Punk’d
Some people have asked me, “Hey Jason, what do you think of President Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to fill the second Supreme Court opening?”
And all I can say in response is, hahahahahahahahaaha.
Because the nomination sends a message loud and clear to all the conservatives who have supported Bush through it all over the years:
You’ve been punk’d. Suckers.
This is the moment you’ve been waiting decades for. The moment when an opening on the Supreme Court could be filled by a real, rock-ribbed, hard core True Grit Winger. Someone who’d put the women back in the kitchen and God back in the classroom and courtroom where he belongs.
O the trials you have endured, waiting for this moment. You gave every spare penny you could find to the Bush campaigns. You wrote letter after letter after letter to the editor. You canvassed and lit-dropped till your feet bled.
You even turned your church over to the GOP — allowed the tawdry ambitions of man into the House of God — because you believed in George W. Bush. When he said he was born again, you nodded me, too. When he said he wanted a “culture of life”, you said preach it, brother!
And then, after all the years of waiting, the moment came. And George W. Bush looked back at you and said:
Fuck you.
Fuck you, I’m nominating my personal lawyer to the Supreme Court.
Fuck you, I’m nominating her even though she’s never served as a judge and nobody knows where she stands on anything and she’s cool with gays and so on.
Fuck you, she thinks I’m the smartest man she’s ever met and she helped me finesse my DUI rap, so I’m nominating her.
You don’t like that?
Fuck you.
That’s right. All the work, all the sweat, all the dedication — and in the end, in the one moment when it all mattered, George W. Bush tossed you aside like a used Kleenex so he could do a favor for one of his cronies.
To which all I can say is:
hahahahahahahahaaha
In the immortal words of Calamity Jane on Deadwood, “Welcome to the fuckin’ club of the rest of us.”
All of us who did not support Bush unconditionally have seen this for a while now. We’ve seen it in his un-conservative spending habits. We’ve seen it in his botched war planning, and in his refusal to dismiss the subordinates responsible. We’ve seen it in his appointments of cronies to critical posts.
We’ve seen that George W. Bush doesn’t give a flying fuck about anything except hanging on to power longer than his Dad and giving out bennies to his buddies.
But you, your eyes have been shut tight. You ignored it all because you were waiting for that One True Moment when all the work would prove worthwhile. And now it’s come — and you’re left with nothing except the sick feeling of being used.
hahahahahahahahaaha
You’ve been punk’d.
Welcome to the fuckin’ club of the rest of us.
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Comments
digby
October 4, 2005
3:58 pm
You’re an asshat, and your oh-so-clever caricature of conservatives says a lot more about you than it does them.
You should be embarrassed.
Joe Dailey
October 4, 2005
4:41 pm
If the Lefkowitz caricature of a conservative is fiscally responsible, wants our wars fought competently, and wants our judges to actually follow the law, then I will accept that caricature; and acknowledge our president may be lacking in many departments.
The irony in this nominee is it is a true diversity pick. Instead of picking a minority or female who has gone to the same schools and served on the same courts as the old white judges, Bush picks someone from a regular law school that has had jobs out side of the beltway for most of her life. Placing someone on the court with honest real world experience (the closest we’ve come before was O’connor and Thomas) might become a more important Bush legacy than we would imagine.
Eric
October 4, 2005
4:43 pm
No way, this is great! Digby, eh? It’s a well known fact that Arthur Digby Sellers wrote 156 episodes of “Branded!” Bulk of the series, dude.
digby
October 4, 2005
5:14 pm
Joe Dailey wrote: “If the Lefkowitz caricature of a conservative is fiscally responsible, wants our wars fought competently, and wants our judges to actually follow the law, then I will accept that caricature; and acknowledge our president may be lacking in many departments.”
Agreed.
Actually, I was referring to the tired “put the women back in the kitchen and God back in the classroom and courtroom where he belongs” yarn.
RichMiles
October 4, 2005
6:41 pm
Hard to tell what the main thrust of this blog is – whether it’s conservative or liberal or somewhere in between – but regardless, I want to second Jason’s observations. Bush has been fucking us since 2000 (I still don’t acknowledge that he was legitimately elected the first time), people on my side of the aisle have seen him for the unspeakable monster he is since then, and that’s why so many people to the left politically hate him.
I was accused by one of the Bushite clan recently of “wanting Bush to fail” – when I heard that, I had to think about it for a minute, because it’s not really true – no one really wants the leader of their country to fail, no matter how much one may hate him, because if he is a total failure then so is the country. And what I finally came up with was that I (and numerous of my fellow lefties) don’t want Bush to fail – we believe he already HAS failed, but has never been made to pay the consequences of his failure. He has failed to make our country a better place, which I suppose can be said of many presidents, but more than that, he has made the country a much WORSE place in many regards, and it infuriates us on the left to see people who are being fucked by Bush just like the rest of us, who are simply too damn stupid to see it, and who buy into his line of bullshit about being a Christian, and compassionate conservatism, and uniter not a divider, and all of the one-liners he is fed by his handlers. If Bush is a good Christian, then I want nothing to do with Christianity. If he calls the unprecedented divisiveness in America today an example of his “uniter not a divider” influence, then one can only shudder to think what our country would be like if he actually were TRYING to set us against each other. And if conservatives and radical religious right-wing nuts don’t know why we on the left despise Bush so, then they’re even stupider than we thought.
Does anyone on the right ever, for one moment, stop to consider that being shut out of everything for which America supposedly stands, and being told we’re unAmerican and soft on terrorism and all those other canards that are casually thrown out by Bush and his sub-demons might make us a little TESTY?
And now, as Jason says, when Bushie has an opportunity to shift the final branch of government to the right, he pussies out, and you people on the right are just apoplectic about it, because you thought you’d finally get TOTAL control over the rest of us and it ain’t gonna happen – well, again as Jason says, FUCK YOU!
It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of cretins.
Joe Dailey
October 4, 2005
7:33 pm
y’know, sometimes I wonder why I vote republican.
I wonder, cuz I’m not a great Bush fan.
Then I read things like the RichMiles post abover and remember why I voted for Bush twice, and would do so again. After reading that last pile of self-ritous hate, portraying Bush as some force of evil and writing off his supporters as stupid just because they believe in different things thab rich,it just makes me sad. We’ve been reduced to the republican party on one side and people who hate conservatives in the republican party on the other (a overgeneralization, yes, but to close for comfort).
I mean, look at the language: cretins, sub-demons, Bushies, Bushies, Bushies. The hard left wing of this country has been telling us for years, often in more polite language, that we all suck and they need to fix things for us. And they get more angry as they’ve been ignored by everyone, including elected democrats, for 60 years of so.
So Rich, maybe conservatives and other people on the right aren’t cretins. Maybe they’ve got hopes and dreams and beliefs as strong as yours. An maybe, just maybe, they feel that these beliefs would make this country a better place. And maybe only getting told by guys like you that they are stupid, really does not add much to the debate. So maybe they are disapointed that this administration has gone so far astray. But I’m pretty sure they would vote for Bush all over again instead of listen to a guy who sounds like an obsessive, whiny, holier than though despot.
Jason Lefkowitz
October 4, 2005
10:57 pm
Hey kids, it’s the asshat here.
(Is “asshat” better or worse than “moonbat”, btw? I can never keep these things straight.)
It’s funny how people react to this piece. Specifically it’s amusing how the predictable left and right wing points of view got trotted out so quickly.
I would argue that rather than “caricaturing” conservatives, I was giving them credit. They busted their asses to get their man into office. My whole point was — what are they getting for all that work? Given that they have delivered elections and all.
And it’s not like the GOP hasn’t been throwing them red meat for quite some time, either. See
http://www.jasonlefkowitz.net/blog1archive/001340.html
… for discussion.
And then comes the one thing evangelical conservatives really care about — pushing the Court to the right so it will strike down Roe v. Wade — and they don’t get it. After all the whipping-up they got at the hands of the GOP, suddenly the one thing they want is too much for Bush to fight for.
If I was a hard core evangelical conservative today, I’d be pissed. Now that Bush has won his re-election he doesn’t seem to have much use for them anymore, you know? Whatever happened to dancing with the one what brung ya?
Plenty of conservatives around the web seem to agree with this analysis. My favorite was this:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_10_02_corner-archive.asp#078386
… but there’s lots of others seizing up in apoplectic fits to choose from, should you be so inclined.
The point is that the evangelicals aren’t stupid, they made a mistake: they believed that Bush cared about their issues. Bush doesn’t give a damn about them or their issues. He just wanted to milk them for all they were worth. If he gave a damn he’d be willing to fight for his constituencies; but he doesn’t, so he can’t be bothered.
And that is the essential flaw in George W. Bush. To use a favorite GOP talking point from the late 90s, “the issue is character”. A leader with character picks his allies carefully, and then fights for them. A leader with character takes his responsibilities seriously. If anyone needed *more* proof that George W. Bush lacks character, you have it now.
This is the point at which people start bleating about Bill Clinton. Before you waste your time, read this thing I wrote seven years ago:
http://static.userland.com/userLandDiscussArchive/msg001251.html
I now return you to your regularly scheduled mudslinging.
RichMiles
October 5, 2005
9:06 am
Well, well – I seem to have hit a nerve with Joe Dailey. I’m sorry I resorted to all that name-calling, though some of it I think should have been recognized for the satire it was intended to be. In the interest of something like fairness, I suppose I should elaborate:
Again I find myself more or less agreeing with Jason – no, I don’t really think Bush supporters are stupid (by and large – there are some of them here in Kentucky where I live to whom, sorry, stupid applies in spades) – what I really think is that people who still think Bush is a good president, a good Christian man, a strong leader are simply not paying attention. Or at least not enough attention to the under-the-radar stuff he or his supporters do that take away the parts of America that give us all, left or right, reason to be proud to be Americans. I could offer examples, but it would cause this post to be book-length.
But a bit of history (my history) is necessary to adequately state what I was (in my high dudgeon) trying to say. While I have been a leftie for pretty much my entire adult life, I didn’t start out, in 2000 or thereabouts, hating Bush. I thought he would be a poor president, I thought he relied too much on slogans like “compassionate conservative” that didn’t match his actions as TX governor, I thought there were too many doubts about him, and that he had had too many failed ventures of varying sorts in the past. I thought he was a rich kid who had gone through life without being made to take responsibility for the messes he left behind him, and I didn’t and don’t think he is intellectually gifted. So no, I didn’t hate him – I just didn’t think I wanted him to be my president.
When I came to hate him was during the 2000 campaign and after he was elected, and made it clear that he would do or say anything to score political points, that he would lie or bend the truth to pander to what he considered his “base”, that he doesn’t really care about the real needs of the American people unless they’re contributors to his campaign, and that he was and still is willing even to stand on the corpses of dead Americans (from 9/11, Iraq and New Orleans) in his pursuit of power, and to accuse his opponents of doing exactly that, of playing politics with the dead, while he does it. THAT’S when I came to hate him. And I still do.
Paradoxically, the net effect of Bush’s presidency for my personal political views is that he has moved me from the far left to a moderate left stance. He has drawn the worst out of both sides of the political spectrum, has caused the nutcases on the left to have to make even more noise than usual, and thus has caused me to think the extremist nutcases on BOTH sides need to sit down and shut up.
So again, I apologize for calling names. But I expressly do NOT apologize for opposing, sometimes vehemently, pretty much everything Bush stands for. I used to think that Ronald Reagan would go down in history as the worst president ever in terms of the harm he did to America and what we all want to think we stand for – but then he was deified when he died, and Bush came along and made the things Reagan did seem mild by comparison. Add to that Bush’s saying one thing and doing the exact opposite – like telling us we’re doing just fine in Iraq, like pretending to be a fiscal conservative while killing our national finances, like trashing his opponents while pretending it’s not him but someone else doing it, like saying he will do anything the religious radicals want and then not doing it, and on and on – and surely any even remotely dispassionate observer can see why those who oppose him would oppose him a LOT.
And yes, I recognize that he didn’t do ALL of the things mentioned above and more by himself – but he is the center around which all that I believe has gone wrong in America since he became president coalesces. Congress and the radical religious right have much to answer for as well – but he’s the rallying point. He’s the one who either encourages or does not discourage bad behavior. So in that sense he is indeed responsible for all of it. IMNSHO.
So do I really think Republicans, esp. those who still support Bush, are stupid? No, not really – I said that in a fit of pique, and I sincerely apologize. But do I think anyone who still supports him has a blind spot, is in denial about what he’s really doing to the country, is unwilling to see if there’s any truth to what the opposition is saying about him? I have to stick with that one, and say yes, I do.