Nothing But Words

I’m learning more about what makes Bush tick, and I’m disturbed by what I’m finding.

Let’s start with the conventional wisdom, which I believe is accurate, but incomplete. It describes his top down, highly insular management style and general lack of curiosity:

While President Clinton consumed vast amounts of daily reading, President Bush has established a much more hierarchical White House with information moving up the ranks, analysts say. “Presidents vary in how curious they are and how far down they reach in terms of the advice they get,” says Fred Greenstein, a presidential scholar at Princeton University. “President Bush has a top down management style…” – Christian Science Monitor, 4/15/04

He is impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic, often uncurious and as a result ill-informed; more conventional in his thinking than a leader probably should be. – David Frum, former Bush speechwriter

DIANE SAWYER: First of all, I just want to ask about reading. Mr. President, you know that there was a great deal of reporting about the fact that you said, first of all, that you let Condoleezza Rice and Andrew Card give you a flavor of what’s in the news.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yes.

DIANE SAWYER: That you don’t read the stories yourself.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yes. I get my news from people who don’t editorialize. They give me the actual news, and it makes it easier to digest, on a daily basis, the facts.

DIANE SAWYER: Is it just harder to read constant criticism or to read -

PRESIDENT BUSH: Why even put up with it when you can get the facts elsewhere? I’m a lucky man. I’ve got, it’s not just Condi and Andy, it’s all kinds of people in my administration who are charged with different responsibilities, and they come in and say this is what’s happening, this isn’t what’s happening. – ABC interview with President Bush, 12/16/03

“I appreciate people’s opinions, but I’m more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.” – Fox News interview with President Bush, 9/22/03

Looking a little deeper, there is more to it than this, however. Bush is capable of curiosity and doing his own investigation, but only when he encounters something that intrigues him. I have only been able to find two instances of this – stem cell research, and his campaign:

Ironically, Greenstein says that Bush was beginning to move outside that hierarchical style in the summer of 2001 – but directed his attention toward stem cells, and not a historic terrorist threat. “There was a lot of concern about whether George W. was really up to speed in the eight months leading up to 9/11,” Greenstein says. “One of the signs that he was locking into the job and not winging it and treating it as if he were still a C student at Yale was his interest in stem cell research. He did what you don’t associate with him: reaching out to other people. When they talked to him about other subjects, he asked them about stem cells.” – Christian Science Monitor, 4/15/04

Several aides said Mr. Bush viewed this as the campaign of his life and had intervened on matters as large as the themes it should strike and as small as particular shots of him in his television advertisements. In particular, aides said, Mr. Bush has, along with Mr. Rove, been a driving force behind the attacks that have become a hallmark of his campaign since Mr. Kerry emerged from the spring primaries as the Democratic candidate…

As Mr. Bush was flying from Texas to New Mexico on Thursday, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, turned to him on Air Force One and suggested that Albuquerque was heavily Democratic, White House aides said. Mr. Bush responded by saying the city was split politically, and he talked about the importance of its suburban counties…

On weekdays, aides say, the campaign essentially begins in the White House residence, where Mr. Bush rises at 5 a.m. to read the newspapers and check on the political news. By 7 a.m., when he is in the Oval Office, aides say, Mr. Bush will frequently tell them about an article they have not seen and tell them to call the reporter and complain. – New York Times, 8/29/04

But he still has his limits:

Rove said he typically went to Mr. Bush in the morning with a list of as many as two dozen topics and political questions scrawled in longhand. Mr. Bush is very engaged at the beginning of the conversation, but begins to flag before long, Mr. Rove said. “He’ll say, ‘You’re running out of airspeed and altitude,’ ” Mr. Rove said. – New York Times, 8/29/04

What’s maddening to me is that Bush did not choose to get involved with acquiring a similar degree of knowledge and expertise in understanding what was really going on in Iraq, before the invasion:

The [CIA's National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq] had concluded (wrongly) that Hussein had WMDs, but it also contained information contrary to that finding. Anyone who read the full NIE – which was only 90 pages long – would have seen that the case was not a slam dunk and that analysts within the intelligence community disputed key portions of the case.
Did Bush bother to read the NIE before deciding to launch the invasion of Iraq? No. Who says so? The White House. The day it declassified parts of the NIE, a senior administration official held a background briefing for reporters, who were not allowed to reveal this official’s name. Here is an excerpt from that July 18, 2003 briefing:

QUESTION: When did the President read this NIE?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I’m sorry. The President has been briefed on more than – countless conversations with his national – with intelligence community about the contents of the NIE. I don’t think he sat down over a long weekend and read every word of it. But he’s familiar, intimately familiar with the case because he based his decisions on the case that is both included in this and information that probably was not included in this.

QUESTION: So this would have been read, presumably, by the National Security Advisor [Condoleezza Rice], and then she would have briefed the President on it?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Again, we have experts who work for the National Security Advisor who would know this information, who understand this information. He relies upon his administration, the CIA, themselves, as well, to give their best judgments. And that’s what took place.

QUESTION: Can you square the one circle? Last week, the National Security Advisor told us that neither she, nor the President were aware of any concerns about the quality of the intelligence underlying this allegation. Given that it is a footnote, it’s one of six opinions, but the fact that in this NIE there is expressed concern that this is of dubious quality, how is it possible that the National Security Advisor and the President would not have been aware of those reservations?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: They did not read footnotes in a 90-page document.

Bush did not read the NIE on Iraq. Neither did Rice. And the reference to “footnotes” is misleading. When NIEs are produced, analysts from different intelligence services come together to try to draft a consensus document. If a service disagrees with the conclusions reached by others, it “takes a footnote.” These “footnotes” are not necessarily buried at the back of the document. Often they are highlighted. Anyone who reads an NIE seriously cannot avoid the “footnotes.” Had Bush and Rice read the NIE on Iraq they would have come across several “footnotes” that should have caused them to question the overall findings. – David Corn, 7/8/04 (and here’s the complete transcript)

According to the New York Times, [Senator Bob Graham - a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee] was one of the few members of the Senate who saw the national intelligence estimate that was the basis for Bush’s decisions. After reviewing it, Graham requested that the Bush administration declassify the information before the Senate voted on the administration’s resolution requesting use of the military in Iraq.

But rather than do so, CIA Director Tenet merely sent Graham a letter discussing the findings. Graham then complained that Tenet’s letter only addressed “findings that supported the administration’s position on Iraq,” and ignored information that raised questions about intelligence. In short, Graham suggested that the Administration, by cherrypicking only evidence to its own liking, had manipulated the information to support its conclusion.

Recent statements by one of the high-level officials privy to the decision making process that lead to the Iraqi war also strongly suggest manipulation, if not misuse of the intelligence agencies. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, during an interview with Sam Tannenhaus of Vanity Fair magazine, said: “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.” More recently, Wolfowitz added what most have believed all along, that the reason we went after Iraq is that “[t]he country swims on a sea of oil.” – CNN.com Law Center web site

Having a leader who receives information solely from an insular group of advisors – who themselves cherry-pick information sources that suit their preconceptions – sounds more like what you’d expect from an oligarchy or a dictatorship, not a democracy. (In regard to Iraq, here are some more sources for this argument: Was Bush fixated on ‘getting Saddam’?, The Manipulator, Did one woman’s obsession take America to war?, and Going into Iraq.)

Obviously Bush has the ability to step outside of the hierarchy he created and obtain information however he chooses. But, as far as I can tell, he has only displayed such initiative on the stem-cell research issue (which I imagine piqued his interest due to its religious implications) and his own presidential campaign. Where was his curiosity and information-gathering initiative when he was weighing the evidence to justify invading Iraq?

There is no such thing as the terrible twos. It’s the terrible threes that you have to look out for. This is the age when kids really start experimenting with different behaviors, as they observe how others behave and try to “find themselves.” That means it’s the age where they start picking up things from other kids. For example, Kai has discovered the phrase “that’s not fair!” which he now uses whenever he doesn’t get what he wants, right now.

I haven’t blogged much this past week as Kai has been running us ragged. After a nice long stretch of being a “good sleeper,” he has reverted to his old habit of being a “bad sleeper.” He’s taking a long time to fall asleep each night, and asking us to come in his room for one thing or another every 5 minutes. It’s sometimes tricky knowing when to indulge him and when not to, as his eczema is a genuine problem, and he’ll scratch himself to the point of bleeding if we don’t keep him properly lotioned and potioned. And he’s off diapers completely now, so we strongly encourage him to use the toilet when needed. So, in order to prolong bedtime, he’s happy to maximize the leverage these two things give him. And then he’s waking up numerous times throughout the night.

He had his first public tantrum at a grocery store on Saturday (until now he’s always restricted his tantrums to the privacy of our home). But on Sunday he was good, and he slept well last night, so hopefully this was just a rough week, and not a sign of things to come.

Here are some pictures we’ve taken here and there since coming back from Newport in June:

The Toogle site is a fun image search engine. If you type in Mike Toppa, you get a picture of my cousin, Mike Toppa. Better him than me

If you use AOL instant messenger, it has probably installed a program called wildtangent on your system. This is an online gaming plugin. According to the company that makes it, it’s not doing anything pernicious. But spyany.com says it that will share your name, address, phone number and email address (if it can get them, presumably from your AOL profile) and track your software product usage. They also tell you how to uninstall it.

What’s interesting is that AOL didn’t modify their EULA to cover the inclusion of wildtangent until after they began distributing it with AIM. So even if you actually bothered to read the fine print, you wouldn’t have known about it.

I discovered wildtangent installing itself on my system when my spybot system monitor caught it trying to make changes to my system registry. I’ve been refusing my AIM client’s recent attempts to upgrade itself, but that apparently doesn’t stop the wildtangent installation from happening. If you’re using Windows, I highly recommend spybot – you can download it for free.

This is a must-read: The Brains Thing – Three years of watching Bush makes the point: Intelligence matters more than “character.” It mentions something I had forgotten about: the State Department’s Future of Iraq group, which was given $5 million before the Iraqi invasion to assess what would happen, and what would be needed, in a post-invasion Iraq. They predicted that we would need to be on guard against looting in the immediate aftermath of the invasion (we weren’t, and looting was rampant), that the Iraqis very well might not greet us with open arms, that the 400,000-strong Iraqi army should not be reduced in size until there were new jobs for the soldiers (instead we completely disbanded the Iraqi army), that we should be prepared for the complexities of the intertwining of religion and politics in Iraq, and that the infrastructure (water, electrical, etc.) was in far worse shape than the Pentagon was planning for. It’s obvious now that none of this advise was heeded, and reading “The Brains Thing” provides some insight as to why.

Here’s an interesting tidbit from the latest Zogby poll: even though the overall polling has Bush and Kerry in a dead heat, the poll “found that voters holding passports preferred Kerry 58 percent to 35 percent for Bush. Voters without passports favored Bush 48-39 percent.” Make of that what you will.

You may have noticed I added a link to Technorati in the right-hand column about six weeks ago. I have removed it. Technorati is supposed to be the Google of blogs. The trouble is, it doesn’t work. I have repeatedly tried to “claim” my blog, but it never goes through. When I try to sign in, my password never works (I end up having to reset it every time I want to sign in). I’ve attempted to change my contact email address with them 3 times, and it never sticks (it keeps reverting back to the email address I initially signed up with). At first I thought maybe they were having a bad day, but I’ve tried several times over the past month or so, and I have the same trouble every time. The idea behind their site is cool, but the implementation is a disaster.

I’m turning off the “comment” feature for a while. For now, please provide comments via the email link on your right. I’m being hit with some automated spam script that’s throwing about 100 spam comments at my site every day. Since I’ve upgraded to Movable Type 3, they no longer appear on the site, which is good (as I have to approve them first), but I still have to go through and manually delete them from the queue every day.

What I’ll do next is upgrade my templates too (I’m still using the Movable Type 2 templates) and then I can require folks to register before they can post comments. I really didn’t want to go there, as I like keeping this as an open forum, but I have to do something to stem the tide of spam.

It’s always a challenge keeping my hobbies under control. My blogging has slowed down as I’ve been distracted by experimenting with my new DVD burner and iPod, building a web site for Maria, and working in the yard.

Maria and Kai visited her folks in Denver last week. They had a great trip, but they lost many of Kai’s DVDs on the plane. Previously, he’s also had DVDs that became unplayable due to scratches. So I’ve invested in a DVD burner so I can make back up copies of his DVDs (well, after we buy or rent the originals again anyway). Unfortunately, the Digital Millenimum Copyright Act has resulted in a situation where we still have a right to fair use of DVDs, including having backup copies, but the tools which allow us to make the copies are illegal. But I started finding ways to back up copy-protected software when I was a 13 year old with a Commodore 64, so I’m not about to stop now….Anyway, I picked the right time to buy a DVD burner, as the new dual-layer burners are on the market now. I got the Sony one. The dual-layer discs can hold as much data as commercially released DVDs, which means you can make direct copies, with no compression required. The only problem is, you can’t get the blank dual-layer discs yet (actually, you can, but only through Verbatim, and all they have is a 10 pack, in which only 1 of the 10 discs is a dual layer one). In the meantime, I’m using single-layer discs with DVD Shrink, which is without a doubt the most well-made freeware desktop application I’ve ever used.

Maria gave me an iPod for my birthday, but my hard drive crash happened soon after that, so I haven’t really had a chance to use it until recently. What a fabulous toy! The people at Apple are colonizing my mind. It’s a fundamentally different kind of music player than a tape or CD player, and at first I was worried there would be an intimidating learning curve (here’s an amsuing comparison of an iPod and a cassette). But I found it to be amazingly intuitive. Every time I wanted to do something with it, I’d take a guess at which button to push, and my guess was always right. It’s impressive how much functionality they’ve squeezed out of an interface that consists of a small screen, four buttons, and a dial. A while back my friend Jay sent me a bunch of CDs full of mp3′s, and I never found the time for the task of converting them to regular music CDs. Last night I downloaded them onto my iPod in no time, and so far I’m enjoying the new Convenant album (well, new to me anyway, it’s actually two years old).

Maria and I have started building a web site for the Decision ’04 class she’ll be co-teaching this Fall. We’re using the Xoops content management system. One of the features we really wanted to use was the “Headlines” feature (an RSS newsfeed service, which you can use for things like embedding the current New York Times headlines directly into your site). But I discovered our hosting provider had disabled the PHP fopen function, which Xoops relies on for the newsfeed. They turned it off for good reason: it has a security hole big enough to drive an open mail relay through. I solved the problem by rewriting the Xoops newsfeeder to use cURL instead. There’s a discussion thread on this problem with the newsfeeder on the Xoops site, so I posted the fix there.

And the yard…A couple weeks ago I hired a crew to come through and remove all the trees and shrubs (save for a nice Japanese maple). I would’ve done it myself, but I don’t have a stump grinder, and they do. The previous owners of our house were an elderly couple, and they neglected the yard for probably 20 years. So the easiest solution was just to remove all the overgrown shrubs and half-dead trees. So now I’m removing all the weeds, defining the borders between the garden areas and the lawn, etc. Until now, I’ve deliberately avoided working in the yard much since we moved in, as I enjoy it more than working inside the house, and I was worried I’d end up neglecting important indoor projects (like re-wiring the electrical system). But I figure it’ll be ok to work on the yard for the rest of the summer, and then turn my attention indoors again in the Fall.