
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* 9/10 Kerry outlines Economic Plan (McQ) - Kerry pretends we've never had "recession, 9/11, war", and then offers his free candy...er, economic plan.
This isn't much of an economic plan in my estimation. Its a "I'll do it better" plan built on a mischaracterization of where we've been (recession, 9/11, war) and where we are (1.7 million new jobs, 5.4% unemployment, increased productivity, total compensation up, and the highest homeownership percentage in the nation's history).
It identifies problem areas, but then misses or overstates government abilities to solve them.
Its a true "candidates" manifesto: Long on charges, short on meaningful specifics, and redolant of the stink of promises impossible to keep.
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* Voodoo economics II - The Sequel (McQ) - The Boston Globe conflates the Kerry's proposed additional spending with Bush's proposed fiscal shift, and claims they're equivalent. They are, to be blunt, wrong.
$2.2 trillion in new spending proposals and $860 billion in new revenue, offset by a 'cost' of $400 billion for middle-class tax cuts? That takes the increase in revenue from the 2% down to a net $460 billion, not the $600 billion we've been told to expect.
So Kerry says he's going to cover $2.2 trillion in spending with a $460 billion net increase in income tax revenue?
And cut the deficit as well?
Sure sounds like voodoo to me.
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* What would Rather do? (Dale Franks and Jon Henke) - In which Dale preemptively nails the CBS reaction to the document forgery, and lays out their roadmap to Obfuscation.
Bases on the coverage of the memo's story at the CBS Website, I suspect they'll be following a line of, "The documents aren't important. It's the deeper truths behind them that are important. Forget the documents. It's the story you need to understand.
[...]
And aliens could have produced them at their sector administrative outpost at Alpha Centauri, then beamed them to earth. Lt Col Killian could have run them off at PIP (the Kinko's of that era), because they were 'specially important. A lot of things could have happened.
But, how likely is it that they happened? That's the question that CBS still doesn't seem keen to address.
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* Triumphalism (Jon Henke) - Blog triumphalism is a bit out of hand, so it's time to remember our "proper place"....what we are, and what we aren't.
Blogs, I think, are a combination of editor and stringer. Bloggers do both the fact-checking (of editors), and the preliminary--even dubious--muckraking (of stringers in search of a story). The Blogosphere might best be compared to the newsroom at a newspaper. There, you'll find everything....the conscientous fact-checking, as well as the unsourced rumors that never make the final product.
Well, in the 'sphere, all of it is thrown against the wall to see what sticks. Blogs, like the preliminary research done in the newsrooms, are not The Record. They are merely the combined intelligence and information that goes into coalescing The Record.
Except, in blogs--for better or worse--it's all written and published as it happens.
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* Old Media BS Filter (McQ) - Blogs are another level of editorial oversight.
What blogs don't do as a rule, is break news. Bloggers are net consumers of news. But what they provide is something new and something which has been lacking forever. The old media likes to talk about editorial "checks and balances". But those are internal checks and balances which may or may not render judgement that a story is both factual and unbiased as we've seen with Rathergate and my other such stories. It is difficult to see beyond institutional bias sometimes, and that is where bloggers perform a valuable "filtration" function. They provide an external version of "checks and balances".
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* How did we end up with this clown? (Jon Henke) - Bush claims Kerry wants to expand government. Which is a bit of a pot/kettle criticism.
Face it - the only thing Bush can brag about is his comparative conservative advantage over Kerry. And that's akin to saying a tornado is--comparatively--better at home improvement projects than a hurricane.
How did this guy ever get nominated by the Republican Party, and how can we make sure the GOP never does that again?
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* The Persistent Myth of the Stolen Election (McQ) - Debunking the 2000/Florida election myths.
Its an article of faith on the left that George Bush "stole" the 2000 election with the aid of the Supreme Court which gave him a win in FL that he didn't earn and thus a Presidency he didn't earn.
To this day, the myth is still perpertrated by the likes of Jesse Jackson, John Edwards and John Kerry:
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The problem for the left is that there are no facts to support the myth. Unlike Michael Moore's claim in his factually challenged film "Fahrenheit 911", none of the recounts which were conducted post election showed that Al Gore would have won:
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* True or election year politics? (McQ) - A Democratic Senator announces a forthcoming Guard and Reserve Call-up that hadn't yet been announced. Er....
That means this falls under one of two categories ... we have here a representative who has no problem telling of military plans in advance of their execution if it will reflect negatively on his party's political opponent or we have a representative who's making something up (which can't be checked) simply to frighten the families of Guardsmen and reservists in hopes of changing their vote.
Either way, I have a real problem with this announcement. It is the ultimate in politicizing the war in Iraq.
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* The Iraq Intel Assessment (McQ) - The Iraq intel assessment: what it shows and what it doesn't.
However there's a reason I, at least, haven't paid that much attention to the intelligence estimate on Iraq that was given to the White House.
Experience.
I've read a good many intel estimates/assessments in my day (most of them tactical) and have come to understand they're a snap shot in time based on the information available at the time as well as assumptions and intel sources. I've also come to understand that with the passing of a day, the assumptions can change to the point that the assessment is rendered useless. I also came to understand that there are varying grades of intel sources. Some are rock solid and some are almost worthless. But both are used in intel assessments.
Lastly, intel assessments reflect the thoughts of, not surprisingly, the intel world. They do not reflect the ground truth that commanders in the field see. They are just another tool for the commander's decision making process.
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* Oh, it's not just the documents, Dan. Apparently, the story has some holes, too (Dale Franks) - "I hate to risk veering off into Freeper territory here, but it's hard to beleive that the only answer for the one-sidedness of the CBS story is just incompetence."
Have you ever wondered when CBS News talked to Col. Staudt? "Cause, if you have, you can stop wondering.
They didn't.
Here they were, with these «damaging »memos, telling a story about how Staudt was applying political pressure to sugar-coat Mr. Bush's EOTRs, and, yet, somehow, they never talked to the man who was allegedly asking for the sugarcoating to be done.
Maybe the phones were out in Manhattan the day they were planning to call.
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