[Mb-civic] Maureen Dowd

[Mike Blaxill]

Sex, Envy, Proximity
    By Maureen Dowd
    The New York Times

    Saturday 15 October 2005

    President Bush started his weekend early. He
decided to leave for Camp David at 2 p.m.
yesterday.

    Can you blame him?

    The White House has lost its mind - and its
survival instincts. The monomaniacal special
prosecutor is moving in for the kill. Republicans
are covered in dirt. And we may be only moments
away from another Newsweek cover on another
President Bush headlined "The Wimp Factor."

    W.'s political career was structured to
ensure that he would never suffer his father's
problems by seeming weak or wobbly on
conservatism. Everything would be about
projecting strength and protecting the base.

    But the reverse playbook got washed away with
Katrina, when Karl Rove and W. did not jump to
attention at the word hurricane. W. ended up with
a job approval rating of 2 percent among
African-Americans, according to a new NBC/Wall
Street Journal poll. He missed the golden hour,
as it's called in combat medicine, the precious
time when acting fast may save those in jeopardy.

    W.'s presidency has become branded with
rushing into one place too fast and not rushing
into another fast enough.

    Astonishingly, with the choice of Harriet
Miers, this Bush has ended up exactly where the
last Bush ended up: giving affirmative action for
the Supreme Court a bad name and angering
conservatives, who call him a mollycoddle.

    Just as the father clearly missed the wily
strategist Lee Atwater after he died, so the son
clearly misses the Atwater protégé Karl Rove,
who has been distracted by kidney stones and
trips to testify to the grand jury looking into
the outing of Valerie Plame.

    Lyndon Johnson said the two things that make
politicians behave more stupidly than anything
else are sex and envy. You might add one more:
proximity. I always think men are more prone to
get seduced by proximity into making unwise
choices. They tend to be a bit lazy. They'll grab
the closest doughnut off the platter. Like Jude
Law and the Nanny.

    It was Monica Lewinsky's proximity that
caused Bill Clinton to forget the dignity of his
office. It was Harriet Miers's proximity - she
has spent more time with W. than any aide except
Andy Card - that caused George Bush to forget
that flattery and catering to his every need are
not qualifications for the Supreme Court.

    "We're innately lazy, like lions," a male
friend said. "We like whoever happens to be
around."

    President Bush is still the same loyalty
enforcer he was in his dad's White House. He
likes deference and dislikes checks and balances.
Having one of his handmaidens on a Supreme Court
designed to be free of "obsequious instruments,"
as Alexander Hamilton called cronies, makes
perfect sense to him, just as paying conservative
columnists to spread the administration agenda
made sense.

    Without his "Boy Genius," Mr. Bush has turned
to other shields. Laura gave the fidgeting and
blinking president support on the "Today" show on
Tuesday, telling Matt Lauer that criticism of Ms.
Miers might be sexist.

    That's silly. The conservatives want a female
justice - they just want one who will be reliably
certain to influence the court to curb women's
rights.

    On Thursday, again with weird and stilted
body language, and an earpiece that kept falling
out, W. held a teleconference and tried to use 10
American soldiers from the Army's 42nd Infantry
Division in Tikrit and one Iraqi soldier as props
to offer a more upbeat assessment of the security
preparations for the weekend vote.

    The surprise wasn't that it turned out to be
rehearsed, although that angered some uniformed
officers at the Pentagon who felt the troops were
being politicized and used as military wallpaper.
If these brave young men and women can be trusted
to carry guns and kill insurgents, these officers
reasoned, why can't they be trusted to speak into
a microphone without stage-managing and a
rehearsal from a civilian Pentagon spin doctor?

    The surprise was how inept the event was. The
White House was always able to pull off these
stagey, scripted events during the campaign and
when selling the Iraq war.

    It's hard to believe sunny reports from
Tikrit with Syria turning into Iraq's Cambodia.
As James Risen and David Sanger write in The
Times today, "A series of clashes in the last
year between American and Syrian troops ... has
raised the prospect that cross-border military
operations may become a dangerous new front in
the Iraq war."

    It was hard to tell whom that teleconference
was aimed at impressing - unless it was just
meant to cheer up the edgy W. Instead, it just
made him seem more lost than ever.

  http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/101505D.shtml