Thursday, January 15, 2009

Thoughts before 1.20.09

With Mr. Obama's inauguration so close one can smell it, a much-commented-upon story recently was Bush's polling numbers: a 27 percent approval rating, up, somehow, from previous months. Many writers have deduced that 27 percent of the country are idiots, or some variant thereof.

Those people aren't idiots. Well, I mean, sure, they're idiots, but not because they approve of Bush's work. They don't, really. They're idiots because they voted for him (twice, separating them from the feebs who voted for him only in 2000). That they say they approve of his work doesn't make them idiots. It makes them utterly unwilling or -able to admit they were wrong. They're not alone in that. They're merely entrenched in the face of less controvertible evidence than the rest of us are when we're entrenched.

I once, somewhere around 2003-2004, spent an intellectually stimulating 40 minutes debating a teenage Bush supporter on the guy's job performance. That was the last time I'll do that. I have no interest in arguing the point; anyone who takes the other side of that argument is possibly a real-life troll, and at the very least will never be convinced. Don't waste your breath.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Kimo Sabe, me rode horse into quicksand during Obama campaign. Scout barely make it out alive. And me had migraine until Election Day.

I wasted a hell of a lot of time arguing with actual Bush supporters, who unconditionally blame Bill Clinton for EVERYTHING terrible that has transpired between Jan. 20, 2001 and Jan. 19, 2009. It’s not really much of an argument as far as they’re concerned: Clinton should’ve gotten Bin Laden instead of blowjobs, and that’s why 9/11 happened. The rest was simply a domino-effect.

And they also said I’m a limp-wristed, Marxist, bed-wetter. (Yeah, like THAT has anything to do with anything …)

I probably should’ve just realized that I needed to get over myself. Who cares what I think, anyway. Seriously.

History will have the last word on Dubya, and contrary to what he believes, we WILL see the verdict well within our lifetimes. And contrary to what about 70 percent of us believe, it might turn out just GREAT for him.

Lookit Truman. Harry’s presidency went to hell after he was elected in ’48. The Korean War. MacArthur. McCarthy. He was hated so much, he declined to run for another term. But he was remembered as a man who stuck to his guns. The original “Decider.” And the historians did an about-face and completely revised their thinking.

Lookit the Gipper. Lil’ Samantha Smitch had about as much to do with the fall of the Soviet Union as Reagan. The Reagan puppet in that Genesis video had about as much to do with the fall of the Soviet Union as Reagan. By ’86 his economic policies were ruining the inner cities and staggering the middle class, and he was stumbling and bumbling and forgetting things and pretending to bomb Russia on the radio, and he got caught in the whole Iran-Contra mess. But then the USSR begins to wobble under the weight of Afghanistan, Chernobyl, a bankrupt economy, a dramatic drop in oil prices, and ethnic unrest. And … uh … there was this reformer named Gorbachev. … So the Cold War inevitably ends on Poppy Bush’s watch, and it would've happened no matter who was in office since '80. But over the past 5 years there have been pro-Reagan movements to bump FDR off the dime and Alexander Hamilton, one of our founding fathers, off the 10-dollar bill. The $10 bill!

So let’s be honest here. There ARE good things to write in Dubya’s historical bio. No other terrorist attacks followed Sept. 11, 2001. Suddam Husseim isn’t murdering his own people and taunting the rest of the world anymore. And there’s the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which is the largest commitment by any nation in history to fight a disease. And Dubya brokered the end to the second Sudanese civil war, the one of the bloodiest conflicts in modern history.

Heck, maybe Bin Laden’s really been dead since 2004. And maybe Iraq and its new “democracy” will grow into a stabilizing force in the Middle East in decades to come. And maybe his Communism for Capitalists bailout model will have created an entirely new school of American financial thought. And maybe after we colonize Mars historians will point out that the early plans for this endeavor were sketched in Dubya’s Oval Office. And maybe Barack Obama really WILL turn out to be the black Jimmy Carter. And maybe pigs will fly.

You never know, Kimo Sabe. You just never know.

troy said...

Dear Tonto

When people call you 'limp-wristed,' you should punch them. That'll be the end of that.

Yer pal
troy

thesearedreams@gmail.com said...

"real life troll" is a funny thing to write. wondering if tonto is planning to blog on the comments page of your blog...

my "word verification" to make this comment was "antsgorc" which must be Russian or something.........

troy said...

Tonto is actually using the comments sections of this blog to avoid joining Facebook.

becingui!