New Kerry Ad Sends Bush a Valentine’s Day message
Names Him Undisputed King of Special Interests

(click on title to go see the ad)

February 14, 2004
Washington, DC –

George Bush officially cranked up the Republican smear machine this week by choosing to make his first campaign ad a misleading attack against John Kerry. In fact, the ad was so misleading that Bush wouldn’t even appear in it to back up its claims.

In response to Bush’s misleading ad, the Kerry campaign today released a new ad entitled “More Than Anyone.” The ad – which will be emailed across the country -- will remind the American people that George Bush has taken more special interest money than anyone, ever.

Using data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, the ad outlines the huge contributions Bush has taken from big oil and gas companies, big banks and investment firms and even Enron, and reveals the favors he gave these powerful special interests in return. Given Bush’s record as the “King of Special Interests,” a Washington Post editorial today called Bush’s attack on Kerry a “brazen display of political chutzpah.”

“It’s the height of hypocrisy for George W. Bush – the undisputed king of special interests – to attack John Kerry on this issue,” said Stephanie Cutter. “Bush is trying to attack to distract voters from his record of three million jobs lost, 41 million uninsured Americans, and a nation less secure today than when he took office. Each and every day, Bush gives the American people yet another reason to doubt his credibility.”

The new Kerry ad will be emailed to over 300,000 Kerry supporters across the nation, who will then be asked to send to 10 friends to reach over 3 million Americans. By Monday, the ad is expected to reach well over 5 million people.

The ad shows an empty Oval Office and a long list of special interest Bush contributors with the question on the screen: “Who’s taken more special interest than anyone?” And unlike the Bush Internet ad, John Kerry is shown approving this message.





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Here's the beginning of an article from FactCheck.org refuting the Bush Attack Ad against John Kerry with the FACTS. Bush is the king of special interests. I'm not including the whole article (just click on the title to go to the website) because if you visit the web page it has links in the analysis where you can go to and learn more of the REAL FACTS of why John Kerry has been visciously maligned by the Rove attack machine. But hey. What else is new? Expect these attacks to happen daily because BUSH IS TERRIFIED OF KERRY'S RISING POPULARITY WHILE HIS POLLING NUMBERS SINK.

Bush's Misleading Attack Video

Internet attack ad says Kerry got most “special interest money” of any senator. He didn't. And Bush got lots more.

February 13, 2004

Summary

The Bush campaign sent an e-mail Feb. 12 to six million supporters with a link to an Internet video attacking Kerry for being "unprincipled." The ad claims Kerry got "more special interest money than any other senator," which is false.

While it is true that Kerry got $640,000 over the past 15 years from individual lobbyists, that's only one type of special-interest money. And the Bush campaign itself has reported raising $960,000 from individual lobbyists in the past year alone.

The ad says Kerry got "millions from executives at HMO's, telecoms, drug companies," which is true -- for Kerry's entire political career. But so far Kerry's presidential campaign has received a small fraction of what the Bush campaign has received from those particular sources. By any definition, Bush's "special interest" money greatly exceeds Kerry's.

Analysis...




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February 13, 2004
Kerry Picks Up Presidential Endorsement From Clark
By JODI WILGOREN

MADISON, Wis., Feb. 13 — Just two days after abandoning his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Gen. Wesley K. Clark endorsed Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts today.

"Request permission to come aboard, the Army's here," a smiling General Clark said as he and Mr. Kerry appeared at a rally here, four days before the Wisconsin primary.

Mr. Kerry, a Navy lieutenant during the Vietnam War, said, "This is the first time in my life I've ever had the privilege of saying `Welcome aboard' to a four-star general."

After thanking his own supporters, General Clark told Mr. Kerry he would do "everything I can to help you take the White House back for its rightful owners, the American people."

"George Bush has compromised America's leadership around the world," the general said. "President Bush hasn't led America; he's misled America time and again, and we have to put a stop to it."

Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, still battling Mr. Kerry for the nomination, said of today's endorsement: "I think General Clark is a wonderful man and he was a terrific candidate for president. At least in the course of these primaries endorsements just haven't mattered much."

The day after the Tennessee and Virginia primaries Mr. Edwards said he spoke with Mr. Clark by phone to tell him "I'd love to have his support."

General Clark had all but confirmed he would endorse Mr. Kerry on Thursday, when he was interviewed on CNN.

"Whether I'm in this race or not is less important to me than the opportunity to speak out and make a difference in this country," General Clark said. "I'm looking forward to seeing John tomorrow."

Even as General Clark was preparing to endorse Mr. Kerry, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, Howard Dean made a direct appeal to Clark supporters on Thursday.

"I ask for your help," Dr. Dean, the former governor of Vermont, said here. "Wes Clark and I have one thing in common: We are both not from Washington, D.C."

Dr. Dean also asked supporters of Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio to back him instead, telling hundreds of University of Wisconsin students that "only one of us can beat George Bush."

"If you think Dennis is the right person to vote for, then please vote for him, never settle for the lesser of two evils," he said. "But we are able to raise the money and I have an executive record that allows me to go after George Bush."

Dr. Dean also lumped in the same boat his two main rivals in Wisconsin, Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards, saying: "They are good people, but they come from inside Washington. It's another world, it's a world that has forgotten ordinary people."

Minutes earlier, Dr. Dean mischaracterized the two senators' position on financing the reconstruction of Iraq. Saying that $87 billion appropriated for Iraq and Afghanistan could have paid for universal health insurance, Dr. Dean said, "We're paying for it because two of the people I'm running against decided it was O.K. to pay it," adding, "those guys made the wrong choice."

In fact, Senators Edwards and Kerry voted against the $87 billion appropriation, though they had voted in favor of the resolution authorizing the initial invasion of Iraq.

The rally in Madison was part of a day of campaigning focused on health care. Dr. Dean and his wife, Judith Steinberg Dean, who is also a physician, toured two clinics, one on the university's Madison campus and one for uninsured people in Oshkosh.

"Judy still makes house calls, I used to," Dr. Dean said at a forum in Oshkosh. "We are going to make one more house call. It's going to be Jan. 20, 2005."

Dr. Dean told reporters between campaign stops that if he loses the Wisconsin primary on Tuesday, "we will not stop the campaign," but that he had not yet figured out what form it might take. He said he would not go into debt to stay on the trail.

"What I've said is we're not going to have a quixotic campaign that I know I can't win," he said. "We're not going to do that. The definition of that we'll have to leave to later."

Asked about Democrats who fear that his criticism of Mr. Kerry could weaken the party's eventual nominee, Dr. Dean said, "In light of the things that I've gone through, I think that would be laughable."

Mr. Edwards held one event in Wisconsin on Thursday, delivering his standard remarks about the privileged winning out over everybody else at a rally in a community center in Racine. He then flew to Los Angeles for a fund-raiser.

Mr. Edwards took questions from the crowd in Racine, which included dozens of high school students, but his drive to reach voters was apparent. Before he began answering, he whispered to an aide, "Are they old enough to vote?"




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February 15, 2004
The Permanent Scars of Iraq
By SARA CORBETT

Robert Shrode can't sleep.

At night, in the fly-speck town of Guthrie, Ky., in the rented farmhouse he shares with his 20-year-old wife, Debra, he surfs the Internet, roams the house. He lies down and gets up again. He drinks a beer and stares out the window at the black fields beyond. Hours pass. He can't sleep. Before the war, he could have six beers and sleep like a baby, but now that works against him. Drinking may help get his head to the pillow, but it also ratchets up the nightmares. For a while, he sweated out his bad dreams on the living-room couch, and it drove Debra crazy. She would come down from the bedroom, touch his shoulder, ask what the problem was. Shrode would just turn his back to her and not say a word. Now she knows better than to ask, though occasionally when the silence between them gets too deep, she'll put it out there, What're you thinking about?

''Iraq,'' he'll say. And then the silence falls again.

He pops Ambien to coax some sleep. The results are mixed. On the advice of his doctors, he is taking three different pills for pain, a pill for swelling and another pill for depression. There are days when he is unrecognizable to himself, a guy who a few years ago was a party-loving bartender at a Mississippi casino and who is now 29 and engaged in what can feel like a never-ending battle to see his own future brightly.

The only person who understands him is his buddy Brent Bricklin, a restless, dark-haired 22-year-old and fellow Army specialist in the 101st Airborne Division, who is also home after serving in Iraq. Most mornings, Shrode picks up Bricklin at Fort Campbell, the sprawling base that straddles the Kentucky-Tennessee state line where both men are stationed, and they go driving. It's always more or less the same. They drive through the buttressed gates of the base, patrolled by armed National Guardsmen, and turn onto Fort Campbell Boulevard, passing the check-cashing outfits, the strip clubs and gun-and-ammo shops that, during peacetime anyway, boom with military business.

Shrode sometimes jokes that he loves his Chevy Tahoe more than his wife, and it's half true. The Tahoe is a big upholstered bubble, a place where he can watch the world drift by harmlessly. Inside it, he shares more with Bricklin than he does with Debra, whom he met at a nightclub in 2002 and married three months before going to war. ''I can talk to him -- I can't talk to my wife,'' Shrode says. ''But 30 seconds with him, and I feel better.''

Not far from the base, they pass a pint-size Kia driving in the next lane. Someone has used soap to write a self-congratulatory ''Back From Iraq'' in large letters across the rear window. This being December, the only soldiers back from Iraq are ones sent home because of expired enlistments or for medical reasons or those on their way to being transferred elsewhere. The bulk of the division -- some 20,000 local soldiers -- remains at war. Shrode and Bricklin stare down at the Kia.

''Dumb idiot,'' Bricklin says. Shrode says nothing.

It's been nearly six months since Shrode and Bricklin arrived home from Iraq. Shrode lost most of his right arm, which was amputated just below the elbow in a Baghdad field hospital. Even healed, his face is pitted with purple shrapnel scars the size of raindrops. Bricklin, a broad-shouldered former competitive swimmer who came home honeycombed with shrapnel, bears larger, raw-looking scars from his thigh to his neck. Both men have significant hearing loss, cocking their heads like a couple of old-timers in order to grasp what's said. They are plagued by headaches and are convinced they've had some memory loss. Between them, they've had nine operations since getting, as they like to say, ''blown up'' in Iraq. Shrode, who is shorter and stockier than Bricklin and speaks with a soft Alabama accent, still visits the base hospital five days a week for occupational therapy. Once a month, he sees a military therapist. He has tried, without luck, to persuade Bricklin to get individual counseling too.

''He says I took it harder than I say I do,'' Bricklin says with a deflective smile.

''He did,'' Shrode says.

''He's says I'm messed up in the head.''

''You are,'' Shrode says earnestly.

It's a subject Bricklin doesn't want to discuss. He playfully jabs a finger near the stump of his friend's arm: ''How much feeling you got left in this thing, anyway? Let's find out.''

Both men say they feel more vulnerable since coming back from war. When someone recently dropped a tray in the hospital cafeteria, Shrode dove, horror-struck, beneath the table. A crackling summer thunderstorm sent Bricklin into a panic, convinced he was caught in the back blast of a grenade again. Both say they have frequent nightmares. And then there's something less tangible, a visceral undercurrent of anger that makes them walk around feeling ready to explode. ''I can go from being happy-go-lucky and joking to having someone's throat in my hand, like that,'' Bricklin says, snapping his fingers. Shrode nods. ''My fuse is short,'' he says. ''It's real short.''

Shrode and Bricklin are 2 of the 2,600 United States soldiers wounded in action in Iraq as of early this month, according to the Department of Defense. The basics of their stories are hauntingly familiar: just after midnight one night in June, a rocket-propelled grenade shrieked out of nowhere and hit their Humvee, which sat parked at a police station in the Baathist city of Fallujah. What was reported in the news bore the standard sterility: ''One soldier killed; five others injured.'' What wasn't said was that Branden Oberleitner, the private who died standing almost shoulder to shoulder with Shrode, was a car buff who once planned to become a firefighter or that he was killed two weeks shy of his 21st birthday. It didn't say that his blood was all over the road.

But for whatever societal void the dead disappear into, it is the wounded who must live with the confounding mix of anonymity and exposure wrought by surviving a war. On and off the Army base, Shrode is approached by strangers who size up his military haircut and missing arm and feel compelled to heap on the thanks for serving in Iraq. They all but ignore Bricklin, who is often with him but whose injuries remain hidden. Shrode finds the situation reliably awkward, sensing a whiff of pity riding on the backside of flattery. The people who open doors for him, he says, make him feel handicapped. And then there are those whose gazes follow him wordlessly as he makes his way down the buffet line at the China King restaurant near the base -- drawn, it would seem, to the spectacle of a one-armed man working to load his plate.

The discomfort feels irresolvable. ''Somebody stares at it, I get mad at them,'' Shrode says. ''Somebody looks away, and I get mad at that.''

For both soldiers, the tension between themselves and the rest of the world builds up quickly and with no real outlet. Bricklin has had one run-in with the police and says that he's been a jerk ''to anyone who didn't go'' to war. Even when someone shows concern for their well-being -- when Debra touches her husband's shoulder or a stranger flashes a kindly smile -- the effect can be abrasive. One day, as Shrode was walking down a hospital hallway, a civilian passing by happened to toss out an innocent ''Howyadoin','' which somehow, in that moment, became the last straw. ''Ninety-nine percent of the time, I tell them what they want to hear,'' Shrode says. But in this instance he couldn't help blurting out a truth that was becoming more evident each day. ''Buddy,'' he said, ''I'm going to hurt the rest of my life.''

Every other Tuesday, Shrode drives over to Fort Campbell's mental-health building to attend a support-group meeting for injured soldiers. Before going to Iraq, before being wounded, he wouldn't have been caught dead doing something like this. Support groups were the stuff of Oprah -- helpful for others, maybe, but not for him.

Given the uncomfortable silence before a session begins, it is clear that Shrode is not the only squeamish one. The soldiers -- usually anywhere between 5 and 15 of them -- sit in a circle of couches and chairs in the cramped linoleum-floored waiting room of the mental-health building, looking almost like a roomful of unusually clean-cut college kids gathering for a study group. Except that one walks with a cane. Several others have burn sleeves covering their arms. A woman with a bobbed haircut wears an arm splint. There's a guy -- an Apache helicopter pilot -- who has balance problems. His neighbor, a muscled young corporal, winces as he takes a seat. When they make chitchat, it tends to be about skin grafts and medication and how there aren't enough handicapped parking spaces on base. Occasionally, some will compare scars, hiking up pants and shirts and inspecting the wreckage of someone else's limb or torso. ''Hey, yours is growing hair back!'' one soldier says to another. ''That's pretty good.''

For every broken body in this room, there are hundreds more confined to hospital beds across the country and hundreds more again who, by choice or by circumstance, are gutting out the effects of their injuries without the help of peers or mental-health counselors. It has been suggested that the wounded are the hidden casualties of the Iraq war, stranded somewhere between our grief for the dead and a wartime patriotism best stirred by the belief that our troops are both productive and healthy. Thanks to the lifesaving properties of body armor and largely impenetrable Kevlar helmets, combined with highly advanced battlefield medicine, more soldiers are surviving explosions and gunfire than in previous wars. The downside of this is that the injury rate in Iraq is high: an average of nine soldiers have been injured per day. The pace shows little sign of slowing, which means it's possible we will bring home another 1,500 wounded before the start of summer. Some military experts worry that in the next four months -- as the U.S. rotates roughly 110,000 new troops into Iraq, many of them reservists and National Guardsmen with less combat training than the full-time soldiers they are replacing -- injury rates could climb even higher.

The government's reports on the wounded can be confusing. In early February, the Department of Defense Web site listed 2,600 soldiers as wounded in action in Iraq and another 403 as injured in ''nonhostile'' incidents like helicopter or motor-vehicle accidents. Meanwhile, the Army Surgeon General's office said that only 804 soldiers have been evacuated with battle wounds and that over 2,800 have been injured accidentally. In addition, the Surgeon General's office reported that another 5,184 soldiers have been evacuated from the theater for other medical reasons, which could include anything from kidney stones to nervous breakdowns. To date, 569 of these have qualified as psychiatric casualties.

Although many of the soldiers who attend the support group at Fort Campbell have escaped enemy fire, their injuries reflect the full spectrum of what can go wrong during war: Sgt. Jenni McKinley had her right hand crushed when her Humvee blew a tire and flipped over on a sandy road outside of Baghdad. Chief Warrant Officers Emanuel Pierre and Stuart Contant were pilots whose Apache helicopter reportedly malfunctioned and then crashed in Afghanistan, requiring them to spend months in the hospital and to endure multiple operations. There is a medic who is physically uninjured but tormented to the point of agony by memories of treating his wounded and dying colleagues. And then there is a quiet young private who comes because her hair is falling out and her fingers are numb and nobody seems able to tell her why.

These soldiers generally are no less disabled than those who were hit by AK-47 fire. Sgt. Jeremy Gilbert, another medic, laments that he never made it into Iraq at all, since a week before the invasion, a Kuwaiti civilian driving 90 miles per hour plowed into Gilbert's Humvee, shattering the soldier's right leg and pelvis and relegating him to a wheelchair for five months. ''There's nothing glamorous about the way I got hurt,'' says Gilbert, who wept in frustration as he watched the first live footage of the Army's invasion of Iraq from a bed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. ''But it sure has trashed my life.''

Operating with a blend of military toughness and quiet empathy, the injured soldiers' support group -- believed to be the first of its kind on an Army base -- has taken on everything from fractured self images and faltering marriages to traumatic memories of Iraq and the pervading question of what each soldier's future looks like in the wake of both war and injury. Yet there is little that's 12-step about it. You won't find group hugs or even metaphorical handholding here. Nor is there any second-guessing whether it was worth it to go to war in the first place. In the context of the Army's rigid hierarchy and low tolerance for weakness, the power of the support group, it seems, comes from its ability to listen.

The first time I visited, in late November, conversation was dominated by one soldier, a newcomer who looked to be in his early 30's, with a spinal injury that had required some of his vertebrae to be fused together. As a result, his neck appeared stiff and unyielding; his back, ramrod straight. He spent the better part of an hour raging about various things that angered him, mainly the way his commanders were treating him and issues he had with his medical care. When he spoke, it was at a full shout, letting out a stream of emotion so potent and vituperative that it seemed his rigid body might launch right off the chair. The other soldiers listened, expressionless except for Brent Bricklin, who leaned back in his chair with a smirk, as if he wasn't buying a word of it. It wasn't until the newcomer mentioned that he wished he were back in Iraq that anybody else chimed in.

''I miss it, too,'' another soldier said. ''At least there was a purpose.''

''I wish I was in Iraq because my buddies are there,'' Robert Shrode offered.

Heads in the group began to nod. The atmosphere seemed to lighten. But then the newcomer -- or Angry Neck Man, as some of the others would later call him -- charged headlong into another furious rant.

A while later, sitting with Terry James, the easygoing retired first sergeant who moderates the group and works as a counselor at Fort Campbell, I remarked upon how unnerving I found the soldier's anger, how potentially violent it seemed. James just laughed. ''That's how they all come to us,'' he said. ''Pretty much everyone starts out mad. Any other place in the military would've cut him off, wouldn't have let him get his anger out.''

The line between venting and sniveling, however, can be imperceptibly thin. One soldier's fury may set off another's, as was the case in a meeting where a soldier ran on too long, in Shrode's opinion, kvetching about a minor gunshot wound in his shoulder: ''He was whining and complaining and I said: 'Shut up. I'd love to be in your situation. There's a lot of people worse off than you and worse off than me.''' At another meeting, a soldier who had been run over by a truck complained to the group he hadn't received a Purple Heart -- the medal reserved for soldiers injured or killed in combat. ''I told him to get lost,'' says Shrode, who received a Purple Heart last summer. ''And then I got up and left.''

A number of soldiers confess that they were initially put off by the concept of group therapy, figuring it was going to be ''a bunch of guys crying and wiping snot on their sleeves.'' Most insist they attend not for emotional release but rather to receive information -- about disability benefits or discharge procedures. The soldiers' questions often reflect a me-against-the-world mistrust of what's to come, an indistinct but entirely accurate perception that this country has failed veterans of past wars. The war will stay with them, they realize, but after a point the Army won't.

For many, including Robert Shrode, the question is when and how to formalize their separation from the military. Everyone in the group is an active-duty soldier, though many say they are doing little more than showing up for morning formation these days -- either too consumed by pain and doctors' appointments or simply uninspired to work while their units are still in Iraq. Yet there is little that's light about what they face. In order to be medically discharged, soldiers must go before the Army Physical Evaluation Board, which assesses their injuries and then either approves or disapproves the discharge. Eventually they receive a ''disability rating'' from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which determines how much money they are eligible for. A soldier deemed ''100 percent disabled'' is granted a base payment of $2,239 monthly. (The payment can be supplemented depending on the severity of the injury.) Though the V.A. judges each case individually, an amputated arm generally gets you a 60 to 90 percent disability rating. Shrode has been told that his hearing loss and depression will likely further increase his rating.

It's the promise of a new arm that keeps him in the Army. When I met him, Shrode was waiting to get a state-of-the-art prosthetic, worth $35,000 and paid for by the government. The Army had flown him several times to Walter Reed to work with its best occupational therapists, training the tiny reflexive muscles in his elbow so that they eventually could control the carbon-fiber myoelectric hand that was being custom-built for him in Nashville. If the new arm didn't work out well, Shrode faced a cruel choice: he could have his elbow amputated in order to be fitted with a different and more effective type of prosthetic.

When it came to fake arms, though, he was hardly optimistic. In August, he had been given a low-tech prosthetic, with a hook where the hand should be, and while he had quickly proved to be a whiz at putting pegs into the pegboards they thrust at him at occupational therapy, he hated both the look and feel of it, preferring to master real-life tasks with his one good arm. He had proudly learned to lace and tie his boots and was working on figuring out how to cut a steak. When we went driving, Shrode smoked a cigarette with his left hand, ably piloting the Tahoe with one knee. In the meantime, his right arm -- or the piece of plastic that was supposed to pass for it -- rolled around neglected in the back seat.


A tornado siren blasts, and Jenni McKinley rips up her pickup truck, hunting for a gas mask. A car backfires, and she dives for cover. The panic is instant and the charge for safety instinctive and ultimately embarrassing as she climbs to her feet again, bug-eyed and looking for snipers, instead finding the Kroger parking lot full of oblivious cart-pushing families. A person can come to doubt her sanity this way.

Then there is the dead marine who visits her as she tries to sleep. A young guy, he can be angry, accusative, and sometimes he just shows up quietly and stares at her until she's jarred awake, heart racing -- another night's rest stolen away.

McKinley is 27 and a career soldier, having logged eight years with the Army, and is hoping to stay until she has earned her military retirement benefits after 20 years of service. Off duty, she has a gentle manner, a dry wit and a penchant for good wines. On duty, she has worked hard to achieve the rank of sergeant, completing tours in Korea and Kosovo, where she led a small team of mostly men. As a female soldier, McKinley says she feels the pressure to constantly prove herself, to remain emotionally bulletproof. But Iraq really got to her.

''I didn't handle war the way I thought I was going to,'' she told me one night over dinner at a Red Lobster on a strip-malled stretch of road not far from Fort Campbell. ''I thought I was going to do my job, be strong. But three days into it, I broke down crying. The scuds were flying. We were waking up to the sounds of explosions over our heads. It was terrifying.'' Whatever fear she felt, nobody saw it: she ducked into an empty field tent to do her crying. Three days later, in 115-degree heat, McKinley's Humvee rolled over, pinning her beneath it and all but destroying her right hand.

Since arriving back in the United States in April, McKinley has been told she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, which garnered recognition in the years following the Vietnam War and today is used to describe the most crippling psychological effects of trauma. The name may be new, but the concept isn't. Research on World War I veterans showed that even those who might be termed well adjusted still reported that they were quick to anger, forgetful, anxious and regularly suffering from headaches and dizziness. Traumatized World War II vets were commonly referred to as having ''battle fatigue.'' Today the military uses the term ''combat stress'' to describe a range of symptoms including anxiety, sleeplessness and depression, but post-traumatic stress disorder itself generally is diagnosed only when the symptoms become ''intrusive'' -- in other words, when they start to really mess up a soldier's or veteran's life.

McKinley has a difficult time parsing the source of her post-traumatic stress disorder. Does it stem from the shock of the Humvee accident? Was it the flying scud missiles or the sirens that wailed nearly hourly early on in the war, signaling possible incoming chemical or biological weapons? Or maybe it was the marine who lay bleeding on the stretcher next to hers at a desert combat support hospital. He was younger than she was and had been shot in the face several times. As McKinley lay watching in a morphine haze, a doctor and team of nurses worked to stabilize him. Just as they moved on to examine her mangled hand, he flat-lined and the doctor rushed back to revive him. But the soldier flat-lined again. The doctor jump-started the marine's heart twice, three times, only to have it fail -- again and again -- until the nurses finally pried him off the soldier's body. After a time, McKinley boosted herself up and took a long look at the dead man's face -- maybe to honor him and maybe to learn something. She still doesn't know why.

Her case of post-traumatic stress disorder most likely stems from the combination of these events. Researchers believe that the condition is not always connected to a specific incident and can, in fact, be spawned by repeated exposure to fear or by bearing witness to something violent or traumatic or by experiencing moral uncertainty connected to these things. Depending on the intangibles of a person's background and ability to either process or shut out stress, there are those who come through war relatively unscathed and those who don't. It's as if every psyche has a reservoir for trauma, and some fill faster than others -- each soldier's breaking point different from the next one's. And while many G.I.'s manage to hold it together during a deployment, the repression of emotion over time can lead to a tumultuous homecoming. Post-traumatic stress disorder is considered controllable but not curable, and often it will flare up years after the original trauma. In 1994, for example, Veterans of Foreign Wars officials noticed a significant spike in claims of post-traumatic stress disorder -- not from soldiers returning from Operation Desert Storm or Somalia but rather from World War II veterans whose nightmares were revved by the hoopla surrounding the 50th anniversary of D-Day.

Since McKinley returned to the United States in April, the vision of the dead marine's face has sat in her mind like an elephant blocking the road. ''When I first got home, the nightmares were him basically calling me selfish, asking why didn't I help save him,'' she said, her voice so grave and quiet that it was nearly inaudible. ''And now it's changed to he's asking me why I didn't go with him.''

McKinley has two children, ages 4 and 6, who live with her ex-husband 50 miles away in Nashville but spend weekends at her two-bedroom apartment close to Fort Campbell. With virtually no use of her right hand, she has struggled with the smallest of maternal tasks, from opening jars to cutting vegetables and carrying laundry. Before she began treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, a child's simple request for apple juice could send her into a tailspin; her sleepless nights left her snappish, unloving. ''My husband would come pick the kids up on Sundays,'' she said, ''and before they'd get halfway home, I'd be calling on the cellphone, crying and asking if I could apologize to them for how I'd acted.''

The low point came on the day she managed to change the sheets on her queen-size bed -- a task that, one-handed, became a two-hour ordeal. In the end, she was nothing short of triumphant, with a bed orderly enough to pass a military inspection. And then the children arrived, tumbling through the door as they always did, eventually settling down on McKinley's bed to watch TV as she cooked dinner. But sitting on the bed led to jumping on the bed, which in turn led to tearing off the sheets in an exuberant frenzy. McKinley became unhinged. ''I completely lost my mind on them,'' she said, sounding as if she were still startled by it. ''I was throwing sheets and screaming.'' For a full month afterward, she slept on the living room couch, unable to confront the bed again.

It was pure desperation that led her to the support group, which she learned about through her occupational therapist at Fort Campbell's hospital. ''I didn't know what was wrong with my head,'' she recalled. But hearing other soldiers talk about what they were grappling with helped her understand that she needed -- and had access to -- help. ''After the first meeting, I almost cried with relief,'' she said. The sessions also gave her the courage to see a therapist, who prescribed Clonazepam for her anxiety and Lexapro, an antidepressant. On her third visit to the group, she managed to sputter out the story of the dead marine before breaking down in tears. When she tried to stuff the emotion back inside, it wouldn't go. ''I didn't want anyone to see me that weak, so I grabbed my keys and started to get up to leave,'' McKinley remembered. And then came the kind of touchy-feely moment so many of the soldiers claim they're not looking for: the guy sitting next to her, one of the wounded helicopter pilots, laid a friendly hand on her shoulder, coaxed her back into her seat and, without saying a word, let her know that it was O.K.


Often during my visits with injured soldiers at Fort Campbell, I would ask what they envisioned as happening in the next few months when the rest of the 101st Airborne -- plus another 100,000 or so troops around the country -- began arriving home as part of the largest troop rotation since World War II. Would returning soldiers suffer the same nightmares and anxiety, the same alienation from both intimates and the world at large, that so many of the soldiers I encountered described having? In essence, I wondered whether the wounded, as the first large group to come back from Iraq, were like canaries in a coal mine, their postwar struggles foretelling those of thousands soon to come. Usually the answers ran along the same lines. ''There will be problems,'' Robert Shrode said. ''There'll be a lot of short fuses, a lot of intolerance. People are going to have to be patient with these guys.''

The fact that post-traumatic stress disorder can develop from fear and anxiety raises particular implications in a war like the one in Iraq, where a seemingly straightforward army-versus-army scenario has long been dispensed with, replaced by the uncertainties of guerrilla warfare. Though military researchers have estimated that 25 percent of soldiers on the front lines of a war will experience combat stress, it seems possible that for Iraq the numbers will be even greater. ''These troops know no front line,'' says Alfonso Batres, the clinical psychologist in charge of readjustment counseling services for the 206 Vet Centers around the country. ''It's just like Vietnam. They have to be on guard with everyone; they're always facing an unknown. In some ways, fighting a conventional war is a lot easier on the psyche.''

Even as the military works to provide mental-health care, history shows that the vast majority of soldiers returning from war will never seek help. Or they will do it years later, when the psychological afterburn has wreaked havoc on their lives. Steve Tice, a retired Vet Center counselor and disabled Vietnam veteran, refers to the legions of soldiers who live alone with destructive war memories as the ''invisible wounded.'' Says Tice, ''There's this unfortunate stigma we attach to soldiers who say, 'I hurt.' And so soldiers don't say anything.''

In this respect, it is conceivable that the physically wounded may have a slight advantage over their peers. Whereas most soldiers without major injuries will touch down on American soil and undergo a relatively impersonal and perfunctory post-deployment medical screening before returning to duty, many of the injured soldiers have already spent months being routinely examined, assessed and questioned about their well-being -- arguably making it easier to ask for help.

One morning I stopped in on Jeremy Gilbert, the medic hurt in Kuwait, as he sat on a hospital bed, awaiting the fourth operation on his leg in six months. His cane lay hooked over the arm of a nearby chair. Two weeks earlier, just as he sensed he was making progress healing, an infection flared up and remained untamed by antibiotics. This was his 10th day as an inpatient, and he was accordingly listless. He had brought his Xbox and was playing video games to pass the time. ''My morale is kind of down,'' he confessed.

Across the hallway from Gilbert's room on Ward 4A-B, the beds were full -- two to a room -- of soldiers freshly evacuated from Iraq. I had met a National Guardsman from Kansas who had been hit by an improvised explosive device in the Sunni Triangle, an Army sergeant from California who had had his leg fractured in a roadside ambush and a small-framed 21-year-old New Yorker who had collapsed during a long march and now had permanent nerve damage in both legs. For the most part, they seemed stunned, anxious to be cleared to go home on convalescent leave, and not quite ready to talk about what had happened.

But Gilbert, who as one of the first casualties to be flown out of the gulf seemed to relish the role of elder statesman, used his own experience to predict what lay ahead. ''At first you're like, wow, I'm injured,'' he told me. ''The news on television is all about Iraq. You're like, this is good; I was part of something good. But then suddenly the news is bad -- it's all about soldiers dying -- and you're not healing the way you thought you would. You start thinking, I wish they'd cut my leg off. You think maybe I was supposed to die.''

Gilbert refers frequently to his ''bitter period,'' which stretched through the summer and involved a lot of sitting around in a wheelchair, playing solitaire, watching ''M*A*S*H'' reruns and refusing to leave the house except for doctors' appointments. It ended, slowly, after his wife, Andrea, who was pregnant with their first child, begged him to ask his doctors for antidepressants. He says he resisted, knowing his request would become part of his medical records, potentially affecting security clearances and promotions in what he hoped would be a full military career. (This was a sticking point for a number of soldiers I spoke with: patient privacy laws apply only loosely in the military, where commanders have access to a soldier's medical history, including what goes on in counseling sessions.) For Andrea Williams-Gilbert, the kick in the pants she gave her husband represented a small bit of military-spouse activism. ''Wives and family members shouldn't have to go through some of what we have to because their spouses are afraid to go on antidepressants,'' she told me. ''It's not fair to anyone.''

Even stabilized with Elavil, Gilbert said he has cycled through ups and downs, and Andrea, an outgoing blond Arkansan who was hugely pregnant when I first met her, does what she can to ride the waves. ''He'll say something touchy, and I'm out of there,'' she told me in November. ''I just head out the door and go walking.'' A week or so later, just before Thanksgiving, their daughter, Lauren, was born. Until he was hospitalized again, Gilbert had been more buoyant, regularly reporting for physical therapy, taking classes at a local university and doting, as best he could, on his wife and child. He was hoping to stay in the Army for a few more years after he recovered, but worried that if he ''toughed it out'' for a while, the fact that he was able to perform his duties (though in pain) would lower his disability rating when he did leave the service -- a difference of potentially thousands of dollars. And as it often does, fatherhood also rearranged his priorities. While earlier he was eager to get well so he could be redeployed to the Middle East, he announced to the support group in December that he'd changed his mind. ''I'm not going back there,'' he said, imagining a conversation with some higher-up in the Army. ''I'm not going to die for you.''

Whether he had wised up or had grown pessimistic, it was hard to say. Knowing that the rest of the 101st Airborne Division was soon to return to Fort Campbell, Gilbert made another prediction from his hospital bed, saying he had a ''bad feeling'' about the homecoming. ''You've got a lot of units pulling security every single day, doing missions every single day,'' he said. ''They're seeing explosions, shootings, burning bodies. And they're going to bring that back to a place where there are lots of people who just won't get it. We're about to have 20,000 people walk through their front door for the first time in a year.'' He pursed his lips, shook his head as if still thinking about it and then laughed. ''If I were a divorce lawyer, I'd be in high cotton this winter.''


Remembering how lonely she was as an inpatient at the base hospital, Jenni McKinley sometimes finishes her daily occupational-therapy appointment on the second floor and wanders up to Ward 4-AB to pop in on new arrivals from Iraq. It was there that she met Caleb Nall, a blue-eyed 23-year-old corporal from Louisiana who was recovering after being hit in the back by a rocket-propelled grenade. His torso had been severely burned; a gaping shrapnel wound had hollowed out part of his pelvis, and his left leg had been damaged. The explosion left him about 70 percent deaf in one ear. ''He was frustrated and tired of being in bed,'' McKinley said. She showed him her scars, invited him to come to the next support-group meeting and then the next day dropped off a few back issues of Maxim magazine and a case of Dr. Pepper.

When it came time for the group's next meeting, Nall showed up. He wore a pile jacket and a pair of jeans, his wounds hidden well away but his anger fully exposed. After a visiting V.A. representative started to natter on about how soldiers needed medical evidence and a formal diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder to receive relevant disability payments, Nall jumped in. ''Would you say waking up with the sound of a mortar round going off next to your head counts?'' he asked, the bitterness thinly wrapped in his Louisiana drawl. ''Jumping six inches off your bed?''

After the V.A. rep left, Nall turned to the group at large. ''Anyone else here having sleep problems?'' he asked.

Brent Bricklin raised his hand. So did Jeremy Gilbert and Jenni McKinley and Robert Shrode, as well as four of the five other soldiers who had come that day. Everybody but Nall burst out laughing.

''Is there something else they did for you?'' he continued, perplexed. ''I'm on morphine, Percocet, Elavil. . . .''

''I did Vicodin and Benadryl, but they counteract each other,'' offered a soldier across the room.

''Have you tried drinking?'' asked another.

Nall nodded earnestly. ''I take two Percocets and drink two six packs of beer, and I still can't sleep.''

This set off a voluble round of pharmaceutical recipe-swapping. Injured soldiers, I have learned, are nothing if not experts on painkillers and sleep aids. And yet little seems truly to work. A few complain that their antidepressants cause them to sleep all the time; more -- like Nall -- report that they sit up half the night in a drugged daze, waiting for sleep to come.

It was on one of these nights not long ago that a garbage truck arrived at 2:30 a.m. to empty the Dumpsters at Nall's off-base apartment. At the first slam of a Dumpster on pavement, Nall, who had been dozing in an easy chair dressed only in his underwear, was back in Iraq. ''My rifle was sitting in the corner,'' he said. ''I grabbed it, ran outside and made a loop around the block.'' Here, he paused to shake his head at just how scary this seemed in retrospect, and how utterly beyond his control. ''I was lucky it was the middle of the night, or I'd be in jail right now.'' The rifle is one of seven guns he keeps at his apartment.

The potential for violence is just one of a list of concerns both the military and veterans' groups have for returning soldiers. Combat veterans have been linked to higher incidences of drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, depression and unemployment. Having learned from its failure to treat traumatized Vietnam War soldiers 30 years ago, the military has dispatched ''combat stress teams'' to Iraq to offer counseling and in some cases dispense antianxiety meds to suffering soldiers. It may be impossible, however, to fully counteract the shock of going from a 24-hour state of generalized fear-apprehension-paranoia, sustained for a year through wartime, to evenings at home on the La-Z-Boy, asked to fulfill the requirements of love and tenderness needed to sustain a family. In a well-publicized string of incidents in 2002, three Special Forces soldiers returned to Fort Bragg, N.C., from Afghanistan and killed their wives in a span of six weeks. All three soldiers committed suicide.

It is unclear whether today's veterans will avoid the hardships that yesterday's continue to know. ''It won't be different for these guys than it was for the Vietnam vets,'' says Shad Meshad, the president of the National Veterans Foundation, who has counseled soldiers and veterans for the last three decades. He says that antidepressants and psychologists can only do so much for a hurting soul. ''There's a voice that rings through all these guys who've paid the price to survive war. No matter how much science or technology you have, those memories never leave you.'' Based out of Los Angeles, Meshad operates a hot line for war veterans. Until recently, the calls came from veterans of Vietnam and of Desert Storm, but in late fall the Iraq calls started to come -- not from soldiers but from their families. ''They're saying, 'Johnny came home, and he's angry; he wants a divorce,''' Meshad says. ''It's all the stuff I've heard from other wars.''

What might save some of today's soldiers is their awareness of the struggles of past veterans and of the resources available to them now. Not only are soldiers better educated and slightly older than their forebears in Vietnam; they are more likely to be married and have children -- meaning more people will be directly affected by their ability or inability to recover from war. On the day I met Debra Shrode, Robert's wife, at the hospital at Fort Campbell, she sat quietly holding his hand. There was an uneasy tenderness between the two, and Debra, who is tall and pretty, with wide down-turned eyes, seemed at first reluctant to speak. ''I told you she was shy,'' Robert said, grinning.

But she did speak. In a hill-country Kentucky drawl, Debra softly described getting the call last June from a commander, telling her that Robert had been hit by a grenade. She described the first time he was able to call her from the Army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, about four days after the incident. (''He told me he was fine,'' she said. ''I lied through my teeth,'' Robert added.) And then she talked about his homecoming -- about meeting his medevac flight, ''scared to death,'' and first taking in the sight of his scar-ridden face, his weak body and missing arm. She remembered smiling as hard as she could at Robert before stepping out of his line of vision as the medics transferred him to a stretcher and letting herself weep.

At home, the awkwardness rarely seemed to lift. When Robert's nightmares drove him to sleep on the couch, Debra lay awake in the bedroom. ''I kept wondering, Is he sleeping down there because he rests better, or is it because he doesn't want to be beside me?'' she said. And while six months after Robert's return their relationship had stabilized somewhat, Debra was still adjusting to what the war has done to her husband. Even as she kept busy going to cosmetology school by day and selling lottery tickets in the evenings, she couldn't help feeling ''left out,'' since Robert seemed to prefer the company of Bricklin and other soldiers to her own. ''I know there's a lot of things he can't talk to me about, that he can talk to his friends about,'' she said, glancing at Robert, who was by now staring quietly at the floor. ''But I'm sitting there thinking, Why can't he talk to me?'' She added that she has become better at living with the distance between them. ''At first, I had thoughts of holding his hand, of wanting to be close with him,'' she said, a quiet resignation in her voice. ''But stuff like that's changed, too.''

For his part, Robert said that he couldn't get past the memories of Iraq, that his experience there felt unresolved. ''My body's here, but my mind is there,'' he said. Despite the injuries he had suffered, Shrode remained loyal to the war effort. ''We're doing good over there,'' he told me. ''People just don't see it.'' When it came to the future, he felt only confusion, saying, ''I'd like to live out West, but what kind of job could I do?'' He was interested in Wyoming, but remembered that cold weather makes his pain worse. ''One day I'm on the Internet searching for property there, and the next day I'm looking for a condo in Key West.'' He had thought about going to college to study forestry or real estate or to become a teacher, but his limitations always came rushing back. ''I type slow. I write slow. I can't carry heavy things. What am I going to do for work?''

Anticipating the challenges of receiving compensation and care from the V.A., he had recently joined the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He was also going to sign up with Disabled American Veterans and the American Legion, and just in case, he was going to hire a lawyer. When I asked what his image of a group like the V.F.W. was, Robert said, ''A bunch of old guys from Vietnam sitting around in field jackets, drinking and not talking about it.'' Did he sometimes worry that he, too, might end up as one of those guys? Robert paused for a long, sobering moment. ''Yeah,'' he said finally. ''I do.''


As Christmas approached, Caleb Nall's insomnia had not subsided. He announced to the group that his doctor had heard out all his complaints and then had the gall to suggest he add a warm bath to his routine. ''A warm bath -- c'mon!'' Nall said.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Gilbert had consulted his doctor about all the pain medication he was taking. Earlier in the fall, he had started shortening the time between his prescribed doses of Percocet until suddenly he was taking twice what he should. Gilbert, who is studying to apply for a physician's assistant degree and can be aptly professorial, cautioned everyone about Percocet. ''They say it's as addictive as heroin,'' he said. Having recently replaced Percocet with controlled-release OxyContin, Gilbert admitted to having a ''serious physical dependence'' on it, developing a crushing headache every time he tried to skip a dose. ''It gets to where you'll kill somebody because you need that fix,'' he joked.

''I'm strung out on Demerol all the time,'' Jenni McKinley piped up. ''I know it's time to take my meds when I start screaming at my kids for little things.''

She added, ''My doctors are talking about switching me to methadone.''

Gilbert laughed. ''Mine said the same thing.''

Whatever lay ahead for them couldn't be as bad, they figured, as what they went through the first few months following their return from war. Or at least they hoped as much. In an attempt to salve her conscience, McKinley had done some research on the marine who died next to her in Iraq, learning his name and the fact that he had left behind a young wife. She was contemplating calling his family, but eventually decided against it. Meanwhile, she had gained some strength and movement in her injured hand and was feeling better able to enjoy her children.

Robert Shrode, meanwhile, has a new prosthetic -- a high-tech beauty complete with realistic-looking fingers -and was out on the air strip on Feb. 1 when the men and women of his unit returned home. At Fort Campbell, the troop rotation is now fully under way, with planes landing almost daily at the base, each one carrying up to 200 soldiers fresh out of Iraq.

Shrode says that he has decided against having more of his arm amputated and is now embarking on the series of doctor's exams he needs in order to receive a medical discharge. His aim is to be out of the Army in April. He has also hit upon a new idea for his future: returning to Iraq as a security contractor for a private company. If it all works out, he could be back in the desert by next January -- his wife, he says, is against it.

Meanwhile, Brent Bricklin's four-year enlistment is up in June. He plans on marrying his girlfriend in Wisconsin, with Shrode as a groomsman, and then he wants to go to college to become a history teacher. Imagining this, he expressed the first bit of military pride I had heard from him. ''I can't wait for the day I say: 'O.K. class, close your books. Today we're going to do Operation Iraqi Freedom. This here is my Purple Heart; here's the Iraqi flag I got off a rooftop in Karbala; these are pictures from Mosul.' How cool will that be?'' But while the dream of this moment kept him going, it also -- he finally admitted -- prevented him from seeking psychological help for the grief and anger he felt in the wake of his time in Iraq. ''I can't have any of that on my record,'' Bricklin told me, as if there were absolutely no choice in the matter. ''I mean, who's going to hire a teacher who has flashbacks?''


At night, in the quiet of their rented farmhouse, Robert Shrode lets Debra pick the shrapnel out of his body. Over the last six months, she's tugged out 15 pieces as they have worked their way to the surface of his skin. She has picked them from his legs, from his neck, his face. Sometimes he will study them, these twisted aluminum chunks that have managed to escape while so many more will forever live inside him.

Barely out of her teenage years, Debra Shrode never pictured her life this way. Never imagined the Army would be calling her up and asking her to hand out advice as some kind of expert wife. Yet someone from the Army's Family Readiness Group wanted her to call another wife whose husband had come home injured. She sighs and dials the number. ''I don't know what I can say to make you feel better,'' she says into the phone. ''If he doesn't want to talk, don't take it to heart.''

She adds each new piece of shrapnel to the collection they keep stored in a Tupperware container. For a while, the container sat on their coffee table, but recently Robert moved it into a spare bedroom drawer.

If it seems as if he might be moving on, Debra has only to ask, What're you thinking about?

''Iraq,'' he'll say. And then the silence falls again.

Sara Corbett is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.





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BuzzFlash Interviews
February 13, 2004
Paul Waldman, Author of "Fraud: The Strategy Behind The Bush Lies And Why The Media Didn’t Tell You," Talks with BuzzFlash about Why Bush is a Complete and Irredeemable "Fraud."

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

"Republicans are better at it than Democrats because they have to be. If everybody just said: Okay, who’s looking out for me? -- in Bill O’Reilly’s words -- and voted accordingly, well, Republicans would only have 1 percent of the votes, because that’s who they’re looking out for. So they have to be much more sophisticated at it, and they have to work a lot harder at controlling the language. They have to work a lot harder at telling those stories, right? This is something that you see in election after election -- the Republicans tend to talk about values, and Democrats tend to talk about programs. Democrats often get lost in the details. Now the details are all things that will reflect well on them. But it’s much harder to get people to understand a whole long list of programs than it is to get them to understand a story.

Republicans are very good at telling these stories. And they’ve constructed a very pleasing and easy-to-understand story about George W. Bush -- that he was sort of the wayward son. Then he found God. He became a serious person. He ran for President. He’s a man of upstanding moral values. And then Sept. 11th happened, and he rose to the challenge, and he‘s the savior of us all. And that’s why, to put it bluntly, I’m sure Karl Rove gets down on his knees and thanks God for Sept. 11th every day because any time they’re in trouble, what do they do? They announce a new threat, and they say this is all about terrorism. And if you ask George W. Bush what time he is, he’ll say: In the wake of Sept. 11th, it’s 3:15. So it’s a powerful story and it activates people’s fear and anger, and all those emotions that we all felt on Sept. 11th. And they’re going to keep activating them as long as they can because they know that it works."

-- Paul Waldman

Rarely have we found a writer that so cohesively builds the case that Bush is a fraud. And, unlike BuzzFlash, the author of "FRAUD" is restrained and patient as he unfolds his case that the image of George W. Bush is a strategically manufactured artifice.

As the book jacket notes:

"At some point, George W. Bush took a good long look at who he was and what he wanted for the country and decided that the American people would never buy it if he gave it to them straight." So Bush and his political machine made their decision: the American people would have to be lied to.

They would construct a persona that would be everything Bush was not.

They would take the same reactionary agenda and cloak it in comforting catchphrases and pleasing visuals, presenting to the public a false image of sympathy.

And they would repeat this message endlessly.

The power of the fraud lies in the ability of the Bush machine to manipulate the press, and thereby avoid having the truth exposed. Waldman’s findings reveal an astonishing record of how the nation’s media has not only given Bush a pass again and again, but have failed to follow up on even the most openly dishonest parts of the Bush agenda."

Paul Waldman is the past associate director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and holds a Ph.D. in communications. He is currently the executive editor of The Gadflyer, an Internet magazine about politics.

"Fraud:The Strategy Behind The Bush Lies And Why The Media Didn’t Tell You" is available at http://www.buzzflash.com/premiums/fraud.html.

Here is the BuzzFlash Interview with Paul Waldman.

* * *

BuzzFlash: You have a book called Fraud about the person who’s sitting in the White House. If we accept that the image of Bush that is portrayed to the country through his speeches -- and, as Karl Rove likes to say, through pictorial images of photos and television video -- is a fraud, what is Bush’s motive and the motive of the people behind him to commit the fraud?

Paul Waldman: I think where it comes from is the fact that -- and I say this in the Introduction -- that at some point he had to have sat down and taken a good, long look at who he was and what he wanted to do, and come to the realization that, if he gave it to the American people straight, they wouldn’t buy it. They would not have elected somebody who had accomplished so little and had been given so much. They wouldn’t sign on to this agenda that’s at odds with their own interests.

So if that’s the position you’re in -- you’ve got this agenda, you’ve got a candidate who has really so little to commend himself, other than his name, and has spent his entire life walking on a path laid before him with wealth and influence, and has so little in common with the people that he’s going to be claiming to represent -- then you’ve got to come up with a story. And that story is going to be a false one.

So what do they do? They said we’re going to create this persona that isn’t somebody who went to Andover and Yale and Harvard, whose father was a President and whose grandfather was a Senator, and who, his entire working life, had never had a real job. It’s all been about his Daddy’s friends giving him money to lose.

They created this persona that he’s a regular guy, a Texas cowboy. He bought a ranch just before the campaign started so he could go down there and clear brush. He exaggerates his drawl whenever he can. He does “home to the heartland” tours to show that the place where he comes from, and the people who vote for him come from, is the real America. And if you live on the East coast or the West coast, or you live in a state that votes for Democrats, then you must not be a real American. So that’s part of it -- the creation of this persona, this kind of regular guy who doesn’t, in fact, represent the interests of his class.

Then you have the second problem, which is: What do you do about this agenda? Well, the agenda is not going to change. That we know. So what they did was they created this wonderful thing called “compassionate conservatism.” Now what’s compassionate conservatism? I think the best summation of it is if you go to the Bush campaign website -- Georgewbush.com -- you can see a “Compassion Photo Album.” Now what’s the Compassion Photo Album? It is -- I kid you not -- two dozen pictures of George W. Bush with black people. That’s the compassion photo album. And that pretty much sums up what compassionate conservatism is.


BuzzFlash: You mean photo ops with minorities as the sum total of compassionate conservatism?

Paul Waldman: Exactly. You know, you stick him in a room full of black people and he will hug them ‘til the cows come home. The cameras will click away, and it’ll be wonderful for everybody. There’s an event that took place that I mention in the book where --

BuzzFlash: Excuse me for interrupting you, but it’s somewhat ironic that when he was informed of 9/11, he was in a minority classroom in Florida reading a children’s book.

Paul Waldman: One of the things that’s so shocking, if we can just digress on that for a moment, is that everyone talks about his tremendous performance on 9/11. I don’t think it was that tremendous. He got informed of the second plane – okay, not the first plane – the second plane. He knew that America was under attack, and he stayed in that classroom for 10 more minutes. Ari Fleischer held up a sign that said: “Don’t say anything yet,” and so Bush went on reading this children’s book for 10 more minutes instead of saying, “I’m sorry children. I have to go.” He hung around as if it really wasn’t all that urgent.

And then he kind of bounced around the country, making very awkward statements that didn’t really seem to be very inspiring. It wasn’t until they coulc actually write something for him to say that he began to take on the appearance of a President.


BuzzFlash: What happened then in that classroom is sort of indicative of the real ineptitude and impotency of Bush without his handlers running the show. Here he is, placed in a photo op situation, part of a Karl Rove strategy. And the biggest crisis to hit this country in anyone’s memory -- nearly 3,000 people lost -- and he’s sitting in a classroom basically until he’s told what to do. Hardly the take-charge President, as you say. And then what did he do? He made a brief statement that someone wrote for him, and then he flew west to Louisiana while the country is in dissaray.

Paul Waldman: But it was so important for everyone to feel like we had a commanding leader that reporters in particular were falling all over themselves -- and to this day -- to talk about how wonderful his performance was on that day.

BuzzFlash: Let’s get back to compassionate conservatism. The fraud is, in part, to advance an agenda that the public doesn’t buy, and we see this borne out in polls. He may have a high favorability rating, but at the same time, when people are polled on his individual policies, particularly domestic policies, he loses in a landslide on most of those.

Paul Waldman: Absolutely. And that’s another thing that is largely a myth. You see reporters repeat this all the time -- that Bush is a tremendously popular President. Well, he was tremendously popular right after Sept. 11th, and that has kind of stuck in their minds. If a trained seal had been President on Sept. 11th, he would have gotten 90 percent approval ratings. But the fact is, right now, Bush is not a tremendously popular President. His popularity ratings are sort of in the low- to mid-‘50s, which is okay by historical standards. It’s not fantastic. It’s not terrible.

The Washington Post recently asked, “Who are you going to vote for?” It was Bush: 48; Democrats: 46. So that’s a tie. But this idea that he’s so tremendously popular and everybody just loves him sticks in the public mind because it sticks in reporters’ minds. They’re, to a certain extent, kind of still locked in that post-Sept. 11th feeling that everybody just loves Bush.

There’s an interesting parallel with Ronald Reagan here. There’s an article that was written by a communications scholar named Michael Schudson some years back. He looked at the Gallup polls on popularity ratings, and he wrote this piece called “The Myth of Ronald Reagan’s Popularity.” This is after Reagan had already left office. And what he found was that, again, by historical standards, Reagan was kind of in the middle. He had better ratings than Nixon and Carter, but worse than most other presidents. But Schudson’s explanation was that reporters, to a certain extent, sort of felt like the American people must have been dupes. Reagan’s people were so good at these terrific photo ops, and reporters saw how well they were staged and just figured, well, the American people certainly must be buying it, because look how pretty those pictures are. They must love Reagan, when, in fact, they really didn’t. He was reasonably popular, popular enough to win reelection. But he wasn’t beloved by every American.

And the same kind of thing is happening with Bush. If anything, they’re even more skilled. They put the Reagan team to shame. Nobody can put together a photo op like the Bush administration can. So there’s a similar kind of thing that goes on. They see him land on the aircraft carrier, and reporters all say: Wow, look at that fantastic photo op. People must just be lapping this up. Everybody must love this guy.

You know what? The American people aren’t that dumb. There was a Gallup poll right before the carrier landing happened, and then one right after it. His popularity went down by one point, so it’s not like everybody saw it and said: Wow, he’s such a fantastic wartime leader, we just love him. But that idea has lodged itself in reporters’ minds, and they keep repeating it – that he’s so fantastically popular.

BuzzFlash: You were associate director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the Annenberg School for Communication. BuzzFlash constantly focuses on the issue of communication, and in many of our interviews we ask people about image and meaning. Going back to what you just said about the carrier landing, people like the infamous Chris Matthews and others analyzed it as though it were a performance and not something that was an extension of policy. In the media today, you have celebrity pundits who can’t divorce themselves from looking at politics as entertainment. And in that sense, they look at Bush’s performance at projecting himself as President, rather than how is his performance as the leader of the American government.

Paul Waldman: I think it goes even beyond the celebrity pundits to prominent reporters in general. Many years ago, I had a conversation with a White House correspondent for a major newspaper, and I asked her about this question of covering the strategy and not covering the policy details. And she said, “Look, I’m not an expert on welfare policy. I’m not an expert on foreign policy. What I’m an expert on is politics, and that’s what I’m going to write about.”

The way that ends up manifesting itself is in theater criticism, and the irony is that reporters tend to be very, very cynical. They assume that the motives that candidates and politicians offer are always false, and they always are concealing some sort of vaguely sinister strategic motive. But the irony is that they reward good image-making and they punish bad image-making. So even though they’re cynical, they’re also playing right into the hands of somebody like Karl Rove, because he knows all too well that it’s not a question of whether or not you are going to try to construct some kind of theater. You’re going to be evaluated based on whether it came off well or not.

If you have a good photo op, you’re going to get praised. If you fall off the stage like Bob Dole did, then you’re going to get criticized. Reporters believe when they’re doing this stuff that they’re kind of in the know, and their cynicism is holding politicians to account. But it really isn’t. All it’s doing is insisting that they put on good theater as opposed to bad theater.

BuzzFlash: I recall reading several years ago about people’s recall and news sources. We are such an entertainment-driven society -- news is geared toward ratings and sweeps weeks, and advertising is dependent upon viewership. I think it was after the 2000 election, where people in some sort of focus group were shown negative ads, news reports, and newspaper articles. Two days later, they were asked about the sources. When asked about a negative attack upon a politician, they couldn’t distinguish where it came from. Although the public generally decries negative campaign advertising, the source of news becomes a blur to the American public in general.

Paul Waldman: That’s because we don’t classify information when we receive it, along with its source, necessarily. We get a piece of information, and we store it into our memory. But it can often get disconnected from where we saw it. Campaigns count on that. One of the things that they do sometimes is try to confuse you about what the source is, so they try to make their ads look vaguely news-like.

There have been a couple of cases where people have done that to the extreme. In Bob Torricelli’s last Senate race against Dick Zimmer in New Jersey, Zimmer aired an ad that was a fake sort of newsbreak. “Breaking news: Torricelli under fire for corruption,” or whatever. That was an extreme case of somebody trying to confuse you about where the source was. The mistake they made is that since they aired it over and over and over again, viewers eventually said: Wait a second, I saw this breaking news thing yesterday and the day before. They’re trying to screw with me. And it backfired on them because it was such a blatant attempt to fool people. But they nonetheless adopt a lot of the visual tropes of news, and it is, to a certain extent, in order to help you to kind of forget where you got the information from.

BuzzFlash: Let’s go back to this notion of what makes news nowadays -- the projection of the Bush fraud. Karl Rove was quoted in a New Yorker piece a couple weeks ago saying, very disdainfully toward the media, that only the headline counts, and reporters only want the good headline, because they’re going to be rated on what brings readers or viewers to their publication or television broadcasting. So as long as we supply them with the good headline, that’s all we need to do.

He was being what’s called disarmingly candid because the Bush administration, and Rove’s office in particular, seems masterful. Whenever Bush gets in a corner, whether it was Enron, Ken Lay -- I mean, we can go down the list of maybe a hundred things that have been damaging to them -- Karl Rove comes up with some headline that knocks whatever is negative and revealing about the Bush administration off the front page, and invariably the press goes along with it, except for maybe a few print publications. Certainly television goes with the headline, and then the Democrats don’t continue an offense about the damaging revelation, and it just dies because the White House has released a distracting headline.

Paul Waldman: The critical information ends up far down the story, which means that on TV, which is basically a headline service, it never gets in at all. They’re very good about forging ahead. They never apologize for anything. And the press has been so compliant and kind of beaten down that if you look back over these stories, some of which you just mentioned, it’s incredible how they just disappeared.

Take Harken Energy, where Bush may well have committed insider trading. There’s a lot of money involved. Dumped over $800,000 worth of stock after apparently hearing that his company was engaging in Enron-style accounting, and their stock was about to tank. If it had been Bill Clinton, well, let’s think about the amount of ink that was spilled over Whitewater. Now what was Whitewater about? Even people who spend every day thinking about politics can’t tell you, because it was basically about nothing, and they found nothing. But we spent $70 million investigating it. And Harken just disappears. They ran a couple of stories for a couple of weeks, and then it just went away.

BuzzFlash: One of the traits of the Bush administration is the old slogan: If you tell a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. Or, I guess a variation on that is: If you tell a lie five times, it becomes the truth, which seems a hallmark of the Bush administration. Let me ask you about a couple things and just see your reaction in terms of media. When it first came out that Bush had been briefed before he went off to Crawford in August of 2001 that al-Qaeda was planning a massive terrorist attack on the United States, it was derailed. Bush suddenly decided it was time to have a Department of Homeland Security -- I’m pretty sure that’s the story that derailed the August briefing story. The press seems to have no memory that this President was opposed to a Department of Homeland Security. Something comes out that’s damaging to him, and suddenly he comes out championing it.

What I’m getting to is when Condoleezza Rice was asked about the briefing, she said, "But we never thought they would use planes to fly into buildings."

Paul Waldman: The other thing about when she got asked about the briefing was that she said: No, it wasn’t about attacks on the United States. It was about attacks overseas. And that was false.

BuzzFlash: No one challenged her, and it did not become a big scandal -- the way you prevent a hijacking is the same way you prevent a hijacking that results in flying planes into big buildings. It doesn’t matter. You didn’t prevent the hijacking. Her attitude was: Well, we’d kind of been warned about hijackings, but not about flying planes into buildings.

How does that happen? A 5-year-old could knock that excuse down and say: How can you be National Security Advisor if you can’t understand that both would be prevented in the same way?

Paul Waldman: I think the press, ever since the beginning, has bought that line that the Bush administration is comprised of grownups. If nothing else, these people are competent, and they know what they’re doing. And even a huge failure like failing to prevent Sept. 11th has done nothing to damage that view amongst the press. They continue, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, to hold to that view that no matter what you think about their policies, these people really know what they’re doing.

BuzzFlash: Even when they say things that reveal they absolutely don’t know what they’re doing.

Paul Waldman: I think part of it is that they’re so good at sort of forging ahead and not being willing to even grant the premise of criticism, and changing the subject.

BuzzFlash: We had an editorial at one point called “The Banality of Lying,” which noted that they lie so frequently and so brazenly that it’s hard for some people of the press to accuse them of lying because they’re so audacious.

Paul Waldman: That is a strategy. And Bush never apologizes for anything, and it’s been very effective. Even in cases you can find where he’ll repeat the same lie over and over and over again, and there will be somebody pointing that out, he just keeps going because he knows that there’s not going to be a cost. And this actually brings me to a point that I think is really important that a lot of liberals misunderstand. It’s easy to make fun of Bush for not being too smart, and for the way that he trips over his words. But when liberals do that, I think they’re making a big mistake because he wants liberals to make fun of him. It makes liberals look like snobs, and it reiterates this idea that he’s just an ordinary guy, because if he went to Andover and Yale and Harvard, he wouldn’t be a guy who trips over his words.

What the press does in a presidential campaign is they sort of home in on what they think each candidate’s Achilles’ heel is. And they tell the public: This is what you have to know about this guy, and this is the area of potential danger. For Gore, it was the idea he was a liar. And for Bush, it was the idea that he was stupid. And once they decided that Bush was stupid, they gave him permission to lie.

There’s a quote that I cite from Cokie Roberts -- if you want to know what the conventional wisdom among reporters is, you can just listen to what she’s got to say. After the first debate, Gore made some utterly trivial inaccurate statements about the girl who has to stand in her classroom when in fact she had a chair, or he went to the fires in Texas with the director of FEMA when it was actually the deputy director. And Bush told a number of falsehoods that were actually consequential and were meant to deceive people about what he wanted to do. What Cokie Roberts said was that with Bush, “you know he’s just misstating.” And that’s a quote. You know he’s just misstating, as opposed to it playing into a story about him being a serial exaggerator.

That’s what reporters felt. If Bush said something that wasn’t true, oh, well, you know, he’s not too smart, so he must have just made a mistake, so we don’t have to hold him accountable for his lies. And we may not even have to say that what he said was wrong.

And when they realized that this was going on, the Bush team knew that they had struck political gold: He was never going to be held accountable for the things that he said. After the State of the Union last year, when he said that Saddam was looking for uranium in Africa, one White House aide said: Well, the President’s not a fact-checker. And this is always their line. It’s not his fault because he’s George W. Bush. He’s not too smart. He’s doing what he thinks is the right thing. But he doesn’t have to be held accountable for the things that he says.

I’ve had it with that. When he was running for President, he said that he was going to usher in the responsibility era. Well, it’s time for him to take some responsibility.

BuzzFlash: In September of last year, on a Friday, which is often when the administration releases information that can be damaging or undercut their credibility, a statement is released on behalf of President Bush in which he states that basically there is no indication that Saddam was tied with al-Qaeda.

It was an enormously significant admission on the part of administration that had done everything possible, through a number of psychological linguistic techniques, to get the American public to believe that the majority of the hijackers on Sept. 11th were Iraqi. At one point, 70 percent of Americans thought that. Then Bush suddenly admits there was no connection, and two days later, if I recall, Vice President Cheney appears on television and once again says we have reason to believe that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. So the Vice President, who many say is really the brains behind the operation, along with Karl Rove, says something completely contrary to what the President has said just two days ago, and there’s barely a ripple in the press.

Paul Waldman: And Bush only said it because he got asked the question directly, and it had begun to become controversial because Cheney has been always the one who has said the most outrageous things when it came to Iraq --that Saddam actually has nuclear weapons, that he’s going to be attacking any minute now. What happened was, after one of these statements, Bush actually got asked directly by a reporter: Do you believe that Saddam was involved with Sept. 11th? And he said no, because there was no escaping it when he got asked so directly. But yes, you’re right, and I wrote a piece in the Washington Post about this -- that reporters just don’t know how to say: The President lied. They especially don’t know how to say it if he lies in a clever way.

They didn’t have to say the words “Saddam planned Sept. 11th” in order to plant that idea in the public mind. All they had to do was to keep repeating the words “Saddam” and “Sept. 11th” in the same sentence over and over and over.

BuzzFlash: Which is a technique called mirroring.

Paul Waldman: Yes. And people would make the connection in their own minds because we know that Saddam is a bad guy, and al-Qaeda is bad. And they’re all sort of Middle Eastern, so why wouldn’t there be a connection between them? The other thing that they do was they hyped these meaningless connections. Bush said, I think it was in his State of the Union, or maybe it was the U.N. address -- I can’t remember specifically -- that a senior member of al-Qaeda has received medical treatment in Baghdad. First of all, the guy wasn’t in al-Qaeda. He was in a different terrorist group. But that actually proves absolutely nothing. By that standard, President Bush is in league with al-Qaeda, too, because there have been members of al-Qaeda that have been found in the United States.


BuzzFlash: Not to mention the close Bush family relationship to Saudi Arabia, to the bin Laden family and so forth.

Paul Waldman: They knew that they wouldn’t have to say it explicitly. They could get 70 percent of the people to believe that Saddam was involved in Sept. 11th if they just kept repeating the two ideas and linking them as closely as they could, over and over and over and over again. That inoculates them against the charge of lying, so when they’re accused of making that connection, they can say: We never said it. This is something that you might call Clintonian or Clintonesque.

BuzzFlash: Parsing.

Paul Waldman: Yes. Going back afterward and saying, well, if you look back at exactly what I said, that’s not what I said. You’ve seen Republicans in recent days make this argument, too. Now that we know that Saddam had no weapons, you’ve heard Republicans say: He never said the threat was imminent. Now how is it that he never said that? Well, the word “imminent” does not seem to have passed his lips. But, of course, he was telling us over and over that if we didn’t attack Iraq, Iraq was going to attack us, and soon. But since the word “imminent” was never heard, you now have Republicans saying: He didn’t say the threat was imminent. But of course he did. That’s what he wanted us to think.

The most appropriate definition of lying is whether you say something that intentionally leads the person who hears you to come to a false conclusion. That’s the kind of lie that Bush is more apt to make, particularly on Iraq, as he did, although there are certainly plenty of things that he said that are literally false. You can rattle off a whole list of those, whether it’s the uranium from Africa, the aluminum tubes, or, the unmanned aerial vehicles that were supposed to be able to spread chemical weapons over the eastern United States.


BuzzFlash: It’s an endless quagmire of lying that was created for the intention of deception. And I guess you’re saying what the Republicans are doing now is what they accuse Clinton of one minor thing having to do with a sexual activity. But they’re distinguishing between technically lying and the intent to deceive. They’re saying those are two different things.

Paul Waldman: Right.

BuzzFlash: So maybe there was intent to deceive, although they’re not really acknowledging that. But they’re kind of saying Bush didn’t technically lie.

Paul Waldman: The intent to deceive is what’s important.

BuzzFlash: Well, to us, an intent to deceive is a lie, whether or not the wording was phrased in a way that you could say that he absolutely said that, and it was a lie. But you could put A and B together and it becomes a lie. Clearly the entire pre-Iraq campaign -- even Powell now acknowledges he lied, and no one seems to care. Powell now says they didn’t really have firm evidence. They seem to be inoculating themselves by stipulating to the facts, but saying it wasn’t intentional lying.

Paul Waldman: Right. And the thing is, if you actually go back and look at what they said, they’re now saying: Well, we just didn’t really know; the evidence was sketchy, and so we were just laying it out there. But the important point is that when they presented that evidence, much of which was false, they didn’t tell us that it was vague and ambiguous. Bush gave us in his State of the Union speech one year ago with specific numbers on tons of biological weapons that they were supposed to have had, and numbers of missiles, and in Powell’s speech to the U.N. It was truly amazing, if you hear that speech to the U.N., all across the country, people said, well, that’s it. Case closed. The case has been made, because Colin Powell, who everyone respects so much, because he’s the moderate, he’s the honest one – he laid it out and that’s it.

We talked about those aluminum tubes. This was something that was extremely controversial within the Administration. Why? Because every expert who knew about enriching uranium said these things are useless for enriching uranium. They’re for conventional rockets, and the Iraqis happen to be telling the truth on this one. And that was the conclusion of everyone who knew what they were talking about.

Now they had some intelligence analysts who didn’t know much about enriching uranium who said they could take the tubes, and maybe they could hollow them out and do this long involved process where maybe they could use them for enriching uranium. And that was what ended up carrying the day. But when Powell got to the U.N., what did he say? He said that the consensus of most experts who have looked at it said that these can be used for enriching uranium. And Condoleezza Rice said they can only be used for enriching uranium. And they were lying. That was not the consensus of most of the analysts. They were almost useless for enriching uranium.

They presented all these things as though they were certainties -- that there was really no ambiguity about it. And now, when it turns out that all these things were false, they’re saying: Well, we weren’t really sure. We were just putting it out there saying maybe it was a possibility. But that's not the way they presented it to us at the time.

BuzzFlash: You write an exquisitely detailed book, very cogent, noting that we basically have a fraud in the White House: a man who pretends that he is something that he isn't, a great pretender. What we have is Bush branded as something he’s not. And it’s kind of like trying to sell someone a product when they don’t really need it and persuading them that it’s going to make their life better. But if someone tries to sell you a peanut butter sandwich, and you taste it and realize it’s turkey, you can send it back. But within the White House --

Paul Waldman: They’ll make you pay and convince you the turkey is what you wanted all along.

BuzzFlash: And persuade you of that. Basically they’ve created a brand identity for Bush, and they keep pushing that based on advertising principles and so forth. At what point do you expose that you’re being told you’re getting prime rib but really you’re getting horsemeat? They’re pretty good at selling horsemeat as though it were sirloin steak.

Paul Waldman: They are. And they wouldn’t be able to do it without the cooperation of the news media.

BuzzFlash: When you say “cooperation,” let me ask you something about the dynamics of the media. We talk a lot on BuzzFlash about the corporate-owned media, but let’s not get into that, because that’s a whole other issue. Let’s talk a little bit about the news cycle at this point in time, and what cable television has done and the nature of the 24-hour headline news cycle.

The Bush administration, and Karl Rove in particular, seem to be brilliant at surfing the headlines -- whenever they’re in a crisis, they jump on a new wave, and people forget about the last wave. How are they aided by information technology? We’re surrounded by information. If you work out at the gym, there’s six television sets. You’ve got CNN. You’ve got the Internet. Newsprint seems as slow as molasses now. Do we have so much information we can no longer determine what’s important?

Paul Waldman: I think most of us don’t use all that information. Most people get their news from the top-level stuff -- their hometown newspaper and the national network news shows. Every argument is out there somewhere. But Bush doesn’t care if there’s a stinging piece in The Nation that really gets to the heart of and lays out the facts about something bad that they’ve done. He doesn’t care, because he knows that so few people are going to see it. So they can ride those waves.

I think that too many reporters see themselves implicitly as kind of stenographers to power. And since the Bush White House is driving the agenda, if the Bush White House says, We’re going to change the subject now, and we’re not going to talk about this criticism -- reporters just go along because they’re at the White House, and the Bush people are setting the agenda. For them to stand up and say: Hold on a second -- we need to talk about weapons of mass destruction; you were saying that all along, but now, all of a sudden, you changed the subject and now it’s about how Iraq was a humanitarian mission. For them to do that requires a little bit of courage, and courage is in short supply in the Washington press corps these days. They know that if they speak out too loudly, they’re going to get blacklisted by the White House. They also know that they are going to be deluged with accusations of liberal bias. That cry is a strategy the Republicans employ to get reporters not to report honestly.

So they just keep going - well, we’ll just write about today’s photo op. And it’s that kind of combination of intimidation and fear that leads them to just go along. I think that they are very successful at defining some things as out of bounds. For instance, I saw an article in the L.A. Times the other day about a Wesley Clark event where somebody asked a question about George Bush being a deserter. And Clark actually answered it, and said something sort of vague and noncommittal about whether he thought that Bush was a deserter. But the incredible thing was that the story didn’t explain what the guy was talking about -- about Bush not showing up for a year’s worth of his National Guard duty.

Now I know that the reporter who was reporting on that story knows what the story is. But the fact that he would not even explain it and instead leave it absolutely impenetrable to almost any reader -- that, to me, is a frightening indication of how their reporters sort of see that there are some kinds of criticism -- well, we’re just not going to talk about that. That’s out of bounds to discuss the fact that Bush didn’t show up and fulfill his National Guard duty.

That’s the kind of thing that I find really frightening -- the fact that they’re beaten down on a day-to-day basis, and just go along with the White House line. It’s tragic and it’s a betrayal of their obligations to the citizenry. But it’s not too surprising.

BuzzFlash: This administration sells itself as an administration of integrity, but it’s perhaps the most dishonest administration in recent memory. It says it’s Godly, but in the Iraq war, almost every denomination, including the President’s own, and the Catholic Church, opposed the Iraq war. Yet the President said God directed him to do this. It’s kind of Orwellian. When you look at its actions vs. his words, it’s almost invariably the opposite of what it says.

Going back to your academic background in communications and journalism -- and James Moore talks about this in Bush’s Brain a bit -- Karl Rove understands that Bush’s role is to create a story, create a brand identity. And everything Bush does is part of elaborating on that story. You talk about it in your book. You said they had to make him into the cowboy. And God knows the only time he ever cuts any brush on his Crawford ranch is during a photo op. Democrats seem to focus on issues -- with the primaries now, we’re seeing them attacking each other on issues. The Bush Republican Party focuses on telling a story about Bush -- the man of integrity, the man of God, the man of homespun, cowboy values who’d rather be back on his ranch. And that story seems to go a long way with a large segment of the American public.

Paul Waldman: Republicans are better at it than Democrats because they have to be. If everybody just said: Okay, who’s looking out for me? -- in Bill O’Reilly’s words -- and voted accordingly, well, Republicans would only have 1 percent of the votes, because that’s who they’re looking out for. So they have to be much more sophisticated at it, and they have to work a lot harder at controlling the language. They have to work a lot harder at telling those stories, right? This is something that you see in election after election -- the Republicans tend to talk about values, and Democrats tend to talk about programs. Democrats often get lost in the details. Now the details are all things that will reflect well on them. But it’s much harder to get people to understand a whole long list of programs than it is to get them to understand a story.

Republicans are very good at telling these stories. And they’ve constructed a very pleasing and easy-to-understand story about George W. Bush -- that he was sort of the wayward son. Then he found God. He became a serious person. He ran for President. He’s a man of upstanding moral values. And then Sept. 11th happened, and he rose to the challenge, and he‘s the savior of us all. And that’s why, to put it bluntly, I’m sure Karl Rove gets down on his knees and thanks God for Sept. 11th every day because any time they’re in trouble, what do they do? They announce a new threat, and they say this is all about terrorism. And if you ask George W. Bush what time he is, he’ll say: In the wake of Sept. 11th, it’s 3:15. So it’s a powerful story and it activates people’s fear and anger, and all those emotions that we all felt on Sept. 11th. And they’re going to keep activating them as long as they can because they know that it works.


BuzzFlash: They have their nominating convention focused around September 11th.

Paul Waldman: Exactly. They have never hesitated for an instant to milk every ounce of political gain they could out of it. I think you’re right on the Democrats because there’s this feeling among Democrats, often a sort of frustration. They say we’re the party that stands for the ordinary people. And there are a lot more ordinary people than there are millionaires. So how come we don’t win every election by 90 percent? It’s because Republicans are better at telling these stories, and they’re better at simplifying things because they have to be.


BuzzFlash: And they’re better at conveying that story for the media, and taking advantage of the headline cycle. It seems the Democrats don’t quite understand how to tell that story through the media, and how to connect emotionally with people.

Paul Waldman: I know some who do it. But the thing is that the Republicans are much better organized when it comes to these kinds of questions.


BuzzFlash: They’re much more disciplined.

Paul Waldman: If you surf around cable news, what you see is that they’re all talking using the same language. They’re all making the same arguments. And the Democrats are all over the map. They just haven’t gotten their act together. I must say that George W. Bush has a way of concentrating Democrats’ minds. And I think BuzzFlash is a part of this. The Democrats are tired of getting the shit kicked out of them. And they are starting to stand up and say enough is enough --- we’re going to fight back. Part of that is getting organized, and you do see that beginning to happen. We’ll see over this election and the ensuing years and decades whether the movement that we’re seeing the beginnings of right now really takes hold. But that will remain to be seen.

BuzzFlash: The goal of brand identity is to sell a product that’s predictable. So if you buy Kraft Cream Cheese in Philadelphia or you buy Kraft Cream Cheese in Los Angeles, that Kraft Cream Cheese tastes exactly the same. The Republicans, who are much more into advertising and business, tend to see politics as the selling of a product. There’s a Bush brand, and they’re consistent and they respect hierarchy. If this is the way we’re supposed to sell Kraft Cream Cheese, this is the way we’re going to sell Bush. We all stick to the consistent message points. Democrats and independents, by their very nature, value diversity. And so it’s a little harder to come out with a branded image because the very nature of diversity goes against the very concept of what makes branding successful.

Paul Waldman: Yes, but you know what? If you actually get deep into the Republicans, you find a lot of diversity there, too. And you find a lot of competing interests. The Libertarians are different from the conservative Christians, who are different from the corporatists. But they understand and appreciate power in a way liberals don’t. I think part of what it means to be a liberal is to have an outsider mindset. The liberal heroes are people who were pushing from outside the system -- people like Martin Luther King, the women’s suffrage movement, the environmental movement. These are all cases where people from outside the system pushed the system for change. Republicans understand that you make the greatest strides towards your agenda when you have power. Let’s not say Democrats, but liberals are not completely comfortable with the idea of power. When power’s on the line, Republicans say: We’re going to put aside our parochial interests, and we’re all going to get behind this guy, because even if he’s not 100 percent of what we want, when he’s in office, we’re going to be getting what we want. Right now, there are thousands of committed conservatives who are working every single day to undermine the values that liberals and progressives hold dear. If you want to see our agenda advanced, we have to get hold of institutional power. You can’t do it without it. Pushing from outside is necessary at times. It’s necessary at almost all times. But you also can’t do almost anything without somebody in the position of authority to make something happen. And that’s what Republicans understand.

There was a point -- I think it was the NAACP Convention -- where a couple of candidates, including Gephardt and Lieberman, didn’t come. And Kweisi Mfume subjected them to this public humiliation afterward, where they had to go and grovel before him. And James Carville said something very interesting afterwards. He said, the NRA doesn’t demand that George W. Bush come to their convention and hold a rifle over his head, because they just know that when he gets into office, he’s going to do what they want.

They're not interested in the symbolic stuff. They're going to work for his election anyway, even if he doesn't do that symbolic stuff. And liberals get too caught up in that symbolic stuff, and they're not comfortable enough with the idea that what you need in order to advance your agenda is power. Republicans have no hesitation to seek power. That's the difference.






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