Speaking of Gore, one pattern that clearly emerges from this exercise is that Presidents who follow a successful two-termer of the same political party invariably flop. John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Van Buren, Andrew Johnson, Taft, Hoover, and Bush were all one-term flops, and Madison and Truman, although they won second terms, were less than distinguished. Would Nixon have done a one-term fadeout had he succeeded Ike after 1960? Will Gore do likewise if elected in 2000? History says yes, and one wonders why. Is this due to some cyclical swing in the mood of the electorate, or is it that popular Presidents are just hard acts to follow? Or do successful Presidents tend to mortgage the future to obtain short-term results (and win re-election), obliging their successors to inherit the wind? If so, then will Gore be stuck with the task of realizing the balanced budget by 2002 and facing the foreign crises that are bound to erupt with a hollowed-out, feminized military? He may well step into Bill Clinton’s shoes only to wish soon enough that he hadn’t. All the more reason for American voters to choose the Republican — any Republican — next time around. At least he (or she) will have a chance to be Great.
— McDougall, Walter A.
National Review 10-27-1997

Yes, the Supposed “feminized” “hollowed out” military of Bill Clinton. I mention this by way of a simple truth: had Gore gone on to be Bill Clinton’s successor as president, the Republicans would blame Clinton mercilessly for a 9/11 event (of whatever type) and would demand the impeachment of Al Gore because… Bill Clinton hollowed out and feminized the military.

As opposed to Bush II, who over-extends the military. But that may be part of the argument: it’s Clinton’s fault there aren’t enough people in the National Guard to fight in Iraq without being re-enlisted!

I was meaning to cut and paste an exchange I had online in the Summer of 2004, and make a point out of it, in celebration of the Third Anniversary of “Mission Accomplished”. But, the ezboard jumbled up the chronology, and thus… I cannot find it. So I’ll have to re-create it to a certain degree.

I had posted an article that pointed out that Republican Nominee of 1944 Thomas Dewey (who four years later would spend the summer planning his cabinet appointees and smiling happily at his huge leads in the polls, until Election Night returns came in at which point I think he probably just got himself plastered on vodka after banging his head against the wall several times) was attacking Roosevelt on the war front, article excerpts found here.

So a very hawkish — um — I’ll just say “Neo-Con” retorted with: So you’re going to vote for Dewey, then?

My response was: I still get goosebumps when I hear that speech Roosevelt made in 1943 proclaiming “Major Combat Operation are over. Mission Acoomplished!”

And the telling response: “Major Combat Operations In Africa are over. Mission Accomplished In Africa.

Which is clearly a sham, where the proper response was to laugh, with perhaps a whiff of a wince. Our celebrations of our Allied victory on the African front had to have been about as mooted as the Union celebrations of their victory on the Western Frontier Front (which was where the Union and the Confederacy sent their crazy generals out. Not that there is any correlation between the two wars on this particular score, as Eisenhower was moved on over to the real action.) As per Bush’s short-sighted photo-op: he never did employ it in a campaign commercial.

That line reverberates even today. Note Scott McClellan’s answer to the question of “Would President Bush use that today?” with a “Democrat efforts to contort what Bush said”, suggesting that Bush meant that mission of that particular crew was accomplished. Which is too bad Bush doesn’t do that celebratory fest with every returning unit… perhaps he could do that even for units coming home to base to take a break before going back to their missions in Iraq — “Mission Paused” could be the banner he stands before for those ones.

Why is everybody getting in a tizzy that Bush just named our course of military actions as per the present as “World War III”?

It’s doing former CIA Director James Woolsey one worst, Woolsey being the author of the “This is World War IV” commentary.

Myself, I have two minds on the subject: we are either still stuck in World War II — World War II never quite ended — the whole “The Nazis faded into the Intelligence Services of the US and the USSR, and took up residence there.”

OR… This is World War FIVE. I can’t quite decide where World War IV could be shoe-horned in, though. Maybe the Napoleonic Wars are tapped as World I, and we can defer to James Woolsey’s worldview from there. (Of course, perhaps his “World War III” isn’t quite over, either.)

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.

Yesterday was the anniversary for the Kent State Incident. Which, since I personally have no connection to it and it’s simply a historical note to me, naurally makes me ponder the differences between his politically charged song of the time (with Crosby, Stills, and Nash) and what Neil Young thumped out with “Let’s Impeach the President”.:

The President Sucks
And He likes to Hunt Ducks
I say about this “Oh Shucks”
‘Cause We are all the Sitting Ducks.

Well, no, those are not the lyrics. These are the lyrics. It’s not a terribly good song. Sometime after “Ohio”‘s jab at Nixon, “Rocking In the Free World”‘s attack on Bush I, and “Southern Man” on the Civil Rights Movement — strong enough to warrant an attack from Lynrd Skynrd… he’s lost it. The song will soon be forgotten, and played nowhere.

I believe the problem is that the political song has lost its sociological import. Go back to “Ohio”, and the song is actually about these College Students’ “on their own”, when — “BANG!” — the “tin soldiers” kill some of their friends (or some of their generation) dead — and goddamned it, I need to get over there to Ohio for Solidarity — Nixon hatred is a backdrop.

Green Day’s “American Idiot” album ends up as something akin to — say, a suburban C-Student with vaguely “mall-punk” attributes going on to Community College and a bad minimum wage job, watching some of his friends enlist to join the Military with hopes that it will get them some way out of this burg (and besides, the military was quite aggressive in their recruitment jobs at the old high school, and the kids were largely directionness), and shipped off to Iraq, and thus… Bush II enters their world.

Neil Young’s new semi-hit gives us… Bumpkis.

Incidentally, Jon Bon Jovi has written a new country song, but as Tim Riley put it, it’s really written by Karl Rove.

05-01-2006, the “Most Ridiculous Item of the Day”…

O’REILLY: Time now for “The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day”. A few letters on the “60 Minutes” profile on Stephen Colbert came in overnight.

Bill Mattern, who lives in Pennsylvania, said, “Bill, Morley Safer made you appear as a guy who says ‘shut up’ and cuts people’s microphones off all the time. I wonder how far back he went to dig that stuff up?” And Randy Watts from Virginia wrote, “Safer slammed ‘The Factor’ as full of half-truths.” Well, that he did, Mr. Watts. I saw the piece and was amused by it.

Colbert’s lampooning of cable pundits is fine with me. He’s not malicious.

Safer simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

We have some of the best fact checkers in the business on this program, and when we make a mistake we correct it. You know, I do three hours of commentary every day. Sometimes you’re going to make mistakes.

And Morley has an open invitation to come in here and back up his statements about half truths. All right? I don’t expect to see Mr. Safer.

Some of the old guard bitterly resent the success of “The Factor” and the FOX News Channel, and that might be ridiculous.

Finally, tonight the mail. It was all over the place this weekend.

Rick Lindsay, Brentwood, Tennessee: “Bill, you and your liberal propaganda has […]

This is hilarious for any number of reasons. To be fair, I’m not altogether sure 60 Minutes should be profiling entertainers, as they do. I winced once when they did a profile of the Car Guys — Click and Clack. Or that 60-something year old sex kitten actress whose name escapes me, largely because I could care less.

Looking back in time for precedents, John Adams’s overreach was rebuked when he was voted out of office in favour of Thomas Jefferson. Franklin Roosevelt finally ended up with a Congress willing to put up some checks and balances after the 1938 midterm elections. (But there was some Machivellian trickery going on with his Court Packing Scheme.) And Nixon was impeached.

I may have Roosevelt figured a bit wrongly. Apparently his initial Social Security bill was quite a bit more conservative than he would have liked as he worked to appease the Southern Democratic delegation, and figuring correctly that he can build on it later. Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, during his reign as Most Powerful Politician in America during the 1950s, would do a similar “slow” path with Civil Rights, and I’ll get to somebody’s comments on that in a later post. As it were, Roosevelt would find himself hemmed in from a supposed “left” by Huey Long and Father Coughlin and Townsend, and after a slight fall from grace in public esteem, come back strongly with new program material for the “New Deal” — in time for the 1936 re-election.

I’m rambling off topic. Arlen Specter. Arlen Specter just came out asking the question what the point of Congress is if the President just keeps giving these “signing statements” that chews away parts of legislation, and tells the public employess how to enact these laws by ignoring parts of the law that Bush Administration would prefer to ignore.

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, accusing the White House of a ”very blatant encroachment” on congressional authority, said yesterday he will hold an oversight hearing into President Bush’s assertion that he has the power to bypass more than 750 laws enacted over the past five years.

”There is some need for some oversight by Congress to assert its authority here,” Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said in an interview. ”What’s the point of having a statute if . . . the president can cherry-pick what he likes and what he doesn’t like?”

The first step to Dictatorship is to do away with Congress or to make it a meaningless institution… or is it to make the Courts do your bidding? At any rate, Specter is late in coming to this realization… better late than never. But then again, he does have a legacy to be concerned with.

I’ve got nothing today. I could expand on — say — my thoughts on Ron Paul — found on the sidebar in this form:

“In fact, the other member of Congress who votes most closely to Congressman Ron Paul is none other than Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.” To be sure, Ron Paul is an interesting casoid, and to be sure a Democratic Congress would be preferable to a Republican Congress, and to be sure a Congress full of Ron Pauls would be a nightmare, and to be sure, a congress without a few Ron Pauls would be a lesser place.

But that’s all I got. Ron Paul, like so many idiosyncratic items of politics: when is right, he is very, very right; when he is wrong, he is very very wrong.

I find this interesting, and I could theoretically create a Political Memoir for myself. I stumble through some of that now and again.

Actually I note that I was transcribing some stuff from a notebook about my final month of high school, a curious hodge-podge of politics and current events bearing down on me of a sort and adolescent angst suddenly magnified. I typed up about 20 pages of it (or so Word tells me), and stopped with what I estimate would be the other 30 pages due to the fact that I don’t think anyone particularly cares, and my time online is short.

Why does Eric Sten’s radio commercial use the same voice and same underlying theme as the commercial for Country Time Lemonade? I find it… bizarre… and incongruent to the candidate.

The other five candidate, Chris Iverson, Sharon Naseset, Ludinda Tate, Michael Casper, and a preacher who goes by the name of “Watchman” fall into the also-running category.

Yes, but isn’t Watchman a mute, as dictated through some Biblical Spiritual hooey-dooey? Once in office as City Commissioner, he’ll get to work on those metaphorical “Gates”, I suppose — “sevens” in hand.

I realize that makes no sense to just about anybody. And I’ll leave it at that.

Unfortunately Watchman didn’t leave anything in the Voter’s Pamphlet. All I have to go on as to whether this is “that” Watchman I had some Internet message board encounters and a real life excursion with a — um — worker Watcher(?) a blue moon ago is his Candidacy Filing. But really, how many Watchmen can there be in Portland?

…………….

Additional Update 12 hours later: Despite all the names, these races don’t look too difficult, folks. Once all the candidates are officially in next week, we’ll be posting endorsements. (Sneak preview: “Watchman” probably won’t be on there.)

This is the only web reference (or real life reference for that matter) to this political campaign of Watchman that I know of. It is possible that I am the only person out there anywhere who knows, to some degree, who “Watchman” is.

I will look through the archives and find something I remember of Watchman talking politics — saying that we should not follow the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, but should follow the Watchman Party. It’s curious to be sure.

Somehow in a world where the cliche “Never talk politics or religion at the dinner table” flows, and in a world where Dick Cheney tells Senator Patrick Leahy to “go fuck yourself”, the tone of the New Republic to those oh so nasty deraugotary commentsd made by “liberal bloggers” at Joseph Lieberman strikes me as incredibly off-putting and partronizing.

Let the record show that Ned Lamont does not consider Joe Lieberman a whiny-ass titty baby. Nor does he believe that Connecticut’s junior senator is a douchebag, an ass clown, or any of the other nasty names liberal bloggers have called Lieberman–whom, with those bloggers’ help, Lamont hopes to defeat in this August’s Democratic primary. “I really regret that rhetoric,” Lamont said one recent afternoon, blushing a little as some of the derogatory appellations for Lieberman were read back to him.

[…]

Indeed, by taking on Lieberman, Lamont has become a hero to those who reside in the angriest corners of the state and national Democratic Party–and whose brief against Lieberman goes well beyond his support for the war. (To wit, one ardent Lamont supporter who blogs at Daily Kos recently trash-talked: “Lieberman is a disloyal, Bush-kissing, torture-loving asshole who hasn’t done shit for CT in years.”) These Lieberman-haters hail Lamont for his “Nedrenaline” and celebrate his “Nedmentum.” He is, in their eyes, “the anti-Lieberman.” “Ned has a gift,” a blogger at the website My Left Nutmeg recently wrote. “The more people see and hear Ned the more they like him and that’s the polar opposite of our current junior senator.” But, as Lamont seems to be discovering, being a hero to this rabid crowd is a strange role for a mild-mannered guy like himself.

To review:

Joe Lieberman a whiny-ass titty baby.
Joseph Lieberman is a douchebag.
Joseph Lierbman is an ass clown.
Lieberman is a disloyal, Bush-kissing, torture-loving asshole who hasn’t done shit for CT in years.

I can’t use any of these insults. They’ve been taken. I have to find one for myownself.

Okay.

Joseph Lieberman is a Poopy-Head.

I will now trademark and copyright that phrase. It’s mine. I have called people “poopy-head” in the past, and have just called Joseph Lieberman one. If you wish to hurl an insult at Joseph Lieberman, you must find one that is different than “Joseph Lieberman is a Poopy – Head”.