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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: steve harris who wrote (203935)	9/26/2004 4:16:28 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1574565

On the stump, the art of distortion Remarks by Bush, Kerry scrutinized By Rick Klein, Globe Staff \| September 26, 2004 BANGOR -- As he often does at campaign events, President Bush got his biggest rise out of the crowd in Bangor Thursday afternoon when he said he was simply paraphrasing Senator John F. Kerry's statements. "Incredibly, this week my opponent said he would prefer the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein to the situation in Iraq today," Bush said at a campaign rally at Bangor International Airport, drawing a round of boos. There was just one problem: Kerry never said what Bush said he did. In a major address Monday in New York City, where Kerry laid out his opposition to the manner in which Bush invaded Iraq, he was careful to call Hussein "a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell." "The satisfaction that we take in his downfall does not hide this fact: We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure," Kerry said, blaming what he described as Bush's lack of diplomacy and proper war planning for putting the nation at greater danger. Distorting an opponent's words and selectively using facts and figures is nothing new in politics. Democrat Al Gore was accused of excessive exaggerations in his campaign against Bush in 2000, with apocryphal stories told as fact and his memorable claim to have been behind the creation of the Internet (his actual quote, in a 1999 interview on CNN, was: "I took the initiative in creating the Internet.") Kerry exaggerates, too. For example, he regularly manipulates federal employment data -- particularly in swing states -- by counting only the jobs lost in the private sector under the Bush presidency, and not including the jobs created in the public sector over the past three-plus years. Kerry has also blamed the president for a Medicaid rate hike that was not his doing, and has contended that the war in Iraq has cost some $200 billion when the real cost is closer to $120 billion. But Bush appears to be the worse offender this year, in terms of the number of misleading claims and the consistency of their appearance in his stump speech. A review of Bush's public statements in recent days reveals a number of areas where he is repeatedly using exaggerated claims and incomplete statistics, in an apparent attempt to fit his campaign themes. George Lakoff, professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley who has written extensively about political addresses, said Bush and his advisers have been masterful at using partial facts and their spin on Kerry's statements to create the perceptions they want. "I've never seen anything like this," Lakoff said. "This is a particular trick, and these guys have mastered it. Each piece is misleading, and together they create a way of understanding Kerry and Bush that is useful to them." Continued... 1 2 Next boston.com