The Bush campaign’s newest TV ad sent indignant bloggers hustling to their keyboards, with many linking directly to Ryan Lizza’s “Campaign Journal” comments about the spot on the New Republic Online.
Just as Bush’s first ad — featuring the smoldering World Trade Center — prompted outcries of bad taste, the second ad, entitled “100 Days,” “might soon become famous for another campaign first,” writes Lizza. “It is the first ad to use the image of a dark-skinned man who is obviously meant to be a terrorist.”
Kos speculates the ads are a measure of a campaign in trouble, adding: “We’ve got eight months of this ahead of us.” Oliver Willis asks, “[D]oes Kerry have to run any ads, or will they [the Republicans] just do themselves in?” And The Poor Man goes so far as to create his own version of the ad. (Check out the Kerry photo.)
(Campaign Desk can just imagine how the blogosphere would have reacted had the Bush campaign put together an ad featuring a blue-eyed blonde terrorist.)
The other topic of major blog-talk is today’s story by Tony Pugh of Knight-Ridder’s Washington Bureau which reports that the government’s top expert on Medicare costs was warned he’d be fired if he came clean on the true costs of the White House-backed Medicare prescription-drug plan.
“These guys really do act like Vito Corleone, don’t they?” writes Kevin Drum at Calpundit. “They knew their estimates were bogus five months before the bill was passed, they refused to let their chief actuary tell anyone about it, and one of their stooges basically told him to either shut up or sleep with the fishes.”
Did the White House, asks Atrios, think it could keep this quiet?
–Susan Q. Stranahan
Susan Q. Stranahan wrote for CJR.