Comity Watch
I think James Baker and Dick Cheney should take Bush out to the woods around Camp David. After 24 hours in a sweat lodge, he should be given only a loin cloth, a hunting knife and a canteen of water. Bush should then set out to track and kill a black bear, after which he should eat its still beating heart so he can absorb its spirit. He should then fly back to Washington in Marine 1. His torso still scratched from the bear’s claws, his face bloodied and steaming in the November chill, he should immediately give a press conference at which he throws the bearskin on the front row of the press corps, completely enveloping Helen Thomas, declaring, “I’m not going anywhere.”
This will send important messages to Democrats and well as to our enemies overseas, who are no doubt high-fiving as we speak.
Leaving aside that Goldberg has seemingly gone feral, this says quite a lot about what to expect from the president and his remaining supporters.
Let’s outline the president’s current situation. Bush has gleefully broken any number of laws for which he has escaped accountability only because the faintest hint of oversight would have killed off the past Republican Congress faster than sunlight to a vampire. Now, unexpectedly (no doubt Rove spun convincing yarns about a lasting majority), oversight is on its way. In spades. The question isn’t whether the president has any Watergates hiding in his closet but how many and how long before the first documents spin their way into the press. The boy president understands as well as anybody that there’s trouble coming down the pike.
This makes the administration’s Nixon fixation timely and more than a bit ironic. Cheney, Addington and the rest took from Watergate the comically misinformed idea that Nixon gave up too easily, which helps explain the veep’s remarkably thorough refusal to share information of any sort. The makeup of Cheney’s energy panels, the names of the Vice President’s staff, his daily schedule, all disappear into the black hole. But, contra Addington’s addled assertions, fighting would have done Nixon no good when he could only look forward to losing an impeachment trial. Nixon resigned because he knew that he had hemorrhaged too much support to keep himself afloat any longer.
Maybe Bush will settle for following the Dems’ lead in the hopes that he can ride out two years without anything impeachable coming to light. It might even work. But if trouble comes Bush can expect precious little from moderate Republicans who haven’t yet been booted by primary challengers or the electorate at large. For the two wooden nickels it’s worth Bush’s only support will come from the fire-breathing partisans represented by Goldberg’s paean to combative peevishness, the angry right who cannot or will not adjust to life in the minority. In comedy they say play to who’s laughing. Right now beside scattered chuckles from Jonah Goldberg and Hugh Hewitt the room sits in a cold, stony silence.
Hmmm. I don’t think the Democrats are really going to care if Bush goes bear hunting. It’s Cheney you’ve got to watch out in the field.
Oh God…I can’t get past the fact that Jonah Goldberg has Ted Nugebt fantasies…eeeewwwwwwwwwwww.
Nugent….sigh. Still..icky.
Yeah, Jonah Goldberg wishes he was Stephen Colbert. As John was saying before… “Beyond Parody”.
I think maybe he was trying to be funny. If so, Mission Accomplished.
I think Arthur Silber has the right take on this:
I thought it was funny, too. I mean, it totally reads like something DougJ would write.
He was trying to be funny.
Obviously he wasn’t in the same zip code as funny, but come on, where’s the sympathy for this kid? He’s had his political views and career handed to him by his parents? How is he supposed to have any idea when he’s being dumb; he has never been told he’s wrong?
He and Bush are both products of the liberal spare-the-rod, if-it-feels-good-do-it culture. They’ve been spoiled for life, isolated from the consequences of their actions by the patronage and lowered expectations that comprise today’s conservatism.
It’s not his fault. Blame conservative society.
Damn shredder machine! Stuck again!
There’s an element of parody here that I have to believe is unintentional, because it is just so damn similar to what Bush has done in the Middle East. Bush should then set out to destroy al Qaeda and democratize Iraq, after which. . . Um, you left out the hard part, in which manly talk isn’t quite enough for the job.
Does anyone else get flashes of that Doritos commercial where the guy chooses to react to a bear based on the three flavor types of Sweet Chili Heat Doritos? Do you think Bush would go Bold, Sweet, or Hot?
Who do I supoena first? Eeeny, meeny, miny, mo…
And, as the last post he quoted over there implies, maybe this wouldn’t have happened if they could each had managed to have killed a bear in their youth… :)
“I think James Baker and Dick Cheney should take Bush out to the woods around Camp David…”
James Baker and Dick Cheney are having a hard enough time right now explaining to Junior how to use the shredding machine.
I bet John Kerry could tell him a bit about trying to be funny.
FWIW, I thought it actually was funny – but I assumed that Joanh already understood Silber’s point. It struck me as kind of a Farley-ish “that would be AWESOME” thing.
LOL! Can you be anymore retardly ridiculous?! Great, now from this place I’ve gotten both a visual of Cindy retrieving her “parts” and now Bush running around in a loin cloth. There’s not enough bleach for those two images.
But Goldberg may have a point. Baker and Cheney should tape that rite of warrior passage. Have it shown on Al Jazerra. While the admin has been totally incompetent to date on terrorism, that tape would likely cause bad guys to laugh themselves to death.
The thing is, there’s only one logical conclusion to this fiasco, and it scares the hell out of me: President Cheney. The only question is, would Bush die by being mauled by the bear, or would he die by being shot in the back by Cheney trying to kill the bear…
Fixed and now funny.
“Spare the rod, spoil the child” means to spank/punish the child and would take place in a home that isn’t a member of the “if-it-feels-good-do-it culture”.
If you believe that Johnah Goldberg “(was) never told he’s wrong” by his parents then they can be considered to have treated their son “with kid gloves”.
Doesn’t a lot of this have to do with which frame the press decides to buy into?
Any number of things could come to light in the next months/years, but if the press decides that it’s a witch hunt, it’s not really going to matter all that much.
In a stunning act of bipartisanship, President Bush is trying to figure out how to bypass the Senate in order to get Bolton back in at the UN:
Bring it on?
Ah, Rusty–they did spare the rod, and it did spoil the child. My read, anyway.
Funny. My Uncle(a Democrat) actually used to hunt bear up in Canada with nothing but a compound bow and a quiver of arrows.
I can’t picture Bush even being alone in the woods without crying for mommy.
I got an idea. Since Senator Norm Coleman wants to be at the UN so much, why not appoint him?
Jonah left out the part of his fantasy where Bush turns down the lights, puts on some Barry White, and makes sweet, sweet love to Helen Thomas on the bear skin.
Come on, you just know that’s where he ended up with it. The man used “enveloping” and “Helen Thomas” in a sentence. Freud would know the score.
Arthur wrote: “On the other hand, I can very easily see Lucianne Goldberg tracking the bear, killing it in an excessively bloody manner, and then gustily devouring its heart.”
Oh no. Lucianne wouldn’t take the heart.
How about Harriet Miers for UN?
Sprare the rod, spoil the child. Isn’t that from the Mark Foley Big Book of Aphorisms?
Oooh, ooh! I propose a new measurement to go with the Friedman. If a Friedman is a unit of time, a Watergate is a unit of weight. As in “How many Watergates will it take to crush a lame rubber ducky?” or perhaps a unit of length: “Dammit Karl, I’m about three Watergates away from firing your ass!” Think about it. It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s Friday.
I thought it was zinc? Still funny though.
Nah in Foley’s case not sparing the rod is akin to spoiling the child.
Perry Como,
re:bypassing the Senate, that has been their Plan B for a while now:
it’s a lot of things, also heard it’s high in vitamin E and therefore a good skin cream…
Jesus Christ. Does the Doughy Pantload think he’s some kind of cathartic comedic genius? I think he should follow his own lame unfunny advice and march down to the local recruiter and sign up for a tour of duty in the war on Islamofascism. He’s not too old. Not even close.
Goldberg can go fuck himself.
I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t we hand Jonah a gun and ship him off to fight the war he so steadfastly said we needed to fight.
Oh yeah, sorry he’s got a wife and kids who Couldn’t afford the lost income
This guy is a piece of shit. Even worse he’s a piece of shit who thinks he is funny/.
Sorry, my last comment was bitter and uncivil. While our soldiers are dying in Iraq, getting their arms and legs blown off and getting their brains damaged by IEDs and RPGs, I just can’t get all giggly over Doughy Pantload’s macho eliminationist fantasies laid bear [sic].
He can still go and fuck himself.
His ass is sorry, all right. As if there has never been anyone else in the military who’s 35+ with a family and a baby daughter… Suck it up, Jonah, fight for what you spout for once, and maybe you’d learn a thing or two!
Richard,
His “sorry ass” should be used to Up-Armor a Humvee.
Back to Bush in a loin cloth with a hunting knife (sounds like the game Clue, doesn’t it?), I think that if Goldberg had suggested that he rampage through Congress, that would have created a nice metaphor for what I expect will happen among Republicans over the next few weeks.
Yes that is indeed funny now.
Given that Dear Leader is scared of horses (why do you think you never see pictures of him riding a horse? They terrify him!), the chances of him doing anything other than running while squealing in terror like a five-year-old girl at the sight of an un-caged bear is somewhere around, uhm, well, the chances of victory in Iraq now that we done good and well FUBAR’ed it.
As for Richard Nixon, he resigned shortly after Senator Barry Goldwater and the rest of the Senate Republican leadership walked into his office and told him, “Mr. Nixon, resign or we will vote to convict you.” But that was back in the old days, in the old Republican party of somber men of conviction in grey suits, when vile little men like Richard Nixon were viewed as rather sordid and common by the party leadership and tolerated only because they managed to bring in dough and win elections. Nowdays, people like Richard Nixon are the norm in the Republican Party, rather than the disdained exception, and the chances of Senator Bill Frist walking into Bush’s office and saying something like that…. BWHAHAHAH! It ain’t happenin!
Damn, I miss the old Republican Party… I might not have always agreed with ole’ Barry, but I never had to doubt that he was a man of principle. Today’s Republicans have no principle, no dignity, no, how shall I put it, conservative values…
– Badtux the once-Republican Penguin
I think Goldberg was trying to be funny, but end but still make a point (i.e. The President should “re-assert his authority”). What’s laughable is that he thinks there is anyway for a President whose party just lost both houses of Congress and is, in so many other ways, on the ropes, to “re-assert his authority”.
The only way Bush will make forward progress on anything is to pull an Arnold, and tack hard to the left. And we all know that’s not gonna happen.
Jonah still operates under the Glenn Reynolds “more rubble less trouble” school of governing. Being rude, obstinate, never changing your mind and never, ever negotiating with those that disagree with you in the slightest are the paths by which you get the world to do what you want. The rest of us see that this only works for tin-pot dictators and grade-school bullies, but Jonah and Glenn still think it’s “serious advice” for governing.
In a sense, Bush is already following Jonah’s advice. See the Bolton nomination and our continued “no negotiations” stance with North Korea & Iran.
Zounds! Goldberg has stumbled onto the secret plan for President Pelosi in 2007! He must be rectumfied!
Btw, we still need a bear big enough and hungry enough to fit Bush and Cheney inside….
It depends on what Bush wants.
If he wants to save his legacy and approval ratings, he should start acting like he’s President for all the people and not just the Republican party.
If he wants to be impeached, he should continue acting like an asshole.
“Sprare the rod, spoil the child. Isn’t that from the Mark Foley Big Book of Aphorisms?”
No, with Foley it’s “Spare the rod, spoil the evening”
Perhaps he should try the Eric Cartman Method: Get a Big Wheel (adult-sized), a police officer’s uniform (we know Bush loves to play dress up) and some mirrored sun glasses. He can pedal into meetings and news conferences shouting “Respect mah authoritah!” and run over the toes of anyone who angers him. However, I prefer Dreggas’ solution, provided I don’t have to see Bush in a loin-cloth. [Shudder.]
In the words of his dear old dad “Not Gonna Do It”
but you are willing to envision him, haggard and dobson in a sweat lodge bare-backing?
“Oh God…I can’t get past the fact that Jonah Goldberg has Ted Nugent fantasies…eeeewwwwwwwwwwww.”
No, it was those CW brothers 6 months back. A chained bear, no?
The GOP these days seems to get all its bright lights from central casting. Fake cowboys like George Allen, fake ranchers like GWB (who, as Putin found out, can’t even ride a horse) and now fake tough guys like Jonah.
John Kerry, doofus that he is, can indeed windsurf and snowboard. And, medal count aside, he was in combat.
Talk is cheap.
Ha! I am immune to gut-wrenching visions of Bush playing the meat in a Spit Roast with The Son of a Dob and sHaggard. You see, as the hearing shuts down at too loud a noise and the pupil contracts at too bright a light, my brain shuts the moment the thought begins to form. Think of it as mental puking.
In a fairer world, Bush would be condemned to a life sentence of having to listen to John Kerry’s taped jokes.
Uh oh, way off topic but here’s some red meat for Red State: Breaking – Germany’s Top Cop seeks Charges Against Rumsfeld Over Prison Abuse!
You lucky lucky person…for me I haven’t perfected that and find myself having to bleach my brain again and again.
Andrew Sullivan?
Perry,
In that vein of “Bears” I know plenty who’d work.
It’s funny because it’s not that far off from what he actually thinks. But it’s to his credit that he understands that his own loony thinking is kind of funny.
To get back to Jonah’s original suggestion, the reason they don’t do this is that the bear would eat Bush.
You know what they say, Kyle: sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you.
er, BadTux? It wouldn’t be Frist, anyway. But you startled me into recognizing a question to which I don’t have an answer, but which will probably have some pretty significant effects.
Who is going to get the Senate Minority Leader and Minority Whip (and other) offices? I mean, it’s not going to be Frist and it’s not going to be Allen. And while McConnell has the lead going into the decisions, are the reasons he didn’t get the majority leader seat still applicable?
Finally, just to rattle our host’s cage a bit… By tradition, the President pro tempore of the United States seat belongs to his favorite Senator, Robert Byrd (D-WV). Fourth in line for the president’s seat.
I’m thinking more of a movie about a canoe trip near the Georgia and Florida border. I see Cheney and Bush tied to trees and a local telling Cheney “you have a purty mouth”. The line “squeal like a pig” comes to mind – it’s not torture or rape, just a fraterity prank.
Honestly, if it was between George Bush, Helen Thomas, and a half-starved black bear, my money is on the black bear. But only because the odds will be with Helen Thomas.
Are you fucking kidding me? How many times can you fire a man before he gets a fucking clue? Can the Senate just hold a vote to take him out back behind the UN Building and have him beaten within an inch of his life by the entire European delegation with the grim hope that he’ll catch a hint?
Or the new improved GOP Version: Sometimes you Mark Foley, sometimes Foley Marks you.
lmao. Now that’s funny.
If you guys want some real comedy, check out this…
http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/
Browse through some of his shows…
That’s a keeper
I picture the French Ambass whipping him as hard as possible with a large white towel.
Bleach!! Where is the bleach!!
And of course this takes us back to: “There’s a bear in the woods. Some say the bear isn’t dangerous…”
Or am I flaunting my immense old age?
Oh well, better a dangerous bear than a bare Bush.
Better Bush in the Bear then Bare’n Bush.
Fixed.
Sully won’t do it, he’s *so* over them.
The incredible mustache of John Bolton can fend off the blows of any mere mortal. There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of animals John Bolton’s mustache allows to live.
Lincoln Chafee for UN Ambassador!
There you go: Feed Bush to the Face Fringe of Doom (shades of Dr. Zoidberg). Or Bush could hunt down and kill John “Coo-coo-ca-choo” Bolton then wear his ‘tache like a grass skirt. As an added bonus it would be far more concealing than a loin cloth.
jay
Dang! I’ve been fixed. How embareassing.
I had the same fantasy about Jonah Goldberg. Except that the bear eats Goldberg’s heart. Except that then I realized that Goldberg doesn’t have a heart. The bear would have to settle for the spleen, I guess.
After reading that fantasy, I have to say, nor does the guy seem to have a brain….ugh.
Babs could do it. Actually Babs probably has done it.
And I wouldn’t wish upon any bear (even the lazy bugger that ate all my blueberries last summer) the ignominy of being successfully tracked and killed by that incompetent asshat.
Unless you’re Canadian.
::ducks FrogPocket::
Okay Mary…that was seriously icky.
In case you wondered.
But it was CanLit, Krista. And — umm, yeah. Icky. Right.
I actually read that one in high school, and went straight back to the Two Margarets instead.
I really don’t think we should impeach the miserable little bastard. Investigate? Sure. Call him out every chance we get? Of course. Drag his ass into court every time he resists a subpeona? Yep.
But for my money it is far better to leave him stewing in the Whitey House to serve as the First Example of the corruption and incomptence that are at the heart and soul of the Republican Party.
After all, the Dems ran against him in 2006 and took both Houses of Congress. I’m certain he could serve the same useful function in 2008 when even more is at stake.
George W. Bush is the GOP’s albatross. Why help them get rid of it?
Yeesh. Yeah, I’ll definitely take Morag Gunn over some chick obsessed with a bear’s wang.
So Jonah’s bright idea is that Bush should say
“I’m going to stay the course”
Yup. That’s how bright Jonah is.
Jonah realizes that this is a guy who has recently been bested physically by snack food, and who still needs training wheels for his bike, right?
“Stay the course” is now the operative statement again.
All the statements about how it was no longer the operative statement are, themselves, inoperative.
This is the leadership we, the American people, can trust to bring us Osama dead or alive. God knows he’s doing a heckuva job, far better than that windsurfer Kerry could ever have hoped to accomplish,w aht with his flip-flopping and his capacity for abstract cognition.
It’s all designed to lull the bear into a false sense of security. Then he can knock him out with the training wheel, and cram pretzels down his maw until the fucker chokes to death.
Mission accomplished, moonbats! And all without using any weapon better than those available to your average 9-year-old. Now THAT’s leadership!
A men!
So George W Bush, a pretzel and a black bear walk into a bar and the bartender says, “Is this a joke?
Seriously, the doughy pant-load probably just believes that he’s the bear, and the President will be putting Jonah out of his misery. Plus, Jonah’s always wanted to envelope Helen Thomas.
Hmm, I dunno. Osama could pretty easily be taken by surprise if the guy chasing him was only wearing flip-flops and traveling by surf-board + sail, dontcha think?
How do you sneak that guy into Pakistan’s tribal areas, though?
Then again, if you parachuted him in, and he surfed the wind down… Hmm, that MIGHT throw terrorists for a loop. It would work if James Bond did it, anyway.
Some morons are on FoxNews this morning talking about how Al Qaeda is celebrating the Dem vitory this week. They appear to be serious. One of them mentioned that Bush has made hard decisions that have made him “unpopular abroad.”
Uh, sort of, but mostly he is unpopular at home. The latest poll I saw over the weekend has his approval rating at 31% and headed south. He is going to challenge Nixon for the deepest approval crater in modern presidential history.
Bush, said the moron, is a politician who does “what he thinks is best and doesn’t care” whether he gets approval, a “refreshing” change from people like Clinton who are “desperate for approval.” No, I am not making this up.
Anyway, the moron, whose name I missed, apparently doesn’t understand that it’s precisely because Bush doesn’t care that he has the low approval rating, and now has a Democratic congress. Bush cares nothing for the people and their view of the world. He’s a Bush, for one thing, and an alcoholic for another. Two things that are not exactly conducive to deep compassion and empathy.
Full speed ahead, his insane Vice President was saying just the other day, regardless of the election outcome. After all “we aren’t running for reelection.” Who cares what the people think? We’ll do whatever we want to do.
Wrapping up my Sunday morning summary, this about Senator Macaca, from Frank Rick in NYT:
Of all the things there are to love about this election, getting rid of Allen is by far my favorite.
And this is the reason that unless Republicans change course and go back to doing things that attract the “moderates” and “independents”, they will watch their party slip away into irrelevance, esp on the National stage.
This is the same kind of black-is-white spin which led the misAdministration to characterize the rising violence in Iraq as evidence of our success.
I don’t read it that way, I read it as Jonah recommending Bush’s version of Clinton’s “I’m still relevant” quote after the 1994 GOP conquest of Congress.