Yeah, Bush looked nervous and struggling. But consider the “good ol’ boy” marketing strategy, in which Bush, in real life an Ivy Leaguer from one of America’s most patrician families, has spent his adult life playing the public role of a modest Texan cracker who’d sowed his wild oats but, thanks to God and a good woman, got over it and is now as successful as you could be if you only stopped being a lazy self-victimizing poor person, and who proves he’s in touch with the common folk by presenting himself as a devout anti-intellectual, a man who must struggle to compete at the elistists’ word games.

…wrote a letter to the editor of his local suburban paper, with elequant verbiage about the continuing war:

“…But this president does not know what death is. He hasn’t the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can’t seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.He does not mourn. He doesn’t understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the 1,000 dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.…”

…I’m currently watching the first Presidential debate. I’m watching it on C-SPAN (and, with a Net connection, so can you). They’ve got a split-screen shot of both candidates on at all times, with no annoying cutaways to the questioners.

Kerry and Bush are giving off the respective auras of my favorite Cartoon Network duo, I. M. Weasel and I.R. Baboon. Kerry’s articulate, level-headed, and cool. Bush is muffing his lines, darting his eyes about nervously, and turning every response into a lead-in to some pre-scripted talking point.

Of course, the op-ed pundits have warned us for the past week not to judge the debates on body language but on message content. There, too, Kerry’s mopping up Bush like just about every baseball team’s mopped up the Mariners this year.

Kerry’s giving solid responses, short and tart but packed with action proposals (or phrases that sound like action proposals). Bush reiterates past buzzwords and demographically-tested catch phrases.

Of course, the cable channels will declare Bush the “winner” of the debate, no matter what.

This is the traditional day for celebrating the change of seasons, the harvest, the end of toiling in the fields, the bounty of the Earth, and the enjoyment of work’s happy result.

We can only hope it’s a change of seasons in the sociopolitical sphere as well.

As one potential sign, John Kerry’s come out swingin’, and not just for the mythical “swing voter.”

And on Monday night, Kerry followed his Jon Stewart gig with a 23-minute spot on Letterman. He made a few stinging gags about Halliburton, Ashcroft, Bush’s tax plans, and his own perfect hair. He flung an index card back behind him like Dave used to do. And he gave some serious barbs about the Iraqi puppet regime’s impending collapse, and about how the neocons’ hubris has left the US more isolated and the terrorists more powerful.

He gave a more entertaining performance, and a politically heavier one, than Clinton gave Arsenio Hall in ’92.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN SUPER-MESS-O’-POTAMIA: It might not be true that, as Kerry alleged, the Bushies had “no plan to win the peace.” Canada’s own anti-corporate essayist Naomi Klein claims they’ve had a plan all along—a deliberately brutal scheme of “shock treatment,” intended to impose the purest example of pro-corporate ideology yet seen on the planet. The IMF/World Bank “adjustments” in Latin America and Africa would be just read-through rehearsals, compared to what would be done to (but not necessarily for) Iraq.

As Klein interprets the scheme, the entire Iraqi economy would be sold off to the multinationals, using whatever legal tricks the neocons could write into the puppet regime’s constitution. The alleged site of the ol’ Garden of Eden would become a paradise for investors. As for the Iraqi people: Well, they’d already endured decades of hardship and repression, so a little more wouldn’t stir ’em to revolt.

The problem, as it usually is with attempts to ideologically purify real societies, is that real life refuses to work out according to plan. In this case, the US/UK occupation army never fully pacified all the disparate tribes and sects that wanted a piece of the post-Saddam governance. And few of them were fond of the neocons’ plans for privatizations and mass layoffs. All hell ensued, and continues to do so.

Harper’s still has a wimpy web presence, so I have to link to part of Klein’s essay as retyped by a reader and posted to a political discussion-board site.

…getting relevant again. Witness its piece on “The Bush Campaign’s TV Commercial If He Was Running Against Jesus.”

The week of Bush’s inauguration in ’01, The Onion (which, as some of you know, has a partial joint ancestry with The Stranger) ran a fake news item declaring “Our long national nightmare of peace and prospierity is finally over.” One Dan Chak has gone and peppered the original piece with web links showing how nearly every disaster mentioned in the spoof story has come true.

…the rest of the election cycle will be a two-month-long version of Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate.”

His press secretary’s been quoted as saying Bush “sees America as a ’10-year-old child’ needing a parent.”

…on the did-they-or-didn’t-they “booing Republicans” item (thanx to Paul Hughes for the tips):

• How the Associated Press retracted its booing story;
• how the Bush press office may have influenced the retraction.

Michael Kent offers the good news that something I wrote about didn’t really happen. I speak of the story that Bush told an audience about Clinton’s heart surgery, and that the audience booed.

Kent writes:

“There were no boos… it was a total fabrication. The video reveals absolutely no booing. The AP edited the story soon after it had gone out, but it was too late by then. Feel free to watch it yourself.But it’s certainly revealing that you would so easily believe such a lie so easily. Perhaps you’ll correct this on the site? Eh, I’ll continue reading it anyway, as I have for years… I’ll just take your political statements with a grain of salt… as I have for years!

As I’d predicted, Bush’s big speech was competently written, passably delivered, and largely content-free. He offered few plans for the future. He brought up war, terror, and the war on terror repeatedly. He bashed Kerry “politely.” He made sure to lie about Kerry’s platform, among other topics, along the way. He presented himself as the no-choice-possible “brand” for a demographic target market of “NASCAR dads” and swing-state suburban whites. And, oh yeah, he hinted oh-so subtly that anybody who dared oppose or disagree with him on anything was unpatriotic, un-American, etc.

The only thing I didn’t expect was the humanity, the near-humility, one could see in Bush’s face and his body language (if not in his script). Like Jimmy Carter in 1980, Bush has clearly aged beyond his years in office. He seemed weary, struggling to get through the script without a flubbed line. I pitied him. I still want him removed from office, but now I have another reason why—I want him relieved of his heavy burdens.

Public speaking, of course, isn’t Bush’s strong point. Heck, being President isn’t his strong point. His strengths are as a backroom dealmaker, a fundraiser for the hard right, and a policy whore for certain industries. He called Kerry unqualified to take over the White House; but he’s proven himself unqualified to run anything but a campaign.

And even at that, he’s gotten scared and desperate, as seen in the ever-shriller attack ads and the insult-filled convention speeches he delegated to his underlings.

The Republicans’ bully aesthetic, which Bush has encouraged, just might fatally disgrace him. Bill Clinton announced he was going into a hospital for heart bypass surgery. Bush mentioned this in a campaign speech on Friday. Bush asked his audience to remember the ex-President in their prayers. Instead, the audience loudly booed. Bush did nothing to discourage them. In one moment, the party’s mean side was revealed in all its grossness.

New-age philosopher and “medical intuitive” Caroline Myss once wrote that the fall of Communism came in a sudden, unexpected flash. In a relative instant, seven decades of clunky, kludgy ideology blew away.

Could we be witnessing, at last, the start of neoconservatism’s own dissolving?

…the near-right speakers fool you—the GOP convention platform is a hardline far-right screed.

…has hewed to the old Holiday Inn slogan, “The best surprise is no surprise.” It’s been a safe, demographically-targeted program thus far.

The only oddities in the spectacle: The relative lack of suburban “country” singers (just about the only celebrity performers at Bush pere‘s conventions), and the prominence of show tunes and disco music at a convention whose official platform endorses homophobia.

The verbal gaffes thus far have been predictable ones. Laura Bush deliberately mistook the Iraqi puppet state for a “democracy.” And Schwarzenneger tried to rehabilitate the spirit and tactics of Richard Nixon.

Meanwhile, the protests in the Manhattan streets may have topped 0.75 million participants, but attract almost no corporate-media attention.

We’ll all watch to see if the broadcast and cable networks will pay kinder attention to the Republican convention than they did to the Democratic convention. You may recall that Fox News and “the networks of NBC” barely acknowledged the Dems’ speakers, preferring to spend time with their own staff pundits’ insult-filled blather.

We’ll also see if and how the Bushies will try to sell themelves to what used to be known as the “mainstream audience.”

This gang of cynical manipulators has worked hard to divide America, then to seek approval from only two castes—billionaires and fundamentalists. How will they re-interpret their hatred and bigotries into a “uniting” positive image?

I know we’ll get a few things:

1) Suburban “country” singers.2) Insult comedians.

3) Arnold Schwarzenegger.

4) John McCain.

5) Slick infomercial segments about the sanctity of (hetero) marriage, the nuclear family, and stem cells.

6) Sappy, insincere promises to help senior citizens.

7) 9/11 references up the wazoo.

8) Flags everywhere.

9) Jesus references everywhere.

10) A Bush speech that’s well-rehearsed, free of flubs, and utterly content-free.

11) Spin-meisters and pundits uniformly lauding Bush’s adequate, content-free speech as one of the great orations in world history.

12) Immediate resumption of the most vile attack ads as soon as the convention’s over (if they’re even paused during it).

Remember: There is no level of sleaze to which the Republicans will not stoop. If they win (or re-steal) this election, I don’t know if there will even be a Presidential election in 2008. There could be some trumped up “terrorist crisis” used as an excuse to indefinitely suspend the Constitution and instill martial law. That’s how serious this is, folks.

…in the Seattle Times today. This one recommends Sen. Robert Byrd’s Losing America, an anti-Bush book with a difference. (Scroll to the bottom of the linked page.)