Garrison Keillor: It's time for 41 and 43 to work something out

[ellisonz]

It's time for 41 and 43 to work something out
By Garrison Keillor

As the new Congress convenes this week and Speaker Nancy Pelosi ascends to the rostrum, you have to wish them all well. These are the kids who got up in school assembly and spoke on Armistice Day and were captains of teams and organized class projects to do good works, a different breed from us wise guys who lurked in the halls and made fun of them, and in the end you want them and not us running your government. Yes, they had serious brown-nose tendencies and a knack for mouthing pieties, but you could count on them to do what needed doing. They were leaders. They weren't going to swipe the lunch money and buy a keg of suds.

You wonder, however, what this earnest bunch can do when things are so far out of whack as they are in Iraq. The gangland-style execution of Saddam Hussein was visible reality, a token of the bloodlust and violence that swirls around Iraq, where our forces are mired, sitting targets, aliens, fighting a colonial war in behalf of a Shiite majority that is as despotic and cruel as what came before except messier.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the limousines come and go, memoranda are set out on long polished tables, men in crisp white shirts sit at meetings and discuss how to rationalize a war that was conceived by a handful of men in arrogant ignorance and that has descended over the past four years into sheer madness.

Military men know there is no military solution here, and the State Department knows that the policy was driven by domestic politics, but who is going to tell the Current Occupant? He is still talking about victory, or undefeat, like some frat boy on meth who thinks he can step off a roof and not get hurt. The word "surge" keeps cropping up, as if we were fighting the war with electricity and not human beings.

http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007701030385

[pacalo]

1. I love the essay but I don't sense that 41 has a problem with showing love to his children.

I believe that there's a clash of personalities between Poppy & this unfortunate offspring of his. The boy king is a mama's boy who has lots to prove about being a man. I think there are complex feelings of resentment, also, due to Poppy's frequent absences while the boy king was picking up Ma Barker's Bush's steely hardness.

It's time for 41 and 43 to work something out, and they can't do it by way of James Baker or Brent Scowcroft. Pick up the phone, old man, and tell 43 you love him dearly and it's time to think about sparing the lives of American soldiers, many of whom have sons, too.

[EFerrari]

2. You can't have one half of the scale balanced.

If Barbara is the case we know she is, her partner had corresponding issues. Or at very least, he was unable to compensate for her behavior.

Look, he was in enough denial not to send out a hit squad when Junior ran in the first place.

I don't buy this "two camps" deal. It's theater, it's leverage. As Junior goes down in flames, the old guard will trot out their next stupid plan. The problem with this in grown old guard is that they don't really believe they need to think things through any more. They're lazy.

Our advantage.

[pacalo]

6. I totally agree that Poppy is as callous as Ma is, but you have to admit

that Poppy's public demeanor & media skills are a bit more polished than Barbara (beautiful mind; Katrina evacuees) & her personality & lack of warmth served as junior's role model. He's as rough around the edges as his mother is.

I do think that Poppy's cabal is trying to rein him in & that they are going to eventually let his presidency fall completely. I think the media would have continued to cover up for this administration if Poppy's cabal wanted them to. Notice that, despite the Democrats' remarkable victories in the mid-term elections, the media doesn't give them enough credit; the media continues to hold a certain allegiance to the Republics (;) ). I think Poppy's cabal has had enough of Junior.

[EFerrari]

11. I think so, too. USA Today poll has him at 26% approval.

Pretty hard to cover that up.

[pacalo]

12. Wow -- I hadn't heard about that poll.

[SpiralHawk]

8. "...lots to prove about being a man..." BINGO - YOU GOT IT

I mean, he is a preppy cheerleader born with a silver spoon in his mouth, never worked a day, Deserted his National Guard Unit, failed America miserably and cowardly on 9/11, and then failed again with Hurrican Katrina.

He is a failed whimp. He knows it. Most other people know it. He is trying to COMPENSATE by waging a war where he is safe, but our sons and daughters in uniform are not.

What a lame excuse for a military commander in chief.

[NewJeffCT]

10. That's why I'm worried about future elections

The media and the RW propaganda machine was able to take Bush - with all those known failures throughout his life - and repackage him as a down-to-earth Texas cowboy regular guy and a good Christian man.

[NewJeffCT]

9. I do think there are some serious father-son issues at work here

What would happen if a reporter actually had the guts to ask Bush a question along the lines of, "How does it feel to be a far greater failure as a president than your father?"

(and don't even mention other bad presidents like Harding, Reagan, Nixon, Grant, etc)

[pacalo]

13. I think the reporter would be sent to the cornfield.

[rodeodance]

3. kickypoo

[renate]

4. wow... what a way this guy has with words

"They are there to die so that a man in the White House doesn't have to admit that he, George W. Bush, the decider, the one in the cowboy boots, made grievous mistakes."

[magellan]

5. Even if 41 did have a problem showing affection properly

...and modified his behavior now, from all signs 43** is a lost cause. There's way more wrong with that boy than an intensive therapy of "You done good, son"s can fix.

[mdmc]

7. mercy

Here we have a slacker son of a powerful patrician father who resolves unconscious Oedipal issues through inappropriate acting-out in foreign countries. Hello? All the king's task forces can gather together the shards of the policy, number them, arrange them, but it never made sense when it was whole and so it makes even less sense now.