I'm just the guy that can't stand cant. ___________

 
ASK NOT WHAT BUSH CAN DO FOR YOUR COUNTRY: Many Americans of a certain age have long felt that a dream of idealistic government died 40 years ago with the assassination of President Kennedy.

Thanks to President Bush, however, there is a new dream of idealism in government. But in the hands of this president with the reverse Midas touch, the new dream is a nightmare.

President Kennedy inspired many Americans with his call for idealism in government. Kennedy’s admonition “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” was not empty rhetoric.

A strain of tough-minded idealism was present in many of the policies and initiatives of the Kennedy administration. Sometimes the idealism was front and center, resulting in initiatives such as the Peace Corps and the negotiation of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Other times, the idealism was tempered, and even slowed, by political considerations or other pragmatic concerns. This was the case with civil rights, which the Kennedy administration approached gingerly at first but eventually came around to promoting. Even if the idealism did not always win out, its influence was pervasive.

The idealism of the Kennedy administration was successful because it was combined with a tough-minded realism that guarded against wishful thinking.

Kennedy’s idealism contained a strong anti-communist bent without distorting a realistic view of the world. It was an idealism that was strong enough to pull back when caution was in the nation’s best interests. Thus, when confronted with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy decided not to support militarily the ill-advised invasion of Cuba by CIA-backed anti-Castro Cubans. This caution was also seen during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Kennedy rejected advice to invade Cuba and instead remained firm in seeking and obtaining a peaceful resolution to what could have been a nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union.

Kennedy’s idealism was the idealism of a pragmatic politician who wanted to improve the world while mindful of the limitations that the world imposed on him.

That was the idealism in the government of yesteryear. An idealism that was tempered with realism and an appreciation for long-term consequences.

Today our government has strains of an idealism that is filtered not through realism, but through a rigid right-wing ideology. An idealism that can be recklessly destructive as it seeks to remake the world while ignoring the likely consequences of its actions.

Bush’s idealism is the grandiose idealism of the schizophrenic. Bush seeks to remake the word without regard for the limitations of the world – or even reality.

Bush decided to push America into invading Iraq largely because he was in thrall to the twisted idealism of naive neoconservative ideologues who believed that an American invasion would be followed by Iraq transforming itself into a peaceful democracy practically overnight.

This neoconservative dream of engineering a democratic transformation of the Middle East was closer to a schizophrenic delusion than a serious plan. It was a dream that jumbled together imperialism, nationalism, unilateralism, arrogance and, yes, even idealism. But it was an idealism that was constrained and twisted by a rigid neoconservative ideology that accepts the truth of only those theories that support its pre-conceived worldview. It was an incredibly stunted and myopic idealism that was incapable of integrating other values – such as respect for international order – or even an appreciation for reality.

Now that Bush has plunged America and Iraq into his neoconservative dream, it has turned out to be a nightmare. The weapons of mass destruction that were supposedly the main justification for war are nowhere to be found. The fighting and dying continue long past the point when Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq. As I discussed in my previous post, BUSH'S WISHFUL THINKING DEBATES CLARK’S STRATEGIC VISION, while Bush has espoused noble intentions for the Middle East, he has failed to offer any realistic plan for success in the pacification of Iraq. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan Al Qaeda and the Taliban are taking advantage of the Bush administration’s neglect of that country and are regrouping.

Since the idealism of the Bush administration is subservient to its ideology, the administration has found it difficult to adjust to reality.

The idealism of the Bush administration is akin to the idealism of the old-time American Communists who denied the reality of Stalin’s brutality less it threaten their dream of a Marxist utopia. Similarly, the Bush idealists had this dream that invading Iraq would be the first step in remaking the entire Middle East into a democratic utopia. They did not let realistic considerations such as the unpredictability of war and the continuing terrorist threat in the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan distract them from trying to live out their dream.

Unlike Bush, Kennedy showed that it is possible for a politician to be both an idealist and a realist. Kennedy was more a pragmatist that an idealist. Ironically, Kennedy’s pragmatism enabled his idealism to be strong and effective.

In contrast to Kennedy, Bush has demonstrated how idealism without realism can result in naivety, one of the most dangerous traits for a statesman to have. Such naivety led Bush to blunder into his Iraqi adventure – for the grand purpose of remaking the Middle East – instead of finishing the more urgent (yet less imperial) job of chasing down Osama bin Laden and the remnants of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Bush’s unrealistic idealism has been harmful to America’s national security. Unfortunately, when Bush asked what he could do for his country, he lacked the judgment to answer that question with realism instead of ideology.
posted by Gary at 10:23 AM

 
BUSH’S WISHFUL THINKING DEBATES CLARK’S STRATEGIC VISION: We may have had a preview of the 2004 presidential candidates’ debate on foreign policy yesterday with President Bush’s and retired General Wesley Clark’s dueling speeches on the Middle East and Iraq.

The two speeches showed each candidate at his best. Bush, the master of wishful thinking, expressed noble intentions of desiring the spread of democracy, albeit without offering a plan likely to achieve such goals. Clark, a military strategist, offered a plan for success in Iraq that would advance the goals Bush claims to have.

As today’s Washington Post reports, Bush posed a vision of democratic change in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East without actually offering any clue how it is to be achieved:

In a speech that redefined the U.S. agenda in the Middle East, President Bush waxed eloquent yesterday about his dream of democracy coexisting with Islam and transforming an important geostrategic region that has defiantly held out against the global tide of political change.

But Bush failed to acknowledge the tough realities that are likely to limit significant political progress in the near future: the United States' all-consuming commitment to fighting a global war on terrorism and confronting Islamic militancy. Washington still relies heavily on alliances with autocratic governments to achieve these top priorities.

....

In a broad assessment of the region, the president inflated the progress toward democracy made by allies such as Saudi Arabia that are harshly criticized for their abuses in the annual U.S. human rights report, while he criticized countries such as Iran that have made some inroads but do not have good relations with Washington.

“His portrayal of what's going on in Arab countries is totally unrealistic,” said Marina Ottaway, co-director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“The reality that he is overlooking is that in all these countries that are supposedly making progress, hostility to the United States is at an all-time high,” she said. “So the idea that these are countries where progress on democracy is going to make them better allies is certainly not supported by what is going on.”

Bush’s call for democratic change in the Middle East wishes for the right things. Unfortunately, wishing doesn’t make it so. Bush now dreams of democratic change in the Middle East just as he and the naive neoconservative dreamers who captured his fancy imagined that an American invasion of Iraq would be greeted by flower-tossing Iraqi Jeffersons and Madisons who would usher in a democratic society practically overnight. Without a strategic vision of how to realize the goal of democratization, however, that aspiration is likely to remain a dream.

In contrast to Bush’s wishful thinking about democracy spreading through the Middle East, Clark offered a detailed plan of how to achieve success in pacifying Iraq. As today’s New York Times reports:

Gen. Wesley K. Clark said Thursday that military operations in Iraq should be turned over to a North Atlantic Treaty Organization force under United States command and that he would replace the civilian administration there with an international effort not under American leadership.

General Clark, who is retired from the Army and who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, made the proposals to build international involvement and stabilize Iraq in an address here at South Carolina State University.

It was the fourth in a series of speeches laying out his platform for the presidency, based on what he calls a "new American patriotism." He also said he would conduct a conference with leaders from Europe, Japan, the Arab world and other countries to enlist their support for a more international approach to Iraq.

As part of that effort, General Clark said, he would recall the former Iraqi army and ask the cooperating nations to commit 50,000 troops to help the Iraqis in policing, police training, oversight and border control.

The creation of a new "reconstruction and democracy council" in Baghdad would be modeled, he said, on the international coalition that oversaw security and military operations in the Balkans in the 1990's.

....

Seeking to repair ties with European allies that he said have been damaged by the Bush administration, General Clark said he would propose “a new Atlantic Charter to reinvigorate our security partnership with Europe.”

He said such an organization would supplement NATO rather than replace it and would “define the threats we face in common, create the basis for concerted action from our allies to meet them, and offer the promise to act together as a first choice, not a last.”

General Clark also said that the makeup of American military forces in Iraq should be overhauled, with more special forces and light units and fewer conventional infantry units, which require significant amounts of lightly armed logistical support units that also make tempting targets for attacks.

The military forces in Iraq also need more specialists in language and intelligence, he said. He proposed asking international inspectors to take over the search for unconventional weapons, which would free American linguists and intelligence specialists to work on efforts “to find the people who are killing our soldiers.”

To help to close Iraq's borders to infiltration by terrorists, General Clark said, “We should engage with the Syrians, the Iranians and the Saudis, and we need carrots as well as sticks.”

“Unfortunately, this administration has made the region wary of working with us,” he said. “I'll make sure as president that we don't ever get into a mess like this again.”

Unlike Bush’s approach, Clark’s levelheaded plan for Iraq does not rely on hope, it offers hope. Clark’s experience in leading NATO forces to victory in Kosovo informs his judgment that the best way to serve America’s interests is to build truly international coalitions to support our goals.

Bush has foolishly alienated much of the world, leaving America to bear a far greater share of the burden in Iraq than would have been necessary under a more cooperative approach. Bush lacks the strategic vision to realize that when America acts with the support of NATO or the UN, it can be far stronger than when it acts alone. Clark has that strategic vision.

“Hope is not a plan,” is a favorite saying of military strategists. With his penchant for treating his hopes as plans, Bush has shown he is no strategist. With his articulation of a plan to achieve success in Iraq, Clark has shown that he is no Bush.

Although Clark still has to overcome a few minor obstacles (such as winning the Democratic nomination) before facing Bush, he won his first debate against Bush hands down. While Bush offered only a vision of wishful thinking that relied on hope, Clark offered a strategic vision that actually offered hope of success in Iraq.

Thursday’s debate between Bush and Clark indicates that if Clark does win the Democratic nomination for president, America will have a clear-cut choice between two different styles of governing – Bush’s wishful thinking versus Clark’s strategic vision.
posted by Gary at 6:07 PM

 
THROUGH THE BUSH LOOKING GLASS: In the 2000 presidential election, George Bush claimed that his favorite political philosopher was Jesus Christ. While I always try to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt (especially when he is trying to express a thought), I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the truth may lie elsewhere.

Recent reports about Bush’s dogged efforts to drag America’s intelligence community through the looking glass with him indicate that it is far more likely that Bush’s favorite political philosopher is actually Lewis Carroll.

In "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass," Carroll imagined a world in which illogic ruled. Imperious rulers made decisions based on events that were expected to occur in the future, reached judgments before considering the evidence and meted out punishments for crimes that had not yet occurred. To Lewis Carroll, it was a dream, to the American people it is the Bush administration.

The decision making processes of the Bush administration bear an uncanny resemblance to the machinations of the Queen in "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass." I suspect that Bush was exposed to one or both of these books in his youth, and viewed the haughty Queen as a role model for decision making.

If my theory is correct, Bush undoubtedly admired – and has sought to emulate – the decisiveness displayed by the Queen. for example, in "Alice in Wonderland," the Queen is outraged at the suggestion that evidence should be considered and a verdict reached before passing sentence:

“No, no!” said the Queen. Sentence first – verdict afterwards.

Bush evidently took these words to heart. On foreign and domestic policy, Bush has habitually made the most important decisions first and then considered the evidence.

In the current New Yorker, investigative reporter Sy Hersh reveals how Bush and his minions dragged the nation’s intelligence community through the looking glass. (Link via Talking Points Memo.) As a matter of policy, the Bush administration has relentlessly fought to stop the intelligence community from performing its job of evaluating intelligence reports and to start giving the administration the answers it wanted to hear. Hersh explains how the intelligence community’s mission was twisted by the Bush administration:

Part of the answer lies in decisions made early in the Bush Administration, before the events of September 11, 2001. In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government’’s customary procedures for vetting intelligence.

A retired C.I.A. officer described for me some of the questions that would normally arise in vetting: “Does dramatic information turned up by an overseas spy square with his access, or does it exceed his plausible reach? How does the agent behave? Is he on time for meetings?” The vetting process is especially important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports – sensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy decisions. In theory, no request for action should be taken directly to higher authorities – a process known as “stovepiping” – without the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny.

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic – and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

“They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,” Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.”

The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. “The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet” – the C.I.A. director – “for not protecting them. I’’ve never seen a government like this.”

The looking glass approach taken by the Bush administration in battling the intelligence community was the same approach used by Bush in leading the nation to war with Iraq. First the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq as neoconservatives had been recommending for a decade. Then the administration settled on the threat of weapons of mass destruction as the strongest rationale for the war. Finally, the administration cherry picked information – regardless of whether it was based on good or bad intelligence – that supported the rationale that Iraq was threatening us with weapons of mass destruction.

Let’s call this the Bush Looking Glass Doctrine. This doctrine is the natural outgrowth of Bush’s naive determination to govern on the basis of his beliefs rather than reality. First decide on a course of action through a mixture of ideology, gut feelings and sheer ignorance. Then look for information and justifications to support that action.

This illogical and result-oriented approach to decision making was also discussed recently on CBS’s 60 Minutes II, which interviewed Greg Thielmann, a former State Department expert on weapons of mass destruction:

Today, Thielmann believes the decision to go to war was made – and the intelligence was interpreted to fit that conclusion.

“There’s plenty of blame to go around. The main problem was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence. They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show,” says Thielmann.
“They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce. I would assign some blame to the intelligence community, and most of the blame to the senior administration officials.”

The Bush Looking Glass Doctrine also has the advantage of being flexible enough to allow the Bush administration to assimilate new information without ever having to admit error or change course. Under the doctrine, all new information – regardless of how it contradicts the original rationales – is just further justification for the existing policy

As it has become obvious that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction that posed a current threat to America, Bush and his administration have shifted the rationale, and now claim that war was justified because Saddam Hussein had ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction in the future. As Hersh reports:

In early October, David Kay, the former U.N. inspector who is the head of the Administration’’s Iraq Survey Group, made his interim report to Congress on the status of the search for Iraq’’s W.M.D.s. “We have not yet found stocks of weapons,” Kay reported, “but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war.” In the area of nuclear weapons, Kay said, “Despite evidence of Saddam’’s continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, to date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material.” Kay was widely seen as having made the best case possible for President Bush’’s prewar claims of an imminent W.M.D. threat. But what he found fell far short of those claims, and the report was regarded as a blow to the Administration. President Bush, however, saw it differently. He told reporters that he felt vindicated by the report, in that it showed that “Saddam Hussein was a threat, a serious danger.”

According to Bush’s shifting looking glass rationale for war, the absence of any imminent threat from Iraq actually justified going to war to prevent such a threat from occurring. Once again, Bush seems to be channeling the Queen in "Through the Looking Glass":

“There’s the King’s Messenger. He’s in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn’t begin until next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.”

“Suppose he never commits the crime?” said Alice.

“That would be all the better, wouldn’t it?” the Queen said.

The Bush Looking Glass Doctrine is not confined to foreign policy. On the contrary, the doctrine has been pervasive throughout the Bush administration.

In fact, the Bush Looking Glass Doctrine actually played midwife to the birth of the Bush administration. In their first major use of the doctrine, Bush and his aides won the 2000 Florida recount battle by convincing the five stalwart Republicans on the Supreme Court to declare Bush the winner of the presidential election before all the votes were counted.

Obviously impressed with the power of a doctrine that was impervious to logic, Bush has made his Looking Glass Doctrine the guiding principle of policy making in his administration.

Thus, never-ending tax cuts for the rich – the centerpiece of Bush’s economic program – was sold to the American people with the aid of the Bush Looking Glass Doctrine. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy were first proposed during the 2000 presidential race, when America had a budget surplus and the lowest unemployment in years. As the economy worsened under Bush, the new rationale for the tax cuts became that they would stimulate the economy. As America continued to lose jobs to an extent not seen since the Great Depression, job creation became the rationale for additional tax cuts for the rich.

Although there was no evidence that Bush’s tax giveaways to the rich in future years would either stimulate the economy or create jobs, evidence is never essential to a judgment reached by Bush. Under the Bush Looking Glass Doctrine, the first step is to make a decision on the basis of right-wing ideology and the second step is to consider all the available information (both good and bad) for ways to justify the decision.

Bush has succeeded in dragging not just the intelligence community, but all of America through his looking glass. Like Alice, we now inhabit a strange world governed by an arrogant ruler who illogically rushes to judgment regardless of the evidence.
posted by Gary at 11:26 AM

 
THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING BUSH: The evidence is unmistakable. I know it may sound incredible, but President Bush is shrinking.

Scientists at The Gallup Organization have been measuring Bush since the start of his presidency and have now concluded that Bush has been rapidly shrinking for the past few months. As CNN reports:

President Bush has the lowest approval rating of his presidency and is running about even with five Democratic challengers led by newly announced candidate Wesley Clark, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Monday.

Fifty percent of 1,003 people questioned for the poll approved of Bush's job performance -- down from 59 percent in August and 71 percent in April -- the president's lowest rating since he came to office in January 2001.

....

Of the 877 registered voters included in the poll, 49 percent said they would vote for Clark, compared with 46 percent for Bush. Each of the four other major Democratic candidates came within three points of Clark's showing in a hypothetical head-to-head race with the president, the poll found.

Media reports are expressing surprise at how this popular wartime president could now be shrinking at this alarming rate. I have a theory which may sound slightly improbable at first, but hear me out.

Bush is shrinking because he went through a radioactive cloud.

While many of you may be too young to recall this, in the 1950s, millions of Americans were educated about the dangers of passing through radioactive clouds by that fine science docudrama, “The Incredible Shrinking Man.” As that movie scientifically explained, if you pass through a radioactive cloud after being sprayed with pesticides you begin shrinking. While the shrinkage may be imperceptible at first, eventually you’re fighting the family cat for survival, and finally dueling with a spider over a moldy piece of bread.

Was Bush exposed to a radioactive cloud? It’s not as crazy as it sounds.

What happened to all those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that Bush cited as our main rationale for going to war? The reconstituted nuclear weapons, uranium from Africa and biological and chemical weapons didn’t just vanish. I’m sure the Bush administration could not have been so deceitful as to exaggerate their existence or so incompetent as to let them slip through our fingers after we invaded.

The only logical explanation is that all of those deadly agents were combined into a radioactive cloud designed to duplicate the effects of that sinister cloud in The Incredible Shrinking Man.

It then would have been child’s play for those Al Qaeda agents closely linked to Iraq to release that radioactive cloud off the coast of San Diego on May 1, 2003. That is the very day that Bush flew through clouds in a jet in order to land on the USS Abraham Lincoln to announce “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq. How do we know one of those clouds was not the radioactive cloud generated from those missing weapons of mass destruction? To quote Dick Cheney’s astute observation about whether Iraq was responsible for 9/11 – “We just don’t know.”

In fact, since Bush started shrinking soon after engaging in the flight suit stunt, I think the evidence is quite strong for the radioactive cloud theory.

Now, even if this radioactive cloud theory is correct, that can’t be whole story. Obviously, a radioactive cloud by itself is not going to shrink anyone. As “The Incredible Shrinking Man” explained, it is only when a radioactive cloud is combined with other toxic elements that shrinkage occurs.

I suspect that it is the combination of that radioactive cloud and the toxic effects of Bush’s disastrous policies that are causing him to shrink. Bush’s handlers are apparently coming to this very conclusion as they worry about his shriveling presidency.

In a clear sign of panic, Bush’s aides are now saying they are not panicked by Bush’s diminished stature. As The New York Times reports today:

People close to the president say that as the 2004 campaign approaches, the mood at the White House is not one of panic, but that Mr. Bush is worried and his top officials are on edge, particularly about the nearly three million jobs lost since Mr. Bush became president and about the so-far jobless recovery.

At the same time, Bush advisers acknowledge a high level of anxiety among House Republicans over what they perceive as the White House's inability to communicate its policies on Iraq effectively.

If any of you still doubt that Bush is becoming physically shorter each day, just do a search on the internet for photos of Bush from the past few months.

I did, and the results are shocking. First look at this photo of a normal-sized Bush in his flight suit on the deck of the USS Lincoln on May 1, 2003, the day that he began slowly shrinking. Next, look at this more recent photo of Bush playing dress up in the same flight suit – now he is no bigger than a doll!

While Bush’s handlers are undoubtedly finding it easier to physically handle the president now that he is doll size, his diminished stature is complicating their job in convincing the American people that he is in control of an office that already dwarfed him when he was of normal height.

Fortunately for Bush, his administration has mastered the confidence-building tactic of just faking it. According to the Times, in Bush’s speech to the United Nations today he is is claiming that America is in control of the situation in Iraq for the purpose of bolstering his domestic political standing, not because Bush actually believes it:

“There's a feeling that you have to assert that the United States is still in control, if nothing else for domestic concerns,” said a senior administration official, who, like most of those interviewed, requested anonymity.

Well, I don’t know about any of you, but that certainly eases my concerns. I was concerned that Bush’s diminished stature would affect his ability to govern, but it appears that becoming the size of a ferret has not diminished Bush’s main tool of governance – deception.

Even if the Bush administration has lost none of its talent at deception, I doubt that Bush's presidency can be saved. Despite his diminishing size, Bush appears as pig-headed as ever in his refusal to reconsider his failed policies. He is determined to forge ahead with his tax cuts for his wealthy supporters even if it means bankrupting our children’s future. He is going to continue with this disastrous economic approach which has failed to prevent the loss three million American jobs. And, as he demonstrated at the United Nations today, he is not going to make any serious attempt to internationalize the effort to stabilize Iraq since that would mean giving up control and admitting error.

With policies like these, the most likely diagnosis for Bush is continued shrinkage.

Although I have on occasion differed with Bush on a couple of matters of policy (just domestic policy and foreign policy), as an American I am concerned about our diminutive president.

While we may not be able to salvage the Bush presidency, it is not too late to save Bush the man, or, at least, Bush the homunculous.

I propose that Bush be given a secure house – one appropriate for his doll-like size – in one of Dick Cheney’s secure locations. Bush could also call on the services of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who is already busy shielding Bush from criticisms of his inept policies in Iraq. Given DeLay’s previous career as an exterminator, he could also protect the ever-shrinking president from hungry mice and other household pests that could eventually threaten our minuscule president.

Unfortunately, it will become increasingly difficult for Bush’s handlers to protect him from all harm as he shrinks to insignificance.

By this time next year, Bush’s bone-headed economic and foreign policies may have resulted in his shrinking to the size of a soy nut. If the diminutive Bush wanders out of his dollhouse at that time, he may well be forced to fight a duel to the death with a spider.

Even worse for the lilliputian Bush, he might very well find himself in a debate with Wesley Clark, who has the potential to squash him like a bug.
posted by Gary at 1:13 PM

 
WILL THE DEMOCRATS WIN WITH WESLEY CLARK?: Will the Democrats nominate the presidential candidate that is most electable or the one that is best on the issues? The Democrats might end up doing both if Wesley Clark lives up to his potential.

Clark’s announcement that he will seek the Democratic nomination for president could be the answer to the Democrats’ prayers for deliverance from the reign of Bush. On paper, Clark seems like the ideal candidate to face Bush. He is a retired four star general and Rhodes scholar from the South with moderately liberal views. Coming from a former supreme commander of NATO, Clark’s criticisms of Bush’s clueless approach to Iraq could attract voters across the political spectrum.

But it’s often tricky figuring out whether a presidential candidate that looks stunning on paper will actually click with the voters in a specific election year.

Clark would undoubtedly like to be thought of as the Democratic Eisenhower, another non-politician general whose status as the one of the architects of victory in World War II was enough to sweep him into the White House in 1952, when America was mired in the Korean War.

The last presidential contender to called the Democratic Eisenhower, however, did not find it easy to live up to the metaphor.

On paper, Senator John Glenn looked like a dream candidate for president in 1984. As an astronaut, Glenn was the first American to orbit the earth at the height of the Space Race and the Cold War. He was an authentic America hero. In a cover story, The New Republic said he could be the Democratic Eisenhower.

When he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, however, Glenn’s star power was outshone by the blinding charisma of Walter Mondale.

Glenn just didn’t connect with the voters in 1984, and found that his impressive resume didn’t satisfy any particular yearning of the electorate. In contrast, in 1952 General Eisenhower, who pledged to go to Korea, fit the bill for voters weary of the stalemate in the Korean War.

Clark’s challenge is to satisfy some yearning of the voters as Eisenhower did, and not relive Glenn’s fate of being viewed as little more than an impressive resume.

While Clark lacks the popularity and heroic aura of Eisenhower, or even Glenn for that matter, his credibility on military issues – and his common-sense approach to foreign policy – could make him the right fit for voters next year. Bush demonstrated in the midterm elections last year that he is not above exploiting national security fears – and impugning Democrats’ patriotism – for electoral gain. The composed and competent Clark could calm such fears.

One factor that may make Clark attractive to much of the Democratic Party is just how bad the Bush presidency has been for America.

In races for presidential nominations, there is often a split between a political party’s idealists, who back a candidate for his stance on the issues, and the party’s realists who back the candidate they think is most electable.

Clark is likely to appeal to many of these “electability” realists. Clark may well be the most electable Democratic candidate given his potential to neutralize Bush’s strongest asset – the perception that he is strong on national security issues.

I think there is also a good chance that the “issues” idealists of the Democratic Party will also gravitate to Clark. Clark could appeal to issue-oriented Democrats because the biggest issue for such idealists should be defeating Bush.

Calling the Bush presidency a series of disasters is closer to understatement than to hyperbole. Bush and his radical right-wing ideology have resulted in disaster after disaster.

First, consider a few of the economic “achievements” of the Bush administration. Bush has transformed the largest federal budget surplus in history into the largest deficit. Bush has pushed through tax cuts that shift the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class and poor. Bush has presided over the loss of 3 million jobs in America – the first net loss of jobs since the Hoover administration.

Next, consider some of the Bush administration’s foreign policy “achievements.” Bush led the country into war on the basis of lies. Bush has failed to devote sufficient forces to pacify Iraq due to a naive belief in neo-conservative fantasies that Iraq would be easy to democratize. Bush has alienated much of the world to such an extent that America is facing the burdens of stabilizing Iraq largely on its own. Bush has neglected the reconstruction of Afghanistan, failing to commit the resources necessary to find Osama bin Laden and stamp out the remnants of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, who continue to operate in Afghanistan.

For idealistic Democrats – indeed, for all Americans that care about either a strong economy or national security – the most serious issue facing America is ending the Bush maladministration. Bush is so bad, the defeat of Bush dwarfs all other issues in importance.

In order to achieve the essential goal of defeating Bush, many party idealists are likely to gravitate to the most electable candidate. Thus, Clark’s perceived electability could gain him the support of many idealists as well.

While I don’t subscribe to the notion that Dean is unelectable, I don’t think he would be as strong a general election candidate as candidates with more impressive national security credentials, such as Clark and Kerry.

Although I previously thought that Kerry might be the Democrats’ strongest presidential candidate, lately there has been an unmistakable Muskie smell emanating from the Kerry campaign. Unless Kerry figures out a way to generate some excitement for his candidacy, Kerry seems destined to follow the path of Muskie, another Lincolnesque New England Senator whose impressive credentials and frontrunner status were no match for the fervor of a more passionate antiwar candidate.

In my opinion, the key question remaining about Clark’s candidacy is whether he can connect with the voters. All of Clark’s strengths on paper will not save him if he fails to click with the voters.

Since Clark has never run for office, it is an open question how much he will appeal to voters. As a television commentator, he has come across as telegenic, poised and thoughtful on military issues. I think Clark has to demonstrate fairly quickly that he has a command of domestic issues as well. Clark does not have a lot of time to demonstrate such domestic expertise given the lateness of his entry into the race for the Democratic nomination.

If Clark can come across as articulate and passionate about the domestic damage caused by Bush’s policies and their effect on Americans’ lives, he has an excellent chance to become the Democrats’ frontrunner and perhaps even their Eisenhower.
posted by Gary at 9:34 AM

 
BUSH’S VIETNAM SYNDROME: President Bush’s bullheaded refusal to rethink his approach in Iraq reveals that he is suffering from his very own strain of Vietnam Syndrome.

Bush’s Vietnam Syndrome is decidedly his own variant of the ailment. In its most common usage, Vietnam Syndrome refers to a reluctance to use American forces out of fear of repeating America’s mistakes in the Vietnam War. Bush, however, seems to be suffering form a mutated form of the ailment in which he chooses the policies most likely to repeat America’s errors in Vietnam.

The question of whether Iraq will turn into a Vietnam-style quagmire is most timely given the combination of continuing guerrilla attacks on American forces, Bush’s recent request for an additional $87 billion to continue the struggle and Bush’s inability to articulate any clear plan of how to pacify Iraq. As today’s New York Times reports:

A week after President Bush's speech seeking to rally support for the campaign in Iraq, the nation appears increasingly anxious about the war effort and worried that the United States may be trapped in an adventure from which there is no evident exit, according to interviews during the last five days with Americans across the nation, historians, social scientists and pollsters.

Some people went so far as to suggest a comparison with an earlier military action that had an unhappy history: the war in Vietnam.

One of the main reasons that the Vietnam comparison is being made is that Bush is stubbornly refusing to face the harsh realties America is facing in Iraq. Retired Air Force Colonel Mike Turner (link via TBOGG) recently listed some of the more disturbing similarities between Vietnam and Iraq in an online Newsweek article :

Some of the similarities between the two wars are obvious. The Vietnam War began when senior White House officials used overblown and distorted threat assessments as an excuse to commit U.S. troops to an action they’’d already decided upon months before. The operation was a unilateral, conventional, U.S. military operation against a Third World power which, in the final analysis, posed only an indirect and peripheral threat to U.S. vital interests. The operation lacked formal United Nations backing and broad international support, two factors that eventually sapped U.S. will and drained our resources. Mission success was ill-defined, and administration officials, assuming a quick victory, adopted and stubbornly adhered to a tragically simplistic and naive view of the both the military forces required to achieve military victory and the level of societal change necessary to win and sustain the peace.

While it is easy to compare Bush’s Iraq approach (I question whether it is coherent enough to qualify as a “policy”) to America’s Vietnam policy of four decades ago, it is also a little unfair. Unfair to the architects of the Vietnam War, that is.

America faced far greater obstacles in dealing with the Vietnam War than it now faces in Iraq. America is currently encountering scattered resistance from guerrillas or isolated forces in Iraq. In Vietnam America confronted both the Viet Cong’s well-organized guerrilla army and the regular army of North Vietnam. Even more significant, these communist forces were backed by the Soviet Union and China.

In the Vietnam War, America’s leaders decided not to extend the war into North Vietnam, which was supplying most of the communist troops and military hardware. America’s leaders feared that any extension of the ground war into North Vietnam would carry too great a risk of escalating into a military conflict with China – as the Korean War did – or even with the Soviet Union.

The decision not to invade North Vietnam meant that as long as North Vietnam was willing to continue sending soldiers to die in the south, the war would continue no matter how many clashes America won on the battlefields of South Vietnam. The war became a waiting game over which side was willing to continue to shed blood without end in Vietnam. America had no strategy for how to actually win the war if North Vietnam did not get tired of the killing before America did.

While America’s leaders made profound errors during the Vietnam War, they had to confront some extremely difficult decisions in the midst of the Cold War, when a misstep could have increased the chances for a nuclear war.

By contrast, America is now having to confront difficult decisions thanks to a combination of the Bush administration’s arrogant dismissal of the need for international cooperation in confronting Iraq and its naive wishful thinking that the postwar reconstruction of Iraq would be quick and easy.

As I discussed in "BUSH'S DEADLY WISHFUL THINKING", a successful reconstruction of Iraq is likely to require a much greater force than the approximately 150,000 troops currently in Iraq. According to Slate, James Dobbins, Bush’s special envoy to post-Taliban Afghanistan and currently a policy director at the Rand Corporation, has concluded that based on the number of troops used in past successful postwar occupations, America would need at least twice as many troops to stabilize Iraq.

The Bush administration, however, is not about to admit that its plans have proved to be grossly inadequate. As the Washington Post reports, Vice President Cheney refused to take off his rose-colored glasses in discussing Iraq on Meet The Press yesterday:

Cheney vigorously defended the level of U.S. troops in Iraq at a time when lawmakers have said more than the current 130,000 American and 20,000 foreign troops are needed. Asked about his earlier dismissal of Gen. Eric K. Shinseki's prewar view that an occupation force would have to be “on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers,” Cheney replied: “I still remain convinced that the judgment that we will need, quote, ‘several hundred thousand for several years,’ is not valid.”

In fact, Shinseki had not mentioned “several years” in his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Feb. 25.

Given the Bush administration’s denial of reality, I am not optimistic about our efforts to build a peaceful society in Iraq. While America is obviously in a far stronger position, and facing a far weaker foe, in Iraq than in Vietnam, our current strategic thinking suffers from the same basic flaw as four decades ago. Rather than having any realistic plan of how to achieve our goals, we just plan to hang around – bleeding money and actual blood – until America wins.

Ironically, though its own ineptitude, the Bush administration has maneuvered America into repeating the Vietnam policy of bloody endurance without any strategic vision of how to actually win.

Bush’s Vietnam Syndrome is primarily a self-inflicted ailment. The arrogance and incompetence of this administration led it to war in Iraq without significant international backing. That same arrogance and incompetence leads it to believe that it can succeed in creating a peaceful Iraq without any substantial international contribution.

I agree with Colonel Turner’s assessment that international assistance is vital to America’s effort to stabilize Iraq:

And though I believe long-term victory in Iraq is, at very best, a long shot, we have a sacred responsibility to the military men and women who have been and will be lost to finish the job. Indeed, the enduring lesson of Vietnam was not, “Never engage,” it was “Engage responsibly.” What does that mean? It means winning this time. It means returning to the U.N. and obtaining U.N. backing at any price. It means going to the allies we have arrogantly disregarded and asking for help. It means dramatically internationalizing the force and, more importantly, the reconstruction of Iraq. This is, quite simply, the only way we will ever get our troops home.

During the years that America was bogged down in Vietnam, America’s leaders could not think of any new approach that would increase the chances for victory without also increasing the chances for World War III.

America does not need to repeat history since it can increase its chances for victory in Iraq by making a serious and all-out effort to internationalize the rebuilding of Iraq. However, such an approach would mean a tacit admission of error and loss of absolute control by the Bush administration.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration acts as if it fears any admission of error or loss of control as much as more responsible leaders feared World War III.
posted by Gary at 2:44 PM

 
A TIME FOR WORDS, A TIME FOR REMEMBRANCE: What to write about today?

Last night I thought that I would write about Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s foolish dismissal of the need for more troops in Iraq. No, not today.

Before starting work this morning, I considered writing about how President Bush’s mismanagement of the economy and Iraq are causing his poll numbers to plunge. No, I’ll save that for another day.

At lunchtime I decided to write about the goodwill squandered by Bush’s arrogance during the past two years. No, my heart just wasn’t in it.

On the train home tonight I started making notes about Bush’s lack of judgment in plunging into Iraq before finishing off Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Now there’s a good topic for today. But for once, I don’t want to focus on Bush and his maladministration.

I don’t want to write much about anything today. I want to reflect on the thousands of innocents that were slaughtered on September 11, 2001.

There will be time enough tomorrow to rail against the incompetence and dishonesty of the Bush administration.

If you haven’t already, join me in remembering the relatives, loved ones, friends, colleagues and strangers who left us that day two years ago.

IN MEMORIAM

posted by Gary at 9:55 PM

 
SOLVING THE ENIGMA OF BUSH’S CHARACTER: While President Bush may have many flaws, lack of character is not one of them. Unfortunately, the character that Bush has in such abundance is that of the double-talking charlatan who fleeces the rubes with a never-ending series of scams.

The New York Times evaluates Bush’s character somewhat more gently – though still critically – in Tuesday’s lead editorial. The editorial tackles the riddle of why so many of Bush’s domestic and foreign policy initiatives have resulted in fiascos. The Times finds clues to solving this mystery in the enigma of Bush’s character:

George Bush's long-term plans for 2003 probably did not call for his August vacation to be followed by a national television address trying to justify a floundering policy in Iraq. Just about nothing, in fact, looks like what he must have hoped for in the run-up to an election. To many Americans, the economic recovery is anything but – 2.7 million private-sector jobs have been lost in the last three years. The number of people living below the poverty line is rising, the trade imbalance has reached unnerving proportions, and the federal budget deficits have grown so huge that even the International Monetary Fund has begun expressing concern. Most of the Bush domestic agenda is a sad deflated version of its earlier incarnation.

....

Other wrong turns, however, were chosen because of a fundamental flaw in the character of this White House. Despite his tough talk, Mr. Bush seems incapable of choosing a genuinely tough path, of risking his political popularity with the same aggression that he risks the country's economic stability and international credibility. For all the trauma the United States has gone through during his administration, Mr. Bush has never asked the American people to respond to new challenges by making genuine sacrifices.

....

Even the administration's foreign policy reflects its tendency to go for quick gratification without much thought of the gritty long haul. The invasion of Iraq appears to have been planned by people who assumed that after a swift military assault, Saddam Hussein would be gone and Iraq would quickly snap into a prosperous, semidemocratic state that would be a model for the rest of the Middle East.

When it turned out that things were far more complicated, the president hedged on the price tag – apparently out of fear that if Congress knew how high the bill was going to be, there would not be enough votes for another round of tax cuts. Congress, however, was happy enough to be deluded until it was too late. Now we know the cost is going to be massive, with much of the tab to be paid by the future generations who will be saddled with the Bush debt.

The United States has no clear exit strategy from Iraq or immediate hope of a turnaround in a violent, complicated and expensive commitment. The hard realities of postwar Iraq have convinced Mr. Bush that he needs the United Nations support he snubbed before the invasion. But even there he is avoiding the hard choice of acknowledging his error and ceding real authority to other nations. Diplomats are wondering, with good reason, whether Mr. Bush is embarking on a new era of international cooperation or simply giving them permission to clean up his mess.

Mr. Bush is a man who was reared in privilege, who succeeded in both business and politics because of his family connections. The question during the presidential campaign was whether he was anything more than just a very lucky guy. There were times in the past three years when he has been much more than that, and he may no longer be a man who expects to find an easy way out of difficulties. But now, at the moment when we need strong leadership most, he is still a politician who is incapable of asking the people to make hard choices. And we are paying the price.

I do not think that Bush’s main flaw is that he is too timid to tell people unpleasant truths. Far more troubling is Bush’s boldness in twisting the truth to bamboozle people into accepting policies that advance agendas they don’t support. Bush’s tax plans would have been dead in the water if he had candidly discussed how his tax cuts would explode the deficit while accomplishing a massive transfer of wealth to the super rich. Similarly, Bush could not have generated sufficient support for a practically unilateral war against Iraq if he had not misled the nation about the supposedly imminent threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and its supposed ties to Al Qaeda.

While I agree with the Times that Bush has character problems, I think they have charged Bush with one of the few foibles he lacks. Bush is not afraid to risk his popularity. Bush just doesn’t risk his popularity on things he considers unimportant – such as telling the truth. Bush is not afraid to risk his popularity in trying to deceive Americans into supporting an ideological agenda that is not in their best interests. Let’s give the man credit. He truly is bold, just not in the way that his supporters claim.

The Bush administration suffers from far more destructive defects than timidity. While Bush’s cavalier disregard for the truth would by itself be harmful, his mendacity is positively calamitous because it serves a rigid right-wing agenda. Perhaps the fundamental flaw in Bush’s character – and his presidency – is he is the most ideologically driven president ever. For the most important questions of state Bush falls back on ideology rather any rational decision making process or even any effort to discern the truth. Bush decides the most important issues on the basis of a right-wing ideology that is prone to unrealistic fantasies of a supply-side nirvana and easy-to-build democracies.

With his ideological approach, Bush engages in a reverse form of problem solving in which his right-wing agenda dictates an action and then Bush selects some problem – real or imagined – that Bush can argue the action solves. This has been the pattern in almost every important policy of the Bush administration.

The heart of Bush’s radical right-wing agenda is to cut taxes for the wealthy. In the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush claimed such tax cuts were the right policy for an expanding economy with a growing budget surplus. When the economy soured, Bush switched rationales and claimed that such tax cuts were the right prescription for an economy in recession. With the economy now having lost some three million jobs under his administration, Bush now touts tax cuts for the super rich for their supposed job-making potential.

Bush engaged in the same ideological approach in engineering the United States into war with Iraq. It is clear that rather than engage in any thoughtful analysis of how to deal with Iraq, Bush naively embraced the pipe dreams of his neo-conservative soulmates that a defeated Iraq would blossom into an America-loving garden of democracy overnight. So, armed with the solution of an invasion of Iraq, Bush claimed that solution would solve the most dire of problems – an imminent threat posed by weapons of mass destruction and close ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda – without regard to whether the evidence of such problems was particularly strong or even existed.

The problem with Bush’s approach to problem solving is that wishing doesn’t make it so. Since Bush’s tax cuts were not devised as part of any actual analysis of how to fix the economy, they are transferring massive amounts of wealth to Bush’s wealthy backers while actually leaving the economy in a worse situation. Not only has the deficit has exploded, but the United States is continuing to lose jobs.

Similarly, since Bush did not decide to invade Iraq as the result of any thoughtful analysis of what the consequences would be, we are faced with a chaotic situation that the rest of the world is none too eager to help remedy with either troops or the billions of dollars needed for reconstruction. If the Bush administration had engaged in any critical analysis of the likely consequences of a war with Iraq, it is unlikely that Bush would have been so dismissive of the United Nations and rushed into Iraq without significant international support.

The problem of Bush’s character is even more serous than the Times depicts. It is not simply a matter of a timid politician taking the easy way out. At least then we would get policies that the majority truly desires before being misled. The problem is that Bush – as his supporters claim – truly is a man of resolute character. Once he decides on a course of action, Bush is so determined to stay the course that he will say anything to justify his actions despite overwhelming evidence that he is not acting in the best interests of America.

Bush suffers from a character flaw far more damning than simply being a “politician who is incapable of asking the people to make hard choices.” When ideology calls, Bush springs into action without bothering to think or to discover the truth.

This defect in character repeatedly causes Bush to mislead America into adopting policies that are inimical to the nation’s welfare. The sad result is fundamentally flawed policies that are destroying America’s fiscal health and threatening the effort to transform Iraq into a peaceful society.
posted by Gary at 4:15 AM

 
BUSH’S TRIFECTA OF DECEPTION: In his Labor Day speech to highway construction workers in Ohio, President Bush was true to form in defending his disastrous economic policies.

Bush lied, evaded responsibility and distorted the scope of the problem. Lucky Bush, he hit the trifecta.

Bush sought to evade responsibility for having the worst presidential record on job creation since Hoover by trotting out what is fast becoming his favorite recurring lie about his economic policies. Once again, Bush pretended that the economy’s continuing to lose jobs despite the end of the recession is really positive news because it means that he courageously rejected the advice of his hordes of Machiavellian advisers that pleaded for him to push the economy into another depression so that the eventual recovery would be more impressive. As today’s New York Times reports:

Mr. Bush again promoted his tax cuts, telling the crowd that they prevented the economic downturn, which the administration says it inherited, from getting worse. “They tell me it was a shallow recession,” he said. “It was a shallow recession because of the tax relief. Some say, well, maybe the recession should have been deeper. That bothers me when people say that.”

Although this tale of Machiavellian advice is fast becoming Bush’s favorite lie in defense of his administration’s record of lob losses, Bush does have trouble keeping his story straight. As the Self Made Pundit discussed last month, Bush claimed at first that it was one evil adviser that urged Bush to push for higher unemployment:

"Someone said, well, maybe the recession should have been deeper in order for the rebound to be quicker."

Within a few days, however, this heartless adviser had morphed into a hypothetical consultant:

“Economic historians would say that the recession of 2001 was one of the more shallow recessions. Some would probably say, well, maybe you shouldn't have acted and let the recession go deeper, which would have made – may have made – for a more speedy recovery,” Bush told reporters after meeting with his Cabinet.

When reporters pressed White House Spokesman Scott McClellan to explain Bush’s evolving tale, McClellan seemed truly befuddled as to the identity or even the reality of Bush’s phantom of economic doom:

As to whether any particular individuals had actually urged Bush to deliberately let economic conditions worsen, McClellan said: “This goes back to conversations that people have said publicly and that – I don't know the specific person, though. I couldn't tell you.”

Proving that he is the living embodiment of Lincoln’s adage that no man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar, Bush now recalls multiple evil advisers, claiming that “people” said “maybe the recession should have been deeper.”

Bush’s lie about his phantom adviser or advisers is nothing more than a transparent attempt to evade responsibility for his administration’s disastrous record of being on track to be the first presidential administration since Hoover’s to see a decline in American jobs.

Bush also engaged in his usual distortion of the scope of the problems facing America. When the problem being addressed is a call to action – such as the supposedly imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction used to justify the war with Iraq – Bush maximizes the problem and exaggerates. When the problem is one Bush bears some responsibility for – such as America’s loss of jobs under his stewardship – Bush minimizes the problem.

Bush egregiously minimized his horrendous economic record when he announced that he was taking the decisive (dare I say BOLD?) step of hiring a new assistant secretary of commerce to do something or other about the loss of “thousands of manufacturing jobs” during his administration:

Mr. Bush said that in creating the post, he would address head-on the loss of what he said were "thousands of manufacturing jobs" in recent years.

Unfortunately, the approximate number of “thousands of manufacturing jobs” lost during the Bush administration is 2,500 thousand. As the Times reports, while Bush may only be aware of a loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs:

In fact, around 3 million jobs have been lost since Mr. Bush took office, about 2.5 million of them in manufacturing.

Given the scope of America’s losses in jobs – not to mention losses in such things as fiscal discipline and credibility – I doubt that hiring one assistant secretary of commerce is a sufficient response to the Bush administration's problem of losing things. I hope Bush has the BOLDNESS to expand his vision and propose a Department of Lost Things.

With a full-scale cabinet level department behind him, the Secretary of Lost Things could not only look for those millions of lost jobs, he could also search for the lost budget surplus and those missing weapons of mass destruction.

If Bush does adopt this proposal, I think I know the right man for the job. I recommend that Bush nominate as Secretary of Lost Things that phantom adviser who urged Bush to push the nation into another Great Depression. Given the phantom adviser’s shifting reality, he would be invaluable in tracking down any of those lost things that might have slipped into another dimension. Who knows, he might even find Bush’s honesty in one of those alternate dimensions and restore it to Bush.

Then again, Bush’s honesty is probably as real as that phantom adviser.
posted by Gary at 3:11 PM

 
GONE FISHIN': The Self Made Pundit, Mrs. Pundit and the two younger Pundits will be on vacation in a cabin in the woods at an undisclosed location for the last two weeks of August.

Check back after Labor Day for the usual trenchant political analysis and well-deserved sarcasm directed at the most inept Presidential administration since Hoover's. Since I'm on vacation, my wife won't let me mention you know who.

I may try to escape from the cabin and find an online computer to make a quick post if He Who Must Not Be Named commits some egregious offense against truth and decency. Wait a minute, that's too low a standard, he does that every day.

See you in September (If not sooner).
posted by Gary at 10:01 AM

 
IN THE HEART OF DARKNESS: And I don’t mean the compassionate conservative heart of President Bush.

I’m not writing about the mean-spirited and disastrous policies of Bush today because I want to discuss what it was like to be one of the 50 million Americans and Canadians thrown into darkness, just as America was thrown into darkness when the Supreme Court selected Bush as our president.

At 4:11 p.m. yesterday, a conference call in which I was participating suddenly went silent as electrical power to my mid-Manhattan office shut down as abruptly as brain power ceased at the White House on January 20, 2001.

For the next few hours, my co-workers and I would listen to a battery-powered radio’s reports of the biggest blackout in American history and wander the halls aimlessly, wondering what to do, acting as if we were Bush’s clueless economic advisers confronting the worst economy since the Great Depression.

At about 7:30 p.m., one of my few remaining colleagues and I decided to see if we could make our way home, and we opened the door to the musty and pitch-black stairwell, just as Bush has opened the door to dark and dank environmental policies.

We descended into darkness, unsure of our footing, much as Bush is plunging us all into the darkness of record-breaking budget deficits with no end in sight.

My colleague and I blundered down the stairs with only the occasional flicker of an inadequate lighter guiding us, just as Bush has America stumbling through Iraq and Afghanistan with inadequate forces to rebuild those countries.

We made it down the stairs and staggered out of our office building and into the hot and chaotic streets of Manhattan with no clear idea how to get home, much as Bush has no clear idea how to pacify a defeated, yet chaotic, Iraq.

With the Grand Central trains out of commission, I waited on Madison Avenue for three hours as I scanned each packed oncoming bus, searching in vain for a bus that would take me near home, just as American forces have searched futilely for those numerous – yet apparently invisible – weapons of mass destruction that Bush claimed imminently threatened America.

After an exasperating three hours on the darkened, yet crowded, streets of Manhattan, at 10:30 p.m. I finally settled for a bus that took me out of the city and about half the way home, just as Bush and his crew have decided to settle for proof of programs of weapons of mass destruction as supposedly justifying a preemptive war to end an imminent threat.

Shortly after the bus ended its route in a dark and unfamiliar neighborhood of a nearby city at about 11:30 p.m., I was ecstatic to see my wife driving up in the dark to end my bleak adventure, just as citizens who care about democracy (with a small “d”) will be ecstatic a year from November for the chance to drive out of the darkness of Bush’s inept policies.

I feel like I’ve made a breakthrough – I wrote an entire Self Made Pundit that was not about President Bush. I think I might finally be over my obsession with the amazing Bush, who has the fascinating ability to combine incuriousness, ignorance, self deception, hypocrisy, duplicity, outright dishonesty and sheer ineptness into one seamless catastrophe of an administration.

Or maybe I’m not.
posted by Gary at 3:17 PM

 
VACATIONING IN BUSHWORLD: Orlando had better look out because it is facing fierce competition from a new contender for the title of the most fantasy-filled vacation spot in America – Crawford, Texas.

Forget about Disneyworld and Universal Studios, the leading theme parks of yesterday. Soon, they will join the aging Weeki Wachee Springs water park and its sad mermaids as vacation spots that have been overshadowed by the latest theme park dedicated to the fantastic.

Welcome to Bushworld, the theme park dedicated to entertaining President Bush with fantasies about his policies as he vacations in Crawford. As the Associated Press is reporting today, Bush is going to be treated to a fantasy-filled revue on the economy performed by his cheerleading cabinet secretaries:

When President Bush gets a state-of-the-economy report Wednesday, there will be hearty agreement all around the table that his tax cuts are spurring a recovery.

There won't be dissenting views because the president's own economic team will be presenting the report at Bush's ranch, unlike last summer when he heard truck drivers, welders, investors and business leaders pour out anxieties about lost jobs, falling stock prices and corporate corruption.

This year the discussion will be led by Treasury Secretary John Snow, Commerce Secretary Don Evans and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.

Away from the ranch, there's no shortage of skeptics about Bush's policies. Some prominent critics said Tuesday that Bush is digging a deficit hole that will severely hurt the economy in time.

“Current economic policies are the worst in our 200-year history,” said George A. Akerlof, who shared the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. “Within 10 years we are going to pay a serious price for such irresponsibility.”

Akerlof took part in a conference call in which economists – including former Clinton advisers Gene Sperling and Laura D'Andrea Tyson – said that Bush's tax cuts are not stimulating the economy and are producing structural deficits that will hurt over the long run.

....

White House officials say the ranch meeting is intended to review how Bush's tax cuts have helped the economy.

They’re going to review how Bush’s tax cuts have helped the economy? Boy, that’s going to be a short meeting!

The nation's unemployment rate stood at 6.2 percent in July; businesses cut jobs for the sixth month in a row, and the administration announced this summer that in part because of the weak economy the budget deficit will soar to $455 billion this year and $475 billion in 2004, both records in dollar terms.

The list of Bush’s economic accomplishments does not stop there. Bush’s disastrous economic policies have also resulted in the economy losing three million jobs since he became president. This administration is on track to become the first presidential administration since Herbert Hoover’s to experience a net loss in American jobs.

Bush’s economic record is so dismal even Bush has come to realize that he has to take decisive action. Unfortunately, Bush can hardly be expected to take any action that goes against the tax-cutting interests of his corporate and wealthy backers. So Bush is resorting to his standard response of pretending that his disastrous policies are succeeding as he cheerfully proclaims that peace and prosperity are just around the corner.

Since Bush is intent on constructing a massive fantasyworld to tout his record-breaking economic policies, perhaps he could actually accomplish something useful by buying the collapsing Weeki Wachee Springs water park and transporting it to Crawford. I’m sure those struggling Weeki Wachee mermaids would be excited to put on a show touting the administration’s economic achievements.

The Weeki Wachee mermaids would certainly have more credibility discussing the nation's economy than the incompetents who gave us this mess – Bush and his team of economic cheerleaders.
posted by Gary at 8:29 PM

 
A BUCK NAKED BUSH GETS GORED: If this country has ever had an emperor with no clothes, it’s President Bush.

With much of the news media and too many timid Democrats barely whispering whether Bush’s pronouncements are dressed in any facts, it was an absolute delight to read Gore’s speech to MoveOn.org, the "online grassroots democracy group," yesterday in which he shouted that Bush is buck naked when it comes to honesty.

While I shudder to think of the type of people who may now hit this website after searching for “Bush+naked” (there goes the neighborhood), I consider the metaphor appropriate.

As I’ve discussed in my recent posts (pick almost any post from the past four weeks), when Bush discusses his policies, he either lies with impunity or he lies with the rest of his dishonest administration. Even a statement as blatantly untrue as Bush’s whopper that the United States went to war because Saddam Hussein would not let U.N. weapons inspectors back into Iraq barely gets noticed by the national news media. It seems as if only when the White House admits telling untruths – as it half-heartedly did with respect to Bush’s use of the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa – does the media feel it has permission to note how scantily clad Bush is.

In contrast, Gore forthrightly discussed the fundamental dishonesty of this administration in selling its policies to the American people. As the Washington Post reports today, Gore pulled no punches:

Former vice president Al Gore issued a broad indictment of President Bush yesterday, accusing the man who narrowly defeated him in 2000 of leading a “systematic effort” to mislead the American people about the war in Iraq, the state of the economy and the future of the global environment.

In a speech at New York University, Gore said Bush threatened to undermine the fundamental workings of American democracy by ignoring “the mandates of basic honesty” in the pursuit of a “totalistic ideology” that will benefit only his wealthy friends and supporters.

“The very idea of self-government depends upon honest and open debate as the preferred method for pursuing the truth,” Gore said, “and a shared respect for the rule of reason is the best way to establish the truth. The Bush administration routinely shows disrespect for that whole process, and I think it's partly because they feel as if they already know the truth and aren't very curious to learn about any facts that might contradict it. They and the members of groups that belong to their ideological coalition are true believers in each other's agenda.”

....

Gore stitched together his criticism of Bush on several issues with a common thread: That in each case, deeply flawed policies were based on “false impressions” that Bush deliberately fostered in public opinion to get what he wanted.

“Here is the pattern that I see,” Gore said. “The president's mishandling of and selective use of the best evidence available on the threat posed by Iraq is pretty much the same as the way he intentionally distorted the best available evidence on climate change, and rejected the best available evidence on the threat posed to America's economy by his tax and budget proposals.

“In each case,” he said, “the president seems to have been pursuing policies chosen in advance of the facts – policies designed to benefit friends and supporters – and has used tactics that deprived the American people of any opportunity to effectively subject his arguments to the kind of informed scrutiny that is essential in our system of checks and balances.”

Gore’s speech was excellent and sharply contrasts with the forays into fantasyland we regularly get from our unclothed emperor.

The United States can hardly be considered a robust democracy if deceitful arguments from our leaders drown out attempts to openly and honestly debate the most important issues facing the nation. This point needs to be made forcefully by all political leaders and commentators that care about the health of our democratic republic.

While I was glad to see Gore saying things that need to be said, I was also saddened to hear Gore reiterate his decision not to enter the 2004 race for president.

Back in December I wrote that the republic was a little poorer with Gore’s announcement that he would not run for president in 2004. After reading Gore’s speech yesterday, I have to admit that I was wrong. The nation is lot poorer without Gore in the race.

Let’s hope that Gore continues speaking out and that the Democrats running for president speak out just as forcefully and truthfully.
posted by Gary at 12:04 PM

 
BUSH’S DEADLY WISHFUL THINKING: President Bush has demonstrated time and again that his preferred method of policy analysis is to avoid any honest discussion of issues and to engage in wishful thinking. Unfortunately, this combination of dishonesty and wishful thinking can have deadly consequences when applied to war and its aftermath.

From Afghanistan to Iraq, the Bush administration has been pretending that America has devoted sufficient troops and money to get the job done. In reality, our efforts in both countries are in jeopardy because the administration has been the embodiment of the old adage penny wise, pound foolish.

In Afghanistan, the Bush administration has been determined from the start to battle Al Qaeda and the Taliban with the minimum number of American troops possible. The folly of this approach has been apparent since at least late 2001, when Osama Bin Laden escaped from the mountains of Tora Bora at least partially because America relied on local Afghan fighters instead of committing sufficient American troops to finally get the butcher of 9/11. The Bush administration had decided to fight war on the cheap and this was one of the consequences.

The Bush administration is foolishly continuing to shortchange Afghanistan. As a result of America’s half-hearted efforts at rebuilding Afghanistan, not only warlords – but also the Taliban – are reportedly making comebacks in regions of that country.

Depressingly, the Bush administration is turning Iraq into another laboratory experiment of what can go wrong when you fight a war – and try to rebuild a society – on the cheap. The approximately 150,000 troops in Iraq is a woefully inadequate number to pacify a country the size of California.

As Fred Kaplan discusses in a must-read article in Slate, the number of troops America has committed to Iraq are far below the number of troops we have previously committed on a per capita basis in successful efforts at nation building. Kaplan eviscerates Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz for his foolish congressional testimony last February that he found it hard to conceive that it could take more troops to stabilize Iraq than it would to defeat Iraq in war. Citing James Dobbins, Bush’s special envoy to post-Taliban Afghanistan and currently a policy director at the Rand Corporation, Kaplan gives us the history lesson that Wolfowitz apparently skipped:

One pertinent lesson Dobbins uncovered is that the key ingredient – the “most important determinant,” as he puts it – of successful democratic nation-building in a country after wartime is not the country's history of Westernization, middle-class values, or experience with democracy, but rather the “level of effort” made by the foreign nation-builders, as measured in their troops, time, and money.

To see just how wrong Wolfowitz was, look at Dobbins' account of how many troops have been needed to create stability in previous postwar occupations. Kosovo is widely considered the most successful exercise in recent nation-building. Dobbins calculates that establishing a Kosovo-level occupation-force in Iraq (in terms of troops per capita) would require 526,000 troops through the year 2005. A Bosnia-level occupation would require 258,000 troops – which could be reduced to 145,000 by 2008. Yet there are currently only about 150,000 foreign (mainly American) troops in Iraq – about the same as the number that fought the war.

To match the stabilization effort in Kosovo, Iraq should also be protected by an international police force numbering 53,000. Yet those 150,000 soldiers now in Iraq are also doing double-duty as cops.

In other words, had Wolfowitz talked with Dobbins (or any other high-ranking officials who'd been involved in nation-building), he would have learned that stabilizing post-Saddam Iraq would take at least twice the number of forces that were being amassed to defeat Saddam's army.

Bringing in more troops and at least some police after the war would also have meant fewer American and Iraqi casualties. Dobbins is categorical on this point: “The highest levels of casualties have occurred in the operations with the lowest levels of U.S. troops.” In fact, he adds, “Only when the number of stabilization troops has been low in comparison to the population” – such as in Somalia, Afghanistan, and now Iraq – “have U.S. forces suffered or inflicted significant casualties.” By contrast, in Germany, Japan, Bosnia, and Kosovo – where troop levels were high – Americans suffered no postwar combat deaths.

The Bush administration’s continuing failure to devote the necessary resources to pacifying Iraq is yet another example of the negative consequences of its policy of leading America to war with lies and half-truths.

Rather than honestly debate the level of threat posed by Iraq, the Bush administration cherry-picked the most dire intelligence reports and warned that America itself faced an imminent threat from weapons of mass destruction that have yet to be found in Iraq. Bush and his crew claimed or implied that Iraq and Al Qaeda had close ties, despite the lack of evidence supporting that allegation.

Bush’s prevarications about the threat posed by Iraq were not the only lies in the administration’s brief in support of the war. The whole administration strategy for convincing America to invade Iraq was based on a conscious decision not to engage in an open and honest discussion of the pros and cons of going to war.

Bush’s policy of mendacity also meant not engaging in an honest discussion of the costs of war – either in money or manpower. The Bush administration did not want to weaken its case for war by admitting the high costs – in both money and manpower – that would be required for a successful conclusion. So the administration engaged in its preferred mode of analysis – wishful thinking tempered by dishonesty – and pretended that American troops could quickly come home as Iraq peacefully embraced democracy.

Not only does this wishful thinking now endanger the attempt to transform Iraq, but it also means that more American troops are likely to die than if the Bush administration had honestly discussed the efforts that would be required to achieve its goals in Iraq.
posted by Gary at 6:56 PM

 
THE MADNESS OF PRESIDENT GEORGE: It must be nice to be President Bush and live in your own protective fantasy world.

No matter how badly things go in the real world, Bush remains protected in a fantasy world of his own making, where every action of his is fully justified and he is never to blame.

In his fantasy world, Bush is not to blame for hyping the reasons to go to war with Iraq. The war with Iraq was fully justified by Iraqi intransigence. Thus, according, to Bush, the United States invaded Iraq only after the United States gave Saddam Hussein “a chance to allow the [U.N.] inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in.” In the real world, however, Iraq did let the U.N. inspectors back in.

In his fantasy world, Bush is not to blame for the gargantuan federal budget deficits that are primarily being caused by his massive tax cuts for the super rich. According to Bush, he warned voters during the 2000 presidential election that the U.S. government could go from surplus to deficit if we experienced a war, a national emergency or a recession. Bush claimed to recall making such a warning, leading him to make his tasteless joke “Lucky me, I hit the trifecta,” after the tragedy of 9/11. In the real world, Bush never made any such warning, and instead campaigned on the theme that the budget surplus was big enough to sustain a massive tax cut without worry.

In the past week, Bush has twice visited the fantasy world he has constructed around his failed economic policies.

Bush’s economic policies are not only giving rise to the biggest federal budget deficits in history – immediately after the biggest surplus – but are also making Bush’s administration likely to be the first presidential administration since Herbert Hoover’s – during the Great Depression – to experience a net loss of jobs in America. After compiling such a disastrous record, other presidents might rethink their economic policies. But not Bush. He knows what he believes, even if it is a fantasy.

In Bush’s fantasy world, he deserves credit – not blame – for the dismal state of the economy because he rejected nonexistent advice to let the economy get worse. When asked by a reporter at his press conference on Wednesday whether he should be rethinking his economic approach given the dismal results of this policies, Bush visited his fantasy world:

The '01 tax cuts affected the recession this way, it was a shallow recession. That's positive, because I care about people being able to find a job. Someone said, well, maybe the recession should have been deeper in order for the rebound to be quicker. My attitude is, a deeper recession means more people would have been hurt. And I view the actions we've taken as a jobs program, job creation program.

Bush, of course, never identified this phantom adviser that suggested the recession should have been deeper. Bush did, however, refer to this phantom adviser again on Friday in defending his administration economic record to reporters:

"Economic historians would say that the recession of 2001 was one of the more shallow recessions. Some would probably say, well, maybe you shouldn't have acted and let the recession go deeper, which would have made – may have made – for a more speedy recovery," Bush told reporters after meeting with his Cabinet.

Once again, Bush did not identify this phantom adviser with the Machiavellian bent who urged him to let the economy get worse so he could claim credit for a more impressive recovery. Perhaps Bush, like William Safire, is being haunted by the specter of an advice-dispensing Richard Nixon. Or perhaps Bush is reticent to identify this little Machiavelli because he is really a miniature Bush with horns who whispers into his ear when Karl Rove is otherwise occupied.

When reporters pressed White House Spokesman Scott McClellan as to whether Bush’s pixie of economic doom actually exists, McClellan instinctively began to cover for Bush, but then in mid-sentence apparently realized he lacked Ari Fleischer’s flair for obfuscation and gave up:

As to whether any particular individuals had actually urged Bush to deliberately let economic conditions worsen, McClellan said: "This goes back to conversations that people have said publicly and that – I don't know the specific person, though. I couldn't tell you."

It is highly unlikely that Bush's phantom adviser exists. Bush himself seems unsure whether his demonic adviser is more than a figment of his imagination, wavering from Wednesday’s claim that “someone said” such advice to Friday’s suggestion that “some would probably” offer such advice.

The strongest evidence that Bush’s phantom adviser is just a figment of his imagination is the sheer stupidity of the advice. Other than Bush, it is unlikely that there is anyone in the White House ignorant enough to believe that the best way to ensure a speedy recovery is to make sure that a recession is as severe as possible. The deepest economic downturn in American history was the Great Depression. And we all remember how speedy that recovery was. Recovery from the Great Depression only took the entire decade of the 1930s and America’s entry into World War II. ( Funny how any discussion of Bush’s economic record invariably leads back to Herbert Hoover.)

Bush’s many retreats to his fantasy world do raise the question of whether Bush is delusional. Does he actually believe the stuff that he tells us?

I doubt Bush is delusional since he puts so little effort into trying to discern reality. When Bush regales us with tales form his fantasy world, he does not appear to be describing some false memory of fictional events that he thinks really happened. Instead, he is blithely making things up and saying whatever he thinks will persuade people into agreeing with him. Bush is so supremely confident in his own beliefs, he just doesn’t give a rat’s rump about little things like reality.

So, while, there is certainly evidence pointing to the madness of President George, I doubt that Bush is truly delusional (at least in a clinical sense). When Bush is put on the defensive, he just makes stuff up to get his way. We can all be comforted in knowing that it is likely that Bush is merely a scheming sociopath and not a paranoid schizophrenic.

I wish Bush would tell the rest of us how we could live in our own protective fantasy worlds – at least until November 2004.
posted by Gary at 3:05 PM

 
THE BUSH SHOW DROPS UNCLE POINDEXTER: A few days ago, in my post “Bush Jumps the Shark,” I took a break from opining on political matters to review the third season of that increasingly inane sitcom “The Bush Administration.” I think another look at the series is warranted with the news that The Bush Administration is dropping one of its minor characters, wacky Uncle Poindexter.

The entertainment media are reporting that the Bush writers are writing Uncle Poindexter out of the show in response to the disastrous reception viewers gave this week’s macabre episode, which had wacky Uncle Poindexter outraging his Democratic coworkers by starting a Dead Pool at the office in which he took bets on the company’s competitors murdering each other. As today’s New York Times reports:

The official who oversaw a plan for the Pentagon to run a terrorist futures-trading market is resigning under pressure, a senior Defense Department official said today.

John M. Poindexter, a retired rear admiral who was President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, is stepping down “within a few weeks,” the defense official said, after the disclosure of a proposal that outraged lawmakers and embarrassed senior Pentagon officials. The plan was to create an online trading parlor that would have rewarded investors who forecast terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld did not personally fire Admiral Poindexter, but the defense official said that Mr. Rumsfeld agreed that the admiral had become too much of a political lightning rod and that it was time for him to go.

The decision to drop Uncle Poindexter from the series is hardly surprising. Many television critics wondered why the show’s creators were resurrecting an annoying character dropped nearly two decades ago from “The Reagan Administration.” Viewers of the once popular Reagan show will recall that Uncle Poindexter was axed after his bizarre antics in the Iran-Contra scandal storyline so alienated viewers they nearly led to the mid-season cancellation of that show.

The Bush writers displayed extremely poor judgment in thinking that the tastes of the prime time audience had so changed in recent years that viewers would now enjoy the outlandish escapades of zany Uncle Poindexter. The show’s writers proved from the start that they wanted the eccentric uncle to engage in the same bizarre adventures that alienated Reagan audiences.

Viewers will recall that in the Bush show’s first subplot involving Uncle Poindexter, he was caught lurking in the neighbor’s bushes and then launched into a fantastic explanation about how he was spying on all of the neighbors to protect them from terrorists. Viewers found this subplot so creepy it was quickly dropped and Uncle Poindexter was given other “hobbies”:

Admiral Poindexter was engulfed in troubles nearly two decades ago in the Iran-contra scandal during the Reagan administration. More recently he oversaw development of a program at Darpa that proposed spying electronically on Americans to monitor potential terrorists.

That program, originally called Total Information Awareness, was envisioned by Admiral Poindexter as a sweeping electronic surveillance plan that would forestall terrorism by tapping into computer databases to collect credit, financial, medical and travel records.

But this year Congress barred the program from spying on Americans, and the Pentagon changed its name to Terrorism Information Awareness.

I doubt The Bush Administration’s woes will end as abruptly as the Uncle Poindexter subplots did. It has long been obvious that the show’s writers not only lack respect for their audience, they are also incompetent. That is a deadly combination. As the Times reports, critics of the show fear there will be more “Uncle Poindexters” in future episodes:

But Democrats suggested more shenanigans were afoot in the Pentagon that had not been uncovered.

“The problem is more than the fact that Admiral Poindexter was put in charge of these projects,” Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, said in a statement. “The problem is that these projects were just fine with the administration until the public found out about them.”

As I discussed in “Bush Jumps the Shark,” the show’s writers seem to have lost their touch. Dropping one minor oddball character does nothing to fix the main problems of a show that cares more about its corporate sponsors than its viewers.
posted by Gary at 10:58 AM