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Wednesday, December 24, 2003
Hannity's new book: "Deliver Us from Evil : Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism". What an ass. | I've been participating in Moveon's Bush in 30 Seconds project. 1200 people sent in 30 second anti-Bush ad spots, and now they're asking everyone else (yes, I'm part of everyone else) to watch and rate them. The top 15 rated will be sent to their celebrity panel to pick one to actually air. After you rate a given ad (the server will give you a max of 20 per day), it tells you what the spot's average score has been. So far, I'm a little worried. Almost everything has averaged between 3 and 3.5 (out of 5), with a few truly horrendous ones between 3 and 2.5. It seems to me there are two possibilities here. One, a lot of people are giving these ads the benefit of the doubt, either because they hate Bush and like anything anyone says against him or because they don't want to hurt the producers' feelings. These motivations, of course, defeat the whole purpose of the thing, which is to pick one ad which is better than the others. To do that, you've got to be willing to say A is good, and B is just bad. The second possibility is that people are in fact being brutally honest in their assessments; those assessments just happen to be so scattered as to make distinction impossible. You can't argue with that, of course, but it's worrisome nonetheless. Some of these ads just aren't very good - I've grown up around at least one successful advertiser and have done a bit myself, so I've seen good ads - and they're getting the same, sometimes better, ratings than some things that are really quite excellent. A certain style of I've been consistently panning has been doing remarkably well in the overall polls. Some might call them Red Meat; to me, they just sound like preaching to the choir. They're all full of heated accusations and rhetoric, mostly about the war and tax cuts and how the American people are going to rise up against these injustices. The problem is, uh, at least half the people watching these ads - the ones we're trying to sell to - don't think those were injustices, and the ads do nothing to persuade them. If anything, these spots will just solidify their visions of the loony left. Conversely, other spots which struck me as ingenious have faired rather poorly. One, also a favorite of my advertiser friend, features an earnest, hard-working looking American man sitting on his front porch, worrying over the state of the economy and his job security, but smiling when he remembers that George W. Bush is in Washington, working hard to set things right. As he speaks, subtitles point out some facts that might rather change his opinion of the president; the fact that the far from saving the ailing economy, the Bush's supply-side economics are hastening its collapse, and that far from "working hard", Mr. Bush has taken more vacation time than any president in history. Another one features dozens of quotes from respected conservative politicians and organizations blasting the policies of the Bush administration, ending with a shot of an abandoned and disarrayed GOP event. See, these ads speak to who we want. They speak to the guy on the street who knows what's going on but hasn't had the time to dig real deep into any of it, the guy who thinks that George W. Bush is a Joe Everyman who's got the same interests as you and me. He's not, and that's what we've got to say. Calling him evil is going to get you nowhere; calling him a liar will do no good as long as he can keep up his "straight-shootin' Texan" facade. People can accept an honest guy who lies sometimes for the greater good. What they can't accept is a flat out fraud. Fortunately for his opponents, that's exactly what President Bush is. Now we've just gotta figure out how to prove it to everyone else. | Tuesday, December 23, 2003
Good point on the Democratic party's DLC/Deaniac rift in an Arizona Republic editorial: "The Democratic Party hasn't split; rather, the sleeping half of it is finally awake". It's hard to have divisions when only the people on one side are talking. Maybe the vast differences between the candidates are actually a sign of healthy changes to an ineffective orthodoxy. It'd be a lot more healthy, though, if they'd stop directing so much of their fire at each other. | Maybe it's just me, but I can't figure out why Russia would bother rolling out new stationary nuclear missiles - or new nuclear weapons of any kind. What are they for? The US isn't going to invade them. China maybe? According to the article, the Russians are also drawing up specifications for a new line of strategic bombers (big, nuclear capable beasts like the B-52) to enter service in 2014. Again, of all the things to add to your military, why nuclear first strike weapons? Not only do they already have thousands of missiles and bombers already deployed (and rusting away without proper funding for maintanance), they things are utterly useless for the fighting they've been doing in Chechnya, etc. You can't fight with nuclear weapons, all you can do is indiscriminately destroy. What are they thinking? They don't have the money for this kind of thing. They don't have the money for any kind of thing. Is this sheer pig-headed Cold War-based bloody-mindedness? Or is there something else going on? Either way, more nukes at large is the last thing anyone needs. I'm really starting to worry about Putin. He runs a distressingly authoritarian ship, what with imprisoning and exiling his political opponents, cracking down on Chechen separatists, taking over the Russian media, and all the rest. When he's called on discrepancies in the vote, he points (irony alert) to Florida 2000 and says "if they can do it there, I can do it here". There are rumors of renationalizing major industries. This sort of increased militarization only adds to my fears. Well, Russia is a faraway place, dealing with crime and corruption problems I can't comprehend. I can't pretend to knows what's best for them. I only know what I see... but what I see, I don't like. Any detractor of the government may well be a criminal, but the Kremlin's line seems to be that all of them are. A little to convenient for my tastes. | |