Top international lieutenants Tony Blair and John Howard lead the list of the yearly departed. Who knows if those two would have lasted until this year without help from now-resigned long-time Bush den mother Karen Hughes, who had returned to Compound W back in 2005 as, get this, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, charged with fighting Islamic extremism by improving America’s image abroad. A world set straight awaits Ms. Hughes’s return.
Top Bush economic advisor Al Hubbard, whose best work consisted of whispering things in the prez’s ear like, “the entire platinum circle for tonight’s fundraiser has sold out, the least we can do is the same,” returned to private hustling. Dan Bartlett, Dubster’s counselor and main conduit for dispersing talking points to the reactionary blogosphere, rewarded all Americans by leaving his job on the Fourth of July. Bush terrorism adviser Fran Townsend announced she’d vacate the waterboard of directors after three and a half years of crushing hope among freedom-haters everywhere. This fall, press secretary Tony Snow returned to private prevarication. Even puppeteer-in-chief Karl Rove oozed out of office, leaving a slick trail from Pennsylvania Avenue to Newsweek, where he is writing a weekly column. Many of us had visions of a different kind of pen for Herr Karl.
Perhaps the most significant departure was that of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Politically eulogizing Gonzales, Bush said, “He has aggressively and successfully pursued public corruption.” No argument here.
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Ewe tube
Anyone who thinks time travel is impossible hasn’t been paying attention to the presidential-election cycle. Before people recovered from their New Year’s hangovers, candidates seeking an office in the dim future were everywhere. By early summer, they began debating. These confabs were sometimes said to be revolutionary because they employed the popular video-sharing Web site YouTube to collect questions from regular Americans, thus cutting out the mainstream media. Except for one thing: the mainstream media vetted the questions. So what we got were either inane stunt queries, included to underscore the Earth-shaking newness of this approach, or the same stupid questions the hacks could have asked more succinctly than some narcissist with a Web cam hamming it up on technology that produced video about two notches below Neil Armstrong’s viral “One Small Step” work in 1969.After months of campaigning and saturation advertising in the early caucus and primary states (which, at last count, includes everywhere except the US Virgin Islands), none of the candidates have caught fire, although after listening to many of them speak, the idea isn’t without merit.
The American electoral process has become so fouled with what is called “campaign finance” that, in 2007, war-chest totals were reported as the actual contest. The unspoken truth of this matter is that the large of wallet had the first and only right of refusal concerning political viability. Former Alaska senator Mike Gravel was excluded from the Democratic debates because he hadn’t raised enough money. No one seemed to have a problem with this.
