DEAD PARROT BULLETIN, 9/5/04

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WHOPPERS FROM THE BIG TENT

The sheer toxicity of the rhetoric wafting out of New York this week left astute listeners gasping--desperate for even a single particle of language that had not been corrupted into an instrument of distortion and manipulation. So foul did the vapors become that the staggering vacuousness of the Bush twins--a scary glimpse of what "family values" come down to--could at least pass for genuine amid the viciously scripted oratory of their elders.

I was in New York on Sunday for the protest and returned home to follow the rest of the proceedings on TV. Despite the networks' merciful decision to limit coverage, the self-imposed assignment was almost unbearable and the event itself so stupefyingly dishonest as to defy commentary. Readers, I watched this for you--and it has left me feeling soiled. Tobias Wolff, in his memoir This Boy's Life, writes that his first confession went badly because he could not fish up, from the swamp of his all-encompassing sense of guilt, a couple of good sins to confess. To parse the lies of the Republican National Convention is equally challenging--there's just too much muck to wade around in. However, having put myself through the agony of watching it, I feel duty bound to try. Here, then, are a few prime specimens, with a note of rebuttal on each.

1. Four hundred thousand anti-Bush demonstrators are "outside of the mainstream."

Republicans are always trying to make something so by asserting it. The ones who staked out Boston at the end of July kept assuring us that John Kerry's ideas "are too far left for the American people"--as if the people themselves needn't play any role in making up their minds on this point. When campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt made this comment about the New York demonstrators (Boston Globe, 8/30), he was indulging in the same sort of magical thinking. Schmidt may have taken his cue from his boss, who has had quite a run with the preposterous idea that Iraq was bristling with weapons of mass destruction and a "gathering threat" to America. Though this claim was transparently false before the war and has since been proven false beyond all doubt, we are STILL expected to believe it simply because Bush said it so many times. As for who's in the "mainstream" and who's out of it, the election will decide.

2. In contrast to those "angry extremist" Democrats, Republicans are a centrist party of good will and inclusiveness.

In fact, even the "moderate" speakers who were supposed to give the convention a smiley face had a hard time keeping the lid on their animus. Of them, more later. Let's consider a delegate who could not even get near the podium last week but who represents George Bush's governing philosophy more than most of those who did. Let's consider Grover Norquist, president of a group disarmingly known as "Americans for Tax Reform." Norquist has famously likened his plan for the federal government to drowning a weak person in a bathtub. What he and Bush mean by "reform" is two things: radically reducing the amount of public money available to be spent for the public good and--via payroll taxes, sales taxes, and ultimately a flat-rate income tax--shifting the remaining burden from the very wealthy to the middle class and the poor. Party members who show qualms about pushing this program for plutocracy get the treatment, which Norquist, who clearly has a way with metaphor, described to a Globe reporter (8/31): "Every once in a while you have a bad Republican who votes wrong, like the rat head in the Coke bottle that interrupts your branding effort. When that happens, we have to quarantine them, put them in leper colonies." (For a detailed analysis of Republican tax plans, see John Cassidy's piece in the 9/6 New Yorker.)

3. Giuliani, McCain, and Schwarzenegger are "three brave renegades."

This more than usually fatuous pronouncement by David Brooks appeared not in a movie fan magazine or an Olympic "color" story but in the NY Times (8/31). Taking a deep breath of the musky, testosterone-soaked air of the convention hall and becoming mildly inebriated with it, Brooks opines that "this whole campaign has revolved around courage" and that "McCain, Giuliani, and Schwarzenegger are featured because they embody the brand of courageous conservatism the party has sought to project since 9/11." (Branding again!--no rat heads in this Coke bottle.) The inevitable comparisons to Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Churchill, and Margaret Thatcher follow. Brooks deals solely in soft-focus generalities: "they are clear and self-confident in their beliefs," "they know their own minds," "they are most alive in the midst of the fray," and so forth. If he were actually to examine the behavior of his three musketeers, he would have trouble squaring it with the platitudes. Giuliani has profiteered shamelessly from his 9/11 celebrity, parlaying it into a million-dollar-a-day consulting business with third-world countries that might better spend their money on hiring a few more police or opening a new school. Schwarzenegger is most alive when he is demeaning women ("girlie men"), twisting history (no, Austria was not a socialist state when he grew up there), or blurring the line between real life and a B-movie scenario (his story about the soldier who had been shot to pieces but couldn't wait to climb out of the hospital bed, get a new leg, and return to action in Iraq). But the saddest case is that of McCain. A man who has showed real courage in his life, not only as a captive in Vietnam but also as a politician, now chooses to lick the hand that abused him. Though victimized in 2000 by the smears that have characterized every Bush-Rove campaign and though fully aware of the smears that are now being visited on Kerry, McCain nevertheless climbs onto the stump for Bush. Some renegade.

4. Zell Miller is a Democrat.

Miller may be a Democrat in the sense that Strom Thurmond once was, but he hasn't voted with the party on any issue of substance in years. Nevertheless, as recently as 2001 he did call Kerry "an authentic American hero" and a friend and credit him with having worked to strengthen the military. What led Miller to fleck the podium with his deceitful bombast on Wednesday night is open to speculation; apparently it had something to do with the fear that al Qaeda was coming to rural Georgia for his grandchildren and that we don't have enough B2 bombers to stop them. The list of weapons systems that Kerry supposedly had voted to sink sounded impressive but didn't hold up under scrutiny. Most of the votes were on omnibus spending bills that contained many items and required careful balancing of priorities with a serious eye to budget restraints; and no less a warrior than Dick Cheney himself had sought to kill several of the same systems when he was Secretary of Defense. But the bogus particulars of Miller's argument were as nothing compared to the fundamental hypocrisy of its premise: that it is treason to discuss defense policy in a political campaign. Dredging the Republican pantheon for a model of noble restraint, he surfaced Wendell Wilkie, who, in his contests with FDR, "made it clear that he would rather lose the election than make national security a partisan campaign issue." Miller then spent half an hour making national security a partisan campaign issue before turning over the stage to Cheney for more of the same.

5. George Bush "didn't want to go to war."

Lines like this one (from Laura Bush on "Compassion Night") could be uttered only here, in what Gore Vidal calls the United States of Amnesia. Anyone who had even one eye open in the fall and winter of 2002-03 should be able to remember the all-but-drooling enthusiasm with which Bush, in appearance after appearance, pushed his plans to attack Iraq. Though he learned to trim his lines with the occasional pious assertion that war is "a last resort," what obviously possessed him was the expected adrenaline rush of scorching someone else's earth in a cause that could be made to look righteous. At the end of the war's first phase, Dead Parrot addressed the myth of Bush's reluctance ("Tin Man Triumphant," 4/19/03). The myth was alive and well in New York this week, not only in his wife's vapid assurances but in his own fanciful account of how the war started. To hear Bush tell it, Saddam simply refused to disarm and left him with the awful choice of accepting "the word of a madman" or acting "to defend our country." The dichotomy is false. At the time Bush ordered the attack, inspectors were verifying that Iraq had no prohibited weapons and did not present the slightest threat to the United States.

No one who has so assiduously built his political identity on being "a war president" can expect us to believe that he "didn't want to go to war." Bush is a warmonger. He has sold us an unnecessary war on false grounds, and he has used war to sell himself. The issue of this campaign is not courage but honesty. The man who, in a faux-humble acknowledgement of his own character flaws, mentions that "Now and then I come across as a little too blunt" is in fact a serial liar. He and his party have had their say in New York. Now it is our turn to get out there, debunk their mendacity, and help John Kerry win this election.