August 2004

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Urban Legends Come to Life, Stalk Republicans Through Manhattan

Bernadette Malone, a columnist for New Hampshire's notoriously Republican--and daft--Manchester Union-Leader, has made a series of shocking discoveries about protesters' plans for Republican convention visitors:

Next week, people who hate Republicans plan to release swarms of mice in New York City to terrorize delegates to the National Republican Convention.

Republican-haters plan on dressing up as RNC volunteers, and giving false directions to little blue hair ladies from Kansas, sending them into the sectors of New York City that are unfit for human habitation.

They plan on throwing pies and Lord knows what else at Republican visitors to the city. Prostitutes with AIDS plan to seduce Republican visitors, and discourage the use of condoms, according to liberal journalist Ted Rall.

[Read Malone's column.] 

So Rall's been talking? Damn him! I suppose now there's no harm in passing along what I've already heard about the fate of several Republicans who traveled to New York City early for a little vacation:

• One couple, while parked and making out on a remote stretch of the FDR Highway, heard an odd noise outside their car. The man left to investigate and never returned. During the long, terrifying night that ensued, the woman began to hear a scraping sound on the roof of the car. When police arrived the next morning, they found the man's mangled body hanging upside down from the tree above the car--that tinny scraping sound had been his fingernails brushing across its roof!
• Another couple, parked and making out on a remote stretch of Broadway in the theater district, heard a report on the car radio about a mad killer with a hook for a hand who had escaped from a mental institution. The man began teasing the woman about it. "What was that sound?" he would ask. "Did you hear that?" Finally the woman became so frightened that she demanded they drive back to their hotel immediately. When the woman got out of the car, the hook from the madman's hand was hanging from the outside car door handle. If they hadn't left exactly when they did, both would have been killed!
• One delegate brought his Doberman Pinscher to New York with him. It escaped one day while on a walk. When the man found the dog about an hour later, it seemed ill. After a while it vomited. In the pile of vomit, the dog's owner found a convention protester's hand! 
• Another delegate, an elegantly dressed woman with a piled-high, beehive hairdo carefully shellacked in place with hairspray, encountered a protester outside a restaurant. They began yelling at each other and then got in a shoving match. When the protester grabbed the delegate by her hair, the elaborate 'do cracked open and released a swarm of killer wasps that had been nesting inside. The wasps stung both the delegate and the protester to death! 

Also, this friendly warning to convention-goers: Forget the hookers--it's the rats injected with the AIDS virus you've got to worry about. They will be released in each hotel where delegates and party officials are staying. Their front teeth have been sharpened to fine points and they were raised on a diet of fetuses torn from Republican wombs to give them the scent and taste of their prey.

A friend of mine has a buddy who heard it from someone in a position to know.

Posted by Steve Perry at August 26, 2004 10:23 AM

 

Swift Boat to Nowhere

Plus the 527 ad you will probably never see

In the past couple of days I've been working on a column about October Surprise scenarios for next week's City Pages. In the first draft I started by alluding to the swift boat dustup, and remarked that, unfortunately for the president, no one cared.

Did I say no one cared? I meant that lots of people cared. This morning's LA Times brings news of a poll showing Bush in the lead 49-46 thanks partly to the Vietnam ads. That is a 5-point turnaround from the Times's July poll. Ron Brownstein writes that the data shows " the electorate edging toward Bush over the past month on a broad range of measures, from support for his handling of Iraq to confidence in his leadership and honesty."

His honesty! Never mind the obvious and unexploited retort about Bush's own military service. Bush's scoring points for honesty is the ultimate tribute to Kerry's--oh, discreet--style of campaigning.

I hereby volunteer my services for the following testimonial Kerry ad:

[Opening shot: Kerry at the podium, waving and smiling in slow motion]

VOICEOVER: "I've been watching John Kerry on the campaign trail. Trying to, anyway. He's hard to see sometimes."

[Cut to shot of Kerry eating corn at a state fair]

VOICEOVER: "I would say John Kerry is a... careful man. And polite. He looks good in public."

[Cut to shot of Kerry and Edwards on stage at the convention finale]

VOICEOVER: "I know he's a lot like Bush. But you know, I think he's actually a lot lazier than Bush."

[Cut to shot of the speaker, sitting in a rocking chair]

"If John Kerry runs the country like he's run his campaign, he won't do anything at all in the White House.

"And that's why I'm voting for John Kerry." 

My colleague Dr. Corey Anderson, by the way, has posted a series of ads from the Bush Swift Yacht Veterans at American Idle.  

Posted by Steve Perry at August 26, 2004 08:37 AM

 

The Great American Lockdown

The Bush brigade prepares to take New York

 

 

Next week the Republicans will occupy lower midtown Manhattan with a security force--they used to be called armies--around 20,000 strong that includes 10,000 New York City police and a host of federal agents and tactical units under the supervision of the Secret Service. National Guard units will be placed on alert for call-up. Advisers from the Pentagon will doubtless be on hand as well, though in a more sub rosa capacity since the Rumsfeld DoD’s wish to participate in domestic police actions has not yet received official blessing. Malice and plausible deniability are in the air: The NYPD’s 35-page manual “Legal Guidelines for the Republican National Convention” takes ominous care to warn that protesters may impersonate officers and beat down their comrades to create the false impression of police brutality. 

  

A 13-block cordon will be set around Madison Square Garden for the duration of the pageant. Outside that perimeter, police will be free to do as they see fit with protesters lacking permits, which is to say nearly all of them. Inside, convention-goers have been presented with an exhaustive list of items they may not bring with them to the convention floor, which includes computers, video cameras, walking sticks, and spray bottles or cans. Jesus himself could not gain entry without first surrendering his crown of thorns, which, for all the screeners could ascertain, might have been dipped in deadly ricin for use in a terrorist attack. Congress made a special $50 million appropriation for Bush’s Manhattan brigade, but the real cost will likely be in the range of $75-$125 million. No traveling delegation of the American imperium has found itself in such foreign, hostile--and heavily fortified--environs since the evacuation of Saigon in 1975.

 

It’s the terrorists they fear, of course. And, more pressingly, the people. The New York Times reported almost two weeks ago that agents of the FBI have been knocking on the doors of likely convention demonstrators to let them know the godly eye of Ashcroft is upon them. The president has seen the whole premise of holding the convention in New York City slip away from him: The teary and triumphal appearance at Ground Zero that Karl Rove envisioned from the start was quietly ruled out in late June for the simple reason that this president can go nowhere in public without having his photo ops ruined by those who loathe him. He is reduced to doing everything in controlled settings. This is no simple matter in a campaign season. It requires, for one thing, a costly and time-consuming process of vetting ticket requests for Bush appearances to ensure that few if any who are not supporters get in. 

 

As all this was happening, John Kerry and a team of the Democrats’ best minds were staying up late confabulating new ways to make The Candidate ever more indistinguishable from the widely hated president. Their latest coup: Kerry would still have authorized Bush to invade Iraq even in the known absence of any weapons of mass destruction.

 

Troops, forward!

 

 

The Silence of the Lambs

 

Here is Paul Waldman, the author of a book called Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies, on the inner life of the modern working journalist:

“Many years ago, I had a conversation with a White House correspondent for a major newspaper, and I asked her about this question of covering the [political] strategy and not covering the policy details. And she said, ‘Look, I’m not an expert on welfare policy. I’m not an expert on foreign policy. What I’m an expert on is politics, and that’s what I’m going to write about.’

“The way that ends up manifesting itself is in theater criticism, and the irony is that reporters tend to be very, very cynical. They assume that the motives that candidates and politicians offer are always false, and they always are concealing some sort of vaguely sinister strategic motive. But the irony is that they reward good image-making and they punish bad image-making. So even though they’re cynical, they’re also playing right into the hands of somebody like Karl Rove, because he knows all too well that it’s not a question of whether you are going to try to construct some kind of theater. You’re going to be evaluated based on whether it came off well or not.

“If you have a good photo op, you’re going to get praised. If you fall off the stage like Bob Dole did, then you’re going to get criticized. Reporters believe when they’re doing this stuff that they’re kind of in the know, and their cynicism is holding politicians to account. But it really isn’t. All it’s doing is insisting that they put on good theater as opposed to bad theater."

The president poses a special challenge to the drama critics: what to do when the hero appears less than heroic, or even less than present. Bush’s penchant for parting his lips and serving up word salad is legend among his detractors, but few actually realize how commonplace the gaffes are outside the confines of his major television appearances. Beyond garden-variety dyslexia, which by itself would not be particularly striking or memorable--witness his father--Bush’s speaking troubles reflect a huge propensity to lose interest in the words coming out of his mouth, often in the middle of sentences. At such times he will utter a word that sounds vaguely like the one memorized for the occasion, or he’ll elide a couple of different talking-point phrases so as to turn them inside out. "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we,” he recently told a Washington audience. “They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

And there are the abundant examples of anecdotes that end at blank walls, parables without point, long and rambling tautologies: in short, times when the president of the United States seems to go to his special place and leave his mouth to fend for itself. Reporters cannot say as much, since presidents do not act this way: They don’t talk without thinking. They do not have to feign interest in their own words. Some presidents are found to be miscreants--it proves the system works!--but none is ever a fool. Members of the media keep to this script, except when they are laughing together over drinks. 

Nor will the fourth estate brook any suggestion that the campaign game is fixed. On the day last week when he visited St. Paul, I listened to the MPR broadcast of Bush’s talk that afternoon in Hudson, Wisconsin. Afterward, the handpicked Republican crowd was solicited for questions, lobbing softball after softball in W’s direction.

The first: We’re praying for you, Mr. President. Nothing more, really.

Bush fumbled it. Specifically, he could not stay engaged long enough to finish an earnest-seeming thanks. “This is an amazing country…”, he intoned in conclusion, then faltered--“which…”--aw, fuck!, he’s thinking--“prays for…”--sounding more mystified now, but nearly home--“me.”  

The tent-revival aspect of the gathering kept floating to the surface. Another concerned citizen for Bush, who identified himself as a “youth minister,” asked after faith-based initiatives. But it was only an entrée to his real question, which concerned any plans the president might have for publicly exposing Satan and his works. Bush thanked the young man for his own works but let the devil off the hook entirely in his reply. Soon, mercifully, it was back on the bus and off to the city.

 

Every day now, this sort of painfully contrived sideshow is passed off as the president meeting the people on the grand road of democracy. The next morning the Star Tribune summarized his trip thus: “A wide embrace for Bush in St. Paul.” It would have been nearly as accurate, and more apt, to make that “Bush in Wisconsin: Soft on Satan?” But the script forbids making fun of the president, even when he’s making fun of the script.

Posted by Steve Perry at August 23, 2004 08:18 PM

 

The Polls, They Aren't A-Changin'

Is everything the survey-takers know wrong this time?

It did not seem unusual when the post-convention polls yielded only a tiny bounce for Kerry--if you watched the Democrats in Boston, you knew why. But there are other clues that the art of the opinion survey may have fallen on hard times this year in view of the furious and contradictory public energies conjured by the Bush White House.

Zogby, the outfit that has performed best in the past few election cycles, had Kerry up on Bush 50-43 last week. The old lion Gallup, contrarily, gave W a 50-47 lead. A 10-point difference between major polling houses at this point is remarkable in itself. That’s not the only thing. Even in disagreeing so widely from one to the other, few polls have budged much since the early gains of Kerry’s post-Iowa surge were lost in the spring.

The media playbook answer is that voters are exceptionally polarized this time, and their minds have been made up from the start. No doubt this is true to a greater extent than usual, but the pollsters themselves are on more uncertain ground as well. Election surveys are based on statistical composites of the likely voter, and I don’t think anyone has a clue what “the likely voter” looks like this time. Everyone who pays any attention at all to electoral politics is inflamed, or claims to be--perhaps most consequentially the young, who do not usually vote in great numbers but may this time.

I can only attest to what’s going on in my circle of acquaintances. None of the Democrats I know plan to vote for Bush. A number of the Republicans I know plan to vote for Kerry. The polls say both parties have a defection rate around 5 percent. I think they’re wrong. There will be more Republican turncoats and no-shows than the opinion-gatherers are catching. I suspect they are also missing a lot of traditional nonvoters who will show up on November 2 to register their distaste for Bush. How great is the margin of error involved? My hunch is that they’re underestimating the Anybody-But-Bush groundswell by 5 points or more.

 

On the other hand, Kerry is such a poor vessel--for anti-Bush sentiment, or anything else--that there always remains a chance he will actually drive large numbers of those ABB voters back into despair and abstention by November.  

Posted by Steve Perry at August 19, 2004 10:07 AM

 

10 Out of 10 Terrorists Want--Bush

Shame is for pussies: Republican pranks, continued

Maybe you've seen the GOP t-shirt ad featured lately at Drudge and elsewhere--this one:

[See the AuthenticGOP couture page!]

Give Rove et al. credit for understanding you can't dance around the truth--you've got to sever its spine. Of course bin Laden and al Qaeda want Bush, for the obvious reasons: He, like they, wants a global holy war. He serves very well as a poster child for the sort of global anti-Americanism bin Laden's movement wishes to foment, for practical as well as religious reasons. W is the greatest recruitment tool Osama's got.

A few weeks ago, Lawrence Wright's New Yorker piece on the Spain al Qaeda bombing included this paragraph:

Four days [after the Spanish election], the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, a group claiming affiliation with Al Qaeda, sent a bombastic message to the London newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi, avowing responsibility for the train bombings. “Whose turn will it be next?” the authors taunt. “Is it Japan, America, Italy, Britain, Saudi Arabia, or Australia?” The message also addressed the speculation that the terrorists would try to replicate their political success in Spain by disrupting the November U.S. elections. “We are very keen that Bush does not lose the upcoming elections,” the authors write. Bush’s “idiocy and religious fanaticism” are useful, the authors contend, for they stir the Islamic world to action.

If Kerry had any pulse at all, his people would have been flogging this line to journalists privately for the past several months--pointing out the degree to which Bush singlehandedly has driven down the country's popularity and trust around the world.

But no. Consequently the Republicans are able to pull shenanigans like this one with the assurance that better than half the people who see it will believe it. "Handling of terrorism" is still Bush's long suit, however else the people may desert him, and for that the president owes John Kerry and the Democrats a debt of gratitude.

Posted by Steve Perry at August 11, 2004 03:12 PM

 

Queue Up the Bogeymen, Boys

Contingency plans: The White House spins a backstory for claiming it "stopped" a terror attack

An interesting little contretemps played itself out on Drudge this morning. In one corner, the New York Times and Washington Post reported that Sunday's ballyhooed terror-plot warning was in fact based on seized documents written three or four years ago. Opposite them, Newsday and the LA Times touted claims that "U.S. authorities" insist the plot remains a going concern.

The dust-up gives every sign of being Bush administration stagecraft in the same spirit as their tales of Saddam's WMD. Even before the disclosure that the evidence in question was old, New York's financial district seemed an odd choice of targets: too much like the first attack, and largely superfluous in the sense that any major attack in the U.S. would play hell with the financial markets. It sounded like more desperate hype from the White House--doubly so when it was announced that the documents seized were several years old, and doubly so again when the administration began insisting it only looked like old news.

What's at stake here is not just another campaign-season elevation of the terror alert level. If the president's men succeed in convincing the public that the alleged plot was still in the works, and no such attack occurs before the election, they will be in a position to proclaim in the waning days of the campaign that W et al.--yes!--foiled a terrorist attack in the United States. 

Naturally this will only matter in the event that there is not a real attack before November 2. Think of it as the unloaded gun mounted over the fireplace in the first act--in case no one shows up with a real one by play's end.

Posted by Steve Perry at August 03, 2004 05:27 PM

 

Kerry's Gambit

Night of the Living Dems

 

John Kerry had a lot to prove when he spoke to the Democratic convention last Thursday night, not least that he was still alive and still wanted to be president. Since turning the primaries on their head in Iowa and locking up his improbable victory only a couple of weeks later, he had transformed himself into something less like a candidate than a wraith that materialized occasionally to haunt the campaign. He was never again as strong as he had been in the days when he was chasing Howard Dean and matching him blow for rhetorical blow against the Bush gang. Part of the reason was emotional stamina: Kerry was visibly worn out, had literally lost his voice, after Iowa. Two things became evident. Kerry, astoundingly, could summon real fire when he needed it. And he couldn’t keep it up for long.

 

But last Thursday night he did manage to conjure an hour’s worth of something close. If the cadences and the content were not exactly timeless, they were good enough. More important, Kerry looked and sounded right in the news clips which constituted all that most Americans would ever hear of the speech. The more vital question revolves around what he does now. Is it back into hibernation until October, or will Kerry start working to wrest the occasional news cycle away from Bush?

 

I’m betting the former is closer to the mark. But the call depends on how one reads Kerry’s invisible-man act to date. Admittedly, this is not entirely Kerry’s doing. The main subject on everybody’s mind is the, well, undeniably historic performance of George W. Bush, and rightly so. When someone seems, by any reasonable standard, so intent on braiding the rope, tying the knot, and hanging himself with it, it’s easy to suppose that the best thing is to stand back so everyone can have an unimpaired view.

 

This has been the main stratagem of the Kerry campaign so far, and it’s a dangerous one. The poison pill in the formulation is that phrase “by any reasonable standard.” Americans now are more nervous, confused, and angry than at any time since the Great Depression, and considerably more ignorant now than then, thanks largely to the undoing of public education over the course of 24 years’ unremitting conservative and neo-liberal rule. (The media deserve their credit, too.) We possess no sense at all of history. We know that references to democratic institutions and values are cues to nod vigorously, but most of us have no working notion of what they mean, or therefore of when they are being honored or violated. John Kerry needs to spell it out more frequently and more fervently. He needs to shape and amplify the meaning of Bush’s actions and sketch the countless scandals unfolding in erratic public view. He isn’t doing it and he probably won’t. He is, after all, the standard-bearer of the party too genteel ever to have explained to the country what really happened in Florida in 2000.

 

In going after Bush, Kerry’s choices are circumscribed not just by his tactical judgments but likewise by his character, sensibility, and record. This is not an election about ideology, as our political mythmakers would have it--as it should be. There may be large practical differences between Kerry and Bush (true or false, we’re betting the farm on it), but they disagree little on first principles. What is Kerry’s line about the outrageous and needless invasion of Iraq? It wasn’t wrong; he voted for it. It was just foolhardy to leap in so precipitously and so nearly alone. The domestic economy? Of course he’ll do splendid things for economic fairness at home. Or as splendid as former Clinton treasury secretary and Wall Street love slave Robert Rubin will permit. It was Rubin who got seated beside Teresa Kerry during John’s acceptance speech; if you wink any harder than that, you’ll put your eye out.

 

Kerry’s case against Bush comes down to the matters of recklessness and managerial competence. Bush is impetuous, facile in his thinking, and mean. He never does his homework or checks his expense account. He makes us look bad and alienates allies for no particularly good reason. His advisers and cabinet members are too rigid and too ideological, which is a rather more stately way of saying too impatient.  But these are, from Kerry and the Democrats’ point of view, errors of judgment rather than direction. They thereby cede a lot of ground that ought to be getting scooped up and flung at Bush.

  

Here’s another sensible reason to doubt that Kerry will go for the president’s jugular anytime soon: the convention itself, an orgy of darned-glad-to-meet-you, wouldn’t-say-shit-if-we-had-a-mouthful bonhomie stitched together by sunny, desiccated music that only a radio station programmer would dare call “classic rock.” (Where was Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me”? Too contemporary? Too good?) The orations were mostly dreadful. On the night when Howard Dean and Teresa Kerry spoke, it sounded like someone backstage had filled a candy dish with Xanax. Only a few rose above the nice-folks torpor, or flouted it. Bill Clinton was more loose and more likeable than he’s ever been on a spotlight occasion. Ron Reagan disclaimed partisanship and then blasted Bush harder than any of the “legitimate” Democrats deigned to do. Al Sharpton was electrifying as he read aloud from the blueprint for the convention that should have been. Each spoke with a moral authority that derived largely from calling George W. Bush by his true names: tyrant, punk, fool. (And no, none used those exact words. Wasn’t necessary.)

 

For months now--since the Bush-bashing extravaganza in Iowa revealed the depth of popular animus toward the president, to be precise--the cable news savants have tended to fill the dead spots in their broadcasts with dutifully grave references to “this deeply divided country.” For once they’re right, even if they are no more illuminating on this subject than any other. So it did not seem inappropriate (unearned, yes; inapplicable, no) when Kerry and Bob Shrum dragooned Lincoln into the convention. He was there in Kerry’s acceptance speech, and more eloquently in Teresa Kerry’s address two nights earlier. It was a calculated effort to bestow upon Kerry the virtues of the picture-book Lincoln, a figure of enormous gravitas and responsibility who arose at a critical hour. The irony is that these times more closely resemble Lincoln’s than anyone dares to say, except that the fissures this time have less to do with race and region than with class and the naked exercise of autocratic power. It goes without saying that Kerry is no Lincoln. He is in fact a lot less than any nation with pretenses to democracy deserves at a time like this. But the more salient fact is that he’s not George Bush. So let him trade on Lincoln if he can pull it off. He’s got the stovepipe head for it. And if focus-group testing says that he’d benefit from growing chin whiskers for the duration of the campaign, he should do that too.    

Posted by Steve Perry at August 02, 2004 01:59 PM

 

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