From Agent Largent (thanks for sending the whole article as I don't have a subscription to SALON) the Joe Consason skewing of rabid right winger Ann Coulter and her new rant, "Treason". This review is required reading so take notes there will be a test later.


Has she no shame?

Of course not, and now we know why: In her new book "Treason," Ann Coulter reveals that her role model is Joe McCarthy. And her grasp of facts is even worse than her judgment.

By Joe Conason

July 4, 2003 | "Slander" is defined in Bouvier's Law Dictionary as "a false defamation (expressed in spoken words, signs, or gestures) which injures the character or reputation of the person defamed." The venerable American legal lexicon goes on to note that such defamatory words are sometimes "actionable in themselves, without proof of special damages," particularly when they impute "guilt of some offence for which the party, if guilty, might be indicted and punished by the criminal courts; as to call a person a 'traitor.'"

So how appropriate it is that in the rapidly growing Ann Coulter bibliography, last year's bestselling "Slander" is now followed by "Treason," her new catalog of defamation against every liberal and every Democrat -- indeed, every American who has dared to disagree with her or her spirit guide, Joe McCarthy -- as "traitors." And like a criminal who subconsciously wants to be caught, Coulter seems compelled to reveal at last her true role model. (Some of us had figured this out already.)

She not only lionizes the late senator, whose name is synonymous with demagogue, but with a vengeance also adopts his methods and pursues his partisan purposes. She sneers, she smears, she indicts by falsehood and distortion -- and she frankly expresses her desire to destroy any political party or person that resists Republican conservatism (as defined by her).

"Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America," according to her demonology. "They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn't slowed them down." And: "Liberals relentlessly attack their country, but we can't call them traitors, which they manifestly are, because that would be 'McCarthyism,' which never existed." (Never existed? Her idol gave his 1952 book that very word as its title.)

Coulter went from cable network sideshow to full-fledged media star last year when her book "Slander," fed by the same ferocious right wing of the country that elevated both Rush Limbaugh and Fox News -- both of which did much to promote Coulter -- became a runaway bestseller. "Treason" displays many of the same mental habits as did "Slander": the obsession with "manly" men, the disparagement of women as weak-willed and whorish, the disturbed attraction to images of violence. "When Republicans ignite the explosive energy of the hardhats, liberals had better run for cover," she barks, obviously longing for the days when construction workers beat up antiwar demonstrators. And there is the same spittle-flecked name-calling, like a Tourette's sufferer without the mordant energy. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is "Jackie Kennedy's poodle." The late religious scholar Reinhold Niebuhr was "a big, sonorous bore." Labor leader Walter Reuther was a "sanctimonious fraud." McCarthy? "A poet," she tells us.

If so, Coulter is inspired by the same paranoid muse. She crafts images of liberals "dedicated to mainstreaming Communist ideals at home," seeking "to destroy America from the inside with their relentless attacks on morality and truth." To make such accusations requires a certain kind of mind, to put it politely. Or to put it less politely -- as the managing editor of Commentary remarked in his scathing review of "Slander" -- Coulter "pretends to intellectual seriousness where there is none." But in the marketplace for conservative ideology, her brand of fakery is hot.

The likelihood is that Coulter's many avid fans are as conveniently ignorant of the past as she seems to be. So the rubes who buy "Treason" will believe her when she accuses George Catlett Marshall, the great general who oversaw the reconstruction of Europe, of nurturing a "strange attraction" to "sedition" and of scheming to assist rather than hinder Soviet expansion.

Her duped readers will believe that Marshall and President Harry S. Truman opposed Stalin only because Republicans won the midterm elections in 1946. They probably won't know that Truman confronted the Soviets in the Mediterranean with a naval task force several months before Election Day; or that the new Republican majority cut Truman's requested military budget by $500 million as soon as they took over Congress in January 1947, nearly crippling the American occupation of Germany and Japan; or that Truman, Marshall and Dean Acheson had to plead with the isolationist Republican leadership to oppose Russian designs on Greece and Turkey.

Her deceptive style is exemplified in an anecdote she lifts from an actual historian and twists to smear Truman. She writes: "Most breathtakingly, in March 1946, Truman ostentatiously rebuffed Churchill after his famous Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri. Immediately after Churchill's speech, Truman instructed his Secretary of State Dean Acheson not to attend a reception for Churchill a week later in New York."


Has she no shame?


In that passage -- footnoted to James Chace's magisterial 1998 biography of Acheson -- Coulter demonstrates that she is both an intentional liar and an incompetent writer. The pages she cites from Chace explain quite clearly that Acheson (who was not then Secretary of State and would not be promoted to that office until 1949) was urged to avoid the New York reception by Secretary of State James Byrnes, not Truman. The British apparently didn't notice that "ostentatious rebuff," since they immediately invited Acheson and his wife to a cordial lunch with Churchill in Washington. And as for Truman, Chace notes that it was he who had invited Churchill to Missouri, his home state, to deliver the speech -- which the American president read in advance, assuring the former prime minister that his strong warning about communist intentions would "do nothing but good."


So replete is "Treason" with falsehoods and distortions, as well as so much plain bullshit, that it may well create a cottage industry of corrective fact-checking, just as "Slander" did last year. (The fun has already begun with Brendan Nyhan's devastating review on the Spinsanity Web site. So far the Spinsanity sages have found "at least five factual claims that are indisputably false" in "Treason," along with the usual Coulter techniques of phony quotation, misleading sourcing, and sentences ripped from context or falsely attributed.)


Such heavy-handed deception was precisely the sort of tactic employed by McCarthy himself against Acheson and all his other targets. In his book "McCarthyism: The Fight for America," for instance, he charged that the Truman aide had "hailed the Communist victory in China as 'a new day which has dawned in Asia.'" Of course, Acheson had neither said nor written anything of the kind.

To Coulter, McCarthy is simply a great man worthy of her emulation. In her alternate universe, he isn't the slimy traducer Americans have come to know and despise. He's bright, witty, warm-hearted and macho, a sincere farm boy who exposes the treasonous cowardice of the urbane Acheson, Marshall and other "sniffing pantywaists." She seems to regard him as kind of a Jimmy Stewart type, albeit with jowls and five o'clock shadow and a serious drinking problem.


And he never, ever attacked anyone who didn't deserve it.

"His targets were Soviet sympathizers and Soviet spies," Coulter proclaims without qualification. But elsewhere she says that he wasn't even really trying to find either communists or spies, but only seeking to expose "security risks" in government jobs. Whatever his mission, it was noble and succeeding admirably until 1954, when "liberals immobilized him with their Army-McCarthy hearings and censure investigation."

Actually, McCarthy was brought down by his own televised misconduct during those hearings -- and by the outrage not of Democrats but of Republicans, including President Eisenhower and a caucus of courageous GOP senators. (Among the latter was the current president's grandfather, Prescott Bush of Connecticut, whose vote to censure McCarthy is another little fact that Coulter forgets to mention.)

The truth is that some of McCarthy's targets were or had been communists -- and therefore by definition "sympathizers" of the Soviet Union -- but he never uncovered a single indictable spy. There had been dozens of Soviet agents in government before and during World War II. But those espionage rings had been broken up by the FBI well before McCarthy showed up brandishing a bogus "list" of 57 or 205 or 81 Communists in the State Department.

Yet the Wisconsin windbag amassed sufficient power for a time to destroy innocent individuals, most notably Owen Lattimore, described smirkingly by Coulter as McCarthy's "biggest star" and the man he once named as Stalin's "top espionage agent" in the United States. "Somewhat surprisingly," as Coulter is obliged to note, Lattimore's name has yet to be found in Moscow's excavated KGB archives or in the Venona cables decrypted by U.S. Army counterespionage agents. The dearth of evidence against Lattimore matters not at all to Coulter, however. Though the eminent China expert was neither a spy nor a communist, he certainly knew and worked with some communists -- and worst of all, he disagreed with the far right about U.S. policy toward China.

Then there are names that Coulter doesn't dare name, such as Theodore Kaghan, a favorite McCarthy target who worked for the Voice of America. In fact, she doesn't mention the Voice of America investigation at all, perhaps because it was so obviously a destructive waste of time and money. Kaghan, a valiant opponent of the communists in Berlin, was dismissed from his VOA position under pressure from McCarthy. He was wholly innocent, but the reckless senator's inquisition ruined him and sabotaged Western interests. That same destructive pattern occurred in the State Department, in the Army Signal Corps, and in other government agencies. His ham-handed brutality made McCarthy an immense boon to communist propaganda abroad, especially in Europe. They loved it when his counsel Roy Cohn and his assistant David Schine junketed around the continent, tasked with removing thousands of "pro-communist" books from the shelves of U.S.-funded libraries.

To transform McCarthy into a hero, Coulter carefully airbrushes all these unpleasant episodes from his career. "This version will be unfamiliar to most Americans inasmuch as it includes facts," she explains, introducing her biographical sketch of the Wisconsin senator. Perhaps it includes some facts, but it certainly omits others.


Coulter discusses McCarthy's impressive high school record in considerable loving detail. But somehow she neglects to mention McCarthy's first moment in the national spotlight. That was his infamous 1949 campaign on behalf of Nazi S.S. officers who were convicted of war crimes for the massacre of American troops in the town of Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge. On their orders, 83 American prisoners of war had been murdered by Waffen S.S. machine-gunners. The S.S. officers were sentenced to death, but McCarthy insisted that the entire case was a frame-up, with confessions obtained by horrific torture. He intervened in Senate hearings on the case and lied repeatedly during his defense of the Nazi murderers. His most spectacular claim was that the American investigators had crushed the testicles of German prisoners as an interrogation technique. McCarthy was later shown to have served as the pawn of neo-Nazi and communist provocateurs who were using the Malmedy case to whip up anti-American sentiment in postwar Germany. The main source for his false charges concerning Malmedy was a Germany lawyer named Rudolf Aschenauer, whose closest ties were to the postwar Nazi underground and to American right-wing isolationists, but who has also been identified as a communist agent. Aschenauer testified at U.S. Senate hearings in Germany that he had passed information about Malmedy to McCarthy. The S.S. officers were guilty, as the Senate report confirmed -- although most of them later got their death sentences commuted in a gesture to former Nazi officials who aided the West in the Cold War. But McCarthy had succeeded in his larger purpose, winning publicity for himself and casting a negative light on the war-crimes trials.


By Coulter's loose definition, his involvement in the Malmedy incident proves that McCarthy was a "traitor." He lied publicly to advance totalitarian forces in Europe against American interests. He sided with enemy forces against American soldiers. He falsely accused American officials of crimes. Moreover, he took up this tainted cause at least in part because of heavy financial support from an ultra-right-wing German-American businessman in Wisconsin. He managed to help both Nazis and communists at once, a feat rarely seen since the end of the Hitler-Stalin pact.

That irony would be lost on Coulter, as she proceeds with her single-minded smearing of Democrats and liberals. It turns out that all her raking over the ancient history of communism and anti-communism serves only as preparation to construct false contemporary analogies. Just as anyone who disagreed with McCarthy was a traitor, so was anyone who opposed the war in Vietnam or dissented from Reagan's war in Nicaragua or doubted Bush's war in Iraq.

In Coulter's beloved country there is no place for debate, only conformity. And in "Treason" there is no space for the complicated, mundane reality of American political life. Conservatives good, liberals bad, is her shrieking mantra. She knows what her audience will buy -- and that most of them aren't bright enough to notice the contradictions.

So while Patrick Buchanan is a good guy when he red-baits liberals during the Reagan era, he suddenly disappears from the pages of "Treason" when he opposes the war in Iraq. For that matter, so do all the right-wing critics of Bush's war, from Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas to the entire staff of the ultra-right Cato Institute. Their existence can't be acknowledged -- because if they do exist, they are "traitors," too. And there is no such creature as a right-wing traitor (which means that the dozens of Americans convicted of spying for Nazi Germany in 1942, the political leadership of the Confederacy, the Tories of the Revolutionary era, Timothy McVeigh, and Robert Hanssen all, naturally, go unmentioned in "Treason").

Likewise absent from Coulter's cracked cosmology are the liberals and Democrats who supported the Iraq war, including dozens of senators, members of Congress, the editors of the New Republic, the Democratic Leadership Council, and writers such as Paul Berman and Kenneth Pollack. According to her, Democrats voted for the war resolution only because they feared their true treasonous nature would otherwise be exposed. In fact, their votes in favor of Bush's resolution perversely proved that they were traitors!

"Liberals spent most of the war on terrorism in a funk because they didn't have enough grist for the antiwar mill. They nearly went stark raving mad at having to mouth patriotic platitudes while burning with a desire to aid the enemy." Somebody is raving here, but it isn't a liberal. With this book, Coulter has paid her homage and surpassed her master.

From now on, maybe we should call it Coulterism.





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MUST READ! You owe yourself a drink at the WHISKEY BAR for a...

Day in the Life

I read the news today, oh boy . . .

On the celebration of our country's beginnings it is our duty to try to understand how its image as a great shinning beacon of liberty has been warped into that of a small-minded brute with a flamethrower.

THE NEW AMERICAN ORDER

Fri Jul 4, 2:23 AM ET
Richard Reeves

By Richard Reeves

LONDON -- "What exactly do you think you're doing around the world?" a French reporter asked me the other day. He was not the first nor the last. They are "dissing" the United States all across what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld calls "Old Europe."

Bush's "Bring it on!" election style is a big help to our men overseas.

U.S. Soldier Killed; 10 G.I.'s Injured in Separate Attack
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 3:05 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Mortar rounds slammed into a U.S. base north of Baghdad, wounding at least 10 American soldiers, the U.S. military said Friday.

Meanwhile, an American soldier was killed in an attack on his convoy in the capital late Thursday, U.S. military spokesman Cpl. Todd Pruden said.

News of the attacks was a somber start to American Independence Day activities for the 150,000 U.S. troops stationed in Iraq.

It's bad in Iraq and will be getting worse by the election. Here's a slice of why Bush will have a real fight on his hands next year. Even the military families are getting pissed off at the lack of planning for AFTER the war.


Anger Rises for Families of Troops in Iraq
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN NY TIMES

FORT HOOD, Tex., July 3 — Luisa Leija was in bed the other morning, she recalled, when her 9-year-old daughter bounded in the room, saying, "Mommy, mommy, there's a man in uniform at the door." (click title above for rest of story)

You tell 'em, Dubya! And remember. This isn't a quagmire. Rummy said so.

Iraqis Defy Bush, Wound Seven U.S. Soldiers in Attacks
Thu Jul 3, 5:41 AM ET
By Daniel Trotta

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Seven American soldiers were wounded in two separate attacks on occupation forces in Iraq on Thursday, a day after President Bush said there were enough U.S. troops in Iraq to deal with the militants.

Three Iraqis killed, 10 US soldiers wounded as violence flares in Iraq

In a sign the guerrilla-style attacks were growing increasingly bold, assailants fired a rocket-propelled grenade on a U.S. Humvee vehicle on a major street in central Baghdad shortly after 10 a.m. (0600 GMT), witnesses said.

Let's all go out and play baseball (T-ball for the kiddies) and eat ice cream!

Jobless Rate Surges to Nine-Year High

By Caren Bohan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. unemployment rate shot up in June to a fresh 9-year high while the economy lost 30,000 jobs, the government said on Thursday in an unexpectedly gloomy report on the labor market.

The jobless rate climbed to 6.4 percent last month from May's 6.1 percent, the Labor Department ( news -web sites ) said, a much worse reading than the 6.2 percent forecast by U.S. economists in a Reuters survey. The rate reached the highest level since a matching 6.4 percent in April 1994.

"It's ugly on the surface and uglier when you look inside," economist Stuart Hoffman of PNC Financial Services Group said about the jobs report. "You now have declines in private-sector jobs for five straight months. And the hemorrhaging of manufacturing continues, there doesn't seem to be any abatement."

First off, let me apologize about not being around of late. Work has demanded my attentions. Okay, I had some fun, too. Now, let's get back to examining the astute leadership of those playing with themselves in the White House.

Wow! Now this is real news! Bush is "concerned" about people out of work! And listen to this. Tax cuts will solve the problem!

W.House: Bush Concerned About Jobless Rate Rise

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush is concerned about a rise in the U.S. jobless rate and believes recently enacted tax cuts will help the economy, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said on Thursday.

The government reported the jobless rate shot up in June to a fresh 9-year high while the economy lost 30,000 jobs, in an unexpectedly gloomy report on the labor market.

"The president continues to be concerned about any American who is looking for work and is unable to find it," Fleischer said.

He said Bush was pleased that income tax withholding tables were now being adjusted to reflect recently enacted tax cuts and the first of child credit checks were going out at the end of July.

"We are also an economy that is having a slow recovery from that short and shallow recession and that's further evidenced in today's unemployment report," he said.

One Republican against Bush
By Amelia Hansen San Mateo Times


Monday, June 30, 2003 - SAN MATEO -- The keynote speaker at Sunday's 2003 Peninsula Symposium and Benefit for Peace, Justice and Human Rights railed against President Bush and left the audience with a straightforward message for the 2004 presidential election: "Remember the A-B-C's -- Anything but Bush and Cheney." The message was met with unsurprising enthusiasm from the crowd. But the speaker himself had a bit of a surprising background: Scott Ritter, former U.N. chief weapons inspector, is a self-professed conservative Republican who admitted to the audience he voted for Bush three years ago.

Since then, Ritter said, Bush has lied to the American public about the true situation in Iraq, particularly in regard to the weapons of mass destruction, which American forces, to date, have failed to locate.

"I leave the door open that they still may find something," Ritter said to the group of 100 or so people gathered in the darkened auditorium at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center on Sunday. "But even if anything is found, it won't be anywhere near what they said it was -- thousands of tons of biological weapons."

Ritter's new book, "Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America," published by Context Books, is due out next week.

A 12-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and an intelligence officer who served as a central weapons inspector between 1991 and 1998, Ritter said if no weapons are found, Bush's decision to wage war on Iraq should be condemned -- whether he lied or made an honest mistake.

"If Iraq is in possession of weapons of mass destruction, they are in violation of international law," Ritter said. "If they aren't, then we are in violation of international law." Click For Rest Of Story

I posted what that commie rag, ARMY TIMES, had to say about Bush's lying concerning the treatment of military personal and families, now that liberal sob-sister Pat Buchahan is crying over Bush's lack of leadership and asks what is the plan concerning the war in Iraq. How dare he question the supreme intelligence of our leader!

WHY ARE WE STILL HERE?
Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted: June 30, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

"What are we getting into here?" asked the sergeant from the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division, stationed north of Baghdad. "The war is supposed to be over, but every day we hear of another soldier getting killed. Is it worth it? Saddam isn't in power anymore. The locals want us to leave. Why are we still here?"

The questions that sergeant put to a Washington Post reporter are ones our commander in chief had better begin to address.

For less than three months after the fall of Baghdad, we have lost almost as many men in Iraq as we did in three weeks of war. One U.S. soldier is now dying there every day.

"Mission Accomplished," read the banner behind President Bush as he spoke from the carrier deck of the Lincoln. But if the original mission – to oust Saddam and end the mortal threat of his weapons of mass destruction – is "accomplished," why are we still there?

What is our new mission? What are the standards by which we may measure success? What will be the cost in blood and treasure? When can we expect to turn Iraq back over to the Iraqis? Or is ours to be a permanent presence, as in postwar Germany and Japan?

If that sergeant does not know what he is doing there, it is because his commander in chief has left him, and us, in the dark. And if the president does not begin soon to lay out the case for why we must keep 150,000 men in Iraq, the American people will begin to demand they be brought home. Already, one poll shows that 44 percent of the nation finds the present level of U.S. casualties "unacceptable."

This is not 1963. Americans no longer have the same patience or trust in government we had when JFK took us into Vietnam. We are no longer willing to have Americans die in open-ended wars for unexplained ends. Dean Rusk's familiar mantra, "We are there, and we are committed," is no longer enough.

When the United States lost 241 U.S. Marines in the bombing of the Beirut barracks 20 years ago, and 18 Army Rangers in the "Blackhawk Down" incident in Mogadishu, Americans demanded we get out. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton hastily did.

As has been written here many times, Americans are lousy imperialists. We are uninterested in ruling and reforming other peoples if they appear to want us out of their lives. Nor are we willing to shed American blood for visions of empire dancing in the heads of Potomac pundits.

This week, six British soldiers were killed – three executed – after surrendering to Iraqi civilians enraged over intrusive house searches that they believe dishonored them and their women. This was in the Shia region of southern Iraq, which had been thought to be pacified.

One is reminded of Yitzhak Rabin's remark after the invasion of southern Lebanon had ignited the peaceful population there: "We have let the Shia genie out of the bottle."

On their visit to Baghdad, Sens. Lugar and Biden warned the U.S. Army might have to remain in Iraq five years. But Americans are not going to tolerate five years, or even two years, of guerrilla war without a better explanation as to exactly what vital interest of ours requires us to stay in Iraq and fight this war.

Moreover, there is every indication the security situation is getting worse. The incident in the south is but one example. The heavy-handed but natural reaction of U.S. soldiers to being ambushed and sniped at and killed every day is another. Invading homes searching for weapons, rousting out and roughing up Iraqi men, and patting down their women is a sure way to antagonize a fighting people.

Lest we forget, among the "Intolerable Acts" that led to our own revolution was the "Quartering Act," where Bostonians had to provide shelter for British troops sent to pacify the city after Sam Adams' tea party down at the harbor.

We are told the United States cannot walk away from Iraq now, or it would descend into chaos. That may be true. But if chaos is one alternative, another is a no-win war such as Israel is today fighting against the Palestinians. And the chances of that are daily rising.

A recent U.S. strike in the west turned up the bodies of Saudis and Syrians who had come to fight Americans, as their fathers went to Afghanistan to fight Russians. Moreover, U.S. pressure on Iran to permit inspections of its nuclear facilities – or U.S. pre-emptive strikes – would surely be answered by the kind of Iranian aid to and instigation of the Shias in Iraq that Teheran gave to Hezbollah in Lebanon. And Hezbollah, after years of guerrilla war, drove the Israelis out of their country.

President Bush had best begin devising an exit strategy for U.S. troops, before our enemies succeed with theirs.

From Fred Clark at The Slacktivist:

http://slacktivist.blogspot.com/2003_06_22_slacktivist_archive.html#105678945898439031

A DAY AT THE RACES

A tortured, obvious and over-extended metaphor.

Okay, so you're going to the track and your friend tells you to check in with this tipster before you place your bets.

So you find the guy and he tells you he's got a sure thing in the fourth race. So you put your money down, following his advice, picking Restored Honor to win, Dignity of the Office to place and Changing the Tone to show.

The fourth race comes up and you lose, watching Harken Hijinx and Partisan Pitbull in first and second, with Vandalism Fraud just edging out DUI Disclosure for third.

So you tell your friend the tipster lied to you.

"Lie is a strong word," your buddy says. "It was really just a matter of emphasis."

"The guy is 0-for-3," you say.

"Hey, these are picks," your friend reminds you. "They're not guarantees."

When you point out that the tipster said it was a "sure thing," your friend tells you that you don't understand how the game works. "That's just a term of art," he says. So you figure you'll give the tipster another chance.

This time he tells you to bet on Ongoing Surplus, Balanced Budget and Sacred Lockbox. You place your bets and you lose again -- this time to three ponies named Record Deficit, Prodigal Tax Cuts and $7 Trillion And Counting. Your wallet is really hurting and it looks like you've been had.

"That tipster is a liar," you say again.

"Go easy with the L-word," your buddy says. "Just because someone repeatedly tells you things that turn out not to be true doesn't make that person a liar. Maybe he just got some bad intelligence. Or maybe he was ideologically self-deceived. Or maybe he has secret, classified reasons for not telling you the truth -- you know, for matters of national security."

"National security? " you say. "Everybody who listened to this guy is broke."

"Calm down," your friend says. "You can't prove intent. He's no liar."

Thinking maybe you should have "sucker" tattooed on your forehead, you head back to the tipster for another try.

He tells you he's got a can't-miss scoop and you put your money on Domestic Security, Four Freedoms and Twin Towers. The three horses collide out of the gate. You've never seen anything so horrible. They end up having to shoot all three horses, plus the jockeys, the track announcer and several thousand people in the grandstands.

"That was the worst thing I've ever seen," you tell your friend. "It was an unprecedented calamity. I'm never trusting this guy again."

But your friend says that just because the disaster took place on the tipster's watch doesn't mean he bears any responsibility for it.

"You said yourself it was unprecedented," he reminds you. "So how could he have foreseen that?"

You're thinking that it's a tipster's job to foresee such things, but you let it pass.

"Sure, we're all broke and thousands are dead," your friend says, "but that just means that it's time to rally behind the tipster. At times like this we all have to band together for the good of the racing community."

This odd argument somehow strikes you as hypnotically compelling. You go back to relying on the miserable failure of a tipster, still feeling like a sucker, but somehow proud to be one. Following his lead, you blow your next paycheck on a horse called Dead Or Alive. It doesn't win, place or show, and you can't even get anybody at the window to tell you where it finished. It's like it just disappeared.

This goes on for years. You keep staking your fortunes based on what the tipster says and you keep getting burned. In all this time only one of his picks even manages to show -- a skinny nag named Jobless Recovery -- but it doesn't pay very well.

Finally, you tell your friend you're about done. You're willing to give the tipster one last chance to prove he's even remotely worth listening to. One last chance and that's it.

Surprisingly, your friend agrees.

"Fair enough," he says. "See who he's picking in the Iraqi Stakes. If that doesn't work out just the way he says, you have every right to ignore him in the future."

So it all comes down to this. You take every dime you can scrape together and put it all down on the three horses the tipster assures you are a sure thing -- Terrorist Ties, Imminent Danger and Democratic Beacon.

You lose, tearing up your tickets as Nigerian Forgery, Doctored Intel and Gaza-On-The-Tigris win running away.

"That's it! " you tell your friend. "You said yourself that this race should be the deciding factor and it was. He lied again. The tipster is a liar!"

"Whoa! Calm down. Again with the L-word," your friend says. "He told you those horses would win, so you just assumed he meant today? You've just got to give it time.

"And remember you still can't prove he was lying. He may just have been mistaken. Or deluded. Or caught up in an exaggeration. He may have been given bad information himself. So you can't say he's a liar.

"Don't you see? Just because someone is consistently mistaken or deluded -- just because everything he tells you isn't true -- that doesn't mean he can't be trusted, does it? Does it? "

Sorry for the lateness of this posting. I've been working at my "real" job this weekend.


Let's see the Bush administration or Ann Coulter spin this and accuse the writers as being liberal traitors. Finish the piece by going to the website at ARMY TIMES.


Issue Date: June 30, 2003

Editorial
Nothing but lip service


In recent months, President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress have missed no opportunity to heap richly deserved praise on the military. But talk is cheap — and getting cheaper by the day, judging from the nickel-and-dime treatment the troops are getting lately.

For example, the White House griped that various pay-and-benefits incentives added to the 2004 defense budget by Congress are wasteful and unnecessary — including a modest proposal to double the $6,000 gratuity paid to families of troops who die on active duty. This comes at a time when Americans continue to die in Iraq at a rate of about one a day.

Similarly, the administration announced that on Oct. 1 it wants to roll back recent modest increases in monthly imminent-danger pay (from $225 to $150) and family-separation allowance (from $250 to $100) for troops getting shot at in combat zones.

Then there’s military tax relief — or the lack thereof...

http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=0-ARMYPAPER-1954515.php