It's Moments Like This

When I feel like I've won the C-Span lottery. The rebroadcast of Cheney's speech is on, but I'm also browsing websites, which keeps the teeth-grinding down.

Freudian slip of the talk--"In Iraq we came as conquerers, not lib...(cough)...mm...as liberators not conquerers."

The rest of it is pretty standard fare for the looking-glass folks, and the gratuitous sleaze thrown at Kerry actually sounds pretty pathetic--Cheney's schtick is suited more for a county agent's election, and he tossed in a few outright lies, just in case anyone had any doubts at all about the almost compulsive lying that is so characteristic of the administration.

Billmon likened Cheney to Laurence Olivier's character in Marathon Man:

And then I realized who it was: Dr. Christian Zell, the sadistic Nazi dentist brilliantly played by Sir Laurence Olivier...

In a subsequent post, he goes on to add

Doesn't matter if it's true, doesn't even matter if it's a complete non sequitur -- as when the White proclaimed that John Kerry was "lying" because he wouldn't disclose the names of the foreign leaders (cough, Chirac, cough. Schroeder, cough) who told him they were aching to see Bush put on a slow train back to Texas. The main thing is to confuse and obfuscate the audience. Most voters, hearing virtually identical charges and countercharges bouncing back and forth, will quickly conclude there's no way to figure it out, and who the hell knows anyway?

Or at least, that's what the Rovians are banking on.

Will this be called the "P.T. Barnum" strategy one day?