1 Boring Old Man

Giuliani Gets America’s Stupidest Endorsement

How much is American’s stupidest endorsement worth to a Republican candidate? On Wednesday, Rudy Giuliani not only received but celebrated the endorsement of Pat Robertson, a foolish religious nut case whom most Americans who don’t worship religious nut cases recognize as one of the stupidest and most embarrassing public figures in America. But not Rudy. Robertson’s endorsement isn’t surprising — he’s an astonishingly stupid man, and so making an astonishingly stupid choice in picking Giuliani is just another in a long list of astonishingly stupid statements. What interested me was Giuliani’s enthusiastic public embrace of Robertson’s endorsement and the media’s reaction. Ignoring what the event revealed about the stupidity of both men, the media focused on the predictable Beltway wisdom: The endorsement means the religious right can support Giuliani despite a personal history and positions opposite those supposedly sacred to the religious right.

Beltway pundits may be shocked, but no one should be surprised by Robertson’s admission: the religious wingers want another thug for President to protect them from terrorists and secular liberals, and their so-called “values” are secondary at best. What was missing was media recognition that when the Republican front runner enthusiastically embraces an endorsement from one of America’s most foolish religious figures, it says more about the presidential candidate and his party than the preacher. Why would any serious candidate ever seek, let along rejoice in, an endorsement from a figure as embarrassingly stupid as Pat Robertson? And why would the media report this as a political coup for Rudy Giuliani?

Rage of Reason

It’s official: Bush Derangement Syndrome is now a full-blown epidemic. George W. Bush apparently has reduced more of his fellow citizens to frustrated, sputtering rage than any president since opinion polling began, with the possible exception of Richard Nixon. That should be a pretty good indicator of where Bush will rank when historians get their hands on his shameful record — in the cellar, alongside the only president who ever had to resign in disgrace. A Gallup Poll released this week showed that 64 percent of Americans disapprove of how the Decider is doing his job. That sounds bad enough — nearly two-thirds of the country thinks its leader is incompetent. But when you look more closely at the numbers, you see that Bush’s abysmal report card — only 31 percent of respondents approve of the job he’s doing — actually overstates our regard for his performance.

According to Gallup, if you lump together the Americans who "strongly" approve of Bush as president with those who only "moderately" feel one way or the other about him, you end up with about half the population. That leaves a full 50 percent who "strongly disapprove" of Bush — as high a level of intense repudiation as Gallup has ever recorded in its decades of polling. Gallup has been asking the "strongly disapprove" question since the Lyndon Johnson administration. The only time the polling firm has measured such strong give-this-guy-the-hook sentiment was in February 1974, at the height of the Watergate scandal, when Nixon’s "strongly disapprove" number was measured at 48 percent. Bush beats him by a nose, but the margin of error makes the contest for "Most Reviled President, Modern Era" a statistical tie.

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Bush didn’t come by this distinction with help from family connections or the Supreme Court. No, he earned it.

Look at the situation Bush’s successor will inherit. Throughout much of the world, the United States is seen as an arrogant bully whose rhetoric about freedom and the rule of law is disgracefully empty. The lawyers and students who are being tear-gassed in the streets of Pakistan’s cities will long remember that, when push came to shove, Bush chose to stick with a cooperative dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, rather than live up to his words about the universal value of democracy. The next president will be left with more than 100,000 U.S. troops bogged down in Iraq, with an unfinished war in Afghanistan — and, between those two crises, a strengthened and emboldened Iran that hopes to dominate the world’s most dangerous region. Nice work.

Bush’s successor will, incredibly, assume control of a United States government that interrogates suspected terrorists with "enhanced" techniques known throughout the world by a much simpler term: torture. The new commander in chief will almost surely take custody of hundreds of people detained without formal charges and on questionable evidence, and held for years in secret CIA prisons or at Guantanamo. The next president will take over a government that claims the right to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens without meaningful judicial oversight. Whoever takes office in January 2009 will be left with a more polarized economy — an America where the rich have been made richer during the past six years with generous tax cuts, while more than 40 million people struggle without health insurance. The new president will be left with a government that not only failed miserably in its response to the most extensive natural disaster the nation has ever faced but that also reneged on Bush’s pledge to rebuild a better New Orleans — and to make it possible for all those who lived in the city to return.

The next occupant of the White House will find the nation’s coffers depleted by Bush’s wars — the price tag doubtless will have reached $1 trillion by Inauguration Day — and by whatever it eventually costs to keep the housing market afloat. He or she will inherit, in short, a dismal mess. It will take most of the new president’s first term to begin to set things right. It’s easy to understand why Americans have come to think of George W. Bush as the worst president in memory, perhaps one of the worst ever. What’s hard to fathom is how we’ll make it through the next 14 1/2 months. But who’s counting?

I found in the blogs people who were just as outraged as I was. I started writing this one just to get my frustration off of my chest. While being negative all the time wasn’t my usual cup of tea, at least I wasn’t gloomy and depressed. The blogs were a good therapy for my feeling that my country had turned into something I didn’t even recognize. What I like about these two pieces is their shared tone of disgust. Scarecrow can’t say "stupid" enough times. Robinson says "worst president in memory" with ease. It’s like I live in a country that might re-find itself.

In Africa, one evening I found a place to sit outside the Lodge away from the buildings and all the travellers. I was in the second or third day of a very lousy cold, was maximally jet-lagged, and had been bouncing around in a van on the African Plains from sun-up to sun-down. I just needed to sit. One of the guys who worked there came up and said, "Jambo [hello]." Seeing that I was not in a talking mood, he disappeared. In a bit, he showed up with some wood and laid a fire with several trips for more wood. Finally, he pulled a dried bird’s nest from a nearby tree and used it to start the fire. He said, "Now you have a fire. You won’t be lonely." And he walked away.