Dean of Dean’s World discusses attack ads and the partisan bickering aimed at Bush in Dean’s World: Who’s Really Attacking The Ads?.
Dean and Rosemary (QoAE) are a pair of my favorite bloggers. Agree or disagree with them, at least they call things as they see them.
The oddest comparison? That the Bush administration enforces a policy that was enforced throughout the Clinton administration not to show soldiers’ coffins coming home. The reasons for that long-standing policy are pretty easy to understand; why intrude, and make public, something that should be a private matter? If reporters want to attend funerals, all they have to do is ask the families.
How this compares to public footage easily available of a national tragedy that we all saw, I don’t know. The one seems to be remembering something we all saw; the other, something that requires actual invasion of privacy, and should require permission.
Of course, the lefties never saw Clinton as one of their own, but rather as a DINO (Democrat in Name Only).
The key, I think, to understanding attack ads — and especially those created under the auspices of MoveOn.com — is that the “voting” base is essentially lefties. Under those terms, the only attack ads that “get the vote” are those that are outrageous. If your video isn’t mean-spirited enough, it doesn’t generate as much of a buzz as your competitor. So you create one that shows Bush drowning Iraqi babies in a barrel of oil. Your video creates more of a buzz and someone else in the left community must out-do you.
I remember the harshness of the critics discussing Bush’s WTC ads on NPR. But who is exploiting whom?
Still, it’s interesting to note a couple of thing: the one “head of a firefighter’s union” who’s been excoriating the President for his ad turns out to have been working for the Kerry campaign for months. And, five of the 6 surviving family members who excoriated Bush today turn out to be highly politically active people with an axe to grind. Which was obvious to anyone who heard the press conference, which was mostly a jeremiad against Bush administration policies, with the content of the half-second image in the commercial barely an afterthought to those folks.
[Note: This posting was earlier and published on a later date.]