Union Square Station
Malone
5/9

All the Depth of a Roosevelt Dime

George W. Bush has disappointed the everyone-who-is-anyone smart set, apparently. The malingerers at the United Nations are so upset that they removed the United States from their Human Rights Commission. (Sudan, where slavery is practiced, is on the commission. What will be its job, proposing standards for slave housing?)

Europeans are upset with Bush for going forward with missile defense and for dropping the Kyoto global warming treaty like a cold potato. But the Euros know that missile defense has been on the cooker since the mid-1980s. And they know that the U.S. Senate put the kibosh on the Kyoto treaty four years ago. Have they been lying in wait for a conservative to affirm these stances?

Democrats all the way from Hollywood to Beverly Hills are upset that Bush thinks he's really the President -- they consider Martin Sheen their President -- and the news media is scandalized by his refusal to chase ambulances. The only "crisis" to arise on his watch so far is an energy crisis, and what fun is that? It's been done before, to death.

Perhaps the worst disappointment occurred after Bush struck a deal with Congress for a $1.35 trillion tax cut. Last year Tom Daschle carried on in his usual Uriah Heep manner against a proposed tax cut less than one-quarter that size. Now he says that if Bush thought that getting his tax plan through was a victory he, Daschle, would take that kind of victory any day. What awful thing would happen to Daschle if he had just said, "Yes, the President has gotten most of what he wanted, even though we opposed it." Why the need to talk like a low-level political hack?

George W's big problem is not that he's an inarticulate bumbler, as the media-comedy industrial complex likes to portray him. His problem is that he's a first rate buzz kill. He will not get out there and exploit the urgent calamities of everyday life. Bill Clinton would use them to keep the hair up on the back of the body politic. But instead of sounding daily alarms, Bush simply asks the foursome in front of him if he can play through so that he can get to some business that needs taking care of.

It's not that Bush is boring -- Jimmy Carter was boring -- it's that he isn't exciting. So far the biggest splash of his presidency came before he took office with the disputed election. After that it was waiting for Bill Clinton's last scandal to run its course through a few dozen news cycles. Since then it's been like the 1950s down at the White House. The only thing missing is black and white television.

Bush even declined to rush off to tearfully welcome home the U.S. fliers who were briefly held hostage by China. Clinton became orgasmic over such prospects.

If you enjoy truly rancorous piffle, check out what the bleeding riff-raff of the political gutter are posting to internet message boards. You will find an organized Orwellian hate effort seeking to do to Bush what its initiators imagine was done to Clinton (as if Clinton hadn't relentlessly stoked the firebox of his own misery). There's even a "pledge" of revenge making the rounds. It reads like it was composed by a psychiatric patient.

This hate begins at the belief that the election was stolen in complicity with a corrupt Supreme Court. It follows through by treating everything that Bush does as a combination of stupidity, venality, and bigotry.

The big problem for the poor cranks who are peddling this stuff is that Bush isn't Clinton. He doesn't have a left-handed approach to everything in his path. He doesn't have a grasping wife striding around the West Wing with a riding crop expression on her face. He doesn't have business partners and political associates for whom there is no such thing as an honest dollar. And up close Bush doesn't come off like a grifter working each moment as a potential score.

So the terrible disappointment with George W. Bush is metal hard, but with all the depth of a Roosevelt dime.

© Union Square Journal 2001

Previously by Malone...

Like Being Lakeside in the Adirondacks (05/08/01)

Get Off Him (04/04/01)

They Ran the White House Like a Chop Shop (02/28/01)

Hannibal: The Silence of the Critics (02/16/01)

Reagan's Two Terrible Mistakes (02/06/01)

The Return of the Hero (01/19/01)

The Hero of Chappaquiddick (01/11/01)

Real Millennium Strange (01/03/01)

Smoke 'em if you got 'em (12/21/00)

Union Square Station (12/11/00)

Union Square Station (12/3 back to 11/24/00)