blog report

Letting Your Guard Down

September 9, 2004

It’s all National Guard all the time today in the blog world, or at least the left-leaning portion of it. Bloggers are largely leaving aside the main course — last night’s allegations on “60 Minutes II” that friends of President Bush’s father pulled strings to get his son into the National Guard, where Bush failed to complete his duties — and feasting on the scraps, highlighting apparent evasion and deception in the White House’s response to the charges.

Kos leads the way. He notes that the White House has long claimed that it released all relevant documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Associated Press. But after “60 Minutes II” had aired last night, the administration released new memos, including a Bush suspension for failing to meet standards of the Texas Air National Guard. Kos’s take: “White House lied to AP, Nation.”

Josh Marshall, by contrast, is troubled by an email sent by RNC chair Ed Gillespie to supporters prior to the televised interview of Barnes, which warned that “Ben Barnes [whose testimony that he helped Bush get into the Guard formed the centerpiece of the “60 Minutes II” charges] … will repudiate his statement under oath that he had no contact with the Bush family concerning the president’s National Guard service.” As Marshall points out, Barnes did nothing of the sort. What he said last night was that the request to help George W. came from a mutual friend of Barnes and the elder Bush, and he continued to maintain that he had no direct contact with the Bush family. Says Marshall: “I guess there’s no getting around the fact that Gillespie lied through his teeth.”

Mickey Kaus has non-Guard related program activities on his mind. He takes on what he calls the “huffy fatuities of Gail Collins’ New York Times ed page,” which today argues that Dick Cheney “stepped across a line” when he warned about the danger of a terror attack if John Kerry is elected. Kaus notes that the Times goes on to charge, “[t]he danger might be a bit less if the current administration had chosen to spend less on tax cuts for the wealthy and more on protecting our ports.” Asks Kaus: “Why can the Times say the administration has increased the danger but Cheney can’t make his arguments that the administration has reduced the danger?” Good question.

Meanwhile, post-post-game analysis of the media’s performance in the Swift Boat brouhaha continues unabated. Oxblog’s David Adesnik attended a recent event in Charlottesville, Va. featuring Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker, who argued, Campaign Desk style, that the media’s “he said/she-said” treatment of the Swifties’ claims gave them unwarranted legitimacy. Adesnik disagrees: “All of the major media outlets, both print and broadcast, ignored the Swift Vets’ story until Kerry himself counterattacked [sic]. Then they provided coverage sympathetic to Kerry.” (He goes on to let us know that after the event, he enjoyed a “very nice dinner with Mr. Hertzberg, not to mention all of the other intelligent and inquisitive guests at the home of Mr. & Mrs. G.”)

Kevin Drum calls Adesnik’s version of events “wildly misleading.” The Swifties’ charges have been proven false in every case where conclusive documentation exists, writes Drum. But despite that, the major papers “ran stories that treated the SBVFT folks as serious (though partisan) critics and left the distinct impression that there was really no telling where the truth lay.”

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Adesnik has promised a response to Drum, though we may have to wait until he’s finished dining with prominent political writers.

–Zachary Roth

Zachary Roth is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. He also has written for The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo, among other outlets.