Los Cuatro Ojos

Obama As JFK?.. Edwards As FDR?.. I Hope He Doesn’t Mean That Literally… Edwards Leading Us In The Next World War… Obama Tragically Ending A Camelot-Like Period.

JB Powell interviews Air America dj Thom Hartmann, who has a new book out about American political discourse called Cracking the Code. This interview is published on Pop and Politics as well as HuffPost’s OffTheBus.

Some of the Questions:

Q: In the current crop of Presidential aspirants right now, who stands out in terms of communication skills?

A: John Edwards is a brilliant communicator. Barrack Obama is a brilliant communicator. I think Edwards has the potential to be the next FDR and I think Barrack has the chance to be the next John Kennedy.

Q: In 2006, we saw Dick Cheney and the President get up and say, basically, ‘If you vote for Democrats, you’re risking a terrorist attack.’ I expect a lot worse in the upcoming 2008 election. Do you?

A: Absolutely. And probably in terms of world events. The Republicans are going to do everything they can, in my opinion, to increase our vulnerability to a terrorist attack. There’s considerable evidence that before the 2001 attack, whether it was intentional or not, nobody was paying attention and everybody was asleep at the switch. George Bush had over fifty different warnings that 9-11 was coming, including the famous memo [Presidential Daily Briefing] that was delivered in August.

He knew that planes could be hijacked because when he was in Italy in March of that year, he had to go sleep on an aircraft carrier, because they had specific, credible intelligence that Bin Laden himself was behind a plan to hijack an aircraft and crash it into a hotel where Bush was sleeping. So you’d think in March when that happened they would have put two and two together. But Bush had put Dick Cheney in charge of the counter-terrorism task force and that task force never even bothered to meet until September of 2001.

So 9-11 wasn’t a failure of intelligence. It was the most spectacular failure of the executive branch in our history arguably. And yet they use it to their benefit. And I suspect that they will do it again, in terms of using it to try to win elections.

It would work tremendously to the Republicans advantage if there was a terrorist attack between now and the election. And even if there’s not, I guarantee you, they’re going to be amping up the fear of terror, particularly just before the election. …It was very psychologically effective. And from a marketing point of view, it was perfect, and it was absolutely intentional.

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