October 30, 2004

Bush Wisdom

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Taking Bush at His Word
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: October 30, 2004

I often criticize statements by President Bush, so today let me praise some of his real wisdom:

• Oct. 11, 2000: "If we're an arrogant nation, [foreigners] will resent us. If we're a humble nation but strong, they'll welcome us. ... We've got to be humble."

It's a good thing Mr. Bush tried to be humble, or the U.S. would have an approval rating even lower than 5 percent in Jordan, and Osama bin
Laden's approval rating in Pakistan would be higher than 65 percent.

• Feb. 27, 2001: "I hope you will join me to pay down $2 trillion in
debt during the next 10 years. ... We should approach our nation's
budget as any prudent family would."

But Mr. Bush, with the help of a weak economy, has transformed the
Clinton budget surpluses into huge deficits. Since Mr. Bush took office, the federal debt has increased by $2.1 trillion, or 40 percent.

• Sept. 25, 2000: "It is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign
oil. More and more of our imports come from overseas."

Hmm. And many of our exports go abroad. Meanwhile, despite the
lackluster economy, oil imports are 1.3 million barrels per day higher
than in Mr. Clinton's last year in office.

• June 11, 2001: "My administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change."

Great! Because America's carbon dioxide emissions, associated with
global warming, have risen 1.7 percent since then.

• June 26, 2003: "Notorious human rights abusers, including, among
others, Burma, Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Zimbabwe, have long sought to shield their abuses from the eyes of the world by staging elaborate
deceptions and denying access to international human rights monitors."

It takes a big man to admit mistakes, like his administration's practice of hiding certain Arab prisoners from Red Cross and other inspectors.

• Nov. 5, 2003: "In the debate about the rights of the unborn, we are
asked to broaden the circle of our moral concern. ... We're asked by our convictions and tradition and compassion to build a culture of life, and make this a more just and welcoming society."

Abortions declined in the U.S. in the Clinton years; the abortion rate
dropped by 22 percent in the 1990's. But while data are incomplete,
abortions appear to have increased sharply since Mr. Bush took office.
Glen H. Stassen, a Christian pro-life theologian, estimates that 52,000 more abortions occurred in 2002 than would have been expected based on the previous trend. Professor Stassen attributes the rise in abortions in part to the troubled economy and concerns among pregnant women that they cannot afford to have babies.

• May 25, 2004: "One of the challenges we face is to make sure the
health care system responds to the needs of the citizens."

But five million more Americans don't have health insurance, compared
with when Mr. Bush took office.

• Sept. 9, 2003: "We must focus early to make sure every child can read and write and add and subtract."

But Mr. Bush's budget guidelines translate into inflation-adjusted
reductions in 2006 alone of more than $900 million for Head Start and
childhood education.

• May 24, 2003: "We will not tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea."

On Mr. Bush's watch, North Korea is generally believed to have gone from two nuclear weapons to about eight.

• 2001: "Not on my watch."

Scrawled note by Mr. Bush on a report to him about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda that had occurred under President Clinton.

That's reassuring to the 100,000 or more people in Darfur who have died in a spasm of murder and rape that Mr. Bush acknowledges as genocide.

• Sept. 30, 2004: "The biggest threat facing this country is weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist network."

But the single most important step to reducing the risk that a nuclear
weapon will destroy New York is to secure loose nukes abroad, and Mr.
Bush has been lackadaisical about that. Only 135 out of 600 metric tons of Russian nuclear materials have been given comprehensive upgrades, and Mr. Bush initially proposed cutting funds for that program.

• Sept. 2, 1999: "Effective reform requires accountability. ... It is a sad story. High hopes, low achievement. Grand plans, unmet goals. My
administration will do things differently."

Oh?

Posted by Elaine at 07:53 AM | Comments (0)

October 22, 2004

Be Afraid

Bush's Blinkers
By BOB HERBERT
New York Times
Published: October 22, 2004

Does President Bush even tip his hat to reality as he goes breezing by?

He often behaves as if he sees - or is in touch with - things that are inaccessible to those who are grounded in the reality most of us have come to know. For example, with more than 1,000 American troops and more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians dead, many people see the ongoing war in Iraq as a disaster, if not a catastrophe. Mr. Bush sees freedom on the march.

Many thoughtful analysts see a fiscal disaster developing here at home, with the president's tax cuts being the primary contributor to the radical transformation of a $236 billion budget surplus into a $415 billion deficit. The president sees, incredibly, a need for still more tax cuts.

The United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. The president responded by turning most of the nation's firepower on Saddam Hussein and Iraq. When Mr. Bush was asked by the journalist Bob Woodward if he had consulted with former President Bush about the decision to invade Iraq, the president replied: "He is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to."

Last week the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University said in a report:

"During the past year Iraq has become a major distraction from the global war on terrorism. Iraq has now become a convenient arena for jihad, which has helped Al Qaeda to recover from the setback it suffered as a result of the war in Afghanistan. With the growing phenomenon of suicide bombing, the U.S. presence in Iraq now demands more and more assets that might have otherwise been deployed against various dimensions of the global terrorist threat."

There are consequences, often powerful consequences, to turning one's back on reality. The president may believe that freedom's on the march, and that freedom is God's gift to every man and woman in the world, and perhaps even that he is the vessel through which that gift is transmitted. But when he is crafting policy decisions that put people by the hundreds of thousands into harm's way, he needs to rely on more than the perceived good wishes of the Almighty. He needs to submit those policy decisions to a good hard reality check.

Here's one good reason why:

Dr. Gene Bolles spent two years as the chief of neurosurgery at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, which is where most of the soldiers wounded in Iraq are taken. Among his patients was Pfc. Jessica Lynch. In an interview posted this week on the Web site AlterNet.org, Dr. Bolles was asked: "What kind of cases did you treat in Landstuhl? And these were mostly kids, right?"

He said: "Well, I call them that since I'm 62 years old. And they were 18, 19, maybe 21. They all seemed young. Certainly younger than my children. As a neurosurgeon I mostly dealt with injuries to the brain, the spinal cord, or the spine itself. The injuries were all fairly horrific, anywhere from the loss of extremities, multiple extremities, to severe burns. It just goes on and on and on. ... As a doctor myself who has seen trauma throughout his career, I've never seen it to this degree. The numbers, the degree of injuries. It really kind of caught me off guard."

If you're the president and you're contemplating a war in which thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of these kinds of injuries will take place, you have an obligation to seek out the best sources of information and the wisest advice from the widest possible array of counselors. And you have an absolute obligation to exercise sound judgment based upon facts, and not simply faith.

In a disturbing article in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, the writer Ron Suskind told of a meeting he'd had with a senior adviser to the president. The White House at the time was unhappy about an article Mr. Suskind had written.

According to Mr. Suskind, "The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' " The aide told Mr. Suskind, "That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality."

Got that? We may think there are real-world consequences to the policies of the president, real pain and real grief for real people. But to the White House, that kind of thinking is passé. The White House doesn't even recognize that kind of reality.

Posted by Elaine at 08:00 AM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2004

New York Times "Enthusiastically" Endorses John Kerry

John Kerry for President
New York Times
Published: October 17, 2004
"John Kerry has qualities that could be the basis for a great chief executive and we enthusiastically endorse him for president."

Senator John Kerry goes toward the election with a base that is built more on opposition to George W. Bush than loyalty to his own candidacy. But over the last year we have come to know Mr. Kerry as more than just an alternative to the status quo. We like what we've seen. He has qualities that could be the basis for a great chief executive, not just a modest improvement on the incumbent.

We have been impressed with Mr. Kerry's wide knowledge and clear thinking - something that became more apparent once he was reined in by that two-minute debate light. He is blessedly willing to re-evaluate decisions when conditions change. And while Mr. Kerry's service in Vietnam was first over-promoted and then over-pilloried, his entire life has been devoted to public service, from the war to a series of elected offices. He strikes us, above all, as a man with a strong moral core.
•

There is no denying that this race is mainly about Mr. Bush's disastrous tenure. Nearly four years ago, after the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency, Mr. Bush came into office amid popular expectation that he would acknowledge his lack of a mandate by sticking close to the center. Instead, he turned the government over to the radical right.

Mr. Bush installed John Ashcroft, a favorite of the far right with a history of insensitivity to civil liberties, as attorney general. He sent the Senate one ideological, activist judicial nominee after another. He moved quickly to implement a far-reaching anti-choice agenda including censorship of government Web sites and a clampdown on embryonic stem cell research. He threw the government's weight against efforts by the University of Michigan to give minority students an edge in admission, as it did for students from rural areas or the offspring of alumni.

When the nation fell into recession, the president remained fixated not on generating jobs but rather on fighting the right wing's war against taxing the wealthy. As a result, money that could have been used to strengthen Social Security evaporated, as did the chance to provide adequate funding for programs the president himself had backed. No Child Left Behind, his signature domestic program, imposed higher standards on local school systems without providing enough money to meet them.

If Mr. Bush had wanted to make a mark on an issue on which Republicans and Democrats have long made common cause, he could have picked the environment. Christie Whitman, the former New Jersey governor chosen to run the Environmental Protection Agency, came from that bipartisan tradition. Yet she left after three years of futile struggle against the ideologues and industry lobbyists Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had installed in every other important environmental post. The result has been a systematic weakening of regulatory safeguards across the entire spectrum of environmental issues, from clean air to wilderness protection.
•

The president who lost the popular vote got a real mandate on Sept. 11, 2001. With the grieving country united behind him, Mr. Bush had an unparalleled opportunity to ask for almost any shared sacrifice. The only limit was his imagination.

He asked for another tax cut and the war against Iraq.

The president's refusal to drop his tax-cutting agenda when the nation was gearing up for war is perhaps the most shocking example of his inability to change his priorities in the face of drastically altered circumstances. Mr. Bush did not just starve the government of the money it needed for his own education initiative or the Medicare drug bill. He also made tax cuts a higher priority than doing what was needed for America's security; 90 percent of the cargo unloaded every day in the nation's ports still goes uninspected.

Along with the invasion of Afghanistan, which had near unanimous international and domestic support, Mr. Bush and his attorney general put in place a strategy for a domestic antiterror war that had all the hallmarks of the administration's normal method of doing business: a Nixonian obsession with secrecy, disrespect for civil liberties and inept management.

American citizens were detained for long periods without access to lawyers or family members. Immigrants were rounded up and forced to languish in what the Justice Department's own inspector general found were often "unduly harsh" conditions. Men captured in the Afghan war were held incommunicado with no right to challenge their confinement. The Justice Department became a cheerleader for skirting decades-old international laws and treaties forbidding the brutal treatment of prisoners taken during wartime.

Mr. Ashcroft appeared on TV time and again to announce sensational arrests of people who turned out to be either innocent, harmless braggarts or extremely low-level sympathizers of Osama bin Laden who, while perhaps wishing to do something terrible, lacked the means. The Justice Department cannot claim one major successful terrorism prosecution, and has squandered much of the trust and patience the American people freely gave in 2001. Other nations, perceiving that the vast bulk of the prisoners held for so long at Guantánamo Bay came from the same line of ineffectual incompetents or unlucky innocents, and seeing the awful photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, were shocked that the nation that was supposed to be setting the world standard for human rights could behave that way.
•

Like the tax cuts, Mr. Bush's obsession with Saddam Hussein seemed closer to zealotry than mere policy. He sold the war to the American people, and to Congress, as an antiterrorist campaign even though Iraq had no known working relationship with Al Qaeda. His most frightening allegation was that Saddam Hussein was close to getting nuclear weapons. It was based on two pieces of evidence. One was a story about attempts to purchase critical materials from Niger, and it was the product of rumor and forgery. The other evidence, the purchase of aluminum tubes that the administration said were meant for a nuclear centrifuge, was concocted by one low-level analyst and had been thoroughly debunked by administration investigators and international vetting. Top members of the administration knew this, but the selling went on anyway. None of the president's chief advisers have ever been held accountable for their misrepresentations to the American people or for their mismanagement of the war that followed.

The international outrage over the American invasion is now joined by a sense of disdain for the incompetence of the effort. Moderate Arab leaders who have attempted to introduce a modicum of democracy are tainted by their connection to an administration that is now radioactive in the Muslim world. Heads of rogue states, including Iran and North Korea, have been taught decisively that the best protection against a pre-emptive American strike is to acquire nuclear weapons themselves.
•

We have specific fears about what would happen in a second Bush term, particularly regarding the Supreme Court. The record so far gives us plenty of cause for worry. Thanks to Mr. Bush, Jay Bybee, the author of an infamous Justice Department memo justifying the use of torture as an interrogation technique, is now a federal appeals court judge. Another Bush selection, J. Leon Holmes, a federal judge in Arkansas, has written that wives must be subordinate to their husbands and compared abortion rights activists to Nazis.

Mr. Bush remains enamored of tax cuts but he has never stopped Republican lawmakers from passing massive spending, even for projects he dislikes, like increased farm aid.

If he wins re-election, domestic and foreign financial markets will know the fiscal recklessness will continue. Along with record trade imbalances, that increases the chances of a financial crisis, like an uncontrolled decline of the dollar, and higher long-term interest rates.

The Bush White House has always given us the worst aspects of the American right without any of the advantages. We get the radical goals but not the efficient management. The Department of Education's handling of the No Child Left Behind Act has been heavily politicized and inept. The Department of Homeland Security is famous for its useless alerts and its inability to distribute antiterrorism aid according to actual threats. Without providing enough troops to properly secure Iraq, the administration has managed to so strain the resources of our armed forces that the nation is unprepared to respond to a crisis anywhere else in the world.
•

Mr. Kerry has the capacity to do far, far better. He has a willingness - sorely missing in Washington these days - to reach across the aisle. We are relieved that he is a strong defender of civil rights, that he would remove unnecessary restrictions on stem cell research and that he understands the concept of separation of church and state. We appreciate his sensible plan to provide health coverage for most of the people who currently do without.

Mr. Kerry has an aggressive and in some cases innovative package of ideas about energy, aimed at addressing global warming and oil dependency. He is a longtime advocate of deficit reduction. In the Senate, he worked with John McCain in restoring relations between the United States and Vietnam, and led investigations of the way the international financial system has been gamed to permit the laundering of drug and terror money. He has always understood that America's appropriate role in world affairs is as leader of a willing community of nations, not in my-way-or-the-highway domination.

We look back on the past four years with hearts nearly breaking, both for the lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities so casually wasted. Time and again, history invited George W. Bush to play a heroic role, and time and again he chose the wrong course. We believe that with John Kerry as president, the nation will do better.

Voting for president is a leap of faith. A candidate can explain his positions in minute detail and wind up governing with a hostile Congress that refuses to let him deliver. A disaster can upend the best-laid plans. All citizens can do is mix guesswork and hope, examining what the candidates have done in the past, their apparent priorities and their general character. It's on those three grounds that we enthusiastically endorse John Kerry for president.

Posted by Elaine at 07:34 AM | Comments (0)

October 11, 2004

Webs of Illusion

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Webs of Illusion
By BOB HERBERT

Published: October 11, 2004

It's understood that incumbents campaigning for re-election will spotlight the good news and downplay the bad. The problem
for President Bush, with the election just three weeks away, is that the bad news keeps cascading in and there is very little good
news to tout.

So the president and his chief supporters have resorted to the odd tactic of claiming that the bad news is good.

The double talk reached a fever pitch last week after the release of two devastating reports - the comprehensive report by
Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector, which destroyed any remaining doubts that Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction; and the Labor Department's dismal employment report for September, which heightened concerns about the
strength of the economic recovery and left Mr. Bush with the dubious distinction of being the first president since Herbert
Hoover to stand for re-election with fewer people working than at the beginning of his term.

Mr. Bush turned the findings of the Duelfer report upside down and inside out, telling crowds at campaign rallies that it proved
Saddam Hussein had been "a gathering threat." It didn't matter that the report, ordered by the president himself, showed just
the opposite. The truth would not have been helpful to the president. So with a brazenness and sleight of hand usually
associated with three-card-monte players, he pulled a fast one on his cheering listeners.

Vice President Cheney had an equally peculiar response to the report, which said Iraq had destroyed its illicit weapons
stockpiles in the early 1990's. Referring to the president's decision to launch the war, Mr. Cheney said, "To delay, defer, wait
wasn't an option."

The September jobs report, released on the same day as Mr. Bush's second debate with Senator John Kerry, was deeply
disappointing to the White House. Just 96,000 jobs were created, not even enough to keep up with the monthly expansion of
the working-age population.

The somber findings forced the president's spin machine into overdrive. Reality, once again, was shoved aside. The
administration's upbeat public response to the Labor Department report was described in The Times as follows: "The White
House hailed it as evidence of continued employment expansion, saying that it validated Mr. Bush's strategy of pursuing tax cuts
to support a recovery from the 2001 economic downturn."

In the president's parallel universe, things are always fine.

Mr. Bush sold his tax cuts as a mighty force for job creation. They weren't. The Times article that reported the sunny White
House response to the disappointing job creation figures also said: "In September, an estimated 62.3 percent of the
working-age population was employed, two full percentage points below the level at the beginning of the recession in March
2001. That difference represents over 4.5 million people without work."

Hyperbole is part of every politician's portfolio. But on the most serious matters facing the country, Mr. Bush's administration
has often gone beyond hyperbole to deliberate misrepresentations that undermine the very idea of an informed electorate. If
unpleasant realities are not acknowledged by the officials occupying the highest offices in the land, there is no chance that the
full resources of the government and the people will be marshaled to meet those challenges.

The president continues to behave as if he's in denial about the war. Iraq remains a tragic mess and the electorate needs to
know that.

In yesterday's Week in Review section, The Times's Dexter Filkins wrote movingly from Baghdad about the reporters trying to
cover the war. There's been a relentless expansion, he said, of areas that reporters dare not venture into because they are too
dangerous. Most European reporters have left the country, and there are far fewer Americans than just a few months ago.

Forty-six reporters have been killed and Mr. Filkins himself has been attacked by a mob, shot at and detained by the Mahdi
Army.

If Mr. Bush has a plan to clean up the mess in Iraq, he should say so. If he has a strategy - besides more tax cuts - to bolster
employment in the U.S., he should tell us. If he's in touch with the real world in which these and other very serious problems
exist, he might consider letting us know.

Spinning gets old after a while. A president who spends too much time spinning webs of illusion can find himself trapped in
them.

Posted by Elaine at 07:44 AM | Comments (0)

October 10, 2004

Nuclear Fiction

Nuclear Fiction
By MAUREEN DOWD
New York Times Op/Ed
Published: October 10, 2004

When W. debated Al Gore, it was the Insufficient versus the
Insufferable.

When W. debated John Kerry, it was the Obfuscating versus the
Oscillating.

We face a choice now between a president who rolled us on Iraq and a
senator who got rolled by the president on Iraq.

George Bush is not giving an inch on Iraq. He's toughing out the cascade of confirmation and criticism from his own people about the hyperpower hyperbole that led to an unnecessary war and an unruly occupation. His advisers say it's better for the president to appear out of touch than apologetic. He'd rather seem delusional than deluded.

He can't admit what the Duelfer report says, that Saddam was no threat
to the U.S. or any other country. The mushroom cloud was a Fig Newton of Dick Cheney's feverish imagination. That would mean W. didn't fix his father's screw-up, but he screwed up his father's fix. A big Oedipal oops.

After Bush 41's Persian Gulf war, Saddam devolved into the Norma Desmond of vicious dictators, shrinking but pretending to still be big, writing romance novels, trying to order liposuction machines, teeth-whitening material and hair transplant equipment, soaking up American culture like his favorite song, Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night,'' and his favorite book, Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea."

The president may not have gotten his money's worth with the report of
Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector. After all, in a vain retroactive attempt to justify his hokum about W.M.D., he had 1,200 people working for 15 months - stretching our scarce supply of Arab linguists - to produce 918 pages at a cost of about a billion dollars just to find out that Saddam would have liked to have had weapons if he could have, but he couldn't, so he didn't.

But at least for his billion, the president got some earnest
Introduction to American Literature analysis of the Iraqi dictator and
his taste for some Western culture, noting that Saddam felt a kinship
with Hemingway's protagonist Santiago, the poor Cuban fisherman (even
though the rich Saddam liked to grenade-fish - toss a grenade in the
water and then send in scuba divers to fetch the dead fish).

"Saddam's affinity for Hemingway's story is understandable, given the
former president's background, rise to power, conception of himself and Hemingway's use of a rustic setting similar to Tikrit to express
timeless themes," the report stated. "In Hemingway's story, Santiago
hooks a great marlin, which drags his boat out to sea. When the marlin
finally dies, Santiago fights a losing battle to defend his prize from
sharks, which reduce the great fish, by the time he returns to his
village, to a skeleton. The story sheds light on Saddam's view of the
world and his place in it. ... to Saddam even a hollow victory was by
his reckoning a real one."

Even though his own report stated that U.N. sanctions had worked to
defang Saddam, Mr. Bush decided to stand firm on nonsense, insisting in the debate Friday night that "sanctions were not working. The United Nations was not effective at removing Saddam Hussein."

When a questioner named Linda asked the president to give three bum
decisions he had made in office, Mr. Bush took a pass. Lincoln could
admit mistakes. J.F.K. could admit mistakes. But W. thinks admitting
mistakes is for powder puffs. Of his decision to invade Iraq, he said:
"Sometimes in this world you make unpopular decisions because you think they're right." Or you stick to them even after you know they're wrong.

The president's living in a dream world. He kept insisting that 75
percent of Al Qaeda has been "brought to justice," even though such a
statistic is misleading, since counterterrorism experts say that the
invasion of Iraq was a recruiting boon for Osama and that Al Qaeda has
metastasized and spawned other terrorist groups.

Mr. Bush tried to pretend the devastating Duelfer report backed him up, noting after the report came out that Saddam "retained the knowledge, the materials, the means and the intent to produce weapons of mass destruction and could have passed this knowledge to our terrorist enemies."

W. should have followed his father's policy on hypotheticals. As Poppy
Bush would say, when someone asked him to be speculative: "If a frog had wings, it wouldn't bump its tail on the ground."

Posted by Elaine at 08:20 AM | Comments (0)

October 08, 2004

Ignorance ISN'T Strength

Ignorance Isn't Strength
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times Op-Ed
Published: October 8, 2004

I first used the word "Orwellian" to describe the Bush team in October
2000. Even then it was obvious that George W. Bush surrounds himself
with people who insist that up is down, and ignorance is strength. But
the full costs of his denial of reality are only now becoming clear.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have an unparalleled
ability to insulate themselves from inconvenient facts. They lead a
party that controls all three branches of government, and face news
media that in some cases are partisan supporters, and in other cases are reluctant to state plainly that officials aren't telling the truth. They also still enjoy the residue of the faith placed in them after 9/11.

This has allowed them to engage in what Orwell called "reality control." In the world according to the Bush administration, our leaders are infallible, and their policies always succeed. If the facts don't fit that assumption, they just deny the facts.

As a political strategy, reality control has worked very well. But as a strategy for governing, it has led to predictable disaster. When leaders live in an invented reality, they do a bad job of dealing with real reality.

In the last few days we've seen some impressive demonstrations of
reality control at work. During the debate on Tuesday, Mr. Cheney
insisted that "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq
and 9/11." After the release of the Duelfer report, which shows that
Saddam's weapons capabilities were deteriorating, not advancing, at the time of the invasion, Mr. Cheney declared that the report proved that "delay, defer, wait wasn't an option."

>From a political point of view, such exercises in denial have been very successful. For example, the Bush administration has managed to convince many people that its tax cuts, which go primarily to the wealthiest few percent of the population, are populist measures benefiting middle-class families and small businesses. (Under the administration's definition, anyone with "business income" - a group that includes Dick Cheney and George Bush - is a struggling small-business owner.)

The administration has also managed to convince at least some people
that its economic record, which includes the worst employment
performance in 70 years, is a great success, and that the economy is
"strong and getting stronger." (The data to be released today, which are expected to improve the numbers a bit, won't change the basic picture of a dismal four years.)

Officials have even managed to convince many people that they are moving forward on environmental policy. They boast of their "Clear Skies" plan even as the inspector general of the E.P.A. declares that the enforcement of existing air-quality rules has collapsed.

But the political ability of the Bush administration to deny reality -
to live in an invented world in which everything is the way officials
want it to be - has led to an ongoing disaster in Iraq and looming
disaster elsewhere.

How did the occupation of Iraq go so wrong? (The security situation has deteriorated to the point where there are no safe places: a bomb was discovered on Tuesday in front of a popular restaurant inside the Green Zone.)

The insulation of officials from reality is central to the story. They
wanted to believe Ahmad Chalabi's promises that we'd be welcomed with
flowers; nobody could tell them different. They wanted to believe -
months after everyone outside the administration realized that we were
facing a large, dangerous insurgency and needed more troops - that the
attackers were a handful of foreign terrorists and Baathist dead-enders; nobody could tell them different.

Why did the economy perform so badly? Long after it was obvious to
everyone outside the administration that the tax-cut strategy wasn't an effective way of creating jobs, administration officials kept promising huge job gains, any day now. Nobody could tell them different.

Why has the pursuit of terrorists been so unsuccessful? It has been
obvious for years that John Ashcroft isn't just scary; he's also scarily incompetent. But inside the administration, he's considered the man for the job - and nobody can say different.

The point is that in the real world, as opposed to the political world, ignorance isn't strength. A leader who has the political power to pretend that he's infallible, and uses that power to avoid ever
admitting mistakes, eventually makes mistakes so large that they can't
be covered up. And that's what's happening to Mr. Bush.

Posted by Elaine at 07:54 AM | Comments (0)

October 05, 2004

What a GREAT Night it was.....

The Falling Scales
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
Published: October 5, 2004

Last week President Bush found himself defending his record on national security without his usual protective cocoon of loyalty-tested audiences and cowed reporters. And the sound you heard was the scales' falling from millions of eyes.

Trying to undo the damage, Mr. Bush is now telling those loyalty-tested audiences that Senator John Kerry's use of the phrase "global test" means that he "would give foreign governments veto power over our national security decisions." He's lying, of course, as anyone can confirm by looking at what Mr. Kerry actually said. But it may still work - Mr. Bush's pre-debate rise in the polls is testimony to the effectiveness of smear tactics.

Still, something important happened on Thursday. Style probably mattered most: viewers were shocked by the contrast between Mr. Bush's manufactured image as a strong, resolute leader and his whiny, petulant behavior in the debate. But Mr. Bush would have lost even more badly if post-debate coverage had focused on substance.

Here's one underreported example: So far, Mr. Bush has paid no political price for his shameful penny-pinching on domestic security and his refusal to provide effective protection for America's ports and chemical plants. As Jonathan Chait wrote in The New Republic: "Bush's record on homeland security ought to be considered a scandal. Yet, not only is it not a scandal, it's not even a story."

But Mr. Kerry raised the issue, describing how the administration has failed to protect us against terrorist attacks. Mr. Bush's response? "I don't think we want to get to how he's going to pay for all these promises."

Oh, yes we do. According to Congressional Budget Office estimates, Mr. Bush's tax cuts, with their strong tilt toward the wealthy, are responsible for more than $270 billion of the 2004 budget deficit. Increased spending on homeland security accounts for only $20 billion. That shows the true priorities of the self-proclaimed "war president." Later, Mr. Bush, perhaps realizing his mistake, asserted, "Of course we're doing everything we can to protect America." But he had already conceded that he isn't.

It's also not clear whether voters have noticed the collapse of Mr. Bush's cover story for the disastrous decision to invade Iraq. In Coral Gables, Mr. Bush asserted that when Mr. Kerry voted to authorize the use of force against Saddam, he "looked at the same intelligence I looked at." But as The Times confirmed last weekend, the Bush administration suppressed intelligence that might have raised doubts in Congress.

The case for war rested crucially on one piece of evidence: Saddam's purchase of aluminum tubes that, according to Condoleezza Rice, were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs." But the truth, never revealed to Congress, was that most of the government's experts considered the tubes unsuited for a nuclear program and identical to the tubes used by Iraq for other purposes. Yes, Virginia, we were misled into war.

Now it's Dick Cheney's turn.

Mr. Cheney's manufactured image is as much at odds with reality as Mr. Bush's. The vice president is portrayed as a hardheaded realist, someone you can trust with difficult decisions. But his actual record is one of irresponsibility and incompetence.

Case in point: Mr. Cheney completely misread the nature of the 2001 California energy crisis. Although he has stonewalled investigations into what went on in his task force, there's no real question that he placed his trust in the very companies whose market-rigging caused that crisis.

In tonight's debate, John Edwards will surely confront Mr. Cheney over that task force, over domestic policies and, of course, over Halliburton. But he can also use the occasion to ask more hard questions about national security.

After all, Mr. Cheney didn't just promise Americans that "we will, in fact, be welcomed as liberators" by the grateful Iraqis. He also played a central role in leading us to war on false pretenses.

No, that's not an overstatement. In August 2002, when Mr. Cheney declared "we now know Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," he was being dishonest: the administration knew no such thing. He was also being irresponsible: his speech pre-empted an intelligence review that might have given dissenting experts a chance to make their case.

So here's Mr. Edwards's mission: to expose the real Dick Cheney, just as Mr. Kerry exposed the real George Bush.

Posted by Elaine at 07:58 AM | Comments (0)

October 01, 2004

Whew!

Kerry Wins!

Observers on both sides of the presidential race say Senator John Kerry emerged as the clear winner of Thursday night's debate in Miami, taking President Bush to task on what he called Bush's "colossal error of judgment" regarding Iraq.

Bush's responses included simple, repetitive statements such as "it's hard work," and numerous times he criticized Kerry for calling this "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." Bush agreed "the biggest disaster that could happen is that we not succeed in Iraq."

Kerry spoke of bringing "fresh credibility" to his plan of developing an international summit to deal with the "incredible mess" in Iraq. He said, "You don't take America to war unless you have a plan to win the peace."

Polls show that Kerry prevailed in presenting a substantial, clearly stated foreign policy, which included details on how to approach the genocide taking place in Sudan and the problem of nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea.

Posted by Elaine at 08:13 AM | Comments (0)