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There’s a first-hand account of the liberation of Paris 60 years ago today in the Washington Post:

I was a 17-year-old Jewish girl who had been hiding under an assumed name with forged identity papers in the Pigalle district of Paris. I’d been waiting since 1940, when France fell, since 1941, when the Germans came for my father, since 1943, when my 13-year-old sister and I — sole survivors of our family — had to abandon our home and go into hiding. I was marking time, focused on one great expectation: deliverance.

Porter Goss, the Congressman Bush has nominated as CIA director has criticized John Kerry for proposing cuts in intelligence funding during the ’90s, so I found this Washington Post story interesting:

President Bush’s nominee to be the director of central intelligence, Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), sponsored legislation that would have cut intelligence personnel by 20 percent in the late 1990s.

Goss … was one of six original co-sponsors of legislation in 1995 that called for cuts of at least 4 percent per year between 1996 and 2000 in the total number of people employed throughout the intelligence community…

The Bush reelection campaign has been blasting Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry as deeply irresponsible for proposing intelligence cuts at the same time. A Bush campaign ad released on Aug. 13 carried a headline: “John Kerry . . . proposed slashing Intelligence Budget 6 Billion Dollars.”

But the cuts Goss supported are larger than those proposed by Kerry and specifically targeted the “human intelligence” that has recently been found lacking. The recent report by the commission probing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks called for more spending on human intelligence.

Does the Bush campaign ever tell a straight story?

From a Los Angeles Times editorial about the anti-Kerry swift boat ads:

The technique President Bush is using against John F. Kerry was perfected by his father against Michael Dukakis in 1988, though its roots go back at least to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. It is: Bring a charge, however bogus … make sure the supporting details are complicated and blurry enough to prevent easy refutation.

Then sit back and let the media do your work for you. Journalists have to report the charges, usually feel obliged to report the rebuttal… But the canons of the profession prevent most journalists from saying outright: These charges are false. As a result, the voters are left with a general sense that there is some controversy… And they have been distracted from thinking about real issues (like the war going on now) by these laboratory concoctions.

Earlier this year I went to see John Kerry speak at a campaign event. I had to pick up a ticket at local Democratic Party headquarters. I’d learned about this because I was on a mailing list for Kerry supporters. Unlike the folks who attended a recent speech by Dick Cheney, I wasn’t asked to swear fealty to the candidate or the Party—all I had to do was show up and ask for the ticket—but clearly the Kerry camp wanted a friendly crowd.

Kerry got a friendly crowd. We stood in the rain without umbrellas, because they would look bad on the TV news. Bush supporters raised big signs across the street from the park where Kerry spoke. Local TV crews talked to them, and showed the signs, but no dissenting voices disturbed Kerry’s speech itself.

Recently a West Virginia man managed to slip past the rigorous screening out of dissident thoughts at a Bush campaign rally. He heckled a Bush speech. He shouted out questions about outsourcing of jobs and about the Iraq war. It was not the highest form of political discourse. It did damage to the carefully-crafted illusion of unanimous support for El Presidente.

The heckler was shouted down at the rally. Then he was fired from his job as a graphic designer. (A Washington Post story is here.)

Here in the Land of the Free™, if you have something to say—well, you’d just better watch your ass.