Obama-Bush Word War

The Administration's verbosity is under bi-coastal attack today from two former Bush factotums.

Bush I speechwriter Peggy Noonan complains in the Wall Street Journal: "As the federal government claims ever greater powers, its language has become vague to the point of meaningless and meaningless to the point of menacing."

On his Los Angeles Times blog, Andrew Malcolm, who was once Laura Bush's press secretary, offers an "Obama Era Language Update," explaining how "terror" and "drug war" have been euphemized into "man-caused disasters" and "a public health issue requiring treatment more than enforcement."

Of the latter, Malcolm predicts "vaccinations against drive-by shootings and muggings."

Noonan meanwhile under the title, "What's Elevated, Health-Care Provider?" drubs Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for using expressions like "accessing affordable quality health care" instead of "going to the doctor."

After eight years of W's mangled simplifications like "axis of evil," the Obama crew's wonkery may indeed be fair game (Treasury Secretary Geithner recently took on a tutor in plain speaking), but "menacing" is more than bit much.

It was Ms. Noonan, after all, who had the first Bush saying, "Read my lips--no new taxes," and we all know how well that bit of straight talk worked out.

Bush's About-Faces

After seven-plus years of stubborn certainty, the Decider suddenly reversed himself today on two major issues--the $700 financial bailout and relations with North Korea.

In a deathbed conversion to consensus, the Administration stepped back from the Paulson Plan to buy toxic mortgage-backed securities and moved toward injecting capital directly into the nation’s banks, a position it opposed during two turbulent weeks of persuading Congress to pass the original bill.

Since then, the meltdown of financial markets has sounded a resounding "no" to the Paulson Plan and, at the start of today's Washington meetings of world financial leaders, President Bush indicated with customary vagueness that the US would follow the lead of Great Britain, which took action this week to unlock credit markets by putting money into banks and guaranteeing loans between them.

Details will differ from country to country but, as Paul Krugman has pointed out, the "rescue announced by the British government this week provides a useful template. It offers to insure up to about $425 billion worth of new bank debt, forces banks to raise new equity capital and makes government money available to buy equity."

Growing accord toward international sanity may very well calm market panic next week and begin to restore order after all the impotent flailing around here and abroad.

On the foreign policy front, the Bush Administration took a wheel off "the axis of evil" by quietly removing North Korea from its list of states that sponsor terrorism.

State Department Sean McCormack announced that the two countries had reached agreement "on an number of important verification measures" of North Korea's nuclear program, including access for the UN nuclear watchdog agency to all of North Korea's nuclear facilities.

This sudden outbreak of sanity in Washington, if it continues until January, may simplify some of the work that a new Administration will have to do to clear away the wreckage of the past eight years.

Death in the Neo-Con Family

Another member of the Axis of Evil expired today in the explosion of a North Korean nuclear cooling tower, and Washington mourners are taking it hard. Dick Cheney, inconsolable, has retreated into stony silence but John Bolton, voluble as ever, is carrying on about the "shameful" loss of another Neo-Con offspring.

The Vice President, grief-stricken at the terrorism de-listing of North Korea, reportedly left a meeting of foreign-policy experts after being asked about the news.

“I’m not going to be the one to announce this decision,” Cheney said, pointing at himself before departing. “You need to address your interest in this to the State Department.”

With Evil on life support in Iraq, the loss of another Conservative whipping boy leaves only Iran as a survivor of the triplets born during President Bush's State of the Union speech in January 2002.

If Israel makes good on Bolton's prediction of an attack on Tehran after our November elections, the Bush Administration may leave office in January childless, sloganwise.

W the Centrist: Right-Wing Robotspeak

If Wikipedia did not indicate that he had a heart attack in 2004 at the age of 39, there would be no reason to believe Michael Gerson exists other than as a code name for a right-wing robot programmed to manufacture faith-based non-sequiturs unburdened by logic or facts to sanctify George W. Bush, for whom it served as a speech writer.

The latest is this week’s assertion that both parties are abandoning the centrism of Clinton and Bush. George W. Bush? Centrism? The machine that ground out “Axis of Evil” and “smoking gun/mushroom cloud” just keeps spewing rhetorical rubbish.

The only interesting question about all this is why the Washington Post is printing these pre-recorded messages, the first of which last month upset Republican Congressmen opposing Bush’s immigration initiative by comparing them to 19th century nativists.

This week’s conflating of the past two Presidents riled Joe Klein into asking a question on his Time blog about how Gerson’s current opinion of Clinton as a centrist gibes with the Republicans’ impeachment.

“I'd ask him,” Klein wrote, “if he'd acknowledge that it was Republican political consultants, talk show hosts, freak-pundits like Ann Coulter and leaders like Newt Gingrich who were the pioneers of the rhetorical poison now afflicting the extremes of both parties.”

Save your breath, Klein. Machines don’t do dialogues.