{"id":5,"date":"2004-01-27T20:31:36","date_gmt":"2004-01-28T00:31:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.test.bradblog.com\/?p=5"},"modified":"2004-01-27T20:31:36","modified_gmt":"2004-01-28T00:31:36","slug":"hes-not-dead-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/?p=5","title":{"rendered":"He&#8217;s not Dead Yet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Whaddaya know? Dean is <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">not <\/span>dead after all! Whodathunkit? I&#8217;d a thunk it. That&#8217;s who. <\/p>\n<p>Watch the Media subtly change their &#8220;Dean is Dead&#8221; message to &#8220;If Dean doesn&#8217;t win soon he&#8217;s gonna be dead anytime now&#8230;really&#8230;we swear!&#8221; message.<\/p>\n<p>Also, watch them overplay the Kerry is King card between now and the next time a good idea occurs to them (or more accurately, is <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">thrust<\/span> upon them by actual voters).<\/p>\n<p>I was pullin&#8217; for and predicting a slightly better show for Dean in New Hampshire, I&#8217;ll admit. But he&#8217;s anything but dead in the water right now. So &#8211; as Dean was in his speech tonight &#8211; I&#8217;ll be a bit gracious for a change and say that the Media and I split the difference. Though even that was more gracious than I really feel like being. So much for gracious. Glad that&#8217;s outta my system.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s worth noting that Dean&#8217;s speech was tremendous and should make a big difference in the coming weeks. It was fascinating watching him attempt to be Presidential. It didn&#8217;t seem to come easy in the first few minutes, but after about 3 minutes (half an entire news cycle!) he settled in and got it just about right. Watch for more of that in the near future.<\/p>\n<p>Out of the remaining candidates (the <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">real<\/span> candidates here, anyway &#8211; unfortunately Kusinich and Sharpton not included), I&#8217;m proud to say that none of them blow. For a change. That is, since Gephardt mercifully left the race anyway.<\/p>\n<p>Sadly though, of the 4 or so viable right now, it&#8217;s the least impressive amongst them who is currently at the top. Other than <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">looking<\/span> somewhat like a President of the United States (can&#8217;t recall who said that John Kerry looks like he is actually <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">from<\/span> Mount Rushmore), I&#8217;m so far rather under-whelmed with him and can still only hope that the Democratic party impresses me this year and <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">doesn&#8217;t<\/span> give him the nomination. That may be a lot to ask from the Democratic party. <\/p>\n<p>None the less&#8230;with Kerry beginning to look like the front man &#8211; ruining Karl Roves previous ruined re-election strategy yet again, it&#8217;s now back to the old-familiar sometimes-working sometimes-not GOP playbook. Here&#8217;s what&#8217;s left in their arsenal. The sum total of their re-election campaign. It goes something like this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>&#8220;Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal! Liberal!&#8221;<\/i><\/Blockquote><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Having learned that it&#8217;s gonna be a long time before they can really figure out exactly who they&#8217;ll be running against, they can always fall back on the above all-purpose GOP fight song.<\/p>\n<p>It may work. Better, at least, than last years now scrapped plan for &#8217;04, which went something like this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>&#8220;9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11! 9\/11!&#8221;<\/i><\/Blockquote><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">With the failures in Iraq, I think even the shameless GOP will have trouble selling that message this year. Even from near the footprints of Ground Zero in <span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">NYC in early September<\/span> where they plan to tread on the memories of some 3000 dead people to retain their cynical hold on <span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">power<\/span> at this Fall&#8217;s convention. It&#8217;s too early to tell for certain, but I have a feeling that ain&#8217;t gonna work for them either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whaddaya know? Dean is not dead after all! Whodathunkit? I&#8217;d a thunk it. That&#8217;s who. Watch the Media subtly change their &#8220;Dean is Dead&#8221; message to &#8220;If Dean doesn&#8217;t win soon he&#8217;s gonna be dead anytime now&#8230;really&#8230;we swear!&#8221; message. Also, watch them overplay the Kerry is King card between now and the next time a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-5","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}