1115.org

(1)
When Denny Hastert appeared on Hannity on America to reassure us that “Republicans will win and I will run for Speaker”, here’s the pitch he made to the American voter:

We have a good story to tell. What the American voters really focus in on what this election in Congress is all about it’s about a lifestyle, it’s about being able to keep a little more of your own money in your pocket rather than having — losing the tax cuts and that republicans brought forward in the last five years. The last five years we have created an economy where 6.3 Million people have more jobs. New jobs in this country. We have said this thing more people own their own homes than ever before in the history of the country. More minorities own their homes than ever before in the history of the country. The stock markets hit a record high. We have had 19 consecutive months (sic) of good economic growth in this country. It’s because we cut taxes when it was tough to do that back in 2001 and 2002 to get the economy going, to get people back to work to get people to invest in America. We have been able to do that.

They haven’t yet descended to the level of couching their message in nursery rhymes, but it’s clear they’re targeting the extremely low IQ voter. (Maybe the nursery rhymes are what they’re saving for the last 72 hours?)

Someone who’ll buy the proposition that even though Republicans will win, if you vote for the Democrat in your local race, the Democrats will be able to vote down the Republicans’ generous plan to extend the tax cuts (and give us many more consecutive quarters of good economic growth whose benefits mainly trickle up to the already very rich).

Someone who can’t look at their own financial situation and figure out if they’re doing better or worse than six years ago, someone who’ll buy the proposition that they must be doing better because Hastert or Bush or Tony Snow have pulled a few statistics out of their party hat to tell us the economy’s doing better.

Someone who’ll believe that the Bush administration got misled into invading Iraq because “We didn’t have good intelligence because they in the Clinton administration cut human intelligence”. Someone who’ll hear “We didn’t have people on the ground to make good decisions for us” and won’t immediately think of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Isn’t it a little pathetic that the best the Republicans can come up with by way of bogeyman this time around is the Democrats, and how they’ll wreck the economy and the country if they’re allowed to retain their minority position in the House?

And how about this choice nugget: “The last five years we have created an economy where 6.3 Million people have more jobs.” These are the people who couldn’t make ends meet and so they had to go from one job to two, or two jobs to three? Since they wouldn’t want to undercount this number, presumably they added in all the Republican lawmakers who decided to moonlight as bribe-takers to supplement their income?

Also, when he went “to get people to invest in America”, he did mean the Chinese people, right?

I also think it’s a huge mistake on Hastert’s part to misspeak key talking points so that conscientious commentators are forced to insert a “sic” into his quotes. I think it just reminds everyone, quite needlessly, of “sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick…”

(2)
Here’s what else we know about the voters the Republicans are hoping to influence:
Either someone who’s still undecided and for whom the decision will be clinched by Saddam Hussein being found guilty on November 5, or someone who would vote Republican but wasn’t sure if they would bother to vote, and for whom Saddam being found guilty on November 5 will provide the missing spark of inspiration.

Either way, this would have to be someone who doesn’t regard it as a foregone conclusion that Saddam will be found guilty. Also, someone with a short enough attention span that their vote would not have been influenced if Saddam had been found guilty in the middle of October.

I do wonder if there are enough low-IQ short-attention-span voters to save the election for the Republicans. But Karl Rove is the genius, not me. And maybe one of the 68 polls he follows each week tracks low-IQ short-attention-span undecideds? In any case, on November 8, one of us will be laughing our heads off at the other.