Click for the entire CouNTeRPuNcH Collection
Political Parodies and more
www.counterpunch.us
Posted on 09/24/2004 3:32:46 PM PDT by Cincinna
It’s time we stopped beating about the Bush
Bush’s regime is a cabal of liars and fanatics President Ronald Reagan’s son, Ron Reagan, denounces the US administration as a cabal of liars and calls on American voters to restore decency to their government
19 September 2004
IT MAY have been the guy in the hood teetering on the stool, electrodes clamped to his genitals. Or smirking Lynndie England and her leash. Maybe it was the smarmy memos tapped out by soft-fingered lawyers itching to justify such barbarism. The grudging, lunatic retreat of the neocons from their long-standing assertion that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama didn’t hurt.
Even the Enron audiotapes and their celebration of craven sociopathy played a part. As a result of all these displays and countless smaller ones, you could feel, a couple of months back, as summer spread across the US, the ground shifting beneath your feet.
Something was in the air, and people were inhaling deeply. I began to get calls from friends whose parents had always voted Republican, “but not this time”.
There was the staid Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, sneering at the “Orwellian language” flowing out of the Pentagon. Word spread that old hands from the days of Bush the Elder were quietly (but not too quietly) appalled by his son’s misadventure in Iraq.
Suddenly, everywhere you went, a surprising number of folks seemed to have had just about enough of what the Bush administration was dishing out. A fresh age appeared on the horizon, accompanied by the sound of scales falling from people’s eyes.
It felt something like a demonstration of that highest of American prerogatives and the most deeply cherished American freedom: dissent.
Oddly, even my father’s funeral contributed. Throughout that long, stately, overtelevised week in early June, items would appear in the newspaper discussing the Republicans’ eagerness to capitalise (subtly, tastefully) on the outpouring of affection for my father and turn it to Bush’s advantage for the election. The familiar “Heir to Reagan” puffballs were reinflated and loosed over the proceedings like (subtle, tasteful) balloons.
Predictably, this backfired. People were treated to a side-by-side comparison — Ronald W Reagan versus George W Bush — and it’s no surprise who suffered for it. Misty-eyed with nostalgia, people set aside old political gripes for a few days and remembered what friend and foe always conceded to Ronald Reagan: he was damned impressive in the role of leader of the free world. A sign in the crowd, spotted during the slow roll to the Capitol rotunda, seemed to sum up the mood — a portrait of my father and the words “Now THERE was a president”.
The comparison underscored something important. And the guy on the stool, England and her grinning cohorts, they brought the word: the Bush administration can’t be trusted.
The parade of Bush officials before various commissions and committees — Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who couldn’t quite remember how many young Americans had been sacrificed on the altar of his ideology; Attorney-General John Ashcroft, lip quivering as, for a delicious, fleeting moment, it looked as if Senator Joe Biden might just come over the table at him — these were a continuing reminder.
The Enron creeps, too — a reminder of how certain environments and particular habits of mind can erode common decency. People noticed. A tipping point had been reached. The issue of credibility was back on the table. The L-word was in circulation. Not the tired old bromide “liberal”. That’s so 1988. No, this time something much more potent: “liar”.
Politicians will stretch the truth. They’ll exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm.
But George W Bush and his administration have taken “normal” mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie.
And people, finally, have started catching on. None of this, needless to say, guarantees Bush a one-term presidency. The far-right wing of the country — nearly one third of us by some estimates — continues to regard all who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid (liberals, rationalists, Europeans, etc) as agents of Satan. Bush could show up on video canoodling with Paris Hilton and still bank their vote.
Right-wing talking heads continue painting anyone who fails to genuflect deeply enough as a “hater”, and therefore a nut job, probably a crypto-Islamist car bomber. But these protestations have taken on a hysterical, almost comically desperate tone.
It’s one thing to get trashed by Michael Moore. But when Nobel laureates, a vast majority of the scientific community and a host of current and former diplomats, intelligence operatives and military officials line up against you, it becomes increasingly difficult to characterise the opposition as fringe wackos.
Does anyone really favour an administration that so shamelessly lies? One that so tenaciously clings to secrecy, not to protect the American people, but to protect itself? That so wilfully misrepresents its true aims and so knowingly misleads the people from whom it derives its power?
I simply cannot think so. And to come to the same conclusion does not make you guilty of swallowing some liberal critique of the Bush presidency, because that’s not what this is.
This is the critique of a person who thinks that lying at the top levels of his government is abhorrent. Call it the honest guy’s critique of George W Bush.
The most egregious examples of distortion and misdirection — which the administration even now cannot bring itself to repudiate — involve our putative “War on Terror” and our subsequent foray into Iraq.
During his campaign for the presidency, Bush pledged a more “humble” foreign policy. “I would take the use of force very seriously,” he said. “I would be guarded in my approach.” Other countries would resent us “if we’re an arrogant nation”. He sniffed at the notion of “nation-building”. “Our military is meant to fight and win wars . . . And when it gets overextended, morale drops.”
International co-operation and consensus-building would be the cornerstone of a Bush administration’s approach to the larger world.
But didn’t 9/11 reshuffle the deck, changing everything? Didn’t Bush, on September 12 2001, awaken to the fresh realisation that bad guys in charge of Islamic nations constitute an entirely new and grave threat to us and have to be ruthlessly confronted lest they threaten the American homeland again? Wasn’t Saddam Hussein rushed to the front of the line because he was complicit with the hijackers and in some measure responsible for the atrocities?
Well, no.
As Bush’s former Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, and his one-time “terror czar”, Richard Clarke, have made clear, the president, with the enthusiastic encouragement of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, was contemplating action against Iraq from day one.
“From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out,” O’Neill said. All they needed was an excuse.
Clarke got the same impression from within the White House. Afghanistan had to be dealt with first; that’s where the actual perpetrators were, after all. But the Taliban was a mere appetiser; Saddam was the entrée. (Or who knows? The soup course?) It was simply a matter of convincing the American public (and our representatives) that war was justified.
The real — but elusive — prime mover behind the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, was quickly relegated to a back burner while Saddam’s Iraq became International Enemy Number One.
Just like that, a country whose economy had been reduced to shambles by international sanctions, whose military was less than half the size it had been when the US Army rolled over it during the first Gulf War, that had extensive no-flight zones imposed on it in the north and south as well as constant aerial and satellite surveillance, and whose lethal weapons and capacity to produce such weapons had been destroyed or seriously degraded by UN inspection teams became, in Bush’s words, “a threat of unique urgency” to the most powerful nation on Earth.
Fanciful but terrifying scenarios were introduced: unmanned aircraft, drones, had been built for missions targeting the US, Bush told the nation.
“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice deadpanned to CNN. And, Bush maintained, “Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists”. We “know” Iraq possesses such weapons, Rumsfeld and Vice-President Cheney assured us. We even “know” where they are hidden.
After several months of this mumbo-jumbo, 70% of Americans had embraced the fantasy that Saddam destroyed the World Trade Center.
All these assertions have proved to be baseless and, we’ve since discovered, were regarded with scepticism by experts at the time they were made. But contrary opinions were derided, ignored or covered up in the rush to war. Even as of this writing, Vice-President Dick Cheney clings to his mad assertion that Saddam was somehow at the nexus of a worldwide terror network.
And then there was Abu Ghraib. Our “war president” may have been justified in his assumption that Americans are a warrior people. He pushed the envelope in thinking we’d be content as an occupying power, but he was sadly mistaken if he thought that ordinary Americans would tolerate an image of themselves as torturers.
To be fair, the torture was meant to be secret. So were the memos justifying such treatment that had floated around the White House, Pentagon and Justice Department for more than a year before the first photos came to light. The neocons no doubt appreciate that few of us have the stones to practise the New Warfare.
Could you slip a pair of women’s panties over the head of a naked, cowering stranger while forcing him to masturbate? What would you say while sodomising him with a toilet plunger? Is keeping someone awake till he hallucinates inhumane treatment or merely “sleep management”?
Most of us know the answers to these questions, so it was incumbent upon the administration to pretend that Abu Ghraib was an aberration, not policy. Investigations, we were assured, were already under way; relevant bureaucracies would offer unstinting co-operation; the handful of miscreants would be sternly disciplined.
As anyone who’d watched the proceedings of the 9/11 Commission could have predicted, what followed was the usual administration strategy of stonewalling, obstruction and obfuscation.
The Bush administration no doubt had its real reasons for invading and occupying Iraq. They’ve simply chosen not to share them with the American public. They sought justification for ignoring the Geneva Convention and other statutes prohibiting torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners but were loath to acknowledge as much.
They may have ideas worth discussing, but they don’t welcome the rest of us in the conversation. They don’t trust us because they don’t dare expose their true agendas to the light of day.
There is a surreal quality to all this: occupation is liberation; Iraq is sovereign, but we’re in control; Saddam is in Iraqi custody, but we’ve got him; we’ll get out as soon as an elected Iraqi government asks us, but we’ll be there for years to come. Which is what we counted on in the first place.
This Mobius reality finds its domestic analogue in the perversely cynical “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” sloganeering at Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency and in the administration’s irresponsible tax-cutting and other fiscal shenanigans. But the Bush administration has always worn strangely tinted shades, and you wonder to what extent Bush lives in a world of his own imagining.
Chances are your America and George W Bush’s America are not the same place. If you are dead-centre on the earning scale in real-world 21st-century America, you make a bit less than $32 000 a year, and $32 000 is not a sum that Bush has ever associated with getting by in his world.
Bush, who has always managed to fail upward in his various careers, has never had a job the way you have a job — where not showing up one morning gets you fired, costing you your health benefits. He may find it difficult to relate personally to any of the nearly two million citizens who’ve lost their jobs under his administration, the first administration since Herbert Hoover’s to post a net loss of jobs.
Bush has never had to worry that he couldn’t afford the best available healthcare for his children. For him, 43 million people without health insurance may be no more than a politically inconvenient abstraction. When Bush talks about the economy, he is not talking about your economy. His economy is filled with pals called Kenny-boy who fly around in their own aircraft. When the party Bush is hosting in his world ends, you’ll be left picking shrimp toast out of the carpet.
All administrations will dissemble, distort or outright lie when their backs are against the wall, when honesty begins to look like political suicide. But this administration seems to lie reflexively, as if it were simply the easiest option for busy folks with a lot on their minds. While the big lies are of immeasurably greater import, it is the small, unnecessary prevarications that may be diagnostic.
Who lies when they don’t have to? When the simple truth, though perhaps embarrassing in the short run, is nevertheless in one’s long-term self-interest? Why would a president whose calling card is his alleged rock-solid integrity waste his chief asset for penny-ante stakes? Habit, perhaps. Or an inability to admit even small mistakes.
Bush’s tendency to meander beyond the bounds of truth was evident during the 2000 campaign but was largely ignored by the mainstream media. His untruths simply didn’t fit the agreed-upon narrative. While generally acknowledged to be lacking in experience, depth and other qualifications typically considered useful in a leader of the free world, Bush was portrayed as a decent fellow nonetheless.
None of that “what the meaning of ‘is’ is” business for him. And, God knows, no furtive, taxpayer-funded fellatio sessions with the interns. Al Gore, on the other hand, was depicted as a dubious self-reinventor, stained like a certain blue dress by Bill Clinton’s prurient transgressions.
All this left the coast pretty clear for Bush. Scenario typical of the 2000 campaign: while debating against Al Gore, Bush tells two obvious — if not exactly earth-shattering — lies and is not challenged. First, he claims to have supported a patients’ bill of rights while governor of Texas. This is untrue. He, in fact, vigorously resisted such a measure, only reluctantly bowing to political reality and allowing it to become law without his signature. Second, he announces that Gore has outspent him during the campaign. The opposite is true: Bush has outspent Gore.
Having got away with such witless falsities, perhaps Bush and his team felt somehow above day-to-day truth. In any case, once ensconced in the White House, they picked up where they left off.
In the immediate aftermath and confusion of 9/11, Bush, who on that day was in Sarasota, Florida, conducting an emergency reading of The Pet Goat, was whisked off to Nebraska aboard Air Force One. While this may have been entirely sensible under the chaotic circumstances — for all anyone knew at the time, Washington might still have been under attack — the appearance was, shall we say, less than gallant.
So a story was concocted: there had been a threat to Air Force One that necessitated the evasive manoeuvre. Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, cited “specific” evidence to that effect. The story quickly unravelled. In truth, there was no such threat.
Then there was Bush’s now infamous photo-op landing aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and his subsequent speech in front of a large banner emblazoned “Mission Accomplished”. The banner became problematic as it grew clear that the mission in Iraq — whatever that may have been — was far from accomplished. Young Americans were still dying almost daily. No surprise, a bit of digging by journalists revealed the banner and its premature triumphalism to be the work of the White House communications office.
More serious by an order of magnitude was the administration’s dishonesty about pre-9/11 terror warnings. As questions first arose about the country’s lack of preparedness in the face of terrorist assault, Condoleezza Rice was dispatched to the pundit arenas to assure the nation that “no one could have imagined terrorists using aircraft as weapons”. In fact, terrorism experts had warned repeatedly of just such a calamity. In June 2001, CIA director George Tenet sent Rice an intelligence report warning that “it is highly likely that a significant al-Qaeda attack is in the near future, within several weeks”.
Two intelligence briefings given to Bush in 2001 specifically connected al-Qaeda to the imminent danger of hijacked planes being used as weapons. According to The New York Times, after the second of these briefings, titled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States”, was delivered to the president at his ranch in Texas in August, Bush “broke off from work early and spent most of the day fishing”.
What’s odd is that none of these lies were worth the breath expended in the telling. If only for self-serving political reasons, honesty was the way to go. The flight of Air Force One could easily have been explained in terms of security precautions. As for the carrier landing, someone should have fallen on his or her sword at the first hint of trouble.
Owning up to the 9/11 warnings would have entailed more than simple embarrassment. But done forthrightly and immediately, an honest reckoning would have earned the Bush team some respect once the dust settled. Instead, by needlessly tap-dancing, Bush’s White House squandered credibility.
But image is everything in this White House, and the image of George Bush as a noble and infallible warrior in the service of his nation must be fanatically maintained, because behind the image lies . . . nothing? Bush apologists can smilingly excuse his malapropisms and vagueness as the plainspokenness of a man of action, but watching Bush flounder when trying to communicate extemporaneously, one is left with the impression that he is ineloquent not because he can’t speak but because he doesn’t think.
Bush promised to “change the tone in Washington” and ran for office as a moderate, a “compassionate conservative”, in the focus-group-tested sloganeering of his campaign. Yet he has governed from the right wing of his already conservative party, assiduously tending a “base” that includes, along with the expected Fortune 500 fat cats, fiscal evangelicals who talk openly of doing away with Social Security and Medicare, of shrinking government to the size where they can, in tax radical Grover Norquist’s phrase, “drown it in the bathtub”.
That base also encompasses a healthy share of anti-choice zealots, homophobic bigots and assorted purveyors of junk science. Bush has tossed bones to all of them — “partial birth” abortion legislation, the promise of a constitutional amendment banning marriage between homosexuals, federal roadblocks to embryonic-stem-cell research, even comments suggesting presidential doubts about Darwinian evolution.
This was not what the American electorate opted for when, in 2000, by a slim but decisive margin of more than half a million votes, they chose . . . the other guy. Bush has never had a mandate. Surveys indicate broad public dissatisfaction with his domestic priorities. How many people would have voted for Bush in the first place had they understood his eagerness to pass on crushing debt to our children or seen his true colours on global warming and the environment?
Even after 9/11, were people really looking to be dragged into an optional war under false pretences? If ever there was a time for uniting and not dividing, this is it. Instead, Bush governs as if by divine right, seeming to actually believe that a wise God wants him in the White House and that by constantly evoking the horrible memory of September 11 2001, he can keep public anxiety stirred up enough to carry him to another term.
Understandably, some supporters of Bush will believe I harbour a personal vendetta against the man, some seething resentment. One conservative commentator, based on earlier remarks I’ve made, has already discerned “jealousy” on my part; after all, Bush, the son of a former president, now occupies that office himself, while I, most assuredly, will not.
Truth be told, I have no personal feelings for Bush at all. I hardly know him, having met him only twice, briefly and uneventfully — once during my father’s presidency and once during my father’s funeral.
I’ll acknowledge occasional annoyance at the pretence that he’s somehow a clone of my father, but far from threatening, I see this more as silly and pathetic. My father, acting roles excepted, never pretended to be anyone but himself. His Republican party, furthermore, seems a far cry from the current model, with its cringing obeisance to the religious right and its kill-anything-that-moves attack instincts.
I write and speak as nothing more or less than an American citizen, one who is angry about the direction our country is being dragged by the current administration. We have reached a critical juncture in our nation’s history, one ripe with both danger and possibility. We need leadership with the wisdom to prudently confront those dangers and the imagination to boldly grasp the possibilities.
Beyond issues of fiscal irresponsibility and ill-advised militarism, there is a question of trust.
George W Bush and his allies don’t trust you and me. Why on earth, then, should we trust them? Fortunately, we still live in a democratic republic. The Bush team cannot expect a cabal of right-wing judges to once again deliver the White House. Come November 2, we will have a choice: we can embrace a lie, or we can restore a measure of integrity to our government. We can choose, as a bumper sticker I spotted in Seattle put it, “Someone Else for President”. — © 2004 Hearst Communications, Inc
• Ron Reagan is an MSNBC contributor and the son of Ronald Reagan, 40th president of the United States
bump
Ah, the ballerina speaks.
Father rolling in grave tear.
Ron Reagan is a spineless little shiite. He is a disgrace to his family.
Gee...how proud Nancy must be of this ferry wanabe activist!!
I don't think he wrote this, himself. The writing style is too cutely colorful for young Ron. I doubt he could produce this.
While I'll agree with Ron that Bush is not in the same league as Ronald Reagan it's a mystery why he's become a waterboy for lurch. Lurch somehow cast a rasputin-like spell on Ron and his sister.
"Right-wing talking heads continue painting anyone who fails to genuflect deeply enough as a “hater”, and therefore a nut job, probably a crypto-Islamist car bomber."
While trying my hardest not to fall off my chair laughing.... I'm thinking... "Well??? Ya.. that about covers it."
little Ronnie "the ballerina" Reagan is a disgrace to his father's DNA
Barf
Someone dropped this Reagan on his head when he was very little. He has a personality disorder.......really!
History will end up disagreeing with you on the Bush Reagan comparison.
After the '94 GOP takeover of Congress Ronald Reagan sent a letter to Haley Barbour (then GOP chair) and congratulated him told him how happy he was and said, just because he was sick don't think he won't still do some spots for the GOP, etc.
That was the party of Newt, the party of "the right wing, etc." Ronald Reagan would have loved today's Republican Party, would have loved George W. Bush, would have loved the tax cuts, would have loved our response to 9/11 and would have continued his lifelong shame of his black sheep ballerina b***h son and his slutty sister...
The queen is upset
So what's everybody having for dinner tonight?
There's that word cabal again. I've been seeing it often.
Wait a second, I'm in the wrong place. I thought this was the Sinead O'Conner thread. (sarcasm/)
It's so sad that he is such a disgrace to his father. It seems like he has gotten worse since President Reagan's passing. What a horrible excuse for a son!!!!!
Since when did "dissent" become a more cherished freedom than the ones outlined in the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.