*Go read Captain Ed, and keep scrolling. There’s just so much good stuff there I can’t begin to link to it all.
*I’ve added Let’s Fly Under The Bridge to the blogroll for Roland Patrick’s unique combination of exhaustive examination of the “Bush AWOL” nonsense (with the benefit of knowledge derived from his own military experience) and his longstanding crusade to mock Brad DeLong. In this installment, he carves up the US News and World Report for misunderstanding Bush’s TANG payroll records and service requirements. (Hat tip to the redesigned QandO – update your blogrolls! – for linking to Patrick).
*Geraghty notes more examples of Kerry’s chronic indecisiveness, this time with quotes from exasperated party loyalist and Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell.
*Godwin’s Law alert from Josh Marshall: “Can we re-check the sprinkler system in the Reichstag?”
*Drezner’s got some great stuff on life in the campaign press corps bubble.
*The spate of retractions on stories harmful to Kerry on Friday seems like a sign of what the ex-Clinton guys like McCurry, Lockhart, Carville and Begala are good at – jumping all over the media to get their side of the story out or, in these two cases, to get errors fixed before they spread too far. Just because media bias, sloppiness and laziness so often tilts against Republicans, we shouldn’t forget that Democrats get burned at times as well, and a Democratic candidate needs people to push back at the media.
By the way, I thought at the time that people might be misreading the Burkett paraphrase that later got retracted. Here’s the original:
During a single phone conversation with Lockhart, Burkett said he suggested a “couple of concepts on what I thought [Kerry] had to do” to beat Bush. In return, he said, Lockhart tried to “convince me as to why I should give them the documents.”
Some people read this as saying that Lockhart wanted Burkett to give the documents to the Democrats, but it always looked to me like he was saying Lockhart told him to give the documents to CBS. This is just bad writing, which leaves the reader in doubt as to critical facts (as Daffy Duck would say, “Pronoun Trouble!”). Anyway, the later retraction clarified that Burkett had told the reporter that CBS wanted the documents – and if that’s what he really said, the reporter just goofed terribly.
*As long as John Kerry is in public life – at least as long as he fails to apologize for or retract his statements in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War – stories like this one will just keep coming (hat tip to Allah).
*And another point, albeit not from what you would call an independent source, on Bush’s entry into the TANG, for those of you not sick to death of this:
Most applicants were applying for ANG enlisted positions not for pilot training. The highest number of pilot applicants that the Texas ANG Group had (at any one time) during the Vietnam War was around ten. The reason for this very low number was there were stringent educational, security clearance and physical requirements that had to be met for pilot training in the ANG; also, there was a high “danger factor” in flying the F-102 aircraft. For every ten pilot applicants, usually only two were selected by the ANG to attend USAF pilot training school.
The question everyone needs to honestly ask themselves is: Why wouldn’t the ANG want George W. Bush in their organization? How many Yale graduates do you think the ANG had to choose from (probably only one) his name was George W. Bush? So when George W. Bush went for his interview with Col. Walter “Buck” Staudt (Texas ANG Group Commander at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston), it would seem to me that Col. Staudt’s decision to select George W. Bush for pilot training was a good one for the ANG – separate from any other consideration. Given that George W. Bush ended up being President of the United States, one might conclude that Colonel Staudt was an excellent judge of character; that he made the right decision.
Link via Powerline.