Tuesday, October 05, 2004
What Cheney will do tonight.
201k has discussed among itself for days the upcoming debate between John Edwards and Dick Cheney. The question has been whether Edwards' trial attorney skills will enable him to do better than Joe "We Surrender!" Lieberman did in 2000. We were not encouraged to read today that Edwards has been preparing with the same person who helped prepare Holy Joe. Our hope is that this person, like all of us, was banging his head against a wall while watching Lieberman, and not nodding in approval. We'll see.
In any event, here's is what we think Dick Cheney will do tonight: lie. Yes, we know that's obvious, but we mean he'll lie in a specific way: he'll pull lies out of left-field.
Cheney knows that Edwards will be prepared to attack him on his past lies, or on lies that have already been exposed. So what he'll do is make outrageous statements that can't be disproved without research. He knows he doesn't have to debate Edwards two nights in a row, he only has to get through tonight. After that he can rely on the GOP ground troops in the media to fog up the field for him.
The Bush administration long ago stopped playing to America at large, concentrating instead on generating material for its own echo-chambers in the press: Fox News, Murdoch papers, Clear Channel radio, etc. That's what Bush was doing at the U.N (you think he cares if the rest of the world thinks he's a liar?) and that's what he was supposed to do in his debate with Kerry: ignore Kerry and the questions as much as possible, repeat his talking points, and let the vast army of GOP media monkeys handle it afterwards. All they needed was the quotes.
Bush blew it because Kerry was beautifully prepared and because--let's face it--he's the weak link in his own machine. But Cheney isn't a weak link. He'll dodge Edwards' attacks not by answering them with old lies but with new, plausible-sounding ones that no one on earth could refute extemporaneously. Their falsity will be handled in stage two, in the media ground war after the debate.
The only effective way for Edwards to counter this is for him to list--directly and clearly--all of Cheney's past "misstatements", and then ask the American people if they can believe anything Cheney says.
Unless Edwards is prepared to attack Cheney at this basic level of credibility, it will be difficult for him to come out of the debate with an edge. The facts won't matter because Cheney will be making them up as he goes along, confident that his media machine can make them sound like the truth for one more month.
In any event, here's is what we think Dick Cheney will do tonight: lie. Yes, we know that's obvious, but we mean he'll lie in a specific way: he'll pull lies out of left-field.
Cheney knows that Edwards will be prepared to attack him on his past lies, or on lies that have already been exposed. So what he'll do is make outrageous statements that can't be disproved without research. He knows he doesn't have to debate Edwards two nights in a row, he only has to get through tonight. After that he can rely on the GOP ground troops in the media to fog up the field for him.
The Bush administration long ago stopped playing to America at large, concentrating instead on generating material for its own echo-chambers in the press: Fox News, Murdoch papers, Clear Channel radio, etc. That's what Bush was doing at the U.N (you think he cares if the rest of the world thinks he's a liar?) and that's what he was supposed to do in his debate with Kerry: ignore Kerry and the questions as much as possible, repeat his talking points, and let the vast army of GOP media monkeys handle it afterwards. All they needed was the quotes.
Bush blew it because Kerry was beautifully prepared and because--let's face it--he's the weak link in his own machine. But Cheney isn't a weak link. He'll dodge Edwards' attacks not by answering them with old lies but with new, plausible-sounding ones that no one on earth could refute extemporaneously. Their falsity will be handled in stage two, in the media ground war after the debate.
The only effective way for Edwards to counter this is for him to list--directly and clearly--all of Cheney's past "misstatements", and then ask the American people if they can believe anything Cheney says.
Unless Edwards is prepared to attack Cheney at this basic level of credibility, it will be difficult for him to come out of the debate with an edge. The facts won't matter because Cheney will be making them up as he goes along, confident that his media machine can make them sound like the truth for one more month.
