From Daily Kos: Offensive and Counteroffensive on the Road to November

[iconoclastic cat]

This is fantastic stuff from Meteor Blades on Daily Kos:

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Offensive and Counteroffensive on the Road to November

by Meteor Blades
Sun Aug 22nd, 2004 at 16:26:06 EDT

If everything happens as usual, now that Bush Team and its surrogates have been challenged – however modestly – over their twisted lies about John Kerry’s military service, they will move on to the next lie. That may turn out to be an enhanced version of an old lie or some new concoction. This technique, applied in campaigning and governing, has worked well for them during the past four years in part because, as we are all too aware, the media and way too many Americans suffer from a spectacular form of Attention Deficit Disorder.

I know some Kosa Nostrans think it’s an awful, perhaps fatal, mistake to be drawn into these battles because they divert our attention away from the real issues. True, they do. But you have little choice but to react when somebody hands you a grenade with the pin pulled. It seems to me the Kerry campaign has reacted rather well to the Swift Boat attack, although many folks here have made suggestions for scorched-earth counteroffensives of the sort that would warm our partisan hearts.

Second-guessing a campaign that has done as well as Kerry’s in the past eight months is definitely not my bailiwick, much less my forte. But, but, but … if it were me in charge, while waiting for the next lie to emerge, I would authorize a never-ending assault on Bush’s policies that show how bereft we are of good leadership in these troubling times.

For instance, again today we are reminded of the moral and military and failure in Iraq where at least one more U.S. soldier and four more U.S. Marines, and who knows how many Iraqis, have been killed in a war that should never have happened.

And there’s the failure in the fight against terrorism:

The FBI has developed "very little quality finished intelligence" about al-Qaida's financial methods, despite the agency's assurances since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that it is committed to tracking down money used by the terrorist network, the staff of the Sept. 11 commission said in a study released Saturday.

The study, released on the commission's final day in business, said the FBI's failure to develop the analysis nearly three years after the attacks showed that the agency "sorely needed" to fulfill its promise to create a strong career track for counterterrorism analysts.

And there’s the failure to deal effectively with the economy:

3,000 Jobs; 500,000 Seekers

Bush administration spin doctors won't be able to paint a happy face on the fact that an effort to fill 3,000 new jobs at the increasingly busy ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach led to a spectacular flood of applications, with half a million underemployed people seeking to fill the slots. This California gold rush — applications were mailed from across the country — is hard evidence of an unusually tough job market that continues to disappoint nearly three years into an economic recovery.

The port jobs, being filled after a lottery in which applicants' postcards were chosen from a giant bin, are part time and offer no benefits. Some could evaporate after crews process the wave of imported goods heading for store shelves in time for the holiday shopping season. Yet, as a labor union official put it, Thursday's job lottery clicked with Americans because "people are hungry for a decent job."

And then there’s the failure in the fight against terrorism:

In the almost three years since September 11, the Bush administration has not only failed to safeguard vulnerable terrorist targets here at home, it has actively blocked an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) initiative to impose security measures for extremely hazardous chemicals stored at power plants across the country.

As a result, according to a new report by the Working Group on Community Right-to-Know, some 3.5 million people living near these non-nuclear power plants continue to face the danger that a terrorist attack could send a cloud of toxic and lethal gas into their neighborhoods.

Titled Unnecessary Dangers:Emergency Chemical Release Hazards at Power Plants (PDF file), the report describes how a sudden release of ammonia or chlorine from a power plant could kill and injure far more people than the tragedy of September 11.

And then there’s the failure of Bush to deal with the health insurance crisis:

Gap Grows Between Hard Data, Projections for Covering 10 Million Uninsured

If the Republican-controlled Congress enacted President Bush's entire health care agenda, as many as 10 million people who lack health insurance would be covered at a cost of $102 billion over the next decade, according to his campaign aides.

But when the Bush-Cheney team was asked to provide documentation, the hard data fell far short of the claims, a gap supported by several independent analyses.

And then - did I mention? - there’s the failure in the fight against terrorism:

The Search for Osama

Did the government let bin Laden’s trail go cold?

by JANE MAYER

Tough talk and aggressive military action have been hallmarks of the Bush Administration’s war on terrorism. In the wake of the attacks on New York and Washington, President Bush made it clear that he was targeting bin Laden; in one speech, he declared that the terrorist was “wanted, dead or alive.” In another speech, Bush said, “If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he will be sorely mistaken.” However, as months went by without a successful capture—“point” targets, as individuals are called by military tacticians, are notoriously elusive—Bush rarely mentioned bin Laden’s name in public. The Administration’s attention shifted to building support for the war in Iraq, and Saddam Hussein seemed to replace bin Laden in the role of the world’s most notorious “evildoer.” Indeed, Bush’s reticence on the subject of bin Laden grew so conspicuous that critics, such as the Democratic Presidential candidate Bob Graham, began referring to the terrorist as “Osama bin Forgotten.”

No doubt, you all have your own choices to add to this list of failures. Next, obviously, comes the list of Bush “successes” for his corporado pals – less regulation, more access, extravagant perks.

As much personal satisfaction as it would give me to see the Kerry Team sucker-punch Bush at every opportunity as a counterblast against Rove’s low blows, I am doing my best to suppress my vengeful reptile brain and hope Kerry takes the high road. As the links above and a thousand more like them show, if the Democrats want to run negative ads, there are plenty of easy targets for these on issues that really matter.

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Note: The responses are also very interesting. Pass it around.