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Hornswaggle is an alternate spelling of hornswoggle, an archaic word that means to bamboozle or hoodwink. I take my pronunciation from the late Harvey Korman in "Blazing Saddles" -- "I want rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, conmen, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswagglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass kickers, shit kickers and Methodists!" |
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Tuesday, February 03, 2004K-E-R-R-Y. Why? Because he's Kerry Kerry Kerry Kerry Kerry Kerry ...Well, Newsweek has gotten what it wanted. Howard Dean's in the doo doo pile, stinky and deep, and John Kerry - ahh the patrician tones, the Skull and Bones pedigree - has taken the lead. Their cover for Jan. 26 shows a dynamic close-up of Kerry, jabbing his finger in the air, with the words: "Bring it on." Subhead: "Kerry's hard charge." You need a degree in semiology to get at what Newsweek is doing, to parse the various agendas that make up the Newsweek stew. It's kind of appalling to observe how they shape the presidential narrative according to their whim. One week their cover story is: "Angry midget Dean can't win. Give it up, loser!" The next week: "Hey, whaddya know? Kerry won!" Anyway, the troubling aspect for Republicans who have been attacking Dean has to be that Kerry does appear to be the more dangerous candidate in a general election. Last week I started to feel really optimistic about how a Kerry-Clark ticket, say, would fare against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, especially in terms of credentials on military issues. Can you imagine the debates? George W. Bush: "I avoided the Vietnam War, and then I avoided the thing I avoided it for." Kerry: "I was shot, like, fifty times." And the vice presidential debates: Cheney: "I sit in a dark room filled with video monitors, thinking about the coming Armageddon. Sometimes I glower. On other occasions I cackle. I have a hatch in my back where you pour the oil in." Clark: "I have more bars on my uniform than there are teeth in your dessicated skull." Not that I'm casting a moral judgement on getting out of the draft for Vietnam, mind you. Plenty of people did it, including Dean and Bill Clinton. What I am condemning is the profound hypocrisy of being a draft dodger turned war monger who sends soldiers off to die seemingly indiscriminately, of a guy who fails to complete his obligations to the National Guard and then struts around the deck of an aircraft carrier in a flight suit like a supply-side monkey. I'm condemning the hypocrisy of a man who partied and snorted coke in his day, yet wants to make harsher the drug laws that send people to prison for marijuana possession. Meanwhile his niece gets busted for narcotics and goes to rehab, because she's got the money, never mind the political connections, to afford good legal representation. And I'm condemning the religious posturing of a man who talks about Jesus while ignoring every single thing that Jesus ever taught, and who believes morality applies to the private lives of citizens but not to corporations that take advantage of the public, that pollute - causing real-life damage to real, live people - and are allowed to get away with it. And the hypocrisy of a man for whom free-market principles always apply, except when political expediency says otherwise. Back to Kerry. I feel for Deaniacs who are disappointed by this turn of events. But he has to take some responsibility for his topple from the pedestal. It's true that Kerry doesn't have the credibility among liberals that Dean has when it comes to Iraq. Kerry's saying the right things now, but the bottom line is that he voted for the congressional resolution authorizing the campaign. But Kerry will have better credibility on Iraq with the general public in the November election. I think Kerry's tax policy is better articulated than Dean's. Dean wants to roll back all of Bush's tax cuts, whereas Kerry wants to retain the elimination of the so-called marriage penalty and a couple other things. That's a smart move politically and, though I'm no tax expert, it sounds like good policy as well. One last thing on Howard Fineman of Newsweek, who wrote the negative cover story on Dean in the Jan. 12 installment, which prompted this article by me. The inaccuracies are astounding. For one, he perpetuates the myth that Dean is "short" and "diminutive," which continues to make the rounds. My roommate has met and stood right next to Howard Dean and swears that Dean is 5'11", about the same height as George W. Bush. For whatever reason, the media likes the idea that Dean is the short guy with the short temper, the Napoleon archetype. For another, Fineman refers to Dean's relatively upscale background by calling him a "Brahman." As if Newsweek's new poster boy isn't the epitome of blue blood? Compared to John Kerry, who married into the Heinz fortune, Howard Dean is as middle class as they come. But Fineman's real inaccuracies come when he talks about Dean's supposed campaign-trail gaffes. Fineman says that Dean "inferred" that all Southerners have confederate flags on their pickup trucks. A) Dean did no such thing. B) Fineman commits the cardinal sin of mixing up "imply" and "infer." The difference between imply and infer is, of course, the following: Implying is on the giving end and inferring is on the receiving end. I may imply something to you. Whether you infer it is a different story. Columbia University's School of Journalism asks you the difference between "imply" and "infer" on the writing test you take to get into the school. In other words, in order to begin studying journalism, you're supposed to know the difference, and Fineman and Newsweek screw it up. Fineman removes any doubt about his error when he does it again in the next sentence, saying that Dean "inferred" that his fellow candidates are Republicans. How can Howard Fineman possibly know what Dean is inferring in such a situation? You'd have to have access to Dean's thoughts. Fineman is wrong on the substance of both his assertions as well. Regarding Southern voters, what Dean said was: I want to be the candidates for "guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks." Nowhere does Dean imply, let alone infer, that all Southerners have flags on their pickup trucks. Fineman is using faulty logic. The spirits of Greek philosphers are slapping themselves in the forehead as I write. What Dean was saying was, Democrats have to do a better job of appealling to a certain cross-section of rural Southern voters, whose socio-economic interests actually lie with Democrats, not Republicans. He'd been using the phrase for a long time and no one noticed until the media, no doubt prompted by a Republican National Committee press release, found that it fit the negative trend on Dean. As far as Dean "inferring" that his Democratic opponents were Republicans: What Dean actually said was that Democrats aren't going to win in November by being "Bush-lite," by being a bunch of milquetoasts, by going along with the war in Iraq, by saying, "You can't have a $1.2 trillion tax cut! I won't stand for that. How about $1.13 trillion?" [UPDATE: Howard Dean has now made the assertion that Kerry is a Republican. Fineman is still wrong, however, for using "infer" in place of "imply."] And that's a true assertion. What he was implying was that some of his opponents, Dick Gephart and Joe Lieberman in particular, were too similar to Bush on key issues, issues that have polarized the American electorate. Basically, he was saying they're pussies. He was making a case for presenting a stark contrast with Bush. Not only has Dean been proven right (Gephart is gone and Lieberman has gone insane, imagining he still has a shot), but he has provided a valuable service to Democrats by making the anti-war stance so prominent and by firing up the liberal base of the party. (It's Kerry's job, if he wins the nomination, to keep those people involved.) If Dean actually "inferred" that all his opponents were Republicans, well, that would be a Fineman-esque lapse in logical judgement, because Dean's opponents are, in fact, all members of the Democratic Party. While Howard Fineman is looking into the portal that opens into Howard Dean's mind and reading his thoughts, he ought to tell us what's in the gubernatorial records that Dean had sealed for ten years. (That was an example of an extremely damaging political mistake that Dean made all on his own, without the aid of the media, as were the disparaging comments he made four years ago about the Iowa caucus that were played on television just prior to this year's event.) Hopefully, this will be the last time I ever write anything about Howard Fineman. .: posted by hornswaggler 11:10 AM| |
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