Bush's October Surprise

Bush's October Surprise
Op_Ed,

Will the Bush Administration Implode?

Implosion?

By MWC Editor At Large Tom Engelhardt

Those in the anti-fascist struggle of the 1930s who went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War were later termed "premature antifascists." Perhaps, in the same spirit, I might be considered a premature Bush-administration implodist.

On February 1, 2004, reviewing the week just passed, I imagined us trapped in "some new reality show in which we were all to be locked in with an odd group of [administration] jokesters," and then wrote:

"When we finally emerge will there be a prize for the survivors? Will we discover, for instance, that our President and his administration have headed down a path of slow-motion implosion…?"

On February 18, 2004, my optimism briefly surging, I imagined the future as a movie trailer (inviting readers back for the main attraction that spring or summer) and offered this synopsis of the future film -- the wild fowl references being to Dick Cheney's hunting habits, then in the news -- with:

"a wall-to-wall cast of characters. Far too many to absorb in a split second including our President, Vice President, CIA officials, a supreme court justice, spooks and unnamed sources galore, FBI agents, prosecutors, military men, congressional representatives and their committees, grand juries, fuming columnists, an ex-ambassador, journalists and bloggers, sundry politicians, rafts of neocons…, oil tycoons, and of course assorted wild fowl (this being the Bush administration). If the director were Oliver Stone, it might immediately be titled: The Bush Follies… And the first scene would open -- like that old Jean Luc Goddard movie Weekend -- with a giant traffic jam. It would be epic. All of political Washington in potential scandal gridlock. And (as with Weekend) horns would be blaring, drivers and passengers arguing. It would be obvious that the norms of civilization were falling fast and people were threatening to cannibalize each other."

Sounds a bit like Washington awaiting the Fitzgerald indictments this week, doesn't it? For good measure, I added, "The Bush administration has been in trouble ever since its arrogance met its incompetence at Intelligence Pass last summer; ever since Plame Gate began…"

On January 17, 2005 (hedging my time spans a bit more carefully), I wrote:

"[T]he Bush administration has insisted with remarkable success that a vision of the world concocted more or less out of whole cloth inside a bubble of a world is the world itself. It seems, right now, that we're in a race between Bush's fiction-based reality becoming our reality… and an administration implosion in the months or years ahead as certain dangerous facts in Iraq and elsewhere insist on being attended to."

Finally, this July, when matters were more visibly underway, I returned to the subject,

"While there is officially no means for the Bush administration to implode (impeachment not being a political possibility), nonetheless, implosion is certainly possible. If and when the unraveling begins, the proximate cause, whether the Plame affair or something else entirely, is likely to surprise us all but none more than the members of the mainstream media."

Shadow Governments and Armed Imperial Isolationists

Now, here we are. So call me prescient or, less charitably, chalk it up to the fact that, if you say anything over and over, sooner or later it may come true. Already we have the first front-page tabloid report -- in the New York Daily News -- on a President (whose reigning adjectives not so long ago were "resolute" and "steady") beginning to unravel. Under the headline, Bushies Feeling the Boss's Wrath, Thomas DeFrank, that paper's Washington Bureau Chief, wrote, "Facing the darkest days of his presidency, President Bush is frustrated, sometimes angry and even bitter, his associates say… ‘This is not some manager at McDonald's chewing out the help,' said a source with close ties to the White House when told about these outbursts. ‘This is the President of the United States, and it's not a pleasant sight.'… Presidential advisers and friends say Bush is a mass of contradictions: cheerful and serene, peevish and melancholy, occasionally lapsing into what he once derided as the ‘blame game.'" Frankly, the description already has a touch of Richard Nixon (as his presidency delaminated after Watergate finally hit).

If you want to understand the present moment, however, it's important to grasp one major difference between the Nixon years and today. In the early 1970s, Richard Nixon had to compete, elbows flying, for face and space time in what we now call the mainstream media. There wasn't any other game in town. (For instance, I suspect that if the secret history of the first op-ed page, which made its appearance in the New York Times in 1970, was ever written, its purpose would turn out to have been to give the hard-charging Nixon administration a space in the liberal paper of record where Vice President Spiro Agnew and other administration supporters could sound off from time to time.)

George Bush arrived at a very different media moment. From Rush Limbaugh and Sinclair Broadcasting to Fox News, the Washington Times, and the Weekly Standard, he had his own media already in place -- a full spectrum of outlets including TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses. As for the rest of the media, his task, unlike Nixon's, wasn't to compete for space, but to pacify, sideline, and, if need be, punish. In this sense, no administration has been less giving of actual news or more obviously tried to pay less attention to major media outlets. The President was proud to say that he didn't even read or watch such outlets. His was a shock-and-awe policy and, from September 12, 2001 to last spring, it was remarkably successful.

The "cabal" of Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and their associates that Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, recently spoke and then wrote about -- "Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift, not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy." -- dealt with the media that wasn't theirs and the government bureaucracy that wasn't theirs in similar ways via those big three: pacification, sidelining, and punishment. Whether it was the hated CIA or the much-loathed State Department, they set up their own small, enclosed structures for governing and attempted to shove the rest of them out into the cold. And again they were remarkably successful -- for a while. (Nixon, too, took a stab at setting up a shadow government, loyal only to him, including, of course, those famous "plumbers.")

In fact, the same cast of Bush administration characters dealt with the world in a similar manner. They buckled on their armor, raised their cruise missiles, broke their treaties, distained anything that passed for multinationalism or had the letters "U" or "N" in it, unpacked their dictionaries to redefine the nature of torture and international relations, proclaimed world domination to be their modest goal -- and, armed to the teeth, sallied forth with their allied corporations in the name of everything good to ransack the globe (and punish any country or government that dared get in their way). In this course, they were regularly called "unilateralists."

In all their guises -- in relation to the media, the federal bureaucracy, and other countries -- they actually were dominating isolationists. They took a once honorable Republican heartland tradition -- isolationism -- turned it on its head and thrust it into the world. They acted in Iraq and elsewhere as armed imperial isolationists. Where the elder Bush and Bill Clinton were multinationalists and globalizers; they were ultra-nationalists and militarists, focused only on the military solution to any problem -- and damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

But when you are a cabal, using such close-to-the-breast, not to say mom-and-pop, methods of ruling, and you falter, whether in Iraq or at home, unilateralism becomes weakness. And when it turns out that what you rule is the "last superpower" and you've sidelined, pacified, or punished large numbers of people in the vast, interlocking worlds of the governmental bureaucracy and the media, your enemies still retain the power to strike back.

When something closer to the full story of our moment is known, I suspect we'll see more clearly just how the bureaucracy began to do so (along with, as in this week's New Yorker magazine in the person of Brent Scowcroft, the old multinational ruling elite). In the meantime, it's clear that what the potential implosion moment awaited was the perfect storm of events now upon us. If this moment were to be traced back to its origins, I would, for the time being, pick the spring of this year as my starting point and give the mainstream media -- anxious, resentful, bitter, cowed, losing audience, and cutting staff -- their due. The Bush slide has been a long, slow one, as the opinion polls indicate; but like that famed moss-less rolling stone, it picked up speed last spring as the President's approval ratings slipped below 50%, and then in the ensuing months plunged near or below 40%, putting him at the edge of free-fall.

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