Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations Watch, End of An Era Edition

Well, they’ll have plenty of help from the paid propagandists down at the Bush Library at SMU.

way we Europeans look down on Americans, but some of you work so hard at being stupid

Never wise to be snarky from a continent that has its own well-developed efforts at stupidity.

Don’t you understand? The issue here isn’t the disintegrating economy,the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, or the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The question is: how many blowjobs did the President receive while in office? Since with Bush the answer is probably ‘none’ (and if anyone has any evidence to the contrary I’d rather they kept it to themselves, lest the resulting mental image have a negative impact on my mental health) that makes him by definition a Good President.

President Obama’s position on fellatio, so to speak, is still not clear. Typical liberal.

Department of How I Know I’m Older than Him:

we see George W. Bush stepping down like every American president before him (well, except the ones that died in office, of course)

Not quite, alas.

And as for Cheney, The Onion, as usual, says it best.

It’s not all, or even a significant segment, of the left by any means—but I do know people who were absolutely convinced that Bush was going to engineer some sort of national crisis and cancel the ‘08 election (and the ‘04 election).

I met only one person who believed this, but even the one came as a shock to me. It just seemed so paranoid.

What’s more telling are the defenses put forth by the reputable pundits, and accepted without disputation by the mainstream media, including its liberals. After all the chief defense of Bush is that the country did not suffer another terrorist attack after 9/11. Really? What was all that about the anthrax then? By the accounts of our own government, this was a terrorist attack with no apparent connection to any Islamic group, launched by someone connected to US bioweapons labs, who targeted prominent liberal politicians and the media. And this person or group is still at large with no apparent progress on catching him or her. The anthrax attacks were certainly treated as a terrorist attack at the time, but somehow they have become in retrospect some kind of half-remembered dream or weird media confection.

Yeah, what Stentor said. I didn’t know anyone personally who believed that Bush would cancel the election, but I certainly encountered a number of them online in blog comments and the like. One guy—who, in my opinion, is largely responsible for ruining the comments section of an otherwise very good blog—wrote in October that “no way” was Bush going to leave office, “just you wait and see”.

What really puzzles me about people like this is that they are, not unlike Bush, utterly unfazed by having been proven entirely wrong. You’d think it would give them pause, cause them to rethink their constant always-certain theories and predictions. But it doesn’t—being proven wrong never acts as a moderator of their beliefs.

What really puzzles me about people like this is that they are, not unlike Bush, utterly unfazed by having been proven entirely wrong.

I’m always impressed that there are fewer people like this than I think there should be given that so many of us have myths we prefer to reality.

I know of one woman who did, who’s part of a major blogging group (by my standards). Her error is that she didn’t realize that the serious evils done by the Bush administration were *part of the system*. She saw what they had done, and the fact that a serious amount of evidence had already leaked, and figured that they couldn’t just walk away from their crimes and not get in trouble. She didn’t realize (and I really didn’t) that 90% of the system is fine with the Bush adminisration’s crimes, and 75% were probably in on them.

A Farewell to Arms

“You see I’ve been leading a sort of a funny life. And I never even talk English. And you are so very beautiful.”

Off to pay my SE taxes…

Bruce, everything that Bush did depended on the inertia of people not really being willing to exert themselves to stop the administration from doing things. Going to aggressive war, torturing foreigners, stealing money for “bailouts” for cronies and so on are things that Americans have pretty much always done; Bush only did them bigger and better and with less shame. But to actually sabotage the four-yearly ritual to the extent of declaring himself dictator for life? No, that would require an active break. It’s possible to have a corrupt Supreme Court steal an election for you, but to have them declare that elections are over goes outside the script.

The hilarious thing is that in order to nutpick his links, he had to descend to the level of Yahoo! Answers. I mean oooooh, mate. Next stop “YouTube comments show the true face of the Left!”

Will Bush walk away in 2009? – 875 comments.

It’s one of the first hits you get if you search for “coup” on dailykos.com.

Seriously, there have been tons of people on the left predicting that Bush won’t give up the reins. I’ve met a few personally. Online, you’d have to be blind to miss them – or at least, do something extravagant like avoid the loonier corners of the online left and stick to the more reasonable sites, like Crooked Timber, where a Bush coup is seriously contemplated only by some commenters, and that very rarely.

It seems to me that the right-wingers should feel as free to gloat at the loony left over Bush leaving the White House peacefully, as the left-wingers have felt free over the years to gloat at the loony right on any number of occasions when those were proven spectacularly wrong.

Both sides could be faulted for picking the easier targets by focusing on the loonier part of the other side, but that’s the name of the game; and isn’t that, after all, what John is doing in this very post as well?

”as free to gloat at the loony left over Bush leaving the White House peacefully,”

Presidents [sitting] can’t get bailouts, and as the saying goes, “ain’t nuttin free.”

Joel Turnipseed 01.16.09 at 10:35 pm
” I think it will be a while before Obama can get to it (or he feels enough heat from “the base”), but remember: it took three years for the Pecora Committee to get going, the Nye Committee took decades to sort out (or not) World War One profiteering and war lobbying, and even the Church Committee took the atrocities of Vietnam and the criminality of Watergate (both profligate) to get underway… and the Church Committee documents weren’t released (and still aren’t, completely) to the public until a couple years ago.

So… Bush, Cheney, et. al., have a number of nervous years ahead of them, no?”

Nah. Think of Nixon. Once he resigned (with Ford’s pardon undoubtedly already in his pocket), it became ‘healing time’. Nixon spent a few years drying out, and started his rehabilitation tour. Bush I, Cheney, and a bunch of other sh*ts continued their careers, having learned important lessons (i.e., no matter how much a president steps on his d*ck and gets caught, he’s immune to the normal law). The right-wing think tanks, mostly established in the 1970’s, started their permanent campaign which resulted in the ‘Law and Economics’ movement, and Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts.

Meanwhile the rest of the right actually started their comeback four years later, in 1978, when the GOP took the Senate. By six years after Nixon resigned, the GOP had the Senate and the Presidency, and probably only Volcker’s ‘kill inflation, even if it kills the country’ recession kept the GOP from owning the House.

By that point, Nixon was an ‘elder statesman’.

Here’s my ‘wingnut’ prediction: two years from now, the elite MSM will be trumping scandals in the Obama administration far louder than they did the abuses of the Bush II administration. We’ll be seeing Bush II administration officials posting Op-Eds in major papers *aside* from the WSJ, acting like butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths.

I also think the liberal belief is less insane than the conservative belief.

I was an early member of RedState and actually liked it.

I am as socialist as anyone but it was interesting just trying to figure out how they thought. I didn’t hide my political affiliation and never caused any problems. I rarely post except top ask for clarification.

Then one day I was “purged” along a post confirming that redstate was a “Real” republican blog and that they were going to put their foot down and stop tolerating all the comments from libertarians and moderates. Soon after it became more of a fascist blog than a conservative blog.

It seems to have mellowed slightly since. Despite being asked to leave i am still on their email list. go fig

In response to Anatoly’s #25, a little farther down that thread is this:

> jr wrote:
>> Fitzgerald is perhaps the last chance to push back the coup…
> The question is, will they have the nerve to fire Fitzgerald? I think they
> will – they have never yet shown lack of will and they have their backs to wall now.

Of course, we now know that Rove was at that very moment firing prosecutors who didn’t follow his instructions to indict and jail Democrats who committed the crime of running successful campaigns against Republicans, and that Fitzgerald was on that list whilst investigating Rove for obstruction of justice. Ah, “looney”. Sure.

Cranky

If Cynthia McKinney had won the election, would some way be found to overturn it and either keep Bush in or install someone else? I tend to think so, because the entire establishment would have supported it. If Bush were going to try something like this, he needed to do it right after 9/11, and in a sense he did by subverting the rule of law. Had he concentrated on the “enemy within”, he might have been able to push the country all the way over, but there was no oil in that. By the end of his regime, most of the establishment, including much of the military, had turned against him, so he wasn’t going to get away with anything.

It’s worth reminding people again of that Atlantic article from the March 2004 issue: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush 1, and Ollie North had plans to install an extra-Constitutional emergency government, deliberately circumventing the transfer of power specified in the law, by asserting control of the nukes. Call it crazy conspiracy theory, but the “crazies” are writing for the Atlantic. Originally, this was conceived in response to a Soviet attack, but as that threat faded, a “terrorist” one was substituted smoothly as a jazz pianist can substitute a chord. To be fair, the stated rationale was continuity after a nuclear attack of some kind – though that continuity explicitly did not include continuing to have a Congress. I would not say these people have undying loyalty to the American notion of democracy.

“If Cynthia McKinney had won the election, would some way be found to overturn it and either keep Bush in or install someone else?”

She was only 70 million votes away. We dodged a bullet there.

Martin, in that case, I’ll just point out that we can take to the hills to defend our freedom, just like in Red Dawn. It’s more plausible.

And I keep meaning to go do something wildernessy, but its just so cold. This morning, the snot in my nose turned to ice before I’d gone three blocks. If I went hunting wolverines, I’d have to go to Nordstrums to get the big jar of moisturizer or my manicurist would never let me hear the end of it.

Bush didn’t stage a coup? Tell it to the Supreme Court.

Everything that was done in the name of Bush over the past eight years has been more worse and more outrageous than we could ever expect, even after we learned they would be more awful and more shameless than we could imagine. So the fears for a coup are not unjustified, even if it seems less and less likely to happen.

If it had been a choice between impeachment and coup, what would you think Bush and co would’ve chosen?

GWB believes that future historians will view him in a better light than the current ones tend to do. And with the passage of the years that could possibly happen. Future events will reflect back to events that he helped to set in motion in our time. The book on GWB is wide open.

As much as Bush hurt this country in a deep and disgusting way, and even though it is easy to spit vitriol at him and his henchmen/women, it only furthers the pain of the INDIVIDUAL to engage in hateful speech toward him and those who support(ed) him. To the point: my, and all individuals’, consciousness is more important, more precious, than stooping to their level. It is not easy, but I try to not let them and the corporate fascists control my mind. That is why I started a website and accompanying blog; http://www.watchingbuddha.com and http://www.watchingbuddha.blogspot.com – as a way of giving voice to deep civility, respect for one’s self, to explore the beauty which is OUR CONSCIOUSNESS, and cultivate love, peace, and all the opposite attributes of humanity that Bush and company represent.
Thank you kindly.

Which is to say: each of us needs to have “change we can believe in” as our personal anthem and change our society, our polity, by changing our selves to become more aware of the true meaning of living. For Obama to succeed, each person needs to succeed. For America to recover from the past eight years of torture and war and lying, thieving, globe trashing, and hate…it is going to take all of us. Let’s get on the right track. Personhood leads to citizenship leads to civility leads to better soci-political economy which can lead us out of the desert of blame and hate into a promised land of understanding and compassion. There is so much work to do, we need to dig down and get to work. Left to politicians, that work will bear no fruit.

what’s so funny ’bout peace, love, and understanding?

Damn! In moderation again. Clearly I should have spelt that “social!st”.

”how could he orchestrate…”

That’s the basic mistake. While more clever than many give him credit for, “he” isn’t that smart or good; as with the 2000 election it was “they” that done it not “he.” Is the President a puppet master or just a puppet?

The first pie graph in this article from the History News Network is very funny:

http://hnn.us/articles/48916.html

Here’s the thing: I encountered this view from time to time, and it seemed highly unlikely and a bit conspiratorial to me. However, I’m going to refrain from any sort of gloating bout being right come Tuesday, and the reason it quite simple. Every other time I underestimated the Bush administration’s mendacity or incompetence, I was wrong and they were right. So now the score is something Looney left 17, sensible ol’ me 1. Acting superior at this point seems pretty ridiculous.

IIRC (Teh Google is failing me) when W took office, his people (FEMA? Nat’l Security? I’m not sure which) were told, in the briefing from the Clinton people, that there were 3 Really Big Disasters they needed to worry about:

1. terrorist attack on NYC
2. Cat. 5 hurricane hitting New Orleans
3. major earthquake in San Francisco.

San Francisco should count its lucky stars.

Every other time I underestimated the Bush administration’s mendacity or incompetence, I was wrong and they were right.

Brad DeLong’s description has gone through a few variants, but it remains a mainstay in this regard: “The Bush administration is worse than you imagine possible, even after you take account of the fact that it is worse than you imagine possible.” (I think it’s more elegant with zeugma: “worse than you imagine possible, even accounting for the fact that it is worse than you can possibly imagine.”)

I was one of those who left comments on various blogs discussing the possibility that Bush would engineer some way to avoid handing over power. I can’t say I ever “believed” this would happen, nor was I convinced that this would happen, but I thought it a distinct possibility. In fact, I went so far as to bet $25 with Ed Brayton that such a thing would ensue. I have never been happier to lose a bet.

So: I was wrong.

I went over to RedState to post an “I was wrong” comment, but one cannot comment on that blog without creating a login account, so I demurred.

The system is the conspiracy. It isn’t “the economy, stupid” It is “the stupid economy.” Built as it is on a foundation of sand: sand equaling corruption, greed, non-sustainability, global destruction, and enslavement of any thing sacred, holy, or good. Bush stole 2 elections and was complicit in all the s— that has gone down the past 8 years. Obama can’t save us-we have to do it ourselves.

I was intrigued to learn that CT holds proprietorial rights over R.Bubba. What are the penalties if he goes elsewhere to exercise his blunted snark and relative venomlessness?

For the last 2 years, many of us have been agonizing as Pelosi meekly backed off of hitting Bush too hard where it counted: impeachment off the table, no hardball on Iraq withdrawal, accepting defiance of subpeonas. Just in the last couple of days, Pelosi is on fire and in defiance of Obama: prosecute the baastids, and restore the rich’s taxes too! Methinks Ms. Pelosi was among those who feared what Bush might do if pushed into a corner, and is only now free to act like a Congresswoman. Go Nancy!

Sincere flattery?

with Bush I never felt the country was caught up in a personality cult.

We experienced the years immediately after September 11 rather differently, then.

Thers notes ongoing Bush-Jesus comparisons. That Jesus is in his lion form is either more or less crazy. Your choice.