None Dare Call It Idiocy: Duhbya Flounders as a Stunned Press Watches

None Dare Call It Idiocy
Duhbya Flounders as a Stunned Press Watches

by Tamara Baker

Monday, October 11, 1999 --Saint Paul, Minn. (APJ)--How long can it last?

Really, I 'd like to know.

How long can the Beltway Boys go on pretending that there's any there there where the Governor of Texas is concerned?

They did their level best to ignore Tucker Carlson's brutally (and unintentionally) revealing piece in Talk magazine, even as they were actively putting words in Hillary Clinton's mouth concerning what she didn't say in an article on her in that very same issue.

They have blown off, at the behest of the RNC, Shrub's past drug usage -- to the extent where, joining the other two self-confessed GOP Druggie Governors, several of the conservative TV tabloid talkers have outed themselves as either druggies themselves, or as being willing to lie to the FBI about the drug usage of their druggie friends.

(Now remember: These are the same folks who got all bent out of shape over Bill Clinton's allergy-doomed failure to inhale. Talk about the death of outrage!)

And now, the celebrity press corps is confronted on Duhbya's part with a series of 180-degree backpedallings worthy of Jesse Ventura himself.

Shrub's Iron Triangle puppet-masters have had the GOP's front-runner doing the following, in the following order:

a) Courted his conservative base by begging Pat Buchanan to stay in the Republican Party, even as every other GOPer was belatedly bashing Pitchfork for the anti-Semitism which they have known about for the past three decades;
b) Kneeled in front of the Rev. Pat Robertson to swear his religio-conservative fealty and opposition to abortion, gay rights and all else the Rev. hates;
c) Did a fast 180 by bashing Congressional Republicans over their plans for the Earned Income Tax Credit (a pure example of grandstanding, considering that even if Clinton doesn't veto the GOP's EITC scheme, it's so blatantly in violation of the law that it would collapse at the first court challenge and even its sponsors know it)
d) Kept up the good cop-bad cop act far longer and far clumsier than was good for him, considering that he managed to raise the ire of not only Tom DeLay and Rush Limbaugh, but also of the Rev. Mr. Robertson himself, whose hands were still covered with the oil he used to anoint Shrub as the right wing's man. (Bear in mind that Ralph Reed, Robertson's brains, is a Bush buddy from way back. Robertson will quietly re-endorse Shrub as soon as it's safe again to do so.)
e) Did an even clumsier 180 of his 180, wherein he denied ever dissing the rest of the Republican Party--a move that, as Jake Tapper noted in the October 6th issue of Salon, stunned the reporters witnessing it:
To a completely incredulous press corps -- which not only had been in attendance the day before but had both written and audio copies of his speech -- Bush insisted that all he had been saying the day before was that the GOP is too often "mischaracterized." It wasn't that Republicans are "speaking a sterile language of rates and numbers, of CBO and GNP" -- as he had said Tuesday -- but rather that "oftentimes people only hear the sterile numbers of economic news that we talk about," as he said on Wednesday. It wasn't that "too often, on social issues, my party has painted an image of America slouching toward Gomorrah," as he'd said Tuesday -- but rather that "oftentimes people only hear the gloom-and-doom scenario." As of press time, it wasn't clear if the governor's staff would be providing a Bush-to-English, English-to-Bush dictionary for future speeches.

All of this in the space of less than two weeks.

This isn't triangulation, this is stupidity.

How long, oh Lord, how long?

Reporters and commentators in the rest of the nation -- even comedians like David Letterman, who called Duhbya a "colossal boob" last week -- are willing to say out loud that the man's a twit. Why not the Beltway CelebCorps?

Why, instead, do we have Maureen Dowd regularly doing for Duhbya the print equivalent of what Anne Manning did for Newt Gingrich?

Why do we have Howell Raines' New York Times patting the Bushlet on the head for standing up to the Big Bad GOP?

Why is the celebrity press corps determined to prop up this buffoon at all costs?

Why, indeed?

One of the few hopeful signs out of last week's CelebCorps' (thanks to the Daily Howler for this word!) reportage is that Waco Fatigue is hitting even them really hard.

The news that one of Dan Burton's expert witnesses detected what he thought was FBI gunfire on the tapes of the last day of the Waco siege was countered by the fact that this same expert also found what he considered evidence of "repeated" gunfire on the part of the Davidians.

The media also took pains to point out--as they have not done consistently in the past--that the FBI's orders did indeed allow them to fire on the Branch Davidians.

In addition, CBS news reported last Wednesday evening that among the materials the FBI asked for from the Pentagon was a "tank retriever".

Think about that for a moment.

If the FBI thought that they'd need a tank retriever--which is a tank-like machine used to haul incapacitated tanks out of harm's way--that tells you something about the kind of firepower they expected to face from David Koresh. And the huge illegal arsenal they found in the ruins of Koresh's self-lit funeral pyre bore out their worst fears.