NGUYEN: Well, it wasn’t quite an apology, but it was an admission. Three weeks after his State of the Union address calling for energy independence, President Bush acknowledged today that his administration has been sending some mixed signals.
Mr. Bush visited one of the nation’s top renewable energy labs in Colorado. He praised the work that’s being done there and acknowledged that just two weeks ago the government laid off 32 workers there. Those jobs have now been restored, just in time for the president’s visit.
I’m sure those 32 workers are grateful, but really. This is becoming embarrasing. I don’t know if you saw him, but he was draped so far forward on the podium he looked like he was trying to crawl over it. Maybe there was a copy of “My Pet Goat” lying open on the floor.
President Bush, on a three-state trip to promote his energy policy, said Tuesday that a budgeting mix-up was the reason 32 workers at one of the nation’s premier renewable energy labs were laid off and then reinstated just before his visit.
Bush addressed the funding problem as soon as he began speaking here at the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is developing the sort of renewable energy technologies the president is promoting.
“Sometimes, decisions made as the result of the appropriations process, the money may not end up where it was supposed to have gone,” Bush said.
Right. He never meant to cut those jobs. The money just ended up where it wasn’t supposed to go.
If there are three hallmarks of this failed Bush administration, it is hubris, incompetence and cronyism. This port deal features all three.
The hubris is illustrated by the fact that they actually thought after years of fear mongering and beating of Islamic terrorist war drums, they wouldn’t be questioned about a United Arab Emirates contract for port security. The king shall not be questioned. The incompetence feature is that they believe it is smart to outsource security, of all things, to another country. If there is one thing all sides can agree upon, it’s that the US should control its own borders and ports. It’s common sense.
And finally, as we should have known, via FDL, it turns out this is also another crony cock-up:
The Dubai firm that won Bush administration backing to run six U.S. ports has at least two ties to the White House.
One is Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose agency heads the federal panel that signed off on the $6.8 billion sale of an English company to government-owned Dubai Ports World – giving it control of Manhattan’s cruise ship terminal and Newark’s container port.
Snow was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004, the year after Snow left for President Bush’s cabinet.
The other connection is David Sanborn, who runs DP World’s European and Latin American operations and was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration.
Knowing I have a penchant for Chayefsky, Arthur sent me a link to his discussion of “The Americanization of Emily” a film I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never seen. I’m going to get it today:
Many of the propagandists for war, 40 years ago and ever since — and up to and most definitely including today — consider Emily to be “anti-American” and “anti-war.” It certainly is all that and more — if your view of war is the mythic one. But Chayefsky rejects the myth and all its various aspects totally and across the board. It is unjustified to conclude that Chayefsky is “anti-war” in the sense of advocating pacifism: such a view finds no support in the film. But what Chayefsky does convey is just as threatening to the war lovers: while he may view some wars as absolutely necessary and required, that still does not make any war a “good” one, in the affirmative sense. Any war, even one dictated by the demands of self-defense, is immensely destructive and causes untold suffering. Much of that suffering is endured by people who are entirely innocent.
Chayefsky’s target is the one identified by Charlie: it is the glorification of war, and the countless ways in which all of us “honor the institution.” We build statues of our war heroes and name streets after them; we erect shrines to the dead. We insist on the “ideals” for which we fought, and the “goodness” of our intentions. Many of us do this in the misdirected and destructive search for “meaning” in our lives: our own stunted souls prevent us from finding fulfillment and happiness in our individual lives, so we look for “glory” by climbing over endless piles of corpses.
And what is lost in all of this is the unbearable horror and pain inflicted on individual human beings, and the particularized, specific costs of our quest for glory, or meaning, or “national greatness,” or honor.
On The Internet No One Knows You’re A (Singing) Dog
by tristero
Thanks, folks, for all the nice comments about my music – including the ones that that truly were LOL. Just a few things before once again scooting back, more or less, into the closet.
I sent Digby the Times review and he asked if he could mention it. I said it was fine with me. The main reason I don’t write more about what I do is that I’m really not trying to promote my musical career in my blogging.* It’s not that I’m above promotion; no one is. Even Stravinsky was shameless when it came to hyping his work. It’s rather that it seems like a blog is the wrong place to flack external reputations.
For me, the most interesting aspect of blogging has nothing to do with anyone’s accomplishments but rather the present quality of their thought and the extent of their knowledge. While it is much less true now than it was in the olden days five years ago, it is still the case that prior reputation counts for much less in the blogosphere than it does Out There. You are read, or not read, based entirely on your ability to persuade from post to post. And in order to be persuasive, not only must you be a decent writer, but you damn well better know how to back up your assertions with convincing, relevant, links. Whether you’ve got a doctorate in political science from Stanford or are an 11 year old afraid to come out of your bedroom really is besides the point.
That is how it should be. If it does anything, blogging can make hash of the rhetorical fallacy of appealing to authority. One’s authority as a blogger, to the extent anyone has any, comes entirely from the merit of the posts. And that is wonderful. You don’t read Josh Marshall’s blog because he’s got a reputation as an ace reporter. You read his blog because with every post, he reports. He is actively making a reputation in a way that, say, a NY Times reporter doesn’t have to. The mere act of being hired by the Times confers (even now, of course) an authoritative reputation, whether or not it is deserved. To put it into big words: At its best, blogging transmutes reified power – authority – back into something contingent. Authority is no longer a noun, but a verb. You earn your reputation with every word. It’s never assumed.
And brother, do we need to stop listening to unearned authority.
In 2002, the experts in the press gave the experts in the Bush administration a free pass to market an insane, unnecessary war. It was so obviously a mistake that even a musician immediately could understand it was doomed to catastrophe. During 2002 and early ’03, I went all over the world for concerts of my music. It was an exciting time, and I loved every minute of it. But there was one thing that was quite striking, wherever I went. Everyone, and I mean I everyone from cab drivers to diplomats, thought the United States had gone insane in its advocacy for an Iraq invasion. And yet, back home the experts assured us it would be a cakewalk.
A few weeks after returning from Sydney, Australia where, John Howard aside, everyone was as alarmed as I was at the impending war, I began blogging in February, 2003. I figured that, artist or no, I knew an imminent foreign policy disaster when I saw one. And to my horror, I was right. I have never wanted to be more wrong than I was about the Bush/Iraq war, but I never doubted that it would end up, more or less, where it has.
And so here I am, still blogging and hoping against hope that this country I love will no longer heed the advice of people who understand the world a lot less well than a fellow who’s spent most of us life composing. It’s not that I know so much, although I’m not stupid or uneducated. It’s that the Bushites know so very, very little.
What the present crisis teaches us, a crisis in which the country is being led by clowns posing as experts, is that the opinions of ordinary citizens are vital to the running of a major democratic power. It’s not that expertise isn’t essential. Of course it is. But political expertise in a democracy must always confront the full range of public opinion in a meaningful manner. Otherwise, there lie monsters.
Today, the public discourse is so clotted and constrained, so limited to the right and far right, that it really is imperative for those of us who object to the direction the country is going to speak out, strongly and often. Not because we all deserve a prominent media role but rather in the hopes that eventually the media will be forced to broaden its coverage of political opinion to acknowledge voices like ours. Voices expert and persuasive enough to articulate alternatives to Bushism. Heaven knows we need them, and fast.
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*When I first started to blog, I was a bit concerned about how my politics would affect my career, but didn’t care that much. If anything, I care more now. By which I mean that I think it is extremely important to stand up and be counted in opposition to Bush. But I like being Tristero, it’s part of who I am, and I don’t see any reason to bump the guy off, any more than there’s a reason to promote my music.
Matt Stoller has a fiery exchange going with Hotline Blogometer and Washington Examiner opinion writer, William Buetler, about the normally navel gazing subject of the blogosphere’s influence on politics. I don’t have a lot to add, except to take issue with one little bit that Buetler writes in his piece:
The phrase [Vichy Democrats]was timely, punchy, and summed up the anger I saw directed against moderate and conservative Democrats.
No, no, no and no. The anger was not and is not against moderate and conservative Democrats. Paul Hackett is a conservative Democrat. It is against those who seek to either make deals with or capitulate to Republicans, particularly on issues of fundamental principle. “Vichy” is a term I don’t use because I think the Republicans do such a fine job of demeaning Dems that I don’t need to help them. However, it is a particular term of art that means something quite specific: to sell out your own people to the enemy.
The grassroots of the Democratic Party see something that all the establishment politicians have not yet realized: bipartisanship is dead for the moment and there is no margin in making deals. The rules have changed. When you capitulate to the Republicans for promises of something down the road you are being a fool. When you make a deal with them for personal reasons, you are selling out your party. When you use Republican talking points to make your argument you are helping the other side. When you kiss the president on the lips at the state of the union you are telling the Democratic base that we are of no interest or concern to you. This hyper-partisanship is ugly and it’s brutal, but it is the way it is.
It’s not “left” and “right” or “liberal,” “moderate,” or “conservative” that animates the grassroots. We argue some amongst ourselves on policy, of course, but that’s not the rap on the establishment. It’s the desire that our representatives wake up and recognise that we are in a new political era in which these designations take second place to “Democrat.” That’s the environment we are in whether we like it or not — a country sharply divided by party, not ideology.
The Democratic party did everything it could to alleviate the culture war and the partisanship in the 90’s by electing southern moderates to the white house and helping the Republicans pass a lot of legislation born of major compromise of Democratic principles. Nothing was good enough. The culture war raged, not on the basis of policy — there was much in Bill Clinton’s policies for a Republican to love. It was based purely on the tribal instincts of the culture warriors who insisted that liberals not only be marginalized (fair enough in politics) but that they be annihilated. They gave no quarter unless public opinion absolutely forced them to.
The grassroots believe that after all that, after moving to the right, after offering to compromise, after allowing our “red state Democrats” to run with the other side who then treated them with nothing but bad faith, now is the time for politicans to make a choice. Submit to them or stand with the resistance.
I was just watching Bush give a speech and he said “it makes sense for the government to incent people.”
I’ve never really subscribed to the great man theory, but I have to say that in my experience organizations do take their cues from the person at the top. When you have a president who says things this ridiculous every single day, for more than five years, I think it’s safe to say that he is a boob. And his government is a perfect reflection of him: incompetent, arrogant, short-sighted, impulsive, secretive. A failure. That is the story of Bush’s life. let no one ever say again that it doesn’t matter who the president is becuase he’ll have great people around him. Bush’s government is as bad as anyone could have predicted when we saw him flub that answer about foreigh leaders back in 1999 — he was clearly unprepared and unqualified. And he’s proven it.
Be sure to read Glenn Greenwald’s piece today about the undercurrent in DC that suggests that the Republicans aren’t so sanguine about the NSA scandal accruing to their benefit after all. This is clearly becauase of the pressure coming from within, but I think that mostly has to do with Bush’s unpopularity generally (as I write below.) The bottom line is that the Eunuch Caucus needs some viagra, and quick.
Many Kansans, including members of The Eagle editorial board, have long admired Sen. Pat Roberts for his plainspokenness and reputation for fair brokering of issues.
So it’s troubling that Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is fast gaining the reputation in Washington, D.C., as a reliable partisan apologist for the Bush administration on intelligence and security controversies.
We hope that’s not true. But Roberts’ credibility is on the line. . . .
What’s bothering many, though, is that Roberts seems prepared to write the Bush team a series of blank checks to conduct the war on terror, even to the point of ignoring policy mistakes and possible violations of law.
That’s not oversight — it’s looking the other way.
This is Kansas we’re talking about.
It’s also a sign that Rovism may have run its course. His MO, after all, is to entirely dominate the party from the top down, something that only works if the “top” can wield the whip. The Cheney episode was a window into the inner workings of the white house in this respect and it’s quite clear that Rove does not have the clout he once did. He couldn’t control Cheney. It’s going to be harder and harder for him to control this nervous congress. All lame ducks have a hard time retaining control — a lame duck at 39% is an albatross around his party’s neck.
Of course, Rove is probably a little bit distracted by certain personal matters too. And that’s one very good reason to keep the pressure on. Even if we can’t advance our own agenda, we can certainly help make it difficult for them to advance theirs. That’s just as important to successful politics as anything else.
This is rich. Julia catches Daniel Okrent, erstwhile “public editor” of the NY Times, being critical of the war coverage after he vociferously defended it in his column a while back:
He said poor press coverage lead to the Iraq war, because “in a time of war, editors being [sic] to wear epaulettes on their shoulder” and The Times’ were not exceptional in jumping on the bandwagon.
I think Julia’s being much to hard on poor Mr Okrent. When he was defending the media’s coverage of the war, the Iraq invasion was the all the rage. Epaulettes were the new little black dress of imperialism. Sadly, it’s now as out of date as stone washed jeans. He’s just keeping himself on all the best invitation lists for fashion week.
Kevin Drum has written a review of Bruce Bartlett’s “Imposter” (the heretical consrevative anti-Bush tract for the Washington Monthly.
Here’s an excerpt:
Put in plain terms, Bartlett’s charge is simple. George W. Bush, he says on page one, is a “pretend conservative.” Philosophically, Bush actually has more in common with liberals than he does with true conservatives.
Now, there’s not much question that this is overstated. Bush won’t be getting an invitation to join The New York Times editorial board any time soon. Among other things, he’s appointed hundreds of conservative judges, cut taxes repeatedly and dramatically, signed into law a ban on partial-birth abortions, and committed America to its biggest and costliest war of choice since Vietnam.
And yet, in a narrower but still provocative way, Bartlett makes a persuasive case. I’m a pretty conventional FDR liberal myself, but several years ago, I came to the same conclusion Bartlett did: Bush may be a Republican—boy howdy, is he a Republican—but he’s not the fire-breathing ideologue of liberal legend.
Kevin may be right that Bush has not governed like a doctrinaire conservative. But what’s important here is that it’s not the lack of conservatism that makes a guy like Bartlett jump ship. It’s the failure. As long as Bush was riding high you heard almost nothing from these people. Oh sure there was a column or two from iconoclasts like Paul Craig Roberts or the occasional jab from Pat Buchanan. But there was no real outcry over the prescription drug benefit or the steel tariffs or the deficit during the entire time Bush has been in office. Certainly the anti-conservative notion of nation building, which Bush ran on, was totally jettisoned from conservative discussion. (We are all Wilsonians now.) Conservatives supported him so enthusiastically that they frequently compared his oratory(!) to Winston Churchill’s:
To a greater extent than any politician since Churchill, President Bush has set forth and defended his policies in a series of speeches that combine intellectual brilliance and philosophical gravity. Today’s speech in Latvia was the latest in this series, and, like the others, it will be studied by historians for centuries to come.
This was the cult of Bush. But, as with all modern Republican presidents who become unpopular, he will be ignominiously removed from the pantheon. They did it to Nixon, they did it to Bush Sr and they are now doing it to Churchill the second. It’s always the same complaint. They failed not because of their conservatism, but because they were not conservative enough. It’s nonsense, of course. Even St. Reagan was no more “conservative” than the others — highest tax increase in history, remember?
Kevin discusses this and has a great insight about why liberals loathe Bush so much:
Although the popular perception of Nixon is still that of an archconservative who infuriated liberals, Bartlett reminds us that on domestic policy Nixon routinely caved in to public opinion and betrayed his conservative principles—for example, by creating the EPA, supporting enormous increases in Social Security, and proposing a guaranteed-incomes policy. Likewise, Bush spent nearly his entire first term talking tough but then caving in with barely a whimper to any interest group that might help him win a few more precious votes in 2004. Tariffs were enacted in order to appeal to steelworkers; the Medicare bill was designed to buy the votes of the elderly; and McCain-Feingold was signed in the hope that it would provide a temporary fundraising advantage for the Republican Party. If all of these actions were precisely the opposite of what a real conservative would do, so what? As Nixon might have said, don’t you know there’s an election coming up?
As far as all this goes, Bartlett’s argument is a good one, and the Nixon comparison even provides a neat and underappreciated explanation for why liberals hate Bush so much. After all, it’s possible to respect someone with whom you have a principled disagreement, but not so easy to respect someone whose only real principle is to crush anybody who gets in his way. (Bush’s alter-ego, Karl Rove, summed up this philosophy within earshot of journalist Ron Suskind when he yelled to an aide about someone who had displeased him, “We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!”) As with Nixon, it’s not really Bush’s conservatism that gets liberals seething. In fact, it’s just the opposite. It’s precisely his lack of political principle, combined with a vengeful ruthlessness so dark it’s scary, that makes liberals break out in hives.
Exactly. He’s the perfect president for Limbaugh Nation (the successor to Nixonland.) But then, that’s really what the modern Republican party is all about — the big money boys and the ruthless operatives. Everybody else in the party are just dupes:
“The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees…Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them.” Michael Scanlon, former communications director to Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff’s first lieutenant
(And by the way, so-called principled conservatives are just another brand of “wackos” to these guys.)
Rick Perlstein knows this terrain very, very well. In the course of interviewing various ideological leaders of the movement over the years he came to see that the activists and intellectuals have an amazing capacity for compartmentalization in which they quite willingly adopt the “ends justify the means” strategy of the ruthless operatives. But they are, unsurprisingly, incredibly dishonest about it. Perlstein writes:
This past year, I interviewed Richard Viguerie about conservatives and the presidential campaign. I showed him an infamous flier the Republican National Committee had willingly taken credit for, featuring a crossed-out Bible and the legend, “This will be Arkansas if you don’t vote.” “To do this,” Viguerie told me, “it reminds me of Bush the 41st, and not just him, but other non-conservative Republicans.”
Republicans are different from conservatives: that was one of the first lessons I learned when I started interviewing YAFers. I learned it making small talk with conservative publisher Jameson Campaigne, in Ottawa, Illinois, when I asked him if he golfed. He said something like: “Are you kidding? I’m a conservative, not a Republican.”
But back to Viguerie’s expression of same. With a couple of hours’ research I was able to find a mailer from an organization that was then one of his direct-mail clients that said “babies are being harvested and sold on the black market by Planned Parenthood.”
Why not cut corners like this, if you believe you are defending the unchanging ground of our changing experience? This is what many Americans of good faith seem to be hearing conservatives telling them.
It is what they are telling us. But, ofcourse, the modern Republican party is not conservative by any definition of conservatism. I’m not even sure it’s ideological at all, but to the extent it is, it’s radical. Yet the allegedly conservative party has enthusiastically supported a president who believes that you can wage wars, lower taxes and expand government all at the same time. That’s not just radical, it’s magical. And they can hardly raise their heads even today to oppose an administration that is radically expanding the police powers of the federal government. But it’s starting to happen. They can adjust their principles to anything except failure. A president at 40% simply cannot be a conservative. Conservatism is, after all, supposed to be tremendously popular in this country.
Here’s a little preview from the ultimate Bush worshippers, Powerline:
For reasons I don’t fully understand, there is something about “leaders,” especially self-appointed leaders, and most especially those who are drawn to intensive participation in organizations, that tends toward liberalism. We see this in politics all the time, of course: it is one thing to vote for conservatism, something else entirely to get it from our elected leaders.
All of which makes me especially thankful, this year, for democracy, limited government and free enterprise: the best measures yet devised to protect us from our leaders.
By the time it’s all over Bush is going to be seen as a coke-sniffing, frat boy hippy by the movement conservatives. This is how they do it. And then they’ll go back to doing the same things they always do — whatever it takes to win.
“Go after ’em like a son of a bitch” Richard Nixon
“I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around a campfire but are lousy in politics.” Newt Gingrich
“This whole thing about not kicking someone when they are down is BS – Not only do you kick him – You kick him until he passes out – then beat him over the head with a baseball bat – then roll him up in an old rug – and throw him off a cliff into the pounding surf below!!!!!”Michael Scanlon, former communications director to Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff’s first lieutenant