Anti-Kerry film slated to air on eve of election By Elizabeth Jensen, Los Angeles Times

The conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group, whose television outlets reach nearly a quarter of the nation’s homes with TV, is ordering its stations to preempt regular programming just days before the Nov. 2 election to air a film that attacks Senator John F. Kerry’s activism against the Vietnam War, network and station executives familiar with the plan said Friday.

Sinclair’s programming plan, communicated to executives in recent days and coming in the thick of a close and intense presidential race, is highly unusual even in a political season that has been marked by media controversies.

Sinclair has told its stations — many of them in political swing states such as Ohio and Florida — to air ”Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal,” sources said. The film, funded by Pennsylvania veterans and produced by a veteran and former Washington Times reporter, features former POWs accusing Kerry — a decorated Navy veteran turned war protester — of worsening their ordeal by prolonging the war. Sinclair will preempt regular prime-time programming from the networks to show the film, which may be classified as news programming, according to TV executives familiar with the plan.

Recall that Sinclair blocked the broadcast of Nightline’s reading of the names of war dead. The Radical Right and its corporations will do anything to retain power. YOU have the power to boot them out. mjh

BOYCOTT SINCLAIR ADVERTISERS

Democratic Talk Radio ACTION ALERT

Political Memo: In New Attacks, Bush Pushes Limit on the Facts By ADAM NAGOURNEY
and RICHARD W. STEVENSON

From the beginning of the year, the White House has charted new ground with the sweep of its negative campaigning, starting with an $80 million wave of attack advertisements directed at Senator John Kerry that began the moment he effectively won his party’s nomination last spring.

But the scathing indictment that Mr. Bush offered of Mr. Kerry over the past two days – on the eve of the second presidential debate and with polls showing the race tightening – took these attacks to a blistering new level. In the process, several analysts say, Mr. Bush pushed the limits of subjective interpretation and offered exaggerated or what some Democrats said were distorted accounts of Mr. Kerry’s positions on health care, tax cuts, the Iraq war and foreign policy. …

[A]nalysts, including some Republicans, said Mr. Bush was repeatedly taking phrases and sentences out of context, or cherry-picking votes, to provide an unfavorable case against Mr. Kerry.

“So much of what they are indicting is taken out of context,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of a book on negative campaigning. “It’s a matter of taking sentences out of context or parts of sentences out of context. And it’s hard for journalists to write the context back in because it takes time.” …

The latest line of attacks by Mr. Bush comes during what has been a tumultuous week for him, amid signs that a once swaggering White House was getting worried. …

“[Karl] Rove and [Ralph] Reed were schooled by Lee [Atwater] and he told them that what you do is you rip the bark off liberals.” said Marshall Wittman, a former senior aide to Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, and is registered as an independent. “Even if they’re not liberals you rip the bark off them. That’s what they are doing.“

The Mystery of the Bulge in the Jacket By ELISABETH BUMILLER

What was that bulge in the back of President Bush’s suit jacket at the presidential debate in Miami last week? …

First they said that pictures showing the bulge might have been doctored. But then, when the bulge turned out to be clearly visible in the television footage of the evening, they offered a different explanation.

“There was nothing under his suit jacket,” said Nicolle Devenish, a campaign spokeswoman.

“It was most likely a rumpling of that portion of his suit jacket, or a wrinkle in the fabric.”

Ms. Devenish could not say why the “rumpling” was rectangular.

Nor was the bulge from a bulletproof vest, according to campaign and White House officials; they said Mr. Bush was not wearing one.
—
See Is Bush Wired?

washingtonpost.com: Second Presidential Debate — President Bush and Sen. John Kerry
Washington University, St. Louis, Mo.
October 8, 2004

Links to a transcript of the second presidential debate between between President Bush (R) and Sen. John F. Kerry (D). The moderator of the nationally televised debate is Charles Gibson of ABC News. The questions came from an audience of “soft” voters selected by the Gallup polling organization.

[Includes annotated fact checking. See also:]

FactCheck.org Cheney & Edwards Mangle Facts
Example: Bush forgets he owns a tree-growing company.

Both candidates played loose with the facts at the second Presidential Debate in St. Louis Oct. 8. Bush claimed Kerry’s health-care plan would lead to rationing and “ruin the quality of health care in America,” a claim unsupported by neutral experts. Kerry claimed the Bush administration had forced the Army Chief of Staff to retire for pushing to send more troops to Iraq, but in fact he retired on schedule.

We offer a sampler of the dubious and sometimes false statements made by each of the candidates.

dangerousmeta!

Blast from the past; a quote from Dick Cheney in 1992:

“And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam Hussein worth? And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait [in 1991], but also when the president made the decision that we’d achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.”

NewMexiKen: Oops oops!

[F]rom Marshall —

In a rather churlish moment, Cheney told Edwards that the two of them had never met before tonight’s debate, despite the fact the Edwards is a serving senator and Cheney’s the body’s presiding officer.

But as Atrios and no doubt many others have now pointed out, one can easily find a citation on the web of a prayer breakfast the two men attended together in February 2001. And the Dems are already circulating a picture from the event showing the two standing right next to each other.

Update: According to Dan Froomkin, AP has identified three meetings:

• “On Feb. 1, 2001, the vice president thanked Edwards by name at a Senate prayer breakfast and sat beside him during the event. …

NewMexiKen: Does he think people won’t check?

“Now, in my capacity as vice president, I am the president of Senate, the presiding officer. I’m up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they’re in session.” — Vice President Cheney during debate last night.

Actual fact: In nearly four years Cheney has presided on just two Tuesdays (out of 127).

Furthermore, Edwards has presided twice during that time also.

Info via Kos.

[links are to NewMexiKen, who pulls several cites together (thanks!)]

2023-11-27: This post is nearly 20 years old. I’ve posted others since then. Please look around.

The Washington Post has the complete transcript in one page with annotations/factchecking: washingtonpost.com – Vice Presidential Debate Between Vice President Cheney and Sen. John Edwards

Edwards: The vice president has still not said anything about what Mr. Bremer said, about the failure to have adequate troops, the failure to be able to secure the country in the short term.

You know, remember “shock and awe”?

Look at where we are now. It is a direct result of the failure to plan, the failure to have others involved in this effort. This is not an accident. …

This is the height of hypocrisy. …

EDWARDS: One thing that’s very clear is that a long resume does not equal good judgment. I mean, we’ve seen over and over and over the misjudgments made by this administration. …

John Kerry has voted for the biggest military appropriations bill in the country’s history. John Kerry has voted for the biggest intelligence appropriations in the country’s history.

This vice president, when he was secretary of defense, cut over 80 weapons systems, including the very ones he’s criticizing John Kerry for voting against. These are weapons systems, a big chunk of which, the vice president himself suggested we get rid of after the Cold War. …

Edwards: Mr. Vice President, I don’t think the country can take four more years of this kind of experience. …

Edwards: Here’s the truth: I have grown up in the bright light of America. But that light is flickering today. Now, I know that the vice president and the president don’t see it, but you do. … What they’re going to give you is four more years of the same.

CBS News | Text Of Cheney-Edwards Debate | October 6, 2004 05:32:20

Cheney: But let’s look at what we know about Mr. Zarqawi. … We know that when we went into Afghanistan that he then migrated to Baghdad. He set up shop in Baghdad, where he oversaw the poisons facility up at Khurmal, where the terrorists were developing ricin and other deadly substances to use. We know he’s still in Baghdad today. [mjh: and we can’t find him? just like bin Laden.]

Washington > Intelligence: A New C.I.A. Report Casts Doubt on a Key Terrorist’s Tie to Iraq” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/politics/06intel.html”>The New York Times > Washington > Intelligence: A New C.I.A. Report Casts Doubt on a Key Terrorist’s Tie to Iraq

The C.I.A. report, sent to policy makers in August, says it is now not clear whether Mr. Hussein’s government harbored members of a group led by the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the officials said. The assertion that Iraq provided refuge to Mr. Zarqawi was the primary basis for the administration’s prewar assertions connecting Iraq to Al Qaeda.