disconnect

I don't really feel like I have too much to say after this debate... I would say that Kerry won it, but then again I'm incapable of an unbiased analysis of the debate. I will say that I would expect undecided voters to largely go for Kerry on this debate and the other two. I think that was what came out in the polling after the first two and I think the same will be true for this one. Bush had a couple of decent answers and one or two good moments, but I thought an impartial voter would have preferred Kerry's answers at least 2/3 of the time (if for no other reason than the fact that Bush steered 1/3 of the questions over to education for no good reason).

The big to-do today seems to be about Kerry mentioning that Dick Cheney's daughter is a lesbian, as Edwards did during the V.P. debate. I could spend a lot of time talking about this, but Andrew Sullivan has done an excellent job talking about why this is an non-issue, and as a gay conservative, he brings a bit more weight to the argument than I would. The jist of what he says (if you don't go and read it directly) is that it wasn't an "outing", since she was already out, so the fact that people act like it was such an offense to mention the fact that she was gay implies that there's something wrong with it, and thus shows the level of anti-homosexual feeling among Republicans (or whoever bashes Kerry over it). The example he brings up is if Bush was proposing a Constitutional ban on interracial marriages and Mary Cheney was married to a black man, it would be fair game. I'll propose another example which is not an exact parallel but I think at least vaguely similar enough to be mentioned - if a question had come up about stem cell research and Alzheimer's, and Kerry had mentioned Reagan's affliction with the disease, would people have been shouting about how Kerry exploited Reagan? No, Reagan had a disease that millions of others have that is directly to a policy choice of Bush's (blocking stem cell research). Similarly, Mary Cheney has a gay partner, as do many other Americans, and that's directly related to a policy choice by Bush (banning gay marriage). Furthermore, it was directly related to the question of whether or not homosexuality was a choice... he was asking those who thought it was a choice to ask Mary Cheney if her lifestyle was a choice. It's probably not surprising that Republicans would be upset at having their bigotry shoved in their face by one simple example, hence all this nonsense.

But now I've spent way too much time talking about this issue when, like I said, Andrew Sullivan handled it much more succinctly and with more authority. Besides, this is what Republicans want - long-winded crap about the Mary Cheney incident to obscure Bush's terrible debates. Given a choice between this and explaining Bush's answer to the question on unemployment that basically blamed unemployed people for being stupid, if I were Ed Gillespie I think I'd focus on Mary Cheney, even if it does imply that there's something inherently wrong with saying that someone's gay.

Nonsense aside, I think these debates went about as well as any Democrat could have hoped for, short of a complete meltdown by Bush (which basically happened in debate 1 and almost happened in 2 and 3). Kerry looked much more presidential than Bush, and every attempt by Bush to paint him as a liberal or as weak on this or that was basically stopped short by a direct answer from Kerry contradicting the President's misinterpretations of him. Kerry may have been a bit heavy on the stats at times (though undecided voters always whine that "I didn't hear enough specifics"), but early polls showed an overwhelming edge to Kerry (61-29) on expressing himself better. Plus he didn't once mention the Dingle-Norwood bill. So "global test" B.S. and lesbian bigotry aside, I'm pretty pleased with the debates.

I should mention that I'll be moving tomorrow and this weekend, so there's some question as to whether or not I'll even have access to the "Internets" for a while, much less the time or inclination to talk about politics. So I wouldn't anticipate any posts here after tonight for a while, though it's not out of the realm of possibility.

I just read a nice analysis of Bush's mischaracterizations (lies) about Kerry's health care plan (written in September, but increasingly relevant as Bush tries to distort the plan). The President has mocked the plan as "Hillary Care" and said at last Friday's debate that it would lead to "big government" managing your health care, something which is obviously false to anyone who's looked at the plan for more than two seconds. The article also says why these smear tactics work, unfortunately:

But there's the problem: It took the Bush-Cheney campaign two paragraphs to completely mischaracterize Sen. Kerry's health plan, and about 800 words to refute the lies. In health care, as in other dimensions of Mr. Bush's parallel universe, the incumbent is relying on the simplicity and consistency that systematic dishonesty makes possible.

Which reminds me... there was an episode of "Frontline" on PBS last night that dealt with Kerry and Bush's past political careers. There were two things that struck me as obvious in Bush's past: One, Karl Rove's trademark campaign tactics have been evident in all of Bush's races from his 1994 gubernatorial race to this year - smear tactics, campaigning on fear, twisting an opponent's strengths into weaknesses, and using polarizing rhetoric and wedge issues. Two, as the above article noted, the advantage goes to the biggest liar. It's funny to think that Bush ran in 2000 under the pledge of "restoring honor and dignity to the White House." Perhaps in his parallel universe, Bush has accomplished that, too.

I decided it was about time to mention something about Sinclair Broadcasting Group deciding to pre-empt regular, prime time programming to show an anti-Kerry documentary commercial free. I heard about this on Saturday, but it took me a full weekend to process the cognitive dissonance required to believe it. Before I talk about why this is so terrible, let's go over some Sinclair recent history.

As you may recall, in April, Sinclair ordered its ABC stations to pre-empt airing "Nightline" on April 30th, saying that the program was "motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq." This move was obviously biased in favor of the Republican Party enough so that John McCain wrote them a letter saying that he hoped that the move "meets with the public opprobrium it most certainly deserves." (I imagine that the Sinclair executives didn't know what the word "opprobrium" means, so they probably just ignored the letter.)

Fast-forwarding to October, Sinclair is pre-empting its own programming to air an anti-Kerry film, "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal". It's doing so commercial-free, costing itself millions of dollars that would have been generated during the programming which will be interrupted. It says this is necessary because the anti-Kerry film is "topical" and "newsworthy."

To summarize, the names of the American dead in Iraq are partisan tools of the Democratic Party, not fit for broadcast on a news program. By contrast, an anti-Kerry documentary made by an unabashed partisan is newsworthy journalism... so much so, in fact, that "Gilmore Girls" will have to take a backseat, because Americans need to hear this. I assume they'll take special care so that the identities of any Americans who may have died to protect your freedom don't smear the documentary with their liberal stench. Make sense? Perhaps you understand why I had trouble wrapping my head around this.

Now there's some question about just how legal this is, and whether or not they'll have to comply with equal-time laws, or if this counts as some sort of political advertisement or not. I imagine there will be a lot of noise over the next couple of weeks about it, and rightly so. I mean, can you imagine what would happen if CBS decided to pre-empt its normal prime time broadcasting and air "Fahrenheit 9/11" without commercial interruption? I think Sean Hannity might explode on live TV just thinking about it. Obviously, it would be a pretty big deal, as this is and should be. But I want to put that aside for a minute.

Let's assume that this is determined to be perfectly legal, Sinclair can show the documentary and they're not required to balance it with anything pro-Kerry. If this strikes you as fundamentally wrong, you're right, and not from a partisan standpoint. This is the kind of manipulation of the media for political purposes that people have been fearing for years and that was ridiculed in totalitarian regimes. It's not fully clear why Sinclair is so biased towards the Republican party, if it's because its executives are staunchly conservative (already known), if it's been directly benefiting from Republican control of government and the FCC (likely), or if it has some sort of quid pro quo with the current administration (unknown). Clearly though, this goes beyond the much-discussed slants of cable news networks like CNN or Fox News. We're one step away from the equivalent of state-run media being used for propaganda purposes, with the minor detail that the media is being run by a proxy instead of the state itself. Then you have the media and government feeding off each other for their own benefit, and if you need details about why state-sponsored propaganda in the media is a bad thing, the last 70 years of world history provides plenty. As an example of Sinclair's unholy mixing of media commentary and corporate leadership, check out this excerpt from the NY Times article mentioned earlier (emphasis mine):

Mark Hyman, Sinclair's vice president for corporate relations, who doubles as a conservative commentator on its news stations, said the film would be shown because Sinclair deemed it newsworthy.

As I said before, this may or may not be legal. There are many laws in place that are supposed to regulate political advertisement in the media in the weeks running up to an election. And we'll never know whether or not this decision was made because some TV exec decided he'd like to be Bush-Cheney's white knight, or because Karl Rove was panicking and had to call in a favor from one of his biggest donors. But I think TV is dumbed down enough already without it becoming a propaganda mouthpiece for the Bush administration. If you have a Sinclair station in your area (I do not), or even if you don't I suppose, this appears to be a blog set up for the purposes of boycotting Sinclair.