No, I’m not asking that question. Rather, it’s my good friend Lau Guan kim in another over-the-top commentary in China Daily. (Lau, if you remember, is the one who refers to me as “the sloppy baker” and condemned my calling this site The Peking Duck.)

His argument is that Taiwan wants to precipitate a crisis by declaring its independence, which will cause China to attack and thus force the US to come to its (Taiwan’s) defense. Could it be that simple, and would they have the balls to roll the dice like that when the stakes are so enormous? Lau thinks so.

When will Taiwan attack China?

When it declares its independent. So the Taidu are smart. They want Taiwan to be the 51st state of the USA so China would not dare attack. For the hawks in the US, this is a bonanza, as Taiwan can be another US unsinkable aircraft carrier like Japan.

This time it is better, for it is much nearer to China.

For China, if Taiwan becomes an American state, its national security is threatened. I think the Americans never forget the Korean War (1950-1953).

The Americans will know the Taiwanese are trying to dupe them. American interest precludes intervention in the Strait. Posturing is their way of showing the American colours and keeping up with America’s image as a superpower. This is less costly, and Americans will never end up in body bags.

All indications are that China will attack if Taiwan attacks first or declares independence. Then the Taiwanese ploy is to cry foul, and America the “lao da ge,” will have to save face by fishing in the muddied Strait.

After that Taiwan hopes to sit behind and watch America do the dirty work for them.

The Americans will have to ask themselves are they sentimental suckers?

Well, in all honesty, sometimes we Americans are sentimental suckers. We were suckered into the Iraq war on the sentrimental notion that we could easily establish a beacon of democracy amid our enemies, and be welcomed with flowers as we approached.

But I can’t imagine we’d allow Taiwan to wag us around like that, which is why bush gave Chen his strongly worded admonition not long ago to stop rocking the boat. If we feel he is heading into a reckless confrontation with the express purpose of dragging us in to save his ass and fight the war for him, I want to think the State Department would realize what he was up to and tell him we can’t let Taiwan manioulate us into a war that will surely be devastating. Or am I wrong….?

Hard to believe, but one of the soberest, fairest assessments of what’s going on with the shrill anti-Kerry crusade is to be found in one of America’s most unappealing journals. So it has a good chance of reaching America’s most conservative readers. I could scarcely believe what I was reading. It’s more typical of the New Republic than the Weekly Standard.

The dissonance and frustration this year’s election rouses in the mind of the dedicated Republican cannot be underestimated. Conservatives actually do revere the military, without reservation. It is not their inclination to debunk combat heroes. Some Republicans, when they drink enough beer, really do wonder whether civilian control of the military is such a great idea. For them, it was never plausible that our boys in Vietnam had “personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads . . . cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians,” and so on, as young John Kerry testified they did.

Yet in 2004, Republicans find themselves supporting a candidate, George W. Bush, with a slender and ambiguous military record against a man whose combat heroism has never (until now) been disputed. Further–and here we’ll let slip a thinly disguised secret–Republicans are supporting a candidate that relatively few of them find personally or politically appealing. This is not the choice Republicans are supposed to be faced with. The 1990s were far better. In those days the Democrats did the proper thing, nominating a draft-dodger to run against George H.W. Bush, who was the youngest combat pilot in the Pacific theater in World War II, and then later, in 1996, against Bob Dole, who left a portion of his body on the beach at Anzio.

Republicans have no such luck this time, and so they scramble to reassure themselves that they nevertheless are doing the right thing, voting against a war hero. The simplest way to do this is to convince themselves that the war hero isn’t really a war hero. If sufficient doubt about Kerry’s record can be raised, we can vote for Bush without remorse. But the calculations are transparently desperate. Reading some of the anti-Kerry attacks over the last several weeks, you might conclude that this is the new conservative position: A veteran who volunteered for combat duty, spent four months under fire in Vietnam, and then exaggerated a bit so he could go home early is the inferior, morally and otherwise, of a man who had his father pull strings so he wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam in the first place.

Needless to say, the proposition will be a hard sell in those dim and tiny reaches of the electorate where voters have yet to make up their minds. Indeed, it’s far more likely that moderates and fence-sitters will be disgusted by the lengths to which partisans will go to discredit a rival. But this anti-Kerry campaign is not designed to win undecided votes. It’s designed to reassure uneasy minds.

Did I really read that in the Standard?? Am I missing something, or is this a confession of sorts, an admission that bush is in trouble with his base? An admission that they can’t stand the guy, and would be tempted to vote for Kerry — so much so that bush had to concoct a false scenario to get them firmly back with him? Again, if this were in a liberal rag I wouldn’t flinch. But to read it in that bastion of right-wing closed-mindendness, the Weekly Standard — well, let’s just say I’m blown away.

Via Meme-orandum

Just go there — it’s wonderful.

Via Duncan.

UPDATE: You can go see for youself just how sickening bush’s attacks on McCain 4 years ago were. Unbelievable. Shocking. Totally over the top — and he not only got away with it, he won because of it. We must not let this happen a second time. The more I watch this new McCain ad, the more it sinks in just how atrocious a person our president is. As McCain talks, watch bush sink in his chair like an embarrassed child, an expression on his face you’d exect to see on a kid who just got caught with his fingers n the cookie jar.

Doesn’t anyone on the other side see what’s going on here? How can Roger and Glenn, intelligent men both, continue to give the platform to these thugs? At what point do we all rise up in chorus and ask our president, the SBVFT and all who offer them space to make their groundless accusations, “Have you no sense of decency?” The time to do so is now. Tonight I’m making my third contribution this month to the Kerry-Edwards ticket. Please, painful as it may seem, consider giving some money to fight this cancer. Whatever you can. It’s more citical now than ever.

I start my new job on Monday, and the workday starts at 8 a.m. So after months of being free to blog for much of the day, that’s all about to grind to a halt. Sure, I may find time to blog from the office (“only on my lunch hour”), but not for the first few days. So I expect a major slowdown, if not complete silence for a while. It was fun while it lasted….

From the NY Times (click to enlarge). Tell me they’re not political, or that Karl Rove has nothing to do with them. Heh.

Via Kos.

A gaggle of warbloggers, led by Instapuppy and Hugh Hewitt and others, have been complaining vociferously that the mainstream media have been ignoring the claims of the Swift Boat Scumbags for bush. They’ve been up in arms that the NYT and others haven’t given the story the play it deserves. Never mind that the “story” is simply a heap of allegations with no documenting evidence. Never mind that their Christmas in Cambodia scandal is just a matter of Kerry misstating the date he was in Cambodia by a few weeks.

Anway, their wish has been granted. Today’s New York Times features a huge front-page article that delves into the story, blowing holes into nearly every accusation. A small sample:

In an unpublished interview in March 2003 with Mr. Kerry’s authorized biographer, Douglas Brinkley, provided by Mr. Brinkley to The New York Times, Roy F. Hoffmann, a retired rear admiral and a leader of the group, allowed that he had disagreed with Mr. Kerry’s antiwar positions but said, “I am not going to say anything negative about him.” He added, “He’s a good man.”

In a profile of the candidate that ran in The Boston Globe in June 2003, Mr. Hoffmann approvingly recalled the actions that led to Mr. Kerry’s Silver Star: “It took guts, and I admire that.”

George Elliott, one of the Vietnam veterans in the group, flew from his home in Delaware to Boston in 1996 to stand up for Mr. Kerry during a tough re-election fight, declaring at a news conference that the action that won Mr. Kerry a Silver Star was “an act of courage.” At that same event, Adrian L. Lonsdale, another Vietnam veteran now speaking out against Mr. Kerry, supported him with a statement about the “bravado and courage of the young officers that ran the Swift boats.”

“Senator Kerry was no exception,” Mr. Lonsdale told the reporters and cameras assembled at the Charlestown Navy Yard. “He was among the finest of those Swift boat drivers.”

Those comments echoed the official record. In an evaluation of Mr. Kerry in 1969, Mr. Elliott, who was one of his commanders, ranked him as “not exceeded” in 11 categories, including moral courage, judgment and decisiveness, and “one of the top few” – the second-highest distinction – in the remaining five. In written comments, he called Mr. Kerry “unsurpassed,” “beyond reproach” and “the acknowledged leader in his peer group.”

Oh, well. I guess it’s a veteran’s right to change his mind.

This isn’t exactly what Instapuppy and Roger Simon and the othershad in mind. You see, they wanted the Times to print the Republican talking points, the way the Washington Times and NewsMax and WorldNetDaily are doing. They wanted the NYT to simply print excerpts of the unfounded charges. You know the drill, throw the mud and hope as much as possible will stick.

Well, yesterday we had the WaPo disproving the claims of Larry Thurlow, and today was the NYT’s turn. Instead of just reciting the charges, they actually did some journalism and fact-checking, and lo and behold, it appears the SBVFT simply aren’t to be trusted. Contradictions and hints of foul play permeate the whole thing.

See the Times’ descriptions of interviews with Merrie Spaeth and others to see just how slimy the whole thing is, and how an insidious web of intrigue ties together all the main players with the upper echelons of the Republican party.

And some want us to believe this is apolitical, just a few earnest veterans doing their humble bit of public service. That’s what they wanted the Times to print, but I’m afraid there’s a bit more.

Needless to say, in a few hours the warbloggers will be dismissing this as more treachery on the part of the liberal media. But they have to say that; they don’t want to admit their Big Story is cracking and crumbling.

The media are giving the story its play, and its originators have been proven, one by one, to be misinformed at best, and terrible liars at worst. Maybe some of the mud will stick, maybe there will be damage. But anyone with minimal grey matter can now see through the whole ugly episode. It’s an instant replay of the McCain asassination, only far more ambitious and unscrupulous. And those journalists who took the scurrilous claims and printed them verbatim, without doing their due diligence — well, they’re partners in crime.

[Link via Kevin Drum.]

I just read a monumental review of the latest books on World War I, one of those great pieces that make history come alive and fill you with questions and leave you with a sense of wonder. This isn’t for everyone, but certainly for anyone who, like me, is utterly fascinated with how the civilized world allowed itself to get sucked into the most pointless and ruinous war of all time. One from which we’re still recovering, and which can even be pointed to as at least a partial cause of our problems today in the Middle East.

If you share my curiosity, you’ll definitely want to read it. The writer, Adam Gopnik, never once mentions Iraq. But as the long article draws to a close, it isn’t too hard to see Gopnik’s point.

History does not offer lessons; its unique constellations of contingencies never repeat. But life does offer the same points, over and over again. A lesson is many-edged; a point has only one, but that one sharp. And the point we might still take from the First World War is the old one that wars are always, in Lincoln’s perfectly chosen word, astounding. They produce results that we can hardly imagine when they start. It is not that wars are always wrong. It is that wars are always wars, good for destroying things that must be destroyed, as in 1864 or 1944, but useless for doing anything more, and no good at all for doing cultural work: saving the national honor, proving that we’re not a second-rate power, avenging old humiliations, demonstrating resolve, or any of the rest of the empty vocabulary of self-improvement through mutual slaughter.

Kipling learned this, if the Kiplingites still haven’t. Niall Ferguson ends his recent neo-imperialist polemic “Colossus” with a mention of Kipling on the White Man’s Burden (which he rejects), and then a quote from Kipling on the fragility of empire (which he admires), but he leaves uncited the best poem Kipling ever wrote about war and its consequences, the simple couplet produced after his son was killed:

If any question why we died
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

No one has ever thought that the First World War didn’t have meaning, in the sense of an effect on things that came after, and purpose, in the sense that it happened because people believed it to be necessary. The questions persist. Were this purpose and this meaning worth the expense of life, the deaths of all those nineteen-year-old boys? Was what had been achieved in Europe by 1919 worth knowing that your son gasped out his last breath in the mud, as Kipling and eight million other fathers did? Was the credibility of liberal civilization worth the suicide of liberal civilization? One of the things that twentieth-century philosophy learned, in the wake of the war, is that big words are empty uniforms without men to live out their meanings, and that high moral purposes have no value outside a context of consequences. As the new century begins, the First World War seems as present, and just as great a pity, as it ever did.

This is so important, this idea that a war, no matter how carefully planned and scripted, always, always, always becomes something different and more horrible than intended. In August of 1914 civilized Europe went to war as if they were going to a tea party. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite go as expected; within 20 days, for example, more than a quarter-of-a-million French boys lay dead on the battlefield.

We’ve learned a lot about the science of war, about war technology. But it seems we still haven’t learned about the nature of war itself, and how once started it can never be controlled and contained the way its architects envisioned it.

This should add yet more excitement to this year’s already hysterical presidential race.

Foes of the president are salivating over a description of Kitty Kelly’s forthcoming tell-all about George Bush and his kin. “The Family: the Real Story of the Bush Dynasty” goes on sale Sept. 14, and the description on Amazon.com promises that Kelley — who made international headlines with her scathing Nancy Reagan bio — will reveal “the matriarchs, the mistresses, the marriages, the divorces, the jealousies, the hypocrisies, the golden children, and the black sheep” of the first family.

Perfect timing. I’ve never been a fan of Kelley and her voyeuristic tell-alls, but I may just shell out the cash for a copy of this one.

You may be surprised.

“I believe Jim Rassmann when he says that Kerry saved his life by pulling him out of a Vietnam river while under fire. Rassmann is a former Green Beret, a former police officer and a long time registered Republican until earlier this year. If he says John Kerry is a hero, nobody should doubt it. Rassmann has earned the right to be trusted and insulting his testimony is way out of line …

“It is absolutely wrong for Americans to condemn Kerry’s war record because he demonstrated provable valor. However, those who distrust him do deserve to be heard although facts not emotion should be demanded.

“I think the Swift Boat political advertisement calling Kerry a charlatan is in poor taste, and if this kind of thing continues it might well backfire on the Kerry haters. Most Americans are fair minded, and bitter personal attacks do not go down well with folks who are not driven by partisanship.”

Answer can be found here>. He must have been drinking.

In addition, today Josh marshall blasts the SBVFT in one of his angriest posts ever, citing an exchange between Slate’s Jacob Weisberg and Will Saletan.

What Weisberg also makes clear is how ridiculous it is to even compare the Swift Boat ad with those now being run by Moveon.org. One has demonstrable falsehoods, while the other contains two statements which are certainly true and have been reported by newspapers around the country (viz, that Bush got into the Guard with family connections and was later grounded) and another that is almost certainly true but not provable from available evidence (viz, that he ‘went missing’).

There is a great desire among journalists to appear even-handed in such cases and create equivalences where there simply are none. And this is a great case of that.

This is the sort of character assassination that our domestic Falange specializes in, the sort of effort that the standard Washington types usually lament as a grievous wrong several years after it happens, but never at the time. The effort is being put together by the president’s supporters. He is benefitting greatly from it. And he and his aides have gone out of their way not to criticize it in any way.
….

As Weisberg puts it, “The ad is a carefully crafted lie … beyond vile.”

Unfortunately, lies like this, once uttered, are impossible to counter in their entirety, just as mud thrown against a wall makes a terrible mess even though it doesn’t stick. The only way to counter such misdeeds is to shine a light on those cynical and deceitful enough to seek to gain from them. That would be the president and his supporters. But on this front most of the media are content to act as indifferent bystanders to the offense.

If you read nothing else today, read Marshall’s post.

As Christmas-in-Cambodia-obsessed Republicans high-five one another over embarrassing Kerry with dirt that only they can see, some old-fashioned record-checking shows beyond doubt that at least one of the Swift Boats Cretins for Bush, Larry Thurlow, is a bullshitter.

Newly obtained military records of one of Sen. John F. Kerry’s most vocal critics, who has accused the Democratic presidential candidate of lying about his wartime record to win medals, contradict his own version of events.

In newspaper interviews and a best-selling book, Larry Thurlow, who commanded a Navy Swift boat alongside Kerry in Vietnam, has strongly disputed Kerry’s claim that the Massachusetts Democrat’s boat came under fire during a mission in Viet Cong-controlled territory on March 13, 1969. Kerry won a Bronze Star for his actions that day. But Thurlow’s military records, portions of which were released yesterday to The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act, contain several references to “enemy small arms and automatic weapons fire” directed at “all units” of the five-boat flotilla. Thurlow won his own Bronze Star that day, and the citation praises him for providing assistance to a damaged Swift boat “despite enemy bullets flying about him.”

As one of five Swift boat skippers who led the raid up the Bay Hap River, Thurlow was a direct participant in the disputed events. He is also a leading member of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a public advocacy group of Vietnam veterans dismayed by Kerry’s subsequent antiwar activities, which has aired a controversial television advertisement attacking his war record.

Read the article for yourself, and see how Thurlow’s statement in the SWBFT affidavit (“I never heard a shot”) directly contradicts his military records. The article also makes it pretty clear that his fury over Kerry stems from Kerry’s anti-war activities.

One day, when we can all be a little more clear-eyed about this nonsense, we will look back at this and see one of the most shameful episodes in America’s political history. Certainly the most shameful I’ve ever witnessed.