NRA goes ahead with Tucson rally days after shootings at nursing school

Albanian and Russian Observers Sent to Monitor American Elections

(specifically in Florida)

Here’s a followup to my earlier post about Bush’s uncomfortable relationship with the truth. Eleanor Clift, columnist and wife of James‘s old companion on the college newspaper, Tom Brazaitis, has a column on MSNBC: Not the Un-Clinton After All.

Yet the myth of Bush as a bipartisan president who operates above the fray is relentlessly promoted by Bush and his minions. Just this week on the campaign trail, Bush took credit for a huge increase in education funding. Yet he has cut funding below what it was last year, making a mockery of the “Leave No Child Behind” education bill he signed last year with Sen. Ted Kennedy’s blessing. Bush uses words and rhetoric to create an image quite different from reality, a tactic that would normally invite condemnation from both the media and political foes.

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But it’s not true that Bush is a man of his word. He has shimmied and shifted in lots of areas, including Iraq, manipulating language the way Clinton did and exaggerating in the same way that he once pilloried Gore for doing. Bush says “regime change” doesn’t have to mean deposing Saddam Hussein—that the regime would be changed if Saddam disarmed. This is rhetoric worthy of Clinton, and it doesn’t mean that Bush has altered fundamentally his commitment to displace Saddam through military force.

Even though there is no credible evidence linking the Iraqi president to the 9-11 attacks, Bush persists in suggesting on the campaign trail that Saddam might use Al Qaeda as his “forward army.” Polls show that two thirds of Americans believe Saddam was behind 9-11, a useful myth irresponsibly fed by Bush. The president said in a speech last month that Saddam is experimenting with unmanned drones capable of reaching the United States with weapons of mass destruction. When confronted with the geographical improbability of such a feat, a White House spokesman countered that the drones could be launched from ships. Unless Iraq has an aircraft carrier we don’t know about, that scenario is equally implausible.

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Compared with taking the country to war based on a body of lies, BushÂ’s duplicity on domestic issues doesnÂ’t seem as egregious, but the pattern is disturbing.

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There is hardly an issue where Bush hasnÂ’t pulled a fast one. The rules he announced with great fanfare this week to make it easier to move generic drugs onto the market were passed by the Senate in July. Bush opposed them then; now with polls showing voters think he hasnÂ’t done enough on domestic issues, heÂ’s flipped.
How does he get away with such crass duplicity? The media doesnÂ’t want to disturb the story line. Gore was the prevaricator; Bush was intellectually challenged. So when Bush fiddles with the facts, the media doesnÂ’t see malevolence. They see a man whoÂ’s not articulate, who doesnÂ’t speak with lawyerly precision. And they canÂ’t believe how believable he is.

In an article on the fact that the wife of Arkansas’s governor, Mike Huckabee, is running for Secretary of State at the same time he is running for re-election against my close friend Jimmie Lou Fisher, we have a number of nice quotes. She (the wife) is so embarassing.

Mr. Huckabee was already being accused of having pretensions to royalty. For example, he accepted $23,000 in clothing and gift certificates from Jennings Osborne, a wealthy supporter and appointee, in 2000 alone, then sued to block the state ethics commission from investigating such gifts.

But his wife’s campaign difficulties have added to the governor’s burden. Her insistence on her own 24-hour state police detail, her crisscrossing the state to campaign events in a giant trooper-driven Ford Excursion provided by the state and her travel in and out of Arkansas on the state airplane, both with and without her husband, for reasons the governor’s office refuses to disclose all produced a month’s worth of bad press for both Huckabees at the start of the fall campaign.

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Mrs. Huckabee remains indignant, writing off her detractors as either mistaken about her or mean-spirited. “I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me,” she said in an interview. “If it wasn’t for the grace of God, I’d have shot a few people already.”

“Jesus wasn’t liked, either,” she added. “And Jesus was mistreated, and called names.”

Democrats say Mrs. Huckabee has shown a mean streak of her own, particularly in her only televised debate with Mr. Daniels, on Oct. 16. There, she raised the subject of Mr. Daniels’s drunken-driving convictions in 1983 and 1990, the more recent offense in a state vehicle; attacked him for putting his wife and daughter on the state payroll; and said he had not come up with “an original idea the whole campaign.”

Mr. Daniels’s driving-while-intoxicated record was well known, and he apologized again for it. But Mrs. Huckabee maintains that he would be a bad role model for Arkansas youths. “He says his problem with alcohol was 12 years ago, and I know that’s not true,” she said this week. “I’ve had personal experience with it, but I haven’t brought that out. He could hardly stand up at the governor’s gala last Christmas.”

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She has a daredevil streak. As a youngster, she crossed the Arkansas River on a pipeline in the black of night. As first lady, she has gone bungee jumping, and even skydiving — albeit strapped to an Army paratrooper.

Well, maybe I miss it a little. You have to read her statements in the proper accent. Also, where do I sign up to get strapped to an Army paratrooper?

The NY Times has a followup article on the story I posted yesterday. The latest attack was 30 miles from the capital. Don’t tell me we’ve “secured” the country.