Reality's Revenge

"'The media is easily duped,' said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, who credited -- or perhaps blamed -- Republicans for being 'very good at translating misstatements into news.'"

Here's Christopher Hitchens talking to Paula Zahn on CNN last night: "I don't remember anything being as shamelessly distorted as Kerry's hapless attempt to tell a feeble joke about Bush's I.Q. But it seems to be quite Nixonian what the White House and the Republican Party's been doing. It's self-evident that Kerry wouldn't have tried to equate stupidity with military service, and it's an attempt to change the subject in the crummiest way. . . .

"It's almost degrading to have to discuss it, but since we are doing so, I think that's what ought to be said. It's an attempt -- it looks like it's talking about Iraq when it's not."

Maybe Not Such a Great Move After All?

Richard Wolffe and Holly Bailey write for Newsweek: "The risks for President Bush are greater than they are for Senator Kerry, who may have suffered the deep embarrassment of falling into a familiar self-made trap. But he leads nothing inside his party, sets no strategy and the Democrats can easily disown him -- as several candidates have done by canceling events with him this week.

"President Bush, on the other hand, enjoys no such luxuries. In fact, the concerted attack on Kerry -- complete with White House and Republican National Committee press releases -- threatens to undermine a central premise of the party's strategy. For months on the campaign trail, GOP candidates have insisted the election isn't a referendum on Bush or national politics; it's a choice between two local contenders. The president may have diverted attention back onto Democrats, but he also turned the focus back on himself and the war."

Wolffe and Bailey also write that "it's easy to see why President Bush is vastly happier campaigning like it's still 2004. His rhetoric on the campaign trail reflects those relatively comfortable days much more than the somber statements he has recently issued from the White House.

"Just last week, at his press conference in the East Room, the president told how the violence in Iraq started with a sophisticated insurgency, fueled in part by al-Qaeda. But more recently the killing turned into 'sectarian reprisals' and what he called 'the cycle of violence.'

"But on the campaign trail, there is no room for the insurgents or sectarian death squads. There are only terrorists, and their apparent friends, the Democrats."

Howard Fineman writes for MSNBC: "We know what George W. Bush thinks of Sen. John Kerry: not much. But doesn't the president have anything to say for himself? In fact he does, or should. He and his fellow Republicans have accomplishments to sell, or at least talk about. But they haven't done it effectively, which is one reason why they are likely to get whacked at the polls next week. . . .

"[T]hey have run a national campaign largely in attack mode. You know the litany: The Democrats will raise your taxes. The Democrats will pack the courts with 'activist' judges. A victory for the Democrats is a victory for the terrorists and Osama bin Laden. The Democrats disrespect the traditional family. . . .

"But the strategy of dividing the world into good and evil may now backfire on the president and his party. If you're an unpopular president -- and Bush is one of the most unpopular in the modern era -- you don't want a world divided that way. In that world, you end up on the wrong side of the equation."

The Great Denier

From a New York Times editorial today: "As President Bush throws himself into the final days of a particularly nasty campaign season, he's settled into a familiar pattern of ugly behavior. Since he can't defend the real world created by his policies and his decisions, Mr. Bush is inventing a fantasy world in which to campaign on phony issues against fake enemies.