This may be one of those things...

...that only I find funny, but find it funny I did.

From the latest ABC/Wash. Post poll: "Do you think George W. Bush has done more to unite the country, or has done more to divide the country?" (the answer)

Made-up Analogies

Here's a fun game you can play. Make up an analogy and sneak it into conversation like it's a commonplace figure of speech.

Like, "He's one banana short of an airplane" or "She's like Pippi Longstocking without the gauze." If you say the phrase with the right mix of snobbery and aplomb, few will have the courage to call you on your chicanery.

Of course, there is the danger of meeting someone too dumb to hide their dumbness:

"What do you think of the new guy?"
"Jon? Well...nothing."
"What do you mean, 'nothing'?"
"It's just that he seems like the type of guy who likes his ice-cream in a waffle cone, if you know what I mean."
"I don't get it."
"You know. The type of guy who washes his slacks with his underwear."
"You mean he's gay?"
"No! Come on, don't be dense. When he's in the express aisle, he only has 9 items. Got it?"
"So he's a bachelor?"
"Do I need to hire a skywriter and spell it out for you? HE'S THE PRESIDENT OF THE KEVIN BACON FAN CLUB!"
"Are you sure he's not gay?"
"You know, sometimes you're like a beer bottle without the born on date."
"I don't know what that means, but I want an apology."

Baltimore, USA

Gay Street

I don't think this is the message the Bush-Cheney campaign wants to give...

Suck it, Koppel

John Kerry on The Daily Show tonight.

Back from porn, on to politics

"President Bush on Monday criticized a commercial that accused John Kerry of inflating his own Vietnam War record, more than a week after the ad stopped running, and said broadcast attacks by outside groups have no place in the race for the White House."

That's the lead of an AP article and in spirit many others by various news organizations on Bush's comments. Here's the problem: President Bush didn't criticize the Swift Boat commercials. In fact, he said the exact same thing he's been saying for the past few weeks--I condemn all 527s and I hope my opponent joins me in doing so--but used a trick straight out from Rhetoric 101 to make it seem like he was condemning the ad.

When asked to condemn a specific ad (e.g. "Kerry Will Eat Your Baby") he condemned the class of ads (e.g. "227 Ads--Funded By Out-of-Work 227 Actor Florence Johnston") and made it appear that he was condemning the baby-eating ad by saying, "This baby-eating ad is a 227 ad."

Josh Marshall describes this better than I do, and he has a transcript of Bush's comments so you can read it yourself. It doesn't change the fact that a majority of news organizations are reporting Bush condemned the ad when he didn't.

A few things to, um, add. The reason Bush can get away with misleading people is because of his carefully cultivated image as a plain-spoken guy who's not very good at words. Reporters parsed every word out of Clinton's mouth because they viewed him through the paradigm that he is a brilliant politician, a former lawyer, and assumed he had the ability to chose his words carefully so he could either tell the truth technically but not in spirit, or mislead people through language that allowed people to hear what they wanted to hear, not what he said.

And they were right to do so, because Clinton did do all of these things. The problem is that Bush uses the same tricks but he wears cowboy boots and says folksy aphorisms like "I can't say it any plainer" to masterfully cover his use of them up.

It's perhaps the element that is most responsible for his success. His image that almost everyone has bought into is that he's too dumb to be clever. That he has a lot of political skills, but speaking isn't one of them. A man who uses language so clumsily isn't skilled enough to mention 9-11 and Saddam Hussein right after one another so people would think there is a connection. (Search for "Before September the 11th" in this transcript of his 2003 State of the Union address).

This type of plain-spoken man doesn't have the savvy to hold a press conference and say the same thing but juggle his words in a way that gives a lazy media the wrong impression. He can't. He's stupid. And we'd be too smart to fall for it.

Addendum: I like using the word addendum. It makes me feel smart.
Addendum 2: Props to The Washington Post for getting it right.

On the one hand, dog bites. On the other hand, porn.

Today's mail included a free porn periodical addressed to an old roommate of mine. Evidentially, pages 1-25 are supposed to generate in you an increasing amount of horniess, until you get to pages 26-30 and dial 1-900-SUPA-TITS with one hand. (And leave off the last S. That's the S for SEARCH THE FREAKIN INTERNET.)

But how did I know there was a nudie mag in the wrapped package? Because it wasn't completely wrapped. Someone had ripped the top open, and neither of my roommates were home.

There you go. Now you know why the mail arrives late some days.

Do you know what would be fun to to? Sending a fake package with a title like "From your friends at XXXPress!" Then when the mail man sticks his hand in the package, he triggers a device that fires at his palm a blob of glue, a bunch of hair, and a note: "Gotcha! - God."

What's the deal with security companies? I mean, they're security, and they're companies.

Design issues are relevant in every industry, even security. For example, and I direct this comment to the Comotron Security company, there are good fonts to use on a warning sign, and there are bad fonts. Bad fonts include Comic Sans MS. A sign I saw while walking a dog this morning:

WARNING

This house protected by
Comotron Security
Also, this Tuesday at
the Laff Factory:
come see Nutzo and Jelly Bean
Criminals will be prosecuted
As well as those hard-to-open medicine bottles

Misc.

• If New York were invaded by a giant race of ants, and someone looked at the invasion from the top of a skyscraper, it would look just like a lot of ants attacking a lot of other ants.
  "Who's winning?"
  "I'm not sure. Which side has the ray guns?

• One of the dogs I am taking care of over the weekend greeted me this afternoon with a pile of watery poop on the carpet. The one good thing about cleaning a dog's poop (and there is only one good thing) is that it makes other chores a lot easier. Like cleaning the bathroom. "Hey, my roommate didn't poop on the floor. Awesome!"

• You know you're really rich when you can poop like a dog: on the carpet and have someone else pick it up.

The Family Guy

Back in 2005 on FOX. Old episodes shown throughout the year. Props to The Cartoon Network and Kazaa.

Anyone Wanna Buy a F***ing Winnebago?

The Winnebago Man (found on BoingBoing). Warning: contains a few curse words.

The beauty and danger of the American political system is the rigidity of its structure. One of the country's greatest assets isn't the Constitution but the widely-shared belief that the Constitution is a revered document that should be rarely changed.

I find it amazing that in Constitutional law the pre-eminent question is still, "What did the founders intend?" rather than "Is this 217-year-old document still relevant today?" Advertising has created in many of us an almost visceral sense that "new is better," and it applies to everything except the structure of our government. It is the oldest and the shortest written constitution of any government in the world, and this is a source of pride, not embarrassment.

I'm not saying this is bad. Overall, it's been beautiful. The principle of checks and balances, the set-up of the Supreme Court, different term lengths for the House and Senate--they have all worked out well...for the most part.

But the danger inherent in our political system is that it makes long-term thinking, anything over 10 years, undesirable and often politically damaging. Not only because politicians have to run for re-election every six, four, and two years, but the system of checks and balances that serves us so well also makes it hard for a few political figures to "take one for the team", i.e. have enough power to make an unpopular but necessary decision that most people would oppose.

This hasn't been a problem until the past twenty years because we didn't have any looming long-term problems back then. The social security crisis was in its infancy. There was no threat of a worldwide oil shortage (as there is now, although the date ranges from the next five years to the next 50+). But the problem now is that these issues require a much earlier starting point to deal with successfully.

For example, the current system of waiting until the public considers an issue important and lowers the political penalty for acting on it would not give us enough time to respond to an energy crisis. There's no magic alternative fuel waiting in storage that the government or private sector can invest a ton of money into and bring to the market in a few years. My hypothesis is that this would take decades, not years.

And the sacrifice we'll have to pay to support the social security system in a decade is monumental by any account, but much more so if we wait until 2009 rather than 2004. But raising the gas tax by $0.50 a gallon or slashing Social Security benefits, even if absolutely necessary, would be political suicide today. Better to wait until the problem becomes really serious and the need for sacrifice is obvious.

In short, both human nature and our government's structure makes us excel at being retroactive, but horrible at being proactive. The fact that everything has worked out so far isn't because our politicians and our system is flexible to handle whatever issue is thrown at them--they're not--but because this is the first time in U.S. history that we have issues to deal with that the current system is ill-equipped to handle.

The Founders considered a lot, but I think one area they missed is long-term crisis management. We have provisions for immediate crises, like presidential powers for military actions, and succession of power in case of assassination. But how could the men who lived in the land of spacious skies and amber waves of grain predict the scarcity of a resource for a vehicle that wasn't invented for another 100 years? Or a troubled social security system for the elderly at a time when the life expectancy was 35 years?

I don't have a solution. I doubt it's even possible to create a political system that encourages long-term thinking without making sacrifices in other areas (like the balance of power between branches of government). But, then, what is to be done?

Letter to the Ombudsman

Every few months, I write a letter to the WP's Ombudsman about something that they printed (or didn't print). I'm surprised that I usually get a thoughtful response, either from him or the author. If I were Ombudsman, I'd do everything I could to discourage people from writing in so I could take more naps, including calling people "poopy heads." Who are they going to complain to? The Ombudsman?

I sent this one a few minutes ago:

Hi,

I was about to cite the article regarding Cheney criticizing Kerry for saying he would fight a "more sensitive" war on terrorism than Bush as an example of journalism done right. Cheney makes a newsworthy comment, which gets reported. The DNC points out that Bush made almost the same comment to the same group that Kerry spoke to, and it gets printed after Kerry's comment.

Except that when I revisited the article so I could link to it, I noticed it was rewritten. The DNC's point was removed and replaced with a much weaker rebuttal by Kerry's campaign that doesn't include Bush making a very similar point to the same group.

I understand the general principle of valuing a response from "the spokesperson" over "a friend of the spokesperson," but this is just bad judgment. The fact that Cheney criticized Kerry for something that Bush also said in principle is a critical piece of information to this story. I think it should have remained, either in addition to the Kerry campaign's response or in place of it.

On a related note, why does the Washington Post allow politicians to quote phrases from other politicians' speeches without printing the entire section it was quoted from to give the reader some context? Politicians from both sides take each other words out of context. It only takes a few sentences to reprint the original context, or describe the situation behind the comment. It's a non-biased way of letting the reader decide for himself if the attacking politician is honestly representing his opponent's words. Couldn't this be practice be made a policy at the Washington Post?

Sorry to belabor my point about context, but there have been several instances (besides this article) in the past few weeks where my opinion of someone has changed after learning about the context which he or she spoke.

For example, I read a quote from Kerry saying he would have attacked differently than Bush did when he was reading to the children on the morning on 9/11 and was told about the attacks. I thought Kerry said that unprompted and I felt he was taking a cheap shot at the President. While it wasn't the best decision President Bush could have made, it's understandable under the circumstances.

Then I read on a well-known blog on politics that Kerry was responding to a question about what he would have done in Bush's situation, and I no longer thought his comment was unwarranted since he was responding to a question and not making an unprompted attack. It's possible that my memory isn't serving me right, but I don't remember this being mentioned in the original article on Kerry's response. (I've noticed that The Post does include context often, but it is often in a related article a few days after the first one and/or in an "Analysis" piece.)

In general, I think The Post does a great job in reporting, better than most newspapers, but there are still a few areas I think the organization can do even better.

To all my hoes and bitches,
Jason W."

Country Club Vets for Truth

Visual: A man sits cross-legged on a chair, his golf clubs by his side. In the background is a picture of a crazed Bill Murray inserting a stick of dynamite in a groundhog hole.

Al French: "I played golf with George W. Bush."

Bob Elder: "I played golf with George W. Bush."

George Elliott: "George W. Bush has not been honest about what happened in the back 9."

Al French: "He is lying about his scorecard."

Visual: A scorecard with the "1" poorly scribbled out from "174."

Louis Letson: "I know George W. Bush is lying about his scorecard because I was his golfing buddy."

Van O'Dell: "George W. Bush lied about his hole-in-one on the 14^th. He barely got a bogey. I know. I was there. I was his caddy."

Jack Chenoweth: "His account of what happened and what actually happened are the difference between the wait staff and us."

Admiral Hoffman: "George W. Bush has not been honest."

Adrian Lonsdale: "And he lacks the capacity to lead us home at night."

Visual: Inside the clubhouse. The bar is lined with foam-stained glasses. His golfing buddies are all staring at him, angry. Bush has a sheepish smile and is holding his pockets out, which are empty.

Larry Thurlow: "When the chips were down, you could not count on George W. Bush to buy us a round at the 19^th hole."

Bob Elder: "George W. Bush is no Phil Mickelson."

Grant Hibbard: "He betrayed the entire country club ... he lied before our wives, saying he beat us like girlie-men."

Visual: A picture of Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and Evil Gandhi (Gandhi with a handlebar mustache) at a Republican rally, all holding signs that say "We like-a da Bush!"

Shelton White: "George W. Bush betrayed the men and women he played golf with in Piedmont Country Estates."

Joe Ponder: "He dishonored his country club... he most certainly did."

Bob Hildreth: "I played golf with George W. Bush ...

Bob Hildreth (off-camera): George W. Bush cannot be trusted to drive our country club's golf cart."

Announcer: "Country Club Vets for Truth is responsible for the content of this advertisement. Wait, we are? Oh, crap."

Who's the Goss?

Bush nominates Florida Rep. Peter Goss to head the CIA. I don't have any comment or opinion to this. But there's no way I'm passing up an opportunity to add some Danza magic to the blog. That would be worse than passing up free ice-cream. With sprinkles in the shape of Tony Danza's head on it.

WP Headlines

Bush Tax Cuts Scrutinized
Liberal media apologizes, promises to construct time machine, set dial to "Relevant".

NASA Plans for Hubble Fix
Secret documents reveal Hubble to go down in third; Don King professes innocence.

Wal-Mart in Talks to Build D.C. Store
Store to be half the size of city; White House will be moved to lumber aisle.

Unlisted Verizon Numbers Made Public
Verizon apologizes, promises to borrow liberal media's time machine.

Md. Doctors Ask to Go Insurance-Free
Crazy doctors also ride bicycles without helmets, demand whole milk with cappuccinos.

Fox Attack Alarms Va. Community
O'Reilly spotted frosting at mouth; Brit Hume disoriented, dangerous.

Lost Laurel & Hardy Film Is Found
On first viewing, reel pops out of protector, whacks toupee from head of snotty professor.

I Can't Help Myself

This one is too good to pass up (courtesy of Air America Radio).

We'll ignore the fact that John Kerry mixed up "terror" and "anti-terror" in his acceptance speech last week.

Too Scared To Hire?

No one knows why economic growth has slowed down. Job gains in July were 32,000, about 200,000 less than what most analysts predicted. One reason may be that employers feel that the threat of terrorism creates an uncertain business environment and they're delaying hiring people and expanding operations until they feel things settle down.

Wouldn't that be the most awesome check and balance on using the fear of terrorism to get reelected? That you can either heighten the fear people feel, which makes them scared of taking "risks" and change (i.e. a new president), but in doing so you hurt yourself on the other big issue in the election, the economy?

I think the President should star in a new ad campaign designed to encourage businesses to hire more people. The campaign: "Don't Be a Pussy".

That Sleazy Flip-Flopper

The next time someone calls John Kerry a flip-flopper, ask them to do a Google search for Bush and "initially opposed."

Along those lines, this is from an AP article today, "McCain Condemns Ad Criticizing Kerry's Military Service":

"The president thought he got rid of this unregulated soft money when he signed the bipartisan campaign finance reform into law," McClellan said. A chief sponsor of that bill, which Bush initially opposed, was McCain.

It's a good article to read. It shows the fine line McCain has to walk between having integrity and working to re-elect Bush.

Sorry for the bitterness, but sometimes the Bush administration's chutzpah angers me. I know politicians spin issues, dodge hard questions, and try to present the best possible light on things, but can you think of any adminstration, Democrat or Republician, that does the exact opposite of what it says anywhere near the level of this one? Their modus operandi is to construct their own reality solely through rhetoric and repeat the rhetoric until their reality becomes the dominant one (i.e. unchallenged by most of the media and accepted by 50.1% of the public). Facts are inconveniences that can be overcome by convincing people to believe the opposite.

If someone at your workplace fought vigorously against an idea you suggested--protesting it at meetings, working behind the scenes to destroy it--and then, when circumstances forces the company to adopt your idea, says "I supported it all along," what would you think of that person? And why do many people refuse to see President Bush in the same way?

Curse ye, squirrels!

I thought my newspaper wasn't delivered this morning. Nope. I found it when I got home.

Happy Birthday Michele

...

* Beauty is only skin-deep. That's true. Once you get past the skin, it's all mushy and disgusting.

* On the tee vee, there was a story on a restaurant in California that gives free meals to bald people on Wednesdays. One of the women, whose husband is lucky to have her, described his head this way: "He's not bald. It's a solar panel for a love machine."

Will Ferrell Rocks

He did a very funny commercial for ACT.

Why Yes, I Do Love Dogs

While checking my server logs, I saw that someone found the site through I-love-dogs.com. "Huh. I guess I got in their database after one of their spiders scanned a post about my experiences as a dog walker." Not exactly.