Memo To: House Leadership. You just can't inhale this much
merde this close to an election and ever breathe normally again.
From: Steve High, lapsed campaign manager. My won-lost record is 30-7 although as Matt Rees once said, I've lied about it so much, I don't really remember.
Subject: L'Affaire Eagleton. Said Affaire was sans doute--English fails me--the most egregious, mismanaged cluster-fuck in either party in American political history. Until now, that is. Back in the day...
...when the network cameramen had to be shaken awake to shoot George McGovern's brilliant Bob Shrum-written
"Come Home, America speech" that nobody but us heard, the delegates nominated Thomas Eagleton of Missouri to be McGovern's running mate.
If you read none of the rest of this snippet of living history, read Shrum's speech all the way through. Then think twice before before you talk shit about your betters. Some day you'll be an old broken-down fuck yourself.
They (we) voted on ballots with Mayor Kevin White's name crossed out and Sen. Tom Eagleton's name written in at the last minute. An intra-party bloodbath that had continued from the NH Primary to a deadly procedural challenge just 48 hours before had left the campaign little time for minor details like picking a vice-president and printing ballots.
Then, about ten days after the convention it transpired that McGovern's running mate, Eagleton, potential commander-in-chief, had had a few mental problems. An electroshock treatment. No wait, maybe a dozen or so. Hadn't mentioned said treatments to McGovern.
McGovern wasn't going to drop him from the ticket. But every Democrat, and every ever-so-helpful boy (and the rare girl) on the bus said he had to get rid of him.
McGovern said he was "1000%" behind Eagleton.
The next day he asked Eagleton to leave. Eagleton squirmed and didn't want to. Finally, with a hard push, he left. Then McGovern got on the phone and started asking people to be the next vice president of the United States.
Six (I think it was) told him to go fuck himself.
Finally, he found one, with enough college try (or too little means of visible support) in him to say no, and thus the star-crossed, doomed, thrice-cursed McGovern-Shriver ticket was born.
This was still before Labor Day. I suppose I should have gotten a job washing cars. I could have been a foreman, with a red hat and all, by November.
But I never was very good at building a resume. If I'd had any sense, I would have worked for Nixon in the first place, and then become a Democrat in 1974. I know a guy my age who did that, and to this day, his wristwatch is worth more than my car.
These gay GOP staff guys in DC who are ratting out Hastert and everybody else they can find to rat out? They're going to be Democrats come next year, you just know it.
And why not? A guy with a purebred cat and a cocaine habit to support has to keep his priorities straight, doesn't he?
So there you have it. I'm kinda like Mark (edited) Foley. As a child (okay, a 25-year-old), I was abused by Richard Nixon and Chuck Colson, who I think had a few nasty habits even before he went in the joint. Now I'm an abuser of sorts myself. I take cruel delight in watching Republicans endure the same kind of slow, painful, unceasingly humiliating and painful torture I suffered. A million-dollar education, really, shoved up your ass, one bus token at a time.
I feel a lot of empathy for your House Republicans. I went through something almost as bad.
And I could almost bring myself to pity them, you know?
But I'm kinda busy.