THE BUSH SURGE/MOORE IS STILL AN IDIOT
I'm not really back from my little hiatus, and Chris has been doing a bang-up job while I'm away, but a couple of stories have popped up today that I feel compelled to comment about. The first is the President's surge in the polls, and the second is that Michael Moore is still an idiot.
A recent Gallup poll shows that President Bush's approval rating is on the rebound--up to 55% approval. That's remarkable when you consider the steady drumbeat of negative news he has had to endure in recent months, from war to economics. Our troops won the Iraq war spectacularly, but the post-war phase has been messy. That's not shocking at all--prior to the war Iraq had been under the thumb of a madman, and is now hosting the last stand of both that old regime and some of its terrorist allies. They promised us a mess, and they're delivering. But the press has covered the ongoing violence without much context, such as the fact that Iraq has more functional hospitals today than at any point during Saddam's reign, or that the country's power grid is back to around pre-war levels, or the fact that two-thirds of Iraqis living in Baghdad want US troops to stick around for a while. The press continually focuses on the negative, and the Democrats play up the negative as a way to criticize Bush and gain ground against him, over time knocking his poll numbers down if he doesn't respond in some way. On the economic front, while all signs point to a rebound there is also talk of a jobless recovery, meaning that all those jobs that allegedly disappeared at the end of the Clinton term and the beginning of Bush's may not come back in time to boost Bush's standing on that front.
But against that backdrop, where Bush's approval rating was sliding a month ago it is surging today. Why?
Say what you want about public relations, that it's based on demographic studies or social psychology or what have you, but at the end of the day it isn't rocket science. Bush may have the right message or may be delivering it in some new way that could potentially attract support, but that is not why he is surging. He is surging because he is visible.
It really is that simple. Over the summer, he all but disappeared from the scene. In fact, during August he literally disappeared from the scene, vacationing at his remote ranch in Crawford, TX. But even when he was in Washington, he seemed to have become more an observer to the political process than the center of it, which as President he is. But in late September and early October, when the Gallup survey was taken, he became more visibly in charge. He and his team members delivered more speeches countering the negativity in the press and among his critics; he reshuffled the Iraq command structure elevating Condi Rice to oversee it and report to him. He has been more visibly in charge in the past three weeks or so than he had in the prior several months, and as the average American finds him trustworthy, his mere presence translates into a slight surge in the polls. He could at this point--and probably until primary season in a few months--be a Woody Allen president, just keeping his approval rating afloat by showing up. With a war on he will do more than just show up, because he has to, but he could get by on his mere visibility if that was what he wanted to do. When the majority of people are already inclined to like you, all you really have to do to maintain a workable level of affection is to be present.
Now, on to the second story--that Michael Moore is still an idiot. Context: Moore is on CNN's Crossfire, talking about himself and his book and generally making a fool of himself as he often does. People are not generally inclined to like Moore, so it's a fair bet that any appearance he makes in public hurts him at least as much as it may help him. But getting back to his remarks, here is what he said about 9-11:
MOORE: I'd like to ask the question whether September 11 was a terrorist attack, or was it a military attack? We call it a terrorist attack. We keep calling it a terrorist attack.But it sure has the markings of a military attack. And I'd like to know whose military was involved in this precision, perfectly planned operation. I'm sorry, but my common sense has never allowed me to believe since that day that you can learn how to fly a plane at 500 miles per hour. And you know, when you go up 500 miles an hour, if you're off by this much, you're in the Potomac. You don't hit a five-store building like that.
You don't learn how to do that at some rinky-dink flight training school in Florida on a little video game with PacMan buttons. I'm sorry. I just don't buy that.
Coming from a guy who is as anti-war as Moore, this is an especially rich line to take. If 9-11 was strictly a military attack, wouldn't that necessitate an even stronger military response from us than those we have taken? If you stand on principle, yes, but Moore has never been one to do that. He just wants to take another cheap shot at Bush, and this time his angle happens to be defining 9-11 as either a terrorist or military attack. His fellow lefties wanted to call it merely a "crime" and treat it as such long before the fires died down, but we won't go there.
Instead we'll go into his bit about flight simulators. On that, he's just simply wrong. Flight schools have very good simulators, not video games as he describes them. They have to; they can't all own 777s or 747s or whatever craft their students are interested in flying, and you can't just put a student pilot into one of those aircraft without extensive work in simulators. And the simulators themselves are quite realistic. I actually spent a little tourist time in one last week. I'm not training to be a pilot or anything, but had the opportunity to sit in one and look around, so I did. And it was amazing. The first scenario was a daytime flight over Manhattan, and from our vantage off the coast I could clearly make out the skyline, rendered in 3D space, and even pick out which building was supposed to be which. All of the highways and coastline were perfectly proportioned, and even the fog that the operator later introduced looked real. Then we moved to a nighttime sim of a landing in Salt Lake City. As good as the daytime sim looked, the night flight looked much better. I could see cars making their way up and down the highways, their headlights mixing with the street lights looking almost photographically real. At one point I noticed a glowing blue building beneath me, and asked what it was. The operator said it was a warehouse with a fibreglass roof, and the glow was caused by the light from inside leaking through the roof. As we landed, I could see the plane's headlights illuminate the runway's grainy surface, and glimpsed another aircraft hurrying to taxi off the runway as we touched down. As we pulled around to the terminal, I could see people walking back and forth behind the plateglass windows inside. The level of detail was amazing, and the sim operator told me that their particular sim had the entire world built into it. If I had asked to fly into London or Kuala Lumpur or buzz Washington DC, he could have made it happen. Flight schools may not have quite the same level of realism in their sims for a variety of reasons (the one I saw was a manufacturer's demo, for instance), but today's flight sims are quite good and very detailed, because they have to be as real as possible or they're not terribly useful. Several of the 9-11 hijackers took flight training from reputable schools that use flight simulators, so it's no stretch at all to believe that they became profficient enough to crash large planes into large buildings in or near large cities. The World Trade Towers were at one time the tallest buildings on earth; the Pentagon, which Moore describes as a "five story building," is in fact of the largest buildings in the world if you take its footprint into account. It doesn't take pinpoint accuracy to hit either target with something as big as an airliner.
Michael Moore has, once again, shown us just how little he knows about anything, and how little time he puts into researching anything. I can't think of anything more damning to say about someone who passes himself off as a documentarian.
(links thanks to Hanks)