Category Archives: Bush Administration

Let’s Get Serious

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I began this post before the Sarah Palin veep pick became news, but it fits in, nicely. This is about what we can expect to see at the GOP convention next week.

What we can expect to see are cartoons.

Today’s Republicans are not serious about governing, as John McCain broadcast loudly with his Sarah Palin choice. The GOP convention will be intensely negative, and also intensely juvenile. I don’t know what this year’s version of the purple band aid will be (are the righties over the tire gauge thing yet?). But most of the energy of the convention will be poured into ridicule of the Dem ticket. At the same time, the convention will be vague if not dishonest about the extremely right-wing GOP platform.

The GOP wins presidential elections by turning the Dem into a cartoon (and suppressing votes). They did it to Al Gore; they did it to John Kerry. They tried to do it to Bill Clinton — well, in a sense, they succeeded, but unfortunately for them they turned him into Bugs Bunny and themselves into Elmer Fudd.

So far, John McCain has been running a Karl Rove-style campaign, meaning one that’s not serious about governing. Rove himself never got the governing thing. The fact that your candidate, once in office, at some point has to actually govern is a point that still eludes him.

As Kevin Drum said of Obama’s acceptance speech,

This is an iron fist in a velvet glove. Or is it a velvet fist in an iron glove? Whichever it is, he’s calling out McCain in plain language not just for running a nasty, Rovian campaign, but for running a fundamentally unserious campaign. By tackling this head on, Obama has put a serious dent in McCain’s ability to continue campaigning with dumb soundbites and too-cute-by-half innuendo. This isn’t a teenager’s campaign for junior high school student council, he was saying, it’s a campaign for president of the United States and you’re old enough to know that you should damn well treat it that way.

They won’t, though. Just watch.

There is a comment at The Fix by Lawrence Hawkins that I can’t link to directly, so I’m going to paste it all here. I hope Mr. Hawkins doesn’t mind.

Amazing. As I scan through the comments above I see the the same sad insults. “Socialism” cries one. “Jerimiah Wright” cries another. “He can’t/won’t change a thing.” And let’s not forget the the eloquent, “I HATE HIM.”

This all goes past the point of being sad. This is psychologically unhealthy for those that feel this way. Be honest with yourselves. You are afraid.

Honestly you need to confront your fears. Barack Obama is a guy with a rocky upbringing. Thank God he had people like his mom, and his grandparents in his life to set him straight. He worked hard in school, got a law degree, passed the bar, which in itself is an accomplishment, and went on to get married, to a woman, and started raising a family. No absentee dad, he. You want a man who shows the system works? Here he is. You want someone who was given lemons and made lemonade? Here he is. Do you want an example to show the world that America works? You’ve got him!

Jerimiah Wright is a jerk. But he’s not running for president.

Face your fear. Grow past it. Barack Obama, despite Rush et al, is not the Bogeyman. He is an American that wants the best for America.

If you’ve got a problem with his tax policy, let’s discuss it like adults. If you have a concerns about abortion and a women’s right to make choices, let’s talk. But this type of reasoned debate can only happen once you get past the fear that cripples your thought process. I guarantee you that once you’ve thought it all through, you’ll vote for Obama/Biden, because at the end of the day, it’s a vote for yourself.

If you’ve got a problem with his tax policy, let’s discuss it like adults. If you have a concerns about abortion and a women’s right to make choices, let’s talk. But this type of reasoned debate can only happen once you get past the fear that cripples your thought process. Spot on.

Sometimes people criticize me for not debating righties. They don’t see the several years I spent wasted attempting to debate righties. I had facts and logic; they had puerile taunting. I gave up; I have more entertaining ways to kill time.

It’s rare to find someone on the Right with whom one can have a serious conversation about a serious subject. The Left has its share of clowns, too, but IMO there is a bigger percentage of us who are not clowns and who are willing to listen to serious, fact-based argument when it is presented to us. Today’s “conservatives” seem congenitally unable to present serious, fact-based arguments, however.

So next week the GOP will get together, and they will put on a great show of hate and ridicule and derision, with occasional breaks for displays of the jingoistic nationalism they confuse for patriotism. What you won’t see them do is get serious.

Toothpaste and Tubes

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I don’t know how much of this is news media hype, and how much of it is real, but we’re still hearing stories about disguntled Hillary supporters who don’t like Obama. Eli Saslow of the Washington Post interviewed some Clinton delegates after the Senator’s speech last night who said they still would not vote for or support Obama. One said she would vote for McCain in November. Another wore a button that said “Obamination Scares the Hell Out of Me.”

Every now and then a pundit will say that Obama ought to be doing more to win over these voters. He needn’t waste his time; if Senator Clinton’s speech last night didn’t do it, nothing will. These people are, as they say, stuck on stupid.

Saslow writes,

Clinton said Tuesday night that it is Obama’s convention. But many of her supporters came here exclusively to honor her. One group traveled from New York and built an impromptu museum commemorating Clinton’s historic campaign. Another lighted thousands of candles in a park to symbolize her widespread support.

On Tuesday morning, hundreds of loyalists formed a 200-yard parade and marched through downtown. They shouted into loudspeakers and beat drums, creating a cacophony that echoed across the blocks. As they began marching, some of the supporters chanted, “We want a roll call.” Many of them wore their opinions on T-shirts: Country Over Party. Damn, We Wish You Were President. Still Making History. Democrats Left Behind.

At the front of the parade route, one banner summarized their message: Hillary. Who Else?

And they call Obama supporters naive cult followers.

So what’s happening with the Hillary worshipers? I’m not sure if it qualifies as a cult of personality, but it’s obvious that the actual, flesh-and-blood Hillary Clinton is irrelevant to this group. They are infatuated with a projection of Hillary Clinton they’ve created in their own minds, and this projection has little to do with the real woman.

That’s why they’re not listening to the real woman; they’re listening to the play-pretend Hillary who lives in their heads. And since the play-pretend Hillary was created out of their own egos and personal grievances, they aren’t likely to let go of her for a long, long time. If ever. And there’s nothing that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or God Almighty can say to these people that will change their minds.

BTW, for those of you who missed it, here is Senator Clinton’s speech:

See also No More Mr. Nice Blog.

The GOP Advantage: Stupid Is Easy. Smart Is Hard.

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It took me a while to find it, but I thought you’d enjoy this little nugget from October 5, 2004, dug out of the Mahablog Archives.

Why We’re Screwed

    Bush’s years as a good-time Charlie and heavy drinker may actually help him draw a contrast to Kerry. Bush led a more “normal” life as a young man, spending his college and postgraduation years partying, chasing women, and raising hell, while Kerry sought academic excellence, positioning himself to be a leader of his generation. Kerry’s devotion to high-minded pursuits, first through his combat service in Vietnam and then as an opponent of the war, may have impressed some, but it now is often portrayed by adversaries as opportunistic and self-important. Those accusations are rarely made against Bush, who showed little interest in leadership as a younger man. [U.S. News and World Report]

We’ve come a way from George Washington and the cherry tree, huh?

The original U.S. News and World Report article, by Kenneth T. Walsh and Dan Gilgoff , appeared in the October 3, 2004 issue. It serves as a nice time capsule to show us how the “elite” versus “regular guy” narrative played out four years ago. The paragraph quoted above still makes my jaw drop.

Smart is elitist, and elitism is, you know, bad. So we can’t elect smart people, and instead elect stupid people, because they connect with us, and they’re more fun to have a beer with, even when (they say) they’ve stopped drinking. Then we wonder why the government doesn’t work. Stupid? Do tell.

I mean, where else in the world is someone accused of academic excellence and high-minded pursuits?

Occasionally we hear that there’s an “anti-education” culture among African-American males that causes them to under-achieve. I will leave it to others to decide how true or false that is. It just seems to me that this phenomenon is not limited to African-American males. The whole country is infested with it. It’s just plain not cool to be smart.

Case in point: Saturday’s event at the Rev. Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church. Discussing this not-debate, Sally Quinn writes that she wishes she could live in John McCain’s world:

I want to live in a world where Gen. David Petraeus and Meg Whitman, former chief executive of eBay, are the wisest people I know, where offshore drilling will help ease our energy crisis, where a guy stays in a Vietnamese prison camp even when told he could get out, and has great stories to tell. I want to live in a world where I was absolutely certain that life begins at conception, where a man is a maverick and stands up against his Senate colleagues when he disagrees with them, where the only thing to do with evil is defeat it, where a guy will follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of Hell to capture him.

I want to believe that our biggest enemy is radical Islamist terrorists. I want to be part of a world that doesn’t have to raise taxes; where America is a beacon, a shining city on a hill; where our values are simply Judeo-Christian values; and where a man always puts his country first. I want to be one of “my friends.”

John McCain’s world doesn’t appeal to me all that much, but let’s go on …

Obama came first, and he handled himself well in front of an audience that clearly disagrees with him on many issues. He also managed to put to rest the notion that he is a Muslim, which 12 percent of Americans still believe he is. He talked directly to Rick Warren as though they were having a real conversation, whereas McCain played to the audience, rarely looking at Warren. He was low-key, thoughtful and nuanced.

That kind of nuance is hard to understand sometimes — it’s unclear, complicated. Obama’s world can be scarier. It’s multicultural. It’s realistic (yes, there is evil on the streets of this country as well as in other places, and a lot of evil has been perpetrated in the name of good). It’s honest. When does life begin? Only the antiabortionists are clear on that. For the majority of Americans (who are pro-choice), it is “above my pay grade,” in Obama’s words, where there is no hard and fast line to draw on what’s worth dying for, and where people of all faiths have to be respected.

Stupid is easy. Stupid lets you give clear and unambiguous answers to murky and complicated questions. Smart, on the other hand, requires dealing with reality.

Columnist William Kristol, a high priest of the religion of stupid, wrote of Saturday night’s whatever it was:

Obama made no big mistakes. But his tendency to somewhat windy generalities meant he wasn’t particularly compelling. McCain, who went second, was crisp by contrast, and his anecdotes colorful.

Smart is boring. Stupid is much more “compelling,” i.e., entertaining and comforting.

(Later in the same column, Kristol challenges his readers: “Where in particular has the United States in recent years — at home or especially abroad — perpetrated evil in the name of confronting evil?” He really doesn’t know. Truly, this is the Stupidity of the Gods.)

Michael Gerson, who’s just a watered-down David Brooks as far as I’m concerned, wrote,

First, the forum previewed the stylistic battle lines of the contest ahead, and it should give Democrats pause. Obama was fluent, cool and cerebral — the qualities that made Adlai Stevenson interesting but did not make him president. Obama took care to point out that he had once been a professor at the University of Chicago, but that bit of biography was unnecessary. His whole manner smacks of chalkboards and campus ivy. Issues from stem cell research to the nature of evil are weighed, analyzed and explained instead of confronted.

Now, let’s think about that last sentence. To me, weighing, analyzing and explaining issues are inseparable from “confronting” them. You have to understand an issue thoroughly before you can deal with it wisely, and sometimes the wisest course is to leave the dadblamed issue alone. In Rightieworld, however, “confronting” an issue takes these steps:

  1. Identify what you want to do (e.g., attack Iraq; help your oil industry buddies increase their profits).
  2. Find or manufacture a reason why you should do what you want to do.
  3. Overwhelm news media and the American people with blustering rhetoric about why America must do what you want to do, accompanied by juvenile taunting of anyone who disagrees with your doing what you want to do.
  4. Do the thing you want to do.
  5. Spend the next several months or years denying or making excuses for the mess you made by doing what you wanted to do.
  6. Eventually, when the mess turns out to be an undeniable failure — blame liberals.

Notice there is neither weighing nor analyzing in the list above. Weighing and analyzing is for academics and women. Red-blooded Americans take the hairy-chested, Neanderthal approach and just smash the hell out of whatever is bothering them.

Let’s talk about moral issues. I’ve written in the past about how “moral clarity” is not clear at all. “Moral clarity” is based on bullshitting yourself; a refusal to weigh and analyze all facets of an issue.

Essentially, “moral clarity” is about bullshitting yourself. It’s about not dealing honestly and compassionately with all aspects of a moral issue. Instead, the “morally clear” begin with the position they want to take and work backward to justify it, scamming themselves and others when necessary to achieve the desired outcome. This twisted way of achieving “clarity” is founded in the dualistic thinking Glenn Greenwald writes about. This dualism assumes one side of an issue must be “good” and the other must be “bad.” Thus, in much anti-choice literature embryos can talk and women who choose abortions are either ignored or assumed to have evil or selfish motivations. But real-world moral issues often involve multiple “good” sides. It is actually quite rare for people and facts to so neatly sort themselves into “good” and “bad” boxes as the morally clear want to sort them. And by achieving “clarity” based on lies and false assumptions, the “clarifiers” actually create more pain and complication.

But, by gawd, “moral clarity” works great on television. The “morally clear” can look the camera in the eye and give decisive, sound-bite answers. People attempting to deal with reality have to explain things. They must fall back on nuance. Boooooooring.

Finally, the really great thing about stupid is that it allows you to believe whatever you want to believe. Peter Dizikes writes that gurus of the Right like Rush Limbaugh and Jerome Corsi are telling people there is all kinds of cheap and readily available oil here at home if only the snotty, elitist liberals would let the noble and virtuous oil industry drill for it. In fact, Corsi tells people that petroleum is not a fossil fuel but instead is something the earth keeps regenerating, never mind what those snotty elitist scientists with their fancy Ph.D.s say.

See how we’ve solved the energy crisis? All we have to do is drill, drill, drill and we’ll get all the cheap oil and gas we want as soon as we want it. And we’ll never have to worry about an energy crisis again. We don’t have to listen to the boring liberals and their boring explanations about science and renewable energy and technology and stuff.

Stupidity like this makes me wonder how our species survived as long as it has, frankly.

Irony Is SO Dead

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Or perhaps John McCain has entered a temporal anomaly, as often happened to the various Star Trek crews. Yesterday McCain said of the Russian military action in Georgia,

My friends, we have reached a crisis, the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War. This is an act of aggression.

To which I say (singing):

Have you forgotten how it felt that day
To see your homeland under fire
And her people blown away?
Have you forgotten when those towers fell?
We had neighbors still inside
Going through a living hell
And you say we shouldn’t worry ’bout Bin Laden
Have you forgotten?

I think McCain should be evaluated for possible Alzheimer’s. I’m serious. In early stages, people remember past clearly but can’t remember recent. Early stage Alzheimer’s would explain a lot.

Sam Stein writes,

Speaking to reporters about the situation in Georgia, Sen. John McCain denounced the aggressive posture of Russia by claiming that:”in the 21st century nations don’t invade other nations.”

The man’s brain neurons are not firing.

Sometimes the headline says it all:

Bush, Decrying ‘Bullying,’ Calls for Russia to Leave Georgia

Delicious. Meanwhile, the Creature still thinks he rules the world by imperial fiat:

President Bush Wednesday promised that U.S. naval forces would deliver humanitarian aid to war-torn Georgia before his administration had received approval from Turkey, which controls naval access to the Black Sea, or the Pentagon had planned a seaborne operation, U.S. officials said Thursday.

As of late Thursday, Ankara, a NATO ally, hadn’t cleared any U.S. naval vessels to steam to Georgia through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, the narrow straits that connect the Mediterranean and the Black Seas, the officials said. Under the 1936 Montreaux Convention, countries must notify Turkey before sending warships through the straits.

Pentagon officials told McClatchy that they were increasingly dubious that any U.S. Navy vessels would join the aid operation, in large part because the U.S.-based hospital ships likely to go, the USNS Comfort and the USNS Mercy, would take weeks to arrive.

“The president was writing checks to the Georgians without knowing what he had in the bank,” said a senior administration official.

BTW, the President, who just got back from spending most of a week sitting in the stands of various Olympic competitions in Beijing, today is beginning a two-week vacation in Crawford, Texas.

Update: My long-time fan the Confederate Yankee doesn’t like the way we lefties are giggling over McCain’s “first probably serious crisis internationally since the Cold War” line. In particular he accused Matt Yglesias of “intellectual dishonesty” for writing this:

Satyam notes “the Gulf War, 9/11, and the Iraq War, to name a few” as possible alternatives. But beyond McCain’s seemingly poor memory, the interesting thing is the confusion in terms of high-level concepts. It was just a little while ago that McCain was giving speeches about how “the threat of radical Islamic terrorism” is “transcendent challenge of our time.” Now Russia seems to be the transcendent challenge. Which is the problem with an approach to world affairs characterized by a near-constant hysteria about threat levels and a pathological inability to set priorities.

To this the CY says,

Is Yglesias actually daft enough to suggest that acknowledging a new or renewed threat is wrong, and that it should be ignored so you can stick with your party’s pre-planned script?

No, Yeglesias is not that daft, because that’s not what he suggested, as anyone with working critical thinking skills who can actually read beyond a third-grade level would have understood.

Simple answers to simple questions …

Bush Blows It Again

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Yesterday President Bush attended a worship service at a Protestant Church in Beijing. This was supposed to be an act of standing up to Beijing’s policies on religion, but it wasn’t. If anything, it reinforced Beijing’s position that people are free to practice religion and worship as they choose in China. I explain why on the other blog.

Dumb and Dumber

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Paul Krugman:

… know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”

As Senator Obama said, “It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.” Truly, to a wingnut, Ignorance Is Strength.

Thomas Frank has a new book out called The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule. There’s an excerpt in the August issue of Harper’s and also one at Salon. This is from Salon:

Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we’ve come to expect from Washington. …

… The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school.

Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action.

Too many Democrats have been in on the scam, of course. But, basically, we’re looking at the anti-government right wing; the descendants of Richard Hofstadter’s pseudo-conservatives. These are the people of whom Hofstadter wrote back in the early 1960s,

The difference between conservatism as a set of doctrines whose validity is established by polemics, and conservatism as a set of rules whose validity is to be established by their usability in government, is not a difference in nuance, but of fundamental substance.

And also,

Writing in 1954, at the peak of the McCarthyist period, I suggested that the American right wing could best be understood not as a neo-fascist movement girding itself for the conquest of power but as a persistent and effective minority whose main threat was in its power to create “a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.”

And quoting Theodore W. Adorno:

The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.

You can argue that there are two kinds of wingnuts — those who are in on the take, and those who are merely dupes. But I suspect a large part of those who have a personal vested interest in wingnut causes also are True Believers who can no more see the harm they do than they can fly to the moon on a pig. So, how much of what they do is calculated, and how much is social pathology, is very hard to measure.

The True Believers are a minority, but they are a minority with a lot of power because they’ve been underwritten by the Big Money interests that benefit financially from the destruction of government. (This, I take it, is the subject of Frank’s book, and also ties in with much of what Naomi Klein has been writing lately.) So, their point of view, if you want to call it that, has been vastly overrepresented in mass media, to the point that large parts of the population hardly know there is any other point of view.

There’s no more important task ahead of us than to discredit whatever you want to call “conservatism” these days in the minds of that part of the population capable of seeing reason. And I believe there is a substantial population capable of seeing reason if reason is ever presented to them. They can be bamboozled about foreign policy, but we see time and time again that when the Right tries to sell the American people on an idea that runs counter to their personal experience or something they’ve seen with their own eyes — on Social Security, New Orleans, Terri Schiavo — the American people on the whole are capable of seeing lies as lies.

From now until the November election, lots of progressives are going to be complaining about Dem politicians, especially Barack Obama, and how they are no different from the Right for this or that reason. And I agree ain’t nobody in politics who is pure. But, although we all may disagree with Obama sometime, on the whole he is less about “simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem” than any presidential candidate I can think of in a very long time. He’s not the whole answer, but he’s a step in the right direction. Er, away from the Right.

On a related note: Some “creative agency” in Los Angeles came up with an “Obama salute,” which looks stupid to me. Gavin at Sadly, No says the “salute” is a joke. (I didn’t get very far into his links before I decided I did not want to know what the joke is.)

As Gavin says, “So an ad agency not affiliated with the Obama campaign has released a joke logo.” But the word from Wingnutland os that the “salute” has already been embraced by the Obamabot Cult. The wingnuts are all over this, as Dave N. says, like stink on shit. It’s the sort of issue wingnuts, who are stuck in pre-adolescence emotionally, just love — trivial and easy to ridicule.

The Uppity Black Guy

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Over the weekend David Gergen said,

“There has been a very intentional effort to paint him as somebody outside the mainstream, other, ‘he’s not one of us,'” said Gergen, who has worked with White Houses, both Republican and Democrat, from Nixon to Clinton. “I think the McCain campaign has been scrupulous about not directly saying it, but it’s the subtext of this campaign. Everybody knows that. There are certain kinds of signals. As a native of the south, I can tell you, when you see this Charlton Heston ad, ‘The One,’ that’s code for, ‘he’s uppity, he ought to stay in his place.’ Everybody gets that who is from a southern background. We all understand that. When McCain comes out and starts talking about affirmative action, ‘I’m against quotas,’ we get what that’s about.”

Exactly what I said last week:

Since the old angry black man stereotype wouldn’t work, the GOP has reached even deeper into white America’s racial memory and brought forth — the uppity black man stereotype.

A lot of bloggers and pundits jumped on the subliminal message of putting Paris Hilton and Britney Spears into the “celebrity” ad, but not so many caught the more dangerous (IMO) subtext of uppity-ness. Maybe you have to be a certain age or have a southern background to see it. But this is what really needs to be pushed back, hard. And now. And Obama can’t do it himself, because he doesn’t want to be “the black candidate.” Others must do this for him.

Regarding the “Praise the One” ad — I’m not sure the Right is acting out of jealousy. There’s a lot of resentment there, of course, but I think they fear Obama’s popularity more than they are jealous of it. I also want to remind everyone that it was the Hillary Clinton campaign that began the meme of Obama the Messiah and his supporters as brainless cult followers. Thanks loads.

Update: Read also “Obama’s crime? Acting too presidential.”