August 03, 2004

Howlers (Lazy Misstatements of Fact) in Kerry’s Acceptance Speech

Yesterday I specified so many internal contradictions within Kerry’s acceptance speech that it appeared necessary to conclude that either he was showing hypocrisy, or else possibly, he just didn’t know what he was saying.

Some absurd misstatements of fact in the same speech may be relevant to this question.

Kerry made a number of evident misstatements of fact in his acceptance speech.

This one is really funny:

A young generation of entrepreneurs asked, what if we could take all the information in a library and put it on a little chip the size of a fingernail?

As anyone who knows anything about the subject can attest, that much data is stored not on individual chips, but on hard drives.

Kerry’s point that:

...America never goes to war because we want to; we only go to war because we have to.

...is a lazy misstatement of fact. As everyone knows, wars forced on America by attacks on our shores have been very few. From Robert Kagan, via ipse dixit:

The United States has sent forces into combat dozens of times over the past century and a half, and only twice, in World War II and in Afghanistan, has it arguably done so because it “had to.” It certainly did not “have to” go to war against Spain in 1898 (or Mexico in 1846.) It did not “have to” send the Marines to Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Nicaragua in the first three decades of the 20th century, nor fight a lengthy war against insurgents in the Philippines. The necessity of Woodrow Wilson’s intervention in World War I remains a hot topic for debate among historians.

...Then there were the wars of the post-Cold War 1990s. The United States did not “have to” go to war to drive Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. No one knows that better than Kerry, who voted against the Persian Gulf War, despite its unanimous approval by the U.N. Security Council. Nor could anyone plausibly deny that the Clinton administration’s interventions in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were wars of choice. President Bill Clinton made the right choice in all three cases, but it was a choice.

Last, let’s check Kerry’s charge that the families of soldiers are being forced to raise money to send them body armor.

You don’t value families if you force them to take up a collection to buy body armor for a son or daughter in the service

When he said it I actually thought it must be true, given that he was saying it on the record for the most important audience of his career. However, it’s not at all accurate. Per Eliana Johnson, via Michelle Malkin:

Since the Interceptor technology emerged in 1999, the military has been gradually replacing the older vests. At the outset of the war, about 40,000 troops lacked the new Interceptor armor, although every soldier on the ground possessed the older armor. According to Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, industries are producing the new armor “as fast as they can and as fast as they’re making it we’re getting it to Iraq.” Three manufacturers worked overtime to produce the vests and plates required to outfit everyone in Iraq by the end of the year, and by mid-January 2004, all troops in Iraq possessed the up-to-date vests. By mid-summer, sufficient numbers of armored Humvees will have arrived.

Between flip-flopping, contradicting himself, and making preposterous errors in matters of fact, the question must be asked:

Does Kerry have any idea what he’s talking about?