By PHK
On March 24, WaPo columnist, E.J. Dionne wrote a column entitled “In charge, except they’re not.” The gist of the story was about how our wonderful W and the Republican Party are now running against themselves. You know: the charge-of-the-light-brigade kind of activity so masterfully executed by the Republicans against “big government” as if they hadn't been in charge of creating an even “bigger government” since they’ve held the White House beginning in 2000.
This kind of stuff has been going on successfully for decades: painting the Democrats as the anti-patriotic party of big government. In contrast, the party of the elephant is portrayed as the party of small government and for the little man enveloped in the stars and stripes.
The way, however, the Republican leadership is now acting – to position itself for the 2006 elections - you’d think they hadn’t been in charge of this country since at least W’s questionable election in November 2000.
Running against themselves
Lest we forget, the Republicans have complete control of both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court and the Executive. Lest we also forget, this single-party political noose dominated by a coalition of Bushite fundamentalist Christian and neoconservative ideologues has brought us a ballooning budget deficit. Why? Because W’s advisors forgot about the old axiom that took down LBJ – guns and butter don’t mix – and led us into a disastrous mess in Iraq now running $6 billion a month with no end in sight.
The administration also brought about a two-faced policy towards the Palestinians’ recent election of Hamas, an even more unstable Middle East than before November 2000 and major problems with a spinning out of control nuclear weapons control treaty regime worldwide. Thank you Mr. Bush, Mr. Bolton, Ms. Wilson (my Congresswoman), Mr. Woolsey, Mr. Perle and others who don’t believe in arms control to have sold the world the mistaken and dangerous idea that brought this about.
The administration also brought with these and other ill-begotten foreign policies this country’s worst international public opinion ratings since – well, it’s hard to say. Never have they been so bad or so bad for so long.
A sandcastle wrapped in a web of relentless rhetoric
One of the myriad of problems that aggravates me the most about this administration is the half-truths-if-that, supported by the drums of relentless rhetoric – as Dionne also pointed out.
Dionne focused his column on the incompetence surrounding W’s FEMA trailer fiasco. In contrast, he pointed approvingly to Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey (D) who has admitted his own administration’s mistakes and is asking the citizens of New Jersey to help him shift course to correct them. This includes raising taxes because of a state budget deficit run-amok.
The comparison between the trailers still parked in Tennessee and fixing New Jersey’s budget problems, however, should not be seen in partisan political terms. They should be seen in terms of integrity, intelligence and flexibility, e.g. willingness to change direction in the face of recognition of bankrupt policies and to admit, not paper-over, mistakes.
Steadfastness = stubbornness = stupidity
Frankly, I see none of these characteristics in W, Cheney or Rumsfeld – the three men most responsible for how this country is run. This is the point where steadfastness becomes stubbornness grounded in stupidity.
I certainly don’t see any of Corizine’s now almost novel kind of integrity. Instead the airwaves emitting from the White House are permeated with airy-fairy rhetoric supporting its “stay the course” stubbornness. This all courtesy of the gang that can’t shoot straight. Admit mistakes in Iraq? Why?
Change direction? Temper tantrum, no.
Instead, ideologically inspired rhetoric replete with hackneyed phrases continues to spew forth – just look at the new/old National Security Strategy that the administration released recently. Talk about living in a cave with the blanket pulled over one’s head.
Even though Iraq, that benighted “country,” has now slipped into predictable civil war the W administration still refuses to admit it. If we’re not witnessing a civil war, pray tell, what is it?
Blame it on the media – or anyone else
This is a US election year so the administration whines
• the media is only reporting the bad side of the story in Iraq – it ignores all the good we’re doing there; and
• we can’t possibly bring the troops home because, well, that would turn the situation on the ground into chaos.
Since it’s already pretty chaotic in 60% of the country (true, only four provinces, but they represent 60% of the country) and our troops remain targets – why not get them out before more get killed or maimed?
Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a nonpartisan research organization that studies the news and entertainment media and also professor of journalism at George Mason University was interviewed March 22 on the Newshour. He said that stories on Iraq are now running 2-1 or 3-1 in the bad news category. Michael Massing, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and former executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review commented on that same Newshour special that the media tends to follow the herd instinct.
I agree: bad news often makes news and the happy stuff doesn’t. True the media tends to follow the pack – the Finnish newspaper Aamulehti in Tampere once had a flock of fake lemmings, if I remember correctly, on the grass near the main entrance of its editorial offices to underscore just that point.
Who manages what news?
Lemmings or otherwise, news is managed in a myriad of ways. A government public relations apparatus with all the resources the Bush Administration has at its disposal – particularly working hand-in-glove with sycophant media organizations, the conservative corporations that own them and the right wing think-tanks that provide too many of the talking heads – has an incredible bully-pulpit for getting out its side of the story fast and effectively.
Far more so than anti-war groups, for instance, whose protests are dismissed as “non-news” because of their predictability, or ordinary citizens like you and me – who before blogs and web pages were even more constrained in registering our analyses, views and opinions.
In the Soviet Union, for example, the bad news was all about the decadent west and the good news all about happy socialist workers and hero mothers. (Most hero mothers, by the way, were Muslims who lived in Central Asia). But the CPSU’s bankrupt propaganda machine ran on empty and by 1978-80 when I lived in Moscow, very few Soviets believed the Kremlin’s propaganda assaults any more.
Like the Soviets of yesteryear, the White House today seems to be losing its grip over media reporting in the US that it once had. Why? Because – like the Kremlin - of the stuff it spins out.
The happy pictures the White House paints simply do not correspond with what’s happening on the ground. Public opinion poll numbers show Americans are finally catching on to the rhetorical disconnect that the Europeans and others abroad knew in 2003.
Whether Bush’s invade-then-democratize Iraq-tomorrow - cabal still really believes its own rhetoric, I don’t know. But the relentless bad news reports of yet another bombing, of Shiites fighting Sunnis, Kurds fighting Sunnis, of a U.S. military licensed to torture, of the rape of Iraqi archeological treasures (not well enough reported on) and the thousands of dead and wounded while Osama Bin Laden sits happily ensconced in a cave in northwest Pakistan are finally making their way into America’s consciousness.
I think the public opinion problem for the Bush administration at home is more serious than those low poll numbers abroad. As a friend observed recently, US public opinion is like a huge ship. Once that ship starts to change course, it is very difficult to steer it in a different direction – particularly quickly. A rapid about-face before November 2006? Don’t count on it. Whether the Republicans running for election, or reelection, will be able to distance themselves far and fast enough from W’s out-of-sink rhetoric and his sinking ship is one question. Whether there will be enough lifeboats for them to jump into is another.
Katrina may have been the straw that broke the US media’s fealty to this administration’s line, but the continuing funereal drumbeat of Iraq is also part of the picture. Dead and wounded vets do not make for pretty, happy or good news stories. Several Iraq War veterans are now running for Congress – almost all on the Democratic side.
W has demonstrated time and again that he does “not feel their or their family’s pain” just as he so obliviously pedaled away on his exercise bicycle throughout much of the Katrina Disaster (whose aftershocks still reverberate throughout this country as the Dionne column suggests.)
But what of the administration’s continuing rhetoric? And its charges that its stories (the happy news ones) are not being fairly covered in, oh-my-gosh the “liberal” media (since the 1990s a misnomer in itself). Isn’t this like the little boy who cried wolf so many times no one would listen any more?
Why can’t the White House take a page from Corzine’s book, admit its mistakes and, for a change, tell the public the truth?