BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Thursday, September 02, 2004
IT'S NOT MILLER TIME
ANYMORE. I had intended to take a closer look at the Dark Lord's
address today, and perhaps I will later on. But on reflection, it
seems that the most significant moment of last night - indeed, of the
entire convention - was the ranting, hate-filled keynote
speech delivered by
Democratic senator Zell Miller, of Georgia.
Miller had been prancing and
preening around the RNC all week, practically becoming a co-host on
the Fox News Channel, where his disgruntled-Democrat act was an
irresistable story line. But make no mistake: Miller is a phony,
puffed-up fool who up until a couple of years ago had nothing but
nice things to say about John Kerry. Check out "Zig
Zag Zell," on the American
Progress website.
Still, nothing prepared me for what
I saw last night. His face twisted in rage, bellowing like a crazed
hyena, Miller essentially accused Kerry of disloyalty - treason,
practically - for having the temerity to run against an incumbent
president during a time of war.
This excerpt is rather mild
compared to some of the other passages, but important
nevertheless:
In 1940, Wendell Willkie
was the Republican nominee....
He gave Roosevelt the critical
support he needed for a peacetime draft, an unpopular idea at the
time.
And he made it clear that he
would rather lose the election than make national security a
partisan campaign issue.
Shortly before Wilkie died, he
told a friend that if he could write his own epitaph and had to
choose between "here lies a president" or "here lies one who
contributed to saving freedom," he would prefer the
latter.
Where are such statesmen today?
Where is the bipartisanship in this country when we need it
most?
Today, at the same time young
Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of
Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker
because of the Democrats' manic obsession to bring down our
commander-in-chief.
Excuse me? Is it even
necessary to point out that Bush's dubious prosecution of the
struggle against terrorism, his grotesque misjudgment in going to war
against Iraq, and his shocking incompetence in managing the aftermath of that war
are the most critical issues facing the country? Doesn't Bush have to
defend himself? Wouldn't even his most ardent supporter concede that
these are issues worthy of debate? As William Saletan
points
out in Slate today,
this is why we have elections.
Miller visited CNN late last night,
and the gang was uncharacteristically well-prepared, ripping apart
his lies as he sputtered and fulminated. In particular, they went
after Miller's contention that Kerry is soft on defense, and that he
has so frequently voted against weapons systems that he would leave
the US military with little more than "spitballs." Let's
roll the tape. Pardon the
length of this excerpt, but it's worth it.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Senator
Miller, the Democrats are pointing out that John Kerry voted for
16 of 19 defense budgets that came through Congress while he was
in the Senate, and many of these votes that you cited, Dick Cheney
also voted against, that they were specific weapons
systems.
MILLER: What I was talking about
was a period of 19 years in the Senate. I've been in the Senate
for four years. There's quite a few years' difference there. I
have gotten documentation on every single one of those votes that
I talked about here today. I've got more documentation here than
the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library put
together on that.
JEFF GREENFIELD: You also were,
I would say, almost indignant that anyone would possibly call
America military occupiers, not liberators, on at least four
occasions. President Bush has referred to the presence of American
forces in Iraq as an occupation, and the question is: Are you not
selectively choosing words to describe the same situation the
president of the United States is describing?
MILLER: I don't know if the
president of the United States uses those words, but I know
Senator Kennedy and Senator Kerry have used them on several
occasions.
GREENFIELD: Yes. So has
President Bush.
MILLER: Well, I don't know about
that.
GREENFIELD: Well, we'll-
WOLF BLITZER: You know that when
the secretary - when the vice-president was the secretary of
defense he proposed cutting back on the B-2 Bomber, the F-14
Tomcat as well. I covered him at the Pentagon during those years
when he was raising serious concerns about those two weapons
systems.
MILLER: Look, the record is, as
I stated, he [Kerry] voted against, he opposed all of
those weapons systems. That, to me, I think shows the kind of
priority he has as far as national defense.
Look, John Kerry came back from
Vietnam as a young man unsure of whether America was a force for
good or evil in the world. He still has that uncertainty about
him.
WOODRUFF: You praised him-
GREENFIELD: Then why did you say
in 2001 that he strengthened the military? You said that three
years ago.
MILLER: Because that was the
biographical sketch that they gave me. This young senator - not
young senator, but new senator had come up there, and all I knew
was that this man had won the Purple Heart three times and won the
Silver Star and-
Look, I went back and researched
the records, and I looked at these, and I - when I was putting
that speech together, I wanted to make sure, whenever I sat down
with people like you who would take these talking points from the
Democrats and who also have covered politics for years, that I
would know exactly what I was talking about, and we don't have
time to go through it on the air, but I can go through every one
of those things that were mentioned about where he
voted.
He voted against the B-1 Bomber-
BLITZER: A lot of-
MILLER: -on October the 15th,
'90, and on and on.
WOODRUFF: But do you simply
reject the idea that Vice-President Cheney, as Wolf said and as we
know from the record, also voted against some of these
systems?
MILLER: I don't think Cheney
voted against these.
BLITZER: No, but he opposed some
of them when he was the defense secretary, and sometimes he was
overruled by the Congress because he was concerned, he was worried
that the defense of the United States could be better served by
some other weapons systems, not specifically those. I'm
specifically referring to the B-2 and the F-14 Tomcat.
MILLER: I'm talking about John
Kerry's record. I'll let Dick Cheney, the vice-president, answer
those charges. He knows what happened in the Department of Defense
years ago. I don't know that.
Do you think Miller realized he had
just destroyed his credibility?
Last night I wrote on the fly that
Miller might have delivered the most hateful
major address since Pat Buchanan's "culture war" speech in 1992.
Somewhat to my surprise, that immediately became a talking point in
CNN's coverage.
Greenfield referenced Buchanan and
told Aaron Brown: "I mean, when you say basically that the effort
against terrorism is being weakened because of the Democrats'
obsession with bringing down a commander-in-chief, you are basically
saying that the other party is not part of an effort to defeat the
enemies of the United States."
Bill Schneider said he thought
Miller's speech was even angrier than Buchanan's: "In a way, yes, I
do. I do because it was basically accusing the Democrats - there were
some breathtaking accusations."
Joe Klein: "The difference between
this speech and Pat Buchanan's speech in '92 is that Pat Buchanan was
making a diffuse attack on - you know, on cultural liberals. Zell
Miller was making a very particular and very personal attack on a
nominee for president of the United States."
Okay, this is a lot of CNN, and it
is experiencing some serious
ratings problems this week:
on Tuesday, at least, it even did worse than MSNBC. I don't know how
long Miller's outburst will be remembered. The papers today rely
mainly on Miller's advance text, and of course tomorrow it will be
all Bush.
On the other hand, we still
remember Buchanan's hateful invective of 14 years ago, and of how it
helped do in Bush's father. This could be one of those things that
takes a little while to register. But if and when it does, Karl Rove
may be sorry he'd ever allowed this vicious, fake little man to
command center stage.
NEW IN THIS WEEK'S
PHOENIX. Last night I was free - at last! - to watch the
proceedings on CNN. Earlier, I holed up with the Fox News Channel,
watching the
GOP on GOP-TV.
posted at 9:27 AM |
4 comments
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4 Comments:
Dan, Dan, Dan... "Wouldn't even his most ardent supporter concede that these are issues worthy of debate?"
You've seen examples of Bush's "most ardent supporters". Do you really believe they want debate about anything? That would require that they stop telling lies, and there's no indication that's going to happen any time soon.
Wow, looks like you were way off. Here we are on Thursday night and all the talk today has been about Zell Miller. MSNBC can't stop talking about it, and the consensus is that Miller really rocked Kerry's world. And try as the liberal media might to ignore Miller's keynote address (no mention of Zell Miller in the entire A section in the New York Times), people will be talking about the impact of Miller's speech for a long time.
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
