Slate’s John Dickerson on “Bush critics you can trust”

[BurtWorm]

Talk about a hack!


http://www.btcnews.com/btcnews/1203

— weldon berger @ 9:54 am
Permanent Link

Former Time Magazine White House correspondent John Dickerson, now a Slate columnist, offers up an early warning of an emerging narrative we’ll see more of as the mid-term elections near: Republican critics of Bush, who are increasing in number, are courageous rebels, while Democratic and liberal critics are “Bush haters. ”

Dickerson’s case studies include former Bush treasury secretary Paul O’Neill and former Reagan official Bruce Bartlett. Of them, he says “These folks have to have a certain amount of courage—heresy is always harder than joining—and they usually try to be intellectually honest, since the Bush presidency has forced them to grapple with their own belief systems … <and here’s> what can they teach the public—and perhaps the administration—about the president that the lefty hacks can’t.” He goes on to list a few items: “Bush is no conservative … He’s a bad CEO … He was hellbent on war.”

Now, one or two or three of those items may sound familiar to readers of this and other liberal blogs, or any daily newspaper, weekly magazine, monthly or quarterly journal, or pretty much anything other than the children’s menu at a fast food restaurant. That’s because Bush is and has been manifestly radical, incompetent and messianically intent on invading Iraq, and despite the best efforts of reporters and commentators to conform to the Bush as hyper-competent, judicious manly man, it shows. He spends like a drunken sailor, he places cronies in critical management slots, and a mountain of circumstantial and documentary evidence, from O’Neill’s comments to a slew of British memos to Andy Card’s comment about the administration’s marketing effort on the invasion to the embrace of absurdities such as the Niger uranium and the aluminum tubes to, most recently, former CIA official Paul Pillar’s broadside against the administration in Foreign Affairs magazine, that Bush was determined to invade Iraq no matter what.

In Dickerson’s world, though, the attention liberals have paid to those issues has been the product of Bush hating and not observation or analysis. We’re right, you see, but it’s accidental. This is shades of Slate editor Jacob Weisberg’s classic construction in which “liberal” hawks who arrived at their support of the Iraq invasion through clear-eyed delusional thinking were much shrewder than liberal opponents of the war who, according to Weisberg, irrationally arrived at the correct conclusion that Bush was about to pilot the ship of state onto some very rocky shoals.

...

[bluedeminredstate]

1. Here we go again...

I'm so tired and pissed off at having to see the Dems get slammed no matter what position they take, what ideas they offer, what pushing back they try to do. No matter what, it's wrong according to the "liberal" press. What really chaps my fanny is the idea that the Dems should come up with the miracle to get us out of Iraq when it's the Chimp's pile of manure in the first place! We're watching a press too afraid to call Bush out so they kick the Dems b/c some kicking must be done and by God, Bush can't be called the fuck up he is.
It's so infuriating.
:nuke: