Friday, November 12, 2004
In case you had any doubt
One side of the debate in America has the intellectual consistency of jello (as Eric Alterman points out):
If the Olympics were ever to introduce a competition for intellectual acrobatics, the hands-down gold medal winner this year would be Dick Morris. On October 23, just before the video surfaced, the disgraced Clinton adviser asked Sean Hannity, "Do you hear a peep out of them? Do you hear a bin Laden tape?" A deeply impressed Hannity declared Morris to be "100 percent right." Likewise, two days later, speaking to Bill O'Reilly, America's most famous foot-fetishist explained, "Al Qaeda attacked us in Spain before the election. Al Qaeda attacked Australia before the election. Hamas and Hezbollah attack Israel before every election, and there has been no Al Qaeda attack anywhere in the world in months. No bin Laden tape, no threats coming out of it, and I think that Al Qaeda is voting with its silence for John Kerry."
But it turns out that in Morris's universe, bin Laden votes for Kerry when he's silent and he votes for Kerry when he's not. After the tape's release, Morris told Fox viewers that "obviously" the tape was "a design on [bin Laden's] part to help Kerry, and that's going to backfire massively." Hannity earned a silver with his own Pythonesque pirouette on his previous pronouncement: Bin Laden, he now said, had "come out and virtually tr[ied to] influence the election today in favor of John Kerry."
It's going to be a long four years.
