More Word Games from George W. Bush

Let's just lay it out there today. Bush's tortuous logic on why he ought to have the right to 'clarify' the Geneva Conventions is not about protecting the United States; it's about protecting George W. Bush. Congress could give Bush all the powers he wants and he still would be an incompetent president and his agenda would still be driven by a flawed understanding of the world.

Dan Froomkin of The Washington Post's White House Briefing has a roundup on Bush's strange Friday press conference:

President Bush was at his most pugnacious and disingenuous Friday in a Rose Garden press conference, refusing to give reporters a direct answer about where he stands on torture.

...Bush's repeated refrain -- that all he wants is for Congress to bring "clarity" to the Geneva Conventions -- was so far from the truth that straight news reporting simply wasn't up to the task of conveying the real meaning of the day.

The Geneva Conventions have been in effect for nearly sixty years and George W. Bush is the only president to be confused about what they mean. This is par for our current president. I've often used the metaphor of the kid who steals cookies from the cookie jar and is very adept at wriggling his way out of trouble. Bush is playing word games about the definition of stealing and the definition of cookies: "I didn't take anything and if I did, I was only making use of some crumbs that were going to be thrown out anyway. What's the big deal?" That's our president.

Bob Herbert of The New York Times captures some of the flavor of Bush's hectic and incoherent drive to save his failed presidency:

The president seemed about to lose it at times last week. He was fighting with everybody—tenacious reporters frustrated by the abssence of straight answers about the treatment of terror suspects; key Republican senators who think it's crazy for a great country like the U.S. to become a champion of kangaroo courts and the degradation of defendants; even his own former secretary of state, Colin Powell, who worries that the world is coming to "doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism."

(snip)

The people at the top are getting scared... The fog of secrecy is lifting, and the Bush administration is frightened to death that it will eventually have to pay a heavy price for the human rights abuses it has ordered or condoned in its so-called war on terror.

(snip)

Bush, Cheney & Co., are desperately trying to hold together a house of cards that is ready to collapse because their strategy and tactics for fighting terrorism were slapped together with no real regard for the rule of law. What we've seen over the past few years has been a nightmare version of the United States. Torture? Secret prisons? Capital trials in which key evidence is kept from the accused? That's the stuff of Kafka, not Madison and Jefferson.

Let's keep in mind that as tortured suspects gave reams of false information, it helped create a climate of fear and false terror alerts that Bush and his advisers were more than happy to exploit for political reasons.

Paul Krugman in today's New York Times had also a few things to say:

Is torture a necessary evil in a post-9/11 world? No. People with actual knowledge of intelligence work tell us that reality isn't like TV dramas, in which the good guys have to torture the bad guy to find out where he planted the ticking time bomb.

What torture produces in practice is misinformation, as its victims, desperate to end the pain, tell the interrogators whatever they want to hear...

(snip)

The central drive of the Bush administration—more fundamental than any particular policy—has been the effort to eliminate all limits on the president's power. Torture, I believe, appeals to the president and the vice president precisely because it's a violation of both law and tradition. By making an illegal and immoral practice a key element of U.S. policy, they're asserting their right to do whatever they claim is necessary.

Essentially Bush has been asking for the right to compound his errors; this has meant that even with all the powers he wants, his incompetence and blunders still manage to shine through. A second part, which everyone knows is there, but which hasn't been mentioned much in the last week, is the right of the president to hide his blunders and failures behind layers of secrecy. These are strange rights for Congress to be granting the president and there are signs that perhaps wiser heads are finally saying, that's enough; we can't afford the hole to go any deeper.

It's time to put away the spy thrillers and remember they're fiction. It's time for the White House to stop running around like chickens without their heads. It's time for Washington to get back to business as if the United States will be here still be here in a hundred years. There's a lot of work to do and no president from our founding days has ever had all the answers and it's time to stop pretending that the current president has much to offer.