Republican Noise Machine Spluttering

There's nothing more embarrassing than a man who's incompetent who keeps blaming other people for his failures. Now it so happens I have met many competent Republicans in my life: businessmen, engineers, doctors, dentists, lawyers, a handful of military officers and a couple of scientists. So, in many ways the incompetence in Washington is not about the Republican party, but a particular collection of right wing ideologues who are good at media games but not very good at getting anything useful done. They've been around for a number of years now, either wealthy like Bush or funded by very wealthy campaign donors and corporate special interests, throwing their weight around, pushing aside experienced people who are competent such as liberals, moderates, and rational conservatives.

A lot of the people these right wing ideologues have been shoving aside never thought much about politics—they just wanted to serve their country; curiously, or perhaps understandably, much of the incompetence of the Bush Administration has been uncovered by nonpolitical professionals who understand their jobs, people who will tell you how much a war will actually cost, not how much Bush and his friends would like voters to believe.

Bush is in trouble and Karl Rove and a lot of Bush's friends know it. Early in Bush's presidency, the spinners spent a lot of time blaming Clinton for everything that went wrong when the real problem were a bunch of heckuva job Brownies that Bush had hired who had little idea what they were doing. Bush, himself, is a heckuva job Brownie. The media and the American people got tired of the Clinton blame game and Karl Rove dropped that line of spin and went on to play other games. Now they're back at it again, trying to blame Clinton for not catching Osama bin Laden when Bush, in his first eight months in office, could hardly remember who the guy was.

There's something very small about a president who can't accept responsibility for things going wrong in the sixth year of his tenure. In 1961, John Kennedy hadn't been on the job three months before accepting responsibility for the Bay of Pigs, an operation that had been planned in the Eisenhower Administration by people who weren't always the best and brightest; Kennedy learned quickly to be more discriminating about the kind of people he had inherited from the previous administration but he accepted responsibility for what happened. Kennedy didn't know about earlier stunts like this:

SEP 28, 1960: The CIA attempts its first drop of weapons and supplies to the Cuban resistance. The aircrew tries to drop an arms pack for a hundred men to an agent waiting on the ground. They miss the drop zone by seven miles and land the weapons on top of a dam where they are picked up by Castro's forces. The agent is caught and shot. The plane gets lost on the way to Guatemala and lands in Mexico. (Thomas, p.241)

The CIA has come a long ways from those bizarre exploits of the fifties that often produced many problems for us down the road. There are a lot of professionals these days but the real problem in the Bush Administration have been the civilians under the control of Cheney and Rumsfeld and the public relations types under Bush: the neocons, the cronies, the ideologues, the hired liars, the young kids, and, for that matter, even somebody like Rumsfeld who seems to fantasize that the freewheeling, uncontrolled days of the CIA in the 50s represented an asset rather than mostly a hindrance to America's foreign policy. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush and their friends never seemed to learned the difference between the real world and a spy novel, though they keep trying to rewrite the history of their own disasters.

Think Progress has a post on a number of prominent Republicans who were dead wrong about Osama bin Laden in 1998 and criticized Clinton for focusing too much on our nation's number one terrorist. They have comments from the time by Rep. Jim Gibbon (R-NV), Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), former Senator John Ashcroft (R-MO), Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), former Sen. Dan Coats (R-IN), Rep. Dave Weldon (R-FL), and former Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA). Check it out. There's apparently a link to more but I think we all get the picture.

George W. Bush is responsible for the failures of his administration. Stubbornly, he refuses to do anything about it. It's time to hold him accountable and get our government working again. The voters need to put an end to the Great Republican Gold Rush of the last six years. Our nation has work to do.