Post-Debate Thoughts and/or observations you catch from the Media!

Okay, we already know the outcome. Even if Bush loses, by tomorrow he will have "won". Nonetheless, the Dems claim they'll be doing all they can this time around to NOT ALLOW a repeat of what happened in 2000 when virtually unanimous Gore acclaim was turned into a loss vis a vis the masterful pummelling of the spin masters on the right in the subsequent 24 hours.

We're still at only about a third of our usual hit numbers here as folks learn that we're back up since yesterdays outtage. But let's go ahead and consider this an OPEN THREAD to discuss the debate as it happens here if you happen to be watching near your computer and wanna vent during, or offer any pre-thoughts now...

COMMENT AWAY! (Remember, it takes a minute or two sometimes for things to post, so only hit POST one time if you can help it!)

So in the first ten minutes of last night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart spent about nine minutes skewering both O'Reilly and Bush. In the last minute, he hit Kerry. (All described in a previous item here.)

At the end of every Special Report with Brit Hume on Fox, they show some cute piece of tape from somewhere or another. Today they just showed a clip from last night's Daily Show. Any idea which clip they decided to use?

That would be correct.

Yup, oil went over $50/barrel again today. If you missed my previous thought on this, please read it now. Before the debate.

Bush and the Right love to say how they were mislead by the CIA about WMD's prior to the war. They were not. They are lying. They knew prior to going in that the weapons weren't there as every one of the sites they said they "knew" had WMD's had already been inspected and turned up nothing. As well, large parts of the intelligence community had told them the same thing. They ignored them.

Recently, Bush has been ignoring another National Intelligence Estimate warning of Civil War in Iraq and has referred to it as "just guessing".

But guess what else it turns out they ignored? From a Tom Tomorrow item on a story in yesterday's NY Times:

Can we stop blaming the CIA now and start blaming the folks who deserve the blame?! Including the guy with whom the buck is supposed to stop?

Tomorrow adds one more thought:

Listen to the thunder.

Last night's Daily Show was as good as it has ever been. From top to bottom. The ball was hit out of the park.

Jon Stewart's opening monogolue answered to the continuous "stoned slackers" charge that O'Reilly made during his pompous interview with Stewart last week. Funny story...As it turns out, two different studies rebut O'Reilly's self-serving claims. One shows that Daily Show viewers are actually more educated than O'Reilly viewers. The second study, from the University of Pennsylvania shows that Daily Show viewers are better versed on current events than those who only watch news channels! Hopefully those will be the "stoned slackers" that save this country.

The opening "news story" then was about O'Reilly's (barely hyped) three-day interview with Bush. Amongst the highlights, the segment from O'Reilly's 'Talking Points' where No-Spin Boy lauded Bush for doing the interview:

Yup. That would be the President's JOB! And it should be the MEDIA'S job, as well!

Most of O'Reilly's "not-stoned, not-slackers" apparently bought O'Reilly's "courage" spin and the notion that Bush faced "hardball" questions. Also they failed to notice that O'Reilly didn't press Bush on the several answers on which Bush was obviously prevaricating. Stewart drove it home.

I look forward to O'Reilly's appearance on The Daily on Oct. 7th, I believe. Stewart ripped him a new one last night, so I'll look forward to his response.

Stewart was equally on the money in his critique of Kerry's Diane Sawyer appearance yesterday. Once they release any of the video from last night's show, I'll try and link to it here.

There was much more in the body of the show including an Ed Helms report on how the "reviews" of tonight's debate are already written by the Media days in advance, and an amazing interview with Seymour Hersh, author of Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, detailing the extraordinary missteps, incompetence, and arrogance of the nine or so Neo-Cons who have hijacked virtually every facet of our Government (from the Congress to the Defense Dept. to the White House to the CIA) and the country itself in the bargain. All while Americans have simply stood by and allowed it to happen. He referred to this period, and specific situations like the Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prison atrocities, as something that we will look back on as one of the most "shameful" periods of our history.

Frankly, it made me think of how we now look back at the shame of Japanese internment during WWII or McCarthy's Un-American Activities Committee in historical retrospect. It seems we've done it again. And the only question now is whether Americans will figure that out before or after November 2nd.

A tremendous show. I've said it before, but hands down --- and yes, also shamefully --- The Daily Show has indeed offered the best and most accurate and incisive coverage of "Indecision 2004" anywhere on television. Period.

UPDATE: Video of the Seymore Hersh interview here.

Just one of Bush's Top Ten Flip-Flops...

Read the rest.

Just one of Bush's Top Ten Flip-Flops...

Read the rest.

The Debate exchange that hasn't happened. Yet.

(From comments by 'Sage Vanden Heuvel' in reply to "The 5 Stages of Bushism" at The Talent Show.)

"And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq." -- Dick "Flip-Flopping" Cheney, 1992

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

When you watch the debates tomorrow night, you may want to keep in mind a few of the lies things that Dubya was kidding around about the last time he was trying to trick folks into believing he was "a man of his word".

In the 2000 debates, when oil prices had risen to about $32/barrel, Bush criticized the Clinton/Gore for not solving the problem...

A man of his word? Oil hit $50/barrel yesterday. Still waiting for the jawboning to take effect. Or, in Bush's words, for the President to "do his job."

Are the citizens of Iraq better off with Saddam out of power? Conventional Wisdom offers a "theoretically, yes" to that question. But for the innocent citizens of Iraq, "maybe, maybe not." I keep hearing, from the few still trying to justify this "miscalculation" about all of "Saddam's mass graves". So I did some quick cursory math.

Since Saddam took over Iraq in 1979 through his ouster in 2003, he supposedly killed some 300,000 citizens (according to repeated Administration assertions). That's roughly 13,000 deaths per year.

In the short time since the U.S. invaded Iraq through today, we've killed about 20,000 of it's citizens (not including the 28,000 Iraqi military that the Pentagon reported as killed). That rate then is also roughly 13,000 deaths per year. A few more than Saddam's numbers actually. And if you add the military deaths to it, of course, then Bush seems to out-Saddam Saddam hands down when it comes to filling mass graves with Iraqi citizens.

In theory, of course, those number should go down as time moves on. Even though they are rapidly moving up as we speak. If the CIA's prediction is true, about civil war breaking out in Iraq --- a notion that seems to be well on it's way to reality according to all sources who happen to be in touch with said reality --- that number may not go down any time soon and will be probably continue to increase.

Why did we invade again? I know that Bush has given anywhere from 23 to 27 different justifications for it. But I don't believe any of them seem to be "operable" anymore, other than we invaded because "John Kerry is a flip-flopper". Or something.