Anticipate This

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“I’m trying to think differently,” President Bush said in New Dehli. If that doesn’t give you the willies, nothin’ will.

Yes, folks, the same crack (or on crack) foreign policy team that pushed North Korea back into the plutonium processing business, didn’t anticipate Hamas would win the Palestinian election even though their own poll said it would, and whose crowning achievement is the war in Iraq, has taken us another step closer to destroying civilization as we know it. David Sanger writes in the New York Times (emphasis added):

Mr. Bush took a step in his efforts to rewrite the world’s longstanding rules that for more than 30 years have forbidden providing nuclear technology to countries that do not sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

“I’m trying to think differently,” Mr. Bush said in New Delhi, referring to the administration’s argument that a new system is needed. But in treating India as a special case — a “strategic relationship” — he has so far declined to define general rules for everyone.

In essence, Mr. Bush is making a huge gamble — critics say a dangerous one — that the United States can control proliferation by single-handedly rewarding nuclear states it considers “responsible,” and punishing those it declares irresponsible. For those keeping a scorecard, India is in the first camp, Iran is in the second, and no one in the administration wants to talk, at least on the record, about Israel or Pakistan — two allies that have embraced the bomb, but not the treaty.

At WaPo, David Von Drehle writes,

In case you missed the memo, the world is multipolar now.

Gone are the days of go-it-alone foreign policy, of unilateral preemption and epoch-making events scheduled solely “at a time and place of our choosing.” That’s all so 2002, back at the climax of what columnist Charles Krauthammer calls “the unipolar moment” of unlimited American power. Unipolar means the big dog, Uncle Sam, bears the burdens and thus calls the shots.

These days, America is into “regional partnerships,” as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice explained earlier this year, because “emerging nations like India and China and Brazil and Egypt and Indonesia and South Africa are increasingly shaping the course of history.”

Condi Rice. The course of history. Be afraid.

A few weeks ago Sebastian Mallaby pointed out that Condi Rice’s foreign policy theories are a work in progress.

In January 2000, as the Bush campaign got underway, Rice published a manifesto in Foreign Affairs that laid out the classic “realist” position: American diplomacy should “focus on power relationships and great-power politics” rather than on other countries’ internal affairs. “Some worry that this view of the world ignores the role of values, particularly human rights and the promotion of democracy,” she acknowledged. But the priority for U.S. foreign policy was to deal with powerful governments, whose “fits of anger or acts of beneficence affect hundreds of millions of people.”

The “great-power politics” perspective was, I assume, the basis of the Bush Administration’s decision to dismiss the importance of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden in March 2001. Another Bush foreign policy triumph. Mallaby continues,

Even six years ago, this was an outdated position. The Clinton administration was certainly preoccupied with powers such as Russia and China, but it was also tracking Islamic terrorists who had already attacked the World Trade Center. The importance of other non-state actors, from rebels to environmentalists to bond traders, had become a cliche of globalization commentary; AIDS had been recognized as a security threat. The era of great-power politics was widely thought to have ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Rice seemed like a Sovietologist who hadn’t quite caught up.

Kissinger-style realpolitik is so 1970s, Mallaby writes. The realists were on the wrong side of history — American support for the Shah of Iran is just one example. “Time and again, the idea that diplomacy consisted mainly of relations with powerful governments proved wrong,” Mallaby writes. “As a rising cadre of neoconservative Republicans argued, diplomacy was often about judging the currents within countries — and backing democratic ones.”

Mallaby explains that recently Rice seems to have caught up with the 1990s consensus that weak, destabilized states can prove to be dangerous, and in the long run the best hope for world peace is a world of stable democracies. And I can’t argue with that. The question is, how does that theory translate into policy?

The Bush Administration seems to think that if the all-powerful U.S. can just find the right combination of carrots and sticks, plus the right message strategy, it can re-shape the world to its liking. Robert Fisk provided a glimpse into this thinking recently:

Last week’s visit to Beirut by one of the blindest of George Bush’s bats – his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice – was indicative of the cruelty that now pervades Washington. She brazenly talked about the burgeoning “democracies” of the Middle East while utterly ignoring the bloodbaths in Iraq and the growing sectarian tensions of Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Perhaps the key to her indifference can be found in her evidence to the Senate Committee on International Affairs where she denounced Iran as “the greatest strategic challenge” facing the US in the region, because Iran uses policies that “contradict the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by the United States”.

As Bouthaina Shaaban, one of the brightest of Syria’s not always very bright team of government ministers, noted: “What is the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by the United States? Should Middle East states adapt themselves to that nature, designed oceans away?”

Fisk quotes Maureen Dowd: Bush “believes in self-determination only if he’s doing the determining.” Heh. David Von Drehle writes,

But can a unipolar president find happiness in a multipolar world? We got a few hints last week, as President Bush visited one of Rice’s emerging shapers of history, India. Like a clumsy groom who has learned precisely one dance for his wedding day, Bush went carefully through the steps of multipolar diplomacy, yet there was no mistaking his natural tendencies. You got the feeling that if George W. Bush is going to embrace “partnership,” it’s going to be on his terms, pardner.

Now the Bushies are playing Santa Claus and deciding who’s naughty or nice. And the Bush/Cheney/Rice team now decides on its own which nations deserve nuclear arms and which don’t. And they do so on the basis of their dumbly one-dimensional world view that attempts to sort all people into neat binary categories — good or bad, friend or foe — without taking in the complexity of nations and their multifaceted relationships with each other. How will the India deal affect the dicey relationship between India and Pakistan? Between Pakistan and the U.S.? Between Pakistan and the terrorists who live there? What about Israel? And what about China? The deal with India is supposed to help counter the power of China. But some critics of the deal point out that India’s economic relations with China are critical to New Dehli. If, someday, India found itself having to choose between China and the U.S. … well, Santa comes but once a year; China is on their border all the time.

In other words, this deal could have all manner of bad outcomes that even smart people might not anticipate. Which means you can assume the anticipation-challenged Bushies haven’t considered them.

See also: Ron Beasley and upyernoz.

Update: Great cartoon.

Oh, the Humanity

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Once upon a time — early 1970s, pre-Roe, I believe — I remember reading a newspaper column written by a fellow who had been opposed to legal abortion. I say had, because he had changed his mind. What changed his mind was a tragedy — his beloved granddaughter, a college student, had been raped.

The young woman didn’t become pregnant. But the episode had made the man think — what if she had. Before Roe, several states banned abortions even for rape victims. For the first time, he reflected on what a pregnancy from rape might do not only to his granddaughter, but to his entire family. Could the family accept such a child? Could he? How would it feel to give a grandchild away? Not just a hypothetical grandchild, but his real, breathing, flesh-and-blood grandchild?

And he considered, for the first, time, how such a pregnancy would prolong and deepen the trauma his granddaughter had already suffered. All his hopes for her — that she would finish college, that she would marry happily and have children — depended on her recovery from the trauma. How could a compassionate and just society not do whatever it took to help her? Yes, babies are precious, but so was his granddaughter!

As I remember it, the man remained uncomfortable with abortion. But he thought on, and he thought about teenagers with poor impulse control, and couples with as many children as they could afford already, and a thousand other circumstances in which people — real people — might choose to seek abortion. Suddenly, for him a woman who sought an abortion was no longer just a hypothesis or an archetype — Careless Woman, Selfish Woman, Woman in a Vacuum. Now he understood these women were real individuals with parents, siblings, husbands, children, and grandparents who loved them.

Today I thought about the man who cared about his granddaughter when I read two posts by Digby — “The Sodomized Virgin Exception” and, um, this other post. What comes through loudly and clearly in both posts is that the anti-abortion rights position is based on an assumption that women aren’t real people — especially women who get abortions. Oh, they’re human in a scientific sense, but they aren’t people. They are archetypes who live in the heads of the anti-abortion righters — Careless Woman, Selfish Woman, Woman in a Vacuum. The same people who imagine embryos can think and feel emotions — and therefore deserve protection — must believe a pregnant woman is just a major appliance.

There are copious anecdotes from abortion providers who say that often the same people protesting outside the clinic one week are patients (or parents of patients) the next week. These people assume that their situations are unique and should be the one exception. They often want the abortion staff to know they aren’t like those other women who get abortions. This inspired the bitter joke that the legitimate reasons for abortion are “rape, incest, and me.” Such people recognize their own humanity (or their daughter’s), but those other women who get abortions are just archetypes who don’t deserve respect or considertion.

I’ve long believed that whether one is pro-choice or anti-choice does not depend on whether one thinks embryos are human beings. It depends on whether one recognizes that women are human beings. Not archetypes, but real, individual human beings. Including women who get abortions.

See also: Amanda M., Echidne and the Wege.

Worst Memory Ever

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Or, Condi Strike Again … Jonathan S. Landay writes for Knight Ridder —

A State Department-commissioned poll taken days before January’s Palestinian elections warned U.S. policymakers that the militant Islamic group Hamas was in a position to win.

Nevertheless, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said after the election that they had no advance indication of a major Hamas triumph.

What is with this woman?

Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy, said that while the poll didn’t predict Hamas’ big win, it clearly showed a trend toward victory for the Islamic militants.

“Either Secretary Rice was being disingenuous or else her department has a serious information-sharing problem, because INR could not have done a much better job of assessing the Palestinian election than they did,” said Aftergood. “No one else did a better job than INR. So to profess surprise of the outcome is incomprehensible.

“This is secrecy squared,” he continued. “It’s one thing to keep secrets from the public. But when the bureaucracy is keeping secrets from itself, policy is compromised.”

Maybe she was out buying shoes.

Update: See Skippy, “we don’t think anybody anticipated that things might happen while he was in office and he’d actually have to lead the country.”

Update update: I’ve been thinking the nation would be better served by a potted plant as POTUS. And Secretary of State, for that matter. But eventually we’d hear “I don’t think anyone could have anticipated that President Ficus would shrivel up and die if we didn’t keep him watered.”

Nukes and More Nukes

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I haven’t quite wrapped my head about whatever nuclear deal Bush just struck with India. Dan Froomkin’s column has me worried —

In addition to all the predictable reactions (pro and con) to the landmark nuclear agreement reached in India yesterday, a powerful and unexpected new concern has emerged based on a last-minute concession by President Bush.

It appears that, to close the deal during his visit, Bush directed his negotiators to give in to India’s demands that it be allowed to produce unlimited quantities of fissile material and amass as many nuclear weapons as it wants.

The agreement, which requires congressional approval, would be an important step toward Bush’s long-held goal of closer relations with India. It would reflect India’s status as a global power. And, not least of all, it would more firmly establish India as a military ally and bulwark against China.

Critics have long denounced such an agreement, saying it would reward India for its rogue nuclear-weapons program and could encourage other nations to do likewise.

But now the criticisms may focus on this question: By enabling India to build an unlimited stockpile of nuclear weapons, would this agreement set off a new Asian arms race?

And here’s another question: Were Bush and his aides so eager for some good headlines — for a change — that they gave away the store?

Somehow I don’t think this will be well received here once it gets some publicity. I ‘spect this is not going down well in Pakistan, either.

Asleep at the Wheel

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This is the sort of quote that makes me want to roll about on the floor and howl:

… even some Bush supporters remain anxious about the economy, the federal deficit, the war in Iraq and the extent of the administration’s warrantless wiretapping.

“The White House has been taking it on the chin lately, and the reverberations are being felt throughout the GOP,” Republican blogger Bobby Eberle wrote this week. “From the Harriet Miers nomination to the Dubai Ports and more, the folks in charge of message strategy appear to be asleep at the wheel.”

The folks in charge of message strategy? That’s the only problem the White House has, substandard bleeping message strategy?

The quote comes from a story by Steven Thomma and James Kuhnhenn of Knight Ridder about increasing GOP anger about President Bush’s “missteps.”

A series of political missteps has raised questions about the Bush administration’s candor, competence and credibility and left the White House off-balance, off-message and unable to command either the nation’s policy agenda or its politics the way the president did during his first term.

This week, newly released video of Bush listening passively to warnings about the dire threat posed by Hurricane Katrina and a report that intelligence analysts warned for more than two years that the insurgency in Iraq could swell into a civil war provided fresh fodder for charges that the president ignores unwelcome alarms.

His attacks on those who questioned his administration’s approval of a seaports deal with the United Arab Emirates and his ill-fated nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court have angered some conservatives and Republican members of Congress.

I really don’t want to pick on Knight Ridder — it has a better record of honest reporting than most other U.S. news outlets — but we’re not really talking about “political missteps.” We’re talking about — finally — facing the inevitable consequences of five years of flaming incompetence.

Paul Krugman writes in today’s New York Times (and True Blue Liberal):

Some commentators speak of the series of disasters now afflicting the Bush administration — there seems to be a new one every week — as if it were just a string of bad luck. But it isn’t.

If good luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, bad luck is what happens when lack of preparation meets a challenge. And our leaders, who think they can govern through a mix of wishful thinking and intimidation, are never, ever prepared.

Krugman looks at three Bush disasters — Iraq, Katrina, the Medicare prescription drug program — and asks what they all have in common. “In each case experts warned about the impending disaster” Krugman says. And in each case, “experts who warned of trouble ahead were told to shut up.”

Eugene Robinson writes in today’s Washington Post:

At least now I know why the White House is so obsessively secretive about its decision-making process. The leaked videotapes and transcripts of pre-Katrina briefings that were obtained this week by the Associated Press leave in tatters the defining myth of the Bush administration — an undeserved aura of cool, unflinching competence and steely resolve. Instead, the tapes show bureaucratic inertia and a president for whom delegation seems to mean detachment. …

… A chief executive who isolates himself from bad news is one thing. A chief executive who hears bad news, in detail, and then plays it back as “heck of a job” is something else.

Robinson adds:

Oh, and health authorities agree that it’s just a matter of time before the avian flu pandemic reaches U.S. shores. The administration says the government is prepared to provide all necessary help to local officials.

Be very afraid.

Also in today’s WaPo A new study warns that Antarctic ice sheets are melting rapidly. Meanwhile, scientists warning about global warming are told to shut up.

At Slate, John Dickerson agrees with Robsinson that the pre-Katrina video shatters Bush myth.

Based on what I’d been told by White House aides over the years, I expected to see the president asking piercing questions that punctured the fog of the moment and inspired bold action. Bush’s question-asking talents are a central tenet of the president’s hagiography. He may not be much for details, say aides, but he can zero in on a weak spot in a briefing and ask out-of-the-box questions.

Yet in the video, Bush doesn’t ask a single question. All he says is ” “I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared,” And he had no idea what he was talking about.

The Bush Administration is a witch’s brew of incompetence, arrogance, avarice, self-deception, and unchecked power. Time and time again, we see the same pattern … the Bushies ignore warnings and expert advice and refuse to acknowledge the consequences.

And this pattern dates from before Bush’s first inauguration, when the outgoing Clinton administration warned Condi Rice and other Bush “security” staff to beware of Osama bin Laden. In April 2001, the State Department issued its annual terrorism report and downplayed the thread posed by Osama bin Laden. At CNN, Judy Woodruff reported,

The State Department officially released its annual terrorism report just a little more than an hour ago, but unlike last year, there’s no extensive mention of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. A senior State Department official tells CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden and “personalizing terrorism.”

Molly Ivins writes,

The administration’s competence problem is already at the yadda, yadda, yadda stage. They were supposed to protect us from terrorist attacks, they said Iraq would be a cakewalk, that we only needed 50,000 troops. They failed to plan for the occupation or Hurricane Katrina or the prescription drug plan. Yadda.

Yet Republican blogger Bobby Eberle sees Bush’s problems as a failure of message strategy.

The President’s ever-shrinking base of die-hard supporters (can we call ’em “bitter enders” yet?) are retreating into a cocoon of finely parsed talking points and absurdist technicalities. Some random examples:

  • One of the AP reporters who “broke” the new pre-Katrina video briefing story used to be a producer for CBS 60 Minutes II. A Rathergate connection!
  • The briefers didn’t say the levees would be breached. They just said they might be “overtopped”! So Bush didn’t lie when he said no one anticipated the levees would be “breached”!!
  • A full three hours after the levees were breached, Louisiana Gov. Blanco (a Democrat!) told the White House “I think we have not breached the levee at this time.” Therefore, it’s not President Bush’s fault he was unaware of the scope of the death of destruction for at least five bleeping more days!!!!

    • Cue music — “You’re travelling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead–your next stop, the Twilight Zone!”

    The Bush Bitter Enders have arrived.

    Dangerous Women

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    In today’s New York Times Adam Liptak writes that many U.S. prisons keep female prisoners shackled while they are in labor.

    Shawanna Nelson, a prisoner at the McPherson Unit in Newport, Ark., had been in labor for more than 12 hours when she arrived at Newport Hospital on Sept. 20, 2003. Ms. Nelson, whose legs were shackled together and who had been given nothing stronger than Tylenol all day, begged, according to court papers, to have the shackles removed.

    Although her doctor and two nurses joined in the request, her lawsuit says, the guard in charge of her refused.

    “She was shackled all through labor,” said Ms. Nelson’s lawyer, Cathleen V. Compton. “The doctor who was delivering the baby made them remove the shackles for the actual delivery at the very end.”

    This is absurd on its face, but only two states — California and Illinois — have laws forbidding the shackling of prisoners in labor. But this is my favorite part:

    Corrections officials say they must strike a balance between security and the well-being of the pregnant woman and her child.

    “Though these are pregnant women,” said Dina Tyler, a spokeswoman for the Arkansas Department of Corrections, “they are still convicted felons, and sometimes violent in nature. There have been instances when we’ve had a female inmate try to hurt hospital staff during delivery.”

    Listen, Dina, laboring women who are not convicts have tried to hurt hospital and delivery staff during delivery. (A couple of hours before my daughter entered the world I tried to get out of bed to strangle a nurse. True story. She wouldn’t bring me ice chips! What was I supposed to do?)

    However, women in labor rarely become homicidal or escape from hospitals by tying sheets together and lowering themselves out of the window. This is especially true once the contractions are two minutes apart or less. Two minutes or less doesn’t give you time to accomplish much.

    The shackles really are cruel, because laboring women need to be able to move around, sometimes even walk around. It helps.

    On the other hand I wouldn’t hand a loaded gun to a woman in labor — especially while the baby’s father’s in range.

    At Least Saddam Is in Jail

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    Via Chris at AMERICAblog, Ed Johnson of the Associated Press reports,

    Human rights abuses in Iraq are as bad now as they were under Saddam Hussein, as lawlessness and sectarian violence sweep the country, the former U.N. human rights chief in Iraq said Thursday.

    John Pace, who last month left his post as director of the human rights office at the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, said the level of extra-judicial executions and torture is soaring, and morgue workers are being threatened by both government-backed militia and insurgents not to properly investigate deaths.

    “Under Saddam, if you agreed to forgo your basic right to freedom of expression and thought, you were physically more or less OK,” Pace said in an interview with The Associated Press. “But now, no. Here, you have a primitive, chaotic situation where anybody can do anything they want to anyone.”

    Sounds pretty grim.

    Update:     See also the BBC, “Gangs ‘Kill Freely’ in Iraq Chaos.”

    Bush’s “Leadership”

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    Read Dan Froomkin [emphasis added]:

    White House spokesman Trent Duffy said this yesterday: “I hope people don’t draw conclusions from the president getting a single briefing. He received multiple briefings from multiple officials, and he was completely engaged at all times.”

    But where, then, is the first-hand evidence of this engagement? Where is the evidence of Bush’s leadership?

    The government’s response to Hurricane Katrina was (and continues to be) a massive failure. The new videotape offers a visceral illustration of how some, if not a lot of the blame, lay in a leader who saw his job as expressing unjustified confidence and making empty promises, rather than taking action to make sure his people were safe.

    Hurricane Katrina (as I wrote as early as Aug. 31 ) was the second great challenge of Bush’s presidency.

    Which inevitably makes me think of how Bush responded, in a moment also “caught on tape,” to his first. After finding out that the nation was under attack on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush remained frozen in his seat in a Florida classroom for seven minutes.

    The grainy video from that classroom, a hallmark of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” can be found at The Memory Hole.

    A staff report from the 9/11 commission described that morning:

    “The President was seated in a classroom of second graders when, at approximately 9:05, Andrew Card whispered to him: ‘A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.’ The President told us his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis.”

    But even after he left the classroom, he didn’t call the Pentagon. He didn’t ask if there were other aircraft hijacked or missing. Instead, he and his staff worked on a statement to the press.

    Faced with challenges like these — an attack on our nation or a natural disaster bearing down on our shores — we can reasonably expect that our presidents will stand up, demand answers and options, and lead.

    If the White House insists that Bush did that with Hurricane Katrina, it is incumbent upon them to back up that claim up with evidence. Otherwise, the image of him mouthing platitudes threatens to become defining of his presidency.

    Eric Alterman:

    Tuesday night, ABC News’ Elizabeth Vargas asked the President about the administration’s response to Katrina, and the failures of the Homeland Security Department, an institution the president opposed until it became politically impossible to do so. The President admitted, “There was no situational awareness, and that means that we weren’t getting good, solid information from people who were on the ground…in many cases we were relying upon the media, who happened to have better situational awareness than the government.”

    Viewers must have been confused. Was that supposed to be an excuse or an explanation? How in the world was such a failure possible four years after 9/11? The President even offered DHS head Michael Chertoff his own “Brownie” moment during the interview, saying that he thinks he’s “doing a fine job”. Given the President’s assessment of Michael Brown’s job in New Orleans and the Congressional Medals of Honor be bestowed on Paul “Pace Yourself” Bremer and George “Slam Dunk” Tenet – one can only imagine what it takes to demonstrate genuine incompetence in this administration.

    And the moral is, strutting around in a flight suit is not “leadership.” I think finally most people are catching on.

    Also: Please take the BlogAds Survey and fill in “The Mahablog” on line 23. Thanks!

    Update: See also “What Bush Was Told About Iraq” by Murray Waas.

    The Further Adventures of Bubble Boy

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    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.