Politics of Hate v. Politics of Hope

Driving home last night, I listened to NPR covering Dick Cheney’s speech live, and I was going to title this the Dumbest Political Speech ever, but then I later saw the coverage of Zell Miller’s speech (including Kash’s post). On “Give ‘Em Hell Zell”, let me just suggest Wibbly Wobbly applies to him. He used to be for fiscal responsbility but now he supports all of Bush’s budget busting ideas. Yes, he says he’s for less spending but many of these budget busting ideas he has supported are simply more pork-barrel spending.

In a way, the staff at Political Animal captured my first reactions with items such as:

Bush’s advisors will not be sleeping well tonight. Going this negative on national television is always dicey, but tonight, they pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed and, finally, fell backwards into backlash. Zell’s speech crossed the line and Cheney’s sneer sealed the impression.

And especially this:

After all, it was just Cheney’s usual flat, boring, rabidly warmongering and intermittently dishonest stump speech.

Cheney was also cracking himself up with his own flip-flop jokes, but bringing up the free trade issue is dangerous for Bush-Cheney since they are for free trade except when it is politically expendient to be for trade protection. The sickest Cheney joke, however, was his abuse of the “Two Americas” theme, but I guess he does think poverty is a laughing matter.

Which got me wondering if John Edwards would comment. He did. But he rose above the fray not being tempted as Kevin Drum was to use the f***-bomb and not even bothering to noted how much Cheney lied. All he did was to dismiss both Cheney and Zell with the very brief and on-point term “Politics of Hate” as he turned to more important theme: the “Politics of Hope” as he noted the breath of poverty in this nation and how we should address this problem. But he did not leave unanswered the National Security issue as he noted that Iran does have an active nuclear weapons program. Odd that while Dick Cheney can falsely claim that Iraq had an an active nuclear weapons program, but forget to tell us than Iran does.

Well done – Senator Edwards!