“Guns are to crime what flies are to garbage.”

Is that bumper sticker pro-gun or anti-gun?

Something from this article popped out at me.

This spring I watched dozens of hours’ worth of old videos of John Kerry and George W. Bush in action. But it was the hour in which Bush faced Ann Richards that I had to watch several times. The Bush on this tape was almost unrecognizable—and not just because he looked different from the figure we are accustomed to in the White House. He was younger, thinner, with much darker hair and a more eager yet less swaggering carriage than he has now. But the real difference was the way he sounded.

This Bush was eloquent. He spoke quickly and easily. He rattled off complicated sentences and brought them to the right grammatical conclusions. He mishandled a word or two (“million” when he clearly meant “billion”; “stole” when he meant “sold”), but fewer than most people would in an hour’s debate. More striking, he did not pause before forcing out big words, as he so often does now, or invent mangled new ones. “To lay out my juvenile-justice plan in a minute and a half is a hard task, but I will try to do so,” he said fluidly and with a smile midway through the debate, before beginning to list his principles.

…

The man on the debate platform looked and sounded smart and in control. If you had to guess which of the two candidates had won the debate scholarship to college and was about to win the governorship, you would choose Bush.

Lakoff also emphasized that what had changed in Bush’s style was less important than what had remained the same. Bush’s ways of appealing to his electoral base, of demonstrating resolve and strength, of deflecting rather than rebutting criticism, had all worked against Ann Richards. These have been constants in his rhetorical presentation of himself over the years, despite the striking decline in his sentence-by-sentence speaking skills, and they have been consistently and devastatingly effective.

Okay. So the George W. Bush of 1994 was a superior product from the George W. Bush of 2004?

Would this creeping dementia-like slide (and I’m going to refrain from making a reference to a dearly departed president) continue into the next term?

Dun. No.

I don’t vote because it doesn’t matter. I lived in the deep south, New Orleans, and I can tell you — there was nothing unique about Florida. That one just happened to be where the strings got tangled up.

The election is over. They’ve already decided it. Bush is still going to be there… I mean, what the hell is a JohnKerry?

The programming and conditioning we get from the teleivision news… it’s toxic. Did you see how they pumped up Reagan last week? That was absurd. I was there. He was not all that.

Other than that… you see that “Missing Poster” outside on the window. Turn on the news and we get nonstop coverage of this other missing girl. Not to bash on either of them — but why’s the coverage different? That girl’s probably in a better place. There are plenty of missing children! It’s all money, I say.

Another case of programming: you’re driving along, and see the police turn their lights on. It doesn’t matter that you’ve done nothing wrong, you still get nervous. That’s programming.

(Well, it’s … you see… you just don’t know what little item from the past, long forgotten, may be back on their record.)

That’s right! That’s right!

(there was plenty more, but that’s enough for the moment… Dwell us out of a generic sense of “victimhood”, while we’re at it.)

A few years back, I read through some articles from the trinity of bland news-weekly periodicals published in the wake of some suburban school shootings.

Here’s what I learned: today’s kids are… alienated. They can also be pretty cliquish. That’s the nature of today’s kids.

Sometime later, I read some new articles from the same outfits. These articles look at the lives of pre-teens, or as they’ve been re-segmented — tweens. What I learned: Makers of various products are marketing hard to this group. They also tend to like fantasy — which is why Harry Potter is a phenomenom.

Brand new developments.

A month back, I gleen some new revelations from The New York Times Magazine. Today’s teenagers, apparently, are horny. And a bit sullen, I might add.

So to review, the drastic changes that are occuring in youth: at an early age, marketers are trying to get them, or through them their parents, to buy lots of schtuff. They like fantasy movies. When they reach puberty they become horny. And, they develop a general sense of alienation, and tend to fall into little groups.

Brand new developments…

“If we can just get rid of the KKK, White Supremicists and the Mafia… the country will be a better place.”

“The world is full of dipshits. Everywhere in the world. I could never forgive Hitler. The world would’ve been a better place without Hitler.”

“It’s obvious that Johnson was involved in the assassination, because… look — how many cars behind him was he?”

“I was stationed in Guam. The bombing was hell.”

“The 60s. It was all burn your draft-card, burn your bra, escape into Canada. I knew a lot of folks who did that. In 1973, for instance…”

“Smile.”

I suspect pretty much the same feature article as well…

Why was C-SPAN showing nonstop banner to banner coverage of Ronald Reagan’s casket?

Why did Fox News do a one-hour interview with Dan Quayle reflecting on the meaning of Ronald Reagan’s life?

Seeing as how Bush’s campaign page is now a shrine to Ronald Reagan, (and there are fractures within the Bush-love coalition, and nobody’s really warmed up to Kerry*) does this mean that the election is going to come down to “We Love Reagan” versus “Anybody But Bush”?

(* It’s interesting to note, noted here as well as many other places, that Kerry appears less frequently on Bush’s website than Bush appears on Kerry’s website. Likewise, Bush’s ads are more negative toward Kerry than Kerry’s are toward Bush. This despite the generic sense that Kerry’s campaign is “Anybody But Bush.)