There's a poll up today on Excite, about the proposals to fence off the US border. The options in this poll are that one supports the House proposal (700 miles of fence), the Senate proposal (370 miles of fence) no fence, or all 2,000 milles of the US/Mexico border (which, just to be clear, is not a proposal on anyone's table). The results of the poll?
63% of the respondants (almost 5,000 people as I write this) think that
the whole fucking border should be fenced off.
Once more forcing me to ask: What the fuck is WRONG with you people?
Yeah. Because building a wall worked so well in China. Or in Germany.
The problem with a wall, as I see it, is that it works both ways. "They" can't get in, but WE can't get out. Maybe it's some weird genetic memory or something, what with the fact that whole branches of my family met their ends in box cars and showers, but the idea of a sealed border just scares the beejeesus out of me.
Next, we'll all need papers to cross state borders. Oh, wait. The national ID card idea is already gaining momentum in Washington.
Papers? We don' need no steenkin' papers. Or do we?
I don't want to be an alarmist here (oh, who are we kidding? I most certainly DO want to be an alarmist: WAKE THE FUCK UP, PEOPLE!!!) but, it is looking more an more like a totalitarian government to me.
But let me just shift this rant a little over to something else: fairness across the board when it comes to illegal immigrants. See, here in Florida, we have the wet foot/dry foot policy regarding Cubans, who, as we all know, have a
special immigrant status, unlike, say, oh, just randomly searching for another ethnic group, Haitians.
Cubans, you see, can stay in this country if they make it all the way to land (dry foot). If they are intercepted at sea, or even 20 feet off shore, they have to go back to Cuba and try again. Haitians, on the other hand (who, PS, tend to vote Democratic when they become citizens, and who, by and large, are Very Poor and Very Black) have to go back to Haiti even if they have two dry feet and an adoring family waiting to take them in and support them.
We already have special status for one immigrant group. And that immigrant group has a history of being given amnesty. Over and over and over and over again. But, well, Cubans are special. They vote for Republicans no matter what. No matter that every administration that arranged boat lifts, air lifts, amnesty and every other damn thing for them was a Democratic administration, to Cubans, Democrat = Communist. End of fucking story.
On the other hand, most other Hispanic groups tend to vote Democratic. Thus, a fence, and no amnesty and the clowns like
Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez (whose own family came in illegally). This is a prime case of there being truer no believer than the converted sinner. Kind of like that a-hole Clarence Thomas and his stand on equal opportunity.
I just gave myself a headache.
Where do I begin?
With the US government spying illegally on its citizens and then trying to spin it like "O, we are only collecting data on who you call, we aren't actually listening in on your conversations" but in the next breath rationalizing this illegal, unconstitutional, covert and terrifying activity by saying that not only will it help them capture terrorists (yeah. right. and I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I can let go cheap) but also child pornographers. Uh, if you aren't listening in, how would just a phone number let you know you are on the path of pedophiles? Just asking.
The whole thing is so disingenuous it makes me want to heave more than I usually do when I look at that smirking chimp and his band of devil-may-care draft dodgers, thieves, criminals, cold-hearted bastards and jack-booted thugs.
This particular cabal of evil doers (aka the Bush White House) is so fluent in double speak that George Orwell his own self could use them to write the play book for Big Brother.
I am not afraid. I will not be made to be afraid.
I will take this fight to the polling booth and despite the best efforts of the corporations who have bought this administration, I will attempt to vote all of them out of office. I will write my spineless, Republican hand-puppet representatives and demand impeachment, or at least a dog and pony show of an investigation.
While I'm ranting about the ugly and the evil, can I just say, once and for all, that I am sick and tired and disgusted with you people? You people (women) who seem to think that MetroRail is the appropriate place to pluck your facial hair and apply your pancake makeup? Look. It is really very simple.
If you need to wear makeup to appear in public, it should be applied BEFORE you appear in public. And let me define public, since that also appears to be a concept far beyond your limited capacity: Public is anyplace outside of your house. That means your car, too. Any form of transportation referred to as PUBLIC, i.e.: buses, trains, els, elevators, trams, trollies, jitneys, taxis, tuk-tuks, car-pools, camel caravans, rikshaws. All of these and anything I may have left out, are public transportation and you should shut the fuck up on your damned cell phones, stop plucking your chin hair, and curling your eye lashes and applying foundation.
And still I'm not done with the ugly and the evil, because I haven't even started on ANTM and Darth Jader. She has to be the ugliest, nastiest, stupidest, annoyingest, delusionalest (that's Darth Jader-speak for most delusioned) hamster this series has ever foisted on us. And that is saying something, since we have had girls with she-nises and Adam's apples, girls who thought all birds are blind, Camille and Ya-Ya.
She looks like a pointy, wet, pissed-off cat and acts much like one, only without the endearing quality of being cute and fuzzy when dried off. Even when the judges say they see her being soft, I only see sallow skin, squinty mean eys and an infinite abyss of stupidity.
Yet, still, I watch. I want to see her fall. I want to see her fail. I want her humbled and brought down. Is that so very wrong?
Today's sociology lesson came from some random asshat on the train. I should know better than to change my routine, because it never works out very well.
Instead of getting off the train at Brickell and taking the shuttle to Bayfront, I got off at Government Center. Once downstairs and on the shuttle, there was a ten minute delay. But, luckily for all those on board, we had a vocal lunatic on hand to give us a running commentary on the state of America with side notes about American history, the curse of poverty and the origins of certain ethnic slurs.
Unluckily for those of us on board, the guy was a raving idiot, and possibly a Tourrette's sufferer too, because he Never Shut Up. He had a sidekick, to whom he addressed his lecture.
Allow me to paint you a picture, if you will.
The doors are open, and a young male who appears to be Anglo (fair, light eyes, tall) comes in and holds the door for his friend, a not-so-young black male in a wheelchair. The guy in the wheelchair has some sort of twisty-writhing thing going on, so that every time I glance over at him, he's in a different position, including, at one point, (I kid you not) upside down, with his head on the foot rest, facing in.
None of these contortions phase his buddy in the least, if, in fact, he is even aware that his friend is wiggling around. The fair-haired boy is wearing a pair of baggy (of course) denim shorts complete with large logo on one leg, and a styled denim jacket in a very now acid wash, fully buttoned to the throat, where he has tied on a grey bandana, old west style, like a bandit about to pull it up over his face just before the bank robbery. Clean sneakers, no baseball cap. And then he opens up his pie-hole and does not stop. He talks like a seriously "gangsta" inner-city thug. Reminds me of Jamie Kennedy in Malibu's Most Wanted. A lot.
It is a rant about how all these people are going to work in offices where they are going to talk on their cell phones and sit on their asses and make piles of money whereas he is a poor working guy who does construction and gets laughed at by the stiffs in their Chryslers. America is doomed to crash. America deserves to crash. But he and his friend will be OK, because they are the poor and the downtrodden and they have better survival skills.
When the power goes out, and OH IT WILL, all of us will be down, and he will be on top and he'll know what to do then, oh, YES HE WILL and we will all be working with our hands and suffering because the (and I quote) SPICS and the NIGGAS will be on top. The working peeps who know what it's like to blahblahblahblah. Then there was a slight digression as he explained where the term spic came from... except I don't think the last letter began with a C...or a K. Anyway.
But America is going to CRASH and it'll be worse than the Great Depression in his granddaddy's day. (HUH? This asshat knows about the Great Depression? I'll be damned.) OH YES IT WILL. And he's got the popcorn ready.
OK. You get the gist. Repeat with variations ad nauseum for the ten minutes we are stuck at the station (although while he was on the people in the towers with their cell phones portion, there was a general fleeing of the ship by the rats in question), followed by more variations on a theme for another ten to fifteen minutes while we creep along the el to my stop. He was still going on when I left.
But, and here's the thing, for all his anti-Capitalist Pig, anarchy in UK posturing, the kid is wearing new clothes, in new styles with highly visible branding. And while I have no way of knowing his level of education, he at least was awake long enough to learn about the Great Depression and even able to place it in the correct time frame... which is more than I can say for a lot of high school graduates.
He is bragging that he's got his popcorn ready when America falls (never mind that Gill Scott Heron said that the revolution will not be televised), which would indicate that he has a home, and the money to pay the electric bills and fork over the buck fifty for a bag of Jiffy Pop. He talked about his job, working hard with his hands. So, anarchy boy? Aren't you just more of the same as me? Job. Rent. Food. Clothes. Mass Transit. TV. Electric bills.
Sucks being the man, don't it?
This is the entire cover story from the current Rolling Stone. Reproduced with attribution, but not persmission, I give you Sean Wilentz:
The Worst President in History?
One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush
George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.
From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty -- and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.
Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant.
The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been.
Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole -- a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled -- and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating -- reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled -- nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success -- flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would certainly be higher.
Even worse for the president, the general public, having once given Bush the highest approval ratings ever recorded, now appears to be coming around to the dismal view held by most historians. To be sure, the president retains a considerable base of supporters who believe in and adore him, and who reject all criticism with a mixture of disbelief and fierce contempt -- about one-third of the electorate. (When the columnist Richard Reeves publicized the historians' poll last year and suggested it might have merit, he drew thousands of abusive replies that called him an idiot and that praised Bush as, in one writer's words, "a Christian who actually acts on his deeply held beliefs.") Yet the ranks of the true believers have thinned dramatically. A majority of voters in forty-three states now disapprove of Bush's handling of his job. Since the commencement of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush's in his second term: Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his resignation in 1974. No two-term president since polling began has fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush's (in the neighborhood of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the midthirties). No president, including Harry Truman (whose ratings sometimes dipped below Nixonian levels), has experienced such a virtually unrelieved decline as Bush has since his high point. Apart from sharp but temporary upticks that followed the commencement of the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during the weeks just before and after his re-election, the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment.
* * * *
How does any president's reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.
Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.
* * * *
THE CREDIBILITY GAP
No previous president appears to have squandered the public's trust more than Bush has. In the 1840s, President James Polk gained a reputation for deviousness over his alleged manufacturing of the war with Mexico and his supposedly covert pro-slavery views. Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois congressman, virtually labeled Polk a liar when he called him, from the floor of the House, "a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man" and denounced the war as "from beginning to end, the sheerest deception." But the swift American victory in the war, Polk's decision to stick by his pledge to serve only one term and his sudden death shortly after leaving office spared him the ignominy over slavery that befell his successors in the 1850s. With more than two years to go in Bush's second term and no swift victory in sight, Bush's reputation will probably have no such reprieve.
The problems besetting Bush are of a more modern kind than Polk's, suited to the television age -- a crisis both in confidence and credibility. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam travails gave birth to the phrase "credibility gap," meaning the distance between a president's professions and the public's perceptions of reality. It took more than two years for Johnson's disapproval rating in the Gallup Poll to reach fifty-two percent in March 1968 -- a figure Bush long ago surpassed, but that was sufficient to persuade the proud LBJ not to seek re-election. Yet recently, just short of three years after Bush buoyantly declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq, his disapproval ratings have been running considerably higher than Johnson's, at about sixty percent. More than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and a decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill Clinton -- a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as "Slick Willie."
Previous modern presidents, including Truman, Reagan and Clinton, managed to reverse plummeting ratings and regain the public's trust by shifting attention away from political and policy setbacks, and by overhauling the White House's inner circles. But Bush's publicly expressed view that he has made no major mistakes, coupled with what even the conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. calls his "high-flown pronouncements" about failed policies, seems to foreclose the first option. Upping the ante in the Middle East and bombing Iranian nuclear sites, a strategy reportedly favored by some in the White House, could distract the public and gain Bush immediate political capital in advance of the 2006 midterm elections -- but in the long term might severely worsen the already dire situation in Iraq, especially among Shiite Muslims linked to the Iranians. And given Bush's ardent attachment to loyal aides, no matter how discredited, a major personnel shake-up is improbable, short of indictments. Replacing Andrew Card with Joshua Bolten as chief of staff -- a move announced by the president in March in a tone that sounded more like defiance than contrition -- represents a rededication to current policies and personnel, not a serious change. (Card, an old Bush family retainer, was widely considered more moderate than most of the men around the president and had little involvement in policy-making.) The power of Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, remains uncurbed. Were Cheney to announce he is stepping down due to health problems, normally a polite pretext for a political removal, one can be reasonably certain it would be because Cheney actually did have grave health problems.
* * * *
BUSH AT WAR
Until the twentieth century, American presidents managed foreign wars well -- including those presidents who prosecuted unpopular wars. James Madison had no support from Federalist New England at the outset of the War of 1812, and the discontent grew amid mounting military setbacks in 1813. But Federalist political overreaching, combined with a reversal of America's military fortunes and the negotiation of a peace with Britain, made Madison something of a hero again and ushered in a brief so-called Era of Good Feelings in which his Jeffersonian Republican Party coalition ruled virtually unopposed. The Mexican War under Polk was even more unpopular, but its quick and victorious conclusion redounded to Polk's favor -- much as the rapid American victory in the Spanish-American War helped William McKinley overcome anti-imperialist dissent.
The twentieth century was crueler to wartime presidents. After winning re-election in 1916 with the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War," Woodrow Wilson oversaw American entry into the First World War. Yet while the doughboys returned home triumphant, Wilson's idealistic and politically disastrous campaign for American entry into the League of Nations presaged a resurgence of the opposition Republican Party along with a redoubling of American isolationism that lasted until Pearl Harbor.
Bush has more in common with post-1945 Democratic presidents Truman and Johnson, who both became bogged down in overseas military conflicts with no end, let alone victory, in sight. But Bush has become bogged down in a singularly crippling way. On September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush's presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Bush's simple, unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling of the Taliban government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership.
No other president -- Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War -- faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized the Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the president's own Cabinet who expressed any reservations or criticisms of his policies -- including retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill -- suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the president's supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches of national security. The wise men who counseled Bush's father, including James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, found their entreaties brusquely ignored by his son. When asked if he ever sought advice from the elder Bush, the president responded, "There is a higher Father that I appeal to."
All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the administration, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were planting the seeds for the crises to come by diverting the struggle against Al Qaeda toward an all-out effort to topple their pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein. In a deliberate political decision, the administration stampeded the Congress and a traumatized citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what has now been demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated evidence of an imminent Iraqi threat to American security, one that the White House suggested included nuclear weapons. Instead of emphasizing any political, diplomatic or humanitarian aspects of a war on Iraq -- an appeal that would have sounded too "sensitive," as Cheney once sneered -- the administration built a "Bush Doctrine" of unprovoked, preventive warfare, based on speculative threats and embracing principles previously abjured by every previous generation of U.S. foreign policy-makers, even at the height of the Cold War. The president did so with premises founded, in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking. He did so while proclaiming an expansive Wilsonian rhetoric of making the world safe for democracy -- yet discarding the multilateralism and systems of international law (including the Geneva Conventions) that emanated from Wilson's idealism. He did so while dismissing intelligence that an American invasion could spark a long and bloody civil war among Iraq's fierce religious and ethnic rivals, reports that have since proved true. And he did so after repeated warnings by military officials such as Gen. Eric Shinseki that pacifying postwar Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of American troops -- accurate estimates that Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush policy gurus ridiculed as "wildly off the mark."
When William F. Buckley, the man whom many credit as the founder of the modern conservative movement, writes categorically, as he did in February, that "one can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed," then something terrible has happened. Even as a brash young iconoclast, Buckley always took the long view. The Bush White House seems incapable of doing so, except insofar as a tiny trusted circle around the president constantly reassures him that he is a messianic liberator and profound freedom fighter, on a par with FDR and Lincoln, and that history will vindicate his every act and utterance.
* * * *
BUSH AT HOME
Bush came to office in 2001 pledging to govern as a "compassionate conservative," more moderate on domestic policy than the dominant right wing of his party. The pledge proved hollow, as Bush tacked immediately to the hard right. Previous presidents and their parties have suffered when their actions have belied their campaign promises. Lyndon Johnson is the most conspicuous recent example, having declared in his 1964 run against the hawkish Republican Barry Goldwater that "we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." But no president has surpassed Bush in departing so thoroughly from his original campaign persona.
The heart of Bush's domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than a series of massively regressive tax cuts -- a return, with a vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush's father once ridiculed as "voodoo economics." Bush crowed in triumph in February 2004, "We cut taxes, which basically meant people had more money in their pocket." The claim is bogus for the majority of Americans, as are claims that tax cuts have led to impressive new private investment and job growth. While wiping out the solid Clinton-era federal surplus and raising federal deficits to staggering record levels, Bush's tax policies have necessitated hikes in federal fees, state and local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families who rely on Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and college students, and in a wide range of state services. The lion's share of benefits from the tax cuts has gone to the very richest Americans, while new business investment has increased at a historically sluggish rate since the peak of the last business cycle five years ago. Private-sector job growth since 2001 has been anemic compared to the Bush administration's original forecasts and is chiefly attributable not to the tax cuts but to increased federal spending, especially on defense. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been dropping since the end of 2003: Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only 2.4 percent, a meager gain that was completely erased by an average inflation rate of 3.4 percent.
The monster deficits, caused by increased federal spending combined with the reduction of revenue resulting from the tax cuts, have also placed Bush's administration in a historic class of its own with respect to government borrowing. According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined. Having inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he has turned it into the largest deficit ever -- with an even higher deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet Bush -- sounding much like Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting that "prosperity is just around the corner" -- insists that he will cut federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best way to guarantee this would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which helped cause the deficit in the first place!
The rest of what remains of Bush's skimpy domestic agenda is either failed or failing -- a record unmatched since the presidency of Herbert Hoover. The No Child Left Behind educational-reform act has proved so unwieldy, draconian and poorly funded that several states -- including Utah, one of Bush's last remaining political strongholds -- have fought to opt out of it entirely. White House proposals for immigration reform and a guest-worker program have succeeded mainly in dividing pro-business Republicans (who want more low-wage immigrant workers) from paleo-conservatives fearful that hordes of Spanish-speaking newcomers will destroy American culture. The paleos' call for tougher anti-immigrant laws -- a return to the punitive spirit of exclusion that led to the notorious Immigration Act of 1924 that shut the door to immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe -- has in turn deeply alienated Hispanic voters from the Republican Party, badly undermining the GOP's hopes of using them to build a permanent national electoral majority. The recent pro-immigrant demonstrations, which drew millions of marchers nationwide, indicate how costly the Republican divide may prove.
The one noncorporate constituency to which Bush has consistently deferred is the Christian right, both in his selections for the federal bench and in his implications that he bases his policies on premillennialist, prophetic Christian doctrine. Previous presidents have regularly invoked the Almighty. McKinley is supposed to have fallen to his knees, seeking divine guidance about whether to take control of the Philippines in 1898, although the story may be apocryphal. But no president before Bush has allowed the press to disclose, through a close friend, his startling belief that he was ordained by God to lead the country. The White House's sectarian positions -- over stem-cell research, the teaching of pseudoscientific "intelligent design," global population control, the Terri Schiavo spectacle and more -- have led some to conclude that Bush has promoted the transformation of the GOP into what former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls "the first religious party in U.S. history."
Bush's faith-based conception of his mission, which stands above and beyond reasoned inquiry, jibes well with his administration's pro-business dogma on global warming and other urgent environmental issues. While forcing federally funded agencies to remove from their Web sites scientific information about reproductive health and the effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS, and while peremptorily overruling staff scientists at the Food and Drug Administration on making emergency contraception available over the counter, Bush officials have censored and suppressed research findings they don't like by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture. Far from being the conservative he said he was, Bush has blazed a radical new path as the first American president in history who is outwardly hostile to science -- dedicated, as a distinguished, bipartisan panel of educators and scientists (including forty-nine Nobel laureates) has declared, to "the distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends."
The Bush White House's indifference to domestic problems and science alike culminated in the catastrophic responses to Hurricane Katrina. Scientists had long warned that global warming was intensifying hurricanes, but Bush ignored them -- much as he and his administration sloughed off warnings from the director of the National Hurricane Center before Katrina hit. Reorganized under the Department of Homeland Security, the once efficient Federal Emergency Management Agency turned out, under Bush, to have become a nest of cronyism and incompetence. During the months immediately after the storm, Bush traveled to New Orleans eight times to promise massive rebuilding aid from the federal government. On March 30th, however, Bush's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator admitted that it could take as long as twenty-five years for the city to recover.
Karl Rove has sometimes likened Bush to the imposing, no-nonsense President Andrew Jackson. Yet Jackson took measures to prevent those he called "the rich and powerful" from bending "the acts of government to their selfish purposes." Jackson also gained eternal renown by saving New Orleans from British invasion against terrible odds. Generations of Americans sang of Jackson's famous victory. In 1959, Johnny Horton's version of "The Battle of New Orleans" won the Grammy for best country & western performance. If anyone sings about George W. Bush and New Orleans, it will be a blues number.
* * * *
PRESIDENTIAL MISCONDUCT
Virtually every presidential administration dating back to George Washington's has faced charges of misconduct and threats of impeachment against the president or his civil officers. The alleged offenses have usually involved matters of personal misbehavior and corruption, notably the payoff scandals that plagued Cabinet officials who served presidents Harding and Ulysses S. Grant. But the charges have also included alleged usurpation of power by the president and serious criminal conduct that threatens constitutional government and the rule of law -- most notoriously, the charges that led to the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and to Richard Nixon's resignation.
Historians remain divided over the actual grievousness of many of these allegations and crimes. Scholars reasonably describe the graft and corruption around the Grant administration, for example, as gargantuan, including a kickback scandal that led to the resignation of Grant's secretary of war under the shadow of impeachment. Yet the scandals produced no indictments of Cabinet secretaries and only one of a White House aide, who was acquitted. By contrast, the most scandal-ridden administration in the modern era, apart from Nixon's, was Ronald Reagan's, now widely remembered through a haze of nostalgia as a paragon of virtue. A total of twenty-nine Reagan officials, including White House national security adviser Robert McFarlane and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, were convicted on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra affair, illegal lobbying and a looting scandal inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Three Cabinet officers -- HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, Attorney General Edwin Meese and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger -- left their posts under clouds of scandal. In contrast, not a single official in the Clinton administration was even indicted over his or her White House duties, despite repeated high-profile investigations and a successful, highly partisan impeachment drive.
The full report, of course, has yet to come on the Bush administration. Because Bush, unlike Reagan or Clinton, enjoys a fiercely partisan and loyal majority in Congress, his administration has been spared scrutiny. Yet that mighty advantage has not prevented the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges stemming from an alleged major security breach in the Valerie Plame matter. (The last White House official of comparable standing to be indicted while still in office was Grant's personal secretary, in 1875.) It has not headed off the unprecedented scandal involving Larry Franklin, a high-ranking Defense Department official, who has pleaded guilty to divulging classified information to a foreign power while working at the Pentagon -- a crime against national security. It has not forestalled the arrest and indictment of Bush's top federal procurement official, David Safavian, and the continuing investigations into Safavian's intrigues with the disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, recently sentenced to nearly six years in prison -- investigations in which some prominent Republicans, including former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed (and current GOP aspirant for lieutenant governor of Georgia) have already been implicated, and could well produce the largest congressional corruption scandal in American history. It has not dispelled the cloud of possible indictment that hangs over others of Bush's closest advisers.
History may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for expanding the powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down by the U.S. Constitution. There has always been a tension over the constitutional roles of the three branches of the federal government. The Framers intended as much, as part of the system of checks and balances they expected would minimize tyranny. When Andrew Jackson took drastic measures against the nation's banking system, the Whig Senate censured him for conduct "dangerous to the liberties of the people." During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln's emergency decisions to suspend habeas corpus while Congress was out of session in 1861 and 1862 has led some Americans, to this day, to regard him as a despot. Richard Nixon's conduct of the war in Southeast Asia and his covert domestic-surveillance programs prompted Congress to pass new statutes regulating executive power.
By contrast, the Bush administration -- in seeking to restore what Cheney, a Nixon administration veteran, has called "the legitimate authority of the presidency" -- threatens to overturn the Framers' healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president's powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim. More specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious "signing statements," which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Earlier presidents, including Jackson, raised hackles by offering their own view of the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts. Bush doesn't bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then governs how he pleases -- using the signing statements as if they were line-item vetoes. In those instances when Bush's violations of federal law have come to light, as over domestic surveillance, the White House has devised a novel solution: Stonewall any investigation into the violations and bid a compliant Congress simply to rewrite the laws.
Bush's alarmingly aberrant take on the Constitution is ironic. One need go back in the record less than a decade to find prominent Republicans railing against far more minor presidential legal infractions as precursors to all-out totalitarianism. "I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the president," Sen. Bill Frist declared of Bill Clinton's efforts to conceal an illicit sexual liaison. "No man is above the law, and no man is below the law -- that's the principle that we all hold very dear in this country," Rep. Tom DeLay asserted. "The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door," warned Rep. Henry Hyde, one of Clinton's chief accusers. In the face of Bush's more definitive dismissal of federal law, the silence from these quarters is deafening.
The president's defenders stoutly contend that war-time conditions fully justify Bush's actions. And as Lincoln showed during the Civil War, there may be times of military emergency where the executive believes it imperative to take immediate, highly irregular, even unconstitutional steps. "I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful," Lincoln wrote in 1864, "by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation." Bush seems to think that, since 9/11, he has been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln faced. But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a "war on terror" -- a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln's exceptional measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush's could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry.
* * * *
Much as Bush still enjoys support from those who believe he can do no wrong, he now suffers opposition from liberals who believe he can do no right. Many of these liberals are in the awkward position of having supported Bush in the past, while offering little coherent as an alternative to Bush's policies now. Yet it is difficult to see how this will benefit Bush's reputation in history.
The president came to office calling himself "a uniter, not a divider" and promising to soften the acrimonious tone in Washington. He has had two enormous opportunities to fulfill those pledges: first, in the noisy aftermath of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other president in living memory. Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less united and more divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious -- much like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures in both domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen," Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces.
No historian can responsibly predict the future with absolute certainty. There are too many imponderables still to come in the two and a half years left in Bush's presidency to know exactly how it will look in 2009, let alone in 2059. There have been presidents -- Harry Truman was one -- who have left office in seeming disgrace, only to rebound in the estimates of later scholars. But so far the facts are not shaping up propitiously for George W. Bush. He still does his best to deny it. Having waved away the lessons of history in the making of his decisions, the present-minded Bush doesn't seem to be concerned about his place in history. "History. We won't know," he told the journalist Bob Woodward in 2003. "We'll all be dead."
Another president once explained that the judgments of history cannot be defied or dismissed, even by a president. "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history," said Abraham Lincoln. "We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation."
SEAN WILENTZ
From my girl cousin, hot off the internets:
A woman bought a new Lexus, and it cost a bundle. Two days later, she brought it back, complaining that the radio was not working.
"Madam", said the sales manager, "The audio system in this car is completely automatic. All you need to do is tell it what you want to listen to, and you will hear exactly that!"
She drives out, somewhat amazed and a little confused.
She looked at the radio and said, "Nelson." The radio responded, "Ricky or Willie?" Soon, she was speeding down the highway to the sounds of "On the Road Again." The lady was astounded. If she wanted Beethoven, that's what she got. If she wanted Nat King Cole, she got it.
At a traffic light, her light turned green and she pulled out. Suddenly, off to her right, out of the corner of her eye, she saw an SUV speeding toward her. She swerved and narrowly missed a terrible collision. "Asshole", she muttered.
And, from the radio... "Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States...."
Here's yesterday's thoughts from my boss:
Why aren’t any Democrats raising this issue:
OK. So the White House says it is the height of injustice and racism to launch kneejerk attacks on the Dubai Ports deal because Dubai has been such a useful instrument in the so-called War on Terror.
Keeping in mind that this is a STATE-owned company, what assurances can Mr. High Crimes & Never-Been-Briefed offer that the government of the nation state of Dubai will always be a government pre-disposed to cooperate with the United States? It wasn’t too long ago, for example, that Iran was a sea of pro-U.S. tranquility/stability/oil in the Mideast and Lebanon was the “Switzerland of the Mideast.” But I think those descriptions, in the words of the Nixon White House, might no longer be operative. Can you imagine what a fix we’d be in if Nixon had sold a half-dozen U.S. ports to the Shah of Iran in 1972? Two generations ago, Yemen was a conservative pro-Western mini-state. Then it became one of the most radical regimes in the world. Now it is struggling to regain its footing and rejoin with the Western World. Libya is pointed to with great pride by the boosh neo-cons as proof of the success of their war of aggression on an Islamo-fascism that is partly of their own making. But who’s to say the Qadaffi will not fall victim next month or next year to a young, radical firebrand of a colonel … somebody exactly like the M. Qadaffi of 35 years ago. Things change. All over. Particularly in such a volatile region of the world as Jim Baker’s Mideast.
So maybe Dubai is the United States’ greatest, strongest, most reliable ally in the world today. In that part of the world, that’s zero guarantee that tomorrow that state couldn’t be the second coming of the Taliban.
And, of by the way, our great and good and cooperative friend Yemen just recently stood by and allowed several dozen Al Qaeda operatives to escape from a local prison. Sure makes me feel good about turning our port security over to a country who’s greatest claim to fame is that Michael Jackson has decamped there.
In other news, I have found a reason to love Richard Gere, something I never thought I would say in my lifetime. But the quotes that have been circulating after his acceptance of the Hasty Pudding Award, have finally won me over. If you haven't seen it yet, here it is:
"I'm asking why I said yes to this," Gere said of the student roast. "'Cause we're all bozos on the bus. All of us, and especially in this world and in this country right now, the biggest bozo on the bus is actually driving the bus."
The emphasis is mine. But who would have ever thought that the man who is the Dalai Lama's BFF would be quoting Firesign Theater. I may just have to swoon a little here over that.
Finally, to round out my reasons to live today, tonight we get to see the great and glorious Tim Gunn visit the finalists of Project Runway in their natural habitats. Maybe, though, natural isn't a word to use with that useless asshat Santino... And as if that isn't enough to keep me on the couch tonight, it is also the ANTM "Where Are They and What the Fuck Are They Doing Now" show, prior to next week's season 6 opener.
Fuzzy bathrobe, bunny slippers and a jug o' plonk and I am good for the night.
OK.
Item the first. Many thanks to RJ for stepping in to be my emergency backup during my surgery. I was rescheduled (without my knowledge) for 3 hours earlier than I had planned, so the RLA was supposed to be in class, and couldn't get a substitute.
If you ever have to sit around and wait for surgery, RJ is your girl. We were having quite the yocks before they came in to sedate me. After? Maybe we continued to have the yocks, but you can't prove it by me.
My reaction to sedation is this: Oh! I think I feel it startizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Part of the cocktail they gave me was sodium pentathol, known to all movie watchers as "truth serum". What truths did I reveal under the influence of this powerful drug? That I wanted to go out for sushi.
This actually came as quite a shock to me, because I quit eating the raw stuff after my housekeeper's son developed
brain worms as a result of sushi. Now, I'd like to think, in my effete snobish way, that we eat at different sushi bars, but a brain worm is a brain worm is a brain worm (take THAT Gertrude Stein) and so I quit. Cold tuna, if you will.
Another thing that RJ and I found infinitly amusing was that in addition to drawing a big blue circle on my tushie where he thought the lump would be found, the surgeon felt it necessary to also write "YES" in big indelible letters next to said circle.
I believe that this is testament to the fineness of my white ass, but RJ says that it's just an extra precaution against cutting the wrong side. Like they all kept saying to each other "not the tatoo side" but I suppose that YES and a big blue circle help. Still, it's my fine white ass, and it's indelible ink, and so who is to debate with me about why the YES is there.
Item the second is for my readers in California. Larry Cafiero, a fellow traveler from my salad days is running for office in your state.
Here is his website. Vote for him. He's really a fine fellow, loves children and cats, and has more common sense in his little finger than most politicians have in their entire bodies. This, of course, bodes badly for his career in politics.
Item the third. Are
they fucking
kidding me?
Item the last in this list. Tonight is the reunion show for Project Runway. Oh, the blissful bitchiness of the dishing. Can my heart take it?
And a special thanks to my most Southern Sistergirl, Miss Pearlie Mae, for this one.
President George W. Bush was scheduled to visit the Methodist Church outside Washington as part of his last campaign. Karl Rove made a visit to the Bishop and said to him, "We've been getting a lot of bad publicity among Methodists because of Bush's position on stem cell research, the War, and such. I'll gladly make a contribution to the church of $100,000 if during your sermon, you'd say the President is a saint."
The Bishop thinks it over for a few moments and says, "The Church is in desperate need of funds. I will do it."
Bush pompously shows up that following Sunday, looking especially smug, sneering for his photo ops, while strutting his way, cowboy-style, into the church.
As the sermon starts, the Bishop begins his homily:
"George Bush is a petty, self-absorbed hypocrite as well as a nitwit. He is a liar, a cheat, probably still a drunk, and a low-intelligence sneaky weasel. He has lied about his military record, and then had the gall to put himself in uniform on a military jet, landing on a carrier, and then posing before a banner stating 'Mission Accomplished.' He invaded a country for oil and money, all the while lying to the American people about the war, with nary a care for the thousands of lives it has taken and continues to take. He is the worst example of a Methodist I've ever personally known or known of. But compared to Dick Cheney, George Bush is a saint."
This is it. I've had it. I'm mad as hell, and you know the rest.
First
this, and then
this.
I loved
Daniel Franco . I want a Daniel Franco suit. I would wear his designs in a NY minute. That
asshat Santino is an asshat. A petty, drama queen, talented, ruthless, batshit insane egotistical asshat. But let me tell you how I really feel about her.
As for Niner? Well, the Florida Marlins can just take their balls and move wherever the hell they want. I wash my hands of them. Back to the Metsies for me, girls.
Feh.
Oh, and a Bush joke, because, well, because they are so easy and they make me so happy.
Ralph Nader, Al Gore and George W. Bush go to a fitness spa for some fun.
After a stimulating, healthy lunch, all three decide to visit the men's room. There they find a strange-looking gent sitting at the entrance who says, "Welcome to the gentlemen's room. Be sure to check out our newest feature: a mirror that, if you look into it and say something truthful, you will be rewarded with your wish. But, be warned, for if you say something false, you will be sucked into the mirror to live in a void of nothingness for all eternity!"
The men quickly enter, and upon finding the mirror, Ralph Nader steps up and says, "I think I'm the most truthful of us three" and he suddenly finds the keys to a brand new Bentley in his hands.
Al Gore steps up and says "I think I'm the most ambitious of us three" and in an instant he was surrounded by a pile of money to fund his next Presidential Campaign.
Excited over the possibility of having a wish come true, George W. Bush looks into the mirror and says, "I think...", and is promptly sucked into the mirror.
