Yesterday in The Hill my Yale '67 classmate Lanny Davis took his "fellow Liberal Democrats" to task for hating on W, on the occasion of the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library. Kos himself took Davis on two years ago when Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury reprinted the flashback strip containing this frame.
Fri May 13, 2011 at 06:45 PM PDT
Doonesbury versus Lanny Davis
by kos for Daily Kos
Lanny Davis' stupidity knows no bounds. After being skewered in this strip, Davis is outraged that people would continue to highlight how morally bankrupt he is.
The question before this house, then, is whether Lanny Davis reached the absolute nadir of stupidity by getting angry because Trudeau called him out for shilling for Laurent Gbagbo, the vicious dictator of Sierra Leone, or whether he has surpassed himself since then. You get one guess before you swallow the orange pill to go down the rabbit hole and see the awful truth.
We go back a ways, Lanny and I. I first encountered Davis at Newark Academy in Newark NJ, before we both went to Yale in 1963. He was astonishingly obnoxious even then. Kerry (Yale 1966) and W (Yale 1968) were also at Yale at the same time we were, and Garry Trudeau arrived a bit later, in 1966. Trudeau started drawing Bull Tales for the Yale Daily News during Lanny Davis's Chairmanship of the Yaley Daily, and turned it into Doonesbury after graduating in 1970.
Many of my classmates had been appalled last summer when Davis, on a panel at our reunion, claimed that Rush Limbaugh and Rachel Maddow were equally bad, and former New York Gov. George Pataki, also a classmate, and also on the panel, chimed in to agree. We talked a bit about false moral equivalence after that. OK, more than talked. Let's leave it at that.
Here are some excerpts from a piece that Davis wrote as a columnist for The Hill yesterday in honor of the opening of the "W" Presidential Library, and sent to the head of the 1967 Yale Alumni group, who passed it on to our little mailing list.
Revisiting a former president
I take this occasion to remind my fellow liberal Democrats [sic], many of whom continue to attack Bush in harsh and personal terms, of three things about him that I don’t think they understand or appreciate.
First…there must be a distinction between disagreement and personal attack. For example, many Democrats still use the “lie” word in describing Bush’s rationale for the Iraq War.
Second, Bush is known for his brilliant slogan when he first ran in 2000, describing himself as a “compassionate conservative.” But let’s not forget that on many issues, Bush was more “compassionate” than “conservative”…
Third, it is important to remember what a good man with a good heart Bush is. I know from personal experience.
Davis, a Washington attorney and principal in the firm of Lanny J. Davis & Associates, specializing in legal crisis management and dispute resolution, served as former President Clinton’s special counsel from 1996-98 and as a member of former President Bush’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board from 2006-07. He currently serves as special counsel to Dilworth Paxson, and is the author of Crisis Tales: Five Rules for Coping With Crises in Business, Politics, and Life, recently published by Threshold/ Simon & Schuster. He can be followed on Twitter @LannyDavis.
Also,
Wikipedia tells us,
President George W. Bush appointed Davis to serve on the five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board…Davis is currently a Fox News Contributor and has a column called "Purple Nation" that appears regularly in The Hill, The Huffington Post, FoxNews.com, The Daily Caller ["libertarian conservative"], and Newsmax [also conservative].
Yeah, Davis, you're right. We don't understand or appreciate why W was so great. Nor do we appreciate you constantly trolling all Liberal Democrats. I would HR you if it applied outside dKos.
The "lie"word? Really? Come on, Davis. Get real. Bush lied, tortured, shredded the Constitution (with Davis's help, noted above), destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, and New Orleans, messed up Pakistan even worse than it was, trashed the US and global economy, and more, and now says it's all good.
I am confident that when this chapter of our life is finished, that we'll both be able to say that we've advanced the cause of peace and freedom and…and the human…and helped improve the human condition.
So Bush proposed immigration reform (starting with punitive measures to "secure the border") and the Medicare drug benefit (which forbade Medicare to negotiate with the drug companies on prices). So Davis thinks that
No Child's Behind Left was pro-child and pro-education. So W one time stood up for a gay classmate, Davis tells us in the continuation, but never for LGBT rights in public life.
Feh.
So of Davis's three claims, which is the stupidest? Or was it some other time? You can vote below.