Friday, November 9, 2007

^(*!&%$**!!!

Gah! No sooner had Patches cheered me up than I received an email from a friend about this. Oh Lordy, if there is anything more gag-inducing than wingnuts waxing sanctimonious about the "Angry Left" it has to be Karl Rove delivering a sermon on the topic of (cough, cough) anonymous incivility. Emptywheel has a good response. I need a drink.

2 comments:

Mike Thomas said...

Good Eugene Robinson column on this topic:

George W. Bush apparently has reduced more of his fellow citizens to frustrated, sputtering rage than any president since opinion polling began, with the possible exception of Richard Nixon.

AnnPW said...

That is a good column. Now I'm REALLY depressed - thanks Mike!>;)
Thisexcerpt from Craig Unger's new book "The Fall of the House of Bush" over at Salon is also good reading. Note this part:

Bush 41 had always told his son that it was fine to take different political positions than he had held. If you have to run away from me, he said, I'll understand. Few things upset him. But there were limits. He was especially proud of his accomplishments during the 1991 Gulf War, none more so than his decision, after defeating Saddam in Kuwait, to refrain from marching on Baghdad to overthrow the brutal Iraqi dictator. Afterward, he wrote about it with coauthor Brent Scowcroft, his national security adviser, in "A World Transformed," asserting that taking Baghdad would have incurred "incalculable human and political costs," alienated allies, and transformed Americans from liberators into a hostile occupying power, forced to rule Iraq with no exit strategy. His own son's folly had confirmed his wisdom, he felt.

But now his son had not only reversed his policies, he had taken things a step further. "The stakes are high ..." the younger Bush told reporters on April 21. "And the Iraqi people are looking -- they're looking at America and saying, are we going to cut and run again?"

The unspoken etiquette of the Oval Office was that sitting and former presidents did not attack one another. "Cut and run" was precisely the phrase Bush 43 used to taunt his Democratic foes, but this time he had used it to take a swipe at his old man. Having returned recently from the Masters Golf Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, the elder Bush was eagerly looking forward to his celebrity-studded birthday bash in June. But, to his dismay, the media didn't miss his son's slight of him. On CNN, White House correspondent John King characterized the president's speech as an apparent "criticism of his father's choice at the end of the first Gulf War." Thanks to a raft of election season books, the press was asking questions about whether there was a rift between father and son.


I truly cannot imagine what it must be like for a parent to have a son that is that much of an asshole. I mean, really.