Well, here we were maybe a year and a half since the big “victory” parade we gave ourselves, and Daddy Bush’s approval numbers were circling the drain two months before the “election”. Not being able to figure out how a bar-code reader worked, right there on TV in front of everybody and their cat, certainly hadn’t helped matters any. So, there was only one thing for Daddy Bush to do, and that’s — you guessed it, gin up another war scare with a pretext so flimsy that I can’t even remember what it was. Get everybody’s patriotic hard-ons working again, and they’ll forget about the economy, and the looming North American Free Trade Agreement… and the fact that their President was such a sheltered preppie that he never even had the chance to see how a bar-code scanner at the frickin’ supermarket works.
A few mornings after our crews had hit the streets with this one, a scattering of them across Capitol Hill started showing up with a note stuck over them addressed to the local GOP contingents — that is, the Hill’s resident population of beer-guzzling interns working for GOP representatives and Senators — from the local Democratic contingent of young beer-guzzlers, apologizing in the most profusely craven and abject manner for the tasteless cartoon being displayed on Capitol Hill, mere weeks before a major Presidential “election”, implying that Daddy Bush was instigating a war scare to rustle up some votes. Oh, p’shaw. A war scare to win an election? Oh, tut-tut, it is to laugh.
Anyway, said young Democratic partisan beer-guzzling youth ended by swearing all up and down that it was the work of a lone nut — admittedly, half true — and not that of the Democratic Party, which goes without saying as even back then, the Democratic Party was one of the most dickless, craven outfits ever to foul the modern American political stage and could never, ever in its wildest dreams, ever summon up the cajones to publicly suggest that a sitting GOP President — a scheming, lying, conniving, former CIA Director, f’cripesake — would actually whip up a phony war threat in order to win an election.
As we were to find out about a year later, President Bill could give us all a clinic in how that kind of behavior is done right.
