Logic need not apply

One wonders whether the media or the Democrats will ever really come to grips with the GOP election machine. While the media merely act as a conduit for every dump of GOP propaganda that dreadful collection of posturing politicos manages to blow out of both ends, the Democrats are, once again, caught unawares by yet more Republican attack ads purportedly demonstrating that the failure of the Bush administration to capture bin Laden is really a problem for weak-kneed Democrats. Logic is not a strong feature of Republican campaigning and it is more than clear that the White House and the Republicans actually enjoy having bin Laden on the loose. Why on earth would they ever want to capture the guy? They get to play Osama during every election cycle. No one ever holds them accountable for it, least of all the Republican base, and bin Laden has been a feature of the GOP campaign strategy since 9/11.

This weekend, the GOP are planning on running an advertisement featuring the spectre of bin Laden and indicates that there are people in world who want to kill Americans. Which means that you, voter, must vote for the Republicans who have let this maniac remain uncaptured to this day and appear, for the most part, to be unconcerned with his capture at all. But the GOP will again employ the ghostly image of bin Laden to imply that it is the Democrats who would leave the al Qaeda leader free to do his dirty deeds.

Of course, this political effect this has is the same one it always has: it keeps the Democrats on the defensive, constantly in a position of rebutting GOP nonsense during the run-up to the election, while the Dems continue to flounder about a coherent message. It is remarkable the Dems are up in the polls as much as they are and that is clearly the result, not of anything the Democrats have actually done, but of the distaste the American public has developed for the corruptions and disasters the Republican party have wrought themselves. A claque of chimpanzees would be polling in the fifties against this GOP.

People I talk to don't buy this crap from the Republicans but I have to wonder, are these ads effective or does the GOP merely think they are because it really is their only play on the election. They sure as hell can't be running around yawping about "moral values" right now. No doubt such ads do have an effect on some small minds. But such minds were probably already Bush supporters. We know that the GOP is fond of believing that they create their own reality but it is beginning to appear that the actual reality of how the voters view these pathetic fear-monering tactics is diverging from Rove's belief in such tactics' effectiveness.