Let's all read Mark Morford

Friday, May 21, 2004


When last we left our sneering caped crusaders, Rummy had testified under oath that he didn't really know who ordered what at Abu "Tortures 'R' Us" Ghraib prison, and George "Wha Happun?" Bush was mumbling into his hand puppet about how he was utterly shocked and appalled and was blaming the whole thing on "a coupla bad apples" and gul-dangit, he warn't gunna stan' fer it.

And while he still loved Rumsfeld like a drunken frat brother and swore Rummy was doing a "superb job" and stood by him 'til death or impeachment they do part, something must be done and some heads were gonna roll and it would definitely be some sad pregnant trailer-park chick from West Virginia ha-ha snicker.

What a difference a couple weeks make. Now word is emerging like ugly greased lightning that not only did Rummy himself order the Abu Ghraib tortures, but it was also a long-standing super-secret plan based on ultra-vile (and morally repugnant) interrogation techniques already employed in Afghanistan.

Not only that, but the plan was authorized across the board, from the Pentagon to the National Security Council to the CIA and then on up the ladder to where Bush his own dumbstruck self was fully informed and fully aware of the general plan to make a sad mockery of the "quaint" and "obsolete" Geneva Convention.

Remember that piffling thing? It basically states you gotta treat all war prisoners with a shred of humanitarian dignity or you can't call yourself a fair and civilized Christian superpower, and if you don't follow those basic rules you are, in essence, no different from the terrorists and the dictators you claim to abhor and you are bombing the crap out of.


Let's just say it again: Rummy allegedly ordered the torture plan. Rummy's undersecretary, Stephen Cambone, ran it. Bush knew about it, even way back in February. As did all of his senior staff. As did the CIA and the NSC and even the Red Cross.

They knew of the torture and humiliation techniques. Knew of the secret beatings. Knew of the electrodes and the snarling dogs and the pistol whippings and, very possibly, of the forced sodomy and the rapes. Not of suspected terrorists, but of people. Men. Women. Young boys. Suspected Iraqi "insurgents," many of whom were, by the military's own admission, wrongly detained in the first place. What fun.

Word has it Bush probably didn't hear the actual details, of the specific brand of U.S.-made hoods or of the rape techniques employed, because, as everyone knows, Bush is a "big-picture guy" who likes only the general Cliff's Notes overviews of world events and can barely find Baghdad on a map and can't really handle too many simultaneous thoughts.

But here's where it gets sticky. Here's where the smell of rot starts to really singe your intuitive nose hairs. Because every president, no matter how unsophisticated or perpetually tuned out (Hi, Mr. Reagan) or disconnected from what's actually happening in his regime, must get briefed. Every day.

And when you're a president who lusts after war the way Bush does, you gotta hear all the grisly facts, the various actions and tactics and super-secret operations, lest you seem completely out of touch during one of your incredibly rare press conferences wherein you scrunch your face all tight and furrow your brow and wag your finger and say things like, "My job is to, like, think beyond the immediate."

It is the eternal Bush conundrum. How to appear sort of blank faced and ignorant of the true atrocities your administration commits so as to avoid any sort of direct accountability, and yet still pretend to be a savvy, aware, tough-guy leader who gets things done and takes no bull and launches unprovoked wars on anything that stands in the way of his dad's portfolio.

After all, it has always been far too easy to smack BushCo around as being an aww-shucks dumb-guy AWOL simpleton daddy's boy with a low-C average and a painfully inarticulate approach to the world, coupled with an astounding, world-famous ability to mangle both the English language and every foreign policy ever implemented.

It's always felt like a bit of a grand ruse, Bush's Forrest Gump-style dunderheadedness, a clever (if entirely plausible) way to deflect much of the responsibility for his regimes's carnage, all designed to make the nation believe that this guy simply couldn't be all that bad because, well, he just ain't all that bright.

But, ironically enough, as far as the Abu Ghraib mega-scandal is concerned, Bush has dug his own hole. It is his very own bull-headed, infantile, stay-the-course, admit-no-mistakes, bomb-first-ask-questions-never approach that has caged him in and makes any move toward getting the U.S. out of the Iraq quagmire nearly impossible. It's not the sign of a dimwit. It's the sign of a dimwit with delusions of shrewdness. Which is, of course, far more dangerous.

Any major moves now -- like firing Rummy, or Wolfie or Uncle Dick, or even apologizing for all the Saddam-grade rapes and tortures -- would make Dubya appear contradictory or unstable or inconsistent, which is exactly the mass illusion he simply must maintain right now lest his approval rating drop even farther, to where it finally matches his IQ. Whoops, sorry. Cheap shot. See how easy it is?

Probably doesn't help that Colin Powell has stepped up and admitted how he was deliberately deceived about WMDs in Iraq, and how he's pretty much sick of being treated like a BushCo lackey and a footnote and a scapegoat errand boy who puts out piddling fires and has to step in front of the U.N. and present reams of bogus CIA data and blurry satellite photos and silly cartoon graphics to try to prove the existence of nonexistent nuclear arsenals in Saddam's rec room.


And then comes word of how Michael Moore's somber new film "Fahrenheit 9/11" illuminates, in painful and appalling detail, Bush's $1.5 billion connection to various Saudi families -- including the chummy bin Laden clan -- and how, even while all commercial aircraft across the U.S. were grounded just after the WTC attack and millions were stranded and the nation was on high alert, Bush had planes sent around the country to pick up his Saudi buddies to fly them home.

So then. You gotta admit, maybe Bush isn't all that stupid after all. Maybe he's not the smirking aww-shucks born-again simpleton he constantly appears to be, the one who sits back and lets his henchmen do all the dirty work and all the complex thinking while he lets Condi Rice massage his ego and fill him in at the ranch while taking more vacation time than any other president in history.

Or, rather, maybe Dubya really is that stupid, just not in the ways anyone really imagined. Maybe Bush is stupid in a way that is far worse, and far more dangerous for the health of this planet, than mere inarticulate, nonintellectual, semiliterate Texas cow-pie bumbling.

It is, in short, the stupidity of the indignant and the self-righteous, of the morally arrogant, of someone whose power base is threatened and yet who is still blindly forcing America down this nightmare path, even when all signs and all leaders and all U.N. councils and all weapons investigators and all flagrant U.S.-sanctioned rapes and tortures are veritably screaming in his face that it is a mistake of increasingly epic, treacherous proportions.

And so maybe, ultimately, it all comes back to us. Maybe it is the majority of people in this flag-wavin', happily deluded, fear-drenched country who can't believe it could happen, who simply, you know, "misunderestimated" just how poisonous Bush's savage brand of stupidity really is.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.

Mark's column archives are here
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. Subscribe to this column at sfgate.com/newsletters.


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2004/05/21/notes052104.DTL


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
©2004 SF Gate