Assorted chunks from one of the most perceptive articles yet on the extraordinary irrationality and utter wackiness of the current election campaign. For anyone who doesn’t know of Karen Hughes and her doglike devotion to bush (and to her task of fictionalizing his past), this is required reading. And even if you do know, it’s required.

Only in an election year ruled by fiction could a sissy who used Daddy’s connections to escape Vietnam turn an actual war hero into a girlie-man.
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As we leave the scripted conventions behind us, that is the uber-scenario that has locked into place, brilliantly engineered by the president of the United States, with more than a little unwitting assistance from his opponent. It’s a marvel, really. Even a $10,000 reward offered this year by the cartoonist Garry Trudeau couldn’t smoke out a credible eyewitness to support George W. Bush’s contention that he showed up to defend Alabama against the Viet Cong in 1972. Yet John Kerry, who without doubt shed his own blood and others’ in the vicinity of the Mekong, not the Mississippi, is now the deserter and the wimp.
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Though pundits said that Republicans pushed moderates center stage this week to placate suburban swing voters, the real point was less to soften the president’s Draconian image on abortion than to harden his manly bona fides. Hence Bush was fronted by a testosterone-heavy lineup led by a former mayor who did not dally to read a children’s book on 9/11, a senator who served in the Hanoi Hilton rather than the “champagne unit” of the Texas Air National Guard and a governor who can play the role of a warrior on screen more convincingly than can a former Andover cheerleader gallivanting on an aircraft carrier.
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The early drafts of the script pre-date 9/11. In “A Charge to Keep,” his 1999 campaign biography crafted by Karen Hughes, Bush implies that he just happened to slide on his own into one of the “several openings” for pilots in the Texas Air National Guard in 1968 and that he continued to fly with his unit for “several years” after his initial service. This is fantasy that went largely unchallenged until 9/11 subjected it to greater scrutiny. Since then, the mysterious gaps in the president’s military résumé have been finessed by the dialogue and wardrobe departments, from the invocation of “Wanted: Dead or Alive” (whatever did happen to that varmint, Osama, anyway?) to the “Mission Accomplished” rollout. Of late, Bush’s imagineers have publicized his proud possession of Saddam Hussein’s captured pistol.
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But with the high stakes of an election at hand, it’s not enough to stuff socks in the president’s flight suit. Kerry must be turned into a girl. Such castration warfare has long been a Republican staple. We’ve had Bill Clinton vilified as the stooge of a harridan wife and Al Gore as the puppet of the makeover artist Naomi Wolf. But given his actual history on the field of battle, this year’s Democratic standard bearer would, seemingly, be immune to such attacks, especially from the camp of a candidate whose most daring feat of physical courage was tearing down the Princeton goalposts.
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No matter. Once Kerry usurped Howard Dean, whose wartime sojourn in Aspen made the president look like a Green Beret, the Bush campaign’s principals and surrogates went into overdrive. His alleged encounters with Botox and a Christophe hairdresser were dutifully clocked on Drudge. Eventually John Edwards would become “the Breck girl,” and Dick Cheney would yank an adjective out of context to suggest that Kerry wanted to fight a “sensitive” war on terror.
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The flaw in Kerry is not, as Washington wisdom has it, that he asked for trouble from the Swifties by bringing up Vietnam in the first place. Both his Vietnam service and Vietnam itself are entirely relevant to a campaign set against an unpopular and ineptly executed war in Iraq that was spawned by the executive branch in similarly cloudy circumstances. But having brought Vietnam up against the backdrop of our 2004 war, Kerry has nothing to say about it except that his service proves he’s more manly than Bush. Well, nearly anyone is more manly than a president who didn’t have the guts to visit with the 9/11 commission unaccompanied by a chaperone.

Please read it all. Rich is quite talented at pointing out the absurdities right in front of our noses that somehow we manage to ignore or block out.

Written quickly and surreptitiously from my desk at The Corporation….