The World Around Us, Part 1

From Scottsdale Arizona comes this from our most loyal reader: No more office memos! Stick to the news of the world!

Just finding my way here. Blogs seem to exist on a continuum, from soxblog,(who not only shies away from personal commentary, but sneers at people--see Sullivan, Andrew--who indulge in it) to The Irish Trojan, who cheerfully, unapologetically shares the X-Rays of his broken arm and the progress of his finals studies at Notre Dame Law School. (I'll say this for Irish--he is perhaps the only person on earth who could sell tickets to a slide show of his family's trip to Yellowstone.) Me, more of a middle line. Little bit of my life, much more of the world around us.

(I re-read the above paragraph and realized I should throw in a full disclosure, which used to be known as "name-dropping": I've gone in with Irish Trojan and three others in the rental of some bandwidth, something Irish apparently knows everything about and me next to none, other than what the final product will look like, but I'm witholding all queries until he finishes his finals and drives to his summer clerkship at a law firm in my boyhood hometown in Phoenix. See: read Irish Trojan, and you get to know him that well.)

Three stories about the world around us. Part One: George Bush and his Fish. I saw a small headline on Huffpost Monday, in which President Bush counted as the greatest moment in his Presidency the occasion of catching a 7.5-pound perch in his Crawford ranch lake. This seemed, at the moment, no more than a sneer by the Huffers, who seize upon every possible moment--no matter how small, no matter how juvenile--to expose the President as Chimpy McHitler. Anyway, I looked at the headline, forgot about it and moved on with my life.

Until this morning, where via the left-wing (but sensible) Daily Howler I learned that this had become a big story, at least one of the top five, according to Keith Olbermann. Howler picks it up, by quoting Olbermann (Howler quotes in bold):

OLBERMANN (5/8/06): I`ve got 33 questions about Hayden, but let`s get the fish thing out of the way first. The president obviously wasn’t serious, but he wasn’t misquoted either, it wasn’t mistranslated. He answered seriously about his worst moment as president. Why didn’t he answer seriously about his best moment? And why does this weird joke seem to have resonated so strongly on the Web and on talk radio?

Really? It was “obvious” that Bush was joking? In fact, we would have thought that was obvious too. But it hadn’t seemed obvious at Digby’s own site, where Tristero, quaking with rage at this outrageous statement, worked his way inside a Bold Leader’s head. We’re sure that Tristero is a fine dude. But what follows is utterly foolish. And increasingly, this is who we’ve become:

TRISTERO: There are, [in my opinion], only three ways to understand this comment, assuming it's true. Quite possibly it's the pathetic whine of a deeply, perhaps clinically depressed man who believes himself a total failure. Or maybe this is a man so uninterested in his job, let alone in serving his country, that he has no business whatsoever being president. Or perhaps this is simply an arrogant bastard who holds in utter contempt anyone who dares to ask him a question, so he responds with the stupidest thing he can say. (Obviously, nothing precludes all three or some combination of two.)

The fourth possibility—that Bush was joking—doesn’t seem all that “obvious” here. But wait a minute! Tristero may have considered that option, although it isn’t clear:T

RISTERO (continuing directly): To be all pre-emptive about it, someone's bound to comment that maybe this just shows how much of a down-to-earth regular guy Bush is.
Yeah? All the down-to-earth regular guys I know don't have their own lake, fer chrissakes. Those people are filthy rich, even if they wear jeans on their estates. But there's a character thing here, too. The down-to-earth people I know who hold important jobs are mighty proud of of what they do and mighty happy with their achievements. And they can tick them off without thinking too hard about what they might be. And, even as a joke, they don't talk about catching a big perch when a newspaper asks them to name their best moment in more than five years. They name their accomplishments. Or, if they're trying to play up the down-to-earthiness, they name their children or something they did with their spouse.

Soon, Tristero was transmitting insight from another source—and debunking the thought that it would have mattered if Bush had been joking:

TRISTERO: One of the trackbacks informs us that Bush was laughing when he boasted of this. As if that makes it any less bizarre a statement—that's just the old "I'm jes' regular folks" nonsense Bush pulls, to distract people from the fact that he's a rich prick who has an artificial lake stocked with sport fishes on his private estate.

Well actually, it would be much less bizarre if this statement was meant as a joke—except in Dumb Loud Pseudo-Liberal Land, where we increasingly live, hatching our feel-good but born-loser strategies, just as we did in the past.

I'm supposing that, if sworn to oath, Bush would list as his finest moment either 1) his presence in the weeks (as opposed to the hours) after the 9/11 attacks, or 2) the capture of Saddam Hussein. Agree or disagree with his policies, one must concede that boasting is simply not Bush's way. One could plausibly accuse him of being flip about a serious question--though I'd argue both ends of that statement.

But to brood over an offhand statement like you see above is to engage in stark, utter madness. Every time I think the GOP is finished, along comes another event like the Alito filibuster or this, and I'm heartened.

Though the principals mentioned above are not Democrats per se, they are part and parcel of the one thing that might mean trouble for the Dems in November. At least a half-dozen times I've heard the Tim Russert wannabes ask a Dem what they would do about Issue X (Iraq, Iran, gas prices, immigration, the deficit), and the jaw-dropping response has been, "We don't need an agenda. We're the opposition."

All throughout the nineties, the GOP kept ignoring Rush Limbaugh's pleading not to bring their face to a knife fight. Too many GOPers felt that Bill Clinton could be beaten simply by pointing at him and saying, "Will you look at that guy?" Similarly, every time someone on the Left points at W and screams, "Will you look at that guy?", I'm reassured.