Making a mockery

It seems that if you mock the president, he will pretend that you're actually mocking the troops, even though he knows you're not.

This latest Lack of Perspective Extravaganza tells us that:

1. John Kerry can't deliver a joke and George W. Bush can't understand one.

2. Bush is thin-skinned, petulant and disingenuous.

3. Bush is more interested in attacking his critics than he is in trying to find some less-than-eternally-disastrous solution for the Fiasco he has created in Iraq.

4. People claiming to be "journalists" act more like the panel of judges on Dancing With the Stars than like actual reporters. They're more interested in "scoring" any dispute, awarding style points for spin and for particularly bold doublespeak, than they are in sorting out the actual truth of anything and who is or isn't twisting that truth beyond recognition.

5. People claiming to be "journalists" will spend more time and attention examining the political effectiveness of Bush's baldly disingenuous claims to be offended on behalf of the "troops" than they ever will examining the many legitimate reasons those troops have to be offended on account of Bush.

All of which we already knew.

Partial list of people who understood, with perfect clarity, the intention, meaning and only plausible interpretation of Kerry's comment: George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, Michael Graham, Joe Scarborough, Jeff Emanuel, Michelle Malkin.

Partial list of people who, knowing this, pretended something else was true: George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, Michael Graham, Joe Scarborough, Jeff Emanuel, Michelle Malkin.

They seem to delight in their indignation, even though they know it's baseless. But even baseless indignation can give you a little bit of a buzz. And I suppose, too, that if reality offers you nothing but cause for shame, then the temptation must be strong to flee to a fantasy world in which you can play the part of the indignant, aggrieved party, acting only out of noble concern for "the troops" — the same troops who, back in reality, you glibly sacrifice in order to feed vicariously off of their courage.

More than 100 dead soldiers this month in a pointless and indefensible fiasco and the leaders who sent them to their deaths, along with the captive press, have nothing better to do than to pretend that they're defending these soldiers' honor from insults that everyone involved in this charade knows perfectly well were directed elsewhere.

And but so, if mocking a disastrously incompetent president is now regarded as the same as mocking the troops, and we're therefore not allowed to mock the president, who can we mock?

People with crippling illnesses.

Here, via Crooks & Liars, is the video of Michael J. Fox being interviewed by George Stephanopoulos.*

Go back in time 20 years. It's Feb 4, 1986, and President Ronald Reagan is delivering the second State of the Union address of his second term. Reagan was still near the height of his popularity — the Teflon was still intact, it was still "morning in America," and the president took a section of his speech to share his brand of infectious optimism with "America's younger generation."

Reagan may not have written this, and it may look hokey on the page, but the man sold it in his delivery:

And tonight I want to speak directly to America's younger generation, because you hold the destiny of our nation in your hands. … Never has there been a more exciting time to be alive, a time of rousing wonder and heroic achievement. As they said in the film Back to the Future, "Where we're going, we don't need roads."

That soaring optimism was part of why Reagan was so successful politically. Watch that interview with Fox for a contemporary dose of that same soaring optimism — that celebration of the possibility and potentiality of America.

Back here in the future, Marty McFly still believes in that potentiality, but the heirs of Reagan's Republican majority do not. First they froze out Reagan's widow, Nancy, shutting out her pleas for funding to allow stem-cell research. And now they have turned on Marty himself, attacking Fox for advocating the same thing and mocking the painful effects of his medication. Neither Nancy Reagan nor Michael J. Fox is partisan, but the current crop of Republicans don't care about that. Any criticism, any advocacy of any alternative stance to whatever it is they advocate, is regarded by them as a partisan attack. And all attacks are met with the same response: character assassination.

So they mock the sick and disabled. And when that backfires — mocking a beloved and sympathetic figure, kicking him while he's down, turns out to not to be an effective vote-winning strategy — they latch onto whatever they can drum up for a distraction. John Kerry, yet again, conveniently provided something they could twist into such a distraction.

The guy who has to be kicking himself after witnessing this most recent amateur political theater is Mark Foley.

Caught red-handed sending lascivious e-mails to underage pages, Foley resigned and checked into rehab. Turns out all he needed to do was to put on his best approximation of indignation and demand — demand! — that his detractors apologize to "our brave men and women in uniform."

Had he done that, he'd still be in office and David Letterman would be off the air, fired in disgrace for insulting the troops with a bunch of jokes about the inappropriateness of IM-sex with teenagers.

Update: Josh Marshall provides an example of Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, really doing what he pretended John Kerry did.

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* That's an interesting pairing. Before getting his own show on ABC, Stephanopoulos was in politics, serving as a White House aide. Fox used to have his own show on ABC — winning an Emmy for Spin City — but left due to the effects of the illness that has now led him to get involved in politics. Fox's Spin City character was based on the character he played in the proto-West Wing film, The American President. And that character was largely based on George Stephanopoulos.