So, here’s the final act in the song-and-dance Bush’s team has been doing all week: CIA director George Tenet has issued a statement taking the blame for the Nigerian-uranium lie in the SOTU. Now Bush graciously grants Tenet his benediction (AP story: Bush expresses confidence in Tenet), Ari declares that “the president has moved on,” and the story’s over, right?

It’s impressive in terms of the choreography, if for nothing else. If safeguarding America, fixing the economy, and successfully invading and rebuilidng other countires were things you could accomplish using only well-coordinated self-serving spin, we’d be in great shape right now. Unfortunately, those things require other abilities, too, and Bush’s team comes up short in pretty much every other area.

But let’s focus on the current flap. I see two major holes in the administration storyline. First is the way Condoleeza Rice wants to have it both ways. Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest has a good write-up: This changes everything. Earlier this week Rice said that the SOTU statements on Niger were revised to reflect CIA concerns (changing the wording to put the focus on British claims, rather than baldly asserting those claims as true). But on Meet the Press on June 8 she said, “We did not know at the time – no one knew at the time, in our circles – maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery.”

No amount of spin can reconcile those two statements; they directly contradict each other. One of them, at least, has to be a lie. And once you’ve accepted that Rice is lying about this, the whole thing falls apart. There’s no way to confine the damage to Tenet, or Rice, or even Cheney (who spent all that time at the CIA “reviewing” intelligence in the run-up to war); they’re all working from the same script. The deception runs seamlessly from top to bottom.

As Nick writes at Morons.org (CIA takes the fall for Bush), it’s ludicrous for Tenet to try to take the blame for “allowing” the President to include the bogus Niger information in the speech. How was he supposed to stop him? Who’s in charge here, anyway?

The notion of presidential authority — and responsibility — in this White House is thoroughly broken. Yes, it’s been obvious since the 2000 campaign that Bush was unqualified to be president. Our collective need to believe in his competence in the wake of 9/11 didn’t change that; it just made it easier for his team to maintain the illusion. But it’s a tight-rope act. His image must be constantly burnished with flattering camera angles and carefully chosen backdrops, his lines must be carefully crafted, the occasional painful ad-libs denied, spun, or ignored until public attention has mercifully moved on.

I’d like to think it’s starting to come apart. A new ABC poll shows that support for Bush has fallen to the lowest level since before 9/11, which I think is a significant threshhold. More and more people are asserting that the emperor has no clothes; check out this excellent piece from Eleanor Clift in Newsweek, for example: No mistakes were made.

My naive side and my cynical side continue to battle with each other. Will Bush win in a landslide in the next election? Or will he be run out of town on a rail? Or will we have another photo finish? When you get right down to it, I honestly have no idea.

This entry was posted by jbc on Saturday, July 12th, 2003 at 8:36 am and is filed under george_w_bush. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.