The DavidCyrus Blog of Wisdom

Mobilize Student Voters Now!

A recent article from USA Today suggests a troubling trend, and a solution.

In short, most likely voters seem to have already made up their mind for the upcoming presidential election. The weekly events don't seem to sway the slight lead that Bush holds over Kerry.

This isn't necessarily bad news. It suggests that whichever party mobilizes the most new voters will win the election. New voter mobilization can be done on college campuses, where plenty of student's are ripe for revitalization. This point has not been lost to Democrats and Republicans alike, as both parties attempt to bring more students into their respective folds.

What are the best ways to do this? One idea is to distribute the book, "Storming the Polls" to college students. Email DavidCyrus with your suggestions, and we can discuss our next moves.

Coulter and Hannity Protest Carter's 28-year Presidency

Ann's love for all that agrees with her is apparent in her column plugging Sean Hannity's latest book, "Deliver Us From Evil". Within the column, she takes a few lines to attack Jimmy Carter's statement on the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. Carter stated, "This action of the Soviets made a more dramatic change in my own opinion of what the Soviets' ultimate goals are than anything they've done in the previous time I've been in office."

The Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan was a surprise to the USA. Anybody who could read a newspaper in the mid-seventies knew that. There was no memo from our deep-cover CIA operatives in the Kremlin titled, "Brezhnev Determined to Strike Inside Afghanistan", that Carter summarily dismissed.

However, Hannity (and Coulter) then list a series of communist atrocities that were supposed to clue Carter into the "Soviet's ultimate goals". Atrocities from Chairman Mao, Stalin, Cambodian genocide, and the Berlin Wall. Heavy stuff, but as usual, completely off the topic of Carter's quote. Did they misread it? No, it's used identically by both of them in the paragraphs preceding their mudslinging. Do they understand what he said? Apparently not.

The problem is that almost none of their fine examples have anything to do with Soviet activities during the Carter administration, and none even hint at Soviet nation-building intentions. Chairman Mao, (who died prior to Carter taking office) was never a reliable barometer for Soviet intentions, due to the fact that he ran an entirely different country. Stalin died in 1953. If Stalin was mass murdering people during Carter's presidency, then Carter would have had to have been President in 1953, right? Stalin was a brutal dictator, but surely he wasn't murdering people after his death. Freddy Krueger, maybe; Stalin, no. How about Cambodian genocide? Was this a Soviet activity during the first part of Carter's administration? Again, no- this was an internal Cambodian uprising orchestrated by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, which was arguably anti-communist.

Of course, the Berlin Wall existed during Carter's presidency. This structure, since 1961, supposedly held the secret plans for understanding Soviet intentions. Maybe a false brick concealed an invasion map of Afghanistan, which we could have used to counter the Soviet invasion, if only Carter had sent Colonel Hogan to look for it.

Coulter transgenderizes into Archie Bunker

I was wondering, "Maybe this preoccupation with scrutinizing Ann Coulter's writings is out of order?" "Perhaps she is just a very solidly-entrenched conservative, who has a weakness in providing factual arguments?" This would not, of course, validate her arguments, which are prone to the most basic of errors of logic, but it could excuse her apparent inability to rationally explain her positions and beliefs, without resorting to sarcasm, exaggeration, or her favored "straw man" argument fashion.

Then she published her latest opinion piece on her site, "How 9-11 Happened" and convinced me she isn't just an ignorant-but-misguided blonde harpy. She uses the venom of deception; not the fire of passion, to fuel her arguments. She intends to mislead, in support of her arguments; in fact, the majority of her arguments cannot stand alone without the use of misleading or outright fallacious supporting points.

How did she open my eyes? By copying large portions of a disproven internet chain email, circulating since early 2002, and representing it as her latest legitimate writing. Yes, it's full of half-truths, no-truths, and made-up propaganda, like most of her essays, but if she is going to ladle that simmering spoonful of witches brew into our bowls, she should at least have a columnist's decency to credit the sources of the writings that she represents as her own original work.

That Coulter uses others' works and claims them as her own should be no surprise. Heck, her idols in the current Administration have been known to grab the unpublished thesis of a grad student without him knowing it, and claim the document as the intelligence work of the CIA. No- to be surprised at plagiarism by the radical Right is to be naive.

What is really surprising is the grade of content she has chosen to claim as hers. As mentioned, nothing written in her column is new, and it has been painstakingly disproven before. She states that, in response to the following:

- The 1993 World Trade center bombing,
- The 1996 bombing U.S. Air Force housing complex in Saudi Arabia,
- The 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania,
- The 2000 bombing of the USS Cole,

...Clinton and his administration invariably did nothing.

Wouldn't it be sad if this was true? A President who did nothing in all these situations would surely be derelict in his duties. The facts of these situations, however, speak a totally different story.

The perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade center bombing were brought to trial, convicted, and imprisoned. Five months following the 1996 Khobar Tower bombing, the US, working with the Saudi Arabian security forces, had arrested 40 Shiite Muslims belonging to a group known as the Saudi Hezbollah, believed responsible for the attack. In response to the 1998 bombings of our embassies, the US struck a terrorism training complex in Afghanistan with cruise missiles and destroyed a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Khartoum, Sudan, that reportedly produced nerve gas. Both targets were believed to have been assets of Osama bin Laden. With the help of Yemen police forces, ten men accused of the Cole bombing were imprisoned in Yemen,awaiting trial. After escaping prison last year, eight of the ten have now been recaptured.

It's easy to try to forget anything worthwhile a past president has accomplished. What did Herbert Hoover ever do for us, for example? It's easy to become outraged when presented with lies about a president's actions, if one fails to validate them. What's not easy is to swallow the hook, line and sinker of Coulter's fish tale, and above all, it has to be difficult for her to live with herself when the lack of journalistic integrity on her purported original website is so blatantly apparent.

9/11's Real Cause? "No One Told Us What To Do!" say White House Officials

One of the topics that has risen from the Condoleezza Rice versus Richard Clarke terrorism prevention debate, is whether the Clinton administration had informed the incoming Bush administration of its counterterrorism plans and activities. Clarke says he himself gave Rice the plan she needed, but Rice first denied that he gave her any sort of plan, but later restated this, saying that she was given a "set of ideas" on the topic. Secretary of State Colin Powell attempted to help out by clarifying: "We were not given a counterterrorism action plan by the previous administration," but rather, "good briefings on what they had been doing."

Let's imagine that the outgoing Clinton administration had pulled together a detailed action plan for Bush, Rice and Powell to follow, step-by-step, which would guarantee the elimination of the al-Qaida threat. Not just good briefings on what they were doing; a real checklist of activities, timelines, resource assignments, contingency plans, etc., that systematically eliminated al-qaida, and averted the 9/11 tragedy. Is there any possibility that the Bush administration would have even considered following the plan?

Furthermore, isn't it the height of irresponsibility, the utmost refusal to accept personal accountability, for the Bush administration to suggest that their failure to detect and intervene in the 9/11 terror attacks is due to Clinton's lack of providing them with a counterterrorism action plan, which forced them to formulate their own plan, based on good briefings? Is Bin Laden still at large because Clinton never explained to them how he could be captured? Are they waiting for a Clinton action plan to start collecting Iraq's weapons of mass destruction? It makes you wonder whether Clinton has ever really finished his term as president, with all those high-ranking defense officials waiting around for his action plans before making any decisive moves.