The Opinion Mill

Arlington National Cemetery, as most of you know, occupies land owned before the Civil War by the family of Robert E. Lee. After Lee resigned his commission in the U.S. Army to fight on the Confederate side, the Federal military brass started using the grounds of the estate to bury the Union dead created by Lee’s generalship.

I propose a portion of King George II’s estate in Crawford be used for the burial of U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq. That way, if there really is an afterlife, we have at least some hope of seeing Bush’s lies come back to haunt him.

One of wingerdom’s favorite dreamland correspondents has declared that the Iraq war is over and — surprise! — we won:

I would go so far as to say that barring any major and unexpected developments (like an Israeli air strike on Iran and the retaliations that would follow), a fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What’s left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved, so those spectacular attacks are diminishing along with the regular violence. Now it’s time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won.

I guess it’s only to be expected that the war we were lied into by the only president to be personally chosen by God would be winding up just in time for the conclusion of that president’s final term. (Assuming Scalia et al don’t have another surprise in store for us.) After all, Obama has made it clear he wants a tight timetable for withdrawal, and the Iraqis themselves have been clamoring for the U.S. to get lost. Let the Republicans declare victory and go home, leaving behind a brutalized pseudo-state, a make-believe government riddled by terrorist elements, a population traumatized by ethnic cleansing, women at the mercy of theocrats and fresh trouble brewing in Kurdistan. Let the victory parades begin!

Look, I’m resigned to the fact that the wingers will be sounding triumpets, crying “Hail Caesar!” and scattering rose petals at Bush’s feet no matter what happened in Iraq. They’ve been doing it ever since that clown show on the aircraft carrier. Bush has his hard core of supporters who don’t care if the country’s been robbed, so long as the crooks have a magnetized yellow ribbon on their getaway car.

Since the bad guys won and the crooks are going to get away clean, why not end the scam now? Ring down the curtain now, get the troops out, leave one less mess for the next administration to deal with? Can we at least get that much out of this horror? Nobody’s fooled except the fools, so let’s just cut the crap and get this thing over with.

That New Yorker cover showing Obama and his wife dressed as terrorists and bumping fists in the Oval Office is lame and stupid. It doesn’t work as satire because its ostensible target — dumb rumors about Obama being a Muslim terrorist in disguise — isn’t even grazed, much less hit. It doesn’t work as humor because when professional dickwads like Sean Hannity and the wingnut aviary are either implying that Obama is a closet terrorist or saying it outright, depicting him as such isn’t a joke.

If the cover had shown as this image a nightmare plaguing Joe Lieberman’s sleep, it would have had a shot at being fun. As presented, it’s simply the furthering of a vile lie that’s already had too much time in the air. And it’s about as funny as a case of kidney stones.

I like The New Yorker, but let’s bear in mind that before Seymour Hersh came aboard, it was yet another platform for Iraq warwhores.

The summer has hardly begun, but it’s never too soon to prepare for Bushtemberfest — with this administration’s overachieving approach to underachievement, every week brings a fresh outrage, a new calamity, a still more nauseating display of contempt for everything that is good and valuable about America. That makes it hard to keep track of all the events to commeorate in our annual Festival of Fatal Fuckups.

So, hats off to Brad Reed for providing a handy rundown of “The 10 Most Awesomely Bad Moments of the Bush Presidency,” which Reed freely admits is far too short and far too arbitrary. Don’t read ‘em and weep — read ‘em and vote.

And remember — even as we spend the weekend celebrating our country, we will bear in mind how much of value has been trashed by this cabal offlakes and thieves, and how much more damage remains within their scope in the months remaining to Bush.  

The challenge: How does one defend the Bush administration, which lies its ass off as a matter of course, against the charge that it lied its ass off about Iraq? Why, by lying one’s ass off, of course.  

Richard Clarke suggests some form of shunning is in order for the intellect-shills, corporate grifters and partisan creeps who greased the skids for the Iraq war:

Well, there may be some other kind of remedy. There may be some sort of truth and reconciliation commission process that’s been tried in other countries, South Africa, Salvador and what not, where if you come forward and admit that you were in error or admit that you lied, admit that you did something, then you’re forgiven. Otherwise, you are censured in some way.

Now, I just don’t think we can let these people back into polite society and give them jobs on university boards and corporate boards and just let them pretend that nothing ever happened when there are 4,000 Americans dead and 25,000 Americans grievously wounded, and they’ll carry those wounds and suffer all the rest of their lives.

Unfortunately, as Think Progress points out, the wingnut welfare machine has already been quite generous with the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, who at the very least deserve to be pelted with rotten fruit every time they step into public.

Clarke suggests something like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission seen in South Africa, in which participants in the apartheid regime were offered amnesty for their crimes in exchange for their coming clean. The problem with the comparison is that the South African leadership had agreed to dismantle the mechanisms of apartheid and opened the way for honest exploration of the regime’s horrors.

We have no such commitment here. We have an entire political movement committed to perpetuating the lie that what is going on in Iraq right now is some kind of replay of World War II, and that the information coming out about this catastrophe is just a lot of liberal media propaganda written by reporters too scared to leave their hotel rooms. We have an entire cable news channel dedicated to disseminating this crap on a daily and hourly basis. A substantial number of America’s political and media professionals have a vested interest in preventing any kind of sustained inquiry into how this country was lied into a contemptible war. I’m counting the minutes until some FoxNews gasbag starts comparing Clarke’s suggestion to the show trials under Stalin. Check your watches, people, it won’t be too long.

So Clarke’s idea, while attractive, seems unlikely to be realized. All we can do for now is remember, and challenge the lies whenever and wherever they surface.

Worst of all, even if there is some kind of initiative, and even if this weasel pack is exposed to some kind of censure and condemnation, the perpetrators will never have to pay any price remotely as terrible as the one paid by their thousands of victims in Iraq.

It isn’t often that I have anything good to say about Chris Matthews and Hardball, but I love the pure comedy gold that turned up when Matthews, listening to wingnut radio host Kevin James wave the Hitler Stick over Barack Obama, asked the clown to explain what he meant when he compared Obama to Neville Chamberlain.

As you will see, the radio squawker hasn’t got the faintest idea – he just picks up on spin points and screeches as loudly as possible, and Matthews swats him down: “You don’t know. You don’t know what you are talking about . . . I gotta go to someone who knows something about history. He is as bad as the press secretary who does not know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was.”

This snap of Josh Brolin as George W. Bush in the upcoming Dubya biopic from Oliver Stone is worthy of study. The big question about the film is whether it will portray Bush as basically evil or basically stupid. There is a whole spectrum of shadings between those two poles, and I’m afraid that Stone doesn’t have the savvy to capture them.

This image, for example, suggests stupidity will prevail: this version of Dubya looks like a guy who’s just taken a dump and can’t decide if he should wipe himself or start shining his shoes. That’s all wrong. The current occupant of the White House — not the president, never call him that around me — is a dolt in many ways, but he’s also got loads of low animal cunning and a bottomless sense of entitlement.

To contrast him with Richard Nixon (the last subject of one of Stone’s historical fantasias), I would say that Nixon acted like a man who wanted to get even with the world, while Dubya acts like a man who wants to use the world like a ten-dollar hooker and then swagger off to church.

It’s tempting and maybe even cathartic for people to write Bush off as the world’s luckiest village idiot, but the last eight years have not been the work of such a fool. Remember, folks, he took America’s measure, gauged its weaknesses and then went to work. George W. Bush decided to play directly to everything that was crappy, lazy and ugly about America, and it paid off for him in every important way. He lied us into a war, corrupted the Constitution and looted the treasury, all the while smirking in the knowledge that the corporate-lobotomized press wouldn’t even raise its voice. At the end of his term, George W. Bush is going home instead of going to jail. He wins.

We are now in the position of a mugging victim who must wait for his head to clear while hoping the injuries won’t be permanent, and then try to figure out how to avoid similar victimization in the future. Making a movie about a drawling dummy with daddy issues might be temporarily satisfying, but it won’t help us in the real task of recovering from the Great Bush Bust-Out.

This Greg Anrig article about the rise and fall of school voucher programs, one of the winger movement’s most cherished hobbyhorses, is a must-read. As Anrig says, vouchers were the brainchild of libertarian economist Milton Friedman and it appears they will not long outlive him:

. . . in recent months, almost unnoticed by the mainstream media, the school voucher movement has abruptly stalled. Some stalwart advocates of vouchers have either repudiated the idea entirely or considerably tempered their enthusiasm for it. Exhibit A is “School Choice Isn’t Enough,” an article in the winter 2008 City Journal (the quarterly published by the conservative Manhattan Institute) written by the former voucher proponent Sol Stern. Acknowledging that voucher programs for poor children had “hit a wall,” Stern concluded: “Education reformers ought to resist unreflective support for elegant-sounding theories, derived from the study of economic activity, that don’t produce verifiable results in the classroom.” His conversion has triggered an intense debate in conservative circles. The center-right education scholar Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a longtime critic of public school bureaucracies and teachers unions, told the New York Sun that he was sympathetic to Stern’s argument. In his newly published memoirs, Finn also writes of his increasing skepticism that “the market’s invisible hand” produces improved performance on its own. Howard Fuller, an African American who was the superintendent of schools in Milwaukee when the voucher program was launched there, and who received substantial support from the Bradley Foundation and other conservative institutions over the years, has conceded, “It hasn’t worked like we thought it would in theory.”

School vouchers always made more sense as a union-busting tactic, and a blow to the teachers unions that are loyal supporters of Democratic candidates, than as any meaningful attempt at educational reform. Anrig documents that while voucher advocates were able to win publicity points by claiming they could work miracles with downtrodden urban school districts, they found themselves faced with resentment and resistance when they peddled their snake-oil outside the cities:

In 1997, the conservative writer Michael Gerson (who would go on to be George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter) took a tour of small-town Indiana when the state was considering a voucher program. He found that its predominantly conservative population prized its public schools (mostly because of their proud basketball tradition) and resented the suggestion that these institutions were failing their students. Over the years, various proposals for vouchers in Indiana have never progressed very far. “Conservative politicians running in this state quickly find that criticizing public education—or suggesting that some people might want to opt out—is like spitting on the school colors,” Gerson wrote in U.S. News & World Report, noting that in 1997, support for voucher programs was higher in the liberal Northeast than the more conservative Midwest.

I’ll say this much for the voucher pushers: unlike the backwater theocrats and frauds who continue to push abstinence-only curricula despite abundant evidence of its failure, many voucher proponents seem to have recognized the failure of the inherently bad idea and have moved on to charter schools — an approach with its owen set of problems. Not every conservative belongs to the “clap-louder-for-Tinkerbell” school. That’s a slender ray of hope for the future.

If you really want to take your gag reflex out for a spin, try this sample of the way the pundits squealed five years ago when the Boy Emperor went flouncing across that aircraft carrier deck with a couple of socks jammed down his flight suit. Joke Line, Tweety Matthews, Drowsy Dave Broder — all our faves fell all over themselves in the rush to bow down before the greatness that was Incurious George. In particular, check out G. Gordon Liddy as he checks out . . . oh, you know:

After all, Al Gore had to go get some woman to tell him how to be a man. And here comes George Bush. You know, he’s in his flight suit, he’s striding across the deck, and he’s wearing his parachute harness, you know — and I’ve worn those because I parachute — and it makes the best of his manly characteristic. You go run those — run that stuff again of him walking across there with the parachute. He has just won every woman’s vote in the United States of America. You know, all those women who say size doesn’t count — they’re all liars. Check that out.

Having read Liddy’s autobiographical rodomontade Will back in college, I’ve always suspected there was, shall we say, a little too much emphasis on the he-man stuff, considering the rather glaring divide between the author’s image of himself and the rather pathetic career chronicled in the book’s pages. Almost like Liddy was, how to put it, overcompensating for something about himself. Let’s just say that when the leader of the Political Gang That Couldn’t Burglarize Straight started slobbering over Bush’s crotch on television, I wasn’t too surprised.

Incidentally, despite what you have been hearing in some quarters, that “Mission Accomplished” banner was entirely appropriate. As students of The Bush Bust-Out know, the mission was never about service, security or stewardship. That grinning chimp knew he had the whole thing dicked, that the twin specters of Osama bin laden and Saddam Hussein were going to keep him in power until all the cash registers had been broken open, all the bank vaults had been looted, and all the goodies pocketed.

I don’t know what the Latin translation of “So Long, Suckers” would be, but that’s what should replace “E Pluribus Unum” on the national seal once Bush swaggers back to Texas for the last time.