Here Peter, check out this editor's comment in this month's Vanity Fair.
Oh yes, you say, "Over a million died as victims of brutal communist dictatorships in Vietnam and Cambodia as a result of retreat minded democrats. How many would you like to see die as a result of the current surrender efforts by democrats?" We couldn't win or solve their problems in Viet Nam, imo, just like today the mess we've created in Iraq appears unwinnable. Thus as you ask me about Viet Nam, why don't Republicans or yourself tell all of us libs how many Americans you expect to see die in Iraq before we can call it a win?
Three Horsemen of
the Apocalypse
Arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence.
Not a pretty cocktail of
personality traits in the best of situations.
No sirree. Not a pretty
cocktail in an office-mate and
not a pretty cocktail in a head of
state. In fact, in a leader, it's a lethal cocktail.
Our president and his administration were
arrogant during the lead-up to the Iraq war
in that they listened only to those who would
tell them what they wanted to hear. They
were ignorant in the lack of scholarship and
due diligence they brought to the matter of how the invasion would
be received by those being invaded. And they were incompetent
at almost every level in the execution of the war and its aftermath.
What the political commentator Bill Maher described last year as
"fuck-up fatigue" in regard to this administration has moved to the
next stage. Around our kitchen table-and I suspect yours-the current
stage is outrage fatigue, a simmering frustration and anger over
what this administration has done in our good name.
The president-now with one ofthe lowest approval ratings of any
u.s. leader ever-has dangerously isolated us from the rest of the
world. We have the beginnings of a new Cold War with the Russians.
We are out of favor in South America, never mind the Arab world.
The French and the Germans don't have much time for our opinions-
although they will take our money. A majority of our Englishlanguage
confederates in Britain, Canada, and Australia think the invasion
was a horrible mistake. And Americans themselves are weary
of the constant fearmongering, the gut feelings of impending doom,
and the absence of any advance in the true war on terror-the one
against al-Qaeda along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
This administration almost always chooses politics over what is
best for the country. Balance the budget or run up vast deficits
with politicaJJy motivated tax cuts? Choose politics. Watch over the
nation's health or suppress medical information and research in the
interest of big business and the Republican political base? Choose
politics. Maintain the delicate equilibrium of our courts or stack
them with right-wing jurists? Choose politics. Protect our environment
or turn public lands and waterways over to Republican-base
polluting interests? Choose politics.
I'!
At all levels of the Bush White House, political hackery mingles
with incompetence, ignorance, and arrogance. It is a strain that
runs wide and runs deep. It begins at the top, of course, with a president
who is now perceived beyond our shores to be one of the most
dangerous men in the world. Indeed, many Americans have a similar
opinion of him. We have our secretive, power-mad vice president, who
can't decide whether he is part of the executive branch of government
or the legislative branch. And then there are the boobs they surround
themselves with. We've got Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who
has turned the Justice Department into a right-wing backwater salted
with White House cronies and assorted partisan nincompoops. For his
role in the politically motivated firing of eight U.S. attorneys, Gonzales
should go. For his role in covering up the firings, he should go up the
river. His boss ordered former White House employees called before
the congressional committees investigating the matter to keep mum.
The president did this by exercising his "executive privilege"-which
under this administration is just a fancy term for breaking the law.
J im Nicholson, the secretary of veterans affairs, had to step down
in the wake of revelations about the scandalous treatment of our
returning troops. Xavier William Proenza, whom Bush's commerce
secretary appointed to head the National Hurricane Center, in Mi-
156 I v ANIT Y FAI R Iwww.vanityfair.cam
ami, was ousted after just six months on the
job, having alienated both superiors and underlings-
a rare feat even in this administration.
Over at the General Services Administration,
the agency in charge of keeping all
other departments running smoothly, Lurita
Doan, the woman the president named to the
top job, was found to have violated the Hatch
Act, which prohibits civil servants like her
from participating in partisan politics while
on the job. Investigators found that she had
asked employees to attend a PowerPoint presentation
by a Karl Rove deputy in which they were told how they
could help Republican candidates in the 2008 campaign. Congressional
investigators wanted details of the meeting, but Doan said she
couldn't remember any. She had been distracted, she said, "reviewing"
e-mails on her BlackBerry.
Everything in Washington, it seems, is showing stress fractures. In
an echo of the flu-shot shortage a few years back, the State Department
doesn't have enough qualified employees to sort through
the huge passport-application backlog. The Food and Drug Administration
is so understaffed that it now checks less than 1 percent
of the food that comes into this country. Thirty-five years ago, the
department conducted 50,000 inspections. Last year it managed just
5,000. Across the country, there are vital shortages ofteachers, cops,
nurses, and, not surprisingly, military recruits. One indication of the
direness of the situation is how the armed forces have bent the rules
for a segment of the population that actually wants to wear a uniform:
gays. Last year just 612 gays and lesbians were forced out of
the armed services, compared with 742 the year before.
Accountability is spotty at best. Exhibit A: the virtual amnesty the
president shamefully gave the vice president's former attack dog
Scooter Libby for lying to a federal grand jury that was looking into
who leaked C.lA. operative Valerie Plame's name to journalists. A few
days later, the president announced that it was time to "move on"-
surely one of the most grating expressions of our age. He made this
statement the same week that Zheng Xiaoyu, the former top food and
drug regulator in China, was executed for taking bribes and permitting
the sale of tainted drugs. Now that is top-down accountability.
Competent members of the Bush circle have their own set of issues.
There was the illuminating testimony of Richard H. Carmona, the
former surgeon general, who left office in 2006 after his term expired.
He told a congressional panel that senior people in the Bush administration
forbade him to speak to the press about emergency contraception,
sex education, stem cells, and mental-health issues. Reports that
would hurt Republican Party piggy banks, such as Big Tobacco, were
watered down. Plus, he was ordered to mention President Bush three
times on every page of every speech he delivered.
Returning to the lethal cocktail of arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence,
which knows no national boundaries: in a documentary
shown on Britain's Channel 4 recently, a former senior adviser to
Tony Blair recounted the meeting Blair, our president's ally, had with
Jacques Chirac just before the invasion of Iraq. According to the adviser,
the French president, who fought in Algeria in the 1950s,worried
that neither Bush nor Blair fully understood the ugly nature of war,
and issued the following warnings: (1) If the U.S. and u.K. invaded
Iraq they would not be welcomed by the Iraqi people. (2)The invasion
could spark a civil war. (3)A country run by a Shiite majority should
not be confused with a democracy. As he left Chirac, Blair turned to
an aide, rolled his eyes, and said, "Poor old Jacques, he doesn't get it,
does he?" Arrogance and ignorance. The incompetence was there, too,
but it really surged later. -GRAYDON CARTER
SEPTEMBER 2007 |
