Have Some Compassion, Please!

EDITOR S LETTER

You really wouldn't want to be the president of the United States in this, the age of One Damned Thing After Another. There was the tsunami last December that killed more than 225,000. Late August and early September—the hottest September worldwide in recorded history—saw the destruction of New Orleans and Biloxi by Hurricane Katrina. The devastation has turned much of the Gulf Coast into a daisy chain of "FEMAvilles"—the rural slums of the future. In October there was the earthquake in Pakistan that damaged some 15,000 villages and left more than two million homeless. (A member of the United Nations response team working there said that they needed more winter-weight tents than existed in the world.) Add to this stew of misery Hurricanes Rita and Wilma, the mud slides in Central America, the serial famines in Africa, and even the rare appearance of thunder and lightning in Southern California. And it just gets worse. There is too much mercury in our fish, the possibility of mad-cow in our beef, and then, for the chicken course, there's that lingering threat of a global avian-flu pandemic.

You would think all this apocalyptic imagery would be comforting to a laige segment of the president's base—the extreme religious right. Almost two-thirds of Americans, many of them Evangelicals, believe that the events predicted in the book of Revelation, including the battle at Armageddon, are just around the comer. (For more on this, see Craig Unger's definitive story on Rapture mania, beginning on page 204.) Divine Destruction, a new book from Melville House Publishing, by Stephenie Hendricks, claims that the president's chipping away at three decades' worth of environmental law is in itself a nod to an element of his ideological base—Dominion Theologists, who believe that by exhausting our natural resources they can hasten the apocalypse and the Second Coming of Christ. Right-wing-policy types call this the "wise-use" doctrine. Hendricks reports that some officials say Bush refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming because it was "against God's prophecies."

The president's own party is up in arms because he nominated his astonishingly average office buddy Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court. Right-wing columnists have taken up torches and pitchforks, too. In The New York Times, conservative columnist David Brooks quoted a Republican member of Congress as calling Bush "radioactive." Meanwhile, not one but two vocal opponents of Bush and the invasion of Iraq won Nobel Prizes—British playwright Harold Pinter, for literature, and the International Atomic Energy Agency and its Egyptian director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, for peace. (More embarrassing still, the president tried and failed to get ElBaradei fired only months ago.) On the torture front, even the Republican-led Senate rejected the president's desire to have a free hand in the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in the grim archipelago of American detainee camps that spot the earth.

Blessedly, President Bush doesn't read the papers. Otherwise he would know that he's still in the doghouse following his non-response to the devastation of Katrina. He would know that his job-approval rating has skidded to 39 percent—the lowest in his presidency. He would know that more than two-thirds of Americans don't like the direction he is taking the country in. On top of all this, everything a president would want to go down is going up—gas and heating-oil prices, inflation in general, unemployment, bankruptcies. The Republican leaders of both the House and the Senate are under indictment or investigation, and the rank and file are looking for the exits, terrified of the 2006 midterm elections, of which the unspeakable is actually being spoken: the possibility that the Republicans could lose control of one or both houses. Across town from the Capitol, things are even worse: the Valerie Plame affair has turned the White House into a whispering carousel of paranoia, scandal, and indictments. (About the only things Bush has going for him are the Democrats—an opposition party most politicians can only dream about.)

Did I mention the war? Forget comparisons to Vietnam. Iraq is increasingly looking like it may go down as one of the worst military blunders in history—up there with Little Bighorn and Balaklava. The vote for Iraq's constitution provided little balm for the president. In some precincts the votes in favor of ratification approached an unlikely 99 percent—talk about exporting American-style democracy to the Middle East! And if all this weren't bad enough, The National Enquirer reported that the president had fallen off the wagon. The story may or may not be plausible, but I mean, really—with all this going on, who could blame the poor man?

Even the commander in chief's attempt to come off like a regular guy by "spontaneously" joshin' with troops from the army's 42nd Infantry Division during a 15-minute videoconference backfired when a live feed of the scripted rehearsal for the chitchat was sent out by mistake. The public knows that virtually all of this president's interactions with actual civilians are by necessity staged, but the video feed put the message-control techniques of TASS, the old Soviet news agency, in the shade by showing that for this president even affably mindless moming-show-like chatter must be canned. The rehearsal for the impromptu session was led by a deputy assistant secretary of defense. Now, call me old-fashioned, but when I hear that sort of title I think of a middle-aged career soldier with a chest full of medals. In this imageconscious administration, a title like this goes not to a soldier but to a forceful public-relations handler named Allison Barber. Following the accidental release of the rehearsal feed, the White House press corps went after administration spokesman Scott McClellan like the mean boys did Piggy in Lord of the Flies. It wasn't pretty.

You'd think all this would be ample distraction for the president, but even the classification of his weekend hideout, the Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas, has been questioned. Warren Vieth, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, called Bush out for referring to his place in Crawford as a "ranch"—saying that it was something of a stretch inasmuch as the Secret Service agents now outnumber the livestock. Bush has made good use of the spread in his campaign to brand himself as a Teddy Roosevelt-like buckskin president. But when you're down to four or five head of cattle, and two of them reportedly have names—Ophelia and Eltonia—well, you can see why some people get all nitpicky. I for one think that if the commander in chief of the most powerful nation on earth wants to call his little hobby farm a "ranch," he should damned well be able to.

GRAYDON CARTER