A few days ago, Bush had one of his blue-moon press conferences. I haven’t posted so far because the issues involved are, well, involved, and require a great deal of time. And with this damned nose problem of mine, it’s hard to find time when I’m not in great pain to be able to deal with the issues. As it is, I am probably not up to snuff today, but I’ll give it a shot anyway. Blame the errors, if any, on the coedine…

In this conference, Bush gave his initial statement, then answered questions form 15 reporters. Bush was in his usual present state, which means he lost track of things a lot, stopped and hemmed and hawed frequently, and lost full track of a reporter’s question at one point. He seems to be getting worse with each one of these conferences.

In his opening statement, he gave firm hints about what he plans to do: scrap and rewrite the tax code, privatize social security, and blame Democrats for the budget. Well, he didn’t put the last one that way, but he made it clear: we have to have “strict discipline,” he wants to halve the budget deficit–but it requires “both parties working in a spirit of bipartisanship,” which is rather clearly code for “if the Democrats don’t agree with what we do and try to block it, we can blame them for it.”

The first two questions were obviously pre-chosen, basically generalized questions that allowed Bush to lay out his positions and talk up for PR reasons a few major points that they wanted him to touch on, while not appearing to focus on them too much. The first was on relations with Putin and Russia, the second–the big one–so as to give Bush a chance to lay down his spiel on Donald Rumsfeld, in hopes to pre-empt actual, detailed questions on the matter. In short, Bush praised Rumsfeld, once again glossing over rather glaring flaws and errors. Bush has a sort of associate blindness, an if-I-like-him-he-must-be-OK mentality–and that is the kindest interpretation.

The third question dealt with Kerik. You know, once, just once, I’d love to hear Bush answer a question straight. The whole Kerik situation was handled incredibly poorly; the entire point of a vetting process is to check out a candidate beyond their word. Kerik had so much stuff wrong with his that it showed up the Bush vetting process as practically useless. And yet Bush said that he had “great confidence in our vetting process,” and part of his reply was so muddled as to be practically nonresponsive. He was explaining the vetting process and why he has confidence in it:

There was a — you know, when the process gets going, our counsel asks a lot of questions, and — and the prospective nominee listens to the questions and answers them and takes a look at what — what we feel is necessary to be cleared before the FBI check and before the hearings take place on the Hill. And Bernard Kerik, after answering questions and thinking about the questions, decided to pull his name down. He — I think he would have a done a fine job as the secretary of Homeland Security, and I appreciate his service to our country.

Note all the stops and starts, the switching of subjects in mid-sentence–but even more, the disjointed nature of the reply within the context of the situation. It’s almost stream-of-broken-consciousness. How did any of that explanation support the idea that the vetting process is worthy of confidence? Is that its extent? If so, then it is pitifully inadequate, though it would explain why they didn’t find anything on Kerik when it took the press all of a few days to uncover a mine of questionable activities and associations.

And this again is an example of how badly Bush does in answering questions–and yet GOP spokespeople talk about him being at the top of his game, and performing brilliantly. They cannot be so blind, and neither can the press–Bush simply gets a bye from the media for these answers–answers so poor that I would give such a failing grade if it came from any of my non-native-speaker students. And yet somehow it is a brilliant answer from the president?

Then Bush was questioned about the weaknesses of the Iraq War in terms of the Iraqi army and the confidence the U.S. people have in the war in general. Bush’s reply was to gloss over the problems–“There have been some cases where when the heat got on, they left the battlefield.” Ya think? I suppose, given the abysmal state of affairs in Iraq, Bush answered as well as he could, but it still came out lame. In the end, he boiled it all down to, “polls change…. Polls go up, polls go down.” This is essentially what all of Bush’s responses to his failures boils down to: trivialization and masking the reality with a fantasy view built out of masking tape, spit, and a pittance of good-news items that pales when you take a good, hard, honest look at the totality of the situation.

It was on Social Security, however, that Bush got grilled on the most; the questions boiled down to: Mr. President, in order to get social security into order, your privatization plan won’t do squat, so in order to fix the real problem, won’t you have to make some actual tough decisions, like reducing benefits, raising the retirement age or raising payroll taxes just enough so that in 48 years, when Social Security might start lacking some funds, things will remain solvent?

That’s where it’s really at: Social Security is not in any real danger. Bush is trying to make it look like it’s falling apart so he can dismantle it completely, under the guise of rescuing it. But he’s not about to make the mistake of getting detailed. Instead of offering specifics about what he’s going to do, he flatly refused to discuss it under the rationalization of “I’m not going to let you make me negotiate with myself,” repeated again and again in his answers. God forbid a president, claiming to have a plan to essentially disassemble one of the most popular government programs, should have to offer details about it. Instead, Bush claims to be an “idea man”: “I’ll propose a solution at the appropriate time, but the law will be written in the halls of Congress.” Unless, of course, Congress makes the horrible error of not realizing that social security is going to fall apart at any moment:

And I understand how this works. You know, many times legislative bodies will not react unless the crisis is apparent, crisis is upon them. I believe the crisis is. And so for — for a period of time, we’re going to have to explain to members of Congress the crisis is here. It’s — lot less painful to act now than if we wait. That’s —

Ah. Well said.

The next reporter up–after Bush flatly refuses a request for a follow-up–asked Bush rather baldly to tell us how privatization will not destroy the system–although I was hoping desperately that this reporter would have the guts to lay down the specifics, not allowing Bush to simply ignore them–but he didn’t. He did not, for example, point out that investment companies would be taking a rather large percentage of workers’ contributions in the form of fees, or that even at its best, the system would leave many seniors in poverty. So Bush was able to entirely sidestep the glaring, gaping flaws in his idea and instead give a practiced PR spiel about how nifty the accounts are. First: they “encourage an ownership society”:

One of the philosophies of this government is if you own something, it is — it makes the country a better — the more people who own something, the country’s better off. You have a stake in the future of the country if you own something.

And he thinks we don’t have that system already? He thinks people feel that not owning things is better? This is just fluff, idiotic at that. One of the things Bush just doesn’t get is that we own the government. Like when he said we should give the wealthy a huge tax cut (and the common American a tiny sliver of one), because “it’s your money.” As if the national debt is not your debt. If anything, Bush believes in an “ownership society” only to the extent that if wealthy people can earn billions by manipulating the money markets, they “own” that money and god forbid that any of it should be taxed.

The second point Bush made: “it’s capital available for — when people save, it provides capital for entrepreneurial growth and entrepreneurial expansion, which is positive. In other words, it enhances savings.” In other words, it takes money from a secure government system and allows money manipulators to gamble with your retirement account money. And many will wind up losers. Those with little money in the first place will, at best, get meager returns; but when the markets go down, as they sometimes do–for long periods of time–how many poverty-line families will be able to support themselves, aside from continuing to work at the minimum-wage “quality” jobs this administration loves so much? Will they have to work well into their seventies while the economy gets better, if they’re lucky enough to have anything left in their accounts to leave to accrue on the chance the markets will come up enough so they can get some pittance from their accounts?

The final point Bush made was that people can pass on their accounts to family members or others. Well, that’s nice. But there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Money ain’t gonna start falling from trees just because you invest in the market rather than pay into a government fund. All the things Bush highlights suggest that everyone will be getting what they get now and more, but that simply is not realistic–especially when you consider that current retirees get paid by current workers. In other words, we’re paying into the system backwards. Instead of investing ahead, we’re paying late. Retirees don’t get the same money they paid in, that’s been spent already; they get money that new employees are paying now. If you switch to a new system which cuts that off, where will the money come from to pay for all the people who don’t have the investment accounts? We would essentially have to double-pay for social security–pay for the retirees off the current system for several decades while at the same time paying fully into the new account system. It just doesn’t add up.

Just like school vouchers, private social security accounts sound good so long as you don’t look too hard at them. Closer scrutiny, however, unveils hosts of problems that reveal that the system will simply not work.

Moving along… one intrepid reported asked Bush, if Iraq was enough of a threat to invade, then what about Iran and North Korea. Bush pulled out his standard “we negotiated with Iraq for 13 years and so we had to attack” chestnut. What, like we haven’t been negotiating with North Korea since, I don’t know, the end of the Korean War? That they haven’t violated so many agreements, that they don’t actively supply terrorists with weapons, that they don’t maintain a nuclear program, that they don’t oppress their own people and cause millions to starve?

Let’s get beyond the fiction here: Bush invaded Iraq for reasons all of his own: political capital, control of oil resources, playing to his base and satisfying the neo-con hardliners. None of these would be satisfied by invading North Korea, else Bush would be trying to get us there right now. One is only confused if one is stupid enough to believe that we went into Iraq because of WMD or to help the Iraqis.

Bush ended his answer with a real gem: “diplomacy must be the first choice and always the first choice.” Yeah, right.

Another reported pointed out that Bush never vetoed a spending bill. Bush answered incredulously, I set a budget, they spent the money in the budget, so how on Earth could I possibly veto their spending. Good lord, what a stupid answer. You veto spending bills if the Congress is spending money like a madman on pork. You use the veto to give yourself negotiating power, so you don’t need a line-item veto. (You know, of course, that the only reason we don’t have a line-item veto is because the GOP knows that Democrats sometimes inhabit the White House, and they can’t just have it rescinded temporarily at times like that. The real answer for Bush here is that he allowed a hemorrhage of spending to occur for Republicans in Congress and didn’t have any inclination at all to stop it–and likely will do the same in the future. Promises for cutting the deficit are science fiction.

The final question was about the Iraq War and its affect on Middle East diplomacy, and again Bush passed the buck here, saying essentially that we’ll make investments on negotiations once the Palestinians got around to electing just the government that we want.

All in all, a rather average press conference for Bush. Full of lies and misinformation. In a by-the-way line of observation, there were a few things I noted in this conference, not really new stuff, but worth noting. His staff occupied at least the first row of seats in the conference. When did they start that? And why are they sitting there? As far as I recall, in the past, it has always been reporters in those seats, and his own people sit or stand by the side, or at the president’s side.

But the other observation is one that I’ve made before: these press conferences are a sham. Bush is rarely challenged as presidents always used to be, the press is intimidated and held harshly in check. This editorial, for example, makes just a few of the many points that can be made on the topic. Harken back to the days of Kennedy when he held such meetings on a regular basis, sometimes every two weeks or so, and handled an inquisitive press corps with intelligence and style.

What we have today is a joke.