Zell and Cheney’s misleading tirades disgust me
For all of you looking for a thoughtful debunking of Zell Miller’s powerfully misleading speech and Dick Cheney’s slimeball slanders at the RNC (Day 3 part 2 at C-span), here it is. George Lakoff (UC Berkeley linguistics professor) lays out the main tactics of Cheney and Miller that night:
- Iraq War = 9/11,
- War on Terror = WWII,
- Dems = Anarchy,
- One vote against a single 1991 spending bill is somehow actually multiple votes against lots of different military weapons systems,
- Bush = strong, Kerry = weak
I think the most disgusting points in day 3 are Cheney’s claim that Kerry somehow “voted against flak jackets for our troops” when his administration was the one who sent them there without these things in the first place. Kerry’s vote against the bloated $87 billion was on *principal* (his alternate funding bill cut out the 20 billion in pork for Halliburton, made half the money a loan to Iraq and would have required the repeal of Bush’s tax cuts to pay for it) and since the vast majority of others were on board to vote “yes” for the $87 billion (doing otherwise seemed tantamount to political suicide), he knew that his vote wasn’t going to count anyway.
First of all, I disliked Sadam Hussein as much as the next guy but the “War on Terror” was supposed to be to kill those bastards who sent people over here to attack us and to dismantle their worldwide network. This network never included Sadam, and most people who have done any reading on Middle East politics know this. Sadam was a brutal dictator whose brand of “Stalinism” had no room for fundementalist Islam - in fact, if there was one country in the Middle East least likely to be harboring terrorists it was Sadam’s Iraq. But that was then. Bush’s “crusade” has brought them out of their “holes” and lured them into an area of the Middle East rich in oil, with lush arable farmland. The birthplace of civilization between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Much nicer than dry, rocky, inhospitable Afghanistan. Yet, if you ask 10 people on the street, more than half of them will tell you that Sadam funded 9/11. This is a testament to how powerful a lie can be, if it is repeated many many times. Its even more powerful if you can drape an American flag over it.
Comment posted on 9-5-2004
The RNC variety show was so slick, I’m afraid I can’t help thinking they
might actually have already caught Osama and are waiting to drag him out
right before the election. tmpl=story&u=/040904/481/ny12509042032" class="external">This story makes me
wonder if they are going to start setting us up for that possibility.
These guys know how to play the media. As my man TSlater points out on
his site: putting
Guliani, Schwartzenegger and McCain (all moderates) up there to speak is
such a ruse. They hide the Wolfowitz, Grover Norquist and Jerry Falwell
types away someplace for the convention.
And Zell’s BS speech just burned me up. Statements like “John Kerry, who
says he doesn’t like outsourcing, wants to outsource our national security.”
when Bush has practically outsourced the whole war to private firms!? My
favorite: “…our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the
Democrats’ manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief.”
HELLO? Does anybody remember what happened to Clinton!? The
republicans *wasted* all of their precious time on capitol hill frantically
searching for some way to bring him down. Hypocrisy!
Comment posted on 9-27-2004
It was pretty scarey stuff.
I’m from Georgia, I remember when Zell was sane. (Well, we thought he was.) I can’t recall ever seeing anything as rabid as this on live TV. I have to wonder if…(1) Zell has had a stroke or is in the first stages of some kind of brain disease and/or (2) he was the warm-up act to make Cheney and Bush look more sane. That old contrasting images trick.
The psychologist in me wanted to shoot a tranquilizer dart into Zell and put him into a strait -jacket. You would think there would be a doctor around at the convention to help people in situations like this keep from swallowing their tongues. I guess not.
It was like watching Dr. Frankenstein’s monster run amok on stage. Painful and horrifying to watch. I was in total shock.
(Where are all those villagers with the torches when you need ‘em?)
Good article in your link. Thank you.