Around noon last Friday a coworker stopped by my cubicle and told me that there was some sort of protest going on in front of the MTV building, which is across an intersection from the office complex where I work. I wasn't busy at the time so, I picked up my camera and headed out to see what was going on.
I found perhaps twenty or thirty people on the sidewalk in front of the MTV building holding Bush campaign signs and handmade signs accusing MTV of lying. I couldn't tell exactly what MTV was supposed to have lied about, so I crossed the street and asked the first person I came to what it was all about. This particular protester was a middle-aged woman who looked like a stereotypical soccer mom. She told me that MTV had claimed that Bush intended to reinstate the draft and that it was a lie. Although she didn't provide any more details, with that information I was able to figure out from the signs that the program in question was something called "rock the vote." The soccer mom had a stack of printed signs lying on the ground, which led me to wonder if their turnout was lower than expected.
Both groups of protesters were overwhelmingly made up of white middle-class people in their early twenties. They looked like a bunch of college kids, and indeed some ever had college t-shirts. Ignore their signs and political t-shirts, and they looked identical--you couldn't tell them apart.
The Republicans who were theoretically protesting MTV were standing with their signs facing the street. Only one or two of them were visible from the MTV building, and those were some of the more unintelligible signs. There was a small group of MTV employees on the steps of their building watching.
Besides myself, I saw two other photographers (one of whom was a Republican carrying a sign), and there was someone with a small video camera and attached microphone interviewing protesters. It looked like a cheap amateur outfit, so I figured he probably worked nearby and was there out of curiosity, as I was.
I don't watch MTV, so I've never seen the ads the Republicans were so upset about. However, I described what I had seen to my coworkers later and got some background from one of them. Apparently MTV has a non-partisan campaign to encourage young people to register to vote, called "Rock the Vote." In their ads, this campaigns suggested that a reinstatement of the draft was a possibility, and that people who might be subject to it should keep that in mind and vote. The Republican Party then sent a nasty threatening letter to MTV claiming that this ad constituted a partisan attack on Bush. A search on Google later revealed that this is correct.
So the question remains--why are the Republican partisans getting so worked out and (as it turns out) lying themselves about what MTV's ad said? Looking at the matter logically, it would seem that if the ad is unfair to anybody, it would be unfair to Kerry, who has said that he intends to increase the occupying force in Iraq by around 30,000 while Bush is saying that no more troops are needed. Those new troops would have to come from somewhere, and since the military is currently overburdened, it seems that (taking their statements at face value) a draft would be more likely under Kerry than under Bush.
It's quite obvious that the Feds' military is currently not large enough to even maintain a firm grip on Iraq, let alone invade other Middle Eastern countries. Clearly the draft is one way of getting enough soldiers to solve that problem. This is only realistic. And that's where the Bush worshippers are getting upset. They have little or no connection with reality, believing instead that they can alter reality just by wishing it. To such people, reality is indeed "partisan."
1:12:54 PM 
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