I just made a discouraging discovery, friends. I guess I was naive; but it seems that some weblogs are just spin machines.
This disturbing revelation came, of all places, on the Bush-Cheney '04 blog, where they're crowing about Bush's new job approval numbers. Gallup has the rating up by three in the last week, to 51%. This, the blogger writes, "is now almost identical to President Clinton's 52% in August 1996 and President Reagan's 54% in August 1984." (Yes. Almost.) So we're to believe Bush is on track to certain re-election, as no incumbent with 50% or above in an election year has ever lost.
Never mind that, exactly one year ago, his approval was at 60%, and at 68% on this date two years ago. The fact that the figure has nudged over 50% -- for the first time since mid-April -- apparently qualifies as progress in the Republican camp.
Their blog goes on to ridicule John Kerry because he used the word "sensitive" last week as one of many adjectives to describe the kind of war on terrorism we should be waging. It quotes from a recent speech by Dick Cheney: "President Lincoln and General Grant did not wage sensitive warfare -- nor did President Roosevelt, nor Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur." Leave it to a Republican who took five draft deferments to smear a Democrat decorated for heroism as "sensitive."
Unmentioned in the blog was that Bush used the same word in the same context in a speech to the same people in the same week. And that Cheney himself has said, "We recognize that the presence of U.S. forces can in some cases present a burden on the local community. We're not insensitive to that. We work almost on a continual basis with the local officials to remove points of friction and reduce the extent to which problems arise in terms of those relationships."
I'm telling you, this kind of manipulation of the facts makes all bloggers look bad. I'm going have to report it to our Ethics and Conduct Committee.
In the meantime, here's more of what you've come to expect from this blogger: the truth about the Bush-Cheney record.
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