is Bush somehow involved in Plamegate?
no way, I don’t believe it…really? are you sure? hmmm…ok, I guess I could see it, but I mean, really? oh gosh. who’d a thunk it?
I woke up this morning and was disappointed to find I still believe in Jesus Christ our Savior. :(
computerized valet service coming to Chinatown in NYC
WD-40 is freaking magic
“if you want to know what happened, you’re going to have to sue us…waahahahahahah”
Helen is cool
From Candy Sandwich:
“This is the most secret administration I’ve ever covered because they do so many things that are bad… Are there any Republicans in here?”
The audience laughed, charmed by the feisty octogenarian. The small crowd gathered at the newest Olssons Books and Records to hear veteran journalist Helen Thomas talk about her newest book, Watchdogs of Democracy? The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public.
A coffee cup on the table loomed larger than life in front of her tiny, stooped frame and seemed to require both hands to lift. Wrinkles lined her face; she wore lipstick that complemented her muted autumnal blazer. A press pass dangled from a cord around her neck.
The store manager introduced her as an icon for journalism for “how many years?”
“Don’t tell them!” Thomas protested, laughing. The whole crowd laughed when the manager said she’d “gone through nine presidents.”
In November 1960, Thomas began covering then President-elect John F. Kennedy, following him to the White House in 1961. She has traveled around the world several times with Presidents Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, and has covered every Economic Summit.
This tiny woman inspired awe in the crowd. Before the event began, people whispered reverently. Hushed bits and phrases such as “shoot an arrow into the air” and “it’s fun, though” and “you’ve lost your coat, Walter” drifted through the waiting crowd, the growing crowd. Whispers of the warren under Crystal City, days without sunlight.
The audience ranged in age, from the white-haired, cane-assisted woman in the front to the young, idealistic journalism student who practically prostrated himself at her feet before the event began. A Peace Corps type sat quietly, beautifully earthy in her rugged cargo pants, layered Ts and a batik scarf around her neck. A man in a ski parka and headband. Balding intellectuals. Government employees. Accents floated above our heads.
In the background, registers ticked loudly, tapping a syncopated beat. When Thomas spoke, her strangely young voice resonated clearly, as did her convictions. She spoke frankly against the current administration and against the war in Iraq.
“We are in the worst shape I have ever seen our country,” she said more than once during her brief talk and the question and answer session that followed. Thomas asked if everyone had seen the President’s State of the Union address. She mentioned the phrase, “Give peace a chance” and offered “Give war a chance” as the underlying message to the nation.
She quoted William Sloane Coffin, Jr., paraphrasing his lines, “The war against Iraq is as disastrous as it is unnecessary; perhaps in terms of its wisdom, purpose and motives, the worst war in American history…. Our military men and women…were not called to defend America but rather to attack Iraq. They were not called to die for, but rather to kill for, their country. What more unpatriotic thing could we have asked of our sons and daughters…?”
More than the government, though, and more than the war, Thomas lamented the current state of journalism.
“Is the press corps less hard-hitting than years past?” asked the red-haired man by the door.
“I’ll say,” Thomas said. “That’s the premise of my book. They’ve let us down… It’s a mess. I think they’ve let the country down. They were afraid.”
“If they don’t ask the questions, nobody will.”
For every question she answered, more hands arose, more questions were asked, the same questions repeated. A voice from the back defended the war with Iraq. The speaker equated the current war with World War II, raising the ire of a white-haired veteran in the front. The speaker proposed entering every war-torn nation, stopping rape, stopping murder. He supported the deployment of more troops saying they signed up to die for our country.
He apparently missed the Coffin quote.
“We have no right to be in Iraq,” Thomas said. Her agent cut off the angry voices and lined people up for the signing portion of the evening. The dissenter disappeared. My brother joined the queue, getting a signature for me, a picture for himself. She talked to him, to us for a while, and posed for another picture with both of us, snapped by a soft-spoken man with a handlebar mustache dressed in black, before turning back to the line.
Fiery convictions in an aging body, opinionated, strong and more than a little bit scary, Thomas reminded me of my Grandma Mavis and my brother lamented that we didn’t have more time. He wanted to take her out for coffee, ask her questions, meet for dinner.
“You’re in love,” I teased. He admitted he was half in love with the octogenarian who held true to her convictions in that Virginia bookstore, a woman who has spent more than half a decade asking questions and forming her mind.
The Psychology Behind the Worst Possible President
Back in the year 2000, when George W. Bush lost the popular vote and was shoe-horned into office by the Supreme Court in spite of clear conflicts of interest on the part of Scalia and Thomas, the psychology of Little George was known to only a few.
To most of us he seemed like a doofus — a more or less well-meaning guy who enjoyed running things like baseball teams and the State of Texas if not too much work was involved. Had been an alcoholic and a drug user, but had apparently come clean in some hazy, quasi-religious way — that was his personal history to many Americans (if not to all those who met with Karl Rove behind closed doors and heard the truth).
At any rate, I remember thinking that Bill Clinton had done such a good job over the years getting the budget into a surplus and winning good feelings around the world that it really didn’t matter who of the four who were running (Gore, Bradley, McCain, Bush) might win. They all seemed about the same in lots of ways.
What we really needed was some respite from Clinton’s own penchant for mischief. I liked Clinton. I remember that The New Yorker magazine asked me for my take on the Lewinsky scandal, and I said that on balance, in spite of the brouhaha, I still preferred a president who would make love, not war. Clinton was a flawed human being, that was evident, but he knew it. He never didn’t know it. And he was always trying to make amends.
But he was exhausting — or the media made him exhausting. I thought we were due for a rest.
Little did we know, of course, that the neocons thought we were due for a war. Thinktank gun-jockeys looking for a fight. Do they personally have some human qualities? Who cares. May they rot.
At any rate, what I think happened is that when the Bush/Scowcroft/Baker faction decided to use Little George as their presidential poster boy to expand their Middle-East-based wealth and power, they didn’t reckon with Cheney and Rumsfeld. They thought their boy would be personable and easy to control.
The key moment was when Cheney went looking for a vice-presidential candidate and found himself. Once they had given him the opening and he had publicly used it to aggrandize himself and his agenda, B/S/B realized that for the sake of party solidarity, they had to live with it. When Baker engineered the coup that was Florida (and I do think one of the “perks” Bush offered as a candidate was that Florida was guaranteed ahead of time by Jeb and K. Harris), I think that B/S/B and C/R found themselves in an uneasy alliance — goals were the same, but temperaments were different. Right there at the pivot was Little George.
It’s pretty clear that Little George requires a constant stream of flattery and cajolery to keep him going, and this was to be supplied by Harriet Miers, Karen Hughes, and Condi Rice. At the same time, his words (and ideas) were going to be supplied by Michael Gerson, who was his favorite speech writer for five or six years, a man who hides his unscrupulous neocon soul beneath a holier-than-thou, falsely modest self presentation. Christian soldier in every sense of the word, and someone who has largely escaped the contempt he deserves for the mess we are in.
At the same time, Little George has a hard time with bad news, so he was never going be told the truth — he can’t take the truth, as Jack Nicholson might say — this is evident in the famous 9/11 film of Bush reading about his pet goat when he gets news of the WTC. Talk about dumbstruck and unprepared and feckless and doltish! No, I don’t think Little George planned the Trade Center attacks. If he had, he would have practiced a smarmy fake reaction, and he didn’t.
But he did get a feel, just a little feel, right after the attacks, of what it might be like to lead the nation. He got a feel and he liked it, and for the purposes of the neocons, it was a good feel and it gave them something to build on in their plan to overcome the cautious side of his nature, represented by B/S/B. The neocons, as we know to our sorrow, never pay back anything they owe, except perhaps with betrayal, so even though B/S/B got them into office, they were never going to listen to B/S/B unless they absolutely had to.
How do you build yourself a madman? Well, first you flatter him, and then you try never to make him angry, and then you feed him ideas that flatter him even more by making him seem to himself sentimentally visionary and powerful and righteous. You appeal to his already evident mean streak and his hot temper by reminding him all the time that he has enemies, and you cultivate his religious side so that the sense of righteous victimization inherent in extreme religion comes out.
If he were not already an ignorant, dependent, fragile, and rigid person, he would not be susceptible to this sort of conditioning, but by temperament and practice, he has nothing of his own to counter your efforts. Then you hire a few shyster-sycophants like John Yoo to tell him (ignorant as he is, with no actual understanding of the Constitution), that as president he can do whatever he wants.