Brutally Honest

Can we say... pedomorphic?

Kerry campaign demands that timing lights be removed from debate lecterns:

Advisers for the Democratic presidential candidate demanded Thursday that the lights signaling when a speaker's time has expired during debates with President Bush be removed from the lecterns because they are distracting. The commission hosting the debates refused.

Bush's campaign accused Kerry, known for favoring long sentences and statements, of trying to violate debate rules against windy answers.

An angry exchange between representatives of the Kerry campaign and the Commission on Presidential Debates took place just hours before the candidates were to meet at the University of Miami for the first of three debates, according to several officials familiar with the meeting. Kerry's team threatened to remove the lights when they visit the debate site with the candidate later in the day.

"We'll do what we have to," Kerry strategist Tad Devine said after his meeting with the commission. But he also suggested the dispute will pass once Kerry's team makes its point. "We'll beat them over the head a little bit, then we'll see what happens."

Isn't this a tad bit...

... babyish, childish, foolish, frivolous, infantile, juvenile, petty, puerile, silly, stupid, trifling, weak, etc?

Just a tad?

Political Advice from Cameron Diaz

Via Drudge, who also brought us the John Kerry tan story:

On Oprah's Wednesday 'voting party' show featuring important celebrities like P. Diddy (Vote or Die!), Drew Barrymore and Christina Aguilera, svelte suffragette Cameron Diaz took to shock tactics to get the female vote out.

After a discussion on lynching and the vote with Oprah, Diaz spoke of the dire consequences for women if they sit out this election:

Ms. DIAZ: We have a voice now, and we're not using it, and women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies. We could lo--if you think that rape should be legal, then don't vote. But if you think that you have a right to your body, and you have a right to say what happens to you and fight off that danger of losing that, then you should vote, and those are the...

WINFREY: It's your voice.

Ms. DIAZ: It's your voice. It's your voice, that's your right.

Cameron, we're less interested in your voice and more interested in your parading around on the silver screen in a bikini...

Trust me...

Can't take a joke

Lynne Cheney Jokes About Kerry's Tan

DULUTH, Minn. - Something about Sen. John Kerry's darker appearance has caught Lynne Cheney's eye.

During a campaign stop with her husband, a group of volunteers moved into the crowd with microphones for the question-and-answer period. Vice President Dick Cheney told supporters to look for the people with dark orange shirts.

When Cheney paused as if searching for the words to describe the shade of orange, Lynne Cheney said, "How about John Kerry's suntan?"

The remark drew a big laugh from the crowd and the vice president.

Responding to her comments, Kerry campaign spokesman Bill Burton said, "Is Mrs. Cheney jealous considering how hard it is to get sun in the undisclosed location with her husband Dick? Or is she distracted over how red-in-the-face George Bush (news - web sites) should be considering his failed presidency?"

Aww lighten up some Bill... or should I have said lighten up some John...

Heh...

The Women Driving the 2004 Presidential Campaign

Without any fanfare, I added Gary Cruse to the blogroll a couple of days ago.

The more I read the man, the more I think I should've trumpeted that event.

Today he turned me on Naomi Wolf, or more specifically, this recent New York magazine column, where she reveals why it is that Kerry is slipping in the polls and W. isn't:

Should wives matter in a presidential campaign? Is it trivial to weigh Laura Bush’s gentle, Xanax-like demeanor, her faultless librarian’s poise and sincerity, against the imperious sexuality of Teresa Heinz Kerry? We often feel a twinge of guilt over our own fascination with presidential candidates’ wives—as if we are secretly reading the Star for our campaign information instead of the policy journals.

But the iconography that candidates’ wives create is important and a serious medium through which a modern candidate can send out his message. Heartbreakingly for Democrats, this is a lesson that the Republicans have learned to their vast advantage. By manipulating the images of the women around George W. Bush, including Laura herself, the Bush team has brilliantly eroded the traditional Democratic advantage among women.

What happened? Karen Hughes. The true genius behind the Bush success is not Karl Rove; she’s a suburban working mom in sensible shoes. It was clear from the start that Team Bush realized that the old, white, male face of the Republican Party was a recipe for losing those crucial suburban women in the swing states who are socially progressive and fiscally conservative. As long as the face of Republicanism was that of Newt Gingrich, ready to talk about women soldiers getting gynecological infections in foxholes, the GOP would face a Democratic hegemony, to paraphrase Rove, for the next twenty years.

So they devised a deliberate strategy that went unnoticed by Democratic strategists, most of whom are white guys over 50: to showcase a moderate, mainstream feminist makeover for the Bush brand. Everyone fell for it, including the press. Bush’s speeches are routinely cast before the eye, I am convinced, of Karen Hughes, who spins tax cuts as a boon to women entrepreneurs, like the one Laura Bush mentioned in her convention speech (Carmella Chaifos, “the only woman to own a tow-truck company in all of Iowa”). The fallen heroes of Iraq are “moms and dads.” Afghanistan was the first time U.S. troops were deployed for a feminist goal, “so Afghan girls could go to school.”

Allow me to interrupt this traipse into the latest leftist broad-brushing of Republican scheme-ology to remind my readers that Naomi Wolf is famous, at least in my eyes, for being paid thousands of dollars each month to help Al Gore acquire a new image back in 1999... remember all that talk of alpha and beta males? That's right... those were Wolf-isms.

Now back to Wolf's description of the latest diabolical (synonymous with Republican) plot. How Laura Bush is merely a tool in Karen Hughes political tool-belt, screwing an unwitting electorate too stupid to see through this obvious ploy:

A key tactic is wife deployment. Is Dick Cheney a scary, old-guard, male-dinosaur guy? Send out Lynne to talk about how he whips up brunch. Karl Rove makes eggs with bacon for Mary Matalin! Laura Bush speaks eloquently about the young George W. changing the twins’ diapers. Why worry about abortion rights when you have Alan Alda in the White House? The Bush team sends out brilliant imagery of women vis-à-vis the president: carefully staging scenes in which a seated W. is listening attentively to a standing Condoleezza Rice. That image counts far more than a thousand words by John Kerry about child care.

You see, it's all about image. It's all about carefully staged scenes. And apparently, the Kerry campaign needs Naomi Wolf to help win the election:

The low value Kerry’s team is assigning to both the visual story of the campaign and the role of gender imagery explains his drop in the polls after the GOP convention. Contrary to RNC spin about “earth tones” and “alpha males,” I was actually an adviser on women’s issues for the Gore campaign. But any cultural critic can tell you that a presidential campaign involves powerful gender archetypes, and presidents are archetypes of male potency. Republicans guided by Deaver understand this: It’s why you saw Ronald Reagan posed by a horse holding a riding crop, or W. in flight gear. And spouses play a massive role in enhancing or undermining the potency of a male candidate.

So Laura Bush, in speaking warmly of her mate’s “wrestling” with issues of war and peace, enhances his potency. This does not contradict my earlier point about appealing to swing voters; it has been well established that modern women maddeningly long for men who are tender in private but authoritative in public. Unfortunately, Teresa Heinz Kerry’s speech, which all but ignored her husband, did more to emasculate him than the opposition ever could. By publicly shining the light on herself rather than her husband, she opened a symbolic breach in Kerry’s archetypal armor. Listen to what the Republicans are hitting Kerry with: Indecisive. Effete. French. They are all but calling this tall, accomplished war hero gay.

The charges are sticking because of Teresa Heinz Kerry. Let’s start with “Heinz.” By retaining her dead husband’s name—there is no genteel way to put this—she is publicly, subliminally cuckolding Kerry with the power of another man—a dead Republican man, at that. Add to that the fact that her first husband was (as she is herself now) vastly more wealthy than her second husband. Throw into all of this her penchant for black, a color that no woman wears in the heartland, and you have a recipe for just what Kerry is struggling with now: charges of elitism, unstable family relationships, and an unmanned candidate.

There's more folks, I urge you to read it all.

The bottom line? John Kerry isn't responsible for how poorly his candidacy is going. It's not his flip flopping on the war in Iraq, nor his constant harking back to those halcyon Vietnam days, or his more recent barrage of self-centered negativisms... it's all the wife's fault.

That's right, it's Teresa Heinz Kerry's fault that the John Kerry campaign is floundering.

Because you see, it's style over substance.

It's no longer the economy stupid.

It's the veneer.

...

...

God help us folks if these people accede to power...

God help us.

Oh, and Gary, welcome to the blogroll!

"Deeply irresponsible"

Kerry has really been getting my goat of late and my fellow bloggers, as usual, are able to articulate why so much better than I can.

First the good folks at Cox and Forkum (the cartoon links to their post):

Here's how Al-Jazeera reported Kerry's comments to the Middle East: Allawi's Congress speech draws flak. First they quote a "regional analyst."

"Iraq is not free nor is it stable. There is nationwide chaos. Its infrastructure has been destroyed and its wealth pillaged and plundered by the US occupation," [Mustafa Bakri, editor of the weekly Egyptian news magazine al-Osboa] told Aljazeera.net.

Then they introduce Kerry's comments:

The most severe criticism, however, came from Kerry, who claimed Allawi's speech was an attempt to put the "best face" on an Iraq campaign that is out of control.

You think al-Sadr and al-Zarqawi smiled when they read that? I do.

I do too... much like the Viet Cong smiled when Kerry was sticking it to his "band of brothers" years ago, something Juliette noticed as well:

Recall then Lt. Kerry’s words before the 1971 Senate Committee on Foreign Relations:

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to dies in Vietnam? How do ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we are trying to do that, and we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations, and if you read carefully the President's last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says, and says clearly: But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the communists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people. But the point is they are not a free people now under us. They are not a free people, and we cannot fight communism all over the world, and I think we should have learned that lesson by now.

Insert the words “Iraq,” “terrorism” and “terrorists” for “Vietnam,” “communism” and “communists” into this segment of the testimony and this could have been part of a Kerry speech from last week.

Indeed. And the beat goes on, as Gordon, that Cranky Neocon, references in his thematic post:

From the The New York Post (thanks to Armies Of Liberation)

In WWII, broadcasts from Tokyo Rose in Japan and from Axis Sally in Germany warned our troops that their lives were being squandered in vain, that they were dying for big business and "the Jew" Roosevelt.

Today, we have a presidential candidate, the conscienceless Sen. John Kerry, doing the work of the enemy propagandists of yesteryear.

Is there nothing Kerry won't say to win the election? Is there no position he won't change? Doesn't he care anything for the sacrifices of our troops in Iraq?

John Kerry cares about nothing except becoming President. Those of us with half a brain can only hope that there are more people like Ann Althouse, who's half a brain seems to have fully engaged, finally:

I could still have accepted Kerry at this point. But Kerry decided to go for the hard Howard Dean-style criticism of "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." In these last few weeks, he has battered us with negativity about the war, but still without offering any realistic positive solutions that are different from Bush's, and raising worries that he will simply give up on Iraq. And then he disrespected Prime Minister Allawi when the man was in the country and speaking to Congress. Yesterday, I wrote of Kerry's treatment of Allawi as his final, fatal mistake. I meant only to say that he had sealed his fate with voters for that, but, realistically, thinking about it today, I have to say he sealed his fate with me personally. Rereading this post, I see that the hope about Kerry I expressed on May 1st is completely lost.

Let's hope, I mean truly hope, that more people's brain's are fully engaged, and they're seeing, as Ann is now seeing, that John Kerry is truly unfit for command.

Truly.

Heide's Point, Poquoson - An oasis of... devotion

Six miles.

Six miles from my house.

A 10 minute ride or so on the Harley, down winding roads, to a place where a mother has tangibly shown the world, at least our local part of that world, how much she loves her daughter.

Mrs. Brutally Honest and I found this... this... oasis... by accident a couple of months ago while simply looking for a place to ride the bikes.

We came to a dead end and started to turn around when I noticed the sign.

Heide's Point.

Next to the sign, a beautiful wrought iron gate, framed and anchored by stone pillars, opening to a sandy walkway leading to the water's edge. On the right stone pillar, we noticed a placard.

There we read about Heidi Laura Cayouette. Born in 1961. Died in 1997. An airline and aerobatic pilot, apparently killed in an airplane crash.

We dismounted, and walked together through the gate. Less than a hundred yards down this finger of land surrounded by water, there on the Poquoson River, we found a small lighthouse (maybe 20 feet or so high). Another placard honoring Heidi's life at the base, at eye-level.

The lighthouse stands at the end of the point, surrounded by marshlands and park benches. A beacon of love, from a mom to her daughter, on display for all those fortunate enough to find it.

It was a moving day. You could just about feel the love.

We've been back numerous times. One of those times, we found the mother there on the grounds near the lighthouse, atop a riding lawn mower. We smiled at her and without turning the mower off, she motioned toward the solar panel at the water's edge, and told us that the lighthouse really does light up at night. Then she rode away, as if to leave us there with her memories.

Again, we were moved. Again, you could just about feel the love.

We've since found that the mother lives alone, just up the street from the point. And we've also found that it's visited often by other people. Last weekend we drove up just as a young couple was leaving. We found a six pack of empty beer bottles beside our favorite bench. That infuriated me. We made sure to discard the bottles as we left, trying in some small way to restore a part of the point's pristine-ness.

It has become one of our favorite local places to visit, especially as the sun is setting. Quite obviously, Heidi's Point is a mother's memorial of devotion and love toward a daughter who's life ended long before it should have but it's also become much more than that.

It's become for me a place of escape. It's a place to go... and remember. A place to go... and forget. A place to go... and think and ponder. A place to go... to simply sit quietly, to read, to look off into the distance and just... be.

Heidi's Point.

If you're ever in the area, you're gonna have to check it out.

UPDATE:  I've posted some relevant pics.

Supporting the troops

Matt, at BLACKFIVE, brings us a good 'un:

BANGOR, Maine, Sept. 23 -- It had been a pretty glum day for Spec. Brian Parker, who along with the other members of his National Guard unit said goodbye to their families and departed on a charter flight for a long-term stint in Iraq. But then, on a refueling stop here, a familiar figure boarded the plane.

"We were down when we left our families," Parker said, giving a thumbs down. "But then we heard Air Force One was here. It's a good morale boost."

President Bush, after a campaign appearance in Bangor, held his plane on the tarmac when he heard an MD-11 carrying 292 Army reservists and National Guard members was about to refuel here. For the troops, grimly heading toward an 18-to-24-month assignment in Iraq, it was a welcome lift. For Bush, who has been accusing his Democratic presidential opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry, of demoralizing the troops in Iraq by criticizing the war effort, it was a chance to demonstrate his devotion to the troops.

"May God bless you all," the commander in chief said over the plane's public address system. "May God keep you safe." As he worked his way up and down the plane's aisles, posing for photographs, signing autographs and shaking hands, the happily surprised troops called out to him.

"That's my president, hooah!" shouted Sgt. Wanda Dabbs, 22, a member of the 230th Area Support Group, a Guard unit from Tennessee. Others seconded her cheer.

That's my president too Sarge... makes me proud.

Grab a friend and sing this one together

Sung to the tune of the Beverly Hillbillies, with props to Marvin Olasky for the tip:

Come and listen to my story 'bout a man named Dan, The documents were fake and he didn't give a damn; He put 'em on the air, an' he thought he'd done the job, But up from the web come a howlin' mob. Blogs, that is. Web logs. Checkin' facts.

Well, the first thing you know ol' Dan's a-runnin' fast; Made a false report an' it bit him in the ass; He said 'dog-gonnit, I done thought I'd get away!' But it turned out to be his a-reckonin' day. Busted, that is. Red-faced. Mud in the eye.

Well, now it's time to say goodbye to Dan and all his men; And they would like to shoot you folks for turnin' them in; You're all invited back next week to watch the Evening News, And see which correspondent's picked to fill Dan's empty shoes. Y'all come back, now, hear?

I'll be whistling that tune now for the next week or so...

Heh...

Things that make you go hmmm...

Via Kevin McCullough, this interesting tid-bit from the New York Times:

"Every American now knows that there's something really screwy about George Bush and the National Guard, and they know that John Kerry was not the war hero we thought he was," said Douglas Brinkley, the historian and author of a friendly biography of Mr. Kerry's war years, acknowledging that Mr. Kerry's opponents had succeeded in raising questions about his service.

Douglas Brinkley, Kerry biographer, thinks that John Kerry is not the war hero we thought he was??!!

Umm... Doug... aren't you responsible for the falsehood?

And as to your aside against Bush... what America now knows is that there's something really screwy in the MSM's continued attempts to make Bush's National Guard service an issue...

So let me ask you again Doug... aren't you responsible for the Kerry is a war hero falsehood?

Are we supposed to believe this?

The CEO of CBS's parent company endorses President Bush.

With the scandal at CBS still festering, questions are being raised about whether a felony was committed when the network broadcast apparently forged memos in an attempt to discredit George W. Bush. Yesterday, the chairman of CBS's parent company chose Hong Kong as a place to drop a little bomb. Sumner Redstone, who calls himself a "liberal Democrat," said he's supporting President Bush.

The chairman of the entertainment giant Viacom said the reason was simple: Republican values are what U.S. companies need. Speaking to some of America's and Asia's top executives gathered for Forbes magazine's annual Global CEO Conference, Mr. Redstone declared: "I look at the election from what's good for Viacom. I vote for what's good for Viacom. I vote, today, Viacom.

"I don't want to denigrate Kerry," he went on, "but from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are not bad people. . . . But from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company."

Sharing the stage with Mr. Redstone was Steve Forbes, CEO, president and editor in chief of Forbes and a former Republican presidential aspirant, who quipped: "Obviously you're a very enlightened CEO."

I find this less than... credible.

What we need is some supporting documentation, an e-mail, maybe a memo, or some paper trail that substantiates this...

... and I'm thinking Dan Rather is already hard at work on the tasking...

Heh...