‘merica

Kissinger in an exchange with the longtime ambassador from the Soviet Union, Anatoly Dobrynin before inviting him to a meeting:

Dobrynin: “I heard that you were sitting with a very nice girl … and I guess I have her picture?”

Kissinger: “Oh, yes?”

Dobrynin: “In the calendar. I think she was on this Playboy calendar.”

Kissinger: “Oh, you’re a dirty old man.”

Dobrynin: “… she’s a real nice girl.”

Kissinger: “… she’s very attractive. I hope she isn’t a nice girl.”

As reported in Newsweek – May 27, 2004

“It took me a while to not say ‘my husband’ meaning John Heinz, cause I’d been married to him for 25 years. Then I switched to thinking my husband John Kerry — and then I thought thank goodness they’re both called John.” — Theresa Heinz Kerry

Images of my candidate keep me up at night: The droning, turgid voice. He’s begun to do this old man thing with his tongue, kind of foppishly licking his muscle-less lips every few seconds or so. I got so worried I called my good friend Paul Bunyan. This is what he told me:

How lame is Kerry really? There are 2 sides to this. The real question is what Kerry would actually do if elected, but first we have to deal with Kerry as a candidate, and the question of how much of a Gore/Dukakis passive temporizing Asperger’s syndrome dweeb he is. The indications so far are not good. It is very confusing to me that he can make the same mistakes as Gore just 4 years later. I guess it’s an instinct to lie about little things that is ingrained and uncontrollable. A few months ago he was skiing and reporters saw him fall on the slopes (a secret service guy had blundered into his path). When a nytimes reporter asked him about it, he snapped “I don’t fall down.” According to the reporter, he then “used an expletive to describe the agent who ‘knocked me over.'”The reporter crafted a brutally contemptuous profile of Kerry around this quote, a real assassination job. Here’s how it begins:

“John Kerry was in the air, approaching the Continental Divide, and the candidate often ridiculed as straddling both sides of political divides was wrestling with the big matter at hand.

Should he ski, or snowboard? Or maybe both? He gave no clue where he stood. But that was Wednesday night.

A longtime adviser recently suggested that there were two John Kerrys: “indoor John and outdoor John” — one who agonizes over decisions, and another who acts boldly on them.

It was outdoor John, decidedly so, who emerged from an armored S.U.V. at the foot of Bald Mountain here on Thursday morning, outfitted in blue ski gear and swigging from a bottle of vitamin-fortified water. From the rear of the vehicle he pulled a weathered old snowboard, and for most of the day proceeded to zigzag down what locals affectionately call Mount Baldy.” (nytimes 3-19-04)

The guy is being mocked for having a car, for drinking water, and for being able to both snowboard and ski, and the entire piece is like that, going on to mix in a few mentions of his supposedly embarassing flip-flops on policy along with the gratuitous ridicule. The question is how much of this is Kerry’s fault, or to put it another way–is there anybody as good or better than he (president-wise) who would fare any better (candidate-wise)? If he really did profanely insult the bodyguard, then he really is autistic and it’s going to catch up with him this summer in some hideous way, but the incident is uncorroborated and comes from a reporter who clearly holds a venomous hatred for him, so I’m suspending belief on that. But it doesn’t really matter what exactly happened because, either way, Kerry has somehow managed to make one of the key campaign reporters loathe him on a visceral level. Inspiring the hatred of reporters is exactly what Gore did, while Bush seduced them like Phineas the cool boarding school jock (A Separate Peace reference). Most reporters hated Bush’s ideas, but it was easy for them to forget about that because he never talked–or probably even thought–about anything of substance. He was just was fun, while Gore was a bore and a scold. Clinton was (almost) as much of a hairsplitting, risk-averse, fence-straddler as Gore and Kerry, but he dazzled the press corps, and got away with it. Now of course Bush has the press corps trained like dogs. There was a question today in his minute and a half “press conference” after his testimony before the 9/11 commission that went in effect like this: “Mr. President, some of your critics–and I know they are desperate and insane–have suggested that you have insisted on giving your testimony in concert with Mr. Cheney in order to–forgive me Mr. President–in order to “get your stories straight,” and also because, as these obviously crazy people might say, you are incapable of answering the commission’s questions without his assisstance. Please forgive me for I only ask this question to give you an opportunity to put an end to this treasonous madness.” (find a transcript and I think you will find my paraphrase captures the basic character of the question.) Bush’s answer was something to see–he never even remotely adressed the question (by the way, how can somebody who only speaks in scripted talking points spend so much time fumbling for words?). There was no follow-up (to see a follow-up question from the press, try the BBC or, in this country, travel backward in time). But Jesus Christ, couldn’t Kerry grab some press by saying something or other? People like us have been saying this a lot lately. And it’s pretty much inexplicable because there’s so much to say. Four years ago we were complaining in the same way about Gore, but it was kind of abstraction–say something, anything, please. But right now the stuff to talk about is sitting right there staring everybody in the world in the face, a mountain of lies, failure, and corruption. Bush lied about the WMD (and that’s why I, Kerry, voted for the war authorization). He is lying about being focussed on terrorism prior to 9-11-01, and in fact ramped down Clinton’s anti-terror protocols. He was on vacation while Osama’s people planned the attacks, and ignored all warnings in August ’01. He threw out all the people trying to plan for post-war Iraq, and what is happening there now is a direct consequence of his ideological blindness and incompetence. He lied about a thousand small things from the Baghdad thanksgiving turkey, to the “mission accomplished” backdrop, to the fake Christmas poem. Plus the Halliburton and Enron scandals, the Hitlerian madness of Guantanomo bay and the Yee debacle, theft from the 9/11 fund, rolling over on Pakistan and N. Korean nukes, and getting played by the Saudis. Sorry for reiterating this stuff, so I won’t mention the environmental policy giveaways to the enregy companies and Total Information Awareness. How can Kerry give a speech, anywhere at any time that doesn’t include the phrase Total Information Awareness? I mean they gave this stuff to him.Okay, whatever, let’s say he gets elected, which stilll could happen despite his best efforts because the sock monkey president is not Reagan, he really is an uncomfortable and idiotic figure.Well, I think people get their hopes too high. Was Adlai Stevenson or Eugene McCarthy or McGovern or Ralph Nader ever president? What do you want from a president? What are you angry about that Clinton signed while dealing with republican majorities?All I want is a president who is not an insane person. Is that too much to ask? I really don’t care that much about politics–except when Hitler tries to come to power, which is what is happening now. There is nothing cynical about “anybody but Bush.” This isn’t some kind of sell-out or lack of principle. We want to just get back to normal, where an arrested person has right to council and to state his case–unlike that poor bastard Padilla–and America doesn’t start “preemptive” wars.I don’t care if Kerry is FDR or LBJ or WJC or something lesser. He won’t be able to do anything anyway, given that at least the house will be against him. We just need a president who is not thinking about some confused vision of the 1000-year Reich combined with the Rapture so that we can go back to doing whatever it is we do.

“Nobody likes to see dead people on their television screens”–GW Bush

And that is why I am having a hard time watching John Kerry.

The hand gestures. Jeez, that alone.

The turns of phrase. How many times can you hear: “and I tell you this…and I say this…”?

Then there’s all this recent questionable stuff:

The SUV claim

The $1,000 haircut

The medals stuff

The botoxy looks-like-hell un-American wife. I don’t know what drugs she’s been doing most of her life, but she has lived pretty hard. She ain’t no Laura Bush.

But the real critique is that he won’t say:

George Bush represents a cabal of powerful moneyed interests that had long-planned to invade Iraq. Whether or not he knew more than he’s telling us, or should have known more than he did, about 9-11, he used it to pursue a policy that was already in place, and that he had not been honest with the American people about. And, due to his and his team’s arrogance, he failed to appreciate how crucial an international coalition was to success. Or worse, he was so greedy about making sure all the spoils that came from controlling the region would benefit his friends that he, accidentally or on purpose, failed to acknowledge what was required to be successful. The threat represented by 9-11 is not something the US can militarize our way out of. Terrorism comes from the hearts and minds of people who feel sufficiently mistreated that they see it as the only option. When 9-11 happened, we had the world on our side. Indeed, the US never had the sympathies and support of the world as we did after that incident. And yet, in only 2 and a half years, we have sufficiently alienated the world to the point that we have never been so hated, or so unsafe from terrorism. I don’t know if George Bush is evil, or an idiot, but he is bad for America, and we have got to elect somebody else President in 7 months. I will…

Anyways, that’s kind of what Dean was saying, what Kucinich and Brown and Sharpton of course said, what Lieberman, Gore, Gephardt and Edwards would never say, and what would need to be said to win. But it will never be said, and therefore we will not win.

~ Axil

My good buddy Paul Bunyan wrote me today. Here’s what he said:

The president has entirely ceded his presidency to his campaign manager and PR people. Bush may be the first president in history who governs without personally holding any ideal whatsoever other than the desire to be elected a second time. Unfortunately, the brand identity that this guy’s advisors have chosen for him is as the Avatar of Christian Vengeance. Somewhere pretty early in the planning of the ad campaign, somebody figured out that a product of this type would have an immense advantage over its competitors so long as both were positioned in a context of global war. They worked it out and it was as pretty as can be. As long as war continues, and American soldiers are at risk, the moo-cow people will feel a vague, primal disturbance, and will huddle around their leader. The effect is stronger if the soldiers are winning, but it is still pretty strong even if they are losing, and with Vietnam it took more than 8 years before people got tired of being patriotic for something that was almost as stupid as the Iraq war. But Karl Rove had also learned a lesson from the first gulf war. Bush’s dad had gone to war in the Middle East almost 2 years before the election, and he made the mistake (the political mistake, as we know in retrospect) of prosecuting his war with almost perfect success. He did this by leaving the war-planning up to the military, who put together what was probably the most perfectly realized execution of a “combined arms” military plan in the history of the world, and utterly destroyed or demoralized their opponent in a matter of days. The Nazis (who invented this style of warfare, which they called “blitzkrieg,” would have been proud). Like younger George, older George enjoyed 80% approval ratings for many months. But unlike younger George, older George was no longer at war when election season rolled around.You know, Bush’s war begins to make sense if you look at it that way. The dismissal of Jay Garner for Paul Bremer. The exclusion of the military intelligence study-group who wrote the briefing on post-war Iraq (I have the details on this somewhere. The head of it has talked to the press. Their paper, which predicted pretty much every nasty thing that has happened in Iraq that has come as a “surprise,” was excluded from CPA briefings and the personnel were all rejected for Iraq duty, despite their special knowledge). The refusal to guard cultural treasures, to police the cities, to talk to the people. The attack on Fallujah. I couldn’t figure it out–are they evil or stupid?The answer is they’re evil, but in this special way. It’s not, as I imagined (I couldn’t think of anything else) that they are trying to bring the world to destruction to hasten the coming of Jesus. It’s something much more simple, believable and clearly motivated. And there is no need for any sort of widespread conspiracy. They (Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld) want to get reelected, and so they want the war to drag on for a while–they can’t afford to succeed. And so they have decided to do everything in a manner opposite to whatever their military people advise. If the generals say we need more troops, we bring in less. If they say we need another week of mobilization before starting the war, we go in a week early and our supply lines are shot to hell. If they have a program for winning the “hearts and minds” of the populace, we make sure that is not implemented. But politically, it works. There is no downside, short-term. It’s a win-win. It really seems insurmountable, thus the panic at the village voice. But here’s the possible hope. Everything that took 8 years in the 1960s takes 1 year now. The people are more brainwashed than ever, but they are also more malleable than ever–It’s not a brainwashing that runs deep. And they have also never encountered this level of incompetence and lies, and some of it will leak through.

# # #

I indeed I agreed with Paul. For to be so low as to be below the requirement to expose this is very low indeed. It’s a frightening concept to contemplate how deeply one must need to draw on the powers of banality to consistently squish oneself so as to remain always below this requirement. Even the slightest slip of the tongue towards reality or honesty would raise the profile of the challenger to visibility, and sheer visibility, any visibility, would shatter the falsity of the Antichrist (President). But Kerry cannot do it, or, rather, the demon driving the earth towards its seemingly certain destruction is so firmly in charge that the slippery droolings constantly emanating from his mouth – the only man in a position to replace the devil – grease his already forlorn carcass with the musky elusiveness of all the losers that have led up to him. It’s a kind of willful lying, a disease of the democrats, a need for daddy that is so sad, so sick in its lack of conviction and understanding of pride, so the same in Mondale and Muskie and Dukakis and Hart and Gore, that we are due for being treated to its burnt butterscotch sweetness one more time. I want to believe, but I can’t make stone soup again.