A Grown-up Is In Charge?
Have we ever had such an angry, privileged, snotty, immature president in the history of this country?
Bush can still not give even one example of a mistake he’s made — except appointing certain people he appointed that he won’t name. (It must be Paul O’Neill and Larry Lindsay because they are the only ones he fired.)
As he has always been, he remains, a piece of shit.
Which One Will We See Tonight?
Before the debate I wanted to reprise the following post in case anybody has any lingering doubt that George W. Bush has two faces. One Public, One Private. One Phony, One Real:
Over the last week or so we have seen an edgy, enigmatic black and white image of George W. Bush appear on web-sites and blogs. At first people thought that sites had been hacked, as Eschaton and Kos and Democratic Underground spontaneously erupted with the black and white figure only to have it disappear and randomly return. Within days it linked to a mysterious DNC web-site with cryptic material that only slowly came into focus. Clearly something was up.
This image is disconcerting and it evokes strong reactions because it symbolizes the cognitive dissonance so many of us have been living with for the last four years as we’ve watched the man who lost the election but won the office drive us to distraction with the contradictions of his character. And nothing has been more frustrating than the fact that so many in the media and in the public at large seemed to see something entirely different than we did.
I believe that this happened because after 9/11, the media cast Bush in the role of strong, resolute leader, perhaps because the nation needed him to be that, at least for a little while. And the people gratefully laid that mantle on him and he took it because the office demanded no less. The narrative of the nation at war required a warrior leader and George W. Bush was all we had. Karl Rove and others understood that they could use this veil to soothe the American people and flatter the president to take actions that no prudent, thoughtful leader would have taken after our initial successes in Afghanistan. This “man with the bullhorn” image of Bush crystallized in the minds of many Americans and has not been revisited until now.
That phony image took us from a sense of national unity to a misguided war with Iraq; it excused his failure to effectively manage the economy and fomented partisan warfare by portraying dissent as unpatriotic; it allowed people to overlook his obvious failure to take the threat of al Qaeda seriously before 9/11 (and even after) and created a hagiography based on wishful thinking and emotional need rather than any realistic appraisal of his leadership.
His handlers wisely kept him under wraps, allowing him face time on television only in the company of world leaders or to give stirring speeches written by his gifted speechwriter, Mark Gerson. He rarely held press conferences and when he took questions, he was aggressively unresponsive, choosing instead to offer canned sound bites and slogans and daring the press corps to call him on it. Few did. The mask stayed in place and he remained a symbol instead of a president — the symbol of American strength, resilience and fortitude. He was, in many people’s minds, the president they wished they had.
On Thursday night sixty-one million people watched George W. Bush for the first time since 9/11 not as that symbol, but as a man. And for those who had not reassessed their belief in his personal leadership since 9/11, it was quite a shock. Their strong leader was inarticulate, arrogant, confused and immature. They must be wondering who that man was.
The truth is that since George W. Bush entered politics he has always had two faces. In fact, virtually everything you know about his public persona is the opposite of the real person.
He claims to be a compassionate, caring man, often admonishing people to “love your neighbor like you loved to be loved yourself.” Yet, going all the way back to Yale, he is quoted as saying he disapproved of his fellow students as “people who felt guilty about their lot in life because others were suffering.” His business school professor remembers him saying that poor people are poor because they are lazy. This from a man who was born rich into one of America’s leading families and relied on those connections for everything he ever achieved.
He lectures on responsibility, saying that he’s going to end the era of “if it feels good do it” and yet he failed to live up to his responsibility as a young man in the crucible of his generation, the Vietnam war. In fact, if it felt good, he did it and did it with relish — for forty years of his fifty eight year life. He has never fully owned up to what he did during those years spent in excess and hedonism, relying on a convenient claim of being “born again” to expiate him of his sins. Would that everyone had it so easy.
He ostentatiously calls himself a committed Christian and yet he rarely attends church unless it’s a campaign stop or a national occasion. The man who claims that Christ is his favorite political philosopher famously and cruelly mocked a condemned prisoner begging for her life. He portrays himself as a man of rectitude yet he pumped his fist and said “feels good!” in the moment before he announced that the Iraq war had begun. (One would have thought that if there was ever a time to utter a prayer it was then.) How many funerals of the fallen has he attended? How many widows has he personally comforted?
He portrays himself as a salt of the earth “hard working” rancher, clearing brush on his land in an artfully sweaty Calvin Klein-style t-shirt. Yet in the first 8 months of his presidency leading up to 9/11, he spent 42% of his time on vacation. His “ranching” didn’t begin until he bought his million dollar property just before he ran for president in 1999. He has lived in suburbs and cities since a brief period in his childhood in the 50’s, when he lived in the medium sized boom town of Midland before going to Andover.
He actively promotes the notion that he is a man of action yet in the single most important moment of his life he froze in front of school kids, continuing on with a script prepared before the national psyche was blown to bits. He didn’t take charge. He didn’t react. He was paralyzed at the moment of the nation’s worst peril.
He claims to be a strong leader and yet he is skillfully manipulated by his staff, who learned early that the only thing they needed to do to convince him of the rightness of their recommended course was to flatter him by saying it was the “brave” or “bold” thing to do. His self-image as a resolute leader is actually a lack of self confidence that is ripe for exploitation by competing advisors who use it to convince this him to do their bidding. This explains why he seems to believe that he is acting with resolve when he has just affected an abrupt about-face. His advisors had persuaded him to change course simply by telling him he was being resolute.
George W. Bush is a man with two faces— a public image of manly strength and a private reality of childish weakness. His verbal miscues and malapropisms are the natural consequence of a man struggling with internal contradictions and a lack of self-knowledge. He can’t keep track of what he is supposed to think and say in public.
There is no doubt that whether it’s a cowboy hat or a crotch hugging flightsuit , George W. Bush enjoys wearing the mantle of American archetypal warriors. But when he goes behind the curtain and sheds the costume, a flinty, thin-skinned, immature man who has never taken responsibility for his mistakes emerges. The strong compassionate leader is revealed as a flimsy paper tiger.
On Thursday night, the president forgot himself. After years of being protected from anyone who doesn’t flatter and cajole, he let his mask slip when confronted with someone who didn’t fear his childish retribution or need anything from him. Many members of the public got a good sharp look at him for the first time in two years and they were stunned. Like that black and white image, the dichotomy of the real Bush vs. the phony Bush is profoundly discomfiting.
Luckily for America and the world, a fully synthesized, mature man stood on the other side of that stage ready to assume the mantle of leadership, not as a theatrical costume but as an adult responsibility for which he is prepared by a lifetime of service, study and dedication. I would imagine that many voters felt a strong sense of relief that he was there.
Live Blogging
Thanks to Chris Bowers over at MYDD, the following are helpful debate resources for tonight:
Here is a list of polls to stuff tonight, and here is a list of emails for people and institutions you can contact. Here is a group fact-checking project for rapid response, and here is another collective, fact-checking, rapid response project..
I just heard Joe Trippi announce that the Kos project will have 200,000 Americans doing fact checking tonight. Matthews snorted derisively. Putz.
Remember to use those night minutes and call them to let them know what you think:
ABC News
www.abcnews.com
47 W. 66th St
New York, NY 10023
Phone: (212) 456-7477, 456-3796
Fax: (212) 456-4866, 456-2795
World News Tonight with Peter Jennings
Phone: (212) 456-4040
peterjennings@worldnewstonight.abcnews.com
Fax: (212) 456-2771
CBS News
www.cbsnews.com
542 W. 57th St.
New York, NY 10019
News Desk:
Phone: (212) 975-4321, 975-3691
Fax: (212) 975-1893
CNN
www.cnn.com
1 CNN Center
POB 105366
Atlanta, GA 30348
Phone: (404) 827-1500
Fax: (404) 827-1593, (404) 827-1784
Fox News
www.foxnews.com
Speakout@foxnews.com
Viewerservices@foxnews.com
1211 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036
Phone: (212) 301-3000
Fax: (212) 301-4224
MSNBC
www.msnbc.com
world@msnbc.com
One MSNBC Plaza
Secaucus, NJ 07094
Phone: (201) 583-5000
Fax: (201) 583-5453
NBC News
www.nbc.com
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10112
Phone: (212) 664-5900
Fax: (212) 664-2914
NPR
www.npr.org
635 Mass Ave
Washington, DC 20001
Phone: (202) 414-2323
Fax: (202) 414-3324
PBS
www.pbs.org
PO BOX 50880
Washington, DC 20091
Phone: (800) 356-2626
What’s Wrong With This Picture?
Hardball panel:
Chris Matthews, Norah O’Donnell, David Gregory, Howard Fineman and … Ben Ginsberg.
The consensus in this fair and balanced panel is that Bush is going to unleash hell on Kerry tonight by pounding him as a liberalsissywimpflipfloppingloser. Which, of course, he is. Really, the only reason Bush is having problems at all is because the TV screens are showing that the country has gone to hell. Nothing he can’t handle.
Bubble Boy
Some critics and supporters of US President George W. Bush agree on an intriguing explanation for his poor showing in his first debate with Democratic rival John Kerry: Blame it on the White House “bubble.”
[…]
Even allowing for heightened protection around him in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Bush has taken unusual pains to insulate himself from hard questions from those who disagree with him.
He has held fewer press conferences than any modern president — including his father, former president George Bush — and aides who disagreed publicly with him have generally recanted swiftly and humbly or left the administration.
[…]
Bush on Wednesday blamed his facial expressions on what he said were Kerry’s constantly shifting or even contradictory views on Iraq saying: “You hear all that and you can understand why somebody would make a face.”
But the president rarely hears a discouraging word, as he is largely isolated from critics, reporters, bad news, and a public deeply divided over the March 2003 Iraq invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.
One of his reelection campaign’s staple events is dubbed “Ask President Bush,” a session in which he takes questions from friendly audiences of campaign aides and carefully screened supporters with nary a heckler in sight.
The first question at one such event on October 4 was a good example of the feedback he typically gets: “Mr President, first, we just want to tell you that we pray for you every night as our President.”
Bush has repeatedly declared that he mostly ignores newspaper coverage, telling Fox News television in September 2003 that he prefers to “get briefed by people who probably read the news themselves.”
This would be interesting except for the fact that evidence is that Junior has always been an ass. He’s extremely spoiled and while the power of the presidency has undoubtedly magnified that characteristic, it’s fundamental to his character. There’s a reason why he’s called “smirk.”
Here’s a great illustration from the 2000 election. Via TNR, this is from the November 2000 issue of Newsweek:
Aboard Bush’s plane, [John] McCain’s chief strategist, John Weaver, had–without thinking–pulled a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich off the snack cart and eaten it. Bush came aboard the plane and asked the flight attendant for his PB&J. She had to tell him it was gone. “It’s gone?” Bush said, disbelieving and suddenly angry. “Who ate my peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich?” After a minute Weaver impishly raised his hand. “I did,” he said. “Fine,” said Bush. “Don’t eat any more of his food,” McCain cracked, sotto voce. A few people chuckled, and Bush returned to his seat to pout.
Observers have known about his childish imperiousness forever and and it has been easily discerned by those in the public who care to see, in his press conferences andpublic appearances. He is a petty tyrant.
Bob Woodward showed it very well in his hagiography of the post 9/11 Little Caesar version of Junior:
“I’m the commander in chief, see, I don’t need to explain, I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting part about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”
Not even the American people, apparently.
Or let’s go back even further to my personal favorite from The Dallas Morning News, Feb. 25, 1990:
“I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes.”
Isn’t that nice? Others were dying in a war he supported, he didn’t feel like “shooting out his eardrum” so he nobly decided to “better himself” by learning to fly airplanes on the taxpayers dime and then quitting for reasons about which we can only speculate.
Was he in a bubble when he made those selfish choices? Was he in a bubble when he made that statement twenty years later?
Here’s a telling one:
Around the same time, for the 1972 Christmas holiday, the Allisons met up with the Bushes on vacation in Hobe Sound, Fla. Tension was still evident between Bush and his parents. Linda was a passenger in a car driven by Barbara Bush as they headed to lunch at the local beach club. Bush, who was 26 years old, got on a bicycle and rode in front of the car in a slow, serpentine manner, forcing his mother to crawl along. “He rode so slowly that he kept having to put his foot down to get his balance, and he kept in a weaving pattern so we couldn’t get past,” Allison recalled. “He was obviously furious with his mother about something, and she was furious at him, too.”
Bush mocking Karla Faye Tucker may be the most emblematic of his lack of empathy and immaturity, but there are hundreds of documented incidents of Bush’s mask slipping, both when he was younger and more recently in his Rove-created adult persona. At heart, he is a snotty little smart ass who has no respect for anything.
The presidential bubble may have made it impossible for his handlers to stop him from being his cocky self instead of hiding behind Rove’s carefully crafted facade of the regular Joe. After last Thursday’s debacle I assume that someone has tried to put the mask firmly back in place.
Then again, maybe not. The man behind the mask is the real Bush and last Thursday I got the sense that he was yearning to breathe free. Judging from his smirking and preening on the stage two days ago when he delivered his “major” speech, he didn’t seem to have learned his lesson. The men behind the curtain may have lost control of their creation.
We’ll see tonight if he can keep his two selves integrated or if the inner Bush emerges once more.
Sanctioned Liar
The vice president said he found other parts of the report “more intriguing,” including the finding that Saddam’s main goal was the removal of international sanctions.
“As soon as the sanctions were lifted, he had every intention of going back” to his weapons program, Cheney said “…the sanctions regime was coming apart at the seams. Saddam perverted that whole thing and generated billions of dollars.”
Millions of dollars of US oil business with Iraq are being channelled discreetly through European and other companies, in a practice that has highlighted the double standards now dominating relations between Baghdad and Washington after a decade of crippling sanctions.
Though legal, leading US oil service companies such as Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Schlumberger, Flowserve, Fisher-Rosemount and others, have used subsidiaries and joint venture companies for this lucrative business, so as to avoid straining relations with Washington and jeopardising their ties with President Saddam Hussein’s government in Baghdad.
Halliburton, the largest US oil services company, is among a significant number of US companies that have sold oil industry equipment to Iraq since the UN relaxed sanctions two years ago.
Oopsie. It appears that Saddam was making those perverted billions with the help of Unka Dickie himself.
And, waddaya know. It looks like old Dick, Iraq and Iran were the real axis of evil. All three of them wanted badly to get rid of sanctions and get down to the business of making big bucks and lethal weapons.
Vice President Dick Cheney, who has called Iran “the world’s leading exporter of terror,” pushed to lift U.S. trade sanctions against Tehran while chairman of Halliburton Co. in the 1990s.
[…]
Cheney argued then that sanctions did not work and punished American companies. The former defense secretary complained in a 1998 speech that U.S. companies were “cut out of the action” in Iran because of the sanctions.
It sure was lucky for Unka Dick that Saddam was willing to “pervert” the oil for food program so that Halliburton could launder its involvement through European countries and avoid being “cut out of the action.” Too bad Tehran didn’t have such a convenient method to funnell money to its good friends. It forced Dick to have to lobby for lifiting the sanctions, making him look bad.
We’ve come full circle. They have so lost touch with reality that Cheney is now implicating himself in Saddam’s WMD programs and he doesn’t even realize it.
Gimme Them Hearts ‘N Minds
Sympathy for al-Zarqawi grows among Iraqis amid U.S. airstrikes
Correction:
I wrote in a post below that the administration had never given a definitive and believable reason for the need to invade Iraq (and play into Osama bin Ladens’ hands by creating a fertile recruiting ground in the heart of the middle east.) I hereby stand corrected. Today the president announced that we had to invade because Saddam was abusing the oil for food program in a bid to convince countries and companies to lift the sanctions and if we had then lifted the sanctions he might have gotten materials that could have resulted in his possibly being able to create a weapon of mass destruction that might have been given to terrorists at some later date. Certainly, that was a grave and gathering danger that could not be allowed to stand for one day beyond March 18th, 2003.
Please excuse the error.
The AP-Ipsos Public Affairs poll, completed on the eve of the second presidential debate, showed a reversal from early September, when the Republican incumbent had the momentum and a minuscule lead. With bloodshed increasing in Iraq, Kerry sharpened his attacks, and Bush stumbled in their initial debate.
Among 944 likely voters, the Kerry-Edwards ticket led Bush-Cheney 50 percent to 46 percent. The Oct. 4-6 survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
The race was tied 47-47 percent among all registered voters, with a 2.5 point margin of error. Other polls show the race just as tight.
Nearly three-fourths of likely voters who were surveyed said they had watched or listened to the first presidential debate last week. Some 39 percent said they came away with a more favorable view of Kerry, while just 8 percent felt better about Bush.
[…]
Nearly six in 10 of all the people questioned – likely voters or not – said the country was headed on the wrong track, reflecting a gloomy national mood that could jeopardize Bush’s re-election bid. His overall approval rating among likely voters, 46 percent, was at its lowest point since June – down from 54 percent in late September.
[…]
Dowd and his fellow Republicans have also said Bush would prevail because he’s considered the strongest leader in a time of war. That is now open to debate.
On the question of who would protect the country, Bush led Kerry 51 percent to 45 percent among likely voters – down from the 20-point lead that Bush held in a Sept. 7-9 poll by AP-Ipsos.
Bush’s approval rating on handling foreign policy and the war on terror was 49 percent – down from 55 percent in a Sept. 20-22 poll by AP-Ipsos.
Forty-four percent of likely voters approve of the commander in chief’s handling of the war in Iraq, down from 51 percent in the late-September poll. It was 49-46 Bush on the question of who is best suited to handle Iraq, within the poll’s margin of error.
On the eve of Friday’s debate, Bush was forced by a critical new report to concede that Iraq did not have the stockpiles of banned weapons he had warned of before the 2003 invasion. Still, he insisted Thursday, “we were right to take action” against Saddam Hussein (news – web sites). Kerry renewed his assertion that Bush had misled voters and mismanaged the war.
Virtually across the board, Bush’s approval ratings were as low as they have been since June. Kerry gained among women, opening a 12-point lead while slashing the president’s advantage with men.
Less than half of likely voters, 47 percent, approve of Bush’s performance on the economy and just 43 percent give him good marks for other domestic policies.
Bush and Kerry are considered equally likable, after Bush’s ratings went down and Kerry’s went up for an 11-point swing.
Slightly more voters consider Kerry honest, a reversal from last month. Far more voters consider Bush decisive (73 percent) than Kerry (43 percent), but the gap closed by 8 points.
Kerry widened his lead on the question of who would create jobs, with 54 percent favoring him and 40 percent Bush.
Permanent War
Via Kevin at Catch, I see that Matt Taibbi infiltrated another campaign, this time the Republicans.
Here’s an interesting observation:
The problem not only with fundamentalist Christians but with Republicans in general is not that they act on blind faith, without thinking. The problem is that they are incorrigible doubters with an insatiable appetite for Evidence. What they get off on is not Believing, but in having their beliefs tested. That’s why their conversations and their media are so completely dominated by implacable bogeymen: marrying gays, liberals, the ACLU, Sean Penn, Europeans and so on. Their faith both in God and in their political convictions is too weak to survive without an unceasing string of real and imaginary confrontations with those people — and for those confrontations, they are constantly assembling evidence and facts to make their case.
But here’s the twist. They are not looking for facts with which to defeat opponents. They are looking for facts that ensure them an ever-expanding roster of opponents. They can be correct facts, incorrect facts, irrelevant facts, it doesn’t matter. The point is not to win the argument, the point is to make sure the argument never stops. Permanent war isn’t a policy imposed from above; it’s an emotional imperative that rises from the bottom. In a way, it actually helps if the fact is dubious or untrue (like the Swift-boat business), because that guarantees an argument. You’re arguing the particulars, where you’re right, while they’re arguing the underlying generalities, where they are.
Once you grasp this fact, you’re a long way to understanding what the Hannitys and Limbaughs figured out long ago: These people will swallow anything you feed them, so long as it leaves them with a demon to wrestle with in their dreams.
This tracks with my pet theory, “The Action Is The Juice.”
These people aren’t really about politics, ideology, faith or winning. They are about fighting. Losing this election will not shut them up — indeed, they will be invigorated by the loss, reassured in their view that they are a victimized minority.
This fight, sadly, will not end after we win on November 2nd. In many ways it will just be beginning. But at least the reins of power will no longer be exclusively theirs and we can begin to reverse the damage.
I actually think that lefty bloggers and their readers will be more important after the election than before. Unless the election is a complete landslide, in which case the other side will be knocked back on its heels for a short time, we will have to be prepared to continue the battle within days. Remember, the Republicans have had an entire machine in mothballs for the past four years that is in the exclusive business of destroying a Democratic presidency. They like being on the offensive and they make a tidy profit at it. Many of these people don’t mind Junior losing one damn bit.
corrected for grammatical boo-boo
