Spin Spin Sugar

I admit it. The Bush team is good at what it does, and if there's one thing this administration has done a lot of, it's spinning. The Bush tactic, which is probably really the Rove tactic, seems to be to know your own weaknesses well enough to pin them on your opponent. IOW, accuse your opponent of doing exactly what you're doing. That's what Bush is doing with the spin on the 380 tons of missing munitions—he's making wild claims by accusing Kerry of making wild claims. He's also saying anything to get elected by saying that Kerry will say anything to get elected. Talking Points Memo has the comments I'm talking about. I wish I had the time to examine all the speeches both candidates are giving in this last week of the campaign and compare the claims each is making to see which is lying the most. Of course both of them are spinning, but I'd like to know it's more than my own partisanship that makes me think Bush is spinning harder (aka, lying more). That aside, it's still funny to hear Bush tell audiences that if Kerry had been president for the last three years Saddam would still be in power and he could be giving weapons to terrorists to attack the U.S. Seems like might have been the Bush administration that gave weapons to terrorists, doesn't it? Salon's War Room has even more on that story. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said:

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.

Maybe the Bush campaign never got that memo. But hey, you gotta believe! In the theme of laughing in the face of disaster, Get Your War On continues its ever-brilliant satire of current events:

Do you think Mohamed ElBaradei is currently running around with 380 tons of Schadenfreude?

Elsewhwere in humorpolitik, a campaign to support Bush has decided to support Kerry:

Before breaking with Bush, the Yes, Bush Can team worked earnestly to support him. They went to the Pacific Northwest to promote Bush's Healthy Forests Initiative--and discovered it was enabling the logging industry to cut down our last old-growth forests. They visited a nuclear power plant in Ohio to promote Bush's domestic security policies--and found no one in the guard booth to meet them. In western Pennsylvania, while promoting the President's energy policy, they learned that it allows coal emissions which kill 23,000 people a year. Finally, while defending Bush's war on terrorism, they found out that even Donald Rumsfeld feels the Iraq War has made the world a more dangerous place.

All right, although the depiction of Bush's policies appears accurate, the rest is a joke. But still, their Patriot Pledge is pretty good. Question: Why is the Bush campaign blocking non-U.S. web visitors?

Posted October 28, 2004 08:44 AM | election 2004