Elisabeth Bumiller, Left-Wing Conspiracy-Monger -- October 18, 2004 -- TimesWatch.org

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Times Watch for October 18, 2004

Elisabeth Bumiller, Left-Wing Conspiracy-Monger

White House reporter Elisabeth Bumiller again treats a conspiracy theory as actual news. Monday marks her second piece on the "bulge," previously a subject of debate only on the far-left side of the Internet.

She writes in her "White House Letter": "In these closing weeks of the presidential campaign, the talk at an edgy White House is of polls, turnout, swing voters and polls. There are also two story lines from the presidential debates that to the exasperation of President Bush's advisers won't go away: the bubble and the bulge. The bulge -- the strange rectangular box visible between the president's shoulder blades in the first debate -- has set off so much frenzied speculation on the Internet that it has become what literary critics call an objective correlative, or an object that evokes large emotions and ideas."

Bumiller's piece, headlined "Talk of Bubble Leads to Battle Over Bulge," is accompanied by a video capture from the third debate.

In an incredibly strained attempt at an anti-Bush metaphor, Bumiller attempts to hook this conspiracy theory to substantive criticism of Bush: "The bulge is in many ways related to the bubble, which is the word Mr. Bush himself uses to describe the isolation of the presidency. In this case, Mr. Bush's critics argue that he has so walled himself off from dissent in his bubble that he was ill-prepared to take on the challenge of Senator John Kerry in their three debates. Therefore, Mr. Bush had to make use of the bulge, which is most popularly rumored to be a radio receiver that transmitted answers from an offstage adviser into a hidden presidential earpiece. In the last two weeks, the bulge has taken on a life of its own to become a symbol to Mr. Bush's critics of all that is wrong with his presidency. New pictures on the Internet last week showed protuberances under Mr. Bush's T-shirt at his ranch and again under his coat at the second and third debates. Some theories had the bulge as a bulletproof vest or a tracking device to help the Secret Service locate Mr. Bush should he be kidnapped. The White House flatly denied it all, and continued to insist that the bulge wasn't there, or that it amounted to nothing. 'I think it is about the most ridiculous story of the campaign,' said Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary."

Bumiller takes it as a given that the debates hurt Bush's standing: "The larger question is whether Mr. Bush has so retreated into the cocoon of the White House that he was stunned to be confronted by Mr. Kerry and flared with anger in the first debate. Not surprisingly, his advisers insisted that wasn't so -- up to a point….David Gergen, a professor of public service at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a veteran of the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton White Houses, said that all presidents lived in bubbles, but that Mr. Bush's seemed unusually thick. 'One had the sense that he was out of training in the rough-and-tumble of argument,' Mr. Gergen said. 'He's lost his edge.'"

The Times liked that quote so much they made it the cut-out line of the story: "A sense that Bush 'was out of training in the rough-and-tumble of argument.'"

The Times even dealt with the bulge on its Saturday op-ed page in an artsy quasi-editorial, "Is That a Transmitter in Your Jacket?" featuring photographs of the jackets of people on New York City streets to try and replicate it. The caption above the set of pictures reads: "Since the first presidential debate, the rumors have been flying about a mysterious bulge in President Bush's suit jacket. Could it have been a radio transmitter feeding the president answers from Karl Rove?"

That piece is at least somewhat facetious. But Bumiller takes it very seriously. Yet as Bryon York reports on National Review Online, the main source of the theory, Dave Lindorff, was a "pioneer in comparing George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler, Lindorff wrote last year, on the website Counterpunch.org, that, 'It's going a bit far to compare the Bush of 2003 to the Hitler of 1933. Bush simply is not the orator that Hitler was. But comparisons of the Bush administration's fear mongering tactics to those practiced so successfully and with such terrible results by Hitler and Goebbels on the German people and their Weimar Republic are not at all out of line.'"

For the rest of Bumiller's letter on the bulge, click here.

Bush's "Intolerance of Doubters"

Two weeks before the election, the Times' Sunday Magazine features a cover story by author and Bush antagonist Ron Suskind, "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush." It was Suskind who wrote "Price of Loyalty," based on accounts from former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and hailed by liberals for its hostile portrayal of Bush.

After quoting conservative economist Bruce Bartlett and liberal Sen. Joe Biden on Bush's certainty, Suskind ponders: "What underlies Bush's certainty? And can it be assessed in the temporal realm of informed consent? All of this -- the 'gut' and 'instincts,' the certainty and religiosity -- connects to a single word, 'faith,' and faith asserts its hold ever more on debates in this country and abroad. That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness."

Later Suskind writes how that "certainty" manifests itself: "The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his positions. Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush's intolerance of doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now. A writ of infallibility -- a premise beneath the powerful Bushian certainty that has, in many ways, moved mountains -- is not just for public consumption: it has guided the inner life of the White House."

One of Suskind's central sources for insight into Bush is the left-wing religious figure Jim Wallis: "He didn't always talk this way. A precious glimpse of Bush, just as he was ascending to the presidency, comes from Jim Wallis, a man with the added advantage of having deep acuity about the struggles between fact and faith. Wallis, an evangelical pastor who for 30 years has run the Sojourners -- a progressive organization of advocates for social justice -- was asked during the transition to help pull together a diverse group of members of the clergy to talk about faith and poverty with the new president-elect…. A cluster of particularly vivid qualities was shaping George W. Bush's White House through the summer of 2001: a disdain for contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness, a retreat from empiricism, a sometimes bullying impatience with doubters and even friendly questioners. Already Bush was saying, Have faith in me and my decisions, and you'll be rewarded. All through the White House, people were channeling the boss. He didn't second-guess himself; why should they?....Wallis recalls telling Bush he was doing fine, 'but in the State of the Union address a few days before, you said that unless we devote all our energies, our focus, our resources on this war on terrorism, we're going to lose.' I said, 'Mr. President, if we don't devote our energy, our focus and our time on also overcoming global poverty and desperation, we will lose not only the war on poverty, but we'll lose the war on terrorism.' Bush replied that that was why America needed the leadership of Wallis and other members of the clergy. 'No, Mr. President,' Wallis says he told Bush, 'We need your leadership on this question, and all of us will then commit to support you. Unless we drain the swamp of injustice in which the mosquitoes of terrorism breed, we'll never defeat the threat of terrorism.' Bush looked quizzically at the minister, Wallis recalls. They never spoke again after that."

Well, given that Wallis seems to be arguing that the 9/11 terrorists acted because of "global poverty and desperation" (the terrorists were mostly well-off Saudis), perhaps Bush was wise to avoid Wallis' advice going forward.

Suskind concludes his long article with more from the left-wing Wallis: "Can the unfinished American experiment in self-governance -- sputtering on the watery fuel of illusion and assertion -- deal with something as nuanced as the subtleties of one man's faith? What, after all, is the nature of the particular conversation the president feels he has with God -- a colloquy upon which the world now precariously turns? That very issue is what Jim Wallis wishes he could sit and talk about with George W. Bush. That's impossible now, he says. He is no longer invited to the White House. 'Faith can cut in so many ways,' he said. 'If you're penitent and not triumphal, it can move us to repentance and accountability and help us reach for something higher than ourselves. That can be a powerful thing, a thing that moves us beyond politics as usual, like Martin Luther King did. But when it's designed to certify our righteousness -- that can be a dangerous thing. Then it pushes self-criticism aside. There's no reflection. 'Where people often get lost is on this very point,' he said after a moment of thought. 'Real faith, you see, leads us to deeper reflection and not -- not ever -- to the thing we as humans so very much want.' And what is that? 'Easy certainty.'"

Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review, calling the Suskind story "a mess," pulls out this example: "Suskind’s central examples don’t demonstrate what he thinks it does. He tells a story about how Bush, in conversation with Rep. Tom Lantos, confused Sweden and Switzerland, said that the former was a neutral power without an army. When Lantos tried to correct him, Bush persisted in his belief -- and only in a later meeting conceded that he had been wrong. Now this is certainly an embarrassing story, and perhaps a disturbing one. But it does not show that Bush is a man of arrogant certainties who relies on his faith rather than on facts and refuses to reconsider his views. It shows that he is a man who sometimes has his facts wrong and will briefly persist in error. I have known very, very intelligent people, whose theological views and psychologies are quite different from those of the president, who have had similar conversations."

Ponnuru argues: "…when Suskind concludes by quoting Wallis on how true faith never yields 'easy certainty,' you wish that he had done a little bit less catering to the easy certainties of the typical Times reader."

For the full Suskind piece on Bush's faith, click here.

Making Ted Kennedy Look Moderate

To scare people out of reelecting Bush, easily frightened Times editorialist Adam Cohen delivers a rant Monday that Ted Kennedy himself might have rejected as overly demagogic: "Abortion might be a crime in most states. Gay people could be thrown in prison for having sex in their homes. States might be free to become mini-theocracies, endorsing Christianity and using tax money to help spread the gospel. The Constitution might no longer protect inmates from being brutalized by prison guards. Family and medical leave and environmental protections could disappear."

Cohen adds: "It hardly sounds like a winning platform, and of course President Bush isn't openly espousing these positions. But he did say in his last campaign that his favorite Supreme Court justices were Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, and the nominations he has made to the lower courts bear that out. Justices Scalia and Thomas are often called 'conservative,' but that does not begin to capture their philosophies. Both vehemently reject many of the core tenets of modern constitutional law. For years, Justices Scalia and Thomas have been lobbing their judicial Molotov cocktails from the sidelines, while the court proceeded on its moderate-conservative path. But given the ages and inclinations of the current justices, it is quite possible that if Mr. Bush is re-elected, he will get three appointments, enough to forge a new majority that would turn the extreme Scalia-Thomas worldview into the law of the land."
More warnings: "If Justices Scalia and Thomas become the Constitution's final arbiters, the rights of racial minorities, gay people and the poor will be rolled back considerably. Both men dissented from the Supreme Court's narrow ruling upholding the University of Michigan's affirmative-action program, and appear eager to dismantle a wide array of diversity programs."

Then it's on to the "cruelty" of Thomas and Scalia: "That sort of cruelty is a theme running through many Scalia-Thomas opinions. A Louisiana inmate sued after he was shackled and then punched and kicked by two prison guards while a supervisor looked on. The court ruled that the beating, which left the inmate with a swollen face, loosened teeth and a cracked dental plate, violated the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. But Justices Scalia and Thomas insisted that the Eighth Amendment was not violated by the 'insignificant' harm the inmate suffered."

Here's a fuller quote from Thomas on the 1992 Eighth Amendment case Hudson v. McMillan, showing Thomas is not condoning the abuse but simply arguing it's not a constitutional issue: ''A use of force that causes only insignificant harm to a prisoner may be immoral, it may be torturous, it may be criminal...but it is not 'cruel and unusual punishment."

For the rest of Cohen on the Supreme Court, click here.

The Suspense Is Over: NYT Endorses Kerry

The Times devotes the entirety of its editorial space on Sunday to endorse "John Kerry for President." Yet the Times deals with Kerry's strengths briefly and perfunctorily: "He has qualities that could be the basis for a great chief executive, not just a modest improvement on the incumbent…. And while Mr. Kerry's service in Vietnam was first over-promoted and then over-pilloried, his entire life has been devoted to public service, from the war to a series of elected offices. He strikes us, above all, as a man with a strong moral core."

The meat of the editorial deals with Bush's "disastrous tenure": "There is no denying that this race is mainly about Mr. Bush's disastrous tenure. Nearly four years ago, after the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency, Mr. Bush came into office amid popular expectation that he would acknowledge his lack of a mandate by sticking close to the center. Instead, he turned the government over to the radical right. Mr. Bush installed John Ashcroft, a favorite of the far right with a history of insensitivity to civil liberties, as attorney general….When the nation fell into recession, the president remained fixated not on generating jobs but rather on fighting the right wing's war against taxing the wealthy….The Bush White House has always given us the worst aspects of the American right without any of the advantages. We get the radical goals but not the efficient management."

For the rest of the Times' not-so-surprise endorsement of Kerry (and flagrant Bush-bashing), click here.

• George W. Bush | Campaign 2004 | Editorial | Endorsement | Sen. John Kerry

Optimism for Kerry, Part I

Todd Purdum's short Sunday Week in Review piece, "Coming Down The Home Stretch," sees good news for Kerry after the debates: "The three presidential debates are over, and they have left the campaign looking a lot as it has for most of the year: more or less even. That's good news for Senator John Kerry, whose strong performance in the first debate erased the lead that President Bush had begun building in September, and bad news for Mr. Bush who heads into the final phase on the defensive."

For the rest of Purdum, click here.

• Campaign 2004 | Debates | Polls | Todd Purdum

Optimism for Kerry, Part II

A front-page story Sunday from Adam Nagourney, "In Iowa, Debates Harden Views And Don't Change Many Minds," spreads pro-Kerry optimism via anecdotal evidence of Kerry enthusiasm: "For Mr. Kerry, Democrats who 15 days ago were unmoved by their standard-bearer said they had been stirred by a candidate who in the debates proved more personable, animated and articulate than they had expected. In an election in which Mr. Bush is benefiting from strikingly more intense support from his followers, that could prove to be something of a breakthrough for Mr. Kerry if it helps him solidify and energize his Democratic base. 'His personability is growing,' said Christine Brandstad, 35, a Democrat and a lawyer in Des Moines. 'He's really developing. Because he started out pretty stiff.' Indeed, on Thursday night in Des Moines, Mr. Kerry and his running mate, Senator John Edwards, were greeted by a huge and roaring crowd which endured traffic jams and a four-hour wait in 35-degree temperature to see them at an outdoor, nighttime rally on the State Fairgrounds.…Mr. Bush's own post-debate rally at the US Cellular Center here on Friday drew a notably smaller and less enthusiastic crowd than Mr. Kerry drew the night before in Des Moines. Swatches of seats and patches of the arena floor were empty, even though the event took place inside a heated building, during the day, and downtown."

But Nagourney is also comparing attendance from a Thursday night at the fairgrounds to a Friday rally when most people are at work, suggesting there are too many imponderables to measure the enthusiasm levels of either camp. Though that didn't stop him from seeing a higher level for Kerry.

For the rest of Nagourney from Iowa, click here.

• George W. Bush | Campaign 2004 | Iowa | Sen. John Kerry

"Hard-Right" Coors Family, "Conservative" O'Connor?

Saturday's story on the Colorado senate race from Kirk Johnson, "Politics Are Both Local and National in Colorado Race." (The online version has the snappier headline, "Which One's the Republican?") throws around loaded labels from the start. Here's the opening sentence: "It is a question that would have shocked the old line, hard-right conservative patriarchs of the clan begat by Adolph Coors: Is Pete Coors, nationally famous beer magnate, scion of old money, and now candidate for the United States Senate, Republican enough to win in Colorado?"

(Last December, the Times' James Traub called the late Joseph Coors Sr. "a right-wing nut.")

Johnson also praises the shrewdness of Coors' Democratic opponent: "Mr. Salazar clearly knows the conservative-minded garden he cultivates. In a debate this week in Denver sponsored by the Allied Jewish Federation, an audience member asked the candidates about affirmative action. It was a red-meat question of the sort that liberals and conservatives have bloodied one another over for decades. Unfortunately for Mr. Coors, Mr. Salazar got to go first. 'I agree with Gerald Ford,' Mr. Salazar declared, quoting the Republican former president, who has spoken and written widely about the value of an inclusive society. Then, for good measure, he quoted Sandra Day O'Connor, the conservative Supreme Court justice, defending the practice in some circumstances."

For the rest of Johnson on the Colorado race, click here.

E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org