Monday Morning Media Quarterback

Perhaps the saddest thing about the Bush administration is how little Americans have come to expect of it.  It has resulted in an orgy of incompetence that have seriously damaged first America’s image, and now our economy and very .

The current agony of more than 200,000 American Airlines passengers stranded on more than 2500 cancelled flights at America’s airports is just the latest example. 

A competent administration would have kept the FAA on the case in the first place.  A more foresighted administration would have recognized the cost to Americans and the economy of airlines like Aloha, ATA, Skybus and now Frontier failing.  And a stronger administration would have acted in the crisis, like Truman did nationalizing the steel industry or, yes, Reagan breaking the air traffic controllers union as a “peril to national safety”. 

“The buck stops here,” Truman said.  By contrast, the Bush Administration has done nothing.  Nothing.  There has been an absolute leadership vacuum. And sadly, that has come to be what we expect from it.  Consider:

• The incompetent prosecution of the war in Iraq, led by my fellow Princeton alumni Donald Rumsfeld.  I originally supported the war on the bill of goods sold us by the administration, but if you’re going to fight a war, win a war, smash the opposition and minimize casualties among U.S. troops.  In five years none of that has happened.
• Where’s Osama? How’s that war on terror going? We’re not losing in Afghanistan, are we?
• Abu Ghraib. 
• Katrina. One word.  More than 1100 people died in New Orleans (in America!)  after the hurricane.  How many have died since or had their lives shortened by stress, disease, alcoholism, and the rest?  How’s the rebuilding of New Orleans coming?
• The credit crisis, stock market crash and the foreclosure epidemic; where was government/adult supervision?  A $600 rebate to spend on Japanese electronics, vacations or, more likely, on alcohol, is supposed to help how?
• Four dollar a gallon gasoline.  If you make $8 an hour and commute 20 miles to work, it will take an hour (more after taxes) just to pay for your gas.  Very soon, the economy will grind to a halt.  Where’s that Iraqi oil when we need it?  Where’s the Manhattan Project or Apollo program to achieve energy independence? 
• Even ’small things’ like last summer’s passport crisis.  Everyone needs a passport to travel now, but no additional staffing of the passport office=long lines, cancelled trips and general chaos.  Now they’ve fully staffed the office with idiots who snoop in passport files.

And the media, distracted by its own evisceration, has done a piss-poor job of holding the administration accountable for its across-the-board failure of leadership.

The wars in Iraq and even Afghanistan are not going well.  The economy is starting to shrivel up and people are losing their homes.  The immigration bill failed badly, the Attorney General doesn’t know if torture is OK,  Osama Bin Ladin is still on the loose and the president’s approval rating is at an all-time low. 

But there’s one target the Feds can hit: medical marijuana dispensaries in California, where medical marijuana for suffering people has been legal since 1996.   Today’s raids came the same day the Los Angeles City Council introduced an ordinance calling on federal authorities to stop targeting clinics allowed under state law.

A DEA spokeswoman described the timing as “purely coincidental.”

LA City Councilman Dennis Zine, who spent over 30 years as a police officer, doesn’t think so.  Zine, who wrote a letter to DEA Administrator Karen Tandy asking the agency to stop the raids, called the federal agents “bullies.”

“They’re trying to bully us. Instead of using resources to go after drug dealers ruining neighborhoods and poisoning school kids, they’re going after individuals dying of cancer and suffering from AIDS who need cannabis to have any type of appetite.”

“Way ahead of the facts” said White House spokesman Tony Snow, on if there’s any internal White House debate on a U.S. troop pullback in Iraq.

It’s similar to the expression “future truth”, coined by an old boss of mine.  No matter that the users he wanted me to write about were as figmentary as John Nash’s roommate in A Beautiful Mind.  Say something often enough, he’d insist, and it will become truth.

But “way ahead of the facts” is also a non-denial denial, an acknowledgement that something not true now will eventually become so.  It’s a a classic of crisis communications from a White House in crisis–or am I way ahead of the facts?

“Anyone want to buy five beautiful acres in Crawford, Texas ? I will consider any reasonable offer. “  This CraigsList.org-like ad actually ran on the liberal Huffington Post.  The poster was war protestor Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq,  saying she was dumping her 5 acre ‘Camp Casey’ near George W. Bush’s ranch.  She ended up with $87,000.

Candy Crowley of CNN describes Sheehan as “the first recognizable face of the anti-war movement” but the left (and the media) eventually soured on her for saying George Bush is a bigger terrorist that Osama Bin Ladin, and that the U.S. is in danger of disintegrating into “a fascist corporate wasteland.” You can read her letter dropping out of the war protest here. 

Not only has no other popular spokesperson emerged for the anti-war movement, but Sheehan’s ‘garage sale’ shows that a broad peace movement has never really developed, even after more than four years of war. 

I was a child during Vietnam, and I remember watching rallies at the Capitol on television that were over 250,00 like this one on November 15, 1969.  Such demonstrations persuaded Lyndon Johnson not to run for re-election, and continued into the 1970’s until most U.S. soldiers were out of Vietnam.

By contrast, rallies against the war in Iraq peaked almost two years ago, when more than 100,000, including Sheehan, (organizers claimed 300,000) marched in Washington on September 24, 2005.   Back then, 1,911 U.S.  soldiers had been killed in the war.  By June 2007, over 3,500 had died in Iraq, and the number of troops in-country had actually risen with the surge.

Yet the protests have died down, and Cindy Sheehan gave up, ‘tired of being called an attention whore.’ 

Why are there so few other leaders and symbols of an anti-war movement? Why are demonstrations limited to fringe groups seemingly more interested in making a statement against the Republicans in September 2008 than trying to stop the war now? Are Americans selfish, apathetic, or do they actually support the war in Iraq, despite what the polls say?

The media may have helped in building Sheehan up and tearing her down, but the media is just a mirror to society.  Although I don’t agree with her on many issues, it’s hard not to sympathize with Sheehan’s pain and frustration, or to analyze the lack of protest without thinking of the selfishness of one generation or another. 

Were the Babyboomers selfishly demonstrating during the Vietnam War, out of fear of being drafted? Or are today’s young Americans the selfish ones, too inwardly directed on their iPods, cellphones and instant messaging to care?

It’s hard to motivate people to get out in the streets and away from their computers.  But it’s easy to understand why people (over) focus on Paris Hilton or American Idol, when the news from Iraq is this grim.