ABOUT FACE: The momentary "liberalization" of George W. Bush and the new-found (though short-lived) efficiency of our bureaucratic federal government
It's taken me a while to process recent events. I got behind over the Labor Day weekend. I was only gone three days but when I returned to several hundred emails and a dozen "must see" news and information programs, I knew it would take a couple of weeks to catch up completely.
In light of that, it's very difficult for me to believe that when President Bush takes 52 days off he doesn't get behind. Then I remembered that our president has people to do his work for him. All he has to do is show up where he's supposed to, and say what he's supposed to say.
That's part of the reason I was sure Bush would use the recent massive FEMA failure as an excuse to put more of the burden for protection of the people on state and local governments. His supporters have long called for a more limited role for federal government. What a great opportunity for them to point to the bureaucratic nightmare that FEMA has become, as an excuse to scale back all large federal programs.
But Bush didn't do that. In fact, he gave what some are calling a "liberal" speech. I watched a replay of it the other night. I was pretty surprised--particularly in light of his behavior in the lead-up to that speech. Here's a recap of what preceded Bush's sudden about face:
President Bush didn't know about the devastation in Louisiana until somebody showed him a DVD of the mess--this was days after the hurricane hit--thus proving that his awareness of current events does not extend beyond what his staff chooses to share with him. (Bush's ignorance of real world events also explains why he sometimes needs to wear a wire: whenever his work requires his extremely limited awareness to expand instantaneously, somebody has to be able to feed him information, on the spot. That's why Dick Cheney had to sit with Bush when he went before the 9.11 Commission. They couldn't use a wire for that because, thanks to internet media, the public was already onto him).
Practically speaking, we have to start with the premise that President Bush is unaware of pretty much everything that's going on in the world, outside his own small sphere; that is, unless one of his peeps gives him some sort of briefing. Or, unless he happens to catch something on TV, which is also becoming more and more tightly controlled by friends of the Bush administration. (Giddy with their obvious success in keeping the president in the dark, they've decided to try their manipulative schemes on the rest of us).
Yet, regardless of the degree to which the men controlling Bush also control the media, there is no question that Bush himself is carefully guarded. It became painfully clear on that fateful day, when we watched in horror--a nation united behind a single common theme--as President Bush patted Michael Brown (then head of FEMA) on the back and said "Brownie, yer doin' a hell of a job."
In that perfect moment, Americans of all types came together--irrespective of political affiliation, social class or religious beliefs--we were one that day, as we cringed with universal embarrassment, while our president shared with the entire world how totally clueless he is.
While his minions scurried to blame the disastermath on looters, the victims of the hurricane, and anybody insisting that there are questions that need to be answered, now, not later; President Bush was frantically searching for a crash course on "How to clean up a clusterfuck the size of which you have, heretofore, only imagined."
But what about Iraq? Surely, he sees what that's become? I think not. As close as I can figure, the bad news in Iraq doesn't show up on Bush's radar at all. Bush gets his news from the people who put us there. And they are, coincidentally, the same people who have the most to gain by keeping us there. They don't talk about the things that aren't working out the way they'd planned, because for them it's all good. The more destruction, the longer we stay; and the longer we stay, the more money they make. They tell Bush exactly what he needs to hear in order to get him to stand at a podium and announce, with absolute conviction and authority: "We must stay the course." And to Bush that makes perfect sense. Based on the information he's getting, we're doing alright in Iraq.
Our president is arguably the biggest single victim of political censorship in the history of the United States. If we received nothing more than the same small portion of reality that Bush is dosed with each day, we would probably see things much the way he does.
But now it's beginning to look as if the administration's strategy has backfired. When Bush failed to rush to New Orleans and comfort the people who were victimized by the flood, when he decided to use a fly-by over the disaster area as a way of getting a "real look" at the carnage below, he demonstrated a harsh indifference to reality on the ground--one that left the majority of Americans outraged.
To the millions who watched and waited as Bush blithely ignored the call for help, it mattered not one bit that his delayed response was the inevitable result of a system that relies on a team of advisors to keep him informed. Their failure to apprise Bush of the extent of the damage, until several days after the fact, does not make the American people feel any better about Bush's ability to protect them. Nor did it help his cause when his horrid mother stood in the Houston Astrodome and claimed that the folks taking shelter there had actually "done very well for themselves" because they "were underprivileged anyway" and now they might get to stay in Texas.
When the Bush indifference surfaced, amid the back-drop of New Orleans, both the public and mainstream media were already mad as hell. They weren't willing to sugarcoat the facts to make the administration look good; nor were they willing to join the party that makes excuses or points to victims in order to deflect blame from themselves. Everybody was talking about the failure of FEMA--even FOX News. As a result, Bush saw a whole bunch of stuff he wasn't supposed to see. He saw angry, hungry, tired, poor people--mostly of color--and they were all asking the same question: is anybody coming to help us? It was the first time in the history of George W's presidency that he saw, in living color, the full effect of his own ignorance and ineptitude.
And right on the heels of Cindy Sheehan, can you beat that? After all that extra driving they had to do to bypass her every day, just when Bush was about to head back to Washington to get away from her, Hurricane Katrina hit and forced him to see the reality of a failure of government that has left the entire world asking "how could something like this have happened in the United States?"
Then something truly surprising occurred: In the midst of all of this, President Bush, who usually refuses to admit even the possibility of making a mistake, did something truly radical. Bush accepted responsibility. In his own words: "To the extent that the federal government failed, I take full responsibility." He went on to talk about the racism that has led to poverty in America and vowed to "do what it takes" to rebuild New Orleans, to fight racism and end poverty, and make a better world for our children's future.
I was stunned. I didn't believe him, but I was still stunned. How could I not be? How could anyone have possibly known that President Bush was planning to appear, live, in Jackson Square, New Orleans and channel Franklin Delano Roosevelt?
It was a dramatic change of course for Bush--one meant to convince the public that his understanding of the situation and his desire to personally correct the errors that led to such a catastrophic failure would actually lead to government programs that would lift the poor and disenfranchised out of poverty, once and for all.
Of course, Republicans are mad as hell because they're worried that he's going to make good on his promise and spend all their hard-earned money bailing out lazy poor people. And Democrats are mad because they know it's all just talk. Nothing has really changed. The "liberal" speech Bush gave at Jackson Square was just one more example of hypocrisy in action.
But you have to hand it to the Bush administration--they know how to put on a good show. When something is really important to them, they can turn the federal government into a machine so efficient it makes Martha Stewart look like a sloppy housekeeper. While hundreds continue to beg for food and water, electricity and a clean place to live, Bush and his crew demonstrated a turn-about in government efficiency that was nothing short of miraculous. As Tom Engelhardt points out in his latest Dispatch:
Without a single mishap, the rescue team delivered to central New Orleans its own generators, lights (not just the warm-glow ones for the President but the HMI movie lights to set the cathedral in the background ablaze), the camouflage netting that was needed to hide from viewers any sign of the surrounding devastation, and even its own communications equipment. And then there was the matter of crowd control - okay, maybe not exactly crowds in depopulated New Orleans, but soldiers from the 82nd Airborne were effectively deployed, just in case, "to keep regular citizens several blocks back."
Naturally, when his speech ended, President Bush drove out of sight, taking the lights, the cameras and the action with him. Again, from Tom Engelhardt:
. . . an hour after he was done and gone - rescues of this sort being limited affairs - the area was "plunged into total darkness again, to audible groans. … It may be true that, for a week or more, this administration couldn't get a bottle of water to a diabetic grandmother, but when something was actually at stake - what reporters far and wide referred to as the "rebuilding" not of New Orleans but of a presidency, or simply of the presidential "image" - efficiency, coordination, and togetherness were the by-words of the day.
Yeah, nothing's changed. But Bush did surprise me. I've got to give him points for that.
-- Laurie Fosner
In light of that, it's very difficult for me to believe that when President Bush takes 52 days off he doesn't get behind. Then I remembered that our president has people to do his work for him. All he has to do is show up where he's supposed to, and say what he's supposed to say.
That's part of the reason I was sure Bush would use the recent massive FEMA failure as an excuse to put more of the burden for protection of the people on state and local governments. His supporters have long called for a more limited role for federal government. What a great opportunity for them to point to the bureaucratic nightmare that FEMA has become, as an excuse to scale back all large federal programs.
But Bush didn't do that. In fact, he gave what some are calling a "liberal" speech. I watched a replay of it the other night. I was pretty surprised--particularly in light of his behavior in the lead-up to that speech. Here's a recap of what preceded Bush's sudden about face:
President Bush didn't know about the devastation in Louisiana until somebody showed him a DVD of the mess--this was days after the hurricane hit--thus proving that his awareness of current events does not extend beyond what his staff chooses to share with him. (Bush's ignorance of real world events also explains why he sometimes needs to wear a wire: whenever his work requires his extremely limited awareness to expand instantaneously, somebody has to be able to feed him information, on the spot. That's why Dick Cheney had to sit with Bush when he went before the 9.11 Commission. They couldn't use a wire for that because, thanks to internet media, the public was already onto him).
Practically speaking, we have to start with the premise that President Bush is unaware of pretty much everything that's going on in the world, outside his own small sphere; that is, unless one of his peeps gives him some sort of briefing. Or, unless he happens to catch something on TV, which is also becoming more and more tightly controlled by friends of the Bush administration. (Giddy with their obvious success in keeping the president in the dark, they've decided to try their manipulative schemes on the rest of us).
Yet, regardless of the degree to which the men controlling Bush also control the media, there is no question that Bush himself is carefully guarded. It became painfully clear on that fateful day, when we watched in horror--a nation united behind a single common theme--as President Bush patted Michael Brown (then head of FEMA) on the back and said "Brownie, yer doin' a hell of a job."
In that perfect moment, Americans of all types came together--irrespective of political affiliation, social class or religious beliefs--we were one that day, as we cringed with universal embarrassment, while our president shared with the entire world how totally clueless he is.
While his minions scurried to blame the disastermath on looters, the victims of the hurricane, and anybody insisting that there are questions that need to be answered, now, not later; President Bush was frantically searching for a crash course on "How to clean up a clusterfuck the size of which you have, heretofore, only imagined."
But what about Iraq? Surely, he sees what that's become? I think not. As close as I can figure, the bad news in Iraq doesn't show up on Bush's radar at all. Bush gets his news from the people who put us there. And they are, coincidentally, the same people who have the most to gain by keeping us there. They don't talk about the things that aren't working out the way they'd planned, because for them it's all good. The more destruction, the longer we stay; and the longer we stay, the more money they make. They tell Bush exactly what he needs to hear in order to get him to stand at a podium and announce, with absolute conviction and authority: "We must stay the course." And to Bush that makes perfect sense. Based on the information he's getting, we're doing alright in Iraq.
Our president is arguably the biggest single victim of political censorship in the history of the United States. If we received nothing more than the same small portion of reality that Bush is dosed with each day, we would probably see things much the way he does.
But now it's beginning to look as if the administration's strategy has backfired. When Bush failed to rush to New Orleans and comfort the people who were victimized by the flood, when he decided to use a fly-by over the disaster area as a way of getting a "real look" at the carnage below, he demonstrated a harsh indifference to reality on the ground--one that left the majority of Americans outraged.
To the millions who watched and waited as Bush blithely ignored the call for help, it mattered not one bit that his delayed response was the inevitable result of a system that relies on a team of advisors to keep him informed. Their failure to apprise Bush of the extent of the damage, until several days after the fact, does not make the American people feel any better about Bush's ability to protect them. Nor did it help his cause when his horrid mother stood in the Houston Astrodome and claimed that the folks taking shelter there had actually "done very well for themselves" because they "were underprivileged anyway" and now they might get to stay in Texas.
When the Bush indifference surfaced, amid the back-drop of New Orleans, both the public and mainstream media were already mad as hell. They weren't willing to sugarcoat the facts to make the administration look good; nor were they willing to join the party that makes excuses or points to victims in order to deflect blame from themselves. Everybody was talking about the failure of FEMA--even FOX News. As a result, Bush saw a whole bunch of stuff he wasn't supposed to see. He saw angry, hungry, tired, poor people--mostly of color--and they were all asking the same question: is anybody coming to help us? It was the first time in the history of George W's presidency that he saw, in living color, the full effect of his own ignorance and ineptitude.
And right on the heels of Cindy Sheehan, can you beat that? After all that extra driving they had to do to bypass her every day, just when Bush was about to head back to Washington to get away from her, Hurricane Katrina hit and forced him to see the reality of a failure of government that has left the entire world asking "how could something like this have happened in the United States?"
Then something truly surprising occurred: In the midst of all of this, President Bush, who usually refuses to admit even the possibility of making a mistake, did something truly radical. Bush accepted responsibility. In his own words: "To the extent that the federal government failed, I take full responsibility." He went on to talk about the racism that has led to poverty in America and vowed to "do what it takes" to rebuild New Orleans, to fight racism and end poverty, and make a better world for our children's future.
I was stunned. I didn't believe him, but I was still stunned. How could I not be? How could anyone have possibly known that President Bush was planning to appear, live, in Jackson Square, New Orleans and channel Franklin Delano Roosevelt?
It was a dramatic change of course for Bush--one meant to convince the public that his understanding of the situation and his desire to personally correct the errors that led to such a catastrophic failure would actually lead to government programs that would lift the poor and disenfranchised out of poverty, once and for all.
Of course, Republicans are mad as hell because they're worried that he's going to make good on his promise and spend all their hard-earned money bailing out lazy poor people. And Democrats are mad because they know it's all just talk. Nothing has really changed. The "liberal" speech Bush gave at Jackson Square was just one more example of hypocrisy in action.
But you have to hand it to the Bush administration--they know how to put on a good show. When something is really important to them, they can turn the federal government into a machine so efficient it makes Martha Stewart look like a sloppy housekeeper. While hundreds continue to beg for food and water, electricity and a clean place to live, Bush and his crew demonstrated a turn-about in government efficiency that was nothing short of miraculous. As Tom Engelhardt points out in his latest Dispatch:
Without a single mishap, the rescue team delivered to central New Orleans its own generators, lights (not just the warm-glow ones for the President but the HMI movie lights to set the cathedral in the background ablaze), the camouflage netting that was needed to hide from viewers any sign of the surrounding devastation, and even its own communications equipment. And then there was the matter of crowd control - okay, maybe not exactly crowds in depopulated New Orleans, but soldiers from the 82nd Airborne were effectively deployed, just in case, "to keep regular citizens several blocks back."
Naturally, when his speech ended, President Bush drove out of sight, taking the lights, the cameras and the action with him. Again, from Tom Engelhardt:
. . . an hour after he was done and gone - rescues of this sort being limited affairs - the area was "plunged into total darkness again, to audible groans. … It may be true that, for a week or more, this administration couldn't get a bottle of water to a diabetic grandmother, but when something was actually at stake - what reporters far and wide referred to as the "rebuilding" not of New Orleans but of a presidency, or simply of the presidential "image" - efficiency, coordination, and togetherness were the by-words of the day.
Yeah, nothing's changed. But Bush did surprise me. I've got to give him points for that.
-- Laurie Fosner
posted by LA Fosner at 2:18 PM
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