By DOLPH HONICKER
If you found yourself having to confront a man responsible for the unnecessary deaths of over 3,220 of your countrymen plus 50,000 to 650,000 lives in a nation that was no threat to us, would you go out of your way to be polite?
Assume further that your own son was in harm’s way because of this person and he walked and asked, “How’s your boy?”
Responding to President George W. Bush, the Democratic senator-elect from Virginia, James Webb replied, “I’d like to get them out of Iraq.”
When Bush asked again, Webb replied, “That’s between me and my boy.”
Webb later told the Washington Post about his refusal to pass through a White House reception for newly elected members of Congress, laying grammar aside, “I’m not particularly interested in having a picture of me and George W. Bush on my wall. No offense to the institution of the presidency, and I’m certainly looking forward to working with him and his administration. {But} leaders do some symbolic things to try to convey who they are and what the message is.”
George Will, a top-chop wordsmith, who can write lovingly of baseball, considers Webb’s response to Bush that of a “boor.”
I disagree.
Webb’s son, a Marine, is in Iraq. Webb himself is a decorated Marine veteran of Vietnam, a war from Bush and Vice President Cheney found an exit strategy.
Had I been in Webb‘s combat boots, I’d have had the temerity to answer: “My boy faces death daily, Mr. President. He’s a Marine who volunteered to go to Iraq to fight in your stupid war. May I ask why your two daughters are not over there as well?”
But that’s me. George Will sees it differently.
I remember that when Cindy Sheehan, a mother who lost her son in Iraq, tried to see Bush, he snubbed her. Did Will consider Bush’s behavior boorish? Cowardly? Craven?
Will says of Webb: “In a republic, people decline to be led by leaders who are insufferably full of themselves.”
Could this not be said of Bush who is so sure of his king-like divinity that he refuses to admit mistakes and blindly follows his own counsel?
Rather that grasping the essence of Webb’s message, Will parses words. Imagine parsing some of Bush’s verbal goofs.
Webb wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal that began, as Will notes:
“The most important -- and unfortunately the least debated -- issue in politics today is our society’s steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America’s top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country.”
While Will focuses on thee words -- infinitely, tier and literally -- I had no problem getting the gist: that the poor are getting poorer, the rich are getting richer, locked away in their gated communities and the country is headed toward third world status unless our deficits and debt are reined in.
A recent issue of The New Yorker offers Webb more reasons for shunning a man who hasn’t learned the meaning of bipartisanship.
On Nov. 15 Bush renominated four of his hardest-right candidates for the federal appeals:
1. A Defense Department lawyer who has been denounced by a score of retired generals and admirals for his role as an architect of the administration’s infamous interrogation regime.
2. A former Interior Department attorney and mining and ranching lobbyist who sees the Clean Water Act as “regulatory excess.”
3. A district court judge whose decisions have been reversed or vacated more than 150 times, including two reversals from the Supreme Court -- one of them in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, no less, in a voting rights case.
4. A former aide to Sen. Trent Lott who is the first such nominee in a quarter of a century to be unanimously rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association.
The next day, notes The New Yorker, Bush appointed Eric Keroack as new chief of “population affairs” at the Department of Health and Human Services. A gynecologist, he will oversee Title X, a Nixon-era program that distributes contraceptives to poor and uninsured women.
“Until recently,” says writer Hendrik Hertzberg, “he was the medical director of a Christianist pregnancy-counseling organization that regards the distribution of contraceptives as ‘demeaning to women.’”
There’s more.
“One of his odder theories,” says Hertzberg, “makes him a sort of family-friendly Gen. Jack D. Ripper” (of Dr. Strangelove fame). “In Keroack’s case, the precious bodily fluid ... is the hormone oxytocin, a.k.a. ‘God’s Super Glue.’ Apparently, oxytocin is released during certain enjoyable activities, including hugging, massage, and, of course, sex.
“It is also, according to Keroack, the fluid that keeps married couples bound to each other. ...”
Too much fooling around and you lose it.
Unfortunately, Sen.-elect Webb, Keroack’s appointment, unlike the others, does not require Senate confirmation.
Copyright 2007, Dolph Honicker
