Bush George Walker - Truth and consequences: special comments on the Bush administrations war on American values

Contents

TO BOB ELLIOTT AND THE LATE RAY GOULDING, who helped undo McCarthy with a weapon as useful as Murrowshumorand who still inspire and amaze

Introduction

David Bloom was dead.

It was Sunday morning, April 6, 2003, and, as in the stuff of nightmares, somebody woke me up with the terrible news. Hed been on my old MSNBC show nearly every night in 1998, and in the week since wed premiered Countdown, wed spokenvia satelliteseveral times. And now hed died from a blood clot in the middle of this new war.

I did what many of us do in times of crisis: I went to the ballpark. There was ineffable value in the chilly first weekend of the season at Shea Stadium in New York, where there would be at least a hint of spring and hope and the easing of mourning; where I could commiserate with news-savvy friends on the field like the Australian-born pitcher Graeme Lloyd, whod wanted to know every detail I had about Davids passing; where I could share the shock with friends in the press box; where I could dial back the pain through the simple ritual of folding up my scorecard and then filing out of the ballpark to the subway.

Hey, one evidently drunken twentysomething fan said to his cohort just as I crossed through the press box hallway toward the exit ramp. Its Keith Olbermann.

Hey, Keith, his fellow staggerer began. Then a thought bounced across his brain like a shiny red ball skipping down the driveway toward traffic, and he stopped short. Nah, forget him, he said to his pal. Hes a liberal.

I had been back at MSNBC for less than two months.

We had only launched Countdown six days earlier.

We had put virtually nothing on the newscast except reports from Iraq and Washington.

We had equally bashed Geraldo Rivera for giving away American troop positions on Fox, and Peter Arnett for giving an interview to Iraqi state television while also working on MSNBC.

We had sent David Bloom into harms way and he wasnt coming back.

And I was not to be talked to because somehow I was a liberal.

BARACK OBAMA CALLED IT 9/11 fever and we all had it, to some degree or another. The winter before, Id actually kept a notebook with me in which to jot down the numbers of the subway cars Id ridden in, just in case there was a biological attack. I could stagger into an emergency room one day and at least hand somebody a numerical trail of where Id been. Maybe that could mitigate the impact of the terror. Even at the time I realized it was a psychological trick I was playing on myself to regain a false sense that I could control something in a world in which somebody had suddenly switched off the law of gravity. But as psychological tricks went, it was damned effective.

We played other tricks on ourselves in the eighteen months after the attacks. We, as the playwrights used to ask us to, suspended our disbelief.

As the naturally dubious, we reporters had severe doubts about the efficacy of blowing Iraq to hell. I even voiced them in my radio commentaries, couching them as gently as I possibly could. Others werent so gentle and wound up losing their programs or getting death threats or having their wives secret and truly patriotic careers exposed and ruined by those to whom patriotism is just a brand name.

Then the plotline in Iraq turned out to be not just phony, but also ridiculous. Not only were there no weapons of mass destruction, but the chemical warfare the generals and ex-generals nightly told us to expect also never materialized. Saddam Hussein not only had no offensive weapons, he didnt have many defensive ones. That summer, when it turned out our troops had staged a lightning raid to save Private Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi military hospital that didnt even have a Nurse Ratched in it, we broadcast the revised history as reported by a Canadian newspaperthe first TV news outlet in the country, I think, to do so. The right-wing water-carriers buffeted our management, and our management buffeted me.

But to that managements credit, the truth rapidly gathering behind the Hollywood story of Saving Private Jessica was sacrosanct to them.

They smelled the rats as surely as did I. Management only wanted to make sure I clarified that I wasnt attacking the heroism of the troops who broke into the hospital. Of course I wasnt, I thought to myself, they were just as sincere as I had been. Just as patriotic. Just as muchwhat was that other word beginning with pat?oh, patsies.

That was the day my last symptoms of 9/11 fever disappeared.

The problem was that whatever kind of three-card monte game President Bush was running in Iraq, and whether he was the shill or just another victim, David Bloom was still dead, and so were a lot of young men and women in helmets whose names werent David Bloom but who still counted every bit as much as he did.

THE WHITE HOUSE, of course, both fabricated and destroyed the rationale for the war, as well as the new American culture of fear first and ask questions later. It did the former through what has to be acknowledged as some very clever thinking, enabling the exploitation of 9/11 in endless ways: Watch the genuinely patriotic opposition voluntarily file in to the political equivalent of comedian Shelley Bermans famous lousy hotel roomthe one he discovers seems to be missing all windows or doors or other ways out; cover Saddam Hussein in 9/11 guilt by association for the vast majority of people who couldnt tell al-Qaeda from Al Jarreau; grab all kinds of un-American powers over the American legal system the way President Adams tried to, or President Nixon, or Joe McCarthy, or anybody else who ever recognized inchoate fear in the public, who were as ever eager to protect their freedoms by surrendering them.

The problem for Messrs. Bush and Cheney and Rove, of course, was that having come up with a brilliant idea, they started to believe their own press clippings. Turns out they might not really have been that smart, or that good at execution.

Not a big deal, just the salvation of our democracy.

Just how bad this White House really was at the follow-through, I witnessed firsthand. At the height of the focused terrorism against Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson in the late spring and early summer of 04, we booked Joe to come on the show. Inexplicably, somebody in the administrations press office was working off an old script. They assumed I would be debunking Wilson, and decided to send me some helpful talking points by e-mail.

Only nobody there knew how to spell my name.

In the twenty-four hours prior to the interview, they must have sent a copy of the e-mail intended for me (Oberman, Olberman, Obermann, Obleman, Ohlbermen, Olderman, and Olberding, if I remember the permutations correctly) to seven different people at NBC whose names they could spell. These transmissions fell upon me like icicles on the first sunny day. Damned annoying. Damned stupid.

So of course, I showed the e-mail on Countdown and asked Joe Wilson about the talking points. And he laughed and I laughed and the audience ratings grew a little bit and I had an odd feeling that the show, and the country, would turn out all right after all.

WITH BITTER IRONY, it wasnt Iraq that did George Bush init was the weather.