Friday, August 27, 2004

More Stuff to Buy

Speaking of spending money on DVDs of cartoons from the Warner vault — as I did, just the other day here — I neglected to mention the second volume of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection, which comes out at the beginning of November. Not much hard sell needed here: More than 60 well-chosen, well-restored vintage WB cartoons, accompanied by appropriate commentary and documentary material. It doesn't get much better than that. Click right here to pre-order a copy from Amazon.

• Posted at 4:10 PM · LINK

Today's Political Rant

I would hate to think John Kerry would lose the election but I'd really hate to think he'd lose the election because of the "Swift Boat Veterans" campaign. Just as I hated the thought that Michael Dukakis lost because a lot of Americans believed he would give prison furloughs to convicted murderers or that Al Gore lost because folks thought he was a liar who claimed to have invented the Internet. I'd have a lot less problem with George W. Bush winning if it seemed like voters knew exactly what each man was all about and preferred him.

This is not to say I think Kerry is going to lose. I think it's going to be up and down for a month or two, in the press if not the polls, and we seem to be entering a "down" time for the Democrats. This will change when the campaign gets back to issues of the economy and Iraq. (It will have to. There's too much airtime to fill before Election Day.)

The thing that bothers me most about the Swift Boat Veterans campaign is the blurring of the line on two separate matters. There is the question of whether Kerry deserved those medals...and it seems to me the evidence is pretty overwhelming that he did. Then there's the question of whether his activities after he left the service honored or dishonored the war effort. I think he was pretty heroic and more accurate than will ever be admitted by some who've never come to terms with how the Vietnam war turned out, and who was to blame for that. But certainly, I can understand that there's another, deeply-held opinion on that point.

On the first question, the so-called "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" have a handful of witnesses with no physical evidence and very dubious accounts. On the second question, they have a few hundred folks who say they "served with John Kerry" (many, only in the sense that they were in the same war at roughly the same time) and they're only really relevant to the second question. I wonder how many Americans — because the campaign seems calculated to induce this impression — think the few hundred had personal experiences with Kerry in combat and therefore can attest that he was a craven, lying leader who didn't deserve those medals. It would be interesting to see a poll on that number...because if the Swift Boat Vets are doing any real damage to Kerry, I think it's predicated on that bit of misdirection.

• Posted at 12:33 PM · LINK