I haven't had much to say about the unraveling of the Bush White House. It's amazing to think that just a year ago he was exulting in his recent victory. In many ways I feel sorry for him. He was from the beginning a guy who was in way over his head manipulated by Rove and Cheney for their own purposes. An empty screen with a big name on which they could project a fabricated image that unwitting Americans could buy into.
I've never disliked Bush. I just came to hate what his presidency represented. I remember reading some of the early on reporting about him from some Texas reporters who got to know him during his years as governor. They felt he was very reluctant to take on this job. Too much work; too much pressure. Too much complexity.
But now that Rove and Cheney have their own problems to deal with, Bush is forced to fend for himself, and the picture isn't pretty. Reports are that he's isolating himself, and you have to wonder who really is running things now. I never believed Bush had the capacity to do so. It's not a question of intelligence; it's a question of character, and it's kind of nervous making if you think too much about how rudderless things are now. How ironic that this guy was elected because Americans believed he was the strong, steady leader who would insure their security.
And so now pretty much all the White House can do is continue the big lie. We have learned that Bush's hard-core support comes from the true-believers-non-reality-based community, and as Josh Marshall points out today, the administration will lose even the support they give him unless the big lie is kept alive:
Virtually all of the arguments the White House is now advancing [in defense of their Iraq War policies] are transparently ridiculous on their face to anyone who has closely followed this evolving debate over the last three years.
But that doesn't matter. The White House doesn't need to win any debates. What they need is for their core supporters to have something to say. Anything. And to be able to say it loudly. The one thing that would be fatal for the White House from its defenders would be silence.
I don't say this as a counsel of pessimism or futility. It's just important to understand, to know what they're trying to achieve. The good news is that most Americans have already figured this out. Clear majorities of the public now believe this president misled them about Iraq. And they'll certainly grow. The key is to press these on the specifics, why they said these things they knew weren't true.
So when we hear any of the ridiculous things coming out of the White House right now, there's no need to fight back. If anybody believes anything these people say anymore, they are unreachable. It's all rather pathetic. The administration, which was built on a lie from the beginning is crumbling from its own inner incoherence, much the same way as the Soviet Union crumbled in the late eighties. They always looked stronger than they were. Looking at them in retrospect, it's clear that it was only a matter of time. Nevertheless, they were pretty scary there for awhile. But it is still disturbing to know that things have to unravel so dramatically for the ordinary American to see that the propaganda has no relationship to what's really happening. It's frightening to think that so many Americans are so vulnerable to propagandistic manipulation.
Now the question is whether a robust alternative can emerge that will return the U.S. to a respected actor on the world stage who can play a role in the shaping a just, humane global order in this new century. The Project for a New American Century has always been misguided even from the assumptions implicit in its name. I'm interested in the Project for a New Global Century. This is a challenge for which I hope a radical centrism will emerge to define the most robust, fruitful way forward.