How to kick the crap out of Bush next year -- a fun Village Voice piece

[Merlin]

Perlstein speculates on some commercials we might run agains his heinous.

The cartoon of a bloody shrub lying on a boxing rink floor is worth the link.

Come Out Fighting
by Rick Perlstein
September 17 - 23, 2003

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0338/perlstein.php


Another reverie: I picture zeros filling the screen. George W. Bush's zeros. There are 11 zeros in $500 billion—the current estimate of Bush's budget deficit. There is one more zero in a trillion—the amount the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates the Bush tax cuts for the rather well-off will end up costing. Maybe start off the commercial with six zeros almost filling the screen: the six zeros in 3 million, the number of jobs lost under Bush. Picture them as balloons: six of them, filling with air, crowding the frame. Five more balloons, then six, crowd them further, the narrator explaining how many zeros there are in $1,000,000,000,000. The balloons get too big, the screen is too small, a single TV set proves unable to squeeze them all in. The balloons begin to explode, one by one, until there's only one fat, round one left. Which begins to whinily leak. A single zero. To illustrate the number of net jobs created under every administration led by a man with the last name of Bush.

...

Then, the voice-over, citing the facts established in an indispensable article in the October 2003 issue of Vanity Fair: "Within minutes of the attacks on 9/11, the Federal Aviation Administration had sent out a special notification . . . ordering every airborne plane in the United States to land at the nearest airport as soon as possible, and prohibiting planes on the ground from taking off."
...

So why were 140 members and associates of two families with close business and social ties to the Bush family—the bin Ladens, and the royal family of Saudi Arabia—allowed the only flights out of the country on those days? The monologue might get a little dry at this point—explaining all those ties: the Saudi family's bailing out Bush Jr.'s Harken Oil, for example. The racquetball games between Colin Powell and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador who brokered the favor. It might get complicated, laying out how, as ground zero was aflame and Arabs were being hustled into FBI interrogation rooms around the nation almost at random, the dozens of people most likely to be able to shed light on the suspects were ushered out of the country under FBI escort.

[Melsky]

1. This is excellent

I like the ideas for the commercials. They need to hit hard and keep hitting. They might have the media on their side, but we have the truth!