Hillbilly Political Armor

First, an update on the Secret Service thing. Over the last two days, there has been zero indication that the President has made any stops at Johns Hopkins Hospital. However, after Dick Cheney's December 7th trip to Afghanistan for Karzai's inauguration, the last place he was seen was a hangar at Shannon Airport in Ireland, early in the morning on the 8th. There hasn't been any word on his location since. Then again, Dick Cheney moves in mysterious ways. I'm going to guess it was either Cheney- in secret- or a massive exercise. The exercise would be less interesting, but it would explain that strange afternoon event. Also, www.isdickcheneydeadyet.com has posted no updates on his condition, so I'm inclined to believe the Vice President is okay.

(Also: My favorite quote of the week. Paul Wolfowitz on TV, stating, "No one could have foreseen that it would take more troops to stabilize the country than to overpower it militarily." Well, I guess if you deliberately ignore it, nobody can see it coming, Paul.)

Anyway. This recent ruckus about how National Guardsmen and Marines are running around Iraq without any armor on their Humvees is really good for the country to hear, but I'm fairly nervous about the backlash that's going to occur, since a reporter helped script the questions for the soldier who put Rumsfeld on the spot yesterday. Without doubt, the conservative press is going to try to spin this one into a cautionary tail of the liberal media, exploiting the honorable servicemen in Iraq and causing our enemies to perceive us as weak and incompetent in battle.

Okay, granted, I don't really like the fact that Ed Pitts from the Chattanooga Times Free Press had to manipulate two soldiers into asking Rumsfeld the kind of tough questions that are now getting all this coverage. It makes the story a lot less heartwarming, that the courageous Guardsman, a specialist named Jerry Wilson from Nashville, had actually been coached on what he was going to say.

On the other hand, I feel pretty bad for Pitts. He'd been embedded with a regimental combat team for a while now, and was regularly exposed to the same dangers as the National Guard soldiers he worked with- especially since the Humvees he was riding in weren't armored. He saw firsthand how the Tennessee Guardsmen had to scrounge for whatever extra armor they could find in scrap heaps.

Of course, Donald Rumsfeld and the administration hadn't been making his life as a reporter any easier. Throughout the war on Iraq, the communications wing of the Bush administration has made it supremely difficult for journalists to gain access to major figures and ask real questions. The gentlemen's agreement between the general press, and the administration, used to go something like this; if the press were allowed occasional, unscripted access to major policymakers, then the press would grant decent coverage to the administration's more scripted events.

At this point, those scripted events are all the press can get. This President has held, by far, the fewest solo press conferences in his first four years of any recent chief executive. Granted, if I were Scott McClellan, I'd want to keep that linguistic goofball 100 yards from a microphone. If your boss is the kind of guy who calls suicide bombers "suiciders," then it makes sense to play the game safely. Keep him from speaking off the cuff and make sure he sticks to his core message.

I understand what McClellan's doing, I just hate that it's working. Bush and his cabinet end up preaching the same ridiculous platitudes every day- "We're resolute, we're strong, this is crucial to the war on terror, we have to make sacrifices," and especially my new favorite, "You go to war with the Army you have." To add to this, the only media opportunities become staged events, like campaign stump speeches but worse. The President's unavailable for questions, every time- supposedly because of his busy schedule, but not so busy that he can't spend more time on vacation than any other sitting President.

When your foreign policy- and domestic policy, I might add- is really tanking, it's a good idea to get out there and be honest with people. I've always wondered what would happen if the President walked out in front of the White House Press Corps tomorrow and gave us a "you break it, you buy it," speech. (Yeah, we really dropped the ball on Iraq, but we gotta fix what we did wrong so we can go home.) It wouldn't represent a change of policy whatsoever- Bush and the hawks would just admit they were wrong, try to fix their mistakes, and once we got out of there, the only casualty would be their pride. And our European allies might suddenly be more willing to help out, to say nothing of the UN.

I'll stop with the what-ifs, because asking an administration like this to admit they screwed up is borderline delusional. (Remember what happened when that poor woman asked Candidate Bush what his regrets were over his first term?) Granted, some might see the administration as completely delusional. I actually think they see the situation just like we do- ("Holy s--t, this is really bad-") but every appearance on TV is one more chance to save face and convince Americans that, nah, it's not really that bad.

But thanks to Ed Pitts and Jerry Wilson- a soldier from Tennessee and a previously-unknown reporter from a fairly conservative newspaper- the most hawkish hawk of them all, Donald Rumsfeld, finally had to face some real questions about why the war in Iraq is going so damn badly. And hopefully, there are going to be some American lives saved over in that hellhole, because so many people are paying attention to the problem now.

If the right wants to complain about how Rumsfeld was embarrassed by a newspaper reporter, fine. Let them. Because they're hiding from the real issue. The embarrassing moment didn't come when Rumsfeld was put on the spot by a soldier who'd been coached by a reporter.

It came when, after hearing Wilson's pointed question, 2,300 soldiers all started cheering.

And I'm pretty sure nobody was coaching them.