Ah what the heck , its the weekend and 4 days to go I figure might as well get flamed. I see now why SR. picked Quayle to be his running mate, it reminded him of his son <VBG> I find it ironic the left side is also slamming the media. who's side are they on ?
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It's the stupidity, stupid
George W. Bush's constant gaffes and mental lapses reflect the luxurious
laziness of a scion who's never had to work hard at anything. And the media
elite has graciously awarded him a Gentleman's C.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Todd Gitlin
Oct. 24, 2000 | What does George W. Bush know and when does he know it? (A)
Not much and (B) not without long study periods and (C) even then not well.
This is not only funny.
Even pundits notice that the man is a gaffe artist -- that's the easy part,
the (you might say) no-brainer. Evidence is not lacking that young Bush is
grammatically challenged, semantically befuddled, factually slipshod. He
makes a cheap spectacle of himself, whereupon his people can brand
finger-pointers as, horror of horrors, elitists. Instant replay is made to
order for television news -- it requires no homework -- and gaffes are made
to order for instant replay.
It's not hard to go to the videotape to show Bush as Governor Malaprop, he
of "subliminable," using "subscribe" for "ascribe," "retort" for "resort,"
"hostile" for "hostage," "forethought" for "forefront," "gracious" for
"grateful," "gist" for "grist," "suckles" for "sucks," and so on ad
infinitum. Jacob Weisberg in Slate has collected these and other examples
(he is not the only one), as well as many an instance of Bush jamming
together singular verbs and plural nouns -- as in "Our priorities is our
faith" (Greensboro, N.C., Oct. 10) and "Reading is the basics for all
learning" (Reston, Va., March 28) -- and inverting, as in "We want to
promote families in America. Families is where our nation takes hope, where
wings take dream." (La Crosse, Wis., Oct. 19) There is also his memorable
crack at Gail Sheehy: "The woman who knew that I had dyslexia -- I never
interviewed her." (Orange, Calif., Sept. 15)
Cast as a regular airhead, W. himself has learned to mock his own
feebleness, joking, "I've been known to mangle a syllable or two, if you
know what I mean." (Greensboro, Oct. 10) As he said to David Letterman the
other night, "Well, a lot of folks don't think I can string a sentence
together so when I was able to do so, the expectations were so low that all
I had to do was say, 'Hi, I'm George W. Bush.'" That's what a man of the
people does, turns a charge of incapacity into a gag at the expense of the
accuser. Thus did Ronald Reagan, whose age had become an issue in the 1984
campaign, say about Walter Mondale, "I am not going to exploit for political
purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience." This is the good-ol'-boy
ingratiator at work, and W. has gotten rather competent at that if nothing
else.
Thus does George W. Bush of Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School, a
chip off his father's pork rinds, appeal to his audience's resentment of
brains. When he tediously, deceptively, ribs Gore for claiming to have
invented the Internet (what Gore said was, "During my service in the United
States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet," a klutzy
formulation that is more than half true, but who cares what he actually said
and what the truth is?), he identifies himself with people who cannot fairly
claim to have invented anything -- people like the winners of "Who Wants to
Be a Millionaire?" consulting friends and studio audiences (audiences as
focus groups!) on their way to winning big bucks by answering questions
about television programs. Bush auditions for entertainer in chief, playing
to know-nothings who resent the idea that there are people who know more
about anything than they do.
In 1956, upon being told that he had all the "thinking people" on his side,
Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson replied, "That's
wonderful. But I need a majority." Bush's handlers are gambling that the
majority will turn its back on the smart kid in favor of the frat party
glad-hander. ("This is what I'm good at. I like meeting people, my fellow
citizens, I like interfacing with them" -- George W. Bush, Sept. 8.) No
presidential candidate ever went broke betting on the anti-intellectualism
of the American people.
Follow W.'s gaffes more carefully and something more sinister than
sloppiness emerges. There's a quality of mind -- or mindlessness, rather --
at work in George W. Bush that ought to give pause to voters and journalists
who may think kindly of some of his positions. After all, a vote for
president is not a vote for positions. It is a vote to place a person in
power -- or, as Bush likes to call it, "leadership."
Bush gives ample evidence that he does not reason. He thinks not in logical
arcs but in scatters. There's a slapdash disorder to many of his
infelicities -- they are piles of disconnected words, a sequence of flash
cards. Each stands for a slogan that stands for an impulse. He knows he is
to repeat them, but he is not clear on what relation they have to each
other. So he strings these chunks of words together and they go clunk, one
against the other. Most likely he has been primed with these bullet points.
But reason he does not. His mind darts -- he cannot keep focus. He loses
track of the points he is trying to make, so they come out redundancies --
"Drug therapies are replacing a lot of medicines as we used to know it" (St.
Louis).
Consider the governor's extended two-minute drift during the St. Louis
debate, in response to a question from a 34-year-old single woman with no
dependents about the tax savings she could look forward to:
"Let me just say the first -- this business about the entitlement he tried
to describe about savings, you know, matching savings here and matching
savings there, fully funded it's going to cost a whole lot of money, lot
more than we have. You're going to get tax relief under my plan. You're not
going to be targeted in or targeted out. Everyone who pays taxes is going to
get tax relief. If you take care of an elderly in your home, you're going to
get the personal exemption increased.
"I think also what you need to think about is not the immediate, but what
about Medicare? You get a plan that will include prescription drugs, a plan
that will give you options. Now, I hope people understand that Medicare
today is -- is -- is -- is important but it doesn't keep up with the new
medicines. If you're a Medicare person, on Medicare you don't get the new --
new procedures. You're stuck in a time warp in many ways. So it will be a
modern Medicare system that trusts you to make a variety of options for you.
"You're going to live in a peaceful world. It will be a world of peace,
because we're going to have a clearer, clear-sighted foreign policy, based
upon a strong military, and a mission that stands by our friends, a mission
that doesn't try to be all things to all people -- a judicious use of the
military which'll help keep the peace.
"You'll be in a world hopefully that's more educated so it's less likely
you'll be harmed in your neighborhood. See, an educated child is one much
more likely to be hopeful and optimistic. You'll be in a world in which fits
into my philosophy: You know, the harder work -- the harder you work, the
more you can keep. It's the American way. Government shouldn't be a heavy
hand. That's what the federal government does to you. It should be a helping
hand. And tax relief in the proposals I just described should be a good
helping hand."
Lacking a story line, Bush flashes cards. He dashes around pressing
rhetorical buttons: the "costs money" button, the "options" button, the
"trust" button, the "strong" button, the school button, the hard work
button. He cannot give cogent reasons for what he says. He does not think he
has to. In fact, throughout his career, he has not had to give reasons. He
is entitled. He need not stoop to reason. This is not exactly stupidity, in
the sense of native incapacity -- it may be that, but he has not been
tested. What it is is slovenliness of a mind-boggling order. He may or may
not be dyslexic, but who cares, since he has never had to read much, write
much or reason much to get where he's gotten.
This is not ordinary laziness. It is the luxurious laziness of a scion who
was raised to think he did not have to give reasons, because he was the
third generation of a dynastic family. The governor of Texas is a man who's
spent most of his adult life slacking around, never taking the trouble to
master any mental discipline, accomplishing nothing worth mentioning that
did not flow to him as an heir. The harder you work, the more you can keep.
This beneficiary of affirmative action for Connecticut nobility worked
harder than a garbageman? What did W. have to know to get where he did? No
wonder that, in St. Louis, he did not have to know what the Supreme Court
has said about affirmative action. He could get away with this deep thought:
"If affirmative action means what I just described, what I'm for, then I'm
for it."
The malapropisms, tautologies and evasions are the work of a man who has
spent his life overreaching -- and getting away with it. In Hollywood, they
call this failing upwards.
Bush has gotten a pass on most of his slipshod ways. Rarely are news
commentators bothered to notice. Where Gore's exaggerations get raked over
indiscriminately and relentlessly, sometimes fairly and sometimes not,
journalists do not rush to point the accusing finger at Bush for his
stumbling and dishonesty. Page 1 reports on the candidates' posture, while
it is left to inside pages (if anywhere) to note errors, with little sense
of which errors count.
Reporters (starting with all-too-moderate moderator Jim Lehrer) thus do not
hector W. for "clarification" when he takes credit for an HMO patients bill
of rights that he vetoed in 1995, and that became law in 1997 without his
signature after he opposed it again. The public's self-glamorizing watchdogs
cannot be troubled much to note that he takes credit for a hate crimes bill
that he opposed. Few voices rise in righteous indignation when Bush dodges
Gore's point that Texas ranks at or near the bottom on health insurance
coverage while vastly overstating Texas spending for healthcare for the poor
by claiming a total of $4.7 billion while neglecting to note that $3.5
billion, three-quarters of the total, comes from charity care and local
government.
The same journals that took seriously the piddling charge that Gore padded
his Vietnam record show decidedly little interest in W.'s lies and evasions
about his service in the Texas National Guard (where he served in order to
dodge going to Vietnam), as documented by Tom Rhodes in the Sunday Times of
London and Joe Conason in the New York Observer but scarcely mentioned
elsewhere.
On television, Bush's flaws in logic and fact get more attention from
Letterman and Leno than the political pundits, who practice knowingness
without knowledge. Thus did they declare W. to have passed Lehrer's
foreign-policy quiz in the second presidential debate because he was quick
to answer thumbs-up or thumbs-down to a list of military interventions. But
for all their vigilance about body language and stylistic tics, reporters,
editorialists and pundits did not note any lapses of substance:
The first intervention that W. thumbs-upped, Lebanon in 1983, was an
unmitigated disaster, resulting in much unnecessary death from American
shelling, culminating in a terror bombing that killed 241 American Marines
asleep in their barracks. Television pundits did not leap to remember.
(Thomas Friedman, in the New York Times, did, though.)
The Gulf War, which W. of course embraced, became necessary when his
father's ambassador, April Glaspie, signaled at a meeting with Saddam
Hussein that the U.S. would not react badly if he marched into Kuwait. Some
foreign-policy success! This fact has slipped down the memory hole,
lubricated by an oblivious press corps. For that matter, Saddam Hussein
built up his bloated power -- and was responsible for thousands of Iraqi and
Iranian deaths -- during the 1980s, when it was the administrations of
Reagan and, you guessed it, George H.W. Bush who green-lighted the Iraq
attack on Iran.
Bush said: "I hope our European friends become the peacekeepers in Bosnia
and in the Balkans. I hope that they put the troops on the ground, so that
we can withdraw our troops and focus our military on fighting and winning
war." But already 85 percent of the troops in Kosovo are European.
For this performance, conventional wisdom awarded the governor high marks on
foreign policy. Manner trumps matter. Even Salon's Alicia Montgomery wrote
that, in Winston-Salem, N.C., Bush demonstrated "command of the issues."
Evidently, ignorance is no disqualification for "command of the issues."
When the emperor has no clothes, it's considered bad form to comment on his
anatomy. Instead, the commentators review his performance: The emperor today
displayed the style for which his appearances are renowned ... The emperor
dressed better than expected, though not so well as in his last display. The
designated commentators are more reluctant than anyone else to blow the
whistle, for they are hired entertainers with an above-it-all position to
lose. This is a democracy, of course, so instead of emperors, we have
governors, but the same principle applies -- when the governor is an
airhead, the pundit who wishes to entertain his public finds him floating
higher than expected. The pundits do not want to misbehave.
Nor do the network news shows want to take precious minutes to demonstrate
that Bush's knock on Social Security for delivering only a 2 percent return
flunks out. The 2 percent net is what contributors ultimately get because
they are paying for their mothers' and fathers' pensions. (Too complicated
to explain, the networks think, not understanding the point themselves or
feeling obligated to learn it.) Those who point this out are either
Democratic "partisans" or they get only a stripped-down sound bite to say
that Bush was wrong but no chance to give reasons. Reasons! How quaint.
Reasons are too much to ask. If the candidate cannot be expected to give
reasons, why should the candidate's critics be different?
Nor do the media take time to explain that the half-reason why Bush can
claim to be "a uniter not a divider" is that the Democratic Party in Texas
is like a Republican Party elsewhere. When Bush distances himself from awful
Washington, they do not trouble themselves to remind voters that the party
that paralyzed government during the Clinton years, the party in charge of
Congress when it shut down the government, the party that stomped on
healthcare, was the GOP: the Governor's Own Party.
What do the news organizations know and when do they know it? Do they care
to find out what they don't know? If they decide they are not obliged to let
the rest of us know what we may not feel like knowing, why are they superior
to the pandering politicians they scorn? If they are embarrassed to point
fingers at a nonentity who is within two weeks of the presidency, where is
their pretense of journalistic craft?
As in 1980, the news organizations, embarrassed to be called "the liberal
media," are bending over backward to be kind to thoughtless Republicans.
Today, as then, their idea of "fairness" is to chuckle and give the smiling
gibberish-spouter a special dispensation. Today, as then, they bend so far
backward they fall down on the hopelessly old-fashioned task of informing
the public. Now, again, they are making themselves useful idiots for an
empty charmer.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Todd Gitlin is professor of culture, journalism, and sociology at New York
University, and the author of "The Sixties," "The Twilight of Common
Dreams," and a new novel, "Sacrifice."
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Confession: I'm not registered for the first time since I was 18, I live in a monachy ( TEXAS ) and my vote couldn't even help get a judge elected, this state is sewn up by the REPs. After reading this thread you would think I lived in the Garden of Eden or Utopia , ect...
BTW... Be careful about drinking and driving, a lot of states including Texas now has .08% as the intoxication level. |
