Bluff and Bluster

In The Smirking Chimp Huffington says:

"Nevertheless, I feel confident predicting that Bush's bluster will soon give way to a far less full-throated stance.

Why? Because we've seen this pattern before. It's the Bush administration's political spin on those five stages of grief, which move from denial to anger, through bargaining and depression to, finally, acceptance.

The president's current posturing is a Kubler-Ross twofer, combining both denial and anger in one handy stage-straddling step. It allows him to deny that what he did was wrong and illegal while simultaneously venting his anger on the enemy. No, not al Qaeda --but the spy program whistleblower.

It's Classic Bush: challenge him and find yourself targeted for aiding and abetting the enemy. 'The fact that somebody leaked this program causes great harm to the United States,' he told reporters ominously. 'There's an enemy out there. They read newspapers, they listen to what you write, they listen to what you put on the air, and they react.'

Which is really the underlying strategy of the president's aggressive defense: the hope that by replaying his effective use of the Fear Factor, he can undercut the planned congressional investigations into the legality of his actions and shift the focus to identifying who let the spy cat out of the black bag. In Bushlandia, you see, undermining the Constitution isn't what 'causes great harm to the United States'; it's the public finding out that you are undermining the Constitution that does."

The "I am the State" mentality of our wannabe despot continues. Of course, Bush does think that the Constitution is "just a [expletive deleted] piece of paper," so the anger directed at the whistleblower is understandable in that context.

I'm actually more interested in who paid who or whatever happened at the New York Times to cause them to sit on this story until Bush was safely reelected. Where is that liberal media? I guess it will be up to the bloggers to function as the fourth estate since the conventional media seem unable to do the job anymore, since they are too busy pandering to religious zealots and well-funded facists.