It must be hard to be a conservative columnist in the months leading up to what will most likely be a crushing defeat of John McCain.
And it must be very hard to be David Brooks, conservative columnist for the New York Times, trying to salvage your credibility as report after report after report proves that you have spent the better part of the past eight years on the wrong side.
In his column The Bush Paradox in today's New York Times, Brooks struggles once again to vindicate not just the disastrous policies of George W. Bush, but the personality flaws of the man himself.
Brooks takes us back to the winter of 2006-2007 when, in Brooks's own words:
Iraq was in free fall, with horrific massacres and ethnic cleansing that sent a steady stream of bad news across the world media. The American public delivered a stunning electoral judgment against the Iraq war, the Republican Party and President Bush.
But Bush paid no attention to the "stunning electoral judgment" of his war policies. He wanted to send another 20,000 troops to Iraq, and nothing would stand in his way.
He paid no attention to the conclusions of the Baker-Hamilton report, "which called for handing more of the problems off to the Iraqi military and wooing Iran and Syria."
He paid no attention to the Democratic leadership or the op-ed pages across the country that called for Bush to start withdrawing troops from Iraq.
He paid no attention to his own generals -- the "generals on the ground" Bush often invokes as a reason to ignore the call of the "stunning electoral judgment."
When President Bush consulted his own generals, the story was much the same. Almost every top general, including Abizaid, Schoomaker and Casey, were against the surge. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was against it, according to recent reports. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki called for a smaller U.S. presence, not a bigger one.
But according to Brooks, Bush's refusal to listen to anyone -- American citizens, the commission tasked with offering solutions to the quagmire, or even his own advisers -- is exactly why Bush is, apparently, a visionary.
The secret to Bush's success, Brooks argues, is those very traits the rest of us decry.
Bush is a stubborn man. Well, without that stubbornness, that unwillingness to accept defeat on his watch, he never would have bucked the opposition to the surge.
Bush is an outrageously self-confident man. Well, without that self-confidence he never would have overruled his generals.
...
Bush is also a secretive man who listens too much to Dick Cheney. Well, the uncomfortable fact is that Cheney played an essential role in promoting the surge. Many of the people who are dubbed bad guys actually got this one right.
See? He's stubborn, arrogant, and secretive -- and, oh yes, he listens to Dick Cheney, the man who claimed the Iraqi insurgency was "in the last throes" three years ago.
But these are all good qualities because look how Bush has been proven right, while everyone else has been proven wrong.
And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility.
We should not be criticizing. We should not be investigating. We should not be questioning. We certainly should not be withdrawing.
No, we should be enjoying our "season of humility."
And then:
...the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.
So we must humble ourselves before the great and brilliant President Bush, and then we must concede that he "actually got one right."
Why does this matter? Bush will be leaving the White House in another six months, and if the current polls are right, he will be taking his failed policies with him as the Democrats sweep the White House, the House, and the Senate, ushering in a new era of politics and policies that are actually based on something slightly more substantive than stubbornness, arrogance, secrecy, and listening to Dick Cheney.
But this is why it matters.
Because David Brooks is still at the New York Times. And as of this year, William Krystol is too.
And countless other talking heads who were wrong -- absolutely, unequivocally wrong -- are still writing and talking, and we are still listening.
And despite Brooks's rather hypocritical call for the "cocksure surge opponents" to humbly admit how wrong they were, we have yet to see such humility from the chattering class that helped to get us into this mess in the first place.
Yes, some newspapers and magazines have attempted to analyze their own failings in covering the build up to the war.
In May of 2004, the editors of the New York Times published FROM THE EDITORS; The Times and Iraq, in which they concluded, after "reviewing hundreds of articles written during the prelude to war and into the early stages of the occupation", that:
But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged -- or failed to emerge.
Too bad about all the dead people. Wish we'd been more rigorous. Wish we'd been more aggressive. (No mention of the reporter, Judith Miller, who wrote the bulk of these stories. No mention of her complicity in allowing members of the Bush Administration to cite her stories, the stories that were fed to her by the Bush Administration, as evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.)
Later in 2004, executive editor of The Washington Post, Leonard Downie Jr. acknowledged that Post's coverage was, well, flawed.
"We were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale," Mr. Downie said in a front-page article that assessed the newspaper's prewar coverage. "Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part."
It was a mistake. See? Mistakes happen. Oh well. Thousands of dead American troops, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, but, you know, that was a mistake.
Whoops.
But has the media really learned its lesson? Have we?
Has the coverage of Iran's nuclear program been any different than the coverage of Iraq six years ago?
Just last month, the New York Times published this story:
Atomic Monitor Signals Concern Over Iran’s Work
The International Atomic Energy Agency, in an unusually blunt and detailed report, said Monday that Iran’s suspected research into the development of nuclear weapons remained “a matter of serious concern” and that Iran continued to owe the agency “substantial explanations.”
The nine-page report accused the Iranians of a willful lack of cooperation, particularly in answering allegations that its nuclear program may be intended more for military use than for energy generation.
A few days later, the Times ran an editorial titled "Iran and the Inspectors," in which it warned:
This latest report is alarming, but it must not be used as an excuse by Washington hard-liners to launch another war. There are no good military options.
That seems like an improvement, doesn't it?
But we shall see. If, for some reason, the Democrats fail to capture the White House, we will likely see an increase in stories about the supposed threat Iran poses to American security. We already know John McCain's foreign policy regarding Iran:
"You know that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran?" the Republican presidential candidate said. Then, he sang. "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran."
So while Bush may be on his way out, we do not yet know what we will get in his place. And we do not know how the major media will cooperate as it did in 2002 and 2003.
But David Brooks is right about one thing:
Life is complicated. The reason we have democracy is that no one side is right all the time. The only people who are dangerous are those who can’t admit, even to themselves, that obvious fact.
[Cross-posted at DailyKos]
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