Category: Current Affairs

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Bush: The Hard Work of Love

I’ve been looking for transcripts of the debate tonight (or last night and last month, technically, because we’ve crossed over into Friday and October) because I wanted to make sure the heading on that first debate post was correct. It’s not really a surprise, but the transcripts I’m finding are “sanitized”; they clean up the speakers’ little tics and hems and haws, but also appear to clean up some of Bush’s butchered syntax and frequent subject-verb disagreement and word-slurring. Some of that can’t be rendered well in print and shouldn’t. But for the record, it seems important to represent what they really said, butchery and all, rather than offer a version that cleans up language errors that were an important part of the exchange and how it will be perceived.

I finally found video of Bush, and here’s the “commander in chiefs” line as he said it and how it appears in transcripts:

Video: “That’s not what commander in chiefs does when you’re trying to lead troops.”
Transcript: “Not what a commander in chief does when you’re trying to lead troops.”

But to be honest, Bush was so garbled in his delivery that the “that’s” at the beginning of the sentence was contracted almost to just “s.” and he may have slipped an “a” in front of the commander. But the “chiefs does” is indisputable. I feel sorry for the poor transcribers.

All that said, here was another gem that I missed during the broadcast:

Bush: You know, I think about Missy Johnson. She’s a fantastic lady I met in Charlotte, North Carolina. She and her son Brian, they came to see me. Her husband, P.J., got killed. He’d been in Afghanistan, went to Iraq.

You know, it’s hard work to try to love her as best as I can, knowing full well that the decision I made caused her loved one to be in harm’s way.

What did he mean? “It’s hard work to try to love her as best I can”?

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The Score

I was wrong that Kerry would be spun out of a “win” in his joint appearance with Bush. My friend Pete — Pete Danko, whose son Niko just had his fifth birthday on Monday, though I didn’t remember until later — just sent me an email with some of the quick poll numbers that are coming out:

CNN / GALLUP
Kerry: 53
Bush: 37

CBS:
Kerry: 44
Bush: 26
Tie: 30

ABC:
Kerry: 45
Bush 36:
Tie: 17

So other people apparently were seeing the same peeved, flustered, halting, hesitant performance I did.

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‘Not What Commander in Chiefs Does’

Now, I think it’s wrong to assume President Bush is an idiot. I mean, there’s some reason, perhaps invisible to those of us who never get to meet him or see him in action behind the scenes, that he got where he is. I mean, beyond the privileged background and unwavering support of partisan zealots and big corporate interests. But tonight’s “debate,” which is about halfway over as I write, is a great example of why so many people, me included, keep concluding he’s a nitwit. Never mind the baseless conclusions he continues to argue for on Iraq and terrorism and security. The phrase in the post title is just one example of the constant tangle he found himself in when contending with basic spoken English and logical argument during his appearance with Kerry. He seems so ill at ease, so hesitant and uncertain about how to phrase his responses, so dependent on falling back on the charge that Kerry has been inconsistent in his positions. I’d say Kerry got the better of him — just spoke more clearly, thought well on his feet, didn’t lose himself (much) in his dangerous, tortuous prolixity.

Of course, the way things are today spinwise and swing voter-wise, no one will really win this debate when it’s all over.

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Debates

Jfknixon
Interesting historical footnote from The Writer’s Almanac, which notes that Sept. 26 is the anniversary of the first televised presidential debate, Kennedy vs. Nixon, 1960. I vaguely remember Mom and Dad watching the debates on TV, though I have a clearer memory of other parts of the ’60 campaign, such as the Democratic Convention on TV from Los Angeles, Mom being a Democratic precinct captain, the giant Kennedy poster in our front windown, and Mom and Dad taking us to shake Kennedy signs at a Nixon rally in Park Forest the weekend before the election (though here’s another reason to love the Web: here’s a transcript of his prepared remarks, delivered Oct. 29 — or 10 days before the election instead of the weekend preceding the vote. More on that memory later, I suppose).

Anyway, after 1960, debates weren’t held again until 1976. It’s not terribly surprising if you think about it: Nixon was running in two of the following three elections; in ’68, he probably didn’t want any part of an exchange that had proved so disastrous in his previous run; in ’72, he simply didn’t need to debate. Interesting that an event that has become a fixture — though obviously flawed and less and less useful as it devolves into a piece of spin theater — took so long to catch on after the 1960 experiment.

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Why Not Jeb?

Jeb
To dabble for a moment in dark speculations: I just got done watching Jeb Bush doing his “OK, everyone, another hurricane is coming” thing on TV. Every time I hear him, I wonder: Between the two brothers, why is he not the Chosen One? He sounds smarter and more thoughtful than his brother; Jeb, logical thought, and the English language do not appear to be irreconcilable entities. After giving his statement in English, he flipped over into Spanish; though he was speaking from a statement, it appeared he was making some extemporaneous remarks, too. That’s always impressive to an English-only type like me.

Anyway, I’m sure not hoping that we have to contend with a third Bush in the White House. But given what the ordinary person like myself can see (and maybe I have to start reading the Bush family histories out there), it seems rather extraordinary that the seemingly more limited of the siblings made it to the top. Or made it to the top first, at least.

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X Prize Update: da Vinci Delay

Monday I plan to go down to Southern California to cover Burt Rutan’s first X Prize flight for Wired News. I had been debating going up to Saskatchewan at the end of the week for the planned rocket launch by da Vinci Project. The launch was supposed to happen next Saturday, Oct. 2, and I had gotten a motel reservation in Kindersley, the launch site. But Wired News wasn’t too keen on paying for me to go up there, so it was going to be a matter of going on my own dime or trying to report it over the phone or something (the latter being a rather lame excuse for covering this kind of story). But the da Vinci Project, whose plans have drawn lots of skepticism (as I noted in a post in early August), made the decision easier for me, announcing last night that they’re postponing their flight. Wired News posted my story on the delay about an hour ago.

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Willfully Blind

By way of my brother John, a good online piece from Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey refuting complaints that critics of the Iraqi war are guilty of Monday-morning quarterbacking.

“To be sure, the State Department did its homework in 2002 with the ‘Future of Iraq Project‘ (my link, not Dickey’s) and came up with some answers. But the Pentagon threw away the studies and effectively banned anyone who had worked on them (meaning just about anyone who knew anything about Iraq) from participating in the ‘transition.’

“This was the real intelligence failure in Iraq—the willful blindness of an administration that did not want to discuss the risks ahead. Didn’t even want to know them. To have talked too much about such things might have made the American public and the American Congress as cautious about this war as the warriors were. It might have given some inkling why most Europeans and our Arab allies and Asians and Africans and Latin Americas were skeptical about the whole venture. Did they hate democracy? No. They hated occupation. They knew its humiliations and its risks.”

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We’re Winning the War …

… against Cat Stevens. Or Yusuf Islam. Or whatever he wants to be called. Allah be praised that our terrorist trackers realized the singer was on a Washington-bound airliner and diverted it to Maine before he could run amok in our capital. Terrorist trackers up there in the woods questioned Stevens/Islam, and now they’re deporting him, Allah be praised.

Why? Praise Allah, now that’s a story.

I just love the way the Associated Press describes the grounds for sending the guy’s plane elsewhere, detaining him, then ordering him out of the country:

“… [A] government official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said Islam was placed on a watch list after multiple intelligence sources in recent weeks indicated the peace activist may have associations with potential terrorists.”

Got that? He may be linked to potential terrorists. Making allowances for a possibly clumsy rendition of what the anonymous government official said, it’d be nice to get the specifics out into broad daylight, because just about anyone may be linked to potential terrorists.

The anonymous official also indicates that this information was reported recently. But the AP story goes on to cite suggestions and whispers dating back to 1988 that Stevens/Islam donated money that wound up in the hands of Hamas and a sheikh convicted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Stevens/Islam denies ever knowingly giving money to terrorist groups, the AP story notes, adding that he’s been donating royalties from one recent CD release to a 9/11 victims fund.

Again: It’d be nice for the government, which saw fit to disrupt the liberty of an entire planeload of passengers, to put its cards on the table: Exactly who is saying what about this guy, and what’s the evidence they’ve got against him? Of course, asking for such elementary respect for civil liberties these days — from a bunch of people who proved impotent to spot or stop a squad of real killers three years ago and who ultimately responded to that attack by fabricating a case for an irrelevant but ruinous war — is probably a bit much.

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Ambushed by History

Philip Roth had a long essay in the Sunday New York Times book review section. The subject was his new novel, a sort of reimagining of American history if the isolationist, anti-semitic Hitler apologist Charles Lindbergh had been elected president in 1940 instead of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Most of the piece is an explanation of the book’s origins and an exploration of method. But he takes a detour near the end to puncture our most comforting national myth: That the purity of our devotion to freedom has made us somehow indestructible, immune from history:

“History claims everybody, whether they know it or not and whether they like it or not. In recent books, including this new one, I take that simple fact of life and magnify it through the lens of critical moments I’ve lived through as a 20th-century American. I was born in 1933, the year Hitler came to power and F.D.R. was first inaugurated as president and Fiorello La Guardia was elected mayor of New York and Meyer Ellenstein became the mayor of Newark, my city’s first and only Jewish mayor. As a small child I heard on our living room radio the voices of Nazi Germany’s Fuhrer and America’s Father Coughlin delivering their anti-Semitic rants. Fighting and winning the Second World War was the great national preoccupation from December 1941 to August 1945, the heart of my grade school years. The cold war and the anti-Communist crusade overshadowed my high school and college years as did the uncovering of the monstrous truth of the Holocaust and the beginning of the terror of the atomic era. The Korean War ended shortly before I was drafted into the Army, and the Vietnam War and the domestic upheaval it fomented — along with the assassinations of American political leaders — clamored for my attention every day throughout my 30’s.

“And now Aristophanes, who surely must be God, has given us George W. Bush, a man unfit to run a hardware store let alone a nation like this one, and who has merely reaffirmed for me the maxim that informed the writing of all these books and that makes our lives as Americans as precarious as anyone else’s: all the assurances are provisional, even here in a 200-year-old democracy. We are ambushed, even as free Americans in a powerful republic armed to the teeth, by the unpredictability that is history. May I conclude with a quotation from my book? ”Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as “History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.’

“In writing these books I’ve tried to turn the epic back into the disaster as it was suffered without foreknowledge, without preparation, by people whose American expectations, though neither innocent nor delusional, were for something very different from what they got.”

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‘Jeb and George’

Jackandbobby

So, the “Jack and Bobby” billboards must be counted as effective advertising for the WB, because they’ve caught my attention. They make me think to myself, “What the hell’s that show going to be about?” Of course, the names, and the tease that one of them will be president, prod Kennedy memories (even if we have to wait till 2041 for the chosen one to become chief executive; will the war on terror still be raging?). When I look at the billboard, I have questions the designers probably didn’t intend: Are Jack and Bobby conjoined twins? And who in heaven’s name is the pensive woman in the background? And the WB probably answers this way: Who cares, as long as people tune in?

My puzzlement isn’t a compelling enough reason to break my record of never having knowingly viewed a WB production. Meantime, we’ve got the real-life drama of George and Jeb, who between them might leave nothing but a smoking crater for Jack and Bobby to preside over in 37 years.