My seven o’clock consultation session yesterday evening was with Calvin Windbreaker, senior executive policy advisor to the Republican National Committee. His first words, as he made himself comfortable on the couch in front of the picture window in my office were, “Jesus Christ, Tom, can you believe this ridiculous weather we’ve been having here in Washington lately?”
“The entire United States,” I noted, “has been having ridiculous weather for quite some time.”
“Yeah, yeah, well,” he responded with a dismissive wave of his hands, “you know what I mean – it’s almost as if God Himself was punishing us for putting…” his eyes rolled toward the White House, visible through the picture window, “you know… somebody like that guy in charge.”
“As opposed to, say, Richard Nixon?” I asked with just a hint of insouciance.
“Well, I don’t know,” he sighed. “I think, in fact, that a lot of people don’t appreciate Nixon sufficiently.”
“Not that he could win the Republican nomination for President these days,” I observed.
“True enough,” Calvin agreed, “the optics would make him seem way too liberal.”
“So,” I ventured, “what can I do for the RNC today?”
“It’s this Ted Nugent thing,” Calvin sighed with an air of frustrated resignation. “Damn Tea Party wingnuts! It’s like with women, you know – you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them.”
“Speaking of Nixon,” I chided, “Nugent is an obvious spokesperson for his Southern Strategy, which gave him victory over Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and which many Republican candidates have used as a wedge issue to attract white southern voters ever since.”
“A candidate’s gotta win elections any way he can,” Calvin shrugged. “You, I and Richard Nixon could all agree on that, I’m pretty sure. And besides, it’s not like what Nugent said was really so bad, anyhow.”
“He called the President of the United States a ‘subhuman mongrel,’ didn’t he?” I inquired.
“Yeah, words to that effect,” he admitted.
“Those exact words, in fact,” I insisted. “And he did so in very close proximity to his good buddy Greg Abbott, who, up until earlier this week when Nugent shot his mouth off about Obama, was the RNC’s Golden Boy for the upcoming Texas gubernatorial primary on March fourth.”
“Yeah,” Calvin muttered ruefully, “we were gonna go places with that guy. Now, we’re not so sure. Damn shame.”
“He could have been useful to you?” I sought to verify.
“Still might be,” Calvin averred. “I mean, it’s not like what Nugent said isn’t basically true, is it?”
I chose my words carefully. “Sir, despite what some members of the RNC might think of him, Barack Hussein Obama is not a subhuman mongrel. Granted, he’s a mulatto, but the word ‘mongrel’ is not generally used in the English language to refer to human beings, no matter what their ancestry, without premeditated pejorative intention. Furthermore, the President is a human being; and the adjective ‘subhuman’ is correctly applied, if at all, only to members of the inferior primate orders, such as bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, gibbons and orangutans, or to orders of currently extinct hominids, such as the australopithecus afarensis.”
“Oh, hell,” Calvin objected, “it’s not that big a deal, is it? Look what those damn Democrats called George W. Bush! They said he looked like a monkey, didn’t they? They used to draw pictures of him in political cartoons so he looked like one!”
“True,” I conceded, “the first recorded incident of that was in 2003, when a Guardian cartoon in England depicted him with simian features astride the Republican elephant dragging Tony Blair off to war in Iraq. Since then, there have been literally thousands of pictures or descriptions of George W. Bush as resembling an ape or a monkey.”
“Right!” Calvin snapped. “So what’s the big deal, huh? And look at all the other things they said about him – that Dubya was an untrustworthy hick cowboy from Texas and such!”
“And that he was a liar,” I added, “and a moron, a cocaine fiend, and terrorist.”
“A terrorist? Who said that?” Calvin demanded.
“Julianne Malveaux called George W. Bush a terrorist,” I answered, “and said he was out of control. Ramsey Clark called him the greatest threat to world peace. Julia Roberts called him an embarrassment to America, Rosie O’Donnell called him a war criminal, Sean Penn called him an obscene traitor, Harry Belfonte called him a tyrant and ‘America’s hand of villainy.’ Al Gore called him a coward, Carlos Santana called him the servant of the greedy rich, Hillary Clinton called him arrogant and incompetent, Joy Behar called him a murderer, Nancy Pelosi called him an ignoramus, and Ted Kennedy said that George W. Bush would, and I quote, ‘mislead, deceive, make up the needed facts, and smear the character of any critics.’ George Clooney said that on 9/11, Bush ‘ran away and hid,’ cowering in his bunker. Ed Asner accused Bush of desecrating America. Michael Moore called him ‘a deserter, an election thief, a drunk driver, a WMD liar and a functional illiterate.’ Cher called him stupid and lazy. Moby called him a pathetic half-wit. Barbra Streisand said he reminded her of Herman Goering and Linda Ronstadt likened him to Adolf Hitler.”
“All of which,” Calvin huffed, “is a bunch of raving liberal lunacy – right?”
“Keith Olbermann called George W. Bush a ‘banana republic despot’ and a fascist, then suggested he get a T-shirt made with ‘FASCIST’ printed on it to wear around the White House. And Ronald Reagan Jr. accused Bush of ‘dementia.’ And speaking of the Reagans…”
“And it was all just Democrat ranting, wasn’t it?” Calvin interrupted.
“Folks never repressed their opinions about Ronald Wilson Reagan, that’s for sure. He and George Herbert Walker Bush were accused of committing high treason with Iran just so they could get elected in the first place. And after he got into the White House, they called Reagan a senile monster, a gibbering moron, an amoral liar, a dumb SOB, a useful idiot, a total fool, an evil bigot, a disgusting fraud, a shameless shill, a unscrupulous crook, bloodthirsty war criminal, a willing accessory to brutal genocide, a gangster, a scumbag, a Satanist, a sadomasochist, a sodomite, a pedophile, a secret member of the Ku Klux Klan, a rapist, a ritual murderer, a…”
“And that was all just leftist lies and faggot fantasies, wasn’t it?” Calvin interjected.
“On the other hand,” I pointed out, “there were plenty of nasty things said about Bill Clinton, too. People claimed he was a Manchurian candidate who had been brainwashed by the Russians when he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and took a student trip to Moscow. They said he had a child with a black prostitute. They claimed he was involved in political corruption, shady real estate deals, and laundering money from the drug trade. Then there was Kathleen Willey, who claimed, albeit in a highly convoluted manner, that the Clintons were involved in the deaths of her husband and Vince Foster, a Clinton White House aide who allegedly committed suicide during the first year of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Other people accused him outright of conspiring with his wife to murder Vince Foster because Foster knew too much. Rush Limbaugh called Clinton “a teabagger,” meaning a sexual pervert, Alex Jones claimed he was a violent rapist, and there were numerous assertions that Clinton is an exhibitionist, molester and philanderer, with a virtual parade of bimbos claiming he cheated on Hillary with them.”
“All of which,” Calvin confidently proclaimed, “is completely true, of course.”
“None of which,” I commented, “is doodly-squat compared to what their political opponents used to say about Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren or Andrew Jackson, for example. Look, Calvin, Mr. Abbott has apologized and Ted Nugent has apologized, too. So what’s giving the RNC such a bad case of heartburn?”
“It’s the way they did it,” he sheepishly admitted as he took out his tablet and read aloud, “Abbott said, ‘This is not the kind of language I would use or endorse in any way. It’s time to move beyond this, and I will continue to focus on the issues that matter to Texans.’ And Nugent – well, damn, listen to this, which I just got e-mailed to me, right before we began our meeting. It seems Nugent said, ‘I do apologize – not necessarily to the President – but on behalf of much better men than myself.’ Then he went on to state that he ‘regretted using street-fighter terminology instead of, say, “violator of his oath to the Constitution.”’ And then he said, ‘I apologize for using the term. I will try to elevate my vernacular to the level of those great men that I’m learning from in the world of politics.’ Now do you see what our problem is down at the RNC, Tom? In order for our hand-picked Republican candidates to win the Republican primaries – instead of some bat-spit crazy Tea Party jackasses winning them instead – we need people like Nugent to say stuff like he did on behalf of people like Greg Abbott. But in order to keep from alienating a majority of the voters in the general election, we need their subsequent apologies to satisfy the independents and swing-vote Democrats without losing our core constituency. And by those criteria, both those apologies suck duck eggs! So that’s what we need, Tom – some responses that sound like apologies to the outsiders, but don’t sound like apologies to our rock-ribbed Republican base!”
“Okay, in that case,” I told him, “Abbott should have said something like, ‘We are surprised and amazed by Mr. Nugent’s frank and candid remarks, but would ask Texas voters to remember that this is a Texas campaign, and that Texas, and the people in it – not Washington DC and the people there – remain our primary concern.’”
“Now that’s more like it!” Calvin enthused. “What would you do with all that crap Nugent spewed out?”
“Nugent,” I advised, “should have said, ‘I regret having expressed my outrage at Washington’s excesses and abuses of power in terms so easily misinterpreted by anyone willing to act in bad faith.’”
“Outstanding!” Calvin burbled. “Look, Collins, how would you feel about being on call, 24/7, to ghost write apologies for Republicans like Abbott and Nugent?”
“As a long as I’m allowed to provide the same service to the Democrats,” I assured him, “it’s a deal.”
“Same… services… to the Democrats?” Calvin echoed, knitting his brow.
“Fair’s fair,” I reminded him, “and a fellow’s got a right to make a living, doesn’t he?”
“Oh, all right,” Calvin acquiesced. “Just so long as you never give both of us the same material.”
“Not to worry,” I promised. “That will never happen. When it comes to political apologies, new ideas just keep arriving in a stream of uninterrupted originality.”