let's stop talking about swift boats

let’s stop talking about swift boats

27 August 2004 _ 10h08m41 EST
related content: assholes, politics

karl rove has a dry erase board somewhere in texas that contains a matrix with the following elements: 1. the lie. 2. number of minds swayed by the lie. 3. number of minds swayed by reaction to the lie. 4. embarrassment of being caught in a lie. if number 3 is less than number 2, then number 4 is wiped from the board and from consideration.
regardless of the fact that the “swift boaters” campaign has been proven to be a fraud, the percentage of voters who are voting based on kerry’s war record has fallen from 41% to 22% since the convention. the lesson here is that it doesn’t matter how many times democrats prove the accusations false; the psychological effect is the same. don’t we remember the calls that were made in south carolina in 2000? “if you heard that john mccain fathered an illegitimate black child, would it make you more or less likely to vote for him?”..”he did that?”..”i’m not saying that he did, but if he did, would you vote for him?”.
note that we are not saying that we might as well let the republicans continue to tell lies; we are only pointing out that the micromanaging of debunking every salvo is not successful. should we lie in return? or should we ignore them and tell other truths? probably neither of these are the answer.
kerry wasted a lot of time talking about shit that happened in vietnam 30 years ago; in return for that, we all wasted a lot of time talking about the swift boat veterans who were talking about shit that happened in vietnam 30 years ago. partisan politics aside, bush’s presidency has been a disaster; he is the first president to hold office over a loss of jobs since the great depression, the number of americans without health insurance has risen to 45 million, ‘no child left behind’ remains unfunded, 1.3 million more people have fallen into poverty for a total of 35.9 million impoverished amercians,… hell, you know there are a thousand reasons [w] to vote against bush; we don’t need to list them all here.
for these past three weeks, we could have been talking about any number of these failures, but instead we all bickered over stupid shit like how many bullet holes are in john kerry’s boat and whether he turned the boat left or right. with bush’s dismal lack of accomplishment, his opponent should be mopping the floor with him right now; our fixation on whether or not kerry acted like rambo or like sir robin 30 years ago is a good reason why kerry pathetically can barely break even with bush. there’s a war in iraq today that we could discuss; or are we going to wait 30 years until an iraq veteran makes guard duty in kirkuk the focus of his campaign? the republicans’ control of our debate has doubtlessly left a smiley face doodled on that texan dry erase board.

let’s stop talking about swift boats

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