The article says that Kerry had always resisted releasing his grades - so the question inevitably comes up - is this something we should know as a matter of course, or is it something a candidate ought to keep private if he wishes? And what should we make of a candidate who shields such things?
This is a big deal - I believe this more than any other issue keeps otherwise qualified and dedicated people from running for office. So you can posture on these boards that this issue is just about a few sermons, but it is bigger than that. And you know it.
Well, yeah, its a lot bigger, in a couple of ways, maybe more.
First off, running for President is strictly on a volunteer basis, you figure you can’t take the shit that comes with it, take up knitting.
Kerry resisted releasing his school records because they put him on a roughly equal footing with GeeDub. Well, duh. Not a BHAD. Same as GeeDub resisted candor about his, ah, military career. Whether you think one more important than another is entirely personal.
Huckleberry already is on record saying some rather remarkable things, several of them stupid, some idiotic, and a few inflammatory. And though it has little measurable effect on the likelihood that I would vote for him (you’re into nanotechnology ranges, there…) it had a considerable effect on how much I would resist his election, whether I would trudge mournfully to the polls and vote for Hillary, or be banging on the doors at 7:59 am.
Are you saying that, in the past year, I haven’t called you on a number of ‘factual’ claims of yours that you have failed to back up?
Please, say it.
Your memory may be poor, but trust me, that bit of history is quite real, and has nothing to do with anybody’s underwear.
Hey, a 2005 cite!
Pardon me, but wasn’t the 2004 election over and done with seven months previous to this cite?
Actually, it doesn’t use the word ‘resisted’ which carries the implication that someone was actively trying to obtain them. The article doesn’t support that implication, and - with respect to your point - gives no evidence that this was an issue of contention during the 2004 campaign.
The transcripts were part of his Navy record, which had been a matter of contention during that campaign.
IOW, your cite isn’t a cite for what you claim it to be a cite for.
**Moto ** claimed that he recalled “a discussion of both Bush’s and Kerry’s college grades” during their campaigns. **RT ** demanded a cite for his recollection. **Moto ** provided it. **RT ** noted, in a spectacular non sequitur, that the cited article postdated the alleged discussion.
And yet, the article stated plainly that:
The grade transcript, which Kerry has always declined to release, was included in his Navy record. During the campaign the Globe sought Kerry’s naval records, but he refused to waive privacy restrictions for the full file.I don’t think one has to be an expert in temporal logic to recognize the signifance of the phrase “has always”. We should be able to agree that it covers at least seven months. But even failing that, the phrase “during the campaign” should suffice.
The Globe had an interest in comparing the transcripts of the two candidates because, as the article cites, the New Yorker had published Bush’s grades (with commentary) in 1999, and because “During last year’s presidential campaign, John F. Kerry was the candidate often portrayed as intellectual and complex, while George W. Bush was the populist who mangled his sentences.”
It is difficult to image there being an ongoing discussion about Kerry’s refusal to release his transcripts — which were “included in his Navy record”, i.e., the record that the Globe wanted — without there being some discussion about the grades to be revealed therein. There was therefore clearly discussion of both Bush’s and Kerry’s college grades during the election, just as **Moto ** claimed.
The non sequitur arises through discarding everything the article had to say while pointing out its date, a date which might have been relevant had the article said something like, “And now we would like to begin a new discussion, one that compares the grades of the two candidates from seven months ago.” The same reasoning that rejects the cite because of its date would invalidate every history text ever written as well as the time-stamped recollections of everyone in this thread, including those of RT.
There are two ways the article could prove Moto’s claim:
The article itself, since it discussed Kerry’s and Bush’s grades, could have been dated during the 2004 campaign.
The article could have been dated later, but could have made reference to efforts to obtain Kerry’s or Bush’s grades or transcript that took place during the campaign, or other speculation about their grades that took place during the campaign.
To demonstrate the failure of Moto’s cite, both have to be dispensed with.
Ergo, mentioning the date of the article isn’t a non sequitur. Doing so demonstrates that the article itself doesn’t constitute part of that discussion.
But since you seem to be focused on (2) to the exclusion of (1), I’ll be happy to address your lack of facility in reading concerning that:
The phrase “during the campaign” applies to Kerry’s naval records, not his transcripts. There’s no evidence in the article that anyone seeking his Navy records was doing so in order to obtain his transcripts, or even that they knew the transcripts were included in those records.
Re ‘Always’:
If I was addressing a person with a lick of common sense, this wouldn’t be an issue. But since you don’t have any, let me address it like this:
A) I have always denied being a mass murderer.
B) During 2004, nobody asked me if I might be a mass murderer.
B =/=> ‘not A.’ So by contraposition, A =/=> ‘not B.’
See above. Lib, you’re assuming the things for which I point out that evidence is lacking for, above.
So Moto’s cite still fails in its purpose, and my pointing out the date of the cite was not just relevant, but necessary: if the article had been dated a year earlier, it would have backed up Moto’s claim.
I don’t remember the issue about grades during the campaign, but I do remember lots of grumbling about releasing his full military records. I think your link strongly implies, although it does not prove, that at least part of that reluctance was due to the grades issue.
Here are two other articles related to the military records (one pre-election, one post-election):
Frankly, I wasn’t much interested in seeing them at the time, and I really couldn’t care less about Huckabee’s sermons. But I can see why political opponents of these guys would want the records out there. Which is why I can’t blame them for not cooperating. Note that that is exactly what Kerry said.
There is a remarkable parallel here in that Kerry made a big deal over his military career, and so he was pretty much inviting folks to poke around in his past and see if that record stood up to close scrutiny. Frankly, it doesn’t seem like he had anything to hide, unless he really was concerned about the grades. Maybe he was, maybe we wasn’t.
Same with Huckabee and his Christian faith. He is the one making an issue out if it in the campaign, so if it comes back and bites him in the ass, well, he has no one but himself to blame. Doesn’t mean he has to aid in the ass-biting event, but it will still be his fault either way.
It also didn’t mention that Kerry was a commissioned officer, but he was. It does mention, however, that he applied to attend OCS, for which one must submit one’s college transcripts to the Navy. It seems to me that one would have to argue the utter cluelessness of The Globe’s staff and management to hold that they were surprised to find the transcripts in his records.
I have no idea what point you’re making with that.
OK, we’ve established that in June 2005, people knew that Kerry had applied to OCS, and were aware that he had to provide his college transcripts as part of that application.
Yawn.
Of course, that re-emphasizes the relevance of the date of the article. Guess that was a sequitur after all.
You’ve made the point that because Kerry had always declined to release his college transcripts, that he’d declined to do so during the 2004 campaign.
My point is that his declining to do so during the 2004 campaign didn’t need to be in response to having been asked for them during the 2004 campaign, but could well be in the trivial sense of not making them available whilst not being asked for them.
Recall that the question is whether there was discussion about Kerry’s and Bush’s grades during the 2004 campaign, and whether Moto’s cite has any relevance. Your ‘always’ point doesn’t bear on either question at all.
May we also establish that people knew it during the campaign as well because one cannot be an officer without applying to OCS, unless one has graduated from one of the military academies, which Kerry did not? Maybe you didn’t know, but most people did.
Guess again.
But that’s factually inaccurate. Kerry told Tim Russert on April 18, 2004 that he would release all his military records. He even lied, saying that they were available to anyone at his headquarters. It was a lie because the Globe’s reporter went there to get them on April 20, two days later, and was told to shove off. Empty handed.
But the conclusion I draw from that is somewhat different from Mr. Moto’s. I think people are capable of deciding what’s relevant, and what isn’t, on an ad hoc basis; there’s no need for deciding where the limits are, or what the implications of demanding a candidate release X this year are in terms of whether a candidate might be asked to release Y next year.
And this carries over to a candidate’s refusal to aid in the ass-biting event. Let the public decide whether a candidate was concealing something they should be able to see, or something that isn’t important to them that it be made public. They can factor that into their decision of whether to vote for a candidate, and life is good.
People can similarly reach conclusions about those raising the visibility of such an issue by demanding the release of relevant records - they can decide whether these people are demanding something that’s both relevant and reasonably important, or decide whether these people are just being damned fools by making an issue of it. But only by raising the visibility of the issue can the opponents incur a cost to the candidate, which is after all the goal.
In short, I don’t see any reasons to be “disturbed by the implications of even the request” in Mr. Moto’s words. It will have whatever effect it will have on this election, but it’s hard to see that there are any worrisome downstream consequences.
This article covers both sides of the question about whether candidates should release their full medical records, as John McCain did in 2000.
How would you feel if your employer had a right to your full medical file?
Regardless of how you feel about the issue, it does not change the fact that the public and media demand an awful lot of information about candidates. I think in most circumstances that this is fair. But we haven’t yet said explicitly that we want all of our candidates to be completely open books, and that kind of a demand would be resisted by the public and by candidates both.
Clearly there are limits to what the public has an automatic right to know. And frankly, a situation that permits us to shame them into revelations they may not want to make isn’t good enough. Such a thing would blow holes clear through our privacy rights were they allowed in the private sector.
I don’t have any explicit notions about what should be off-limits, as I haven’t devoted much time to this subject. I think clearer rules about what the public was entitled to and the candidates were obligated to divulge would help. As it is, lots of people are chased away from public service, even at an appointed level, because of these requirements that in a great many cases just go too far.
You’re relying on the public - a public that’s mostly grown up since the draft ended, meaning that most people have no firsthand experience with the military and its workings - making a lot of connections and recollections here: that Kerry’s officer status meant that he was specifically a commissioned officer (if you asked 100 people what an NCO was, how many would know even that?), that that meant he’d either attended a service academy or attended OCS, that he hadn’t attended a service academy so he’d attended OCS, and that to apply to OCS he’d need to provide his college transcripts, and that finally, having gone through that chain of logic, the transcripts were a major motivation for why people wanted to see Kerry’s military file.
Forget it, dude.
All this is not flattering to Kerry, but is irrelevant.
You say the reporter asked for the transcripts?
That’s right, he didn’t. He asked for the military records.
Sorry, this still doesn’t come one iota closer to demonstrating that Kerry’s and Bush’s grades were a subject of discussion in 2004.
And that’s it for me with respect to Kerry’s transcripts. At this point, I don’t care if there was such discussion. We know that Moto’s sucky cite doesn’t show that there was. He hasn’t provided another one since, though he’s participated in the discussion in other ways.
If you make factual assertions in a debate that aren’t common knowledge, you ought to be able to back them up. Mr. Moto has a tendency to assert first, then check later. Often this results in his factual assertions’ being unfactual; other times, we go through a wearisome process of his producing cites of dubious relevance over the course of a few days before he finally finds a good one, which drags down the debate and gets it caught in a worthless eddy like this one where we’re debating whether one should be able to read something into a cite that it doesn’t directly say, rather than debating the actual issue at hand.
I can’t decide which is worse, and I frankly don’t care. Either way, an unsourced factual claim by Mr. Moto isn’t worth jack shit.
