Bush: how to build a facade
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| Tue, 08-03-2004 - 4:19pm |
Mr. Bush's Wrong Solution
t a time when Americans need strong leadership and bold action, President Bush offered tired nostrums and bureaucratic half-measures yesterday. He wanted to appear to be embracing the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, but he actually rejected the panel's most significant ideas, and thus missed a chance to confront the twin burdens he faces at this late point in his term: the need to get intelligence reform moving whether he's re-elected or not, and the equally urgent need to repair the government's credibility on national security.
Mr. Bush spoke on a day when Americans were still digesting the terrifying warning of possible terrorist attacks against financial institutions in New York, Newark and Washington. The authorities in those cities did the right thing by stepping up security. But it's unfortunate that it is necessary to fight suspicions of political timing, suspicions the administration has sown by misleading the public on security. The Times reports today that much of the information that led to the heightened alert is actually three or four years old and that authorities had found no concrete evidence that a terror plot was actually under way. This news does nothing to bolster the confidence Americans need that the administration is not using intelligence for political gain.
The 9/11 panel's most important recommendation was to create the post of national intelligence director. Such a director would be confirmed by the Senate and have real power to supervise the 15 disparate intelligence agencies. The director of central intelligence has that charge now, without the power to do it. The commission said the new official should be part of the White House Executive Office, not a cabinet member, to ensure access to the president.
There are a variety of credible ways to construct the job, whether in the cabinet or not, but what Mr. Bush proposed is not one of them. His intelligence director would be in the worst of all worlds: cut out of the president's inner circle and lacking any real power. Andrew Card Jr., Mr. Bush's chief of staff, said the post would not carry real authority over the intelligence agencies' budgets or intelligence jobs in the Pentagon, the Justice Department and other agencies. The decision bore the unmistakable stamp of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was never going to willingly give up control of appointments or his share of the intelligence budget: $32 billion of the overall $40 billion.
Mr. Bush did embrace the 9/11 commission's suggestion - one that did not challenge his turf - that Congress stop supervising intelligence and homeland security through scores of committees and instead have one committee in each house to oversee intelligence and one for homeland security. And he went beyond the 9/11 panel in one way by proposing a post to coordinate intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. That sounds like a bad idea, especially with the administration's record of fanciful interpretations of that intelligence on Iraq.
Mr. Bush's bureaucratic dodge on the intelligence director's job is the same one he used on the job of director of homeland security. Then he was forced to reverse field, endorse a new cabinet department and claim it as his own idea. We don't care who gets credit. What's important is that Congress reject what Mr. Bush came up with yesterday and do the job right when it returns in September.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/opinion/03tue1.html?pagewanted=print&position=
The issue here is the president's supposed embrace of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, particularly on the creation of a new National Intelligence Director under whom the heads of the various intelligence agencies would operate
I was working on another project pretty much constantly through most of the day and heard discussion of this on the cable networks, particularly CNN. What I heard there was that the president had embraced the commission's recommendation on this point while only disagreeing on whether this new head of national intelligence would be housed within the White House or have cabinet rank status outside the White House structure.
Yet it turns out that this is but one, and not at all the most significant way in which the policy the president has embraced differs from that of the commission. In fact, when you look closely at it, it's nothing like what the commission recommended at all. The president went out into the Rose Garden, said he was adopting the commission's proposals. But in fact he was doing close to the opposite, doing more or less what they said shouldn't be done.

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Come on, the man in charge of protecting America is having to be TOLD HOW TO DO IT!
By whom? Here's another article making the same point.
9/11 SHAM....Yesterday I suggested that George Bush's proposal for a new intelligence director was a ruse: by refusing to make the director part of the White House staff, he was keeping the form of the 9/11 Commission's recommendations but weakening the new director's actual power to do anything.
Still, at least the new director would have cabinet rank, right? And budget authority. And the various deputy leaders of the national intelligence apparatus (CIA, Pentagon, counterterrorism, and FBI) would still report to him. So even if he's not part of the White House, he'd still have a fair amount of power. Right?
Wrong:
Bush's proposals differed from the commission's recommendations in two critical ways. First, the president said the intelligence czar should not be part of the White House. Second, Bush said the new director should have "input" in, but not control over, the budgets of the country's 15 intelligence agencies.
....But experts and administration critics said that without budgetary authority over the entire intelligence apparatus, the new director would hold little sway over the agencies that are part of the Department of Defense, especially the powerful Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. Together the defense intelligence organizations account for more than 80% of the intelligence budget, while the Central Intelligence Agency spends less than 20%. Precise figures are classified.
"A national intelligence director who doesn't have Cabinet rank or budget authority or work in the executive office of the president risks irrelevance. It's hard to see what kind of power base such an official would have," said Daniel Benjamin of the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Budgetary "input" doesn't mean a thing and Don Rumsfeld knows it. And although none of the news reports mention it, I'll bet that Bush doesn't intend for the undersecretary of defense for intelligence to report to the new director either, as the 9/11 Commission recommended.
Bottom line: the new director heads no agency, doesn't have cabinet rank, doesn't work in the White House, has no budget authority, and apparently has no reporting authority. In other words, he's just a figurehead.
This is a sham. If Bush doesn't like the 9/11 Commission's recommendations he should have the guts to say so. Instead, he and Rumsfeld have cooked up a transparent con: to the public at large it looks like he's acting decisively to take up the commission's recommendations, but anyone who knows how Washington works understands that he's really just giving them the finger.
This is a complete victory for the Pentagon. They'll be able to brush off this new director like a fly.
—Kevin Drum 12:15 PM Permalink | TrackBack (5) | Comments (52)
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/
>"The 9/11 commission report is a blueprint to overhaul the U.S.'s intelligence agencies and plug holes in homeland security. Any swift executive action on those fronts lets Bush remind voters that he is a war President and that the danger is still real. Moving now is particularly important for Bush, since his once unassailable advantage on fighting terrorism has shrunk to just 8 percentage points in the polls. Kerry pounced on the findings of the 9/11 commission last week, using them as a bludgeon, charging that Bush was derelict for not aggressively embracing its recommendations. Very soon — perhaps as early as this week, aides say — the President will appropriate some of those ideas and offer up a few of his own.
The Administration's rush to comply has rankled some of Bush's people. "They seem to be hell-bent to do something to give the false impression of progress, whether they've got a plan or not," said a senior Administration official involved in the war on terrorism. "They're desperate to announce something so they can't be accused of not doing something." But the President's political advisers were hoping not to repeat the fight over creating a new office of Homeland Security. The White House endured months of criticism for opposing the plan, only to embrace it eventually. "We always drag our feet," said a Bush campaign adviser, referring to the Administration's initial opposition to creating the commission and to giving it access to presidential intelligence briefings and testimony by Condoleezza Rice. In each case the Administration ultimately relented. "Why not agree now to what we're going to be for later?"
A senior White House official suggested last week that the Administration would take its time with the commission's grandest demand, a new national director of intelligence. The biggest question was not whether to create such a post — Bush seems destined to endorse the notion — but how to do it. Should the duties of the CIA director be expanded or a new entity created? The commission recommended putting the new intelligence uberboss in the Cabinet, but Bush aides say they fear that doing so would subject the post's holder to political pressure — a position ironic to Democrats who believe the Administration has politicized intelligence. Administration officials hinted at a politically neutralizing move for the President: he could take measures to protect civil liberties — thus confounding Kerry and the Democrats who have accused Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft of trampling rights in the name of the war on terrorism.
But Bush's biggest vulnerability is on the domestic front, where voters believe the Democratic ticket would do a better job on everything from health care (Kerry and running mate John Edwards lead Bush and Cheney by 16 percentage points) to the economy (8 percentage points) to understanding working-class needs (8 percentage points). With Kerry and Edwards aiming so much of their rhetorical fire at the middle-class squeeze, Bush will offer a counterattack that he hopes will prove "he understands the challenges that people face every day," in the words of Bartlett. One of Bush's signature lines in his new stump speech is "This world of ours is changing," and his new proposals are meant to show that his government could help families adapt."<
From page #2 of Time mag. article "How Bush Plans To Win". The link is accessable now but will only last a few days. Article too long to copy...........
http://www.time.com/time/election2004/article/0,18471,674761,00.html
Is this a flip-flop?
Bush reminds me of a person who will say or do anything to get elected. I don't understand why more people don't see this. The man is not honest, and it is beyond my understanding why more people can't see beyond the image projected.
"Is this a flip-flop?"
Smells like, looks like, moves like..... by
Just another case of the wealthy taking money from the poor.
"Just another case of the wealthy taking money from the poor. "
Well at least your consistent....
Does anyone have free will or are all poor people just too dumb for their own good.
Not dumb, just desperate and confused.
"Not dumb, just desperate and confused. "
So is the fix having someone run their lives for them?
Perhaps their faith in their God is what gets them through. If that means sending some of their money to strengthen their faith, that is their right.
You always seem to miss the point. These poor people are desperate and the evangelicals know this--they exploit it. This is acceptable to you? Do the powerful have the right to prey on the weak just as the weak have the right to be preyed upon?
<> Do you think sending money to evangelicals is sending money to God?
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