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Negative Energy
My latest column "Negative Energy" takes on the Bush administration's latest line of attack against John Kerry and Josh Marshall's suggestion that we poke a little fun at the president:
While John Kerry was serving as an officer in the United States Navy, leading men in a shooting war and winning an armful of medals in the process, Bush was a male cheerleader and fraternity president at Yale. He later went on to use family connections to land a spot in the Air National Guard, duty from which he took ample time off to run losing political campaigns. Kerry became a leader in an influential movement, a candidate for office, a successful prosecutor, the Lieutenant Governor of a medium-sized state, and then a U.S. senator during a period when Bush was letting alcoholism nearly wreck his marriage, doing something with drugs he refuses to answer questions about, and running a variety of businesses into the ground, losing his dad's friends a bundle of money in the process.Read the rest.Kerry didn't do much as a senator besides read bills other people wrote and decide how to vote on them. The president, meanwhile, doesn't read the newspaper. Or his daily intelligence briefings. Or the reports of government commissions. Not even the executive summaries!
August 2, 2004 | Permalink
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Comments
Matt,
This is fun, but it is unfair to Kerry to say that he did nothing except "read bills other people wrote and decide how to vote on them." Kerry led at least two important Senate investigations (the Vietnam POW/MIA and the BCCI scandal). This is not chickenfeed. Salon put Kerry's Senate career in fair perspective; please read it and change your piece accordingly.
Posted by: raulm231 | Aug 2, 2004 11:37:37 PM
Okay, here's the deal...
What is up with all the Republican men who used to be cheerleaders?
The list is apparently quite long, and someone actually wrote a column about it a few years ago (though I don't remember who) - just that it included Trent Lott.
Now Bush?
We get the sports heros. They get the cheerleaders. Shouldn't we be able to capitalize on this somehow?
Posted by: Ken | Aug 2, 2004 11:39:26 PM
The point about going on the offensive is well taken, but you might have brought out the notion of using humor and mockery a bit more. It's a great idea. One of the mistakes liberals frequently make is taking Republicans seriously even when the Republicans are offering profoundly unserious ideas (Hastert's recent opinings on the tax code being one recent example). When such laughable notions are offered, we should respond in a suitable manner.
Even when we do use mockery, we frequently come off as more angry or bitter than bemused. Generally speaking, the attitude could be less "Dennis Hastert is out of his fucking mind" and more "Aw, i'n' that cute, the widdle republican's gonna turn nasty mean bad taxes into smiling happy joy taxes, what a sweetie."
Posted by: agrajag | Aug 2, 2004 11:41:36 PM
Raulm:Kerry was one of a very small number of senators with the guts to vote against the appalling Defense of Marriage Act; did some solid work on investigative committees in the 1980s; expanded the writ of the previously piddling Fisheries Subcommittee he briefly chaired in 2001-02; and really was a key player in normalizing relations with Vietnam, something that doesn't take up a lot of mind space here at home but has contributed immensely to improved living standards in Southeast Asia.Does this not cover the facts to which you refer?
Posted by: Matthew Yglesias | Aug 2, 2004 11:42:42 PM
The article's only omission, as I said, is the phrase "ambitious secretaries."
Posted by: praktike | Aug 2, 2004 11:56:03 PM
The Democratic Party is the party of Michael Moore: the party of hatred of America and admiration for her terrorist enemies. The Democratic Party is the party of racial whiners and feminazi bitches. To be a Democrat is to love crime, illegitimacy, lousy public schools, greedy trial lawyers and bloated public payrolls.
The Republican Party, for all its many faults, is the party of honest middle and working class people who believe in duty, truth, honor, hard work, family and country.
Republicans pay and Democrats prey. Such is the political order.
Posted by: Joe Willingham | Aug 3, 2004 12:23:24 AM
Hot damn! Keep that shit coming, Joe.
It ain't easy to find good satire these days, so I'll take it where I can get it, even from people who might actually intend to be serious.
Posted by: JP | Aug 3, 2004 12:57:35 AM
Matt: I think you stumbled on a brilliant strategy.
"...[Kerry] really was a key player in normalizing relations with Vietnam, something that doesn't take up a lot of mind space here at home but has contributed immensely to improved living standards in Southeast Asia."
In other words Kerry went to fight the Vietnam war, correctly diagnosed it as wrongheaded, came home and, didn't just criticize it as such, but went about to correct the situation. First by getting a better accounting of the boys left behind--POW's/MIA's, then by normalizing relations with the country. Kerry won southeast asia, first putting his own ass on the line, then being as responsible as anyone in government for the current peaceful relationship we enjoy with the Vietnamese. Kerry found peace with honor in a quagmire. Just what we need now in Iraq.
Posted by: epistemology | Aug 3, 2004 12:57:51 AM
I wrote "Willingham's" post. Pretty good, eh? I'm developing my parody skills.
Posted by: Zizka | Aug 3, 2004 1:02:05 AM
More apropos of the post: to mock Bush, a timeline needs to be constructed so that every Senate vote of Kerry's that Bush mocks, the decisions Bush was making at the same time would be contrasted.
Bush: Kerry votes down CIA funding.
Kerry: Bush decides to skip required flight physical.
Etc.
Of course this from the media fund or moveon.org, not from Kerry.
From Kerry, the message should be relentlessly upbeat, with the only negative ads be: "Why is Bush so negative saying these lies about m; here is the truth...Can't we keep the campaign positive Mr. President?"
Posted by: epistemology | Aug 3, 2004 1:08:56 AM
now zizka, does this mean you're Al as well?
Posted by: praktike | Aug 3, 2004 1:10:35 AM
Maybe I am mistaken, and zizka is right. Maybe Democrats are in favor of school choice, family, individual responsibility, truth, and a strong national defense. The empirical evidence points in the opposite direction, but I am will to listen to contrary evidence. John Kerry's voting record supports my thesis. Mr. zizka has a challenge to prove the contrary.
Posted by: Joe Willingham | Aug 3, 2004 2:08:30 AM
Maybe I am mistaken, and zizka is right. Maybe Democrats are in favor of school choice, family, individual responsibility, truth, and a strong national defense. The empirical evidence points in the opposite direction, but I am will to listen to contrary evidence. John Kerry's voting record would seem to support my thesis. Mr. zizka has a challenge to prove the contrary.
Posted by: Joe Willingham | Aug 3, 2004 2:12:52 AM
And I suppose the fact Bush was a fighter pilot must be making up for mass feelings of inadequacy, and having a pleasant wife is his way of covering up for his meanness. Come on, get a life...if you want to talk about character, Bush isn't the nominee who admitted to committing war atrocities in Viet Nam; and nor did he use Senate committee hearing to promote nomalizing relations with Viet Nam at the expense of not finding our MIAs (which was committee's primary goal).
Kerry accomplished little to nothing during his 25± years as a Senator, except to hurt our military and American intelligence services. Great credentials during a time of war.
Posted by: Michael Palvic | Aug 3, 2004 3:22:23 AM
Matt I read your article and completely agree with it. However, I'm still not sure that you're correct about the convention.
Up to this point the Democrats, and others, have spent a lot of time appropriately attacking and criticizing Bush. I'd like to have seen a little more of it personally, but it was pretty effective. This has influenced many people to join with the Democrats to defeat Bush, and as we know, the party is pretty united as a result. However, all the criticizing didn't appeal to many undecided voters, who are mostly swayed by positive messages.
Now we're heading down the stretch and more people are paying attention to politics and the image the candidates project from this point onward will likely stick around until election day. This is the period when winning campaigns are usually the ones that are more effective at leaving a positive image. I don't think you want to appear angry at this point in the campaign or spend too much time attacking your opponent (the attacks early in the campaign will remain in the peoples subconcious, while the positve image of Kerry is thrusted to the forefront.) However, other groups (moveon.org, michael moore, etc) will continue to keep the pressure on Bush by pointing out his fallacies, problems, lies, etc, and keep him on the defensive in the process.
The problem with spending too much time talking about your plans is that it gives the Bush Campaign more ammo to attack Kerry, regardless of the validity of the attacks themselves. It would be wise for Kerry to slowly release pieces of his plans, as to not give the Bush attack dogs too much to work with at any one time. In the meantime, the Bush attack dogs have to find something to attack Kerry with - that they may later wish they hadn't, if it isn't good enough - or simply not attack him at all, at a time when Kerry's doing well in the state polls.
Meanwhile, the positive image will hopefully tap into a segment of undecideds that are mostly swayed by positive messages, which shouldn't be too difficult when the alternative is this President's past record. Kerry has gotten about all he's going to get from attacking Bush and it's time to start looking for votes in new places. What better place to do this than with your convention speech, which will probably create the biggest impression yet of Kerry and in front of his largest audience until the debates begin. One thing I'm pretty certain about is that Kerry didn't want to get up there and spend too much time attacking Bush or giving Bush too much ammo to attack him. If the latter had happened, then we'd be spending the next month listening to Bush attack Kerry's plan, instead of weak attacks on Kerry's few "signature" bills.
Posted by: rob | Aug 3, 2004 3:31:04 AM
"and nor did he use Senate committee hearing to promote nomalizing relations with Viet Nam at the expense of not finding our MIAs (which was committee's primary goal)."
Anybody have the slightest idea what meaning this tortured aggregation of words is trying to shit out?
Posted by: djangone | Aug 3, 2004 3:40:20 AM
And I suppose the fact Bush was a fighter pilot must be making up for mass feelings of inadequacy
I think you mean 'flighter pilot'. As in, taking flight from his Guard duty...
Posted by: ahem | Aug 3, 2004 5:35:30 AM
"'and nor did he use Senate committee hearing to promote nomalizing relations with Viet Nam at the expense of not finding our MIAs (which was committee's primary goal).'
"Anybody have the slightest idea what meaning this tortured aggregation of words is trying to shit out?"
In the late 70's and early 80's, there was a widespread myth that the Vietnamese were still holding a bunch of US prisoners. The fact that there were significant numbers of casualties from the war listed as missing in action (MIA) was the chief evidence cited in support of this myth (although, of course, there are still large nubmers of MIAs from WW II, but nobody thinks the Japanese and Germans are still holding American prisoners).
A senate committee led jointly by Kerry and John McCain effectively debunked this MIA theory, by organizing joint US/Vietnamese investigations into what become of various MIAs. In many instances, the investigators were able to actually find the bodies of the US casualties (one such find was Howard Dean's brother, although that was actually in Laos).
Vietnamese cooperation on this issue led to normalization of relations.
Of course, there are still wingnut conspiracy theorists who think the Kerry/McCain investigation was a fraud, and that the Vietnamese are still holding a bunch of elderly US prisoners. In order to believe this, you have to believe that both Kerry and ex-POW MCCain are fools or traitors.
You notice the guy above trying to use this issue to bash Kerry conveniently forgets McCain's role . . .
Posted by: rea | Aug 3, 2004 8:27:35 AM
There is a little more to the MIA story than rea tells. Many of these soldiers were killed in the secret illegal wars beyond the borders of Vietnam, and were listed MIA so the government could continue to deny these wars were taking place. And the Defense Department refused to supply the families with death certificates or pay survivors benefits for many years. One of the crueller episodes in a heartless war.
Posted by: serial catowner | Aug 3, 2004 9:09:46 AM
That is about the least funny thing I've ever read. I'd leave the humor to others better suited.
Posted by: Reg | Aug 3, 2004 9:19:55 AM
Actually it reads like it was written by a high school sophmore. Are you sure you went to Harvard?
Posted by: Reg | Aug 3, 2004 9:21:18 AM
Hey Zizka, are you doing Reg now? You sure are versatile.
Posted by: Tim H. | Aug 3, 2004 9:35:37 AM
Dammit, Zizka, don't ruin our fun! Let the joke seep in a little before you go seeking acknowledgement!
Hee hee...
And Reg, don't be a dick. It's not as if you could do any better. Why are conservatives always so humorless?
Posted by: JP | Aug 3, 2004 9:50:39 AM
You are right Reg it isn't funny. It is scary how the entire Republican appartus ignores the fact the emporer has no clothes.
Posted by: Rob | Aug 3, 2004 9:51:08 AM
The Vietnam War was the Right War at the Right Time for the Right Reasons and it was worth it!
President John F. Kennedy decided to stop the locust swarm-like advance of Communism in Southeast Asia for morally right and geopolitically correct reasons. He continued in the tradition of President Harry Truman and the old patriotic Democratic Party. President Lyndon B. Johnson loyally continued and expanded that effort to contain Communism.
Contain Communism? Modern Americans are prone to laugh at such a goal because they are totally ignorant of the bloody history of Communism because the Left liberal controlled Media-Academic Complex has done its best to erase it from our collective memory.
Here is the truth about Communism;
http://pep.typepad.com/public_enquiry_project/2004/08/the_vietnam_war.html
Posted by: Adrian Spidle | Aug 3, 2004 10:02:00 AM
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