I have taken a little time off from blogging the last couple of days to attend to more important matters, but now hope to compensate with major news. Following up on my disclosure that Michael Moore is a Republican operative, I can now report this even more startling news: The man cka "John Kerry" is actually a Republican operative installed by Karl Rove and the invincible Bush political machine. I understand that Dan Rather's crack CBS news operation is checking into this story as I write.
Political observers have long wondered how it is that Bush, a widely hated president whose judgment on Iraq and handling of the economy has been questioned by many, nevertheless manages to have dominated this campaign, and to have escaped a serious debate of the issues.
The answer begins last winter when Democrats chose a nominee. Kerry, a man with long-known presidential ambitions, an undistinguished senator with a long and confused voting record, particularly including a recent flip-flop on Iraq, was not an obvious choice. By a stroke of sheer luck, Kerry managed to secure the nomination.
But Rove's machine was unwilling to trust to continued luck. How could it know for sure that Kerry wouldn't somehow run an effective campaign? So beginning around the time that Kerry had locked up the nomination, the real John Kerry was abducted and replaced by a double. Although it is hard to tell exactly when that occurred (since the real John Kerry was himself so ineffective), the switch clearly had been accomplished by the time of the convention.
At the convention the real fun began. "John Kerry" unaccountably insisted on making the Vietnam war an issue in this campaign, taking the focus off of Bush's potential weakness on the economy and Iraq. Kerry's reasoning: I have a better Vietnam record than he does. As weak as this strategy sounds, it must be remembered that top campaign aides did succeed in talking "John Kerry" out of making his windsurfing prowess an issue in the campaign.
Of course, "Kerry's" followers would continue to insist that the war was a referendum on Iraq. "Kerry," Rove's hand-picked man, could not allow this to happen. And so he made it clear that he would have prosecuted the war even knowing what we know today. So much for any possible strategy based on prevarication about WMD.
The clever moves from this point are numerous and obvious in retrospect. There was, for example, Kerry's midnight ramble in Ohio, designed to highlight the strengths of Bush's acceptance speech and therefore "Kerry's" own weakness.
Of course we know that every time the campaign appears ready to veer toward issues on which Bush and the Republicans are vulnerable, the "Kerry" campaign wrenches it back on (I mean off) course. And so, in mid-September, we find ourselves debating the minutiae of typeface on a document Rove's operatives were able to feed to their most trusted confederate, "Dan Rather" (that's another story).
And so I was prescient when I observed a few days ago that this election only has one candidate.
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