Truth - Al Franken [44]
Miller was confronted by this inconvenient fact on CNN that very night, in what many consider Judy Woodruff and Wolf Blitzer’s finest moment.
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.
Of course you don’t, Zell. Your brain has been melted by rage.
As for Kerry, there is a technical sense in which he had voted against all of those systems. He had also voted for all of them. Flip-flops? No. Let me explain.
All of the attempts to “shut down” weapons systems cited by Miller referred to votes on defense appropriations bills that contained every single dollar of defense spending for an entire year. Three of Miller’s examples (the B-1, the B-2, and the F-15) referred to a single vote on Senate Bill S. 3189 on October 15, 1990.
I admit it. That day, John Forbes Kerry—along with five Republicans—cast a “nay” vote on S. 3189. That meant he “voted against” every weapons system, every toilet, every fiber in every sheet of toilet paper that the military was slated to buy in 1991. There was not a vote on each specific weapons system.
Miller could have argued just as honestly that Kerry had tried his best to shut down the entire military, toilet paper and all. But while the delegates on the convention floor would have believed it, those at home might have scratched their heads and said, “Hey, that can’t be true.” And they would have been right.
Why did Kerry cast that fateful vote against S. 3189? I don’t know. But I assume it’s the same reason John McCain voted with Kerry against the 1996 conference report on the Defense Appropriations Bill, the vote that inspired Miller to say Kerry wanted to kill the Apache helicopter. Here’s what John McCain said on May 12, 2004 on The Sean Hannity Show, taking a break from stumping for Bush in order to momentarily defend Kerry:
MCCAIN: I would be accused of voting against numerous weapon systems, because I voted against defense appropriations bills, because they’re loaded down with pork. And they’re obscene today with all of the pork-barrel spending and multitrillion-dollar deficits. I’ll probably vote against the Defense Appropriations Bill this year.
Why would McCain have bothered to defend Kerry on this point?
MCCAIN: I was also subjected to allegations of being against things like breast cancer research, which was on a defense appropriations bill.
He was talking about the Rove-donor-financed smear job from the 2000 primary campaign. Hannity responded with uncharacteristic decency:
HANNITY: I remember. That’s not fair. I understand.
(By the next day, Hannity had regained his composure and indecency enough to go back to claiming that Kerry had “voted against every major weapons system.”)
In other years, Kerry did vote “aye,” which means “yes.” If you want to play Zell Miller’s game—and why not?—then you can truthfully say that Kerry had voted for $4.4 trillion in military spending over the years. But you didn’t hear that from Zell Miller. Instead, you heard:
This is the man who wants to be the commander in chief of our U.S. Armed Forces? U.S. forces armed with what? Spitballs?!
And then you heard a huge roar from the Hate Pit at Madison Square Garden.
There were plenty of other lies in Miller’s speech that night, but do we really need to go through them?
I’d prefer to think back to a different Zell