[Mb-civic] Frank Rich

[richard haase]

i know frank rich as now become a liberal and says good things politically
etc
but i remember him as the butcher of bdwy
all the carnage he wrought
have very hard time getting into him
even though politically we are colinear etc

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Blaxill" <mblaxill at yahoo.com>
To: <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
Sent: Monday, October 10, 2005 11:07 AM
Subject: [Mb-civic] Frank Rich


> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Mb-civic mailing list
> Mb-civic at islandlists.com
> http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic