In a recent post, I referenced an interview in Rolling Stone of Seymour Hersh, entitled Cheney’s Nemesis. Hersh is a fascinating character – always in the eye of a storm, his own or the storm of others [the linked Wikipedia article catalogs some of those storms and is a fascinating short read]. I think of Hersh as a curmudgeon in my own mind – crusty, contraversial, rarely pulling any punches. I’m not good at curmudgeonly-ness myself, so I’ve pulled out a few of his remarks to hide behind, because they seem so dead on.
Is what’s gone on in the Bush administration comparable or worse than what went on in the Nixon administration?
Oh, my God. Much worse. Bush is a true radical. He believes very avidly in executive power. And he also believes that he’s doing the right thing. I think he’s a revolutionary, a Trotsky. He’s a believer in permanent revolution. So therefore he’s very dangerous, because he’s an unguided missile, he’s a rocket with no ability to be educated. You can’t change what he wants to do. He can’t deviate from his policy, and that’s frightening when somebody has as much power as he does, and is as much a radical as he is, and is as committed to democracy — whatever that means — as he is in the Mideast. I really do believe that’s what drives him. That doesn’t mean he’s not interested in oil. But I really think he thinks democracy is the answer…
Among other things, this comment makes explicit one of the great paradoxes of the Bush Administration and George Junior. "He believes very avidly in executive power" and "is as committed to democracy – whatever that means – as he is in the Mideast." Bush did everything possible to subvert our Democracy, but preached the Gospel of Democracy for the Middle East. That makes little sense. Hersh also says, "he’s an unguided missile, he’s a rocket with no ability to be educated. You can’t change what he wants to do. He can’t deviate from his policy, and that’s frightening when somebody has as much power as he does." No clearer description of President George W. Bush will ever be written…
This seems to be something that Bush has in common with Nixon: the White House ignoring everyone and seeking to become a government unto itself.
One of the things this administration has shown us is how fragile democracy is. All of the institutions we thought would protect us — particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress — they have failed. The courts . . . the jury’s not in yet on the courts. So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn’t. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that’s the most glaring…
I had marked this article for a thorough read, but before I re-read it, I was lamenting the fragility of our democracy in an email to a friend:
"It feels like somebody has put a dent in something that I naively assumed was invincible – not like the dent of racism, or sexism, or homophobia, or anti-environmentalism, or even conservatism. Those are things I understand. This is another kind of wound – people who want to change the way we do business. People who actually have changed the way we do business. It’s more than political wrangling or posturing. It’s things like infiltrating the Department of Justice and using it for political ends. The same with the Defense Department, having its own foreign policy agenda, setting up its own Intelligence alternative to the C.I.A. It’s ignoring transparency, Separation of Powers, Congress – adding signing statements to every bill Congress passes. It’s having a coordinated propoganda machine in the media that runs 24/7. It really does remind me of the methodology so explicitly laid out in Mein Kompf [which my mother insisted I read].The repartee between factions riding up and down the seesaw of our government is a wild ride, but it’s the kind of ride that moves us forward. It’s still not working right. Now we have a Democratic Party essentially in control, yet the news is about Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, John Boehner, Rush Limbaugh. They are very out by every poll, yet they are still in front of us everyday – setting a tone that makes consensus hard to see even when there is one. So, I worry about the dent this kind of institutionalized corruption has put in our daily lives and how it stays on the front burner with the help of its media arm – divisive, sarcastic, contemptuous, ingenuous, noisy."
But why isn’t there more of an uproar by the public at atrocities committed by American troops? Have people become inured to those stories over the years?
I just think it’s because they are Iraqis. You have to give Bill Clinton his due: When he bombed Kosovo in 1999, he became the first president since World War II to bomb white people. Think about it. Does that mean something? Is it just an accident, or is it an inevitable byproduct of white supremacy? White man’s burden? You tell me what it is, I don’t know…
I don’t know that anyone else has been brave enough to say this so clearly. It’s racism, simply racism. Who knows? Maybe Bin Laden is a racist too. But our treatment of the Arabs is what Hersh says it is – little else…
What’s the main lesson you take, looking back at America’s history the last forty years?
There’s nothing to look back to. We’re dealing with the same problems now that we did then. We know from the Pentagon Papers — and to me they were the most important documents ever written — that from 1963 on, Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon lied to us systematically about the war. I remember how shocked I was when I read them. So . . . duh! Nothing’s changed. They’ve just gotten better at dealing with the press. Nothing’s changed at all.
Hersh’s last forty years is the same as my last forty years. 1969 was a killer year – just after the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy Assasinations, in the midst of the worst of Viet Nam, on the road to the Kent State Shootings, Nixon on the ascendency – it was a painful time that would surely be over soon. It didn’t end. "Nothing’s changed at all." While that’s too cynical for my sensibilities, I still take his point…
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