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March
27, 2002 8:00 a.m. |
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ave
you noticed that it’s okay to tell Bush-dumb jokes again? There was
a hiatus after Sept. 11, but now they’re back, on the late-night
talk shows and so on.
Bush-as-dumb is one of the dumbest notions I know. Bush-as-inarticulate, okay. But Bush-as-dumb? Really stupid. Even a casual familiarity with the man and his career tells you that George W. is exceptionally sharp.
One might use some common sense, too. Hard to be dumb and graduate from Andover — even in the old days. Hard to be dumb and graduate from Yale College (probably easier now). Hard to be dumb and graduate from Harvard’s business school. Hard to be dumb and make millions in business (after first failing a little — which is, after all, the American, and the free-market, way). Hard to be dumb and be nominated for governor and defeat a popular incumbent. Hard to be dumb and have a hugely successful first term, and be reelected resoundingly. Hard to be dumb and capture a major-party presidential nomination. Hard to be dumb and rise to the presidency.
Of course, the most impressive thing about George W. Bush is not his smarts, but his spiritual resiliency: his ability to pick himself up off the floor, rebound from the doldrums, and live a meaningful and consequential life.
You might argue that, as the son of a president — and the grandson of a U.S. senator and all that — George W. could have had anything he wanted. All he had to do was ask, and there it would come, on a silver platter.
Let’s think, for a moment, about presidents’ sons. George H. W. Bush has four sons, two of whom are stars of public service, two of whom have less glorious lives. Ronald Reagan has two sons, both very fine people, no doubt, but neither of whom seems a world-beater. Jimmy Carter has three sons, and you haven’t heard of any of them. Gerald Ford has three sons, too, and you haven’t heard of any of them either (although I believe that one of them had a brief career in soap operas). Nixon had only daughters. Johnson had only daughters. JFK had JFK Jr.
You see what I’m saying. My point is most certainly not to disparage the presidential sons whose lives have been more normal — only to say that being the son of a president doesn’t guarantee bright lights, adoring throngs, and “Hail to the Chief.”
The
fact that official Egypt opposes violently any suggestion that the Egyptian
co-pilot downed that Egypt Air plane, murdering all of those people —
and it seems pretty clear he did — bodes ill for our present efforts,
and sums up the difficulty of conducting relations with Middle Eastern
countries.
We
in the press like to pose as great champions of the First Amendment —
but remember, if you will, that virtually all of the press supported these
new campaign-finance restrictions, which severely hamper political speech
(the kind of speech the Bill of Rights was written to protect). Of course,
McCain-Feingold greatly enhances the prestige and power of the press,
given that regular citizens have to shut their mouths for a month or two
before an election. In the McCainized world, only the press gets to talk
(and, in view of the senator’s treatment by the press, why should
he object to that, other than on principle?).
If journalists want to support new and unconstitutional limits on speech, that’s their business, of course. I just hope that the rest of you will be less patient than ever with lectures from them on the First Amendment. They like freedom of the press, they like Mapplethorpe, they like Annie Sprinkle — but “To Hell with Reno” (or “Jeb”) is something else.
I was particularly tickled by something Sen. Feingold said: He averred that he didn’t think many Republicans would want to join a suit against the new law because “what they’d be doing is saying that their own president has signed into law something that is unconstitutional, which is kind of an odd thing to do to your own president.”
Sort of touching — and very revealing — that Feingold would find it alien to oppose a president of one’s own party: to call a spade a spade. Certainly the Democrats never said a cross word about Clinton, even as the rest of the Congress was impeaching him. The Democrats were virtually Bolshevik in their unanimity. James Carville called it “stickin’”; I called it cowardice and amorality.
And do you remember, as I do, how Democrats used to chastise us Republicans when we referred to Clinton as “their president”? They practically accused us of treason.
Well . . . maybe Feingold doesn’t remember.
One of the reasons I like the Republican party is that its members seem to be willing to tell even one of “their own” presidents that he’s wrong, when he’s wrong.
My
vote for Gracious and Witty Losing Candidate of the Month goes to Jim
Oberweis, the Illinois Republican who lost his party’s senatorial
nomination to Jim Durkin. (This sets up a race of Durkin vs. Durbin, as
the incumbent Democrat is Richard Durbin. This is rather annoying, ear-wise.)
According to the Aurora Beacon News, Oberweis “asked supporters
to rally around Durkin and ‘make sure we do everything we can to
beat Dick Durbin and send him out to test the free-enterprise system,
which he’s never had a chance to do.’”
Lovely — and Republicans should be using this line against Democrats repeatedly.
John
Erickson, the British historian and writer, died recently. I immediately
thought of something that Condoleezza Rice told me, in an interview. I
asked her how she happened to become interested in Russia (she is a Russianist,
of course). The first thing she said, I believe, is that she had read
Erickson: The Road to Stalingrad, The Road to Berlin. This
intrigued her not only with the Soviet Union but with power (that is,
with the role of power in the ordering of the world).
I have no special point to make — just a tidbit.
Sticking
with Russia for a minute: There was an
illuminating article by Michael Wines in the New York Times
recently, on the state of Russia’s liberals (which is to say —
to use the shortest hand — the good guys). The article comports with
a terrific piece in the current NR by Garry Kasparov and Therese
Raphael (“When Red Is Not Dead”). (Kasparov, incidentally, is
the number-one-ranked chess player in the world, as well as a writer about
Russia. Raphael is an editor with The Wall Street Journal Europe.)
One passage in Michael Wines’s article made a particular impression on me:
Mr. Rybakov [a parliamentarian] traces the box that liberals are in to the resurgence of his Soviet tormentors. Months before becoming president, Mr. Putin directed the Federal Security Service, independent Russia’s successor to the K.G.B.’s hated domestic arm.
“The guards of the prison fled because they were afraid they would be hung from the lampposts,” he said, alluding to the collapse of Communism. “Now it turns out that we can exist, and life has stabilized. Now the guards are back. And this time, they’re wearing plainclothes. Our task is not to allow the restoration to happen.”
They were afraid they would be hung from the lampposts. And yet the Communists, unlike the Nazis, had no comeuppance, faced no accounting, whatsoever. Too many people had been into it too deep, apparently. (This is what Vaclav Havel said, as quoted in the Kasparov/Raphael article.)
I also learned from the Wines piece that Yuli Rybakov “spent six years in an Arctic logging camp as K.G.B. punishment for handing out Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s works.”
How nice to know about a great man — Rybakov — whose name I had never heard.
It
was either comical or tragic — tragicomical? — to read about
Andrew Cuomo’s visit to South Carolina last week. He stopped by Furman
University, in Greenville, to give a speech. But the NAACP has declared
a boycott against South Carolina, on account of the Confederate flag.
There was a great dispute — in New York politics — over
exactly what Cuomo did, and when, and where. A vicious rumor had it that
he spent the night in a South Carolina hotel. No! the Cuomo campaign reported:
He had only used a room in South Carolina to make a phone call or two.
“He did not pay for a room, and no one was charged for anything because
he didn’t stay there.” Cuomo had dutifully skipped over the
line to the Holiday Inn Express in Flat Rock, N.C.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Andrew Cuomo would probably swap spit with the poisonous Al Sharpton, but he is too pure to patronize a South Carolina innkeeper (black, for all we know). South Carolina is a leper state. Has anyone proposed a campaign to encourage tourism in South Carolina, to offset this weird Cuomo-style punishment? I’m sure someone has.
Well, at least Jesse Helms’s North Carolina gets Andy C.’s Seal of Approval.
When
I listen to these Oregon suicide people go on about states’ rights,
I swear I’m listening to George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Orval Faubus,
and the rest of the Dixiecrats. I guess if you live long enough, you hear
everything — or the same thing from sharply different people.
A
friend of mine from Ann Arbor reports one of her favorite bumper stickers:
“Live Simply, that Others May Simply Live.”
Isn’t that cute? It, of course, reflects the Marxist and erroneous “pie” view of the economy and life: that everything good in this world is finite — in a pie — and to the extent you have more, someone else has less.
I
also have roughly a million requests to comment on language: I had pleaded
No mas, but the pet peeves and queries and conundrums won’t
stop coming.
Let’s deal for a moment with the pronunciation of “err”: It’s “er,” of course — like the last syllable in “better” — not “air.” Alice Roosevelt Longworth once famously quipped, “To err is Truman.” I once put the following title over a review of a Truman biography that detailed the president’s gross slander of Tom Dewey in the ’48 campaign: “To Slur Is Truman.”
If you don’t have the right pronunciation, of course, that little joke makes no sense.
And how about this business of “growing the economy” and so on? Bad, bad, bad. Grow out of it, please.
Also, we have talked several times about the absurd replacement of the perfectly good and meaningful word “foreign” with “international” (which is not the same thing, of course). A reader — in Oman, of all places — writes, “Sooo, if ‘international’ is the politically correct term, why do we say ‘foreign aid’? I’m offended — it should be changed immediately!”
Good point.
In
a recent Impromptus, I chastised the columnist Thomas L. Friedman for,
among other things, scoffing at missile defense as “pie-in-the-sky.”
Why would you do that, I wondered, if only out of concern for reputation?
So many technological endeavors have been scorned over the years, only
to prove successful. Why risk being a numbskull of your own generation?
A reader was kind enough to send me a New York Times editorial from January 1920, complimenting Professor Goddard on his rocketry so far but laughing out of school the notion that a rocket could go to the moon (unmanned, no less). For a little fun and satisfaction, go here.
Brink
Lindsey, trade wiz of the Cato Institute, informs me that he has “joined
the weblogging craze.” I plan to visit www.brinklindsey.com often.
May there never be a tariff on it.
Every
now and then in this column, we note the first Bush’s goofiness,
or endearing malapropisms, or general, awkward touchingness.
Have you noticed that he loves to refer to his son as “The President of the United States”? As in, “I was a little ticked about it, but that was nothing compared with what the President of the United States felt about it.” He never says “the President” or “George W.” or “President Bush” or anything. It’s “The President of the United States.”
And when he’s really feelin’ it, he stretches it out to “The President of the United States of America.”
He’s reveling, the father. He just has to have his eye on Jeb in ’08. Would that pose a dynastic dilemma? Doesn’t seem very American, does it?
Oh, hell, everyone’s got a free vote.