disconnect

Isn't it funny that while the Bush campaign centers itself around the concept that Kerry is a flip-flopper, quotes like this exist?

And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq... All of a sudden you've got a battle you're fighting in a major built-up city, a lot of civilians are around, significant limitations on our ability to use our most effective technologies and techniques. Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place? You know, you then have accepted the responsibility for governing Iraq.

- Dick Cheney, 1992

Well, it didn't take long for my last post about keeping your chin up going into the debates to be rendered obsolete.

I'm not sure which was more surprising, how good Kerry was or how bad Bush was. I expected Kerry to be good - he's a smart guy and all - but I didn't expect him to express his points so clearly and without wiggle room or an opening for counterattack. I expected Bush to be dumb and stubborn, but I thought he'd have more to say than repeating the same lines 12 times each. I still don't know what the heck he was trying to get at by repeating "grand diversion".

I think the debate showed a couple of things that were going to become evident eventually but perhaps couldn't really fully be seen until the debates. First, this is why the Democrats nominated John Kerry. The Bush/Cheney campaign ran their convention and really their whole campaign as if they were running against Dennis Kucinich. Just last week they said Kerry was advocating "retreat and defeat". I think he made a giant step last night towards finally shooting that perception down. Kerry can bring a certain seriousness that I don't think any of the other candidates would have had. I think he's the only candidate that projects the image that he could keep you safer than George W. Bush can. I mean, I think any of the other candidates would have still kept us safer than Bush, but Kerry's background and demeanor really help him sell that to a skeptical public. I always feared a Dean-Bush debate not because of Bush winning on rhetoric, but because of the "Howard Dean face". If the face came out when Dick Gephardt attacked him, I can only imagine what a Bush attack would generate... Dean's head might have exploded. In this debate though, as Bush attacked Kerry, Kerry simply smiled and wrote down notes. By contrast, whenever Kerry was on the attack Bush seemed to squirm around and look uncomfortable. Bush absolutely hates being told he's wrong - it's one of the reasons why protestors are never allowed around him, why only loyalists are allowed in his campaign events, and why it takes him so long (if ever) to meet with foreign leaders of "Old Europe" that disagree with him.

Another lesson learned from this debate along those same lines is why Bush has his surrogates do all the attacking for him. This is really the first time since the March primetime press conference that Bush has had to stand alone and answer tough questions. It didn't go so well for him in March, and it went even worse now because there was someone with an opposing viewpoint able to give clearer and more convincing answers than he could. The flip-flop label that was pinned so well on Kerry for months by GOP surrogates and commercials slid right off when Bush tried to use it today. Many times, Bush would pause for several seconds during rebuttal time, unsure of what to say. Once I actually waved my hand at the TV trying to get him to talk. Of course, there are inconsistencies in Kerry's record, just as there are inconsistencies in Bush's record, Cheney's record, and everyone else's. On the Daily Show afterwards, Rudy Giuliani tried to go after Kerry on some contradiction in saying Hussein was a threat and then saying he wasn't a threat, something 150 times less consequential than the distinction between saying "we know Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction" and saying "we found that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction-related program activities." No one was buying it.

It's not surprising really that Bush's version of events in Iraq and elsewhere was going to have to conflict with the reality on the ground, but I was surprised with how plainly Kerry framed the situation and how inept Bush was at describing why his plan is working (apparently "hard work" is being done). When you look at it, it's really not that tough to explain. You don't need the pages of stuff I've written on this site or layers of nuance to describe it. Bush had a chance to unite the country after 9/11 and focus on the people who did that attack, and he didn't. He did for a while, but then he didn't finish the job and got distracted by Iraq, which he also funked up. It's pretty simple, and Kerry did a good job of laying it out in those simple terms, while Bush was left to accuse Kerry of slighting the Polish contribution to the war in Iraq. Poland, in case you were curious, has 2% as many troops in Iraq as America does, and will be reducing that to 1% in January [source]. If Kerry was slighting the coalition partners in Iraq, it's because the coalition Bush built was slight.

Anyway, I was afraid that Bush would continue to be able to obscure reality in the debate as he's done through the campaign. Clearly, this was not the case, and it wasn't helped by his horrid performance either. I think the town hall format will be better suited to him, though I don't see how the debate on domestic policy can go any better for him than this one did, given his terrible record on that as well. As for Kerry, the only negative I can think of is that the candidate we saw last night didn't show up three months sooner. If he can keep up that kind of performance for 32 more days and two more debates, I look forward to inauguration day.

I'm sure you've noticed (assuming you visit this site on a semi-regular basis) that I haven't been posting as much recently. This is in part due to me not wanting to rehash the same stuff I've been going over for the past few months on here. Bush is still Bush, Kerry is still Kerry, the situation in Iraq is still bad and the same good and bad things are still here at home. I've also become pretty sick of the whole election, something which is not terribly surprising given its length and intensity. And I've been trying hard not to be discouraged. Between the whole situation in Iraq, the sluggish economy, and stuff like the peak oil link in the previous post, it's easy to see things continuing downhill even if Kerry wins. And it's difficult to trust in the sanity of a populace that continues to vote for or support Bush despite a record of failure on almost every front. I've said before and I'll say again that I respect people who believe in conservative ideologies. There are some good ones out there, and there are decent reasons to vote Republican other than getting duped by Karl Rove. But a great many people swung to the Bush side after the Republican convention based on the premise that Bush can keep them safe and Kerry is a "girlie man". It's never good to elect a president based on a load of B.S., but now seems to be an especially bad time.

Still though, I came to the conclusion that we (meaning myself and other like-minded Democrats reading this now) just have to keep fighting. If during the debates tonight, Kerry makes some real good points about Iraq and the war on terrorism while Bush blathers on about Kerry flip-flopping, and the media proclaims Bush the winner because "talks like us" while Kerry has a tendency to be long-winded in his responses, it doesn't matter. If Bush has another catch phrase like "fuzzy math" that completely obscures the fact that dozens of people were killed yet again in Iraq today and everyone buys it, it doesn't matter. You just have to keep on going. Even if it's our fate to live in an America in 20 years that's out of fossil fuels, wracked by domestic and international terrorist attacks, and completely devoid of any prestige, industry or intellect, you can sit on your front porch with no job, no money and no hope but know that you did all you could to keep things from turning out like that, or you can be haunted by the fact that yourself and others knew that this could happen, and you didn't do all you could to stop it. Or, you know, things could turn around for the better. Or I could be totally wrong and a second Bush term could unite the world in peace and prosperity for generations to come. You decide which is more likely.

Ironically, the DNC picked the perfect time to call me tonight while I was doing dishes and thinking about this need to not give up, netting them an extra fifty bucks.

Josh Marshall touches on what I said before about my difficulty in finding anything to say about Iraq in this post, saying "I haven't written as much lately as I usually do about Iraq because it is, quite simply, hard to know quite what else to say." But he gives what must be the 100,000th and 100,001th example of right-wing attempts to put a pretty face on the war/occupation:

And speaking of that membrane, the Post today has another example of the Orwellian moment we're passing through. On Monday the Post ran a story about the sheer scope and spread of the insurgency in Iraq based on data from USAID compiled by the security contractor Kroll Security International.

The response, according to today's Post, is that USAID will stop making the data public.

That's their solution. Just think about for a second. That's their response.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is sponsoring a PR campaign by hand-picked Iraqi-Americans and former CPA officials who will be speaking at US military bases around the country. The memo sent out to base commanders says the presentations will be "designed to be uplifting accounts with good news messages" and that commanders should try to get local news coverage for the speeches since "these events and presentations are positive public relations opportunities."

That's their policy: denial.

I'll try to keep thinking of relevant things to post about in the future that at least have some originality to them.

Given that the big story today has been that oil reached $50 a barrel, I thought it would be as good a time as any to link to this site:

Life After The Oil Crash

I've read that site a couple times now and each time it scares the hell out of me. You can google for "peak oil" and get lots more on the topic if you like. The jist of it is that oil production is peaking and it's going to cause the shit to hit the fan quite soon. You can think that the predictions that site makes are too apocalyptic (or not apocalyptic enough), but the fact remains that our world is centered around oil and we're using it up. But as the site makes clear, we don't have to use it all up before we're screwed, we just have to use enough so that oil becomes expensive enough to ruin our economy. To make things all the more fun, it's not really clear that we can do much about it, though certainly we can do more than the nothing we've been doing.

In a perfect world, I'd expect a hard-hitting question about this to be posed at one of the upcoming debates, followed by thoughtful responses from each of the candidates. However, even if we're lucky enough to get this subject raised in the debates, I'm sure whatever is said will be overshadowed by discussions about whether or not Kerry sighed while Bush was giving his answer, if Bush talked sufficiently like the "common man" while giving his response, and/or whether or not John Kerry made some statement about hybrid vehicles in 1968 that contradicts his statement at the debate. So I'm trying to get the word out here in the hopes that enough people are aware of the situation to make a difference about it.