The term is “conspiracy theorist”.

When I said what I thought of as the obvious, that the dropping of the statue of Saddam Hussein was staged, and spurred by the US Military more than the Iraqi civilians, what was I indulging in? Playing in the realm of conspiracy theories.

It took over a year for the mainstream press to deliver the news to anyone who was still paying attention.

The biggest problem with the piece of propaganda was that the propaganda was aimed at the wrong audience: draping the statue with the American flag goes over well with the American public — sort of — but leaves the “liberated” Iraqis a bit cold, and leaves a lasting impression toward anyone in the Arab World who wishes to yell “Imperialism!”

Oddly enough, I was never willing to go so far as this source suggests, that the crowd consisted of a lot of Iraqi National Congress People…

… until just about now. But that’s just a gut feeling.

The same thing happened with Jessica Lynch. But, it seems that most people — shy of the Fox News / FreeRepublic set — picked up on that one rather quickly. Here, we get the curious case where when Jessica Lynch finally said that the gummint made a lot of it up, a lot of the FreeRepublic crowd actually turned on her. “Support the Troops”, indeed.

Part Two coming later.

“This is all Theater!” — Saddam Hussein.

The Bush Administration has expressed concern that the Phillipines have agreed to remove all of their troops from Iraq in exchange for the release and non-beheading of a Philipino soldier.

Granted, it’s not a positive sign, and I’m weary of it, but…

A population made where 80 percent opposed starting a war in Iraq high-tails it out when the going gets rough, particularly after the reasons for the war fades into oblivion? Could you expect anything else?…

Looking at the tv advertisements, Bush’s ads are negative attacks on Kerry and Kerry’s ads are positive biographical ads. It flies in the face of the commonly held idea (which still has merit, by the way) that Kerry is running as “Not Bush”.

The response to this is: hey, Moveon.org and other organizations like that have ads that are negative. But, frankly I don’t know if I’ve actually seen those ads during commercial breaks. Recall that the networks didn’t let them air the rather typical contest winner — focused on the deficit.

The latest Bush ad goes through the votes that Kerry didn’t cast a vote on due to campaigning. It’s a common ad theme against members of the Legislative Branch busy running for president. The list that the ad brings up is rather meaningless, except … well… I want to know one thing:

Did Kerry bother to vote on the Kitten Protection Act? It’s almost worse if he didn’t take the effort to vote on the Kitten Protection Act than if he had shown his hand that he hates kittens and voted no on it.

In the same riff of over-reaching toward cleverness that had him calling New Year’s Day a silly holiday, and saying that he wasn’t going to celebrate it in any way going into 2000…

… my brother went out of his way not to get news of the presidential election the year 1992. Somewhat specious, since anyone with an even faintly passing familiarity with the ebb and flow of the election knew that Clinton was going to tumble all over Bush. Nonetheless, he watched whatever Fox was airing on his black and white television in his room, while in the family room the election results were pouring forth on one of the 3 Alphabet, non-staticy, networks.

From his words, at one poing the Fox screen flashed with 3 faces and a bar graph. Bush, Clinton, Perot and votes. He closed his eyes and waited it for it to go away.

And the next day, he asked someone “Clinton won, didn’t he?”

For my part, someone asked me the next day at school (I was in the sixth grade) the same question, and clapped with the answer “yes.”

I rather distinctly remember my dad laughing at Zell Miller’s line from the keynote speech at the 1992 DNC convention:

And so the choice in this election is clear–we’ve got us a race
between an aristocrat, an autocrat and a Democrat.

Ross Perot withdrew from the race the following day, before rejoining the race seemingly during the RNC Convention.

Zell Miller is speaking at the 2004 Republican Convention, seemingly the most Conservative and straight-forward Republican face that the RNC is going to have speaking during prime-time… going with this line.

One thing I recall about the DNC and RNC conventions: during the week of the DNC convention, the far-flung fourth network FOX (not covering these events– interestingly enough, they broadcasted just few enough hours to avoid the then-curcial and now-probably not “public service mandate” of news coverage) finished an unprecedented third in the ratings race. During the RNC Convention, they finished second.

This was the start of fazing out the network coverage of these un-newsworthy pageants of fliffery.

The purplest of the purple swing states is the state of Ohio.

Attack Ohio in the afternoon on Election Day. Since the terror attacks are concentrated solely in the state of Ohio, every other state will go right ahead with the elections, but Ohio — in a similar state of chaos that the state of New York City was on Primary Election Day 2001 (that’s September 11), will have to postpone their state’s election (as per possible requirements when the Commission on these things comes up with their report.)

Then, if the election actually does come down to Ohio in the same way that Election 2000 came down to Florida…

the results of Election 2004 will not be know until Ohio gets to vote…

… and we’d get to see the Bush and Kerry campaigns at their most politically crass — diving for votes in the state of Ohio in the wake of a terrorist strike.

(Disclaimer: Please don’t do this, anyone.)

I say let’s cancel the elections already!

See… if the polls show that Bush is going to lose, it must mean that the terrorists have disrupted the election and the American people have gone all pussy on us.

So, for their own good, since the world cannot afford this great nation to be exposed to be like the Spanish, the elections MUST, in that event, be … er… indefinitely postponed.

Just saying…

Sorry, I left everybody hanging… Anyway, cut and pasted from that blog comes:

Part Two: The Goat Stops the Robber

The Pet Goat, Siegfried Engelmann & Elaine C. Bruner, Lesson 60, page 153, Reading Mastery 2, Storybook #1, SRA (Scientific Research Associates), McGraw-Hill, 1995, ISBN# 0026863553

Analysis of this story in light of current events is much needed.

An unfortunate mistake was made when the original keyboardist typed out Part One. The goat ate cans and he ate canes. He ate pans and he ate panes. He even ate capes and caps. … not, as it is on this blog He ate cans and he ate cakes. He ate cakes and he ate cats. It subtley shifts the story… See: in the corrected version, this is what you call actionable intelligence, as opposed to the wishy-washy muddled version that came watered down because of the various beauracratic channels that this came through.

This address: http://www.mypetgoat.com makes the common name mistake. It’s The, THE, THE, not My.

Contrary to popular belief, the name of the story, available in a reader found on the sidebar, was “The Pet Goat”.

Some excerpts:

A girl got a pet goat. But the goat did some things that made the girl’s dad mad. The goat ate things. He ate cans and he ate cakes. He ate cakes and he ate cats. One day her dad said, that goat must go. He ate too many things. The girl said, that if you let the goat stay with us, I will see that he stops eating all those things. Her dad said he will try it. So the goat stayed and the girl made him stop eating cans and cakes and cats and cakes. But one day a car robber went into the girls house. He saw a big red car in the house and said, I will steal that car. He ran to the car and started to open the door. The girl and the goat were playing in the back yard. They did not see the car robber.

(google search for content from the book lead me here.)

Now I just need the next chapters, and we’ve got the puzzle figured out.

Asked about the differences between Edwards and Cheney going into the November 2 presidential election, Bush replied tersely: “Dick Cheney can be president.”

John Kerry: “He was right that Dick Cheney was ready to take over on day one, and he did and he has been ever since, and that’s what we got to change.”

………….
US President George W. Bush walks away from a briefing with the media, refusing to answer questions after he was asked about Enron and the reported indictment of former CEO Kenneth Lay, who was a close adviser and fund-raiser for Bush and his father, earning him the presidential nickname of ‘Kenny Boy.'(AFP/Paul J. Richards)

And… yes, we’ve got no bananas:
“It’d be great. I’d love to see Ken Lay Secretary of Energy,” says one Enron worker.

………………