We interrupt our war coverage to bring you our favorite sport - bashing Bush

1. President on Another Planet -- by Eugene Robinson

For a moment there, I was almost encouraged. George W. Bush, the most resolutely incurious and inflexible of presidents, was reported last week to have been surprised at seeing Iraqi citizens -- who ought to be grateful beneficiaries of the American occupation, I mean "liberation" -- demonstrating in support of Hezbollah and against Israel.

Surprise would be a start, since it would mean the Decider was admitting novel facts to his settled base of knowledge and reacting to them. Alas, it seems the door to the presidential mind is still locked tight. "I don't remember being surprised," he said at his news conference yesterday. "I'm not sure what they mean by that."

I'm guessing "they" might mean that when you try to impose your simplistic, black-and-white template on a kaleidoscopic world, and you end up setting the Middle East on fire, either you're surprised or you're not paying attention. But that's just me.

As for George Bush, what on earth is on his mind?

Even conservatives have begun openly assessing the president's intellect, especially its impermeability to new information. Cable television pundit Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, devoted a segment of his MSNBC show to "George Bush's mental weakness," with a legend at the bottom of the screen that impertinently asked: "IS BUSH AN 'IDIOT'?"

It's tempting to go there, but I'm not sure we'd get very far. While we have the president on the couch, I'm more interested in trying to understand his emotional response -- or lack of response -- to the chaos he has spawned.

According to the Iraqi government, 3,438 civilians were killed in July, making it the bloodiest month since the invasion. The president was asked yesterday whether the failure of the U.S.-backed "unity" government to stem the orgy of sectarian carnage disappoints him, and he said that no, it didn't. How, I wonder, is that possible? Does he believe it would be a sign of weakness to admit that the flowering of democracy in Iraq isn't going exactly as planned? Does he believe saying everything's just fine will make it so? Is he in denial? Or do 3,438 deaths really just roll off his back after he's had his workout and a nice bike ride?

"I hear a lot of talk about civil war" in Iraq, he allowed -- much of it apparently from his own generals, who have been increasingly bold in using the once-forbidden phrase -- but all that talk doesn't seem to penetrate very far. To the president, is all the bad news from Iraq just "talk" without objective reality?

Here's another line from the president's news conference: "What's very interesting about the violence in Lebanon and the violence in Iraq and the violence in Gaza is this: These are all groups of terrorists who are trying to stop the advance of democracy."

Now, whatever you think about George Bush's intellect, he knows full well that the Hamas government in Gaza was democratically elected. He also knows full well that Hezbollah participates in the democratically elected government of Lebanon, or what's left of Lebanon. And so he has to know full well that U.S.-backed Israeli assaults on Gaza and Lebanon -- even if you believe they were justified -- had the impact of crippling, if not crushing, two nascent democracies of the kind the Bush administration wants to cultivate throughout the Middle East.

He also knows that the Iraqi government has real sovereignty over only the Green Zone in Baghdad -- a fortress made secure by the presence of U.S. troops -- and assorted other enclaves where American and British troops enforce the peace. He has heard the leader of that nominal government praise Hezbollah and denounce Israel.

So when the president lauds democracy as the magic elixir that will cure the scourge of terrorism, is he really putting faith in his favorite mantra rather than his lying eyes? Is his view of the world so unchangeable that he dismisses actual events the way he dismisses mere "talk''?

Or is he just trying to hold on until January 2009, when all this will become somebody else's problem?

In his news conference, the Decider did make a couple of nods to objective reality. He admitted in plain language that Iraq had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks and possessed no weapons of mass destruction -- in other words, that his rationale for this elective, preemptive war had no substance. And he acknowledged a certain occasional exasperation.

"Frustrated? Sometimes I'm frustrated. Rarely surprised," the president said. "Sometimes I'm happy. This is -- but war is not a time of joy. These aren't joyous times."

No, they're not.


2. What a Moronic Presidential Press Conference! It's clear Bush doesn't understand Iraq, or Lebanon, or Gaza, or ...
By Fred Kaplan

Among the many flabbergasting answers that President Bush gave at his press conference on Monday, this one -- about Democrats who propose pulling out of Iraq -- triggered the steepest jaw drop: "I would never question the patriotism of somebody who disagrees with me. This has nothing to do with patriotism. It has everything to do with understanding the world in which we live."

George W. Bush criticizing someone for not understanding the world is like -- well, it's like George W. Bush criticizing someone for not understanding the world. It's sui generis: No parallel quite captures the absurdity so succinctly.

This, after all, is the president who invaded Iraq without the slightest understanding of the country's ethnic composition or of the volcanic tensions that toppling its dictator might unleash. Complexity has no place in his schemes. Choices are never cloudy. The world is divided into the forces of terror and the forces of freedom: The one's defeat means the other's victory.

Defeating terror by promoting freedom -- it's "the fundamental challenge of the 21 st century," he has said several times, especially when it comes to the Middle East. But here, from the transcript of the press conference, is how he sees the region's recent events:

What's very interesting about the violence in Lebanon and the violence in Iraq and the violence in Gaza is this: These are all groups of terrorists who are trying to stop the advance of democracy.

What is he talking about? Hamas, which has been responsible for much of the violence in Gaza, won the Palestinian territory's parliamentary elections. Hezbollah, which started its recent war with Israel, holds a substantial minority of seats in Lebanon's parliament and would probably win many more seats if a new election were held tomorrow. Many of the militants waging sectarian battle in Iraq have representation in Baghdad's popularly elected parliament.

The key reality that Bush fails to grasp is that terrorism and democracy are not opposites. They can, and sometimes do, coexist. One is not a cure for the other.

Here, as a further example of this failing, is his summation of Iraq:

I hear a lot about "civil war" -- [But] the Iraqis want a unified country. -- Twelve million Iraqis voted. -- It's an indication about the desire for people to live in a free society.

What he misses is that those 12 million Iraqis had sharply divided views of what a free society meant. Shiites voted for a unified country led by Shiites, Sunnis voted for a unified country led by Sunnis, and Kurds voted for their own separate country. Almost nobody voted for a free society in any Western sense of the term. (The secular parties did very poorly.)

The total number of voters, in such a context, means nothing. Look at American history. In the 1860 election, held right before our own Civil War, 81.2 percent of eligible citizens voted -- the second-largest turnout ever.

Another comment from the president: "It's in our interests that we help reformers across the Middle East achieve their objectives." But who are these reformers? What are their objectives? And how can we most effectively help them?

This is where Bush's performance proved most discouraging. He said, as he's said before, "Resentment and the lack of hope create the breeding grounds for terrorists." This may or may not be true. (Many terrorist leaders are well-off, and, according to some studies, their resentment is often aimed at foreign occupiers.) In any case, what is Bush doing to reduce their resentment?

He said he wants to help Lebanon's democratic government survive, but what is he doing about that? Bush called the press conference to announce a $230 million aid package. That's a step above the pathetic $50 million that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had offered the week before, but it's still way below the $1 billion or more than Iran is shoveling to Hezbollah, which is using the money to rebuild Lebanon's bombed-out neighborhoods -- and to take credit for the assistance.

As for Iraq, it's no news that Bush has no strategy. What did come as news -- and, really, a bit of a shocker -- is that he doesn't seem to know what "strategy" means.

Asked if it might be time for a new strategy in Iraq, given the unceasing rise in casualties and chaos, Bush replied, "The strategy is to help the Iraqi people achieve their objectives and dreams, which is a democratic society. That's the strategy. -- Either you say, 'It's important we stay there and get it done,' or we leave. We're not leaving, so long as I'm the president."

The reporter followed up, "Sir, that's not really the question. The strategy -- "

Bush interrupted, "Sounded like the question to me."

First, it's not clear that the Iraqi people want a "democratic society" in the Western sense. Second, and more to the point, "helping Iraqis achieve a democratic society" may be a strategic objective , but it's not a strategy -- any more than "ending poverty" or "going to the moon" is a strategy.

Strategy involves how to achieve one's objectives -- or, as the great British strategist B.H. Liddell Hart put it, "the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy." These are the issues that Bush refuses to address publicly -- what means and resources are to be applied, in what way, at what risk, and to what end, in pursuing his policy. Instead, he reduces everything to two options: "Cut and run" or, "Stay the course." It's as if there's nothing in between, no alternative way of applying military means. Could it be that he doesn't grasp the distinction between an "objective" and a "strategy," and so doesn't see that there might be alternatives? Might our situation be that grim?


3. Bush's Arab Dream Palace
Is it Narcissism? -- by Prof Juan Cole (from juancole.com)

Bush said again on Monday that he would keep US troops in Iraq until 2009 and argued that for the US to withdraw would send a bad message to reformers in the region. He said he is concerned about that talk of civil war in Iraq and seemed to admit that he isn't very happy most of the time about the way things are going, but added that he doesn't expect to be joyous in wartime. He admitted again that Saddam Hussein did not "order" 9/11, but went on to again link Baathist Iraq to the threat of terrorism against the US, an unproven charge.

I am not a psychiatrist and don't play one on t.v., so treat what follows as political satire please, and nothing more.

But what strikes me about Bush's Monday appearance is how consistent it is with what I understand of the symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. Let's look at it this way:

'1. An exaggerated sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).'

Bush is not content to be the most powerful man in the world. He thinks he is on a mission from God, and has decided that he is going to "reform" the Middle East, and turn Middle Easterners into something else. He is the Great Transformer of these other peoples' lives. The reason he has to stay in Iraq until the end of his presidency (it is all about him) is that he cannot admit that he did not succeed in being the great Transformer of the Middle East, that in fact he screwed up the Middle East royally. Because such an admission of any slightest mistake, much less a major series of failures, would fatally threaten his sense of grandiosity. Thus, he can't pull troops out of Iraq not because of practical military considerations, but because it would send the wrong signal to regional "reformers," i.e. Bush's mini-me's, the people fulfilling his sense of grandiosity.

Nobody else is in the picture here, just Bush. He doesn't ask any sacrifice from the US public for the war, as Bill Maher and others have noted. The heroics are his alone. The rest of us should go shopping (so as not to interfere with his self-image as Atlas of the Middle East.)

' 2. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love. '

Bush suffers from T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") syndrome. Lawrence, despite polite denials, clearly thought that he led the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during World War I and wrote:

' All men dream: but not equally, Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did. I meant to make a new nation, to restore a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundations on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts. So high an aim called out the inherent nobility of their minds, and made them play a generous part in events: but when we won, it was charged against me that the British petrol royalties in Mesopotamia were become dubious, and French Colonial policy ruined in the Levant. '

Bush, like Lawrence before him, imagines that he is inspiring a people to accomplish things they couldn't do without him. (That is why he can't admit that the Lebanese have been having elections for decades, and has to pretend it all started with him.) And all he gets for his inspired Transformation of others' lives is carping about the expected oil contracts in Iraq not being there. There is even prickliness from the French. Lawrence might have sympathized.

3. Believes he is "special" and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)

4. Requires excessive admiration

5. Has a sense of entitlement.

He is the Decider. He doesn't need Security Council resolutions to start wars. He doesn't need warrants for wire taps. He is entitled. He is the War President (never mind that he chose to go to war in Iraq and so made himself into the war president, and that the war presidency would be over with by now if he were any good at it.)

' 6. Selfishly takes advantage of others to achieve his own ends.

7. Lacks empathy'

Bush only "worries" that eventually there may be a civil war in Iraq. He doesn't admit that he made a whole country of 25 million people into guinea pigs, and that as a result 3,000 are dying a month in civil war violence of the most brutal kind. '

8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him

9. Shows arrogant, haughty, patronizing, or contemptuous behaviors or attitudes. '

Saying that he can understand that having over 2600 of our troops come home in body bags and over 8,000 come home seriously wounded, with limbs gone or brain or spinal damage, is a cause of "anxiety" to the American "psyche" is patronizing. He knows better about why this has to be. The inferior people are a little upset, but that is because they don't understand that he is the Transformer. What they're upset about is just the side effect of the Transformation. They don't believe. They can't see the Transformation before their eyes. They are inferior.


4. Oval Office Books – by THOMAS VINCIGUERRA

Two books on Lincoln and one on polio. Oh, and a Camus novel. It was “The Stranger” that caught everyone’s attention when the White House told of the books that President Bush was taking to Texas on his ranch vacation. Last year, he toted books about a czar, a plague and salt — no French philosophers.

This business of the most powerful man in the world announcing his current reading list, presumably to demonstrate a restless intellect (although there’s no pop quiz to see whether he’s done the reading), is comparatively new. When Coolidge and Eisenhower kicked back on fishing and golf holidays, they didn’t pack many books.

“I don’t know if most presidents spent their time reading,” said Henry Graff, professor emeritus of history at Columbia . “Grover Cleveland didn’t read even after he became a trustee of Princeton . A curator of the F.D.R. Library told me that Roosevelt collected books, but he didn’t read them.”

By contrast, John Quincy Adams rose at 4 a.m. to study Greek. Thomas Jefferson ’s collection of 6,500 books formed the basis of the Library of Congress .Theodore Roosevelt took 60 volumes of Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and others on safari.

Little of this mattered to the public until 1961, when Hugh Sidey published an article in Life about John F. Kennedy ’s 10 favorite books. The list was top-heavy with titles like “The Young Melbourne,” by David Cecil, and “John C. Calhoun,” by Margaret L. Coit. What captured the popular imagination was Kennedy’s selection of the Bond thriller “From Russia With Love.” Sales of Ian Fleming’s novels took off. (Kennedy didn’t need the excuse of summering at Hyannis Port to curl up with books. He would snatch them from the office of his press secretary, Pierre Salinger. “Nothing was really safe,” recalled a Salinger aide.)

Reading became a measure of presidential character during the 1988 campaign, when it was reported that Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, had read “Swedish Land Use Planning” on vacation. The item helped cement his reputation as a dull bureaucrat — unfairly so, he said.

“This story is getting more ridiculous by the minute,” Mr. Dukakis wrote in an e-mail message. “I was not reading ‘Swedish Land Use Planning’ during the presidential campaign. In fact, I hadn’t read the book since my legislative days during the 1960’s when I was a young state legislator.” In a later message, he added, “I love history and biography, and that is what I was reading during the presidential campaign in 1988.”

Would-be presidents took care after that to demonstrate that their literary tastes were serious but accessible. In 2000, Al Gore told Oprah Winfrey that his favorite novel was Stendhal’s “Red and the Black.” In 2003, The Washington Monthly reported that Joseph I. Lieberman ’s favorite book was “the ultimate safe choice,” the Bible.

“If they’re doing a good job, presidents can read whatever they want,” said Paul F. Boller Jr., whose latest book, “Presidential Diversions,” will be published next year. “Nixon read a lot of political philosophy,” Mr. Boller added. “But I don’t know if he pondered it.”


5. ‘Islamo-Creeps' Would Be More Accurate
President Bush refers to Muslim terrorists as 'fascists.' Does he know what he's talking about?
By Geoffrey Nunberg

IT WASN'T THE first time President Bush had described the United States as at war with "Islamic fascists." But coming in his remarks about the arrests of two dozen terror suspects in Britain last week, the phrase signaled that the administration was shopping for new language to defend its policies at a time when the evocations of the "war on terror" don't seem to stem rising doubts about the wisdom of "staying the course" in Iraq.

Hence the appeal of using "Islamo-fascism," as people often call it, which links the current conflict to images from the last "just war": Nazi tanks rolling into Poland and France, spineless collaborators sapping the national will, Winston Churchill glaring defiantly over his cigar, the black ink spreading across the maps of Europe and Asia in Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" newsreels.

Squint in just the right way and the parallels are easy to see. In a speech at the National Press Club last month, GOP Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania raised the specter of the Islamists' dreams of "a new, global caliphate where Islamic fascism will rule mankind," and he reminded the audience that "we had no problem understanding that Nazism and fascism were evil racist empires. We must now bring the same clarity to the war against Islamic fascism."

In that picture of things, last week's arrests in Britain are connected to the Iraq occupation as immediately as the London Blitz was to Stalingrad during the last great anti-fascist struggle. Those were the connections Vice President Dick Cheney was presuming when he said that Ned Lamont's victory over Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic primary would embolden the "Al Qaeda types" who are trying to "break the will of the American people."

Actually, the phrase "Islamo-fascism" has been around for more than 15 years. But it was only after 9/11 that neocons and other hard-liners seized on it to justify a broad-based military campaign against Islamic governments and groups hostile to the West.

Actually, the term "Islamo-fascism," if taken literally, doesn't make sense. The "fascist" part might fit Saddam Hussein's Iraq, with its militaristic nationalism, its secret police and its silly peaked officers' hats. But there was nothing "Islamo" about the regime; Iraq's Baathists tried to make the state the real object of the people's devotion.

That's why it's odd to describe repressive theocracies like the Taliban as fascist — just as it would be for Savonarola's Florence, John Calvin's Geneva or the Spain of the Inquisition, all of which reduced the state to an instrument for enforcing God's will. The Islamic world doesn't seem to offer very fertile soil for fascist cults of the state. In a 2005 Pew Global Attitudes survey, majorities in most Muslim nations said their loyalty to Islam came before their loyalty as citizens.

But in the mouths of the neocons, "fascist" is just an evocative label for people who are fanatical, intolerant and generally creepy. In fact, that was pretty much what the word stood for among the 1960s radicals, who used it as a one-size-fits-all epithet for the Nixon administration, American capitalism, the police, reserved concert seating and all other varieties of social control that disinclined them to work on Maggie's farm no more.

Back then, conservatives derided the left for using "fascism" so promiscuously. They didn't discover the usefulness of the elastic f-word until the fall of communism left traditional right-wing slurs such as "communistic" and "pinko" sounding quaint.

Time was when right-wingers called the ACLU a bunch of communist sympathizers. Now Bill O'Reilly labels the group and others as fascist, with a cavalier disregard for the word's meaning that would have done Jerry Rubin proud. Of course, it's the point of symbolic words such as "fascist" to ease the burden of thought — as Walter Lippmann observed, they "assemble emotions after they've been detached from their ideas." And it may be that Americans are particularly vulnerable to using "fascism" sloppily, never having experienced the real thing close up.

But like "terror," and "evil" before it, "Islamic fascism" has the effect of reducing a complex story to a simple fable. It effaces the differences among ex-Baathists, Al Qaeda and Shiite mullahs; Chechens and Kashmiris; Hezbollah, Hamas and British-born Asians allegedly making bombs in a London suburb. Yes, there are millions of people in the Muslim world who wish the U.S. ill, and some of them are pretty creepy about it. But that doesn't mean they're all of a single mind and purpose, or that a blow against any one of them is a blow against the others. As Tolstoy might have put it, every creep is creepy in his own way.

(GEOFFREY NUNBERG is a linguist at UC Berkeley's School of Information. His new book, "Talking Right," is about politics and language.)


6. Finish Chewing Before Reading This Item (from truthdig.com)

Seriously: We won’t be responsible for the above if you try to digest your dinner and this news simultaneously....

Ready? OK: Bush is apparently frustrated that the Iraqi people have not shown greater support for America’s mission in Iraq.

That’s right: Bush is frustrated at the lack of public support for America in Iraq.

Has the man stopped watching even Fox News, and instead installed a one-way walkie-talkie in his brain with Don Rumsfeld on the other end?

N.Y. Times:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 15 — President Bush made clear in a private meeting this week that he was concerned about the lack of progress in Iraq and frustrated that the new Iraqi government — and the Iraqi people — had not shown greater public support for the American mission, participants in the meeting said Tuesday.

Those who attended a Monday lunch at the Pentagon that included the president’s war cabinet and several outside experts said Mr. Bush carefully avoided expressing a clear personal view of the new prime minister of Iraq, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

But in what participants described as a telling line of questioning, Mr. Bush did ask each of the academic experts for their assessment of the prime minister’s effectiveness.

“I sensed a frustration with the lack of progress on the bigger picture of Iraq generally — that we continue to lose a lot of lives, it continues to sap our budget,” said one person who attended the meeting. “The president wants the people in Iraq to get more on board to bring success.”