Saturday, October 21, 2006
Deceptive ad by McMorris
I had reached the "had enough" point several months ago, and was getting set to vote for Dems on the national level this time. Last night, the campaign for Cathy McMorris (the R incumbent in this congressional district) put out a TV ad that almost caused me to change my mind.
The ad is aimed at McMorris's Dem opponent, Peter Goldmark. The ad says:
"Did you know? Goldmark thinks Bush caused 9/11!"
It then refers to the Seattle paper on Oct 6.
This was indeed an eye-opener; if Goldmark is among the "Truthers", who believe that 9/11 was a vast fake, with no actual hijackings and no actual planes, then he would deserve to lose.
So I looked it up.... And it turns out that Goldmark was saying something entirely different.
Here's the quote:
[Goldmark] has also taken up journalist Bob Woodward's claim that senior Bush administration brass received but ignored warnings of an imminent al-Qaida attack.
"9/11 was directly attributable to George Bush and the Republican administration," Goldmark told a Seattle fundraiser.
Granted, he was stretching what Woodward said. In fact, Woodward's point was the same thing that our "little Churchills" have been trying to tell us for a long time. Our government, for various reasons including bureaucratic gridlock and fighting the last war, has been totally ignoring the Mohammedan threat as it gradually built from 1979 to 2001. This is unfortunately normal; we always fail to see new threats until they knock us over. Pointing this out is not as good as offering realistic plans to fix it, but it's emphatically not the same thing as the paranoid fantasy of the "Truthers".
Two frames of the ad, captured from TV:
¶ 5:55 AM
The ad is aimed at McMorris's Dem opponent, Peter Goldmark. The ad says:
"Did you know? Goldmark thinks Bush caused 9/11!"
It then refers to the Seattle paper on Oct 6.
This was indeed an eye-opener; if Goldmark is among the "Truthers", who believe that 9/11 was a vast fake, with no actual hijackings and no actual planes, then he would deserve to lose.
So I looked it up.... And it turns out that Goldmark was saying something entirely different.
Here's the quote:
[Goldmark] has also taken up journalist Bob Woodward's claim that senior Bush administration brass received but ignored warnings of an imminent al-Qaida attack.
"9/11 was directly attributable to George Bush and the Republican administration," Goldmark told a Seattle fundraiser.
Granted, he was stretching what Woodward said. In fact, Woodward's point was the same thing that our "little Churchills" have been trying to tell us for a long time. Our government, for various reasons including bureaucratic gridlock and fighting the last war, has been totally ignoring the Mohammedan threat as it gradually built from 1979 to 2001. This is unfortunately normal; we always fail to see new threats until they knock us over. Pointing this out is not as good as offering realistic plans to fix it, but it's emphatically not the same thing as the paranoid fantasy of the "Truthers".
Two frames of the ad, captured from TV:
¶ 5:55 AM
