<html>
<table border=0>
<tr><td width=5><td width=160></td></tr>
<tr><td width=5><td width=160></td></tr>
</table>
<font face="helvetica" size=1><b><u>washingtonpost.com</b> <br>
</u></font><font size=4><b>President of Fabricated Crises</b></font>
<br>
<font size=1>By Harold Meyerson<br><br>
Wednesday, January 12, 2005; Page A21 <br>
</font>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.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
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?<br>
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.<br>
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. <br>
<font color="#0000FF"><i><u>meyersonh@washpost.com</u></i></font> <br>
<div align="center">© 2005 The Washington Post Company <br>
<br>
</div>
<br>
<font face="Courier New, Courier" size=1>-- <br><br>
</font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
<font size=2>"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<br><br>
</font>Nicholas F. Gier<br>
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho<br>
1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843<br>
<a href="http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm" eudora="autourl">http://users.</a>adelphia<a href="http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm" eudora="autourl">.net/~nickgier/home.htm</a><br>
208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950<br>
President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO<br>
<a href="http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm" eudora="autourl">http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm</a><br><br>
</html>