Who Let the Dogs In? (7 page)

George Will wrote: “Such corruption of language indicates political nihilism. Bush’s meandering rhetoric stopped being amusing long ago, when it became recognizably symptomatic of two things. One is the incoherence that afflicts a public person operating without a public philosophy. The other is Bush’s belief that he need not bother to discipline his speech when talking to Americans because the business of seeking their consent is beneath him.”

We always knew those right-wingers were short on compassion, but that is downright merciless. Again and again, George Bush has cried out for help, has tried to explain to us what the problem is: “Not good on the vision thing. Can’t talk the fancy talk.”

Being hopelessly inarticulate didn’t hurt Gary Cooper in
High Noon.
Why does Will think a leader needs to be able to communicate? Or, for that matter, need to have something to communicate? Is this not just a bit hypocritical coming from the man who kept telling us Ronald Reagan was a great leader? Do we honestly think the Great Communicator’s mental life was lightning swift and crystal clear?

Do you remember Reagan’s testimony when they called him as a witness in the Iran-contra trial?

The pathos of George Bush, born into an English-speaking country of English-speaking parents, would touch any heart of more permeable stone than the basilisk that occupies George Will’s chest.

I’m not saying I ever thought that writing lovely thank-you notes was sufficient qualification for being president. I am just recalling what the Republicans of the world told me four years ago when they got to enumerating Mr. Bush’s excellencies.

For those of you interested in the results of my years of study in Bushology, yes, it is my conclusion, after lo these many years, that George Bush truly does believe in something. The current joke is wrong: “Bush, like John Gotti, does have one conviction. He believes in a capital gains tax cut!”

August 1992

Bit in the Balls

N
OW
, LOOK, SOMEONE
has got to write about George Bush telling the story about the gladiator who bit the lion in the balls. You cannot count on the David Broders of the world to keep you posted on the bizarre excesses of campaign dementia—people like that are paid to take the whole schmear seriously. This column feels it has some responsibility to keep track of political ludicrousness on grounds that the republic is sorely in need of all the laughs it can get.

This column is in no way qualified to comment on the psychological implications of the gladiator-lion story, but we are prepared to parse the sucker for political meaning, because we believe there is a high probability future historians will cite the gladiator-bites-lion’s-balls story as the turning point of the entire 1992 campaign. For those of you who missed this whole deal, here is the story told by the president of the United States—as Lyndon Johnson used to remind us, the only president we’ve got—on Thursday at the annual convention of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group of conservative state lawmakers, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. This is not quite a verbatim rendition—I was too stunned to take notes fast enough—but any possible alterations will be noted:

“This all reminds me of the old story of the fierce gladiator who killed every lion they could throw at him. Finally, the other gladiators went to and they got the worst, meanest lion there ever was. Then they buried the great gladiator in the center of the arena in sand up to his neck, and they unleashed the terrible lion. The lion charged the great gladiator, and it made its first pass, jumping over the gladiator’s head. As he did, the gladiator reached up and took a very ferocious bite in a very sensitive place in the lion’s anatomy. And the lion howled in pain, ran for the exit, and fled from the arena, and the lead centurion ran out and attacked the gladiator, saying, ‘Fight fair, dammit, fight fair.’ ”

At this point, there was confusion in the audience: Who was the lion? Who was the gladiator? Was this a history lesson in the first sound bite? But the prez went on to explain: “Every time I tiptoe into the water with this guy, they start yelling, ‘Negative campaigning, negative campaigning.’ ” Get it? Bush is the gladiator buried in sand up to his neck; Clinton is the most ferocious lion, and the other centurions are maybe the press or the Democrats. Or maybe the Democrats are other lions. Or what.

Now, Bush has lately been in his tweeter-and-woofer mode, which has nothing to do with sound systems but is a semidescription of his habit of alternately making tweeting and woofing sounds while campaigning. (What happens, folks, to those of us who listen to the president a lot is that we, too, start treating words like confetti: We just throw a lot of them up in the air and they come down in random patterns, and we assume you’ll know what we mean—it’s catching.) You could tell when he announced to an astonished nation earlier in the week that he was our “moral compass.” Those who tend to think of him as a moral weather vane were left whomper-jawed, as one so often is by our only president. I mean, just try saying that aloud: “George Bush is my moral compass.”

Quite naturally, when I saw a headline on the day after the gladiator-bites-lion story saying, “Bush’s Campaign Dismisses Four Speech Writers,” I as-sumed those responsible for the gladiator-lion story had been given the ax. But no, according to
The New York Times,
the triumphant victor in the speech- writer infighting is the very fellow who put the gladiator story in the speech. According to the
Times,
“Mr. Bush told a long anecdote provided by his new speechwriter, Steven Provost, who has been supplying him with increasingly folksy flourishes intended to help him connect with the common man.”

OK, commoners, are we feeling connected? Here’s the conventional wisdom on the gladiator situation: Bush is unfairly buried in sand—the economy is unfair to him, Japan was unfair to him, the tear gas during his triumphant tour of Panama was unfair to him—he’s up to his neck. Clinton is this ferocious lion and his most sensitive point is bimbos, so Bush will go for the bimbo bite and then claim to be the victim. All clear?

I realize that while I have been engaged in this exhausting explication of text, all of political Texas is in a state of chaos and confusion because state Senate redistricting is once more in the twilight zone. As things now stand, thirteen Senate nominees of assorted parties are no longer living in the districts they are running in, a slight electoral impediment. This ungainly mess will probably go all the way to the Supreme Court, proving once again that when the Texas Legislature sets out to mess something up, nobody does it better.

But it’s easy to handicap the whole deal: Pay no attention to the sniveling, hypocritical Republicans. Had the sniveling, hypocritical Republicans now crying, “Foul!” not hijacked the Senate redistricting plan in a secret midnight judicial coup (which we must all admit was a terrifically shrewd political move) in the first place, we wouldn’t be in the present pickle. The R’s may jerk this thing around in the courts long enough to force a special election for the Senate seats, but on the whole, both legality and minority representation are on the side of the D’s.

August 1992

Character Issue

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One
can’t
believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS

C
HARACTER
, SAYS GEORGE BUSH,
is the issue. George Bush. Says character is the issue.

Character, one supposes, comprises both principles and integrity. What are George Bush’s principles, this man who accuses Bill Clinton of waffling? George Bush has been on both sides of the abortion question. He has been on both sides of civil rights. More recently, he has been on both sides of new taxes. He has been on both sides of Saddam Hussein. He says he is for a balanced budget amendment while the deficit has increased to $288 billion and he has asked for more money than Congress has actually appropriated. He has been on both sides of “voodoo economics.”

In 1964, George Bush campaigned against Ralph Yarborough as a staunch opponent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the first great piece of civil rights legislation that gave blacks the right to eat in the same restaurants and drink out of the same water fountains as whites. He was wrong, he was mistaken, and he has never admitted it. Why doesn’t he admit it? George Wallace has.

As a Republican, despite his heritage from both his mother and his father as a moderate Republican, he first became active in the Goldwater wing of the party. Later, he became a moderate. Then he became a Reaganite. Then he became whatever he has been for the past four years.

Those who were around during Watergate may recall Bush’s inane, burbling denial of the entire stinking mess. Those who recall his vice presidential years may recall why George Will described him then as “the tinny, yapping lap dog of the Reagan administration.”

George Bush and principle. There is one single issue on which George Bush has been resolute through the years, despite its unpopularity and defeat—a capital gains tax cut that would disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

George Bush and integrity. You may recall when he said on national television that Walter Mondale had said our marines in Lebanon “died in shame.” Mondale had said they died “in vain.” Bush tried to prove with a dictionary that Mondale
meant
“in shame.”

You may recall his 1988 campaign—a vapid, racist exercise featuring the flag and Willie Horton, conducted while he carefully concealed the extent of the savings and loan fiasco and lied about his involvement in the Iran-contra scandal. In this campaign, he has descended into rank McCarthyism with his unfounded charge that there was some impropriety about Clinton’s having visited Moscow during a tour of European capitals and with his demagoguery implying that it was unpatriotic to oppose the war in Vietnam.

One reason Bush won in 1988 was his famous interview with Dan Rather about Iran-contra—Bush blustered, he fulminated, he attacked Rather—but he never answered the questions. And the reason becomes more apparent every day. He was not “out of the loop.” From the George Shultz memo to Tuesday’s revelation of the John Poindexter cable that lists Bush among those supporting secrecy and concealment of the entire operation. A month after that cable was written, Bush made a speech saying, “Let the chips fall where they may. We want the truth. The president wants it. I want it. And the American people have a right to it. If the truth hurts, so be it. We’ve got to take our lumps and move ahead.” But he went right on with the cover-up and is still lying about it today.

His entire administration is embroiled in a massive cover-up of Iraq-gate, the illegal use of American grain credits by Saddam Hussein to buy weapons. To cover up this piece of folly, the administration had to interfere in and then botch the prosecution for the largest bank fraud in the history of this country. The CIA, the FBI, and the Justice Department are now engaged in investigating one another in the farcical fallout. It would be more farcical if Americans hadn’t died fighting Iraq.