Round Two
A year after they mixed it up in these pages over the president's job performance, loyal Bushie Mark McKinnon and die-hard Democrat Paul Begala step back into the ring to argue over tax cuts, the war on terror, and the prospect if Al Gore in '04.
(Page 2 of 3)
Big Mac,
It’s stunning and scary. You’ve failed my sanity test. You know Bush, you work for him, and you even presumably voted for him, yet you can’t think of anything about him or his policies with which you disagree. Wasn’t it William Wrigley who said that if two people agree on everything, one of ‘em ain’t necessary?
You’d think that if Bush would be good at anything, it would be inheriting things. Apparently not. He inherited the strongest economy in history. Now 2.2 million Americans who had jobs on the day W. stole the election are out of work. He inherited a Middle East peace process that brought the parties to the brink of lasting peace. Today, the Holy Land is ablaze. He inherited a Western Hemisphere that had turned squarely in the direction of freedom and democracy. Then he backed an anti-democratic military coup in Venezuela, with one administrative official actually saying it was okay to depose a freely elected leader because “legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of the voters.” I have to hand it to you, Mac. You guys have chutzpah. I suppose winning the vote of a Supreme Court your daddy helped pick is more legitimate than winning a free election?
Still, as you well know, I was pulling for him, rooting for him, supporting him after September 11. Like most Americans, I turned a blind eye to his frighteningly shaky performance that day. While some pointed out the stark contrast between Rudy Giuliani’s courage in risking his life to rush to the Twin Towers and Bush’s panicked public statements, his hiding in a bunker in Nebraska, and his staff’s lying that Air Force One had been under attack, I bit my tongue. But when you and your gang brandish Bush’s poll numbers like a bloody shirt, when Karl Rove tells Republicans to make political hay out of the deaths of thousands of Americans, I have to call you on it.
In those quiet moments when you’re honest with yourself, you know that more than half a year since W. bragged we’d drag bin Laden to justice “dead or alive,” Osama is laughing his tail off and W. is too embarrassed to mention him anymore. (Is there something in the Bush genes that makes them incapable of finishing off the bad guys? I seem to recall Poppy telling us Saddam Hussein was another Hitler.)
W. was right to tell the American people about the evil of Al Qaeda. And when he finally found his voice reading the speech y’all wrote for him to the joint session of Congress, I cheered as loud as anyone. But Bush has squandered his moral authority by refusing to stand up to the Saudi oil sheiks who some believe fund terror; he’s shifted his focus away from the long twilight struggle to cripple Al Qaeda in favor of finishing what Poppy started in Iraq; and he’s systematically alienated every ally we need to win the war.
So you can bash Al Gore all you want. He is a highly qualified man who ran a bad campaign. Bush was an unqualified man who ran a good campaign. If Gore had had you on the payroll, he’d have won by so much that even Thief Justice Rehnquist couldn’t have gotten away with stealing it.
Scientists at UT are working on an antidote for your Bush Kool-Aid, Mac. Until then, hang on.
Pablo
Pablo,
I love your passion, but you need some medication. Is it cable television that’s responsible for your hysteria? (By the way, congratulations on the Crossfire gig. No offense to Bill Press, but he was a little like watching a human Quaalude. On the other hand, you and Carville may turn the show into a pundit version of the WWF. That would probably be good for CNN’s anemic ratings.)
I can easily think of policies on which the president and I disagree. But you know what? Unlike so many folks in the Clinton administration, I don’t air my disagreements in public. What little counsel I have to offer the president is shared privately with him, not the media. And he is always an open and honest audience. In fact, he likes to hear contrary opinions, and I believe I was hired in the first place because I often bring a different perspective to the discussion. But when my commander in chief makes a decision, I salute and shut up.
Anyway, Paul, you have selective amnesia. One of the major differences between this administration and the last one is the degree of loyalty between the president and his staff and friends. Clinton was not loyal to those who served him (think Zoe Baird and Webster Hubbell, to name just a few). And, not surprisingly, Clinton had few true loyalists. You were one of the only ones, Paul. It was you who stood up on television and defended President Clinton throughout the Monica Lewinsky affair. When everyone in the country knew the truth, you stood your ground and defended the indefensible, even after you discovered the president had lied to you. Why? Because you were loyal. You put his interests above yours. A rare and admirable quality, Paul—a quality worth emulating, and I’m trying. So if you want to criticize me for being loyal to the president, look in your own rearview mirror.
On the Middle East: What is your tidy solution to a problem that no one has been able to resolve for more than fifty years, including your ex-boss? I won’t point out his failings in this department because I think he made a valiant effort, as I believe President Bush is doing now. There’s no magic wand that any American president is ever going to be able to wave over the Middle East.
Your interpretation of Karl’s remarks is totally inaccurate. I was there. All he said was that if the president was doing a good job on the war on terrorism, Republicans should use the issue in their campaigns. Odd that you would criticize this rather obvious strategy, because to be morally parallel, you’d be compelled to argue that it would be wrong for Democrats to use the war as a campaign issue if it weren’t going well. And yet in the same breath you proceed to attack the president on the war on terrorism! You didn’t even let a paragraph break get in the way of your collision in logic.
Here are some late-breaking poll results about which there is little disagreement: Sixty-two percent of the country believes Al Gore looks better without his beard. Ninety-two percent believes the beard looks better without Al Gore.
Kumbaya,
McKinnon
Big Mac,
We’re talking past each other. Nothing makes me prouder than for you to see me as the gold standard for loyalty. I’ve never regretted my loyalty to President Clinton, and I’ll be there for him until the end. And so I respect and admire your loyalty to your man.
But there’s a difference between blind loyalty and just plain blindness. I’m not talking about picking a public fight with your boss or undermining his agenda. I’m talking about admitting mistakes, acknowledging faults, and taking steps to correct flaws. Can it be that in a year and a half Bush has made no mistakes? There’s a steep learning curve in the West Wing, and if you pretend you’ve never made a mistake, you’re not exactly on the right side of that curve. Nothing could be more arrogant than to assume the most difficult job in the world and refuse to admit you’ve made even a single mistake. And Bush has never acknowledged that he’s made even a single mistake as president. Stunning.
Let me help you out. Perhaps the cardinal sin of the Bush Era has been a slavish devotion to corporate America. When the big money boys say, “Jump!” W.’s in the air before he asks, “How high?” Well, it was a mistake for Bush to endorse handing back fifteen years worth of taxes to corporate America. Enron alone would have pocketed $254 million of our money from this bailout of big bidness.
My Library
