Commander Codpiece, wearing the aviator’s portable urinal that accentuated his manly bits. And no, I’m not making that up.
Today’s WashPo story about the new, improved BushCo: ‘Blunt Rhetoric Signals a New Thrust.’ Ooo, so manly:
Bush suggested last week that Democrats are promising voters to block additional money for continuing the war. Vice President Cheney this week said critics “claim retreat from Iraq would satisfy the appetite of the terrorists and get them to leave us alone.” And Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, citing passivity toward Nazi Germany before World War II, said that “many have still not learned history’s lessons” and “believe that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased.”
Pressed to support these allegations, the White House yesterday could cite no major Democrat who has proposed cutting off funds or suggested that withdrawing from Iraq would persuade terrorists to leave Americans alone. But White House and Republican officials said those are logical interpretations of the most common Democratic position favoring a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq.
“A lot of the people who say we need to withdraw from Iraq say we’ll be safer, and I don’t think that’s accurate,” said Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, a key architect of the party’s strategy heading into the fall congressional campaign. Mehlman noted that al-Qaeda leaders and other Islamic radicals have said they want to drive Americans out of Iraq and use it as a base. “We ought to not ignore when they say they’re going to do that.”
Blunt. Manly. Thrusting, by WashPo standards. But then, just how low can those standards go?
And I was thinking: How would I have written this story? Well, the lede would have gone something like this:
The Bush administration, sinking in a sea of bad-news polls and a growing sense of desperation on Capitol Hill, sent out the always affable (if increasingly batty) Don Rumsfeld yesterday to test-market a reliable old ploy: Blaming the Democrats for their own failures in Iraq.
Despite Republican control of the White House, the House and the Senate, the Bush team believes their best hopes lie in a strategy of holding the Democrats responsible for increasing casualties, civil war and rising costs with little results in Iraq. But are voters gullible enough to buy it?
As opposed to:
President Bush and his surrogates are launching a new campaign intended to rebuild support for the war in Iraq by accusing the opposition of aiming to appease terrorists and cut off funding for troops on the battlefield, charges that many Democrats say distort their stated positions.
See the difference?
I’m reading Matt Taibbi’s “Spanking the Donkey,” and the book (about his time covering the 2004 Democratic primary and Kerry’s campaign) is deeply depressing. Yet it’s the very best, most insightful political book I’ve read in a very long time, and we can’t even begin to fix anything until we identify the real problems.
If more Democratic politicians read this instead of George Lakoff, we’d be in much better shape. Taibbi is as accurate as he is angry. He writes:
It’s not so much that the reporters are ignoring an important issue in the voter participation survey. The issue is how they cover it: from which point of view, and with what emphasis. This massive, unceasing amount of coverage is aimed exclusively in one direction - at this exquisitely stage-managed soap opera of the American democratic process, where all of America looks clean and hopeful, and everybody in the picture believes. It becomes a never-ending advertisement for the health and functionality of the system, and within the parameters of that advertisement, the candidates are quite incidental.
All that really matters is that the reporters are kept on a steady diet of the he-said, she-said routine that passes for politics inside the bubble: you, sir, are soft on defense and won’t spend enough on intelligence! No, sir, it is you, sir, who is soft on defense and won’t pay enough for body armor! (This was actually the current theme between Kerry and Bush that night in Houston.) And once the exchange of shots that day is safely recorded, everyone goes home to a five-star hotel and tries to sleep off the poached salmon and sea scallop fajitas and blackberry creme brulee they just ate at the “office” cafeteria. Democracy works! America is doing just fine!
It’s exhausting to constantly de-construct the steady diet of agenda-ridden crap shelled out by the vast majority of the press corpse. After reading this book, you may not bother to read them ever again.
