At this very moment, over on The Drudge Report, the headline is "Gloves Come Off" and the premise is that Democrats and Republicans have stopped being nice and started bloodying one another with charges and invective and comments about how each other's mother is a whore. The big picture is of George W. Bush and there's a link to the AP coverage of his latest speech. And to represent the other side, Drudge has up three headlines which I've captured and reproduced above.
The first, the one labelled "Carter," links to a story about a speech given by Jimmy Carter, who's out campaigning for his son. The second, "Clinton," turns out to be about Hillary Clinton, not Bill. Almost the first thing I learned in my Journalism class in junior high school was that headlines should never be confusing or ambiguous about any aspect of the story. Obviously, Drudge never took that class. And then the third example of the gloves coming off is that Stone is ashamed of his or her country.
"Stone?" Who's "Stone?" Is there some former Democratic president or current Democratic senator I'm forgetting named Stone? We're not talking Sharon Stone here, are we?
Turns out it's director Oliver Stone. Which raises the question: How did he get in that list? No one ever elected him. His name's never been on any ballot aside from the one for the Oscars. There's no reason to believe he represents anyone but himself. I'm not even sure what political party, if any, he's signed up with at the moment.
Mr. Stone is entitled to his opinion and if the press wants to cover it like news, fine. But it seems to me like at any given time in the last decade or three, you could go to Oliver Stone and get a sound bite that he's ashamed for his country. You could also get a few juicy but ill-defined conspiracy theories at the same time. I'm not sure why it's news that Oliver Stone is against what any current administration is doing or why that now shows that "the gloves are off." There's always been someone, at least as prominent, saying that the president — whoever it was at the moment — was leading the nation into disaster and shame. There were guys on the radio who made their living doing that from Day One of the Clinton administration.
What I get from looking at the news is that the gloves are barely off…or maybe only off in the White House corner. Polls suggest that most voters embrace the idea that Bush needs a lot more Checks and a whole lot more Balances and maybe needs to be stopped altogether. Still, most prominent Democrats let Bush's latest "I can do whatever I want" laws pass with barely an ahem. Some opposed that bill just enough so they can say they were against it, not enough to perhaps do anything to stop it. And on this one, I sure get the feeling that a lot of House and Senate Republicans don't like that they were forced to vote for it, so as to not tick off a vital part of the G.O.P. base. During the debate stage, Arlen Specter (doing his usual Good Arlen/Bad Arlen act) said that the bill sets us back "900 years" in human rights, allows the president to imprison people indefinitely without trial and that it violates core Constitutional principles. But he voted for it anyway.
If he was a better reporter, Drudge could have finished out his "list of three" without going to Oliver Stone. You need three in a situation like that because two doesn't seem like a trend or a movement. For some reason, three does.
There certainly are other important Democrats who speak for a large part of the country who are saying that Bush is screwing up big-time: Kerry, Gore, Ted Kennedy, John Edwards, etc. There just don't seem to be very many who are in serious re-election campaigns at the moment saying it, which strikes me as odd. You'd think, with more than half the country saying Bush is doing a bad job, you'd have more than half the Democrats proclaiming that above a whisper.