Preemption and Patriotism Redux

by Jason at 2:04 am on November 21st, 2003 in Bush Man Date

Waaaay back on November 13, I wrote a post about the Republican strategy of pushing the President’s “Doctrine of Preemption” and painting the Democrats as weak-willed, indecisive and perhaps unpatriotic.

Well, it looks like we won’t have to wait too long to see the first examples of this campaign. According to the New York Times, the RNC will start airing Bush ads this Sunday in Iowa, the first in a series of ads they will be running in early-primary states.

The ads will (surprise!) indirectly invoke the September 11 attacks and portray Bush as fighting terrorism, in contrast to the critics who are trying to undermine him. This comes as no surprise, but what is really interesting is the imagery that was chosen for the commercial: The President, speaking in front of Congress during the State of the Union address.

Think about that for a moment: this is the same speech where the President said the dreaded “16 words” about Iraq and Yellowcake Uranium, which led to numerous questions about the war’s justification as well as the whole Valerie Plame affair. Since both of those issues have been pretty effectively swept under the rug, and no one in the administration wants them to be brought out again, I’m surprised that the speech is being used to illustrate the President’s policy towards terrorism.

The Republicans probably think that not enough people will make the connection between this use of the speech and the controversies that it originally spawned. And, sad to say, they are probably right.

Trackbacks & Pings

Say Uncle on 21 Nov 2003 at 10:27 am

Watching the Fungus spread
Via Kevin, came this article from the NYT which details an pending ad for Bush. The ad is not done by Bush’s campaign team, by…

Comments

Coolfer wrote:

Get off those 16 words, dude. They’re meaningless. He fucked up. A lot of people fucked up in that Niger assessment. And it wasn’t anybody’s lone basis for going to war. Those 16 words didn’t constitute 1% of the administration’s decision to go to war. There’s a long list of reasons, and that one was way down the list.

And they’ve been swept under the rug? Shit, seems like that’s all I ever read about. 16 words, 16 words…at this point it would be nice to forever put them under a rug. The press will only run with a story as long as people care. People stopped caring, so we’ve stopped hearing about it. Blogs and op-eds will beat it to death, but the major media outlets have found other things to attack.

I think the reason “not enough people will make the connection between this use of the speech and the controversies that it originally spawned” is because people can keep those 16 poorly chosen words in perspective. It’s not because they’re too stupid too get it, which I believe was your implication.

Can’t wait to see those ads. I’m sure they’re quite lovely. Alas, I don’t live in Iowa.

Posted 21 Nov 2003 at 2:37 pm ¶
matt wrote:

Coolfer: Thanks for the comments. We don’t get many dissenting opinions (except for spelling corrections), mainly owing to the fact that we are never wrong.

The fact that the Niger-Uranium fiasco is now called the “16 words” is a testament to the Republicans mastery of language. They started the marginalization of the story 3 days after it came out. More about that in an in-progress entry. It’s only 16 words, but the duplicity and dishonesty contained in the actions are the story.

We’ll “Get off it” when there is some resolution to it. The press left the story because the administration took all the air out of it, and since both houses of congress are republican controlled, no one there can push for answers. These actions were undertaken on behalf of all of the citizens of this country, and we deserve the full story.

You are right that the Niger-Uranium bit wasn’t 1% of the decision to go to war. It probably was 0% of the decision.
But is was a huge part of the marketing of the war to the American people. For that reason and more, there should be a higher standard, not “I’m tired of hearing about the 16 words already”. Your attention span is of no importance to us.

If there wasn’t already a huge mass of similar shadiness, we would probably let this one go. But come on, it’s 2+ years of bullshit now. If the Dems had and competent leaders making the decisions on how to take advantage of this, we’d all be in a different situation now.

We don’t think that it is because people are too stupid (even though they may be), it’s that they tune it out because they are busy trying to make ends meet. Nothing another upper-class tax cut can’t fix.

Those ads will be all over the web, no need to move to Iowa yet.

Posted 21 Nov 2003 at 8:06 pm ¶

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