Saturday, September 25, 2004
The Quinella
The New York Times is out this morning with an editorial on recent Repug attempts to suggest that a vote for Kerry is a vote for the terrorists. The paper criticizes the Bush team for the devastating effect such tactics have on the very thing Bush claims only he can do--keep our children from being incinerated in their beds by Insensate Evil.
We knew the Bush gang was going to do this, of course. This is the last bullet in the chamber, and it's one we knew they'd get down to sooner or later. But now that they've done it, what matters is how people react to it. And there's a tiny sense that maybe the press corps is finally beginning to stir--that they're finally getting just how off-the-charts ridiculous the Bush campaign's tactics really are. (There's lots of interesting analysis of the editorial and the tactics over at Daily Kos.)
Or maybe not. The first story I clicked on this morning was a Yahoo headline that said "Bush Twists Kerry's Words on Iraq". Finally, I thought, something breaks through into the mainstream about how disconnected from reality Bush's rhetoric is. Then I read the story, and saw it contained another one of those lazy observations, all in the name of balance: That Bush's astounding misstatement of Kerry's words yesterday in Racine, Wisconsin, was "not unlike the spin that Kerry and his forces sometimes place on Bush's words." This is, of course, total bull, and the AP reporter who wrote it, Jennifer Loven, has to be blind not to see it--or so immersed in the ideals of "journalistic objectivity" that it's made her unable to accurately report what happens in front of her own eyes and ears. Sure, Kerry spins Bush. But Bush assigns utterly new and entirely unsupportable meanings to Kerry's words, and the media seems unable or unwilling to differentiate one from the other.
As the Times observes, "The people running the government clearly regard keeping Mr. Bush in office as more important than maintaining a united front on the most important threat to the nation." That's what the whole war on terror has been about, from the moment it became clear that the planes that hit the World Trade Center were not just the work of really bad pilots--sowing fear to make people vote Bush in 2004. And it's working. Several major newspapers came out with stories this week about how the gender gap, which usually works in favor of Democrats, is actually closing. Bush is thought to be gaining support among women, whose fears of terrorism tend to be more concrete than those of men. Men tend to fear terrorist attacks in a general sense; women tend to fear more specific attacks on their city or their family. World O'Crap had an interesting analysis of the stories earlier this week, and although the website's trademark snark pointed out the inconsistencies of that shift, the post also illustrated the problem Kerry and the Democrats are having. And as long as polling data shows that fear works, Job One for the Repugs will be to make people afraid to vote for Kerry.
So fear is working, and because it's so primal and as such, not subject to rational persuasion, we're going to get more of it from the Bush campaign, which is as amoral a bunch as has ever called itself American. But the fact that a large number of American voters are on a continuum from ill-informed to flat stupid also helps the Bush campaign. As polemicist Ted Rall (can't really call him a columnist anymore) wrote this week:
So another week has gone by, and John Kerry still has a mountain to climb. The speech on Iraq helped greatly this week. Next week is the first debate. (Kerry is preparing for the debates here in Wisconsin starting tomorrow.) Former Texas governor Ann Richards, who lost her job to Bush in 1994, was in Madison this week stumping for Kerry, and she told the Capital Times that Bush's advantage in the debates is his simplistic style. He dismisses complexity with simple platitudes that sound good but mean nothing--which will be quite a contrast if Kerry goes off on one of his nuanced and footnoted discursions, and not in a good way, given the typical American distaste for people who seem too smart, or to lord their knowledge over more average folk. So Richards advises Kerry, "Be direct." But she also says, "I think George Bush can be confronted, and he hasn't yet." That's what we've been salivating for all these months--that moment when Bush is on the stage with a question in the air and, finally, the unclothed emperor has nowhere to hide. But Kerry has to have the courage to be tough, and the panelists have to have the integrity to let the chips fall wherever, and the media has to have the brains to report what really happens, and the voters have to have the brains to see it for what it is--but in this year, that seems like a quinella that's tough to hit.
If we have a debate at all, of course. I'll believe it when I see it.
Note: I will no longer be linking here to posts on my other blog, The Hits Just Keep On Comin'. If you want to know when that blog is updated, go over there and sign up for the mailing list.
The New York Times is out this morning with an editorial on recent Repug attempts to suggest that a vote for Kerry is a vote for the terrorists. The paper criticizes the Bush team for the devastating effect such tactics have on the very thing Bush claims only he can do--keep our children from being incinerated in their beds by Insensate Evil.
We knew the Bush gang was going to do this, of course. This is the last bullet in the chamber, and it's one we knew they'd get down to sooner or later. But now that they've done it, what matters is how people react to it. And there's a tiny sense that maybe the press corps is finally beginning to stir--that they're finally getting just how off-the-charts ridiculous the Bush campaign's tactics really are. (There's lots of interesting analysis of the editorial and the tactics over at Daily Kos.)
Or maybe not. The first story I clicked on this morning was a Yahoo headline that said "Bush Twists Kerry's Words on Iraq". Finally, I thought, something breaks through into the mainstream about how disconnected from reality Bush's rhetoric is. Then I read the story, and saw it contained another one of those lazy observations, all in the name of balance: That Bush's astounding misstatement of Kerry's words yesterday in Racine, Wisconsin, was "not unlike the spin that Kerry and his forces sometimes place on Bush's words." This is, of course, total bull, and the AP reporter who wrote it, Jennifer Loven, has to be blind not to see it--or so immersed in the ideals of "journalistic objectivity" that it's made her unable to accurately report what happens in front of her own eyes and ears. Sure, Kerry spins Bush. But Bush assigns utterly new and entirely unsupportable meanings to Kerry's words, and the media seems unable or unwilling to differentiate one from the other.
As the Times observes, "The people running the government clearly regard keeping Mr. Bush in office as more important than maintaining a united front on the most important threat to the nation." That's what the whole war on terror has been about, from the moment it became clear that the planes that hit the World Trade Center were not just the work of really bad pilots--sowing fear to make people vote Bush in 2004. And it's working. Several major newspapers came out with stories this week about how the gender gap, which usually works in favor of Democrats, is actually closing. Bush is thought to be gaining support among women, whose fears of terrorism tend to be more concrete than those of men. Men tend to fear terrorist attacks in a general sense; women tend to fear more specific attacks on their city or their family. World O'Crap had an interesting analysis of the stories earlier this week, and although the website's trademark snark pointed out the inconsistencies of that shift, the post also illustrated the problem Kerry and the Democrats are having. And as long as polling data shows that fear works, Job One for the Repugs will be to make people afraid to vote for Kerry.
So fear is working, and because it's so primal and as such, not subject to rational persuasion, we're going to get more of it from the Bush campaign, which is as amoral a bunch as has ever called itself American. But the fact that a large number of American voters are on a continuum from ill-informed to flat stupid also helps the Bush campaign. As polemicist Ted Rall (can't really call him a columnist anymore) wrote this week:
We're all equal at birth, but what we do later determines whether or not our opinions are worthwhile.Rall illustrates his thesis with painful quotes (like the voter in Ohio who says of Iraq, "We shouldn't be over there building them back up because they didn't build our towers back up") and painful statistics (one in five Americans thinks Iraq used weapons of mass destruction on us during the 2003 invasion).
At this writing, the world's greatest nation flails under the rule of buffoons and madmen, bogged down in two optional wars we're actually losing. The world's richest economy is shedding jobs, running up debts and building nothing for the future. Voters, offered an election year alternative to the subliterate idiot who single-handedly created this mess, spurn him for a leader even dumber than they are. America has become a stultocracy: government by morons, for morons.
So another week has gone by, and John Kerry still has a mountain to climb. The speech on Iraq helped greatly this week. Next week is the first debate. (Kerry is preparing for the debates here in Wisconsin starting tomorrow.) Former Texas governor Ann Richards, who lost her job to Bush in 1994, was in Madison this week stumping for Kerry, and she told the Capital Times that Bush's advantage in the debates is his simplistic style. He dismisses complexity with simple platitudes that sound good but mean nothing--which will be quite a contrast if Kerry goes off on one of his nuanced and footnoted discursions, and not in a good way, given the typical American distaste for people who seem too smart, or to lord their knowledge over more average folk. So Richards advises Kerry, "Be direct." But she also says, "I think George Bush can be confronted, and he hasn't yet." That's what we've been salivating for all these months--that moment when Bush is on the stage with a question in the air and, finally, the unclothed emperor has nowhere to hide. But Kerry has to have the courage to be tough, and the panelists have to have the integrity to let the chips fall wherever, and the media has to have the brains to report what really happens, and the voters have to have the brains to see it for what it is--but in this year, that seems like a quinella that's tough to hit.
If we have a debate at all, of course. I'll believe it when I see it.
Note: I will no longer be linking here to posts on my other blog, The Hits Just Keep On Comin'. If you want to know when that blog is updated, go over there and sign up for the mailing list.
