The October Surprise

by tristero

Well! Rove certainly had me fooled, that’s for sure. I had no idea that the secret weapon Republicans were planning to deploy against Democrats was one made in North Korea. But there it is.

Get it? A nuclear North Korea requires an American party in power that is completely serious about national and international security. And up until around the start of the Foley scandal,* most Americans thought that was the Republican party.

Surprise, Karl. Ain’t gonna work this time. [UPDATE: Am I suggesting that US intelligence had advance warning from, say, this summer, that a NoKo nuke test was imminent? Yes, I think that is more than plausible and that the Republicans were counting on the alarm that would create in the US to accrue to their benefit. Can I prove it and would I be willing to admit I was wrong if it turned out that the nuke test took the US by surprise? No. Yes.]

Josh Marshall has a pretty good take on how hard it will be, post Foley, for most Americans to escape the obvious conclusion that NoKo was a monumental Republican/Bush fuckup :

Threats are a potent force if you’re willing to follow through on them. But [Bush] wasn’t. The plutonium production plant, which had been shuttered since 1994, got unshuttered. And the bomb that exploded tonight was, if I understand this correctly, almost certainly the product of that plutonium uncorked almost four years ago.

So the President talked a good game, the North Koreans called his bluff and he folded. And since then, for all intents and purposes, and all the atmospherics to the contrary, he and his administration have done essentially nothing.

Indeed, from the moment of the initial cave, the White House began acting as though North Korea was already a nuclear power (something that was then not at all clear) to obscure the fact that the White House had chosen to twiddle its thumbs and look the other way as North Korea became a nuclear power. Like in Bush in Iraq and Hastert and Foley, the problem was left to smolder in cover-up and denial. Until now.

Hawks and Bush sycophants will claim that North Korea is an outlaw regime. And no one should romanticize or ignore the fact that it is one of the most repressive regimes in the world with a history of belligerence, terrorist bombing, missile proliferation and a lot else. They’ll also claim that the North Koreans were breaking the spirit if not the letter of the 1994 agreement by pursuing a covert uranium enrichment program. And that’s probably true too.

But facts are stubborn things.

The bomb-grade plutonium that was on ice from 1994 to 2002 is now actual bombs. Try as you might it is difficult to imagine a policy — any policy — which would have yielded a worse result than the one we will face Monday morning.

Basically, I think Josh has it exactly right here. But I can’t help thinking – and this is not snark, ladies, gentlemen and Republicans, this is serious – that Marshall’s being overly optimistic. Let’s read that last bit again:

Try as you might it is difficult to imagine a policy — any policy — which would have yielded a worse result than the one we will face Monday morning.

Not for the Bush administration.

Oh, I know Josh is talking about “any policy towards Korea’s nuke ambitions” but it doesn’t matter. Wherever you turn with Bush, it is always difficult to imagine a worse result from any of their policies. But they always seem to surprise us and manage ever more catastrophic outcomes.

Could anyone imagine that the Bush administration policy towards natural disaster would be so inept they would fail to respond with even minimal effectiveness to Katrina? Or that a US president would be so focused on bogus threats he’d receive a report entitled “Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US” and not put the entire country on high alert? Could anyone imagine a worse solution for the millions of patients that would benefit from stem-cell-based treatments than for the United States to cripple research with a policy that bans federal funds for new stem cell lines? Or a worse politics for an American democracy than pandering to the most ignorant constituency in the country – the true believers in the Dobsons, the Falwells, and the Robertsons? A constituency so fucking dumb that when their preachers tell them the most dangerous issue facing the country is two guys who love each other, they actually believe it, then propose and pass laws that advocate bigotry and hate? Could anyone possibly imagine an ideology so idiotic that it actually takes seriously the likes of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Douglas Feith, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton, John Ashcroft, Ahmad Chalabi, Paul Bremer, or Richard Cheney?

It is a simple fact that the most creative people in the world are the incompetent. They find unique ways of making life hell which are far, far beyond anything the rest of us can imagine. And so, the kind of fiascos that Joshua Micah Marshall – and you, and I – find difficult ever to imagine are a piece of cake for George W. Bush to create.

If Josh really thinks this spectacular screwup on North Korea is the worst result imaginable from a Bush policy towards NoKo (or anything else), I’d like to remind him that Bush has 833 days left to generate far worse ones.** And I for one am certain that Bush and Co. can, and will.

* It truly is remarkable how often American politics is mediated by things like sex scandals which are far from central to the actual concerns of the time. If there hasn’t yet been one, there’s a doctoral thesis or two to be written on the subject.

**According to my Bush Countdown Keychain, a birthday gift from my daughter.