Joe Klein: When Loyalty Trumps Truth

[question everything]

(apologies if already posted; took me a while to find this online..)

Sunday, Oct. 08, 2006

When Loyalty Trumps Truth
The House of Bush is a feudal operation, except when it's an Oedipal one
By JOE KLEIN

(snip)

Why was the President so eager to dump Lott and protect Hastert? Because George W. Bush prizes loyalty over competence or accountability... Lott's problem was ancient history. He had been disloyal to Bush's father, siding with Newt Gingrich against the tax increases that President George H.W. Bush proposed in 1990 and dissing Bush the Elder by participating in a noisy, Gingrichite call for tax cuts during the 1992 campaign. "You think W. doesn't remember Trent knifing the old man during the Clinton campaign?" a Gingrichite reminded me as Lott went down. "It's Bush-family omerta," he added, referring to the Mafia code of honor.

Loyalty is considered a paramount, honor-among-thieves virtue by political practitioners in both parties... The House of Bush is a more elaborate feudal operation. For one thing, it is intergenerational. There is a medieval quality to eternal advisers like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Andrew Card, Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice. You can picture them in velvet robes, whispering in the Prince's ear, in a 15th century Venetian tableau. Their loyalty to the family is impeccable, which is what seems to matter most to the Prince�more than the national interest, in some cases.

We know, for example, that then National Security Adviser Rice was warned repeatedly in 2001 about an imminent al-Qaeda attack against the U.S., but, along with Cheney and Rumsfeld, she simply didn't believe that a cave dweller like Osama bin Laden could be that much of a threat. She was warned by the outgoing Clintonite Sandy Berger, in January 2001. She was warned by the White House counterterrorism scold Richard Clarke. And now, with Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial, and subsequent Washington Post reports, we've been reminded that cia Director George Tenet warned Rice on July 10, 2001, that "the system was blinking red," meaning that there could be "multiple, simultaneous" al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. interests in the coming weeks or months. Rice has been a force for diplomatic sanity as Secretary of State in the second Bush term, but if there ever was a candidate for a Bush official to take the fall for the intelligence failure of 9/11 —and, of course, none did —it was she.

And then there's the strange case of Donald Rumsfeld. Here was a flaming exception to the Bush family code of honor. Rumsfeld was an ancient rival of Bush the Elder who became Secretary of Defense, Woodward implies, because of a mild Oedipal spasm: the Younger wanted to prove the Elder was wrong about the guy. How to explain the current President's continuing, suicidal loyalty to the architect of the Iraq debacle, even after Laura Bush and then chief of staff Andrew Card lobbied Bush to replace Rumsfeld in 2004? It's a perfect Freudian boggle: if he dumps Rumsfeld, isn't George W. Bush tacitly admitting that his dad was right about a lot of other things too, like choosing not to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 1991? "The hilarious part is everyone in Washington now believes that the only way Bush will change course on Iraq is if Jimmy Baker's commission shows him the way out," a prominent Republican told me. Former Secretary of State Baker was Bush the Elder's longtime consigliere. This is a family psychodrama for the ages.

http://www.time.com/time/columnist/klein/article/0,9565,1543871,00.html

[pretzel4gore]

1. a cell awaits you, klein

blooody traitor....pretending these gang of thieves are true elected representatives, when klein knows better then anybody they're the same type of crap as he is.
trying to give a Shakespearian facade to the antics of a bunch of political criminals just exposes the criminality of joe klein and times warner...shootem all, let lucifer sortem out
(and thanks for the post question everything; gotta watch these scheming bastards closely)

[Demit]

2. Richard Clarke as a "counterterrorism scold"? God, I hate Joe Klein.

So, not that Clarke was right all along, but he was such a nag about it?

And I know it's a quote from someone else, but you can tell Joe Klein likes it, that there's a "hilarious" component to the situation in Iraq. Klein is so pumped about his allegory—and his access to the power structure—that he is oblivious to how obscene this sounds.

If this is Shakespearean, Joe Klein is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.