Wehner: Let’s Get Cocoonier
Peter Wehner used to be the White House’s designated in-house intellectual, his job being to flatter the idiot President’s vanity and impress Washington Post reporters:
Pete Wehner has the rarest of White House jobs. He is paid to read, to think, to prod, to brainstorm — all without accountability. He recalls the words of White House senior adviser Karl Rove when he interviewed for the job: “He said my job is to bug him.”
Wehner runs the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives (or the Office of Strategery, as it is known inside the building after a “Saturday Night Live” skit spoofing the president’s mangling of the English language). The OSI was Rove’s idea, created shortly after President Bush was elected in 2000. It is the smallest unit in the Rove empire, with six employees, and represents the closest thing the White House has to an in-house think tank. [...] A current folder on Wehner’s desk is labeled: “2d Term/Analysis.” It is a compendium of how other presidents often went wrong in their second terms, history Bush hopes not to repeat. [...]
Wehner said: “I think he’s on the right side of history and is on the right side of the important debates of our time, and he’s comfortable in that.”
Now he seems to have given himself the task of explaining, implausibly, why massive electoral repudiation of conservative politicians would somehow not represent a repudiation of conservatism:
But it is a mistake to assume that significant GOP losses, should they occur, are a referendum on conservatism. In part, the GOP’s problems stem from being seen as having become less conservative and less principled (think “Bridge to Nowhere”).
This was a widespread conservative talking point in the wake of the party’s large losses in 2006, repeatedly endlessly by the leaders of conservative institutions and the GOP’s congressional leadership. There was, at the time, zero evidence for this view. Nonetheless, it became the animating principle of the next two years worth of conservatism up to and including the Republican Party nominating the country’s best-known pork-buster as its 2008 standard-bearer. At the moment, it seems overwhelmingly likely to lead to further losses in the House of Representatives, further losses in the Senate, and the loss of the White House. Wehner response to this additional information is to . . . repeat the conclusion! No wonder Bush asking him to study how to avoid a second-term collapse led to the most spectacular second-term collapse ever.
33 Responses to “Wehner: Let’s Get Cocoonier”
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October 27th, 2008 at 11:39 am
It’s nice that you consider the bailout bill, FISA and a few other things a disaster. It was a disaster for the country, not for wingnuts like Dubya and Wehner.
October 27th, 2008 at 11:42 am
A few months ago I was browsing through a remaindered book whose title was “A Complete Wingnut’s History of the USA”. (Or something.) Anyway, it was recent enough to end with the 2006 elections, whose results are explained as being because the electorate was angry at the Republicans for not throwing all the immigrants out.
October 27th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Wehner is like one of those latter day Marxists who insiste
that “real communism” hasn’t yet been tried, but
Pol Pot is gonna really do what the Sovs failed to ….
October 27th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Wehner and his EPPC (LOL) colleague Kurtz are part
of a growing trend of conservative regression.
The conservative movement is going back to the pre-Buckley
era of unthinking grunts and moronic reaction and
paranoia.
Matt – you’ve probably posted that Lionel Trilling essay
from the 50s that Buckley said he was fighting against.
But the joke is that Joe McCarthy was probably
more mainstream in his thinking than someone like
Andy McCarthy. At least the USSR was a real menace too.
October 27th, 2008 at 11:53 am
sigh…
i feel ok and then i see stuff like this:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDI2MTkyMjNkNmFlN2Q3NWI5ZjkyYjM5MWYzYWNlMjg=
October 27th, 2008 at 11:54 am
Isn’t Andrew Sullivan going to get miffed with you for using “conservative” and “Republican” so interchangeably?
October 27th, 2008 at 11:58 am
Was it here that we used to be told how we shouldn’t think of Bush Jr. as stupid? ‘Cause “idiot President” is pretty close, I’d think.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Obama should drop a few more Marxy sounding memes this week – as a form of psywar.
Obama’s “spread the wealth” comment served to tease
out the most embrassing elements of the GOP
magnetic underwear/ tin foil hat
crowd.
Obama should come up with some reasonable sounding phrase that sounds somewhat like certain passages in the C. Manifesto . Then he can let the NRO types “find”
the phrase and “decode” it for Fox.
This stuff all makes them sound loony.
Btw – Dubya used to do something similar in 2000 – When
he heard media liberal on TV making fun
of something he said or how he said – He would
intentionally repeat his “mistake” – Thus, distracting
Gore’s lame communications squad with
meaningless stuff.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
It’s impressive how little these folks understand about where the country is right now. “Think Bridge to Nowhere”? Yeah, fine, think that. But you’ll be the only one thinking that. Nobody cares about the Bridge to Nowhere.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
So this guy spent all his time thinking about how to help Bush not screw up his second term? That’s stupid. Presidents screw up by not anticipating problems, and when problems occur, by not handling them properly. Maybe this guy should have invested a few neurons to considering things like housing bubbles, disaster response, financial crisies, etc.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Given this logic, how will we ever know if the voters are unsatisfied with conservative ideas?
Since conservative politicians cannot be said to represent conservative ideas, perhaps we can examine polling on specific conservative policies like privatizing Social Security, the Iraq War, or market deregulation.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Again… Social Psychology 101: Cognitive dissonance doesn’t make people change their minds. It produces and promotes the creation of social structures that will confirm the threatened beliefs.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
The beauty part of revisiting that WaPo piece from Dec 2004: Wehner was actually the engineer of Bush’s all-out assault on Social Security in the spring of ‘05 (he wrote a memo about how the “privatization” campaign was the best chance in six decades–i.e., since the advent of Social Security–to roll it back). That’s specifically when the Bush legacy began going downhill, gathering speed. After six months of that, Bush’s poll numbers were heading into negative territory–and then Katrina happened. Good times–er, well, or something….
October 27th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
These dudes all look the same. Crazy.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Wehner’s piece was horrible. It spent the entire time diagnosing the problem and never really said what exactly conservatives should do to get on the right track. I would say that merely saying they should be watchdogs for responsible institutions is pretty weak. He only slightly acknowledges energy/climate change, the financial crisis and health care as the big issues of the day.
Even worse, David Frum’s piece on Sunday said the two biggest reasons for better Republican representation in the senate were: 1) to watch over the administration of the $700 bailout; and 2) to prevent Democrats from changing tax laws to harm conservative think-tanks.
The journey out into the wilderness seems to have begun — and right now the Republicans are very lost.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
“These dudes all look the same. Crazy.”
Odd – but it does sometimes seem that way. Maybe it’s the diet – too many chickenhawk salad sandwiches.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
I read this piece in the WaPO. All the way through I kept hearing the phrase “Baghdad Bob, Baghdad Bob…”.
If this was the leading intellect in GWB-2. a lot becomes more comprehensible…bot no less reprehensible.
I do hope this mantra continues. It is almost a guarantee that these idiots will spend several decades in the wilderness. In the meantime, we may be able to construct a 21st century society.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
re Bridge to nowhere –
IMO – that was actually a good project. It would
have created jobs and led to economic development.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
The beauty part of revisiting that WaPo piece from Dec 2004: Wehner was actually the engineer of Bush’s all-out assault on Social Security in the spring of ‘05… After six months of that, Bush’s poll numbers were heading into negative territory–and then Katrina happened.
And yet, Wehner still has a job, instead of having been fired for this big screwup. The Republican party apparatus seems to be dominated by people whose careers have progressed from failure to failure, instead of facing punishment.
October 27th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
I don’t think Wehner even begins to understand what he’s saying when he’s using a phrase like “the right side of history”. The reason it resonates as Marxism-like is because it’s a formulation that only makes sense if you accept some form of Hegelianism (which Marxism is one variant, of course). Note that Hegel and the American political regime are not in agreement.
October 27th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
IMO – that was actually a good project. It would
have created jobs and led to economic development
And there’s no reason why it couldn’t have been funded by the state of Alaska – which give out millions in oil proceeds to government and socialism hating libertarians every year.
October 27th, 2008 at 11:59 pm
Yeah – but it was funded by the Congress.
October 28th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
As for that bridge…the money would have been better spent on another bridge, I-35 before it collapsed.
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