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Since I had not been able to shake that insipid image of the cavalier torturer in the armchair, there is little excuse for my being surprised at what Bush writes in his memoir about his role in ordering torture and the pride he takes in having done so.
I should have been fully prepared for Decision Points, in which the counterfeit cowboy assumes the very same posture of in-your-face-and-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it-when-even-the-wimps-sworn-to-enforce-the-law-are-too-timid-to-do-so.
I have seen much change in the body politic since I arrived in Washington, DC, almost 48 years ago. There is one change, however, that dwarfs all others in significance. It is that the country no longer has, in any real sense, a free media. Read Jefferson and Madison on the importance of a free media to preserving a democracy and you will be reminded of how very BIG this change really is.
Don't believe me? This coming week, watch how the media gives George W. Bush a stay-out-of-jail pass as he starts to peddle his lie-infested memoir on TV and in bookstores. Watch how the moneyed interests he served lionize him at the groundbreaking for Bush's "Presidential Center" in Dallas on Nov. 16.
The accomplices of the FCM can be counted on to suppress the truth about Bush and about their own complicity in cheerleading for war, torture and the rest. As is well known, cheerleading is a team effort demanding equal enthusiasm by all.
Maybe this is the real reason why NBC chose this particular time to put Keith Olbermann on leave without pay. Olbermann would never quite "get with the program."
Unlike most of his pundit colleagues, he was uncomfortable buying into the wisdom of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who famously said:
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it"It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
How does the Big Lie technique translate to today? Simple. We will be getting a steady diet of this kind of punditry: waterboarding is merely something that a bunch of liberals associate with torture. And, besides, we waterboarded some of our own servicemen to show them what it was like (as if no one has the mental capacity to distinguish between a demonstration and the real thing). And, Bush's confidence was bolstered by the results of his painstaking efforts to acquire guidance from both the legal and the medical profession. Right?
And most of the lawyers and doctors of this great country will keep silent -- even in the face of that kind of provocation.
Media Attention
With the book not yet formally released, it has been easier for the FCM to give Bush's bragging on waterboarding relatively little attention.
Last Thursday, after Bush's comment on torture hit the news, the Washington Post, to its credit, ran on page two a report by staff writer R. Jeffrey Smith titled "Bush says in memoir he approved waterboarding." Smith even noted in his first paragraph that "simulated drownings [are] a practice that many international legal experts say was illicit torture."
Smith highlights Bush's admission that he answered, "Damn right," when CIA thugs asked permission to waterboard "9/11 mastermind" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for the first of 183 times, and indicates that Bush repeated the mantra that he would decide the same way again "to save lives."
That was Thursday. On Sunday the Post hastened to inject the customary "balance" with a long panegyric defending George W. Bush from "Five Myths" spread by "liberals" and other recalcitrants unwilling to give him his due.
Did you know, for example, that Bush was "personally invested in compassionate conservatism?" And that his "experience as a born-again Christian led him to empathize with individuals' personal struggles and to respect the role of religion in civic life?" So writes Professor Julian Zelizer of Princeton, whom the Post apparently paid bucks for "balance."
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