POOR WIFE: You know it's my birthday next week, right? Have you bought my present yet?
RILEY: How many does this make, dear?
[silence]
RILEY: See, I knew that would shut you up.
POOR WIFE: Quiet! I'm counting.
Lou "Boom Boom" Cannon, "Obama's Reagan Transformation?" January 27
WITH little to go on beyond a few excerpts and the fact that their combined throw weight is fast approaching that of James Mitchner (plus the fact that he's now enlisted his son in the effort), we've pretty much restricted ourself to the occasional baseless insinuation about Lou Cannon's Reagan canon, now up to volume five and, one imagines, Young Ronald's first day of school, or perhaps the cutting of his second molars or first public park massacre. Really, I happen to view Ronald Reagan as the edge where McCarthyism, modern PR flackery, and the bombing of Dresden meet, and I'm not exactly taciturn, and I have no idea how I'd fill five volumes about the man without a lot of repetition. And cussing.
Sure, my opposition is ideological and, as I've admitted, might not differ qualitatively from age-group Gipper-worship nerds of the David Brooks class. I was, thankfully, spared the direct experience of that sort of Hollywood which carved Reagan into a demi-star. My first encounter with him was when he took over Death Valley Days from The Ol' Prospector, or whomever, though what I remember most about the show was 20 Mule Team Borax, the sponsor whose product, as a hand cleanser, I adored (Lava, too; I just liked washing with grit, I guess). Next thing I knew he was Governor of California, somehow, and a Nazi. Then he spent a time as a political punchline, then out of the blue he bought a microphone, stole a briefing book, and was elected President. I'm not sure I've had another experience that compares. Maybe the time my sister knocked me unconscious with an old wood-shafted driver she was swinging, but that didn't last nearly as long or hurt as much.
My young life had seen an Oval Office occupied by The Allied Commander in Europe, Mr. Camelot, the Crafty Senate Fixer, a Former Vice-President and Perpetual Paranoid, then the Accidental Accident Not Waiting To Happen, and Jimmy Who?, the last two the product of interesting times, as the Chinese would say. For sure, Nixon had always seemed to me to be the President of Somewhere Else, not anywhere where I lived, but at least one understood the political dynamic that had put him there. If Carter came from nowhere and was already a primary lock before anyone noticed, well, at least he'd accomplished it with a sort of new understanding of the process, like he'd gotten the Democratic nomination by hiking the ball directly to the running back, which you had to respect. Reagan, on the other hand, was like looking up and seeing Cap'n Bob from the old morning Popeye cartoon show of your youth taking the Oath. Not to mention that he'd run on a platform of These Kids Today! With the Hair and the Music an' the Marihuana! Let's Shoot 'Em! Reagan wasn't a fluke, or an aberration; he was New Coke™, he was Pepsi Clear™, he was Harley Davidson™ cookware. He was the cynical manipulation of Product Placement by a coterie of Kennedy-obsessed wingnuts who'd realized that Name Recognition, properly packaged, could be hurled onto peasant houses below with a reasonable expectation of success, provided you defined "success" in a certain way.
The Reagan hagiography business has, among other things, tended to suggest that he rode into the White House having convinced the American people that his time-honored ideals, recently fallen into disrepute through fashionable Sixties commie-narco-nihilism, were in fact the magic elixir of American Greatness. Or it does so when it isn't necessary to tell the opposite story (a common feature of St. Ronnie tales is their reversibility). This is where we find Cannon:
the presidential exemplar that may be most useful to President Obama as he seeks to jump start the economy is a Republican whose single-mindedness in his first months in office enabled him to gain the confidence of the American people and approval of his proposals from a Congress he did not control.
That president is Ronald Reagan, whose long-term goals were different from Mr. Obama’s but who was also willing to put pet projects on the back burner in the cause of economic recovery. In 1980, Reagan campaigned against President Jimmy Carter on a mix of issues, while giving priority, as Mr. Obama did in 2008, to a sagging national economy. “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Reagan asked over and over again.
TWELVE-point-five inches of snow here, officially, and a Republican mayor, which means the streets are still such a mess that Indianapolis Public Schools, which almost never close to begin with, and never for two days in a row, are closed for the second day in a row. I took yesterday's closing as God's insistence, via Dennis Prager, that we should have sexual relations in as many and various positions as we're still able to get into; my Poor Wife took it to mean I should get the driveway shoveled. We compromised: I cleared it enough to make sure the paramedics could get in.
The bit about "a Republican mayor" is hardly partisanship on my part, since I'm not a Democrat, and neither is the opposition party in Indiana; the last Republican mayor, Stephen "I Am Legend" Goldsmythe, routinely skimped on maintenance in order to protect his image as a tax-cutter, and would have lost his reelection bid in 1996 if the election had been held at the end of winter instead of the beginning, and if the Demopublicans had managed to nominate someone who'd ever been photographed.
Mayor Gomer's not being blamed for the shoddy work, not yet, in part because his handlers launched a highly-effective preemptive strike last October (The price of salt is up! Our trucks are aging!), and in part because that would require something resembling an adversarial Press. And the storm did dump about twice as much snow on us as predicted, but it was still supposed to be bad enough, and lengthy enough, that they should have preparting to plow all along. Instead they wasted time salting, which wasn't going to work for long, if at all. Okay, so you get wrong-footed sometimes; there's no grading on a scale. The Japanese still lost Midway, but one imagines that Nagumo didn't get to go on local teevee afterwards to explain how well everything was going.
So, posting is on Snow Holiday, but I did want to mention this. tbshrew, in comments:
Almost certainly Kristol enjoyed [a] student deferment from '70-'73...
I hold a personal advantage here, since I was a member of the '72 draft class: Nixon ended student deferments in 1971, the year of Kristol's eligibility, as part of an ongoing attempt to answer charges of favoritism in conscription before the law expired in mid-1972. My recollection is that deferments were grandfathered for people who had completed two years of college. That may not be accurate, but at any rate, Kristol could not have received one; it's possible he could have applied for one when he registered, but he would have been classified 1-H until the lottery, after which it would have been no longer available, even if he was already in college. He's a big fat liar, in other words.
Anyway, back to work, and if you think getting a savvy, desirable, middle-aged woman shit-faced drunk at 8:30 in the morning, without her realizing it before it's too late, isn't work, then you and I run in different social circles.
Asashoryu's great comeback win in the just-completed Hatsu basho--going 14-1 after withdrawing from the previous three tournaments due to injury--was marred by his making this gesture afterwards. No, really. The Yokozuna Deliberation Council plans to warn him about it. Compare the career of Bill Kristol.
Richard Pérez-Peña, William Kristol's Column in The Times Ends". January 26
Michael Calderone, "Who Should Replace Bill Kristol?" January 26
Scott Horton, "The Sacking of Bill Kristol". January 26
Peter Edmonston,"Thane Says He'll Repay Remodeling Costs". January 26
YES, indeed: compare the career of Bill Kristol. I was not one of the Left Blogostaners who thought the sky was falling because the Times hired him. When your stable includes MoDo, Brooks, Friedman, Kristof, Herbert, Collins, and Rich, with John Effing Tierney departing, the sky, like your pants, is already around your ankles. We'll grant the larger issue is probably the idea that the Op-Ed Ward should be fastidiously faux-balanced according to the dictates of someone who imagines Maureen Dowd to be at the far pole of political discourse, one opposite David Brooks; obviously, if the Times would just acknowledge the lack of epistemological rigor--without even addressing the remarkably narrow "range" between "liberal" and "conservative" exemplar--things could improve overnight. How about balancing all those people who were dead wrong about Iraq, or the Bush presidency in general, or the importance of selecting a Commander-in-Chief who doesn't wear earthtones, with someone who wasn't? How about adjusting for abject careerism, Conventional Wisdom molding, or apparent sanity? Maybe one Op-Ed slot should go to someone who has actually met an American who earns less than $125,000 without having to calculate how much to tip.
Just kiddin'. Look, anyway, my problem with Kristol was not that he got the slot, so much as it was he who got the slot: no writer, no thinker, apparently holds no opinions which could not be predetermined by anyone familiar with Hudson Institute press releases, and personally and professionally dishonest. (Again I repeat--since it was on C-SPAN, making me one of thirty-five people who actually witnessed it without working there--that in August of 2002, on that morning call-in show, Mr. Kristol twice told callers that he was "too young for Vietnam". I had no idea at the time how old he was, but it was obvious the moment he said it that he was lying. In fact, it was obvious the moment he was asked the question that he had already been lying about it for years, probably decades. Kristol is in fact a year older than I, making him a member of the last draft class eligible for conscription for an entire year. He got a high draft number [rare for a December baby; they didn't mix the lotto balls thoroughly, apparently] and so was able to go right from The Collegiate School to Hahvahd Yahd. I do understand that should we decide to remove everyone who is personally dishonest from the ranks of journalism/pundithood vast stretches of teevee/newspaper/magazine reporting would go unmanned, but there are probably some arguments against doing so as well; it's just than none comes to me offhand. So Kristol, faced with incontrovertible proof of his hypocrisy--something any college grad should at least have been able to talk his way around, if not confront head-on--chose instead to lie, blatantly, in an effort to get through the following twenty minutes. There's only one reason to lie under those circumstances, and it answers the question of whether the Chickenhawk business is all feathers or marrow-deep.)
Last night I started poking around news coverage of the Kristol Dismissal, beginning with the Times own coverage, a couple hundred words from Pérez-Peña (who now tops Michael Bérubé for Most Superfluous Actions Required To Type A Last Name), including a howler artfully withheld to the last second, when Kristol says of his Times column: "It's a lot of work."
Scott Horton tops that bit, albeit unintentionally, with this from his "inside source with first-hand knowledge":
The source makes clear that the decision not to renew Kristol’s contract is not related to his neoconservative ideology—Kristol’s proximity to key Washington players ranging from Bush and Cheney to John McCain (whom he supported in 2000) was considered a distinct plus. His leading advocacy of the Iraq War also added to his appeal. Kristol was viewed as a mover and shaker whose ideas had ready impact on the political firmament in Washington.
William Kristol, "Will Obama Save Liberalism?" January 26
All good things must come to an end. Jan. 20, 2009, marked the end of a conservative era.
Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, conservatives of various sorts, and conservatisms of various stripes, have generally been in the ascendancy. And a good thing, too! Conservatives have been right more often than not — and more often than liberals — about most of the important issues of the day: about Communism and jihadism, crime and welfare, education and the family. Conservative policies have on the whole worked — insofar as any set of policies can be said to “work” in the real world. Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of.
I'M at Target. If you must know, I was buying a wire-mesh wastebasket. Okay, since you're now saying "Wastebasket? I thought the Riley household didn't waste anything", it was to house my collection of juggling balls, beanbags, clubs, and cigar boxes formerly located on a chair in my office, plus somewhere to the south, east, west, and north somewhat. Anyway, I have one item. I'm heading for the checkout. I am ready, I think, for anything.
My new Target is now a few months old, meaning that even if the economy weren't in the crapper they'd be cutting back on cashiers by now. So there's a little back-up, but I manage to find a line that's wrapping up one customer with only one ahead of me. And yes, I should have known this was an ill-omen, thanks.
Now, the woman in front of me is older than I, maybe approaching elderly, but she also looks like one of the professional elderly, like she smelled something unpleasant in 1962 and her face stuck like that. Plus her dress code is strictly First Thanksgiving.
So the first thing that happens is that while her purchases are being rung up an equal-sized pile is remaining behind on the conveyor belt, and in front of the pile is what appears to be a Target gift-card. I immediately figure I've managed to get behind a phantom shopper. You know the sort? There's one person in line ahead of you, but she accounts for three or four separate transactions, because not only can none of her friends venture out in pursuit of their own sundries, none of them can do math or make change. Which does tend to call into question all the Chicken Little reports about modern public education.
But hey, okay, there are shut-ins and such; I'm a charitable fellow. But it seems to me that if you need someone else to do your shopping you could just kick in the change for travel expenses, plus maybe I'd like to get the medicine home before Baby's croup gets any worse. But, okay. Ready for anything. I'm now a couple feet back from the transaction, because her stuff is still spread across the entire length of the conveyor, and the cashier gives her the first total, and she says--do not get ahead of me--but the shelf said it was on sale for $40, not $70.
And the cashier explains that the item rings up for full price, but then she gets the discount.
Now, I'm not sure it precisely was a gift card, but whatever it was the clerk instructed her to swipe it through the credit card deal, and this was a foreign concept to her. You have my complete sympathy, lady. But it's enough of a mystery that the two of them manage to complete a register pas de deux that locks everything up for forty-five seconds. Then there's a couple more swipes, one by each, before it takes, and the Grant Wood painting come to life is just sort of standing there, frozen, and the clerk hands her the stylus and says, you have to sign.
At this point I am thanking god I didn't go with the cast-iron wastebasket.
Now she looks down at the little screen, and suddenly she's got the eyes of a twenty-year old. "But this says I agree to pay this amount. I don't agree. It's supposed to be forty dollars, not seventy!"
So the cashier explains, yes, well, we have to do this in this order; your final price will be $40, which will be taken off at the end of the transaction.
"But I don't agree to pay $70."
"You're not paying $70. It will..."
"But it says I agree."
"Just a moment, m'am."
"It says 'I agree'. I don't agree."
I will give the clerk credit; when she hit the button to light up the flashing beacon for "Manager needed" it was without any sign of rancor. Professionalism is professionalism.
I was simultaneously selecting which of the remaining three lines I wanted to be third in, unfortunately failing to adjust for the breeze from the guy behind me shoving into it first. That one moved along as expected, about a quarter off Indifferent. I'd made it to next up when back behind me the second manager arrived to reinforce the first, who was looking like a man who'd just realized he left his pills in a different jacket.
Karl Rove, "Bush Was Right When It Mattered Most". January 22
THE Times lets us know that some of the Bush43* Jolly Junketeers had their feelings hurt by what they felt was personal criticism of their man in Barack Hussein Obama's inaugural speech. Mr. Rove, apparently, was among them (though that's not what the piece some staffer wrote his Journal column would have you believe). Meaning--do not get ahead of me--that the same administration, some of the same people, and, in fact, its very political architect, who came to power with an orchestrated six-week effort to cover their criminal enterprise--and their criminal incompetence--with a series of personal attacks on their predecessor, leave it with a hissy fit.
It's fitting, yes, and again we ask "why not?" and "who ever deserved it more?"
Which ought to be enough: we're sick of you people; have you not been out in sunlight in the past four years? Just go away. Cheney's found happiness speaking to the twenty-five people in the country who wouldn't rather kill him. You can too. (Karl, maybe you could orchestrate another takeover of the College Republicans! Sounds like fun. Although it still won't get you laid.) If you insist otherwise we can go on like this; at some point you're going to stop commanding whatever interest that now remains, except on FOX, and the real truth will start coming out, at which point you'll wish you'd taken this time to dig fallout shelters.
I remind you Joe Fucking Klein complained about the Vandalgate story, and he might as well have been a member of your administration, and look what it got him. Like the groundhog, only six more weeks of slime. Not a rhetorical denunciation of failed policies at a time of great national anger over what was done in our name, but patently false accusations, planted and fanned in the Press. Oh, of course, the Court-appointed President didn't sully his hands with it; it was just his Press Secretary and Sources in the Administration who Spoke on Condition of Anonymity. Yeah, that fooled us.
So as much as one is tempted to say "Eat it, assholes, and remember it's just the appetizer course," or "Tell it to Max Cleland, Fuckface," and be done with you, the rules are pretty clear, and you wrote them: it's the President's job to say "Nothing to see here, folks"; the rest of us are supposed to keep it alive indefinitely, amid general merriment. So the intrepid blogger follows the link to hear just what The Brain has to say (or whoever wrote it; my own doubts about The Brain's ratiocenations are well established, but if this is an example of his work, and what wowed 'em in the Oval Office for seven years, we're lucky to be getting off with just a few major disasters). Let's climb aboard the Former Air Force One with the other freeloaders, shall we?
The former president and his wife thanked each passenger, showing the thoughtfulness and grace so characteristic of this wonderful American family.
Yet, as Mr. Bush left Washington, in a last angry frenzy his critics again distorted his record, maligned his character and repeated untruths about his years in the Oval Office. Nothing they wrote or said changes the essential facts.
To start with, Mr. Bush was right about Iraq.
The world is safer without Saddam Hussein in power.
And the former president was right to change strategy and surge more U.S. troops.
Mr. Bush was right to establish a doctrine that holds those who harbor, train and support terrorists as responsible as the terrorists themselves.
These tough decisions -- which became unpopular in certain quarters only when memories of 9/11 began to fade -- kept America safe for seven years and made it possible for Mr. Obama to tell the terrorists on Tuesday "we will defeat you."
Mr. Bush was right to be a unilateralist when it came to combating AIDS in Africa. While world leaders dithered, his President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief initiative brought lifesaving antiretroviral drugs to millions of Africans.
At home, Mr. Bush cut income taxes for every American who pays taxes. He also cut taxes on capital, investment and savings. The result was 52 months of growth and the strongest economy of any developed country.
I'M scanning the Times this morning and I note the latest of our biennial battles over teaching 20th century biology in schools has begun in Texas (of all places), over a little-noted and much-ignored requirement that students critique "the strengths and weaknesses" of all scientific theories.
And the first thing that pops into my head is "Blah, blah, blah", followed by my most recent experience with Parker, the pernicious kindergartner from next door, who got into the house Tuesday afternoon on the pretense that his mother wasn't home, and immediately asked if we had a laptop. I talk with him from time to time, and I'm fairly convinced he's a bit weak in the analytical thinking department; forcing him to consider various knots and alternate theories of fastenings would probably do little except delay his mastery of shoe-tying several weeks, if not months. We gave him a sugar-free soda and let him play with the cat. With the Cartoon Network on. Young multi-tasker.
Next was the fact that this time around the exercise in small-town small-mindedness writ to Commonwealth scale is being spearheaded by a Young Earth dentist, and I had to wonder if he thinks A Good Talk With Jesus should be taught as a critical-thinking-man's alternative to the professional treatment of dental caries.
But as I read on, depressingly familiar argument after argument--and the required allotment of time for the well-heeled Discovery Institute to insist it isn't a Creationist front--something was nagging at me, and I was near the end when it suddenly crystallized. It was in paragraph two, and it's so familiar that it was hiding in plain sight:
The debate here has far-reaching consequences; Texas is one of the nation’s biggest buyers of textbooks, and publishers are reluctant to produce different versions of the same material.
• Now that it's possible, how 'bout we end the smirky, smarmy '41' and '43' business, and clear up any further confusion over whether President Bush means George Herbert Weepy or George Doofus, Jr., by never referring to either of them ever again?
• Or at least not as "President". "The Defendant" would be acceptable.
• Mr. Real President, who, now that you are safely ensconced in the office I would like to begin referring to as "Barack Hussein Obama" at every opportunity--it's not quite so funny now that he's really the President, eh, wingnuttosphere?--just who was it decided to punt on the speech, and why? Afraid of trying to live up to your reputation? I'm agnostic about it, myself--and some other things we'll get to in a moment--but it felt like turning up for some big-name rock star who plays nothing but his new material, straight through, no encore.
• Going short was good--you wanna draw parallels to Lincoln that's a good place to start--but how do you go short and still have filler? Valley Forge? Whoever put that there should be named US Trade Representative to the Northern Mariana Islands, starting tomorrow.
• Same, and long overdue, for this Westward Ho the Wagons shit. This country was settled by slaughtering the indigenous peoples and destroying their way of life. We can argue about smallpox, if you really want to; we can note that those peoples were, in their turn, frequently as ruthless and bloodthirsty as the rest of our damnable species. But the general pattern is clear: Europeans, especially the English and Spanish, and less so the French, took the land for their own use, through numerical and technical superiority and certain biological advantages (disease, horses), slaughtering and enslaving thousands; and the United States of America warred on any tribe with the impudence not to git when we said Git, then broke the resultant treaties as soon as it was desirable.
I'm not saying I was hoping you'd announce you'd be reviewing every treaty back to 1778, in your office, starting noon Friday. Anybody who'd run on such a platform--or, hell, was discovered to have expressed the idea in an undergraduate paper, for that matter--is not going to be elected President. But lemme tell you a little story.
My wife has been watching a particular soap opera since her college days. She used to have to catch up on vacations; now we get Soap Net. And I've been known to sit in, just to spoil her fun.
And here's the thing: there will be the most ridiculous story lines designed to get someone from A to B; currently, as one example, one of the wealthiest women in the world has suffered transient global amnesia, been declared dead and buried (it was actually her doppelgänger, a waitress from the wrong side of the tracks. I'm not sure how many doppelgängers this makes over the last twenty years). But wait, that's not the ridiculous part. She's arrested for trespassing on her own property--the cops in town don't recognize one of their most illustrious citizens, of course, but that's not the ridiculous part, and thrown in the clink for what seems to be several days without a court appearance. And my question, my usual question, is this: given that you'd settled on this absurd chain of events, and given even that you imagine the conventions of the genre give you a free hand with Coincidence, Probability, and advances in DNA testing, how hard could it be to write it so that it doesn't insult the intelligence at every fucking turn? If we need this "toiling, straining, carving out a better life for their descendants" routine, does it have to be at the expense of our knowledge of the enormity that came before?
• Going topical, well, your call, and who knows? I'm all for slagging the greedy, of course, and the line about "favoring only the prosperous" was when you were in your best rhythm. (Speaking of which, can we do something about that lack of modulation, or is it simply too late and you too famous to bear correction? You're good one on one; you certainly are capable of taking flight; but every speech sounds like you practiced it with a bullhorn. Vast stretches of the transcript ought to be typed in ALL CAPS. Silence. Spaces. Mezzo-fucking-piano, dude.) I just think your audience wanted to soar.
IT'S a day for other people to make speeches, not to take note of what I hope, for what's left of his sake, is the worst thing Christopher Hitchens ever wrote, and not just in terms of its subject (Wow, you just gave Oliver Fucking Stone a flesh wound!). You may already have formed some notion of how I view the breathless celebritization of presidential inaugurations, versus the genuine significance of the speech, and you're probably correct. Even so respected an orator as The Next President seems somehow to take a back seat to The Hoopla, in which people who would otherwise be fawning over the Oscars™ get to imagine they are doing so, quadrennially, thankfully, in the service of something serious, and historical, and earth-shaking, when they're really only interested in determining the night's Winners and Losers in the fashion derby.
In this I am not the mere prisoner of irascibility, innate or cultivated, the dour profile of my Midwestern upbringing, nor my sans-culottes political tastes: the first Inaugural in my active memory is John Kennedy's in 1961, which set a damned high standard for speechmaking that all intervening speeches have failed even to approach; as the gowns and the glittering stage costumes have become exponentially more dazzling the speeches have mostly huddled in Pat Nixon's Good Republican Cloth Coat, yet failed to ward off the cold. (It's interesting, too, that the recent Inaugural Hoopla follows almost the same arc as the Republic at large: revived by the wrong-headed Truman, heedless of the size of the snowball, the general downhill trajectory he was launching it on, or the avalanche field 100 meters below; quixotically downsized to something befitting a democratic society, and government, both poised to benefit from post-Renaissance advances in thinking, by Jimmy Carter, who was promptly taken out and pummeled for the affront; returned to its full ersatz, Old Hollywood Todd-AO pseudo-Glamor by President Nancy and Ronald Reagan, who managed to quadruple the number of inaugural balls as a warm up to tackling the National Debt; followed by Bill Clinton, who just couldn't stop himself. George W. Bush's featured Ricky Martin.)
As well, y'know, I do not share this visceral reaction to Presidential melanin. It is not that I don't understand those who do. I don't understand the "how far we've come on race" business, which seems to me, if it needs illustrating--and a better way of doing that, I think, is a hard look at where we were--is much better shown by the ability of Denzel Washington or Samuel L. Jackson to open movies that could have as easily gone to Bruce Willis, and that Oprah is not only the most powerful person on earth, but also its Lit teacher. Those are every-day realities; the odds on Barack Obama becoming President were long, regardless of his skin color. Conversely, the idea that his skin color was some sort of impediment to getting the nomination of the Democratic party was simply one of those fantasy simulations his rabid blog-o-sphere fanboys ran when they needed to explain their natural superiority to the backwoods residents of Pennsylvania or Indiana, states which ultimately went to Obama in the general, it should be noted, and without need of further exegesis. I mean, God Knows that Chronos could have been kinder to Barbara Jordan, but then her gender, her sexual orientation, and her multiple sclerosis all probably cost her more than her heritage. It seems, if anything, that people are celebrating the fact that Democratic party power brokers conceded that an African-American could be elected President, provided he was a remarkably attractive candidate, raised a lot of money, and the Republican party was lying face down in its own sick. Call me when they decide an un-photogenic lesbian atheist socialist with a minute knowledge of the US role in South and Central America is just what the ticket needs. I'm in the book.
Frankly, I'm more excited about having a President who can speak, and I'm hoping--foolishly--that it might start a trend which could eventually find its way to local news, where I have been enduring a week-long festival of coiffure models who cannot pronounce the word "inaugural". You try joining in the excitement under the circumstances. Out of no fewer than seventeen I have heard exactly one do it right, and she was sporadic about it. In-nawg-er-ul. In-aw-gurr-ation. Channel 8 managed to give one of its bench players the historic overview piece where he mangled it as every fifth word for two-and-a-half fucking minutes. Indeed, the damn thing has partnered with historic much like Bonnie teamed with Clyde; somebody last night tossed us to "the historic streets of Our Nation's Capital" where one of her satellite henchmen was standing on the historic sidewalk in front of an historic wrought-iron fence. I suppose I should be thanking god that he's called the Vice-President, and not dep-a-dee something-or-other, and I suppose we're all thankful we don't have to wait until Feb-a-wary.
Small blessings, though, were soured somewhat by the occasional break from the Celebrifest to discuss "the massive security problem" with counter-terr-iz-im experts. On the grounds, I suppose, that these guys don't want to be called "Security", since it draws unfavorable parallels between their own real expertise and the policing acumen of the average mall cop. And, no doubt, because the nets don't have any "counter-Republican experts" on the payroll *.
_______
* cheap shot
I SUPPOSE the Limbaughs, the Aileses, the Malkenseses, the Bozells, and the Cornerites will be with us Always; like cockroaches, the clap, and shithouse rats, the seamless melding of vermin and environment is the difference between evolutionary success and failure, and God's Own Blowtorch burns hot but sadly indiscriminate. In truth I have no real idea how they and their ilk will fare in the coming years, but I do know that conventional recourses--accuracy, honesty, shame, ridicule, decency--have proven notoriously non-lethal to this point. Though it is also the case that a strong, if minority, opinion holds they must be kept around lest in eliminating them entirely we fall prey to some more loathsome insect, one with the possibility of approaching human-like cognitive functions.
Somewhere, this time next year, a Britt Hume or a Sean Hannity will discuss "the news" on FOX, a Richard Perle or a Frank Gaffney will pocket a speaking fee, a David Frum or a Glenn Beck will assault innocent NPR listeners. A year from now Laura Bush's book will be one year closer to the remainder bin, and, if the wind is southerly, Condi Rice might be close to finding a deal for hers. Peggy Noonan will see angels or talk to monuments. The economy is always sunny for fixers and image consultants and lobbyists and button men; not Andy Card, Dan Bartlett, nor Dan Senor will miss any meals. Colin Powell will eke out a living intoning military-sounding management tips when he's not helping his wife vandalize public schools for that sweet, tax-exempt largesse. Whatever Dick Cheney is up to will, like an iceberg, remain 9/10ths hid, but a glimpse at the remainder will be enough to confirm that it's constructed of taxpayer dollars, severed baby parts, and bullshit. And somewhere Jonah Goldberg will say something that is both stupider and lazier than anything anyone's ever said before.
The Wheel goes 'round, the Moving Finger writes; the new Fall shows are just eight months away. We don't pretend to remember every atrocity, scandal, fuck-up, or Remarkable Act of Brave Cupidity this administration has foist upon us, and, frankly, at my age it's all begun to blend into Nixon and Reagan, anyway. We're too old to try to cheer anyone up, and anyhow it was never exactly our line. We say, only, enjoy this Rogue's gallery if you can, and let it stand for the hundreds of others time, space, and even the generous free hosting limits of a Blogger account prevent us from picturing here. They're far from gone, and many of those who're not presently incarcerated but are of no current use to what are euphemistically known as "Republican donors" will shortly be drawing government pensions. If we can't be cheery about it, we can at least express our hope, and our hope that many share our hope, that the filthy scum stain these people left on the Tidal Basin is their high-water mark, at least until the next hard rain.
"Pickles", your popularity was always based on the public's desperate
hope that, if it came to it, you'd prove up to the task of putting
poison in the man's Dr. Pepper. This being no longer needed, you're
about to find out just how deep that popularity ran.
Rent-a-White-Riots
KathERINE "Are You Here For an Affair?" Harris
The Hammer
Condimelda (thanks, Chris)
Bill "The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing" Frist
L. Paul "I Was Only Issuing Orders" Bremer
John "The Perfect Backdrop" Negroponte (thanks, Alex)
Rare support for Democracy among Congressional Republicans
A proud, proud moment for us all.
New Iraqi flag. Rumors it was designed by Simone Ledeen proved unfounded,
and besides, she took an Art class.
Cheer up, Mary. You'll always have Jimbo.
Mary "I Got Mine" Cheney
Bud Day, Patriot.
Meghan O'Sullivan. I understand you're not one of the major culprits, but look: I smoked dope constantly from 1969 to 1976, and I concluded that, high or not, I should not pursue a career where my decisions would impinge on public safety. Having posed for that sort of picture should have told you the same.
Monica Goodling. The Strategic Orgasm program is long overdue.
Former Representative Mark Foley (right), West Palm Beach, FL.
Ben Domenech, author.
Ken Blackwell, voting rights activist.
James "I Sorry, That Line Is Busy" Tobin
Ever notice how those WSJ gravures look like mug shots, but never are?
Darleen "Former Boeing Executive" Druyun (story here in case you missed it.)
Michael "On To Damascus" Ledeen
Holy Joe. In the spirit of that bipartisanship the kids are all diggin' today.
"Dunno, but last I checked, no one's announced that the White House is booked and won't be ready for occupancy on Monday."
Pattern from recreation of the Harry Whittington shooting. The discrepancy
The President of the United States personally thanks decorated Marine Jim-Jeff "Bulldog" Gannon-Guckert, who served as his official Press Room bodyguard before it turned out he couldn't handle flak, either.
WE'RE not exactly up-to-the-minute at Chez Riley--damn! I meant to warn you to sit down and swallow your coffee first before unleashing the news--so when I get not one but two emails mentioning Bush's remarkable Britney Spears impression Final Press Conference I had to switch on the teevee and aim in the general direction of cable news to try to catch up. Which landed me at the Joe Scarborough and Horrible Blonde Appendage Show--while I'm thinking of it, is there anyone in the History of Television who looks less likely to have invited a Woman to sit down and discuss the day's events with him, absent No Other Choice?--just in time to hear Joe defendo-'splaining, or apolofending, his actions the previous show, when he "was a little rough" on some guest or other who had, one took it, herself been too rough on the Still Acting President, at least by Joe's lights. (During the course of said attacko-traction, or retracto-punch, Scarborough told us--twice--that he was "almost a libertarian". Which, of course, means he is a libertarian, not in a dictionary-definition sense, but in the workaday American political sense of someone putting a label he doesn't understand on a series of philosophical positions he doesn't actually hold, in order to fool, or impress, people who do not exist with the fact that he's a self-centered asshole, which they already knew.) Joe's point--I'm granting him one, of course--was that people were too tough on Bush because they did not remember what it was like after 9/11, which is to say that by now most Americans have casually strolled far enough away from their initial hysterical pants-pissing that murderous poltroons like Scarborough have been forced to adjust their rhetoric if they want to continue making money off the suckers.
And Still Acting President Bush used the same argument yesterday (I caught a few excerpts this AM), though considering the shambles he's left of himself, his party, the Presidency, the country, and the Christian religion I'm not willing to elevate it to the level of Talking Point anymore. It's just one of the few remaining soggy straws still afloat. People don't remember what it was like after 9/11! To which I suppose the immediate reply is "I guess that's lucky for you, since if they did you wouldn't have anything to grasp at at all."
Which is followed by "who was stoking the fucking fires? Who turned it into electoral lemonade?" You cannot pretend that this was some mob action you sadly were forced to join. At this point you're reduced to defending yourself on the grounds that you weren't really in charge, followed by blithering about the absence of metaphysical certainty and plain Bad Luck. If people really did remember "what it was like" the first thing they'd recall is all the assertions that you were in charge, and all the declarations of metaphysical certainty and Divine Blessing for our noble revenge plan. That Events may overtake even the most vigilant and best prepared of Men does not make you one of them just because they got you too. On the contrary. How different would your Presidency have turned out had you been able to counsel some small degree of reflection, some sense of perspective, instead of fanning the flames of fear and hatred? Of course, you'd be a different man, but then that's the point.
Let's do look back, shall we? It turns out, right off the bat, that there was no still-smoldering emotional or philosophical obstruction to a simple understanding that what you were urging in the aftermath of 9/11 was an unlimited, interminable "war" on a tactic. And that there was no real shortage of people saying so, only a shortage of teevee face time for anyone who did. People who on 9/11 had no idea who Susan Sontag was may have been throwing rocks at her a week later, but if the President of the United States had chosen to frame the attacks as acts of homicidal insanity, and demanded--with, remember?, practically the whole of the international community behind him--the extradition of those responsible, it might have worked, or it might have failed, but what's certain is it couldn't have failed as spectacularly, nor as expensively, as giving the Taliban until sundown to get out of town, 'les'n George W. Bush get all John Wayne on their ass. And don't get me wrong; you certainly did pretty much exactly what I expected you'd do. Let's just not pretend it was your only option.
So, no sale, Mr. MBA President. If people remembered 9/11, they'd remember that not only did you shoot first and ask questions never, but that the invasion of Afghanistan was a near-perfect exemplar for the war you really intended to fight, the one you fucked up beyond all measure. Our rhetoric framed it as The Battle for a Civilized World, but in reality we were afraid to take casualties; we had no plan in place for the aftermath, or none beyond the cheery illiteracy that supposes the entire population of the world to be eager suburban burgher wannabees, anxious to wash worm burgers down with corn beer while watching American Idol for Wogs. The domestic PR campaign which turned al-Qaeda into SPECTRE succeeded in hiding what we were up to from us, permitting you to substitute military hardware for thought.
The jury may still be out on whether the primary motivation was political--Bob Woodward's risible defense, in Slate, of the idea that we invaded Iraq as a response to 9/11, and the even more risible notion that the decision wasn't made until January, 2003, merely reminds us that we license barbers but not "pundits"--or just True Belief informed by a political decision reached, most likely, in 1999. But we know for sure that we quick-kicked Afghanistan in late '01 or early '02--removing key personnel, leaving the dirty work to hired local thugs--to jump-start Iraq. We know that 2002 was spent promoting the next war, and promoting the idea that questioning the next war and the administration who loved it was treasonable at best. 2002 went from the Axis of Evil to Gloves Off at Guantanamo, with stops along the way to sucker a pathetic Democratic leadership into scheduling a one-time, Olly-Olly-Oxen Free authorization for any conceivable lethality your administration chose to pursue--no further questions, no declaration of war--and scheduling it astonishingly, disgracefully, three weeks before a national election. And as if "unprecedented abdication of legal responsibility, ethical responsibility, the fundamentals of democracy, and higher cortical function" wasn't enough, to do so immediately before an election they would have, historically, been expected to win. I grant you are not responsible for the sorry aggregation of moral cowardice on the other side of the aisle, but you are responsible for the attempt--make that successful attempt--to maneuver Congress into authorizing a war without declaring one, in the heat of a political season instead of with due diligence, and for threatening to do as you damn well pleased anyway, regardless of the outcome.
And if you imagine some future historian will absolve you, let's note that he or she will be required to overlook, not just that, but a year-long, concerted disinformation campaign culminating, on September 8, 2002, with the breathtaking--and no more so than in the incredible distain for its near-total transparency--collusion of the Vice President, the front page of the New York Times, and a host of Meet the Press and major network political chief who, in life, preferred being known as an incompetent fame whore to admitting there could possibly have been anything hinky about the deal he might have been expected to notice. This postulates, I think, the accumulation of more gullibility than there is in the entire history profession in a single theoretical future entity.
But hey, hope, like stupid, springs eternal.
And 2002 wasn't just the Year of Ignoring Hans Blix, Disgracing Scott Ritter, and mushrooming a nonexistent threat. Future historians, if any, might wonder at the first US Presidential proclamation of the right of presumtive self-defense; the first administration in history sued by the Government Accounting Office; the ongoing Enron scandal; the Downing Street Memo; the cashiering of Eric Shinseki; Mitch "I Played RISK™ Once" Daniels reducing $100 billion dollar estimates of the Iraq war's cost to less than half that; the Clear Skies Initiative, which relaxed controls on air pollution; the Healthy Forests Initiative, which relaxed controls on logging; the suppression of the National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts as urged by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, otherwise known as Exxon-Mobil; John Ashcroft's, well, unholy obsession with "The American Taliban", John Walker Lindh; Ashcroft's, well, questionable Operation TIPS, which would have organized mailmen, meter readers, and our strategic Fuller Brush Salesman reserve into a sort of American Sturmabteilung, except with more unintentional homoeroticism; and the President's urging patriotic Americans to get back to shopping full time, lest the terrorists win. Which, as we now know, they did anyway.
THE Times anticipates this one in a weekend Op-Ed, which sent the intrepid indolent researcher right to the Search page to see what "Bush" +"Presidential Records law" might turn up in the way of contemporary coverage, at least in the first four pages or so of results, until he got bored and went back to watching the ballgame.
Contemporary, in this case meaning "November 1, 2001" when, despite the enormous pressures of the 9/11 attacks, mounting Operation Enduring Freedom Fries, the anthrax attacks, the difficulties in deciding whether the frame for the anthrax attacks looked better on Saddam Hussein or The Former Soviet Union (a call ultimately left up to Judith Miller), and the Herculean task of intercepting every last phone call, email, fax, kaffeeklatsch, and snatch of back fence gossip in the country--why, the background checks necessary to set up the Strategic Block Captain Program [STRATBLOC] alone required the reassignment of most of the twenty-five FBI agents attached to the Clinton Scandals, Inc., desk--only half of that comment is made up, by the way--Acting President George W. Bush still found the time to give a chilling foretaste of the next seven years of what historians now jokingly refer to as "his Presidency": he rewrote, via Executive Order, the 1978 Presidential Records Act, excluding from its provisions, well, Presidents. And Vice-Presidents. And anyone named "George", living after 1978.
And here's one of those little historical tidbits people like me--high, clinically depressed, or both--can't get enough of: the decision was written by a then-obscure White House mouthpiece named Alberto Gonzales, later, of course, a Supreme Court nominee.
By the way, what we meant to say above was "foretaste of the chilling Presidency to come", not the other way 'round, since by then we'd already been treated to great heaping platefuls of the Stupidity and Venality on the daily menu. The Times, as we would expect, reported the story with the utmost professionalism, turning a naked power grab by a skid-row bum turned Presidential usurper designed to hide, in perpetuity, public records, and the public's right to know--supposedly the lifeblood of operations like, well, the Times--(effectively sealing off, not coincidentally, all evidence of the criminal activities of the aforementioned bum's father, the Crime Family the father had now passed along, as well as the rap sheet of the bubble-brained capo di tutti capi that father had replaced) into a faux-balanced He said/He said between the Commander-in-Chief in a Time of War and a few fusty academics. In fairness, a couple weeks later the Gray Lady published a scathing editorial moderately deploring the act. In theory.
We don't really mean to be unfair, at least not any more unfair than usual; this was, indeed, a time of great national anguish, which as Mnemosyne has since told us, as She already had countless times before (I guess you can afford infinite patience on the Time beat), is probably the exact moment when you want to be more vigilant, not less. Still, situational-adjusted oversight might be forgiven had realistic standards been applied to the Bush administration, the Bush "election", or the Bush candidacy, for that matter, before Everything Changed, but the news there was taken up with Al Gore's lying ways, Bill Clinton's lying ways and, later, Laura Bush's three weeks as a grade-school librarian and her Crawford Ranch decorating dilemmas. Asking questions and expecting answers is, after all, what lost us Vietnam.
Anyway, by fiat George W. Bush determined that the decision whether to release the papers of Ronald Reagan, e.g., rested with George W. Bush, a complex legal mind-twister which actually makes sense if you pretend you're Alberto Gonzales and really need your job. The American People had not yet begun to notice the funny smell, let alone realize it was coming from the vicinity of its own underwear; this made it incumbent upon a Free Press, and hey! Look over there! Isn't that Bill Clinton with a hot Rolex?
Yes, there were other things to think about at the time, and yes, there's also such a thing as doing so a little too eagerly (if you think I'm exaggerating the abdication of Press responsibility, note that when the Bush administration tried to use the thing four years later to avoid releasing some of John Roberts' records the Boston Globe called the order "little noticed"). By the time of the decision Bush had already delayed the release of the unvacuumed Reagan Papers for a year, despite his clear conflict of interest and the direct contravention of the Republican argument, now eight years strong, that "The President is not above the law". (What a shame Irony was dead.) In fact, had President Clinton been as guilty of trading pardons for campaign contributions as the Burton Commission was claiming investigating, he would have been legally unassailable; Bush, by contrast, had the merest assertion of possession, and would eventually lose in court. And Alberto Gonzales, of course, would eventually be given a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Okay, fine. Let's just say, arguendo, that the Press just couldn't let go of Clinton's cock, or sniggering in general, and/or let's say it was totally in the tank for the Bush Crime Family, Cheney's agents, or SMERSH. Even so, ladies and gentlemen of the jury: on November 1, 2001, Presidential Press Secretary Ari Flescher, a man who had already demonstrated the administration's, and his own, personal, contempt for the truth, anything approaching the truth, or anything which might accidentally brush up against the truth in the middle of the night while headed for the can, as well as each and every "professional" "news" "gathering" operation, told the assembled Press that ''more information will be forthcoming because of the order", and the Press reported this rather than grabbing him by the necktie and pummeling him unconscious. Nothing can explain that, let alone excuse it. We are just twelve months away from the day a male prostitute catering to the Marine fetish specialty market would be admitted into the White House Press room, fully credentialed, little more than 8 uncut inches from the Most Powerful Image In The World. But we're getting ahead of our story. Let's just say, then, that abject fear is one thing, supplicating yourself to a sleezeball like Ari Fleischer, not to mention a malicious clodpate somehow elevated to the Presidency is, and was, quite another.
Laura Bush unveils George W. Bush state china
By LISA TOLIN
WASHINGTON (AP) — First lady Laura Bush showed off a new gold-rimmed set of official George W. Bush state china on Wednesday, with less than two weeks to use it before the family packs up for Texas.
OKAY, so we waited seven years, eleven months, and eight days, but the Bush Administration finally makes a smart move, namely, waiting until they were almost out of town before unveiling their new finery.
Laura Bush said the china has been in the works for several years and the family had hoped to be able to use it, but the process took longer than expected.
Sure it did.
Look, no problem on general principles here; it is the People's House, and thus must be decorated and furnished for the second coming of The Sun King. The objection to Nancy Reagan and her Marie Antoinette instincts wasn't custodial, but, well, one, just that Nancy Reagan was so fucking objectionable; two, that the whole thing was part of an orchestrated Style Offensive for the return of the Imperial Presidency and the Great Stratified Society program; and, finally, that the woman had no fucking taste whatsoever, or none that could not be subsumed as "Tinseltown Regency Revival".
Laura Bush said she commissioned the dinnerware because of breakage and a need for more settings for larger events, and added a second Magnolia-patterned set for $74,000 for use at private family dinners and smaller events.
She said she was aware of criticism her predecessors received for buying expensive china, but said it was paid for with private money and that when the process started, "the economy was a lot better than it is today."
No, the problem is getting the "paid for by private donations" routine. Of course it was paid for by private donations, you twit; even if we had wanted to give you your own 320-piece porcelain Medal of Freedom, which we didn't, we couldn't have, because your husband spent the entire public treasury he inherited, plus everything that can be collected for the next twenty-five years assuming all goes well, in some perpetual-adolescent--albeit, in the main, successful--attempt to prove he could be a worse choice than his Daddy, even. For that matter, private fucking donations got us his Presidency in the first place, and we didn't really need that, either.
And why did we need enough of your china to completely cover the largest White House events? Mix and match has been the order of the day since Benjamin Harrison, and there's been a China Room since Wilson. It's history, not the fuggin' Wealth Network. Oh, and thanks for choosing magnolias. I don't think faux-Southern gentility gets nearly enough play. (What? Oh, there are magnolias on the White House lawn? Well, never mind, then; I guess we should just be thankful you didn't go with the gopher motif.)
Just leave, okay? Nobody's demanding that you slink. Nobody's even bothering to ask how the economy got so fucking bad in the interim between grandiose privately-funded scheme and delivery. Just go, bearing in mind the backhanding your husband gave the previous administration when they left, and hold your tongue when Michelle Obama announces she's turning Dick Nixon's bowling alley into a combination Frisbee golf and skeet-shooting bunker for the girls.
ONE thing most everyone to the left of the American center can agree upon--excluding any who've been elected to Congress, that is--is that George W. Bush was given the biggest Free Pass in History after 9/11; any of several of his responses would have led to a Bill of Impeachment for Carter or Clinton, if not right away, then certainly as soon as the initial supply of warm, pants-drenching urea was exhausted. (In fact, if I'm not mistaken, by the time they'd been eight months in office both Carter and Clinton had been impeached.) And Lord knows, given the enormous popularity of movies featuring the madcap antics of People Who Weren't Really All That Funny When They Were Doing Teevee Sketch Comedy, it's understandable how a country like ours would still find Splooge-Stained Blue Dresses and What the Definition of "Is" Is a continued source of merriment, but My Pet Goat not so much. In fairness, of course, at least Clinton Scandals, Inc., were something we could laugh off; the big problem there being that we didn't, not for seven years or more, anyway.
Which reminds us that at this respective distance, the attack on Pearl Harbor had been investigated by The Roberts Commission (a Presidential commission set up days after the attack, which reported a year later); the Hart Inquiry (a one-man Navy investigation undertaken in 1944 so that important information [including courts-martial evidence] would not be lost); the Army Pearl Harbor Board; a Naval Court of Inquiry; one-man expert inquiries supplimental to those two ordered by the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy, respectively; The Clarke Investigation (into the handling of pre-attack intelligence and communications, also ordered by Secretary Stimson); and the Joint Congressional Committee investigation, which delivered its 40-part, 23 volume, 25,000 page report July 20, 1946, after eight-months' investigation; compare the 9/11 Commission, which took a year and a half to produce the bi-partisan slush it was designed to, having previously taken a year of bad publicity just to begin the formation process. Of the above, all were completed in less time after the event than it took for the single investigation of 9/11, excepting the two supplemental Services inquiries and the Congressional investigation, which did not begin until after the War.
And again, in fairness, that War was over a lot quicker, too, giving them an unfair head start.
You might recall, despite the Mass-Market Media's expressed desire that you not, that on 9/11 Acting President George Walker "Interesting Day" Bush basically turned tail and ran at the news, stopped by the nearest Air Force Base with a broadcasting facility to tape a message, before donning a flight suit and jetting off to land on an aircraft carrier that had been cunningly turned so terrorists couldn't see the San Diego skyline in the background. [on edit: sorry, I got my chronologies mixed up there!] Bush came in for some criticism for the long delay in his return to Washington.
Now, look: I don't think that just because Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who at the time was a) under fire and b) legless still ordered his driver to back up, and managed to lift the mortally-wounded Anton Cermak into the car, that every President of the United States should play the hero, nor even that it's a good idea; I just think Bush hagiographers ought to have the decency to shut th' fuck up about Roosevelt. And I realize that there are bound to be conflicting stories whenever a) there are fast-moving, highly-charged events, or b) Dick Cheney is involved. Personally, I would like to imagine a President who would either dive under the nearest mountain range for protection, or begin talking about Everlasting War, but not both at once. In the end Bush is said to have acceded to the demands of that same Secret Service he had overruled on the matter of departing Emma E. Booker Elementary School just a brief time before. Thus Bush's vigorous leadership was forced to make itself known through videoconferencing, though whether he inquired if the NYFD had been provided with Bibles the Washington Post has not chosen to let us know. Though it is sure that they had more use for 'em than that spy plane crew.
One of the little details that may have settled into the detritus of Time deserves to be dusted back up. It took about twenty-four hours for the shock to wear off enough that people began seriously to ask Just Where Th' Fuck The President Had Been While All This Was Going On (it is, as usual, a process which would result, not in demerits for Bush, but plaudits for Rudy Giuliani, thus prolonging that national agony for six fucking years). It occurred, in of all places, the New York Times, later such a skeptical analyst of White House spin. Bill Safir(e) questioned his Commander-in-Chief's absence; two days later a front-page story with the byline of R.W. Apple, Jr., and Safir(e)'s own column revealed the truth: that credible threats to Air Force One had been intercepted, their credibility resting on the fact that "code words" had been transmitted, along with the message "Air Force One is next".
Now, let's be fair: these people are predisposed to hero worship and Sky-Is-Falling insanity on the sunniest of days. So the fact that this was the first piece of real Breaking With the Compact piece of political bullshit I'd heard since the attacks (under such circumstances I'm supposed to be tacitly supportive, and you are not supposed to take the time to Cover Your Ass. Of course, we all know who breaks first.) should not be reflected on the ink-stained wretches of the Lapdog Press. It is only in retrospect that the average American has come to understand that Islamic extremism was not the only Evil unleashed on the country in those days; there was information from Dick Cheney's Office, too.
But the thing about Safir(e) was not just that he stovepiped it (apologizing, in the process, for ever having doubted), but that he claimed this suggested the presence of a high-level mole inside the White House, a claim which apparently became inoperative once a frightened nation decided a couple days later it had better pretend to admire whatever idiot was nominally in charge of giving empty bullhorn-spouted platitudes at Ground Zero.
Which reminds us: the heroic fireman standing next to him on the rubble turned out to be a Republican prop, the battered Port Authority badge George Howard's mother "presented" him in remembrance was actually wrested from her by the Secret Service, and when the men on duty denied ever having passed on that "credible threat to Air Force One" message to Cheney, his office simply invented someone who couldn't be traced. The code name, by the way, was "angel". A-N-G-E-L. Someone saying "angel" somewhere was hard evidence of a threat. I shop some places online where they won't let you use something that simple as a password to buy socks.
I DON'T have much to say about the Bush Twins--really, what is there to say? and once you've said that you've just about said it all--but for the sake of completion we might go ahead and touch a couple high points.
We certainly don't believe a politician, or any parent, for that matter, can be judged exclusively through his or her children, nor that people can be condemned for making mistakes. But it is once again interesting how the pandering Press played the Bush Daughters most notable achievement: being cited for criminal activity while under Secret Service protection (Jenna twice, the second time while still weighted down by a grueling sixty-day probationary period, after which her record would have been expunged). This was, remember, May of 2001. In other words, it was the height of the Charm Offensive, Boy, Aren't We Double-Plus Lucky the Court Picked Such A Good President For Us, Please Don't Wish My Career Into The Cornfield era, which had been more reliant on pushing the bad example of Those Horrid Clintons than on anything that could be conjured up by the appearance, speech, or alleged thought processes of the Acting President.
So while the seasoned political observer did not expect great gobs of moral outrage to take flight--if for no other reason than the fact that professional moral outrage is under long-term exclusive contract with GOP, Inc.--one of my general description might have been knocked slightly off-balance by what he did get, namely, this:
• suggestions that the server, or the manager, had singled Jenna out for the publicity (which they did get in spades, by the way, when the death threats started coming in)
• the "everybody does it" defense, notably (for me) put forward on whatever godawful punditfest Jeff "Concision" Greenfield was hosting then on CNN, where four or five middle-aged white guys simply agreed that this was the case
• "that's not news" and "the President's family should be off-limits" were, as always, advanced by the people who owned the ox in question, never mind they'd been the ones doing the Goring for the previous eight years
• the "they didn't ask their father to run for President" gambit, which tended to overlook the fact they hadn't asked him to be born filthy rich, either, but managed to struggle along with that one okay
Leave us simply put aside the small-potatoes ethics of the thing: that Bush, and the Republican party in general, spouted Jesus and Family and Morality and Service and Law-Abidin' as keys to their personal identity and electoral success; that where these particular Apples had fallen was of some importance in getting a hard look at the real George W. Bush; that we'd just spent eight years with schoolmarmish shrieks about sexual morality, the obligations of role modelhood, and Won't Someone Please Think of the Children? in our ears. It meant little enough, apparently, that the Bush Twins were the Alice Roosevelt of hedonistic conformity, nor that they appeared to be setting out to squander the opportunities of vast amounts of money, power, and connection on a tiresome squalidity without having learned anything from their father's bio. I personally didn't care a jot whether the hopeful pandering twits of Greenfield's program pointed out what was, after all, obvious; what I did object to was the rapidity with which twenty years of Wars on Drugs, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and the more recent awareness of identity theft just suddenly left everyone's consciousness. Everybody does it, they said. You think we should be trying to do something about it or somethin'?
No, I don't care about the Bush Twins, although I don't think a program to reduce the incidence of Cocktails and Shopping as a Lifestyle Choice is necessarily unwarranted, and I was somewhat gratified to note that as 2004 rolled around someone pulled the Trust Fund strings hard enough to yank the two into a) campaigning for their father, however lacking in energy, luster, or enthusiasm; b) announcing their personal Noble Service to Mankind goals for after graduation; and c) giving this speech at the RNC [caution: may cause irreversible brain bubbles]:
Ben Feller, A.P., "Analysis: Bush's personality shapes his legacy." January 3
WHEN the idea of a retrospective of the minor abuses and petty criminality of George W. Bush & Friends struck me a couple years ago--and I promise I'll be getting to the research any day now--the basic impetus was what the lesser lapses, the more garden-variety venality, said about the man and his minions, and how the great engines of Public Relations and the cheerful quislings of the Press facilitated them, how they worked overtime to try to convince people there was Nothing To See, Please Return to Your Homes and Places of Worship in the aftermath of the 2000 election. (There was, and is, the other consideration--it's been with us quite a while now--that the sheer weight and import of Bush disasters has rendered everything other than the major felonies unimportant and too-quickly forgotten. Thus what would have remained as headline-grabbing scandal in earlier administrations--Burt Lance, say, or Bobby Baker, or Margaret Truman's singing voice--are with this one just charges to be dropped so prosecutors can concentrate on the capital offenses. Lord knows I can't remember half the stuff these people got away with or tried to get away with.) I realized such a look back might butt up against a concerted last-ditch effort to resuscitate his presidency, or even the man himself, while he was still in office and able to issue pardons; I did not, at first, have any precedent available for a President hitting Truman-like low approval numbers and keeping them for, well, approximately the length of the entire Truman administration.
What I did not consider was the total collapse of world financial markets and the resulting desperate attempts to give the man something, anything, that could be called a Legacy and not a list of indictable offenses. And, as God is my witness, I never stopped for a moment to ponder what The End of His Presidency puff pieces, if any, were going to look like.
What they look like is that Feller piece linked above, which I stumbled upon in the Sunday Racist Star under the headline "Bush has revealed his human side". It is the salient defense of the once-proud American Economic Miracle that fish, barrels, and ammunition remain well within the average family's budget, available for the cost of the average daily and found in boxes at every major intersection.
Digby, understandably, found the piece unmitigated flummery. But I'm just left confused, since it makes my point for me--you have, at the end of the Bush Presidency, The Associated Press trying to construct a legacy out of the exact same nonsense it, and much of the rest of the Mass Market Press, tried to construct a President out of in 2001--but, on the other hand, it does so with an enviable efficiency I couldn't even have dreamt of.
He's a fast-moving, phrase-mangling Texan who stays upbeat! [paragraph one] He relaxes by clearing brush! He gives people nicknames! [paragraph two] He likes punctuality, and stays optimistic! [three] Demands punctuality. [six; the cupboard's damned empty already, apparently] Early to bed, early to rise! [seven] A sixth sense about other's preparation! [eight, nine] Reads the Bible! Works out! Challenges Secret Service men to keep up! Competitive! Likes to be in charge! [ten]
THE Calm Confidence of a Public Christian Holding Four Aces, a $5M/yr contract, and yet another Express Ticket to an Early Vacation:
"...and because I want to do some things with young men, some hands-on stuff. We had a very very tough year this past year in Indianapolis, the worst summer we had for homicides, our graduation rate is 19% in the public schools..."-Colts Coach Tony Dungy, explaining his now annual pre-playoff flameout "Am I Gonna Retire And Become Football's Mother Teresa or What?" Tour, to Al Michaels
Mostly, the details of Bush’s involvement are consistent with his past management style: He set broad parameters and then dispatched his underlings to do the job, checking in regularly on points that particularly interested him. He also placed strong emphasis on public perceptions and demanded discipline from the small group of advisers he trusted to handle the matter.
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