http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=9015
President of Fabricated Crises
Some leaders overcome crises. George W. Bush invents them.
By Harold Meyerson
01.13.05
Some presidents make the history books by managing crises.
Lincoln had Fort Sumter, Roosevelt had the Depression and Pearl
Harbor, and Kennedy had the missiles in Cuba.
George W. Bush, of course, had September 11, and for a while
thereafter -- through the overthrow of the Taliban -- he earned his
page in history, too.
But when historians look back at the Bush presidency, they're more
likely to note that what sets Bush apart is not the crises he managed
but the crises he fabricated.
The fabricated crisis is the hallmark of the Bush presidency.
To attain goals that he had set for himself before he took office --
the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the privatization of Social Security
-- he concocted crises where there were none.
So Iraq became a clear and present danger to American hearths and
homes, bristling with weapons of mass destruction, a nuclear attack
just waiting to happen.
And now, this week, the president is embarking on his second great
scare campaign, this one to convince the American people that Social
Security will collapse and that the only remedy is to cut benefits and
redirect resources into private accounts.
In fact, Social Security is on a sounder footing now than it has been
for most of its 70-year history.
Without altering any of its particulars, its trustees say, it can pay
full benefits straight through 2042.
Over the next 75 years its shortfall will amount to just 0.7 percent
of national income, according to the trustees, or 0.4 percent,
according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
That still amounts to a real chunk of change, but it pales alongside
the 75-year cost of Bush's Medicare drug benefit, which is more than
twice its size, or Bush's tax cuts if permanently extended, which
would be nearly four times its size.
In short, Social Security is not facing a financial crisis at all. It
is facing a need for some distinctly sub-cataclysmic adjustments over
the next few decades that would increase its revenue and diminish its
benefits.
Politically, however, Social Security is facing the gravest crisis it
has ever known.
For the first time in its history, it is confronted by a president,
and just possibly by a working congressional majority, who are opposed
to the program on ideological grounds, who view the New Deal as a
repealable aberration in U.S. history, who would have voted against
establishing the program had they been in Congress in 1935.
But Bush doesn't need Karl Rove's counsel to know that repealing
Social Security for reasons of ideology is a non-starter.
So it's time once more to fabricate a crisis.
In Bushland, it's always time to fabricate a crisis.
We have a crisis in medical malpractice costs, though the CBO says
that malpractice costs amount to less than 2 percent of total health
care costs.
(In fact, what we have is a president who wants to diminish the
financial, and thus political, clout of trial lawyers.)
We have a crisis in judicial vacancies, though in fact Senate
Democrats used the filibuster to block just 10 of Bush's 229
first-term judicial appointments.
With crisis concoction as its central task -- think of how many
administration officials issued dire warnings of the threat posed by
Saddam Hussein or, now, by Social Security's impending bankruptcy --
this presidency, more than any I can think of, has relied on the
classic tools of propaganda.
Indeed, it's almost impossible to imagine the Bush presidency absent
the Fox News Network and right-wing talk radio.
With the blurring of fact and fiction so central to the Bush
presidency's purposes, is it any wonder that government agencies
ranging from Health and Human Services to the Office of National Drug
Control Policy have been filming editorial messages as mock newscast
segments, complete with mock reporters, and offering them to local
television stations?
Is it any wonder that the Education Department paid commentator
Armstrong Williams $241,000 to promote its No Child Left Behind
programs?
In this administration, it is the role of a government agency to turn
out pro-Bush news by whatever means possible.
Fox News viewership in the African American community wasn't very
large, and here was Williams, who seemed to have learned during his
clerkship for Clarence Thomas that it was rude to decline any gifts.
We've had plenty of presidents, Richard Nixon most notoriously, who
divided the media into friendly and enemy camps.
I can't think of one, however, so fundamentally invested in the spread
of disinformation -- and so fundamentally indifferent to the corrosive
effect of propaganda on democracy -- as Bush.
That, too, should earn him a page in the history books.
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Harry
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