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Politics : The Donkey's Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (3660)	4/16/2002 9:39:04 PM
From: rich4eagle	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 15516

Condolezza Rice is a threat to Democracy of the highest order

To: Mephisto who wrote (3660)	4/18/2002 7:37:29 AM
From: Dorine Essey	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 15516

IN THE UNITED STATES THE NEW BUSH DOCTRINE: “SEE YOU NEXT WEEK” By Arianna Huffington Tribune Media Services Did you catch the following through-the-looking-glass exchange regarding President Bush’s appeal to the Israelis to withdraw immediately from the West Bank? “I don’t think that he meant exactly to say ‘Just get out,’” said Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer on ABC this Sunday. “But he said ‘without delay,’” replied an incredulous George Stephanopoulos. “Yes, but I don’t think that he meant that,” insisted Ben-Eliezer. This stunning refusal to take the president of the United States at his word prompted National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, on her own round of the Sunday talk shows, to admonish the world “not to parse the president’s words.” But that’s precisely what the world is doing — and with good reason. The president, after all, has been building quite a record of full-blooded rhetoric and anemic follow-through. One might even say it’s starting to become his MO. For instance, after urgently declaring last Thursday that “The world finds itself at a critical moment,” “the storms of violence cannot go on” and “enough is enough,” he announced that he would be sending Secretary of State Colin Powell to the region sometime “next week.” I could have sworn I heard him add “or whenever he can get around to it.” Why wasn’t a helicopter waiting on the South Lawn to immediately whisk Powell off to start his peace-keeping mission? Was Air Force One all booked up? Or did Powell have more important plans for the weekend? The lackadaisical pace of Powell’s departure was all the more unfortunate considering that what the president really needed was not Air Force One, but a time machine at the ready to send Powell to the Middle East of a year ago, when he might have stood a fighting chance of heading off the grisly horrors of the moment. Despite the efforts of his inner circle to paint the post-9/11 president as the rough-riding, straight-shooting, second coming of Teddy Roosevelt, the events of the last six months have actually revealed him to be the anti-Teddy — a politician who speaks very loudly while, more often than not, carrying a very small stick. Take the Bush Doctrine, that marvel of philosophic and moral precision that has now been amended, parsed, redacted and clarified into a murky mush. The thing now has more footnotes than an annotated version of “Remembrance of Things Past.” “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,” said Bush on Sept. 20. But then he kneecapped himself by giving Yasser Arafat a “get-off-our-terrorist-list-free” card. As Powell put it: “It would not serve our purpose right now to brand him individually as a terrorist.” So much for the black-and-white clarity of “with us or against us.” Bush’s “follow-through gap” is made even more noticeable by the melodramatic nature of his pronouncements. If you whip out something as powerful as “the axis of evil,” you’ve got to do more than just wag your finger at Iran, Iraq and North Korea. The same goes for his famed “Dead or Alive” vow: It raised certain expectations. His muscular language made it clear that winning the war on terror included the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. Now we’re being asked to settle for the trials of John Walker Lindh and Zacarias Moussaoui. We’ve gone from the original Broadway cast to the community theater production. And while the president has repeatedly promised “to make sure Americans are more secure and more safe than ever before,” are we really safer than we were on Sept. 10? Are our borders more secure? Are we more prepared to face biological warfare? Or dirty nukes? The president is also matching strong words with ineffectual action when it comes to the most elementary exercise of his power: failing to order the disparate agencies responsible for homeland security to end their petty turf wars and work together under one regulatory umbrella. Yet the president’s approval rating shows that he is not being held accountable for his actions; he’s simply being given credit for his words. When it comes to the war on terror, the world is divided into those who believe that the worst is behind us and those who think the worst is yet to come. The president is similarly torn: He talks like the worst is ahead but acts like it’s behind. ########## Arianna Huffington’s e-mail address is arianna@ariannaonline.com. © 2002 Arianna Huffington. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc. [back to top] copyright © 2001-2002 - Radio Progreso, Inc.