Category Archives: Politics

Matt Taibbi Skewers Bush One Last Time

Humor, Politics, ,

Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi bids our worst President farewell with a hilarious imaginary exit interview in the pages of his magazine. Bush’s incompetence, incuriosity and inability to do anything more than be a monstrous bastard are all giving their just summation.

 

There’s only an excerpt available online, but the funniest parts seem to be in the print version, which is well worth tracking down. My favorite exchange:

We’re now in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Do you feel any responsibility for what’s happening?

Hey, markets is markets. Whatever happens in a market is what’s supposed to happen. You’re not supposed to interfere. That’s why they call the market the hidden hand. If I can see your hands, it’s communism.

 

Are you saying that what’s happening is good?

 

I’m saying if you hand a retard a pistol and he shoots himself, that’s the market. And markets are good.

 

So when it comes to the economy, your policy was to hand out pistols to retards.

 

All I’m saying is that if you did hand him a pistol, he might shoot himself and he might not. But if he does, that’s capitalism, and that’s the system we live by. It’s America.

Bush’s Reach, Bush’s Grasp

Politics, ,

The New Yorker recently had an illuminating profile of Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve. Beyond exploring how Bernanke’s Alan-Greenspan-hand-me-down, laissez faire philosophy contributed to our current recession (hey, we may yet get a Great Depression out of this after all!), the article presents this revealing account of Bernake’s first meeting with Bush.

In June 2005, Bernanke was sworn in at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. One of his first tasks was to deliver a monthly economics briefing to the President and the Vice-President. After he and Hubbard sat down in the Oval Office, President Bush noticed that Bernanke was wearing light-tan socks under his dark suit. “Where did you get those socks, Ben?” he asked. “They don’t match.” Bernanke didn’t falter. “I bought them at the Gap—three pairs for seven dollars,” he replied. During the briefing, which lasted about forty-five minutes, the President mentioned the socks several times.

The following month, Hubbard’s deputy, Keith Hennessey, suggested that the entire economics team wear tan socks to the briefing. Hubbard agreed to call Vice-President Cheney and ask him to wear tan socks, too. “So, a little later, we all go into the Oval Office, and we all show up in tan socks,” Hubbard recalled. “The President looks at us and sees we are all wearing tan socks, and he says in a cool voice, ‘Oh, very, very funny.’ He turns to the Vice-President and says, ‘Mr. Vice-President, what do you think of these guys in their tan socks?’ Then the Vice-President shows him that he’s wearing them, too. The President broke up.

This emphasis of propriety—something Bernanke dismissed earlier in the article as “signaling”—is the only thing Bush seemed to have a handle on during his eight years in office. Hell, about the only time he apologized was after needling a reporter for wearing sunglasses. The reporter turned out to be blind.

I guess that’s what you get when you elect the first M.B.A. President. We took a middle manager and made him the most powerful man in the world.

Blago-Bashing

FLYMF Alums, Politics, , ,

FLYMF alum Stefan Schumacher pulls a nice burn on in-the-process-of-being-disgraced Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich in the Chicago Tribune. (I would like to point out, for posterity, that I identified Blagojevich as a scumbag during his first run in 2002. I even voted Republican, people!)

Quoting Stefan:

Following Elvis’ lyrics closely

Gov. Blagojevich is all shook up. He’s the devil in the disguise. He’s a fool who rushed in. And soon he’ll be doing the jailhouse rock.

–Stefan Schumacher

Des Plaines

Stefan’s work for FLYMF included I Love My Dingy Poppers.

Republican Roots

Politics, , , ,

Neal Gabler has an interesting opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times tracing the roots of modern Republican electoral success not back to Goldwater, as the story often goes, but instead to the vicious scapegoating of McCarthy.

In a way, Goldwater was less a fulfillment of McCarthy conservatism than a slight diversion from it. Goldwater was ideological — an economic individualist. He hated government more than he loved winning, and though he was certainly not above using the McCarthy appeal to resentment or accusing his opponents of socialism, he lacked McCarthy’s blood- lust. McCarthy’s real heir was Nixon, who mainstreamed McCarthyism in 1968 by substituting liberals, youth and minorities for communists and intellectuals, and fueling resentments as McCarthy had. In his 1972 reelection, playing relentlessly on those resentments, Nixon effectively disassembled the old Roosevelt coalition, peeling off Catholics, evangelicals and working-class Democrats, and changed American politics far more than Goldwater ever would.

Today, these former liberals are known as Reagan Democrats, but they were Nixon voters before they were Reagan voters, and they were McCarthy supporters before they were either. A good deal of McCarthy’s support came from Catholics and evangelical Protestants who, along with Southerners, would form the basis of the new conservative coalition. Nixon simply mastered what McCarthy had authored. You demonize the opposition and polarize the electorate to win.

Sarah Palin’s tactics in the past election fell right along these same lines, which is why many of us find her so disgusting. Still, I hope she runs in 2012 because I don’t think she has the knowledge necessary to pull off a sustained smear campaign.