In other words: A discussion of The Bush Administration
"You and Paul Krugman are enabling each other"
is the quote from my pal Nagourney at the Times, in response to something I sent him more than a year ago. Here's Krugman in a recent Buzzflash interview about Bush and those Orange Alerts:
Paul Krugman: ... For four years now, some of us have been saying, whether or not you think they’re bad guys, they’re certainly radical. They don’t play by the rules. You can’t take anything that you’ve regarded as normal from previous U.S. political experience as applying to Bush and the people around him. They will say things and do things that would not previously have made any sense -- you know, would have been previously considered out of bounds. And for all of that period, the critics have been told: "Oh, you know, you’re overreacting, and there’s something wrong with you."
We just saw it with the increased level of terror alerts. Among those of us who had made a judgment about what kind of people we’re dealing with, the reaction was, this timing was awfully convenient. After all, they’ve done this sort of thing before. Of course, this was criticized as completely unreasonable to say -- after all, this time we’ve got "specifics." But here we are with this morning’s headlines: Oh, it’s all three-year-old information.
BuzzFlash: Headlines in mostly The Washington Post and The New York Times revealed the information predated 9/11.
Paul Krugman: Right.
BuzzFlash: There was an article, as you know, in The New Republic, which said the Bush Administration had put pressure on the Pakistani government to come up with a "high-profile al Qaeda target" in the last two weeks of July, and preferably during the Democratic Convention. That article was met with a lot of skepticism, although it was quite detailed and written by three people for a prestigious publication. And indeed, what has happened is it has been announced that a high-target al Qaeda individual was arrested by the Pakistanis. He had actually been arrested the Saturday before the Democratic Convention, but it was only announced, I believe, on Wednesday or Thursday.
Paul Krugman: It was Thursday, a few hours before Kerry’s speech.
BuzzFlash: So exactly what had been foretold, but dismissed by some as a conspiratorial theory, was proven to be true. On top of that,it was three-year-old information, the pre-9/11 information, that was the primary basis, even the Administration admits, for the so-called specific terror alerts. (They said "specific," even though the information was more than three years old.) The information came from the computer of this high-target al Qaeda figure who was captured by the Pakistanis at the request of the Bush Administration, basically, to drown out the message of the Democratic Convention.
Paul Krugman: Well, you know, just about a year ago, in one of the new columns in my book, I said that the stakes are very high for the Bushies, because we all know that there are terrible suppressed scandals. And that was before we even had any hint about Abu Ghraib. They will do anything to win. You have to expect that it’s going to be the dirtiest campaign in American history, and so it’s proving. We probably ain’t seen nothing yet. Over and over again, the people who made a judgment about the motives of the Administration, and assessed the facts on the basis of that judgment, have proved again and again to be getting it right in interpreting the latest story. People who keep on clinging to the belief that these are reasonable people who behave like a conventional government have been snookered.
Enabling is a funny kind of a word coming from the NYTimes' chief political correspondent, even if he was only teasing (he was); still, you can see how anyone who sees through the Bush administration's cynical ploys to arrive at an independent conclusion is immediately branded and marginalized by major media commentators and hence 99.9 percent of the American public.
We're told not to think.
One leg good, no legs better!
- Michael 1:54 PM - [PermaLink] -
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