American Politics Journal -- Mac in Philly: Grandiose Finale



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Mac in Philly: Thursday's Grand(iose) Finale --
The Blue Jeep He Rode Out On -- to Oblivion
BushBaby Appears As a Rock Star After a Bad Film

by Mac MacArthur

Thursday, August 4, 2000, 11:18PM -- PHILADELPHIA (AmpolNS) -- As George W. Bush took the podium -- following a very poor film about his life and non-accomplishments in which he linked himself to JFK, Martin Luther King, and Richard Nixon, then drove into the distance in a gas-guzzling blue Jeep -- he moved toward his sycophants, oh-so-hungry for power, power they would derive from him and his Daddy.

Bush couldn't help but smile genuinely -- it was the first time I have seen him smile without that wince -- the wince that tells of great personal torture -- perhaps of being battered as a child in some way, or branded in some secret, kinky Skull and Bones induction ritual.

In a way, he is a sad man who would have been so happy to have slipped away to Mexico with a beautiful señorita -- rather than being strapped to his librarian wife, two daughters and a career which he assuredly hates.

But he is a Bush, after all, and so he must bear the loneliness of the political life -- the horror of constantly being someone you are not.

He opens his speech with talk about his pride, in America, in Dick Cheney, in his family.

And why not? Why shouldn't he be proud of them? But it is he proud of himself? This is the question that Americans -- all few hundred thousand of them that bother to watch him tonight -- will be asking.

The rest will be asking who will be knocked of the island in the sickening and demeaning television hit show "Survivor."

As he spoke of his family and especially his mom and dad, I could see he didn't love them, not really, and that they have given him much pain -- and yet he wanted to love them. He claimed that his father was the last leader of a great generation -- as if his own generation, and he himself, were nothing. He had stolen that "greatest generation" idea from Tom Brokaw, whose two books on our fathers and mothers have done so well -- with our fathers and mothers.

But what is this man offering that Clinton-Gore did not and is not offering?

Well, nothing -- except what they have offered and delivered for the past near eight years.

He says he is going to confront the hard issues. Hard issues? What hard issues? There is no disagreement that we want our children well educated, and that we want our parents to have good and inexpensive health care and pharmaceuticals, and that we want to be able to be able to defend ourselves against Saddam Hussein or the next maniac that would poison our grandchildren with sarin gas or anthrax or a stealthy small nuclear bomb.

That's his problem -- he has nothing to cure. There country is doing more than well. The country is stronger than ever.

He gives his father and Reagan credit for the end of communism in Russia -- but the truth is that communism Russian-style was dead for more than a decade before the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.

He says Americas power has "ebbed." Is he joking? What is he talking about? Are all the people in the audience really that stupid?

They applaud in agreement. Yes. They are.

He is concerned that all children didn't get to go to Andover and Yale like he did -- and didn't get the chance to flunk out as he nearly did and Dick Cheney did. All of sudden he is concerned.

I heard Barbara Bush lying on camera today about how the Bush boys and Doro, their aptly named sister, went to public school. When? When they were five?

He claims the Democrats have not led. But it was the Democrats -- who held the House from the Second World War on with only a few term exceptions. It was the Democrats who led everything - from FDR to JFK to LBJ to WJC.

This is not the time for third chances, he says. This is the time for new beginnings. What does he mean? What is he talking about? He said that "my generation" had to grow up.

He means that he has to grow up -- and the only way he will allow that is if he can be the President. He is not satisfied to be the governor of a fourth-rate state with fourth-rate education and health care. He is not satisfied to be one to the few governors in this nation with practically no power at all.

He talks about defeating Hitler -- but his own family financed Hitler through the Harriman bank -- of which they owned a big chunk in the 1930s.

He wants to lead "the party of Reform." Reform what? A nation swimming in wealth, power unprecedented in world history? Does he want to reform a plummeting crime rate? Growth in personal savings and housing starts? Initiatives for peace in Korea, the Middle East, and Ireland?

He knows "the test of leadership," he claims -- he says he will face the great challenges -- he declares that those great challenges are Social Security and Medicare.

But his father and his GOP controlled Congress attacked both unmercifully -- and his confederates in Congress have spent the last seven years ignoring the elderly, the poor, and children with no medication and no access to hospitalization.

He pledges no changes, no reductions, no way -- yet his own plan wants to raise the age of retirement to 72 for the rest of us so we will be dead before we can collect a penny.

He talks about "investing" part of your social security -- as if he knows a thing about economics. This man flunked his math classes both in prep school and college. Does he know that there is already too much money chasing too little value in the nation's stock markets? Does he realize that giving Wall Street hundred of billions more to invest would most likely cause a stock market crash? Does he know, when he speaks of education, that the American people know he wasted his on booze and women and drugs?

How dare this man, as he is now, talk about Head Start -- a program his running mate voted against with only 6 other minority-hating Neo-Nazi House members.

He talks the same old tired lines, over and over and over and over again. "The surplus is the pee-pull's money" -- when he knows there is no surplus -- and that what extra money there is should be used to pay off the national debt. He is going to abolish the "death tax" for his wealthy friends. He thinks it's okay that Americans pay ONE-THIRD of their incomes in taxes - so he will cut taxes (to the rich because they are the only ones that ever pay more than one third -- and then only if they have no business interests and merely clip coupons). He will give the poor a 5 percent cut -- which means about 25 dollars a year in tax cuts!

He says that he -- a draft dodging piece of garbage who was AWOL for a full year because he couldn't pass a drug test -- will give the military a President they can respect as Commander and Chief.

Is he joking?

He says he will work to reduce nuclear weapons. Gee, no one in the White House is doing that now, are they? But W. will also build Star Wars to pay off his campaign debts to high-tech companies pleading for those big-buck defense contracts -- much as his buddy Trent Lott did last month, and as Newt Gingrich did when he was Speaker.

He says nothing important. He quotes Gore talking about Bush's "risky schemes" -- which they are, but not too risky for the rich. He then tries to tell jokes -- that Gore would have called the moon launch "a risky rocket scheme" and the Internet would have been a risky something (the loud applause of easily fooled morons drowned out the weak punch line).

Of course, this was also a ploy to label Gore a liar about "inventing the Internet." But Gore never said that -- but he did say, correctly, that he undertook the initiative that created the modern Internet on which you are reading this commentary. Bush's risky "lie about Gore" scheme was an embarrassment.

Bush says that Gore leads the party of Roosevelt but the only thing he has to offer is "fear itself." Yeah, what a zinger. He says Gore always sees the "tunnel at the end of the light." He continues with stupid little witticism - -about his stupid little town whose motto used to be The Sky is the Limit.

I bet it isn't anymore -- not since BushBaby ascended to his father's throne.

BushBaby says he is impatient with pretense. Yet everything about him is pretentious -- except his wife, whom he would trade (and has traded) for a drunken barfly with a personality and firm breasts.

He claims that he has improved education in Texas -- and that is a total lie. He cut taxes -- yes, but for the rich, and he rewarded them by raping every environmental law in the state so that Texas is now the smog and noxious chemical capital of America -- ranked the same as Bangalore, India.

He said as governor he made difficult decisions -- yes, about what to have for lunch and who to squeeze for money.

He asks for a mandate to lead the nation, and even the people on the floor of this hall -- owned by First Union, a corporation who gave him millions for his coronation -- look at each other and wink.

He does not want to forget the "struggle for human dignity." He talks about his visit to a children's jail for kids who committed adult crimes. A 15-year-old kid raised his hand and asked what Bush thought of him as a White man in suit. Bush does not answer this question in his speech -- he just goes on talking some West Side Story crap. Of course, Marlon, the 15-year-old Bush mentions, has no future -- because of George W. Bush, a man who keeps a lawn jockey in the front of home and deeds his property to others with a "no niggers allowed" clause in it. Bush dares to quote Ronnie Reagan -- and tells the audience "We must tear down this wall" -- the wall he and his family created and continue to create.

Ask him about his sister-in-law -- the wife of the governor of Florida who stole taxpayer money by smuggling contraband into the nation and getting caught. Did she serve time like a Black man or woman for a lesser offense? No The situation was hushed up.

Ask her son -- the new GOP Julio Iglesias or Lorenzo Lamas, who goes off to law school later this month. Ask him if he is a compassionate conservative -- a de facto admission that conservatives have never been compassionate and never will be.

Now he sounds like his father -- talking about charity and, in the background, Big Daddy's garbage about a thousand points of light which do not exist.

He wants to tell young people that drugs and alcohol destroy you. Yes, if you are poor and a minority. But if you are a wealthy white punk like W., it won't destroy you -- it will catapult you to a chance for the White House, just so long as you sweep it under the rug.

He talks over and over again like a the most liberal Democrat -- but then he sneaks in his little zinger to placate Jerry Falwell and says he must protect the life of the unborn. He will sign a bill on partial birth abortion to make certain that more sick, miserable and deformed babies will lie alone in a dark corner of a foster home where people have taken them in FOR THE MONEY and nothing more, where they will be ignored and then die after a miserable and lonely life.

He says women are now treated better. He says that repairing racial inequality has been too slow -- how true. And we are relying on BushBrat to make the situation better when no man has been able to do so, because of Bush's redneck friends and others like the students he paid homage to at Bob Jones University, who hate minorities with every bone in their bodies.

He quotes Robert Frost -- who is surely turning is his grave from the insult.

He mentions synagogues and then dares to say that industry must leave our water and air clean -- when he systematically dismantled the clean air laws in Texas single-handedly.

His parents watch him, and I watch them. And they look at each other as two businessmen might look at their Chairman giving bullshit to the stockholders. "Good job," they are thinking. Good job scamming America.

Then he compares his presidency-to-be as a mix of Teddy Roosevelt, Truman, and Reagan -- three interesting but lackluster presidents. That figures.

He claims he does not reinvent himself -- yet that is all he has done. He has reinvented himself, from a 40-something, drunken, drug-sotted creep who got rich at the expense of the oil investors he soaked into a born-again Eeeee-vangelical lust-filled miserable loser -- who now asks you to make him the most powerful man in the world.

He says he will not attack a part of this country because he wants to lead the whole of it -- but he emphasizes the wrong words because he doesn't even understand what he says.

He says he is facing something familiar -- the politics of hatred and attack -- this from an eager member of the party that destroyed a child, Chelsea Clinton, and tried to destroy her parents. He talks of "all the scandal," code for the President getting a hummer from a power-princess -- just as Bush took the mouths of dozens of young innocents, just as he went AWOL from the National Guard, just as he snorted that coke with very young girls in his convertible car -- and was caught and then bailed out.

He chants over and over again the new theme: "It won't be long now." It won't be long now until he ascends the throne, he thinks. He talks about America being ready for a new beginning.

Huh? What the hell is he talking about?

And yet the crowd goes wild as they did in Nuremberg 70 years ago for another ambitious young leader talking gibberish to idiots.

He even trips over his last line -- "God Bless -- uhh God Bless America."

It was a great speech -- for a sociopathic liar.

The balloons are released,. Laura Bush runs to him and kisses him.

It's over, thank God. The speech, and the whole Summer of GOP Love -- tough love that does nothing for those in greatest need.

But Bush was right, it won't be long -- until he goes home to Texas and begins drinking again.

Less than one percent of Americans watched this pap.

So if you think this made a difference, it did not.

I am now covered with what appears to be tons of confetti and 150,000 balloons. What's with the balloons? Can't anyone think of anything more unusual?

I am standing not five feet from CNN's Jeanne Meserve, who says "Wowie zowie." He we stand in 120-degree heat in some short of overheated stupor. I think Candy Crowley will stroke out any minute. Sweat is practically pouring from her, and there is a pool on the floor -- her sweat? someone's beverage? -- where it soaks the red, blue and white shredded paper and turns it into a brownish-purple mess.

I am leaving.

Good luck, America!