Smart Polls
Today DonkeyRising features a study by Alan Abramowitz that shows the ARG September poll was was highly accurate in the the 2000 election —- certainly far more accurate than the wildly up and down Gallup poll.
They’ve just released the first 20 states of their 50 state poll for this year. Unsurprisingly it shows what we all know to be true. The reds are red and the blues are blue — and it’s going to be a street fight in the purple states.
Here’s the ARG web site.
Deja Vu Vu
This passage from “Citizen Perot” by Gerald Posner reminds us that where there’s a Bush campaign, there are often strange Texans wielding information and evidence that blows back on the ones who fall for it:
IN JULY 1992, Ross Perot hastily called a press conference to announce he was dropping out of the presidential race. He reentered the race on Oct. 1 and, through infomercials and solid performances in the presidential debates, soon approached 20% in the polls. Then he made a decision that stopped his momentum cold: he agreed to a 60 Minutes interview to present the “real reason” for his earlier withdrawal.
On Sunday, Oct.25, he told startled viewers he had pulled out after receiving “multiple reports” that there was a Republican plot to embarrass his daughter by disrupting her summer wedding, and that there was also a plan to distribute a computerized false photo of his daughter. After the show Perot was widely ridiculed, and many believed his reasons were bogus.
Some aspects of this scandal have long been known, yet the details were always murky. The full account, now available, reveals that while Perot did have some basis for his bizarre charge, he appears to have relied on sources of dubious credibility. The episode provides insights into the behind-the-scenes intrigue of political campaigns, as well as painting a disturbing portrait of FBI incompetence.
Read the whole thing. It’s very reminiscent of the bizarre tales we’ve been reading about these last few days. Funny that.
The Big Mea Culpa
Tim Grieve at Salon.com thinks that Dan Rather may have inadvertantly provided the template for the speech we’ve all been waiting for George W. Bush to give:
I no longer have the confidence in the intelligence that led me to take our country to war. I find I have been misled on the key question of whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. That, combined with the complete lack of evidence that Saddam Hussein had any role in the attacks of Sept. 11, leads me to a point where — if I knew then what I know now — I would not have started a war in Iraq, and I certainly would not have done so if I’d known that more than a thousand U.S. troops and thousands more Iraqi citizens would be killed in the process.
“But I did start the war. I made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry. It was an error that was made, however, in good faith and in the spirit of trying to make America safer.
“Please know that nothing is more important to me than people’s trust in my ability and my commitment to keeping America safe. “
As Grieve points out, all it would take is a very little bit of cutting and pasting on Microsoft Word and Junior could show that he has as much integrity as Dan Rather.
Chapter Two
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Washington, DC–Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie issued the following statement on CBS’s admission today that memos regarding the President’s National Guard service are not real.
“We accept CBS’s apology for a breach of the journalistic standards that provide the American people confidence in news organizations, but some disturbing questions remain unanswered.
“CBS has now answered questions about the authenticity of the documents but questions remain surrounding who created the documents, who provided them to CBS and if Senator Kerry’s supporters, Party committee, or campaign played any role.
“Did Bill Burkett, Democrat activist and Kerry campaign supporter, who passed information to the DNC, work with Kerry campaign surrogate Max Cleland? Did Bill Burkett’s talks with ‘senior’ Kerry campaign officials include discussions of the now discredited documents? Was the launch of the Democrat National Committee’s Operation Fortunate Son designed with knowledge of the faked forged memos? Terry McAuliffe said yesterday that no one at the DNC or Kerry campaign, ‘had anything to do with the preparations of the documents,’ but what about the distribution or dissemination?
“In an effort to regain the trust of the American people CBS should not only investigate the process that led to the use of these documents but they should identify immediately those engaged in possible criminal activity who attempted to use a news organization to affect the outcome of a Presidential election in its closing days.”
This is where it’s going folks and the cable-whores are eating it up with a spoon tonight. Look for congressional and justice department investigations (maybe a grand jury) and nightly ratcheting up of leaks and speculation on the gasbags shows. They may even call the Barbizon School of blond former prosecutors up from the minors for this one. That’s how these trumped up Wurlitzer frenzies work. I could write the narrative in my sleep.
Here’s a little parlor game for everyone. Let’s assume that I’m right and this story is rapidly shifting to a “whodunnit in the Kerry campaign.” What should Kerry’s strategy be and what should the surrogates do on the cable shoutfests to get ahead of this?
Rigged
Following up my post below on the new stepped up Justice department efforts to root out Democratic voters and throw out the votes of those who do manage to vote, Jeffrey Toobin has an article in the New Yorker on the same subject. Jesus, it’s going to be tough to win this one even if we win this one. It’s not just the voting machines:
On October 8, 2002, Attorney General Ashcroft stood before an invited audience in the Great Hall of the Justice Department to outline his vision of voting rights, in words that owed much to the rhetoric used by L.B.J. and Lincoln. “The right of citizens to vote and have their vote count is the cornerstone of our democracy—the necessary precondition of government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” Ashcroft told the group, which included several veteran civil-rights lawyers.
The Attorney General had come forward to launch the Voting Access and Integrity Initiative, whose name refers to the two main traditions in voting-rights law. Voter-access efforts, which have long been associated with Democrats, seek to remove barriers that discourage poor and minority voters; the Voting Rights Act itself is the paradigmatic voter-access policy. The voting-integrity movement, which has traditionally been favored by Republicans, targets fraud in the voting process, from voter registration to voting and ballot counting. Despite the title, Ashcroft’s proposal favored the “integrity” side of the ledger, mainly by assigning a federal prosecutor to watch for election crimes in each judicial district. These lawyers, Ashcroft said, would “deter and detect discrimination, prevent electoral corruption, and bring violators to justice.”
[…]
Von Spakovsky, a longtime activist in the voting-integrity cause, has emerged as the Administration’s chief operative on voting rights. Before going to Washington, he was a lawyer in private practice and a Republican appointee to the Fulton County Registration and Election Board, which runs elections in Atlanta. He belonged to the Federalist Society, a prominent organization of conservative lawyers, and had also joined the board of advisers of a lesser-known group called the Voting Integrity Project
The V.I.P. was founded by Deborah Phillips, a former county official of the Virginia Republican Party, as an organization devoted principally to fighting voting fraud and promoting voter education. In 1997, von Spakovsky wrote an article for the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a conservative research group, that called for an aggressive campaign to “purge” the election rolls of felons. Within months of that article’s publication, the V.I.P. helped put von Spakovsky’s idea into action. Phillips met with the company that designed the process for the removal of alleged felons from the voting rolls in Florida, a process that led, notoriously, to the mistaken disenfranchisement of thousands of voters, most of them Democratic, before the 2000 election. (This year, Florida again tried to purge its voting rolls of felons, but the method was found to be so riddled with errors that it had to be abandoned.) During the thirty-six-day recount in Florida, von Spakovsky worked there as a volunteer for the Bush campaign. After the Inauguration, he was hired as an attorney in the Voting Section and was soon promoted to be counsel to the Assistant Attorney General, in what is known as the “front office” of the Civil Rights Division. In that position, von Spakovsky, who is forty-five years old, has become an important voice in the Voting Section. (Von Spakovsky, citing Justice Department policy, has also declined repeated requests to be interviewed.)
Well, I feel much better about these coming elections knowing that such a fair minded, non-partisan civil servant is working to ensure that all goes well.
In case anyone is wondering about the Voter Integrity project, it is another poisonous tentacle of the VRWC run by Helen Blackwell, wife of Morton Blackwell uber-conservative co-founder of the Moral Majority, recently renowned for the classy act of handing out purple band-aids at the Republican convention. (More on Blackwell at Democratic Veteran.)
I think it’s also a good bet that Spakovsky is friends with the infamous Buckhead, fellow Atlanta republican elections board supervisor and federalist society clone.
Sometimes I think this whole VRWC could fit into a large jacuzzi.
Mighty Casio Needs To Crank Up
I wonder what would happen if Democrats worked as hard at discrediting this bogus polling as the Republicans have worked at discrediting those stupid National Guard documents?
Of course we couldn’t fall back on decades of charges of liberal bias to get anyone to pay attention, but if even the Wall Street Journal admits that the polls are screwy you’d think we could get just a little attention to the polling firms’ bizarre and unsubstantiated notion that there are suddenly much larger numbers of self-identified Republicans in the country than ever before.
I wonder if it might then be possible to reframe the horserace coverage to the real story. Why is an incumbent president who had a 90% approval rating for a large chunk of his presidency having such a hard time closing the deal? Incumbents don’t usually have to fight for their lives in the middle of a war unless something has gone terribly wrong.
Oh, and by the way, if the president were really 13 points ahead, he would not have agreed to three debates. This is, after all, a president who has faced the press in formal news conferences fewer times than any president in history. He would not subject himself to three sessions of unscripted questions if he were confident he had it in the bag. They know they’re tied and need to break out.
Framing The Argument
I’m busy today and don’t have time to write much, but since I noticed that both Kos and Jerome Armstrong are writing about Lakoff’s new book, I thought that I would repost a piece of mine from almost a year ago about Lakoff and his framing of the two parties.
Let me emphasize that my criticism is not of his analysis or of the substance of his frame, but merely of the idea of the Democrats using the frame literally to try to sell our ideas, particularly during a national security crisis. In fact, I think using his frame plays into Republican hands. I never hear Lakoff doing this, but I sure have heard a lot of Democrats saying we should. And that, I think, is absolutely wrong.
Frame Up
A number of readers have written to me today asking if I’m familiar with George Lakoff, whom Atrios points to in this interesting interview, because I discuss this kind of thing quite a bit here on Hullabaloo. As these guys guessed, I’ve read his work and have been very influenced by it. He is completely correct, in my view, about the immense power of framing issues with language and image and his ideas about candidates as “identities” is right on the money.
If I have a beef with Lakoff it’s that the one frame he’s most known for — the Republican “strict father” and the Democrat “nurturing parent” — is one of the more unfortunate metaphors for the progressive cause that I can imagine.
It’s not that he’s wrong in his analysis, it’s that he’s used the wrong terms to frame it. (Yep. You heard me. I hereby accept the 2003 Shameless Intellectual Arrogance Award. Thank you very much.)
I don’t think it’s a very good frame to begin with because it isn’t honest. Let’s not pretend that the real frame isn’t “strict father” vs “nurturing mother.” The frame doesn’t really make sense otherwise. And, rightly or wrongly, this frame makes the tension gender based, and in doing so it defines progressive leadership as female leadership, something that is an indistinct and still evolving archetypal image. This puts progressives at a disadvantage because people don’t immediately associate women with public leadership just yet. That will, of course, come to pass in the not too distant future (I hope.) But framing isn’t a matter for wish fulfillment. To work, it must be immediately recognizable. The fact that Lakoff didn’t use the obvious “father-mother” construction indicates to me that knew that this was a problem.
I do not mean to condemn him completely for the fact that his framework is being used to give Republicans an advantage. He has never suggested that Democrats use this as a campaign slogan or even a public identity and yet I read people all the time who think that this “nurturing parent/mother” image is a winning one for the Democrats. I think that it informs a lot of thinking about what issues on which the Democrats should run even when the political environment makes those issues far less salient than others, regardless of what polls say people care about. And, just because we are the “nurturing parent” party does not mean that the way to win elections is to pretend that the only problems worth addressing are those that can be solved with nurturing — or that nurturing can solve every problem.
Lakoff says that the progressive worldview is:
“Children are born good; parents can make them better. Nurturing involves empathy, and the responsibility to take care of oneself and others for whom we are responsible. On a larger scale, specific policies follow, such as governmental protection in form of a social safety net and government regulation, universal education (to ensure competence, fairness), civil liberties and equal treatment (fairness and freedom), accountability (derived from trust), public service (from responsibility), open government (from open communication), and the promotion of an economy that benefits all and functions to promote these values.”
The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline — physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own. Those children who remain dependent (who were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrant) should be forced to undergo further discipline or be cut free with no support to face the discipline of the outside world.
I believe that this is all true. But, I don’t like the “strict” and “nurturing” characterizations any more than I like the “Father” and ”Mother” dichotomy.
If it is necessary to frame the political divide in family terms, I might have done it as “rigid parents” vs. “conscientious parents.” The analysis remains the same, but the words don’t imply character traits that people automatically associate with strong vs weak leadership, but rather they connote negative vs positive leadership.
The word “strict” does imply discipline but self-discipline is valued by most people, even if cruel methods to attain it are not. And the word strict does not, as Lakoff seems to say, necessarily correlate to abuse and heartlessness in most people’s minds. “Rigid” on the other hand, implies narrow mindedness and inability to admit error along with a severe, uncompromising temperment.
The word “nurturing” does exactly what Lakoff admonishes the Democrats to stop doing, which is play into the GOP framework. The right has been framing the left and right for many years as the “nanny state” vs “individual freedom.” “Nurturing parent” and “nanny state” are too closely related. “Conscientious”, however, encompasses all the empathetic qualities that Lakoff ascribes to the left, but also implies a willingness to react with strength where necessary. A conscientious parent responds to hostile threats as well as well as cries for help.
Both traits are equally masculine and feminine, so there is no archetypal leadership image associated with them.
From a tactical communications standpoint, it is very important for the left to acknowledge that Lakoff is telling us that our current method of framing ourselves is as flawed as the way the other side frames us. (Indeed, I’ve just argued that the master himself has made a major error.) But, even if I agreed with his framework, it would still not be useful to merely parrot it and assume that it is a good tactical framework merely because Lakoff himself is a progressive. The point of all this is to frame issues in such a way as to persuade the undecideds and apathetic and at least some members of the opposition to agree with our side of the argument. That means we have to stop preaching to the choir all the time.
And framing alone is not enough. We also have to take into account certain realities about how people arrive at political decisions these days. It’s my observation that they rely on simplistic symbolism and image more than they have in the past, mostly because of the pervasiveness of the shallow celebrity culture and television’s position as the epicenter of the American community. (I’ll elaborate on that in a later post.)
As Lakoff says in the article:
In the strict father model, the big thing is discipline and moral authority, and punishment for those who do something wrong. That comes out very clearly in the Bush administration’s foreign and domestic policy. With Schwarzenegger, it’s in his movies: most of the characters that he plays exemplify that moral system. He didn’t have to say a word! He just had to stand up there, and he represents Mr. Discipline. He knows what’s right and wrong, and he’s going to take it to the people. He’s not going to ask permission, or have a discussion, he’s going to do what needs to be done, using force and authority. His very persona represents what conservatives are about.
I think this is right on the money. Schwarzenegger’s campaign rested solely on his scripted action-hero persona. In fact, this may be the first election in which all pretense of substance was completely abandoned in favor of purely manufactured Hollywood symbolism. The “crisis” that precipitated the recall wasn’t real, the ensuing voter “anger” wasn’t real and the winning candidate wasn’t real. The entire narrative was scripted as a loose form reality TV show in which the drama was pushed and prodded by the “producers” even though the outcome wasn’t preordained. It was “real” in the same way that “Survivor” is real.
As Lakoff rightly points out, this stuff is important and the Democrats are just not getting with the program. The other side is doing it with a tremendous amount of sophistication and almost unlimited financial backing. California is the most populated state in the nation and if it can happen here, a Democratic state, it can happen nationally. In fact, in many ways, election 2000 was an early version.
Meanwhile, many on our side seem to believe that there is something distasteful about framing issues and using symbolism and metaphor to win elections as if being unable to govern honestly is the natural consequence of using these communication techniques. This is wrong.
It is only a method to get our ideas across and make the American public see our candidates in a way they are comfortable with. There is no reason that politicians must be vapid in order that their campaigns and issues are communicated through positive framing, metaphor and symbolism. It’s just that the Republicans have such geeky, unpleasant politicians and policies that they have no choice but to pick people like manufactured movie stars or dynastic restoration figures as their symbols and then destroy the opposition with ruthless character assassination.
Here’s a little example of framing that worked for the Democrats. As much as any position on issues or rhetorical brilliance, Bill Clinton, for all of his wonkish intellect, won in 1992 mostly because he symbolized the changing of the guard from the WWII generation to the baby boom. The cold war was over; the boomers were middle aged and ready to take power. There were two important symbolic moments in that campaign, both of which Clinton seemed to instinctively grasp and where his natural gifts as a politician served him well.
The first was when he played “Heartbreak Hotel” on the sax with his shades on, an unprecedented act of post-modern presidential media coolness. The other was showing the footage at the convention of John F. Kennedy shaking a 17 year old Bill Clinton’s hand – an almost literal passing of the torch from the guy who inspired the baby boomers with an inaugural speech in which he said “the torch has been passed to a new generation.” It was brilliant. Clinton understood his historical moment and framed that election as Young vs Old, Change vs Stasis and he used his own quintessential baby boomer narrative (and all that that entailed, good and bad) to make that case.
The task for Democrats in 2004 is to recognize this historical moment and muster all the tools at our disposal to frame this election in our favor and nominate the most qualified candidate whose image and personal narrative best serves as a metaphor for the current zeitgeist.
Planning Ahead
I’m telling you, if we win this election and it’s close, the wheels are in motion for the RNC to contest it. You can see it in the way they are telling their people to vote absentee ballot, by the fact that they’ve appropriated the Democratic rallying cry “make sure your vote counts” and by this:
Voter Probes Raise Partisan Suspicions
Democrats, Allies See Politics Affecting Justice Department’s Anti-Fraud Efforts
Earlier this month, U.S. Attorney David Iglesias in New Mexico launched a statewide criminal task force to investigate allegations of voter fraud in the upcoming presidential election. The probe came after a sheriff who co-chairs President Bush’s campaign in the state’s largest county complained about thousands of questionable registrations turned in by Democratic-leaning groups.
“It appears that mischief is afoot and questions are lurking in the shadows,” Iglesias told local reporters.
[…]
The probe is one of several criminal inquiries into alleged voter fraud launched in recent weeks in key presidential battlegrounds, including Ohio and West Virginia, as part of a broader initiative by U.S. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft targeting bogus registrations and other election crimes. The Justice Department has asked U.S. attorneys across the country to meet with local elections officials and launch publicity campaigns aimed at getting people to report irregularities.
[…]
Justice officials say it is the department’s duty to prosecute illegal activities at the polls, and stress that civil rights lawyers are also working to ensure that legitimate voters can cast their ballots without interference. Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra said that “the department must strike a proper balance and we cannot be deterred from investigating allegations of criminal voter fraud.”
Civil rights advocates and many Democrats, however, complain that the department is putting too much emphasis on investigating new voter registrations in poor and minority communities — which tend to favor Democrats — and not enough on ensuring that those voters do not face discrimination at the polls. More attention should be given to potential fraud in the use of absentee ballots, which tend to favor Republicans, the critics say.
They also charge that announcing criminal investigations within weeks of an election — as was done in New Mexico on Sept. 7 — is likely to scare legitimate voters away from the polls.
“I’m concerned that the Justice Department is being overtly political,” said Nancy Zirkin, deputy director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. “Bells are going off for me because searching for voter fraud has often been a proxy for intimidating voters.”
The Justice Department’s guidelines say prosecutors “must refrain from any conduct which has the possibility of affecting the election itself.”
“A criminal investigation by armed, badged federal agents runs the obvious risk of chilling legitimate voting and campaign activities,” the department’s manual on elections crime says. “Federal prosecutors and investigators should be extremely careful to not conduct overt investigations during the pre-election period or while the election is underway.”
Experts on both sides acknowledge that faulty or bogus voter registrations are a persistent problem. For example, one study found that 5,400 dead people cast votes over a 20-year period in Georgia. But experts question whether the phenomenon is widespread, and elections officials say they are most concerned about absentee ballot fraud.
“The problem is, you don’t know if the voter is being coerced, misled or bribed, because it all happens away from public scrutiny,” said Denise Lamb, New Mexico’s election director.
[…]
Still, in recent months, elections officials in swing states have reported thousands of problematic registrations, including addresses that do not exist, duplicate names, the names of deceased voters and names that appear to be copied out of a phone book by the same person. Republicans have pointed to such registrations as evidence of possible widespread election fraud.
“Violations of voter registration laws, registering dead or nonexistent people to vote, creates the opportunity for Democrats to disenfranchise legitimate voters on Election Day, which on any scale is something that should concern all voters,” said Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson.
Elections officials of both parties, however, say that bad registrations do not necessarily translate into Election Day fraud. New identification laws, as well as signature checks, make ballot-box stuffing extremely difficult, they say.
[…]
But many Democrats are suspicious of the prosecutors’ motives in the most recent cases — most of which involve GOP complaints and alleged wrongdoing on behalf of Democratic candidates — and are uneasy with Ashcroft’s role in overseeing such probes. Ashcroft, a former Missouri governor and senator, came under fire during his 2001 confirmation for vetoing bills that would have promoted voter registration in St. Louis, a heavily African American Democratic stronghold.
[…]
But civil rights advocates worry that, in the case of criminal investigations such as the one in New Mexico, investigators will have to go door-to-door to question new registrants before balloting. In the 2002 South Dakota elections, state and federal agents questioned hundreds of newly registered Native Americans, a key constituency for Democrats in that state. The probe resulted in charges against one woman, which were subsequently dropped.
“Often there’s no real basis for these fraud allegations,” said Jonah Goldman of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The New Mexico probe was launched in part at the request of Bernalillo County Sheriff Darren White, who chairs the county’s Bush-Cheney campaign. The announcement came after a district court judge ruled against plaintiffs in a Republican-led lawsuit that sought at-the-poll identification requirements for new voters registered through drives. As proof that change is needed, the plaintiffs listed a number of questionable registrations in their lawsuit, including one from a 13-year-old. But several women whose registration cards were attached to the lawsuit testified they registered twice by mistake and that no fraud was involved.
Democratic groups have been pushing to register new voters in New Mexico, which Bush lost by 366 votes in 2000. The Democratic Party has testified that changing ID rules would disenfranchise some voters, and spokesman Matt Farrauto called the criminal probe “worrisome.”
Iglesias’s spokesman, Norman Cairns, said the FBI is investigating “questionable voter registrations.” But he added: “Our objective is not in any way to influence this election.”
So, the investigations themselves may intimidate voters most likely to vote Democratic. And if we still manage to win, they will form the basis for contesting the election. And, it’s purely coincidence that all these investigations are sought by the GOP against Democratic GOTV efforts.
OxyMorons For Truth
Jay Rosen has written a very interesting post on the journalistic ethics and dramatic narrative surrounding the memo controversy. He makes the very interesting observation that much of this is unfolding as a spectacle of political theatre as much as anything else:
That report, which Rather hosted, announced to the nation the sensational existence of documents CBS had failed to authenticate.
This is the crime of which the network stands accused in the theater of election year politics, and in a longer history of resentment that some see as coming to a fiery end in Rather’s acts of self-destruction. Whether that’s true or not, CBS has to understand that its news division has become protagonist (or villain) in a 60 Minutes-style scandal story, an investigative drama, not just an investigation.
The documents were “sensational” because of the revelations in them about the character and conduct of the President in a bitter election-year struggle. If they had forgeries inside them, then the charges CBS aired were very likely attempts at political sabotage. For the network to be involved in something like that goes beyond bounds of forgivable error.
This is no doubt true. The thought of a network or major newspaper acting as a tool of political sabotage to sully the character of a president is chilling indeed.
But, I can’t help wondering why this orgy of recriminations is happening over this incident when there have literally been thousands of even worse examples of the press willingly acting as partisan tools over the past 12 years or so, much of it fed to them directly by political operatives. Why is the thought of Dan Rather being used for partisan political purposes (if indeed he was) so shocking when we know that the mainstream press has been the victim of hoax after hoax by such outfits as Citizens United for years?
Did anyone ever call Jeff Gerth on the carpet for falling for the Scaife financed “Arkansas project” propaganda on the NY Times Whitewater stories? How about the chinese espionage “scandal” which was also a right wing hack job that proved to be absolutely bogus (aided and abetted by our good friend Rep. Chris Cox and his wholly discredited Cox Report.) Did anybody pay a price for pimping the Vince Foster story for the Mighty Wirlizter? Troopergate? The White House vandalism and stolen gifts stories? The list is endless. Years and years and years of hoaxes and smears and lies that led to tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money wasted on investigations that went nowhere and NOBODY SAYS A FUCKING WORD about the press’s incestuous involvement with those who perpetrated these expensive frauds on the American public. (I won’t even mention the elephant sitting in the middle of the room with the words “Saddam and 9/11” tattooed on his forehead.)
The lesson in this is clear. Dan Rather made a big mistake all right, but it wasn’t the one that the rest of the press corp is unctuously wringing its hands over. The lesson is that he should have never have shown the documents. He should have done the story with some guy in the shadows with his voice disguised saying that “he’d seen the documents.” He should have hinted darkly at death threats and used many anonymous sources without ever producing any kind of proof. He should have dribbled the story out over a couple of weeks on the CBS evening news instead of presenting it all at one time.
Oh yes, and he should have done the story about a Democrat. Nobody ever gets in trouble for committing journalistic malpractice against them. In fact, it’s a career booster.
For the record: I have no idea if the Killian documents are real or forged or whether they were manufactured in Niger or by elves in Karl Rove’s office and nobody else does either at this point. When I wrote that it was a dirty trick, I did so with the ironic preface, “according to the new rules of journalism and truth” and “good enough for GOP government work” which should have been a hint that I was, at the very least, being flip. As far as I’m concerned, this story is now in the permanent realm of conspiracy mongering and I am exercising my right to set forth whatever conspiracy fits my personal political bent. That’s the way it’s done nowadays, boys and girls. Credibility and intellectual consistency are for losers.
Sports Illustrated readers overwhelmingly voted Mr. Bush the better athlete and sports fan, a conclusion the magazine’s managing editor, Terry McDonell, finds baffling.
“Clearly Kerry is a much, much, much, much better athlete,” he said, noting that Mr. Kerry has long played competitive hockey and also regularly snowboards, Rollerblades, windsurfs and kite-surfs.
“Kite-surfing,” Mr. McDonell said, “is the hardest, most radical thing to do. It’s what the most extreme surfers are doing.”
Mr. Bush, in contrast, was a cheerleader, and not, Mr. McDonell notes, the kind that did flips. “It’s like spirit club.”
[…]
Mr. McDonell puzzled over what all this shooting and fishing had to do with being leader of the free world. “Within sports, you can see leadership,” he said, “but that does not mean going to a Nascar event will make you a good president.”
Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, said that voters have a primal need to know that a candidate is a member of their tribe. “If you’re sitting around watching sports on a Sunday and you know your president is also sitting around watching sports, you’re not only in intellectual sync, you’re probably in some biological sync on some level,” said Ms. Fisher, who is the author of “The Sex Contract: The Evolution of Human Behavior.”
So, a bunch of potbellied Nascar fans are voting for George W. Bush because they imagine he and they are great athletes due to the fact that they like watching other people drive cars. Is democracy great, or what?