SOURCE: AP/FOX News, Freddie Lee

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) speaks on "Fox News Sunday" in Washington, Sunday, January 29, 2012. Rep. Ryan received a surprise 40th birthday cake as host Chris Wallace looks on.

Last Sunday, on the very same morning when he complained on “Meet the Press” that the mainstream media were, in his view, treating Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney more harshly than President Barack Obama (of course without presenting any evidence), Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) admitted on ABC’s “This Week,” “I’m not going to sit here and complain about coverage of the campaign because, as a candidate, if you do that, you’re losing.”

Ditto Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the former Massachusetts governor’s vice presidential running mate. Appearing (apparently without irony) on “Fox News Sunday,” the show that brought Rep. Ryan a birthday cake and whose moderator, Chris Wallace, bragged that “we kind of discovered” him, Rep. Ryan insisted that “it kind of goes without saying that there’s a media bias,” adding, “We’ve—look, I’m a conservative person, I’m used to media bias. We expected media bias going into this.”  But like Gov. Christie, Rep. Ryan did not have any specifics in mind when asked to present an example. And later, he sort of took it back—or at least his spokesman did. In an email to Politico, the spokesman insisted that Rep. Ryan “did not blame the media. He was asked a question about media bias and answered it. And his answer made clear it’s not something he worries about.”

One thing that many conservatives profess to worry about of late is polling. In a letter addressed to what they called the “Biased News Media,” conservative leaders Brent Bozell, Gary Bauer, Ed Meese, Tony Perkins, Rush Limbaugh, and Richard Viguerie signed a letter authored by Bozell’s right-wing Media Research Center, “holding the liberal media accountable for shamelessly advancing a left-wing agenda.” The signatories argued: “This election year, so much of the broadcast networks, their cable counterparts and the major establishment print media are out of control with a deliberate and unmistakable leftist agenda.” Again, not much in the way of evidence was presented. (See for yourselves if you doubt this.)

The issue of alleged bias that most excites conservatives this year is polling. The purpose of this year’s polls, according to Rush Limbaugh, is not to take the pulse of any given election contents. Rather, “they are designed to do exactly what [Rush has] warned you to be vigilant about, and that is to depress you and suppress your vote. These two polls today are designed to convince everybody this election is over.” Again, zero evidence from Rushbo. And according to FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, that would be awfully surprising. As he explains, “The polls have no such history of partisan bias, at least not on a consistent basis.”

Polling is a decidedly inexact science and is never perfectly accurate, even allowing for changes in peoples’ minds over time. Silver explains:

There have been years, like 1980 and 1994, when the polls did underestimate the standing of Republicans. But there have been others, like 2000 and 2006, when they underestimated the standing of Democrats. … but as in the case of the presidential polls, the years in which the Senate polls missed in either direction have tended to cancel one another out. On average across 240 Senate races since 1990, the polls have had a Republican bias of just 0.4 percentage points, a trivial number that is of little meaning statistically.

Add up all of the above and you have a great many accusations—some withdrawn, some not—but not a whole heck of a lot of data to support a single one of them. It may be because they are absolutely correct but that liberal bias in the media is so sneaky it disappears before you can catch it, quantify it, or even identify a compelling example of its persistence. Then again, it may be because the entire notion is a lot of nonsense, cooked up by conservatives to be used as a kind of stick with which to beat journalists in the hope of getting better coverage.

Think I’m making this up? Just ask Rich Bond, who, as the then-chair of the Republican Party, complained during the 1992 election, “I think we know who the media want to win this election—and I don’t think it’s George Bush.” That was Bond on a bad day. On one of his truth-telling days, however, the very same Mr. Bond observed of the very same election, however, “There is some strategy to it [bashing the ‘liberal’ media]. … if you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one.”

This latter sentiment is not really so rare among conservatives, at least the ones who understand that they are playing a game. Far-right pundit and sometime presidential candidate Pat Buchanan admitted, “I’ve gotten balanced coverage, and broad coverage—all we could have asked. For heaven sakes, we kid about the ‘liberal media,’ but every Republican on earth does that.”

And conservative standard-bearer William Kristol told The New Yorker, upon launching The Weekly Standard back in 1995, that “the liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.” Even so, in a 2001 subscriber pitch for the magazine, Kristol complained, “The trouble with politics and political coverage today is that there’s too much liberal bias. … there’s too much tilt toward the left-wing agenda. Too much apology for liberal policy failures. Too much pandering to liberal candidates and causes.”

This constant confusion—you might even call it “flip-flopping”—was finally explained in 2003 by The Weekly Standard “senior writer” and Kristol protégé Matt Labash, who told the website JournalismJobs.com:

While all these hand-wringing Freedom Forum types talk about objectivity, the conservative media likes to rap the liberal media on the knuckles for not being objective. We’ve created this cottage industry in which it pays to be un-objective. It pays to be subjective as much as possible. It’s a great way to have your cake and eat it too. Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It’s a great little racket. I’m glad we found it actually.

It sure is. And after all this time, it still works. Take, for instance, last Sunday’s Washington Post ombudsman’s column “Will The Post be about news or opinion?” by Patrick Pexton. In it, Pexton rehearses the usual complaints from Republicans about alleged liberal bias in the Post’s coverage both in polls of conservatives and his own email box. He finds this upswing in conservative complaints significant because, when combined with recent polling data that reflect a similar degree of discontent, these feelings must, Pexton opines, reflect a reality of unfair coverage. Again, Mr. Pexton does not deal in such mundane details as evidence, but observes that “with the exception of Dan Balz and Chris Cillizza, who cover politics in a nonpartisan way, the news columnists almost to a person write from left of center.”

Actually, this is not true. They may or may not hold left-of-center views, but most of them are data driven. The biggest problem conservatives have today is not with media but reality.

Is it “liberal” to refuse to deny the scientific consensus on global warming embraced by 97 percent of climate scientists? Is it liberal to note, along with almost all economists, including those who have served in Republican administrations, that tax cuts for the wealthy fail to improve tax revenues and succeed only in increasing inequality? Is it liberal to report the truth about the timing of factory closings in Wisconsin when a conservative candidate muffs it on purpose?

What’s more, Pexton has a strange idea of left of center, since it includes Dana Milbank, who thought it appropriate, on the Post website, to joke that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was a “mad bitch.”

Ironically, nowhere is the conservative flight from reality better illustrated than in the Post’s hapless attempts to hire a right-wing blogger. In doing so, they have easily found plagiarists, nonconservatives, and abusive, violence-inciting, race-baiting attack dogs. What they have yet to find is a qualified journalist.

Pexton concludes with a homily: “The Post should first be about news without slant. If The Post wants to wrap its news in commentary, fine, but shouldn’t some of those voices then be conservative?”

Congratulations Mr. Bond. That ref-working strategy of yours is still going strong—after only 20 years.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media” columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

SOURCE: AP/Jose Luis Magana

A Newt Gingrich candidacy would be plagued with details of his personal and public past. But you only get a glimpse of those details in a recent New York Times story.

In one of those stories without a lot of “there” there, Newt Gingrich toyed with announcing that he was “planning” to create an “exploratory” committee before he decides whether to run for president in 2012—at least he did before he found out it would cost him his Fox sinecure.

It’s all a little murky. Nevertheless, in anticipation of this earth-shattering development, New York Times reporter Jeff Zeleny wrote a story over the weekend in which he attempted to focus on some of the challenges Newt Gingrich will have to face as he is forced to “grapple with aspects of his life and career that could give pause to elements of the Republican primary electorate.”

The article began with a typically insane Gingrich quote and with the reporter—again, typically—pretending that there is really nothing all that odd about it. To wit: Gingrich warned a crowd of 1,300 at an Ohio Catholic school recently that: “To a surprising degree, we are in a situation similar to Poland’s in 1979. … in America, religious belief is being challenged by a cultural elite trying to create a secularized America, in which God is driven out of public life.”

The statement is nuts, in the first place. The United States has nothing to do with a country that was simultaneously communist, occupied by a brutal foreign power, ruled by a totalitarian clique, on the brink of revolution, almost entirely Catholic, lacking in racial minorities, rather poor, without much in the way of natural resources, technologically backward—I could go on.

Second, it is factually wrong. There is no “cultural elite” seeking to drive “God” out of public life. There are only a few atheists here and there writing the assorted book. I would have heard about such a plot if it existed as a card-carrying member of the cultural elite and a proud Jewish agnostic. It’s about as real as Bigfoot and Martian moon landings. But Gingrich said it and the Times reports it despite the fact that it, too, is a member of the cultural elite and a proud promoter of Mr. Gingrich.

Mr. Zeleny does note that Gingrich knows a presidential campaign “would bring new attention on the full scope of his personal and political background,” and adds that “he grew testy when he received a question from a Democratic student activist about the details of his two divorces.”

What are those “details”? Well, one, Zeleny notes, involved “an extramarital affair with Callista Bisek, then a House staff member, while leading impeachment proceedings against Mr. Clinton for lying about his own sexual transgressions.”

But despite the almost superhuman level of hypocrisy necessary to pull that one off, it’s still not the really interesting one. That one, described as a parenthetical, goes, according to the Times, like this: “(In 1981, he and his first wife, Jackie, divorced, and he married his second wife, Marianne, that year. In an episode often cited by his detractors, he visited Jackie in the hospital in 1980 while she was recovering from a cancer operation to discuss terms of their divorce. Mr. Gingrich disputes the account.)”

Well, that’s one way of putting it. In fact, that’s exactly how I would put it were I Newt Gingrich and did not want anybody to know any of the disturbing details. But if I really wanted people to understand what had happened as a window into Newt’s character, I would have leaned more heavily on the well-sourced version of the divorce that appeared in Esquire.

There we learn, for instance, that the former Jackie Gingrich, Newt’s first wife, was his high school geometry teacher, and Gingrich started dating her at 16. He divorced her because, as he explained to an associate, “She’s not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of the president. And besides, she has cancer.”

He left her without any resources—at least until the court ordered him to provide some. The family required church alms to survive. It was a pretty neat trick for a guy who argued that his opponent for the seat he eventually won would have to separate her family to move to Washington and would have to hire a nanny to fulfill her maternal obligations.

Anyway, the meeting in question took place when Gingrich stopped by the hospital to offer his divorce terms while she was recovering from uterine cancer. He then fought her so tenaciously that the soon-to-be ex-Mrs. Gingrich required a court order just to pay her utility bills.

The Times, in skirting over these decidedly unpretty details, apparently had no room to mention Gingrich’s second divorce. That’s too bad, because the details are almost as good.

For instance, in order to marry a much younger woman with whom he had been having an affair, he left his second wife by telephoning her at her mother’s home (on the woman’s birthday) not long after—wait for it—her diagnosis with multiple sclerosis to let her know their marriage was kaput. (This was all going on, needless to say, while Speaker Gingrich was leading House Republicans in America’s first-ever impeachment of an elected president for the crime of adultery.)

One has to admit Gingrich had a point when he explained to his ex-wife: “It doesn’t matter what I do. … people need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live."

And hey, I know it was only a newspaper article in The New York Times. But if the topic was problems with Mr. Gingrich’s past that might make it difficult for him to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate, then perhaps it might have been worth finding time to mention.

For instance, there’s the $4.5 million “advance” from Rupert Murdoch he tried to nail down even before he was sworn in as speaker for a book of speeches worth an infinitesimal fraction of that amount. And let us not forget that he was getting this payoff from a man who desperately needed the help of the House majority to make his ventures a success both nationally and globally. (Gingrich was later forced to return the money.)

But even this pales beside the story of why the House Ethics Committee found Gingrich guilty of laundering donations through charities and submitting "inaccurate, incomplete, and unreliable testimomy” to investigators, leading to a January 21, 1997 “reprimand” by Gingrich of the entire House including a $300,000 “cost assessment” of the entire investigation—the first-ever sanction of a sitting House speaker.

This sounds bad, I know, until you take a look at the details, which—like the divorces—make it sound even worse. For instance, the committee found Gingrich was merely pretending to raise money through a charity for inner-city kids called the Abraham Lincoln Opportunity Foundation. Another alleged “charity” he called “Earning by Learning” used half the money he raised to pay an ex-Gingrich staffer who was writing his biography. Gingrich was so energetic a salesman that he even gave out an 800 number for videotapes he was hawking on the House floor.

The Ethics Committee not only faulted his dishonesty but also faulted him for making "an effort to have the material he funded and hawked appear to be nonpartisan on its face, yet serve as a partisan, political message for the purpose of building the Republican party." Never one to take responsibility for what were clearly his own failings, Gingrich pretended to be guilty only of being a target of a liberal calumny, which was a rather odd charge for someone who sent his colleagues a letter instructing them to call their Democratic opponents "sick," "corrupt," and "traitors." (Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal seems to be taking a page out of, um, Gingrich’s book when it comes to intermingling profit and charity.)

According to Gingrich’s famous 1992 doodling, he considers himself an "advocate of civilization, definer of civilization, teacher of the rules of civilization and leader (possibly) of the civilizing forces."

What are the ideas through which he plans to civilize us? Well, first, he needs to defend the nation against “a gay and secular fascism … prepared to use the government if it can get control of it.” It would not be hard to conclude that this gay, secular fascist conspiracy in Gingrich’s view is now occupying the White House. After all, Gingrich recently mused that Obama might deserve to be impeached for his reversal on the Defense of Marriage Act legislation.

No less crazily, a few months ago he suggested, after reading Dinesh D’Souza’s nutty anti-Obama screed in Forbes, "What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? … that is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior."

One might go on almost indefinitely citing reasons why this crazy, personally irresponsible, and publicly corrupt individual could only be considered to be a serious candidate for the presidency in a country that had itself gone nuts.

One presumes that the national news reporters and editors of The New York Times know this. One also presumes they are aware of all of the insurmountable obstacles to a Gingrich candidacy in a country that retains a measure of political sanity. So the question becomes: Is the Republican field really so divorced from reality that the paper has no choice but to take Gingrich seriously?

After all, NBC’s “Meet the Press” featured Gingrich as its most frequent guest in 2009 with nine separate appearances despite the fact that he held no position, that it did not book the actual Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on the show even once that year, and that no ex-speaker had ever appeared on the show even once.

Is the paper afraid merely to print the truth about the man? Or can it be that the conservative “working of the refs” is such an effective tool that even the dreaded avatar of America’s cultural elite feels it has no choice but to publish propaganda pieces on behalf of the people who have declared themselves to be its enemy? Or has our political culture, together with Newt Gingrich, gone nuts?

I report, you decide.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a columnist for The Nation, Moment, and The Daily Beast. His newest book is Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama.

SOURCE: AP/James Crisp

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul recently remarked that we're headed for an "Amero" and a "borderless, mass continent." Meanwhile, a new poll finds likely voters in battleground districts see extremists as having a more dominant influence over the Democratic Party than they do over the GOP.

Below I’ve assembled a small collection for you of some of the new thinking that Tea Party advocates are bringing into the political process in case you’ve not been paying attention:

“Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?”

- Christine O’Donnell, Republican candidate for Senate, Delaware, October 18, 2010

“You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason, and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said, it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that’s not where we’re going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying, my goodness, what can we do to turn this country around? I’ll tell you, the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.”

- Sharron Angle, Republican candidate for Senate, Nevada, January 2010

CNN’s John King: “But how about an American born tomorrow or born the day after Joe Miller was sworn in in Washington? Would that person perhaps grow up in an America where there is not a federal Social Security program if you got your way?

Joe Miller: "Absolutely.”

- Joe Miller, Republican candidate for Senate, Alaska, September 1, 2010

[On Social Security]: “I don’t know whether it’s constitutional or not. … yeah, it’s the same thing. It’s gonna go up through Texas, I guess, all the way to Montana. So, it’s a real thing, and when you talk about it, the thing you just have to be aware of is that, if you talk about it like it’s a conspiracy, they’ll paint you as a nut. It’s not a conspiracy, they’re out in the open about it. I saw the YouTube of Vincente Fox talking about the Amero. So, it’s not a secret. Now it may not be [inaudible] tomorrow, but it took ‘em 20 or 30 years to get the Euro, and they had to push people kicking and screaming into the Euro. But I guarantee you it’s one of their long term goals to have one sort of borderless, mass continent.”

- Rand Paul, Republican candidate for Senate in Kentucky, 2008

His response when asked why people should vote for him: “Because I do not wear high heels. She [Jane Norton] has questioned my manhood, and I think it’s fair to respond. I have cowboy boots, they have real bullshit on them. And that’s Weld County bullshit, not Washington, D.C., bullshit.”

- Ken Buck, Republican candidate for Senate, Colorado, July 17, 2010

"There’s a reason Greenland was called Greenland," he said. "It was actually green at one point in time. … it’s a whole lot whiter now.”

- Ron Johnson, Republican candidate for Senate, Wisconsin, August 23, 2010

I suppose it is possible to agree or disagree with any of the above sentiments and possibly even disprove a few of them. But it would be hard to argue that they do not constitute departures from the sorts of comments one generally hears in election campaigns—particularly for a body that one typically hears called “the world’s greatest debating society.”

The intellectual sources of these unfamiliar sounding notions, of course, are not exactly new. (Not much in life ever is, alas.) Princeton historian Sean Wilenz traced some of the intellectual roots of the Tea Party politicians and their supporters in a recent New Yorker article.

Particularly influential in Wilenz’s view is Willard Cleon Skousen, an American author and political theorist whose self-published books like The Naked Communist and The Naked Capitalist have played a major role in shaping the ideology of the Tea Party movement. This is in no small measure thanks to the reverence with which the books are treated by the influential cable and radio host Glenn Beck.

According to the former work, Communists were creating “a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters.” According to the latter work, the Ivy League Establishment formed “the world’s secret power structure” to control the actions of all of us through the Federal Reserve, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Rockefeller Foundation. This particular conspiracy commenced, he explained, when President Woodrow Wilson’s close adviser Col. Edward M. House helped to create the Federal Reserve to institute the graduated income tax.

Skousen founded the Freemen Institute in 1971, which was later renamed the National Center for Constitutional Studies. It targeted for elimination: “the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Communication Commission’s fairness doctrine in editorial broadcasting, the federal government’s change of the gold standard in currency, all subsidies to farmers, all federal aid to education, all federal social welfare, foreign aid, social security, elimination of public school prayer and Bible reading, and (that familiar right-wing nemesis) the United Nations.”

Beck touts almost all of Skousen’s works. He put Skousen’s The 5,000 Year Leap in the first spot on his required-reading list, though this may have something to do with the royalties he receives for writing a rapturous new introduction for the reissued tome. Wilenz notes that this once-forgotten book sold more than 250,000 copies in the first half of 2009. Local branches of the Tea Party Patriots, the United American Tea Party, and other groups across the country have since organized study groups around it. “It is time we learn and follow the FREEDOM principles of our Founding Fathers,” a United American Tea Party video declares, referring to the principles expounded by Skousen’s book.

I do not cite the above statements by conservative Senate candidates or conservative authors—and their cable television and radio promoters—to critique or even examine them terribly closely. Many of them are, in any case, entirely matters of faith and beyond proof. Rather I raise them to provide a context for the jaw-dropping headline on Tobin Harshaw’s October 15 New York Times “Opinionator” blog: “Are the Democrats the True Extremists?”

Harshaw, who is almost as baffled as yours truly, notes the virtually unarguable fact that “the progressives are at the moment far more marginalized by their Democratic president and Congressional leadership than are the Tea Party enthusiasts by the Republican powers-that-be.” (And let us note, how many prominent progressives hold views as—let us say “unorthodox”—as those outlined above?)

Yet Harshaw cites a report by The Hill’s Alexander Bolton that found:

Likely voters in battleground districts see extremists as having a more dominant influence over the Democratic Party than they do over the GOP. This result comes from The Hill 2010 Midterm Election Poll, which found that 44 percent of likely voters say the Democratic Party is more dominated by its extreme elements, whereas 37 percent say it’s the Republican Party that is more dominated by extremists.

Harshaw surveys a number of liberal and conservative bloggers to try to get to the bottom of this mystery. The BooMan Tribune, he notes, comes up with he calls “a dandy of a conspiracy theory,” pointing out that the poll in question was commissioned from Mark Penn and Doug Schoen. The accusation is, “Schoen and Penn make their living off of corporate clients, and they do everything they can to make the Democratic Party sympathetic to those client’s interests. All this poll represents is an effort to blame the midterm losses on the Democrats going too far to the left.”

Indeed, if you want to hear what either of these guys think you’re likely to find one of them on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News or in the pages of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. But without any evidence it is unfair to accuse pollsters of doctoring a poll—at least any more than most. As likely is the fact that the people polled have been watching plenty of Fox News—or news that is driven by Fox News, which includes much of the mainstream media.

It’s hard to keep track of all the “news” sources this year running ideological interference for these nutty views. In the case of Fox it is purposeful and ideologically driven. In the rest of the mainstream media it is a function of laziness in some cases and a commitment to objectivity in others that prevents a journalist from calling a spade a spade and a liar a liar.

In any case, this extremist liberal is more than a little concerned about what this country will look like when we (inevitably) pay the price.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College. He is also a Nation columnist and a professor of journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His most recent book is, Why We’re Liberals: A Handbook for Restoring America’s Most Important Ideals. His "Altercation" blog appears sporadically here and he is a regular contributor to The Daily Beast.

SOURCE: AP/Ross D. Franklin

John McCain waves to supporters at an election victory party on August 24, 2010.

So Arizona, apparently Sen. John McCain is going to retain his Senate seat in your state after beating ultraconservative primary challenger J.D. Hayworth. True, it cost him over $20 million mostly on negative advertising, and he was running against a nobody with nothing but nutty views about almost everything. Even so, many in the mainstream media appear to be in mourning.

Carol Felsenthal, writing on The Hill’s “Pundit’s Blog,” says, “It seems clear now that no one lost more in the 2008 campaign than John McCain. He lost not only the election; he also lost the distinctive qualities—including his sense of humor—that made him, well, made him John McCain.” And according to “The Onion,” the embrace of Hayworth’s campaign by the likes of Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter were based on, among other reasons, the fact that “McCain is soft on hate,” and “fears McCain will take away America’s God-given right to torture a Muslim.”

Those statements may have appeared on the humor website, "The Onion," but they were still not as funny as some of the things real pundits have written about McCain in the past. I collected some of these during the 2008 election for The Nation. They included pundits calling McCain “a cool dude” (Jake Tapper, Salon); “a man of unshakable character, willing to stand up for his convictions” (the late R.W. Apple Jr., New York Times); “kind of like a Martin Luther” (Chris Matthews, MSNBC’s “Hardball”); “the bravest candidate in the presidential race” (Dana Milbank, Washington Post); “an affable man of zealous, unbending beliefs” and “the hero [who] still does things his own way” (Richard Cohen, Washington Post); and a man who, in “an age of deep cynicism about politicians of both parties…is the rare exception who is not assumed to be willing to sacrifice personal credibility to prevail in any contest” (David Broder, Washington Post).

Tucker Carlson explained the source of all this affection in his book Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites: My Adventures in Cable News. “McCain ran an entire presidential campaign aimed primarily at journalists…. To a greater degree than any candidate in thirty years, McCain offered reporters the three things they want most: total access all the time, an endless stream of amusing quotes, and vast quantities of free booze.”

The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza added that, “McCain not only packs his bus with reporters (whom he often greets with an affectionate ‘Hello, jerks!’), but also talks until the room is filled with the awkward silence of journalists with no more questions.” Lizza also noted that the “chumminess” between the campaign and the reporters has almost no boundaries. Questions of strategy—even media manipulation—are discussed openly with reporters present, and “McCain’s senior advisers dine almost nightly with the people covering the candidate.”

Yet pundit after pundit during the 2008 election went through a process of expressing their disappointment with the route McCain had taken. Steve Benen, writing in The Washington Monthly, collected a few of these from former fans such as Time’s Joe Klein, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman, and The Washington Post’s Sebastian Mallaby, who complained that the “man of principle has become a panderer.”

Slate’s Jake Weisberg, perhaps the leader of the McCain cheerleading section, went so far as to deny as late as 2006 that McCain could even be considered a “conservative.” And he is again late to the party of reality. Weisberg, upset that McCain has now “flipped his position on dropping the military’s antigay “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, soft-pedaled his support for climate-change legislation, and dropped his support for humane immigration reform… came out against Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination on the lamest of grounds, and defended Arizona’s ugly anti-immigrant law against challenges by the Justice Department,” has admitted, “I’ve stopped reading news about John McCain.”

And yet hope persists among many in the media. The New York Times’s Marc Lacey observes in a recent article that McCain “endorsed Arizona’s immigration crackdown… changed his mind on the necessity of the border fence… [and] also backpedaled fiercely on whether there ought to be a path to citizenship for those who entered the country against the rules, which in the past he has endorsed.” Yet he nevertheless returns to the old formula in that very same article, saying, “the question now is whether Mr. McCain’s sharp shift to the right during the campaign—the onetime maverick declared at one point that he no longer wanted anything to do with that label—will ultimately come back to haunt him and perhaps tarnish his legacy as a pragmatist willing to reach across the aisle.”

I have to admit I am a little tired of this. McCain has voted with conservatives in Congress about three quarters of the time since entering the Senate. He showed he was willing to jettison unpopular positions if he thought it would win him votes even back in 2000 when he was the pundits’ hero. He admitted as much after the election when he said that he did not really believe that the Confederate flag should fly over the South Carolina state capitol, but he lacked the courage to take this position in the primary, admitting, that when “it could come down to lying or losing. I chose lying.”

And yet reporters continued to run interference for McCain until it became almost undeniable in 2008, insisting over and over that he was really a good guy underneath, no matter what he felt he had to say to get elected. Here’s just one example:

McCain falsely insisted during a March 18 press conference with reporters in Amman, Jordan that Iranian operatives were “taking Al Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back.” The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder termed the quote a “momentary confusion.” Jake Tapper postulated “jet lag.” But the folks at Think Progress noted that McCain had made the same misstatement to nationally syndicated radio host Hugh Hewitt in a March 17 interview, saying, “As you know, there are Al Qaeda operatives that are taken back into Iran, given training as leaders, and they’re moving back into Iraq.” Media scholar Jay Rosen points out that McCain made this false claim four times, although Gen. David Petraeus had refuted it. (One Weekly Standard blogger insisted that McCain was correct, apparently overruling Petraeus, along with pretty much the rest of the world.)

My point is not to complain about John McCain. It is rather to point out how easy it is to snow the smart guys who determine the tone and tenor of our national politics. They created the John McCain of their dreams. And when he turned out to be the same expedient conservative politician he had always been, they reacted in horror at what he had become. A better strategy would be to look at themselves in the mirror. On what would be the 10-year anniversary of when they first fell in love, now would be as good a time as any…

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College. He is also a Nation columnist and a professor of journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His most recent book is, Why We’re Liberals: A Handbook for Restoring America’s Most Important Ideals. His "Altercation" blog appears sporadically here and he is a regular contributor to The Daily Beast.

Read more here.

SOURCE: AP

As we near Election Day, both parties are ramping up their efforts to reach potential voters. The fictional “average Joe” and the more recent  “Joe six-pack” were pushed aside last week to make way for the headline-dominating “Joe the Plumber.” Incorporating the lives of real workers into the presidential debate is essential in both connecting with voters and in demonstrating that a campaign hasn’t forgotten who they should be focusing on. But the dialogue surrounding Joe the Plumber has missed what should be the main point of such stories: how good policies can help workers achieve the American dream.

Stories about the plumber named Joe Wurzelbacher have mostly discussed the presidential candidates’ tax policies in a way that focuses on technicalities and misses the larger story. Under Sen. Barack Obama’s plan, individuals earning an annual income of $250,000 or more would be taxed at a slightly higher rate than they currently are, while those earning less than $250,000 would receive a nice tax break. Sen. John McCain has little to offer in tax cuts for middle- and lower-income taxpayers. Most of the media attention has focused on how profitable the business Joe hopes to buy actually is, and whether he would face a tax increase or decrease under Sen. Obama’s plan.

Others stories have narrowed in on Joe’s business and personal life, questioning whether Joe has a plumber’s license, whether he is really an undecided voter or a Republican partisan, and denigrating his extreme views on other political issues, such as his desire to see Social Security dissolved. Whether Joe is undecided or if Sen. Obama’s tax plan would raise or lower his taxes does matter, but the way the stories have been told misses the main point of how economic policies facilitate or hinder more people from achieving the American dream.

Joe should be seen as the aspirational figure that he is—one whose ambitions are intimately linked with government policy. He wants to get ahead and achieve the American Dream, which for him is to buy a plumbing business.

Government policies matter for this sort of upward mobility. Joe’s profession might, in fact, be a good example of a job that rewards workers, in part because of government policies. Plumbers are skilled workers who receive training that is supported through public policies such as vocational high school and union apprenticeship programs. Jobs like Joe’s pay well and provide income protection in an era of global outsourcing. And perhaps most importantly, plumbing is the kind of job that has a career ladder, where a worker can start off as an apprentice, acquire training and experience to become a journeyman plumber, work up to becoming a master plumber, and then hire other plumbers.

We need to ensure that America has more jobs that can boast these attributes, and that is what the conversation should focus on during election season, as well as after the ballots have been counted, when policymakers will need to help deliver the good jobs that their constituents need. Government policies matter not just for plumbers, but for all of us.

The kind of tax cuts supported by Sen. McCain, which are the centerpiece of his economic plan and disproportionately benefit those with high incomes, have a poor track record. Such tax cuts don’t do a good job of creating economic growth or improving the incomes of most workers. Economic growth rates—average annual real median household income, average real hourly earnings, employment, real investment, and real U.S gross domestic product—were all lower after Ronald Reagan’s supply-side tax cuts in 1981 and George W. Bush’s in 2001-2003, than they were after Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increases. Federal budget deficits and national debt also increased during supply-side periods, but decreased following the 1993 tax increases.

Government data and anecdotal stories alike highlight the pain that a growing share of America’s workers and their families are feeling. The Census Bureau released data in August detailing that the median household income was 0.6 percent lower in 2007 than it was in 2000 when the previous business cycle ended. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest monthly employment release also announced a decline of 159,000 jobs in September, meaning that the economy has now lost a total of 760,000 jobs in 2008.

In contrast to this misguided emphasis on tax cuts for those with the highest incomes, the Center for American Progress has put forth an agenda for progressive growth that is based on investments in energy transformation, universal health care and education, and improving opportunity and security for workers.

Achieving the American dream takes hard work and individual responsibility, but it also requires good public policy in order to become a real possibility for the majority of workers. Public policies that lead to a productive and adequately rewarded workforce range from increased financing for education at all levels and in a vast array of arenas, to encouraging the creation of “good jobs” in underserved communities. More specific to the current economic downturn, the United States could jumpstart both job creation and the transformation to a low-carbon economy through a Green Recovery program. While such policies do cost money, they are a necessary investment in our nation’s future.

Successful careers and a healthy labor market are the result of public investment in people. It is long past time we commit to making that investment. Failing to do so now will only result in more pain for American workers and the long-term growth of the U.S. economy.

Learn more from the American Worker Project.

SOURCE: CAPAF

America today is in the midst of “a second Gilded Age” of increasing income disparity and declining standards of living for working Americans, writes John Podesta in his new book, The Power of Progress, which he discussed at a Center for American Progress Action Fund event this week. He built on this idea at the event, saying that the country needs a new alliance of progressives on the model of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt to bring it into a new era of prosperity, and that nothing but a new wave of progressivism can combat the growing idea that government is incapable of working with people, and restore people’s faith in the country’s ability to change.

Podesta describes his grandparents as “penniless immigrants,” and his parents as blue-collar workers, yet he became chief of staff to a president. “That’s an extraordinary journey,” he said, “but I think it’s also an ordinary one,” because millions of immigrants succeeded in an America “built around a core set of values that progressives brought to the table.”

Progressive ideas are needed now more than ever, Podesta emphasized, since “eight years of a failed conservative experiment” saw family incomes drop, unemployment rise, millions more Americans fall into poverty, and personal debts hit all time highs.

The progressive platform Podesta outlined is focused on supporting working Americans, providing equality of opportunity for all, attacking concentrations of wealth, promoting human rights internationally, and working with other countries to extend peace and prosperity across the world. Progressivism is first and foremost a practical tradition of politics, and progressives are willing to try new and different policies to achieve its ends. Indeed, Podesta said, restless pragmatism is critical to the success of the progressive movement.

Podesta also layed out some ideas for a basic progressive plan for the next president. Progressives “see energy transformation, from high-carbon to low-carbon based…not only as meeting the challenge on energy and climate, but as a central element of what the president’s next economic policy should be.” A new clean energy program could, with a $100 billion investment from the next Congress, create 2 million new jobs and establish American leadership in the field.

Podesta also sees an opening for a “new coalition” on health care; it’s a juncture where the business community and labor share common goals—a very different landscape than existed in 1993 when business and industry largely stood by health insurance companies as President Clinton tried to reform the health care system. These two priorities—energy and health care—are the key crises of the moment, Podesta said, and progressivism is uniquely positioned to address them.

View the event slideshow:

“[Conservatives have] eliminated the need to actually argue the issues,” said Eric Alterman, author of Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, at a Center for American Progress Action Fund event yesterday. “All they have to do is associate these things with the term liberal and it’s off the table.”

Alterman joined Thomas Edsall, author of the 2006 book Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power, to discuss problems with and misconceptions about the liberal agenda. Moderated by John Halpin, Senior Fellow of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the two authors debated the presence of a liberal-conservative divide in politics as well as the perceived issues in liberalism.

Halpin asked the participants why they thought both major presidential candidates this year have distanced themselves from prevailing party ideology. Alterman focused on the media’s role in reinforcing misperceptions. In polls, while only some 20 percent of people have defined themselves as liberal, some 55 to 70 percent have expressed the liberal consensus on most national issues, he said.

“It’s not just a majority,” he said. “It’s a super majority on issue after issue after issue after issue.” According to Alterman, it is the term “liberal,” rather than the policies liberals endorse, with which the American public has problems. Conservatives have capitalized on mistakes and errors made in the past to pigeonhole liberals as elitist and antifamily, Alterman said.

“They have made a boogeyman of the term ‘liberal,’” he said. Alterman argued that the word should be accepted once more because public perception does not line up with the policy and politics.

Edsall disagreed with this explanation of liberals’ problems. Instead, he pointed to structural problems within the liberal coalition. Liberals have always been on one side of every revolution and civil rights movement, and the other side has had to pay a price, he said. “The lower classes cannot absorb changes,” Edsall said. “You cannot dismiss these things as fictions by Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.” In addition, Edsall worried that the new applauded coalition created by Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) cannot last without an African-American candidate.

While Alterman agreed about the historical issues faced by liberals, he did not believe that the current situation was comparable. In fact, he said that lessons of the past have been synthesized and that Edsall was “fixated on the liberalism that is 20 years old.” Instead, he described liberals today as smarter, more resourceful, and more respectful of the country in which they live.

Both authors agreed that the current administration had greatly hurt conservatives and the entire country. In addition, Alterman referred to small dollar donors as indicative of greater democratic participation and the irresponsibility of members of the press who encourage character-based interrogation of presidential candidates.

Although Alterman approved of the term “progressive,” he emphasized the necessary embrace of the word “liberal. “You can’t run away from the term ‘liberal’ because you’re running away from how you’re perceived,” he said.

For more information on this event, please visit the events page.

Presidential candidates have, for the past year, been doing their best to address this problem, and with good reason. Health care is the number two concern of voters, behind the Iraq war, and three-quarters of voters expect America’s next president to do something about health care costs.

Given the complexity of the problem, the media plays a crucial role in educating the public about its options. But on three simple and essential points, reporting has proven itself deficient: indulging politicians who claim, indefensibly, that the United States enjoys the world’s greatest health care system; failing to emphasize the sound economics behind government-provided health care—and the shaky economics behind consumer-driven care; and neglecting overwhelming popular opinion in favor of government solutions to the health care crisis.

Conservatives like to claim that American has “the best health care in the world.” It wasn’t 30 seconds into the very first Republican debate in May that New York Mayor and then-candidate Rudy Giuliani made that now clichéd claim. Chris Matthews and the two top editors at Politico.com, the moderators of the debate, sat by in silence.

Perhaps relieved that the batty claim would not be checked, the candidates began regularly proclaiming America’s health care the best. Fred Thompson made it a regular line of his; he even put it on his website. All of the candidates agreed when asked in January by ABC’s Charlie Gibson that America had the best health care in the world.

The first step is always admitting that you have a problem, and the conservative candidates—empowered by a co-dependent media—appear unwilling to do so. The evidence to the contrary is overwhelming: the World Health Organization ranked our health system at 37th in the world, spending is out of control, measures of overall health are poor, millions are uninsured, and 18,000 die each year in America because of a lack of medical coverage.

Perhaps these candidates just mean that the health care provided in America is very good, but that the number of Americans it’s provided to and the cost it’s provided at is inconsequential. But shouldn’t they be probed to justify that position? Apparently not.

Another journalistic oversight comes when equal time is given to those who say government needs to intervene to fix health care, and those who say the opposite. Take for example the recent one-hour special on CNN hosted by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, interestingly titled “Broken Government: Health Care, Critical Condition.” Gupta does ponder whether this is an appropriate name for a show on a health care system that is largely run by private corporations, and then provides his analysis: a sound bite from arch-conservative Grover Norquist, who says government is the problem, and a bite from Sen. Ted Kennedy saying the opposite. He concludes the show by saying “There are a lot of different opinions on how to get out of this health care mess.”

On the pro- and anti- government sides of the health care debate, it’s true that liberals generally take one side and conservatives another, but that doesn’t mean the positions have equal weight. This is the fundamental weakness of so-called “objective journalism.”

Simply, government does a better job at providing health care than private companies do. Medicare operates with about 2 percent overhead; conversely, private health insurance companies operate with at least 15 percent overhead. And a 2003 study by the Harvard School of Medicine and the New England Journal of Medicine found that there is $400 billion in administrative waste in the private health care industry—one out of every three health care dollars.

The quality of care in government-run health systems is excellent—our own VA system, which is entirely government-run, consistently ranks better than even the Mayo Clinic or Johns Hopkins in quality and performance rankings. These are all facts sadly absent from Dr. Gupta’s report and much of the on-one-hand reporting around the health care crisis.

The evidence for government’s involvement in health care is strong, as is the voter’s preference to see it happen. Polls show that by massive margins, American voters feel it’s the government’s responsibility to make sure everyone has health care and that it is provided it to those that cannot afford it. This is another fact often overlooked by the media when providing equal weight to proclamations about the government’s role in health care. Returning to the debates, when Mitt Romney said “I hear the people say they think we deserve health care for all our citizens but not government health care”—a popular refrain among many candidates—he went unchallenged by Chris Wallace and the other debate moderators.

In diagnosing an illness, doctors need to have all available information in front of them. A healthy dialogue about how we provide medical care in this country needs the same level of evidence. Remember, the first step is to admit we’re sick…

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, and a professor of journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His blog, “Altercation,” appears at www.mediamatters.org/altercation. His seventh book, Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, will be published in March.

George Zornick is a New York-based writer and worked as a researcher on the film, “Sicko.”

Well, that was then. Today the tables are turned, and it’s the Republicans who are doing the filibustering. They’re doing so much of it that, at their present rate, they will have filibustered three times more than any Congress in the previous decade. Nearly one vote in six so far this year has been a filibuster vote. And these are hardly trivial issues. Republican filibusters have stopped bills to withdraw combat troops from Iraq—despite a 52-49 majority in favor of it—enact comprehensive immigration reform, address the Justice Department scandals, bolster labor rights, and, well the list goes on.

Reading and listening to the mainstream coverage of these filibusters, however, the casual citizen would have a hard time figuring out who’s responsible. As Matt Yglesias writes: “It seems, though, that the GOP has decided that if they use filibusters to obstruct congressional action that the press will keep reporting this in a ‘Congress fails to do X’ kind of way rather than a ‘GOP obstructionism’ kind of way, which makes filibusters a win-win for Republicans.”

This is, naturally, the same storyline the Republicans themselves have constructed. “We really ought to be asking why this Democrat leadership won’t allow Congress to move forward on serious policy debates,” complains Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). “Americans have been disappointed by a majority leadership that stages one show debate after another, while the only consistent legislative work getting done is the renaming of post offices.”

That problem could easily be solved if Republicans allowed votes to take place and bills to be placed on the president’s desk. And yet, almost universally, the mainstream media has written this story as if dictated by the same folks who come up with Republicans’ talking points each morning.

Take, for instance, last week’s all-nighter on Iraq. It was designed to call attention to the Republicans’ filibustering tactics, but most reporters portrayed it as a Democratic “stunt” designed to detract from the real business of governance, as if this horrific war were none of Congress’s business. Few apparently remember that former Senate Majority Leader Bill First (R-TN) employed exactly the same tactic in the Bad Old Days merely to get a few of Bush’s judges confirmed. (Far fewer judicial nominations were held up under Bush II than under Clinton, by the way, but who’s counting?)

In the case of Fox News, we get pretty much what we’ve been trained to expect. The story was reported as follows: “By a 52-47 vote, the Senate on Wednesday rejected a bill that would have started bringing troops home within 120 days of passage.” Never mind that the 52 votes were actually in favor of the bill.

Now take a look at the coverage by Reuters, one of many such pieces flagged by Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo.com. It manages to describe the whole event without using the word filibuster once. Rather, we read that “Democrats have all but publicly acknowledged that they will be unable to pass their end-the-war amendment because opposition Republicans are insisting on 60 votes for a victory.” Didn’t any of the editors in question think that readers might need some guidance as to why a simple majority was not enough? Are Republican filibusters to continue wars they cannot and will not defend simply assumed?

Even The New York Times—allegedly ground-zero of the Liberal Media Conspiracy—played the story in the same misleading fashion. Its headline read: “Democrats Fail to Force Vote on Iraq Pullout.” Well, yes, but a more accurate headline would have read: “Republican Minority Refuse to Allow a Vote to End the War.” Over on the paper’s editorial page, things were considerably clarified: “The nation’s anguish over the Iraq war was kept on hold in the Senate yesterday as the Republican minority maintained serial threats of filibuster to buy time for President Bush’s aimless policies.”

The Washington Post coverage manifested the same blinkered priorities that have characterized so much of its pro-Bush, pro-war coverage. It referred to the filibuster only once, and then in the context of discussing MoveOn.org “counter-filibusters.” And what were they countering, exactly? Your guess would be as good as that of any Post subscriber, at least as far as they were informed by articles like that one.

And on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Diane Sawyer did what might be a termed a “full Orwell” by announcing that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) was leading the Dems in a filibuster, though even here she was topped by the all-but-inimitable Fred Barnes, who claimed that Harry Reid was somehow “filibustering his own bill.” Huh?

Could Barnes somehow be bested in a contest to see who can be simultaneously more inaccurate and nonsensical? Sounds like a job for one Robert Novak. “These antics fit the continuing decline of the Senate, including an unwritten rules change requiring 60 votes to pass any meaningful bill,” he writes. “When I arrived on Capitol Hill 50 years ago, Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson (like Reid today) had a slim Democratic majority and faced a Republican president, but he was not burdened with the 60-vote rule. While Johnson did use chicanery, Reid resorts to brute force that shatters the Senate’s facade of civilized discourse.”

Novak has obviously been too busy outing CIA agents to read Robert Caro’s magisterial account of Lyndon Johnson’s years as majority leader. Perhaps the fact that Novak married the man’s secretary gives him a rather rosy view of just how Johnson went about his business. But with all due respect to Harry Reid, he is not just a pussy cat, but a veritable newborn kitten compared to the harsh and petulant rule of Majority Leader Johnson.

Then again, in the days before the blogosphere was in existence as a mainstream media corrective, lots of people used to fear Bob Novak too—and not just loyal CIA agents and the people whose lives depended on them…

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow of the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His weblog, “Altercation,” appears at www.mediamatters.org/altercation, His seventh book, Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, will appear early next year.

Research Assistance: Tim Fernholz

The night after hosting what he billed as “the first presidential forum to address the issues important to African Americans and people of color,” author and television/radio show host Tavis Smiley joined the Center for American Progress Action Fund to discuss the candidate forum and how race is and is not addressed by politicians and the media.

Outlining the genesis of the historic forum, Smiley noted his bestselling book, The Covenant with Black America, as the beginning of what he hopes to be a new political consciousness and prominence among African Americans and people of color. The book, a collection of essays by prominent black writers and professors, outlines what Smiley believes to be the largest issues currently facing black America and serves as a checklist of sorts for black voters to use to compare candidates’ positions.

Smiley said the presidential forum served to shed light on issues that are important not only to black America, but to all Americans. Topics such as poverty and education have been largely absent from debates so far, he said, pointing to what he described as a mainstream media that seeks to fit debates and issues into the frames it prefers. These issues, among others, are crucial to black America but also to Americans of all races and ethnicities, he said, and the lack of attention paid to such large issues is something we should seek to correct. This is borne out of Smiley’s belief that all Americans hope for the same thing: to live in a nation that is as good as its promise.

While economic and social questions were broad, others were more tailored to challenges that are particularly concentrated in the African American community. Smiley and the six other journalists at the forum—all of color—sought to ask tough, pointed questions about racism, HIV/AIDS, and reconstruction of the Gulf Coast post-Hurricane Katrina. These questions were ignored by mainstream media and most campaigns. Regardless of the responses of the candidates, simply asking these questions forced the issues into the mainstream consciousness and conversation, and with enough repetition, Smiley hopes that he and his colleagues can force candidates to pay attention to and address these issues.

Renowned Princeton Professor Cornell West, a close personal friend of Smiley’s, was invited to speak during a question and answer session at the presidential forum. Described by Smiley as “this generation’s W.E.B Dubois,” West remarked that the issues associated with racial inequality have historically been tackled by grassroots pressure from the outside, courageous leaders from the inside, and intellectuals asking tough questions and inspiring others to action. He agreed that the mainstream media often stereotypes minority suffering, and that books such as The Covenant with Black America and major events such as the presidential forum are essential in the fight for justice.

Adding to that point, Smiley said he hoped to re-engage the black community in politics. He wants to reinvigorate competition for African Americans’ support by holding candidates to election-year promises and asking them tough questions about topics many politicians are uneducated about or feel uncomfortable addressing.

While Vermont is considered a liberal state, its governor’s office and state House of Representatives are controlled by Republicans. Venice is famous for its iconoclastic beach scene and toney canal-house district. But is it is also community where people of diverse backgrounds fill densely packed middle- and working-class neighborhoods, and the homeless are everywhere.

“Most people knew the second debate is focused on domestic issues,” Moyers writes from the road. “But I couldn’t stop them from asking questions about national security and Iraq. That is what was really on their minds. That’s what most wanted to ask about.”

Click photos/names to see their questions for the candidates.

Andrew Jackson, attorney, Bristol	Christopher Williams, cashier, Venice
Jen Brandt, Ferrisburgh	David Bedard, Bristol
Donna Fournier, New Haven	Jim Dumont, attorney, Bristol
Lisa Misipeka, Venice, track coach at a junior college	Lorraine Wells, West Los Angeles, manager, Trash and Treasure thrift store
Mustafa Mustafa, house painter, Venice	Piper Smith, shopkeeper, Bristol
Tamra Hernandez, Venice, student and waitress	Town Hall Managers, Bristol

Photos and text by John Moyers

“[Saddam] provided a safe-haven for terrorists over the years…he had a relationship with al Qaeda.”

FACT: A new CIA assessment – which Cheney himself requested months ago – states, “there is no conclusive evidence that the regime harbored terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi.” One U.S. official stated, “The evidence is that Saddam never gave Zarqawi anything.” [Knight Ridder, 10/5/04]

FACT: The Sept. 11 Commission found no “collaborative relationship” between Iraq and al Qaeda. [Washington Post, 6/17/04]

FACT: CIA interrogators found “Osama bin Laden had rejected entreaties from some of his lieutenants to work jointly with Saddam.” [New York Times, 1/14/04]

FACT: The chairman of the monitoring group appointed by the United Nations Security Council to track al Qaeda found “no evidence linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein.” [New York Times, 6/27/03]

FACT: A British Intelligence report found “no current links between the Iraqi regime and the al-Qaeda network.” [BBC, 2/5/03]

FACT: “Nearly a year after U.S. and British troops invaded Iraq, no evidence has turned up to verify allegations of Saddam’s links with al-Qaida.” [Knight Ridder, 3/3/04]

“We’re also working very hard to stand up Iraqi security forces, training and equipping the Iraqis so that they’ll be able to take on the fight and be responsible for providing for their own security just as quickly as possible.”

FACT: Last Monday, the Pentagon said that “only about 53,000 of the 100,000 Iraqis on duty have now undergone training.” According to Pentagon documents obtained by Reuters, of the 90,000 in the police force, “only 8,169 have received full training.” [ABC News, 9/24/04]

FACT: According to the Associated Press, “Some $257 million in spending authority was held up by Wolfowitz’s office for two months, delaying construction of Iraqi army barracks for four brigades awaiting training.” [AP, 6/10/04]

FACT: Last week, the U.S. military “arrested a senior commander of the nascent Iraqi National Guard.” The commander was arrested on suspicion of “having associations with known insurgents.” The move raised concerns “about the loyalty and reliability of the new security forces just months before general elections are scheduled across the embattled country.” [New York Times, 9/29/04]

“America faces a choice on November 2nd between a strong and steadfast President and his opponent, who seems to adopt a new position every day.”

FACT: Cheney opposed invading Baghdad before he supported it. In 1991, Cheney cautioned against U.S. troops advancing into the city, “telling a Seattle audience that capturing Saddam wouldn’t be worth additional U.S. casualties or the risk of getting ‘bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.’” [Seattle Post Intelligencer, 9/29/04]

FACT: Bush has flip-flopped on at least 30 major policy issues. [American Progress Action Fund, 9/2/04]

FACT: “An examination of Kerry’s words in more than 200 speeches and statements, comments during candidate forums and answers to reporters’ questions does not support the accusation… Kerry repeatedly described Hussein as a dangerous menace who must be disarmed or eliminated, demanded that the U.S. build broad international support for any action in Iraq and insisted that the nation had better plan for the post-war peace… taken as a whole, Kerry has offered the same message ever since talk of attacking Iraq became a national conversation more than two years ago.” [San Francisco Chronicle, 9/23/04]

“On national security, [Sen. Kerry] has shown at least one measure of consistency. Over the years, he has repeatedly voted against weapons systems for the military. He voted against the Apache helicopter, against the Tomahawk cruise missile, against even the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.”

FACT: Almost all of the defense cuts Kerry voted for were endorsed or originally proposed by…Dick Cheney. In 1991, the Washington Post reported Cheney’s Defense Department wanted “to terminate such gulf war veterans as the…Bradley Fighting Vehicle.” And in 1989, Cheney told Congress, “I forced the Army to make choices . . . I recommended that we cancel the AH-64 [Apache Helicopter] program two years out.” [Washington Post, 12/10/91; Congressional Testimony, 7/13/89; American Prospect, 9/9/04]

FACT: Cheney once bragged he had set “an all-time record as defense secretary for canceling or stopping production [of weapons systems].” He “put an end to more than 100 systems, including the F-14, F-15 and F-16 fighters, the A-6, A-12, AV-8B and P-3 Navy and Marine planes, and the Army’s Apache helicopter and M-1A1 tank.” [Washington Post, 12/8/91]

“Iraq for years was listed by the U.S. State Department as a state sponsor of terror.”

FACT: That didn’t stop Cheney from doing business with Saddam’s regime. “The United States had concluded that Iraq, Libya, and Iran supported terrorism and had imposed strict sanctions on them. Yet during Cheney’s tenure at Halliburton the company did business in all three countries.” [New Yorker, 2/9/04]

FACT: “Halliburton Co., the oil company that was headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, signed contracts with Iraq worth $73 million through two subsidiaries while he was at its helm.” [UPI, 6/23/01]

FACT: Halliburton is being investigated by a grand jury for doing business while Cheney was CEO with Iran, also listed as a “state sponsor of terror” by the State Department. “The grand jury has subpoenaed various documents covering Halliburton’s Iranian operations, a sign some evidence has surfaced indicating the company knowingly violated” U.S. anti-terror sanctions. [Washington Times, 7/22/04]

“We’ve got a great alliance—we’ve got 30 countries fighting alongside of us in Iraq.”

FACT: The shaky international alliance in Iraq is disintegrating. Norway quietly pulled out its 155 military engineers last June, “leaving behind only about 15 personnel to assist a new NATO-coordinated effort to help train and equip Iraqi security forces. New Zealand intends to pull out its 60 engineers by September, while Thailand plans to withdraw its more than 450 troops that same month, barring a last-minute political reversal that Thai officials consider unlikely, say envoys from both countries. The Netherlands is likely to pull out next spring after the first of three Iraqi elections, while Polish military officials told the Pentagon that Poland’s large contingent will probably leave in mid-2005, other diplomats say.” [Washington Post, 7/15/04]

FACT: After initial support, many members of the “coalition of the willing” decided to pull out of Iraq. Spain pulled its troops out this summer. Costa Rica pulled out last month after its government ruled it was illegal to support the war; Nicaragua withdrew troops last February. “Last spring, Honduras cut short the deployment of its 370 troops, and the Dominican Republic followed suit with its contingent of 302 forces – just days after reiterating a commitment to complete their one-year term.” [Miami Herald, 9/24/04]

FACT: International confidence in the United States has plummeted. According to new reports, “Much of Europe and the world feel insecure, but a growing number of nations no longer look to the U.S. for leadership and sanctuary. The Bush administration’s unilateralist policies in Iraq and its perceived aloofness have left it less trusted at a time of widening global vulnerability.” [LA Times, 10/3/04]

FACT: While the invasion and occupation of Iraq has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $144 billion, the rest of the world has provided only $1.3 billion for Iraq’s reconstruction (more than half of that coming from just two countries – Britain and Japan). The administration has done little follow-through on pledges made at Madrid’s donors conference one year ago and as a result, America’s allies have failed to meet their commitments. Compare that to the first Gulf War, where $53 billion of the $61 billion cost was provided by countries other than the United States, including Saudi Arabia and other Arab states ($36 billion), and Germany and Japan ($16 billion).

“One of the most important commitments the President made during the 2000 campaign was that our troops would be given the resources they need and the respect they deserve – and he has kept his word to the U.S. military.”

FACT: Last October, eight months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, nearly one-quarter of American troops serving in Iraq did not have ceramic-plated body armor, which can stop bullets fired from assault rifles and shrapnel. As late as this past March, soldiers headed for Iraq were still buying their own body armor. It wasn’t until June 2004 – sixteen months after the invasion – that the Army’s chief logistician announced that all U.S. troops were finally equipped with the lifesaving vests. [CBS News, 10/14/03; Associated Press, 3/26/04; Associated Press, 6/8/04 ]

FACT: President Bush sent soldiers into Iraq with Humvees which were equipped with “little more than vinyl fabric for their roofs and doors.” Last September, the Army’s vice chief of staff admitted the military miscalculated the number of armored Humvees troops would need, leaving many soldiers unprotected. Last March, a year after the start of the war, the total number of Humvees in Iraq was only about half of what the Army said it needed.” [Slate, 2/18/04; Boston Globe, 3/8/04]

FACT: The Washington Post reported in July that the U.S. military was running short on one crucial wartime need: bullets. The Pentagon underestimated both production need and the level of resistance soldiers would face in Iraq. Until U.S. production could be brought up to speed, however, the Army had to take “unusual stopgap measures” such as buying ammunition from foreign governments like Britain and Israel. [Washington Post, 7/22/04]

FACT: The White House fought to keep reservists from receiving TRICARE – the Pentagon health insurance plan. According to estimates, 20 percent of guardsmen lack outside health insurance. The Bush administration formally opposed giving National Guard and Reserve members access to TRICARE, saying it was too expensive. [Stars & Stripes, 7/17/04; Gannett, 10/23/03]

FACT: The Bush administration has tried to keep the true cost of war away from the eyes of the American public. The White House banned photos of flag-draped coffins coming home (even though the Bush campaign uses flag-draped corpses at Ground Zero in its political commercials). President Bush has also refused to attend funerals of the fallen in Iraq. [Washington Post, 10/21/03; Illinois Times, 11/6/03]

“Five days after we captured Saddam Hussein, [Libyan dictator Moammar Ghadafi] went public and announced he was going to give up all his nuclear materials.”

FACT: The decision by Libyan dictator Moammar Ghadafi to permit U.N. weapons inspectors into his country validated the argument that the United States can achieve its strategic international goals using tools other than military force – namely, diplomatic, political and economic pressure. According to the LA Times, “Libya was virtually isolated from the world” because of U.N. economic sanctions since it orchestrated the Pan Am 103 bombing. Desperate to re-enter the international community, the North African country has been trying for at least 10 years to have those sanctions lifted. And while the developments are certainly positive, they beg a number of questions. [ABC News, 12/22/03; LA Times, 12/20/03]

HEALTH CARE

“It is now possible for senior citizens to get a Medicare discount prescription drug card, which allows them to save 15 percent to 30 percent off their prescriptions.”

FACT: A study commissioned by the AARP shows price increases have negated much of the savings promised to Medicare beneficiaries because drug manufacturers are offsetting discounts with prices that are higher than they otherwise would have been. [AP, 7/1/04]

“We will work for medical liability reform because America’s doctors should be able to spend their time healing patients, not fighting off frivolous lawsuits.”

FACT: While Cheney was at the helm, Halliburton filed 151 claims in 15 states around the nation, petitioning America’s legal system an average of 30 times a year; most actions were filed against other corporations. [Halliburton Watch]

FACT: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) this year found that “even large savings in premiums can have only a small direct impact on health care spending – private or governmental – because malpractice costs account for less than 2 percent of that spending.” In fact, an analysis by the CBO shows capping Medicare malpractice would benefit physicians and doctors, but would reduce private health insurance premiums 0.4 percent. [CBO Report, 1/8/04; Washington Post, 7/20/04]

FACT: The Government Accountability Office found that malpractice costs did not affect access to health care. In fact, in Pennsylvania and West Virginia – two of the 19 states supposedly in a “full-blown liability crisis,” the number of doctors per capita has actually gone up over the past six years, according to the GAO. [CBO Report, 1/8/04; Washington Post, 9/16/03]

FACT: Last year, Weiss Ratings, Inc., an independent financial services analysis company, issued a comprehensive study showing that in 19 states with malpractice caps, physicians suffered a 48.2 percent jump in their premiums. Meanwhile, in 32 states without caps, premiums rose by only 35.9 percent. The Des Moines Register points out, “There’s simply no correlation between lawsuits and insurance rates. Rather, insurance rates are tied to the climate of the stock and bond market, where insurance companies invest much of their money.” [Weiss Ratings, 6/3/03; Des Moines Register, 7/11/03]

ECONOMY

“The average savings from the President’s across-the-board tax cuts topped $1,500.”

FACT: According to CBO numbers, households in the middle 20 percent of income levels, with incomes averaging $57,000 per year, are receiving an average cut of $1,090 from the Bush tax cuts. Americans with incomes averaging $1.2 million per year are receiving average tax cuts of $78,460. [Reuters, 8/14/04]

FACT: One-third of President Bush’s tax cuts have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, shifting more of the tax burden from America’s rich to middle-class families. [Reuters, 8/14/04]

FACT: If the Bush tax cuts are made permanent, data indicate people in the middle of the income spectrum would receive a 2.5 percent change in their after-tax income, with average tax cuts of $655 – a little more than one-ninetieth of what those in the top 1 percent would receive. [CBPP, 1/30/04]

“We’ve created jobs for the last 12 consecutive months—a total of about 1.7 million new jobs over the last year.”

FACT: The economy has shed 900,000 jobs since March 2001, assuring Bush he will end his four-year term with the worst jobs record since Herbert Hoover. [Jobwatch, 8/31/04]

FACT: All told, Bush currently presides over the weakest “recovery” in 72 years, in terms of job growth. Additionally, wages are stagnating, personal bankruptcies are up 33 percent since 2000, and consumer confidence is plummeting. [CNN, 8/26/04; USA Today, 8/27/04; NYT, 8/28/04; AP, 8/31/04]

FACT: The gains from America’s “productivity-led recovery” have been unevenly distributed. While corporate profits, CEO pay and business investment have risen, pay has lagged behind and the wages of production workers have stagnated. [Economist, 8/6/04]

“Congress took an important step last week by extending tax relief for working families.”

FACT: Two-thirds of the benefits in the bill went to the top one-fifth of all earners. [Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 9/24/04]

FACT: The bill included $12 billion in corporate tax breaks – including provisions benefiting Caribbean distillers. [LA Times, 9/24/04; USA Today, 9/24/04]

FACT: Middle-class families receive an average benefit of just $169. This could be more than off-set by program cuts or future tax increases that will inevitably be required to pay down the added debt created by the bill. [Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 9/27/04]

JUDICIAL SYSTEM

“The Democrats in the Senate have been doing everything they can – including using the filibuster – to keep the President’s sensible, mainstream nominees off the bench.”

FACT: 201 of Bush’s judicial nominations have already been confirmed, more than in Ronald Reagan’s first term, George H.W. Bush’s only term or Clinton’s last term. The Senate has confirmed 35 circuit court nominees, more than in Reagan’s or Clinton’s first term. More than 96 percent of federal judicial seats are filled. [Senate Comparison; Judiciary Committee; CNN, 10/04/00]

FACT: Just 10 of Bush’s nominees have been blocked. [Reuters, 7/22/04]

FACT: The nominees that have been blocked were radical right-wingers. For example, California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown – whose nomination was blocked – has said, “Today’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much ‘free’ stuff as the political system will permit them to extract.” [People for the American Way]

Roger Ailes Gives Political Advice to the Bush White House
According to Bob Woodward’s book, Fox News executive Roger Ailes, who formerly served as a GOP political operative, gave White House political adviser Karl Rove a confidential memo after 9/11 that advised the president on how to consolidate his power. “[Ailes'] back-channel message: The American public would tolerate waiting and would be patient, but only as long as they were convinced that Bush was using the harshest measures possible” in response to the terror attacks, Woodward writes. The move was so brazen, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson told PBS, “Roger Ailes is the editorial chief of fox news, and this gives the appearance of partisanship. This is sucking up to power.” [Source: New York Daily News, 11/19/02; PBS, 11/21/02]

Fox Correspondent Jokes on Camera About His Wife Working for George W. Bush
Fox News was so openly close with the Bush campaign in 2000 it allowed Carl Cameron to cover George W. Bush, even though Cameron’s wife was working on the Bush campaign. As the New York Observer reports, the movie Outfoxed has camera “footage showing Mr. Cameron pandering to George W. Bush in a sit-down interview on July 19, 2000: Mr. Cameron tells Mr. Bush that his wife, Pauline Cameron, was campaigning with Mr. Bush’s sister, Dorothy (‘Doro’) Bush Koch. This delights Mr. Bush.” One source familiar with the situation, who declined to be named, told NYTV “that Mr. Cameron had attempted to get his wife a job with the Bush transition team.” [Source: New York Observer, 7/26/04]

Fox Puts Bush Cousin in Charge of Election Night; Calls Bush Five Times to Consult
Fox News put John Ellis, President Bush’s cousin, in charge of its election night projections in 2000. Fox became the first network to call Florida for George W. Bush – even though the data did not support the call. AP later reported that Ellis “spoke five times with his cousin, George W. Bush” on election night. [Source: AP, 12/12/00]

Fox Pushed Swift Boat Ads Without Confirmation of Truth; Never Gave Apology
Fox News has criticized CBS for supposedly wanting to influence the presidential election. Yet it was Fox News that continued to repeat all of the allegations of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth against Sen. John Kerry, even though there was no factual evidence to prove them. Fox News has yet to issue an apology.

Fox Airs 20 Percent More of GOP Convention than Democratic Convention; All Other Networks Kept Parity
A study immediately after both political conventions concluded found that Fox News devoted 20 percent more air time to covering speeches at the Republican National Convention than speeches at the Democratic National Convention. The other major networks aired equal time of both conventions. [Source: Media Matters, 9/3/04]

The kid gloves with which so much of the mainstream media have chosen to treat this president and his party were particularly in evidence during the 2004 Republican convention. Speaker after speaker came to the podium prepared to mislead the nation as to the policies of the past and the prospects for the future, and aside from the invaluable Jon Stewart and his fake news crew on Comedy Central, rarely, if ever, did anyone think to offer a reality check.

As the Columbia Journalism Review’s “Campaign Desk” reported, many local newspapers “fell prey to [Vice President Dick] Cheney’s stalest and most discredited distortion of John Kerry’s words.” Specifically, it found that newspapers such as the Detroit Free Press, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the St. Louis Dispatch simply aped Cheney’s contention that “[Kerry] talks about leading a more sensitive war on terror, as though al Qaeda will be impressed with our softer side,” without mentioning the fact that, as we know, Kerry actually said, “I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side.” But for all their mocking, “sensitivity” has not always been such a sissy word to top administration figures. In March 2001, the president himself claimed, “Precisely because America is powerful, we must be sensitive about expressing our power and influence.” Even the vice president himself, last April, declared that “We recognize that the presence of U.S. forces can in some cases present a burden on the local community. We’re not insensitive to that.”

When Democrat Zell Miller took the stage to deliver the convention’s keynote address, he took a swift boat to the land of McCarthyite lies and paranoid fantasy. A conservative pundit – who not only feels no compunction about revealing the names of U.S. intelligence agents, but also feels no compunction to inform his viewers and readers that his own family members are working in conjunction with the so-called “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” to publicize their false and slanderous claims while praising their work—was quick to support Miller’s right to lie. Novak explained that “To quibble over whether Zell was right on this or that point…is to miss the point,” because old Zell is simply a man who “relishes his heritage.” In fact, Miller’s speech was indefensible, as was evident in the bizarre exchange he had with Chris Matthews when asked to defend it. (Miller said he would like to challenge Matthews to a duel and wished he could “get up in his face.”) The White House may have the same concerns, as after Miller’s speech, it seems that he and his wife were disappeared by the party when they were removed from the list of dignitaries who would be sitting in the first family’s box during the president’s acceptance speech. While refutations of Miller’s falsehoods concerning John Kerry’s congressional defense spending votes were reported here and there, they were nowhere near as vociferously denounced as the near-treasonous charges warranted.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan looked into them in some detail and discovered, lo and behold, that on Jan. 31, 1990, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney proudly boasted before the Senate Armed Services Committee that “Overall, since I’ve been Secretary, we will have taken the five-year defense program down by well over $300 billion.” Still, Cheney wanted more. If only, he claimed, Congress, controlled by Democrats, had “let me cancel a few programs. But you’ve squabbled and sometimes bickered and horse-traded and ended up forcing me to spend money on weapons that don’t fill a vital need in these times of tight budgets and new requirements. You’ve directed me to buy more M1s, F14s, and F16s—all great systems but we have enough of them.” By coincidence, these were among the very weapons systems Miller falsely accused John Kerry of having opposed.

Much of the misinformation was reinforced by sympathetic pundits who either did not know or care enough to correct the record. While Matthews took on Miller, he played the patsy for Arnold Schwarzenegger. “Here’s a guy who lived firsthand through the Cold War. He was under Soviet rule. That’s pretty personal. And then, of course, he went through socialism. He didn’t quite like that. And now of course he is making the case for the war against Saddam Hussein, of the occupation of Iraq. It struck me, this guy has street cred,” Matthews gushed. Too bad the bodybuilder never did live under a socialist government – Austria was governed by conservative governments during his lifetime – and it is highly unlikely that he ever saw a Soviet tank in Austria, as the Soviets left his home town two years before he was even born. What’s more, he appeared to invent a 1968 debate between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey that never took place as well, in his fulsome praise for the man who disgraced both his country and his office, but turned Arnold into a Republican. (The pundits were too polite to ask about that apparent incongruity as well.)

Even given all of the above, the underreported whopper of the week came when the president told NBC’s Matt Lauer that the United States could never expect to “win” the war on terror. Bush is actually right. Terror is a tactic, not an enemy, and no civilization in history has ever or can ever hope to eliminate it. But it is also verboten to recognize such uncomfortable facts in an administration which treats reality as something about which only wimps worry. Bush quickly flip-flopped and explained that all he meant to say was that terror is simply a “different kind of war, we may never sit down at a peace table.” True enough, but compare this reversal of all Bush pronouncements with the media’s treatment of Teresa Heinz Kerry’s request to a Richard Melon Scaife reporter to “shove it.” According to Mediamatters.org, the former flip-flop was reported for a total of four days, with a total of 397 mentions in news databases, while Mrs. Kerry’s inconsequential remark—she is not after all running for president and was addressing an obnoxious newspaper, not the central tenet of U.S. foreign policy—was reported for 12 days with a total of 998 mentions.

Fair and balanced, indeed.

Eric Alterman is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the author of six books, including the just-published When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences. Paul McLeary is a New York writer.

Those men and women were betrayed, as were the hundreds of thousands of wounded left behind after America’s misadventure in Vietnam. They were not betrayed by John Kerry when he returned to oppose the war in which he had fought. Nor by me, who did not serve but argued and demonstrated against that war, seeking to bring Americans home before they became the casualties of arrogant and misguided political leadership.

I find I have more in common with the men who fought in Vietnam than with many other Americans who missed the war or did not care. We were all betrayed by political leaders who, from arrogance, ambition and “groupthink,” lied to the American people for 10 years, leading to slaughter in a country where we had minimal stakes and faced no threats to our security.

A small, embittered group of veterans who call themselves the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have organized themselves today around that feeling of betrayal. Naive men in the big arena, they have formed a circular firing squad around the wrong target–Sen. John Kerry– the first presidential nominee who served in Vietnam and one of the few who understood that American soldiers had not been betrayed by the demonstrators, but by the politicians. The target for the swift-boat broadside should be former Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara–the men who sent U.S. troops to Vietnam to fight a completely useless war.

Kerry had the courage to stand up and be heard about that betrayal. He did not do so perfectly; none of us in the heat of anger is perfect. But he decided to tell his truth, in the best way he could, and help lead the nation out of that misguided adventure before more men had gone mad, lost hope and died.

Moreover, the swift boat warriors are supporting political leadership that is betraying soldiers yet again. The number of Americans wounded and dying in Iraq may never surpass 58,000, but that distinction will give no comfort to the new generation of disabled soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Once again, American leaders were not forthcoming about getting us into that war. We have not found Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, nor evidence that he collaborated with Al Qaeda. As in Vietnam, once the lying started, it had to be amplified because political careers and credibility were at stake. So the lie grows: We are repeatedly being told that the war in Iraq is part of the war on terror, as if it were true, and dissent from this version of truth is suppressed in the Bush administration. Everybody needs to be on message.

These betrayals are multiplying and sadly familiar: We were told we would be the welcome liberator in Iraq; today we cannot control the security situation outside of Baghdad. We were told we could make Iraq a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, but put in power a Potemkin government, unrepresentative of the people. We were told the enemy would melt away, terrified by our dominant response, but hard combat continues, with Americans dying almost every day.

We were told the “mission” would be accomplished and the tunnel would at last have light, told not once, but over and over, as it has unraveled. Some U.S. soldiers, trapped in this hopeless situation, turn on the enemy in frustration, as we saw in the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse case.

The wrath of the swift boat warriors should be directed not at John Kerry, but at the current political leadership, which has put American soldiers in harm’s way when there was no need and there was no certainty of success. Some of these leaders neither served in nor protested that last war.

I will weep at the names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall and for the names that will soon appear on another war memorial that is yet to come. But it makes no sense at all to attack the one candidate who saw combat up close and came home to make it right for the men and women with whom he served.

Gordon Adams is director of security policy studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University.

This article first appeared and is republished with the permission of the Chicago Tribune.