Political Commentary

Unanswered Questions

John O’Neill says that the latest modified, limited hangout from Kerry doesn’t answer the mail:

We called for Kerry to execute a form which would permit anyone to examine his full and unexpulgated military records at the Navy Department and the National Personnel Records Center. Instead he executed a form permitting his hometown paper to obtain the records currently at the Navy Department. The Navy Department previously indicated its records did not include various materials. This is hardly what we called for. If he did execute a complete release of all records we could then answer questions such as (1)Did he ever receive orders to Cambodia or file any report of such a mission (whether at Christmas or otherwise); (2) What was his discharge status between 1970 and 1978 (when he received a discharge) and was it affected by his meetings in 1970 and 1971 with the North Vietnamese? (3)why did he receive much later citations for medals purportedly signed by Secretary Lehman who said he did not know of them; (4) Are there Hostile Fire and Personnel Injured by Hostile Fire Reports for Kerry’s Dec. 1968 Purple Heart (when the officer in charge of the boat Admiral Schacte, the treating Surgeon Louis Letson, and Kerry’s Division Commander deny there was hostile fire causing a scratch) awarded three months later under unknown circumstances.

As Hugh Hewitt points out:

Imagine if in response to the TANG controversy of last year, the president had authorized the Texas National Guard to provide his records to the Dallas Morning News and only the News. Would the furor over their release have subsided?

Of course not, and that’s why the Kerry SF 180 lies have been so interesting to follow in the media –a sort of perfect example of MSM bias in real time. The bias continues, of course, as is evident in the handling of the story today.

[Update a few minutes later]

I’ve always been stupefied at the notion that Kerry was so brilliant, as his campaign attempted to portray him. He always seemed to me to be a subpar intellect, with speechifying that would only appeal to people who mistook ponderous bellowing that never quite gets to the point with oratory “nuance.” In a post appropriately titled “Not Too Swift,” Roger Simon agrees:

Kerry was clearly not the brightest bulb, but we knew that. One of the more interesting obfuscations (deliberate and otherwise) that went on… and continues to go on to some extent… about the last presidential campaign is that Bush was the dumb one. In actuality, I always thought one of the reasons for Kerry’s famous flip-flopping, possibly the key reason, was that the Senator didn’t really understand the issues. I know this sounds rash and almost vicious, but he seemed to have some kind of cognitive disorder. There may be a lot of that in politics. After all, rational discourse is not often rewarded. Talking endlessly around a subject is.

I continue to be amazed that he got as many votes as he did (many more than I expected him to, last summer). It can only be attributable to irrational Bush hatred.

General

Customer (Dis)Service

I have a Chase credit line. I logged on to the site to pay my bill, and find a message:

ATTENTION! Your account is over its credit limit. Please pay now to protect your credit privileges. Please call us at 866-252-5780 immediately.

Why is my account over its limit? Because they charged me a thirty-five dollar late fee. Why did they charge me a thirty-five dollar late fee? Because I pay it on line, and Chase won’t tell you when your payment will actually post, so it’s pot luck.

I call the number, am put on hold for several minutes, and then finally get someone. She asks me what she can do for me. I explain that I’d like to get my fee waived.

“Oh, we don’t do that here. For that, you have to call 800-551-8340.”

“But this is the number that it said to call on the web site.”

“I wouldn’t know about that, but that’s the number you have to call.”

So I call the other number, and wait again. I finally get a message asking me to input my sixteen-digit number. Of course, since it’s a credit line, and not a credit card, the number has less than sixteen digits. I enter it anyway.

“We’re sorry, but we don’t recognize that account number.”

I then get a person.

“What’s your account number?”

I read it to him.

“Is that a credit card account?”

No, it’s a credit line account.

“We don’t handle those here. I’ll transfer you over.”

(Note, I get no number to call if the transfer doesn’t work–I just get to go through the process again).

Ringing again.

“If you want to use our speech recognition system, say ‘yes.’ If you want to use our touchtone system, press ‘1’.”

I press one, which takes me through a menu of options, none of which are “If you’d like to waive your late fee, because our sucky web site is uninformative about when your bill will actually get paid when you pay it on line, and furthermore can’t even provide the right number to call about it, please press…”

I finally hear an option to talk to a representative, and hit it.

“Please enter your account number, followed by the number sign.”

I do this (this is probably the dozenth time I’ve done it on these two calls).

Long pause.

I don’t know if this is the exact wording of the next words I heard, but it’s close:

“If you think that we’re ending this call by mistake, please feel free to call back.”

Dial tone.

It would never have occurred to me to try to make this stuff up. No one would believe it.

Media Criticism

Pet Peeve

Stephen Spruiell has an interesting story about how the Washington Post was used by on-line political operatives, and doesn’t seem to care.

What he doesn’t point out, though, and is an ongoing sign of the continued cluelessness of mainstream reporters, is that while the word “bloggers” is used throughout the saga, including one of the story headlines in the Post, there were no blogs involved. Free Republic is not a blog, any more than it was during Rathergate.

Political Commentary

So When Do We Get To See Them?

According to this story (which points out that John Kerry is not the brilliant student that his mythology implies–his grades were actually slightly worse than Dubya’s), Kerry has released his military records to the Boston Globe, which reports:

The military and medical records, however, appear identical to what Kerry has already released.

There’s a follow-up more specifically on it here:

The records, which the Navy Personnel Command provided to the Globe, are mostly a duplication of what Kerry released during his 2004 campaign for president, including numerous commendations from commanding officers who later criticized Kerry’s Vietnam service.

misquoting an expert to do so. Note also that the second piece is by Michael Kranish, one of those “unbiased” Globe reporters who had close ties to the Kerry campaign.

We of course don’t know if these are the complete records, or another selective release, as the first one was (though the article states that they were provided by the Navy). Pardon me if I’d prefer to make the judgement myself, or at least have a few other bloggers, like Powerline, etc., check them out, before I’ll give him a clean bill of health. What, for example, do they say about his discharge status? How do the rest of us get a document dump from the Navy?

[Update a couple minutes later]

Michelle Malkin has more, with other links.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!