Traveling from New York City in late September 2001, on a pre-scheduled book tour, author Joan Didion spoke with audiences in several cities on the West Coast. In the wake of 9/11, she later wrote, “these people to whom I was listening — in San Francisco and Los Angeles and Portland and Seattle — were making connections I had not yet in my numbed condition thought to make: connections between [the American] political process and what had happened on September 11, connections between our political life and the shape our reaction would take and was in fact already taking. These people recognized that even then, within days after the planes hit, there was a good deal of opportunistic ground being seized under cover of the clearly urgent need for increased security. These people recognized even then, with flames still visible in lower Manhattan, that the words ‘bipartisanship’ and ‘national unity’ had come to mean acquiescence to the administration’s preexisting agenda…”

A lot of media coverage was glorifying people who died and/or showed courage on September 11, 2001. “In fact,” Didion contended, “it was in the reflexive repetition of the word ‘hero’ that we began to hear what would become in the year that followed an entrenched preference for ignoring the meaning of the event in favor of an impenetrably flattening celebration of its victims, and a troublingly belligerent idealization of historical ignorance.”

To observe the political manipulation of 9/11 after the towers collapsed was to witness a multidimensional power grab exercised largely via mass media…

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For President Bush, a classic political question — “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” — must be answered with a resounding “No.”
In 2001, within days of 9/11, mass media touted Bush as a walking FDR and hailed him as the nation’s visionary leader. The president settled into a jerky rhetorical rhythm that had the Washington press corps tapping its feet.

With major assistance from the news media, Bush struck a pose as the country’s protector-in-chief. That was his story, and he was sticking to it.

But now, in the wake of the hurricane, Bush is widely seen as the nation’s menace-in-chief…

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Calls for firing Michael Brown are understandable. Aptly described as “the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA” by columnist Maureen Dowd a few days ago, he’s an easy and appropriate target.

President Bush met with Brown last Friday and publicly told him: “You’re doing a heck of a job.”

In the grisly wake of the hurricane, Brown’s job performance cannot be separated from Bush’s job performance. To similar deadly effect, the president has brought to bear on people in New Orleans the same qualities that he has inflicted on people in Iraq — refusal to acknowledge basic realities, lethally misplaced priorities, lack of compassion (cue the guitar), and overarching arrogance…

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The man in the Oval Office is fond of condemning “killers.” But his administration continues to kill with impunity.

“They can go into Iraq and do this and do that,” Martha Madden, former secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, said Thursday, “but they can’t drop some food on Canal Street in New Orleans, Louisiana, right now? It’s just mind-boggling.”

The policies are matters of priorities. And the priorities of the Bush White House are clear. For killing in Iraq, they spare no expense. For protecting and sustaining life, the cupboards go bare.

The problem is not incompetence. It’s inhumanity, cruelty and greed…

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The men and women of the National Guard shouldn’t be killing in Iraq.
They should be helping in New Orleans and Biloxi.

The catastrophic hurricane was an act of God. But the U.S. war effort in Iraq is a continuing act of the president. And now, that effort is hampering the capacity of the National Guard to save lives at home.

Before the flooding of New Orleans drastically escalated on Tuesday, the White House tried to disarm questions that could be politically explosive. “To those of you who are concerned about whether or not we’re prepared to help, don’t be, we are,” President Bush said. “We’re in place, we’ve got equipment in place, supplies in place, and once the — once we’re able to assess the damage, we’ll be able to move in and help those good folks in the affected areas.”

Echoing the official assurances, CBS News reported: “Even though more than a third of Mississippi’s and Louisiana’s National Guard troops are either in Iraq or supporting the war effort, the National Guard says there are more than enough at home to do the job.”

But after New Orleans levees collapsed and the scope of the catastrophe became more clear, such reassuring claims lost credibility…

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Also, Will Bunch writes in Editor and Publisher, Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen? ‘Times-Picayune’ Had Repeatedly Raised Federal Spending Issues.

Over the weekend, a spectrum of liberal responses to Cindy Sheehan came into sharper focus.

The message is often anti-Bush… but not necessarily anti-war.

Frank Rich spun out his particular style of triangulation in the New York Times. While deriding President Bush’s stay-the-course stance, Rich also felt a need to disparage the most visible advocate for quick withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Putting down Sheehan — and, by implication, the one-third of the U.S. public that wants all American troops to exit Iraq without delay — Rich’s column on Sunday mocked “her bumper-sticker politics” and “the slick left-wing political operatives who have turned her into a circus.”

Rich criticized “the utter bankruptcy of the Democrats who had rubber-stamped this misadventure in the first place.” Yet, in effect, he was willing to help rubber-stamp continuation of the “misadventure” in the present tense…

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For a long time, the last refuge of scoundrels was “patriotism.” Now it’s “the war on terror.”

President Bush and many of his vocal supporters aren’t content to wrap themselves in the flag. It’s not sufficient to posture as more patriotic than opponents of the Iraq war. The ultimate demagogic weapon is to exploit the memory of Sept. 11, 2001.

Next month, the fourth anniversary will provide the Bush administration with plenty of media opportunities to wrap itself in the 9/11 shroud and depict Iraq war critics as insufficiently committed to defending the United States. A renewed attempt to justify the war as a resolute stand against terrorism is well underway.

On Wednesday, eager to pull out of a political nosedive, Bush stood in front of National Guard members in Idaho and read from a script that was thick with familiar rhetoric: “Our nation is engaged in a global war on terror that affects the safety and security of every American. In Iraq, Afghanistan and across the world, we face dangerous enemies who want to harm our people, folks who want to destroy our way of life.” And: “As long as I’m the president, we will stay, we will fight and we will win the war on terror.”

Such presidential oratory has become routine. And anniversaries of 9/11 are occasions when the White House ratchets up the spin…

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The Bush administration may ratchet up the Iraq war.

That might seem unlikely, even farfetched. After all, the president is facing an upsurge of domestic opposition to the war. Under such circumstances, why would he escalate it?

A big ongoing factor is that George W. Bush and his top aides seem to believe in red-white-and-blue violence with a fervor akin to religiosity. For them, the Pentagon’s capacity to destroy is some kind of sacrament. And even if more troops aren’t readily available for duty in Iraq, huge supplies of aircraft and missiles are available to step up the killing from the air.

Back in the USA, while the growth of antiwar sentiment is apparent, much of the criticism — especially what’s spotlighted in news media — is based on distress that American casualties are continuing without any semblance of victory. In effect, many commentators see the problem as a grievous failure to kill enough of the bad guys in Iraq and sufficiently intimidate the rest.

(Bypassing the euphemisms preferred by many liberal pundits, George Will wrote in a Washington Post column on April 7, 2004, that “every door American troops crash through, every civilian bystander shot — there will be many — will make matters worse, for a while. Nevertheless, the first task of the occupation remains the first task of government: to establish a monopoly on violence.”)

A lot of what sounds like opposition to the war is more like opposition to losing the war…

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The day after Wednesday night’s nationwide vigils, the big headline at the top of the MoveOn.org home page said: “Support Cindy Sheehan.” But MoveOn does not support Cindy Sheehan’s call for swift withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Many groups were important to the success of the Aug. 17 vigils, but the online powerhouse MoveOn was the largest and most prominent. After a long stretch of virtual absence from Iraq war issues, the organization deserves credit for getting re-involved in recent months. But the disconnects between MoveOn and much of the grassroots antiwar movement are disturbing…

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