Who's the poseur?

Stolen from Atrios:

Dukakis, who was resoundingly ridiculed for his tank "joyride" actually did serve in the military, as an Army Specialist 3rd from 1955 to 1957 - completing his service, unlike our "lets join the National Guard to avoid getting sent to Vietnam" commander-in-cheif, who couldn't even be bothered to show up for his last year of service. (And, yes, the longer this war drags on, and the more of our young men and women Bush kills in is twisted attempt to create a "domino effect" in the Middle East, the angrier I'm getting about his own draft dodging and going AWOL when his generation was called upon to die for the government's twisted attempt to prevent the communists from creating a "domino effect" in Southeast Asia)

In addition, as Norbizness notes in the comments section:To complete the "spot the differences", Dukakis apologists or a Dukakis version of Peggy Noonan weren't claiming that he actually drove the tank and blew up several structures in a live-fire exercise; in addition, his press secretary didn't claim that he HAD to use the tank because all of the jeeps were out of service.We need someone to - independent of any of the actual candidates - run an ad using the footage of Bush's carrier landing, with the voice over talking about "Bush pretends to be a jet fighter pilot, but in reality, he used his father's influence to get a prime National Guard posting and then went AWOL". Make it part of an overall campaign showcasing Bush's phoniness - other ads could feature shots of the "Mission Accomplished" banner with a voice over and on-screen graphics saying "Bush pretends that our mission is accomplished in Iraq, but since this announcement on May 1st, at least xx soldiers have died in combat, and another xx have died in other incident - deaths that would not have occured if our mission really had been finished"; images of Bush signing his tax cut, with voice saying "Bush pretends that his tax cut is progressive, but in reality the top 1% of taxpayers benefit at a much greater rate than middle or low income taxpayers", and graphics featuring this quote from TNR: "In fact, the top 1 percent of taxpayers would have their tax burden slashed by 9 percent, the middle quintile would have its taxes cut by 4.5 percent, and the lowest quintile would have its taxes cut by 0.8 percent.". A really great one would be images of Bush and of Osama bin Laden with the voice over talking about how "Bush pretends that we're winning the war on terrorism, but the reality is that we're no closer to finding Osama bin Laden than we were the day after the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda is still active (show headlines or new footage of recent bombings), and resources for going after bin Laden were diverted to the war in Iraq when Bush decided that Saddam would be our new priority".

There are a bunch of other, similar spots that could be done, focusing on how Bush pretends that the war in Iraq was to prevent Saddam from being a threat to the US, when in reality there's no solid evidence he was; same with the issues on Saddam's links to al Qaeda and the other issues involved there. Using the "Bush pretends...." but "the reality is...." formulation, it wouldn't be hard to start getting the message across that Bush isn't at all what he seems.

Posted by thorswitch at August 7, 2003 01:26 PM | TrackBack