Stance Clarification
Sorry for the scattershot approach, but I'm installing and reinstalling Palm Desktop on my Windows machine (again and again), so I thought I might have a few minutes to pull some things together.

Since the idea of flip-flopping certainly doesn't apply to our President, he decided to clarify his statement yesterday on the Today Show (many thanks to Talking Points Memo):

"One of the interesting things people ask me, now that we're asking questions, is, can you ever win the war on terror? Of course, you can."

George W. Bush
White House Press Conference
April 13th, 2004

"I don’t think you can win it (i.e., the war on terror). But I think you can create conditions so that the — those who use terror as a tool are — less acceptable in parts of the world."

-- George W. Bush
Today Show
August 28th, 2004


"We meet today in a time of war for our country, a war (i.e., the war on terror) we did not start yet one that we will win."

-- George W. Bush, August 31st, 2004

Today's the first day that my pal Ward Sutton has his daily cartoon about the Republican convention--be sure and check it out.

I watched John McCain's speech last night and was fairly underwhelmed. So was David Corn of The Nation:


He praised Bush, though his actual endorsement had an odd ring:

"While this war has many components, we can't make victory on the battlefield harder to achieve so that our diplomacy is easier to conduct. That is not just an expression of our strength. It's a measure of our wisdom. That's why I commend to my country the reelection of President Bush, and the steady, experienced, public-spirited man who serves as our vice president, Dick Cheney."

I commend the reelection? Were we in the House of Lords? This was not a kick-ass call for Americans to swing behind the commander-in- chief. The crowd did respond with shouts of "four more years." But the delegates were not entranced by McCain's can't-we-get-along plea. What popped their cork, though, was a swipe McCain took at filmmaker Michael Moore (who was in the hall, as an accredited columnist for USA Today). Defending the war in Iraq, McCain said,

"Our choice wasn't between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war. It was between war and graver threat. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Not our critics abroad. Not our political opponents. And certainly not a disingenuous filmmaker who--"

Now the delegates went wild. It was the first signs of life in the audience. When the jeers died down, McCain continued:

"--who would have us believe Saddam's Iraq was an oasis of peace when in fact it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture chambers, mass graves, and prisons that destroyed the lives of the small children held inside their walls."

McCain, a war hero, fretting over Michael Moore? He was only elevating Moore's status. It was red meat, but McCain looked smaller for hurling it to the delegates

Now, Juan Cole's take on Monday's speeches:

The speech-makers kept saying "we did not seek this war," and that it was imposed on us, and by God we were going to keep hitting back. That is, the rhetoric was that of righteous anger, of the avenging victim. While this argument works with regard to Afghanistan (which the US did not invade, only providing air cover to an indigenous group. the Northern Alliance), it is hollow with regard to Iraq. Only by confusing the "war on terror" with the war on Iraq could this rhetoric be even somewhat meaningful, and it is not a valid conflation.

No American president has more desperately sought out a war with any country than George W. Bush sought out this war with Iraq. Only Polk's war on Mexico, also based on false pretexts, even comes close to the degree of crafty manipulation employed by Bush and Cheney to get up the Iraq war. Intelligence about weapons of mass destruction was deliberately and vastly exaggerated, producing a "nuclear threat" where there wasn't even so much as a single gamma ray to be registered. Innuendo and repetition were cleverly used to tie Saddam to Usama Bin Laden operationally, a link that all serious intelligence professionals deny.

So, I agree that the war in Afghanistan was imposed on the US. But the war on Iraq was not. And pretending that the US had no choice but to attack Iraq and reduce it to a pitiful failed state is flatly dishonest.

Now, this is low (and it's covered in Ward's cartoon):

Delegates to the Republican National Convention found a new way to take a jab at Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's Vietnam service record: by sporting adhesive bandages with small purple hearts on them.

Morton Blackwell, a prominent Virginia delegate, has been handing out the heart-covered bandages to delegates, who've worn them on their chins, cheeks, the backs of their hands and other places.

Blackwell is president of the Leadership Institute, a nonpartisan educational foundation he founded in 1979. According to its Web site, the institute prepares conservatives for success in politics, government and the news media.

This reaches back to Bob Dole stating, in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer, that Kerry had been wounded three times in Vietnam, "Three purple hearts and never bled that I know of." In that same interview, Blitzer showed Dole footage of McCain taking Bush to task in the 2000 Republican primaries for using surrogates to say that McCain had let down veterans. While the video played, Bob had a precious comment (check out the link at Slate, which includes the video):

The former Senate majority leader and 1996 presidential nominee of the Republican Party made several demonstrably false statements about John Kerry's war record this past Sunday on CNN's Late Edition before saying that "not every one of these people can be Republican liars. There's got to be some truth to the charges."

But Dole also made another statement that day, one that hasn't been aired until now. Of McCain's charge to President Bush during a 2000 debate�"You should be ashamed"�Dole told Wolf Blitzer, "He was right." Dole made the remark off-air, while CNN broadcast the Kerry ad called "Old Tricks," the one featuring McCain's 2000 debate remarks. The campaign stopped airing it recently at McCain's request.

And finally, the truth about where we're at with stem cell research--kinda brings me back to 2000:

In a recent USA Today op-ed, Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson suggested that stem cell lines are more widely available to researchers in the US than anywhere else in the world:

Most of the established US scientists in this field have received funding, and shipments of stem-cell lines are going out to researchers in record numbers. More lines are available in the USA than in any other country.

Thompson's first sentence concerns the availability of embryonic stem cell lines and funding to American researchers. Thus, when read in context, the claim that "[m]ore lines are available in the USA than in any other country" implies that scientists here have access to more lines than those in other countries.

This is misleading. Though it may be technically true that more lines are offered by laboratories based in the US than those in any other single country, the embryonic stem cell debate concerns the number of lines that American scientists can use in federally funded research, not the geographic location of those lines. Contrary to Thompson's spin, President Bush's policy restricting federal funding to lines created before August 9, 2001 means that far more lines are "available" to government-funded researchers in many other countries than in the US (similarly, privately funded researchers in the US have access to a wider array of lines). As Gareth Cook wrote in the Boston Globe in May:

[T]oday there are only 19 usable lines created before [August 9, 2001], and that number is never likely to rise above 23, according to the National Institutes of Health. However, the number of cell lines available to the world's researchers, but off-limits to US government-funded researchers, is now much higher: at least 51, according to the survey. It could rise to more than 100 over the coming year.
(Note: The lines currently available to federally-funded researchers from the NIH registry is 22.)

This strategy is reminiscent of the Bush administration's sleight-of-hand when initially announcing its policy on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. In his August 9, 2001 speech, Bush said "more than sixty genetically diverse stem cell lines exist" and argued that "we should allow federal funding to be used for research into these existing stem cell lines." However, while more than sixty lines did exist in a technical sense, most of those lines were not available and ready for research, as Bush had implied. Thompson's disingenuous spin is just more of the same.