Thank You, George W. Bush
What he was trying to do instead was build an empire out of lies.
But his arrogant rejection of the public’s right to know or the media’s responsibility to inquire; his secretive, undemocratic governing process; and his cynical, mendacious efforts to promote his agenda with convenient lies instead of the awkward truth, compelled Americans to discover an alternate world in which facts and logic stood a chance against wealth, power, coercion, and deceit.
Teasing out the truth became the avocation, if not obsession of thousands of observers who turned to the Internet to disseminate, validate, and share their alternate hypotheses.
Of course, George had plenty of help, especially from the media.
The Bush Administration has achieved the acme in media control. Its tools: lockstep uniformity of message; the use and abuse of government officials, policies, and institutions to promote narrowly political aims and set the media agenda; cloaking its secrets and deceptions behind a curtain of plausible deniability and executive privilege; aggressive campaigns to discredit its enemies and bury inconvenient facts; and granting and withholding access as a form of reward and punishment.
Big-league journalism has become an exercise in fawning stenography. The mainstream media is on its knees, slurping up pap — or worse — while the national outlets scramble to maintain their increasingly valueless role in an ever more debased news cycle.
Small wonder that people have turned to the Internet for foreign news and domestic commentary not beholden to the White House and its blatantly false and self-serving version of events.
But the last two years have been bad for elites in general.
The disastrous folly of Iraq has demonstrated that our leaders are not only fallible and capable of catastrophic error. It has shown that they are unwilling to undermine their own legitimacy and authority either by taking responsibility for their mistakes or bearing the political costs of mitigating them.
With a few notable exceptions, the intelligence, diplomatic, military, religious, media, academic, and business elites, who claim to hold a near monopoly on the experience and wisdom needed to guide us in these perilous times to the optimum national outcome, failed us badly both during the stampede toward war in Iraq and in its awful aftermath.
Now it looks like We the People could have done a better job.
Therefore, instead of blind faith in our leaders and our so-called betters to conceive and deliver the best possible future — or even an acceptable one — we have skepticism.
We have critical analysis and a quest for truth and new ideas.
We have, in one word...
...democracy.
And we have a medium in which we exercise our democratic imperative to explore, argue, persuade, and progress — the blogosphere.
A venue that owes its vitality, legitimacy, and importance to one man.
And for that, I never thought I’d be typing these words, but…
Thank you.
Thank you, George W. Bush.
