Welcome to 201k.com - A Commonwealth Perspective.

Back on August 31 we predicted that the Red Sox would win the World Series and that John Kerry would get enough votes to win the election, but that that might not be enough to get him in the White House.

We've been proven right--miraculously--on one count. And the other has us concerned.

We believe certain pollsters and much of the media have been juicing the polls to make the race seem closer than it is. We simply do not believe that George Bush is as close to or even ahead of John Kerry as some polls suggest. And we're very concerned that all Americans' votes might not be counted.

Our fear is that we'll head into election night with a phony Bush "lead" of, say, four points, and that he'll end up "winning" by two points or so, and the talking heads will say, "whew, that was close--looks like the religious right showed up in force to give him the margin for victory."

This seems to be what's being set up.

It would not only create a believable story line, it would give the illusion of a mandate for the religious right--and seem to explain away any questions about the integrity of the vote. The fact that year after year more people vote Democratic would conveniently be forgotten.

We know this is all conspiratorialist, but we're having trouble believing that a gang like the Bush administration, who have demonstrated both unprecedented abuse of power and stunning disrespect for the law and the public, would simply let the voters derail them. Reality doesn't MATTER to these people.

After 86 Years, Red Sox Finally Do It!

Congratulations to the Beautiful Idiots: The World Champion 2004 Boston Red Sox.

And while we're celebrating, we'd like to take this opportunity to point out that we predicted this World Series victory back on August 31st.

Don't believe us? See for yourself.

William Safire, whose editorial "opinions" always seem to bear a striking resemblance to Bush administration talking points, manages to do it again today -- but this time with an unintentionally humorous twist.

Picking up on (or more likely reading the same preparatory memo as) George Bush, Safire's Rove echo is summarized by the Times thusly:

The Year of Fear
October 20, 2004
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

...the Fear Room at Kerry campaign headquarters is on a hair trigger to turn any breaking news into a personal threat.

You an oldster? The fearmongers' pitch is that President Bush is plotting to snatch your Social Security check....You a youngster? The fearmongers noticed an urban legend floating around the Internet about a ''January surprise'' to bring back the draft and throw you into the first wave into Falluja. ...You got a cough? The Fear Room says it is probably the flu and that anti-health Bush stole your vaccine...

...My advice to voters in this political Year of Fear, as well as to journalists and our sources, is from Joshua 1:9: ''Be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed.'' Courage and freedom will win, and the purveyors of panic will lose.

Got it? John Kerry is a "fearmonger" and a "purveyor of panic" for warning Americans about Bush administration policy.

Meanwhile...

By Andrew Welsh-Huggins

Oct. 19, 2004 | Carroll, Ohio -- Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday evoked the possibility of terrorists bombing U.S. cities with nuclear weapons and questioned whether Sen. John Kerry could combat such a threat, which the vice president called a concept "you've got to get your mind around."

Yeah, that Kerry, he sure is a fearmonger.

Memo to Safire: Retire.

Additional memo to Safire: we don't know or care if we used "thusly" properly above. Retire.

Below is our response to an email received from General Mills in reply to requests that the company pull its ads from Sinclair Broadcasting.

From: Editor - 201k
Date: Tue Oct 19, 2004 6:24:57 PM US/Eastern
To: cshelp@genmills.com
Subject: Fwd: General Mills' Position Regarding Sinclair Broadcast Group

General Mills "chooses" to misrepresent the concept of freedom of the press, and pretends that advertisers owe some duty to the media with which they place ads.

Their position is beyond willfully obtuse; it is an insult to the intelligence of American voters and consumers. Clearly, General Mills would reserve for itself the right to cancel ads with a media outlet if that outlet were criticizing General Mills. To claim that a higher duty is in play here is both spurious and disingenuous.

We therefor can only presume that General Mills is in sympathy with the message Sinclair is preparing to send, and mistakenly believes that a dissembling notice from their Public Relations Department will fool Americans. It does not.

201k.com therefor recommends our readers "choose" to boycott General Mills.

Regards,

201k.com

Here's the email that prompted our response:

From: "Consumer Services-Help"
Date: Tue Oct 19, 2004 3:25:54 PM US/Eastern
To:
Subject: General Mills' Position Regarding Sinclair Broadcast Group

Thank you for contacting General Mills.

Many consumers have written to share their views on this issue. Some have urged General Mills to use its influence as an advertiser to ensure that the media reports the news in an unbiased manner. Some have urged General Mills to continue advertising, and have threatened to withdraw support for our products if we alter our advertising plans. Passions run deep on both sides, particularly this close to an election.

Whenever possible, General Mills does strive to preview the programs on which our advertising appears. We do so to assure that we do not advertise on programs inconsistent with the family-oriented nature of our products. This works well with entertainment programs produced and available for advance screening, but pre-screening of news broadcasts is usually not possible.

Our view in this area is clear. We believe one of the fundamental elements of our society is the freedom of the press. Companies such as ours, in our view, should not attempt to influence, control or pre-empt the content of news through the leverage of advertising sponsorship. To do so would undermine that fundamental freedom.

From time to time, any one of us as viewers may consider a particular news story to be inaccurate or imbalanced. News organizations do err. Judgment is not always well applied. One major news organization recently acknowledged that errors were made in stories relating to the current presidential election. When such errors occur, certainly a price is paid in terms of reputation. But errors and questionable judgment are an acceptable price to pay, in our view, to assure the presence of a free and independent media in our society.

As viewers, each of us is free to make a choice. We can choose to patronize or not patronize programs with our viewership. We can choose to patronize or not patronize particular television stations, or even entire networks.

Similarly, advertisers may choose not to sponsor certain broadcasts, a particular network or specific publications because of their journalistic standards and judgment. But advertisers should not attempt to control or pre-empt news programming prior to broadcast or publication. That, in our view, would be inappropriate.

In this instance, as in the example cited earlier, passionate voices are calling on advertisers to insert themselves into the election by threatening to boycott those who remove or who do not remove their advertising.

We choose to stand with freedom of the press.

We welcome the views that you and others have shared with us. You may rest assured that we will remind the networks we sponsor that the integrity of their reporting reflects on the companies that advertise during their broadcasts.

Hopefully, you will understand our views and the importance we place on a free press.

Again, thank you for taking the time to contact us and share your views.

Sincerely,

General Mills

Make no mistake about this letter: Generals Mills has only echoed in a few noble-sounding paragraphs what has been Sinclair's smarmy legal argument: that the anti-Kerry documentary is "news". General Mills goes further, taking pains to cover its you-know-what and reserve for itself the right to "choose not to sponsor certain broadcasts, a particular network or specific publications because of their journalistic standards and judgment" and, of course, "to assure that we do not advertise on programs inconsistent with the family-oriented nature of our products". But this case is different, they say, because the anti-Kerry screed is "news".

It cannot be an accident that General Mill's defense is identical to Sinclair's own. Make of the amazing coincidence what you will.

Memo to General Mills: if ordering 62 affiliates to preempt prime-time programming to run without commercial interruption a documentary full of disproved smears of a Democratic presidential candidate that was made by known Republican operatives is "news", then boycotting General Mills products is "a sacrament".

Remember how President Bush said he couldn't allow Americans to buy prescription drugs from Canada because he couldn't guarantee their safety? How he pretended that this pork to the pharmaceutical industry was really an anti-terrorism measure?

So do we. But hey, look:

U.S. to stop inspecting tobacco
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Nancy Zuckerbrod

Oct. 17, 2004 | WASHINGTON -- Legislation just passed by Congress abolishes the requirement that the government inspect imported tobacco to ensure it is not laced with chemicals and pesticides banned in the United States but permitted elsewhere.

The tobacco plan is part of a major corporate tax bill that is awaiting President Bush's signature.

Now to some this may seem inconsistent, but to us it highlights the one sure consistency of George W. Bush's political philosophy:

Which is: whatever corporate campaign donors want, corporate campaign donors get.

Now here's an analogy for you:

To the Editor:

Thomas L. Friedman decries President Bush's focus on 9/11 and the fight against terrorism. He wants to "put terrorism back into perspective," and not allow Sept. 11 to "become a day that defines us." It's about "the bad guys," he says, but "we're about the Fourth of July."

Has Mr. Friedman forgotten what the Fourth of July is about? It commemorates the fight for the same principles as those President Bush is leading the fight for today: freedom from oppression; an end to the powers of tyranny; the rights of self-government, life and liberty for all people.

The people of Afghanistan and Iraq, long crushed under murderous tyrannies, are now being set free and are beginning to taste those same cherished values that we fought for in 1776 and that we fight to bring to them today.

No doubt there have been and will be failures and setbacks. But it is a noble fight.

Steven Sittser
Ballwin, Mo., Oct. 15, 2004

Gosh darn it, Steven is right. Why, where would we be if back in 1776 the French hadn't invaded the British colonies in America, wiped out the Red Coats, and appointed the Marquis de Lafayette President?

Oh, and converted us all to Catholicism.

"Smear and Fear" should be the Bush/Cheney election campaign slogan.

President Bush has no plan to deal with the rising cost of health care or prescriptions. When pressed on this issue--critical to millions of Americans--Mr. Bush repeats his scripted tirade against "trial attorneys" and "frivolous lawsuits", and calls John Kerry names.

That is not a health care plan.

But Mr. Bush has nothing else to offer. Well, not quite all; we've seen recently that the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine has spent millions investigating the possible health benefits of prayer. Since a recent government study found that 45 percent of adults prayed specifically for health reasons and suggested that many of them were poor people with limited access to care, it was, in the words of NCCAM senior advisor Dr. Richard Nahin, "a public health imperative to understand if this prayer offers them any benefit."

Attacking trial attorneys and counting on the benefits of prayer to meet "a public health imperative" do not constitute a health care plan, and Mr. Bush knows it. So when the subject comes up--he attacks John Kerry.

Similarly, Mr. Bush has no plan to untangle the mess in Iraq. Bogged down in a guerilla war, caught in what experts now say was Saddam Hussein's plan all along--retreat followed by sustained guerilla attacks--the US is bearing 90% of the "coalition" costs in lives and money. Mr. Bush has gone back to the UN looking for assistance, but has been met with skepticism.

This is unsurprising, given that he tried to mislead and bully them into this war in the first place. He sent Colin Powell to present highly dubious evidence in support of now-discredited claims of Iraq's WMD and ties to al-Qaida--claims Mr. Powell himself now regrets making. When that failed to convince, Mr. Bush himself went and told the UN that if they didn't follow him unquestioningly they were "with the terrorists". It was hardly America's greatest moment on the world stage.

Mr. Bush never had a viable plan for fighting terrorism. He never had a viable plan for engaging the rest of the world in his war in Iraq. He has no viable plan for getting out of Iraq. He has no viable plan for sustaining the troops levels we now need with a volunteer military.

So he attacks John Kerry.

We could go on and on, but the repetition would be tiresome. The fact is that on issue after issue Mr. Bush has nothing to offer, and instead counters every criticism of his term in office not with substantive refutations but with attacks and yes, smears, on his opponent.

These smears do not answer the questions which any American has a right to ask about Mr. Bush's basic competence. Changing the subject and attacking John Kerry does not combat rising health care costs, set a strategy for getting out of Iraq, balance the budget, or create jobs.

We believe that if Mr. Bush had plans for dealing with these things we'd have heard them by now.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have perfected the art of suggesting that a vote for Kerry is a vote for "terrorism", or will somehow bring down upon us another terrorist attack. Their surrogates have gone as far as claiming that "the terrorists" prefer John Kerry, which, frankly, is a little hard to believe given how much they've accomplished under George W. Bush.

The lowness of this Strategy of Fear is almost beyond comprehension; we've never heard anything so pernicious, so un-American, come out of the mouths of a candidate for the nation's highest office.

But it's all they have. Mr. Bush has presided over what may be the worst four years in office for a president since the Civil War erupted around Abraham Lincoln: the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, the worst jobs record since Herbert Hoover, and the worst foreign policy since William McKinley's. He could not possibly run for reelection on his record. So instead he has embraced the politics of Smear and Fear.

Americans should reject Smear and Fear--and reject Mr. Bush.

201k.com endorses John F. Kerry for President of the Unites States. Simply put, the world is too dangerous a place for us to any longer trust the presidency to the hands of Mr. Bush, who mistakes image control, obfuscations and mule-headed certainty for policy.

John Kerry is pragmatic, experienced, accomplished, and intelligent. America desperately need that.

The recent attempt by American Catholic Bishops to meddle in politics--which in our opinion should invalidate the Church's tax-free status--did not go unnoticed by a fellow Commonwealth denizen:

To the Editor:

You write (front page, Oct. 12), "The National Catholic Reporter reported that on a visit to the pope this year Mr. Bush asked Vatican officials directly for help in lining up American bishops in support of conservative cultural issues."

I am a 61-year-old middle-class wife and mother. I have never felt so marginalized and fearful of the misuse of power, and so aware of the insidious blurring of constitutional safeguards like the separation of church and state.

Karen Rappaport
Stow, Mass., Oct. 12, 2004

The email below went out to all Poor Readers of 201k.com. For information on the boycott, including a list of advertisers searchable by geographic region, go here.

Hello,

This email is to inform you that we have joined a boycott of your business due to the fact that you advertise with Sinclair Broadcast Group, who are violating the spirit--if not the law--of democracy by airing political propaganda days before the presidential election under the guise of "news".

Our website, "A Commonwealth Perspective", is based in Massachusetts and gets thousands of hits a day. We will be posting our decision to join the boycott on the site, and including it in our daily email to our readers.

Please understand that we do not hold you responsible for the actions of Sinclair, nor do we wish to harm your business. However Sinclair has gone too far, and we--along with millions of other Americans across the country--feel we have no other option.

For more information on this boycott, including lists of advertisers who have already pulled ads from Sinclair, please see http://www.boycottsbg.com

Regards,

Editor
201k.com

After reading this article from tomorrow's Times, readers may want to revisit the www.201k.com entry for June 23, 2004, detailing the media's complicity in this farce.

MYSTERY MAN

Who Is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi?

By DON VAN NATTA Jr.
Published: October 10, 2004

Who is Mr. Zarqawi? Is he Al Qaeda's point man in Iraq, as the Bush administration has repeatedly argued since weeks before the invasion of Iraq? Or, as some European and Middle East intelligence officials argue, is he a staunch rival of Mr. bin Laden's network whose importance has been exaggerated by the United States in an attempt to dramatize a link between Al Qaeda and the deposed regime of Saddam Hussein?

There is no dispute that Mr. Zarqawi has brazenly led a campaign of car bombings, mortar attacks, kidnappings and beheadings in Iraq, asserting his responsibility for the devastating attack in August 2003 on the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad.

But is Mr. Zarqawi responsible for "most of the major car bombings that have killed or maimed thousands of people," as Mr. Cheney charged at the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday?

He may not be quite the prolific terrorist mastermind that the Bush administration claims.

Last night's second debate between John Kerry and George Bush likely changed few minds. Certainly not ours. More on that later.

But first: we heard some extraordinary things last night from George Bush. More extraordinary than usual, even.

Asked whether he had adequately prepared to manage post-war Iraq, Mr. Bush said:

"I remember sitting in the White House looking at those generals, saying, 'Do you have what you need in this war? Do you have what it takes?' " Mr. Bush said. "I remember going down to the basement of the White House the day we committed our troops, as a last resort, looking at Tommy Franks and the generals on the ground, asking them, 'Do we have the right plan with the right troop level?' " Mr. Bush said. "And they looked me in the eye and said, 'Yes, sir, Mr. President.' "

The president of the United States last night blamed the current Iraq debacle on his generals.

We cannot remember a sitting president telling the American people and the world--on national television--that his military commanders were to blame for the difficulties of an ongoing mission*.

But it didn't end there. Asked to name three mistakes he's made and what he did to correct them, George Bush said:

"Now you ask what mistakes. I've made some mistakes in appointing people, but I'm not going to name them. I don't want to hurt their feelings on national TV."

In other words, the only mistake he can think of is that some of the people he appointed were no good.

It's hard to be president when the help keeps letting you down.

It's bad enough that Mr. Bush is unable to realistically look at his own decisions and performance. It's worse that it's so easy for him to publicly blame others. But it's positively frightening to understand that the "appointees" Mr. Bush was referring to were not, in fact, the ones that most Americans would think of when the question of "mistakes" arises. Not at all.

He does not mean Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who personally insisted on taking America to war with what we now know was a force insufficient to truly secure the country in preparation for post-war management.

He does not mean Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor who ignored all warnings of the attacks of 9/11--then denied that she'd been warned, mischaracterized the information she'd seen, and tried to avoid testifying about it under oath.

He does not mean Attorney General John Ashcroft, who has relentlessly striven to increase the power and reach that the Justice Department has over loyal American citizens, while failing--disastrously in some cases--to catch even one real terrorist.

No, sadly, it's clear that the appointees that Mr. Bush regrets, the ones he feels let him down, are the ones who disagreed with him. The ones who told him, and the American people, the truth.

Because truth and reality aren't the standard Mr. Bush cares about; loyalty to him and unquestioning commitment to the message are. Get off message and you're a mistake.

But never fear--he'll spare your "feelings on national TV". Unless you're a general, of course--then he'll blame you, by name, for the situation in Iraq.

Look: asked to account for clear errors, the president of the United States twice blamed others. He laid responsibility for the situation in Iraq at the feet of his generals, and said that in four years the only mistake he's made is appointing some bad people.

Frankly, we didn't think anything George Bush could say would surprise us at this point, but he proved us wrong. He proved last night that he is, in fact, the most irresponsible man to hold his office in our lifetime.

Back to the notion of changing minds, or more specifically, the "undecideds". We admit we have trouble with this. The differences in these two men and their policies could not be more distinct. How on God's green earth could anyone be undecided?

Adam Nagourney and Robin Toner of the New York Times report:

Three voters in the audience said after the debate that they were unmoved by the candidates' answers and that they remained undecided.

"I'm no more near a decision now than I was this time yesterday," said Linda Grabel, a 63-year-old legal secretary...

Look, we don't want to be unkind, but if the two major party candidates actually standing in front of you answering your questions for 90 minutes isn't enough for you to make up your mind how you're going to vote, then maybe you should try THINKING ABOUT IT A LITTLE HARDER.

What do they need to do? Come to your house and do your laundry? Marry your daughter?

Good grief, people, get a glove and get in the game. Look into what these two men stand for; go to their websites, read their policies and decide which one comes closest to your own views. It's not that hard--they're REALLY, REALLY DIFFERENT.

We can't help thinking these undecideds are the people in restaurants who pore over the menu, can't decide what to have for dinner, keep everyone else at the table waiting, ask the waiter to recite the specials again and again--then when their choice finally arrives, say they wished they'd got the fish.

Why are these people the focus of the election? We wouldn't even go on a second date with one of them.

[* This is not the first time Bush has publicly criticized his own military, by the way. Back on May 2 of this year 201k noted that Mr. Bush chose to air his "disgust" at the actions of soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison to the media. This was before it was revealed that the "legal opinion" authorizing torture had come from his administration.]

How's this for a thesis:

Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Scooter Libby--and others--knew all along there were no WMD in Iraq. In fact, they knew that, far from being a threat, Saddam Hussein's Iraq was actually the weakest target in the Middle East, and that's why they decided to invade there. That they were determined to put a US military presence in the region for reasons having nothing to do with US security, and Iraq was their chosen foothold.

Doesn't everything that's happened--and everything they've said--make a lot more sense in this light? Why they thought a small force would suffice? Why they didn't bother equipping the soldiers with proper gear? Why they didn't bother getting a coalition to help pay for it? Why they ignored all the voices in their own government who suspected their "intelligence" on Iraq's WMD was faulty? (Because they didn't care.)

That they thought they could get away with "stretching the truth" about Iraq's WMD and ties to al Queda because they truly believed it would be a cakewalk--since there were no WMD--and that once the deed was done no one would bother to go back and check the details?

Think about it: if post-war Iraq had gone well, no one would be paying attention to who said what beforehand. isn't that what they were counting on?

It's time to take a step back and really look at what's happened here. Think about what they said, what the reality turned out to be, and how they changed rationales as the story began to fall apart. Think about George Bush and Dick Cheney constantly putting the words "9/11" and "terrorism" in sentences while talking about Iraq and Hussein but never truly connecting them grammatically.

They were deliberately suggesting a link without actually saying it--to make a phony case but leave plausible deniability. Aren't they now in fact trying to plausibly deny they ever made a connection? Dick Cheney actually said in the debate with John Edwards that he never suggested to Americans a connection between 9/11 and Iraq.

Then who did? Santa Claus? Does he expect us to accept now that that case was made by anyone other than the Bush administration?

Check out this recent quote from White House spokesman Scott McClellan:

McClellan ticked off a litany of what he said were links between Iraq and al-Qaida. Both were "sworn enemies of the free world, including the United States''; both "celebrated the Sept. 11 attacks on America,'' he said.

Wow, some links, huh? They practically share a checking account. By this standard we'll have to invade 34 countries tomorrow. Using the National Guard, presumably.

How's that pap compared to what they were saying before the invasion?

Here's the bottom line: they can no longer justify the decision to invade Iraq. We're talking about the first preemptive war in the history of the country. They now justify it by saying--repeatedly--that this is the "post-9/11 world". Ask what Iraq had to do with 9/11 and they mumble something about "a nexus of terrorism and WMD". That's just rhetoric; there were no WMD, no ties to terrorists, and nothing to connect the two together in Iraq. Just the opposite, in fact.

Given all this, are we supposed to forget that many of these guys had been talking about invading Iraq for years? Is it all just an amazing coincidence? They got to use the US military to fulfill a plan they'd had for years, after which--oops--it turns out there weren't really any weapons or ties to al-Qaida? But oh well, now we're stuck with it so we have to "stay the course"--but gosh don't hold us responsible for the screw up?

Please. I was born at night but it wasn't last night.

Meanwhile they've abandoned Afghanistan to the point that Hamid Karzai is only in charge of whatever street his guards happen to be standing on at the moment. And the same thing is happening in Iraq; they've been pushed back to the Green Zone, and now the word is they can't even fully protect that. And they can't convince the Congress or the American people--let alone the rest of the world--to voluntarily increase the troops or money because they have no credibility left.

Worse: they haven't done anything to protect us from terrorism here at home. They caved in to the airline industry on screening baggage, they caved into the chemical industry on protecting chemical plants, they caved into the shipping industry on screening container ships...and they put the budget nearly a half a trillion dollars into deficit.

How have they done anything but make things much, much worse? And why shouldn't Americans demand to know exactly why Iraq was so important to them?

The truth is, the world is a far more dangerous place than George Bush understands. That's the only way to explain his disastrous choices and priorities. And frankly, we think that's because he's never had to live in the real world or suffer the consequences of poor decision-making the way the rest of us do.

Dick Cheney didn't disappoint. Here are a few of the "lies from left field" we predicted he'd throw at John Edwards:

1. "...in Massachusetts we had the Massachusetts Supreme Court direct the State of the Legislature of Massachusetts to modify their constitution to allow gay marriage. And the fact is that the president felt that it was important to make it clear that that that's the wrong way to go, as far as he's concerned."

The SJC of the Commonwealth did not "direct the State of the Legislature of Massachusetts to modify their constitution to allow gay marriage". The Court found that the state constitution as written gives gays the right to marry, and allowed time for the Legislature to amend the state constitution to ban gay marriage should it so desire.

Not even the opponents of gay marriage in Massachusetts claimed the state's constitution needed to be changed to permit gay marriage. Their argument against it was based on the claim that gay marriage was inherently bad for marriage and children and that the state had a constitutional duty to protect those things. The court disagreed--but nether side ever claimed that allowing gay marriage would entail modifying the constitution.

Simply put, Cheney grossly distorted the facts.

His misstatement is more than just a misunderstanding--it's a deliberate attempt to muddle the public's understanding of both the legal issues surrounding gay marriage, and the role of the courts in government. Gay marriage itself is not the point here; John Kerry and George Bush both oppose it. What matters is that Dick Cheney deliberately mischaracterized the legal issue at stake. Why? Why did he intentionally misstate the court's position, and the nature of the dispute here in Massachusetts?

2. "The reason they keep trying to attack Halliburton is because they want to obscure their own record. ...Now, in my capacity as Vice President, I am the president of the Senate and the presiding officer. I'm up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they're in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight."

Here's the truth:

Oct. 6, 2004 | CLEVELAND (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney said Tuesday night that the debate with Democratic Sen. John Edwards marked the first time they had met. In fact, the two had met at least three times previously.

On Feb. 1, 2001, the vice president thanked Edwards by name at a Senate prayer breakfast and sat beside him during the event.

On April 8, 2001, Cheney and Edwards shook hands when they met off-camera during a taping of NBC's "Meet the Press," moderator Tim Russert said Wednesday on "Today."

On Jan. 8, 2003, the two met when the first-term North Carolina senator accompanied Elizabeth Dole to her swearing-in by Cheney as a North Carolina senator, Edwards aides also said.

No one should be surprised to hear that this lie from mars came in response to Edwards' telling the American people that Halliburton did business in Iraq contrary to US sanctions while Dick Cheney was CEO.

And here's a beaut, in response to Edwards' pointing out that by not assembling a true international coalition before invading Iraq, the Bush administration left the US paying 90% of the casualties:

3. Mr. Cheney: Well, Gwen, the 90 percent figure is just dead wrong. When you include the Iraqi security forces that have suffered casualties, as well as the allies, they've taken almost 50 percent of the casualties in operations in Iraq, which leaves the U.S. with 50 percent, not 90 percent.

Get it? Dick Cheney is saying we haven't suffered 90% of the casualties stemming from the invasion of Iraq if you count the dead Iraqis, too. You have to stand back and admire that one. Even if we knew how many Iraqi casualties there have been--which we don't because the Bush Administration won't release the figures--you have to wonder how many dead Iraqis would consider themselves "coalition casualties".

More to come, certainly, as we chew this over.

201k has discussed among itself for days the upcoming debate between John Edwards and Dick Cheney. The question has been whether Edwards' trial attorney skills will enable him to do better than Joe "We Surrender!" Lieberman did in 2000. We were not encouraged to read today that Edwards has been preparing with the same person who helped prepare Holy Joe. Our hope is that this person, like all of us, was banging his head against a wall while watching Lieberman, and not nodding in approval. We'll see.

In any event, here's is what we think Dick Cheney will do tonight: lie. Yes, we know that's obvious, but we mean he'll lie in a specific way: he'll pull lies out of left-field.

Cheney knows that Edwards will be prepared to attack him on his past lies, or on lies that have already been exposed. So what he'll do is make outrageous statements that can't be disproved without research. He knows he doesn't have to debate Edwards two nights in a row, he only has to get through tonight. After that he can rely on the GOP ground troops in the media to fog up the field for him.

The Bush administration long ago stopped playing to America at large, concentrating instead on generating material for its own echo-chambers in the press: Fox News, Murdoch papers, Clear Channel radio, etc. That's what Bush was doing at the U.N (you think he cares if the rest of the world thinks he's a liar?) and that's what he was supposed to do in his debate with Kerry: ignore Kerry and the questions as much as possible, repeat his talking points, and let the vast army of GOP media monkeys handle it afterwards. All they needed was the quotes.

Bush blew it because Kerry was beautifully prepared and because--let's face it--he's the weak link in his own machine. But Cheney isn't a weak link. He'll dodge Edwards' attacks not by answering them with old lies but with new, plausible-sounding ones that no one on earth could refute extemporaneously. Their falsity will be handled in stage two, in the media ground war after the debate.

The only effective way for Edwards to counter this is for him to list--directly and clearly--all of Cheney's past "misstatements", and then ask the American people if they can believe anything Cheney says.

Unless Edwards is prepared to attack Cheney at this basic level of credibility, it will be difficult for him to come out of the debate with an edge. The facts won't matter because Cheney will be making them up as he goes along, confident that his media machine can make them sound like the truth for one more month.

Hey, it's been a while since we've mocked a letter to the Times. Oh look, here's one:

To the Editor:

David Brooks has it exactly right: John Kerry is the competent paint-by-numbers guy who will accurately execute a composite vision, which is what we might expect of a good senator.

President Bush is the creative artist, the visionary, the innovator, trying to create something dramatically new, which is what we need in a great president.

So now the choice is even clearer: slow and steady into an unimaginative future, or boldly into a new world where grand things are possible.

Brian Rom
New York, Oct. 2, 2004

All together now: HEIL! HEIL! HEIL!

MALIBU, Calif. (AP) -- Mel Gibson obtained a temporary restraining order against a man who allegedly showed up at his estate and the chapel he attends, demanding they pray together.

[The man] allegedly went to the gate of Gibson's estate twice in September and asked to pray with the actor. He was first ordered away and then detained.

In a court filing, Gibson said the man interrupted his worship Sept. 19 at a chapel and "demanded that I pray with him.'' The filmmaker's bodyguard escorted Sinclair out.

[The man] also allegedly sent letters to Gibson and his family in which he recounted his prayers for the actor, cited biblical verse and praised Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ.''

I continue to be extremely concerned for the safety of my family,'' Gibson said in the court filing.

Gee, there sure are a lot of nuts in the world. Sounds like this guy has serious reality-contact problems.

You have to feel sorry for him though--people like that are so vulnerable. They wander around obsessed with thoughts unconnected to observable reality and too often they're taken advantage of by the greedy and the power-mad.

And now poor Mel Gibson has to deal with it! Imagine having to worry about protecting your family from people whose obsessions have derailed their grasp of normal social interaction.

We're sure by the end of the weekend the press will have spun last night's "debate" into a Bush victory--or at least into something other than the total Kerry success that it was--but for the time being let us bask in the warm feeling of what it would be like to have a strong, articulate, intelligent president.

The feigned media surprise at the initial positve poll results to Kerry's performace brought smiles to those of us familiar with the Senator; we knew, as did they, that he would impress America once America actually got to see and hear him. But it tells you all you need to know about the state of political news coverage that the true character of the Democratic nominee for president would surprise so many people mere weeks before the election.

Sadly, the buzz won't last. Within minutes the hacks had received their talking points and began what will surely be a weekend's worth of "readjusting" to the public opinion. It was amusing, however, to watch CNN's Candy Crowley struggle to get a coherent thought out in the moments between the end of the debate and before being handed the GOP script. Unable even to form a grammatical sentence, she looked like a player piano in a sequined pink blouse, bad wig--and no music roll.

George Bush was something else. We're told his great strength--besides his vast army of poop-throwing media monkeys--is his ability to "stay on message". There's surely no arguing that, although we'd have hoped that somewhere along the line those paid to report the news would point out that most of what he says is meaningless or inaccurate. But his defeat was so total last night that the best they could do--until the poll results came in--was pretend it was kind of a draw with Bush maybe looking a bit out of sorts.

To us he looked like a man struggling to remember his lines. He'd clearly practiced reciting several statements, and did so--repeatedly--simply ignoring the questions he'd been asked in favor of getting his message out over and over again.

And this is where we have an issue. Given the seriousness of the situation that Mr. Bush's gross incompetence has put the country in, John Kerry needs to suggest to the American people that a president who simply says the same thing over and over and over and over again in direct contradiction to known reality is not "being resolute".

Mr. Kerry did mention Mr. Bush's odd, unfathomable "certitude", and in our opinion this aspect of the president's character deserves further consideration. Mr. Bush has often been very, very certain of things even as his opinions and positions change.

For instance, George Bush was certain, we've learned from his Harvard Business School professor, that the poor were lazy and that the New Deal was "socialism". He was certain he was in favor of the Vietnam War even as he was certain he didn't want to fight in it. He was certain he did his full duty in the Texas Air National Guard.

As a youth he was certain, we're told, that the rules that applied to others didn't apply to him. Presumably he was certain that consumption of alcohol and who knows what else wouldn't harm him.

He became certain it HAD harmed him right about the same time he became very, very certain about Religion.

He was certain he'd filed the required SEC forms when he sold his Harken Oil stock--though he hadn't. And he was certain the SEC had cleared him of wrongdoing in the matter--though they didn't.

He was certain he wouldn't endanger Social Security, or plunge the country into budget deficits. He was certain he hadn't been warned about impending terrorist attacks. He was certain the White House (or Air Force One) was a 9/11 target.

He was certain he didn't want an independent 9/11 commission. Then he was certain there should be one.

He was certain Osama bin Laden was public enemy number one, a man who could run but couldn't hide from us. Then he was certain bin Laden didn't matter in the grand scheme of the "War on Terror".

He was certain Saddam Hussein had WMD, had tried to obtain yellowcake uranium from Nigeria, had ties to al Queda, and was a "grave and gathering threat" to the US. He's just as certain now that those things didn't really matter.

He was certain the the Mission in Iraq was Accomplished. Then he was certain his people hadn't put that sign up. Then he was certain he'd never said those words. Now he's certain democracy and freedom are just about to flourish in Iraq despite the fact that his own intelligence agencies have told him otherwise.

He's certain that John Kerry "saw the same intelligence" on Iraq that he did. Though of course what John Kerry, the Senate, and all of America saw was the intelligence Bush's White House showed us.

He's certain that a vote for the Democratic nominee for president--a man with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts--is a vote for "the terrorists". He's probably certain he won the debate last night.

One thing about George Bush: he never loses his certainty. And he can certainly say the same thing over and over again.

Last night the refrain, in case you were on Mars, was that John Kerry "voted for the Iraq War" and sends "mixed signals" to our allies. This is also in direct contradiction to reality, of course, because, in the first instance, Kerry voted not "for the war" but to give the Mr. Bush the authority he said he needed and subsequently manifestly mishandled, and in the second, everyone--including Mr. Bush and our allies--knows that Mr. Bush has no credibility left anywhere they don't get Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, and that Kerry will be able to go back to the table and negotiate with our allies the deals for Iraq oil contracts in exchange for troops and money that Mr. Bush--because of who financed his election--could not.

But...we expect that not long after the GOP talking points have begun to bubble up in Murdoch-owned newspapers and Clear Channel-owned radio stations across the map, the public will be concerned not about the fact that George Bush grossly misled them into war, and continues to grossly mislead them about how that war is going, but rather about the fact that John Kerry said Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan when "everyone knows" he's waaaaaaaaay over in Pakistan.

Wait a minute--how do they know where he is? Oh, nevermind.