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Because this is a democracy, where majority rules.

A recent poll shows that 42% believe in creationism, 18% in ID, and 26% in straight evolution. So why not teach all three and let people decide for themselves. Why is the idea of inclusion so threatening? If 42% of the people believed in scientology, then you might have an argument for including it.

As was the case with Iraq, with Iraq's years of cheating and interference one would naturally lean towards "he may have something hidden". ...While decades of CIA deception, a written desire to overthrow the man from the majority of his PNAC cabinet, written desires to install US-friendly regimes in oil producing regions, exposed misuse of intelligence led *Europe* and the *American antiwar crowd* to suspect that the Bush adminstration had ulterior motives. Heck, in a poll just a little bit later, the United States was ranked above Iraq as a threat to world peace - four of our allies ranked us as the greatest threat to world peace).

If you think there is something inconsistent with "not guilty" and "he may have really done it" visit the OJ Simpson and Michael Jackson trials, both are extremes but then again so is Sadaam and his insane antics.

The majority of jurors actually did not believe that OJ, nor MJ, did it. In each case, there were a few that did, but willingly accepted.

"Likely no WMD" was not the common belief.

The heck it wasn't.

Your citiation indicated 60% of Britons believed the US/UK had failed to prove the WMD case. Now relax the survey question from "proved" to "likely to have it", now relax it again to "may have it" (my position), now relax it again to "it's a tossup", now relax again to "he might have gotten rid of it", and now relax it yet again to "likely to have gotten rid of it", the position you claim to be the norm.

Why not make up another fifty steps to put in there to try and make it sound like the wording is off. The fact is that the vast majority of those people would have agreed no matter what the wording. This is attested to by editorials, letters to the editor, etc in European papers. And remember that we're talking about *Britain* right now, not France, Germany, et al.

You think after 5 relaxations of the question 60%

Just say "a million billion relaxations!" - you can fit as many steps in there as you want.

would not drop to well below 50%, don't be rediculous.

Even if it *was* I understand that you may not have personally revisised your position but the position you advance is the same position advanced by politically inspired revisionists, and the latter are far more numerous.

In America they are, because a clear majority of Americans bought into this garbage. In Europe, that's not the case. The majority of the "There were no WMD crowd" had that same position before the war.

Yet the jets existed and no one was really sure until they got there and look underneath and found camera ports.

That is not true. The article that I linked cited that the Air Force viewed the Iraqi UAV program as having cancelled the drones, and that all signs pointed to the program being for spying: before the war

A reusable drone aircraft is one thing, an expendable drone is something else.

And a drone that doesn't have all of its parts because its budget was cut, and a drone that has no range because it wasn't fully equipped, and a drone that crashes on takeoff because the defects were never worked out, hurts *you*.

That one aircraft would only be relevant if it were the most capable.

It was all that the Iraqis had when we invaded, and this was the view of the Air Force *before* we invaded.

" You just changed your words from "lead anti-war spokesman" to "leading opponent of the invasion" "

  Sure, they are synonymous in the context of a pre-invasion timeframe.

The heck they are! He was a "leading" opponent in that he was a world leader, not that the antiwar community agreed with him. He wasn't our spokesman simply because he opposed the war any more than Hillary Clinton was your spokeswoman simply because she supported the war.

By the way, even if you do want to engage in this infantile (and as I demonstrated above, wrong) brainwashed idiocy about how your beloved liberal states subsidize the evil red states, you should take into account that it's not liberals in the blue states who pay all those excess taxes. If you do a little research -- you could start here, at a liberal place -- you'll see that by a wide margin upper class and upper-middle class Americans vote Republican, not Dem., that the middle class is divided, and that only poor people have majority support for the Dems. In other words, those wealthy New Yorkers and Californians and so on who pay taxes to subsidize Kansas farmers, they're overwhelmingly conservative.

Now, as I say, I think the whole thing is somewhat silly, and I myself am neither Rep. nor Dem., but if you'd done even the tiniest bit of research you'd see that you're totally off-base on any number of levels, and basically just being a complete ass.

You might want to read this article I wrote a while back.

Part of the issue:
citizenship is a form of property right-like a share in a large condominium. Letting companies import workers in a specific profession dilutes the property rights of condo owners in that profession-and has the effect of letting employers pay in immigration rights rather than cash. The "market value" of an H-1b visa right now is around $50,000. If companies paid that in visa fees, there would be much less of an issue(also if the visas were up for public auction without being tied to a particular job/profession).

Now, that aside, I'm not sure if the move of countries like Canada to let folks essentially buy residency rights(i.e. by promising a certain level of investment) is a good idea. H-1b is nothing but a corporate welfare program though. Companies pay in green cards rather than cash. The real issue is why major companies are so dependent on these kinds of subsidies.

The job of the government isn't to enforce some kind of utopia property rights applicable only to the very wealthy. The job of the government is to create a situation in which the broad base of its citizens have decent life-while being a good "international citizen". The present US government isn't doing that job-and is in fact liquidating the assets of the broad base of citizens for the profit of wealthy elites(technies and African Americans have been among the hardest hit BTW).

Just FYI, the group among which immigration is the hottest issue according to Pew Research are the heavily black "Disadvantaged Democrats". The way immigration continues is massive buying of corrupt politicians. Most Americans want less immigration.

If you don't see the CNN is left leaning you it's only because you yourself are left leaning and therefore see it as centrist. This topic has been studied several times in several different ways and been proven that the news media is liberal baised

http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/barro/bw /bw04_0614.pdf

http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?PageI D=829

http://www.mediaresearch.org/SpecialReports/2004/r eport063004_p1.asp

a few searches on google will bring up more.

I really doubt that the vote fraud was larger than the margin of voter error. The country is closely divided, near 50/50, plus or minus just a few percentage points. Most pre-election polls (not to mention the Iowa Electronic Market) indicate that.

Besides, dictatorship is not by itself and indication of failure of a society or country. South Korea and Taiwan had tremendous increases in GDP and broad personal wealth under near-dictatorships, and have only become highly democratic recently.

On the other hand, India spent nearly 40 years as a democracy, with extremely low GDP growth and poverty reduction, until free-market reforms began in the 1980's.

It's like people who link to that worldvoting site... it's 75%/25% in favor of kerry in the US. That shows a bias.

Yeah worldvote or whatever is simply an online poll. Of course, it's bullshit. A much more reliable indicator would be the extensive scientific polling by the nonpartisan Pew Research's "Global Attitudes Project".

the liberal news media. Do some independent research people.

Okay. I'll do some research.

William Kristol, editor of the "Weekly Standard", and one of the most influential conservative voices in America today, said in an interview with the New Yorker in 1995, "I admit it. The whole idea of the 'liberal media' was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.'"

Former Republican party chairman, Rich Bond, in the August 20, 1992 issue of the "Washington Post", said of conservative cries of "liberal media bias", "If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is 'work the refs.'"

By playground rules, you lose. I cite "your own guy said so".

Probably because he's been outside the USA.

I know dozens of people who regularly travel to Singapore, China, Japan, India, Malaysia, South America and a host of other regions. All of them are far more liberal then I am.

However, a more interesting anecdote would be of the Americans one meets on foreign travel, do they tend to be more liberal than Americans in the USA. My experience is that, if anything, they are more conservative.

While there are degrees of anecdotes, anecdotes are still rather useless. The claim was "survey says". So identify the survey.

Conventional wisdom, which admittedly is often wrong, is that people who travel regularly, tend to have more money than those who do not. And it is a fact that the wealthier tend to be Republican.

Nope it isn't a fox bias, it is just further proof that the "liberal media" is a myth...

Is it? Then why, when I go to an "unbiased" news site like cnn.com, do I see ads urging me to donate money to John Kerry? Personal bias aside, don't you think that a reporter who knows that some portion of his salary comes from Kerry will feel tempted to paint democrats in a better light?

21 percent of adults ages 18 to 29 said they regularly turn to "The Daily Show" and "Saturday Night Live" for presidential campaign news.

"They feel like it doesn't speak to their desires or interests, and part of that is just being young, but part of it is feeling like, 'What's the point of being informed because you can't change anything anyway,"

Some good points have been made already.

The balance of payment situation has been mentionned, but I think it also has something to do with security concerns as well as countries wanting to develop an indigenous software sector.

Basically, your whole economy is dependent on outside investments to keep running, and that's hurting your currency. Some have suggested using the Euro for petroleum sales to hurt the dollar further, possibly causing a recession in the US (obviously aiming to affect the next elections).

If you are unsure how deep anti-American sentiment runs, consider the last Pew Research Center annual survey on attitudes towards Americans. The percentage of people that think suicide bombings against the US are justifiable is just plain scary.

So while the BOP, security and protectionnism all play to a certain extent, I wouldn't underestimate the sheer resentment against the US.

Stubborn refusal to change is the safest long-term response to terrorism.

Something tells me that you will be a great parent someday. When your kid rebels against you, your solution will be to avoid change and to visit punishment for the rebellion. Nations work like teenage kids that way -- they're never going to see you as right if visit nothing but pain on them. Terrorism is as much a lashing out in frustration as it is a political tool. Changing your behavior is not necessarily (the much demonized) appeasement so long as it's not exactly what they want you to do.

Remember, Al-Qaeda's primary goal is the abolishment of corrupt Middle Eastern governments and the establishment of a borderless Middle East under the rule of sharia. Getting rid of US interference in the region is a key goal for that. The current problem is our form of interference, which breeds or supports the ability of the regional governments to foster hatred, oppression, death, and poverty.

If we want to get rid of terrorism, then we must get rid of hatred and desperation, for terrorism is the last act of the desperate. "Shock and Awe," the industrialized, government-backed form of terrorism will not rid the Middle East of hatred and fear of the US -- it will reinforce it and give justification to the poisonous litany of Al Qaeda and its supporters. Terrorism only works if it has support. Support comes from hate.

We must make the Middle East love (or at least respect) us, and anyone can see that our policy of unpopular overthrows and sloppy nation-building does nothing to further that end. I fear that the war in Iraq and other policy decisions have set this back for 20 years or more. We must make strides to end poverty and ignorance in the Middle East because a content populace does not support terror, and an educated one does not suffer tyrants and fundamentalists well. We must make genuine gestures to promote democracy in the Middle East by cutting the flow of money to despots like the Saud royal family. (Note that those the goals of ending poverty and ending support of tyranny are often in opposition and require careful balance.) We must pluck out the thorn in the side of the Arab world and negotiate a real Israel-Palestine peace accord that puts an end to suicide bombing, to military attacks on civillian targets, and to the economic stagnation that has ground down the Palestinians' hopes. Arabs all support the Palestinian cause, and ending their anger and misery in a supportive way would go a long way to ending a source of anger at the US.

Terrorism should have been a warning sign that something is desperately wrong about our foreign policy -- not a lash to drive it forward faster and deeping into the wilderness. It is a lesson lost on a half of America that would prefer to "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" about the actions of the country that they love. God help us all, because self-critique has long been abandoned as an American trait, and we've come a long way since having a leader that would recognize that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" instead of calling Orange Alerts and restricting the Freedom while mouthing support for the concept in press releases.

Your efforts to defend your mention of the equivalence of Bush and Saddam in your mind are simply semantics. You said you dislike them equally, so you consider them morally equivalent. Easy enough.

Eh? I dislike Britney Spears more than I dislike Ghengis Khan, but that doesn't mean I consider brutal dictators to be morally superior to pop stars.

You can condemn his father with some justice, but George W Bush is doing the morally correct thing, insofar as I can determine.

Living in San Francisco, I agree that there is certainly a chunk of the American left that is irrationally biased against George Bush to a point that is ridiculous. It seems to be the same thing (if smaller in scale) as the American right's irrational hatred of Clinton. It has a lot to do with their personalities, and very little to do with their capabilities.

However, you shouldn't let that blind you to what are very reasonable critiques of the Bush administration. The war wasn't sold to the public on the basis of removing a bad dictator; it was sold on the basis of Iraq posing an imminent threat. Tony Blair got reamed for this, but the American media gave Bush pretty much a free pass on it, as demonstrated by the large proportion of Americans who still have basic facts wrong (especially, as it shows on page 13, the ones who get most of their news from Fox). Many lefty commentators feel that the Bush administration is directly responsible for this, but at the very least they have done very little to correct these misperceptions.

But even if you believe that military action against Iraq was the only option (and many who oppose Bush felt that way), there are still very reasonable gripes with the way it happened. The unilateralist rush to immediate action spent vast amounts of international political capital. Two years ago the world was saying "We are all New Yorkers now." Recent surveys show a drastic falloff in worldwide approval of America as well as loss of stature for the UN. This isn't just a long-term issue, either; the lack of support from other nations, especially Islamic ones, is making it much harder to turn Iraq into a functioning democracy.

Personally, I favored the use of force to bring Iraq into compliance with UN anti-proliferation treaties. I also favor the use of the US's power to benefit the downtrodden everywhere, especially by furthering the spread of the freedoms that we in western democracies often take for granted. But I think our Iraqi adventure was poorly executed and done for the wrong reasons.

>I still don't know a single person who supports this war.

Meet an American; the odds are that he or she supports the war. 63% of us support the war even if a second resolution were vetoed, according to this poll. We wanted a second resolution but we support the war even without it. Congress passed a resolution giving Bush the legal authority (from US law's point of view) to invade. And, only 25% of eligible US voters in 2000 voted for GW Bush.

This is not a war that Bush is pursuing despite majority opposition in the US. The majority in the US supports it. (If you extrapolate the poll numbers to the US population of ~350 million, 100 million Americans oppose the war, but that leaves 250 million who support it.)

Actually, less than half of Americans who were eligible to vote did vote in the 2000 Presidential elections. Less than half of the Americans who did vote voted for George W. Bush. If you're keeping track, that means that less than 25% of Americans who were eligible to vote voted for George W. Bush.

The vote was so close that the results of a few districts in Florida would have decided the election. That's where the scandal came in - Florida's Governor is GW's brother Jeb, and there was quite a bit of doubt as to the validity of the votes in that district. In the end, the Republican-dominated US Supreme Court voted to halt a recount of the votes in Florida, making GW Bush president. There is still a dispute as to whether this was legal, but after 9/11 and all o the ultra-conservative legislation that the Bush administration has passed to fight terrorism (PATRIOT act etc.), not too many people are still arguing about the election.

That's why his opponents in the US call him "the Thief in Chief" (a play on the fact that the President of the US is also the "Commander in Chief" of the US military). Some people are angry about the fact that the US Presidential election process uses a system called the Electoral College to effectively award all the votes from a state to whoever won in just that state, so it is technically possible for the national popular vote (that is, the count of the millions of individual voters' votes) to support one candidate and the electoral college votes to support a different one. That happened in 2000 - the popular vote supported Al Gore (former VP under Bill Clinton), but

As for the war, according to this poll of American support for the war, on February 20, only 34% of Americans thought that the "US has enough international support for the war." 57% said that we should get a second U.N. resolution before taking military action. However, 30% said that we "should" get a second resolution, but if vetoed, we should go ahead with a war if we feel it's the right thing to do. That means that even with a second UN measure vetoed, 63% of Americans polled supported a war.

So, to Americans and foreigners trying to pin this war on Bush, don't. Almost 2/3 of Americans supported going to war even with a veto, even though 3/4 of eligible voters didn't vote for GW Bush.

From your previous post, i rather suspected that you're (formally or informally) trolling for the Dems, but this one proves it. As much as i dislike this phony and destructive Left-Right political paradigm, people like you (and that right-wing idiot who didn't do any fact checking) insist on keeping the ball rolling.

My Sincere Apologies to the thinking/rational members of the /. Community for the excesive length, but "tossed off" facts require real context. SORRY!

Let's deconstruct some of the above post, why don't we?

"Once again you are lying. Insdustries give much more money to republicans while unions tend to give more to democrats. It's the classic struggle. Teachers, cops, firemen, plumbers etc support democrats while CEOs support republicans.

In the last two Federal cycles, Republicans received about 625 million dollars and Democrats received 449 million, or the Democrats recieved about 70% of revenues the Republicans received. Don't know about where you live, but around here, 449 MILLION DOLLARS is a lot of money.

here are some links to real data, you can find verified numbers for just about anything, if you look;

Common Cause
Judical Watch
Federal Election Commission
Roll Call Magazine
Library of Congress' THOMAS legislative info site
Vote dot Com
TownHall dot Com
Pew Research Center (reasonably balanced/verified poll data)

You also neglected to mention some rather important things. Especially as you seem to be attempting to tie the current economic probs to a particular party.

1. The vast majority of Technology CEOs supported Clinton and Gore, and routinely give big donations to the Democratic Party.

2. The vast majority of CEOs in the Finance sectors (stock brokerages, investment banks, bond houses) are also Democrats and are amongst the Dems biggest contributors

3. The Republican Party gets much more of its money from individual "grass roots" contributors (i.e., people sending in twenty or fifty bucks) than the Democratic Party does.

Whereas, the Democratic Party gets the vast majority of its donations from corporations, with very few dollars coming from "grass roots" donations. That's a kinda important point in this discussino, since you seem to be so wound about corporate donations.

4. The two largest contributor groups of the Democratic Party are two of the most regressive and damaging special interests in America. Teachers Unions (NOT the teachers themselves -- for whom i have HUGE respect by and large) and Trial Lawyers.

Teachers Unions have gutted and stalled any meaningful educational reform in this country for 30 years, while students' test scores have plummeted (and they continue to actively obstruct schoool reform) and Trial Lawyers are making it virtually impossible for anyone to start a new business in America without hugely expensive liability insurance (which many entrepeneurs cannot afford). I've done several tech startups in Cali -- next one WON'T be here, i'm done with this messed up state.

Trial lawyers are also increasing the price of virtually every product we buy with frivolous deep pockets liability lawsuits.

The key determinent in politcal fundraising actually seems to be, not so much supposed politcal affiliation, but rather who has control of the House. When the Dems had control of the House (and the White House) they outraised the Republicans by about an average of 20%.

The actual reality is that corporations will give money to whoever can deliver the goods. That will always favor the Party in the Majority. We have the best legislators money can (and does) buy. But, why would any corporation want to waste money on a legislator in the Minority??? What sense does that make? You spend money to buy influence, PERIOD.

When the Republicans took control of the House, they found that they could outraise the Dems, especially in "party building" monies. The reason is generally held to be that whoever controls the House, controls the purse strings. If you're looking for bucks, you go to the Majority Party.

"Once again you are lying. Insdustries give much more money to republicans while unions tend to give more to democrats. It's the classic struggle. Teachers, cops, firemen, plumbers etc support democrats while CEOs support republicans."

nice troll! actually cops and firefighters vote mostly republican (about 68% nationwide), teachers do indeed vote mostly democrat (about 82% nationwide -- though that's starting to change -- there's been nearly a 10% increase nationwide of teachers who are voting republican in the last decade, whoda thunk it?)

(i have no idea how plumbers vote), you're sidestepping the fact that it's actually police and fire unions who give big amounts of their members' dues to far-left candidates.

"All of this adds up to the grim fact that republicans get a ton more money then democrats over all.

True kinda/sorta, but certainly NOT "..a ton more", through the next election cycle, there will probably be about 18-22% advantage for the Republicans. Or about the same numbers that the Dems had over the Republicans when they controlled the House and Senate.

A significant difference, but certainly not fatal. Clearly the Dems aren't attacting voters the way they used to. The Republicans are (and have always been) the "Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight", when it comes to image projection. So, that pretty much suggests that the Dems are just losing their appeal. The Republicans are usually not adroit enough at attack politics, they're too busy blowing off their own media toes. (Look at Bill Simon in Cali,-- this guy couldn't get a BJ in a whorehouse, what were the Republicans thinking????)

From about the 1960's to the late 1980's, the Dems had an (by your standards "large") advantage in money raising. When the Republicans and Gingrich took over the Congress in the '94 mid-terms, the money gap started favoring the Republicans.

My favorite though is "...Combine that with the conservative media and you can explain how they control the country."

Where would this conservatie media be? You've got the looney-tunes Washington Times, the spooky strange FoxNewsChannel and that's about it.

Meanwhile, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washingpost, Time, Newsweek, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC and CBS, and most big city newspapers might as well just print the DNC's "Message of the Day".

Limbaugh gives the Republicans a pretty large presence on talk radio. (despite a decade of dire predictions by the Left about Limbaugh fading away, he's still do quite well, fascinating. i woulda never thunk it.)

But the most successful "politics" shows on TV are O'Reilly (yeech, i'm waiting for Bill to allow a guest to complete a sentence before he starts screaming at them) and Larry King, who spends more time discussing his own opinons than his guests. I can't watch EITHER of them without getting a headache. So, I don't.

O'Reilly is hardly a conservative, and while King is technically a liberal, as O'Reilly continues to pummel King in the ratings, King has drifted back to the center.

So the vast majority of media in this country is pretty much Center-Left.

It is also boring, trite and doesn't spend any real time discussing any alternatives to the obviously dysfunctional Left-Right paradigm that has captured the votes of the majority of the few voting Americans and turned off/over about half the eligble voters in America.

I voted for Nader before, and it looks like i'll be doing it again in '04.

According to these links, between 20% and 25% of American homes have neither cable or satellite.
Of course of fair few of them are not going to watch over-the-air TV either.

The New Science of Character Assassination
Phil Agre
15 October 2000

You are welcome to forward this article electronically to anyone for any noncommercial purpose.

The past ten days will go down as a turning point in American history. This is what it's like when the far right is taking over your country: the people support Al Gore's policies, but the polls are shifting toward George W. Bush because the media is filled with false attacks on Al Gore's character. A story in today's (10/15/00) New York Times states openly what has been clear all along, that this campaign of character assassination has been planned and executed over a long period by the Republicans.
--Story Link--

Character assassination is, of course, nothing new for Republicans, who mastered the art in the days of Richard Nixon. What's new is that the press constantly repeats the lies. Not just once or twice, not just the occasional slip, but over and over and over.

Let us consider the New York Times story in detail. Written by Alison Mitchell, it describes Al Gore's abject apology for two trivial and much-exaggerated errors in the first debate as "the culmination of a skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy".

The New York Times discerns four landmarks in this campaign, and they are as follows:

• Landmark number one:

• ... in December 1997 ... the [Republican National] committee announced it had started a contest to come up with a slogan for Mr. Gore after he told reporters that the hero and heroine in the novel "Love Story" were modeled after him and his wife, Tipper. (Erich Segal, the author, soon said that his protagonist, Oliver Barrett IV, was only partly based on Mr. Gore, while Jenny Cavilleri had nothing to do with Tipper Gore.)

  In this case, the RNC's claim was false. Gore had not told anyone that Love Story was based on him and his wife. Rather, he had mentioned a newspaper article that had inaccurately said that, and was carefully to say that he only had the article's word to go on. Observe that Mitchell repeats the RNC's false account, and then (following the longstanding convention) makes it sound as though Segal was contradicting Gore, when in fact he was defending him. The false "Love Story" store continues to be repeated to the present day.
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number two:

• So when Mr. Gore said in an interview with CNN in March 1999 that "during my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet", Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, issued this mocking statement: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the paper clip".

  The problem, of course, was that Gore's claim was correct. As the Internet's scientific leaders attest, often heatedly, Gore recognized the significance of the Internet very early, and took the initiative in doing the political work and articulating the public vision that made the Internet possible. His sentence, which is often not quoted in its entirety, makes perfectly clear that he was talking about the work he did in the context of his Congressional service, and that he is not claiming, ridiculously, to have done the technical work as well. Mitchell shades the story by omitting the Republicans' (and media's) most common distortion of the matter, that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. This falsehood has been repeated on literally hundreds of occasions, and George W. Bush routinely uses it in his speeches.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number three:

• On the day Mr. Gore announced his candidacy in Carthage, Tenn., his family's hometown, Jim Nicholson, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had a more elaborate stunt. He rode in a wagon pulled by mules to the hotel on Embassy Row in Washington where Mr. Gore lived for much of his youth.

  "He has tried to pass himself off as this hardscrabble, homespun central Tennessee farm boy and that is not what he is", said Mr. Nicholson, playing off the fact that Mr. Gore had told The Des Moines Register that he had learned to slop hogs and clear land on the family farm. Friends later told reporters that Mr. Gore's father had kept him on a backbreaking work schedule during summers on the family farm.

  The problem, again, is that Gore's claim was true. He did work on his family farm as a child. This time, Mitchell admits that the Republicans were making it up. But she still shades the story by making it sound as though the truth hadn't come out until later, and as though the contrary view rests solely on the word of Gore's friends. In fact the childhood farm chores had been extensively reported for a decade. The false claim that Gore had lied about the chores was repeated on many occasions in the press.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number four:

• The Republicans got help as well from an unexpected source. When the Democratic primary fight became bitter, former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey insisted that Mr. Gore had deliberately distorted his policy positions in what he called a "pattern of misrepresentation". At one point, Mr. Bradley spat out, "Why should we believe that you will tell the truth as president if you don't tell the truth as a candidate?"

  The problem is that Bradley is endlessly quoted to this effect without any attempt to determine whether he is right. In fact Bradley often wrongly accused Gore of distorting his positions.

And that's it. That, according to the New York Times, is the story of the Republicans' campaign to paint Al Gore as an embellisher. The New York Times cites four accusations, all of them false, and in every case the New York Times either repeats the false accusations as truth or else provides misleading accounts of them.

The New York Times' article is not an aberration. The list of false attacks on Al Gore's character that have been circulated in the media for the last two years is extraordinary. In some cases, as in the ones (mis)cited by the New York Times, Gore is accused of lying when he was actually telling the truth:

• Several publications have called Gore a liar in very harsh terms because he claimed that his father was a pioneer in the civil rights movement. It is true that his father lost his nerve on the Civil Rights Act, but that does not change the overwhelming and (until recently) universally accepted evidence of his leadership on civil rights. Gore's assertion is perfectly accurate.
• 
  --Story Link--
• In probably the single most vicious attack of the entire campaign, several publications have suggested that Gore lied when claiming to have been present at his sister's death. The only evidence they offer is that he also made a political speech the same day, and Gore's driver has explained his schedule for that day in detail.
• 
  --Story Link--

In other cases, Gore's words are twisted, misquoted, or simply made up to make him sound as though he were making a claim that he was not making. For example, some publications have even claimed, falsely, that Gore literally uttered the words "inventing the Internet".
--Story Link--

There are many others:

• In the closing moments of Gore's second debate with George W. Bush, Jim Lehrer falsely accused Gore of having called Bush a "bumbler" in one of his campaign commercials.
• 
  --Story Link--

  Was this simply a mistake on Lehrer's part? Okay, but Lehrer made his "mistake" in the context of rebuking Gore for his own miniscule mistakes in the first debate.

• Gore told a a union audience that his mother had sung the "union label" song to him as a child. Gore's comment was obviously a joke and the audience took it as a joke. Yet, incredibly, numerous supposed journalists have asserted that he meant it seriously, or else tried (on no evidence) to cast doubt on Gore's obviously-true claim that it was a joke.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When Gore spoke of his proposal to put Social Security and Medicare in a "lockbox", some "journalists" accused him of dissembling on the astonishing grounds that he was not actually proposing to put the money into a physical box.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When the Washington Post finally gave up on the "Love Story" story, pretending that it had only recently been disproven, they moved to another falsehood. Gore had claimed that his sister was the first volunteer for the Peace Corps. This claim was accurate, inasmuch as his sister had in fact worked for the Corps without pay from its earliest days, only later joining its paid staff. But the Post called Gore's claim a "lie", on the grounds that she had not worked as a volunteer *overseas*, which Gore had never claimed; they did not mention that she worked without pay.
• 
  --Story Link--
• Gore told some students in New Hampshire the story of a Tennessee community activist who brought his attention to a toxic dump, whereupon he looked for other examples, found Love Canal, and held the first hearings on the issue. "Journalists" first misquoted him as having claimed to to have started the issue, when in fact he was giving credit to the activists. Even when the misquotation was grudgingly corrected, they continued to distort his words, as if he were claiming to have discovered the toxic pollution at Love Canal.

In yet other cases, Gore made a trivial error that has been exaggerated by his critics, and the exaggeration has been falsely attributed to him. Such is the case with the school in Florida that Gore cited in the first of his debates with George W. Bush.
--Story Link--

These are just a few examples among many. People make mistakes all the time. Al Gore is one of them, and it's surprising that an army of opposition researchers hasn't come up with more substantive errors after fact-checking a whole life of public statements. So is George W. Bush, whose errors during the two debates so far have been dramatically worse than those of Gore. To start with, Bush falsely implied that the Europeans have no troops in Kosovo, when in fact they have tens of thousands, and that the United States has significant numbers of troops in Haiti, when it does not. And he made numerous false statements:

• that Gore was outspending him, when the opposite was true;
• that the rate of uninsured people was falling in Texas and rising nationally, when the opposite was true;
• that the men who killed James Byrd would be put to death, when only two had been sentenced to death and their appeals had not been exhausted;
• that middle-income seniors would get drug coverage immediately under his Medicare plan;
• that Gore had lied about this;
• that the new spending in his budget plan is equal to the tax cuts;
• that "most of the tax reductions [in his plan] go to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder";
• that the president is unable to influence the actions of the Food and Drug Administration;
• that Hillary Clinton's 1993 national health insurance initiative would have entailed nationalizing health care; and
• that Gore had claimed to be the author of the Earned Income Tax Credit law.

That is just a partial list of Bush's "mistakes" in two ninety-minute debates, and it doesn't include the dubious numbers he quoted from Republicans in the Senate or the mess he made of education, taxes, Social Security, and the Middle East. Nor does it include the "mistakes" that littered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, or the especially egregious "mistakes" of his brutal campaign against John McCain in South Carolina, and so on.
--Story Link--

With only a few exceptions (like the one just cited), the press has gone to great lengths to cover up or minimize Bush's false statements. Press coverage of the first debate focused overwhelmingly on Gore's two comparatively trivial errors and on endless suggestions that Gore was rude for having sighed several times.
--Story Link--

Of course, the sighs were often exaggerated by turning the volume up. (Falsely calling someone a liar, as Bush did several times, is not rude?) Pundits bizarrely praised Bush for his command of the issues after the first debate despite his lengthy catalog of errors:
--Catalog Link--

And the 10/5/00 Washington Post buried the Democrats' list of Bush errors at the end of a long story about Bush's accusations against Gore.

The problem is systemic. A reporter for a British newspaper, the Observer, was struck at the completely different approaches of the reporters covering Gore and Bush, and reported a disturbing incident in which a Washington Post reporter well-known for her open hostility to Gore held a toy gun to his head.
--Story Link--

Indeed, press coverage of Gore has been spun in a strongly negative fashion for a long time.
--Story Link--
--Story Link--
--Story Link--

The press, following the lead of Republican "investigators", has repeatedly falsified and spun the famous Buddhist temple event, among others.
--Story Link--

They have also falsified and exaggerated Gore's performance in earlier debates, thereby creating a caricuture of him as a vicious attacker.
--Story Link--

Yes, the press has suggested that Bush is not mentally competent to run the country. But it has not fabricated huge amounts of evidence to support this charge, and it has not routinely used vocabulary that is remotely as harsh as that used against Gore. You have rarely seen the media call Bush a "moron" or "idiot", but Gore has routinely been called much worse. Here is a very partial list:

• "evil"
• "imperious&qu ot;, "repellent"
• "lethal", "ruthless", "liar"
• "ruthless", "relentless", "bully", "maniacal"
• "manipulative", "dishonest"

(I am citing the Daily Howler for most of these examples so that you can read some analysis of them. But the Howler provides precise citations for the originals, which should be easy to look up.)

Indeed, Bush's alleged mental incompetence is often tacitly used to excuse his falsehoods -- he doesn't know what he's talking about, so he can't be lying. Or Gore is accused of a "pattern" of false and exaggerated statements, but then Bush escapes the same accusation for the simple reason that nobody bothers to gather Bush's false and exaggerated statements in one place.

This is just the press. We're not even talking about the conservatives on the Internet that have been circulating long lists of Gore's supposed lies and exaggerations -- most of which are, of course, themselves lies or exaggerations, including garbled and embellished versions of the already false versions in the press. Some of these lists are credited to the RNC, but of course it is hard to know for sure.

The new science of character assassination, then, has several components:

• It starts with a strategy: a conscious choice by a political party that it is going to position its opponent in a certain way. The 10/15/00 Washington Post quotes a Republican consultant as saying that "PR 101 is define your opponent before he tries to define himself", and the whole campaign is clearly organized by the principles of PR.
• It requires a clearinghouse to distribute "facts" that fit the strategy. In this case the burden has been carried by the Republican National Committee and by the office of House majority leader Dick Armey, which got its start by circulating the original fraudulent charges from Wired News about Gore's Internet statement.
• It requires rank-and-file supporters who are willing to pass along any junk that fits the party line.
• But above all, it requires a press corps that has decided to go along with it. Part of the problem is that the press operates in packs -- an echo chamber of lazy pundits in which every "fact" that fits a prevailing stereotype gets endlessly repeated.

But it's not just that. It is not surprising that Rupert Murdoch's media properties, such as Fox and the New York Post, publish smears against people who disagree with Murdoch's far-right views. But it can hardly be an accident that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press have all assigned reporters to the Gore campaign who write, day in and day out, the same sorts of exaggerated smears. To be sure, the press is not unanimous in spreading Republican lies as truth; the contrast between the NYT/Post/AP axis and the calm reporting of the Los Angeles Times could hardly be greater. But the Post, Times, and AP, all well-connected and widely syndicated, set the tone for the press as a whole. The fix is clearly in, and these establishment media operations are clearly down with it. They see which way the wind is blowing, and they don't want to get left behind.

A kind of coup is in effect, continuing the pattern of the Whitewater hoax and impeachment. If the far right succeeds in its campaign, then the incoming government will be staffed by people who are trained in the new science of character assassination. It's all they know. And having destroyed Al Gore, they will come after the rest of us.

Copyright (c) 2000 by Philip E. Agre.
All rights reserved.

This means that more than twice as many people will use the Internet as an election resource than will buy books, download music from Napster and trade stocks online combined.

My point is that if you're looking for critical mass, it's already here. But if you're looking for politicians and the government to lead on this one, you're looking in the wrong place. It's up to us collectively to set a high standard for how the Internet gets used for political communication, to make sure that it doesn't end up like Television, The Sequel. 2000 is a unique opportunity. By 2002, most people's expectations of what the "political Internet" is will have already been set.

Interested? Check out my personal effort to help set that standard, or email me and I'll point you to other like-minded folks who are doing good stuff in this area.

The Pew Research Center survey finds no evidence that Internet use is driving down regular use of cable news channels, daily newspapers, or radio news. However, all news outlets are being affected by the public's slowly declining appetite for the news...

With the viewership of network news declining, and cable news audiences remaining flat, network's lead over cable has narrowed to 11 percentage points...

If you have data that refutes mine, go ahead and post it so I'll know that you really don't just pull this stuff out of you know where...

1) Kids think they'll be worse off than their parents (55% vs. 38%)

2) A majority (42%) thought immigration would prove to be a "major threat" "to our country's future well-being" (38% saw it as a "minor threat")

3) The crime rate will be higher (68%)

4) The gap between rich and poor will grow (69%)

5) The global economy will hurt average americans (52% v. 43%)

Hmm ... (see the survey results for yourself)