The blog will set you free

Praise for bloggers by Michael Novak on the Swift Boat Vets on National Review Online:

The Swift Boat debate is one of those cases that has persuaded me that if one seeks the truth of things, much more help is on the way from the best of the bloggers, liberal as well as conservative, than from the main organs of the national press.

Most of the bloggers seem to me to be lawyers, to think clearly, and to have a very sharp eye for conflicting evidence. Most of the mainstream press, perhaps because of their editors, seem hemmed in by blinkers. It frequently startles me to discover how far behind the story they really are. The mystique of the mainstream press has self-destructed.

Whatever your take on this issue it is clear that the blogosphere has had much more interesting debate and analysis on this issue, as compared to the mainstream players such as the New York Times and Washington Post who have been unwilling or unable to actually tackle to Swift Boat charges themselves and instead have riveted us with the shocking scoop that... wait for it... some Republicans have been financing the Swift Vets (though it is rarely mentioned that the largest source of funding is from small individuals.) Now it would have been news if DEMOCRATS had been paying the bills, just as it would be news if Republicans were giving to MoveOn.org.

The most I've seen mainstream press tackle this issue directly it's been to condemn by insinuation the motives of the Swift Vets by suggesting they have changed their tune. Michael Novak puts the lie to that analysis:

After John Kerry's two campaign books came out — the more scholarly one by historian Douglas Brinkley and the more or less official one by writers from the Boston Globe — the Swift Boat Vets grasped for the first time John Kerry's view of his four-months service with them (from November 17, 1968 to March 17, 1969). In Brinkley, they read for the first time Kerry's contemporaneous (and also his recent) reports on that period — and they were shocked.

In previous political races, more than once, some of these vets had traveled long distances to defend Kerry against unfair accusations that he was a "war criminal." They hated that charge, and putting aside what he had done to them, they defended him against it. They considered their service on his behalf to be a defense of all of them against the same charge.

I personally don't care much about what either Kerry or Bush did or did not do in the Vietnam era, but I am much more concerned about the ongoing movement to silence political speech in this country. McCain-Feingold was an abomination, in my view, as it regulated speech without doing anything to remove money from politics. In fact, as David Broder has pointed out, "The best one can hope is that new rules do not produce more unintended negative consequences than benefits. McCain-Feingold is flunking that test." Now we have the unseemliness of a major political candidate, John Kerry, asking his opponent to silence free, independent individuals, rather than responding to the merits of their charges. Shame on him. And shame on the Bush team for not defending the Swift Vets right to free speech and instead calling for an end to ALL 527’s! Whatever our politics, we should all be alarmed that beneath the surface what’s going on here is politicians pressing each other to silence independent and critical voice. MoveOn should have a right to spend whatever they want to get their message out and so should the Swift Vets, and so should anyone else who wants to be heard in this process. But we seem to be seeing, with calls from both sides for the other to silence critics, a collusion of politicians to cap the level of political discourse over our airwaves. The mainstream media won’t sound these alarms because their vested interest is to keep political discourse in their bailiwick—probably a big reason why the editorial pages of mainstream media have been the biggest supporters of campaign speech restrictions. So bloggers play an important role here.

Anyone who doesn’t believe that politicians will collude (and have colluded) on a bi-partisan basis to protect their power and create restrictions to grass roots opposition hasn’t been paying attention. The shame of American politics is that hardly any race is truly competitive. Well over 90% of US Congressional seats are locks for the incumbents and this has been accomplished by political rules and gerrymandering that heavily favor those that already hold the seats. In fact, the presidential race is one of the few in this nation that is truly competitive, and shame on BOTH candidates for calling for an end to free speech in such an important campaign.