Connecticut Yankee, Not Ignorant Cowboy

As an addendum to the good Doctor's last post, he adds this:

One implication of this is that we should never have been attacking Bush for being stupid, as that's his weakness which everyone knows about. I'm not suggesting that we should have ignored it. But his ignorance should always have been as a backdrop of ridicule against him, rather than the focus of anything. Everyone already knows that he's stupid, and rather than avoiding it, his handlers have always emphasized it to his advantage. That is the second part of the strengths and weaknesses post, of playing up your weaknesses and showing how they're good. But I won't get into that just yet.

Rather than emphasizing his all too obvious idiocy, we should have always been mocking his supposed resoluteness, boldness, and integrity. For example, the man doesn't have a single bone of ideological purity in his body and supports everything based on how the subject is framed. He may be stubborn, but it's not out of rational ideological bias, but rather is from his own egotistical sense of entitlement and inability to reason properly.

Ideologically speaking, the man is all over the map. Any real conservative knows that. Nation building, farm/steel/timber subsidies, open immigration laws, demand-side economics, those are not policies of a conservative. Yet liberals continue to harp on the man for being a brazen ultra-conservative cowboy, which might mean a lot in their hometown, but only endears him to many Americans who really should be against his anti-conservative, anti-populist, anti-American agenda. His policies consistently screw-over Joe Sixpack, yet we continue to alienate such people and push them into Bush's camp. Fuck the environment, we always needed to hit Bush where it hurt, by continually reminding people how unconservative he really is.

And we never should have called him a cowboy. He's not one. Trust me, I live in Texas and know what a cowboy is. Bush is just a poseur who bought an animal-less ranch for PR purposes. He pretends to clear brush in August for fun when real Texans only clear brush during the cooler months (both of them). He's the type of dude who Texans make fun of. A city-slicker. Yet rather than realize that the "cowboy" label was his marketers' idea, we immediately jump on it and try to make fun of him for being an ignorant cowboy. If anyone's the idiot here, it's us (and by "us" I mean you idiots who refer to him as a cowboy).

We always needed to attack him where he felt secure and get him on the defensive. We needed to deny him the ability to rely on his strengths, rather than repeating weaknesses that everyone knows about. That's how modern politics work and if we want to take back our country we'll have to learn the new rules.