How sad for you

Bush and his hatchet men are at it again. Only this time, everyone is starting to notice how inept they are. Ruy Teixeira compares what Bush claims on the economy vs. reality and then what the public believes via polls. The result? People know that the economy still sucks, and the White House can't spin its way out of that one.

Meanwhile, Mark Schmidt takes apart Bush's latest ineffectual (and, of course, negative) Ads. Here's the meat:

"These ads all aggressively fail the most basic test of any political ad: What do you hear when you're watching it out of the corner of an eye, doing dishes, talking on the phone, trying to stop one kid from taking the other one's Power Rangers, etc. I look at the "Yakuza" ad that way and all I hear is 'Kerry had a plan to fight terrorism [blah, blah, some Japanese thing I never heard of, blah blah], 'plan to fight crime [blah, blah]'. OK, sounds good, Kerry's against terrorism and crime. I watch the ad called "Patriot Act" like that, and the only thing I notice is the middle frames: 'Wire Taps' [Clang!] 'Subpoena powers' [Clang!] 'Surveillance' [Clang!] Bad things, scary mean government. But the point of the ad is supposed to be that those are good things, and Kerry is against them, except he sort of isn't ... Getting the point of this ad requires a logic even more nuanced than Kerry's own position, which begins to seem quite reasonable."

National Review's Jim Geraghty tries to task.

"Hope those New Hampshire dairy farmers were paying attention. The senator's explanation:

'I plead guilty. I did vote for it, because I represented Massachusetts,' Kerry said. 'I was a United States senator, and I was working in a context that we were living in a number of years ago, and that's the way we saw the world.

'We don't see the world that way now,' he told the crowd at the Dejno farm. 'I guarantee you that as president, I'm not going to be president of New England, or president of Massachusetts; I'm running to be president of the United States of America. And I'm going to stand up for farmers in Wisconsin and Minnesota and Iowa and other parts of the country just as hard as I did before.'

But Senator, the point is that you weren't standing up for farmers in Wisconsin and Minnesota and Iowa before, you were sticking it to them to benefit farmers in your home state." I dunno, sounds to me like those are two different things, what you did in congress as a representative of Massachusetts and what you would do as President of the USA.

On some issues, that line of reasoning is sound. For example, how one voted on the war, or No Child Left Behind, the PATRIOT Act (alas, Kerry voted for all of them), or the $87 billion (Kerry voted no). But others are purely local issues. The Northeast Dairy Compact is one that pits New England (and upstate NY/Rural PA) against the Midwest.

After a while, they just start to get pathetic.