0
   

Let's talk about replacing GWBush in 2004.

 
 
PDiddie
 
  1  
Reply Wed 9 Jun, 2004 11:38 pm
Foxfyre wrote:
But I am pretty old and remember a time when you could be partisan and still have civil discourse.


You should remember when Dutch and Tip used to take a nip after five in the Oval.

That time died out awhile back.

The last I saw of that time, I believe, was when the Republicans felt compelled to pursue impeachment proceedings over a blowjob.
0 Replies
 
Foxfyre
 
  1  
Reply Wed 9 Jun, 2004 11:40 pm
That's strange. I thought it was over obstruction of justice and lying to a grand jury. At least a federal judge in New York and the Arkansas State Bar thought that's what it was all about.
0 Replies
 
PDiddie
 
  1  
Reply Wed 9 Jun, 2004 11:59 pm
Nope.

It was all about something that was none of their business -- consensual extramarital oral sex.

That's why the collegiality went out the window. Henry Hyde's affairs, Newt Gingrich's affairs; they weren't cause for an investigation.

Must we really dredge this up again?
0 Replies
 
Foxfyre
 
  1  
Reply Thu 10 Jun, 2004 12:03 am
I didn't dredge it up. You did. Smile
And it had nothing to do with consensual sex.
0 Replies
 
PDiddie
 
  1  
Reply Thu 10 Jun, 2004 12:10 am
That was THE ONLY thing with which it had to do.

Just that. Nothing more.

Every single contention in that witch hunt came as a result of the blowjobs.

Rest now.
0 Replies
 
nimh
 
  1  
Reply Thu 10 Jun, 2004 04:11 am
What's obstruction of justice and lying to a grand jury to do with civil discourse between political parties?

Lots of lying scoundrels in the past who were perfectly collegial to their colleagues of the opposition ;-)
0 Replies
 
BillW
 
  1  
Reply Thu 10 Jun, 2004 10:29 am
The Rush Limbaugh days birthed the problems of today..............
0 Replies
 
blatham
 
  1  
Reply Thu 10 Jun, 2004 07:27 pm
Lie #? WE ARE WINNING THE WAR ON TERROR!

Quote:
The State Department acknowledged Thursday it was wrong in reporting terrorism declined worldwide last year, a finding that was used to boost one of President Bush's top foreign policy claims -- success in countering terror.

Instead, both the number of incidents and the toll in victims increased sharply, the department said. Statements by senior administration officials claiming success were based ``on the facts as we had them at the time; the facts that we had were wrong,'' department spokesman Richard Boucher said.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Powell-Terror-Report.html
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Thu 10 Jun, 2004 09:08 pm
Some things are worth repeating.
***********
Epitaph and Epigone
June 10, 2004
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Sometimes I feel as if I'm watching a nation mourn. And sometimes I feel as if I'm watching a paternity suit.

At every opportunity, as the extraordinary procession solemnly wended its way from California to the Capitol, W. was peeping out from behind the majestic Reagan mantle, trying to claim the Gipper as his true political father.

Finally, there's a flag-draped coffin and military funeral that President Bush wants to be associated with, and wants us to see. (It's amazing they could find enough soldiers, given Rummy's depletion of the military.)

"His heart belongs to Reagan," Ken Duberstein declared about Mr. Bush on CNN, in a riff on the old Cole Porter ditty "My Heart Belongs to Daddy." W. "is that bold-stroked primary-colors leader that-- somebody who has this big vision and wants to stick to it." (Well, the two presidents do share a middle initial.)

The Bush-Cheney re-election Web site was totally given over to a Reagan tribute, with selected speeches, including "Empire of Ideals" - too bad we didn't just stick to ideals - and "The Boys of Pointe du Hoc," President Reagan's 1984 Normandy speech, played so often last Sunday that it eclipsed W. at Normandy.

Bush hawks were visibly relieved to be on TV answering questions that had nothing to do with prison torture, phantom W.M.D. or our new
C.I.A.-operative-turned-prime-minister in Iraq. What a glorious respite to extol a strong, popular, visionary Republican president who spurred democracy in a big backward chunk of the world - even if it isn't W., and it's the Soviet bloc and not the Middle East.

Showing they haven't lost their taste for hype, some Bushies revved up the theme that Son of Bush was really Son of Reagan.

Never mind that back in 1989, the deferential Bush père couldn't wait to escape the Gipper's Brobdingnagian shadow. Though he liked Ronald Reagan, 41 had a secret disdain for 40's White House. He was dismayed by the way media wizards treated the president like a prop and the Oval Office like an M.G.M. set. He and Barbara, who divide the world into peers and "the help," also hated being treated like "the help" by the Reagans, who did not have them upstairs at the residence for dinner and who did not always thank them for
presents.

The Reagans returned the favor. "Kinder and gentler than who?" Nancy sniffed after 41's convention acceptance speech. (As for Barbara, Nancy had warned her off wearing "Nancy Reagan red.")

For the neocons, ideology is thicker than blood. Bush père is the weakling who broke his tax pledge and let Saddam stay in power. Just as Ronnie was a poor kid from Dixon, Ill., who reinvented himself as a brush-clearing cowboy of grand plans and simple tastes, so W. was a rich kid from Yale and Harvard and a blue-blooded political dynasty who
reinvented himself as a brush-clearing cowboy of grand plans and simple tastes.

While W. talks the optimistic talk, he doesn't walk the walk; the Bush crew conducted its Iraq adventurism with a noir and bullying tone.

But Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz tried to merge Junior and Gipper. Mr. Perle said on CNN that Mr. Reagan wouldn't have been "pushed out of Iraq before completing the mission," and Wolfie agreed that 9/11 had "changed everything. I think it would have changed it for Ronald Reagan. We've gone from just being concerned with the freedom of other people in the Middle East to the threat to
our own country from totalitarian regimes that support terrorism."

These maunderings forget that Mr. Reagan sometimes avoided risk, compromised and retreated; when 241 marines were blown up in Beirut, he rejected advisers' pleas and pulled
out. Mr. Wolfowitz has told friends this was Mr. Reagan's low point.

As Alexander Haig told Pat Robertson yesterday, Mr. Reagan won the cold war without a shot. He championed freedom but didn't impose it at the point of a gun barrel. He had "Peace Through Strength"; Mr. Bush chose Pre-emption Without Powell.

The Bush crowd's attempt to wrap themselves in Reagan could go only so far. While Laura Bush and Donald Rumsfeld shared memories of fathers who had suffered from Alzheimer's, Mrs. Bush said she could not support Mrs. Reagan's plea to remove the absurd and suffocating restrictions on stem cell
research.

Whether he was right or wrong, Ronald Reagan was exhilarating. Whether he is right or wrong, George W. Bush is a bummer.

E-mail: [email protected]

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
0 Replies
 
PDiddie
 
  1  
Reply Fri 11 Jun, 2004 12:57 am
Don't ya just love Mo?

If I wasn't married already I'd marry her.
0 Replies
 
blatham
 
  1  
Reply Fri 11 Jun, 2004 07:27 am
More falsehoods to scare you and that damned Supreme Court!

Quote:

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5175105/site/newsweek/site/newsweek

Quote:
The moment of truth came on May 17. A sharp Washington Post opinion piece by Princeton economist Alan Krueger and Stanford political scientist David Laitin sliced "Patterns 2003" to shreds. Their review showed that the "number of significant terrorist acts increased from 124 in 2001 to 169 in 2003," or 36 percent, and that "the number of terrorist events has risen each year since 2001, and in 2003 reached its highest level in more than 20 years." The professors accused the government of concocting a misleading picture by combining the statistics for all "terrorist" acts, whether or not they were "significant." The number of "nonsignificant" terrorist incidents dropped -- but as the professors noted drily, that fact is itself "nonsignificant" and was used to create a phony statistic. By the State Department's own standards, its conclusions were false.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2004/06/11/terror_report/index.html
0 Replies
 
Ethel2
 
  1  
Reply Sat 12 Jun, 2004 09:47 am
I'm sorry I've been so busy the last couple of weeks. I've missed everyone here. I'm packing my boxes and the movers are coming tomorrow to take all my stuff to New York City. yay!

But someone sent this to me via e-mail and I thought it appropriate here. I didn't have time to look back to see if someone else had already posted it. But, nevertheless, here it is:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski79.html

Quote:
The Neocons' One-Trick Pony
by Karen Kwiatkowski

Since I retired to the gentle Shenandoah Mountains, I've noticed some strange goings on in Washington. This makes me indistinguishable from most of my neighbors. But I am different.

When I left the Pentagon, after an honorable twenty year military career, I was angry about what I thought were lies that some folks I worked for were putting out as truth. It bothered me even more because it seemed like they were lying on purpose, in order to get a little war, a little oil, a little financial advantage, the odd basing right. Damn lying government officials always bothered me, but I had never met any face-to-face until I worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Obviously, my decision - which was to go public with what I saw as soon as I could, and sooner - was not designed to promote my employment with certain institutions. For example, the American Enterprise Institute did not seek my contribution to the American enterprise. Cliff May at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies was not interested in my defense of this democracy. I didn't receive a feverish call from Eleana Benador begging to represent me.

I didn't get a call from the National Review or the Washington Times, or the Times's Insight Magazine, or from Frontpagemag. The New York Post was not competing to headline my story. Neither was the New York Times.

In 2002, what I saw, and what many of us saw, was terribly dismaying. But none of us know the future, and perhaps, somehow, maybe, we were wrong about what we were seeing, hearing, experiencing. You can bet we all prayed that we were.

But today, in 2004, all of us who observed, worried, commiserated, and the few who spoke out against the neoconservative agenda have been proven correct. Not just 100% accurate, dead on, and rock solid. Over the top correct. What we saw was literally the tip of the god-forsaken iceberg.

Richard Clarke saw it coming, Paul O'Neill saw it. Rand Beers saw it. Joe Wilson saw it, and American national security has been seriously compromised by the Bush team's brutal, ham-fisted and criminal retaliation against him. General Toni Zinni saw it coming, and tried to prevent it. The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity warned again and again. Even Iraq weapons inspector Scott Ritter tried to caution the administration. None of these folks are leftists, crazies, anti-Semites, or Larouchies. They are simply outstanding public servants who served and continue to serve their country with honor and courage.

None on this list, nor the hundreds of others who recognized what was happening in American foreign policy as it unfolded in 2002 and 2003, or myself, take the slightest bit of pleasure in being right. No one wanted the President, Vice President, Secretaries of State and Defense to play brazen hustlers in expensive suits.

No one in America wanted a brash and dangerous foreign policy pursued for the narrow and counterproductive interests. No one dreamed that in a modern information age, a war could be conducted for reasons never to be honestly shared with those same Americans who would send their beloveds to fight and die.

The price for speaking out against any government program is often to be vilified, attacked, slandered, smeared and discredited. Neoconservative circular logic says those who disagree with their prescriptions must be crazy, because to be sane is to know - to feel - that neoconservative political desires are innately beneficent, noble and wise. Every critic of the lies leading to war has received similar, almost identical, treatment by neoconservatives, through whispering campaigns, quiet threats, false statements and newsy articles and opinion pieces built around a smear.

But the worm turns. Today, neoconservatives are finding it increasingly difficult to discredit the slumbering multitude now waking up and speaking out. They need a new trick, but the old pony can only stomp his feet.

Soldiers returning from Iraq are speaking out. Soldiers under courts martial for violation of Geneva Conventions are calling witnesses from the White House and top civilians in the Pentagon. Soldiers retiring and those in academic environs are joining the criticism of Bush's war in Iraq with measured and credible voices. Serious government advisors and intelligence analysts are coming forward with valid and scathing criticism.

It turns out we are not freeing Iraq, and it appears we never intended to. Iraqis are freeing themselves, in a slow, evolving and increasingly confident exercise of national liberation, and self-determination. It is ugly and dangerous and it kills them as it kills us. Neoconservatives hate Ben Franklin, with his silliness about Republics. But Iraqis have taken Franklin's words to heart. They know if they sacrifice a little liberty for a little security, they will have neither.

This reality doesn't concern loyal neoconservatives. Only other people's children are dying and being maimed, and other people don't have value in the neocon calculator. But when special prosecutors come knocking, and FBI agents approach burdened with technical gear and detailed statements from witnesses, neoconservatives begin to get nervous. Who will sell them out? Who will cop a plea? Who will defect first, second and deluge? When the President and the Vice President contract private criminal attorneys, we wonder if the neocon pony has a new trick we haven't yet seen.

Still, predictable attacks on those who calmly and honestly critique the administration's foreign policy continue, even as neoconservatism's star travels the path of Ahmad Chalabi's own career, from crook to liar to statesman wannabe to liar and crook.

The latest hysterics are from Anthony Gancarski with Front Page Magazine. We've seen it before. He couldn't find time to talk to me while his smear was being copied word for word from the AEI playbook, but he had plenty of time afterward to converse with me via email. He explained that he had done his research to his usual fine level, and that wouldn't necessarily include an interview with or any questions for me. Truly, what smear would?

He also suggested that I ought to reject what I saw with my own eyes and get on board with the neoconservatives.

Ignore the facts, and get on board. Now where have I seen this before? Wait a minute! That's how neoconservative foreign policy is developed! It's how they handle dissent within their political group! And it's how they attack their critics! My friends, what we have here is a used up, unhappy one-trick pony, and the only question left is which one of us is going to make the call to PETA?

June 11, 2004

Karen Kwiatkowski [send her mail] is a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, who spent her final four and a half years in uniform working at the Pentagon. She now lives with her freedom-loving family in the Shenandoah Valley, and writes a bi-weekly column on defense issues with a libertarian perspective for militaryweek.com.

Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Sat 12 Jun, 2004 11:26 am
Lola, That's old news, but it deserves repeating. I just wonder how Karen Kwiatkowski is faring after this revelation? I'm also wondering when some brave individual will make any charge against GWBush and his criminals for all the damage they have done to this nation and the world at large. It seems our congress and supreme court are "chickens in the raw."
0 Replies
 
BillW
 
  1  
Reply Sat 12 Jun, 2004 05:11 pm
chickenhawks, the lot of them :sad:
0 Replies
 
blatham
 
  1  
Reply Sun 13 Jun, 2004 07:29 am
and the lies keep popping up

Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/international/middleeast/13SADD.html?hp
0 Replies
 
blatham
 
  1  
Reply Sun 13 Jun, 2004 08:15 am
and let's use the Catholic Church to try to get re-elected

Quote:
Bush Asked for Vatican's Help on Political Issues, Report Says
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Published: June 13, 2004


n his recent trip to Rome, President Bush asked a top Vatican official to push American bishops to speak out more about political issues, including same-sex marriage, according to a report in the National Catholic Reporter, an independent newspaper.

In a column posted Friday evening on the paper's Web site, John L. Allen Jr., its correspondent in Rome and the dean of Vatican journalists, wrote that Mr. Bush had made the request in a June 4 meeting with Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state. Citing an unnamed Vatican official, Mr. Allen wrote: "Bush said, 'Not all the American bishops are with me' on the cultural issues. The implication was that he hoped the Vatican would nudge them toward more explicit activism."

Mr. Allen wrote that others in the meeting confirmed that the president had pledged aggressive efforts "on the cultural front, especially the battle against gay marriage, and asked for the Vatican's help in encouraging the U.S. bishops to be more outspoken." Cardinal Sodano did not respond, Mr. Allen reported, citing the same unnamed people.

A spokesman for the Vatican declined yesterday to disclose the contents of the meeting, which followed the president's brief meeting with the pope. Jeanie Mamo, a spokeswoman for the White House, said: "They had a good, private discussion. They discussed a number of priorities of shared concern, and the president's and the Vatican's positions on these issues are well known."

The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, called the report "mind-boggling."

"It is just unprecedented for a president to ask for help from the Vatican to get re-elected, and that is exactly what this is," Mr. Lynn said. Linda Pieczynski, a spokeswoman for Call to Action, a liberal Catholic group, said, "For a president to try to get the leader of any religious organization to manipulate his fellow clergymen to support a political candidate crosses the line in this country."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/politics/13george.html

And let's not forget to note that Bishops who have denied or threatened to deny communion have done so only with Democratic politicians, not to any Republicans who support, for example, abortion rights (correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I think it is so)
0 Replies
 
blatham
 
  1  
Reply Sun 13 Jun, 2004 08:50 am
Quote:
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/2004/la-na-diplo13jun13,1,1142936.story?coll=la-home-headlines
0 Replies
 
Foxfyre
 
  1  
Reply Sun 13 Jun, 2004 09:40 am
Just to keep it all in perspective

http://vets4bush.com/DickWinters.shtml

http://vets4bush.com/

http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2004/040528-political-corps.htm
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Sun 13 Jun, 2004 10:29 am
Fox, You're a comedian! Comparing the list from blatham's post to yours is comparing apples and garlic. LOL A major! Give me a break. Your second link; from Bush supporters. another LOL This is balance? cheeeze......
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Sun 13 Jun, 2004 10:59 am
This one's a bit long, but worth the read.
**************
First Reagan, Now His Stunt Double
FRANK RICH
June 13, 2004

"BOY, if life were only like this," says Woody Allen in
"Annie Hall" after he brings out the actual Marshall
McLuhan to silence a pontificating McLuhan expert with whom
he's trapped on a movie line. Well, last weekend life was
like that.

George W. Bush was all suited up in Normandy to repeat
Ronald Reagan's 1984 blockbuster elegy to "the boys of
Pointe du Hoc" (screenplay by Peggy Noonan). It was not the
first time that the current president had taken a page from
his fabled predecessor's script, but it may have been the
most humiliating. The D-Day-eve timing of Reagan's death
had pushed the replay of his original oration to center
stage on TV, much as the real McLuhan is yanked on screen
in "Annie Hall." And as the McLuhan wannabe soon slinks
away in that movie, so Mr. Bush's would-be Reaganesque
speech atomized into white noise, to the limited extent
that it was broadcast at all.

Some would argue that no politician in his right mind would
even invite comparisons to the Great Communicator. In the
aftermath of Reagan's death, his fans and foes alike remain
agog at his performance chops. Kennedy may have brought the
Rat Pack to the White House, but no one has ever arrived
there with Reagan's particular gifts as an entertainer.
They were a product of training, not accident. He had first
performed as a child in church skits put on by his mother.
Later came the legendary path through baseball announcing,
52 feature films, "General Electric Theater" and the
conservative speaking circuit, where he honed what became
known as the Speech. Not even other Hollywood-spawned
politicians, whether George Murphy before him or Arnold
Schwarzenegger after, can match this résumé. To see the
difference between an acting professional and an aspiring
amateur, just look at the one recent president who had show
business on the brain, Bill Clinton. Though Mr. Clinton's
act may be better than any Reagan successor, he nonetheless
lacks the master's disciplined ability to hit his mark, not
to mention his timing, ready wit and brevity.

Mr. Clinton went so far as to incongruously appropriate
Reagan ideology ("The era of big government is over") for
political expediency. But no one has more strenuously tried
to emulate the 40th president in both style and substance
than George W. Bush. Reagan's body was barely cold when Ed
Gillespie, the Republican chairman, said: "The parallels
are there. I don't know how you miss them." Yes, the
parallels are there - hammered in by Mr. Bush's packagers
so we can never miss them. But Karl Rove and company may
have overplayed their hand. The orgiastic celebration of
Reagan's presidency over the past week, an upbeat Hollywood
epic that has glided past Iran-contra, Bitburg and the
retreat from Lebanon with impressive ease, has brought into
clear focus the size of the gap between the two men. To say
that difference in stature is merely a function of an
actor's practiced skill at performance is both to
understate the character of Ronald Reagan and to impugn the
art of acting.

The White House's efforts to follow the Reagan playbook
have been nothing if not relentless. As Michael Deaver's
crew famously would have Reagan cut ribbons in front of
nursing homes even as he cut funds for their construction,
so Mr. Bush can be found communing with nature each time
his administration takes a whack at the environment. To
pass himself off as a practiced hand at proletarian manual
labor, Mr. Bush clears brush on camera at his ranch in
Crawford just as Mr. Reagan did in Santa Barbara. In
Washington, the Bush speechwriters strain to equate an
"axis of evil" with the "evil empire."

Even his personality is presented to the public as a clone
of Reagan's. Mr. Bush is always characterized by his
associates as a "big picture" guy who leaves any detail
that can't be fit on a 3-by-5 card to his aides. As Donald
Rumsfeld says in Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack": "This
president has a lot of the same quality that Ronald Reagan
did where he'd look out, way out to the horizon and plant a
standard out there and then point toward it."

To some who admire both men, the analogy is plausible. Mr.
Bush's certitude about his war on terrorism matches
Reagan's unyielding anti-communism. Both presidents made a
religion out of big tax cuts, talked of curbing government
even as they increased spending and then serenely ignored
the daunting deficits that ensued.

Those who dislike both men see less salutary parallels.
Both presidents tried every stunt imaginable to create the
illusion that their wartime service had not been confined
to the home front. Both pandered to the religious right by
impeding urgently needed federal medical research that
would have saved lives (Reagan with AIDS, Mr. Bush with
stem cells). Where Bush and Reagan boosters see both men as
refreshingly disdainful of intellectuals, critics see a
smug lack of curiosity in any ideas but their own. The
ur-text of today's profuse Bushisms can be found in such
Reaganisms as his remarks upon returning from a trip to
South America: "Well, I learned a lot. . . . You'd be
surprised. They're all individual countries." Both
presidents inspired "Tonight Show" gags about their endless
vacations.

But whether one likes either president or not, the
difference between them remains far greater than any
similarities, and that difference has more ramifications
during a hot war than a cold one. Reagan may have been an
actor, but in Garry Wills's famous phrase, he played "the
heartwarming role of himself." Though he never studied with
Lee Strasberg, he practiced the method; his performance was
based, however loosely, on the emotional memory of a
difficult youth as the son of an itinerant, sometimes
unemployed alcoholic. That Reagan triumphed over this
background during the Depression, developing the
considerable ambition needed to work his way through
college and eventually to Warner Brothers, informed the
sentimental optimism that both defined (and limited) his
vision of America as a place where perseverance could pay
off for anyone. It was indeed the heartwarming role of
himself (with the New Deal backdrop of his own biography
eventually stripped out).

Yet there was more to Reagan's role than its Horatio Alger
success story. Reagan may have stayed in Culver City during
the war, but as a teenage riverfront lifeguard in Illinois,
he rescued 77 people, demonstrating early on the physical
courage that would see him through an assassination
attempt. And for all Reagan's absorption in show business,
he was always engaged in politics (to the point of
alienating his first wife, Jane Wyman, who found his
preoccupation a bore). As president of the Screen Actors
Guild in the late 40's, he was at the center of fierce
labor and blacklisting battles.

Nor was he wholly isolated from the America beyond
Hollywood. A contract player who became "Errol Flynn of the
B's," he wasn't a big enough star to merit all the
perquisites of top show-biz royalty. As his movie career
dwindled in the early 50's, he was briefly reduced to
serving (at age 42) as the baggy-pants M.C. to a cheesy,
showgirl-laden revue at the Last Frontier casino on the
Vegas strip. Once he was reborn as a G.E. spokesman, he
spent years meeting workers in the company factories that
he repeatedly toured when off camera.

Whether you liked or loathed the performance that Mr.
Reagan would give as president, it derived from this
earlier immersion in the real world. The script he used in
the White House was often romanticized and fictional; he
invented or embroidered anecdotes (including that ugly
demonization of a "welfare queen") and preached family
values he didn't practice with his own often-estranged
children. But even the fiction was adapted from experience.
While he had arrived in politics in middle-age with the aid
of a kitchen cabinet of wealthy financial backers, there
had been decades when he lived in an America broader than
that of Justin Dart and Alfred Bloomingdale.

Mr. Bush's aw-shucks persona, by contrast, has been
manufactured from scratch. He has rarely, if ever, ventured
out of the cocoon of privilege. He "lost a lot of other
people's money in the oil business," said Ron Reagan Jr. in
2000. "What is his accomplishment? That he's no longer an
obnoxious drunk?" While the young Ronald Reagan used his
imagination to improvise play-by-play radio accounts of
baseball games based on sparse telegraphic accounts, Mr.
Bush made a killing on a baseball team with the help of
cronies and sweetheart deals. He has no history of
engagement with either issues or people beyond big oil or
the Andover-Yale-Harvard orbit until he belatedly went into
the family business of politics.

He does the down-home accent well, and he dresses the part.
In the new issue of The Atlantic, a linguist hypothesizes
to James Fallows that Mr. Bush, a smoother speaker in his
Texas political career than now, may have "deliberately
made himself sound as clipped and tough as John Wayne"
since then "as a way of showing deep-down Nascar-type
manliness." It's as if he's eradicating his patrician
one-term father to adopt the two-term Gipper as his dad
instead. But unlike Reagan, Mr. Bush is so inured to the
prerogatives of his life of soft landings that his attempts
to affect a jus' folks geniality are invariably betrayed by
nastiness whenever someone threatens to keep him from
getting his own way. It's impossible to imagine Reagan
countenancing the impugning of the patriotism of war heroes
like John McCain and Max Cleland as the Bush machine has
done in the heat of close campaigns.

Last weekend in Normandy, the president sat for an
interview in which Tom Brokaw challenged his efforts to
pull off a bigger flimflam than impersonating Ronald Reagan
- the conflation of the Iraq war with World War II. "You
referred to the `ruthless and treacherous surprise attack
on America' that we went through during our time," Mr.
Brokaw said. "But that wasn't Iraq who did that, that was
al Qaeda." With the gravesites of the World War II dead
behind him, the president retreated to his familiar script
("Iraq is a part of the war on terror"). Even if you think
the lines make sense, the irritated man delivering them did
not sound like someone who had ever experienced pain of the
life-and-death intensity that comes with war. The problem
is not merely that Mr. Bush lacks Reagan's lilting vocal
delivery. As any professional actor can tell you, no
performance, however sonorous, can be credible if it
doesn't contain at least a kernel of emotional truth.


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/arts/13RICH.html?ex=1088131187&ei=1&en=eb0ece021af27a7f

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
0 Replies
 
 

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