Saturday, October 30, 2004

Recommended Reading

Michael Kinsley makes a good point. Right now, this election is about a lot of trivia and it looks like it's going to be very close. But as soon as one guy wins, it's going to be about a mandate for the winner and the rejection of the loser's entire existence.

• Posted at 9:55 PM · LINK

P.S.

One other thought on the new Osama tape and one "by the way"...

We've heard a lot of low, contrived attacks during this election but I don't think any are as desperate and as lacking in reality as, "The terrorists want to see [name of candidate] to win." Who the hell knows who they would like to see win the presidency? Or even if they care? One would tend to think that where the rulers of America are viewed as the spawns of Satan, the characterization applies to anyone — Bush or Kerry — who is not prepared to utterly reverse decades of U.S. policy.

For that matter, even if video analysis of the tape showed that Osama was wearing a Bush-Cheney button or a Kerry-Edwards lapel pin, what would that mean? He could be hoping for the election of a given ticket because he thinks that administration is more likely to pull U.S troops out of the lands he holds sacred. Or he could be rooting for those candidates because he thinks they're more likely to do something so egregiously destructive that it will further unite the Arab world against us. He could even come out for the candidate he likes less because he thinks that will drive American voters to the other guy. My guess is he doesn't care who's in the White House any more than we care who Al Qaeda names Employee of the Month.

I mean, if he cared, he could have said something that really sank one guy or the other...like, "I hope you Americans will vote for my old business partner, Dick Cheney — oh, and Dick, thank the Halliburton boys for that new, secret shipment of weapons." Or "I hope you Americans will vote for John Kerry because he has secretly assured me that he will arrange for flying lessons for my men if we'll promise to destroy the Del Monte ketchup factory!"

The issues in this election are pretty clear. It's amazing how many people are trying to drag in ambiguous, arguable points like which candidate the terrorists would prefer.

Here's the by-the way: By the way, the first TV coverage I saw of the Osama tape happened to be a CBS News Special Report anchored by Dan Rather. I suppose all the initial reports said something about how the footage had not been verified so it was possible it was not Bin Laden or was not what it was purported to be. But Rather must have said that twenty times in about ten minutes. Every sentence included a disclaimer that the tape had not been verified, that they were not saying that the man in the tape was definitely Osama, etc. Guess someone at CBS said to someone else, "Dan, for God's sake. We got hung out to dry over some bogus letters...try not to totally humiliate us if this tape turns out to be phony."

• Posted at 12:52 PM · LINK

Animated Award

Last year, the Animation Writers Caucus of the Writers Guild foolishly bestowed its Lifetime Achievement Award to the proprietor of this website. This year, they've come to their senses and they're giving it to Jack Mendelsohn.

I first knew Jack's name from a brilliant, short-lived Sunday-only newspaper strip that he wrote and drew from 1959 to 1960, Jacky's Diary. It was funny but a lot of people apparently didn't "get it." It looked like the work of a child but it was signed, "by Jacky Mendelsohn, age 32-and-a-half." I loved reading it in the papers and I treasured the one issue of the comic book published by Dell. I later learned that this Mendelsohn guy had quite a history, writing (and even directing) theatrical animation for Paramount's cartoons studio, writing other comic strips and comic books. Jack, for example, wrote the Felix the Cat newspaper strip and most of the classic comic book, Panic, published by EC Comics in imitation of its own Mad. Jack soon became a top writer of both live-action and animated cartoon shows.

My pal Scott Shaw! has a good rundown of the man's career here so I'll just mention that Jack's credits include Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Three's Company, The Groovy Goolies, Scooby Doo, The Carol Burnett Show, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Hong Kong Phooey and the movie, Yellow Submarine. That's a very partial list. Jack became a good friend of mine and I'm delighted to see the Lifetime Achievement Award go to someone with more actual Lifetime Achievements than all us past winners put together. In fact, the best thing about winning last year was that I got to be the one to call Jack and tell him that he won this year's award.

The presentation is on Thursday, November 4, 2004, at the Writer's Guild of America, West building at 7000 West 3rd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90048. The reception begins at 7 PM and the awards ceremony is at 8:00. Call the Guild at (323) 951-4000 for further info.

• Posted at 11:42 AM · LINK

Today's Political Rant

I've stopped looking at the various electoral projections. They're down now to moving states back and forth as one contender pulls one point ahead of the other...in a poll with a three-point margin of error that missed predicting the winner in 2000 by five points. They all have different rules of how to weigh the surveys ("We take the three most recent of likely voters and divide by the four most recent of registered voters unless conducted on a Thursday, assuming it's not raining...") and it seems to me these formulas are groping for a precision that cannot possibly be there. In any case, the fact that ten different electoral maps yield ten different scores should tip us off that at least nine are wrong.

I don't know who's going to win — or what good it does now to pretend your guy has a lock on it. I know who I want to have win...and especially who I want to have lose. In a way, I have the feeling that we're all going to lose. We're about to elect a president who about half the country will fervently believe is a very bad man who doesn't deserve the office and probably didn't win honestly. And once that guy's installed, the opposition party will be having meetings, scheming how to cripple his presidency and perhaps gin up some investigations that could lead to impeachment. Just what we need when we're at war and the economy's hanging on by its fingernails.

As happens too often, I don't have a high opinion of any of the folks whose names I'll see on my ballot on Tuesday, at least under the "President" category...and I'm suspicious of those who claim they really and truly like their choice. I think the Bush supporters are kidding themselves to claim they have a man of character, or even one that has a clue how to deal with our current problems. Hell, Bush hasn't even convinced me he knows there are problems. But John Kerry has also failed to inspire great confidence. One of the best arguments for him turns out to be that he couldn't do much worse, and that a fresh start — clearing out folks like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Rice — is what is needed at the minimum. I think Kerry's a smart man with better intentions than we've seen in and around the White House lately. But with the wafer-thin mandate he's likely to have if he wins — to say nothing of a probably-Republican Congress — I can't say that I'd be optimistic he could make a lot of difference.

I can't help but think that if the Democrats lose, the common wisdom will be that they didn't fight dirty enough. If Republicans were running against a President Gore with this track record, they'd be screaming that the deficit alone — never mind Iraq or National Security — proved the incumbent was close to destroying America as we know it. Kerry, because of his initial vote to authorize funds for the Iraq war, has been hampered in declaring it a disaster and the waste of human and financial resources that it's turning out to be. In hindsight, I think Howard Dean would have been a stronger candidate, if only because he could be as hard on the economic points as Kerry and harder on Iraq. This is not to say I'll be surprised if Kerry wins; just that it shouldn't be as close as it now seems to be.

The worst thing about Friday's Osama tape, apart from showing that he seems to be alive and well, may be that it muddies the post-election analysis. You can make a strong argument that the reappearance of our real enemy helps Kerry: It reminds America that Bush failed to catch the mastermind of 9/11 and that it was not Saddam Hussein, as some Bush voters seem to believe. You can also argue that it helps Bush because much of America wants a John Wayne nuke-the-enemy approach to roaches like Bin Laden, and they still think Bush is Mr. Tough Guy. No matter who wins next Tuesday (or whenever someone wins), we're going to hear that ol' Osama tipped the election in that guy's direction. But no one can ever really know. We may not even know who got the most votes.

• Posted at 11:07 AM · LINK