Turdblossom shits all over Rick Perry

Former Bush speech writer, Matt Latimer, pens a column on Karl Rove's disdain for the new savior of the GOP, Rick Perry.

The inside baseball here is tantalizing.... but not quite tantalizing enough. If I were Latimer's editor, I would have thrown it back to him.

I've read the thing twice, and while, yes, I believe that this hatred exists, I still don't quite understand what the cause of it was.

As far as I can tell, the animus is based on three things (which are really all the same thing):

1) Perry has succeeded without Rove's blessing.

While one should never diminish the power of the petty dispute, this would seem to me to be so minor as for me to say that, no, I don't believe it. If it really is true I'd demand that someone who knows both parties (on or off the record) confirm this with evidence.

2) It's about money and succession.

Fine. And what are the details of this, please?

Yes, these sorts of things might be too insidery for the rest of the world to care. But that's the meat of great drama, isn't it? What money are we talking about? Who's money? The GOP's? The big donors? This whetted my appetite.

3) It's a plain old piece of Texas political muscle flexing.

As in, "You think you're in charge down here, Rick Perry? Think again!"

OK, maybe that's it. I understand that local political fiefdoms obey different rules in different ways. But one would think that a man like Rove, who ran a national campaign, wouldn't care so much about local Texas politics once his political showhorse (Bush) had left. I suppose that people as driven as Rove never forget the details. (It partly explains their personal success.) But I'd like to know more. I feel there has to be some incident that someone could point to.

The most perplexing thing about this, of course, is that Rick Perry is George W. Bush. (Perhaps without the breeding and with about 15 to 20 fewer IQ points.) One would think that this would be the kind of folksy Texan Rove would be behind with every fiber of his being. And maybe that's the biggest reason Rove can't stand him: The caricature is unbearable. (Which might explain why the Bush family hates him, too.)

Obama as your longterm boyfriend?

My old friend Marla Trilling read my post about why I think President Obama hasn't been the disappointment everyone on the left says he is... and she says the reason is we view him as "The Country's 'Disappointing Boyfriend.'"

But I'll let Marla explain her position:

I’ve been trying to find a way to vent my frustration about the country’s lack of support for our President.

It just seems he’s not getting a fair chance to make the changes he talked about during his campaign. The only way I can wrap my mind around this rather distressing situation is to use an analogy: he’s the country’s “disappointing boyfriend.”

Yup, we are in one mass relationship with Obama, whether we like it or not.

Bush is that cute well-to-do boyfriend who comes from a good family, but let's face it, he has some serious issues. He listens to his friends too much and didn't give us the support we so desperately needed. So, basically we ditch him at a Billy Joel/Elton John reunion concert, and who's there to pick us up? Obama, in his new hybrid.

We're happy. He notices our stained nails and yellow teeth and tells us we should quit smoking because it's better for us. We end up having a long conversation on the way home and he makes us feel okay with the fact that our family is a bit dysfunctional, and even though his family also faced some difficult times, they fought through it and he became a better person because of it. He's our knight...in a shining new hybrid. We are in love with him. He's given us hope. Yup, he’s a keeper!

Fast forward two years later - we're still dating, with no ring on the finger. We're still on the nicotine patch and he's driving that hybrid because he can't afford a new car. Bush is looking good again. You see his friend's at Applebee's and ask them how Aunt Palin and Uncle McCain are doing. It feels safe to go back to something that was comfortable.

Maybe, just maybe, we need to give Obama a break. It’s not his fault we started smoking when we were seven years old and that when our families get together they fight like the Hatfields and the McCoys. He may not be able to buy a new car yet, but maybe that's because he's helping us get out of the horrible credit card debt we wracked up because our ex encouraged us to borrow so we could live beyond our means. Phew. It's certainly a lot to overcome.

Obama and us—we’ve been through a lot. And just because times are hard now doesn't mean we should give up on a relationship that started with so much promise. We've all made mistakes in the past, and unlike an article that can sum up one person’s sentiment in 500 words or less, the country's ability to rectify the wrong will take much more than that.

OK, Marla... I buy it. Even if I, personally, would never date George W. Bush.

You gotta love those Gawker commenters ...

CNBC's chief bloviator (and former coke head) Larry Kudlow made the jaw-dropping claim that President Obama's parting hug to Rahm Emanuel was inappropriate and some kind of display of weakness.

"Why not just a dignified, stand-up, serious handshake?" Kudlow asks. "That's what Reagan would have done."

God bless the Gawker readership. Not only did a commenter display a photo of Reagan in mid-hug, but they unearthed this little doozy.

Remember how former President Bush used to speak about "restoring dignity and honor to the White House"? Mission Accomplished.

Worst President Ever?

Andrew Sullivan seems to think so.


I have to admit, the thought has crossed my mind, too.


Last night's farewell address was really quite pathetic; a mixture of fantasy and outright distortion. (Jonathan Chait has a really wonderful take on Bush's comment, "I have followed my conscience and done what I thought was right." The answer to which, naturally, is "Yes, we can all agree that you're not a paid enemy agent.") Slightly less pathetic was the presser he gave a few days ago in which James Fallows thought he was watching a Eugene O'Neill play. I get what Fallows is saying (although I think O'Neill is the wrong playwright). Bush looked as if he knew, deep down, that his presidency was a failure. And it was slightly poignant.


But I think we really are way too close to Bush to properly examine his legacy. It will take a few years. And I have little doubt that history will rank his presidency in the bottom five -- but number one? I'm not sure about that.


Sullivan says that his greatest challenger is James Buchanan. A pretty good choice. But, actually, not the worst in my eyes. Buchanan has the dubious distinction of being president as -- one-by-one -- the southern states seceded from the union... And doing nothing about it!


This was certainly unforgivable. But I've always thought it was sort of ridiculous to lay the fault of the Civil War on his doorstep. You have to wonder what would have happened had Buchanan immediately jumped into some sort of negotiation with the leaders of the Confederacy. Would there have been an end to slavery? Or would war have come later and at an even greater cost? Impossible to know -- but my sense is that the Civil War was inevitable by the early-1850s.


Warren Harding's administration certainly gives W. a run for his money in terms of corruption (see Teapot Dome scandal) and malapropisms ("The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead," e.e. cummings noted upon his death.) But I find it difficult to get as mad at Harding as, say, Richard Nixon.


Richard M. Nixon has enjoyed some measure of public forgiveness recent years -- possibly because some of his policies were a little more liberal than they seemed at the time and some of his diplomatic moves had a measure of success. But I think this view is a mistake.


Not to put too fine a point on it, but Nixon was a criminal. He (and his staff) committed numerous felonies while in office. For anyone who doubts me on this, pick up Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's classic, The Final Days or Rick Perlstein's great book, Nixonland (which I was surprised not to see on too many "Ten Best" lists this year.) There was a great deal of winking at the Justice Department under Bush -- and he was ruthless with his political rivals. But you don't see break-ins to a rival's psychiatrist office as you did with Daniel Ellsberg. You don't see them planting evidence in an assassin's apartment to make Democrats look like the party of the nuts, as they did with Arthur Bremer. The levels of fraud and illegal activity under Nixon are just too mind boggling to recount.


Moreover, while Nixon might have opened up China, he is a miserable failure on Vietnam, Cambodia, South America, Greece and many other arenas. (See Christopher Hitchens' screed against Henry Kissinger -- which is just as much a screed against Nixon.) Some of the bloodiest fighting of the Vietnam war (a war he promised to end) came under Nixon. I do not feel charitably towards him. He's certainly in the bottom three.


The other one whom I really think is in contention is Herbert Hoover -- the only one on the list I feel slightly bad putting on, because Hoover wasn't necessarily a bad guy. (He might have even been considered a great man if he had never been president.) He cared deeply about humanitarian relief work -- and he provided a tremendous amount of relief for a badly battered Belgium during World War I, as well as the rest of Europe afterwards.


However, like Buchanan, Hoover was completely impotent during an unprecedented crisis.


Unlike Buchanan, who only dithered for a few months as states seceded, Hoover dithered for three long, painful years before he got out of dodge. Not just dithered. He likely made the Great Depression even worse with ill-conceived ideas like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Letting the military loose on poor veterans (the "Bonus Army") was a national disgrace. And his determination not to deviate from "volunteerism" as a recovery plan for the poor was a disaster. Nearly 25 percent of the country was out of work by 1932.


Many people don't realize just how close the U.S. was nearing all out anarchy in March of 1933 when FDR was sworn in. Banks were closing at a shocking clip. Two million people were homeless. Many, many people believed that the U.S. would be shifting to some sort of socialist economy. Was that all Hoover's fault? No. But he worsened a horrible crisis.


So those are my nominees. I think Bush stands shoulder-to-shoulder with these men. War. Crisis. Corruption. Incompetence. Congratulations, Mr. President (for four more days, anyways). It's been quite a ride.

Sock and awesome

As much disdain that I have for the current occupant of the White House, I have to admit I was outraged when that Iraqi reporter threw his shoes at him.

Nothing makes me stick up for Bush more than when somebody goes totally overboard. (One of the reasons I couldn't stomach so much of the antiwar movement was because Bush was regularly compared to a certain mustached Austrian Fascist.)

Say what you will about George Bush's policies (which, I think could be argued, are murderous in their wreckless) there's something horrible about throwing things at the President of the United States. Even if he's a douchebag who's running out the clock, the President's personal safety is of the utmost importance (with the noted exception of the incoming President Obama) and is nonnegotiable. The fact that the Secret Service's response was so slow and lame was even more outrageous.

All that being said, this new videogame is kind of great.

Could this guy get any douchier?

Blair House, the government-owned guest house where heads of state and future presidents stay when awaiting inauguration is, apparently, not letting the Obama family stay there in early January, according to the Times' Helene Cooper.

The State Department says that no heads of state are in town... so I take this to mean that the Bush family wants to put one of their friends up there.

The official line from Blair House?

“You’re trying to make a story out of something that’s not a story.”

Always the sign that you've got a good story...

Somewhere, Joe Lieberman is smiling

Barbara Streisand (yes that Barbara Streisand) lets Satan plant a big wet one on her cheek.

Awkward...

The Cheney Administration

Last night on the Daily Show show, Jon Stewart did a brief little story about how one of Dick Cheney's investments -- in this case prisons -- was getting him in legal trouble.

Stewart looked into the camera and asked: "Is there any unpleasant aspect of our society that Dick Cheney isn't making money off of?"

Dick Cheney was kind of the gift that kept on giving for Stewart; the ultimate cartoon of a nefarious puppetmaster behind the scenes, plotting sinister dealings, ruling the world through George W. Bush. Always good for a joke.

But for a long time, I thought that this kind of cartoon wasn't particularly helpful to Democrats -- and probably wasn't even true.

Frankly, I didn't think that George Bush was all that easily manipulated by the likes of a Dick Cheney. Sure, I knew that Cheney was extremely powerful (more so than any other Vice President) but Bush was also very much a man who knew his own mind; who knew his wants and desires; who refused to be coached into something that he didn't believe in.

In short, I thought that a cartoonish exaggeration badly missed the mark. And misunderstanding the Bush administration (as Democrats did throughout his presidency) was a mistake. It enabled Bush and his cohorts in Congress to run rings around Democrats for the bulk of the last eight years.

Well, after reading Barton Gellman's book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, I no longer thing that the cartoon was so far off the mark.

Gellman's book might very well be the single best book that I've read about the Bush administration -- which should more accurately be called the Cheney Administration. (For the first five years or so, anyway.) The portrait Gellman paints is of a Cheney who is much more powerful than I had any idea. And probably more powerful than even George Bush knows.

And while I just made the point that the book makes the greatest case for the cartoon version of the Bush Administration, I would argue that paradoxically Angler succeeds so well because it does not take a cartoonish view of the administration or the Vice President. It doesn't have an ideological ax to grind, and doesn't take long winded stands. It doesn't examine the unverifiable evidence, or the rantings of the unstable. It deals with the players extremely seriously, and on their own terms.

I would be loath to come away from Angler thinking that Dick Cheney is an idiot. He is anything but. He is a frighteningly smart man. I was extremely surprised at the fact that he voiced a great deal of skepticism about the invasion of Iraq in early 2003. (Even though none of this was aired publicly.) Apparently he thought both the option of going to war and not going to war were very bad -- which is a more nuanced position than I initially gave him credit for.

Moreover, Gellman steers away from the idea that Cheney went to war for personal enrichment.

I think that the argument that America went to war for oil has some merit in it (but not in the way the, "No blood for oil!" protesters think -- more along the lines of, "Our entire economy is based on oil right now, so putting the Middle East in the hands of madmen is kind of a mistake" reasoning). But it's ludicrous to think we went to war in Iraq to ensure Dick Cheney's stock portfolio would rise. Gellman has examined his finances and concluded that he divested himself from Haliburton before becoming Vice President -- at a significant personal loss. (Although Cheney was already quite rich by the time he became VP.)

But the cartoon of Cheney holding power in the administration definitely holds true.

I won't ruin the book by going into each and every instance of Cheney's power (or just how little of it Bush was aware of) except for one small story about why Cheney is so powerful:

During the Florida recount in 2000, when Bush was extremely distracted by the politics and lawsuits going on, Cheney came to Bush and told him that he would need to prepare for an eventual transition; staffing decisions would need to be made, etc., and he was obviously too busy to handle it now. Cheney volunteered himself to do this.

In other words, everybody in the first part of Bush's administration was essentially handpicked by Cheney. True, Bush signed off on everybody -- but every cabinet member (or anybody who needed congressional approval) was vetted first by Cheney. He decided whose resume would reach Bush's desk and whose would not.

And being that they were all Cheney picks, they had an interest in keeping him informed and running decisions and policy through him before going to the President.

A shocking read -- go out and buy it!

The Dark Side

I just finished reading Jane Mayer's truly devastating book, The Dark Side, about the Bush administration's torture policy, and the legal machinations to give the CIA (and the Defense Department, to a lesser extent) a freer hand in interrogating suspects -- sometimes to the point of death.

Very chilling, horrible stuff. Everybody should read it (especially if you take a very hard line on terrorism -- as I often do). Also, a fascinating portrait of the way the administration works (apparently David Addington is possibly the most bullying, and arrogant man on the planet, and even crazier than his boss, Dick Cheney. If Mayer's book is to be believed, this youtube clip is probably Addington at his most polite.)

This book is not the kind of thing you can find funny anecdotes in.

That being said, there was one story which is sort of hilarious in illustrating the confounding stupidity of it all. It's the story of a guy named Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, who had the misfortune of having a name very similar to that of a wanted terrorist. He was picked up by the Macedonian authorities and rendered to an American prison in Afghanistan. Right from the beginning he had a German Passport (as well as a family and employment history back in Germany which could fairly easily be checked to corroborate his story) and the authorities thought his arrest was extremely fishy. But one particularly zealous CIA officer had some sort of gut suspicion of Masri, and he was allowed to rot in prison for months before reason prevailed.

George Tenet was, apparently, terrified that he had been tortured in prison. ("Just tell me -- please -- we haven't used enhanced interrogation techniques on him, have we?" was the question to his underlings.) The CIA had no idea what to do to try to keep the situation as quiet as possible.

They finally decided that the smartest thing to do was release Masri with a shitload of cash, hope he kept relatively quiet and pretend the thing never happened. But Condoleezza Rice overruled them. "We can't put the President in the position of telling a lie to our allies," she piously replied.

OK...

So the US ambassador tells his German counterpart about this clusterfuck who replies: "Why are you telling me this? My secretary is here -- taking notes! Now there's a record! It will get out -- it will become a German political issue! I'll have to face investigations -- I'll have to testify in front of the Bundestag! Why didn't you just let him go, give him some money, and keep it quiet?"

Comic book movie appeals to nerds, real people

Much to my surprise, I actually enjoyed The Dark Knight.

And even though I was expecting to be disappointed by Heath Ledger's performance, I thought it was generally excellent. (David Edelstein had said that it was a little scattershot and painful to watch. I disagree. It was a very stylized, no doubt, but I think it was actually better than Jack Nicholson's performance in the first Batman all those years ago -- which was really just a reprise of his much better role in The Shining.)

This comes with a few caveats, though:

There was one (maybe two) plot(s) too many. The Joker's final crime didn't really carry a lot of umph (it wasn't as scary as his previous acts of terrorism).

It could have lost about 20 to 30 minutes of screen time and been a lot richer for it.

Also, it struck me as pretty blatantly allegorical about the war on terror -- in a way that I'm not sure I agree with. It was in favor of a very heavy hand in terms of torturing suspects, spying on evildoers, etc. (There's a scene in which Batman beats the crap out of the Joker -- and only an utter wuss would say that the Joker didn't have that and a lot more coming to him.) Of course, when you talk about fighting terrorism, unfortunately, it must be linked to your opinion of George W. Bush and how he's prosecuted the war thus far. I couldn't help but feel a little bit the way Pauline Kael felt after watching Dirty Harry. It was no doubt a well made movie -- but I'm not sure I agree with what it's saying.

My buddy Robert George insists that this Batman was doing things that the Bush administration never would have done -- i.e., Christian Bale makes Morgan Freeman something of his overseer about the way he spies on Gotham's citizens. The administration fought tooth and nail to avoid congressional or judicial oversight on spying and torture.

(A counter argument could also be made, by the way, that this Batman was so dark that you don't come out necessarily feeling particularly good about Batman. That the compromises he makes are not worth it. But given how evil the Joker's actions are, I don't buy that.)

The schlub factor: Poor Aaron Eckhart. He turns in a performance that, in its way, is better than Ledger's, as a well meaning, slightly schlubby, DA who loses his way. But Ledger will get the Academy Award nomination because of his untimely death. Eckhart will merely get Max Gross' adulation.

Oh. My. God.

Bob Barr. Yes that Bob Barr (the guy who led the impeachment charge against Bill Clinton -- and the guy Sasha Baron Cohen gave a piece of cheese to made out of his wife's breast milk) says that Bush's constitutional transgressions are worse than Clinton's!

I feel exactly like Jane Hamsher. I think need a cigarette.

And then Barr gets off an even better kicker!

My respect for this nut job just shot up exponentially.