“He is exaggerating the effects of the disease,” Limbaugh told listeners. “He’s moving all around and shaking and it’s purely an act…This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn’t take his medication or he’s acting.” For some reason people got upset over Rush’s analysis here, and he appologized, before pointing out that parkinson’s has made Fox almost as sick as liberalism has. Truth is, if the government started funding stem-cell research today, there wouldn’t be a cure for this disease tomorrow, so it’s clearly not worth discussing. Our missile defense shield on the other hand is a mere turn of the screw away from rendering nuclear attacks against the United States forever feckless.
Speaking of feckless, how about this President of ours! He’s on TV saying “we’ve never been stay the course”, which on its own is enough to keep you laughing and/or crying (depending on whether or not you’re in the military) for a few hours, days, deployments…here’s a video with him saying over and over and over the three word phrase most liked by the phonics monkey writing the bulk of his Iraq war jargon until just recently. Here’s a good Q&A with Tony Snow on the matter: Q: Tony, it seems what you have is not “stay the course.” Has anybody told the President he should stop calling it “stay the course” then? SNOW: I don’t think he’s used that term in a while. Q: Oh, yes, he has, repeatedly. SNOW: When? Q: Well, in August, because I wrote a story saying he didn’t use it — and I was quite sternly corrected. —— OK then, so the President hasn’t said “stay the course” in a long time, except for in August, and the Republicans who have been saying it a hundred times a day each just aren’t paying attention to what’s happening “on the ground” I suppose. Because our strategy is quite dynamic these days, what with the patrols and shooting and the new Popeye’s Chicken that opened up in the Green Zone…but wait, Donald Rumsfeld is being intereviewed by Sean Hannity on the radio today and says, “of course (Bush) isn’t backing away from ‘stay the course'”…I’m sure Tony Snow will clear all of this up tomorrow.
As for Iraq itself, it’s clearly going well over there, as the death toll has been in decline, chocolate bars are being accumulated in preparation for Halloween, and in just a few days we should be hearing an announcement on the Summer Olympics coming to Baghdad. Today something funny happened, perhaps a big of trickery in honor of October 31st…General Casey and the ambassador are holding a press conference touting the progress being made, and the lights go out. That’ll make your shirt collar feel a little tight.
F-Jackie! — Oh, and BC kicked Florida St in the teeth last Saturday, on their home turf…nail up that scalp alongside our two wins in two years vs. Clemson, last year in Death Valley and…carry the two…factor in wind…32 mason jars of moonshine…
Did that Q&A with Tony Snow really happen or was that a joke? It sounds ridiculous, but entirely possible.
It realy happened – I watched a clip of it.
Holy shit..that is a partial copy of the new Dem ad”Stay the Course” I just put up on my political blog Al..
Rushie is coming unglued even more than normal it seems.
Ah – OK, so you do have a political blog…I’ll go on Moments tonight and find the link to it. Wish I’d known that already! We could have been exchanging ideas on this stuff a while ago.
Maureen Dowd: Running Against Themselves
Things have become so dire for the Republicans that now even Bush is distancing himself from Bush.
The president is cutting and running from the president.
In a momentous event at the White House on Monday, Tony Snow made a major announcement about an important new strategy for Iraq. The president will no longer stay the course on the rallying cry “stay the course.”
A presidency built on message discipline (Message: “Stay the course”) is trying to salvage itself with some last-minute un-messaging (Message: “No more stay the course”).
Of course, the administration has never really said what “the course” is, so it was never really apparent what “staying” it meant, anyhow.
It was a wacky moment for Tony Snow, who renounced the slogan while sticking to the policy. “It left the wrong impression about what was going on,” the press secretary said, “and it allowed critics to say, ‘Well, here’s an administration that’s just embarked upon a policy and not looking at what the situation is,’ when, in fact, it’s just the opposite.”
The important thing was that the cliché sounded good to Republicans, strong and virile, for a while. But pollsters for the White House seemed to be the last to learn that even many of the party faithful had soured on the phrase, deeming it inflexible and stupid. Has Karl Rove, who urged G.O.P. candidates to keep the Democrats on the defensive on national security, lost his magic?
In a White House with a Fox News all-spin sensibility, officials don’t think they need to change the strategy as much as they need to change their slogan.
The overworked Bush phrase suggested “burying your head in the sand,” Steve Hinkson, political director at Luntz Research Companies, a G.O.P. public opinion firm, told The Washington Post’s Peter Baker. “The problem is that as the number of people who agree with remaining resolute dwindles, that sort of language doesn’t strike a chord as much as it once did.”
Unwilling to admit mistakes or face the urgent need to go past semantic changes in a protectorate that has fallen into a vicious civil war, in which Americans are merely referees and targets, the White House is falling back on marketing. Just as Andy Card rolled out the war as a marketing event, the Bush team now thinks that all it needs to do is come up with a catchy and chesty new advertising pitch.
Bay Buchanan assured Wolf Blitzer that the president still intended to stay the course and seek victory, he just wouldn’t use that phrase, because it gave people the impression that W. was unwilling to change tactics.
After all, Dick Cheney told Rush Limbaugh last week that the inept Iraqi government was doing “remarkably well.”
But given the Republican meltdown, it’s obvious that Democrats are having better luck mocking the Republicans for staying the course than Republicans are having mocking the Democrats for cutting and running. But Democrats have no ingenious ideas about how to extricate ourselves from this nasty war either.
Yet W. once more accused the Democrats of wanting to cut and run in Iraq at a campaign stop in Sarasota, Fla., yesterday.
Many frantic Republican lawmakers are also running against themselves, either reneging on their support for the war they started, or railing against Washington, the town they absolutely control, claiming that the capital has forgotten their values, or making ads denouncing the Democrats’ “homosexual agenda,” even though Republicans are now the party of gay scandal.
It’s a hilarious spectacle of a whole party re-enacting the classic scene in Mel Brooks’s “Blazing Saddles,” in which the sheriff holds the gun to his own head to take himself hostage.
The Bushes don’t connect words with action. Action is something that’s secretly plotted with the inner circle behind closed doors. The public should stay out of it. The Bushes just connect words with salesmanship. Poppy Bush never meant it when he said “Read my lips: no new taxes” at the 1988 convention. It was just a Clint Eastwood-sounding line in a Peggy Noonan speech, meant to pump up his flighty image.
Just so, his son never paid any mind to his campaign promise not to nation-build, and he didn’t come through on his bullhorn pledge to catch the perpetrators of 9/11 or his tough-guy vow to bring in Osama dead or alive.
To W., the words he says to Americans don’t matter as much as the words Dick Cheney says to him. He just has to hope that daddy’s friend, James Baker, the smooth fixer who is co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group and who has already suggested moving past the meaningless partisan jargon of “cut and run” and “stay the course,” comes up with a plan to rescue Junior from a fine mess one more time.