For the Democrats, the presidential hopes of many hang on what happens in 2004, but the Republicans seem rather… settled on who the big-wigs in the smokey rooms have set up to send down the pike.

Brief excerpt stolen from another blog: “We are not saying that he is absolutely running, but we’re saying that there are plans being made,” Peter Schweizer said in an exclusive interview with the Tallahassee Democrat before the book’s full contents are released next month. “Jeb has talked to his mother about his financial situation, in the context of running for president. So we know that within the family, they’re talking about the realities of running.”

Republicans Priming and Being Primed for the Presidency

(1) Jeb Bush
(2) Bill Frist
(3) Arnold Schwarzenegger

It war clear as early as the 1998 mid-term elections (and perhaps even 1996’s election) that the Bush Brothers were coming down the pike. I recall reading a George Carlin piece online back in ’98 marvelling on the coming Bushes… (somewhere plugged into the bit that we all know deep down that the country is run on bullshit, and Clinton won in ’96 ’cause he was honest about his bullshit, unlike Dole.)

As for Arnold… well, first there’s the matter of changing the constitution… which, I suppose, would have some muscle-room competition with that other constitutional amendment hopping about (and going nowhere fast, though int its semi-defense it’s not designed to go anywhere.)

Flick past Fox News early this afternoon. They were covering the Spanish elections.

To the horror of the Fox News-hounds, (and dashing of the hopes of the hopeful calculations of America’s Iraq War Hawks, the Socialists won.

The entire dynamic of the post-3/11 terrorist strike had been: if the signs pointed to Basque-rebels, the Conservatives will win. If the signs pointed to the Socialists, the Socialists win.

The Conservatives tried to the very last, despite the emerging evidence, to insist that it was an attack from Basque-Separatists. This politically-calculated denial out of desparation, more than anything else, very like dun ’em in.

Something on the order of 90 percent of the Spanish public was against Aznar’s “coalition of the willing” support for the Iraq War.

DAMNED Socialist appeasers!

The Fox News hounds stumbled about to couch the proper Chamberlain references with the miff of not coming across as “commenting” beyond the “Fair and Balanced” psuedo-mandate.

“You know… if a terrorist attack were to strike in America, it’d ensure a Bush victory, because the American people fully support the WAR ON TERROR ™.”

“Spain is Socialist-Land. Always has been, ever since Franco. We can expect the Spanish Stock market to slide into oblivion, a stock market that had only come alive under the watch of Prime Minister Aznar.”

“We really can’t separate the Basque-rebels with Al Qaeda, y’know. Same tactics. Inspired by one another.”

“This is a bad sign. It shows Al Qaeda that they can affect electoral politics throughout the world.”

And so on… and on… and on…

Obviously, I was not the only one who thought John Kerry made the quip knowing full well that the mic was on.

John Stewart asked Paula Zahn if it was done on purpose. Paula Zahn said she had sources that suggest it was.

Go over to The West Wing and we find that this type of antic is not overly original.

March 27, 2002 episode summary:
WHEN BARTLET SPEAKS, PEOPLE LISTEN — When the President (Martin Sheen) is overheard making a disparaging comment on an open-mike about the potential Republican nominee, C.J. (Allison Janney) does damage control for days.

The quote:
“I don’t know, Leslie. I think we might be talking about a .22 caliber mind in a .357 magnum world.”

The West Wing, and the personality of Jed Bartlett, is the sort of wet-dream fantasy presidency of the nation’s Clinton-fans. If Kerry’s operatives are thinking three spots ahead of themselves, perhaps they have the scripts of Jed Bartlett in mind, ready for incorporation.

Post-modern Politics abounds.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry Thursday stood behind remarks he made to supporters in Chicago Wednesday while the cameras were still rolling, in which he called the GOP “the most crooked, lying group I’ve ever seen.”

John Kerry knew that the cameras were rolling. It gives him a chance to launch into the rest of what’s in that article.

And the chattering class chats on about it.

Norman Podhoretz, from the first generation of neo-conservatives (when the term literally referred to what the prefix “neo” suggests) author of the oh-so-prescient 1980 book The Present Danger regarding the rapidly deteroiating American military and the mighty and rapidly building Soviet military, was on Chris Matthew’s Hardball a couple months or so ago.

I digress on that point about his oh-so-prescient book, though. Y’see, the line of thinking with regards to the Soviet threat is that Reagan’s rapid expanse of the military budget (after Carter’s late-term military expansion, but forget that ever happened), most notably his “Star Wars” Defense Shield budget priority, forced the Soviet Union to expand its military budget and bankrupt itself. (Which, inadvertedly, feeds into my general take on the Cold War: it was a contest to see which side could bankrupt itself first, and in the end we simply traded a Vietnam for an Afghanistan.)

But, back to Podhoretz. I wish I could find some trasncripts quickly and search for exact quotes, but his comment left a sour taste in my mouth. To paraphrase: it is the job of the Democratic leadership to keep their rank and file from thinking of George W. Bush as an extreme president (se– he’s really aligned with the great majority of the country), and they have failed to do so.

Or, to put another way: a top-down approach to politics. The Political Parties are in charge of regulating the thought patterns of those that are, nominally or less nominally, aligned with whichever political party.

OK.

BTW: Podhertz’s newest book is Bush Country. Place it alongside The Present Danger, I guess it belongs on the bookshelf before it when you alphabetize the titles.

The chattering classes are being absurd again.

CNN radio news break Friday or Saturday night. Mentioned Hillary Clinton as being there “if Kerry is significantly behind come August.”

What is it with the media’s obsession with Hillary Clinton’s political ambitions — none of which every quite match reality?

We also have been entreated with the “prospect” of John McCain being asked to be Kerry’s running mate. Absurd on the face of it. Indeed there it was last night: a soundbyte from McCain about how absurd that question was, asked in all seriousness by some member of the chattering class.

8 more months of this…

I edited the “Recommended Reading” category down a ways on the sidebar.

Deleted the Pinkwater book Picture of Morty and Ray. I do recommend little book — a delightful smograsboard of cultural references, bemusing insults, and quirky pictures. But it has nothing to do with electoral politics. So I replaced it with the only Pinkwater book I can think of that deals in some way with the world of politics: Young Adults…

All three novellas that make up the book feature references to electoral politics. First we see the outcast psuedo-intellectual Dada Ducks of Himmler High School (ahem) oh-so-ironically bring to power a hitofore unremarkable dullard (exposing the sham of the school’s Student Body elections in the process), who immediately surrounds himself with a gestapo-like group of kids adorned in silly Donald Duck sailor outfits, eliminates the arts (or whatever it is that the Dada Ducks practice), and throw their power toward the persecution of the Dada Ducks (the manifestation of which is… I won’t divulge, but I will point out that it is rather silly)…

The next novella opens up with this cold rumination of who the power elite are… which is a similar sentiment to that which pretty much all of human civilization had after World War II, when looking back at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Holocaust (or, if you will, the rather silly fate that greeted the Dada Ducks at the end of the first novella).

And the third novella? The Dada Ducks in College? Note who the ASB officials are in their university… so much overlap exists between the Student Body Government and the Campus Crusade for Christ that eventually the two bodies simply… merge together into one rather vindictive, and hypocritical, force of power. (What is Pinkwater saying here?)

I also replaced Walter Karp’s book Indespensible Enemies: the Politics of Misrule in America with his Liberty Under Siege: American Politics 1976-1988. I have not read the former; I have read the latter — which has a gripping narrative. They seem to share pretty similar theses. I can pretty easily quote sections of Liberty Under Siege, change a few names of some of the actors, and we’d have current commentary on the politics of the present day… history truly does regurgitate itself forward.

And I added Michael Moore’s first book, simply a written catalouge of the best of his first network tv show, Adventures in a TV Nation. Moore has since devolved into a bit of a self-parody and charicature of himself. Dude, Where’s My Country? is decent enough I suppose — though probably unremarkable in the current glut of anti-Bush books; Stupid White Men is a stupid book not worth reading.

I’ll add books of relevance as they come to me. Suggestions welcome, I suppose.

There’s the liberal media again. Purposefully misconstruing Oklahoma Representative Tom Cole’s remarks as meaning that electing John Kerry would be like electing Adolf Hitler.

Clearly what Tom Cole actually means is that if Kerry is elected, Saddam Hussein will escape custody, find Osama Bin Laden, and provide him the materials that will have a mushroom cloud over Los Angeles in August of 2005.

Clearly that’s what he meant.

Supposedly Kerry’s 1996 re-election race is one of the crucibles of Kerry’s political life — a tough-fought race where Kerry was down and out, but came storming back and showed his mettle and demonstrated what he is made of. The pundits have drawn comparisons of his recent comeback from the dead in the 2004 Democratic primary race to this 1996 campaign.

So, with that in mind, a google search through Usenet posts for the names “John Kerry” and “William Weld”, constricted to January 1, 1996 to December 31, 1996 so as to highlight everything from relatively early prognasticating as the race clearly shaped up to post-mortem analyses of what just happened brings us:

184 results. 72 non-repetitive.

… And On to what’s there…
Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it’s not quite “Morning In America.” What it is is “America: Turning the Corner”.

Or, to put a finer spin on John Marshal Micah’s take on the ads’ message, and to quote the Mayor Quimby for Mayor Mayoral Committee: “It’s not the Mayor’s fault that the Stadium Collapsed.
If you were running for mayor, he’d vote for you.”

If anyone wants to see them on the web, look around the blogs. Otherwise, watch during news programming in the swing states mentioned on the left bar over there. Or watch the various blatthering fests where the chattering class will moronically dissect them… which is where the advertisements get their biggest bang for the buck anyways.