Tom Tomorrow Nails The Bushies' Rationale For Iraq

In addition to the Big Lie, the Bushies depend on the choice of love it or leave it. If this is (fair & balanced) hackneyed rhetoric, so be it.

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Copyright © 2005 Salon

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Q: What's A Four-Letter Word For Liar? A: Bush

Dub wouldn't know the truth if it came up and kicked him in the ass. On a day so cold in central Texas that — according to Austin humor columnist, John Kelso — the balls would be frozen off a billiard table, my daily Austin fishwrap was not delivered. So much for sleet, rain, and the dark of night. I went to the online version of the Austin fishwrap and read Paul Mulshine's latest rant about Duplicitous Dub. If this is (fair & balanced) scoring points, so be it.

[x Austin Fishwrap]
Bush is turning out to be a pretty bad liar
By Paul Mulshine

People say with assurance that George W. Bush is a man of his word, a man who means what he says and says what he means.

Well, that's the spin. In reality, he's a politician. In other words, he's a liar. That doesn't bother me. I admire a good politician, which is to say I admire a good liar.

What bothers me is that of late Bush's lies are so obvious that even the boobs can see through them. I allude, of course, to his recent attempts to placate his base with an alleged "crackdown" on illegal immigration. That's a great idea. The problem is, even the boobs can see he's lying. Here's what he said while wearing a Border Patrol jacket in Tucson, Ariz., last week: "We want to make it clear that when people violate immigration laws, they're going to be sent home, and they need to stay at home."

And here's what he said in his Saturday radio address: "Our immigration laws apply across all of America, and we will enforce those laws throughout our land."

There are more than 10 million people violating our immigration laws at this moment. Bush hasn't the slightest intention of enforcing the immigration laws against them. His goal, obvious to anyone with ears, is not to enforce the laws but to suspend them. He wants an amnesty. And he's lying about that, too.

"I oppose amnesty," he said Saturday. "Rewarding lawbreakers would encourage others to break the law and keep pressure on our border."

But Bush does indeed plan to reward those who broke the law. He wants to give them guest-worker permits good for six years. That's an amnesty.

And consider the Bush administration's push to grant driver's licenses to illegal aliens. If he's going to send home all those who are violating our immigration laws, why will the violators need driver's licenses?

I suspect that even the dimmest of the dim bulbs out there in the red states can see through this spin. But many of them are still buying the spin on the Iraq war. Bush made a speech about that last week as well, this time in Annapolis, Md. He somehow refrained from dressing up in that Navy flight suit again, but the speech was full of the usual lies and evasions that have followed since the unraveling of the mission his spin doctors once portrayed as accomplished.

Most of the speech was devoted to countering the criticisms of those who are advocating what Bush termed "an artificial timetable for withdrawing our troops." The spin emanating from the Rove spin machine is that there is something inherently unpatriotic about demanding an exit strategy. One problem: The first politician to do so was none other than George W. Bush. It might have been more refreshing if he'd said something like this:

"When I was first running for the presidency back in 2000, I made a promise to the American people. I promised I wouldn't get our military tied up in nation-building exercises overseas. 'Absolutely not,' I said. I also said, 'I'm going to be judicious as to how to use the military. It needs to be in our vital interest, the mission needs to be clear and the exit strategy obvious.'

"Well, I made a big mistake: I trusted Dick Cheney. What can I say? He sure looked like he knew what he was doing. But I managed to get 2,000 good Americans killed because Cheney and his nutty neocon pals never bothered to draw up that exit strategy I had promised. In fact, they never intended to exit Iraq at all. They thought our troops would be greeted with rose petals and we'd have permanent bases there for nation-building exercises throughout the Mideast.

"Don't worry, though. I've wised up. Cheney's in the doghouse. I'm finally releasing a national strategy for victory in Iraq. Critics may say it's a little late to be coming up with a strategy for Iraq. They're right. It's three years too late. What can I say? Cheney's an idiot. And I'm an idiot for trusting him."

That would be a good start. As I said, I'm cynical about this sort of thing. Under normal circumstances, I would never recommend that a politician actually tell the truth.

But even the boobs in his political base are starting to look at Bush's speeches on Iraq the same way they look at his speeches on illegal immigration. This is, I suspect, a rare moment when a politician might be better off leveling with the American people. If I were his spin doctor, I'd advise him to take advantage of it.

Paul Mulshine is a columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, NJ.

Copyright © 2005 Cox Texas Newspapers, LLP

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The Cobra Lectures Austin

The late editorial writer for the Austin American-Statesman, Mary Alice Davis, was fearless. Her family endowed a lectureship at UT-Austin in Davis' name and the inaugural lecturer was The Cobra. Dowd was more than up to the task. If this is (fair & balanced) truth-telling, so be it.


[x Austin Fishwrap]
We can't be afraid to tell it like it is
By Maureen Dowd

The following is a text of Dowd's comments she delivered on November 18, 2005:

I'm honored to be giving the first Mary Alice Davis Lecture.

I've been learning all about Mary Alice today, and I know I would have loved her. She never hesitated to tweak power-brokers. She enjoyed seeing young women compete and succeed — in basketball and in life. She loved to have fun and to work hard. And she loved telling stories. Now we have to tell stories for her.

OK, first a confession. I don't have an iPod. Don't even have any idea how an iPod works. Worst of all, I don't want an iPod — even to get iPorn, which is apparently the latest thing to download on an iPod.

I agree with the New York businessman who wrote an op-ed piece in the Financial Times saying that he wanted to hear the soundtrack of his life, from crickets in the summer to the guy on the street who might call out a warning about an impending terrorist attack.

I'm not a Luddite. I'm not as bad as Mary McGrory, the late, luminous Washington Post columnist who used to write her columns on the campaign bus on a pad in longhand, as close to a Jane Austin quill pen as she could manage. She called laptops "fiendish little gadgets."

I confide this by way of telling you that I don't know anything about technology and where it's taking journalism.

I'm not worried about blogs overtaking print journalism. If it weren't for print journalism, what would bloggers have to write about? I say, the more the merrier. Competition makes everyone sharper.

As Amanda Bennett, the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote in an article recently, the myth is that the Internet is eating our lunch. "Actually," she said, "the Internet IS our lunch. And our dinner, too. We are the Internet. Our site, philly.com, is the No. 1 local Web site in our area."

In September alone, NewYork Times.com achieved record traffic of 21.3 million visitors worldwide. The New York Times generated 561 million page views, whatever that means. But it's good. Ms. Bennett wryly noted that, as Mark Twain said of himself, "Reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated."

I was on Larry King the other night with my old friend, Andrea Mitchell, a fantastically dogged reporter — who, by the way, is the only woman who can get her TV eye makeup put on while she's reading the paper with one eye and her TV lipstick put on while she's reporting on a cell phone.

Anyhow, she said something that was meant to be encouraging about journalism. She told Larry that the NBC evening news would survive, even if it ended up being delivered by Brian Williams to individual cell phones.

I've read the Jetsons prediction that we'll have a newspaper on a coffee table that will instantaneously change every few minutes to update the news, like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel. But I've never paid much attention to these futuristic scenarios. I'm such a technological creton, I can't even figure out how to get onto Times Select, and I've paid my $49.95 with my Mastercard. (Paying to read yourself: Priceless.)

But I'm an optimist about the future of journalism. Because, in the end, it isn't the form that matters. It's the function. It isn't the medium, it's the message.

And here's my message: From time immemorial, from the Roman Senate, which we're vividly reliving on HBO on Sunday nights, to Shakespeare's royal courts to Dick Cheney's House of Pain, power leads to abuse of power. Power, as you can see with King Lear and the Boy Emperor, W., makes people deaf. The pursuit of power, as you can see in MacBeth and with Paul Wolfowitz and the neocon cabal, makes people blind.

Fawning, as you can see with Othello and the Harriet Miers fiasco, poisons judgment and makes those fawned upon behave in ways contrary to their interests, and the interests of the nation.

Maybe it's because I'm Irish and our tradition is storytelling. But, to me, the most important thing is narrative. What is the story arc? What is the fascinating tale to spin for your readers orviewers?

In my decades as a journalist, I've always been drawn to the human stories that compelled me, not necessarily the one judged most important by the paper or my colleagues, and certainly not the narrative the White House tried to push.

The elements of a compelling story don't change from Greek mythology to Greek tragedy to Shakespeare to the farcical Clinton impeachment to the grandiose drama of these last Bush years.

The story of a young man torn between a good father and a bad father, the forces of light and the forces of darkness, is an old one, but it is just as fascinating when you see it in Star Wars or the White House. With the President as Luke Skywalker and Cheney as Darth Vader, the only thing missing from W.'s "Star Wars" drama are the light sabers.

Primal human instincts, tragic flaws, profiles in courage, driving people to do great things and self-destructive things. Sometimes, as with Lyndon Johnson, simultaneously. In my new book, the historian Michael Beshloss tells me that LBJ said that the two things that made politicians more stupid than anything else are sex and envy.

What could be more Shakespearean than that?

At a time when journalism is considered an endangered species, our profession is more necessary than ever. The Bush Administration has done everything it could to kill the system of checks and balances, even as Tom DeLay — or "Hot Tub Tom," as he was known in his salad days here — was pushing to get rid of an independent judiciary.

Bush officials tried to mau mau the press corps by acting as though any tough questioning about their tactics in going to war in Iraq was unpatriotic. They tried to replace the skeptical press corps with a more malleable, Potemkin press corps, giving access only to favored, fawning court reporters, Fox TV and Robert Novak; secretly paying columnists like Armstrong Williams to push the administration line, and spending hundreds of millions on self-aggrandizing covert propaganda and puffery, fashioned like fake newscasts with faux anchor people that were peddled to local news outlets. They even tried to shift PBS to the right. The president's pick to head the corporation for public broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, paid a Republican operative to monitor the political leanings of guests on Bill Moyers' show. Big Brother on Big Bird — doesn't get much weirder than that.

My press pass was taken away, and I was told I'd have to undergo a six-month FBI check to get it back, while a male prostitute writing for a conservative Web site was allowed daily access to the White House press room and presidential press conferences. They thought they could create an alternate reality, and for awhile it worked disturbingly well.

As a Bush official chillingly told Ron Suskind in the New York Times magazine, they considered journalists "the reality-based community." The official added, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

That's what you call a narcissistic explosion.

Their alternate version of reality, which I called Bushworld, worked because 9/11 created a situation where Americans wanted to support and believe in their President. In turn, this White House played on Americans' fear and misled them into war on false pretenses. Their actions, from ginning up evidence for war to outing one of their own spies to creating CIA black torture sites across the globe, have changed the American identity in terrible ways, and left us wondering what our value system is, what it means to be American.

As John McCain says, we're losing our moral authority. Hurricane Katrina allowed reality to flood in, and underscored the incompetence of the administration in Iraq. The Democrats were reduced to stomping their feet and turning out the lights in Congress to force the Republicans to even consider giving answers about whether we misused intelligence leading to war.

Things are going so badly for W. he's reverted to attacking John Kerry and Democrats who are complaining that the administration snookered them and the country with flawed intelligence as unpatriotic, because that's the last time he won one.

Swift boat ads at 11.

Of course, we have to ask why Democrats like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton allowed themselves to be so easily snookered. And the answer is: they both wanted to seem manly, not wimpy, because they planned to run for president. Even now, with its approval ratings plunging faster, as Dave Barry would say, than a pig dropping out of a helicopter, the administration is still attempting to get rid of checks and balances, with Cheney, the lord of the underworld, pushing to find ingenious new ways to make sure that Congress doesn't ban torture, as an appalled John McCain fights back.

Democracy depends on us. It depends on our ability to be patriots, to fulfill the founding fathers vision of keeping a check on power. We can't leave it to male escorts, fake anchors and professional fawners. It doesn't matter how you tell the story — with hieroglyphics, with a royal typewriter, with an IBM think pad, with a cell phone, with a Blackberry, with a carrier pigeon.

Just tell the story.

Make Mary Alice proud.

Pulitzer Prize winner Maureen Dowd recently inaugurated the Mary Alice Davis lectureships at the University of Texas. Davis, who died in 2004, was an American-Statesman editorial writer and a fan of Dowd's. So it was more than appropriate that the New York Times columnist and author was the inaugural speaker for the series.

Copyright © 2005 The Austin American-Statesman

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The Big Lie(s)

Hell, if Dub and The Dickster can do it, why can't I? Quoting the fount of all Internet info, Wikipedia, here is the explanation of the Bushies' basic strategy:

[x Wikipedia]

"The phrase Big Lie refers to a propaganda technique which originated with Adolf Hitler's 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf. In that book Hitler wrote that people came to believe that Germany lost World War I in the field due to a propaganda technique used by Jews who were influential in the German press. This technique, he believed, consisted of telling a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe anyone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". The first documented use of the phrase "big lie" is in the corresponding passage: "in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility".

"Later, Joseph Goebbels put forth a slightly different theory which has come to be more commonly associated with the phrase big lie. In this theory, the English are attributed with using a propaganda technique where in they had the mendacity to "lie big" and "stick to it".

"There is an uncited rumor to the effect that Goebbels also offered up his version of the big lie technique without attributing it to either Jewish or Allied propaganda. That uncited quote is the most wide-spread attribution of the big lie and it is usually given in a context where the implication is that the propaganda technique was invented by Goebbels, who was the propaganda minister for the Third Reich."

Hitler and Goebbels, Dub and The Dickster. Birds of a feather. The ends justify the means. How anyone can read the stuff that Dub and The Dickster spew and not upchuck is beyond me.

If this is (fair & balanced) mendacity, so be it.

[x The Village Voice]
How Do They Deceive You? Let me count the lies—the building blocks of Bush's 'democracy'
by Sydney H. Schanberg

Every time I try to wrap my mind around President Bush's Iraq war and his associated war against the press, I come back to the lies the president and his courtiers have endlessly told. And to how they conned and cowed much of the press into being their early accomplices.
Those offended by the jolt of the word "lies" can substitute a gentler synonym, such as "fictions" or "frauds" or "breaches of the national trust."

The lies haven't stopped. Vice President Dick Cheney lately accuses the "reprehensible" Democrats in Congress of twisting history when they point to the flagrant disinformation campaign that got us into the war. He is saying, in effect, that telling the truth about a lie-based presidency comforts the enemy and makes you a bad American. That might be so if anyone were revealing national-security secrets. But these senators and representatives whom the vice president would crush are merely—and very belatedly—calling attention to the untruths sown by his own tribe to concoct a war.

The press too was slow to question and reveal the lies. Most of America was slow. People were still in shock over the 9-11 terrorist attacks and didn't want to believe that their president would mislead them into the wrong war. The press, like many other Americans, was temporarily intimidated.

What was in the minds of the president and his political advisers? Many of them (who had never seen battle) seem to have believed that 9-11 was the opportunity they had been hoping for since the 1991 Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein, though defeated, was left in power by the first President Bush. But how did they imagine they could, by force of arms, create a world empire on a foundation of distortions and lies about a "grave and gathering danger" from Iraq? Maybe someday they'll give us a halfway credible insight into what they were thinking.

It is tempting to go back and recite all the falsehoods—and all the scorned opportunities to exhibit honest, American humility by acknowledging them. A handful will suffice.

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."—Cheney, August 26, 2002

"[He] has indeed stepped up his capacity to produce and deliver biological weapons. . . . He has reconstituted his nuclear program to develop a nuclear weapon."—Cheney, September 8, 2002

"We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons—the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have."—Bush, February 6, 2003

"We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."—Cheney, March 16, 2003 (three days before the start of the U.S. invasion)

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."—Bush, March 17, 2003 (two days before the invasion)

"We know where they [the weapons] are. They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad."—Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003 (11 days after the war began)

It is now two years and eight months later, and none of these weapons or stockpiles or assembly lines or mobile labs have been found. The only explanation the White House has offered up is that it was given faulty intelligence. Many Americans believe that the Bush regime chose faulty, hyped intelligence because it believed it could not otherwise get either the public or Congress to approve the war.

The mainstream press is no longer timid. But it, too, has suffered some major credibility failures, the most scrutinized of them having occurred at two superior papers, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Responsible journalism— responsible to the public—needs to find its footing and spirit again.

The public itself is troubled, nervous, seeking diversion. Confidence in the government and other institutions is very wobbly. The Bush presidency tried—and is still seeking—to make radical changes in the nation's social-support structure but has failed to demonstrate it has the competence to make these changes work for the majority of Americans. Next to the war, reducing the taxes of the wealthy has been the signature act of this White House.

From the start of the Bush presidency in 2001, senior White House officials have been telling reporters, usually anonymously, that because journalists are reality based, they cannot understand or relate to the Bush administration, since it is pursuing a "bold," God-guided doctrine that intends to create its own reality. Iraq was clearly one of those bold ventures, and because the planning behind it was both flawed and unrealistic, the nation is now suffering psychologically and materially.

Many nonpartisan voices across the country have urged Bush to come forward and admit his mistakes, arguing that the public will respond to such honesty. But there is still no sign of any acknowledgment of error, hardly a hint of humility. The president's message, as recently as his we-will-never-cut-and-run speech November 30, remains: We will persevere until we have "complete victory," and we will not moderate our "bold" policies.

This adamantine stance is visible in virtually every corner of the Bush government. Here is a useful example, from a superb November 27 story by Adam Liptak of the Times. The story was about the rigid Bush policies concerning "enemy combatants" taken prisoner in the Iraq war, who have been allowed almost no legal rights, even those granted by the Geneva Conventions. Most of the prisoners are simply being held indefinitely without trial.

Liptak described a hearing last December before a federal judge in Washington, Joyce Hens Green. Using hypothetical questions, Green pressed a Justice Department official, Brian Boyle, for a clearer, more specific explanation of who could be detained as an enemy combatant under the government's definition.

The judge first asked if it would include "a little old lady in Switzerland who writes checks to what she thinks is a charitable organization that helps orphans in Afghanistan but really is a front to finance Al Qaeda activities."

She next asked: What about a resident of Dublin "who teaches English to the son of a person the CIA knows to be a member of Al Qaeda?"

Finally, "What about a Wall Street Journal reporter, working in Afghanistan, who knows the exact location of Osama bin Laden but does not reveal it to the United States government to protect her source?"

Boyle replied that the military could detain all three people as enemy combatants.

There is no compromise—or reality—in the "bold" Bush government. Only secrecy and prevarications.

(Almost forgot. Yes, the reporter in the third hypothetical should be shackled in the stocks for life—but for intentional stupidity, not as an enemy combatant.)

Sydney H. Schanberg is best known for his coverage of the war in Cambodia. His book, The Death and Life of Dith Pran that was about the struggle for survival of his assistant Dith Pran in the Khmer Rouge regime inspired the film "The Killing Fields." Schanberg won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting while working for the New York Times.
Copyright © 2005 The Village Voice

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Don't Walk On The Wild Side, Walk On The Ice

Garrison Keillor is a national treasure. If this is (fair & balanced) drollery, so be it.

[x Salon]
A walk on the ice: With a little dose of courage and grandeur, who needs therapy?
By Garrison Keillor

Call me Hrothgar the Savage, but when I look at men's fashions in magazines, the models all sullen and sensitive and obviously spending much too much time on their hair, wearing sweaters made from Persian cat fur woven with feathers of snowy owls, yours for $1,495, I feel a strong urge to put on a parka and insulated pants and walk out onto a frozen lake and cut a hole in the ice and fish.

I felt the urge rather strongly the other morning as I drove along the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, which was frozen over, while listening to a man talk on the radio about a book he'd written in which he explored his feelings about his father, whom he'd never felt close to. I said to him, "Oh, get over it." The ice is a good place for a man to go rather than waste time writing books about not knowing your father.

In other parts of the country, you can climb to the top of a mountain and look around. Here, we walk out on the ice.

You could be living in south Minneapolis, in a neighborhood of comfortable homes with DSL and HBO and nearby shops selling latte and cranberry scones, but if you walk a few blocks to Lake Calhoun and stride out onto the ice, suddenly you are in Tolstoy's "War and Peace," waiting for Natasha and Prince Andrei to come lickety-split through the birch forest in the sleigh. The moment you leave shore, you are gripped by a sense of grandeur.

This is all thanks to your mother, who warned you 11,000 times to stay off the ice lest you fall through, warnings that now serve to heighten the drama, which is further heightened by the fact that every year a few men, seeking a leadership role for themselves, drive their snowmobiles onto lakes before the ice is thick enough and drown, a Darwinian moment indeed. The water is cold and the laws of physics apply to us all. But a man must do what a man must do. It's in our circuitry. Little boys of sensitive, caring parents take the dolls that they've been given and rip the legs off and use them for pistols. It's just how they're wired.

A man needs grandeur in his life, more than calcium or vitamin E, so we can get loose of tedious regimentation and blather and b.s. and escape from Gravity Week when Americans are reminded not to slip and fall, and we can march to a different drummer, one who leads us out onto the ice.

Think of grandeur as an alternative to therapy. Hercules did. He had gone mad and done terrible things, as we all do from time to time, and he purified himself by performing heroic labors such as killing the nine-headed hydra and capturing Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the gates of Hades, and in this way he regained his health, and so may we, if we are brave.

In therapy, you complain about your dad not being available for you emotionally and you do it until you get tired of it and then you quit. It is whiny by nature. When you seek grandeur, you put your dad behind you and you get away from women and their endless questions (Why are you so quiet? What's wrong? What do you mean, "nothing's wrong"? What are you thinking? Why don't we ever talk? Are you listening to me? Do you think I'm too fat?) and you go off to do heroic deeds, such as write your autobiography, or drive to California, or build a cabin, or walk out on the ice.

I once led a group of winter visitors from California and North Carolina and Texas out onto White Bear Lake north of St. Paul. They had never done such a thing before. They stepped onto the ice gingerly, as if it might disintegrate under them, and walked out a hundred yards from shore, stopped, and looked around. It was a cold bright day and they trembled in the grandeur of the moment. They were speechless. They looked at me with tears in their eyes. Their noses were running. They wanted to tell me what a transforming experience this was for them, but it was indescribable, and anyway they knew I understood. We stayed as long as we needed to and then went back to the car. You don't have to go to Katmandu to experience transcendence. It's right here in Minnesota.

Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country.

© 2005 By Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Copyright ©2005 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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