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March 12, 2004
Sloganator








Ah, interactive democracy. It appears that the Republicans have become a bit jealous of the remarkable things that Democrats like Howard Dean have been doing with Internet technology. So the Bush/Cheney folks decided to set up their own super-fun interactive tool -- a slogan generator. You can input a few words of text and it will immediately produce a poster with your slogan floating above the Bush/Cheney logo. It'll even give you a PDF of it, suitable for printing and displaying in your window.

Here's where it gets fun. The political blog Wonkette discovered this little tool, and decided to see if the Bush/Cheney folks had banned any words. She quickly found out that it won't let you make a poster with the words "penis" or "Prince of Darkness". It also won't let you make one reading "Not Hitler!", or "910 Days Since Last Terrorist Attack".

However, it does accept "homophobe" and "racist" -- as Wonkette readers discovered as they raced over to check it out. They also found that it'll accept "queer," "faggot," "fascism", "evil," "lying," "scum," and "sodomy".

Interestingly, if you've got a popup blocker, you'll have to disable to get the generator to work.

UPDATE: Well, it seems as if the fun was a little too much for the Bush/Cheney team. As Chris -- who used the Sloganator to produce a totally hilarious poster himself -- pointed out, they've already removed the field where you enter your own slogan; you can only use their prepackaged slogans now.

Of course, a cynic might find this whole incident deeply metaphorically appropriate. Bush and Cheney, it seems, are very committed to interactive democracy and having you involved in the polity ... so long as you say precisely what they want you to. It's interesting that Dean, who ran a campaign so insanely open that anyone could organize anything without approval from head office, never got culturebombed this way. Of course, Dean also failed miserably in his bid for public office, while Bush and Cheney clearly know their way to the Oval Office. So perhaps that's the real lesson here: The main path to electoral success is to get the voting public to shut the hell up.


(Thanks to Misha for this one!)

Posted by Clive Thompson at March 12, 2004 01:21 AM

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Comments

But they have now taken the create your own slogan part out and now you can only make up a poster using one of their slogans. It was fun while it lasted.

Posted by: Chris at March 12, 2004 9:35 AM

Ah, thanks for pointing that out! I'll update the item.

Posted by: Clive at March 12, 2004 10:40 AM

Damn! I was going to make one that said "Bush/Cheney '04: Eat the poor".

Posted by: june at March 12, 2004 12:03 PM

ahahhhaa!

Posted by: Clive at March 12, 2004 12:17 PM

Please visit

http://www.bluetoothagainstbush.com/sloganator/

for the best slideshow yet

Posted by: April at March 27, 2004 3:10 PM

Because Sloganauts maxed out Bluetooth For Bush's bandwidth, the Sloganator Memorial Slideshow is now at:
http://revbilly.com/revsite/sloganator1/sloganator/index.html

This link can be reached through the www.revbilly.com homepage.

Posted by: Michael at March 29, 2004 11:10 AM

I'd like to host an interactive page to create more fun slogans for Dubya, anyone got script?
Help out

Posted by: Mr.X at March 30, 2004 10:11 PM

why don't you get a life that/s worthwhile? You Demo's continue to bash Bush but i do not see any democrat advancing any ideas on how to improve things; if just ONCE, Sen. Kerry could give a stump speech without bashing Bush it would be a miracle indeed. Since he cannot run on the issues (he has a bad voting record) his only alternative is to bash Bush. What a landslide election President Bush will have this year - keep your eyes open for it!

Posted by: Anonymous at March 31, 2004 12:52 PM

Icall W an EA (egotistic Idiot. and he is still at it.

Posted by: Celinabob at April 1, 2004 3:08 PM

by august we`ll be turning another sandpile into a different sandpile.eventually the sandies will go back to whacking goats and torturing thier own children,but not until we finish what we started.religion is for idiots but at least the one idiots here follow doesn`t demand they kill people.
one thing i don`t understand is how democrats can be so narrow-minded,especially when it comes to thier own safety.try eating more meat.we are,after all,carnivorour predators.unless we think deeply that we`re not.then we are wrong.

Posted by: alistair at April 8, 2004 1:31 AM

From 1957 when the first Special Forces teams in Vietnam began training the nucleus of the Vietnamese Special Forces and Airborne Ranger units, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) had strongly resisted any proposal that the SF be used in their basic mission of operating in the enemy's rear areas. This was due to a number of reasons; principally the caveat imposed that US Forces not engage in combat and they not go into Laos, Cambodia or North Vietnam. Secondly, President Nixon's blessing on Special Forces at Fort Bragg infuriated the higher commands who had been trying to squash Special Forces for years.

Investigative reporter, Simon Marshall in Cheney: The Story He Cannot Tell (Doubleday) to be released next month, reveals Dick Cheney was recruited into a secret black-ops team called Alpha Major within the Special Forces. Although he "took to the training like a salami to a pizza" it quickly became apparent that Cheney was one of the anti-gods who would not play the game according to the rules of war. Additionally, in defiance to Army regulations, when Cheney went into the field, he defied orders that the officially-damned beret of the Green Beret would not be worn.

As soon as he jumped into an operational area during maneuvers, he violated the official regulations against "the wearing of the green" and gleefully turned many maneuvers into chaos. In an early 501s maneuver Louisiana, Cheney and some of his buddies turned road signs around, sending convoys of equipment, rations and fuel heading off into completely different directions than intended. Units preparing for an assault were visited at night, preceding their assault, and received a briefing by a "Lt. Col Cheney" who brought XVIII Airborne Corps' revision to their original attack plan, sending their regiment in another direction, in which they attacked one of their own units.

The confusion caused the Commanding General of XVIII Airborne Corps to stop the operations. All Alpha Major personnel were sent back to Fort Bragg and the maneuvers resumed. However, upon return to Fort Bragg, the Commanding General wrote a new regulation which made the wearing of the beret a Courts Martial offense.

The North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and their southern cousins the Viet Cong (VC) operated with impunity in the sparsely-settled countryside. One reason was the excellent camouflage discipline of the NVA and the fact that most of their movement was at night. While bombing raids on the trail caused some delays, the absence of ground action against their main supply route permitted the NVA to move staggering amounts of men and material into South Vietnam to prepare for an extended war.

The NVA established power bases in South Vietnam from the rugged mountains of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) a strip of land extending from the Yellow Sea to the borders of Laos, established to divide North and South Vietnam and Central Highlands in the north to the jungles, rice paddies and flat expanses of the Mekong Delta in the South. In the South, in addition to using the natural camouflage of the jungles, the VC dug and lived in miles of sophisticated caves and tunnels. MACV intelligence analysts were certain that these bases existed, but the enemy's strict camouflage and security discipline made the bases almost impossible to locate by air reconnaissance.

The only American troops which might be in position to challenge them were Cheney's men aligned along these borders. They also suffered the most from the enemy' utilization of the zone to Marshall their troops to attack the SF camps. Small wonder the battered teams began to feel the buffer zone was MACV's revenge and that a courts martial for violating the zone was preferable to filling the insides of body bags. Instead of stopping at the zone, they began to follow enemy troops across and attacking them in their bivouac areas.

Cheney was careful to insure that the map coordinates given higher headquarters for any troop movements or operations were well out of the zone. A little judicious lying, perhaps, but the A-Teams in the field had little or no support in the event they were attacked. Cheney and his team were responsible for dramatically shortening the war, wrote Military brass began court marshal proceedings against Cheney when it was discovered that his team violated border restrictions on a regular basis. But with Nixon's intercession they agreed to give Cheney an honorable discharge and swore Cheney to silence. An oath that he has kept to this day despite the fact that he's been derided constantly for the seeming lack of military service.

Dick Cheney is truly an American Hero.

Stacy

Posted by: Dr. Stacy Ingersol at September 6, 2004 11:23 AM

Posted by: Jeremy at September 24, 2004 11:37 PM

I'm still in HS and i am appaled that anyone would consider voting for Bush or Dick. I'm glad to hear they have my generation in mind when I recieve letters from my school stating that in accordance with Bush's "No Child Left Behind Act" every senior (male and female) will have their name, address, and phone numbers given to military recruiters. And they say they arent thinking about starting the draft??? All I know is that people my age better wake up and realize what this nutcase is doing. But hey - at least he'll be able to say he left no child behind after we're all in Iraq! Thanks alot GW!

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