Wed, August 24, 2005

I TiVo'd this CNN special, Dead Wrong, about the intelligence failures that led us into war in Iraq, because when I heard about it, I thought, "Whoa! CNN is going to do some actual reporting? This I have to see!" I didn't have any immediate plans on when to watch it, but then I noticed that Special Snowflake's twin quasars of female punditry were all over it. If I wanted to wade amidst their insightful eloquence... well, I needed to get my ass in gear.

The first thing I noticed about Dead Wrong was PRODUCTION VALUES! Whizzing graphics! Dramatic music! CNN misses no opportunity to dress up journalism like a pageant, so its documentary gravitas is hobbled right out of the gate. The next thing I thought was, "I'm really glad someone is saying this stuff at the CNN level." As the program went on, and continued to have a clear and unmistakable point of view, I started to worry: "Uh oh. This whole thing is going to be dismissed out of hand as liberal media propaganda." Nevertheless, the apparent ease with which CNN located handfuls of former administration and CIA officials to say that the run-up to the Iraq war was laden with missteps and intelligence failures seems to confirm that it's more than just a lot of lefty whining.

The Ladeez were both disappointed that the program featured no new information, but if you think about it, if anything new came out it would be old news to us well before CNN got around to talking about it. We read the blogs, and if we don't, we've got friends who forward us the important stuff, not to mention True Majority constantly marching through our inbox with new things to get huffy about. CNN will not be scooping the anti-Bush camp with stories about how awful Bush is. We're the first ones to get our hands on that stuff; most times, we're growing it ourselves. The Ladeez are rightly disturbed that this information isn't already considered to be widely known, but I think most of it qualifies as "fog facts" – a term appearing in Larry Beinhart's brilliant satire, The Librarian, to refer to things that are widely known but sort of collectively ignored, like Bush avoiding his National Guard duties. As we've learned, in today's era once something goes out over the TV airwaves, it's immediately forgotten – it's considered old news. So, I found it heartening that CNN was actually reiterating these points in a mainstream setting. It might even make the average viewer think twice about how important this information might be – perhaps the first step along the progression from "fog facts" to "facts."

Because, even though they're airing The Situation Room, CNN does retain a shred of credibility, and having this timeline laid out on their network, rather than the airwaves of Air America or the pages of Talking Points Memo, underlines these facts with a certain legitimacy. Which brings me to the key complaint I had with Dead Wrong, production-wise. It seems to follow in line with the current assumption that Americans are morons and are perpetually on the edge of information overload. News shows always simplify information and talk to us real slow like we're characters in a dumb blonde joke. In this case it's something relatively simple: they don't put an interview subject's name on the screen when you first see him. For some reason, they've adopted the NPR model – interjecting after his first sound bite, to mention his name and role via voiceover narration. When a talking head re-appears later in the broadcast, the name will come up, but on the entire first interview, nothing. Are they afraid we're too busy with the ticker, and we can only read so much on the screen at once? I found it disorienting and condescending. It seemed to say, "We know you'll only be confused if we show you his name, so let us just tell you."

Since the facts in Dead Wrong are mostly old news, I ended up thinking more about the aftermath and the general implications than I did about the specific details. I doubt we'll ever be completely sure whether Bush was honestly duped by grossly inept intelligence reports or whether he asked someone to cook the books. But even if he earnestly believed in the WMD scare based on classified information we'll never see, it's unfortunate that his exploration of non-military alternatives was so half-hearted. And it's a shame that he couldn't be up front with Americans (or Congress) about his reasons for invading Iraq. Because even if you accept that his WMD argument for pre-emptive strike wasn't intentionally falsified, it's just one among five scattershot justifications. (Alongside human rights violations, Al Qaeda/9-11 funding, the democracy domino effect, and liberation.) Seems to me, if you believe in something so strongly that you're willing to send hundreds upon hundreds of American servicemen into harm's way, you should be confident enough in your reasoning that you're not afraid to display it publicly. But instead of outlining all these actual reasons they went with, "Saddam's got yellowcake which means he could have a nuclear missile pointed at your house and – let's face it – he probably does."

Why? I'm just one bitter lunatic with an axe to grind, but I think it's because that makes a pretty sound bite. This administration approaches everything through the prism of politics and PR. Remember Andy Card's comment on the timing of the invasion? "You don't introduce new products in August." Remember the temporary re-branding attempt from War on Terror to Global Struggle Against Extremism? (That got nixed as soon as they realized if they're setting their sights on extremists that includes Pat Robertson, and he's on their side.) The Bush Administration functions like a big corporation: it bends legislation to its whim, it jealously protects "trade secrets" from the inquisitive press corps, and it presents all its ideas to the American public in the form of a strategic marketing campaign. And it works. He won his re-election, after all. For the most part, Bush has been very successful gaining the trust of Americans despite his missteps in postwar planning and his flip-flops on the justification for invasion. (Recent polling nosedives, both for him personally and for his handling of the war, are seen by some as an overdue crack in the armor – I'm convinced that Rove has more tricks up his sleeve to turn those numbers back around.) His chummy, steadfast persona has carried a lot of weight with Americans who are justifiably nervous after years Bush Administration fearmongering. And I think Holly has hit upon a key element of this: Bush's apparent spirituality and folksy empathy, which are actually just for show.

Maybe he truly believes he's a spiritual person, but even if he does he's clearly fooling himself. His actions betray his true motivation: he approaches religion as an opportunist, not as a member of the flock. What bothers me the most about Bush's spirituality is that in my view he represents the very worst of the Religious Right, a faction that professes itself a representative for all Christians, even though it's really an extremist fringe group. Bush and others like Pat Robertson and the "Justice Sunday" crew do not follow the ethical guidelines of a spiritual life; they just use Christian values as leverage to motivate a base of constituents for whom those values are tied to deeply held beliefs. Commandeering those beliefs, and stirring up a frenzy by creating a false perception of attacks against them, is a heartless and cynical exploitation of spirituality. They take advantage of real Christians by interlocking the conservative Republican agenda into traditional religious beliefs and duping a huge segment of the God-fearing population into believing that the conservatives' fights are their own. Bush, or Ralph Reed, or any "think tank" with the word "Family" in its name: they're not faithful or altruistic, they just hide behind religion for convenience' sake. Actual religious people are harmless and good, like the beautiful family in Junebug. Decent, humble people for whom spirituality is a moral compass, not a crusade.

It positively infuriates me to see them used as pawns, when they're really the last people Bush cares about. If I trusted red-staters to watch CNN and take it seriously, I'd hope that programming like Dead Wrong might help them see how they've been used; maybe it would start to turn them against the man who acts like their leader but never has their interests at heart. But by now they've all been told that – like it or not – Fox News is their channel.

***

Holly also mentions that if Bush were truly human about using war as a last resort, he'd have more respect for the sacrifice involved and the country would be pulling together for the war effort rather than chilling at the food court and "trying to pretend that a couple thousand soldiers on our side and countless civilians on their side aren't a very big deal." This is a strong and compassionate point, and reminds me of a very moving and insightful op-end by Uwe Reinhardt, a political economist and father of a wounded veteran of Bush's War: Who's Paying for Our Patriotism?

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