[Mb-civic] MUST READ: The amazing shrinking president - Joan Vennochi - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

The amazing shrinking president

By Joan Vennochi, Globe Columnist  |  October 9, 2005

IT'S HARD to listen to George W. Bush and not think about the Wizard of Oz.

What comes to mind is the weak, fallible human being who was revealed 
when Toto pulled the curtain.

There, in the small booth, a small, ordinary man, not an omnipotent 
sorcerer, frantically yanks at levers and dials. When the ''wizard" 
finally admits the obvious fraud, Dorothy says, ''Oh, you're a very bad 
man." Replies the wizard, ''Oh, no, my dear, I'm a very good man. I'm 
just a very bad wizard."

Of course, ''The Wizard of Oz" -- published first in 1900 as a 
children's story by L. Frank Baum, then made world-famous by the classic 
1939 movie starring Judy Garland -- has long been debated as political 
allegory.

Today, some people will see presidential adviser Karl Rove as the man 
behind the curtain.

But I see President Bush -- a decent, but flawed man with grandiose 
intentions, who is looking right now like a very bad wizard-president.

Like the wizard, he huffs and puffs in an attempt to maintain 
bamboozlement in the Land of Oz. But once the curtain is pulled, the 
people of Emerald City can never look at the fellow behind it the way 
they did before.

The curtain has been pulled on Bush, not by a tiny, black terrier, but 
by the outcome of presidential decisions and policies.

In recent weeks, Hurricane Katrina revealed a nation unprepared for 
natural catastrophe. Bush looked weak and ineffective in his initial 
response to the hurricane. And he was further weakened by the 
bureaucratic ineptitude televised from New Orleans and personified by 
Bush's longtime friend, Michael Brown, the deposed head of the Federal 
Emergency Management Agency. It all raised serious questions about the 
nation's preparedness for terrorist attacks.

Bush's most recent Supreme Court nomination adds to the sense of a 
weakened president. Harriet E. Miers is known chiefly as a friend of 
Bush, not as a well-known attorney, judge, or legal scholar. In that, 
she is the opposite of John Roberts, who was confirmed as chief justice 
on the basis of his credentials and intellect.

But it is Iraq itself that pulled the curtain on Bush. His recent speech 
before the National Endowment for Democracy is yet another attempt to 
push the levers and turn the dials to gin up support for a ''war on 
terror" fought in Iraq. Instead of lions and tigers and bears, it is 
Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and ''a dictator who hated free 
peoples" (Saddam Hussein). Bush once again links the US invasion of Iraq 
to the ''great evil" of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Bush also tries to 
reverse the creeping feeling of national insecurity by telling Americans 
that the United States and its partners have disrupted 10 serious 
terrorist plots since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But the damage is 
already done.

What the president referred to in his speech as ''self-defeating 
pessimism" is reality. He cited some examples of reality in his speech 
-- Iraqi children killed in a bombing, Iraqi teachers executed, hospital 
workers attacked as they treat the wounded. But in that, he wants us to 
see a country fighting for democracy, with Iraqis ''arguing with each 
other." Bush must be living in Oz if waves of suicide bombings look to 
him like citizens ''arguing" rather than a country imploding.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/10/09/the_amazing_shrinking_president/
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