Into the Freying Pan:Eugene Robinson(Bush on Oprah's couch)

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Into the Freying Pan

By Eugene Robinson
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/30/AR2006013001160.html
Tuesday, January 31, 2006; Page A17

If there were justice in the world, George W. Bush would have to give his State of the Union address from Oprah's couch.

Not when she's being the New Age, touchy-feely Oprah, though. Bush should have to face the wrathful, Old Testament Oprah who subjected author James Frey to that awful public smiting the other day. She could open with the same line she used on Frey, whose best-selling memoir, which Oprah had touted on her show, turned out to be a tissue of lies. "I have to say it is -- it is difficult for me to talk to you, because I really feel duped. I feel duped," Oprah could tell the president.



Now that would be a State of the Union address worth watching -- one that would get a lot closer to the real state of the Union than the usual Kabuki theater of revisionist history, empty promises, focus-group-certified applause lines and choreographed nods to carefully selected heroes in the balcony.


How much more revealing it would be to sit the president down with Oprah and let her go after him. He'd go through his explanation of how the war against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda became a war to depose Saddam Hussein because he had weapons of mass destruction, only we learned that those weapons didn't exist, but by then it didn't matter because Iraq had become the "central front" in the war against terrorism, even though bin Laden remains free to inspire jihadists around the world. Oprah would respond, as she did to Frey's convoluted rationalizations, with a withering "Mm-hmm."

Then Bush could try to explain why he had stained the nation's honor with extrajudicial kidnapping, indefinite detention and shameful abuse of terrorist suspects, and why he had authorized the National Security Agency to conduct domestic surveillance without following established procedures to first obtain warrants. And as Bush cited his lawyers' memos arguing that torture isn't really torture and that the law on domestic spying doesn't say what it in fact clearly says, Oprah could give him a skeptical "Uh-huh."