Talking of Suicidal

[Annie]

Oh man, speaking of tin ear:

http://www.hillnews.com/york/091604.aspx

Dan Rather, Terry McAuliffe and those phony papers

Dan Rather may have trouble finding supporters these days, but he’s always got one at 430 S. Capitol St.

That’s the address of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), where on Tuesday DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe called in the press to unveil what he called
“Operation: Fortunate Son.”

A prominent part of McAuliffe’s new campaign is a video that details the ways in which George W. Bush allegedly received preferential treatment in the Texas Air National Guard.

It’s the standard anti-Bush line. “Where was he?” the narrator asks of the future president. “And why did he miss his physical? This son of privilege. This fortunate son.”

McAuliffe’s video includes a clip from the now-notorious CBS “60 Minutes” program in which Rather relied on apparently forged documents said to have been written by Bush’s superior officer. CBS quickly asked the Democrats to remove the network’s footage from the video — which seemed counterproductive, since McAuliffe’s was the biggest vote of confidence Rather has gotten lately.

The conventional wisdom is that the latest attack on Bush — the one-two punch of the CBS report and McAuliffe’s offensive — is the result of the devastatingly effective anti-Kerry ads aired by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

But it was going on before that.

Back on July 20 — before the Swift boat campaign got under way — McAuliffe held a conference call with reporters to announce that, from that day forward, Democrats would devote a great deal of time and energy to exposing Bush’s Guard record.

“It is time Bush came clean with the American people about what he was doing during the Vietnam War,” McAuliffe said.

At the time, it seemed a little odd. The Guard issue had been thoroughly aired during the Democratic primaries, when McAuliffe called the president “AWOL,” and filmmaker Michael Moore — perhaps the most popular Democrat among the party’s base — called him a “deserter.”

The issue flared again briefly in April, when Kerry himself took a few whacks at Bush’s service.

But in July, things seemed quiet on the military-records front. There were few Democratic attacks on Bush’s service, and no Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacks on Kerry.

That’s why McAuliffe’s announcement seemed a bit out of place. On the conference call, McAuliffe made it clear that he intended to press the issue every day of the campaign.

He even announced the creation of a new website, democrats.org/wherewasbush.
Fast forward to Tuesday. “Bush has stubbornly refused to come clean” about his record, McAuliffe said as he unveiled “Operation: Fortunate Son.”

Of course, this time there’s a new context for McAuliffe’s charges, and that is the ongoing scandal over the apparently phony “60 Minutes” documents.

One might think that the scandal could prove a problem for Democrats, undermining one of their main avenues of attack against Bush. But not for McAuliffe.

In “Fortunate Son,” Democrats included clips from the discredited CBS broadcast after it had been discredited. The DNC is simply pretending that didn’t happen.

It’s sometimes remarked that McAuliffe is a roaring hypocrite on the Vietnam issue
because he so ardently defended his friend Bill Clinton, who actively avoided service in any branch of the military during Vietnam. But a look at the Nexis database reveals that for much of his time in the DNC chairman’s office, McAuliffe has in fact lain low on the issue.

He didn’t say much about it during the Clinton years — unlike, say Kerry, who loudly defended Clinton’s non-service. McAuliffe didn’t say much about Vietnam during the 2000 campaign of Al Gore, who went to Vietnam as an Army journalist.

And McAuliffe remained quiet during the months in which it appeared that former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who spent some of the Vietnam years skiing out West, would be the party’s nominee.

Only in recent times has McAuliffe found his voice on Vietnam.

Given the CBS scandal, now might not seem the right time for McAuliffe to press the issue. But Democrats think they have a winner.

“I do think it’s working,” top DNC official Howard Wolfson said Tuesday when asked about the Democratic attack on Bush’s service. “There was a Newsweek poll that came out this week that showed that the president lost 10 points in his credibility numbers in one week since these issues about his service began.”

And that, of course, is what it’s all about. The CBS memos are forgeries? Who cares? They did the job.

Democrats might call it tit for tat after the Swift Boat episode. But those veterans were real — not anonymous — people with real stories who served with Kerry and are now offering themselves up for public scrutiny.

They’ve taken a beating, but in the process have raised real questions about some — but by no means all — of Kerry’s service record.

The author of the CBS memos should face questions, too — if only we knew who he was.


Byron York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: [email protected]