Shadow Governments and Armed Imperial Isolationists

Excerpted from TomDispatch.com

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=31576

Now, here we are. So call me prescient or, less charitably, chalk it up to the fact that, if you say anything over and over, sooner or later it may come true. Already we have the first front-page tabloid report -- in the New York Daily News -- on a President (whose reigning adjectives not so long ago were "resolute" and "steady") beginning to unravel. Under the headline, Bushies Feeling the Boss's Wrath, Thomas DeFrank, that paper's Washington Bureau Chief, wrote, "Facing the darkest days of his presidency, President Bush is frustrated, sometimes angry and even bitter, his associates say… ‘This is not some manager at McDonald's chewing out the help,' said a source with close ties to the White House when told about these outbursts. ‘This is the President of the United States, and it's not a pleasant sight.'… Presidential advisers and friends say Bush is a mass of contradictions: cheerful and serene, peevish and melancholy, occasionally lapsing into what he once derided as the ‘blame game.'" Frankly, the description already has a touch of Richard Nixon (as his presidency delaminated after Watergate finally hit).

If you want to understand the present moment, however, it's important to grasp one major difference between the Nixon years and today. In the early 1970s, Richard Nixon had to compete, elbows flying, for face and space time in what we now call the mainstream media. There wasn't any other game in town. (For instance, I suspect that if the secret history of the first op-ed page, which made its appearance in the New York Times in 1970, was ever written, its purpose would turn out to have been to give the hard-charging Nixon administration a space in the liberal paper of record where Vice President Spiro Agnew and other administration supporters could sound off from time to time.)

George Bush arrived at a very different media moment. From Rush Limbaugh and Sinclair Broadcasting to Fox News, the Washington Times, and the Weekly Standard, he had his own media already in place -- a full spectrum of outlets including TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses. As for the rest of the media, his task, unlike Nixon's, wasn't to compete for space, but to pacify, sideline, and, if need be, punish. In this sense, no administration has been less giving of actual news or more obviously tried to pay less attention to major media outlets. The President was proud to say that he didn't even read or watch such outlets. His was a shock-and-awe policy and, from September 12, 2001 to last spring, it was remarkably successful.

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