The passion of George W. Bush
The president doesn't care that he is reviled. He is a martyr,
and someday all will see his glory. Meanwhile, he's got Karl
doing his dirty work.
By Sidney Blumenthal
04/27/06 "Salon" -- -- The urgent dispatch of Karl Rove to the
business of maintaining one-party rule in the midterm elections
is the Bush White House's belated startle reflex to its
endangerment. Besieged by crises of his own making, plummeting
to ever lower depths in the polls week after week, Bush has
assigned his political general to muster dwindling forces for a
heroic offensive to break out of the closing ring. If the
Democrats gain control of the House or Senate they will launch a
thousand subpoenas to establish the oversight that has been
abdicated by the Republican Congress.
In his acceptance speech before the Republican National
Convention in 2004, the "war president" spoke of "greatness" and
"resolve" and repeatedly promised "a safer world" and
"security," and compared himself "to a resolute president named
Truman." Afterward, Bush declared he had had his "accountability
moment"; further debate was unnecessary; the future was settled.
But Rove's elaborate design for Republican rule during the
second term has collapsed under the strain of his grandiosity.
In 2004, Rove galvanized "the base" (ironically, "al-Qaida" in
Arabic) through ruthless divide-and-conquer and slash-and-burn
tactics. But with Bush winning the election by a bare 50.73
percent, he failed to forge the unassailable Republican
realignment that he sought.
Rove is an amateur historian whose goal was modeled on the
apparently unlikely figure of President William McKinley. Bush's
radicalism bears little resemblance to McKinley's stalwart
conservatism except for his friendly orientation toward big
business. Rove zeroed in on McKinley because his election in
1896 created a natural Republican presidential majority that was
broken only by the party split of 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt
ran as a Progressive and when Franklin D. Roosevelt ushered in a
Democratic realignment in 1932. Rove and Bush had hoped to use
the second term to force radical changes that would alter
American government, society and politics. At last, they planned
to undo the New Deal and return to the Republican Eden. But
Rove's proposal for the privatization of Social Security, among
other schemes, was aborted without even a single congressional
hearing.
The Republican cathedral of his dreams in ruins, Rove has now
discharged formal control of moribund domestic policy to a prot駩,
Joel Kaplan (a former law clerk of Justice Antonin Scalia's), in
a reshuffle of the White House senior staff that includes the
rise of another Rove prot駩, Josh Bolten, as chief of staff,
replacing Andrew Card, a New England Bush family factotum left
over from the term of the elder Bush who was not one of Rove's
creations. As Bolten has explained privately, Rove remains at
the apex of a new iron triangle, just as he stood at the peak of
the Texas triangle of Karen Hughes, Joe Allbaugh and himself
that managed George W. Bush's 2000 campaign for president.
Rove's lieutenants have been promoted to hold the fort while he
begins the epic defense of the embattled regime. His mission is
to salvage the Republican majority in Congress from the blighted
corruption of its leadership and rescue the Bush White House
from the consequences of its own radical policies on everything
from the endless Iraq war to skyrocketing gasoline prices. In
2004, Rove was still able to manage the Bush campaign on the
momentum of fear from Sept. 11. No longer perceived by the
public as a rock of security, Bush's rigid leadership is seen as
the source of turbulence. Security was his promise, but disorder
has become his byproduct.
So Rove must depend on the tricks of his trade -- arousing fear
of gays and other threats (Hollywood) to traditional family
values, as he did in 2004; spinning national security to cast
the Democrats as weak and unpatriotic, as he did in 2002; using
well-financed front groups and his regular corps of political
consultants to outsource smears and produce them as television
and radio commercials, as he did to destroy John McCain in the
Republican primaries of 2000 and John Kerry in 2004; and
conducting whispering campaigns about the personal lives of
those he seeks to annihilate, as he has done since his
devastating rumor-mongering about then Texas Gov. Ann Richards
as a "lesbian" helped install his patron in the Lone Star
Statehouse in 1994 as the springboard for the White House.
Rove must concentrate his mind with one gimlet eye fixed on
special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who on Wednesday summoned
him back to testify before a federal grand jury. As Rove
develops strategy for elections to come, he is a subject under
investigation for dirty tricks past.
The ferocious defense of Bush's radical presidency is being
mounted on other fronts. In the face of the generals who
commanded the troops in Iraq and demand the resignation of
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for blind arrogance and
unswerving incompetence, Bush has reaffirmed his support. In the
last two weeks, Rumsfeld has appeared on 14 right-wing radio
talk shows, securing "the base" and giving full vent to his
untethered personality. On April 18, Laura Ingraham interviewed
him on her syndicated program. The transcript as it appears on
the official Defense of Defense Web site records: "Ingraham: I
saw Charles Krauthammer (the conservative pundit) a couple of
nights ago saying there is absolutely no chance that you would
step down. Is he right about that? Secretary Rumsfeld: He is a
very smart man. [Laughter.]"
The administration's die-hard supporters in the Senate,
meanwhile, are fighting to prevent the Armed Services Committee
from calling the generals to testify. Frustrating congressional
oversight is essential to preserving executive power. Checks and
balances are the enemy of the Bush White House.
Vice President Dick Cheney, a principal author and defender of
this constitutional doctrine, maintains his ever-vigilant grip
on the executive branch, even as he was caught napping during a
meeting last week with Chinese President Hu Jintao. David
Addington, his chief of staff, extending his discipline far into
the national security apparatus, never rests.
For Rumsfeld and Cheney the final days of the Bush
administration are the endgame. They cannot expect positions in
any future White House. Since the Nixon White House, when
counselor Rumsfeld and his deputy Cheney watched the
self-destruction of the president, they have plotted to reach
the point where they would impose the imperial presidency that
Nixon was thwarted from doing. Both men held ambitions to become
president themselves. The Bush years have been their
opportunity, their last one, to run a presidency. Through the
agency of the son of one of their colleagues from the Ford White
House, George H.W. Bush (whom President Ford considered but
passed over for his vice president and chief of staff, giving
the latter job to Cheney), they have enabled their notion of
executive power. But the fulfillment of their idea of
presidential power is steadily draining the president of
strength. Their 30-year-long project on behalf of autocracy has
merely produced monumental incompetence.
Yet Rumsfeld and Cheney do not really care. Bad public opinion
polls do not concern them. Their ambition is near its end. They
want to use their remaining time accumulating as much power in
an unaccountable executive as possible.
Ironically, the more Bush tries to entrench his imperial
presidency the weaker he becomes. Believing that his
single-mindedness, stark convictions and bold indifference to
criticism have been the secret of his success, he is confounded
and baffled by the inability of his constant redoubling of
effort to produce the same results as before. Why should the
traits that pulled him up suddenly have a reverse magnetic
effect of pulling him down? At his peak, he proudly declared,
"In Texas, we don't do nuance." Now he reasserts himself as "the
decider."
And yet he feels compelled to explain the nuances of his
decisions. On Monday, Bush appeared before the Orange County
(Calif.) Business Council to justify the origins of the Iraq war
and his foreign policy in general. "I also wanted to let you
know that it's before you commit troops that you must do
everything you can to solve the problem diplomatically. And I
can look you in the eye and tell you I feel I've tried to solve
the problem diplomatically to the max," he said.
Just the day before, on CBS's "60 Minutes," Tyler Drumheller,
the former CIA chief in Europe, disclosed that during the run-up
to the Iraq war the Iraqi foreign minister, Naji Sabri, had been
bribed to hand over military secrets. "We continued to validate
him the whole way through," Drumheller said. His information was
that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. But the White
House dismissed the intelligence. "The policy was set,"
Drumheller said. "The war in Iraq was coming. And they were
looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the
policy."
Drumheller's account is consistent with the famous Downing
Street memo, memorializing British Prime Minister Tony Blair's
conference with his top national security and intelligence
advisors on July 23, 2002. The memo stated: "Bush wanted to
remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the
conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts
were being fixed around the policy."
In his Orange County speech, to illuminate his thinking, Bush
summoned the authority of the "higher Father." "I base a lot of
my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are
true. One, I believe there's an Almighty." This is one Bush
doctrine that is inarguable. But Bush's profession of faith is
precisely the message that incites Islamic terrorists in their
jihad against the Christian crusader. For Bush, the culture war
and the war on terror are one and the same. Understanding that
the latter undermines the former, that his policy and politics
are at cross-purposes, involves too much nuance.
The more beleaguered Bush becomes, the more he is flattered by
his advisors with comparisons to great men of history whose
foresight and courage were not always appreciated in their own
times. Abraham Lincoln is one favorite. Another is Harry Truman,
who established the framework of Cold War policy but left office
during the Korean War deeply unpopular with poll ratings sunk in
the 20s. Lately, Bush sees himself in the reflected light of
Winston Churchill, bravely standing against appeasers. "Never
give in -- never, never, never, never, in nothing great or
small, large or petty, never give in," Churchill said in 1941 as
Britain stood alone against the Nazis. "Bush tells his
out-of-town visitors to think of how history will judge his
administration 20 years hence and not to worry about setbacks in
Iraq," conservative columnist Arnaud de Borchgrave writes.
Of course, Bush does care about the outcome of the midterm
elections. He knows full well the catastrophe that his already
wounded presidency would suffer if the Republicans were to lose
one or the other chamber of Congress. Once again, he is
depending upon Rove's skill. But insofar as his policies are
concerned "the decider" has decided that public opinion doesn't
really matter.
On Tuesday, Bush reached the invisible but fateful mark of 1,000
days left in his term. It is a magical number associated with
the 1,000 days of President Kennedy, the time taken as the title
of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s memoir of that White House. Bush
cannot run again and has no obvious successor who will hold his
team together. On March 22, he announced that he would leave to
the next president the decision about continued U.S. presence in
Iraq. In the final days of his backward Camelot he will never,
never, never change his basic policies, the source of his
unraveling.
The greater the stress the more Bush denies its cause. In his
end time he has risen above his policy and is transcending
politics. In his life as president he has decided his scourging
is his sanctification. Bush will be a martyr resurrected. The
future will unfold properly for all the wisdom of his decisions,
based on fervent faith, upheld by his holy devotion. Criticism
and unpopularity only confirm to him his bravery and his
critics' weakness. Being reviled is proof of his righteousness.
Inevitably, decades hence, people will grasp his radiant truth
and glory. Such is the passion of George W. Bush.
Click below to read or post comments on this article
