Swift Boats

The Bu$h campaign has complained that as revenge for the Swift Boat Vets, the Kerry Campaign has recruited 264 Alabama hookers, hoes, and pimps calling themselves Alabama National Guard and Friends, which is putting together an ad accusing Bu$h of falsifying information leading to his Good Conduct Medal. A Bu$h spokesman has attacked the credibility of the hoes by saying, "They can't even prove that he was in the state."

The Bu$h spokesman said, "Not only did Bu$h not falsify any records, he never received a Good Conduct Medal and never threw it over the White House fence... although he did throw an empty bottle of Jim Beam at a homeless person sleeping in a doorway on Pennsylvania Avenue."

Regarding the Letter to Fencepost titled "Facts you should know beforeVoting" on 17 Sept 2004... it contains the sentence,

"We have been looking for evidence of chemical weapons in Iraq for less time than it took Hillary Clinton to find the Rose Law Firm billing records."

I did a google search on it. I got 113 hits including:

• http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1160622/posts
• http://www.socialbaggage.com/
• http://www.crumpetpugs.com/2004/08/interestingextract.html

All these seem to have this same essay. It appears that either Petar V. Kovacevich of Geneva has shamelessly borrowed this spam without
appropriate attribution or he is the victim of an internet theft, where his thoughts and words have been stolen. Thankfully, I found no button on the RNC site that automattically sent this crap to every newpaper within 20 miles of the clicker's area code.

For those who are not sufficiently offended by the plagarism, perhaps you would like to consider the quality of the information in the piece. Mr.Kovacevich states:

"There were 39 combat-related killings in Iraq during January. In the fair city of Detroit, there were 35 murders in January. That's just one American city, about as deadly as the entire war-torn country of Iraq."

I think there is an "apples to apples" problem here. If there were 39 police officers, first responders and civic authorities killed in Detroit in a single month, that could be comparable to his Iraq figure. If there were only 39 killed in Iraq, including, not just US forces the comparison might be considered fair. However, Iraqis, policemen, members of the army, insurrgents, women, and children also died. This number, although not reliably reported, is in the thousands. If there were thousands of killings in Detroit, that would be more comparable, but a national story.

This is just one example. The entire posting is hopeless flapdoodle. Someone at the Daily Herald should have noticed, and should have
exposed this at the time of publication. From http://www.spj.org/ethics_code.asp, where it says:

"Test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error. Deliberate distortion is never permissible."

Robert Lemon

1. Like many rich young men in Texas at that time, George Bush received preferential treatment in getting into the Texas Air National Guard.
2. For 5 months, George Bush did not show up for required drills in Alabama.
3. George Bush was reduced from the F102 to the trainer version, then to the T33 and eventually refused to take a required physical and was grounded.
4. George Bush got out of the Guard early with an Honorable Discharge.
5. George Bush puffed his career by claiming to have been an Air Force pilot.

I was reading this just the other day...

"According to a 1999 Associated Press report, Bush's congressional campaign ran a pullout ad in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal that declared he had served "in the US Air Force and the Texas Air National Guard where he piloted the F-102 aircraft."
http://thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=1704

But when AP asked Bush if he had been justified in claiming service in the Air Force, Bush, then the governor of Texas and a presidential candidate, said, "I think so, yes. I was in the Air Force for over 600 days." Karen Hughes, his spokeswoman, maintained that when Bush attended flight school for the Air National Guard from 1968 to 1969 he was considered to be on active duty for the Air Force and that several times afterward he had been placed on alert, which also qualified as active duty for the Air Force. All told, she said, Bush had logged 607 days of training and alerts. "As an officer [in the Air National Guard]," she told the AP, "he was serving on active duty in the Air Force."

"If a member of the Air National Guard is in pilot training," says Captain Cristin Lesperance of the US Air Force media relations office, "they would remain on the Guard books. They would be counted as Guard, not as an active-duty Air Force member."

WegoWeb

"... a Washington Post poll found that 69 percent of Americans believed that Saddam was "personally involved" in Sept. 11 and 82 percent thought Saddam "provided assistance to Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network." This overwhelming agreement was a natural result of an overwhelming public relations assault by the White House.

In a Newsweek poll last week, 42 percent of Americans still think Saddam was "directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/
oped/articles/2004/09/10/as_war_toll_climbs_bush_still_deceives/

How do we know how to vote when we are so poorly served by the press?