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Thursday, September 02, 2004

Last night

Readers, I have to beg for your compassion and your forgiveness.  I’m sorry-- I’ve never had to do this before on this humble blog, and I’m not sure exactly how to go about it.  But those of you who’ve written this week to tell me that I’ve been a fool or a knave to jump to the Republicans-- what can I say?  You were right.  I was wrong.  I should have listened to you back on Monday.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let me explain.

By 8 pm we were all pretty buzzed here in the Garden.  “You can’t spell ‘win’ without ‘w’,” said Rich Lowry, to which I replied, “you can’t spell ‘whoop-ass’ without ‘w’ either!” Whereupon we gave each other those manly hands-over-head forearm-taps that actual athletes exchange when they do something manly.  The evening had started off with some light amusement-- our suite had a Kerry Pinata, and like all pinatas, this one was amazingly resilient, so we didn’t get to consume the goodies until Grover Norquist got out the blowtorch and pliers and got all medieval on its ass.  And you know what the goodies were? no-bid contracts! Boo-yeah!  For about two hours tonight I held in my hands the exclusive contract for the provision of electricity to Najaf.  “Nick, my son,” I thought, “your tuition is definitely taken care of-- and me, I’m thinking about Hawaii.” Those were good times!

Then George Pataki took the stage.  Pataki said the right words in the right order, but Pataki was not strong enough or hard enough.  Seriously.  He had this weird breathless delivery that ended every sentence up half an octave, and I kept closing my eyes and thinking, this has got to be Will Ferrell doing his impression of Harry Caray.  At one point he said “This is no ordinary time. This is no ordinary time. The stakes could not be higher. Fate has handed our generation a grave new threat to freedom. And fortune has given us a leader who will defend that freedom. This is no ordinary time.” Yeah, OK, I get the sense that this is no ordinary time.  But “fortune” has given us George Bush?  What’s that about?  That’s some weird, pagan-atheist stuff right there, “fortune.” I thought to myself, didn’t Pataki get the memo? The Almighty God Himself gave us George Bush.  Fortune had nothing to do with it.  “Fortune"-- that sounds like something Niccolo Machiavelli would say, and he was a wannabe foreign leader.  Screw these northeastern gay-friendly Republicans anyway-- they’re window dressing.  Or in Guiliani’s case, window cross-dressing!! Ha ha ha ha!!  That line made everybody in the suite laugh so hard, and they all toasted me with their fine Republican political-elite liquor.  Those were good times too!

Then came actor-Senator-actor Fred Thompson from the heart and soul of America, introducing the W. introductory video:  How do you tell the story of a presidency? he asked.  The story is the story of a man, which leads, inescapably, to the question of who he is.  Uh, what kind of narrative theory is this, I wondered?  “History throws ya what it throws ya, and you never know what’s coming,” Thompson said. Well, yeah, I guess, when that historical document full of historical information about al-Qaeda appeared out of nowhere on August 6, 2001, there was no way of knowin’ what was comin’.  But better not to dwell on that, I thought.

The warmup video was intense, though!  The highlight-- indeed, the very conclusion-- was Bush throwing that pitch at Yankee Stadium.  That pitch told me what kind of man he is!  Despite the fact that the President was encumbered by a Secret Service bulletproof vest, it was a good strong, hard and firm pitch, not a flippy or floppy or Frenchy kind of throw.  It was a heroic pitch, the very pitch that George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Winston Churchill might have thrown at Yankee Stadium.  And it was-- yes-- a strike, and surely Osama bin Laden noticed.  Oops!  Not supposed to mention Osama bin Laden.  Sorry, Karl!  Talk about missing the memo!  Won’t happen again, I told my new friends.

And then . . . and then . . . the man himself.  The thrower of strikes, the steel of spine, the President who has done more for human rights than any other President . . . Dubya!!  W.!!  43!!  I shouted myself hoarse.  We all did.

. . . and then, for the next half hour, I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. 

We have seen a shaken economy rise to its feet.

Why, why, why would Bush mention the economy at a time like this?  I thought the important thing was that he will grab terrorists by the throat.  All I wanted to know was whether he would rip out the terrorists’ jugular veins or tear their windpipes from their necks.  I didn’t want to hear about whether the economy was staggering under the eight count.

Since 2001, Americans have been given hills to climb, and found the strength to climb them. Now, because we have made the hard journey, we can see the valley below.

What does this mean?  We’re on top of the world?  Or is it all downhill from here?  And is that good or bad?  Is this the valley where we turn the corner?  Or did we already turn the corner before we climbed the hill?  Or maybe the hill was the corner?  Querulous, restive, scattered applause.

Then, some very strange family dynamics:

I am grateful to share my walk in life with Laura Bush. Americans have come to see the goodness and kindness and strength I first saw 26 years ago, and we love our First Lady.

I am a fortunate father of two spirited, intelligent, and lovely young women. I am blessed with a sister and brothers who are also my closest friends. And I will always be the proud and grateful son of George and Barbara Bush.

My father served eight years at the side of another great American-- Ronald Reagan. His spirit of optimism and goodwill and decency are in this hall, and in our hearts, and will always define our party.

Never mind the surrealist twins here.  I’m thinking, whoa, dude, not a word about your dad except that he served at Reagan’s side in that out-of-the-loopy way of his?  Hell, I can understand you not going into detail about Neil’s banking scandals and the whole Asian prostitution thing, sure, but “my father served eight years”?  Like the antecedent of “his spirit of optimism and goodwill and decency” is Ronald Reagan, and Poppy is left twisting in the syntactical wind? 

Yep, that’s the syntactical wind a-blowin’ through the Garden.  Screw Poppy-- he’s a loser, baby.  And here’s the next stuff.  Last night it was the fires of Zell, tonight it’s the gentle Zephyr of spring:

I believe every child can learn and every school must teach, so we passed the most important federal education reform in history. Because we acted, children are making sustained progress in reading and math, America’s schools are getting better, and nothing will hold us back.

Tepid applause.

I believe we have a moral responsibility to honor America’s seniors, so I brought Republicans and Democrats together to strengthen Medicare. Now seniors are getting immediate help buying medicine. Soon every senior will be able to get prescription drug coverage, and nothing will hold us back.

I remember back in 2002 when Howard Fineman was ridiculing Democrats as the party of prescription drugs.  And so does everyone else in Madison Square Garden.  Clap, clap, clap, we clapped.

I believe in the energy and innovative spirit of America’s workers, entrepreneurs, farmers and ranchers, so we unleashed that energy with the largest tax relief in a generation.

OK, fair enough-- America’s farmers and ranchers, freed from the fear that their $2,000,000-and-up estates would be taxed to death by the death tax, began to clear brush with a frenzy not seen since the days of Rutherford B. Hayes.  They unleashed all that energy.  Very good.  But where is this going?

If America shows uncertainty or weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy.  This will not happen on my watch.

The first thunderous applause of the night!  The Garden rocks!  We are so against the world drifting toward tragedy!!  We are the world-should-not-drift-toward-tragedy party!!  Four more years!

High-fives all around.  Here, we think, is where Bush will get hard and firm!  But then something odd happens.  Our man goes back to the workplace.

The times in which we work and live are changing dramatically. The workers of our parents’ generation typically had one job, one skill, one career, often with one company that provided health care and a pension. And most of those workers were men.  Today, workers change jobs, even careers, many times during their lives. And in one of the most dramatic shifts our society has seen, two-thirds of all moms also work outside the home.

Uh, run that by me again?  Once upon a time, workers had job security, health care, and a pension-- and most of them were men.  Now we conservatives have eroded all that shit, and women work too, so our evisceration of job security and health care and pensions should be balanced by the entry of women into the workplace?  Me no get.

At this point, I turned to Norquist, sitting over to my right, and said, “Grovernator, dude, this shit does not make sense.” Grover just gave me a look.  Little did I know what that look meant at the time!

Meanwhile, down on the floor, things just kept getting curiouser and curiouser.  Bush spoke of the “explosion of frivolous lawsuits that threaten jobs across our country.” Sure, those frivolous lawsuits have cost Americans approximately 1.8 million jobs since Bush took office, as we all know, but this is an awfully wonky point to make in an acceptance speech.  He said he’d “reform and simplify the federal tax code” and “increase funding for community colleges.” And that wasn’t all.  Looking out over the crowd with compassionate firmness, the President said:

As I’ve traveled the country, I’ve met many workers and small- business owners who have told me that they are worried they cannot afford health care. More than half of the uninsured are small- business employees and their families.

In a new term, we must allow small firms to join together to purchase insurance at the discounts available to big companies.

We will offer a tax credit to encourage small businesses and their employees to set up health savings accounts and provide direct help for low-income Americans to purchase them. These accounts give workers the security of insurance against major illness, the opportunity to save tax-free for routine health expenses, and the freedom of knowing you can take your account with you whenever you change jobs.

Whenever you change jobs? you know, like whenever someone moves your cheese, you can find new cheese and bring your health savings account with you!  Or whenever you decide to get outsourced, you’ll have the opportunity to save tax-free!  Speaking of which, what about Social Security?

We must strengthen Social Security by allowing younger workers to save some of their taxes in a personal account, a nest egg you can call your own and government can never take away.

Uh, we must strengthen Social Security by allowing people to opt out of it so that the government can never take away their money?  At this point I was tugging on Grover’s sleeve, trying to get him to explain this part of the speech to me, when suddenly the President said,

As we make progress, we will require a rigorous exam before graduation.  No longer will we tolerate an America in which students are not required to memorize the formula for the volume of a cone until the tenth grade-- in a new term, every American child will know that 1/3 pi r squared times h gives you the keys to an ownership society in which seven million people over the next ten years will be able to say, “this is the volume of my cone,” and we will lead an aggressive effort to enroll millions of poor children who are eligible but not signed up for the government’s volume-of-a-cone calculation programs. We will not allow a lack of attention or information to stand between these children and the geometry equations they need.

And then, to slap down all those skeptical liberal geometry teachers out there, Bush added, “anyone who wants more details on my federal geometry agenda can find them online.”

Cheers, cheers, and more cheers.  But when the cheers died down, Bush went off on this riff about how John Kerry wants to spend two quintillion dollars on government programs that tell people how to run their lives, and at that point, I had to poke Norquist again and say, “hsssst, Grovermeister man, this speech is seriously in the realm of Johnny Cochrane it-does-not-make-sense land.  Bush has got to talk about grabbing terrorists’ throats, m’fren’, and-- “

Readers, I never finished that sentence.  First, Grover turned to me, whistled for silence in the suite, and then took my tumbler of single-malt, walked slowly over to the wet bar, and ceremoniously dumped it in the sink.  Suddenly I felt a hand on my neck and a couple of hands in the small of my back, and before I knew it, four or five of my new friends were hustling me out of the suite, into the elevator, and right out one of Madison Square Garden’s service entrances on the 31st Street side.  Rich Lowry followed me down, roughly tossed my laptop and my no-bid Najaf contract to me, and said, “you should know that you’re now back on the Lynne List.  And if you blog about this, you French-fried flip-flopper, you can just forget about boarding an airplane for the next four years.”

So I never got to hear the part of Bush’s speech where he talked about “the protection of marriage against activist judges,” those black-robed fornicators who roam the land looking for innocent dogs and box turtles on whose tiny, innocent bodies they can slake their illicit thirsts.  And I think I was foraging for food outside the Post Office on Eighth Avenue when Bush spoke of our mission from beyond the stars to stand for freedom.  If someone could please tell me whether this mission was assigned to us by one of those newly-discovered Earth-like planets, I’d appreciate it.  But for now, I’ve got to find a comfortable doorway for the night.

Again, folks, I’m so sorry.  It’s been a rough week all round, and I apologize to my old friends in the effete arugula-eating liberal elite.  Please forgive me-- it was just so intoxicating being embraced by the real elite, being toasted around town as “the conscience of the left blogosphere” and being asked to do my “ah-agree-with-the-governor” impersonation of Al Gore.  Can I please come back?  I promise I’ll never be hornswaggled again. . . .

Posted by Michael on 09/02 at 08:42 PM
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