The Futility Hotline
Sunday, October 10, 2004
 
Things Heating Up...Where The Hell Are We?
Yeah, I know...we're smack in the middle of debate season. There's a little over 3 weeks until the presidential electon. The "October Surprise" may have occurred with the latest report on Saddam's WMDs (or lack thereof). Bush says this. Kerry says that. FactCheck.ORG (not com, Mr. Vice President) keeps them in line. So where's all the new entries from us?

Gimme a break, eh? It's a lot to go over!

Or is it really? Although the two presidential debates have been different formats, Bush and Kerry, but mainly Bush, have repeated the same lines ad hoc. But while Kerry's repeated lines are done to deflect Bush's inaccurate attacks, Bush's repeats the same lines and attacks contained in his truth bending political commercials. If I hear him go off about "Wrong war, wrong place, wrong time" anymore, I'm going to have to pull an Elvis and blow up my TV screen.

Still, I do find the charges that Bush and company spin against Kerry to be disturbing. His campaign seems to think they've hit on a foolproof tactic: to use actual Kerry quotations against him. And it would be a great tactic too, if only they weren't taken so far out of context.

The Bush campaigners, and of course Bush himself seeing as he's George W. Bush and he approves these messages, seem to think that Americans will gladly take these things at face value. That when they see John Kerry say, "The winning of the war was brilliant," they won't know or bother to check that the whole quote was "I think they clearly have dropped the ball with respect to the first month in the after -- winning the war. That winning of the war was brilliant and superb, and we all applaud our troops for doing what they did, but you've got to have the capacity to provide law and order on the streets and to provide the fundamentally services, and I believe American troops will be safer and America will pay less money if we have a broader coalition involved in that, including the United Nations." That's a statement well within the boundaries of what Kerry claims his position has been all along.

Oddly and ironically enough, Dick Cheney gave Americans the key to seeing all these distortions by saying that going to factcheck.org will show how his relationship with Halliburton was misrepresented. But the funny thing is, the site will also reveal just how badly they also distorted John Kerry's statements.

Ultimately, there is one thing to consider. If these tactics of misrepresentation and exaggeration are the lengths George W. Bush will go to to achieve re-election, what do you think he might do, or might have done, to testimonies, reports and other documents to push forth an item on his presidential agenda?


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