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(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

 
Kerry's embellishments poorly concealed...

It doesn't really matter by now, since the mainstream press has volunteered to become a dead letter over this nonsense, but here is the Washington Post admitting that John Kerry has embellished his war record:

An investigation by The Washington Post into what happened that day suggests that both sides have withheld information from the public record and provided an incomplete, and sometimes inaccurate, picture of what took place. But although Kerry's accusers have succeeding in raising doubts about his war record, they have failed to come up with sufficient evidence to prove him a liar.

To make this clear, since the author's intention is to smear the SwiftVets: Lifelong resume polisher John Kerry "withheld information from the public record and provided an incomplete, and sometimes inaccurate, picture of what took place."

Still a week before the Republican National Convention takes the spotlight. I think Kerry is toast.
posted by Greg Swann at 9:08 PM

 
Is Classical Liberal society cracking up?

I've made no secret of my view that the War on Terror, the War on Islamism, is ultimately to be fought by exporting the Western virtues--freedom of thought, reverence for objective truth, political and property rights, equality of opportunity, etc. None of this part of the war has been engaged so far, of course, in no small part because the infestations of an incestuous modernity have called these Classical Liberal traditions into question. Thought is trumped by political correctness, truth by dogma, rights by license and privilege, equality by egalitarianism. Still worse, the West, even what is left of the best of the West, is unwilling to assert itself, unwilling to insist that it is objectively, measurably, demonstrably, obviously better than a rigid and irrational death cult.

I don't subscribe to Billy Beck's idea of Endarkenment, but it could be we've seen the moment of our greatness flicker. It's nothing but an episode, but this SwiftVets controversy is enlightening--and one may hope not Endarkening. There have been a number of reports of bookstores lying to their customers to keep them from buying their book. Human Events hints that major on-line bookstores may be being similarly tendentious. The Kerry campaign has threatened television stations that dared to run the SwiftVets' ad, and Salon reports that the campaign has asked Regnery Press to suppress "Unfit for Command". Today's New York Times features a page one article that is so obviously biased that only a leftist could be (willfully?) deceived by it.

No conclusions from me, but this article from Tech Central Station makes a very interesting argument about the sources of this kind of epidemic suasion:

The "mainstream press" may be in the process of squandering a precious resource that its leaders no longer have the institutional memory to recognize as the source of its legitimacy and its living. In the last few years -- essentially since 9/11 plunged us into a new world, a new agenda, that the press did not understand -- the major organs of civilized journalism, once trusted by the billion most effective people on the planet, have given away their credibility upon a trifle.

Everybody now recognizes that such voices as CNN, the New York Times, the BBC, the Washington Post, the major TV networks, the New Yorker, the Guardian, etcetera, are now the express and all-but-explicit advocates of a very special point of view, one with specific political goals. Those goals are certainly different from those of al-Jazeera or the socialist press, but they are in their own way as coherent, exclusive, and unquestioned.

The short run embraces a vast miscalculation, I think: Kerry is late and inept, compared to the Clintons, at smearing his opposition. And the SwiftVets--some of them hugely decorated, high-ranking war heroes--are going to be tough to smear without inviting an actual investigation of Kerry's own war stories. And as the TCS piece points out, the left's biases are by now so obvious--imagine lying about your bookstore's inventory to keep people from improving their minds in ways you disapprove!--that there cannot be any victory to be won by these crooked means. It's too much to hope that Americans, trusting and credulous to a fault, will see through the left for good. But it seems likely to me that they are on the cusp of seeing through the left for now, at least.

For the longer run, I'm not so sanguine. The contrary to ultradogma is not infradogma but simply truth, white light unbent by the prisms of ideology. Is there room left in the West for truth? It's nothing but an episode, but in the SwiftVets controversy we might discover the story of our future. If we're not ready to practice those Western virtues now, then we have more in common with the rigid, irrational Islamists than with Socrates...
posted by Greg Swann at 11:35 PM

 
BetterVegas: This owl might actually fly...

From today's Las Vegas Review-Journal:

Just when it seemed as if every brand imaginable had made it to the Strip, along comes Hooters -- billing itself as delightfully tacky, yet unrefined -- with plans to plant its high-profile brand on one of the quietest little hotels in town.

The world's first Hooters Casino Hotel will debut in Las Vegas next year, following the recent sale and planned renovation of the 711-room Hotel San Remo on Tropicana Avenue just off the Strip, the companies said Tuesday.

I've never been to a Hooters, but no one can be immune to their marketing. What is interesting about this is that we have a national brand with real national reach able to deliver its customer base to its own property in Las Vegas. No one is doing this so far, and there's no guarantee that Hooters will get it right, either, but it is at least possible. It's a trick that Harrah's, for example, could get better at, but, even so, Harrah's special jurisdiction and Indian casinos are nothing compared to the vast Hooters clientele. If they can cross-market the Vegas property through all the restaurants--trips as sweepstakes prizes, frequent-ogler comp dollars, etc.--they can write their own marker in Sin City. Even the fact of the property being somewhat off-Strip is a feature, not a defect: If they can market a uniquely Hooters experience, convenient access to the rest of Vegas becomes less an issue.

Hooters has the chance, at least, to leap two very high marketing hurdles: Drawing upon a population with whom they already have a unique relationship, reducing the cost of conversion and limiting the appeal of competing offers; and retaining a very high proportion of their guests' expenditures on their own property. It's not just Vegas, it's Hooters Vegas. This turns a commodity product with fairly rigid price-point categories into a truly branded product. Very exciting, if they can pull it off.
posted by Greg Swann at 11:06 PM

 
Out-thinking John Kerry's lying mind...

One of the essential fantasies of bad liars is the belief, entirely unwarranted, that no listener has ever been lied to--or about--before. The Bush team has proved remarkably adept at anticipating the lies John Kerry will have to tell, then cornering him into telling them in the most incredible way possible. So Kerry is boxed into insisting that American troops must remain in Germany to protect us from the Communists who withered away in 1989. Hillary Clinton, who is a much, much better liar, would have been brazen enough to claim that it was Bush's failure not to redeploy those troops in October of 2001.

Here's another example of a brilliant pre-emptive strategy for a predictable bad Kerry lie. This is taken from The Kerry Spot. It's allegedly a weblog, but it's so inept techincally that it makes Rip Van Sullivan look ept, almost. In any case, I'm quoting the squib in its entirety because I cannot link to it:

Dang. John O'Neill of the Swift Boat Vets for Truth ate his Wheaties and did his homework.

John O'Neill, partner in a Houston law firm and a founding member of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, anticipating the controversy the TV spot would generate and the need for documentation, sent a letter to station managers on August 2 (three days before the team of [Marc Elias, Esq., General Counsel for the Kerry-Edwards campaign, joined by Joseph Sandler, General Counsel for the Democratic National Committee] shifted into gear). The letter itself, eight pages long, is buttressed with 27 exhibits--roughly 100 pages of what O'Neill correctly labeled "factual support for the advertisement."

So by the time the legal threats from the DNC and Kerry camp were arriving at television stations, the stations' lawyers had had the rebuttal -- a prebuttal? -- for two days. No wonder the DNC legal threat went nowhere.

The article The Kerry Spot is quoting from is a tour de force by Erika and Henrry Mark Holzer, the latter Ayn Rand's attorney late in her life.
posted by Greg Swann at 10:43 PM

 
Islam watch: Identifying Islamism

Daniel Pipes in the Chicago Sun-Times on George W. Bush's gradual acknowledgement of the enemy's identity:

Rolling these comments into a single summary statement establishes how Bush -- and by extension the whole of the U.S. government -- sees the enemy: a false doctrine of Islamic purity inspires a totalitarian ideology of power and domination. The extremists who advocate this doctrine see the United States as the chief obstacle to achieving their goals. Ultimately, they hope to bring about a collapse of the United States as it now exists.

This is a fine description of Islamism, its mentality, methods and means. It also shows that Bush draws the subtle distinction between the personal faith of Islam and the political ideology of Islamism (or militant Islam).

In this, he parallels what a number of Muslim leaders have said. Following acts of terrorism in Riyadh in May 2003, Interior Minister Prince Naif publicly attributed this violence to ''ideology'' and ''fanatical ideas.'' And if Naif -- himself an Islamist -- attributes the problem ultimately not to acts of violence but the ideas behind them, surely Americans can say no less.

Bush already has alluded to the United States having to confront its third totalitarian ideology. Now he should name that ideology. I hope he will surround himself with a group of distinguished anti-Islamist Muslims, foreign and domestic alike, and formally announce America's acceptance of leadership in the war against Islamism.

Only with such specificity can the civilized world start on the path to victory over this latest manifestation of barbarism.

This is a war of ideas. It's high time we had some...
posted by Greg Swann at 7:49 PM

 
BetterVegas: At last, a discouraging word is heard about the Monorail...

The dew is off the rose for the Las Vegas Monorail, the Nowhere Train. Saturday's Las Vegas Review Journal finally calls the Boosterdoggle claims into questions:

One would think, however, that ridership numbers might spike initially given the novelty of the new system. And it's sheer folly to believe that ridership will significantly increase when the hours of operation are expanded later this month from 8 a.m. to midnight to 6 a.m. to 2 a.m.

All of this needn't concern Las Vegans at this point. It may indeed be true that numbers will pick up as the system matures and officials provide more options for purchasing tickets. Besides, the monorail is privately financed, although the state backed the bonds used to build the project.

But don't be surprised if taxpayers are eventually asked to subsidize the monorail's expansion to downtown or the airport. And if that happens, the ridership and revenue figures take on a whole other dimension.

It is more likely, I think, that the taxpayers will have to buy out the whole damn mess.
posted by Greg Swann at 7:47 AM

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