Ari Fleischer – Bush Apologist
November 4, 2008
by George Thomas
Every now and then the New York Times treats us to something a little different. The Gray Lady may have muddied its waters by hiring William Kristol, whose argumentation for a tired, vapid, even dangerous far-right ideology has become practically iconic; at least Kristol doesn’t cheapen his soapbox by indulging in rabble-rousing poison in the manner of a Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter. Sometimes Kristol, in true Buckleyesque fashion, comes up with a challenging point or two, and he survived a grilling by master comedian and commentator by default, Jon Stewart.
On November 2nd The Times ran an assortment of reminiscences by commentators, successful escapees and unrepentant Bush apologists. The last item, by Paul Burka, senior executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine, may have expressed the most in the least number of column-inches. Burka had watched Bush as Texas governor, and then as President, concluding that President George W. Bush has been “a person I didn’t recognize.” The real Bush “was never to return.”
From my vantage point as a Texas denizen, I can attest to my early failure to observe very much to condemn in Bush. During that atrocious distortion of governance that was the right wing impeachment of Clinton over an outrage no more shocking than shady, unconventional, consensual volunteerism involving a particular intern during extracurricular hours — a fantasy shared by most of us young adolescents — I admit being impressed by Bush’s refusal to treat seriously any press questions about his history of alcoholism and drug use. If only Clinton had continued to put the Lewinsky “caper” into perspective as Bush did his pharmaceutical past, we might have avoided the mess.
There was only one reminiscence in the Times nostalgia assortment who remains unrepentant – Ari Fleischer. Fleischer is remembered as the press secretary who cautioned citizens as the Bush Administration sank downward into an Orwellian swamp, “people have to be careful of what they say.” I am mystified as to why this one quote hasn’t consigned Fleischer to the dung heap of history along with his cousins Atilla, Kublai, Benito, Adolph and Jabba-The-Hutt.
Fleischer shares an accomplishment with William Kristol: he did well in his appearance on Jon Stewart. He is, after all, smart, knowledgeable, articulate and even clean, and he holds his own in a discussion. Stewart, not to be outdone, managed to slip in one item after another that showed Fleischer up as an ideologue subject to ridicule, but he remained amazingly collegial and thus brought out more obliging Fleischerisms to thicken the stew.
Fleischer’s a smart guy, but his premises kill him – whoops! In view of some of the uglier asides during this Presidential campaign of indecision and a little spare change, I must clarify: His premises kill him rhetorically and philosophically. Put the sniper rifles away.
But he’s so charming, I guess, so they don’t push him down and out of public view. He still presents a “collegial” face for radical conservatism, so Fleischer lives. We can’t ask for a more suitable debate team coach. He has the technique down pat.
It’s all very well to admire a leader for moral clarity, and determination to vanquish whatever or whoever it is that does wrong. It’s another thing to go to bat for a prima-donna who insists on doing the wrong, or ineffectual, thing. Bush went against normally reliable intelligence agencies and advice, and insisted on battling the wrong wrong. In his apology, Fleischer writes of his own attempt to caution Bush that his theme of good vs. evil was simplistic, and that there are shades (ahem….”nuances”) of gray. There may be many sides to a set of issues, but even a dualistic, “good-vs-evil” premise can be effective if the ways and means of fighting “evil” are somehow the right ones, sustainable, effective, and don’t manage to increase the roster of those horrified by one’s behavior.
Fleischer gives away the basis for his questionable naivete finally, when he states, “I’ll miss that direct talk [of George W. Bush]. In the age of terrorism, the one thing we have to fear more than anything is moral relativism.”
Oh really?
Let’s not confuse our relativisms here. So-called “moral relativism” is useful only insofar as we maintain a hold on what is “moral,” and which thing we’re talking about is “relative” to what. Right wing moral police academy grads refer to a thing as “moral relativism” if it happens to be something with which they disagree.
In the ozone zone of intellectual endeavor so much on today’s political chopping block, relativism is a useful concept, and seems to apply to a lot of situations. Scholars mention things like Einstein’s theory of relativity — a smashing, mind- (not to mention light-) bending complex of formulae that led us to put old Newton’s simple gravitational and other laws of physics on hold while we went back to our telescopes and drawing boards. Ah, but this particular “relativism” is irrelevant.
Other scholars refer to things like “cultural relativism,” which is a flat-out admission that there are many human societies out there with many perspectives on the world, divided for the most part into classifications that don’t particularly match ours. Many people “harbor” values (a right winger would lump this with the “harboring” of terrorists?) that would make many of our individual skins crawl. And the trick is to find ways to communicate (or not communicate) with such folks.
What we really have to fear more than anything in “this age of terrorism” (a criminal act), is large, superpower governments dealing with the world’s variety in ways no more sophisticated than those of Third World people chuckling at our Western ways and regarding us out of pity.
We can get back onto our cruise ships or airliners and return to our jobs at our selected failed banking firms and lending institutions. The Third World custard vendor we have just snubbed (and smiled at and given a nickel) is still there at his custard stand near the ruins and ticket booths – if he hasn’t been whisked away in an unmarked cattle truck, handed a high-powered rifle and told where to stand.
Maybe Fleischer has mistaken “moral relativism” for something his opposition seems to want to employ in foreign policy — something ungrounded, without goals or premise, without value. The right even likens its opposition to appeasers, wishing to capitulate without principle to one enemy or another. Fleischer makes the same mistake as early missionaries trying to foist the values of the European Inquisition on Indians encountered in the Americas. Although their manners are “noble and prayseworthy,” they lack true morals.
Fleischer is smart, educated, and refined, and he talks in complete sentences. He may be professionally honed for some kind of business or even specialized field. But I find his sense of political “morals” to be inappropriate in the extreme. As an adviser on foreign policy, Fleischer is a bumbling moron who follows long-debunked Renaissance schools of social thinking like an obedient lap-dog. It’s possible to devise foreign policies that do not involve wilting in the face of opposition, but which maintain a sovereign state’s interests guided by mutual respect and intelligent negotiation. We can do without bumbling Renaissance morons at our helm for a while.
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