Frank Rich is back: Bush of a Thousand Days

[Rose Siding]

LIKE the hand that suddenly pops out of the grave at the end of "Carrie," the past keeps coming back to haunt the Bush White House. Last week was no exception. No sooner did the Great Decider introduce the Fox News showman anointed to repackage the same old bad decisions than the spotlight shifted back to Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury room, where Karl Rove testified for a fifth time. Nightfall brought the release of an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll with its record-low numbers for a lame-duck president with a thousand days to go and no way out.

The demons that keep rising up from the past to grab Mr. Bush are the fictional W.M.D. he wielded to take us into Iraq. They stalk him as relentlessly as Banquo's ghost did Macbeth. From that original sin, all else flows. Mr. Rove wouldn't be in jeopardy if the White House hadn't hatched a clumsy plot to cover up its fictions. Mr. Bush's poll numbers wouldn't be in the toilet if American blood was not being spilled daily because of his fictions. By recruiting a practiced Fox News performer to better spin this history, the White House reveals that it has learned nothing. Made-for-TV propaganda propelled the Bush presidency into its quagmire in the first place. At this late date only the truth, the whole and nothing but, can set it free.

All too fittingly, Tony Snow's appointment was announced just before May Day, a red-letter day twice over in the history of the Iraq war. It was on May 1 three years ago that Mr. Bush did his victory jig on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. It was May 1 last year that The Sunday Times of London published the so-called Downing Street memo. These events bracket all that has gone wrong and will keep going wrong for this president until he comes clean.
...
"We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools," Mr. Bush said on that glorious day. Three years later we know, courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers, that our corrupt, Enron-like Iraq reconstruction effort has yielded at most 20 of those 142 promised hospitals. But we did build a palace for ourselves.

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.html?URI=http://select.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/opinion/30rich.html&OQ=_rQ3D1&OP=5040d11cQ2F.Q3BQ60E.Q3EQ7B-ssQ3E.Q2455D.5Q7D.m5.sltPtsP.m5-tQ3AQ3FQ25Q3FQ3EkV

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Blog with full article in here:

http://guerillawomentn.blogspot.com/2006/04/rich-bush-of-thousand-days.html

(don't you just hate the NYTimes select business model?)

[Karenina]

4. Their bidness model...

[Martin Eden]

2. The truth might set our country free ...

... but it wouldn't set Bush free.

By recruiting a practiced Fox News performer to better spin this history, the White House reveals that it has learned nothing. Made-for-TV propaganda propelled the Bush presidency into its quagmire in the first place. At this late date only the truth, the whole and nothing but, can set it free.

Certainly, the appointment of Tony Snow demonstrates that it's propaganda-as-usual with this White House, but do they have a choice? I think if the truth -- the whole truth -- were to come out, Bush would be impeached (and possibly sent to prison).

[Spoonerian]

3. Rich:

"A new defense or press secretary changes nothing. The only person who can try to save the administration from itself in Iraq is the president. He can start telling the truth in the narrow window of time he has left and initiate a candid national conversation about our inevitable exit strategy."

When I read this I instantly recalled the great old website www.gwbush.com. A guy (named Zack Exley apparently) had snatched the domain name and set the site up soon after bush announced he was running for President. The site was set up to look like bush had had a sudden epiphany of honesty and realized the hypocrisy of having himself been an un-punished cocaine criminal while tyring to attain the job of being commander in chief of the war against cocaine criminals.

So on the site www.gwbush.com, bush does the honourable thing and voluntarily checks himself into a prison cell where he runs his campaign for President promising to pardon 100s of thousands of drug law prisoners if elected.

I recall one great story on the site which was a play on Thoreau and Emerson, where Ralph Reed comes to visit bush in prison to find out what the hell's going on and of course bush ends up asking Reed, "Ralph, what are you doing out there?"

The site stirred up a big controversy over domain name snatching. It looked like the real thing. An unsuspecting visitor could actually be fooled for a few minutes and think that bush had been converted to honesty and justice.

Anyway the site seems to be now defunct. But, I think Rich's final paragraph that I cite above needs to have the same kind of parody disclaimers that I recall bush and his gang demanding be slapped on to www.gwbush.com.

[TexasLawyer]

5. Loved it!!! /nt

[fightingdem]

6. Yeah!

'Bout time. Frank Rich and Paul Krugman are the only reason I actually paid for Times Select. I couldn't hold out

I have to disagree with this though...

"...The demons that keep rising up from the past to grab Mr. Bush are the fictional W.M.D. he wielded to take us into Iraq. They stalk him as relentlessly as Banquo's ghost did Macbeth. From that original sin, all else flows."

It was the stolen election that was the "original sin" that undermines everything Bush does and is. Reagan had legitimaticy, Bush never any any to start with.