Here I am, once again using my bookstore employment to check out the latest new releases. Several weeks ago, I held my nose and offered a two-part tour of Tom Delay's No Retreat, No Surrender (Part One is HERE and Part Two is HERE). That was a painful reading experience, believe me...but now I've devoured yet another book by a conservative...and I've rarely had so much fun in my life. Vic Gold was Barry Goldwater's press secretary, co-author of George H.W. Bush's autobiography, and a Republican PR operative for decades. KStreetProjector's Diary yesterday gives you a taste, but follow me below the fold for more juicy quotes on George W. "Presidential Bobblehead" Bush, Dick "Prince of Undisclosed Darkness" Cheney, and much more...
Before I begin, I'm happy to report that the over two weeks since Delay's book went on sale, not a single copy has sold in the large chain bookstore where I work, even though it has been discounted 20% the entire time! Yes, my store is in a liberal area, but still, to not have sold even one copy is amazing.
Now on to Invasion of the Party-Snatchers. Let me tell you, this is one of the most wicked eviscerations of George W. Bush and his administration that I've read...and I've read my fair share. Hell, I read a lot of it every day right here on DKos...and I think Vic Gold would fit right in. He's so nasty, he might even earn the occasional troll rating. I can't say I learned much new; the litany of scandals, abuses and outrages is for the most part woefully familiar to me already. But I enjoyed reading the gloves-off anger of a true conservative towards the Bush administration. I hope the book gets read widely on both sides of the political spectrum.
In my review of Delay's book, I did a lot of analysis, but this time, let's just kick back and enjoy...
Remember how good you felt after Election day last year, when we felt we were taking the first steps towards reclaiming our country? Well, Vic felt the same way, as evidenced in his very first paragraph:
November 7, 2006 (-5minutes to midnight): You know something has gone wrong in your political universe when the party you've worked for and voted with for over forty years is getting blown out in a national election and you feel good about it
Gold ratifies his conservative roots as he reminisces about how good he felt on the election nights of the 1994 "Gingrich revolution" and the 2000 election of Bush:
Separately and together, those were the election night returns conservative Republicans had been waiting for since the Goldwater presidential campaign of 1964: Big Government Liberalism repudiated, Republicans in control at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, from Congress to the White House.
Clearly, this is not a man with whom I am going to share much in the way of political views, hardcore liberal with many socialist leanings that I am. Nevertheless, when it comes to George W. Bush and his cronies...well, he takes the words right out of my mouth:
Yet there I was on election night 2006, an aging Goldwater conservative who felt not only good but also gratified that all this was unraveling state by state and district by district....and, hard as they tried, the disingenuous party hacks spouting the White House line on Fox News couldn't explain it away....
What I saw instead was a party of pork-barrel ear-markers like Dennis Hastert, of political hatchet men like Karl Rove, and of bible-thumping hypocrites like Tom Delay, all giving oleoginous cover to a profligate Congress that ran up eye-popping deficits and an insulated White House run by a self-righteous Texan and his arrogant inner circle of syncophants and cronies.
Gold next relates the rise of the Republicans through Reagan and the elder Bush, a fairly stock tale of the religious right's increasing power and the ways in which Republican political operatives tried to harness it. During the Reagan years, Gold seems to feel that the government offered little more than symbolic return on the political investments of the religious right. The first genuine inroad they made into wielding true power came during the elder Bush's presidency:
[T]he "symbolism" of the Reagan era was followed by the appointment of an evangelical activist to an influential position inside the George H. W. Bush White House in 1989.
His name was Doug Wead and he was personally selected for the White House post by the president's newly reborn son, George W., who perceived a need for someone to act as his father's ambassador/liason to "the faith-based community." It was a pietist prelude to George W.'s establishing the first White House Office of Religion and Morality a dozen years later. (No, they don't call it that: under Karl Rove's Orwellian dictum it's been euphemized into "the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.")
So here we see a very early example of W.'s feelings of antagonism and superiority towards his father and his early thrall to biblethumper morality. We also see how Vic Gold just can't resist slipping in his zingers! (Doug Wead, by the way, was credited by Time Magazine as having coined the phrase "compassionate conservative," and is also the guy who, a few years ago, revealed that he had secretly taped candid conversations with W; see the Wikipedia article HERE.
Along the way in his accounting of the Gingrich revolution and the Clinton impeachment frenzy, Gold has some advice for Democrats that echoes a lot of what we say here on DKos:
When congressional Democrats chose to focus public attention on the Contra half of the Reagan administration's Iran-Contra scandal in 1986, they were not only engaging in a political jerk-off, but also doing the Reagan Bush team a huge favor, one measurable in electoral votes.
Consider: How much difference would it have made in the presidential campaign of 1988 if George H. W. Bush had been called on to answer the question, "Why did your administration sell arms to the Ayatollah?" instead of "Why did your administration furnish aid to the Contras?" A major difference, in my opinion. Whether enough to have changed the election's outcome, I can't say. What I do know is that defending the sale of missile launchers to the Ayatollah would have been a hell of a lot harder than defending aid to the contras in Nicaragua.
That being the case, why didn't the Democrats emphasize the Iran side of the scandal in making their case against Bush? Other than sheer stupidity (always a possibility in Democratic presidential campaigns), there's no answer to that other than ideological force of habit: Venting outrage at Republican administrations for backing anti-Communist coups in Latin America--from Guatemala in the 1950s to Chile in the 1970s--is for Democrats a matter of self-gratification. It just felt good.
Yep. Know how to frame the issues, be ferocious when going on the offensive. Let's do it, Dems! (And don't feel too bad, readers, for Gold uses this anecdote as a springboard to pillory the Republicans for their similar obsessive self-gratification in their drive to impeach Clinton.)
OK, let's get Oedipal. Chapter Four is entitled "Like Father, Unlike Son."
What does George-the-father really think about his son's following Dick Cheney's Neo-Con lead and triggering a preemptive war that's led to the erosion of America's power and prestige around the world? Of George W.'s embrace of the Scopes Trial world view of the Theocratic Right? Of the transfer over the last half-decade of presidential power to the Vice President's office, allowing the Prince of Undisclosed Darkness to set and influence policy in virtually every area of executive governance?....
...[G]iven the caveat that what happens in the Bush family stays in the Bush family, here's one speechwriter/biographer's read on what George H. W. really thinks about his son's conduct of the presidency he inherited not by Divine Right but from his earthbound father:
Oh, with a buildup like that, I was ready for some real dish. Alas, I was disappointed. Gold chooses the honorable course and stays loyal to his friendship with the elder Bush, and largely limits his criticisms to policy matters. Even so, I don't expect that this man, described on the dust jacket as a longtime friend to the Bush family, will be invited to any Thanksgiving dinners in the coming years.
There's still a sharp edge to Gold's analysis of Bush family dynamics. For example, when discussing the likelihood that the former President and CIA Director Bush retained ample contacts withing the government, and that many in the State Department and the Intelligence community expected that he would use those contacts to try and stop the drift towards war with Iraq, Gold writes:
Their assumption, of course, was that a father who, in addition to his credentials as a former president and diplomat, had actually experienced war would have influence over a son who hadn't; that George W., for all his macho rhetoric, would heed the old man's counsel to wait and see what the UN inspectors came up with on weapons of mass destruction.
The assumption proved wrong, of course. Instead, the son chose to follow the lead of a vice president who, like himself, had "other priorities" when his own time came to serve in Vietnam, though together they had no compunction about putting the lives of young Americans at risk in the volatile killing fields of the Middle East.
But Gold makes up for his noble reticence towards spilling too much intra-family dirt on the Bushes with his devastating takedown of Dick Cheney. That quote above, calling him the "Prince of Undisclosed Darkness," is only the beginning.
It's worth starting out with his discussion of the Vice Presidential debate between Cheney and Joe Lieberman in 2000:
[D]ebating with Joe Lieberman, his Democratic counterpart running for vice president, Dick would answer Lieberman's reference to how rich he'd become as Halliburton's chief executive by acknowledging yes, he'd made a lot of money, but "Government had nothing to do with it."
Lieberman, having learned the art of political debate from his running mate, Al Gore, then proceeded to blow an opportunity to knock one out of the park by merely grinning his most ingratiating Alfred E. Newman grin and waving to his mother in the audience.
Government has nothing to do with Halliburton's profits? If it didn't, Dick Cheney would never have been hired as its CEO.
The unsettling thought is that in the hall of mirrors Dick Cheney wakes up in every morning, he may very well believe that Halliburton's bottom line is immaculately conceived. A man who in the third year of the Iraq war could insist that, by God, there are weapons of mass destruction, or were, until saddam slipped them across the Syrian border into the hands of Osama bin Laden, is likely to believe anything (and insist that you believe it as well).
Gold opens his chapter "The Imperial Vice Presidency" with the following anecdote:
"Seventeen agents?
"Seventy. Seven-oh."
"For a party in Maryland?"
"Right. About twenty miles outside Washington."
A pause at the other end of the line, then: "Who was the host, Che Guevara?"
I'd called a retired Secret Service agent--a member of the protective detail during my days as George H. W. Bush's speechwriter--after getting word that Vice President Dick Cheney had carried no fewer than six dozen bodyguards with him to a waterfront reception on Chesapeake Bay. That's seventy armed agents, plus a hovering helicopter, plus three motorized boats circling the waters....Not to minimize the gravity of the terrorist threat, but seventy agents swarming over a private residence to protect the Vice President on a Sunday jaunt to the D.C. suburbs seemed a bit excessive....Clearly, what we've had in Dick Cheney is a high-maintenance vice president with an exaggerated sense of al Qaeda's outreach and/or his own importance....Paranoid Dick, a leader for the times.
Earlier in the book, Gold had described how Donald Rumsfeld twice derailed the elder Bush's selection as Gerald Ford's running mate in 1974 and 1976 and tried his best to keep Reagan from selecting him as well. George W. Bush's selection of him, then, as Secretary of Defense, was a major slap in the face:
With a few notable exceptions--Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condleeza Rice, Andy Card, Josh Bolton--everyone connected with the Bush-I presidency had been frozen out of anything having to do with policy. More than that, the selection of George H. W. Bush's most bitter political enemy, Donald Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defense signaled not only distance but also a wall between the two Bush presidencies.
Why Rumsfeld?....It wasn't as if Rumsfeld brought anything to the table politically....But as happens in Washington (with notable frequency in the Bush-II years), the appointee had a crony in the right place
Yes, Cheney. There was more to Rumsfeld's choice than just the younger Bush wanting to snub his daddy. After all, W. keeps his own petty scorecard of spite, and he knew that Rumsfeld had been a harsh enemy of his family's political fortunes. Cheney had some manipulating to do.
Hell-bent on seeing to it that this time around Powell, the incoming Secretary of State, would be boxed in, Cheney set about to place a kindred spirit in charge of Defense...
Dick knew just the man, though it would be no easy job to get him past George W.: The sonofabitch, after all, had tried to bury his father....
Getting young George to see himself as the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, a president chosen by God to lead his country in a time of peril, was a piece of cake. Working Rumsfeld into the cake was another matter....
But Rumsfeld could be a charmer, and in the long one-on-one meetings Cheney arranged, they managed to get George W. to let bygones be bygones, and Cheney had his man in at Defense.
Gold wraps up his chapter on Cheney:
To gauge the extent of Dick Cheney's transformation after assuming that office--the toxic mix of megalomania and paranoia...try visualizing any previous vice president playing the Cheney hand: Vice President Walter Mondale taking weekly trips to Langley to spin CIA intelligence; Vice President George H. W. Bush shuttling to Capitol Hill to lecture lawmakers on the virtues of torture and wire-tapping; Vice President Al Gore assembling a task force to draft an energy bill, then telling any and all who want to know the task force roster to go fuck themselves....
And what does all this say of the man who sits in the Oval Office--on the rare days, that is, when Dubya is actually in the office and not aboard Air Force One, strutting across the countryside like a wind-up presidential bobblehead, soaking up applause before audiences preselected to stroke his ego? Simply this: For all the Rove-built facade of his being a "strong" chief executive, George W. Bush has been, by comparison to even hapless Jimmy Carter, the weakest, most out-of-touch American president in modern times. Think Dan Quayle in cowboy boots....
Dick Cheney as Dick Nixon on andro, George W. Bush as a president on strings. No wonder Brent Scowcroft worries: A vice president in control is bad enough. Worse yet is a vice president out of control.
Or try this one:
The vice president and his technocratic soul mate in the Pentagon have never been known to take calls from a higher father. It's sufficient for their purposes that the evangelical urban cowboy in the Oval Office does hear voices in the night. Knowing that, they can play off his moralistic self-image to get their plans approved and the troop ships moving.
In Chapter 7, Gold decries what he dubs the "Coulterization of Republican Rhetoric." He describes Ann Coulter as "Intelligent Design's gift to late-night comedians" and "a shrill, ball-busting caricature." But he considers her a perfect example of the Rovian campaign game plan:
I've seen other administrations try to cultivate the news media with varying success, but under Karl Rove's direction, the Bush-Cheney White House has put together a stable of columnists and commentators who, in return for special treatment, operate as a virtual arm of Tony Snow's press office (Snow himself having once been part of the stable)....
Oh, what Richard Nixon wouldn't have given for talk radio and Fox News to have been around in the 1970s. Impeachment? By the time Rush Limbaugh and Bill O' Reilly were finished with Sam Irvin and Peter Rodino, the Watergate committee chairman would have been lucky to have their spaniels greet them at the door when they arrived home after a hard day's hearings.
As for Nixon, Gold imagines the following:
Let me tell you, there are things that have taken place in the Bush-Cheney White House that Nixon would have gagged at, not because he thought they were wrong, but because they were so blatant.
Here's just a bit of Gold on the Abramoff scandal (along with once again pointing to the press as White House lapdogs):
Consider the odds on this "aberration": Karl Rove, arguably the most powerful unelected official in George W.'s White House, was looking for an executive assistant to run his office. Quick guess as to how many experienced candidates...would apply for the job if the hiring process were open? Ten thousand? Twenty?
Conceded, to be Karl Rove's executive assistant, privy to the innermost operations of the Oval Office, requires something extra in the way of know-how, so cut the number to a mere five thousand; then put the names in a hat or a barrel, draw one out and by golly, as Don Rumsfeld would say, guess who got the job?
One Susan Ralston, Jack Abramoff's executive assistant! There was news there, significant news, but the White House press corps, bulldogs when it comes to questioning why they're limited to one travel bag on presidential trips, somehow missed it. Had they been given a handout telling them the executive assistant to the number one sleaze on K Street would start Monday as the executive assistant to the number one political advisor to the president, someone--perhaps the intrepid David Gregory of NBC-TV celebrity--might have raised an eyebrow. But no handout being offered, public awareness of Jack Abramoff's pipeline to the Bush-Cheney White House came only after a House committee investigation in September 2006.
Victor Gold ends his book predictably, since he is, after all, a true conservative who feels his party has been body-snatched, with a couple chapters imagining how Barry Goldwater would govern, and with a prescription for restoring the Republican Party to a true conservatism. But before that, he has one last very dark chapter entitled "The Sinclair Lewis Presidency."
He takes his premise from Sinclair Lewis' novel It Can't Happen Here, written during Hitler's rise to power and imagining the United States embracing a right-wing totalitarian dictatorship. Clearly, Gold thinks the Bush-Cheney administration has come perilously close to manipulating that into reality.
Yes, in all, quite a read. Really, an evening spent with this book was almost as good as an evening reading the stories and diaries here on DKos. But now I'm here, and looking forward to your comments...