Let's Play Hide the Candidates

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CCCXXXII

What's a member in good standing of the Mainstream Media branch of the Democratic Establishment supposed to do?

• Bush takes beatings in the polls, but Kerry doesn't get any benefit. That's because lots of folks unhappy with Bush's handling of certain situations think Kerry would do worse, not better.
• Getting out of sight for a while is what actually makes Kerry look better.
• The vaunted announcement of the vaunted selection of the vaunted Other John as Kerry's running mate produced, at best, a fleeting and minuscule bump in the polls.
• Al Gore, their last previous nominee, is losing his mind more publicly than anybody since Caligula, and he still has his supporters whom they can't afford to antagonize.
• Hollywood's Vacuumheads — while they surely do echo the thoughts and feelings of their comrades in mainstream media — just won't shut up and sing, further alienating folks all over flyover country.
• And that's where George W. Bush & Co. remain far more popular than they ever were and/or are and/or could hope to be in newsrooms and editorial boardrooms.

Ack.

What to do?... what to do?

Well, one thing to do would be to ignore the national political conventions. Kill two birds with one stone that way: keep Kedwards from boring the country to tears, and keep the Bushies from getting their message out without having to pay for it. Next best thing would be to cover the conventions as little as possible:

Jim Lehrer, anchor of PBS's acclaimed News Hour is blasting his commercial broadcast rivals for dialing back their coverage of the political conventions.

"The huge audiences for television are still at the three commercial networks and when they say to the American people that these conventions are not important enough to cover, they become, in my opinion, part of the message of the conventions themselves," Lehrer told the AP's David Bauder.

While PBS will air three hours a night of live coverage during each party's four-day convention, ABC, CBS, and NBC are scheduling just three hours per convention, mostly for commercial reasons as the party confabs are generally not ratings winners.

Despite the fact that they're scaling back out of financial considerations, all of the three networks' news divisions try to justify their decision journalistically. Dan Rather, for instance has long complained that the conventions lack news value and are mostly "bullshine." ....

Surely, I must have this wrong, no? There couldn't be such resignation amongst the Democratic Establishment, could there be? Well, lookee here.

Unless the upcoming national political conventions create some kind of climate I totally don't anticipate at the moment, I'm thinking this year's presidential campaigns are virtually going to be matters of glittering busywork and mostly for grins.

John Kerry can't beat George W. Bush.

John Kerry backed up by all the charm and energy John Edwards can muster can't beat George W. Bush.

Not that Bush couldn't be beaten by someone, and not that he couldn't or shouldn't be beaten on any number of scores. It's just that John Kerry can't beat him.

Even with all the foul language, foul humor and foul world-vision Dick Cheney contributes to the national debate, John Kerry can't beat George W. Bush.

With every under-thinking, overreaching Pentagon neocon in Washington hung around George W. Bush's neck, John Kerry can't beat the presidential incumbent.

Even the disfavor, disappearance and vaporization of the former Don Rumsfeld and all his grandstanding, squinty-eyed, macho bluster don't add a thing to Kerry's prospects.

(And speaking of macho bluster, surely John Kerry hasn't been boring his friends and relatives with his shining-but-brief moments in combat for all the decades that have passed since he was in 'Nam. Tell me this is a campaign thing that will find its place in a some much largermessage. [sic])

No amount of Bush playing to the social conservatives of the right will motivate any sort of Kerry-benefiting groundswell from their opposite number on the left.

Hasn't anybody figured out that the right worked and hustled for what they've gained while the left has favored leisurely lamenting of how the right has stolen America?

The right didn't steal America or anything else (with the possible exception of the 2000 Florida vote); the lethargic left made a gift of most of what the right has gained.

Kerry is a poor bet to lead any kind of un-right resurgence in political thinking and/or political involvement.

How can he energize anybody else when he seems so tired himself?

The last un-right surge this country saw was in the days of Camelot with John F. Kennedy. Causes were identified, consciences were stirred, people were energized and a nation reached for not only the moon, but in many ways reached for the stars.

Kennedy himself was more than imperfect and his moment at the center of the country's life was brief, but what he awakened survived for a long, long time.

But even while the energy that Kennedy stirred survived and even at its peak, the country was never without the vigor of Goldwaters, Nixons (yes, Nixon), other Republicans and, ultimately, Ronald Reagan pleading for their beliefs and causes.

That was commendable. Even when minority parties take a licking, they should keep on ticking, so to speak.

The Democrats, who more and more present themselves as the rollover and whining party, could stand some lessons in standing up and fighting on, even when the going gets tough — and this would mean something more effective and enduring than the back-pedaling compromises of Bill Clinton or tours in hideouts in Oklahoma and New Mexico by certain Texans.

The line out of the Democrats this year is they are more unified than ever for this campaign. Consumed, as it were, with defeating George W. Bush and all he has wrought.

But unless it's a different party from what it has demonstrated for quite a while now, unity and John Kerry are not formula enough to defeat George W. Bush.

The narrowest shot Democrats have would be if, come November, there is a perception of an Iraq boiling over and an economy barely boiling at all — in which case, George W. Bush would stand an excellent chance of defeating himself and handing victory to Kerry and his party, whose possible ascension even by these means would be nothing much to get excited about.

Houston, the Chronicle's editorial cartoonist, is a member of the Editorial Board.

The Blog from the Core asserts Fair Use for non-commercial, non-profit educational purposes.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 07/20/04 06:39:27 PM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode.

Centigrade 9/11

Yes, centigrade.

Thanks to Paul for pointing us to this.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 07/20/04 07:37:34 AM
Categorized as Political.

"Terror in the Skies, Again?" Part II

Annie Jacobsen writes a follow-up (multi-page) to last week's WWS article; it's here in one page.

.... This brings us to the heart of the matter — political correctness. Political correctness has become a major road block for airline safety. From what I've now learned from the many emails and phone calls that I have had with airline industry personnel, it is political correctness that will eventually cause us to stand there wondering, How did we let 9/11 happen again?...

See also Michelle Malkin's The Saga Continues and I Believe the Jacobsens.

[Follow-up: Re: Terror in the Skies?.]

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 07/20/04 07:25:31 AM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

The Five Franciscan Martyrs of Georgia

Vide.

(Thanks, G. Thomas.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 07/20/04 07:15:54 AM
Categorized as Religious.

Wrap Your Head Around This, Faithful Reader

Has Jayson Blair got another job at NYT as an editor?

As you know by now, Faithful Reader, Joseph Wilson has been caught in his lies about the Saddam Hussein regime and Niger: not only did Saddamites investigate buying yellow-cake uranium in the African country, Wilson himself told the CIA so, and then lied to the entire USA about what he had told CIA. (True, they didn't buy uranium; but nobody had claimed they bought it.) Yet, how does the New York Times headline their approach to these developments, in Sunday's newspaper?

New Reports Again Question Whether Iraq Sought Uranium in Niger

And here is the first sentence of the article:

Were those infamous 16 words correct after all?

Those would be the "infamous" sixteen words of George W. Bush's 2003 SOTU: The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. They were true when they were spoken; they were true every time since then that somebody has called the statement a lie; and they're true now. And not merely true in a technical or indirect sense, but true also in the substance (Saddamites seeking uranium in Niger) to which they advert.

Read the headline again. Read the lede. Read the headline. Read the lede.

The headline couldn't be more true, and it couldn't be more false. I am reminded of what Malcolm Muggeridge said about Pravda: the Communist Party's mouthpiece in the old Soviet Union could publish a story that got in all the facts — but still left out the truth.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 07/20/04 06:50:30 AM
Categorized as Media.