Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
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James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
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Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
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Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
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.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog

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Tuesday, October 5, 2004
17:36 - Rope-A-Century http://cartagodelenda.blogspot.com/2004/10/what-is-bushs-game.html	(top)
Matteo at Cartago Delenda Est is another Silicon Valley blogger with a beleaguered-conservative bent (and a very attractive site to boot); a couple of days ago he posted some interesting thoughts about what Bush may be up to in this election season, and indeed throughout his term: Think about it. Bush does not run a 24/7 media war machine or �permanent campaign� like Clinton did (and the Dems and MSM still do). A victory for him via such methods is not a victory at all, for himself, or the country. During his presidency he has held back. The result? It�s staring us all in the face right now. Look at the Blogosphere. Look at the renaissance of discussion, analysis, and just plain thinking that is taking place. This is politics at the �grass roots�. This is engagement, this is involvement, this is a revolution! I was just thinking about this the other day, actually. What has he held, twelve press conferences since 2000? Part of what's so befuddling about this whole political football game that's been raging since we saw the smoking towers on TV and wondered just what the anchorpeople meant when they said this changes everything is that the level of vitriol raised against the Bush administration has gone so stunningly unchecked. How many baseless accusations against him has Bush seen fit to go on TV to refute? Why has he not given any evening addresses to defend his National Guard service? Why hasn't he explained the role of Halliburton in Iraq, giving historical context and industry statistics describing why they have the contracts they do, and just how tenuously their fortunes are connected with Cheney's? Why, for Pete's sake, hasn't he thought it necessary to explain the overall long-term strategy of the War on Terror to the American people? And how much grief and approval points could he have saved himself if only he had? If this were the Clinton era, or even the Reagan era, there'd be an explicit Administration line on every controversy of the day. There'd be no chance for anyone to write up a sign calling the president Hitler, much less convene a 150,000-strong protest in San Francisco, because he'd have taken the stage on day three to dispense a carefully worded rationale for any action that anyone might find objectionable. That hasn't happened this Presidential term. Like, at all. And this is supposed to be a fascist dictatorship, remember, where we're all told what to think on a daily basis. So there's next to no defense coming out of the White House for any of the actions that anyone has attacked it for, from not signing Kyoto to being in bed with the Saudis to supposedly cutting veterans' benefits to the entire strategy of the Global War on Terror, including Iraq and future political and/or military steps involved therewith. The Administration has just gone about its business, going through all the proper legislative and procedural channels and all, but leaving the American populace curiously out of the loop. And who's been left to pick up the slack here? Well, who did I just link to several times? Bloggers. Random people on the Internet with a penchant for being thoughtful and long-winded. Average Joes have taken up the task of defending the President's agenda, because he doesn't seem to have any interest in doing so himself. They've been doing the research, spending the money, and putting in the tireless effort to propound rationales and defenses for Bush that the President doesn't seem to want to issue himself�and that are, for all the analysis behind them, mostly guesses. Why is that the new standard for discourse over our nation's committed direction? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? I mean, what the hell kind of President is it who says not a single word in response when a local headquarters of his re-election campaign is sprayed with bullets? You'd think that with the tone of the anti-Bush slogans rising in a seemingly endless crescendo, unchecked, unchalleged, there would eventually come a time when the charges the Left raises would have to be answered. But Bush isn't doing so, not even in the debates. He's backing off of the tough questions, not going for the easy kill. It's like he doesn't even care about defending his actions. We don't even know why. It could be because he doesn't believe in his own agenda himself. It could be because he sees the criticism to be a completely meaningless distraction. Or it could be because of some ingenious plan to empower individual Americans by inducting them into the political process on a completely populist level, leaving himself completely open to attack because he knows that some people will see the method in what he's doing and take it upon themselves to be his banner-bearers, voluntarily and on their own recognizance, painstakingly building up their own credibility as they go. This last possibility seems freakishly remote. But there was once a time when we believed our government was easily capable of such intricate and century-long-lasting social engineering projects, wasn't there? Remember the CIA of the 60s? The Pinkertons? NASA? The thick-rimmed-glasses-wearing spooks to whom the guy from A Beautiful Mind reported? That's not completely gone today, is it? We know how dunderheaded the FBI has become... or is that just what they want us to think? I don't even know what the most likely explanation for this phenomenon is; all I know is that it's extremely strange, and a little bit unnerving. It certainly explains why people like Michael Moore exist and are so popular, and yet have such an amazing lack of an irony gland as to claim their dissenting opinions are being crushed by an overbearing government enforcing a party line. The reality is so unbelievably far in the opposite direction, with near-silence coming from the White House even when it's under the fiercest attack, that it's easy to imagine that something sinister must be going on. What else can explain it? Occam's Razor would tend to tell me that this silence isn't complete disinterest nor an intricately orchestrated conspiracy; I think it's mostly just extreme discipline and focus on the job at hand, and a refusal to involve the White House in the quagmire of the scurrilous charges raised against it, because to answer them would be to legitimize them. Even that possibility seems a bit far-fetched, though. Certainly it seems as though ignoring the Moores of the world hasn't made them go away, and so the strategy may have backfired. I hope it's not too late. It's possible for the White House to have restored too much dignity, I suppose. By the way, Matteo has a couple of other posts�here and here�that discuss the ins and outs of running a GOP voter-registration table in Silicon Valley. Maybe showing restraint in responding to insults is a systemic feature after all...