Lowering The Veil
Via Reuters:
Political consultants and analysts said Clarke’s allegation that Bush ignored the al Qaeda threat before the Sept. 11 attacks and was obsessed by a desire to invade Iraq were especially damaging because they confirmed other previous revelations from policy insiders.
“Each of these revelations adds to the others so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and the message gets reinforced with voters,” said Richard Rosecrance, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
[…]
“The administration can huff and puff but if there are enough bricks in the structure, they can’t blow the house down any more,” said American University historian Allan Lichtman.
“Right now, you have quite a number of bricks. It’s not just scaffolding any more,” he said.
[…]
“Bush has chosen national security and his response to the terrorist attack as a cornerstone of his campaign and now comes this guy Clarke, their guy, who says that the administration was intentionally or unintentionally not paying enough attention to the terrorist threat,” said Rick Davis, a Republican political consultant.
[…]
“If people start to doubt that claim and if the message from Clarke and O’Neill and others begins to stick, it would seriously weaken Bush on his strongest point,” said Fordham University political scientist Tom DeLuca.
The administration response has usually been to try to destroy the reputations of its critics. It suggested O’Neill had illegally used classified documents and said he was motivated by sour grapes after having been forced to resign from the Cabinet. A Treasury probe has cleared him of misusing documents.
Similarly, White House aides said Clarke was bitter about having been denied a promotion and “out of the loop” in the administration. They also said he was a closet Democrat working as a proxy for Bush’s presidential opponent, John Kerry.
“This administration has shown a tremendous ability to demonize its opponents. But at some point, people start to ask themselves, could all these people be pathological liars? At some point, they can’t all be liars,” said Democratic consultant Michael Goldman.
Now that Against All Enemies has gone into its fifth printing, and the 9/11 commission hearings have generated a huge amount of press coverage — and, judging from the anecdotal evidence, a fair amount of kitchen table and coffee break conversation as well — it looks like the events of the past week may be evolving into something much more significant than just another political mud fight.
I agree that with Clarke’s charges, aside from the fact that they were very effectively delivered by a very credible source, the central complaint about the Bush administration is finally reaching critical mass. There was the outing of Valerie Plame, the phony Jessica Lynch story, the AWOL charges, Paul O’Neill’s book, Halliburton corruption, the strong arming of the Richard Foster and much more, all layering upon the other until it’s impossible to ignore the idea that there might be something to all this. And, of course, there is the humongous elephant in the middle of the room — the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. That alone is such an enormous, jarring failure, especially in light of the unspeakably arrogant way in which they told the rest of the world to shove it, that all these other things can no longer be shoved aside.
The air of desperation in the furious character assassination of Clarke actually plays into that concept. They are rattled and it shows.
In the piece linked above, Billmon comments on the rather strange (and unprecedented) national sense of denial after 9/11, which I think is an important element of the George W. Bush mystique:
One of the things I found most remarkable about 9/11 — at least when compared to past national traumas like the Kennedy assassination or Pearl Harbor — was how willing the American public was to put questions of responsibility and accountability out of mind, seemingly indefinitely.
I think the reason for this is that subconsciously most people did not really believe that George W. Bush was capable of leading the country through a serious national security crisis. In order to keep from panicking, they simply went into denial. It’s a natural reaction in a situation over which you have very little control.
There was nothing particularly inspiring about Bush standing on the rubble saying “The people who knocked down these buildings are going to hear all of us soon.” (It was hardly “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”) People just knew that they had no choice but to put their faith in this shallow fellow and so they did.
Deep down, everyone has always feared that this inarticulate son of a failed president was not up to the job. It’s been the undercurrent of his entire life. One of his strongest selling points was that he would bring “the grown-ups” back into government. Nobody ever thought he was one of them. He himself said on Oprah in the 2000 campaign that “the public’s biggest misconception of him is that ‘I’m running on my daddy’s name.'”
But a politician can’t be tarred with something that isn’t believable. One of the reasons that most of the public didn’t give a damn about corruption charges against Clinton was that he had no money. It never made sense that a smart guy like him would have been corrupt without getting rich. Yet, most believed immediately that he’d strayed with Monica. They simply didn’t find such a personal matter relevant to his job as president.
Bush’s appearance on Meet The Press a few weeks ago was a disaster. His public statements are increasingly annoying in their stale and repetitive rhetoric. Loyal civil servants are coming forward and complaining about the errors, lies and thuggish tactics that the Bush administrtation is perpetrating. Nothing seems to be working.
And, deep down, the American people are not surprised. With more than three years to go and a national security crisis on their hands they closed their eyes and held on for dear life, hoping against hope that he would rise to the occasion. He didn’t, despite all the phony media hooplah that insisted he was Churchill in ermine and epaulets. We are now only eight months away from our first chance to replace him with someone more capable. People are starting to let go of their desperate need to believe.
The veil is being lowered because it finally feels safe to do so.