tis the season

In honor of the upcoming election, here is some of the best political stuff I've read/watched lately:

Bill O'Reilly: "Do you want the United States to win in Iraq?"
David Letterman: "First of all ..."
O'Reilly (interrupting): "It's an easy question. Do you want the United States to win in Iraq?"
Letterman: "It's not easy for me because I'm thoughtful."

"At a New York Times lunch, when Stewart was asked how his show did such a good job digging up clips catching the president and other officials contradicting themselves, the comedian shot back, 'A clerk and a video machine.'" -- from a Rolling Stone cover story on Stewart and Colbert written, interestingly enough, by Maureen Dowd

"Go ahead, people, you have your orders from Napoleon Bonaparte, I mean Donald Rumsfeld. 'Back off' and 'relax.' Book a cruise to Chillsville. Don't worry your pretty little heads about the debacle in Iraq, because 'it's complicated, it's difficult.' Are mere mortals going to be able to get their minds around a problem that even Albert Einstein, I mean Donald Rumsfeld, finds complicated? Let's be realistic here.

We should all thank our lucky stars that 'honorable people' are willing to do all this super-advanced thinking for us. Aristotle, I mean Donald Rumsfeld, was kind enough to phrase it that way rather than spell out what he really meant, which was 'people who are smarter than you.'" --Eugene Robinson in a Washington Post column

"The other familiar excuse for negative advertising is that "everybody does it." Newspaper stories about attack commercials usually include a sampling of harsh Democratic spots in an effort to appear evenhanded. But there's really no comparison between what the two parties and their respective surrogates are doing. According to factcheck.org, a respected site that reviews the accuracy of various ads, "the National Republican Campaign Committee's work stands out this year for the sheer volume of assaults on the personal character of Democratic House challengers." Negative Democratic ads tie Republican candidates to President Bush, and to the Iraq war, or accuse them of being in the tank for the oil or pharmaceutical industries. But Democratic ads do not charge that their opponents "prey on our children"—even though one recently resigned following accusations that he did precisely that. One can only imagine the ads Republicans would have made this year if Mark Foley had happened to be a Democrat." -- from a Jacob Weisberg article in Slate