Zogby Says Junta Is On The Ropes
by Linda Thieman
Q: How many journalists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A:
None. They wait for a Republican mouthpiece to tell them it's in, and
then they repeat it ad infinitum as fact without ever verifying it.
One of
our favorite (non-Republican mouthpiece) journalists, Eleanor Clift,
has a couple of articles out in Newsweek in which she discusses a
recent Zogby poll. The analysis is quite interesting.
In “Fighting a Phony War: Is The Real Aim of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (sic) to Divert Attention from Iraq,” (August 20) Clift concludes with this remark:
Questioning
Kerry’s heroism fires up the GOP base, but it leaves “solid undecideds”
cold. They’re not paying attention. Zogby says among this very narrow 5
percent of the electorate, 16 percent say Bush deserves to be
re-[s]elected; 39 percent say it’s time for somebody new. “You can’t
help but look at those numbers and conclude they’ve made up their mind
about one side,” says Zogby. But Kerry hasn’t been able to close the
deal. Zogby has him stuck at 47 percent, which isn’t good. But Bush is
stuck at 43 percent, which is worse. “It’s still the phony war period,”
says Zogby. For an incumbent pResident in as much trouble as Bush,
fighting a war that’s been over for nearly 30 years takes voters’ minds
off Iraq.
So,
according to Clift, the “solid undecideds” are not paying attention,
although it looks like 39% of “undecideds” are leaning Kerry and 16%
are leaning towards the junta. Plus, she makes the assertion that
the GOP smear tactics “fire up the GOP base,” but mentions nothing
about how these tactics also seem to be firing up the Democratic
base. I mean, if my own reaction and that of Iowa’s own Rapid Response team is any indication, this thing is going to backfire big time on junta-meister Karl Rove and his boy-toy puppet.
The following week (August 27), in Clift’s piece called “Bush’s Sleeper Cells: All it takes is a wink and a nod from the White House, and this network springs into action,” she does discuss the possible “boomerang” effect:
My
Republican mole on Capitol Hill says the green light has gone out to
Republicans to do whatever it takes to get Bush elected. “This is the
way we hold onto power,” he says with disgust. Pollster John Zogby’s
survey of battleground states taken last week as the Swift Boat
controversy raged shows no fundamental change in the race. “It’s
running its course, and it may boomerang,” he says of the attack on
Kerry’s heroism.
But here’s the point that Clift made that really struck me:
The
fact that the sleeper network has gone nuclear is evidence of Bush’s
weakness, not his strength, says Zogby. “If [the Bush team] weren’t
seeing serious damage, they wouldn’t be hitting so hard so early. The
pResident is on the ropes; there’s no other way of looking at it.”
Kind of
reminds me of this dog we had when I was a kid. Ordinarily, she
just loved my dad, but one day, she tried to jump up onto the back of a
chair and fell and broke her leg. She was wounded and in
excruciating pain, so when my dad lifted her to take her to the vet,
she attacked him, the first bite going all the way through his thumb,
then followed by traveling bites all the way up his arm, just like
Gomez kissing Morticia when she speaks French. Both dog and dad
survived, until a year later when a bread truck smashed the dog flat in
front of my eyes. May we wish a similar fate for the junta.
But, in the meantime, the junta survives, and as Clift points out, the
nation’s attention has been successfully diverted from the real news: Bush’s failed
Iraq war and the announcement of 1.3 million more Americans living in
poverty.
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