disconnect

Not that there aren't crazy liberals making insane posts on message boards out there somewhere, but for all the flak some of us take for being liberals, it sure is nice to read a post like this on a message board and just feel relieved that our views are 180º from that guy's. I don't remember how I ran across that post the other day, but here are the rest of that guy's ("Defender2") posts on freerepublic.com and they're all pretty good, with nuggets like "C-SPAN1 = Communists-Socialists Aided Network #1". Aside from the fact that he lost a "P" somewhere in there, characterizing C-SPAN as some sort of communist propaganda tool is arguably more insane than O'Reilly comparing Media Matters to the Ku Klux Klan. C-SPAN? Are you kidding me? I don't know that they have a single "opinion" show on there; mostly it's just footage of congressional business and the like. On Sunday I happened to catch them replaying an old "Dick Cavett Show" where John Kerry debated John O'Neill (now of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, then a Nixon attack dog sent after Kerry). I thought it was a very interesting piece of history extremely relevant to current events, not to mention eye-opening as to where Kerry and his detractors were at even 30-some years ago. Little did I know that the socialists were drawing me in with their propaganda... thankfully "Defender2" was around to reeducate me back to the Right side.

Anyway, I certainly understand if you don't want to read that guy's post, chock-full of interesting usage of capitalization and exclamation points, I just thought it was funny. I mean, it's got gems like, "Avoid the Socialists/Communists backed johns(not capitolised on purpose) like the Plague!!!! Flush the Socialists/Communists/Enemies Loving johns(Prince johns wanting to be King johns) down the john!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Can this guy get his own talk radio show please? Seriously, why isn't this man on the air?

(Incidentally, freerepublic.com is where Jerome Corsi, co-author of the Swift Boat Veterans book "Unfit For Command", made a bunch of really nasty comments against Muslims, Catholics, the media, the Clintons, everybody. Here's the story from Media Matters, if you can trust such a slanderous tool of the extreme extreme way-out-there far left.)

Really good post by my friend Mike... I don't have a direct link to the post but you can follow that link to his journal and it's the one made 8/19 at 5:09 PM. Basically he's sick of this political crap and so am I. I've had at least two posts I've tried to write the past two days but just couldn't do it... either I got sick of what I was writing or the entire story was so stupid I couldn't waste my time with it. I've actually been avoiding reading certain things online this week because it's so frustrating. There's so much B.S. coming out of the right-wing attack machine recently that it's exhausting trying to keep up with it all. I do what I can on this site to make what small contribution I can to discrediting misinformation but it really feels like sailing into a hurricane lately.

Anyway, I wanted to quote one of his paragraphs that nicely sums up something Robyn and I have been particularly befuddled with lately.

Conservatives want video games, movies, music and the liberal media to take responsibility for the social failings in our country? Why don't they take a look in the mirror and see what attack politics, an agenda of fear, radicalizing and motivating their base with non-issues and personal politics, and encouraging people to not look deeper. I think of my uncle, who is out of a job, his son has a college degree and works security at Target, his wife is working too hard for not enough money, and his daughter is overweight and attention-starved, and he is voting for Bush. WHY? Because abortion kills babies. He is gone. He is done thinking. Kerry could come to him and offer him a high paying job, a new car, opportunities for his children, a public health system that can help his daughter cope with her life, and he would shake his head because Kerry wants to let women decide what to do to their bodies. He is the most uninformed citizen ever thanks to (Rush / Hannity / Fox News), but because he listens to people talk all day, and trusts them, he is actually deluded into thinking he knows truths that journalists (with objectivity, standards, and a need to defend their sources and facts) are just "too blind to see."

This is funny... you would think that an incumbent president would be focusing on his record over the past four years and his proposals for the next four on his website. You would think that the Democrats, being nothing more than a legion of Bush-haters with no real plan of their own, would have anti-Bush propaganda all over their website. You might think that. You would be wrong.

Check out johnkerry.com and georgewbush.com yourself right now, or see this image as an archive in case it's changed.

It's hilarious, both the Kerry site and the Bush site feature two pictures of Kerry on the top of their front pages. There are NO pictures of Bush or Cheney ANYWHERE on their front page, but several of Kerry. They even prominently feature a "Kerry Gas Tax Calculator", where you can add up how much more John Kerry would cost you with a 50 cent gas tax increase... if you elected John Kerry from 1994. What's funny is that the Democrats could do this exact same thing if they wanted, because the current chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisors advocated the same 50-cent hike in 1999, but for some reason the Democrats seem to be focusing on their own candidate and his plan... The Bush campaign could update the tax calculator to reflect their own team's tax increase proposals from five years after Kerry's, but that may be slightly less effective in scaring visitors to Bush's site into thinking that if elected, Kerry would raise their gas tax by 50 cents (he would not). Similarly, any pictures of Bush on his own site might remind visitors of all the stuff he's been doing as President, rather than letting them worry about what Kerry might do to their gasoline taxes if you went back to 1994, grabbed Kerry, brought him back to present-day and forced him not to reconsider any of his proposals.

This ties into a long post I'm trying to write about the mindset of the two parties that's not coming out the way I want it to, so I figured while I work on the other one I'd just throw this thing out there on its own and let it stew among all the Bush accusations of Kerry's campaign being pessimistic and the Democrats being obsessed with hating Bush and having no vision of their own.

I wanted to give a link to this article which puts forth the argument that perhaps it matters if the president is intelligent. More specifically, it argues that intelligence is more important than character. I'll let the article speak for itself.

I've taken quite a few long trips by car in my life, and after seeing various pictures of fighting and troops heading down highways recently in Iraq I've wondered what it would be like over there to go on a similar drive. One of the blogs by Iraqis I read from time to time, Healing Iraq, had a post on this very subject this weekend entitled "From Basrah to Baghdad", describing that trip. It's a shorter trip (about 60 miles shorter) than the Minneapolis to Milwaukee trip I've made many times myself, but as you can read yourself, it's a little different experience than driving through central Wisconsin. It helps you comprehend a small amount the utter chaos that that country is going through right now. I'm all for hope and optimism and pulling people out from under tyranny and all that, but keep this article and others like it in mind in case Bush resurrects the "turning the corner" concept and applies it to Iraq. I know under Saddam you could be killed for expressing the wrong political opinion. It looks like the situation now is one in which you could be killed for venturing out on the highway, or running into a band of kidnappers looking for the latest victim, or getting caught in the crossfire of a battle, or refusing to quit your job as a doctor... or, if you're in an area controlled by insurgents, by expressing the wrong political opinion.

Apparently Laura Bush has been out explaining her husband's stand on stem cell research... that is, stifling it in order to protect the lives of discarded embryos from fertility clinics that will be destroyed anyway. Unfortunately, those crazy embryo-blood-thirsty bastards that are the families of people suffering from diseases that stem cell research might cure are a little perturbed by the whole thing.

One person who's witnessed his father and three uncles die of Alzheimer's, Charles Pierce, wrote:

[S]houldn't we be a bit alarmed as well that a back-country librarian from Level Crossing, Texas is out there explaining cutting-edge science to the nation? Where in hell is the President's Council On Bioethics? (Probably either bleeding people with leeches or booking tours to Lourdes.) I mean, would I ask Gregor Mendel where the biography section is?

Then Michael Kinsley, former co-host of CNN's "Crossfire" and editor of Slate until he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, had this to say in Sunday's Washington Post (read the whole thing if you're registered at the W.P., it's pretty great):

In a display of her husband's famous compassionate conservatism, Laura Bush scolded that "it really isn't fair to people who are watching a loved one suffer" to overplay the promise of stem cells. She said, helpfully, "We don't know that stem cell research will provide cures for anything."

As someone with a loved one (myself, as it happens) who has the disease (Parkinson's) for which stem cells hold the most promise, please allow me to say: Thank you so much, Mrs. Bush, for trying to make sure that I don't get too hopeful. While your husband and Sen. John Kerry make a major issue out of who is more optimistic, it is inspiring to have a first lady with the courage to say: Let's be pessimistic! Optimism is unfair!

When President Bush gives a speech on one of his campaign stops, he has a segment called "Ask President Bush" where audience members ask him questions. Now, some say that these questions are too easy given that you have to be a Bush supporter to hear him speak in the first place. Some even say that his campaign pre-selects questions for him to answer or puts ringers in the crowd to ask questions he wants to answer. To that I say hogwash, and I give the following example from August 10 in Niceville, Florida of the kind of tough, hard-hitting questions Bush has to address on these tours... in fact, Bush himself described it as a "great question" after answering it. I can only hope our hard-hitting, aggressive press corps will make sure the two candidates receive this kind of grilling in future news interviews and in the debates:

Q: Mr. President, I was wondering if you were a Christian.

I just wanted to quickly draw attention to this press release from the Kerry-Edwards campaign in response to a new Bush ad. I haven't watched the actual video, just read the quotes contained in the press release, but it seems to be a fairly standard attack ad coming from the president's campaign, saying things like, "In the year after the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Kerry was absent for every single one [intelligence committee hearing]. That same year he proposed slashing America's intelligence budget by $6 billion. There's what Kerry says, and then there's what Kerry does." The press release contains plenty of facts showing that the Bush campaign counts a meeting Kerry attended but did not speak at as an "absent" meeting and other things showing Kerry's work on intelligence, facts which contradict the ad but, of course, are meaningless, since 95% of the people who see the ad on TV aren't going to check what's being said and simply trust that the president must be telling the truth, because he's the president.

One of the things mentioned during the documentary "Outfoxed" was that Fox News often doesn't care to win an argument as long as they can keep the other side from winning it. It's a tactic I see being used by the Bush campaign increasingly often, something that this latest ad embodies perfectly - the idea that voters may not like the way Bush is doing things, but as long as they don't trust Kerry to do things any better, they won't vote for the challenger. In almost every article I read about undecided voters, including this one in yesterday's NY Times about swing voters in Wisconsin, I hear the same refrain:

"Now, when I look at it, I think Bush misled the people about Iraq, and I feel sad for all the families, for all these soldiers that had to die," she said. "But then I don't really know what Kerry would do about it either." Ms. Zavala stopped, then finally said, "I guess I can only wait and see what happens."

In other words, hundreds of people are dying in a war we stand a good chance of losing, a war which was entirely the president's doing, but there's no guarantee Kerry will do any better, so who knows? To be fair, things are so bad in Iraq and Afghanistan that there's no guarantee Kerry could do anything to fix the situation, but it's almost like it doesn't matter that the reason it's such a quagmire is Bush and his administration. And focusing on whether or not the current mess can be cleaned up also ignores the question of whether or not any more messes will be created in a second Bush term. But when you focus just on current problems like unemployment, Iraq, the budget deficit and health care, again, Bush doesn't really hope to win any of these issues (or if he does, he isn't doing a very good job of it). He just wants to get the idea across that Kerry won't do any better, and if he says he can, he's just being a typical Washington politician who says one thing and does another. "There's what Kerry says, and then there's what Kerry does."

Getting back to the actual ad itself, I just wanted to make the often-overlooked observation that this is just one of many Bush attack ads against Kerry, while the Kerry campaign has had very little in the way of negative ads. Tennessee not being a hot swing state, I don't get to see many campaign ads, but I'm not aware of any ads Kerry has run on the level of this Bush ad or previous ones I know of. There are independent groups running ads sharply critical of Bush, but Kerry's campaign, by law, has no control over these and couldn't pull them even if they wanted to. You would think that after four years of leading the country through incredibly trying times, the Bush administration would have more to campaign on than a misleading and false assessment of how many Senate intelligence committee meetings John Kerry attended. You would think.

I shudder to think of some of the ads that will be coming from the Republican side if Bush exits the Republican convention still trailing Kerry in the polls. At that point I figure the desperation will be so thick in the air that practically anything will go. For as much dirt as this Bush-Cheney campaign has been slinging around since March, I have enough faith in Karl Rove that he's still got something really devious left in reserve to bring out of the bullpen in September or October if things are still at "Kerry: 50, Bush: 46".