Unpacking Conventional Wisdom

Just finished watching Syriana, George Clooney's discursive pastiche of oil and geopolitics, and what I could really appreciate was its sense of knowing pessimism. Not necessarily in the conspiratorial "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you" sense, but in the more common-sense idea that money and power, by nature and almost by definition, do tend to operate with ulterior motives. That these motives get glossed over by their enablers and starfuckers and sob sisters in the corporate media is not exactly a revelation.

And when the Washington Post decides to put on its trusty HNIC uniform and trot out the usual platitudes, it just confirms all those suspicions that were pooh-poohed as so farfetched and unnecessarily lurid when Syriana was first released.

The headline is a dead giveaway: A Driven President Faces a World of Crises. Seriously? About what exactly can Bush honestly be said to be "driven"? As the current Princess Bride parlance goes, I do not think that word means what the Post headline monkeys think it means. To be "driven" is to be ambitious and forceful, but intelligently so. It means to operate from an informed stance, going toward planned, cogent, attainable goals. That is entirely different from merely being a political wind-up toy that simply goes and goes. Being obsessed is not the same as being driven.

So again, I ask how exactly is Bush "driven", except in the most basic Homer Simpson sense of "me wantee"? Everybody wants something; it is understanding how to achieve or obtain that something and having a plan to do it that defines the "driven". So Pravda is already in the tank after the first indefinite article of the damned headline. This is not good; the question is why they went with such a demonstrably nonsensical adjective. (Not to mention that the rest of the headline naïvely implies that Chimpco hasn't exacerbated at least some of the crises the U.S. faces and will continue to face after they're blessedly termed out.)

The body of the article, I think, tends to provide some answers, as far as tone and stance, keeping in mind that we are talking about a putatively combative, hostile, liberal press.

I am hard-pressed to think of any other moment in modern times where there have been so many challenges facing this country simultaneously," said Richard N. Haass, a former senior Bush administration official who heads the Council on Foreign Relations. "The danger is that Mr. Bush will hand over a White House to a successor that will face a far messier world, with far fewer resources left to cope with it."

Bush has already indicated that the greatest of these crises, the Iraq war, will probably be fobbed off to his successor. In other words, there has never been any real sense of urgency as to what the necessary criteria would be to resolve the situation. Seriously, think about it. Has Bush ever been any more detailed than "as Iraqis stand up, we will stand down"? Hell, he hasn't even defined any specific metrics as to what that entails, not that it matters, because it's indisputably failed on that count. The few units that can even operate without significant U.S. support are apparently devolving into ethnic death squads settling old grudges.

So, no real "drive" to resolve that, just a lot of finger-crossing and corner-turning. How about the other crises? Iran and North Korea, rather than being cowed into submission by the Axis of Evil bluster and the subsequent invasion of the low-hanging fruit, were emboldened by our failure to secure the occupation, and have since ramped up their respective nuclear programs. Seeing us get further bogged down in Iraq for three years, with no real end in sight, has only encouraged their intransigence.

As for our deteriorating relations with Russia, I think it's more of a piece with our relations with most of Europe in general, coupled with Putin's seeming dislike for Bush's preening buffoonery. Putin was a KGB colonel; he's supposedly a martial-arts expert and an excellent chess player. Bush rides his bike really fast until he crashes, and is well-known for going to bed early. Occasionally he reads biographies about Thomas Jefferson or George Washington so he can try to impress European leaders with shit even they already knew. Apparently he is skilled at clearing brush.

So it's understandable if a guy like Putin (despite his weird tummy-kiss moment recently) maybe looks askance at a twit like Bush, and figures he's just not worth the bother. It doesn't help that the Russia-Iran reactor deals are money for Putin and friends, and the neocons' mindless sabre-rattling is probably cutting into their action somewhat.

They also showed how the huge commitment of resources and time on Iraq -- and the attendant falloff in international support for the United States -- has limited the administration's flexibility in handling new world crises. "This is a distracted government that has to take care of too many things at the same time and has been consumed by the war on Iraq," said Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy magazine.

Yes and no. They're supposed to be able to multitask, and they certainly have been pre-occupied by Iraq, but like everything else with these people, it's run by the political arm of the administration. It's all photo-op this and good-news that; there's never any solutions or analysis in the real-world sense. If there was, they'd have made the necessary adjustments and changed tack here and there. But nothing's changed; to them it's all just a series of opportunities to bolster one's image and maybe squeeze a dead-cat bounce out of the polls at the right time.

Saying that the Cheney administration is "consumed" by the war in Iraq is kinda like saying that O.J. Simpson is "haunted" by the loss of his wife.

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said in an interview yesterday that such criticism is misplaced, adding that victory in Iraq is crucial to success in fighting terrorists and in creating a new democracy that could serve as a beacon to other Middle Eastern countries. "Is it a major investment? Yes," he said. "The stakes are high [in Iraq], but we think the rewards are commensurate to the effort, and the consequences of lack of success are sobering."

Hadley agreed that there are "a lot of issues in motion right now" on the international front. "In some sense, it was destined to be, because we have a president that wants to take on the big issues and see if he could solve them on his watch."

Christ, Hadley is one of the biggest halfwits in the claque. And that last sentence of his definitely bears some serious parsing. Taking on big issues doesn't mean blindly ramming the door until your head hurts, then running around invoking God and Jesus so your peeps don't desert you in disgust. Taking on big issues means you open your eyes and turn the freakin' doorknob.

Look, I know that Bush has this illusion of himself as some sort of can-do take-charge kinda guy, but someone should tell these simps that it's not enough to tell everyone what a problem-solver you are. At some point, if you want to burnish that particular reputation, you actually have to solve a fucking problem, okay? That's how that tends to work. As far as I can tell, the only "problems" these suckers have actually "solved" are exorbitant taxes on the 1% who put them in office, and keeping homos from getting married. Nicely done, folks.

There's more, as there always is, but you get the idea. They go on and get Madeline Albright's take on things, and she's got some points, but let's not forget her own momentous visit to Pyongyang in 2000, to try to procure some concessions from the original Dear Leader.

How'd all that work out?

So it's not just Chimpco that fucked the dog on foreign policy, some of the go-to people from the Clinton era have some baggage as well. But the thing is that none of it's ever mentioned. Steve Hadley is quoted as if he had something useful to offer, rather than easily deconstructed boilerplate. Madeline Albright is worshipped as if she'd never trucked through some of Kim Jong Il's Potemkin villages in the midst of a horrific -- and preventable -- famine.

It's as if the job requirements are merely compiling and editing quotes to the ideal column space, and vetting your quals with the Beltway power players, rather than having some pride and actually reading those quotes and maybe thinking that they're not worth putting your name over.