One of the dumber storylines of the 2004 campaign, election campaigns being a nattering of silliness largely best left ignored (though never ignored — lest by me) instead toward the pursuit of the question of who bought the individual candidates (California offers a glimpse on how this matter will be resolved in the near future) — the demand to see Kerry’s records — has now been belatedly resolved.

The same major players that were documented to have engaged in a flip-flop in the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” were discovered to have … yes indeed, given Kerry high praise.

And Kerry was a mediocre student.

What does the latter one mean? Perhaps when you’re scheming world domination within the confines of Skull and Bones, the matter of academic achievement means nothing — you’re set, right?. The matter of the “Swift Boat” crapola remains what it is.

Perhaps you’re not aware of this controversy, in the Republican Primary Race for Governor of New Jersey, a candidate had this photograph on his website.

The problem with this photograph is twofold: (#1): It’s photoshopped from this photograph:

And #2: … Coming home from a vacation with my parents to Russia, my mother blew up a few photographs. One was of us and some hosts on a boat on the Ob River travelling past Kargasok. My parents peering in, and me sort of straddling out of the photograph a bit.

But they cropped me out of the photograph. I was deleted from the scene. Save one thing: my legs.

Here, Howard Dean keeps his thumb in the photograph…

I note this comment, found at the home of the Iraqi blogger “Raed in the Middle”, found here:

Uh, the letter says that the US was ramping up for a posssible war with Iraq by June of 2002. As I recall it was pretty clear after Sept. 11, 2001, 9 months earlier, that the shit was gonna hit the fan. It was only a matter of time after Saddam kicked out the UN inspection teams, and Iraq tried to play games when the US started demanding their reinstatement. What was kinda funny was that they counted on the French to keep the US from actually invading. Anyway, this is no smoking gun and Conyers is a hack politician with no widespread following.

There seemed to (and still seems to) be bizarre parallel storylines, some in alternate universes, about the War and the Run-up to War in Iraq. Bush said, in late 2002 or early 2003 to the press, “You say we’re headed to war. I don’t know why you suggested that. I’m the person who gets to decide, and not you.“… a statement that was full of bull on many counts, which was obvious bull at the time. (Beyond the lie aspect, and the faked incredulity toward the reporter who (gasp!) suggested that a war looks forthcoming — there’s the weird matter that the Constitution decrees that Congress declares war — a matter that was thrown to the wind during the Cold War with the new innovation of “War Authorization.”)

Anyway… Bush Administration finally has some kind of response to this story that’s … sort of overhyped in what accounts for the Liberal Media. (That’d be Nation and such magazines, Air America, a batch of blogs… and, really that’s about it.) It amounts to a joke.

Rasheed Wallace, after his Detroit Pistons lost to the Miami Heat in game 5 of a best of 7 series, said the following:

“It’s real damn tough. Y’all had to see that out there. It’s so blatant. I’m going to see out of y’all who really knows basketball by reading your columns and sports stories.”

“Oh, we’re going to win Game 6. They’re going to send some good people out there, and there’s going to be a Game 7. (Because) there’s no other series. If y’all can’t see that you’re crazy.”

Actually, you’re never terribly sure if that’s not the case with professional sports — that it’s, to some degree, akin to WWF wrestling… ie, when in a position to do so, subtley staged and manipulated.

Dale Earnhardt, Jr. wins the big race, coming from behind, considered a “tribute” to his father.

Remember Phil Luckett? The official who botched a coin-flip call? And, that same season botched a touchdown that benefitted the New York Jets… the largest market in the nation.

You see such an attitude in national politics, ala:

Kerry lost because, as a Skull and Bones liberal, that’s his mission in
life. This was the most important election of his life, and he is proud to
plan to run again. And do his thing again. Lose.

Pave the way for Hillary Clinton, I suppose…

The Nixon apologists are telling us something.

The names of Pat Buchanan, Ben Stein, G Gordon Liddy, and Chuck Colson. They stand out because they worked for Nixon… in some cases, were actually intimately involved in the Watergate crime. The others — the partisan hacks of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin — push them aside.

The puzzling thing about G Gordon Liddy: why is he a voice reverberating on the airwaves with an occasional jab on cable news? In the end, isn’t he just an incompetent burglar?

Chuck Colson: was he really re-habilitated in prison?

It’s almost a cliche to say that Bush’s level of corruption is worst than Nixon’s. That may miss the point altogether. Nixon, and his sidekick Spiro Agnew, didn’t have the smoke and mirror contraptions that the RNC-machinery of today possesses. There’s something about G Gordon Liddy’s presence on the radio that tells ua half the story.

Or the idea of Oliver North holding forth with a Fox News tv show.

I mention Spiro Agnew because of his diatribes against the “liberal media”. Here is the great coup of the “Conservative Movement”. Notice the last cover of the National Review. A picture of a toilet. Caption “Insert Mainstream Media’s Reputation Here.” The reference to the Newsweek article, and retraction on the dumping of Koran into a toilet at Guantanamo Bay. Never mind that the US has now admitted, at the very least, urine has been splashed onto Korans (and mind you, of the troubles at Guantanamo, this is the least of the problems), a significant part of the electorate believes Newsweek is greatly off-based, and are currently hemming and hawing to a position of needle-work: “They splashed urine on them… they didn’t place it in a toilet!”

“Where is today’s Deep Throat?”, the proverbial “some” are now asking. The answer to that question is immediately trashed in the right-wing echo chamber upon entry into the public sphere. Scott Ritter is a child molester. Joseph Wilson is a partisan hack. And if it’s an anonimous source: (a) considered “rumour mongering”, (b) liable to be politicl trickery working for the powers that be, ala the inner-workings of the Koran in Toilet story (the Pentagon let it be published, mind you) or, quite possibly, Bush’s National Guard memos. (The effect is so fogged up, if you place yourself into a particular political corner, that you’re going to cry “Fake!” when memos regarding the political opportunities of the Terri Schiavo case are released to the public… thus enjoy the stupdified blogosphere!)

Rumours? The weight given to rumours depends entirely on what channels they come out of. Drudge reports on them — they must have some weight to them!

And PBS is a liberal media machine that needs to be balanced out. Never mind you can’t really find any examples except for Bill Moyers… who, incidentally, was the closest thing we had to what Woodward and Bernstein were if you chose to believe the hype.

# of news references to Linda Lovelace, via Google News: Too. Damned. Many.
(Hyuk. Hyuk. Our news writers, and more importantly bloggers, are comedians.)

Amazon.com Sales rank for the DVD of “All the President’s Men”: 15.
For “Deep Throat”: 9,208

For the book “All the President’s Men”: #34.