The cowboy and Bin Laden show

Gene Lyons' dissections of the problems of American politics are consistently some of the best in the business. No wonder he's kept far away from network TV shows where the Big Pundits recite their established scripts indifferent to a disastrous war jusitified on the basis of lies and to Bush's claims that the President can decide on his own authority to disobey any law he chooses.

In his latest - In realm of political illusion, the world’s a stage 02/01/06 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette - he offers us this memorable short take:

Bush is the living embodiment of the Texan proverb, "All hat and no cattle." The French word is "poseur."

Or "big ole fake" would do it, too.

Lyons goes on to talk about the ways in which all politicians these days have to be actors to some extent. The problem with Bush's show, he says, is that Osama bin Laden is allowed to write the screenplay. Lyons writes:

But are we truly terrified by the bogeyman under Bush’s bed? Digby [the blogger] thinks not. We're more like teen-agers watching a horror movie, psychologically amped, but as spectators, not participants. Ghastly and horrifying as 9/11 was, he writes, "there was a sense of spectacle and drama about it that was literally unreal to those of us who watched it on television. This was fear put to music, with dramatic title treatments and a soaring voice-over." Constantly invoking that fear, Bush has turned bin Laden into a political asset - evil incarnate, Satan in a turban. That's one reason the president remains so popular in the Deep South, where fundamentalist black/white thinking and a taste for authoritarianism run strong. But it's worse than useless against the actual threat. Granting the president king-like powers to spy on anybody he chooses not only diminishes our own freedoms, it simply doesn't work. FBI and CIA agents complain of being flooded with a tsunami of useless information they can’t even translate, much less use. Real investigations grow narrower, not wider, as they proceed. Meanwhile, such tactics as torture, kidnapping combatants' wives and firing missiles from pilotless drones into Pakistani villages don't make terrorists fear us. They merely drag us down to their level, eroding America’s moral authority while sowing rage like dragon's teeth. (my emphasis)