Points of view: a memo to self to get to work

As Obi-wan tells Luke, most things depend on your point of view.

Commenting on my post the other day, Doggedly flunking Psych 101, Greg pointed out that I might have been going a little hard on Newsweek's Evan Thomas.

I'd built my post around a single complimentary paragraph in a what I thought was on the whole a very crititical article by Thomas, How Bush Blew It.  Thomas called Bush's supposed "doggedness" admirable, and I said (shorter Lance Mannion):  Phooey.

But Greg thought I might have been picking on Thomas for a typo that very likely wasn't even his fault.

While the media have apparently turned from their fawning behavior to acting more as jackals, they have not really relinquished their previous subservience to anyone willing to talk to them, especially from within the halls of power, so it's turning out to be a big ask to expect anything consistently worthwhile to come out in any major media organ. Nevertheless, I think the paragraph you quoted represents a different failure - a failure of language skills, rather than in understanding. The third sentence should read "His doggedness is often admired," in which case it would say something true, if widely understood already. I blame the editor as much as the journalist.

If that's the case and admirable should have been changed to admired, then the sentence is true (although still gratuitous), but as I wrote to Greg, I think Thomas is too good a writer and too good an editor to have made the mistake himself and I can't see any junior copyeditor messing with the Assistant Managing Editor's copy without checking with him first.  Plus, I've read other things by Thomas that have made me think that Thomas himself sees, or used to see, Bush's doggedness as an admirable quality in the man.  (I didn't write this to Greg, but Thomas' use of the passive voice in that sentence would be a slip by a good writer, but it's the sort of construction that many journalists routinely use when they're trying to pass off their own opinion as the general consensus on an issue.)  Greg and I can't settle which it was unless somebody from Newsweek turns up in the comments to set us straight.  But I think we agree that the article was for the most part not helpful to the image of George W. Bush.

Agi T. of Agitprop disagrees:

Newsweek = Newspeak

I guess I'm pretty cynical towards the media in general. But that article was feel-good "Dear Leader" Bushie propaganda at its best.

This surprised me.  For one thing, next to me, Agi T. is about as cynical as SpongeBob.  If he saw the article as Bushie propaganda and I didn't, I figured I must have missed something.  So I went back and re-read the story.

It's not the hit job I thought it was the first time.  To be fair, a lot more has come out since Thomas did his reporting for his article that has shown that the Feds screwed the pooch even more egregiously than we thought and his story does seem a little soft in comparison.  But it's still not going to get a link from the RNC website.   The headline nails Thomas' main point.  Bush blew it.  And I don't think Thomas tries to pass the President's failure off as an inexplicable laspe of focus or a case where Bush was victimized by his aides or the bureaucracy.  He shows that Bush's failure was due to the way the White House does business and it does it the way Bush wants it to.

There is, though, another very curiously fawning paragraph like the admirable one I picked on.  Writing about accusations that Bush failed to save New Orleans because the people there who most needed saving were black, Thomas says:

Liberals will say [Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other top aides and advisors] were indifferent to the plight of poor African-Americans. It is true that Katrina laid bare society's massive neglect of its least fortunate. The inner thoughts and motivations of Bush and his top advisers are impossible to know for certain. Though it seems abstract at a time of such suffering, high-minded considerations about the balance of power between state and federal government were clearly at play. It's also possible that after at least four years of more or less constant crisis, Bush and his team are numb.

Ok, there's that cheap shot use of "Liberals."  "Liberals will say...and we know they'll say anything and everything nasty that comes to their minds about the President, so we don't need to listen to them."  "Liberals" aren't the only ones saying it.  Black people are saying it.  And so are a large number of white people who watched all those black people trapped on their rooftops and suffering in the Superdome and forgotten at the Convention Center and held at gunpoint in pens and on the roadways out of the city while the President and his men moseyed out to help, sort of.  Americans are saying it!

"The inner thoughts and motivations of Bush and his top advisers are impossible to know for certain," Thomas writes, and then he goes on to make some pretty certain sounding statements about the inner thoughts and motivations of Bush and his gang.  And what were they thinking?  What were their motivations?

They were worried about the terrorists, of course!  They were focused on the war!

Thomas doesn't use the words, but what other crises have the Bush people been dealing with constantly over the last four years?  They sure aren't worried about the budget or the economy or the environment.  Getting Bush re-elected was a crisis, I suppose.  Mr Popular President came very close to being a one-termer.  But I'm pretty sure Thomas didn't mean that.  He meant that Bush and his co-presidents have worn themselves out saving us from the terrorists.

Except that one of the things we've learned from the Bush Leaguers' response to Katrina is that they haven't been worrying about the terrorists at all.

War doesn't seem to be much on their minds either.

They've been telling us they've been worrying about.  They've been insisting that we all should do much more worrying about it too---and the way to show how much we're worried is to vote Republican, of course.  But if they have been worried, it's clear they haven't been worried enough to actually prepare for a terrorist attack or even bother to capture Osama bin Laden, so I don't see how they can be even a little bit numb from all their worrying, let alone numb enough to let a whole city drown before their eyes.

That graph is not just dumb, it's weird.  It doesn't fit with anything that Thomas writes anywhere else in the article---except for the graph about Bush's admirable doggedness.

There he goes again.

(I just did my awesome Ronald Reagan impression.  Pretty good, huh?)

Neither of those two paragraphs fits with the portrayal of Bush the bungler in the rest of the article.  But both fit with the great, outside narrative that the Media have been telling us about Bush for years:

George Bush, the simple man of the people, the unpretentious regular guy you'd enjoy having a beer with, came to office bringing a refreshing sincerity and lack of intellectual dithering, a reliable gut instinct (and admirable doggedness), and brought back honor and integrity to the White House Bill Clinton's Arky hillbilly gang trashed.  Sure Bush was a bit callow and inexperienced, but all he needed was a national crisis to bring out the hidden hero, and when the terrorists struck on 9/11, Bush responded with greatness.  He grew at once into the job and has led us ever since with grit, determination, and cool courage, one of our great War Presidents (if you don't count Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, which we don't because that would muddy the narrative and Karl Rove wouldn't like it).

That was the story up until Katrina hit.  The question is will it become the story again?  Will the Media forget what they saw over the last two weeks or have they given up covering Bush as the President with the Bullhorn and from here on cover him as the President with the Guitar?

The fact that Thomas lapsed and reverted to writing about the President with the Bullhorn in the middle of describing the bungling by the President with the Guitar makes me think they're going to have a hard time giving up the Great Narrative.

After all, all writers love their own creations, and Bush the War President is their creation as much as he's the creature of Karl Rove.

And that reminds me that I never finished the point I was driving towards in Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?... and It's always been about Whitewater.  Not that I think any of you have been holding your breath in anticipation.  But a lot has come out over the last couple of weeks that has convinced me that I was more right than I knew, and my vanity just won't allow me to let it go.  I'll post it tomorrow so you can all ignore it over the weekend.

Sheepish update:  Ok.  Like I'm the first writer to blow a deadline.  I'll post Part 3 Monday.

Comments

[Linkmeister]

I just got and read the print copy yesterday, and that "numb" business struck me too. Numb, my ass. Uncaring would better describe it. Why would they be numb? They've all shown the sensitivity and empathy that a box of rocks has for five years; why would that change now?

[Phil Nugent]

I'll admit to a prejudice. For almost twenty years I've mostly thought of Evan Thomas as the co-author of "The Wise Men," which I remember as being a valuable book on Cold War-era policy. Most of what he's written in praise of Bush's greatness is just part of a larger culture that'll soon seem like an exercise in mass psychosis passing for conventional wisdom, like McCarthyism.

But Thomas crossed over to my enemies list last summer with his Deep Throat article, which was based on the idea that Watergate made it too acceptable for people to doubt our leaders, but that Bush has, thankfully, rolled back that wave. It even seemed to imply that journalists who had made politicians too timid to make big, bold moves were indirectly responsible for the Iran hostage crisis. Unusually pigheaded even for these times, and hypocritical, too, since people who are happy that Bush is president (which never could have happened if his dad hadn't had the job earlier, which in turn never could have happened if the elder Bush hadn't had Reagan's coattails to ride on) ought to get down on their knees and thank God for the Iran hostage crisis every night of their lives. From now on, I'll be inclined to buy into the very worst possible interpretation anyone can offer for everything he writes.

[blue girl]

Hi Lance, Evan Thomas was on Imus last week and Imus wouldn't stop talking about how clueless Bush is/was and all the things he could've done better.

Thomas responded, "Well, you can't expect him to be God!"

And Imus replied, "You're right. But I can expect him to be Rudy Giuliani."

I thought it was odd that Thomas said that to Imus. But then I remembered that behind-the-scenes Newsweek book about the election.

I'm not sure how much Thomas wrote himself -- but, there was so much gossip and low-down scoop about the Kerry campaign. Personal things, embarassing things, etc. God, you knew everytime Teresa had PMS. But, they didn't treat the Bush/Cheney campaign that way in the book. If I remember right they blamed it on "lack of access." But that reason did not ring true to me when I read it.

I haven't read this current article yet, but am going to do so now.

Great post. I love it when you get all journalism-ish.

[Matt]

Will the Media forget what they saw over the last two weeks or have they given up covering Bush as the President with the Bullhorn and from here on cover him as the President with the Guitar?

Judging from the on-air reaction to his god-awful speech tonight, I think they're going to take a third route: they won't forget what they saw, but they will ignore it as they concentrate on the "positive" actions the administration is taking now.

You described the story arc before in this post. It seems to me that things are starting to proceed according to (their) plan.

[carla]

Ok, there's that cheap shot use of "Liberals." "Liberals will say...and we know they'll say anything and everything nasty that comes to their minds about the President, so we don't need to listen to them." "Liberals" aren't the only ones saying it.

This is a bit off the beaten topic, but why is it that we still allow "liberal" to be used like a four-letter word?

[Lance]

carla,

Good question. It'd make an interesting article, tracing the history of the word. My own sense is that the word had begun to have negative connotations before the Right adopted it as an all purpose curse word. Liberals were people who thought themselves to good to be Democrats but who were too timid to be leftists. Which suggests that like the term Political Correctness, Liberal as an insult was an invention of liberals. And it's funny, I never called myself a Liberal until sometime in the early 1990s. Before that I was just a Democrat. I became proud of my Liberalism when the Right switched into high gear and began using the word to mean everything good that had been done in the US since the beginning. So maybe the Right's been doing the word, and us Liberals, a favor. By defining the word as meaning everybody who is not THEM, they've made it a description of the majority of Americans who are not THEM.

Phil, I missed Thomas' Deep Throat article. I'll have to go find it. It was his writings about the last election that got to me. He wrote one comparing Bush's and Kerry's life histories, noted that at every step of the way Kerry was the over-achiever and Bush the screw-up, and still somehow managed to conclude that they were still pretty much the same, a pair of rich boys playing at politics, with a slight advantage to Bush, because he was more "real." Probably had something to do with Bush's doggedness. That's the kind of thing that I expect turned up in the book Blue Girl mentioned.

Blue Girl,

You know that whenever I get all journalism-ish I'm wearing a snapbrim hat with my press card in the brim, right?

[Agi T. Prop]

Lance,

Thanks for the mention. I should clarify my earlier comment, which was probably written in a fit of angst. I guess it was this paragraph in Thomas' article which lit my fuse:

President George W. Bush has always trusted his gut. He prides himself in ignoring the distracting chatter, the caterwauling of the media elites, the Washington political buzz machine. He has boasted that he doesn't read the papers. His doggedness is often admirable. It is easy for presidents to overreact to the noise around them.

While Thomas was critical of Bush's performance on the Katrina issue as a whole, I feel as if he is somehow rationalizing Bush's performance due to Bush’s innate personality traits, as if that legitimates his failures.

Here Thomas equates the entire Katrina fiasco to a simple battle that Bush lost, not a tragedy which Bush willingly chose to ignore:

Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as "strangely surreal and almost detached." At one meeting described by this insider, officials were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an effort to buck each other up. Life inside a bunker can be strange, especially in defeat.

He could have said “They screwed up, but it’s hard work!” Or maybe I was analyzing Thomas’ word choice too much since I’ve been reading George Orwell’s piece “Politics and the English Language”.

[Earl Bockenfeld]

What is the MSM supposed to report, except the Bush Administration can only do ONE thing at a time? The Bush Administration is just proceeding in a bipartisan logical manner to investigate all causes of this disaster, in alphabetical order:

A - assholes: these are the people who stayed behind. blame them

B - blacks: they did all that rioting and looting

C - Clinton: He didn't fix the NOLA levees so they wouldn't breach in a cat 5 storm

D - Democrats: because its all their fault.

Now we are up to E and that's those environmental terrorists. We have files on them.....

[Lance]

Earl,

Excellent! You think by the time they get to Z they'll be ready to blame the whole thing on zydeco?

[Earl Bockenfeld]

Lance, zydeco music sounds like a winner. And I don't see any progressive blogs or democrats whose names start with Z.