Adam Nagourney's article in today's NY Times,
"Delicate Dance for Bush in Depicting Spy Program as Asset" is disheartening, disingenuous.
Nagourney writes:
Applying the campaign lessons of simplicity and repetition, Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove, his chief political adviser, have systematically presented arguments in accessible if sometimes exaggerated terms, and they have regularly returned to the theme of terrorism since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
He would do better to call this by its proper name: PROPAGANDA.
The administration's "systematic" use of propaganda, its "repetitive" droning of terror and fear has succeeded time and again, as Nagourney notes, in re-establishing President Bush's vise-like grip on the American imagination. But Nagourney and David D. Kirkpatrick, who reported on this article, the NY Times' two most esteemed political correspondents, continually present this as a legitmiate political "tactic," rather than the insidious machination it actually is.
In recent months, there has been, as noted in the comments below, a strange turn toward metaphors of dance and theater more generally in characterizing Bush propaganda and evasions of the truth. At the start of the Alito hearings, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Arlen Spector stated plainly that the hearings would no doubt be a "minuet." During the Roberts' hearings, Senator Joe Biden likened the process to "kabuki theater." Now Nagourney calls Bush's attempt to get out of the questionable legality of his NSA wiretapping program as a "delicate dance."
These metaphors themselves "dance" around the issue, help to further obscure propaganda and evasions of the truth. Notably, minuet and kabuki are by their nature performative arts that make use of shadowplay and seductive cover-up.
Print journalism, and the NY Times especially, has lost most of its credibility. But alarmingly, it is increasingly becoming more, rather than less of a mouthpiece for the administration and for government. It is daily legitimizing public manipulation and illegial acts by presenting them as the "regular" business of government. In doing so, they are aiding in the degredation, the outright perversion of the English language and the possibility for independent thought.
Some might argue that the columnists fare better. The truth is, Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, both of whom I still read with great pleasure, simply offer up a different but no less pernicious form of cynicism. They, too, use the dictionary of acceptable terms the administration has put foward in advancing its agenda in order to critique it in turn. But, you cannot speak truth to power, as the saying goes, by using the terms those in power have themselves defined or emptied of meaning and redefined.
Systematic use of simple terms and repetitive cycles of fear mongering renders time and protest obsolete. This is a primary totalitarian tool and goal.
In the now seemingly halcyon days of 2002, 2003, and 2004 America's literary lions emerged from their dens to protest the administration's policies in a remarkable boon of articles and small books. There was Susan Sontag writing articles and Op-Ed pieces The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, and her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others. There was Norman Mailer writing in The New York Review of Books. And there was Gore Vidal writing in The Nation, and in a series of chapbooks published by The Nation. We were listening, we were reading, but did it matter?
With the return to "National Security" as the Republican propaganda call for the 2006 election, and as a defense of the NSA wiretapping program, we are back to 2001 and that is exactly where the administration wants us to be.