Sidney Blumenthal interview (LA City Beat 10/19)

[Starfury]

This is a nice, short interview with some interesting comments at http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=4495&IssueNum=176


A few snippets (interviewer's questions are italicized):


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.



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.



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.”