Check out Pierce's take on Andrew Card's quote about Bush as father. The article is far less shrill, more nuanced and rational, than this excerpt might lead you to believe:
...my old friend Andy Card said the single most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard from a representative of an elected government -- even a dubiously elected government like the current one.
Card is now the White House chief-of-staff, and it was he who had to interrupt the ensemble reading of The Pet Goat in order to tell George W. Bush that someone had flown airplanes into the World Trade Center, thus starting the clock on the now-famous Seven-Minute Glaze. Card was talking to the two delegations about that moment, clinging to the GOP talking points like a nun to her beads. The president “didn’t introduce fear into any of those young children or through the national media, to the American people,” explained Card. Then, he attempted to explain how the president feels about the 200 million-odd souls who are, after all, his employers:
“It struck me as I was speaking to people in Bangor, Maine, that this president sees America as we think about a 10-year-old child. I know as a parent I would sacrifice all for my children.”
Let us leave aside any discussion prompted by Card’s remarks that might uncomfortably contain the word “Fatherland.” Let us take him at his word -- namely, that the president of the United States looks at the world’s longest-standing free democratic republic and sees . . .
A middle-schooler.
I wish it hadn’t been Andy Card who gave us this peek behind the curtain, because I know him to be a sensible, decent person who wouldn’t have mouthed this lunacy unless he really meant it. If it had come from one of the wolverines in Karl Rove’s shop, it wouldn’t have been half as frightening. Nevertheless, what Card said perfectly encapsulates this administration’s approach to governance -- its fundamental contempt for democratic restraints and its hubristic insolence toward any limits on its political appetites. Our president is our Daddy. He will make his wars to keep us safe, and all we have to do is love him back, and do what he tells us to do. Go shopping. Go on happy vacations. Leave the decisions to Daddy and to Daddy’s friends. They run things so we don’t have to.
Can any principled conservative (which, alas, for the moment, leaves out John McCain) seriously maintain this argument? Can you imagine Barry Goldwater, or Ronald Reagan, or even Alexander Hamilton, for pity’s sake, endorsing this nonsense? Hamilton may have thought the “American people” to be an unthinking mob, and he may have been a little less willing to trust them than I’d have liked him to be, but, glorioski, he never looked upon them as children who must be sheltered and nurtured by their government. This isn’t politics. This is pious psychopathy run completely amok -- Peggy Noonan now d/b/a Lizzie Borden, Constitutional Scholar.
He goes on to discuss how the media covered the 2000 election as if the people of this country needed "closure" and couldn't stand one more instant of uncertainty (I remember the same thing in the run-up to the Iraq War, with the mainstream press corpse pining away for SOMETHING to happen -- let the bombs drop, let the blood start flowing, let the people start dying, we just can't stand all this waiting, waiting, waiting.... ):
It has its roots in the developed sense within the media and its audience that self-government consists mainly of the media’s ability to navigate from one disconnected episode to another -- which is why speakers at the Republican convention could cite both Richard Nixon and Reagan’s dubious finagling in Central America with impunity from the podium, secure in the knowledge that nobody would point out the obvious fact that Watergate and Iran-Contra were both way stations on the road leading to the bunker in which our government has stashed itself. The connective tissue of institutional memory has been allowed to wither to the point where both of those festivals of felonies seem as separate from one another as two sitcoms that premiered 16 seasons apart.
A telling insight into our current understanding of history. And a great research paper topic, by the way. There is much more, read the whole thing.
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