On the doorstep of the end of the Bush years, I just came across this great peice by Jay Rosen from back in 2006 that reaches to the philosophical core from which the fatal course of the Bush Presidency was set.
Rosen credits the reporting of Ron Suskind, particularly his Without A Doubt article from the New York Times Magazine, as revealing the intellectual scoop for how to interpret the Bush White House.
From Rosen:
A different pattern had appeared under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The normal checks and balances had been overcome, so that executive power could flow more freely. Reduced deliberation, oversight, fact-finding, and field reporting were different elements of an emerging political style. Suskind, I felt, got to the essence of it with his phrase, the “retreat from empiricism.”
Which is a perfect example of what Bill Keller and others at the New York Times call an intellectual scoop. (“When you can look at all the dots everyone can look at, and be the first to connect them in a meaningful and convincing way…”) Over the last three years, and ever since the adventure in Iraq began, Americans have seen spectacular failures of intelligence, spectacular collapses in the press, spectacular breakdowns in the reality-checks built into government, including the evaporation of oversight in Congress, and the by-passing of the National Security Council, which was created to prevent exactly these events.
[snip]
The alternative to facts on the ground is to act, regardless of the facts on the ground. When you act you make new facts. You clear new ground. And when you roll over or roll back the people who have a duty to report the situation as it is—people in the press, the military, the bureaucracy, your own cabinet, or right down the hall—then right there you have demonstrated your might.
It was Suskind's reporting that led to the coinage of the now famous phrase the "reality-based community." As noted, this seeming disdain for the facts wasn't so much an unintended result of anti-intellectualism run amock as it was a calculated method for clearing the ground for actions the White House wanted to take.
Facts or dissent could create roadblocks to desired actions. So, facts had to be subverted, channeled or ignored.
To paint Bush as simply a bumbling, redneck bumpkin who slid into the White House on Daddy's coattails is to undercut the level of intentionality at work here. It is a way of shifted or mitigating the blame. Or, to frame Bush, as some of his remaining supporters do (can there still be any?), as a good man led astray by bad advice.
This simply doesn't wash for me. His trajectory is more complex and directed than the simple narrative of "good man, bad advice" will allow.
It was more than dim-witted ignorance that was propelling him. It was arrogance that served to cover, for all his vaunted Texas swagger and machismo, a real weakness at the core of the man. A man whose doubt has to be covered with needless and unearned certitude.
A strong man can afford to be humble. A weak man cannot, as there is no pillar from which to hang his humility.
From Bob Woodward, via a post by Dreher:
During a December 2003 interview with Bush, I read to him a quote from his closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, about the experience of receiving letters from family members of slain soldiers who had written that they hated him. "And don't believe anyone who tells you when they receive letters like that, they don't suffer any doubt," Blair had said.
"Yeah," Bush replied. "I haven't suffered doubt."
"Is that right?" I asked. "Not at all?"
"No," he said.
Now try to square this attitude with the following description, by Rosen, of the White House debrief of the first leader of the post-war Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Jay Garner:
When Jay Garner returns to the White House from running the American effort in Iraq, Bush, Cheney, Condi Rice and Rumsfeld are there to greet him. Not only does he know to give a falsely upbeat assessment in his written report and stick to cheerful banter during the meeting, but he finds that no one asks him a single question about the situation on the ground in Iraq. [em: mine]
Here you have the best possible reporter, but there is no report. The scene (as described by George Packer) is highly ritualized. A message is being sent about who gets to define what’s happening on the ground, and it isn’t the people on the ground.
Honestly, it is hard to read such stupid s*** like this and not want to strangle the dumb m*****f***** with my own bare hands. He had a f***ing responsibility here that was much bigger than any self-aggrandizing dreams of himself!! A responsibility to the lives of 150K+ soldiers (not to mention the millions of Iraqis), and the cavalier attitude that he managed to revel in while simultaneously abdicating this responsibility through willfully blind recklessness and outright incompetence is truly enraging.
Rather than suffusing himself to the responsibility of his Presidential authority, that authority was bent in the service of his own ego.
For instance, Bush has a well-known habit for giving nicknames to everyone around him. On the one hand such behavior could be be seen as an ice-breaker, a way of tearing down the formal stiffness that might naturally be present when one finds oneself addressing the President of the United States.
On the other hand, it is an interpersonal power play. Bush can nickname, jibe, even soft-handedly demean the other person with full knowledge that the same will never be returned in kind, given the authority of his position. And, thereby Bush can relish in the capacity to lord his authority over others around him, even in such an insignificant manner.
This is the mark of a weak man and tyrant by nature.
And while Bush is often criticized due to his various malapropisms and mangled syntax, it was this quote that always riled me the most:
I'm the commander, I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation.
There is an imperial sensibility at work here. I am in command and what I say goes.
In such circumstances, loyalty is the highest value in one's subordinates. Since disunity is a threat to a weak king. It threatens to pull back the curtain, to reveal the man who is really there. And, that is something that Bush couldn't abide.
So as this sorry chapter in our political history draws down, I find that this commenter to James Fallows blog captures the sentiment of these times for me properly:
I too thought the final Bush press conference was a remarkable performance; if an actor were to memorize and replicate it, it would seem like something out of Eugene O'Neill, staged in a barroom, and we might feel pity.
The inept man without words realizes that he cannot say what he must say: an admission of failures across the board, a realization that his pipe dreams were deadly, an understanding that his nation and the world now hold him in low esteem and wish him gone.
And not to be able to say these things is to remain their captive forever. But there is no expiation for Mr. Bush, and that is the objective tragedy. How can he live without awareness?
He also must see how much Barack Obama is his opposite, how much he is admired and welcomed to the office, so unlike the stolen Bush arrival in 2000. It's a remarkable achievement for Mr. Bush: every moment of his presidency is touched with a shame that cannot be bathed away. I think he will disappear; I cannot see any post-presidential role he could fulfill without the full recollection of that shame.
And, this is a shame that is fully deserved. And, so it is not with a twinge of sadness or pity that I read the following revelation from the devastating retrospective assessment of Bush by the Economist which characterizes his presidency as one of "partisanship, politicization and incompetence."
He leaves the White House as one of the least popular and most divisive presidents in American history. At home, his approval rating has been stuck in the 20s for months; abroad, George Bush has presided over the most catastrophic collapse in America’s reputation since the second world war. The American economy is in deep recession, brought on by a crisis that forced Mr Bush to preside over huge and unpopular bail-outs.
America is embroiled in two wars, one of which Mr Bush launched against the tide of world opinion. The Bush family name, once among the most illustrious in American political life, is now so tainted that Jeb, George’s younger brother, recently decided not to run for the Senate from Florida. A Bush relative describes family gatherings as “funeral wakes”. [em: mine]
Well, he's getting a full f***ing dose of reality now, isn't he? Too bad for the rest of us it was eight years too late.
I, for one, won't be sending the SOB any flowers.
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