Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

If the left-leaning blogs were as on-message as the right-leaning blogs, in the next few days you would be hearing a vast echo-chamber effect from this Gadflyer post, about GW Bush, Girlie Man.

By next weekend, you would hear questions based on it on your TV pundit shows.

A few days after this, the obvious wimpish implications of draft-dodging, cheerleading at Yale, and question-dodging would be standard watercooler stuff.

But in fact, Democrats are not organized (pace Will Rodgers), they fail to understand that if you repeat something often enough it becomes taken as true, and they don't own TV networks.

So it probably won't happen.

Even though, oddly enough (and the implications drawn from male cheerleading excepted), I'm in broad agreement with the Gadflyer article's basic thesis: Bush is frit. That's why, for example, he won't face questions from a representative public. That's why he's running away from the second debate, where he might have to face real, unscripted, people rather than the milquetoasts we have for journalists.

More tellingly, that's why we have this idiotic color-coding system for terror warnings that never goes down. Bush & Co. are terrified that they'll get blamed for being asleep at the switch again for the next terror attack, having been asleep at the switches for 9/11. As a result, rather than take the stiff upper lip approach used by the British government in light of IRA terror — an attitude in which the whole country more or less shrugged off the constant bombs, our government here in the US encourages public panic. The fact that 'security theater' and other silly and expensive actions which don't do much good are constant victories for the terrorists is less important than the paramount need felt by a certain type of moral cowards: the need to avoid blame at all costs.

John Kerry got near the edge of this with his speech recently about the pass-the-buck administration, the excuse presidency: never wrong, never responsible, never to blame, but it's really deeper than that.

OK. Now I probably deserve my induction into the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill.

Boy, the Telegraph sure screwed up its report on this one:

Reuters.com: The U.S. Navy has rejected a legal watchdog group's request to open an investigation into military awards given to Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry during the Vietnam War, saying his medals were properly approved.

“Our examination found that existing documentation regarding the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart medals indicates the awards approval process was properly followed,” the Navy's inspector general, Vice Admiral Ronald Route, said in a memo written to Navy Secretary Gordon England.

“In particular, the senior officers who awarded the medals were properly delegated authority to do so. In addition we found that they correctly followed the procedures in place at the time for approving these awards.”

In rejecting the request for an investigation made by Judicial Watch last month, Route said that “conducting any additional review regarding events that took place over thirty years ago would not be productive.”

That's for sure.

Update: More of the same from AP.