This is the impression I got from the debate. Click on the video here for a wonderful remix of the debate.
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Meta
Wow! I had no idea that my impromptu impersonations of Bush for my fellow office comrades was so accurate. Before I saw that, I thought that I may have been a little over the top.
i’ve been telling my republican friends for the past four years that george shrub’s facial tics, whenever they do manage to get past the tv editors, are a serious credibility-killer.
twitch, lie, purse lips, lie, blink, blink, blink, lie.
All I can say is that the left keeps reminding me how superficial their thinking is. This detracts from the serious business of promoting open software which is off the radar screens of either of these two “performers”.
Oh, there’s plenty of substantial crititicism to make of Bush too, but every time the left does that the right switches tactics and yells that the left is being shrill and emotionally unstable. So basically no matter what anyone says of Bush, the right finds a way to attack the critic instead of dealing with the criticism. Now who’s being superficial?
It’s not superficial, it’s realpolitik. People go on appearances. Which is why, for example, the Republican reps on the debate committee wanted the room kept hot, so Kerry would look uncomfortable and sweaty, and why they wanted Bush’s hors-champ squirming and facial tics off the national airwaves.
Bush’s facial tics kill his credibility. Similarly, Kerry looks and sounds like he has a two-by-four up his ass.
beachguy:
On the topic of superficiality I have two words for you: “Gore” and “sigh”.
“Dean” and “yeehah!”?
I didn’t see anything wrong with “the scream”.
Four comments:
First, why is Kerry labeled flip-floper? Bush run the 2000 presidential elections/campaign on the premise of pulling all US troops from abroad, claiming that the US armed forces were over-extended, & should not be involved in nation building. He executed exactly the opposite of what he preached. If this is not flip-flopping, what is?
Second, why isn’t Kerry talking about the thousand of US forces that have been injured & will most likely remain disabled for the rest of their lives, in addition to the thousand plus that perished & thousand more innocent Iraqis that were caught in the cross-fire?
Third, maybe President Bush is not as dumb as he appears, but if he really is, I bet you he would not have be allowed to supervise a convinience store in any other nation, let alone to run a super-power. It is pretty embarrassing!
Finally, do American really believe that we are more safe today than we were four years ago? It’s almost a joke when the president makes such an assertion. But then, based on his previous statements, the president neither reads the news papers nor does he watch the news on TV. How is he going to really understand the dier situation on the ground, in places like Falluja & Najaf? But what’s even more surprising, is that there are Americans out there that believe this blatent lie. They also believe that Sadam/Iraq attacked us on 9/11. It is laughable! Just like the president, these people must either be ignorant like the president, or are mis-informed, or don’t read/listen to the news.
You need to watch more Jay Leno, particularly the “Jaywalking” segments. There are many many appallingly uninformed Americans. And they like it that way, because they don’t know any better.
In other words, an increasing number of Americans are voluntarily putting themselves in an Orwellian world. Instead of the government using totalitarianism to force people to accept black = white, they use propaganda and depend on a sizable portion of the population to gladly accept the phony feel good news and place themselves in Big Brother’s hands. Make us safe, Big Brother, they call out, and in response they have a president who tells them that they are indeed safer every day, and the war in Iraq is going well, and Al Qaeda has lost 75% of its leadership. All lies, but because they are optimistic lies these voluntary Orwellian Americans eat it up.
And they come to realize they love Big Brother.
Amazing. What couldn’t be done through enforcement, is increasingly being done through emotional manipulation. Whoda thought it could be so easy?
Exactly! That’s why Marshall McLuhan once said, “1984 really happened around 1930, only no one ever noticed.”
I originally stayed out of this thread because I didn’t bother to watch the video. However, the conversation has strayed enough, I think I’ll wade in.
Simple. Kerry doesn’t think in binary (war bad, taxes good, medicare good, etc.). Kerry ranks the war against terrorism somewhere around level 8, the war in Iraq around 5, unemployment around 6 or 7, tax cuts for people making more than $200,000/year around 3, etc. When he tries to explain that the war is more important than tax cuts, but less important than unemployment, he loses many Americans who think he’s simply dancing around and confusing issues. His “I voted for it before I voted against it” simply means that reining in Bush is more important to him than the war in Iraq.
I don’t remember this part of the 2000 campagn. However, giving you the benefit of the doubt, you can’t ignore the effect terrorism and terrorist fears have had on Americans since 2000. No, terrorism is no deadlier than it used to be, but the largest-scale terrorist attack ever did make terrorism less of a hypothetical question and more of a real-life issue for most Americans.
Because he’s fighting that flip-flopper label by talking in binary even though he doesn’t think in binary terms.
However, 1000 combat deaths after 18 months of fighting isn’t nearly as bad as the 5000 deaths/year we had in Viet Nam.
It’s embarrassing to support a candidate that has trouble campaigning against a man you believe is unfit to run a convenience store. Really, if Bush were that stupid, what would Kerry’s position in the polls (ranging from dead heat to slightly behind) imply about him?
He probably reads first-hand reports from the military commanders on the ground. In fact, he probably lets the generals run the war based on their training and experience, and deals with the details like troop levels and diplomatic relations.
Americans believe the blatant lie that they feel safer today? If they feel safer, how is that a blatant lie?
I’m tired of seeing this straw man argument. From what I remember, neither Bush or Cheney claimed a connection between Iraq and 9/11 (if I’m wrong, please send me a link). Bush did tie Saddam to terrorism (Palestinian terrorism), and for some reason, people assume terrorism == Al Quai’da. Bush never implied this (and dioing so would be ridiculous; is there a link between Al Quai’da and the IRA of the ’80s, for instance?).
Both Bush and Cheney did try to link Saddam to Al Quai’da operatives, who after September 11 went to Iraq without being arrested. As far as I can tell, this was to use Congress’s authorization of force in Afghanistan against Iraq (the authorization of force included permission to carry out war activities in any country that harbored terrorists linked to the 9/11 attacks). That is different from claiming Iraq had a planning role in 9/11, (the straw man I’m tired of seeing).
Another straw man from another post:
The straw man, of course, is that nobody can love Big Brother. Apparently, if a war goes well (or as “well” as a war can go, any way), it’s proof positive of Big Brother. But if pointing to positive facts about the war (that 14 out of 18 Iraqi provinces are in good enough shape to hold elections today, or that we have experienced lower casualties than even the most optimistic military planners expected, etc.) falls under a “Big Brother” government, then what would you call fear-mongering over the government’s social programs?
Kerry simply doesn’t seem ready to stop, or even modify, any of the long-standing social experiments from Johnson’s war on poverty (or FDR’s New Deal). Kerry tells seniors and Baby Boomers to vote for him, because Bush will steal their Social Security checks (of course, Kerry doesn’t point out that he has no plan to keep Social Security solvent for any real length of time, so the checks aren’t going to be in the mail); he tells minorities that Bush is just ready to pounce on their civil rights (never mind Rosa Parks getting behind Bush on his faith-based initiative because she honestly believed it would help out minorities); and he tells any social liberals that Bush is just moments away from remaking the courts in his own image (never mind various constitutional checks and balances that make changes in the courts incredibly slow, and we can’t ignore the kind of political pressure that prevented FDR from packing the court even though the vast majority of Congress belonged to his party and supported the New Deal.).
So, if making sure positive news about the war gets out (without silencing negative news) is proof of a “Big Brother” government, what do you call fear-mongering over the government’s role as a great provider?
Nope. I wasn’t talking about discussing positive news from Iraq, and there surely is some. I was talking about the black=white business from the Bush White House where they say things that are the opposite of reality. Things are improving in Iraq? No, things are going badly and getting worse. Americans are safer today? No, they are at greater risk. And so on. People want to feel secure. Bush tells them they are secure. They buy it. But it’s not real. That’s the Orwellian touch.
I’ve never seen a political administration in a non-totalitarian state that so openly tells its population things that are so obviously not true. And I’ve been shocked at how many in that population don’t seem to realize it.
Throwing al Sadr out of Fallujah and taking Sammara count as going well in Iraq in my book. I don’t believe it is possible for a war to be all peaches, but the Iraqi war is going as well as any ground war can. We’re losing people at the rate of about 60/month, in Desert Storm we lost people at the rate of about 200/month.
People feel safer today because they know Bush doesn’t have missiles aimed at terrorist camps just in case there’s an attack. Any missiles aimed at terrorists have already been fired. They know Bush isn’t waiting for another attack on US embassies so he can respond. The older policy kept Clinton from responding to the Cole attack (because the CIA took too long to identify al Qua’da as the source of the attack). The current policy makes people feel secure, even though they now see terrorism as something they may actually encounter.
But the biggest anti-Big Brother argument is simply that the Administration can say whatever it wants because obvious falsehoods should be vetted by the independent media. Since Bush has not shut them down, they are still vetting his stories. If people believe Bush over the media, then perhaps you have a point. But if that’s the case, is it Bush’ fault?
Oops. Al Sadr was thrown out of Najaf. He did go with his weapons but:
That’s an interesting way to compare wars, since the first was over in a matter of days, and the current one is dragging on month after month after month. Indeed, the Administration is talking about being in Iraq for years, and we saw how that worked out in Vietnam.
Americans are not safer today because terrorism is on the rise around the world, and more Americans have died in the last year in terrorist attacks than in any year other than 2001.
You can’t view the video using Firefox on an Apple Powerbook, or at least I can’t.
Nate, I recognize that it’s almost impossible to compare wars. Our objectives in Kuwait were much different from our objectives in Iraq.
If we look only at the first month of Iraqi Freedom, we had 130(+/-) deaths, and that was the actual invasion part. All of Desert Storm was invasion, and we lost about 200 people per month (or 300 [+/-] for the six week invasion). After the actual invasion, our casualties have dropped considerably, and we are now losing 60 people a month.
Of course that means 60 families lose a spouse, child and/or parent. But as wars go, that’s about as good as you can hope for.
My point is that Desert Storm had widespread public support (largely because it lasted “days”), and Iraqi Freedom has been labeled a quagmire (largely because it has lasted 18 months) although it is going better in some respects than Desert Storm.
Regarding terrorism, the reason 2001 had such a large American death toll is because of the previous policy of only reacting to attacks by launching missiles. That atmosphere made it possible to plan the largest terrorist attacks in history.
Going after terrorists where they live will obviously lead to short-term increases in terrorism. Over time the idea of being a jihadist will lose some of its appeal. Cheney made an interesting comment last night that Palestinian suicide bombers are starting to dwindle, partly because their families no longer get checks from Saddam Hussein. Even Arabian terrorists think rationally and can be deterred if the cost-benefit analysis doesn’t work out.
The reason for the previous policy toward terrorist acts was due to American expectations based upon the Powell policy. They wanted only clean wars, something that was unrealistic, but one that hampered the military. Indeed, Republicans roundly ridiculed Clinton when he did launch missles, and never suggested sending in the troops. Complaining about the prior policy without acknowledging that it was a bipartisan policy is disingenuous.
I agree that you cannot compare wars. Different circumstances and all. My point was that there is no need to compare them. Just deal with the current one. The administration says things are going better than they actually are. You cannot get more Orwellian than that — that tactic is right out of the book.
To Nate,
I notice that you mentioned Orwellian twice. I
want to point out that the Democratic Party employs
the same strategy. The Democratic Party would love
to mislead…oops…lead the Americans to believe
that its way – the Democratic Way – is the right
way, the only way, the truth. Kerry is trying to
tell the Americans that they will be much safer
when Kerry becomes president. Of course, it is
easier said than done. The bottom line is that all
what the Democratic Party wants is the power and
it does not give a damn about the truth.
In other words, the Democratic Party, as well as
the Republican Party, is not immune to the
Orwellian thinking.
Joseph Pietro Riolo
<[email protected]>
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions
in this comment in the public domain.
I am aware that Republicans have avoided escalating several fights because of the ghost of an increasing death toll. There was little criticism when Clinton withdrew from Somalia, for instance. Reagan withdrew from Beirut because of bombings against US barracks. Both sides share some guilt here.
Clinton also had no qualms about flexing military muscle as long as no Americans got hurt. Yes, I used that policy as an example of how Clinton ran things, and perhaps I shouldn’t have. Then again, when Clinton had good reason to attack US enemies, I don’t remember him being ridiculed for it. I am aware of one time Republicans criticized Clinton’s missile strikes, and that was an attack on an Iraqi “WMD research facility.” The ridicule came from the timing of the attack — the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Could you point me to other examples?
As a country, we have avoided deadly actions since Viet Nam. That isn’t Clinton’s fault. But I’m not so sure Bush deserves criticism for the death toll in Iraq, if you recognize that the American desire for “only clean wars” was “was unrealistic” and “hampered the military.”
My point about the death toll is simple: the death toll from the current war isn’t enough, by itself, to call the action a mess. As far as a war can go, this one is going relativley well. Our enemies in Iraq have effectively nickle-and-dimed us for 18 months, so the numbers eventually added up. But, the numbers are much lower than even the most optimistic planners expected.
If you have other reasons the situation is a mess, I would like to hear them.
On the other hand, I don’t consider the Administration’s positive claims Orwellian, because (if you recall), the Administration doesn’t own the media. Any positive claims it makes should be vetted by the media before they are reported, and it appears that’s how things are going (aside from CBS’s poor record of repeating stories instead of reporting them).
So, when the Administration reports that there are now enough Iraqis to retake Samarra, and that other cities are next on the list, the media can confirm this. This appears to support the Administrations view that Iraqi forces are getting decent training and will be able to (one day) take over the country’s security concerns. When the Administration can point to large sections (i.e., 14 out of 18 provinces) where there is little or no terrorism, the media can verify this report. That isn’t Orwellian, unless you can point to something I’m missing.
And, no, I’m not missing the negative reporting. I know that the media reports negative stories as well. Americans then have the chance to look at both angles, and decide for themselves if they feel safer. This isn’t Orwellian, either.
Yes, the Democrats have become like the Republicans in their behavior. The Bush Team goes beyond both, however, in their insistence on calling black = white. I’ve not seen the likes of it since Nixon insisted he wasn’t a crook.
Nate, would you please give some examples? It’s fun to accuse people, but I would like to see proof backing up the accusations.
Are you referring to the Iraqi war? If so, how do you refute that (as far as wars go) this one has gone pretty well? Are you referring to Bush’s claims that intelligence showed Saddam had WMDs? If so, how do you square that with Clinton’s similar claims, and Kerry’s similar claims, and Edwards’s similar claims?
the video is now at http://www.democrats.org/faces