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.

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.

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?

Item #1

A state court judge in Florida ordered Thursday that the board of elections immediately release a list of nearly 50,000 suspected felons to CNN and other news organizations that last month sued the state for access to copies of the list.

Item #2

The state scrapped the database Saturday after finding it ignored thousands of Hispanic voters. (Florida Hispanic voters = Cubans.)

Item #3:

“We are not going to engage in every accusation du jour from people whose goal it is to undermine voter confidence,” DiPietre said. “The governor has every confidence in the Department of State, election supervisors and the staffers who are working to ensure a fair and seamless election, and the voter should, too.”

Item #4:

The liberal Democrats have already begun their attacks and the new electronic voting machines do not have a paper ballot to verify your vote in case of a recount. Make sure your vote counts. Order your absentee ballot today.”

My tagline at the top is an obvious lie. It doesn’t lie as much as it did previously, but it still lies. I changed it from “as though it doesn’t matter” to “as though it barely matters.”

I obviously have a dog in this fight… despite any and all grievances I express about Kerry… I view Kerry as an improvement over what the DNC offered up in 2000 (yes, that is damning him with a little feignt praise), and Bush as worse than what I thought he was in 2000. At the same time, it frequently seems like the election is analogious to an election for American Mob Boss.

Forget it though. I feel the need to steer away from the cynicism and get down to brass tasks: I shall create two lists. The first: the Case Against Bush. The second: the Case For Kerry. I jotted some items down, and it’s obvious the first list is easier than the second list — without too much thought, I have 10 items down against Bush and 5 items down for Kerry.

Suggestions and ideas are being taken.

I’m thinking that the term Liebermangracious does not quite roll of the tongue.

Lieberman is speaking tonight. For some reason, the Kerry high – command boosted him from Wednesday, where he was originally speaking beside Al Sharpton and Bob Graham, to the night Kerry himself gives his acceptance speech.

Is this a sign that Kerry thinks Lieberman can actually help the undecideds in OhioPennsylvaniaFloridaWisconsin?

The Reverend Al Sharpton, evidentally speaking beyond his prepared speech:

. “They promised us 40 acres and a mule. We waited and nothing happened. The fact of the matter is, Mr. Bush, we waited around with the Republican Party through Herbert Hoover. Still didn’t get the 40 acres. Didn’t even get the mule. So we decided we’d ride this donkey as far as it would take us.”

Al Sharpton, through the primary season, was big on the donkey reference, vowing to “slap the donkey” or “whip the donkey”, etc. The mental picture of Al Sharpton “slapping the donkey” was never terribly pleasant.

(My favourite Shartponism, seemingly a jab at Lieberman, talking to Wesley Clark: “And don’t be defensive about just joining the party. Welcome to the party. It’s better to be a new Democrat that’s a real Democrat, than a lot of old Democrats up here that have been acting like Republicans all along.” )

Yesterday, Barak Obama completely revolutionized the art of political speeches. After hearing him yesterday, I had to overhaul and alter my prior definition of the word “political speech”.

A giant cataclysmic paradigm shift. It was the Day the Earth Stood Still. The world will never be the same after Obama’s keynote speech. We will have to redo the calendar, marked Before Obama’s Keynote Speech, and After.

Obama’s speech was a pinacle triumph for Human Civilization. Historians will pour over it, and talk it up in the same breath as the Invention of the Wheel, Gutenberg’s Press, and the establishment of Mosaic Law.

It was the Day the World Stood Still. Granted, the broadcast networks didn’t cover it, but imagining the impact if they did cover it blows the mind. Adding sugar to sugar!

Nay, I didn’t see it.

I will say this: it’s too bad that the Republicans aren’t able to find a replacement for Jack Ryan to run against him. (Mike Ditka declined, and Ted Nugent seems to be a no-go as well… yes, those are the names that came up to run for the US Senate: Mike Ditka and Ted Nugent!!) Because, that could be a heck of a negative campaign meme: Obama equals Osama.

In the meantime, the debate over President Mario Cuomo’s legacy rages on — what with that brilliant 1984 speech, and history will always tell how Bill Clinton’s career ended when he gave that long, meandering, and just plain bad speech back at the 1988 Democratic Convention.