Weather Of Mass Destruction
Thomas Friedman on the unraveling of the Bush administration's carefully controlled image:
It was just a gut reaction that George Bush and Dick Cheney were the right guys to deal with Osama. I was not alone in that feeling, and as a result, Mr. Bush got a mandate, almost a blank check, to rule from 9/11 that he never really earned at the polls. Unfortunately, he used that mandate not simply to confront the terrorists but to take a radically uncompassionate conservative agenda - on taxes, stem cells, the environment and foreign treaties - that was going nowhere before 9/11, and drive it into a post-9/11 world. In that sense, 9/11 distorted our politics and society.Well, if 9/11 is one bookend of the Bush administration, Katrina may be the other. If 9/11 put the wind at President Bush's back, Katrina's put the wind in his face. If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with Katrina - and all the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at home.
These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending "intelligent design" as a theology than practicing it as a policy.
For instance, it's unavoidably obvious that we need a real policy of energy conservation. But President Bush can barely choke out the word "conservation." And can you imagine Mr. Cheney, who has already denounced conservation as a "personal virtue" irrelevant to national policy, now leading such a campaign or confronting oil companies for price gouging?
And then there are the president's standard lines: "It's not the government's money; it's your money," and, "One of the last things that we need to do to this economy is to take money out of your pocket and fuel government." Maybe Mr. Bush will now also tell us: "It's not the government's hurricane - it's your hurricane."
An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist - who has been quoted as saying: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" - doesn't have the instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town.
The Bush team has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day. Just spend money. You knew that sooner or later there would be a rainy day, but Karl Rove has assumed it wouldn't happen on Mr. Bush's watch - that someone else would have to clean it up. Well, it did happen on his watch.
As I've heard a few people say, it's not "the blame game," but the responsibility game. Where's Dad? Do we have a dad? Or a smirking boy cowboy in charge. In a crisis like this one, when a president really needs to act presidential -- and not just send in the cavalry, but be the cavalry...George Bush has failed pretty pathetically. Hey, but the guy's got a golf game to practice, right?
I think the proper name you're looking for is ChimpyMcBushHitlerHalliburSmirkton.
Dmac at September 9, 2005 9:23 AM
Paragraph 4 - Is this guy simultaneously promoting conservation and price controls? Have I read this wrong? He may be right on other things, but if he's saying what I think he's saying, he's a damned fool.
Price gouging, which to me, just means higher prices in response to scarcer resources is one of the original market conservation methods. If you're familiar with any basic economics, you already know this.
Charlie at September 9, 2005 9:37 AM
Oh christ, I did read it wrong. Sorry!
Charlie at September 9, 2005 9:38 AM
> Where's Dad? Do we have a dad?
> Or a smirking boy cowboy in charge.
Amy, Amy, Amy... BUSH IS NOT YOUR DAD. He's not even your leader. He's your PRESIDENT: He's hired help. You may have had better employees in that position in the past. You may have better in the future. But rhetoric like this poisons any warnings from you in the years ahead about intrusions on liberty. Because after all, if he's your Dad, he's SUPPOSED to be reading your teenage diary to make sure the right kind and color of boy is slipping his mitts up your sweater on a school night.
It's this sort of reductive, infantilized thinking that continues to sink liberals.... Year after year, decade after decade. It makes people think liberals are struggling to work out their most personal emotional scenarios in the most public possible realm. As a favorite writer (Flo King) used to say, "I don't mind navel-gazing by liberals, I just wish they wouldn't gaze at MINE."
And yes, this is relevant. To the extent that America is enjoying a "conservative moment" in its history, it will continue to do so.
> ...the unraveling of the
> Bush administration's
> carefully controlled image...
Bush/Rove is not a master manipulator. Neither was Clinton/Carville, neither was Reagan/Deaver, neither --for the sweet love of Christ-- was Carter/Jordan. And that's instructive!
My dear mother sent me a Nixon bio a few months back. It picked up the story during the first inauguration. Thirty pages in, the Trickster was writing memoranda to Pat about household operations, in longhand, on a fourteen-inch yellow legal pad. (I couldn't continue the book.) You might have thought this was a very particular sort of emotional dislocation, but consider the very next guy the American Voters selected for the office: Jimmy Carter. He too was known for sending his aides away so that he could listen to classical music and write the precious longhand, yellow-legal memos that would lead America from the darkness.
It didn't work out. Nixon gave us Watergate, Carter gave us the Desert One debacle. American politics has patterns, and they bridge crises.
George Bush and Bill Clinton are no more responsible for the levees than I am. (I had a rockin' weekend in N.O. in April, complete with an evening in Mobile & Biloxi; it was the day the Pope died.) Is there any literate American over the age of 25 who didn't know that this was coming? And that corrective measures would cost in the tens of billions, would continue to deform the natural landscape, and would shelter some of the most poorly-governed and poorly-connected people the nation has ever seen? It's not the POLITICIANS who couldn't find the money. It's the VOTERS. I never heard ANYONE north of Baton Rouge say we needed to spend the money to protect that city.
In general terms, the rest of the United States are going to continue to starve the Gulf Coast for the resources they need to compete with the rest of the nation, in the same way that America viewed whole will continue to be conservative.
But it's not THAT conservative: The screams of annoyance you hear about Bush's incompetence are very real. Which is not the same thing as saying anyone wants to pony up any dough.
Cridland at September 9, 2005 9:33 PM
I wouldn't count on the 'smirking cowboy' to bring home a roll of toilet paper from the grocery store, much less manage the government.
Sheryl at September 12, 2005 5:33 PM
Why is it that people never seem to notice when their complaints about infantile "leaders" become infantile as well?
Radwaste at September 13, 2005 2:25 AM
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