Missouri Breaks

Random thoughts, political opinions and sage advice from the midlands.

Name:
Location: Kansas City, Missouri, United States

I am a former UPI journalist now operating from behind a public relations desk located in a blue city but a red state.

Thursday, October 14, 2004

Bush's Bulges

The talk last night was about the saliva drip from the corner of his mouth, but what about those bulges in his suit back? Twice they have been sighted and NO ONE at the White House has an explanation. Here is Dave Letterman's:

From the "Late Show with David Letterman", via the Associated Press:

Top Ten President Bush Explanations For The Bulge In His Jacket

10. "It's connected to an earpiece so Cheney can feed me answers -- crap, I wasn't supposed to say that!"

9. "It's a device that shocks me every time I mispronounce a word."

8. "Just a bunch of intelligence memos I haven't gotten around to reading yet."

7. "Mmm, delicious Muenster cheese."

6. "John Kerry initially voted for the bulge in my jacket, then voted against it."

5. "I'll tell you exactly what it is -- it's a clear sign this economy is moving again."

4. "Halliburton is drilling my back for oil."

3. "Oh, like you've never cheated in a presidential debate!"

2. "Accidentally took some of Governer Schwarzenegger's (ste)'roids."

1. "If Kerry's gonna look like a horse, then I'm gonna look like a camel."


Bush Flippin' & Floppin'

Bush: Worried about bin-Laden?

President Bush yesterday told Senator John Kerry and the American people that he had never said he wasn't worried about Osama bin-Laden.

When Kerry accused Bush of losing focus in the War on Terror and saying that bin-Laden wasn't a big concern, Bush immediately hit back. Hard. Bush answered by saying "Gosh, I just don't think I ever said I'm not worried about Osama bin-Laden. That's kind of one of those... exaggerations," he said.

Only one problem. In one of Bush's very rare press conferences, this one in March of 2002, Bush said this: "I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him... I truly am not that concerned about him."

This came after Bush promised to "smoke him out of his cave" and "capture him dead or alive."

When Bush didn't have much success "smoknig him out of his cave" he became unconcerned. Bush, conveniently, became unconcerned around the time he wanted to invade Iraq. While we "can walk and chew gum at the same time," it was said, we really "aren't that concerned about [bin-Laden]."

Saddam Hussein was much more important. Right, President Bush?

I've got a very nice pair of flip-flops here for Mr. Bush if he'd like to come and pick them up.

Let us never forget. Osama bin-Laden attacked the United States of America on September 11, 2001. Osama bin-Laden is responsible for the deaths of thousands of American citizens. Bin-Laden and his network, al-Qaeda, have committed numerous acts of war across numerous years against the United States of America. They have bombed American embassies, American civilians, American warships and American servicemembers.

Somehow President Bush thought that Saddam Hussein, a man who had not been engaged in hostilities against the United States in years, a man who was considered a "diminished threat", a man who the Bush Administration itself had called "contained" and "unable to project conventional power against his neighbors" was a larger and more imminent threat to the United States than Osama bin-Laden, a man actively killing Americans.

Before September 11 Bush was truly unconcerned about bin-Laden. He ignored multiple briefings on the subject, he refused to meet with his counter-terror czar. His attorney general specifically asked for an end to counter-terror briefings.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11 Bush became the cowboy. "Wanted dead or alive" posters went up throughout New York City, inspired by Bush's strong rhetoric. The inspiring leader, compared by some to Churchill, promised to kill or capture bin-Laden and end the threat of Islamist terror. The invasion of Afghanistan was planned.

And then, suddenly, even as the Taliban and al-Qaeda was resurgent in Afghanistan, Bush changed course. Bush was "not that concerned about bin-Laden". Bush was now focused on Saddam Hussein.

Now, apparently, in this election year, Bush is once again concerned about bin-Laden. Now that the heat is on, now that Bush is up for re-election, Bush must somehow convince Americans that he genuinely cares about combatting terrorism.

Bush is failing. Bush isn't that concerned with Usama bin-Laden. He'd much rather have American soldiers engage in house-to-house battles with radicalized Iraqi citizens than smoke the real terrorists out of their holes.

All is forgiven, Tom

It wasn't that long ago that I had given up on Thomas Friedman. He was looking for every excuse imaginable to justify the Iraqi Incursion, apparently on the ridiculous hope that by subduing Iraq the rest of the Mideast would somehow overlook Israel's near-genocide policy toward the Palestinians.

Maybe that's too harsh, but he did irk me.

But in the time he took off to write yet another book, he has finally come to his senses. Today's article in the Times puts the Bush Administration in proper perspective.

Welcome back to the revolution, Tom.

Addicted to 9/11
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

don't know whether to laugh or cry when I hear the president and vice president slamming John Kerry for saying that he hopes America can eventually get back to a place where "terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance." The idea that President Bush and Mr. Cheney would declare such a statement to be proof that Mr. Kerry is unfit to lead actually says more about them than Mr. Kerry. Excuse me, I don't know about you, but I dream of going back to the days when terrorism was just a nuisance in our lives.

If I have a choice, I prefer not to live the rest of my life with the difference between a good day and bad day being whether Homeland Security tells me it is "code red" or "code orange" outside. To get inside the Washington office of the International Monetary Fund the other day, I had to show my ID, wait for an escort and fill out a one-page form about myself and my visit. I told my host: "Look, I don't want a loan. I just want an interview." Somewhere along the way we've gone over the top and lost our balance.

That's why Mr. Kerry was actually touching something many Americans are worried about - that this war on terrorism is transforming us and our society, when it was supposed to be about uprooting the terrorists and transforming their societies.

The Bush team's responses to Mr. Kerry's musings are revealing because they go to the very heart of how much this administration has become addicted to 9/11. The president has exploited the terrorism issue for political ends - trying to make it into another wedge issue like abortion, guns or gay rights - to rally the Republican base and push his own political agenda. But it is precisely this exploitation of 9/11 that has gotten him and the country off-track, because it has not only created a wedge between Republicans and Democrats, it's also created a wedge between America and the rest of the world, between America and its own historical identity, and between the president and common sense.

By exploiting the emotions around 9/11, Mr. Bush took a far-right agenda on taxes, the environment and social issues - for which he had no electoral mandate - and drove it into a 9/12 world. In doing so, Mr. Bush made himself the most divisive and polarizing president in modern history.

By using 9/11 to justify launching a war in Iraq without U.N. support, Mr. Bush also created a huge wedge between America and the rest of the world. I sympathize with the president when he says he would never have gotten a U.N. consensus for a strategy of trying to get at the roots of terrorism by reshaping the Arab-Muslim regimes that foster it - starting with Iraq.

But in politicizing 9/11, Mr. Bush drove a wedge between himself and common sense when it came to implementing his Iraq strategy. After failing to find any W.M.D. in Iraq, he became so dependent on justifying the Iraq war as the response to 9/11 - a campaign to bring freedom and democracy to the Arab-Muslim world - that he refused to see reality in Iraq. The president seemed to be saying to himself, "Something so good and right as getting rid of Saddam can't possibly be going so wrong." Long after it was obvious to anyone who visited Iraq that we never had enough troops there to establish order, Mr. Bush simply ignored reality. When pressed on Iraq, he sought cover behind 9/11 and how it required "tough decisions" - as if the tough decision to go to war in Iraq, in the name of 9/11, should make him immune to criticism over how he conducted the war.

Lastly, politicizing 9/11 put a wedge between us and our history. The Bush team has turned this country into "The United States of Fighting Terrorism." "Bush only seems able to express our anger, not our hopes," said the Mideast expert Stephen P. Cohen. "His whole focus is on an America whose role in the world is to negate the negation of the terrorists. But America has always been about the affirmation of something positive. That is missing today. Beyond Afghanistan, they've been much better at destruction than construction."

I wish Mr. Kerry were better able to articulate how America is going to get its groove back. But the point he was raising about wanting to put terrorism back into perspective is correct. I want a president who can one day restore Sept. 11th to its rightful place on the calendar: as the day after Sept. 10th and before Sept. 12th. I do not want it to become a day that defines us. Because ultimately Sept. 11th is about them - the bad guys - not about us. We're about the Fourth of July.

Thursday, October 07, 2004

Oops! Junior spills his milk.

I have been less than regular in my following of the campaign, and very neglect in getting back to the blog after the recent first debates.

But we are back with a vengence. The following from the New York Times I believe is the best assessment of why Kerry now has a chance against that . . . . that . . . . shrub, as Mollie would say.

October 10, 2004
FRANK RICH

Why Did James Baker Turn Bush Into Nixon?

E'VE never seen anything like this, even the old Kennedy-Nixon classic great debate," said a breathless Chris Matthews on the "Today" show as he touted a poll showing that John Kerry had won presidential debate No. 1 by as much as a 4-to-1 margin. But actually we have seen something like this - and at that first Kennedy-Nixon debate. The polls may have gyrated more violently this time around, but the scenario is identical: a campaign's seemingly mundane decision about television theatrics has potentially changed the dynamic of a presidential election.

Only Election Day will reveal if Sept. 30, 2004, set off a political chain reaction to match that of Sept. 26, 1960; then as now the candidates soon settled down into a post-debate statistical dead heat in the horse race (Kennedy 49, Nixon 46, according to Gallup). But at the very least the first Bush-Kerry debate marked the moment that the savvy Bush-Cheney machine lost its once-invincible grip on the all-important TV game and, just like Nixon before it, did so because of its own blunders, not any sorcery by the opposing J. F. K.

As Mr. Matthews recounts the historical antecedent in his 1996 book, "Kennedy and Nixon," the debate director, Don Hewitt, offered the haggard Nixon makeup to help bridge the video gap with his tan and fit opponent, the junior Democratic senator from Massachusetts. Not only did Nixon decline but this decision was seconded by his campaign media adviser, Ted Rogers. The world remembers the rest. The only cosmetic aid that Nixon used - an over-the-counter product called Lazy Shave to mask his stubble - melted in sweat, casting an incumbent vice president in a lesser light than his lesser known challenger.

In the 2004 replay the Ted Rogers of the story is, of all people, James A. Baker III, the Bush family consigliere who so cannily gamed the 2000 count in Florida, outsmarting the Gore forces at every turn. This may be the year he lost his fast ball, unless you take the Freudian view that he has an unconscious wish to prevent 43 from bettering the re-election record of his original patron, 41. Either way, the thoroughness with which Mr. Baker's offstage maneuvers set his guy up for disaster on Sept. 30 may tell us more about the state of play in the campaign than the much-dissected style and substance of the debaters' onstage performance.

It was Mr. Baker's job to negotiate the 32-page debate agreement with Vernon Jordan, representing the Kerry camp, and by all accounts, the Bush campaign got almost everything it wanted. Yet as we now know, every Bush stipulation backfired, from the identically sized podiums that made the 5-foot-11 president look as if he needed a booster stool, to the flashing "Time's up!" lights that emphasized Mr. Kerry's uncharacteristic brevity and Mr. Bush's need to run out the clock by repeating stock phrases ad infinitum and ad absurdum.

The most revealing Baker error, though, was to insist that the first debate be about the president's purported strong suit, foreign affairs, instead of domestic policy. Did no one anticipate the likelihood that Iraq might once again explode that day, as it has on so many recent others? Insurgent attacks have gone from a daily average of 6 in May 2003 to as high as 87 in August. And so, as Adam Nagourney of The Times reported, "In the hours leading up to the debate, television images of aides to Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry were mixed with images of corpses and bloody children from Baghdad," on a day when some 35 Iraqi children were slaughtered by car bombs. With this montage grinding away in the media mix, Mr. Kerry probably could have gotten away with even more inconsistent positions about the war than he did that night.

Mr. Baker isn't responsible for the other split-screen visuals that undid Mr. Bush on Sept. 30: the reaction shots during the debate itself. They were forbidden by the 32-page agreement. But earlier that week, the networks, including Fox News, publicly announced they would violate that rule. The Bush campaign has since said that the president knew this was coming, but if so, that makes his lack of self-discipline seem all the more self-destructive, or perhaps out of touch. He couldn't have provided a better out-take promo for the DVD release of "Fahrenheit 9/11" had Michael Moore been directing it himself.

Mr. Bush could recoup by Nov. 2 for all manner of reasons, including his showing in the subsequent debates, both yet to come as I write. John F. Kerry is no John F. Kennedy. But the liberal blog Daily Kos had the big picture right: on Sept. 30, "months of meticulous image manipulation" by the Bush-Cheney forces went "down the toilet in 90 minutes."

That's a shocking development because until recently, that manipulation had been meticulous and then some. The administration has been brilliant at concocting camera-ready video narratives that flatter if not outright fictionalize its actions: "Saving Jessica Lynch," "Shock and Awe," the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue (a sparsely populated, unspontaneous event, when seen in the documentary "Control Room" ), "Mission Accomplished." Mr. Bush has been posed by his imagineers to appear to be the fifth head on Mount Rushmore; he has kept the coffins of the American war dead off-screen; he has been seen in shirtsleeves at faux-folksy Town Hall meetings that, until his second debate with Mr. Kerry, were so firmly policed in content and attendees that they would make a Skull and Bones soiree look like a paragon of democracy in action. Time reported last spring that even the Department of Homeland Security was told to take a break from its appointed tasks to round up one terrorism-fighting photo op a month for the president.

To enforce the triumphalist narrative of these cinematic efforts, the Bush team had to cut out any skeptical press, or, as Mr. Bush once put it, "go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people" (as long as they're pre-selected). This didn't just mean avoiding press conferences and blackballing reporters from campaign planes. It also required an active program to demonize "the elite media" while feeding Fox News and its talk-radio and on-line amen chorus at every opportunity. "I end up spending a lot of time watching Fox News, because they're more accurate in my experience" is how Dick Cheney put it earlier this year. Thus the first Bush-Kerry debate was preceded by a three-installment interview with the president by Fox's Bill O'Reilly, whose idea of hard-hitting journalism is encapsulated in his boast that his was "the only national TV news program" to shield its viewers from pictures of Abu Ghraib. The highlight of his pre-debate Bush marathon was his expression of admiration for the president's guts in taking questions not submitted to him in advance. This is a "free press" in the same spirit as that championed by such Bush pals as Silvio Berlusconi, Crown Prince Abdullah, Pervez Musharraf, Ayad Allawi and, of course, dear old "Vladimir."

But those who live by Fox News can die by Fox News. If you limit your diet to Fox and its talk-radio and blogging satellites, you may think that the only pressing non-Laci Peterson, non-Kobe, non-hurricane stories are "Rathergate" and the antics of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Your diet of bad news from Iraq is restricted, and Abu Ghraib becomes an over-the-top frat hazing. You are certain that John Kerry can't score in the debates because everyone knows he's an overtanned, overmanicured metrosexual. You reside in such an isolated echo chamber that you aren't aware that even the third-rated network news broadcast, that anchored by the boogeyman Dan Rather, draws 50 percent more viewers on a bad night than "The O'Reilly Factor" does on a great one (the Bush interview).

Eventually you become a prisoner of your own fiction and lose touch with reality. You start making the mistakes Mr. Baker made - and more. The whole Bush-Cheney operation is less sure-footed about media manipulation than it once was. You could see this the week before the debate, when the president rolled out Mr. Allawi for a series of staged Washington appearances that were even less effective than his predecessor Ahmad Chalabi's State of the Union photo op with Laura Bush. No one at the White House seemed to realize that if you want to keep a puppet from being ridiculed as a puppet you don't put him on camera to deliver sound bites (some 16, by the calculation of Dana Milbank of The Washington Post) that are paraphrases of the president's much replayed golden oldies. The whole long charade played out like a lost reel of "Duck Soup."

The Bush-Cheney campaign can console itself with the hope that the embarrassing first debate images will be superseded by debates No. 2 and No. 3. (Nixon aced the third of his four matchups with Kennedy.) But it can't suppress the pictures from an ongoing war that only Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Allawi believe is getting better by the day. It was back in March that the discrepancy between the White House's narrative and the reality on the ground was first captured in dramatic split screen: as Dick Cheney delivered a speech at the Reagan presidential library bashing Mr. Kerry and boasting of our progress in Iraq, his sour certitude was paired with an especially lethal car bombing in central Baghdad. These days the bombings are more frequent and often more lethal, and such tragic juxtapositions are the rule rather than the exception.

If anything, the first Bush-Kerry confrontation has given split-screen television a new vogue. Having defied the efforts of both campaigns to squelch its use on Sept. 30, emboldened TV news organizations can run with it at will. So we saw on the Sunday after that debate, when Condoleezza Rice appeared on ABC's "This Week."

There she was quizzed about the report in that morning's Times saying that in 2002 she had hyped aluminum tubes as evidence of Saddam's nuclear threat a year after her staff was told that government experts had serious doubts. Ms. Rice kept trying to talk over the soft-voiced George Stephanopoulos's questions, but he zapped her with a picture: a September 2002 CNN interview in which she had not, shall we say, told the whole truth and nothing but. As the old video played, ABC used a split screen so we could watch Ms. Rice, "This Is Your Life" style, as she watched the replay of her incriminating appearance of two years earlier. Maybe, like Mr. Bush at the first debate, she knew her reaction was being caught on camera. But even if she did, the unchecked rage in her face, like that of her boss three days earlier, revealed that her image and her story, like the war itself, had spun completely out of her control.