Kerry, Kerrey, What's The Difference?
Good God Almighty, I don’t know if I can find the words to describe this, or keep my composure long enough to express them. Maybe I’ll just let Rush Limbaugh take it for a paragraph or two:
I still don’t know what to say. The President challenges Kerry to declare, in light of what we have since discovered about Iraqi WMD, whether he would have changed his vote for war – Kerry, feeling his manhood threatened, swaggeringly replies with a nuanced “no,” or a resounding “maybe,” or whatever it was, coming square on the heels of his declaration several days earlier that he was going to evacuate Iraq within as little as six months of taking office, causing his supporters to bite their tongues in half without clarifying much for anybody else. The 95% of his “band of brothers” who aren’t his palm frond-wavers and towel boys challenge his “colorful” accounts of his truncated tour of duty in Southeast Asia, triggering a clumsy fusillade of character assassination, followed by multiple explanation salvos that each disintegrate even faster than the original anecdotes they were intended to reinforce, all of which make his refusal to simply refute the allegations – most efficiently by releasing his military records – embarrassingly conspicuous. And now another of his cherished pieces of self-puffery – his supposed intelligence prowess – has been punctured, and once again the response is weak, almost pathetic ducking and dodging, with another large dollop of fabrication thrown in for…what? Leavening? Entertainment? Comedy relief?
I mean, I haven’t been bashful about how unimpressed I am with John Kerry as a national candidate. But this is reaching “sport fishing with power saws” depth. It’s like that episode of Gilligan’s Island where Gilligan tries to arm-wrestle Skipper and the latter looks like he’s pounding nails with Gilligan’s forearm. The Bushies run a single ad highlighting what a slacker Kerry is on the area in which he’s invested so much of his contrived virility, and the best Kerry’s camp can do is try to pilfer Bob Kerrey’s identity? Do his staffers really not check on things like this? Does Kerry not check on things like this? Or did he actually say that he once co-chaired Senate Intelligence? And in the end, doesn’t he, as the candidate, “approve this message,” ad spot or not?
This is truly stunning. It’s like Kerry’s personality is the “liquid mirror” in the scene from The Matrix when Neo is liberated from the machines’ mainframe – his penchant for bumbling indecision and lame bravado is like a suffocating paralysis spreading over and enveloping his entire campaign. It can’t even really, strictly speaking, be called pure dishonesty, because a lie is, in its basest sense, designed to put over a particular notion to the listener(s) – a false one, but a singular one. With Kerry he tries to put over every possible notion on every possible issue. He can’t possibly keep his story straight on anything because he’s telling all versions of it at the same time.
Put another way, Bill Clinton was an ambitious liar who knew how to lie and had an unparalleled talent for it. Al Gore was an ambitious liar who knew how to lie, had no talent for it, but made up for it by his fanatical belief in the lies he told. John Kerry is an ambitious liar who doesn’t know the first thing about lying, has even less talent for it, but thinks he’s better at it than anybody else, no matter how many times he gets caught.
The partisan media loved Clinton because he was a winner. They tolerated Gore because they thought he would win. But what they cannot abide is failure so blinding that not even they can conceal it.
One gets the sense that the Kerry campaign is like a really, really slow pug boxer who’s being worn down by a steady serious of jabs peppered in, around, over, and through his clumsy, ineffective counter-lunges. And he’s being set up for the twin haymakers of the GOP convention and the 9/11 commemoration. Once that sobering – and much needed – reminder is administered…well, it may be time for the smelling salts.
Of course, the Bushies may after all pull their punches – the “new tone” and all that.
Or Kerry might just try to bite off Bush’s ears….
Get this. Fox News yesterday had a segment. It was in the afternoon. The Kerry campaign, the John Kerry campaign, in angry response to the Bush campaign claim that Senator Kerry attended very few intelligence briefings…And so the Kerry campaign got really in a huff, and they got angry, and they responded to Bush. They said that Kerry had at one time been the vice-chairman of the Intelligence committee. In response to that, the Bush people said, ‘No, it wasn't you. It was Bob Kerrey who was the vice-chairman of the intelligence committee." (Laughing.) Fox went on to say that Bob Kerrey (story) had attended three times as many intelligence briefings as John Kerry and that Bob had also contested John Kerry's attempt to cut the budget of the intelligence agencies by $6 billion.
So, ladies and gentlemen, the damn conductor has screwed up again. The conductor of the train has told somebody that the wrong Kerrey was the vice-chairman. Do you believe this? It's on their website. (See it at johnkerry.com) They were putting it out that John Kerry was the vice-chairman of the Intelligence committee when it wasn't, it was Bob Kerrey.
I still don’t know what to say. The President challenges Kerry to declare, in light of what we have since discovered about Iraqi WMD, whether he would have changed his vote for war – Kerry, feeling his manhood threatened, swaggeringly replies with a nuanced “no,” or a resounding “maybe,” or whatever it was, coming square on the heels of his declaration several days earlier that he was going to evacuate Iraq within as little as six months of taking office, causing his supporters to bite their tongues in half without clarifying much for anybody else. The 95% of his “band of brothers” who aren’t his palm frond-wavers and towel boys challenge his “colorful” accounts of his truncated tour of duty in Southeast Asia, triggering a clumsy fusillade of character assassination, followed by multiple explanation salvos that each disintegrate even faster than the original anecdotes they were intended to reinforce, all of which make his refusal to simply refute the allegations – most efficiently by releasing his military records – embarrassingly conspicuous. And now another of his cherished pieces of self-puffery – his supposed intelligence prowess – has been punctured, and once again the response is weak, almost pathetic ducking and dodging, with another large dollop of fabrication thrown in for…what? Leavening? Entertainment? Comedy relief?
I mean, I haven’t been bashful about how unimpressed I am with John Kerry as a national candidate. But this is reaching “sport fishing with power saws” depth. It’s like that episode of Gilligan’s Island where Gilligan tries to arm-wrestle Skipper and the latter looks like he’s pounding nails with Gilligan’s forearm. The Bushies run a single ad highlighting what a slacker Kerry is on the area in which he’s invested so much of his contrived virility, and the best Kerry’s camp can do is try to pilfer Bob Kerrey’s identity? Do his staffers really not check on things like this? Does Kerry not check on things like this? Or did he actually say that he once co-chaired Senate Intelligence? And in the end, doesn’t he, as the candidate, “approve this message,” ad spot or not?
This is truly stunning. It’s like Kerry’s personality is the “liquid mirror” in the scene from The Matrix when Neo is liberated from the machines’ mainframe – his penchant for bumbling indecision and lame bravado is like a suffocating paralysis spreading over and enveloping his entire campaign. It can’t even really, strictly speaking, be called pure dishonesty, because a lie is, in its basest sense, designed to put over a particular notion to the listener(s) – a false one, but a singular one. With Kerry he tries to put over every possible notion on every possible issue. He can’t possibly keep his story straight on anything because he’s telling all versions of it at the same time.
Put another way, Bill Clinton was an ambitious liar who knew how to lie and had an unparalleled talent for it. Al Gore was an ambitious liar who knew how to lie, had no talent for it, but made up for it by his fanatical belief in the lies he told. John Kerry is an ambitious liar who doesn’t know the first thing about lying, has even less talent for it, but thinks he’s better at it than anybody else, no matter how many times he gets caught.
The partisan media loved Clinton because he was a winner. They tolerated Gore because they thought he would win. But what they cannot abide is failure so blinding that not even they can conceal it.
One gets the sense that the Kerry campaign is like a really, really slow pug boxer who’s being worn down by a steady serious of jabs peppered in, around, over, and through his clumsy, ineffective counter-lunges. And he’s being set up for the twin haymakers of the GOP convention and the 9/11 commemoration. Once that sobering – and much needed – reminder is administered…well, it may be time for the smelling salts.
Of course, the Bushies may after all pull their punches – the “new tone” and all that.
Or Kerry might just try to bite off Bush’s ears….
posted by JASmius at 3:42 PM
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