More fun with pictures from the Bush campaign web site

“Really; Dick Cheney’s head is like this big!”

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“Are these those Internets I keep hearing about?”

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“I’m with stupid.”

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An unholy ritual of some kind.

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“Hey, did you notice the flag?”

Vox simius, vox dei

Letters to the (London) Times deny that the guy I mentioned yesterday is the first Satanist in the Royal Navy, one claiming to have filled that in on a form in 1947. He was asked what special facilities he would require for Sunday worship.

Funny and all too appropriate John Bunning picture.

I should probably be thinking about the political implications of Rehnquist’s cancer. But instead I keep picturing him in a hospital gown with stripes on the sleeves and his butt hanging out. Please make it stop.

An Indy reporter says that he’s been to Al Qa Qaa, the arms depot with the funny name, before. It was named in Tony Blair’s “dodgy dossier” as a site where chemical weapons were manufactured. The Iraqi government immediately invited reporters to check it out, and they did, and it wasn’t. IAEA inspectors also regularly visited. So by the time the war started, the US knew exactly what was in Al Qa Qaa; it wasn’t an intelligence failure, but a failure to act on intelligence. But you know what they say in the Pentagon: 350 tons of high-quality explosive here, 350 tons of high-quality explosive there, pretty soon it adds up.

The WaPo Tuesday has a truly wrong-headed editorial suggesting that the candidates should promise now to “put the national interest first” and not challenge close election results merely because they might have been, ya know, stolen. That was Scalia’s logic in Gore v. Bush. The logic that the next president’s legitimacy would be harmed by his election being put under judicial scrutiny is the logic that causes the Bushies to complain about his being fact-checked, or about Chimpy’s assertions being questioned. My favorite recently was the campaign threatening legal action against MTV’s Rock the Vote campaign for discussing the possibility of a draft, saying that Shrub’s promise that he wouldn’t start one should have been enough to put the issue beyond doubt or discussion. Thus the title of this post, which hopefully is the Latin for “the voice of the monkey is the voice of God” (there seems to be no Latin word for chimpanzee), a play on the phrase Vox Populi, Vox Dei.

If my readership drops to zero tomorrow, I’ll blame my attempt to make a joke in a dead language I don’t actually know.

Anyway, I’ve heard R campaign officials--there was one today in Ohio talking about why they were planning to put thousands of workers into polling places to challenge voters who, ahem, look ineligible; I’ve lost the quote, but he was blaming it on D voter-registration drives, which he evidently considered tantamount to a dirty trick.

Good for...

The Bush campaign sent another email to my cat. Who is still not impressed.



This one cleverly appeals to her as a Californian, with a link to a webpage that shows “President Bush is Good for California.” Actually, it looks like no one even bothered to customize these pages for each state, just inserted the state name every sentence or two, like a piece of junk mail. There are no pages for Guam, Puerto Rico or the District of Columbia. Each page has pictures, and some of those are pretty generic, too, campaign events, people waving signs. Some are not. See if you can guess which state’s website this picture is from (all pictures are from the Bush website):



That’s right, Texas. Looks kinda naked without the hat.



Ah, that’s....better?

One of the California pictures shows typical young Republicans, at least in California.



And here’s Bush with a typical older Republican. After this picture was taken, he couldn’t color in his coloring books for a week.



After that, he decided it was safer to send a stand-in to California. No one noticed the difference.



He also sent a stand-in to Alaska, because he’s afraid of polar bears.



Arctic Warriors? Um, are we at war with the Eskimos or something? I think we should be told.

Legitimately targeted, regrettably harmed, shit out of luck

In talking about the historical amnesia over Fallujah, I missed a quote, from British Foreign Minister Jack Straw, who after the 4 contractors were killed said that it “was not the Americans who cast the first stone...in Fallujah.” My own historical amnesia was pointed out to me (by email) by blogger ManicNetPreacher, who noted that in the 1st Gulf War, the market in Fallujah was bombed twice (by the British).
(Update: he's written his own post on the subject, with more details.)

The Dayton Daily News used the FOIA to get hold of Iraqi compensation records, and found that most Iraqis were turned down, with such comments as “Coalition forces dropped ordnance during Operation Iraqi Freedom on legitimate targets. Your family was in an area that was being legitimately targeted and therefore regrettably harmed.”

Al Qaqaa Cock-Up

So we let 380 tons of explosives get stolen from the Al Qaqaa military base in Iraq. As Rummy likes to say, freedom is messy.

My contribution to the discussion of this fiasco is to give it a name, that in the title of this post. Please use it widely.

Triumph of the W

A member of the crew of the Royal Navy frigate Cumberland (his rank is “Leading Hand”) has been allowed to practice Satanism aboard the ship. When Churchill was First Sea Lord, an admiral complained that one of his proposed reforms went against naval traditions. Churchill replied that the only traditions the Royal Navy had were “rum, sodomy, and the lash.” No, I didn’t write a segue between those 2 items--does there always have to be a segue?
(Update: a reader informs me that the quote is apocryphal, pointing me towards the “Churchill didn’t say that, dummy” page of The Churchill Centre website.)

Although ethnic Serbs in Kosovo boycotted the elections, they are guaranteed 1/12 of the seats in the Kosovan parliament.

Lithuanian parliamentary elections are likely to produce a prime minister who made his millions from pickles. Should have a lot to talk about with Teresa Heinz-Kerry.

ANGRY BLACK FLORIDIANS FOR KERRY. Amusing AP headline: “Gore Urges Angry Black Floridians to Vote.” He told them, “If anybody ever tells you that one vote doesn’t count, you tell them to come talk to me,” adding, “really, come talk to me, I’m lonely. So very, very lonely.”

Another AP story describes a Bush rally: “And if the helicopter arrivals weren’t showy enough, Bush had Air Force One fly over the NFL football stadium in Jacksonville where tens of thousands of people were waiting to hear him speak.” Am I the only one reminded of the beginning sequence in “Triumph of the Will,” when Hitler arrived by plane for the Nuremberg rally? Just saying.



Really, just saying.

Fallujah, again & again

Kerry, according to the LA Times, is “framing the White House contest as a choice between hope and fear”. Guess which one is which.

Zarqawi has changed the name of his organization from Jamaat al Tawhid wal Jihad to Tanzim Qaedat al Jihad fi Bilad al Rafidain (Qaeda Organization for Jihad in Iraq).

How many of you were thinking “People’s Front of Judea?”

A few days ago I wrote a post which I called “Fallujah, again,” my point being that long before Fallujah became a symbol of Iraqi intransigence in the minds of American political and military rulers (a role it also took on for the Iraqi resistance), the crushing of which was central to the US mission, indeed long before most Americans had heard of the place, military ham-handedness had ensured that Americans would always be hated in Fallujah. I was trying to remind y’all of how in April 2003 US soldiers shot up two crowds of protesters, and any positive mission was irretrievably lost, leaving only conquest and subjugation.

I didn’t realize how necessary my reminder was until I read this LA Times article, quite a long one entitled “Why America Has Waged a Losing Battle on Fallouja.” Actually, before you read that (or if you don’t intend to), look at this sidebar timeline. Everything before the 4 US contractors were killed is ignored, giving the impression that Americans are the victims in all this and that the Fallujans brought on themselves the onslaught that is coming. The article isn’t quite as bad as the timeline, and is worth reading, but it glances over the school protest in 2 sentences in an 8,000-word article, and this near-amnesia about the events of 2003 allow it to buy into the demonization of Zarqawi and talk about the need to “root out insurgents,” as if it’s just “outside agitators” behind the Sunni uprising.

These are the most significant posts in this blog from the “lost year” of American operations in Fallujah:
4/29/03
5/3/03
6/8/03
6/15/03
9/14/03

Every vote counts--I mean, zero’s a number, right?

40% of Albanians live on streets which don’t have names.

The motto of the dark comedy that is Election 2004 is “Now, We’re All Florida!” To ratchet up our embarrassment for our nation one more notch, read about it in a British newspaper. I like the description of Florida’s plan to deal with the manual recounts required by law as “staggeringly devious”:

The state will now permit analysis of the computerised machines’ internal audit logs in the event of a close race, she said, but if there is any discrepancy the county supervisors are to go with the original count. In other words: we will do recounts, but if the recounts change the outcome we will disregard them.

And the article presents a “nightmare scenario” in which the Supreme Court turns the election back to state legislatures, which technically have the right to appoint electors irrespective of how the electors actually voted. One update: the 6th Circuit is allowing Ohio not to count provisional ballots cast at the wrong precinct (which is a bad ruling based on a bad reading of the law, as I understand it). The number of people accidentally disfranchised will certainly be surpassed by the number deliberately disfranchised. People should not be prevented by petty loopholes and technicalities from voting for the people who will create future petty loopholes and technicalities.

On this subject, see also this NYT editorial.

Speaking of crappy elections, the Serbs in Kosovo boycotted today’s elections, almost unanimously.

Dick Cheney was inspired, evidently by the sign pictured behind him, to conjure up a world in which Kerry had always been president: the US would have “ceded our right to defend ourselves to the United Nations,” Saddam would have taken over the whole Persian Gulf, the Soviet Union would still be intact, and the Grinch would have stolen Christmas. Enchantment, indeed.

With the same energy I put into going after that goose...

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court quietly destroyed the 1st Amendment, ruling that a newspaper is not protected when it neutrally reports something defamatory said by one person, in this case a borough councilman, about another.

The Polish parliament fails to reintroduce the death penalty, 198-194. Yay!

After watching Kerry’s 1971 testimony in “Stolen Honor,” it is a weird contrast to see Kerry today trying to use the Vietnamese War to bolster his image. “With the same energy ... I put into going after the Viet Cong and trying to win for our country, I pledge to you I will hunt down and capture or kill the terrorists before they harm us.” “I can wage a better war on terror than George Bush has.” A better war on terror, for chrissake.

What is his current position on the justice of the Vietnam war? Here he’s equating the Viet Cong, whose goals were confined to Vietnam, with terrorists who plan to harm us. The “win for our country” phrase suggests that Vietnam was a just war, in American interests to fight. The “before they harm us” suggests he’s swallowed the Bush Doctrine of preemption hook, line and sinker, and claiming the ability to read people’s thoughts and kill them before they act on those thoughts.

Kerry went on, “And we will wage a war on terror that makes America proud and brings the world to our side.” Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think I’m ever going to be proud of a war on terror(ism). If you support the “war,” you should consider it a necessary evil, if you don’t, it’s an unnecessary evil. Pride doesn’t enter into it.

I watch “Stolen Honor” so you don’t have to

Although if you want to, you can find it here. This is the original, not the version that just aired. And I’m using a not-completely-accurate “rush transcript” from Daily Kos to check quotes against my own notes, but I went into it fresh.

Before I forget: every anti-Kerry former POW interviewed in the film is white. I assume because we only sent white people to fight in Vietnam.

The argument, if one can distinguish it with that word, is that Kerry’s 1971 testimony was a stab in the back (Dolchstoß, in the original German version of this theme),



which resulted in the US losing the Vietnam war (“a cause lost more at home than on the battlefield”), and POWs being kept by the Vietnamese longer than they would otherwise have been (“the anti-war crowd...owe us two years”) (I know how he feels: the makers of this film owe me 42 minutes of my life back).

I’m a little unsure of the causality of all this, but John Kerry in 1971 was evidently the most powerful person in the country--who knew? Because Kerry called some American soldiers “war criminals,” the North Vietnamese thought that the POWs they held must be war criminals and... no, sorry, the logic escapes me.

The existence of actual war crimes is rejected out of hand, Kerry accused of knowingly lying about them. My Lai is mentioned in order to dismiss it, in the fashion of Rumsfeld talking about Abu Ghraib, as an isolated incident, and anyway wasn’t Lt. Calley punished? (With about a year of rather luxurious house arrest, as I recall). There is some talk, mostly from wives of former POWs, of the US military being over there just to help the Vietnamese people.

It should be pointed out that Kerry’s crime consisted of talking (oh, and he went to North Vietnam too) and being believed. He “wrote the first draft of history,” creating the image of the American soldier in Vietnam that has dominated media portrayals (they really don’t like Apocalypse Now, which oddly enough they hold Kerry responsible for).

They don’t like him having talked about Vietnam in 1971, and they don’t like him talking about Vietnam now. “By making his actions during and after the war the corner-stone of his political career, he forces us to feel again the old agonies and regurgitate old doubts.” At this point, the film just sounds whiny.

So the themes are 1) Kerry is a big ol’ liar, 2) criticizing a war while it’s going on, or even 30 years later, is bad, and 3) we don’t want to have to regurgitate old doubts. In fact, doubt is bad, period. And Jane Fonda also sucks.

Tremulous with anticipation

An Ohio case shows one Bush strategy for “winning” the election in the courts by stopping challenges to election-rigging dead. The Ohio secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, has already shown his willingness to use petty rules (the thickness of the paper used in voter registrations) to deprive people of the right to vote. Now he’s decided that voters can’t cast provisional ballots except at their own polling places. Let’s pass over the rights and wrongs of this case and focus on the US Justice Dept. position, which is that individuals and the Democratic party have no standing to challenge such rules, and that only Ashcroft’s merry minions may sue to enforce election laws.

Bush says Kerry “does not understand the enemy we face and has no idea how to keep America secure.” Yes, George W. Bush is accusing someone of knowing less about something than he does.

By the way, note Bush’s newest rhetorical trick: strategic non-use of contractions. This is also on display in “He can run, but he cannot hide.”

The London Times has the correction to end all corrections: “In our leading article of Tuesday, November 14, 1854, we described the Charge of the Light Brigade as a disaster...” Evidently it wasn’t that bad. Also, their correspondent’s sentence “This melancholy day, in which the Light Brigade was annihilated by their own rashness” has bad pronoun-verb agreement.

Not that I would ever condone such behaviour, but some advice to the next people trying to hit Ann Coulter with a pie: study the methods used in the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.

The Welfare State: A British consultant psychiatrist writes in the British Medical Journal about discussions over whether to find a prostitute for a resident of an old age home in his 80s whose regular one had stopped coming around. The staff refused to help him find a new one (he was hard of sight and hearing, making it difficult for him to do so), so he started asking female staff members. They hired a male orderly to follow him around, full time, to prevent him propositioning the women, before eventually finding a prostitute for him. “Mr Cooper had been tremulous with anticipation, and the cab had already been summoned, when the liaison was called off by social services. There had been a second change of plan. Social services now took the view that the prostitute was a sort of therapy, and they would only continue the ‘therapy’ if it was initiated in an NHS hospital and was shown to have a beneficial effect on his behaviour in an inpatient setting.” Eventually he died unfulfilled. It’s a funny story, of course, but you can read it as human interest or for what it says about the treatment of the elderly in institutional settings.

My, what big teeth you have, grandmother

Seen the Bush “Wolves” ad yet? Others have dealt with the ongoing slander on wolves and the fact that the intelligence cut Kerry supported was a Republican plan. I want to highlight two words: “In an increasingly dangerous world, even after the first terrorist attack on America ... John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America’s intelligence operations.” What was the first terrorist attack on America? The assassination of McKinley? The bomb-thrower at the Haymarket riot? I presume they mean the first attack on the World Trade Center, but if the casual viewer understands it to mean 9/11, that’s just fine with the RNC.
(Update: and what do the wolves have to say, you ask.)

A reader wrote to ask, “How long do you think it will take to have a decision on the presidency? I mean assuming the Republicans don’t steal it outright.” As I thought about all the factors involved--the inevitable court challenges in close states, voting-machine meltdowns, dirty tricks, felon purges, voter suppression, incomplete voter lists, etc--it became clear how much the legitimacy of the electoral process has been damaged (good Orcinus post, with lots of links, on these issues). When you think of Bush or Kerry or Nader or Pelletier “winning the election,” do you think that he will have 1) won the most votes, 2) won the most electoral votes, 3) won the most Supreme Court justices, 4) won the most state Supreme Court cases? The link between votes cast and outcome seems to be more and more attenuated. We won’t really believe the final vote count. We will know that many who wanted to vote were disenfranchised, one way or another. I really don’t want to spend another 4 years putting the word president inside quotation marks.

The same reader has brought my attention to Ohio’s Issue I. 11 states have anti-gay marriage measures on the November ballot. Ohio, which already bans gay marriage, will vote on whether “This state and its political subdivisions shall not create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance or effect of marriage.” This is a roll-back of rights going far beyond marriage. Civil unions, which exist in some localities, would go, but the phrasing is so vague that it might also ban gay adoption, domestic violence provisions for unmarried couples, insurance coverage, etc etc.

Elephant man

“Left I” has 2 Cuban stories. State Dept spokesmodel Richard Boucher, asked about Castro’s broken knee, said of the 78-year old man, “You’d have to check with the Cubans to find out what’s broken about Mr Castro” and refused to wish him a speedy recovery. Class, pure class.

Also, in a story I can’t believe got so little attention, the Bush admin argued in the Supreme Court last week that the 917 Mariels (shipped by Cuba to the US in 1980) still in American detention have no right to be freed, ever. John Paul Stevens asked whether, if they have no rights at all, they could just be summarily shot. The gov lawyer said no, but couldn’t explain why not.

The Washington Post (finally) checks up on one of Bush’s oft-repeated claims: “Townsend, Bush’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, said ‘three-quarters’ of ‘the known al Qaeda leaders on 9/11’ were dead or in custody. Asked to elaborate, she said she would have to consult a list. White House spokeswoman Erin Healy referred follow-up questions to the FBI. Spokesmen for the FBI, the National Security Council and the CIA did not respond to multiple telephone calls and e-mails.”

California is evidently going to pass a proposition to make primaries “non-partisan,” with all voters being able to vote for any candidates in the primaries, irrespective of party, with only the top 2 being on the ballot, and those as centrist, bland, and death-penalty-supporting as possible. After it passes, I will never be able to vote again for major statewide public offices. So please, Californians, and I will say this bluntly to catch the search engines, Vote no on 62 (for the rest of my prop. endorsements, use the link at the top of the right column).

You may have heard that Gubana Aahnuld Schwarzenegger demonstrated his alleged independence from his own party by coming out in favor of stem cell research (Prop. 71). But he did it late. Indeed, he did it to bolster his unearned rep for independence, then use that rep for Republican goals. Today, my mailbox was graced by an expensive booklet of “Gov. Arnold S.’s Ballot Proposition Voter Guide,” which was paid for by the Republican Party ($2 million, 5 million copies mailed out), which does not feature any position on 71. You can see it by clicking below on what I assume is an unintended juxtaposition on their website (it shows up this way on IE & Foxfire, but not Opera), showing an elephant emerging from Arnie’s forehead. It’s an impressive piece of obfuscatory propaganda, designed to uninform. For example, its description of Prop 63, which it opposes, is “new tax and state bureaucracy,” with no explanation that it is for mental health services. It does say that 63 “will not contribute one cent to education or dealing with the budget crisis.” Or to legalizing ownership of ferrets, but it’s not supposed to. And it says Prop 66 “waters down three strikes law,” creating “another loophole”. The loophole is that for a criminal to get life imprisonment for a 3rd strike, it would have to be for a violent crime, not stealing a slice of pizza.

But what annoys me about this document, why I’ve spent so long on it, is the impropriety of its use of the trappings of office: the governor’s seal appears no fewer than 3 times on the cover and 16 times in total, in a leaflet put out by one party. It is legitimate to put the Gropenführer’s influence into play, but not his office. There are no stylized elephants in the pamphlet.

How much training do you need to learn that it’s wrong to force a man to masturbate?

Fidel Castro trips and breaks his knee. The Times of London helpfully provides a photo sequence of the fall.

Bush signed a law providing $82 million in grants for preventing suicide among the young. And yet he still funds abstinence programs, which can’t be helping.

Brad Friedman has a list of some of the audio/video clips of Bush’s more embarrassing moments removed from the White House website.

Alternet on polls showing that Bush supporters (the unreality-based community) still believe that Iraq had WMDs and links to Al Qaida. Oh, and they believe that this is exactly what experts and the 9/11 Commission have determined. And the percentage of people who are wrong on the facts is increasing over time. In some ways it’s reassuring that so much of Bush’s support is based on pure pig ignorance (they are also wrong about his positions on various issues). In other ways, not so much.

Sgt Ivan Frederick of the Abu Ghraib Fredericks is going to jail for 8 years. The prosecutor asked, “How much training do you need to learn that it’s wrong to force a man to masturbate?” I’m pretty sure that’s a trick question.

Be vewwy vewwy quiet, I'm pwooving my manwiness to swing voters

John Kerry went hunting in Ohio today.

Shouldn’t that be cetacean-American?

Kerry: “The president says he’s a leader. Well, Mr. President, look behind you. There’s hardly anyone there. It’s not leadership.” Ah, the old “Look behind you!” ploy.

Clearly, everyone needs to call their Congresscritter and ask if they have had a flu shot. If they have, vote against them, the wimps. That’s what I like about American elections, their sense of perspective: yesterday Cheney threatened that if Kerry were elected, American cities would be hit with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, rains of toads, the slaying of the first born, crappy parking, etc, and today Kerry attacked Cheney for having been vaccinated.

The 9th Circuit throws out a suit by the “cetacean community” against the Pentagon for damage caused to them by the use of sonar. A scientist brought the suit on the cetaceans’ behalf, in order to bring attention to their plight by becoming the butt of late-night comedians’ jokes.

From the White House website, Department of Shamelessness:

Email the White House...
Q:Heidi from Grafton, WI:
My mother called me in a panic today, because she heard that President Bush has a plan to privatize Social Security. Is this right?
-- Click here for more...

Fallujah, again

Enjoythedraft.com suggests that Bush won’t call the draft a draft, but watch out for the “No 18-to-25-Year-Old Left Behind Act.”

I feel like I’ve been writing about Fallujah forever. The first time most of us heard the name was when American soldiers shot up a crowd peacefully protesting the occupation of their school. The next day, they shot up a crowd protesting the earlier shootings. 25 dead over both days, and that was it for any possibility of winning the hearts and minds of Fallujah, it wasn’t possible after that. Everything since then has been about subjugation, pure and simple.

When the soldiers withdrew from the school, they left graffiti such as “Eat shit Iraq,” and “I love pork.” By June of last year, I wrote, Fallujah had become “Belfast without the politeness.”

I’ll spare you further recapitulation--although anyone who wants to know more about the history of US-Fallujah relations before we pound the city into dust might wish to use the handy search function. There’s a must-read article in the Guardian by Patrick Graham. He reports that many Fallujans don’t believe there is such a person as Zarqawi. The city authorities say he’s left the city, and I can’t imagine how they would be able to capture him and hand him over if they wanted to.

If you haven’t had enough horror, the Guardian also provides a detailed description of the shooting of a 13-year old Palestinian girl by an Israeli officer. Firing on full automatic.

God’s blessing is on him

The problem with quoting Pat Robertson quoting Bush saying that there would be no casualties in Iraq, is that it’s Pat Robertson, who is batshit insane.

Pat goes on to endorse Bush because “God’s blessing is on him.” Similarly, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council also endorses Bush to head up the Great Satan. That Bush sure does know how to build a coalition!

Iraq is trying to persuade Care International not to leave Iraq after its director Margaret Hassan is kidnapped, saying that pulling out would be giving in to the terrorists. Care International says we’re ok with that.

The US bombs a teacher training college in Fallujah. Fallujah children say we’re ok with that.

You’ve got to get your mind around that concept

Embarrassing death of the day, Guardian headline: “Farmer, 73, Killed by Rutting Stag.”

I believe the official story is that Burma’s semi-moderate semi-reformer PM, Khin Nyunt, has arranged to be deposed by the military in order to spend more time with his family. No, sorry, he has retired “for health reasons.” This is an intramural thing (the Indy explains that in military-junta terms, General Nyunt being made prime minister in the first place was considered a demotion), so not a big deal, I think.

In Ohio, Dick “Mr. Sensitive” Cheney again accuses Kerry of having gone “over the top” by mentioning Mary Cheney’s lesbianism. That metaphor comes from World War I trench warfare. In the very same speech, Dick the Dick demonstrates his greater modernity by going nuclear on Kerry’s ass, saying that under Kerry terrorists would attack American cities with chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, or possibly all three at once, ‘cause Kerry will suck just that bad. “That’s the ultimate threat. For us to have a strategy that’s capable of defeating that threat, you’ve got to get your mind around that concept.” As for instance:



AP headline: “Mormon Church Voices View on Gay Marriage.” I won’t leave you in suspense: they’re against it.

A Guardian article on the US elections notes that while there are some PC limits established by the left--attacking gays and women is now off-limits, for example--the right has created still more taboos: the military can’t be criticized, so Abu Ghraib is never mentioned; anything done in the name of 9/11, including the Patriot Act, is also sacrosanct; concern for international opinion is verboten.

A WaPo article about the use of lies in campaign ads quotes a consultant saying something I’ve said before, that there are simply no penalties for distortion and just plain making shit up. I can’t tell how much of it is that Americans consider it such an integral part of the political process that they literally don’t mind being lied to, and how much is that Bush (and yes, Kerry does it too, more so lately, but he’s not in the same league) has made the calculation that he can lie to the politically ignorant (which is what the undecided voters mostly are at this stage) without pissing off those among his base who know that Kerry didn’t say that terrorism is just a nuisance, and understand why he voted against the $87 billion. You would think that the fact that Bush threatened to veto that very same money if the tax cut for the rich was repealed would make it impossible for him to say that Kerry was abandoning the troops. Another possibility is that news & commentary consumption is so bifurcated now that Bush’s base will simply never see their fearless leader corrected on Fox. The distortions and lies should be treated as a great insult, both to the intelligence of the electors, and to the dignity of the electoral process. You can stop laughing at the word “dignity” now. Really, stop.

Relishing victory

In yesterday’s speech, Bush said that Kerry “has a record of trying to weaken American intelligence.” As opposed to Bush, who brings down the average national IQ all by himself.

Factcheck.org points out that some of the weapons programs Bush is faulting Kerry for not supporting were also opposed by Bush’s father.

I’ve said before that we need to stop using the same vocabulary to describe real elections and sham elections. In the NY Times today, a headline on page 3: “Relishing Victory at Polls, Belarus Leader Denounces Critics.” But there’s also an editorial, headlined “A Sham Election in Eastern Europe.” The former, by attempting to appear neutral, winds up being a less accurate representation of reality than the latter. It wasn’t a “victory” at the polls, because Lukashenko had rigged the election; the word “relishing” is therefore also inappropriate.