Dowd slams Bush on double standard

Maureen Dowd's latest column - Bush has some nerve lecturing Putin - is right on the money. Dowd takes Bush to task for chiding Putin about curtailing democracy in Russia, driving home her points without wasting any words.

We'd like to reprint the entire column here on the blog, but we'll settle for a few choice excerpts that gave the column plenty of punch:

The only balance [George] W. [Bush] likes is the slavering, Pravda-like "fair and balanced" coverage Fox News provides. Bush pledges to spread democracy while his officials strive to create a Potemkin press village at home. This White House seems to prefer softball questions from a self-advertised male escort with a fake name to hardball questions from journalists with real names; it prefers tossing journalists who protect their sources into the gulag to giving up the officials who broke the law by leaking the name of their own CIA agent.

That point is right on. By now, most Americans who don't blindly accept the right's rhetoric are aware of the GannonGuckert scandal, which surprisingly (or maybe unsurprisingly) hasn't been covered by the mainstream media.

Dowd goes on:

An irritated Putin compared the Russian system with the American Electoral College, perhaps reminding the man preaching to him about democracy that he had come in second in 2000 according to the popular vote, the standard most democracies use.

Another great point. Bush wasn't voted into office - he was put there by five justices on the Supreme Court who killed the recount in Florida.

And this excerpt demonstrates the sad reality of what's going on in Washington, D.C. right now, as well as attacking Bush's claims of "transparency":

"I live in a transparent country," Bush protested to a Russian reporter who implicitly criticized the Patriot Act by noting that the private lives of U.S. citizens "are now being monitored by the state."

Dick Cheney's secret meetings with energy lobbyists were certainly a model of transparency. As was the buildup to the Iraq war, when the Bush hawks did their best to cloak the real reasons they wanted to go to war and trumpet the trumped-up reasons.

The Bush administration wields maximum secrecy with minimal opposition. The White House press is timid. The poor, limp Democrats don't have enough power to convene congressional hearings on any Republican outrages and are reduced to writing whining letters of protest that are tossed in the Oval Office trash.

It's unfortunate what the Republicans have been doing to our government. Dowd goes on to talk about the Frist/Bush effort to stamp out the filibuster in an effort to bring in more radical right wing judges. And she concludes with a final line that sums up what Bush really believes in: "The president loves democracy -- as long as democracy means he's always right."

When the GOP doesn't win, it howls with anger, puts its Noise Machine to work, and commits itself to even dirtier and fouler tricks than it's employed in the past. Examples needed? How about the targeting of Max Cleland, a veteran from the Vietnam War, who lost three limbs in that conflict and who was up for reelection back in 2002 in the state of Georgia? The GOP ran TV ads comparing him to Osama bin Laden. They even savage their own - like when Bush declared war on McCain back in 2000.

Bush has a double standard. As Dowd says - democracy is fine with Bush, as long as democracy means he is always right and he always wins.