Reagan demonstrated that you could spend eight years expanding the federal government and build up a vast deficit, all the while talking about how government was the enemy and that you, an outsider, were holding it at bay by the use of strict financial discipline, and people would love you for it, because the results of your cluelessness would perfectly align with the nature of their hypocrisy: the problems of this country over the course of my lifetime have been the result less of too much big government than of the childishness of an electorate overstocked with people who want everything they they’ve grown accustomed to seeing as part of their way of life regarded as sacrosanct but regard anything the government does that they don’t see as benefiting them directly, whether it’s a school lunch program or signs printed in two languages or buildings that are designed to be wheelchair-accessible, as a waste of money at best or an infringement on their space and pocketbook at worst. The stupidest and meanest among them aren’t even ashamed to appear in public equating having a few cents shaved off their taxes to pay for such things with “tyranny”. Phil Nugent ☀
For the past forty years or so, any Republican strategist who’s been sufficiently eager to win points for candor to acknowledge how important the white racist vote has been to the GOP in its vote-getting efforts has been quick to add that it’s just politics and that, sure, it’s sort of embarrassing, but for a while it was necessary because of the way the Democrats had cheated in FDR’s day by unfairly getting so many people to favor them just because they’d gone and created a halfway livable society. But now that people had had the chance to get a taste of Republican rule and see how swell their ideas were, they’d be able to drop the “welfare queen in a Cadillac” crap from their playbook and win on their own virtues. That never work out too well. The classic Republican campaigner since Nixon may not be the magical elf Reagan or his spiritual heir Li’l War President, but Li’l’s babbling daddy, who ran the ugliest, most content-free campaign in modern memory in 1988, then spent at least three and a half years entertaining reporters by telling them how, now that everyone had the chance to see what a dandy president he was and how much they loved him, he’d be able to run a proper, dignified re-election campaign in 1992, one that would make it easier for his future hagiographers to point to as an example of what was best about him and his party. Whereupon the queasy-making old bastard tumbled from his perch in the poles, had a public meltdown, and wound up needlessly elevating Larry King’s blood pressure with wild tales about how we just didn’t know for sure that Bill Clinton hadn’t peddled state secrets to the KGB when he went to Moscow on a school trip. And who knows? Maybe the only reason that Bush couldn’t save himself that year was that he’d recklessly used up all his race-based ammunition four years earlier. The first time you pull Willie Horton out of the box, it’s shocking; try it a second time and the desperation is so evident that it just looks as if the Wizard of Oz’s diaper needs changing; people just feel sorry for you. Phil Nugent ☀
McCain once claimed to hate the kind of politics he now embodies, and with the current low standing of the people who turned his party into a cesspool, he had a great opportunity to rise above it this year: rising to the status of party nominee over the dead bodies of the party faithful who loathe him because they judge him guilty of having the personality of a liberal, he could have capitalized on widespread disgust with the Rove-Bush way of doing things and taken the high road, secure in the knowledge that Obama wouldn’t get down in the mud without a shove; Obama can only lose this election if enough people respond to the sleaziest kind of negative campaigning. Between the two of them, they could have taken American politics out of the pattern of mutually assured destruction that it’s been stuck in since at least the end of the Cold War. But something in him, whether it was terror overcoming him as he accepted the fact that this is his last chance, or a misguided, grudging decision that Rove and Bush are right after all but their way being the only way to win elections, or the genuine contempt he feels for Obama, which seems to be rooted in nothing more elevated than his resentment at having to share the fawning good opinion of the media with anyone else, caused him to buckle, and so now, unable to rise to the standard set by his opponent, he’s running a campaign that, at its best, is based on sneering sarcasm at the whole idea of eloquence and inspiration. The maverick’s last message to us is, stop all that high-falutin’ jibberjaw and get down here in the pigpen with us good small-town people. Phil Nugent ☀
George W. Bush got to be president by riding on his father’s name while promising the dubious that he had nothing in common with his father besides that name, but they do share a close, dysfunctional relationship with the concept of loyalty. By the time he was ready to run for president as Ronald Reagan’s heir presumptive, the older Bush—a man with no spine and no deep beliefs in much of anything, a man willing to say anything and wipe out what personality he had if it would get him enough votes—claimed to have nothing in him but loyalty. It was his only characteristic. If you liked Ronald Reagan, it was your duty to vote for him, because he had been loyal to Ronald Reagan, to the point of throwing many things he’d once claimed to believe overboard, and as president he showed that he was prepared to take a chance when it meant showing his loyalty—to the Chinese government, with whom he’d worked as Ambassador, after the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators, to the CIA, which he’d once been in charge of, when there were calls that maybe it could use some housecleaning given how thoroughly it had botched its reports on the dying years of the Soviet Union. Now his son has reached the point where the only grounds for supporting or defending him is…loyalty. Phil Nugent ☀
If Christianity as it’s practiced in America—the religion of John Brown, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, John Updike, James Earl Carter, and my grandmother—is going to survive as something other than a fully owned subsidiary of and recruiting tool of the Republican party, then it’s going to need people who will stand up and reaffirm that compassion and forgiveness are Christian virtues, and then actually challenge those who have profited from encouraging people to believe that they are somehow demonstrating their devotion to their faith through material greed, selfishness, harsh judgement of the unfortunate, libelous attacks on those they disagree with, and congratulating themselves on their enthusiasm for meting out punishment of all kinds. Mike Huckabee is to be appreciated and applauded for the extent to which he offers an alternative to the small-mindedness of George Bush’s puny vision; it is regrettable that he himself is a compromised figure, with his own self-righteously callous side. That doesn’t make his better qualities count for nothing, but the fact that someone so flawed can seem so enlightened in comparison to Bush is a sad comment on Bush himself. Phil Nugent ☀
There is a popular conservative myth now that Thomas was sandbagged at his hearings by the scheming harridan Anita Hill, and Thomas’s remarks indicate that he himself thinks this was all part of some rearranged plan. In fact, Thomas was cruising towards his nomination when someone leaked Hill’s name to the press and the resulting uproar forced Democratic Congressmen who had wanted to leave the matter alone dragged Hill into a public mess that she’d been trying to avoid getting involved in. I’ve never had any trouble believing that Thomas was guilty of the weird behavior that Hill ascribed to him, if only because of two things: one, if she was lying, it would have meant that she was lying about him for years and years, usually in private, just in case someday this dullard would luck into a chance at a high-profile job that she could sabotage; and Thomas, unlike Hill, was already known to be a shameless liar. He had just finished lying, hell, perjuring himself, by swearing to have no opinion on abortion, so why would he have any problem lying about his tastes in porn? Phil Nugent ☀
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