< PREVIOUS ] [ 2005 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
It was Colorado's own Congresswoman Pat Schroeder who
coined the term Teflon President
for Ronald Reagan
because no allegation ever stuck to him, whether it was
swapping arms for hostages or influence-peddling by cabinet
members.
President George W. Bush seems to have gone one better -- call him the Boomerang President, because whatever is thrown his way seems to come back. And it comes back so hard that we might borrow a term from rocket scientists and call him the Gravitational Sling President.
The sling effect is used by space probes; if one approaches Jupiter on the right track, the probe does not fall to the planet, but instead picks up speed so that when it leaves Jupiter's gravitational field, it's going faster than it was before. And that's how things seem to work with this president.
For instance, there's his military record. But when that
became an issue again last year, the allegations whirled
around him and came back to smite others. CBS and Dan
Rather, not George W. Bush, ended up in disrepute over the
documents that allegedly showed favoritism toward Bush in
his National Guard days. And when John Kerry, who actually
went to Vietnam and got shot at, tried to make that an
issue, it was the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth
who
were all over the news, not Bush's safe stateside
service.
Most recently, we have Newsweek Magazine. In its May 9 issue, there was a brief item about U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo prison with mention of flushing a copy of the Koran down a toilet. Riots broke out in some Muslim countries, starting in Afghanistan and spreading from Gaza to Indonesia. At least 15 people died.
Let's start with whether the Koran episode happened.
Released detainees have made such charges, and the
International Committee of the Red Cross sent credible
information
about Koran mishandling to the Pentagon in
2002 and 2003.
It seems believable to me, for I know that if I were
conducting such interrogations, I wouldn't have any trouble
saying Achmed, you're not leaving me any choice here.
You need to tell me who you met on the road to Damascus in
February of 1999, and what you talked about, or else your
holy book could fall into this bucket of [fecal matter].
I'd rather not have that happen, but this is out of my
hands. It's up to you now.
Assume, though, that Newsweek fabricated the item. What would it have to gain? Nothing comes to mind.
No, wait, it's part of the Evil Liberal Media Conspiracy, and Newsweek wanted to start anti-American riots, even though the Koran-abuse allegations had been made public before without starting riots.
And if the magazine meant to start riots, it didn't do
the job, according to the U.S. commander on the ground in
Afghanistan, Gen. Carl Eichenberry, who reported to Gen.
Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that
the rioting was more tied up in the political process
and the reconciliation process that President Karzai and
his cabinet is conducting in Afghanistan,
and
Eichenberry thought it was not at all tied to the
article in the magazine.
Despite all that, people write letters to the editor denouncing Newsweek for deliberately harming America's image in the Muslim world, and they attack the magazine's credibility.
But did Newsweek order the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan? Wouldn't a military invasion be more likely to anger people than a sentence in a magazine? Or is that question too difficult for Bushites to answer?
Did Newsweek claim that Iraq had to be invaded in order to remove the weapons of mass destruction that were never found? Or that Saddam Hussein was working with Al Quaida? Or, to move on, that federal tax rates could be cut and the budget would still remain in surplus?
It is George W. Bush who has often told us things that are not so, and who does far more to make the United States unpopular abroad than any magazine item ever could.
But look at the commentary and criticism. It's all about Newsweek, not Bush. This is beyond the boomerang, perhaps even greater than the gravitational sling. Black holes, anybody?
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2005 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >