Quote of the day: Dodging versus deferment

(Also known as the First Law of Conservation of Schmuckiness.)

If Trump is a draft-dodger for having taken a II-S (or four of them), he is among millions of "draft dodgers" and so you need to STFU because you're outnumbered.

The heel spurs letter is more interesting, mostly because of the timing.

Spurs are not permanent and, had the lottery not made it irrelevant, he'd have had to go back to confirm that they were still an issue, but, yes, he dodged the draft, based on one medical deferment. And, as Chris Britt notes, it puts him in no position to comment on other people's service.

Here's the thing: You don't have to lie to make this guy look like a schmuck, and you don't even have to lie to make him look like a draft dodger.

And you sure as hell don't have to slander the millions of us who took student deferments.

That's Mike Peterson, known to loyal p3 readers for his blog Comic Strip of the Day, clarifying an important legal and ethical distinction that seems poorly (sometimes, I suspect, willfully) misunderstood in the age of the all-volunteer army.

Eleven years ago, I found myself in the wretched position of having to defend the bloodthirsty likes of John Bolton and Dick “five deferments – count 'em, five!” Cheney, in defense of a larger principle. Or at least to make sure that they were damned for what they really are. As I wrote at the time:

Claiming a legal deferment instead of enlisting is no more "draft dodging" than taking the standard exemption on your 1040 form is "tax evasion."

On the subject of "dodging" the draft: If you don't want people to have legal ways of getting out of military service, don't create legal ways for them to get out of military service. If they avoided service legally, and you still don't like it, then your problem is with the law, not the person.

And--here's where the trouble lives--a law that's administered unequally, depending on how wealthy and connected you are, is a law worth having a problem with.

Legal ways to avoid service have always existed, often but not always tied to how much disposable income you have. The thing about Trump is that he thinks anything that doesn't benefit him first, most, and – ideally – alone, is for chumps. If, instead of a military draft, we'd had a Clinton-style national service program at the time, he'd have pulled whatever strings he could to get out of that, too. It's of a piece with his stated belief that not paying taxes makes him “smart” – he believes the opposite, that the idea of a commonwealth is stupid.


(And no one asked me, but I have to say that giving Ann Telnaes a live target would almost -- not quite, but almost -- be worth having Cheney back in the public light again.)

Shifty. Untrustable.

So this happened:

At the recent CPAC gathering, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a likely Republican presidential candidate, seemed to stumble on one of the basic facts of the Middle East. “The reason Obama hasn’t put in place a military strategy to defeat ISIS is because he doesn’t want to upset Iran,” the Florida Republican said.

Alas for Senator Rubio, Iran and ISIS are enemies. (Much like al Qaeda under bin Laden and Iraq under Saddam were , although that didn't stop the Cheney-Bush administration, did it?)

Still. Iraq, Iran, ISIS -- all four-letter adversaries beginning with "I." You know who's next, don't you?

Ikea.

I mean, seriously -- what's the deal with those sneaky Swedes?

Winifred Ames: What have they done to us?

Conrad 'Connie' Brean: What have they done for us? What do you know about them?

Winifred Ames: Nothing.

Conrad 'Connie' Brean: See? They keep to themselves. Shifty. Untrustable.

The unforgiving minute: In fairness to Mr. Williams

While he did tell what Huckleberry Finn called "a stretcher" regarding his time in Iraq in 2003, Brian Williams was a piker compared to the top eight members of the Bush Administration during the same time.

One wonders if any of them -- Dubya, Cheney, Condi, Rummy, or the rest -- considered taking themselves off the air for a few days.

One doubts it. One doubts it very seriously.

Williams only egged on, and surfed on, their crimes. He's a sad case -- albeit a sad case with magnificent hair -- but he's not the one who belongs in a cell in The Hague.

A quantum of umbrage: Mistakes

This has got to be the lamest excuse for telling a self-aggrandizing lie that I've ever heard.

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams admitted Wednesday he was not aboard a helicopter hit and forced down by RPG fire during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a false claim that has been repeated by the network for years.

Williams repeated the claim Friday during NBC’s coverage of a public tribute at a New York Rangers hockey game for a retired soldier that had provided ground security for the grounded helicopters, a game to which Williams accompanied him. In an interview with Stars and Stripes, he said he had misremembered the events and was sorry.

The admission came after crew members on the 159th Aviation Regiment’s Chinook that was hit by two rockets and small arms fire told Stars and Stripes that the NBC anchor was nowhere near that aircraft or two other Chinooks flying in the formation that took fire. Williams arrived in the area about an hour later on another helicopter after the other three had made an emergency landing, the crew members said.

“I would not have chosen to make this mistake,” Williams said. “I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another.”

He calls his choice a mere "mistake"? A mistake in which he "conflated" two aircraft - the one he wasn't on (that got shot down) and the one he was on (that didn't)? That's quite a slip-up, there, Sparky.

On the other hand, Williams can at least claim that his wasn't the worst, most shameful, indeed most despicable lie about Iraq told to the American public in 2003 by a famous person who left it out there and never paid a price for doing so. So there's that.

Saturday morning tunes: I ain't no senator's son

Via Roy Edroso and many others comes the story of rightwing bloggers, most of whom came of age after the Vietnam War ended the second time, and after the military draft, who were deeply, deeply offended that Bruce Springsteen, David Grohl, Zac Brown, and other musicians used the Veterans Day concert on the National Mall – called Concert for Valor so that no one would mistake it for a mattress sale event – to perform the CCR classic "Fortunate Son."

Contrary to their fervid belief, the song "Fortunate Son" was not written to disrespect veterans, nor was it written in opposition to war, strictly speaking. It was written in opposition to the cheap tub-thumpers for war who remain secure in the knowledge that neither they nor their children will ever have to go anywhere near a war zone. 

People like this:

And this:

And, of course, this:

Oh, and definitely this:

You want to see some serious vet disrespecting, start there.

In the little Indiana town where I grew up during the Vietnam era, there were families with connections at the county seat (where the draft board sat) whose sons never saw military service, let alone went into harm's way. It was a source of genuine irritation to my father, not so much for my sake, I think, as for the daily indignation of a being Democrat in a Republican county. As it turned out, I didn't serve either, although that was far more a matter of dumbass luck than anything remotely resembling political connections.

Part of the current problem, of course, is that Republicans have a long history of appropriating rock songs they haven't listened to all the way through. And that's what's happening here; ask John.

So here's the original:

Oh, and by the way:

Quote of the day: Why is the Iraq War like using a CB radio?

No elite voice in this country seems capable of coming to terms with the fact that the Iraq war was "lost" the moment it was launched. It was lost because it was based on lies and deception. It was lost because it violated international law. What a pathetic narrative people like John McCain and Lindsey Graham regurgitate this late in the game: that things were "won" in Iraq by Bush the Younger and then "lost" by Obama with the US withdrawal. We lose IQ points even listening to that drivel.

- Joseph A. Palermo, winding up one of the best – of many, many, many – essays this week on why no one anywhere should be listening to the opinion of the Zombie Iraq Warhawks.

Palermo's piece is going on the p3 Readings list.

The unforgiving minute: Still waiting

As we all settle in to watch Jeb "The Smarter One" Bush begin his dance of the seven veils, this might be a good time to recall that, after packing an extraordinarily high number of gaffes and missteps into a comparatively short Wyoming Senatorial primary campaign last fall, Bush's fellow legacy Republican Liz "Spawn of Dick" Cheney pulled out of the race in early January, offering this explanation:

Citing health concerns in her family, Cheney said the issues arising prompted her to end her GOP primary challenge to Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.).

“Serious health issues have recently arisen in our family, and under the circumstances, I have decided to discontinue my campaign. My children and their futures were the motivation for our campaign and their health and well-being will always be my overriding priority,” Cheney said in the statement.

Three months and one day later, we're still waiting for any particulars on the needy-relative story to emerge. . . .

Quote of the day: Rising to the bait, and other things

The fact of the matter is that Liz Cheney (daughter of Dick) is getting mau-maued by gay-hatin’ Sarah Huckabee Sanders (daughter of Mike) and Liz rose to the bait because she desperately wants to represent a state that likes their gays tied to a fence and left to die from exposure.

- the once and future Tbogg, tipping his hat to Tom Wolfe and summing up the evils of American political dynasties, socially-sanctioned homophobia, and the Electoral College all in one sentence. Not bad.

Eight years ago today on p3: Vietnam, deferments, and the Bush administration

Two years into the Cheney-Bush war in Iraq, I looked at the question of what those two now-extinct phenomena -- the draft, and draft deferments -- really meant forty years after the Vietnam War hit its peak.

Four years ago at p3: Testing the limits of conservatives' convictions

Why, I wondered, were conservatives so enamored of the authoritarian torture porn of "24," but so unwilling to follow Jack Bauer's moral example all the way?

Update: And it turns out that this topic is something of an evergreen.

A quantum of umbrage: The company they keep

At least this Navy SEAL can claim membership in an even more elite group -- people doing highly secret work for the U.S. government who were outed by a shameless media hack simply as an exercise in conservative payback.

The only other member is Valerie Plame.

Refresh my memory -- Is this sort of thing even a crime anymore?

The unforgiving minute

James Fallows reminds us that, while Dick Cheney's score-settling behavior is unprecedented among former vice presidents, there is a sort of tradition among sitting VPs that Cheney successfully revived during his tenure: Shooting people.

Minute's up.

Three things Andrew Sullivan got right this morning, plus an observation

The three things he got right:

1. If Dick Cheney didn't have ready access to compliant news media, he'd just be sad and pathetic. As it is, he's sad, pathetic--and dangerous:

The former vice president, the man who imported torture into the American constitutional system, failed to capture bin Laden, invaded a country under false pretenses, allowed the Afghanistan campaign to disintegrate, and added $5 trillion to the next generation's debt burden, is attacking a sitting president on a day he announces a critical military strategy in front of his troops.

It is, again, a breathtaking piece of dishonor from this bitter, angry man. To accuse your successor of "weakness" because he has actually conscientiously tried to figure out the right thing to do in a war Cheney and Bush clearly botched is a new low in American politics and the partisan politicization of war and peace.

2. In its aching desire to drive the morning news cycle, The Politico has become--if it was ever anything else--the premiere go-to site for political axe-grinding tarted up as "news:"

[O]ne wonders what the circumstances were in which Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei took a trip to interview Cheney the day before Obama's Afghanistan address. What was the news hook? Did Cheney summon them to transcribe his vile assault? Did they request a newsy interview the day before Obama's speech?

3. Accusations of treason are now flung about with such cynicism and careless disregard for consequences that the charge has been completely debased, which is a lucky thing for those who actually have committed offenses against the Constitution and our laws (emphasis added):

Accusing the president of giving aid and comfort to the enemy is such a disgusting charge, such a deeply divisive, unAmerican tactic, it would be excoriated if it came from some far right blogger. That it comes from a former vice-president, violating every conceivable protocol (as he did in office), reminds me of why Cheney and Cheneyism remain such a threat to core American and Western values.

If you truly use a position of such authority to show contempt for the sitting president, to accuse him of treason, to attack him on the day he addresses the nation in a critical address, to divide him from the troops, to use sacred issues of war and peace which a president is solemnly engaging as a political weapon or as a vain and self-serving attempt to make your own record look better, then you have no core respect for the institutions and traditions and civility that make a constitutional democracy possible.

Look also at the focus of his attack: the civil trial of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed in New York City. All Cheney can see is the opportunity for such a figure to grandstand, as if KSM's rantings will have any effect but to demystify him. What Cheney cannot see - because he has no deep appreciation of it - is the beauty of treating a monster like KSM to the stringent calm of Western justice. And what Cheney fears - for he is no fool - is that the trial will also reveal Cheney's torture regime, how it distorted intelligence, prevented bringing suspects to justice and tarred the US for ever as a country that now does what its enemies used to do: abuse, torture and mistreat prisoners in wartime.

And the observation:

Sullivan wasn't always so fastidious about the way in which allegations of treason got raised:

The middle part of the country -- the great red zone that voted for Bush -- is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead -- and may well mount a fifth column.

That was Sullivan seven days after the 9/11 attacks. Sarah Palin might as well have cribbed her 2008 campaign speeches from it.

Everyone who was right about Bush's War is still waiting for an apology and a retraction on that one, by the way. And non-denial denials, just to be clear, don't count.

Offense enough to go around

Dick Cheney is unhappy.

He told the reliably-safe Chris Wallace of Fox News that the idea of anyone investigating the use of torture by the Bush administration "offends the hell out of me."

He's also rankled that those who favor such an investigation clearly aren't sufficiently grateful for Bush and Cheney's "track record now of eight years defending the nation against any further mass casualty attacks from Al Qaeda," as if the first mass casualty attack from Al Qaeda, against which they defended so poorly, was a mulligan.

I feel Mr. Cheney's pain.

Me, I'm offended as hell that he's not living out the remainder of his life in a cell in The Hague, while back home his name is being taught to school children along with other disgraced names from our history like Benedict Arnold, as a lesson for generations to come.

So, you know, I guess it's not a perfect world for any of us.

Robert McNamara: "An American tragedy, our tragedy."

In one of the very first posts on p3, I compared former Defense Secretary McNamara to the title character in Graham Green's urtext of Vietnam fiction The Quiet American, whom the narrator described as "a leper without a bell."

McNamara, perhaps because his sense of American rightness remained tone-deaf to the end, died over Independence Day weekend.

But, as Will Bunch observes:

The life of Robert McNamara was a personal tragedy, but it was also an American tragedy, our tragedy -- because even after McNamara spelled out everything that went so horribly wrong in Vietnam, he lived long enough to see a new generation of the self-appointed "best and brightest" in Washington pay absolutely no mind to the lessons of our recent past.

In Iraq, as in Vietnam, our policy-makers knew nothing or cared little about the long history and convoluted ethnic and religious politics of Mesopotamia's Fertile Crescent. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, there was no plan for the proper military follow-up to a period of "shock and awe" bombing. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, we totally misjudged the "nationalism" of the people who lived there and how they would react to a long American occupation. And perhaps most importantly, In Iraq, as in Vietnam, there was no real "public debate" as we marched headlong and foolishly into the 2003 -- with way too many "unexamined assumptions," "unasked questions," and "readily dismissed alternatives."

I didn't have much sympathy for McNamara's suffering; I grew up at the wrong time for that. But, as Bunch suggests, perhaps it was his penance to live so long, so aware of the consequences of the evil he'd helped set in motion even if he remained unable to grasp the fundamental cause of his error.

If that's the way it works, I suppose we have no choice but to wish a long, healthy, and lucid life to Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, George W. Bush, et al.

But I'm not that optimistic.

Obama's DOJ: Making the world safe from The Comedy Channel

This argument is certainly preposterous on its own merits:

A federal judge yesterday sharply questioned an assertion[…] that former Vice President Richard B. Cheney's statements to a special prosecutor about the Valerie Plame case must be kept secret, partly so they do not become fodder for Cheney's political enemies or late-night commentary on "The Daily Show." […]

[An attorney in the case] told the judge that if Cheney's remarks were published, then a future vice president asked to provide candid information during a criminal probe might refuse to do so out of concern "that it's going to get on 'The Daily Show' " or somehow be used as a political weapon.

But what's downright revolting is that the argument wasn't made by one of Cheney's defenders (well, at least not strictly speaking); it was made by "career civil division lawyer Jeffrey M. Smith" of the Obama Justice Department!

Let me see if I've got this: Cheney conspired with others in the Bush Administration to out an undercover CIA agent as political payback because her husband wrote a perfectly accurate NYTimes op-ed piece disagreeing with one of the smaller lies Cheney told to get us into Iraq and keep us there--and the Obama "Change You Can Believe In" Administration doesn't want to compel Cheney to cooperate in the investigation because it might provide fodder for Jon Stewart?

As Jim Naureckas of FAIR asks:

Do they still teach the First Amendment in law school? […]

Here's an alternate plan: How about instead we allow the media to criticize and even satirize the statements of public officials, and make sure that officials cooperate with criminal investigations by subpoenaing them if they refuse to do so?

Disgraceful.

But at least maybe it will provide some fodder for Jon Stewart.

Gentlemen, Madam Secretary: Your suite in The Hague is waiting

Gleaned from among the 100,000 pages of Bush administration documents pried loose by the ACLU's Accountability for Torture project FOIA lawsuit:

On January 25, 2002, then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales advised George W. Bush in a memo to deny al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners protections under the Geneva Conventions because doing so would "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act" and "provide a solid defense to any future prosecution."

Two weeks later, Bush signed an action memorandum dated February 7, 2002, addressed to Vice President Dick Cheney, which denied baseline protections to al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners under the Third Geneva Convention. That memo, according to a recently released bipartisan report issued by the Senate Armed Services Committee, opened the door to "considering aggressive techniques," which were then developed with the complicity of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Bush's National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and other senior Bush officials.

Sunday morning toons: Special "What's Goodbye for GM" Edition

Good news and bad this week: Good: GM gets a long-overdue flushing out. Bad: Domestic terrorism in the heartland again; Good: Obama talks to the Middle East and only the American right-wing media responds hysterically. Bad: The craziest person in the world who doesn't have his own cable news program is testing nukes.

This week's Daryl Cagle toon round-up has it all: The good, the bad--and possibly even the ugly.

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Nate Beeler, Pat Bagley, Mike Keefe, John Trever, John Darkow, Jimmy Margulies, Adam Zyglis, Milt Priggee, and Drew Litton.

David Fitzsimmons knows when the genie's been let out of the bottle.

The p3 Legion of Merit (with black crepe) goes to R. J. Matson,

The p3 No Pussy-Footing Around citation goes to John Sherffius.

p3 World Toon Review: Stephane Peray (Thailand), Michael Kountouris (Greece), Humberto Lázaro Miranda Ramírez (LAZ) (Cuba), and Peter Pismestrovic (Austria).


It's an unprecedented Ann Telnaes three-fer this week: The family business, Spring cleaning, and The Sixth-and-a-Halfth Commandment.


Miss it at your peril! Spike & Mike's Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation comes to Cinema 21 in Portland next weekend.


p3 Guest Toons: I saw my share of professional conventions back in the day but, save maybe the first one or two when I was still a virgin in Babylon, I never came away as jazzed up as The K Chronicles' Keith Knight did after crashing the National Cartoonists Society convention. He even came away with A Dream. (Dude--lobby for Portland!)

Carol Lay celebrates--if that's the word we're looking for here the emerging medium for public debate. (Oregon even gets a nod!)


Protecting Our Endangered Toonists: Red Meat reflects on the natural impulse to set things right.

(Thanks to John Sherffius for permission to use his "Signature Loss" image. Click to enlarge.)


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman offers a toast.


Genius! As loyal p3 toonophiles have probably figured out, I'm not the world's biggest Disney fan. But there's one exception: As Roger Rabbit marveled,

Nobody takes a wallop like Goofy. What timing! What finesse! What a genius!

Goofy's forte was the cheerfully accident-prone everyman--think of Fred MacMurray as the dad on "My Three Sons," but heavy on the wallop--in a series of "How to" films. From 1942, directed by Jack Kinney (who also directed (Der Fuehrer's Face), the national pastime gets the Goofy treatment in "How to Play Baseball:"

p3 Bonus Toon: When it comes to tax cuts, Jesse Springer wonders why it seems so easy to get voters to vote against their interests. Does it have anything to do with how refreshed they feel when they wake up?



And don't forget to browse Dan Froomkin's weekday political toon review.

The unforgiving minute

This just in:

Florida governor Charlie Crist doesn’t want to be shot in the face.

Minute's up.

Sunday morning toons: Special "Every Day is Memorial Day" Edition

It runs the gamut this week at Daryl Cagle's round-up, from Memorial Day to credit cards, to the green economy, to Obama and the Democrats, to the Freddy Krueger-like refusal of the former Vice President to simply go away.

"Every day is Memorial Day." While Oregon enjoys a week of beautiful weather, here's a reminder of why this holiday wasn't created to sell mattresses, courtesy of: David Fitzsimmons, Jeff Parker, R. J. Matson, J. D. Crowe, Mike Keefe, and Steve Benson.

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, R. J. Matson, Mike Lane, Mike Keefe, John Trever, Jerry Holbert, Harry Payne, Adam Zyglis, John Cole, Matt Davies, and Dick Locher.

Funny how there's never an undisclosed location around when we really need one. It's a match made in heaven: The most unpopular man in the country is making his bid to become elder statesman of the most unpopular party in the country. Now Dick Locher, John Darkow, Nate Beeler, Mike Keefe, and Pat Bagley all ask the question: We've seen more of Dick Cheney in the last 8 weeks than in the last 8 years, so how can we make him go back into hiding?


p3 World Toon Review: Pavel Constantine (Romania), Olle Johansson (Sweden), Christo Komarnitski (Bulgaria), Igor Kodenko (Ukraine), and Frederick Deligne (France).


Ann Telnaes notes the irony of one holiday-weekend tradition.


Before the "Bailey or Jennifer?" decision, even before the "Ginger or Mary Ann?" dilemma, there was "Betty or Veronica?"

Look for this story arc to end in a year or so with a Very Special Episode, in which Archie discovers it was all a dream. (Hat tip to Comics Worth Reading.)


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman reviews the status of the "two-state solution."


Send more cats! Boxes and boxes of fireworks sitting opened in the cellar? Of course--why not? From 1943, the first of 7 Oscar-winning Tom and Jerry theatrical shorts. The references behind Jerry's two War Communiqués can be found here and here. (Subtitles provided courtesy of the Hong Kong Fireworks Company.)

p3 Bonus Toon: Oregon's unemployment rate--second-worst in the nation--leveled off last month. Does that mean the worst is over? Jesse Springer reminds us that, just because you can feel something with your toes, it doesn't mean you've hit bottom. (Click to enlarge.)



And don't forget to browse Dan Froomkin's weekday political toon review.