[Mb-civic] Frank Rich

[Mike Blaxill]

The Faith-Based President Defrocked 
    By Frank Rich 
    The New York Times

    Sunday 09 October 2005

    To understand why the right is rebelling
against Harriet Miers, don't waste time boning up
on her glory days with the Texas Lottery
Commission. The real story in this dust-up is not
the Supreme Court candidate, but the man who
picked her. The Miers nomination, whatever its
fate, will be remembered as the flashpoint when
the faith-based Bush base finally started to lose
faith in our propaganda president and join the
apostate American majority.

    Though James Dobson, America's foremost
analyst of the gay subtext of SpongeBob
SquarePants, was easily rolled by Karl Rove and
dragged back into the Miers camp, he's an
exception. The pervasive mood on the right was
articulated by Cathie Adams, president of the
Texas branch of Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum.
She told The Washington Post: "President Bush is
asking us to have faith in things unseen. We only
have that kind of faith in God."

    This is a sea change. If anything, Ms.
Miers's record of opposition to abortion (a
contribution to Texans United for Life, a
leadership role at a strenuously anti-abortion
church) is less "unseen" than that of John
Roberts, whose nomination aroused no protest on
the right only three months ago. The difference
between then and now is a startling index of the
toll taken by a botched war and hurricane
response on whatever remains of Mr. Bush's
credibility. The continuing inability of the
administration to accomplish the mission in Iraq
and of its post-Brownie FEMA to do a heck of a
job on the Gulf Coast has inflicted collateral
damage on its case for Harriet Miers.

    "The president's 'argument' for her amounts
to: Trust me," George Will wrote in the op-ed
column that last week galvanized conservative
opposition to the nomination. He then went on to
list several reasons why he doesn't trust Mr.
Bush. As if to prove the point, the president
went out to the Rose Garden and let loose with
one whopper after another in his first press
conference in four months.

    "Of all the people in the United States you
had to choose from, is Harriet Miers the most
qualified to serve on the Supreme Court?" Mr.
Bush was asked. "Yes," he answered. Has he ever
discussed abortion with her? "Not to my
recollection." How much political capital does he
have left? "Plenty." With a straight face he
promised that Ms. Miers was "not going to change"
and that "20 years from now she'll be the same
person with the same philosophy that she is
today." Even were that a praiseworthy attribute,
it would still contradict the history of a woman
who abandoned her Roman Catholic faith for
evangelical Christianity and the Democratic Party
for the Republicans.

    But Mr. Bush's dissembling wasn't limited to
his Supreme Court nominee. Asked how he was going
to pay for Katrina recovery, the president twice
said he'd proposed $187 billion in budget cuts
over 10 years - but failed to factor in his tax
proposals and other budget increases. The real
net total for proposed Bush cuts is $103 billion,
according to the Congressional Budget Office, and
even less according to some independent number
crunchers. Turning to Iraq, Mr. Bush once again
fudged our "progress" there with a numerical
bait-and-switch, bragging about "30 Iraqi
battalions in the lead." (Translation: in the
lead with American military support.) Less than a
week earlier his own commanders had told Congress
that the number of Iraqi battalions capable of
fighting unaided had dropped from 3 to 1 since
June. (Translation: 750 soldiers are now ready to
stand up on their own should America's 140,000
troops stand down.) For good measure, Mr. Bush
then flouted credibility one more time to set the
stage for the next administration fiasco. In the
event of a bird flu epidemic, he said, one option
for effecting a quarantine would be to use the
military. What military? Last week The Army Times
reported that the Pentagon, its resources already
overstretched by Iraq, would try to bolster
sagging recruitment by tapping "a demographic
long deemed off limits: high school dropouts who
don't have a General Educational Development
credential."

    Like most Bush fictions, the latest are
driven less by ideology than by a desire to hide
incompetence. But there's a self-destructive
impulse at work as well. "The best way to get the
news is from objective sources," the president
told Brit Hume of Fox News two years ago. "And
the most objective sources I have are people on
my staff who tell me what's happening in the
world." Thus does the White House compound the
sin of substituting propaganda for effective
action by falling for the same spin it showers on
the public.

    Beware of leaders who drink their own
Kool-Aid. The most distressing aspect of Mr.
Bush's press conference last week was less his
lies and half-truths than the abundant evidence
that he is as out of touch as Custer was on the
way to Little Bighorn. The president seemed
genuinely shocked that anyone could doubt his
claim that his friend is the best-qualified
candidate for the highest court. Mr. Bush also
seemed unaware that it was Republicans who were
leading the attack on Ms. Miers. "The decision as
to whether or not there will be a fight is up to
the Democrats," he said, confusing his
antagonists this time much as he has Saddam
Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

    Such naked presidential isolation from
reality was a replay of his response to Hurricane
Katrina. When your main "objective sources" for
news are members of your own staff, you can
actually believe that the most pressing tragedy
of the storm is the rebuilding of Trent Lott's
second home. You can even believe that Brownie
will fix it. The truth only began to penetrate
four days after the storm's arrival - and only
then, according to Newsweek, because an adviser,
Dan Bartlett, asked the president to turn away
from his usual "objective sources" and instead
watch a DVD compilation of actual evening news
reports.

    Mr. Bartlett's one desperate effort to prick
his boss's bubble notwithstanding, the White
House as a whole is so addicted to its own
mythmaking prowess that it can't kick the habit.
Seventy-two hours before Ms. Miers was nominated,
federal auditors from the Government
Accountability Office declared that the
administration had violated the law against
"covert propaganda" when it repeatedly hired fake
reporters (and one supposedly real pundit,
Armstrong Williams) to plug its policies in faux
news reports and editorial commentary produced at
taxpayers' expense. But a bigger scandal is the
legal propaganda that the White House produces
daily even now - or especially now.

    As always, much of it pertains to the war in
Iraq. On Sept. 28, to take one recent instance,
the president announced the smiting of a man he
identified as "the second most wanted Al Qaeda
leader in Iraq" and the "top operational
commander of Al Qaeda in Baghdad." As New York's
Daily News would quickly report, the man in
question "may not even be one of the top 10 or 15
leaders." The blogger Blogenlust chimed in,
documenting 33 "top lieutenants" of Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi who have been captured, killed or
identified in the past two and a half years, with
no deterrent effect on terrorist violence in
Iraq, Madrid or London. No wonder the nation
shrugged at the largely recycled and
unsubstantiated list of 10 foiled Qaeda plots
that Mr. Bush unveiled in Thursday's latest
stay-the-course Iraq oration.

    The administration's strategy for covering up
embarrassing realities with fiction reached its
purest expression two weeks ago when both Laura
Bush and Karen Hughes were recruited to star in
propagandistic television "reality" shows. In the
first lady's case, this was literally so: she was
dispatched to Biloxi to appear in an episode of
ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition." The
thinking seems to be that if Mrs. Bush helps one
family on a hit reality series, perhaps no one
will notice the reality that no-bid contracts and
ineptitude have kept hundreds of thousands of
other hurricane victims homeless indefinitely
while taxpayers foot the bill for unused trailers
and cruise ships.

    Ms. Hughes took her act on the road in the
Middle East. There she conducted a culturally
tone-deaf "listening tour" in which she read her
lines from briefing papers and tried to win
hearts and minds by posing with little Arab kids
as if they were interchangeable with the little
black kids in Mr. Bush's "compassionate
conservative" photo ops back home. She didn't
seem to know that this stunt wouldn't even fly on
Fox News anymore, let alone Al Jazeera.

    This Saturday is supposed to bring new
victories on both these troubled fronts: Oct. 15
is the day that Iraqis vote on their constitution
and the day that the president set as a deadline
for all hurricane victims to be moved out of
shelters. Chances are that the number of
Americans who still have faith that the light is
at the end of either of these tunnels is
identical to the number who believe Harriet Miers
is the second coming of Antonin Scalia and that
Tom Cruise has found true love.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/100905F.shtml