Bob Dole rails on against the “Democratic Wars”. He both has a point, and he doesn’t have a point. At any rate, he certainly is grouchy, ain’t he?

Dan Quayle says this: ” have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency.”
Loyd Bentsen responds thusly: “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

Comparing the current occupant of the White House and Quayle, I must say: everybody owes Dan Quayle an apology.

Saturday Night Live has the “Dukakis After Dark” sketch, where Bentsen tells the story over and over again the the guests of how he zinged Quayle, the guests growing weary of that anecdote.

James Stockdale shouts out, “Who am I? Why am I here?” The problem with the debate that follows is not that he asked the question, but that he never answers it. The Saturday Night Live sketch that follows shows Ross Perot telling Stockdale what a great debate peformance he had, driving Stockdale out to the woods, and leaving him there. For what it’s worth, the actual opening statement isn’t too bad… and the only problem is with Stockdale’s inflection and with the general unease with which he had through the rest of the debate.

Nobody remembers a damned thing beyond those three moments. Bush — Ferraro? Apparently, all we get there is Ferraro disarming Bush for a patronizing attitude of sorts. Gore — Kemp, anybody? Everybody remembers, vaguely in the back of their mind, that Lieberman — Cheney had a certain tea-party quality to it (sort of like the second debate between Gore and Bush, where the most common words spoken were “I agree with my opponent”), but it’s all a blur.

Today we have Edwards — Cheney. I don’t really want to hear either one. I’m not likely to get a satisying answer to my question “Mr. Cheney, how can you keep saying such absolute rubbish?”, or “How many Enron officials were there at the Energy Meeting?”. They say that Cheney has good experience, what with all his Meet the Press appearances. I don’t know if Cheney has appeared on those shows as of late… I know he was there the week after 9/11, and that wasn’t exactly threatening in any way, shape, or form.

Well, it looks like not only is Lyndon LaRouche trying to gain control on the Wiki entry for his name, he’s also trying to gain control over the history and origin of the “great(?)” wikipedia.

Whoever controls the past… or, at least the past in the minds of the converted. A historical re-writing. If you asked any members of the LaRouche Youth Squad, you’d learn that the man nearly received the base 15% of the Oregon primary vote in 2000.

I guess LaRouche likes that website so much that he wants to cliam it as his own. Meanwhile, my bloglines indexing shows that the contentious dispute for the Wiki entry continues.

Meet THIS Press.

Meet the Press is broadcasting debates between the candidates of the various close Senate races. I didn’t watch the show, but I’m looking over the transcript, and … it’s a depressing spectacle.

One candidate is running on his support for every piece of the Bush’s tax cut program, full-throttle support of the Patriot Act (and likely all of its progeny), unwavering support for the mission in Iraq — indeed, we need to bomb the Sunni Triangle a little bit more, and his support of the Bush-backed Medicare bill (semi-bi partisan, passed in the House with a certain number of shenanigans to coerce a few dissenting truly principled Republican anti-government budget-hawks.)

Then we turn to where the Republican candidate stands, and…

Perhaps it’s best to just go ahead and endorse Sheila Bilyeu.

In 2000, the Republican candidate — Tom Coburn — was the sole Republican member of Congress to endorse Alan Keyes for nomination. He was asked about that, and in a follow-up we get:

MR. RUSSERT: I just want to follow up on Alan Keyes one last time and then I want to ask Mr. Carson about George Bush. “In May of this year”–this is what Alan Keyes said–“now you think it’s a coincidence that on September 11th, 2001, we were struck by terrorists–an evil that has at its heart the disregard of innocent human life? We who have for several decades killed not thousands but scores of millions of our own children, in disregard of the principle of innocent human life–I don’t think that’s a coincidence, I think that’s a warning. … I think that’s a shot across the bow. I think that’s a way of Providence telling us, `I love you all; I’d like to give you a chance. Wake up! Would you please wake up?'” Do you agree with Ambassador Keyes that September 11 was a warning by the creator about America and its policy on abortion?

DR. COBURN: He or she should be put to the penalties that we think, as a society–today, in many states, we don’t have the death penalty. In other states, we do. Whatever that is, but I believe that we have to stick on the side of life. I think…

Actually, the line that strikes me from this passage, beyond the “Death Penalty” angle, is the idea that Dr. Coburn has seen the procreation and creation at its very earliest stages. How often has he watched the procreation at its earliest stages? Isn’t that called “fore-play”?

Brad Carson: Tom Coburn has said repeatedly, even after 9/11, that we have more to fear from our own government than we do from terrorists abroad. More to fear from our own government than we do from terrorists.

At different times, Tom Coburn also said that the Gay Agenda was the number one threat to the nation. That was left out of the whole discussion… unless you start with the whole first questions of the debate about the Coburn Campaign’s “this is a battle between good and evil.” But, come to think of it, Coburn may just be right in some ways. Carson is clinging to a bill which the Supreme Court is in the process of gutting.

Coburn’s also clearly anti-pork, while Carson gleefully is pro-pork. We know that the distribution of federal funds slides from “Blue State” (urban) land and into “Red State” (rural) land… which I don’t have much problem with, to be honest, except for the rhetoric of “small government”. Oklahoma’s ratio in the “dollars in to dollars out) is something like 1.4 in for every 1 out.

I don’t know how any of this played out in Oklahoma. At the moment, Brad Carson is ahead: the right-wing excesses of Tom Coburn have eaten away at him. Should the Democrats re-gain the Senate, the story will be how the Republicans overplayed their hands. In South Carolina, where it once looked like the Republican candidate had sealed the deal but where the Democrat is gaining to the point where it’s now just a slight Republican edge — a proposed national sales tax has given the Democrat an opening. (Also, there more than any other state, it appears that the sleeper issue — The Draft is having an effect. You will notice that Bush made a point in his debate, in his closing statements, of asserting All Volunteer Military. Current polls show that young males are gravitating against Bush … a turn-around from 2002 when the “pro-Wrestling esque” rhetoric turned them toward the Republican Party. Perhaps Howard Stern is having an effect? Fascinating changes.)

Anyway… the Oklahoma Senate Race. In many areas of the nation, we’d call it A Republican Primary Race.

Their Kerry is better than their Bush. They had a good Bush back in the 2000 election, two Bushes ago. It’s a step down to the next Bush they funneled out a couple years ago, and another step down to the newest Bush.

We’re a ways away from the inspired political comedy that the 2000 election evoked… but then again, the scene of Gore and Bush singing “I Got You Babe”. (Their first Gore was inspired. The second Gore was pretty funny too… the second Gore being, of course, Al Gore.)

#1: The “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” ad parody… “Yes… he served admirably, but take a look at what his service says about his domestic priorities.: “We were under attack, when Kerry said ‘You know, people don’t pay enough taxes.” I said, “We’re under attack from that sniper, what should we do?” And Kerry responded “I’d tax him too.”
“… and it was there, in the jungles of Vietnam, that John Kerry performed a same-sex marriage.”
“Kerry insisted that we change the boat so that it runs off of wind power. Later, in characteristic fashion, he flip-flopped.”

#2: “James Carville” walks in to Kerry and Heinz in the hotel after the debate: “You beat George Bush in a talking contest. That’s like Wilt Chamberlain beating Stephen Hawking at basketball and celebrating when you beat him by two points.” Actually, that’s probably a funnier Carvillism than anything that’s come out of the real James Carville’s mouth.

#3: Of course, the opening was a spoof on the debate. A sketch that ran a bit too long for its own good, packed with good material juxtaposed with bad material. They played up the Bush comment “But it’s hard.” And went on with the Kerry “flip flop”ping.

Sort of par for the course. You laugh sometimes. You wince sometimes.

#1: From Alex Jones: This is obviously totally partisan and Kerry’s the same posion as Bush, but it shows the start of Kerry’s possible comeback in line with his closer bloodline relations to European royalty.

#2: From “Free Republic”: noticed something last night.

Maybe it was an accident, maybe not. I think not. If anyone has contacts to Bush, please advise them of this possible purposeful action, or at the very least, MAKE SURE BUSH’S TIE IS STRAIGHT. I was focused on the tie, it looked so sloppy.

#3: Some Guy With A Website: President Bush’s fantasy world has crumbled right before the American public. Last election he came across as one of the average people. This time he showed himself to be one of the “special” children who ride the little yellow bus.

Last night, the Bushies went up there seemingly without a plan except to have Bush repeatedly – and we mean repeatedly and repeatedly and repeatedly, until he began to sound like Rain Man …

Sean Hannity calls it for George W Bush. The visual flubberations? Just the natural reaction to the gall of John Kerry’s lies. As opposed to the natural reaction of someone stepping out of the cocoon of his own making — the ideologically straight yes-men of his administration, the true-believers who meet him at his rallies after signing a loyalty oath, and — in the afterglow of September 11 and the Iraq War — the pliant media.

Karl Rove calls it for Bush. The query is given to Rove, “You can say that with a straight face?”

Contrarians exist, and perhaps they have the signs of warning, but the murmuring is in. The campaign may just well have hit the sort of wall that it hit right off the gate when Bush appeared on Meet the Press. And Dick Cheney has some clean-up duty to do at the Vice-Presidential Debate.

Between now and that time, the RNC tries to pick out the Kerry sound clips to hammer their themes of doom, so as to change the general dynamic of what just happened.

For their part, Democrats, before the debate bemoaning the “Drama Criticism Coverage” of the 2000 debate, have seize on the look of Bush exasperation. The DNC splices together a video and sticks it up on their website. Lessons learned: things move fast in politics.

The evidence was there that something like this would happen. It swirled around in my mind when I read the Atlantic Monthly article about the Bush debate with Ann Richards and the Kerry debate with William Weld. The 1994 Bush was a superior version of himself than the 2000 version. The 2000 version of Bush was a superior version than the 2004 version. The trait that helped him in 1994, that “Brilliant Minimalist” where most important of all is the mantra Hammer home the message fell apart at the first debate in 2004.

Bush blanked out on us an awful lot… demonstrating He got nothing. “30 minutes of material”, a small bag of tricks that just… wasn’t … big enough to “do the job”.

If Kerry appeared to meander a bit too much, it’s possible to say that it was an apt, though awkward, offensive that he picked up on along the way: Overload Bush with facts.

Recall that Reagan faltered with his first debate. And he picked himself up at the second debate with good humour. A key difference between then and now: Reagan was some godawful number of points ahead in the polls anyway.

Transcript Excerpts of note, and I’ll try to pick up on some different things than some of the online fact-checkers who pointed out a number of items:

Kerry: That’s why they had to close down the subway in New York when the Republican Convention was there.

Evidentally, the fact checkers say that it is an incorrect statement.

Bush: I don’t think we want to get to how he’s going to pay for all these promises. It’s like a huge tax gap and — anyway, that’s for another debate

We all want to keep nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists and to staff police and fire departments, but who’s going to pay for it?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Jim?
MR. LEHRER: New — all right, go ahead. Yes, sir?
PRESIDENT BUSH: I think it’s worthy for a follow, if you don’t mind?
SEN. KERRY: Sure, fine. Happy to.
MR. LEHRER: Okay.
SEN. KERRY: Sure, let’s change the rules, we can have a whole —
MR. LEHRER: We can do 30 seconds each here.

This year’s example of this.

SEN. KERRY: Well, you know, when I talked about the $87 billion, I made a mistake in how I talk about the war. But the president made a mistake in invading Iraq. Which is worse?

BOOL-YAH! I was wondering what Kerry’s answer would be… an answer designed to not sink him into explaining because the rule is that if you’re explaining, you’re losing.

Bush: Well, actually, you forgot Poland.

Fodder for comedy.

Bush: Osama bin Laden isn’t going to determine how we defend ourselves. Osama bin Laden doesn’t get to decide.
The American people decide. I decided. The right action was in Iraq.

Okay. Notice the “American people decide. I decided.” Visions of grandeur.

SEN. KERRY: Jim, the president just said something extraordinarily revealing and, frankly, very important in this debate. In answer to your question about Iraq and sending people into Iraq, he just said the enemy attacked us. Saddam Hussein didn’t attack us; Osama bin Laden attacked us.

BOOL-YA! That needed to be said… and this response needed to be aired out before a maximum audience.

PRESIDENT BUSH: — of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us. I know that.

Since polls show an ungodly percentage of Americans believe crap to that regard: BOOL-YA! Now Cheney, always a beat behind the rest of the administration in the warped-version of events category, can’t make that assertion / implication. And, by the way… something about this, the old Seymour Hersh story I have no way of verifying, become popular in some minds… repeated three or four times at yesterday’s debate.

Kerry: And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains, with American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn’t use the best-trained troops in the world to go kill the world’s number one criminal and terrorist. They outsourced the job to Afghan warlords who only a week earlier had been on the other side, fighting against us, neither of whom trusted each other.

Bush offered no rebuttal to what is a pretty lofty charge. Perhaps he was “not in the loop” on these matters, and perhaps Cheney has a response to this, but surely that New England Republican that played Kerry in his debate preps offered it up. (The “rational reason” being that we couldn’t risk destabilizing Pakistan’s government… but that would run counter to Bush’s “Tough Guy Unnuanced” demenor.)

SEN. KERRY: Thirty-five to 40 countries in the world had a greater capability of making weapons at the moment the president invaded than Saddam Hussein.

BOOL-YAH! I’ve wanted somebody to say that for so damned long it’s not even funny. (My thought-process always having been: Where’s a terrorist more likely to get dangerous material: on the black-market from ex-Soviet nations or perhaps from Pakistan or from Mr. Hussein?)

Kerry: But if and when you do it, Jim, you’ve got to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you’re doing what you’re doing, and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.

Here we have the Kerry quote that Bush Campaign has seized on, and will treat as a “gaffe”, and indeed Bush replied to it in his response. But it’s more or less sound: name it a coalition only if it passes the “smell test.”

Bush: As well, we included South Korea, Japan and Russia. So now there are five voices speaking to Kim Jong Il, not just one. And so, if Kim Jong Il decides again to not honor an agreement, he’s not only — ah — ah — doing injustice to America, it would be doing injustice to China as well.

Bush the Multilaterialist. As Biden said, the problem here is that South Korea, Japan, Russia, and China are asking the US to have one-on-one discussions with North Korea.

…

As per the Billmon thesis that the blogosphere is being co-opted and tamed: the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee both disseminate talking points to their respective* corners of their blogosphere.

I probably should have said more nasty things about Kerry just to offset that effect. If I wanted to, I could feed myself into a self-aware storyline, raising expectations for the second debate to a preposterous level, by saying that he’s going to come in and give the performance of his lifetime… thereby transmuting any higher level of performance that comes with better preparedness on Bush’s part.

*Note: if you look up “respective” in the dictionary, you’ll find that I misused that word. But, I do believe in “common usage”, so screw George Carlin.

A fundamentalist, better to say Reconstructionist, Christian put this on the web a week or so ago: The well-known skeptic and author Mark Twain once said of Christians: “It will be conceded that a Christian’s first duty is to God. It then follows, as a matter of course, that it is his duty to carry his Christian code of morals to the polls and vote them. Whenever he shall do that, he will not find himself voting for an unclean man, a dishonest man. If Christians would vote their duty to God at the polls, they would carry every election, and do it with ease. Their prodigious power would be quickly realized and recognized, and afterward there would be no unclean candidates upon any ticket, and graft would cease. If the Christians of America could be persuaded to vote God and a clean ticket, it would bring about a moral revolution that would be incalculably beneficent. It would save the country.” (Colliers magazine, September 2, 1904)

The model of fundamentalist Christian politicians at the time being… William Jennings Bryan. The man who so enthralled the Democratic Party that they nominated him thrice. The Populist. “Cross of Gold”. When it became politically expedient (the rules of the political game are that the politician defines him/herself against the opposing party — which leads to some tricky political shifts), the anti-imperialist. Which, for the most part, pretty well slid into Mark Twain’s political ideology. (He was fervently anti-imperialist)

Oh, and Bryan was the defender of Evolution at the Scopes Monkey Trial.

Which brings us over to the post comparing the electoral map for 1896 with that of 2000. Flip Flop (September 10).

These thoughts popped into my mind when I saw this post. The “New Labor” electoral strategy that made Tony Blair a Bill Clinton clone (rubbing off from “New Democrat” of 1992) [just as assuredly as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were joined at the hips, and less impressively, John Major and George Bush I. The irony of the John Major situation being, Major won a close re-election in 1992, seemingly due to the fact that the British election was held before the American election… at any rate, his election briefly gave the Bush campaign renewed hope that they could pull it ott], while the devout faith (with general pomposity) factor now fuses Tony Blair with George W Bush.

Does that mean that the “Center — Left Party” of Britain, albeit a “Center – Left” Party that which has been partly co-opted by the Ruppert Murdoch Empire, is holding Jesus right now? I don’t know, and it might be moot since the rank and file Labor members are somewhat miffed at Blair at the moment.

Keep that in mind the next time you read something like this, from Salon:

Bush has no idea at all of — well, of anything. Both [Blair and Bush] try to cover their moral vacuity with religious language that further relieves them of responsibility — God is responsible.

No political party can hold on to God for ever. The American religious tradition is vital and tumultuous. In part because it is an evangelical, and not primarily a birthright, tradition its connection to conservatism is contingent, not necessary. Some liberals have trouble grasping the emotional depth of religious commitment in others, or consider it freakish and scary. I am not one.

The “liberal” churches have drawn attention to the moral failings of preventative war, capital punishment and regressive taxation. Their challenge is just, and their message has entered the ongoing, bottom-up religious conversation. One day — and perhaps sooner than we now can hope — Bush and the hard right will lose the church.

Jimmy Carter was, in 1976, the choice of the Born-Again Christians that now serve as a vital part of George W.’s base. He lost out on that vote four years later to Ronald Reagan… it’s pretty clear now where the fissures of the change were a’moving — the Equal Rights Amendment is part of the Vast Dyke Conspiracy, dontchaknow — and that Carter’s victory was a cosmetic fluke all the way around.

I don’t know what we’re seeing today. Everything is muddled; ‘Strange things are afoot at the Circle K!’

Stay Tuned, I guess.