Day: June 18, 2005

Arlie Hochschild – who wrote an article titled “Let Them Eat War” in 2003 accurately predicting that President Bush would use fear of terrorism to manipulate blue collar voters into voting for him, against their own best interests, in the 2004 presidential elections – says in the current Mother Jones:

I’m continually appalled by the Bush administration. But I’m also an optimist. The whole mess we’re in — the trade of butter for guns, clear skies for soot, good will for Abu Ghraib, an open society for a closed one, live soldiers for dead ones — this whole mess could be reversed. It would only take a change of heart among just a few percent of blue-collar voters the next time around. But the change of heart depends on understanding and exposing a certain underlying logic of our present situation — that Bush is manipulating feelings of anguish, fear, anger (especially among those faced with job loss and lower wages) with one hand, while pursuing policies that exacerbate exactly those situations with the other. In my next piece, I’ll be continuing to chip away at that underlying logic, the one I first tried to lay out in “Let Them Eat War” with a modest faith that, at the end of the day, reason will win out.

Here is a story published last fall that offers yet more evidence that President Bush and his team had planned to invade Iraq even before the 2000 presidential campaign was fully underway:

Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.

“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father’s shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. “Suddenly, he’s at 91 percent in the polls, and he’d barely crawled out of the bunker…”

According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush’s beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House – ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. “Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.”

Bush’s circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War. Said Herskowitz: “They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches…”

Yesterday we had a story about an exchange between ABC News White House reporter Terry Moran and Bush spokesman Scott McClelland in which Moran agressively questioned Scottie about Vice President Cheney’s recent assertions that the insurgency in Iraq was in its “last throes.” That was encouraging.

But now comes evidence that the MSM has sadly slipped back into its coma. Writing in the Washington Post, former White House reporter, enabler and sometimes stenographer Dana Milbank gave a scathing and derisive account of a hearing held by Democrats on the Downing Street documents.

In his Post article, Milbank completely ignored the seriousness of these allegations and treated the forum and its chairperson, Rep. John Conyers, the Ranking Member on the Judiciary Committee with dripping sarcasm.

In response, Rep. Conyers sent a letter objecting to the rightwing bias of the coverage to the Post’s omsbudsman.

I write to express my profound disappointment with Dana Milbank’s June 17 [article] which purports to describe a Democratic hearing I chaired in the Capitol yesterday. In sum, the piece cherry-picks some facts, manufactures others out of whole cloth, and does a disservice to some 30 members of Congress who persevered under difficult circumstances, not of our own making, to examine a very serious subject: whether the American people were deliberately misled in the lead up to war. The fact that this was the Post’s only coverage of this event makes the journalistic shortcomings in this piece even more egregious…

The article begins with an especially mean and nasty tone, claiming that House Democrats “pretended” a small conference was the Judiciary Committee hearing room and deriding the decor of the room. Milbank fails to share with his readers one essential fact: the reason the hearing was held in that room… Despite the fact that a number of other suitable rooms were available in the Capitol and House office buildings, Republicans declined my request for each and every one of them. Milbank could have written about the perseverance of many of my colleagues in the face of such adverse circumstances, but declined to do so. Milbank also ignores the critical fact picked up by the AP, CNN and other newsletters that at the very moment the hearing was scheduled to begin, the Republican Leadership scheduled an almost unprecedented number of 11 consecutive floor votes, making it next to impossible for most Members to participate in the first hour and one half of the hearing…

The fact that I and my fellow Democrats had to stuff a hearing into a room the size of a large closet to hold a hearing on an important issue shouldn’t make us the object of ridicule. In my opinion, the ridicule should be placed in two places: first, at the feet of Republicans who are so afraid to discuss ideas and facts that they try to sabotage our efforts to do so; and second, on Dana Milbank and the Washington Post, who do not feel the need to give serious coverage on a serious hearing about a serious matter-whether more than 1700 Americans have died because of a deliberate lie. Milbank may disagree, but the Post certainly owed its readers some coverage of that viewpoint.

I happened to catch the last half of the hearings at 2AM Pacific time on C-Span last week. It was sad to see proceedings like these being held in a small crowded room. The hearings conducted by these same Republicans not so long ago into President Clinton’s sex life were televised live and given no-expense-barred, full Congressional trappings. Now, hearings into a Republican president’s lies and incomptent war planning are held in windowless conference room.

Why are the Republicans averse to holding hearings on the contents of the Downing Street documents? The childish attempts to stop the truth from being told underscore the concern among the GOP’s leadership that the documents offer incontrovertible evidence that the Bush Administration deliberately misled the American public, the Congress and the world about the reasons they took the country to war in Iraq.

The Bush Administration could never have succeeding in duping the American public without the willing and able assistance of conservative tools like Milbank, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. These propagandists have blood on their hands, just as surely as do President Bush and Vice President Cheney.