The Last Refuge of Scoundrels
Sun Sep 03, 2006 at 07:38:01 PM PDT
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel"
--Samuel Johnson
Not so fast, Sam. As Jim Hoagland's latest column illustrates, Johnson got it wrong.
President Bush made headlines recently by adopting a more somber, realistic tone on Iraq. Then Bush, his vice president and his defense secretary stepped all over that message with unduly harsh assaults on the war's critics last week. What gives?
What gives, indeed? How on earth could such earnest, benign leaders send us such confused signals?
The answer, says Jim, is that
they're still new at this. Leveling with themselves and with the public, that is. The infamous Bush Bubble, as it turns out, was all Andy Card's fault.
The tone reflects an ongoing change at the White House, where a psychological renovation led by Josh Bolten, Bush's new chief of staff, is having some effect.
Bad news now gets more quickly to Bush, who in his first term "tolerated a system that was designed to evade reality whenever it was unpleasant," says an insider who deals frequently with the White House. "The place has gone from having a concierge who smoothed out wrinkles to having a consigliere running things."
The concierge in that formulation is the departed Andrew Card...
Nice to know we finally have somebody "running things" after five years. Wasn't it the president's job to establish a
working system, not "tolerate" a lousy one? It wasn't Andrew Card but Bush himself who
brushed off that fateful PDB in 2001.
But that's all water under the bridge. Now that Josh Bolten is keeping Bush in the loop, it's just a matter of working out the kinks in the ol' propaganda catapult by letting the rabid attack dogs in the field know what the born-again Camus scholars in the WH are thinking:
The great irony of this administration is that its opponents credit it with being masterful at spin when it is in fact pathetic in managing its messages and its collective image. Whatever small credit Bush was gaining for becoming more realistic about Iraq was quickly wiped out by the controversy created by sharply partisan speeches of Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld last week in the latest example of a gang that can't spin straight. The message water was later muddied even more by a belated reaching-out letter to Democrats from Rumsfeld and by a bleak Pentagon report on sectarian violence in Iraq.
Misoverestimated again, have we? The VP and the Secy. of Defense are just off the reservation. Failure to coordinate. Where's Alexander Graham Bell when you need him?
It's a comforting theory for the dwindling faithful who have few options remaining. For a Bush partisan, I suppose that even admitting you never knew what the hell you were doing is more palatable than conceding that your highflown theories about the world were crap to begin with. Even in defeat, you can take one last shot at your enemies--this time for giving you too much credit for planning and execution.
So, when life gives you Katrina, you make lemonade: For the desperate GOP and its neo-con claque, it's time to brush off the last remnants of shame and run unabashed on the "Incompetence is Strength" platform. Make a hash of everything from Iraq to FEMA to Medicare, then run for reelection on a populist indictment of "Big Govermnment".
And thus we learn that the last refuge of scoundrels is not patriotism, but ineptitude.
For clueful moonbats at least, Hoagland's credulous analysis of this Administration's mixed messages ignores a simpler, quite plausible explanation. We all know that pounding the security issue and projecting an image of fortitude and resolve are the only way for the GOP to retain its majority. It won't work, yet they must try--hence their fervid memetic exhumations of Chamberlain and Hitler.
Much as that "bleak Pentagon report" on Iraq was released late on the Friday before Labor Day, that earlier show of furrowed brows and consternation Hoagland refers to happened in August--which is, as Andy Card would tell you, a terrible time to "roll out new products" like an elective invasion, let alone a realistic appraisal of its aftermath.
August is, however, a wonderful time to slip items into the record that may come in useful later. When the media (apart from Krugman and Olbermann) complain loudly about the disconnect from reality or the overheated and simplistic demagoguery of the election campaign, the White House can always refer everyone back to that sober, nuanced August speech that nobody heard.
No, Jim, this is not incompetence, but simply the logical extension of a core cynical stratagem: the familiar, massive campaign of innuendo, half-truths and tendentiousness (cf. Saddam, Prague, 9/11, mushroom clouds) followed first by stentorian scapegoating of whistleblowers and subordinate agencies (the CIA, e.g.), and then by a terse, mumbled retraction on page B41. It resembles nothing so much as the abusive drunk who mixes in the occasional scrap of calculated humility with his barrage of brushback fastballs. Got to keep your battered electorate guessing.
There's nothing new here, except that by now they've realized you can keep right on telling the Big Lie even after you've admitted it's total bollocks.
Only 2.5 more years to go...
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