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Net War Room for Bush vs Kerry Debate
ancice writes "Article by Wired. Seems like Bush and Kerry are going to battle in cyberspace. The Bush Team is going to have a War Room to provide live rebuttals to thousands of conversative blogs. Not much info on Kerry's response though. This seems like a good use of the Information Super Highway. Would be interesting to see how this War Room will affect the election. Will this tactic be successful or will it be information overload? Worse still, will technology be exploited? Tune in on Thursday."
"Worse still, will technology be exploited?"
I don't get it. What does ancice mean by this? Am I just being dense?
i'm impressed with the alertness the bush team is picking up on ways to use the internet.
00010111 always try everything twice
> Would be interesting to see how this War Room will affect the election. Will
> this tactic be successful or will it be information overload?
For the blogosphere to be anything but a wash, civility needs to evolve to enable people with conflicting ideas to actually talk and listen to each other.
Most mainstream political blogs are echo chamber fraternities for like-minded people to impishly vent about the "loonies" on the other side. For all of the stuff being written, there is very little over-the-center discourse. There is, however, lots of censorship, ill-will for stray visitors from the "other side", and groupthink.
Give it a few years - as more people arrive on the scene, a basic sense of civic decency might emerge and make blogging a useful tool for actual debate, instead of a big petri dish for idealistic bigotry.
> I'm far more interested in the "real" live rebuttals that will be happening on stage.
Except that there won't be any live rebuttals on stage. It's a scripted non-event. It's not a debate, not even close.
It's more like a joint press conference where the two candidates get to say what they want.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
The Bush team keeps driving the point home that Kerry is a flip-flopper. Besides the obvious point that Bush and Co. twist facts and statements to smear Kerry, the more obvious thing is that the attack isn't logically sound. An ad hominem isn't a persuasive argument.
The fact that some people take the Bush and Co. statements to actually mean something significant is just a sign of how poor our education is in this country.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
There are different election strategies at work here. The Bush strategy is to energize the Republican base. His campaign wants to get voters so angry about Kerry or some other issue (e.g. Gay Marriage) that they won't stay home on election night. One of the ways Bush fires up the base by demonizing and mocking Kerry. Blogs may help with that.
Kerry's strategy is partly to sign up new voters (AKA "the ground game") and partly to reach for the center and the undecided voter. Blogs probably won't help as much with either of those approaches.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
The Bush Team is going to have a War Room to provide live rebuttals to thousands of conversative blogs. Not much info on Kerry's response though.
That's because Kerry's team is more bottom-up than the GOP, which is clearly top-down. Talking points are distributed by the GOP to Rush Limbaugh and other talk show hosts, as well as the blogs. The democrats do this to some extent, but with no where near the uniformity that the GOP does. You'll suddenly hear Rush, Hannity and the President all use the same talking point starting on the same day. Kerry gets some of his talking points from the blogs themselves. It's a known fact that the Kerry campaign reads DailyKos and cherry picks the good material.
include $sig;
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The winner of the debate doesn't exactly have to come that night. For instance, in the Ford/Carter debate, everybody that night thought Gerald Ford had won, but it wasn't until the following days did the press report, and both Ford and the public realize how big a mistake Ford's "There is no Soviet Domination of Eastern Europe" line was. The "winner", as you would have it, was actually Carter - but only the preceding days after the debate told us that.
I think this ties into blogs in that, as one blogger so famously put it, "We can fact check your ass!". The average Joe never really had this power before, we would see something said in the media and have little recourse but to talk about it at the water cooler, but now he can post corrections to bad journalism and candidate's claims for the world to see.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
Well, the true conservative bloggers would be attacking Bush for running up huge deficits, expanding the government, and curtailing civil liberties. So Bush might want to rebut them too.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I could look you in the eye and tell you that you're full of crap.
Kerry did not vote for the war. There was never any vote for the war. There was a congressional vote to permit the President to use force with the UN in order to get weapons inspectors back into Iraq. You can read Kerry's full speech from the Senate floor here: http://www.independentsforkerry.org/uploads/media/ kerry-iraq.html.
The resolution succeeded, getting weapons inspectors back into Iraq. They never found WMDs, so Bush invaded, without a congressional vote and without UN authorization--a violation of the US consitution and the UN charter.
There were two votes, as you know, on the $87billion "body armor" vote. The first, which Kerry voted FOR, would have repealed those portions of the $1.3trillion tax cut that went to the richest Americans, so that the $87billion could actually be paid. Kerry voted FOR that. Congressional Republicans voted AGAINST that. The President threatened that he would VETO such a bill. Who's playing politics? The President would have vetoed a bill to actually pay for that equipment if it resulted in his cronies losing part of that tax cut. The President thinks it is better to borrow money than to actually pay for things. When it was clear that the next version of the $87billion funding bill would pass, since congressional Republicans could pass it themselves, Kerry gave a protest vote against the bill. There was never any chance that our troops would go without supplies as a result of Kerry's voting. Bush was the one who threatened to veto the bill outright if he didn't get his way.
Your 90-second response? :)
Kerry sponsored an amendment to the funding bill that would have rolled back the tax cuts by an equal amount, a more responsible move than borrowing the entire amount.
George Bush threatened to veto the bill if it contained any rollback of the tax cuts, as if the $87 billion would just materialize out of thin air.
The Republicans defeated this version. The original version, which was to borrow the entire $87 billion, then passed over Kerry's "no" vote.
Lots of Republicans voted against the first bill and for the second.
So like Kerry, they all cast two opposite votes on this issue.
Unlike him, they voted to pay for the war with a credit card.
That $87billion will have to be paid back someday, with interest. This won't happen before the election, though, so Dubya's not worried about it.
The vote in late 2002 was not an up or down vote to go to war. It was supposed to give authorization to Bush to wage war if all other avenues were exhausted. The timing was right before the midterm elections, while hysteria over 9/11 was still high, and the Republicans could use any no vote as a club to beat opponents down as 'soft on terror'.
Bush was going to war no matter what. He never had any other intention, and fighting a war on terrorism was just an excuse. And in doing this, allowed Bin Laden to escape.
Incredibly, Bush said in the debate tonight that Bin Laden is 'isolated' and apparently, no longer a concern for him. Following 9/11, Bush is on record with his famous "dead or alive" proclamation, but claimed a year later that Bin Laden was 'not a priority'.
But let's not forget that Kerry is a flip-flopper.