The Reality
Friday, September 08, 2006
The History of Bush Foretold
It got me thinking. What else can we now see down the road? I ask myself that a lot. A chessplayer must have this strategic skill. It comes from knowing the patterns, the sequences, moves or events and how they tend to follow from one another. This hard data is balanced with an understanding of the psychology of your opponent and the currents of the context.
Merely loading a historian with all the relevant analogous situations and storylines from all of history as if his head was Deep Blue taking on Gary Kasparov, will never be enough to make the historian a prophet... or a profit. Not even Deep Blue wins every time. But I do think some of us on the left have a pretty good read of this President. "We know his soul." Now we can extrapolate a little.
The question I mull over like a delicious single malt is where on the list of worst Presidents ever, the boy king Bush Junior will fall like so much dead meat. Consider the competition:
James Polk's (1845-1849) reputation among historians is one for unparalleled deviousness thanks to his manufacturing a war with Mexico and his destructive and covert pro-slavery views. A liberal Illinois congressman once called him a liar on the floor of the House of Representatives saying that President Polk's war, "was from beginning to end, the sheerest deception" and that Polk himself was "a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man." That Congressman, Abraham Lincoln, was surely giving aid and comfort to America's enemies in saying those words (according to Joe Lieberman). Polk was hated and he hated the people. At least Polk had the decency to only serve one term and then die shortly after leaving office, providing a graceful exit that spared him the ignominy which he and other pro-slavery conservatives deserve.
Bush's reputation will probably have no such reprieve. Unless he dies in a meeting with President-elect John Edwards. Though I'm still hoping for a full cabinet murder-suicide.
Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) oversaw the ridiculous puritanical idiocy of prohibition, the rise of anti-immigration lynch mobs, the rise of murderous KKK local government in the South, a disastrous and pointless invasion and occupation of the Philippines finally reaching the breaking point -- not to mention the total collapse of the American economy and a staggering Great Depression dragging the dollar’s value down to where it wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. That's a lot of failure for one sentence.
It remains to be seen if Bush will produce another depression, but not even Hoover was able to rally 1 billion people around the world to despise the United States the way Bush did. And he did it while simultaneously pissing on our closest and oldest allies too! Credit where credit is due, Bush was the first President since Hoover to lose jobs over the course of his presidency, so maybe Bush is on his way to catching Hoover in one of the all time greats' greatest strength -- shattering economies.
Just about every president has some charges of corruption leveled against him, though Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877) is labeled the worst in this regard for graft and corruption on a gargantuan scale including a kickback scandal that led to the resignation of his secretary of war under the shadow of impeachment. Lots of Presidents mishandled Reconstruction after the Civil War, Grant was the first and the worst. Yet these scandals produced no indictments of Cabinet secretaries and only one of a White House aide, who was later acquitted. It's not like the secretary stole 8.8 billion dollars the way Bush's cronies did in the CPA. Salvaging Grant's legacy would be his positive racial stance, the fact that the man really could write a hell of a book and win a huge ass war. Three things Dubya... is working on. Okay. Sucks at.
By contrast, the most scandal-ridden administration in the modern era, apart from Nixon's, was Ronald Reagan's, now widely remembered through a haze of delusional nostalgia as a paragon of virtue. A total of twenty-nine Reagan officials, including White House national security adviser Robert McFarlane and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, were convicted on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra terrorist-appeasement program. An illegal lobbying and looting scandal inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development forced three Cabinet officers - HUD Sec. Samuel Pierce, AG Edwin Meese and Sec. Def. Caspar Weinberger - to flee their posts under clouds of charges.
In contrast, not a single official in the Clinton administration was even indicted over his or her White House duties, despite repeated high-profile investigations and a successful, highly partisan impeachment drive. Many aspects of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson are now viewed as a partisan witchhunt almost as baseless as that of Bill Clinton. Almost.
But. George W. Bush and his similarly incurious Republican sheeple in Congress are matched by an equally feckless and quisling press corps that behave like a claque suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. Because the Bush Administration enjoys such a fiercely partisan and loyal majority in Congress and such an uninterested media (vain, addicted to trivialities, merrily content to stenograph for conservative propaganda), Bush does not face required oversight and therefore he is most likely safe for decades while his records are sealed.
Bush didn't get off scot free however, in Scooter Libby’s indictment, Bush still has the highest level official indicted while in office since the Grant Administration - not bad. But all of the Congressional scandals and Duke Cunningham / Abramoff / Ralph Reed scandals may be of his Republican party, but they're not of his particular Administration. For the shit to hit the fan on this Administration, it would take a Democratic Majority in Congress out for blood and a media culture that abandons the "he-said, she-said" style of reporting - and the utter abdication of responsibility that is it's byproduct.
It would take a civic and media climate where adjudication of fact and respect for the rule of law again become a virtue. In other words: not in America, not in my lifetime. When Bush's records are unsealed though, that'll be the day. It'll be a day 1 million years in the future. They'll be opened by a brave expedition of inter-galactic squid-headed space creatures from the Dagobah System who come to excavate the wasteland Planet #3's burned out ruins.
So Bush won't be remembered in his lifetime for his corruption scandals, but Bush surely deserves to be known now as the most despotic of Presidents. Those few times when Congress has passed legislation to limit his assertions of absolute power, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious "signing statements," which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question - even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Ha! Earlier loathed presidents, including Jackson, freaked people out merely by offering their own view of the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts.
But dude, Bush doesn't bother with that! He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then goes on and governs however the hell he pleases - using the "signing statements" as if they were line-item vetoes, stating that he just sees the law differently. Serious. It's a brazen kick to the nuts of the founding fathers who crafted the Constitution in retaliation of identical behavior from King George. In those instances when Bush's violations of federal law have come to light, as over warrantless domestic spying, the White House has devised a novel solution in four steps : Stonewall investigations into the law breaking, put the leaker in jail, accuse the media of treason, and then ask a submissive gimp Congress to simply rewrite the law being broken so that the shits no longer illegal. Stunning. Orwellian. The Sith are a powerful party.
Back to the other contenders: Akin to George W. Bunnypants, President Warren Harding (1920-1923) is remembered for being wholly unqualified for the job. A amiable dolt, steered by corrupt conservative Republican puppeteers and party power-brokers, his administration collapsed under the Teapot Dome scandal where public land in Wyoming was given to shady oilmen connected to the Secretary of the Interior. Horrifically stupid, racist, and isolationist, Harding was a drunk and also a compulsive gambler. Harding literally gambled away the White House flatware while pissdrunk. Harding's Presidency is a model for a "failure," but again, lucky for him he died only a few years in to his one awful term after he ate some bad crab. Aw.
James Buchanan's (1857-1861) southern elitist partisanship, mixed with his effete God-complex helped further divide the country which was teetering on the edge of Civil War. His inaction also helped further enflame sectional violence. Ultimately he failed to avert the Civil War. His rudderless leadership ruined his party, and being such a weak foppish clown, he was prone to frequent bouts of depression which invariably affected his Presidenting. The single decision to not deal with succession might be the worst single decision ever made by a President.
Ah, but wait. In ten years we'll see clearly whose decision was worse; Buchanan's decision (to allow Civil War) or Bush's decision to invade Iraq... for no good reason and then proceed to remake the Middle East in the image of.... of a hornets nest, hit with a cat, swung by it's tail. (It'll take 10 years for the hornets and the cat do do their thing.)
But really folks, it comes down to this, in a time of great civil strife, President Buchanan did not have the guts to act - Bush Junior did.
When America was attacked by Osama bin Laden -- for Bush to stare in the face of that historical moment, with the entire world rallied in compassion, infused with a feeling of unprecedented, almost ethereal harmony with the grieving Americans - compatriots in the human race; that singular time of supreme clarity on the whole human condition, and the unfathomable interconnectivity of such a fragile species, on this delicate planet, all of us eager for positive reinvention and rededication to humanity, for Bush to look into the face of that, pause, and then rape it in the ear, kidney punch it, take a dump on its desk and then go and do the EXACT WRONG THING in order to destroy the world, takes guts... no it takes more than guts. It takes atom-splitting stupidity and a sheer, unrelenting hatred for all that is good and decent.
Bush wins. ¶ 10:34 PM
After rereading this post of mine called The Next Deal, I really have to point out, hot damn. This is from a year ago. It's scarily prescient if I may say so myself. Go on and read it again, for the first time.
It got me thinking. What else can we now see down the road? I ask myself that a lot. A chessplayer must have this strategic skill. It comes from knowing the patterns, the sequences, moves or events and how they tend to follow from one another. This hard data is balanced with an understanding of the psychology of your opponent and the currents of the context.
Merely loading a historian with all the relevant analogous situations and storylines from all of history as if his head was Deep Blue taking on Gary Kasparov, will never be enough to make the historian a prophet... or a profit. Not even Deep Blue wins every time. But I do think some of us on the left have a pretty good read of this President. "We know his soul." Now we can extrapolate a little.
The question I mull over like a delicious single malt is where on the list of worst Presidents ever, the boy king Bush Junior will fall like so much dead meat. Consider the competition:
James Polk's (1845-1849) reputation among historians is one for unparalleled deviousness thanks to his manufacturing a war with Mexico and his destructive and covert pro-slavery views. A liberal Illinois congressman once called him a liar on the floor of the House of Representatives saying that President Polk's war, "was from beginning to end, the sheerest deception" and that Polk himself was "a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man." That Congressman, Abraham Lincoln, was surely giving aid and comfort to America's enemies in saying those words (according to Joe Lieberman). Polk was hated and he hated the people. At least Polk had the decency to only serve one term and then die shortly after leaving office, providing a graceful exit that spared him the ignominy which he and other pro-slavery conservatives deserve.
Bush's reputation will probably have no such reprieve. Unless he dies in a meeting with President-elect John Edwards. Though I'm still hoping for a full cabinet murder-suicide.
Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) oversaw the ridiculous puritanical idiocy of prohibition, the rise of anti-immigration lynch mobs, the rise of murderous KKK local government in the South, a disastrous and pointless invasion and occupation of the Philippines finally reaching the breaking point -- not to mention the total collapse of the American economy and a staggering Great Depression dragging the dollar’s value down to where it wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. That's a lot of failure for one sentence.
It remains to be seen if Bush will produce another depression, but not even Hoover was able to rally 1 billion people around the world to despise the United States the way Bush did. And he did it while simultaneously pissing on our closest and oldest allies too! Credit where credit is due, Bush was the first President since Hoover to lose jobs over the course of his presidency, so maybe Bush is on his way to catching Hoover in one of the all time greats' greatest strength -- shattering economies.
Just about every president has some charges of corruption leveled against him, though Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877) is labeled the worst in this regard for graft and corruption on a gargantuan scale including a kickback scandal that led to the resignation of his secretary of war under the shadow of impeachment. Lots of Presidents mishandled Reconstruction after the Civil War, Grant was the first and the worst. Yet these scandals produced no indictments of Cabinet secretaries and only one of a White House aide, who was later acquitted. It's not like the secretary stole 8.8 billion dollars the way Bush's cronies did in the CPA. Salvaging Grant's legacy would be his positive racial stance, the fact that the man really could write a hell of a book and win a huge ass war. Three things Dubya... is working on. Okay. Sucks at.
By contrast, the most scandal-ridden administration in the modern era, apart from Nixon's, was Ronald Reagan's, now widely remembered through a haze of delusional nostalgia as a paragon of virtue. A total of twenty-nine Reagan officials, including White House national security adviser Robert McFarlane and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, were convicted on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra terrorist-appeasement program. An illegal lobbying and looting scandal inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development forced three Cabinet officers - HUD Sec. Samuel Pierce, AG Edwin Meese and Sec. Def. Caspar Weinberger - to flee their posts under clouds of charges.
In contrast, not a single official in the Clinton administration was even indicted over his or her White House duties, despite repeated high-profile investigations and a successful, highly partisan impeachment drive. Many aspects of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson are now viewed as a partisan witchhunt almost as baseless as that of Bill Clinton. Almost.
But. George W. Bush and his similarly incurious Republican sheeple in Congress are matched by an equally feckless and quisling press corps that behave like a claque suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. Because the Bush Administration enjoys such a fiercely partisan and loyal majority in Congress and such an uninterested media (vain, addicted to trivialities, merrily content to stenograph for conservative propaganda), Bush does not face required oversight and therefore he is most likely safe for decades while his records are sealed.
Bush didn't get off scot free however, in Scooter Libby’s indictment, Bush still has the highest level official indicted while in office since the Grant Administration - not bad. But all of the Congressional scandals and Duke Cunningham / Abramoff / Ralph Reed scandals may be of his Republican party, but they're not of his particular Administration. For the shit to hit the fan on this Administration, it would take a Democratic Majority in Congress out for blood and a media culture that abandons the "he-said, she-said" style of reporting - and the utter abdication of responsibility that is it's byproduct.
It would take a civic and media climate where adjudication of fact and respect for the rule of law again become a virtue. In other words: not in America, not in my lifetime. When Bush's records are unsealed though, that'll be the day. It'll be a day 1 million years in the future. They'll be opened by a brave expedition of inter-galactic squid-headed space creatures from the Dagobah System who come to excavate the wasteland Planet #3's burned out ruins.
So Bush won't be remembered in his lifetime for his corruption scandals, but Bush surely deserves to be known now as the most despotic of Presidents. Those few times when Congress has passed legislation to limit his assertions of absolute power, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious "signing statements," which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question - even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Ha! Earlier loathed presidents, including Jackson, freaked people out merely by offering their own view of the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts.
But dude, Bush doesn't bother with that! He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then goes on and governs however the hell he pleases - using the "signing statements" as if they were line-item vetoes, stating that he just sees the law differently. Serious. It's a brazen kick to the nuts of the founding fathers who crafted the Constitution in retaliation of identical behavior from King George. In those instances when Bush's violations of federal law have come to light, as over warrantless domestic spying, the White House has devised a novel solution in four steps : Stonewall investigations into the law breaking, put the leaker in jail, accuse the media of treason, and then ask a submissive gimp Congress to simply rewrite the law being broken so that the shits no longer illegal. Stunning. Orwellian. The Sith are a powerful party.
Back to the other contenders: Akin to George W. Bunnypants, President Warren Harding (1920-1923) is remembered for being wholly unqualified for the job. A amiable dolt, steered by corrupt conservative Republican puppeteers and party power-brokers, his administration collapsed under the Teapot Dome scandal where public land in Wyoming was given to shady oilmen connected to the Secretary of the Interior. Horrifically stupid, racist, and isolationist, Harding was a drunk and also a compulsive gambler. Harding literally gambled away the White House flatware while pissdrunk. Harding's Presidency is a model for a "failure," but again, lucky for him he died only a few years in to his one awful term after he ate some bad crab. Aw.
James Buchanan's (1857-1861) southern elitist partisanship, mixed with his effete God-complex helped further divide the country which was teetering on the edge of Civil War. His inaction also helped further enflame sectional violence. Ultimately he failed to avert the Civil War. His rudderless leadership ruined his party, and being such a weak foppish clown, he was prone to frequent bouts of depression which invariably affected his Presidenting. The single decision to not deal with succession might be the worst single decision ever made by a President.
Ah, but wait. In ten years we'll see clearly whose decision was worse; Buchanan's decision (to allow Civil War) or Bush's decision to invade Iraq... for no good reason and then proceed to remake the Middle East in the image of.... of a hornets nest, hit with a cat, swung by it's tail. (It'll take 10 years for the hornets and the cat do do their thing.)
But really folks, it comes down to this, in a time of great civil strife, President Buchanan did not have the guts to act - Bush Junior did.
When America was attacked by Osama bin Laden -- for Bush to stare in the face of that historical moment, with the entire world rallied in compassion, infused with a feeling of unprecedented, almost ethereal harmony with the grieving Americans - compatriots in the human race; that singular time of supreme clarity on the whole human condition, and the unfathomable interconnectivity of such a fragile species, on this delicate planet, all of us eager for positive reinvention and rededication to humanity, for Bush to look into the face of that, pause, and then rape it in the ear, kidney punch it, take a dump on its desk and then go and do the EXACT WRONG THING in order to destroy the world, takes guts... no it takes more than guts. It takes atom-splitting stupidity and a sheer, unrelenting hatred for all that is good and decent.
Bush wins. ¶ 10:34 PM
