More Gerson Douchebaggery

Today Michael Gerson hosts a pity party for his old boss, George Bush, in his column in the Washington Post. Apparently everyone has been unfair to Bush, who has "a deeper decency" then we all give him credit for.

Boo frickin' hoo.

Hey Mr. Gerson, has Bush done anything to stop the torture his administration authorized? Is Guantanimo Bay still open? How dare you say a man who would allow innocent people (most of the people picked up in sweeps and sent to Gitmo) be denied rights affirmed in the Geneva Conventions and by U.S. law, and then describe the man who should be ultimately responsible as decent by any measure.

Tell that to the child who lost his mother to an errant bomb in an unnecessary war. Or tell the child whose father was tortured at Abu Ghraib that Bush took some unfair hits from the press and has a low approval rating. I expect (and hope) that kid would hit you with the sole of his shoe.

Gerson sites Bush's AIDS initiative. I'll give Bush credit for his increased aid, though it should be noted that the elimination of any kind of birth control and the abstinence only bent blunted what could have been a truly great achievement. I'll give Bush credit for his willingness to work with the G-8 on fighting malaria, too.

Gerson says that my image is Bush is so skewed that I cannot accept his portrait of this deeply decent man. He writes, "That is, perhaps, understandable. But it means little to me. Because I have seen the decency of George W. Bush."

Fine. But Gerson's also been on Bush's payroll. Perhaps he can't understand that a short list of compassionate acts does not erase a much longer list of incompetent, callous, and even cruel ones. Perhaps there is some threshold of charity that blots out war crimes, but I'm not sure what that would look like, and Bush's record doesn't come close.

Mr. Gerson, rumor has it that Nero played his lyre and sang songs while Rome burned, but one historian claims that wasn't true. He says Nero may have started the fire, but then he did a great job rebuilding the city. When the people got angry about the tax increases needed for all the rebuilding, Nero found some Christians to use as scapegoats, and had them thrown to the dogs, crucified, or burned. But his urban renewal plans were nice, and after the fire he let some of the homeless live in his palaces, so, I guess by your standard, he had "a deeper decency". If only he'd had a fan like you to rewrite history for him.

So this is what we're in for?

Bill Kristol is almost always wrong, but I respect him more than I respect Micheal Gerson, former Bush employee and steadfast Bush boot-licker over at the Washington Post. Maybe I should start a list of people who deserve less respect than Bill Kristol. Think of it as the Razzie of political punditry.

Today Michael Gerson tries to write an op-ed saying we should all support the new President-elect because it's important to have a president we all see as legitimate. He wants us to put partisanship aside. I know he wants to be a part of the historic moment, and probably also wants to jump from the sinking ship (too late!) but the piece is a mess of hypocrisy and faulty reasoning.

At one point he writes: "Liberals have perfected this machinery of disdain over the past few years."

But in the same post Gerson criticizes partisanship and describes theories about criminality and deception from the Bush administration "lunatic". This is Gerson's attempt at magnanimity and bi-partisanship in the name of country.

As the kids would say: Epic Fail.

Sometimes calling a liar a liar is not partisan. Calling a criminal a criminal is not necessarily bitter or ideological. And treating deception and criminality with disdain is entirely appropriate.

Would Gerson disagree? Depends on the party participating in the deception or criminality.

Is Bill Kristol ever right?

Jon Stewart once asked, "Oh Bill Kristol, are you ever right?" I'm reluctant to believe anyone can be consistently wrong; the whole even-a-broken-clock-is-right-twice-a-day theory. But William Kristol might be a clock that's just off by enough to be wrong all the time. Today, in his latest column for the NYTimes (a paper his own conservative friends consistently mock) he tries to take a populist tack, arguing that Americans are not stupid or uninformed. At first, he had me wondering if, for once, he was on to something. Considering Obama's poll numbers, for a moment I thought he might be vying for a position in the conservatives-attacking-conservatism movement we're going to hear a lot from over the next few years. Instead, he tried to make a case for Joe the (well, not really a) Plumber. Seriously, Bill, I think Jon Stewart may have you pegged.

I know the anger over Obama's clumsy "spread the wealth around" comment must have lit a fire under dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, but if Joe the Plumber really is one of the intelligent and informed electorate Kristol is talking about, then he could probably hear the fact that both candidates are talking plenty about spreading wealth around. At the last debate, Joe's debate, McCain, after deriding any spreading of wealth, and after proposing a spending freeze, talked at length about his $5000 tax credit for health coverage. That's spreading the wealth. If Americans are intelligent and informed, they know that. They also know that it won't cover the cost of most of their care now, let alone when they are old, so it amounts to spreading around the wealth, but doing so ineffectively. That's what Americans, the intelligent and educated ones, are sick of. We don't dislike the conservative's line on free market economics, even if we disagree and even when it proves intellectually bankrupt as it has these last few weeks, nearly as much as we dislike their penchant for consistent, ideologically driven mismanagement of government. Of course they think government is bad: they do their best to make it so every chance they get.

Kristol not only threw down with some Latin etymology, tracing the root of "Vulgar to "Vulgaris", but he even quoted Horace. I'm not sure if he was trying to show that conservatives are educated elites, or if he was trying to say the "common people" could appreciate this linguistics lesson, but either way it felt condescending and not particularly illuminating. Then, he put to rest any misconception that a nuanced study of history might inform his politics by writing: "Most of the recent mistakes of American public policy, and most of the contemporary delusions of American public life, haven’t come from an ignorant and excitable public. They’ve been produced by highly educated and sophisticated elites."

No, they've been produced by highly educated and sophisticated elites who were willing to work for George W. Bush, who is neither. But then, the term "Sophisticated" comes from the Greek sophos or sophia, meaning of "wise" or "wisdom", and I'll bet there are a lot of hacks who worked for Dubya who are now reconsidering the wisdom of that career move.

I'm not sure if Kristol was telling conservatives to stop looking down on the common people, or if he was telling us common folks that the elites aren't to be trusted as much as a plumber who isn't a plumber, but one thing is abundantly clear: We can trust the vulgar masses a lot more than we can trust Bill Kristol.