18th
& 19th September, 2008
New concerts announced!
Click HERE for details.
|
|
Photo by Jay Hagan,
7/12/08 Burbank, CA
A Thought for Today
Time? Don't trust it for a minute. See,
another minute's gone and what have you accomplished?
TO BEGIN WITH
You can rouge up a red-necked reindeer and mascara an old bull moose but
all the drug store cosmetics in the world can’t disguise McBush and
Tondelaya. A vote for the GOP this year is a ballot for rearrange, as in
deck chairs on that famous ship, not change. Who are these people and
what are they trying to do to my country?
It has taken long enough but last week the press finally caught up with
McBush and stopped pussyfooting around with terms like distortion and
exaggeration to describe the bilge coming out of The McBush for
President Headquarters.
Now they are calling those ads, strategies and leaks to the media
exactly what they are, lies.
Here is one of many op-ed pieces that have appeared in print in the past
week regarding the situation.
WORTH READING
A BLIZZARD OF LIES
By PAUL KRUGMAN, Op-Ed Columnist
Published NYT: September 12, 2008
Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in
kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms.
Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy
Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?
These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently
made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.
Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first
year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of
the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.
But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the
blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s
lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to
realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain
campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection
can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over
again.
TROUBLED WATERS
Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin
credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms.
Palin didn’t say “no thanks” — she was all for the bridge, even though
it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would “not
allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something
that’s so negative.”
Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn’t
righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout,
but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to
cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the
federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it
elsewhere.
So the whole story of Ms. Palin’s alleged heroic stand against wasteful
spending is fiction.
Or take the story of Mr. Obama’s alleged advocacy of kindergarten
sex-ed. In reality, he supported legislation calling for “age and
developmentally appropriate education”; in the case of young children,
that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators.
And then there’s the claim that Mr. Obama’s use of the ordinary metaphor
“putting lipstick on a pig” was a sexist smear, and on and on.
Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well,
they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of
being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician
says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong,
it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie
from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other,
conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.
HORSERACE REPORTING
They’re probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race
reporting, so that instead of the story being “McCain campaign lies,” it
becomes “Obama on defensive in face of attacks.”
Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign’s lies? I mean,
politics ain’t beanbag, and all that.
One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is
preventing a debate on real issues — on whether the country really
wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight
years.
But there’s another answer, which may be even more important: how a
politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.
I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of
horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning
campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast
between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva
job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and,
in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting
and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.
BUSH LEAGUE
I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a
campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the
deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an
all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion
that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way
the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics
that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.
And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a
campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics
class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?
What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest
that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of
Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is
any indication, it would be much, much worse.
© Copyright 2008 by The NYT & Paul Krugman, All Rights Reserved.
Click
on the Stanyan House logo to buy Rod McKuen books, CD's and lots more
Click on the heart logo to
subscribe to the Rod McKuen mailing list
Catch Rod McKuen live!
Click on the links below for details of
concerts and appearances.
ROD McKUEN
CONCERTS
ROD
McKUEN APPEARANCES
|
