Bush Farewell Tour, Supplemental: Fine. Now Can We Unveil The New First Lady?

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.

Bush Farewell Tour, Pt. 17: Twins: Hot or Not?

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]:

right before they both disappeared for good. I'm still not certain if that was the deal ahead of time, or if that appearance caused Babs to cut 'em each a check and point in the general direction of South America.

2008: Worst Year Ever, Or Just In The Last Twelve Months?

OKAY, so, you're busy, I'm busy, we're all busy this time of year, and it took a couple days before I had time to consider Dana Perino's Night-Before-Xmas (okay, two days Before) explaination of that mangled Pardon: that neither the Acting President nor Fred "Forty Years In Politics And I Wind Up Getting Dicked By George W. Bush?" Fielding knew enough about the Toussie Crime Family contribution to Team Bush to recognize "the appearance of impropriety". I think that consideration took six seconds. Six is my estimate, anyway; in a couple of eyelash battings, tops, it became clear that we have finally cleared the last hurdle in the Bush administration's eight-year struggle to develop a language which appears, for all intents and purposes, to be a variant of English, but which has no cognitive or semantic function at all.

Here's a rough outline of those six seconds:

0.0-1.8 sec.: instantaneous grasping, without conceptualizing, as a Gestalt, one might say, the idea that someone has suggested not just a theoretical limit to the Bush administration's capacity to commit 'improprieties', but that this theoretical limit could be reached by a concern over the appearance of impropriety.

1.9-2.6 sec.: sympathetic nervous system assesses neurological information, prevents skeleton from leaping out of body.

2.7-4.5 sec.: quick, though not instantaneous, realization that the statement actually manages to transcend comparison, and is therefore non-, trans-, or anti-lingual; i.e., one may not in fact say, "The Bush administration is to the suggestion of impropriety as x is to y", because we have nothing left that could possibly begin to suggest a means of conveying the irony there, let alone coming anywhere near resembling it....

4.6-5.1 sec.: ...and this, despite the fact that a half-second's reflection is all that is required to realize that the field for such comparisons has never been larger, in no small part due to the moral leadership of the Acting President and his Republican cronies. In fact it's difficult to name a single famous person in this country who is not, let's say in the main famous for some sort of embarrassing excess, and most likely several.

5.2-6.0 sec.: leading, somewhat paradoxically, to an intuited recognition that none of these, nor, in fact, all of them put together, could serve as a metaphor for this administration's Borg-like relationship with Impropriety. Not bug-witted tundra dwellers suddenly cast as Vice-Presidential candidates despite failing to name a single daily newspaper, not national news anchor chairs filled by self-tanner models and people with crippling speech impediments, not even Joes the Plumbers who are neither Joes, nor Plumbers, nor familiar enough with current events to pass a junior high pop quiz yet ascend to the national political stage, however fleetingly. We could construct a wall of ironic ineptitude and butt-nakid greed in this country high enough to hold off a melted polar ice cap, maybe two, without much effort, but all in vain. The Bush administration is not to the appearance of impropriety what Plaxico Burress is to handgun safety, "Jeff Gannon" to military service, nor Phil Gramm to economics advice. The latter are ironies which exist on a human scale. The idea that the Bush administration would be forced into a moment's fucking reflection over the "appearance of impropriety" is simply beyond our experience, even as extended by the Hubble telescope, sub-atomic particle acceleration, and televangelism.

Neither is it sufficient to suggest that Ms Perino herself should have experienced some instant response of a physical or spiritual nature: head exploding, convulsive laughter, Plague of Boils. Though here we must admit that a mere passing familiarity with the history of public relations work, the modern Republican party, or simply the general high regard placed on personal honesty in this country sufficiently prepares one for any possible combinations of English (or, in this case, English-like) words coming out of a White House Press Secretary.

There is, of course, another component to this: the incoming Bush administration's plan (hatched, we think, in 1999, like the Iraq war, the Kyoto snub, and the decision to keep George W. as far from microphones as possible) to use Pardons as one tine of its three-pronged offensive to fork Bill Clinton and thus take the spotlight off its initial incompetence so it could work on perfecting it.

And here's the thing, which you may recall: the whole thing's cut-and-dried; people howled about Ford's pardon of Nixon, and there was even a brief mention of the first Bush's more numerous, more egregious, and directly self-serving list (Clinton would up disbarred, you recall; George H. W. F. Bush wound up precluding the indictment, trial, and serious stretch in Leavenworth he'd deserved since 1985). But the power is absolute, though this did not stop the Congressman from One Gerrymandered District to my West, Daniel Lee "Two Handicap" Burton, from chairing Congressional hearings. And this is the same party which insists that Money is the freest form of Free Speech, not to mention the most attractive, and that the modern Presidency has suffered considerable harm from the pernicious idea that there are two other branches of government.

The Grand Old Hypocrisy of the thing is a helluva lot more damaging to our politics than the chance that somebody, or fifteen somebodies, might manage to buy themselves a pardon, which, for that matter, is pretty mild even as a form of corruption, since a Pardon is a one-off; it's lobbying interests which are the gift that keeps on giving. The proper response to Bush I pardoning all his Iran/Contra co-criminals wasn't a Congressional investigation, it was a general recognition of the foul stench that resides at the core of the Bush Crime Family, and a vow never to put another one in public office. Sure, Hindsight's 20/20, but Common Sense can still keep you from being run over by a bus.

Who do they think they have left to kid? Laura Bush? She and Condimelda were sent out Sunday to confabulate a version of the Bush II legacy that doesn't include the words "nadir" and "shitbag", presumably on the grounds that no gentleman would throw a shoe at a lady. Who're they kiddin'? Issue the fucking pardon now, or don't, but shut th' fuck up. Getting all prissy about it at this point is like curling up in the fetal position and imagining it's January 2001 all over again. Which, come to think of it, is a fitting legacy, just not one the rest of us can be forced to share this time.

The feather'd race with pinions skim the air

SO I'm looking at that pic of Bush looking at his portrait, and I'm trying to come up with a witty caption, and I notice that his fingers are weirdly intertwined:

And it took me about a day's incubation to Remember the Pueblo:

And, mind you, I'm not saying George W. Bush is flipping off the National Portrait Gallery or anything.  I'm just sayin' that if we had a President capable of that sort of thing, he'd be it.

Oh, So That's Why The Times Hired Kristol.

William Kristol, "Popularity Isn't Everything". December 22

You gotta love Dick Cheney.

Or stay out of range. [rimshot]

O.K., O.K. ... you don’t have to.

Well, I wouldn't call it love, exactly, but I have to admit that if Dick Cheney did not exist it would have been necessary to invent him, either by digging up Dick Nixon and giving him the brain of a (stupider) criminal, or by giving Phil Gramm a charmectomy.

But consider this exchange with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday”:

WALLACE: Did you really tell Senator Leahy, bleep yourself?
CHENEY: I did.
WALLACE: Any qualms, or second thoughts, or embarrassment?
CHENEY: No, I thought he merited it at the time. (Laughter.) And we’ve since, I think, patched over that wound and we’re civil to one another now.

No spin. No doubletalk. A cogent defense of his action — and one that shows a well-considered sense of justice. (“I thought he merited it.”)

And again, with apologies to Tom Lehrer, you gotta respect the courage of a right-wing rageball like the Vice-President who's willing to go on FOX and admit he said Fuck you to Pat Leahy.

You can't expect this to get any better. There's no theoretical objection to someone attempting to limn Dick Cheney, I suppose, unless it's another one of those pieces Slate assigns using Magnetic Poetry ("Sarah Palin" "Is" "Intellectual"). There is an objection to that someone being Bill Kristol, and not just that he and Cheney haven't exactly been hiding all those cozy, candlelit, têtes-à-têtes these past eight years (at this point all we don't know is which one's the trick). It's that counter-intuition isn't in the Republican playbook, which for thirty years now has consisted of repeating GOP! USA! and promising Remarkable Economic Success, Super Military Buffness, and Getting Back on Jesus' Good Side. To the long debate over the relative paucity of "conservative" comedy we can add that it's damn difficult to score points through cosmic buffoonery when your party is introducing a Flag Burning Amendment every Congressional session.

Certainly the events of the past decade have put the lie to this (that is to say, again; it's a measure of the power of pernicious PR bullshit that people now forget that the final years of the Reagan administration were pretty much the Bush II administration minus the humiliating military setbacks, which Reagan had had the good sense to schedule for his first term and counter-program with the Combined US Western Hemisphere [COMWESCOM] Command's glorious defeat of the 1st Cuban Overseas Typing Platoon. For that matter, which he had the even better sense to get the hell out of once it happened. By the way, the first six months of the Iraq War killed just thirty more American military personnel than did the two Beirut bombings six months apart). But they also seem to have overwhelmed the sort of claims these people made for decades, back when everything was going their way. It's as if, having determined that George W. Bush represented a choking hazard, we forgot the fact that we bought him in the first place because the ad said he was the perfect toy for teething infants.

But theoretical problems are dwarfed by the practical, which include a) the fact that Bill Kristol is a pathetic writer, an egregious liar, a moral coward, and a sorry excuse for a human being; and b) the fact that you couldn't invent any positive contributions Dick Cheney has made to his country or its politics without resorting to the worst conventions of science fiction. Cheney took the panoply of American political might, the power of the modern Presidency, and the treasury of the United States, and fashioned himself a secret lair, which he exited, rarely, only in order to out agents of our own government for personal gain or help lie us into the worst political decisions, well, in our history; to say otherwise is to find oneself obliged to apologize to both Herbert Hoover and James Buchanan, and who can afford the seance bills these days? By the time his Invisible Fortress was half completed he had no one left to talk to except Western Ranching and Mining interests and People United for Redecorating Harry Whittington's Face. Reagan's hagiographers and re-write men could at least pretend that being a genial narcoterrorist counted for something; whaddya do with Cheney? "Never proven to have consumed human flesh while on duty"?

Of course, this isn't what Kristol is really up to. Five-hundred-seventy of his eight-hundred-forty words will address Rod Blagojevitch, and, not surprisingly, in an entirely different fashion than his famed column [Caution: famed Bill Kristol column] claiming the prosecution of Tom DeLay, the Fitzgerald investigation of Scooter Libby and Karl Rove, the SEC investigation of Medicare grifter, medical clairvoyant, and friend of homeless animals Bill Frist, the partisan investigation of the duly-appointed partisan hack running PBS, and the horrid, horrid lies Dan Rather told about George W. Bush's heroic National Guard service proved a conspiracy to "criminalize Conservatism". Whereas this time a Fitzgerald investigation proves that Democrats are uniformly shady. The Cheney business is just cover for a sorry-assed wingnut hack job of the sort Kristol's been getting away with since the Times hired him. But it's made to serve a dual purpose, since the reality--which Kristol must face at some point, even if only when changing blades in his razor--is that, aside from the pages of the Times Kristol is bound to Cheney like Eng was to Chang, and they've been takin' hits off the same truck exhaust since 2003. The only difference is that Kristol, if anything, has been even more spectacularly wrong, since he's been obliged to do things in public.

So we get this, the one defense of Cheney he can come up with besides "When he says 'Fuck You' he means it":

Cheney’s loyalty to Rumsfeld didn’t stop Cheney from being a key behind-the-scenes player in encouraging George Bush to order the surge of troops to Iraq at the end of 2006 — after Rumsfeld had resisted adding troops for years. I’m told by several key advocates of the surge that Cheney was crucial in helping the president come to what was a difficult and unpopular decision — one opposed at the time by the huge majority of foreign policy experts, pundits and pontificators.

Okay, look: 'The Surge Is Working!' is now done, like your reign. The goddam thing did its job, namely, it provided enough distraction to allow Bush to refuse to admit defeat through the end of his term. Mission Finally Fucking Accomplished; right-wing diehards will be able to argue ad infinitum that "we didn't lose the war", or Bush didn't, just like they've been arguing about Vietnam for forty years, and with equal likelihood that the past will magically bend to their wills.

The reality is something else, and the reality is going to be there, this time. You managed to play the Nam-era You Can't Lose A War So Long As You're Still Paying Lip Service To It card one last time, but the fact is that this time most Americans understand that "Victory" meant something more than "Managing to solve the problems you yourselves created through poor planning, ideological rigidity, and the use of American blood and treasure for temporal political gain in the space of a mere five-and-a-half years". There will soon (thank gods) be little reason left to play pretend, beyond George W. Bush's, and Dick Effing Cheney's non-existent reputations. We will return to the public understanding--never gone away, just superseded by later Republican disasters--of Iraq as an utter waste and a military disaster.

And again we find, in a sort of mirror image of the Bush Is An Idiot, So Let's Forget That He Was Once Sold As A Genius And Give Column Inches To The People Responsible, historical amnesia: let us recall that back when various "key advocates" [Question: are they all named Kagan?] tell us the Dick of all Dicks threw his support behind this "unpopular" decision, it was the only fucking decision that offered any hope of his saving face. In 2006 the Bush/Cheney Gulag had the choice of acceding to the Strategically Delayed, Strategically Bearded by Lee Hamilton recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, with its carefully denatured approach to the extensive motherfucking generation-long multiple fracturing of American military strength caused by the Iraq War, or to simply ignore it and maintain present troop levels past the breaking point in an effort to avoid acknowledging failure. Guess which one it chose? After that, declaring victory was a foregone conclusion, though, admittedly, it invoked the considerable risk involved in telling the American public it was #1 in something. Violence is down, due to any number of factors, but there's precious little in-depth reporting about that. (I got to watch last night as CBS's abominable Harry Smith cheerfully enthralled listeners with the tale of The Little Commuter Train in Baghdad, that now carries nearly a half-dozen passengers. Things are returning to normal! It's five-and-a-half-years and untold trillions of dollars, dude. A sorry-assed third-world train chugging through a blasted Malaria Town is a Success Story?)

The major thing that's not reported in all this is the added cost to the already disastrous effect on military preparedness we might find ourselves needing to combat actual genuine threats some day. We don't really know what it's cost us to stick a toothpick through a cherry tomato and garnish the footlong shit sandwich just so the right could exit without publicly admitting it smelled anything funny. In something just over forty-five months, from the invasion of Iraq to the Kegan/Keane PR blitz, Dick Cheney managed, though force of intellect, to grasp the need for more troops! Compare Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who in forty-five months after Pearl Harbor, had only managed to defeat Nazi Germany, the Japanese Empire, and be dead for five months. Hey, everybody! Rod Blago's got funny hair!

Friday Bush Farewell Tour Vol. II: Well, That's Settled

I DON'T suppose even the most ardent Republican hater could have imagined just how awful a Chief Executizer George W. Bush would turn out to be, seeing as how "unprecedented" only begins to cover it, but even so, for me, the "acceptance" speech that terrible December 13 eight years ago--whether God in His Infinite Crankiness could have made it Friday the 13th, and if so why He didn't, is one for the theologians--maybe He was in a snit because we'd ignored the Boil thing--still represents a nadir of sorts;. I listened--no, I'm serious--intending to give the man a chance; within a couple minutes I had vowed never to forgive or forget what he said. And though he could have made me eat those words, even by just turning out to be a moderate Republican problem-solver, I felt confident that what the man had made of this "opportunity"--facing what was unquesionably the most gravid acceptance speech in the history of the Presidency, he gave birth to a misshapen two-headed microencephalic, the mindless homilies of a State Treasurer's victory celebration with one of his own empty stump speeches growing out of its back--told just about everything you'd want to know about him. That he proved so much worse in reality is due to a combination of factors, not all driven, but none overcome, certainly, by his multi-faceted lack of talent. And if one knew even then the boundless evil that is Karl Rove, or Dick Cheney, or that informs the banality of the Bush Crime Family; even though one suspected (in fact, had seen) the capacity of the mass-market Press for puffing and fluffing a President with no discernible positive qualities; even as the cocktail proved more toxic than all these combined, a Gestalt of noxiousness, still, the cold hard slap in the face of December 13, when we fully confronted the reality that not only had a man been appointed President of The Most Powerful Nation On Earth For Some Of The Next Eight Years, but that the man in question was completely hollow.

Let's follow along, shall we? No doubt with better reading comprehension than his?

Thank you all.

(APPLAUSE)

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Good evening, my fellow Americans. I appreciate so very much the opportunity to speak with you tonight.

Okay, so I don't want to get all nit-picky right at the start, but it's now five weeks since you lost the popular vote, and your fellow Americans have seen or heard you twice in that time, leaning on a fence while your team talked to reporters. It's not as though you didn't know where the camera trucks were parked.

Mr. Speaker, Lieutenant Governor, friends, distinguished guests, our country has been through a long and trying period, with the outcome of the presidential election not finalized for longer than any of us could ever imagine.

Though, as it turned out, not nearly long enough. Never would have been preferable. Hopeless deadlock and turmoil would have been a major improvement.

Vice President Gore and I put our hearts and hopes into our campaigns. We both gave it our all. We shared similar emotions, so I understand how difficult this moment must be for Vice President Gore and his family.

Okay, this is where I simply abandoned hope, though maybe it's just me. What th' fuck does Hallmark have to do with this? This is perhaps what might have been said between them, given that George W. Bush has no talent whatever for word usage, (unless you consider mangling a talent) but it just seemed too creepy by half to me. The man had at least seen professional athletes, right?  I mean, you say, "Wow, that 2-1 slider just hung up a little bit, and I was just trying to get my bat on it, you know?  I never thought it'd get out of the park." You do not say, "Well, my first thought was that his wife and kids were probably watching. My heart goes out to them." It's a parody of Nice, and it comes from a man who obviously thinks politics is all about entitlement, and in case of a tie, decided by a pissing contest.

And this was supposed to be an address to the public, and god knows the public had suffered, too; millions of its component parts had just seen their votes flushed down the toilet in the most jaw-droppingly partisan act ever to occur in the annals of American jurisprudence. They will wait in vain for their condolences from this jerk.

Add to it that the entire sentiment rings doubly false. It makes it sound like Gore was faced with a heart-breaking but necessary concession; he could have chosen to denounce the gang of lying bastards led by Bill "Light Opera" Rehnquist. But Gore, sadly for the rest of us, had chosen the honorable thing. The other thing, of course, is that George W. Bush had no freakin' idea in the world what Al Gore was going through; Bush had never lost anything in his life other than his dignity, his balance, and his driving and flying privileges.

He has a distinguished record of service to our country as a congressman, a senator and a vice president.

This evening I received a gracious call from the vice president. We agreed to meet early next week in Washington and we agreed to do our best to heal our country after this hard-fought contest.

And, as usual, George W. Bush was as good as his word. What, do you imagine, did Al Gore have to offer to get Bush to promise "to do his best"? Do you think "spend the first six weeks claiming Clinton trashed the White House" or "give everybody nicknames" were Gore's prescriptions for national healing?

Tonight I want to thank all the thousands of volunteers and campaign workers who worked so hard on my behalf.

And here I remember thinking, "Is this a fucking Oscar speech?" I mean, thank your supporters at the end, or on your own time, but not before you address the majority of voters, you know, the ones who voted for the other guy?

I also salute the vice president and his supports for waging a spirited campaign. And I thank him for a call that I know was difficult to make. Laura and I wish the vice president and Senator Lieberman and their families the very best.

Again with the fucking phone call! And that "spirited campaign", which is how you describe something that finished eight points back, not ahead of you.

I have a lot to be thankful for tonight.

Yeah, we know. And at our expense.

I'm thankful for America and thankful that we were able to resolve our electoral differences in a peaceful way.

Okay, it's not fair to blame George W. Bush for this, and God knows that politicians, especially Republican politicians, seem to imagine that the American public needs more reassurance than a child heading into major surgery, but then again, maybe if Bush were actually familiar with any other country on the face of the earth--and no, a lost weekend in Nuevo Laredo doesn't count--this might sound a little more convincing.

I'm thankful to the American people for the great privilege of being able to serve as your next president.

I want to thank my wife and our daughters for their love. Laura's active involvement as first lady has made Texas a better place, and she will be a wonderful first lady of America.

(APPLAUSE)

Okay, again with the tangents, which might have been appropriate if he'd been speaking to a bunch of drunken Bush Pioneers at the Houston Marriott after winning on election night. He wasn't.

I am proud to have Dick Cheney by my side, and America will be proud to have him as our next vice president.

(APPLAUSE)

Indeed. It was an historic night; the last time the name "Dick Cheney" elicited applause.

Tonight I chose to speak from the chamber of the Texas House of Representatives because it has been a home to bipartisan cooperation. Here in a place where Democrats have the majority, Republicans and Democrats have worked together to do what is right for the people we represent.

It's the fucking Texas State Legislature. Using that as an example of your bipartisan outreach is like saying you've worked with leading Civil Rights leaders because you had lunch with J.C. Watts.

Blah blah Texas, blah, Texas blah blah [snip]
(APPLAUSE)

The spirit of cooperation I have seen in this hall is what is needed in Washington, D.C. It is the challenge of our moment. After a difficult election, we must put politics behind us and work together to make the promise of America available for every one of our citizens.

I am optimistic that we can change the tone in Washington, D.C.

I believe things happen for a reason, and I hope the long wait of the last five weeks will heighten a desire to move beyond the bitterness and partisanship of the recent past.

Our nation must rise above a house divided. Americans share hopes and goals and values far more important than any political disagreements.

And with that promise began the transfer of power to the greatest collection of lying political hacks and criminal sociopaths ever assembled in a single city, an administration which would set the tone in its first hours by ginning up reports of White House vandalism and gifts to the American people unlawfully removed by the previous occupants.

Republicans want the best for our nation, and so do Democrats. Our votes may differ, but not our hopes.

"Nope, whatever our various choice of race, creed, or political philosophy, at heart we're all just lookin' to line our own pockets. And I pledge to you mine will be the most American administration in history in that regard."

I know America wants reconciliation and unity. I know Americans want progress. And we must seize this moment and deliver.

Together, guided by a spirit of common sense, common courtesy and common goals, we can unite and inspire the American citizens.

Examples? Anyone?

And let me say, without giving the rest away, that by now I was thoroughly convinced that Bush had no intention whatsoever of addressing directly the millions of voters, the majority of voters, who'd voted for the other guy and seen the election swiped by a banana republic of a state run by his brother and a Supreme Court run by pimps, pickpockets, and sexual degenerates. The more the motherfucker told me he was intending to inspire our commonality the more I was convinced it was a good time to start hoarding gold.

Together, we will work to make all our public schools excellent, teaching every student of every background and every accent, so that no child is left behind.

Together we will save Social Security and renew its promise of a secure retirement for generations to come.

Together we will strengthen Medicare and offer prescription drug coverage to all of our seniors.

I gotta tell ya, when I found my copy of the speech and I saw that I was dumbfounded to learn he'd actually said something that night that proved to be close to the truth. Though of course all the rest of it proved to be worse than wrong.

Together we will give Americans the broad, fair and fiscally responsible tax relief they deserve.

Together we'll have a bipartisan foreign policy true to our values and true to our friends, and we will have a military equal to every challenge and superior to every adversary.

Together we will address some of society's deepest problems one person at a time, by encouraging and empowering the good hearts and good works of the American people.

This is the essence of compassionate conservatism and it will be a foundation of my administration.

Thus do all Americans stand shoulder-to-shoulder, and wave goodbye to the Good Ship Compassionate Conservatism, which vanished mysteriously the minute it got out of sight.

These priorities are not merely Republican concerns or Democratic concerns; they are American responsibilities.

During the fall campaign, we differed about the details of these proposals, but there was remarkable consensus about the important issues before us: excellent schools, retirement and health security, tax relief, a strong military, a more civil society.

We have discussed our differences. Now it is time to find common ground and build consensus to make America a beacon of opportunity in the 21st century.

Though in the event he only managed to make it a target of opportunity.

I'm optimistic this can happen. Our future demands it and our history proves it. Two hundred years ago, in the election of 1800, America faced another close presidential election. A tie in the Electoral College put the outcome into the hands of Congress.

After six days of voting and 36 ballots, the House of Representatives elected Thomas Jefferson the third president of the United States. That election brought the first transfer of power from one party to another in our new democracy.

Shortly after the election, Jefferson, in a letter titled "Reconciliation and Reform," wrote this. "The steady character of our countrymen is a rock to which we may safely moor; unequivocal in principle, reasonable in manner. We should be able to hope to do a great deal of good to the cause of freedom and harmony."

At this point I remember I had passed beyond lividity into a great pacific calm of the sort one probably experiences just before shooting up a post office.

The Election of 2000 resembled 1800 only in that the party on the losing end of the popular vote had the juice where it counted and was able to bollox things up; in all other regards it was nothing like it. Jefferson was the overwhelming winner of the popular vote and was understood by the voters to be the Republican/Democrat choice for President, with Burr for Veep. But they wound up tied, turning the thing over to the still-Federalist-controlled House. 1800 was a sea-change in Congress as well, whereas in 2000 Bush's party lost seats in both chambers. In 1800 the logjam in the Electoral College was precisely the result of the way the law was then written; in 2000 the election was decided by a Court which had no Constitutional basis for inserting itself. And, for that matter, in 1800, though somewhat delayed, the House did finally see fit to do what was understood as right. I'm sure you can compare that one with 2000 without my help.

The real precedent, of course, as frequently remarked upon at the time, was the Stolen Election of 1876, which gave the country Rutherford B. Hayes, the disastrous withdrawal of Federal troops enforcing the Reconstruction, and the first use of Federal troops to gun down striking workers. The latter two became traditions which lasted well into the 20th century; the precedent of throwing an illicitly-appointed President out on his ass after one term sadly remained a one-time, 19th century event.

Of course, it's tough to come up with a really good platitude about 1876, and comparing Bush to the great, near-great, highly-regarded, or simply fictionally competent would remain a parlor game for the Right throughout both his first and second ignominies. Jefferson, Churchill, Wilson, John Wayne, Flash Gordon, and Jesus all made appearances; later it was Truman, Hoover, Imelda Marcos, and Ham, the First Chimp in Space. That was after they'd run out of uses for him.

I have something else to ask you, to ask every American. I ask for you to pray for this great nation. I ask for your prayers for leaders from both parties. I thank you for your prayers for me and my family, and I ask you to pray for Vice President Gore and his family.

I was pretty certain by this time that we didn't have a prayer.

I was not elected to serve one party, but to serve one nation.

The president of the United States is the president of every single American, of every race and every background.

Whether you voted for me or not, I will do my best to serve your interests and I will work to earn your respect.

I will be guided by President Jefferson's sense of purpose, to stand for principle, to be reasonable in manner, and above all, to do great good for the cause of freedom and harmony.

The presidency is more than an honor. It is more than an office. It is a charge to keep, and I will give it my all.

We are, mercifully, at the end of the thing, except for his parting "Thanks, and may God show you more mercy in the future than He's shown tonight" bit. And he's never once looked me, or any other Gore voter, in the eye. He's never once acknowledged that we might have any reason to be irate about this turn of events; it's just a Tough Loss. I'd have forgiven him, really, if he'd simply acknowledged losing the popular vote. That's all I asked. I grant you the forgiveness wouldn't have survived his inaugural speech, but that, too, was ungraciousness personified. Like all that business about Gore, and his feelings, and his need for prayers: if someone with human feeling is touched by such an act he responds with genuine emotion, not with his best good wishes and an offer to do lunch. It was clear, then and there, even before the sliming of the Clintons began in earnest, what this guy was all about. I can't say that I was caught slack-jawed when the first three months of his administration was consumed by cheap attacks on his predecessor. And I sure understood the desire to keep the actual President as far away from microphones as possible.

Friday Bush Farewell Tour Blogging

I'VE been going through my Bush archives.  Okay, so that makes me sound more organized than I'll ever be able to pretend to be; it's a political dump file that dates back to Whitewater. or, roughly, whenever it was I got enough storage to actually keep stuff (ask your parents), with a mind toward giving the man a proper send-off, as opposed to the Bush Farewell Tour hosted by the likes of Charlie Gibson. By the way, the thing I find fascinating about that--not fascinating enough to watch, mind you, beyond what clips Jon Stewart decides to use--is that mass market "news" has been excusing itself for nigh-on thirty years now for its tabloid-worthy coverage by claiming the dictates of the Free Market. So, okay, who th' fuck wants to hear from George W. Bush any more? I can't imagine that yet includes even that portion of the audience which believes the presence of Laura Bush adds something (other than her creepy, Mother's Little Helper vibe; we're about to suggest that a certain event in late 2000 C.E., pictured above, should have caused America to pack up its 0.9 shootin' irons per capita and surround the Supreme Court, demanding Al Gore win Florida. But the simple fact is that no man's immediate family, let alone extended Crime family, ever argued more convincingly that he had no business being President of his local Jaycees, let alone a developed country, and we should have realized it long before Election Day).

Anyway, it's been interesting to note that practically everything I have dating to Campaign 2000 comes from Salon, or from some USENET (ask your parents) poster who laboriously stole someone's copyright for the greater good. Weren't no blogs in my day, sonny! It's also interesting to note that there was considerably--considerably--more criticism of George W. Bush, the man, the campaign, and the record, than I recalled. This may in part be because of what I was choosing to save, but there is a real sense that through 1999 and into the primaries Bush was being held reasonably accountable for his positions and his record, and not just his unfamiliarity with the most-common language used in America. There's actual anger in some Republican circles at South Carolina; there's Molly Ivans ridiculing Bush's campaign expense/ vote count ratio in Michigan; there are claims, from Republicans, that Democratic crossover votes are buoying Bush, and assurances that after his sliming of the Media Darling in SC the Press will be all over him. And then there's nothing. Nothing except Bushisms, the apparent suggestion that George W. Bush was lagging behind in the critical Grammatically Correct Americans demographic.

Then Al Gore invented the Internet.

It's difficult, maybe impossible, to accurately describe the campaign of 2000, let alone its culmination, without employing the word "theft". And, pace Kevin Drum and his readers, Bob Somerby is not a crazy old coot who's gone 'round the bend because of it; he's dead right. Once you've caught your leg in a bear trap, moving on may still be a concern, but there are others. The great majority of the people who committed fraud in the nation's Press in 2000 are still at their jobs, still disseminating, trivializing, juvenilizing, forcing everything to fit into their comfortable upper-class scripts. They don't apologize for helping put Bush in office; hell, they awarded themselves Gold Stars for the coverage. Campbell (Mrs. Dan Senor) Brown boogied the night away at Bush 2000 headquarters; once 2008 was clearly a Democratic year she went from baking cupcakes to throwing them.  She's suddenly a Feminist, the sort of Feminist who slags the President-Elect because he won't play the Hillary Clinton Is A Drama Queen game with her. You have to be an embarrassment on the order of Judith Miller to even receive a demotion. In fact, you have to be Judith Miller; there are enough other embarrassments at the Times alone to fill two new Tina Brown vanity websites.

Okay, so how Bush got there, and what he did once he was there, are two different things, but it can be a little difficult for the seasoned dyspeptic to sort them out, or care. And I'm sure I mentioned this before, but in the horrible month between the Election and the Selection, George W. Bush, the Man Who Would Be Exponentially The Worst President Ever, not only ducked the Press--appearing, I believe, exactly twice--but who, when he did turn up, showed evidence that his own skin was trying to reject his body. And while we may not be the most politically savvy, or informed, nation on earth, we are, hands down, that nation which, alone among countries whose primary language has an alphabet, believes quite literally in angels, demons, visitations from Beyond the Grave, extraterrestrials, card readers, palm readers, tea-leaves readers, entrails readers, table tappers, phrenologists, planetary omens, appearances of the Holy Family on baked goods, backwards messages on records, and half-off coupons. How th' fuck we missed that boil is forever beyond me.

Joementum

Helene Cooper and Scott L. Malcomson,"Welcome to My World, Barack". November 16

WE'RE only gonna say this once. Okay, we're probably gonna say it a few hundred times, but this is the only time we're gonna say we're only saying it once. You cannot bi-partisan your way out of partisanship. I know, I know, its sounds a bit formulaic, doesn't it? If you want to push something down, you have to pull it up. If you want to go left, you have to go right. It-- It's-- The Centrist Democrat playbook is as tattered and out of date as the Bush playbook, but without the diversion of pitchforks and torchlight. You don't lead by tacking to the Center; you lead by leading, and expecting the Center to come to you. This is the same default position--rudderless--the Obama campaign fell into time and again over the past two years, the same one that's held steady for the Democratic party for thirty-five years.  I remind you that during that time the two two-term Republican Presidents we or our Courts elected were hailed as geniuses, at least for a time, despite evincing no evidence of intellectual curiosity, familiarity with discourse, or higher cortical event, while the one-point-five moderate Democratic Presidents were hunted like tundra wolves, or gays. People did not vote for Barack Obama because they thought that was the best way to get Colin Powell back into the cabinet, or return Joe Lieberman to his chair. Nobody gives a fuck about Joe Lieberman except the people who will hate him forever. Give him a gold fucking watch or something, a comfy pillow and a 10 volume set of Six Day War footage, and let him pass away in his sleep.

I mean, you're on notice; the script is being prepared right in front of you, from the Bush retrospectives which attempt--against the bounds of sanity, let alone decency--to find positive things to say about him, through the post-election Dancin' With the Stars Palin coverage, to the inevitable "How Will Obama Satisfy the Left?" (like he intends to try) stemwinders, the stage isn't exactly being set quite yet, but somebody's sure going around with the fluorescent orange paint marking boundary lines. Digby:

Tweety and other gasbags, including Christopher Hitchens(an extremely thoughtful critic as always) are all wringing their hands about Obama's possible choice of Clinton as Secretary of State because he promised change and this is so not it. He's destroying his mandate before our very eyes.

In other news, Obama is also known to be considering keeping Bush administration cabinet member Robert Gates as secretary of defense, and former secretary of State and war architect Colin Powell is breathlessly mentioned being on the short list for a number of posts. This strikes everyone as being a perfect example of how Obama is bringing change to Washington.

That Times Magazine cover story Sunday looked to be the cake topper. Condi Rice's advice to the next President! The mind does not reel. The mind intuitively recognizes the insufficiency of reeling and goes ahead and throws up in its own mouth, in hopes of speeding up the process a bit. Newt Gingrich's Tips for a Successful Marriage comes to mind. Or Paris Hilton's 100 Books That Changed The World! Then the mind throws up again.

In the event the goddam thing reads like a failed attempt at that 20 Questions deal, except Deborah Solomon was busy interviewing Karl Rove for the same issue. (Karl Rove? Please. I'm not about to suggest that the spoils should go to the Victor, but could you at least find someone to talk to you who had something to do with the Loss, aside from being its model of assholicity? Anybody who wants Rove's opinion can tune in FAUX News and, at any rate, isn't likely to be looking for it in the Times.) Maybe Condi's depressed; she should be grateful if that's all she is. Maybe she was drunk. Maybe she just dislikes Helene Cooper as much as I do. Nah, that's not possible. Anyway, if this thing represents an accurate portrayal, or even a mostly un-blurry snapshot, of her mental processes the world has dodged a bullet (we are, by the way, approximating the Times' actual typography, believe it or not):

WHAT ALL THOSE ELECTIONS IN IRAQ AND UKRAINE AND LEBANON MEANT.

It’s not that you deliver on it tomorrow. Maybe 2005 was a bit deceptive in that way because you had the Iraqi elections, the Cedar Revolution, the Orange Revolution, the Rose Revolution and the Palestinian election. So maybe people came to expect too much too soon.

Really, this is like the Amway salesman telling you you shouldn't have expected that detergent he sold you wouldn't dissolve fabric.

WHAT ELECTIONS COULD MEAN FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T TEND TO HAVE THEM.

I’ve seen too many peoples dismissed as not ready for self-government. First it was Asians, and then Latin Americans and Africans were there for a while. I know for a while black Americans were, too.

Th' fuck? "I know for a while black Americans were dismissed as not ready for self-government"? What exactly is your definition of "a while", lady?

THE PROBLEM RUSSIA HAS.


They’ve got problems, and the basis of this is that the legitimacy of the Russian government is not ideology; it is not a pretension to a different route for human development as Communism was. It is the ability of Russians to, if they can’t afford those Cartier shops near Tverskaya, to be able instead to go to the Ikea store that now completely dominates the Tank Trap Monument that celebrates the repulsion of the final push of the Germans into Moscow.

I'm sorry, really. I'm sure there's something in there somewhere to be snarky about, but I can't figure out what th' fuck any of it is supposed to mean. Is it a good thing that Russians can shop their brains out while ignoring the defeat of the German armies at the Gates of Moscow in 1941? Or a bad thing that they don't remember it? "The basis of [the problems] of the Russian government is that [its legitimacy]...is the ability of Russians to...shop at Ikea". I've read that through eight times and I still haven't got a clue as to what the fuck it might possibly be turned into in an effort to make some sense out of it. I'm not even sure that parse is correct. And the room is spinning again. Maybe she was trying to tell Scooter Libby when the aspens would start turning.

THE BIGGER PROBLEM RUSSIA HAS


Russia has an aging population that’s not being replaced and unfortunately a sickly population, and an economy that did not take advantage of higher oil prices to diversify. It’s still an infrastructural nightmare if you get outside of major cities and certainly if you start going toward the Far East. So I think we should be calm.

Look, Lady, either you can be Secretary of State or you can tell us to be calm. You can't do both.

SOMETIMES EUROPEANS ALSO COME FROM MARS.


I remember telling my European colleagues that I know they always think that America is going to be more aggressive on fighting extremism than they. But you know, we could never, within our context, have passed the law like the basic incitement laws that the British have passed.

Wow, funny thing...Great Britain has different libel laws from us! It's a funny, funny old world. Not that we've paid any heed to our own laws.  But it's still funny.

Bonus Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Friedism:

RUSSIA AND US — THE MORAL DIFFERENCE.


The West does not go out and conquer countries by using force, try to deprive countries of a choice. It didn’t insist that Poland join NATO. Poland wanted to join NATO. It didn’t impose NATO membership or E.U. membership on Estonia; Estonia chose it. That’s a difference, and it’s a moral difference as well. . . . If you validate the assumptions of Russians who believe that the only proper relationship between Russia and its neighbors is one of subordination and intimidation, then how do you expect a more cooperative Russia to emerge in the future? The United States has learned that it is in our interest that our neighbors, Mexico for example, be prosperous, successful and free. And Russia needs to develop a normal set of relations with its neighbors. The notions of privileged relations or its sphere of influence . . . which the Russians demand is not the formula for greater stability; it’s the formula for greater tension. I’m not stating these things as a fiat; I’m suggesting that the next administration will have to think this through.

Got that, Mexico? Make with the prosperity. Pronto.  Just because we've never used force before...

Y'know, I keep telling myself these people have done everything they can to surprise me, and yet, every time I read them I find myself taking renewed interest in those jet contrails and refusing to eat at Church's Fried Chicken in black neighborhoods.

Mulligan

THE Narrative is a palimpsest; as of Tuesday night the Obama campaign is a roaring success, and McCain's is a failure, or, more frequently, he never had a chance, being saddled with Bush'n'all. Of course this is called into question somewhat by the fact that the Acting President was barely mentioned from January on, so much so that when Bob Schieffer brought his "remarkable absence" up last week my Poor Wife and I looked at each other, amazed to find someone at CBS News still remembered the man's name when they weren't covering one of the sorry little Autumnal photo ops he's been reduced to. Compare Al Gore's rejection of Clinton's aid in 2000, a major story the whole campaign long. (Here, for example, is Time in Springtime, congratulating the Vice President on finding ten feet of usable pole with which to distance himself from a President who was leaving office more popular than Ronald Reagan. And yes, the "John F. Dickerson" is the same John Dickerson who, as Slate's chief political correspondent, was last seen offering Barack Obama tips on how to have a successful Presidency. I haven't gotten around to numbering my own list yet, but it is looking as if "Don't take advice from journalists Ari Fleischer considered good bets to stovepipe the Joe Wilson story" will make the cut.)

On the other hand, yesterday's overwritten file is tomorrow's brilliant flash of originality, and I'm not ready to trash anything I said about the Obama campaign just because it all proved completely erroneous. "Find charismatic candidate/ run against most unpopular office holder since the invention of Zero/ hope opponent nominates backwoods religious nut who spends at least six months of every year in total darkness as running mate" is certainly a winning formula; it's just mighty tough to duplicate. Progressive Blogtopia still seems to think it's won an election on the merit of its positions, without asking how many of 'em the President-elect actually shares.

(It's the same with the Creeping Towards Cloture Watch on the Senate, as though sixty Democrats meant a Liberal Supermajority, as though these weren't the very same people and the very same party that coughed up 17 votes--1/3 of its number--to immunize telecoms for spying for the Bush administration. And not, we remind you, at the height of the Terra craze, but four friggin' months ago.)

But I digress. It's interesting that "Bush's historically unimaginable approval numbers" hamstrung the McCain campaign, but the much-ballyhooed historically low approval of Congress did not much affect, well, Congress, the actual people whose numbers those were. Bush's numbers tended to camouflage the serious disarray of the Republican Brand generally, and McCain had no problem running to that, early and often.

And why shouldn't he've? Bush won in 2004 because Republicans turned out in record numbers to salvage his, and their, legacy, or "legacy" (which was, at the time, attributed against all evidence to "Values" Voters, you'll recall). It looked for all the world as if all a Republican candidate ever had to do was Just Add Ohio to the ready-made near electoral lock. If the one truly dishonest, out-of-character thing John McCain did in order to get elected was to publicly embrace George Bush in 2004, well, it seemed like the smart move in Republican politics at the time.

Don't we get a whole lot closer to the bone if we consider that McCain's real problem in 2008 was that he came pretty close to revealing the real John McCain, as well as the real Republican electoral majority, 1980-2004? The McCain campaign, v. 2.0, was practically a carbon copy of the Lee Atwater campaign of '88, with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers as The Incredible Two-Headed Willie Horton, the same charges of anti-capitalism and insufficient patriotism, and Sarah Palin in the place of Dan Quayle.  I don't recall anyone at the time cautioning that the party was running too far from St. Ronnie. If we're personally too jaded to imagine sea change is accomplished by an election (in large part because we remember how furious the scripting required to make 1980 appear that way), let us also recognize that McCain's loss was, really, truly, a Republican loss, a long-overdue correction to the Southern Strategy, and that the Senator from Arizona needed to run so far from Bush as to be outside the stadium, the party, and maybe the country before that would have begun to have an effect.

The "reinvention" of Republicanism will now struggle under the twin weights of decades of the denial of reality, and the constant eye on its every move, unlike the backroom deal that brought us George W. Bush in 1999. The glorious confluence of Robber Baronage, Ozzie and Harriet Provincialism, and Permanent Warfare has passed its sell-by date; leave us not imagine that's all George Bush's fault.

No, Just Spots.

(Via  Kevin Drum, who's doing a good job at Mother Jones.)

BY the way, I don't suppose I'm the first to note this recently, but since the takeover of the GOP by the Goldwaterites, every Republican administration has ended in recession, and connected to a major bailout.

GOP Realizes Long-Term Goal Of Reversing Roosevelt Administration: Loses War, Creates Depression

Hey, look! Oktoberfest!

(essence of Oktoberfest from farbfilm)

I BEEN busy. I been the kind of busy that's already busy when it has two big projects dumped on it with less than twelve-hours' notice, resulting in yesterday's first-ever un-proofread (no, it's true!) posting, and, mostly, leaving out my central thesis, which was that if you wanna talk about Irrational Bush Hatred, start talking about the millions of Extrapolated Americans who used to cheer for this guy and now think he's a bum. If a Foolish Consistency really is the hobgoblin of little minds America can rest easy on the Hobgoblin Problem, and maybe go straight to work on the microencephally thing.

I did find the time to watch all of Chimpy McDisaster's Address to the Chumps last night--a first for me since 9/11, or 9/12, or whenever it was he actually poked his head above the desk he was hiding under and smirked at the adoring throngs. In fact, I was hoping he'd reach for that bullhorn again, but no such luck; the first casualty in these sorts of things is always the phony iconography that used to wow 'em in the Sticks.

And now I'm sorry that I didn't have the constitution (sorry) to endure any of his other speeches, since there was a definite Zen quality I'll forever wonder if I missed all along: I didn't know anything about economics before his speech, and now that it's all been explained to me, I don't know anything about economics. For instance, I'm a little unclear about how the people who applied for the loans they later defaulted on helped create the problem when, y'know, the lender wound up with the property, plus everything that had been paid on it to that point. Seems to me there was something, I dunno, missing in the middle there.

We have a mortgage. Back when it was formulated, I'm pretty sure whoever did it understood a) compound interest and b) return on investment. And even though we used a mortgage broker, and thus had a professional working to get us the best deal, my distinct impression at the time was that the Lender had the Upper Hand. I'm pretty sure they didn't single us out to pay off substantial chunks of interest first, before they applied any payments to the principle. And yet our mortgage was sold twice in its early days. That is, they made a deal for what was, ostensibly anyway, a reasonable rate of return, and then they decided they wanted their money back. And this is not Pete down the Street selling to Joe from Kokomo; it's major banks and lending institutions, and presumably they were not caught short by child support payments or laid up with a bad back.

Again, they didn't single us out; they were churning this shit. Maybe it's economically defensible to have these sorts of secondary markets in play, but does it make $1 trillion worth of sense? The value of the loan didn't change, while, if anything, our credit rating went up. The only thing the game was taking notice of was macroeconomic trends. Supposing this was actually guarding against something, other than boredom on the part of financial industry brigands, it doesn't seem to have done a very good job.

Now, all I know about economics is what Simian McPretzelchoker taught me last night, but, again, my wife and I need to pony up $5500, with no security, in order to assure somebody'll loan us money for a new car? Thanks, I'd just as soon walk. Seems like Lowe's is still taking my credit card; when they stop I'll start watching paint peel. I'll live on ketchup soup and iodine-flavored creek water. It seems to me it's the wealthy fuckers who are running scared (since when does the G notice anyone else?).  So why do they get to dictate the terms of the surrender? So small businesses won't be able to borrow money to expand. Maybe they shouldn't be expanding if they can't finance it themselves. Thing is, this business of holding jobs and economic expansion over the heads of the American people ought to have been laughed off the screen before the man finished a sentence. (Well, in truth, we should have lined him up against a wall in 2004 sometime--that's allowing for consensus, not my personal opinion--but laughing it off seems the next best thing.) What th' fuck has economic development done for the average American over the past thirty years? Sure, an economic downturn is painful--it's already been, since this current bunch took office. Just as it was throughout the 70s, and when the bill came due for Reaganomics.   It's also painful getting fucked over by the money interests when Times are Good.  It's painful to pay my health insurance every month.  So at this point I'm willing to bet they blink first.  $2500 apiece--for this deal, not counting the rest of it--or else they're gonna do what? Delay the next iPhone? Close a Wal*Mart?  Fuck it--let's go all in. Show the fuckin' cards, dicks, or eat your loss.  This is what the Republican party has had us dancing on the brink of for three decades, and now Mike Fuckin' Pence gets to go on FAUX and say Wait, we need to be intellectually pure. Where was the fucking concern while all this was going on? Nobody sold this shit as a devotion to intellectual purity; it was the Cure-All, the Shining Light on the Hill, Fuckin' Daybreak in Fuckin' America. And it turned out to be a cover for the most massive criminal operation in history. Wow, nobody saw that comin', huh?

Really, in a country dominated politically by people who claim a 2000-year-old reanimated carpenter watches them go to the bathroom, wouldn't you think superstition alone would be enough to make people run from anything that George W. Bush proposed, at this point?

My favorite moment in the whole Pooches Were Screwed routine was the bit about the poor 21st century being regulated by the outmoded regulatory systems of the 20th. George W. Fucking Buck Rogers Bush. It's what's left of the sensible first-half of the 20th century regulatory structure that saved us, to whatever extent it did, from the rapine of the late-20th-century deregulators.

I was driving home from one of my enforced errands yesterday afternoon when I happened to yank the Wailin' Jennys CD and turn on NPR, just in time to hear Urban Bäckström, the former governor of the Swedish Central Bank in the 1990s, when they recovered from a banking crisis brought on by intemperate deregulation. Asked how they'd solved the problem, Bäckström said they'd looked, above all, to 1933 for inspiration. (He had to explain to the host, whose name escapes me, that yes, while the Wall Street crash was in 1929, it was left to the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which occurred in 1933, to begin the solution. Perhaps it's too much, expecting Americans to solve their current problems when it takes Scandinavians to explain their history to them.  Pass the ketchup.)

Shorter New York Times Sunday Magazine: It Takes A Truly Remarkable Leader To Be So Thoroughly Hated

Peter Baker, "The Final Days of the Presidency of George W. Bush". August 31

CONTINUING the Times Sunday Magazine personality-profile technique pioneered in its pages with Zev Chafets' Rush Limbaugh: Hero or Savior? namely, that the best way to know a man is to crawl up his rectum tongue first, Peter Baker discovers there's no one on the planet who doesn't admire George W. Bush's stoicism in the face of the utter, spit-on-the-ground contempt he's justly held in by the vast majority of his fellow citizens. Or at least none worth talking to.

...friends say that Bush, who just turned 62, has been looser lately, more relaxed, more willing to joke around and even do a little dance for the cameras from time to time....

Whatever the president’s virtues, they remain unappreciated in his own time....

If anything, it may be that the low numbers have become almost a badge of honor for Bush....

Donald Ensenat, a friend of Bush’s for more than 40 years who worked as his chief of protocol before stepping down last year, said that the president’s view, as he paraphrased it, has come down to this: “I’ve already taken my last licks for being unpopular, so these last two years I do what’s right — that’s my job, not with my finger in the air.”...

Stoicism has been a hallmark of his second term....

He can flash anger over what he considers unfounded criticism or at something on his schedule he does not like, but he does not wrestle with his inner demons, at least not out loud....

As Kirbyjon Caldwell, a Texas pastor who gave the benediction at both of Bush’s inaugurations and officiated at Jenna Bush’s wedding, told me, “Assuming the fetal position is just not in his vocabulary.”...

Friends and advisers usually cite what some call “the three Fs” to explain Bush’s seeming serenity in the face of so much tumult — faith, family and friends.

“It’s his deep-seated faith in God,” says Mike Conaway, who once worked for Bush and now serves as a Republican congressman from Texas. “He’s rooted in his walk with Christ. He believes he’s got a role and he’s doing what God wants him to do.”...

And then there is his near-fanatical dedication to his workout regimen, which friends credit for keeping him on an even keel....

The devotion to exercise and schedules seems to stem from the same discipline Bush summoned to quit drinking at age 40....

He also likes to look ahead rather than back....

“I feel so strongly about my principles and my values, and I’m an optimistic guy.” --George W. Bush

...the father said the son could handle the heat. “He’s fine,” he said. “We talk all the time. It’s been a tough run in terms of criticism. But that’s all right. He’s strong.”

Bush's unpopularity moves through the piece like objects in a Robbe-Grillet novel, all shiny and oddly self-propelled; Bush is unpopular because, you know, the Iraq thing, but Iraq is now a success. So now he's suffering from what G.W.H.M.S.Pinafore Bush calls "a bad break on the economy", which is doubly ironic, according to Baker, because back when Iraq wasn't a success no one gave him credit for the sparkling economic recovery his policies had brought to nearly one full percent of the population.  Life's just like that.  

We ask again--we're endless fascinated by this--would you, could you, write this sort of thing without feeling some deep emotional or legal compunction, such as you, your newspaper, and your profession being largely unindicted co-culprits? Would you say this sort of thing just for money? Would you spend good money to get someone to say it? Seventy percent of the public sees George W. Bush as a failure, and one of historic proportions. Are they all misinformed? Are they simply too illiterate to catch on as Washington insiders try to explain things? Does current market research suggest they never read the Times Magazine, nor patronize its fine advertisers? The public has been mislead about The Surge through a successful marketing campaign, but the public had long since tuned out, and rightly so.  

Happy endings, Orson Welles once noted, depend on stopping the story before it's over; crediting The Surge for "progress" in Iraq relies on sculpting it while it's still going on, plus a unique trick of perspective: "Surge" is synonymous with the (desperate) escalation of forces in 2007 back up to circa 160,000. It also credits, by extension, the tactical changes under General David Petraeus, the so-called Seize, Clear, and Hold.

What the "vindicated" Surge does not convey--this is doubly unsurprising when all one's sources are current and former Bush underlings now aiding the production of one's upcoming book--is how much of its "success" consists of redefining failure upward. The Surge, like the Soviet System in the old Solidarity gag, is a success because it solves problems we otherwise wouldn't even have.  My Iraq Adventure, v. 1.0 included as a prominent feature the rubbing of Sunni noses in the sand; the Surge now succeeds on the back of the reluctant admission--as in "having no choice but"--that bribing Sunni tribal chieftans was preferable to the Bizarro World ideological purity which had held (since Vietnam, kids!) that the mere application of US military force coupled with a refusal to let Dirty Hippies, in association with Librul Media, Inc., lose another war for us, guaranteed success. We can couple this with the similar pressure put on the Shi'a-dominated government, or "government", to provide the Republican party with pleasant news going into 2006, and with the largely-complete ethnic cleansing and enormous numbers of (largely Sunni, largely well-off and educated) refugees now gone to Jordan and somewhat north, south, east, and southwest of there. It's difficult to understand what species of historian is supposed to be trumpeting this sort of thing in fifty years time, given even a slightly elevated vantage point on the accomplishments of American imperialism over the past half-century. Latter-day Truman worship (not exactly a universal, to begin with) depends on a continuation of the Cold War narrative; God help us if Bush doesn't prove to be the culmination of that folly.

Of course this points out the dangers of reverse-Santayanaism, the idea that the future will surely be smarter than we are, but in this case it's difficult to see how it could get any stupider than the eager recipients of "The Surge: The Riskiest Presidential Decision in a Generation", and "George W. Bush: The Man Who Makes Tough Decisions Without Regard for Opinion Polls". The Surge was specifically cooked up by what remained of the people who brought you the Iraq Disaster in the first place. It amounted, basically, to a scheme to keep US troop levels elevated by extending tours and reducing the amount of time between them. In this time frame--that is, the run-up to the 2006 midterms, beginning with the massive hemorrhoidal discomfort among his own, majority, party in spring 2005--Bush the Decider had basically three options: A) find a way to double-down; B) accept some sort of wishy-washy Ur-Baker/Hamilton, let's negotiate with the Terrasts scheme; or C) Cut and Run. Is there really any reason to accept the idea of A) as the risky choice? It's his only fucking choice, both in terms of the supreme hubris that got us to that point in the first place, and in terms of the best political calculation with regard to 2006. What in the personal history of George W. Bush suggests he'd have chosen otherwise? What example is there of Bush every making a decision that went against the Republican grain? We are speaking of the most ideological administration in US history, and the titular head who never vetoed a single measure passed by a Republican majority. It's the most risible aspect of the ludicrous notion of George W. Bush, Steely-Eyed, Poll-Averse Decisioner-in-Chief.

This is enough of an indictment (of the simple-minded Surge Be Workin' media coverage; alas, there will never be sufficient indictment of Bush himself), but we surely can add "Compared to What?" We have no way of knowing, now, what so slight a nod in the direction of Reality as the Baker/Hamilton "Do Not Open Until After Xmas Midterms" Report would have accomplished, just as we have no real way of knowing what sort of realpolitik shenanigans have been pulled behind the scenes to bolster our "success". In 2005/2006 the administration was wallpapering Iran with threats of imminent retaliation. Since then the Sadrists have been relatively pacific. Was that another Bush "decision"? If so, when did he announce it? And we have no way to gauge the ultimate fate of post-invasion Iraq. The one thing we can say is that it was sold on horseshit, executed on moonshine, and continued for years after its ultimate failure for the one and only purpose of saving what remained of Bush's face and leaving the cleanup to his successor. Mission Fucking Accomplished, and thanks almost entirely to a Democratic Congress elected in 2006 to force the opposite, and which, refusing to do so, now shares his Sticky Shit on the Dumpster Bottom-level approval ratings, though not his backlog of toadying apologists.

Things You'd Read Only To See If Your Immediate Reaction To The Title Was Borne Out 100%, Vol. XXCVI

Fareed Zakaria, "What Bush Got Right". August 9

WAS your answer "Things Fareed Zakaria already supported?" Wow. Mine, too. Wanna make out?

Now, your next question, which I forgot to ask you to place in a sealed envelope and hide, anywhere in the city, along with my paycheck, is "Th' fuck, Riley? Were you stuck in a doctor's office this morning with only one magazine to read?" And the answer is No. I was stuck in line at the grocery, when the cashier disappeared while I was still third in line (evidently, judging by the duration of his absence, to change drachmas into leks, which errand caused him to arrive at the office just as a passing customer went into premature labor), and somehow I looked down at the magazine rack, which is like scanning for Gorgons. And there was this sad little toric survivor looking back, waiting to be picked up and pulped, with some sort of Newsweek patented Soviet Heroic portrait of the Acting President on the front, converted to black and white, sliced off the neck, eyes and chin still skyward, as though some real citizens had managed to get at him, or vandals had broken into Peggy Noonan's secret Commander Codpiece altar and put the statuary to the guillotine. How could I not take it home? Okay, I didn't, but I came home and read the article.

And, since we're coming clean here, it wasn't with the intention of sitting at Professor Zakaria's feet, or engaging the question. More like seeing what the warflogging regular Daily Show guest was parading down the runway in this season.

The most obvious case is Iraq. For many people—a clear majority of those polled—the decision to go to war is now seen as a mistake. But wherever one stands on that issue, it is overwhelmingly clear that the administration made a series of massive blunders in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. It went in with too few troops, dismantled Iraq's Army, bureaucracy and state-owned factories, arrested tens of thousands of Iraqis, mistreated and tortured some of them, and used overwhelming military force against all perceived threats.

How convenient it is for the Church of the Reformed Warflogger that Bush and Rumsfeld "botched" "the job"! What prodigies of Error it manages to excuse! Reader, imagine yourself the driving instructor who hears the bells jingle over the storefront door, looks up to find a paid companion steering the dark-sunglassed and red-tipped cane-wielding Zakaria to the counter.

But then, you, Dear Reader, are merely one of the rash, uninformed Poll answerers to whom Zakaria now inclines his head, almost imperceptibly, in patrician recognition of your superior, if clumsy, numbers. Hell, you're not even right anymore (The Surge is working!), you just happen to be standing where Right might be located if someone were so unfair to Dr. Zakaria as to take a look.

So, by all means, leave us extend the same sort of fairness that the War's opponents famously received back in the Golden Days. We will refuse to question how anyone paying attention during the first two twelvemonths of what wags are now calling the Bush Administration would have trusted it to park his car, let alone sell him on the idea of Preemptive War. Let us politely avert our gaze should anyone mention the risible Festival of Hubris that preceded it, and primly raise our napkin to cover our mouth before we hawk up great gristly gobs of Imminent Threat from a tenth-rate military power, already exhausted by two wars and an embargo, which not even the fabulists in the administration could arm with ICBMs. Fair's fair. Just because all you bandwagon jumpers now see the war as a mistake does mean we can casually dismiss all the thinkers who were wrong about it all along.

Instead, let's ask Zakaria what the fucking hurry was. Let's ask him now, in 2008, where he proposed to raise the additional troops necessary to do the Job the Way he said he had wanted It done after the first method didn't work out so hot. A draft? Building a coalition by answering the objections of Germany, France, and Russia? Legos™? It's multiple choice, Professor, and there ain't that many choices. The Bush administration already selected "None of the Above". Many see that as a mistake.

Here's Zakaria, in the first of Slate's biennial Let's Cut a Check To People Who Were Dead Wrong About the War if They'll Agree To Excuse Themselves, Plus Hitchens, Roundtables, just after New Year's, 2004, the only one which he appears to have participated in:

Given the costs, was the war worth it? I think it was. Many of the costs (ruptured alliances, the postwar mess) can be alleviated (through better planning, diplomacy, etc.). I don't minimize these and have been vocal in pointing them out. But they do not invalidate the entire enterprise.


I've often been associated with the "democratization spillover" argument, so let me point out that the elimination of Saddam Hussein has been a big plus for American national security. The most anti-American and expansionist regime in the Middle East has disappeared. An actual and potential threat to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Kuwait has been eliminated. A violent, rejectionist state has faced consequences. This has had a sobering effect on the region: See Syria and Libya's recent behavior. Given our interest in a stable Middle East, this is good.

Now?

The outcome? Chaos; an angry, dispossessed and armed Sunni community; a sullen and restless Shiite population; an insurgency; a jihadist terrorist movement, and spreading sectarian violence. In addition, foreign forces were destabilizing the country because both the invasion and the occupation were undertaken without first gaining support from neighboring Arab states or winning international legitimacy. The result was a perfect storm in international affairs, a failure that kept getting worse.

It's funny that "getting rid of Saddam Hussein" is now absent from the list of What The Fuck Did Bush Get Right? and that the 2004 litany of the Costs, which, surprisingly, turned out to go unalleviated, subsumes the War's Great Accomplishment, now that the public tells pollsters it doesn't believe the Middle East has erupted in a Jubilee of Democracy and America Respecting. 9/11 Changed Everything. Who knew the Dictates of Careerism would change it back?

Y'know, it's far from me to doubt the sincerity of anyone's penance over the Disastrous Iraq Adventure, but from my limited understanding of the genre one is supposed to actually wear the hair shirt, not open the closet door and show us where it hangs. "[We] went in with too few troops, dismantled Iraq's Army, bureaucracy and state-owned factories, arrested tens of thousands of Iraqis, mistreated and tortured some of them, and used overwhelming military force against all perceived threats". What gave you to imagine it would be any different? Especially since our mission there, as redefined by its public backers after Rationales 1-5 proved somewhat faulty, involved punishing the Middle East for a generalized anti-Americanism.   Or when the Acting President (and much of the Congressional leadership) couldn't be bothered to learn the distinction between Shi'a and Sunni. What did you think was going to happen? We acknowledge torture and mistreatment because we cannot deny what photographic evidence got out before the lid was shut; we ignore the thousands of innocents killed by our own actions out of camera range. That is what war is, and it is reprehensible in every way to ignore it, or forget it, or treat it like a side effect. The women and men of the US military serve, overwhelmingly, honorably. But anyone who unleashed, or excused the unleashing, of a couple hundred thousand of them on a people we proclaimed culpable in a coordinated act of murder we knew they had nothing to do with must face a lifetime of consequences, not an obligation to re-tailor the story before he's allowed on with Jon Stewart again.

So, I'd come that far; let's briefly address Dr. Zakaria's main contention:

...blanket criticism of Bush misses an important reality. The administration that became the target of so much passion and anger—from Democrats, Republicans, independents, foreigners, Martians, everyone—is not quite the one in place today. The foreign policies that aroused the greatest anger and opposition were mostly pursued in Bush's first term: the invasion of Iraq, the rejection of treaties, diplomacy and multilateralism. In the past few years, many of these policies have been modified, abandoned or reversed. This has happened without acknowledgment—which is partly what drives critics crazy—and it's often been done surreptitiously. It doesn't reflect a change of heart so much as an admission of failure; the old way simply wasn't working. But for whatever reasons and through whichever path, the foreign policies in place now are more sensible, moderate and mainstream. In many cases the next president should follow rather than reverse them.

No. Let me say, both as a Crazy Critic and a Stander To The 'Failure' Side of the Iraq "Argument", that viscous liquid running out from underneath the Brick Wall of Reality where it collapsed on the Bush administration, its neo-con puppetmasters, and--collaterally, if you prefer--everyone foolish enough to have defended it, does not smell of moderation, admission of failure, nor a sadder-but-wiser realism. It's the result of their having trusted the Helmet of Stupidity to protect them in repeated crash testing. It's not the first Bush administration that promoted Alberto Gonzales, that eventually fired Donald Rumsfeld ("the finest Secretary of Defense this Nation has ever had"), or sought to make waterboarding legal. Bosh. This is like saying the twenty-seven-year-old man who impregnates his 13-year-old mentally retarded cousin has seen the light because he offers to marry her as the cops are hauling him away. Bush is, at best, the Horrible Example to end all Horrible Examples, and if he got anything right--inadvertently, of course--it was to make a growing number of Americans aware of the toadying know-nothingism that passes for their mainstream punditry.