American Politics Journal

Pretzel Logic
Is He Reeling in the Beers? (Apologies to Steely Dan)
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

Sept. 17, 2002 -- MT. SHASTA (ZeppNews/APJP) -- The pretzel jokes haven't even had a chance to get stale yet.

I'm sure you've heard most of them: 1600 Pretzelvania Avenue, police report a powder believed to be pretzel salt was found in Tom Daschle's office, thousands of Democrats are mailing pretzels to the White House. Various cartoonists hit on the theme of Putsch coughing up a pretzel that comes out in the shape of the Enron logo.

Of course, nobody believes the pretzel story.

Most people figure that either Laura got pissed and popped him one, or he fell, in quick succession, off the wagon and then off the sofa. I tend to side with the latter, since in addition to that big mouse on his left cheek, there is the fact that he has aged noticeably, and his face manages to look puffy, pale and haggard all at once. At the very least, he looked, the day after, like someone who had tied a big one one on the night before.

They say the Presidency eats those foolish enough to attain it, and certainly it takes its toll, especially on two-termers. Clinton, arguably the most vigorous and energetic President in history, nonetheless aged considerably. Reagan left office a senile wreck. It nearly killed Ike, and of course it did kill FDR.

"Pretzel Logic" courtesy Alan Bisbort

But for Putsch, the Presidency has been a part-time job: easy money, good bennies. Even if you are capable of really stretching your imagination and have managed to somehow convince yourself that Putsch is the actual decision-maker in the administration, he's still had an easy time of it, even with September 11th. All he has to do is get on TV, prattle about "evil-doers" and "patriotism", and let the neo-fascists in Justice and Congress rescind the Bill of Rights. After that, it's just a matter of calling Kenny-boy and asking for more money.

As Putsch himself observed, it's a lot easier if you can be a dictator, and the Republican party and a large portion of the media is devoted to making life as easy as possible for Putsch.

Still, he's been in way over his head, and the stress has to be considerable. It's bad enough that he keeps blowing his lines and the press is doing an imperfect job of covering up for him.

But there is one goof-up he has made twice, seemingly minor the first time, that has caused considerable talk about his mental acuity.

When he made a remark about how he saw the first plane fly into the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11th, that caused raised eyebrows and questions about his memory, since there was no footage of the first crash that day. Of course, every paranoid and conspiracy theorist in the country promptly jumped up and said, "no KNOWN footage, that is!" and Putsch's statement created yet another cottage industry in speculation about the events of that awful morning.

But then he went and said the same thing AGAIN a few weeks later, and now a lot of people are beginning to seriously wonder just what he did see, or thought he saw, that morning. There are people who believe that the Washington mall was firebombed that morning and it's being covered up, or that all the Jews working at the World Trade Center called in sick that day, but the President of the United States isn't supposed to be a part of that particular chorus.

Of course, there is the likeliest explanation that El Residente, dumb as mud and confused by events that day, really did misremember, and hasn't paid enough attention to events to realize his memory is in error. We probably all started with some confused recollections in the days immediately after the attack. I wrote a piece the day after called, originally enough, "The Day After," and in it, I can observe that I recollected the time frame from the first crash to the collapse of the second tower as being something on the order of an hour. I remember that first day being convinced that I had seen a ripple traverse the second tower similar to that caused by shaped charges when a building is being deliberately imploded by crews. That I made such mistakes in the hours following the attack would come as no surprise to anyone. That I hadn't figured out that they were mistakes in the subsequent days and weeks -- especially if I was the one responsible for figuring out what America had to do about it -- would be troubling.

Putsch, with his apparent inability to understand the sequence of events of that morning, is troubling. This isn't a case of trying to remember what you had for breakfast three years ago today. This is a "where were you when you heard Kennedy had been shot?" sort of event. Some things stick in your memory forever, and if we, as eyewitnesses, are notoriously unreliable, we do form a social gestalt of events through media reproduction that is generally cohesive and uniform. Jackie Kennedy may not have remembered clambering onto the trunk of the limo, but the rest of us do, along with the overpass, the book depository, Parkland General Hospital, the hitch in Walter Cronkite's voice.

Ever run into anyone who remembers Kennedy being assassinated in Oklahoma City? That's the sort of error Putsch is making when he talks about that morning.

It's weird. It suggests something's wrong with the man.

Of course, the conspiracy theorists, the David Icke fans who believe that the entire Bush family are secretly extraterrestrial lizards, have an entire panoply of wildly imaginative and amazing explanations for all this.

While I do tend to associate Republicans with cold blood, unblinking eyes and scales, I don't really believe they are secretly extraterrestrial lizards. Therefore, I posit the much less interesting theory that what ails Putsch is that liquid most often associated with pretzels, beer. And lots of it.

I could be wrong. It could be that the man is simply stupid, and if I walk over to the nearest wall and smash my head against it as hard as I can five or six times, I might even buy the theory that he passed out from coughing up a pretzel that "went down the wrong way." While I'm at it, I'll allow that the Atlanta Thrashers could still possibly win the 2002 Stanley Cup, that fourteen year old boys watch Britney Spears because they are utterly captivated by her fine singing voice, and that Whitewater was just as bad as Enron.

Speaking of which, the Enron mess is still spreading, and getting uglier and uglier by the minute. It's already the nastiest scandal ever to hit the American business community, an institution that has seen its share of nasty scandals, and the 'Pubs are scared because there are so many ties between Enron, Arthur Anderson, and the Republican party.

The GOP supporters have taken up the chorus of "But Clinton But Clinton But Clinton...", which is right wing for admitting that they don't have any response and are scared. They are trying to say the Democrats, who got 27% of Enron's political donations, are just as bad, but that is backfiring on them, because it just provides an opening for John McCain, and other politicians who are fed up with the money-trough system we have now, to bring up the issue of campaign finance reform.

Face it: limiting the ability of the wealthy elite to manipulate elections and politicians would be the death of the Republican party. They might as well pack up Rush Limbaugh and the whore media and move to one of those tax-free havens offshore, where nobody would miss them. They are as worried about the impact Enron will have on the financing of the 2002 and 2004 campaigns as they are about public perception.

For now, all they can do is let George sleep it off, lock up the booze, and hope that Enron and Arthur Anderson destroyed enough evidence in time to prevent the whole party from choking on a pretzel and falling down.