In which things may appear other than they really are
It’s unfair the bad rap that the decline in George Bush’s approval rating has been giving second terms of presidents. After all, most of his problems have their roots not in his second term but his first. His error is having been reelected and letting the eggs he hatched in that term, grown to turkeys, flock home to roost in this one. The list of his strategic mistakes is unusually long and varied. Beginning with tax cuts which have added 2.7 trillion dollars to the deficit so far, pandering to big oil, denial of global warming, the belligerent diplomacy, the dictatorial and obdurate relations with Congress and the Press, the rampant cronyism and self-defeating secrecy, the devotion to loyalty over excellence, the lies and incompetence of the war in Iraq, their “it’s not as important to get it right as it is to get it through and then to get even with those who got in the way” approach to policy, etc.
Likewise they have ignored long standing international conventions and laws, behaved belligerently even to our allies and cut legal and ethical corners at will in foreign affairs which has replicated in the world what their behavior domestically has done to their reputations here.
All are just symptoms of a deeply skewed ethical compass. It’s been said that the architect of much of this administration’s contentious and shallow style, Karl Rove, is a fan of Machiavelli. Machiavelli wrote of the suspension of private morals in the pursuit of personal advantage in public policy. I don’t know if Rove derived that from Machiavelli or not but for sake of discussion this would serve to explain the actions of this administration as well as any other. Beginning with doubts about the disputed election in 2000 that started it all, this administration is well on its way to being one of the least effective in American political history. Along the way they have perfected political dishonesty, compounded by congenital mismanagement and a general lack of willingness to communicate with the public, to such a fine art that it is often easier to search for the truth in the opposite of what they say they are going to do rather than in what they actually do.
From the very beginning they set out to create a perfect and perfectly perfidious hall of mirrors designed to hide a multitude of sins of omission and commission alike. The Bush White House regards itself as a magical mythical kingdom where the bucks go round and round and never stop anywhere and where mistakes when made are never acknowledged and so never corrected; where accountability as a precedence is worse than ineptitude as a constant occurrence; where ruinous methodology has no incentive to improve and where incompetence is as likely to be rewarded as honesty is to be punished.
By way of reference, The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli is a famous text of political amorality and realpolitik of the Italian Renaissance. He allegedly wrote it for a specific patron he wished to impress. His model of the perfect prince was based on a contemporary, Cesare Borgia. Machiavelli was no doubt fascinated at the strange and apparently unstoppable series of successes achieved by the Borgia clan through all the most brazen and unapologetic means of corruption imaginable. There is a certain admiration of the ruthlessness of these techniques apparent in The Prince. But, because Machiavelli was an exceedingly clever man, this treatise should perhaps be thought of as less an unvarnished appreciation of these tactics (particularly in light of some of his other writing) than a pandering piece meant to flatter an amoral, brutal man. Therefore the image of the prince Machiavelli was holding up, as it were, was a mirror of appreciation to a type of behavior in which a person very like Cesare Borgia could be expected to see himself grinning back and approve of what he saw.
Therefore in practice, The Prince was as much a portrait of someone like Cesare Borgia as it was advice to someone like him. This is the genius of the courtier. Machiavelli didn’t receive the preferment he was after but he left one of the more brilliant job applications in history. It just so happened that the man he based his treatise on was a complete and immoral fool. Yet if only Machiavelli had written a sequel, a volume II of The Prince, it might not have been so appealing to the gullible because what happened next proved the tactics detailed in The Prince wrong and unable to be long sustained. Karl Rove couldn’t be expected to know this, of course, as he and others like him (including his previous boss, Lee Atwater, and vicariously, no doubt, George Bush himself, all the way back to Nixon and beyond to infinity), have apparently taken Machiavelli and tactics such as he espoused at face value.
Because unlike other administrations that may engage in an ad hoc cover-up now and then in response to a particular mistake or embarrassing lapse, this administration is little more than an ongoing cover-up of everything. It goes beyond plausible deniability and spin. In the same way a certain type of personality actually seems to take perverse satisfaction in winning by cheating rather than playing by the rules (they suppose cheating doubles their chances at surprise and consider themselves cleverer than others to have been first to discover this cunning method), we are not talking about deceit of necessity or even just convenience but of pure preference. By design this administration starts their cover-ups well in advance of the commission of the acts which they have already decided will have to be covered up as they proceed.
So the proponents of the preemptive war were first practitioners of the preemptive lie and have perfected to a fault the pre-spin cycle of the untruth. They spin and cover-up before they need to spin and cover-up, before during and after every statement, on the theory that if their feet never touch ground, if their true purposes are kept under wraps from the public, they will keep their critics off balance and present them a moving target much harder to hit. And, if they never quite tell the truth about anything, they’ll never have to be seen to reverse course, or admit to having been wrong in their public projections on issues or accept accountability because their projections were never honestly put forward to the public to begin with. Meanwhile they will have already brazenly and unrepentantly moved on and merely covered up the previous bogus projections with new bogus representations. Every policy initiative then fairly bristles with wild exaggerations, back spins, sidespins, and reverse spins which all add up to self conscious untruths that become a virtual adventure in carefully calibrated misdirection.
By now, of course, the dishonest case made for Iraq is well known. But a similar approach was pursued for tax cuts, replete with shifting, often competing, rationales put forward for a “middle class” tax which benefits were always designed to primarily go to the wealthy . (How many times are we going to fall for that one! It’s your money, they say over and over as they carefully secrete it in their own pockets!) Their arguments culminated in the odd conclusion that the danger of a government surplus becoming too large was a far more damaging threat to our future than a return to massive deficits would be!
Their Social Security reform, too, they said, was necessary because of a wildly exaggerated projected insolvency claim designed (like Iraq) to scare and steam roll the American people into unwise and unnecessary reform that would allow them to cheat us before we knew what hit us. That the public didn’t buy it this time should have been a warning to them of worse days to come.
Similarly their secrecy, as has been remarked upon by many, is unprecedented.
Just as an aside, secrecy and dishonesty are certain death to a democracy. If the public is not kept well informed by their employees as to the true state of the country they have no way to make proper decisions with the rudder of elections and the scold of public opinion about the future direction of the nation which ultimately rests in their hands.
Yet in this White House honesty is apparently valued so highly and yet is in such short supply that though untruth is used promiscuously, truth is only given out parsimoniously, as if they are afraid they might run out of it. So leaks, by anyone else, are branded as treason for the same reason that all their investigations are really just pretences, feints and on going cover-ups, because in this administration nothing is given away to the public, their employer, without a scuffle. After covering their beginning with a pre-spin smog of exaggeration and intentional disinformation all their policies, especially their many failures, end up veiled in legally questionable tangles of plausible deniability, confused intent and executive privilege. The Press and people and even Congress are said to have no inherent right to know anything about what their own government is doing. While we, conversely, are told that we are allowed to have no privacy from them. “Trust us with the truth,” we are constantly urged even though they have done nothing to earn and much to betray that confidence.
The oddity is that they ever would think they could get away with such persistently high-handed and one-sided behavior in a democracy, and that what may come to be known as the stealth presidency of George Bush could succeed for long on such frankly undemocratic terms. Yet they continue to parse their public statements more carefully than English professors. It is a “don’t ask - and we’ll tell you no lies - don’t tell” administration. They persistently deny Congress any and all pertinent information necessary to reach any coherent legislative decisions and pollute the public airwaves with statement after statement that are clearly contrary to the truth of the facts. The whole charade is about as subtle as an elephant on tiptoe that believes that if its intentions are concealed and its footprints muffled, the public will never eventually figure out from the displacement, the telltale length of its trunk and the pile of elephant manure left behind, who actually instigated, carried out and is responsible for the derelictions which have plainly occurred.
So, listening to Don Rumsfeld speak (and this is a common trait among many others in the administration) for five minutes is about as illuminating as watching a dog chase its own tail around a tree for an hour and a half. It’s only impossible to accuse Vice President Cheney from having strayed from the truth because he’s never come anywhere near close to finding it in the first place. The President’s speeches too, seem largely disconnected from reality. One feels they are written by speech writers with the current poll numbers in front of them saying what they think the public most wants to hear which the President, who never really seems to grasp the intricacies and implications of his own policies, dutifully recites like a bad actor from a good script. Then the policy plays out in its own way and if it happens to coincide in passing to what they said they were going to do prior to their doing the opposite, it’s merely accidental.
There are two essential uses of power. One is to use it judiciously to achieve something of value with - to solve a problem or ease a difficulty or to act forcefully to keep other problems from arising. The other use of power is to use the power you have acquired, meretriciously, merely as an inanimate tool to acquire more power. The second is the route chosen by this administration. Cheney and Rumsfeld are past masters at bureaucratic infighting and self-aggrandizement the way Rove is at consolidating crude political advantage by use of whatever means necessary. Nothing is done without an eye, or actually both eyes, on how any given action may enhance them politically, financially and to acquire more centralization of power. Selfless public service is a concept as foreign a language to them as Urdu is to an Eskimo.
And, of course, just as Machiavelli suggested they would, for a time they got away with it. They became smug and arrogant beyond any reason or justification. George Bush wasn’t considered smart but at least he was effective and Karl Rove was a political genius. Whether they read Machiavelli’s The Prince for guidance or not, in a curious, watered down kind of way, which would be typical of the dilettantish, half baked way this group approaches everything, they seem to have distilled some of the dishonest cynicism, the win at all costs right or not, by whatever means necessary anti-ethic, that a shallow reading of Machiavelli would suggest.
Cesare Borgia was successful for a time as well. Briefly, he was the greatest and most powerful warlord of his day. He was the publicly acknowledged son of Pope Alexander VI and the brother of the deadly and beguiling Lucretia. Thus comprising power on all levels of the sacred, sexual and profane, this family held a position of dominant power in Italy in the late fifteenth century. The lovely Lucretia’s husbands had a peculiar way of dying off – poisoned it was assumed – presumably at the hands of her brother. Cesare also was thought to have poisoned his own brother in a competitive fit. Naturally they also engaged in murder and mayhem in many varied and more conventionally dastardly and bloodthirsty ways as well.
In other words this was an entirely corrupt and profane family circle where expedience and venality mingled immodestly with lust, simony and violence. There was no amount of harm they were not willing to inflict, no amount of bloodshed bothered them and no reverence for the liturgical offices they held was anywhere to be found. They valued nothing but themselves, everything they came in contact with was prized only so far as it worked to their benefit. In the eyes of Machiavelli, Cesare Borgia was the young, virile and talented epitome of the best and worst of the age.
Their denouement and undoing came as suddenly as the decline of such careers invariably will. It started when the Pope and his illustrious son were reputedly preparing a lunch for a troublesome cardinal. This cardinal must have been beset with some unaccountable spate of honesty or other which the Borgias found intolerable. The story continues that while fiddling with various ways to poison this prelate, these two idiots somehow managed to poison each other instead. Within a few days the Pope, so bloated he had to be pried and jammed into his coffin, was doornail dead and Cesare seriously ill. Cesare recovered only long enough to suffer most of the indignities and betrayals that he had previously inflicted on others himself before he was killed.
Now, in truth, no one knows for a certainty what caused the death of Pope Alexander VI and it may merely have been an illness they shared, but the story of such apt, retributive justice, fitting their crimes, has always been too deliciously ironic for history to discount. Interestingly, just as an aside, Alexander VI’s successor was a rival to the Borgias, named della Rovere and may have been Karl Rove’s distant relation, with only the “re” removed and the della dropped at Ellis Island.
Now I’m not suggesting that a Bush is quite a Borgia or that Rove is anywhere near as intelligent as Machiavelli, but the similarities in approach and attitude and the results which seem to be following are intriguing.
Consider the Plame case as the window where all the worst techniques and counterproductive tendencies of the Bush Administration may be laid bare to the eye. And then consider, as you must, that this fiasco represents just the iceberg’s tip of their everyday machinations. This story begins, as usual, with a lie. The President wanted to pretend that Iraq had tried to obtain fissionable material to achieve nuclear weapons so the administration could deceive the American people into believing that Iraq was trying to build a bomb to attack us with (“mushroom shaped clouds over America, et al.”) They knew it wasn’t true. Yet George Bush inserted the claim in a formal State of the Union address to the nation anyway, conveniently blaming the British for it. A diplomat who’d previously examined the theory wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times debunking it.
George Bush claimed to be shocked that this untruth had somehow been inserted into his own speech (apparently by some alien poltergeist) and disavowed it. He claimed he didn’t know how it got there but then made no apparent effort to uncover how it had. At the same time, behind the scenes, he was authorizing members of his team to leak information to smear this ambassador for having dared try to undercut his lie with the facts even though he had already had to publicly acknowledge the statement was untrue. This resulted in a story appearing in print that tried to get even with the diplomat by trying to destroy the career of his wife! Because she was an undercover operative for the CIA whose employment was classified, this was illegal and triggered an investigation.
George Bush claimed to be shocked at this leak. He declared that someone needed to get to the bottom of it and that anyone in his administration found to be guilty of such a leak would be summarily dismissed. When suspicion quickly fell on several very highly placed aides the President’s press spokesman quickly stepped forward to categorically deny that they had anything to do with it. When one of the President’s advisor’s, the Vice-President’s chief of staff (Libby), was then indicted, he resigned. When a second aide (Rove) was implicated, at least to the extent of lying to the public about his intimate knowledge of the affair, he was kept on anyway.
When court documents subsequently revealed that George Bush himself had been at the bottom of the very leaks that he’d said he wanted to get to the bottom of (which theoretically should have made his investigation easier) this time at least he didn’t even try to pretend that he was shocked at the revelation that he was the one at the bottom of the leaks all along. But he was quite unapologetic all the same. Technically, his apologists offered in a classic, cover all the bases, internally self-contradictory defense, the President hadn’t specifically authorized the illegal leak of intelligence, but if he had it didn’t matter anyway because since he was president he got to do whatever he wanted and make up the rules as he went along and explain it to us later (if he got caught) if at all.
So let’s tally it up. What is it, say, five or six additional layers of cover-up and dissembling to cover up the original untruth? And this lie was only a small part of a whole Rubic’s cube of additional exaggerations and misstatements and lies told to support the attack on Iraq. No wonder no one in this administration ever has time to get anything done properly. Dissembling is a treacherous thing. Lies may be more prevalent in life but truth is more persistent. Dishonesty builds nothing of any public good and unlike truth must always be carefully defended from discovery. If discovered a lie may quickly cut the ground out from under its practitioner and once it starts to be exposed it is like trying to build a house on a hillside in a landslide to keep the truth covered up. Unless your position is very strong or can be maintained by external force or influence it will soon be lost to you.
Machiavelli’s work, as I say, is less a guidebook to behavior than a mirror set up to seduce any fool ignorant enough to think they see their own reflection in it. The Prince then is the ultimate lure, a political siren, set forward by a master illusionist to invite the shallow, amoral and egocentric to their own fatal destruction. It is tempting to think that this is what’s happening to the Bush Administration in some small, sad, reflective (as opposed to “insightful”) way. Like the Borgias, those who play by the poisonous rules of The Prince are likely to get confused by their own lack of moral compass, get disoriented and eventually wind up murdering themselves.
So predictably, the nest of short-sighted lies and cover-ups that this administration bridge-burningly embarked on in their first term without regard to their long term effects are coming back like Scrooge’s ghosts to haunt them in the second. Even the second term disaster of their lack of response to hurricane Katrina can only be explained by a pattern of mismanagement in the government agency in charge of the response so comprehensive that it must have its roots in the first term for the decay to have been so egregiously far advanced by the second. Meanwhile all their own disingenuities, exaggerations and betrayals that worked to get them elected have ensured that they would be failures once they were.
As all those tangled webs they weaved, when first they practiced to deceive, once a stray thread’s worked loose, will inevitably unweave right back up the loom to the still busy fingers of those who wove them at the start. Machiavelli’s probably quite amused.
What Machiavelli really thought of Cesare Borgia isn’t really known. He was reputed to have commented about him after the death of his father the Pope removed the pontifical protection Cesare had previously enjoyed, something like, “He (Cesare) expects others to be more honest with him than he ever was with them”, which implies a certain understanding on Machiavelli’s part of the trouble The Prince’s own perfidious behavior had landed him in. Because, in truth, the curse of Machiavelli’s mirror is that, provided they survive long enough, those who think they see themselves reflected in it - like a premonition of their own future - will sooner or later suffer every harm and indignity they have inflicted on others themselves.
The moral of this thesis is, if you are going to be dumb enough to play at being Machiavellian at least be smart enough to get away quickly, before your duplicities (and all the enemies these tactics invariably create) have a chance to double back on you and get even.
