Steve Young

Still Think Bush Is Doing a Great Job?
It's Not Your Fault!
by Steve Young

Oct. 24, 2005–HOLLYWOOD (apj.us)–With every administration fumble and criminal revelation, the President's poll numbers free-fall further toward oblivion. Jumping the White House ship has become all the rage in Washington, with eminent conservative pundits including the Weekly Standard's William Kristol, ABC's George Will and Republican Radio's Sean Hannity speaking out against some of George Bush's decisions.

Some, like former Bush team member David Frum, have even taken up producing television ads decrying Bush's choice of Harriet Miers as a Supreme Court nominee.

Yet with all the internal dissent and alleged corruption (growing more and more unalleged every day), there are still a few Bushies left (under 40%) who continue to hang on by a thread to Republican talking points.

Which begs the question:

Why?

The answer may be found in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Bush apologists are like drunks who won't stop hanging on to the bottle until they find out that what's in the bottle is killing them. They could have a thousand bad days and nights, but they wake up every morning... or afternoon, and are willing to buy any twisted logic that says they can still drink. It's why Hannity and O'Reilly and Limbaugh exist. They're just your friendly neighborhood bartender who tells you that it's everyone else who's wrong. How 'bout another shot?

Why do these Bushies continue to drink from the partisan flask?

First of all, it feels good to be told that you're right. If they thought differently they'd have to acknowledge that everything they believed has been wrong. Some would rather die first. Problem is...you don't die first. You die last. Then it's too late. Still, to so many, dying would seem to be preferable to admitting to a problem–and that, as much as anything else, says that they're not so much Republican as much as they are sick.

But there is still hope: there is a cure for the disease of George Bush's Republicanism.

Here are a few simple suggestions so that you never have to vote Republican again.

1. You have to admit that you are powerless over George Bush -- that he's made your life unmanageable and many other lives dead.

2. You came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity–even if it's a woman who tried like hell to establish Universal Healthcare, which with today's out-of-control medical costs and unaffordable health insurance proves how shortsighted you were to condemn her for what she tried to do.

And while at it, you must also admit that it does take a village.

3. You made a decision to turn your will and your life over to the care of a Democratic Congress, which certainly can't do any worse than the sitting one and will not be a rubber stamp to this president.

4. You must make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself, revealing all the people you voted for or listened to on the radio, who, while you knew they were lying to you, you kept on buying what they were selling you.

You must also agree that oral sex, even if you lie about it, is not all that bad, but that lying us into war is.

5. You admit to God (if you have one), to yourself and to another human being the exact nature of your wrongs.

And you can't leave out the fact that you really didn't believe that John Kerry volunteered for Vietnam war duty because he wanted to pad his resume–and that if the guy you did vote for, who left his National Guard post to work on some guy's political campaign during wartime, had been a Democrat, you would have been all over him for being a lying coward of privilege.

6. You were entirely ready to have Barbara Boxer remove all these defects of character.

7. You humbly asked Howard Dean to remove your shortcomings.

8. You made a list of all persons you had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

Especially Al Gore and Gray Davis.

9. You made direct amends to such people wherever possible.

This includes everyone you told that Rush Limbaugh was funny.

10. You continued to take personal inventory and when you were wrong promptly admitted it.

Better yet, just find out what Bill O'Reilly says to do and do the opposite.

11. You sought through prayer and registration to improve your conscious contact with the environment, and if you do believe in intelligent design, praying only for the knowledge that God probably didn't want us to kill off most of what he had designed.

12. Having had a political awakening as the result of these steps, you try to carry this message to other Republicans while following these principles in all local and national elections.

I hope that there are some brother and sister Republicans out there who will join us on the path to political serenity.

And now. Let's end today's meeting with a prayer of my choice:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and change the Senate and the House in 2006.

Now... let's have some coffee.

Steve Young, author of "Great Failures of the Extremely Successful" takes the KTLK 1150AM mike every Saturday, 1-4 PM and read every Sunday in the LA Daily News Op-Ed page (right next to Bill O'Reilly).