Have You No Sense of Decency?

The comedy show circuit has become an important vehicle for candidates in the past several election cycles, and with the Daily Show, the comedy circuit has become even more ingratiated into American politics. But who knew that a candidate for president would stoop to mockery (and worse) as campaign discourse. The Bush/Cheney campaign this week released a video, entitled "Windsurfing" (viewed on the campaign's web site--just click the latest videos button) that continues the flip-flop meme, which seems to be the main message of the BC04 gang... er, campaign. I found this cartoon (found on Slate/MSNBC to nail my feelings about this tactic exactly.

President Bush also had some joking asides to brush off some serious questions at a press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi this week, including one where he snickered that the right track/wrong track polling numbers were better in Iraq than they were here in the states. (It's interesting that a man who claims not to pay any attention to polls because he listens to his heart is able to comment so clearly about such polling data.) The Kerry Edwards campaign hit back with this ad (available in a couple of different video formats)). The press conference, on the whole, is pretty entertaining, and makes clear the reasoning why President Bush holds so few of them--check out the whole thing in RealPlayer format from C-Span. Skip to about the 29-minute mark to start hearing some tough questions from the press (who actually show a little backbone).

Some of the highlights:

Why haven't we found Zarqawi (the terrorist in Iraq whose group has beheaded several kidnapped foreigners): "We're looking for him. He hides."

I agree, I'm not the expert on how the Iraqi people think, because I live in America where it's nice and safe and secure.

By the way, it's the Afghan national army that went into Najaf and did the work there.

But more than mockery, the BC04 gang and its affiliates continue to insinuate that a vote for Kerry is what the terrorists want. And the NYTimes editorial board on Saturday published a very powerful commentary on this rhetorical strategy:

resident Bush and his surrogates are taking their re-election campaign into dangerous territory. Mr. Bush is running as the man best equipped to keep America safe from terrorists - that was to be expected. We did not, however, anticipate that those on the Bush team would dare to argue that a vote for John Kerry would be a vote for Al Qaeda. Yet that is the message they are delivering - with a repetition that makes it clear this is an organized effort to paint the Democratic candidate as a friend to terrorists.

When Vice President Dick Cheney declared that electing Mr. Kerry would create a danger "that we'll get hit again," his supporters attributed that appalling language to a rhetorical slip. But Mr. Cheney is still delivering that message. Meanwhile, as Dana Milbank detailed so chillingly in The Washington Post yesterday, the House speaker, Dennis Hastert, said recently on television that Al Qaeda would do better under a Kerry presidency, and Senator Orrin Hatch, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has announced that the terrorists are going to do everything they can between now and November "to try and elect Kerry."

This is despicable politics. It's not just polarizing - it also undermines the efforts of the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency to combat terrorists in America. Every time a member of the Bush administration suggests that Islamic extremists want to stage an attack before the election to sway the results in November, it causes patriotic Americans who do not intend to vote for the president to wonder whether the entire antiterrorism effort has been kidnapped and turned into part of the Bush re-election campaign. The people running the government clearly regard keeping Mr. Bush in office as more important than maintaining a united front on the most important threat to the nation.

Mr. Bush has not disassociated himself from any of this, and in his own campaign speeches he makes an argument that is equally divisive and undemocratic. The president has claimed, over and over, that criticism of the way his administration has conducted the war in Iraq and news stories that suggest the war is not going well endanger American troops and give aid and comfort to the enemy. This week, in his Rose Garden press conference with the interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, Mr. Bush was asked about Mr. Kerry's increasingly pointed remarks on Iraq. "You can embolden an enemy by sending mixed messages," he said, going on to suggest that Mr. Kerry's criticisms dispirit the Iraqi people and American soldiers.

It is fair game for the president to claim that toppling Saddam Hussein was a blow to terrorism, to accuse Mr. Kerry of flip-flopping and to repeat continually that the war in Iraq is going very well, despite all evidence to the contrary. It is absolutely not all right for anyone on his team to suggest that Mr. Kerry is the favored candidate of the terrorists. And at a time when the United States is supposed to be preparing the Iraqi people for a democratic election, it's appalling to hear the chief executive say that loyal opposition gives aid and comfort to the enemy abroad.

The general instinct of Americans is to play fair. That is why, even though terrorists struck the United States during President Bush's watch, the Democrats have not run a campaign that blames him for allowing the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to be attacked. And while the war in Iraq has opened up large swaths of the country to terrorist groups for the first time, any effort by Mr. Kerry to describe the president as the man whom Osama bin Laden wants to keep in power would be instantly denounced by the Republicans as unpatriotic.

We think that anyone who attempts to portray sincere critics as dangerous to the safety of the nation is wrong. It reflects badly on the president's character that in this instance, he's putting his own ambition ahead of the national good.