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AP Suggests Bush Is a Combination of Churchill, Confucius, and Gandhi Rolled Into One.
by Chris Edelson The Washington Post and Associated Press are certainly doing their best to give the Bush Legacy folks an unfiltered megaphone to spew their hagiographic BS. As I noted yesterday, the Washington Post graciously turned over its front page to advancing the Bush legacy, giving Bush apologists an unchallenged platform to praise the president with transparent falsehoods. Today, as digby pointed out, AP is on the case, with an utterly nauseating piece that’s better suited to a celebrity magazine than anything else. The AP piece manages to be lengthy but as empty as a can of soda. My head is kind of spinning from the breathless suggestions that Bush ought to be honored for his no-nonsense attention to detail, his moral clarity, and his underappreciated status as a “meticulous thinker.” Like the Washington Post story, the AP piece offers not one dissenting viewpoint, just quotes from Bush worshipers who see the president as something of a cross between Churchill and Confucius, alternately dispensing philosophical wisdom and hardheaded realism. Let me add a little reality to AP’s journey to fantasyland. Ben Feller, who wrote the piece, asserts as received wisdom that Bush sees the world “through a moral lens” that moves him to imbue even the mundane act of eating with a sense of higher purpose. Feller is not the first writer to accept Bush’s claim that he is a man of moral absolutes and clarity–as I observed last April, Cokie Roberts also accepted this claim without questioning it. The reality is that Bush is no moralist, guided by principles that lead him to consistent action. He is, in fact, a moral relativist. Bush has been able to justify allying the U.S. with a country like Uzbekistan, which has actually boiled people alive. That’s not moral clarity, it’s textbook relativism, the notion that it’s ok to condone the most horrifying kinds of torture when it serves our interests. Of course, Bush and his number 2 Cheney have themselves approved torture–more moral relativism. The Bush administration has also sent prisoners to countries with abyssmal human rights records, reasonably expecting the prisoners to be tortured. Bush doesn’t see the world through a moral lens any more than Louis XIV, of “l’etat, c’est moi” (”I am the state”) fame did. For Bush, it morality is whatever he says it is. He can even decide when it is acceptable to set aside the Constitution and break the law. Maybe the AP piece is meant as satire. After all, it contains this gem,attributed to White House Communications Director Kevin Sullivan: “He [Bush} can sniff it out a mile away when you don’t have the goods.” Too bad the president chose not to exercise this power when it came to analyzing the intelligence put forward to justify war with Iraq.
Chris Edelson is a lawyer in Washington, D.C. who writes frequently about current political and legal issues. His writing has previously been published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Metroland (Albany, NY) and at commondreams.org.
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