One of the more entertaining aspects of our descent into the gaping maw of hell has been to see not just who the conservatives are that have bailed on this Administration, but when they decided to bail and why. I mean, if everything is well along the swirling path down the drain of destruction, you mine as well find some interesting tidbits along the way to keep you occupied while you're waiting for the inevitable.
One such conservative that I find a quiet pleasure in reading is the proprietor of the Cunning Realist (wink, wink. nudge, nudge). Although I'm sure I have many disagreements with him on many issues, we seem to find ourselves sharing the same bed - along with pretty much everyone else on the planet at this point, except for the scary 30% of the US population which forms the Republican base at this point - with respect to this Administration and the wasteland they have created out of the American body politic. He has three posts up which I find quite good and exhibit the kind of thought and perspective that I really miss about the paleocons, when such dinosaurs roamed the earth.
The first, The Furthest Thing From Their Minds? looks at the recent JFK keystone cops terrorist plot that was recent foiled and asks some rather obvious questions about how this piece of data fits with the storyline that is being spun by the architects and supporters of the disaster formerly known as the Iraq war. Well worth the read and a real pity that such questions aren't picked up by the Fourth Estatetm and battered against the impenetrable wall represented by Tony Snow and his merry band of obfuscators.
But another one of his posts regarding Mark Steyn, Promises Kept, Apparently, is the one I'd like to focus on. Not for the well deserved snark at Steyn's expense, but for the other interesting tidbit that often spills out in the medium of blogging.
I voted for Bush in 2000 based mainly on three broad promises he made, each of which I believed: to restore honor and decency to the White House; to build a highly competent administration marked by a rigorous, corporate style of management; and to have a restrained, non-interventionist foreign policy. Other issues important to me at the time were tax reform and social security reform.
Now, I certainly don't expect to get an answer from the C.R., but it really is quite stunning to me to read this paragraph from a self described "New York City resident in my early forties, an executive in the financial industry, a lifelong conservative [who has] an M.B.A. in International Business from Columbia University."
The question I have for the C.R. is, of course, what were you smoking in 2000 and is there any possibility that stuff has made it into the food chain?
Of course, I'm on the "other side" of the political spectrum, being a commie lefty something or other, but that paragraph above still seems stunning when I put on my objective glasses and interpret it through mechanical aids which have no detectable bias - being apolitical and inert, inanimate machines. Let me just unpack that paragraph.
The first of the three issues for which he voted for Bush - i.e. to restore honor and decency to the White House - is perhaps the one which people can argue endlessly about because it's essentially about concepts which even reasonable people can violently disagree about regarding the interpretations. But even setting aside what exactly "honor and decency" are, I still scratch my head regarding this.
Whatever you think of Clinton, the simple fact is that the issue he was actually pinned with wasn't even something that was there "at the beginning" of the whole sorry saga. I'm speaking, of course, about his lying under oath to the jury. After all, this was after literally years of a desperate attempt to find anything - literally anything - that they could prosecute the man for. The whole issue started with the unprecedented Supreme Court decision to allow a civil suit against a sitting president. Again, whatever you thought about Clinton personally, it's clear that without this little tidbit that the entire sordid mess would never have happened.
And so when the C.R. says "restore honesty and decency", I look at it from the perspective of watching a right wing - at that point, still accepted as "conservative" - desperate to pull a President and his administration down into the mud. The prime figures in all this mess are not exactly unknown even today: I'm thinking Lucianne Goldberg who runs the torture lovin', hard core right wing site lucianne.com - not to mention being the womb that spawned Jonah - the white whale that runs the corner that the whores people like Mark Steyn hang out. And then there's that paramount of "honesty and decency", Ann Coulter.
I could, of course, go on and on and comment about the central figure Ken Starr and the hoary host of congressman involved in the whole mess, but the point is not to rehash the past but scratch my head in wonder about "restoring honesty and decency". I mean, it's quite clear that the very people who made this into the spectacle that it became were the very people who were part of George Bush's campaign staff and behind his push to become chief executive of this once fine country. And so, putting these lunatics in charge of the nut house would seem to do precisely the opposite of "restoring honesty and decency". It was perfectly clear that honesty had nothing to do with their tactics - I mean, we're talking about Karl Rove. It's very hard for me to understand how one can expect a silk purse to be made out of a Sow's ear without some dark magics being involved (or a nuclear reactor, but that's another story altogether).
There's an old saying in my own profession of software engineering:
Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO)
And even a generous reading of the actors involved in the hounding of Clinton would result in a pretty clear reading of their own characters. How someone could expect that group to "restore honesty and decency" is simply beyond my comprehension.
And speaking of GIGO, the C.R.'s second item strikes me as even more incomprehensible: "to build a highly competent administration marked by a rigorous, corporate style of management". Again, leaving aside the argument as to whether it is, in fact, a good thing to have a corporate style of management in government, who's sole function is to provide things that corporations can't, one has to seriously wonder about someone who thought that George W. Bush was the person to be entrusted with this grand experiment. Where ever you stand on the advisability of running government like a business, one simply had to look at GW's public record to realize that regardless whether the idea is a good one or not, surely this was not the person to be entrusted with implementing this grand scheme.
Again, this assertion of the C.R.'s is one of those things that literally makes me want to crawl in a hole and stockpile guns as I fear for the continued future of humanity. Here's a guy - the C.R., that is - who's an executive in the financial industry with an MBA - pretty much a high powered executive type who's at the top of his class. No slouch, in theory. And yet he voted for GW because he thought this serial failure was going to bring a "highly competent administration marked by a rigorous, corporate style of management".
Stunning.
I mean, it's like hiring a critical employee for your business after ignoring the long list of failures prominently displayed on his resume and the chorus of references telling you what a complete loser he is... What exactly about GW gave the C.R. the impression that he was going to run a competent administration? Was it the way he handled his duties as a national guard during the Vietnam war? Is that the hallmark of a man who takes his responsibilities seriously? Or possibly it was the numerous accounts of GW's substance abuse - beyond a doubt alcohol and almost certainly Cocaine. Maybe it was the arrest for driving under the influence of alcohol and the way that was effectively swept under the carpet during the 2000 election - I guess one can interpret "corporate style of management" as the ability to make problems "disappear".
Perhaps it was his flawless leadership of Arbusto Energy, Spectrum 7, or Harken Energy. Then again, maybe it was his presiding over the trading away of Sammy Sosa while he was the managing general parter of the Texas Rangers - where he was able to turn an $800,000 investment into $15 million. I guess financial executives are impressed by rather different qualities than people like me who are merely technical cogs in the great corporate sea.
But seriously, this item alone makes me question the judgment of C.R. in that what appears to hold sway was the illusion of competence rather than actual evidence for such. Oddly, I actually agree with Mark Steyn here in that GW pretty much delivered precisely on what he promised in this "running the government like a business". I guess the only issue is whether you think the management style and corporate ethics of Enron are qualities that the Clinton administration desperately lacked.
Finally, the third point of C.R's vote for GW is perhaps the most baffling: "a restrained, non-interventionist foreign policy". Certainly from the perspective of 2007, it's clear that these jokers don't have even the slightest intention of following up on that policy point, but my issue is with what was known in 1999 and 2000. One really doesn't have to dig too far to find the infamous PNAC document, Rebuilding American's Defenses, released in September of 2000. Reading the list of the project's participants one can see the core of George Bush's executive staff and key positions. And it's not like this was a big secret, either. The stunning thing about this whole mess of Iraq is that they telegraphed this move literally years in advance and quite clearly spelled out their motives and plans. And it had nothing to do with "a restrained, non-interventionist foreign policy" in any meaningful sense of the phrase.
The common thread running through these three points is that what we have in the current situation of mid 2007 was precisely what was advertised. Granted, the whole politics thing combined with the need to pander certainly made it perhaps a bit difficult to clearly see what was being laid out, but for someone with even basic information gathering capabilities and certainly - it would seem - to someone who actually cared about such issues to the point of listing these as a reason to vote for the man should have clearly seen the writing on the wall in 1999 - much more so in 2000 as he became the clear front runner. I mean, just look at how Rove ran Bush's primary campaign and it was clear that "honesty and decency" wouldn't be anything more than a line to fool the rubes.
Geebus.
And so, when I shudder in fear for the existence of the human race, it's example's like the Cunning Realist I like to point to as the basis of my paranoia. Here's someone who's highly intelligent, powerful and highly motivated. And yet he can't see the simple facts staring him in the face and was blinded by the PR from the likes of Kenneth Starr, Ann Coulter and Lucianne Goldberg. When Liberals like me shake our heads in disbelief, this is one of the prime examples as to why.
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