A few days ago The Washington Post's Dana Milbank wrote an article explaining
that for George W. Bush, "facts are malleable." Documenting "dubious, if not wrong"
statements on a variety of subjects, from Iraq's military capability to the federal
budget, the White House correspondent declared that Mr. Bush's "rhetoric has taken
some flights of fancy."
Also in the last few days, The Wall Street Journal reported that "senior officials
have referred repeatedly to intelligence . . . that remains largely unverified."
The C.I.A.'s former head of counterterrorism was blunter: "Basically, cooked information
is working its way into high-level pronouncements." USA Today reports that "pressure
has been building on the intelligence agencies to deliberately slant estimates
to fit a political agenda."
Reading all these euphemisms, I was reminded of Monty Python's parrot: he's
pushing up the daisies, his metabolic processes are history, he's joined the choir
invisible. That is, he's dead. And the Bush administration lies a lot.
Let me hasten to say that I don't blame reporters for not quite putting it
that way. Mr. Milbank is a brave man, and is paying the usual price for his courage:
he is now the target of a White House smear campaign.
That standard response may help you understand how Mr. Bush retains a public
image as a plain-spoken man, when in fact he is as slippery and evasive as any
politician in memory. Did you notice his recent declaration that allowing Saddam
Hussein to remain in power wouldn't mean backing down on "regime change," because
if the Iraqi despot meets U.N. conditions, "that itself will signal that the regime
has changed"?
The recent spate of articles about administration dishonesty mainly reflects
the campaign to sell war with Iraq. But the habit itself goes all the way back
to the 2000 campaign, and is manifest on a wide range of issues. High points would
include the plan for partial privatization of Social Security, with its 2-1=4
arithmetic; the claim that a tax cut that delivers 40 percent or more of its benefits
to the richest 1 percent was aimed at the middle class; the claim that there were
60 lines of stem cells available for research; the promise to include limits on
carbon dioxide in an environmental plan.
More generally, Mr. Bush ran as a moderate, a "uniter, not a divider." The
Economist endorsed him back in 2000 because it saw him as the candidate better
able to transcend partisanship; now the magazine describes him as the "partisan-in-chief."
It's tempting to view all of this merely as a question of character, but it's
more than that. There's method in this administration's mendacity.
For the Bush administration is an extremely elitist clique trying to maintain
a populist facade. Its domestic policies are designed to benefit a very small
number of people — basically those who earn at least $300,000 a year, and really
don't care about either the environment or their less fortunate compatriots. True,
this base is augmented by some powerful special-interest groups, notably the Christian
right and the gun lobby. But while this coalition can raise vast sums, and can
mobilize operatives to stage bourgeois riots when needed, the policies themselves
are inherently unpopular. Hence the need to reshape those malleable facts.
What remains puzzling is the long-term strategy. Despite Mr. Bush's control
of the bully pulpit, he has had little success in changing the public's fundamental
views. Before Sept. 11 the nation was growing increasingly dismayed over the administration's
hard right turn. Terrorism brought Mr. Bush immense personal popularity, as the
public rallied around the flag; but the helium has been steadily leaking out of
that balloon.
Right now the administration is playing the war card, inventing facts as necessary,
and trying to use the remnants of Mr. Bush's post-Sept. 11 popularity to gain
control of all three branches of government. But then what? There is, after all,
no indication that Mr. Bush ever intends to move to the center.
So the administration's inner circle must think that full control of the government
can be used to lock in a permanent political advantage, even though the more the
public learns about their policies, the less it likes them. The big question is
whether the press, which is beginning to find its voice, will lose it again in
the face of one-party government.
Copyright The New York Times Company
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