Nutty Buddy
by digby
I had read excerpts of Fred Barnes’ column describing his meeting with the president and fellow conservative sycpophants, but I didn’t get a chance to read the whole thing until today. The codpiece is full to bursting even as the mind is shrinking.
Inside the Oval Office President Bush gives journalists a “heads up” about the mid-term elections, among other things.
[That’s the real headline, I swear — d]WE NOW KNOW WHY the Bush administration hasn’t made the capture of Osama bin Laden a paramount goal of the war on terror. Emphasis on bin Laden doesn’t fit with the administration’s strategy for combating terrorism. Here’s how President Bush explained this Tuesday: “This thing about . . . let’s put 100,000 of our special forces stomping through Pakistan in order to find bin Laden is just simply not the strategy that will work.”
Rather, Bush says there’s a better way to stay on offense against terrorists. “The way you win the war on terror,” Bush said, “is to find people [who are terrorists] and get them to give you information about what their buddies are fixing to do.” In a speech last week, the president explained how this had worked–starting with the arrest and interrogation of 9/11 planner Khalid Sheik Muhammad–to break up a terrorist operation that was planning post-9/11 attacks on America.
“It’s really important at this stage . . . to be thinking about how to institutionalize courses of action that will enable future presidents to gain the information necessary to prevent attack,” he said. This, presumably, would include the use of secret prisons, tough but legal interrogation techniques, a ban on lawsuits against interrogators, electronic eavesdropping, and monitoring of bank transfers, among other measures.
Bush talked about his strategy in the fight against Islamic jihadists in a 95-minute session in the Oval Office with seven journalists. At the outset of the interview, which occurred the morning after his speech to the nation on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Bush declared: “I’ve never been more convinced that the decisions I made are the right decisions.”
Barnes is so in the tank for Bush that he’s grown gills, so I wouldn’t expect even the tiniest bit of skepticism from him. But I assume he’s accurately reporting what the president said. And he’s reporting that Bush’s plan to combat terrorism is to institutionalize torture, warrentless spying on his own citizens, indefinite detention, secret prisons, warrantless monitoring of bank transfers and legal immunity for those who carry out those tasks.
What do you suppose such “institutions” usually characterize?
He’s also consciously conflating “rogue states” and terrorists, and failing to draw the proper distinctions at the same time, just as he’s done from the beginning. He does not think, for instance, that it’s important to “decapitate” the head of al Qaeda, yet “decapitating” Saddam Hussein made the world safer.
I’m sure I don’t need to point out how wrong both of those suppositions are. Bin Laden continuing to elude the vast power of the US only makes him stronger — and deposing Saddam uselessly destabilized the world in ways that we haven’t even been able to fully discern yet. (What we know now is that we have precipitated a civil war in Iraq and empowered Iran — not bad for government work.)
This also brings up something I found somewhat hilarious in his press conference the other day:
Q Thank you, Mr. President. Earlier this week, you told a group of journalists that you thought the idea of sending special forces to Pakistan to hunt down bin Laden was a strategy that would not work.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
Q Now, recently you’ve also —
THE PRESIDENT: Because, first of all, Pakistan is a sovereign nation.
Q Well, recently you’ve also described bin Laden as a sort of modern day Hitler or Mussolini. And I’m wondering why, if you can explain why you think it’s a bad idea to send more resources to hunt down bin Laden, wherever he is?
THE PRESIDENT: We are, Richard. Thank you. Thanks for asking the question. They were asking me about somebody’s report, well, special forces here — Pakistan — if he is in Pakistan, as this person thought he might be, who is asking the question — Pakistan is a sovereign nation. In order for us to send thousands of troops into a sovereign nation, we’ve got to be invited by the government of Pakistan.
I know. I know…
Barnes continues:
Bush said it’s difficult for many people to understand how serious the terrorist threat is. “It’s impossible for someone to have grown up in the 50s and 60s to envision a conflict with people that just kill mercilessly, using techniques that are kind of foreign to modern warfare. But it’s real. I’m telling you, it’s real.”
I grew up in the 1960’s doing nuclear war drills in school. My next door neighbors in Wichita, Kansas had a bomb shelter in their back yard. On October 22, 1962 the president of United States went on television and told the American people that we were on the brink of nuclear war — and we were. If he thinks that is somehow less frightening than bunch of suicde bombers and nutballs with box cutters, he truly is stupid.
This was what a president sounds like when he is dealing with a real and imminent existential threat:
I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations between our two nations. I call upon him further to abandon this course of world domination, and to join in an historic effort to end the perilous arms race and to transform the history of man. He has an opportunity now to move the world back from the abyss of destruction by returning to his government’s own words that it had no need to station missiles outside its own territory, and withdrawing these weapons from Cuba by refraining from any action which will widen or deepen the present crisis, and then by participating in a search for peaceful and permanent solutions.
I pity these poor idiots who are so desperate for meaning in their lives that they are trying to turn Islamic extremism into a threat on that scale. Apparently, since it isn’t they are just going to try to make it so.
The aburdity of his statement that people who grew up in the 50’s and 60’s can’t understand this kind of threat should send chills down people’s spines, however. This is the president of the United States not some moist, bobby soxer who’s desperate to be that nurse kissing the handsome sailor in the famous VE Day picture. We need leaders who are clear eyed about threats to our country and fashion appropriate responses.
Barnes continues:
Bush dismissed as cynical the charge that he hasn’t asked the American people to accept sacrifices as American soldiers fight against terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere. “You know what the definition of sacrifice is for a lot of people” who question him about the lack of sacrifice? “How come you didn’t raise taxes? That’s what that means as far as I’m concerned . . . If we had raised taxes to create a sense of sacrifice, it would have caused even greater sacrifice because I believe raising taxes in a recession would cause the economy to get even worse.”
I don’t know what he thinks he’s saying here, but he’s said it more than once. Evidently he’s persuaded himself that by cutting taxes, he’s asked the American people to sacrifice. Or something. It’s completely incoherent.
The truth is that he hasn’t asked anyone for a sacrifice (except the poor soldiers) because he’s waiting to get out of office so somebody else can give the country the bad news and be blamed for it. That’s how Republicans govern. And until Democrats learn to hang this stuff around their necks they will continue to get away with it.
The president said he is not isolated in the White House. “I know exactly what’s in the news,” he said. “I listen to a lot of people. I’ve got smart people around me. And they can march right in here–this Oval Office can be slightly intimidating, but I’ve got people here who can fight through the aura and say, ‘I think you’re wrong. I think you’re right.'”
It’s a standing joke among the president’s top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS…it is not clear what President Bush does read or watch, aside from the occasional biography and an hour or two of ESPN here and there. Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. Bush can ask tough questions, but it’s mostly a one-way street. Most presidents keep a devil’s advocate around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam; President Ronald Reagan and Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, grudgingly listened to the arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them what they didn’t wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth.
He won’t stand for dissent, it’s quite obvious. Instead, grey eminences like Dick Cheney play all kinds of mind games to get him to do something he doesn’t understand. He is a spoiled, stupid stubborn little brat — a dauphin terror who does not lead but rather succumbs to whichever appeal to his vanity sounds good. He is a disaster.
In the midterm election on November 7, Bush predicted Democrats won’t win either the House or the Senate. “I believe these elections will come down to two things: one, firm belief that in order to win the war on terror there must be a comprehensive strategy that recognizes this war is being fought on more than one front, and, two, the economy.” Bush said the price of gasoline, which has been falling rapidly, is one of the “interesting indicators” that the press should watch carefully. “Just giving you a heads up,” he added.
I guess he told them to “turn on the spigot.”
This guy doesn’t just sound thick and slow any more. He increasingly sounds completely nuts.
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