Action Jackson
Topic: Bush
Another item from the Los Angeles Times. Here James McWilliams, an assistant professor of history at Texas State University-San Marcos and a contributing writer at Texas Observer, compares George Bush to Andrew Jackson. Say what? Well, you can read it and decide if that is convincing. Are the rest of us acting like John Quincy Adams? Well, maybe. Are the Iraqis to Bush what the Seminole Indians were to Jackson? That's stretching things. But yes, Jackson was "a man of dubious literacy."

The key theme here though is what we have been discussing on and off for months - the appeal of militant anti-intellectualism to most Americas... and too what this guy sees as Bush's most popular trait, how he "favors instinct over principle."

I like this: "Bush embroiled the country in a war based on a series of false assumptions. His genius has been to recognize that, politically, it doesn't matter. Saddam Hussein has been ousted and if anyone is still nagging us about those pesky weapons of mass destruction, it's just sour grapes. Of course, thoughtful (if elaborate) justifications against the war have been articulated. But we don't necessarily want our leaders to be thoughtful. Bush has had the finest education a man can buy or inherit, but the only time he mentions it is when he brags that he was a C student at Yale. He's more likely to be photographed holding an ax than a book. He plays up his Texas heritage (we're all kinda slow in Texas) at the expense of his Connecticut connections (people there, of course, are smarter). Hacking away at mesquite grub on his Crawford ranchette, he convincingly puts forth the image of a rugged individualist, a doer, a true frontiersman, a man who's never quoted a law in his life but has made laws to suit his base urges, a plowman rather than a professor. Who knows why we lap it up, but lap it up we do."

Well, folks do lap it up.

Is it a problem? Yeah, I suppose. McWilliams points out the obvious. "But so what? The nation has no patience for long-winded justifications. In fact, it is suspicious of them."

So. How does any opposition party - Democrats, Greens, Nadar-ites - deal with that?

See Plain Old Cowboy's Winning Ways James McWilliams
November 20, 2003 Los Angeles Times

Oh yeah. I should mention that the Los Angeles Times requires registration to read their articles, and to read the articles in the entertainment pages one needs to actually subscribe to the paper.

- Alan

John Lennon singing IMAGINE had nothing on this guy....
Topic: Bush
Ah, in today's local paper, the Los Angeles Times, we find the basic "what if" stuff. Here Matthew Miller reviews what would have happened had we not adopted our diplomacy-is-for-wimps posture two years ago. I know, I've been harping on this for months. Yeah, well. (See Just Above Sunset Magazine, September 7th: Opinion for that.) But Miller here is a lot more succinct than I am.

The "what if" thing? "Yet imagine if Bush had gone to European capitals last fall, rather than this fall. Imagine if he and Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had made a fraction of the effort that Bush's father's team made in 1991, when members shuttled to Europe constantly in advance of Desert Storm to assemble the bona fide coalition that made that conflict a triumph of diplomacy as well as military might."

Well, that didn't happen.

Why not? "Why didn't Powell and Rumsfeld fan out to Berlin and London and Istanbul with similar messages -- generating coverage and debate in which American officials would have been seen respectfully making the case to allies whose views were deemed relevant and worthy of persuasion? Why instead did Rumsfeld simply dismiss 'Old Europe' in macho fashion and assert (wrongly, in the long run) that we could go it alone? Why, in a word, didn't Bush lead? When I raise such 'what ifs' with die-hard Bushies, they say quietly that it might have been a good idea. But in the next breath they add that it might not have changed the result -- that France and Germany in particular would still have stonewalled. Even so, the difference in the way Bush and the U.S. were viewed would have been great."

The real "why not" for Miller is this: "...Bush and his team would have perceived this course as a sign of weakness."

As for Miller's contention that in the UK today, and in Istanbul today, Bush is reaping the wages of arrogance, well, that is debatable. Bush will be reelected, as far as I can tell. This may be, as he contends, one of the most profound diplomatic failures in history, but it's good politics.

It's a good read. President Reaps the Wages of Arrogance Matthew Miller, November 20, 2003 - Los Angeles Times

Everyone is doing this...
Oh, and by the way, an old friend in the Boston area just started her own blog. GrittyBits. Click here to go there: Gritty Bits

The start of a daily web log associated with Just Above Sunset Magazine
This is the start of a daily web log (a blog) associated with Just Above Sunset, my weekly magazine from Hollywood, California. I have an email "discussion group" of more than a dozen people to whom I send interesting items I find in the press - odds events, outrageous commentary and that sort of thing. They reply from various time zones - California, New York, Atlanta, London, Paris, Montreal - and everything coming and going gets all jumbled up. This web log will allow them to post their replies, and their own outrageous "finds," in sequence by topic. At least that's the idea.

So I will be phasing out my email group and inviting them to this blog. And all others are welcome.

Click here to go to the "parent" site: Just Above Sunset Magazine