The Simple, But Oh So Complicated World of George W. Bush

Conservatives and liberals have a basic difference in their view of the world. Conservatives see the world as a simple, straightforward place, comprised of basic truths that get mucked up by liberal nuance, fuzziness and “relativism.” Liberals, on the other hand, see the world as a complicated place, one which is ill-served by conservatives’ tendency to see it as simple, black and white, and absolute. Never has the rift in these warring cosmologies been clearer than during the Bush II presidency. Take for example the pre-2000 George W. Bush. Remember him? The one who told us with great confidence that he didn’t believe in nation building:

“I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I'm missing something here. I mean we're going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not. Our military is meant to fight and win war. That's what it's meant to do and when it gets overextended, morale drops… I'm going to be judicious as to how to use the military. It needs to be in our vital interest. The mission needs to be clear and the exit strategy obvious.”

Wow! What ever happened to that vision of the world? Bush also told us during that second debate with Al Gore that American forces were extremely overextended in the world (apparently because softhearted Democrats wanted to take democracy everywhere). He then went on to say that the dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians “won't be on my timetable. It'll be on the timetable that people are comfortable with in the Middle East,” presaging the stagnation and chaos in the Middle East that would ensue during his presidency. Finally, in the year 2000, Bush repeatedly gave voice to one of his most simple and cherished solutions to Middle East violence:

“I think it's important for this nation to develop an anti-ballistic missile system that we can share with our allies in the Middle East, if need be, to keep the peace.”

Now, when was the last time you heard anyone seriously press for a Star Wars anti-ballistic missile program? We’ve gone from talking about a Stars Wars shield, to trying to figure out how we can get more armor for Humvees, in order to ward off crude, homemade roadside bombs. The simplicity of the conservative worldview also played a large role in our nation’s reaction to 9/11. In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush was praised greatly for his strength and leadership. Indeed the tragedy has been credited in some quarters with jumpstarting the Bush presidency. But was this image of strength and leadership accurate? Here is an alternative view on what happened after the attack on the twin towers: In the wake of 9/11, the world abruptly, for a brief moment, assumed the simple, stark, black and white contours that the president had been telling us about for years. For that brief moment, it was suddenly a world of good guys vs. bad guys, freedom vs. terror, us against them. The world had morphed into George Bush’s life-long image of it, and when he stood before the nation and told us that we were going to defeat this axis of evil, he gave the appearance of strength and wisdom. There was one nagging problem, however. The world doesn’t really fit this image; it’s far more complicated.

What happened subsequently was that this window of simplicity, when the world was painted in black and white, closed in a hurry. Soon, Bush had to face many not-so-simple questions: Were the Saudis, for example, now our friends or our enemies? When he stood on that aircraft carrier, was the war over, or was it just beginning? Would a democratically elected, but theocratic government in Iraq be a good thing or a bad thing? Were those pesky French our historical allies, or mischievous thorns in our side? (It must be noted that conservatives who were busy vilifying the French while chomping on “freedom fries” took scant notice of the fact that the French predicted virtually every failure that has taken place in Iraq.) And how about the Pakistanis? Were they now good guys or allies of the bad guys? These, and similar quandaries have served to unbuckle the “simple” neo-conservative notion that there was an easy, military solution to the problem of Iraq.

The dueling liberal and conservative worldviews were acted out beautifully last Sunday on “Meet the Press,” as moderator Tim Russert hosted, in separate appearances, Donald Rumsfeld and Teddy Kennedy. In interviewing Rumsfeld, Russert, like so many before him, was trying to get an answer to a question that has taken on metaphysical inscrutability: How many trained Iraqi troops are there? Are there 120,000 as Condoleezza Rice insists, are there 14,000 as Joe Biden believes, 136,000 as Rumsfeld recently stated, or 40,000 as General John Myers recently estimated? Here was Rumsfeld’s response:

“There are people that are trying to make this more complex, for whatever reason, than it is. It's not complex. …let's go to Dick Myers' comment. We have 136,000 Iraqi security forces, excluding the 70,000- plus in the site protection, and they are in the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Defense, and there's a lot of different types. Some are policemen and they walk a beat. Some are border patrol and they sit on a border in a patrol place. Others are in commando units and they operate in a region and go in on special assignments. Still others are in the regular army, and they're being trained for that type of function. A small number of them, as Dick Myers said, something like 40,000, are highly mobile, can move anywhere in the country and be sustained. We have 136,000. The implication that the rest are not useful is silly. It's nonsense. The policeman on the beat outside your office doesn't need to be mobile and sustainable and go into Los Angeles.”

But Russert wanted to know, like every other American, how many Iraqis are currently prepared to take the place of American soldiers. He persisted, “How many Iraqi security forces do we need fully trained and capable of fighting insurgents?” Responded Rumsfeld:

“Well, the answer to that question is not complicated. We need as many as are needed. If you have an insurgency that's this level, you'll need X. If you have an insurgency that's that level, you'll need X-plus. And if you have an insurgency that's quite low, you'll need X-minus. And to think that you can sit here today and--I mean, no one predicted the level of the insurgency as it is today.”

This answer is quintessential Rumsfeld: condescending, supercilious, and of course non-responsive. Despite the apparent “simplicity” of this matter, at the end of a rather lengthy discussion, we had no better idea of Iraqi preparedness than we did at the beginning. While griping throughout the interview about liberals’ need to overcomplicate things, Rumsfeld told us virtually nothing.

Then Ted Kennedy appeared, and Russert was intent on showing us that he could be as tough on one as on the other. After talking foreign affairs with Kennedy, Russert turned to domestic matters, and brought out his best fast ball:

“We have a situation where the number on people in Social Security is going to double. People, rather than spending 15 months, are going to spend 15 years. In 2018, the Social Security Trust Fund will begin to draw down, and in 2042 run a deficit, according to the trustees of the fund. What is your plan? What will you do? If the president's wrong, what would you do specifically to fix Social Security?”

Without missing a beat, Kennedy responded:

“The president's program to make his tax cuts permanent is three times what's necessary to fix the national--to fix Social Security. Let's start with that.”

Russert, for his part, was caught off guard. He had thought that he had Kennedy on the run. Russert thought that Kennedy was going to respond with the typical pabulum about convening a bipartisan panel to find vague, unspecified ways to tweak Social Security. What he got instead was a real answer: Let’s rescind at least one-third of the president’s tax cuts, and fix Social Security! Russert tried to recover, to get back on the offense:

MR. RUSSERT: But we have....
SEN. KENNEDY: Let's start with that. You've asked the question and I'm giving you an answer.
MR. RUSSERT: But, Senator, with Social Security, with Medicare, we have $5 trillion of unfunded mandates, and we are sitting here saying we simply roll back the tax cut on the top 1 percent or grow our way out of it?
SEN. KENNEDY: Well, wait a second now. You asked about Social Security. Now do you want to know on the Medicare how we ought to go to deal with the Medicare? I've given you a very good way to resolve the...
MR. RUSSERT: So you would roll back the president's tax cuts.
SEN. KENNEDY: That's a possible--for one-third, he wants to make it permanent. You can roll back just one-third of it and solve the Social Security problem. I think that ought to be on the table. It's interesting, when the president spoke the other night, Tim, he never mentioned what his answer was. He never told us what his solution was for the out years.

Ah, it was a beautiful moment! The ballyhooed simplicity of the conservatives had turned into a morass of unanswered questions, illusory troop counts, budget numbers that don’t add up, and fixes (read "privatization") that don’t fix anything. By contrast, one of the stalwarts of much maligned liberal fuzziness, had offered a very clear vision of the future: We need more money! And if we continue to gut the treasury in order to make the wealthy wealthier, we will do grave damage to our society.

So the next time someone tells you that conservatives have a simple, straightforward, even theological view of the world, don’t ask them something complicated, like “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Instead, ask them something simple like, “How many trained Iraqi troops do we need?” Don’t be surprised if they change the subject.
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 7:19 AM

 
Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby”—Sadly, the Fix is In!

This blog has at its core a contrarian spirit, the view that when too many people believe something too earnestly, the truth often lies elsewhere. Rarely has this contrarian impulse been triggered more strongly than after my viewing of the Clint Eastwood movie Million Dollar Baby. Warning: The following discussion is meant only for those who have already seen the film. If you haven't seen it and plan to, either stop reading, or proceed at your own peril, because what follows is almost certain to spoil it for you. The film, a leading Oscar nominee, has earned universal praise as a tough-minded, minimalist study of family dynamics, boxing, and right-to-die issues. Rave reviews notwithstanding, I found it to be a melodramatic, contrived film that struck the wrong psychological note at virtually every turn. Allow me to list the faults of this woefully hyped film:

1) The first problem with the film is the tired, trite use of Morgan Freeman as the benign, omniscient narrator/janitor. Haven't we been down this road before, in better films like Shawshank Redemption and Driving Miss Daisy? One exasperated critic ruefully suggested that the movie should have been called "Driving Clint Eastwood," or "Million Dollar Redemption." There is an important difference, however, between Baby and its predecessors: In Shawshank, Freeman was the narrator, but his character was a central agent in the action, on equal footing with that of co-lead Tim Robbins. Shawshank Prison became the ultimate leveler: within its walls, all men became equal—that is, equally powerless--making for fascinating alliances, and a film of timeless merit. In Million Dollar Baby, however, Freeman is little more than a prop. His narrative wisdom is thin, his character insignificant, his talent largely wasted. Memo to Clint Eastwood: If you're going to use someone of Freeman's stature in your movie, give the Brother something to do! In fact, each of the leads basically borrows from past performances: Hillary Swank reprises her trailer trash persona from previous movies; Clint does his perennial tight-lipped-but-oh-so-profound shtick. Admittedly, both do these characters well, and the movie could have worked, had the storyline held together. But it doesn't hold together:

2) The first howler in the plot line occurs when trainer Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) takes aspiring female boxer Maggie Fitzgerald (Hillary Swank) under his wing and sets up her first professional fights. He buys her a warm-up robe with the Gaelic phrase "Mo Cusha" inscribed in it. Before long, Maggie's success and winning style have Irish fans chanting "Mo Cusha, Mo Cusha." This becomes her tag, her moniker. Absurdly, Eastwood would have us believe that despite the fact that this phrase has become her calling card, Maggie never knows what it means. Ridiculous. The phrase would have been translated in every news story, have arisen in every interview, would have become part of Maggie’s identity. Maggie's obliviousness to the meaning of phrase is nothing more than an amateurish contrivance: At the end of the movie, when she is in bed on a respirator, this set-up allows Frankie to tell her melodramatically that it means "My darling, my blood." But for that scene to work emotionally, the audience has to accept the idea that she was the only person in the world who didn't know this, despite the fact that her fans were chanting it at every fight. Such a plot device might pass muster on an afternoon soap opera, but not a serious movie.

2) The second howler occurs once Maggie earns enough money from her growing success to buy her mother a new house, freeing mom from the trailer community. The mother, an unvarnished, hillbilly shrew not only hysterically spurns the offer, fearing that it will jeopardize her welfare check, she tells Maggie to stop boxing because "they're laughing at you here." Now think about this for a minute: Maggie, according to the movie, has become an international star at this point, with fans on two continents flocking to her bouts, and we're asked to believe that she is a laughingstock and a disgrace within her own community? Absurd! There is no imaginable circumstance in which Maggie would be more popular in Dublin than in Missouri. Even the sassy, “uppity” Cassius Clay was thrown a parade by racist Louisville after winning the Olympic gold medal in 1960 (despite the fact that certain restaurants still wouldn't serve him). But it is clear why Eastwood uses this unbelievable characterization: He feels the need to make Maggie as big a martyr as possible, the idea being that if he casts her mother as an unreconstructed ogre, this will make Maggie more sympathetic to the audience. In fact, Eastwood got it all wrong: A supportive mom who yet feared for her daughter's health and safety would have been much more on key, and would have served the film far better than the cartoonish character that Eastwood has created.

3. When Maggie finally gets her title shot, she faces a bruising, brawling woman who looks frighteningly mannish. This choice again reflects Eastwood's heavy-handed need to martyr Maggie: In this film, Eastwood can't simply give Maggie a tough, skilled opponent; rather, he has to give her someone who is the incarnation of evil. Surpisingly, he seems to have no confidence that the poignancy of Maggie's life will come through naturally. As a result, he stacks the deck, making all of the antagonists in her life caricatures. True to her evil appearance, Maggie's opponent, during a moment when the referee has stopped the fight and Maggie's back is turned, rushes over and clubs Maggie over the back of the head. As a result, Maggie hits her head on a chair, suffers head trauma and spinal cord damage that makes her a quadriplegic. The outrage of this scene is that we discover later that Maggie's opponent, by virtue of this act, won the fight. Huh? You don't win championship boxing matches by running over to your opponent during a break, and clubbing them over the head from behind. This scene alone shows that Eastwood has no conception of boxing, and has confused it with the theatrics of professional wrestling. When the central scene in the movie is this unbelievable it tears a gaping whole in the entire movie. The conduct of Maggie's opponent was not only outside the rules of boxing; in real life it probably would have triggered a criminal complaint.

4. As a result of her neurological trauma, Maggie is paralyzed from the neck down, and unable to breath on her own. Frankie summons Maggie's family to her Las Vegas hospital for support. At this juncture, the cartoonish character development continues: The family members ignore Maggie--a quadriplegic--for six days while they go to Disneyland! Clint, we get the message! She's been emotionally abandoned, and only has you to take care of her. But we didn't need to get hit with a sledgehammer to understand this! When the family finally shows up at the hospital, fresh from Disneyland, the scene is so over the top as to be cringeworthy.

5. Maggie's tragedy has so undermined her quality of life, that she tells Frankie that she wants him to disconnect her life support and let her die. This creates an ethical crisis for him and he consults with his priest. His touchy, prickly relationship with his priest is in fact the most real, believable, compelling relationship in the movie. The priest tells him in no uncertain terms that it would be wrong, but Frankie’s heart tells him otherwise. One night, he slips into Maggie's hospital room, expresses his care for her, explains "dramatically" what "Mo Cusha" means, administers a pain-killer, disconnects Maggie's respirator, and the deed is done. Of course, in the facile world of this movie, this is apparently not treated as a criminal act, and there is no apparent investigation that we know of. Such real-world inconveniences would get in the way of the plot. While Frankie’s mercy killing as an act of love is quite moving in the moment, it comes after such a series of psychologically flawed scenes that it is hopelessly contaminated. While I credit Eastwood with trusting the audience with such a risky ending, it is ruined by the fact that his earlier heavy-handed direction showed no trust of the audience. This movie is not Oscar-worthy, and is vastly inferior to the pitch-perfect Sideways. However, my gut tells me not to bet against Million Dollar Baby. Alas, the fix is in.

- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 8:10 AM