My thanks to William Saletan of Slate for putting an idea into my head that I'm thinking of sending to Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo.
Marshall said yesterday that Kerry needs something catchy as a central theme for his comments about the Bush administration, and later I read Saletan's wonderful article "Wrong-Way Bush" on Slate, where he recounts the story of a football player running towards his own endzone after recovering a fumble. Well, with the examples below, how about picking up "Wrong Way" Bush as the "umbrella" for his critiques, that we are going the wrong way in just about every major category we can thing of, and this administration is determined to keep "leading us" off the cliff.
The trends are going up where we would want them to go down, and trends are going down where we want them to go up since January, 2001.
Examples follow:
Unemployment UP
Employment DOWN
American Casualties UP
American Readiness DOWN (due to so much of our fighting force stuck in Iraq)
Number of Stem Cell Lines Open for Research-DOWN
Number of Stem Cell scientists leaving the US to pursue their work-UP
401K Balances DOWN
Pension Defaults UP
Stock Prices DOWN
COrporate Scandals UP
Hostility to the US UP
Trust in the US DOWN
Belief in the US as the "shining city on the hill" DOWN
Belief that the US is engaging in war crimes UP
US Budget Deficit now in RED, was in BLACK
(My personal favorite) US troops sent to guard Iraq oil fields in the early days of the war-MANY
US troops sent to guard Iraq nuclear stockpile in the early days of the war -NONE (it took press reports of people looting the facilty before these buffoons sent troops there, and this from an administration that was trying to scare the country that Iraq was a nuclear threat-why the lack of attention?)
Number of Iranian Double Agents invited to sit with the First Family at the State of the Union-UP
Number of administration officials fired for incompetence in both 9/11 and Iraq-NONE
Number of CIA agents outed for political purposes-UP
Number of administration officials fired for this action, which Bush's father called traitorous-NONE
I suspect I could go on forever, and you're welcome to add to it. I do wish the Kerry campaign would emphasize some of these trends in simple color charts (like employment, or layoffs, or the budget deficit in Blue for Clinton, Red for Bush) to show how awful, and obvious, these trends are. But whadya' think of "Wrong Way Bush" as a clear, understandable motto to encapsulate all the blunders/scandals of this administration.