When do we get to see copies of Kerry's girlfriends's plane tickets?

Not copies of the plane tickets, but who owns or controls the accounts that were used to pay for them.

As for the busy work-- welcome to BureaucratWorld, where the most important thing is to make sure you punch in and out on time, but what happens in between is irrelevant, as long as it isn't illegal.

But it's even worse in UnionWorld, where you are a slave when you are clocked in. When the Burlington Northern shut down a divisional center in Livingston, Mont., they were required by the union contract to provide alternate work there for their employees based on senority for those who didn't want to move away. So the company did-- those guys showed up at a room for eight hours a day and did absolutely nothing. And I mean nothing-- you were not allowed to do anything else during that time either-- like read, study, do crossword puzzles or even watch television. Two years later, there were still men reporting to "work" every day.

Silly? What's silly about it? The point is not to paint Bush as some sort of deserter (although it certainly helps if that's what some people want to believe), or to pretend that whether or not he showed up for the busy-work of Guard service in the early 70's has some sort of relevance to his performance as president, or even to highlight how his upper-class political connections were used and abused to get him a Guard spot he otherwise never would have earned in the first place.

The point is to bring up embarassing details about the president's past and see if he's stupid enough to stonewall about it or cover it up. So far, he is. One can understand, perhaps, why right-wing Christians might be willing to forgive Bush his early trespasses--the story is that he saw the light when he turned 40 (right?) and so long as he holds the "right" positions now just about anything can be forgiven, from going AWOL to DUI. But things get more thorny if the callow, irresponsible rich boy never really changed his ways. Many people (and you can count me among them) believe that in his own way Bush is just as fundamentally amoral and personally irresponsible as Clinton ever was, and as president sets an insidious example for our youth and for the nation as a whole.

The trick is to find a way to point this out to the millions of "undecideds" who will decide the election later this year. Show that he was irresponsible back _then_ and you're preaching to the converted; we knew back in 1999 what a turd the man was. Show that he's a liar _now_, be it on Iraq or his Guard service or what-have-you, and the scandal reaches a wider audience.

The recent Kerry flap comes nicely into perspective in this light: the timing is such, and given that we know who Drudge's sources are, it seems beyond question that the RNC or Rove are behind it, whether it is true or not. The intent is to distract attention from Bush's troubles. Time will tell if it works.

Wow. You seem like a sensible person, but this whole Bush hatred thing has really made you certifiably insane. Seriously. You're coming off as a nut-job, a barking moon-bat along the lines of Kucinich or even Michael Moore. I don't think you recognize the harm you're doing to your own party, any more than nutty GOPers did during the Clinton years.

Timothy: I am unable to understand how you can put these two sentences together--"You seem like a sensible person" and "You're coming off as a nut-job." Apparently, I contain multitudes.

I am not a "Bush-hater" in quite the sense that you probably think. I cringe at the crudeness of Bush-hatred as practiced by Janeane Garofolo or Michael Moore. I also don't feel like my attitude towards the man qualifies as "hatred." More like a lack of respect.

Beyond this, "nutty GOPers" may have helped the Democrats gain a few seats in Congress in the 1998 elections, and may also have contributed a few percentage points to his approval ratings around that time. But,as OJ has pointed out on this blog, Clinton-hatred served the GOP quite well, if you count controlling the Senate and House, along with the majority of state governorships, since 1994; not to mention setting up the atmosphere that prevented Al Gore from claiming an election--both nationally and in Florida--that was rightfully his. It's called "mobilizing your base." Hell, Republicans are still milking Clinton-hatred three years after he left office, and if Hillary Clinton ever does decide to run, they'll milk it again. Hatred works.

M. Bulger, but hatred doesn't seem to be working for the Democrats. Look at the off-year elections of 2002. The Dem's bucked history in that one. Last year, the Dem's lost California, you know California the largest and most liberal state in the union. Sure the Democrats gained in Louisiana, but Louisiana is a strange place. The Republicans then picked up Kentucky and Mississippi. Add to that angry Howard and his implosion and it looks like hatred ain't working for the D's. Thin gruel indeed.

Actually hatred does not work. GOP under Gingrich proved that as Clinton won his 2nd Term. DEM proved that as the GOP took control of the House and Senate. 2004...?

Hatred makes good press and great debates among the pundits but normal voting Americans are turned off by this. If the hatred towards Bush increases during the year it will be a landslide for him, if the DEMs calm down then it will be a closer race.

The only atmosphere that was set up by anyone for the FL election was that candidates now can sue to change rules after the fact if they don't like the results. It was repeated in NJ, attempted in CA, and who knows where it will strike again? If Kerry resigns his seat before November, would MA Democrats sue to keep a 'D' in the chair? Perhaps.

Sandra O'Connor asked the best question of all when she simply referred to the sign on the wall of the polling places in FL (about making sure the ballot is correct before leaving the polling place) - "isn't that sufficient?" I am sure David Boies was not impressed, but too bad for him.

Some things are too important to be left to the relativists - elections are one of them.

By the Bulger repeated another lie. There's no evidence that Bush received favorable treatment to get into the Guard. That's one lie that should be stamped out.

Another important point: Bush tried to get assigned to Viet Nam.

M., I've seen you post before. Though you and I disagree about a lot, you have *seemed* like a reasonable person. But when you start wildly repeating utterly baseless accusations as fact and accusing Karl Rove of being behind everything that goes poorly for Kerry, you just sound nutty. Rationalize all you want, but you just come off as imbalanced.

M --

We'll see if the other thing about Drudge's item on Kerry -- the fact that Wesley Clark reported was heard by a group of reporters to say that Kerry "has an intern problem" -- just days before the story came to light turns out to be true.

If Clark was in fact gossping about the intern tale, then it's hard to see how Rove's fingerprints play into this, unless you think Wes was actually a deep cover mole within the Democratic primary race who managed to fool key party operatives including former Clinton/Gore staff members. It still might not prove that someone like Chris Lehane leaked the info, but it does point more towards an intra-party attack than something across party lines.

It also looks like someone in the Gore 2000 camp is yakking to Michael Sneed of the Sun-Times. Hard to hang this one on Rove but I'll bet that the "mainstream" media put more effort into finding the leak than they do investigating the story.

Jim Hamlen: Not sure what you're talking about here. The problem in Florida in Nov. 2000 was not that anyone, even George Bush, was trying to "change the rules." The rules were in conflict: Florida state law declared that any contest that close was subject to a recount; the electoral process, however, was subject to deadlines that might not have allowed a full recount to take place, depending on which deadline one wanted to make the final one. It was the sort of thing that is rightfully put in the hands of the courts; that both the Florida State Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of the United States fell back on partisan politics was only to be expected with the stakes so high.

One other piece of trivia: had a statewide recount been allowed to proceed, Gore would have won under _any_ standard (hanging chads, fully punched, whatever). A recount was all the Gore team ever asked for (albeit the wrong one, since they wanted only a few specific counties involved, and would have lost if they had their way), and in point of fact the Gore campaign never filed a single lawsuit. All of the legal actions were made by Bush's team, and all in an effort to stop the recount.

[As an aside, this allows me to repeat my assertion re: the 2002 mid-term elections and their supposed "historical" aspect: those were not Bush's midterms. They were Gore's. The supposed basis of the midterm losses for the party holding the White House is the lack of "coattails" that prevailed in the previous election. History repeated itself just fine.]

Timothy: "But when you start wildly repeating utterly baseless accusations as fact and accusing Karl Rove of being behind everything that goes poorly for Kerry, you just sound nutty."

Actually, to my knowledge, I wasn't repeating anything. I made it all up. I don't doubt that somewhere others are making the same wild speculations (I hesitate to call them "accusations." I mean, dirty-tricks campaigning ain't a crime, and does anyone, even here, disagree that Karl Rove is a master of the trade?) I normally don't post those sorts of speculations, but even humorless Democrats have to have a little fun now and then.

To clarify, the baseless accusations I was referring to were seperate from the Rove thing. I was referencing your accusations regarding Bush, which, as Edward showed, are utterly baseless.

M. Burger. Hate to disagree with you but Gore WOULD NOT have won under any recount. Countless news organizations went and did their own recount and Bush won under all of them. Chill Out.

I'm sure everyone has "moved on" from this thread however, I should mention to "M" that there was actually a recount statewide, before the Florida Supreme Court ruled. It was a machine tabulated recount and was even required by state law. Not that the LAW should hinder your speculations. The Democrats wanted a special type of recount, which wasn't required by law, that would allow for more imaginative interpretation of who voted for whom. Actually some Democrats even requested, with a straight face, that there be a re-vote in one county (Palm Beach?).
I sincerely believe that they would still be recounting in Florida today, if Democrats had their way.

Not that anyone's listening, but where are you getting your information, Jana? A consortium of newspapers obtained all of the original Florida ballots and performed a hand recount, and by any standard they used Gore came out ahead. The only counting method by which Gore lost, ironically, was the one his legal team was asking for--a recount limited to Dade and a few other Florida counties. Any statewide recount would have given Gore the Florida election; this was the Bush team's greatest (and well justified) fear.

h-man: Yes, the machine tabulated recount was required by state law and was duly performed. It was just as inaccurate as the first machine tabulation. _Also_ required under state law, if requested by either candidate, was a hand recount. No speculation required on my part. Not that the "LAW" should hinder your own fulminations.

Edward's links were interesting, but failed to address the questions as I originally understood them. It wasn't that Bush jumped ahead on some sort of waiting list; it was that he jumped ahead of hundreds of more qualified applicants with higher test scores (his own scores were the bare minimum for entry into the Guard). Someone else is free to edify me as to whether time of application or qualifications were the deciding factors in who was admitted into the Guard back then.

The "Bush applied for service in Vietnam" angle was a new one to me and would definitely throw a new wrinkle on things, if true. It stands or falls on the word of one man at this point, however, while the words of several men are being discounted in order to dismiss his alleged irresponsibility in 1972-73.

BTW, before everyone continues so far off the subject, in my original post mentioning the above accusations, I was hypothesizing that none of these matters were the real point of the scandal. Scroll up and read again.

Thanks for your time.