How Do You Tell a Bush
Then it clicked. It was during one of those embarrassing, staged press encounters in the aborted little scandelette which we might call Cocainegate when the wolf pack was (rightly) out to get Shrub to admit what we all already knew to be true. And there was Baby Shrub hemming and hawing his way through non-answers night after night. And I suddenly thought: DAN QUAYLE. He's Dan Fucking Quayle, Jr.! Yes? The preppie rich-kid frat-boy who's gotten by all his life on daddy's money and daddy's connections, even going through Yale on a string of gentleman's C's. A reprint, a re-run, a Xerox of little Indianapolis rich-kid Dan Quayle. Which solves one political puzzle, anyway. Think back to 1988 and the Republican Convention. I'd never understood how or why George Bush who, for all his troglodyte politics and policies, is no dummy would select a Charlie McCarthy clone like Dan Quayle as his running mate. And, God knows, Quayle's vice-presidential persona during the ensuing four years only confirmed one's initial impression. Here was a good little rich kid the depth of whose perceptions and personality could be measured in tens of microns. Now fast-forward a decade, and we have a defeated Big Bush, nursing his wounded ego at home in Houston, with two sons governing two of the largest states. The one son, Jeb, in Florida, actually shows signs of some political savvy and some desire to respond to the needs of constituents with incomes of less that six figures. But does Daddy Bush go with Jeb to make the big revenge run at Clinton and the Democrats to get back for the 1992 humiliation? No. Again, just as in 1988 when he chose a vice president, he goes with the dummy, with Shrub, governor of Texas, friend (and pawn) of anybody whose income is seven figures or higher. From a weed as vice president in 1988, we advance to a shrub for president in 2000. Which ought, for any thinking person, to make clear the utter cynicism of national Republican politics. A president, for the moneyed, powerful Republicans is only a tool, a front, to be put up and manipulated as needed to protect and extend the far-flung vested interests of the American money-class. They pulled the trick off but good with Reagan, and lucked out, because Reagan could act the part of president with disarmingly convincing skill. In 1988 Bush was trying to set the trick up again, with the Indiana Weed, who presumably would be groomed to take over after Bush in 1996. Having failed there, Big Bush had a fall back position right at home with his own in-house version of Dan Quayle: Prince George, who's actually a kind of Alfred E. Neuman with a Texas accent. END Illustration from The Texas Observer. And, in case you missed it, take a look at The Nation's homage to our boy from Texas.
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Every time I would see Shrub on TV or read his
remarks in the paper, he would remind me of somebody, but I couldn't put my finger on who.
The blank stare, the clumsy forced posture, the wooden delivery of scripted words all
seemed so familiarly irritating and slightly insulting. I mean, who would have the gall to
put such a person in front of the American voters as a possible president? Not to mention
who would give hundreds of millions of dollars to the campaign fund of such a walking
zero?