It’s like those stories we read about Chinese AIDS orphanages that raise lots of money being plundered by local CCP officials and the kids carted off to God knows where. Only this one strikes closer to home, as the money was raised in the US.

It was supposed to be a heartfelt cultural exchange between Chinese and Americans, a $3-million gift from followers of a Buddhist group in Los Angeles to repair a centuries-old temple in China. The site, reportedly built during the rule of Kublai Khan eight centuries ago, was desecrated during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution and was badly in need of help.

After months of renovation, invitations were printed up for the grand reopening of the Dari Rulai Xingyuan Temple in Inner Mongolia. Three hundred Buddhists from China, Japan, the United States

Suddenly everything went wrong, followers said Thursday. In the days leading up to the party scheduled for last Saturday, police, firefighters, undercover detectives and army troops broke down temple doors, arrested the church’s spiritual leader on charges of “inciting superstition,” carted away two truckloads of precious artifacts and closed the temple, citing “structural danger.”

“They invited us in, said, ‘You did a beautiful job,’ took our money then kicked us out,” said Robert Stubblefield, vice abbot of the City of Industry-based Dari Rulai Temple, who had stayed at the Kulun temple for eight months. “This has been a huge shock to everyone.”

Followers of the 1,400-year-old Hanmi Buddhist sect say that all the necessary permits were approved and that their members were warmly embraced by Kulun officials keen to boost tourism and the local economy.

Somehow this is okay, just business as usual. There’s no one to complain to and no one’s accountable. Oh well.

Link via Cosmic Iguana.

Things are worse over there, not better. And it’s as though there’s not even a war going on in Iraq — no one seems to notice, let alone care. At least the warbloggers have stopped trying to convince us things are swell by posting happy picture of US soldiers and smiling Iraqi kids at their new Halliburton-built schools.

This site offers good daily roundups of the carnage, lest we forget.

Below is a post lifted from Kevin Drum that succinctly demonstrates just how feeble the controversy generated by the SBV really is. All the links to the various quotes can be found in his post.
———————————————————————

THEN AND NOW….I’ve mentioned before that one of the reasons you shouldn’t trust the SwiftVets group is that until recently a lot of them said nice things about John Kerry — and then suddenly refreshed their memories early this year. Some of those nice things were said to reporters during the past few years, some were said in official reports 36 years ago, while in other cases official documents directly contradict what they’re saying today.

This probably isn’t a complete list, but here’s a quick recap of why nobody with a brain should trust a word they say:

Roy Hoffman, today: “John Kerry has not been honest.”
Roy Hoffman, 2003: “I am not going to say anything negative about him — he’s a good man.”

Adrian Lonsdale, today: “He lacks the capacity to lead.”
Adrian Lonsdale, 1996: “He was among the finest of those Swift boat drivers.”

George Elliot, today: “John Kerry has not been honest about what happened in Vietnam.”
George Elliot, 1996: “The fact that he chased an armed enemy down is something not to be looked down upon, but it was an act of courage.”

Larry Thurlow, today: “…there was no hostile enemy fire directed at my boat or at any of the five boats operating on the river that day.”
Larry Thurlow’s Bronze Star citation, 1969: “…all units began receiving enemy small arms and automatic weapons fire from the river banks.”

Dr. Louis Letson, today: “I know John Kerry is lying about his first Purple Heart because I treated him for that injury.”
Medical records, 1968: “Dr. Letson’s name does not appear on any of the medical records for Mr. Kerry. Under ‘person administering treatment’ for the injury, the form is signed by a medic, J. C. Carreon, who died several years ago.”

Grant Hibbard, today: “He betrayed all his shipmates. He lied before the Senate.”
Hibbard’s evaluation of Kerry, 1968: “Mr. Hibbard gave Mr. Kerry the highest rating of ‘one of the top few’ in three categories—initiative, cooperation and personal behavior. He gave Mr. Kerry the second-best rating, ‘above the majority,’ in military bearing.”

They were either lying then or they’re lying now. Take your pick. But either way, since there’s no documentary evidence to back up their stories, the only thing going for them is their own personal credibility.

And that seems pretty thin, doesn’t it?

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.