With the latest polls seemingly indicating the country's willingness to sign on for four more years of George W. Bush, this interviewer thought it would be refreshing to get the point of view of someone as repulsed by that prospect as anyone this side of the narrator in Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint.
In addition to skewering Mr. Bush in his signature diatribe quizzes in The New Yorker, my interviewee recently published The George W. Bush Quiz Book (Broadway Books, $9.95), a definitive, grimly hilarious compendium of damning facts, unflattering observations and incoherent Bushian locutions that Karl Rove would surely prefer voters not to dwell on as Election Day nears. He has also started www.StampOutBush.com, a website that sells self-inking rubber stamps with what he calls "delightfully scathing anti-Bush messages."
This author/entrepreneur's name: Paul Slansky. Yes, I'm interviewing myself.
What motivates your crusade against George W. Bush?
The answer, as if you didn't know, is outrage, despair and incredulity. Outrage that someone who wasn't actually elected—and who wouldn't be in office if Al Gore's representatives had been smart enough to demand a recount of the Florida over-votes instead of the under-votes—has managed in just four years to lay waste to so much of what it took his predecessors more than two centuries to build. Despair that my 6-year-old daughter is going to have to bear the burden for this swaggering know-nothing's unprecedented incompetence. And incredulity that fully half of the electorate seems disinclined to hold him or that gang of James Bond villains around him accountable for anything. One hates to see one's fellow citizens as lazy, over-entertained gluttons for punishment, but a Bush victory in November will preclude reaching any other conclusion.
So, what do you hope to accomplish with your Stamp Out Bush website?
My goal is to see the visual landscape of the nation decorated with millions of pungent messages crying out for regime change in America. I love the idea of people stamping these fiercely anti-Bush messages on checks they write, envelopes they mail, business cards they hand out, magazine covers in doctors' offices, ads in buses and subways—in short, on anything ink can dry on that others will see. I'd heard that some people were even using them on money, though of course defacing currency is illegal—I guess it depends on what the definition of "defacing" is—and then a few days ago I got change for a hundred and actually received a $20 bill with "HASN'T BUSH DONE ENOUGH DAMAGE?" stamped right over the White House.
Do you have a favorite stamp?
I'm especially fond of "BUSH AND CHENEY: THE EVIL OF TWO LESSERS," "GEORGE W. BUSH: UNITING THE WORLD AGAINST US" and "GEORGE W.: THE BUSH THAT NEVER GROWS." And my daughter's humble submission has an elegant simplicity that appeals to me, and evidently to others as well. "GEORGE W. BUSH IS A MEAN MAN" is currently my fourth-biggest seller. But we're adding new ones all the time. A friend of mine just gave me a great one the other day: "FUNNY STORY—ACTUALLY, GOD HATES GEORGE W. BUSH."
Given his abysmal record, why do you think Bush is doing as well as he is?
Because the Democrats, with embarrassingly few exceptions, have sat by wordlessly while, in any area you examine, this pretender has made our nation more polarized and less secure. Imagine what would happen to a Democratic president with an identical record to Bush's! What would Republicans do to a Democrat who took office without even really being elected and governed as if he had a mandate for change? What would Republicans do to a Democrat who turned a record surplus into a record deficit in record time? What would Republicans do to a Democrat who received that August 6, 2001, briefing warning of impending attacks against America and didn't even bother to cut his vacation short? They'd EVISCERATE him. But our testicularly challenged Democrats failed to register any kind of effective protest for three-and-a-half years, and then they wasted four nights of their convention without ever daring to come right out and state the obvious—that George W. Bush is the worst president in American history, and that the very notion of his running for re-election instead of slinking out of Washington in shame needs to be ridiculed into unthinkability. Then, as if all this wasn't bad enough, those geniuses in the Kerry campaign minimized the difference between him and Bush by having Kerry say that, even knowing what he knows now, he would still have voted for Bush's war in Iraq. Who believes that? And if you do believe it, why would you support him?
You're getting a little loud.
And that Swift Boat Veterans grotesquerie. If Kerry can't defend his Vietnam heroics against a smug little twerp who used his rich-kid connections to beat the draft and then couldn't be bothered to show up for National Guard duty, mightn't a swing voter legitimately wonder how he'll defend us against real trouble? I mean, the man killed people in battle, and he's been campaigning as Dukakis with height. Why do I seem to have more passion about this than the actual candidate? The next president will get to name four Supreme Court justices. Why aren't Democrats screaming about what the country will look like after that? You think single women might bother to vote if they knew that abortion is going to be illegal again? Why aren't they talking about how Bush is going to have to reinstitute the draft in order to wage all of his pre-emptive wars? You think college kids might show up at the polls if they feared for their lives? Why aren't they urging their base to vote absentee, so that when Bush sends Ridge and Ashcroft out on Halloween to warn us that bin Laden has threatened to blow up our polling places, the Kerry votes will already have been cast?
Come on now, take some deep breaths.
What are these wusses so afraid of? Losing? The way things have been going, that's guaranteed. The only chance they have now is to hammer away at one single point—Bush has made us less safe. Not safer, but LESS SAFE. He is not protecting us, he is PUTTING OUR LIVES AT SERIOUS RISK. That's the entire campaign right there, and it is easily documentable. Our borders? LESS SAFE. Our ports? LESS SAFE. Our economy, our environment, our health care, you name it, we are LESS SAFE under Bush. The same way the Swift Boat ads turned Kerry's war record against him, so should the Kerry campaign and all the 527 groups supporting him throw Bush's claim that he's protecting us back in his face. Carpet-bomb television viewers with ads making that singular point over and over again until people hear it in their sleep. BUSH IS NOT MAKING US SAFER, HE'S MAKING US LESS SAFE!!!
Most commentators take pains to claim that their antipathy is political, not personal, but you don't seem to make that distinction.
What should I do, pretend that I don't find George W. Bush utterly insufferable on every imaginable level? His policies and his personality are completely intertwined, and I loathe them both.
What in particular do you find so repugnant about the man?
His ignorance, his arrogance and his intransigence—undesirable qualities in any leader, to be sure, but especially disquieting in a paranoid bully who thinks God is telling him what to do.
And yet the pollsters will tell you that even many of the people who disagree with him politically find him likable.
That's the thing I find most preposterous, this idea that he's a "nice guy." When he was a kid, George W. Bush blew up frogs with firecrackers. In college, he branded fraternity pledges with hot wire hangers. At 40, he cursed out The Wall Street Journal's Al Hunt in front of the man's wife and 4-year-old son. Certainly his policies—his largesse to the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, his hostility to the environment, his scorn for the Bill of Rights, his indifference about health care, his obstructionism towards medical advances, his recklessness with the lives of American soldiers—don't seem very "nice."
Please sit down ...
That cocky strut of his embodies his sense of superiority and entitlement. His voice drips with condescension and contempt. His facial expressions range all the way from a smirk to a sneer. Where's all this "niceness"? I wish I could take all the people who think Bush is a "nice guy" and strap them down in chairs like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, with their eyes held open, and force them to consider all the evidence to the contrary. What am I missing here? What's to "like"?
Mr. Slansky, I think our time is up.
Depending on what happens on November 2, that may be truer than you know.
Editor's note: The previous interview is an expanded version of an article that appeared in the September 6 issue of The New York Observer.