Guest post: "White stems can't jump" (Is it possible that George W. Bush is just a wee bit of a, you know, racist? Shhh!)

How did Larry Bird get dragged into the contorted mental gymnastics of George W. Bush's, er, "thinking" on the subject of stem cell research? Are you sitting down?

To outsiders, the Republican Party's response to its collapse under the catastrophic "leadership" of George W. Bush seemed counterintuitive: ruthless self-shrinkage into a party of the old white Dixiecrat South and the survivalist West. Stranger still is the incredibly prickly response of those Tiny Tenters -- and their pop-eyed puppeteer, Rush -- to being called (gasp!) racists. Oh, they don't seem to mind being racists; it remains the tie that binds, the party's fundamental organizing principle. They just go crazy when they're called racists. Go figure!

It seems to surprise them that the question of who's a racist isn't always resolved with scientific precision by asking, "Are you a racist?" It's entirely possible that there are people like, for example, poor old Chimpy the Ex-Prez who actually don't know that they are (and sure as shootin' aren't interested in finding out). When cogboy sent us this "book observation," we were eager to share it as a guest post for this fascinating example of how a mind like Chimpy's works, or doesn't. We should probably add the obvious caveat in dealing with "Chimpy's book": that not only didn't he write it, but it seems even more probable that he hasn't read it. Still, there doesn't seem much question that the bit of blatantly racist gibberish that popped out at cogboy came from "the author." Who would, or could, possibly have made it up? -- Ken

Guest post: A book observation from cogboy (Juan Adams)

So I was reading a few random pages in Bush's re-overestimation of his residency (Decision Points) because, well... I'm an out of work musician and I waste a lot time reading at the local mega bookstore. It was out of a true sense of patriotism and a curiosity about the impact of hindsight that I picked up his unlikely tome. Brian Eno claims to not be a musician yet he has repeatedly produced masterpieces (Devo, U2, Coldplay, Talking Heads, Bowie . . .). Could a literary treasure be locked inside the brains of this former "most powerful man on earth"
who could not be bothered with reading? A Hemingway armed with crayons and a Big Chief pad...

It was page 112. The decider was in deep decidification mode over government funding of embryonic stem cell research. He had sent "a lively lawyer from New York with a serious commitment to his Jewish faith" (?, ! & wtf...) to gather materials for him to look over (Katrina helicopter style, I'm sure). Bush, after all, didn't want to join the Flat Earth Society -- how could those dummies explain Capital Hill, hello?! He knew he was going to have to hunker down and experiment with thinking because all this stem-craft seemed mysterious
and very scary.

But even as a Reagan fellow at the Ronald Reagan Association for renaming everything after Ronald Reagan, Bush managed to do the unthinkable (no suprise, that). He actually rebuffed the widow Reagan! He ignored her pleas and opted out of granting government support for stem cell research. He hit stem and he hit it hard.

He was the decider and I cannot argue his right, as an elected official (he elected to steal The Whitehouse), to do as such. But what of his moral compass? How had he arrived at this conclusion?

Well........ (sorry, Ron . . . ), Dubya imagined that dread slippery slope (which, by the way, can't exist on flat earths!). Designer babies, organ harvesting, boy-clones bringing boy-abortions to the senior prom . . . His last stop before realization of the full-on horror? The letting of Jack out of the Pandora's Box of bagged cats, as it were? Let me quote:

I could foresee the temptation of designer babies that enabled parents to engineer their very own blonde haired basketball player. Not far beyond that lies the nightmare of full-scale human cloning.*

[*p. eleventy-two, Decision Points : George Double "U" Bush's memo to the IRS as told to George Bush, 2010 Big Chief Publishing]

Of thee, I shit not! It's right there on page eleventy-two! Blonde haired frickin' basketball players!

Now I'm a black gay guy and I'm hypersensitive to accusations of playing the race card (really, I do leave home without it) but this struck me as some kind of veiled racist comment or perhaps hatespeak. But I couldn't put my finger on it. Was he really worried about another Larry Byrd? Could some madman of no morals and no regard for consequences possibly create two, count 'em , two people with identical DNAs?!? Was the thought of ElIen surrogating for RuPaul and the other "Little Ricky" enough to make him rechewdiate his lunch? I mean what
was the real underlying (and Bush certainly isn't above lying) fear factor?

I decided to do some heavy misdundecidifying of my own, and when I started substituting words, I landed on a curious "what if": What if Bush had said "hockey player with an afro"?

And there it was, tea partyesque enfrightenment. Folksy and humorous. Hiding in plain sight where the literate dare not tread. In a book written by a guy who doesn't read. You won't see it online because it's not for the internetters, no siree Bob! It's for folks who'll go buy the book, make it a best seller, not read it, then vote.

And scarier still, it reaches the folks who've got plenty of time to scan books at Wal*mart or the swap meet but can't afford an ipad on which to download Rachel Maddow podcasts while sipping pumpkin spice lattes. No, it's sunny-D's at Wal*mart and they're reading it right under the big yellow smiley face (hey, if the queers get rainbows, then . . . )

They've learned how to vote, and some of them can read (albeit at the previous-presidential level.) But books? Bush?! In a grand anti-Obama-esque low tech maneuver, Bush slid that shit right past the liberal e-literate!

Bush's logic is so fucked up it would take stem cell research to find a cure for it. On the surface, a nearly harmless quote from a totally useless president. But did I detect Hitlaryan seed-sowing of racist stupidity in hopes of future government takeover? Oh come on! It's not like the guy was the most powerful man on earth, capable of entirely fucking up its most powerful nation!

Only an overly sensitive, gay black guy could imagine some racial drama bullshit like that. I should have probably sat back, relaxed and had Sarah fetch me a cup of tea (or a pumpkin spice latte . . . )

Then it hit me . . . Stem cell research is as much about basketball as war in Iraq is about 9/11. "Aha! euphoria" be thy bitch's name! Bush distracted and obstructed by slowly losing every cloudy, incorrect debate while he swiftly prevailed on every cloudy incorrect course of action. Could he possess a gift? Just when you start wondering if "Dark side of the moon" was a fluke, Bush gives you "The Wall."

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