Andrew Golis

Here’s a quick look at the Social Security issue. The article explains where the recent Social Security flap came from and what the President did (and didn’t do) about the issue in his first term.

So KE04 has decided to stoop to BC04′s level. Kerry and the DNC have started running ads that, similar to most run by Bush and the RNC, take a sliver of truth and then blow it to smithereens in the most effective and dishonest-without-lying way possible. As pointed out by the Note, the first three of these ads are:

1. Social Security – “January Suprise”

Claim: Bush will try push hard to privatize social security as soon as he takes office for a second term.

Target: The elderly, especially in states like Florida.

Level of dishonesty: moderate. I think this is the least dishonest of the three. It absolutely fits within Bush’s ideology, he has proposed many more moderate examples of the same thing (but will be free from having to make his ideas mainstream and electable if he wins). Also, the Dems claim that he told supporters at a private lunch recently that he would do just that. While it’s hard to know if he really did say that, BC04 called the claim that he did “inaccurate,” not a flat out lie.

2. Flu Vaccine

Claim: The current shortage of the flu vaccine is due to incompetence on the part of the President and his administration and speaks to their carelessness with issues of health.

Target: Again, the elderly. Of course, the intention is to have the secondary target anyone who has doubts about Bush’s handling of health care.

Level of dishonesty: moderate to high. So far as I can tell, it wasn’t the Bush administration’s fault. Everything that I’ve read basically says that it was an issue with the manufacturer that could not have been predicted, fixed or corrected, even with better planning ahead. There are, after all, a limited number of vaccines. It’s not like there’s a bunch floating around that the Bushies didn’t care enough to buy.

3. The Draft

Claim: The president will reinstate the draft because his policies spread our military so thin that we will have no other option.

Target: Young people and blue collar families (in states like Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa etc.) who believe themselves to be more susceptible to being drafted then white collar or generally more affluent families.

Level of dishonesty: High. Kerry has been careful to never say that Bush wants to reinstate the draft, but has just warned that that’s what his policies would lead us to. This is the kind of rhetorical shading that needs to be eliminated from our political system, because it allows people to lie and claim innocence. Also, claiming that Bush’s policies will lead us to a draft is like claiming that having a cold will cause us to die. It’s possible, but not very likely and only if we’re stupid and negligent.

Anyway, it’s important to note again that this is just the Kerry Team playing catch-up to where the Bush Team has been for months. I much preferred it when they were the (more) dishonest ones, but it begs the question: is it justified if it’s the only way to beat this crazy fuck?

My title isn’t meant to imply that the election IS lost, but if Kerry does lose, one of the things they’re going to talk about is the news cycles of the last 4 days.

Here’s what happened. Wednesday night, Kerry beat Bush (fairly soundly according to many snap polls of undecided voters) in the last debate. According to media consensus (and what a ridiculous, silly and unfortunately important thing that is), Kerry had beaten Bush badly in the first debate, and maybe won, maybe tied in the second. So Kerry left the series of debates with a fairly overwhelming victory over the President of the United States.

However, on Wednesday night and Thursday morning, the newspapers were mostly neutral, as they tend to be the day after. They try not to immediately decide the winner, but wait for polling and consensus. The day after the first debate most seemed to hint at the fact that Kerry won, but it wasn’t until the second day after the debate that consensus had solidified and media folk felt comfortable declaring the winner. Now, this little process in and of itself is fairly ridiculous, but that’s how it’s happened.

So, Kerry came out of Wednesday night with a win. Thursday morning articles were neutral, with many opinions giving Kerry the win but not enough time for that to solidify and become fact. On Thursday (and even late Wednesday night in the spin room), the Republicans began a particularly potent attack meant to create a dominant story that would supersede the Kerry victor story for the Friday cycle and throughout the weekend.

That story was the Mary Cheney outrage. Personally, I think it was a bit silly of Kerry to do, and I can understand a little “eh, c’mon man, leave her out of it.” The Republicans, however, were successful at making it more than just a “meh, that was weird.” They made it a mini-scandal. It was the top story for the campaign on all of the Sunday shows today. It’s received tons of media attention.

That is nothing short of political genius. On the first Sunday after John Kerry, the man challenging the sitting wartime President of the United States, won his third debate in a row, the story was about something else! Pundits were talking about different polls that were done that expressed common sentiment on the Mary Cheney issue, surrogates for the BC04 and KE04 campaigns were debating this more than anything else.

And that’s how Kerry may have lost the election. If the story for the last three days had been about how he spanked the President around for a week and a half, about how we saw a different President in each debate (scowly, yelly and chipper), Kerry probably would have received a couple of point bounce, and stories coming into this next week would have been about his growing momentum. Instead, as the Mary Cheney issue goes away, stories will be about how the campaign is still neck and neck, with neither candidate having momentum over the other (or different people having different claims, but no media consensus). No one will remember what happened in the debates.

A few days ago our beloved Daily Show host went on Crossfire, supposedly to discuss his new book (which I’ve been told is very funny). Instead of doing that, he went on the attack, assailing Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala for being exactly what they are: partisan hacks whose show doesn’t even generally resemble journalism or debate.

Watch this clip, it may be the most important discussion of the state of American media I’ve seen on cable or network television in a long time.

If the video doesn’t work, read the transcript here.

yes. The correct answer is yes. If you answered no, give yourself a swirlee as punishment. If you don’t know what a swirlee isn’t, shame on you. Shame will be your punishment.

The reason I ask this question is so that I can answer it with evidence that supports my belief that yes, news is fun.

Here is that evidence. The money line:

The injured campers managed to set off a rescue beacon, capturing the attention of government wildlife officials in the area who were eradicating wild pigs.

How long will the lies (on both sides, but especially from the BC04) and half-truths continue before the media gets serious about this? How long before, instead of reporting:

“Candidate X said this (insert lie here) and Candidate Y said this (insert denail here).”

they report:

“Candidate X lied today about Candidate Y”

They KNOW it’s true. They know that the  bs that is being thrown out there is COMPLETELY dishonest, out of context and often purely factually incorrect, but they just go on reporting it like it COULD be true. The latest example is Kerry talking about terrorism in the NYT Magazine interview. This article about it isn’t bad, because it tries to present the facts that would lead you to conclude that BC04 is a bunch of liars, but it doesn’t just out and out say “they were hugely dishonest in the way they presented the information.”

Sooo frustrating.

It is pretty strange, when you think about it. The national and local media is being fully and obviously manipulated by the campaigns, they know about it and even WRITE about it. Doesn’t that seem surreal?

I saw this article months ago (well, you can just look at the date of the article) and had it in my favorites. Now, I share it with the world!

HEADLINE: “Bear guzzles 36 beers, passes out at campground”

Read on, it’s gets better!

update: it’s funny that I named this post what I did, since I spelled his name wrong in the subject and throughout. I should have said to myself: remember this name: TAIBBI!!!

I’ve read a few things he’s written in the last few months. He’s hilarious and insightful, completely honest about his biases; he clearly has a distaste for the inherent dishonesty of politics, and while he doesn’t seem to think Kerry is any different, is clearly quite repulsed by Bush. His stuff is apparently a little too spicy for “mainstream” political media- I’ve only seen it in Newsday, The New Yorker and now Rolling Stone (i.e. not the Times, the Post, Time or Newsweek or anything). But this probably also has to do with the fact that the media itself is also one of his targets (his description of the media pool, penned up like cattle behind a rope line, watching breathlessly as Kerry threw a football on an airport tarmac was PRICELESS).

This article is one of the best I’ve read. Essentially, he assumes a false identity in order to infiltrate the local Bush/Cheney campaign in Orlando, Fla in order to learn about the enemy: how it works, how it sleeps, why it does what it does. While his writing is wonderfully tongue-in-cheek, his insight is profound. The way he represents the cultural divide in America is stunning, and his thoughts on the mentality of Republicanism (not the ideology so much as the culture) are nothing short of sociologically important:

One of the great cliches of liberal criticism of the Christian right is the idea that these people are wrongheaded because they profess to know the will of God. H.L. Mencken put that one best, and perhaps first: “It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.”

These criticisms sound like they make sense. But I think they are a little off-base. The problem not only with fundamentalist Christians but with Republicans in general is not that they act on blind faith, without thinking. The problem is that they are incorrigible doubters with an insatiable appetite for Evidence. What they get off on is not Believing, but in having their beliefs tested. That’s why their conversations and their media are so completely dominated by implacable bogeymen: marrying gays, liberals, the ACLU, Sean Penn, Europeans and so on. Their faith both in God and in their political convictions is too weak to survive without an unceasing string of real and imaginary confrontations with those people — and for those confrontations, they are constantly assembling evidence and facts to make their case.

But here’s the twist. They are not looking for facts with which to defeat opponents. They are looking for facts that ensure them an ever-expanding roster of opponents. They can be correct facts, incorrect facts, irrelevant facts, it doesn’t matter. The point is not to win the argument, the point is to make sure the argument never stops. Permanent war isn’t a policy imposed from above; it’s an emotional imperative that rises from the bottom. In a way, it actually helps if the fact is dubious or untrue (like the Swift-boat business), because that guarantees an argument. You’re arguing the particulars, where you’re right, while they’re arguing the underlying generalities, where they are.

Once you grasp this fact, you’re a long way to understanding what the Hannitys and Limbaughs figured out long ago: These people will swallow anything you feed them, so long as it leaves them with a demon to wrestle with in their dreams.

While I have no idea to what extent that psycho-sociological analysis is correct, it certainly seems both believable and important. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m confident that a similar psycho-sociological analysis would not come up with the most flattering things about my liberal brethren and I. For example, his comments on the cultural hypocrisy within the Democratic establishment fit my experience to the T. However, this seems to be the kind of analysis, theorizing and entertainment that you simply don’t get from most political reporters. Rather than really pushing at what makes people move, think and feel, they’re more comfortable covering the bullshit inside politics, the rumors, the semi-controversies etc..
We need more reporters like Matt Tiabbi.

Check out this mini-controversy. Basically, the head of the Political Unit of ABC wrote a memo to his staff to say that, despite complaints from the Bush campaign, they should continue to hold Bush/Cheney accountable for the incredible dishonesty of their campaign. Because the B/C campaign is MORE dishonest than the Kerry Campaign:

We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn’t mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides “equally” accountable when the facts don’t warrant that.

This is the kind of thing that people will read about political science classes of the future.