Badeep-Badeep-Badeep

This thread will be an open diary on Gonzo’s testimony in front of the Senate…so far I’ve been able to catch a collection of idiots holding up signs in the hearing room, and right now Orin Hatch is stimulating the chicken, lining it up for Gonzo to go to work on. They’ve certainly terrorized a coop or two together before now…that’s obvious. The bird is wishing it were dead, with the attorney general having his way as Senator Hatch holds it in place, wide eyes and a sick grin on his face, every once in a while slapping Gonzo’s ass and barking encouragement.

1PM – From what I can tell, Gonzo had to make love to that chicken on his own once Hatch’s time was up, and without the old man’s farmly expertise and steady hand, the attorney general couldn’t figure out where to put it, and from start to finish it was a sloppy Sanjaya with a side of Sizemore. He is so full of shit, and it is so obvious, that if he doesn’t choose to either flee or cut his own tongue out during the lunch recess, he’s a fool.

4/20 – Gonzo runs point on this whole thing, falls on his sword, leaves in disgrace and the entire thing is over with, except when it comes to whether or not the US attorneys are reinstated, and except for the “No” from Bush that follows such a request/demand (for no other reason besides the fact that he can), the new Attorney General Orin Hatch is nominated and confirmed, the world keeps turning. THAT IS THE ONLY SMART PLAY HERE! There is zero upside for the GOP in Gonzales remaining in charge of the Justice Dept, and besides the ability to obstruct investigations from that post, there’s no correlative upside for the White House either. 

For Bush it’s all about impeachment, and since Gonzales will follow orders, he doesn’t want to lose a weapon. What he’s failing to appreciate though, is that the longer this goes on, the worse it looks, and ultimately Democrats are gifted this narrative that can so easily be related to Bush’s leadership on the Iraq war, that by the time Congress cuts off funding, his assumed gift to future Republicans (a talking point about how Democrats turned their backs on our military in the middle of a war) turns out to be an empty package.

This is the political calculation of a quarter century ago, and the White House is assuming that the story lines that inspired baby boomers to vote Republican throughout their adult lives will naturally bring about the same result today. In essence what Bush is primed for is martyrdom. By ignoring the public and Congress often enough, he is itching for the move by Democrats to cut off funding for Iraq and file articles of impeachment against him, because it ended up working out well for Republicans when the same thing happened following Nixon’s departure. The simplicity of it perfectly matches the simplicity of the man himself…always looking to cut corners and idealize his own persona as something far more relevant and divine than it ever has been or ever will be.

Following Nixon’s impeachment, you had a segment of society that was utterly disgusted with another segment and vice versa. The anti-war movement not only went against the nationalistic instincts of most Republicans, but the amount of moral outrage over drug use, not working a job, and the propaganda mill producing little lies over time (like protesters spitting on the troops), had the most to do with why the counter-counter culture turned to the GOP. These people wanted to be respected by their elders, and for a long time, the worst thing that could happen would be to have a hippie stigma attached to them. Families rejected their own because of this stigma, with parents casting out their own children, as “anti-war” was so neatly folded into the visual of Woodstock. When a 50 year old Republican pictured anti-war in the 70s, they associated it with a girl on acid running around topless at a concert.

There’s no way that dynamic is possible today, as the furthest the right-wing noise machine has been able to go with it and gain traction is to attack Cindy Sheehan, a mother who lost a son in the war. That is a far cry from Woodstock! So that’s a mistake. Then you have the martyrdom of Nixon, who is far less of a crook in the hearts and minds of retirement age folks than say, Jane Fonda. And as ridiculous as that sounds, it’s a fact. The Watergate break-in, taken in historical context, is the equivalent of Capone getting convicted of tax evasion. Much is made out of the loss of some supposed innocence the country enjoyed prior to the crimes being reported, but this has always been more of a press and Hollywood driven legend than anything having to do with the citizens of the republic.

My take on Watergate is that from a political perspective it was brilliant for Republicans to embrace and own every last bit of it. Help the generation to forget about the President saying he wasn’t escalating the Vietnam War, yet at the same time bombing Laos and Cambodia. Not to mention the fact that John F. Kennedy and his brother were both murdered by their own government, along with all those thousands of young lives lost in Vietnam, the veterans who were pissed on and discarded, the democratic governments our CIA toppled for this or that reason…

In light of all that, I’d be happy with the public, press and everyone else focusing all their time on the Watergate scandal if I were a Republican strategist at the time. It worked so well that Bob Woodward actually went from there to shilling for Bush in two straight books during his Presidency. If that’s not an indictment on how undeserving his star status was for the decades that followed Watergate, then surely his 180 degree turn in the opposite direction for the third book of the series has to be the nail in the coffin. Though, even that is fine to me if I’m a GOP fixer, since every time he’s on television, Republicans are reminded of how Nixon got a raw deal.

From the 1990s until today though, the strategies that have been thought of as “cementing a GOP majority” have been anything but. In hindsight the Republican congress looks foolish and somewhat demented in their pursuit of Clinton throughout his two terms. To see the pettiness of what they went after, what they held hearings about (Christmas cards for example) and how little obstruction took place on the part of Clinton’s administration in response to all of it, and compare that with the legitimate matters that the GOP refused to investigate when it came to Bush and how much obstruction of justice has taken place (5 million missing emails)…it doesn’t take a genius to realize precisely why the children of these cynical boomers are making decisions based on the facts, rather than the fear of being stigmatized.

There’s no stigma out there that can be exploited. And the longer President Bush continues to play chicken with Congress, the worse off his party will be as result. He thinks that Democrats are going to focus on him, just as Alberto Gonzales pleaded with Senator Durbin to do yesterday when he said “attack me, attack me” a few times…but that’s not going to happen. There are going to be no cheap martyrdoms this time around. Everyone around the President will be torn to pieces before Congress allows Bush to realize the benefit of what he expects to be empathy from the voters – casting himself alongside the soldiers and marines who were heartbroken when told they could no longer spend 15 months out of 24 in Iraq and had to go home – but by the time all his key people are throughly skull-fucked like Gonzales was yesterday, all he’ll be able to count on will be the shouldering of full blame for why the Republican Party lost power to the Democrats.

Republicans are a fickle, finger-pointing lot, and when mistakes need to be provided a narrative, they’ll more often than not herd the blame towards on a single person if they can. That person will be Bush after 2008. Rumsfeld will be off the hook. Even cowards like Bill Kristol will feel safe to write it like that after 2008. Dial up deadissue in 2017 and see if I was right.