http://www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/Buyer's_Remorse.htmlI don’t know about you, but I for one am getting sick and tired of all these right-wing hacks righteously and publicly jumping ship on the Bush administration and the national nightmare they’ve been so kind as to bequeath to us this last awful decade... pardon me if I reject this new line of garbage from the likes of Alan Greenspan and Sandra Day O’Connor. I liked the old line of garbage much better. Whatever else you could say about it, it reeked a lot less of rank hypocrisy.
The list of the deluded publicly waking up to what the regressive movement has wrought at home and abroad is long and seems to grow larger each month. Generally, the pattern is the same. Somebody who was highly instrumental in creating this Category 5 destructive force of nature decides that their conscience can’t quite handle the amp load anymore. So they go public with inside dope on the machine they previously had themselves helped to ram pall-mall into our bodies and our hearts. The White House smear machine then goes into hyper-drive, and the offending former-insider is derided as somehow mentally unbalanced or the equivalent, just like Rove did to McCain in South Carolina’s 2000 primary. Meanwhile, something (and, boy, wouldn’t we all like to know what) gets said behind the scenes, and next thing you know there’s some sheepish humiliating half-retraction. It pretty much always goes down that way.
John DiIulio provides an early example. An academic brought in to the administration to run the pander party charade of tossing electoral spoils to the religious right, DiIulio had already had enough by the end of 2002 and became perhaps the first administration insider to risk the Wrath of Rove by breaking ranks with this famously closed clan of mafia clones and their oath of omertà. His apostasy didn’t last long...In an interview published in Esquire, DiIulio made the ridiculous mistake of telling the truth about the operation inside the White House, and even doing so with a well-deserved nasty little rhetorical flourish: “There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus”, he said. “What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”...Mayberry Machiavellis!! Oooooohh, I like that! But then, of course, DiIulio got The Call (“Please hold for the Vice President of the United States”). Next thing you know, it’s this from his spokesperson: “John DiIulio agrees that his criticisms were groundless and baseless due to poorly chosen words and examples. He sincerely apologizes and is deeply remorseful.” Hey, that’s a good one too! DiIulio goes overnight from “everything, and I mean everything” to “poorly chosen examples”. It’s a bit hard to imagine how one could choose poorly when everything you could possibly choose from (and I mean everything) was in the same category, but perhaps those photos the White House has of him doing strange things with cute and furry little animals or the like would explain his sudden and radical change of heart. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence.
MULTIPLE OTHER EXAMPLES GO HERE--SEE LINK!
Still, though, the all-time prize for hypocritical inanity has to go to Sandra Day O’Connor, at least if Jeffrey Toobin has portrayed her accurately in his new book, “The Nine”. Not only does it seem likely that his portrait is accurate, it seems even more likely that the direct source for his characterization is none other than the former justice herself, who – like Powell – doesn’t have the courage to directly tell the truth herself, in public....Apparently, however, O’Connor was a wee bit shy of sympathy for those Florida voters back in 2000 whom she considered dumb (nevermind that they weren’t responsible for the ballots they were handed), and so she thought the whole darned thing just need to be over with and the presidency handed over to the (extremely) right candidate. You know who. Didn’t hurt, of course, that she was big pals with the Bush family, tennis partner with Barbara, and that she wanted to retire but didn’t want to turn the seat on the Court over to a Democratic president. So she not only signed onto the most blatantly partisan and jurisprudentially embarrassing decision in the Court’s history, but by providing the fifth vote to make that opinion the majority, she in fact became the decision... Now we find out that she’s more than a tad disappointed with the results of her work in the Supreme Court laboratory! Now we learn that being known as the Dr. Frankenstein who built the monster that produced the Guantánamo and habeas corpus and Fourth Amendment horror shows is not exactly what O’Connor had in mind for the second sentence of her freakin’ obituary, dude! Sorry, Sandy, if you’ve come to find George W. Bush “arrogant, lawless, incompetent and extreme”. Welcome to our world, dark and foreboding as it’s now long been. You certainly won’t get an argument with your assessment here, other than to wonder why you broke every law and principle in the book to make someone with exactly those qualities president. (Or did you simply think, way back in 2000, that Boy George was merely stupid, dumb, uneducated and dimwitted, as opposed to “arrogant, lawless, incompetent and extreme”?) So sorry that you are reported by Toobin to be appalled at Ashcroft, the Schiavo case, Harriet Miers, the administration’s position on everything from affirmative action to the war on terror, and having the Iraq Study Group on which you served dissed by your own monster, only then to suffer the greatest indignity of having the very guy (Alito), whose lower court opinion requiring husbands to notify their wives in advance of an abortion horrified you enough to label it “repugnant”, appointed by Bush to fill your own seat.
......
What a sad litany of losers lining up on the wrong side of history, purchasing the cant and the calamity and leaving us the bill. DiIulio, O’Neill, Clarke, Powell, Kuo, Fukuyama, Dowd, Greenspan, O’Connor.
What’s next?
The publication of George H. W. Bush’s book, “Blame It On The Milkman”?
Barbara Bush’s “If You Thought That Was Fun, Wait Till You See What Jeb Does”?
Condi’s “Omigod, I Had No Idea!”?
Cheney’s “Snarl: Two Wars Are Just Not Enough”?
Or perhaps W’s doddering attempt at a mea culpa for the history books: “Hey, Fellas, What Happens If You Push This Button Right Here?”
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