The Weekly Screed

Of Balls and Brains

Hello again,

So, tonight's the big debate. The future of humanity, the rush to Armageddon.... it all hinges on what happens in 90 minutes on TeeVee tonight.

I've been rather amused with all the talk in the media this week about "lowering expectations" -- the exercise in which each side tries to make the other guy sound like the Great Masterdebater. Both sides want us to believe that the other guy is just so good, they win if their guy is still standing when it's over.

I'm not buying it. Kerry has to knock Bush out of the park tonight. If John Kerry Kerry cannot dazzle us with his brilliance, then Bush is going to baffle us with his bullshit.

Make no mistake, that is George W Bush's stock in trade as a politician: his ability to orate without any regard for even the slightest shred of reality.

I realized this (again) yesterday when NPR aired an extended excerpt of Bush's stump speach . And I had to admit that, Bushes pushed all the right buttons, and he pushes them effectively.

Bush reduces the enemy in Iraq "cold blooded killers" and invokes the image of the beheadings to arouse both the ire the sympathy of his audience. Once the hook is set he yanks on the line with, "these killers know we have a conscience and they don't."

Then he puts the fish on the boat: "The way to prevail...is not to wilt or waver or send mixed signals to the enemy." Big applause. We can grieve but we will not waver." Big cheer.

Then Bush takes a swipe at Kerry: "Incredibly, my opponent said this week that he would prefer the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein to the situation in Iraq today." The crowd boos. "You cannot lead the war on terror if you wilt when times are tough. You cannot expect the people of Iraq to do the hard work of democracy when you are pessimistic about their abilities... I will continue to lead with clarity and when I mean something, I will mean what I say."

Yes, he will certainly mean what he says. But will what he says have anything to do with the real world?

Our National Character

Hello again,

Brace yourself, kids... this is going to be a long one (like that's a surprise?). I hope you can stay with me, because I think your diligence will pay off in the end.

Last week I got a very long and passionate e-mail from my friend Mike, which explains in great detail why he will be voting for George Bush in November. The message was originally written in response to the Screed of two weeks ago, the one entitled "How Do You Talk to A Republican?" In the interest of "fair and balanced" reporting, I have taken the liberty of posting Mike's entire message on the blog site .

In this space, I'm going to do my best to answer some of Mike's most compelling points. I hope that by the time I'm done you all will have something that you can pass on to any body you know who says they're going to vote for Bush as a last-ditch attempt to appeal to their higher instincts.

First, a bit of background: Mike describes himself as a "hardcore independent." His voting record includes voting "for Reagan twice, would have voted for the first Bush though I was [relocating] and missed registering, voted for Clinton twice, and voted for W in 2000." On most issues, especially fiscal, economic, and national security issues, he says "I'm conservative... My only leftward leanings have to do with the environment and corporate excess."

After observing and commenting on my migration from Wes Clark during the primaries to John Kerry in the general election, Mike gets to the heart of his support for the incumbent candidate:

"Do you understand John Kerry's fundamental problem? Beyond all the right-wing rhetoric and spin here's the conscious and/or subconscious reason I and most Americans will never vote for John Kerry: He has no core... he does not know who he is. He's never been a man of guiding principle (other than possibly that of trying to get elected)."

On that last point, I have to ask, how does that make John Kerry different from 98% of the politicians in the world? And in the remaining 2%, I certainly don't include the likes of George W. Bush. I think it is absurd to criticize a politician for wanting to get elected. That's their job. Shoot me for being cynical about such things, but find me a candidate for any political office that doesn't make a deliberate attempt to reflect the attitudes and ideals of his constituents, and I'll show you a candidate who can't get elected.

Returning to the issue of whether or John Kerry has any kind of moral or political core, Mike goes on, "the only wisp of a core he has will never get him elected so he's not forthright about it. In the past he's been an extreme liberal, except where it's been politically expedient not to be. I mean, he was a proud liberal at Yale, his voting record over 19 years ranks him as the most liberal Senator during that time (including Ted Kennedy), yet he feels the need to call himself "the candidate of conservative values."

Now, if I was a comedian (as opposed to merely playing one on the Internet), I would say something like, "how can anybody who has no 'guiding principle' possibly be the 'number one liberal' in the known Universe?" I mean, you can't reach that kind of exalted status without having SOME kind of "core" values, can you? It may not be the way YOU would vote, but don't say on the one hand that the man has no core and then attack his record for demonstrating precisely the kind of guiding inner principles you say he lacks. Why...that's flip-flopping!

Vote And/Or Die

Hello again,

To Start you week off right, I suggest you follow these instructions, which come courtesy the National Congress of American Indians . This should work on either a PC or a Mac:

1. Create a "new folder" on your computer.
2. Name it, "George W. Bush."
3. Send it to the trash.
4. Empty the trash.
5. Your computer will ask you:? Do you really want to get rid of "George W. Bush? "
6. Answer calmly, "Yes", and press the mouse button firmly...

Would that it were that easy....

Ann and I went to McCabe's on Saturday night. We consider this Sylvan Park tavern our "neighborhood pub." Never mind that we live like 16 miles away from the place. There are no pubs in our neighborhood, so we adopted McCabes years ago (and yes, we usually go on Thursdays, but we missed our regular date with the bar-stools this week).

We were still hungry after attending the four-county Democratic Party "Labor Day Celebration" on a farm near Clarksville, TN -- where the "barbecue" consisted of a chicken breast and a slice of white bread (mmm mmm... Gotta love that Southern Democrat cooking!). After sitting in a drizzling rain and listening to various speakers rail against George Bush for a half hour, decided we'd heard all we needed to hear. Hell, we heard all we needed to hear weeks...months ago.

When we got to McCabes, we ran into Beth, an acquaintance, who we'd seen at a couple of other Democratic Party and Kerry functions, and as usual the conversation started in on Dubya. Before it got too far I just had to say, "you know what, I'm really tired of talking about this..." And you know what? I really am.

I mean, our national dialog has gone from the ridiculous to the positively sublime. Consider the "news" from the past week:

How Do You Talk To A Republican?

Hello again,

After I sent out last week's "Screed," I got a reply from a reader that got me thinking. Almost in passing, near the end of last week's piece, I'd written, "... It's not really George Bush that worries me. It's the hundred million people who are still going to vote for him that I can't figure out."

To which regular "Screed" reader (Screader?) Nancy replied ,

"Bingo! I've been thinking about this a lot, as I drive around Nashville and see hundreds of huge SUVs and big ass American trucks sporting "W 2004" bumper stickers and here's what I've figured out: These Bush fans don't care that going to war in Iraq was unmindful and WRONG. They KNOW that it was for the oil, and you know what? They BACK that."

Nancy's reply reminded me of the challenge that faces us all, and after reading her comments, I could not stop wondering, "How Do You Talk To A Republican?"

Unfortunately, once I'd posed that rhetorical question to myself, the first answer that came to mind was the recollection of a frequent junior high schoolyard taunt: "Let's have a mock-out contest... I'll leave my brains outside the door to make it fair."

Does it not seem at times that the only way to talk to a Bush supporter is to turn your brain off? How, indeed, do you engage a meaningful dialog with somebody who's committment to their candidate mostly resembles devotion to a religious icon -- a belief devoid of any objective assesment of the facts? Reason be damned, this is their savior. How can you talk to these people -- let alone let alone persuade them that they've settled on a false god?

I didn't watch all of the convention in New York last week, but I did watch enough -- like all of W's acceptance speech -- to be reminded that nothing sells in America as well as fear: fear of death, fear of rejection, fear of loss, fear of fear itself. And yes, now that Dick and Zell and Rudy and their paraonid brethren have struck all the right chords, now I am really afraid: afraid that the Republicans are going to win in November.

So I keep wishin' and a hopin' that there might be some way to reason with these people.

Bush in One Sentence

The envelope please... and now, the award for the most concise critique of the GWBush administration in a single (very compound) sentence goes to Hedrik Hertrzberg of the New Yorker. Welcoming the delegates of the Republican National Convetion to New York, Hertzberg writes:

"We hope they are treated politely by all of our fellow canyon dwellers, including those among us who are alarmed by the performance of the incumbent Administration during the past three and a half years—alarmed by its mania for shovelling cash to the very rich at the expense of families of middling means, its servility to polluters and fossil-fuel extractors, its reckless embrace of fiscal insolvency, its hostility to science, its political alliances with fanatic religious fundamentalisms of every stripe except Islamic (and of that stripe, too, when the subject is
family planning or capital punishment), its partisan exploitation of our city’s suffering after the attacks of September 11, 2001, its transubstantiation of the worldwide solidarity that followed those attacks into worldwide anti-Americanism, and its diversion of American blood, treasure, and expertise away from the pursuit of Al Qaeda to a bloody occupation of Iraq that appears to have done nothing to weaken Islamist terrorism and may have done more than a little to strengthen it."

Hard to believe, but that's just ONE sentence. A link to the rest of Hertzerg's column is provided, but the article will probably be gone by the time you click it; the New Yorker's not very good about leaving content on the web past the current issue.

--PS