Again, things have kind of been overwhelming lately in the What’s Up In Politics department, and with my new classes starting (two courses, each a more or less brand new prep), I’ve been a bit pressed for time. So let’s take a look at just a few of the things that have been happening lately, aside from the Moore film being yanked by Disney.

There is of course the Iraq prisoner debacle. It’s really gone beyond just “scandal.” The Arab world is outraged, of course. The world community is disgusted with us now. What little moral high ground we occupied is shattered. There is the hiring of “contractors,” who operated in Iraq under no law–military, U.S., nor Iraqi law applied to them–and tortured, humiliated, and killed God knows how many prisoners.

Bush and Rumsfeld apologizing may have a little currency at home, but pretty much zero overseas–not that they really care too much about that–especially when Rumsfeld refuses to step down over the matter, even after he withheld the evidence in the case, failing to notify Congress. He claimed he takes “full responsibility,” just like Bush did for his lie about the Niger uranium in his State of the Union speech. It is clear that in this administration, the claim of responsibility is a fake-out, a hollow promise.

Kerry is getting Gored. It comes as no surprise that the fourth estate is doing this; they savaged Al Gore in 2000, where they massed on him and labeled him a liar because he mixed up exactly which of 17 trips he had gone on with James Lee Witt, thinking he had visited a specific forest fire in Texas with him when in fact Witt was not on that trip–and yet Bush was selling whoppers right and left, like claiming that “the vast majority of my tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum,” a blatant and easily-checked lie, and the press stood back and failed to take him to task for it. Gore got flamed in the media for trivial stuff, whereas Bush was telling lies that affected the entire nation; but to read about it in the press, Gore was a pathological liar and Bush was “plainspoken.”

Well, here we go again. We have Bush telling lies at a fervently increasing pace, and yet the press is jumping onto all sorts of Republican smear campaign bandwagons, like the one which is trying to claim that Kerry’s Vietnam service was nothing big, that he has no bragging rights because he only got “minor wounds,” and BS like that. Like they did with John McCain and Max Cleland, these Chickenhawks who have hardly any service time at all between them are trying to smear their opponent’s honorable service record–and the press is licking it up. The GOP produced a man who they misleadingly labeled as someone who had served on Kerry’s swift boat (making sound like he had served with Kerry, when he actually served after Kerry and had never been with him one moment in Vietnam), who they tried to seel as impartial (he is clearly biased), and the press sold it to the people.

The liberal media strikes again.

Fortunately, Kerry is finally gearing up to present himself in his own words. Kerry’s failure to counter Bush’s smear campaign may have allowed him to save money while Bush spent his pile, but Kerry may be coming in to the “Who Is John Kerry” game a bit too late–people seem to see him as a tax-raising, flip-flopping liberal. Kerry’s $25 million commercial spurt will hopefully help undo some of that, but one gets the uneasy feeling that it might be harder than it would have been a few months ago.