Robin Toner is a GOoPer hack. A1 today gives Bush's endorsement of the first discriminatory amendment in the history of the U.S. Constitution its mandatory Big Executive Moment treatment: putatively fact-based reportage, today from Elisabeth Bumiller (Fact-esque can fill you in on that one), paired with the always laughably so-called analysis piece, this one by Robin Toner ("Bush Keeps Faith With His Base"—get it? Keeps faith? You know, 'cause they're religious conservatives and all ...?).

Here's a question: the President has just come out in support, however hedged, of passing the first discriminatory amendment to the Constitution in history. Should your A1 analysis piece discuss the amendment currently before Congress, unpack its language, assess its probable effects and its prospects for passage? (David Kirkpatrick's piece, on the inside jump page, at least attempts however halfheartedly to document the debate over the Musgrave amendment's ambiguous language, a debate that has even conservatives roiled—and which has so far received only limited attention in the national press.) Or do you foreground an article where "analysis" means "completely uncritical recitation of Republican spin points till your readers' eyes bleed"?

OK, I guess the answer's pretty obvious. But really, I can't recall when I've seen any more egregious piece of horseshit on the Times' front page than this thing of Toner's. Read the article and notice the rhetorical structure: George Bush acts. Republicans explicate and approve his acts. Democrats carp (briefly, mildly and in ways already anticipated by Toner or her Republican sources), and Republicans rebut them. The initiative is all on the side of Republicans in Toner's world. Not only do they have first and last word, but their statements are always confident, and Toner loves to associate them with strong verbs and forceful adjectives: Bush's announcement isn't just an endorsement of a marriage amendment, it's an "impassioned" endorsement, his recess appointment of hard-right judges is a "classic exercise of presidential muscle," conservatives "hail" his efforts to accommodate them, are "euphoric" over his backing the marriage amendment. The one time Toner colors a Democratic talking point, it's to mention that Democrats "harken hopefully [em. mine] back to the 1992 election" as a precedent for the new culture war—about as weak an adverb as you could use in this context.

What really drops my jaw, though, is the narrative Toner's at pains to construct. It's one thing for the Times to maintain the rhetorical fiction—phony as it is in Dubya's case—that policy pronouncements emanating from the President, or offered on his behalf, are the result of the actual decisions of the man himself. It's one thing even for the Times to demand that its reporters render the Dear Leader's statements into coherence in the absence of genuine coherence, as Richard Stevenson had to do reporting on Shrub's MTP tête-à-tête with Pumpkinhead a couple of weeks back. But Toner's gone way beyond simply employing the standard rhetorical fig-leaves: she's off creating a whole celebratory mythology for Young Churchill. Watch as Bush, with his trademark steely resolve, swings into action to defeat the dark forces of despair:

The administration clearly recognized in recent weeks that it faced political unrest on its right, after what Mr. Keene described as "a short period of denying the problem existed." The soaring deficits, the growth in government, and most particularly the passage of a Medicare bill that amounted to the biggest expansion of that entitlement program in 38 years, all led to growing discontent among economic conservatives. Other conservatives were dismayed by the administration's immigration proposal, granting temporary work permits to illegal immigrants.

At the same time, in the wake of a Massachusetts court ruling declaring marriage a basic right that could not be denied to gay people, social conservatives were pushing hard for the president to embrace a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexuals. Still others were frustrated in the face of Senate filibusters of some conservative judicial nominees.

Mr. Bush began to respond. In a classic exercise of presidential muscle, he bypassed the Senate and installed two conservatives in federal judgeships, positions long denied them by Democrats on Capitol Hill. He issued a veto threat against a $318 billion highway and mass transit bill, cheering economic conservatives who have long demanded a harder line on spending.

Finally, after a long period of edging up to the amendment with qualifications and reservations, and after days of news dominated by gay couples getting marriage licenses in San Francisco, Mr. Bush made his intentions clear on Tuesday.

And just like that, a month and more of Administration fumbling, weeks of outright anger and threats of defection from the evangelical right, a reluctant and temporizing endorsement of a marriage amendment, becomes a sure and confident passage into the pre-ordained clarity of Dubya's intentions. [Need we note, by the way, that this pattern is classic Republican spin? It's always, for the BushCo shills, about Dubya's intentions, which are always big and bold and unambiguous and always, always save the day.]

And I'm not even going to try to cover Toner's other sins, say the way she consistently treats Republican spin as the mere statement of fact. [Though I can't pass up the moment where she helps Gary Bauer invent a whole spankin' new GOP-oriented social movement out of thin air: "Conservatives are also confident that their current causes are part of a new broadly appealing cultural populism [em. mine]. Unlike previous 'cultural battles,' said Gary L. Bauer, a longtime conservative strategist, 'this one is not much of a battle.'"] Honestly—at this point, why doesn't Robin Toner just spare us all and take a job writing for the fucking RNC?

posted by michael  5:04:45 PM  
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In case there were any doubts about the Pentagon's colonial agenda in the Persian Gulf, let Gen. Jay Garner—as Bob Harris says, writing on Tom Tomorrow's blog, "until recently the U.S. occupation's Great Gazoo in Iraq"—deliver you the gospel:

"I think one of the most important things we can do right now is start getting basing rights" in both northern and southern Iraq, Garner said, adding that such bases could provide large areas for military training. "I think we'd want to keep at least a brigade in the north, a self-sustaining brigade, which is larger than a regular brigade," he added.

Noting how establishing U.S. naval bases in the Philippines in the early 1900s allowed the United States to maintain a "great presence in the Pacific," Garner said, "To me that's what Iraq is for the next few decades. We ought to have something there ... that gives us great presence in the Middle East. I think that's going to be necessary."

Amy Klamper, "Former Iraq administrator sees decades-long U.S. military presence"

No, of course it wasn't about oil ...

posted by michael  10:03:29 AM  
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