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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."
i'm impressed with the alertness the bush team is picking up on ways to use the internet.
00010111 always try everything twice
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.
You're new to the internet, aren't you?
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!
It's useful right now - look at how conservative bloggers were able to take down CBS news. No matter what you may think of the story, there's no question the memos were forged, and ineptly at that. This story would not have broken without the bloggers.
There is actually enough controversy between people nominally on the same side in sites like Free Republic (right) and Democratic Underground (left) to create effective debates. As a conservative site, Free Republic contains material of all kinds (from The Nation to National Review), and the conservatives who debate range from libertarians to fundamentalists. Democratic Underground is much smaller and ironically has much less tolerance of opposing views than Free Republic. Both sites will delete blatant trolls within seconds, but someone called Liberal Larry has survived on FR for years. He's civil, so he survives. In contrast, I wrote civil messages on DU which people seemed to enjoy responding to and I was deleted simply because I wasn't a liberal. I don't think that would have happened on FR.
A major reason for the emergence of liberal and conservative enclaves is that liberals and conservatives are pretty darn nasty when put in the same web site together, and as a result very little productive discussion actually occurs. This is unfortunate but true.
It's interesting that Slashdot has developed into essentially a liberal ghetto because intelligent conservative posts are moderated down. I have seen this happen to many of my posts, to the extent that I feel unwelcome. As a result, I don't post nearly as much as I did when the section was originally opened.
D
Well, if you read my comments elsewhere, it's pretty plain that I'm no Kerry cheerleader, but I think the concern here is that the "War Room" might really be just a tool for astroturfing the blogs, and that seems like a reasonable suspicion to me.
You've basically got a whole army of spin-doctors who are going to seed all the conservative blogs (and maybe others, such as here at politics.slashdot.org) with RNC talking points.
If that is the direction they choose to go, I think it's a bad idea for the same reason why it was a bad idea when Microsoft did it. For years after Microsoft got caught doing this sort of thing, nearly every pro-MS post (or FUD post about Linux or Apple) was suspected of coming from a Redmond employee, and how could anybody argue that it wasn't, once it was known that Microsoft actually did that sort of thing? It made it almost impossible for a fan of some NT feature, or a hater of some Linux build, to say anything without getting credibly accused of being a paid shill.
If this "War Room" is used to respond to questions while carefully identifying themselves as Bush spokespeople, then it might be a neat new idea... but if they try astroturfing, then people like me had better get used to being accused of drawing a paycheck from Karl Rove every time we express the opinion that Bush was right to go into Iraq, because that's how it's gonna be from then until Election Day.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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.
Gore's advisers thought he won because he did win. As the Daily Howler points out, the five "instant polls" of viewers after the debate gave Gore the win by an average of 9.6% -- a huge margin, especially considering more Bush supporters were watching.
And that perception did change in the hours and days to come, until finally the American people were browbeaten into believing that Bush had won. But one can't blame GOP press releases and emails. The fault lies squarely on the media, as the Daily Howler has been demonstrating all week.
Whether you think our media has a conservative bias or not, it's indisputable that it let Bush get away with murder after that first debate, refusing to do even basic fact-checking on his blatant errors, and it crucified Gore, mostly by focusing on absurdities and trivia like the color of his suit or his body language. Let's put the blame where blame is due.
The polls held directly after the first debate between Bush and Gore in 2000 had Gore winning, albeit it by a slight margin. But after the right wing spin machine got going with a full head of steam within three days those same polls showed Bush winning them by a wider margin than Gore had, and that's been the "result" ever since. Mechanisms like these, where the campaigns themselves directly distribute talking points and rebuttals directly after the debates were generally exclusively a Republican tool, while the Democratic party simple played ctach up and defense. It's interesting to see that the Bush squad has put together a better plan for distributing their version of the events than Kerry's team has, but it's not surprising. Perhaps they'll throw something together since this news has come out. I'm sure they're will be a recptive audience to it.
Th
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.