Third Party & Independents: Archives

In the short term (between now and November) Bush’s TV money will continue to fool the electorate. But media coverup cannot prevent awareness of the deficit, oil prices, jobs, war costs, immigration policy, and a failed war & homeland defense strategy indefinately? Lay got what he wanted from Cheney who got what he wanted from Bush. Bush has taken better care of his Saudi co-conspirators than this country. What will fundementalist Christians think when war ceases to obfuscate these problems become? Will praying help?

An increase in direct quotes from Bush is, I think, a good thing. I’ve grown sick and tired of reporters generously paraphrasing him or reporting what the “White House” says rather than simply playing a tape of Bush’s rambling incoherent blabbering about issues.

If the American people got more of “raw Bush” (that is, verbatim quotes and extended sound bites) they might plainly see how he is neither knowledgable, forthright, or even comfortable talking about anything important.

Of course, I could be totally wrong about this and I could be underestimating the American people’s tolerance for incoherent political rhetoric. In 2000, polls showed that many Americans came to think that Bush had a deep command of the issues after watching the three Bush/Gore debates. Almost everyone I know thought that Bush showed an exceptionally profound lack of interest or knowledge about almost every single issue discussed in the debates. We’ve all seen a thousand people on TV news programs, people from both parties, who showed a vastly deeper understanding of issues than Bush did. I was sighing along with Al Gore at the bloodbath I thought I was watching. But when I later heard the polls that showed that viewers were evenly split on who “won” the debates, well, that was a deep shock to me, and I’ll freely admit was gravely disappointed with the American electorate.

So, I guess we’ll see how people react to Bush’s media coverage now that they’ve come to know (the hard way) that the American people have to take Bush’s statements with a big ol’ grain of salt.

-Cf

Is this result very surprising? It’s kind of like those advertisements that are really annoying. They don’t care if they upset you, as long as you remember to buy the product.

After all we Americans are the “common clay of the new west”. (Quote from Blazing Saddles)

Here is link to a funny little chart (bottom of page) that may or may not be true but is sure to start an argument about the intelligence of voters.

http://americanassembler.com/features/iq_state_averages.htm

Isadora,

Ofcourse opinions are persuaded by TV spin it’s as I’ve remarked before the “problem in the center” broadcasting. Whereas ‘journalism’ doesn’t sell adtime and slots, fixate-able situations and problems do. We as Americans are under the impression through 24/7 news coverage that any of this is an accurate reflection of ourselves no matter how ‘funhouse’. There is no center to news as reportable so they have to seek a false ‘priority system’ to guide their reporting day. Top Stories are what they make them to be and hyper-exposure on that gives it us more of a sense of their importance than something more intellectual. It’s dumbed down for the masses that don’t understand policy or more technical things. IE they have ad-time to sell and intellectuality would only make viewer’s A.D.D. go stir crazy.

Are we lead along by the nose by polling numbers? I personally think people don’t care and are actually getting wise to the hoakum-factor involved in it.

While on topic of spin…

We Dems just might find this Abu Ghraib maelstrom to be less of a Kerry boon than we thought when the pictures first emerged. Due to recent and horrid footage of Berg it makes this prison scandal thing quite justifiable in many people’s eyes. Kerry trying to rail against the commanders is entirely transparent and as Kerry’s problem all along, he doesn’t know when to shut-up. The Point: Bush still has a chance at this thing and those numbers could be growing. People are rip-sh*t over the slaying whether the press identifies that or not.

They know it’s real that we are pissed but they can’t seem to get past wanting to be our liberazzi gate-keepers and stray roughshod over the seething hate that I hear everywhere but for some reason our news wants to pretend that we all don’t want to beat the shit out of an Arab at random or light a mosque on fire. On every call in radio show anger and rage against terrorists and Islam. The press won’t allow any opinion that they can’t play liberal gate-keeper on.

I am actually starting to see a bias that I had only heard remarks of before. Islam is sweet and kind and we don’t want negative attention placed on their communities. Gate-keeper stuff.

Skunkbud, I am one who has, and had, no such reaction as far as wanting to go beat up an Arab or burn a Mosque. I am personally repulsed by such bigoted, prejudiced, and small-minded-ignorant, parochial, and immature responses from grown adults in America.

I wanted to see those responsible held accountable, in a court of law if possible. And I know there is a broad spectrum of Americans who feel the same as I do. I know, because I listen to, read, and watch the media publications which those people visit, like here, and C-Span. But, more telling is the fact that Americans have grown up from the Jim Crow days by and large, and blind rage / revenge reaction against anyone in the same class as terrorist is just “bad form”, if not abhorrent to a firm conviction in what religious teachings or faith in what our country stands for.

I listened hour after hour the other night to a local radio show that had numerous callers espousing that sort of rage at a religion that has not come out and condemned the horrible actions. When the abortion clinic in Georgia was bombed by an abortion rights vigilante. Church after church came out in condemnation of the actions. So far just Hisb Allah in Lebannon out of fear of US intervention with their terrorist networks. But aside from that nothing. And there’s no news on that front at all. Like I said media gate-keeping.

Failure of Muslim clerics to condemn terrorism is largely due to fear of reprisals from those Muslims who fully sympathize with terrorist causes. They’re trying to walk a careful balance between social acceptability in America, and religious acceptability among their own people. If things get much worse, though, there won’t be any way to walk the tightrope anymore, and they’ll have to choose a side.

Isadora wrote a thoughtful article, well documented and articulate.

Polls must also be on the mind of Karl Rove and others. With Bush Polls rapidly declining, the White House must be near panic.

Though seemingly unrelated, the atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gitmo, are very telling about the lengths this adminstration will go to win. In the “Washington Whispers” column today, Sunday 5/16, on the “Drudge Report”, the leading article is about the practice drills for the coming “Terrorist Attacks” in Washington DC or immediate environs. According to the article those on the “ferverent right” believe these terrorist attacks will occur before the November elections.

“From the White House, a nightmare scenario
White House officials say they’ve got a “working premise” about terrorism and the presidential election: It’s going to happen. “We assume,” says a top administration official, “an attack will happen leading up to the election.” And, he added, “it will happen here.”

‘Unclear is the political impact, though most Bushies think the nation would rally around the president. “I can tell you one thing,” adds the official sternly, “we won’t be like Spain,” which tossed its government days after the Madrid train bombings.’

With Bush polls rapidly heading south, is it conceivable that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush etc, will stage some dramatic terrorist attack so we can all rally around the Bush “war president”? Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Maureen, some say 9/11 itself was staged for that purpose. I used to give that conspiracy theory no credence at all, but the Nick Berg incident has my gears turning again. He was an acquaintance of Zacharias Moussaoui and was being investigated by the FBI as a possible “John Walker Lindh” type, of questionable purpose for being in Iraq. He was “released” from U.S. custody just days prior to the infamous beheading. What if CIA decided they could kill two birds (or two Bergs) with one stone: eliminate a possible traitor on the one hand, and also gain a psyops coup to divert attention away from what they were doing at Abu Ghraib?

If you step back and think about it, if a government were to be in control of both sides of a “war on terror”, that would be enormous power, because you could keep a moral high ground (minus some Abu Ghraib pecadillos) with one side of the conflict and lure the most dangerous elements of your potential opponents into rat traps with the other side of it (and also operate unrestricted in the black zone).

And come to think of it, the guaranteed most effective way to fight terrorism period, (albeit least morally defensible), would be to create a terrorist organization and use that organization as a lure to gather in those who hate you, collect them all in a box, and exterminate them. In a way it could have the “ends justify the means” sort of rationalization that was used by the CIA in decades past, i.e., Pinochet, MK-Ultra, Paperclip, etc.

I don’t envy whoever it is who thinks they’re up to investigating this though. I’ll just leave it at that.

Wow, Ciggy. I find it hard to believe that any group of people can keep that kind of secret for any amount of time. You’d have to have a collection of really hard-ass, conscienceless MFs to pull that off. Hmm… On the other hand, it does make you wonder why the Bush administration has been underfunding port security, the Coast Guard, and other basic homeland protections.

And one of Bush’s media consultants, Dick Morris, has been urging him to play up the terror angle when the polls dip.

Hmm… :)

I read an article somewhere that stated polling data is routinely used to manipulate public opinion. Doesn’t it seem like every media outlet has it’s own pollsters?

I guess the most blatant example would be the push polling that the Bush campaign used against McCain in the 2000 primaries. Republican voters in the south were asked “Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?”

There was also a Republican push poll during the 2000 presidential election making sure voters knew that Lieberman is a Jew.

The Pinochet support didn’t stay secret forever. MK-Ultra didn’t stay secret forever. Operation Paperclip didn’t stay secret forever. What is usually required for the deep dark secrets to percolate up into the daylight is for the public’s “give a shit factor” to simmer down and let it be revealed as an interesting historical curiosity rather than an exposé on current administration policy. Iran/Contra, well, that was an aberration to the norm of how secrets are vented out. One wrong plane crash and the world hiccups for the black ops world, for a while.

No, I don’t think that anything regarding the “war on terror” as it’s currently prosecuted, is going to blow wide open anytime soon. It’s just too easy for CIA to eliminate potential loose cannons within the Company, by compromising them out to the enemy; or to eliminate investigative reporters or other squirrelly people getting too close to the facts, and making it look like Al Qaeda did it. Much of the same sort of thing that happened in the Cold War is still very obscure and anecdotal, to that effect.

And we all know how critics of the magic bullet theory in the JFK assassination get their sanity attacked.

Playing up to the terror angle is exactly what Bush has been doing for roughly three years now. If anything Americans are getting desensitized to it, and less apt to suspend their rage at the wastefulness and lies of the Iraq campaign. The concentric circles of excuses for that war have all fallen down, and little is left besides naked aggression for its own sake, and now the question of “why” is spilling over to the Kerry campaign for why he’s promising to continue the insanity.

Ciggy, Kerry is only going to continue the insanity for as long as it takes to get NATO and the UN to take over.

As for the conspricy theory, my first instinct is just to laugh it off. But I have an open mind. I just don’t see how the lifer CIA beaurocrats benefit from helping Bush get reelected. Given the fact that Bush betrayed Plame for political revenge seems to make him dangerous to the Company.

Lee, for one thing, Baghdad is nowhere near the North Atlantic, so a NATO operation there is going to look very nearly as much like colonial aggression as a “coalition of the willing”.

Promising the get the U.N. involved, on reflection, is really just a promise to change the color of the hats the U.S. troops are wearing. It will still be U.S. troops dying, for an essentially stupid exercise. No other U.N. members in their right mind would send troops there, not with sufficient capability to truly provide the security needed for “whoever does reconstruction”.

I take your point on how CIA must view W at the moment. I honestly think they winked and nodded at his ascendancy initially, because of the prestige carried by his father, who was a former DCI. But it would appear the Iraq exercise did little other than sandbag the Agency, pushing them into a dire analysis of Saddam and then blaming them FOR that analysis when it all fell apart.

At the same time, a Kerry presidency might be problematic to Central Intelligence as well. Top intelligence chiefs tend to prefer stability and predictability in their politicians, as a “known quantity”, and a guy who “voted for it before he voted against it”, or who alternates between saying he was a war criminal and saying he was a war hero, has got to give them the willies. “He’s going to be carrying the FOOTBALL fer chrissake” and I don’t mean a padded knockoff of rugby either.

I’d hate to be a high muckety muck at CIA at the moment. In the ranks beneath, there are the creepy crawlies brought in by the Paperclip nonsense; and in the Oval Office, there’s a 100% guarantee of some unworthy nutjob calling the shots next year. I’d quit if I were George Tenet. Being able to see real-time satellite imagery of SEAL missions as they whack terrorists, not even that is worth all the other B.S. that goes with the job.

Haha! That’s a good point about Tenet, Ciggy. The same point could be made of anyone who decides to run for president. I’m just glad all the lifers in the government beaurocracies, the glue that keeps it all together, seem really dedicated.

I’m not sure NATO would be a problem with most Muslims. Turkey is a Muslim nation. It certainly wouldn’t be as bad as it is now. Perception is key, and I haven’t heard the Arabs screaming about the job NATO is currently doing in Afghanistan.

I think Kerry could get German, French, and possibly even Egyptian and Jordanian troops into Iraq. As I said, it’s all perception. Outside the US, this isn’t viewed as an American war, it’s seen as George W. Bush’s war. Get rid of Bush and the perception will become ‘rebuilding Iraq’, rather than ‘occupying Iraq’.

Lee,
“I’m just glad all the lifers in the government beaurocracies, the glue that keeps it all together, seem really dedicated.”

Some are dedicated. And some need to be forcibly disengaged from the work they’re doing. And some are just on an elaborately disguised welfare program. People are people. I left the Department of Defense in late 1997 fresh off a BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) project, and it was a big eye-opener to all that was good, bad, and ugly, in many of the Departments outside of DoD, and in the Congress. It really is a mixed bag though, and sweeping criticism is just as inaccurate as sweeping praise.

On NATO vis a vis Islam: Turkey (and possibly Kosovo) as token Muslims in a NATO force would probably not be enough of a counterbalance to the overall European non-Muslim “flavor” of the force engaged under that banner.

If I were whispering in Bush’s ear at the outset of the war, and unable to dissuade him from the disastrous idea to invade, I would at least lobby VERY vigorously to line up the Arab League as the interim, “occupying” force, while reconstruction is going on and elections are being prepared. U.S. spearheading and leadership of the conventional operation to destroy Saddam’s army was the right thing to do, but there is no amount of training that can fully prepare a U.S. force to be able to deal with the complexities involved in occupying a predominantly Muslim nation. The benefit of Arab League occupation is that the U.S. would be remembered as the main “liberating” force, and any unpleasantness of occupation (which you’re bound to have) would be considered the fault of some Saudi or Kuwaiti or Egyptian or Jordanian soldier who might have gotten a little rambunctious on a bad day. And an Arab pecadillo is far easier for an Arab to forgive than a non-Arab pecadillo.

The U.N. would really be the second-best option after the Arab League, and NATO third after the U.N. But if not even NATO can be geared into it, that should be a sign that the operation is a non-starter.

I am absolutely convinced, from what I’ve seen and researched in French politics (I lived four years in Tahiti and have French contacts there, and keep up with what they have to say), that there is zero chance of France sending troops to Iraq, even with Kerry in charge of the U.S. They may sweeten their rhetoric considerably regarding the U.S. and cheerlead us from the sidelines even, but troops? No way. I suspect Germany is similar, and what other U.N. nations are there that could send effective peacekeeping forces even if they wanted to?

Americans with blue hats to “legitimize” their presence has some valid argument to it, but at the end of the day it’s still Americans dying in an insurgency that still won’t let up. And the Al Sadr faction of Shiah (with Sunni allies) is going to fight the less radical Sistani faction of it, by hook or by crook, and no blueness of headgear is going to make that magically stop.

Turkey (and possibly Kosovo) as token Muslims in a NATO force would probably not be enough of a counterbalance to the overall European non-Muslim “flavor” of the force engaged under that banner.

Maybe, but like I said, I haven’t heard of any Arab problems with NATO’s peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan (which, like it would in Iraq, includes US troops).

You’re totally right about having Arab League members acting as the peacekeeping force. There are a lot of Muslims where I live, and I have to force myself to remember not to point my feet at them when I sit down. Grave insult. When you see those old clips of Iraqis hitting Saddam’s statue with their shoes, that’s what’s going on.

And you may be right about France, possibly even Germany (it will be interesting to see who the new president will be, the anti-US chick or the pro-US guy). But even though Schroeder got reelected on an anti-Bush platform, they were, about four years ago, one of our closest allies.

In any case, if they declined to send troops after a Kerry victory, you could be sure it wasn’t be personal. :)

but at the end of the day it’s still Americans dying in an insurgency that still won’t let up…

True, but if we just leave, it will mean a bloody civil war. I’m not quite cynical enough to believe we shouldn’t do what we can to clean up the mess. At least with the blue helmets on, we’d have the moral support of the rest of the world with us, and it might be enough to get us those Arab peacekeeping troops.

Lee, Afghanistan is not an ARAB country, and they don’t have the same intensity of xenophobia and Arabic chauvinism that you will see in Iraq. Pashtun and Persian and Uzbek and other ethnic groups in Afghanistan don’t exactly hold hands and sing kumbaya together, but it makes their ethnic chauvinism more dry and jaded and less hotly passionate. If a NATO or U.N. soldier in Afghanistan is from Poland, it’s not much different to a Pashtun clan than if the same soldier were Uzbek: not trusted, but not hotly hated in all cases.

The Arab mindset is analogous to Archie Bunker’s white chauvinism in the old TV series “All in the Family”: not always violent toward non-Arabs, but always critical and quick to find offense. An Arab force would find far fewer problems during occupation of Iraq, than any non-Arab force (even if that force comprises non-Arab Muslims!)

I wouldn’t get too excited about how closely France and Germany were “allies” of ours prior to the Iraq war. Obviously when we took away the money train they had going with the Saddam regime, that angered them to no end, and they’ve managed to parlay that anger on the part of their elite into street anger, by way of propaganda about colonial aggression and such.

I personally don’t think Iraq would have been worth it even as an oil-grabbing exercise, though, because Saddam was pumping enormous quantities of it out into the market. Granted, the oil-for-food scam was enriching Saddam and Europe and continuing to starve the Iraqi people, but the oil going into the market WAS keeping the prices lower and keeping up with global demand; and I’m not seeing anything near ‘gratitude’ from the Iraqi people who are now no longer starving.

The Iraqi people weren’t better off with Saddam in charge, but the rest of the world, including the U.S., WAS.

If we just leave, so WHAT if it’s a ‘bloody civil war’? The U.S. had a civil war after France left, but it was a U.S. problem, not a French one. The Iraqi people have scores to settle with one another—fine. Let them. But if we continue to lord it over them in an occupational force, they WILL unite, and that unity will be AGAINST US, blue helmets or brown, it really doesn’t matter.

Good point about Arab Muslims vs Afghan Muslims, Ciggy, but I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree about the effectiveness of UN involvement and whether we should even still be in Iraq.

Time will tell. From what Bush has been saying the last few days, it looks like we may end up just leaving anyhow.

Hey, I just saw where the Arab League is calling for UN intervention in Iraq. They’re passing a resolution that says, “…the occupation should end as soon as possible and the United Nations should have a role that is central and effective in rebuilding institutions.”

Lee,
“From what Bush has been saying the last few days, it looks like we may end up just leaving anyhow”

He must be trying to pry my vote out of the third party column. It’s tempting, but no—the energy policy of “jawbone OPEC” still sucks.

American Pundit,
“…the occupation should end as soon as possible and the United Nations should have a role that is central and effective in rebuilding institutions.”

Whatever the U.N. wants to do in Iraq, that’s fine with me. As long as it no longer includes U.S. troops, and I’m sure the Arab League could be persuaded to agree with me on that. Bush might be persuaded too, if a total pullout on 6/30 can give an excuse for a self-congratulatory “mission accomplished”. I’m for that. Puff up that ego all you want there, W, just stop making the soldiers die for nonsense.

Hey Ciggy. I’m Lee. I post articles here as American Pundit, and it was getting confusing so I consolidated. :)

I just saw where it’s “common knowledge” that of the OPEC countries, the only one that can increase production is Saudi Arabia. All the rest are pumping at capacity. Interesting. At what point does consumption exceed pumping capacity?

That explains why a large part of Cheney’s energy plan consists of US investment in drilling foreign oil fields, doesn’t it?