Bush and Condi Rice strut in their speeches -- the secretary of state
also strutted in Wiesbaden in her foxy "Matrix"-dominatrix black
leather stiletto boots -- but they shy away from taking questions from
the public unless they get to vet the questions and audiences in
advance.
Administration officials went so far as to cancel a town hall meeting
during Bush's visit to Germany last week after deciding an unscripted
setting would be too risky, opting for a round-table talk in Mainz
with preselected Germans and Americans.
From The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 3/1/05:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/213878_dowd01.html
Bush has some nerve lecturing Putin
By MAUREEN DOWD
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
WASHINGTON --
It was remarkable to see President Bush lecture Vladimir Putin on the
importance of checks and balances in a democratic society.
Remarkably brazen, given that the only checks Bush seems to believe in
are those written to the "journalists" Armstrong Williams, Maggie
Gallagher and Karen Ryan, the fake TV anchor, to help promote his
policies.
The administration has given a whole new meaning to checkbook
journalism, paying a stupendous $97 million to an outside PR firm to
buy columnists and produce propaganda, including faux video news
releases.
The only balance W. likes is the slavering, Pravda-like "fair and
balanced" coverage Fox News provides.
Bush pledges to spread democracy while his officials strive to create
a Potemkin press village at home.
This White House seems to prefer softball questions from a
self-advertised male escort with a fake name to hardball questions
from journalists with real names;
it prefers tossing journalists who protect their sources into the
gulag to giving up the officials who broke the law by leaking the name
of their own CIA agent.
W., who once looked into Putin's soul and liked what he saw, did not
demand the end of tyranny, as he did in his second Inaugural address.
His upper lip sweating a bit, he did not rise to the level of his hero
Ronald Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."
Instead, he said that "the common ground is a lot more than those
areas where we disagree."
The Russians were happy to stress the common ground, as well.
An irritated Putin compared the Russian system with the American
Electoral College, perhaps reminding the man preaching to him about
democracy that he had come in second in 2000 according to the popular
vote, the standard most democracies use.
Certainly Putin, the autocratic former KGB agent, needs to be
upbraided by someone -- Tony Blair, maybe? -- for eviscerating the
meager steps toward democracy that Russia had made before Putin came
to power.
But Bush is on shaky ground if he wants to hold up his administration
as a paragon of safeguarding liberty -- considering it has trampled
civil liberties in the name of the war on terror and outsourced the
torture of prisoners to such bastions of democracy as Syria, Saudi
Arabia and Egypt.
(The secretary of state canceled a trip to Egypt last week after
Egypt's arrest of a leading opposition politician.)
"I live in a transparent country," Bush protested to a Russian
reporter who implicitly criticized the Patriot Act by noting that the
private lives of U.S. citizens "are now being monitored by the state."
***** Cheney's secret meetings with energy lobbyists were certainly a
model of transparency.
As was the buildup to the Iraq war, when the Bush hawks did their best
to cloak the real reasons they wanted to go to war and trumpet the
trumped-up reasons.
The Bush administration wields maximum secrecy with minimal
opposition.
____________________________________________________________
Harry
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