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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (408093)	5/21/2003 12:21:12 PM
From: Skywatcher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

A White House Fluent in Language of Fanatics By Arianna Huffington, Arianna Huffington writes a syndicated column. E-mail: arianna@ariannaonline.com. Maybe Hollywood's Wachowski brothers are auditioning for the role of Ari Fleischer's replacement. Maybe Karl Rove has moved his office into the "Matrix." Maybe it's all just a bad dream: "The White House Reloaded." I've been racking my brain, trying to reconcile the ever-widening chasm between what the White House claims to be true and what is actually true. After all, we know the president and his men are not stupid. And despite the tidal wave of misinformation pouring out of their mouths, I don't believe they are consciously lying. The best explanation I can come up with for the growing gap between their rhetoric and reality is that we are being governed by a gang of out-and-out fanatics. The defining trait of the fanatic — be it a Marxist, a fascist, or, gulp, a Wolfowitz — is the utter refusal to allow anything as piddling as evidence to get in the way of an unshakable belief. Bush and his fellow fanatics are the political equivalent of those yogis who can go without air for hours. Such is their mental control, these political masters can go without truth for, well, years. Because, in their minds, they're always right. Oopso facto. That pretty much sums up the White House MO on everything, from the status of Al Qaeda to the magical job-producing virtues of the latest tax cuts. Who else but a fanatic would have made the outrageous claim, as the president did Friday, just four days after the deadly reemergence of Al Qaeda in Riyadh, that "the United States people are more secure, the world is going to be more peaceful"? More peaceful than what? The West Bank? In the weeks before the attacks in Riyadh, the president had repeatedly maintained that "we are winning the war on terror" and that Al Qaeda was "on the run — slowly, but surely, being decimated." So he clearly wasn't going to let a little fact like 34 dead bodies — the result of three closely coordinated suicide bomb attacks — change his mind. And just four hours after Bush strapped on his trusty blinders and delivered his rosy vision of a more peaceful world, the tranquillity was shattered by five simultaneous suicide blasts in Casablanca. The president's evidence-be-damned fanaticism is equally apparent when it comes to the state of postwar Iraq. "Life is returning to normal," he proclaimed just two weeks after the fall of Baghdad. "Things have settled down inside the country." Really? Just who is preparing his morning briefing papers? Pollyandy Card? Condoleezza Sunshine? Did he bother consulting any Iraqis about "normal" life there? Probably not. One of the keys to being a flourishing fanatic is to always surround yourself with those of a shared — and equally deluded — mind-set. And according to that mind-set, the definition of "settling down" can be expanded to include looting, sporadic water and electricity service, hospitals in disastrous condition, outbreaks of cholera and dysentery, streets filled with uncollected garbage and raw sewage, ransacked nuclear facilities, missing radioactive material, growing anti-American sentiment and disparate ethnic and religious groups arming themselves. And don't bother trying to make the case that everything isn't hunky-dory in Baghdad to rabid acolytes such as Jay Garner. Like the president, the demoted viceroy doesn't care what the facts indicate — to him even a looted and punctured glass can be half full. "We ought to be beating our chests every day," he said, dismissing the notion that any of us should feel bad about the problems besetting Iraq. "We ought to look in a mirror and get proud. We ought to stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say, 'Damn, we're Americans.' " And if you think the president is saving his fanaticism only for the international sector, think again. His dogged devotion to selling his latest round of tax cuts for the wealthy as a "jobs creation plan" — despite an avalanche of evidence that it will do nothing of the sort — proves that he can be just as fervent on the home front. "Jobs are on the line," said Bush after the Senate passed its version of the tax cut. "I call on Congress to resolve their differences quickly so I can sign a bill that will help create jobs, boost take-home pay and spur economic growth." And for those folks with "-illionaire" as part of their economic description, it probably will. It obviously makes no difference to the president that 10 Nobel Prize-winning economists have condemned his tax cuts as "not the answer" to high unemployment, or that a new Congressional Budget Office study found that the "jobs and growth package" would actually have very little effect on long-term growth. The fact is there are now 2.1 million more unemployed Americans than when Bush took office, the vast majority of them having lost their jobs after the president's initial $1.3-trillion tax cut was passed in 2001. A popular definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Well, that seems to be the White House theory on the power of tax cuts to produce new jobs: It didn't work before; let's try it again. Welcome to the D.C. Matrix. CC