Links 8/31/04

*Tim Blair notes that Kerry staffers have recently been admonished to be “more diligent about staying on top of the Senator’s position.” They’ll need GPS for that one.
*QandO notices that John McCain has pointedly not denounced the Swift Boat Veterans’ second ad, the one featuring Kerry’s 1971 Senate testimony. Given the history there, this should not be surprising. Meanwhile, Wizbang reports that the Swifties are offering to drop their remaining ads if Kerry will meet certain conditions including an apology for his 1971 charges of war crimes.
*The Bush campaign, wisely, wants no part of Britney Spears at the GOP Convention.
*Jonathan Chait gets a convenient case of amnesia (subscription only):

Four years ago, Bush dismissed the attacks against McCain by insisting McCain’s attacks against him were just as bad. Now Bush is using that line again, and McCain is repeating it. When asked about the discredited Swift Boat charges, McCain replied, “It bothers me that that is the case. It also bothers me that people connected to the Kerry campaign have had to do with attack ads against President Bush as well.” You see, Bush’s allies are accusing Kerry of lying about his war record and faking his wounds, but Kerry’s allies are accusing Bush of weakening environmental regulations. So it’s all the same thing.
McCain has even asserted that Kerry brought this on himself by emphasizing his record. “His critics are saying, ‘Look, you made it fair game,'” McCain said. “I mean, that’s very legitimate, and I think there’s a risk that he took when he made it such a centerpiece. He may be paying a very heavy price.” Uh huh. Four years ago, Bush made a big deal about his record as Texas governor. By that logic, then, it would have been “fair game” for critics to accuse him of using the governor’s office for Michael Jackson-style sleepovers with little boys.


Leaving aside Chait’s facile dismissal of the Swift Vets’ charges, note how he assumes that all the attacks on Bush have been about such high-minded policy disputes as “accusing Bush of weakening environmental regulations.” Apparently Chait has never heard of Michael Moore, or of the persistent and entirely unsubstantiated claim (made even by Kerry himself) that Bush was AWOL from his National Guard unit.

Win-Now Watch

Since July 30:

Team W L +/-
Braves 21 8
Marlins 15 12 -5
Expos 16 13 -5
Phillies 13 16 -8
Mets 11 18 -10

Smells like victory . . .

PLAYER G AB H 2B 3B HR R RBI BB* K SB AVG SLG OBP
David Wright 29 113 34 9 0 6 19 19 5 17 1 .301 .540 .331
Ty Wigginton 29 90 14 2 0 1 5 7 10 18 0 .156 .211 .240

* – Includes HBP
Well, this much is certain: the one decision the Mets made that has helped them win a few ballgames now was the one that involved giving an everyday job to a 21-year-old prospect.

PITCHER W L G IP ERA H/9 HR/9 BB/9 K/9
Kris Benson 2 3 6 35 6.43 10.54 1.32 3.09 5.14
Victor Zambrano 2 0 3 14 3.86 7.71 0.00 3.86 9.00
Scott Kazmir 1 0 2 8 5.63 14.63 0.00 4.50 6.75

But hey, at least Rick Peterson can say that Victor Zambrano hasn’t walked anyone in two weeks . . .

The “G” Word

Andrew Sullivan has often ripped President Bush for not using the word “gay” – I wonder if he saw Friday’s USAToday interview (only an abstract is now available online, but the cached version is here for now), Bush addressed the same-sex marriage issue:

Bush said he has not discussed the amendment with Mary Cheney, but “of course I’ve heard from people that are my friends who are gay. … I will encourage a debate in a way that doesn’t divide people into camps and doesn’t disparage anybody.”

Not that this really makes a huge difference, but since Sullivan has marked this as an important yardstick in his estimation, it’s worth noting.

McCain Pulls His Punches

Fine speeches last night by McCain and Giuliani, both of whom made some necessary points about the war on terror and the war in Iraq. The two speeches were a reminder that, no matter how else people may try to spin their presence at the podium, the two were there not because of their moderation on some issues but because of their star power, their obvious political talents, and most of all their unrelenting hawkishness on foreign policy. There’s a reason McCain has a big speaking role at this convention and Chuck Hagel doesn’t.
McCain’s speech, however, was also an illustration of why he is unlikely to find success again as a presidential candidate. Once upon a time, John McCain was a brutally negative campaigner, promising an end to “the truth-twisting politics of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.” Lately, though, McCain has seemed to take to heart his own crusade against negativity, alternating between cheerleading and chiding President Bush while staying mostly silent on the sins of the Democrats. McCain’s prime-time slot covered the important stuff – the foreign policy stakes, the absence of sensible alternatives in Iraq, and a well-deserved potshot at Michael Moore – along with a clenched-teeth tribute to Bush’s leadership. I particularly liked this one shot at the Al Gore far left: “I don�t doubt the sincerity of my Democratic friends. And they should not doubt ours.” (Emphasis most definitely in original).
But a convention crowd wants more: an explanation of why John Kerry’s competing vision (or lack thereof) should be found wanting. McCain mostly left that to Rudy. And if he seriously wants to be president, he will have to change that. Yes, it’s true that Bush himself mostly avoids the big broadsides against Democrats, but he is willing to throw the occasional punch at his opponent. If McCain isn’t willing to do the same anymore, maybe he doesn’t want it badly enough.

Why Give Up On Kinney?

Rany Jazayerli has a good point about the Royals’ acquisition of Matt Kinney:

I don�t know why on earth the Brewers would waive Matt Kinney.
Start with the reasons why they did. He�s now on his fourth organization; the Red Sox traded him to Minnesota for Greg Swindell back in 1998, and the Twins dealt him to Milwaukee two years ago when they ran out of room on their 40-man roster. He�s got a 5.18 career ERA, which isn�t good. Like far too many Royals� pitchers, he�s a little too prone to flyballs (0.83 G/F ratio, 55 HR in 361 career IP).
Now here are all the reasons why they shouldn�t have. He�s not that old (27). He�s cheap ($400,000), although I think he�ll be arbitration-eligible this winter. He can miss bats, and he�s getting better at it. His K/9 ratio is 6.80 for his career, and consider this progression: 5.10, 6.14, 7.18, 7.51. Last season, he struck out 152 batters in 190 innings. Do you know how long it�s been since a Royals pitcher struck out 152 batters? Try 1997, by a pre-injury Kevin Appier.
And most importantly, he appears to have taken a big leap forward this season. His strikeout rate is the best of his career�and so is his walk rate (3.32 per 9). His ERA this season is 5.78, but most of that damage was done in the season�s first six weeks. His ERA on May 15th was 8.61; since then, this is his line:
31.2 IP, 35 H, 4 HR, 7 BB, 30 K, 3.13 ERA.
Plus, it�s worth noting that he�s been awfully hit-unlucky this year, surrendering 8 hits more than expected, which is a pretty margin in just 62 innings.
And we�re not talking about a soft-tosser; Kinney throws in the mid-90s, and was considered a top prospect in the minor leagues.
So why did the Brewers flat-out release him? Damned if I know. He was definitely getting torched by lefties (.379/.443/.543). While his platoon splits have never been as dramatic as they were this year, that may always be a problem for him. And the turnaround to his season corresponds to the time he was demoted to the bullpen. He had a 9.72 ERA as a starter this season, and even though he�s been pitching well in relief, I suppose the Brewers may be disappointed by what Kinney hasn�t become, as opposed to what he has.
What he has become is a pretty damn good reliever, with the stuff and sudden breakout in his K/BB ratio to suggest continued upside. The Royals plan to use him in middle relief, and maybe that�s all he�ll ever be good for. But it�s sure as hell worth giving him the roster spot to find out.
Point, Allard Baird.

Following The Rules

Judge Richard Conway Casey of the Southern District of New York has joined judges in San Francisco and Nebraska in enjoining the partial-birth abortion ban, despite his own convictions on the issue:

While Casey concluded that such abortions are “gruesome, brutal, barbaric and uncivilized,” he said the law banning them is unconstitutional because it doesn’t contain an exception to protect the health of the mother. A previous U.S. Supreme Court ruling held that the procedure can be outlawed “only if there exists a medical consensus that there is no circumstance in which any women could potentially benefit from it,” Casey said.


Casey – an alum of both my college and my law firm, I should add – is a sort-of Clinton appointee; he was originally nominated by George H.W. Bush at the recommendation of Al D’Amato but had his nomination blocked by Senate Democrats. President Clinton renominated him in 1997, making him the first blind man appointed to the federal bench. I haven’t seen the opinion and I am, of course, disappointed with the result, but I have to respect the fact that Judge Casey went against his own expressed policy preferences in following what appears to be the Supreme Court’s lead on this issue. It’s unfortunate that that sort of judicial restraint tends to be a one-way street.

BASKETBALL: Shooting By The Numbers

The miserable showing by the US Olympic basketball team has people talking about the decline of shooting in the NBA. It’s certainly true that this team can’t shoot. But is offensive efficiency and skill really in decline around the league? It’s an appropriate time to unveil another of my long-standing research projects: a statistical history of offensive efficiency and tempo in the NBA. My apologies if someone else has done this stuff before, but I got tired of trying to find it somewhere; tip of the hat to Basketball-Reference.com for the numbers.
I’ll run these in table form, decade by decade. The first four columns of the chart should be familiar enough: the leaguewide averages for team points per game (P/G), shooting percentage on two-point shots (2%), on three-point shots (3%), and on free throws (FT%). A key stat I use here is Points Per Field Goal Attempt (PPFGA), developed by John Hollinger of the Basketball Prospectus; the formula is (P/(FGA+.44(FTA))). Basically, Holinger started by assuming that a free throw is worth 1/2 of a field goal attempt (e.g., you get two shots for two points instead of a single field goal attempt), then cut the ratio from .5 to .44 based on an analysis of how often guys shoot an extra free throw after hitting a bucket, for a technical foul, etc. I use the denominator of this formula to estimate the number of team shot attempts per game (FGA/G). The last three columns seek to break down the components that go into offensive efficiency above and beyond the shooting percentages: the percentage of the league’s points that were scored at the line (FT/P), the frequency of free throw attempts per field goal attempt (FGA/FTA; a higher number means less free throws), and (since 1979-80) the percentage of shots that were three-point attempts (%3).
I’ve listed league expansion and contraction under “Major Rules Changes,” but I’m sure I’ve missed some actual changes in the rules that had some significant effects. Also, I haven’t set out the blow-by-blow extension of the schedule; the NBA schedule rose gradually to 72 games in 1953-54, then went up to 75 in 1959-60, 79 the following year and wound up at its present 82 in 1967-68. I also haven’t done a similar table for the ABA, for a variety of reasons; maybe another day. Let’s begin:
The 1940s
Major Rules Changes: 1947-48, league contracts from 11 teams to 8; zone defenses outlawed

Season P/G 2% 3% FT% PPFGA FGA/G FT/P FGA/FTA %3
1946-47 67.8 .279 N/A .641 0.693 103.9 23.4 3.75 N/A
1947-48 72.7 .284 N/A .675 0.674 107.9 25.1 3.56 N/A
1948-49 80.0 .327 N/A .703 0.781 102.4 27.5 2.83 N/A

The NBA traces its official records back to 1946-47, although the league was known as the BAA (Basketball Association of America) for the first three years prior to a merger with another professional league. To the modern eye, a league-wide field goal percentage around .280 is almost inconceivable, although to the novice basketball fan at the time it may have seemed to make it easier to grasp basketball statistics (see! they’re just like batting averages!). As you can see from the above and the seasons of the early 1950s, however, the offensive skill level of the league was improving rapidly as the league gathered the nation’s best basketball players; look at the 60-point increase in the league’s free throw percentage in a two-year span. Free throw percentage is a good barometer of basic shooting skill, since free throw shooting is basically just man vs. basket, with no adjustment for the level of competition. The pace of play reached a pre-shot-clock high of 107.9 shot attempts per game in the league’s second season, when teams played just a 48-game schedule.
The 1950s
Major Rules Changes: 1951-52, size of foul lane doubled from 6 to 12 feet; 1954-55, shot clock introduced; 1957-58, ban on offensive goaltending

Season P/G 2% 3% FT% PPFGA FGA/G FT/P FGA/FTA %3
1949-50 80.0 .340 N/A .715 0.820 97.6 29.5 2.52 N/A
1950-51 84.1 .357 N/A .732 0.855 98.3 29.1 2.50 N/A
1951-52 83.7 .367 N/A .735 0.877 95.5 29.2 2.43 N/A
1952-53 82.4 .370 N/A .716 0.887 92.9 31.2 2.15 N/A
1953-54 79.5 .372 N/A .709 0.885 89.9 29.4 2.28 N/A
1954-55 93.1 .385 N/A .738 0.911 102.2 28.5 2.41 N/A
1955-56 99.0 .387 N/A .745 0.916 108.1 28.6 2.40 N/A
1956-57 99.6 .380 N/A .751 0.899 110.8 27.9 2.56 N/A
1957-58 106.6 .383 N/A .746 0.898 118.7 26.8 2.66 N/A
1958-59 108.2 .395 N/A .756 0.915 118.3 25.4 2.82 N/A

Basketball in the Fifties, especially early in the decade, was a bruising business, as earthbound forwards and centers dominated the game. The level of violence in the game reached a pinnacle in the 1952-53 season, with one foul shot for every 2.15 field goal attempts and a record 31.2% of all points being scored at the line. Perhaps the archetypical player was Dolph Schayes, who shot 40% in a season just once (.401 in 1959-60), but averaged nearly 8 free throw attempts per game for his career while shooting .849 from the line, and averaged 12 or more rebounds a game 11 years in a row. Bob Cousy debuted in 1950-51, and revolutionized the game by being the first true point guard, but took some time to foster imitators; Bill Russell arrived in 1956-57, although black players would not become a common fixture for several more seasons. You can see the immediate and dramatic impact on tempo of the shot clock, as well as the fact that it was introduced to arrest a decline in the pace of the game.

Continue reading BASKETBALL: Shooting By The Numbers

STRINGS ATTACHED

OK, rant time. It’s 1 in the morning, and I just got off the phone after two hours (most of it spent on hold) trying to get assistance from Dell with our wireless connection. I should have been in bed a long time ago, I’ve got to work in the morning, and for good measure I’d hoped to work on a long blog entry I’ve been working over. All out the window.
Here’s the deal: my wife and I got a Dell laptop about two months ago. Although there were other uses for the laptop, we paid a lot of extra money to ensure that the laptop would have wireless service so that, among other things, I could blog without having to hibernate in the basement, where the desktop and cable modem are located. We paid for the wireless card, we paid for the router. I spent upwards of 90 minutes on the phone with tech support in early July to hook the ^%!^@! thing up.
Result: we can now use the internet . . . in our bedroom. It’s the only place on the ground floor of the house where the wireless signal comes through (it’s directly above the room in the basement where the desktop and router are located). To keep the connection, you need to walk very slowly out of the bedroom, and then it’s a weak connection that can be lost at a moment’s notice, which among other things means frequent saving or risk of losing lots of work on the blog.
So, tonight I got fed up and called Dell for help. 25 minutes on hold, get the call center in India on the line, get a few hugely time-consuming but ineffective pieces of advice. Get switched to the wireless specialist; almost an hour on hold ensues. Wireless specialist walks me througn a few items and then announces that (1) the problem may be that the wireless connection can’t work in the presence of cordless phones (both our phones are cordless, and without one I could not call him from in front of the computer) or microwave ovens; (2) the router could be interfered with by walls, ceilings, etc., and (3) if we want it to work we have to buy yet another router. None of which cautions were mentioned anywhere by Dell or any of the other sources I looked at before plunking down the money for this thing. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to buy another router only to be told I need to replace my telephone and unplug the microwave to use the computer.
Is wireless access really a mirage? Is it just Dell? Or did I just talk to an idiot in tech support? I don’t know. I just know I’m unlikely to ever get what I paid for. And I’ll be blogging in the basement for the foreseeable future. Grrrrr.

McQ Reads The Reports

One of the lingering debates on the Swift Boat story is whether the incident in which John Kerry pulled James Rassman out of the water – and won the Bronze Star – occurred under enemy fire or not; the Swifties say that there was no fire and that several boats (the captains of which have lined up against Kerry on this point) were at the scene for some time fishing the crew of PCF 3 (Kerry’s boat was PCF 94) out of the water after it hit a mine and was disabled.
McQ over at QandO explains why the NY Times has (unsurprisingly) misread the Navy documents on Kerry’s website to mistakenly claim that several Viet Cong were killed during the incident; McQ contends that the documents actually show that they were killed on land by soldiers the swift boats had been carrying earlier in their mission.
UPDATE: Don’t forget to follow McQ’s links; this and this present sober, clear-headed assessments of the available evidence regarding the March 13, 1969 engagement, with more supporting links. Frankly, this is getting to be an interesting “whodunit”-type story, even apart from its (tenuous) relevance to the presidential race.

In The Tank

Watching Kerry on Jon Stewart – Stewart is totally in the tank for Kerry. Maybe that’s not surprising; you don’t expect tough questions on a comedy show. But Stewart makes it clear whose side he’s on.
One interesting note: Kerry is starting to play the expectations game by noting that Bush has won every debate he’s been in.

The F-102

While we’re in the pre-convention lull – and I assure you, faithful readers, that by next week I’ll be back on the issues as far as political coverage goes – it’s worth remembering what a fraud many of the attacks on President Bush’s National Guard service have been. The Donovan pointed recently to an essay on Aerospaceweb.org (with useful, and let’s face it, really cool pictures) on the F-102, Bush’s aircraft, and on his service record. A few key excerpts (but make sure to go there and read the whole thing):

Continue reading The F-102

Kerry Crack-Up

CrushKerry.com – not an impartial source, obviously – claims that the decision to threaten legal action against the Swift Boaters came from Kerry himself against the better judgment of his advisors. Here’s what’s interesting about Kerry wanting to use the courts to squelch criticism: remember the FOX lawsuit against Al Franken, which was widely reported to have been instigated by Bill O’Reilly? Remember the hue and cry on the left at O’Reilly over this?
*Matt Yglesias: “If this sort of thing is going to be typical of rightwing tactical thinking in the near future, then Bush is definitely going down in 2004.”
*Kevin Drum endorsed attempts to shame the lawyers who filed the suit.
*Jack Balkin called it “A Fair and Balanced Attempt at Censorship” and added:

The most troubling aspect of the lawsuit politically is its attempt to harass a political opponent through the use of intellectual property laws. . . . We can only hope that Fox receives the bad publicity it deserves for filing this lawsuit; first, for being on the wrong side of this free speech controversy, and second, for trying to suppress people who disagree with its coverage of the news. It is particularly upsetting for a news organization to try to use the courts to suppress the speech of its political critics.


(See also Oliver Willis and Mark Kleiman)
Now, it turns out that the Democrats’ presidential candidate is the same sort of glass-jawed bully that O’Reilly is. Oh, the irony.

Cross Balls

I just noticed a new feature at Baseball-Reference.com: lists of baseball players by the colleges they attended. My alma mater, Holy Cross, is well represented with 77 major league players, albeit the great bulk of them real old-timers, and the last guy (former Twins pitcher Mike Pazik) retiring in 1977. Notables include 19th century star Cubs outfielder Jimmy Ryan; Lou Sockalexis, the Native American supposed namesake of the Cleveland Indians (who was kicked out of HC for drinking – I guess the place was rather different then); Andy Coakley, a successful pitcher for Connie Mack’s pennant-winning 1905 A’s; Jack Barry, the shortstop in Mack’s “$100,000 Infield,” who later coached baseball at the Cross for decades; “Jumpin’ Joe” Dugan, the third baseman for the 1927 Yankees; Rosy Ryan, a starting pitcher for the Giants when they won four pennants and two World Series between 1921 and 1924; and Mike Hegan, a journeyman catcher who played for the 1964 Yankees, 1969 Seattle Pilots, and 1972-73 A’s.
Not a bad crew. Barry or Jimmy Ryan was probably the best player of the bunch.

Don’t Know Much About Cambodia

Captain Ed, who’s been one of the blogosphere’s All-Stars lately, notes a Washington Post article that puts the final nail in John Kerry’s claims to have a “memory . . . seared — seared — in me” of making an illegal border crossing into Cambodia on a swift boat during his tour in Vietnam.
UPDATE: But one of Kerry’s “Band of Brothers,” Del Sandusky, is sticking by the Cambodia story.

Quick Links

*Reuters doesn’t know the difference between documents and evidence
*Joe Klein:

George W. Bush announced last Monday in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) that he wanted to bring around 70,000 troops home from Germany and North Korea over the next 10 years. In principle, that is not very controversial. The military and foreign policy priesthoods have favored that sort of restructuring since the end of the cold war. And yet, when Kerry spoke to the VFW two days later, he attacked Bush’s position, using an argument with some merit but of microscopic import in the midst of a presidential campaign: he said it was a “hasty” and “political” plan and certainly not a good negotiating tactic to withdraw troops from Korea while we are trying to get the North Koreans to drop their nuclear program.
But oops. Some two weeks earlier, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Kerry had taken a different position: “I think we can significantly change the deployment of troops, not just [in Iraq] but … in the Korean peninsula, perhaps, in Europe, perhaps.” As you might imagine, the Bush campaign quickly pointed out the inconsistency.
The stumble raises two basic questions about Kerry’s campaign. First, is he a latter-day Ron Burgundy�the idiot 1970s anchorman of Will Ferrell’s recent film who would read anything that appeared on his TelePrompTer? Did Kerry not remember what he had said to Stephanopoulos?


*This is unbelievable, and a good example of why Tad Devine is such a tool: blaming Bush for the Democrats’ over-the-top rhetoric:

Now listen, I think we can understand Senator Harkin said something very tough today and I think I know why. Because this president and this vice president have so polarized this country, have so polarized this campaign, they�re bringing out the absolute toughest things on both sides.


Link via Hanks.

Continue reading Quick Links

Candidate, Denounce Thyself

John Kerry is in a box. He’s been calling on President Bush to denounce the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad, although Bush’s more generalized blast at independent “527” groups yesterday makes it harder to press that point. But what are Kerry’s possible arguments for dismissing the Swift Boat ads?
1. It’s Ancient History. This is the easy and logical response to attacks on something a politician did 30+ years ago under factual circumstances that have grown hazy: dismiss it as old news. Heck, Bill Clinton routinely called for people to “move on” from things he’d done while he was President. Indeed, even the Vietnamese think that the Vietnam War should be a non-issue in this campaign. But Kerry torched that bridge a long time ago; a man who introduced himself to the general electorate in July and made his Vietnam service literally the first thing out of his mouth, surrounded by his “band of brothers,” can’t plausibly argue that what happened in Vietnam means nothing to his campaign.
2. Independent Ads Are Bad. Given the vast array of anti-Bush spending over the past year – including Michael Moore pushing his movie’s video release up to October – Kerry can’t well denounce 527 groups and other independent actors in principle.
3. It’s Wrong To Attack A Man’s Service Record. Here’s the biggest problem: if Kerry wants to stand on principle as saying you shouldn’t attack a man’s service record, he has a three-pronged problem: (a) he himself is attacking over 200 of his own comrades who are involved in the Swift Boat campaign; (b) he has to deal with his own past history of making false charges of widespread atrocities against American troops in Vietnam; and (c) he has personally attacked Bush’s service record with the Texas Air National Guard. From Kerry’s own mouth:

I think a lot of veterans are going to be very angry at a president who can’t account for his own service in the National Guard, and a vice president who got every deferment in the world and decided he had better things to do, criticizing somebody who fought for their country and served


That was accompanied by this Kerry campaign press release entitled “Key Unanswered Questions on Bush’s Record In National Guard.” And, from Kerry’s campaign spokesman, Chad Clanton:

Voters are going to have to decide: someone who volunteered to service their country when their country needed them or someone else who, you know, it speaks for itself. It is a contrast, it is a difference. � There is no better test than whether someone is committed to defending their country than whether they’ve put their life on the line on the battlefield.


Were Kerry to take the same stand he demands from Bush, he’d have to denounce himself and his own campaign. Oops.
4. Attack The Financing. This has been Kerry’s main tactic: focus on the Republican financiers of these ads rather than the men in the ads. Of course, Charles Krauthammer had the best response to this:

The Democrats have reacted to the Swift boat vets with anguished and selective indignation. This assault was bankrolled by rich Bush supporters, they charge. No kidding. Where else would Swift boat vets get the money? With the exception of the romantic few who serially marry millionaire heiresses, Swift boaters are generally of modest means. Where are they going to get the cash to be heard? Harold Ickes?


Anyway, unlike Paula Jones – about whom the charge may have had some credibility – people can’t seriously believe that the 200+ Swift Boat Veterans, each one a man who served his country in wartime, have been bought off; they may or may not be the most credible individuals, but most of them seem to be gainfully employed, and some quite successful.
5. They’re Lying. Of course, this is the bottom line, but it’s a place Kerry doesn’t want to go, because it means engaging the Swift vets on their terms: disputing whether the accusations are true. But it’s all he has left, and now – with the campaign focusing on Kerry’s anti-war activities, about which the only dispute is how clear it should have been to Kerry that his charges were untrue – even that is not a defense.

Wright to Dream

David Wright hasn’t missed a game yet since arriving at Shea; here are his numbers projected to a full season:

G AB H 2B 3B HR R RBI BB K SB-CS AVG SLG OBP HPB GIDP
162 671 203 58 0 29 110 87 23 104 6-0 .303 .519 .331 6 23

Well, we Mets fans need something to dream on. Wright’s flyball/groundball ratio of 0.78 bodes particularly well for him as a power hitter, although it hasn’t stopped him from hitting into double plays. Ironically, Wright has been missing the two elements – steady defense and patience at the plate – that were his predecessor Ty Wigginton’s two most conspicuous weaknesses. But Wright is 21 and showed both in the minors, so there’s hope for the future.
Now, if we can ever get Jose Reyes healthy . . .

Matthews v. Thurlow

I gotta say, on reading this transcript, Larry Thurlow – one of the Swift Boat vets – doesn’t sound very credible to me, although it’s hard to tell with Chris Matthews browbeating the guy.
UPDATE: The bottom line: even leaving aside the issue of the relevance of microanalysis of Kerry’s war record to the campaign – I continue to think that Kerry’s actual record is of little relevance, although if he’s been lying about his record all these years that is something, whereas I also continue to think that Kerry’s early-70s anti-war activities when he was preparing a run for Congress are much more relevant – it seems over-the-top for the Swift Boaters to be attacking every one of Kerry’s medals. The attack on Kerry’s Bronze Star (the rescue of Jim Rassman), of which Thurlow is a part, is especially central to this controversy; while the attack on Kerry’s Silver Star seems mostly to involve a difference of opinion, there’s a direct factual contradiction between Kerry and the other swift boat captains over (1) how many boats were present when Kerry pulled Rassman out of the water and (2) whether there was enemy fire at the time. Rassman seems like a sincere and truthful witness in support of Kerry on this point, but his vantage point may not have been that great – by his own testimony, he was under water for most of the incident and (correct me if I’m misreading this) may not have been able to tell the difference between enemy fire and fire from the swift boats at the shore – and John O’Neill has cited physical evidence supporting the Swift Vets’ version of the event.
At the end of the day, it may be that some of the Swift Boaters are not being honest or don’t remember things real well, although (1) that doesn’t necessarily call into question the whole enterprise, since we’ve seen examples already of Kerry, to put it charitably, having inaccurate recollections of those events, and (2) I don’t for a second think these guys have been bought off or that they are all partisan Republicans; it’s much more likely that their primary motivation is bitterness at Kerry’s anti-war speeches.

Bob Dole Goes Postal

Bob Dole became the first major Republican to directly attack John Kerry’s war record on Wolf Blitzer’s show today, lighting into Kerry with startling ferocity:

BLITZER: First of all, Senator, what’s your bottom line on this whole ad campaign?
DOLE: I think this can hurt Kerry more than all the medal controversy. I mean, one day he’s saying that we were shooting civilians, cutting off their ears, cutting off their heads, throwing away his medals or his ribbons. The next day he’s standing there, “I want to be president because I’m a Vietnam veteran.”
And I think he’s — I said months ago, “John, don’t go too far.” And I think he’s got himself into this wicket now where he can’t extricate himself because not every one of these people can be Republican liars. There’s got to be some truth to the charges. But this is on tape. This is on television. This is before the Senate committee.
BLITZER: Just to remind our viewers, this is when he came back from Vietnam. He testified in 1971…
DOLE: Ran for Congress.
BLITZER: Right. And he was quoting a whole bunch of other Vietnam veterans who opposed the war and making these allegations of atrocities, if you will, war crimes committed by U.S. troops. And a lot of people have always suggested that what’s really angered these Vietnam veterans, the other side, is, not so much what he did or didn’t do when he served in Vietnam, but what he did when he came back.
DOLE: I think that’s true. And I think this ad’s going to take — it’s going to be tough on Kerry because — and he says, “Well, this is all hearsay,” what he picked up from other veterans. But he said it. He said it before a Senate committee. It had worldwide attention.
BLITZER: The fact that he said on Tim Russert’s “Meet the Press” a few months ago he probably went too far. He was a young man just back from Vietnam, and he probably shouldn’t have said some of those things during those statements when he came home from Vietnam. Does that ease the responsibility that he has?
DOLE: Maybe he should apologize to all the other 2.5 million veterans who served. He wasn’t the only one in Vietnam. And here’s, you know, a good guy, good friend. I respect his record. But three Purple Hearts and never bled that I know of. I mean, they’re all superficial wounds. Three Purple Hearts and you’re out. I think Senator Kerry needs to talk about his Senate record, which is pretty thin. That’s probably why he’s talking about his war record, which is pretty confused.
BLITZER: You know, the American public seems to be paying attention to these Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads. There’s a CBS poll that came out. I think this is the right poll. Here it is. Presidential choice among veterans, 37 percent support Kerry-Edwards, 55 percent Bush-Cheney. But after the convention it was at 46 percent. He seems to be losing support among veterans, which is an influential bloc of voters out there.
DOLE: You know, I think it’s too early to tell what — nobody maybe in six — how many days left? Not many. There are eight weeks. Maybe this will be forgotten. Maybe there will be something else. But I think this has certainly damaged Senator Kerry. And I think it’s partly his own doing. He can’t lay out — I remember in ’96, I was the veteran in the race. Bill Clinton avoided the draft. And we didn’t have all this trouble over my service versus his non-service. There wasn’t much written about it. People accepted the fact that I had a record. Now there’s all the talk about Bush’s National Guard service. Has he told the truth? Has he released the records? And one way, I think, for John Kerry, who I consider to be a friend, is to maybe apologize to all these people for something he may have said at a very early age, and let us have those records he’s given to the author…
BLITZER: Douglas Brinkley.
DOLE: Douglas Brinkley, the records and the journals…
BLITZER: Who wrote a book about his experience.
DOLE: Yes. But somebody ought to find out the facts. I think this is going to be — could be the sleeper issue.


[Snip]

DOLE: . . . John McCain is absolutely correct. But as I recall, it was Terry McAuliffe who made reference to President Bush as being AWOL. They dragged up all the stuff. I think there were 80 stories in the media about the National Guard. There’s only been about eight or 10 on the so-called Kerry flap.
So it seems to me they’ve initiated it, and now they’ve got into some rather murky area. But I don’t — I wish they’d forget it. It’s not about whether or not you’re…


[Snip]

DOLE: . . . . [T]hese same people now are going after Bush. I didn’t see them going after Clinton in ’96 because he didn’t serve at all. They were going after me on my record. That’s why I say we ought to get back to the issues. Let’s talk about the issues.


[Snip]

DOLE: I don’t quarrel with that. I said John Kerry’s a hero. But what I will always quarrel about are the Purple Hearts. I mean, the first one, whether he ought to have a Purple Heart — he got two in one day, I think. And he was out of there in less than four months, because three Purple Hearts and you’re out. And as far as I know, he’s never spent one day in the hospital. I don’t think he draws any disability pay. He doesn’t have any disability. And boasting about three Purple Hearts when you think of some of the people who really got shot up in Vietnam…
BLITZER: And speaking about people getting shot up in Vietnam, the Democrats, at least some Democrats, are now going after the president and the vice president for avoiding service in Vietnam. Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, Democrat…
DOLE: He’s not a very good one to complain because he was hiding out in Japan, claiming he was a Vietnam veteran.


(via SpinSwimming). Some of this smacks of bitterness, of course, but Dole is plainly disgusted with Kerry’s overuse of his Vietnam record, and it’s not hard to see why the stress on the three Purple Hearts are particularly galling to Dole, given Kerry’s obvious robust health compared to the severity of Dole’s wounds. You can also hear the former infantry officer in Dole when he’s asked about John McCain’s comments and he remarks, “Yes, but, John wasn’t there. He was up in the air.”
I await the usual suspects calling Dole a “chickenhawk” because he didn’t serve in Vietnam. At any rate, we’re getting another object lesson in the ugliness of campaigns based on my-war-record-can-beat-up-your-war-record.
UPDATE: Captain Ed suggests that Dole may have been provoked into this outburst by a Boston Globe editorial that denigrated one of Dole’s own Purple Hearts. Idiots.

BASKETBALL: New Source

I was contacted recently by the proprietors of the new site Basketball-Reference.com . . . a little background: Sean Forman for years has done great work with Baseball-Reference.com, the premier baseball stats page on the web and one I support with several page sponsorships, and after some stumbles introduced Pro-Football-Reference.com. But for some time, a need was unmet in basketball, and a competitor set up (an extremely useful) knockoff site, Basketballreference.com. I had been using the site for many months and permalinked it here, but an affiliate of Forman has finally established the new site. Check it out; it seems to run a little faster and better than the imitation site.

Moving To Close Quarters

Instapundit (just keep scrollin’) and the Minute Man have moved in for the kill on the Swift Boat story. Blood in the water! This is getting nasty, and of course it’s all feuled by the fact that there’s a bunch of veterans out there who have been nursing a very well-deserved grudge against Kerry for 33 years now. This, from the Swift vets’ ad (watch it yourself), is just devastating – following an explanation of how the North Vietnamese often tried to get POWs to falsely confess to war crimes:

“John Kerry gave the enemy for free what I and many of my comrades in the North Vietnam prison camps took torture to avoid saying,” says Paul Galanti, identified on screen as a prisoner of war from January 1966 to February, 1973.


Welcome to 21st century political campaigns.

Governor Piscopo

Joe Piscopo says he may abandon his lucrative career as . . . uh . . . well, anyway, he may run for governor of New Jersey as a Democrat.
Piscopo, of course, stopped being funny when he started lifting weights, which makes him the prime example of what I might term Picsopo’s Laws of Thermodynamics for Comedians:
*The talent of a small-to-average-size comedian decreases in direct proportion to the increase in the mass of the comedian.
*The talent of an average-size-to-large comedian decreases in direct proportion to the decrease in the mass of the comedian.
Not sure why exactly this is. Partly it’s because fat comedians who make jokes about being fat and sloppy get less funny when they get in shape, skinny comedians who do a lot of pratfalls and physical comedy lose some of that if they get fat (think: Dan Aykroyd), and comedians generally get less funny if they start working out and taking themselves seriously. Which is another way of saying that growing up is bad for comics.

Not The Last To Be Tortured With Kerry’s Speeches

John McCain on John Kerry’s 1971 Senate testimony charging American soldiers with widespread and systematic war crimes in Vietnam:

In piece he wrote for the May 14, 1973, issue of U.S. News & World Report, the POW-turned-senator charged that testimony by Kerry and others before J. William Fulbright’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee was “the most effective propaganda [my North Vietnamese captors] had to use against us.”
“They used Senator Fulbright a great deal,” McCain wrote – a reference to Kerry’s 1971 Senate testimony that U.S. soldiers were committing war crimes in Vietnam as a matter of course.
He said Kerry political ally Sen. Ted Kennedy was “quoted again and again” by his jailers at the Hanoi Hilton.
“Clark Clifford was another [North Vietnamese] favorite,” McCain told U.S. News, “right after he had been Secretary of Defense under President Johnson.”
“When Ramsey Clark came over [my jailers] thought that was a great coup for their cause,” he recalled. Months earlier, Sen. Kerry had appeared with Clark at the April 1971 Washington, D.C., anti-war protest that showcased his testimony before the Fulbright Committee.
“All through this period,” McCain told U.S. News, his captors were “bombarding us with anti-war quotes from people in high places back in Washington. This was the most effective propaganda they had to use against us.”


Via Henry Hanks. It’s stories like this that make ads like this one so devastating.
Sometimes, in war, soldiers – even in the best of armies – commit horrible atrocities; such is human nature and the opportunity war affords for the exercise of its most brutal impulses. And nobody really disputes that some American soldiers committed such atrocities in Vietnam, probably – given the nature of the war – with greater frequency than other wars.
But Kerry has sold himself – and won the hearts of some veterans – on the theory that service in Vietnam was, whatever the merits of the war itself, no different than any other service; that American soldiers who served there did so with the same honor, and deserve the same recognition, as veterans of other wars. I have no quarrel with that argument, which seems quite right to me; but hardly anybody did more at the time to argue the contrary position – that American soldiers had acted barbarously as a matter of course – than Kerry. No wonder his words (while he was still a member of the Navy Reserve) were such effective propaganda for the enemy.

“Front” Groups

Bryon Scott over at Blogs for Bush takes a hard look at “independent” 527 groups and finds that, for all the fuss about “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” such groups are overwhelmingly Democratic.
UPDATE: Jay Caruso has done a good deal more digging, and looks at individual Democrats with close ties to both the Kerry campaign and the “independent” 527s. If the Bush people are savvy, they will counterclaim with such a bill of particulars against Kerry’s complaint to the FEC (which I gather is based on the work of Kerry’s investigators at the NY Times) regarding the independence of the Swifties.

More Ichiro

If the season ended today, the AL division winners would be the Yankees, Twins and A’s, and the Red Sox would take the Wild Card. Ichiro is hitting .428 against those four teams (68/159). Wow. (The overall scalding hot streak continues: .394 since May 1 (163/414), .483 since the All-Star Break (70/145)).

Snakes, Bit

How bad are the Diamondbacks? You probably know that they’re on pace for more than 110 losses and that, entering last night’s action, they’d lost 46 of their last 55 games. Mike’s Baseball Rants has some historical perspective; even the 1962 Mets and last year’s Tigers never lost more than 44 of 55 games (the 1916 A’s, however managed a 4-56 slide).
How about this: before last night’s victory over Pittsburgh, the D-Backs were 0-14 against the Tigers, Expos, Devil Rays and Pirates.
Opposing lefthanded batters are hitting .299/.486/.395 – against a team that sends Randy Johnson to the hill every fifth day. Take out Johnson (.171/.261/.244) and that goes to .309/.503/.405. With men on base, opposing teams are hitting .289/.495/.385 against Arizona.

The Team That Might Have Been Actually Was

The 1994 Montreal Expos are one of baseball’s great “what-if” stories – what if they’d played out a full season? What if they’d won the World Series? Would they have been able to hold together such a talented team? Would they have saved baseball in Montreal?
Well, we can’t answer those questions precisely . . . although we can approximate an answer to the first question, and without resort to “what-ifs.” I was playing around with the Streak Reports on Baseball-Reference.com some time ago, and noticed that from August 19, 1993 through May 5, 1995 – a full 162-game schedule including the entire 1994 regular season – the Expos won 110 games and lost just 52. (The Expos finished the 1993 season on a 31-10 tear in a futile attempt to catch the Phillies, went 74-40 to post the best record in baseball in 1994, and opened 1995 with a 5-2 spurt before slumping to a last-place finish with a depleted lineup. For that stretch, they were, in plain sight, a great team for one full season’s worth of games, similar to, say, the 1975 Reds (108 wins), the 1986 Mets (108 wins), or the 1984 Tigers (104 wins). And now, thanks to the magic of Retrosheet, we can not only see that 110-win record; we can flesh out the picture by reconstructing the individual stats of the players who made up a great team. Let’s take a look:
Batting Stats

PLAYER G AB H 2B 3B HR R RBI BB K SB-CS Avg Slg OBP DP HB
Darrin Fletcher 132 419 110 27 2 15 46 79 31 35 0-0 .263 .444 .314 7 7
Cliff Floyd 117 387 105 19 4 5 47 44 27 79 12-3 .271 .380 .321 4 3
Mike Lansing 145 532 145 29 2 5 59 49 42 55 19-10 .273 .363 .334 15 8
Wil Cordero 149 555 161 40 4 20 83 90 50 79 17-5 .290 .485 .356 10 8
Sean Berry 139 427 121 27 3 18 69 60 51 72 19-1 .283 .487 .361 11 3
Larry Walker 140 524 160 50 4 26 101 112 73 91 23-8 .305 .565 .390 10 5
Marquis Grissom 151 648 198 30 4 18 130 72 54 82 60-7 .306 .448 .356 14 1
Moises Alou 129 497 166 37 6 26 93 90 46 75 7-7 .334 .590 .393 7 6
Lou Frazier 103 188 48 3 2 0 29 18 19 33 22-5 .255 .293 .325 1 1
Rondell White 69 185 50 14 2 6 28 30 17 36 2-3 .270 .465 .340 3 3
Lenny Webster 57 143 39 10 0 5 13 23 16 24 0-0 .273 .448 .370 7 6
Randy Ready 32 105 27 6 1 1 17 10 18 6 2-1 .257 .362 .371 4 1
Juan Bell 38 97 27 4 0 2 12 10 15 21 4-0 .278 .381 .372 1 0
Randy Milligan 47 82 19 2 0 2 10 12 14 21 0-0 .232 .329 .337 1 0
Freddie Benavides 47 85 16 5 1 0 8 6 3 15 0-0 .188 .271 .222 2 1
Oreste Marrero 27 66 15 4 1 1 9 3 14 12 1-3 .227 .364 .363 0 0
Tim Spehr 76 72 24 7 1 1 16 9 6 19 3-0 .333 .500 .385 0 0
Delino DeShields 17 61 15 2 1 0 9 4 13 10 9-0 .246 .311 .362 0 1
John Vander Wal 24 49 10 4 1 0 8 3 8 3 0-1 .204 .327 .316 1 0
Jeff Gardner 18 32 7 0 1 0 4 1 3 5 0-0 .219 .281 .286 1 0
Roberto Kelly 7 29 7 2 0 1 5 3 0 4 1-1 .241 .414 .241 3 0
Tony Tarasco 6 20 9 3 0 0 3 2 1 4 0-0 .450 .600 .476 0 0
Shane Andrews 6 16 5 2 0 2 3 5 2 5 0-0 .313 .813 .389 0 0

Team Totals

PLAYER G AB H 2B 3B HR R RBI BB K SB-CS Avg Slg OBP GDP HPB
NON-PITCHERS 162 5265 1497 330 41 155 808 746 523 798 203-57 .284 .451 .352 103 54
PITCHERS 162 343 46 5 2 0 18 16 21 134 0-0 .134 .160 .184 4 0
TOTAL 162 5608 1543 335 43 155 826 762 544 932 203-57 .275 .433 .342 107 54

One thing that really jumps out at you about the Expos’ offense is its incredible balance. The team leader in homers hit 26, but they managed 209 155 home runs – an average of 26 19 per non-pitching lineup slot. [NOTE: Yes, my arithmetic goofed there somehow, as Travis Nelson has pointed out to me. I’ll fix any other arithmetical errors as they come to my attention.] Nobody on this team walked a whole lot – besides Walker with 73, nobody drew more than 54 walks – but everybody drew at least a halfway respectable number of walks and hit for a good enough average to not have a horrid OBP, and nobody struck out 100 times. Everybody could steal a few bases. And everyone hit gobs of doubles. It doesn’t look like a terrifying offense, but it was solid all the way through.
Walker and Alou, of course, were the offensive stars, and would go on to distinguished careers elsewhere. The hidden big year here was Grissom, who was dazzling – playing by far the best baseball of his long, erratic career – down the stretch in 1993, batting .353, scoring 34 runs and stealing 24 bases in 25 attempts in 41 games. And, of course, all the way down the depth chart (see more below) you see guys who have had long, productive major league careers.
As you can see, the Expos had an unusually poor-hitting pitching staff; if you break the numbers down (see below), the mainstays of the rotation were especially awful, while guys like Butch Henry, Denis Boucher and the relievers did OK in limited action.
Pitching Stats

Pitcher W-L SV ERA G GS CG IP H HR BB K R ER
Jeff Fassero 15-8 0 3.00 32 31 2 207.1 176 17 58 189 79 69
Ken Hill 18-8 0 3.66 30 30 2 196.2 192 15 61 107 92 80
Pedro Martinez 13-5 1 3.20 26 25 1 157.1 121 12 50 156 59 56
Kirk Rueter 12-4 0 4.53 27 27 0 135 144 15 31 66 75 68
Butch Henry 9-5 1 2.82 34 17 0 127.2 120 12 24 78 42 40
Mel Rojas 4-3 22 3.09 79 0 0 110.2 96 13 27 103 46 38
Gil Heredia 9-3 1 3.28 48 7 0 107 117 10 20 89 45 39
Jeff Shaw 6-2 1 3.95 63 0 0 86.2 88 11 21 56 42 38
John Wetteland 5-6 42 2.31 72 0 0 85.2 55 5 25 101 24 22
Tim Scott 8-2 2 3.12 56 0 0 69.1 64 3 25 57 25 24
Dennis Martinez 5-1 0 2.53 8 8 0 57 46 5 16 43 21 16
Denis Boucher 3-2 0 3.83 15 7 0 47 48 7 10 31 23 20
Gabe White 1-1 1 6.08 7 5 0 23.2 24 4 11 17 16 16
Chris Nabholz 2-0 0 0.59 6 2 0 15.1 7 0 8 14 1 1
Brian Barnes 0-1 0 6.00 11 0 0 12 17 0 8 7 9 8
TOTAL 110-52 71 3.41 162 162 5 1466.1 1350 133 409 1133 623 556

What’s striking here is that, even for a modern team, this staff never finished its starts. Felipe Alou had a great bullpen (and a deep roster to pinch hit for his helpless-hitting starters), and made extensive use of it. . . Ken Hill and Dennis Martinez went in opposite directions down the stretch in 1993, as Martinez salvaged what had been an awful year, while Hill had the swoon some were expecting again in 1994 when the strike hit . . . Wetteland was incredibly lights-out in 1993, and even moreso the end of the year.
More players:

Continue reading The Team That Might Have Been Actually Was

Who Is John Hurley?

UPDATE: Not the same guy. A relative? Even so, it kind of moots the point. Consider this item corrected.
So last night, I saw John O’Neill of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth on Joe Scarborough’s show, debating John Hurley, national director of “Vietnam Veterans for Kerry.” (I missed the same duo on Hardball last week, but it sounds like they did the same routine). Some Kerry supporters may wish to know: who is John Hurley? Well, Hurley is obviously a politically active head of a veterans’ group, and he has a pretty thick Boston accent. Which leads me to believe that he is one and the same as John J. “Wacko” Hurley, head of the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council, who successfully fought all the way to the Supreme Court in 1995 to keep a gay group out of the Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
Somebody call Media Matters, which tried to discredit the Swift Boat group by dredging up a variety of intemperate and in some cases intolerant quotes by O’Neill’s co-author, Jerome Corsi. At least Corsi isn’t actually heading a group directly affiliated with the Bush campaign.
(Of course, the merits of keeping gay groups out of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade is open to fair debate, depending on one’s view of the parade, but what do you think Atrios would say if Hurley was heading a pro-Bush group?)
As for the merits, I gotta say, if this was the first I’d seen of this controversy, I would have started off very skeptical – O’Neill seems so over-the-top in attacking just every bit of Kerry’s service record, and his demeanor is very cheesy trial-lawyer. But I was definitely more convinced by the end that O’Neill’s charges could have some weight to them. O’Neill just had a whole lot more specifics on his side, and all Hurley could do – besides say he thought O’Neill should be ashamed of himself – was to cite Navy reports that apparently relied on Kerry’s own information.
The debate over the circumstances of Kerry’s Bronze Star (the rescue of James Rassman) seems particularly stark – Kerry and Rassman say that Kerry came back alone under fire to pull out Rassman, O’Neill cites the captains of several other boats who say Kerry alone fled the scene and came back when the shooting stopped while there were several other boats around pulling other guys out of the water. It’s very hard to write this off as a difference in perceptions.
Anyway, I remain open to persuasion on who’s right here, and I remain skeptical of how relevant any of this really is to the 2004 campaign. But there’s clearly an interesting story here.

Not in the Same Boat, Part II

I’m on my way out of town again on business. It turns out that for all the Kerry camp’s blather about how (most of) the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth never served on the same boat with John Kerry, one of his vocal “band of brothers” who spoke at the Democratic Convention may not have been either, and may be lying today. I’ve said for some time that I wasn’t interested in exactly what Kerry did to earn medals in Vietnam, but it looks like the swift boat story is gaining some real traction anyway based on problems with the, er, accuracy of Kerry’s narrative.
Captain Ed is on this story like a starving man on a sandwich. Go check him out.

Sauce, Goose, Gander

So, last week, Louisiana Congressman Rodney Alexander switched parties, to catcalls from Democrats; Alexander chose to time his switch late enough to prevent the Democrats from fielding a viable opponent on November’s ballot, a bit of non-beanbaggery that the perennially overwrought Mark Kleiman described as “about the sleaziest, most cowardly thing I’ve ever heard of a politician doing”. Mmmm, short memory there, Professor Kleiman. Kevin Drum also called it “Pretty sleazy”.
Well, now New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey has delayed his resignation in disgrace until November 15, to prevent any election at all to fill his job and keep the governorship in (unelected) Democratic hands until 2006. Neither Drum nor Kleiman has had anything to say on this yet – not that it’s my place to tell them what to write – but it will be amusing to see if they turn around and defend this sort of chicanery when it helps their side. Hmmmmmmm.

UPDATE:
The Mad Hibernian points me to this Professor Bainbridge post calling Kos on the same point.

The Mark of Zambrano

Now, I haven’t seen Victor Zambrano pitch for the Mets yet. And I continue to believe that they way overpaid for him. And I continue to be skeptical of Rick Peterson’s reported boast that he could turn Zambrano around “in 10 minutes.”
That being said, I am optimistic about Zambrano’s future with the Mets, and his performance in his first two starts (2.92 ERA, 12 K, 5 BB, 10 H, 0 HR and 0 HBP in 12 innings) does nothing to undermine that confidence. Hopefully, Mets fans won’t hold against Zambrano the front office’s foolishness in dealing for him. And, of coure, people should be patient if he gets shelled in his next start – in Colorado.

The Vietnam Veteran in Nicaragua

While I’m away, I will leave you with this, a wonderful illustration of how Vietnam winds up being at the center of anything John Kerry does, no matter what the issue at hand, and an illustration in particular of the context behind his use of the “Christmas in Cambodia” fable in a 1986 debate on Nicaragua; from a wonderful May 17, 2004 cover story by Jay Nordlinger in National Review on Kerry’s Latin America policies dating back to the 1980s, available in full online only to subscribers:

Continue reading The Vietnam Veteran in Nicaragua

Not All In The Same Boat

John Cole demolishes one of the Kerry camp’s fraudulent talking points on the swift boat story: that the Swift Boat Vets aren’t qualified to speak to Kerry’s Vietnam experience because they were not in his boat. I’m left with three possibilities to explain why the Kerry people are relying on such thoroughly bogus arguments, coupled with foolish, bullying threats of lawsuits to stifle a poorly funded ad campaign:
1. The Swift Boat Vets are right.
2. The Kerry people are incompetent fools.
3. The Kerry people have such contempt for the public that they think this will do.
(My money’s mostly on #3, but the Swifties have at least scored one apparent hit with the “Christmas in Cambodia” story that Kerry has now backed off from after saying in 1979 – when it should have been fresher in his mind – that it was “seared” in his memory).
And we have to consider who this story is aimed at. To me, John Kerry is still a war hero. But I’m not the Swift Boat Vets’ target audience.

Continue reading Not All In The Same Boat

No Boone

I was mildly surprised that nobody took a chance on Bret Boone at the trading deadine, given that it was only last season that Boone was third in the league with 117 RBI, scored 111 runs, won the Gold Glove and finished tenth in the MVP balloting, and given some of the weak-hitting second basemen fielded by contenders: the Twins’ Luis Rivas (.247/.399/.274); the Yankees’ Miguel Cairo (.286/.418/.332 being way over his career averages of .271/.367/.319); the Angels’ Adam Kennedy (.257/.366/.327); the Phillies’ Placido Polanco (.277/.385/.340); and the A’s’ Marco Scutaro (.280/.386/.306). Sure enough, Boone – who averaged .301/.526/.358 with 106 runs and 122 RBI the past three seasons, and who I ranked before the season as the 8th best player in baseball by Established Win Shares (with 29)is batting .305/.467/.368 since the All-Star Break.
Not that I think Boone is a superstar at this juncture; he’s 35, and he had a horrid first half, and frankly I haven’t really seen him play this season. I suspect his defense may have deteriorated badly; the Hardball Times’ Win Shares numbers (granting that in-season Win Shares are not the best way to evaluate defense) show him with 1.5 defensive Win Shares compared to 4.0 for Rivas, 2.6 for Cairo, 2.9 for Kennedy, 3.2 for Polanco, and 3.9 for Scutaro. Boone’s Range Factor and Zone Rating this season are 4.32 and .755, career lows and down from 4.54 and .814 just last season. And frankly, while the other second basemen listed above are all offensive weak links, none but Rivas – possibly the best of the bunch with the glove – has really been horrendous. So maybe it’s no surprise that the highly-paid Boone ($8 million salary this season) just couldn’t be shopped despite pretty good odds that he’d provide an offensive upgrade for a contending team.

Direct Hit: Kerry Was Wrong On The Cold War

More on Vietnam another day – for now, this is the link of the day, QandO discussing an op-ed in the LA Times on the real scandal in Kerry’s record: how he was wrong on nearly every major foreign policy initiative during and immediately after the Cold War. Key quote:

Many leaders had a hand in Washington’s Cold War triumph, but Ronald Reagan’s contributions were pivotal, and Kerry opposed every one of them. Reagan’s defense buildup disabused Soviet leaders of any hope that they could ultimately come out ahead of the United States. Kerry derided these military expenditures as “bloated” and “without any relevancy to the threat.” In particular, Reagan’s plan to seek a missile defense system against Soviet ICBMs and NATO’s decision to station new missiles in Europe to counteract the new Soviet deployment there rendered futile the Kremlin’s vast investment in nuclear supremacy. Instead of these measures, Kerry advocated that we adopt a one-sided “nuclear freeze.”

Bush’s War Stump Speech

Here’s President Bush’s current stump speech on the war, which has a pretty good nutshell summary of why it all happened, and a good zinger at Kerry; I highlight some of the points the Administration hasn’t really stressed enough in the past:

Before September the 11th, the ruler of Iraq was a sworn enemy of America. He was defying the world. He was firing weapons at American pilots who were enforcing the world’s sanctions. He had pursued and he had used weapons of mass destruction. He harbored terrorists. He invaded his neighbors. He subsidized the families of suicide bombers. He murdered tens of thousands of his own citizens. He was the source of great instability in the world’s most volatile region.
After September the 11th we looked at all the threats of the world in a new light. One of the lessons of September the 11th is that America must take threats seriously before they fully materialize. (Applause.) We saw a threat. My administration looked at the intelligence and saw a threat. The United States Congress looked at the same intelligence; members of both political parties, including my opponent, looked at the intelligence and came to the same conclusion.
We went to the United Nations, which looked at the intelligence and demanded a full accounting of Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs, or face serious consequences. After 12 years of defiance, he again refused to comply. He deceived the weapons inspectors. So I had a choice to make: either forget the lessons of September the 11th and take the word of a madman who hated America, or defend this country. Given that choice, I will defend America. (Applause.)
Even though we did not find the stockpiles that we expected to find, removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right thing to do. (Applause.) Saddam Hussein had the capability to make weapons of mass destruction. And he could have passed that capability on to terrorist enemies. After September the 11th, that was a chance we could not afford to take. And America and the world are safer because Saddam Hussein sits in a prison cell. (Applause.)
And now — and now, almost two years after he voted for the war in Iraq, and almost 220 days after switching positions to declare himself the anti-war candidate, my opponent has found a new nuance. He now agrees it was the right decision to go into Iraq. After months of questioning my motives and even my credibility, Senator Kerry now agrees with me that even though we have not found the stockpile of weapons we all believe were there, knowing everything we know today, he would have voted to go into Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power. I want to thank Senator Kerry for clearing that up. (Applause.)

Easterbrook

I’m a little late to this particular party (what else is new?), but you owe it to yourself to read Howard Bashman’s interview with Seventh Circuit Judge Frank Easterbrook in its entirety (and weep that this man does not sit on the Supreme Court). Don’t know how I missed this, but I actually didn’t know he was the brother of Gregg Easterbrook, the New Republic writer and Tuesday Morning Quarterback and one of the most entertaining politics/sports writers in the business. But which brother is more entertaining is debatable, as Judge Easterbrook has some great lines here. I’d emphasize that you should read the whole thing; here are some excerpts:
*How can you not be impressed by a guy who says, “I read science journals as well as economics journals and law reviews in my spare time”
*Easterbrook catches Bashman at one of his tricks in this feature: “although the interview is captioned ’20 Questions for the Appellate Judge,’ you propounded more than 40, with multiple interrogatory sentences per paragraph and compound inquiries per sentence. So a two-to-one ratio must be acceptable.”
*On judicial legitimacy:

Judges must explain not only why their views are sound but also why on debatable issues only the judges’ views count. Unless the Constitution encodes principles that can be applied using the approach of Marbury v. Madison, then the political resolution must prevail. (I expatiate on this in Abstraction and Authority, 59 U. Chi. L. Rev. 349 (1992).) Justices are fond of saying that all power must be checked, but where is the check on the Supreme Court’s? It lies in text, logic, and history.

Continue reading Easterbrook

Confidential Sources

The US District Court for the District of Columbia today released an opinion (dated July 20, 2004; link opens as PDF file) ordering Tim Russert and Time Magazine reporter Matthew Cooper to disclose information provided to them by confidential sources (presumably, the identities of individuals within the Bush Administration) in the Valerie Plame investigation. (The Washington Post has more here).
UPDATE: Here’s the bottom-line order (also a PDF) holding Cooper and Time in contempt but staying the contempt order pending an appeal to the DC Circuit.

Walker, St. Louis Cardinal

Watching the Mets get completely dismantled by the Cardinals this weekend was not fun – let the record reflect that just 8 days after trading their best prospect and several other key blue chips to shore up theirn rotation for the 2004 stretch run, the Mets stand 11 games out of first place and 8 1/2 games back (in 9th place) in the wild card race. It’s over.
The Cards, meanwhile, had a real strike of genius in acquiring Larry Walker to join Jim Edmonds and . . . well, Jim Edmonds in their outfield. Even for all his injuries and Coors and everything else, Walker is still a formidable offensive threat (.279/.494./.392 on the road the last three years, and .317/.780/.508 in 58 plate appearances on the road this year). For St. Louis, this is the time to go for the jugular, and that’s exactly what the Walker acquisition represents.
I’m less clear, at this distance, why Ray Lankford (.258/.425/.353) got his walking papers rather than, say, Reggie Sanders (.252/.476/.297); Brian at Redbird Nation thinks other reserve outfielders, notably So Taguchi, should have been the odd men out.

A Swift Confusion

Kevin Drum says the Vietnam vets in the Swift Boat group must be “certifiable lunatics” because Media Matters has assembled a bunch of (admittedly wacky) quotes about the co-author of their book . . . who isn’t one of the vets. Josh Marshall (tongue in cheek) says he’s starting a “Concerned Vietnam Combat Veterans Whose Service Records Have Been Attacked by Friends of President Bush Even Though President Bush Has Nothing To Do With It and Did His Best to Stop it But Failed” group . . . except, of course, that he doesn’t even humorously suggest that any such vets exist.
As I’ve said before, I think the whole swift boat story is something of a sideshow, and I’m withholding judgment on the credibility of these guys. And yes, as with the Democrats’ favorite small subset of 9/11 widows, their credibility needs to be evaluated just like anybody else in politics, no matter how sympathetic (or, in this case, heroic) their own personal stories are. I do have an open mind on this one.
But note to people attacking the vets: discrediting people who assist, finance or run with the story won’t do. If you don’t have the goods on the men who wore this country’s uniform and now want to be heard on what they saw and did in Vietnam, don’t dismiss them out of hand.

More on the Swift Boat Story

Captain Ed has the latest. Read for yourself.
UPDATE: I still think this is a relatively minor story, as are Kerry’s and Bush’s service records generally, although it’s a bigger deal because Kerry’s made his four-month tour in Vietnam the centerpiece of his campaign. But one thing that’s really clear here from reading the two sides’ letters is that the Swift Boat Vets have much better lawyers than the Kerry/Edwards camp does (which is unsurprising if you look at John O’Neill’s resume). The Swift Boat Vets’ letter is far more detailed and deals directly with the issues, while the Kerry/Edwards letter seems obsessed with non sequiturs like who served on which boat and who filled out particular forms.

Another Satisfied Customer

Democrats who cheered the courage of Jim Jeffords call Louisiana Congressman Rodney Alexander a “coward” and a “turncoat” for switching parties to become a Republican. Of course, both sides cheer switchers to their side and hiss those who go the other way, although Republicans are more apt simply to trumpet switches as a sign of the strength of the party and its ideas, rather than as some great profile in courage (although many big GOP stars have switched from the Democratic side at some point, including Reagan, Phil Gramm, Bill Bennett, Jean Kirkpatrick, and many others).