Bollettino

LI has been grimly trying to accommodate ourselves to the thought that Bush will be the president for the next four years. This looks more and more probable. The NYT includes a story about the laughable Kerry campaign – a campaign that has spent a month focusing on foreign policy without suggesting what Kerry’s foreign policy would actually be, which is quite a feat – with a story of how the Kerry-ites are trying to reinvigorate themselves by connecting to Clinton. The story includes this immortal line:

“On Saturday, Mr. Johnson drew applause from Democrats assembled for a weekly strategy meeting at Mr. Kerry's headquarters when he reassured aides that the campaign had settled on a clear line of attack against Mr. Bush, people at the meeting said. “

Is there anything more pathetic?

Since the Dems rolled over about Iraq – after all, isn’t the real issue that Kerry was a GENUINE hero back in the days when Mick Jagger was young? – the media has been left in a vacuum. As the Post explained long ago about its systematically flawed coverage of the WMD issue, since both ‘sides’ – there are only two sides, Democrat and Republican, in our wondrous freedom loving Flatland for the media – agreed about the issue, the newspaper found it hard to get outside of the narrative, which would mean taking seriously the protests of all those silly anarchist types in the street. My God, the Post didn’t even want to report on them – much less take a thing they said seriously. Since the two sides again agree that the occupation of Iraq was a good idea from the beginning, merely flawed by a few Iraqi bad eggs, the sidelessness of it all has pushed stories about Iraq into the B section. There were a thousand American wounded last month. Today, seven Americans died in a bomb near Fallujah – yesterday, another helicopter was downed. These are all yawners to the media, and evidently to Kerry. At least, we haven’t heard him refer to those injuries, or to Najaf, or to anything pertinent happening in Iraq. He does think it would be nice if more wine was served among the coalition of the willing.

Looking back on the Democratic primaries, one has to marvel at the Howard Dean effect. For a brief time, he galvanized the party into something that looked like life. It lumbered around like life, and it even occasionally spouted a truth that was like life – as in Dean’s derided opinion that capturing Saddam Hussein wouldn’t make Americans any safer. I am not sure of the numbers, but I believe since the capture more Americans have been killed than before – but to contemplate this is the utmost impoliteness, and it isn’t countenanced at tables in D.C. Why, it makes one sound like Michael Moore. So the Dem party walked and talked, and we all thought: the zombie days are passed. LI thought, at the time, that this was so obviously a good thing that maybe the former zombie would drop by a spine store and pick up a spare. Alas, then came the convention, with Kerry reporting for duty in what has turned out to be Daschle’s Navy -- a wacky bunch of hapless vets who just can't get it together in the face of mighty Bush and his fiercesome genius, Karl Rove (who is to genius as Schlitz is to beer -- the cheapest variety).

At least LI is hoping for some consolation in the upcoming Dem defeat -- that is, that Daschle will be going down with the ship. But that is, perhaps, to project more rationality on this party than it possesses.