A sharp column by Katha Pollitt; an excerpt:
"Reservists mutiny in Iraq, old people keel over standing in line for flu shots and all sorts of cats leap out of Bush's bag of secrets: According to Ron Suskind's revelatory New York Times Magazine cover story, the President himself recently told a closed Republican meeting that if elected he would 'move quickly' to privatize Social Security, lavish funds on faith-based initiatives and more. The debates, which were supposed to seal Kerry's doom as a garrulous dandy, actually showed that he'd make a pretty good President: confident, serious, knowledgeable, affable. Who cares about his windsurfing now? The President's performance--sluggish and sullen in the first debate, prickly and evasive in the second and third--was so disgraceful that even on the National Review website there was wailing and gnashing of teeth. He couldn't recall a single mistake he'd made in four years? Most people would have no problem thinking of a mistake they'd made that week.
"Thank God for Mary Cheney. Without her, right-wing pundits would be stuck with David Brooks's truly embarrassing 'Bush is heart, Kerry is head' line--vote for Bush, he cares less about the facts! Defending the honor of Mary Cheney has to be more fun than that: How dare John Kerry, that cad, that lowlife, that poltroon, mention on national TV that the Vice President's older daughter is a... lesbian? Writes Brooks, 'He will say or do anything to further his career.' Was Kerry's remark 'spontaneous--and unpleasant' (Robert Novak) or 'McCarthyite' and evidence of Kerry's 'cheap, cold, calculating cynicism' (William Kristol)? As I write, the phony scandal is in full swing: Pundits preen, shock jocks rant, closet Republican Ed Koch waxed so wroth he practically gave himself a heart attack on New York 1. We're back in the world of soaps and scandal and sex: Maybe Zell Miller will challenge Kerry to a duel!"
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