Some good quotes in this interview of Robert Scheer at Alternet on why we can’t elect acquire better presidents:
RS: The process itself is so debilitating, so controlling, that it really doesn’t matter who these guys are or what they start out with.
Even with the best of intentions, even when they’re very smart and knowledgeable — as opposed to George W., who is neither — it doesn’t seem to matter. All they are proving is their ability to manipulate, to think superficially, and to exploit national security issues rather than deal with them. …
… The media, because it’s been driven much more by market competition and competition with electronic media. They’re doing this “gotcha” journalism. What passes for investigative journalism is finding somebody with their pants down — literally or otherwise. …
…OR: Do you think American voters care enough about the substance of policy?
RS: At the end of the day they do. When their taxes are wasted and their sons and daughters are killed in a meaningless war, when fanaticism is unleashed around the world because we follow stupid policies, and when we can’t save a city like New Orleans, yeah, I think they care. And when gas prices go up even though they were supposed to have gone down with the conquest of Iraq, I think they care. But the media fails them in not making a connection between the things they care about and the positions that these politicians take. …
…OR: You say in your book that George W. Bush is the first electronically projected president. Can you explain that?
RS: This administration doesn’t feel they need a mindful audience. They don’t care about facts, logic or consequences. They are the most cynical people that I’ve ever encountered in politics. This is the most cynical bunch — just think about that “reality-based community” quote. They create their own reality. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that kind of cynicism before, and I’m the guy who interviewed Richard Nixon.
These guys are, as John Dean keeps pointing out, far worse than the Nixon crowd because they think they can get away with it. Nixon, at the end of the day thought it mattered what the New York Times said. He felt that if there was a big contradiction, a big error, they would catch him and there would be all hell to pay.
There’s no longer that feeling. Over the years, I’m not getting cynical — they’re cynical. If I were truly cynical I wouldn’t be talking to you, and I wouldn’t be writing and teaching. Mark Twain said a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth puts its pants on. Well, the fact is the truth does get its pants on, it does catch up, and right now 65 percent of Americans think Bush lied to them.
OR: Between that kind of arrogance seen in your interview with George H.W. Bush, the showsmanship we see with Reagan, who is a better comparison to George W.?
RS: As we say in the subtitle of the book, none of them prepared me for Bush. Reagan had been on the election circuit on issues. I didn’t have to agree with him, but when he was a salesman for G.E. and head of the Actor’s Guild, he was talking about issues of foreign policy and domestic policy. He cared about these things and collected anecdotes and information that supported his views. When he was running, he was aware of the issues and what was at stake.
That was true of all of them. They were adults, and this guy, George W., as far as I can figure, is just a spoiled preppy, as he’s been described. What he’s done is rely on his tutors and he picked, unfortunately for us voters, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
OR: Are Americans capable of recognizing a good president?
RS: I do. I think the problem here was the failure of the democrats. When Kerry was asked by Bush, “Knowing what you know now, would you have gone into Iraq?” he should have said, “No.” He should have said, “You lied to Congress, you lied to the American people, it’s unconscionable.” He would have won the election, but Kerry was not comfortable in his own skin. Here’s the boy-scout war hero who seemed to be faking it, and yet in real life, this guy performed every time. And there’s George W., who has been faking it his whole life and somehow came across as more genuine.
I agree that Kerry screwed up, but I’m not persuaded that Americans are capable of recognizing a real leader from a faux one who just plays the role on TV. What do you think? What if media did a better job making the “connection between the things they care about and the positions that these politicians take”? Would enough Americans get the message? Or would too many of ’em still listen to Limbaugh and O’Reilly? And if we survive the next thousand days with Bush in the White House, will America have learned a lesson?
Update, sorta related: What might have been. And speaking of (maybe) finding somebody with their pants down … See also Billmon.
As far as the last election was concerned Bushitler had to win.Even as bad as things will be with him in office, the situation could not be rectified with a Dem because the blame machine that would have hit Kerry’s every move. Also, now, no blame can be shifted away from the current crew as it would have been if someone else was in power. Course if we start a nuculer war my dog would have been a better choice…and he’s not even yellow.
It’s like waiting for the clock to finally wind down after all these years of Republican tantrums and hissy fits. We’ve all been condemned to some pretty serious straights as we’ve waited it out. We just hope it won’t trigger WWIII. (Bolton was on CNN just now, talking about Iran.)
Maha,
Of course if the media did its job we would not have this imbecile in office. If the media wasn’t so concerned with superficial crap I believe Howard Dean would be president. Remember the “scream” they played that clip at nauseaum until Dean’s chances where crushed. Kerry wasn’t the strongest choice (among democrats) but the media portrayed him as weak, a “flip-flopper”. How about if the NYTimes had published the NSA story before the election? I consider that doing your job. O’Rielly and Limbaugh aren’t really the problem. Everyone knows what they are and most that listen are not well informed and will always vote for the conservative. It’s really the MSM that manipulates voters in a way that benefits their corporate suitors. Mediamatters.org documents these things everyday. Its much more subtle.
Take heart…..even without the media doing its job, the public is steadily, if slowly, learning to discern and articulate on topics that matter and are awakening [because of Bush’s utter idiocy] to the connections, impact and consequences of political spinning as affects their own lives.
The Limbaugh and O’Reilly fans may be the least willing to learn, but those I personally know stay rather silent nowadays when political topics come up. I take that silence as a form of ‘lesson absorbing’ because those folks actually seem to sit and listen rather than doing what they did a couple of years age, which was to belligerently and quickly counter everything with Limbaugh or O’Reilly talking points. Some weeks ago, during an exchange with a rightie, I said, “What was unforgiveable to me about the ’04 campaigning was the trashing of John Kerry’s heroism in Vietnam.”
Surprised me …when the righie said, “That was wrong…I know it was”.
I compare citizenship competency with learning algebra. In any class, some will pick it right up and some will slowly get the hang of it and some will hate new concepts and fight learning them.
Bush and company have blatantly used lies and orwellian deceit to abuse the trust of citizens, bringing America to crises to a degree that gets most everyone’s attention and concern. I think that motivates a lot of folks to dig deeper to comprehend political sloganeering and orwellian speech because they care to know why and how they got so fooled.
Yep, some will fail to learn and some will cling to immature loyalty to a ‘team’. But I see those polls about Bush as reflective of a learning across the land.
Nicely said, Donna. I believe I do feel that the wind is shifting just a mite. Feels…hopeful.
Very nicely expressed truth, Donna.
Yeah, they’re gettin’ wise to his act!
D.
Steadily and slowly will not do in the 24hr bullshit news cycle. I read your post and you have some good things to say but unfortunately you are mostly wrong. Don’t fool yourself; we are not that smart (you’re included). I believe Maha’s question was really is there a media left? My answer is no. Citizenship=Algebra? Blogspeak=Orwell=bullshit. There is no media left. Only corporate ConArtists and bloggers. I like to think of the media as the used to be middle class. Remember when we had rich, middle and poor? The rich didn’t need media, they had money, the middle class had the networks telling us what we wanted to hear, and selling soap, and the poor had their drug dealers. Our lack of media is going to take some time to really make a difference, but it will.
uncledad……I read your #7 response to my earlier post and wondered about the cause of all the negatives you used. Are you stuck and frustrated in some impossible situation?
Seems to me that your statements about the media are based upon a premise that a ’24hr bullshit news cycle’ is and will always be all-powerful, like some severe/authority father who decides ‘truth’ and controls the minds and actions of the whole family. Will the wife and kids never question his ‘word’ or learn of other perspectives about what ‘father’ tells them? Will the public never get beyond what is ‘fed’ to them?
The steady and slow change I see is that citizens are questioning what they have been led to believe by politicians or by the 24hr news serving up what politicians say. It takes a while for trusting or immature [those you call ‘not that smart’] people to comprehend how con artists ply their trade, just as it takes some experience for a starry-eyed bride or groom to learn that honeymoons are not the whole reality of marriage.
Last comment for you…..having grown up in severe poverty [not enough food, cardboard in shoes….], I personally resent and most want to admonish you for ‘and the poor had their drug dealers’ prejudicial flippancy.
It takes a while for trusting or immature [those you call ‘not that smart’] people to comprehend how con artists ply their trade
They do it through language by mental imagery….” I don’t want the smoking gun to be in the form of a mushroom cloud”.. Now, who said there was a strong potential for a nuclear attack from Iraq on the United States?..certaintly, not Condi or Cheney. I just don’t know how I drew the conclusion that Saddam had to be taken out.
Seeing how Rush Limbaugh is so eager to confess his guilt as a fraud, I think I’ll be big enough to confess my ignorance in not understanding how I was conned by Bush and his political machine..prior to getting educated online from writers like Maha and Digby who understood the dynamics of rhetoric and where able to illustrate the snares that the Bush machine were setting for chumps like me who prided themselves in their ability to reason. I didn’t know how to identify a strawman, I didn’t understand the concept framing an argument so that reason would bring you to the place the presenter of the argument wanted you to be.And I didn’t understand the entrapment of hypotheticals(you know, the nuclear suitcase bomb..the one that justifies torture). Anyway, I have no shame in admitting I was duped and I’m thankful for those who set me straight to the con job that Bush pulled on me and the American public.
God bless America!
Your quote laments the corrupting process of Presidential nomination, you wonder if Americans are capable of recognizing a good leader, and you wonder if too many still listen to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. And the first nine commenters here raise excellent points. But what I don’t see mentioned here, is that voters are really running a double gauntlet: a “good” candidate also has to get past the conservative, pro-war, guardians of the [dismal] status-quo who compose the Democratic Party leadership. As, for example, when conservative Democrats who backed John Kerry — such as former Senator Robert “the Torch” Torricelli, yes that Torricelli — spent one million dollars on slanderous attack ads, including one linking Howard Dean to Osama bin Laden, for the Iowa caucus.
See: http://www.publicintegrity.org/report.aspx?aid=194
A million dollars. A million dollars. Spent by Democrats to defeat a popular Democrat who threatened to upset the status quo. If I got five percent of a million dollars as a gift in the mail, I could parlay it into savings and investments and probably be set for life. You could comfortably employ 30 people for a whole year for one million dollars. And this one million dollars went for no other purpose than to defame a good, honest candidate on TV.
Torricelli is gone now, but most of the people responsible for that ad are still walking the halls of power (content with their minority status so long as it brings in the bucks) right now. Worse in my opinion, a large number of Democratic leaders as well as rank-and-file Dem voters, who found out later about this funding — yet sat back and remained silent because “Well, Dean is unelectable but Kerry is going to win!” … those people still think they aren’t harming America nor helping move the mainstream further Right.
As I say, we face a double gauntlet. Rage against Bush and Rush and the rest of the Republicans is a #1 priority, but getting rid of these Vichy Democrats is a very close #2.
#10, Kevin…..thanks for the link. I had heard that folks behind Kerry and Gebhart had joined together in Iowa to trash Howard Dean. [and makes me wonder if Gebhardt’s decline and the later swift-boating of Kerry was cosmic ‘chickens coming home to roost’, karmically speaking] Your linked article explains some particulars.
Thanks for the reminder to be alert to shame-on-us destructiveness in intra-party primary cycles as well as the two-party system election cycles. No wonder we get more of the same sloganeering leadership rather than new effective leadership.
Can we come up with a powerful antidote to such campaign destructiveness…..a phrase that could sink deep within the consciousness to innoculate citizens against absorbing and holding and repeating vicious memes?
I hate to sound defeatist, but “good” politicians have been searching for such an antidote unsuccessfully for decades or maybe even centuries.
However I was impressed by an article I read which recommended the phrase / meme “The Common Good” as a unifying principle for Democrats (or, I suppose, other parties opposed to the current corrupt regime). Hopefully, such a meme could not be misused against “good” politicians. I think it’s very hard to actually smear or libel an individual person or candidate while at the same time making a coherent argument for “The Common Good”. I suppose it might be done, but it just seems to me like any such attempt would be too transparently self-serving and voters would see the hypocrisy.
Thank you for depersonalizing my above comment and steering me back towards positive thinking and positive memes.
Kevin, thanks for ‘the common good’ meme.
I like it a lot, and, as I have written before, I compare the country to a human body. Why should some organs or tissue cells get more nutrition than others? Why do we think it is good for the whole to let organs compete with each other? [I think that part of the answer here is that ‘scarcity’ is beloved by power/money brokers]
In the human body, any cells which feed themselves at the expense of the whole are called cancerous. Why can’t we think of special interest narrowness as pre-cancerous? Why can’t we think of certain short-term-gain policies [like allowing more toxins in the environment] in the same way we understand that smoking shortens life?
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