Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Gee, did we claim that we’d find WMD in Iraq? “Billmon has knit a noose out of quotes,” says JOHO.

What did the Bush team claim, and when did they claim it? Right now, a lot of embarrassing statements by Rumsfeld and others are still on line–for example, this March 30 interview with Rumsfeld:

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, weapons of mass destruction. Key goal of the military campaign is finding those weapons of mass destruction. None have been found yet. There was a raid on the Answar Al-Islam Camp up in the north last night. A lot of people expected to find ricin there. None was found. How big of a problem is that? And is it curious to you that given how much control U.S. and coalition forces now have in the country, they haven’t found any weapons of mass destruction?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Not at all. If you think — let me take that, both pieces — the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.

Unfortunately, many of Billmon’s links go to interviews hosted by servers at the Department of Defense. I would feel more confident in finding them tomorrow if somebody else with a nice big server would make copies elsewhere.

Bush says we found those WMD. Did we find nuclear weapons, tons of ricin, stockpiles of anthrax? Nope. But we did find two trailers.

The agency reported that no pathogens were found in the two trailers and added that civilian use of the heavy transports, such as water purification or pharmaceutical production, was “unlikely” because of the effort and expense required to make the equipment mobile. Production of biological warfare agents “is the only consistent, logical purpose for these vehicles,” the CIA report concluded.

Well, my apologies for suggesting that evidence of WMD in Iraq was exaggerated to provide cover for sending US troops. They had not one but two big trailers–gosh, who knew?

The Bush flight suit story and pix had been around blogs for weeks before Richard Goldstein surfaced it in VV. “AllHatNoCattle” was early, with lot of links:

http://www.allhatnocattle.net/5-12-03-bush-sock-flight-suit.htm

Of course I like my version best:
http://BetsyDevine.weblogger.com/2003/05/16#a178 aka
http://betsydevine.com/blog/2003/05/16/but-karl-you-told-me-to-stick-a-sock-in-it/

Several people have said that flight suits just plain do this–Google image searches didn’t turn up even one similar photo. Flight suits without those crotch straps make guys look like eunuchs…you check it out, you know how to google. It’s hard to believe the hyperactive image consultants described in the NYT article

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/16/politics/16IMAG.html?ex=1054094400&en=a1fcc8877e3f54ec&ei=5070

didn’t finetune the fit of that flight suit before letting Bush be photographed in it. Like you, I doubt that fine-tuning was as low-tech as “shoving a sock down the commander in chief’s tightie-whities.” That couldn’t be it–preppie Yalies wear boxer shorts.

What did the artist leave out? Check yesterday’s post.

(Cartoon by Tony Auth of the Philadelphia Enquirer.)

That flight suit photo-op story is hitting the blogs in a form the dead-tree press most likely won’t, er, touch. Oh yeah, both the WSJ and the NYT recycled the “Bush-in-flight-suit-sexy” meme–to quote Maureen Dowd

Lisa Schiffren, a Quayle speechwriter who wrote the “Murphy Brown” rant, gushed in a Wall Street Journal piece entitled “Hey, Flyboy” that President Bush in a flight suit was “really hot . . . as in virile, sexy and powerful.”
She polled her soccer-mom girlfriends in Manhattan and got the same reaction. “He’s a hottie,” said one. “Hot? SO HOT!!!!! THAT UNIFORM!” said another. And a third panted, “That swagger. George Bush in a pair of jeans is a treat to watch.” (If it gets any hotter, Wal-Mart may have to ban The Journal.)

But will they pick up on “Republicans bring back the codpiece”?
Will they take up the growing speculation that Bush’s flight suit was–errrr–strategically enhanced?

For more visuals of the Bush Top Gun display, check out this WhiteHouse.org parody, scroll down, and click on “hunky flight suit sausage strut.”

Yet another Bush campaign photo op, paid for by taxes.

Voters beware!–a powerful elite controls the media, forces its ugly values into the classroom, and sneers with disdain at the average working American. That’s the big Republican meme these days. And who are the “elite” they hope voters will rise up against? (Hint–not the billionaires who run our country.)

We are the evil “elite.” Young couples marching for peace with their babies in strollers. People of color sending kids to college. Four-eyed professors who drive rusting Volvos. People who don’t get their news from Fox and their values from Rush Limbaugh.

When Democrats said the Bush tax cut was big for billionaires and lousy for most of us, Republicans were outraged. Bush called it “the typical class warfare rhetoric, trying to pit one group of people against another.”

But pitting one group of people against another is almost a family value for the Right. Southern Democrats pioneered the trick, holding onto power by keeping blacks from voting and keeping whites afraid of voting by blacks. (Republicans try to be subtler with the white-versus-black trick.) The big thing now is promoting “family values”, with the implied threat that if Democrats get elected your baby sister will star in lesbian porno.

When Pennsylvania’s Sen. Rick Santorum compared homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery, many people were outraged by his effort to spread–and benefit from–division and hatred. Dean, Kerry, and Lieberman spoke out against it. Republicans saw the liberal outrage as a PR bonanza –“proof” that the left is elitist and anti-family:

Conservative Republicans, including former presidential candidate Gary Bauer, rallied to Santorum’s defense. ‘I think that while some elites may be upset by those comments, they’re pretty much in the mainstream of where most of the country is,’ Bauer said.

In the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto gloated the Democrats’ reaction could cost them votes:

Many Americans have deeply held religious or moral objections to homosexuality, and it would not be unreasonable for them to take the Democrats’ attack on Santorum as an attack on their own values.

So, in conclusion

• It is evil, divisive, unAmerican class warfare for economists to point out that the Bush tax cuts benefit billionaires.
• It is noble and heartfelt to assert that American family life will be destroyed unless the law forbids “bad” sex between consulting adults.
• And the “left-wing intellectuals,” the “self-styled experts,” the “Hollywood elites” who think homosexuals should be treated like human beings–we will be painted as the real enemy of American voters.

Remember the wolf wrapped up in Grandma’s nightie? He’s now a role model for top marketing droids. As they spread their slick prose out over the Web, imagining we’ll all imagine they’re “just plain folks”– let’s imagine instead we’re Red Riding Hood checking out someone who claims to be Grandma. Marketing droids may not have great big teeth, but they do make some very obvious mistakes:

1. Droids ask for trust but dodge verifiability. The author of Microsoft’s “I just switched from Apple” story (outed by Slashdotters in October 2002) larded her prose with “personal” details and cute little interjections like “Girl Scout’s honor.” She also kept her identity secret, used a stock image as if it were her own photo, and turned out to have been promoting Microsoft products for years.
2. Droids love fake ultra-amateur effects. Check out the scrawly “graffiti” on Dr. Pepper’s faux blog for Raging Cow. OK, handwritten scrawls on a piece of paper might be the work of a real amateur. But to get such a scrawl into a 4K gif with a transparent background…Grandma, is that you? Who went out and bought you an art department?
3. Droids can’t resist adding stuff that Grandma wouldn’t. That Republican canned-letters-to-smalltown-papers campaign reeked of obvious spoilers. You can picture a non-droid Grandma writing “President Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership”–a little pompous, maybe, but it’s possible. But how likely is she to cite average tax cuts to four significant figures? The fake “Microsoft switcher” couldn’t resist urging readers to buy, right away, Microsoft’s most expensive package. She also jumped schizophrenically, back and forth, between oh-so-sincere gushing personal memoir and complex step-by-step switching procedures.

I notice, since starting this story, that Dr. Pepper has stopped pretending their ragingcow.com page is a blog. It’s now a webpage that admits it’s an ad. I give lots of credit for this to webloggers who protested their original deception. In this case we bloggers played not only Red Riding Hood but the woodsman with the ax. Both roles are needed, with all those wolves out there.

Betsy’s quote of the day for earnest droids: “The most important thing is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” Jean Giraudoux

Blogger alert–here come the right-wing think-tanks! That’s the word from Gary Farber, a clueful libertarian and one of my favorite sources for interesting links. The Heritage Foundation wants Gary (and probably other bloggers) to opt-in for a barrage on right-wing-policy email. I love the smarmy opening:

“Gary, You’ve been discovered! Tim Rutten’s Media column in today’s edition of The Los Angeles Times is the latest example of the traditional media’s newfound appreciation of the growing influence of bloggers on America’s public policy debates. “

Checking out the press releases online at Heritage.org, I’m not sure they rise much above “President Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership.” The tone of the praise for Bush sounds like Smithers raving about Montgomery Burns. Consider this rosy “analysis” of the Bush tax cut:

“We’ve been scoring tax proposals for years, and I’ve never before seen one that would give the economy such a boost,” he [Heritage economist William Beach] said. “The main reason—and it’s ironic, when you consider how the plan is criticized—is the dividend tax cut…
“This isn’t a tax cut for the wealthy,” he said. “It’s a job-creation machine.”

No word on how many of those predicted new jobs go to India or Korea–or how many just pay as if you were living there.

Who is the Heritage Foundation? According to a recent article in The Economist (the article is premium content there, but online with permission over at Heritage.org):

At their most organized, the right-wing think-tanks often seem more like businesses than universities. Heritage, for instance, has a carefully defined mission: influencing Capitol Hill. Mr. Feulner ruthlessly sets objectives and measures performance. Heritage is as passionate about selling conservative ideas as Coca-Cola is about selling gaseous drinks.

Bloggers, watch out for gaseous drinks ahead–Coca-Cola or Raging Cow–and now Heritage Foundation wants you to drink their Kool-Aid.

Urrrrrrrpp.

Blocking Democrats’ phones on election day with repeated hang-up calls–an Idaho phone bank was paid thousands of dollars to do just that. NH Republicans admit paying $15,600 to the firm that set up these calls. Phone foolery is just a misdemeanor, but interfering with elections is a felony. So, is any NH Republican in trouble?

No.

The NH GOP claimed the only guilty party was GOPMarketplace.com. Did state or federal agencies follow up?

No.

According to the Feb. 20 Union Leader, the GOP Marketplace attorney said “the firm hasn’t heard from federal or state investigators, either.”

The party of law and order blocked calls to the Manchester Firefighters’ Union as well as to Democrats. This infuriated Manchester police, who asked both state and national officials to investigate. Did anything come of this request?

No.

A week later (Feb. 12) the Union Leader reported “For the third consecutive business day, the Justice Department’s public affairs office in Washington did not return The Union Leader’s call.“

Republicans run NH, Republicans run DC. This investigation was over before it started.

The Feb. 21 Union Leader reports that Manchester City Republican Party Chairman Joe Kelly Levasseur used his TV show to call NH Democratic chair “Kathy Sullivan a bitch” and city chair Raymond Buckley a “political masturbator.” Was he reined in by the party of “family values”?

No.

“State Republican Party Chairman Jayne Millerick issued a statement saying Levasseur “certainly has a colorful way of expressing himself.” But Millerick questioned why Democrats were focusing on Levasseur’s behavior instead of important state issues. She would not answer a question about whether Levasseur’s behavior violates the new Republican code of ethics.”

What new code of ethics? The one that forbids GOP staffers to indulge in “any activity which would corrupt or degrade the political process.”

In today’s Union Leader, veteran reporter John DiStaso smashes the Republican cover-up piece by piece.

The Republicans have claimed at various times:

• That they never hired GOP Marketplace.
• That they paid GOP Marketplace for get-out-the-vote calls.
• That they were demanding a refund from GOP Marketplace.“If we don’t get it back, you might see a theft of services charge,” said Republican leader Richard Kennedy .

Within the past few days, GOPMarketplace.com has disappeared from the web, replaced by a collection of “Access Denied” and “404-not found” pages. The phone still works, though, and DiStasio talked to the company’s attorney, who said that NH Republicans have made no effort to get back the $15,600 spent on phone-jamming.

When confronted by DiStasio, GOP State Chair Millerick explained “she hasn’t tried to get a refund since she’s been in office, preferring to ‘move forward’.”

The GOPMarketplace attorney John Partridge also says the firm hasn’t been contacted by any investigators–federal or state. If true, that makes the disappearance of their website even more strange.

And one more question. If no NH Republicans knew about the plan to block get-out-the-vote phone lines–how did Virginia-based GOP Marketplace or the Idaho-based phone bank get the phone number of the Manchester Firefighters’ Union?

The Boston Globe was got lots of publicity for blasting Republican efforts to disguise press releases as “letters” from local readers. But the Globe was not the only one to complain.

• The Times Herald-Record called them “phony letters … an insult to readers”.
• The Press of Atlantic City called them ” canned letters from partisan Web sites.”
• The Christian Science Monitor warned of “the danger…when powerful interests overwhelm ordinary citizens’ voices.”

Maia Cowan’s Astroturf page lists even more angry newspapers, with links.

Now, as David Weinberger points out, GOPTeamleader.com is urging its fans to write angry letters to the Boston Globe–and thoughtfully offers that now-discredited “genuine leadership” form letter as a starting point.

Coupling negative ads with calls to action lets spin-mongers recruit angry people to do their dirty work for them. Irate callers and letter-writers harass your enemy’s staff, and if those staff members try to present their own side of the story, it’s at your enemy’s expense. There are a lot of angry people in the world who are willing to do work like this for free. But working for GOPTeamLeader.com has an added benefit–you get “GOPoints” if you write to abuse the Globe.