[Vision2020] The President of Fabricated Crises

[Nick Gier]

washingtonpost.com
President of Fabricated Crises
By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, January 12, 2005; Page A21
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 Sept. 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. 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.
meyersonh at washpost.com
© 2005 The Washington Post Company


-- 


"Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be 
discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part 
by itself. . . .We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on the 
interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual 
life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and 
art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts." 
--Max Planck

Nicholas F. Gier
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho
1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm
208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950
President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm

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