Politics: Sleight of Hand
There are days like the two we've just had here in Washington that make it almost possible to forget the slime and sh*t that is pooling all around us. The weather was magnificent, with a bright sun piercing a cloudless sky, like clarity erupting for the first time. But clarity, for those of you who could drag yourselves inside and wade into the cesspool of television news or brought a newspaper out onto the deck, is long from here.
The most revolting news of the weekend came in the form of President Bush's assertion that our sound trouncing of a tiny country with no command and control (and almost no air force, FYI) somehow led the nuclear armed and absolutely insane Kim Jong Il to accede to multilateral talks on his little proliferation problem. The very thought that President Bush was somehow executing some grand vision by attacking Iraq, that he was planning all along to ignore North Korea and used his war in Iraq to demonstrate by example what NK should be afraid of is vomitous. It is clear by the nature of our reconstruction plan in Iraq that we aren't exactly running this show with both oars in the water. Take our plan to quell the nonstop civil unrest: Paul Wolfowitz thought we would recruit Iraqi civilians from within the former government and see if they would be "acceptable" at keeping the peace. Presumably, the rest of the Iraqis will just hack to death anybody who they find unacceptable.
So a big plan this wasn't. No, its much more likely that the Bush administration was cruising through the preparations for this war with blinders on about the whole nuclear mess in North Korea. (And has everyone forgotten that Iran has a bustling nuclear program that our whole intelligence apparatus missed? I have a feeling these idiots ought to start looking for new jobs, perhaps as spy-hunters at the FBI.) The fact that the North Korean situation took a single step closer to what Bush wanted isn't the result of good policy, it's dumb luck, like being the governor of Texas or the son of a former president. Bush's whole plan to resist unilateral talks with North Korea was just a badly-executed knee-jerk interpretation of the old SWAT team standby of "I don't negotiate with terrorists." I have no information to back this up, but I am fairly confident that Colin Powell wanted to engage, negotiate, move the conflict back from the brink, but the hawks in the White House (who only let Powell out of his little box if he promises to badmouth Syria and make a joke about how everybody in the White House hates him) put the kibosh on that sh*t bigtime. Seriously, if anyone believes that Colin Powell endorsed a plan to ignore a lunatic with a million troops and nuclear weapons thirty miles from Soeul, I've got a bridge for sale.
But this is the mythology of the Bush presidency. They don't plan, they act. They don't even muse about what will happen next (they know some nervous bastard on some weblog will do all that thinking for them). They just come up with cockamamie ideas, and do them with a straight face, like a drunken superhero on a bender. They don't think two steps ahead about much of anything, except executing their evil plans, and even then, their planning seems unbalanced at best. ("Okay, so we get elected talking about an education bill, get it passed, and then underfund it by billions while slamming through a tax cut that burns all the money we saved by underfunding education.... Later we'll get into a huge war requiring an $80 billion war-supplemental that nobody will say boo to because we're in a war. After we win the war, we'll ram through another tax cut so we can't afford to take care of the countries we've had wars in. Then we'll have a war in Syria...")
Instead, what began as an administration that seemed to avoid all of the Clinton administration pitfalls has defined a new and astounding set of mistakes to make. The Clinton administration's mistakes were often made within the confines of attempting to do the right thing. They overthought, they analyzed, they anticipated the reactions, and tried to generate a response to those reactions, and then imagined what opponents would say next, and attempted to create a response to those reactions. They often seemed paralyzed, and too frequently let the faithful down in service of a narrow slice of the populace whose long term potential for supporting their efforts was dubious at best. But the Bush administration is making mistakes the Clintons wouldn't dream of. They basically think of nothing. No thought at all. They rely solely on the force of their convictions and a threadbare ultra-hawkish playbook to move things forward.
This sort of fringe behavior has always worked for rinky-dink office holders in both parties. Jim Traficant served nearly nine terms based on being crazy but saying that everybody who said "you're crazy, Jim" was really the crazy one. Everybody's favorite race-baiting congresswoman Cynthia McKinney should have been out on her ear before last November, but she just kept on keeping on, accusing anybody who wondered if she was seriously qualified of racism, and using the same "distract and dodge" school of leadership that Ari Fleisher peddles every day, and that Wolfowitz was chomping down on all the talk shows these last two weeks. And don't get me started on Marion Barry or Buddy Cianci or still-not-called-on-it Carol Mosely Braun.
But the Bush administration has elevated this prestidigitation to high science. It's Karl Rove, of course. Rove isn't some evil genius. He's just evil. And he wins whatever way he can. And he lies and cheats and steals and deceives to do it.
There is a story about Rove that I heard in a radio interview with Lou Dubose, I believe, who wrote the first in a limited edition series of Rove books called "Boy Genius."
The author was talking about how Rove was that kid who wore a tie to his public junior high, and pretty much made him out to be the classic nerd, which is fine (I have strong and enduring fashion and opthamological connections to the nerd lineage, thanks). But there was this debate tournament. And to prepare for the debates, the students would gather information (about the issue, or the country they were supposed to represent, or whatever) on index cards. And Rove and his partner had a plan to intimidate the other team by bringing in a huge stack of index cards. The intimidating image of the massive stack of cards created the impression of a vast and comprehensive knowledge of the subject at hands. If the other team had two stacks of cards, Rove had four. If they brought four, Rove brought eight. In the end, his partners were so intimidated and shaken by his monstrous knowledge of the issue, he rarely had to actually debate.
But 90 percent of the cards were blank. It was all a ruse to get the upper hand without deserving it. That works fine for debate club, and probably in Texas politics. But Americans are losing their lives, and their shirts behind this nonsense. This is an untenable policy. In 99 percent of U.S. politics, the no-plan, lead by pretending you know what you're doing school of leadership doesn't survive at this level. Straw candidates don't generally make it through so much crap to get all the way up here. North Carolina Senator Lauch Faircloth was like that, just an empty shirt with handlers who figured an old white guy has a good a chance as anybody to win a Senate seat. Mosely Braun isn't empty, she's just poisoned. Unfortunately, the good heart of Jean Carnahan wasn't enough to overcome the fact that she had a tough race and she wasn't quite up to the task.
Bush's candidacy should have been pruned back by thoughtful, reasoned (or half-crazy) conservatives like John McCain. But there never was an honest competition of ideas about the future of America, in the Republican or Democratic primaries, or in the national election. It was disgustingly about the person who could lie the hardest, and the candidate who only alienated people they didn't need, and the handlers who made the fewest stupid mistakes. So now, somehow, we've got the kid who won at debate club by deceiving instead of debating running the country. And he's going to run it into the ground.
There are days like the two we've just had here in Washington that make it almost possible to forget the slime and sh*t that is pooling all around us. The weather was magnificent, with a bright sun piercing a cloudless sky, like clarity erupting for the first time. But clarity, for those of you who could drag yourselves inside and wade into the cesspool of television news or brought a newspaper out onto the deck, is long from here.
The most revolting news of the weekend came in the form of President Bush's assertion that our sound trouncing of a tiny country with no command and control (and almost no air force, FYI) somehow led the nuclear armed and absolutely insane Kim Jong Il to accede to multilateral talks on his little proliferation problem. The very thought that President Bush was somehow executing some grand vision by attacking Iraq, that he was planning all along to ignore North Korea and used his war in Iraq to demonstrate by example what NK should be afraid of is vomitous. It is clear by the nature of our reconstruction plan in Iraq that we aren't exactly running this show with both oars in the water. Take our plan to quell the nonstop civil unrest: Paul Wolfowitz thought we would recruit Iraqi civilians from within the former government and see if they would be "acceptable" at keeping the peace. Presumably, the rest of the Iraqis will just hack to death anybody who they find unacceptable.
So a big plan this wasn't. No, its much more likely that the Bush administration was cruising through the preparations for this war with blinders on about the whole nuclear mess in North Korea. (And has everyone forgotten that Iran has a bustling nuclear program that our whole intelligence apparatus missed? I have a feeling these idiots ought to start looking for new jobs, perhaps as spy-hunters at the FBI.) The fact that the North Korean situation took a single step closer to what Bush wanted isn't the result of good policy, it's dumb luck, like being the governor of Texas or the son of a former president. Bush's whole plan to resist unilateral talks with North Korea was just a badly-executed knee-jerk interpretation of the old SWAT team standby of "I don't negotiate with terrorists." I have no information to back this up, but I am fairly confident that Colin Powell wanted to engage, negotiate, move the conflict back from the brink, but the hawks in the White House (who only let Powell out of his little box if he promises to badmouth Syria and make a joke about how everybody in the White House hates him) put the kibosh on that sh*t bigtime. Seriously, if anyone believes that Colin Powell endorsed a plan to ignore a lunatic with a million troops and nuclear weapons thirty miles from Soeul, I've got a bridge for sale.
But this is the mythology of the Bush presidency. They don't plan, they act. They don't even muse about what will happen next (they know some nervous bastard on some weblog will do all that thinking for them). They just come up with cockamamie ideas, and do them with a straight face, like a drunken superhero on a bender. They don't think two steps ahead about much of anything, except executing their evil plans, and even then, their planning seems unbalanced at best. ("Okay, so we get elected talking about an education bill, get it passed, and then underfund it by billions while slamming through a tax cut that burns all the money we saved by underfunding education.... Later we'll get into a huge war requiring an $80 billion war-supplemental that nobody will say boo to because we're in a war. After we win the war, we'll ram through another tax cut so we can't afford to take care of the countries we've had wars in. Then we'll have a war in Syria...")
Instead, what began as an administration that seemed to avoid all of the Clinton administration pitfalls has defined a new and astounding set of mistakes to make. The Clinton administration's mistakes were often made within the confines of attempting to do the right thing. They overthought, they analyzed, they anticipated the reactions, and tried to generate a response to those reactions, and then imagined what opponents would say next, and attempted to create a response to those reactions. They often seemed paralyzed, and too frequently let the faithful down in service of a narrow slice of the populace whose long term potential for supporting their efforts was dubious at best. But the Bush administration is making mistakes the Clintons wouldn't dream of. They basically think of nothing. No thought at all. They rely solely on the force of their convictions and a threadbare ultra-hawkish playbook to move things forward.
This sort of fringe behavior has always worked for rinky-dink office holders in both parties. Jim Traficant served nearly nine terms based on being crazy but saying that everybody who said "you're crazy, Jim" was really the crazy one. Everybody's favorite race-baiting congresswoman Cynthia McKinney should have been out on her ear before last November, but she just kept on keeping on, accusing anybody who wondered if she was seriously qualified of racism, and using the same "distract and dodge" school of leadership that Ari Fleisher peddles every day, and that Wolfowitz was chomping down on all the talk shows these last two weeks. And don't get me started on Marion Barry or Buddy Cianci or still-not-called-on-it Carol Mosely Braun.
But the Bush administration has elevated this prestidigitation to high science. It's Karl Rove, of course. Rove isn't some evil genius. He's just evil. And he wins whatever way he can. And he lies and cheats and steals and deceives to do it.
There is a story about Rove that I heard in a radio interview with Lou Dubose, I believe, who wrote the first in a limited edition series of Rove books called "Boy Genius."
The author was talking about how Rove was that kid who wore a tie to his public junior high, and pretty much made him out to be the classic nerd, which is fine (I have strong and enduring fashion and opthamological connections to the nerd lineage, thanks). But there was this debate tournament. And to prepare for the debates, the students would gather information (about the issue, or the country they were supposed to represent, or whatever) on index cards. And Rove and his partner had a plan to intimidate the other team by bringing in a huge stack of index cards. The intimidating image of the massive stack of cards created the impression of a vast and comprehensive knowledge of the subject at hands. If the other team had two stacks of cards, Rove had four. If they brought four, Rove brought eight. In the end, his partners were so intimidated and shaken by his monstrous knowledge of the issue, he rarely had to actually debate.
But 90 percent of the cards were blank. It was all a ruse to get the upper hand without deserving it. That works fine for debate club, and probably in Texas politics. But Americans are losing their lives, and their shirts behind this nonsense. This is an untenable policy. In 99 percent of U.S. politics, the no-plan, lead by pretending you know what you're doing school of leadership doesn't survive at this level. Straw candidates don't generally make it through so much crap to get all the way up here. North Carolina Senator Lauch Faircloth was like that, just an empty shirt with handlers who figured an old white guy has a good a chance as anybody to win a Senate seat. Mosely Braun isn't empty, she's just poisoned. Unfortunately, the good heart of Jean Carnahan wasn't enough to overcome the fact that she had a tough race and she wasn't quite up to the task.
Bush's candidacy should have been pruned back by thoughtful, reasoned (or half-crazy) conservatives like John McCain. But there never was an honest competition of ideas about the future of America, in the Republican or Democratic primaries, or in the national election. It was disgustingly about the person who could lie the hardest, and the candidate who only alienated people they didn't need, and the handlers who made the fewest stupid mistakes. So now, somehow, we've got the kid who won at debate club by deceiving instead of debating running the country. And he's going to run it into the ground.
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