March 14, 2007--"Mistakes Were Made"
In “taking responsibility” for the latest scandal to rock the Bush administration, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said that “mistakes were made.”
By taking responsibility in the passive rather than the active voice, a grammatical construction where the objects of action become more important than their performer—“mistakes were made” as opposed to “I made mistakes”—he was attempting to deflect responsibility from himself while taking it. As if the mistakes somehow manifested themselves on their own momentum, without the initiation of an actor.
And for good measure, if he couldn’t get away with that, he had two ready fall people on which to blame the whole thing—his now-resigned deputy, fall-guy Kyle Sampson, and a fall-gal, the almost-Supreme-Court-justice Harriet Miers. (See NY Times article linked below.)
The administration is now seeming so universally inept that I am beginning to suspect that something other than incompetence and feloniousness is going on.
To illustrate, the list of fiascos and scandals from just the past two weeks leaves one breathless. I’m not sure I have them in the right order since they rolled out so rapidly—Scooter Libby was convicted of four felonies; the shame of Walter Reed Hospital and the unconscionable treatment of veteran “heroes” was revealed; Halliburton announced that it would move its headquarters to Dubai--I assumed to get closer to its money, others accused them of attempting to avoid taxes and dodge Congressional investigations; the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called homosexuality “immoral”; and now we are learning about the shamefully political way in which U.S Attorneys were summarily fired.
Of course this comes on top of even greater examples of incompetence and malfeasance—the inability to rebuild New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast, the quagmire in Iraq (we are about to “celebrate” the fifth anniversary of that war), and of course the failure to win the so-called War On Terror.
But the more I think about all of this, the tectonic failures and the reprehensible political machinations, I am coming to see them as interconnected. Not in the fact that they are all manifestations of a contemptuous, overreaching, and inept administration that is eager to snatch power back from the other branches of government, but rather as a strategy of distraction.
The media helps to distract us from critical and disturbing issues by devoting so much of its print and air time pandering to our appetite for salacious things such as Anna Nicole Smith’s death and autopsy; but the administration is brilliant at distracting us from its failures by overloading us with a relentless wave of . . . failures.
The Scooter Libby trial and verdict distracted us from the war that he helped get us into; Walter Reed pushed Libby into the background so that we forgot about whose fall guy he in fact was; Walter Reed then slipped off the screen as we debated again the army’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy; and now that, after just one day in the “news,” has been subsumed by Congress sensing that the Attorney General’s blood is in the water.
What will tomorrow bring? What mistakes will be made? Stay tuned since I promise you there is more to come.
By taking responsibility in the passive rather than the active voice, a grammatical construction where the objects of action become more important than their performer—“mistakes were made” as opposed to “I made mistakes”—he was attempting to deflect responsibility from himself while taking it. As if the mistakes somehow manifested themselves on their own momentum, without the initiation of an actor.
And for good measure, if he couldn’t get away with that, he had two ready fall people on which to blame the whole thing—his now-resigned deputy, fall-guy Kyle Sampson, and a fall-gal, the almost-Supreme-Court-justice Harriet Miers. (See NY Times article linked below.)
The administration is now seeming so universally inept that I am beginning to suspect that something other than incompetence and feloniousness is going on.
To illustrate, the list of fiascos and scandals from just the past two weeks leaves one breathless. I’m not sure I have them in the right order since they rolled out so rapidly—Scooter Libby was convicted of four felonies; the shame of Walter Reed Hospital and the unconscionable treatment of veteran “heroes” was revealed; Halliburton announced that it would move its headquarters to Dubai--I assumed to get closer to its money, others accused them of attempting to avoid taxes and dodge Congressional investigations; the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called homosexuality “immoral”; and now we are learning about the shamefully political way in which U.S Attorneys were summarily fired.
Of course this comes on top of even greater examples of incompetence and malfeasance—the inability to rebuild New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast, the quagmire in Iraq (we are about to “celebrate” the fifth anniversary of that war), and of course the failure to win the so-called War On Terror.
But the more I think about all of this, the tectonic failures and the reprehensible political machinations, I am coming to see them as interconnected. Not in the fact that they are all manifestations of a contemptuous, overreaching, and inept administration that is eager to snatch power back from the other branches of government, but rather as a strategy of distraction.
The media helps to distract us from critical and disturbing issues by devoting so much of its print and air time pandering to our appetite for salacious things such as Anna Nicole Smith’s death and autopsy; but the administration is brilliant at distracting us from its failures by overloading us with a relentless wave of . . . failures.
The Scooter Libby trial and verdict distracted us from the war that he helped get us into; Walter Reed pushed Libby into the background so that we forgot about whose fall guy he in fact was; Walter Reed then slipped off the screen as we debated again the army’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy; and now that, after just one day in the “news,” has been subsumed by Congress sensing that the Attorney General’s blood is in the water.
What will tomorrow bring? What mistakes will be made? Stay tuned since I promise you there is more to come.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
11:55 AM
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