Posted by Fitz
I really had not intended to make three posts today, but this piece from the Associated Press was so absurd that I felt it required comment. I have pretty much come to expect that any AP piece with Will Lester’s byline will be disjointed and illogical. I do not know if the jarring chronological and subject jumps between paragraphs are a taught literary mechanism, or simply an indicator that the neurons in his brain do not fire sequentially. Whatever the reason, articles like his piece on parents fearing that their children will contract aids are unpleasantly surreal.
The most obvious problem with Lester’s latest piece is easily seen if you start at the end and skim backwards. The last paragraph states:
The GOP war room in Boston is similar to the Bush campaign’s war room in Arlington, Va. Both are modeled after Bill Clinton’s campaign war room in 1992, designed to respond rapidly to all opposition charges.
A few paragraphs earlier we learn:
“We’re behind enemy lines and we’re well aware of that fact,” Gillespie said in an earlier interview. “But we can’t allow baseless charges to go unanswered.”
However, if we simply go to the beginning of the article, we read:
“We believe that for the next four days, the Democrats are going through an extreme makeover of John Kerry’s record,” portraying a liberal Massachusetts senator as a moderate presidential candidate, said Republican national chairman Ed Gillespie.
So, if I understand Mr. Lester’s strange literary construct, it appears that Ed Gillespie believes that the best way to answer “baseless charges” is to respond to them before they are even made. Apparently, pre-emption has worked out so well for the GOP in Iraq that they are sticking with it in Boston…
Seriously, this whole war room scheme cracks me up. It is so absurd that, perhaps, only Mr. Lester can truly do it justice. As he notes in his article:
They don’t give out the address of their makeshift war room, and they don’t advertise their presence in Boston.
I will remember to hold a press conference the next time I am laying low. Presumably the war room is not that secret because Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey has been hanging out there. Alas, the Gov. himself could not hang out in the secret club house because:
Healey said Romney didn’t come to the GOP war room for partisan attacks on Kerry because he’s focused on security in Massachusetts during the convention.
This gives us two staggering facts in one sentence. First, there is at least one elected Republican who is actually putting their job ahead of “partisan attacks”. Second, Mr. Lester understood the purpose of the war room well enough to paraphrase it, yet he reported this garbage as news anyway.