Wag the dog

The Downing Street memo story is beginning to gain traction.

The war is going horribly wrong.

Bush failed to sell his plan to dismantle Social Security.

His polls just keep getting worse.

What can the Bush Leaguers do?

Find Osama, of course.

The director of the CIA [told Time magazine] he has an "excellent idea" where Osama bin Laden is hiding...

Of course you have to read the fine print.

...but that the United States' respect for sovereign nations makes it more difficult to capture the al-Qaida chief.

In other words, we know where bin Laden is but we can't go get him because that would either offend an ally or start another war we can't win.

But nevermind that.  We know where he is which means we're this close to hunting him down at last!

How fast will the Washington press corps drop everything to go chasing after this red herring?

If this trick doesn't work and the press stays focused on Bush's failures, how soon before we have another terror alert?

Haven't had one of those in a long time.

Karl Rove didn't invent this trick.  Presidents have been using "National Security" to try to distract the media and voters from their domestic problems for a long time.  Johnson did it, Nixon did it.   Nixon seemed to be out of the country more than he was home during the Watergate crisis, making visits to any place he could think to go to where he could plausibly pretend to be dealing with issues of National Security.

When he couldn't go himself, he sent Kissenger.

Carter did it.  He latched on to the hostage crisis like a liferaft and wouldn't let go until it drifted with him to a desert island and marooned him there.

Reagan did it, although he didn't need to do it that often because his genius was in pretending that problems weren't problems and that failures were just expected missteps on the sure path to progress and success and then convince everybody to go along.  But he did it, and the media kept kicking itself for letting him get away with it.

Or they said they kicked themselves.

The first Bush did it when he could but his term in office was subsumed into two real issues of National Security, the end of the Cold War and the war in Kuwait.  When he needed foreign policy issues to distract people from his problems at home late in his term, people were just plain too worn out to look beyond the borders.

He was genuinely puzzled during the election when nobody seemed to care about his accomplisments overseas.  He grew testy about it too.  Perot and Clinton talked nonstop about the economy while Bush peevishly insisted on his record as Commander in Chief and the President on hand to accept the Soviet surrender at the end of the Cold War.

When Bill Clinton went after al Qaida in the midst of the Impeachment charade, the media reacted with guffaws.  Look at Slick Willy desperately trying to wag the dog, they said.

They weren't wrong to be cynical, although it would have been helpful if more of them could have separated in their minds what was happening in the real world from what happened in the movie they had all just seen.  (Actually, I suspect few of them saw the movie.  Going to the movies would mean having to pass up a party some night.  They knew the movie from talking about it at the parties.)  There wasn't anything so special about Bill Clinton that should have made journalists automatically think he was different from the five Presidents who came before him.

One of Clinton's failures was not to persist in his course, in spite of the media's cynicism.  It was his job to convince them that al Qaida was a serious threat that had to be dealt with, even if dealing with it looked like political opportunism.

So here is the question that drives Democrats and Liberals insane.

How did George W. Bush, of all people, come to be the first President since John Kennedy to earn an exemption from the media's natural cynicism and skepticism?

Why this guy?

How is it that to point it out when the Bush Leaguers engage in the most blatant acts of political opportunism is to be dismissed as just a raving Bush hater?

How is that to simply ask if a President who came to office by hook and by crook might have stolen votes last time out is to mark yourself as someone in need of a tinfoil hat?

How is it that to raise the question of whether or not a President might have lied us into a war, let alone wave the proof that he did in the media's faces, is to get a dismissive That is so over or even to be told that you're just playing make-believe, real grown-ups don't bother with such fun and games?

Why this guy?

As Mark Felt---Deep Throat---said of Nixon and his henchmen, "The truth is, these are not very bright guys."

Bush and his gang are not even as smart as Nixon and his.  Everything they've done to manipulate the media and public opinion, to mow down their enemies and keep their "friends" in line, has been unoriginal, unimaginative, obvious, childish, and not at all smart, only sly.  Their major virtue, so to speak, has been their brazenness.

Karl Rove isn't a genius.  He's just persistent and shameless.

So what's going on?

Why has it been so easy for them to get away with it?

There isn't a good answer to this, except luck.  George Bush happened to come along at the moment when the Washington press corps was at its most cowardly, lazy, corrupt, and just plain dumb.  Robert Parry:

Observing the behavior of the national news media over the past three years has been like watching incompetent players in the mystery game "Clue" as they visit all the rooms and ask about all the suspects and weapons, but still insist on guessing at combinations that are transparently incorrect.

(Hat tips to The Heretik, Kevin Drum, Roxanne Cooper, and Brad Friedman.  Thanks to Avedon Carol for the link to Parry's article at The Costortium News.)

Comments

[slothrop]

Bush and Rove were able to get a lot done after 9/11 -- the nation was willing to follow dummies for a long period there. It's been one of the longest honeymoons for a Presidency ever.

I think the honeymoon's finally over.

[Exiled in NJ]

Rove is channeling Josef Goebbels; that is how they do it.

Time to imagine Daniel Ellsberg approaching anyone on the Times or Post today with the Pentagon Papers. Better yet, a contemporary Felt would have been the second coming of Diogenes.

[blue girl]

I see Bush shrinking big time -- not that he ever stood that tall to begin with.

The reason I say this is because of conversations I've had with Republican/right-wing friends and family over the last month or so on a wide range of issues.

A staunch right wing friend/client knows they are trying to dismantle social security, not "save it." And he has said so -- out loud -- in front of other Republicans, who've agreed.

Another very good friend, who's a Republican to his very bones -- thinks we should completely pull out of Iraq.

My brother-in-law said just yesterday -- "Bush has got to stop lying. He's not good at it. It's just too obvious." And he was talking about Bush lying about the environment! When you've got Republicans worrying about the environment -- especially Republicans like my brother-in-law -- well, some sort of shift is taking place.

Now, would these same people start waving their Bush flags again with if they "get really close" to catching bin Laden, or if they raise the terror alert and Cheney starts his -- Nuclear Bombs Are Going To Fall In Many U.S. Cities If You Don't Do, Think Whatever.....speeches?

I don't think so -- not these guys -- but, the masses would because of the media --

Loved the "Clue" analogy -- but really believe Robert Parry's conclusion in the same article:

"To some extent, the news media’s reluctance to solve the Mystery of Bush’s Iraq War Lies may be explained by a well-founded fear of retaliation from Bush’s powerful defense apparatus – from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page to the screamers on Fox News and right-wing talk radio.

But there may be another motive, a fear of the logical consequence that would follow a conclusion that Bush willfully deceived the American people into a disastrous war that has killed almost 1,700 American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis.

If that conclusion were to be accepted as true, it would force mainstream editors into a tough decision about whether they should join the supposedly fringe position advocating Bush’s impeachment."

When everything, and I mean everything, seems to be falling apart in this country -- and everyone knows it -- would we all willingly let or want our government to fall apart too?

If the "people" had the courage for that -- the mainstream editors might also.

I'm just not sure that the majority of people are brave enough to admit they were wrong, throw these bums out, start over and get back on track.

And to top it off -- most people would say -- "Get back on track with who? They are ALL corrupt. Who are we going to turn to? Is there anyone left to trust anymore?"

[jwhook]

Curious about the Carter comment. It's been a while, and that was my time of recovery from the fuzzy years, but my recollection is that the hostage crisis was used against Carter, not by Carter to defuse criticism in other areas of his administration. Ted Koppel got his big break intoning "day 57 of the hostage crisis," and by the time Reagan was elected Nightline was a fixture on TV, so all the next set of terrorist acts perpretrated on Americans overseas were not highlighted night after night after night. So the marines killed in Beirut, and the hostages held in Lebanon for many, many months didn't get the Koppel treatment. Well, that's my recollection in any case.

[KathyF]

At a media relations workshop I went to, they told us "a big lie is easier to pull off than a small lie". I had a hard time wrapping my mind around that, but it really is true. BushCo has pulled off the big lie, with ease, precisely because it is so preposterous.

I'm a fiction writer, and I can't make this shit up.

[harry near indy]

the media are not entirely at fault.

put some of the blame on most of the 285 million-plus who live in the united states.

as long as they don't have to pay taxes to finance war, or their kids aren't coming home in coffins or with missing limbs, and their lives aren't being interrupted in any big and serious way, they won't give a shit.

[marianne19]

Why Bush? After he did his deer-in-the headlights routine after 9/11 perhaps some (most?) of the press felt they had to build him up. It was too scary to contemplate that we had an incompetent at the helm. Was it deliberate or self hypnosis? Was it the flip side of of their trashing Al Gore in the 2000 election cycle? Who knows? Mom always said "it's better to be lucky than smart."

[Lance]

JW,

My recollection's probably hazy too, but based on my impressions at the time and things I've read since, I think that the hostage crisis was seen at first as helping Carter regain his lost stature. He was struggling in the fall of 79 already, before the embassy was taken. His troubles were so bad analysts were saying there was a good chance he wouldn't be renominated by the Democrats. There were several serious challengers gearing up to campaign against him the '80 primaries, even before Teddy Kennedy got into the race. Jerry Brown, John Glenn, couple of others I forget. When the hostages were taken Carter benefited from the same Rally Round the President feeling that Bush did from 9/11.

The Democratic challengers even promised not to use Iran as a campaign issue. Or at least Kennedy did.

But then Carter made the mistake of making too much of his role as the only guy who could get us out of the mess. He locked himself in the Rose Garden, promising to focus on nothing else but bringing the hostages home. As the weeks and then months wore on, and Nightline and Walter Cronkite and the NYT kept their count of the passing days, it began to look as though Carter had been taken hostage right along with the people in the embassy.

Still, I don't think the tide really turned against him until the rescue mission failed.

Anyway, that's how I remember it.

[Tilli (Mojave Desert)]

My thinkings are real ly loo ping incircles these days. I can't seem to get a handle on politics and the public and the media and Iraq. and etc. There are so many convolutions and out-and-out deceptions that, no matter how solid the reality, thinking drifts or lurches or swaggers or falls as if in a dream. A really bad dream.

Ya know what I mean?

I think media fell for Bush (and then for Terror and then for Iraq War) because of easy-entertainment value.

But, I think media -- and the public -- is now bored with the show and ready to participate in the new show called "don't believe a damn thing this administration does or says or says it's doing".

Or, something like that.