So Bad, It Might Be Good

Prime-time White House press conference? That's never a sign that things are going smoothly on Pennsylvania Ave. Karl Rove must have been desperate to get those pictures of Dubya and Prince Abdullah holding hands off the airwaves. I watched a little of last night's tableau. I'm sure Bush hates doing a press conference, but I can't objectively assess whether he's had a good performance and achieved his aims with the thing, or not. Most people obviously don't see what I see: a guy getting inappropriately pissed off, at a bunch of people just doing their jobs, whom he (Bush) invited there to ask him questions in the first place. Maybe the conference did him some good, I sure can't tell.

GW Bush, Donald Rumsfeld ("Are we getting our ass kicked in Iraq? You bet."), Tom Delay, Bill Frist, Das Ahnuld, John Bolton, and more of my least favorite people, have all had a bad week, and that's good. Too good to believe, and so I won't believe it yet, not until Social Security is safe and the danger of a troglodyte getting lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court is past.

Being more of a rhetoric kind of a guy than a policy kind of a guy, in the flurry of bad news for the Pubbies I've been particularly transfixed by the Beltway sleight of hand by which the GOP has tried to redefine the term "nuclear option" as a threat from the Democrats. This is even more brazen than the White House's efforts to strongarm the media into calling them Social Security "personal accounts," rather than "privatization," the commonly accepted term of long standing.

Reality is, Trent Lott coined the term "nuclear option" for the threat of the GOP's eliminating the Senate filibuster on judicial nominations, and it's been perfectly well understood as the biggest mashie in the Republicans' golf bag. But Frank Luntz must be giving them an earful how the n-phrase is killing them in the polls.

As an aside, you think the Goopers do a collective headslap thinking of the Trent Lott debacle of two years ago? That Strom Thurmond birthday toast was a killer, less for the stain of racism it put on the GOP (eh, what's one more) than for the elevation of featherweight Bill Frist to the post of Senate Majority Leader. Say what you will about Lott, he would not paint himself into a corner the way Dr. Frist consistently does.

I don't see how a meat-eating Republican can go along with this namby-pamby stuff, these word games. How can they strut around Capitol Hill like committee room tough guys, then turn into wussies when they encounter the soccer moms? Embrace your inner bully, wingers. Besides, I thought the GOP was the party of national strength. They're real comfortable talking about the actual nuclear option, yet they get all squeamish about the parliamentary one? What, have they turned into Jackson Browne all of a sudden?

Most of all, I guess I hate being instructed in proper vocabulary by Dubya and his ilk. Listen, Mr. Preznit, don't tell me how to operate the English language, and I won't tell you how to fuck up the country.