[Austin-ghetto-list] NYTimes.com Article: Autumn of Fears

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Karen,
Here's the column that mentions rove

fontainetx@earthlink.net


Autumn of Fears

September 23, 2001 

By MAUREEN DOWD


 

WASHINGTON 
In the lost world, when New York's twin towers were still
standing, in fact the day before they were diabolically
demolished, a friend e-mailed to suggest a column about why
George W. Bush didn't seem to like his job. 

What's your evidence? I asked. 

"He doesn't look happy on
TV," my friend replied. "Plus the long vacation. Plus him
complaining about all the work involved in the stem cell
decision. Maybe what would make him happy is having been
president. But not being president." 

It was true that Mr. Bush did not bound through the White
House the way his father and Bill Clinton did. This
president seemed happiest escaping the White House, flying
down to whack brush on his isolated ranch. 

It was clear early on that Mr. Bush did not like tumult. He
cringed from the election muddle, recoiled from the
abortion miasma, suffered through the stem cell debate.
After the Technicolor chaos of Mr. Clinton, Mr. Bush tried
to paint his White House - and world - in black and white.
Unilateral and punctual. With certainties and without
disruptions. With restrictions on informal dress and
cellphones. 

It is an astonishing knuckleball of history that the
president who abhors mess is presiding over a spectacularly
messy conflict. A devout believer in the simple and short
is hunting down a devout believer in the murky and
metastasizing, an unholy demon who creates an endless loop
of malevolence. 

Mr. Bush's administration might have been clinging to a
cold-war mentality, but America's new foes in Afghanistan
are clinging to a medieval mindset in a country so ravaged
Clinton officials said they tried to "bomb them up to the
Stone Age" (a bombing that only succeeded in lionizing
Osama bin Laden). Women are not allowed to go to school and
TV's, music and even kites are banned. Mullah Mohammed
Omar, the leader of the Taliban, is reputed to be so crazed
that when shrapnel hit his eye in a battle with the
Russians, he simply cut it out with a knife and kept going.


Washington's organization man is confronting the unknown,
abruptly shifting his attention from T-ball and lockboxes
to the amorphous and impenetrable. The homebody, who always
preferred a more sheltered existence than his father, the
peripatetic internationalist, has courageously committed to
ripping the homeless terrorists from their cells. 

Mr. Bush distinguished himself in the Capitol on Thursday
night, with an impressive speech impressively delivered. He
looked, for that searing half- hour, as if he really wanted
to be the president who delivers us from this "autumn of
tears," as the writer Leon Wieseltier calls it. 

Those close to the president say he has left his political
self behind to take on his life's mission. 

But Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's political strategist, is in the
middle of our national security crisis. First, he called
around town, trying to sell reporters the story - now
widely discredited - that Mr. Bush didn't immediately
return to Washington on Sept. 11 because the plane that was
headed for the Pentagon may have really been targeting the
White House, and that Air Force One was in jeopardy, too.
Then Mr. Rove apparently grew livid when Dick Cheney's
dramatic retelling of the scene in the White House
relegated the president to a footnote. 

Mr. Bush seems aware that fate has brought him to an
amazing juncture. The scion who started as an Ivy slacker,
getting serious about politics late in life, the candidate
who loped into the White House, propelled by daddy's
friends and contributors, the good-natured guy who
benefited from low expectations, has taken on a campaign
that would chill even Churchill: annihilating nihilists in
the cradle of civilization who want to wreck civilization. 

The president's inner circle was drawn from the bunker of
the Persian Gulf war. He has used the same language about
good vs. evil, but no one is claiming this conflict is
about oil. Poppy's video-game war provides him with little
guidance. America has never tried to protect itself from
the inside out. The Bush team says this is a different kind
of war. The country is hoping the Bush crew won't fall back
on conventional thinking. 

Mr. Bush promised, as his father once did, to draw a line
in the sand. But how do you draw a line in a maze? How can
you be definite in these mists - smallpox and anthrax and
shape- shifting suicide bombers? 

We know about the fog of war. Now we learn about the war of
fog.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/23/opinion/23DOWD.html?ex=1002520655&ei=1&en=86d571a3154dacb8



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