Now McCain Is A Liar?

The Kerry campaign has, in their subtle wisdom, decided that calling John McCain a liar is a good idea. Team Powerline is shocked.

Scratch your head with me as I excerpt one of McCain's "lies, mischaracterizations, distortions, [or] half-truths":

10. Senator John McCain: “My friends in the Democratic Party and I'm fortunate to call many of them my friends assure us they share the conviction that winning the war against terrorism is our government's most important obligation. I don't doubt their sincerity. They emphasize that military action alone won't protect us, that this war has many fronts: in courts, financial institutions, in the shadowy world of intelligence, and in diplomacy. They stress that America needs the help of her friends to combat an evil that threatens us all, that our alliances are as important to victory as are our armies. We agree. And, as we've been a good friend to other countries in moments of shared perils, so we have good reason to expect their solidarity with us in this struggle. That is what the President believes. And, thanks to his efforts we have received valuable assistance from many good friends around the globe, even if we have, at times, been disappointed with the reactions of some.”

Being neither a Dem nor a telepath, I am not sure what the lie is here, but I have highlighted a few possibilities, none of them serious.

UPDATE: The Kerry people are kidding, right? They have taken it down from their website, and all's well with the world? Or do they also have a mole near every fax machine in every newsroom in the world, ready to rip this up? (Don't answer that!).

Too late - Rob Bernard has immortalized this, and provided some thoughts. Begging to Differ also has some good sleuthing and all your lies. Mischaracterizations, distortions, and half-truths, too.

But to suggest that this is a sign of a Kerry campaign in disarray? C'mon, the Times explained the revised organization to us:

The installation of former Clinton lieutenants is creating two distinct camps at Mr. Kerry's campaign headquarters on McPherson Square in downtown Washington.

The first is the existing Kerry high command, which includes Mary Beth Cahill, the campaign manager; Bob Shrum, a senior adviser; Tad Devine, a senior adviser; and Stephanie Cutter, the communications director. The second is the Clinton camp, which includes Joe Lockhart, a former White House press secretary; Joel Johnson, a former senior White House aide; and Doug Sosnik, a former Clinton political director. And Howard Wolfson, a former chief of staff to Hillary Rodham Clinton, joined the campaign yesterday.

Members of both camps played down any suggestion of a Clinton takeover of a troubled campaign and insisted there was no tension between the two groups. Still, these days, Mr. Lockhart is stationed in an office on one side of the campaign war room; Mr. Shrum's office is on the opposite side.

On the "no tension between the two groups" point, my imaginary mole tells me the exact quote was, "there is no f****** tension between the f***** groups, why would there be any f****** tension between us and those a**h****?"

Comments

[mikem]

I doubt that McCain will react. If he cared about his reputation he would not have supported Kerry's repeated denunciations of Vietnam veterans.

[Jumbo]

Are you sure that's still up at Team Kerry? I think they might have down the amazing-disappearing-never-existed-AP-story deletion with it.

[J_Crater]

To be fair to Kerry-Edwards, they did say these were "Lies, Mischaracterizations, Distortions, And Half-Truths."

Since this did come under the banner "Bush Has Done A Good Job With Our Allies", the most likely offending passage must be "as we've been a good friend to other countries in moments of shared perils, so we have good reason to expect their solidarity with us in this struggle."
I presume that Kerry feels we have treated "other countries" badly. This would seem to indicate at least some level of "hate America first" or Kerry is hung up on the French and Germans again.

This is getting a bit tiresome, so I have to ask .. did Teresa have any investments that were impacted badly by the Bush Administration going to war in Iraq ?
I hope so, because the alternate reasoning for Kerry to object to this statement by Sen. McCain (America is wrong, but I can save America from itself) would, in my judgment, render John Kerry seemingly dangerously unfit to be President.

[TM]

Well, I did quote the "lies, mischaracterization, etc." in my post, since I did not want to suggest that I would stoop to doing any of those things. Whether St. John will parse it as carefully is up to him.

And I don't care if McCain doesn't object - I just don't expect to see him support Kerry against the Swiftees quite as quickly.

[Bill Arnold]

This looks (looked, it's gone now) like a mistake; even a partisan democrat news junkie (e.g. me) would have a hard time filling in all the justifications. I have to guess that there were explanatory paragraphs for each numbered section, that somehow got dropped?

The argument for #10 is probably that the Bush administration did not, in fact, competently engage its friends, that (for instance) allowing Rumsfield to shoot his mouth off about Old Europe (and similar dissing of potential allies) might have cost American taxpayers 10s billions of dollars and perhaps cost the lives of American soldiers (rather than French or German or other non-American soldiers. If not in the invasion, then in the occupation, and in the (ehem) "post-occupation").

It's hard to parse McCain's statement as disagreeing with that, though.

[Fredrik Nyman]

Looks like the Kerry folks have disappeared the release. What did it say? Specifically, what was the context? "Lies and the lying liars that tell them"?

[Rob Bernard]

For context I have the full text on my site. (http://www.robbernard.com/archives/001436.html) The only difference between the text in my blockquote and the actual release is that the Kerry site had the title "The 2004 GOP Convention: Four Days Filled With Lies, Mischaracterizations, Distortions, And Half-Truths" before "For Immediate Release" and the headers for each section were bolded.

[jason]

If you click the link in your post, the story does not appear on the Kerry website. Either you may have typed the link wrong, or they may have...removed the article?!?

[luke]

Looks like they pulled it, the same link is on Powerline and it's broken too.

[John Behan - Commonwealth Conservative]

Boy, he's really going off the deep end, isn't he? It wasn't that long ago that Kerry thought McCain was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Now he's a liar like everyone else who's saying all these mean things about Kerry!

JB

[Jumbo]

"allowing Rumsfield to shoot his mouth off about Old Europe (and similar dissing of potential allies) might have cost American taxpayers 10s billions of dollars and perhaps cost the lives of American soldiers (rather than French or German or other non-American soldiers..."

Bob A., that presumes there was a chance in hell that France or Germany would have participated. Nice conceit, but never gonna happen. Even if each did not have significant business ties to Saddam which they did not want revealed (and they did), France's megalomania, about being the leader of a vigorous, powerful EU which will be the equal to the US, will NEVER let it cooperate with us. But it will be entertaining, now that there will be no US presence "oppressing" Europe, to see how long it takes for the Germans to decide they really would like their French pals to give them that lovely Alsace-Lorraine.

"..or they may have...removed the article!?"

Jason, that is exactly what Team Kerry did. Just like the AP with the Bogus Booing Story. No biggie; it's only like lying to the world.

[Brett]

Page Not Found
You have requested a page that does not exist. Check the Web address (URL) that you entered or search this site.
Search For:

Match: Any word All words Exact phrase
Sound-alike matching

This found at the McCain link at 10:03 PM Eastern.

[luke]

Diggers Realm fortunately backed up the Kerry page, you can find it here: http://www.diggersrealm.com/mt/static/JohnKerryFourDaysFilledWithLies.htm

[Jim Glass]

Krugman is really nasty to people who pull web pages without admitting they did or why.

What until he gets on top of this!

[EddieP]

Boy that reorg at the top of Kerry's campaign is really paying off. They are really on message and are only having to pull down about 5 pages a week from the website.

John Sasso and the other John's have a new strategy. They post some anti-Bush claim, the web fact checks them and calls them on it and they are forced to take it down. It's a lousy campaign strategy, but look at the pageviews they are generating!

[Jack Stephens]

The Kerry campaign appears to have taken down the page.

[MWB]

Seems like, at the Kerry campaign, the left hand doesn't know what the other left hand is doing...

[voletti]

Hey, Mr Kerry himself has volunteered to clarify this page-pulling situation thing.

In an in-depth interview to the NYT (surprised?), reported by AP (who else?) he's reported to have said
" I put the page down before I put the page down"

[Kenneth Kruger]

The press release is down, but the trail is obvious:

On September 3rd, the four press releases (see links at the Kerry site)are numbered:

pr_2004_0903.html
pr_2004_0903a.html
pr_2004_0903b.html
pr_2004_0903c.html

On September 4th the two releases are:

pr_2004_0904.html
pr_2004_0904a.html

On September 6th the three releases are:

pr_2004_0906.html
pr_2004_0906a.html
pr_2004_0906b.html

But on September 5th we have:

pr_2004_0905.html
?
pr_2004_0905b.html

The second press release of the day, the one linked to above, has now disappeared.

[Bill Arnold]

Jumbo, re "that presumes there was a chance in hell that France or Germany would have participated. Nice conceit, but never gonna happen." They probably wouldn't have helped in the invasion (it being a war of choice, at least arguably, and Europe post WW2 is shyer about such things), but perhaps they would have helped in the occupation/post-occupation, which is where our losses are happening. But we'll never know... What purpose, exactly, did Rumsfield et al's dissing of Old Europe serve? (I'm really asking, btw. I've never heard it defended as being good, just as probably being neutral.)

[jason]

Another item the Kerry camp has lost in its deletes is their points, one of which making fun of Zell Miller's accent. The true colors come out when the heat is up - which one is the hateful party of bigotry and anger?

[Teri]

I found a cache of the Press Release flipper tried to hide.

You can still see it here http://www.diggersrealm.com/mt/static/JohnKerryFourDaysFilledWithLies.htm

Btw, doesn't he look like a character on the twighlight zone? getting older, crazier, more demented..... any second now and he's going to melt into a plague. or a pile of ashes.

[Robert]

Two things...

1) He put it up before he AP'd it (see http://www.mudvillegazette.com/archives/001317.html ), actually, this apparantly happened several times...

2) I saw a quickie comment I love about this...
Kery for President, a 404 campaign.

[J_Crater]

"What purpose, exactly, did Rumsfield et al's dissing of Old Europe serve?"
It put a finger in the eye of France and Germany who were putting heat on the eastern European members of the coalition who were being told "to shutup." This was something that they, pratically speaking, could not do themselves without risking their upcoming EU memberships. Think of it as a helpful hand; Kerry would call it a "bribe."

[JorgXMcKie]

Bill Arnold: the problem is that your stance pre-supposes that all the difficulties are on the American side. If this is true, then our only foreign policy answer is to do whatever France or Germany or whoever want. Is this what you are saying? On the other hand, if the difficulties are on both sides (and not necessarily evenly distributed), then answers must involve effort on their part, too. Where is Kerry's criticism of France's and Germany's missteps? Does he have any? Does he make any suggestions on what they could have done better so the US could have responded more appropriately?

(Maybe he could cite Chirac, and point out the various points at which they "missed a good chance to shut up.")

[BarCodeKing]

The two Kerry campaign factions will be fighting like scorpions in a bottle. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.

[Bill Arnold]

J, thanks, "the finger in the France's eye" argument at least makes a little sense. Though I still do not understand how it could have been expected to affect the EU admission votes in a positive way. Are you suggesting that if we hadn't dissed Old Europe that the coalition of the willing (and the somewhat different coalition willing to take part in the occupation) would have been smaller?

Jorg,
I don't follow this argument. I saw it as a foreign policy dispute between friendly countries, about participation in a war of choice. (Arguably at least, and very arguably in retrospect. Please note, I'm not arguing here that the choice we the US made was good or bad.)

Kerry could/should be criticizing Old Europe for not forgiving the finger in the eye and taking part in the occupation/post-occupation. (What are we calling the presence of 130K US troops in Iraq these days, anyway?) Perhaps Kerry is already doing this, if not he should.
France in particular has troops engaged all over the world. (e.g. troops in Kabul)

[twalsh]

If you were Kerry and knew Hillary was eyeing the Presidency in 2008 would you be bringing Clinton staffers on board?

[Evan]

Google cache of the original press release -

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:AQByqqKRgkEJ:www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/releases/pr_2004_0905a.html+&hl=en

[Evan]

Trying again here...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.johnkerry.com%2Fpressroom%2Freleases%2Fpr_2004_0905a.html&btnG=Google+Search

[Jumbo]

Bill: England is our ally; France is just not an enemy.

And I think Rummy was putting the word out that the US is not going to reward an anti-American policy. I think it's kind of neat to think of American air bases and supply depots going up about 500 miles east of Berlin.

[Cecil Turner]

"What purpose, exactly, did Rumsfield et al's dissing of Old Europe serve?"

That assumes "dissing" is a fair characterization, and I don't think it is. The quote in context was a response to a reporter's question with a dubious assertion:

"Sir, a question about the mood among European allies. . . . If you look at, for example, France, Germany . . . it seems that a lot of Europeans rather give the benefit of the doubt to Saddam Hussein than President George Bush. These are U.S. allies. What do you make of that?"

Rumsfeld's response is on point, and he correctly objects to generalizing German and French reaction to all of the European allies:

"Now, you're thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don't. I think that's old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the east. And there are a lot of new members."

The point is not that France and Germany are "old," but that with EU and NATO expansion, the European alliance is now rather larger, and the attitudes among members is not uniform. His statement was correct, and a fair reading suggests one would need a very thin skin to construe an insult.

As to France being "friendly," there's little evidence to suggest an altruistic motive to help the US, especially in an exercise of power. In fact, French diplomatic efforts have been geared more toward competition for several years. For example, from 1999:

"Once a world power, French influence is overshadowed by Hollywood, McDonalds, the US economy - and Washington's military muscle. Jospin, President Jacques Chirac and Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine have in the last month repeatedly condemned US ''hyperpower'' and stressed the importance of a multi-polar world."

[penis enlargement pills]

ok