Six years ago, when my Aunt Peggy was still alive but elderly and in failing health, she confidently predicted doom for the Bush presidency. George W. Bush, she said, would be the worst president since Hoover - and she remembered him. Indeed, her disdain for President Bush kept her charged up and alert even as her health grew worse. She'd call me up and rail against the newly-chosen President, whom she referred to derisively as "Georgie Porgie."
I wanted to know why my mother's 80-something, conservative but culturally Democratic sister was so dead set against Bush the Younger. Frankly, some of the "values" he pretended to run on were her values, the social consciousness of an earlier generation. Well, she said, George W. Bush just isn't interested.
Interested in what, Aunt Peggy?
Interested in anything!
Her take was that Bush wasn't necessarily stupid, but that he was intellectually lazy; she believed that he'd been "handed everything his whole life" and was "bailed out by Daddy" time and time again. Not only did Bush not care about the regular people - i.e., us - he didn't care about much at all. Plus, she warned confidentially, as if Verizon were shipping manuscripts to Karl Rove, he's a bully. He pushes people around, and the act of pushing people around - of getting his own way - was an end in itself, it had no greater policy ambition. Bush, said my aunt, just liked to prove time and time again who was boss. He was addicted to it.
Peggy's gone now, but her prediction haunts us all. The shallow, disinterested President is on his last legs, wields little real power, and shambles around the world in a beat-up old 747 hoping that even our puppet governments will meet with him. He's tossed away his majority in Congress and wrecked his own party. And he's recklessly send almost 3,000 Americans to die just to show who's boss, as my aunt would have said.
I'm sorry my aunt's not around now, though. And not just to see her predictions come uncannily true. She'd have loved the show of chutzpah put on by the incoming Senator from Virginia. My aunt loved the south, having spent many years there on military bases with my uncle, a career U.S. Marine officer. Jim Webb was her kind of Democrat - tough, ex-military, straight-talking - like my grandfather, who worked the Yonkers wards for Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt. And she'd have put pen to paper to the likes of George Will, one of a cadre of Republicans who thought Webb was really one of them because he'd served as Navy Secretary under a Republican. Will made a complete fool of himself with a willfully inaccurate version of the no-famous White House snub delivered by the Senator-elect.
Webb's more gross offense was calculated rudeness toward another human being -- one who, disregarding many hard things Webb had said about him during the campaign, asked a civil and caring question, as one parent to another.
That's not the version Jim Webb, Democrat from Virginia, tells. It's not the version of a father with a Marine son on patrol in Iraq tells. James Webb wasn't the boor, and it was no caring question. It was bait. And Webb shoved aside both the bait and the bully.
Then he walked away.
