I was going to write something about this syrupy ode to George Bush by Caroline Glick and this PUMA nonsense from the Hillbuzz, but Daniel Larison handles it so much better:
Yes, this is what you would expect from Glick (or from anyone, for that matter, who thinks that the last two years of Bush’s foreign policy were his worst), but it’s offensive all the same. As tempting and easy as it would be to turn this formulation around on one of the worst Presidents of all time, I don’t assume that Bush did any of the things he did because he didn’t have “American values” or didn’t love his country. I don’t assume that he trashed our relations with Europe, Turkey and Russia because he wanted America to be isolated or because he loathed these other nations. It is certainly true that he harmed American interests, weakened American power, wrecked our fiscal house and isolated us from many of our allies and potential partners, but the world is full of stories of people who harm that which they love. Bush’s problem wasn’t that he didn’t love America. The problem was that he had no idea what he was doing and substituted ideological fantasies in place of understanding.
Indeed, most of his catastrophic blunders came from an excess of sentiment and emotion concerning these things, combined with absolutely incompetent execution and an ideological obsession with American virtue and strength that ensured that his actions would be excessive, arrogant, ill-conceived and unrelated to the real world. Bush’s love of country was something similar to what the Apostle called in another context “zeal not according to knowledge.” The man was actually overflowing with saccharine, do-gooding, Gersonian sentimentality and he had no shortage of emotional, demonstrative professions of patriotic devotion. So what? What good did it do anyone? It might even have been better had Bush been less enthusiastic in trying to protect the United States, since he would not have been so ready to see dire threats around every corner where none existed. America needs fewer paranoid, jealous lovers, not more.
Can a brother get an Amen?
R-Jud
A-motherfucking-men.
SpotWeld
You know that saying how the left loves America like it’s wife, and the right loves America like it’s mother.
America needs fewer Norman Bates
cleek
amen.
Blue Raven
A-men!
Preach it, Larison!
(being ex-Southern Baptist comes in handy at the oddest times)
Mike E
Sack o’ dittoes, brother
AngusTheGodOfMeat
A-men.
And, moo.
Bernie
Spot on Larison. Spot fucking on.
Hunter Gathers
Of course, this means Larison is shrill.
Redshirt
I’ve stopped thinking about Bush, and it feels great.
BFR
I think it’s great to see a lecture on the anti-American-ness of the current president from someone who served in the IDF and has spent all but 2 of the last 18 years living in Israel. Charming.
binzinerator
A bullseye within the bullseye!
The Moar You Know
Not for Larison. He may be right a fair amount of the time, but I can’t get over his support for Southern secessionism, nor his fundie beliefs.
Good piece here, but keep the source in mind.
AnotherBruce
The problem was that he had no idea what he was doing and substituted ideological fantasies in place of understanding.
You can pin most human caused problems on this, just substitute the word “religion” in place of the word “ideological” where needed, because they are almost the same thing.
Max
On a related note, if you don’t cry when you read this article about Obama’s walk amongst the headstones at Arlington, you’re not human.
I found the link on the GOS.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2009/11/12/2009-11-12_my_solemn_surprise_meeting_with_the_president_at_my_friends_resting_place.html
tamied
Don’t let me ever follow one of those links again. I read some of the comments on the Hillbuzz piece and thought I was going to throw right up. Why are these people so stupid?
psychobroad
I clicked on both links. They’re kidding , right? Seriously?
Bubblegum Tate
@Hunter Gathers:
He probably hates Murrica, too. Most people who are this dead-on do.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@SpotWeld:
fixt.
If the torture-glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit, also.
binzinerator
And Gawd-dayum…..Caroline Glick is one fugly woman.
Bubblegum Tate
@psychobroad:
They’re not kidding. Here’s another one.
liberal
Heh.
Ajay
Very very well said.
But then if you are someone who was like that(thoughtful, cool headed, knowledgeable), you dont really have any American values. America is number 1 and must always prove it to the world.
Mark S.
I was going to say something about that Glick post, but then I read the HillBuzz one and–WTF?
BoB, you seriously need to step up your game, because you are not one-tenth as crazy as that.
Zifnab
@The Moar You Know:
I’d be tempted to support southern secessionism, but I’m a southern. Please don’t abandon us to the crazy people down here.
If I was living in Michigan, however, I’d be one more John Cornyn or Pete Sessions away from telling the entire Deep South to go suck its own tail-pipe off my taxpayer dime.
fledermaus
well if you need some cheering up it’s a O RLY Taitz update.
When we last left her, our heroine was fined $20k in federal court. Now one of her witnesses says she told him to lie in a hearing. He also says a whole lot more.
Wingnuttia
Whatever you do – DON”T follow the links to her commenters.
They exist in a different reality and heaven forbid you should get stuck there. I thought that this comment was bad enough:
For all that he disappointed me, I miss George W. Bush. I really do.”
I thought nothing could top that until I read this from one of her disciples.
“We are now officially committed fans of George W. and Laura Bush. We are fans of Dick Cheney. Our gratitude for them makes us newly protective of them, and the continued role they play in this country.”
Personally, I think she was disappointed because she didn’t get an mementos like Monica Lewinsky did. You know – something to share with the girls over coffee :^)
binzinerator
@BFR:
In fairness, if I was as ugly as she is I’d have left the country too.
psychobroad
Thanks Bubblegum Tate–that sound you heard was my head exploding. And everyone should read Max’s link.
El Cid
In cases in which the angry ex kills the other ex and kills the children, too, and takes the time to leave a note or remains alive long enough to be captured and interviewed, usually you’ll hear something about how they loved the children so much they didn’t want them to suffer.
I really don’t know what made me think of this when considering how much the right wingers profess to love America.
eemom
You will probably also like the Obama lovefest your “Sully” has up today. Fine piece — until he totally blows it in the last line.
Sorry, work computer won’t let me do linky.
bago
Asshole.
And that’s just the beginning. Read the article.
Blue Raven
@binzinerator:
So what? How does that even begin to apply to her writing? Can we please get past the stupid remarks about appearance and focus on the stupid these people write?
JHF
A-mayen!
Midnight Marauder
@eemom:
I presume you are talking about this piece and this line:
The mind is still reeling from reading that earlier.
licensed to kill time
__
Does anyone doubt that a Palinocracy/Teabagger candidate would be more of the same? Governing From The Gut and all? OTOH, could there ever be a more massive fail than Dubya? One shudders to think of the possibilities. I hope we never get a chance to find out.
Anonymous37
I went to high school with her. Actually, I always thought she was kind of cute. I don’t agree with her views, and I’m kind of sad that we’d probably get into a huge argument if we were to meet again. But what can you do? People move on and grow apart.
Notorious P.A.T.
How many times did he welcome home returning servicemen, or their coffins? How many times did he visit recovering servicemen in the hospital?
Sentient Puddle
Key line from Larison, if you ask me:
Serious. I think there needs to be some corollary to the Tinkerbelle strategy or Green Lantern theory to cover this shit. Republicans abused this “love of America” idea back then, and they’re still beating it into the ground today. It’s so goddamned stupid.
handy
My only explanation for all this is we have some serious cases of Stockholm Syndrome in this country.
Notorious P.A.T.
When Bush took over, our country had a large budget surplus, a mighty military, and the respect of the world, and look what he did with it. Now think of what President Palin would do with our country in the straits it is in.
AnotherBruce
@El Cid:
I think you’re right about this, and that’s a disturbing thought.
aimai
I hate to say it, because as the Moar You Know points out Larison is a certifiable loon on some issues–but if you read down his column almost all the other top posts are really right on the money. I mean, they could have been written by John when he was plus 3.
aimai
Da Bomb
@Midnight Marauder: You beat me to it.
Yeah, I kinda threw up in a mouth a little after reading that line.
Ronald Reagan had such strength, that Sully would probably be dead, if it was left up to St. Ronnie. I don’t think he like Teh Gays or especially Teh Gays with HIV.
Anne Laurie
In other words, Bush was America’s abusive boyfriend. If only we hadn’t kept defying him, he wouldn’t have had to spy on us, pick fights with all our friends, steal all our money, and encourage his cronies to rape us! He only did that stuff because he loved us so much, and yet we cruelly reject his heartfelt and irresistable maneuvers…
Senyordave
So what was the arrogant thing that Obama said about himself at Ft. Hood? This Glick person said this as a fact.
Just Some Fuckhead
George Bush is like the little dork kid that crushes his pet rabbit by hugging it too much and too heartily, according to Larison.
I personally think George Bush is the kind of amoral sociopath that kills his pet rabbit by putting a firecracker in it’s ass and lighting it.
Notorious P.A.T.
I’ll say “amen” to that.
handy
This. Bush had way too much of the frat boy thing going on for me to take this “touchy feely” nonsense seriously.
El Cid
@Anne Laurie: Remember that in your example, the sane outsiders do not waste any time wondering whether or not the abusive boyfriend / husband / ex is telling the truth from his point of view that it was love or whatever which caused the abuse.
That’s because we’re sane, and we realize that not only do people say such things simply to come up with a more acceptable sounding excuse for their hatred, jealousy, meanness, cruelty, and abuse, but that in the end what’s important is what they do.
sweetgreensnowpea
hmm…given his misnomers (he ran as a “compassionate conservative”), obfuscations, lies…his address to his base as the “haves and have mores”, “mission accomplished”…there are so many reasons why i can’t believe that he was incompetent, blinded by his love of america, but that he (or his handlers) achieved exactly what (t)he(y) set out to do – he out reagunned reagan. the greatest shift in wealth in american history. the greatest incurment of debt by the government. tax cuts and endless war.
isn’t that why the right love him?
carl rove, cheney, beck…bush. their agendas are all hidden behind sentiment.
but then, i’m not very bright. i must be missing something.
o/t anyone heard anything about little bitsy in the c.d. competition?
Notorious P.A.T.
@Just Some Fuckhead:
GEORGE W. BUSH’S JOURNEY: A Boy From Midland
El Cid
@Just Some Fuckhead: I think George W. Bush Jr. is more of the type of sociopath who would kill one of his brother’s pets in order to ‘teach him a lesson’.
Will
He deserves a Pulitzer for that sentence alone. Damn he’s good.
Butch
OMG, reading the comments….reels the mind. Made me think of the expression, “same planet, different world.”
Common Sense
I’m not excusing Bush’s many errors. I think he is unquestionably the worst President of my lifetime and among the worst ever. I never doubted his patriotism.
I also think he deserves credit for his actions since Obama’s election. He handled himself admirably during the transition and inauguration, and has acted quite decently since. He has been restrained and statesmanlike. The polar opposite of lackeys like Cheney and Rove.
I like this George Bush. I always thought he’d make a great Commissioner of MLB.
SarahLoving
A brother can. A big, honking fat one.
Righteous.
Trinity
@El Cid: Frighteningly true.
Calouste
@Midnight Marauder:
Sullivan is an unreconstructed Thatcherite. It wouldn’t be to far off the track to assume that he had a St. Ronnie poster next to the Maggie T. poster above his bed.
Common Sense
I should also point out I don’t agree with either of the two pieces’ attempts to smear Obama.
Comrade Dread
Because he is still rational.
You may not agree with some of the conclusions he makes (as I disagree with John on some items), but there is some framework of reason behind them that can be debated, challenged, and discussed.
It’s a mindset that is a complete 180 from the standard ‘clap louder’ denial tripe repeated by an endless parade of Red State clones.
Mark S.
If you had to choose, would you rather have Orly Taitz
a) give you a root canal, or
b) represent you in a capital case.
You’re gonna die either way, so it’s more a question of how you want to go out.
El Cid
@Trinity: Somehow, living in Georgia, I get to see these types of stories a lot.
Brian J
When Larison says
he’s making perhaps the most severe indictment against the Bush administration that one can make. I have very few nice things to say about former president and everyone who worked for him, but I don’t doubt for a second that they meant well. It’s a fairly big stretch for people to believe, and since the same sort of intellectual laziness and shortsightedness seems to plague any Republican that has a shot of actually winning any seat, I think it’d be wise for people to abandon it. The other thing to attack them with not only has the benefit of being true, it could be more effective.
Chad N Freude
@Wingnuttia: I looked at Glick’s commeners stuff. My fave is
I guess that’s why he sent so many to die, to be wounded, to acquire PTSD, so he could care for them even more deeply.
And there’s this paean to Bush’s military cred and and what appears to be the only two countries that have servicemen (not women) who should be honored :
I frequently find this kind of thinking amusing, but her piece and the responses are anything but that.
Trinity
@Max: And now I’m all verklempt.
Thanks for sharing the link.
RememberNovember
The road to hell is paved with good intentionamints.
Brian J
@Common Sense:
That’s pretty much how I feel, too. We can never be sure if he feels the same way as Cheney but is simply keeping his mouth shut, but regardless, we can thank him for acting like the gigantic dickbags Cheney and his ilk are acting like.
Joshua Norton
When you get right down to it, the “love” the new wingnuttery has for the USA is no different than that of the most deluded, bunny-boiling stalker.
And they prove it on a daily basis.
I’ve been looking for the right words for years. Now I have them.
geg6
OT, but here’s a lawsuit I think has a very, very good chance of winning on the merits:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/nyregion/13acorn.html?_r=1
gwangung
Hell, yeah. I can oppose that kind of person, but still feel OK if I lose, because I know things will probably work themselves out with competent people at the wheel.
With the current crew, they’d just be likely to cut their own heads off (as well as mine) if they got anywhere near the levers of power….
licensed to kill time
__
Yep – entitled, defiant, casually cruel and thinks just saying “sorry” (to jebus) gets him off the hook. Bluto Blutarsky had more humanity in his beer can-crushing forehead.
Joshua Norton
Sure. Especially the dead ones. That’s why he made so many of them.
General Winfield Stuck
Something interesting and amusing I have noticed reading the comments this morn in Glick’s piece as well as a general theme amongst wingers pining for Bush these days.
For most of them, it is standard to carve out, or make note of the awful job he did the last two years in office, on how they lost faith in Georgy Porgy around 2006. And of course for those of us who hated the sumbitch without pause, the last two years were not all that different than the first 6.
The only diff that year, was losing congress to the dems, an unpardonable crime that somebody needed blaming for. Never mind, that up till then, the wingnuts loved them some GWB without regret.
Chad N Freude
@geg6: Maybe not so much. The last two paragraphs:
Bostondreams
Wow. Please do not ever link to those boys from Hillbuzz again. Disturbing.
And who still uses words like ‘fey’? Really? What century is this?
binzinerator
@Blue Raven:
I guess my penchant to point out Jonah Goldberg is fat is out of bounds too.
And Al Gore is f.. er, the inventor of the internets! Yeah that’s it.
Sheesh. Not much ad hominem fun to be had when you’re around.
Ever considered that you’re taking it little too seriously?
eemom
@Common Sense:
in other words, he deserves credit for going away, shutting the fuck up and not trying to kick the bucket over while Obama’s mopping up his mess. Well, ok, I’ll give him that — though I frankly think he’s just glad as hell to be done with all that “hard work” he used to do.
El Cid
I stopped caring about this sort of question when I repeatedly asked it myself when trying to stop my government under Ronald Reagan from hiring genocidal governments and warlord terrorists in campaigns specifically directed to torture and slaughter civilians in Central America and Southern Africa.
It usually proceeds from a perspective like: A) the worst thing ever would be for Soviet communism to take over the world; B) in Ronald Reagan’s (and his allies) insane views, what was happening in Central America and Southern Africa looked sufficiently like Soviet influence that (A) seemed to be involved; so C) literally anything they could get away with doing to stop the threat of (A) which was running in their heads was therefore justified.
In the most charitable interpretation of their intentions based on reality (and not denialist fantasy), they were willing to slaughter any number of actual people around the world because in their heads they imagined that they might suffer a worse fate.
At this stage, I realized that this whole game of demanding that ‘critics’ openly and graciously acknowledge that politicians apparently doing evil must be viewed as ‘trying to do the right thing’ or ‘had good intentions’ or ‘were trying to follow their heart’ was a stupid, harmful propaganda exercise mainly intended to soften critiques and help silence dissent.
I no longer give much of a damn about wondering whether or not some politician ‘in their heart’ truly feels they’re doing what’s right, or whether they have a secret dark closet hideaway with a mirror and a flashlight to hold under their chin and laugh an evil laugh about how they’re doing Satan’s work.
It truly, truly doesn’t matter.
David
@aimai: That’s because Larison is a real conservative. Those are the guys that liberals could debate and come to an amiable agreement to improve the country. They (i.e., the paleocons) weren’t self-destructive jackasses when they ran the Republican show, and they were often good governing partners (really!).
The points on which he is not in sync with liberals is fine, because unlike what passes for a conservative these days, his reality meter isn’t out of whack. His interpretation may be different, but is often surprisingly close to a liberal point of view because he isn’t delusional. If there were more like him in the Republican party, there would be a lot more healthy competition for the electorate’s mindshare, and a lot less teabagging – but that would mean a lot less ignorance, paranoia, passion and jealousy, and a lot more level-headedness that the current Republican party is totally lacking.
And even Larison can’t fix that.
Common Sense
@eemom:
I agree with all of this. He may not be rushing out to buy a mop, but he isn’t running his mouth about the type of mop used either. At this point, I’d be ecstatic if more of his ilk learned from his example instead of thriving on their divisiveness.
And sure, his unpopularity and laziness has a lot to do with it. The unpopularity hasn’t stopped Dick Cheney though, and the laziness hasn’t dampened Palin’s ego either. Maybe Bush doesn’t have that massive inflated sense of importance and has learned some humility?
Joel
Bart Stupak today, with Chris Good from the Atlantic:
Corner Stone
@aimai:
I apologize, but I have no idea what this means. Is this faint praise of Larison, an indictment of Cole’s thinking/writing when he imbibes, or some other third thing?
Colette
@binzinerator: Ever consider that women are just fucking sick and tired of seeing women criticized and dismissed for their looks in a context where that is entirely irrelevant? We’re “taking it a little too seriously” in exactly the same way that African-Americans who can’t see the sly, subtle humor in blackface skits are just “taking it a little too seriously.”
Gah. Unconscious sexism is almost as bad for my blood pressure as the conscious kind.
Wile E. Quixote
Caroline Glick is a disgusting lump of shit. Really she is. Really she does. She grows up in the US and then fucks off to Israel to serve in the IDF. No love for the country she was born and raised in and that has spent billions of dollars over the last fifty years protecting Israel
Good fucking riddance. I’m sick and fucking tired of fasciscto-Jews like her who believe that the only purpose of US foreign policy is to insure the safety of a shitty little Jewish theocracy in the middle east that’s run by people who would cheerfully apply their own final solution to the Palestinians if they thought that they could get away with it.
tamied
@David: Which is supposedly how a good two-party system would work. The checks and balances thingy
binzinerator
@Just Some Fuckhead:
@handy
Bush had way too much of the frat boy thing going on for me to take this “touchy feely” nonsense seriously.
Bush was preznit of his frat at Yale and he defended his frat’s hazing practices of branding the pledges with red-hot coathangers. Some were beaten before being branded.
Garry Trudeau, quoted in that article:
Sound familiar, no?
mary
@Anne Laurie: I remember thinking around the time of last year’s convention, “the Republican party pitching itself as the choice for change in 2008 is kind of like an abusive boyfriend saying, ‘baby, I know I hurt you, but this time it’ll be different!'”
Comrade Scrutinizer
@binzinerator:
__
Huh? Granted she has the acuity of a turnip, but what’s wrong with the way she looks? I mean, put her next to Candy Crowley or Anne Coulter, and she’s not so bad. Personally, I think she’s better looking than Sarah Palin. Also.
Whatever difference does it make, anyway? Do Prejean’s looks give her a pass?
Corner Stone
@El Cid:
And this is what strikes me as so curious when people defer to the godbotherer politicians here in the US. Sure, they have “deeply held beliefs”, or “they sincerely believe XYZ”. And?
I wish more people would waste less time considering/evaluating someone’s position on an issue based on “what that politician truly believes to be truly true”.
Joel
@Joel: blockquote fail again.
BDeevDad
@BFR: This
binzinerator
@Colette:
I see your point Colette. For Blue Raven and others: I’m sorry.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@binzinerator: And don’t forget how he mocked Karla Faye Tucker before she was executed.
MNPundit
Not really an Amen since Larison doesn’t have any kind of emotion at all. Not saying that he’s wrong, just psychologically defective.
different church-lady
Glick: “You can’t say any of that about his successor.”
Uhh… yes I can. Maybe you can’t, but other people can.
David
@tamied: Well, yes, except that the checks and balances thingy wasn’t supposed to be via political parties, but I get your jist. Certainly, viable, rational parties who disagree can come to common ground to govern more effectively, unlike the teabagging crew who are consuming the corpse of the Republican party.
jenniebee
I’m going to go again with my theory that if more people in this country got into Al-Anon, it would fundamentally change our politics.
Sure, everything he did hurt me, but he looooved me, I just know it!
Reason60
I am thinking about Bill Maher’s line about how the Right is acting like a guy whose wife left him and took the kids;
He alternates between maudlin weeping about how much he loves her, and bitter rage about what a effing whore she was.
“paranoid jealous lover”…that is one perfect description of the Right nowadays.
catclub
1. At the end, Bush was the sane one keeping Cheney from bombing Iran. For that he does have my thanks.
2. To all the people who are not questioning the patriotism of Bush and those who worked for him: Does that Include Cheney?
3. Some argue that the plan was to make the rich richer and the nation poorer – at which he succeeded admirably. Is that patriotism?
I simply cannot wrap my brain around the idea that planning to make the rich richer and the nation and most the non-rich poorer, feels patriotic to the one who is doing it.
binzinerator
@Comrade Scrutinizer:
For my response to the first, please see @binzinerator #92.
For the second, I’m inclined to think her looks combined with her dumbassery and well-publicized boob-job that she sued the pagent to pay for made it more likely she’d get called certain gender-specific names commonly used for the attractive-but-empty-headed or not-too-bright.
So, truthfully no I don’t think it did.
:
Calouste
@Chad N Freude:
It would indeed be funny if there weren’t such things as “American and Israeli servicemen” a few words away from “the 91st anniversary of Armistice Day”. Do these people know what Armistice Day was about? And if not, can we make them crawl on thier knees past the hundreds of thousands of headstones in the war cemeteries in northern France just to make the point clear?
Reason60
@binzinerator:
“Bush was preznit of his frat at Yale and he defended his frat’s hazing practices of branding the pledges with red-hot coathangers. Some were beaten before being branded.”
News Item:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125791145785743099.html
The head of AIG, bailed out by American taxpayers, threatens to quit. He has been supervising the corporation, telecommuting, while overseeing the wine production at his vineyard of his estate overlooking the Adriatic.
His reduced pay will amount to a mere $10.5 Million this year.
No disagreement about your characterization of Bush;
But right about now, the thought of beating and branding a bunch of future Masters-of-the-Universe types on their way to careers at Goldman Sachs/AIG/Citibank has an oddly comforting appeal.
kay
Obama’s also the first post-draft era President, simply because of his age.
But they’re too stupid to figure that out.
They better figure it out, because unless they plan on continuing to run John McCain, younger conservative candidates are less likely to be veterans.
The modern veteran population is going to be smaller; no draft.
Wasn’t this discussed to an almost ridiculous extent during the election? That Obama wasn’t subject to Bill Clinton “draft dodger” smearing because Obama wasn’t drafted?
I expect the rules will change when they run a candidate in his forties. The rules always change just in time for conservatives.
binzinerator
@catclub:
How do you know it was Bush?
bemused
Pumas, teabaggers, birthers, tenthers, neocons….
It’s a quagmire of extremist wackos. They’re either multiplying like flies or crawling out of their holes to join in the cacophony.
Max
TPM has the video of the reporter on MSNBC. You can see the encounter with Obama shook him to his core.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/11/must_see.php#more
ppcli
Ok, but let’s take a moment to say that if the story she recounts about Bush and Laura quietly visiting wounded soldiers without fanfare is true, then they did a good thing. (Of course, the mere fact that Glick says it’s true increases the probability of its truth only very slightly.)
.
Overall, given what a catastrophe Bush was in virtually every respect as a president, he’s been assuming the mantle of ex-president pretty well. (Beginning with his refusal to end his tenure with an orgy of self-interested pardons the way Reagan, Bush I and Clinton did.) Credit where it’s due.
John D.
@binzinerator:
Who else outranked Cheney?
Tom Levenson
I’m still amazed (OK, not really) that when the NY Times had a slot to fill for a conservative columnist, they chose vagina-terrified Douthat instead of Larison.
For a perhaps inappropriate sports analogy, try the decision to take Sam Bowie ahead of one Michael Jordan. I mean, oops.
Anne Laurie
@El Cid:
But plenty of Good Conservatives will insist that she must have done something — surely she was asking to be abused, because why else would such an upstanding godly citizen like Dubya be forced to resort to violence?
Too many political conservatives are still trying to find some reason to excuse Dubya, just as too many Talibangelical conservatives are still trying to convince us sane people that there’s no such thing as ‘domestic violence’, except of course when some crazy woman drives her poor beleagured spouse to try and shut her up.
Elizabelle
Thank you — NOT — for introducing me to Caroline Glick.
She could fit under your next headline too — “Where Do They Find These People?”
Her next post after the one you linked was also incredible on a quick skim. “Upside of an Obama Presidency”
Lede:
“After watching Obama’s speech at the Fort Hood memorial yesterday, I feel I do owe him an apology. That was the first speech I ever saw him give that wasn’t all about him. And for this he should be commended. And Michelle was appropriately dressed and coiffed.”
Such class, drawing Michelle’s attire into it.
Another jewel, toward the end of whatever argument Glick is attempting:
“In short because Obama is increasingly recognized as a radical, far leftist who is hostile to the very notion of US power projection abroad …”
Recognized by whom?
Miss Glick and her ilk truly do live in their own world. And it’s a damn pathetic one.
different church-lady
@Elizabelle:
“Plays well with others. Excellent penmanship.”
Bubblegum Tate
@bemused:
Coincidentally enough, I read this very good New Yorker article during my morning commute. The upshot: Technology, primarily the Web, has made it very easy for extremist nutjobs like teabaggers, tenthers, birthers, etc. to connect with their ideological brethren. Whereas before they would be far-flung nutjobs, now they can easily congregate online, and when they do so, it drives them even further into craziness.
kay
@Elizabelle:
Ooooh. “US power projection”.
I bet that was thrilling to write. Glick looks back, misty-eyed, on Shock and Awe.
It always kills me what absolute, unapologetic war-mongers conservative women are. They’re worse than the men. We’re told again and again that they are these paragons of Traditional Female Values, but they’re happiest and chirpiest when they’re throwing around phrases like “power projection” and threatening to slaughter people.
catclub
elizabelle @ 111
There was a time when it was the conservatives who were hostile
to projection of American power abroad. Of course, they were America Firsters who were cheering for Hitler, but nobody’s perfect.
Before that it was George Washington.
To everything there is a time…
(and I know you were quoting Glick.)
bemused
@Bubblegum Tate:
I think it was Charles Pierce who made a point in his book “Idiot America” that we’ve always had eccentrics, shouters on soapboxes, & assorted off the wall kooks but they weren’t given so much notice by the mainstream. Now every damn one of them gets his/her soapbox on cable news.
catclub
Kay @ 103
The Mittster’s sons served valiantly in the Iowa caucuses.
Far tougher than the military.
Eating rubber chicken with the local Chamber of Commerce
deserves its own Medal of Honor.
The Golux
Glick’s wet dream about “US power projection” confirms the first of my three-part synopsis of right-wing “thought”:
1. In foreign policy, we’re going to be the biggest pricks on the planet, and if you don’t like it, fuck you.
The other two legs of this stool of stupidity are:
2. In economic policy, the obscene wealth of the obscenely wealthy is insufficiently obscene, and if you don’t like it, fuck you.
3. In social policy, we don’t like what you do with your genitals, and if you don’t like it, fuck you.
Jay C
That post from Hillbuzz was astonishingly rancid: I guess it proves that the PUMA isn’t extinct, after all!
The ODS on display from so much of the Right these days is really starting to veer even further over the edge than it already was. Myself, I saw Pres. Obama’s reactions (and actions) in the wake of the Ft. Hood shootings to be exactly what I would expect a President to do. Respectful, sympathetic (he is the military’s C-in-C, after all); nothing “political”, concentrating on the grief of the survivors and families – and capped with a moving and eloquent speech.
And yet there is a core of irredeemable nuts out there who still seem utterly (if not downright pathologically) incapable of giving Barack Obama the least break or credit for anything ; but just have to bitch and carp – usually in shrill mockery or overheated hysterical tones. I see now why they call it a “Derangement Syndrome”
I mean, I think GW Bush was rivaled only/maybe by James Buchanan as shoo-in candidate for “Worst Preznit Evah!”; but I think his and Laura’s appearance at Ft. Hood was a good and classy thing to do.
Jay B.
@ppcli:
No. None given. He’s a “good” ex-president only because if he ever said anything it would remind 78% of America why they hated that son of a bitch to begin with.
The man and most of his Administration should be on trial, but given that they’re not and they won’t be, the VERY least he can do is shut the fuck up until he dies. He was a shit and cancer on the body politic for 8 excruciating years and did incalculable damage to every part of our country except for the ultra-wealthy and we will be EXCEEDINGLY lucky if we never see his likes again.
One of the reasons he didn’t have to do self-interested pardons was because so few “important” people ever got prosecuted under his watch. He knows he got away with it, so why rock the boat? I’m not ever, ever, ever going to give him credit for doing something (or in this case, NOT doing something) when there’s almost certainly a malicious motive that could equally explain his actions. It’s certainly more plausible than “he left with dignity” — because he didn’t come in with dignity, he didn’t govern with dignity and he certainly didn’t get re-elected with dignity.
Davex99
wow… He’s so right it stings.
gypsy howell
Hitler left with dignity too. Of a sort.
I’m just sayin’
Irony Abounds
It never ceases to amaze me how some people can look fondly upon Bush while at the same time criticize Obama for not immediately cleaning up the economic and foreign policy morass left by 43. I honestly have no idea how Obama will eventually turn out, but given how deep in shit he started, just returning everything to relatively normal will be a huge accomplishment.
El Cid
I actually do think that in his last 2 years, Bush Jr. tamped down the crazy.
Not likely because of some great degree of insight, but just having gotten pissed off and tired that he, Bush Jr., had bought all the Cheney bullshit about how if he just acted like a raging right wing violent greedy asshole all the time on every issue, things would not only go great but people would love him.
And finally he saw that it was all a big pile of shit, he was tired of even having to try to look like he was having to work hard on it all, and he was just god-damned sick of pretty much everybody hating him. Sure, it was a ridiculous transfer of any responsibility, but then, that’s the kind of guy I think he was.
So, in the end, I think it was his pissy disgust for all the Cheneyism he had swallowed that got him to head off the Iran attack that so many of his ilk had been rubbing themselves about, and that he didn’t issue a bunch of pardons as a minor, lazy, passive aggressive ‘fuck you’ to all the Cheney types.
justinslot
@ Tom Levenson: Larison goes against whatever the NYT thinks conservative conventional wisdom is far too often to be published there. He’d be too controversial–they’d cut him the first time his Russophilia flared up. Douthat is safely Brooksian.
I don’t get the fundie critique of Larison. He’s hardcore Orthodox, right? But it’s not like it infects what he writes.
Neutron Flux
@El Cid: This. IMO.
kay
O/T but I love this:
The Tea Partiers are splitting into warring factions, and sparring (of course) not face to face, but with angry email exchanges.
“Where has all this money gone?” asks Perdue. “If there is nothing wrong going on, why has there not been one single piece of paper produced to back up why people got checks, some for $3,000, $7,400+, $4,000, $10,400+??? Where is the documentation? Why isn’t the cash deposited like it should be? Why did it take more than two weeks to deposit cash from the meetings?”
Who would have predicted that a …..club… whose one activity is forming mobs and hollering angry slogans, with no one ever listening to anything, would devolve into a loud mess, where no one understands what anyone else is up to, suspicion runs rampant, and one faction is suing another?
Chad N Freude
@El Cid: I think it’s pretty well established that Bush became — umm … disillusioned — with his overlord Cheney during the last two years of his term.
HyperIon
@The Moar You Know: but I can’t get over his support for Southern secessionism
Didn’t you comment recently at Pat Lang’s place about confederates being guilty of treason? Curmudgeon Lang was not amused. I can’t get over HIS support for Southern secessionism. Especially when he is so quick to label others’ actions as treasonous. Also a Virginian having a blog with a title based on what John Wilkes Booth shouted right after shooting Lincoln seems a bit provocative to me.
And Larison is not a fundie in the usual sense. He’s a (Russian?) orthodox person. Or Greek orthodox. Pardon my ignorance of the Eastern church.
Alien-Radio
@Chad N Freude: More than that, The last part of his term was when Daddy’s clean up crew were airlifted in.
JEB was supposed to be president but Dick and Karl saw everything they needed in W. When shrub fucked it up The senior bush had to put space between Cheney and Shrub. Rumsfeld’s ousting in 2006 is when Cheney lost the battle.
G.W. is an aristo, he doesn’t believe in anything but keeping his family in the ruling class, Cheney was a middle class ideological warrior, he was a true believer in the aristocracy’s propaganda. That’s vulgar to an aristo. Worse than that he fucked shit up for jeb, the one who could have further entrenched the ruling class without cocking the whole thing up.
Cheney starts trash talking W when he leaves office because of the lack of pardons. Obviously because he wants to save his own skin. Bad move. I Fully expect Cheney to wind up behind bars because G.W. wants revenge and it’s the best way to rehabilitate the family name.
HyperIon
@Notorious P.A.T.: How many times did he welcome home returning servicemen, or their coffins? How many times did he visit recovering servicemen in the hospital?
This is slightly OT but your comment reminds me of the POV documentary shown last night here in Seattle about the folks in Bangor Maine who have been greeting the returning troops’ flights for many years now.
The longer I watched, the more I noticed that different people had different motives for this action. Some were just lonely and old and wanted something to pour their energies into. One woman said she didn’t know what she would do when the flights stop. The good new for her (and the bad news for everybody else) is that the flights will not be stopping anytime soon.
HyperIon
@MNPundit: Not really an Amen since Larison doesn’t have any kind of emotion at all. Not saying that he’s wrong, just psychologically defective.
But he recently went to Paris to visit his girlfriend so he must have SOME emotions. ;=)
Sly
The insider accounts I’ve seen have consistently pointed to Jr’s delight in politicking. Policy and governance take a back seat (or no seat at all) to getting in the mud of campaigning. That other stuff needs to be left to the eggheads.
2006 probably at least hinted to him that the stuff he’d been charged to sell to the public wasn’t in their best interest, considering it was the largest shift in Congressional seats in a generation or two. I’m willing to grant him that small amount of ego-driven wherewithal, and that’s being incredibly generous towards a man I believe to have been the worst President since Buchanan.
As for Glick, she and the rest of the backwash clearly don’t need a President who actually does the whole policy thing. They need one to comfort their petty prejudices (such as not having a black man be President) and coddle them for being such abject cowards. Bush managed to do this, because that’s all he really set out to do.
This section was particularly galling:
Considering the need and expense of psychiatric care, what with the massive disparity in suicide rates between recent veterans and the population in general, I hope she hurts a hell of a lot more in the future. She deserves nothing less for being such a shitstain of a human being.
AhabTRuler
It’s the state motto of Virginia.
Pseudonym
mclaren
Why beat around the bush? So to speak. Why not just say the guy was an ignorant incompetent alocholic coke-snorting sociopath?
Why does everyone use these goddamn euphemisms when they start talking about the president? Instead of saying “the president misrepresented the facts,” why not just say “the president lied”?
licensed to kill time
O where o where can my reply arrow be?
O where o where can it be?
With a comment to submit
So my arrow won’t quit
O where o where can it be?