All Hat, No Cattle: a cycle of bluster, blunder, and blame

I'm clearing out some of the things from the last week that I wanted to write about but haven't had time to, including this Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial from yesterday:

President Bush spoke before a Washington, D.C., audience this week at a time when many Americans are growing weary of the war in Iraq, uncertain of success there, confused about our country's military and political strategy and nervous about the high and continuing cost in U.S. lives and dollars. If the speech was intended to provide the basis for optimism about the war and, as consequence, improve Bush's sagging political ratings, it didn't work. [. . .]

Bush's speech displayed little awareness of what has happened in Iraq since the invasion in March 2003. In fact, it was a speech that, change a few details, he could have delivered before the invasion began. It was a campaign speech, long on boilerplate, short on details and insights. Those who believe the U.S. is on the right track in Iraq probably came away from it more confident than ever. Those who have doubts about this country's strategy probably came away unsatisfied and bewildered.

I did not watch the speech because I, you know, have a job and stuff, and also because I can't listen to the man for very long without dissolving into an incoherent fit of profanity and spittle. But I read the reviews and the transcript, and cannot fathom how anyone could possibly take it seriously. Bush lamented how there's a "temptation in the middle of a long struggle to seek the quiet life, to escape the duties and problems of the world" when he vacations more than the French. Bush went into a long litany of evils the other side supposedly does:

Evil men obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience must be taken very seriously [. . . They] pretend to be in an aggrieved party, representing the powerless against imperial enemies. In truth, they have endless ambitions of imperial domination and they wish to make everyone powerless except themselves.

Under their rule, they have banned books and desecrated historical monuments and brutalized women.

This very list is everything Bush and the Republicans have become in the last five years. They exhibit naked political and world ambition; they get their way by playing the victim as often as possible. And let's not get into burning of books, desecrating monuments, and targeting women, okay?

But the point at the end of what I quoted--that Bush True Believers were strengthened in their resolve by the speech while the rest of us wondered what planet Bush was from--is borne out by Barbara O'Brien in a couple of pieces about the speech. In the first, she asks,

Have you ever noticed that, on a very simple level, righties support Bush because of what he says and lefties oppose him because of what he does?

For example, I'm sure at some point you've crossed paths with a rightie who is fired up about the "liberation" of Iraq. You know the dance. You make faces; the rightie assumes you oppose the war because you don't want the Iraqi people liberated. But in fact you oppose the war because the Iraqi people aren't being liberated. At best they're in a transitional phase between despots. Americans are fighting and dying to establish an Islamic theocracy, assuming civil war doesn't take down the "nation-building" process first. But the rightie won't even listen to this. Bush says we're liberating Iraq, and that's it. [. . .]

Here's an editorial in today's Los Angeles Times:

PRESIDENT BUSH SPOKE FORCEFULLY on Thursday about the threat from within to Islam, and what the United States is doing to protect Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia and Somalia. Yet the president is strangely reluctant to take even the smallest step to protect Muslim prisoners being held by U.S. forces in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. His rhetoric will be exposed as even emptier than usual if he keeps squandering opportunities to back it up.

See? There's what Bush says, and then there's what Bush does; two elements that rarely inhabit the same time-space continuum.

She goes on to cite "Blog of the Year" Powerline and its fawning response to the speech:

Hinderaker's take is that the President was trying to warn us of the dangers of terrorism, and the news media won't listen. [. . . He] presents a paragraph from Bush's speech and challenges us lefties to argue with it. But I cannot argue with the paragraph. It's a fine paragraph. I agree with everything Bush says in that paragraph. The problem is not with what he says, but with what he does.

And this is where I think somehow, maybe, just maybe, the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court might start changing some minds on the other side. All week we've heard the criticism from the vocal right minority that Bush should have nominated someone more obvously on their side to replace centrist Sandra Day O'Connor. Never mind that Miers's much-touted born-againness means she is probably one of them; Bush's refusal to nominate another Scalia or Thomas--as promised--is a violation of the right's faith in him. Well, welcome to the club. The rest of us have been seeing for five years how what Bush says and what he does are often polar opposites, from changing the tone in Washington to being a uniter not a divider to keeping us safe.

Bush's speech again idiotically associated the current debacle in Iraq with terrorism. He explicitly links Iraq to the Beslan school massacre in Russia last year, a Chechen and al Qaida operation that included no Iraqis and was not linked to the US invasion. How can we take seriously someone who gets basic facts like that wrong? How long will he invoke 9/11 to justify his folly?

Barbara O'Brien's second post expands on the idea from the warrenterra to Bush in general:

Bush's style of "leadership" is to declare what he wants to happen and to expect his underlings to make it happen. This is essentially his approach to Social Security reform, for example. He wants to switch part of the program to private accounts but doesn't bother his smirky little head with the very thorny, and costly, process that would be required to accomplish this. Details are for the hired help to worry about. [. . .]

As I wrote Friday, the goals Bush presented in the speech sound just grand. I don't disagree with any of them. Who can be opposed to replacing "hatred and resentment with democracy and hope"? And, hey, I'm all for peace and freedom. But by now even a potted plant should have noticed that, with Bush, the gap between rhetoric and results is vaster than the Pacific. [. . .]

Although Bush does seem to care personally about Social Security "reform," if not enough to sweat the details, for the most part he uses issues only as a means to achieve power. Whether conservative policies are successfully implemented is a minor concern. Take (please) No Child Left Behind. He still likes to talk about it as if it were a marvelous achievement. But this NPR report says NCLB "has sweeping promises, irresponsible authority, and is more expensive than many school systems can afford." (Hmm, sweeping promises, irresponsible authority, too expensive. The quintessential Bushie program.) Although he seems proud of his program, Bush has shown little interest in dealing with the problems and making the program work as promised. As long as NCLB is a useful rhetorical device for Bush, it's a success as far as he's concerned.

NCLB is actually a very salient example, for it is the one that will probably be the most far-reaching in its domestic consequences. I myself have argued repeatedly that the broad goals of NCLB--including making plain failures that schools often try to hide--are valid and inarguable. But the methods used to achieve those goals, and the utter lack of support from the enforcement agency, are diriving schools, districts, states, and, most importantly, parents up the wall. It will not be very much longer until all the just-below-the-surface tensions surrounding NCLB come to the fore. Connecticut has already sued over underfunding; states as Republican as Utah and as close to D.C. as Virginia have considered similar radical action against the strictures of the law.

And yet, when anyone dares speak against the shortcomings in the implementation of No Child Left Behind, they are chided for wanting students to fail. Anyone opposing Social Security reform wants old people to eat cat food and die. Anyone opposing the war in Iraqi doesn't want Arabs to experience democracy. O'Brien again:

The Right's trump card is, of course, that questioning the "mission" amounts to helping the enemy. You know they're all set to blame us lefties if when the "mission" finally turns into a rout--as if the incompetence and blundering of the Bush Administration had nothing to do with it. [. . . T]he people who blame the Left for failure are the same ones who shouted down any attempt an meaningful debate before the Iraq invasion. Having hustled We, the People into war on false pretenses, now they scream that opposition to the war is unpatriotic. Sorry; democracy doesn't work that way.

This cycle of bluster, blunder, and blame is what the Republican agenda has been reduced to. They have taken the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower and turned it into a sideshow, complete with barkers and con men looking at us as the marks.

Of course, the big question is, can Democrats make this clear to the people, can they capitalize on the growing dissatisfaction with the way things are going? Because if we can't take back at least one house in 2006, and the presidency in 2008, it won't be long until this whole country is an empty lot full of trash and bitter marks once the sideshow leaves town.