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Mr. Bush ... Brought to the Bar of Poetic Justice (Finally)

by Robert S. McElvaine

Mr. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts and Letters and Chair of the Department of History at Millsaps College. He is currently completing a book, Oh Freedom!: America in the 1960s (Norton).

Good morning Mr. and Mrs. Red State America; this is your wakeup call. It’s 11:55 PM. Do you know where the people being put in charge of our ports are coming from?

You have been accepting any number of dubious (at best) policies and actions by the Bush Administration because you have bought the claim that this president is “keeping us safe.” “Remember 9-11” has been the high-decibel noise used to drown out debate on highly debatable policies and to justify anything this administration wants to do.

It is entirely understandable that people fervently desire to believe that their president is keeping America safe. That desire has led many Americans to disregard all the evidence to the contrary, such as the disastrous disaster response to the Hurricane Katrina and going into the wrong war at the wrong time against the wrong enemy, thereby creating more terrorists and strengthening the real danger, Iran.

Karl Rove and company have long worked to grow support for the administration’s misguided policies by using on the American people the same method that mushroom farmers use to grow their fungi: Keep them in the dark and feed them a lot of excrement.

The Dubai port deal has suddenly turned on the lights. Many Americans who once were blind to the Bush Administration’s duplicity now see. It is such a load of what they have been feeding us that it has stuck in our craw. It is finally too much for the American people to swallow.

“Remember 9-11” is finally coming back to bite the Bush Administration. A week after Vice President Cheney reminded us that this administration doesn’t know what it is shooting at, we found out that it also does not know who is shooting at us.

President Bush says canceling the Dubai deal would send the wrong message to the Muslim world.

Let me see if I have this straight: Torturing Muslim prisoners; holding them without charges; calling for democracy in the region and then trying to undermine the winners of a democratic election in Palestine; invading a country in the region on the basis of selective, misleading intelligence and with most of the world opposed to the invasion . . . the list goes on. None of that sent the wrong message to the Muslim world, but saying “No, thanks,” to letting a company run by the government of a country from which two of the 9-11 terrorists came, which provided some of the funding for al Qaeda, and was one of only three nations that recognized the Taliban regime—that would send the wrong message?

And this is what Mr. Bush will use his first veto on?

But the administration insists that the port deal does nothing to increase the threat of terrorism. That’s an interesting argument. It boils down to this: American ports aren’t safe anyway. Only 2% to 5% of cargo coming in is inspected anyway. Much of the general public did not realize this fact. Now they will. And that information will do nothing to reinforce the belief that the Bush Administration is keeping America safe.

Still, it could be true that the dubious Dubai deal isn’t a real security threat. If so, the irony is delicious. The administration found it much easier to sell its long train of abuses—a whole host of untruths—than to sell what just could be the truth. That should not be surprising. They have, after all, had little or no experience at trying to sell the truth.

Beyond the Bush-Cheney Administration’s inexperience with marketing the truth, this deal simply won’t pass the proverbial smell test.

The façade of George W. Bush as the man who is keeping America safe is crumbling over what may be a false threat to American security. All the bad karma that the president and his advisors built up over years of misleading stories about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, mushroom clouds over American cities, and links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda is finally bringing its appropriate consequences.

An administration that has for so long lived by misinformation about terrorist threats may now be dying by misinformation about terrorist threats. The latest CBS News Poll finds that the president has fallen to his lowest approval rating yet, a Nixonian 34%, with 59% disapproving. Bush is being hoisted on his own petard—or his own past pretenses.

Poetic justice lives.