Saturday, October 30, 2004

Bin Laden Thumbs Nose at US

Here's what bin Laden said:
"Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands. Any nation that does not attack us will not be attacked," bin Laden said in the video.

Here's the Bush response:
"Americans will not be intimidated or influenced by an enemy of our country. ..."


The Frame

Bush isn't scared by Osama. Bush is a protector, he'll keep us safe from Osama.


Luckily the campaign clarified the truth behind the frame far better than I could:
"We want people to think 'terrorism' for the last four days," said a Bush-Cheney campaign official. "And anything that raises the issue in people's minds is good for us."

A senior GOP strategist added, "anything that makes people nervous about their personal safety helps Bush."

He called it "a little gift," saying it helps the President but doesn't guarantee his reelection.


Translation
President Bush wasn't concerned about Osama bin Laden because Bush wanted the American people to be scared. If Bush could manipulate us into being scared, it would help his chances of re-election. So leaving bin Laden free to do whatever he might choose, including potentially killing thousands more Americans, was an important part of Bush's campaign strategy.

Lucky for us, bin Laden chose only to shoot some video, instead attacking us with IEDs made from 760,000 lbs of missing HMX and RDX.

Thank goodness. Now go vote Bush out of office, quickly. We need a President who will catch bin Laden, recapture the stolen explosives, and clean up Bush's Iraq failure. Enough is enough!

8 Comments:

Blogger Karin said...

The Redskins lost to the Packers, so now we know, Kerry is a shoe-in come Tuesday.

On a more serious note, it seems that the press is unwilling to report that Kerry could possibly, and in my mind definitely will, win on Tuesday. Democracy Corps (James Carville's group) has a partial survey (this according to emergingdemocraticmajorityweblog) showing the Bin Laden tape had no affect on views towards the election. That is good news. Perhaps the American public is getting smarter.

9:41 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It looks like Comic Karin was wrong .

10:48 AM  
Blogger rhetoretician said...

Not by much. Bush had a barely 3 million vote lead vs Clinton's 8+ million lead in his second term. And Clinton hadn't cheated by illegally purging a million voters from the roles at the start. So the cheater didn't even manage to get 1/2 the margin Clinton managed in a fair fight.

10:16 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Once again the hero of the left is brought up. Bill Clinton never managed to capture over 50 percent of the vote. Prior to this past election, the last one was the first Bush. As far as your contention that Bush "cheated by illegally purging a million voters...
"And that they it wasn't ," a fair fight," this just proves you refuse to accept anything that does not validate your opinion. There have been plenty of examples of the other side cheating such as signing up illegal alliens.the adult and mature attitude would be to accept that others have opposing opinions to you and that more of them voted in this past election. But then that would destroy your cherished notions that only your side is moral. Most agree that republicans won big and in every way. Not only did they win the White House but they also added seats in both houses. Look forward to a much easier time for the President in naming as many as 3 new justices to the supreme court. It is a shame your side cannot accept that in this battle they lost to a smarter and more dedicated group of people both at the head of the party as well as at the ballot box.

1:51 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

as a person who considers himself independent i find this string interesting. i agree with anonymous above that both the left and the right are guilty of cheating in the electoral process. dialog is always important and no one can learn from reading and speaking only to people who preach what they want to hear. usually these strings end up with each side declaring the other is stupid or brainwashed or somehow can not make up their mind for themselves. still, i would like to say that in any of these battles the truth invariably becomes a victim.
For me the saddest thing to evolve from this "anybody but Bush " campaign was the deception and say anything attitude which occurred on the far left. I witnessed many of my antiwar friends suddenly talking about Bush not being forceful enough with Iran and north Korea as if that implies they would want the US to start bombing these countries instead of Iraq normally passive people started speaking like hawks. It is my belief that too many were too fast to give up their core beliefs for chance to unseat George Bush. What could possible account for this fervor? HATE! the same hate that was normally used as reason for not bombing innocents. The hate from the left for Bush is undeniable and palpable and it was embraced by faction which normally would repudiate such irrational feelings.

2:39 PM  
Blogger rhetoretician said...

Anonymous #2 -

Thanks for the thoughtful comments.

If I believed this election was won fairly by Bush, I'd be willing to admit it.

While I understand that there is voter fraud on both sides, the scale and audacity on the right is unheard of. The "registering illegal aliens" theme is similar to the welfare queen myth that was so popular under Reagan. There may be a small number of aliens signing up to vote, but for the most part, those folks have no interest in calling any attention to themselves, especially government attention.

I've seen the same phenomenon among ordinarily peaceful people to try to out-war-monger the war-mongers. It's very strange, and sad. I think you're right that it's an anybody but Bush phenomenon driven by hatred. My personal ABB philosophy is driven by a deep concern for the constitutional rights of all Americans. I wouldn't care who was in office - any administration that put together something like the ABUSE A PATRIOT act is a dangerous one. I'm also not a fan of the way NAFTA handed a big chunk of our sovereignty to a tribunal outside of government control, without the consent of the people.

Anonymous #1 -
I don't believe Bush won legitimately. I understand that there are people who disagree with my viewpoint. Many are friends, family, and co-workers.

Based on the way the vote tallies varied from the exit polls, expecially the heavy skewing toward Bush in those highly democratic districts that just happened to have paperless voting machines, combined with the well-documented fact of the purge rolls' 95% inaccuracy rate, this one appears to have been totally cooked.

Skipping the topic of maturity for a moment, would you be willing to concede that it's *possible* that people who agree with me may have voted in larger numbers in certain states than people who agree with you, and that something *could* have been wrong in the way the voting was handled?

5:04 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I would say that you have a desperate need to feel the vote was stolen from you .It may be that you have some sort of mental illness or that your political dogma is as blinding to you as religeous dogma is to others. You might want to think about that.
you do seem to be smart and well read so i wonder how you could have missed the most plausable answer to your question.Are you not aware that word was sent out to voters in the the so called battle ground states to avoid answering questions by pollsters? It was felt that many of these polls leaned heavily toward Kerry.Zogby polls are particularly suspicious to some.Some voters claim to have felt uneasy and others even harrassed at the polls and thus kept thier vote to themselves.Regardless as to why they did not answer the exit polls, this ending in skewing of the numbers. Remember, our vote is supposed to be private and we can keep it that way if we like.

10:30 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I agree that when republicans chose not to answer exit polling per thier grand leader's marching orders it skewed the exit polls. However, would like to pass along somthing from former Clinton adviser, Dick Morris.

So why were the exit polls wrong?

That an exit poll is always right is an axiom of politics. It is easier to assume that a compass is not pointing north than to assume that an exit poll is incorrect. It takes a deliberate act of fraud and bias to get an exit poll wrong. Since the variables of whether or not a person will actually vote are eliminated in exit polling, it is like peeking at the answer before taking the test.

But these exit polls were wrong. And the fact that they were so totally, disastrously wrong is a national scandal. There should be a national investigation to unearth the story behind the bias.

In this election, we have seen CBS go with a story on Bush's National Guard service based on forged documents. We have seen the New York Times and CBS report 377 missing tons of explosives that were not missing, not that many tons and confiscated by American troops. And now we have seen exit polls that were wrong, quite possibly deliberately biased.

So now you have 3 possible reasons for these failed exit polls

1:39 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home

Progressive Women's Blog Ring

Join | List | Prev | Next | Random | Prev 5 | Next 5 | Skip Prev | Skip Next

Powered by RingSurf