The definition of insanity

January 15th, 2009

First off, apologies for going AWOL; I’ve been without heat for six days — I was sincerely grateful for some this morning when the thermometer read 5 degrees, although it will take awhile for the bones of the house … and mine … to thaw. This was an ordeal, and I’m newly empathetic for those in Palin Territory who, apparently, have no one who gives a good tidily whether they make it through the winter or not. Make that the exclamation point on all things Republican and failed; we simply MUST become more than this, as a species.

So, the definition of insanity — we know that one, right? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. We should be able to sniff that out, easy enough at this point. Or can we?

Israel is pounding Gaza into phosphorescent pulp as we speak. Here’s a Fiori, illustrating the same-old mindlessness behind this struggle — you decide which one’s Israel and which one’s Hamas. Seriously — we’ve been twitching with guilt for 60 some years for having turned our heads and looked away from Jews being slaughtered … and now, we’re doing … what???

Insane, you say? I’ll just use a Bushism for that one — so what?

Condi got her leash pulled up short and Olmert’s narrative on that is akin to a big Israeli shoe being thrown at Bush’s head — he’s a good ducker, though; and he doesn’t care what anyone thinks anyway, he says. That’s good — because Juan Cole, below, thinks that more of us curl our lip at American compliance to Israel’s behavior than Dubby realizes.

Evidently our Dub doesn’t care about the Red Cross, who say they’re shocked at the conditions in Gaza; doesn’t care about Dennis Kucinich, who tells us that unless we stop this, our souls are at stake. Probably won’t even notice that the Israeli’s shelled the UN headquarters in Gaza, destroying food and humanitarian supplies, and then issued an … ummm … apology. Oopsie.

Doesn’t care that the national debt has increased by an astounding 72% during his tenure, or that, in his forever mentioned and pitched … hard-sell style … “ownership society,” foreclosure is up by 81% this year.

I started writing about what Bush didn’t care about in 2003 — I’ve logged thousands of posts and even more words about what didn’t catch his attention. Time has softened the climate of those early days, but if we are to remember Bush in all his glory, we need a little trot past all that’s gone before…

I wailed as the media sang songs of heroism and righteousness to lull the average citizen into a war of hubris, encouraged them to offer up their children and their treasure, declaring the slightest murmur of protest that of un-American Leftists — I ranted when the Dubby came to the podium to spread his double-tongued ego-speak, backed by the silent and leering Uncle Dick who seemed to be mouthing the words before they spilled from his lips — I railed at the vacant single-mindedness with which every bill was passed with the help of God’s own stalwarts and ass-kickers, Tom DeLay and John Ashcroft. Those were the Captain Codpiece days — when Rummy laughed at the ‘known unknowns’ … and at us, as well. The days when we got our war coverage ‘imbedded’ … and nobody questioned a damned thing.

All that came before Gonzales, yellowcake, Plame, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo — before Ninegate, Spygate and the many, many gates that came before and after that. As we wave farewell to the Bushies, let’s reckon not just the cost of their hubris in the international arena, but the years of domestic anxiety they’ve cost us including our loss of self-respect, confidence and economic security.

And now, as we arrive at Bush’s final hours, long anticipated, I’m pissy that the moment to kick him to the curb is upon us, but too many of us are living there to be able to enjoy the moment. Life has become one long, brutal emergency under George W. Bush — and to those remaining Neanderthals who say it couldn’t be helped because it all started with 9/11, let me offer you a long and resounding PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT!

To the Republican voices that shout loud and long with no proposals for commonwealth but only bitter obstruction, I can only say that you must, sooner or later, get on to the fact that the same arrogance that considers everything but right-wing Republican rhetoric un-American is the same kind of energy that considers a dead Palestinian child ‘collateral damage.’ You refuse to separate your narrow version of God from the inner working of a secular nation — but you cannot open your heart to see the need for humanity in governance. And now, after almost a decade of blank checks to do it your way, you still want to blame someone else for the rubble we see around us; that is neither sane nor insightful.

A tearful Pappy Bush [listen to him] has been making the rounds with George, as has a miffed Laura, upset at the tone of the election commentary — tonight the Dubby will give us a final farewell on TV … but no matter what the speechwriters craft, he gave us all we needed to know in his last presser. Despite eight long years ripe with opportunity to rise to the occasion of history, Bush leaves his tenure a self-involved narcissist to the last — allow Jon Stewart to clarify that for you.

Bush’s legacy will not be his moral convictions — I do not share them, nor does most of the nation who think he’s probably a nice enough guy and meant well, but fell on his ass as the lightweight he actually is; they should have read his resume before they elected him. His failure to serve a nation that now finds itself in severe crisis is matched by his failure to secure his party as leaders into the foreseeable future — and now he’ll do what he’s always done when a gig is over: walk away with a scratch and a smirk, mumbling that things will probably work out. His cheerleader skills, what he brought to the position of leader of the free world, is all he takes with him; he apparently learned nothing, hasn’t changed a bit, but … so he says … he’s had a really fun time anyway — and that, right there, says more about his moral poverty than anything else I could mention.

Yes, I’m pissy I’m not having that long-imagined big party with fireworks and shared glee as Dubby gives up his faux-cowboy hat and finally becomes a private citizen — but my house is too cold, my pantry too short, my piggybank tapped and my friends all scrambling to keep their own lives held together with spit and bailing wire.

Bush’s real legacy is … amazingly … that of a uniter. He has united the world and the nation against the kind of rough-shod, belligerent and narrow-minded politics he played — he’s united them against foreign adventurism, cronyism, greed and corporate excess, as this Telneas ‘toon illustrates; he’s given us a picture of personal and political littleness — and we’ve chosen against repeating that any time soon. The definition of our national insanity is hereby repealed.

Thanks, Dub — you’ve shown me how little Christ there is in the Christian community, how historically relevant the notion that empiricism can only gut those who aspire to it and how important it is, when you elect a president, to assess his/her personal maturity and emotional health [and do a quick read of their transcripts.]

So let’s raise one to the Uniter — may his remaining days be filled with self-reflection and insight, with realization and illumination; I could wish him no greater Hell … and one last painful shot at redemption.

Below, a few reads and links on Gaza, including Juan Cole and a Youtube of Dennis — as well, select articles on the Little Brush-popper, including a list of Bushisms [absurd that we can only find a snippet of tenderness toward this man when he reminds us of our kids endearing fumbles at the kindergarten play.]

And I offer … in lieu of inviting you all over for a proper celebration … a last look back at what WE KNEW so long ago — put brilliantly, as always, by our mentor in the fight for speaking truth to power, securing our liberty and promoting the moral high-ground, Molly Ivens [last.]

Jude

Dennis Kucinich speaks to the House of Representatives
YouTube

Robert Naiman: Kucinich to Introduce Gaza Ceasefire Resolution - Who Will Co-sponsor?

Have Bush and the Neocons Ruined it for the Israelis?
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Monday, January 05, 2009

Israel’s Free Ride Ends
As Israel pulverises Gaza, questions and doubts about Israeli policy are becoming more prominent in the American media
Michelle Goldberg, The Guardian/UK
Wednesday, January 14, 2009

The Moral Dead Zone
Robert C. Koehler, Common Wonders via Common Dream
Thursday, January 15, 2009

“Mr. Ban said too many people had died and there had been too much civilian suffering.”

That almost bears repeating, but I won’t because I don’t believe it. Too many? In the moral dead zone of the human heart, perennially justified as “war” (evoking honor, triumph, glory), there’s no such thing as too much suffering. There’s no bleeding child or shattered family or contaminated water supply that can’t be overlooked in the name of some great goal or strategic advantage, or converted to fodder for the next round of hatred, revenge and arms purchase.

Ban Ki-Moon, the U.N. secretary general, about to embark on a peace and diplomacy tour of the Middle East, was speaking, of course, about the hellish conditions in the Gaza Strip, pummeled by Israel with modern weaponry and Old Testament fury for the last three weeks. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the coalition government. Close to a thousand have died. Many more thousands have been injured or displaced. Too many?

No. Not even close. If too many had died - if hell had reached its capacity, or some other limit had at last been achieved - something would change. The collective enterprise of human violence would convulse and start malfunctioning. Fear, perhaps, would mutate into courage, anger into forgiveness, hatred into love. Or at least we would start looking at what we’re doing . . . how do I say this? With evolved compassion? With an understanding, with a determination to survive, we now disdain and mock?

Israel’s invasion of Gaza is the world’s spotlight war right now, reaping headlines, global censure, a special endorsement from the U.S. Congress and, apparently, an audiotape hiss from Osama bin Laden, possibly from beyond the grave.

What all of these reactions do, it seems to me, is confer an unwarranted special status on the war, as though it were isolated, without a context any deeper than its accompanying propaganda. This forces us to try to understand the war strictly on its own terms - who started it? who’s the bad guy? who’s innocent? - rather than as an occurrence within a larger, dysfunctional system as deep as human history and as wide as planetary politics.

This war, and the nine or 10 other armed conflicts officially classified as wars that are going on right now - including wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (4 million dead since 1997), Darfur-Sudan (500,000 dead since 2003), Somalia (400,000 dead since 1988), Sri Lanka (80,000 dead since 1983), and of course Iraq (possibly a million or more dead) and Afghanistan (35,000 dead) - whatever they are on their own terms, are also symptoms of a human syndrome of self-destruction.

So are the local conflicts on city streets and other jungles that are too small to be called wars. So are the horrific aftermaths of conflicts that have officially ended, including poisoned environments, the ruined health of participants and bystanders, unexploded mines and bombs, the psycho-spiritual traumas that never go away, and the grievances that fester from generation to generation.

What links them in an immediate way is the global arms industry, as corrupt as it is invisible, which does a trillion dollars worth of business annually worldwide, is crucial to every major economy and is therefore served, either with overt collusion or discreet silence, by governments and the mass media.

But the problem is bigger than mere greed. The business of war, like war itself, defies rational control and containment because it is fed by the paradox of human fear. As we arm to protect ourselves and fight back, our enemy also arms, and thus is born, over and over again, the cycle of escalation, from which the cynical can profit handsomely. The industry of war is self-perpetuating.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that, as Anup Shah noted recently in an essay on the arms industry for GlobalIssues.org, “The top five countries profiting from the arms trade are the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the U.S.A., U.K., France, Russia and China.”

Thus world peace - at least the sort of peace that most of us envision, which is sustained by international cooperation and universal disarmament rather than subjugation and the capacity for hair-trigger retaliation - would challenge the status quo of the world’s largest economies, as they have come to constitute themselves.

As long as we stay trapped in the paradox of fear, we can’t even use our intelligence to save ourselves. We have employed it to serve only our self-destruction. The ultimate paradox is that the military industrial complex, that highest of high-tech human endeavors, about which Dwight Eisenhower sounded the alarm nearly half a century ago, is wedded to the most primitive of human emotions. We have become trapped in our collective reptile brain.

Only if we disarm our intelligence do we have a chance to find wisdom. And only wisdom can save us. ++

Goodbye, George — a collection

America needed a titan in the White House, not a narcissist
George Bush’s presidency is being forgotten by the public already, even though he is still here
Frank Rich, The Observer
Sunday 11 January 2009

We like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians. So here, too, George W Bush has let us down. Even the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for President 43. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.

The last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Bush’s presidency found that 79 per cent of Americans will not miss him after he leaves the White House. He is being forgotten already, even if he’s not yet gone. You start to pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is. It stretches from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street and even into the heavens, which have been a safe haven for toxins under his passive stewardship. The discrepancy between the grandeur of the failure and the stature of the man is a puzzlement. We are still trying to compute it.

The one indisputable talent of his White House was its ability to create and sell propaganda both to the public and the press. Now that bag of tricks is empty as well. Bush’s first and last photo-ops in Iraq could serve as bookends to his entire tenure. On Thanksgiving weekend 2003, even as the Iraqi insurgency was spiralling, his secret trip to the war zone was a PR slam-dunk. The photo of the beaming commander-in-chief bearing a supersized decorative turkey for the troops was designed to make every front page and newscast in the country and it did. Five years later, in what was intended as a farewell victory lap to show off Iraq’s improved post-surge security, Bush was reduced to ducking shoes.

He tried to spin the ruckus as another victory for his administration’s programme of democracy promotion. “That’s what people do in a free society,” he said. He had made the same claim three years ago after the Palestinian elections, championed by his “freedom agenda” (and almost $500m of American aid), led to a landslide victory for Hamas. “There is something healthy about a system that does that,” Bush observed at the time, as he congratulated Palestinian voters for rejecting “the old guard”.

The ruins of his administration’s top policy priority can be found not only in Gaza but in the new “democratic” Iraq, where the local journalist who tossed the shoes was jailed without formal charges and may have been tortured. Almost simultaneously, opponents of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki accused him of making politically motivated arrests of rival-party government officials in anticipation of this month’s much-postponed provincial elections.

Condi Rice blamed the press for the image that sullied Bush’s Iraq swan song: “That someone chose to throw a shoe at the president is what gets reported over and over.” We are back where we came in. This was the same line Donald Rumsfeld used to deny the significance of the looting in Baghdad during his famous “stuff happens!” press conference of April 2003. “Images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over,” he said then, referring to the much-recycled video of a man stealing a vase from the Baghdad museum. “Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?” he asked, playing for laughs.

The joke was on Americans. Iraq burned, New Orleans flooded and Bush remained oblivious to each and every pratfall on his watch. We essentially stopped listening to him after hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but he still doesn’t grasp the finality of their defection. Lately, he’s promised not to steal the spotlight from Barack Obama once he’s in retirement, as if he could do so by any act short of running naked through downtown Dallas. The latest CNN poll finds that only one-third of his fellow citizens want him to play a post-presidency role in public life.

Bush is equally blind to the collapse of his propaganda machinery. Almost poignantly, he keeps trying to hawk his goods in these final days, like a salesman who hasn’t been told by head office that his product has been discontinued. Though no one is listening, he has given more exit interviews than either Clinton or Reagan did. Along with cronies such as Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, he has also embarked on a Bush “legacy project”, as Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard described it on CNN.

To this end, Rove has repeated a stunt he first fed to the press two years ago: he is once again claiming that he and Bush have an annual book-reading contest, with Bush chalking up as many as 95 books a year, by authors as hifalutin’ as Camus. This hagiographic portrait of Bush the Egghead would be easier to buy were the former national security official Richard Clarke not quoted in the new Vanity Fair saying that both Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had instructed him early on to keep his memos short because the president is “not a big reader”.

Another, far more elaborate example of legacy spin can be downloaded from the White House website: a booklet recounting “highlights” of the administration’s “accomplishments and results”. With big type, much white space, children’s-book-like trivia boxes titled “Did You Know?” and lots of colour photos of the Bushes posing with blacks and troops, its 52 pages require a reading level closer to My Pet Goat than The Outsider

This document is the literary correlative to “Mission Accomplished”. Bush kept America safe (provided his presidency began on 12 September 2001). He gave America record economic growth (provided his presidency ended December 2007). He vanquished all the leading al-Qaida terrorists (if you don’t count bin Laden and al-Zawahri). He gave Afghanistan a thriving “market economy” (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade) and a “democratically elected president” (presiding over one of the world’s most corrupt governments). He supported elections in Pakistan (after propping up Pervez Musharraf past the point of no return). He “led the world in providing food aid and natural disaster relief” (if you leave out Brownie and Katrina).

If this is the best case that Bush and his handlers can make for his achievements, you wonder why they bothered. Desperate for padding, they devote four risible pages to portraying our dear leader as a zealous environmentalist. But the brazenness of Bush’s alternative-reality history is revelatory. The audacity of its hype helps clear up the mystery of how someone so slight could inflict so much damage. So do his many print and television exit interviews. The man who emerges is a narcissist with no self-awareness. It’s that arrogance that allowed him to tune out even the most calamitous of realities, freeing him to compound them without missing a step. The president who famously couldn’t name a single mistake of his presidency at a press conference in 2004 still can’t.

He can, however, blame everyone else. Asked by Charles Gibson of ABC News if he feels any responsibility for the economic meltdown, Bush says: “People will realise a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived.” Asked if the 2008 election was a repudiation of his administration, he says: “It was a repudiation of Republicans.”

“The attacks of 11 September came out of nowhere,” he said in another interview, as if he hadn’t ignored frantic intelligence warnings that summer of an al-Qaida attack. But it was an “intelligence failure”, not his relentless invocation of patently fictitious “mushroom clouds”, that sped us into Iraq. Did he take too long to change course in Iraq? “What seems like an eternity today,” he says, “may seem like a moment tomorrow.” Try telling that to the families of the thousands killed and maimed during that multi-year “moment” as Bush stubbornly stayed his disastrous course.

The crowning personality tic revealed by Bush’s final propaganda push is his bottomless capacity for self-pity. “I was a wartime president and war is very exhausting,” he told cable TV network C-Span. “The president ends up carrying a lot of people’s grief in his soul,” he told Gibson. And so when he visits military hospitals, “it’s always been a healing experience,” he told the Wall Street Journal

But, incredibly enough, it’s his own healing he is concerned about, not that of the grievously wounded men and women he sent to war on false pretences. It’s “the comforter in chief” who “gets comforted,” he explained, by “the character of the American people”. The American people are surely relieved to hear it.

With this level of self-regard, it’s no wonder that Bush could remain undeterred as he drove the country off a cliff. The smugness is reinforced not just by his history as the entitled scion of one of America’s aristocratic dynasties, but also by his conviction that his every action is blessed from on high. Asked last month by an interviewer what he has learnt from his time in office, he replied: “I’ve learned that God is good. All the time.”

Once again, he is shifting the blame. This presidency was not about Him. Bush failed because in the end it was all about him. ++

The Enigma in Chief - A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Moron
We still don’t know how or why Bush made the key decisions of his administration.
Jacob Weisberg, Slate
Saturday, Jan. 10, 2009

As George W. Bush once noted, “You never know what your history is going to be like until long after you’re gone.” What I think he was trying to say is that, over time, historians may evolve toward a more positive view of his presidency than the one held by most of his contemporaries.

At the moment, this seems a vain hope. Bush’s three most obvious legacies are his decision to invade Iraq, his framing of a global war on terror after Sept. 11, and the massive financial crisis. Each of these constitutes a separate epic in presidential misjudgment and mismanagement. It remains a brainteaser to come up with ways, however minor, in which Bush changed government, politics, or the world for the better. Among presidential historians, it is hardly an eccentric view that 43 ranks as America’s worst president ever. On the other hand, he has nowhere to go but up.

In a different sense, however, Bush’s comment has some validity to it. We do not know how people will one day view this presidency because we, Bush’s contemporaries, don’t yet understand it ourselves. The Bush administration has had startling success in one area-namely keeping its inner workings secret. Intensely loyal, contemptuous of the press, and overwhelmingly hostile to any form of public disclosure, the Bushies did a remarkable job at keeping their doings hidden for eight years.

Probably the biggest question Bush leaves behind is about the most consequential choice of his presidency: his decision to invade Iraq. When did the president make up his mind to go to war against Saddam Hussein? What were his real reasons? What roles did various figures around him-Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice-play in the actual decision?

Was the selling of the war on the basis of WMD evidence a matter of conscious deception or of self-deception on their part?

Bob Woodward, Ron Suskind, and I recently debated in Slate the issue of how much we really know about Bush’s biggest decision. Woodward, the author of four inside accounts of the Bush administration, believes that we do know the most important facts. He argues that Bush decided to invade Iraq in January 2003, that the reason was 9/11, and that Bush himself was the real decision-maker. Suskind and I argued that we don’t know really how, when, or why the decision was made-though we suspect it was much earlier. By the summer of 2002, administration officials and foreign diplomats were hearing that Bush’s course was already set.

The disputed dates and details go to the most interesting larger issues about what went wrong during the Bush years. Did Bush’s own innocence and incompetence drive his missteps? Or was it the people around him, most importantly his vice president, who manipulated him into his major bad choices? On so many issues-the framing of the war on terrorism, the use of torture, the expansion of executive power-it was Cheney’s views that prevailed. Yet at some point, perhaps around the 2006 election, Bush seems to have lost confidence in his vice president and stopped taking his advice.

To reckon with the Bush years, we need to understand what went on between these two men behind closed doors. Yet despite some superb spadework by journalist Barton Gellman and others, we know very little about Cheney’s true role. We have seen few of the pertinent documents and heard little relevant testimony. Congressional investigations and litigation have shed only the faintest light on Cheney’s role in Bush’s biggest blunders.

The same is generally true of Bush’s most important political relationship, with Karl Rove, and his most important personal one, with his father. Only with greater insight into these connections are we likely to be able to answer some of the other pressing historical questions. To what extent was Bush himself really the driver of his central decisions? How engaged or disengaged was he? Why, after governing as a successful moderate in Texas, did he adopt such an ideological and polarizing style as president? Why did he politicize the fight against terrorism? Why did he choose to permit the torture of American detainees? Why did he wait so long to revise a failing strategy in Iraq?

It seems unlikely that the memoirs in the works from Rove and Rumsfeld will challenge Bush’s repeated assertions that he was not only in charge but in control. As for the president himself, we’re unlikely to get much: Bush has a poor memory and is too unreflective to have kept the kind of diary that would elucidate matters. In time, however, other accounts are sure to emerge. Congressional investigations will shed new light. Declassified documents and e-mails may paint a clearer picture.

Once the country is rid of Bush, perhaps we can start developing a more nuanced understanding of how his presidency went astray. His was no ordinary failure, and he leaves not just an unholy mess but also some genuine mysteries. ++

The One Big Thing George W. Bush Did Right
Robert Creamer, HuffPo
January 15, 2009

History will record that George W. Bush made one critically important contribution to our country — and to the entire world. He and his administration provided unquestionable proof of the bankruptcy of radical-conservative ideology, and set the stage for a qualitatively different progressive era in American politics.

History is not linear. It is not gradual or evolutionary. Human progress proceeds in fits and starts like a volcano, where pressure gradually builds over years and then erupts with enormous power.

Very often those explosions of progress — periods when we expand the realm of democratic values, human dignity, economic opportunity and optimism — are precipitated by periods of domination by the forces of privilege, inequality and selfishness.

By assuring that all of the fruits of the growth of productivity in our economy went to the wealthiest 2% of our population, the Bush administration set the stage for the current economic collapse.

By actually putting into practice the Neo-Conservative theories of pre-emptive war and unilateralism, George W. Bush demonstrated their failure more persuasively than could the most articulate progressive critic.

By abandoning our historic commitment to due process and sinking into the dark world of torture, George W. Bush and his partner Dick Cheney isolated themselves from the growing worldwide commitment to human rights.

A brilliant new book by Democratic strategist and author Mike Lux documents the other periods in our history when conservative domination led to progressive renewal. The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, describes the five “big change” moments in American history since the American Revolution: the Bill of Rights, the ending of slavery, the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the civil rights movement.

He argues that big changes have never occurred gradually — nor have they been spread randomly over our history. Rather, they have been concentrated in these periods of “big change.”. In each, a cascade of progressive innovation took place over a short period of time, after years of right wing opposition.

Lux writes:

Progressives invented the American ideal and inspired the American Revolution. Conservatives, then known as Tories, opposed it. Since then, every major advancement in American freedom, democracy, social justice, and economic opportunity has been fostered, fought for, and won by progressives against conservative resistance. Now who’s anti-American?

We’ve already seen previews of the new progressive era, but the curtain will really go up next Tuesday when Barack Obama is inaugurated the 44th President of the United States. The next few years could be a transformational period — if we all make it so.

As for Bush, he will be remembered as the man who set the stage. He has played the Hoover to Obama’s Roosevelt, the James Buchanan to Obama’s Lincoln.

Lux’s study also makes something else absolutely clear. In American history, the pendulum has not swung inevitably back and forth between conservative and progressive periods with some form of historic equivalency. Instead, the changes emerging from periods of progressive success, once made, remain a permanent feature of our society.

Conservatives fought against the ending of slavery, women’s suffrage, Social Security, collective bargaining, Medicare, and the end of segregation. After the progressive period that brought them to life was done, a conservative backlash often tried to limit the scope of these important advances — with Jim Crow, assaults on Labor, or attempts to privatize Social Security. But conservatives have never been successful at eliminating them.

Once enacted, progressive change is hard to dislodge. That’s because progressive change is progress. Progressive values are the most adaptive trait human beings have yet created to ensure our success and survival on this small planet.

The Right battled for decades to take complete control of the levers of power in Washington. The election of George W. Bush finally gave them the ability to combine the power of the presidency with their control of Congress to make their program the law of the land.

Ironically, their very success may assure that George W. Bush is remembered as the president whose failures created the conditions we needed to craft a new bottom-up economy, to pass universal health care and to create new international institutions that bring us closer to a world where we no longer rely on war to resolve our differences.

Of course nothing is inevitable. We cannot afford to squander the opportunity that history and George W. Bush have provided us. It is time for all of us to report for duty in the battle to turn this historic opportunity into the next great period of progress in America. ++

W.’s Greatest Hits
The top 25 Bushisms of all time.
Jacob Weisberg, Slate
Monday, Jan. 12, 2009

I started gathering Bush’s verbal slip-ups while covering his first presidential campaign. From the first one we published in Slate in October 1999—”The important question is, how many hands have I shaked?”—adding to the collection has been my main pleasure, perhaps my only pleasure, in watching the man.

Since then, I’ve collected—with help from Slate readers—more than 500 Bushisms. What follows is a list of my 25 favorites. There were many to choose from, but in my opinion, the greatest Bushism of all was delivered on Aug. 5, 2004, when the president declared: “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”

People often assume that because I’ve spent the past nine years collecting Bushisms, I must despise George W. Bush. To the contrary, Bushisms fill me with affection for the man—and not just because of the income stream they’ve generated. I find the Bush who flails with words, unlike the Bush who flails with policy, to be an endearing character. Instead of a villain, he makes himself into an irresistible buffoon, like Mrs. Malaprop, Archie Bunker, or Homer Simpson. Bush treats words the way he treated recalcitrant European leaders: When they won’t do what he wants them to, he tries to bully them into submission. Through his willful, improvisational, and incompetent use of language, he tempers (very slightly) his willful, improvisational, and incompetent use of government. You can’t, in the end, despise someone who regrets that, because of the rising cost of malpractice insurance, “[t]oo many OB/GYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women all across the country.”

It helps his case that Bush, like Yogi Berra, is in on the joke. This was clear from the first White House correspondents’ dinner, in March 2001, when the new president read from the first collection of Bushisms, which he described as like Mao’s “little red book,” only not in Chinese. “Now ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “you have to admit that in my sentences I go where no man has gone before.” Of course, he bumbled his speech, claiming that he’d invented the term misunderstanding. He meant to say “misunderestimated.”

Being able to laugh at yourself is a rare quality in a leader. It’s one thing George W. Bush can do that Bill Clinton couldn’t. Unfortunately, as we bid farewell to Bushisms, we must conclude that the joke was mainly on us.

1. “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”
—Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004

2. “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.”
—Greater Nashua, N.H., Chamber of Commerce, Jan. 27, 2000

3. “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”
—Florence, S.C., Jan. 11, 2000

4. “Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB/GYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women all across the country.”
—Poplar Bluff, Mo., Sept. 6, 2004

5. “Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican.”
—declining to answer reporters’ questions at the Summit of the Americas, Quebec City, Canada, April 21, 2001

6. “You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.”
—Townsend, Tenn., Feb. 21, 2001

7. “I’m the decider, and I decide what is best. And what’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense.”
—Washington, D.C., April 18, 2006

8. “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”
—Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005

9. “I’ve heard he’s been called Bush’s poodle. He’s bigger than that.”
—discussing former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as quoted by the Sun newspaper, June 27, 2007

10. “And so, General, I want to thank you for your service. And I appreciate the fact that you really snatched defeat out of the jaws of those who are trying to defeat us in Iraq.”
—meeting with Army Gen. Ray Odierno, Washington, D.C., March 3, 2008

11. “We ought to make the pie higher.”
—South Carolina Republican debate, Feb. 15, 2000

12. “There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.”
—Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

13. “And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I’m sorry it’s the case, and I’ll work hard to try to elevate it.”
—speaking on National Public Radio, Jan. 29, 2007

14. “We’ll let our friends be the peacekeepers and the great country called America will be the pacemakers.”
—Houston, Sept. 6, 2000

15. “It’s important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It’s not only life of babies, but it’s life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet.”
—Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 24, 2000

16. “One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.”
—U.S. News & World Report, Jan. 3, 2000

17. “People say, ‘How can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil?’ You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in’s house and say I love you.”
—Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2002

18. “Well, I think if you say you’re going to do something and don’t do it, that’s trustworthiness.”
—CNN online chat, Aug. 30, 2000

19. “I’m looking forward to a good night’s sleep on the soil of a friend.”
—on the prospect of visiting Denmark, Washington, D.C., June 29, 2005

20. “I think it’s really important for this great state of baseball to reach out to people of all walks of life to make sure that the sport is inclusive. The best way to do it is to convince little kids how to—the beauty of playing baseball.”
—Washington, D.C., Feb. 13, 2006

21. “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”
—LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000

22. “You know, when I campaigned here in 2000, I said, I want to be a war president. No president wants to be a war president, but I am one.”
—Des Moines, Iowa, Oct. 26, 2006

23. “There’s a huge trust. I see it all the time when people come up to me and say, ‘I don’t want you to let me down again.’ ”
—Boston, Oct. 3, 2000

24. “They misunderestimated me.”
—Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 6, 2000

25. “I’ll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office.”
—Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008

++

Some Kind of Manly
Bush administration, dead to morality, says torture is the American way
Molly Ivins, Working For Change
Thursday, November 10, 2005 by Working For Change

Austin, Texas — I can’t get over this feeling of unreality, that I am actually sitting here writing about our country having a gulag of secret prisons in which it tortures people. I have loved America all my life, even though I have often disagreed with the government. But this seems to me so preposterous, so monstrous. My mind is a little bent and my heart is a little broken this morning.

Maybe I should try to get a grip — after all, it’s just this one administration that I had more cause than most to realize was full of inadequate people going in. And even at that, it seems to be mostly Vice President Cheney. And after all, we were badly frightened by 9-11, which was a horrible event. “Only” nine senators voted against the prohibition of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of persons under custody or control the United States.” Nine out of 100. Should we be proud? Should we cry?

“We do not torture,” said our pitifully inarticulate president, straining through emphasis and repetition to erase the obvious.

A string of prisons in Eastern Europe in which suspects are held and tortured indefinitely, without trial, without lawyers, without the right to confront their accusers, without knowing the evidence or the charges against them, if any. Forever. It’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” Another secret prison in the midst of a military camp on an island run by an infamous dictator. Prisoner without a name, cell without a number.

Who are we? What have we become? The shining city on a hill, the beacon and bastion of refuge and freedom, a country born amidst the most magnificent ideals of freedom and justice, the greatest political heritage ever given to any people anywhere.

I am baffled by these “arguments”: But we’re talking about really awful people, cries the harassed press secretary. People like X and Y and Z (after a time, one forgets all the names of the No. 2’s after bin Laden we have captured). The SS and the Gestapo and the KVD weren’t all that nice, either.

Then I hear the familiar tinniness of the fake machismo I know so well from George W. Bush and all the other frat boys who never went to Vietnam and never got over the guilt.

“Sometimes you gotta play rough,” said Dick Cheney. No shit, Dick? Now why don’t you tell that to John McCain?

I have known George W. Bush since we were both in high school — we have dozens of mutual friends. I have written two books about him and so have interviewed many dozens more who know him well in one way or another. Spare me the tough talk. He didn’t play football — he was a cheerleader. “He is really competitive,” said one friend. “You wouldn’t believe how tough he is on a tennis court!” Just cut the macho crap — I don’t want to hear it.

If you are dead to all sense of morality (please let me not go off on the stinking sanctimony of this crowd), let us still reason together on the famous American common ground of practicality. Torture. Does. Not. Work.

Torture does not work. Ask the United States military. Ask the Israelis.

There seems to be some fantastic scenario floating around — if Osama bin Laden had an atomic bomb hidden in a locker at Grand Central Station, and it was due to go off in 12 hours, and we had him in prison … I seem to have missed some important television program on this theme. I am told it was fiction, but it must have been really scary — it certainly seems to have unbalanced the minds of some of our fellow citizens.

Torture does not work. It is not productive. It does not yield important, timely information. That is in the movies. This is reality.

I grew up with all this pathetic Texas tough: Everybody here knows you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs; and this ain’t beanbag; and I’ll knock your jaw so far back, you’ll scratch your throat with your front teeth; and I’m gonna cloud up and rain all over you; and I’m gonna open me a can of whup-ass …

And that’ll show ‘em, won’t it? Take some miserable human being alone and helpless in a cell, completely under your control, and torture him. Boy, that is some kind of manly, ain’t it?

“The CIA is holding an unknown number of prisoners in secret detention centers abroad. In violation of the Geneva Conventions, it has refused to register those detainees with the International Red Cross or to allow visits by its inspectors. Its prisoners have ‘disappeared,’ like the victims of some dictatorships.”

– The Washington Post.

Why did we bother to beat the Soviet Union if we were just going to become it? Shame. Shame. Shame. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves