If any further proof were needed after Zell Miller’s pit bull performance the other
night that reality and Republicans do not share the same universe, it was demonstrated once again
from the podium in Madison Square Garden by a president so proud of his Texas swagger that he
inevitably creates the impression of a prevaricating gunslinger.
“There was nothing in the speech last night that suggested a new era of frankness from the
White House, or hope that any … fundamental problems” — immigration reform, stem cell
research, polarization of the electorate, to name just three — “would be approached with anything
but the ‘my way or the highway’ attitude Mr. Bush has used on issues like tax cuts and Iraq.”
So said this morning’s negative editorial in The New York Times,
which described his domestic, so-called proposals for the future as “extremely vague
concepts” and “troubled, half-finished initiatives.” As for his judgment of current
conditions, it consists of outlandish exaggerations. For example, “he presented the dangerous and
chaotic situation in Iraq as a picture of triumphant foreign policy on a par with the Marshall Plan.”
The Washington Post had a mixed editorial — mixed only
because it began by saying he “offered a robust defense of his first term and a forceful case
for giving him a second,” but then proceeded to undermine its own premise. “The chief
difficulty with Mr. Bush’s speech,” it said, “wasn’t so much what he put in, but what he left out:
the missteps and difficulties that have marred his first term and will make many of the goals he
cited difficult to obtain.”
The Post said his domestic proposals “were short on detail.” For instance, he failed to say that
reforming Social Security his way “would cost $1 trillion or more over the next decade” and
would be “daunting” — to put it mildly — now that his “tax cuts have piled up record deficits.”
Deficits? What deficits? He never mentioned them, even though he “promised to make his
reckless tax cuts permanent.” And while railing “against federal spending,” he “proposed a raft of
new spending programs and tax credits.”
In the Midwest, the Chicago Sun-Times did not have an editorial — at least not online. The
positive
editorial in the Chicago Tribune, however, begged to differ with its
Eastern rivals. It hailed “the agenda Bush outlined” as “a refreshing balm for voters frustrated by
decades of nanny-state proposals that hinge on big government solutions” and said his notion of a
so-called “ownership society” would “offer intriguing alternatives.”
In the West, The Los Angeles Times headlined its negative editorial
“Consistently Inconsistent” and pointed out in the first paragraph: “His well-written speech would
have been more convincing if he had not actually been president for the last four years.”
I don’t see a Wall Street Journal editorial about the speech online, not even for paying
subscribers, which is just as well. I can imagine what it would say, but I’d rather not. It
would ruin my Labor Day weekend.
Postscript: New York City was held in contempt of court and
ordered to release hundreds of anti-Bush protesters following “one of the largest mass arrests in
the country’s history,” far exceeding the number arrested at the 1968 Democratic Convention in
Chicago. A judge ruled that the city had failed to provide the speedy justice required by law. In
New York, detainees under arrest must be arraigned within 24 hours or be released.
Watch Democracy Now‘s
report and its interview with the protesters who managed to make it into this week’s
Republic Convention. The authorities — police, Secret Service and Homeland Security —
were pissed off at them, they said, because by infiltrating the convention they had shown that the
vaunted security measures were less effective than claimed. In other words, if the
protesters could do it, terrorists could have.
PPS: Just caught up with William Saletin’s take, in
Slate, on the little fucker’s spew. It strikes me as especially good. “This was a speech all
about what Bush will do, and what will happen, if he becomes
president,” Saletin writes. “Except he already is president.” (Italics added.)
Saletin draws a bead on the sublime contradiction of the rhetoric, singling out
the tricky metaphor that “Americans have been given hills to climb”:
Recession. Unemployment. Corporate fraud. A war based on false premises
that has cost us $200 billion and nearly a thousand American lives. They’re all hills we’ve “been
given to climb.” It’s as though Bush wasn’t president. As though he didn’t get the tax cuts he
wanted. As though he didn’t bring about postwar Iraq and authorize the planning for it. All this
was “given,” and now Bush can show up, three and a half years into his term, and start solving the
problems some other president left behind.
But Saletin’s favorite moment — because it was laden with unintended irony — came
when the prez touted the No Child Left Behind Act, which demands that students pass required
tests for promotion. “We are insisting on accountability, the prez boasted. LOL. “Shouldn’t the
president have to show results, too?” Saletin asks.
