Fear Of Bush

by tristero

In his latest column, Dan Froomkin does discuss that the press was disgracefully out to lunch in the run-up to the disaster known as the Bush/Iraq war, covering the march to war rather than critically examining whether the war was either a good idea or necessary. But nowhere does he mention one of the crucial reasons why, because doing so would come a bit too close to exposing – to coin a phrase – an inconvenient truth.

The fact of the matter is that by November, 2001 Bush decided – for whatever passel of reasons you care to muster – that he would invade and occupy Iraq. To be explicit, Bush made it quite clear to all and sundry that if they stood in the way of his war, he would not only destroy critics personally. That went without saying. Going further, Bush was prepared to provoke an overt constitutional crisis if, say, Congress voted against the war.

What provided this amount of power was Bush’s insanely high approval ratings after 9/11, which the press had done its level best to abet. (In reality, the Bush administration was criminally negligent in deliberately shifting its attention away from bin Laden in the first nine months of the Bush regime. But the press portrayed 9/11 as some kind of weird triumphal moment for Bush rather than the spectacular failure it really was.) Fortified by those approval ratings, an administration that believed itself possessing dictatorial powers literally dictated to Congress and press what was going to happen. And what would happen if they opposed the administration.

Not only careers were on the line, but the fate of the US as a democratic republic. People were scared and acceded to Bush’s demands. They probably assumed that Bush’s will to power was limited to this one war, and that he would accept the limits the Constitution places on the president’s power in other ways – remember, this was before people understood exactly what Guantanamo was and Abu Ghraib was close to unimaginable. They were wrong.

Bush was not joking when he said it would be easier if the US was a dictatorship with himself as dictator. So he’s made it easier on himself, and we are now living in a a country whose fundamental principles bear only the vaguest relationship to what they were 8 years ago. Today, you can be arrested without any cause – and imprisoned indefinitely = on the whim of the president, you can be charged and convicted of crimes without ever seeing the evidence against you. Your telephone company can, and has, turned over to the government wiretaps on private citizens that were ordered merely on the president’s say-so. Call this system of government whatever you want, anything but American democracy.

Given the atmosphere of government intimidation back in 2002/2003, the press and Congress’s behavior of appeasement of Bush is understandable but it remains inexcusable. When danger reared its ugly head, they turned the other way and fled. Yet, many of us knew as early as the 2000 recount what the true nature of the Bush administration would be. We, too, were scared, but many of us felt compelled to speak out, and millions marched in protest as Bush pursued his mad war.

Yet, today, those protests – the largest in history! – are all but forgotten. And, in the press, those who obeyed Bush’s demands still have their jobs, cheek to jowl with those who got the Bush/Iraq war completely wrong. We can, fairly rapidly, punish elected officials for their craven votes in favor of the war in 2002 – Clinton may have lost crucial support, for example, because of hers. But changing the media will take concerted effort, and a lot of time.

A lot of time.