I don’t like Karen Hughes. I don’t think I like any of George Bush’s friends. Anyone who thinks Dubya is fun, or funny, or a great guy to have a beer with, I basically think is an asshole. Apparently, that makes me a whack-job.
What is currently irking me about Mrs. Hughes is her inability to understand that the vast bulk of anti-Americanism going around the globe is related to our policies and not to our media management.
The NY Times notes:
“Would any of you like to guess what was driving the commentary and all the chatter in all the talk shows in Western Europe that weekend?” Ms. Hughes said she asked. “You know what it was? It was the death penalty case in California!”
flip
I was in Paris when Timothy McVeigh was executed and Parisians were not too friendly to Americans that week. Just as Jim Crow laws were incredibly detrimental in our efforts to win the upper moral hand against the Soviets, so too is our continuing use of the death penalty in our effort to sell the world on the idea of the U.S. as the sole superpower.
And it isn’t only the death penalty, but our use of torture, our extraordinary renditions, our suspension of habeas corpus, our use of gulags, our abandonment of the Geneva Conventions, and our rejection of a multilateral approach to environmental issues, arms control, and human rights.
For those that think there isn’t much difference between the Bushes and the center-left, I offer the above as Exhibit A. If nothing else, the center-left offers a better approach on all of the above, and putting the center-left back in power (while falling short of our goal) would do wonders to repair the perception problem that currently accompanies the pax americana.
By that definition, count me in as the mother of all whack-jobs!
Ditto.
Boy, I always feel embarrassed about these issues — as Darin Kagan just reported on CNN, the U.S. is considered “barbaric” by other counries re the death penalty.
And, while I sense that Europeans and others are sympathetic to those of us who oppose the Bushites, they are probably also quite puzzled by our passivity. As am I at times … by my own .. and by others.
Well, maybe I’m being harder on myself and us that I should. We write and call and communicate constantly, don’t we … that’s something … so many of you went to Camp Casey and to D.C.’s big march …
then, Saturday night, I watched the most extraordinarily powerful performance from New York City by Salman Rushdie, Edward Albee, and a large group of writers — all members of PEN — who gave readings on a November night on the U.S. as a country that practices torture. PEN’s Web site has the audio, and an intro page:
State of Emergency
(The title is apt.)
What i meant to add was that viewing this performance, carried on national cable and satellite, told me that there are very strong, powerful, eloquent voices in the U.S. for what is right …
the reading of Abraham Lincoln’s “Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838” was particularly powerful — and it was read very well.
it is so relevant. Lincoln saw what could happen and is happening.
But we don’t eat children in this country like they do in Europe.
I stumbled on that near the end. I found a Link to clips of the readings if it’s not already posted.
Oh, Rumi. You’re priceless.
You found one of my favorite selections. I was so curious, and told my daughter the story. She and I looked up the “fish” (I won’t give away more here), and found more.
And this morning I looked up his writings…. Curzio Malaparte.
and here at the Culture Court is a long piece on Malaparte’s life, including a detailed description of the boo, “The Skin,” which was read.
one tiny snippet, above the section on The Skin and his other great writing, that’s so curious:
I had to look too after appreciating the reading on C-Span but those are new to me. That short piece was a prefect summary of how I see those who seem to think that way. When I can have a dog, the name will be Frebo.
Thanks for the extra info and links on the great writer.
As my daughter and I discussed, it was a side of the Americans that is not often described in memories of World War II.
Also, although the reader was a bit nervous, I found this one particularly ironic and interesting:
* Heidi Julavits: “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby” from Amateurs by Donald Barthelme”
(LINK)
I should say .. a side that is not often described in our heroic, self-aggrandizing memories of the U.S. in WWII …
BooMan, you live in a world of action and consequence, a world ruled by responsibility. Hughes lives in a world ruled, instead, by perception: what one does is meaningless; how one is perceived is everything.
There has always been an aspect of image trumping action: remember the Kingston Trio’s last line to “The Streets of Laredo”?: “So get yourself an outfit and be a cowboy too.” And Hughes is the queen of image.
As someone who has spent a great deal of time chopping wood (and has the scars to prove youthful stupidity), I cringe each time I see tape of Junior handling a chain saw. He hasn’t a clue as to what he is doing, but his handlers like the image.
Ultimately, that’s the difference between those of us on the left and those on the right. John Kerry looks stupid on a motorcycle–but the truth of the matter is that he does ride. The left tries to live its image, or let the image come from what it does. The right in America these days is all about image and image only (I mean, you don’t really think they believe that religious blather they spout–that they don’t is proven by the fact that they are the ones getting caught in hypocritical actions, not the left–at least, not nearly as often).
You just nailed it and stuck the landing.
That’s what is so exciting about the internet, I think. It makes it so that those who influence reality do not necessarily dictate perception.
Maybe it’s gone beyond that. She seemed genuinely shocked when the women in Saudi Arabia and other countries on her tour said they didn’t want to drive.
Born with it or learned through a lifetime of misinformation, some people believe that others who disagree are wrong or deficient.
All of us should think a little before thinking and saying what we think is better for others. Hughes is just an obvious example of this. Not everyone in this world wants to live in a little version of Amricana.
A lot of peple in the world would rather have food, safety and shelter before democracy and freedom of the press. A lot of people in this world are happy with their lot even though it seems alien, bizarre, autocratic, or lacking freedom to us.
One of the women running Bush and enabling him. The others, as you know, are Condi, his mom, and his wife.
Just like the enabling GOP-led Congress.
Just like the enabling Rove.
The enabling Supreme Court.
The enabling media.
I keep wondering what is it about this guy’s dick that makes everyone fall down and take it. Must be the masochist in them all.
Indeed they are masochists. And Bush plays the swaggering alpha male. (No lack of crotch shots in the media, either!) Yet really he isn’t one–he just plays one on TV. He doesn’t realize the difference
. . . and neither do they.
This is telling: A true masochist can sense power and seeks it out to submit to it. Whereas they fall for a charade. It is emptiness on all sides: He pretends to rule and they pretend they are submitting to power, like children who have forgotten that their game is make-believe.
To a man with only a hammer everything looks like a nail. Hughes is a PR person, therefore she thinks everything can be fixed by better PR.
Remember Brownie, another person who confused PR with the real world.
I have my own saying: “Reality has a way of catching up with you.”
that she actually believes the talking points?
Republican communication is not part of any dialogue; it’s never meant to elicit participation. It’s merely to give orders or to clarify duties.
I’m stunned by the prospect that a Republican as high up as Hughes might actually believe enough of these instructions as to be surprised by input from the instructees.
Richard Holbrooke, in his recent convesation with Charlie Rose, emphasized the absolutely critical importance of Karen Hughes’ current position … that she could begin to make an enormous difference in how the U.S. is perceived (after Abu Ghraib, etc., which Holbrooke despondently referred to) …
he did not give an opinion on her ability to do so, and, alas, Charlie didn’t ask, perhaps because he’d just had her on as a guest.
but, given the whole of his conversation, Holbrooke must be profoundly worried about her inadequacy for the job.
She simply is NOT qualified.
That’s really the bottom line here.
She has none of the requisite background, education, training, and savoir faire for such a position.
I’m not sure qualification has anything to do with it. The Bush policies are patently tyrannical, and no amount of PR can paper that over. Over the past week I have been pouring through the second volume of Kershaw’s ‘Hitler'(I was interested in finding out when the German military establishment first realized that they were going to lose the war — the answer is the end of November 1941), and was struck, as many others have been, by the similarity between the Nazi administration and the Bush administration. The similarities that strike one most particularly are the primacy of public relations over fact and logic in the formulation and prosecution of public policy, and the utter disregard for constituted legal authority and procedures, which in a muted way still existed in Germany in 1941.
The differences are, of course, huge. By 1939 the Nazi administration was able to liquidate people like us without fear of reprisal. But the similarities between that originally populist regime and the populist PR that drives the present administration are striking. Mrs. Hughes exemplifies that similarity. She is very good at what she does, but even Mrs Hughes cannot paper over the defeat in Iraq, just as Goebbels was unable to paper over Stalingrad.
We are safe taking as an article of faith that all Bushistas like most modern Republicans are incompetent for any ostensible governmental purpose they’re assigned. The Republicans are not a political party; they’re ruling rather than governing, and they’re taking over rather than taking advantage of changing voter (or foreign leadership) preferences.
I’m just surprised that someone so close to the inner circle actually believe any of their propaganda. I would have expected her to report back on a need for change of message or tactics of course; but not on her surprise that the intended audience isn’t seeing that their program ‘works.’
It adds a frightening element to the anti-Bush movement. It suggests that there may well be leaders–and perhaps this could ultimately be almost any other Republicans–who would be much more competent at completing the Republican revolution.
If so, whatever allies we may recruit to contain if not remove Bushism will be coming at us at hurricane strength at the next opportunity.
I’m shocked to see this comment from you. I thought you had been aware of that attitude for a while and had recognized it as part of the problem.
We would do well to focus on reshaping policy so the dispensible political individuals are less powerful.
Let me clarify the previous comment. I didn’t mean shocked as an insult or any other judgement of your actions. I meant it as surprised that you didn’t see them believing their own propaganda before now. From other comments of your’s, I thought you had.
Yeah, that’s what makes them more dangerous.
is always a mistake.
Even the smallest-time salesman knows that when the customer is not buying the line, you change the pitch.
Another level of Bushco incompetence.
However, there is this aspect: Bush has been using the media (with its open complicity) with no understanding. He quickly got the impression he was controlling it, and is near to discovering that on the contrary, it was using him, for its own purposes, and now is moving on. This is leaving him helpless and flustered: He hasn’t quite realized what has changed.
Sweet, sweet days, people! Enjoy!
Fortunately, Bushco is unlike the Nazis in one important way: The Nazis believed in practical competence, especially in war. None of Bush’s people have given any thought to the practical aspects of war. Or of runnning an economy during war.
Even now, it appears that a means is being found to get rid of the Bush regime. And we will celebrate when that happens. However. The plan is to replace incompetent evil with competent evil. The gulag will not be torn down. The renditions, torture, and spying will continue, but out of sight. The unconstitutional laws will somehow . . . remain on the books. All that war-draft enabling-legislation will remain in place, ready for the moment it can be sprung, even as we scour the world for mercenaries to do our fighting for us.
Why? Because the war for oil must continue: There is no back-up plan. Americans will gladly sell their freedoms–indeed they are selling their own children–to gas up their cars. This is what non-negotiable–as Cheney said about the “American way of life,” (that is, automobiles)–means.
That the war is destined to be lost does not change a thing. America is on the final doper’s binge, the one that takes you all the way to the bottom. The one that leaves you broke, sick, starving, and probably dead.
Progressive strategy needs to accomplish three goals:
1. Resist. There must be an alternative to the trance of death which is carrying America to oblivion–an idea of another way, that people can put hope in.
2. Hide. The dying regime will turn on and attack anything that is not itself. A way of effectively disappearing, of dropping off the radar, or some form of camoflage, is needful.
3. Survive and persist. There must be a physical infrastructure of survival. This is no easy thing, because a) the economy as we know it is going to collapse or disintegrate, and b) anything that works will become a target, an enemy of the state. So disappearing, becoming anonymous, is implicit in any survival plan, yet the plan itself must be a physically practical approach to sustainance.
These goals make for a very tall order, and would be plainly impossible, except that the level of competence needed by the Bush-replacement regime will not be achieved. Events have already spun too far out of control. And the less control, the greater opening of the doorway to survival.
Susan: I truly agree — she has absolutely no qualifications for a position of this importance other than that the President and his family appears to like her: and that is evidently enough. She is without question a continuing embarassment to the United States and without a doubt a danger to whatever is left to our standing in the world’s perception of our country. In statement after statement reported in the world press, she’s proven herself to be misinformed, unguiding and appalling ignorant and tactless. PS: one of the WaPo editorials today is entitled “Saga of Incompetence”, and ends with the question “Will incompetence be remembered as the salient characteristic of the Bush presidency?”
I know how I’d vote…
would be able to present US policies in terms that would be more attractive to that sector of US mainstream that may have begun to have some niggling questions, however it would not be realistic to expect a change in the actual policies, nor that the more skillful presentation would effect the same kind of upswing in support for them outside the US, especially in those areas of the world where those policies have the greatest and most immediate and graphic impact, and advances in technology have severely compromised the potential of covertization, again, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, naturally in the US, where the press is more stringently controlled, greater success would be achieved.
“Would any of you like to guess what was driving the commentary and all the chatter in all the talk shows in Western Europe that weekend?” Ms. Hughes said she asked. “You know what it was? It was the death penalty case in California!”
VIENNA (Austria) – The name Arnold Swarzenegger has been removed from the country’s most important Soccer Stadium as a result of Austrian criticism for California Governor Swarzenegger.
Fran’s Breakfast Article @EuroTrib :: Spiegel Online
SIEGEL’S DAILY TAKE – Schwarzenegger Terminating Ties With Austria
Tue Dec 20th, 2005 at 10:01:01 PM PDT
Ms Hughes discovers the real world outside the neocon empire dream for the 21th century. The single death sentence and execution, screws her PR boost for GWB and rightfully so!
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
“Apparently, that makes me a whack-job”.
Well apparently I am one of those also. Seriously who here would ever invite one of these caricatures of a person into our own home and space? Would you even hold out your hand to shake if introduced in public?
I consider them to be sewer rats, and frankly, I do not want them in my space under any circumstance and at this point I refuse to be polite about it.
Reading through this thread most seem to agree that the policies are so bad they need changing. What is somewhat worrisome is that for the life of me I cannot think of alternative policies offered by the Democrat party. Where do we start?
BooMan wrote:
But what got Bush elected twice, and still keeps about 40% of poll respondents happy with him, seems to have been media management more than his policies. Sounds like what he and Hughes are trying to do with those unappreciative foreigners is more of the same routine that’s been working so well with good red-state Americans.