Posted on 07/20/2004 5:44:29 PM PDT by kristinn
Here are some things Christopher Nunneley, a conservative activist in Birmingham, Alabama, believes. That sometime in June, apparently unnoiticed by the world media, George Bush negotiated an end to the civil war in Sudan. That Bill Clinton is "lazy" and Teresa Heinz Kerry is an "African colonialist." That "we don't do torture," and that the School of the Americas manuals showing we do "were just ancient U.S. disinformation designed to make the Soviets think that we didn't know how to do real interrogations."
Chris Nunneley also believes something crazy: that George W. Bush is a nice guy.
It's a rather different conclusion than many liberals would make. When we think of Bush's character, we're likely to focus on the administration's proposed cuts for veterans, the children indefinitely detained at Abu Ghraib, maybe the story of how the young lad Bush loaded up live frogs with firecrackers in order to watch them explode.
Conservatives see it differently.
"He's very compassionate," says, Chris, an intelligent man who's open-minded enough to make listening to liberals a sort of hobby. "If you look at the way he's bucked the far right: I mean $15 billion for AIDS in Africa!" He speaks at the church services for blacks, "and you don't fake that. That's not just a photo-op."
Of course, two years after Bush made his pledge, only 2 percent of the AIDS money has been distributed (in any event, it will mainly go to drug companies). And appearing earnest in the presence of African Americans has been a documented Bush strategy for wooing moderate voters since the beginning.
So what does a conservative say when such "nice guy" jazz is challenged? Say, when you ask whether a nice guy would invade a country at the cost of untold innocent lives on the shakiest of pretenses? Or, closer to home, whether he would (as Bush did in late 2000) go on a fishing trip while his daughter was undergoing surgery, and use the world's media to mockingly order her to clean her room while he was away? Doesn't signify with Chris. "If you're in one camp, the idea of being firm, 'tough love,' is very popular. If you're in another, you can say, 'Well, that's just mean!' On my side, well, I like the whole idea of 'tough love.' "
This is a journey among the "tough love" camp. The people who, even in the face of evidence of his casual cruelty, of his habitual and unchristian contempt for weakness, love George Bush unconditionally: love him when he is tender, love him when he is tough—but who never, ever are tough on him.
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On July 15, the Bush-Cheney campaign organized 6,925 "Parties for the President" in supporters' homes nationwide. I chose to attend in Portland, Oregon. The right love to believe the whole world is against them. In a county where Ralph Nader got a quarter of the votes of George Bush and Al Gore well over double, the sense of martyrdom is especially fragrant: Portland's conservatives are like others anywhere, only more so. One leader told me that here, it's the conservatives who are oppressed by the gays.
They certainly love them some George Bush.
Twelve people gather on the houseboat of Bruce Broussard, a perennially failed candidate popular among local conservatives for, well, his race: He is African American. First the group hears Laura Bush on a conference call. ("All of us know what makes George a great president. He has the courage of his convictions, the willingness to make the tough decisions and stick with them.") Then, they get a bewilderingly disjointed address from their host (he hits some key points from his recent Senate platform: presidential terms of six years instead of four, a cabinet-level Department of Senior Citizens with himself as secretary). Finally, beef-and-cheese dip loading down a plateful of Mrs. Broussard's homemade tortilla chips, I open the floor to the question of why they personally revere George Bush.
Ponytailed Larry, who wears the stripes of a former marine gunnery sergeant on his floppy hat, bursts into laughter; it's too obvious to take seriously. "Honesty. Truth. Integrity," he says upon recovering. "I don't think there's any difference between the governor of Texas and the president of the United States."
Gingerly, I offer one difference: The governor ran for president on a platform of balanced budgets, then ran the federal budget straight into the red.
Responds Larry (of the first president since James Garfield with a Congress compliant enough never to issue a single veto): "Well, it's interesting that we blame the person who happens to be president for the deficit. As if he has any control over thelegislature of the United States."
Larry's wife, Tami Mars, the Republican congressional nominee for Oregon's third district, proposes a Divine Right of Eight-Year Terms: "Let the man finish what he started. Instead of switching out his leadership—because that's what the terrorists are expecting."
Larry is asked what he thinks of Bush's budget cuts for troops in the field. He's not with Bush on everything: "I hope he reverses himself on that."
I note that he already has, due to Democratic pressure.
Faced with an existential impossibility—giving the Democrats credit for anything—he retreats into a retort I'll hear again and again tonight: Nobody's perfect. "I don't think we're going to find a situation in which we find a person with which we're 100 percent comfortable."
Then he reels off a litany of complaints about Bush. "Horrible underemployment situation . . . the big-business aspect of the Republican Party I have some issues with."
The next thing I hear is the last refuge of the cornered conservative: a non sequitur fulmination against the hippie Democrats.
"Having said that, what's your option? To have more bike trails?"
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The vibe at my next stop is different. None of the people at Kitty and Tom Harmon's bungalow are stupid. Instead they are the kind of "well-informed" that comes from overlong exposure to conservative media: conservatives who construct towers of impressive intellectual complexity on toothpick-weak foundations. My hosts are Stepford-nice (Mom sports "Hello Kitty!" seat covers in her car and loads me down with shortbread for the flight home; Dad shows off the herb garden he'll use to season my eggs if I consent to stay the night). But everyone present shows a glint of steel when their man's character is challenged.
"One of the reasons I respect this president is that he is honest. I believe that after eight years, the dark years of the Clinton administration, we finally have a man in the White House who respects that office and who speaks honestly."
The speaker is Christina, an intense, articulate, and passionate publicist.
"Such a refreshing change for the country. People believe in the president."
I don't mention recent poll figures suggesting that more Americans believe John Kerry than Bush when it comes to terrorism.
After affirming "I still believe that there are weapons of mass destruction"—the commonplace is beyond challenge—Christina displays another facet of the conservative fantasy: Going into Iraq, she says, "is not the sort of thing one does if one wants to be popular. . . . He doesn't stick his finger in the wind." I don't challenge that point, either—though if I did I might ask why Bush scheduled the divisive debate over the intervention for the height of the 2002 campaign season, more certain of what Andrew Card called "new products" than his father, who held off deliberation on the first Iraq war until after the 1990 congressional elections.
Instead I challenge the grandmotherly lady sitting on the piano bench.
Says Delores: "There is an agenda—to get rid of God in our country."
Chirps the reporter: Certainly not on the part of John Kerry, who once entertained dreams of entering the priesthood.
I'm almost laughed out of the room.
I ask why Kerry goes to mass every week if he's trying to get rid of God. "Public relations!" a young man calls out from across the room. "Same reason he does everything else." Cue for Delores to repeat something a rabbi told her: "We have to stand together, because this is what happened in Europe. You know—once they start taking this right and that right. And you have the Islamic people . . . "
She trails off. I ask whether she's referring to the rise of fascism. "We're losing our rights as Christians: yes. And being persecuted again."
I ask why so many liberals believe the administration lies, if there might be anything to the suspicions. What about the report of the Los Angeles Times that morning, that the State Department dismissed 28 of the claims the White House demanded Colin Powell bring before the U.N. as without foundation in fact?
Delores: "You make mention of a paper in Los Angeles that made such and such a report; well, that doesn't mean it's accurate or complete or unbiased."
I respond that the report came from a memo reproduced in the recent report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Republican-dominated. I'm not sure whether she hasn't heard me or just has decided to change the subject. "John Kerry attended a party in which there was bad language, bad humor, being evidenced in all quarters!" she cries. Kitty chimes in: "And Kerry said it reflects American values!"
I ask Tom what role he sees in America for nonbelievers. "Well, if people are of an opinion that their God is supreme and are willing to burn your house down to prove it or dismantle your car to prove it or make all sorts of loud noises, disturbing the peace, and say that they have a right to do that in the name of God. . . ." he begins, in his best Mr. Rogers voice. Later I parse out what the hell he was talking about. I was asking about atheists. But Tom understood "nonbeliever" according to the premise that God is exclusively Judeo-Christian. It wasn't about whether you believe in anything, but whether you dared diverge from his belief.
Walking me to my car (he insisted), Tom, who works for a construction conglomerate, reaches for a favorite metaphor to describe George Bush: linoleum. "You know: Usually you get a microfilm of the color, and if you drop a plate on it you discover it's an ugly-looking floor. Then linoleum came out—the pattern goes through the entire one-eighth of material. You can drop a plate on it, and the color is true all the way down!"
His face glows. He gets a far-off look in his eyes. That's his Bush.
It's like a scene from a John Waters movie.
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What all does it mean? The right-wing website Free Republic is infamous for galvanizing harassment campaigns against ideological enemies, but it also has a lighter side: a robust culture of George W. kitsch. "Freepers" display and study the famous photograph of Bush embracing Ashley Faulkner, whose mother perished on 9-11, a woeful, iconic look on his face ("The protective encirclement of her head by President Bush's arm and hand is the essence of fatherly compassion," Freeper luvbach1 writes); the ladies exchange snaps of the president in resolute pose, rendering up racy comments about his sexiness; they reference an image of Bush jogging alongside a soldier wounded in Iraq like it's a Xerox of his very soul. "He's the kind of guy who's going to remember to call a soldier who's lost a leg," one citizen of the Free Republic reflects, "and go jogging with him when he gets a replacement prosthetic." Revering Bush has become, for people like this, a defining component of conservative ideology.
Once I interviewed a Freeper who told me he first became a committed conservative after discovering the Federalist Papers. "I absolutely devoured them, recognizing, my God, these things were written hundreds of years ago and they still stand up as some of the most intense political philosophy ever written."
I happen to agree, so I asked him—after he insisted Bush couldn't have been lying when he claimed to have witnessed the first plane hit the World Trade Center live on TV, after he said the orders to torture in Iraq couldn't have possibly come from the top, all because George Bush is too fundamentally decent to lie—what he thinks of the Federalists' most famous message: that the genius of the Constitution they were defending was that you needn't base your faith in the country on the fundamental decency of an individual, because no one can be trusted to be fundamentally decent, which was why the Constitution established a government of laws, not personalities.
"If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary . . . "
Conservatives see something angelic in George Bush. That's why they excuse, repress, and rationalize away so much.
And that is why conservatism is verging on becoming an un-American creed.
Chris Nunneley also believes something crazy: that George W. Bush is a nice guy.It's a rather different conclusion than many liberals would make. When we think of Bush's character, we're likely to focus on...
Incredible, outrageusly good find!
Global socialists certainly are against conservatives in America. Big Media is also against conservatives. We don't feel that the "whole world" is against us though.
There is a lot right in America. The difference between Al Gore Jr. and George W. Bush in the certified totals in the popular vote was 0.52% (half of one percent). The popular vote is a virtual tie in the 2000 election and certainly statistically within the margin of error.
When we look at the county by county map and see BUSH COUNTRY, we see just how dense the liberal pockets are around major cities. This is why conservatives who live in those cities can be made to feel oppressed. The media opposes them and the person on their "right" and "left oppose them.
Why is it so hard for the Village Voice to believe that homosexuals could be prejudiced against conservatives (especially Christians)?
Just another VV asswipe.
As opposed to his candidates that lie, cheat, steal elections, support and ignore corruption in their own ranks while criticizing Bush on some misconstrued and embellished propaganda.
Such a pompous idiot. And just what evidence did he give any of those people of his claims - none.
He cites blowing up frogs as a child to claim Bush is a fraud? Give me a break.
Interesting.
A sodomite who is trying to spin being anti-bush as pro american.
He is also following the ignorant talking point of conservatives are not smart and are closed minded.
Ironic when you consider teh left is generally the most illogical and closeminded of all political positions.
He/She/It seems to enjoy arguing with us here on the Free Republic.
If "globalism" and selling things is what the "unAmerican right" are into, what countries/organizations/political parties are "we" partnered with?
Yep and probably ripping off/plagiarizing while doing it.
Does the Blue Zone really want to fight the War on Terror without the Red Zone? You Blue Zoners seem to believe that if Kerry is elected president, everyone on the right will just fall into line, and continue the fight.
I myself will take a Kerry victory as a sign that there never was a War on Terror, and additional attacks on the big cities will never convince me otherwise.
I can see the Left's response to an Al-Qaeda suitcase nuke attack on Manhattan now: Protestors flying to Pakistan to surround an Al-Qaeda strong point and marching with their blue UN flags held high.
That'll make 'em stop. ;-)
Basically, the Left just makes up stuff about the people they dislike, and spread the slurs far and wide.
Bush, in Gallup and in most other polls, still has about a ten point edge on this issue. He's not doing well on the Iraq question, but media agitprop has hurt him here.
Be Seeing You,
Chris
You give the left too much credit. I doubt they'll rely on the UN to respond militarily on our behalf. Instead, they'll send out a team of lawyers to threaten Al Queada with civil litigation.
A week ago I stumbled onto the thought that drug burnouts are all Bush haters. I took stock of all my friends who did too much drugs way back when (especially acid) and to a person, they are irrational USA haters.
What do you suppose is the % of Village Voice writers and editors who have a history of drug abuse?
Hmmm?
Bush said this in which State of the Union address?
Obviously none of them, because he never said it. Leftists just make $h!t up.
The first plane hitting the WTC wasn't shown live on TV. There was an initial report on CNBC, shortly before 6 AM Pacific time, that a plane had hit one of the towers. It wasn't until several minutes later that they got the live shot up, just in time to see the second plane to hit the second tower.
Could the condescension drip any more from that article? Sheesh.
Who should you hire to fight AIDS, if not the medical industry?
What a maroon!
What's black is white, what's white is black.
It is fundamentally a spiritual problem with the left........and that is why George W. Bush's goodness, and our recognition of it offends them so much.
It shines a light into their dark world.
Funny how this guy talks about FR but can't be bothered to read the articles where folks rip into Bush for his spending and expansion of government.
Like just about every liberal essay nowadays, it quickly reaches an erroneous thesis and then proceeds to cherry-pick the information that supports that thesis - or make up facts if real ones aren't in sufficient supply.
What a crock of sh**.
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