FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 25, 1999
Governor Bush has unveiled his one-year plan to "teach deception and its evils" to the American public, one week before the plan's culmination and grand finale.
"The American public has been lied to, cheated, and 'subverted' too many times," Bush said yesterday at a widely televised press conference. "It's time to show America what deception is all about, so that in the future people can recognize it--before interns end up getting slept with."
Bush's plan, which began over a year ago, involves buying up hundreds of internet domains with "negative" names like "bushsux.org" and "bushbites.com," and, for a limited time, causing them to redirect visitors to the official Bush campaign site.
No one typing in "bushsux.org," for example, could be looking for the official Bush campaign site--so registering it might be thought a form of deceit, or even a tactic to prevent citizens from easily finding material critical of Bush. Proving that this is not the case, Governor Bush will allow all his "negative"-sounding domains to lapse next week, and revert to public availability.
Governor Bush explained that "the point of this program is to highlight deceitful tactics by engaging in them, and then fully repudiating them with great fanfare. I want Americans to notice what politicians and corporations are doing all the time by providing a purposefully clumsy and visible example."
The Bush program also highlights the governor's longtime admiration for progress: "If I'd been living a hundred years ago I would have had to cut down millions of trees to prevent people from writing bad things about me. That would have been a lot just to teach people a lesson, and I really like trees. With the internet, I can teach my lesson and not hurt any trees. That is why I am the technology candidate."
Still, Bush is intent on showing that deceit, far from extending only to politics, includes technology itself as well. "I registered these 'negative' domains a year ago, as I have told the press again and again. Yet a so-called 'whois' search says they were registered in February of this year. I also want to teach people that they can't believe everything they read, even when it comes from the command prompt of an advanced UNIX-brand computer."
Karl Rove, Bush's morality strategist and sometime guru, described the excitement of working on the "stinky Bush project," as it came to be known within campaign circles: "It was great. We got a bottle of Jack and sat around thinking up dirty words--not something you get to do all the time in this business. 'Bushblows' was the climax--it was then that we realized how well this would work to educate the American public on tactics that politicians sometimes use for terrible ends."
