A word to the wise

Publius sees signs that the self-styled conservatives on the Right who advocated for the withdrawl of Harriet Miers' nomination to the Supreme Court are going to be too quick to forgive and forget.  Having practiced a form of tough love on their beloved Hero President---and in some cases actually breaking up with him in their hearts and taking his picture out from under their pillows and tearing it up---these conservatives are already putting a light in the window to guide their wandering boy home.

Publius, who would rather have not touched this post by Cornerite KJ Lopez with a barge pole, cites her effusion as an example of a fatted calf being rushed into preparation for dinner:

You know what the relief is this morning? A return to the feeling that this president gets the big things right. There was a detour, but I’m confident we’re going to have good news shortly on SCOTUS, because this president tends to get the big things right. That’s the confidence so many of us have always had in him.

Angry and disappointed as they were with Bush for nominating an obvious political hack who besides being a judicial embarrassment couldn't even guarantee she was going to vote the right Right way when she took her seat on the Supreme Court bench, they are willing to excuse Miers as the one and only big mistake W. has ever made.

But Publius asks them to take a long hard look at what really happened and what such a mistake tells them about their hero's feet of clay.

I hope this little episode taught you something about your President – because there is an important lesson to be learned. The lesson is that this administration makes bad decisions. And the reason that it makes bad decisions is because it makes uninformed decisions.  And the reason it makes uninformed decisions is because it lacks any sort of decision-making process.  As ex-Bush aide DiIulio warned long ago in Esquire:

"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," DiIulio tells Esquire. "What you've got is everything--and I mean everything--being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”

It’s not that the administration is bad because it’s too mean or too conservative or whatever.  It’s bad because it is necessarily incapable of making sound decisions because the process by which it reaches decisions is completely corrupted. (Corrupted is actually too kind in that it assumes the existence of some past condition that was better.)

Now this is all fine and dandy when it comes to dumb nominations. You can always withdraw a nomination. But here’s what you need to understand – the same decision-making process that brought us Miers was precisely the same decision-making process that took us to war in Iraq. And it’s precisely the same decision-making process that planned the war in Iraq. And it’s precisely the same decision-making process that administered the post-war occupation. Take a moment and think about that now that Miers has opened your eyes to the reality of the man behind the curtain.

But it’s more than Iraq. The process that led to Miers is the same flawed decision-making process that responded to Katrina. It’s the same flawed decision-making process running our budget and taxing our children. It’s the same flawed decision-making process that gave us an incoherent, budget-busting train wreck of a Social Security reform proposal. And it’s the same flawed decision-making process that concluded that authorizing torture was ok. All respect to KJ Lopez, these are “big things,” and the administration has been very wrong on all of them.

Publius mentions K-Lo and wouldn't mind if she and other Right Wing bloggers like her learned the lesson.  Small chance of that.  Their biggest objection to Miers is that she was a wound to their vanity.  But wise conservatives in Congress and in general might be ready to listen.

I disagree with Publius on only one point.  Harping on it wouldn't help Publius' argument, but since I'm pretty sure no Republican Congressman read my page and I've already established myself as a hopeless partisan jerk in the eyes of wise conservative civilians who drop in from time to time, I'll harp.

Publius separates the corruption of the Bush Leaguers' decision-making process by politics from accusations of their meanness.  But their meanness is their politics.

Dick Cheney and Karl Rove have always run the show and they aren't just mean men, they are nasty and hate-filled men.  The third member of the triumvirate, Donald Rumsfeld, is no model of sweetness and light either, it's just that unlike Cheney and Rove, Rumsfeld might actually have wanted to accomplish something.

Rove and Cheney have wanted power for power's sake.  They have had no agenda but personal aggrandizement.  Rove wants to stick it to his enemies.  Cheney just wants to give away the store to his friends.

In these limited and mean ambitions, both men have been resounding successes.

Their meanness is their politics is their policy is their outcomes.

Since World War II we have suffered through three disasterous Presidencies.  Johnson's, Nixon's, and now George W. Bush's.

Whatever you think of Carter and Reagan, neither one of them burned down the house around them the way those three did.

And all three of them governed in anger, out of spite, and full of hatred.  Nixon was just being Nixon.  Johnson gave in to his own darker side.  George W. Bush, no moral paragon, has been the tool of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove for all of his political life.

Right Wing bloggers admire the Bush Administration for its collective meanness, which they call toughness, because it matches and gives powerful expression to their own petty hatreds and vindictiveness.

But wise conservatives will take note and remember that none of the successful Presidents, and certainly none of the great ones, ever let their angers and hatreds show, let alone control them.  FDR, Lincoln, and Washington weren't just forgiving and patient with their political enemies; they were actively conciliatory.  They were tough, but they weren't vindictive or spiteful.   For the sake of this argument, let's say Reagan was as successful as conservatives believe him to have been.  Then they should look at Reagan's sunny disposition, his ability to get along with everybody, the fact that he was truly friendly with Tip O'Neill, and then look at George W. Bush's irritability and his frequent lapses into spite and meanness.  Reagan's greatest achievement, recognizing that the Cold War was over and the United States had won, was a victory of temperament.

Iraq illustrates the same point in the opposite way.

As long as I'm giving them Reagan, I think they should give me Clinton, and impress upon themselves this:

During the whole of the Impeachment Crisis, once, and only once, did Clinton let loose on anyone working to destroy him.

And that one time was at one person.  Ken Starr.  A man so slimy, so hypocritical, so smug and self-righteous that he could have provoked Gandhi into taking a swing at him.

Clinton gave him the attention of a single sentence.

Every thing the Bush Leaguers have set out to do has begun with a pre-emptive character assassination of any possible opponents to their plan.  The point of this has always been to rally the base by getting them angry, a mean thing to do in itself, but Cheney has always taken grim satisfaction in that aspect it all and Rove quite clearly enjoys it so much that he can barely keep from giggling as he goes about it.

Publius is right.  Miers' nomination is not an any more of an aberration than was letting New Orleans drown or turning the running of the reconstruction of Iraq over to party hacks and Haliburton.

They don't think things through.  They often appear not to think at all.  They "go with their gut," which isn't even a virtue if your gut is telling you to do the right thing.  They are openly contemptuous and actively hostile to anyone who does think---the reality-based community, which was used as a description not of journalists, know it all eggheads and so called experts, Liberals and Democrats, but of anybody and everybody, including people inside the Administration who thought things through.

Because for them, all the thinking that needed to be done had been done, by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.

They're the ones that corrupted the process, and the corruption is their politics and their politics is themselves and their personal meanness.

Comments

[Jennifer]

Are they truly making uninformed decisions or are we erring by assuming their focus is on the well-being of the country? Being more of an idealist than my husband, I get into this debate all the time… I keep assuming that they have the good of the country at heart no matter how different their idea of good may be. I keep thinking that the administration will pay because they are not doing their job or because they are doing it poorly, but it is at that point that my husband says they don’t give a rat’s ass about the country, but rather are only in this for their personal agenda. I keep thinking there will be a comeuppance because they are failing the people of the country, but he says they don't really care what the people think and are just in this to take the money and run. Maybe their decisions are very informed, maybe they are thinking things through… they just aren’t decisions based on the goals one would think the government should have. The well-being of the country and its people is obviously not a priority and never has been. They are a mean-spirited, miserable bunch.

[Pepper]

This made my Fitzmas. It fits in with my theory of the "Republican Dick," and this weekend might be a prime time for a "Republican Dick" essay!

[Shakespeare's Sister]

Great post, Mannion.

They'll never give you Clinton, though, or you or I or anyone else, for that matter, because they come at this thing from a position of victimhood. What liberals have seen as progress, a word that has for us not the connotation of winning as much as necessity if we are to fully realize a vision of an equal and free America, they have seen instead as hostility directed squarely at them. And in truth, it is hostile to many of the things they hold dear--racism, sexism, homobigotry, and all manner of bias and prejudice. What we viewed as the necessary steady march of progress, they viewed as meanness. And so they are mean in return, and wonder why we don't just acquiesce that it's what we deserve after so many years of being mean to them.

Someone who is a racist, or a sexist, or a homobigot will never believe that a white, straight man (for example) could genuinely want to see someone not white, not straight, and/or not male be his equal. They don't believe that liberals celebrate equality, but that we secretly mock "traditionalism" and wrap our mockery in a P.C. bow.

They don't see a distinction between how we behave and how they behave, because through their impenetrable filter of victimhood, everything is completely misshapen.

[Rasselas]

It's a commonplace among conservatives, and the sort of people who like both pot and guns and call themselves libertarians, that liberals and Democrats and Hillary Clinton most of all enter the political realm, and do what they do and say what they say, not out of any true conviction or for the ultimate amelioration of the American way of life, but only to indulge their busybodyish tendencies and Mother Courage fantasies by telling everybody not to smoke, not to eat cheeseburgers, not to drink and drive (thought I forgot that bit in the WSJ in late 2000, eh, Christopher Buckley?).

I don't believe that's true in all, or most, cases, but I do believe that a similar analysis does apply to conservatives: they like to know that people die because their commands: foreigners, criminals, the unruly mob. And they like to get away with it. They like knowing that shots are fired and bombs are dropped where and when they like, on the wicked and the innocent alike, and that no one but a few pitiable wannabe Saint Francises will ever have the guts to condemn them.

The germ of this is the knowledge that, when he was in Congress, Dick Cheney's chief concern was not handing out care packages to oil companies or banks, but making sure that the United States had a nuclear first-strike capability.

[Linkmeister]

Rass, let's not forget that Cheney was also one of the few to vote against Head Start while in Congress, thus showing his stripes early, for those clever enough to see (if they'd even known who the single representative from Wyoming was).

[coturnix]

I'm glad you are reading Publius (my blogfather). Always thought-provoking without being firebrand. The comments sections are usually delicious.

[coturnix]

Also, Fitzgerald must be reading your blog - that 'sand in the face' eerily resembles your 'sand in the engine' you mentioned a few days ago. That is how current GOP operates.

[Exiled in NJ]

In one sense, Fitz followed the procedure of the boys from Brazil or whatever you want to call the crew in charge: he announced the bad news on Friday afternoon when everyone is going home for the week.

[The Heretik]

People who go with their gut all the time usually must do so because most of what was in the head is long gone.

[Red Tory]

Bush and Cheney are both mean and cheap – not only intellectually, but emotionally. They have demonstrated time and time again that they couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the welfare of the country, let alone have any concern whatsoever for the livelihood of the “average American.” Try as I might (not all that hard, I have to admit) I cannot imagine that they have the best interests of people at heart, or are in the slightest way interested in advancing the country’s overall quality of life. All available evidence points to a diametrically opposite conclusion.

You are entirely correct in pointing out that the same dysfunctional, beetle-brained mindset that thought Harriet Miers was an absolutely super nomination for the SCOTUS is the same bunch that brought about the Iraq War, massive deficits, FEMA mismanagement, amongst many, many other giant cock-ups.

[Anne Laurie]

I'm reading down from the top of your blog, Lance, and now I see that you've slightly pre-empted my comments on Rove's Genius, which is mostly Meanness. On the other hand, while I agree that Meanness is the driving & possibly the only principle behind the Mayberry Machiavells, I think you underestimate how attractive that very Meanness is to the "base" (in every sense) of the Fox News audience as well as its public presenters. One of the biggest Liberal problems is that we assume, as part of our own political credo, that most people generally mean well by others, most of the time, at least if they have things explained to them in terms they understand. One of the biggest Conservative weapons is the fact that a certain percentage of the human race just likes to see other people suffer. The current Republican base, I suspect, contains a lot of people who never got past their childhood enthusiasm for stomping ants, pulling the wings off flies, setting fire to cats (hello, Mr. Frist), beating up smaller kids and stealing their lunches. Or at least cheering on the playground "geniuses" who were brave or uninhibited enough to actually do the ugly things the rest of them only talked about. Human, and American, history is the slow progression of social empathy beyond total self-centeredness; the older & smarter we get, the more people we include as part of our "tribe", the "human family" that we treat as partners instead of enemies/victims. But it's never a straight-line progression, and when we're threatened we have to resist the urge to go straight back to the law of "I've got mine, Jack, bugger you." The Repugs have been playing that old jingle to great effect for the last decade; for some people, the only thing that'll win them over will be the conviction that the Democrats can be just as vicious, if less amorally, or at least more intelligently... maybe "ruthless" would be a better term here.