The Washington Post's
E.J. Dionne takes up the Bauer, Weise and Young (you'll recall, the ones with the "No Blood for Oil" bumper sticker) ejection from Bush's "Conversation on Social Security" in Colorado last week:
If President Bush is so insistent on the need for his political adversaries to talk to him about fixing Social Security, then why does he keep throwing them out of his campaign rallies -- excuse me, "town meetings" -- on the subject?
More E.J., and more pundits below, including:
- Bob Herbert on retired brass speaking out against Pentagon on prisoner abuse
- David Ignatius on the Robb-Silberman whitewash
- Derrick Jackson reminds us what Rumsfeld said to Clinton in 1998
- H.D.S. Greenaway warns against premature optimism in the Mideast
- Ellen Goodman closes the book on Schiavo
- Today's cartoon
E.J. Dionne, continued:
Lately the president has been chastising Democrats for not sitting down with him to fashion a solution. "I think there is a political price for not getting involved in the process," Bush said in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Wednesday. "I think there is a political price for saying, 'It's not a problem, I'm going to stay away from the table.' " But when Bush's critics show up at the president's taxpayer-financed events, they are often told there is no place at the table for dissenters.
Dionne asked Joe Lockhart if Bush's practice is really unique:
Yes, all presidents try to present themselves in the best light, a fact acknowledged by Joe Lockhart and Doug Sosnik, top aides to former president Bill Clinton who also helped John Kerry in 2004. "We clearly used our allies to try to build crowds," Sosnik said of the Clinton approach. But the Clintonians did not exclude opponents, as a review of scores of news stories reporting hecklers at Clinton speeches confirmed. "I'd guess that at one out of every six events, people heckled," Lockhart said, "and Clinton came out ahead." Facing dissent head-on is part of the job description for the leader of a free people.
Clinton could do it, Reagan could also, and even "Poppy" Bush handled his share of hecklers.
In the end, Bush is not helping himself by living in the bubble. I'm reminded of LBJ, who in the heydey of antiwar protests, took to limiting his public speaking events to military audiences in well guarded armories.
As Dionne puts it, not such a tough leader after all, huh?
And so you wonder why a president who sells himself as a tough, confident bring-'em-on type of guy seems so anxious about facing average citizens who disagree with him. Why does he insist on being surrounded, always, by people who tell him that he's right and great and wonderful?
Retired brass break silence on abuse and torture of prisoners
The NY Times' Bob Herbert recounts the dinner this week where he heard Rear Adm. John Hutson, Ret., and Brig. Gen. James Cullen, Ret., describe their reactions and positions in response to the ongoing revelation of torture practices encouraged by the White House and the Pentagon:
Both men said they were unable to remain silent as institutions that they served loyally for decades, and which they continue to love without reservation, are being damaged by patterns of conduct that fly in the face of core values that most members of the military try mightily to uphold.
"At some point," said General Cullen, "I had to say: 'Wait a minute. We cannot go along with this.' "
General Cullen and Admiral Hutson have been involved with Human Rights First, who along with the ACLU filed the lawsuit against Rumsfeld seeking to hold him accountable for the pattern of torture and abuse of prisoners held by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Cuba.
Whitewash of the White House
David Ignatius calls the presidential commission report what it is, scathing on the intelligence failures, but a whitewash of the White House's role in the drive to invade Iraq:
The report blamed everyone involved in the WMD fiasco except the Bush administration officials who actually made the decision to go to war. "[W]e were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received," the commission explained. That omission is unfortunate. If there's one thing that has become clear in the history of U.S. intelligence over the past 50 years it is that the CIA is not in fact a rogue agency. It is shaped, often to a fault, by the priorities and pet projects of whoever is in the White House. Intelligence supports policy, but it doesn't make it.
On the same matter, The Boston Globe's Derrick Jackson finds irony in the passing of Terri Schiavo--the right-wing's poster child for their "culture of life"--on the same day as the Robb-Silberman Commission released its report on Bush's "culture of death" fraud in Iraq.
Jackson, as did many others yesterday, points out the whitewash behind the report exonerating the White House from pressuring intelligence agencies to produce desired outcomes, and reminds us of the bias exhibited well before Bush's inauguration in 2001:
The answer to why the commission saw no evidence is because it is amazingly unclear as to how much they questioned the White House, whose public relations campaign from the current defense secretary to forcibly remove Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein predates Bush's 2000 election. A 1998 open letter to President Clinton from defense hawks, one of them Donald Rumsfeld, said, ''even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq's chemical and biological weapons production. . . .
''The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy."
Premature optimism in Mideast
The Globe's H.D.S. Greenaway gives the U.S. and the Bush regime cautious credit for recent steps towards democracy in the Mideast and Central Asia, but warns that too much self congratulation is premature:
Fifty years ago the United States represented hope and freedom to much of the world still under European colonialism. Its universities and schools in the Muslim world in particular attracted many of the developing world's best and brightest. I always remember the words of Stephen Penrose, a former president of the American University in Beirut, who wrote in the 1950s that ''Americans have never been seen as colonizers or subjugators, and it is hard even now for most Arabs to conceive of them as such." It is no longer hard for Arabs to see Americans as subjugators today.
We have been down the regime change road before. After the US-inspired coups in Iran and Guatemala in the '50s, Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms worried that such actions had become ''a foreign policy panacea." The Bay of Pigs soon followed.
So if his call to freedom can inspire people to seek democracy, let's hear it for President Bush. But if the lesson taken from recent events is that the invasion of Iraq can be repeated elsewhere, then hopes will turn to dust, the tunnel will be very long and dark indeed, and Bush won't have gotten it right.
Terri Schiavo's legacy
Ellen Goodman sums up the lessons learned from the agonizing Schiavo ordeal:
Nearly 80 percent of Americans have said of Schiavo, "I don't want to live like that." Yet less than 30 percent have signed living wills to tell their doctors and families what they have told pollsters.
It took Michael Schiavo, the demonized husband, four years to give up hope. In far-less-certain cases, the initial desire to "do everything" to save someone we love often evolves into uncertainty about what we should do for how much hope of what kind of recovery.
It's why we need a health-care proxy as well as a living will. We need someone we can trust and burden with the authority to make decisions for us when we are unable. [...]
People on all sides share a moral obligation. We need to let the people we leave behind mourn with the clear conscience that, as much as possible, they did what we wanted.
Terri Schiavo was only 25 when this tragedy began. Her family has been, simply, devastated. We owe our own families much, much more than that.
I think Ellen just about said it all, and no more needs to be said about Terri Schiavo.
Today's cartoon
From the somber to the satire, courtesy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Mike Luckovich: