Regards from Australia, Mike B) *******************************************************
10/13/04: So, presidential debate no. 2 last week, a "town-hall" format at Washington University in St. Louis with 150 "uncommitted" voters submitting questions before hand, from which moderator Charles Gibson picked some for "the show." Dubya did well, holding his own with an animated defense of his policies in Iraq, challenging Kerry to do better, Kerry's promises sounding like a heady mix of wool-gathered optimism. "I will do this, I will do that, I will solve the Iraqi problem by proposing a true international effort to do it. I will create jobs and bring health care to the masses. I will raise taxes on only the top 2% to pay for my programs and cut taxes for the middle class. I will lower the deficit." And etc. And this pie-in-the-sky drone is accompanied by Kerry’s refusal (for whatever reason) to defend himself against Dubya’s charges that he (Kerry), for example, voted against the $87 billion bill to fund troops in Iraq. Instead of meeting the charge head-on and refuting it by putting it in its correct context, Kerry just ignores it and moves on to his next promise. Why doesn’t he just tell the truth? Why doesn’t he point out that there were two funding bills and he voted for the good one and against the bad one? Why? Is this another instance where he, at the behest of his handlers, believes it’s better to dumb-down the rhetoric than to explain something that might be too complicated for voters to understand? If so, I think he’s hurting more than helping himself by just letting the potentially damaging charge hang there between him and Dubya in the poisoned air. Dubya defended his economic record rather astutely, blaming the record deficits, the job losses on a combination of terrorism and the Dot.Com stock market bubble burst. Not being an economist (e.g. not knowing the mechanics involved) I'd say it was a good answer, one that scored some points with all those voters looking for simple answers. Dubya also pounded away at Kerry with his ideological faith in the power of democracy to transform the terrorist landscape in the Middle East. Sounds good too, but is it feasible? I'd say not, but Dubya says he believes it is. He pointedly does not define the character of this democracy, whose imperfect parameters seem to be coming clear in the day to day chaos in Iraq. Just yesterday (10/12), for example, the NYT carried a front page story in which several American and Iraqi pundits stated their fear that most of the Sunni population will boycott the election in January because they hate America for its military’s destruction of their towns, and they don’t trust the Shiites. Although the Sunnis are only about 20% of the population, they are the most educated of all Iraqis, the professionals whose skills are needed to run the country, and they have controlled Iraq since its “independence” in 1920. Their participation is crucial to the success of any fledgling government. The results of an election in which they don’t participate will hardly be seen as legitimate. Dubya also says he believes (because he must, his ass is on the line) that the military venture in Iraq must be pressed to a conclusion, and that Kerry, because of his "wrong war at the wrong time" remark, hasn't a chance in hell of doing it. The generals and the troops won't trust him to do it. And he may be right about that too, although, certainly, Kerry’s remark does not preclude more leverage than Dubya with other countries in trying to form a real coalition. Kerry did make one very strong emotionally rational point when he accused Bush of following only the advice of his generals whose job, he said was "to win the war," while the president's job was "to win the peace." How that's to be done, I don't know. But it too sounds good. Kerry also jumped down Dubya's throat following the latter's assertion that the pre-war sanctions on Iraq were not working at the time because they were meant to "get rid of Saddam Hussein," whose power remained more or less intact until the U.S., er ah, excuse me, coalition military forces did the job. Poor Dubya, again blinded and confused by the dogmatic power of his own rhetoric. Kerry had to remind him that the U.N. sanctions were meant not to get rid of Saddam Hussein but to get rid of WMDs, and they had, in fact, so very obviously succeeded. For his part, Dubya scowled less than in the first debate, but his cocky banty rooster demeanor betrayed the presence of, I think, a small minded man so full of himself that he’s really not got much room upstairs for real ideas, as James Wolcott so nicely put it, a smug smirking strutting “hogcaller” emitting “a dull roar with a one-track mind that runs on tanktreads.”
10/14/04: Bush's performance in last night’s debate (the last of three, this one at Arizona State University in Tempe, with Bob Schieffer moderating and asking some pointed questions) was mindnumbing in its stupidity. He was rendered apoplectic by Kerry's sledgehammer facts, to the point where his answers were nearly incoherent. The man is incapable of marshalling facts, processing information, and formulating original topical answers. Logical thought escapes him. And yet, alarmingly, the CNBC and FOX talking heads seem to have not seen this because they neglected to remark on it in any of the post-debate punditry I saw. Some said they thought Dubya had finally gotten his debate performance right. Post-debate viewer polls show that if Kerry didn’t gain any ground, he at least didn’t lose any either. "If you thought this race was drifting toward Kerry, this did nothing to stop that," said veteran GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio. "Certainly Bush was far more restrained than I thought he was going to be. ... I expected to see the president take the wood to Kerry, and he only took a couple of swipes." Well, Tony, I’m afraid you’ll have to face the fact that your boy is too dumb to take the wood to Kerry, whose performances in the three debates served him well, closing the 8 to 10 percentage point gap Dubya enjoyed over him a few weeks ago. "We're in a virtual tie now," said Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego. "If either had made a major blunder, it would have made a difference. But at this point, we're down to 2000 all over again: equally balanced, highly polarized. We just don't know the outcome; it's too close to call." But, “Just as important, writes the L.A. Times’ Ronald Brownstein, “almost all surveys show Bush attracting less than 50 percent of the vote, a troubling sign for an incumbent this close to an election. ‘That's the most telling fact right now,’ said independent pollster John Zogby.” Let’s hope so. But it all comes down to the same battle over and over in this backwater country between liberal erudition and conservative myopia. Kerry champions the middle class while accusing Dubya of favoring the affluent. While the evidence supports this contention, Dubya rather disingenuously denies it. Kerry wants to protect legal abortion and defends affirmative action; Dubya, who wants to shove his Evangelical Christian beliefs down unbelieving throats, doesn’t. And there are oh so many fundamentalist believers out there who would probably agree that Bush’s strongest answer last night came in response to Schieffer’s question about the role of religion in his decisions. Brownstein writes, “Bush balanced powerful promises of tolerance with heartfelt expressions of his own religious faith that recalled his famous remark during the 2000 GOP primaries when he identified Jesus Christ as his favorite philosopher.” Bush admitted, “You're equally an American if you chose to worship an Almighty and if you chose not to,” (big of him to do so), but added, "Prayer and religion sustain me. I receive calmness in the storms of the presidency. I love the fact that people pray for me and my family all around the country. Someone asked me one time, 'Well how do you know?' I said, 'I just feel it.' " Kerry’s answer to the same question was much less dogmatic, you could say mature, a balanced assessment of the role Catholicism plays in his life, one of acting with tolerance and compassion, of being non-judgmental and able to put yourself in the shoes of another. But it’s the Bush crap that sells, the testifying true-believer tripe that resonates with the simpletons who talk to and hear from Gawd-in-Heben Hisself while resolutely searching for pie-in-the-sky. "You talk about a sweet spot: that was a sweet spot," Fabrizio said. "If the Bush campaign strategy is to energize the fundamentalist conservatives, that's the answer." And liberal is, of course, still a dirty word (but for all the wrong reasons). This campaign resembles nothing so much as a rehash of the Scopes Monkey Trial after nearly a century, with Kerry as Clarence Darrow fighting prejudice and ignorance, but to no avail. It's astounding. And there's empty-headed Dubya, the modern William Jennings Bryan, but not nearly so articulate, incapable of speaking to the point, repeating the same tired slogans over and over, revealing his lack of compassion for gays or poor people, his ignorance of anything that might remotely resemble cosmopolitanism, while Kerry, looking and sounding very JFKish, is sophisticated, engaging and thoughtful. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the differing responses to Bob Schieffer’s question about whether the candidates thought homosexuality is a learned behavior. Kerry said in effect, no, it’s not learned behavior by reckoning that if you asked Dick Cheney’s daughter about her lesbianism, she’d say, “That’s just who I am.” Dubya responded with a curt “I don’t know,” but followed with a plea for “tolerance, respect, and dignity” for all people. That’s like saying, “Gays are misguided but we have to be nice to them anyway.” Am I making this up? Am I losing my mind to see that Dubya really is as vacant as I thought he was? Do I see his stupidity only because I want to see it? Really. He never disappoints, and it can be entertaining. He is so dumb he’s dangerous, even to himself. How do people find this endearing? Why would they want a twit like that leading their country? Yet, apparently they do ….all those live warm bodies out there watching this blockhead, this simpleton, this dimwit, clown, dunce, fool, imbecile, lamebrain, idiot, moron, jerk, nitwit, numskull, and digging him and his empty answers! We can only hope there aren’t enough of them to get him elected.
===== "In the shadow of its own incomplete emancipation the bourgeois consciousness must fear to be annulled by a more advanced consciousness; not being the whole freedom, it senses that it can produce only a caricature of freedom-- hence its theoretical expansion of its autonomy into a system similar to its own coercive mechanisms."
Adorno, NEGATIVE DIALECTICS
http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal
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