Or at least in Shnaghia. And not the pirated DVD version. Here’s how.
June 30, 2004
June 29, 2004
John Kerry spoke to a huge crowd at Phoenix Civic Plaza today, and I was lucky enough to get one of the front-section seats, just a few rows in front of him.
I am going to keep this post short and I’m going to try to avoid effusive metaphors and gushing phrases. But I was utterly blown away and surprised, because I had no idea to what extent the John Kerry I know from soundbites and articles differs from John Kerry in person.
My attitude as I took my seat was that I was going to force myself to like Kerry. After all, I knew he was a bore, a distant and somewhat haughty elitist, a singularly uncharismatic old-timer with very limited appeal to The Man on the Street.
I can’t tell you how wrong I was on each and every count. Kerry’s grace, poise, charm, wit, self-effacing humor, mental agility, deep compassion and obvious intelligence were a breath — no, an overpowering gust — of fresh air.
He never talked at us or down to us, but rather connected, almost Clinton-like (though never quitethat warm) with everyone in the room. His speech was superb, and I am a critical son of a bitch, even with pols that I like. He knew how to get the crowd revved up, and how to bring it down a bit only to take them higher a few minutes later. He won one standing ovation after another.
Giving a speech is one thing. When our preznit has a good speech in front of his beady eyes, he, too, can be excellent. But where Kerry scored highest was the Q & As, where he had to think on his feet. His responses were swift, specific, and well thought out, unfolding with a logic and depth Bush could never command. As he answered questions, I tried to imagine him debating Bush with the eyes of the entire world upon them. It seemed utterly preposterous. Kerry, former head of the debate club at Yale, will trounce him alive.
Do you remember Bush at his famous “magic tie” press conference where someone asked what his biggest mistake since taking office was, and he disintegrated into a tongue-tied, trembling wreck? In that moment, we saw the exact kind of paralysis and helplessness he exhibited reading My Pet Goat as minute after minunte after minute after minute after minute passed after he was told “America is under attack.”
I tried to imagine John Kerry becoming similarly paralyzed. It’s possible, but I can’t imagine it. The Bush paralysis we saw in the aforementioned instances was an amplification of the bumbling, stumbling, deer-in-the-headlights leadership we had come to expect from Bush since day one. It was nothing really new, just a lot worse than usual. Kerry is a man of gravitas, of informed thoughts and sharp analysis. I saw that today. And for the first time, I know he would be a real president; he wouldn’t need to be pushed out of the elementary school classroom by his chief of staff if America were attacked. He wouldn’t stand there like the village idiot if he were asked a tough question he hadn’t prepared for.
Is John Kerry perfect? Is he the very best candidate we can find for president? No to both, and I still harbor my same concerns about the lack of both directness and responsibility he’s shown at time with the press. (But then, this stems from those those over-publicized episodes when the media was being silly, like pressing him about his owning an SUV. What’s wrong with owning an SUV? Is it a crime? I live with a guy who loves animals and nature and drives an SUV.)
But what I saw today is that John Kerry is a far stronger candidate than I had ever suspected. And it drove home to me that this is still a big secret here in America. And that makes sense: We are, for better or for worse, at war. All the world’s cameras are fixated on Iraq. It dominates the headline and the news programs, and there’s been very little coverage of much else. The convention and then the debates — those will be Kerry’s big opportunities, when he will be in the spotlight.
Watching him today, I felt thrilled, because I saw it really was possible. Kerry may very well be our next president, and it would be a great thing, not only because he is not Bush, but because he is John Kerry. Next to him, Bush is a small and inconsequential shrub. He’s still dangerous, and it’s going to be a bloody battle. But I can promise, had you been there today, you would feel just as I do now — energized, optimistic and thoroughly impressed.
But we all knew beforehand it was strictly for show.
Iyad Akmush Kanum, 23, learnt the limits of sovereignty on Monday when US prosecutors refused to uphold an Iraqi judges’ order acquitting him of attempted murder of coalition troops.
US prosecutors said that he was being returned to the controversial Abu Ghraib prison because under the Geneva Conventions they were not bound by Iraqi law….
Faisal Estrabadi, an Iraqi lawyer, said yesterday after the refusal to release Mr Kanum: “If the Iraqi courts have acquitted an individual he must be released. Anything else is a violation of sovereignty.”
“Iraq cannot be one large Guantánamo Bay.”
Why not, pray tell?
Via Eschaton.
With two days remaining before what is expected to be a huge pro-democracy march on Thursday, Chinese authorities are clamping down to prevent news of the demonstration from spreading on the mainland, while leading democrats here have split over tactics.
Mainland tourists have flooded Hong Kong in the past year, taking advantage of a relaxation of Chinese exit-visa rules that was intended to help the economy here. The annual commemoration here on June 4 of the 1989 Tiananmen Square killings drew large numbers of mainlanders this year, watching silently an event that would have quickly been broken up by the police if it had occurred anywhere else in China.
But travel industry officials say China has cut back very sharply this week on the number of mainlanders allowed to be in Hong Kong during the march on Thursday, which will protest Beijing’s decision not to allow general elections here.
Charles Ng, the vice chairman of the Hong Kong Inbound Tour Operators Association, said Tuesday that relatively few tour groups were scheduled to enter this Chinese territory for the rest of the week. The typical pace in recent months has been as many as 500 groups a day.
Chinese censors blocked the entry of Western newspapers immediately after the commemoration of the Tiananmen Square crackdown earlier this month, and even removed pages of later newspapers that had articles mentioning the Hong Kong protest. Britain turned Hong Kong over to China in 1997.
It almost sounds as if they’re afraid of something.
I hate to tell them, but I’m sure word of the HK protest has spread thru China via the Internet already, and to a large extent the consors are only fooling themselves.
William F. Buckley Jr. sees the light.
“With the benefit of minute hindsight, Saddam Hussein wasn’t the kind of extra-territorial menace that was assumed by the administration one year ago,” Mr. Buckley said. “If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war.”
Unfortunately, with the economy “drifting upward,” Josh Marshall fears that Bush may well win in November despite the Iraq fiasco.
CBS/NYT has a new poll out showing a Bush rebound and a neck-and-neck race, with the president’s rise due to public perceptions of an improving economy?
One sounding means little in itself, of course. But this does seem to be the general direction — a slow upward drift based on a recovering economy contending with the majority’s belief that the president’s foreign policy is fundamentally flawed.
Time to mobilize the troops. Kerry is anything but a shoe-in and we can’t let down our guard.
Check out Danwei’s piece — apparently it just might happen. And he says the DVD is already out in some areas. On the one hand, I can understand why some in China would delight in making the US appear dysfunctional, corrupt and creepy. On the other hand, do they want to inspire local Michael Moores-in-training to think about making their own movies criticizing the CCP? There’s ample material.
June 28, 2004
Most of my readership (all 12 readers) are in Asia, and I know they come here for brilliant commentary and deep insights, especially on China. I apologize for being so engrossed (a nice way of saying “obsessed”) with US politics lately. And with Michael Moore’s new movie. I’ll try to get back to a more balanced menu of topics, but I have to admit, right now I feel America is at war — with itself. And I feel if we (the smart people) don’t take this country back from them (the not-so-smart people), our great country will inevitably slide further backwards as the Bill of Rights is whittled away and blatant, unashamed lying forever replaces productive political discourse.
I am obsessed with censorship in China, so I have to be equally obsessed with what I see as similar patterns in America. No, not necessarily government imposed censorship — but an eerie post-911 pressure to not speak out, to be silent on that which only a few years ago would have created a national outcry.
I’m not putting up this post to argue any specific point, just to explain why this blog has taken such a turn lately, which some may say (and have said) is off course. It may be a somewhat different course than before, but I don’t think it’s “off” — just focused on a different part of the world for now. I promise, Asia isn’t going anywhere. As long as part of me is still there (in other words, forever), this blog will have an Asia slant. Sometimes, like now, as our elections approach, that slant may just be a little less obvious.
Why Gephardt would be a great choice for VP! Hilarious.
Gephardt would have an amazing pull with loser voters, voters who like losing the House to opposing parties, voters who have a long history of being supported by decrepit and dying labor institutions in failing political campaigns, just people who generally like to lose. He could swing loser states, such as Wyoming or Rhode Island, or put states with a large loser population, such as Nevada or Alabama, into play.
The upside to having a Kerry-Gephardt ticket is it would take all those people who go into shock in the voting booth thinkin’ “Oh dear god we nominated Kerry?!” and push them just far enough over the edge with “Oh dear god we nominated Kerry and Gephardt?!” that it would sort of jar them into a feeling of complacent somnambulism that would render them susceptible to voting for Kerry-Gephardt anyway. The downside to this is that such a hypthetical waking sleepstate could also get them to vote for Nader.
Via Belle at Crooked Timber, who in turn says:
This is so, so very true…. Gephardt? Gephardt??!! Please, God, don’t let the Democratic party snatch certain defeat from the jaws of potential victory by choosing Dick Gephardt as the VP candidate. Pleasepleaseplease. Anybody but Gephardt. If the DP makes me cast a vote for a Kerry/Gephardt ticket I’m going to…well, crap, just put out like a straight-ticket ho. They could put a can of processed cheese food on the ballot against Bush, and I would vote for it. But I’m not going to enjoy it! And no ticket with Gephardt on it is going to win, ever in a million years! How can this blindingly obvious fact be so clear to Giblets yet obscure to Kerry? Maybe they are just toying with us. Maybe. Then when they pick Vilsack, instead of saying, “who the hell?” we will all just be so grateful they didn’t pick Gephardt that we’ll get all fired up, like, “Hey, that Vilsack, he sure does…have a lot of consonants in his name! Frickin’ awesome!”
John, are you listening? (I thought Vilsack was a type of pickle.)
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