Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [64]
Instead of using this unique moment of national unity to usher in a new American century founded upon a reasonable measure of shared sacrifice, Bush and Rove decided to ask nothing of average Americans other than that they silently acquiesce to their eventual enslavement by a corporate hegemon.
Wealthy Americans, however, would be asked only to accept larger and larger tax cuts, and ever-weaker oversight from the underfunded Securities and Exchange Commission.
Ordinary citizens were asked to do their part in the war on terrorism by remaining alert and reporting suspicious packages and neighbors. A new color-coded alert system was instituted for purposes of alarming Americans with fine-tuned precision. At the orange level, the second-highest level of alert, people are still encouraged to go to the mall. At the red level, the highest state of alert, the President suggests that you stay away from public places, and instead shop on-line.
These days, at airports, Americans stand cheerfully in line—at the Cinnabon counter. Nearby, another, longer line of slightly less cheerful air travelers waits patiently to surrender their nail scissors, even though it seems extremely unlikely that the terrorists will strike in that precise way again. Personally, I think they’re more likely to get us with a porn bomb.
First of all, there’s no way the hijackers could ever get past the reinforced cockpit door. Secondly, every guy in first class has now deputized himself. Desperate to support the floundering airline industry and make a few bucks on the corporate lecture circuit, I flew often in the months following September 11. Invariably, when I sat down, the guy next to me would say something like: “I played high school football, how ’bout you?”
“I wrestled,” I would reply.
“Any trouble, we’ll kill ’em, right?”
“Yeah. Kill ’em.”
Actually, and this is totally true, for the first six months after 9/11, I put three baseballs in my carry-on bag. I am blessed with an unusually accurate throwing arm, and wanted more than anything to thwart a hijacking by beaning a terrorist. How American is that!? I imagined the New York Post headline: “Franken Beans Hijacker: Terrorist Hit in Face with More Balls than Elton John.”
In its October 19, 2002, issue, the conservative British newsmagazine The Economist wrote that “Mr. Bush is as partisan a president as America has ever had.” That includes George Washington, whom the British have little reason to love.
A window into just how exclusively political the thinking is at the Bush White House was opened by University of Pennsylvania professor John DiIulio, whom the President had appointed to head the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. DiIulio quit the office in February of 2002 after only one of its initiatives, the Faith-Based Bureau of Weights and Measures, came to fruition. (The FBBWM had some success in reintroducing the cubit by requiring that the biblical unit of measurement be used in plans for new federal buildings.)
DiIulio stupidly wrote a seven-page letter to Esquire’s Ron Suskind to provide background for Suskind’s article on Karl Rove’s role as senior advisor in the Bush White House. “There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus,” DiIulio admitted in the soon-to-be-much-regretted letter. “What you got is everything—and I mean everything—run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”
DiIulio contrasted the Bush White House with Clinton’s, where “every domestic [issue] drew multiple policy analyses that certainly weighted politics, media messages, legislative strategy, et cetera, but also strongly weighted policy-relevant information, stimulated substantive policy debate,