Author Topic: Gerson Is Ignorant to Political Consequence.  (Read 1938 times)

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Offline Rapunzel

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Gerson Is Ignorant to Political Consequence.
« on: October 02, 2013, 01:59:56 am »
http://jenkuznicki.com/2013/10/gerson-is-ignorant-to-political-consequence/

   
Gerson Is Ignorant to Political Consequence.
By Jen Kuznicki On October 1, 2013


Michael Gerson, speechwriter and man of questionable character, wrote in the Washington Post, that the tea party is an ideological faction at odds with real conservatism.

This guy wouldn’t know conservatism if it bit him in the ass.

Gerson is of the mindset that conservatism is merely a pragmatic approach to deal-making.  Be prudential, he advises, be pragmatic, he scolds, both arguments are proven to advance leftism on the nation in form of Communism, Fascism, Marxism, and never Constitutionalism.

Michael says, in his opening sentence:
Quote

    If you can judge people by the quality of their enemies, one quality shared by many opponents of the tea party is their conservatism.

Oh hell yeah. Obama is a conservative, so is Mikulski and Schumer, not to mention Durbin, Kaine, and in fact, every one of the 25 Republicans who voted for cloture, resulting in a simple majority of these great conservatives in the Senate to fund Obamacare.

When 25 Republicans buy the leftist line and demonstrate their inability to connect the dots between a cloture vote and the next simple majority vote, the problem lies not with the minority, but with ignorance of consequence.

Hey Mike, I just came up with a buzz phrase, “ignorance of consequence”.  I’m sure you’ll use it and claim you came up with it.

Anyway, the Gersonian tack is to try to extract tea party influence from the Republican party by labeling them as a faction not at all interested in conservatism because to him, conservatism is what those 25 Republicans have demonstrated, being pragmatic and all, saying that they couldn’t get defunding past, and then made it so.

Mike’s a liar.

   
Quote
So the Senate Conservatives Fund runs ads against Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and other solid Senate conservatives for opposing a counterproductive strategy to defund Obamacare. The circle of tea-party purity is drawn so tightly that it excludes Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and John Cornyn (R-Tex.) — some of the most reliably conservative members of Congress.

Obviously, what would be productive in the pragmatic strategerists mind of the genius Gerson, would be to force Harry Reid to prove, once again, that Democrats love Obamacare and would vote to strip out Obamacare funding, which they did, after the 25 Republicans voted to give him a simple majority to do so.

Wow, how pragmatic.  How “Heroic”.  How nuanced and beneficent.

 
Quote
  Tea-party populism, however, moved quickly beyond this point. We are no longer seeing a revolt against the Republican leadership, or even against the Republican “establishment”; this revolt is against anyone who accepts the constraints of political reality.

Au Contraire Mon Frer.

What the hell was Gerson doing during the 21 hour beautiful discourse on the Senate floor?  I was entralled, fell asleep only for a bit, and woke up to Mike Lee talking about Wickard vs. Filburn.  It is clear, now more than ever, that your average DC punk like Gerson has not one clue about how we got here, and the tea party KNOWS.


That makes him, and his cronies, part of the ignorant “faction” of the Republican Party, and us, the tea party, constitutional conservative the well-versed and the highly educated.

Gerson’s “political reality” is that he believes that Republicans cannot win, and we had better get used to it, because he already is.

It’s sad, really.

 
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  Tea-party activists assert that the launch of health­insurance subsidies and exchanges will cause immediate and pervasive entitlement addiction — creating a permanent new class of Democratic-voting clients of the state. It seems more likely that Americans will see the flaws of a hastily and poorly designed system and express their displeasure in midterm elections. But the notion that the character of the country is about to suddenly change helps explain the state of emergency in tea-party circles.

Now who doesn’t understand political reality?  It is Gerson that is blind to consequence, and ignorant of history.

As Mark Levin offers in The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic, the motions of a controlling Federal Government is slow, until it strangles us.

Quote
    The nation has entered an age of post-constitutional soft tyranny. As French thinker and philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville

    explained presciently, “It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through

    which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupe-fies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”1

Gerson closes with scolding the “20%” of the House Republicans as a tiny minority that the leadership has deigned to acknowledge this one time, and hopes the future of the House actions realize the “faction” will continue to drive Republicans down the road of defeat.

He refuses to realize that behind those 20%, waits an army of millions.
�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

Offline sinkspur

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Re: Gerson Is Ignorant to Political Consequence.
« Reply #1 on: October 02, 2013, 02:07:24 am »
Another despicable post.

Michael Gerson is a "man of questionable character"?  What IN HELL does that mean?  Michael Gerson wrote speeches for George W. Bush.  He's an evangelical Christian with a wife and two children.

Where does this skank get off inferring that Gerson is a man of questionable character? Where's her evidence?

 I didn't read any further than that.

You ought to check your sources, Rap.  You're travelling in some mighty scummy company.
Roy Moore's "spiritual warfare" is driving past a junior high without stopping.

Offline Rapunzel

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Re: Gerson Is Ignorant to Political Consequence.
« Reply #2 on: October 02, 2013, 02:10:03 am »
Just because Gerson wrote for Bush does not make him a God..  David Frum wrote for him, too........ of course you know that as well... 
�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

Offline sinkspur

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Re: Gerson Is Ignorant to Political Consequence.
« Reply #3 on: October 02, 2013, 02:16:02 am »
Just because Gerson wrote for Bush does not make him a God..  David Frum wrote for him, too........ of course you know that as well...

You didn't answer my question.

What evidence does this dopey woman present to back up her contention that Michael Gerson is a "man of questionable character"? 

When I come here, I don't want to read kooky crap, birther crap, 9/11 truther crap.

Jen Kuznicki is a kook.  A slandering kook.
Roy Moore's "spiritual warfare" is driving past a junior high without stopping.

famousdayandyear

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Re: Gerson Is Ignorant to Political Consequence.
« Reply #4 on: October 02, 2013, 02:19:53 am »
You didn't answer my question.

What evidence does this dopey woman present to back up her contention that Michael Gerson is a "man of questionable character"? 

When I come here, I don't want to read kooky crap, birther crap, 9/11 truther crap.

Jen Kuznicki is a kook.  A slandering kook.

Ace of Spades is another option for your reading/posting pleasure.

Oceander

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Re: Gerson Is Ignorant to Political Consequence.
« Reply #5 on: October 02, 2013, 02:21:59 am »
You didn't answer my question.

What evidence does this dopey woman present to back up her contention that Michael Gerson is a "man of questionable character"? 

When I come here, I don't want to read kooky crap, birther crap, 9/11 truther crap.

Jen Kuznicki is a kook.  A slandering kook.

Then you should stop hunting so desperately for the one or two posts every so often that do contain "kooky crap, birther crap, 9/11 truther crap" and instead spend your time reading the plethora of other posts that are nothing of the kind.

Offline Rapunzel

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Re: Gerson Is Ignorant to Political Consequence.
« Reply #6 on: October 02, 2013, 02:31:53 am »
You didn't answer my question.

What evidence does this dopey woman present to back up her contention that Michael Gerson is a "man of questionable character"? 

When I come here, I don't want to read kooky crap, birther crap, 9/11 truther crap.

Jen Kuznicki is a kook.  A slandering kook.

Interesting if you had actually READ the article there is no kooky, birther or 911 truther crap anywhere to be found in the article.  And all of a sudden a person who writes for the Washington Post and Huffington Post is a great person because he once wrote for Bush  :silly: :silly:

Esquire doesn't have much good to say about him, either... actually NOTHING good

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/A_Bad_Reason_Is_Stated_Badly

Frankly I don't care as much about his background as he is yet one more journalist who has no use for conservatives.
�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

Offline Cincinnatus

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Re: Gerson Is Ignorant to Political Consequence.
« Reply #7 on: October 02, 2013, 02:38:30 am »
What evidence does this dopey woman present to back up her contention that Michael Gerson is a "man of questionable character"? 

When I come here, I don't want to read kooky crap, birther crap, 9/11 truther crap.


My goodness, what is this guy so upset about? Change a few words and you have exactly his style when writing about people of whom he disapproves.

Jen Kuznicki is a kook.  A slandering kook.

Ho hum.
We shall never be abandoned by Heaven while we act worthy of its aid ~~ Samuel Adams

Offline sinkspur

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Re: Gerson Is Ignorant to Political Consequence.
« Reply #8 on: October 02, 2013, 02:44:31 am »
Interesting if you had actually READ the article there is no kooky, birther or 911 truther crap anywhere to be found in the article.  And all of a sudden a person who writes for the Washington Post and Huffington Post is a great person because he once wrote for Bush  :silly: :silly:

Esquire doesn't have much good to say about him, either... actually NOTHING good

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/A_Bad_Reason_Is_Stated_Badly

Frankly I don't care as much about his background as he is yet one more journalist who has no use for conservatives.

LOL!!  Esquire?   Are you kidding me?  ESQUIRE????

I will ask for the third time:  where is the evidence that Michael Gerson is a person of questionable character?
Roy Moore's "spiritual warfare" is driving past a junior high without stopping.

Offline Rapunzel

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Re: Gerson Is Ignorant to Political Consequence.
« Reply #9 on: October 02, 2013, 03:03:03 am »
LOL!!  Esquire?   Are you kidding me?  ESQUIRE????

I will ask for the third time:  where is the evidence that Michael Gerson is a person of questionable character?

I guess the facts of Gerson slipped your mind all these years later:

 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/09/present-at-the-creation/306134/


September 2007
Present at the Creation

The only person the speechwriter Michael Gerson made look better than President Bush was Michael Gerson. The shaping of a Washington reputation, as witnessed by a White House colleague

 Matthew Scully Sep 1 2007, 12:00 PM ET
 
Michael J. Gerson, my former speechwriting colleague in the Bush White House, is a talented fellow with a first-rate mind and serious purposes—all of which we can expect to see in his new book, Heroic Conservatism. But reading a few insider stories in the first chapter of the book, which his publisher has sent out for publicity, I was not surprised to find that the personal heroics begin early.

By page 3, a “solemn quiet” has fallen over the Oval Office, and we have one of those crossroads moments that come in every White House memoir. Large and consequential matters were in the balance, “the keepers of the budget” were about to crush the hopes of millions, only truth well spoken could save the day, and guess who had the courage to speak it? The conviction and idealism of his words were so characteristic that, in Mike’s telling of the story, President Bush declared, “That’s Gerson being Gerson!”

The president’s little tribute, however, would much better describe what happened after this incident, when the story of “Gerson being Gerson” found its way into a Washington Whispers item by a friend of Mike’s at U.S. News & World Report. Someone had to tell the reporter about this inspiring moment, and I have a feeling it wasn’t the keepers of the budget. It was always like this, working with Mike. No good deed went unreported, and many things that never happened were reported as fact. For all of our chief speechwriter’s finer qualities, the firm adherence to factual narrative is not a strong point. He has chosen the perfect title for his book, because in his telling of a White House story, things often sound a lot more heroic than they actually were.

This tendency to rearrange and romanticize events could be observed in the scores of media profiles and other articles that Mike sat for over the years. When he resigned in June 2006, USA Today remembered “the man whose words helped steady the nation” after 9/11—meaning Mike, not President Bush. It was Michael Gerson, said TheWashington Post, who “crafted the two speeches after the September 11, 2001, attacks that will probably be recorded as Bush’s signal moments of national leadership: the service at the Washington National Cathedral and the address to Congress.” He “filled George Bush’s mouth with golden phrases,” said TheTimes of London. In numerous profiles, Mike was the “conscience of the White House” and answered also to “moral compass for the Bush presidency.”

In a January 2006 piece, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution gave the standard portrait:

    A devout Christian known to lead fellow staffers in prayer, Gerson is what colleagues call a writer’s writer, a big-picture thinker with an instinct for the broad sweep of history who melds the mind of a policy wonk with the heart of a poet.

He is surely the only member of our presidential speechwriting fraternity as celebrated for his moral example as for his literary inspirations. A couple of years ago, Time magazine even named the “President’s Spiritual Scribe” one of the “25 most influential evangelicals” in America, placing Mike in the company of Billy Graham.

“Leading staffers in prayer” might not have been a bad idea, but in our White House speechwriting office it never happened—unless it was the practice to get the morning oblations out of the way before I showed up. Yet even to point out such errors was futile: the “spiritual scribe” served some larger purpose for the media, as a character of their own invention as much as of his own, and attempts at correction only intruded on a private and mutually satisfying arrangement.

My favorite example came in a piece by Bob Woodward and two other Washington Post reporters. The writer’s writer and the reporter’s reporter spent a lot of time together, and whatever Bob got out of the deal you could always find Mike’s reward in print. There had been a September 13, 2001, Oval Office meeting attended by adviser Karen Hughes and three speechwriters—Mike, John McConnell, and me. Early in the meeting President Bush said to us, “We’re at war”—an exact quote, and not the sort of moment easily forgotten. In The Washington Post account, however, the rest of us have vanished, and the president declares, “Mike, we’re at war.”

One word, and history is changed. And not only have colleagues been cleared out, but the attention of Woodward’s readers isn’t even on the president anymore. Things like this happened all the time with Mike—crowded rooms and collaborative efforts gave way, in the retelling, to the self-involved spectacle of one.

Then there was Mike’s Newsweek account last year of the high drama he experienced trying to get into Washington on September 11, while “my evacuated staff” near the White House was doing, well, whatever. (That would be us, his colleagues, who contributed the sole line in that evening’s address, drafted by Karen Hughes, that anyone remembers: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”) Mike never made it into town that day, but that doesn’t prevent him, in his own version, from staying at the center of events—a position from which even the president, as Mike put it in Newsweek, looked “stiff and small.”

“Gerson is a ‘planner,’ not a ‘plunger,’” a 2005 National Journal profile noted, “meaning that he makes a meticulous outline, which he consults during the writing process.” This is true, and equal care and intensity went into crafting the Gerson image. Colleagues were not in the outline, nor were the normal standards of discretion in White House speechwriting. People have a way of disappearing in Mike’s stories. The artful shaping of narrative and editing out of inconvenient detail was never confined to the speechwriting. (The phrase pulling a Gerson, as I recently heard it used around the West Wing, does not refer to graceful writing.) And though in Heroic Conservatism Mike has doubtless offered a kind word or two for speechwriting colleagues, no man I have ever encountered was truer to the saying that, in Washington, one should never take friendship personally.

Woodward’s trilogy about the Bush years is a tale of speechwriting glory that Mike himself could hardly improve upon. Remember those powerful and moving addresses the president gave after September 11? According to Woodward’s State of Denial, Mike wrote all of those speeches by himself—and if there were other speechwriters, well, they must not have made it back from the evacuation:

    Gerson, a 40-year-old evangelical Christian who had majored in theology at evangelist Billy Graham’s alma mater, Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, had written all of Bush’s memorable post-9/11 speeches, including the one he gave at Washington’s National Cathedral on September 14, 2001—“This conflict has begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour of our choosing”—as well as his remarks before a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001: “Americans should not expect one battle but a lengthy campaign.” Gerson had written Bush’s 2002 State of the Union speech identifying Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “Axis of Evil” connecting terrorism with weapons of mass destruction, and had also come up with the intellectual and historical roots for Bush’s “preemption” doctrine speech, delivered at West Point in June 2002—“The war on terrorism will not be won on the defensive.”

How do I break the news to Bob Woodward that his high-placed source wrote not a single one of the lines quoted above, at best a third of any of the speeches he mentions, and that the National Cathedral address was half-written before Mike even entered the room?

Without fear of contradiction—because it’s all in the presidential records—I can report here that Michael Gerson never wrote a single speech by himself for President Bush. From beginning to end, every notable speech, and a huge proportion of the rest, was written by a team of speechwriters, working in the same office and on the same computer. Few lines of note were written by Mike, and none at all that come to mind from the post-9/11 addresses—not even “axis of evil.”
 
Quote
He allowed false assumptions, and also encouraged them. Among chummy reporters, he created a fictionalized, “Mike, we’re at war” version of presidential speechwriting, casting himself in a grand and solitary role. The narrative that Mike Gerson presented to the world is a story of extravagant falsehood. He has been held up for us in six years’ worth of coddling profiles as the great, inspiring, and idealistic exception of the Bush White House. In reality, Mike’s conduct is just the most familiar and depressing of Washington stories—a history of self- seeking and media manipulation that is only more distasteful for being cast in such lofty terms.

There are rewards for such behavior, and in Mike’s case the Washington establishment has raised him up as one of its own—a status complete with a columnist’s perch at The Washington Post. There is a downside, too, measured in the lost esteem of friends and in the tainting of real gifts and achievements. At his best, Mike is a serious man, with an active Christian faith that could be seen in his work as an adviser in the president’s program for helping AIDS and malaria victims in Africa—a vital contribution and well deserving of praise. Yet being a part of such efforts was never reward enough for Mike, and there was always more to the story, always an angle.
�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

Offline Rapunzel

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Re: Gerson Is Ignorant to Political Consequence.
« Reply #10 on: October 02, 2013, 03:04:01 am »
I remember all this from when his book came out, he was very popular with Chris Matthews and company - and he parlayed it into his current job at the Washington Post.
�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

Offline sinkspur

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Re: Gerson Is Ignorant to Political Consequence.
« Reply #11 on: October 02, 2013, 03:11:08 am »
And now, Rap, you've convinced me that Matthew Scully is pretty much an bleep too.

His criticisms of Gerson reflect a man of much less inspiration trashing an associate who was jealous of Gerson's abilities.
Roy Moore's "spiritual warfare" is driving past a junior high without stopping.

Offline Rapunzel

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Re: Gerson Is Ignorant to Political Consequence.
« Reply #12 on: October 02, 2013, 05:08:44 am »
And now, Rap, you've convinced me that Matthew Scully is pretty much an bleep too.

His criticisms of Gerson reflect a man of much less inspiration trashing an associate who was jealous of Gerson's abilities.

Clearly you have let 2007 when the Gerson book came out slip your mind, he took most of the credit for the administration and basically pissed off everyone from your hero Rove on down.
�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

Offline olde north church

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Re: Gerson Is Ignorant to Political Consequence.
« Reply #13 on: October 02, 2013, 10:27:52 am »
Another despicable post.

Michael Gerson is a "man of questionable character"?  What IN HELL does that mean?  Michael Gerson wrote speeches for George W. Bush.  He's an evangelical Christian with a wife and two children.

Where does this skank get off inferring that Gerson is a man of questionable character? Where's her evidence?

 I didn't read any further than that.

You ought to check your sources, Rap.  You're travelling in some mighty scummy company.

You sir, are a eunuch.  Slowly fanning an ostrich feather while cooing tender lionizations upon the unworthy.
Why?  Well, because I'm a bastard, that's why.