Frank Rich Reviews the Bush Follies
By Terrence McNally, AlterNet. Posted October 4, 2006.
The New York Times op-ed writer explains how the White House propaganda machine replaced reality with "truthiness" to lead us into Iraq. People are discontented for a lot of reasons. Iraq is very high on the list, but so are certain economic issues, particularly the inequality of gain for the middle class, in terms of tax cuts and everything else. I think these things eventually do have consequences.
I believe that the Bush propaganda machine -- and this as a big point in my book -- has been enabled by two things. One is the media environment, whether it be the credulousness of newspapers like the Times in the run up to the war, the obsequiousness on the part of a lot of television news, which is still the main way that most Americans get their news, or the press's self-inflicted errors, like ours, like CBS's. All of that has helped them.
But so has a not very interesting or brave Democratic party with a rather lousy bunch of leaders, including potential presidents. One reason I feel the tide is changing -- I felt this even before the 2004 election and before I started to write this book -- is that Kerry was an incredibly ineffectual candidate. He was clumsy, and his views about the war were incoherent. Even so, he lost by only three and a half million votes against a war president. I think that if the Democratic party had had its act together, they could have probably done better than they did in 2000, when, as we know, they won the popular vote.
It didn't happen largely because you can't fight something with nothing. The Democrats have to start fighting something with something. That doesn't mean doctrinaire positions, but it means leadership and sticking their necks out there and taking stands, and I think we're finally beginning to see some of that.
the rest of the interview at:
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/42315/
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