Sidney Blumenthal explains why George Bush needs Joe Lieberman in the Senate.
Lieberman has become an active obstacle to Democratic victory and one of the key bulwarks for protecting Bush’s one-party rule, essential for him to remain unaccountable for the rest of his presidency. For Bush, that is the importance of Lieberman.
Gary Farber discusses the PBS documentary on Dick the Dick that I missed last night.
Jonathan Alter on last night’s Countdown:
OLBERMANN: But even in that context, other historical examples, President Reagan rebounded from Iran-contra, and President Clinton rebounded after the impeachment. But Harry Truman did not shake off Korea while troops were still in Korea, and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon certainly didn’t shake off Vietnam while troops were there. Are not the president’s poll numbers, and, to a large degree, his presidency now, absolutely indivisible from our continuing presence in Iraq?
ALTER: Yes, I think pretty much, which is why there are not a lot of people who expect him to move very much in the polls. And once you’re tagged as an incompetent, that’s pretty hard to recover from.
I mean, you’ve got a situation now where, you know, in workplaces across America, if somebody says, He’s a real Dick Cheney, what they mean is, a guy who sounds like he has a lot of gravitas in those meetings at your company, and looks the part, but is actually, you know, kind of full of it and can’t get the job done when it comes to making a profit.
And so that’s where these guys are now. Their credibility for getting the job done has been eroded, I think largely because they surround themselves with these yes-men, the truth doesn’t get up the chain of command, as we saw with these trailers. So they—because people feel like if they tell them the truth, they’re just going to get their heads bitten off. And as a result, your batting average on decisions goes down, down, down, your competence level goes down, down, down, because you’re not making well-informed decisions.
Heh.
A couple of significant stories from Knight Ridder — Ron Hutcheson reports that the Bush Administration is sending mixed messages on Iraq.
Vice President Dick Cheney said Tuesday that conditions in Iraq were improving steadily, but the American ambassador in Baghdad has said the U.S. invasion opened a “Pandora’s box” of ethnic and religious violence that could inflame the entire Middle East.
Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told the Los Angeles Times in an interview published Tuesday that the “potential is there” for a full-scale civil war in Iraq. Khalilzad, a highly regarded diplomat, warned that a victory by Islamic extremists “would make the Taliban in Afghanistan look like child’s play.”
The conflicting themes – Cheney emphasizing progress, Khalilzad stressing the difficulties and dangers – highlight the Bush administration’s struggle over how to deal with bad news from Iraq. Striking the right balance between optimism and realism could be crucial as Republicans head into the November elections with their control of Congress on the line.
Striking a balance, my ass. Cheney is delusional. Awhile back I stumbled on this paper about delusional thinking —
The DSM-IV defines delusions as “erroneous beliefs that usually involve a misinterpretation of perceptions or experiences.” Delusions may be bizarre, that is, “clearly implausible, not understandable, and not derived from ordinary life experiences” or nonbizarre, that is, involving “situations that can conceivably occur in real life.” …
… One common misconception about delusions–reflected in the DSM-IV definition–is that the thinking processes of delusional individuals are defective, or different from those of normal people. In fact, research suggests that delusional people use the same rules of reasoning as everyone else. Indeed, once a normal individual forms a belief, he or she is also reluctant to change it, and will actively seek out confirmatory evidence (“confirmation bias”) and ignore contradictory evidence.
Delusional people can appear to be completely normal and rational. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to diagnose delusion because the doctor doesn’t have any way to know that what the patient believes to be true isn’t true. The delusions may be obviously delusional or may seem entirely plausible. In general, delusional people don’t have visual or auditory hallucinations the way schizophrenics do. More commonly, they become fixated on some false belief and will look obsessively for evidence to confirm the belief. For example, a delusional vice president fixated on a belief that Saddam Hussein is plotting to destroy America might rattle cages all over Washington for evidence to back up the belief, ignoring whatever doesn’t back it up. Hypothetically.
Hutcheson continues,
In a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Cheney said that as Iraqi security forces grow and the political process advances, “we’ll be able to decrease troop levels.”
U.S. intelligence officials, who agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity because intelligence on Iraq is classified, said the broad consensus in the intelligence community was that while violence had subsided somewhat since the bombing of a major Shiite shrine last month in Samarra, a few more major incidents could plunge the country into full-scale civil war.
Cheney is nuttier than a pecan farm, I tell you.
The other story at Knight Ridder, by James Kuhnhenn, says that Senate Republicans today blocked an investigation into the NSA Spy program.
Senate Republicans blocked an investigation into President Bush’s secret domestic spying program on Tuesday, but agreed to expand congressional oversight of the surveillance system in the future.
At the same time, a group of four Senate Republicans began circulating legislation that would restrict the administration’s ability to eavesdrop on U.S. residents without court approval.
The legislation would require the administration to obtain warrants to eavesdrop on U.S. residents unless the attorney general certified to House and Senate intelligence subcommittees that seeking court approval would hurt intelligence gathering.
The legislation was sponsored by Sens. Mike DeWine of Ohio, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Olympia Snowe of Maine, all Republicans.The legislation emerged as the Senate Intelligence Committee voted behind closed doors to block a Democratic demand for a full investigation into the program. The surveillance, which is carried out by the National Security Agency, tracks communications between al-Qaida suspects overseas and U.S. residents, according to the administration.
Right now I’m a little too tired to wrap my head around this, but it seems significant.
Sidney Blumenthal has a must-read article in Salon (also at True Blue Liberal) that paints a disturbing portrait of President Bush.
Republicans representative of their permanent establishment have recently and quietly sent emissaries to President Bush, like diplomats to a foreign ruler isolated in his forbidden city, to probe whether he could be persuaded to become politically flexible. These ambassadors were not connected to the elder Bush or his closest associate, former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, who was purged last year from the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and scorned by the current president. Scowcroft privately tells friends who ask whether he could somehow help that Bush would never turn to him for advice. So, in one case, a Republican wise man, a prominent lawyer in Washington who had served in the Reagan White House, sought no appointments or favors and was thought to be unthreatening to Bush, gained an audience with him. In a gentle tone, he explained that many presidents had difficult second terms, but that by adapting their approaches they ended successfully, as President Reagan had. Bush instantly replied with a vehement blast. He would not change. He would stay the course. He would not follow the polls. The Republican wise man tried again. Oh, no, he didn’t mean anything about polls. But Bush fortified his wall of self-defensiveness and let fly with another heated riposte that he would not change.
I hate to say I told you so — well, um, actually I get a charge out of saying I told you so, truth be told — but I predicted this. Late last year all manner of conservative pundits smugly assured us that Bush’s falling poll numbers didn’t mean nothin’. Lots of presidents were low in the polls going into the second term. All Bush had to do is make some staff changes, maybe launch some new initiatives, and he’d be back on track. But I wrote last November that no way was Bush going to make staff changes:
Bush’s White House staff is not so much a staff as it is a coccoon of co-dependency, a team dedicated to the care and maintenance of Bush’s mighty persona. New people might actually try to follow their job descriptions and be staff, rather than enablers. That would not do at all.
Bush needs his old gang around him, because they are extensions of himself.
Blumenthal writes,
Within the sanctum of the White House, his aides often handle him with flattery. They tell him that he is among the greatest presidents, that his difficulties are testimony to his greatness, that his refusal to change is also a sign of his greatness. The more is he flattered, the more he approves of the flatterer. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has risen along with her current of flattery. She is expert at the handwritten little note extolling his historical radiance. Karen Hughes, now undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, was a pioneer of the flatterer’s method. White House legal counsel Harriet Miers is also adept.
Bush the Bubble Boy is eatin’ this up. He’s persuaded himself that he is FDR, Harry Truman and Abe Lincoln rolled together into one package of presidential perfection. The entire United States of America, its people and institutions, exist only to give George W. Bush his glory fix.
Meanwhile, the flamingly delusional Dick Cheney is actually in charge. Blumenthal continues,
But it is Vice President Dick Cheney who has sought and gained the most through flattery. While Bush is constantly and lavishly complimented as supreme leader, Cheney runs the show. Through his chief of staff, David Addington, he controls most of the flow of information, especially on national security, that reaches the incurious president. Bush seeks no contrary information or independent sources. He does not delve into the recesses of government himself, as Presidents Kennedy and Clinton did. He never demands worst-case scenarios. Cheney and his team oversee the writing of key decision memos before Bush finally gets to check the box indicating approval.
Addington also dominates much of the bureaucracy through a network of conservative lawyers placed in key departments and agencies. The Justice Department regularly produces memos to justify the latest wrinkle in the doctrine of the “unitary executive,” whether on domestic surveillance or torture. At the Defense Department, the counsel’s office takes direction from Addington and acts at his behest to suppress dissent from the senior military on matters such as detainees or the “global war on terror.”
Tightly regulated by Cheney and Bush’s own aides (who live in fear of Cheney), the president hears what he wishes to hear. They also know what particular flattery he wants to receive, and they ensure that he receives it
There’s a word for organizations like this — dysfunctional.
This morning I really did plan to write about something other than Dick the Dick and his little accident, but Ronald Brownstein and Peter Wallsten have an article in today’s Los Angeles Times that make some excellent observations about what The Incident says about the Bush Administration’s governing “style.”
Observation #1: They are utterly flummoxed by unexpected events that weren’t part of The Plan.
Bush and his White House often seem to struggle when pressed to react to unexpected events, a difficulty highlighted Wednesday by the continuing furor over Vice President Dick Cheney’s hunting accident and a congressional committee’s sharply critical report about the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.
“There are maybe three or four things [Bush] really cares about, and on those things he will be clear, decisive and maybe even ruthless,” said Donald F. Kettl, an expert on government administration at the University of Pennsylvania.
But Bush and his aides “are not very good at … quick reaction, on-the-fly decision-making,” Kettl said. …
…From his initial campaign for Texas governor in 1994, Bush has excelled at establishing and adhering to long-term plans. He is rigorous about sustaining a message or limiting his legislative agenda to a few priorities. But that laser-like focus can sometimes leave the administration unable to quickly recognize the significance of events that don’t fit into their blueprint, critics say.
“That’s just not how they think,” said Ron Klain, a former Clinton administration aide.
“Not very good” is an understatement. This blogger has written many times about the Bushies’ pathological inability to respond to unexpected crises. This is from the December 28, 2004 Mahablog about his slowness to respond to the tsunami disaster:
This, of course, is just part of a pattern. After September 11 The Brat had to hide out on Air Force One for several hours before he could pull himself together (or sober up?) and act like a president. More than a year ago he had to be coaxed into addressing the nation after a particularly bloody day in Iraq (not as bloody as the days have been since, of course). And do you remember The Blackout of August 2003? I wrote at the time
It took him four hours to bring himself to speak to the nation after the Blackout began, and then he could do so only on tape. (Drunk or stupid? We report — you decide.) After this week’s bombing that killed at least 20 UN workers, Bush’s keepers managed to get him off the golf course, into a suit and tie, and in front of cameras a bit faster. The keepers are learning, it seems.
Of course, he would have been a lot quicker if he’d been able to wear a quasi-military costume and prance around in front of a few thousand screaming groupies.
You can read more about the Boy’s slow response to the tsunami in this Washington Post article of December 29, 2004:
The Bush administration more than doubled its financial commitment yesterday to provide relief to nations suffering from the Indian Ocean tsunami, amid complaints that the vacationing President Bush has been insensitive to a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions. … domestic criticism of Bush continued to rise. Skeptics said the initial aid sums — as well as Bush’s decision at first to remain cloistered on his Texas ranch for the Christmas holiday rather than speak in person about the tragedy — showed scant appreciation for the magnitude of suffering and for the rescue and rebuilding work facing such nations as Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and Indonesia. …
… Some foreign policy specialists said Bush’s actions and words both communicated a lack of urgency about an event that will loom as large in the collective memories of several countries as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks do in the United States. “When that many human beings die — at the hands of terrorists or nature — you’ve got to show that this matters to you, that you care,” said Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
There was an international outpouring of support after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and even some administration officials familiar with relief efforts said they were surprised that Bush had not appeared personally to comment on the tsunami tragedy. “It’s kind of freaky,” a senior career official said.
Last March, the White House was criticized for failing to express sympathy for the shootings on the Red Lake reservation in Minnesota.
And may I say … Katrina?
Brownstein and Wallsten draw parallels between Katrina and the veep’s utterly inappropriate non-response to his shooting of a hunting partner:
The Cheney shooting and the Katrina response have raised tough questions about what the president knows, when he knows it and how the White House shares information with elected officials and the public.
Which leads us to …
Observation #2: They can’t communicate with each other.
White House counselor Dan Bartlett rejected the suggestion that the two controversies [Katrina and The Shooting] pointed to communication failures among Bush and his aides. “That’s just over-interpreting,” he said.
Yet other observers, in both parties, maintained the incidents underscored concerns about Bush’s willingness and capacity to react to unanticipated challenges.
“If the buck stops with you, you are the person who has to take charge,” said Leon E. Panetta, a White House chief of staff under President Clinton. “I get the impression in this White House that the buck sometimes stops everywhere else but [with] the president…. Frankly, that mentality leads to nothing but trouble.”
Some senior Republicans, including top officials from previous GOP administrations, privately said they shared Panetta’s views.
One GOP fundraiser close to the White House said he thought the administration’s response to the news that Cheney had mistakenly shot a fellow hunter Saturday so closely replicated the Katrina experience that he wondered, “Is this a bad dream we are seeing again?”
“There is a pattern here,” said the fundraiser, who requested anonymity when discussing the administration’s workings.
Regarding the Saturday hunting incident, the White House account of who said what to whom, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card told the President there had been a hunting accident at 7:30 pm Saturday, but Card had not learned that Cheney was the shooter. First, does anyone remember who told Card? I know he didn’t hear about the shooting from Cheney. Second, how weird is it that Card hadn’t bothered to ask who the shooter was? It was left to Karl Rove to inform Bush of this little detail, about 7:50 pm. It appears Karl learned what happened from ranch owner Katharine Armstrong, not through Bush Administration channels.
This is the same pattern we saw after Katrina, when White House staff tip-toed around in fear of telling the President the true dimensions of the unfolding catastrophe. Brownstein and Wallsten also remind us of the decision to invade Iraq:
But the question of whether the president receives a wide enough range of information has persisted for years — most notably in the administration’s conclusion before invading Iraq that leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
In a little-noticed remark in November, national security adviser Stephen Hadley conceded that there might have been flaws in the information flow to the Oval Office, preventing Bush from hearing that many intelligence experts disagreed about Hussein’s arsenal.
“One of the things we’ve all learned from that is that it is important [to] … make sure that dissenting opinions also are given visibility,” Hadley told reporters.
Ya think?
The final observation:
Observation #3: Who’s in Charge?
Brownstein and Wallsten write,
The hunting imbroglio has sparked a related question about Bush’s management style: whether he has provided the vice president too much autonomy in an administration in which Cheney has wielded as much influence as any second in command. …
…The incident has also revived the debate about the degree of Cheney’s independence in the administration. Cheney’s office did not confirm the shooting until Sunday, after his host on the ranch, with his agreement, informed a local newspaper.
In an interview Wednesday with Fox News, Cheney said White House communications officials encouraged him “to get the story out,” but deferred to him on how to release the story.
That follows the pattern established since Bush took office in 2001, said one former senior administration official who closely observed the relationship between the presidential and vice presidential staffs.
“The vice president’s office does indeed operate with a significant degree of autonomy,” said the former official, who requested anonymity when discussing internal White House relations. “Unless the vice president is helping the president to deliver a message [on policy], it is really the VP’s office that decides what they want to do when.”
This is from yesterday’s New York Times article by David Sanger:
Until this week, the periodic disconnect between Mr. Cheney’s office and the rest of the White House has been the source of grumbling, but rarely open tension. … In the past five years, Mr. Cheney has grown accustomed to having a power center of his own, with his own miniature version of a national security council staff. It conducts policy debates that often happen parallel those among Mr. Bush’s staff.
Sanger relates an incident in which the Vice President made a speech that stated a position contrary to the President’s decisions. Sanger writes, “it was left to Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, to call Mr. Cheney and get him to strike that wording from a speech he was giving a few days later.”
Bush can’t stand up to Cheney? So who’s in charge?
Back in 2000, when George W. choose Dick to be his running mate, there was much gushing in news media about the seasoned, experienced hand that would be guiding Bush in foreign policy. But as revealed in this 2003 article in Washington Monthly by Josh Marshall, “Vice Grip,” going way back Cheney’s judgments and opinions have been, um, kind of freaky. I urge you to read it, because it reveals much about the Cheney mindset — for example, this paragraph about the corporate-Washington-insider class of which Cheney is the insider’s insider:
In such a framework all information is controlled tightly by the principals, who have “maximum flexibility” to carry out the plan. Because success is measured by securing the deal rather than by, say, pleasing millions of customers, there’s no need to open up the decision-making process. To do so, in fact, is seen as governing by committee. If there are other groups (shareholders, voters, congressional committees) who agree with you, fine, you use them. But anyone who doesn’t agree gets ignored or, if need be, crushed. Muscle it through and when the results are in, people will realize we were right is the underlying attitude.
That might work, except Cheney is more often wrong than right. Josh provides lots of examples. Worse, I strongly suspect Cheney is pathologically delusional. I wrote about this in the past; see “Moron, Idiot, or Nefarious Bastard?”
In sum, we a President who likes to prance around in flight suits and talk tough, but who can’t stand up to his father-figure Vice President. And the veep is a whackjob. Nice.
I see that Deadeye Dick has finally taken responsibility for shooting Mr. Whittington. However, Joe Strupp and Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher report that The Dick is less than contrite.
Speaking on camera and disclosing some of the unaired footage, [Brit] Hume said Cheney was “utterly unapologetic” about the reporting lag but “a shaken man” in his interview. In comments on the cable channel just minutes after ending a 25-minute interview with Cheney, Hume described the encounter as revealing, but with little contrition on Cheney’s part.
“He didn’t blame anyone else, he blamed himself [for the shooting],” Hume told Fox’s Shepard Smith during a brief conversation. “But he didn’t take blame for the way it was handled…the White House press corps be damned.”
The veep admitted having one beer with lunch that day, but also said no one had any beer. See Think Progress for more about the amazing appearing and disappearing beer story. Other rumors for which I have no corroboration whatsoever involve women.
You knew Maureen Dowd would have something to say about The Incident. Today’s column (via True Blue Liberal) doesn’t disappoint, as she describes the “swift-BB-ing” of Harry Whittington.
Private citizens have been enlisted to blame the victim. Maybe poor Mr. Whittington put himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. But he was, after all, behind Vice, not in front of him. And the hunter pulling the trigger is supposed to make sure he has a clear shot. Wouldn’t it be, well, classy for Shooter to express just a bit of contrition and humility?
Instead, the usual sliming has begun, with the Cheney camp trying to protect the vice president by casting a veteran hunter as Elmer Dud.
Indeed, righties are lashing out at everyone in North America except those in the Bush Administration. Get this editorial at National Review Online:
Never has an accidental shooting occasioned so much glee. Whatever mistakes Vice President Dick Cheney might have made while hunting on the Armstrong Ranch in Texas this weekend, or in deciding how to make the mishap public, have been eclipsed by the disgusting wallowing in the accident of all his critics and the unsurpassable self-regard of national reporters outraged by a delay of at least 14 hours in getting alerted to the story. They worked themselves into a first-class tizzy at Monday’s White House press briefing, proving that no matter what the story is, reporters think it’s all about them. It is understandable that Cheney would not consider notifying the media his first priority following an accident during a quail-hunting trip with friends, and the meaning that is being read into the incident — about Cheney’s character, the administration’s competence, Bush’s foreign policy, and much else — is absurd.
This little tantrum is followed by the mild suggestion that, um, maybe the Veep should make a public statement now. But how juvenile is this? NRO sounds like a kid who got in trouble for not doing his homework and who then complains to Mom and Dad that Teacher picks on me.
Dear righties: Vice screwed up. Big Time. Stop making excuses for him and let him take his lumps like a man.
Fact is, even some Republicans are acknowledging that Cheney’s behavior is seriously weird. Jim VandeHei and Peter Baker write in today’s Washington Post:
Vice President Cheney’s slow and unapologetic public response to the accidental shooting of a 78-year-old Texas lawyer is turning the quail-hunting mishap into a political liability for the Bush administration and is prompting senior White House officials to press Cheney to publicly address the issue as early as today, several prominent Republicans said yesterday.
The Republicans said Cheney should have immediately disclosed the shooting Saturday night to avoid even the suggestion of a coverup and should have offered a public apology for his role in accidentally shooting Harry Whittington, a GOP lawyer from Austin. …
… “I cannot believe he does not look back and say this should have been handled differently,” said Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota who is close to the White House. Weber said Cheney “made it a much bigger issue than it needed to be.”
Marlin Fitzwater, a former Republican White House spokesman, told Editor & Publisher magazine that Cheney “ignored his responsibility to the American people.”
This episode does speak volumes about Dick Cheney’s character. And what it’s saying isn’t good. Whatever happened in that quail hunt, the fact that the Vice President couldn’t even tell the President what happened, and that he still cannot publicly state that he is sorry he pulled that trigger, bespeaks a pathological lack of character.
This is genuinely disturbing. Even your standard sociopath could have managed an act of contrition for the public once he understood it was in his best interest to do so.
And if the Veep is so unglued by a hunting accident that he can neither inform the President nor speak in public about it, what’s he doing a heartbeat away from the presidency?
David Sanger writes in today’s New York Times that The Incident has created a serious rift between the President’s and Vice President’s staffs. “The tension between President Bush’s staff and Mr. Cheney’s has been palpable,” Sanger writes.
Until this week, the periodic disconnect between Mr. Cheney’s office and the rest of the White House has been the source of grumbling, but rarely open tension. … In the past five years, Mr. Cheney has grown accustomed to having a power center of his own, with his own miniature version of a national security council staff. It conducts policy debates that often happen parallel those among Mr. Bush’s staff.
Um, so who’s in charge?
At WaPo, David Ignatius placed The Incident in the context of “An Arrogance of Power.” The Bush Administration, he writes, has become intoxicated with a belief in its own “God-given mission.”
I would be inclined to leave Cheney to the mercy of Jon Stewart and Jay Leno if it weren’t for other signs that this administration has jumped the tracks. What worries me most is the administration’s misuse of intelligence information to advance its political agenda. For a country at war, this is truly dangerous.
The most recent example of politicized intelligence was President Bush’s statement on Feb. 9 that the United States had “derailed” a 2002 plot to fly a plane into the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles. Bush spoke about four al Qaeda plotters who had planned to use shoe bombs to blow open the cockpit door. But a foreign official with detailed knowledge of the intelligence scoffed at Bush’s account, saying that the information obtained from Khalid Sheik Mohammed and an Indonesian operative known as Hambali was not an operational plan so much as an aspiration to destroy the tallest building on the West Coast. When I asked a former high-level U.S. intelligence official about Bush’s comment, he agreed that Bush had overstated the intelligence.
“Bush and Cheney are in the bunker,” Ignatius concludes. “That’s the only way I can make sense of their actions.” And the hard-core culties are in the bunker with them, outraged that anyone dare question the Vice President’s actions.
Criticize a politician? In America? Unthinkable. Our dear leaders are beyond reproach. Unless they’re Democrats.
(Cross-posted to The American Street)
CNN is reporting that Harry Whittington, the man “peppered” by Dick Cheney in a hunting accident, suffered a “mild” heart attack. Yes, this the same guy who’s been in the hospital since Saturday even though he’s just fine. Somehow, some birdshot that had “peppered” Mr. Whittington’s face migrated to his heart.
Uh-HUH.
This is starting to remind me of the “cat on the roof” joke.
Meanwhile, Dr. Atrios has learned that “Every conservative on the internet is an avid hunter and they’ve all been shot multiple times.” Suggestion: Stay out of the woods in red states.
In other news, Dr. Atrios observes the Stalinist discipline of rightie bloggers and Glenn Greenwood suggests that righties may have some double standards (Really? Wow!).
Update: See Dan Froomkin, “Loose Cannon.“
Proving once again that she lacks a basic appreciation of traditional American culture and values, Michelle Malkin is outraged at Dana Milbank’s gentle ribbing of the Vice President on last night’s Countdown With Keith Olbermann on MSNBC.
If you watch Countdown, you know that the program mixes humor with hard news. So it was not at all out of keeping with the show’s format for reporter Dana Milbank to appear dressed in an orange vest and hat. His current location was near the vice president’s residence, he said.
Cute, I thought.
But Michelle Malkin and others on the Right are on a rampage. Media bias! they scream. They want to know when Countdown will display a bumper sticker that says “I’d rather hunt with Dick Cheney than ride with Ted Kennedy.” Can they not tell the difference between good-natured kidding and hateful meanness? I’d hate to sit down to a family dinner with these folks.
In some ways its a sign of respect to be able to kid our leaders. It says we’re comfortable enough with them to tease them. And Americans have made fun of our leaders since the guys at Valley Forge sat around the campfire and badmouthed George Washington. Some of our most-beloved humorists — Mark Twain, Bob Hope and Will Rogers come to mind — showed how it was possible to poke fun at leaders — often in their presence — without being mean about it. Here’s an example from Will Rogers —
The fire at the Treasury Department started on the roof and burned down until it got the place where the money ought to be and there it stopped. The Harding Administration had beat the fire to it. A fire in the Treasury Building is nothing to get excited about during a Republican Administration.
Damn, that’s still funny.
Malkin et al. will argue that Dana Milbank is not a humorist, but a journalist. To which I might say, since news coverage is a joke, what’s the difference? (Ba-bump BUMP) But I think it could be argued (to anyone not a twit) that Milbank’s costume showed a pro-Cheney bias. It signalled the audience that this is not a serious story. Nothing to get fired up about. Let’s have a chuckle and forget about it.
Believe me, a reporter with a real anti-Cheney bias would have taken a more sober approach to this story. In fact, I bet the White House has a crack team of joke writers on the job right now …
Updates: See “Cheney Accident Triggers Jokes on Late-Night TV“; “After Cheney’s Shooting Incident, Time to Unload“; “Groans at Home Re: (Cheney Joke Here).” See also Ezra Klein.
Update update: Boy, was I right about the White House crack team of joke writers, or what? Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press reports:
The White House has decided that the best way to deal with Vice President Dick Cheney’s shooting accident is to joke about it.
President Bush’s spokesman quipped Tuesday that the burnt orange school colors of the University of Texas championship football team that was visiting the White House shouldn’t be confused for hunter’s safety wear.
“The orange that they’re wearing is not because they’re concerned that the vice president may be there,” joked White House press secretary Scott McClellan, following the lead of late-night television comedians. “That’s why I’m wearing it.”
The president’s brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, took a similar jab after slapping an orange sticker on his chest from the Florida Farm Bureau that read, “No Farmers, No Food.”
“I’m a little concerned that Dick Cheney is going to walk in,” the governor cracked during an appearance in Tampa Monday.