disconnect

Just finished watching the documentary on Fox News, Outfoxed. I've gotten a little spoiled with Michael Moore's documentaries perhaps in that the editing and directing of this one left a bit to be desired, but the footage from Fox News is so stunning that it overwhelms any minor criticisms I may have with anything else. The general argument, of course, is the Fox News is constantly slanted to the right despite their claims of "fair and balanced" coverage. Most of the time this is done with subtle things like parroting the Republican Party's talking points, or always showing Bush's campaign events, things that don't really register as overt propaganda until you take the time to see if it's being applied to the other side as well. This movie devotes plenty of time to documenting Fox's and Murdoch's biases, but where it really drops your jaw to the floor is in some of the clips where the hosts and anchors say things so outrageous you can't believe that anyone gives the network a shred of journalistic credibility. You ought to see them for yourself, but I'll echo many of the reviews on the Amazon.com customer reviews by pointing out O'Reilly's interview of Jeremy Glick, a young man who lost his father on 9/11. When Glick started challenging O'Reilly, O'Reilly just lost it and looked like he was ready to kill the guy. You have to see it to believe it. There's a poor-quality 56k clip of the entire interview here, or of course most of it is in the movie.

I'll leave things at that and just suggest that it's worth a watch just to see or be reminded of the threat that Fox News poses to journalism and an informed citizenship, which should be the cornerstone of a democratic republic.

I don't know if I've brought this up before or not, but I thought it would be a good idea to just give my opinions for a second on where John Kerry and John Edwards stand on economics. I don't pretend to be an economist for a second so feel free to correct me if I'm way off somewhere in this.

One of the things that Republicans, or people who have bought sufficiently into Republican propaganda, tend to think about Kerry is that he'll raise your taxes and give it all to the poor. Engage in "class warfare". "Soak the rich." In one email exchange between my mom (whose birthday was yesterday and is getting a lot of mention today on the blog) and a hard-core right-winger, Mr. Right-wing said, "The Democratic party used to be the party of the workingman. Now it is the party that frowns upon hard work, and wants to penalize those who deserve to reap the rewards of their labors." I suspect this sentiment is widespread in varying degrees among people planning to vote for Bush this year. So let me make one thing straight.

John Kerry is not a socialist.

Whew, that was tough. I know that comes as a shocker to all of you who watched the Democratic Primary debates, where Kerry regularly took out copies of Karl Marx's works and quoted liberally from them... no wait. If Dennis Kucinich was the nominee, you might have a point here, but even Howard Dean was a fiscal conservative (judging from his record in Vermont - I mostly only remember specifics on his Iraq stance). Despite what Republicans will tell you about him being the "most liberal member of the Senate", John Kerry was widely regarded as one of the more conservative choices in the primaries. That's probably one reason why he won.

Listen, if John Kerry started thinking about collectivizing property under the state, or raising taxes drastically on the rich and giving the money away to the poor, Teresa Heinz Kerry would bitch-slap him faster than you can say "shove it". In case you've forgotten, she's a millionnaire (billionnaire?). So's John Kerry, for all intents and purposes. So's John Edwards. That doesn't mean they're incapable of grasping the needs of lower- and middle-class America, but it means they know a little about being rich. I'm guessing they like it. And I'm guessing a lot of their supporters are quite wealthy as well. They've earned a lot of money over their lifetimes and they know that the government doesn't deserve to come in and take it all, that people deserve to keep most of what they've earned.

So why all this talk about soaking the rich? Why roll back the tax cuts on only the wealthiest?

The idea is that in our current capitalist economy, wealth has an increasing tendency to accumulate at the high-end. Think of things in terms of two magnets, one at the upper-class end and one at the lower-class end, pulling people to each side. Not too many people get pulled to the upper-class side, but those that do tend to get pulled WAY over.

You can see this in the tremendous rise in corporate profits lately, which translates into lots of money for shareholders. Republicans might argue that since so many Americans have stock in 401(k)'s and whatnot nowadays that this spreads the wealth around evenly enough, but you and I both know that well-off people have way more stock than a middle-class retirement account has. In any case, you have to have money to buy stock. Then once you have the stock, you get a share of those profits, which gives you more money to buy more stock and so on. There's nothing really wrong with that in theory unless conditions are such that people without stock have no way to get any wealth at all, conditions that would occur if, say, the employment market was very poor and workers had very little leverage as far as salaries or health care were concerned.

Now everything in those last two paragraphs are a matter of debate... reasonable people can disagree with those conclusions and I don't profess to always be right. One thing I don't think people can disagree with however is that the assertion that John Kerry is some sort of wacko Marxist is way off. Kerry, Edwards and the overwhelming majority of the Democratic party do not "frown upon hard work."

Today's quote on my desk calendar of dumb Bush quotes is, "Some say, 'give it to the taxpayers who pay the bills.' That some is George W. Bush." (from 1/22/2000). Bush may have had a point on reducing taxes back when we were running gigantic surpluses. Now that those surpluses have vanished into huge deficits on his watch, he no longer has one. He is effectively borrowing large sums of money from overseas in order to finance those tax cuts now, and it is his economic plans that are out of touch with reality, not John Kerry's. When Bush said during the 2000 Republican primary debates, "We need to make the pie higher," he wasn't kidding. His economic plans are pie-in-the-sky, and the pie is getting so high now I can't even see it anymore.

Uh oh... someone tell my mom to get the Kerry/Edwards bumper stickers ready for my dad. He might be persuaded to turn from the dark side now that Bruce Springsteen is endorsing Kerry and Edwards.

Apparently, John Kerry held a rally at the lakefront in Milwaukee yesterday. He and his wife spoke, the two Democratic senators from Wisconsin were there, and Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters performed. It sounds like a lovely time was had by all.

Well, almost all...

About 30 Bush supporters chanted loudly during the speeches by Kerry and his wife, sometimes setting off air horns. The pro-Bush group was on the Kilbourn Ave. sidewalk overlooking Pere Marquette Park, almost a full block from the stage, but it could be heard throughout the park, including on stage.

Tom Lange, 18, of Waukesha said he was setting off an air horn during Kerry's remarks because "we want them to hear us and not hear what he has to say."

Lange said it's "probably not nice, but it's my beliefs."

This gives me an idea for a new bumper sticker for the Bush campaign...

"Bush/Cheney '04: We're probably not nice, but it's our beliefs."

Putting aside whether or not someone has the right to have a rally without constant airhorn interruption, or whether or not screaming into a bullhorn is a good tool for political discourse, or even why making as much noise as you can when someone you don't like talks is one of your "beliefs", you might want to consider whether or not disrupting a speech like this simply makes you a huge asshole, Tom.

I guess once you've run out of ideas on your own and can't campaign on anything you've accomplished, you have to resort to drowning out what the other guy is saying. Then again, this could be a new tactic for Republicans in general. I can just picture the first Presidential debate now...

Moderator: Mr. Kerry, our troops are bogged down in a quagmire in Iraq that shows no signs of improvement. How would you fix the situation?

Kerry: That's a good question - we can't pull out now and plunge Iraq into civil war, but it's unacceptable for our troops to continue incurring these sorts of heavy casualties. The only direction we can go in now is to secure the help of other nations in keeping the peace and protecting free elections. Unfortunately, this administration has destroyed our credibility in the international community. That's why a change of leadership is needed to restore our respect in the world, which will be necessary to draw allies to us in Iraq.

Moderator: Mr. President, your response.

Bush: Well.... terrorists... weapons of mass... <holds up an airhorn> EHHHHHHHHHHH! (ear-piercing airhorn sound for 30 seconds)

Moderator: OK... Mr. Kerry, you have 20 seconds for a rebuttal.

Kerry: I'm not sure I can respond to...

Bush (interrupting Kerry): EHHHHHHHHHHH!

Last night, I watched video of an interview Bill O'Reilly did with Michael Moore at the Democratic convention... I can't find a link to the video now, but here is a link to a transcript of the interview. It's pretty good and worth a watch/read, and one of the first things they argue about is Moore calling Bush a "liar" for what he said about Iraq's weapon capabilities prior to the war. Moore says he lied, O'Reilly says he was "misled". Personally I think that if you think Clinton lied about what he did with Lewinsky, then Bush lied about Iraq. Neither of them are technically 100% lies because there's some wiggle room in there, but it's just semantics - they were misleading us either way. I intentionally used that example because of the harsh standards Clinton was held to when he misled us, as opposed to the lax standards Bush is being held to after misleading us in something far more important. But that's really another issue entirely.

Key to O'Reilly's argument of whether or not Bush was "misled" is what our intelligence was saying in the months and years leading up to the war, and what Bush was saying right before the war. Once again, Atrios points me to this article on In These Times entitled "They Knew...". It's a pretty lengthy analysis of various reasons why we went to war (before we couldn't find any WMD and the reasons changed) and what the Bush administration knew while they were telling us we had to invade. It's a pretty devastating attack on the argument that Bush was misled and couldn't have known better and I recommend it to anyone who still buys the argument that the administration was completely duped by bad intel.

My favorite part of the article though is regarding the infamous interview Cheney gave on CNBC in June where he asserts that he never pushed the story that Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague in 2001. This, to me, is a symbol of so many things that are wrong with this administration. I wrote a post about this on June 23 in case you need a refresher. This article's last sentence regarding this situation sums it all up:

Even today, with all of the intelligence firmly against him, Cheney remains unrepentant. Asked in June about whether the meeting had occurred, he admitted, "That’s never been proven." Then he added, "It’s never been refuted." When CNBC’s Gloria Borger asked about his initial claim that the meeting was "pretty well confirmed," Cheney snapped, "No, I never said that. I never said that. Absolutely not."

His actual words in December 2001: "It’s been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service."

In other words, Cheney hit a new low. He resorted not only to lying about the story, but lying about lying about the story.

Word on the street is that the Bush campaign is looking to shift the discussion on Kerry from his Vietnam service, which got so much airtime during the convention, to his record in the Senate. They of course will be able to do this since they control Fox News and most of the mainstream media. I admit that they do have a point - not much specific was said about Kerry's Senate record during the convention, and I don't really know much about it. As long as we're discussing the candidates' records in public life though, I thought I would bring up a little on Bush for discussion. The following is from a New York Times article (stolen from Eschaton) on May 3, 2003, two days after "Mission Accomplished":

The Bush administration is planning to withdraw most United States combat forces from Iraq over the next several months and wants to shrink the American military presence to less than two divisions by the fall, senior allied officials said today.

The United States currently has more than five divisions in Iraq, troops that fought their way into the country and units that were added in an attempt to stabilize it. But the Bush administration is trying to establish a new military structure in which American troops would continue to secure Baghdad while the majority of the forces in Iraq would be from other nations.

Under current planning, there would be three sectors in postwar Iraq. The Americans would keep a division in and around Baghdad; Britain would command a multinational division in the south near Basra; and Poland would command a third division of troops from a variety of nations.

The British are organizing a "force generation" conference next week in London to solicit troops for the effort, and another conference is likely to be held later this month in Warsaw.

The Bush administration's aim is to bring most of the American troops here back to their bases in the United States and Europe so they can prepare for potential crises.

The administration does not want substantial numbers of American forces to be tied down in Iraq. It is eager to avoid the specter of American occupation, and it is hoping to shift much of the peacekeeping burden of stabilizing Iraq to other governments.

If the administration plan is carried out, the effect would be to reduce the number of American troops in Iraq from over 130,000 soldiers and marines at present to 30,000 troops or fewer by the fall.

Eerie, isn't it? It's like reading news from another dimension, especially since the NY Times doesn't keep their archives around for more than a week. Of course, our number of troops has only increased in Iraq since that article was written.

As long as we're talking about past records and flip-flops and everything, I just thought it was fair to bring this up. What's more of a flip-flop, voting against a funding resolution for the war after voting to authorize the President to go to war if he deems it necessary, or telling 100,000 troops that we should have them home by the fall, and then extending their tours of duty and getting hundreds of them killed after you completely bungle and mismanage post-war Iraq?

What's striking to me about this, and really all the criticisms I post about Bush, is how commonplace they are. This is just one of many. For every article like this or example Krugman cites in his columns, there are dozens more. This was about how many troops we were supposed to have in Iraq... let's go back and find some articles on how many new jobs the Bush administration has said were supposed to be created by now. Or how large the deficit was supposed to be now. Or how far along Afghanistan was supposed to be now. I'm really having trouble thinking of examples where they've been right about anything. How anything they predict about their second term can be taken seriously given their track record is beyond me.

What's especially ironic is that Republicans and some fence-sitters criticize Kerry for not saying enough specifics about his plans, as if Kerry knew of a magic bullet to solve the country's problems. If it were that easy, Bush would have done it by now (well... it depends on how easy it was). Would you rather have an administration that tells you that they know what they're doing, pisses off half the country trying to do it, and then consistently comes up wrong? Or would you rather have an administration that gives you their vision, patiently waits until it's time for them to govern, and then looks at the facts as they inherit them? We don't know if Kerry will get it right over the next four years. We do know it would be difficult to get it any more wrong.

Apparently not content with Dick Cheney's abysmally low approval ratings, the Bush-Cheney campaign has kicked off the "Piss Off America" tour of 2004, where Dick Cheney tours the Southwest and annoys the hell out of anyone he can. Among the highlights...

Loyalty oaths required to see the man speak...

...and racial profiling of press photographers.

Meanwhile, 15,000 people, presumably of whatever political affliation they like and with varying shades of colors of skin, showed up in Scranton, PA in blistering heat to hear Kerry and Edwards speak.