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

 
SEARCHING THE RUINS OF A BUSH PRESS CONFERENCE: Reading transcripts of statements by Bush can be a fascinating experience in the same way that staring at a highway accident can be morbidly fascinating.

You drive by slowly, staring at the ugly verbal wreckage littering the road. Amidst the tangled debris of memorized buzzwords, you see burning and twisted metaphors and aphorisms. Occasionally, you are lucky, and just beyond the remains of evasions and euphemisms you discern barely surviving information.

It’s a bloody and ghastly mess, but somebody has to go through it.

Which brings us to Bush’s press conference yesterday.

When Bush is under pressure, as he was at the press conference, he gets defensive and frequently says whatever is necessary (regardless of its relation to reality) to elicit a desired emotional response from the listener. Since Bush in such situations does not actually use language to communicate thoughts and ideas, attempts to discern meaning from Bush statements is akin to deciphering pronouncements from the Kremlin in the days of the late Soviet Union.

Using the techniques of the old Kremlinologists (who often found what was not said to be most revealing) we can glean some information from yesterday’s press conference.

It obvious that despite all the blather written by lazy journalists in the past two years about how Bush has grown in the job since 9/11 into a more self-assured president, he still doesn’t have a clue. When asked questions that refer to any weaknesses in his policies, Bush shies away from any substantive discussion and invariably resorts to memorized buzzwords, contentless phrases or meandering evasions. When he is feeling expansive, he resorts to all three.

In response to questions about the search for Saddam Hussein and the continuing threat from Al Qaeda, Bush used these techniques as he tried to sound in command of the issues:

I don't know how close we are to getting Saddam Hussein. You know -- it's closer than we were yesterday, I guess. All I know is we're on the hunt. It's like if you had asked me right before we got his sons how close we were to get his sons, I'd say, I don't know, but we're on the hunt.

....

And the threat is a real threat. It's a threat that where -- we obviously don't have specific data, we don't know when, where, what. But we do know a couple of things. We do know that al Qaeda tends to use the methodologies that worked in the past.

We've got more to do. And the American people need to know, we're not stopping. We've got better intelligence-gathering, better intelligence-sharing, and we're on the hunt. And we will stay on the hunt. The threat that you asked about, Steve, reminds us that we need to be on the hunt, because the war on terror goes on.

I get it, Mr. President. We’re on the hunt.

Bush’s “guess” that we’re “closer [to getting] Hussein than we were yesterday” is is the kind of unsupported speculation that you would expect to find in a weblog or a State of the Union address. Since the reports a few days ago were that American troops had missed Hussein by 24 hours, does this mean that we are now missing Hussein by only 12 hours?

Bush’s statement that “al Qaeda tends to use the methodologies that worked in the past” achieves the distinction of being both blindingly obvious and clueless. It does not take any intelligence to conclude that any person or organization “tends to use the methodologies that worked in the past.” The same could be said for any higher primate. Yet one of the main risks we face in confronting Al Qaeda is that they will devise new tactics that we are not expecting. In fact, one the Bush administration’s main defenses for failing to prevent 9/11 was that flying jets into buildings was an unexpected terrorist tactic.

In both his Hussein and Al Qaeda answers, Bush responded with empty phrases rather than attempting to engage in any substantive discussion.

Bush may have inadvertently revealed some information about the supposed ties between Hussein and Al Qaeda in responding to a question on whether there is any evidence of such ties. For rather than citing to any such evidence, Bush tried a filibuster:

Q: Saddam Hussein's alleged ties to al Qaeda were a key part of your justification for war. Yet, your own intelligence report, the NIE, defined it as -- quote -- “low confidence that Saddam would give weapons to al Qaeda.” Were those links exaggerated to justify war? Or can you finally offer us some definitive evidence that Saddam was working with al Qaeda terrorists?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes. I think, first of all, remember I just said we've been there for 90 days since the cessation of major military operations. Now, I know in our world where news comes and goes and there's this kind of instant -- instant news and you must have done this, you must do this yesterday, that there's a level of frustration by some in the media. I'm not suggesting you're frustrated. You don't look frustrated to me at all. But it's going to take time for us to gather the evidence and analyze the mounds of evidence, literally, the miles of documents that we have uncovered.

David Kaye came to see me yesterday. He's going to testify in closed hearing tomorrow -- which in Washington may not be so closed, as you know. And he was telling me the process that they were going through to analyze all the documentation. And that's not only to analyze the documentation on the weapons programs that Saddam Hussein had, but also the documentation as to terrorist links.

And it's just going to take awhile, and I'm confident the truth will come out. And there is no doubt in my mind, Campbell, that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States security, and a threat to peace in the region. And there's no doubt in my mind that a free Iraq is important. It's got strategic consequences for not only achieving peace in the Middle East, but a free Iraq will help change the habits of other nations in the region who will make it -- which will make America much more secure.

In other words, Bush is totally incapable of pointing to any “definitive evidence that Saddam was working with al Qaeda terrorists.”

As the questioner noted, Hussein’s alleged ties to Al Qaeda was one of Bush’s main justifications for leading America into war. As Bush’s empty answer reveals, this justification does not appear to have been any more substantial than Bush’s exaggerations about the supposedly imminent threat of a nuclear Iraq.

Ironically, Bush may have been at his most informative yesterday when he was being his most evasive.
posted by Gary at 12:58 PM

 
THE FAITH BASED PRESIDENCY: President Bush is on a faith-based roll.

Having successfully used his faith-based approach to lead America into war, Bush is now directing his awesome power of wishful thinking toward the economy.

Bush undoubtedly realizes (or at least has been told by Karl Rove) that he cannot ignore America’s lackluster economy without jeopardizing his hopes to actually be elected to the presidency in 2004. Unfortunately for America, the Bush administration’s idea of doing something about its dismal record on the economy is sending out a squad of cheerleading secretaries to tell states Bush narrowly lost in the 2000 presidential election that prosperity is just around the corner. As the Associated Press reports today:

An administration bus tour aimed at selling the benefits of President Bush 's latest tax cuts turned into a listening tour as Cabinet members heard heartfelt expressions of concern about the massive loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs.

Treasury Secretary John Snow, Commerce Secretary Don Evans and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao declared that Bush is committed to doing everything he can to get the economy humming again, but they also said increased job anxiety is probably here to stay because of the competitive nature of the global economy.

The bus trip was scheduled to conclude with three Minnesota stops on Wednesday – a session on job training at the famed Mayo Clinic, a session with investors in St. Paul and a concluding discussion at the headquarters of retailing giant Best Buy in a suburb of Minneapolis.

Each stop in the tour, which began Tuesday in neighboring Wisconsin, was designed to highlight different aspects of the recently enacted $330 billion tax cut package, which features lower tax rates, expanded child tax credits and sharp cuts in the taxation of capital gains and stock dividends.

Democrats and other critics contended the whole tour is a prolonged photo opportunity for the administration to mask a dismal record on the economy that includes 3 million jobs lost since Bush became president and record budget deficits.

A small band of demonstrators staged a counter-bus tour that shadowed the administration tour, complete with protesters holding signs that read, “Read Bush's Lips ... No New Jobs.”

It sounds like those critics and demonstrators don’t have the right attitude. How can Bush’s faith-based approach work its magic if people refuse to believe in Bush’s “reality”?

One of the defining characteristics of Bush’s presidency is his approach that if you believe in something strongly enough it becomes reality. This is the faith-based presidency.

You can find Bush taking this faith-based approach in practically every major decision of his administration.

The prime example, of course, is Bush’s decision to go to war with Iraq. Bush wanted to believe that war was justified because Iraq was an imminent threat and had ties to Al Qaeda and so he did, ignoring reports that there was no substantial evidence supporting either justification.

The effects of this faith-based approach to foreign policy was recently described by a nuclear proliferation expert who worked for the Bush administration. As The New York Times reported in a July 12 article about Bush’s use of the discredited African uranium report in his State of the Union address:

Greg Thielmann, a proliferation expert who worked for the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, added this week: “This administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude: ‘We know the answers, give us the intelligence to support those answers.’ When you sense this kind of attitude, you quash the spirit of intellectual inquiry and integrity.”

Bush is using the same faith-based approach to the economy. Bush has wanted to drastically cut taxes – primarily for the wealthy – since the 2000 presidential campaign. At that time, Bush pushed for such tax cuts as the right thing to do since America had a strong economy and a sizable budget surplus. Even though the economy has done a 180 degree turn under Bush and the deficit is now exploding to record levels, Bush is still prescribing the same medicine of tax cuts for the wealthy.

While Bush and his crew now claim that tax cuts focused on the super rich will help the economy to recover, they are once again asserting something because they want it to be true, not because there is evidence to support it. If Bush really wanted to stimulate the economy, he would have proposed tax cuts for people who would spend the money this year, not tax cuts that have virtually no stimulative effect because they lower rates for the wealthy in future years.

Since Bush’s presidency is based on faith, it makes perfect sense that he is addressing America’s economic woes by sending out his squad of cheerleading secretaries. If the cheerleaders can convince voters to have faith in Bush’s economic stewardship – despite his disastrous economic record – Bush will have succeeded in turning his wishes into reality.
posted by Gary at 10:36 AM

 
THE DEATH OF THE PENTAGON’S DEAD POOL : You may be aware of macabre web sites with “Dead Pools,” in which people bet on which celebrities will die in the coming year. Apparently, the Bush administration is also aware of these Dead Pools, and until today thought a Dead Pool would have been a cool tool to use in formulating national security policies.

Warning: While the Bush administration-sponsored Dead Pool sounds like a parody, it is not.

The Pentagon announced today that it was abandoning an idea in which anonymous speculators would have bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups in an online futures market. As The New York Times is reporting this afternoon:

Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, said today that he had conferred with the program's director at the Pentagon, "and we mutually agreed that this thing should be stopped."

The senator's announcement - made during a confirmation hearing for retired Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, who has been nominated to be Army chief of staff - signaled the end of a program that was met with astonishment and derision almost from the moment it was disclosed.

The plan for the Pentagon’s Dead Pool had a short and unhappy life.

The Associated Press reported yesterday that the Pentagon was planning to set up a stock market-style exchange to allow people to bet on the likelihood of future terrorist attacks and assassinations. (Link via Talking Points Memo.)

The Pentagon views it as a potentially innovative way to get clues about terrorists' plans: a public, stock market-style exchange where traders can profit by correctly predicting terror attacks or assassinations in the Middle East.

....

The program is called the Policy Analysis Market. The Pentagon office overseeing it, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, said it was part of a research effort "to investigate the broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks."

Traders would buy and sell futures contracts —— just like energy traders do now in betting on the future price of oil. But the contracts in this case would be based on what might happen in the Middle East in terms of economics, civil and military affairs or specific events, such as terrorist attacks.

Holders of a futures contract that came true would collect the proceeds of traders who put money into the market but predicted wrong.

A graphic on the market's Web page Monday showed hypothetical futures contracts in which investors could trade on the likelihood that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat would be assassinated or Jordanian King Abdullah II would be overthrown. Although the Web site described the Policy Analysis Market as Middle East market, the graphic also included the possibility of a North Korea missile attack.

It’s a close call whether the Pentagon’s Dead Pool was more moronic or crazy. Let’s compromise and call it both. Unless the Bush Administration had plans to entice terrorists into betting in the Pentagon Dead Pool, I doubt it would have been a better predictor of terrorist activity than intelligence services (not that the Bush administration listens to our intelligence services when they contradict administration policies). The Pentagon Dead Pool, at best, would have been a good gauge of what rumors were currently circulating. The Pentagon Dead Pool might also have been a useful tool for terrorists who could have selected targets after checking which potential attacks people were not expecting.

This now-dead proposal may strike you as the looniest government plan since the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra scheme of trading arms for hostages and money from Iran that could be illegally funneled to rebels in Nicaragua. Well, this most recent lunatic proposal actually has a connection to that Reagan-era lunacy.

The Policy Analysis Market was under the supervision of retired Admiral John Poindexter, the head of the Terrorism Information Awareness Program. Poindexter, who was Reagan’s national security adviser, was one of the “brains” behind the Iran-Contra scheme. After Poindexter was criminally convicted for lying to Congress about the scandal, his conviction was overturned on appeal because it was tainted by immunized testimony he had given Congress. However, Poindexter has been given another chance to develop lunatic plans in service of his country because Bush does not view a little thing like lying to Congress as a bar to service in his administration.

As could be expected, some Democrats criticized the Pentagon’s Dead Pool simply because it was a crackpot proposal that was likely to be ineffective.

Two Democratic senators say the program is useless, offensive and immoral. They are demanding that the program be stopped before investors start signing up Friday.

"The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's grotesque," Sen. Ron Wyden news, bio, D-Ore., said Monday.

While this criticism has proven to be effective with the cancellation of the program, I question whether it was really fair. Sure, you can call the Bush administration’s Dead Pool “ridiculous and grotesque,” but you can make the same criticism about the administration’s tax cuts for the super rich, its economic policies, which are creating the biggest federal deficits in history and the worst job market since the Great Depression, and its neglect of Afghanistan, which has led to the resurgence of warlords in that country. Why, if the Bush administration stopped adopting policies simply because they were “ridiculous and grotesque,” it’s entire domestic program and much of its foreign policy would be gutted.

Devising programs that are “ridiculous and grotesque” is what this administration does best. It is neither fair nor realistic to expect Bush and his administration not to use this God-given talent. While the administration may have blinked this time, don’t bet in any pool that this is the last lunatic proposal we see from Bush and his crew.
posted by Gary at 1:29 PM

 
BUSH JUMPS THE SHARK: In recent days it has become increasingly obvious that the Bush administration has mutated into a poorly written television sitcom.

With its main characters giving improbable and shifting explanations for misunderstandings that lead to conflicts with foreign characters, the Bush Administration has descended to the level of implausible sitcom. Since the Bush administration has become a comedy of errors, I think it would be fitting to pay this administration the same degree of respect it has shown the American people by critiquing its latest escapades as the episodes of the sitcom that it has become.

As viewers of “The Bush Administration” will recall, after a shaky first season, it became one of the highest rated administrations of all time as it adopted a heroic storyline chasing one of the worst villains in American history to the mountains of Afghanistan. For a while in its second season, The Bush Administration seemed to be closely in tune with the desire of viewers (including this one) for a heroic story. Surprisingly, however, the Bush writers seemed to lose interest in this popular plot and never bothered tying up the loose ends in the Afghanistan story – and even downplayed their inability to come up with a way of bringing the villain to justice.

The Bush Administration tried to revive this storyline – and its popularity – as it started its third season with a new villain in a new location – this time in Iraq. This new plot certainly had potential. Many reviewers (including this one) thought the confrontation with Iraq potentially had merit if handled thoughtfully. The writers of The Bush Administration, however, rushed into the Iraq War storyline, apparently without adequately thinking through how they would resolve the story of reconstruction that would follow. The result is that the Iraq plot has become a jumbled mess. This viewer believes the Iraq story would be heading toward a more satisfying conclusion if the Bush Administration writers had spent the time to integrate more international players into the story, rather than rushing to war.

The writers’ lack of forethought in mapping out the Iraq storyline is symptomatic of their floundering around this season. In fact, the Bush writers now seem to be at a loss in deciding what kind of a show they want The Bush Administration to be. While they started out the season with the proven formula of a rousing action show, lately they have devolved to verbal slapstick and other forms of low comedy. It is time for fans of the show to face the sad fact that the Bush Administration has jumped the shark.

Many fans of classic television shows are familiar with the phenomenon of jumping the shark – which refers to the defining moment of decline for a television show. The reference is to the Happy Days episode when the show’s writers revealed that they were creatively exhausted by having Fonzie actually jump over a shark while water skiing.

Looking back on this past season of The Bush Administration, I think it is clear that the show jumped the shark when its writers had Bush put on a flight suit and sit behind the controls of a fighter jet for a landing on an aircraft carrier to announce – prematurely – “Mission Accomplished.” It was at that point that the show’s writers revealed that were disposing of any pretense of keeping the characters consistent and believable. The writers had suddenly changed the character of Bush into a fighter pilot, conveniently ignoring the back story of Bush’s callow youth established in the pilot episode (no pun intended) of the show. Back in 2000 the pilot episode established that thanks to Bush’s family connections, he was able to get into the Texas Air National Guard – thus avoiding the Vietnam War – and then cavalierly did not bother to show up for required duty during his last year in the National Guard. When the writers of the Bush Administration so drastically rewrote the main character, it became obvious that they had given up on keeping the characters consistent and believable.

If there was any doubt that The Bush Administration had jumped the shark, it has been dispelled by the writers’ switching gears in mid-season from serious melodrama to broad comedy with the show’s extended homage to Abbott and Costello’s classic “who’s on first” routine. To the Bush writers credit, it was a bit of inspired casting to have Bush play the role of the befuddled Costello as he tried to make sense of what he had said. But while The Bush Administration’s running gag about how that reference to the African uranium got into the State of the Union address was comical for several episodes, it is now alienating more and more viewers. The writers’ decision to have numerous and conflicting explanations proffered by supporting characters has resulted in bogging down the Bush Administration in a confusing mess that is dissipating the popularity of the main characters.

Indeed, the Bush writers have offered so many changing explanations, they seem to have written themselves into a box. Bush characters have offered so many contradictory explanations that any new explanation is almost sure to conflict with one of the previous explanations.

For example, did the CIA tell the main characters that reports of Iraq seeking uranium in Africa were flawed? Bush Administration characters have contradicted each other in addressing this issue from one week to the next. As an Associated Press reviewer has noted:

[A] senior White House aide briefing reporters last week repeatedly insisted that the CIA objected in October only because the statement then was based on "a single source, not because it was flawed."

But [Bush national security aide Stephen] Hadley contradicted those accounts.

An unsigned CIA memo on Oct. 5 advised that "the CIA had reservations about the British reporting" on Iraq's alleged attempts in Niger, Hadley said. A second memo, sent on Oct. 6, elaborated on the CIA's doubts, describing "some weakness in the evidence," such as the fact that Iraq already had a large stock of uranium and probably wouldn't need more, Hadley said.

Then, in a phone call around the same time, Tenet "asked that any reference to Iraq's attempt to purchase uranium from sources from Africa to be deleted from the speech," Hadley said.

Similarly, the Bush writers can’t seen to keep straight whether the main characters were aware of State Department doubts about the African uranium story.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice and other aides pointed repeatedly to the fact that doubts about the intelligence appeared in a footnote, written by the State Department, buried deep in a top-secret National Intelligence Estimate.

That footnote was thus not read by Bush, Rice or other top aides, said a White House official, on condition of anonymity.

However, newly declassified portions of the NIE, on which the speech was based, show that the very first paragraph of the report's "Key Judgments" had a prominent reference to an addendum containing the State Department's "alternate view" of intelligence on Iraq's nuclear pursuits. The White House official said Rice and others did read the "Key Judgments" section.

The show’s confused scripting on the African uranium story has taken a toll on the popularity of the Rice character, once one of the rising stars of the show. As a Washington Post review indicates, the subplot on whether Rice has been less than diligent or less than truthful has made the character far less appealing to viewers:

[Rice] has since become enmeshed in the controversy over the administration's use of intelligence about Iraq's weapons in the run-up to war. She has been made to appear out of the loop by colleagues' claims that she did not read or recall vital pieces of intelligence. And she has made statements about U.S. intelligence on Iraq that have been contradicted by facts that later emerged.

The remarks by Rice and her associates raise two uncomfortable possibilities for the national security adviser. Either she missed or overlooked numerous warnings from intelligence agencies seeking to put caveats on claims about Iraq's nuclear weapons program, or she made public claims that she knew to be false.

....

In a broader matter, Rice claimed publicly that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, did not take issue with other intelligence agencies' view that Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear program. "[W]hat INR did not take a footnote to is the consensus view that the Iraqis were actively trying to pursue a nuclear weapons program, reconstituting and so forth," she said on July 11, referring to the National Intelligence Estimate. Speaking broadly about the nuclear allegations in the NIE, she said: "Now, if there were doubts about the underlying intelligence to that NIE, those doubts were not communicated to the president, to the vice president, or to me."

In fact, the INR objected strongly. In a section referred to in the first paragraph of the NIE's key judgments, the INR said there was not "a compelling case" and said the government was "lacking persuasive evidence that Baghdad has launched a coherent effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program."

The show’s writing has been so sloppy lately that the writers even had the main character try to resolve the issue of whether administration exaggerations played a major role in the United States going to war with Iraq by misstating the some of the main events that occurred last season. In the July 14 episode, Bush claimed:

"[W]e gave him [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region."

As Bush Administration viewers will recall, however, last season Iraq did allow the U.N. inspectors back in. The inspectors only left Iraq after the U.S. warned the U.N. that they were not safe because the U.S. invasion was imminent.

As a result of such inaccurate and contradictory statements, the stars of The Bush Administration are simply not as believable as they once were. Viewers of the show are expressing displeasure with the jarring and incompetently executed switch in the theme of the show from action-adventure to verbal pratfalls and slapstick. With such incompetent writing, it’s not surprising that the ratings of The Bush Administration have declined lately to the mid 50s.

Will the Bush show be cancelled? Well, it comes up for renewal in a little more than 15 months. We’ll see at that time just how much tolerance the viewers have for low comedy in high places. Until that point, I fear that viewers will have to brace themselves for even more episodes of Bush playing the hero and jumping the shark.
posted by Gary at 9:23 AM

 
HOW LOW CAN BUSH GO?: The Zogby poll released today on likely voters’ views of Bush and his policies indicate that Bush better hurry up and distract voters from his actual job performance if he wants pundits to keep writing vapid articles about how unbeatable he will be in 2004.

In his poll of 1,004 likely U.S. voters conducted from July 16 to 17, Zogby found that likely voters are not particularly enamored of Bush, whom they give low marks on nearly all aspects of his job.

Not only has Bush's overall job performance rating slipped in the past month from 58 percent positive to 53 percent positive, but Bush has dropped below 50 percent on nearly all ratings of his performance in office. In fact, with the exception of dealing with terrorism, Bush’s ratings on specific issues are, to put it delicately, in the toilet:

Voters rate only President Bush's performance in the war on terrorism positively, 59% - 40%. Opinion is split on foreign policy, 49% positive compared to 50% negative. His performance on health care is rated 36% positive, 61% negative; the environment, 31% positive, 65% negative; taxes, 45% positive, 54% negative; and jobs and the economy, 33% positive, 66% negative.

What may be even more ominous for Bush is the decline is his favorability ratings. Since he first declared for the presidency years ago, Bush has consistently been weak on the issues, finding majorities either lukewarm or disapproving of his positions on most domestic issues. Bush’s main strength as a presidential candidate has always been his supposed image as a likable, down-to-earth man of good character. Thanks in large part to the soft treatment he usually receives from the media, Bush’s favorability ratings have remained high despite his having the most fundamentally dishonest administration since Nixon’s.

Bush's uranium hoax, however, may be acting as a tipping point, causing people (and even White House correspondents) to finally acknowledge his administration’s pervasive arrogance and deceitfulness. Whatever the cause, Bush’s unfavorable ratings have jumped 10 points in the past month. According to Zogby’s June survey, 66 percent of likely voters viewed Bush favorably as a person and 32 percent viewed him unfavorably. Now, Bush’s favorable rating has dropped to 57 percent and his unfavorable rating has leaped to 42 percent.

Zogby considers Bush's declining favorability rating to be potentially fatal to his presidency given the unpopularity of his policies:

Pollster John Zogby: "What has been propping up the President in the past few months is his personal favorability rating. To me, what is most ominous is this alone has slipped 9 points in the past month. If he cannot count on a large majority of Americans to like him personally, this could spell doom for his re-election hopes because he has little support for his overall performance and how he is rated on the issues."

Bush’s negative ratings are already eroding his support to win election (as opposed to his appointment in 2000) to the presidency in 2004. Those pundits that claim that Bush will be nearly impossible to beat in 2004 don’t know what they are talking about. A majority of voters currently have no desire to extend Bush’s maladministration for another four years. As Zogby notes:

For the first time, more likely voters (47%) say it's time for someone new in the White House, compared to 46% who said the President deserves to be re-elected.

Now it’s time for the obligatory caveat about how a lot can happen in the next 16 months, and Bush could well be elected in a landslide if America’s reconstruction of Iraq goes smoothly and if the economy rebounds as projected by the Bush administration. (And if lies could fly, Bush would be long gone.)

Now that I’ve gotten the required weasel words out of the way, I can tell you what I really believe. I think Bush’s popularity is likely to continue sinking. According to Zogby, only 33 percent of likely voters give Bush a positive rating on jobs and the economy – which other recent polls have found to the most important issue to voters. As bad as this number is for Bush, it could well get worse.

Bush’s disastrous economic policy of massive tax cuts for the rich has returned America to massive deficits. Since the rich are not spending that money right back into the economy – as the poor and middle class would do if the tax cuts had been tilted toward them – Bush’s deficit spending is resulting in virtually no stimulus to the economy. As a result, we are experiencing a jobless recovery. Not only has Bush produced the biggest deficits in American history, but his administration is on track to be the first presidential administration since Hoover’s to result in a net loss in employment.

Bush’s claim that his tax cuts for the wealthy will create jobs is the equivalent of his State of the Union claim regarding Iraq’s supposed attempts to purchase Uranium in Africa. It was just something to say build support for what he wanted to do anyway. Bush habitually seeks support for his policies by offering justifications because they sound persuasive, not because they are true.

Bush engages in this deceitful tactic so often, he is bound to get caught occasionally, even by a complacent press. This month Bush’s uranium lie tripped him up. I think there is a fair chance that Bush’s lies about the economy will become harder and harder to ignore as the deficit balloons past the Bush administration’s dishonest projections and the projected robust economic recovery never materializes.

Sure, Bush and his brain (Karl Rove) will do their best to distract voters with fear-inducing talk of terrorist threats. But I don’t think Bush’s actual record on national security – as opposed to his bravado – is so strong that the Democratic presidential candidate will not be able to battle Bush on this issue. If the Democrats are able to at least remain competitive on the issue of national security, I doubt that Bush will be able to distract a majority of Americans from his singular achievement of combining the honesty of the Nixon White House with the prosperity of the Hoover administration.

By this time next year, Bush may look wistfully back to the days when 33 percent of likely voters approved of his performance on jobs and the economy and 46 percent wanted to see him elected president in 2004.
posted by Gary at 7:04 PM

 
THE MISLEADERSHIP OF BUSH: The Bush administration deserves high marks for consistency in defending against charges that Bush misled Americans in his 2003 State of the Union address with now-discredited statements about Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium in Africa.

While a lesser administration might be tempted to come clean after being caught with making misleading arguments in support of war, the Bush administration is remaining true to its principles of duplicity by defending itself with misleading evasions.

As the New York Times is reporting this morning, Bush and his aides are defending against charges that intelligence officials expressed doubts about Bush’s claims in his State of the Union address by arguing that the CIA eventually “cleared” the speech:

President Bush said today that intelligence services cleared his State of the Union speech, which included a now-discredited allegation that Iraq was seeking to buy nuclear material from Africa.

Bush's national security adviser specifically pointed to the CIA and said it had vetted the speech. If CIA Director George Tenet had any misgivings about that sentence in the president's speech, “he did not make them known” to Bush or his staff, said national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

The issue arose a day after other senior U.S. officials said that before and after Bush's Jan. 28 speech, American intelligence officials expressed doubts about a British intelligence report that the president cited to back up his allegations.

Those doubts were relayed to British officials before they made them public, and that word was passed to people at several agencies of the U.S. government before Bush gave that nationally broadcast speech. The White House this week admitted the charge about Iraq seeking uranium should not have appeared in his speech.

Bush, asked how erroneous material had ended up in the address, “I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services.” He did not explain how the allegations wound up in his speech.

But he said he made the right decision about invading Iraq and asserted that the world is a more peaceful place for it.

Rice said “the CIA cleared the speech in its entirety.”

The agency raised only one objection to the sentence involving an allegation that Iraq was trying to obtain "yellow cake" uranium, she said. Yellow cake is a slightly processed form of uranium ore the color and consistency of yellow corn meal.

“Some specifics about amount and place were taken out,” Rice added.

“With the changes in that sentence, the speech was cleared,” she said. “The agency did not say they wanted that sentence out.”

Note that Bush and Rice are not denying that intelligence officials expressed doubts about the core allegation that Iraq was seeking nuclear material in Africa. Apparently, after those doubts were expressed to Bush and his aides, they decided that they could still convince Americans of this threat with a factually accurate statement that a British report was making such allegations. There is no dispute here that Bush was trying to persuade Americans of the truth of allegations that American intelligence officials had already rejected.

Similarly, Bush is now seeking to convince Americans that the CIA had no misgivings about his State of the Union speech by arguing that the CIA “cleared” the speech. Intelligence officials “cleared” the speech, however, only after expressing doubts about the message that Bush was peddling about the Iraqi nuclear threat. The Bush administration was clever enough to think of another way of getting that same message across with a factually accurate statement about what British intelligence officials had concluded.

The fact that the CIA only fought to remove factually inaccurate statements -- and not misleading statements -- does not mean that the CIA approved Bush’s statements. The CIA limited itself to informing Bush of its doubts about the allegations and correcting factually inaccurate statements. There is no dispute that the CIA continue to disbelieve the allegations that Bush was trumpeting as one of the reasons to go to war.

Thus, Bush is defending his misleading statements about Iraq being an imminent nuclear threat with a misleading defense. In his State of the Union address, Bush sought to convince Americans that American intelligence officials believed Iraq was an imminent nuclear threat by ignoring those officials’ actual conclusions and focusing on the British report. Now, Bush is arguing that the CIA “cleared” that speech -- giving the impression that the CIA shared his conclusions, when it had actually rejected them.

There are times when it appears that the only way the Bush administration is capable of leading is by misleading. This is one of them.
posted by Gary at 10:58 AM

 
A CONTENTLESS, YET POTENT, POST: While virtually devoid of content, this post is nonetheless bad news for the administration of Bush the Lesser. After a long hiatus, the Self Made Pundit can no longer keep bottled up his outrage at the most dishonest administration since Nixon's and the most inept administration since Hoover's.

In other words, it's back to blogging for me.

Check back later for the usual trenchant political analysis.


posted by Gary at 1:00 PM