Counterintuitive Slate Article

Also, "February Snowstorm in Fargo."

I haven't really got much of a handle on John Dickerson, Slate's new Chief Political Correspondent. He doesn't seem to be quite the self-satisfied Lord Saleton, nor the I'm-so-clever-my-deepest-cut-on-Bush-is-his-verbal-flubs Weisberg. But he also doesn't seem to have a lot of meat to his work. I'm not sure he's given me anything to think about yet.

But today's rather lame effort, Kerry Swift-Boats Bush, certainly qualifies as one of Slate's endless parade of articles that seek to delve only far enough below the surface to appear counterintuitive. The subject of the column is John Kerry's response to Bush's supposedly important speech yesterday. Kerry's argument is that Bush is ignoring reality on the ground - that the very presence of US forces drives the insurgency. Dickerson thinks that Kerry is Swift-Boating Bush - that it's an unfair attack, because of course Bush understands this; he just won't say it aloud.

Let's set aside for a moment whether this argument has any validity - the fact that Dickerson supports himself by saying that Bush's strategy-free speech has a strategy that proves the argument isn't impressive - and look at the comment, "Kerry is leveraging Bush's reputation for stubbornness and lack of candor and turning it into a deadly flaw."

Is this somehow out of bounds? I mean, Bush's entire rhetorical strategy - the one that won him election over Kerry - is based on stubbornness and lack of candor. Is Dickerson actually arguing that, in a democracy, lying to voters is a pure action, one that must not be questioned or impugned?

Look, Bush has gotten where he is today by bullshitting Americans - lying about Iraq and 9/11, lying about his own tax cut plans, lying about Iraqization of the war. Live by the sword, die by the sword. If Kerry can use Bush's official statements to damn him, then it's fair game. Let Bush prove Kerry wrong by admitting that he's been lying to the American people in speech after speech after speech. But, until then, fuck John Dickerson and his effort to weasel Bush out of the hole he's dug himself.