The Independent Weekly: Shame is for sissies BY HAL CROWTHER
Bolton is simply the Republican fist with its middle finger held erect, a calculated insult aimed at the Democrats, the media and the world–a rude gesture of unprecedented arrogance and defiance. Is this a coarse joke, irony served White House-style? For America’s most visible and sensitive diplomatic post, they offer the ultimate anti-diplomat, an obnoxious bully so incapable of diplomacy or common tact that he offends everyone he encounters, Democrat or Republican, ally or enemy. …
You don’t have to be subtle, as the White House constantly reminds us. You don’t have to reckon with irony, that last refuge of the effete. Just change the words, repeat them incessantly, and disparage anyone who resists them. Incompetent, arrogant and inflexible, the Bush administration White House has scored its greatest successes changing the words America uses, and reorganizing its flow of information.
Totalitarian thinkers, Hannah Arendt once wrote, are characterized by “extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it.” If you told me 20 years ago that a cocky free press, still flaunting Richard Nixon’s scalp, could be reduced to groveling impotence by the likes of George W. Bush, I guess I’d have laughed at you. …
Journalists–journalists by true vocation as opposed to some who list that occupation on IRS returns–are largely immune to ideology, rhetoric and partisan politics. We have no heroes among politicians; we’ve seen too many clowns and thieves on both sides of the aisle. We don’t vilify the president because we disagree with his philosophy; he has no philosophy. We oppose him because we’re conditioned to hate liars, hypocrites, bullies and “serial abusers of little people,” and he’s assembled the most frightening collection we’ve ever seen.
By branding all unfriendly journalists (and other Americans who criticize the president) “liberals”–embittered members of a losing team–Karl Rove and company have ingeniously compromised fair comment and legitimate dissent. …
In fact, some of the most articulate criticism of the White House has come from conservatives.
“Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation as president will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations,” argued American Conservative magazine, endorsing John Kerry. “The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation’s children. … It is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy.”
[Thanks to A&JP via MR.]
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The Independent Weekly: In the realms of the unreal by Hal Crowther (2004-08-04)
It turns out that Ronald Reagan’s greatest achievement was not saving us from the Soviets, but saving us from the rabid neocons in his own administration who were spoiling for World War III. Advisers like Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld seemed so crazy for nuclear confrontation that they spooked poor Reagan, the primitive optimist. He ignored their advice and negotiated with Gorbachev, and then purged most of them when they were caught in bed with Ollie North. George W. Bush, of course, brought back this whole flock of indicted and discredited chicken hawks, who then crafted the “muscular” foreign policy that lured us into our apocalyptic fiasco in Iraq. …
Americans were like moths to Reagan’s pale flame. His myth seemed to generate a hunger for illusion, a distaste for bare fact and hard truth that has become pandemic and changed the face of our culture. It’s no wonder that “leaders” like Bush tell implausible, even fantastic, lies–“We’re doing this for the Iraqis”–and expect Americans to believe them. It’s not surprising that their language reverses or obliterates meaning, like the voice of Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984. Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Clear Skies Initiative and the Healthy Forests Initiative all mean the exact opposite of what they say; when President Bush publicly thanked Donald Rumsfeld for “a superb job” in the heat of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, what he must have meant was “You incompetent bastard, you’ve ruined us, I wish I could kill you.”