Thursday, October 11, 2007
By now, it's clear that "We don't torture" is going to be George Bush's equivalent to "I am not a crook" or "I did not have sexual relations with that woman"--an embarrassingly transparent, obviously untrue statement that the speaker never would have even made in the first place if he hadn't been obligated to deny something that everybody had already figured out was the case. In the earlier examples, you could at least understand the emotions behind the decision to go on TV and indignantly challenge these unfounded accusations that the sun is hot. In Nixon's case, it must have been deeply nerve-racking for a such a rigid, uptight old Quaker, one who had built his administration on promises of restoring "law and order" to a nation that had lost its moral compass, to start seeing cartoons of himself and his top aides in prison stripes in the paper every damn day. The very idea undermined everything that he wanted to believe about himself and everything his supporters wanted to believe about him. As for Clinton, for a free-wheeling, charismatic dude who had a well-documented taste for the ladies and a serious JFK complex, it must have been...well, anyway, I'm sure he didn't want to sleep on the couch. But George Bush is supposed to be our self-styled Mr. Grim Reality, President Bauer. Why the hell is he denying that we do what he must know his most hardcore supporters worship him for having the balls to do? Why doesn't he respond to questions about whether we torture by barking "Damn straight," and then pulling a former Gitmo resident's spleen out of his jacket pocket to gnaw?
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Bush doesn't need to put on this show of being concerned about niceties. In the period after 9/11, when Everything Changed, there were two ways to go. The government and the media could have said, okay, this is scary, but it's not the end of civilization and doesn't have to be. The next few years aren't going to be as quiet as we obviously thought they were going to be, but there are a few intelligent people in the government mixed in with George's kid's playmates from Texas, so let's send the, um, president around the country to make speeches and sell bonds, and let the people who can handle this handle it. The other way to go was to let Bush have anything he wanted and do whatever he wanted while the rest of us stood around hissing, "Sure, he's a different kind of cop and he doesn't play by the book--but he gets results!" The media, which seems to have been suffering from some kind of collective attack of brain-disabling testosterone poisoning that it might have picked up from a hot tub party at Chris Matthews' house, enthusiastically opted for the latter. Bush has since complicated things by not getting any results that anyone would want covered in their evaluation report, but his remaining supporters and even many of his former supporters retain their enthusiasm for what people in Clint Eastwood movies call "unconventional methods". That's why some of them get off on Giuliani and what Jon Stewart has called his "9/11 tourette's", and why nobody at the Republican debating hall fell off their chair laughing or puking when Mitt Romney vowed to "double" Guantanimo. ("And what happened then? Why some people say that the Mormon's gonads grew three sizes that day.")
There will always be people are so weirdly impressed by juvenile displays of macho that cost the macho man nothing that they'll think back warmly to the time Bush sidled up to a mike and invited Iraqi insurgents to blow the shit out of American soldiers with the words "Bring it on" as proof that, yes, there were giants in those days. That's the real Bush, the "Who cares what you think" Bush, the Bush who entertained Tucker Carlson with a hilarious impression of Karla Faye Tucker whimpering for mercy from her Death Row cell (which Karla Faye Tucker didn't actually do, but then Bush didn't watch the TV interview he was making fun of--he's just intelligent enough to know that his lack of empathy is based on ignorance of the people he so easily scorns and so must be carefully guarded). If Bush went all the way with it, swaggering around the White House lawn in a muscle shirt, hawking loogies into the rose garden and kicking reporters in the nuts, his standing with what's left of his base would only harden, and his standing with the likes of Chris Matthews would probably shoot back up like a rocket. But some part of him feels--or is compelled to listen to the people around him who feel--that it's important to send the message that the part of him that sends soldiers to their deaths to scratch his Oedipal itch and authorizes waterboarding isn't the real him, that there's some other invisible part of himself that's so troubled and pained by the suffering he's caused and the disgrace of his presidency that he wouldn't touch himself with a ten-foot pole. This is, to put it gently, hard to believe. And the fact that he wants to publicly deny the inner badass that is so beloved of his real fans bespeaks a wimpiness that links him to his famously spine-free father, who really was the mirror image of his son, a civilized, not wholly unintelligent man who was always embarrassing us by insisting that he was really a pork-rind-eatin' country music listenin' macho wild man son of a bitch. The sad thing about Bush Junior's attempt to have it both ways is that it so completely dynamites his dirty-realist-bastard image that it leaves him with blood on his hands but with none of the glamour that's supposed to go with it; that Clint Eastwood act only works at all if you go all the way with it and stick the hell with it. But maybe that's why so many people, even now, profess to find Bush lovable. Barney Fife is a lot more lovable than Dirty Harry.
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