Looking Back

New Years Eve here in Hollywood was quiet this year. It was quiet everywhere, as in Economy Puts Damper on New Year’s Eve Celebrations, the Associated Press noting that things were tough all over:

 

Public celebrations were canceled in communities from Louisville, Ky., to Reno, Nev., and promoters in Miami Beach, Fla., reported slower ticket sales than expected for celebrity-studded parties that they say would have sold out in past years.

 

It seems few wanted to ring in the New Year with young Lindsey Lohan, or at least few were willing to shell out thousands of dollars for that privilege.

 

And it wasn’t just us:

 

Around the world, people paused for a deep breath and a sip of … perhaps something cheaper than champagne.

 

“We’re not going to celebrate in a big way. We’re being careful,” said architect Moussa Siham, 24, as shoppers in the affluent area west of Paris were scaling back purchases for the traditional New Year’s Eve feast.

 

So the big dinner at home in Paris was scaled back, which is fine, because the restaurants were being ridiculous.

 

And here in Hollywood:

 

The beat is slowing on the Sunset Strip, muffled by a less-than-festive economy. For the first time in years, clubs in this night-life mecca on Sunset Boulevard and nearby will be ringing in 2009 on Wednesday by slashing cover charges or offering special incentives, such as open bars and free hors d’oeuvres. A night out on New Year’s Eve will still cost a premium, of course, but many club operators say they are purposely keeping a lid on prices even though they might be able to charge more.

 

It’s the times:

 

Clubs also struggled after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but the Viper Room’s Berghammer said the current downturn looks to be worse because of the competitive environment and the projected length of the recession.

 

For months, club goers have been showing up earlier and staying later to maximize the value of their cover charge instead of bouncing from club to club throughout the night, he said. Instead of splitting bottle service among four people, the cost is now shared among many more.

 

It’s quite a contrast from just a few years ago, Berghammer said, when high rollers thought nothing of dropping $30,000 a night on table service and clubs could get $750 for a bottle of Grey Goose vodka (which sells in stores for about $30).

 

Times are tough all over.

 

But some things don’t change – because they’re free. That would be the year end lists, like CNN’s From Obama-Mania to Palin Power: 2008’s Top Political Stories or Fox News’ Top Ten Dumbest Criminals of 2008 or Foreign Policy’s Ten Worst Predictions of 2008, with, among others, this one:

 

“I believe the banking system has been stabilized. No one is asking themselves anymore, is there some major institution that might fail and that we would not be able to do anything about it.” – Henry Paulson on National Public Radio, Nov. 13, 2008

 

Of course this one isn’t bad either:

 

“If Hillary Clinton gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she’s going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her, then. … Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.” – William Kristol, Fox News Sunday, Dec. 17, 2006

 

Of course Kristol was wrong. He almost always is. But in American Prospect, Ezra Klein here says being right isn’t his job, really:

 

Political scientists have studied pundit predictions and found them to be, on the overall, inaccurate. Indeed, the effect gets stronger as the pundit becomes more popular: “the better known the pundit, the less accurate his or her forecasts.”

 

But all this suggests that political punditry has something to do with accuracy. It doesn’t. It’s entertainment. Just like people who like sports want to be able to watch TV shows about sports and people who like women in bikinis want to be able to watch TV shows about women in bikinis, people who like politics want to be able to watch TV shows about politics. The pundits exist to fill that need. Their role is to make those shows entertaining, so the shows have good ratings, so they can sell time for advertisers, so they can make a profit for networks.

 

Steve Benen says that sounds about right, but he doesn’t like it:

 

Using Ezra’s analogy, imagine a sports commentator whose predictions are always wrong, whose rumors never pan out, and whose observations aren’t based on reality. After a while, one would hope, the audience would stop taking that commentator seriously, and he/she would go away.

 

But that rarely happens with political pundits. It’s annoying.

 

Well, that rarely happens with sports commentators either. Think of the late Howard Cosell.

 

But it is annoying. And as much as end-of-the-year lists are about what is fascinating or wonderful, they are more often about what is really, really annoying. One thinks of the words of Noel Coward – “I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.” Many of the year-end lists name those who should just take a hike.

 

Michael Tomasky is editor of Guardian America, the American edition of the Guardian (UK) and he has the list of this sort that is being circulated most widely – Welcome to America’s Hall of Shame.

 

The framing is the new, versus the old:

 

We made history in electing an African-American president. I and 67 million of my fellow citizens brought the era of conservative dominance to a thundering close. For those of us who’ve been told for eight years that we weren’t real Americans – liberals, urbanites, non-believers, cabernet-sippers, same-sex lovers, anti-war-mongerers, Volvo drivers – well, the tables have turned. We’re the real Americans now.

 

But ill winds still blew, and blow, across the republic. It being the duty of journalism to take the measure of these winds, I hereby dedicate my year-end column to ranking some of the worst Americans of the year.

 

He was going to do the ten worst Americans of the year but things got out of hand, and he ended up with nineteen.

 

And at nineteen he places Fox News’ E. D. Hill:

 

Ms Hill is the Fox News anchor who referred to Barack and Michelle Obama’s on-stage fist bump in early June as a “terrorist fist jab.” I guess she’s well familiar with the various and sundry ways in which couples express intimacy – she’s been married three times herself. Fox announced in November that it wasn’t renewing her contract.

 

Of course he covers Joe the Plumber (Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher) – obvious stuff – but he reminds us of John Edwards:

 

How could a person run for president knowing that he’d cheated on his cancer-stricken wife with a woman who subsequently bore a child? (He denies paternity.) What if he’d actually won the nomination, and then this news came out? He gives bad judgment a bad name.

 

And he’s not fond of Geraldine Ferraro, but he’s even less fond of Sam Zell:

 

Yes, market forces and technology are putting the American newspaper on life support, but that doesn’t mean that the man who bought the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times should stroll into the intensive-care unit and pull the plug. Zell’s belief that productivity should be measured purely by word output is a death knell for intensive, investigative work that uncovers corruption.

 

And of course there is David Addington and the executives at AIG, and of course, Addington’s boss, Dick Cheney:

 

Just because. If he lives to be 99 – and he’s not as old as he looks: can you believe, for instance, that he’s younger than Ringo? – and I’m still doing this column, something tells me he’ll always find his way on the list. It’ll take that long to undo the damage he’s done to flag and country.

 

And there’s Steve Schmidt:

 

John McCain didn’t make the list, but his chief campaign strategist has earned an indisputable spot. He displayed a rare combination of incompetence, tone-deafness and cynicism. He’s only as low as number eight because it didn’t work.

 

Joe Lieberman is on the list too, as Rod Blagojevich (of course) and George Bush, at number three:

 

There were years when he would have been higher – 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. I’ll give him a slight pass for 2001, what with the attacks and all that. In those previous years, he stole an election, started an unnecessary war, lied about it, approved torture, let a great US city drown and so on. This year he merely presided over the bankruptcy of the global economy. Twenty days and counting.

 

At two is Sarah Palin:

 

Does she really deserve to be this high? Never in my adult lifetime has one politician so perfectly embodied everything that is malign about my country: the proto-fascist nativism, the know-nothingism, the utterly cavalier lack of knowledge about the actual principles on which the country was founded. So, heck, you betcha she does!

 

That leaves the top spot on this Shame List, and that had to be Bernard Madoff:

 

It’s pronounced “made-off.” Could Dickens have named him better? Bilking people and institutions out of $50bn is a pretty surefire way to make yourself No 1 with a bullet on anyone’s year-end bad guys’ list.

 

Steve Benen loves the list, but would add more names:

 

Rudy Giuliani – His campaign hackery, before and after his own candidacy, continues to offend. His convention speech, accusing Obama of being “cosmopolitan,” was so painfully stupid, it’s hard to forget.

 

Bill Kristol – Dollar for dollar, the worst newspaper columnist in America was a constant source of predictable drivel and misguided predictions.

 

Phil Gramm – Not only did Gramm’s policies help create the financial nightmare, but he mocked Americans’ pain, calling us a “nation of whiners.” That he was a leading candidate to be the Treasury Secretary in McCain’s administration continues to send shivers down my spine.

 

Paul Broun – The Republican congressman from Georgia argued, publicly and on the record, that Barack Obama reminded him of Adolf Hitler. …

 

And I think Ashley Todd probably belongs in the mix of the year’s worst Americans. Her self-mutilation/racist/sexual-assault story was the year’s most offensive stunt.

 

Are we forgetting anyone?

 

Well, perhaps we are. Elsewhere there are the nominees for the 2008 Golden Winger Wank of Year, and among those nominees is Pam Atlas carefully making the case that Malcolm X was Barack Obama’s father – it wasn’t the fellow from Kenya. Barack Obama is the illegitimate child of Malcolm X – lots of Google and lots of imagination and you see it could be so. The rest of the list is amusing – the folks on the right got weird last year.

 

Peter Brown of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute has a piece in the Wall Street Journal calling for a counterpart to Time’s “Person of the Year” award – a “Bumbler of the Year.” That would be for the person who had everything going reasonably well in their quest for fame, fortune or power, and then managed to screw it all up, all on their very own. Peter Brown says Hillary Clinton should win that. At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey disagrees – better Rod Blagojevich, Hugo Chavez or Elliot Spitzer.

 

This is a matter of very personal opinion, as David Neiwert explains here:

 

Well, there’s little doubt about Blago and Spitzer and Chavez all bumbling to varying degrees, the first two especially. Hillary, on the other hand, did indeed wind up looking the bumbler, but that was largely due to the contrast to Obama’s extraordinary competence.

 

As it happens, Obama left his tracks even more indelibly down the backs of Republicans this year. If you want to find bumblers, you might want to look there first.

 

Indeed, all these ostensible “liberal” bumblers (Chavez does not qualify) were mere pikers – more in the way of mediocrities – compared to the right-wing bumblers on parade this year.

 

He suggests you simply look as Sarah Palin, John McCain and George W. Bush:

 

Palin: Who can forget the painful Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric interviews? The visit to the turkey farm? The Perky Conservabot debate with Joe Biden? And the best thing about Palin is that she’s the GOP’s Great White Hope for 2012.

 

McCain: The list of mistakes is endless, from the “suspension” of his campaign just prior to the first debate to the insistence that “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” to his selection of Palin as his running mate. And those were just the big mistakes. It seemed as though every day, McCain’s campaign was trying to recover from some fresh gaffe or tactical blunder. It’s a credit to the power of Kool-Aid that he was able to win any states at all.

 

George W. Bush: The economy, stupid. ‘Nuff said. Without doubt, the biggest and most consequential blunderer of them all.

 

Neiwert seems to think Obama can make anyone look inadequate, but the folks on the right really didn’t need that very much help.

 

You could go on and on with this sort of thing – kicking the Republicans when they’re down – or you could be nonpartisan in your scorn, or inclusive, or fair and balanced.

 

The humorist Dave Barry is good at that. See his annual month-by-month year in review – 4,282 words, all worth considering.

 

And consider the opening:

 

How weird a year was it?

 

Here’s how weird:

 

O. J. actually got convicted of something.

 

Gasoline hit $4 a gallon – and those were the good times.

 

On several occasions, Saturday Night Live was funny.

 

There were a few days there in October when you could not completely rule out the possibility that the next Treasury Secretary would be Joe the Plumber.

 

Finally, and most weirdly, for the first time in history, the voters elected a president who — despite the skeptics who said such a thing would never happen in the United States — was neither a Bush NOR a Clinton.

 

Of course the devil is in the details as in February, “when, amid much fanfare, Congress passes, and President Bush signs, an ”economic stimulus package” under which the federal government will give taxpayers back several hundred dollars apiece of their own money, the idea being that they will use this money to revive the U.S. economy by buying TV sets that were made in China. This will seem much more comical in the fall.”

 

And there was March:

 

In politics, Barack Obama addresses the issue of why, in his 20 years of membership in Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, he failed to notice that the pastor, Jeremiah Wright, is a racist lunatic. In a major televised address widely hailed for its brilliance, Obama explains that … Okay, nobody really remembers what the actual explanation was. But everybody agrees it was mesmerizing.

 

Obama’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, gets into a controversy of her own when she claims that, as first lady, she landed in Bosnia ”under sniper fire.” News outlets quickly locate archive video showing that she was in fact greeted with a welcoming ceremony featuring an 8-year-old girl reading a poem. Clinton’s campaign releases a statement pointing out that it was “a pretty long poem.”

 

And there was August:

 

Barack Obama, continuing to shake up the establishment, selects as his running mate Joe Biden, a tireless fighter for change since he was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1849. The Democratic Party gathers in Denver to formally nominate Obama, who descends from his Fortress of Solitude to mesmerize the adoring crowd with an acceptance speech objectively described by The New York Times as “comparable to the Gettysburg Address, only way better.”

 

Meanwhile John McCain, still searching for the perfect running mate, tells his top aides in a conference call that he wants ‘’someone who is capable of filling my shoes.” Unfortunately, he is speaking into the wrong end of his cellular phone, and his aides think he said ‘’someone who is capable of killing a moose.” Shortly thereafter McCain stuns the world, and possibly himself, by selecting Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a no-nonsense hockey mom with roughly 114 children named after random nouns such as “Hamper.”

 

And there was November:

 

Barack Obama, in a historic triumph, becomes the nation’s first black president since the second season of 24, setting off an ecstatically joyful and boisterous all-night celebration that at times threatens to spill out of The New York Times newsroom. Obama, following through on his promise to bring change to Washington, quickly begins assembling an administration consisting of a diverse group of renegade outsiders, ranging all the way from lawyers who attended Ivy League schools and then worked in the Clinton administration to lawyers who attended entirely different Ivy League schools and then worked in the Clinton administration.

 

But the hopeful mood is dampened by grim economic news. The stock market plummets farther as investors realize that the only thing that had been keeping the economy afloat was the millions of dollars spent daily on TV commercials for presidential candidates explaining how they would fix the economy. As it becomes increasingly clear that the federal government’s plan of giving hundreds of billions of dollars to dysfunctional companies has not fixed the problem, the government comes up with a bold new plan: give more hundreds of billions of dollars to dysfunctional companies. Soon the government is in a bailout frenzy, handing out money left and right, at one point accidentally giving $14 billion to a man delivering a Domino’s pizza to the Treasury building.

 

And so it goes.

 

It’s a good thing the year is over – no more looking back.

 

Gridlock Assured

The question is where we go from here. The economy is collapsing, as is rather obvious:

 

The worst financial crisis in over 80 years, sparked by the meltdown of the risky US subprime mortgage market, made this year one of the worst ever for investors, wiping some $10 trillion off major stock markets. It also radically changed the landscape of global finance, bringing down big U.S. investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and crippling the credit system that keeps the world economy humming.

 

… Tuesday brought more dismal economic news in the United States, with single-family home prices down 18 percent in October from a year earlier and consumer confidence plunging to a record low due to severe job cuts. “We are not going to be seeing anything fundamentally positive from the US for the time being,” said Michael Woolfolk, senior currency strategist at Bank of New York Mellon.

 

Things are shutting down, and the general consensus seems to be that we need some sort of New Deal – fix the roads, bridges, schools and hospitals, and anything else that needs fixing. Rebuild the power grid so not only do we get no more of those cascading blackouts, but we can move power from remote wind and solar power complexes to population centers where we need it. Oh yeah – we have to build those too.

 

Actually, it hardly matters what we do – the idea is to get people working again, lots of people, so they have money to buy goods and services, and there’s then a reason to supply those, and not just lay off more folks left and right and wait for better times. It’s pretty simple, really. And if you’re going to get into a make-work mode like that, why not make the work useful? Not much of the nation’s infrastructure has had much attention for decades – visitors from abroad are surprised America is so shabby and rundown, and bridges falling down and the power going out is not impressive. With our education system ranked somewhere around twenty-eighth in the world, and our high infant mortality rate, and even our best home broadband service running at twentieth the speed you find in Japan or France, at triple the cost, we’re looking a little third-world. We might as well fix up the place while we’re at it.

 

Yes, this would mean massive deficit spending – and the plans being discussed range up to a trillion dollars, about what the Iraq War will soon have cost us. But every economist in the world says this must be done, and fears we may be too timid. We’re in big trouble.

 

Of course, the Republicans are unhappy – see House Leader John Boehner Solicits Stimulus Skeptical Economists over the Web. Boehner hasn’t had much luck. All the economists agree – he hasn’t been able to find that big block of famous economists who says we should simply cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy and just wait this out.

 

But there is an opposition. Regarding Obama’s big stimulus plans, Mitch McConnell is very concerned and wants hearings:

 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voiced skepticism today about the emerging economic stimulus plan, applying a brake to Democratic plans to quickly pass up to $850 billion in spending and tax cuts soon after President-elect Barack Obama’s Jan. 20 inauguration.

 

“As of right now, Americans are left with more questions than answers about this unprecedented government spending, and I believe the taxpayers deserve to know a lot more about where it will be spent before we consider passing it,” McConnell said in a statement, which will be publicly issued later today.

 

A friend in New York, reading the previous column on this, sent this along:

 

The obstructionist stuff is just plain depressing – but, can they get away with it for long, or will they cave, under pressure?

 

That depends on what you consider pressure. Via Talk Left there was Politico’s take on Mitch McConnell story:

 

McConnell may be likely to side with the growing public sentiment against the government’s unprecedented use of federal dollars to jolt the economy…

 

But about that growing public sentiment, it seems Politico just made that up:

 

A new national poll suggests most Americans favor an economic stimulus package even if it comes with an $800 billion price tag, although that support doesn’t indicate the public wants to see a new era of big government. Two-thirds of people polled think Present-elect Barack Obama’s stimulus package will help the economy. Fifty-six percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Tuesday said they favor the stimulus package that President-elect Barack Obama is proposing; 42 percent were opposed.

 

Something else is going on here. As for the Republicans blocking pretty much all stimulus programs, they do have those forty-one votes in the Senate, and you need sixty votes to end debate and bring anything to a vote – so with any bill they can and will block cloture. Nothing will make it to a vote. The rules are rules – you need sixty senators agreeing that it’s time to vote on any bill, and if you can’t get that agreement, debate stays open, forever. Democrats don’t have sixty senate seats. That’s just the way it is. Maybe in two years they might, but probably not even then.

 

So, unless some Republicans defect – Olympia Snow and Susan Collins perhaps – nothing will pass. And when things crash for good – unemployment hits twenty-five percent and whole industries fold – the Republicans can blame the Democrats for not getting anything done. Hey, the Democrats controlled congress, they had the majority in both houses, and they blew it. They’re useless, you know.

 

People will buy that – every single new outfit has always played it that way – and then they’ll be back in power. Lather, rinse, repeat – that’s the game. Since the Democrats will not reach sixty seats in the Senate, this is simply what will happen. There’s not much to do about it.

 

Why shut down the economy and assure economic ruin? Many Republicans feel they have to do this, as this is their chance to have what they always wanted, their chance for Herbert Hoover, finally, to defeat FDR, the man who ruined everything. See Jonah Goldberg here:

 

A very old story is once again being retold, with a few of the characters’ names updated to besmirch the innocent. In this story, conservatives are to blame for an economic crisis because they allegedly believe there is no role for government in the economy, and all economic crises are due to lax regulation of markets.

 

Cokie Roberts recently gave a sense of how old this story is on ABC’s “This Week.” She said of John McCain, “He’s a Republican, and whenever Republicans get into this kind of mess, everybody, even people who were not born or close to being born, the specter of Herbert Hoover comes out to haunt them.”

 

But Goldberg argues that Hoover was the real hero:

 

… there’s this idea that FDR rode to the rescue, saving the day by untying the American people from the railroad tracks of runaway capitalism. Former Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, now a surrogate for Barack Obama, recently said on NPR: “It’s very tempting to always think that the government should just stand back and let the private sector sort these problems out. That’s the kind of thinking that made the Depression ‘Great.’”

 

Summers should know better (in fact, I’m sure he does). The Great Depression was not made “Great” by government inaction. Indeed, FDR’s New Deal may have been wonderful in some mytho-poetic sense, and maybe some of its reforms can be defended in some broader context, but as an effort to end the Great Depression, the New Deal was a failure.

 

You see Hoover was right, except that he raised taxes – otherwise, had he won again, there would have been no Great Depression. Read the whole thing, if you wish. It’s what they call counterintuitive, or counterfactual. Perhaps having Herbert Hoover become a folk hero is something you didn’t expect. It’s bit depressing.

 

And of course Digby has a few choice words on this matter:

 

I’m watching stupid spokes-models on MSNBC chortle and giggle and express shock and disgust at the idea of all the “pork” that the governors have put into their stimulus requests, openly siding with the Republicans who say that the only fiscal stimulus that’s allowed will be in the form of tax cuts. The idea of projects to create jobs is simply not acceptable because they are now all labeled “pork.”

 

She knows the problem:

 

What with Mitch deciding to obstruct everything in sight and the media lining up to call all government spending for stimulus “pork” we may have a little problem on our hands. As Krugman says, the problem isn’t that the government might spend too much – it’s that it will spend too little. And it looks like the media and the Republicans are going to join forces to make sure that the government is hobbled in this regard before they even start.

 

She says this is just “another example of how the conservative movement work on rhetoric and propaganda over the past thirty years will continue to pay dividends even as they are out of power.”

 

It’s all in the framing:

 

Since people have not heard anything different during that period, as Democrats embraced the idea that government was the problem not the solution and that liberal ideology was “divisive” and wrong, they pretty much left the playing field to the conservatives. Now that the right wing ideologues have destroyed the economy, people don’t have any idea how a government is supposed to work and will be susceptible to tired, useless Hooveresque solutions because they simply don’t know anything else.

 

Is seems ideology does matter right now:

 

The idea of massive government spending to stimulate the economy is not intuitive when individuals are being told to tighten their personal belts and pay off their debts. (When people hear for decades that the government should run like a household budget or a business, that’s to be expected.)

 

If they had a simple faith that government is a solid, dependable actor, or were given a short primer in liberal economics as part of the political debate, they would know that this emergency requires serious government intervention. But they have been told for a quarter century that government is an irresponsible, spendthrift institution that stands in the way of individual prosperity and nobody has been saying otherwise, least of all Democrats who’ve also been fetishizing markets and praising tax cuts like a bunch of Ayn Rand groupies.

 

That happens when you let the other guys frame the issues. And now we’re stuck:

 

Obama will likely get some kind of large stimulus through the congress, but it’s probably going to take a huge amount of his political capital to get it done, which it shouldn’t, and will leave him with less than he needs to deal with the rest of this pile of compost the Republicans have left on his plate. And every incident of “pork” that is subsequently revealed will be exploited by the Republicans and gleefully reported by the press, thereby chipping away at the notion that the stimulus was the reason for any upturn, instead reinforcing the old saw about Democrats as feckless tax-and-spend liberals.

 

That is the game, even if it is, as she notes, a dangerous game:

 

This so-called pork is stimulus – and it doesn’t matter if the states spend it on courthouses or if they spend it on a snow making machine for a ski resort. It’s about getting money into the economy, preferably by building and making investments in things that will provide jobs in the long run. But the most important purpose is to give the economy a quick, strong jolt that only the government is capable of giving. Obsessing about pork is entirely beside the point.

 

So there is this advice:

 

Someday Democrats will learn that they need to make their own case to the people instead of repackaging warmed over Republican rhetoric. It puts them 20 points behind at beginning of every play. There may be enough good will toward Obama that they can get a serious stimulus through, but it shouldn’t take this scope of economic devastation for that to happen.

 

But here Digby really nails the faming issue.

 

She riffs on the new Vanity Fair oral history of the Bush administration:

 

Former administration underlings depict President Bush as a “Sarah Palin-like” leader with a short attention span who deferred on big decisions.

 

Larry Wilkerson, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said Vice President Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld promoted the notion they were a national security “dream team” to guide the foreign-policy amateur Bush.

 

“It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin-like President – because, let’s face it, that’s what he was – was going to be protected by this national security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire,” said Wilkerson.

 

She’s having none of that:

 

Yeah well, some of us repeatedly pointed this out from the get-go and we were endlessly lectured by the breathless media that the American people wanted a moronic “regular guy” rather than some boring egghead for president and that his election meant the “grown-ups” were back in charge, even though he clearly had the emotional maturity and judgment of a testosterone overdosing teenager.

 

And then, for years after 9/11 they actually tried to make us believe that he was some kind of Churchillian savant, whose “gut” was so brilliant that brains were irrelevant.

 

I’m sorry, but from the moment the Republicans trotted out that brainless brand name in a suit and passed him off as a leader (“I’m a leader cuz ah’ve led!”) I’ve been agog with wonder at the sheer audacity of their scam. It makes Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme look like a small time grift.

 

(And frankly, the demonization of Palin after their deification of Bush struck me from the beginning as nothing more than class and gender snobbery. There really is no substantial difference between them except that Palin actually had more government experience than Bush did. She was his natural successor.)

 

There is more at the link, but it comes down to this:

 

I’m sorry, these insiders dishing on Bush is fun and all, but I will always have a sour taste in my mouth from the years of being forced to listen to so many elites try to sell me on the absurd idea that George W. Bush was capable of being president in the first place and then force me to listen while they absurdly extolled him as one of the greatest leaders the world has ever known.

 

It was obvious from the first time I saw him slumped in his chair like a surly delinquent at a Republican primary debate that the man had no more business being president than my cat (who is far more dignified and has better table manners.) It was an insult that they even recruited him for the job and even worse insult that the press destroyed Al Gore on his behalf and managed to help him eke out a victory by presenting him as the rightful winner from election night on.

 

Why I’m supposed to be impressed by these belated observations now I can’t imagine.

 

Maybe it is part of the big plan – dump on Bush and talk up Herbert Hoover and what might have been had Hoover remained in charge.

 

Actually, as part of that Vanity Fair oral history, there’s this interesting tidbit from Richard Clarke, the former chief White House counterterrorism adviser:

 

We had a couple of meetings with the president, and there were detailed discussions and briefings on cyber-security and often terrorism, and on a classified program. With the cyber-security meeting, he seemed – I was disturbed because he seemed to be trying to impress us, the people who were briefing him. It was as though he wanted these experts, these White House staff guys who had been around for a long time before he got there – didn’t want them buying the rumor that he wasn’t too bright. He was trying – sort of overly trying – to show that he could ask good questions, and kind of yukking it up with Cheney.

 

The contrast with having briefed his father and Clinton and Gore was so marked. And to be told, frankly, early in the administration, by Condi Rice and [her deputy] Steve Hadley, you know, Don’t give the president a lot of long memos, he’s not a big reader – well, shit. I mean, the president of the United States is not a big reader?

 

Ah – Hoover’s looking better all the time. It’s all a game.

 

And any good idea can be stopped.