A War President

That’s how Bush describes himself. That’s how his administration thinks of itself. They see it as justification for pretty much any action, as absolving them of any blame, as an excuse not to answer hard questions and as a reason to ignore all unbelievers who do not think the way they do.

We are at war. With us or against us. Shut up and sit down.

The attitude showed up in spades in Rice’s testimony this week, it’s apparent in every word Rumsfeld says and the President exhudes it while still maintaining a befuddled and untrained air.

They need to convince you that you have no right to question them or their whole house of cards comes tumbling down. How do you apologize for invading a country by accident, anyway? You don’t. With the requirements for invasion by the United States having dropped from actually having weapons of mass destruction and the intent to use them to allowing or “sponsoring weapons of mass destruction related program activities”, any country in which anyone is doodling something that looks vaguely like a microbe on a cocktail napkin could be next. This is a shockingly trigger-happy and nervous foreign policy.

It’s not the kind of thing you can admit to supporting in an election year. Thus, the obsfuscation. The shucking. The jiving.

Meet the Press

The first salvo was the Tim Russert/Bush interview on Meet the Press from a while ago, in which Russert addressed (or asked about) things like the 9/11 commission and whether Bush would testify. Bush responded that he would be willing to “visit with them”, complete with trademark smirk. President Meets The Press (Plastic) has a pretty interesting discussion on that interview. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart did some wicked coverage of it in Meet the Prez. It’s worth it just for the number of clips they found of Bush saying “madman”.

I know we’ve heard it a thousand times, but, until recently, the administration, and especially Bush, has been given the smoothest of rides by the mainstream press. Reading many articles about him (again, up until recently, when the heat has been a bit more on), you get the impression he’s basically steering this country right, except for a few quibbles. Even a relatively reputable, relatively non-slanted news source writing about the Flap over Bush military service (Christian Science Monitor) describes Bush in ways that would never occur to me. Here’s a sample:

“Perhaps most important, the flap over Bush’s National Guard service raises questions about the president’s credibility at a time when his most valuable asset − a reputation for integrity and candor − is under siege. … One of Bush’s strengths is he seems to be a straight shooter, and his ratings on integrity and honesty are still pretty good”

Really? Who thinks this? I don’t think even most of the people who actually voted for him would be this generous.

The article goes on to indicate that Bush’s “desertion” (emphasis added) shouldn’t be much of an issue, but that “[a] picture of [democratic front runner John] Kerry and actress Jane Fonda attending the same antiwar rally in Valley Forge” is ammunition in Bush’s arsenal. How can that be? John Kerry fought in Vietnam, a disastrous aborted attempt at empire that left millions dead and nothing accomplished. He came home and protested the war.

You can look at that two ways: he was called to duty by his country and he did it, or he fought in an unjust war instead of taking a moral stand against it. Amazingly, there is a third way of looking at it: ignore the Vietnam service altogether and concentrate on the fact that he did protest the war when he returned. This is the Republican tack and one which the Christian Science Monitor sees as potentially damaging to Kerry in the eyes of American voters. Are they right? Are there really enough mean, petty, stupid, shallow Americans who will squint their piggy eyes and write Kerry off for protesting Vietnam, but somehow be able to ignore Bush’s shirking of his military duties, not once, but twice? I don’t think so.

Rice Testifies

Condi’s Cover-up Caves In by David Corn (Common Dreams) takes us to the next big interview of a Bush administration official. Yeah, Condi looked bad. She said laughable shit. She just plain didn’t answer pretty important-sounding questions. The most damning point centered around a 3-year-old piece of paper.

You’re going to hear that the patently liberal media is jumping all over the administration for nothing … for little niggly details. It’s unfair. Now they all pile on, like lemmings. Not so. I think it’s because the media is so lenient the rest of the time that these situations stick out. It’s because so many of these things slide, or are not reported because they aren’t politically advantageous. When something comes along that is irrefutable, media services report it ad nauseum because they can’t be held accountable by the administration for reporting what is already considered true.

You’re not going to get fired for reporting something that everyone else is also reporting. That may seem like it takes a lot of coordination, but it happens instinctively, like with those large schools of fish. They just move as one. That is, we only get news that we already know (and, by definition, isn’t actually news), because it’s the only safe thing to report. That’s why news agencies either all report something or no one does. No one important, anyway. I’m looking at you, Jon Stewart.

The PDB (Presidential Daily Briefing), as it’s called, was reported on before, in “[a] May 19 , 2002, front-page Washington Post story did report the correct title of the PDB and did state that the briefing had noted that al Qaeda members were living or traveling to the United States.”. The PDB was reported long ago (almost two years ago) … no one jumped on … it was squashed and denied by the White House and the media swam in a different direction.

They’re all swimming against the White House now, though, even The Silent President (Common Dreams), an editorial from the NY Times, accuses the White House of an “extraordinary exercise in bureaucratic excuse making and misdirection”. They also mention the interesting point that President Bush “limit[s] critical briefing papers to little more than a page”. So when Condi says the PDB didn’t have much information, she’s not lying; it’s just that you’re apparently not allowed to give him any more than one page at a time to read. More fuel for the dyslexia fire.

Now everybody’s talking about a 3 year old memo as if it’s the most incriminating thing in the world. It is pretty damning evidence; it just feels so out of context because it’s such a late reaction. It’s a calculated reaction on behalf of the media because it only comes when it’s politically safe to do so, rather than when it’s socially responsible. It feels fake because it’s so self-serving. Again, the Daily Show is an exception to the rule with their coverage in Me Ain’t Culpa.

White House/white noise

You’ve just got to be able to concentrate on whether or not an issue is important or not, regardless of how you feel about its press coverage. The fact that this investigation is coming two and a half years after 9/11 doesn’t mean having an investigation is stupid. It just feels pointless because it’s so late. It’s so late because the people telling you it’s pointless put it off for two years. Don’t be fooled.

These are the same people who like us to believe that there is no right and wrong. That everything is relative and who really knows the truth? Everything is done for an advantage and that affects the truth. That’s what White House smear campaigns are about: they never address the truth of an issue; they address the accuser’s history and background. Richard Clarke was the most recent victim.1 When you watch his interview, he sounds extraordinarily competent and sincere. Apply the noise filter from the White House and you don’t know what to believe.

The administration wants us to see the uncomfortable questions being asked of them as pure second-guessing and 20/20 hindsight. They don’t want us to ever objectively consider whether they might have really screwed up or not. They want us to believe that since the people asking a question might be politically motivated, the question itself is bunk.

And the uproar isn’t about who knew what and whether the administration is complicit; it’s just about finding out how to prevent it from happening again. The fact that the administration goes to such lengths to admit no complicity, remorse or guilt in the matter is the problem. They simply never admit that something went wrong or that one of them may have made a mistake. And the lengths they go to to cover up any information to the contrary becomes more and more suspicious — it makes one think they weren’t honest mistakes and somebody screwed up badly enough to be fired or incarcerated.

“Yet the White House is unable to acknowledge that it made a misjudgment. Much of the public might even believe that it was a natural mistake for a new administration to underestimate the abilities and reach of a madman hunkered down in faraway Afghanistan. In a way, such a screw-up may be more forgivable than Bush and his lieutenants’ efforts to cover up information and prevent the 9/11 commission from completing a thorough examination.”

Babbling Bush/Tenacious Tenet

After all, if “a country that is hiding something….is a country that has something to hide….”2, doesn’t that equally apply to people? Why do you think the President talks that way? If you only express yourself in tautologies, you’re never wrong.

The President was on television a few nights ago and, once again, admitted nothing, reiterated long-since disproven “facts”3 and generally fail[ed] to impress (BBC). His almost patented “missionary zeal” to “stay the course” no matter what, “drove home the single-mindedness that has become the hallmark of his presidency”. It also drives home the fact that he simply cannot express himself except in talking points that have been lovingly prepared for him by Karl Rove. It’s like he doesn’t hear about things like this article: Anti-U.S. Outrage Unites a Growing Iraqi Resistance (Ny Times). These are not “terrorists”, “shadowy figures”, “thugs” or “Baathist remnants”; they’re just people sick of having to look out the window and see an American tank.

George Tenet, head of the CIA was also interviewed by the 9/11 panel. Panel Finds Fault With Intelligence Efforts (Washington Post) quotes him as:

“estimat[ing] that it would take another five years to achieve the agency’s goals in improving its clandestine service.”

I saw part of his testimony on CNN and he looked earnest, but 5 years? What the hell? The CIA’s been sucking money for 60 years now, funding all sorts of clandestine overthrows and drug operations (from which they made more money), but, now that it comes down to brass tacks, they need five more years in order to actually do the job they were supposed to have been doing all along? I appreciate the honesty, but you’re fired. If it takes them 5 years to reel back in all of the factions they incited throughout the world (the Mujahadeen were their creation), I bet it takes less time than that for organizations pissed off at the CIA to forgive us once we publicly fire them.