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xiphiasAs much as I'm disgusted with the Bush administration, I'm more disgusted with our press. Politicians lie, cheat, and steal -- not all of them, but it happens -- and it's the press's job to be skeptical, to ask tough questions, and to kind of point out, "Hey, this is totally divorced from reality," when something is totally divorced from reality.
From the New York Times:
The appropriate question for a reporter to ask at this point would have been, "So, if the President had sneezed, would we now be invading North Korea? What if he had hiccuped? Would that have meant an attempt to press the Fed to lower interest rates? Is the entire 'anti-gay marriage Constitutional amendment' thing based on a bad burrito the President ate?"
Apparently, we're making policy decisions that will cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives on attempts to decode the President's facial tics. I'd frankly be more comfortable with haruspicy.
From the New York Times:
WASHINGTON, June 3 — On a Tuesday afternoon two months ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sat down to a small lunch in President Bush's private dining room behind the Oval Office and delivered grim news to her boss: Their coalition against Iran was at risk of falling apart.
A meeting she had attended in Berlin days earlier with European foreign ministers had been a disaster, she reported, according to participants in the discussion. Iran was neatly exploiting divisions among the Europeans and Russia, and speeding ahead with its enrichment of uranium. The president grimaced, one aide recalled, interpreting the look as one of exasperation "that said, 'O.K., team, what's the answer?' "
That body language touched off a closely held two-month effort to reach a drastically different strategy, one articulated two weeks later in a single sentence that Ms. Rice wrote in a private memorandum. It broached the idea that the United States end its nearly three-decade policy against direct talks with Iran.
Mr. Bush's aides rarely describe policy debates in the Oval Office in much detail. But in recounting his decisions in this case, they appeared eager to portray him as determined to rebuild a fractured coalition still bearing scars from Iraq and find a way out of a negotiating dynamic that, as one aide said recently, "the Iranians were winning."
The appropriate question for a reporter to ask at this point would have been, "So, if the President had sneezed, would we now be invading North Korea? What if he had hiccuped? Would that have meant an attempt to press the Fed to lower interest rates? Is the entire 'anti-gay marriage Constitutional amendment' thing based on a bad burrito the President ate?"
Apparently, we're making policy decisions that will cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives on attempts to decode the President's facial tics. I'd frankly be more comfortable with haruspicy.