From the incomparable Johnny Buttrocket:
That seems to be the message of this Fox News Poll. By a 50% to 36% margin–a wide gap in today’s polarized climate–respondents say they would rather have Rudy Giuliani at the helm than Hillary Clinton if another terrorist strike were to happen in the U.S. Giuliani also leads his Republican contenders by a wide margin as a “strong leader.”
There is lots more interesting data in the poll, but the bottom line, I think, is that Giuliani’s ace in the hole is also his party’s, and that if Republicans are able to retain the White House in 2008, it will be largely because of the public’s concerns about national security.
There are three lessons here.
One, Fox News polls might be biased. Just a bit.
Two, somebody needs to tell Johnny that the only way the Republicans will retain the White House is through a combination of mass voter fraud and scaring the shit out of everyone, aided by “news outlets” like Fox screaming TERRA ATTACK TERRA ATTACK THE GREAT BETURBANED HORDE IS COMING FOR YOUR FAMILY ZOMG ELEVEN!1ONE!!
Finally, somebody also needs to tell Johnny there that another attack — the basis of the poll question — would in fact mean that the entire Bush (and therefore GOP) national security apparatus has failed, utterly. All of it. All the security procedures and “legislation” and signing statements and trashing of the quaint little Constitution will have resulted in a systemic failure. So, in case of a demonstrable systemic failure of the national security apparatus put in place by a GOP President, that the GOP Presidential candidate — especially one running primarily on his 9/11 national security credentials — would likely not benefit very much in an election from another attack, as Buttrocket there assumes.
There’s a number four here, and that number four issue is “even implying that you are wishing for another attack just so Hillary loses makes you an asshole.”
All I need to know about that asshole Giuliani I learned from the FDNY firefighters.
President? IMHO, the man is not worthy to shovel pig shit from a sty. It would be insulting to the pigs.
having a meglomaniacal egomaniac piece of human trash like Giuliani as president.
True.
It amuses me when I hear “The Left is invested in our defeat in Iraq!”, in which case I like to respond “I guess then that the Right is clearly invested in another terror attack on US soil.”
At some point in the future this fact will be uncovered. We already know that the Bush family connections with the Saudi royal family are deep and long lasting. 15 of the 19 attackers on 9/11 were Saudis. The events of 9/11 are our Reichstag fire. I have no faith that the lunatic Right will not manufacture another terrorist attack in 2008 for just the purpose you outline.
Depends almost entirely on whether they think they need another attack before bringing in martial law or if they think they have enough swing left to just formally disband congress and suspend the Constitution late some Friday night and figure it’ll be Monday before anyone notices. (or actually christmas eve of 2008 would be a wizard time – play it right and it’d be almost two weeks before anyone’s either sober or concerned enough to look at the news.)
Hey, you’re too good at this. You been talking to Karl Rove.
Eh. Rove’s actually not that uniquely bright or even particularly an original thinker. What he IS is ruthless and vicious to a degree we haven’t formerly seen in the US political process. He’s a genuine sociopath… no scruples, no morals, no empathy. HIS goals are everything; nothing and nobody else matters even slightly. Our political process doesn’t really take adequate account of such people, because in the time before mass communication, they’d have been known for what they were, and they’d have been dealt with, long before they became politically powerful.
I was thinking the other day apropos of something on another blog that one of the biggest problems we have now is that Bush and Rove and Cheney are really the first administration we’ve had that didn’t have (or feel the need to pretend to) even a peripheral interest in the public good. As crooked as Nixon was (what with hiding behind a corkscrew an’ all), he still did take the good of the country as a whole into account in a lot of ways. McKinley didn’t, except in the “Good for Big Bidness is good for the country” sense, but there was still that sense, the idea that the public interest was a significant concern, even if only for the purpose of keeping things humming for the well-off. There wasn’t the kind of outsourcing or mass transportation/communications technology we have now which permits OTHER countries’ poor folks to be used even more cheaply than ours.
These guys, though… They’re on a mission from God, living in the last years preRapture, and they simply don’t care what kind of world they leave in two, three, five years, or who gets destroyed or maimed in the interim – and our society is, again, not set up to deal with such people. There’s still a sense among the boomers and older folks, and even a lot of the idealistic progressives, that there must be SOME line out there somewhere that Rove and Bush and Cheney wouldn’t cross. Things they wouldn’t do because they’d be bad for the country, because they’d be, maybe, “unAmerican.”
And the existence of that idea, the gap between the American idea of how politics works and the reality of what Rove and Cheney and Bush will do, is where they find space to continue doing whatever they want… because there’s nothing in the books or the institutional memory (or even the theoretical underpinnings of US society) that allows us to deal with it.
The US political system is predicated on rationality, mutual respect, and good faith, and the idea that we’re all working towards some sort of common welfare goal even if we do disagree radically on how to get there. Ain’t a word in there about megalomaniacal sociopathic whackjobs with rich daddies or political friends, or how you deal with them when you’ve got them.
And that’s what we have to find. We have at the outside perhaps fifteen months to find an approach to controlling the nutcases, implement it, and sell it to the public, including large measures of those who think the problem with Bush is that he’s just not quite ruthless enough.
There’s not a chance in hell.