There are only 24 days to go until the national
referendum on CHARACTER, CREDIBILITY and COMPETENCE of
the increasingly unhinged and incredibly shrinking
_resident…There is an Electoral Uprising coming …All
of us are crossing the Rubicon now. All of us…The
whole voting populace, as well as the US intelligence
community, the US military, the US federal law
enforcement community and the US foreign policy
establishment in particular, AND ESPECIALLY, the US
regimestream news media...Will it break with the Bush
Cabal and its-wholly-owned-subsidiary-formerly-known-as-the-Republican-Party, its partners in the Triad of shared special interest
(e.g. oil, weapons, media, pharmacueticals, tobacoo,
etx.)? Will there be a Caine Mutiny? There is some
razor thin fracturing, some fault lines, in the deep
fix...It isn't taking, so will it be abandoned?
Security is the central issue: National Security,
Economic Security, Environmental Security, Health Care
Security…Can you, any of you, even these special
interests, afford for more years of the Bush
abomination?
Here are FIVE important pieces. Please read them and share them with others. Please vote and encourage others to vote.
William Rivers Pitt: George W. Bush, still smarting
from his embarrassing performance in the Florida
debate, decided on Friday night in St. Louis that
volume was a good substitute for strength, that
yelling would be mistaken for gravitas. The result was
an ugly, disturbing, genuinely frightening show.
In my report on the first debate, I described Bush
as, "Shrill. Defensive. Muddled. Angry, very angry.
Repetitive. Uninformed. Outmatched. Unprepared.
Hesitant." As bad as that display was, it honestly
paled in comparison to the frenzied hectoring Bush
sprayed at 140 Missouri citizens who had the ill
fortune of watching the man come unglued before their
eyes.
John Kerry, by comparison, was every inch the
controlled prosecutor pressing his case to the jury.
It was, perhaps, that calm delineation of Bush's
myriad errors which caused the Republican candidate to
blow his stack. Exactly 30 minutes into the debate,
Bush became so agitated by Kerry's description of the
"back-door draft," which is literally bleeding the
life out of our National Guard and Reserve forces,
that he lunged out of his chair and shrieked over
moderator Charles Gibson, who was trying to maintain
some semblance of decorum.
"You tell Tony Blair we're going alone," Bush
roared. "Tell Tony Blair we're going alone!" The
disturbed murmur from the crowd was audible. Bush,
simply, frightened them.
More unsettling than Bush's demonstrable agitation
was his almost uncanny disconnect from reality.
The voluminous report released by Charles Duelfer
and the Iraq Survey Group, compiled by 1,625 U.N. and
U.S. weapons inspectors after two years of searching
some 1,700 sites in Iraq at a cost of more than $1
billion, stated flatly that no weapons of mass
destruction exist in that nation, that no weapons of
mass destruction have existed in that nation for
years, and that any capacity to develop weapons of
mass destruction within that nation has been crumbling
for the same amount of years.
"My opponent said that America must pass a global
test before we used force to protect ourselves," said
Bush during the Iraq phase of the debate. "That's the
kind of mindset that says sanctions were working.
That's the kind of mindset that said, 'Let's keep it
at the United Nations and hope things go well.' Saddam
Hussein was a threat because he could have given
weapons of mass destruction to terrorist enemies.
Sanctions were not working."
What? First of all, the Duelfer Report proves
beyond any question that sanctions had worked
incredibly well. The stuff wasn't there, because Scott
Ritter and the UNSCOM inspectors destroyed it all
during the 1990s, along with any and all equipment and
facilities to make it. The stuff wasn't there because
the sanctions put into place against Hussein prevented
him from getting any material to develop weapons. The
stuff wasn't there because Hussein stopped making it
years ago, because the sanctions were breaking his
back. The sanctions worked.
When Bush made the statement about Hussein giving
weapons of mass destruction to "terrorist enemies,"
the needle edged over from 'Dumb' to 'Deranged.' How
many different ways must one say "The stuff wasn't
there" before George picks up the clue phone? How does
someone give away something he doesn't have?
www.buzzflash.com: Well, the Bush handlers must have
given the Texas Chihuahua a shot of something in his
butt, because the guy couldn't sit down during the St.
Louis debate. Clearly Charlie Gibson, the ABC
moderator of the evening, left his leash at home,
because he didn't stop Bush from jumping up and
offering a rebuttal to Kerry whenever the Midland
Cheerleader Chickenhawk felt like it.
Bush improved dramatically in theatrics over the first
debate. The guy was so pumped up, he looked like a
caveman on speed. The media will probably give him the
debate because he was actually coherent in his lying.
Given that the facts don't matter to the press in a
debate, they will just say George was hot to trot.
As for the killer drugs from Canada, Bush claimed he
wasn't stopping their import, he just wanted to ensure
they were safe. Given that they are mostly American
drugs exported to Canada and returned to the U.S. at
lower prices, it's your usual Bush lie. In fact, Kerry
pointed out that Bush promised he would look into
lifting the ban on importation of Canadian drugs four
years ago in a debate with Al Gore.
Kerry's game plan was to stay on message, continue to
attack Bush for making the wrong decision to invade
Iraq, outline clear domestic plans, and evidence
ongoing empathy for the middle class. In this debate,
which was divided with the half time on foreign policy
and half the time on domestic affairs, Kerry was
definitely tilting a bit more populist in repeatedly
opposing a tax give away to the wealthy.
It was clear that Kerry also came across as more
empathetic and understanding of the audience
questioners than his media stereotype has portrayed.
(This was a "town hall" audience setting debate.)
You got the feeling that Kerry was following the old
public relations technique of going in with the
message points you want to get across and sticking to
them no matter what. He was a bit more cautious than
in the first debate, clearly trying to avoid
alienating swing voters on the abortion issue, for
instance. But his style was competent, strong, clear
and firm. He was in command and unflappable. Bush was
so hot and lathered, you wanted to throw a bucket of
water on him.
Amidst Bush's wild stalking around the center carpet,
Kerry kept a cool head and stuck to his game plan. He
has extremely limited vehicles to reach the entire
nation -- and repetition works when the clock is
ticking down.
www.dailyhowler.com: DID WELCH MAKE A CALL: By
Wednesday morning—the morning after—Chris Matthews
seemed to be taking it back. “Maybe we were all wrong
about last night because we all thought it was
definitely a Cheney night,” he said, telling Don Imus
about the bender he and his Hardball cohort had gone
on (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 10/7/04). “I’ve watched
Cheney for about twenty-five years now,” Matthews
said, “and I think I got snookered again too by the
guy.” Of course, Matthews’ comments to Imus didn’t
really make sense. Moments earlier, he had described
the VP debate in much the same way his gang had done
the night before:
MATTHEWS (Wednesday morning, 10/6/04): Well you know,
I kept looking at the reaction shots last night, like
we did last Thursday, and Edwards, fairly or not,
always looked like he had just been smacked. He had
this look on his face that he had been smacked, he was
hurt, he didn’t know what to do—he’s almost like
crying! It didn’t look too good for him last night.
According to the crackpot pundit, Edwards looked
almost like he was crying. But that was very much the
tone his gang had adopted the night before. Here’s the
way this mixed-up man had opened his 11 PM hour:
MATTHEWS (Tuesday evening, 10/5/04): I am stunned! I
wish everybody would show an equal exclamation point
after their thoughts here tonight! Dick Cheney was
prepared! He was loaded for bear tonight! He was out
on a hunting trip looking for squirrel!
[LAUGHTER]
MATTHEWS: And he found squirrel! Does anybody share
that? Because I think the newspapers are going to
share that tomorrow.
In Edwards, Cheney “found squirrel,” Matthews said. Of
course, the newspapers—largely run by sane
people—weren’t “sharing that” view the next morning.
So there was Matthews, on with Imus, saying he may
have gotten it wrong. Except, of course, when he was
saying that Edwards looked like he’d been smacked.
Like a squirrel.
A reasonable person would question this man’s mental
balance. But then, all the pundits on Matthews’ panels
had ridiculed Edwards the night before—part of one of
the strangest evenings ever turned in by a network.
>From top to bottom—from Brokaw on down—NBC and MSNBC
personnel had seemed to be working from one single
script. If you watched their coverage and didn’t
wonder if the network’s performance had simply been
fixed, then you will never—never in your
life—entertain a conspiracy notion.
By Wednesday morning, Matthews seemed to realize that
no one else was playing this evening the way his gang
did. So he went on Imus and almost took it back. But
where had the lunacy come from?
...At NBC, things were surely a trifle strange, though
they kept the lid on. Anchor Brokaw implied that
Cheney had won, a view he would openly state on MSNBC.
Anchor Russert quickly pimped Cheney’s Great
Statement, forgetting to say that the statement was
wrong. Both reporters, asking only one question,
clearly implied that Cheney had won. And then they
brought on two expert bloggers—one a conservative, one
just an idiot. Both bloggers said Cheney won.
No, liberal bias was hard to find as NBC worked its
magic,. But over at MSNBC, the drunken frat boys were
just running wild. John Edwards? He was “a squirrel,”
a “little kid,” who “George Foreman” Cheney had “put
in his place.” When Reagan attempted to voice an
alternative view, he was loudly shouted down. The
endless group [LAUGHTER] riddles the transcript as
this half drunken crew voiced its wisdom. And eight
hours later, its unbalanced leader was wringing his
hands with Imus. “I think I got snookered again,” he
now said. Why is this man on the air?
No, “the newspapers” weren’t sharing their view the
next day; the newspapers weren’t calling John Edwards
a squirrel. And there were no empirical data—none at
all—that suggested that voters had judged the debate
the way this strange group of frat boys had done. For
ourselves, as we watched this gang’s strange evening,
we found ourselves entertaining a thought for the
first time. We found ourselves thinking, for the first
time, that the explanation for the conduct was
obvious. Jack Welch must have jumped on the phone and
told these strange people just what they must say.
Their Instant Verdict was so odd and so wildly
asserted that you couldn’t help wonder about that.
Do we think Jack Welch made that phone call? Only a
fool would guess about that. But let’s say this: If a
Martian visitor had watched this exhibit, that would
be his first supposition. We all assume that it just
can’t be true. But try watching the tape as Matthews
wildly emotes all night and then, the next day, takes
it back.
POSTSCRIPT: Needless to say, Matthews has been
flip-flopping wildly since Wednesday morning, revising
his stand on Cheney/Edwards with every new TV
appearance. For example, read Eric Boehlert’s latest
at Salon to see the erratic Hardball host as he keeps
pimping Cheney’s false statement.
Matthews is erratic, unbalanced, unstable. Why is so
wildly erratic a man a steward of our precious public
discourse?
Dave Lindorf, Guardian: To watch the debate again, I
ventured to the website of the most sober network I
could think of: C-SPAN. And sure enough, at minute 23
on the video of the debate, you can clearly see the
bulge between the president's shoulder blades.
Bloggers stoke the conspiracy with the claim that the
Bush administration insisted on a condition that no
cameras be placed behind the candidates. An official
for the Commission on Presidential Debates, which set
up the lecterns and microphones on the Miami stage,
said the condition was indeed real, the result of
negotiations by both campaigns. Yet that didn't stop
Fox from setting up cameras behind Bush and Kerry. The
official said that "microphones were mounted on
lecterns, and the commission put no electronic devices
on the president or Senator Kerry." When asked about
the bulge on Bush's back, the official said, "I don't
know what that was."
So what was it? Jacob McKenna, a spyware expert and
the owner of the Spy Store, a high-tech surveillance
shop in Spokane, Washington, looked at the Bush image
on his computer monitor. "There's certainly something
on his back, and it appears to be electronic," he
said. McKenna said that, given its shape, the bulge
could be the inductor portion of a two-way
push-to-talk system. McKenna noted that such a system
makes use of a tiny microchip-based earplug radio that
is pushed way down into the ear canal, where it is
virtually invisible. He also said a weak signal could
be scrambled and be undetected by another broadcaster.
Mystery-bulge bloggers argue that the president may
have begun using such technology earlier in his term.
Because Bush is famously prone to malapropisms and
reportedly dyslexic, which could make successful use
of a teleprompter problematic, they say the president
and his handlers may have turned to a technique often
used by television reporters on remote stand-ups. A
reporter tapes a story and, while on camera, plays it
back into an earpiece, repeating lines just after
hearing them, managing to sound spontaneous and error
free.
Suggestions that Bush may have using this technique
stem from a D-day event in France, when a CNN
broadcast appeared to pick up - and broadcast to
surprised viewers - the sound of another voice
seemingly reading Bush his lines, after which Bush
repeated them. Danny Schechter, who operates the news
site MediaChannel.org, and who has been doing some
investigating into the wired-Bush rumors himself, said
the Bush campaign has been worried of late about
others picking up their radio frequencies - notably
during the Republican Convention on the day of Bush's
appearance. "They had a frequency specialist stop me
and ask about the frequency of my camera," Schechter
said. "The Democrats weren't doing that at their
convention."
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Eugene Weekly: This is the
worst environmental president we've had in American
history.
If you look at Natural Resource Defense Council's
website, you'll see over 400 major environmental
roll-backs that have been promoted by this
administration during the last three and a half years,
and I tell you it's part of a concerted deliberate
attempt to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law.
It's a stealth attack. They have concealed their
radical agenda from the American public using
Orwellian rhetoric. When they destroy the forest, they
call it the Healthy Forest Law; when they destroy the
air they call it the Clear Skies Bill. And most
insidiously they have put polluters in charge of
virtually all the agencies that are supposed to
protect Americans from pollution. The head of the
Forest Service is a timber industry lobbyist. The head
of public lands is a mining industry lobbyist who
believes that public lands are unconstitutional. The
head of the air division at EPA is a utility lobbyist
who has represented the worst air polluters in
America. The second in command at EPA is a Monsanto
lobbyist. The head of Superfunds, an agency critical
to quality of life here in Oregon, is a lobbyist whose
last job was teaching corporate polluters how to evade
Superfunds.
If you go through all the agency heads, sub-heads and
secretaries in the Department of Agriculture,
Department of the Interior, Department of Energy and
EPA, you'll find the same thing: The polluters are
running regulatory agencies that are supposed to
regulate them. And these are not individuals who have
entered government service for the sake of the public
interest, but rather specifically to subvert the very
laws that they are in charge of enforcing. This is
impacting our quality of life in America in so many
ways that we don't know about because the press simply
isn't doing its job of informing the American public,
scrutinizing these policies, connecting the dots
between the corporate contributors and the dramatic
decline in American quality of life that we are now
experiencing.
This year for the first time since the passage of the
Clean Water Act, EPA announced that America's
waterways are actually getting dirtier. The New York
Times ran a story that the levels of sulfur dioxide
(that causes acid rain) have grown 4 percent over the
last year. I have three children who have asthma and
one out of every four black children in this country
in our municipalities now has asthma.
Asthma rates have doubled among our children over the
last five years. Whether it's hormones in our food or
antibiotics, something is causing our children to have
these kinds of haywire immune systems. We do know that
asthma attacks are triggered primarily by two
components of air pollution: ozone and particulates.
About 60 percent of those materials in our atmosphere
are coming from 1,100 coal-burning power plants that
are burning coal illegally. They were supposed to have
cleaned up 15 years ago. The Clinton administration
was prosecuting the worst 70 of these plants for
criminal violations. But this is an industry that
donated $48 million to President Bush and the
Republican Party in the 2000 cycle and have given $58
million since. And one of the first things that
President Bush did when he came into office was to
order the Justice Department to drop those lawsuits
against those utilities
According to the EPA, just the criminal excedences
from these 70 plants kill 5,500 Americans every year.
And then the Bush administration tore the heart out of
the Clean Air Act abolishing the New Source Reviews
section that require these companies to clean up their
pollution. That decision is killing 30,000 Americans
every single year, according to EPA, including 165
people in the state of Oregon.
Last week the federal EPA announced that in 19 states
it's now unsafe to eat any freshwater fish because of
mercury contamination. In 48 states it's now unsafe to
eat at least some of the fish or most of the fish, and
Oregon is one of those.
Support Our Troops, Save the US Constitution,
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Restore Fiscal Responsibility in the White House,
Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Save the Environment, Break the Corporatist
Stranglehold on the US Mainstream News Media, Rescue
the US Supreme Court from Right-Wing Radicals, Cleanse
the White House of the Chicken Hawk Coup and Its
War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat the Triad, Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/101004Z.shtml
The Scary Little Man
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 08 October 2004
"He had a feeling that the answer was quite different
and that he ought to know it, but he could not think
of it. He began to get frightened, and that is bad for
thinking."
- J.R.R. Tolkien
George W. Bush, still smarting from his
embarrassing performance in the Florida debate,
decided on Friday night in St. Louis that volume was a
good substitute for strength, that yelling would be
mistaken for gravitas. The result was an ugly,
disturbing, genuinely frightening show.
In my report on the first debate, I described Bush
as, "Shrill. Defensive. Muddled. Angry, very angry.
Repetitive. Uninformed. Outmatched. Unprepared.
Hesitant." As bad as that display was, it honestly
paled in comparison to the frenzied hectoring Bush
sprayed at 140 Missouri citizens who had the ill
fortune of watching the man come unglued before their
eyes.
John Kerry, by comparison, was every inch the
controlled prosecutor pressing his case to the jury.
It was, perhaps, that calm delineation of Bush's
myriad errors which caused the Republican candidate to
blow his stack. Exactly 30 minutes into the debate,
Bush became so agitated by Kerry's description of the
"back-door draft," which is literally bleeding the
life out of our National Guard and Reserve forces,
that he lunged out of his chair and shrieked over
moderator Charles Gibson, who was trying to maintain
some semblance of decorum.
"You tell Tony Blair we're going alone," Bush
roared. "Tell Tony Blair we're going alone!" The
disturbed murmur from the crowd was audible. Bush,
simply, frightened them.
More unsettling than Bush's demonstrable agitation
was his almost uncanny disconnect from reality.
The voluminous report released by Charles Duelfer
and the Iraq Survey Group, compiled by 1,625 U.N. and
U.S. weapons inspectors after two years of searching
some 1,700 sites in Iraq at a cost of more than $1
billion, stated flatly that no weapons of mass
destruction exist in that nation, that no weapons of
mass destruction have existed in that nation for
years, and that any capacity to develop weapons of
mass destruction within that nation has been crumbling
for the same amount of years.
"My opponent said that America must pass a global
test before we used force to protect ourselves," said
Bush during the Iraq phase of the debate. "That's the
kind of mindset that says sanctions were working.
That's the kind of mindset that said, 'Let's keep it
at the United Nations and hope things go well.' Saddam
Hussein was a threat because he could have given
weapons of mass destruction to terrorist enemies.
Sanctions were not working."
What? First of all, the Duelfer Report proves
beyond any question that sanctions had worked
incredibly well. The stuff wasn't there, because Scott
Ritter and the UNSCOM inspectors destroyed it all
during the 1990s, along with any and all equipment and
facilities to make it. The stuff wasn't there because
the sanctions put into place against Hussein prevented
him from getting any material to develop weapons. The
stuff wasn't there because Hussein stopped making it
years ago, because the sanctions were breaking his
back. The sanctions worked.
When Bush made the statement about Hussein giving
weapons of mass destruction to "terrorist enemies,"
the needle edged over from 'Dumb' to 'Deranged.' How
many different ways must one say "The stuff wasn't
there" before George picks up the clue phone? How does
someone give away something he doesn't have?
Bush continued in this appalling vein when he
said, "He keeps talking about, 'Let the inspectors do
their job.' It's naive and dangerous to say that.
That's what the Duelfer report showed." Welcome to
Bush World, where everything is upside down and two
plus two equals a bag of hammers. It is naive and
dangerous to point out that the inspectors got the job
done in the 1990s, that Iraq had no weapons of mass
destruction whatsoever? No, George. It is simply the
truth.
The mental disconnect reared its shouting head
repeatedly throughout the evening. Bush somehow lost
track of where he was at one point and called his
opponent, "Senator Kennedy." He told one questioner
that he would control the deficit by stopping Congress
from spending, only a few minutes after defending the
fact that he had never, not once, vetoed a spending
bill from Congress.
He made an accountant crack about "Battling green
eyeshades," a statement that immediately became a
first-ballot nominee for the Gibberish Hall of Fame.
When asked what kind of Supreme Court Justice he would
nominate if given an opportunity, he wandered off
along a free-association rant about Dred Scott.
Clearly, this President will make sure to nominate
people to the bench who are opposed to chattel
slavery.
Perhaps the most telling moment came when
questioner Linda Grabel asked Bush, "Please give three
instances in which you came to realize you had made a
wrong decision, and what you did to correct it."
As with his April prime time press conference, in
which he was asked a very similar question, Bush
absolutely refused to admit to any errors in judgment,
beyond a cryptic quip about mistakes in personnel
appointments which he would not elaborate upon. He
opened himself up to the judgment of history, a sad
straddle given the simple fact that no President can
avoid such a judgment. That was all he was willing to
offer. Ms. Grabel did not hear about three mistakes.
She did not even hear about one.
Bush was every inch the angry man on Friday night,
which is dangerous enough. But to witness anger
combined with belligerent ignorance, with a willful
denial of basic facts, to witness a man utterly
incapable of admitting to any mistakes while his clear
errors in judgment are costing his country in blood,
to see that combination roiling within the man who is
in charge of the most awesome military arsenal in the
history of the planet, is more than dangerous.
It is flatly terrifying.
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and
international bestseller of two books - 'War on Iraq:
What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and 'The
Greatest Sedition is Silence.'
http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/04/10/edi04074.html
BuzzFlash Second Debate Analysis: Watch Out for Those
Killer Drugs from Canada, Bush Warns
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
October 8, 2004, 11:30 EST
Well, the Bush handlers must have given the Texas
Chihuahua a shot of something in his butt, because the
guy couldn't sit down during the St. Louis debate.
Clearly Charlie Gibson, the ABC moderator of the
evening, left his leash at home, because he didn't
stop Bush from jumping up and offering a rebuttal to
Kerry whenever the Midland Cheerleader Chickenhawk
felt like it.
Bush improved dramatically in theatrics over the first
debate. The guy was so pumped up, he looked like a
caveman on speed. The media will probably give him the
debate because he was actually coherent in his lying.
Given that the facts don't matter to the press in a
debate, they will just say George was hot to trot.
As for the killer drugs from Canada, Bush claimed he
wasn't stopping their import, he just wanted to ensure
they were safe. Given that they are mostly American
drugs exported to Canada and returned to the U.S. at
lower prices, it's your usual Bush lie. In fact, Kerry
pointed out that Bush promised he would look into
lifting the ban on importation of Canadian drugs four
years ago in a debate with Al Gore.
Kerry's game plan was to stay on message, continue to
attack Bush for making the wrong decision to invade
Iraq, outline clear domestic plans, and evidence
ongoing empathy for the middle class. In this debate,
which was divided with the half time on foreign policy
and half the time on domestic affairs, Kerry was
definitely tilting a bit more populist in repeatedly
opposing a tax give away to the wealthy.
It was clear that Kerry also came across as more
empathetic and understanding of the audience
questioners than his media stereotype has portrayed.
(This was a "town hall" audience setting debate.)
You got the feeling that Kerry was following the old
public relations technique of going in with the
message points you want to get across and sticking to
them no matter what. He was a bit more cautious than
in the first debate, clearly trying to avoid
alienating swing voters on the abortion issue, for
instance. But his style was competent, strong, clear
and firm. He was in command and unflappable. Bush was
so hot and lathered, you wanted to throw a bucket of
water on him.
Amidst Bush's wild stalking around the center carpet,
Kerry kept a cool head and stuck to his game plan. He
has extremely limited vehicles to reach the entire
nation -- and repetition works when the clock is
ticking down.
Bush was clearly told to be as aggressive as possible
by his handlers. It fits in with BuzzFlash's elect a
"Son of a Bitch" in a time of terrorist threat theory.
It's something we realized recently.
Maybe the explanation as to why half the country is
still in Bush's camp has to do with the fact that they
think a congenital liar and Son of a Bitch is exactly
who you need to deal with crazed terrorists. For
voters who fit this description, the more Bush lies
and cares less about who is getting killed -- our
soldiers or Iraqis -- the better he is to deal with
the S.O.B.s who are out to do in America. Because, you
know he will stop at nothing, even if he is wrong.
Maybe some people think this keeps the elusive
terrorists -- whoever they might be -- on their toes.
As with Cheney, Bush's biggest vulnerability is that
just about every word out of his mouth is a lie. His
interpretation of the CIA report just out that
concluded there were no WMDs in Iraq was almost
comical, if thousands of people hadn't died as a
result of Bush's catastrophic decision to invade Iraq.
Bush kept bringing up WMDs. Kerry pointed out that
Bush let Iran and North Korea develop nuclear
potential while he was obsessed with Iraq. And then
there's that little matter Kerry didn't bring up of
Mr. Khan from Pakistan who sold nuclear secrets to
Iran and North Korea, while Pakistan was our ally in
chasing Al Qaeda. What did Bush do about Mr. Khan? He
allowed Pakistan to let him go free AND to keep his
profits from selling the nuclear secrets to Iran and
North Korea.
In case you wanted to know more about Bush's duplicity
about Khan, here is an excerpt from the Washington
Post this week:
Pardon Me?
Spin of the Week award: The winner, despite intense
competition, is national security adviser Condoleezza
Rice. Rice, chatting Sunday with CNN's Wolf Blitzer,
was asked about Bush's claim that Pakistani scientist
Abdul Qadeer Khan, who sold nuclear secrets to North
Korea, Iran, and Libya, had been "brought to justice."
"To 'justice'?" Blitzer asked, saying that seemed to
be very "sloppy wording," since Khan had been
"pardoned by President [ Pervez] Musharraf."
Khan, who has done more damage to the security of the
United States than anyone since Benedict Arnold,
"himself lives in a villa," Blitzer noted -- actually
five of them. "And the [International Atomic Energy
Agency] would like to question him, and the Pakistani
government doesn't even allow that to happen."
"A.Q. Khan, in a sense, has been brought to justice,"
Rice said with a straight face, "because he is out of
the business that he loved most. . . . And if you
don't think that his national humiliation is justice
for what he did, I think it is. He's nationally
humiliated."
Well, so is Ken Lay. So is Martha Stewart, and she's
going to the slammer. But we hanged Arnold's
co-conspirator. And if we could have found Arnold. . .
.
[LINK]
And remember, the Bush administration allowed Khan to
keep the money he "earned" from peddling nuclear
secrets.
Of course, Bush's White House also exposed Valerie
Plame, a CIA analyst who specialized in tracking the
illicit trade of WMDs, thus sacrificing the security
of America in order to send a message to dissenters
such as her husband Joe Wilson. And Bush has never
bothered to ask who did it. Maybe, because he can't
implicate HIMSELF or Karl Rove.
Oh well, there we go again, digressing, but we
couldn't resist, even if none of the Khan affair came
up in this debate (although Bush took credit for
allegedly bringing Khan to justice -- have you stopped
laughing -- in the first debate.)
Suffice it to say, in debate two, Bush will be
credited with making a comeback. He met his threshold
of lying in a way that was not incoherent. And the
"S.O.B." voters will admire that he pounced about the
stage unleashed, spouting out all sorts of nonsense
that sounded believable, but wasn't.
At the end of the debate, a woman asked Bush if he
could name three mistakes he had made in decisions
during his presidency.
He couldn't.
As for Supreme Court nominees, he wouldn't name
potential candidates because he said he wanted them to
vote for him -- and then we think he snorted or
something akin to that. It was real sweet and
touching.
As for John Kerry, he won, but it wasn't as clear a
victory as in the first debate, because Bush
controlled his grimaces, although he always seemed to
have the glimmer of a smirk as he listened to Kerry
speak.
Kerry had meaningful and direct answers.
That might not account for a lot nowadays, but it
probably connected well with the swing voters, who he
was clearly trying to woo.
We'll give it three debates to zero for the
Kerry/Edwards team, because Kerry was looking to get
his message out to a targeted group of voters -- and
Bush was just trying to look like the 800-pound
guerrilla.
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
http://www.dailyhowler.com/
DID WELCH MAKE A CALL? We wondered if NBC’s coverage
was fixed. Watching CNN, Shafer asked the same thing:
// link // print //
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2004
OVERVIEW: Today, we offer a lengthy report on the
NBC/MSNBC coverage of Tuesday’s Cheney-Edwards debate.
How strange did we find the network’s coverage? Simply
put, we found ourselves wondering if the coverage had
simply been fixed. As you’ll see, we weren’t the only
ones entertaining such thoughts. At Slate, Jack Shafer
had the same reaction as he watched CNN’s coverage.
At any rate, we thought NBC’s performance deserved
recording. MediaMatters was also struck by the
network’s oddball conduct. For one detailed overview,
just click here. Other reviews of the network’s odd
conduct can be found at the site.
Before we start, though, a note on this morning’s
newspapers. How utterly foolish can your Pundit Corps
be? Read Charles Krauthammer as he pretends that he
can explain Osama bin Laden’s view of our current
election. We’ll probably offer more tomorrow. And to
see the great New York Times as it finally respond to
the endless dissembling of Bush-on-the-trail, read
Adam Nagourney’s welcome report. (Headline: “Bush
Pushes Limit on the Facts.”) Almost surely, we’ll
offer more on this piece tomorrow. But before we do,
the obvious question: What took this paper so long?
A HOWLER report: NBC’s oddball evening
DID WELCH MAKE A CALL: By Wednesday morning—the
morning after—Chris Matthews seemed to be taking it
back. “Maybe we were all wrong about last night
because we all thought it was definitely a Cheney
night,” he said, telling Don Imus about the bender he
and his Hardball cohort had gone on (see THE DAILY
HOWLER, 10/7/04). “I’ve watched Cheney for about
twenty-five years now,” Matthews said, “and I think I
got snookered again too by the guy.” Of course,
Matthews’ comments to Imus didn’t really make sense.
Moments earlier, he had described the VP debate in
much the same way his gang had done the night before:
MATTHEWS (Wednesday morning, 10/6/04): Well you know,
I kept looking at the reaction shots last night, like
we did last Thursday, and Edwards, fairly or not,
always looked like he had just been smacked. He had
this look on his face that he had been smacked, he was
hurt, he didn’t know what to do—he’s almost like
crying! It didn’t look too good for him last night.
According to the crackpot pundit, Edwards looked
almost like he was crying. But that was very much the
tone his gang had adopted the night before. Here’s the
way this mixed-up man had opened his 11 PM hour:
MATTHEWS (Tuesday evening, 10/5/04): I am stunned! I
wish everybody would show an equal exclamation point
after their thoughts here tonight! Dick Cheney was
prepared! He was loaded for bear tonight! He was out
on a hunting trip looking for squirrel!
[LAUGHTER]
MATTHEWS: And he found squirrel! Does anybody share
that? Because I think the newspapers are going to
share that tomorrow.
In Edwards, Cheney “found squirrel,” Matthews said. Of
course, the newspapers—largely run by sane
people—weren’t “sharing that” view the next morning.
So there was Matthews, on with Imus, saying he may
have gotten it wrong. Except, of course, when he was
saying that Edwards looked like he’d been smacked.
Like a squirrel.
A reasonable person would question this man’s mental
balance. But then, all the pundits on Matthews’ panels
had ridiculed Edwards the night before—part of one of
the strangest evenings ever turned in by a network.
>From top to bottom—from Brokaw on down—NBC and MSNBC
personnel had seemed to be working from one single
script. If you watched their coverage and didn’t
wonder if the network’s performance had simply been
fixed, then you will never—never in your
life—entertain a conspiracy notion.
By Wednesday morning, Matthews seemed to realize that
no one else was playing this evening the way his gang
did. So he went on Imus and almost took it back. But
where had the lunacy come from?
In real time: On Hardball, the gang-bang started up
instantly. The Cheney-Edwards debate ended just after
10:30 Eastern, and Matthews came on the air with his
gang. With apologies for the length of our excerpt,
here are the opening comments:
MATTHEWS (10/5/04): There it was, the big debate! It
ran a bit over, about 10 minutes late, but let's talk
about it right now. And I think we can come up with a
jury decision rather quickly.
Andrea Mitchell, you are a straight reporter. You
can't make political judgments. But what do you think
the country's judgment will be as to who won this
encounter?
MITCHELL: I think Dick Cheney did awfully well at,
first of all, putting John Edwards in his place,
saying that I have been presiding over the Senate and
I didn't meet you until tonight. Talking about his not
having been on the job was pretty devastating.
MATTHEWS: Not only is he new to politics. He is late
to politics.
[LAUGHTER]
MATTHEWS: Ron Reagan, who won?
REAGAN: Well, that was Cheney's best line. I don't
think we are going to see—I don't think we saw in this
debate what we saw last time, which was a pretty clear
winner that would be obvious to anybody.
MATTHEWS: Speak for yourself!
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Speak for yourself!
MATTHEWS: Don't drop that "we" in there!
SCARBOROUGH: Oh, my God!
Reagan’s modest attempt to dissent was steam-rolled by
Matthews and Scarborough. “I think we can come up with
a jury decision rather quickly,” foreman Matthews
originally said. And despite a feeble protest by
Reagan, the Hardball gang quickly judged—Cheney had
rolled over Edwards. Edwards looked like he was
crying. Cheney had hunted him down like a squirrel.
Cheney put Edwards in his place. “The analogy would be
a water pistol against a machine gun,” Matthews said.
With the exception of Reagan, all other pundits shared
this view. Weak-willed Newsweek lacky Jon Meacham
quickly joined the pleasing consensus. “I think that
the vice president did very, very well,” he affably
said. “He turned in a strong and serene performance,
compared to Edwards, who I think seemed like
Kerry-lite.”
There was only one problem with this outlook, of
course. Matthews, Mitchell, Scarborough and Meacham
spent the next 90 minutes trashing Edwards. But
alas—Reagan’s first statement turned out to be right.
“I don't think we saw...a pretty clear winner that
would be obvious to anybody,” he said. And despite the
fraternal uproar of Matthews’ crew, that assessment by
Reagan turned out to be right. No other set of network
pundits saw the debate as this half-drunk gang did,
and polling by ABC and CBS suggested that average
voters had come out fairly even when asked to say
which man had prevailed. On MSNBC, the abusive imagery
and mocking laughter would only build as the evening
wore on. But no one else had seen it this way, and,
seven hours after he went off the air, Matthews was
stupidly sitting with Imus, saying “I think I got
snookered again” and saying that “maybe we all were
wrong.” Of course, Matthews is becoming famous for
endless flipping on his assessment of White House
debates (links below). Our question: Why does this
half-drunk, erratic man still serve as a steward of
our discourse?
No, it didn’t take long for this jury’s decision—and
it didn’t take long for its foreman to renounce it.
But oddball assessment of this debate wasn’t
restricted to MSNBC. Even as Matthews’ “jury” hung
Edwards high, Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert were
assessing the debate on NBC. Eventually, the pair of
Great Men would show up with Matthews and add their
less-than-two-cents to the clowning. But the odd
review of this debate wasn’t confined to the cable
channel. There was much more decorum at NBC as Brokaw
and Russert assessed the debate. But conduct there was
a bit puzzling too. It fed our conspiracy theory.
The state of affairs at NBC: Give him credit. For once
in his life, Brokaw didn’t come right on the air and
instantly trash the Dem candidate (see THE DAILY
HOWLER, 10/1/04). Yes, the NBC anchor would soon
describe Edwards as “a political novice” who’d been
punched by George Foreman (full quote below). But to
his credit, his instant summary played it right down
the middle:
BROKAW (10/5/04): Vice President Cheney and Senator
John Edwards, the vice-presidential candidates, get
only one debate, but they get an extra eight minutes
altogether...The vice presidential candidates
demonstrated tonight that you could have hand-to-hand
combat while seated. These are the sharpest, most
cutting personal and policy attacks of the campaign so
far. They were commanding and tough adversaries, Dick
Cheney saying at one point that he does not believe
that John Kerry has the conviction to carry through
the fight against terrorism. And he said about the two
of them, “You couldn't stand up to Howard Dean, how
can you stand up to terrorism?” And for his part, John
Edwards said, “A long resume doesn't mean good
judgment, and you've not been straight with the
American people.”
True, Brokaw cited two Cheney zingers versus only one
for Edwards, but, for him, that’s quite
fair-and-balanced. And co-host Russert played it
straight too—although you’ll note he instantly cited a
statement by Cheney which he knew to be factually
bogus:
RUSSERT (10/5/04): Both men played very much to their
political base, Tom. John Edwards came out of the gate
and said, “You're not being straight about Iraq.” He
wanted this debate to be about Iraq. How did Dick
Cheney counter? “If you want to win the war on terror,
big macro war on terror, you need George Bush.”
Then we had a very interesting exchange where, as you
noted, John Edwards saying, “Just because you have a
lot of experience, Mr. Vice President, doesn't mean
you have good judgment.” Cheney countered by saying,
in effect, “You're a young man in too much of a hurry.
I preside over the Senate, and I never met you until
tonight.”
“I never met you until tonight.” As we have seen,
Russert already knew that this statement by Cheney was
false (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 10/7/04). But so what? As
we’ll see, Russert would cite this statement all
night, never revealing that it was false. Indeed, when
he went over to comment on Hardball, Russert got in
the half-drunken spirit that prevailed on that air. He
offered an heroic account of what Cheney meant by this
statement, never revealing that he knew that Cheney’s
slam had misstated the facts.
Yes, Brokaw and Russert were fair-and-balanced in
their opening summaries. But then the microphone went
back to Brokaw, and Brokaw began to show tilt:
BROKAW (10/5/04): Sixty-three-year-old Dick Cheney
from Wyoming, a veteran in Washington of the Congress,
the White House, secretary of defense, now a vice
president against a 51-year-old political novice,
effectively. Two different styles: Dick Cheney
reminded me of George Foreman, kind of a slow gait but
a powerful right hand when he unleashed it in a number
of areas as he went after the Kerry-Edwards ticket.
John Edwards, for his, for his sake, you can see the
folksy courtroom style that he had that was so
successful for him as he played out against what he
says is more of the same of this administration,
suggesting to the American people with, “It's time for
a change.”
Imagery? Cheney was now an impressive Washington
veteran, working against a “political novice.” And
Cheney had been like George Foreman, with “a powerful
right hand,” working against a guy with a “folksy
style.” Compared to the clowning over at Hardball,
this was very minor tilt. But as we’ll see, Brokaw
would later embellish these images, and they’d be
hyped at Hardball—big-time. On MSNBC, Brokaw would
make his point abundantly clear: Powerful Foreman had
won.
And others would seem to say this on NBC, even in this
first half-hour. Were NBC personnel reading from
script? The troubling thought first crossed our minds
when Brokaw threw to two reporters in the Spin Room.
Each reporter would ask one question of a campaign
spokesperson. But take a look at what David Gregory
said when he question Bush aide Mary Matalin:
GREGORY (10/5/04): Thanks very much, Tom. I am with
Mary Matalin. And, Mary, obviously, you're feeling
good about the debate. But I want to challenge you on
one point about Iraq.
MATALIN: What a surprise!
“Obviously, you’re feeling good about the debate?”
Karl Rove couldn’t have typed this prologue better;
Gregory seemed to be saying that Cheney had won. But
then, that’s exactly what Campbell Brown seemed to
say, too! Gregory threw it over to Brown, who posed
her one question to Kerry’s Joe Lockhart:
BROWN (10/5/04): Thank you, David [Gregory]. I'm here
with Joe Lockhart, adviser to Senator Kerry. It was a
tough performance tonight by the vice president. There
were sharp attacks against John Edwards, especially
with regard to his Senate record, his absence from the
Senate, missing votes. Did you lose some of the
momentum that you had gained after the last debate?
Brown seemed to be saying that Cheney won too! And
then Brokaw threw to his pair of bloggers. How did
that fair-and-balanced segment turn out? John
Hinderaker, the conservative blogger, said that Cheney
clearly won. Then Brokaw threw to the vacuous Ana
Marie Cox. And, in between her silly giggles, Cox said
that Cheney won too! See THE DAILY HOWLER, 10/6/04.
Was something wrong with NBC’s half-hour? That is
clearly a matter of judgment. But no one could ever
cry “liberal bias” as this odd half-hour unfolded.
Both reporters seemed to suggest that Cheney had won
the debate. And both guest bloggers came right out and
said so. (As we all know, it’s a standard Fox
trick—match a straight-ahead conservative guest with a
simpering “liberal” like Cox.) Meanwhile, Brokaw’s
descriptions favored Cheney, and Russert was failing
to mention the fact that Cheney’s Great Line had been
a misstatement. No, NBC’s half-hour didn’t begin to
compare to the clowning underway on its sister
channel. But are NBC reporters so poorly skilled that
they don’t know how to ask two questions without twice
telling viewers that Cheney had won? Are Brokaw’s
producers really so dense that they matched those two
bloggers in good faith? On Fox, you’d know what a
match like that meant. Is it really so different with
Peacocks?
And is Brokaw unable to restrain his opinions? Shortly
after 11, the undisciplined man went over to MSNBC.
And once he got there, he stated what he previously
only implied—Dick Cheney won the debate.
Brokaw and Russert unbound: Over at MSNBC, the great,
brilliant anchor could let his hair down. Shortly
after 11 o’clock, Brokaw and Russert joined the
half-drunk Hardball gang. And make no mistake—the frat
party really was poppin’ by now. With dissenter Reagan
long since put in his place, here’s the way Matthews
and Scarborough started the 11 o’clock hour:
MATTHEWS (10/5/04): I am stunned. I wish everybody
would show an equal exclamation point after their
thoughts here tonight. Dick Cheney was prepared. He
was loaded for bear tonight. He was out on a hunting
trip looking for squirrel.
[LAUGHTER]
MATTHEWS: And he found squirrel. Does anybody share
that? Because I think the newspapers are going to
share that tomorrow. He had tremendous ammunition at
his disposal, tremendous opposition research on the
absentee ratings of both candidates on the Democratic
ticket. He was able to defend, almost, almost, his
position as former CEO of Halliburton.
But on every other topic, he seemed like he was in to
hit home runs and he did so. Joe Scarborough.
SCARBOROUGH: Yes, no doubt about it. And, again, I
will go back to what I said before the debate. This
guy, Dick Cheney, is so comfortable in his own skin.
There aren't a lot of people that, when you ask him a
question, will stand there and—
MEACHAM: Like George Bush.
SCARBOROUGH: Look down for a second, and look, and
basically say, I cannot believe I am going to have to
educate this little kid on how government really
works.
“Yes, no doubt about it,” Scarborough said. While
weak-willed Meacham affably agreed, Edwards was
compared to a squirrel and to a “little kid.” Cheney
was hitting home runs.
And then, nirvana! Great Brokaw came on! Want to see a
weak-willed man in action? Then read through Brokaw’s
two-sided statement, in which he says that he
shouldn’t opine—and then immediately does just that,
sharing the view of the crew:
MATTHEWS: Let's go right now to some experts. NBC
Nightly News anchor, Tom Brokaw, and NBC News
Washington bureau chief and moderator of Meet the
Press, Tim Russert, join us right now.
Gentlemen, what did you think?
BROKAW: Well, I think that it's always premature for
us to make a decision about who won the debate, Chris.
I know that it's part of the sporting moment after the
debate, but people really will decide in the next
couple of days, and they will piece it together with
last week and what they see again on Friday night.
But I absolutely agree. And I was not surprised by
this, having covered him for more than 30 years now,
that Dick Cheney was extremely well prepared. And
earlier on NBC here, I compared him to George Foreman.
He kind of shuffles across the ring and then he
unleashes a powerful right hand. He had any number of
memorable lines: You couldn't stand up to Howard Dean.
How can you stand up to terror?
He doesn't believe that John Kerry has conviction to
carry through on the war on terror. He said, you were
for the war when the headlines were good. You were
against it when the polls were bad.
Those are not only memorable lines, but those are
sound bites that are going to get repeated again and
again, Tim.
“It’s always premature to make a decision,” the Great
Man said. But so what? As soon as the words were out
of his mouth, he made a decision anyway! And yes, he
voiced the Great Motto of his disturbed fraternal
order. “I absolutely agree,” he said, as he openly
stated the view he had only implied on NBC. Cheney had
beaten up Edwards, Brokaw said. And when he threw to
his side-kick, Russert, Russert pimped that Great
Cheney Statement—the statement he knew was untrue:
RUSSERT (continuing directly): I thought Senator
Lindsey Graham, the Republican from South Carolina,
had a very interesting point, Tom. He said that last
Thursday was not George Bush's best night.
BROKAW: Right.
RUSSERT: And they were very much afraid that if this
debate went the same way as last Thursday's, there
would be an extraordinary momentum for the
Kerry-Edwards ticket going into Friday.
They do believe that tonight they blunted some of that
momentum, because Dick Cheney was able to rally the
Republican base, at least, by putting forward a very
instructive and heartfelt case for the Bush-Cheney
administration. I think John Edwards, when he said,
you are not being straight on Iraq, was trying to
frame this campaign on Iraq, and Dick Cheney kept
saying, it's broader than Iraq. It's the war on
terror. And if you want to win the war on terror, you
have got to reelect George Bush.
And then when he turned to John Edwards and basically
said to him, you know what, you are a young man in too
much of a hurry. I never met you before in my life
until you walked on the stage tonight, it was
basically saying to the American people, you may
disagree with me, but I am steady and I am resolute,
and I have a lot of experience, and you don't have to
worry about the government if I am a heartbeat away.
Good boy! Cheney was saying he was steady and
resolute. And Cheney was saying the people could trust
him. And oh yes, one other thing—Cheney was lying in
the faces of the people. But Russert knew he mustn’t
say that. After pimping Cheney’s Great Statement all
night, he said that to Couric the next morning.
Oh what a night: For ourselves, we’re not sure we’ve
ever seen an odder performance by a whole network.
Let’s review what happened when NBC/MSNBC covered the
VP Debate.
At NBC, things were surely a trifle strange, though
they kept the lid on. Anchor Brokaw implied that
Cheney had won, a view he would openly state on MSNBC.
Anchor Russert quickly pimped Cheney’s Great
Statement, forgetting to say that the statement was
wrong. Both reporters, asking only one question,
clearly implied that Cheney had won. And then they
brought on two expert bloggers—one a conservative, one
just an idiot. Both bloggers said Cheney won.
No, liberal bias was hard to find as NBC worked its
magic,. But over at MSNBC, the drunken frat boys were
just running wild. John Edwards? He was “a squirrel,”
a “little kid,” who “George Foreman” Cheney had “put
in his place.” When Reagan attempted to voice an
alternative view, he was loudly shouted down. The
endless group [LAUGHTER] riddles the transcript as
this half drunken crew voiced its wisdom. And eight
hours later, its unbalanced leader was wringing his
hands with Imus. “I think I got snookered again,” he
now said. Why is this man on the air?
No, “the newspapers” weren’t sharing their view the
next day; the newspapers weren’t calling John Edwards
a squirrel. And there were no empirical data—none at
all—that suggested that voters had judged the debate
the way this strange group of frat boys had done. For
ourselves, as we watched this gang’s strange evening,
we found ourselves entertaining a thought for the
first time. We found ourselves thinking, for the first
time, that the explanation for the conduct was
obvious. Jack Welch must have jumped on the phone and
told these strange people just what they must say.
Their Instant Verdict was so odd and so wildly
asserted that you couldn’t help wonder about that.
Do we think Jack Welch made that phone call? Only a
fool would guess about that. But let’s say this: If a
Martian visitor had watched this exhibit, that would
be his first supposition. We all assume that it just
can’t be true. But try watching the tape as Matthews
wildly emotes all night and then, the next day, takes
it back.
POSTSCRIPT: Needless to say, Matthews has been
flip-flopping wildly since Wednesday morning, revising
his stand on Cheney/Edwards with every new TV
appearance. For example, read Eric Boehlert’s latest
at Salon to see the erratic Hardball host as he keeps
pimping Cheney’s false statement.
Matthews is erratic, unbalanced, unstable. Why is so
wildly erratic a man a steward of our precious public
discourse?
VISIT OUR INCOMPARABLE ARCHIVES: Matthews has
reinvented his take on the Bush-Gore debates too (for
example, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/15/02). Why is so
erratic—and so dishonest—a man stewarding your public
discourse?
SHAFER IMAGINED A PHONE CALL TOO: Did someone tell
CNN’s pundits what they had to say? As he watched
CNN’s coverage of Cheney v. Edwards, Slate’s Jack
Shafer asked himself that very same question—the same
question we asked about MSNBC! We think that Shafer
raises very good points; we strongly suggest that you
read his report. Free people don’t all reach a uniform
judgment when confronted with an event. Of course,
uniformity of judgment is the press corps’ great
hallmark; it almost defines this press corps’
dysfunction. But uniformity of judgment ran rampant
Tuesday night. We found ourselves wondering if Welch
made a call. As he sat and watched CNN, Shafer asked
himself the same thing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/salon/0,14779,1323334,00.html
Bush's mystery bulge
The rumour is flying around the globe. Was the
president wired during the first debate?
Dave Lindorff
Friday October 8, 2004
Was President Bush literally channeling Karl Rove in
his first debate with John Kerry? That's the latest
rumour flooding the Internet, unleashed last week in
the wake of an image caught by a television camera
during the Miami debate. The image shows a large solid
object between Bush's shoulder blades as he leans over
the lectern and faces moderator Jim Lehrer.
The president is not known to wear a back brace, and
it's safe to say he wasn't packing. So was the bulge
under his well-tailored jacket a hidden receiver,
picking up transmissions from someone offstage feeding
the president answers through a hidden earpiece? Did
the device explain why the normally ramrod-straight
president seemed hunched over during much of the
debate?
Bloggers are burning up their keyboards with
speculation. Check out the president's peculiar
behaviour during the debate, they say. On several
occasions, the president simply stopped speaking for
an uncomfortably long time and stared ahead with an
odd expression on his face. Was he listening to
someone helping him with his response to a question?
Even weirder was the president's strange outburst. In
a peeved rejoinder to Kerry, he said, "As the politics
change, his positions change. And that's not how a
commander in chief acts. I, I, uh - Let me finish -
The intelligence I looked at was the same intelligence
my opponent looked at." It must be said that Bush
pointed toward Lehrer as he declared "Let me finish."
The green warning light was lit, signalling he had 30
seconds to, well, finish.
Hot on the conspiracy trail, I tried to track down
the source of the photo. None of the Bush-is-wired
bloggers, however, seemed to know where the photo came
from. Was it possible the bulge had been Photoshopped
onto Bush's back by a lone conspiracy buff? It turns
out that all of the video of the debate was recorded
and sent out by Fox News, the pool broadcaster for the
event. Fox sent feeds from multiple cameras to the
other networks, which did their own on-air
presentations and editing.
To watch the debate again, I ventured to the website
of the most sober network I could think of: C-SPAN.
And sure enough, at minute 23 on the video of the
debate, you can clearly see the bulge between the
president's shoulder blades.
Bloggers stoke the conspiracy with the claim that the
Bush administration insisted on a condition that no
cameras be placed behind the candidates. An official
for the Commission on Presidential Debates, which set
up the lecterns and microphones on the Miami stage,
said the condition was indeed real, the result of
negotiations by both campaigns. Yet that didn't stop
Fox from setting up cameras behind Bush and Kerry. The
official said that "microphones were mounted on
lecterns, and the commission put no electronic devices
on the president or Senator Kerry." When asked about
the bulge on Bush's back, the official said, "I don't
know what that was."
So what was it? Jacob McKenna, a spyware expert and
the owner of the Spy Store, a high-tech surveillance
shop in Spokane, Washington, looked at the Bush image
on his computer monitor. "There's certainly something
on his back, and it appears to be electronic," he
said. McKenna said that, given its shape, the bulge
could be the inductor portion of a two-way
push-to-talk system. McKenna noted that such a system
makes use of a tiny microchip-based earplug radio that
is pushed way down into the ear canal, where it is
virtually invisible. He also said a weak signal could
be scrambled and be undetected by another broadcaster.
Mystery-bulge bloggers argue that the president may
have begun using such technology earlier in his term.
Because Bush is famously prone to malapropisms and
reportedly dyslexic, which could make successful use
of a teleprompter problematic, they say the president
and his handlers may have turned to a technique often
used by television reporters on remote stand-ups. A
reporter tapes a story and, while on camera, plays it
back into an earpiece, repeating lines just after
hearing them, managing to sound spontaneous and error
free.
Suggestions that Bush may have using this technique
stem from a D-day event in France, when a CNN
broadcast appeared to pick up - and broadcast to
surprised viewers - the sound of another voice
seemingly reading Bush his lines, after which Bush
repeated them. Danny Schechter, who operates the news
site MediaChannel.org, and who has been doing some
investigating into the wired-Bush rumors himself, said
the Bush campaign has been worried of late about
others picking up their radio frequencies - notably
during the Republican Convention on the day of Bush's
appearance. "They had a frequency specialist stop me
and ask about the frequency of my camera," Schechter
said. "The Democrats weren't doing that at their
convention."
Repeated calls to the White House and the Bush
national campaign office over a period of three days,
inquiring about what the president may have been
wearing on his back during the debate, and whether he
had used an audio device at other events, went
unreturned. So far the Kerry campaign is staying clear
of this story. When called for a comment, a press
officer at the Democratic National Committee claimed
on Tuesday that it was "the first time" they'd ever
heard of the issue. A spokeswoman at the press office
of Kerry headquarters refused to permit me to talk
with anyone in the campaign's research office. Several
other requests for comment to the Kerry campaign's
press office went unanswered.
As for whether we really do have a Milli Vanilli
president, the answer at this point has to be, God
only knows.
· Dave Lindorff is the author of This Can't Be
Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American
Democracy.
This article has been provided by Salon through a
special arrangement with Guardian Newspapers Limited.
Visit the Salon site at Salon.com
© Salon.com 2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Printable version | Send it to a friend | Save story
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/20124/
Bush's Crimes Against Nature
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Eugene Weekly
Posted on October 7, 2004, Printed on October 9, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story/20124/
Editor's Note: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is arguably the
nation's most prominent environmental attorney. His
new book is "Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush
and His Corporate Pals are Plundering the Country and
Hijacking Our Democracy." On Sept. 23, he made an
impromptu appearance in Eugene, Oregon. Below is an
edited transcript of his talk.
I've written a book about Bush's environmental record,
but it's not so much about the environment as it is
about an excess of corporate power and the corrosive
impact of that on our democracy. And it's not about a
Democrat attacking a Republican. I've been disciplined
for 20 years as an environmental advocate about being
non-partisan and bi-partisan in my approach to these
issues. I don't think there's any such thing as
Republican children or Democratic children, and the
worst thing that can happen to the environment is if
it becomes the province of a single political party.
But you can't talk honestly about the environment
today in any context without speaking critically about
this president. This is the worst environmental
president we've had in American history.
If you look at Natural Resource Defense Council's
website, you'll see over 400 major environmental
roll-backs that have been promoted by this
administration during the last three and a half years,
and I tell you it's part of a concerted deliberate
attempt to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law.
It's a stealth attack. They have concealed their
radical agenda from the American public using
Orwellian rhetoric. When they destroy the forest, they
call it the Healthy Forest Law; when they destroy the
air they call it the Clear Skies Bill. And most
insidiously they have put polluters in charge of
virtually all the agencies that are supposed to
protect Americans from pollution. The head of the
Forest Service is a timber industry lobbyist. The head
of public lands is a mining industry lobbyist who
believes that public lands are unconstitutional. The
head of the air division at EPA is a utility lobbyist
who has represented the worst air polluters in
America. The second in command at EPA is a Monsanto
lobbyist. The head of Superfunds, an agency critical
to quality of life here in Oregon, is a lobbyist whose
last job was teaching corporate polluters how to evade
Superfunds.
If you go through all the agency heads, sub-heads and
secretaries in the Department of Agriculture,
Department of the Interior, Department of Energy and
EPA, you'll find the same thing: The polluters are
running regulatory agencies that are supposed to
regulate them. And these are not individuals who have
entered government service for the sake of the public
interest, but rather specifically to subvert the very
laws that they are in charge of enforcing. This is
impacting our quality of life in America in so many
ways that we don't know about because the press simply
isn't doing its job of informing the American public,
scrutinizing these policies, connecting the dots
between the corporate contributors and the dramatic
decline in American quality of life that we are now
experiencing.
This year for the first time since the passage of the
Clean Water Act, EPA announced that America's
waterways are actually getting dirtier. The New York
Times ran a story that the levels of sulfur dioxide
(that causes acid rain) have grown 4 percent over the
last year. I have three children who have asthma and
one out of every four black children in this country
in our municipalities now has asthma.
Asthma rates have doubled among our children over the
last five years. Whether it's hormones in our food or
antibiotics, something is causing our children to have
these kinds of haywire immune systems. We do know that
asthma attacks are triggered primarily by two
components of air pollution: ozone and particulates.
About 60 percent of those materials in our atmosphere
are coming from 1,100 coal-burning power plants that
are burning coal illegally. They were supposed to have
cleaned up 15 years ago. The Clinton administration
was prosecuting the worst 70 of these plants for
criminal violations. But this is an industry that
donated $48 million to President Bush and the
Republican Party in the 2000 cycle and have given $58
million since. And one of the first things that
President Bush did when he came into office was to
order the Justice Department to drop those lawsuits
against those utilities
According to the EPA, just the criminal excedences
from these 70 plants kill 5,500 Americans every year.
And then the Bush administration tore the heart out of
the Clean Air Act abolishing the New Source Reviews
section that require these companies to clean up their
pollution. That decision is killing 30,000 Americans
every single year, according to EPA, including 165
people in the state of Oregon.
Last week the federal EPA announced that in 19 states
it's now unsafe to eat any freshwater fish because of
mercury contamination. In 48 states it's now unsafe to
eat at least some of the fish or most of the fish, and
Oregon is one of those.
We know a lot about mercury now that we didn't know 10
years ago. We know that one out of every six American
women now has so much mercury in her womb that her
children are at risk for autism, blindness, mental
retardation, cognitive impairment, heart, liver and
kidney disease. I have so much mercury in my body – I
got levels tested recently – that I was told by Dr.
David Carpenter, who's a national authority on mercury
contamination, that a woman with my levels, which are
three times the safe levels, would have a child with
cognitive impairment. He estimated a permanent IQ loss
of 5 to 7 points in her children. He said the science
is very certain. Today there are 630,000 children born
in this country every year who've been exposed to
dangerous levels of mercury in the womb.
Clinton, recognizing this catastrophic national
epidemic, reclassified mercury as a hazardous
pollutant under the Clean Air Act, which triggered a
requirement that those plants remove 90 percent of the
mercury within three and a half years. It would have
cost them less than 1 percent of revenues and it would
have solved the problem. Well, this is the same
industry that's given that $100 million to the
president, and eight weeks ago President Bush
announced that he was scrapping the Clinton-era regs,
substituting instead regulations that the industry
never has to clean up their mercury contamination.
So we are living today in a science fiction nightmare
where my children and the children of millions of
other Americans who have asthma are being brought into
a world where the air is too poisonous to breathe –
because somebody gave money to a politician. And where
my children and the children of most Americans can no
longer go fishing with their father and come home and
eat the fish – because somebody gave money to a
politician. And the mercury in the waters here in
Oregon, the fish are too dangerous, particularly for
children and women. Some of that mercury is coming the
power plants, most of it's coming from old mining
tailings and from Superfund sites. On the Willamette
River, that's where the mercury's coming from. Well,
guess what? The Bush administration has allowed the
Superfund to go bankrupt, which means that those sites
will probably never get cleaned up.
Superfund (money) is raised through a tax on polluting
industries, and it's a very, very small tax. But they
don't like it. They don't mind the tax, what they mind
is that that fund is used as a leverage to force them
to spend billions of dollars to clean up their mess.
And this is how it works. The Superfund doesn't just
clean up orphan sites, but it can also be used by EPA
to clean up the sites of recalcitrant polluters. So
the EPA – there's a provision in Superfund that says
that if a polluter refuses to clean up its Superfund
site, the EPA can go to them and say, OK, fine, we're
tired of dealing with the lawyers and enriching your
lawyers. What we're going to do instead is clean it up
ourselves and charge you triple. It's called the
Treble Damages Provision.
At virtually every Superfund site that's been cleaned
up by industry over the past 20 years, since 1981,
it's been cleaned up because of the threat of the
Treble Damages Provision. It's the only thing that
makes them clean up. Well, guess what? That threat no
longer exists. The teeth have been ripped out of EPA
so that they will no longer be able to force polluters
to clean up their sites. As a result of that, most of
these sites along the Willamette will never get
cleaned up, and if they do get cleaned up, guess who's
paying for it? You and I and the American public. How
ridiculous is that?
It's always been illegal to pollute the Willamette –
the 1888 Rivers and Harbors Act said you can't pollute
any waterway in the U.S. Even before that it was
illegal to pollute. They were able to get away with
it. They thought they could make more money by
polluting. Now we've got an administration that rather
than telling polluters they have to clean up their
mess, they're saying that the public instead is going
to foot the bill.
All of these issues, and there are many, many others,
examples of how corporations are controlling our
government and plundering the common, stealing what
belongs to the American people, our air and water, the
commonwealth, the shared resources, the public land,
the wandering animals – the things that give us a
sense of community, the source of our values, our
virtues, our character as a people. And we're
plundering those. And if you ask people at the White
House, why are you doing this? What they'll say when
they're not lying to conceal this radical agenda and
mask it from the American people, they'll say well, we
have to choose between economic prosperity and
environmental protection. And that is a false choice.
In 100 percent of the situations, good environmental
policy is identical to good economic policy – if we
want to measure the economy based upon how it produces
jobs and the dignity of jobs over the generations,
over the long term, and how it preserves the value of
the assets of our community. If on the other hand, we
want to do what they've been urging us to do with this
White House, which is to treat the planet as if it
were a business in liquidation, convert our natural
resources to cash as quickly as possible, have a few
years of pollution-based prosperity, we can generate
an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a
prosperous economy, but our children are going to pay
for our joy ride. And they will pay for it with
denuded landscapes, poorer health and huge clean up
costs that will be amplified over time, and that
they'll never be able to pay.
Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way
of loading the costs of our generation's prosperity
onto the backs of our children. There is no stronger
advocate for free-market capitalism than myself. I
believe that the free market is the most efficient and
democratic way to distribute the goods of the land.
It's also the best thing that can happen to the
environment because a true free market encourages
efficiency and the elimination of waste, and waste is
pollution.
So free market capitalism does not pollute our
environment. It's always the suspension of free market
rule. In a true free market economy, you can't make
yourself rich without making your neighbors rich,
without enriching your community. So what polluters do
is make themselves rich by making everybody else poor.
They raise standards of living for themselves by
lowering quality of life for everybody else, and they
do that by escaping the discipline of the free market,
by forcing the public to pay their production costs.
You show me a polluter and I'll show you a subsidy.
I'll show you a fat cat who's using political clout to
escape the discipline of the free market.
When those coal companies and utilities put their acid
rain into the air and sterilize the lakes of the
Adirondacks and destroy the forests from Georgia to
Quebec, they put the mercury in the air which poisons
our children, makes them mentally retarded, gives them
cognitive impairment and terrible diseases, and it
makes it so I can no longer go fishing and come home
and eat the fish. They have stolen that from me, and
as they are discharging the ozone and particulates
that give our children ashthma and make our workers
miss work – all of those impacts impose costs on the
rest of us that should, in a true free market economy
be reflected in the price of the companies' products
in the market. But what polluters do is they use
political clout to escape the discipline of the free
market and pawn their costs off on the public.
Corporations are externalizing machines. They are
always looking for ways to get the public to pay their
production costs, and what all the federal
environmental laws are meant to do is to restore free
market capitalism in our country, by forcing actors in
the marketplace to pay the true costs of bringing
their product to market. What we do as an
environmental advocates is to go out into the
marketplace – I don't even consider myself an
environmentalist any more, I'm a free marketeer. I go
out and catch the cheaters, the people who are
polluting, and I say to them we are going to force you
to internalize your costs the same way you internalize
your profits, because when somebody cheats the free
market, it distorts the whole marketplace and none of
us gets the benefits of the efficiencies and the
democracy of our country.
Americans have to understand that there is a huge
difference between free market capitalism which
democratizes our country which makes us more
efficient, more democratic, and the kind of corporate
crony capitalism which has been embraced by this
administration and which is as antithetical to
democracy in America as it is in Nigeria.
This is an administration that's about plundering our
air and our water, plundering our national treasure,
shifting our wealth, plundering the great
relationships we had with people all over the world,
and shifting the wealth of those assets to large
corporations who are its donors, who are the lowest
bottom feeders who profiteer on the American people.
© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights
reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/20124/
_______________________________________________
Liberation News Service mailing list
Website: http://www.mindspace.org/liberation-news-service/
Manage your subscription to this list:
http://www.mindspace.org/liberation-news-service/subscribe.html