William Rivers Pitt: Grand Old Parachutes

William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t, June 23, 2009

George W. Bush crawled out of the puckerbrush last week to deliver a speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, in which he took a poke at President Obama. “I told you I’m not going to criticize my successor,” he said, before doing exactly that. “I’ll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don’t believe that persuasion isn’t going to work. Therapy isn’t going to cause terrorists to change their mind.”

Ah, yes, the eloquence we’ve all missed so much since January. “I don’t believe that persuasion isn’t going to work” has to be tall in the running for first-ballot induction into the Gibberish Hall of Fame, and that quip about terrorists in therapy absolutely pegged the needle on the Irony Meter, as ABC News pointed out. “Interestingly,” reported the network, “it was the Bush administration that sent some Gitmo detainees to a Saudi jihadi rehabilitation camp – called the “Prince Mohammed bin Nayef Centre for Care and Counseling. To decidedly mixed success.”

Well, go figure. It wouldn’t be vintage Bush without a few hearty dollops of mangled verbiage combined with maddening factual inconsistency, now, would it? It almost makes one nostalgic for the daily brain cramps our former president used to deliver with such gruesome consistency. Well, no, actually, not really.

In all likelihood, a day will come when the Republican Party will recover from the dazzling carnival of buffoonery, insanity and self-destruction it has become over the last three years, but that day has neither come nor looks to anytime soon. For the time being and until further notice, mostly because no new leader has stepped forward without sounding like an Appalachian snake-handler far gone on the still, the GOP is the party of George W. Bush. There’s bad; there’s worse; there’s worst, and then there’s that.

Greg Sargent, on his Washington Post blog, pointed out some data buried in a recent Wall Street Journal poll that must have every breathing Republican strategist grinding their teeth in despair:

The overall popularity of the Republican Party has now dropped below even the abysmal level of approval enjoyed by Dick Cheney. The poll found that 26% of respondents have a very positive or somewhat positive view of Cheney, up eight points from April. Meanwhile, it found that the GOP overall is viewed very or somewhat positively by only 25%, down four points from April. Okay, the difference is within the margin of error, making this a statistical tie. But still, this is pretty awful for the GOP, given that for a long time Cheney’s historic unpopularity seemed to define a kind of low-water mark among Republicans.

Read More Here