Luxembourg On Steroids
Eleanor Clift’s Kerry-excuse-making piece in Newsweek magazine begins with this: “Republicans are better at the game of politics.”
After I cleaned up the mess I made with my spit-take and subsequent hysterical laughter, I managed to finish the piece, though with nothing close to a straight face.
Clift’s spin is basically Deania mixed with bet-hedging fatalism. In essence, she echoes Dr. Demented’s paranoia about the White House “manipulating terror alerts for political gain,” does it one better by adding that another successful terrorist attack will also help Bush, and finishes with “The advantage goes to Bush unless the public gets wise to the game.” IOW, we’re all stupid until we come to our senses and buy into Howard Dean’s fevered formulations and pull the lever for John Kerry instead. And most of us are so stupid that we’ll never come to our senses, so Bush has the advantage. Or, put still another way, the only primates dumber than Dubya are his supporters who make his masterful Machiavellian manipulations possible. Or something like that.
Meanwhile, there are the following headlines:
TIME Revelations on Prudential, Citigroup, Congressional Targets
Terrorists' 'Probing Attacks' Said to Be Happening Nationwide
FBI Warns al-Qaida Will Try More Attacks
And just think: if the election were held tomorrow, according to my analysis, John Kerry would be elected the 44th president of the United States.
I’m not claiming to speak for anybody else, but that prospect scares the piss out of me. And that’s not a partisan statement, either.
I’ve read three different columns in the last week or two – five if you count Newt Gingrich’s recent speeches - predicting, almost defiantly, that George Bush is going to blow out John Kerry, and stating why. And invariably the reasons amount to why the columnists are supporting Bush over Kerry rather than getting at why they think that the President is going to win in a landslide.
Rest assured, I share their reasons, and I’d love to believe that they are going to propel Dubya to a second term in walk-off style. But the numbers just don’t show it.
In my polling composite, the biggest lead Mr. Bush has enjoyed is two points (45%-43%) in late June, after the passing of President Reagan and his state funeral. Since then, while GDub’s support has remained steady, Senator Kerry’s has up-ticked three percentage points, one from Nader’s total and the other two from the undecided ranks. And even that brief and small lead from six weeks ago isn’t what it might have appeared because, given the fact that undecideds tend to break roughly 2-1 against the incumbent, the President’s “break-even” point is really about a three point advantage in the composite. And, aside from an outlier here or there, just about every poll across the board has shown this race to be a dead heat going clear back to the winter wastes of Iowa and New Hampshire. And the reason for that in a race that the incumbent should have long since run away with, is, in my oft-expressed opinion, that Mr. Bush rope-a-doped for ten months following his carrier landing photo-op and allowed the opposition to cripplingly define him as a mendacious warmonger.
Why do I bring up – and in some cases, reiterate – all of these points again? To pose a very salient question: Will anything Dubya can say or do between now and Election Day make any difference? Is any portion of the electorate not already in the President’s column willing to listen to him at all? Do any of them realize, or are they willing to even acknowledge, that the 9/11 commission, Senate Intelligence Committee, and British Butler reports all exonerate Bush on the whole detestable “He mislead us into an elective war” excrement that has set around his image like concrete?
I want to say yes to all those questions. I want to believe that in times a serious as these, with the very real possibility of mass casualty terror attacks an immutable fact of life, that those voters outside the brain-dead Fahrenheit/moveon.org/George Sorosian lunatic fringe will pay heed to rational arguments (such as I cite above in my analysis of Kerry’s “Operation Retreat” comments) that have won over Democrats like Ed Koch and Senator Zell Miller, who harken back to the Truman/JFK days when national security was left outside the realm of partisan politics. I want to believe that a convention in New York, reminding us all of what happened on 9/11, why it happened, and why the election of John Kerry would be a willful repudiation of all those hard-learned lessons, will break the President out of this frustrating stalemate, even break the campaign wide open, and settle the damn thing once and for freaking all.
Who knows? Maybe it will. Maybe the onrush of events will so make the case for Bush and against Kerry that it will drown out even “bloated bigots” like Michael Moore and the ticket that apes him.
But maybe it just won’t matter. Maybe even another 9/11 or worse won’t matter, or will even push more voters further toward the false comfort of 9/10 delusionalism. Maybe the left has been so successful in demonizing a good, kind, decent man and a war leader potentially of the cut of a Lincoln or FDR whose only “crime” is taking seriously his primary constitutional responsibility to protect the American public “from all threats, foreign and domestic” that the American electorate, like Legion in the herd of pigs, will stampede right off the cliff into chaos and destruction all the while thinking they’re doing precisely the opposite via a single magical quick-fix.
In a time when the world needs America to be America (whether it realizes – or likes – it or not), George Bush wants to continue meeting that need. John Kerry wants to transform America into Luxembourg on steroids and hope that that makes everybody happy.
If reason and rationality proves to be the order of the day, this election will be a slam-dunk.
But if raw emotion sweeps it all away, the haters – both foreign and domestic - stand a better than even chance of triumph.
And then…God help us all.
After I cleaned up the mess I made with my spit-take and subsequent hysterical laughter, I managed to finish the piece, though with nothing close to a straight face.
Clift’s spin is basically Deania mixed with bet-hedging fatalism. In essence, she echoes Dr. Demented’s paranoia about the White House “manipulating terror alerts for political gain,” does it one better by adding that another successful terrorist attack will also help Bush, and finishes with “The advantage goes to Bush unless the public gets wise to the game.” IOW, we’re all stupid until we come to our senses and buy into Howard Dean’s fevered formulations and pull the lever for John Kerry instead. And most of us are so stupid that we’ll never come to our senses, so Bush has the advantage. Or, put still another way, the only primates dumber than Dubya are his supporters who make his masterful Machiavellian manipulations possible. Or something like that.
Meanwhile, there are the following headlines:
TIME Revelations on Prudential, Citigroup, Congressional Targets
Despite claims that the recent terror alert affecting Washington and New York was released for political purposes, new information reveals chilling details of al-Qaida’s plans to attack financial and political targets in the U.S.
Terrorists' 'Probing Attacks' Said to Be Happening Nationwide
The terrifying account of a Northwest Airlines passenger, detailing how the suspicious activities of a group of Middle Eastern men aboard the plane had convinced her that it was being hijacked, is one of hundreds, if not thousands, of similarly scary events reported to U.S. authorities since the 9/11 attacks.
Counter-terrorism experts interviewed by CNSNews.com say these incidents, many of which were "probing attacks" by terrorists methodically casing locations for an assault in the future, indicate the extent to which the United States currently finds itself threatened.
FBI Warns al-Qaida Will Try More Attacks
The FBI is warning that al-Qaida could attempt to commandeer helicopters, limousines and other rental vehicles to launch attacks inside the United States.
And just think: if the election were held tomorrow, according to my analysis, John Kerry would be elected the 44th president of the United States.
I’m not claiming to speak for anybody else, but that prospect scares the piss out of me. And that’s not a partisan statement, either.
I’ve read three different columns in the last week or two – five if you count Newt Gingrich’s recent speeches - predicting, almost defiantly, that George Bush is going to blow out John Kerry, and stating why. And invariably the reasons amount to why the columnists are supporting Bush over Kerry rather than getting at why they think that the President is going to win in a landslide.
Rest assured, I share their reasons, and I’d love to believe that they are going to propel Dubya to a second term in walk-off style. But the numbers just don’t show it.
In my polling composite, the biggest lead Mr. Bush has enjoyed is two points (45%-43%) in late June, after the passing of President Reagan and his state funeral. Since then, while GDub’s support has remained steady, Senator Kerry’s has up-ticked three percentage points, one from Nader’s total and the other two from the undecided ranks. And even that brief and small lead from six weeks ago isn’t what it might have appeared because, given the fact that undecideds tend to break roughly 2-1 against the incumbent, the President’s “break-even” point is really about a three point advantage in the composite. And, aside from an outlier here or there, just about every poll across the board has shown this race to be a dead heat going clear back to the winter wastes of Iowa and New Hampshire. And the reason for that in a race that the incumbent should have long since run away with, is, in my oft-expressed opinion, that Mr. Bush rope-a-doped for ten months following his carrier landing photo-op and allowed the opposition to cripplingly define him as a mendacious warmonger.
Why do I bring up – and in some cases, reiterate – all of these points again? To pose a very salient question: Will anything Dubya can say or do between now and Election Day make any difference? Is any portion of the electorate not already in the President’s column willing to listen to him at all? Do any of them realize, or are they willing to even acknowledge, that the 9/11 commission, Senate Intelligence Committee, and British Butler reports all exonerate Bush on the whole detestable “He mislead us into an elective war” excrement that has set around his image like concrete?
I want to say yes to all those questions. I want to believe that in times a serious as these, with the very real possibility of mass casualty terror attacks an immutable fact of life, that those voters outside the brain-dead Fahrenheit/moveon.org/George Sorosian lunatic fringe will pay heed to rational arguments (such as I cite above in my analysis of Kerry’s “Operation Retreat” comments) that have won over Democrats like Ed Koch and Senator Zell Miller, who harken back to the Truman/JFK days when national security was left outside the realm of partisan politics. I want to believe that a convention in New York, reminding us all of what happened on 9/11, why it happened, and why the election of John Kerry would be a willful repudiation of all those hard-learned lessons, will break the President out of this frustrating stalemate, even break the campaign wide open, and settle the damn thing once and for freaking all.
Who knows? Maybe it will. Maybe the onrush of events will so make the case for Bush and against Kerry that it will drown out even “bloated bigots” like Michael Moore and the ticket that apes him.
But maybe it just won’t matter. Maybe even another 9/11 or worse won’t matter, or will even push more voters further toward the false comfort of 9/10 delusionalism. Maybe the left has been so successful in demonizing a good, kind, decent man and a war leader potentially of the cut of a Lincoln or FDR whose only “crime” is taking seriously his primary constitutional responsibility to protect the American public “from all threats, foreign and domestic” that the American electorate, like Legion in the herd of pigs, will stampede right off the cliff into chaos and destruction all the while thinking they’re doing precisely the opposite via a single magical quick-fix.
In a time when the world needs America to be America (whether it realizes – or likes – it or not), George Bush wants to continue meeting that need. John Kerry wants to transform America into Luxembourg on steroids and hope that that makes everybody happy.
If reason and rationality proves to be the order of the day, this election will be a slam-dunk.
But if raw emotion sweeps it all away, the haters – both foreign and domestic - stand a better than even chance of triumph.
And then…God help us all.
posted by JASmius at 12:07 PM
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