Culture warriors (continued)

TO AN EXTENT you wouldn’t think possible, Bush’s defenders have already succeeded in defining, and thus limiting, his problems.

Take, for instance, the matter of whether he went AWOL in 1972 and ’73 while serving in the Texas Air National Guard — reported on exhaustively in 2000 by the Boston Globe’s Walter Robinson, and now getting a wider airing because of the contrast with Kerry’s war record. Already, we have seen attempts to cast this as though the issue were Bush’s choice to serve at home rather than in Vietnam — a perfectly honorable choice, and just as honorable as fleeing to Canada in order to avoid serving in that evil misadventure. Last week, none other than former senator Bob Dole, who was badly wounded during World War II, appeared on The Daily Show to peddle the line that he wasn’t going to criticize anyone who chose to serve in the Guard. Host Jon Stewart was incredulous, and asked whether the real issue wasn’t whether Bush didn’t serve in the Guard. The audience whooped and hollered. But, already, we’ve seen several Bush-friendly commentators dig up Kerry’s 1992 defense of Bill Clinton’s avoidance of Vietnam service, as though that were in any way comparable to the gap in Bush’s record. (On Tuesday, the Globe reported that newly uncovered documents suggest that Bush did serve. Yet, as the story noted, those documents do not square with the recollection of Bush’s commanding officer, who has insisted that Bush did not report for duty.)

Or, to take a more crucial example, the matter of the failed intelligence over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which led us to invade a sovereign nation and transform a totalitarian, murderous hellhole into a chaotic, murderous hellhole. (Remember, we had to: they wouldn’t let us in.) A failure of intelligence, David Kay assured Congress. We can’t get everything right, said CIA director George Tenet in a speech last week. "I expected to find the weapons," the president told Tim Russert. "Sitting behind this desk, making a very difficult decision of war and peace, and I based my decision on the very best intelligence possible, intelligence that had been gathered over the years, intelligence that not only our analysts thought was valid but analysts from other countries thought were valid." Poor George W. What was he supposed to do?

Yet the notion that the intelligence agencies somehow failed Bush is a grotesque rewrite of recent history. Last spring, in long, detailed reports, John Judis and Spencer Ackerman (in the New Republic) and Seymour Hersh (in the New Yorker) wrote about how the White House repeatedly pressured the CIA and other intelligence-gathering groups to give it what it needed, what it wanted, to make the case for war in Iraq. The pressure, on occasion, reportedly came from Dick Cheney himself, and included such falsehoods as an assertion by national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice that the Iraqis were using a particular type of aluminum tube to reconstitute their nuclear-weapons program (US experts had already concluded that wasn’t true) and by other officials that Iraq had attempted to obtain yellowcake uranium, a nuclear-bomb ingredient, from Niger (former ambassador Joseph Wilson discredited this claim at the CIA’s behest, which may have led directly to the outing of his CIA-agent wife, Valerie Plame, in retribution). Hersh went so far as to describe the existence of an alternative intelligence-gathering operation, run out of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz’s shop, that trafficked in rumors from the notoriously unreliable Iraqi-exile community and that denigrated the naysayers at the CIA.

Russert pressed Bush on this, but not very hard. And the presidential commission Bush established last week to explore the quality of American intelligence before the war — which, conveniently, will not report until well after the November election — reflects the notion that it was the CIA that failed the president, rather than the other way around. The only hope is that Senator John McCain, who will serve on the commission, will live up to his maverick reputation and blow the whistle if he sees the need, despite his own pro-war stand.

"I strongly believe the CIA is ably led by George Tenet," Bush told Russert last weekend.

"His job is not in jeopardy?"

"No, not at all, not at all," Bush replied.

No surprise there. Why should he turn on his trained poodle? Especially since a bitter Tenet, bent on revenge, could do him so much harm.

THIS WEEK’S National Enquirer teases an ELECTION SHOCKER. The front-page headline: JOHN KERRY’S SECRET LIFE EXPOSED. Inside is an info dump of every negative piece of news and non-news that "America’s Newspaper" had managed to find out about the Massachusetts senator. (I almost said "managed to dig up," except that I’ve heard every story the Enquirer’s got except the "telling revelation" that he supposedly likes to look at himself in the mirror while making whoopee.)

Yes, it’s all here. When he wasn’t married, he had sex, sometimes with Hollywood stars. He might have had sex with a 22-year-old model when he was married. (Then again, he might not have.) He wasn’t injured all that badly in Vietnam. He didn’t really throw his medals away. He smoked pot. He had plastic surgery. His ex-wife has suffered from depression. He’s part-Jewish!

Wow.

Granted, the Enquirer’s the Enquirer. But a lot of this stuff, trivial though it may be, is true. And this may be a preview of coming attractions. We’ve seen it before. From the Enquirer to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, the New York Post, the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and, of course, the Fox News Channel. Next, the Republican National Committee begins hectoring the allegedly liberal mainstream media for not covering this garbage. The mainstream media, ever terrified of the "liberal bias" charge, dip their toes into the water, then wade in, then splash all around.

Of course, Kerry deserves to be scrutinized just as heavily as Bush. His ties to lobbyists, and whether he did any favors for those lobbyists, are a legitimate story, and he’s currently getting a well-deserved working-over on precisely that issue. But Bush and Cheney are likely to raise some $200 million, nearly all of it from special interests. Is their bought-and-paid-for campaign supposed to be off-limits just because they, unlike Kerry (and unlike every reform-minded Democrat stuck in a system not of his making), can’t be accused of hypocrisy?

The worst-case outcome: every Kerry flaw, real or imagined, is examined, magnified, exaggerated, and distorted, while Bush is allowed to explain away his miserable record, his phonied-up war, his tax cuts for the rich, and his assault on the environment with a minimum of tough scrutiny.

The fire hydrant. Gay marriage. "Massachusetts liberal." These are the cultural touchstones the right will use in its attempt to destroy John Kerry. That they are nothing more than a distraction makes them no less dangerous.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com . Read his daily Media Log at BostonPhoenix.com.