Wednesday, August 11, 2004

Time To Get Out The Bush

How do you know it’s time for a major change in American leadership? Let us count the signs

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, August 11, 2004

You know it’s time for a serious change when the president of the United States actually mutters the infantile, instantly infamous line, “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we,” just after finishing phonetically spelling out his name, in his favoritest red crayon, on yet another budget-reaming $417 billion defense-spending bill.

And you know it’s time for a change when not a single one of the rigid and spiritually curdled military yes men standing around the ceremonial signing table, those sad automatons with their wooden smiles and stiff spines and bone-dry souls, not one broke into a hysterical bout of sad, suicidal laughter, followed by uncontrolled wailing and the rending of flesh and the muttering of oh my freaking God what the hell is this man doing as leader of the free world.

You know it’s time for a change when you hear that Kerry and Edwards both wrote their own riveting, galvanizing acceptance speeches at the Democratic National Convention, heartfelt and effective rhetoric that gives you hope not for the quality of polished oratory but for genuine, refreshing political intellect, and verbal acumen, as you offer deep thanks that at least some politicians can still speak coherently and cogently without mangling the goddamn language at every adjectival clause.

Whereas you just know Dubya isn’t capable of writing a single word of his own speeches, and will employ entire squadrons of lackeys to do it for him at the RNC, and will regardless still insist on mispronouncing “nukuler” and “‘Murka” and “terrist” and “gin bender at Yale,” and will doubtlessly say something like, “We must stamp out evil in all its forms because evil wants to do evil things to us and evil don’t know the depths of its own, uh, evilnesses. Praise Jesus.”

There are signs and indicators. There are feelings and intuitions. There is that undeniable tang in the air, that clenching of the cultural colon, that cringe in the collective soul. Something has got to give. A national shakeup is more than imminent—it is desperately, urgently needed. And Bush is just about finished.

Don’t you feel it? The sensation that the country cannot continue to careen down this ultraviolent, antihumanitarian path much longer without implosion and desperation and a massive increase in sedative prescriptions for anyone with an even slightly intuitive sense of justice and future and long hot sighs of hope? You’re not alone.

You know it’s time for a dramatic change when American bookstores and movie theaters are filled with unprecedented numbers of extraordinarily damning BushCo exposés and embarrassing tell-all tomes and brutal whistle-blower digests from all corners of the culture, produced by everyone from disheartened CIA insiders to ex-generals to respected reporters to former U.S. allies.

From Clarke’s “Against All Enemies,” Woodward’s “Plan of Attack,” Suskind’s “The Price of Loyalty,” Phillips’ “American Dynasty,” Dean’s “Worse Than Watergate,” Unger’s “House of Bush, House of Saud” and “Imperial Hubris,” by ‘Anonymous,’ to “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “Outfoxed” and “The Hunting of the President.” Go ahead, Google any one (or all) of those titles. The list is endless and stunning in its depth and in the heat of its unanimous BushCo condemnation.

Hell, it’s getting so you can’t turn a corner or have a nuanced, humane thought without confronting another hunk of undeniable proof that what these media documents say is true: The Bush administration is quite possibly the most economically destructive, environmentally devastating, ethically corrupt, internationally loathed, deliberately tyrannical, worst-dressed administration in American history.

What, too harsh? Hardly.

When the professors and other intellectuals and the artists and the social workers and the mystics and the truly spiritual among us are appalled and mournful, and the homophobes and the rednecks and the religious zealots are cheering and shooting their guns in the sky, this is how you know.

When America has become a global punch line, a petulant and screeching child in an oversize Texas cowboy hat throwing oily little tantrums on a WMD whim, and the global community can only sit there, stunned and enraged, as every ally withdraws all offers of support and overtures of concern for our well-being, this is how you know.

The activists know it. Angry groups are popping up by the hundreds across the nation, all working diligently to toss a nice emetic into the Republican gorge-fest. Some are even going so far as to offer up the ultimate sacrifice: They will have sex with any Republicans willing to withhold their Bush vote this election.

It’s true. It’s funny. It’s called fthevote.com. What, too extreme? Hey, extreme times call for extreme lubrication.

The watchdogs know it. The usual reaction from most analysts and wonks, most intellectuals and artists, when faced with another presidential election, is this: Yawn. After all, such ultra-elitist, top-tier shifts have little effect on the massive daily political grind, the real meat and potatoes of government, right? This is the common wisdom. A change in presidents is like changing the paint on an aircraft carrier: different patina, same damn boat.

Not this time. All those who normally claim that a change in who sits in the Oval Office means nothing are now all frantically waving their arms and shouting their protests and joining the resistance. This election is different. This one matters like never before in history, considering how so many of us underestimated just how much damage a single president’s gnarled, hateful administration could unleash upon the world in a single term.

This is the new rallying cry. If you care at all about the soul of this country, if you care at all about women’s rights and gay rights and true spiritual freedom and the environment and our international standing, if you care at all about actually reducing the anti-U.S. hatred in the world, as opposed to amplifying it a thousandfold, then oh my god yes, this election matters.

This, then, is how you know it’s time for a serious change. When you can feel it in your bones, when you finally attune and really listen to the underlying messages and dig deep into your own spirit and discover that no, this isn’t the way the world is supposed to work. This is not the way the country has to be.

This is not the way the world’s greatest superpower is supposed to behave, this bitter metallic taste that leaps into my mouth whenever I see a picture of BushCo isn’t really supposed to be there, the vice president isn’t supposed to make children cry and flowers wilt and the gods recoil in disgust.

And the president isn’t supposed to mangle the language and induce multiple wars and invite international derision and make so many millions of us ashamed to be Americans. It’s time for a serious change. This is how you know.

Latest Bush blunder: A mole made public

Joe Conason
The New York Observer
08.11.04

British officials outraged at politicizing of security

Exactly one week after the President accepts his party’s nomination in New York on Sept. 2, two days before the anniversary of 9/11 and seven weeks before Election Day, the Secretary of Homeland Security plans to hold a Washington press conference to announce that September will be “National Preparedness Month.”

The government’s “partners” in this month-long, well-meaning public-awareness campaign will include many national groups, including the American Red Cross, the National Association of Broadcasters and the Advertising Council. Newspapers and airwaves will be saturated with messages urging worried citizens to learn how to cope with “emergencies.”

Presumably the September campaign will improve considerably on Secretary Tom Ridge’s earlier advice, such as wrapping windows in cellophane secured with masking tape to thwart poison gas. How could anyone criticize the idea of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts helping their neighbors prepare to escape a terror attack?

Let’s hope that Mr. Ridge can set politics aside when he inaugurates this campaign. (For a darkly amusing chart that plots terror alerts against the President’s poll ratings and various political events, see juliusblog.blogspot.com. These bloggers could never function as journalists—they’re too independent, skeptical and creative.)

Unfortunately, the news that has emerged about the administration’s bungling of its latest orange alert suggests otherwise. Their first mistake came when Mr. Ridge misled the press about the information that prompted him to elevate the threat level on the Sunday after the Democratic convention. The alert was based on information that was at least three years old. His remarks obfuscated that truth.

Administration officials quickly explained they had acted on the basis of current intelligence that amplified the alarm raised by the old computer files. But Mr. Ridge’s British counterpart, Home Secretary David Blunkett, soon denounced the entire exercise.

Writing in a London newspaper on Aug. 7, the British counterterror chief asked acidly: “Is that really the job of a senior cabinet minister in charge of counter-terrorism? To feed the media? To increase concern? Of course not. This is arrant nonsense.”

According to press reports, the Bush administration’s closest allies in the Blair government were “dismayed by the nakedly political use made of recent intelligence breakthroughs both in the U.S. and in Pakistan.” The Brits simply didn’t believe there was any imminent threat justifying a public alert.

That brings us to the second, more serious error committed by the Bush administration last week. To justify the Ridge announcement, unnamed officials revealed that an Al Qaeda operative arrested in Pakistan had provided fresh information. On Aug. 2, The New York Times named the captured operative, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan.

Leaking Mr. Khan’s name enhanced nobody’s safety—with the possible exception of certain Al Qaeda members warned of their own impending capture when they read the morning newspapers. For within a few days, Reuters reported that following his arrest, Mr. Khan had been “turned.” A computer expert picked up in Lahore, he was said to be helping the authorities break up terrorist cells in Britain and the United States.

Security officials in London are still enraged because the Khan leak from Washington forced them to act too precipitously, rushing to arrest 13 suspects in broad daylight raids across Britain the next day. No doubt the C.I.A. officials whose high-tech tracking efforts led to Mr. Khan’s capture felt similar frustration. In a war against terrorist groups that have proved nearly impossible to penetrate with human agents, the loss of such a well-placed turncoat could prove tragic.

There is no question about who perpetrated the leak. On Aug. 8, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice admitted that the administration had disclosed Khan’s arrest to The Times “on background.” Experts around the world are still astonished by this reckless decision.

“The whole thing smacks of either incompetence or worse,” said Tim Ripley, a security expert who writes for Jane’s Defense publications. “You have to ask: what are they doing compromising a deep mole within al Qaeda, when it’s so difficult to get these guys in there in the first place?”

That is the pertinent question, and the answer is all too obvious.

What useful purpose was served by Mr. Ridge’s press conference remains unclear. His defenders say that he would be mercilessly criticized if he failed to warn the public about a real attack. But the problem during the months before 9/11 was not the government’s failure to post constant vague alerts of impending disaster, true as they eventually would have proved to be. The problem was that the agencies and individuals responsible for protecting the United States, including the President, failed to mobilize and act together, despite many warnings from within and outside the government.

It is encouraging that American intelligence agencies and their allies in Britain and Pakistan have begun to roll up Al Qaeda cells. It is troubling that their efforts were compromised for political advantage.