Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Front Men
Aaah, another day, another Pravda puppet rally.
I once, a month or two ago, described the gruesome spectacle of the administration’s Potemkin Town Hall meetings as having all the charm of a fat, aging man energetically humping a blow-up doll. I have discovered that they do not get prettier with the passage of time.
The fat, aging man is our utterly uncharismatic president sitting at 34% in the polls. The blow-up doll, of course, is the fake village people who crowd the meetings.
Normally if I saw such a spectacle I would tap the man on the shoulder and tell him to:
- Try intercourse with real people. It’s better.
- Lose some weight and reform your habits.
- If you just can’t resist, don’t do something like that in public. It’s obscene.
But, of course, such advice would be lost on an administration that is a PR front for a corporatist junta, and it would also be lost on a president who has been shielded from reality his entire life, and who maintains that shield vigorously by continually surrounding himself with yes men and sycophants.
The one trait of JFK that I always liked was his open-mindedness. He sought out disagreement and debate. As one person who worked with him put it, “You could yell at him, insult him, do anything to him, you just couldn’t bore him.”
Our current Preznit shares no such intellectual curiosity and tolerance for debate. His supporters have historically called it “leadership.” I have historically called it “wanton igonorace.”
But now, slowly, the conservatives are coming around to the fact that Dear Leader lives in a bubble. This rally is just business as usual for the GOP. The show must go on.
Reagan was the last time I saw a president so clearly as a charlatan, a man who was simply a charismatic front man for a corporate syndicate. He didn’t know what was going on in the nation. He fell asleep in his own cabinet meetings. He set a record for the most vacation days ever taken by a president. Every reputable account of people who used to work with him portrayed him as an idiot.
Aside from pretty speeches scripted by Peggy Noonan, there was no substance to the man, which made it easier for me to dismiss him instead of hate him. But even to dismiss him is to do him a disservice: he accomplished what he needed to. Or, more appropriately, his administration accomplished what it needed to. All he needed to do was look good and read off of the teleprompter.
Reagan was the first president to completely prove that a president could be utterly unfit, but he could still get elected if the PR campaign was good. He was the first president to prove the style not only trumps substance, it eliminates the need for substance entirely. Republicans proved that an actor is all you need to take over the White House.
He was also a statist reactionary, which earns him the laudation of modern conservatives as the modern father of their party. It is fitting.
But Bush is a new low. He never pulled himself up from a working class family, like Reagan did. He utterly lacks the charisma of his predecessor. And he shares Reagan’s destructive foreign policy and Reagan’s utter stupidity. He shares Reagan’s ignorance.
Time will tell whether Drinky will hang like an albatross around the neck of his party for years to come, and I think it will. But I don’t trust the judgment of the American electorate to learn anything from Bush’s demented presidency. Reagan left office with a huge approval rating. Bush was elected twice. We don’t learn from our mistakes.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 3:58 PM 
