Monthly Archives: October 2004

Dump Duhbya

Conservative Media Attacks

Anti-Kerry film slated to air on eve of election By Elizabeth Jensen, Los Angeles Times

The conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group, whose television outlets reach nearly a quarter of the nation’s homes with TV, is ordering its stations to preempt regular programming just days before the Nov. 2 election to air a film that attacks Senator John F. Kerry’s activism against the Vietnam War, network and station executives familiar with the plan said Friday.

Sinclair’s programming plan, communicated to executives in recent days and coming in the thick of a close and intense presidential race, is highly unusual even in a political season that has been marked by media controversies.

Sinclair has told its stations — many of them in political swing states such as Ohio and Florida — to air ”Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal,” sources said. The film, funded by Pennsylvania veterans and produced by a veteran and former Washington Times reporter, features former POWs accusing Kerry — a decorated Navy veteran turned war protester — of worsening their ordeal by prolonging the war. Sinclair will preempt regular prime-time programming from the networks to show the film, which may be classified as news programming, according to TV executives familiar with the plan.

Recall that Sinclair blocked the broadcast of Nightline’s reading of the names of war dead. The Radical Right and its corporations will do anything to retain power. YOU have the power to boot them out. mjh

BOYCOTT SINCLAIR ADVERTISERS

Democratic Talk Radio ACTION ALERT

Dump Duhbya

Bush Distortions

Political Memo: In New Attacks, Bush Pushes Limit on the Facts By ADAM NAGOURNEY
and RICHARD W. STEVENSON

From the beginning of the year, the White House has charted new ground with the sweep of its negative campaigning, starting with an $80 million wave of attack advertisements directed at Senator John Kerry that began the moment he effectively won his party’s nomination last spring.

But the scathing indictment that Mr. Bush offered of Mr. Kerry over the past two days – on the eve of the second presidential debate and with polls showing the race tightening – took these attacks to a blistering new level. In the process, several analysts say, Mr. Bush pushed the limits of subjective interpretation and offered exaggerated or what some Democrats said were distorted accounts of Mr. Kerry’s positions on health care, tax cuts, the Iraq war and foreign policy. …

[A]nalysts, including some Republicans, said Mr. Bush was repeatedly taking phrases and sentences out of context, or cherry-picking votes, to provide an unfavorable case against Mr. Kerry.

“So much of what they are indicting is taken out of context,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of a book on negative campaigning. “It’s a matter of taking sentences out of context or parts of sentences out of context. And it’s hard for journalists to write the context back in because it takes time.” …

The latest line of attacks by Mr. Bush comes during what has been a tumultuous week for him, amid signs that a once swaggering White House was getting worried. …

“[Karl] Rove and [Ralph] Reed were schooled by Lee [Atwater] and he told them that what you do is you rip the bark off liberals.” said Marshall Wittman, a former senior aide to Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, and is registered as an independent. “Even if they’re not liberals you rip the bark off them. That’s what they are doing.“

Dump Duhbya

What is Under Bush’s Coat?

The Mystery of the Bulge in the Jacket By ELISABETH BUMILLER

remote control?What was that bulge in the back of President Bush’s suit jacket at the presidential debate in Miami last week? …

First they said that pictures showing the bulge might have been doctored. But then, when the bulge turned out to be clearly visible in the television footage of the evening, they offered a different explanation.

“There was nothing under his suit jacket,” said Nicolle Devenish, a campaign spokeswoman.

“It was most likely a rumpling of that portion of his suit jacket, or a wrinkle in the fabric.”

Ms. Devenish could not say why the “rumpling” was rectangular.

Nor was the bulge from a bulletproof vest, according to campaign and White House officials; they said Mr. Bush was not wearing one.
—
See Is Bush Wired?

Dump Duhbya

Transcript: Second Presidential Debate

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washingtonpost.com: Second Presidential Debate — President Bush and Sen. John Kerry
Washington University, St. Louis, Mo.
October 8, 2004

Links to a transcript of the second presidential debate between between President Bush (R) and Sen. John F. Kerry (D). The moderator of the nationally televised debate is Charles Gibson of ABC News. The questions came from an audience of “soft” voters selected by the Gallup polling organization.

[Includes annotated fact checking. See also:]

FactCheck.org Cheney & Edwards Mangle Facts
Example: Bush forgets he owns a tree-growing company.

Both candidates played loose with the facts at the second Presidential Debate in St. Louis Oct. 8. Bush claimed Kerry’s health-care plan would lead to rationing and “ruin the quality of health care in America,” a claim unsupported by neutral experts. Kerry claimed the Bush administration had forced the Army Chief of Staff to retire for pushing to send more troops to Iraq, but in fact he retired on schedule.

We offer a sampler of the dubious and sometimes false statements made by each of the candidates.

Election

The 2nd Presidential Debate

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I suppose the big news after the 2nd Presidential debate is that Duhbya didn’t do nearly as badly — huzzah! The guy goes in with the lowest expectations and ‘does well’ by surpassing those very, very low expectations.

I wonder what Kerry says in Bush’s ear at the start of each debate. Duhbya doesn’t seem to speak first.

Things that caught my attention in real time:

Early on, Bush uses Cheney’s line about Kerry/Edwards becoming anti-war in response to Howard Dean. Must have tested well in focus groups.

Bush: “a lot of pressures” (ie, “It’s hard work!” — some pundit noted earlier that he had never heard any president complain about the work. Let’s retire Bush and let him rest at the ranch (oh, wait, he already does that)).

Bush: “That answer almost made me want to scowl.” His well rehearsed week-late retort to what everyone saw for themselves in the first debate.

Bush: said something about rumors on “the internets” — this year’s version of not having a clue about the cost of a gallon of milk.

Bush: “brand drugs”

Bush: “I went to Washington to fix problems…. I went to get something done.” Boy, did he.

Kerry responded with real empathy a few times, accurately identifying the feeling behind two questions. He did his best to respond to a young woman who may be opposed to abortion rights. Yes, his answer was long and thoughtful, but sincere and right. Bush comes back with ‘I’m still trying to decipher that’ — well, he’s none too bright.

Bush cited the Dredd Scott case as an example of a judicial decision that would disqualify a nominee from the Supreme Court. Boy, that’s a relief.

When it comes time to nominate two to four people to the Supreme Court, who do you think will actually have read some (all) of the decisions the nominees wrote: Kerry/Edwards or Bush/Cheney.

The late killer question to Bush: list 3 (!!!) errors you’ve made and what you’ve done to fix them. (“3”, just in case he actually prepped after his astonishing flub at an earlier press conference). With his knee twitching oddly, he said he knows “what they’re usually talking about” (Iraq). “They”? I wonder how the questioner felt with this implication that this wasn’t her own question. And, he did it again: he listed the things that weren’t mistakes (in his mind only — so, maybe this was actually the right answer). Finally, in a twisted effort at admitting fallibility, he said he made a mistake appointing some people (O’Neill, no doubt — not Rumsfeld or Rice, certainly), but he wouldn’t embarrass them on TV. Yeah, right. Better he should embarrass himself and the entire nation.

We do see clearly: a man for whom everything is simple and one who appreciates complexity. One who does everything by his gut and one who uses his mind. One who is president of the Evangelical Christian Nation of America, and one who would try to represent all, even a damned atheist like me.

If you didn’t see this debate and IF you buy any spin that it was a Bush win, god help us. mjh

ps: the ‘townhall’ format worked better than I expected; these seemed like real people with real concerns that most of us can relate to.

Dump Duhbya

Dick Flips & Flops

dangerousmeta!

Blast from the past; a quote from Dick Cheney in 1992:

“And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam Hussein worth? And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait [in 1991], but also when the president made the decision that we’d achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.”