Love & Politics
Historians currently debate whether George Bush or George Buchanan is the worst American president. I am relieved the world still exists and we can now begin to indulge such academic questions. Yet there remain a very few intelligent diehard Bush supporters. Kirby Olson, for instance, has written a wonderful study of Gregory Corso and an excellent novel, Temping. Yet he is a diehard Bushie. How can this be?
Perhaps people select a political leader the way they fall in love. Little can rock such love. It’s what makes politics interesting and unpredictable. Think of the old movie Dietrich movie, The Blue Angel. The elderly professor played by Emil Jannings falls for the whorish Dietrich, follows her and loses everything. That’s the sort of thing that happened a lot in Germany in the 1930s. But it also happened to me in New York in the 1980s. I left my wife of ten years to move in with a divorcee and her young son. From the first the divorcee cheated on me. I refused to believe or even see it. She was dyslexic; we could not discuss books. She was a stage mother. All her social energy and positive skills went into advancing her son’s acting career. In the end, she found somebody better. She kicked me out. After eight years, I had lost -- eight years.
Perhaps people select a political leader the way they fall in love. Little can rock such love. It’s what makes politics interesting and unpredictable. Think of the old movie Dietrich movie, The Blue Angel. The elderly professor played by Emil Jannings falls for the whorish Dietrich, follows her and loses everything. That’s the sort of thing that happened a lot in Germany in the 1930s. But it also happened to me in New York in the 1980s. I left my wife of ten years to move in with a divorcee and her young son. From the first the divorcee cheated on me. I refused to believe or even see it. She was dyslexic; we could not discuss books. She was a stage mother. All her social energy and positive skills went into advancing her son’s acting career. In the end, she found somebody better. She kicked me out. After eight years, I had lost -- eight years.
posted by Michael Andre at
7:50 PM
14 Comments:
Diehard?
Oh geez, no.
I voted for Gore the first time out. The second time out I voted for myself.
But compared to Kerry, Bush is a human being and I like him fine.
His wife likes him, he has his own direction, he can be funny, and so on.
Kerry was a disaster. I hated everything about him: his hair, his speaking voice, his 55 mansions while he squeaked about the poor, and so on.
I even hated the way he suddenly took up hunting, and windsurfing to attract those two demographics. He was just a fraud.
Bush is what he is, and no bones about it. He's authentic, and I respect that.
I can't stand Kerry. When he shows up on my TV my hair stands on end to match his hirsute tsunami.
I hate the left, it's true. But it's only because they've taken so many bad turns. I am basically one of them. But I enjoy the way that Bush rankles them.
Because they rankle me to the pink.
James Buchanan. Marc Kessler tells me Updike wrote a play called Buchanan Dying.
America has been ambushed.
I've never seen that play. alot of people claim that Buchanan was gay. A lot of other people claim that he wasn't. I believe the latter group.
Was Buchanan really so bad? Let's resurrect his reputation!!
Buchanan was certainly better than Bush. He was gay, and that's part of it; Bush is still in the closet, faking it with Laura the Clown. But the big difference is one of scale--Buchanan wrecked the United States, Bush the world.
Q: Is Bush the worst person ever?
Who has the worst haircut; -- Rumsfeld or Cheney or Wolfowitz? Who is the worst man; -- Judas or Hitler or Bush? Why are multiple choice questions in myths and fairy tales generally limited to three?
Buchanan wasn't gay, any more than Lincoln was. If you read the Wikipedia entry you'll see that this is just wishful thinking on the part of certain "scholars." Back then it was normal for men to share the same bed now and then.
It didn't mean that they were indulging in 69.
Three is apparently the number that a mind can hold easily. We can think of three things at once. More than that and the juggler tends to drop the ball.
The United States is fine. We have a powerful economy and people are still piling in from everywhere in the third world. We have by far the most powerful economy in the world. It's based on the justice established in part by the Civil War (which the Democrats were against). We have a functional system. The Democrats want to wreck it by making us turn into communists.
Bush, a nice capitalist, is only trying to spread this system of rights to the third world so that they can stop coming here and trying to muscle in on our capitalist economy so that they can send money back to their failing communist systems (Mexico is a de facto communist country). Bush's way too nice, and he loves Laura, and she loves him back. They are the world's greatest love story, unless you want to talk about Reagan and his wife.
It's rare to see two people so happy with one another as W and Laura. What a wonderful thing. It's kept them young.
Compare the Clintons. They see each other as use value, and nothing more.
Clinton still has outstanding allegations of rape against him by the Brodderick woman, and many charges of harassment. And yet the Democrats look the other way in their Augean stable that even Hercules (Poirot) couldn't begin to examine because the filthy fingerprints are everywhere! Or should I just say pawprints.
Ever since the 60s it's been a menacing situation in which people who pretend to be enlightened but who are really dark and dangerous are promoted to the top ranks of the Democratic party. People took LSD saw the light and began to rape everybody in the name of love.
Ooky spooky eat your kooky cookie,
The world's gonna end!
Article on George Bush
The Boston Globe -- the respected, liberal newspaper owned by the New York
Times -- ran an article last week that Bush critics may wish to read
carefully. It is a report on a new book that argues that President Bush has
developed and is ably implementing only the third American grand strategy in
our history.
The author of this book, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience
(Harvard Press) to be released in March, is John Lewis Gaddis, the Robert A.
Lovett professor of military and naval history at Yale University . The
Boston Globe describes Mr. Gaddis as "the Dean of Cold War studies and one
of the nation's most eminent diplomatic historians." In other words, this is
not some put-up job by an obscure right-wing author. This comes from the
pinnacle of the liberal Ivy League academic establishment.
If you hate George W. Bush, you will hate this Boston Globe story because
it makes a strong case that Mr. Bush stands in a select category with
presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and James Monroe (as guided by his
secretary of state, John Q. Adams) in implementing one of only three grand
strategies of American foreign policy in our two-century history.
As the Globe article describes in an interview with Mr. Gaddis: "Grand
strategy is the blueprint from which policy follows. It envisions a
country's mission, defines its interests, and sets its priorities. Part of
grand strategy's grandeur lies in its durability: A single grand strategy
can shape decades, even centuries of policy."
According to this analysis, the first grand strategy by Monroe/Adams
followed the British invasion of Washington and the burning of the White
House in 1814. They responded to that threat by developing a policy of
gaining future security through territorial expansion -- filling power
vacuums with American pioneers before hostile powers could get in. That
strategy lasted throughout the 19th and the early 20th centuries, and
accounts for our continental size and historic security.
FDR's plans for the post-World War II period were the second grand strategy
and gained American security by establishing free markets and
self-determination in Europe as a safeguard against future European wars,
while creating the United Nations and related agencies to help us manage the
rest of the world and contain the Soviets. The end of the Cold War changed
that and led, according to Mr. Gaddis, to President Clinton's assumption
that a new grand strategy was not needed because globalization and
democratization were inevitable. " Clinton said as much at one point. I
think that was shallow. I think they were asleep at the switch," Mr. Gaddis
observed.
That brings the professor to George W.Bush, who he describes as undergoing
"one of the most surprising transformations of an underrated national leader
since Prince Hal became Henry V." Clearly, Mr. Gaddis has not been a
long-time admirer of Mr. Bush. But he is now.
He observes that Mr. Bush "undertook a decisive and courageous reassessment
of American grand strategy following the shock of the 9/11 attacks. At his
doctrine' s center, Bush placed the democratization of the Middle East and
the urgent need to prevent terrorists and rogue states from getting nuclear
weapons. Bush also boldly rejected the constraints of an outmoded
international system that was really nothing more that a snapshot of the
configuration of power that existed in 1945."
It is worth noting that John Kerry and the other Democrats' central
criticism of Mr. Bush -- the prosaic argument that he should have taken no
action without UN approval -- is rejected by Mr. Gaddis as being a proposed
policy that would be constrained by an "outmoded international system."
In assessing Mr. Bush's progress to date, the Boston Globe quotes Mr.
Gaddis: "So far the military action in Iraq has produced a modest
improvement in American and global economic conditions; an intensified
dialogue within the Arab world about political reform; a withdrawal of
American forces from Saudi Arabia; and an increasing nervousness on the part
of the Syrian and Iranian governments as they contemplated the consequences
of being surrounded by American clients or surrogates. The United States has
emerged as a more powerful and purposeful actor within the international
system than it had been on September 11, 2001."
In another recent article, written before the Iraqi war, Mr. Gaddis wrote:
"[Bush's] grand strategy is actually looking toward the culmination of the
Wilsonian project of a world safe for Democracy, even in the Middle East .
And this long-term dimension of it, it seems to me, goes beyond what we've
seen in the thinking of more recent administrations. It is more
characteristic of the kind of thinking, say, that the Truman administration
was doing at the beginning of the Cold War."
Is Mr. Bush becoming an historic world leader in the same category as FDR,
as the eminent Ivy League professor argues? Or is he just a lying nitwit, as
the eminent former Democratic Party Chairman and Clinton fund-raiser Terry
McAuliffe argues? You can put me on the side of the professor.
Tony Blankley
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Have I seen Tony Blankley on TV as a talking Republican head? Bush is now a lame duck, whose broken webbed feet have little power. Even his immigration bill failed. But History often surprises me with her judgments. I hesitate therefore to say History will judge Bush and Gaddis harshly or applaud Gore and Clinton enthusiastically. Who knows? But I am now happy to hear Bush quack impotently.
"Lame duck" may now return to the land of dead metaphors.
Bye bye, Mr little W. Duck.
I can't understand how history will make anything at all of Mr. Gore. He's going to get a footnote at most because he was too much of a wanker to put up a fight over the dimpled chads.
Now he's back as big as a porpoise with the purpose of blaming everything on global warming. That global warming stuff is a lot of hot air, if you ask me.
W should bomb Mexico and then make a surprise attack on Ottawa.
Canada is ours! Should have been our rallying cry.
Once we take it, we can go up there and ride polar bear around for free if there are any left. Right?
This comment has been removed by the author.
Although these remarks about attacking Canada and Mexico are absurd and antisocial and are meant to be ridiculous, they fail to be funny. I am not, at the moment, amused. Why not put aside hysteria and bullshit? Is not the world worth an honest look?
We wouldn't have to police those borders any longer. That in itself would be a huge relief. I think it's necessary to take Canada and Mexico. Then our sole point of exposure would be the tiny Central American Republics. But perhaps the NAFTA agreement is already a step toward accomplishing this in a de facto manner so that we needn't use bazookas.
I knew your Canadian patriotism would resurface on this point, however, I like to remind YOU to take a serious like now and then.
Ha ha.
I'm still not amused.
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