[Mb-civic] Krugman

[Mike Blaxill]

Ending the Fraudulence
    By Paul Krugman
    The New York Times

    Monday 31 October 2005

    Let me be frank: it has been a long political
nightmare. For some of us, daily life has
remained safe and comfortable, so the nightmare
has merely been intellectual: we realized early
on that this administration was cynical,
dishonest and incompetent, but spent a long time
unable to get others to see the obvious. For
others - above all, of course, those Americans
risking their lives in a war whose real rationale
has never been explained - the nightmare has been
all too concrete.

    So is the nightmare finally coming to an end?
Yes, I think so. I have no idea whether Patrick
Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, will bring
more indictments in the Plame affair. In any
case, I don't share fantasies that Dick Cheney
will be forced to resign; even Karl Rove may keep
his post. One way or another, the Bush
administration will stagger on for three more
years. But its essential fraudulence stands
exposed, and it's hard to see how that exposure
can be undone.

    What do I mean by essential fraudulence?
Basically, I mean the way an administration with
an almost unbroken record of policy failure has
nonetheless achieved political dominance through
a carefully cultivated set of myths.

    The record of policy failure is truly
remarkable. It sometimes seems as if President
Bush and Mr. Cheney are Midases in reverse:
everything they touch - from Iraq reconstruction
to hurricane relief, from prescription drug
coverage to the pursuit of Osama - turns to crud.
Even the few apparent successes turn out to
contain failures at their core: for example, real
G.D.P. may be up, but real wages are down.

    The point is that this administration's
political triumphs have never been based on its
real-world achievements, which are few and far
between. The administration has, instead, built
its power on myths: the myth of presidential
leadership, the ugly myth that the administration
is patriotic while its critics are not. Take away
those myths, and the administration has nothing
left.

    Well, Katrina ended the leadership myth,
which was already fading as the war dragged on.
There was a time when a photo of Mr. Bush looking
out the window of Air Force One on 9/11 became an
iconic image of leadership. Now, a similar image
of Mr. Bush looking out at a flooded New Orleans
has become an iconic image of his lack of
connection. Pundits may try to resurrect Mr.
Bush's reputation, but his cult of personality is
dead - and the inscription on the tombstone
reads, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

    Meanwhile, the Plame inquiry, however it
winds up, has ended the myth of the
administration's monopoly on patriotism, which
was also fading in the face of the war.

    Apologists can shout all they like that no
laws were broken, that hardball politics is
nothing new, or whatever. The fact remains that
officials close to both Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush
leaked the identity of an undercover operative
for political reasons. Whether or not that act
was illegal, it was clearly unpatriotic.

    And the Plame affair has also solidified the
public's growing doubts about the
administration's morals. By a three-to-one
margin, according to a Washington Post poll, the
public now believes that the level of ethics and
honesty in the government has declined rather
than risen under Mr. Bush.

    So the Bush administration has lost the myths
that sustained its mojo, and with them much of
its power to do harm. But the nightmare won't be
fully over until two things happen.

    First, politicians will have to admit that
they were misled. Second, the news media will
have to face up to their role in allowing
incompetents to pose as leaders and political
apparatchiks to pose as patriots.

    It's a sad commentary on the timidity of most
Democrats that even now, with Lawrence Wilkerson,
Colin Powell's former chief of staff, telling us
how policy was "hijacked" by the Cheney-Rumsfeld
"cabal," it's hard to get leading figures to
admit that they were misled into supporting the
Iraq war. Kudos to John Kerry for finally saying
just that last week.

    And as for the media: these days, there is
much harsh, justified criticism of the failure of
major news organizations, this one included, to
exert due diligence on rationales for the war.
But the failures that made the long nightmare
possible began much earlier, during the weeks
after 9/11, when the media eagerly helped our
political leaders build up a completely false
picture of who they were.

    So the long nightmare won't really be over
until journalists ask themselves: what did we
know, when did we know it, and why didn't we tell
the public?

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/103105O.shtml