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<P>(I've been back 'n' forth on the VF scribe for years, but he's found his true
voice in blogland -- no rad he, but a mainstream lib who sees how corrupt
the mainstream is -- DP)</P>
<P>"For much of last night's debate George Bush looked like a blister about to
pop. Loud, mouthy, swaggering, interested only in hearing himself lay down the
law, he behaved like a verbally abusive husband. Not a wifebeater but a
browbeater with a bar-fighter's grin. It is astonishing and sobering that this
dull roar with a one-track mind that runs on tank treads is fighting for
reelection instead of facing impeachment; his lies and failures have fed
thousands of graves, and filled thousands more hospital beds with bodies and
psyches that will never be whole again. And still our mainstream pundits can
not, will not see him for what he is. He cracks a corny joke, and they marvel at
his Reaganesque humor. He hollers at Charlie Gibson, and he's hailed as a
take-charge guy.</P>
<P>"Bush reminded me most of Pat Buchanan last night, not perhaps the best model
to imitate if you're courting independents and women. The same judo chop to
emphasize a point, the same hot-temperature demeanor and rhetoric, the same
empty machismo masquerading as decisiveness. Here we have multimillionaire
pundits who pride themselves on being knowledgable, articulate, capable of
taking issues and personalities apart and examining them from different angles
and reassembling them--and they swoon over someone who is none of these things,
like intellectual jocksniffers in a locker room listening to some athlete grunt
platitudes. They use words for a living, but distrust any politician who treats
words with care, or even acts as if words might have meanings. Bush throws words
as if they were rocks picked up in a playground, and they treat him like Roger
Clemens. </P>
<P>"But just as the MSNBC panel, which ought to be shipped to Guantanamo for the
duration of the election season, blundered so badly after the Cheney-Edwards
debate, the pundits didn't seem to recognize what was happening in front of
their eyes last night. As Pauline Kael used to say after reading the reviews of
certain movie critics, 'It's hard to believe they were actually looking at the
screen.' Fortunately, the cable-news spinmeisters seem to matter less and less
in the framing of the debate reaction--they've insulted the viewers' sense of
reality too many times. </P>
<P>"The sanest debate analysis I heard last night came from Fox News' Chris
Wallace, who was a guest on Charlie Rose after Charlie had subjected us to some
deadbeats. Wallace came across as someone thinking for himself rather than
inhaling fumes, and he saw that it was Kerry who was persuasively presidential
last night, a perception that may widen over the coming days as the footage of
Bush hollering like a hogcaller are replayed to a cringing nation."</P>
<P><<A
href="http://www.jameswolcott.com/">http://www.jameswolcott.com/</A> ></P></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>