Guess who’s a little thin-skinned? Zell Miller, fresh off his starring role as the wild-eyed attack dog at the Republican convention, wrote an op-ed for (who else?) the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page today, mounting something resembling a defense of his controversial remarks.
Unfortunately, Miller still isn’t making any sense.
Initially, Miller he rejects the notion of him being an “angry nut” with an “angry demeanor.” He then immediately turns around and says, “I would never put my family’s safety in [John Kerry’s] hands.” Great, as long as he isn’t angry, right?
The brunt of Miller’s substantive argument, meanwhile, emphasized Kerry’s alleged votes against weapons systems.
I charged that John Kerry is weak on national security, and I listed some of the many weapons systems he has opposed over the years. My critics tripped over themselves to point out that Dick Cheney opposed some of the same weapons systems when he was defense secretary.
But, like with so many things in life, timing is everything. Mr. Kerry was proposing the cancellation of many of these weapons systems at the height of the Cold War — the worst possible time to weaken our military strength. It would be comparable to a senator in 1943 proposing to scrap the B-29 Bomber or Sherman tank or Higgins landing craft. By contrast, Mr. Cheney waited until after we had won the Cold War to propose modernizing our forces and replacing older weapons systems. There’s a huge difference.
This might make some sense, if it weren’t completely and embarrassingly wrong.
First, the idea that Kerry voted against these weapons systems just isn’t true. As Slate’s Fred Kaplan noted:
Kerry did not vote to kill these weapons, in part because none of these weapons ever came up for a vote, either on the Senate floor or in any of Kerry’s committees. This myth took hold last February in a press release put out by the RNC…. The RNC took those bills, cherry-picked some of the weapons systems contained therein, and implied that Kerry voted against those weapons. By the same logic, they could have claimed that Kerry voted to disband the entire U.S. armed forces; but that would have raised suspicions and thus compelled more reporters to read the document more closely.
Note Miller’s demonstrably false choice of words: Kerry “was proposing the cancellation of many of these weapons systems,” as if Kerry had sponsored legislation on killing these defense programs. That’s absurd. Miller is either breathtakingly wrong or helplessly dishonest. Or maybe both.
Second, Miller says Kerry’s alleged position on the systems was irresponsible because they came “at the height of the Cold War.” This, too, is false. One of the Defense bill votes Miller relies on came in 1995. If Miller considers 1995 the height of the Cold War, he needs a history textbook in addition to a Valium.
Third, Miller’s defense of Dick Cheney is incoherent. Cheney boasted of sweeping cuts to defense programs as late as 1991, four years before one of the Kerry votes that Miller believes was so radical and dangerous.
If Miller wants to be a lackey for Bush, that’s his business. If he wants to embarrass himself on national television, that’s entirely up to him. But if he’s going to write transparent nonsense and have it published in a national newspaper, he shouldn’t be surprised when he’s exposed as a right-wing clown.