Things I noticed over a long weekend …
posted 2-4-2008 8:14 p.m.
amended 2-7-2008 5:55 p.m.

 
… while down with a cold and ignoring the Super Bowl:

• George W. Bush is still stubbornly hallucinating about what’s going on in the world.

The country is finally restless with the current regime (at last! How long did they have to wait?), that's clear enough. How many ways can you take a 71 percent disapproval rating other than to admit that 71 percent of the populace hates you? Thus the sullen monotone delivery of the State of the Union address. And yet, beneath that depressed and depressing delivery was still the old, blindly stubborn pugnaciousness that is the flip side of the thin, shallow nice-guy routine that got W. Bush close enough to a win the second time around to steal it (the first time, he had to rely on The Supremes to steal it for him and on Gore's sense of honor not to pursue the matter further; what a waste *that* was).

Read the text of last Monday's State of the Union address, or even listen carefully to the words, and you hear that determined, knee-jerk rewriting of history in light of his own fantasy that is Shrub's trademark. He thinks if he tells a lie often enough, most people will believe it. More to the point, if he lies to himself often enough that he believes it, he expects us to believe it, too. Some will, sure — but the evidence of his incompetence is simply too great, the economy too badgered and the needless deaths too many to allow that now.

• Voters are just as capable of rewriting history to suit their fears and fantasies as politicians are.

I don't doubt voters are looking for hope a la 1960. But it ain't the '60s, folks, and it’s long after Watergate, too; and we already know what happened to the political folk heroes of the 1960s. They died, long before they could accomplish their goals. And they weren't saints, either: JFK, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King all had their enormous flaws. Their successors were lesser figures but got more done. The war on poverty, for example, was LBJ’s thing. Shortly after, Watergate reminded us of just how badly presidents can betray us when their personal vanity and desire for power is at stake. Yet we forgot that for the longest time, once Ronald Reagan gave us that swill about ‘morning in America’ and showed us that even a B-movie actor has better and more believable delivery of even the most transparently mendacious pap than any career politician could ever hope to have.

We’ve forgotten how out of touch Reagan was during his own campaigns, how many huge misstatements he made before he was finally elected and how his handlers had to rein him in during the campaign and keep him from ad libbing lest he go off the deep end again and anyone think he was going senile (we now know that he was, in fact, coming down with Alzheimer’s and probably long before he left office; remember the Bitburg fiasco, when Reagan insisted on visiting a German cemetery where Nazi SS officers were buried and he called the German military dead there 'victims'?). We've also forgotten how much Reagan rewrote history and took credit for things that had little to do with him (see my critique of Reagan on the occasion of his death). It’s not like the Republicans are eager for us to remember Reagan’s many errors and blunders, either.

Reagan was so persuasive in part because he believed what he was saying, even when what he believed was utter nonsense. Had there been no Reagan lulling our wise post-Watergate suspicions to sleep, nobody could have gotten us into a war like the current Iraq fiasco so soon after Watergate by lying to us about the evidence – we’d have lynched anyone who tried. We’d have surely demanded more clearly verifiable evidence than the crap Colin Powell presented (and how clever of Shrub’s aides to let Colin Powell present that lie to the world, knowing he had far more credibility than the know-nothing W. Bush). And having discovered that there were no weapons of mass destruction and no connection between Saddam Hussein and Islamic terrorists gunning for the U.S., we’d have clamored for impeachment.

After all, how much more, other than outright treason, do you need for impeachment when you have a case of a president getting us into a needless war on the basis of grossly and deliberately misrepresented data? Isn’t getting us into war under false pretenses SO much worse (and doesn’t it fit the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors so much better) than simply lying about getting sucked off by an intern in the Oval Office because you’re afraid of what your wife might do if she found out? Had Dubya’s War happened before Reagan, it would have landed much of his staff and perhaps part of his cabinet in jail and he himself would have been either forced to resign or impeached. That’s if Congress then had even allowed the war in the first place.

• People still grant the Kennedy family an esteem and reverence that is out of proportion with what the political members of that family have actually accomplished but is more in line with respect for the family of ‘martyrs’ — and because of this reverence, people are also loath to carefully examine the individual members’ flaws, even as they hungrily grab the tabloids for the latest Kennedy family gossip. Thus, the family still has more popular influence than perhaps it should.

The one thing we can credit JFK with beyond setting an inspirational tone is setting a number of positive programs in motion, the two most notable being the Peace Corps and the space race. Still, a good start isn’t enough unless efforts are dutifully maintained. The Peace Corps has been chronically underfunded and underrated since 1970, and the space program was largely abandoned as an attempt to get human beings permanently into space by none other than Richard Nixon and was barely resuscitated after a 20-year hiatus. It’s still touch and go, a victim of presidential whims and budget cuts over the years, and now underfunded as well. And notice how Shrub wants to take credit for the space program now, too?

Anyone who doubts how tarnished the Kennedy legacy is needs to read Robert Dallek's recent JFK bio, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, which has some new information in it; it's both revealing and humanizing, but it sure doesn't give us any reason to canonize JFK. The book also shows just how slow Bobby was to coming 'round to his older brother's more strategically tolerant point of view.

As for Ted Kennedy, he's had a much longer, dutiful, productive, and more unabashedly liberal political career than either of his two more famous brothers, but he really makes a much better senator, being unfit for the presidency. Yes, he has a long list of honorable accomplishments — but has everyone forgotten Chappaquiddick and how in a drunken stupor he left a young woman to drown after his car went off a bridge? It seemed like all anyone could talk about in the political blogs last week was the degree to which Ted did or didn't diss the Clintons by supporting Obama and why. What puzzles me is why this should be remotely important.

One would have thought Ted could relate more to Bill: after all, there are plenty of Kennedy men, Ted included, who couldn't manage to keep their pants zipped at the right moment. Ted has nephews who have bedded their kids' nannies, others who have beat rape charges by having more expensive lawyers than their accusers could ever afford. And it's not like Bill Clinton or any of the Kennedy men ever chose really intelligent, savvy, discreet women for their affairs (if they had, those affairs might still be private — or they might not have happened at all, smart women being capable of seeing the futility of an affair with a public figure).

All of which brings us back to the long-suffering Hillary Clinton and the virtually-anointed-once-he-spoke-at-the-Democratic-convention Obama, two senators who have a checkable voting record but who have never had direct experience in administration because they've never been governors. And here, the one edge Sen. Clinton has over Sen. Obama is that she knows what it took to get her husband's first administration off the ground and running: the process of selecting a cabinet and staffers, why judicial nominees are important, how to get White House aides talking to congressional staffers, and so on.

Don't think for a moment that she was so sequestered in the White House with things that first ladies are expected to do that she had no input over the dinner table or didn't see and read files and position papers with Bill late at night, didn't debate with him every bit as much as Rahm Emanuel did about how things should get done. Oh yes, I'd bet anything her input went much further and was far more detailed than anything Laura Bush has had to contend with. It had to be, given her involvement with the health reform effort. This is neither good nor bad as first ladies are concerned, just fact because of how much Bill and Hillary have always shared politically during his long career.

Political dynasties aren't all that beneficial, yet people are more than willing to grant them if they like the family. The Kennedys have had no less in Massachusetts than what Bill and Hillary are trying to achieve in the White House. But because the Bush dynasty was so disastrous for the nation and the economy and people are so tired of the abuses and stupidity of Dubya Bush in particular, they now find it easy to reject another dose of Clintons, erroneously equating the two families. Those who hate the Bushes and now prefer Obama want to tar the Clintons with the Bush brush. They're wrong to do so.

If you want to hate the Clintons, at least hate them for their own sins, which are truthfully nothing like those of either Bush presidency in kind or degree. There is no immediate default position, for example, of either Clinton being on the side of oil moguls or the rich the way there is with the Bushes. There is no comparable willingness to lay waste to the economy by driving up the national debt in the same spendthrift, willfully blind way that the Bushes did — the sole (and worst possible) way in which they imitated Ronald Reagan, the guy who did more damage to the national debt than the five presidents preceding him did as a group (they actually helped lower the debt by repaying debts left over from World War II, the war that Reagan managed not to fight in while he was busy making propaganda films; that must have been what inspired the young George W. Bush to fly in the Texas Air National Guard and go AWOL even from that when he might have been bleeding and dying in Vietnam instead).

To simply say that the Clintons and the Bushes are the same is to admit that you’ve stopped thinking and actually don’t care about thinking hard on what their differences might be and are content to make blind, sweeping generalizations instead. Which bodes ill for the elections and the next presidency. In fact, it's almost as idiotic as Barack Obama saying nice things about Reagan when he ought to be using this opportunity to discredit Reaganism altogether, along with all of its anti-poor, anti-populist, anti-progressive consequences (nice blooper there, Senator; got an encore? Will you be rehabilitating Nixon's role in Watergate next?).

What is worse is that if you keep on not thinking that way, you’ll probably get the idiot president you deserve — but you’ll also stick me and everyone else who does give a damn with the same idiot as well. Which is, in part, how we got Shrub the second time around, isn’t it?

Which also brings be back to what started me writing Op-Ed in the first place:

• Of course it matters whether we vote and whom we vote for, be it a primary or a regular election.

People who are trying to rationalize their own unwillingness to go to the polls insist that one vote doesn’t count. But of course one vote matters. Multiply that thought by thousands who've thought exactly the same thing, and you come up with at the very least a margin of error, at the most a margin of victory. Yes it does matter which of these very human, flawed people we vote for, for more reasons that are immediately apparent. We may well want better candidates, but all we have are those who are running and have decided to endure what the race demands. Running for office takes courage, money, vanity, singlemindedness bordering on obsession, and a big enough ego to take a lot of rejection and still come out swinging. Politics isn’t for sissies or wallflowers, and the process doesn’t necessarily make you very likeable. We have to choose from what's available.

Dennis Kucinich had one issue very right — health care reform — and on the rest, he was sadly misinformed about much. He was there to bring that one idea to the table. To John Edwards (way not perfect either and also known to spin his own history, but not as obnoxious as some), that one issue was poverty. I thank these two for their contribution of ideas, but they're gone now and someone else has to push their discussions. And that won't be Obama or Clinton, sad to say. So it has to be us. Voters and media.

What really nauseates me is the amount of sheer vitriol I read in the online comments appended by readers to virtually any political article in the papers and magazines these days. Much of it spills over into the blogs. The amount of venom spewed by partisans of all stripes is just staggering — mostly because so little of it is well thought out or even pretends to have any thought or evidence behind it. This isn't about persuasion or provoking thought, it's about libel and slander, pure and simple. As if individual members of society thought they could, through this slander, punish the politicians whom they think have wronged or abandoned them (not likely).

And slander, besides persuading no one, doesn't make for informed consent, the only thing besides free, fair, unrigged elections that gives attempts at self-governance any meaning. The point being that free elections by themselves are meaningless if you know nothing about the candidates, or are so accustomed to authoritarian rule that you'd gladly hand over your governance to the next strong man out of sheer relief at not having to think for yourself until the next election. Free elections, when not backed up with informed consent and a certain amount of skepticism on the part of the voters, can produce very bad results indeed.

I'd let the reader comments and vitriolic blogs depress me more except for the fact that I know this is a self-selected group of People Who Choose To Respond, and I don't know how far their comments or their polarization can be taken as representative of the whole. I’d like to think the electorate as a whole is smarter than that. But we’ll see.