Maha Reader John P. recommends the PBS Frontline program "The Choice 2004." Most PBS stations will be showing it at various times this weekend, so check your local listings. (Many will be showing it at 2 pm today.) I haven't seen it. Mr. P. says you should get your undecided friends to watch it. I don't have any undecided friends, but maybe you do.

 

Update: This program really is good. You can watch it online. Also, as I said before, check your local listings to see if it's being repeated tomorrow.

 

I was particularly impressed with a clip from 2002 of John Kerry announcing his vote for the Iraq war resolution. He said his vote for the resolution was to help pressure Iraq into re-admitting weapons inspectors. He called on Bush not to invade until diplomatic efforts were exhausted, and not to go in without a plan to win the peace. Exactly what he's saying now. The Kerry campaign should take that clip and put it into a campaign ad.  

 

There is a page of letters from viewers. One said,

The portrayal of John Kerry as the highly principled, intelligent, understandably nuanced, public servant with great achievments during his Senate career and military career while portraying George Bush as an abject failure who is incapapable of rational thought and handed the presdency by the old guards of the Republican Party can only be described as extreme bias.

Sometimes the truth's a bitch, huh?

 

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''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . .

''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.''

Much later in the article, Suskind describes an encounter with a White House aide in 2002:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

You'll love this part:

In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. ...The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman -- the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress -- mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

''I don't know why you're talking about Sweden,'' Bush said. ''They're the neutral one. They don't have an army.''

Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: ''Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They're the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.'' Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.

Bush held to his view. ''No, no, it's Sweden that has no army.''

The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.

A few weeks later, members of Congress and their spouses gathered with administration officials and other dignitaries for the White House Christmas party. The president saw Lantos and grabbed him by the shoulder. ''You were right,'' he said, with bonhomie. ''Sweden does have an army.''

You can't make this stuff up.

The response from the Cheneys and the Bush campaign has been blatantly political. In fact, it is they who are using Mary Cheney -- using her now to score points against Kerry and John Edwards over an issue on which they themselves are guilty of the wrongs that Kerry and Edwards are fighting against. Even after almost 30 years in Washington, I am surprised by the overwhelming hypocrisy and meanness of the Bush reelection campaign.

"We're talking about dozens of sites being dismantled," one diplomat said. "Large numbers of buildings [were] taken down, warehouses were emptied and removed. This would require heavy machinery, demolition equipment. This is not something that you'd do overnight."

Diplomats in Vienna say the agency fears these facilities, part of a pre-1991 covert nuclear weapons program, could have been sold to a country or militants seeking nuclear weapons.

Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of vice presidential candidate John Edwards, said of Lynne Cheney in an interview Thursday with ABC Radio: ``She's overreacted to this and treated it as if it's shameful to have this discussion. I think that's a very sad state of affairs. ... I think that it indicates a certain degree of shame with respect to her daughter's sexual preferences. ... It makes me really sad that that's Lynne's response.''

SCHIEFFER: ... Both of you are opposed to gay marriage. But to understand how you have come to that conclusion, I want to ask you a more basic question. Do you believe homosexuality is a choice?

 

...

 

KERRY: We're all God's children, Bob. And I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she's being who she was, she's being who she was born as.

I think if you talk to anybody, it's not choice. I've met people who struggled with this for years, people who were in a marriage because they were living a sort of convention, and they struggled with it.

And I've met wives who are supportive of their husbands or vice versa when they finally sort of broke out and allowed themselves to live who they were, who they felt God had made them.I think we have to respect that.

But there is an obvious solution to this debate: let Mary speak. She's running the veep's campaign. She's an adult. Why can't she tell us if she's upset by Kerry's and Edwards' remarks? Give her a microphone, guys. What are you afraid of?

Mary Cheney is happily in the public eye, an open lesbian whose job before she joined the 2000 campaign was as liaison to the gay community for Coors beer in Colorado. She now holds one of the most important jobs in her dad's reelection effort. And her life partner joined the Cheneys on stage in St. Louis after the debate. She'd have to be in deep denial to think her sexual orientation wasn't going to come up, given that Republicans have made gay marriage a defining issue of the campaign. ...

 

You couldn't read Lynne Cheney's outburst about a cheap and tawdry trick without thinking that she herself finds homosexuality cheap and tawdry. Herein lies the irony of the flap. At the moment of Bush's evasion, it was entirely appropriate for Kerry to drive home the point that, as the Cheneys and millions of other American families know, homosexuality is about identity, not about a lifestyle choice.

By standing up and saying so, it was John Kerry who was defending Mary Cheney. If anyone was doing her a disservice it was her mother. She used Kerry's remarks to launch yet another character attack on the senator, when in fact Kerry was just doing what Mary's own father hasn't.

Now, as to this question, let me say first that I think the vice president and his wife love their daughter. I think they love her very much. And you can't have anything but respect for the fact that they're willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter, the fact that they embrace her. It's a wonderful thing. And there are millions of parents like that who love their children, who want their children to be happy.

Edwards went on for a while, and then Cheney was asked to respond:

IFILL: Mr. Vice President, you have 90 seconds.

CHENEY: Well, Gwen, let me simply thank the senator for the kind words he said about my family and our daughter. I appreciate that very much.

IFILL: That's it?

CHENEY: That's it.

The only difference between Kerry's and Edward's remark was that Kerry gave Mary's name.

Joe Garofoli writes in the San Francisco Chronicle, "Neither parent explained what Kerry did that was offensive -- Mary Cheney has long been out as a lesbian, has been a member of a Republican gay-straight alliance, and reportedly earns $100,000 for being a top adviser to her father's campaign."

The Human Rights Campaign issued this response to Lynne Cheney's anger at Kerry:

“President Bush missed one more chance to denounce discrimination last night so it is bewildering that Lynne Cheney instead attacked Senator Kerry.

“Senator Kerry made clear that gay Americans should have the same basic rights, responsibilities and protections as every other American.

“Vice President Cheney first discussed his own daughter in the context of this issue two months ago and it is not surprising that Senator Kerry mentioned her experience as emblematic of millions of gay Americans.

“Senator Kerry was speaking to millions of American families who have hard-working, tax-paying gay friends and family members.”

Andrew Sullivan recalls that earlier this year Dick Gephardt spoke frequently about his love for his lesbian daughter, Chrissy, and no one accused Gephardt of being "tawdry." Sully also writes,

Mary Cheney is out of the closet and a member, with her partner, of the vice-president's family. That's a public fact. No one's privacy is being invaded by mentioning this. When Kerry cites Bush's wife or daughters, no one says it's a "low blow." The double standards are entirely a function of people's lingering prejudice against gay people. And by mentioning it, Kerry showed something important. This issue is not an abstract one. It's a concrete, human and real one. It affects many families, and Bush has decided to use this cynically as a divisive weapon in an election campaign. He deserves to be held to account for this - and how much more effective than showing a real person whose relationship and dignity he has attacked and minimized? Does this makes Bush's base uncomfortable? Well, good. It's about time they were made uncomfortable in their acquiescence to discrimination. Does it make Bush uncomfortable? Even better. His decision to bar gay couples from having any protections for their relationships in the constitution is not just a direct attack on the family member of the vice-president. It's an attack on all families with gay members - and on the family as an institution. That's a central issue in this campaign, a key indictment of Bush's record and more than relevant to any debate. For four years, this president has tried to make gay people invisible, to avoid any mention of us, to pretend we don't exist. Well, we do. Right in front of him.

The Cheneys point to their gay daughter and demand that people not stare at her.  Strange.

An essentially dignified and thoughtful performance by Sen. John Kerry, contrasted with an oddly giggly turn by President Bush, combined to give the last debate of the presidential campaign to the challenger last night, but very narrowly.

Bush seems to have been taken apart and put back together again after each debate, reassembled according to estimates of how he'd done. Last night it looked as though his handlers had told him to smile, smile, smile, especially when Kerry was trying to make points, points, points.

I think Kerry won tonight. I think Bush was stronger than he was in the debates against Gore in 2000; I think he was sharper than he has been in almost all of his press conferences.

Debating is something that Kerry happens to be very, very good at. Bush's performance wasn't as steady as it was in the second debate. Debates gave Kerry his current momentum and I doubt Bush stopped it in Tempe.

The instant poll of undecided Americans conducted by CBS News tonight echoes my suspicion. It shows Kerry was the winner according to 39 percent, Bush by 25 per cent. Some 36 percent of these undecided voters were again undecided and said it was a tie. What is it with these people?

With less than three weeks before the election, President Bush may be in a politically precarious position going into tonight's critical debate with Sen. John F. Kerry. Anecdotal and quantitative evidence suggest that Democrats and independent groups that support Democrats have done a better job than Republicans at registering new voters in key battleground states. In a normal year, the difficulty in getting the newly registered to the polls might mitigate this advantage. But anti-Bush passions on the left are running exceedingly high, making it more likely that marginal voters -- people who rarely or never vote -- will turn out this year. [Terry Neal, Washington Post]

"The Reagans" was stopped by public outcry, not government action.

The IAEA director-general said entire buildings related to Iraq's former nuclear programme appeared to have been dismantled, and that the agency had lost track of high-precision equipment thought to have been inside the buildings.

Since 17 March 2003, the IAEA has not been in a position to implement its mandate in Iraq under resolution 687 (1991) and related resolutions. ...

As a result of its ongoing review of satellite imagery acquired on a regular basis, and follow up investigations, the IAEA continues to be concerned about the widespread and apparently systematic dismantlement that has taken place at sites previously relevant to Iraq’s nuclear programme and sites previously subject to ongoing monitoring and verification by the IAEA. The imagery shows in many instances the dismantlement of entire buildings that housed high precision equipment (such as flow forming, milling and turning machines; electron beam welders; coordinate measurement machines) formerly monitored and tagged with IAEA seals, as well as the removal of equipment and materials (such as high strength aluminium) from open storage areas.

As indicated previously to the Council, the IAEA, through visits to other countries, has been able to identify quantities of industrial items, some radioactively contaminated, that had been transferred out of Iraq from sites monitored by the IAEA. However, none of the high quality dual use equipment or materials referred to above has been found. As the disappearance of such equipment and materials may be of proliferation significance, any State that has information about the location of such items should provide the IAEA with that information.

Remember the bad old days when Saddam Hussein was a bad guy because he wouldn't cooperate with UN weapons inspectors? But the fact is that the United States and its wholly owned subsidiary, the government of Iraq, haven't been cooperative, either.

According to Edith Lederer in the Boston Globe,  "IAEA teams were allowed into Iraq in June 2003 to investigate reports of widespread looting of storage rooms at the main nuclear complex at Tuwaitha, and in August to take an inventory of 'several tons' of natural uranium in storage near Tuwaitha."

But the IAEA inspectors were placed under severe restrictions by U.S. military guards.

According to Trudy Rubin of the Knight Ridder (June 12, 2003):

The administration didn't want to let inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency back into Iraq. U.S. officials finally recognized, however, that they needed the help of the IAEA which has been monitoring Tuwaitha for years and is best prepared to assess how much uranium is missing.

But the United States is trying to keep the IAEA mission totally under wraps.

The inspectors are kept isolated in the Rashid Hotel and are not allowed to speak to the press. Nor did U.S. officials permit them to bring a press officer from their Vienna headquarters. When I try to drive toward Location C, where the IAEA team is working on a limited two-week assignment, I am stopped by Sgt. Steven Collier. Standing in front of a tank, he tells me his superiors "don't want nobody here right now. They don't tell us why."