When Bill Clinton picked Al Gore as his Vice-Presidential running mate, Frank Scott and I had one of our disagreements. Frank thought it made no sense because Gore didn’t bring anything different to the ticket, whereas I thought it was brilliant because for once both the nominees were on the same page. If Clinton became president and Gore was his Veep, then Clinton’s replacement had pretty much the same political philosophy that Clinton did. It made sense to me.
I was initially enthusiastic about Gore’s running to replace Clinton in 2000.
But then Gore made a horrendous, boneheaded, stupid mistake.
He picked the absolute worst running mate possible: Connecticut senator and all around asshole Joe Lieberman.
The idea was that because Lieberman had criticized Clinton, this would distance the campaign from Clinton’s “scandals”.
Which was stupid.
Clinton was still very popular. I guess Gore got some very bad advice.
He did figure it out towards the end of the campaign, and Clinton did do some campaigning for him then.
In any case, Gore ended up winning a majority of the popular vote.
But there was the stupid electoral college to deal with.
It all came down to Florida, hanging chads, and Sandra Day O’Conner, a Supreme Court Justice who had been overheard to say that she was delaying her retirement until there was Republican in the Oval Office.
Well, she got her chance, because the election was decided by the Supremes in a decision that was contrary to all precedent, and because it was so bad, it stated that it was not to be used as a precedent for future cases.
So Junior Bush was installed by the Supremes. Of course, Florida wouldn’t have been so close if that other major league asshole Ralph Nader hadn’t mounted a third party candidacy to teach the Democrats a lesson.
Junior Bush was another sock puppet, this time with his Vice-President Dick Cheney’s hand up his ass.
He appointed a bunch of incompetent jerks to his cabinet, but of course, with the political realignment that had been going on for the past few years, pretty much all Republicans were incompetent by this time, although we didn’t know it yet. But we soon would.
For example, his first Attorney General was John Ashcroft, who ignored the warnings about an imminent attack by al-Qaida because he was more concerned about pornography. Oh, remember when Ashcroft was so embarrassed by the Spirit of Justice statue’s tits, that he had to put a drape over them?
Yes, that was the calibre of asshole that sock puppet Bush appointed to his cabinet. Ashcroft was eventually replaced by Alberto Gonzales. Remember him?
Then there was Condoleeza Rice, his national security officer, that some folks try to say was actually pretty savvy. Well, ok. She’s the one who claimed that nobody could have imagined anyone using an airplane as a weapon. Imagine that? Well, Sam Byck did, all the way back in 1974, he tried to hijack a plane and fly it into the White House to kill Richard Nixon. You’d think the national security advisor would know about that. All Stephen Sondheim fans do, as Sam Byck was included in Assassins. And then there’s Tom Clancy, a conservative writer of thrillers, who had made it a major plot point in one of his books. The point is that the use of an airplane as a weapon was not something that nobody had ever imagined.
Sock puppet Bush then took us into a needless war in Afghanistan, which should have been a law enforcement issue, if he had listened to anyone who actually knew what they were talking about. And a completely pointless war in Iraq.
His response to Katrina was anemic, to say the least.
One of the worst presidents of all time.