"Prof. Leland Milton Goldblatt , PhD. Gop wants Starve kids and Old
people!"
<Dr.Goldblatt@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:1131832502.393277.21550@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> This was written by my friend Andrew Foster Altschul, a fairly
> successful fiction writer (which is to say he publishes and has a novel
> coming out) and lecturer at Stanford. He doesn't have a password to
> post here so I'm posting his rant for him. He writes excellent rants.
> -se
>
> Erratum
>
> I was wrong.
>
>
> It happens, from time to time, even to the political Nostradami, the
> greatest minds of our generation. And if we will claim glory when our
> predictions come true, then we must admit it when they are horribly,
> grotesquely wrong.
>
> Wednesday night at a cocktail party at the home of Julie Orringer and
> Ryan Harty, I held forth to Stephen Elliott and Peter Orner, as well as
> a small gaggle of my credulous and admiring graduate students, that I
> thought things were about to change. It was a defining moment for
> George W. Bush, the fulcrum of his presidency, I said. Even a baboon
> could not fail to notice that he was on the verge of permanent
> disgrace, the historians were sharpening their pencils to write of his
> failed presidency and its terrible cost: for American prestige and
> respect, for the U.S. economy, for lives lost in the Middle East.
> Perhaps most im****tant, from his perspective, the "permanent Republican
> majority" is in jeopardy, the 1994 revolution's appeal, such as it was,
> lies in the tatters of New Orleans, Virginia's bellwether has rung
> loudly, the Terminator and the Exterminator have been terminated and
> exterminated. The Scooter Libby affair is a cancer that has given us
> the band-aid spectacle of White House "ethics cl*****"; the vow to
> "restore honor and dignity to the Oval Office" has become a punch line.
> As a second-term president, I said, Bush would be thinking about his
> legacy. It was time, I opined, to make some changes. It was time, I
> said, pleased with my metaphor, for Nixon to go to China.
>
> The President considers himself a fundamentally decent man, I said.
> Unlike Dick Cheney, who wants only to see himself as right and
> powerful, George Bush wants to see himself as decent. He could not
> ignore recent events, I said, reaching for the shrimp cocktail. They
> were humbling, chastening - or at least they made it clear that a tone
> of humility and chastity would be necessary in order to restore trust
> in his administration. After a long, thoughtful sip of cabernet, I said
> humility and chastity dictated some housecleaning. It dictated a move
> to the center, an engagement with the parts of the electorate he has
> sneered at. Bush does not want to be remembered merely for cutting
> taxes and licking the boots of bigots and Bible warriors, I said,
> eyeing a truffle. He himself is not truly a bigot, nor a Bible warrior,
> and the time when it was expedient to pose as one has obviously passed.
>
> I made other predictions which, in retrospect, are too embarrassing to
> reveal - though I still stand by them.
>
> "Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated
> the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to
> war," said Bush in his Veterans Day speech, raising higher an audacity
> bar that he and Cheney have already elevated to Himalayan heights. "The
> stakes in the global war on terror are too high and the national
> interest is too im****tant for politicians to throw out false charges,"
> he said, reverting to the rhetoric of the pre-war marketing campaign
> and the post-Mission Accomplished backfill: If you oppose the war, you
> are a traitor; if you disagree with its architects, you are against the
> national interest. You might as well be shooting at our troops
> yourself.
>
> "We will never back down. We will never give in. We will never accept
> anything less than complete victory," he said, the day after three
> hotels in Jordan were bombed by al-Qaeda in Iraq, just weeks after we
> passed 2,000 American casualties in this vainglorious escapade. Only
> cowards and Democrats could question his omniscience, his goodness, his
> will - and never mind that moderate Republicans are speaking out
> against the war, demanding an exit strategy, abandoning ****p on issues
> of torture and presidential prerogative. Even Rick Santorum doesn't
> want Bush around. And when a bottom-feeder like Rick Santorum won't
> return your calls, it's really time to check your deodorant.
>
> Meanwhile, Karl Rove took an I-didn't-get-indicted victory lap before
> the Federalist Society, where he beat up Federal judges, lamented the
> treatment of Harriet Miers (apparently forgetting it was the
> Federalists and Brownbacks who sank her), and impugned the patriotism
> of Democratic Senators Schumer, Durbin, Leahy, and Kennedy. (This, the
> day after Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney took applause following a
> reference to Kennedy as part of a "KKK, the Kennedy Kerry Klan.")
> Seeing as Rove most likely isn't allowed to urinate without permission
> these days, it's pretty clear that this was a calculated effort, a
> one-two punch, Butch and Sundance charging into a hail of pansy-assed
> liberal gunfire to prove once again: It doesn't matter if you're right
> or honest or successful, as long as you never stop calling other people
> dirty names.
>
> "Karl Rove has... come into the cross-hairs of criticism from the
> liberal establishment here in Wa****ngton," said David McIntosh,
> co-chairman of the Federalist Society. "When the establishment can't
> defeat the power of one's ideas, they crank up the engine of personal
> attack in order to distract the leaders." McIntosh seems to have
> forgotten that it was a Republican prosecutor, assigned by a Republican
> Justice Department, who investigated Rove and indicted a Republican
> Chief of Staff for his conversations with a hawkish journalist and the
> resulting column by a prominent Republican troglodyte. Inconvenient
> though it may be to Republican delusions, the truth is that Democrats
> were on the sidelines of this one. But why should the truth get in the
> way of the marketing campaign? Why examine your own weaknesses and
> errors when you can smear people instead and change the subject?
> Self-examination makes for bad PR.
>
> Clearly, there will be no turn toward the center. There will be no
> contrition, no reaching out, no soul searching. There will be no road
> to Damascus, no trip to China. Bush and Rove are going to try to shoot
> their way out of this, resorting to precisely the s***my smear tactics
> Patrick Fitzgerald just laid bare. They're going to keep trying to
> Swiftboat anyone who opposes them - except that Bush's approval rating
> is about 37% right now, which means they're going to have to Swiftboat
> almost two-thirds of the U.S.. Six in ten voters now think Bush is
> dishonest, and yet he's going to insist, as always, that we shut up and
> trust him or be branded traitors. It's almost funny.
>
> But really it's sad. I thought, perhaps, there was a moment when better
> natures might take over, if only in the name of self-preservation. Once
> again I underestimated this man's tragic stupidity. My consolation is
> that it can't work. The numbers are against him now. If this is really
> the way he wants to spend the next three years, his reputation going
> down in a hail of bullets while he and Turd Blossom keep jabbering
> about everyone else's crimes, I say: Bring It On.
What goes around, comes around. Arrogant frat boys like Bush Jr. never
figure that out.
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