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Monday, October 31st, 2005

Ending the Fraudulence

Paul Krugman/New York Times

Let me be frank: it has been a long political nightmare. For some of
us, daily life has remained safe and comfortable, so the nightmare
has merely been intellectual: we realized early on that this
administration was cynical, dishonest and incompetent, but spent a
long time unable to get others to see the obvious. For others - above
all, of course, those Americans risking their lives in a war whose
real rationale has never been explained - the nightmare has been all
too concrete.

So is the nightmare finally coming to an end? Yes, I think so. I have
no idea whether Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, will
bring more indictments in the Plame affair. In any case, I don't
share fantasies that Dick Cheney will be forced to resign; even Karl
Rove may keep his post. One way or another, the Bush administration
will stagger on for three more years. But its essential fraudulence
stands exposed, and it's hard to see how that exposure can be undone.

What do I mean by essential fraudulence? Basically, I mean the way an
administration with an almost unbroken record of policy failure has
nonetheless achieved political dominance through a carefully
cultivated set of myths.

The record of policy failure is truly remarkable. It sometimes seems
as if President Bush and Mr. Cheney are Midases in reverse:
everything they touch - from Iraq reconstruction to hurricane relief,
from prescription drug coverage to the pursuit of Osama - turns to
crud. Even the few apparent successes turn out to contain failures at
their core: for example, real G.D.P. may be up, but real wages are
down.

The point is that this administration's political triumphs have never
been based on its real-world achievements, which are few and far
between. The administration has, instead, built its power on myths:
the myth of presidential leadership, the ugly myth that the
administration is patriotic while its critics are not. Take away
those myths, and the administration has nothing left.

Well, Katrina ended the leadership myth, which was already fading as
the war dragged on. There was a time when a photo of Mr. Bush looking
out the window of Air Force One on 9/11 became an iconic image of
leadership. Now, a similar image of Mr. Bush looking out at a flooded
New Orleans has become an iconic image of his lack of connection.
Pundits may try to resurrect Mr. Bush's reputation, but his cult of
personality is dead - and the inscription on the tombstone reads,
"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

Meanwhile, the Plame inquiry, however it winds up, has ended the myth
of the administration's monopoly on patriotism, which was also fading
in the face of the war.

Apologists can shout all they like that no laws were broken, that
hardball politics is nothing new, or whatever. The fact remains that
officials close to both Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush leaked the identity
of an undercover operative for political reasons. Whether or not that
act was illegal, it was clearly unpatriotic.

And the Plame affair has also solidified the public's growing doubts
about the administration's morals. By a three-to-one margin,
according to a Washington Post poll, the public now believes that the
level of ethics and honesty in the government has declined rather
than risen under Mr. Bush.

So the Bush administration has lost the myths that sustained its
mojo, and with them much of its power to do harm. But the nightmare
won't be fully over until two things happen.

First, politicians will have to admit that they were misled. Second,
the news media will have to face up to their role in allowing
incompetents to pose as leaders and political apparatchiks to pose as
patriots.

It's a sad commentary on the timidity of most Democrats that even
now, with Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff,
telling us how policy was "hijacked" by the Cheney-Rumsfeld "cabal,"
it's hard to get leading figures to admit that they were misled into
supporting the Iraq war. Kudos to John Kerry for finally saying just
that last week.

And as for the media: these days, there is much harsh, justified
criticism of the failure of major news organizations, this one
included, to exert due diligence on rationales for the war. But the
failures that made the long nightmare possible began much earlier,
during the weeks after 9/11, when the media eagerly helped our
political leaders build up a completely false picture of who they
were.

So the long nightmare won't really be over until journalists ask
themselves: what did we know, when did we know it, and why didn't we
tell the public?

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