Slate
http://www.slate.com//id/2134448Barnes' Bush
The president with no warts at all.
By John Dickerson
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2006, at 7:08 PM ET
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http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=75089978 All great men are pestered by mental midgets. As Fred Barnes tells it in his new book on the Bush presidency, the tiniest of George W. Bush's tormentors ride in the press bus, wildly misunderstanding him and the country he represents. As an example of the press's abject cluelessness and Bush's vision, Barnes cites a West Point speech in June 2002 in which the president outlined his policy of taking "pre-emptive action when necessary" to thwart terrorists before they attacked. "Few reporters understood the message," writes Barnes, "or as a Bush aide said, 'broke the code.' "
It would have been extraordinary if the press had missed Bush's message about pre-emptive action in that speech. Fortunately, it didn't. The networks covered Bush's new strike-first strategy that night, and the Washington Post and New York Times buried it on the front page the next day. A search for the words "preemptive" and "Bush" on Nexis in the week following the speech brings up 250 citations. At the time, the White House blamed reporters for jumping to the conclusion that Bush was talking about Iraq, which it turns out he was.
The White House press corps has flaws: a herd mentality, a fixation on who's ahead politically, and difficulty engaging deeply with policy issues. I know, I was one of them. But Barnes has his boot on the scale, inflating the foolishness of the press to make Bush look better. Perhaps with so many books offering cartoon images of Bush as dumb and evil, the shelves need to be balanced out by one that errs in the opposite direction. But Rebel-in-Chief is such a love note that it fails to counteract the negative myths. The case Barnes makes is maddeningly superficial. He repeatedly tells us that Bush is in charge. "It is a world-changing policy crafted mostly by Bush himself, not his advisers," he writes, referring to Bush's foreign-policy approach. "Bush took a different tack. And he devised the strategy, not his aides." … "Within hours of the attacks, Bush was already fashioning a new policy. It was Bush policy, not the work of his advisers." … "Success in at least laying the foundation for representative government in Iraq had many authors … but one in particular stands out. That's Bush."
It's telling that in the fifth year of Bush's presidency, his defenders are still trying to persuade us that he's not disengaged or controlled by his advisers. But Barnes tries to redress the balance without providing meaningful support for his assertions ... And anyone who isn't already on Team Bush is going to think the lack of evidence here proves there isn't any.
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