Your Clock Is Up, George

Your Clock Is Up, George
Second debate proves it´s time for a new driver

http://hartfordadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:85641
by Alan Bisbort - October 14, 2004
The World This Week
"Have we eaten on the insane root?"- Banquo, in Macbeth

Sleep did not come easily last Friday night after the second presidential debate. Oh sure, the Red Sox swept the Angels and John Kerry took another large step -- no, a flying leap -- toward the Oval Office. Still, it's hard to sleep when a disturbing thought keeps coursing through the brain. For me, that thought was: the man with his finger on the red button may be cracking up before our eyes.

Put aside any distaste you might have for John Kerry, Democrats, "trial lawyers," "flip-floppers," or even "moderates." We are witnessing something unusual here, and if we're vigilant and very lucky, we may never have to witness it again. But until we come together as a nation and rid ourselves of it, we are in imminent danger of destroying the great American experiment that was born 228 years ago in Philadelphia. That is, this president -- one who was, it's important to remind ourselves, not elected by the people but by five partisan Supreme Court justices -- has begun to sound and act like a character in Stanley Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove .

Seriously, how can anyone who watched that debate not suspect --deep down -- that Bush might be losing his grip? When I say "losing," I don't mean in the electoral sense. It was not just the misstatements, lies, incomplete sentences, incessant blinking and facial tics, and failure to tune, even momentarily, into reality. Indeed, Bush's hardcore base admires how he says things like, "Is my clock up?" and "I increased wetlands by 3 million" and "Drugs might be from a third world" or when he rambles ignorantly about the 1857 Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court ("see? they misunderestimate how smart Bush is!").

It was not even the strutting around the red carpet like a bantam gangsta rooster or the inappropriate attempts at humor ("Want some wood?") in St. Louis.

It was the seething anger, the petulant, voice-cracking whine ("he's not CRED-ible ... he's just not CRED-ible!"). Mostly, though, it was the SHOUTING. Though Bush tried mightily, by chewing his lips and blinking, to rope in that cowboy-on-steroids persona that cost him the first debate, he finally let it out of the corral in an exchange about the lack of a real coalition in Iraq.

"You tell Tony Blair that!" he screamed and leaped from his seat, completely out of order, walking menacingly toward the moderator. "You tell Tony Blair!" If you listened closely, you could hear a murmer among the Gallup-tested "town hall" audience, which was collectively taken aback. Even if the post-debate TV pundits tried to spin this outburst out of existence, these salt-of-the-earth Midwesterners, otherwise so touchingly ready to give Bush the benefit of the doubt, know exactly what they saw and heard. And they were startled by it.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when a person begins to shout at a formal occasion, he has lost his bearings. Go back and watch the tape again. Bush's shouting was not just aimed at Kerry. It was aimed at Charles Gibson, the avuncular moderator, and at the audience, which to Bush embodies the most repellent aspect of democracy: informed voters. But it was mostly aimed at the unseen forces that have, up until now, held Bush's self-image and self-esteem together.

It was Shakespearean, this moment of Bush's unhinging, like Macbeth when the paranoia conjures Banquo's ghost, then infects his wife with guilt. "Out, damned spot! Out, I say!" Lady Macbeth rails for the two of them. "What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?"

After all, Macbeth, like Bush, was inserted on the throne by witches in black robes sitting around a cauldron. At the time, when the witches make their famous prophetic announcment to Macbeth ("Thou shalt be king hereafter!"), the skeptical (and soon to be late) Banquo spoke for all future citizens of democracies when he asks, "Have we eaten on the insane root?"

I believe it is time for my fellow Americans to wake up and see it for themselves: GW Bush may be chewing the root. It's not worth destroying our Constitution and our country over thi