Bob of Unfogged quotes William Saletan:
Posted by DeLong at September 3, 2004 10:01 AM | TrackBackUnfogged: ...guess what word—other than "a," "and," and "the"—occurs most frequently in the acceptance speech George W. Bush delivered tonight. The word is "will." It appears 76 times. This was a speech all about what Bush will do, and what will happen, if he becomes president.
Except he already is president. He already ran this campaign. He promised great things. They haven't happened. So, he's trying to go back in time. He wants you to see in him the potential you saw four years ago. He can't show you the things he promised, so he asks you to envision them. He asks you to be "optimistic." He asks you to have faith.
[...]
My favorite moment was when Bush touted the No Child Left Behind Act. No more social promotion, he promised. "We are transforming our schools by raising standards and focusing on results. We are insisting on accountability." Wasn't this speech, full of unfulfilled promises and appeals to good character, basically a plea for social promotion? Isn't that the message of the entire Bush campaign? Shouldn't the president have to show results, too?
They wanted a circus. Apparently they forgot that every circus has its clowns.
Posted by: Chuck Nolan at September 3, 2004 10:12 AM>This was a speech all about what Bush will do, and what will happen, if he becomes president.
As usual, The Onion is way ahead of the pundits:
28 January 2004
George W. Bush pledged Monday that, if re-elected in November, he and running mate Dick Cheney will "restore honor and dignity to the White House."
http://www.onion.com/election2004/news_4004.php
That President Bush appears to be an incompetent moron to quite a lot of people is a fact. And, that he, evidently does not appear to be an incompetent moron to a lot of people -- or a lot of people still think it doesn't matter that he is an incompetent moron -- is also a fact.
I understand why, say Ron Silver or Dennis Miller (or a lot of less prominent people I know personally), were scared by 9/11. It affected me deeply as well, and that sense of my own mortality and the reality of ruthless, irrational, dangerous people in the world, made me somewhat more open to ruthless, authoritarian action.
Something -- maybe everything -- about last night and the Bush campaign in general -- was and is about holding on to the Ron Silvers and Dennis Millers.
What could Democrats say or do, which would make scared people doubt that Bush is at all suitable?
Posted by: Bruce Wilder at September 3, 2004 10:55 AMTriumph of the "will."
Posted by: TomF at September 3, 2004 11:40 AMHe's been an utter failure so far, so why should we expect him to succeed at anything in a potential second term?
Posted by: Brian at September 3, 2004 01:31 PMExcellent point about social promotion. But like so many other really good (even great) points, it is too subtle for this campaign to use. We are up against emotions operating at a very low level of consciousness here: fear and aggression. The appeal of the Bush message is all to these base feelings, almost instincts.
If your house is burning down - or, more precisely, you THINK it is burning down - and while this is happening, I come in and say, "Combustion is an exothermic chemical reaction of oxygen with another compound," you might or might not knock me down before running out of the building, but you will probably not absorb any new information about chemistry from my little speech. Yet what I said was perfectly true and quite honest and even, in its own way, somewhat pertinent.
My proposal for the new Kerry meme: "Bush is a liar. With every word he speaks, he is deceiving you."
Remember what Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, on the Dick Cavett show?
"Every word she writes is a lie, even 'and' and 'the'."
I don't at all agree with Mary McCarthy about Lillian Hellman, but that statement really stuck in my mind, and if Hellman were here, I would probably be watching her closely for any tendency to deceive - despite my positive feelings toward her writing.
If they are afraid... okay, they should be afraid. I say let us redirect their fear. They should be afraid of Mr. Bush's lies and deceptions. They should be afraid of what he is NOT telling them.
Really, they should!
Posted by: Ralph at September 3, 2004 02:19 PMWilliam Salaten has it exactly backwards. It is clear why Bush is opposed to social promotion. In the words of a brilliant commenter on an earlier post (the the Economist is psychotic post) Bush is hoping the voters decide "Mr Bush has failed his first term and shall be forced to repeat".
Posted by: Robert Waldmann at September 3, 2004 03:20 PM>I understand why, say Ron Silver or Dennis
>Miller (or a lot of less prominent people
>I know personally), were scared by 9/11.
Sure. I myself was scared by 9/11.
The difference is that I and others were not scared *witless*, as these individuals appear to have been.
I'm not a blinkered pacifist in these matters; I'm one of those cynical Huntingtonian types who genuinely believes that we do have a clash of civilizations going on between radical Islam and the West.
(Or, at a higher and more abstract meta-level, there is a clash of civilizations between secularism and fundamentalism in general, one prominent Western society in particular being riven with that problem, ahem).
I had thought before 9/11 that said clash would come to violence and would require violent means to confront and resolve -- yet the idea of attacking Iraq as part of that doctrine was so profoundly loopy and misdirected on the face of it, even before the troops had gone in, that I found myself utterly flabbergasted.
What's abhorrent about Bush is not that he has gone to war, but that he has done so, in the case of Iraq, in the wrong place and at the wrong time, wasting resources best spent elsewhere.
What is still worse is that he did so on a flimsy pretext, and to have been motivated at least in part to do so because of an emotional reaction to an alleged attempt by the Iraqis to kill his father, an allegation based on shaky hearsay evidence extracted under duress, evidence that wouldn't have been admitted in any Western court of law.
Let me advance an unsettling proposition here.
This administration claimed that there was a dictator of an unstable Middle Eastern state, who posed a critical threat to US interests and possibly to our survival; it was further posited that this state's intelligence services had a lengthy history of collaboration with radical Islamic terrorists, including al-Quaeda, and that said state was also in actual possession of deployed weapons of mass destruction which could be ready for use in less than one hour.
Every single one of those claims was true -- in the case of Pakistan.
And if Dubya's first action after 9/11 had been to launch a lightning raid on the Pakistani Air Force's weapons storage bunkers, to seize and confiscate the actual WMD kept there, it would have been infuriating to the Islamic world -- but so has the occupation of Iraq, and that hasn't done a damned thing for our strategic safety.
If this Administration had disarmed Pakistan, instead of going on the fool's errand of invading an already disarmed Iraq, I would be out there donating money and walking precincts for the GOP this fall.
Instead? I'm seriously contemplating selling the house and moving to a place in the countryside, with a barn full of a year's survival kit, and my savings converted to hard goods.
And that holds true even if the GOP loses the White House. Come next year's Inauguration Day, Pakistan will still be full of nukes, and still be full of nuts, and that's an unhealthy combination.
Posted by: marquer at September 3, 2004 05:02 PMRalph seems to think this analysis is pointyheaded (excellent point) and useless (academic).
This not only undermines the social promotion view expressed here but the whole business of blogging.
Let's not construe commentary so narrowly that we miss (or dismiss) the light that this view( and there are tons of others) sheds on this administration. There is a role for discussion/blogging, no? The better informed our opinions the better our decisions will be.
I, for one, am not here to learn the new anti-Bush cheer, you?
Maybe the social promotion view *is* too subtle, but not for this crowd, no?
I find Robert's flip view merely cute in comparison.
I didn't realize Triumph of the Will had been colorized and edited into a mini-series.
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