Thursday, September 02, 2004
Swift Boat endgame?
If this is right, a lot of their supposed membership is made up of people who never wanted to be members. Yikes.
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Neil Sinhababu's philosophy and politics blog, 2004-2015 ‡ neiladri, at gmail dot com
My other blogs
I've blogged in many different places. Here are some of them:
I'm very proud of War or Car, where I posted a new thing you could buy for the price of the Iraq War everyday, for 121 days. This was during the 2008 elections, and I was glad that the antiwar candidate won. The site got its name because you could buy every American household a Toyota Prius for the $3 trillion price of the war. Or you could buy the Irish their annual beer intake, in Guinness, for a millennium. Or you could buy all the world's pandas their own personal stealth bombers!
Probably my greatest era of internet awesomeness was guestblogging for Ezra Klein long before he achieved his current superstardom at Vox. My posts there are pretty scattered, so they'll be hard to find. My work for Ezra catapulted me into other opportunities like filling in for Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly. After that from 2008 to 2015, my friend Nick Beaudrot and I wrote a blog called Donkeylicious. As the name suggests, it was largely about Democratic politics.
During the 2012 elections, I created a little blog called VoteSeeing that tabulated election predictions and graded predictors on how well they did. The folks at Daily Kos Elections won the prediction contest, with Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight a close second. Shortly afterward, a group of philosophers at a blog called NewAPPS got me to put up a few posts for them.
This post at the Philosophers' Cocoon has more about my job at the National University of Singapore, where I'm a philosophy professor.
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September
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- Getting facts into play
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- Kerry on the warpath
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- Last SBVT post (I hope)
- Swift Boat endgame?
- Zell Miller, 2001
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September
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7 comments:
And if this is right, it's time for me to put on my tinfoil hat.Yikes.
I am happy that the bopcollective will not play a major role in this presidential election. I am dismayed that SBVT might.
It seems that you missed my joke.
Anyway, it seems that the effect of SBVT on the election should only be a problem if their charges are untrue. Your post, while suggestive, is merely a conditional, not an argument. You need to show: 1) the antecedent is true, and 2) the consequent affects the truth of the swifties claims about John Kerry's actions both during and after the war.
Could you explain the joke, then? I mean, I suppose those bop people are amusingly bizarre, but was there more to the joke than that? (I take it that the 'this' in your initial comment refers to the bop page.)
I've done this SBVT-disproving thing with a few people, and I'd like to suggest a format for it. You cite a SBVT charge, and I'll refute it. The one thing I am prepared to concede, in advance, is that Kerry was in Cambodia during Tet rather than Christmas.
Could you explain the joke to me? If it presupposes that the Billings Gazette is as unreliable a source as the bopcollective, that would explain why I didn't get it.
For a nicely footnoted rundown of the SBVT claims and the evidence, go here.
To summarize:
-Schachte claims to have been the 4th man on the skimmer when Kerry got his Bronze Star, and says Kerry hurt himself with a grenade. Runyon and Zaladonis, the two other men on the skimmer (besides Kerry) deny that Schachte was there and say Kerry never used a grenade. (This story, by the way, was the one that Michelle Malkin tried to spread on Hardball.)
-Thurlow claims that Kerry wasn't under fire when he pulled Rassmann out of the water. He is contradicted by everyone on Kerry's boat, a guy on his own boat, well-corroborated military records, and intelligence reports that show 1 VC killed and 5 wounded in the battle.
-Elliott now claims that Kerry merely shot down a fleeing defenseless wounded enemy and doesn't deserve a Silver Star for that. This fits ill with Elliott's intense praise for Kerry during the war, and is contradicted by Kerry's crewmates and William Rood, who say the enemy had a rocket launcher and could have blown up Kerry's boat.
-The one thing I will concede is that Kerry wasn't in Cambodia during Christmas. He was there later though, and I think the experiences that he described as 'seared into' his memory (a winter holiday, allies celebrating and firing weapons, Nixon being president) are from Tet rather than Christmas.
(Crap! Post #4 didn't become visible until just now, and I thought it wouldn't ever come up, so I decided to go a different way and write #5. Liz, feel free to respond however you like.)
Jokes aren't generally very funny in explanation, but I'll do my best. I guess what I thought was amusing is the way you phrased your post...I can make an equally true (and perhaps more alarming) conditional using your antecedent and appending a link to any crazy crap I want.
(I didn't mean to imply anything negative about the paper reporting the story or the possible truth of the story itself...just about the suggestive, but non-commital phrasing of your post.)
As far as SBVT, I am (like Max) ambivalent about the medals charges. I don't know who to believe and am more or less ignoring that part of it.
However, I am inclined to believe vets who say that Kerry's behavior after he left Vietnam had a direct negative impact on them. I'm particularly bothered by the testimony of Paul Galanti, who heard the audio while still a POW) and by the testimony itself (which can be read here...of particular interest is the part that's getting media coverage and the portion toward the end on drug use in Vietnam). This does seem like a direct set-up for the Vietnam-vets-are-all-crazy-unstable-psychos attitude that was common in my childhood.
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