|
Pres. Bush’s fall from grace continues, as the evangelical and philosophical
base splits with his nomination of Miers to replace O’Connor. This was a choice entangled in huge expectations by the “movement
conservatives” who feel that they have waited since Judge Robert Bork was rejected
by the then-Democratic controlled Senate to reclaim the holy grail at the third
branch of government. Bork became the “Rosa Parks icon’ to the conservative movement and
yesterday for a solo interview on CNN midday said that the Miers nomination was
“a disaster
on all levels”, a slap in the face to the conservative movement. While he feels
sympathetic with her as a person, he recommended that she should be
rejected. “I think this is the
final straw” with Bush, he added. This
isn’t a gender or elitist rejection, he said, if she were a lawyer with a
constitutional law ‘paper trail’ it wouldn’t matter where she got her degree,
it matters that she hasn’t taken a stand for the movement’s principles.
Further, Judge Bork complained that Bush seems to be saying to conservative
jurists “don’t write or take controversial positions or you’ll never advance”. When asked, he replied that he doubts
that Miers will be withdrawn, that Bush is “a stubborn man”. Worse, the
evangelical leaders who have spoken publicly do Bush no favors. Besides Rev.
Dobson’s self-promoting claims that he was assured by Karl Rove that Miers was
a reliable vote on “their issues”, Richard Land of the S. Baptist Convention actually
claimed that not just as Bush’s own lawyer, but that as a Texan, Bush had confidence that Miers would vote the
way he wanted her to, otherwise
it would be a personal betrayal. This smacks not just of cronyism but of proxy
voting, something about which the public should be concerned. Meanwhile, the
White House seems ‘stuck on stupid”, as one conservative complained, unable to ‘spin’
its way out of this mess, perhaps because Rove and VP Cheney’s chief of staff “Scooter”
Libby are distracted with possible indictment by the CIA leak prosecutor,
something even William Kristol of the Weekly
Standard has disclosed may be forthcoming. kwc The
Faith-Based President Defrocked To understand why the
right is rebelling against Harriet Miers, don't waste time boning up on her glory
days with the Texas Lottery Commission. The real story in this dust-up is not
the Supreme Court candidate, but the man who picked her. The Miers nomination,
whatever its fate, will be remembered as the flashpoint when the faith-based
Bush base finally started to lose faith in our propaganda president and join
the apostate American majority. Though James Dobson,
America's foremost analyst of the gay subtext of SpongeBob SquarePants, was
easily rolled by Karl Rove and dragged back into the Miers camp, he's an
exception. The pervasive mood on the right was articulated by Cathie Adams,
president of the Texas branch of Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum. She told The Washington Post: "President Bush
is asking us to have faith in things unseen. We only have that kind of faith in
God." This is a sea change.
If anything, Ms. Miers's record of opposition to abortion (a contribution to
Texans United for Life, a leadership role at a strenuously anti-abortion
church) is less "unseen" than that of John Roberts, whose nomination
aroused no protest on the right only three months ago. The difference between
then and now is a startling index of the toll taken by a botched war and
hurricane response on whatever remains of Mr. Bush's credibility. The
continuing inability of the administration to accomplish the mission in Iraq
and of its post-Brownie FEMA to do a heck of a job on the Gulf Coast has
inflicted collateral damage on its case for Harriet Miers. "The president's
'argument' for her amounts to: Trust me," George Will wrote in the op-ed
column that last week galvanized conservative opposition to the nomination. He
then went on to list several reasons why he doesn't trust Mr. Bush. As if to
prove the point, the president went out to the Rose Garden and let loose with one
whopper after another in his first press conference in four months. "Of all the
people in the United States you had to choose from, is Harriet Miers the most
qualified to serve on the Supreme Court?" Mr. Bush was asked.
"Yes," he answered. Has he ever discussed abortion with her?
"Not to my recollection." How much political capital does he have
left? "Plenty." With a straight face he promised that Ms. Miers was
"not going to change" and that "20 years from now she'll be the
same person with the same philosophy that she is today." Even were that a
praiseworthy attribute, it would still contradict the history of a woman who
abandoned her Roman Catholic faith for evangelical Christianity and the
Democratic Party for the Republicans. But Mr. Bush's
dissembling wasn't limited to his Supreme Court nominee. Asked how he was going
to pay for Katrina recovery, the president twice said he'd proposed $187
billion in budget cuts over 10 years - but failed to factor in his tax
proposals and other budget increases. The real net total for proposed Bush cuts
is $103 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and even less
according to some independent number crunchers. Turning to Iraq, Mr. Bush once
again fudged our "progress" there with a numerical bait-and-switch,
bragging about "30 Iraqi battalions in the lead." (Translation: in
the lead with American military support.) Less than a week earlier his own
commanders had told Congress that the number of Iraqi battalions capable of
fighting unaided had dropped from 3 to 1 since June. (Translation: 750 soldiers
are now ready to stand up on their own should America's 140,000 troops stand
down.) For good measure, Mr. Bush then flouted credibility one more time to set
the stage for the next administration fiasco. In the event of a bird flu
epidemic, he said, one option for effecting a quarantine would be to use the
military. What military? Last week The Army
Times reported that the Pentagon, its resources already
overstretched by Iraq, would try to bolster sagging recruitment by tapping
"a demographic long deemed off limits: high school dropouts who don't have
a General Educational Development credential." Like most Bush fictions, the latest are driven less by ideology
than by a desire to hide incompetence. But there's a self-destructive impulse
at work as well. "The best way to get the news is from objective
sources," the president told Brit Hume of Fox News two years ago.
"And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me
what's happening in the world." Thus does the White House compound the sin
of substituting propaganda for effective action by falling for the same spin it
showers on the public. Beware
of leaders who drink their own Kool-Aid. The most distressing aspect of Mr. Bush's
press conference last week was less his lies and half-truths than the abundant
evidence that he is as out of touch as Custer was on the way to Little Bighorn.
The president seemed genuinely shocked that anyone could doubt his claim that
his friend is the best-qualified candidate for the highest court. Mr. Bush also
seemed unaware that it was Republicans who were leading the attack on Ms.
Miers. "The decision as to whether or not there will be a fight is up to
the Democrats," he said, confusing his antagonists this time much as he
has Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Such naked
presidential isolation from reality was a replay of his response to Hurricane
Katrina. When your main "objective sources" for news are members of
your own staff, you can actually believe that the most pressing tragedy of the
storm is the rebuilding of Trent Lott's second home. You can even believe that
Brownie will fix it. The truth only began to penetrate four days after the
storm's arrival - and only then, according to Newsweek, because an adviser, Dan
Bartlett, asked the president to turn away from his usual "objective
sources" and instead watch a DVD compilation of actual evening news
reports. Mr. Bartlett's one
desperate effort to prick his boss's bubble notwithstanding, the White House as
a whole is so addicted to its own mythmaking prowess that it can't kick the
habit. Seventy-two hours before Ms. Miers was nominated, federal auditors from
the Government Accountability Office declared that the administration had
violated the law against "covert propaganda" when it repeatedly hired
fake reporters (and one supposedly real pundit, Armstrong Williams) to plug its
policies in faux news reports and editorial commentary produced at taxpayers'
expense. But a bigger scandal is the legal propaganda that the White House
produces daily even now - or especially now. As always, much of it
pertains to the war in Iraq. On Sept. 28, to take one recent instance, the
president announced the smiting of a man he identified as "the second most
wanted Al Qaeda leader in Iraq" and the "top operational commander of
Al Qaeda in Baghdad." As New York's
Daily News would quickly report, the man in question "may not
even be one of the top 10 or 15 leaders." The blogger Blogenlust chimed
in, documenting 33 "top lieutenants" of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who have
been captured, killed or identified in the past two and a half years, with no
deterrent effect on terrorist violence in Iraq, Madrid or London. No wonder the
nation shrugged at the largely recycled and unsubstantiated list of 10 foiled
Qaeda plots that Mr. Bush unveiled in Thursday's latest stay-the-course Iraq
oration. The administration's
strategy for covering up embarrassing realities with fiction reached its purest
_expression_ two weeks ago when both Laura Bush and Karen Hughes were recruited
to star in propagandistic television "reality" shows. In the first
lady's case, this was literally so: she was dispatched to Biloxi to appear in
an episode of ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition." The thinking
seems to be that if Mrs. Bush helps one family on a hit reality series, perhaps
no one will notice the reality that no-bid contracts and ineptitude have kept
hundreds of thousands of other hurricane victims homeless indefinitely while
taxpayers foot the bill for unused trailers and cruise ships. Ms. Hughes took her
act on the road in the Middle East. There she conducted a culturally tone-deaf
"listening tour" in which she read her lines from briefing papers and
tried to win hearts and minds by posing with little Arab kids as if they were
interchangeable with the little black kids in Mr. Bush's "compassionate
conservative" photo ops back home. She didn't seem to know that this stunt
wouldn't even fly on Fox News anymore, let alone Al Jazeera. This Saturday is
supposed to bring new victories on both these troubled fronts: Oct. 15 is the
day that Iraqis vote on their constitution and the day that the president set
as a deadline for all hurricane victims to be moved out of shelters. Chances
are that the number of Americans who still have faith that the light is at the
end of either of these tunnels is identical to the number who believe Harriet
Miers is the second coming of Antonin Scalia and that Tom Cruise has found true
love. Article found at http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/100905F.shtml |
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
