Here’s the response that was produced by Ishar-user Bravo posting a particular URL:
Yian says, “oh, my eyes”
Yian says, “oh, my brain, seared with images that should never be”
Danthar says to Bravo, “awezome.”
Hiro says to Bravo, “So wrong.”
With that said, here you go. But remember, you have been warned: Candidates in drag.
There are some interesting correspondences between this 30-year-old resignation form from a soon-to-be-ex-National Guardsman named George Walker Bush, and the problems that same individual is having these days with the presidency. From onegoodmove: Commitment.
How would Bush fill out a similar form today? I especially like the part that reads, “I (am) (am not) accountable or responsible for public property or funds” (though I guess we could just cut it off after “responsible”). In 1974, Bush was honest enough to circle “am not”. And I think that would pretty much sum up the major problem I have with him today.
Here’s an eye-opener that crossed my browser today: Why W. Doesn’t Go to Church.
Now as some of you may remember, I was once asked that, George Bush calls himself a Christian, what do you make of that? And I’d replied, I knew he went to church but didn’t want to make any judgments - your religion and relationship is between yourself and God.
But, as this article reports, one my central assumptions about George Bush seems to be wrong. He doesn’t belong to a congregation - Bush is unchurched. And as a Christian, that raises a lot of alarm bells.
First, I still don’t question if he’s a Christian or not. That’s everyone’s personal decision. But I do believe that despite all the platitudes you hear about the United States being a Christian nation, founded by fathers who believed in God and wanted to escape religious persecution, and everyone holding generally Christian values - I believe that most people who call themselves religious or Christian aren’t really “believers.”
I find that most people believe in a worldview that generally aligns with Christian morals. And I don’t think that you’d find anyone who would strenuously disagree with the Ten Commandments. But in the Christian community there are, as they’re commonly known, “CE Christians.” These are your Christians who profess faith in God but show up to church only on Christmas and Easter - the biggie Christian holy days. Most other Sundays out of the year, you won’t find them sitting in the pew next to you.
Yes, a Christian can take private time and introspection with God away from others. And yes, it’s actually encouraged that you have quiet, personal time of your own. But no Christian is ever told to “go it alone” in their walk with God. Being with other believers and being a part of the body of the church is essential.
I quote from the Bible:
Bottom line, being a part of the body of the church - a part of a congregation - isn’t just a nice to have. It’s an essential part of Christian growth. You need to be a part of the church for your own growth, for fellowship, and for worship. And it’s pretty clear in the Bible that not everyone who merely professes to be a Christian will be recognized as one, and that you can tell Christians apart by their acts and attitude.
So what kind of a Christian is Bush, a true Christian who walks with God and is recognizable by the fruit of the Spirit? Or an unchurched, CE Christian? I think the religious right who have flocked to Bush’s side should have a good long think.
I’ve updated my Iraq-Vietnam comparison graphs with the number of US dead for September. The number was up again from the previous month, with 80 US fatalities.
Again, I’m getting these figures from the advanced search tool at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund site, and from Lunaville’s page on Iraq coalition casualties. The figures are for the number of US dead per month, without regard to whether the deaths were combat-related.
The first graph shows the first 19 months of each war. (Click on any image for a larger version.)
Next, the same chart, with the Vietnam numbers extended out to cover the first four years of the war:
Finally, the chart that gives the US death toll for the entire Vietnam war:
Disclaimer: I’m aware that we have more troops in-theater in Iraq than we had during the corresponding parts of the Vietnam War graph. Vietnam didn’t get numbers of US troops comparable to the number currently in Iraq until shortly after Johnson won the 1964 election, some three-and-a-half years after the starting point of the Vietnam graphs above.
These graphs are not intended to show the relative lethality of the two conflicts on a per-soldier basis. I was just curious how the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and these graphs let me see that. You are free to draw your own conclusions.
You can view more discussion of these charts on the following pages, if you’re interested. The graphs are all the same; I just update them in place when the new numbers become available.
Plenty of fun post-debate spin to read in blogland, of course, but here are some of the wackier items that caught my eye:
From the Rude Pundit (careful! he’s all about the pottymouth!) comes this laser-like focus on some of the weirder Bush moments: President Stupid.
There’s also the strange case of Fox News’ chief political correspondent, who wrote a piece in which he quoted Kerry as saying a bunch of stupid things at a post-debate rally — except that Kerry didn’t actually say them (”Women should like me! I do manicures” and “I’m metrosexual — he’s a cowboy” and so on). The piece was (briefly) posted on Fox News’ web page, then yanked, and later an apology appeared. Joshua Marshall has the details: I will spare you any pretense of mock surprise… (and thereafter; he covered it in a series of items).
Finally, for wackiness there’s no beating Fafblog’s Giblets: Has leadership failed us?
Giblets tuned into the presidential debates expecting to see an exciting duel between two of his favorite cartoons: namby-pamby Frenchy-French made-of-ketchup John Kerry and gung-ho cowboy dumb-but-full-of-heartland-values George Bush. And he expected, like he has always expected since he was a little Giblets sitting down to watch cartoons, for the Good Guy in the cowboy hat to win. What Giblets was not prepared for - what has completely blindsided him! - is seeing them not show up at all. Instead of the weak-kneed flip-flopping elitist being put in his place by the simple-talkin’ cowpoke who squints ABMs in the face of terror, Giblets had to endure seeing the leader of the free world whine like an old woman with an expired aspirin coupon while Mr. Monument trounced him in rich, dulcet tones!
That’s my Giblets.
Update: http://www.youforgotpoland.com/. That was fast.
Later update: Meanwhile, predictably, a good chunk of the echo chamber is hard at work convincing themselves that what they saw happen they did not, in fact, see happen. A comprehensive list of them is here: Allah Is in the House.
Wei-Hwa Huang has put together a few histograms showing the frequency of various words and phrases as used by the major players in the first debate. I’m not convinced that these graphs can be used for scientific analysis anymore then tea-leaves can, but it still provides some mild entertainment and head sctraching. Notable things to look for: “poland”, “at the wrong place”, “at the wrong time”, “made a mistake”, “United States”, “United Nations” and “respect”
It’s an obvious idea, but the execution in this case really does rise above: gopconstrm.mov.
The net is many things to many people, but one thing it has always been to me is a fascinating window on the weirdly obsessed (yeah, I know). Like Victor Littlebear, creator of The Bushiad and The Idyossey.
The guys who brought you South Park are close to delivering Team America: World Police, in which Thunderbirds-esque puppets lurch into action in the Global War on Terra. But there’s a hitch: the filmmakers are contracturally obligated to deliver the film with an R rating, and the thought police at the MPAA say a scene showing simulated puppet sex requires an NC-17.
I boggle in consternation. We’re talking puppets. With no sex organs, even.
Anyway. From The Guardian: Puppet oral sex goes against grain for US censors.
As last Thursday’s presidential debate recedes into the distance, a couple of questions still float in the minds of partisans on each side. What did Kerry take out of his pocket? And what was that bulge under Bush’s jacket?
Kerry first, since his mystery seems pretty well solved. I’m not going to bother linking to him, but unprincipled attention-whore Drudge, along with a smattering of Bush-leaning webloggers, made a big deal about that moment when Kerry approached the podium and reached into his coat to remove something. I noticed the move while watching the debate in realtime; there wasn’t anything sneaky about it, and the subsequent movement of his hands made it pretty clear what he’d taken out: a pen.
Drudge led the speculation in another direction: it could have been prepared notes, notes that would clearly have given Kerry an unfair advantage in the debate. And even if it was a pen, pointed out Drudge, pens were explicitly forbidden by the 32 pages of debate rules agreed to by both sides beforehand, which stated quite clearly that the debaters had to deliver up all pens, paper, whatever, to the debate organizers in advance. The items could then be inspected, cleared for fairness, and left on the podium. No pulling anything from your pocket. That would be (at least potentially) unfair.
Yeah, well, okay. You caught him. Kerry broke the rules. And subsequent investigation reveals that, as was clear from the outset, what Kerry pulled from his pocket was, in fact, a pen.
So, I’m glad we got that out in the open. Good work, righties. The republic has been saved, once again, by your eternal vigilance.
Turning to Bush’s alleged rule-breaking, the situation gets both murkier and more sinister. There’s no conclusive evidence, but the allegations circling in the Bush-hating part of blogland are significantly juicier. Basically, there’s actually reason to believe that Bush may have used some kind of hidden wireless receiver at the debate to get outside help on his responses.
Which makes even me pause for a tinfoil-hat check. I realize how this sounds. At a minimum, there’s the objection that if Bush was getting his answers fed to him from off-stage, they would have been better answers. But set that objection aside for a moment, and consider the evidence.
Midway through the debate, in the middle of a 90-second rebuttal to a particularly strong Kerry attack on the way Bush misled the country in the run-up to the Iraq war, Bush said the following:
I think what is misleading is to say you can lead and succeed in Iraq if you keep changing your positions on this war, and he has. As the politics change, his positions change. And that’s not how a commander in chief acts.
I — let me finish. The intelligence I looked at was the same intelligence my opponent looked at. It’s the very same intelligence.
Now, the weird thing is, no one was trying to interrupt Bush at that point. As far as you can tell from the televised feed, neither Kerry, Lehrer, nor the audience was doing anything to hinder Bush. None of his little lights had come on. (Update: Per the later Salon piece by Dave Lindorff — Bush’s bulge — the first light actually had come on at that point. Sorry about the disinformation.) So who was he talking to? (Audio available here, if you missed it: Bush blows debate! Talks to Rove in earpiece!)
There was also the moment when Bush, again having been bloodied by a particularly sharp attack, swung quickly into action, faced into the camera, then said, “Yeah, uh, I, uh –” and then stopped, staring straight ahead, for five… long… seconds… before actually beginning his response. (Jon Stewart got a huge laugh when he ran the clip on The Daily Show’s post-debate coverage. But it was very much one of those “funny because it’s actually kind of scary” moments.) So yeah, maybe he was just “gathering his thoughts.” But five seconds is a really long time. And it’s not like his manner gave the impression of someone thinking up a really juicy rejoinder. It looked, I swear, much more like someone listening to a secret voice inside his head telling him what to say, anxious for it to hurry up and finish so he could tee off on Kerry.
Okay, okay. It’s nuts, I know. But then we have “the bulge.” Check out the images, and the accompanying discussion of past situations in which Bush has been caught more or less red-handed being fed answers via earpiece: The voice in Bush’s ear.
Now, I’m not saying this is a slam-dunk case. I’m not sure it even rises much beyond the Drudge level of silliness. (Well, actually, I am sure it does that. But that’s a very low bar.) But think about it for a minute: If this is true, if Bush really did come into the debate wired to receive secret promptings, that’s… just… I dunno; actually worse than I would have expected of him. And that’s a very high bar indeed.
Anyway, it’s something to think about as we head into Friday’s rematch.
It’s long, and a little slow in parts, but for a Bush-pshchology junkie like me, this article by Noam Scheiber in The New Republic is irresistable: Hero worship. (Registration required; cypherpunk/cypherpunk currently works.)
Yeah, I know Edwards stretched a few things in the debate yesterday. But Cheney stretched things, twisted them, tore them up and put them back together with duct tape. Anyway, here’s Kevin Drum with a handy table on some of the more obvious of Cheney’s whoppers: Lie patrol.
Another interesting debate followup was this absolutely beautiful response that Edwards didn’t make, but should have, courtesy of Bad Attitudes’ Lead Balloons: How to bury Cheney and Bush.
Gwynne Dyer speculates: Will an attack on Iran be the real October Surprise?
Newsweek writers Michael Issikoff and Mark Hosenball offer some additional detail on Cheney’s Fun Facts from the debate, including the al-Zarqawi-in-Baghdad stuff: Rewriting history.
It’s just a hell of a week to be the Bush administration, isn’t it? Let’s see, so far we’ve got:
And we haven’t even made it to Friday’s Kerry-Bush rematch.
Damn. I think it’s time to start warming up the cruise missiles and smart bombs for that Iranian nuke-facility strike. Karl needs some different headlines.
Update: Kevin Drum has a better version of how bad it’s been for Bush: Bad week…
This flash cartoon is weirdly funny, if also kind of juvenile. But hey, that’s never stopped me before. From The Toilet Online: Leave it to Bush!
Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi pretended to be a Republican, and returned alive to tell the tale: Bush like me.
Republicans are paranoid enough to expect a mole from the Kerry campaign, but I was far worse than that — a dissolute, drug-abusing anarchist who reads the battle diaries of Vietnamese generals on rainy days, roots for Russia at the Olympics and once published an article titled “God Can Suck My Dick.” I was, in short, the most offensive individual who could conceivably be planted in the campaign of George W. Bush.
I (legally! woot!) bittorrented the new Kerry documentary, Going Upriver, today, and just finished watching it. It’s great stuff. If you found Fahrenheit 9/11 preachy, rambling, and annoying, you owe it to yourself to see this movie.
It’s very much a real documentary, in the traditional sense. It covers Kerry’s time in Vietnam and with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War; there’s archival news footage, present-day interviews, and so on. Yes, it’s pro-Kerry, but it’s not a hagiographic biopic like they one they showed at the Democratic convention. It’s an attempt to really talk about what happened in Vietnam, and the role that Kerry and others played in the unresolved-to-this-day national conversation about it.
Not mentioned, but ever-present in my mind, was the inevitable comparison between the thoughtful, articulate John Kerry of 1972, and the George Bush of that era, who was accomplishing little more than hard partying and getting bailed out of various excesses by the grownups unfortunate enough to be responsible for him.
Really, there’s just no question anymore. We all saw it in the first presidential debate last week. I’m betting we’re going to see it again tomorrow night, and any other time we stand these two guys up next to each other in an unscripted context. One of them would make a decent president. The other one has no business being anywhere near the White House.
It’s just not even close.
There’s a lot of talk among the webloggers I frequent about this Howard Fineman piece from MSNBC: Bush is beginning to sound desperate.
There’s an “if we’ve lost Cronkite, we’ve lost the war” tone to the coverage. And really, reading it, the guy makes a powerful case. This has been the Week from Hell for Bush, and it’s not even over.
If you caught last night’s Daily Show (and if you haven’t, you should), there was a really fun interview with Bill O’Reilly after the also-really-fun send-up of Bush’s campaign-speech-disguised-as-a-policy-address. (Okay. I’m done with the hyphenation thing. Promise. At least for now.)
Jon Stewart is really at his best when he can play up his wise-ass (oops) nature. His recent interviews with Clinton and Kerry were pretty weak; I guess he actually likes and respects those guys (or at least is genuinely awed by them, or something) to the point where his inner class clown goes into hiding.
But when Stewart faces off with someone whose behavior pushes his buttons, he comes alive as an interviewer. And it’s not just that the comedy ratchets way up. You also get these glimpses of what I (perhaps naively) believe to be the real Jon Stewart, moments in which the comedy stops and there’s some actual genuine human emotion on display, if only for a second. I’m thinking of things like the “sad little man” comment to Republican congressman Henry Bonilla. It’s powerful stuff; in some ways the best thing about a very, very good show.
That’s all prologue. What I really meant to talk about here was last night’s interview with Bill O’Reilly. It was really, really good, in part because there was that tension that brings out Stewart’s best. But O’Reilly was actually really good, too. The most interesting part for me was O’Reilly’s assertion, and Stewart’s end-of-interview (ach!) at-least-somewhat-serious-sounding (ach!) admission that he believed said assertion, that he (O’Reilly) was, in fact, an undecided voter going into the presidential election. And that he (O’Reilly) had a lot of respect for Kerry, and wanted very much to have him appear on his show.
Which is fun and all. I mean, I know that O’Reilly has a huge incentive to try to get Kerry on his show, and certainly isn’t above playing nice for a bit in order to try to bring it about. But then we’ve got this brief item from Salon today (not really worth the one-day (!) pass, but what the heck): Kerry: I like Bill O’Reilly.
“I like Bill O’Reilly,” the Democratic presidential candidate told TV Guide. “I think he does a terrific job. I think he’s got a very good show.”
Kerry said he’d “love to” appear on “The O’Reilly Factor” and would ask his schedulers about it.
Anyway. Enough rambling. Enough hyphens. Watch The Daily Show. Onward.
Hooray for premature slapping of the “-gate” suffix on a silly story!
Anyway, more today on the “Was Bush wired with a hidden earpiece at the debate?” story. From Salon’s Dave Lindorff (you’ve got the one-day pass already, so what the heck): Bush’s mystery bulge.
It points out, by the way, that I erred previously in saying none of Bush’s little lights were on when he made the weird “let me finish” comment; apparently the first of his lights had come on at that point. Anyway, there’s some interesting followup on the story.
Additional discussion is available at the Is Bush Wired? weblog’s second posting: What’s the frequency, Karl?
Here are a couple of good pieces about Bush’s practice of avoiding contact with reality, and how it might be problematic for tonight’s town hall-style debate in particular, and for the outcome of his policies (like, his Iraq policies) in general.
First up, from the WaPo’s Mike Allen: Bush’s isolation from reporters could be a hindrance.
Bush has held 15 solo news conferences since taking office. At the same point in their presidencies, according to research by Martha Joynt Kumar of Towson University in Maryland, Bill Clinton had held 42; George H.W. Bush, 83; Ronald Reagan, 26; Jimmy Carter, 59; Gerald R. Ford, 39; Richard M. Nixon, 29; Lyndon B. Johnson, 88; John F. Kennedy, 65; and Dwight D. Eisenhower, 94.
Second, from Paul Krugman: Ignorance isn’t strength.
As a political strategy, reality control has worked very well. But as a strategy for governing, it has led to predictable disaster. When leaders live in an invented reality, they do a bad job of dealing with real reality.
It looks as if someone’s hitting isbushwired.com with a DoS attack (or else just a very large amount of legitimate traffic), and that’s resulting in a lot of traffic to an older item here (The smallness of George W. Bush) that the good people at isbushwired.com had linked to. That in turn was causing problems with the web server.
The site was down for about 30 minutes while I installed some caching in an effort to improve matters (thanks, Hiro!), and it seems to be helping. But if you noticed me gone for a while, that’s what it was.
Onward!
Update: Per a helpful commenter, I learn that isbushwired.com got slashdotted this morning. See: Battle of the Bush bulge. So it was the secondary effect of that slashdotting that made my Little Server That Could start puffing out steam.
New server on order, thanks to the tremendously helpful people at the best ISP in the history of the known universe, Cyberverse, Inc.
Another Bush hater (Jonathan Chait in the LA Times) chimes in with his best-case argument for why you should vote for Bush: He’s so bad, he might be perfect. (cypherpunk98/cypherpunk login worked last time I checked.)
Loyal lies.com readers will recall my own attempt to construct such a case in Why you should vote for Bush. Chait went in a completely different direction, and he makes an interesting case. Nutty, but interesting.
The Nobel Prize Committee, in their wisdom, help shift my all-Bush/all-Iraq/all-the-time focus, at least momentarily, with this timely announcement about women’s-rights and forest-planting activist Wangari Maathai: Kenyan environmental activist wins Nobel Peace Prize.
Way to shake that tree.
People continue to be interested in this issue of Bush’s having received (or not received) secret help via a wireless transmitter at the first presidential debate. Since traffic on lies.com is running about three times higher than normal, with virtually all of the difference coming from an influx of people interested in the question of Bush’s electronic voices, I figure I’ll give the people what they want, and update you with some more links.
First up, from BBC News: Bush’s bulge stirs media rumours.
Next, from Elizabeth Busmiller of the New York Times: The mystery of the bulge in the jacket.
With the leading innocent explanation for the lump currently being a ridge of fabric caused by Bush’s leaning forward on the podium, Jerome Doolittle of Bad Attitudes goes a bit deeper into the story, digging up an earlier article about Bush’s tailor, Georges de Paris: The customer is always right.
From a democrats.com forum comes some interesting discussion of the different appearance of Bush’s back at the two debates: From ‘T’ to ‘Hump’ - Who’s “got” Bush’s back?
Finally, from a posting at cryptome.org: Bush’s mystery bulge.
Enjoy yourselves, fellow conspirators!
Hiro brought this one to my attention, and he was right; I liked it enough to want to share.
It turns out that as long as the Washington Redskins have been the Washington Redskins, their performance in the last game before the presidential election has always correctly predicted whether the party in power in the White House would retain it or not: Winning tradition.
What do we make of all this? Nothing. We see it as coincidence, as evidence that anyone who tries long and hard enough can find apparent patterns in any collection of data. But for those who believe in this sort of thing, the Redskins’ last home game before the 2 November 2004 election is a Halloween Day contest against the Green Bay Packers — Republican supporters will be rooting for the Redskins, and Democratic supporters will become Cheeseheads for a day.
So, if you flip a coin seventeen times, what are the chances that it will come up heads each time? Pretty low, obviously, but just as obviously (well, almost as obviously) that streak will turn up eventually if you try it enough times. Which is what we’ve got here, of course: Of all the silly predictive phenomena that could have given this result, this one actually did.
So, what are the chances it will work this time? Flip a coin.
I know the Bush supporters among you will attribute this to my hopeless liberal bias (and the hopeless liberal bias of the mainstream media). But I feel compelled to point out the truth anyway.
Or rather, to point to Kevin Drum’s pointing out of several other people’s pointing out of the truth: Shading the truth and Shading the truth, part 2.
The main point here is that as the campaign closes in on its conclusion, the Bush people are being significantly more dishonest than the Kerry people. Which is true. They are.
More on this, and on the way the mainstream media are having difficulty calling it like it is, given their institutional bias in favor of the appearance of even-handedness, is in this interview with Michael Kinsley: Michael Kinsley on Slate vs. the L.A. Times, calling a lie a lie, and opinion journalism as indulgence.
And lest you think the Bush people aren’t continuing with the same sort of thing, check out this story from CNN: Bush campaign to base ad on Kerry quote.
That’s my Bush.
This Josh Marshall item struck me as a concise and well-reasoned round-up of the Bush administration’s behavior of the last 4 years. It begins with a quick synopsis of the recent onslaught of unprovable assertions and out-of-context misquotes, but carries them back through the administration’s handling of every major challenge it’s faced. in short:
The president and his aides don’t speak untruths because they are necessarily people of bad character. They do so because their politics and policies demand it.
Those policies come straight from the maybe-well-intentioned neocon vision of strength and control abroad and non-engagement with international bodies, combined with a corporate-centric goal of domestic proseperity through the return of power (and cash flow) to the movers and shakers of industry. Agree with them or not, these are not goals of the compassionate conservative, they are the goals of the discontented radical. The fervor with which these ideals are held comes through when Bush speaks of “hard work” and in his incredulity at Kerry’s criticism of his policies. And it comes through with the shifting justifications for tax cuts for the wealthy, for oil drilling in wildlife reserves, and for invading Iraq.
Marshall brings together a long history of shifting faces put on seemingly predetermined policy as well as disregard for any expert who might disagree. The administration has taken on a post-modernist outlook wherein those who disagree are merely those whose words and facts are tainted by preconceived notions. Some amount of untruth is necessary, they believe, to get around these nay-sayers and get on with the business of building a better America.
The issue with this kind of untruth however is that it discourages (and sometimes actively suppresses) public discussion of these policies. I’m not certain that a majority of America would be comfortable with the knowledge that “stay the course” doesn’t mean resolve against the enemy as much as it does dedication to a drastically different view of America’s role in the world and its shape within. After all, if this Kerry guy were in power, *Saddam might still be in power*. He’s completely missing the plan!
Continuing the “some lies are more equal than others” theme, Jonathan Weiler has this item in Fly Trap: Are all distortions created equal?
Sometimes you find a profoundity in something relatively simple like this lighter from Iraq.
Kevin Drum is no raving lefty. Yeah, he’s not particularly fond of George Bush, but he works hard (a little too hard, I sometimes think) to maintain a certain degree of mainstream credibility.
Anyway, with that said, you really should check out what he’s done here: Bush lies more than Kerry… Film at 11:00… Basically, he reviewed lots of mainstream media fact-checking articles on the town hall debate last Friday, and scored the candidates on all their lies. To make the comparison more meaningful, he scored the lies in terms of their degree of inaccuracy, the apparent intent to mislead, and the importance of the underlying issue.
When he was done, he ended up with a “dishonesty score” of 118 for Bush, 60 for Kerry. Additionally, he found that Bush had 7 “serious” lies, while Kerry had only one. (Update: Valued-reader Sven writes to point out that Drum’s revised analysis now shows Kerry with no serious lies in the debate.)
In other words, Bush rather clearly lied more than Kerry and lied more seriously than Kerry. I did my best to apply the same rigor to both candidates, but even with a different formula and different scoring, it’s hard to see how Bush wouldn’t come out as seriously more deceptive than Kerry. As Halperin said, deception seems to be central to George Bush’s campaign while it’s basically peripheral to John Kerry’s.
Those who question the numbers are free to analyize the specifc scores awarded by Drum in each case; he includes detail on all of them in the linked-to item.
No surprise here: Paul Krugman agrees that Bush is being qualitatively more dishonest in the debates than Kerry is. What’s more, Krugman pre-emptively fact-checks the lies he expects to hear tomorrow at the final presidential debate: Checking the facts, in advance.
By singling out Mr. Bush’s lies and misrepresentations, am I saying that Mr. Kerry isn’t equally at fault? Yes.
Mr. Kerry sometimes uses verbal shorthand that offers nitpickers things to complain about. He talks of 1.6 million lost jobs; that’s the private-sector loss, partly offset by increased government employment. But the job record is indeed awful. He talks of the $200 billion cost of the Iraq war; actual spending is only $120 billion so far. But nobody doubts that the war will cost at least another $80 billion. The point is that Mr. Kerry can, at most, be accused of using loose language; the thrust of his statements is correct.
Mr. Bush’s statements, on the other hand, are fundamentally dishonest. He is insisting that black is white, and that failure is success. Journalists who play it safe by spending equal time exposing his lies and parsing Mr. Kerry’s choice of words are betraying their readers.
It was a month or two ago that I started noticing the mentions, buried deep in newspaper accounts, of airstrikes in the no-go zones in Iraq. Maybe we’ve been using such airstrikes all along, and I’ve just become more sensitive to their being mentioned, but it sure seems to me that their incidence has increased.
Blowing up people with cruise missiles and laser-guided bombs is popular with the civilian leadership, of course. It reduces the US bodycount, thereby helping Bush maintain the fiction that things are going great for our side. And even if going in with ground troops to clean up those areas turns out to be necessary, Bush wants very much to postpone that carnage until after the election, as this item in the LA Times the other day makes clear: Major assaults on hold until after US vote (cypherpunk98/cypherpunk should work for the login).
So in the meantime, we blow things up from on high. A video of a crowd in Fallujah being treated thus is available from The Memory Hole: Video of Fallujah bombing massacre. It’s worth watching, especially for the accompanying radio chatter. You may or may not enjoy it (past items of a similar nature on this site have provoked widely varying reactions), but it’s important, I think, to realize what’s being done in our name, regardless of how you feel about it.
As Jeanne points out at Body and Soul (Falluja), there’s no way to tell who those people are (er, were; now they’re bloody bits); maybe they were all insurgents, maybe they weren’t. But it’s certain that detonating bombs in the middle of a densely populated city is not the kind of thing that’s going to win a lot of hearts and minds.
Jeanne links to an interesting article in the New York Times (Terror command in Falluja is half destroyed, US says). (Side issue: This might be a good time to brush up on al-Zarqawi, since he’s the guy whose network the article talks about. See this nice rundown from Foreign Policy in Focus if recent statements by people like Dick Cheney have left you kind of fuzzy on the subject: House Republicans and Democrats unite in linking Iraq with 9/11. Scroll down to the section headed, “The Saddam–al-Zarqawi–bin Laden Connection.”)
So, it’s all very Vietnam-esque, isn’t it? Having recently watched Going Upriver, the similarity to the Vietnam war’s free-fire zones is chilling. No, we’re not that far down the slippery slope yet. But we’re definitely sliding.
Random factoid: Having watched Going Upriver, I now know where Kubrick got the line in Full Metal Jacket where the helicopter door gunner shouts, “Anyone who runs is V.C. Anyone who stands still is well-disciplined V.C.” It was from a statement by one of those testifying at the Winter Soldier Investigation. I wonder: Will we need to have a similar event a few years hence, so that young men like the one who voiced the appreciative, “Whoa, dude,” when that Fallujah street exploded will have a chance to tell their stories?
Some lessons it’s better to learn just once, I think.
Another day, another one-day pass from Salon to read Dave Lindorff on the subject of Bush’s electronic receiver: Technical expert: Bush was wired.
I’m posting this mainly because traffic to lies.com continues to run about 80% referrals from isbushwired.com, in the wake of their slashdotting a few days ago.
I find this story really interesting. Not the story about whether Bush is wired or not, but the story about how y’all are obsessing over the question so much, and what the rampant conspiracizing out here on the Internets might mean in terms of the election.
I’ve been publicly wringing my hands, liberal-like, over the prospect of dishonest campaigning by Bush successfully returning him to office. What would that say about the gullibillity of the electorate, and the future of US democracy? Whinge, whinge, whinge.
Well, lookee now: It seems at least possible that the same gullibillity might lead to Bush losing the election, as some ambiguous bulges in his jacket and a realtime communications medium that serves as a mind-boggingly powerful amplifier of random wingnuttery spreads the meme that he’s a dirty trickster who cheats in debates. Which, while it seems at least somewhat credible to me, is a hell of a long way from being adequately demonstrated. For people to actually alter their voting behavior based on this story would be just as damning, in its own way, as Bush being able to successfully use crap like the Swift boat ads to sabotage Kerry.
So, am I as depressed at the prospect that a broken democracy might cause Bush to lose the election as I am that it might let him win it?
Hm. I’ll have to get back to you on that.
I really, really liked this: The Immoderator.
Using a couple of the most memorable bushisms as audio, along with some 3D modelling, Cameron Travelli has produced a couple of cool-looking animations. Check them out: Portfoliage.com.
So, the debates are over. Virtually all polls show that Kerry won each of them, the first one convincingly, the others less-so. (Real polls, I’m talking about. Not the astroturfed online insta-polls, where us Bush-haters pretty much pwned, too. Not that that means much.)
The main significance of the debates, I think, is that when you put John Kerry on a stage next to George Bush without a script, there’s really no way to escape the conclusion that Kerry is much more qualified to be president. Those ideologically committed to supporting Bush can refuse to acknowledge that if they want to, but people like them won’t be deciding this election. For the wafflers in the middle who apparently will be deciding it, I think Kerry emerged as the obvious choice.
Last night’s biggest Bush gaffe was his assertion that he’d hadn’t said, six months after 9/11, that he wasn’t concerned about Osama bin Laden. From the good folks at onegoodmove, here’s a clip of Bush’s gaffe, together with video of the original statement: Exaggeration: Not.
Joshua Marshall has this to say about the issue: Now, to follow up.
Not only is the quote accurate. But the broader context is entirely on the mark. This wasn’t some stray comment taken out of context.
Setting the narrow gotcha issue aside, though, there are three reasons why the Democrats can use this effectively against the president.
First, this isn’t some insignifcant matter like whether Dick Cheney ever met John Edwards. This cuts to the essence of what the election is about: terrorism and whether the president kept his eye on the ball.
Second, the president’s honesty is also a central issue. In particular, honesty about terrorism and bin Laden and Saddam. This cuts to the heart of that too: the president not leveling with the public about what’s happened in the war on terror.
Third, as Kevin Drum rightly notes, this is an excuse to play that video clip again and again and again. And for the president that’s not a good clip at all.
Besides the Kevin Drum item linked to by Marshall above, Drum also had this to say in a later posting: The Bush cocoon. Drum asks why Bush walked headlong into the gaffe, when he could easily have ignored or deflected Kerry’s remark.
I suspect the answer lies in the cocoon Bush lives in. Not only has he convinced himself that he never really said that he wasn’t concerned about Osama, but he has no idea that the outside world believes otherwise. He doesn’t realize that not only is his Osama statement well known, it’s actually quite a popular target of mockery. What’s more, nobody on his staff has ever clued him in.
It’s a pretty good metaphor for Bush’s biggest problem: his staff spoon feeds him a rosy view of the outside world and he honestly believes that this rosy world is the real world — and that’s why he makes so many disastrous decisions. After all, you can’t solve real world problems if you refuse to understand the real world in the first place.
Which sums things up nicely. Bush was really cocky in his assertion that Kerry was exaggerating his position. As a commenter to the above Kevin Drum item pointed out, Bush “thought he had really zinged Kerry.” But it was only possible for him to believe that because he — and the people around him — are so focused on re-ordering reality to always put him in the best light.
We irresponsibly link, you decide. From Salon’s Farhad Manjoo (hm. and what kind of name is that?): The bulge returns.
Look, I don’t know what it is. But it’s something. I mean, I’ve tried to convince myself that it’s just his shoulder blades and some edge-on lighting. But no, it’s not.
Also, watching Bush at the debate, there were times when I seriously thought he was “shadowing” (listening to secret instructions, before speaking the prompted words). He’d get this goofy look, staring blankly into space for a few seconds with a slight brow-pucker, then resume his response with a new point completely unrelated to what he’d been saying before.
Yeah, I know. Maybe that’s just him thinking. Maybe the effects of all that hard partying have caught up with him, such that the thought process that goes into speaking extemporaneously requires visible effort.
Maybe. But even if true, that isn’t exactly the best qualification for the presidency. And still, what’s under his damn jacket?
Sigh. Craig: help me out here. Voice of reason time. What’s going on?
Craig says Kevin Drum admits that Bush isn’t wired with a hidden receiver to prompt him during ostensibly unprompted speaking opportunities (like debates). But Drum remains obsessively interested in the question of just what that thing is under Bush’s jacket: The Bush bulge.
Fun cartoon in the Schoolhouse Rock tradition: Pirates & Emperors.
I didn’t like it when Kerry went out of his way to mention Mary Cheney’s being a lesbian in his answer at the last debate. Yes, despite the fact that he was making a point about reason and tolerance that was refreshing to hear, especially coming from someone who has straddled the issue by talking about how marriage should always be between a man and a woman as a matter of definition.
Speaking out for tolerance, pointing out that gays and lesbians are just being who they are, is great. But going out of his way to mention Mary Cheney was indeed cheap and tawdry. Not because there’s anything wrong with being gay. But because it was clearly intended to hurt the Bush campaign through an appeal to precisely the sort of bigotry that the response allegedly argued against.
This is the reality about Kerry that has always bugged me. This is the kernel of truth that gives legs to the charges from Bush that he’s just an unprincipled opportunist.
And yeah, I’ve argued with myself back and forth on it. There comes a point in the struggle where you have to be willing to get down in the mud and wrestle alligators if you want to win. Is it better to compromise your principles in order to fight fire with fire, or is it better to stay pure and above the fray, and lose?
Clearly, there’s a lot at stake in this election. Losing to Bush would really, really suck. And the fact that Kerry is willing to engage in this kind of gutter politics is just part of his makeup, part of what has put him in a position to beat Bush.
But I still don’t like it, and wish he hadn’t done it. It smacked of hypocrisy, which is why the other side is making so much hay with it now. And then there’s this, from Lambert of corrente: Ah! I get the Mary Cheney thing!
Alert reader grannyinsanity explains:
Let me explain this one to you folks. It is a diversion plain and simple.
The biggest thing that happened at the debate was George Bush denying that he said he wasn’t that concerned about Bin Laden.
That was a lie so blatant that many bloggers had the link posted before the subject even changed. Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum both predicted that we would be seeing that over and over.
That hasn’t happened because Lynne Cheney threw out a great big cheap shiny distraction.
I would still like to see that public display of George caught in a big whopper, but that won’t happen as long as the press is distracted by Lynne Cheney’s hypocritcal grandstanding
[Sound of lambert striking forehead] Duh!
Richard Cohen has an interesting column in the Washington Post: The president vanishes.
Had Bush admitted that things went wrong with Iraq, he could have been himself. But he was out there three times telling us what we know is not true. This was Kerry’s problem when he was defending his vote in favor of a war that he never, in his gut, thought was a good idea. When he finally was able to say how he really felt, his campaign took off. The man settled into his own skin. He had the better argument. The camera picked it up.
Bush, though, has been hobbled by artifice. The natural has been turned into just another synthetic pol. His only good moments came when he talked about his faith and his family, tapping into a wellspring of emotional truth. Other than that, he was only rarely the politician he used to be — crushed, not empowered by incumbency. If I could, I’d wager differently. The man I bet on no longer exists.
Another political conservative who can’t, in good conscience, vote for Bush. Robert A. George makes an awfully strong case. I basically agree with his take on just what it is that makes Bush such a bad choice. (Hint: It isn’t about some strange lump under his jacket.) Anyway: Conscientious objector.
