Needlenose

The Associated Press reported yesterday on a visit by Secretary of State Colin Powell to Baghdad to meet with the temp president of Iraq, Ghazi al-Yawer:

Al-Yawer said after his meeting with Powell that rebel forces have been increasing violent attacks recently because they realize they have no chance of winning.

“The bad guys, the army of the darkness, are getting more helpless and hopeless. That’s why they are stepping up these things. Time and the place is on our side,” al-Yawer said.

Then, this evening, the New York Times posts this article:

Bush Planning August Attack Against Kerry

President Bush’s campaign plans to use the normally quiet month of August for a vigorous drive to undercut John Kerry by turning attention away from his record in Vietnam to what they described as an undistinguished and left-leaning record in the Senate.

Mr. Bush’s advisers plan to cap the month at the Republican convention in New York, which they said would feature Mr. Kerry as an object of humor and calculated derision.

. . . The decision by Mr. Bush’s aides to continue the attacks on Mr. Kerry up to and including the convention is in keeping with the aggressive tone the White House has struck against Mr. Kerry from the moment he effectively won his nomination in March.

Some Democrats and even some Republicans have argued that such attacks have less power than they once did, and could backfire on Mr. Bush.

The “army of the darkness” is indeed getting more desperate, I guess.

I’m curious, though, about that description of the Republican convention being designed to ridicule Kerry. After all the hay they’ve tried to make about supposed Bush-hating Democrats, do they really want to set themselves up to appear far more hateful at their own convention? Should the Democrats start laying the groundwork to vividly make that point over the next few weeks?

Yesterday, Dubya’s campaign announced a new theme:

Nicolle Devenish, the Bush campaign’s communications director, said the president will pivot away from tough rhetoric against Democratic candidate Kerry and focus more on “laying out a vision” for the next four years.

. . . Bush’s new refrain will be “we’ve turned a corner, and we’re not turning back,” Devenish said.

Indeed, Dubya dutifully included that exact phrase five times in a speech in Ohio yesterday.

Unfortunately, as Kevin Drum was quick to note, the image of turning a corner has some unwelcome historical connotations in American politics — and John Kerry’s campaign was quick to point them out, as the New York Times wrote in quoting a Kerry speech in Pennsylvania:

“Let me tell you something, folks: The last time we had a president who talked about turning a corner, and ran on the slogan of turning the corner, was Herbert Hoover, and he ran on the prospect that ‘prosperity is just around the corner.’ I don’t want to run talking about turning the corner. . . .”

Now you’d think that the Bushites would have to have thought a move or two ahead on this, and the Times article has them responding by saying Kerry is “pessimistic” and trying to compare the current economy to the Great Depression.

Even so, I wonder how many newscasts depicting Bush’s image on the stump and saying the word “Hoover” they can take — especially in the face of deteriorating economic reports — before they drop the slogan and try something else.

As the New York Times writes this morning, if you blinked, you may have missed it:

The pace of economic growth slowed abruptly in the second quarter of the year as consumers forced to pay higher energy bills curbed their spending on just about everything else, the government reported yesterday.

The Commerce Department estimated that the nation’s gross domestic product – the broadest measure of economic activity – expanded at an annual rate of 3 percent in the April-to-June quarter, sharply below the 4.5 percent growth achieved in the first quarter of the year and less than the expectations of Wall Street analysts.

. . . Personal consumption spending slowed to a 1 percent annual growth rate, the most sluggish pace since the second quarter of 2001, when the economy was in the midst of a recession, down from a rate of 4.1 percent in the first three months of the year. Sales of durable goods – things like cars, furniture and appliances – actually fell slightly.

. . . For the economic expansion to return to brisker growth, businesses will need to pick up the baton from consumers – investing more in capital equipment and adding more jobs so that income growth from wages and salaries can in turn refuel spending.

Job growth, however, took a dip in June, expanding by barely 112,000, less than necessary to absorb the natural growth of the labor force. Wages, adjusted for inflation, declined and the average number of hours in the work week fell.

Ah, well, at least we’ll always have those boom years months of early 2004 to remember. Those were great times, weren’t they? Dollar bills falling from the skies, everyone throwing lavish parties nightly … I guess it was just too good to last.

384 528From the Associated Press today:

Testifying under immunity, three U.S. Army commanders admitted Friday that soldiers were told to cover up an incident in which two Iraqi civilians were forced off a bridge into the Tigris River, where family members say one of them drowned. . . .

Capt. Matthew Cunningham said soldiers under his command admitted they forced the Iraqis to jump into the river last Jan. 3. He said the soldiers told him they had the Iraqis “get wet” and that “they wanted to make them miserable a little bit and walk home.”

He said it was a bad decision, but that soldiers had to have non-lethal ways to make their presence felt in the area. . . . Cunningham, a company commander in the brigade, testified along with deputy battalion commander, Maj. Robert Gwinner, and battalion commander Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman. All three were granted immunity in return for their testimony.

Not dead, according to
the U.S. Army. The family
that buried him disagrees.

Gwinner said the incident was the result of [a] clash between Sassaman and the brigade’s then-commander, Col. Frederick Rudesheim.

Gwinner said Sassaman instructed soldiers not to tell investigators they had forced the Iraqis to jump in the river because he was concerned the investigation was “a personal vendetta between he and Col. Rudesheim.” Gwinner said the brigade commander was jealous of Sassaman, a former star quarterback at West Point, because he was very aggressive and getting lots of television coverage.

Like Friday’s witnesses, defense attorneys argue that there is evidence that no one actually drowned on Jan. 3. The defense attorneys said insurgents have frequently faked deaths to embarrass U.S. forces and get soldiers into trouble.

. . . Family members, however, say Zaidoun Hassoun drowned that night and his body was found downriver 13 days later. The survivor, Marwan Fadel Hassoun, 23, has told The Associated Press he tried to save his cousin’s life as soldiers watched and laughed from the bridge above.

An uncle, Nizar Fadhel al-Samarrai, told the AP that Army investigators never showed up to confirm the death of his nephew, though the family was prepared to exhume the body to prove it.

Army investigator Sgt. Irene Cintron testified that it was too dangerous to exhume the body, and she relied on the word of family members and members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Force.

This is awful and pathetic in more ways than I have the heart to discuss. For anyone interested, though, I’ll mention that this death was first brought to light by this Iraqi blog (at the time, a favorite of war supporters for its pro-U.S. views) in January, with follow-ups here and elsewhere up through the past month.

And let’s not neglect the role of Col. Nate Sassaman, whom we’ve previously honored here and especially here for his arrogance and bluster. Seven months after taunting, “We will dominate Samarra,”, Col. Sassaman is a confessed criminal, and Samarra is tantamount to liberated territory for the resistance.

Mission accomplished, I guess.

That’s Kevin Drum‘s summed-up review of John Kerry’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention last night, and I think it (like the speech itself) hits the mark. In a sense, it was a refreshing change of pace — and may actually turn out better than a better speech would have, ironic as that sounds.

Certainly other speakers at this convention (and previous Democratic nominees) could have turned out a speech with more brilliant rhetoric and displays of genius-level intelligence. But Republicans like Dubya have been somewhat effective in turning those skills against them in election campaigns by running as a “regular guy” against a slick talker who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else (remember “fuzzy math”?).

Whatever else the Bushites accuse Kerry of, I don’t think they’ll get much mileage out of calling him a slick talker — certainly not if Kerry sticks to the plain language he used last night. Just as important as not being seduced by the need to show off rhetorical or intellectual skills he may or may not have was not falling into the laundry-list trap of discussing “SB 1122″ or “the Smith-Burton Act,” as candidates who have served in Congress for decades often do (this was one of my long-standing fears about nominating Kerry, Gephardt, or Lieberman this year).

Staying on a regular-guy level with his language also helped with the strategy that Atrios describes very well:

To me, the whole thing was the ultimate judo move. What Kerry did was take everything the Republicans had been throwing at him and Democrats over the past few years, grab it and flip it over, including throwing their 2000 election campaign refrains back in their faces (“help is on the way”, “restore honor and dignity”). It was particularly impressive how he managed to seize on the issue of “optimism” that the Bushies have been pushing and completely redefine it, to remind people what the concept of American optimism really is.

Kerry’s speech laid out Democratic priorities and ideas, but did so in a way that was bulletproofed as much as possible against the typical Republican lines of attack — in many cases by assimilating them.

Which, of course, is what the voters who cast the pivotal ballots for Kerry back in Iowa and New Hampshire were hoping for. Judging from last night, they got what they wanted.

Update: Billmon makes some valid, less positive remarks about the speech. I was walking and listening to Kerry on the radio for the first part of the address, so I missed the hand gestures Billmon mentions, but I cringed at some of the same moments he brings up. One sign of the strength of the latter part of the speech though, is that it was good enough to make me forget all about the lame opening portion until I read Billmon’s post.