“The answer to this last question will determine whether you are drunk or not. Was Mickey Mouse a cat or a dog?”

The New York Times reports this morning on Bush’s new attacks against John Kerry, stating that:

. . . the scathing indictment that Mr. Bush offered of Mr. Kerry over the past two days – on the eve of the second presidential debate and with polls showing the race tightening – took these attacks to a blistering new level. In the process, several analysts say, Mr. Bush pushed the limits of subjective interpretation and offered exaggerated or what some Democrats said were distorted accounts of Mr. Kerry’s positions on health care, tax cuts, the Iraq war and foreign policy.

[…]

Mr. Bush’s aides defended Mr. Bush’s statements, saying that the president had fairly spotlighted positions Mr. Kerry has taken over the years. “The campaign’s criticisms of John Kerry are meticulous and precise and most of the criticisms involve reading back John Kerry’s own words,” said Steve Schmidt, a campaign spokesman for Mr. Bush.

But other analysts, including some Republicans, said Mr. Bush was repeatedly taking phrases and sentences out of context, or cherry-picking votes, to provide an unfavorable case against Mr. Kerry.

Combine this with the fact that the position of the U.S. investigators is now that Iraq has not had weapons of mass destruction since shortly after the Persian Gulf War (“Iraq had destroyed its illicit weapons stockpiles within months after the Persian Gulf war of 1991, and its ability to produce such weapons had significantly eroded by the time of the American invasion in 2003. . .”, New York Times, “U.S. Report Finds Iraqis Eliminated Illicit Arms in 90’s”, October 7, 2004), something the Defense Department knew before the war even started.

We’ve been looking at a very heavy dose of revisionist history with the Bush administration, which continues to push weapons of mass destruction as the main reason for war against Iraq. There has never been any link established between al Qaeda and Iraq, nor have there ever been any WMDs found in Iraq, though a disturbing polling study published by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) found that viewers of Fox News Network were more likely to believe these two assertions than anyone else in the United States. This is especially scary considering that Fox continually bills itself as “Fair and Balanced Reporting” when it’s not anything of the sort (and, in fact, is being sued over the continued use of that phrase). There’s an interesting documentary out there called Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism which I’ve seen. I don’t particularly believe all of it, but the general message is correct.

An interesting turn of events, to be sure, for the Bush administration. This could all make it much harder for Bush to stay in office, while at the same time benefitting Kerry in tonight’s debates.