The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight

Of course, to be fair, probably few of them have any actual firearms experience, given their stance on guns…

The Kerry campaign, in response to charges that he’s soft on intelligence, says that he was Vice-Chair of the Intelligence Committee. This is an assertion easily proven false. Apparently whoever came up with this gem didn’t know the difference between their candidate and his former colleague, Senator Bob Kerrey.

You’d like to think that, given how much baggage from his past the Senator apparently carries, he’d hire competent people to defend his record. You’d also like to think that the people he’d hire to help run the country, if elected, would be more competent than those he’s hired to run his campaign.

Unfortunately, there’s sparse evidence on the ground that either of these hopes will be other than forlorn.

The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight

Of course, to be fair, probably few of them have any actual firearms experience, given their stance on guns…

The Kerry campaign, in response to charges that he’s soft on intelligence, says that he was Vice-Chair of the Intelligence Committee. This is an assertion easily proven false. Apparently whoever came up with this gem didn’t know the difference between their candidate and his former colleague, Senator Bob Kerrey.

You’d like to think that, given how much baggage from his past the Senator apparently carries, he’d hire competent people to defend his record. You’d also like to think that the people he’d hire to help run the country, if elected, would be more competent than those he’s hired to run his campaign.

Unfortunately, there’s sparse evidence on the ground that either of these hopes will be other than forlorn.

The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight

Of course, to be fair, probably few of them have any actual firearms experience, given their stance on guns…

The Kerry campaign, in response to charges that he’s soft on intelligence, says that he was Vice-Chair of the Intelligence Committee. This is an assertion easily proven false. Apparently whoever came up with this gem didn’t know the difference between their candidate and his former colleague, Senator Bob Kerrey.

You’d like to think that, given how much baggage from his past the Senator apparently carries, he’d hire competent people to defend his record. You’d also like to think that the people he’d hire to help run the country, if elected, would be more competent than those he’s hired to run his campaign.

Unfortunately, there’s sparse evidence on the ground that either of these hopes will be other than forlorn.

The Stealth Candidacy

Mickey Kaus has long noted that Senator Kerry does much better when he doesn’t campaign. The less people see of him, the better he does in the polls. So this story, that he’s taking the next three weeks off, isn’t necessarily that surprising. However, I wonder if it’s also a way to continue to avoid press questions about his Vietnam record, and hoping that it will somehow blow over by then? Clearly, his people still don’t have a substantive response to the Swift Vets’ charges, instead deflecting them with a non-sequitur:

Along the trail, the campaign also had to deal with a variety of distractions.

A group of Vietnam veterans, angry at Kerry’s anti-war activities when he returned from Southeast Asia, accused Kerry of misrepresenting his combat record, and the extent of his wounds.

Kerry aides called the charges ludicrous, contrasting their candidates’ three Purple Hearts with the lack of war experience from Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Bush and Cheney’s war records, or lack thereof, aren’t the issue, of course, since they’ve never made them one. Neither of them has claimed their respective behavior in the late sixties as uniquely qualifying them for the job, as Kerry has. Try as the Kerry campaign might, such comparisons are spurious. The issue is not Kerry’s record versus theirs, but his claimed record, on which he’s staked his candidacy, versus the reality.

If Kerry doesn’t fear the truth, he should be demanding that journalists investigate the claims of his former band of brothers, and validate him, instead of engaging in ad hominem attacks on them. But apparently that’s a very big “if.” Easier to go on vacation and attempt to change the subject.

[Late afternoon update]

Here’s another Vietnam vet (he claims to be a former SEAL) who finds Kerry’s Cambodia stories more than a little fishy.

[Another update, a few minutes later]

Brit Hume is not going to let this story go away. After getting into a heated discussion with Juan Williams over this yesterday on Fox News Sunday, he devoted half the panel to it today on his show. And Juan continues to be an obfuscating moron, claiming that the Washington Post and New York Times have already investigated the claims. Both Fred Barnes and Mort Kondracke set him straight, but I’m sure that he still doesn’t get it. Fred calls the mainstream media’s failure to report this the biggest dereliction of journalistic duty that he’s ever seen in his career.

The Storm With No Name

Well, I guess that this post was a little premature. While it’s possible that it could regain strength, Earl has been downgraded to a nameless tropical wave. If it restrengthens to become a storm again, does it get a new name, or does it get to be called Earl again?

How science works

Over on Technology Review there’s a good article by Richard Muller on the discovery of the K-T impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, and the history of the science behind its discovery. He makes the point that science is inherently a process of asking ever more questions, each concrete answer generating a host of new questions.

The article is worth a read on its own merits, but as soon as I read it I immediately thought of this article on global warming, written by people who claim to be conducting scientific inquiry, but then end with this astonishingly dishonest statement:

The science is settled. The “skeptics” — the strange name applied to those whose work shows the planet isn’t coming to an end — have won.

I’ll usually give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to what they believe about global warming, since the science is complex and information is still coming in. The state of the field is rapidly evolving, so disagreement is not just reasonable, it’s mandatory for the health of the science. However here we have three people claiming scientific credibility while making utterly inane statements which to a layman might seem like solid proof, but which don’t pass even the most basic scientific smell test. Let’s take a look at the quote above in detail:

The science is settled.

Bullshit. Simple, barefaced bullshit. The science is not settled until a model exists which is consistent with all the observations. The fact that there are difficulties with a certain subset of observations (atmospheric temperature data for example) does not mean that the null hypothesis (no warming) is true: in fact, if there is other reliable data that is inconsistent with the null hypothesis, the question is very much not settled. There is ocean surface temperature data, for example, which cannot easily be reconciled with the null hypothesis.

The “skeptics” — the strange name …

Apparently the authors are unfamiliar with the meaning of the word “skeptic” – it is entirely appropriate to apply it to people who doubt, who question, who disbelieve orthodox views. To be a skeptic in science is a good thing – it’s what the whole enterprise is about.

…applied to those whose work shows the planet isn’t coming to an end …

Ah yes, the signature of scientific integrity: distorting the view of your opponents beyond all recognition. The generally accepted view within the climate research community is that the world is warming and that there will be negative consequences. The difference between that and “the planet coming to an end” is the difference between a hangnail and death.

… have won.

Riiiiiiight. Questions about consistency of a subset of data completely overwhelm all of the data in favor of the hypothesis.

As I’ve said before, there’s a lot to be done before we’ll have a clear picture of what is up with global warming. There are entirely reasonable arguments that the warming is primarily natural rather than caused by humans, there’s plenty of reasonable doubt about the magnitude of the warming, there’s reasonable questions about wether the net long term effect might in fact be beneficial, and there are reasonable grounds to argue against any given policy regarding climate change. There is not even a slight amount of reasonableness to claims that the science of global warming is even close to settled, let alone settled in favor of the theory that there is no warming.

The authors of the TCS piece might have a defensible position if they were engaging is strictly political polemic, but they are not: they are brandishing scientific credentials on the one hand, and making blatantly false statements on the other. They are using scientific credentials to bolster claims which any credible scientist simply would not make. If you want to use scientific credentials to establish credibility, you have an obligation to meet a certain standard of integrity. Saying things which any scientist would know to be false, but which a member of the general public might believe, violates the most basic standards of personal and professional integrity. These guys are liars, and should be treated as such.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!