Iacocca: Throw the bums out!

You have totally got to look at this, brought to you by Carpetbagger via Kevin Drum. Lee Iacocca lays it on Bush big-big-time, in the kind of biting, memorable language we need to see more of.

How can you top this: “A man of character does not ask a single soldier to die for a failed policy”?

Or this: “Swagger isn’t courage. Tough talk isn’t courage. George Bush comes from a blue-blooded Connecticut family, but he likes to talk like a cowboy. You know, My gun is bigger than your gun. Courage in the twenty-first century doesn’t mean posturing and bravado. Courage is a commitment to sit down at the negotiating table and talk…. Bush can’t even make a public appearance unless the audience has been handpicked and sanitized.”

Or this: Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

A point of clarification: one of the comments rips into Iacocca for waiting until now, when he has a book to promote. With tail properly between the legs, the same commenter comes back quickly to say that, in fact, Iacocca switched quite publicly from being a prominent Bush supporter in 2000 to backing Kerry in 2004. Which itself raises the question: How come I forgot that? Or did I ever know? Did Kerry’s campaign give it the emphasis it should have had? With the over-50s, especially the ones that consider themselves business-oriented libertarians, Iacocca is still a big deal. We should have seen a commercial, and not expect everyone to pick it up reading the newspapers. (Or am I just being forgetful of a mighty effort?)