September 7, 2006

Sometimes, I think that liberals and conservatives are living on two different planets. Increasingly, it seems that the two groups can’t agree on a common history — much less a common standard for dealing with important tasks ahead.

It appears to me that virtually everything that George W. Bush has done to wage the “war on terror” has been deliberately to help the Republican Party and to hurt the Democratic Party. I think that a truly great U.S. president after 9/11 would have put partisanship aside and established a genuine dialogue among experts of all political pursuasions to determine how to fight Islamic jihadism effectively, while still adhering to the Bill of Rights as closely as possible. Instead, because “national security” has been an issue working in the Republicans’ favor, they constantly use it as a hammer to beat the Democrats. In effect, Bush would rather be President of the Republican Party than President of the United States of America. It didn’t have to be this way.

Now that Bush’s standing has plummeted in the polls, conservative commentators are scolding the American people that they are being too hard on Bush. And I can’t imagine these pundits using the language they do if they were discussing a Democratic president. Here is an example of such a tactic, from conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg, and my replies:

GIVE BUSH A BREAK

The president’s most stubborn critics won't stop beating the Iraq and Katrina drums despite much success elsewhere

by Jonah Goldberg

August 31, 2006


Lord knows I have my problems with President Bush. He taps the federal coffers like a monkey smacking the bar for another cocaine pellet in an addiction study. Some of his sentences give me the same sensation as falling backward in one of those “trust” exercises, in which you just have to hope things work out. Yes, the Iraq invasion has gone badly, and to deny this is to suggest that Bush meant for things to turn out this way, which is even crueler than saying he failed to get it right.

But you know what? It’s time to cut the guy some slack.

I think that voters have “cut [Bush] some slack” ever since the 2000 election. I can’t imagine them turning a blind eye to a Democrat with Bush’s poor powers of communication.

Of course, I will get hippo-choking amounts of e-mail from Bush-haters telling me that all I ever do is cut Bush slack. But these folks grade on the curve. By their standards, anything short of demanding that a live, half-starved badger be sewn into his belly flunks.

Maybe lines like “half-starved badger” are primarily meant to be funny, but they are a symptom of a common tendency among conservative commentators: to use extreme language to caricature — and thereby dismiss — people of opposing political tendencies. In other words, Goldberg is setting up a straw man to knock down. [I also think that Goldberg’s use of hyperbolic language serves to mask how serious Bush’s blundering and over-reaching have been. If you use such excessive imagery as sewing half-starved badgers into human skin, it makes more realistic human excesses — such as starting a war on false pretenses — seem more mundane and, therefore, no big deal.]

No, we liberals are not demanding that feral animals be sewn to Bush’s belly. All we are asking for is Bush to be held accountable for what he’s done. And it’s hard to have an accountable president when the Republican-controled Congress sees itself primarily as an extension of the Bush White House, rather than a seperate branch of government. In fact, if it weren’t for moderate Republicans like Sens. John McCain and Arlen Specter, I daresay that there wouldn’t be any oversight of Bush at all.

Also, note Goldberg’s use of the word “haters,” which makes our criticisms of Bush sound irrational and unreasonable. What makes these criticisms “hate”? Bush has done virtually nothing to reach out across the aisle. After losing the popular vote in 2000, and winning the presidency only on a technicality, he proceded to govern as if he won in a landslide. When some Democrats compromised in good faith with Bush on some of his pet projects, he would then turn around and campaign against them. After winning the 2004 vote by the narrowest of margins for a sitting president, he proceeded to crow that he had a “mandate” and “political capital.” He continues to use issues to advantage the Republicans and disadvantage the Democrats. He doesn’t consider himself answerable to the 49% of the American voters who voted against him. I wouldn’t call my feelings for Bush “hatred,” but I am very frustrated by his behavior and his unwillingness to compromise. Should I love a guy like this instead?

Besides, the Bush-bashers have lost credibility. The most delicious example came this week when it was finally revealed that Colin Powell’s oak-necked major-domo Richard Armitage — and not some star chamber neocon — “outed” Valerie Plame, the spousal prop of Washington’s biggest ham, Joe Wilson. Now it turns out that instead of “Bush blows CIA agent’s cover to silence a brave dissenter” — as Wilson practices saying into the mirror every morning — the story is, “One Bush enemy inadvertently taken out by another’s friendly fire.”

Even though Plame was outed inadvertently by Armitage, it seems to me that the Executive Branch was more concerned with concocting an excuse to overthrow Saddam Hussein than it was with the accuracy of Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. (This was the speech where Bush asserted that Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Africa in order to make nuclear bombs, an assertion subsequently challenged by Plame’s husband, former amassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had investigated this charge earlier for the CIA. Conservatives wondered if Plame, an undercover CIA agent specializing in weapons-of-mass-destruction issues, had nominated her husband for the investigation out of nepotism. If so, conservatives contended, Wilson’s conclusions were at least debatable.)

And then there’s Hurricane Katrina. Yes, the federal government could have responded better. And of course there were real tragedies involved in that disaster. But you know what? Bad stuff happens during disasters, which is why we don't call them tickle-parties.

The anti-Bush chorus, including enormous segments of the mainstream media, see Katrina as nothing more than a good stick for beating on piñata Bush’s “competence.” The hypocrisy is astounding because the media did such an abysmal job covering the reality of New Orleans (contrary to their reports, there were no bands of rapists, no disproportionate deaths of poor blacks, nothing close to 10,000 dead, etc.). It seems indisputable that Katrina highlighted the tragedy of New Orleans rather than create it. Long before Katrina, New Orleans was a dysfunctional city in a state with famously corrupt and incompetent leadership, many of whose residents think that it is the job of the federal government to make everyone whole.

The Mississippi coast was hit harder by Katrina than New Orleans was. And although New Orleans’ levee failure was a unique problem — one the local leadership ignored for decades — the devastation in Mississippi was in many respects more severe. And you know what? Mississippi has the same federal government as Louisiana, and reconstruction there is going gangbusters while, after more than $120 billion in federal spending, New Orleans remains a basket case. Here's a wacky idea: Maybe it's not all Bush's fault.

Note that Goldberg says nothing about the video of Bush being briefed on Katrina before the hurricane struck, a video that showed an intellectually disengaged president. Also, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which had worked so well under Clinton, became a dumping ground for cronies under Bush, thereby undermining its effectiveness. No, it’s not all Bush’s fault, but I think that a more engaged president wouldn’t have let his response to the disaster get so out of hand.

Then, of course, there’s the war on terror. Democrats love to note that Bush hasn’t caught Osama bin Laden yet, as if this is the most vital metric for success. Yes, it’d be nice to catch Bin Laden — no doubt Ramsey Clark, the top legal gun for both LBJ and Saddam Hussein, will be looking for a new client soon. [Note Goldberg’s unnecessary dig at a Democratic operative.] But even nicer than catching Bin Laden is not having thousands of dead Americans in New York, Washington and L.A. Contrary to all expert predictions, there hasn’t been a successful attack on the homeland since 9/11.

Indeed, the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly contains a (typically) long, exhaustively reported cover story by James Fallows about how the U.S. is in fact winning the war on terror, thanks largely to Bush’s policies (though Fallows works hard not to credit Bush).

I can’t imagine conservative commentators holding a Democratic president to this low a standard: no Bin Laden, but no new attacks either. This seems especially bewildering when so many conservative pundits are blaming Clinton for not capturing or killing Bin Laden when he was president, such as Rich Lowery’s book Losing Bin Laden. More important to me is that — after the 9/11 attacks, when Bin Laden had actually done something that made his capture imperative — Bush passed up a chance to get the terrorist mastermind in Afghanistan, in order to redeploy U.S. troops for the overthrow of Hussein in Iraq.

Political dissatisfaction with the president rests entirely on Iraq and overall Bush fatigue. The rest amounts to little more than Iraq-motivated brickbats gussied up to look like free-standing complaints. That's how hate works: It looks for more excuses to hate in the same way that fire looks for more stuff to burn.

Again, what makes our criticisms of Bush’s behavior “hate”? I find it very ironic that some conservatives — even lawmakers in Congress! — considered it acceptable political discourse to accuse Clinton of rape and murder when he was president. But even the most sober, fact-based, constructive criticism of Bush’s policies is considered “hate.” To call this a double standard is an understatement.

That’s why Bush's Democratic critics flit about like bilious butterflies, exploiting each superficial or transient problem just long enough to score some points in the polls and then moving on. Bush’s Medicare plan was an egregious corporate giveaway, they cried, until seniors overwhelmingly reported that they like it. And the Patriot Act? Can anyone even remember what the Democrats were whining about? I think it had something to do with libraries that were never searched.

Look, things could obviously be a lot better. But they could be a lot worse too. John Kerry could be president.

How would a John Kerry presidency be worse?

In the end, Goldberg still hasn’t convinced me that the war in Iraq, the erosion of our constitutional rights, and FEMA’s disastrous response to Katrina are all “superficial or transient problems.” Just the fact that someone is making so far-fetched an argument — in order to tell us that the naked emperor is wearing a wonderful suit of clothes — nauseates the hell out of me.