I drove 8 hours yesterday from Southern California to Northern California and one of the motifs on conservative talk shows was this: they were still hammering on the theme of John Kerry’s bungled joke (a truly dumb move on Kerry’s part since his joke was actually scripted and he didn’t learn his script) despite Kerry’s apology.
To listen to some of these talk show hosts, the closing days of the campaign should be about John Kerry’s comments and what it said about all Democrats and it was clear they wanted the GOP to keep pounding the issue.
An exaggeration? Nope. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman (who has been a war supporter) writing in the paid Times select section takes up this idea of Republicans trying to turn the campaign now into a referendum on the appropriateness of Kerry’s remarks and, by implication, what Democrats (supposedly) feel about the brave young men and women in uniform. Here’s part of Friedman’s take on it:
George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you’re stupid. Yes, they do.
They think they can take a mangled quip about President Bush and Iraq by John Kerry — a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, never ran away from combat service — and get you to vote against all Democrats in this election.
Every time you hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney lash out against Mr. Kerry, I hope you will say to yourself, “They must think I’m stupid.� Because they surely do.
They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team’s real and deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by hyping and exaggerating Mr. Kerry’s mangled gibe at the president.
What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to the U.S. military than to send it into combat in Iraq without enough men — to launch an invasion of a foreign country not by the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force, but by the Rumsfeld Doctrine of just enough troops to lose? What could be a bigger insult than that?
Friedman details other flaws in Bush administration planning, equipment for the military, postwar planning and implementation…and more. Then he writes:
Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal for the 21st century — to bring out the best in us. His “genius� is taking some irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out the worst in us, so you will ignore the mess that the Bush team has visited on this country.
And Karl Rove has succeeded at that in the past because he was sure that he could sell just enough Bush cigarettes, even though people knew they caused cancer. Please, please, for our country’s health, prove him wrong this time.
Let Karl know that you’re not stupid. Let him know that you know that the most patriotic thing to do in this election is to vote against an administration that has — through sheer incompetence — brought us to a point in Iraq that was not inevitable but is now unwinnable.Let Karl know that you think this is a critical election, because you know as a citizen that if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq — and then get away with it by holding on to the House and the Senate — it means our country has become a banana republic. It means our democracy is in tatters because it is so gerrymandered, so polluted by money, and so divided by professional political hacks that we can no longer hold the ruling party to account.
There’s a bit more.
PERSONAL OBSERVATION: When people meet me they (usually) think I’m a bit younger than I am. But I have lived through many Presidents. And there is a true feeling out there now that this is NOT an election anymore about Democrats and Republicans (although to the locksteppers it is) but, as Andrew Sullivan says, an “intervention.”
The feeling today is NOT the same as during the Vietnam era. The Vietnam war began to lose the public as campus turmoil erupted, generations turned against generations, and a mind-boggling body count began to pepper the front pages of daily newspapers and newscasts. In this war, anti-war demonstrations have largely been tepid, the campuses aren’t erupting (not having a draft has something to do with that), there is no massive generational confrontation, and the tragically zooming body count has not (yet) reached Vietnam proportions.
In this war, the concerns boil down to three words: credibility, competence and oversight.
Many Americans of both parties and of no party are beginning to conclude this administration lacks all three and operates with virtually no controls or consequences.
Will Tuesday mark the day that changes?
Or will it be a day when we need to buy a bunch of bananas?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.