TOTALLY DECONTEXTUALIZED FUN WITH ELECTION MOTIFS: John Edwards and his campaign’s “Two Americas” theme
Author: jp
Hey, fellas: What’ve you been listening to lately? Brian Wilson’s newly-revised and -released SMiLE? We thought so.
Frankly, it’s rather impressive that Arafat was able to get ahold of a copy of this album after being holed up in his compound by Israeli tanks for two long years. You see, there is a practical application for those smuggling tunnels everyone’s always going on about.
RELATED: MISSOURI POLL: Missouri reflects tight race, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 26, 2004: “A new poll for the Post-Dispatch shows the race in Missouri tightening. President George W. Bush’s earlier lead has slipped among the state’s voters. But the Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, has so far been unable to close the gap, in part because the poll shows a growing number of Missouri voters view him unfavorably.”
ALSO RELATED: Red-Faced: Boston wraps up sweep, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 26, 2004
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I am Jack’s dated movie tie-in
Coming soon to your pretentious “anti-establishment” best friend’s smoke-filled rec room: Fight Club: The Game from that bastion of anti-authoritianism, Vivendi Universal Games. (FOX must’ve passed on it since it destroyed Bill Mechanic‘s career.)
So put down that dog-eared Hunter S. Thompson book and pick up your PS2 controller, you rebel. It’s time to tear this whole fucking system down: from your couch!
Yes, in fully-pixelated glory, it’s a recreation of the dilapidated yard you grew to love so much with your repeated DVD viewings of David Fincher’s Fight Club…you remember the film, right? It came out in, ummm, 1999?
And there’s that beautifully grimy, dimly-lit basement! It’s almost as if Chuck Palahniuk himself is getting all up in your face, ready to pummel it into oblivion.
God. There’s Meat Loaf, in what surely has to be his first-ever appearance on an X-Box or PS2.
And in the vein of a good self-help group session, video game fans are congregating and clamoring for changes to the way in which this particular one is played. From the manufacturer’s forums:
“Wouldn’t it have been awesome if, after the fight, both fighters, completely covered in bruises and blood would hug each other? That would have been so much funnier and different than all the other crappy fighting gmes target to pre-adolescent rap-boys with Girls, Money and Power on their minds.
VU, you missed your shot to create something truely [sic.] special.
Hey, man! The first rule of Fight Club is you do not reveal the queer subtext of Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is you DO NOT reveal the queer subtext of Fight Club. The third rule of Fight Club is take off your shirt and let’s grapple.
ANSWER: Iraq, specifically Fallujah!
ANSWER: Palestine, specifically Gaza!
Be sure to check in again a few days from now when we have our next round of Super Fun Military-Incursion Home Destructions with which to work!
Golly gee. Who’d have ever thought that a few hundred tons of weapons gone missing in some Middle Eastern nation-state would have such an effect on the waning days of the race for the White House? Certainly not the American military unit that apparently wasn’t told to search the weapons-storage facility from which these munitions were presumably taken. Realistically, if their bosses had known there were weapons floating around Iraq, they’d have been on high alert over this sort of thing, right?
From “Spokesman: Unit Didn’t Search Al-Qaqaa”, Associated Press, October 27, 2004:
The Kerry campaign called the disappearance the latest in a “tragic series of blunders” by the Bush administration in Iraq.
Vice President Dick Cheney raised the possibility the explosives disappeared before U.S. soldiers could secure the site, and he complained that Kerry does not mention the “400,000 tons of weapons and explosives that our troops have captured.”
OK, there you go. This is how war works, and politics, too. It’s that classic Cheney tactic: accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative. To wit, regarding the administration’s now-very-clearly-fucked-up invasion of Iraq, the Vice President said in June:
“After decades of rule by a brutal dictator, Iraq has been returned to its rightful owners, the people of Iraq,” Cheney said in a speech in New Orleans, which made the case that Bush had reversed a terrorist threat that grew unchecked before he came to office. “America is safer, and the world is more secure, because Iraq and Afghanistan are now partners in the struggle against terror, instead of sanctuaries for terrorist networks.”
You see how that works? He plays up the good things that have come from the invasion and overthrow of Iraq and Afghanistan, and doesn’t act like a certain senator from a certain state in the Northeast might, by focusing on, say, the fact that 3,000 Americans died three years ago, or that well more than a thousand American soldiers have died in military action since then, or that much more than ten thousand Iraqis and Afghans have perished at the hands of American weaponry in that interim…see, that’s meaningless, folks.
Because at the end of the day, those hundreds of millions of Americans who don’t fall into those “irrelevant” categories of deaths detailed above are, of course, safer. It’s about positivity. Optimism. And that’s the Cheney way.
At least I think that’s how it works. Though I’m probably overlooking something. I can just feel it…
Oh, shit, I’ve got it! This, right here!
“The biggest threat we face now as a nation,” he said, “is the possibility of terrorists’ ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us – biological agents or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind – to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.”
“You have to get your mind around that concept,” he added.
You go, Dick! For a few fleeting moments up there I’d somehow managed to convince myself that you’d gone all Disney, all “hakuna matata” and “circle of life” and shit, but thanks for grounding us in the bare necessities: Vote or die.
It’s 4th and 10 with six days on the clock and hundreds of electoral votes to go…and John Kerry hopes that his Hail Mary Cheney play works!!!
And please take note that sports metaphors will never again appear on this site. Ever.
So, like, yesterday the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog agency announced that a whole lot of explosives were missing or gone or something from an Iraqi weapons facility. This, like, looks so so bad for President Bush, who’s been campaigning non-stop on the perceived strength of his, like, handling of this war on terror thing. We’re, like, fighting terrorists, and if they have weapons that they shouldn’t have, it’s so totally bad for our troops.
Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan fielded questions on the munitions – which are, like, missing – from reporters aboard Air Force One.
Q: Are U.S. troops under any kind of higher alert because there’s enough munitions for like 50 car bombs? Is there, like, any kind of alert going on for them? Are they on any kind of higher standard?
MR. McCLELLAN: I think you need to look at what we have done in terms of destroying munitions. As I point out, we’ve destroyed more than 243,000 munitions, we’ve secured another nearly 163,000 that will be destroyed.
OMG those numbers totally shot you down, anonymous White House pool reporter! Or should I say…Ms. Lohan!
Soon enough, they’ll both be aged ex-presidents, after all, so it’s only fitting that they’ve begin to look like one another. And by “soon enough,” we mean, January 2009, unless certain American voters get their shit sorted in time.
EARLIER: Bush 41 and 43 in happier years, when little W. was content to merely drink Barbara’s milk while wearing a Yale sweater, as opposed to his later-in-life consumption of JD while disingenuously sporting a cowboy hat.
