Bush Is A Miserable Failure, But Good News - John Kerry Has An Optimistic Plan For a Better America

Great post on Daily Kos -- Daily Kos :: Bush Is A Miserable Failure, But Good News - John Kerry Has An Optimistic Plan For a Better America
Its EXACTLY what the democrats and friends need to stress now.

He's coming back

Some better poll news.
The Rasmussen traking poll Prez track 2004 shows Kerry is coming back, to 46.4%, with Bush down to 47.6%. Two-thirds of this poll includes the Bush speech and the Kerry reaction. As I understood it during the Canadian election, the tracking polls may not indicate absolute numbers but they do indicate direction, whether someone is winning or losing. This poll is now calling a thousand people a day.

We had bad polls, too

To my American friends: a note about polls.
The Time and Newsweek polls are pretty discouraging, I admit.
But its still 8 weeks to the election. Come November, no one will remember what anyone said they might do on Sept. 2.
During the Canadian election campaign, which was only a month long, the Martin liberals had lots of bad polls -- from the beginning, the polls showed a close race, and about two weeks into the campaign, it looked as though Harper was winning. Martin didn't even "win" the leaders debate a week before the vote.
But, on election day, the Liberals elected 130 seats and the Conservatives about 95 (sorry, I cannot tell you the exact numbers because my computer is working so slowly it would take forever to call up the right references).
The key problem, for Harper, was when he started swaggering -- talking about who would be in his cabinet and the like. Many Canadians had been flirting with the idea of supporting him -- a likeable guy, good looking, energetic. In comparison, Martin looked sort of old, and he was dragging behind him a lot of scandal from the Chretien administration. But Martin got the nod in the end because he had "just enough" support to carry the liberals in a number of close races. So it didn't matter that the Conservative majorities in Alberta were huge. Basically, "just enough" people spread out across the country could not support Harper's brand of radical conservatism.
The bad polls had another effect -- they energized Martin -- for the first time in his life, he threw himself into campaigning, pounding home his messages, speech after speech, rally after rally. And oh, wasn't everyone still telling him he was doing it wrong, that he had the wrong messages! But HE believed in what he was saying, and it came through.
On the last day of the campaign, he flew coast to coast, walking in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The national press corps was pissed -- they had expected to be able to quit early on the last day, instead they had to follow Martin on a dawn til dusk odessey, ending in BC at midnight and still having to fly home from there. But this, for Canadians, sealed the deal -- it was a stunt, but people liked it.
So be of good cheer, Americans. Polls do not an election make.

Who dropped the ball on 9/11?

Bush did, that's who.
Watching the coverage of the horrible Russian school disaster, I noted that a lot of the parents are blaming Putin for the disaster. Unfairly, perhaps -- but Putin promised, apparently, to keep them safe two or three years ago and now its proven that he did not.
So why has Bush been let off the hook so throughly on 9/11? The media completely accepted Condi's "but nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" line. The reason Bush was so opposed to the 9/11 commission was his fear that they would blame him for the attacks -- and they should have. It has now been proven that he had plenty of warning, with plenty of people running around with their hair on fire for months before it happened.
It's easy to see now how simple it would have been to stop 9/11 -- if, in mid-July, they had increased airline security by banning knives on planes, that would have done it. And if they had also, in August, followed up on the Presidential Daily Brief by pulling together all those on-going FBI and CIA investigations, that would have done it, too.
Now, you can argue that no one then could have known how easy it would have been to disrupt the 9/11 attack. But they knew that something big was being planned. And they failed to take some pretty obvious steps to increase protection for the American people.
Richard Clarke was right to apologize to the 9/11 families -- he WAS at fault. But so, even more so, was the rest of the Bush administration.
9/11 is back on the public stage now, because the republicans put it there during their convention.
So I wonder now if America will begin to reexamine its 9/11 meme, where the fall of the towers has been talked about as though it was a completely unexpected act of god. And I wonder if they will begin to realize that while Al Quada was to blame for 9/11, the Bush administration should have stopped it but didn't because they dropped the ball.

"It was better in the original German"

Best comment on Zel Miller's speech, from a commenter on Atrios.GOP backs away from Miller's blast -- too late! You guys decided to let a nutcase be a keynote speaker -- what were you thinking?

All hat, no cattle

This was Kerry's response to Bush's speech. Right on!
Moe Rocca hit it during his little comedy bit on Larry King -- oh that Kerry, he said, what a buzz-killer.
He was right -- Bush's speech was pretty good -- brilliant toward the end, when the audience was in tears.
But he'll get little buzz from it now, and all because of Kerry's midnight rally, surrounded by thousands of people gathered to hear HIS speech. It was not defense, either -- instead he put Bush and Cheney on the defensive -- instead of basking in the glow of their own speeches, they'll be sputtering about how unfair and misleading Kerry's speech was.
Kerry covered just about everything -- he said health care was a right and he would not lie America into a war and he promised jobs and said America should not have to depend on Saudi Arabia to lower its oil prices and should not have given no-bid contracts to Halliburton while still being paid by them and that no one who avoided service like Bush and Cheney had the right to question his fitness to command.
So now, its the flaws in Bush's speech that are being talked about - even Tucker Carlson said it was too long. And they just got a phone call from a woman who asked, when Bush talks about bringing freedom to the world, is he talking about more wars?
And the media are lapping it up, so gleeful that they will have all sorts of stuff to cover for the next two months.

Smacktards!

"Smacktard" is the insult now used by my son and his friends -- he says its some kind of combination of the old insult "retard" (which for his generation is too un-PC and insufficiently insulting anyway) plus the phrase "smacked upside the head" (which they don't use either because it has its own unacceptable connotations).
Anyway, from what I have heard about the Cheney and Miller speeches, it seems to be an appropriate insult -- they're both a bunch of smacktards!

Pissing on a car

George W. Bush's missing year
The most memorable image from this story -- Georgie pissing on a car.
So while John Kerry was getting shot at in Vietnam, George Bush was coming to work late and leaving early, whooping it up in Georgia. Gee, what a leader of men!

It's all Nixon's fault

Listening to Arnold tonight, I thought I was listening for the most part to a speech that could have been delivered to a democratic convention, except for the "you may be a redneck" moments.
So as well as giving us that tiresome "--gate" label, we have another thing to thank Richard Nixon for -- turning natural-born-democrat Arnold into a republican.
Now I'm listening to Ben Stein talk about how "everyone" is talking about religion rather than the economy (though not too many of the people he talks to are unemployed, I would think) and how they will elect Bush as a "man of faith".
I just don't get it -- of course, the great divide between Canada and the United States now is a religious one, with America apparently becoming increasingly religious while Canada becomes increasingly secular, but I cannot understand voting for someone based on their religion rather than their policies. Maybe Marx was right - religion is the opiate of the masses.
I thought Laura Bush did a good job with her speech tonight, though her riff about children being safe rang a little hollow when it followed her story about the woman whose three sons are in the military, two of them at Fallaujah -- ah, yes, vote for Bush and your babies will be safe, but they will grow up to go to war.
It will be a religious war, though, so I guess that's OK.

Hey, Presto! Chango!

So not only did the Washington Post actually fact-check Guiliani's speech, but they also point out that the latest swifty attack is from a lobbyist whose client received a $40 million federal contract.
When the media flips, they really flip. I guess Mrs. Graham didn't raise any stupid kids, after all.
And I am glad that someone is finally following the money -- the idea that all of the swifties are just sincere, though perhaps misguided, patriots has been a media trope for too long.

Trust the Republicans

To be so politically tone-deaf that they come up with a stunt that ridicules wounded soldiers while also demonstrating beyond any denial how the swifties agenda is connected solely to the Bush reelection agenda. RNC Delegates mock wounded soldiers

Bush may be losing his base as well as his war

I hope the republican delegates read Paul Krugman's column A No-Win Situation.
Just like they found out yesterday how hundreds of thousands of people hate George Bush -- thus explaining their schizoid reaction of both distraction and hysteria with the McCain and Guiliani speeches tonight -- they would find out reading Krugman's column how the American military is losing in Iraq.
I found it odd, listening to tonight's speeches, how many "crowd" shots showed people yawning, chatting, frowning, staring off into space. I do think they were still a little shellshocked about the demonstration. Sure, they applauded McCain, but it was somewhat perfunctory and mechanical some of the time (particularly compared to the rapt attention and shining eyes shown during the democratic evenings). And the relative silence following his call for unity was deafening. During the 9-ll widow speeches, the hum of conversation was reaching an embarassing level - cue the singer.
They got fired up was when McCain attacked Michael Moore, and when Guiliani attacked the Germans, the Italians and John Kerry. But with all the talk, talk, talk about 9-11 and Bush's leadership, the image which kept popping into my mind - emphasized by McCain's reference to Moore - was Bush flipping through My Pet Goat while Guiliani was staring horror-struck at the people jumping from the 102nd floor.
I wonder how many republicans found themselves thinking about that, too.

Yes, the US is losing the war

I've been saying since June, I think, that the US is losing the war in Iraq and will not admit it.
Gilliard summarizes the American problems in Meanwhile, back in Najaf: "The question is why the US Army cannot force a battle to the conclusion against lightly armed, barely trained guerrillas. The better part of a combined brigade of US heavy armor and Marines could not defeat an insurgency of pissed off ghetto teenagers. Think a pissed off group of bloods and crips with high explosives and religious support. The US could not close and kill with them, even before they got to the Imam Ali shrine. Now, they're back to Sadr City, bloodied but unbowed."
On CNN last Thursday, former UN ambassador Richard Holdbrook said this:
". . . the United States' position in Iraq is getting progressively more difficult to sustain. Fallujah has now become a liberated zone, only 35 miles from Baghdad in which all sorts of the worst people in the world, terrorists, al Qaeda types, other people hostile to U.S. are pouring in. Najaf is now happened the same thing. The United States is in a disastrous situation in Iraq right now . . . I think that Americans really ought to hear from President Bush as to what our policy is in Iraq. He hasn't explained in a long time what's going on. He tells the American public things like, well, we've turned the corner in Iraq or we're bringing democracy to Iraq or he praises Iraq's performance in the Athens Olympics, but he doesn't explain what our policy is, whether there's any exit strategy and our troops have turned into the military wing of the Allawi government and that's a very odd position to be in. . . Any way you cut this, Miles, Najaf is a setback for the United States politically. . . . What is the United States doing, acting as the military force for Allawi, a secular Shiite, in his brutal internal civil war against Muqtada al Sadr, a monstrous and brutal extreme Shiite? . . . Ayatollah Sistani helped us out of a jam today, but anyone who thinks he is our friend has got a lot of learning to do about Islam, Iraq and Shiism."

No story here, folks - move along, move along

I posted a comment on Artios this weekend that when one guy passes secrets, its espionage; when a group does it for more than a year, its policy. And it doesn't matter whether the policy is both unannounced and unconscionable.
Washington Monthly describes this as Iran-Contra II, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is true -- another secret foreign policy authorized and run by the Pentagon, outside the purview of the State Department.
It appears that there are even many of the same guys involved, again.
But we'll likely never know unless the democrats are elected -- or unless Washington Monthly keeps going -- because the FBI investigation is being shut down -- back to harassing demonstrators, I guess.
The excuse is that the media publicity made the investigation impossible to pursue -- Officials Say Publicity Derailed Secrets Inquiry Here's the key portion of the story:
"The disclosure of the inquiry late on Friday by CBS News revealed what had been for nearly a year a covert national security investigation conducted by the F.B.I., according to the officials, who said that news reports about the inquiry compromised important investigative steps, like the effort to follow the trail back to the Israelis. As a result, several areas of the case remain murky, the officials said. One main uncertainty is the legal status of Lawrence A. Franklin, the lower-level Pentagon policy analyst who the authorities believe passed the Israelis a draft presidential policy directive related to Iran. No arrest in the case is believed to be imminent, in part because prosecutors have not yet clearly established whether Mr. Franklin broke the law. But the officials said there was evidence that he turned the classified material over to officials at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group. Officials of the group are thought to have then passed the information to Israeli intelligence."
Excuse me -- they have had more than a year to "follow the trail back to the Israelis" -- if they haven't done it by now, its not going to happen. But its pretty damned convenient for the Bush campaign that the story is now being declared officially dead.
And actually, I think it IS all the media's fault for breaking the story -- not because this made the sources dry up, but because this alerted the Bush administration to the situation, thus resulting in immediate kibosh.
UPDATE: Hmmm -- Google News shows 1,400 stories about this spy scandal - its obviously struck quite a chord. So one story in the NYT may not be enough to shut it down after all. It may, in fact, just lead others to same speculation that I have made.

Turning sauce for the goose into sauce for the gander

Digby in Projection Politics presents a very interesting thesis:
Rove has developed a campaign of projection in which he tars his opponents with his own candidates' weaknesses and then attacks them. He attacks Kerry for phony heroism thirty years ago when just last year his own candidate had himself filmed in a little costume prancing around on an aircraft carrier pretending he'd won a war that had only begun. But, by tarring Kerry with using war as a PR stunt for his own personal gain, people can process the uncomfortable feelings they are experiencing about Iraq as not really being caused by Junior, but by his rival who is the real shallow opportunist who only pretends to be a man of proven leadership and experience.
He spent 70 million to get people to call Kerry a flip flopper when the truth is that the compassionate-conservative-uniter-not-divider has a very recent proven record of unprecedented ugly partisanship and ruthless bloodlust. He's mananged to convince a large number of Americans that Kerry is unprincipled when the fiscal conservative Bush has just spent the entire surplus and run up the deficit beyond our wildest imaginings just three years ago. That's a pretty good trick. He's projected Bush's weaknesses on to Kerry and then gone after them ruthlessly. It makes it very difficult to then turn the attack back on Bush because it's been co-opted.
Given this thesis, then, if Kerry were to do the same thing he would:
1. attack Bush's speaking style. Too difficult to understand, too accented, too many convoluted sentences and mispronounced words
2. attack Bush's appearance. Too short and slight, mouth too small, ears too big. Alfred E Neuman
3. attack Bush's "signature" accomplishments. Too many announcements without any action. Too many photo opportunities without any real commitment. Too much pandering to the base.
Actually, sounds like a plan to me.