Today’s phony controversy being used to distract voters from real issues, from the New York Times:
Mr. Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate who is believed to be considering another run for the White House in 2008, set the stage for bitter back-and-forth as he addressed a gathering at Pasadena City College in California.
The senator, who was campaigning for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Phil Angelides, opened with several one-liners, joking at one point that President Bush had lived in Texas but now “lives in a state of denial.â€
Then, Mr. Kerry said: “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.â€
The usual herd of sheep — I’m not going to link; you know who they are — bought the GOP line that Kerry was insulting the troops. Remarkably, at the beginning of today’s Hardball both Chris Matthews and Republican former Senator Congressman Richard Armey admitted that Kerry was referring to George W. Bush getting stuck in Iraq, not the troops.
Oliver Willis has John Kerry’s full response. Here is a press release from John Kerry’s web site. See also Taylor Marsh.
And on a day nearly every rightie blogger is thumping his/her chest over who loves the troops more — Republican staffers of Virginia Senator George Allen assault a Marine vet.
Kerry is not a candidate for anything right now, but that isn’t stopping the Bushies from bubbling over in fake outrage to fire up the base against the evil Democrats. Because, you know, if one Democrat says something (that he didn’t actually say), all Democrats must think exactly the same way.
It’s nasty out there, people. E.J. Dionne writes,
Whatever else it will be remembered for, this year’s campaign will mark the moment when Republican leaders who govern in the name of conservatism turned definitively away from hope and waged one of the most trivial and ugly campaigns in our country’s history. …
… this year Republican campaigners and their advocates in the conservative media have crossed line after line in sheer meanness, triviality and tastelessness. Conservative optimism and its promise of morning in America have curdled into the gloom of a Halloween midnight horror show.
It was always obvious to me that the “morning in America” promise was only for rich and heterosexual white people. And when walking vegetables like David Brooks or George Will write about how conservatives are so much more optimistic and lighthearted than Dems, I never bought that, either. What conservatives are is more out of touch with their own emotions. They’re miserable, hateful little buggers most of the time. That’s what makes them conservatives.
And, frankly, this campaign doesn’t seem all that much different from the last several campaigns to me. The righties have been pelting us with feces for the past several elections cycles.
I saw a Daily Show montage this morning in which every Republican candidate shouted some version of the argument that Democrats would “raise taxes” and “lose the war” in Iraq. Bush said the same thing yesterday. I get pretty depressed by the state of the world when I see this kind of thing because of how stupid these people assume voters must be. Who started this war that we are now losing and will continue losing until we’ve finally admitted we lost? Who destroyed the fiscal balance they inherited from the Clinton administration and helped cause the single worst reversal of fiscal fortune in the country’s history? And just how would a Democratic House or Senate “raise taxes” without Bush’s signature on a bill? Does anyone think they are about to assume a “veto-proof” majority? In other words, the Republicans are running a campaign on what is, whatever you happen to believe politically, pure nonsense. And not only do they expect it to work, none of the smart-guy pundits think to call them on it. Sad, sad, sad, particularly when you think about how many hundreds of thousands of people must die in Iraq and elsewhere, for this idiocy.
Bush is campaigning his desperate little ass off — if only he’d put that much energy into, you know, governing. He’s flat-out saying that if the Dems take back Congress, the terrorists will win. And then — get this — when Sean Hannity asked Bush about criticism of him from Democrats, Bush said — “It’s sad that we can’t have a civil discourse in the midst of historic times.”
I think I’ll blow that up a bit.
I’ve got to admit — the boy’s got some cojones.
Update: I had to laugh at this, from John Cole at Balloon Juice:
A general rule of thumb regarding controversies like this is to count how many posts Michelle Malkin has about the issue, and to note that there is a positive correlation to how trivial the matter is and how many posts she has about it. At my last count, she had four on her site, two on her spin-off site Hot Air (who I still think ripped their name off from me). That would tell me that this issue would be somewhere between Cindy Sheehan and crescent-shaped 9/11 memorials and Terri Schaivo in importance, but the possibility is there for a new record.
See Balloon Juice for links, and also to see how Lying Lulu distorted Kerry’s quote.
Update update: See also Josh Marshall and Shakespeare’s Sister.
Tsk. Stirring the hornets’ nest again. This has become so pathetically predictable. Really, righties are all very amusing, in a sort of despicable way.
As for the Bush quote: I rolled on the floor.
I wish I had a nickle for every time I blew a punch line.
Gimme a break, guys. Can we return to the issues now?
See a tongue-in-cheek posting that employs the same GOP tactic used in relation to Senator Kerry to creatively interpret remarks made by the President in the most unfavorable manner…here:
http://www.thoughttheater.com/2006/10/bush_endorses_malpractice_sexual_assault.php
I can’t understand why Bush would think that the America public is stupid.
http://www.townhall.com/content.aspx?ContentGuid=f8dcfd3f-6b4e-4127-880f-1ec11908d695&Comments=true#comments
“The usual herd of sheep…”
Retired and active service military, and their families, are not happy about Senator Kerry’s original, extemporaneous remarks (you can’t hide from YouTube).
They are, of course, as we all know now not very sophisticated or academically credentialed. Poor little lambs.
They are, of course, as we all know now not very sophisticated or academically credentialed. Poor little lambs.
I’ll pass your comment on to my brother, a retired career army officer and Ph.D.
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To the best of my knowledge, Dick Armey was never a senator, just a representative from the lone brain cell state. He was the leader of the dick army, er GOP Majority before delay.
It was good to see Sen Kerry showing the spine we all knew he had (in his rebuttal), it’s just 24 month’s too late. However, he has rendered the most accurate description of Tony Snow we’ve heard (so far).
Now back to discussing Iraq.
Smart or dumb doesn’t change the fact that they are dying for a lie.
58,000 died in vain in Vietnam because Americans cared enough to support a lie. 2,814 have died in vain in Iraq so far because America cares enough to support a lie.
a fact that many disabled Iraqi veterans will soon find out,is that when America’s false praises of honor and sacrifice fade.. they’ll be left alone to bear the burden of the sacrifice that others once attached themselves to so readily. And another thing they should know..when they are out selling their buddy poppies in front of Walmarts, the people who avoid them do it because they are just uncomfortable looking at disfigured men and it’s nothing personal.
Who cares? Kerry isn’t running for anything this year. How does this help Republican candidates get their message out in this last week?
Vote for me because John Kerry said something either stupid or badly!
I don’t get it. It might hurt Kerry if he runs again but that’s it. Otherwise it’s a waste of a news cycle for trailing candidates.
As I’ve observed the flap over Kerry’s words at Pasadena Community College over the last few hours, I’ve been struck by how similar this is to the way in which the Republican noise machine distorted, took out of context, and just flat-out lied about Al Gore’s remarks on the internet back during the 2000 election.
What actually happened was that Gore was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN on March 9, 1999. At that time, he was competing against Bill Bradley for the Democratic nomination. Blitzer asked a question this way: “Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley, a friend of yours, a former colleague in the Senate? What do you have to bring to this that he doesn’t necessarily bring to this process?”
Gore responded as follows (bear with me, because context is important in these matters): “Well, I will be offering — I’ll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be. But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I’ve traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system. During a quarter century of public service, including most of it long before I came into my current job, I have worked to try to improve the quality of life in our country and in our world. And what I’ve seen during that experience is an emerging future that’s very exciting, about which I’m very optimistic, and toward which I want to lead.”
Now, this isn’t the best example of spoken English in the history of English-speaking people. It’s vague, for example, and Gore overuses the word “initiative.” However, it is clear from the context that he was talking about his “service in the US Congress” and about legislative “initiatives,” which would include laws authorizing policies and appropriating funds. He applied that language, without giving any specific examples, to a number of issue areas: the internet, economic growth, environmental protection, and our educational system. He never said, “I invented the internet.” And yet I don’t think it’s going too far to say that the endless assertion of that “quote” — that lie — by the Republican noise machine was the decisive factor in Gore’s “loss” to Bush in 2000.
And now we have the Kerry story. When I first heard about this story on a CNN report, all they were talking about was how he had said, “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.†I thought, what the hell, maybe he’s flashing back to Vietnam when we had the draft and when social class was more of an issue in terms of military service than today. The next thing I thought of was the film “Fahrenheit 9-11,” where we see recruiters trolling through a mall looking for unemployed or under-employed young men and women. Even though Chris Matthews, to his credit, wasn’t buying the Republican spin, I still couldn’t figure out the context of Kerry’s words, or what exactly he had been trying to say.
On Google last night, I couldn’t find the text of Kerry’s remarks. Here’s the way a New York Times article reports the story: Mr. Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate who is believed to be considering another run for the White House in 2008, set the stage for bitter back-and-forth as he addressed a gathering at Pasadena City College in California. The senator, who was campaigning for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Phil Angelides, opened with several one-liners, joking at one point that President Bush had lived in Texas but now “lives in a state of denial.†Then, Mr. Kerry said…” So — now we’ve got a little context, maybe. He was trying to make some sort of joke about Bush.
The nature of Kerry’s remarks became even more clear, thanks to Keith Olbermann. Olbermann’s basic point: Kerry had been unloading on Bush, and Bush and his minions were too stupid to know they were being called stupid. Listening to Keith, it became clear to me that Kerry had intended to say something along the lines of, “if you don’t study hard (and pay attention to your history professors, for example), you will make stupid decisions (which ignore historical facts and basic logic, like Bush did) that get us stuck in Iraq.” Later, I found this news report: A Kerry aide told CNN that the prepared statement, which had been designed to criticize President Bush, “was mangled in delivery.” Kerry was supposed to say, “I can’t overstress the importance of a great education. Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq.”
Like Gore, in other words, Kerry didn’t use the English language particularly well. But once you see his remarks in context, once you realize that he was talking about Bush and not about our soldiers, it’s clear that he in no way insulted or even questioned those serving in Iraq. In fact, he never used the word “soldiers” at all. He — not as clearly as he should in the words of that single sentence — advised his student listeners not to emerge from college as ignorant, lazy, callous, and mistake-prone as George W. Bush. Given the context, the obvious meaning, and the clarification, there should be no controversy. Unless Kerry and those of us who sympathize with him fight back, however, the Republican noise machine will get away with a replay of 2000.
Speaking of Dubya, he once actually said: “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.†Of course, people on our side would never try to make anything out of such an obvious miss-statement. Would we?
As much as I disagree with George Will, he is someone who can agree to disagree. He has reestablished his mainstream conservative credentials with this week’s column on the last page of Newsweek.
Titled:
Prohibition II: Good Grief
When government restricts Americans’ choices, ostensibly for their own good, someone is going to profit from the paternalism.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15265338/site/newsweek/
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