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Case and point: gaze yonder at the shifting platform—more
pernicious plan than surface, more prop than principle,
the Bush team has worked a relentlessly effective
two-headed slogan into the argot of the current political
clime. It’s a slogan that eases and excites,
all while covering every angle: America Is Safe, but
Be Afraid.
Bush’s advantage is our misfortune; he’s
stumping around the so-called ‘battleground
states’ hyping how his Iraq adventure has made
Americans more safe, all while Cheney wields the gravitas.
The world has changed, Cheney bellows to the faceless
many (usually seated in GOP friendly confines like
the conservative think-tank, the Heritage Foundation);
‘the prospect of a future attack against the
United States is almost certain.’ Apparently
in Bush’s world, the condition of ‘more
safe’ can be easily substituted with ‘less
safe.’ And that’s just the beginning.
The ilk of Bush’s mantra, America Is Safe:
Be Afraid, is more brazenly subtle than Bush’s
renegade reversals; unlike Kerry—who is incessantly
fingered for chronic flip-flopping by the administration
and its lackeys—Bush has flipped and, consequently
flopped, on nearly every big issue that’s dared
to raise its head during his tumultuous term. Moreover,
Bush’s reversals are as black-and-white, as
this-or-that, as his ‘thinking.’
Like Bush’s demarcating dare, ‘you’re
either with us, or against us,’ his (mis)judgment
on many key issues showcases not only his disregard
for American’s basic welfare, it casts light
on a simplistic man who’s allowed his truncated
purview and closet cynicism to hijack his support,
and therefore the American people right along with
it. How else might one explain his pledge not to touch
the Social Security Surplus—which resulted in
Bush’s touching, and spending of the Social
Security Surplus? How might one explain Bush’s
concession to state governments to handle gay marriage
that turned into a concession to his evangelical base?
Shifting from indifference to obsession, Bush decided
to make a massive wedge-issue out of the gay marriage
debate, politicizing it from coast to coast, touting
the ‘sanctity’ of marriage, and supporting
a constitutional amendment to prevent same-sex unions,
effectively diverting the certain destruction of civilization.
And it only gets worse: How might one explain how
Bush oscillates between wanting bin Laden ‘dead
or alive’, and—at a Presidential Press
Conference (March 13, 2002)—admitting to not
‘spending too much time on him?’
Why didn’t Bush simply tell those firefighters
and rescue workers digging through the smoldering
rubble of Ground Zero on Sept. 15, 2001 that those
people that knocked down our buildings were only the
bearers of opportunity for he and the neo-cons? I
suppose that his ‘defining’ moment, replete
with bullhorn and sagacious firefighter propped under
his arm, wouldn’t get as much play at the upcoming
GOP convention if he had admitted to ultimately ‘not
spending that much time on [bin Laden].’
And yet Bush and Cheney spend an inordinate amount
of time on bedazzling the American people with factually
fractured claims, all delivered with a near mythic
bravado and hubris. Of course, we know by now that
there were no WMD in Iraq, but Bush, as of May 29,
2003, believed we had found them; and he wasted little
time relaying the (mis)information to myriad news
sources. Eventually, these ‘weapons’ turned
out to be only weapons of mass destruction-related
program activities, which aren’t really ‘weapons’
per se, but rather the ‘desire’ to acquire
them in much the same way as you or I desire to acquire
a bottomless quart of Ben & Jerry’s.
Bush ultimately came clean, admitting that there
had been no real weapons uncovered (but I’m
positive it took all of Bush’s reserve to not
utter the neo-con’s new-fangled acronym—WMDRPA).
Of course, we know by now that there was no Iraq-al
Qaeda connection, but that didn’t stop Bush
from claiming that it’s impossible to distinguish
between Hussein and al Qaeda; and even after Bush
admitted no connection, he’s got Cheney out
there sounding the trumpets: but, there is a connection;
there really, really is. While this may cast an air
of stupidity unto Bush, don’t assume that he
is, even if when he’s asked to discuss tribal
sovereignty he sounds emphatically so.
This is the main problem: Bush is not stupid; he
knows that the more he whittles his language, the
more he repeats his ersatz claims, the more the media
repeats them; the more we repeat them. Bush knows
about fear, yes, but he also knows the potency of
compression. Kerry: Bad; Bush: Good is the essential
substance of the administration’s claim; and
the more they say it, the more the media says it;
the more we say it. Ultimately, it doesn’t even
matter how often Bush ‘flip-flops,’ we’re
too busy listening to him telling the media to tell
us how to receive him; and if we keep listening, and
don’t start parsing his language, we’ll
be listening to it for four more years.
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