[Mb-civic] Into the Freying Pan - Eugene Robinson - Washington Post
William Swiggard
swiggard at comcast.net
Tue Jan 31 04:04:11 PST 2006
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
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