And I don't mean full corona Monte Cristos.

Here's a potential ad script for GWB:

FADE IN

BUSH: "Hi, I'm George W. Bush, and I approved this message"

DISSOLVE TO SENATOR ZELL MILLER, REPUBLICAN CONVENTION:

MILLER: No pair has been more wrong, more loudly, more often than the two Senators from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry.

Together, Kennedy/Kerry have opposed the very weapons system that won the Cold War and that is now winning the War on Terror...

I could go on and on and on: against the Patriot Missile that shot down Saddam Hussein's scud missiles over Israel; against the Aegis air-defense cruiser; against the Strategic Defense Initiative; against the Trident missile; against, against, against.

This is the man who wants to be the Commander in Chief of our U.S. Armed Forces?

U.S. forces armed with what? Spitballs?

DISSOLVE TO SENATOR KERRY, FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE:

KERRY: Right now the president is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to research bunker-busting nuclear weapons...Not this president. I'm going to shut that program down.

FREEZE FRAME, HEAVY REVERB ON LAST WORD

VOICEOVER: Shutting programs down and undermining our own troops' security in a time of war. No wonder Senator Miller--who's in the same party as Senator Kerry--doesn't believe that Senator Kerry should be president.

Do you?

FADE OUT

--There's your 2004 Dukakis in the tank moment, using the Senator's own words.

Update: Robert Modean, in the seventh comment of this Brothers Judd post, also has a great commercial script all ready to go.

Hugh Hewitt sounds awfully rah-rah in his pro-Bush recap of the debate, but he makes a great point:

Overall: Bush gets a big win, by hiting all his messages over and over again. He wins on substance. Biggest mistake by Kerry: "The Global Test." Sorry, the American voters aren't interested in passing any global tests. Bush stresses steadfastness and resolve. Kerry firmed up the hard-left vote, but you can't win on this.

If that's the soundbite that emerges from the debate (and whether or not it becomes The Moment is largely up to how well Bush's team and the pro-Bush contigent of the new media controls the post-debate spin), then Hugh's absolutely right.

Update: This line could also be a Kerry-killer if repeated.

Update: Orrin Judd declares the final score a draw--"Kerry on debating points, Bush on political"--and adds:

If part of John Kerry's task tonight was to seem more likable, and that was not achieved, he also had to reassure his own party that he isn't a complete disaster--and there he certainly succeeded, probably winning the debate in technical debating terms--and to try and clarify his muddled message. On that last he did not do himself much good, but it's hard to see how he could have. His message tonight was: "The war was a mistake because Saddam wasn't a threat but I voted for it because Saddam was a threat and though I disapprove of the war now, I'll prosecute it just as vigorously as the President who believes in it wholeheartedly." That just isn't a coherent position but it's one that he's trapped in after voting for the war.

Last, on a series of issues he came across as soft in exactly the ways that Republicans have been portraying him. The idea that our policies should pass a global test, that al Qaeda will attack us because of Iraq so we shouldn't have gone, that we should grant Kim Jong-il the bilateral talks he's seeking, that we should give Iran nuclear material and that we shouldn't develop the nuclear capacity to bust bunkers, even though Iran and North Korea are developing nukes, are all the kind of liberal pabulum that the GOP has been forcing back down Democrats throats for a quarter century now.

More on mining the debate for hidden gold--and plutonium--here.

Update: Another gaffe for Kerry, via Matt Drudge:

FLASH: Kerry stated: 'That's why they had to close down the subway in New York when the Republican Convention was there.' (Driving home point that Bush as not done enough to protect the country.)

The NYC subway did not close at all during the convention, according to a report on cable outlet NY1...

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt has some further thoughts.

Prediction: Sooner or later, the phrase "rope-a-dope" will be used to describe what Bush did to Kerry in the debate.

This will be at the top of the page on Thursday. Follow the link below to add one to your site or blog.

Kerry apparently had a manicure today before the debate. As Jim Geraghy writes, " if true, it just says so much about Kerry. It also says so much that he would not grasp how much that single act would confirm every negative perception about him among the voters he needs to win over the most."

Since I'm on the West Coast, I'll probably be heading out for dinner just as the debate is starting, and later finishing up a piece for a dead-tree publication that's due first thing tomorrow. So don't look for much--if any--live blogging, with the exception of the live Debate Facts feed above.

But there are lots and lots of bloggers who will be liveblogging--and in one or two cases even blottoblogging the debate.

Stop by their sites early and often.

In his "Best of the Web Today" column, James Taranto wonders if Senator Kerry's use of Max Cleland as a portable stage prop has caused Kerry's poll numbers amongst US adults with disabilities to decline eight percent in August.

(Scroll down to the item with the cheeky subhead of "Handicapping the Race".)

Christopher Buckley explains some of the lesser known rules encompassing tonight's debate.

Senator Kerry's going to have to work extra hard to avoid violating paragraph #98.

(Via Polipundit and Betsy Nemark.)

Update: On a more serious note, it's been lots of fun watching the Kerry camp bicker over the podium lights rule--only hours before the debate begins!

In what has to be one of the great blog headlines, World Magazine Blog looks at Senator Kerry's Thurston Howell problem.

It reminds me of one of our posts from early August, which also featured a brief Thurston sighting.

(Via Scott's Space.)

Charles Johnson spots today's first Lapham.

Speaking of two-way media, Hugh Hewitt advises the legacy media they best play straight tonight.

One of the things that's always fascinated me about newspapers is how little most newspapermen appreciate anything new. Because whenever something new that's changed the world--or at least the US--has appeared ever since the liberalism really tilted left in the late 1960s, newspapers have cynically pooh-poohed and tut-tutted those changes.

Personal computers arrived in the mid-1970s with little more than an initial yawn from the press. Ronald Reagan's efforts to rebuild the economy, our national defense and our pride were actively reviled. When those efforts resulted in the Dow Jones going from about 800 in 1980 to 3000 in 1991, and the liberation of Eastern Europe, Central America, Kuwait and ultimately the collapse of the Soviet Union by 1991, the press could scarcely understand how the world had changed.

When Matt Drudge ran stories that the media had thought embargoed, he was written off as a crank, and a loner, instead of the harbinger of a new, two-way, interactive media.

Since 9/11, bloggers, following his lead, have:

Explained why the Taliban would fall, even as the legacy press was writing the war off as a Vietnam-style quagmire.

Explained why the liberation of Iraq was a good and necessary thing.

Called Trent Lott, Chris Dodd, Al Sharpton and Cynthia McKinney on their racism.

Shamed the New York Times into finally--finally--admitting that they've got a liberal and parochial bias.

Brought Senator Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia lie into the sunshine.

And exposed Dan Rather as a hack with a grudge and his staff as incompetent.

A huge element of the success of bloggers has been in bringing a two-way dialogue to two groups that long dictated how information would be presented: politicians and the media.

No wonder both groups hate them.

Mike Murphy of The Weekly Standard writes, "As you watch the debate on Thursday night, remember: No matter what happens, on Friday morning, you're going to hear that the race is tightening".

Power Line looks at a devastating new ad by Congressman George Nethercutt.

The Motorcycle Diaries is a new film praising every leftist's favorite revolutionary and T-shirt icon, Che Guevara. Fortunately, James Bowman and Paul Berman have other ideas.

Iranian citizens trash Fahrenheit 9/11.

Interesting theory at PoliPundit.com for Senator Kerry's new Oompah-Loompah look.

Update: Betsy Newmark also weighs in on Oompah-Loompahgate.

...And they're voting for Kerry!

Update: Bill Hobbs has set-up a Web page to catalog reports of voter fraud. It sounds like he'll have his work cut out for him.

VodkaPundit writes that when it comes to Dan Rather, some people never learn.

Update: Not surprisingly, the Professor has some additional links.

Another Update: Charles Johnson catches CBS adding lines to their transcript that were never spoken on-air.

Jonah Goldberg writes, "When Kerry starts scripting Bushisms, you know the syndrome is in its final stages and the end is near."

When I linked to a 1999 Jonah Goldberg G-Spot in the post below as background on Mumia Abu Jamal, I was struck at how well it also served as background for another recent scandal:

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Charles Johnson and H.D. Miller are wondering if Kerry will speak out for Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted cop-killer and far left cause celebre.

My latest Electronic House newsletter is online. It features an interview with Adi Kishore of the Yankee Group technology consulting firm on the current state of HDTV.

James Taranto reveals all--just keep scrolling.

As Steve writes, "Don't ask, just read."

David Frum has some thoughts on Matthew Klam’s much discussed New York Times article on the left side of the Blogosphere:

For conservatives, the advent of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and FoxNews and the blogosphere is all good news. But for liberals, the move from a world dominated by three big liberal networks, two big liberal newsmagazines, and two great liberal newspapers to a world in which bloggers can bring down a network anchor and the Times' own executive editor is an absolute and utter catastrophe, even if some of those bloggers happen to be liberal themselves.

Americans are living now in a world of media diversity. It’s the worst thing to happen to Democratic hopes since the Sunbelt went Republican. It’s understandable that the Times should feel surly. The only wonder is that this time it chose to vent that surliness against bloggers who want nothing more than to contribute their mite to the Times’ own team.

Read the rest; back with more in a little while.

Hugh Hewitt has a must-read email from a Marine stationed in Iraq. Read the whole thing, because you won't hear anything positive about Iraq from ^the evening news.

And as stupid as a piece of lead: the Minnesota police clock a motorcyclist going 205 miles per hour down Highway #61:

Kathy Swanson of the state Office of Traffic Safety said unless Tilley was wearing the kind of protective gear professional motorcycle racers wear, he was courting death at 200 mph.

"I'm not entirely sure what would happen if you crashed at 200 miles per hour,'' Swanson said. "But it wouldn't be pretty, that's for sure.''

The Darwin Award trophy on his widow's mantlepiece would be, though.

Interesting post on Instapundit-. I particularly like this line by one of Glenn's readers:

"Blogs are the letter to the editor that the editor does not want to print."

Indeed (to coin a phrase).

Jim Geraghty writes:

I heard Kerry correctly yesterday when he said, "Why are our troops facing more terrorists today than they ever were before? And even Secretary Powell has admitted that, that Iraq has become the magnet for terrorists."

My personal reaction: Outstanding! Thank goodness we got the magnet for terrorists working! Three years after we feared that every massacre-minded jihadi planned to collect his virgins on the streets of New York, or Washington, or Chicago, or some small town in America, they're choosing to fight in Basra. Instead of taking on innocent American civilians walking to work in the morning, they're taking on U.S. military forces, trained to be the best and armed with the best weapons in the world. I like our odds on that battlefield over there much more than the odds on this battlefield over here.

Exactly.

The Swift Boat Vets have another devastating ad, this time about Kerry's Paris adventures with the North Vietnamese. The ad explicitly compares Kerry to Jane Fonda.

As John Hinderaker of Power Line writes:

Like the others, it's nuclear. Only this time the Vets have money. And it makes the Dems' counterattack on President Bush's National Guard service look very small indeed. The KO punch: "Jane Fonda eventually apologized for her actions, but John Kerry never has."

Think any members of the "objective" mainstream media will ask Kerry about the charges in this commercial?

Jonathan V. Last, in a post titled "Mapegoat!", suggests that CBS is setting up producer Mary Mapes to take the fall for Dan Rather.

Meanwhile, Daniel Wiener writes that it would be "a brilliant political move" for Bush officials to keep pressing for CBS News correspondent Bob Schieffer removal as the moderator for the final (Oct. 13th) presidential debate, "simultaneously skewering CBS and the Kerry campaign."

Remember Pong, one of the first videogames? A German designer has created a tabletop version of it, that recreates the video display with a Rube Goldberg-like mechanical mechanism.

I wonder if Nolan Bushnell has seen this?

You know when an article is titled, "Dan Rather - The anchor as madman", that the author comes to bury his subject.

And Slate's Bryan Curtis definitely does, along with several damning comments about Rather's employer:

These days, network news survives in hermetically sealed cocoons—free of commercial pressures and calls for financial viability. CBS News has more cocoons than any other network. There's Evening News, which languished in last place for years; Face the Nation, another ratings disaster; Sunday Morning, which remained unchanged even after the death of anchor Charles Kuralt; and 60 Minutes, which is profitable but has an employee-retirement program similar to that of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The CBS cocoons engender a kind of madness. Rather is paid an outsized salary—he makes $7 million per year—that is in no way commensurate with the number of viewers he delivers. Where most prime-time shows have a few weeks to prove their viability, newscasts often are given years and decades. The network's former glory allows Rather to shroud himself in the aura of Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. "I'm confident we worked longer, dug deeper, and worked harder than almost anybody in American journalism does," Rather told the Washington Post Sunday, when in fact CBS spent less time verifying the Guard documents than most bloggers.

One thing that Rather has in common with both Walter Cronkite, and Ted Baxter, another (albeit fictional) ex-CBS employee, is the belief that as a newsman, if he doesn't appear omniscient, he can't succeed. Imagine any blogger saying, "And that's the way it is", as Uncle Walter did every night and expecting his readers to trust him solely based on his word, without the reader following the links and doing his own digging.

No wonder Fox, with its "We report, you decide" motto, and the Blogosphere, with its "we link, you decide"--and probably start your own blog to tell us why if we're wrong--are pummeling CBS into the ground.

(Via Polipundit.)

Update: Bruce Bartlett compares the CBS cocoon to the Flat Earth Society.

John Fund has some thoughts on how the Kerry campaign ended up as "Dukakis: the sequel":

No doubt few Democrats will agree, but Mr. Caddell's larger point--that the Democratic Party will have some soul-searching to do should Mr. Kerry lose--is clearly valid. A party that is so myopic as to repeat so many of the mistakes it made in an historic loss only a decade and a half ago is a party that needs to re-examine its relationship with the American people.

Meanwhile, Eric S. Raymond notes that the DNC will have to campaign with a mainstream media who's finding its power increasing diluted.

Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports looks at the NFL Channel--in 22 million homes, and growing.

For more on the NFL, checkout my latest Electronic House newsletter, and my piece on NFL Films for Tech Central Station.

Check out the sign on the windshield of a CBS news van.

(*Bush Derangement Syndrome, a clinical term originally coined by Charles Krauthammer.)

Power Line and Mackubin Thomas Owens look at John Kerry's activities in Vietnam and immediately after.

A lot of this stuff won't be news to those who regularly read our blog, Power Line, InstaPundit, etc. But, as John H. Hinderaker writes, these articles "are intended as a primer for those who have followed the Kerry story only casually, and as an update that sums up the current state of the evidence and the questions that remain unanswered by Senator Kerry."

Patrick Ruffini explores "The Mother of All Flip-Flops".

Update: Orrin Judd writes:

John Kerry did the American people a great service today. In a powerful anti-war speech at NYU he laid out a vision of a Kerry foreign policy that could not be more different than President Bush's nor further divorced from America's traditions.

* * *
It seems unlikely that any candidate for the presidency has ever made a more morally despicable statement than this one: "Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell. But that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war."

With that "but", Senator Kerry may have just made the ultimate Copperhead Conjunction.

Meanwhile, the RNC counts 14 flip-flops in that speech alone.

PoliDock.com diagrams Democratic politics in Texas, including Dan Rather's connection to the Travis County Democratic Party, via his daughter.

(Via PoliPundit, who writes, "bet you won’t see this web of connections in the Old York Times".)

Michael Graham and Jim Geraghty explore what it would take for the DNC to dump Kerry if things continue to look bad in October:

Would a majority of those folks vote to dump Kerry if he seemed to be a McGovern-style disaster in the making?

Probably not. For starters, there's no easy choice to replace him. Hillary Clinton appears to be laying the groundwork for 2008. The party could bump up Edwards, or bring in two new guys.

The advantage for the Dems would be that all of the anti-Kerry efforts of the GOP and conservative groups - all the Swift Boat Vets for Truth ads, all the flip-flop jokes, all the "I voted for it before I voted against it" — all of that would get wiped off the table. And if things are looking so horrifically grim, the point of the last-minute switch wouldn't be to win, it would be to make it respectable.

It's like pulling a struggling quarterback in the fourth quarter of a rout, and hoping that the backup QB can at least make the score look respectable when time runs out.

As Geraghty writes, "This isn't likely, and it's just a theory. But if radio talk show host and NRO contributor Michael Graham has thought of this and looked into it... it's probably a safe bet some DNC lawyer has looked into it."

I'm watching Fox's halftime show during the Niners-Saints game. Jim Brown asked how long it would take to turn the Niners around. When Howie Long started vacillating between "two years. No, four. Maybe three", Terry Bradshaw cracked up and start making flip-flop motions with his hands and said, "you sound like my friend from Massachusetts!"

This isn't the first time that the Bay State senator's flip-flops have been mentioned during an NFL game.

After getting sacked while running the bootleg and dissed by NFL announcers, no wonder Kerry is switching to the more European-friendly metric-style football.

On Friday, Bernard Goldberg wrote that "If Dan Rather's source turns out to be a partisan, say goodbye to CBS's reputation".

And possibly another's. AP reports:

A retired Texas National Guard official mentioned as a possible source for disputed documents about President Bush’s service in the Guard said he passed along information to a former senator working with John Kerry’s campaign.

In an Aug. 21 e-mail to a list of Texas Democrats, Bill Burkett said after getting through “seven layers of bureaucratic kids” in the Democrat’s campaign, he talked with former Georgia senator Max Cleland about information that would counter criticism of Kerry’s Vietnam War service. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the e-mail Saturday.

“I asked if they wanted to counterattack or ride this to ground and outlast it, not spending any money. (Cleland) said counterattack. So I gave them the information to do it with,” Burkett wrote.

Orrin Judd adds:

From nutty Bill Burkett to Mad Max at Kerry HQ to Dan Rather, who's been looking for revenge since George H. W. Bush played him for a fool on national tv. All it needs is a pretty pink bow cause it's already gift-wrapped.

Hugh Hewitt, noting that "John Kerry ought not to have been hurt by the Rathergate scandal", has some thoughts on why "the scandal has indeed hurt him, badly".

I'm not sure who will be immediately effected, but there's a pretty darn reasonable chance that futher implosions will be ocurring this coming week.

Meanwhile, to borrow a phrase from Monty Python's crazed "Hungarian Phrasebook" sketch, Jeff Goldstein's nipples explode with delight!

I've been looking forward to seeing Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow ever since James Lileks began the year by linking to a trailer of it and writing:

The movie I like, the movie that appeals to fx-addicted wobby-bellied dullards who’ve been trained by Hollywood to spurn nuance and storytelling for the brash percussive thrills of onscreen carnage, is called – seriously – “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.” As far as I can tell it involves the invasion of New York by many gigantic Met-al Monsters. It involves zeppelins, dashing pilots, all that wonderful pulp-fiction rubbish. I wouldn’t be so enthused if it didn’t look like a Hugh Ferris sketchbook come to life. It’s a dreamworld Manhattan of the 30s, and I can’t wait to spend 100 minutes there. Even the unnerving sight of Angelica Jolie (Voted “most likely to pull a knife on you during sex”) doesn’t bother me.

So I did so yesterday; here are some quick thoughts.

Shot for shot, this is the most dazzling looking film I've seen in quite some time. It's a totally manufactured world, the equivalent of a Pixar Toy Story film, but with live actors blue screened into the settings.

...Which brings up part of the problem: there didn't seem to be much chemistry between the cast. Gwyneth Paltrow's acting appeared as stiff and unbelievable as Angelina Jolie's Laura Croft-style English accent. (Jude Law wasn't bad, and neither were Giovanni Ribisi and Omid Djalili in supporting roles.)

Roger Ebert has compared Sky Captain to Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I think he'd be the first to admit that Jude and Gwyneth are a poor substitute for the winning chemistry of Harrison Ford and Karen Allen.

But even more so than Ford and Allen, they're simply there to add a human element to the knockout visuals.

And they are a knockout. It's a wonderfully stylized version of the 1930s, sort of a cartoon recreation of a Depression-era Hollywood film with a zillion dollar budget. (Any film that starts with a Zeppelin docking at the Empire State Building(!) while Christmas snow is falling gets big bonus points in my book. And I swear I saw a classic Raymond Loewy-designed GG-1 trundle through the corner of a scene.)

Watching the trailers, I was sure that the giant robots attacking New York was some sort of pretentious Hollywood statement on 9/11. But no, they're just there (I think) because stomping giant robots are always cool. And as Frederica Mathewes-Green writes in National Review:

The visual accomplishment of the film is so amazing that it takes awhile to get around to the plot. It's a good plot, a satisfying, comprehensive romp through every sci-fi and fantasy convention a lover of those genres would wish. As you read over a summary, little points of recognition light up in your memory with a happy "ding!" First, scientists are disappearing, and better yet, they're Germans. Turns out they did "terrible things" at an experimental laboratory "before World War One" (one of the movie's few anachronisms; in 1939 nobody knew there would be a Two). Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow), a fearless gal reporter with a hat cocked over one eye, is on the case. That's about when the giant robots take their stroll down the avenue. I couldn't figure out later what purpose this plays, since the evil scheme that is finally revealed didn't require destruction of Manhattan. But, really, who cares? The movie's dreamlike mood of all-purpose foreboding accommodates any familiar-looking elements without asking too many questions.

The ending was a bit of a letdown. Sky Captain called for one last mindblower, but instead we're given something we've seen before in numerous James Bond films.

Visually, I'd like to think that Sky Captain represents the future of movies: total visual fantasy worlds, where anything is possible, and the more imaginative the better.

But it's a shame to watch writing (both dialogue and plotting) continue to decline as imagery gets exponentially more impressive.

Update: Guess a lot of other people liked Sky Captain as well--it's number one at the box office this weekend. But will it have legs?

Update: I like the way Wired puts it:

But Sky Captain doesn't seem newfangled. It's designed to play like a relic from some nostalgic, pulp- and comics-inflected past. Conran's film is the Restoration Hardware of movies -- manufactured to evoke our notions of cool stuff from some imaginary golden age. It's grainy and textured, and filled with nifty gadgets, storybook landscapes and Tinkertoy-looking robots.

It does have a Restoration Hardware/Ralph Lauren shiny happy reconstruction of the past feel to it, doesn't it?

Kane Webb of The Wall Street Journal writes that the Clinton band of political advisors is staging a reunion--"but their new lead singer is tone-deaf":

Can Carville and Begala and Greenberg and all the other Clinton all-stars save Kerry from himself? Here's how two veteran political consultants answer that question: "It has always been our belief that consultants don't win elections; candidates do."
Want to guess who's talking? It was Begala and Carville, writing in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in December 1992. The headline: "Who wins the election? It's the Candidate, Stupid." Yes the old Clinton hands are getting the band back together, but the problem is, the lead singer is still John Kerry.

On the surface, the return engagement of Carville-Begala "for one show only!" smacks of political desperation. A Hail Mary heave of a staff shakeup. What with this being football season and Arkansas being football country long before it was Clinton Country, let's continue the gridiron analogy: It's like a head football coach changing offensive coordinators a week before the opener. Never a good sign.

Dick Morris has speculated that the Clinton troops have infiltrated Camp Kerry as a way to assure defeat and clear the debris for Hillary's inevitable '08 run. But having watched the Clinton campaign up close and too personal, I think something else is going on here: ego. The Clintonoids can't help themselves. They remember the good old days of '92 and '96. They saw Al Gore make a Florida of things in 2000. And they can't sit on the sidelines again. They're kind of like Joe Gibbs coming back to the Redskins. They see the team making so many mistakes, and they know how to win. Plus, it's a free shot.

That makes sense, more so than Morris' conspiracy theory.

Jonathan V. Last writes:

If you were curious as to what sort of treatment the other networks would afford CBS, you now have your answer. NBC has contributed absolutely no reporting of any worth to the story. ABC has latched on to it like a rabid, syphalitic pit bull. Good for them!

Meanwhile, Charles Johnson has some kind words for the L.A. Times' remarkably even-handed and comprehensive reporting.

Mark Steyn writes that polygamy is coming sooner than you think to a Canada near you.

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My latest Electronic House newsletter is online, all about the kickoff of pro football season.

Stanley Kurtz of National Review has an interesting theory about the media's increasingly obvious leftwing bias:

Something important seems to be happening to the media — something those of us who complain about liberal media bias may have missed up to now. Although there is a major and ever growing alternative media composed of talk radio, opinion journals, Internet news sites, blogs, and Fox News, the "mainstream media" still dominates. In terms of sheer numbers, the network newscasts still out-pull cable news channels by considerable margins. And Internet sites and blogs still attract a relatively small (if growing and disproportionately influential) audience. Because of its prestige — and because it's just plain bigger — the mainstream media is, well, "mainstream," while the rest are just "alternative."

Although all of this is still true, we may well be seeing the initial signs of a profound realignment of the media along more strictly and openly partisan lines. The mainstream media as a whole may be larger than the alternative outlets, but the mainstream audience itself is segmented. Looking at the CBS News audience alone, we are probably talking about the most self-consciously liberal part of the network audience pie. True, nowadays all the network newscasts are liberal. But CBS has had that reputation longer than the rest. Gradually, with the exit of moderates and conservatives to other networks and the alternative media, CBS's audience is probably now composed largely of liberal Democrats. In the middle of the most divisive presidential election in years, we have to assume that the CBS audience itself is far more interested in helping John Kerry than in getting to the bottom of the forgery issue. So as the country increasingly divides into two media camps, the "mainstream media" is becoming more openly partisan. And it's the audience that's driving this — not only, or even primarily, the journalists, liberal though journalists may be.

If that sounds vaguely familiar, it's because it's a topic we discussed back in June.

Hi I'm actor Troy McClure. You might remember me from such automated information kiosks as "Welcome to Springfield Airport" and "Where's Nordstrom?".

No, wait a second. Hi, I'm Ed Driscoll. You might remember me from my Weblog. Sorry to have not had some updates for a couple of days, especially with all the excitement of Dan Rather's ongoing implosion. As Jonah wrote:

I love the CBS News forged-document story. To paraphrase the abominable snowman from the Bugs Bunny cartoons, I want to hug it and squeeze it and name it George. Okay, I don't want to name it George, but you get my drift. If this story were hot fudge, I would smear it all over my body and then roll around in nougat.

While blogging is obviously best done in pajamas, it's still good-ole dead tree publications that pay for them, and I've had several articles due simultaneously for them these past couple of weeks, and a few more due before the month is out.

So while I'll keep posting my share of tasty pajama-driven bloggity nougat (or something like that), for next couple of weeks or so, things may be a bit slow around here.

Courage. (Sorry! Ccouldn't resist.)

Michael Rosen looks at the increasingly leftward tilt of Pat Buchanan

(Be sure to check out the two opening quotes, one from Buchanan, the other uttered by someone who would shriek if compared to him, and note how similar they are.)

Well, after being MIA about 40 days, Senator Kerry has finally given an interview. No wonder Kerry's handlers don't want him talking to the press. Even answering nothing but softball questions, he flip-flops: Based on his Dean-like midnight speech in Ohio and his Time interview, he actually watched the Republican Convention this month, before he decided he didn't.

And yesterday, on the third anniversary of September 11th, he gave a remarkably commendable radio address.

And then went out and incited racial division.

Nice to know the ol' Winter Soldier is still reporting for duty.

Update: Speaking of which, I'd like to think that Senator Kerry has a few more regrets than these.

There won't be any blogging later tonight, because I'm heading off in a little while to the Montalvo Winery in Saratoga to see the Funk Brothers--the surviving members of Motown's crack studio band when the record label was still based in Detroit.

Last year for Blogcritics, I interviewed Allan Slutsky, the writer and producer of Standing in the Shadows of Motown, the heartfelt documentary that reunited them.

The latest Washington Post/ABC poll is out. The headline:

Bush Gains Solid Lead, Poll Shows It will be interesting to see if the kerfuffle with 60 Minutes makes any impact on the next round of polls.

Did 60 Minutes use forged documents to try and make the umpteenth case about Bush being AWOL in the reserves? A post on Power Line notes this detail:

The "Memo To File" of August 18, 1973 also used specialized typesetting characters not used on typewriters. These include the superscript "th" in 187th, and consistent ’ (right single quote) used instead of a typewriter's generic ' (apostrophe). These are the sorts of things that typesetters did manually until the advent of smart correction in things like Microsoft Word.

Read Power Line's post and then follow their link to the CBS story, which contains the documents in question.

Really in question.

Update: Jim Geraghty writes:

Now it appears this document includes include the superscript "th" in 187th, add as a Powerline correspondent points out, "There are no keys on any typewriter in common use in 1973 which could produce a tiny "th." The forger got careless after creating the August 1, 1972 document and slipped up big-time."

CBS News and the Globe ought to check this out big-time, and fast. If they ran with a story based on a forgery (and a forgery that the blogosphere managed to check out in just a few hours) this report will join Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Janet Cooke in journalism's hall of infamy.

Update: In what could end up as the ultimate example of "we have computers, we can fact-check your a**", Charles Johnson simply fires up Microsoft Word and pastes his version of the document next to a scan of the CBS version.

Johnson is getting traffic from NRO, Fark, and probably every other site on the Internet, so expect some slow page loading if you go there today.

Oh, and Drudge is linking to Power Line--expect similar wait times as well there.

Update: PoliPundit (which is fast becoming a daily stop for me) writes:

If the 60 Minutes documents indeed turn out to be fake, this would be the second time that Dan Rather has unwillingly helped elect a President called Bush.

In 1988, Rather's no-holds-barred "interview" (video here) backfired and helped Bush 41 overcome the "wimp factor."

Now, if these documents are shown to be fake, that could kill the Kerry campaign, Rather's career, 60 Minutes, and CBS News, all in one fell swoop.

At the moment, it's not looking good for Captain Dan The News Man.

Alan Bromley, who grew up "in a Jewish-socialist household, where whatever my poor mother served for dinner was secondary to the political rantings of my father, an attorney, activist and speaker before the Abraham Lincoln Brigade", has some thoughts on what motivates the angry left. Bromley says it all boils down to one word: revenge.

Bob Novak writes about a new phenomenon in American politics: out and out hatred and rancor by urban leftwing protestors:

While the 1968 demonstrators foolishly risked street combat with the Chicago cops, their 2004 brethren wisely kept their distance from New York's finest. Unlike their predecessors of 36 years earlier, last week's protesters wanted to single out individuals with verbal abuse that was often vile for the sole reason that they were presumed to be Republicans.

Tim Carney, a reporter for this column, got a taste of that last Thursday night as he left the Garden. He was wearing a three-piece suit and presumably was mistaken for a delegate by a young woman, who yelled at him: "Get out of New York!" She added to Carney, a native New Yorker: "You don't belong here!"

That was much milder treatment than one journalist (who preferred his name not be used) underwent one day when he probably also was mistaken for a delegate. Walking out of the arena, he was called a "Nazi." That was a favorite epithet used by protesters, along with "fascist," "scumbag" and "crook." This reporter, who has spent much more time in Europe than I, says such harassment in the street is commonplace in European cities. He regrets its spread to this country.

Bob must be whoring for hits though. He mars an otherwise thoughtful and well written column with this:

I have covered every national political convention beginning with 1960 and never before encountered so unpleasant an atmosphere. Not even the infamous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago approached last week's level of animosity. The irrational loathing expressed daily on the Internet by passionate, though poorly informed, bloggers was transferred into the streets.

Somehow I doubt very many well-known bloggers on either side of the political spectrum were out busting heads at either convention.

Because in sleepy Manhattan, there's just no place for a street fightin' blogger.

OK, I'm almost ready to possibly think about considering buying into the wild conspiracy theories that Kerry is just marking time so that Hillary can run in 2008. Because they would certainly explain away this quote from James Carville:

Frothing-at-the-mouth Democrat attack dog James Carville is accusing Republican Party officials of drugging Sen. Zell Miller for media appearances after his speech to the GOP convention last week.

"They probably shot him up with something," the wild-eyed Ragin' Cajun insisted Wednesday during an interview with radio host Don Imus.

Do you really want to be talking about drugs when and your current candidate has yet to release his medical records, and according to ABC News, your most revered president took "as many as 12 medications at once, taking more during times of stress"?

Despite his "Ragin' Cajun" image, Carville's been around the block enough times to know not to say anything asinine that's going to be picked up, amplified and analyzed by the media during this period of maximum coverage. So why would he make a gaffe like that?

Update: Lori Byrd of PoliPundit notes more Kerry-damaging silliness from Carville.

It's been 38 days since Senator Kerry sat down with a serious journalist.

Is that him? Is he emerging from the shadows? Is he going to talk to one?

No! The senator is talking to MTV, after his last interview on August 24th, with Jon Stewart of Comedy Central. And it appears the MTV piece was shot in mid-August.

Comedy Central? MTV? Well, the senator definitely has the Viacom vote locked down.

Lowell Ponte has some thoughts on Ben Barnes, who will be appearing on 60 Minutes tonight.

So when will John O'Neill and the Swift Boat Vets be on?

I kid; I know.

Update: Not surprisingly, the Professor has some thoughts and links.

AP is reporting that Jimmy Carter accused fellow Georgia Democrat Zell Miller of "unprecedented disloyalty" for the senator's speech at the Republican convention.

Unprecedented disloyalty? Jimmy's soaking in it.

PoliPundit and inadvertently, Larry King, place the number of American casualties in Iraq into sharp perspective. This Neil Boortz post from July is also instructive.

Update: As is this John Hawkins post.

Interesting take on Zell Miller's speech by Paul Greenberg.

Update: David Horowitz has some thoughts on Zell's speech as well:

The most central – and generally unarticulated – fact about the war in Iraq is the way the Democrats have broken a tradition of bi-partisanship in war which has been the central pillar of American foreign policy going back at least to World War II and Wendell Wilkie, a figure with whom Zell Miller began his speech. In 1940, with Hitler marching across Europe and 70% of the American people demanding that America stay out of the war, Wendell Wilkie gave Roosevelt support for an unpopular military draft -- because it was the right thing to do. Wilkie knew it was not the political thing to do. He knew that it might cost him the presidency. But before he died, as Zell Miller recounted, “Wilkie told a friend that if he could write his own epitaph and had to choose between ‘here lies a president’ or ‘here lies one who contributed to saving freedom,’ he would prefer the latter.” Then Miller asked, “Where are such statesmen today? Where is the bi-partisanship in this country when we need it most?”

If one were to fault Zell Miller, it would be to point out that there is such a Democrat who put his country above his party. His name is Joe Lieberman. As a former vice presidential candidate and the conscience of his party during the Clinton impeachment, Joe Lieberman was the Democratic heir apparent. An acknowledged statesman and much larger figure than any of his Democratic rivals, Joe Lieberman should have won the nomination. But unlike John Kerry, who turned his coat in mid-course, Joe Lieberman refused to back away from his support for the war to liberate Iraq. He sacrificed his bid to be president because he preferred the epitaph of “here lies one who contributed to saving freedom.” Today, Joe Lieberman is the invisible man of the Democratic Party and that is why Zell Miller’s charge is so telling and so true: “Now, while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats’ manic obsession to bring down our Commander-in-Chief.”

I think that's a valid point. And it would have only strengthened Miller's speech to have included a reference to Lieberman.

Nick Schulz, my editor at Tech Central Station, corrects one of the legends that the media has created ("If we say it's true, it must be. Because we're the media") about Pat Buchanan's speech in 1992. Despite revisionist spin to the contrary, Buchanan's speech actually helped Bush #41 in the polls, just as Zell Miller's speech is helping his son.

And since Bush #43 isn't running away from it, he may have learned that lesson as well.

(Just to reiterate a point that Nick makes as well in his article: I'm not a Buchanan supporter, and as he tacks farther and farther into kooksville, I'm very happy that he's no longer associated with the Republican party.)

It's not surprising that John O'Neil of the Swift Boat Vets For Truth sat down with John Hawkins of the Right Wing News Weblog for an interview.

Because unlike the Kerry campaign, there's no doubt that O'Neill gets the power of the Internet, and the new media it's driving.

Jim Geraghty summarizes Senator Kerry in two sentences.

At least Dean was more consistent.

Powerful essay by Dennis Prager on the Beslan atrocity.

Several others can be found via these links.

Update: The late Yanis Kanidis, hero. (Also via Charles Johnson.)

Update: The New York Times deliberately alters a quote from the event to avoid any chance of admitting what their readers probably know all ready: the ideology behind the shootings.

Update Captain Ed also has some thoughts on how America's media is covering--or not covering, to be honest--this story.

Via Captain Ed.

P.J. O'Rourke once wrote that "Commies love concrete, but they don’t know how to make it".

In North Korea, they also don't know how to finish it: next time you're in Pyongyang, why not visit the Ryugyong Hotel?

Well, probably because the massive pyramidal structure, which cost two percent of North Korea's GDP, and looks like a building from Logan's Run, was never completed. Instead, it looms over the city like an enormous unfinished black pyramid of gloom.

....Probably because it is an enormous unfinished black pyramid of gloom.

Doug Brinkley, in an effort to salvage his reputation as a historian, continues to move away from Senator Kerry.

An AP story today has this astonishing paragraph:

In West Virginia, Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, gave Bush a rifle as a gift. Bush, a self-described gun-owner and hunter, quipped: “I thank you for the gift, but I can’t take it to the debate with me.”

Actually, it says nothing of the sort. I simply substituted Bush for Kerry.

But imagine if the president actually had made such a remark. The press would report it endlessly for a week--and rightly so: most politicians rarely announce that they'd like to murder their political oponents.

But Kerry just did.

Watch this gaffe go right down the memory hole, along with all of Kerry's other gaffes. Because even though the press can't be seen to be as obviously in the bag for the senator as they have been, they'll still do anything they can to keep him propped up.

Update: A far milder gaffe in tone, but equally telling about character:

Mr Bush's campaign staff will have loved his opening comments, praising the limited menu of a local cafe. Mr Kerry said it was perfect "for confused people like me who can't make up our minds about what we're going to eat" - words which would fit perfectly into a pro-Bush attack ad.

Expect this quote to ricochet around the Internet shortly.

(Heck, it already is!)

Update: Oh, and about that gun...

We've linked to other articles and posts about how reactionary the left has become. But few that make so powerful a case as this Weekly Standard piece by David Gelernter, which equates the left's ambivalence about upending the hell that was Saddam Hussein's Iraq with the ambivalence of liberal New Yorkers to react when Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death on a New York street 40 years ago.

Speaking of the reactionary left, Gelernter's article makes a potent bookend with James Lileks' Monday Bleat, as he shames AP, Wallace Shawn and Art Spiegelman to look at the horror they're willing to dismiss so readily.

Earlier today, we linked to Kerry's latest take on Iraq. Back on August 10th, we wrote:

President Bush has gotten Senator Kerry to publicly state that he'd also have gone into Iraq, even knowing, as do today, that their capacity to produce WMDs was much more limited than we know now.

One of the commenters on the Brothers Judd Blog makes a great point: Kerry is now in a box. This is one opinion that he can't flip-flop on, because if he does, President Bush can call him on it, via the Bully Pulpit--and the press, which has to cover the President of the United States, has to report it, no matter how much they loathe the man.

Today, Polipundit has this:

Quote of the Day

"After voting for the war, but against funding it, after saying he would have voted for the war even knowing everything we know today, my opponent woke up this morning with new campaign advisers and yet another new position."

-- President Bush

Polipundit agrees with my off-the-cuff remark earlier today, that "the fact that Kerry has flipped--yet again--on the Iraq war means that he may simply be trying salvage the anti-Bush, anti-American vote". In a post titled, "Kerry Becomes Dean", he writes:

John Kerry is now starting to sound like the anti-war protester he was 30 years ago...Because of backbiting from his panicked supporters, Kerry is giving into emotion. He has decided to follow his ultra-liberal heart and become the unabashedly antiwar candidate.

Time to hop in the tank with Massachusetts Mike!

On Friday, we wrote:

There's a twinge of biased anger in this Knight Ridder piece titled, "Bush, Republicans reduce John Kerry to a punch line", but let's face it, the success of the convention may have been the ultimate rope-a-dope by President Bush.

Since January, Bush endured a year where he was beaten up over 30 year old phony AWOL charges. (And before the Swift Boat Vets raised the stakes, you can't help but think they surfaced partially with the hopes of making Kerry look better in comparison, and shut down debate about his service record.) The first lady had disingenuously headlined articles written about her thoughts on gay marriage. That the gay marriage issue was brought up so forcefully in both Massachusetts and in San Francisco simultaneously (where it's illegal, but that didn't stop a newly elected mayor) in this election year was probably not a coincidence.

Then the partisan 9/11 Commission. Then Fahrenheit 9/11, and the endless anti-Bush tomes at bookstores, and endless attacks first by Howard Dean, then Al Gore, and then Senator Kerry.

The silence from the White House was brutal to endure for those of us who wanted to see the president fight back. But it paid off this week.

Stan Brown, a correspondent to Betsy Newmark's Weblog explores that theory. I think he's really onto something:

As Clinton told George Stephanopoulos, he believes in killing people when they are hurting you politically. In fact, Democrats are now furious with John Kerry because he didn’t attack the Swift Vets immediately as Clinton would have.

I think there are two good reasons why Bush chooses to avoid the Clinton model of immediate, full scale counterattack. First, he has a very good understanding of his enemies. Second, he knows what cards he has.

Bush is blessed to have liberal Democrats (including the news media) as his enemy. I’m convinced that he can read them like a book. He lets them rant and rave without challenge because he knows they will overplay their hand. He also understands that the news media has enlisted in the Democratic cause and will eagerly join the attack. The feedback Democrats get from their media allies only serves to encourage them to attack with greater and greater ferocity until they have gone way too far. They interpret Bush’s lack of response as an indication that their attack is succeeding. After all, they wouldn’t take that kind of abuse if they had a way to respond. So they conclude that Bush is wounded and they press forward for the kill. Only to find themselves outflanked and vulnerable when Bush finally responds at the appropriate moment.

He also understands that the alliance of the media with the Democrats means that a Clinton type savage counterattack is not a viable option for him. Clinton could use it because the media eagerly joined in his assault. Bush would not have that same assistance. Instead, he chooses to use the wrath of the enemy against itself. Since the media serves as an enormous bullhorn to amplify the Democrats’ vitriol, it would be unwise to engage them on their terms in a conventional war. Better to stay out of the fray and let them scorch the earth until they have exhausted themselves.

Which brings us to the second big difference between Bush and Clinton – Bush has the cards. Clinton couldn’t allow allegations against him to get a full hearing because they would cause him tremendous damage. The truth can hurt when it is allowed to shine. Bush can afford to wait because he knows what the real facts are and he has faith that regular Americans will accept them when he speaks directly to them without interference from the media. The conventions and the debates give him that direct, unfiltered access to the people.

Read the rest, and then wonder why you're reading it on the Weblog of a North Carolina schoolteacher, instead of in The New York Times.

After being a key member of the Mercury Seven team of original American astronauts, and later the Keating Five team of American political grafters, John Glenn plays the Hitler card in describing the Republican convention last week.

Newsday, having been found wanting by a variety of bloggers, also violates Godwin's Law in their write-up of last week.

A month ago, we wrote:

In many TV sit-coms and comedy movies from the 1960s through the early 1980s, you'll see the cliché of the wealthy country club Republican, ala Nelson Rockefeller. Jim Backus' blue double-breasted blazer-wearing Thurston Howell III character was an example of this; David Ogden Stiers' Major Charles Emerson Winchester on M*A*S*H (ironically, Winchester was a Boston Brahmin, like Senator Kerry) was another.

George H.W. Bush's image was very much in that mold. But he interrupted a flip-over that began with President Reagan's self-made aw-shucks folksy style and continued with George W. Bush's cowboy boots-wearing, BBQ-loving manner and the Texas twang of his voice.

It highlights an interesting trend in politics over the last 25 years:

The shift of the Republican party as now being associated with "the little guy", the average man--who might be a blue collar guy, or he might be a self-employed high tech entrepreneur. But either case, he's working hard to get by and better himself. In contrast, the Democrats are now very much the party of the elite: ambulance chasing trial lawyers (including John Edwards him