As Salon’s War Room discussed earlier today, the Bush campaign insisted on those ridiculous recumbent traffic lights on each candidate’s lectern, hoping that the emphasis on the time limits would hurt the proverbially long-winded John Kerry.

So it only serves them right that, while Kerry stuck to the rules and confined his responses to the allotted time, those dumb lights only ended up emphasizing the multiple occasions on which George Bush ran out of things to say before his lights had flashed.

What was supposed to highlight one candidate’s verbosity ended up emphasizing the other’s vacuity.

In the first Gore/Bush debate in 2000, as we know, viewers who actually watched the debate thought Gore won — but by the time the spinners were finished, and the media coverage was done obsessing over Gore’s sighing reactions to his opponent, the consensus was that Bush had prevailed.

I dunno, I just finished watching George Bush sigh at least a half dozen times — as well as grimace, pout and otherwise express his exasperation at John Kerry’s inexplicable failure to pontificate or gasbag beyond the 2-minute limit Bush’s handlers had insisted upon.

Will Bush get called on it? Or is sighing only culpable when it’s done by Democrats?

“Someone who blinks when things get hard is not the right person to win the war on terror.” That’s President Bush’s communications director, Nicolle Devenish, in this morning’s New York Times.

Now, maybe Bush doesn’t blink. But we know that the current president, “when things got hard” on 9/11, sat with a dull, vacant stare for agonizingly long minutes in a Florida classroom before waking up to the fact that he was commander-in-chief and the nation was under attack. And we know that Kerry fought in Vietnam, led troops in combat and saved comrades’ lives. Who would you rather have guarding your back?

But look how effectively the Bush team has cemented its message: Kerry is a wimp. That’s what this whole campaign has been about: Karl Rove’s sick but smart strategy punched Kerry in the groin with the Swift Boat Veterans’ lies, then used Kerry’s failure to punch back hard to demonstrate that the candidate has no guts. If he can’t protect his reputation, goes the subtext, how will he protect your children? (Josh Marshall applied the crude but accurate label of “bitch-slap” to this psychodynamic.) Depressingly, this neanderthal logic actually appears to be working: NPR reported this morning that “soccer moms” are turning into “security moms,” as Bush makes some inroads among female voters normally thought to lean Democratic.

Kerry really has only one big opportunity left to change the tide of this campaign: At Thursday’s debate, he needs to get in President Bush’s face. Since Bush has chosen to make this a showdown over the candidates’ masculinity, Kerry should take off the gloves. The Bush campaign has outrageously reframed all criticism of its failed policies as “aiding and abetting the enemy”; it has scandalously declared that if the nation elects Kerry, we’ll get the terrorist attack we deserve. This president has forfeited the decorum that normally prevails between candidates. Kerry should feel no obligation to civility.

For the sake of the country and the world, I hope Kerry and his advisers are preparing debate lines something like this:

“Mr. Bush, after 9/11 your job as president was to protect this nation, and you’ve failed. You didn’t bring the World Trade Center attackers to justice. Bin Laden is still on the loose, and the Taliban still operate in Afghanistan. Instead, you led the nation into a war on Iraq on false grounds. You botched the war, and thousands of Americans and Iraqis have died and are still dying because of your mistakes. In a time when America should have been a beacon of justice to Iraq and to the world, you allowed our troops to torture enemy prisoners. Despite all these mistakes, not a single official in your administration has ever taken real responsibility for them.

I know what responsibility means, Mr. President. Do you? I didn’t ask my daddy to find me a safe berth away from the fighting in Vietnam. I know what it’s like to have people’s lives depend on my split-second calls. I’ve made the choices that won battles and saved troops’ lives. Have you?

You’re a failure, Mr. President, and the only way this country can get back on track is by putting you on the unemployment line.”

I’m no speechwriter, but it seems to me that Kerry has nothing to lose and everything to gain by being blunt — by showing he’s not afraid to face Bush down. Bush is at his best following a script, and he’s at his worst when he’s confronted by the unexpected (like in that Florida classroom). Kerry ought to rattle him with the facts.

They can keep the angry demonstrators far away from Bush’s speeches. They can jack up the polls with deceptive ads. But, so far at least, they can’t stop the opposition candidate, if he has the requisite nerve, from speaking the truth on live television.

If you were paying attention to the political world last winter you probably already know who Joe Trippi is. And if you’ve been paying attention to the computer world for the last 20 years or so you probably already know who Mitch Kapor is. Both of these guys have spent a significant amount of time thinking about how technology can reshape the arena of democracy, and just possibly improve things.

Kapor will be talking with Trippi about his new book, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” in a live Webcast tomorrow, Friday, at 2 p.m. Pacific Time. More info here. It’s the start of a regular series at the Of, By and For site.

I spoke at the first Bloggercon last year and enjoyed it. Missed the second one last spring. Dave Winer asked me to moderate a discussion at the next one, on Nov. 6 at Stanford, and I was game. The topic is the next phase of the continuing dialogue on blogging and journalism. The previous discussions led by Ed Cone and Jay Rosen set high standards I’ll aim to match.

I’ve been a pro journalist for 20 years but I’ve always been on one fringe or another — first, as a writer for an alternative weekly; then, as a theater critic on the “wrong” coast, writing for the underdog afternoon paper here in San Francisco; then, as a migrant from the print world to the Web, here at Salon; most recently, as a pro editor turned blogger. Since I started my publishing career in my teens cranking out mimeographed Diplomacy and Dungeons & Dragons magazines in my basement, the new world of self-publishing makes me feel right at home.

I’ll do my best to steer us out of the shallow familiar waters (is blogging journalism? Of course! Much of the time, anyway) and toward what I feel are the more challenging questions about journalists’ and bloggers’ symbiotic relationship. I’ve tried to lay some of them out here. Feel free to join the discussion over on the Bloggercon site, or at the event, or right here.

Among many other unfortunate provisions in the Patriot Act, passed in haste and hysteria in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there’s one that’s especially loathsome to American values: It gives the government an unprecedented and scary carte blanche to paw through library and bookstore records to see what you’ve been reading. If you believe that such records might actually help the government nail the next wave of al-Qaida terrorists, then you don’t have to do anything. But if you believe, as I do, that this particular power is useless for that goal — but might prove handy for John Ashcroft and successors should they decide that, for example, citizens who read too many books about subject X might warrant close surveillance — then you should go here and sign the petition by the Campaign for Reader Privacy, a coalition of booksellers, librarians and writers, to push Congress to change this un-American law.

This particular part of the Patriot Act is one of those stealth provisions that simply invites government abuse. Consider: “The FBI may request the records secretly; it is not required to prove that there is ‘probable cause’ to believe the person whose records are being sought has committed a crime; and the bookseller or librarian who receives an order is prohibited from revealing it to anyone except those whose help is needed to produce the records.”

This isn’t the sort of power we should trust in any government’s hands; given the current administration’s record, it’s even scarier.

I haven’t posted much on the CBS Guard memos saga because it didn’t seem like there was much more to say. CBS seems to have had the essence of the story right, but allowed itself to get duped by some bad evidence. The White House evidently found it credible, too. The moment the documents hit the Net they were questioned and ultimately discredited. CBS compounded its error by failing to take its critics seriously and adopting a blustery, “we stand by our story” wagon-circling defense.

That’s pretty much it. On the one hand, no one seriously doubts that President Bush obtained his Guard posting through family influence, then used family influence again to bail out on the service he’d signed on for. (Today’s New York Times account puts this story together one more time.) On the other hand, CBS has provided the Bush campaign with a great gift of distraction.

I don’t view this saga as a demonstration of the power of the Internet’s fact-checking multitudes so much as a display of the network’s extended ineptitude. Everyone makes mistakes; professionalism lies not in perfection but in responsibility, responsiveness and openness. CBS’s “we know better” response was the opposite. Dan Rather and his colleagues have now stuck a fork in the tattered remnants of the blue-chip brand name they inherited from Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.

What really hurts, for CBS and the rest of the networks’ news operations, is that, at this late date in media history, trust is the only advantage the broadcast networks can claim. They no longer deliver the news faster than rivals, they certainly don’t deliver it in more depth or from more viewpoints or with more style. Their only remaining edge has been a sort of generic, fossilized authority. More people get their news from us than through any other channel, the broadcasters’ unspoken claim went. That makes us the arbiters of the news. And we take that responsibility seriously — you can count on us to get things right.

This claim was always problematic, of course, but it bore enough relationship to the truth, back in the days of Walter Cronkite, that when Cronkite turned against the Vietnam War in 1968, it actually meant something. Today’s network broadcasters simply glop together the mediasphere’s news judgments into boluses of headlines — and when they try to do original reporting, they slip on banana peels.

I don’t think CBS’s mishandling of the Guard memos story has much to do with left vs. right or Kerry vs. Bush; it’s about the passing of an ancien regime. The twilight of the anchors has been upon us for some time, but with the affair of the memos, the flames are now climbing up Black Rock.

In the end, it feels fitting that “60 Minutes’ ” vaunted TV news operation was taken in through its ignorance of the Selectric-to-software history of typography. The typed word — TV’s achilles’ heel!

Bonus links: Good reading on the subject from Reason’s Jesse Walker and, as always, from Jay Rosen.

Correction 9/21: It appears that, though the “Black Rock” building (a/k/a the CBS Building) is associated in the public mind with the network, it has not actually housed CBS for something like a decade.

“Iraq’s once highly fragmented insurgent groups are increasingly cooperating to attack U.S. and Iraqi government targets, and steadily gaining control of more areas of the country.”

Defeatist spin from the slanted liberal media? Sorry; it’s the lead sentence of the lead story in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Back in 2001, you’ll recall — months before 9/11 — President Bush “looked into the eyes” of Russian president Vladimir Putin and told us that this was a man he could trust. Bush and Putin, the word was, had bonded — as Bush always seems to — through their mutual belief in a “Higher Power.”

Well, now we know all about the kind of higher power Putin aspires to. In a story that should, perhaps, receive at least three percent of the attention the U.S. media have devoted to the grievances of Swift Boat Veterans and the peculiarities of IBM office machines circa 1972, The Russian leader has scuttled the flimsy remnants of democracy in his country, concentrating power in his hands and returning Russia to the kind of one-party rule it had for decades under the Communists — this time with no lip service paid to Marxist theory. (In fact, a day after consolidating his power, Putin announced the formation of a humongous new Russian energy consortium open to Western investment. How convenient that he previously used the powers of his state to jail the head of Yukos, a competitor to the new energy firm, who’d begun to be active in the political opposition.) The rhetorical dressing today may be different from that in the days of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev, but the brutal dynamics are familiar: Russia’s brief trajectory from glasnost to perestroika to democracy has now boomeranged straight back to dictatorship.

The Bush administration, for its part, is shockingly mum in the face of this globally significant event (Colin Powell has “concerns”), but that shouldn’t be a surprise. Putin may be an anti-democratic thug, but dammit, he’s our thug — a staunch ally in the War on Terror. And while Putin’s putsch is a lot more aggressive than the PATRIOT Act, Russia’s leader is cribbing from the same playbook Bush and Cheney used in the wake of 9/11: A terrorist disaster provides awfully good cover to roll out long-stewing policies (an invasion of Iraq for Bush, a suppression of democracy for Putin) that would be unpalatable except in a climate of fear and anger.

In this context, it hardly seems to matter that the awful terrorist acts confronting Putin’s Russia stem mostly from Chechen separatists and ethnic conflicts between Ingush and Ossetians (let’s hear Bush pronounce those names during the upcoming debates). So what if Russia’s “war on terror” is an entirely different conflict from the United States’ “war on terror”? Let’s roll these conflicts up, unite our enemies and delude ourselves that Russia’s decade-long war with Chechen guerrillas is morally aligned with the U.S.’s struggle against the perpetrators of 9/11. Since democracies like France, Germany and Spain can’t be lined up to support Bush’s ill-considered policies, then, hey, we’ll have to take a strongman.

As a dictator sitting on a vast reserve of oil and decaying stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, Vladimir Putin is looking more and more like a certain other Bush administration nemesis now awaiting trial in Baghdad. This time, though, it’s okay: remember, we can trust Putin — about as much as we can trust Bush.

POSTSCRIPT: President Bush has now weighed in. He is “worried,” says the AP, that Putin’s moves “could undermine democracy.” This is like saying Bush’s tax cuts “could undermine the budget surplus.” The rhetorical device of transforming a fait accompli into a vague possibility may be expedient, but it’s a pretty transparent dodge, and it effectively gives Putin a green light.

I’ll be talking on a panel about “The Role and Impact of News Aggregators,” sponsored by the Online News Association here in San Francisco next Tuesday, Sept. 21 (the equinox!). The whole thing starts at 6:30 pm at CNet, 235 Second Street. More details here.