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	We Americans are like recovering addicts after a four-year bender by Naomi Wolf, Paul Krugman The Guardian / New York Times USA   November 7, 2005   "We Americans are like recovering addicts after a four-year bender", by Naomi Wolf.   President Bush made his white constituency feel good about themselves, but no longer. Citizens are rediscovering democracy.   In the US comic strip, Peanuts, there is a little boy who is always followed by a cloud of dust. Wherever he goes, his cloud follows him. George Bush can"t shake his personal cloud. The until recently eerily untouchable president has now lost his mojo. The man to whom the entire US press corps has been on its knees for four years is finally in the doghouse.   It is almost a cartoon of karma. First, hurricane Katrina hit - and the sight of black and brown bodies floating in what had been the streets of a US city, of babies crying for water, of old people shrouded in their wheelchairs seemed to rip right through the collective fantasy of US goodness and infallibility constructed by Dick Cheney and his cabal and hyped by a crotch-strapped Bush in a flightsuit.   How did he get away with so many lies for so long? After 9/11, Bush, Cheney and Karl Rove successfully used the fear of more terrorist attacks and the intoxicant of ruthless jingoism to sedate the country and make it compliant.   They could not have had more fortunate timing. During an era when US prestige abroad had already been declining, when US schools were turning out subliterates, when the US economy was being crippled by competition from harder-working south-east Asians and Chinese, Americans - and especially American men - were feeling the sinking self-regard characteristic of those losing prestige in once-great empires in decline.   Bush, Cheney and Rove changed all that with their myth making post-9/11. Suddenly those feminists were no longer so threatening: we still needed tough men in firefighter suits to protect the less powerful. Suddenly American men could feel potent at the sight of a statue of a tyrant toppling in a public square, could vicariously inhale the discourse about "liberating the Middle East" and "spreading democracy", could put a yellow "Support the Troops" sticker on their SUVs and forget the spiking mortgage, the downsizing of good-paying white-collar jobs, the increasing obstreperousness of their women. Bush managed to be golden for so long because he made Americans - and especially white American men, his core constituency - feel good about their identity again.   Well, Katrina was like the end of the Wizard of Oz: the tiny, fibbing man was revealed behind the great big voice and the inflated ideals. Scene after scene of the failure of the US to act like the US held a mirror up to our faces. It was like an intervention for a drug addict: suddenly the lies, the hype, the intoxicants, the bad company, looked as destructive to our true selves as Americans as they really had been all along. "This is not who we are," we realised inwardly, in revulsion at our own long bender.   So now Bush can get no slack. The Miers fiasco showed him up as arrogant - no news, but we are sick of it now. The Valerie Plame leak suddenly feels serious, now that Bush has lost the monopoly on the word "treachery". The press is refusing to go away in the face of threats and platitudes. We hit the 2,000 mark for dead young American men and women in Iraq, and no one thought that was inspiring any more. The man can do nothing right.   It"s true that, in spite of Bush"s current implosion, some rightwing structures will remain well past this lame-duck presidency. The right has a firm grasp on such powerful institutions as Fox News, the network of think tanks, and soon, probably, the supreme court as well.   But here is the thing about democracy: when it is really working, it is not deferential to institutions. Real citizen action upends the best-laid plans of the best-financed oligarchs. Alabama was locked up politically in 1955 by segregationist old boys - but a bus boycott, sparked by a seamstress, Rosa Parks, who did not want to give up her seat, led the Jim Crow henchmen at the top into irrelevance. Because of an outburst of second-wave feminist activism, Roe v Wade was passed in spite of a number of conservative justices during a conservative Nixon presidency. Before Katrina, when the mass hypnosis of US jingoism still prevailed, there was widespread judicial support for curtailing the rights of war prisoners. Now, because of a changed national mood, judges seem far less eager to hand over authoritarian executive privilege to Bush. Justices, in other words, are people who live in and cannot help but respond to the bigger cultural shifts of their time. I believe in the power of this cultural shift around us to move even the judiciary: Institutions are made up of human beings, and no one likes being looked at with contempt at dinner parties.   But will this shift in the wind affect US relations with the larger world community? I think it could, but not, again, because our role at the UN will change or because we will have an awakening about our pathetic behaviour in relation to Kyoto. The shift in foreign relations will be an outcome of ordinary human shame. We were willing to be held in contempt by those effeminate Frogs - by "old Europe" - when we were intoxicated with ourselves: our isolationism made that easy. But now we are actually ashamed of ourselves at home, we can"t bear international contempt in the same way. Now it hurts.   I don"t see Cheney being shamed into dropping his Halliburton cronies now carving up Iraq. But I do see a renewed citizen interest in wind power, in driving petrol-electric hybrid cars, in reading about the short lives of the war dead - who, only six months ago, were spirited home away from the cameras in their body bags, when protest was considered unseemly. Today on the AOL homepage there is a headline about Bush being jeered by a foreign leader: that story would never have made it out of the land of blogs six months ago.   Like recovering addicts who have taken a step into a 12-step programme, we are ready at last to hear how we have harmed others - and to try to make amends. Star, the supermarket gossip tabloid, has put Angelina Jolie"s work with Ethiopian Aids orphans on the cover, with a bigger photo than that of Paris Hilton"s latest outfit. We used not to think black children in trouble overseas had anything to do with us - until we saw what happened to other black children, on our watch, here at home.   I do feel hopeful: everywhere I go, I hear disgust at our long drunken lurch through recent history give way to a renewed interest among ordinary people in activism, in justice, in what we used to understand as citizenship. I am less concerned about whether this results in a Democratic or Republican victory at mid-term elections than I am in whether we get to be a democracy again.   I am seeing Americans across party lines look again at what made us for so long, a moral force in the world - our judiciary, our until recently free press, our almost-retired belief in the equality of all - and think, yes, that is who we are. That is what makes us able to face ourselves in the mirror of news events. That is what made the US great, when it was great - not armies, not penal colonies, not a licence to terrify the world.   Bush will never recover his swagger in our eyes: he was our dealer. What remains to be seen is whether we will turn again to the next good drug to come along, with the next charismatic pusher - or whether Katrina"s real legacy will lead us to do the hard work of reclaiming a civil society rooted in reality. My bet is on the latter.   31 October 2005   "Ending the Fraudulence", by Paul Krugman. (The New York Times)   Let me be frank: it has been a long political nightmare. For some of us, daily life has remained safe and comfortable, so the nightmare has merely been intellectual: we realized early on that this administration was cynical, dishonest and incompetent, but spent a long time unable to get others to see the obvious. For others - above all, of course, those Americans risking their lives in a war whose real rationale has never been explained - the nightmare has been all too concrete.   So is the nightmare finally coming to an end? Yes, I think so. I have no idea whether Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, will bring more indictments in the Plame affair. In any case, I don"t share fantasies that Dick Cheney will be forced to resign; even Karl Rove may keep his post. One way or another, the Bush administration will stagger on for three more years. But its essential fraudulence stands exposed, and it"s hard to see how that exposure can be undone.   What do I mean by essential fraudulence? Basically, I mean the way an administration with an almost unbroken record of policy failure has nonetheless achieved political dominance through a carefully cultivated set of myths.   The record of policy failure is truly remarkable. It sometimes seems as if President Bush and Mr. Cheney are Midases in reverse: everything they touch - from Iraq reconstruction to hurricane relief, from prescription drug coverage to the pursuit of Osama - turns to crud. Even the few apparent successes turn out to contain failures at their core: for example, real G.D.P. may be up, but real wages are down.   The point is that this administration"s political triumphs have never been based on its real-world achievements, which are few and far between. The administration has, instead, built its power on myths: the myth of presidential leadership, the ugly myth that the administration is patriotic while its critics are not. Take away those myths, and the administration has nothing left.   Well, Katrina ended the leadership myth, which was already fading as the war dragged on. There was a time when a photo of Mr. Bush looking out the window of Air Force One on 9/11 became an iconic image of leadership. Now, a similar image of Mr. Bush looking out at a flooded New Orleans has become an iconic image of his lack of connection. Pundits may try to resurrect Mr. Bush"s reputation, but his cult of personality is dead - and the inscription on the tombstone reads, "Brownie, you"re doing a heck of a job."   Meanwhile, the Plame inquiry, however it winds up, has ended the myth of the administration"s monopoly on patriotism, which was also fading in the face of the war.   Apologists can shout all they like that no laws were broken, that hardball politics is nothing new, or whatever. The fact remains that officials close to both Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush leaked the identity of an undercover operative for political reasons. Whether or not that act was illegal, it was clearly unpatriotic.   And the Plame affair has also solidified the public"s growing doubts about the administration"s morals. By a three-to-one margin, according to a Washington Post poll, the public now believes that the level of ethics and honesty in the government has declined rather than risen under Mr. Bush.   So the Bush administration has lost the myths that sustained its mojo, and with them much of its power to do harm. But the nightmare won"t be fully over until two things happen.   First, politicians will have to admit that they were misled. Second, the news media will have to face up to their role in allowing incompetents to pose as leaders and political apparatchiks to pose as patriots.   It"s a sad commentary on the timidity of most Democrats that even now, with Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell"s former chief of staff, telling us how policy was "hijacked" by the Cheney-Rumsfeld "cabal," it"s hard to get leading figures to admit that they were misled into supporting the Iraq war. Kudos to John Kerry for finally saying just that last week.   And as for the media: these days, there is much harsh, justified criticism of the failure of major news organizations, this one included, to exert due diligence on rationales for the war. But the failures that made the long nightmare possible began much earlier, during the weeks after 9/11, when the media eagerly helped our political leaders build up a completely false picture of who they were.   So the long nightmare won"t really be over until journalists ask themselves: what did we know, when did we know it, and why didn"t we tell the public?
	Remember that Mushroom Cloud by The Seattle Post / New York Times USA   02 November 2005   Remember That Mushroom Cloud? (The New York Times)   The indictment of Lewis Libby on charges of lying to a grand jury about the outing of Valerie Wilson has focused attention on the lengths to which the Bush administration went in 2003 to try to distract the public from this central fact: American soldiers found a lot of things in Iraq, including a well-armed insurgency their bosses never anticipated, but they did not find weapons of mass destruction.   It"s clear from the indictment that Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff formed the command bunker for this misdirection campaign. But there is a much larger issue than the question of what administration officials said about Iraq after the invasion - it"s what they said about Iraq before the invasion.   President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and George Tenet, to name a few leading figures, built support for the war by telling the world that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling chemical weapons, feverishly developing germ warfare devices and racing to build a nuclear bomb. Some of them, notably Mr. Cheney, the administration"s doomsayer in chief, said Iraq had conspired with Al Qaeda and implied that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11.   Last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee did a good bipartisan job of explaining that the intelligence in general was dubious, old and even faked by foreign sources. The panel said the analysts had suffered from groupthink. At the time, the highest-ranking officials in Washington were demanding evidence against Iraq.   But that left this question: If the intelligence was so bad and so moldy, why was it presented to the world as what Mr. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, famously called "a slam-dunk" case?   Were officials fooled by bad intelligence, or knowingly hyping it? Certainly, the administration erased caveats, dissents and doubts from the intelligence reports before showing them to the public. And there was never credible intelligence about a working relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.   Under a political deal that Democrats should not have approved, the Intelligence Committee promised to address these questions after the 2004 election. But a year later, there is no sign that this promise is being kept, other than unconvincing assurances from Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican who is chairman of the intelligence panel, that people are working on it.   So far, however, there has been only one uncirculated draft report by one committee staff member on the narrow question of why the analysts didn"t predict the ferocity of the insurgency. The Republicans have not even agreed to do a final report on the conflict between the intelligence and the administration"s public statements.   Mr. Reid wrested a commitment from the Senate to have a bipartisan committee report by Nov. 14 on when the investigation will be done. We hope Mr. Roberts now gives this half of the investigation the same urgency he gave the first half and meets his commitment to examine all aspects of this mess, including how the information was used by the administration. Americans are long overdue for an answer to why they were told there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.   October 27, 2005   “Leak indictments would be “a sad day," Wilson says”, by Sam Skolnik. (Seattle Post – Intelligencer)   Visiting Seattle on the eve of possible grand jury indictments against top White House advisers over the leak of his wife"s identity as an undercover CIA officer, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson said it was "a sad day for our country."   Wilson said Wednesday he took little comfort that the men he believes have engaged in a campaign of character assassination against him for the past two years - Karl Rove, President Bush"s deputy chief of staff, and Lewis Libby, the vice president"s chief of staff - may soon be facing charges and possible jail time.   "The fact that this may become a crisis of governance should please no one," Wilson said. He said that by publicly questioning the president"s reasoning for the war in Iraq, he was simply acting in the country"s best traditions. "It is called holding your government to account for what it says and does in the name of the American people. We need to put this government on notice that it truly is a government of the people, by the people and for the people. "When a government takes the country to war on lies and misinformation, that government ceases to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And that government becomes a government that preys on the people."   Though Rove and Libby appear to be at the heart of the grand jury investigation, The New York Times reported this week that, according to lawyers involved in the case, Vice President Dick Cheney first disclosed the name of Wilson"s wife, Valerie Plame, to Libby in June 2003. But Libby testified to the grand jury, according to lawyers close to the case, that he first heard the name of Wilson"s wife from journalists.   The two-year grand jury investigation is now coming to a head. Knowingly disclosing the identity of covert federal agents is a crime. Fitzgerald is also investigating other possible crimes, including obstruction of justice, making false statements to a grand jury and mishandling classified information.   Wilson served as a career diplomat from 1976 to 1998. In 2002, he was asked to investigate claims that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapons program.When his inquiry turned up nothing, Wilson said he reported to officials in Washington that the claims were unfounded.   Wilson publicized his beliefs in a July 2003 Op-Ed column for The New York Times, arguing that the Bush White House had distorted intelligence about Saddam"s attempts to acquire nuclear materials in order to justify the invasion of Iraq.   The article angered the administration, which denied the accusation. Eight days later, in what Wilson and his supporters saw as raw personal payback, syndicated newspaper columnist Robert Novak published a column noting that he had been told by top administration officials that Wilson"s wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA officer, may have played a major role in having Wilson sent to Niger.   "What I did was write 1,500 words in The New York Times," he said during the speech. "This was not an act of civil disobedience. This was an act of civil responsibility." Wilson said he doesn"t regret saying that Karl Rove ought to be "frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs".   He said the more important thing is that the legal system functions properly and justice is served. "I believe in the institutions that have made our country great for 229 years," he said. "I continue to believe that the system, rooted to the rule of law, will be up to the task."
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