Thursday 26 August 2004

Strange electoral tactics.

No surprise here that Senator Kerry appears to have been getting his own biography wrong yet again. I'd be surprised if even his most staunch defender were to describe him as "reliable". His campaign are offering the absurd defense that they got confused between the names of Bob Kerrey and John Kerry. It's not absurd to confuse the names; it's absurd not to ask the guy whose presidential campaign you're supposed to be running what political jobs he's held. Or, if they did ask him, it's absurd that he didn't know. (Yes, I am being terribly charitable.)

Anyway, none of that is even the point of this post. The really weird thing is that Kerry's campaign claimed that he was on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from 1995 to 2001, while Dubya's team claimed that Kerry was on the SSCI from 1993 to 2001. Either Bush is right, in which case Kerry is lying in order to make his own achievements look smaller, or Kerry is right, in which case Bush is (for once) lying in order to make his opponent look better than he really is. What kind of fucked-up election is this?

I was predicting a Bush win, but I had kind of assumed that both candidates understood how elections work and were at least slightly sane. Looks like I was wrong. Since both candidates are trying hard to sabotage their own campaigns, or are so incompetent that they might as well be, this one's now totally unpredictable.

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