Working Hard to Control the Message

I'm a believer that it's useful sometimes to state the obvious: for more than five years, the Bush presidency has largely been an exercise in damage control. Bush or one of his administration advisers manage to make a stupid or careless decision or commit a blunder in just a matter of hours or days, and the administration spends weeks, months, sometimes even years doing public relations damage control. In fact, the only thing the Bush Administration seems good at is public relations. What America is seeing is the first Potemkin Village presidency. The public relations machinery isn't just good, though, for covering up incompetence—it's also useful for covering up lies and dirty little secrets Bush doesn't want the American people to know about. It's no wonder that Karl Rove has been so busy in the last six years.

Now I tend to oppose some of the more colorful analogies that are used to explain Bush simply because some of the analogies have been counterproductive and simply push people away from the national discussion that needs to take place. But the Bush presidency is so unprecendented it's hard to find comparisons. And woe to the writer who, in an honest effort to make a point, a point that might wake people up to just how unprecedented Bush's presidency is, tries to illustrate the point from history. Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly has a short post on the problem, though he hints it's time for Americans to get real about a very strange and dangerous presidency.

The question unavoidably hangs in the air: how many more Bush Administration secrets are there that are comparable to scandals like NSA domestic spying, Abu Ghraib, the phony case for war and Guantanamo Bay?