George Bush’s Test of a Good War: Now and Forever

JIM KLOBUCHAR

The vigilante posses of the White House have been launched on a new offensive to cleanse the country’s newspapers and television screens of professional reporting.

One of the hallmarks of the Bush government is its versatility in waging wars. The latest blitz is targeted against the subversive tendencies of some reporters to tell their readers and listeners what’s actually happening in Iraq and the White House. This means the count of the wars Bush has invented or expanded is approaching double digits.

The common qualifier for most of Bush’s wars is that they should all have the potential for being endless

Although the president’s closest advisors privately counsel him that endless war is not necessarily the safest ticket for keeping other Republicans in office, George Bush can’t restrain himself from reminding America and the world that none of the wars he has organized is a short-term flash in the pan. This is because George Bush’s highest calling, by his own description, is being “a wartime president.” He has used the description incessantly. It is his niche in history, his revenge on Yale and the grammarians.

The latest Bush war to rise to the level of endlessness is the one in Iraq. There had been some lingering hope in the hearts of many of the president’s devoted supporters that the president and his handlers could wind up the carnage in Iraq sometime before his farewell address at the beginning of the year 2009. That would allow the president the better part of six years to clear up the loose ends of his “Mission Accomplished” announcement made in 2003. It’s possible to underestimate George Bush. He has a quality of being able to understand the large picture. It is this vision that enables Bush to now see the war stretching out three more years, one third of the way to the gold standard of the 30 Years War.

Iraq thus takes its place beside the continuing war in Afghanistan, the continuing war against truth in government, the continuing war against science, against harmless pine trees and against the virtually unanimous conviction of everybody else on earth that the planet is starting to warm and will probably not be saved by greenhouse emissions, fossil fuel, Halliburton’s board of directors and the oil cartels. The war on terror is officially declared to be endless. The British faced such a possibility a century ago. The British had built an empire that was under constant assault by murderous guerrillas in their colonies. The British didn’t call them terrorists. They called them Fuzzy-Wuzzies and the Fuzzy-Wuzzies used spears instead of car bombs. The British eventually solved the problem of endless war by deciding that life was eminently more tranquil and economically more sane without an empire.

And now the Bush government has begun a campaign to push or embarrass the news agencies into printing and broadcasting good news. That becomes a problem when the news isn’t good. We had already gone through an earlier good-news rapture from Afghanistan. Unluckily, this was somewhat slowed when the folks in charge of enforcing religious law in our newest democracy put out a death sentence on a citizen who converted to Christianity, an act nervously overruled by some unidentified hand of God operating out of the White House.

Behind the latest good-news offensive of the Bush administration is the revived demon of “the liberal media” of America. That is an old cartoon that is laughable if you surf today’s talk shows on the radio bands and read a few paragraphs of a recent magazine piece by Helen Thomas of the White House press corps.

Helen is the indisputable dragon lady of American journalism. Bush adherents who are offended by her raspy interrogation of the Bush White House flack, Scott McClellan, should examine the text of Helen’s performance during Bill Clinton’s regime or further back to Jimmy Carter and, for all I know, to Grover Cleveland.

They would be comforted. Helen Thomas harpoons them all, indiscriminately. But she should be read seriously when she evaluates the American press performance of the Bush years as she did in “The Nation” earlier this month:

Of all the unhappy trends I’ve witnessed—conservative swings on television networks, dwindling newspaper circulation, the jailing of reporters and “spin”—nothing is more troubling to me than the obsequious press during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. They lapped up everything the Pentagon and White House could dish out—no questions asked.

Reporters and editors like to think of themselves as watchdogs for the public good. But in recent years both individual reporters and their ever-growing corporate ownership have defaulted on that role. Ted Stannard, an academic and former UPI correspondent, put it this way: “When watchdogs, bird dogs and bull dogs morph into lap dogs, lazy dogs or yellow dogs, the nation is in trouble.”

She cited the aroused White House press corps of the Watergate years, after the truth started coming out, and called it “a lion’s den.” She compared that with the sycophantic performance of media generally in the wake of the Iraq invasion, their failure to stand up to the intimidation from the White House and its surrogates. So maybe you can’t blame Helen from quoting her exchange with McClellan last May.

Helen: The other day…you said that we, the United States, are in Afghanistan and Iraq by invitation. Would you like to correct that incredible distortion of history?

Scott: No. we are…that’s where we are currently.

Helen: In view of your credibility, which is already mired…how can you say that?

Scott: Helen, I think everyone in this room knows that you’re taking that comment out of context. There are two democratically elected governments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Helen: Were we invited into Iraq?

Scott: There are democratically elected governments now in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we are there at their invitation. They are sovereign governments, but we are there today.

Helen: You mean, if they asked us out, that we would have left?

McClellan, treading water desperately, changed the subject.

A few days ago, Jennifer Loven, an Associated Press reporter did a piece examining Bush’s self-serving habit of creating straw men, fictitious arguments placed in the mouths of unidentified people, and then swatting them down. Bush’s surrogates, in a naked attempt to muscle the reporter’s employer, screamed foul, saying the reporter was indulging in opinion journalism.

So if that is the sound of yet one more endless Bush war, send some calcium tablets to Helen Thomas. If she can’t get the truth out of the Bush crowd, maybe she can outlast it.