2000 Elections

Tuesday, Nov 23, 1999 5:00 PM UTC

The mediocrity that roared

Three books probe the mystery at the core of the angry, ordinary guy who might just be our next president.

By Joan Walsh

more
- All Share Services

You’ve got to have a little sympathy for J.H. Hatfield. The would-be boss-killer turned George W. Bush biographer had a tough job: to make sense of the life of the feckless frat boy turned Texas governor who now wants to be president. The kind of affable Reaganesque emptiness that tortured Edmund Morris, leading him to insert himself as a fictional Reagan contemporary in the unreadable “Dutch,” may have, in the person of George W., helped drive Hatfield to his own flight of fancy: filling in Bush’s self-described “nomadic years” with a badly documented, probably fictional story of a cocaine arrest that got expunged by a friendly judge.

That’s not to defend Hatfield’s dishonesty (or his sloppy, unbelievable sourcing, should the tale be true). It’s just to note that none of the three Bush biographies now out — including his autobiography — has succeeded in penetrating his mildly charismatic, militantly unreflective averageness, to fill in the blanks in his past and explain how this under-accomplished son of privilege amassed a $100 million campaign war chest a year before the 2000 election, making the American presidency his to lose.

Bill Minutaglio’s “First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty” is by far the best of the lot, but that’s not saying much. All the books cover much the same ground: George Herbert Walker and Barbara Bush leaving the Eastern elite and lighting out for Texas; George the elder’s absence from the family as he attempts to make his own way in the oil industry independently (starting out with a job his father got for him, of course); George W.’s sister Robin’s tragic death at 4, when he was 7; the party years at Andover and Yale (friends from those days thought Bush was the model for John Belushi’s Bluto in “Animal House”); the notorious “nomadic years” of the early ’70s.

Then came the putative “entrepreneurial” years, when Bush returned to his dad’s Midland, Texas, oil roots and got family and friends to help him fail ever upward. Eventually he turned his investment in the aptly named, money-losing Arbusto Energy into a million-dollar stake in a much bigger firm and ponied up about $600,000 for a tiny share of the Texas Rangers baseball team, which was worth almost $15 million when he sold it last year. (To be fair, maybe the books explain more than I’ve given them credit for. Because if your life worked out this dang well, you might wanna run for president, too.)

Like a lot of reporters before and since, Minutaglio and Hatfield spend much time scouring the record to find out how Bush made all that money. (Bush’s own book blithely ignores such questions.) They dutifully — and in Hatfield’s case breathlessly — cite the controversies: the lawsuits and the Security and Exchange Commission investigations, the links to people connected to unsavory Saudi investors. But none of his critics have ever pinned him with any crime, or even any clear-cut breach of business ethics. He apparently made his money the old-fashioned way: He got some from his family, and made the rest thanks to the kindness of wealthy friends — or strangers who wanted to be his friends.

These books are less useful as biographies of our would-be president than as primers in American privilege. But as such, they’re very useful. Bush, like Reagan, stands for the open defense of inherited status and power, of the rights of people like us to run the world because people like us have always run it — a kind of affirmative action for the white and wealthy that was challenged, to Bush’s chagrin, in the 1960s and 1970s, but began its rehabilitation under Reagan in the 1980s. The next election could be a plebiscite on the notion of dynasty vs. meritocracy — but only if Bush faces someone other than Vice President Al Gore, similarly privileged and protected from the need to be self-reliant.

And yet, to his advantage, Bush has a shadowy romance with the non-white and non-wealthy that accounts for his political success. He’s in touch with the basic optimism of low-income and minority folks, with their aversion to being treated like victims, as well as their instinctive sympathy for a black sheep like George W. His pedigree makes him dynasty material; his flaws make him interesting to the rest of us. If he can integrate both, he’ll be president, and he might then even be a good one. But judging from the contents of these books, it’s not clear that he can hang onto all parts of his complex past as he moves into his overdetermined future.

Bush’s autobiography, “A Charge to Keep,” is the worst read of the three, devoid of all detail about what makes Bush’s life mildly intriguing: his temper, his years of rowdy drunkenness, his unresolved relationship with his father, the undercurrent of sadness and self-destructiveness that may well spring (we’ll never know for sure; the Bushes are hostile to “the couch”) from the early death of his sister. The book reads like most inspirational bestsellers by famous people on the back slope of their careers — former President Jimmy Carter, Children’s Defense Fund president Marion Wright Edelman, Gen. Colin Powell — as a collection of easy-listening observations best left on the bedside table for a night when sleep is elusive and there’s nothing on TV. Try this:

Faith, family and friends … They guided my father during twelve years as president and vice president; they are the ways by which ultimately, I believe, all of our lives will be measured … I could not be governor if I did not believe in a divine plan that supersedes all human plans. Politics is a fickle business. Polls change. Today’s friend is tomorrow’s adversary. People lavish praise and attention. Many times it is genuine; sometimes it is not. Yet I build my life on a foundation that will not shift. My faith frees me.

And so on. Written by Bush’s communications director, Karen Hughes, it skates over the nomadic period between his graduation from Yale and his entry into Harvard Business School in just a few pages. Most of those pages are devoted to his flyboy years in the Texas Air National Guard. Bush spends just a few sparse pages on his entrepreneurial years, a time when old friends from Midland just happened to hook him up with the right people at the right time to help him make his fortune.

And yet, from all three books, a picture of Bush’s early life emerges. He opens “Charge,” after a meandering introduction, with a stark and moving picture of the day his sister Robin died of leukemia. By his own account and others, it was the trauma of his otherwise happy childhood. He didn’t know she was dying beforehand, though his parents did, and his high-WASP family didn’t discuss her death much afterward, either. But he took it hard, as did his mother, and would be plagued by nightmares for years.

Later, at Andover, asked to write a paper about an “emotional experience” — only Minutaglio’s book reveals the topic he chose was Robin’s death — Bush struggled to find a synonym for the overused word “tears” and came up with “lacerates” in his thesaurus. He described “lacerates running down my cheeks,” causing what must have been a stone-hearted teacher to flunk him.

Of course, Bush’s attendance at cold-blooded Andover was a key stepping stone on his path to the presidency. When the Bush family moved from Midland to Houston, George W. had gone to the tony Kincaid school, known as the place for rich kids who couldn’t get into the more rigorous St. John’s. East Coast privilege obviously didn’t yet cut mustard in Houston, but it certainly did at Andover, where the mediocre young Bush was accepted, like Bushes before him, despite failing to distinguish himself intellectually. And so it would go at Yale, too — where he was a solid C student — and at Harvard Business School.

Through pop foreign-policy quizzes and hapless attempts to list the books he’s read, a question continues to dog Bush: Is he stupid? Time magazine obtained his SAT scores, and it pains me to admit they’re exactly the same as mine, only inverted — he got 660 in math and 540 in verbal, while I got the high score on verbal. (Of course I marched off proudly to the University of Wisconsin without a thought about Yale; those weren’t Ivy League scores even in the ’60s and ’70s.)

Bush mostly thrived at Yale, among other legacy admissions and his frat-boy buddies. But he kept up his Houston roots, becoming engaged to Cathy Wolfson, a brainy coed at Houston’s Rice University, though the pair would never marry. The Hatfield book insists their trouble stemmed from the Bush family’s distaste for her Jewish stepfather (which the Bushes denied); Minutaglio, typically, underplays the story, but does reveal that the girl’s social status suffered due to “whispers” about her “merchant” roots, and that while the elder George Bush liked to play matchmaker, he never matched his son up with the wealthy and beautiful Wolfson. Bush himself devotes only one sentence to their romance.

In “Charge,” he describes his time at Yale as a lost age of innocence, just before the anti-war and civil rights movements ignited the nation’s campuses. This is silly, of course — those were the years of the Watts riots and other urban uprisings. While Bush was there, a majority of Yale students signed an anti-war petition, and the university’s black student union staged a two-day class boycott. He missed all of it. He did manage to rouse himself to protest one social outrage: the increasing attacks on fraternities, especially on their sadistic hazing rituals. He was first quoted in the New York Times in 1967, defending DKE’s practice of branding new pledges. The resulting mark “resembled a cigarette burn,” Bush told the Times.

There was another cause that got his goat at Yale, though he wouldn’t be able to articulate his outrage for some years: the spectacle of privileged youth protesting the institutions of their privilege. This utterly cheesed the young Bush, first at Yale, then at Harvard. Minutaglio quotes him later, describing his sense of anger at his left-wing classmates: “These are the ones who felt so guilty that they had been given so many blessings in life — like an Andover or a Yale education — that they felt they should overcompensate by trying to give everyone else in life the same thing.”

He would find solace, years later, in the works of David Horowitz, a ’60s radical who would become famous for denouncing the decade in the same outsized rhetoric that he earlier used to promote it. George W. resonated to the critiques of Horowitz and other reformed radicals, who gave him solace that his inherited privilege should be enjoyed, not resisted, or — God forbid — redistributed.
(Ironically, his discomfort with Yale’s prevailing liberalism helped
the son of privilege craft an unlikely self-image as an oppressed Texas
outsider, which would serve him well personally and especially politically in the years to come.)

Despite how many others have covered it, it’s still worth spending some time on those entrepreneurial years. These authors, as well as reporters for the Dallas Morning News and Houston Chronicle, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, the New York Times and, yes, Salon, have sniffed around Bush’s vaguely dodgy investments, stock trades, buyouts and mergers, and none has come up with a blockbuster story to tell.

Here’s the story in a nutshell (the narrative comes from Minutaglio, since Bush is mostly silent on these issues and Hatfield’s book, which hews to essentially the same story, was withdrawn by the publisher and thus shouldn’t be relied on for factual accuracy): Bush mostly cleaned up his act, went to Harvard Business School (“the West Point of Capitalism,” a Cambridge cab driver told him) and became a loyal foot soldier for the profit motive. He drove out to Midland in a 1970 Cutlass to be a “land man,” a glorified paralegal who researched the ownership of the mineral rights beneath certain plots of land, and hooked them up with those who wanted to drill. He then founded Arbusto Energy (the name means “bush” or “shrub” in Spanish), and began to attract investment to fund his own drilling.

Bush would later call it “entrepreneurial heaven … one of the few places in the country where you can go without portfolio and train yourself and become competitive.” Of course he wasn’t exactly without portfolio. His uncle Jonathan Bush, a stockbroker, would tell Minutaglio, “I introduced him to clients. I marketed his firm. I think I was probably pretty helpful.” One of his best friends, Charlie Younger, added: “He could get into doors with his name that you and I couldn’t — with oil people. His Dad had friends, and he didn’t mind calling on them.”

Even with those advantages, it wasn’t easy for Bush to strike it rich in Midland. He got distracted by an unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978, though he won the Republican primary, an amazing reach for a 32-year-old without a résumé. But thanks to Uncle Jonathan, the money-losing Arbusto attracted a growing list of investors, including William Draper and John Macomber, who would later become presidents of the U.S. Export-Import Bank under the Reagan and Bush administrations; James Bath, a front man for shady Saudi investors, including the father of Osama Bin Laden; and, when times were really tough, Philip Uzielli, an old Princeton pal of James Baker, George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign manager, who invested $1 million and lost almost all of it.

Ultimately the firm — whose name was changed to the snazzier sounding “Bush Exploration” after Bush’s father became vice president — never made a profit; the number of dry holes it drilled would just about equal the number that yielded oil. Bush Exploration was rescued, first by investments from a firm called Spectrum 7, then by Harken Energy, which bought Spectrum and was awarded rights to drill off the shores of Bahrain, beating out giants like Amoco even though the Texas firm had never drilled overseas, or under water.

Six weeks before Iraq invaded Kuwait, the son of the U.S. president dumped two-thirds of his Harken stock, earning almost $850,000, or two-and-a-half times its original value, on the eve of Harken announcing a huge quarterly loss. Bush faced accusations that he’d traded on insider knowledge to time his stock sale. Unhappily, he had neglected to file insider trading forms on the sale, triggering a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, and the issue would dog him through his run for governor. Ultimately, though, the SEC declined to file charges.

In the end, baseball was where Bush ultimately struck oil, so to speak. In 1989 he invested $606,000 — or 1.8 percent of the sale price — in the Texas Rangers, and became the team’s managing partner. When the ownership group sold the Rangers in 1998, Bush’s stake would be worth $14.9 million. He was already governor; he had finally made his fortune; all that was left was the pursuit of the presidency, Minutaglio says, and finally Bush felt worthy to pursue it.

All three books make clear that Bush is to his party and his era what Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were to theirs — a peerless politician who unites his followers by virtue of his charisma and personal power, and frees them from the tyranny of ideological hairsplitting and circular firing squads. But whereas Clinton and Reagan came to their political personas by way of dysfunctional, working-class homes and absent, alcoholic fathers, Bush was handed everything his predecessors had to work for. And yet they all found redemption the same way, in the endless orgy of approval-seeking known as American politics. Do they have more in common than is apparent from their lineage?

Certainly they all had absent fathers, of a sort. It’s hard not to see Bush’s entire life as an attempt to live up to his father’s achievements and avenge his disappointments. You could read these three books and come to the defensible conclusion that Bush ran for Texas governor mostly to get back at Gov. Ann Richards for her legendary insult to his father at the 1988 convention: “Poor George, he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” One of the most (unwittingly) poignant moment in “Charge” is when Bush recalls his father giving him cufflinks he’d gotten from his parents when he went into the Navy at 18; George W. finally received them at 48, when he was elected governor of Texas.

And Bush’s path to politics took him through alcohol troubles, too, mostly of his own making. At Yale, his drinking drew notice, but wasn’t a problem — it was part of the curriculum for a member of the rowdiest fraternity on campus. But the partying continued when he joined the Air National Guard and didn’t let up when he left. He bounced around, working on a couple of Republican Senate campaigns and signing on as a management trainee for an agribusiness company in Houston, then quit. His favorite job, he reveals in his autobiography, was sporting goods salesman at Sears. (There is an entry in the index to
“Charge” for Sears Roebuck and Co., by the way, but not for Securities and Exchange Commission.)

Bush apparently reached his nadir around Christmas 1972. Home for the holidays, worrying his parents by working too little and partying too much, he got carried away at a party with his 15-year-old brother Marvin, and drove the boy home drunk, smashing into a neighbor’s garbage cans and infuriating his parents. His father asked to see him in the den, and a drunk George W. burst in: “I hear you’re looking for me. You wanna go mano a mano right here?”

Jeb Bush broke the tension by announcing to his unhappy parents that George had been accepted to Harvard Business School. (Would that all domestic crises on the verge of violence could be diffused so easily!) But the angry young George insisted he didn’t plan to go to Harvard, he just wanted to prove he could get in (no mean feat given his solid C’s at Yale).

After the drunk-driving incident, his worried father got him a job at Project PULL (the placement Hatfield would insist was community service to expunge his alleged cocaine bust). And Bush may be counted among the many young people the inner-city project saved from self-destruction. Bush himself would say he found a “mentor” in PULL founder John White, a former Houston Oiler turned community activist in Houston’s African-American Third Ward. It was White who urged him to accept the entry to Harvard Business School. “If you really care about these kids as much as I think you do, why don’t you go and learn more and then you can really help,” Bush says White told him, and he took the advice.

After the Hatfield firestorm, Jay Leno would make fun of the fact that the Bush campaign was denying a cocaine arrest preceded his Project PULL stint, when the truth was it was only a drunk driving incident — as though the latter wasn’t scandal enough. Even Minutaglio’s softer version of the nomadic years provokes the reader to wonder what was eating at the affable son of privilege, driving him to squander his advantages on alcohol and a badly controlled anger.

And none of the books resolve it. It’s easy to see he spent most of his adulthood trying, and failing, to measure up to his father, struggling to go “mano a mano.” Ultimately, though, he did what his father was never able to do: find acceptance as a Texan and win statewide office. And his personal troubles paradoxically make him a far better politician than his father could dream of being. While Bush hasn’t publicly reckoned with his demons and how he gained control over them, the semi-public struggle has become part of his legend, giving him what depth he has and a sympathetic, instinctive identification with the underdog. He, his handlers, the media and the voters all know that’s the most interesting thing about him.

It also threatens to ruin him, as time and again, he faces questions about his past and flubs them with a series of lame non-denials, leading the public to the inescapable conclusion that sometime more than 25 years ago he did some kind of illegal drug. Odds are he’ll face the questions again, because Americans don’t like mysteries, and they don’t like unfairness. Everybody knows that hard-drinking, drunk-driving, angry C students from Houston’s Third Ward don’t grow up to become governor, after all — let alone president.

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More Joan Walsh.

Saturday, Sep 3, 2011 10:03 PM UTC

The “Saturday Night Live” of the West Bank

A hit satire show on the West Bank wrings laughs from the Occupation -- and gets canceled for humor that hits home

By Joel Warner

more
- All Share Services

(Credit: Joel)

The hit Palestinian TV satire show “Watan ala Watar” began its Aug. 14 episode with a sketch featuring Palestinian Attorney General Ahmad Mughani getting besieged by Palestinians filing lawsuits over “Watan ala Watar” making fun of them. One woman says in Arabic that the TV show hadn’t parodied her yet, but she’s sure it’s going to, so she wants to file suit preemptively. In the middle of the commotion, the frazzled Mughani, played by “Watan ala Watar” co-creator Imad Farajin, gets a phone call: “Watan ala Watar,” it turns out, just made fun of him, too.

The sketch ends by showing Farajin and his “Watan ala Watar” colleagues one year later, silently clowning around, suggesting that even if Mughani and his government cohorts muzzle them, that won’t stop the comedy crew’s high jinks.

Those high jinks have been a runaway success since “Watan ala Watar,” aka “Homeland on a String,” hit the airwaves in 2009, the first political satire show ever broadcast on Palestinian TV. The weekly 15-minute show’s three creators became local celebrities in the West Bank capitol of Ramallah, where they live and work, and episodes became a must-watch phenomenon, especially during Ramadan, when the show ratchets up to a nightly schedule. The holy month is akin to a U.S. “sweeps” period, with everybody at home by the TV. Last year, a local polling organization found that 60 percent of those in the West Bank and Gaza who’d seen “Watan ala Watar” actively approved of it — far higher approval ratings than those of either Fatah or Hamas, the two major political parties.

From the start, the show enjoyed a surprising amount of editorial freedom, considering that it aired on state-run television in the Middle East. “We told officials there would be one condition: no censorship,” says the show’s 30-something co-creator Manal Awad, who dresses in stylish, modern clothes and speaks English with a heavy British accent, courtesy of her time in London where she got a master’s degree in theater directing.

Palestinian officialdom agreed, allowing the show to air a sketch in which progress on an Israeli peace deal is announced by Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas — that is, Mahmoud Abbas the 13th, at a time 500 years in the future. Hamas, the Islamist party governing the Gaza Strip, received its share of knocks, too. One skit featured an Islamist judge making eyes at a male courtroom reporter. While Hamas’ Ministry of Information has called “Watan ala Watar” “an example of black propaganda,” the show has long enjoyed the blessing of the Palestinian Authority. Yasser Abed Rabbo, one of President Abbas’ closest advisors and head of Palestine TV, even played himself on the show.

Most promising of all, during this year’s Ramadan, “Watan ala Watar” had competition: “EscotChat,” a new sketch comedy show that aired 20 minutes later. “Five years from now, you will find comedy clubs and comedy series here, and not just ‘EscotChat’ and ‘Watan ala Watar,’”says Ihab Al-Jarere, “EscotChat’s” creator.

“Watan ala Watar,” it seemed, was helping Palestinians ascend the Middle Eastern comedy ladder, the unofficial scale in which Egyptians are considered to be the funniest of the funny and the Jordanians the exact opposite. (As one Palestinian joke goes, “Have you heard the one about the Jordanian businessman? Every morning before work he puts on his shirt, tie and angry face.”)

But then, two days after “Watan ala Watar’s” skit about the attorney general sketch aired, Palestine dropped a few comedy rungs closer to Jordan. Mughani, in a move reminiscent of the skit itself, pulled the show off the air.

It had told one controversial joke too many — and Mughani and his cronies weren’t the only ones not laughing. Recently, the show had diversified its subject matter, turning its satirical gaze upon Palestinian society itself. “We criticize all the governments, Hamas and Fatah, but they haven’t changed since we started,”says Awad. “We needed new figures to criticize.”

That’s why in one recent sketch, the show took on the local medical industry’s outdated practice of settling malpractice issues outside of court with informal payoffs, depicting a doctor and a grieving mother bargaining over a dead baby as if haggling over prices at the market. Another episode satirized the shabbiness of Palestinian Authority police. In the skit, officers on the lookout for drunk drivers couldn’t afford breathalyzers, so they’re forced to smell the scofflaws’ breath — and get drunk themselves off the fumes.

Those jokes didn’t go over so well. While local politicians had been fair game (maybe because in territories still controlled by Israel, the Palestinian Authority doesn’t have much authority at all), the Palestinian elite apparently was not. The local police and the physicians’ union filed grievances, and “Watan ala Watar’s” creators say that for the first time ever, officials censored them. Meanwhile, newspaper opinion pieces called the show a disgrace, and somebody hacked the TV show’s Facebook page, causing it to lose 40,000-plus fans.

Then, on Aug. 16, the attorney general, noting the complaints, pulled the plug. “Watan ala Watar” hasn’t been on since, with “EscotChat” moving into its time slot. “I thought this season was going to be a really, really huge success,” sighs Awad between puffs of an ever-present cigarette. “I didn’t expect this really aggressive reaction against us.”

This wasn’t the only recent aggressive reaction to artistic rabble rousing in Palestine. In April, a masked gunman shot and killed Juliano Mer-Khamis, founder of the Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank, a murder that’s still unsolved. While Palestinians mourned his death as a national tragedy, some weren’t surprised: Mer-Khamis was a half-Jewish artist and activist who was always pushing the cultural envelope, staging versions of Animal Farm that featured boys and girls onstage together, wearing pig masks and criticizing the revolution. As Awad says of Mer-Khamis’ murder, “You can’t force new thoughts on people. Bit by bit, you have to work with them.” Maybe Awad and her colleagues had been guilty of the same mistake.

Do such developments suggest the people here aren’t yet ready to laugh at themselves? Is comedy in Palestine as stagnant as the peace process?

Far from it, in fact. There has always been humor in Palestine,” says Sharif Kanaana, a Palestinian folklore professor who’s been collecting local jokes since 1989, from the jubilant highs of the two intifadas (where many zingers involved street kids getting the better of Israeli soldiers) to the disillusioned lows in between. (A typical post-intifada joke goes, “Several heads of state meet with God and make requests for their people. To each, God says, “Not in your lifetime.” Then Yasser Arafat asks for his people’s freedom and God says, “Not in my lifetime.”) “It’s not just fun and entertainment,”says Kanaana. “It is a pan-human way of people expressing themselves.”

And in a place defined by absurdity — where the beach is a few miles away but people in the West Bank have to hopscotch though Jordan and Cyprus to get there — if Palestinians aren’t allowed to express themselves through laughter, what else do they have left?

That’s why the people haven’t taken “Watan ala Watar’s” shutdown lightly. Hundreds have signed on to Facebook campaigns such as “People against the decision to stop broadcasting Watan ala Watar,”and “People want Watan ala Watar,” and in Bethlehem, protesters marched against the decision.

Many officials agree with them. “This decision of the attorney general is bad news and, in my opinion, is wrong,” says Palestinian Authority spokesman Ghassan Khatib. “I think I speak for Prime Minister Salam Fayyad as well.” Politicians such as Fayyad are savvy enough to know that in a period where Middle Eastern dictators are falling left and right, now is not the time to crack down on free speech.

While “Watan ala Watar’s” shutdown could be bad news for the Palestinian Authority, it could end up being good news for the comedians behind the show. Headline-grabbing controversies, after all, are a comedian’s bread and butter. Awad hints that Watan ala Watar is already fielding offers from other media outlets, and the hubbub may even score the show attention in Israel. “I haven’t heard of them, but it’s a shame that they were shut down,” says David Kilimnick, an Israeli comic who owns the Off the Wall Comedy Basement club in Jerusalem. “I wouldn’t be against giving them a stage here.”

In the meantime, Palestinians can catch a glimpse of “Watan ala Watar” at the three comedians’ weekly live show at an upscale open-air restaurant in Ramallah. Two days after being pulled off the air, the trio took the stage there armed with timely material. As television news cameras rolled, the three apologized for being late. They said they had been detained at Attorney General Mughani’s house. “Watan ala Watar” may be muzzled by the authorities, but that’s not going to stop them from clowning around.

Joel Warner, who blogs for Wired.com and Psychology Today, is co-authoring a book about traveling around the world with a humor professor in search of what makes things funny. Find out more at Humorcode.com and on Twitter @HumorCode.

Continue Reading Close

Thursday, Dec 16, 2010 6:17 PM UTC

It’s still OK to hate Joe Lieberman

Sure, he's fighting to repeal "don't ask, don't tell." He's also still a sanctimonious troll

By Alex Pareene

more
- All Share Services

Joe Lieberman

It looks very much like “don’t ask, don’t tell” will finally be repealed, 17 years after the discriminatory policy was enacted. And it’s thanks, in very large part, to the tireless work of independent/”Connecticut for Lieberman” Sen. Joe Lieberman. Yep, Joe Lieberman, the single most annoying man in the United States Senate — the august home, since the days of our founders, of America’s most annoying citizens — was instrumental in righting a fundamental injustice. Andrew Sullivan has anointed him a “civil rights hero,” and barring some last-minute betrayal or successful Republican attempt to delay the vote until the New Year, he may actually earn the title.

But it’s still totally OK to hate the guy.

Seriously.

Seven months ago the guy introduced a bill that would automatically strip Americans of their citizenship if they were charged with “a terrorist act.” He named it “the TEA Act.” Why did he do that? Because he’s a political troll. Not in the “living under a bridge eating goats” sense, but in the old Usenet sense of someone who purposefully enrages and frustrates members of a community, while pretending to have no idea what he’s doing.

Joe Lieberman gets his kicks trolling the left — how else to explain why he nearly torpedoed the fragile healthcare reform process by blatantly reversing himself on the Medicare buy-in?

Liberals used to be told that while Lieberman was a hawk, he was a reliable liberal Democrat on domestic issues. That reliable liberal Democrat recently promised to fight to his last breath to protect the rights of our richest citizens to have smaller tax bills.

Even before Iraq, this was the guy who took to the Senate floor to ponder “the moral consequences for our country” of Bill Clinton’s misbehavior. He regularly flirted with banning “indecent” music and video games. Before Al Gore picked him as his running mate — whereupon Lieberman did all he could to sink the campaign from within, by throwing his debate with Cheney and repeating GOP talking points during the recount — Lieberman even voiced support for Social Security privatization.

That whole miserable history of sanctimonious opportunism aside, it’s true that Joe Lieberman has always proudly fought for the rights of gay and lesbians to serve openly in our armed forces.

While his opposition to “don’t ask, don’t tell” is one of the handful of positions Joe Lieberman hasn’t reversed himself on, his support for gays in the military is pretty much directly tied to his blood lust. Of course he wants gay people in the military — he wants everyone in the military, and he wants the military everywhere. He supports the right of every American to serve his or her country regardless of race, creed, color or sexual orientation, and he also supports making those brave young heroes invade and occupy the entire Middle East, forever.

So you’re still OK hating the guy.

Continue Reading Close

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Wednesday, Sep 1, 2010 4:01 PM UTC

Maureen Dowd phones in world’s worst Obama speech reaction column

The New York Times columnist talks about the new Oval Office carpet, and makes ancient Al Gore jokes

By Alex Pareene

more
- All Share Services

Maureen Dowd

Award-winning New York Times Op-Ed columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a political column about Barack Obama’s speech last night! Of course the column had to be finished in time for this morning’s paper, so it was obviously written in 10 minutes or so yesterday afternoon, before the speech was actually delivered. There is a joke about Al Gore and “earth tones” in the very first sentence of this column on Barack Obama’s speech about the Iraq war.

An earth tones joke. In the year 2010.

The “earth tones” thing was a completely fictional story invented, almost simultaneously, by the entire 2000 campaign press corps, because the narrative everyone had decided on was that Al Gore was a phony and a wacko weakling liberal loser. MoDo led the charge, and has clung to that caricature, despite its basis almost entirely on complete fabrications, ever since.

As far as I know Maureen Dowd has never acknowledged — let alone apologized for — her relentless, inaccurate smearing of Al Gore. (In 2007 she pretended to apologize, in the voice of Clarence Thomas, but I’m not sure she’s actually self-aware enough to get the real joke she ended up making.) And her blithe willingness to go back to the “earth tone” well illustrates both her lazy hackishness (it’s been a decade, Maureen) and her complete disregard for any truth beyond the idiotic fantasies she constructs about public figures.

That, as I said, is only the very first sentence.

The “earth tones” crack is because there was some utterly inane pseudo-news over the weekend about the Oval Office getting redone. Which, obviously, is a subject of much more interest to political opinion columnist Maureen Dowd than a “war,” because it is utterly inane pseudo-news.

So! She refers to the Oval Office as President Obama’s “redecorated man cave,” because “man caves” are a trend thing she read about, in the year 2005. She then throws in a gratuitous reference to the terrible, trashy taste of those awful Clintons, another Dowd pet topic.

And then the column ends with a dreadful series of Dowd’s trademark stupidly obvious, terribly out-of-date pop culture references. (“Cool Hand Luke.” “Jaws.” “Scarface.” “Body Heat.” Yes, “Body Heat.”)

Maureen Dowd is a Pulitzer-winning columnist.

Continue Reading Close

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Thursday, Oct 1, 2009 10:31 AM UTC

Reading “The Clinton Tapes,” thinking about Obama

The president and the historian provide a candid, intimate look at how the GOP became a nasty party of obstruction

By Joan Walsh

more
- All Share Services

I need a break from the rhetorical outrage beat. I was going to write about the Newsmax columnist who all but advocated a military coup to bring down Obama, then I was pondering a post about Rep. Alan Grayson’s claim that the GOP health reform plan amounts to if you get sick, “die quickly.” But I’m tired of overheated rhetoric right now, (plus the indefatiguable Alex Koppelman got to both stories first!) so I took refuge in Taylor Branch’s new book, “The Clinton Tapes.” I had planned to review it, but it’s almost 700 pages, and I have a day job. If I took the time to read it and then write about the whole thing, it would be weeks before I’d get it done — and I think the book has insights that are supremely relevant to today.

So I thought I’d try to blog my review, over several days, and ask for your help, if you’re reading the book. Every few days I’ll write about what I am learning, and anyone who’s reading, or curious, can participate in comments. (We could do the same thing with “Going Rogue” next month, but it would probably take us about an hour.)

I have to start by saying Taylor Branch’s trilogy, “America in the King Years,” is my favorite work of history. He brought the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. alive for me. And to see my favorite civil rights historian — so far, there are some up-and-comers that deserve a look, too! — grappling with the president who, until Obama, thought and did more about civil rights than any president before him, well, it’s a thrilling combination. The book opens with the pair believing they are fulfilling the movement they’d worked for as young men, convinced Clinton can do so much to advance King’s goals, though we know that eventually politics got in the way. Still, it’s important to remember that civil rights was the mission that animated Clinton’s, and Branch’s, passion for politics.

One hundred pages in, here’s what’s fascinating. First: Serendipitously, Branch started his private, taped talks with Clinton nine months into the Clinton presidency, in October, roughly where Obama is now, the better to focus you on the parallels and differences in their first year. I am not privy to the secrets of the Obama White House, but Branch brings the reader directly into the rooms where a red-eyed, exhausted Clinton sits talking late into the night about the challenges he faced in Mogadishu, Bosnia, Haiti and Iraq (remember how he bombed a weapons facility to retaliate for an attempt on President Bush’s life, so W. wouldn’t have to start a war!); the disappointment of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and the thrill of the short-lived Israeli-Palestinian peace accords, signed just eight months into his presidency; his failure to get a stimulus bill passed (thanks to Democratic turncoats and Republican opponents); the early work on healthcare reform (and that 1,342 page bill) and the controversial NAFTA.

Reading it all, your head and heart hurt for Obama. We know our presidents have to juggle multiple crises, that’s the job, but the way Branch depicts the pace of it, and the toll it took on Clinton (who still found time to help Chelsea with her math homework), well, it made it real. I got tired just thinking about it. I am probably going to be a little easier on Obama in the weeks to come.

There are some wonderful windows on policy triumph and disappointment: He depicts a stormy but funny meeting of Democratic senators to tell Clinton why they’ll block any liberalization of policy on gays in the military. Robert Byrd leads off fulminating about the immorality of homosexuality, and Clinton tries to head him off by noting that adultery is immoral (ahem) but we don’t dismiss military folks for cheating on their spouses. Sam Nunn raised the unit cohesion argument (there was a lot of discussion of those close quarters, especially on Navy ships!). Clinton observes Sen. Ted Kennedy on the sidelines: “I couldn’t tell if Teddy was going to start giggling or jump out the window” as the talk turned to the bawdy, omnisexual practices of ancient Greek and Roman warriors.

But at the end of the day, Clinton said, he was surprised by the fact that he couldn’t tell which of the opponents truly believed it was bad to have gays in the military (or anywhere else); all they discussed was the politics of the proposal. That theme would recur. Clinton was the consummate horse-trader, no steely ideologue, but even he was surprised at the extent to which politics trumped policy, or even the silly idea of what’s right or what’s best for the country, in every single debate.

There are also eerie parallels with some of Obama’s battles this year. Clinton lost the stimulus battle that Obama (after compromising) won, doomed by zero Republican support and duplicitous Dems like Oklahoma’s Chuck Boren, who kept insisting he needed the bill to be bipartisan. (Hello, Max Baucus!) The utter hypocrisy of the GOP is well traced back to 1993, when they fought an anti-deficit bill that would have cut spending and raised some taxes. They’ve been the party of no for 16 years, even switching sides to say no, cynically, to completely opposite ideas: They were against shrinking the deficit when the Dems were for it; now they’re suddenly worried about deficit spending (after eight years of Bush budget-busting) when Dems are trying to spend money on the economy and healthcare, and not merely war and bailing out Wall Street and banks.

Branch is mystified by Clinton’s strange passivity with the press — he just accepted that they’re against him, and he put none of his considerable charm and charisma behind the task of courting them, unlike the young president he so admired, John Kennedy. The funniest scene in the first four chapters comes during an interview with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner and political correspondent William Greider. Greider comes in with a photo of a destitute American (who’d apparenty been in Clinton’s “Faces of Hope” campaign materials), and began guilt-tripping Clinton. Branch paraphrases:

Here is one of the countless poor people who looked to you for leadership; you were their last hope! Now they feel utterly disillusioned and abandoned. Can you look into this face and name one thing that you have done to help? Or one principle you won’t compromise? One cause you will uphold? One belief you would die for ? [In fact, the R.S. interview transcript shows that Greider said the man told him: "Ask him what he’s willing to stand up for and die on."]

Clinton “kind of went off on him,” he told Greider.

He told Greider he had done things already that no other president would do. He had raised taxes on the rich and lowered them for the working poor. He introduced the AmeriCorps service program, which Rolling Stone campaigned for … He was taking on the gun lobby and the tobacco industry. He had proposed fair treatment for gay soldiers. He was fighting for national health care coverage, and more, but liberals paid very little attention to any of these things because they were bitchy and cynical about politics. They resented Clinton for respecting the votes of conservatives and opinions of moderates. They wanted him to behave like a dictator because they didn’t really care about results in the world … He said he had pointed at Greider to tell him the problem is you, Bill Greider. You are a faulty citizen. You don’t mobilize or persuade, because you only worry about being doctrinaire and proud. You are betraying your own principles with self-righteousness.”

Clinton took a breath. “I did everything but take a fart in his face.”

In fact, the president was much more eloquent on tape than in his memory (although he might have misremembered what he said directly to Greider, or else Greider cut it). You can read, and listen to, the actual exchange on the Rolling Stone site. It’s fun.

Here’s Clinton’s retort, verbatim, with some narration from R.S.:

The president, standing a foot away from Greider, turned and glared at him. Clinton’s face reddened, and his voice rose to a furious pitch as he delivered a scalding rebuke — an angry, emotional presidential encounter, the kind of which few have ever witnessed.

“But that is the press’s fault, too, damn it. I have fought more damn battles here for more things than any president has in 20 years, with the possible exception of Reagan’s first budget, and not gotten one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press, and I am sick and tired of it, and you can put that in the damn article.

“I have fought and fought and fought and fought. I get up here every day, and I work till late at night on everything from national service to family leave to the budget to the crime bill and all this stuff, and you guys take it and you say, ‘Fine, go on to something else, what else can I hit him about?’ So if you convince them I don’t have any conviction, that’s fine, but it’s a damn lie. It’s a lie.

“Look what I did. I said that the wealthy would have to pay their fair share, and look what we did to the tax system. I said that I’d give working families a break, and I did. People with modest incomes, look what’s going to happen. Did I get any credit for it, from you or anybody else? Do I care if I get credit? No.

“But I do care that that man has a false impression of me because of the way this administration has been covered. It is wrong. That’s my answer. It is wrong. I have fought my guts out for that guy, and if he doesn’t know it, it’s not all my fault. And you get no credit around here for fighting and bleeding. And that’s why the know-nothings and the do-nothings and the negative people and the right-wingers always win. Because of the way people like you put questions to people like me. Now, that’s the truth, Bill.”

[At this point the president started to walk away but changed his mind and came back, still mad as hell.]

“That’s why they always win. And they’re going to keep winning until somebody tells them the truth, that this administration is killing itself every day to help people like them and making some progress. And if you hold me to an impossible standard and never give us any credit when we’re moving forward, then that’s exactly what will happen, guys like that will think that. But it ain’t all my fault, because we have fought our guts out for ‘em. And the bad guys win because they have no objective other than to win. They shift the blame, they never take responsibility. And they play on the cynicism of the media.

“That’s not what I do. I come to work here every day, and I try to help that guy. And I’m sorry if I’m not very good at communicating, but I haven’t gotten a hell of a lot of help since I’ve been here.”

Let me make you read one part of that quote again, because you could be talking about the Obama administration’s dilemma in 2009:

“That’s why they always win. And they’re going to keep winning until somebody tells them the truth, that this administration is killing itself every day to help people like them and making some progress. And if you hold me to an impossible standard and never give us any credit when we’re moving forward, then that’s exactly what will happen, guys like that will think that. But it ain’t all my fault, because we have fought our guts out for ‘em. And the bad guys win because they have no objective other than to win. They shift the blame, they never take responsibility. And they play on the cynicism of the media.”

The bad guys win because they have no objective other than to win. Sixteen years later, it’s just as true. After opposing efforts to censure Rep. Joe “You lie!” Wilson, Republicans are trying to censure Rep. Adam Grayson (whose rant maybe went over the top,) even though Rachel Maddow assembled a string of video clips showing at least a half-dozen Republicans depicting Democratic healthcare plans as an effort to get Americans to die, drop dead, be killed, you name it, by any means necessary. A lot of my liberal Twitter friends were over the moon about Grayson’s string of bold remarks, and while part of me enjoyed turning the tables on the lying ideologues, part of me thinks Democrats win when they stick to facts and focus. And part of me is laughing at that naive part of me right now.

Wait, I said I was going AWOL on the rhetoric war. I tried. It’s going to be a fun book. Stay tuned. Tell me what you think.

Continue Reading Close

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More Joan Walsh.

Monday, Aug 11, 2008 9:38 AM UTC

I’m so angry, it’s time to change

Ever since the 2000 elections I've been angry -- not just at the government but at all of us Americans.

By Cary Tennis

more
- All Share Services

Dear Cary,

The past few years my personal life has taken a nosedive. I think the biggest factor is this anger I’ve got inside, which frequently prevents me from socializing and meeting new people (or just having a good time with people). Basically I’ve become a very grumpy middle-aged man.

This all basically started after the 2000 election. By now, I feel justifiably disgusted by the Bush administration and his supporters of course, but it’s bigger than this. I also feel my fellow Americans the past two decades or so have been awash in gleefully/mindlessly practicing the seven deadly sins, of which I believe ignorance should be added as the eighth.

Anyway, I know some people go to anger management therapy but I’m not sure that is for me. You associate that type of therapy with people who have snapped, people who have abused people physically as well as verbally. My anger is merely my own; I don’t lash out; I just despair, because I know lashing out would cost me (my job, family, friends).

BTW, I have been on Prozac for about 15 years for mild chronic depression. Normally I feel like Prozac has been good for me, keeping away the blue days and making my skin thicker. I also exercise a lot, running three times a week and playing soccer, but lately I’m pissed off even after a good workout! I eat pretty well and drink moderately. But lately I’m thinking my chemistry is not right (though dropping the antidepressant sounds very risky).

Can you or Salon readers offer any advice? I fear I am on a path to becoming an urban hermit, joylessly working toward retirement, and maybe not giving a toss when I get there.

Anger Issues

Dear Anger Issues,

Some of us who think of ourselves as liberal, rational, freethinking, freedom-loving patriots have a special problem with anger. We are deeply affected by what we see going on in our country. We see a symphony of outrage heaped upon outrage; we see the brazenness of it, its roots in years of secret plotting; we perceive intricate patterns in its serpentine, many-tentacled, conspiratorial vastness; we see our sacred precepts violated, sacred vows trashed; we jeer the garishly painted faces of evil as they trot onstage, and our jeers do not seem to be heard and this compounds our outrage; we join our compatriots in outrage, and our righteous anger grows.

We think our anger is justified. The abuses are so obvious, the perpetrators so shameless, the crimes so awful and historic. Who would not be angry? How could anger be our problem?

But our anger is our problem. At historic moments like this, we are called to come up with something better than anger.

If you are not sure whether anger management classes are for you, then the intelligent thing to do is to go to a few sessions and see what methods are being used. Fearlessly investigate and make an honest assessment. If it appears that others have benefited from these methods, consider how you might adapt those methods to your own situation. Your situation may not be as dire as theirs. Use what is useful. Leave the rest. Participants in the workshop are likely to be at different stages in their anger. Some may have lashed out physically. Some may have suffered legal and financial consequences. Others may just be curious, or feel that they are not skillful enough in their management of anger. You may learn from all of them. And you may have things to teach them as well.

By beginning in this individual way, we have a chance to demonstrate the collective superiority of another approach. The country’s response to 9/11 was a response of anger, as if anger would suffice. The country responded to a cunning, devastating blow with brute anger and was led into a trap. We responded as the enemy expected, with blind, misguided, disproportionate violence, like the one-eyed Cyclops stumbling with rage, outwitted in the cave by a nimble Ulysses. If Enlightenment ideals are to prevail over religious tyranny once again, anger will not suffice. We must be more cunning, more devastating, wiser, more full of resolve, better controlled, more far-thinking, more strategic. We must be better statesmen, better orators, better historians.

When angry we cling to what we feel will shield us and we drop what we sense is a burden or an encumbrance. Collectively, as a nation, in response to the 9/11 attacks, it could be said that we clung to our pride, our feelings of masculine superiority and our addiction to ease and consumption; we held on to our simplicity of feeling, our belief in our goodness, our woundedness. And we dropped our love of ideas, our belief in ideas, our faith in a future of law and reason, our reliance on intelligent pragmatism, our unshakable reliance on constitutional principle.

We dropped what we needed and clung to what was useless. Now we are in a pickle.

Those of us who saw this happen feel a sputtering rage. But we must not fall into the trap again. We must work as individuals to let go of our anger so that collectively we can think more clearly and see what is before us.

Letting go of anger is hard. It’s like letting go of money. We give up, we pay, we sacrifice what we have held dear, but we bring home peace of mind in a big shiny box with a bow on it. What could be more American than that?

But seriously, in seeking peace of mind, it can be most difficult to let go of the anger we think is justified.

So I do hope you will look into these anger management sessions. But you can go far beyond that. You have much to gain by working with your anger. It may be the doorway to a new way of thinking and living.

Get on the mailing list for Cary Tennis Books.

The Best of Cary Tennis

“Since You Asked,” on sale now at Cary Tennis Books: Buy now and get an autographed first edition.

What? You want more advice?

Read more Cary Tennis in the Since You Asked directory.

See what others are saying and/or join the conversation in the Table Talk forum.

Ask for advice. Letter writers: Please think carefully! By sending a letter to advice@salon.com, you are giving Salon permission to publish it. Once you submit it, it may not be possible to rescind it. So be sure. If you are not sure, sleep on it. You can always send tomorrow. Ready? OK, Submit your letter for publication.

Or, just make a comment to Cary Tennis not for publication.

Or, send a letter to Salon’s editors not for publication.

Continue Reading Close

Cary Tennis writes Salon's advice column, leads writing workshops and creative getaways, publishes books, plays guitar, performs in art galleries, writes an occasional newsletter and tweets as @carytennis.

Send me a letter! Ask for advice!

Letter writers please note: By sending a letter to advice@salon.com, you are giving Salon permission to publish it. Once you submit it, it may not be possible to rescind it. So be sure.