What do the Bush White House and Austin Powers have in common?

May 1, 2006

They both lost their mojo.

But let’s be more precise: Austin Powers (in The Spy Who Shagged Me) had his mojo stolen by his archnemesis Dr. Evil. Powers returns to 1969, and he and partner Felicity Shagwell recover it. And all is well, Fat Bastard and Mini-Me notwithstanding, until the appearance of Goldmember, which stunk.

The sad state of the shagless Bush came about quite differently. And I needn’t get into it here. I’m sure you can all outline the causes of the demise of the Bush presidency.

But new Chief of Staff Josh Bolten wants to reverse course. He has no time machine at his disposal, at least none that we know of, but he intends on recovering the White House’s mojo:

It’s time for the White House to go on offense and “get our mojo back.” Josh Bolten said Sunday in his first interview since taking over as the president’s chief of staff.

Bolten made no promises of pulling up President Bush’s all-time low approval ratings, but he said he and Bush have decided they want to be more open with the media and the public.

“We’ve taken advice from a lot of folks that we ought to put the president out more in ways that the American people can see what he’s really like,” Bolten said on “Fox News Sunday.”

But he said that does not mean the president’s policies are going to get an overhaul. “I don’t think we need to change, but we do need to refresh and re-energize,” Bolten said.

And that’s the key. No change in substance, just change in style. Or, to put it differently, a new spin.

Bolten’s resistence to change is laughable — and all-too-predictable given what we know of this White House and its Rovian obsession with politics. Stubbornness isn’t a virtue, at least not according to Aristotle, but Bush seems to misconstrue his own stubbornness for political courage. Which is why Iraq’s turned out the way it has, why I’m pessimistic that there’ll be a peaceful resolution to the Iranian nuclear crisis, and why Bush has no domestic agenda left. He stuck to policies that were broken from the get-go and now his approval ratings are hovering in the low-30s.

This is about propping up Bush at least through this fall’s midterms. With no substance to work with, no viable policy objectives beyond yet another military escapade, all Bolten has is a five-point plan that’s pure PR (plus a collision course with Iran). Steve discussed that here; I did here.

I wouldn’t put anything past this desperate, degenerate White House, and the spin has worked wonders in the past, but it’s simply too late for Bush to recover his mojo. It’s long, long gone.

May 1, 2006 at 12:47 pm

In other words, it’s the same damn choir singing out of the same damn hymnal, just singing in a different key. Same shit, just a new color — it still stinks and needs to be flushed down the crapper of bad history.

Maybe they should’ve hired Beyonce as the new spokesman … ?

On a more serious note, as someone who works in PR, I can assure you that if what you are trying to push is crap, there is nothing you can do to change it. Sure, you can use buzzwords and attempt to spin it any way you like, but in the end most people will see through it.

It also doesn’t help that BushCo is in a reactionary mode — PR always works best when it’s proactive.

And if these points are true in the smallish business for which I work, then it’s even moreso when the “business” is on such a grand scale.

Of course, we can discuss whether or not PR is a noble profession some time later. It pays the bills and wasn’t exactly my first career choice, nor the path I plan on taking. But it has taught me a lot about the ways business and our government work, and having seen the sausage being made (metaphorically speaking), I can assure you that it’s put every single thing I read into question.

Is there anything more sad that a Republicanite trying to be ‘cool’?

What this White House lacks is INTROSPECTION. The process of actually taking the time to rethink your thoughts, see from experience where you have made errors, and apply the lessons learned to your future planning.

But for the Rovians, introspection stopped at “Don’t do it Clinton’s way”. Even though Clinton’s administration stopped the Millenium attacks, and the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, as far as the NeoCons and Cheney were concerned, everything was done wrong.

And what had America gotten from George W. Bush?

9/11

Katrina

Additional nuclear weapons in North Korea

A quadmire in Iraq

A pending war with Iran

$70 a barrel petrolium and $3 a gallon gasoline

Systemic deficits as far as the accountant can calculate and total dependence on COMMUNIST China to fund them

and an assault on most if not all of our civil liberties (except guns, of course)

What does Bush need mojo for? He has unlimited power. So I don’t think he’s talking about mojo to keep the common citizen, like us, happy. Who cares what we think, right?

The only people he needs “mojo” for are his “true base”–the corporate fat cats and inherited-money wastrels who are the real basis for his unlimited power. They are the ones who buy off the politicians so Bush can do as he pleases. They are the ones who select the “news” (read: entertainment). They are the props for this regime, just as they were for Hitler’s regime.

But the whole thing for Bush depends on keeping his true base happy. And it seems, for whatever reason, that they are not happy. So he has to come up with a new ploy to buy their support. More tax cuts to benefit the superrich? Privatize social security to benefit the superrich? Start a war with Iran to benefit the superrich?

I’m not so sure it’s too late, and that a few
folksy performances might not add a few
points to his ratings.

The MSM all but ignored Stephen Colbert’s
electrifying performance at the White House
Correspondents Dinner, and instead praised
and fawned over the president’s doppelganger
skit. It seems clear that the sycophantic MSM
will continue the charade of pretending that this
disgraceful fraud is a real president and that
all is well in American governance.

If Bush suddenly begins making folksy
appearances, they’ll cover them in depth,
and he’ll get a bit of a boost. They’ll make
sure he does. Remember, the execs in
the MSM corporate world got those big
tax breaks, too. Think they want to lose
them?

Joshing. Mojo in the movie is unnatural and not really wanted. It’s a disease, actually.

If Bush really wants to “refresh and re-energize,” he should book a guest appearance on “The Colbert Report.”

“What do the Bush White House and Austin Powers have in common?”

Massive quantities of extreme, over-the-top silliness? Hey, it was worth a shot. As for Kid George, he can now provide the perfect excuse for not doing things like:

“Promising to uphold, protect, and defend the Constitution,” or

“Giving the troops everything they need to fulfill the Iraq mission,” or

“Promoting world-class education for every American child.”

He just has to say, “You shouldn’t have taken us seriously; we were just Joshin’….”

Regime change, people…America needs regime change….

Oh, I didn’t think Bolten was referring to Austin Power’s Mojo.

Bolten’s Mojo reference should be closer to Mojo the Monkey from the Simpsons. You know, the helper monkey who did all of the things Homer was too lazy to do including stealing doughnuts (till Mojo discovered the joys of eating them.) It worked well for Mojo till emmulating Homer’s lifestyle caught up to him and the monkey ended up wearing a diaper, having trouble breathing because his blood had the cholesterol of gravy and typed/uttered his last words, “Pray for Mojo.” Kinda like Stonewall Scotty’s final days.

When the decider decides something on Monday he still believes in on Wednesday no matter what happened on Tuesday.

Steve Colbert is a great American.

Yep, rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenberg. I think that Colbert has contributed some great one-liners to the Democratic lexicon.

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