I love you because of your twice-weekly columns in the New York Times. I love your stinging attacks on George W. Bush, attacks that turn me into a blubbering schoolgirl. The way you slap him around, the way you expose him for the fraud that he is, the way you refuse to ease up on him and his nefarious, knuckle-dragging administration, the way you seem to merely shrug off the gripes about you from dim-witted right-wing pundits (pundits who, apparently, fail to recall their own rabid attacks on Bill Clinton from 1992 until... well, until this day)--all this fills me with no end of joy.
In short, you are a motherfucking rock star. And I just wanted to tell you so. Hence this embarrassing mash note.
You see, dear Paul, beginning way back before the 2000 election, when you and I and many others found ourselves befuddled and stunned by Bush's popularity, you rightly nailed our soon-to-be-president for exactly what he is: a lying idiot. As you wrote in your November 1, 2000 column (which blasted Bush's economic rhetoric during his campaign):
"My guess is that if elected, Mr. Bush will try to govern as he has campaigned. The accounts will simply be fudged until the financial markets, alarmed by America's rapidly deteriorating finances, deliver a message that cannot be ignored.... But maybe I've underestimated Mr. Bush's willingness to cast aside his campaign promises. Sad to say, if he wins we must indeed hope that he actually was playing bait-and-switch."
And after the election, when we all watched the "popular" George W. Bush fail to win the popular vote, when he failed to win the Electoral College, when he failed to win Florida and yet still, somehow, went on to win the White House, your columns continued to inform and engage and give well-deserved drubbings to the president--the kind of well-deserved drubbings the rest of the media seem unwilling to administer. Another example, from your April 5, 2002 column on how Bush & co. were using the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in an attempt to sell their energy plan to the public:
"This isn't the first time the Bush administration has engaged in 'hitchhiking,' using a crisis to promote a pre-existing agenda that has nothing to do with that crisis. A year ago it was trying to promote drilling in the wildlife refuge as the answer to electricity shortages in California--a connection as far-fetched, if you think about it, as the alleged connection between arctic drilling and the war on terror. And the administration has shamelessly exploited Sept. 11 to cover its fiscal tracks, pretending--in flat contradiction of the facts--that the war on terror is the reason those huge projected surpluses have vanished, and that tax cuts have nothing to do with it."
These unkind words are bracing, thrilling. Like few columnists today, you simply refuse to pimp the Bush administration's line. You refuse to cower before the Presidential Primate. And that you blast away from Bush in the New York Times--America's recently battered, but still proud, paper of record--and not in some lefty echo chamber like the Nation or the American Prospect makes your columns all the more brilliant. And my crush on you all the more passionate.
Fact is, Paul, sweetie, the left is in a severe state of disarray right now. Dubya and his henchmen seem to be winning at everything, and right-wingers keep declaring with relish that us lefties "keep 'misunderestimating'" him--as if believing a moron is a moron, albeit a lucky moron surrounded by gleefully corrupt, arrogant advisers, were tantamount to underestimation, much less misunderestimation. The blunders of the Clinton administration, the vanity campaign of Ralph Nader, 9/11, the war on terrorism, the war on Iraq, cowardly Democrats--each has left the left in shambles. But while the few nationally prominent figures who protest the Bush regime's corrupt, immoral actions quickly find themselves shouted down, you refuse to shut up. On November 8, 2002--just three days after Republicans took complete control over Congress--you wrote:
"Even criticizing the Bush administration's policies will [now] become far more difficult. It will be hard even to find out what it's up to; the most secretive administration in the nation's history will now be even less forthcoming. And anyone who criticizes the administration, even on purely domestic issues, will be accused of lacking patriotism."
This, of course, is exactly what came to pass. How many Americans, both in the public eye and not, were called unpatriotic during the gear-up to the Iraq war? For simply questioning whether or not America needed to engage in the campaign, especially without the world's encouragement? And later in that same column, you drive the point home, writing, "Too many pundits, confusing politics with policy--or engaging in sheer power worship--imagine that a party that wins a battle must be doing something right. But it ain't necessarily so. Political victory doesn't make a bad policy good; it doesn't make a lie the truth."
Dearest Paul, the intelligent dissent you provide no doubt has personal repercussions. I know that you are often attacked by right-wing hatchet men. But hopefully you receive many a flowery note such as this one from your devoted readers, and hopefully these kind words help to counteract the sour letters you are surely flooded with from Fox News-fed sheep. I say "hopefully" because left-friendly writers are never as heaped with praise as their counterparts across the fence; any chump right-wing "thinker" who makes appearances on Fox News (see Ann Coulter, Bill Bennett, et al.) is treated like royalty by right-wingers, while lefty writers and thinkers--unless their names are Chomsky or Ivins--are usually taken for granted by us liberals.
But you, Paul, you deserve to be praised, loved, embraced. Worshipped. You deserve to be treated like a rock star. For that is what you are--a frumpy Mick Jagger penning columns for the New York Times. And you should be treated as such. If I wore women's underwear (on a regular basis, that is), I would certainly toss them your way.
In closing, Paul, honey, I would like to bring up a December 2002 Washington Monthly profile of you in which you stated, "This is not what I do. This is not who I am.... Sometimes, I think that if I had known what it would be like, I would never have agreed to do this column." Your conflicts about your column--along with the limelight you have found yourself thrust into--are certainly understandable, but if ever we needed a hyperintelligent Princeton economics professor (and future Nobel laureate) penning a president-bashing column, it's now. The right wing is organized, and it has a lot of weight--both in the capital and in the media--on its side, which makes you (and, hopefully, one day more people like you) more important than ever. As you pointed out in November 29, 2002, "The political agenda of Fox News... is hardly obscure. Roger Ailes, the network's chairman, has been advising the Bush administration. Fox's Brit Hume even claimed credit for the midterm election. 'It was because of our coverage that it happened,' he told Don Imus. 'People watch us and take their electoral cues from us. No one should doubt the influence of Fox News in these matters.'"
We need your influence, Paul. We really do. Don't doubt your impact, reach, or rock-star status.
Your number-one fan,
