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"Steady Leadership"
Let the Buyer Beware
By TOM STEPHENS

In early March the Bush/Cheney administration rolled out new campaign ads. Most public controversy focused on their cynical use of images from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, for partisan political purposes. But to some extent that misses the point. The ads praise the "steady leadership" of George W. Bush. In November Bush will face the voters in a referendum on his leadership. The "steady leadership" theme invites an evaluation.

Focusing on the hypocritical use of 9/11 imagery allows the Bush gang to avoid something they cannot honestly run on: their record. The lies this administration tells about its brand of "leadership" are numerous and persistent. It spin-doctors everything to divide-and-conquer. Amending the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Feloniously "outing" an undercover CIA agent. Praising the "outsourcing" of jobs to foreign countries. Several best-selling books have tried to come to grips with the Bush/Cheney team's pattern of mendacity-as-public-policy, in service of the rich. Beginning to lose control over how their efforts are reported in the corporate media, they recently tried to suggest in an official economic report that loss of US manufacturing jobs isn't so bad, if you just consider jobs in the fast food industry as "manufacturing" hamburgers! This first crop of campaign ads is an attempt to regain control and positive associations that have been slipping away from Bush's handlers for the last several months.

"Steady Leadership" Confronts the Reality Gap

The Bush pirates' looting of the economy and bankrupting of state and local governments, combined with their bedrock dishonesty, is a massive subject. For now I want to focus on the choice facing the nation in only eight months, by limiting the inquiry. One interesting period would be three months between the end of July and the end of October 2003, ending almost exactly one full year before the US electorate will go to the polls. This was when the Bush/Cheney team adjusted their single biggest initiative, "Operation Iraqi Freedom," to the brutal realities of the occupation of Iraq. It has recently been observed that George W. Bush's much-discussed "credibility gap" is more like a "reality gap." This was never clearer than during the events connecting Iraq, Washington, and Crawford, Texas in late summer and fall of 2003.

On July 29, in the face of steadily mounting casualties in Iraq, Bush left Washington for his annual extended Texas vacation. He reportedly claimed that "Iraq was growing more secure by the day." Even by the amazing standards of incredulity established by the Bush/Cheney team, this would prove to be a major whopper.

Events proceeded rapidly. The month of August saw one deadly bombing after another: at the Jordanian embassy, UN headquarters and a major police station in Baghdad, and massive carnage at the Tomb of Ali in Najaf (to mention only the four biggest massacres during this period). US corporate media propaganda about plans for "transfer of sovereignty" and "democracy," in the face of such nightmarish, bloody atrocities, occurring almost daily throughout Iraq, defied linguistic or ideological spin. The Bush/Cheney regime resorted to over-the-top rhetoric. News reports of their line on August 25, 2003 transcended satire: "From Baghdad to the White House, administration spokesmen went to elaborate lengths to argue that the presence of terrorists in Iraq was somehow a positive development."

This blatant attempt to turn reality on its head ushered in a period of newly critical reporting and commentary, the first public test since the 9/11 tragedy of what had passed for leadership by the Bush/Cheney team. Stink bombs started to go off in the US corporate media in September 2003. On September 4 the New York Times reported that "Top White House officials personally approved the evacuation of dozens of influential Saudis, including relatives of Osama bin Laden from the US in the days just after" 9/11, when most flights were grounded. Four days later Bush asked Congress for $87 billion to pay for his Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns. The second anniversary of 9/11 was followed by the emergence of the Valerie Plame affair into public consciousness, and its bizarre return to the back burner. It still simmers there today, along with the story about smuggling bin Laden family members out of the US, and many other Bush scandals. The Nation magazine's David Corn (author of The Lies of George W. Bush) came out with a scoop. Administration officials who sought to punish CIA agent Valerie Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, for publicly disclosing that Bush lied about Iraqi attempts to obtain enriched uranium from Africa, by revealing her undercover work, probably committed a felony. Such stories nourished a slightly more critical corporate mass media focus on Bush's credibility problems, which hasn't really let up ever since. Along with the administration's continuing attempts to stonewall investigations, into the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and into the 9/11 disaster itself, this new-found spirit of journalistic integrity provided the media context for the "steady leadership" ads in March 2004.

Bush was publicly unfazed, advancing even further into the Big Muddy with the same bland obliviousness he demonstrates in his brief speaking parts for the new ads. On October 10, exactly six months after Baghdad had fallen to US troops, Bush said that the situation in Iraq is "a lot better than you probably think." Four days later Bush defended himself and his team against accusations that he had lost control of Iraq policy, claiming that "the person in charge is me." But hopefully at least one quote will not turn out to be a lie: "If the people don't think I'm doing my job, they'll find somebody else."

The rest of the month of October 2003 provided no relief. On October 26 a missile struck the Al-Rasheed Hotel, where deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, principal architect of "Operation Iraqi Freedom," was staying at the time. On the next day, the beginning of Ramadan, four coordinated suicide bombings in Baghdad killed around 40, and injured more than 400 people. Bush's crackpot optimism for public consumption was unflagging. He insisted the US was making progress in Iraq, arguing vacuously that "American successes are actually spurring the violence by making insurgents more desperate."

The Real Issue

Bush's calculated exploitation of the 9/11 disaster is neither surprising, nor the biggest weakness in his case for election, this time without the aid of a judicial coup. The issue is not John Kerry's lukewarm record or unappealing personality either. The issue is what a democracy does about dangerous, dishonest, and perhaps even borderline psychotic leaders who abuse power, in ways that threaten continued viability of that democracy. Focusing primarily on their propaganda styles and bad taste lets them off the hook for what they are doing to the US and the world, in the name of "We the People."

The essential reality behind Bush's brand of "steady leadership" was recently described by two especially keen observers: Indian activist and author Arundhati Roy, and Assistant UN Secretary General Hans Von Sponeck, in their initial reactions to Bush's 2004 "State of the Union" (SOTU) speech. Such international opinion has sometimes differed substantially from how Bush's scripted ramblings play to potential voters at home. But this time polling data indicated that the US public received Bush's January 2004 SOTU no more warmly than they had his $87 billion Iraq fiasco speech about four months earlier.

Hans Von Sponeck: "My immediate reaction is that there is a truly frightening disconnect between rhetoric of president Bush and the reality, as it exists, as we see it, as you know it, as we know it in Europe, as the Iraqis know it, the reality outside the White House. I would say that president Bush's assessment of that reality is really deeply, deeply flawed. One is presented with facts which really are fantasies. Very, very dangerous fantasies. One wonders whether there is an element of psychosis here in the White House."

Arundhati Roy: "[W]e used the word 'psychosis' to describe what's going on: it is not the lies, the quality of the lies that has become so insulting, it really is beyond argument now, you know, it's really beyond being able to say anything, because the description of the kind of world that president Bush is proposing in America sounds like a nightmare, tracking terrorist threats, bombing airline passengers, homeland security department patrolling. Doesn't it sound Orwellian and doesn't it sound like something that people should run a mile from? It sounds like he's trying to recreate Afghanistan with the Taliban there, you know, like this kind of religious right wing sentiment that's overtaking everything in the world today."

Along with the oft-noted influence of religious fundamentalism on what is sometimes referred to as George W. Bush's "thinking," and the unbridgeable gap between his rhetoric and reality, there is the dramatic difference between the pious words and venal actions of leading figures in his administration. As an illustrative example of this administration's acts of "steady leadership," it's hard to improve on the saga of Halliburton Corporation and its swollen corporate/military welfare subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root (better known as "Burn & Loot" to Vietnam-era GIs). Dick Cheney's former employer has grown unimaginably wealthy on no-bid contracts to supply the US military with everything it needs in the imperial killing fields. The casualness of the corporate war profiteering is breathtaking. An anonymous businessman with close ties to the administration told a reporter from The New Yorker magazine: "It's like Russia. This is how corruption is done these days. It's not about bribes. You just tell your friends to get access. Cheney doesn't call the Defense Department and tell them, 'Pick Halliburton.' It's just having dinner with the right people."

Rep. Henry Waxman of California, quoted in the same New Yorker magazine piece, put it most succinctly when he said "the war is being used by people close to the Bush Administration to make money for themselves." There you have it. At last a clear, simple and compelling explanation for the Bush/Cheney administration's willful blindness and continuous mendacity in the face of catastrophes of its own creation. "Steady leadership" means corporate piracy, pathological lies, psychotic detachment from reality, economic injustice, cover-ups, fantasies of power, and of course ruthless mass killing to get whatever they want from the least among us. The "messianic incompetence" of a miserable failure at everything, except taking money from his corporate fat cat financial backers. It's how corruption is done these days. Let the buyer beware.

http://www.counterpunch.org/stephens03172004.html

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Originally posted by Grey:
Richard Clarke...was a ineffective leftover from the Clinton administration.

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Originally posted by Grey:
I am blaming him for 8 years of failures serving Clinton I don't care who hired the loser.

I think it doesn't matter what he says anyway, we will get the official answers from the 9/11 panel.

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First off Grey can you point to the failures that Clarke had? We are all waiting with bated breath!

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Second It most certainly does matter what he says in sworn testimony before the commission!

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"gave me the impression she had never heard the term (Al Qaeda) before."

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Or will you just say that he purjored himself to sell his book

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Please try not to predict what I will say, I myself do not know what I will say half the time

If he was so concerned about all he is accusing the Bush administration of then why did he not open his mouth about in in the past three years?

Instead he writes a book & times its release to coincide with the re election campaigns in full swing & the 9/11 commissions.

Sounds like hes trying to make a quick buck to me.

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That is if you respond to either of these 2 points.

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Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism official promoting a book critical of the Bush administration, insists Saddam Hussein had no connection to al-Qaida, but in 1999 he defended President Clinton's attack on a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant by revealing the U.S. was "sure" it manufactured chemical warfare materials produced by Iraqi experts in cooperation with Osama bin Laden.

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However, Sunday night in an interview with Lesley Stahl on "60 Minutes," Clarke denied Saddam had any connection to al-Qaida.

Stahl pressed Clarke further, asking, "Was Iraq supporting al-Qaida?"

Clarke replied: "There is absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al-Qaida ever."

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"I really don't know what Richard Clarke's motivations are, but I'll tell you this: Richard Clarke had plenty of opportunities to tell us in the administration that he thought the war on terrorism was moving in the wrong direction and he chose not to."

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I guess he was just researching his book?

All this was taken from here. if you want to read the full story.

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Originally posted by Grey:

Its undeniable that Clinton ran this country for 8 years. Yet 8 months after GWB is elected we were attacked. I can't see the logic in placing blame on the guy who barely has his foot in the door.

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Clarke said that he warned Bush officials in a January 2001 memo about the growing Al Qaeda threat after the Cole attack but was put off by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who "gave me the impression she had never heard the term (Al Qaeda) before."

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The commission's report Tuesday said Clarke pushed for immediate and secret military aid to the Taliban's foe, the Northern Alliance. But Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, proposed a broader review of the Al Qaeda response that would take more time. The proposal wasn't approved for Bush's review until just weeks before Sept. 11.

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If he was so concerned about all he is accusing the Bush administration of then why did he not open his mouth about in in the past three years?

Instead he writes a book & times its release to coincide with the re election campaigns in full swing & the 9/11 commissions.

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Sounds like hes trying to make a quick buck to me.

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So What was bush still wearing his trainee outfit, What would happen to you if you screwed up at your job after being there for 8 mos would your boss blame the guy you replaced?

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Sounds like Clarke was doing his job. Maybe rice hadn't heard the term al queda before!

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But Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, proposed a broader review of the Al Qaeda response that would take more time. The proposal wasn't approved for Bush's review until just weeks before Sept. 11.

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And would you have listened?

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OK I'm going out on a limb here by saying you probably consider yourself a "Consevative", so whats wrong with the guy making a buck? You know free markets capitalism and all that.

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