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From the Rude Pundit, a comparison between rock music and Rutherford Bush.

Neither one comes off looking good, I hasten to add.

You know what the worst kind of rock songs are? The kind where a pampered, rich rock star sings about how rough it is to be on the road every night, performing. Christ, you wanna say, nobody fucking forced you to play a guitar, fuck groupies, and get high every night. So when Bush kept falling back on how hard it is to be the man in the Oval Office, making decisions that affect Americans, all the Rude Pundit kept thinking was, ironically, the lyrics to Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive." Stop fucking whining. Shut the fuck up and do the job you campaigned for, destroyed others for, and finally stole.

Link to the Rude Pundit courtesy of

supergee.

Current Mood: rocking
Current Music: "Turn the Page", Bob Seger

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From: (Anonymous)

I find it hard to defend George W. Bush on anything, but I will put in a good word for Bob Seger, if I may. "Turn the Page" comes from a time when Seger was a regional star ("I don't need any money, just my fame," as Otis Redding once sang) whose closest shot to a national breakout had ended when "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man" fell off the charts. In addition, the song is an early example of the genre the Rude Pundit disdains and is of a piece with "Lookin' Back" (both songs I first heard on the LIVE BULLET album which preceded NIGHT MOVES), when some culture was still counter.

According to Paul Krugman, Bush need only maintain his optimism for nine more months. Giving him "Four More Yeara" makes me think of H.L. Mencken's support for Roosevelt in 1940, on the grounds that "he should bury his own dead horse." In kinder (and gentler, naturally) moments, I think of Robert Redford in "The Candidate," wondering what to do after he's compromised himself so much in order to win the Senate race.

Better that than Mr. Harding in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, who told McMurphy that he was so crazy that he voted for Eisenhower twice. Come to think of it, we had a President named Harding. He's traditionally ranked as a failure...

Rutherford Hayes, in contrast, comes off higher. I sometimes think this is because he's the only winner who lost the popular vote not to try for a second term. (Unlike John Quincy Adams and Benjamin Harrison.) There's a lesson in there somewhere, wouldn't you say?

From:

supergee.livejournal.com

Eisenhower had his virtues. Like Sherman, he knew that war is Hell because he'd been there, and for the same reason he did not have to get us into Vietnam to demonstrate personal equipment size. And of course he was way to the left of Bush.

From: (Anonymous)

I'm coming off Robert A. Caro's MASTER OF THE SENATE, where we learn how Lyndon Johnson put the Democrats in Eisenhower's camp because he realized that the Republicans were split between Eisenhower and Taft. As you say, Eisenhower was to the left of Bush, and his utterances, if occasionally convoluted, were easier to follow. He ended the Korean War and didn't take us into Vietnam (aside from a few hundred "military advisers"). People seemed to think he meant well even if they didn't agree with him.

I suppose I brought Harding and McMurphy into it because the alternative to the dueling Bull Goose Looneys is Flounder in "Animal House" being told merrily: "Ya fucked up! Ya trusted us!" There was something to "like" about Ike, and there was much to like in his first term -- the end of the Korean War, the end of Joe McCarthy's excesses, a certain relaxation of tensions with the Soviets (Summit in Geneva!) and not going to war over Poland, Hungary and the Suez Canal in 1956 (I'd mention Brown v. Board of Education, but that was the Supreme Court's doing) -- to give him a second term. (Even if that was a disappointment.) But I don't know what Bush has to recommend himself for in 2004 beyond what didn't work for Herbert Hoover in 1932: "You're lucky it was me driving and not some inexperienced Democrat."

Clearly, Bush has something, if only the fact that he doesn't have a Lewinsky in the Oval Office. (I was talking to someone at work who was concerned about the deficit, and when I struck an anti-Bush note, he said that he preferred him to Clinton and wished death on both Bill and Hillary.) I don't know what it is, though, or how it can be overcome.

Halberstam writes in THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST of Lyndon Johnson's response to Chappaquiddick. Johnson was convinced that Ted Kennedy would get off relatively unscathed, which he did, but that he would not have been so fortunate: "If I'd been with that girl, and she'd been so much as stung by a bumblebee, they would have put me in Sing Sing."

Maybe I should write to Karl Rove and tell him to have his bosss study the utterances of LBJ, paying particular attention to the remarks of March 31, 1968, when Johnson said: "I shall not seek, and will not accept, another term as your President..."

When a knowledge of history is no comfort, you just have to dream.