Any sensible, informed person paying attention to last week’s theater regarding the Petraeus performance and Bush’s pathetic followup would not recognize the way it played to the Beltway theater critics, who just loved the show. Greenwald this morning sums up their reviews:
Jonathan Weisman and Shailagh Murray, The Washington Post (h/t Atrios): "MoveOn.org provided Republicans a life raft when it ran a full-page newspaper advertisement Monday taunting Petraeus as ‘General Betray Us.’"
Time’s Joe Klein (h/t emaydon): "It seems clear the President has won this round. An optimistic general will trump a skeptical politician anytime."
Fred Barnes, The Weekly Standard: "For Democrats, Petraeus Week was a wrenching ordeal. . . . The New York Times ad by MoveOn.org trashing Petraeus as a liar backfired badly. . . . The prospect of a return engagement by Petraeus can only fill Democrats with a feeling of dread."
Mitch McConnell: "I assure you, we’re going to continue to press Democrats both collectively and individually to denounce this ad. I think this organization is ruining the reputation of the Democratic Party."
Time’s Joe Klein: "I remain convinced that the MoveOn ‘Betrayus’ ad was not only deeply stupid and an unconscionable slur against an honorable man, but also potentially very damaging to Democratic candidates running across the country."
Fox News favorite Susan Estrich: "The Democrats, especially the Democrats running for president, have a problem, and his name is Petraeus."
The New Republic’s Jason Zengerle: "I think this is a pretty politically tone-deaf ad . . . . When U.S. military commanders are the only people a majority of Americans trust to end the war — as this new NYT/CBS poll makes clear — attacking America’s most prominent military commander doesn’t seem like a very smart move. . . ."
"Joe Klein makes the essential point about Bush and Petraeus in a much more cogent fashion . . . . Maybe the next time Bush sends Petraeus to the Hill, Democrats–to say nothing of MoveOn–will take a different approach to dealing with him."
All these and so many more are living on Planet Beltway, and it has little or nothing to do with reality. It’s theater and entertainment, and the Bushies put on a bravura performance that only people with their insider knowledge and sensibilities understand and can interpret for the rest of us rubes out in the hinterlands. Not one of these people have anything to say about the substance of the message; it’s all about staging, delivery, and style. And MoveOn fits into the drama filling the archetypal role of America-hating leftists who seek to undermine everything that is wholesome, strong, and beautiful about our great nation and noble military.
Greenwald takes great pains to say that the reviews of the experts are not in line with broad American public opinion, but what Greenwald doesn’t seem to understand is that American public opinion is like a crowd of people who witness a mugging and turn away and mind their own business. Afterward they
are asked what they think about mugging, and, of course, they all disapprove. The more important question is how did they act.
And then one reads articles like this one by Gary Kamiya, "Breaking the Iraq Stalemate" in which he says that " Once a mighty war god, Bush has run out of tricks, troops and time. Will Americans finally rise up to stop his endless war?" Is he kidding? Is Kamiya actually trying to talk sense in a world that makes no sense? Does he really believe, in this week after the Petraeus performance and the standing ovation it received by the media and everyone who counts as "serious" that Bush has run out of tricks? Is Kamiya’s essay anything but a naive exercise in wishful thinking? Paragraphs like this seem almost as stupid as the plaudits given to Petraeus:
But beneath the surface, something may have changed. Most Americans have been skeptical of Bush’s war and everything he has said about it for a year or more. Still, they have entertained hope that the situation in Iraq would improve. Bush’s "surge" was his last gambit: Everyone knew that there were no more troops to throw in. It had to work. Now that it is clear that it didn’t, there is nothing else Bush can do.
This is an unprecedented situation. Bush always had another trick up his sleeve, another milestone to point to, another winning tactic to propose. But he has run out of tricks. The thing he dreaded most has come to pass: He is now completely at the mercy of events in Iraq.
Of course, Bush was always hostage to the harsh reality of Iraq. But he was able to counter that reality by invoking his master narrative about how Iraq was the front line of the war on terror, a battle of good vs. evil, a crucial battle on which the fate of the West depended. Even though Americans increasingly rejected that narrative, it had enough resonance to perform its function. At least Bush came across as consistent.
Now Bush’s grand war story has not only been discredited by reality, he
himself has been forced to adjust it in ways that make him look both
hypocritical and powerless. His aura as an aggressive winner has been
destroyed. This fact has not sunk in yet, but it could lead to the
final erosion of American support for the war.
Doesn’t Kamiya get it? Nothing is going to change while Bush is in office, and it’s not likely to change radically if a Democrat is elected next year.
Why? Because American public opinion is toothless and irrelevant. And for this reason, there is no real democracy at the national level anymore. We still have
shreds of it at the local and state level, but national policy has
little or nothing to do with the will of the people because the people, even if they have the will,
have no real power. The politicians we elect, no matter how noble their intentions at first, get eaten alive by the entrenched power system that has its own will, and elected representatives learn to serve that will or they will be marginalized as non-players.
Because this is the way the world works. Power uses power to consolidate power. The power system is self-perpetuating because it only hires and promotes people who serve its interests without question. And the system and those who serve it co-opt or threaten anybody who would question it. The beltway media are full of people who have been threatened or coopted, and they may or may not be consciously aware of their acquiescence.
They live in a culture of acquiescence to power, and so it is normal and expected behavior for them to acquiesce to it. They do it without thinking, taking their cues from whoever it is whose job it is to give such cues. And they take the cues because their careers and lifestyles depend on it. They would not have risen to the positions they hold now if they were not ambitiously good cue takers. And so they have a vested interest in praising and supporting those who, like them, take the cues and squelching anybody who refuses to take them, because their livelihood and wellbeing depends on the charade continuing.
And whether the rest of us approve or disapprove makes no difference because we don’t hire them, and our criticisms have little or no impact on their performance. As long as the ratings are kept high by keeping tabs on Britney, Paris, and O.J. They otherwise perform for their bosses and for one another in this self-reinforcing fiction that keeps them all in the positions they worked so hard to obtain.
The self-perpetuation of the system doesn’t require conspiracies and evil geniuses, just a lot of people pursuing their self interests and forming alliances with others who understand the game and will help you out so long as you serve their interests and play by the rules of the game. Challenging the rules is out of the question, and to do so gets you kicked out of the game. A guy like Ralph Nader will never be taken seriously because he challenges the rules–he’s not a player. And Liberals who want Nader thrown out of the game are basically acquiescing to the rules as they are set up. The problem with Liberals is basically their naive belief that the system works the way its described in the civics textbooks. That’s why they are such losers when it comes to playing the game. They think their attitudes and opinions matter.
Kamiya and Greenwald are like wide-eyed boys who are telling us the emperor has no clothes, but it doesn’t matter because there are too many people with a vested interest in the charade continuing, and everyone who sees the truth of the situation has no imagination about what to do about it. And if they do, if they express their understandable outrage, they will get ridiculed, ostracized or even tasered and arrested by those who are the established players. And for what? Will it change anything?
So here’s the point: Nothing is going to change in Washington until serious power coalitions develop that have weight enough to counter the enormous entrenched and unaccountable corporate and bureaucratic power that is the driving force behind, particularly, the M/I complex. There are other power centers, but this one is the most deeply entrenched and the most resistant to political control. Or more accurately it controls the political process more than it is controlled by it. It dictates; it is not dictated to. It is the locus of the most advanced elements in the crony capitalist system into which we are evolving. Cheney is its posterboy.
I don’t think the people who serve these power centers are evil, but
they are the banal servants of evil. In Cheney’s case, who knows? I’m sure in his own mind he thinks of himself as a patriot and an honorable man. But he is first and foremost a servant of this system’s will which has a bizarre transpersonal character that is bigger than any individual. It’s a beast at whose teats all these servants suck, and in their sucking absorb its life and become its creatures.
These servants of power are just ordinary human beings like the media types described above. They are ambitious, and they do what they are told in order to get ahead. Petraeus is the archetype of this kind of person. The media recognize one of their own–he’s a talented brown-nose, nothing more. That’s what is so facetious about his being lionized last week. People like him don’t think about the big picture. They are given assignments, they complete them, and they are rewarded. They mostly believe they are doing good work, serving their country. They don’t think about the implications too much, and they are too willing to believe the propaganda justifying their mission because to question it would undermine their career aspirations, and, anyway, what good what that do? Don’t rouse the anger of the beast that gives suck. Unthinkable for such as he.
The power system is self-perpetuating in this way. To tame this beast would require a high level of awareness and a level of heroic commitment from millions of people inside and outside of government. And what citizens do in the ballot box is irrelevant until a slate of candidates arise who say that they are willing to confront and subject this system to the will of the people. Until that happens, the charade continues, and while Republicans are the more obsequious in serving these power centers, the Democrats, as we’ve seen, haven’t the political will to confront them. They, too, are careerists, and first and foremost is the fulfillment of their own and their consultants’ ambitions, and that requires that they, too, play by the rules. That’s what it takes to be taken seriously, and that’s just how the world works.
P.S. The whole Greenspan Iraq was "largely about oil’" statement in his new book is an interesting breach of the rules that even he, the most serious of serious Beltway types, felt he had to back away from by convolutedly talking about the threat Saddam posed to the Straits of Hormuz (?!). Just say anything, Alan–Americans don’t know where the straits are anyway, and don’t care. Of course Iraq was and continues to be largely, if not most importantly, about oil. But it’s against the rules to talk about oil. What was he thinking? Did Andrea know he slipped it into his book?
Update: The American Conservative weighs in on Petraeus as Sycophant.
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