ot the most discusting thing ever written about the republikkkon white house...
bozak
Esquire, January 2003
Maybe it's because the midterm elections went so very well. Maybe it's because at the
White House, politics is the best policy. Maybe it's because it's the reign of Karl Rove.
An inside look at how the most powerful presidential adviser in a century does what does
so well.
On a cool Saturday a few days before Christmas last year, Karl Rove showed up in a
festive mood at David Dreyer's house in suburban Washington, D. C., to trim the tree and
have a cup of eggnog. Dreyer is a liberal Democrat, formerly the deputy communications
director in the Clinton White House and also a senior adviser to Treasury secretary
Robert Rubin. He now runs a small public-relations firm. His daughter and Karl's son were
in the same seventh-grade class. After a few brief, friendly encounters at school
functions, Dreyer invited Karl and his boy over for a tree-trimming party with the class,
about fifteen kids and eight or nine parents in all. It was one of those enchanting days
that you remember for a long time. Rove was the ringmaster of fun, brimming with good
cheer, Mr. Silly, without a care in the world. All in attendance were warmed by his
presence, and you never would have known that his job carried such awesome
responsibility. Rove was far too busy decorating cookies and stringing popcorn to betray
anything close to that. "Karl completely took charge, absolutely in the most endearing
way possible. He had a vision of what each kid could contribute. What they could make or
hang, based on how tall they were, or what they could do . . . what ornament, what
Christmas ball. Need more lights? Hey, kids, let's get in the car and go get some more
lights!" Dreyer, a sober man, is trying not to go overboard about how all this affected
him. "You expect a partisan who's onstage all the time, and it doesn't function that way
in real life. You get a father and husband." He pauses. "I think it's sad." What's sad? I
ask. "That we so often have such an extraordinarily one-dimensional view of people, of
our fellow human beings." Not that Dreyer, having glimpsed Karl in repose, far from his
natural habitat, sees him as anything less than extraordinary. "He was magnetic," Dreyer
says dreamily. "He picked up my four-year-old son, Sam, so he could place the star atop
the tree. It was lovely. Just lovely."
When I heard this story, it made me like Karl Rove. It made him sound like a hero to
children, and in my view, there's no better person. But I've never heard another story
like this one, because people in Washington, especially Rove's friends, are utterly
petrified to talk about him.
They heard that I was writing about Karl Rove, seeking to contextualize his role as a
senior adviser in the Bush White House, and they began calling, some anonymously, some
not, saying that they wanted to help and leaving phone numbers. The calls from members of
the White House staff were solemn, serious. Their concern was not only about politics,
they said, not simply about Karl pulling the president further to the right. It went
deeper; it was about this administration's ability to focus on the substance of
governing-issues like the economy and social security and education and health care-as
opposed to its clear political acumen, its ability to win and enhance power. And so it
seemed that each time I made an inquiry about Karl Rove, I received in return a
top-to-bottom critique of the White House's basic functions, so profound is Rove's
influence.
I made these inquiries in part because last spring, when I spoke to White House chief of
staff Andrew Card, he sounded an alarm about the unfettered rise of Rove in the wake of
senior adviser Karen Hughes's resignation: "I'll need designees, people trusted by the
president that I can elevate for various needs to balance against Karl. . . . They are
going to have to really step up, but it won't be easy. Karl is a formidable adversary."
One senior White House official told me that he'd be summarily fired if it were known we
were talking. "But many of us feel it's our duty-our obligation as Americans-to get the
word out that, certainly in domestic policy, there has been almost no meaningful
consideration of any real issues. It's just kids on Big Wheels who talk politics and know
nothing. It's depressing. Domestic Policy Council meetings are a farce. This leaves
shoot-from-the-hip political calculations-mostly from Karl's shop-to triumph by default.
No one balances Karl. Forget it. That was Andy's cry for help."
But now the stunning midterm ascendancy of the Republicans boosts Rove into a new
category; a major political realignment may hereby be ascribed to his mastery, his grand
plan.
At the moment when one-party rule returns to Washington-a state that existed, in fact, in
the first five months of the Bush presidency, before Senator Jeffords switched parties-we
are offered a rare view of the way this White House works. The issue of how the
administration decides what to do with its mandate-and where political calculation
figures in that mix-has never been so important to consider. This White House will now be
able to do precisely what it wants. To understand the implications of this, you must
understand Karl Rove.
"It's an amazing moment," said one senior White House official early on the morning
after. "Karl just went from prime minister to king. Amazing . . . and a little scary. Now
no one will speak candidly about him or take him on or contradict him. Pure power, no
real accountability. It's just 'listen to Karl and everything will work out.' . . . That
may go for the president, too."
Over time, I came to know these sources to be serious people with credible information.
And, of course, their fear of discovery is warranted, for this White House has defined
itself as a disciplined command center that enforces a unanimity of purpose and has a
well-known prohibition of leaks, a well-known distaste for openness. But still, the fact
that they must veil themselves leaves them open to the charge of being disgruntled
employees. I can only attest to the fact that they certainly do not seem to be that.
There is, however, one man who, at some personal and professional risk, has now decided
to speak openly about the inner workings of the White House.
President George W. Bush called John DiIulio "one of the most influential social
entrepreneurs in America" when he appointed the University of Pennsylvania professor,
author, historian, and domestic-affairs expert to head the White House Office of
Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He was the Bush administration's big brain,
controversial but deeply respected by Republicans and Democrats, academicians and policy
players. The appointment was rightfully hailed: DiIulio provided gravity to national
policy debates and launched the most innovative of President Bush's campaign ideas-the
faith-based initiative, which he managed until this past February, the last four months
from Philadelphia.
"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a
complete lack of a policy apparatus," says DiIulio. "What you've got is everything-and I
mean everything-being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry
Machiavellis."
In a seven-page letter sent a few weeks after our first conversation, DiIulio, who still
considers himself a passionate supporter of the president, offers a detailed account and
critique of the time he spent in the Bush White House.
"I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy
discussions," he writes. "There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues.
There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all
about policy substance and analysis, and they were even more overworked than the
stereotypical nonstop, twenty-hour-a-day White House staff. Every modern presidency moves
on the fly, but on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy
knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking:
discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare;
near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing
political communications, media strategy, et cetera. Even quite junior staff would
sometimes hear quite senior staff pooh-pooh any need to dig deeper for pertinent
information on a given issue."
Like David Stockman, the whip-smart budget director to Ronald Reagan who twenty years ago
revealed that Reagan's budget numbers didn't add up, DiIulio is this administration's
first credible, independent witness-a sovereign who supports his president but must,
nonetheless, speak his mind.
Sources in the West Wing, echoing DiIulio's comments, say that even cursory discussion of
domestic policy became much less frequent after September 11, 2001, with the exception of
Homeland Security. Meanwhile, the department of "Strategery," or the "Strategery Group,"
depending on the source, has steadily grown. The term, coined in 2000 by Saturday Night
Live's Will Ferrell, started as a joke at the White House, too, but has actually become a
term of art meaning the oversight of any activity-from substantive policy to ideological
stance to public event-by the president's political thinkers.
"It's a revealing shorthand," says one White House staff member. "Yes, the president
sometimes trips, rhetorically, but it doesn't matter as long as we keep our eye on the
ball politically."
This approach to policy-making is a fairly radical departure from the customary
relationship between White House political directors and policy professionals. Each has
always influenced the other, of course, but the political office has rarely been so
central to guiding policy in virtually every area, deciding what is promoted and what is
tabled.
"Besides the tax cut, which was cut-and-dried during the campaign," DiIulio writes, "and
the education bill, which was really a Ted Kennedy bill, the administration has not done
much, either in absolute terms or in comparison with previous administrations at this
stage, on domestic policy. There is a virtual absence as yet of any policy
accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded nonpartisan, count as the flesh on the bones
of so-called compassionate conservatism. There is still two years, maybe six, for them to
do more and better on domestic policy and, specifically, on the compassion agenda. And,
needless to say, 9/11, and now the global war on terror and the new homeland- and
national-security plans, must be weighed in the balance. But, as I think Andy Card
himself told you in so many words, even allowing for those huge contextual realities,
they could stand to find ways of inserting more serious policy fiber into the West Wing
diet and engage much less in on-the-fly policy-making by speechmaking."
DiIulio calls the president "a highly admirable person of enormous personal decency . . .
[who is] much, much smarter than some people-including some of his own supporters and
advisers-seem to suppose." So what, then, is John DiIulio's motivation for now offering
his pointed critique? There is, as he says, "two years, maybe six." He has a vision for
who George W. Bush might yet become.
If you buy Isaiah Berlin's famous dictum about history being a struggle between foxes and
hedgehogs, Karl Rove has, like the hedgehog, stayed focused on a single ideal and pushed
it forward relentlessly. A bookish kid born in Denver on Christmas Day 1950, Rove has
known George W. Bush for thirty years. He started bobbing up on senior staffs of Texas
campaigns in his late twenties, with the unshakable goal of making the Republicans the
permanent majority party. He's up early and works late, with an assured disdain for
Marquis of Queensberry rules of political engagement. In conversation with scores of
people who know him, the assessment ultimately is the same: For Karl Rove, it's all and
only about winning. The rest-vision, ideology, good government, ideas to bind a nation,
reasonable dissent, collegiality, mutual respect-is for later.
And Rove is disciplined in maintaining his mystery. In visiting the White House
frequently from February to April of this past year, I interviewed much of the senior
staff, as well as the First Lady. No one would utter so much as a word about Rove. They'd
talk about one another, assessing the strengths, weaknesses, and specific roles of
Hughes, Card, deputy chief of staff Josh Bolten, media adviser Mark McKinnon,
communications chief Dan Bartlett, Cheney aide Mary Matalin, national-security adviser
Condoleezza Rice, the vice-president, and, of course, the president himself. When I'd
mention Rove, the reaction was always the same: "I can't really talk about Karl." It was
odd; it was extraordinary.
Eventually, I met with Rove. I arrived at his office a few minutes early, just in time to
witness the Rove Treatment, which, like LBJ's famous browbeating style, is becoming
legend but is seldom reported. Rove's assistant, Susan Ralston, said he'd be just a
minute. She's very nice, witty and polite. Over her shoulder was a small back room where
a few young men were toiling away. I squeezed into a chair near the open door to Rove's
modest chamber, my back against his doorframe.
Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had
gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and
reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like
ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. "We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck
him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!" As a reporter, you get
around-curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events-but the ferocity,
the bellicosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking. This went on without a
break for a minute or two. Then the aide slipped out looking a bit ashen, and Rove, his
face ruddy from the exertions of the past few moments, looked at me and smiled a gentle,
Clarence-the-Angel smile. "Come on in." And I did. And we had the most amiable chat for a
half hour. I asked a variety of questions about his relationship with Karen Hughes. Were
there ever tensions between him and Karen? Nope. "Oh, we're both strong-willed people,
but we work well together." I mentioned a few disputes others had told me of. He
dismissed them all. Didn't they sort of bury the hatchet after September 11? Nope-no
hatchet to bury. As the president's two most powerful aides, did they ever disagree? "Not
often." Any examples? Nope. He couldn't be nicer, mind you. Finally, I asked if one of
his role models was Mark Hanna, the visionary political guru to President William
McKinley who helped reshape Republicans into the party of inclusion and ushered in
decades of electoral victory at the turn of the twentieth century. Rove's a student of
McKinley and Hanna. He has talked extensively in the past about lessons he's learned from
this duo's response to challenges of their era. "No, this era is nothing like McKinley's.
I'm not at all like Hanna. Never wanted to be."
Since then, I've talked to old colleagues, dating back twenty-five years, one of whom
said, "Some kids want to grow up to be president. Karl wanted to grow up to be Mark
Hanna. We'd talk about it all the time. We'd say, 'Jesus, Karl, what kind of kid wants to
grow up to be Mark Hanna?' " In any event, it's clear, when I think of my encounter with
Rove, why this particular old friend of his, and scores of others-many of whom spoke of
the essential good nature of this man who was a teammate on some campaign or other-don't
want their names mentioned, ever. Just like Rove's mates on the current team-the one
running the free world-who go numb at the thought of talking frankly, for attribution,
about him. These are powerful people, confident and consequential, who suffer gaze
aversion when I mention his name. No doubt they've had extended exposure to the two Karls
I William Kristol, among the most respected of the conservative commentators-a man
embraced by the Right but still on dinner-party guest lists for the center and Left-is
untouchable. He is willing to speak.
"Karl and I aren't really friends. I have sort of a vague and indirect relationship with
him. But we talk pretty regularly. He has always been fair and straight and honest with
me, despite the stories that others have about him." He pauses, as though encountering
one of those beware falling rocks signs. "I believe Karl is Bush. They're not separate,
each of them freestanding, with distinct agendas, as some people say. Karl thinks X. Bush
thinks X. Clearly, it's a very complicated relationship." He goes on to say that he
thinks Bush is a "canny manager" who creates competing teams and plays them against one
another. As for those who sometimes disagree with that point, he says, "There is
criticism of Karl from the friends of the former President Bush who don't approve of the
way the current President Bush is doing his job in every case." Kristol notes that "the
kid is what he is, and he's different from the father, some differences that I feel good
about," but that gray men around "41" who don't approve of "43" have trouble criticizing
the son to the father "and ascribe everything to Karl's malign influence." In that, Rove
is at the center of the most portentous father-son conversation of modern times. Sources
close to the former president say Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush presidential campaign
after he planted a negative story with columnist Robert Novak about dissatisfaction with
campaign fundraising chief and Bush loyalist Robert Mosbacher Jr. It was smoked out, and
he was summarily ousted.
Mark McKinnon, who would not speak of Rove in my earlier interviews with him for another
story on the Bush White House, is now effusive. "Karl's sheer bandwidth is greater than
anyone I've ever met. . . . Lots of people have planetary systems, covering history or
policy or politics, but Karl covers the whole universe." He goes on: "James [Carville]
and Dick [Morris]"-both advisers to Clinton whom McKinnon knows from his days, up until
the mid-1990s, as a Democratic consultant-"can drive the car and drive it very well. Karl
can take out the engine and put it back together. He's the best ever. And his love for
policy is as great or greater than his love of politics." This is the Rove defense. He's
really a policy guy, a seeker of best remedies, a nonpolitical.
Senator John McCain knows something of Karl Rove, though he'd rather not think about all
that tonight, as a crowd gathers to celebrate the release of the senator's new book. In
fact, lots of folks here know Rove well. "Sure, I know Karl," says one man who has worked
on several campaigns with him. "At the end of long days, we'd always meet at one bar or
another, everybody but Karl. Where's Karl? we'd wonder. The line was always 'Oh, he's out
ruining careers.' "
These are virtually all Republicans, gathered in an elegant room off the wide atrium of
Union Station. It's a good night for McCain. He and the intellectually lithe Mark Salter,
his longtime aide, have produced their second book in just three years. The first, Faith
of My Fathers, documented McCain's early life as the rebel son and grandson of legendary
admirals who was shot down in Vietnam and held prisoner for five and a half years. This
second book, which picks up after Vietnam, is more reflective, angry, and lyrical, as
McCain bares his breast and beats it a little. At sixty-six and in middling health, he's
settling, it seems, on the idea that he won't get a chance to be president. It's the kind
of thing that has liberated his already libertine spirit, though it stands as tragic
injustice to everyone else in the room. And people in various corners of the wide room
are retelling the story again-they'll tell it forever-the moment when McCain surged in
the New Hampshire primary, when he caught, and won the state in a walk. The Bush
juggernaut had stalled. McCain, embraced by the media, to whom he gave extraordinary
access-"just hang with me, boys, all day, everything on the record"-was seizing the high
middle ground, where you win presidential elections. And someone points to a guy in the
room-yeah, him over there near the curtains, tall, friendly-looking guy named John
Weaver. He was the other genius wunderkind in Texas in the 1980s, along with Rove. They
won campaigns left and right, those two. Rove was mostly a direct-mail fundraiser back
then, Weaver more a strategist-manager type. Something happened that neither will talk
about, and they stopped working together in 1988. Many of the people in this room
followed Weaver, who was McCain's political director in his bid for the 2000 Republican
presidential nomination, to this side of the Republican party. Since their estrangement,
Weaver's relationship with Rove has gotten somewhat odd.
On the night of the vote in New Hampshire, the senator's senior staff was all gathered at
the Crowne Plaza in Nashua. A call came in to the penthouse suite moments after McCain's
big victory was declared by the networks. It was Rove. A junior staffer cupped his hand
over the receiver and told Weaver: "Rove says he's calling to concede."
Weaver was stunned. "Karl's conceding?" He shook off disbelief, gathered himself, and
said, "Tell Karl that he can't concede. He's not the candidate. The governor has to bring
himself to actually call the senator." Weaver gave Karl a cell-phone number where McCain
could be reached, and a few minutes later, the candidates had a brief chat. Then it was
off to the showdown in South Carolina, which changed everything . . .
I suddenly hear McCain laugh through the din. He laughs like a pirate. There's a cluster,
bent in tight, as he whispers something hysterical. Heads go back. Man can tell a story.
Tonight he is ebullient. On Sunday, The Washington Post gushed over his book, leading
with what it called the strange occurrence that the president is the third-most-popular
politician in America, behind Al Gore, who got more votes, and, of course, John McCain.
He loved that, God knows, and tonight he's among his lovers, his troops, cutting between
them, slapping and clasping, a man of modest height and fiercely angled, always leaning a
few degrees forward, a bit pinched, in his blue suit. He breaks from the cluster; I meet
him in the clearing. We huddle for a moment, make small talk about this and that. I ask
if historians will consider South Carolina a crossroads moment for the Republican party.
"Well, it was unprecedented, South Carolina," he says softly. "But you have to put it
past you and move on." He points over to the corner where his top aide, Salter, is now
standing next to Weaver and a few others. "Those guys can tell you all about what
happened. As for history," he says, offering a pained smile, "I think it will little note
nor long remember and all that." I go over. Weaver gets asked about Rove quite often;
people know about their history. He always demurs. "Not worth getting into," he says.
People around him, though, will talk. "John will never work in the Republican party
again, thanks to Karl," says Salter. Weaver now works for the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee. It's commonly held that Rove ran him out of the party. The word went
out: Any Republican who hired Weaver would be held in disfavor by the president. "What
can I say?" Weaver says quietly. "Like me, all the moderate Republicans have been run out
of the party by the Right. I'm doing what I've always done politically; these guys just
call themselves Democrats now."
As for the Waterloo of South Carolina, most of the facts are well-known, and among this
group of Republicans, what happened has taken on the air of an unsolved crime, a cold
case, with Karl Rove being the prime suspect. Bush loyalists, maybe working for the
campaign, maybe just representing its interests, claimed in parking-lot handouts and
telephone "push polls" and whisper campaigns that McCain's wife, Cindy, was a drug
addict, that McCain might be mentally unstable from his captivity in Vietnam, and that
the senator had fathered a black child with a prostitute. Callers push-polled members of
a South Carolina right-to-life organization and other groups, asking if the black baby
might influence their vote. Now here's the twist, the part that drives McCain admirers
insane to this very day: That last rumor took seed because the McCains had done an
especially admirable thing. Years back they'd adopted a baby from a Mother Teresa
orphanage in Bangladesh. Bridget, now eleven years old, waved along with the rest of the
McCain brood from stages across the state, a dark-skinned child inadvertently providing a
photo op for slander. The attacks were of a level and vitriol that even McCain, who was
regularly beaten in captivity, could not ignore. He began to answer the slights, strayed
off message about how he would lead the nation if he got the chance, and lost the war for
South Carolina. Bush emerged from the showdown upright and victorious . . . and onward he
marched.
Eight months after the South Carolina primary, McCain and Weaver were on a plane
campaigning with the nominee. This was the kind of barnstorming finale-closing in on the
last week of the campaign-that Rove normally wouldn't miss. But Weaver was with McCain on
the plane, and if Weaver is present, Rove will not show. The governor was, nonetheless,
ecstatic. With McCain at his side for the better part of two weeks, he'd been on fire.
After a stop in Fresno, California, for a joint speech, Weaver slipped out of the hall
and Bush slipped out after him. McCain, who was still inside working the crowd, was due
to leave now, his promised time with Bush completed. McCain had told Representative Tom
Davis, a Virginia congressman heading up the Republican congressional effort, that he'd
spend the last week whistle-stopping House and Senate races.
Governor Bush approached Weaver, who was huddling with the McCain staff. They'd known
each other for fifteen years. "Johnny, I want you and John to be with me until the end."
"Can't do it, George," Weaver said. "I just talked to Tom Davis, and he's really counting
on us. We've made a commitment."
Bush grew agitated. "You don't seem to understand. I want you with us!" It was already
clear that the race was very close. Bush was looking for every advantage. He said, "Look,
I'm better when John's with me."
Bush said, "Hold on a minute," stepped away, placed a call on his cell phone, and walked
back, looking relieved. "Look, I just talked to Karl, and he says don't worry about the
congressional races. It's okay for you to come with me."
Weaver said, "Thanks anyway, but Karl's not in charge of us." McCain walked up. "Weav
says you can't stay with me for the last week. Is that right, John?" Bush was simmering.
McCain was uncertain what to do. After an awkward moment, Weaver said, "I'm sorry, we've
really got to go," and hustled McCain into a waiting limo. The senator slumped into the
seat, exhaled, and then, with a smile of relief, turned to Weaver and said, "Thank you."
I've come to meet John DiIulio.
It has been three weeks since our first interview, when he spoke with surprising
frankness about the style and substance of the White House. Other White House officials
had discussed and corroborated the range of Rove's influence, how all major decisions
were passing first through his political-strategic directorate. But I was still regarding
this White House in terms of the long-standing model, in which the art of political
strategy is carefully balanced against serious policy discussion, in which church-state
separations of these two distinct functions are respected, even championed.
It seemed that in the person of Karl Rove such distinctions had been blurred. And I hoped
that DiIulio, a true believer in problem solving through sober policy analysis, could
clarify how this had happened. He, after all, was present when the architecture of this
White House-and the key relationships in it-was established.
But even more striking, he is the most credible independent witness to exit the
administration so far.
I race into the Sofitel Hotel in downtown Washington a little late for a cocktail party
held by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, a nonpartisan think tank based
in Albany, New York, that has brought luminaries together to kick off its three-day
conference on religion and social-welfare policy. The French-owned hotel has little
bustle in its portico-all cool marble and polished mahogany and whispery potted
hydrangeas-and I wander, searching for life, until I see an enormous man near the
elevator banks. He's stuffing his hand into a shoulder-slung briefcase, looking for his
glasses. He doesn't seem to fit here, or in his blue suit, pulled taut as a windbreak
across a frame a few inches shy of six feet that has to be supporting three hundred
pounds. He looks up and squints at me, his glasses now slightly askew on a gentle,
soft-edged mug, like Big Pussy in The Sopranos.
His story is as unlikely as it is inspiring: a working-class kid from a tough
Italian-Catholic neighborhood, the son of a sheriff's deputy and a department-store
clerk, who stumbled forward from a local parish school to Philadelphia's exclusive
Haverford School-there through a program for lower-income kids-then to the University of
Pennsylvania and Harvard for graduate school, picking up speed with each stride. By the
time he got his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard-one of the best students his
mentor James Q. Wilson had ever seen-his mass times velocity was bending laws of physics.
At Princeton, he was made a full professor after just five years. He was thirty-two.
We talk briefly about our conversation of a few weeks ago; DiIulio knows he has collapsed
a wall by offering his frank assessment. "I'm on the record," he says. And then, lightly,
"It's not a problem, really not."
His appearance in Washington qualifies as a special event, a top ticket for the guests
tinkling glasses inside, where John stops at the reception table.
"Hey, big man!" He turns. It's the Reverend Eugene Rivers, the former gang member who
tamed urban violence in Boston, and a DiIulio buddy. They hug as the hive notices DiIulio
and surrounds him. They are fans, admirers, but also part of an ideal, that there's
nothing odd about Democrats and Republicans dining together and agreeing on a few things,
even in regard to fault-line issues like religion and social policy and the bracing
possibility of connecting the two.
And disagreeing constructively. Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action
Center of Reform Judaism and a liberal opponent of federal funding for faith-based
institutions, makes small talk with Rivers-a conservative black supporter of such
funding-while nearby is Harris Wofford, the former Democratic senator from Pennsylvania,
right beside Michelle Engler, wife of Michigan's Republican governor, John Engler. This
kind of ecumenical promise, political as well as religious, is what helped get George W.
Bush elected-the ideal, at its heart, of "compassionate conservatism" and the pledge of
returning a more civil tone to Washington.
"There he is, the face of compassionate conservatism," says Richard Roper, who was
DiIulio's colleague at Princeton. "Whatever that means." DiIulio has often found himself
an enemy of the Left. During the Clinton impeachment drama, he beat the drum for Clinton'
s removal from office and decried the failure to do so as a signal of the "paganization"
of American political culture. And before that, research he conducted in the early 1990s
identified the growth of what he called "superpredators" in urban America: youths who
seemed to carry a virulent strain of unchecked violence. The research, born of DiIulio's
focus on urban America and prison cultures, formed an intellectual framework for
mandatory-sentencing statutes that swept the country. DiIulio coauthored Body Count with
conservative thinker William Bennett and built a thinking-writing-speaking franchise as
the conservatives' favorite intellectual. Then he did something that almost no
academician, especially one atop his own mountain, seems ever to do: He said, Hold on a
minute. Data he'd started collecting in the mid-1990s seemed to contradict the
"superpredator" theory. What this latest evolution of his research showed was that
prevention, especially targeted at "at risk" urban environments, really does work.
And that brought him to church. Churches-along with mosques and, in some cases,
synagogues-have long stood as a bulwark against chaos in many blighted urban cores, as
true sanctuary and often an engine of homegrown social services. Urban analysts know this
in a general way; DiIulio wanted to know, as a serious researcher, the whys and hows,
variables, structures, etiology, and outcomes. This turned out to be a very bright idea;
he swiftly captured an enormous swath of unmapped territory. The early trend line of
DiIulio's research evolved into his work for the president.
DiIulio and Bush bonded. At a Philadelphia stop early in the campaign, the two spoke for
nearly two hours about the possibilities of federal support for faith-based programs, a
nuanced discussion that left DiIulio duly impressed. "The president is up to the task. We
had an extraordinary exchange. He had significant knowledge and real sensitivity to the
challenges that such an effort would face. It's not as though he's not capable."
Bush started talking about his friend "Big John," and a year later DiIulio was an anchor
tenant in the new administration. He would attend the 7:30 a.m. senior-staff meeting
every day and offer insights on a broad array of domestic policies while launching
programs that, in some fashion, used federal financial support to enhance the efforts of
faith-based institutions.
Meanwhile, the White House's political arm was asserting itself in the new Office of
Strategic Initiatives, which Rove created. In this period before September 11, 2001,
domestic affairs accounted for most of what the White House did every day. So John
DiIulio and Karl Rove started to regularly encounter each other, forming one of the most
interesting couples in the executive branch.
Each, after all, is among the most accomplished in his field. Rove, the consummate
political strategist, having trained at the knee of the master, Lee Atwater, who guided
Republicans, including George H. W. Bush, to electoral victory; and DiIulio, the public
intellectual and academic heavyweight, the only one to join this administration. In
almost every realm of public policy, there are always a few people who lead the
intellectual parade, advancing the research and ideas that form the agenda for discussion
in that field. It's a ferocious meritocracy, played out in symposia and academic
journals, on peer-review committees and editorial pages. Generally, administrations tap
several of these leaders to join them. Republicans and Democrats both have their share.
In economics, for instance, think Milton Friedman or Herbert Stein; they can sometimes be
young up-and-comers, like Pat Moynihan in the Nixon administration. In the Clinton White
House, they were numerous, including Robert Reich at Labor and Lawrence Summers, Clinton'
s Treasury secretary and now the president of Harvard.
It's clear, standing in this room with DiIulio, why such men can be so valuable to a
president: In the White House, where political calculation is like respiration, they can
make confident, fact-based assessments of which important ideas are worth executing.
Ideas, ultimately, that a presidency will be remembered for.
The cocktail party is moving toward dinner. Doors are opened to a baronial chamber that
cossets a stunning forty-foot-long table. Almost time for DiIulio's speech. He doesn't
seem to notice. His wide back is to the door and he's digging deep, trying as he will to
make sense of his strange journey.
He says he loves Bush. He loves him as a man, as a friend. He loves his decency, his
compassion, which, he says, is "not a 'feel your pain' thing like Clinton. With Bush it's
more grounded, more real."
But mention of Clinton turns him inward, tapping repressed memory. He says he visited the
White House five times during the Clinton presidency-Al Gore called upon DiIulio in the
mid-1990s to assist with his reinventing-government initiative.
Clinton, DiIulio says, was a wonk-in-chief. "For all his flaws, he had that monster to
feed. Bush is just too 'normal,' " DiIulio says, curling his thick fingers into quotation
marks around the word normal, this huge man with profound hungers. "Great guy. But he
doesn't have a beast to feed, that got-to-know-the-answer beast. It's a problem being
president at this time, without that, without that hunger."
Then he pauses, and we're both thinking the same thing. Karl. DiIulio smiles his cockeyed
smile. "Yeah, he's got a beast. One problem: He's not the president."
Two days later, I get a very long letter from John DiIulio.
It is a manifesto, really, the work of a scholar, reasoned and sober. It is designed to
be constructive criticism of the White House that, in large measure, Karl Rove has
created, and to give context to his remarks of a few weeks before. Early on, in its
opening section, DiIulio, thinking like a historian, offers a stream of qualifiers. "I'm
no 'representative sample,' as it were, but I do have some things that are maybe worth
saying now on the record."
In the letter, DiIulio is charitable toward his former colleague. "Some are inclined to
blame the high political-to-policy ratios of this administration on Karl Rove," DiIulio
writes. "Some in the press view Karl as some sort of prince of darkness; actually, he is
basically a nice and good-humored man. And some staff members, senior and junior, are
awed and cowed by Karl's real or perceived powers. They self-censor lots for fear of
upsetting him, and in turn, few of the president's top people routinely tell the
president what they really think if they think that Karl will be brought up short in the
bargain. Karl is enormously powerful, maybe the single most powerful person in the
modern, post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political-adviser post near the Oval Office. The
Republican base constituencies, including Beltway libertarian policy elites and
religious-Right leaders, trust him to keep Bush 43 from behaving like Bush 41 and moving
too far to the center or inching at all center-left. Their shared fiction, supported by
zero empirical electoral studies, is that 41 lost in '92 because he lost these right-wing
fans. There are not ten House districts in America where either the libertarian litany or
the right-wing-religious policy creed would draw majority popular approval, and most
studies suggest Bush 43 could have done better versus Gore had he stayed more centrist,
but, anyway, the fiction is enshrined as fact. Little happens on any issue without Karl's
okay, and often he supplies such policy substance as the administration puts out.
Fortunately, he is not just a largely self-taught, hyperpolitical guy but also a very
well informed guy when it comes to certain domestic issues."
According to various sources close to Rove, he and DiIulio had a wary but respectful
relationship. DiIulio, like any heavyweight with his own constituency, didn't seem to
fear Rove. Rove, who never graduated from college but has a deep love of academic
inquiry, seemed to enjoy having DiIulio to fence with. Periodically, he would ask John to
advance the administration's political agenda, and John would do what almost no one does
currently at the White House now that Karen Hughes has left: tell Karl to take a hike.
For instance, there was Karl's desire to have John cozy up to the conservative
evangelicals, with whom DiIulio was having problems. DiIulio recalls Karl telling him to
bury the hatchet "and start fighting the guys who are against us." DiIulio says he
responded: "I'm not taking any shit off of Jerry Falwell. The souls of my dead Italian
grandparents are crying out to me, 'That guy's not on the side of the angels.' " Rove
backed off, DiIulio recalls, and said, "Look, those guys don't really matter to this
president."
"Sure, Karl," DiIulio responded. "They don't matter, but they're in here all the time."
On his primary mission-push forward ideas and policies to partner government with
faith-based institutions-DiIulio says that he saw the beginning of what was to become a
pattern: The White House "winked at the most far-right House Republicans, who, in turn,
drafted a so-called faith bill that (or so they thought) satisfied certain fundamentalist
leaders and Beltway libertarians but bore few marks of compassionate conservatism and
was, as anybody could tell, an absolute political nonstarter. It could pass the House
only on a virtual party-line vote, and it could never pass the Senate, even before
Jeffords switched.
"Not only that, but it reflected neither the president's own previous rhetoric on the
idea nor any of the actual empirical evidence. . . . I said so, wrote memos, and so on. .
. . As one senior staff member chided me at a meeting at which many junior staff were
present and all ears, 'John, get a faith bill, any faith bill.' Like college students who
fall for the colorful, opinionated, but intellectually third-rate professor, you could
see these twenty- and thirty-something junior White House staff falling for the Mayberry
Machiavellis."
DiIulio defines the Mayberry Machiavellis as political staff, Karl Rove and his people,
"who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted
in reducing every issue to its simplest black-and-white terms for public consumption,
then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible. These
folks have their predecessors in previous administrations (left and right, Democrat and
Republican), but in the Bush administration, they were particularly unfettered."
"Remember 'No child left behind'? That was a Bush campaign slogan. I believe it was his
heart, too. But translating good impulses into good policy proposals requires more than
whatever somebody thinks up in the eleventh hour before a speech is to be delivered."
Weekly meetings of the Domestic Policy Council "were breathtaking," DiIulio told me. As
for the head of the DPC, Margaret La Montagne, a longtime friend of Karl Rove who guided
education policy in Texas, DiIulio is blunt: "What she knows about domestic policy could
fit in a thimble."
When DiIulio would raise objections to killing programs-like the Earned Income Tax
Credit, a tax credit for the poorest Americans, hailed by policy analysts on both sides
of the aisle, that contributed to the success of welfare reform-he found he was often
arguing with libertarians who didn't know the basic functions of major federal programs.
As a senior White House adviser and admirer of DiIulio's recently said to me, "You have
to understand, this administration is further to the right than much of the public
understands. The view of many people [in the White House] is that the best government can
do is simply do no harm, that it never is an agent for positive change. If that's your
position, why bother to understand what programs actually do?"
It was encounters with the president-displays of his personal qualities-that time and
again restored DiIulio's commitment. From the way he "let detainees come home from China
and did not jump all over them for media purposes" to a time, DiIulio writes, when he and
Bush were in Philadelphia at a "three-hour block party on July 4, 2001, following hours
among the children, youth, and families of prisoners . . . running late for the next
event. He stopped, however, to take a picture with a couple of men who were cooking ribs
all day. 'C'mon,' he said, 'those guys have been doing hard work all day there.' It's my
favorite and, in some ways, my most telling picture of who he is as a man and a leader
who pays attention to the little things that convey respect and decency toward others."
Five days later, on July 9, at the administration's six-month senior-staff retreat,
DiIulio writes that "an explicit discussion ensued concerning how to emulate more
strongly the Clinton White House's press, communications, and rapid-response media
relations-how better to wage, if you will, the permanent campaign that so defines the
modern presidency regardless of who or which party occupies the Oval Office. I listened
and was amazed. It wasn't more press, communications, media, legislative strategizing,
and such that they needed. Maybe the Clinton people did that better, though surely they
were less disciplined about it and leaked more to the media and so on. No, what they
needed, I thought then and still do now, was more policy-relevant information,
discussion, and deliberation."
Part of the problem, DiIulio now understood, was that the paucity of serious policy
discussion combined with a leakproof command-and-control operation was altering
traditional laws of White House physics. That is: Know what's political, know what's
policy. They are different. That distinction drives the structure of most
administrations. The policy experts, on both domestic and foreign policy, order up "white
papers" and hash out the most prudent use of executive power. Political advisers, who
often deepen their knowledge by listening carefully as these deliberations unfold, are
then called in to decide how, when, and with whom in support policies should be
presented, enacted, and executed.
The dilemma presented by Karl Rove, DiIulio realized, was that in such a policy vacuum,
his jack-of-all-trades appreciation of an enormous array of policy debates was being
mistaken for genuine expertise. It takes a true policy wonk to recognize the difference,
and, beyond the realm of foreign affairs, DiIulio was almost alone in the White House.
"When policy analysis is just backfill to support a political maneuver, you'll get a lot
of oops," he says.
DiIulio points to the "remarkably slapdash character of the Office of Homeland Security,
with the nine months of arguing that no department was needed, with the sudden,
politically timed reversal in June, and with the fact that not even that issue, the most
significant reorganization of the federal government since the creation of the Department
of Defense, has received more than talking-points-caliber deliberation. This was, in a
sense, the administration's problem in miniature: Ridge was the decent fellow at the top,
but nobody spent the time to understand that an EOP [Executive Office of the President]
entity without budgetary or statutory authority can't coordinate over a hundred separate
federal units, no matter how personally close to the president its leader is, no matter
how morally right it feels the mission is, and no matter how inconvenient the politics of
telling certain House Republican leaders we need a big new federal bureaucracy might be."
One has to consider the possibility that John DiIulio just wasn't cut out for working at
the White House. Government, after all, is not a graduate seminar. I need to get a
reality-based assessment on what the professor himself is proffering. DiIulio's last day
running the faith-based initiative was February 1, 2002. He never intended to stay for
long, he says, and the commute from Philadelphia was becoming onerous. And though he
remains in regular touch with former colleagues, he is not there now-not in the building.
I talk to several sources in the West Wing, and one of them agrees to meet me at a
neutral site: a restaurant off Pennsylvania Avenue with a dark back room. It's
midafternoon. We order coffee. He is nervous about a face-to-face. "You know, this is
risky, just being here."
I tell him we'll try to make this quick, and I describe DiIulio's rendering of the White
House, its conduct and character, and Rove's enveloping role. Does this resemble reality,
or is DiIulio mistaken or misguided?
He nods. "All of that is realistic, basically correct. It's really been even worse since
after 9/11. There has been no domestic policy, really. Not even a pretense of it."
He pauses. "You know, if John had stayed, we might have actually had a domestic policy.
He's just that smart, that credible. The reason is that he's rigorous, that he demands
the data. He asks, What does the evidence indicate? What is the best path? He truly doesn
't care about politics, which is all anyone here seems to care about. He just digs in to
actually see what policy would most benefit the most people."
We talk for more than an hour. He's an honored member of the political Right with a
flawless conservative pedigree and pure faith in ideas emerging from that flank of the
Republican party. But he is as pointed in his critique of the processes of this White
House as the more moderate DiIulio. It's clear from every word that this is not about
politics or ideology. It's not about who's right or wrong. It's about a kind of regret.
"Don't you understand?" he says, his voice rising. "We got into the White House and
forfeited the game. You're supposed to stand for something . . . to generate sound ideas,
support them with real evidence, and present them to Congress and the people. We didn't
do any of that. We just danced this way and that on minute political calculationsand
whatever was needed for a few paragraphs of a speech."
He says that in mid-August, Jay Lefkowitz-a longtime policy manager who was hired in
early 2002 to work as Margaret La Montagne's deputy at the Domestic Policy Council-became
part of an effort to create some forward motion. He and a small group of senior staffers
started to meet each week or so to discuss domestic issues and long-term goals. "They're
attempting to at least generate some ideas. It's a small sign of hope . . . but
everything will have to go through Karl."
We sit for a while and sip coffee, now cold. He says he's not going to leave-he waited
too long to get to the White House-but that increasingly he finds himself thinking in the
past tense, of missed opportunities.
"Here's what would have worked," he says a bit later. "Swap DiIulio in for [deputy chief
of staff for policy] Josh Bolten. Bolten's a good guy, a smart guy, but DiIulio knows
more about everything, every area of policy, than anyone. He would have helped us have
the balance-the considerate, thoughtful approach to everything-that administrations are
supposed to have."
Shortly after this conversation came the midterm elections. Early the morning after, my
White House sources were on the phone, offering the insider view.
"It's unbelievable," one of them says, awe coming across the phone line. "Could Karl be
that smart? Could anyone?"
There's just silence for a bit as he maps the frontiers of possibility.
"Maybe the last two years wasn't just a case of benign neglect," says this source, with
whom I spoke extensively throughout October. "Maybe it was brilliant neglect."
He went on to explain: From early on, Rove may have been focused on energizing the core,
the far Right, for the midterms. An attempt to push centrist policies through a divided
Congress would have done anything but that, and it would have violated the prime
strategic directive: don't alienate the right wing like the first President Bush. Karl's
remedy: co-opt the policy-creation process; put it in a lockbox until after genuine
Republican control is established.
"Now the troops are ready to march," the source says. "The question is, What will we do?
Will we finally put together a thoughtful policy team to create a coherent plan for
America's future, or just push through one political favor after another dressed up like
policy? I guess it's really for Karl, Karl and the president, to decide."
>
John DiIulio knows that because of what he's done here, he will lose friends. The White
House will personally attack him. Some longtime Republican colleagues will suddenly be
too busy to return his calls. Others may spread rumors. Karl Rove, who would not comment
for this story, might say that DiIulio's manifesto is "duly noted." Rove likes to say
that after doling out a condemnation-that someone's actions have been duly noted. It's a
very adult version, with teeth, of "This will be put on your permanent record."
But DiIulio and an increasing number of people in the White House seem to have their eye
on a somewhat different permanent record.
http://www.ronsuskind.com/writing/esquire/esq_rove_0103.html
--
"Trent Lott did not do anything wrong, he did not say anything wrong,
his heart was not full of malice when he got up there and made that
honorable statement, or rather that benign statement for Strom
Thurmond. The President of the United States stood up and stuck
a knife in his chest... the heart and soul of the Republican party
is working class, middle class white folks, males, who don't like
what was done to Trent Lott."
Pat Buchanan
Kobe shots to much.
you dont think imma give him props for that
do you??? that was pretty cruel...
Dan
discusting?
--
"You think that's the whole story? Well friend, I'm about to pull a
Paul Harvey on your ass and give you the rest of the story."
bozak
"Dan" <Pet_S...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:avmp0h$hfiud$1...@ID-142071.news.dfncis.de...
> bozak <bo...@mail.com> scribbled:
>
> discusting?
so kill me for not using a spell checker... :-)
--
"We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has
ever fucked him!"
Karl Rove - The man who pulls the strings of the idiot in chief
Jesus, because some adults need a Santa Claus too.
bozak
Liberals.HATE.America.
"Dan" <Pet_S...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:avmp0h$hfiud$1...@ID-142071.news.dfncis.de...
> bozak <bo...@mail.com> scribbled:
>
> discusting?
Probably the victim of a liberal education..
JC Martin
*ROTFLMAO*
JC Martin
news:92CT9.7074$0w.383...@newssvr14.news.prodigy.com...
>
> "Dan" <Pet_S...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:avmp0h$hfiud$1...@ID-142071.news.dfncis.de...
> > bozak <bo...@mail.com> scribbled:
> >
> > discusting?
>
> so kill me for not using a spell checker... :-)
No, because only an idiot would spell such a simple word incorrectly.
-JC
Branden Wolner
"JC Martin" <jcma...@sonic.net> wrote in message
news:ASDT9.60157$Ik.21...@typhoon.sonic.net...
bozak
"Branden Wolner" <dewey_de...@netzero.net> wrote in message
news:avn3gt$h75p1$1...@ID-110142.news.dfncis.de...
probably not... he has to use a spell checker...
i worked him over so bad in the past he doesnt have a choice...
do you not remember him always using spelling errors as
a reason to flame while his posts were full of them...
apparently the idiot has learned something...
not much, but something...
to be honest, i dont know whats better, ignoring him and
watching him make a fool of himself, or answering him and
tearing his dumbass to shreds... no matter what, mindfucked
is mindfucked... :-)
Ford Prefect
What is REALLY funny is bozak thinks since I don't like him, I'm a
Democrat-hater
and a liberal-hater. lol.
Hey bozoak...."mindfukage" HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Ford Prefect
Exactly.
> -JC
>
>
Branden Wolner
"Ford Prefect" <fo...@oldlinemensretirementhome.org> wrote in message
news:Os%T9.927$V36...@newssvr19.news.prodigy.com...
> HEY MORON...learn to compose a sentence correclty. And learn to spell.
>
> What is REALLY funny is bozak thinks since I don't like him, I'm a
> Democrat-hater
> and a liberal-hater. lol.
>
> Hey bozoak...."mindfukage" HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
>
--
Branden Wolner
UMass Medical School
Worcester, Ma.
--
Go Yankees! Get 'em next year!
Go Lakers (RIP Chick)
Go Giants - Fire Jim Fasshole Now!!!!
Go Rangers - high payroll, shitty team.
Dan
>>> "Dan" <Pet_S...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>>> news:avmp0h$hfiud$1...@ID-142071.news.dfncis.de...
>>>> bozak <bo...@mail.com> scribbled:
>>>>
>>>> discusting?
>>>
>>> so kill me for not using a spell checker... :-)
I might break something off and shake it at you in a angry manner, but I
won't kill you.
Weber's A Bitch
By the way "ford perfect," I'm sure you are not a moron and you can
compose a sentence correctly, but is there much of a difference
between a democrat hater and liberal hater? Can someone be one and not
the other?
Oh well, back to my truck.... have to scrape the remains of a little
ford truck off the front grill before my big date tonight.
hahahahahahaha
Dan
> "Ford Prefect" <fo...@oldlinemensretirementhome.org> wrote
>>
>> HEY MORON...learn to compose a sentence correctly. And learn to
>> spell.
>>
>> What is REALLY funny is bozak thinks since I don't like him, I'm a
>> Democrat-hater
>> and a liberal-hater. lol.
>>
>> Hey bozoak...."mindfukage" HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
>
> Why do so many people quote my 7 ha's without proper acknowledgement?
>
> By the way "ford perfect," I'm sure you are not a moron and you can
> compose a sentence correctly, but is there much of a difference
> between a democrat hater and liberal hater? Can someone be one and not
> the other?
sure, just as you can be a conservative hater, and a republican. the kind of
republicans I like are of the tom mccall mold. not the jesse helms, trent
lock, and stromun my six-pack thrumon.
>
> Oh well, back to my truck.... have to scrape the remains of a little
> ford truck off the front grill before my big date tonight.
>
>
>
> hahahahahahaha
Greg Lentz
<dewey_de...@netzero.net> wrote:
>
>"Ford Prefect" <fo...@oldlinemensretirementhome.org> wrote in message
>news:Os%T9.927$V36...@newssvr19.news.prodigy.com...
>> HEY MORON...learn to compose a sentence correclty. And learn to spell.
>>
>> What is REALLY funny is bozak thinks since I don't like him, I'm a
>> Democrat-hater
>> and a liberal-hater. lol.
>>
>> Hey bozoak...."mindfukage" HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
>>
>Can anyone spot the irony?
Yeah. You root for a bunch of chokers.
"Bummer..."
Greg Lentz
Branden Wolner
"Weber's A Bitch" <heartles...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:65949a40.03011...@posting.google.com...
> "Ford Prefect" <fo...@oldlinemensretirementhome.org> wrote
> >
> > HEY MORON...learn to compose a sentence correctly. And learn to spell.
> >
> > What is REALLY funny is bozak thinks since I don't like him, I'm a
> > Democrat-hater
> > and a liberal-hater. lol.
> >
> > Hey bozoak...."mindfukage" HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
>
> Why do so many people quote my 7 ha's without proper acknowledgement?
>
> By the way "ford perfect," I'm sure you are not a moron and you can
> compose a sentence correctly, but is there much of a difference
> between a democrat hater and liberal hater? Can someone be one and not
> the other?
>
democrat"? Or do these categories not fit your narrow, neo-bigotted view of
the world?
> Oh well, back to my truck.... have to scrape the remains of a little
> ford truck off the front grill before my big date tonight.
>
Fords suck.
--
Registered True Patriot
TP ID#72975-JESUS-7420
http://www.whitehouse.org/initiatives/patriot/index.asp
Branden Wolner
"Greg Lentz" <gle...@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:eb522vcpr4rpa4gs1...@4ax.com...
> On Sat, 11 Jan 2003 16:08:13 -0500, "Branden Wolner"
> <dewey_de...@netzero.net> wrote:
>
> >
> >"Ford Prefect" <fo...@oldlinemensretirementhome.org> wrote in message
> >news:Os%T9.927$V36...@newssvr19.news.prodigy.com...
> >> HEY MORON...learn to compose a sentence correclty. And learn to spell.
> >>
> >> What is REALLY funny is bozak thinks since I don't like him, I'm a
> >> Democrat-hater
> >> and a liberal-hater. lol.
> >>
> >> Hey bozoak...."mindfukage" HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
> >>
> >Can anyone spot the irony?
>
> Yeah. You root for a bunch of chokers.
>
> "Bummer..."
>
> Greg Lentz
>
--
Regime Change begins at home!
Branden Wolner
> <dewey_de...@netzero.net> wrote:
>
> >
> >"Ford Prefect" <fo...@oldlinemensretirementhome.org> wrote in message
> >news:Os%T9.927$V36...@newssvr19.news.prodigy.com...
> >> HEY MORON...learn to compose a sentence correclty. And learn to spell.
> >>
> >> What is REALLY funny is bozak thinks since I don't like him, I'm a
> >> Democrat-hater
> >> and a liberal-hater. lol.
> >>
> >> Hey bozoak...."mindfukage" HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
> >>
> >Can anyone spot the irony?
>
> Yeah. You root for a bunch of chokers.
>
> "Bummer..."
>
> Greg Lentz
>
lose to the Buccaneers in a playoff game. At least my team has a shitty
coach. What's your team's excuse?
--
sthomps
Branden Wolner wrote:
> "Greg Lentz" <gle...@nospam.com> wrote in message
> news:eb522vcpr4rpa4gs1...@4ax.com...
>
>>On Sat, 11 Jan 2003 16:08:13 -0500, "Branden Wolner"
>><dewey_de...@netzero.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>"Ford Prefect" <fo...@oldlinemensretirementhome.org> wrote in message
>>>news:Os%T9.927$V36...@newssvr19.news.prodigy.com...
>>>
>>>>HEY MORON...learn to compose a sentence correclty. And learn to spell.
>>>>
>>>>What is REALLY funny is bozak thinks since I don't like him, I'm a
>>>>Democrat-hater
>>>>and a liberal-hater. lol.
>>>>
>>>>Hey bozoak...."mindfukage" HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
>>>>
>>>>
>>>Can anyone spot the irony?
>>>
>>Yeah. You root for a bunch of chokers.
>>
>>"Bummer..."
>>
>>Greg Lentz
>>
>>
> How does that foot taste Greg? Imagine being only the 4th team in history to
> lose to the Buccaneers in a playoff game. At least my team has a shitty
> coach. What's your team's excuse?
A Happy QB, a mediocre O-line, a mediocre defense and not much else to
go with TO. I hope Mooch doesn't take the fall for a team that over
achieved by making it to the second round.
Greg Lentz
<dewey_de...@netzero.net> wrote:
>"Greg Lentz" <gle...@nospam.com> wrote in message
>news:eb522vcpr4rpa4gs1...@4ax.com...
>> On Sat, 11 Jan 2003 16:08:13 -0500, "Branden Wolner"
>> <dewey_de...@netzero.net> wrote:
>>
>> >
>> >"Ford Prefect" <fo...@oldlinemensretirementhome.org> wrote in message
>> >news:Os%T9.927$V36...@newssvr19.news.prodigy.com...
>> >> HEY MORON...learn to compose a sentence correclty. And learn to spell.
>> >>
>> >> What is REALLY funny is bozak thinks since I don't like him, I'm a
>> >> Democrat-hater
>> >> and a liberal-hater. lol.
>> >>
>> >> Hey bozoak...."mindfukage" HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
>> >>
>> >Can anyone spot the irony?
>>
>> Yeah. You root for a bunch of chokers.
>>
>> "Bummer..."
>>
>How does that foot taste Greg?
Well if you were to taste it, it would taste like your ass cause
that's where I put it in that post above.
>Imagine being only the 4th team in history to
>lose to the Buccaneers in a playoff game. At least my team has a shitty
>coach. What's your team's excuse?
My team's excuse is that they're better than the Giants.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Greg Lentz
Branden Wolner
> On Sun, 12 Jan 2003 16:41:42 -0500, "Branden Wolner"
> <dewey_de...@netzero.net> wrote:
>
> >"Greg Lentz" <gle...@nospam.com> wrote in message
> >news:eb522vcpr4rpa4gs1...@4ax.com...
> >> On Sat, 11 Jan 2003 16:08:13 -0500, "Branden Wolner"
> >> <dewey_de...@netzero.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> >
> >> >"Ford Prefect" <fo...@oldlinemensretirementhome.org> wrote in message
> >> >news:Os%T9.927$V36...@newssvr19.news.prodigy.com...
> >> >> HEY MORON...learn to compose a sentence correclty. And learn to
spell.
> >> >>
> >> >> What is REALLY funny is bozak thinks since I don't like him, I'm a
> >> >> Democrat-hater
> >> >> and a liberal-hater. lol.
> >> >>
> >> >> Hey bozoak...."mindfukage" HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
> >> >>
> >> >Can anyone spot the irony?
> >>
> >> Yeah. You root for a bunch of chokers.
> >>
> >> "Bummer..."
> >>
> >How does that foot taste Greg?
>
> Well if you were to taste it, it would taste like your ass cause
> that's where I put it in that post above.
>
> >Imagine being only the 4th team in history to
> >lose to the Buccaneers in a playoff game. At least my team has a shitty
> >coach. What's your team's excuse?
>
> My team's excuse is that they're better than the Giants.
>
Only when the refs blow the last call of the game. Boy I know that would
make me proud.
--
Bishop B
The New England Chapter of
The Los Angeles Lakers
Basketball Church of the Hoop
Ford Prefect
What team is that. The Holyoke ChickenShits?
You're no football fan punk and everyone knows it.
Brad.
"Branden Wolner" <dewey_de...@netzero.net> wrote in message
news:avsnf2$jbm63$1...@ID-110142.news.dfncis.de...
Branden Wolner
> "At least my team"
> What team is that. The Holyoke ChickenShits?
> You're no football fan punk and everyone knows it.
> Brad.
>
gk1
elect the Emperor either....) Who is this megalomaniac running this
country with an iron hand in a velvet glove?
This article contains a lot...yet another reason to despise SC and the
Confederate States of America; is Falwell the AntiChrist? Find the
hilarious quote. Ever since I was a kid, I thought the AC would be
one of those televangelist hypocrites.
The Bush head-in-the-sand approach is like a virus:
"The view of many people [in the White House] is that the best
government can
do is simply do no harm, that it never is an agent for positive
change. If that's your position, why bother to understand what
programs actually do?"
Note the slip of the tongue by a White House staffer at the end (on
what the junta will do now): "I guess it's really for Karl, Karl and
the president, to decide."
G