The Dish

A reader sent me a piece by Pete Hamill from January 2001. It’s buried in Hamill’s mess of a website, but if you search under "Journalism" and then click on "Politics", you’ll find the whole thing. In the piece, Hamill laments Bush’s crippled 2000 election victory and predicts the ensuing presidency. I found the following passge disturbing:

"[W]e should be prepared for armed melodrama. Bush is not a worldly man. His father was head of the CIA, ambassador to China, and president of the United States. The son stayed home. During the Vietnam War, he hurried into the Texas National Guard, defending the skies over Houston. He has visited only two foreign countries, one of them Mexico (the other seems to have slipped his mind). He was the first presidential candidate in memory who needed briefings about geography.
But he knows where Iraq is, and is completely aware of what his father failed to do in that country: remove Saddam Hussein. A son in rivalry with a father can be a very dangerous man. To show "leadership", the new President Bush might defy the European allies of the United States, and risk another oil crisis, by seizing on some slight -–real or imagined – to finish off Saddam Hussein. He would thus force his father to admire him and get a boost in the public opinion polls."

I didn’t see it coming. But it behooves me to acknowledge those who did.

"I lost the house I spent 3 years lovingly restoring by hand, my job, and everything that didn’t fit into my car. This week I finally settled with my insurance company (for far less than I think was fair). I am living in a 1 room apartment in Baton Rouge, and earning about 55% of my previous income. Multiply my story by several hundred thousand. Many thousands fared worse than me. I will never forget – nor forgive – the incompetence that cost my fellow New Orleanians their lives. I will never forget that picture of our President yucking it up with the guitar at a fund-raiser in San Diego while my city drowned.
I pray that the (tiny, very tiny) silver lining is that Katrina pulled the curtain back on his arrogant incompetence."

A Baptist college boots a sophomore because he wrote about his sexual orientation on his MySpace.com page. I liked this quote from a friend of his:

"I would consider Jason a Christian because so many of his values are Christian. He embodies everything a friend should be. A lot of people are suffering because he is not here."

Notice there’s no accusation of actual homosexual conduct. Just a purge of a social undesirable. Discrimination on the lines of Benedict XVI. Just as Jesus would have done.

"Every day now, it seems, hundreds of thousands of ungrateful human parasites rally in American cities condemning their host country’s lack of hospitality … They have taken advantage of loopholes in our laws by dropping babies in this country who automatically become U.S. citizens, despite the illegal entry and presence of the parents … They are darn lucky I am not running the country. I would order mass arrests at these events, forcing every single participant to prove their legal right to be in this country or face deportation. I keep hearing about how expensive it would be to find all of the illegals and deport them. They are making it very easy for us with these rallies. The fact that no one is even suggesting roundups shows just how far gone our country is," – Joseph Farah, WorldNet Daily.

"Dropping babies?" The language tells you a lot about how some on the far right view these human beings.

"Can anyone doubt that matters are just as serious today, on the American right, as they were for the left in 1947? In much the same way that liberals felt torment over disowning the monsters on "their side," so we now see decent conservatives writhing and twisting, like pretzels, in order to make excuses for rapacious kleptocrats, incompetent thugs, moronic armchair warriors, cynical spin doctors, conniving feudalists and screeching fanatics.
Are they truly loyal to such monsters? Are they kept in rigid lockstep out of some misplaced fealty to a ridiculous "political axis" that was insipid even when the French invented it, in 1789? A left-right axis that offers no relevance or insight or utility for an agile and sophisticated Third Millennium?" – David Brin, on his blog.

Greg Djerejian gets to the heart of the matter. In this war, the president has essentially delegated all key decisions to the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis. The fact that these two are manifestly incompetent, have trashed the military, destroyed its honor, and turned Iraq into an early chapter in Hobbes is irrelevant. The president doesn’t trust anyone else sufficiently to replace them. And he’s too out of touch to make the key decisions himself. Commenter Joe Britt adds:

"Bush has delegated virtually all war planning and management of the military to Rumsfeld; his own relationships with uniformed military officers or other Pentagon officials appear to be neither numerous nor deep compared to those of other wartime Presidents… All I’m saying is that what the sudden departure of a man who has served as a kind of Deputy President for over four years would leave is a situation in which many decisions now finally made in Rumsfeld’s office could not be made, military leaders that have by and large allowed themselves to be run by Rumsfeld would be left to jockey amongst themselves for position and influence in his absence, and — from Bush’s point of view this factor must loom especially large — the President’s tenuous grasp both on what is happening in Iraq and what is happening in the military would be further exposed."

This is why Rumsfeld will stay. Bush has few alternatives. He couldn’t handle bringing in an outsider like Lieberman, becaue he runs his administration as a cabal of friends and lackeys, and that’s the only form of government he knows how to handle. Case in point: check out this video clip from Wonkette. It’s Bush responding to a smart question about the rules governing foreign mercenaries in Iraq. The president hasn’t a clue what the rules are and says his method for dealing with such issues is to call Rumsfeld. If this president is relying on Rumsfeld for actual data on this war, he will not get an assessment of reality. Rumsfeld has no grip on reality. But he sure has a grip on the president.

(Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty).

These new poll numbers seem to me to reflect the unraveling of this presidency. What’s stunning is not the approve/disapprove numbers, which are consistent with other polls, i.e. mid-to-upper 30s approve, mid-to-upper 50s disapprove. What’s stunning is that almost half the sample – 47 percent – strongly disapproves. I came to the conclusion that Bush was an incompetent abetting something much more dangerous before the last election, hence my reluctant endorsement of the pathetic Kerry. But the broad middle of American opinion has taken longer to see what this administration is and what Republicanism has become. These are pretty stunning numbers given the relatively strong economy – strong in part because it’s been propped up by an unsustainable Keynesian stimulus.

Historians will figure this out, but my own view is that Katrina did it. Katrina was the equivalent of Toto pulling back the curtain. Once Bush’s passivity, indolence and arrogance were put on full display, once it was apparent that the government was not working, and that Bush was the reason, people figured out why the war in Iraq was such a shambles. And so the mystique required to sustain patriarchal authority was shattered. I think this is largely irreparable because it’s about a basic assessment of a single man. What worries me is that we have almost three more years. If we face a confrontation or a crisis, this president will not be able to carry Americans with him. Our enemies will take comfort from this. Which is why re-electing him was such a terrible risk.

"I voted for President Bush twice, and contributed to his campaign twice, but held my nose when I did it the second time. I don’t consider myself a Republican any longer. Thanks to this Administration and the Republicans in Congress, the Republican Party today is the party of pork-barrel spending, Congressional corruption ‚Äî and, I know folks on this web site don’t want to hear it, but deep down they know it’s true ‚Äî foreign and military policy incompetence. Frankly, speaking of incompetence, I think this Administration is the most politically and substantively inept that the nation has had in over a quarter of a century. The good news about it, as far as I’m concerned, is that it’s almost over," – George Conway, National Review.

But the latest results indicate Berlusconi might still make it.

It appears to have passed her by.