Molly Ivins: Bush administration's redefinition of problems reaches comic Heights
AUSTIN, Texas -- So the Democrats have a candidate at last, and he is about bent over double with gravitas. I think that means he doesn't a have humorous bone in his body. It's a good thing there's at least one serious person in this race -- the Bushies are getting sillier and sillier.
Just when you thought no one could top Rod Paige calling the teacher's union "a terrorist organization," along comes Veep Cheney with this gem, "If Democratic policies had been pursued over the last two-to-three years, the kind of tax increases both Kerry and Edwards are talking about, we would not have had the kind of job growth that we've had."
Uh, in the first place, Kerry and Edwards are not talking about tax increases at all, but about repealing part of Bush's tax cuts -- so we would have had no tax cuts, not tax increases. And in the second place, if losing 2.3 million jobs is "job growth," Dick Cheney is a laugh riot.
We've got a $500 billion deficit this year, and Bush's idea of a solution is to make his tax cuts permanent, a move that would cost about $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years. Their other helpful suggestion is to redefine burger-flipping as " manufacturing jobs," (are these people never serious?) and if they can't redefine the problem out of existence, there's always the option of just announcing bad is good. Think how surprised we were to learn from Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers: "Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade. ... More things are tradable than were tradable in the past, and that's a good thing."
I also like the dodge where Bush claims the reason there's a $500 billion deficit is because, "We're at war." Unfortunately, the cost of Iraq is not even included in the budget: It's going to be a supplemental surprise request after the election. Does any of this strike you as grown-up behavior? Or even grown-up behavior-related program activities?
One symptom of the fundamental unseriousness of the Bushies is that they never, ever admit they are wrong. Nor do they pay penalties for being wrong. What do you have to do to get fired in that outfit? They canned Paul O'Neill for telling the truth -- that seems to be fatal. On the other hand, when CIA Director George Tenet said intelligence "analysts never said there was an imminent threat" from Iraq, he wasn't cashiered -- they just pretended they didn't hear him. It is already a truism that this will be an event-driven election, and the spiraling chaos in Haiti and the horrendous coordinated bombings in Iraq remind us that it is good to have grown-ups in charge when serious things happen.
Look at it this way: Even with a couple of bores like Kerry and Cheney talking for the rest of the year (with Bush you get the occasional Bushism), at least it won't be as boring as this year's Oscars.
If you look at the TV ads the president just unveiled today, you quickly see a main -- probably the main -- theme of his reelection campaign: It's NOT My Fault!
In scary/gauzy images, the president does his best to shift the blame, take the credit and transmit concern about regular folks — waitresses, welders, firefighters, black children, black seniors, middle-class families — when he really spends more time helping his fat-cat corporate friends.
Mr. Bush continues to imply that we should be scared because we're not safe, so we need to keep him to protect our national security. Which seems like a weird contradiction. If he's so good at protecting us, why aren't we safe?
The president doesn't hesitate to exploit 9/11 in his ads, even as he tries to keep 9/11 orphans and widows in the dark about what really happened.
Mr. Bush's ad flashes a shot of firefighters removing some flag-draped remains of a victim from the wreckage at ground zero even as he prohibits the filming of flag-draped remains of soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. You might call the Bush ads, an homage to Ronald Reagan's famous ads, "Mourning in America."
Nothing like hypocrisy with high production values.
Thus the new ads, the message of which might fairly be summed up as "It's midnight in America. But if the Democrats were in, the sun might never come up!"
