One of the least respected and most important conversational features of a democratic polity is the question. If you’ve been watching the past two decades of Reaganism, Clintonism, and Busholepsy, you may have noticed the steady progress of politicians sidestepping, evading, ignoring, and otherwise refusing to respect the most simple questions directed at them. So it’s nice to see some rumbling from liberal and Leftist sources–brainstorming hard questions that demand serious answers (pointed out by Sappho’s Breathing: Questions for W.).

Of course, there are the expected stuff. Why have you lost interest in Osama bin Laden, the leader of the organization that attacked the United States of America on September 11? and all that. Good questions, questions that deserve to be answered; but the ones that I would insist on are a bit different. (If I had three questions, I’d include an obligatory war question–on Iraq, and on the killing of Iraqi civilians, specifically. But this is Two Questions for George W. Bush.)

First question:

George, in 2000 you promised to preside over a fiscally conservative administration. Yet over the past four years, with a clear majority of both houses of Congress held by your allies, you have presided over the largest increase in federal spending and programs since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. More than half of the growth in expenditures has had no relation at all to war or civil defense. Who will pay for these spending increases, and the rapidly increasing federal debt?

Second question:

If you had the opportunity to rewrite the laws as you see fit, George, would you make a law banning abortion? If so, what would you do to women who sought abortions, and what would you do to doctors who provided them?

(Sidebar: why in God’s name aren’t John Kerry and his pals drilling George Bush at every opportunity over abortion? Bush has no politically acceptable answer to a question like this–he cannot say he wouldn’t, or else his base will be screaming for his head on a platter; and he cannot say that he would (particularly not if saying that he would entails spelling out the actual means by which such bans would be achieved)–if Democrats make this election a referendum on abortion then Democrats will win. Is it because Kerry doesn’t want to be closely associated with the controversial abortion issue? But why not? A solid pro-choice position is only controversial for the Christian Right. Is Kerry trying to win votes from the Christian Right?)

In any case, even if I only got two questions, this third follow-up would be necessary:

Very well, but what is your answer to my question?

Or, perhaps:

What in God’s name did that even mean?

Yesterday I offered the following commentary on the debate over the authenticity of the alleged memos on Bush’s alleged no-show for Air National Guard appointments: Blah blah blah. As devastatingly brilliant as that response was, that didn’t stop it from netting some critical responses from intelligent people; so it’s worth taking a bit of time to follow up a bit on why I think that the issue isn’t worth taking a bit of time to follow up on. (If this seems paradoxical, you’ll have to review the object language / meta-language distinction.)

Sam Haque defended the claim that Bush’s war record does matter:

Well the issue is important beacause as President he shouldn’t be giving orders for US soldiers to do things he wouldn’t do himself. These countries are being invaded on the authority of President who knows of war from Hollywood. To quote Vonnegut, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.

I responded to some of these points in situ on the page; but there is a larger point to insist on here. Although I certainly agree with Sam that Bush’s bellicose Hollywood strutting (bomber jacket, War President, and all), when held up in comparison to his (perfectly rational!) unwillingness to ship off and fight in Vietnam, reveals him as a pretty contemptible character, I don’t think it would have made him better to have signed up to fight in Vietnam. John Kerry’s voluntary enlistment in Vietnam was bold but it was not courageous–there is no virtue in letting yourself get duped into volunteering to ship off and kill people for another dumb imperial war. John Kerry was courageous to live up to his own conscience and, after getting out of Vietnam as quickly as possible, standing up to oppose the war. Which is part of the reason it’s too damn bad that he can’t seem to live up to that anymore.

All well and good, but the thing is that none of these issues, or the issue that Sam originally raised, are the issue that’s being debated in the bluster over the Killian memos. All the parties to that debate are already well aware that Bush dodged the draft by heading into the Texas ANG, and that part of his ability to land that cushy position was due to being the fortunate son of a powerful Dad. The debate here isn’t over whether he dodged the draft, but whether (a) he dodged the draft and then failed to show up for some of the pointless rigamarole involved in a pointless position he never should have been coerced into taking, or (b) dodged the draft and then showed up for all the stupid stuff he was told to show up for. (Actually, that‘s not even the debate; the debate is over whether or not some of the evidence claimed for (a) is genuine or a forgery.)

On that note, I echo my own statements from yesterday’s post, and sympathize with John Lopez’s comments:

Not at all. My interest is in the fact that Dan Rather is a confirmed lying sack of garbage. I don’t care one iota that Kerry and Bush dodged the draft – I’d say “good for them”, if I didn’t hold them both in utter contempt. As for what “the most important political issue in the world” is, that happens to be my one-and-only life, which is affected more by the culture of willful self-deception we live in than by, say, the mess in Iraq.

George Bush had every right to dodge the draft, and happened to have the opportunity at hand. If he was also able to get away with skipping some of the pointless rigamarole that his draft-evasion technicality supposedly required, then more power to him; would that everyone had the opportunities that he did.

If there is any interesting issue here, as John Lopez rightly points out, it hasn’t got anything to do with whether or not Bush actually failed to show up for something or another. The only real point where interesting discussion might be possible (unless other observers are willing to honestly take on the issue of individual rights, the draft, and Vietnam–and they are far too busy dickering over the latest inconsistent poll numbers for that) is CBS’s conduct: whether one thinks that they published a major exposé based on forgeries, and if so, how culpable they were in the process.

John thinks that they are forgeries, and that CBS and Dan Rather are being revealed as at best casually indifferent to the truth. I don’t have much of a dog in that fight–I haven’t spent much time researching the issue, have mostly skipped over posts about it on other blogs because of the fact that I don’t care, and only mention it at all here in order to point out why I think the whole debate is a waste of time–in particluar when it’s being pursued by apparatchiks such as Drum or that other Charles Johnson dude, who–unlike John Lopez–are trying to make some partisan hay out of the memos (whether at Mr. Kerry’s or Mr. Bush’s expense). I will say, though, that I think that, say, the on-going disaster in Iraq and the never-ending stream of lies and Newspeak coming out of the ruling class in the attempt to justify it or explain it away, or the know-nothing bellicosity that the rank and file of the Right lap up, is a lot more troubling than the sort of nonsense that’s produced by the everlasting jabber of court intellectuals talking to each other about each other’s opinions. (N.B.: I’ve read too much of John Lopez’s excellent contributions at No Treason to include him in this characterization–but I do think that he has–as we all do sometimes–fallen victim to one of its smelly red herrings.)

If you want cases that reveal Rather and his colleagues in network and cable news as a bunch of dishonest gasbags, war coverage is where it’s at. (When PIPA found that television news actively made you stupider about the Iraq War, nobody should have been surprised.) And these are the sorts of lies and prevarication and ruddy-faced ignorance that actually hit home, that most people end up listening to and arguing about and having to sort through when they think about how politics impacts their lives. Not to mention, say, the crying need for rational discussion of abortion rights–which reminds me that I need to get back to part II of Pro-Choice on Everything–or something, Jesus, anything that actually bears on your life or the lives of some folks that you know.

The kind of gossip-rag material that flies around most election coverage, on the other hand, is an excellent indicator of how degraded political culture has become. But the rules of the game with the chattering class are so twisted that it’s no longer clear that either truth or rationality is even expected–even part of the rules in the language game. Or perhaps that these terms could, in those contexts, only be deployed to indicate the conformity of a position to the party line. Spending much of any time trying to get to the bottom of this sort of noise, or to correct it, seems much less to the point than simply working to replace it; certainly it’s not a strategy that has ever seemed to me to be well-justified by its success. The sort of people who bring themselves to hang on the twists and turns of issues such as these–who provide the major market niche for channels devoted to 24-7 soundbite repetition–who are outraged at Dan Rather but not at Brit Hume (or vice versa)–are not really the sort of people who are worth worrying about, or addressing, or trying to convince of the bankruptcy of the professional news media.

Further reading:

• GT 2004/08/16: The Long Memory
• GT 2004/06/12: Outrage Fatigue
• GT 2004/03/20: The War on Iraq One Year On: Countdown to Regime Change
• GT 2004/02/08: What you mean we?
• GT 2003/11/12: White House Press Flack Tells All
• GT 2003/11/12: Roderick Long Unblogs Veteran’s Day
• GT 2003/08/17: Who Has the Better Argument? We Report, You Decide

[Minor update 2004-09-19: typos fixed.]

Let’s review, so I can see if I’ve got this straight.

In the early 1970s, the United States government was hellbent on pursuing an immoral and strategically disastrous war in Vietnam–a war that nobody should have fought in, let alone forced to fight in–which, before it was over, killed fifty thousand American soldiers and murdered about 4,000,000 North and South Vietnamese civilians. During the war, many of those who were fortunate enough to be able to flee and defy the draft, or to sidestep it through cushy “military” assignments far away from the fighting, did so–because they didn’t want to participate in a war they considered morally indefensible, or dangerous to their person, or both. One of those people was a young George W. Bush–who , admittedly, supported the war, but, understandably, didn’t much want to fight in it. So he used his fortunate position as the son of a wealthy aristocrat and powerful Texas politico to avoid being shipped off as a slave to fight and possibly die in Vietnam, through the technicality of joining the Texas Air National Guard. That might have made him a hypocrite then; and it certainly makes him contemptible for strutting around in his bomber jacket in Caesarian triumphs today; but it was certainly a perfectly understandable exercise of his natural human right not to be forced to fight against his will.

At some point, he requested a transfer and shipped off to the Alabama National Guard. While using a legal technicality to get out of being forced to go to war, he may–or may not–have declined to show up for some of the pro forma rituals of his pro forma position. In any case, he got away with anything that he did, and was eventually discharged without complaint from the military.

CBS thought there may have been some more direct evidence that Bush had failed to show up for some of the pro forma rituals of his pro forma position. A pro forma position he was using to get out of being forced to fight and die in a war that he didn’t want to fight and die in. Some people, though, allege that these documents may have been forged.

So what we’re arguing over is whether (A) Bush dodged the draft (as he had every moral right to do) through a cushy ANG position to fulfill red tape for avoiding military enslavement, or (B) Bush dodged the draft (as he had every moral right to do) through a cushy ANG position and then didn’t show up for some of the pointless rigamarole that his position was supposed to entail as part of the red tape for avoiding military enslavement.

And around the third anniversary of the September 11 massacre, as Pinochet prepares to face trial for his crimes, as even the CIA admits that Iraq is disintegrating and 13 civilians were murdered live on the air by American soldiers (who bombarded them with seven rockets), this is, apparently, the most important political issue in the world to argue about on your weblog (cf. Kevin Drum 2004-09-09, that other dude named Charles Johnson on 2004-09-11, No Treason! 2004-09-11 10:42am, No Treason! 2004-09-11 8:34pm, Matt Yglesias 2004-09-14 , This Modern World 2004-09-14, etc.–if you’re into that sort of thing).

Blah blah blah. Jesus. Where are all the good male political bloggers?

(Scharzenegger quote pointed out by Ghost in the Machine 2004-09-01.)

Arnold Schwarzenegger, speech to the Republican National Convention, 2004-08-31:

My fellow immigrants, my fellow Americans, how do you know if you are a Republican? Well, I tell you how. If you believe that government should be accountable to the people, not the people to the government, then you are a Republican.

Zell Miller, speech to the Republican National Convention supporting George W. Bush, 2004-09-01 (emphasis added):

In the summer of 1940, I was an 8-year-old boy living in a remote little Appalachian valley. Our country was not yet at war, but even we children knew that there were some crazy man across the ocean who would kill us if they could.

President Roosevelt, in a speech that summer, told America, All private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger.

In 1940, Wendell Wilkie was the Republican nominee. And there is no better example of someone repealing their “private plans” than this good man.

He gave Roosevelt the critical support he needed for a peacetime draft, an unpopular idea at the time.

And he made it clear that he would rather lose the election than make national security a partisan campaign issue.

(This passage got loud applause and vocal cheers from the Republican audience.)

Hiding the Truth? President Bush’s Need-to-Know Democracy by Stephen Pizzo:

It’s been said that the first casualty of war is always truth. But with the Bush administration’s war on terrorism, it’s hard to know, because even before 9/11 the administration had begun hermetically sealing formerly public sources of government information.

It began when Vice President Dick Cheney refused to provide details of his energy task force meetings with energy companies, particularly top Enron officials. Then, came President George Bush’s November 2001 executive order allowing the administration or former presidents to order executive branch documents withheld from the public. At the time, the administration said the new restriction on presidential papers was to protect the privacy of former presidents and those they dealt with while in office.

But, the order also shields from public view documents from President Bush’s father’s term in office that could be awkward now. The suspicion was that the executive order was designed to protect several current White House officials who served in the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations from embarrassment –specifically, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and former Budget Director Mitch Daniels, Jr.

Each official had brushes with controversial policies in earlier administrations — not the least of which was the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration. The elder Bush, then-Vice President, maintained he was out of the loop. Documents in the Reagan archives might contradict that version of history.

Both Cheney’s refusal to hand over his energy task force documents, and the presidential order shielding past administrations’ archived documents caused uproars among open-government advocates, historians and members of Congress.

. . .

Effectively, keeping secrets means never having to say you’re sorry. It also means never having to admit you made a terrible mistake, or even lied.

White House press flack Ari Fleischer:

They’re reminders to all Americans that they need to, to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that. It never is!

John Ashcroft, Attorney General of the United States of America, 2001:

To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberties, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists — for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.

I suppose that I’ll read some of the commentary on the speech tomorrow. But, as happens so often with this administration, it’s just the same damned stuff, and there’s little to do other than repeat what you’ve already said. Thus, here is my summary and commentary for the night:

Are you surprised by anything that’s been said by anyone at this convention? If so, why the hell are you surprised? Why even bother talking about it at length? When the Bush League give speeches, they just lie. There’s very little left to be surprised at; save your indignation for throwing the bastards out.