We are glad to welcome William Saletan to the ancient and hermetic order of the shrill, with the rank of C-sharp heresiarch:
Posted by DeLong at August 31, 2004 05:40 PM | TrackBackBeing There - What does 9/11 tell us about Bush? Nothing. By William Saletan: For the past month, a group of veterans funded by a Bush campaign contributor and advised by a Bush campaign lawyer has attacked the story of John Kerry's heroism in Vietnam. They have argued, contrary to all known contemporaneous records, that Kerry was too brutal in a counterattack that earned him the Silver Star, and that he survived only mines, not bullets, when he rescued a fellow serviceman from a river. President Bush, who joined the National Guard as a young man to avoid Vietnam, has been challenged to denounce the group's charges. He has refused.
Now the Republican National Convention is showcasing Bush's own heroic moment. As John McCain put it last night: "I knew my confidence was well placed when I watched him stand on the rubble of the World Trade Center with his arm around a hero of September 11 and, in our moment of mourning and anger, strengthen our unity and our resolve by promising to right this terrible wrong and to stand up and fight for the values we hold dear."
Pardon me for asking, but where exactly is the heroism in this story? Where, indeed, is the heroism in anything Bush has done before 9/11 or since?
Two days ago at an Ellis Island rally, Dick Cheney described Bush's 9/11 leadership this way: "In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on America, people in every part of the country, regardless of party, took great comfort and pride in the conduct and the character of our president. They saw a man calm in a crisis, comfortable with responsibility, and determined to do everything necessary to protect our people."
Calm and comfortable. I appreciate that. This was a major selling point of Bush's 2000 campaign: He would allow us to "look at the White House with pride." But isn't a president supposed to, um, do things? Isn't it a bit strange to praise a man's leadership not for doing something, but for maintaining a certain appearance?
Bush partisans point out that he did do things in the 9/11 aftermath. In his convention address last night, former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik recalled Bush's famous visit to New York, "inspiring a nation as he stood on hallowed ground, supporting the first responders."
OK, so Bush stood there. He "supported," in a Clintonesque sense, the people who were doing something. He touched the mayor. As Rudy Giuliani told the New York Times over the weekend, "When he got off the helicopter, he put his arm around the back of my neck and said, 'What can I do for you?' It was a personal thing: 'I know what you've been through, and what I can do to support you?' "
Amid all this touching, did Bush put himself in any peril? He certainly did. As Giuliani explained to the convention audience:
When President Bush came here on September 14, 2001, the Secret Service was not really happy about his remaining in the area so long. With buildings still unstable, with fires raging below ground of 2,000 degrees or more, there was good reason for their concern. Well, the president remained there. And talked to everyone. ... [A construction worker] grabbed the president of the United States in this massive bear hug, and he started squeezing him. And the Secret Service agent standing next to me, who wasn't happy about any of this, instead of running over and getting the president out of this grip, puts his finger in my face and he says to me, "If this guy hurts the president, Giuliani, you're finished."
This is Bush's heroism? Showing up three days later, "remaining in the area," and enduring a hug?
The only moment of physical bravery any of last night's speakers could find in Bush's life was his secret trip to Iraq. "As I think about his leadership," Kerik recalled, "I think of the courage it took for our commander in chief to land on an airstrip in the dark of night, a world away, to be with our troops on Thanksgiving."
Thanksgiving? You mean, six months after we captured the airport and Bush declared victory?
And isn't "the dark of night" normally a term we use to describe the preferred arrival and departure time of people who aren't exactly overflowing with courage?
Or is Kerik pointing out the difficulty of landing a plane in the dark? Is he unaware, perhaps, that Bush wasn't flying the plane? That once again, as in Vietnam, somebody else was doing the hard part and Bush was along for the ride? That Air Force One has more security systems than any other vehicle on Earth? That Bush went to Baghdad to "be with" the troops in the same way he went to New York to "be with" the firefighters? That waiting for a safe time and place to "be with" people who have braved unsafe places at unsafe times is the difference between heroism and a photo op?
Maybe Bush's courage is moral rather than physical. Maybe it lies in the conviction Giuliani extolled last night: "President Bush sees world terrorism for the evil that it is."
Calling terrorism evil? Answering a deed with a word? This is courage?
Not fair, says the Bush camp. Bush has answered terrorism with far more than words. "He worked effectively to secure the cooperation of Pakistan," McCain pointed out last night. "He encouraged other friends to recognize the peril that terrorism posed for them and won their help in apprehending many of those who would attack us again and in helping to freeze the assets they used to fund their bloody work."
Ah, diplomacy. Now, that's courage.
The ultimate testament to Bush's manhood, supposedly, is the two wars he launched. As McCain put it, "He ordered American forces to Afghanistan" and "made the difficult decision to liberate Iraq." But the salient word in each of those boasts is the verb. Bush gives orders and makes decisions. He doesn't take personal risks. He never has.
I don't mean to be unfair to Bush. Vietnam was a lousy war. He wanted a way out, and he found it. But isn't it odd to see Republicans belittle the physical risks Kerry took in battle while exalting Bush's armchair wars and post-9/11 photo ops? Isn't it embarrassing to see Bob Dole, the GOP's previous presidential nominee, praise Bush's heroism while suggesting that Kerry's three combat wounds weren't bad enough to justify sending him home from Vietnam?
Watching the attacks on Kerry and the glorification of Bush reminds me of something Dole said in his speech to the Republican convention eight years ago. It was "demeaning to the nation," Dole argued, to be governed by people "who never grew up, never did anything real, never sacrificed, never suffered and never learned."
You tell me which of this year's presidential candidates that statement best describes.
Thus far, the republican convention has confirmed the sagacity of all who doubted the prof's notion that there are adult republicans left....
Posted by: howard at August 31, 2004 05:44 PMAs the man says, do you believe your eyes, or me?
Posted by: Knut Wicksell at August 31, 2004 06:01 PMIf you want to vomit, look at the recent Yale Alumni Magazine, where they ascribe the large representation of Yalies in presidential political prominence in part to a "sweetness of character" the place instills. Sweetness of character? Howard Dean, Paul Tsongas, and John Kerry, yes, but George H.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, George W?
Posted by: Bob H at August 31, 2004 06:56 PMBrad,
After McCain's and Guiliani's performance at the Convention the list of Republican Grown-Ups is shrinking. Funny, the Indianapolis Star is reporting that Lugar is skipping the convention to work over in the Former Soviet Union on Nuclear Weapons disarmament. Perhaps, he is the last grown-up left. Quick somebody get him for the rest of the rest of the right-wing pod people.
Brad,
After McCain's and Guiliani's performance at the Convention the list of Republican Grown-Ups is shrinking. Funny, the Indianapolis Star is reporting that Lugar is skipping the convention to work over in the Former Soviet Union on Nuclear Weapons disarmament. Perhaps, he is the last grown-up left. Quick somebody get him for the rest of the rest of the right-wing pod people.
Brad,
After McCain's and Guiliani's performance at the Convention the list of Republican Grown-Ups is shrinking. Funny, the Indianapolis Star is reporting that Lugar is skipping the convention to work over in the Former Soviet Union on Nuclear Weapons disarmament. Perhaps, he is the last grown-up left. Quick somebody get him for the rest of the rest of the right-wing pod people.
This article by Saleton, it seems to be lacking a certain.... I dunno... shrewdness we've come to expect from writers at Slate.
Posted by: Kuas at August 31, 2004 09:15 PMCourage...must be talking points again- D. Brooks went on about this in the NYT today...and he points out why Schwarzenegger was one of the featured convention speakers- because of his- 'courage'.
Posted by: jen at August 31, 2004 10:00 PMBush was a cheerleader. Always on the sidelines. Where it is safe, wher you do not have to work or take a risk. What a wuss.
Posted by: masaccio at August 31, 2004 10:02 PMI can't go that far with the praise of Saletan; I object to the sneer about support in the Clintonesque sense. Clintonesque support for police and fire fighters meant increased funding for increased personnel based on raising taxes on the highest income brackets.
Posted by: Gene O'Grady at August 31, 2004 10:24 PMAnd the Secret Service agent standing next to me, who wasn't happy about any of this, instead of running over and getting the president out of this grip, puts his finger in my face and he says to me, "If this guy hurts the president, Giuliani, you're finished."
Look, we are talking about the guy who chokes on pretzels and passes out (or was it peanuts?). That he manages to put on his suit and come out for photo-ops is sacrifice enough.
More interesting question: Secret Service agent can "finish" the mayor of New York. I wonder how?
Posted by: a at August 31, 2004 10:45 PMThe Bush-Kerry parable *is* the Tale of America.
Before the Viet Nam war, only someone who came up through the ranks could expect to take the reins of executive power. That's why Kerry went to Viet Nam. Real men of great political moment before Viet Nam were men who had hoed the row, pushed the tools, roustabouts with muscles of iron and brains like Swiss watches, their hands calloused and scarred from field work, on their way up the ladder towards the executive suite.
All that changed with Viet Nam, the first war where the privileged did not have to fight, as long as they were safely in an MBA Ivy League. Which is why Bush went to Yale and Harvard. His family a blue-blood Connecticut banking one, they were used to just buying their way in.
After the war, you started to see it happening. Hard-working field managers found themselves answering to newly-minted division managers with pasty hands and a cerebral view of equipment and labor as disposable commodities, and that MBA.
Most MBA's were draft-dodgers, but you didn't talk about that back then, everything was wacko, if you really stop and remember the 1970's. With that brutal recession, you just knuckled down and answered "yes, sir", and prayed the bastards didn't find a way to eliminate your job.
The "ladder to success" of pre-Viet Nam became the MBA "glass ceiling" of the 1980's. It was as if overnight a ruling class of fops had taken over Napoleon's battle-hardened army. The only way you had into the executive was to play their game, their chitter-chatter, their code-talking, but sooner or later, they'd sniff you out.
Soon after Reagan's "piss down our backs" era, the corrupted S&L Fed bailout, Michael Milken, MLM's, golly, those MBA's were proliferating like cockroaches. In a growing avalanche, the 1990's, InterNet pump and dump, Black-Scholes derivatives gaming debacle, entire industries stripped down and sold off by leveraged buyout. Somewhere in the middle of that nightmare, America entered the twilight zone of 9/11.
So this whole Swift Boat thing should come as no surprise to those who began their careers after Viet Nam, who worked their way to where they are stopped today, by the privileged, epic-dreaming, evangelistic, MBA class of "titans".
Read Ayn Rand, 'The Fountainhead', and remember.
There's no going back now. Remember all we lost.
An old WWI veteran told me once, "Until you've experienced war, you can't appreciate freedom." I thought he was full of existential crap at the time, but then, here we are today.
Today it's all about managing crisis ... and managing to always have a crisis to manage.
Posted by: Harry Possue at August 31, 2004 11:31 PMMore interesting question: Secret Service agent can "finish" the mayor of New York. I wonder how?
Posted by a at August 31, 2004 10:45 PM
And - just to make it clear - if Giuliani was not a fucking craven that he is he would say something like:
- Look, you are a hired goon. More than a million people voted for me. Get the fuck out of my sight.
re: post by Harry Possue. One of the truest, and saddest posts i've read on the web.
Posted by: tom rogers at September 1, 2004 03:08 AMA recent television documentary reminds us that at the height of the Three Mile Island crisis, Carter went to the control room of the reactor.
Frankly, if you ever wanted a practical definition of 'brass balls', I think that would be it.
Posted by: serial catowner at September 1, 2004 05:53 AMThis picks up a thought that has been echoing again and again in my (evidently shrill and narrow) brain. The Republican Convention meme that every voice in the area is repeating is "look how much HE has done to defend us against terror." Yet specifics are stunningly scarce...one might suspect because, perhaps, there aren't very many. Oddly enough, the only specific most convention delegates in the media are willing to name is the attack on Iraq -- where an overwhelming preponderance of evidence suggests that the attack had little or nothing to do with the actual terror threat the US faced.
No mention of vastly expanding the federal airport security (well, not a very republican thing to do, and besides, anyone who travels much knows by now that airport screening contains a considerable element of farce and show, though that isn't to say it should be abandoned). Nuclear materials control? Well, Bush hasn't been there, though I'm glad to hear that at least Lugar is on that rather critical case. Port security? Ummm...no. Border security? Ummm, not really, though a lot of European academics can't get visas to come to conferences, so (from a Republican perspective) the republic may be safer.
In short, the Bush strategy is an old and tried one: keep saying something often enough, and people will believe it. After all, even Dole endorsed the Swifties on this basis, followed by George Sr. (because Dole had said so).
Meanwhile, avoid all substance altogether. (This isn't just avoiding complexity or nuance, since 'most all politicians do that, but something far more extreme: no reality at all, just reassuring generalities, endlessly repeated).
We'll see if it works. As the saying goes, in democracies, the public gets the leadership it deserves...and I profoundly hope that we deserve better, since there are many reasonably intelligent and concerned citizens who _might_ just see through this load of hype and baloney.
Posted by: PQuincy at September 1, 2004 07:07 AMSpeaking of "joining the ranks of the shrill": check out MarketWatch.com's column today!
'Ownership Society's' bogus balance sheet
Assets go to the rich 10%, liabilities left for other 90%
By Paul B. Farrell, CBS.MarketWatch.com
Is it possible that Saletan is playing the Anti-Kaus of the 2004 election season? IIRC, Kaus had a scam going on slate where he faked being undecided with his kausometer indicating how he was swayed by the political winds (or was that breaking winds). Anyway, it looks as though Saletan is the bizarro-Kaus or this is a marketing ploy of slate for their pen of undecided voters.
Posted by: self at September 2, 2004 10:21 PM