] But as Adam Clymer pointed out yesterday on the Op-Ed page of
] The Times, front-page coverage of the 2000 debates emphasized
] not what the candidates said but their "body language." After
] the debate, the lead stories said a lot about Mr. Gore's
] sighs, but nothing about Mr. Bush's lies. And even the
] fact-checking pieces "buried inside the newspaper" were, as
] Mr. Clymer delicately puts it, "constrained by an effort to
] balance one candidate's big mistakes" - that is, Mr. Bush's
] lies - "against the other's minor errors."

Personally, I've been getting disgusted lately with the lies coming from the Kerry campaign, though of course those too can be looked at as "word-twisting" or "a matter of perspective."

For example, in Kerry's speeches, and this editorial, they're saying things like, "Bush let Osama get away. Bush ignored North Korea. Bush turned Iraq into a haven for terrorists, when it wasn't before." Or when Kerry speaks in absolutes like when he said that *every* decision that Bush has made has been the wrong one. Every single one? Give me a break. All of those assertions are so clearly false, it just turns my stomach and makes me tune out any other *good* points that Kerry may have. The rhetoric is absurd.

It's clear hypocrisy: Accusing Bush of misleading the American public, while Kerry is systematically doing misleading of his own!

- Elonka

Elonka wrote:
] It's clear hypocrisy: Accusing Bush of misleading the American
] public, while Kerry is systematically doing misleading of his
] own!

[ Even if that's true, at the very least, you have to admit that Bush is doing the same. And I think a fair analysis indicates that Bush is doing it more, and in more destructive ways. He says every day that Iraq is better, it's "turning the corner" or it's people are free as they never were under saddam. This is patently bullshit as the CIA, senior military staff, Colin Powell, prominent members of congress (many of them Republicans) have all recently indicated that the opposite is true. It's getting worse. Bush continues to frame the Iraq war in terms of the global war on terror when most credible analyses made in the past year (9/11 commission; CIA report, for examples) indicate that they were previously unlinked and only now is Iraq a hotbed of foreign terrorists. Framing Saddam in the same context as bin Laden is a nice rhetorical device, but it's not accurate.

As for Kerry's apparent misleading, I guess, yeah, I'm not a big fan of big declarative statements either. I don't think that Bush has been wrong on every decision and yes, the political rhetoric is abominable, on both sides. The point is that thinking people like us don't have to rely on the public face these guys are putting forward for the benefit of the general populace, who vote on amorphous qualities like "attitude" and "confidence" or notions of simpathetic identities. Bush knows that photos of him clearing brush are effective in exploiting that aspect of people, and it's also why the "rich, liberal, intellectual" frame is so good at demolishing populist appearances on the left. I'm not denying that those aren't valid things to take account of, but they should never have attained the primacy that they have. That's what this editorial is talking about. Most people don't analyze issues in depth, which is why the republican/Right tactic of framing the issues in linguistic constructs favorable to themselves is so incredibly effective. But we're all capable of seeing past the rhetoric, as infantile and simplistic and, yes, false as it is most of the time, and take a hard look at what the record *actually* shows about these two men.

For me, the record shows that Bush is largely incompetent. He didn't finish the job in Afghanistan, he's pursued a war on provably false pretenses which has cost us billions and, worse, thousands of lives, he's alienated our long time allies and marginalized the UN, he's spent my and my childrens money on benefits for the rich and for corporations, demolished environmental protections, worker protections and the public school system, and gutted the medicare system, not to mention lost millions of jobs while playing games with the numbers to achieve even that awful record.

That's my analysis, but I don't claim it has to be anyone elses, as long as they used logic to reach their decision and aren't basing their response on some intangible emotional response to flags and burning buildings or what a good guy they think Bush is. That's fine for the masses, or at least, it's not something i expect to change for the masses, but it's not a signifigant asset on either side of a logical debate.

At any rate, I understand and agree with your criticism to a large degree -- marketing, even marketing a candidate, tends to distort reality. Nonetheless, the reality is there, and I don't think being unhappy with the rhetoric is a reason to stop listening, and it certainly doesn't prevent us from looking at all the other extant information available to us. -k]