Dowd, Krugman and Moore make inflammatory accusations (6/26)

By Bryan Keefer

The last few days have seen several jargon-filled attacks on the Bush administration from prominent commentators, including Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman of the New York Times and filmmaker and author Michael Moore. All three have used loaded, manipulative rhetoric to suggest the same thing: President Bush is attempting to make himself a dictator.

In her latest column in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd uses quotes from an unnamed acquaintance to make ominous suggestions about the Bush administration. Quoting a friend, Dowd strings together a number of inflammatory accusations:

"We thought America was being run by the corporate-military-industrial white male power structure. . . .We were certain there was a right-wing conspiracy. We thought civil liberties and free speech were imperiled. . . .

She recalled all the old leftist tracts in the Nixon years about a secret government plan to suspend the Constitution and declare a national security emergency and round up people without charges, and that the oil companies and banks would plunge us into nuclear war.

"And now," she concluded with a rueful smile, "all our worst paranoid nightmares are coming true. We wake up in our 50's and our enemies from the 60's have crept back into power."

This is cutting-edge anti-Bush jargon, tying together liberal attacks on Bush's domestic anti-terrorism policies and allegedly corrupt ties to oil companies with the suggestion that Bush may have "a secret government plan to suspend the Constitution" - a wild distortion of contingency plans to keep the government running should some sort of event wipe out most Congressional and executive leadership. Writing in this way, Dowd can make several vicious suggestions about Bush without ever having to say them directly - a classic tactic of manipulative jargon.

Her counterpart at the New York Times, Paul Krugman, mounted a similar attack against Bush in a column Tuesday. Ridiculing a Bush aide's remark that the President's commencement address at Ohio State University drew on several famous thinkers, Krugman suddenly begins imputing motivations to the aide, claiming his statement "gave us an indication of the level of sycophancy that Mr. Bush apparently believes to be his due."

Krugman continues, "Next thing you know we'll be told that Mr. Bush is also a master calligrapher, and routinely swims across the Yangtze River. And nobody will dare laugh: just before Mr. Bush gave his actual, Aristotle-free speech, students at Ohio State were threatened with expulsion and arrest if they heckled him." The first sentence is a loaded allusion to the usually fictional displays of physical and artistic talent attributed to Chinese Communist dictator Mao. The second uses the passive voice ("were threatened") to make it seem as though Bush was behind the threats to have students arrested, when that threat was actually made by the university administration.

But the award for the densest attack goes to filmmaker and author Michael Moore. In a new online-only chapter of his book Stupid White Men titled "The Sad and Sordid Whereabouts of bin Cheney and bin Bush," Moore asks "What if there is no 'terrorist threat?' What if Bush and Co. need, desperately need, that 'terrorist threat' more than anything in order to conduct the systematic destruction they have launched against the U.S. constitution and the good people of this country who believe in the freedoms and liberties it guarantees?" He goes on to claim that Bush is part of a "corrupt, banal administration of con artists who shamelessly use the dead of that day in September as the cover to get away with anything."

Citing an anonymous source who claims that the Bush administration refused to ban matches and cigarette lighters from flights after September 11 at the behest of the tobacco industry, Moore segues into a broad attack on Bush that concludes: "The bottom line: Anyone who would brazenly steal an election and insert themselves into OUR White House with zero mandate from The People is, frankly - sadly - capable of anything . . ."

If Dowd, Krugman and Moore wish to disagree with Bush's policies, they should do so on the merits, rather than attempting to discredit them by suggesting Bush wants to appoint himself dictator. Lurid claims about "paranoid nightmares" and fictitious threats are not substantive contributions to the debate.

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6/27/2002 12:47:12 PM EST |

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