[Mb-civic] (no subject)

[Hawaiipolo at cs.com]

Excellent article..read it through...MD> 
> Will the Bush Administration Implode? 
> By Tom Engelhardt 
> Tomdispatch.com 
> 
> Wednesday 26 October 2005 
> 
> 
> >> Bush's October surprise.
>  
> Those in the anti-fascist struggle of the 1930s who went off to fight in the 
> Spanish Civil War were later termed "premature antifascists." Perhaps, in 
> the same spirit, I might be considered a premature Bush-administration 
> implodist. 
> On February 1, 2004, reviewing the week just passed, I imagined us trapped 
> in "some new reality show in which we were all to be locked in with an odd 
> group of [administration] jokesters," and then wrote: 
> >> When we finally emerge will there be a prize for the survivors? Will we 
>> discover, for instance, that our President and his administration have headed 
>> down a path of slow-motion implosion...?
>  
> On February 18, 2004, my optimism briefly surging, I imagined the future as 
> a movie trailer (inviting readers back for the main attraction that spring or 
> summer) and offered this synopsis of the future film - the wild fowl 
> references being to Dick Cheney's hunting habits, then in the news - with: 
> >> A wall-to-wall cast of characters. Far too many to absorb in a split 
>> second including our President, Vice President, CIA officials, a supreme court 
>> justice, spooks and unnamed sources galore, FBI agents, prosecutors, military 
>> men, congressional representatives and their committees, grand juries, 
>> fuming columnists, an ex-ambassador, journalists and bloggers, sundry 
>> politicians, rafts of neocons..., oil tycoons, and of course assorted wild fowl (this 
>> being the Bush administration). If the director were Oliver Stone, it might 
>> immediately be titled: The Bush Follies... And the first scene would open - 
>> like that old Jean Luc Goddard movie Weekend - with a giant traffic jam. It 
>> would be epic. All of political Washington in potential scandal gridlock. 
>> And (as with Weekend) horns would be blaring, drivers and passengers arguing. 
>> It would be obvious that the norms of civilization were falling fast and 
>> people were threatening to cannibalize each other.
>  
> Sounds a bit like Washington awaiting the Fitzgerald indictments this week, 
> doesn't it? For good measure, I added, "The Bush administration has been in 
> trouble ever since its arrogance met its incompetence at Intelligence Pass 
> last summer; ever since Plame Gate began..." 
> On January 17, 2005 (hedging my time spans a bit more carefully), I wrote: 
> >> The Bush administration has insisted with remarkable success that a 
>> vision of the world concocted more or less out of whole cloth inside a bubble of 
>> a world is the world itself. It seems, right now, that we're in a race 
>> between Bush's fiction-based reality becoming our reality... and an 
>> administration implosion in the months or years ahead as certain dangerous facts in Iraq 
>> and elsewhere insist on being attended to.
>  
> Finally, this July, when matters were more visibly underway, I returned to 
> the subject, 
> >> While there is officially no means for the Bush administration to implode 
>> (impeachment not being a political possibility), nonetheless, implosion is 
>> certainly possible. If and when the unraveling begins, the proximate cause, 
>> whether the Plame affair or something else entirely, is likely to surprise 
>> us all but none more than the members of the mainstream media.
>  
> Shadow Governments and Armed Imperial Isolationists 
> Now, here we are. So call me prescient or, less charitably, chalk it up to 
> the fact that, if you say anything over and over, sooner or later it may come 
> true. Already we have the first front-page tabloid report - in the New York 
> Daily News - on a President (whose reigning adjectives not so long ago were 
> "resolute" and "steady") beginning to unravel. Under the headline, Bushies 
> Feeling the Boss's Wrath, Thomas DeFrank, that paper's Washington Bureau Chief, 
> wrote, "Facing the darkest days of his presidency, President Bush is 
> frustrated, sometimes angry and even bitter, his associates say... 'This is not some 
> manager at McDonald's chewing out the help,' said a source with close ties to 
> the White House when told about these outbursts. 'This is the President of 
> the United States, and it's not a pleasant sight.'... Presidential advisers and 
> friends say Bush is a mass of contradictions: cheerful and serene, peevish 
> and melancholy, occasionally lapsing into what he once derided as the 'blame 
> game.'" Frankly, the description already has a touch of Richard Nixon (as his 
> presidency delaminated after Watergate finally hit). 
> If you want to understand the present moment, however, it's important to 
> grasp one major difference between the Nixon years and today. In the early 
> 1970s, Richard Nixon had to compete, elbows flying, for face and space time in 
> what we now call the mainstream media. There wasn't any other game in town. (For 
> instance, I suspect that if the secret history of the first op-ed page, 
> which made its appearance in the New York Times in 1970, was ever written, its 
> purpose would turn out to have been to give the hard-charging Nixon 
> administration a space in the liberal paper of record where Vice President Spiro Agnew 
> and other administration supporters could sound off from time to time.) 
> George Bush arrived at a very different media moment. From Rush Limbaugh and 
> Sinclair Broadcasting to Fox News, the Washington Times, and the Weekly 
> Standard, he had his own media already in place - a full spectrum of outlets 
> including TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses. As for the 
> rest of the media, his task, unlike Nixon's, wasn't to compete for space, but to 
> pacify, sideline, and, if need be, punish. In this sense, no administration 
> has been less giving of actual news or more obviously tried to pay less 
> attention to major media outlets. The President was proud to say that he didn't 
> even read or watch such outlets. His was a shock-and-awe policy and, from 
> September 12, 2001 to last spring, it was remarkably successful. 
> The "cabal" of Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and 
> their associates that Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary 
> of State Colin L. Powell, recently spoke and then wrote about - "Its insular 
> and secret workings were efficient and swift, not unlike the decision-making 
> one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy." - dealt with 
> the media that wasn't theirs and the government bureaucracy that wasn't 
> theirs in similar ways via those big three: pacification, sidelining, and 
> punishment. Whether it was the hated CIA or the much-loathed State Department, they 
> set up their own small, enclosed structures for governing and attempted to 
> shove the rest of them out into the cold. And again they were remarkably 
> successful - for a while. (Nixon, too, took a stab at setting up a shadow 
> government, loyal only to him, including, of course, those famous "plumbers.") 
> In fact, the same cast of Bush administration characters dealt with the 
> world in a similar manner. They buckled on their armor, raised their cruise 
> missiles, broke their treaties, distained anything that passed for 
> multi-nationalism or had the letters "U" or "N" in it, unpacked their dictionaries to 
> redefine the nature of torture and international relations, proclaimed world domin
> ation to be their modest goal - and, armed to the teeth, sallied forth with 
> their allied corporations in the name of everything good to ransack the globe 
> (and punish any country or government that dared get in their way). In this 
> course, they were regularly called "unilateralists." 
> In all their guises - in relation to the media, the federal bureaucracy, and 
> other countries - they actually were dominating isolationists. They took a 
> once honorable Republican heartland tradition - isolationism - turned it on 
> its head and thrust it into the world. They acted in Iraq and elsewhere as 
> armed imperial isolationists. Where the elder Bush and Bill Clinton were 
> multi-nationalists and globalizers; they were ultra-nationalists and militarists, 
> focused only on the military solution to any problem - and damn the torpedoes, 
> full speed ahead! 
> But when you are a cabal, using such close-to-the-breast, not to say 
> mom-and-pop, methods of ruling, and you falter, whether in Iraq or at home, 
> unilateralism becomes weakness. And when it turns out that what you rule is the "last 
> superpower" and you've sidelined, pacified, or punished large numbers of 
> people in the vast, interlocking worlds of the governmental bureaucracy and the 
> media, your enemies still retain the power to strike back. 
> When something closer to the full story of our moment is known, I suspect 
> we'll see more clearly just how the bureaucracy began to do so (along with, as 
> in this week's New Yorker magazine in the person of Brent Scowcroft, the old 
> multinational ruling elite). In the meantime, it's clear that what the 
> potential implosion moment awaited was the perfect storm of events now upon us. If 
> this moment were to be traced back to its origins, I would, for the time 
> being, pick the spring of this year as my starting point and give the mainstream 
> media - anxious, resentful, bitter, cowed, losing audience, and cutting staff 
> - their due. The Bush slide has been a long, slow one, as the opinion polls 
> indicate; but like that famed moss-less rolling stone, it picked up speed 
> last spring as the President's approval ratings slipped below 50%, and then in 
> the ensuing months plunged near or below 40%, putting him at the edge of 
> free-fall. 
> If there's one thing that this administration and Washington journalists 
> have in common, it's that both groups parse opinion polls obsessively; so both 
> saw the signs of administration polling softness and of a President, just into 
> a second term, who should have been triumphant but was failing in his 
> attempt to spend what he called his "political capital" on social security 
> "reform." 
> Vulnerability, it gets the blood roaring, especially when it seeps from an 
> administration so long feared and admired as the "most disciplined" and "most 
> secretive" in memory, an administration whose highest officials (as the Plame 
> case showed) regularly whacked their opponents with anything at hand and 
> then called on their media allies, always in full-battle-mode, for support. 
> Probably the key moment of weakness came in August, when Cindy Sheehan ended up 
> in that famed ditch at the side of a road in Crawford, Texas, and the 
> President and his men - undoubtedly feeling their new-found vulnerability, anxious 
> over an Iraq War gone wrong and the protesting mother of a dead soldier so near 
> at hand - blinked. 
> In their former mode, they would undoubtedly have swept her away in some 
> fashion; instead, they faltered and sent out not the Secret Service or some 
> minor bureaucrat, but two of the President's top men, National Security Adviser 
> Stephen Hadley and Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin. For forty-five minutes, 
> they negotiated over her demand to meet George Bush the way you might with a 
> recalcitrant foreign head of state - and then she just sent them back, 
> insisting she would wait where she was to get the President's explanation for her 
> son's death. 
> Trapped in no-news Crawford with a President always determined to offer them 
> less than nothing, hardened by an administration whose objective for any 
> media outlet not its own was only "rollback," and sympathetic to a grieving 
> mother from Bush's war, reporters found themselves with an irresistible story, 
> ratified as important by the administration, at a moment when they could 
> actually run with it - and they headed down the road. 
> Not long after, hurricane Katrina swept into town; the President refused to 
> end his vacation; FEMA began twisting, twisting in the wind; Tom DeLay went 
> down; Rita blew in (to be followed by Wilma); Senator Frist found himself 
> blinded by his trust; the President nominated his own lawyer to the Supreme Court 
> - at this point, even some of his conservative allies began peeling away - 
> and then, of course, waiting in the wings, there was the ultimate October 
> surprise, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald - backed by a reinvigorated media 
> and an angry bureaucracy - ready to lift the lid on a whole can of worms not 
> likely to be closed for years to come. 
> Our Imploding Future 
> To me anyway, this looks like a potential critical-mass moment. Of course, 
> there are a few missing elements of no small import. The most obvious is an 
> opposition party. The Democrats are essentially nowhere to be seen. In fact, 
> whether or not they even remain a party is, at this point, open to serious 
> question. Their leading candidate for president, Hillary Clinton, still wants to 
> send more (nonexistent) American troops into Iraq and, like most other 
> Democrats in Congress, has remained painfully mum - this passes for a strategy, 
> however craven - on almost everything that matters at the moment. Even on the 
> issue of torture, it's a Republican Senator, John McCain, who is spearheading 
> resistance to the administration. 
> The other group distinctly missing-in-action, as they have been for years 
> now, is the military. Many top military men were clearly against the Iraq War 
> and, aghast at the way the administration has conducted it, have been leaking 
> like mad ever since. But other than General Eric Shinseki, who spoke up in 
> the pre-invasion period, suggesting the kind of troop strength that might 
> actually be needed for an occupation (rather than a liberation) of Iraq and was 
> essentially laughed out of Washington, and various retired generals like former 
> Centcom Commander Anthony Zinni and former Director of the National Security 
> Agency retired Lieutenant General William Odom, not a single high-ranking 
> military officer has spoken out - or, more reasonably, resigned and then done 
> so. This, it seems to me, remains a glaring case of dereliction of duty, given 
> what has been going on. 
> As for the implosion of this administration, we have no idea what implosion 
> would actually mean under the present circumstances. Even with a Republican 
> Congress partially staffed with the American version of the Taliban, will 
> whatever unravels over many months or even years, post-the Fitzgerald 
> indictments, lead to hearings and someday the launching of impeachment proceedings? Or 
> is that beyond the bounds of possibility? Who knows. Will this administration 
> dissolve in some fashion as yet undetermined? Will they go down shooting (as, 
> points out Robert Dreyfuss in a striking if unnerving piece at Tompaine.com, 
> they already are threatening to do in Syria)? Will Daddy's men be hauled out 
> of the pages of the New Yorker magazine and off the front-lines of 
> money-making and called in to save the day? Again, who knows. (Where is Bush family 
> consigliere James Baker anyway?) 
> As you consider this, remember one small thing: So far, hurricane Katrina 
> aside, this administration has largely felt tremors coursing through the elite 
> in Washington. The real 7.9 seismic shocks have yet to happen. Yes, in Iraq, 
> the 2,000 mark in American dead has just been breached, but the Iraqi 
> equivalent of the 1983 Lebanon barracks suicide bombing in which 241 American 
> servicemen died, hasn't happened yet. Yes, gas hovers near $3.00 a gallon at the 
> pumps, but the winter natural-gas and heating-oil shock hasn't even begun to 
> hit; nor has next summer's oil shock (after the Bush administration bombs 
> Iran); nor has the housing bubble burst; nor have foreign countries begun to cash 
> in their T-bills in staggering quantities; nor has oil sabotage truly spread 
> in the Middle East; or unemployment soared at home; or the initial wave of a 
> recession hit; nor have we discovered that next year's hurricane season is 
> worse than this terrible one; nor... but I'm not really being predictive here. 
> I'm simply saying that, once upon a time not so very long ago, this 
> administration had a fair amount of room for error. Now, it's no longer in control of 
> its own script and has next to no space for anything to go wrong in a world 
> where "going wrong" is likely to be the operative phrase for quite a while. 
> The Fitzgerald indictments, in other words, are probably just the end of the 
> beginning. Whether they are also the beginning of the end is another question 
> entirely. 
> Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular 
> antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire 
> Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American 
> Triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has just 
> come out in paperback. 
> ------- 
> Jump to today's TO Features:                                                 
>                                                                              
>       
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