Anecdotal Evidence

Real people know Bush is bad.

A report from the Real World, by Maia Cowan

I just had a new front door installed. My chat with the contractor who did the installation work is merely anecdotal evidence from a sample of one, but it brightened my day to hear an average working guy's spontaneous (well, almost spontaneous) opinion of George W. Bush and related matters.

When he brought the paperwork over for me to sign and saw I was on the Internet, he commented about how easy it is just to live on it, and talked about how you could probably spend your whole life on it.

I could not resist the opening he offered me. "And it's hard to remember there was a time we didn't have it."

He fell right into my trap. "It started out as just for the government."

"Yes," I replied, "and never mind all those false reports that Al Gore said he invented it, and that his claim wasn't true -- he really was responsible for making it available for civilians."

He was already onto me, having been in my garage. "I saw your bumper sticker. I voted for him, too. And now I think of all the suckers who supported Bush who are saying, 'Did we ever make a mistake.' "

So we talked a bit about the economy going into the tank, and how it was Bush's fault. The contractor's in a position to know -- buying new front doors is something people only do when they've got extra money, and his business has gone from work scheduled for the next four weeks to work scheduled for the next three days.

"And where's Bush? Playing golf. When you're in charge and things are going wrong, you're supposed to be on the job trying to do something about it, not out playing golf."

So I told him about the phony photo op with the Habitat for Humanity house, and how the neighbors weren't allowed to leave their houses while Bush was there; and about the "First Amendment Zones" and the Tampa 3.

He also said, "For all the trouble around Clinton's sex life, he sure ran the country right. The economy just kept getting better and better. And now it's going downhill again."

And then he said -- I swear I didn't prompt him -- "And now they're spending all that money investigating that congressman out in California, what's his name? She's a missing girl, and I really feel for her parents, but the only reason they're having such a big investigation into it is because he's a Democrat. What about the hundreds and hundreds of missing children? Why don't they look for those children instead of spending all that effort on one grown woman?"

So I told him about Lori Klausutis having been found dead in a Republican Congressman's office. Of course he hadn't heard anything about her, and he readily agreed that the reason there wasn't a big investigation and headlines every day and hours of talk on TV about that case is that Joe Scarborough isn't a Democrat.

As he was leaving, I told him how the whole Whitewater thing got started because David Hale, a known perjurer who was looking at a stiff jail term for cheating his clients, offered to hand the prosecutors Clinton's head on a platter if they went easy on him; and the prosecutors accepted everything Hale said without caring whether it was really true or not. He had no trouble believing that, either.

I'm hoping he passes on even just a small part of what I casually brought up in our conversation. We don't have the news media on our side, but I'm seeing more and more evidence that the news media don't have the Real People on their side.