If the Bush administration
can't get anything else right, they definitely know how to stage a photo
op. George W. Bush's surprise
Thanksgiving Day visit to the troops at Baghdad
airport was as cleverly contrived a piece of political theater as White
House imagineers
have dreamed up since since his "Mission Accomplished"
aircraft carrier landing back in May. It's likely to have exactly the same
effect.
But let's hold
that thought for a moment. For me, the president's well-choreographed stunt
served as a quick Rorschach test.
Was I, or was I not, a Bush-hater? See, for months
now, right-thinking pundits who respond to the Republican National Committee's
party line have been wringing their hands over
a supposed epidemic of unreasoning hatred shown Bush by his detractors.
Ironically, the
first to advance the theme was Byron York, a columnist who got his start
writing for, get this, The American Spectator
--home of the infamous "Arkansas Project," a
$2.4 million project to defame President Clinton funded by Richard Mellon
Scaife, the
Scrooge McDuck of the American right. To my knowledge,
York played no role in the secretive scheme, but the idea of any Spectator
alum playing Miss Manners is pretty funny.
"Remember 'The
Clinton Chronicles,'" York asked "the 1994 video that attempted to implicate
Bill Clinton in all sorts of 'unsolved' deaths?
Remember the 'Clinton Body Count' lists? Remember
the stories of the president's connections to drug running?"
Sure do. In fact,
I remember American Spectator articles devoted to the preposterous idea
that Bill Clinton ran a cocaine-smuggling ring
through a rural airport in Mena, Arkansas. I
also recall "Arkansas Project" operatives making clumsy efforts to investigate
the private lives of
journalists deemed "Clinton apologists." I don't
recall York or many "mainstream" pundits getting too upset about it either.
But I digress.
York's article proved that if you scour the internet, it's possible to
locate sites like Bushbodycount.com
or Presidentmoron.com
devoted to denouncing President Bush as everything
up to and including a Nazi.
But, hey, no kidding.
One of the ironies of contemporary life is the huge boost given irrationality
by the internet, satellite technology, etc.
Pornography aside, nothing travels faster through
cyberspace than quackery. There are multiple sites for every kind of superstition:
religious
cults, alien visitations, anti-Semitism, Creationism,
and conspiracy theories of every conceivable variety. That York could google
up Bush-haters
was no surprise.
More remarkable
was the number of mainstream pundits who took the bait. It was hardly shocking
to see the Washington Post's George Will,
who once called Bill Clinton a rapist on the
thinnest possible evidence, join the chorus. Nor to observe Charles Krauthammer,
once a practicing
psychiatrist, allege that "Democrats are seized
with a loathing for President Bush...that is near pathological." Their
game is to label all criticism of
our court-appointed leader crazy.
When New York Times
columnist Nicholas Kristof joined the chorus, however, Bob Somerby of dailyhowler.com
brought him up short.
Conceding that it's "utterly hypocritical" for
conservatives who savaged Clinton "to complain about liberal incivility,"
Kristoff had nevertheless
detected disturbing anger in reader e-mails.
"Liberals," he lamented "have now become as intemperate as conservatives."
Somerby reminded
Kristoff of a few home truths: "It wasn't everyday people, writing e-mails,
who pushed those murder lists against Clinton.
It was well-known public figures who peddled
those lists, and they were invited to do so on national TV. Similarly,
it wasn't a random bunch of
e-mailers who kept trying to prove that Clinton
killed [Vince] Foster. It was major Republicans--can you say 'Ken Starr?'--who
engaged in this
endless political porn. As they did so, 'good
guy' pundits hid beneath desks, too scared to condemn their behavior.
"Are today's liberals
as bad as those cons? Unless you simply enjoy propaganda, the answer quite
plainly is 'no.' Have you seen Bush
murder lists on TV? Have you seen a major 'religious
figure' [i.e. Jerry Falwell] selling tapes which call Bush a serial killer?...In
short, have
you seen anything like the wave of insanity that
typified the Clinton-Gore years?"
Anyway, back to
Bush's Thanksgiving day appearance. What were my feelings? Immediately,
exactly the kind of sentimental patriotic warmth
the stunt was designed to evoke. As Molly Ivins
and all my Austin friends say, George W. Bush is hard to dislike on a purely
personal level.
Next, mild irritation
at the fawning of the TV talking-heads. OK, it was a nice gesture. But
Lincoln, FDR, Churchill? Give me a break.
Bush's late night airport visit took a lot of
effort, but no particular courage--no more, at any rate, than did Hillary
Clinton's daylight visit the next
morning. After that, I felt chagrin that a retinue
of hand-picked journalists would agree to secret participation in a transparently
political stunt.
Finally, realization that should events in Iraq
continue to spiral sickeningly out of control, all the warm fuzzies in
the world won't save Bush from
the consequences of his ill-conceived policies.
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