Monday, February 20, 2006

There was up and there was no down

Several bloggers have written about the "down is up"-ism of this administration, in which "wiretapping" becomes "defending our liberty", "deficits" become "fiscal conservatism", "judicial activism" becomes " "judicial restraint" etc. In my reading, these are just manifestations of the ability of the Bush spinners to make everything into a positive for the President, i.e., not just down is up, everything is up! There is no down! To me this reached its absurb pinnacle when bin Laden released his videotape right before the election and for some reason everyone seemed to think this was a plus for the President. I mean, shouldn't it remind everyone that HE IS STILL OUT THERE?
So it has gone with the NSA wiretape story - Rove, followed by all the administration mouthpieces on the chat shows and in the rightie blogs, have been saying this will actually help the President and the GOP. However, Glenn Greenwald wrote a well-researched piece showing how, behind the scene, they were desperately working to avoid letting this thing get out of hand. The interesting thing to me is why they seem to be trying so hard to change the law now when they seem to have decided before that no one would go along with it. Like, what's different now? Perhaps they figure that now the issue has become one of those "make or break" ones, like "you're either with the Preznit on this one or you're for the turrurists", enough Repub sheep will fall into line to pass it (Bah bah Olympia, fleece as white as Snowe?).
Maybe they needn't have worried so. "Up is Up"-ism only works when the press is willing to go along with it, and so far they have never let me down in terms of how far they are willing to bend over to make the GOP overlords happy. Everytime I think something (WMD, Katrina, global warming, I better stop now) has to make the MSM realize what saps they've been played for, they just take it like another clunk in an increasingly clunky car, but they just smile and keep driving.

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