[Mb-civic] Into the Freying Pan - Eugene Robinson - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Into the Freying Pan

By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, January 31, 2006; A17

If there were justice in the world, George W. Bush would have to give 
his State of the Union address from Oprah's couch.

Not when she's being the New Age, touchy-feely Oprah, though. Bush 
should have to face the wrathful, Old Testament Oprah who subjected 
author James Frey to that awful public smiting the other day. She could 
open with the same line she used on Frey, whose best-selling memoir, 
which Oprah had touted on her show, turned out to be a tissue of lies. 
"I have to say it is -- it is difficult for me to talk to you, because I 
really feel duped. I feel duped," Oprah could tell the president.

And just maybe, as happened with Frey, the cockiness and bluster would 
instantly drain from the president's face as he grimly steeled himself 
to take his medicine.

Now that would be a State of the Union address worth watching -- one 
that would get a lot closer to the real state of the Union than the 
usual Kabuki theater of revisionist history, empty promises, 
focus-group-certified applause lines and choreographed nods to carefully 
selected heroes in the balcony.

The president's annual report to Congress and the American people has 
devolved into a ritual so predictable there isn't even much suspense 
left in counting how many times the speech is "interrupted" by comically 
unspontaneous applause, most of it from the president's own party. If 
you were watching the speech in a bar with friends (not likely, I 
realize), there is one drinking game you might play (not that I'm 
advocating any such thing, of course): Down a shot every time the 
president says something so bipartisan, irresistibly patriotic or 
blindingly obvious that Democrats have to rise to their feet as well.

True, any president's first State of the Union speech is actually an 
important moment in his presidency. But we've been hearing these 
perorations for years now, so the novelty has worn off. In Bush's case, 
his version of the Iraq war is shared by some people and rejected by 
others, and at this point no speech could possibly change many minds. 
And on the domestic front, promised new programs will lose their luster 
after Americans realize that years of unchecked spending and chainsaw 
tax cuts have left the government with no money to pay for them.

How much more revealing it would be to sit the president down with Oprah 
and let her go after him. He'd go through his explanation of how the war 
against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda became a war to depose Saddam 
Hussein because he had weapons of mass destruction, only we learned that 
those weapons didn't exist, but by then it didn't matter because Iraq 
had become the "central front" in the war against terrorism, even though 
bin Laden remains free to inspire jihadists around the world. Oprah 
would respond, as she did to Frey's convoluted rationalizations, with a 
withering "Mm-hmm."

Then Bush could try to explain why he had stained the nation's honor 
with extrajudicial kidnapping, indefinite detention and shameful abuse 
of terrorist suspects, and why he had authorized the National Security 
Agency to conduct domestic surveillance without following established 
procedures to first obtain warrants. And as Bush cited his lawyers' 
memos arguing that torture isn't really torture and that the law on 
domestic spying doesn't say what it in fact clearly says, Oprah could 
give him a skeptical "Uh-huh."

Then she could ask about the promise Bush made, in his televised speech 
from flooded New Orleans, to do whatever it took to rebuild that 
devastated city. She could ask him why, if he really meant what he said, 
his aides have rejected the one measure proposed thus far that could get 
things moving -- a bill that would create a buyout program for ruined 
properties. If Bush began mumbling about how city officials needed to 
come up with a rebuilding plan, Oprah could stop him short, the way she 
did Frey: "I don't know what that means." She could point out that the 
city did come up with a plan, and that federal officials should be 
engaged in trying to correct its flaws -- not sitting back in Washington 
while a great city dies.

Oprah might tell the president that the nation's highest elected 
official, even in wartime, has the duty to tell the American people the 
truth and obey the law. And if he said no he didn't, she could respond 
with the same words she used to Frey's chagrined publisher:

"Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, you do. Yes."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/30/AR2006013001160.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060131/17cfe696/attachment.htm