Where Did the Worst of Bush's Cronies Go? To Work for Corporate Media

By Eric Alterman, The Daily Beast. Posted April 10, 2009.

ROVE: about this. They have assigned a senior aide to President Obama [who] is heading this up inside the White House, an unnamed aide. This has clearly got Carville, Begala, and Rahm Emanuel, who talk literally every day -- they have an early morning phone call. This is clearly something that they've concocted. And the question that we -- there are two questions we ought to ask. First of all, is this appropriate? The idea that the White House is devoting all this time and energy and effort when we've got all this myriad problems facing the country, that they've got senior aides in the White House gaming out how they can make Rush Limbaugh the headline in the evening news seems to me to be a little petty, small, and really inappropriate.

I know my job here is to have something to say about that but I don’t see how I can possibly improve on it.

Of all of Bush’s disaster lieutenants, the one who has most successfully reinvented himself is probably David Frum. He was the first one out the door, and bet badly on a hagiographic portrait of his boss when he was still riding high, but quickly switched gears and starting voicing misgivings. While Frum is better at it than his colleagues, his project is the same: to paint Obama and company as no different than Bush, and hence, make the implicit case that Bush wasn’t so bad after all. In a forthcoming article in the liberal American Prospect, he explains, “In a way…Paul Krugman is the General Shinseki of the Obama administration. The Axelrods and others are like those who fired Shinseki. They don't want to know, because it would be too inconvenient.”

Now think about that analogy for a second (which, to be honest, is 99/100ths of second more than it deserves): General Shinseki was a top-ranking career military officer under the command of his superiors who tried to warn the country, correctly it turns out, that we were being deliberately misled into a potentially disastrous military engagement by his gung-ho civilian counterparts. For this he was fired from his job and forced to end his career in apparent ignominy, attacked ceaselessly and anonymously, by those who forced his firing. Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist who teaches at Princeton University and enjoys a sideline as America’s most influential political columnist, publishing twice weekly in The New York Times, the country’s most important newspaper. He has an intellectual disagreement with members of the administration about the size and scope of its economic recovery policy, has been the topic of no friendly fire whatever, and yet … Actually, I can’t go on. Perhaps I’m insufficiently schooled in the ex-Bush Aide College of Audacious Analysis, but I’m as lost as Jimmy Hoffa’s body in trying to locate even a microcosm of meaning in that analogy.

Back in the real world, in polls released this week, Obama’s 66 percent approval rating is higher at this (ridiculously early) point in his presidency than it was for either Bush or Clinton. His approval rating is more than double that of his Republican opponents in Congress, and despite this moment of profound economic uncertainty and emergency, Americans are, according to a CNN poll less pessimistic about the future than they were a year ago.

My advice, guys: Next time, blame Canada….

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