Skip past Bush’s renaming of what was formerly known as the “War on Terror” (better throw that off your cable news banner and replace it with the the “The Struggle Against Ideological Extremists Who Do Not Believe in Free Socities Who Happen to Use Terror as a Weapon to try to Change the Concious of the Free World”.*)

So, Mr. President, what does “tribal sovereignty” mean to you?

Tribal sovereignty means that, it’s sovereign. You’re a —
you’ve been given sovereignty, and you’re viewed as a sovereign entity. And,
therefore, the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one
between sovereign entities.

And… then there’s this question:

In 2000, an estimated 2 million people — half African American
— had their votes discounted, from Florida to Cook County, Illinois to other
cities. (Applause.) Come on, that cuts into other questions. Are you going to
order Attorney General John Ashcroft to send federal election monitors to
Florida and other southern states? And in this age of new constitutional
amendments, will you endorse a constitutional amendment guaranteeing every
American the right to vote in federal elections?

Which gets this answer:

[…] Now, I — the best thing we did was to pass the Helping America Vote Act with over — I think it’s $3 billion of help to states and local governments
to make sure the voting process is fair. And it’s not just the South, by the
way. The voting process needs help all over the country to make sure that
everybody’s vote counts and everybody’s vote matter. I understand that. And
that’s why I was happy to work with the Congress to achieve this important
piece of legislation.
Just don’t focus on Florida. Now, I’ll talk to the governor down there to
make sure it works. (Laughter.)

* Hm. Throw out the slight and really understandable stutter at the start “the the the”, and you actually get a defense agains the Bush stereotype.

So, what do you make of Bush’s new gaffe?

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we,” Bush said. “They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”

On first blush, it seems to be a simple explication toward Teresha Heinz’s quote “They want four more years of Hell. But look closer.

When he refers to “our enemies”, he’s not referring to Al Qaeda or Islamo-fascists, but his political enemies — namely the John Kerry campaign, who already said this.

Bush means this: “Sure, my opponent has new and innovative ways to harm our country, but they’re nothing when compared to ours!”

I await Kerry’s response to this challenge.

What a great Campaign!

..
(Note: I’m just fulfilling the mandate that I was tossed with when I named this blog “Skull / Bones 2004”. Take heed. Take grains of salt.)

Item #1: George W Bush speaks in Davenport, Iowa.

Item #2: John Kerry speaks in Davenport, Iowa.

(For what it’s worth, here’s Rush Limbaugh’s take on the events: he says Kerry bombed. The neat thing about the right-wing echo chamber: it leads to confusion when the Democratic Party does well.)

And, of course, the 157 police officers of Davenport, Iowa being tied:

Item #3: Three bank robberies. Police think that the bank robberies are unrelated, suggesting that… 3 different people had the same lightbulb over their head.

There is some merit to this, though I have a slightly different take.

There have been some key Bush — Kennedy fusions made. Arnold Schwarzeggar is the most obvious example — married to a Kennedy, though a Bush Republican through and through: what with his Enron connections and governance through stagecraft.

Also recall that Teddy Kennedy was the recipient of the 2003 George Bush Award for Excellence in Public Service. At the time, raised eyebrows abounded: Is this a slap in the face from key Daddy Bush Administration figures at Sonny-boy Bush’s Foreign Policy?

… Or maybe it’s the power elites signifying the downfall of the Bushes and the Return of the Kennedys…

Previously, I wondered about the downfall of the Rockefellars. But, it’s hit me. They had their last hurrah (perhaps temporary, perhaps permanent) with the Ford assassination attempt. But, a Lewis Lapham piece from Fortune’s Child, tells of a jolt that the nation received when the Rockafellars had to unveil the total amount of their fortune…

… and the amount was disappoiningtly and surprisingly low. The Emperor has No Clothes!

This represented the passing of the torch from one elite group to another elite group: the Rockafellars to the Bushes, George Senior having been groomed in the CIA through the decade.

Likewise, Kennedy saving the Kerry campaign and basically taking it over, Kennedy taking over the Bush surrogate in California are manifestations of the Return of the Kennedys. A tragic family, that was supposed to be dead when John Kennedy, Jr fell into the sea back in the mide-late 1990s, is resurrected.

And the passing of the torch? When Kennedy received the Bush Award, of course. That was the hand-signal for the puppet-masters to start making their moves… to destroy the current administration, and to slowly but surely prop up Kerry.

Now we await to see if there are any signs from the Rockafellars of any rebirth or pulse.

I don’t know if this latest selective Orange Alert is politically timed or not*. Sure, the intelligence has been there for four years, but the “four years in the making” spiel makes some sense, and it occurs to me that better political timing would be during Kerry’s speech.

Still, something pops into my head with the schmeraing of Dean. What he said:

It’s just impossible to know how much of this is real and how much of this is politics. And I suspect there’s some of both in it.

and

I am concerned that every time something happens that’s not good for President Bush, he plays this trump card, which is terrorism.

Here’s where it gets rather wacky. These are being brandished as evocative of a previous statement from Dean:

WOODRUFF: It’s not the first time the former Vermont governor’s words have made waves. Remember what he said after U.S. forces in Iraq bagged the ace in the deck?

DEAN: We’re not safer today than we were before Saddam Hussein left.

A line that was slammed… and a line that was whole-heartedly true.

Lieberman, just as he did back then, is critical of Dean again:

I don’t think anybody who has any fairness or is in their right mind would think that the president or the secretary of Homeland Security would raise an alert level and scare people for political reasons.

About there being some of both of it (politics and reality), we move back to Tom Ridge:

But we must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the president’s leadership in the war against terror […]

Tom Ridge later lobbed the following criticism at himself:

We don’t do politics in the Department of Homeland Security.

…
* For what it’s worth, Bill Clinton just defended this on Bush’s part, saying “You can’t be too cynical.” Of course, he was once accused of “Wagging the Dog”, so sympathies on sympathies.

From All Things Considered.

Mr. FELDSTEIN: Well, it’s pretty wild, but it’s true. The CIA started spying on Anderson under Nixon which was illegal, and Anderson found out about it and he sicced his nine kids–he’s a devote Mormon and has nine children–on the CIA agents and they waved and let the air out of the tires of the agents and made sport of it all. So everything Nixon tried, you know, didn’t seem to work and finally he turned to smearing him sexually and an assassination plot.

NAYLOR: Now what did the assassination plot involve? I mean, was this something that Nixon was directly involved with?

Mr. FELDSTEIN: We don’t know. Here’s what we do know–and it’s been really interesting. I’ve been going through the National Archives documents on this and the White House tapes. We do know that E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, two names that would become famous a few weeks later during the Watergate break-in when they were arrested as part of that, secretly met at The Hay-Adams Hotel in March of 1972, a block from the White House, and they discussed rubbing out Jack Anderson, and they discussed various ways they were going to kill him. First, they talked about putting LSD in his drink. The trouble was as Mormon and a teetotaler, he didn’t drink alcohol. So that was out. So then they talked about making him crash in an automobile accident, but they would have to go to the CIA and use a special car for that. So finally G. Gordon Liddy volunteered to kill Anderson himself personally by knifing him, slitting his throat, and staging it as a mugging that would look like a Washington street crime. At the last minute, this assassination plot was aborted, and a few weeks later, the men were arrested in the Watergate break-in and never had a chance to put their plan into operation.

Well, the Capitol Hill Blue just published another couple of exclusive scoops detailing Bush’s Deteroiating Mental State.

Some liberal blogs are picking it up. Some conspiracy sites are picking it up. A previous exclusive about a previous step downward in Bush’s mental state was cited by Michael Ruppert at fromthewilderness.com, for example.

This particular article cites the bizarro Charles Krauthammer for the Liberals: some professional psychiaritrist with an anti-Bush screed out. You may know Krauthammer from his various Washington Post editorials on how Dean is nuts, Gore is nuts, Clinton is nuts, and… you get the idea.

We’ve arrived at a point in political discourse where the two sides pick out a psychiaritrist and stand back as they make diagnostics and call the other side crazy!

On the other hand, some guy named Justin has a point here:

wouldn’t you be a little bit down if you had just committed the worst foreign policy mistake in American history?