Even a wallet FULL of these...

won't buy you a blowjob.


This post (cited in part here) on Steve Gilliard’s site got me thinking...

“You know, Bush doesn't scare me much. Because at heart he's a coward. He will never stand up to anyone who can possibly help him, even if they threaten to take the country down with them.

I don't scare easy, some nerves, but very little real fear.

Bill Frist scares the shit out of me.

If you've ever cared for small kids, you know the scariest thing they can do is the thing they do not know is dangerous, jumping on couches, running with scissors, picking up glass.

That's what I think about Bill Frist...”

And what that got me to thinking was, you know who would have made a great post-9/11 President?

Anybody.

Take my alcoholic sister-in-law, for example. Let her live through the September 2001 attacks, give her the most powerful military in the history on the Universe and tell her that the evil men that did the to us are right over there, and she would have done bang up job. So would the guy who used to make the best falafel in the North side. So would the Polish lady who empties out the trash can in my office building, and she speaks maybe ten words in English.

Quick jump: There’s a principle in marketing that I hope I’m explaining correctly called Credence Good Quality. It means there’s a feature of the product that the buyer or user cares about, but it has nothing to do with the actual product or how it performs when you use consume it. Like using child labor to make Nikes, has no effect on the actual shoe-ishness of the shoe, or how you wear or use it, but it might make you shun it just the same.

Anybody remember that up until 09/10/01 Bush was well on his way to join his Poppy in One Term Loserville? He was at that time just Product Bush –

Ingredients: peevishness, cowardice, feeble-mindedness, egomania, a trustifarian sense of absolute entitlement, complete detachment from and lack of comprehension of very basic issues. And throw in dry-drunk bellicose and grandiose, and its not a pretty picture.
Caution: May Be Harmful or Fatal if Swallowed.

09/11 and the aftermath did not change the basic composition of the man one iota, but it did allow Product Bush to mutate into Brand Bush, and Brand Bush was all about Courage and Decisiveness. Evidence showed that he and his team got every single thing utterly fucking wrong. And they callously pimped 9/11 to ram though every deranged Right Wing bullet point. Even post election his approval rating were showing that a majority of the country did (and does) think he's doing a bad job and the country's on the wrong track.

So what happened when Moderates bought "Brand Bush" in 2004? They bought safety and security -- not based on any objective competencies on Bush's part -- but based solely on the fact that he stood on the rubble.

That’s his “Credence Good Quality” and that is crucially important.

In the minds of the Moderates, that made the garden incrementally higher than the weeds (so to speak). In the minds of the Moderates, my drunk sister-in-law would have been instantly transmuted into an Infallible Goddess. It was all about who was standing on the rubble.

This isn’t a post-mortem on the 2004 elections. Suffice it to say that I was shocked, most people I know were shocked, that Bush won. We could not believe that so many Americans were so fucking hip-mo-tized that they were literally voting to rip their own throats out, and remarking at what a lovely lightheaded feeling the blood loss gave them.

Such people – deep in the Fear Trance – can’t be reasoned with as-is (but can be slowly coaxed out of it), however this is not a critique of 2004. There have been a trillion 1's and 0's spent on analysis, self-recrimination, slithering pessimism and so forth. The whole thing, every angle, and it boils out to this;

Bush won, but barely squeaked by, and had the run the most purely filthy, all out, shoot-the-wounded campaign in modern history to do it.
He is the C-n-C at a time of war, and still he barely squeaked by.
Rove had to go all-in on gay bashing.
He had to go all-in on virtually criminally slandering good men for honest disagreements.
Lie like a dog every time he opened his mouth.
Promise the Courts the Constitution and his first born to the Fundies for ritual slaughter...and they still just barely squeaked by.

I do not see 2004 as a cause for long-term despair: Rather 2004 was the high-water-mark of the Faustian Non-Aggression pact between two natural enemies: the No Government Plutocrats and the Nanny Government Theocrats. The Republican electoral "juggernaut" is a Jenga game, with no slack in the stack. It is a “Just In Time” coalition that can deliver the vote...but only if every step in the supply chain is executed to perfection.

And thus is exposed the single, corroded bolt that holds the whole Daemon Armada together: No one else can ever stand on the rubble.

The high-temperature recasting of Product Bush into Brand Bush is the Republican Party’s one big magic trick, and the magic is not fungible. Brand Bush is like Confederate Currency – it is only expendable at a particular time and place, and under particular circumstances.

Because the equation works in both directions: Bush needed Moderates AND Nut Jobs to win: lose either – even a little – and you lose it all. So 9/11 became the universal balm -- the Lamb's Blood -- with which every dirty Republican thing could be hosed down and immunized from criticism. And because 9/11 stunned enough Independents and Centrist Democrats like beeves on the slaughter line, Bush could lock down far more than his natural share of that vote, by having his proxies snipe and carpetbomb away at the opposition, and neutering all criticism by suckerpunching every honest critique.

Team Bush could focus on mining the Crazies because Brand Bush could command the loyalty of enough Moderates to let him win by a nose. But out of that came an increased willingness on the part of the GOP to let the Ultra’s drive the bus, to pander to them, and to play to them at every opportunity.

Enter Herr Senator Doktor Frist.

The delightfully fatal mistake that he and most of the rest of the GOP are making is mistaking a last-gasp quick-fix to the basic electoral arithmetic that dooms them over the long term as some Profound New Wisdom and new, winning doctrine: that that mining the bottom of the Nut Bucket is where to spend your political capital.

Like the Inchon invasion, or Hannibal coming over the Alps, this Republican strategy only works for Bush, and only work in 2004, and only works because of the completely unique set of circumstances that begin and end with his ability to hold enough moderate hands, while simultaneously sucking enough Fundy dick to squeak by.

And the only reason it worked was because Bush stood on the rubble --- and Herr Senator Doktor Frist did not.