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Suddenly, he gets it It's All Different Now. (Or Is It?)By Rick Horowitz
Do you believe in the transforming moment? Of course you do! We all do. It's the instant when "never could" becomes "just might." It's the wondrous millisecond when the bright light pierces through the clouds. When life's wakeup call suddenly comes with a brand-new ring tone. It's wondrous and it's glorious. Except, of course, when it's bogus. Which brings us to one George Walker Bush, who has himself been thoroughly transformed -- or so we're expected to believe -- by a force of nature named Katrina. Not enough, the president tells us, to spend whatever it takes to put the people of the Gulf Coast back on their feet again after Katrina's calamitous visit. The transformed George Bush wants to go beyond. The transformed George Bush suddenly sees, in a way he's never seen before, the awful legacies of race and poverty in our nation. Sees them, and vows to root them out. It's stirring, isn't it? And inspiring. Assuming, of course, you believe it. And if you do, good for you! Would you like to own some swamp land? George Bush's White House is always ready to sell. I'm just not ready to buy. It's the cynic in me, always looking the gift nag in the mouth. Then again, there's so much to be cynical about. There's precedent. There's timing. And most of all, there's Karl Rove. Precedent first: This isn't the first time the Bush White House has had an extreme goals-and-objectives makeover. Remember that nasty bit of business called "Iraq"? When Iraq first popped onto our radar screens, it was all about weapons of mass destruction. We needed to do something about Iraq, the White House insisted, because of its weapons of mass destruction. Except that when we marched into Baghdad and toppled the statue and opened the warehouses -- well, there weren't any weapons of mass destruction. Oops. But this bunch never says "Oops." Instead, they expanded their goals. The reason they went into Iraq, they declared, wasn't simply to get rid of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction; it was to "rid the world of an evil dictator," too, because getting rid of Saddam Hussein would mean that Iraq would stop being a trouble spot. And hasn't that gone well! So what did they do next? Did they admit they'd failed to do their homework? Admit that they'd gone into Iraq with terrible intelligence -- and even worse judgment? Not this bunch. Here's what they did: They expanded their goals again. The real reason they were in Iraq, they suddenly announced, was to bring democracy to the entire Middle East! (And the body count keeps rising.) It's a pattern: When they fail at the big things, they turn them into even bigger things. So when they failed to get off the dime in time to save lives in New Orleans -- suddenly it wasn't about bodies floating in the water; it was about putting an end to poverty and racism. Nice try. Then there's the timing. Would George Bush's Lyndon Johnson impression have been slightly more credible if it hadn't come only when his poll numbers were stuck in the polar regions? When nothing else he had tried, and no one else he and his gang had tried to blame, had done anything to repair the damage to his carefully crafted image as a decisive leader? Let's just say that this latest transformation was...convenient. Unless, of course, you prefer the word "desperate." And then there's Karl Rove. Wasn't one of Katrina's biggest stories the crony-laden leadership (or lack of same) from the Federal Emergency Management Agency? So they follow that huge mistake by putting large chunks of the Gulf reconstruction plan into the hands of the president's chief political strategist and image manipulator? It's an enormous rescue effort, all right. But the person Karl Rove is most intent on rescuing -- yet again -- is George W. Bush. Do you believe in the transforming moment? Of course you do! We all do. But this isn't it. Posted 9/20/05. Get
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Rick Horowitz
