Lion King is Loooong Missed last night's debate and instead spent the evening with my family. We had tickets to the Lion King at the Opera House in Boston. The Opera House is gorgeously restored, and the cartoon turned to musical was brilliantly and cleverly staged as the actors became one with their puppetry costumes.

But look. The cartoon, while possessed of a few snappy tunes, didn't have a great score to begin with. And the stage musical version added more songs, and, well, they didn't convey any of the emotions they were meant to. They were just long forgetful songs that sounded almost mono-noted and monotoned.

If you're given tickets, go see the musical. But I wouldn't recommend buying tickets. The cartoon was never much to begin with, musically or storywise. The stage musical version, while stunning to look at, takes a bad story and weak score, and makes them worse.
  ¶ 4:34 PM 0 comments   

  The Price of Bubble Wrap Doonesbury has poked fun at Bush's campaign events, many of them done in town-hall style. As you can see if you look at the strip from 9/13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18, Bush's events rely on highly screened loyalists to ask softball, feather duster light softball, questions.

The Washington Post reports on the consequences of coddling Bush. Here are some highlights:

During a campaign forum in the Cleveland suburbs last month, President Bush was asked whether he likes broccoli, to disclose his "most important legacy to the American people" and to reveal what supporters can do "to make sure that you win Ohio and get reelected."
. . .
Wayne Fields, a specialist in presidential rhetoric at Washington University, said the first debate showed Bush had been overprotected. "If you don't talk to the press and deal with audiences with some degree of skepticism, you can't build understanding so people have confidence in you in hard times," Fields said. "His handlers think they're doing him a favor, but they're not."
. . .
The president has stopped taking questions from the small pool of reporters who cover his photo opportunities, and he has answered questions from the White House press corps twice since Aug. 23, both times with interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi at his side. His last prime-time news conference was April 13.
. . .
Tonight's town-hall audience of about 100 will ask 15 to 20 questions and will consist of an equal number of voters who say they lean toward Bush or Kerry but could change their minds, plus a few who say they are undecided. Bush's debate negotiators had sought to eliminate the event from the debate schedule because they were concerned that partisans could pose as uncommitted voters and slip in with tough or argumentative questions.
. . .
Mike McCurry, who was Clinton's press secretary and is a senior adviser to Kerry, said Bush was hurt in the first debate because his aides do not appear to recognize the benefits of having reporters "regularly ask the hard questions that are on the mind of the public."

"They have been very effective and disciplined at managing a message and getting through," McCurry said. "Until now, they have not paid any real price in their press coverage. They have mostly been getting out of the news every day what they wanted to."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16131-2004Oct7.html

The Bush camp is afraid of "uncommitted voters . . . with tough or argumentative questions." Amazing. A leader who is afraid to talk to the people. Wait, that lest sentence is an oxymoron. His fear means he's not a leader, not in a democracy he's not. No wonder Doonesbury draws him as an empty Roman general's helmet.

  ¶ 1:16 PM 0 comments   

  Weak Analogy Mickey Kaus, a reluctant Kerry supporter, suggests that instead of Bush trying to retrojustify the war in Iraq by saying it was because Saddam was trying to get around sanctions, should say simply that we went to war because Saddam fooled us. He uses this analogy to make the case:

If a man says he has a gun, acts like he has a gun, and convinces everyone around him he has a gun, and starts waving it around and behaving recklessly, the police are justified in shooting him (even if it turns out later he just had a black bar of soap). Similarly, according to the Duelfer report, Saddam seems to have intentionally convinced other countries, and his own generals, that he had WMDs. He also convinced much of the U.S. government. If we reacted accordingly and he turns out not to have had WMDs, whose fault is that?

The problem with this analogy is that Saddam stopped waving the black bar of soap around.

In September 2002, Bush received authority to wage war in Iraq, and he used that authority to force Saddam to issue a detailed report and to come clean on where and whether he had any WMD's.

That report Saddam issued claimed Iraq had no WMD's, but it was a negative that Saddam could not prove to Bush's satisfaction, nor the U.N.'s for that matter. Still, Saddam dropped the black soap and put up his hands. Inspectors were let back into Iraq, avenues of investigation had been opened. Meanwhile, Bush shaded his intelligence evidence by ignoring the conflicting estimates in it, and presented to the American people the spector of nuclear weapons and biological bombs being unleashed in America by Al Qaeda operatives supplied by Saddam Hussein.

At the same time, the UN Security Council wasn't convinced by PowerPoint Colin Powell has since recanted "proving" Saddam had WMD. The U.N. said in February and March 2003 let's give this inspection process more time and didn't Bush couldn't get his war resolution.

Bush had a choice. He could use the threat of force to investigate further, to allow renewed inspections more time, or, to invade.

So Bush assembled a coalition outside of both UN and NATO auspices, a coaltion where American troops made up 5 times the force of all the other coalition troops combined, a coalition where many members were rewarded for joining via US foreign aide, and rushed into Iraq, changing plans at the last minute because Turkey's parliament elected not to let Bush base operations for invading northern Iraq there.

Bush made the wrong choice, and carried it out in stunningly incompetent fashion. He made a bigger mess of the decision and now Iraq's a hornets nest of pissed off Jihadist and Muslim extremests taking potshots at American troops and any Iraqi's doing anything normal, let alone those signing up to policemen.

Given that Bush could have taken the time to look closer to see whether the gun was real or soap since Saddam had stopped waving it, Bush is in no position to use the Kaus defense. So he's left with something even more desperate now: Bush is saying that the war was still justified, despite how wrong he's been in his most fundamental reasons for going, because Saddam allegedly tried to bribe officials to divert U.N. oil-for-food money into his own pockets.

Please.  ¶ 9:31 AM 0 comments   

  Strafer Strife As President Bush continues to go ballistic on John Kerry, his desperate distortions become more and more obvious, inviting yet more and more analysis of just how dishonest he has become. A few days ago it was Howard Fineman at Newsweek listing the deceptions, then it was the closing paragraphs in a Washington Post story on Bush's "policy speech" in Wilkes-Barre. Now the New York Times examines Bush's plan to eviscerate John Kerry by contorting the facts:

To cheers in Michigan, Mr. Bush asserted that under Mr. Kerry, the nation would have to "wait for a grade from other nations and leaders'' before acting to protect itself. Mr. Kerry has repeatedly said that he would not give up the right to act pre-emptively "in any way necessary to protect the United States,'' but has suggested that any president would need to demonstrate legitimate reasons for such an action.

To laughter, Mr. Bush said that Mr. Kerry would impose "Hillary care'' on America, a huge national health care program that would impose increased federal control over the health care decisions of citizens. Mr. Kerry's health care plan is significantly larger than the one Mr. Bush has offered, and it includes increased reliance on Medicaid and state health insurance programs for the poor. But unlike what Mrs. Clinton proposed in 1993, it would not create any big new federal bureaucracy and would retain the current employer-based system, and Mr. Kerry said he was averse to any kind of national health care plan.

To boos, Mr. Bush said that Mr. Kerry had set "artificial timetables'' for pulling troops out of Iraq, which the president warned would embolden the enemy and endanger the troops. In fact, Mr. Kerry said that he could envision beginning to withdraw troops in as little as six months, but only if he succeeded in moving Iraq toward stability, and has decline repeatedly to set a timeline.

Bush doesn't trust his own record. He must, like so many voters, find it so fundamentally indefensible that he can only try to win by shredding a caricature of John Kerry. But just as Cheney and republicans thought the Vice President had won the debate only to see him considered the loser the next morning when fact checkers proved he lied about never meeting Edwards and never suggesting a connection of Iraq to 9/11, so too is Bush beginning to lose in the poll as his own lies about Kerry and the facts in Iraq become more divorced from reality.

  ¶ 8:38 AM 0 comments   

  If Bush Were Like Blair . . . Jim Geraghty, in a "Kerry Spot" entry at the National Review Online, writes:

Now - picture the Democrats nominating a candidate who takes the war on terror seriously, who wants to finish the job in Iraq, and who doesn't see every foreign policy issue as a rerun of Vietnam.

A Tony Blair-style Democrat would probably be trouncing Bush right now. Karl Rove & Co. are very lucky to have the opponents they do.
http://www.nationalreview.com/kerry/kerry200410071308.asp

That's one way to look at it.

Another is this: If Bush were a Tony Blair-style Republican, who could articulate an argument without resorting to rhetoric like this when left on his own:

Of course we're doing everything we can to protect America. I wake up every day thinking about how best to protect America. That's my job.

I work with Director Mueller of the FBI; comes in my office when I'm in Washington every morning, talking about how to protect us. There's a lot of really good people working hard to do so.

It's hard work. But, again, I want to tell the American people, we're doing everything we can at home, but you better have a president who chases these terrorists down and bring them to justice before they hurt us again,

then Karl Rove wouldn't have to worry.

If Bush were a responsible president, who could admit mistakes and level with the American people, then Karl Rove wouldn't have to worry.

If Bush were an honest president, who looked at both sides of the conflicting intelligent estimates he was receiving back in late 2002 and early 2003, if his White House hadn't deliberately suppressed that evidence, then Karl Rove wouldn't have to worry.

But Bush isn't honest, isn't responsible, and certainly, when bereft of prepared text and asked to think on his own, isn't articulate.

He is in short, no Tony Blair.

And so Karl Rove has to worry and thus his campaign runs on one strategy and one strategy only: deny reality and destroy the opposition in everyway possible. So a major policy speech isn't a vision for the future, but a bait and switch (just like the reasons for this war in Iraq), that's really just a castigation of Kerry built on a string truth-distorting one-liners.

Bush is desparate and it shows. He's been caught lying, caught shifting, caught short and is increasingly found wanting. If John Kerry were as forthright as Tony Blair, Bush would in fact be toast. If George Bush were as forthright as Tony Blair, Kerry wouldn't stand a chance.

But Kerry has a chance because as weak a candidate as Kerry is, Bush is that much worse a leader and president. And the facts in Iraq past and present make that impossible to hide. Even for Karl Rove.

  ¶ 9:01 PM 0 comments   

  1984 is 20 Years Late What's King George's last name? It's Bush right?

Because the more facts that come out, the more he sounds like an apparatchik out of an Orwellian nightmare.

I mean it's not what he does to language accidentally through his oral dyslexia (or is it linguistic dyspepsia?), which, while funny, is relatively harmless. What's really frightening is his sustained belief that by saying up is down often enough, people will believe that's the case. Well that's not frightening so much as the idea that it might work, that enough voters will suspend disbelief to re-elect Bush even though he simply doesn't trust them and won't level with them.

So, we learn from Duelfer's report that Iraq had no capability to build WMD's after 1994, much less have any WMD's in their possession. We learn that Bush's whole original rationale for going to war never existed. Remember when he addressed the nation and described the threat as imminent and said we could not wait for more inspections? Here's how the New York Times covers it:

Mr. Duelfer's 900-page report concluded that contrary to Bush administration's assertions on the eve of war, the Hussein regime had rid itself of chemical and biological weapons, nor was it well on the way to having nuclear weapons.

Today, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney seemed to embrace other findings by Mr. Duelfer, that Mr. Hussein planned to reconstitute his military's deadly-weapons capabilities once United Nations sanctions on him were lifted, and that he was constantly scheming to skirt those sanctions.
http://nytimes.com/2004/10/07/politics/campaign/07CND-BUSH.html?

Sigh. I see. A plan to reconstitute deadly weapons, which couldn't be started until sanctions were lifted, that was the clear and present danger that justified rushing into an ill-planned war, turning attention from Afghanistan, and generating even more Muslim anger that's helped make terrorism a more noble sacrifice.

Gross incompetence is one thing, but incompetence and this shifting of reasons slathered in a campaign of systematic denial that things were ever different from what Bush says they are today, when the evidence is so clear that things are different, is gobsmackingly outrageous. How can we elect a president who lacks the courage to level with America?

That we still might is just frightening.
  ¶ 5:42 PM 0 comments   

  Refereed Debate Transcripts The Washington Post offers a refereed transcript of the debates, where staff writers from the paper and washingtonpost.com site "examine the candidates' claims and charges. The "referee" icon marks the spots of our calls and where you can make your call as well."

Links:

Vice Presidential Debate -- Vice President Cheney and Sen. John Edwards


First Presidential Debate -- Presdient Bush and Sen. John Kerry  ¶ 5:02 PM 0 comments   

  Unspun by Facts Republican loyalists, such as Fred Barnes for example, or group-think analysts such as Chris Matthews and his crew, are spinning (Barnes) or calling (Matthews et. al.) the V.P. debate as a win for Cheney. The argument is that Cheney effectively shifted focus away from Bush's troubled record back to Kerry's record.

Normally that spin might work, and Cheney did look like a winner in the immediate aftermath to a lot of people.

But any benefit from that perceived win is evaporating already, and Cheney's becoming a clear loser. And the reason he's becoming the perceived loser has nothing to do with -- as Matthews insinuated it would -- the liberal media not admitting that Cheney won. It has to do with all the facts Cheney got wrong. Yes, Edwards made some mistakes, but Cheney's omissions, obfuscations, and errors were huge. And they're being challenged not by liberal media sympathizers so much as they are by reports coming from administration appointees and Cheney's own past public pronouncements.

The revelation of those facts, and the analysis of how they contradict Cheney's claims, is, instead of shifting attention away from Bush's record, calling greater attention to it.

Relevant examples of fact checking and breaking news that is undoing Cheney:

Rewriting History
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball

With virtually all of the administration’s original case for war in Iraq in
tatters, Vice President Dick Cheney provided shifting and sometimes misleading
arguments in last night’s debate with John Edwards about Saddam Hussein’s ties
to terrorists and his access to weapons of mass destruction.

U.S. Report Finds Iraq Was Minimal Weapons Threat in '03
By DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 — Iraq now appears to have destroyed its
stockpiles of illicit weapons within months of the Persian Gulf war of 1991, and
by the time of the American invasion in spring 2003, its capacity to produce
such weapons was continuing to erode, the top American inspector in Iraq said in
a report made public today.

U.S. Report Finds No Evidence of Iraq WMD
By KEN GUGGENHEIM

Contradicting the main argument for a war that has cost more than 1,000
American lives, the top U.S. arms inspector reported today that he found no
evidence that Iraq produced any weapons of mass destruction after 1991. The
report also says Saddam Hussein's weapons capability weakened during a dozen
years of U.N. sanctions before the U.S. invasion last year.

Contrary to prewar statements by President Bush and top administration
officials, Saddam did not have chemical and biological stockpiles when the war
began and his nuclear capabilities were deteriorating, not advancing, according
to the report by Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group.

  ¶ 4:26 PM 0 comments   

  Debate Tactic: Hoping They Don't Check Facts In last night's debate, Vice-President Vader denied John Edwards' claims that Halliburton was currently under investigation and had in the past, when Cheney was CEO, used end-runs around U.S. sanctions forbidding companies do business in Iran by farming the work out to an off-shore subsidiary.

To make his refutation seem more formidable, Cheney urged viewers to go to "FactCheck.com." Here's what FactCheck.org opens with in today's post-debate, FactCheck email:

Cheney & Edwards Mangle Facts
Getting it wrong about combat pay, Halliburton, and FactCheck.org

10.06.2004

Summary
<>Cheney wrongly implied that FactCheck had defended his tenure as CEO of Halliburton Co., and the vice president even got our name wrong. He overstated matters when he said Edwards voted "for the war" and "to commit the troops, to send them to war." He exaggerated the number of times Kerry has voted to raise taxes, and puffed up the number of small business owners who would see a tax increase under Kerry's proposals.

Edwards falsely claimed the administration "lobbied the Congress" to cut the combat pay of troops in Iraq, something the White House never supported, and he used misleading numbers about jobs.
http://factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=272

To be fair, I've posted the full summary, which is also critical of some of Edwards' remarks. But it was Cheney who wrongly invoked FactCheck. Of course, he gave the wrong URL too, but let's assume that was an innocent mistake, and that he meant to say FactCheck.org.

Clearly Cheney evoked the WWW site and drew on its nonpartisan reputation to shield himself from Edwards' accurate (on Halliburton) criticisms. Since FactCheck.org does not supply the defense Cheney claims, since they will not be refuting Edwards' claims, Cheney can only be hoping that viewers won't check FactCheck.org, but instead will take his call for viewers to check it as proof enough that Edwards is wrong. He's hoping, cynically, that simply by asserting that the site defends him and telling viewers to check it out, that viewers will assume the site defends him -- why else would he send them there? He's counting on voters to trust him.

Oh, and for kicks, see the automatic redirect that occurs when you go to FactCheck.com. How's that for poetic justice?

Update: 1:54 PM. Kevin Drum at Political Animal snippets a Wall Street Journal storythat says FactCheck.com is owned by a domain-parking group located in the Cayman Islands. They had had info about online degree programs at the URL, but the minute they heard Cheney's gaffe, they redirected the URL. The redirect also saved them some broadband fees because their site traffic jumped: " -- about 50,000 unique visitors in the first hour."
  ¶ 7:40 AM 0 comments   

  King Bubble-Boy George Jonathan Alter, writing in the Newsweek, looks at how living in a yesman-toady bubble has robbed Bush of the need to reflect on his decisions. Instead of reflection and the ability to logically defend his choices, Bush argued, in the debate, from bald assertion and a misplaced sense of divine right:

Oct. 11 issue -- No wonder President Bush lost round one in Miami: he got rusty living in the bubble. The president looked peeved in the debate cutaway shots not just because he's a competitive guy, but because John Kerry was leveling harsh criticism to his face—a new experience for him. Bush claims not to want yes men and women around him but he's had little experience in the past four years with anyone else. Not since last winter—when he handled Tim Russert poorly and botched a press conference by refusing to admit any mistakes—has Bush taken tough questions in public. Instead of responding to those failed outings with more practice, the Bush team took the most inaccessible president in 75 years and cut him off even further from reality. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6160550/site/newsweek/

  ¶ 2:09 PM 0 comments   

  "Global Test" Distortion Debunked Writing in Slate today, William Saletan takes on Bush's false and absurd accusation that Kerry will use a "global test" to get permission to act preemptively:

We've just reached the crux of the presidential campaign—the moment in which one candidate, purporting to expose the other's fatal flaw, has instead exposed his own.

Saletan goes on to make a more detailed analysis of Bush's distortion of Kerry's words than I did on Saturday. It's worth reading Saletan -- here's the link: http://slate.com/id/2107690/
  ¶ 11:37 AM 0 comments   

  Mixed Up Campaign Strategies Thomas Friedman's analysis from today's New York Times, on how Bush screwed up Iraq is devastatingly accurate:

But here is the cold, hard truth: This war has been hugely mismanaged by this administration, in the face of clear advice to the contrary at every stage, and as a result the range of decent outcomes in Iraq has been narrowed and the tools we have to bring even those about are more limited than ever. What happened?

The Bush team got its doctrines mixed up: it applied the Powell Doctrine to the campaign against John Kerry - "overwhelming force" without mercy, based on a strategy of shock and awe at the Republican convention, followed by a propaganda blitz that got its message across in every possible way, including through distortion. . . . [A]las, while the Bush people applied the Powell Doctrine in the Midwest, they applied the Rumsfeld Doctrine in the Middle East. And the Rumsfeld Doctrine is: "Just enough troops to lose."

. . .

Mr. Bush is president, charged with protecting the national interest, and yet from the beginning he has run Iraq policy as an extension of his political campaign.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/opinion/03friedman.html?oref=login&th

And why did Bush turn this war into a campaign set piece? Why did ideology trump facts and strategy? Why? Because Bush lacks the courage to leave his political base. He doesn't trust the American people. He won't truly engage them and speak frankly to them; he speaks only from staged political set pieces and campaign ad propaganda. He even fakes press conferences. In a democracy he fakes press conferences. If Bush can't give a speech before adoring believers programmed to roar approval at every applause line, then he'd rather not speak at all.

In a democracy you have to lead by persuasion, not deriding those who bring bad news (the press, your opponent, your own intelligence agencies). Bush acts and thinks like he's entitled to the presidency and that because there's a war, that he's beyond questioning.

But he forgets what America did to the last King George who ruled over her. If recent polling trends are any indication; he's about to relearn some history.
  ¶ 9:31 AM 0 comments