Folks,

This is one of the most frightening, incredible, scholarly articles I have ever read about George Bush and the Dominionist religious movement to which he and much of the GOP apparently belong. If you’re not entirely clear on why this administration seems so bent on destroying the walls between church and state, or how “compassionate conservatism” should look so much like Machiavellianism in practice, you should definitely read this article. It explains so much of the underlying motivations of the whole religious right, in fact, that I’d go so far as to call it required reading.

Here’s a small excerpt:

Dominionists have gained extensive control of the Republican Party and the apparatus of government throughout the United States; they continue to operate secretly. Their agenda to undermine all government social programs that assist the poor, the sick, and the elderly is ingeniously disguised under false labels that confuse voters. Nevertheless, as we shall see, Dominionism maintains the necessity of laissez-faire economics, requiring that people “look to God and not to government for help.”[13]

It is estimated that thirty-five million Americans who call themselves Christian, adhere to Dominionism in the United States, but most of these people appear to be ignorant of the heretical nature of their beliefs and the seditious nature of their political goals. So successfully have the televangelists and churches inculcated the idea of the existence of an outside “enemy,” which is attacking Christianity, that millions of people have perceived themselves rightfully overthrowing an imaginary evil anti-Christian conspiratorial secular society.

When one examines the progress of its agenda, one sees that Dominionism has met its time table: the complete takeover of the American government was predicted to occur by 2004.[14] Unless the American people reject the GOP’s control of the government, Americans may find themselves living in a theocracy that has already spelled out its intentions to change every aspect of American life including its cultural life, its Constitution and its laws.

And this quote, taken from Machiavelli himself, is chilling:

“Let a prince therefore aim at conquering and maintaining the state, and the means will always be judged honourable and praised by every one, for the vulgar is always taken by appearances and the issue of the event; and the world consists only of the vulgar, and the few who are not vulgar are isolated when the many have a rallying point in the prince.”

The Despoiling of America


How George W. Bush became the head of the new American Dominionist Church/State


By Katherine Yurica

February 11, 2004

-C

Folks,

After a
week of taking a break from GRL, I’m ready to bring you up to date. But it’s not
like the world has been standing still. Indeed, the news of the last week has
been breathtakingly, crushingly bad, from every direction, and that’s in part
why I haven’t written about it. It’s very demoralizing. Still, I wish I had the
energy to bring you the key points of all that I have read about it, but it’s
just not feasible for one guy, with no budget, no staff, a life to lead and an
income to make. I know that some of you rely on GRL for most of your world news (gulp!),
but I can’t promise you that it will be a reliable source. You should subscribe
to Truthout, the Progress Report, From the Wilderness, MoveOn, The Daily
Misleader, and a few other sites that can do that for you (I read all of those
and more, myself). See a list of great newsletters sites here.

But I
can try to bring you up to date on the most important story of all: the
impending oil crash. AKA, the end of the world as we know it. This is the story
that renders all else–including all the politics that I have written about in
GRL–utterly trivial.

Lately, I can think about little but the oil crash. It’s putting every future plan, and every conception I had about my life, in a
new light. I’m looking at everything
differently now. I look around at new cars, computers, everything that runs on electricity, and think:
all of this could be pointless and useless in 10 years. Imagine not being able to afford to board an airplane,
watch TV, buy fresh fruit, or drive to the store. Imagine everything that you
take for granted about life to be about to vanish. Imagine violent and hungry
hordes evacuating the major cities. Imagine yourself trying to eke out a living
in subsistence farming, and living like the Amish. Imagine your children growing
up in a world with precious little energy. Imagine 5 billion of the world’s 6
billion people dying off in the next 70 years or so. Because that could be
exactly what we’re headed for. In fact, it seems unavoidable.

I wonder every day how, and where, I
would try to make my last stand. And it’s
driving me absolutely crazy
that I can’t get more people to wake up and look at this problem! A friend recently described it as “a planeload of people on steep crash descent, with nobody in the cockpit, and a cocktail party going on in the cabin.”

I know
what you want now. You want me to digest this mass of information and just lay
it out for you with dates and milestones. But I’m not going to attempt that,
because for one, it’s a complex assessment, and a success of approximation, so
the task just isn’t that easy. But for another, I think it’s important that
everyone understand the dynamics of the problem and get a grasp of the possible
solutions and their various limitations, so that you can argue it out for
yourself. You won’t be able to nitpick one assertion and go to bed with sweet
dreams. No, this is one case where you really don’t want the Cliff Notes; you
want the whole semester of classes.

Here is
a compilation of some of the best material I have found on the subject. I have
read much more on it than this, as I suggest you do, and there is much more to
be found beyond these articles. But this is a good collection to get you
started.

First, here’s one resource that gives you the basics, cheat-sheet style. This is as close to the Cliff Notes version as you’re going
to find.
Running on
Empty

Folks,

Thanks to Cirrito for submitting this excellent article. As he commented:
“I’ll tell you, the revolving door from government to business, and business to government is really getting me sick. We have oversight agencies stacked to the gills with operatives from the industries they are supposed to be regulating, and we have high level government employees jumping ship to corporations and industries that ultimately influence and shape policy.”

The “foxes guarding the henhouse” theme is one we’ve explored on GRL for a while now, but I thought that was very well said. If the GOP (and often they are the real force behind the scenes when we mistakenly point to “the Bush administration”) continues to succeed at corrupting all of the oversight groups that we depend on to safeguard our health and wealth, there’s really no point in continuing with the sham of oversight at all. It’s ultimately a lot of expense and waste, and we should just do away with it. And I’m sure that, on that point, the GOP and I would be firmly agreed.

On to the article: Like a good doctor, New York commentator Deroy Murdock examines the recent Medicare bill with a magnifying glass, and finds it crawling with corruption.

Here’s a little excerpt:

So, to review: Taxpayers are stuck with a program that costs 35 percent
more than when their bamboozled representatives approved it last
November. Top officials win golden parachutes stitched together by
interests they have legislated and regulated. Trampled House voting
practices, a federally-funded TV deal for GOP political consultants and
a bribery probe all frost this ugly cake.

This is why movement conservatives are so grumpy. They are sick of
knocking themselves out to promote limited government and fiscal
prudence, only to watch their solemn beliefs burn to a crisp in the
increasingly Third World crucible called Republican-controlled
Washington.

A few centrist Republicans (and the very few who actually stand for values and are true to them, like John McCain) are starting to complain. But will that be enough to save the soul of the Republican Party? Or will they allow the foxes to kill every last chicken, until there’s no point in hanging out in the henhouse at all anymore? (Maybe that’s the ultimate logic behind Bush’s fantasies about colonizing space.)

I hope, for the sake of our country, that the Republicans will stand up for their stated values as they so often claim to do, hold these shifty bastards accountable for the damage they’re doing to the country, and stop the looting of America. They’re in control of all three branches of government, and we’re all at the mercy of their ethics. I pray they won’t let us all down.

–C
GOP HELPS TURN USA INTO TANZANIA

by Deroy Murdock

Source: Scripps Howard News Service

NEW YORK – The Tanzanianization of America proceeds apace.

This word encapsulates Washington’s steady slide from transparency, the
rule of law, and First World political norms toward an equatorial
standard of public integrity. Tanzania, among Earth’s most corrupt
nations, foreshadows the ultimate destination of America’s government.

Hyperbole? The Clintons’ virtual auction of presidential pardons as they
looted the White House, for example, oozed the sickly-sweet fragrance of
a banana republic.

Alas, Republicans suffer this malady, too.

Consider the brand-new Medicare drug benefit. Citizens can debate the
merits of the biggest entitlement since 1965. However, every American
should deplore the shifty way it was enacted and the shady deals now
benefiting powerful people associated with this law.

The White House stunned taxpayers when it announced January 29 that the
new Medicare benefit’s 10-year price tag would be $534 billion rather
than the $395 billion advertised when President Bush signed it December
8. This news startled Congressional Democrats and Republicans, many of
whom opposed this bill.

Now it appears they were hoodwinked.

Late last month, Congressional analysts acquired a June 11 forecast from
Medicare’s Office of the Actuary. It priced the Senate drug bill at
$551.5 billion, approximating the White House’s $534 billion cost for
the similar, final measure. Had Congress learned this promptly, this
bill would have flopped.

Rep. Pete Stark (D - California) said on January 30: “I am confident
that they [the Administration] knew prior to the vote on the Medicare
bill that their estimates would continue to be considerably higher than
those of the Congressional Budget Office,” which foresaw spending $395
billion.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson claimed, “There was
no attempt to keep our number camouflaged,” according to the February 2
New York Times. Yet Thompson himself invoked CBO’s thriftier estimate on
Fox News November 24, while the Senate considered this bill.

When congressional Democrats sought these projections, they slammed into
a brick wall named Tom Scully, then-Administrator of the Center for
Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“They don’t have the right on the Hill to call up my actuary and demand
things,” Scully told the Associated Press June 25. “These people work
for the executive branch, period.” Scully said he would release these
data “if I feel like it.”

The AP’s Laura Meckler added that officials in Congress and at HHS said
“Scully threatened to fire Foster if he released his memo.”

Scully’s muzzling of Foster either undermined or violated the 1997
Balanced Budget Act. The House-Senate agreement cited in that law
explains that the Office of the Actuary “serves both the Administration
and the Congress.” This conference report adds: “The process of
monitoring, updating and reforming the Medicare and Medicaid programs is
greatly enhanced by the free flow of actuarial information from the
Office of the Actuary to the committees of jurisdiction in the
Congress.”

Thompson now concedes HHS generated unflattering estimates but failed to
share them with members of Congress. “I did not tell them because it was
not my responsibility,” Thompson said. Yet it evidently was his
responsibility last November 22 to ignore congressional customs, patrol
the House floor at 5:00 a.m., and dragoon members during a two-hour,
53-minute tally that torched the House’s 15-minute-vote procedures.

This protracted ballot may have helped someone attempt to bribe retiring
Rep. Nick Smith (R -Michigan), a bill opponent who said that for his
vote, he was offered “$100,000-plus” from “business interests” to his
son’s congressional campaign. To his credit, Smith’s “No” vote stuck.
The House Ethics Committee is investigating these allegations.

Meanwhile, Rep. Billy Tauzin (R - Louisiana), the bill’s co-author,
stopped chairing the House Energy and Commerce Committee February 16. He
reportedly was offered over $2 million annually to join Pharma, the drug
association that lobbied for Tauzin’s legislation. If he accepts, his
salary could be a sort of royalty for creating this measure.

“If you want to know the price of selling seniors down the river,” House
Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California said, “it’s approximately
$2 million a year, if you want to hire the manager of the bill on the
floor of the House.”

Scully, the departed Medicrat, spun through the revolving door and
twirled onto two hospital companies’ boards and into Alston & Bird, a
Washington law firm that performs healthcare work. Secretary Thompson
granted Scully an undisclosed May 12 waiver that allowed him to seek
employment even as he negotiated the Medicare bill with Congress and
medical lobbyists.

Democratic Reps. Stark and Illinois’ Jan Schakowsky wrote Thompson on
December 10 after they finally saw Scully’s waiver. They were
“absolutely shocked that it could pass muster.” They continued: “For
seven months, Members of Congress who relied on Mr. Scully for
information were kept in the dark about the fact that he was actively
engaged in looking for employment with firms that have significant
interests in the issues at stake.” They added: “It is not intended that
high-ranking government officials be actively trolling for work in the
very industry they are being entrusted to regulate and oversee on behalf
of the public.”

In apparent response to this situation, White House Chief of Staff
Andrew Card issued a memo January 6 that said only the White House could
issue waivers allowing top officials to seek positions with companies
they supervise.

On yet another front, $12.6 million in TV ads now state, “Same Medicare.
New benefits.” These tax-funded commercials were placed by National
Media Inc., a Bush-Cheney ’04 partner company.

So, to review: Taxpayers are stuck with a program that costs 35 percent
more than when their bamboozled representatives approved it last
November. Top officials win golden parachutes stitched together by
interests they have legislated and regulated. Trampled House voting
practices, a federally-funded TV deal for GOP political consultants and
a bribery probe all frost this ugly cake.

This is why movement conservatives are so grumpy. They are sick of
knocking themselves out to promote limited government and fiscal
prudence, only to watch their solemn beliefs burn to a crisp in the
increasingly Third World crucible called Republican-controlled
Washington.

New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps
Howard News Service.

Folks,

MoveOn has organized a campaign to censure President Bush for lying to us about the war in Iraq. If you’re angry about this illegitimate and unneccessary war that has cost us over $100 BILLION so far, while our infrastructure and state budgets are crumbling for lack of federal funds, then please contact your Congressmen and ask them to support the call for Censure of President Bush.

I have called both of my senators and my House representative today. In fact, I made contact cards for them in my Outlook and cell phone so that I can easily dial them up again in the future. I suggest that you do the same!

For more information, see MoveOn’s letter, below.

Don’t let them get away with this.

–C
Sent:
Thursday, February 19, 2004 11:40 AM
To: Chris Nelder
Subject: Censure:
Call Senators Feinstein and Boxer


Dear MoveOn member,

This is
a key week in our campaign for Censure.  Our Senators and Representatives
are home from DC on recess, so it’s a great time to call their local
offices.  They’ve got to hold President Bush accountable for deliberately
hyping and distorting the facts about Iraq’s supposed WMDs.

To make an
impressive show of support for Censure, we need everyone to help out.  Can
you please call your Senators and Representative now?

Make sure their staffers know you’re a constituent. 
Then urge your representatives to Censure President Bush.  Let them know,
politely but firmly, why it’s important to you that he be formally
reprimanded.
 

We’re
organizing calls all this week, but we’ll only ask you to call once, and we’ve
timed the arrival of this email to make it as likely as possible that you’ll get
through, if you call now.

Our Censure campaign has picked up incredible
momentum.  Already, more than half a million MoveOn members have signed
onto our petition calling on Congress to censure President Bush for misleading
us into war.

We’re advertising in the Washington Post and on radio
stations around the country, and we’ve written letters to our newspaper
editors.  Now it’s time to call.

Americans are outraged.  A new
poll says “a majority of Americans believe President Bush either lied or
deliberately exaggerated evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass
destruction in order to justify war.” [1]  A recent Newsweek cover asks
“Will Anyone Pay?” [2] 

Even Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly is now
admitting that Bush misled us, saying, “I was wrong.  I am not pleased
about it at all and I think all Americans should be concerned about this.”
[3]

The fact is, President Bush was planning for war with Iraq from his
first days in office. [4]  Having made that decision, he ran a campaign of
misinformation, hype and hysteria that led us into war. 

Before the
war, Bush was repeatedly told there was no definitive evidence that Iraq
possessed weapons of mass destruction. [5]  He knew Iraq was not a nuclear
threat. [6]  He knew there was no Iraq connection to 9/11. [7]  Iraq
posed no imminent danger to the United States.  There was no case for a
pre-emptive war.

Yet Bush relentlessly led us into a war that has cost
500 American lives, left 3,000 seriously injured, and wasted tens of billions of
dollars.  Thousands of Iraqis have been killed as well.

President
Bush has betrayed our trust, and there must be consequences. 

Please
call your Senators and Representative now.

Thank you, for all you
do.

Sincerely,

–Adam, Carrie, Eli, James, Joan, Laura, Noah,
Peter, Wes, and Zack
  The MoveOn.org Team
  February 19th,
2004

P.S.: If you haven’t already signed the petition for censure, please
do, at:

  http://www.moveon.org/censure/


Notes:

[1]
Washington Post, “Most Think Truth Was Stretched to Justify Iraq War”,
2/13/04:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37340-2004Feb12.html

[2]
Newsweek, Cover, 2/9/04:
http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20040201/NYSU006

[3]
O’Reilly on Good Morning America, as quoted in Reuters, “Pundit O’Reilly Now
Skeptical About Bush”, 2/10/04:
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=4325220

[4]
Former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill, 60 Minutes, 1/11/04:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml

[5]
“The Selling of the Iraq War: The First Casualty,” The New Republic,
6/30/03:
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/unmovic/2003/0630selling.htm
and
Defense Intelligence Agency Report, 6/13/03:
http://www.iraqwatch.org/government/US/Pentagon/us-dod-iraqchemreport-060703.htm

[6]
International Atomic Energy Agency Report, 10/8/98:
http://www.nci.org/i/iaea10-8-98.htm
and Washington Post,
“Bush Aides Disclose Warnings from CIA”, 7/23/03.

[7] Seattle
Post-Intelligencer, “Bush: No Link to 9/11 Found”, 9/18/03:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/140133_bushiraq18.html

Hey folks,

Thought I’d share an e-mail I just sent to the local and national offices of CBS after finding out that, under pressure, CBS has reversed its decision and will begin running the Bush administration’s controversial (and misleading) Medicare ads.

As is often the case, I first heard about this outrage through the Progress Report. Quality stuff, made fresh daily. If you’re not already signed up, I’d encourage you to do so.

– Lee

Partisan Politics in CBS’ Advertising Policies

As disapointed as I was when CBS caved into pressure from the right wing and other Reagan apologists and pulled “The Reagans” miniseries*; as outraged as I was (as an active member of MoveOn.Org) by the refusal to air “Child’s Play,” deeming it a spot that ran counter to CBS’ stated policy against airing ads that contain an “advocacy of viewpoints on controversial issues of public importance;” as shocked as I was to then see that CBS was airing the completely misleading and partisan Medicare prescription drug law ads… I finally thought there was some hope for fairness when CBS pulled that ad while awaiting a full General Accounting Office (GAO) investigation.

The GAO investigating an ad? Why on Earth would that be necessary? It’s simple: It’s trying to determine whether the ad is an improper and illegal expenditure of taxpayer monies for political purposes. It is. We, the taxpayers — a group of which you, dear reader, are a fellow member — paid for this ad. An ad that was, coincidentally no doubt, produced by Bush’s own campaign media firm. Guess what? They also do ads for the drug industry, which stands to benefit tremendously from this new Medicare law. They should — after all, they helped write it.

That hope for fairness has evaporated now that CBS has announced that it will lift its restriction on the inacurate and partisan election-year Medicare ads and allow them to run. Until this decision is reversed, or CBS’ airwaves opened up to a full and fair public debate, my family and I will avoid all CBS stations.

Shame on you, CBS.

Lee Thompson

* PS: Here’s an excerpt from an interesting article on CBS’ handling of “The Reagans” by the Columbia Journalism Review. I encourage you to read it in its entirety at http://www.cjr.org/issues/2003/6/reagans-grossman.asp.

CBS made three mistakes in its handling of “The Reagans”:

Its first mistake was to produce an entertainment series that focused on President Reagan’s personal life while he is suffering from serious illness and being cared for by his wife. That’s called bad taste.

Its second mistake was to succumb to outside pressure by abruptly canceling the series and putting it on Showtime, its more restricted cable network. That’s called setting a terrible precedent.

CBS’s third mistake was to deny that it had caved in to outside pressure and claim it was a “moral call.” That’s called misleading.

By canceling “The Reagans,” CBS set a dangerous example for dealing with the pressures that invariably arise to kill controversial programs before they can be seen. The network’s weakness will only encourage future protesters from the left and right to demand that programs they don’t like be pulled. Such programs, especially news documentaries on tough issues, are already network television’s most endangered species. If “The Reagans” had not been a drama but a legitimate CBS News documentary, would CBS still have canceled it? Instead of running for cover and fobbing off “The Reagans” on Showtime, CBS should have run it, made television time available to give critics and supporters their say, and let the people decide for themselves.

Time for a little humor, don’tcha think? Here’s a little animated trifle featuring Dubya as Gollum.

Lord of the Right Wing

Folks,

I deemed this BuzzFlash interview of author Paul Waldman worthy of wider distribution not just for being another tour of the Bush team’s history of serial lying, but because it examines the tactics of the lies, the techniques of “Hot” Karl Rove, and the complicity of the media in allowing it all to happen.

How does the Bush administration manage to get away with telling the same lies over and over again, even after they’ve been revealed as lies, and still get people to believe them? How does his homespun, non-intellectual cowboy image let him get away with it? And how have they convinced the press to give Bush a pass on these lies because he’s just not that smart?

This article may have some answers.

–C
Paul Waldman, Author of “Fraud: The Strategy Behind The Bush Lies And Why The Media Didn’t Tell You,” Talks with BuzzFlash about Why Bush is a Complete and Irredeemable “Fraud.”

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

February 13, 2004

“Republicans
are better at it than Democrats because they have to be. If everybody
just said: Okay, who’s looking out for me? — in Bill O’Reilly’s words
— and voted accordingly, well, Republicans would only have 1 percent
of the votes, because that’s who they’re looking out for. So they have
to be much more sophisticated at it, and they have to work a lot harder
at controlling the language. They have to work a lot harder at telling
those stories, right? This is something that you see in election after
election — the Republicans tend to talk about values, and Democrats
tend to talk about programs. Democrats often get lost in the details.
Now the details are all things that will reflect well on them. But
it’s much harder to get people to understand a whole long list of programs
than it is to get them to understand a story.

Republicans
are very good at telling these stories. And they’ve constructed a
very pleasing
and easy-to-understand story about George W. Bush –
that he was sort of the wayward son. Then he found God. He became a serious
person. He ran for President. He’s a man of upstanding moral values.
And then Sept. 11th happened, and he rose to the challenge, and he‘s
the savior of us all. And that’s why, to put it bluntly, I’m sure Karl
Rove gets down on his knees and thanks God for Sept. 11th every day because
any time they’re in trouble, what do they do? They announce a new threat,
and they say this is all about terrorism. And if you ask George W. Bush
what time he is, he’ll say: In the wake of Sept. 11th, it’s 3:15. So
it’s a powerful story and it activates people’s fear and anger, and all
those emotions that we all felt on Sept. 11th. And they’re going to keep
activating them as long as they can because they know that it works.”

–
Paul Waldman

Rarely have we found a writer that so cohesively builds the case that
Bush is a fraud. And, unlike BuzzFlash, the author of “FRAUD” is
restrained and patient as he unfolds his case that the image of George
W. Bush is a strategically manufactured artifice.

As the book jacket notes:

“At
some point, George W. Bush took a good long look at who he was and
what he wanted for the country and decided that the American people
would
never buy it if he gave it to them straight.” So Bush and his political
machine made their decision: the American people would have to be lied
to.

They would construct a persona that would be everything Bush was not.

They would take the same reactionary agenda and cloak it in comforting
catchphrases and pleasing visuals, presenting to the public a false image
of sympathy.

And
they would repeat this message endlessly.

The
power of the fraud lies in the ability of the Bush machine to manipulate
the press, and thereby avoid having the truth exposed. Waldman’s
findings reveal an astonishing record of how the nation’s media
has
not only
given Bush a pass again and again, but have failed to follow
up on even the most openly dishonest parts of the Bush agenda.”

Paul Waldman is the past associate director of the Annenberg Public
Policy Center and holds a Ph.D. in communications. He is currently the
executive editor of The Gadflyer, an Internet magazine about politics.

“Fraud:The
Strategy Behind The Bush Lies And Why The Media Didn’t Tell You” is
available at http://www.buzzflash.com/premiums/fraud.html.

Here is the BuzzFlash Interview with Paul Waldman.

*
* *

BuzzFlash: You have a book called Fraud about the person who’s sitting
in the White House. If we accept that the image of Bush that is portrayed
to the country through his speeches — and, as Karl Rove likes to say,
through pictorial images of photos and television video — is a fraud,
what is Bush’s motive and the motive of the people behind him to commit
the fraud?

Paul Waldman: I think where it comes from is the fact that — and I
say this in the Introduction — that at some point he had to have sat
down and taken a good, long look at who he was and what he wanted to
do, and come to the realization that, if he gave it to the American people
straight, they wouldn’t buy it. They would not have elected somebody
who had accomplished so little and had been given so much. They wouldn’t
sign on to this agenda that’s at odds with their own interests.

So if that’s the position you’re in — you’ve got this agenda, you’ve
got a candidate who has really so little to commend himself, other than
his name, and has spent his entire life walking on a path laid before
him with wealth and influence, and has so little in common with the people
that he’s going to be claiming to represent — then you’ve got to come
up with a story. And that story is going to be a false one.

So what do they do? They said we’re going to create this persona that
isn’t somebody who went to Andover and Yale and Harvard, whose father
was a President and whose grandfather was a Senator, and who, his entire
working life, had never had a real job. It’s all been about his Daddy’s
friends giving him money to lose.

They created this persona that he’s a regular guy, a Texas cowboy. He
bought a ranch just before the campaign started so he could go down there
and clear brush. He exaggerates his drawl whenever he can. He does “home
to the heartland” tours to show that the place where he comes from, and
the people who vote for him come from, is the real America. And if you
live on the East coast or the West coast, or you live in a state that
votes for Democrats, then you must not be a real American. So that’s
part of it — the creation of this persona, this kind of regular guy
who doesn’t, in fact, represent the interests of his class.

Then you have the second problem, which is: What do you do about this
agenda? Well, the agenda is not going to change. That we know. So what
they did was they created this wonderful thing called “compassionate
conservatism.” Now what’s compassionate conservatism? I think the best
summation of it is if you go to the Bush campaign website — Georgewbush.com
— you can see a “Compassion Photo Album.” Now what’s the Compassion
Photo Album? It is — I kid you not — two dozen pictures of George W.
Bush with black people. That’s the compassion photo album. And that pretty
much sums up what compassionate conservatism is.

BuzzFlash: You mean photo ops with minorities as the sum total of compassionate
conservatism?

Paul Waldman: Exactly. You know, you stick him in a room full of black
people and he will hug them ‘til the cows come home. The cameras will
click away, and it’ll be wonderful for everybody. There’s an event that
took place that I mention in the book where –

BuzzFlash: Excuse me for interrupting you, but it’s somewhat ironic
that when he was informed of 9/11, he was in a minority classroom in
Florida reading a children’s book.

Paul Waldman: One of the things that’s so shocking, if we can just digress
on that for a moment, is that everyone talks about his tremendous performance
on 9/11. I don’t think it was that tremendous. He got informed of the
second plane – okay, not the first plane – the second plane. He knew
that America was under attack, and he stayed in that classroom for 10
more minutes. Ari Fleischer held up a sign that said: “Don’t say anything
yet,” and so Bush went on reading this children’s book for 10 more minutes
instead of saying, “I’m sorry children. I have to go.” He hung around
as if it really wasn’t all that urgent.

And then he kind of bounced around the country, making very awkward
statements that didn’t really seem to be very inspiring. It wasn’t until
they coulc actually write something for him to say that he began to take
on the appearance of a President.

BuzzFlash: What happened then in that classroom is sort of indicative
of the real ineptitude and impotency of Bush without his handlers running
the show. Here he is, placed in a photo op situation, part of a Karl
Rove strategy. And the biggest crisis to hit this country in anyone’s
memory — nearly 3,000 people lost — and he’s sitting in a classroom
basically until he’s told what to do. Hardly the take-charge President,
as you say. And then what did he do? He made a brief statement that someone
wrote for him, and then he flew west to Louisiana while the country is
in dissaray.

Paul Waldman: But it was so important for everyone to feel like we had
a commanding leader that reporters in particular were falling all over
themselves — and to this day — to talk about how wonderful his performance
was on that day.

BuzzFlash: Let’s get back to compassionate conservatism. The fraud is,
in part, to advance an agenda that the public doesn’t buy, and we see
this borne out in polls. He may have a high favorability rating, but
at the same time, when people are polled on his individual policies,
particularly domestic policies, he loses in a landslide on most of those.

Paul Waldman: Absolutely. And that’s another thing that is largely a
myth. You see reporters repeat this all the time — that Bush is a tremendously
popular President. Well, he was tremendously popular right after Sept.
11th, and that has kind of stuck in their minds. If a trained seal had
been President on Sept. 11th, he would have gotten 90 percent approval
ratings. But the fact is, right now, Bush is not a tremendously popular
President. His popularity ratings are sort of in the low- to mid-‘50s,
which is okay by historical standards. It’s not fantastic. It’s not terrible.

The Washington Post recently asked, “Who are you going to vote for?”
It was Bush: 48; Democrats: 46. So that’s a tie. But this idea that he’s
so tremendously popular and everybody just loves him sticks in the public
mind because it sticks in reporters’ minds. They’re, to a certain extent,
kind of still locked in that post-Sept. 11th feeling that everybody just
loves Bush.

There’s an interesting parallel with Ronald Reagan here. There’s an
article that was written by a communications scholar named Michael Schudson
some years back. He looked at the Gallup polls on popularity ratings,
and he wrote this piece called “The Myth of Ronald Reagan’s Popularity.”
This is after Reagan had already left office. And what he found was that,
again, by historical standards, Reagan was kind of in the middle. He
had better ratings than Nixon and Carter, but worse than most other presidents.
But Schudson’s explanation was that reporters, to a certain extent, sort
of felt like the American people must have been dupes. Reagan’s people
were so good at these terrific photo ops, and reporters saw how well
they were staged and just figured, well, the American people certainly
must be buying it, because look how pretty those pictures are. They must
love Reagan, when, in fact, they really didn’t. He was reasonably popular,
popular enough to win reelection. But he wasn’t beloved by every American.

And the same kind of thing is happening with Bush. If anything, they’re
even more skilled. They put the Reagan team to shame. Nobody can put
together a photo op like the Bush administration can. So there’s a similar
kind of thing that goes on. They see him land on the aircraft carrier,
and reporters all say: Wow, look at that fantastic photo op. People must
just be lapping this up. Everybody must love this guy.

You know what? The American people aren’t that dumb. There was a Gallup
poll right before the carrier landing happened, and then one right after
it. His popularity went down by one point, so it’s not like everybody
saw it and said: Wow, he’s such a fantastic wartime leader, we just love
him. But that idea has lodged itself in reporters’ minds, and they keep
repeating it – that he’s so fantastically popular.

BuzzFlash: You were associate director of the Annenberg Public Policy
Center at the Annenberg School for Communication. BuzzFlash constantly
focuses on the issue of communication, and in many of our interviews
we ask people about image and meaning. Going back to what you just said
about the carrier landing, people like the infamous Chris Matthews and
others analyzed it as though it were a performance and not something
that was an extension of policy. In the media today, you have celebrity
pundits who can’t divorce themselves from looking at politics as entertainment.
And in that sense, they look at Bush’s performance at projecting himself
as President, rather than how is his performance as the leader of the
American government.

Paul Waldman: I think it goes even beyond the celebrity pundits to prominent
reporters in general. Many years ago, I had a conversation with a White
House correspondent for a major newspaper, and I asked her about this
question of covering the strategy and not covering the policy details.
And she said, “Look, I’m not an expert on welfare policy. I’m not an
expert on foreign policy. What I’m an expert on is politics, and that’s
what I’m going to write about.”

The way that ends up manifesting itself is in theater criticism, and
the irony is that reporters tend to be very, very cynical. They assume
that the motives that candidates and politicians offer are always false,
and they always are concealing some sort of vaguely sinister strategic
motive. But the irony is that they reward good image-making and they
punish bad image-making. So even though they’re cynical, they’re also
playing right into the hands of somebody like Karl Rove, because he knows
all too well that it’s not a question of whether or not you are going
to try to construct some kind of theater. You’re going to be evaluated
based on whether it came off well or not.

If you have a good photo op, you’re going to get praised. If you fall
off the stage like Bob Dole did, then you’re going to get criticized.
Reporters believe when they’re doing this stuff that they’re kind of
in the know, and their cynicism is holding politicians to account. But
it really isn’t. All it’s doing is insisting that they put on good theater
as opposed to bad theater.

BuzzFlash: I recall reading several years ago about people’s recall
and news sources. We are such an entertainment-driven society — news
is geared toward ratings and sweeps weeks, and advertising is dependent
upon viewership. I think it was after the 2000 election, where people
in some sort of focus group were shown negative ads, news reports, and
newspaper articles. Two days later, they were asked about the sources.
When asked about a negative attack upon a politician, they couldn’t distinguish
where it came from. Although the public generally decries negative campaign
advertising, the source of news becomes a blur to the American public
in general.

Paul Waldman: That’s because we don’t classify information when we receive
it, along with its source, necessarily. We get a piece of information,
and we store it into our memory. But it can often get disconnected from
where we saw it. Campaigns count on that. One of the things that they
do sometimes is try to confuse you about what the source is, so they
try to make their ads look vaguely news-like.

There have been a couple of cases where people have done that to the
extreme. In Bob Torricelli’s last Senate race against Dick Zimmer in
New Jersey, Zimmer aired an ad that was a fake sort of newsbreak. “Breaking
news: Torricelli under fire for corruption,” or whatever. That was an
extreme case of somebody trying to confuse you about where the source
was. The mistake they made is that since they aired it over and over
and over again, viewers eventually said: Wait a second, I saw this breaking
news thing yesterday and the day before. They’re trying to screw with
me. And it backfired on them because it was such a blatant attempt to
fool people. But they nonetheless adopt a lot of the visual tropes of
news, and it is, to a certain extent, in order to help you to kind of
forget where you got the information from.

BuzzFlash: Let’s go back to this notion of what makes news nowadays
— the projection of the Bush fraud. Karl Rove was quoted in a New Yorker
piece a couple weeks ago saying, very disdainfully toward the media,
that only the headline counts, and reporters only want the good headline,
because they’re going to be rated on what brings readers or viewers to
their publication or television broadcasting. So as long as we supply
them with the good headline, that’s all we need to do.

He was being what’s called disarmingly candid because the Bush administration,
and Rove’s office in particular, seems masterful. Whenever Bush gets
in a corner, whether it was Enron, Ken Lay — I mean, we can go down
the list of maybe a hundred things that have been damaging to them –
Karl Rove comes up with some headline that knocks whatever is negative
and revealing about the Bush administration off the front page, and invariably
the press goes along with it, except for maybe a few print publications.
Certainly television goes with the headline, and then the Democrats don’t
continue an offense about the damaging revelation, and it just dies because
the White House has released a distracting headline.

Paul Waldman: The critical information ends up far down the story, which
means that on TV, which is basically a headline service, it never gets
in at all. They’re very good about forging ahead. They never apologize
for anything. And the press has been so compliant and kind of beaten
down that if you look back over these stories, some of which you just
mentioned, it’s incredible how they just disappeared.

Take Harken Energy, where Bush may well have committed insider trading.
There’s a lot of money involved. Dumped over $800,000 worth of stock
after apparently hearing that his company was engaging in Enron-style
accounting, and their stock was about to tank. If it had been Bill Clinton,
well, let’s think about the amount of ink that was spilled over Whitewater.
Now what was Whitewater about? Even people who spend every day thinking
about politics can’t tell you, because it was basically about nothing,
and they found nothing. But we spent $70 million investigating it. And
Harken just disappears. They ran a couple of stories for a couple of
weeks, and then it just went away.

BuzzFlash: One of the traits of the Bush administration is the old slogan:
If you tell a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. Or, I guess a variation
on that is: If you tell a lie five times, it becomes the truth, which
seems a hallmark of the Bush administration. Let me ask you about a couple
things and just see your reaction in terms of media. When it first came
out that Bush had been briefed before he went off to Crawford in August
of 2001 that al-Qaeda was planning a massive terrorist attack on the
United States, it was derailed. Bush suddenly decided it was time to
have a Department of Homeland Security — I’m pretty sure that’s the
story that derailed the August briefing story. The press seems to have
no memory that this President was opposed to a Department of Homeland
Security. Something comes out that’s damaging to him, and suddenly he
comes out championing it.

What
I’m getting to is when Condoleezza Rice was asked about the briefing,
she said, “But
we never thought they would use planes to fly into buildings.”

Paul Waldman: The other thing about when she got asked about the briefing
was that she said: No, it wasn’t about attacks on the United States.
It was about attacks overseas. And that was false.

BuzzFlash: No one challenged her, and it did not become a big scandal
— the way you prevent a hijacking is the same way you prevent a hijacking
that results in flying planes into big buildings. It doesn’t matter.
You didn’t prevent the hijacking. Her attitude was: Well, we’d kind of
been warned about hijackings, but not about flying planes into buildings.

How does that happen? A 5-year-old could knock that excuse down and
say: How can you be National Security Advisor if you can’t understand
that both would be prevented in the same way?

Paul Waldman: I think the press, ever since the beginning, has bought
that line that the Bush administration is comprised of grownups. If nothing
else, these people are competent, and they know what they’re doing. And
even a huge failure like failing to prevent Sept. 11th has done nothing
to damage that view amongst the press. They continue, in the face of
all evidence to the contrary, to hold to that view that no matter what
you think about their policies, these people really know what they’re
doing.

BuzzFlash: Even when they say things that reveal they absolutely don’t
know what they’re doing.

Paul Waldman: I think part of it is that they’re so good at sort of
forging ahead and not being willing to even grant the premise of criticism,
and changing the subject.

BuzzFlash: We had an editorial at one point called “The Banality of
Lying,” which noted that they lie so frequently and so brazenly that
it’s hard for some people of the press to accuse them of lying because
they’re so audacious.

Paul Waldman: That is a strategy. And Bush never apologizes for anything,
and it’s been very effective. Even in cases you can find where he’ll
repeat the same lie over and over and over again, and there will be somebody
pointing that out, he just keeps going because he knows that there’s
not going to be a cost. And this actually brings me to a point that I
think is really important that a lot of liberals misunderstand. It’s
easy to make fun of Bush for not being too smart, and for the way that
he trips over his words. But when liberals do that, I think they’re making
a big mistake because he wants liberals to make fun of him. It makes
liberals look like snobs, and it reiterates this idea that he’s just
an ordinary guy, because if he went to Andover and Yale and Harvard,
he wouldn’t be a guy who trips over his words.

What the press does in a presidential campaign is they sort of home
in on what they think each candidate’s Achilles’ heel is. And they tell
the public: This is what you have to know about this guy, and this is
the area of potential danger. For Gore, it was the idea he was a liar.
And for Bush, it was the idea that he was stupid. And once they decided
that Bush was stupid, they gave him permission to lie.

There’s a quote that I cite from Cokie Roberts — if you want to know
what the conventional wisdom among reporters is, you can just listen
to what she’s got to say. After the first debate, Gore made some utterly
trivial inaccurate statements about the girl who has to stand in her
classroom when in fact she had a chair, or he went to the fires in Texas
with the director of FEMA when it was actually the deputy director. And
Bush told a number of falsehoods that were actually consequential and
were meant to deceive people about what he wanted to do. What Cokie Roberts
said was that with Bush, “you know he’s just misstating.” And that’s
a quote. You know he’s just misstating, as opposed to it playing into
a story about him being a serial exaggerator.

That’s what reporters felt. If Bush said something that wasn’t true,
oh, well, you know, he’s not too smart, so he must have just made a mistake,
so we don’t have to hold him accountable for his lies. And we may not
even have to say that what he said was wrong.

And when they realized that this was going on, the Bush team knew that
they had struck political gold: He was never going to be held accountable
for the things that he said. After the State of the Union last year,
when he said that Saddam was looking for uranium in Africa, one White
House aide said: Well, the President’s not a fact-checker. And this is
always their line. It’s not his fault because he’s George W. Bush. He’s
not too smart. He’s doing what he thinks is the right thing. But he doesn’t
have to be held accountable for the things that he says.

I’ve had it with that. When he was running for President, he said that
he was going to usher in the responsibility era. Well, it’s time for
him to take some responsibility.

BuzzFlash: In September of last year, on a Friday, which is often when
the administration releases information that can be damaging or undercut
their credibility, a statement is released on behalf of President Bush
in which he states that basically there is no indication that Saddam
was tied with al-Qaeda.

It was an enormously significant admission on the part of administration
that had done everything possible, through a number of psychological
linguistic techniques, to get the American public to believe that the
majority of the hijackers on Sept. 11th were Iraqi. At one point, 70
percent of Americans thought that. Then Bush suddenly admits there was
no connection, and two days later, if I recall, Vice President Cheney
appears on television and once again says we have reason to believe that
there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. So the Vice
President, who many say is really the brains behind the operation, along
with Karl Rove, says something completely contrary to what the President
has said just two days ago, and there’s barely a ripple in the press.

Paul Waldman: And Bush only said it because he got asked the question
directly, and it had begun to become controversial because Cheney has
been always the one who has said the most outrageous things when it came
to Iraq –that Saddam actually has nuclear weapons, that he’s going to
be attacking any minute now. What happened was, after one of these statements,
Bush actually got asked directly by a reporter: Do you believe that Saddam
was involved with Sept. 11th? And he said no, because there was no escaping
it when he got asked so directly. But yes, you’re right, and I wrote
a piece in the Washington Post about this — that reporters just don’t
know how to say: The President lied. They especially don’t know how to
say it if he lies in a clever way.

They didn’t have to say the words “Saddam planned Sept. 11th” in order
to plant that idea in the public mind. All they had to do was to keep
repeating the words “Saddam” and “Sept. 11th” in the same sentence over
and over and over.

BuzzFlash: Which is a technique called mirroring.

Paul Waldman: Yes. And people would make the connection in their own
minds because we know that Saddam is a bad guy, and al-Qaeda is bad.
And they’re all sort of Middle Eastern, so why wouldn’t there be a connection
between them? The other thing that they do was they hyped these meaningless
connections. Bush said, I think it was in his State of the Union, or
maybe it was the U.N. address — I can’t remember specifically — that
a senior member of al-Qaeda has received medical treatment in Baghdad.
First of all, the guy wasn’t in al-Qaeda. He was in a different terrorist
group. But that actually proves absolutely nothing. By that standard,
President Bush is in league with al-Qaeda, too, because there have been
members of al-Qaeda that have been found in the United States.

BuzzFlash: Not to mention the close Bush family relationship to Saudi
Arabia, to the bin Laden family and so forth.

Paul Waldman: They knew that they wouldn’t have to say it explicitly.
They could get 70 percent of the people to believe that Saddam was involved
in Sept. 11th if they just kept repeating the two ideas and linking them
as closely as they could, over and over and over and over again. That
inoculates them against the charge of lying, so when they’re accused
of making that connection, they can say: We never said it. This is something
that you might call Clintonian or Clintonesque.

BuzzFlash: Parsing.

Paul Waldman: Yes. Going back afterward and saying, well, if you look
back at exactly what I said, that’s not what I said. You’ve seen Republicans
in recent days make this argument, too. Now that we know that Saddam
had no weapons, you’ve heard Republicans say: He never said the threat
was imminent. Now how is it that he never said that? Well, the word “imminent”
does not seem to have passed his lips. But, of course, he was telling
us over and over that if we didn’t attack Iraq, Iraq was going to attack
us, and soon. But since the word “imminent” was never heard, you now
have Republicans saying: He didn’t say the threat was imminent. But of
course he did. That’s what he wanted us to think.

The most appropriate definition of lying is whether you say something
that intentionally leads the person who hears you to come to a false
conclusion. That’s the kind of lie that Bush is more apt to make, particularly
on Iraq, as he did, although there are certainly plenty of things that
he said that are literally false. You can rattle off a whole list of
those, whether it’s the uranium from Africa, the aluminum tubes, or,
the unmanned aerial vehicles that were supposed to be able to spread
chemical weapons over the eastern United States.

BuzzFlash: It’s an endless quagmire of lying that was created for the
intention of deception. And I guess you’re saying what the Republicans
are doing now is what they accuse Clinton of one minor thing having to
do with a sexual activity. But they’re distinguishing between technically
lying and the intent to deceive. They’re saying those are two different
things.

Paul Waldman: Right.

BuzzFlash: So maybe there was intent to deceive, although they’re not
really acknowledging that. But they’re kind of saying Bush didn’t technically
lie.

Paul Waldman: The intent to deceive is what’s important.

BuzzFlash: Well, to us, an intent to deceive is a lie, whether or not
the wording was phrased in a way that you could say that he absolutely
said that, and it was a lie. But you could put A and B together and it
becomes a lie. Clearly the entire pre-Iraq campaign — even Powell now
acknowledges he lied, and no one seems to care. Powell now says they
didn’t really have firm evidence. They seem to be inoculating themselves
by stipulating to the facts, but saying it wasn’t intentional lying.

Paul Waldman: Right. And the thing is, if you actually go back and look
at what they said, they’re now saying: Well, we just didn’t really know;
the evidence was sketchy, and so we were just laying it out there. But
the important point is that when they presented that evidence, much of
which was false, they didn’t tell us that it was vague and ambiguous.
Bush gave us in his State of the Union speech one year ago with specific
numbers on tons of biological weapons that they were supposed to have
had, and numbers of missiles, and in Powell’s speech to the U.N. It was
truly amazing, if you hear that speech to the U.N., all across the country,
people said, well, that’s it. Case closed. The case has been made, because
Colin Powell, who everyone respects so much, because he’s the moderate,
he’s the honest one – he laid it out and that’s it.

We talked about those aluminum tubes. This was something that was extremely
controversial within the Administration. Why? Because every expert who
knew about enriching uranium said these things are useless for enriching
uranium. They’re for conventional rockets, and the Iraqis happen to be
telling the truth on this one. And that was the conclusion of everyone
who knew what they were talking about.

Now they had some intelligence analysts who didn’t know much about enriching
uranium who said they could take the tubes, and maybe they could hollow
them out and do this long involved process where maybe they could use
them for enriching uranium. And that was what ended up carrying the day.
But when Powell got to the U.N., what did he say? He said that the consensus
of most experts who have looked at it said that these can be used for
enriching uranium. And Condoleezza Rice said they can only be used for
enriching uranium. And they were lying. That was not the consensus of
most of the analysts. They were almost useless for enriching uranium.

They presented all these things as though they were certainties — that
there was really no ambiguity about it. And now, when it turns out that
all these things were false, they’re saying: Well, we weren’t really
sure. We were just putting it out there saying maybe it was a possibility.
But that’s not the way they presented it to us at the time.

BuzzFlash: You write an exquisitely detailed book, very cogent, noting
that we basically have a fraud in the White House: a man who pretends
that he is something that he isn’t, a great pretender. What we have is
Bush branded as something he’s not. And it’s kind of like trying to sell
someone a product when they don’t really need it and persuading them
that it’s going to make their life better. But if someone tries to sell
you a peanut butter sandwich, and you taste it and realize it’s turkey,
you can send it back. But within the White House —

Paul Waldman: They’ll make you pay and convince you the turkey is what
you wanted all along.

BuzzFlash: And persuade you of that. Basically they’ve created a brand
identity for Bush, and they keep pushing that based on advertising principles
and so forth. At what point do you expose that you’re being told you’re
getting prime rib but really you’re getting horsemeat? They’re pretty
good at selling horsemeat as though it were sirloin steak.

Paul Waldman: They are. And they wouldn’t be able to do it without the
cooperation of the news media.

BuzzFlash: When you say “cooperation,” let me ask you something about
the dynamics of the media. We talk a lot on BuzzFlash about the corporate-owned
media, but let’s not get into that, because that’s a whole other issue.
Let’s talk a little bit about the news cycle at this point in time, and
what cable television has done and the nature of the 24-hour headline
news cycle.

The Bush administration, and Karl Rove in particular, seem to be brilliant
at surfing the headlines — whenever they’re in a crisis, they jump on
a new wave, and people forget about the last wave. How are they aided
by information technology? We’re surrounded by information. If you work
out at the gym, there’s six television sets. You’ve got CNN. You’ve got
the Internet. Newsprint seems as slow as molasses now. Do we have so
much information we can no longer determine what’s important?

Paul Waldman: I think most of us don’t use all that information. Most
people get their news from the top-level stuff — their hometown newspaper
and the national network news shows. Every argument is out there somewhere.
But Bush doesn’t care if there’s a stinging piece in The Nation that
really gets to the heart of and lays out the facts about something bad
that they’ve done. He doesn’t care, because he knows that so few people
are going to see it. So they can ride those waves.

I think that too many reporters see themselves implicitly as kind of
stenographers to power. And since the Bush White House is driving the
agenda, if the Bush White House says, We’re going to change the subject
now, and we’re not going to talk about this criticism — reporters just
go along because they’re at the White House, and the Bush people are
setting the agenda. For them to stand up and say: Hold on a second –
we need to talk about weapons of mass destruction; you were saying that
all along, but now, all of a sudden, you changed the subject and now
it’s about how Iraq was a humanitarian mission. For them to do that requires
a little bit of courage, and courage is in short supply in the Washington
press corps these days. They know that if they speak out too loudly,
they’re going to get blacklisted by the White House. They also know that
they are going to be deluged with accusations of liberal bias. That cry
is a strategy the Republicans employ to get reporters not to report honestly.

So they just keep going - well, we’ll just write about today’s photo
op. And it’s that kind of combination of intimidation and fear that leads
them to just go along. I think that they are very successful at defining
some things as out of bounds. For instance, I saw an article in the L.A.
Times the other day about a Wesley Clark event where somebody asked a
question about George Bush being a deserter. And Clark actually answered
it, and said something sort of vague and noncommittal about whether he
thought that Bush was a deserter. But the incredible thing was that the
story didn’t explain what the guy was talking about — about Bush not
showing up for a year’s worth of his National Guard duty.

Now I know that the reporter who was reporting on that story knows what
the story is. But the fact that he would not even explain it and instead
leave it absolutely impenetrable to almost any reader — that, to me,
is a frightening indication of how their reporters sort of see that there
are some kinds of criticism — well, we’re just not going to talk about
that. That’s out of bounds to discuss the fact that Bush didn’t show
up and fulfill his National Guard duty.

That’s the kind of thing that I find really frightening — the fact
that they’re beaten down on a day-to-day basis, and just go along with
the White House line. It’s tragic and it’s a betrayal of their obligations
to the citizenry. But it’s not too surprising.

BuzzFlash: This administration sells itself as an administration of
integrity, but it’s perhaps the most dishonest administration in recent
memory. It says it’s Godly, but in the Iraq war, almost every denomination,
including the President’s own, and the Catholic Church, opposed the Iraq
war. Yet the President said God directed him to do this. It’s kind of
Orwellian. When you look at its actions vs. his words, it’s almost invariably
the opposite of what it says.

Going back to your academic background in communications and journalism
— and James Moore talks about this in Bush’s Brain a bit — Karl Rove
understands that Bush’s role is to create a story, create a brand identity.
And everything Bush does is part of elaborating on that story. You talk
about it in your book. You said they had to make him into the cowboy.
And God knows the only time he ever cuts any brush on his Crawford ranch
is during a photo op. Democrats seem to focus on issues — with the primaries
now, we’re seeing them attacking each other on issues. The Bush Republican
Party focuses on telling a story about Bush — the man of integrity,
the man of God, the man of homespun, cowboy values who’d rather be back
on his ranch. And that story seems to go a long way with a large segment
of the American public.

Paul Waldman: Republicans are better at it than Democrats because they
have to be. If everybody just said: Okay, who’s looking out for me? –
in Bill O’Reilly’s words — and voted accordingly, well, Republicans
would only have 1 percent of the votes, because that’s who they’re looking
out for. So they have to be much more sophisticated at it, and they have
to work a lot harder at controlling the language. They have to work a
lot harder at telling those stories, right? This is something that you
see in election after election — the Republicans tend to talk about
values, and Democrats tend to talk about programs. Democrats often get
lost in the details. Now the details are all things that will reflect
well on them. But it’s much harder to get people to understand a whole
long list of programs than it is to get them to understand a story.

Republicans are very good at telling these stories. And they’ve constructed
a very pleasing and easy-to-understand story about George W. Bush –
that he was sort of the wayward son. Then he found God. He became a serious
person. He ran for President. He’s a man of upstanding moral values.
And then Sept. 11th happened, and he rose to the challenge, and he‘s
the savior of us all. And that’s why, to put it bluntly, I’m sure Karl
Rove gets down on his knees and thanks God for Sept. 11th every day because
any time they’re in trouble, what do they do? They announce a new threat,
and they say this is all about terrorism. And if you ask George W. Bush
what time he is, he’ll say: In the wake of Sept. 11th, it’s 3:15. So
it’s a powerful story and it activates people’s fear and anger, and all
those emotions that we all felt on Sept. 11th. And they’re going to keep
activating them as long as they can because they know that it works.

BuzzFlash: They have their nominating convention focused around September
11th.

Paul Waldman: Exactly. They have never hesitated for an instant to milk
every ounce of political gain they could out of it. I think you’re right
on the Democrats because there’s this feeling among Democrats, often
a sort of frustration. They say we’re the party that stands for the ordinary
people. And there are a lot more ordinary people than there are millionaires.
So how come we don’t win every election by 90 percent? It’s because Republicans
are better at telling these stories, and they’re better at simplifying
things because they have to be.

BuzzFlash: And they’re better at conveying that story for the media,
and taking advantage of the headline cycle. It seems the Democrats don’t
quite understand how to tell that story through the media, and how to
connect emotionally with people.

Paul Waldman: I know some who do it. But the thing is that the Republicans
are much better organized when it comes to these kinds of questions.

BuzzFlash: They’re much more disciplined.

Paul Waldman: If you surf around cable news, what you see is that they’re
all talking using the same language. They’re all making the same arguments.
And the Democrats are all over the map. They just haven’t gotten their
act together. I must say that George W. Bush has a way of concentrating
Democrats’ minds. And I think BuzzFlash is a part of this. The Democrats
are tired of getting the shit kicked out of them. And they are starting
to stand up and say enough is enough — we’re going to fight back. Part
of that is getting organized, and you do see that beginning to happen.
We’ll see over this election and the ensuing years and decades whether
the movement that we’re seeing the beginnings of right now really takes
hold. But that will remain to be seen.

BuzzFlash: The goal of brand identity is to sell a product that’s predictable.
So if you buy Kraft Cream Cheese in Philadelphia or you buy Kraft Cream
Cheese in Los Angeles, that Kraft Cream Cheese tastes exactly the same.
The Republicans, who are much more into advertising and business, tend
to see politics as the selling of a product. There’s a Bush brand, and
they’re consistent and they respect hierarchy. If this is the way we’re
supposed to sell Kraft Cream Cheese, this is the way we’re going to sell
Bush. We all stick to the consistent message points. Democrats and independents,
by their very nature, value diversity. And so it’s a little harder to
come out with a branded image because the very nature of diversity goes
against the very concept of what makes branding successful.

Paul Waldman: Yes, but you know what? If you actually get deep into
the Republicans, you find a lot of diversity there, too. And you find
a lot of competing interests. The Libertarians are different from the
conservative Christians, who are different from the corporatists. But
they understand and appreciate power in a way liberals don’t. I think
part of what it means to be a liberal is to have an outsider mindset.
The liberal heroes are people who were pushing from outside the system
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