Wednesday, March 15, 2006
The Plan
It never ceases to amaze me how some people refuse to see the truth. CBS recently re-released their job approval rating poll for Bush, weighting it to get essentially equal amounts of democrats and republicans (366 and 358 respectively) and the results are much the same: Bush’s JAR is at 34%.
This is following several other polls released after CBS’s Feb. 28 poll showing Bush’s JAR in the 30’s that also had Bush in the 30’s.
Conservatives derided the CBS poll when it was released as “biased,” as I said they would, as they do with every poll that shows a result unfavorable to their cause. I wrote comments on some conservative websites defending the accuracy of the poll and deriding the statistical ignorance of the conservatives there. I was universally dismissed.
They were wrong, but they are not ones to apologize or admit mistakes. Eric Boehlert has a great article on the situation here.
You can’t argue with these people. You can’t debate with someone who is not swayed by reason or facts. You can’t convince someone who refuses to admit when they are clearly, unambiguously wrong.
People like that have no place in governing this country. They really shouldn’t even vote. But these people are the republican base.
Or perhaps they are its leadership. The stench of intellectual dishonesty is always strongest when I approach a newsstand with The Wall Street Journal. No publication is more vile or politically skewed. While I’m not a fan of Southern Partisan, it can’t hold a candle to The Wall Street Journal. The former is the standard of the South. The latter is the standard of the corporate world.
There is a difference. I may disagree with evangelicals on a lot of things, but conservative Christians still believe in charity. I may think a lot of southerners are bigots, but a lot of southerners are decent people, too, and a lot of them even elect democrats, at least to state assemblies and to the Congress of the United States. Let us not forget that every democratic president since JFK has been a southerner.
But in the corporate world there is no such diversity of opinion, nor is there a spirit of intellectual honesty. They know which side their bread is buttered on, and they have never shown a concern for the greater good. Or democracy. Or honest debate.
They are the leadership of the GOP, and their hands have been on the wheel for decades.
Their diseased, autocratic culture has poisoned every institution that they have influenced. Just look at conservative blogs. Powerline doesn’t even allow comments. Right Wing News cut off my ability to post comments after one post in which I (in a non-vulgar manner) disagreed with the prevailing “wisdom” of the post I was commenting on.
When you take Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity out of his carefully-controlled and screened bubble environment, their arguments don’t sound very good when they’re not debating caricatures of left-wing callers. When their opponents can’t be cut off and hung up on they don’t do very well.
It is this culture that produces George W. Bush as a two-time nominee to the presidency. It is this culture that shelters Tom DeLay. It is this culture that elects Bill “She Does Respond” Frist to the leadership position in the Senate. It is this culture that chooses Pat Roberts to be the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
So this is why my lip curls in disgust when I read about conservatives who have suddenly figured out that W is “incompetent.” This is why I sneer when conservatives then try and throw his help under the bus. This is why I shake my head when they, barely a year into Drinky’s second term, start eagerly looking forward to the ’08 presidential election, searching for the next criminal to pick up the standard after the current one has failed so completely.
They won’t acknowledge that they were wrong. They won’t acknowledge the all-too recent past. They won’t recognize that Drinky floated to the top of their organization for a reason. W is not an aberration, but when it’s convenient they will scapegoat their fundamental corruption on his back like he’s the same kind of “bad apple” that tortured people at Abu Ghraib.
They see no connection between arguing for torture (see The Weekly Standard, National Review, American Spectator, Dick Cheney, Pat Roberts, etc.) and incidents of torture all across the U.S. military prison system, from Gitmo to Bagram Air Force Base. They see no connection from the criminal assertion of imperial presidential powers in the Nixon presidency to Bush’s presidency. They see no correlation between the Reagan Adminstration’s brazen repudiation of law and congressional authority and George W. Bush’s own.
Actually, they just pretend not to see the correlation. They don’t “accidentally” keep committing the same crimes, over and over again. They do it very purposefully, because they won’t acknowledge that they were wrong, even when they’re caught red-handed. That’s been Bush’s M.O. for six years, for his entire life, and now they excoriate him for it, disingenuously, like that isn’t S.O.P. for their entire power structure. When it worked they were all for it. Now that his JAR is 34% it’s “stubbornness.”
These are people who have already made up their mind where they’re going with full knowledge that it has nothing to do with what’s best for America. When something goes wrong they’ll make a small adjustment by throwing a staffer under the bus, blaming the help, tacitly acknowledge a “small” mistake, and then they’ll continue right along the same path.
Because when an administration is revealed to be lawless the buck never stops at the president’s desk. Reagan sold arms to Tehran and funded terrorists in Nicaragua, in contravention of international law, in contravention of U.S. law, and when he was caught it was Oliver North and Elliott Abrams who took the fall while the president hired a few more new faces and just kept going.
When we invaded Iraq and found no WMDs it was the CIA’s fault. When we tortured people across the globe it was the work of a few bad apples. When Katrina hit the disaster that followed was the local government’s fault. When Iraq was looking like a disaster in 2003 and 2004 and 2005 it was just because the biased mainstream media was reporting all the bad news.
There are things that the president can’t run away from, though, and they are beginning to revolt on the Right. They have suddenly discovered that their leader is a dolt. But expect no apologies or improvements.
They will only acknowledge the faults that they are forced to, just like in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005. They will still deny what they can. They will still throw the help under the bus.
So now Bush is “incompetent,” but not evil, no sir. He’s “tired.” His advisors keep him in a “bubble.” It’s the advisor’s fault. He won’t get new advisors because he’s “stubborn.”
Such was the line on CNN last night, with Anderson Cooper supplying the party line. Thanks, Cooper. You can always count on the corporate media for incisive analysis.
The problem is that conservatives are never sorry, even when they say they’re sorry. Ken Mehlman apologized for the Southern Strategy, but I don’t see him kicking Trent Lott and Conrad Burns out of the party. Reagan fired Elliott Abrams and Oliver North and John Poindexter, but instead of being repudiated by their kind they have all found new jobs in the Bush Administration (Abrams, Poindexter) or on Fox News (North). These are convicted felons we’re talking about, people. The “faulty” intel that led to the Iraq War was the CIA’s fault, but George Tenet got a Presidential Medal of Freedom after he retired. No one above the rank of captain has ever been convicted of anything in the prisoner abuse scandals. Michael Brown was thrown to the dogs and promptly revealed that the willful ignorance regarding the Katrina Disaster went all the way the president’s desk.
Drinky has yet to “clean house” regarding the mishandled Iraq War or the wiretapping scandal because those decisions can’t really be thrown at the feet of underlings. But even if he did answer for those things what would the GOP have to offer in Drinky’s place? Are we looking for leadership from the party of Bill Frist? Tom DeLay? Dick Cheney?
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 9:43 AM 
