Updates on recent 404 reports
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THE HALLMARK OF PERSISTENT FAILURE
After five long years of the era of Bush II, the White House has finally achieved the seemingly impossible: It has lost its ability to shock and awe. Every fresh outrage is really an old outrage writ new.
Flashback to October 2003 and there's National security advisor Condoleezza Rice telling the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations that Americans must be patient with progress in Iraq. Now in April 2006, Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice tells the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations that Americans must be patient with progress in Iraq and "prepared for violence to continue in Iraq, even after a government is formed." Back to Oct. 2003 and the White House is denying rumors that Rumsfeld's being pushed aside: "He's doing an excellent job," Press Secretary Scott McClellan says at the time. In April 2006 McClellan is again defending Rumsfeld on behalf to the White House press corps -- or at least, until the Press Secretary announces his own resignation. You can even make the case that these stories come up with clockwork regularity; just a few days before 9/11, the hot rumor in Washington was that Rumsfeld would quit. On September 8, 2001 the New York Times reported, "Rumsfeld has cratered at the Pentagon... [he] has done a lousy job of selling his military reform plans to the generals and admirals, not to mention to Congress." The next day the Defense Secretary told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that the rumors were "nonsense" and he expected to be around a long time. Let's project this pattern forward to the summer of 2008: presidential candidate Condi will be promising a Chicago audience that peaceful democracy is right around the corner in the Iraq-Iran War and the White House will be telling us that Rummy has the full support of both remaining generals and their lieutenant.
The greatest failures of the Bush administration aren't the stumbles and scandals and strategic mistakes that make the headlines (or more often, should be making headlines); it's their stubborn refusal to fix any of these problems once exposed, allowing them to continue festering year after year. If any business had chronic problems like that, stockholders would demand top management be fired -- particularly if the boss was rarely minding the store.
Vacationer-in-Chief Bush has spent more time away from Washington than any leader in history, clocking about 20 percent of his presidency either at the Texas ranch or en route.
Then there's the relentless campaigning; in the entire summer of 2004, he only slept ten nights at the White House.
These merry trips don't come cheap, either. It costs $56,518 for every hour that Air Force One is in the air, and $14,552/hr for Cheney to fly (which puts the going price for a round-trip ticket to shoot an old man in the face @ $87,000). And that
doesn't even count the nearly $7,000 per hour it costs the military cargo planes to haul along their limousines, helicopters, and emergency gear, or the further costs of Secret Service protection or additional passenger aircraft for backup or guests.
As noted in a recent 404 report, all expenses are paid by taxpayers if the White House claims it's an "official" trip, but if the travel is deemed "political," federal election rules require payback of the cost of a first-class plane ticket for each "political" passenger. Skeptical Rep. Henry Waxman (D-California) wondered whether Bush and Cheney were getting free rides to all those fundraisers and other political appearances and
asked the General Accounting Office to take a look. Using 2002 -- a non-presidential election year, like 2006 -- the GAO found that the White House soaked the public for 97 percent of their flight expenses. This included at least 168 campaign-related stopovers costing an estimated $6.5 million, which the GOP reimbursed the government for only $198k.
Fairness requires us to point out that Clinton was better behaved, but not by much. In the 22-month run-up to his 1996 re-election, Clinton made a (then) record-breaking 123 flights on Air Force One, reimbursing the government $544,000. It's an inexact comparison because one year had a presidential election, the price of fuel was less in the mid-1990s, etc, but it would be generally fair to say that the Dems repaid at least three times more than the Repubs, although it's still pennies on the dollar.
But the big difference between the Clinton-Bush years lies in media coverage. Not even ten years ago, dozens of mainstream news articles and op/eds can be found scourging Clinton for personal or political flights, almost all of them hammering at how much his trips cost taxpayers. Some headlines:
"Air Force One Becomes the Fund-Raising Express"
(Cox News Service); "Taxpayers Foot $700G+ Bill for Clinton Vacay" (Boston Herald);
"Taxpayers get hit for Fund Raising Travel" (Rocky Mountain News);
"Clinton Chooses Pre-Debate Sites With Rest, Golf and Votes In Mind" (AP); "Clinton Piles up Miles, Money as Frequent Political Flier" (Atlanta Journal and Constitution). On Dec. 12, 1997, NBC News anchor Brian Williams introduced a report on the topic: "The President, as you may know, has been busy raising money this year. And he needs to. His party is more than $13 million in debt. But, who really pays when the President crosses the country as Fundraiser in Chief? ... It just might be another fleecing of America."
When it comes to Bush, however, it's a different story; the American press rarely pays any notice to his personal or political frequent-flier miles.
Aside from some cynical commentary last month when he flew back to vote in the Texas primary because the White House forgot to order his absentee ballot, the only mildly-critical media attention came in August, 2005, when the Washington Post noted that his five-week vacation would be the longest presidential retreat in at least 36 years -- a record-breaking rest that was cut short two days by the Hurricane Katrina crisis, alas for Bush.
Nor did any newspaper article, wire service item, or broadcast news report mentioned the March GAO study on Bush/Cheney flight costs.
All that can be found in the NEXIS database is a single April reference in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where a columnist used it as ammo to complain about Cheney's visit to raise about half-mil for local Repubs.
Major media outlets also downplayed or misrepresented a Nov. 2005 report from the
non-partisan Center for Public Integrity showing that Cheney is unnecessarily making the public pay millions for his travel costs. Instead of allowing think tanks, trade organizations or academic institutions to pay the transportation bill when he's invited to deliver a speech (as Gore did, and as others in the Bush admin have done), Cheney refuses to accept their money because rules demand that he then would have to disclose details of who he was travelling and meeting with. The Washington Post coverage, "Vice President's Office Keeps Travel Expenses Under Wraps" obfuscated the issue by focusing on Cheney's hair-splitting argument against disclosure, and
as Media Matters reported, CNN left viewers with the misconception that Cheney simply didn't take any sort of trips that might legally need to be disclosed.
It's particularly sad that there was no coverage of the GAO report because the Office also projected
their findings onto 2006, estimating that Bush/Cheney are preparing to hand taxpayers a $7.2 million tab for their current travels around the country. Of course, that money also represents time that the dynamic duo should be spending on the job in Washington instead of the distractions of
promoting Republican candidates, vacationing in Crawford, and shooting old men in the face.
(April 29, 2006)
DON'T TELL ANYONE, BUT THE WHITE HOUSE IS IN WASHINGTON
A recent 404 report on the
militarization of America's skies
explained how the Bush administration has greatly expanded the protective bubble around the President to include the entire Washington-Baltimore airspace, which is now protected as if it were the border of a separate nation. While the heightened security was put in place to prevent a 9/11-style attack feared in the days following the Iraq invasion, the restrictions do nothing to enhance safety, private pilots say. In fact, one pilot explained exactly why the changes were ineffective at a January public hearing on the issue -- and as a result, transcripts of the hearings were yanked from government web sites because they might reveal "security sensitive information."
After three months of badgering from AOPA, the largest flyer's organization, the powers-that-be decided that no government secrets were revealed after all.
"How could there have been any secret information revealed at these hearings?" AOPA President Phil Boyer asked on the group's website. "There were officials from NORAD, the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service, and the FBI both on the dais and in the audience. If anybody had started to reveal secret information, wouldn't one of these folks cut them off? Wouldn't their oaths of office require them to stop the leak?"
The fuss was over remarks made by Tom Bush, a U.S. Navy F-18 Hornet pilot who often flies his private plane to Dulles Airport in Washington. Bush gave a slide presentation at the hearing showing his flight path, commenting that at one spot, any plane is just a short distance from the place where another fellow named Bush lives.
At this point, let's say I was a bad guy with evil in his heart and I wanted to do our nation harm. I could just hang a right right here -- and this isn't a state secret; it's just a math problem -- a bearing of basically east 13 nautical miles or, at 180 knots with a prevailing westerly tailwind, any high- performance, 200-horsepower, single-engine airplane like there are a million of out there -- and oh, by the way, there's private jets that can halve this time -- can be on the White House lawn in less than four minutes or right about four minutes.
That's no kind of threat or anything like that. That is simple arithmetic.
So meanwhile, to get there I had, as a good guy, I had to jump through all kinds of administrative hoops, file a flight plan, trying to do the right thing, and yet so can a bad guy. He can do the same procedures, do everything right, and then just hang that right turn right there and be a threat to the Capitol Region.
Now, what am I saying? I'm saying that freedom and security are polar opposites. The more you have of one, the less you have of another. And I am not willing to give up my freedom for the sake of terrorists.
Pilot Bush continued by ridiculing the Department of Homeland Security's own comments:
"'While the DHS has no specific information regarding GA [General Aviation, private, non-military] aircraft . . . to perpetrate
attacks, terrorists may -- may -- turn to GA as an
alternative method for conducting operations.' I may
get struck by lightning when I walk outside. I may
contract a disease that kills me. If I am willing to
turn over for every rule that gets made that restricts
my freedom, I may as well crawl under a rock somewhere
and wait to die...
"...I am an American living in America and I am unwilling to
give up my rights and freedoms to idiot terrorists, and
I'm disappointed in my government for currying to the
perceived pressure to take ineffective measures at the
expense of liberty.
We're the country that shunned British rule,
tamed the West, won World War I, World War II, put men
on the moon, and stared down the Soviets, and it's time to act like that."
Come to think of it, maybe it wasn't the "simple arithmetic" comments that led to the attempted censorship after all -- maybe it was the official's embarrassment at having been so eloquently slapped down in public.
(April 16, 2006)
ONE LAST MISREPRESENTATION FOR THE ROAD
Peripheric politico and right-wingnut Howard Kaloogian briefly made national news at the end of March after he charged the media with overplaying violence in Iraq, and even posted a snapshot of "calm and stable" downtown Baghdad to his campaign website as proof. Soon the picture was exposed as a fake, identified by bloggers as a scene from a peaceful suburb of Istanbul, Turkey. Kaloogian e-mailed supporters that he took full responsibility for the error (while telling an out-of-town newspaper it was "a stupid mistake" made by a staffer), and predictably claimed it was a sign that his personal credibility and pro-war campaign theme were under siege by "journalists and liberal political activists...determined to beat down the morale of the American people." Send money now, he urged, to "show the media and anti-war activists that their attempt to attack our trip to Iraq to support our troops has backfired."
Caught in a whopper like that, you'd think the candidate for the House seat from San Diego might be a bit more circumspect in the waning days of his campaign. But on April 7, with only a few days remaining before the special election, Kaloogian shotgunned out an e-mail crowing, "Polls show we have pulled to a statistical tie for the lead." If accurate, this indeed would have been big news; before the dustup over Baghdad/Istanbul, Kaloogian was a distant fourth place. Alas for Howard, he again forgot that he wasn't running for office in Fantasyland. The "SurveyUSA" poll that came out that day projected Kaloogian having 12 percent of the vote -- far behind from the 45 percent polled for Democratic front-runner Francine Busby.
This time, Kaloogian fiddled with words instead of misleading pictures. He and Busby weren't alone on the ballot; there were thirteen other Republicians in the crowded field -- conservative competition that he brazenly ignored in his fund-raising letters.
The April 7 survey found him the runner-up in the GOP pack, behind the leader by two points. But because the poll had a five-point margin of error, Kaloogian claimed that translated into a "statistical tie" for leadership in a partisan battle he didn't otherwise admit existed. Sheesh.
On election day, Kaloogian finished a weak fourth, with under 7.5 percent -- about half as many votes as either of the two leading Repubs. Democrat Busby led with nearly 44 percent, but because she didn't win an outright majority, Busby faces a runoff in November. And oddly enough, her opponent could still be Kaloogian: This was a special election, and the Republicans must choose their contender in the regular June primary. Will battling Howard fight on? As of this writing, Kaloogian -- whose entertaining letters manically swung between wild boasts and whining bouts -- has fallen uncharacteristically silent.
(April 13, 2006)
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