a view of the radical right

Interview with Sidney Blumenthal
The journalist and Clinton advisor on
The 'radical' GOP, the real Dick Cheney, and
why you should thank Nancy Reagan
-- by Steve Appleford
Los Angeles City Beat

Sidney Blumenthal first came to Washington, D.C., as a journalist, arriving in time for the '80s Reagan Revolution and all the revolutions that followed: Clinton, Gingrich, Bush II. He witnessed much of it up close, first as a reporter for the New Republic, Washington Post, and The New Yorker, and then as a special advisor to President Bill Clinton. It was in the White House that he experienced politics at its most immediate and ruthless, watching legislative ideas turned into real action but also being called before the grand jury of independent counsel Kenneth Starr.
Blumenthal is a journalist once again, contributing columns and heavily reported pieces on Washington for Salon and the Guardian of London. In How Bush Rules: The Chronicles of a Radical Regime (Princeton), Blumenthal collects much of that work into a document of the George W. Bush years, a "real time" chronology of missteps and misinformation that very often reads like an indictment of our current president and the GOP. It is the story of an imperial presidency, a time of one-party rule and a collapse of the crucial checks and balances provided for in the Constitution.
His days as a White House aide remain a vivid memory. "It's certainly the most encompassing, intense experience I've ever had," Blumenthal says now. "You see human nature under the greatest possible stresses."

CityBeat: How long have you viewed the Bush administration as a "radical regime"?

Sidney Blumenthal: During the Reagan period, I covered the conservative movement and Iran-Contra and the Reagan White House for the Washington Post and spent a lot of time with the neo-conservatives. In the elder Bush administration, they were not allowed in. And when I saw them coming back, I had a very clear idea of what they were all about, and that at least in foreign policy would be very radical.
I also had personal experience with [Dick] Cheney. When I first came to Washington in the mid-'80s, I used to interview him when he was the House minority whip. I knew that he was much more of a hard-right figure than the false stereotypes perpetuated by much of the media - that he was this senior, moderating, prudent figure who would guide the young Bush in the ways of elder Bush. I never believed that.
When Cheney was leading the Bush campaign search for a vice-presidential candidate in 2000, he picked himself.
Cheney was put in charge of the process, and was supposedly the most disinterested person as a surrogate for the father. He gathered all the dirt on all the potential candidates, then picked himself. Cheney has always wanted to be president. He wanted to run in '92. [Donald] Rumsfeld wanted to be president, too. Now they are.

Is the Cheney that you knew back in the '80s the same as he is now?

The Cheney I knew had hard-right instincts and has moved systematically hard-right. Cheney went from facilitating [Newt] Gingrich and the so-called Republican revolution to an alliance with the neo-conservatives. And that was facilitated by his wife, Lynn Cheney, who had been far-right chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. I call her Madame Mao. She was at the American Enterprise Institute, where all these neo-conservatives were clustered. Cheney really got to know them well, and saw in them a network that he could put in place.
So even if Cheney wasn't necessarily part of that movement, he saw some common ground to exploit.
They were useful. They shared perspectives. Cheney is a smart man but not an intellectual. He was impressed with the veneer of intellectualism of the neo-conservatives. It gave greater rationales for where he wanted to take things.

In the '80s, Reagan seemed radical to many progressives, but Bush makes Reagan look fairly reasonable.

This Bush is one of the major causes of historical revisionism. Every past president now gets his past reputation revised upward. Reagan is a different figure. For example, Reagan would make a deal with Democrats on Social Security. When the neo-cons and other adventurers ran his administration into the Iran-Contra scandal, he got rid of them. He actually had a vision of world peace - which Bush does not have at all - that he steered toward the end of the Cold War, despite heavy criticism from his right.

Should we give some credit to Nancy Reagan?

I was a big Nancy Reagan fan. I wrote an article at the New Republic praising Nancy Reagan for her role in helping her husband find his path toward the end of the Cold War. She was absolutely instrumental. There is no similar relationship between Bush and Laura at all. She apparently has as much power as you and I.

Your book's opening column, from 2003, already refers to "post-war carnage."

It was apparent to me then the occupation was a catastrophe, everything had been bungled, that the Bush administration was at war with the career staff professionals in the intelligence community, that they were engaged in the politics of annihilation against any critics and were already trying to destroy Ambassador Joe Wilson. All of these things were apparent.

Popular opinion is now overwhelmingly opposed to the Iraq war. Why has it taken this long?

Historians are going to ask this question. There was a study done on voters by the University of Maryland on the parallel universes of Kerry and Bush supporters, which says people who supported Bush had a completely different set of facts. The vast majority of them believed Saddam Hussein was involved in Al Qaeda and 9/11, that there were WMD in Iraq - and that they had been found.
There were a lot of people who persuaded themselves that what Bush was doing would last forever politically, and they aligned themselves with Bush, including parts of the press corps. They convinced themselves that Karl Rove was a genius and all this was the result of his genius political strategy. And Bush was a stalwart person of profound conviction. And they thought it was all going to work.

Many people had doubts early on about going into Iraq. Why weren't they represented by an effective opposition in Congress?

People didn't know whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction. And when the National Intelligence Estimate was produced on WMD and given to Congress, something like 72 hours before the vote on the authorization to use military force, very few members read through it. If they had, they would have found the caveats buried in the footnotes. And we later found out the NIE was distorted and contained falsehoods, as well.
This took place in a very heated political atmosphere, in which Democrats who might have hesitated were stigmatized as unpatriotic and soft on terrorism. And the resolution itself called for diplomatic activity, and the U.N. weapons inspectors to complete their mission - which they were never allowed to do. Democrats got completely boxed in and turned in on themselves. And with the new Congress coming in 2003, they had no power. They controlled nothing.

What role did the press have in all this?

There are a lot of people in the press who have done really excellent reportage. But the press as a whole during this period has a sorry record of passivity, abdication of responsibility, caving in to campaigns of intimidation, and, above all, self-censorship.

It looks like we're about to enter into an interesting period following this election.

We're headed into a potential constitutional crisis if the Democrats get one or both houses of Congress. They will certainly have subpoena power and I think the Bush administration is likely to resist the production of documents.
The idea in my book is that Bush has created a radical presidency that is unaccountable. And if a check-and-balance is introduced for the first time to Bush, instead of one-party rule, we're going to have another crisis. The conflict will increase, not diminish. As Bette Davis said, "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy ride."