Blogger's post counter, which had seemingly been glued in place at "294" for a while, finally tore loose and updated itself. So now I know that this is my 301st post on the site. No more significant than 300 or 302, I suppose, but I wanted to note it.
Those of us up to it watched and/or listened to the first of the presidential debates Thursday night. I was stuck at work until approaching 9, so I caught the opening sections during the drive home and quickly picked it up on tv for the rest. If you were like me you watched it and then immediately either turned off the tv or switched to something else. (I jumped over to Ed Wood, btw., which I don't seem to be able to see to excess.) To stick around longer is to have partisans of one stripe or another pretend to be impartial while telling everyone why one or the other "clearly" won. I'm not going to make the slightest pretense of impartiality as the Bush regime cannot be shooed out of the White House quickly enough to suit me. What was a pleasant development was that the debate furthered a very recent trend for me, as John Kerry gave me more reasons to vote for him as opposed to being primarily motivated to vote against G.W. Bush.
My thumbnail take on this first event?
Kerry made the strong move of going on the offensive concerning the Bush administration's decisions, along with emphasizing what he would do differently. An advantage Kerry has over Al Gore in this is that in 2000 a Bush presidency was theoretical. In 2004 it's all too real. We could have done without one or two of the Viet Nam references, but aside from that I was generally fine with him.
Bush was Bush, or at least Bush after his handlers had crammed with him for several days straight. His solutions continue to strike me as misdirected and dangerous to all, and his hammering, hammering, hammering on the sham propaganda point of Kerry changing his core positions was tired by the second iteration. I was happy to see Kerry counter it a few times but otherwise let it roll off his back while giving a patient, knowing smile for the petulant child-king. I know Bush was simply doing what he was told - treating the public the way his administration has been all along by joining the chorus of agents who try to make something true by repeating it again and again until it seems to be part of the very air - and I would have simply laughed it off if I didn't know that I'd be hearing the same lines from people the next day, either because they heard it there and then or from Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh today. That Kerry didn't allow Bush to put him on the defensive and keep him there was a significant victory and the #1 aim for his campaign during the debates.
My favorite parts, I must admit, were where the camera also caught Dubya's face during Kerry's portions. (I was told today that CNN did a split screen and so kept both candidates on the screen at all times. Had I known that in advance I'd have watched it there rather than on our local PBS station, WHYY.) His fidgeting as he fought to contain his temper was entertaining, as was seeing how he began to wander at points during his sections near the middle to two thirds mark, complete with that smirk and a slight quaver as he seemed to be going through withdrawal from being deprived of the applause of yes men for so long.
After hearing Bush yet again try to get America to put its Winky Dink screens on the tube and draw a picture of a happy Iraq, it's time to help remind people how well things are going in Iraq. Here's a piece by a Wall Street Journal reporter who's been holed up there for a while. Mission accomplished, dudes!
Oh, as for Bush's assertions of the danger of a president sending "mixed signals", he should look at his own record on the matter. In September of 2001 Osama bin Laden was someone Bush swore he'd get dead or alive, but six months later he publicly said he wasn't that concerned about bin Laden's whereabouts. Then there's the larger, idiomatic "War on Terror" issue, which has seen him declaring in April that we could win, on August 30th that we couldn't, and the next day went not only back to it being winnable but that we were doing it. Does Bush have a smart twin somewhere out there who (rarely) puts in an appearance for his brother? Maybe this extends back over the entirety of his candidacy, including the 2000 election. After all, during the campaign he promised tax cuts skewed strongly towards the bottom of the economic ladder, that gay marriage was best left as a state issue, and promised to end a perceived abuse of our troops in the task of nation building. What happened under a Bush presidency? A series of tax cuts were phased in that will, by 2010 (if not derailed) provide over half the tax cuts to the top 5 percent, in 2004 he proposed a constitutional amendment against gay marriage, and, well, then there's Afghanistan and - far worse in that it was wholly unwarranted - Iraq.
Talk about flip-flopping and changing positions. It's like riffling through the pages of the Kama Sutra. It would be more amusing if it didn't seem as if we keep finding ourselves on the receiving end of all of the positions.
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