Quagmire Redux

Just as likely as the rose-colored Rose Garden scenarios regarding Iraq is this scenario.

Local Iraqi insurgents combating the American occupation and what they consider a puppet regime continue to increase in numbers, as foreign fighters stream in from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Pakistan, Egypt, Iran and elsewhere. We’re forced to escalate our troop numbers, just as happened in several stages in Vietnam. The government declares that each new infusion of U.S. troops will ‘finish them off by Christmas," but the larger American presence only fans the flames of the insurgency.

Violent incidents between the Sunnis and the Shiites lead to full-scale battles between those religious factions, further complicating the situation.

Some of the foreign fighters, now fully trained and better equipped, return to their home countries and help lead Muslim revolutions, tipping the balance in countries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Joining with Iran in a loose confederation of theocracies, these Islamic nations drive the U.S. out of Iraq with a massive invasion, then install a religious regime. American citizens are forced to watch another scene of a last desperate helicopter leaving from the rooftop of a country we had no business being in. The Islamic confederation puts a choke-hold on oil for the U.S., thus crippling our economy.

The bloody purge of infidels, "Westernized dogs," and collaborators that follows leaves millions dead in the region. Americans wring their collective hands and wonder how they could have made such a tragic mistake, costing so many lives, ruining our economic well-being and further besmirching our international reputation. The only winners (as in Vietnam) are the defense contractors.

(In 2032, having forgotten the lessons of the previous two generations, and flush with new defense contractor money, some hot-shot cowboy-brained administration decides to invade oil-rich Venezuela. And so it begins again ...)

Jabs and Hooks

The Bush Administration are, collectively, a team of trust-busters, but not in the sense of breaking up monopolies (which they encourage in every way they can) but in the way that they have shamelessly manipulated the populace with lies and misinformation, taking cynical advantage of the vast reservoir of patriotism and respect for the presidency that the average citizen has.

What we had in 2000 was very much like a bloodless coup, bringing in a new leadership group under starkly false pretenses (compassionate conservatism, protecting the budget surplus and the environment, etc.) which then proceeded to fail miserably on all fronts, from protecting the country from attack to keeping the budget balanced.

They also, under the falsest of pretenses, put us in a nasty foreign war without a semblance of a sensible plan to extricate ourselves. But, owing to the one thing they do accomplish better than any administration in history -- manipulating the truth and people’s emotions -– they got re-elected.

An Iraqi man who met George W. Bush during a State Department function a scant six weeks before the war started (and a year or two after it was decided by Bush’s team that they would attack that nation) was shocked that he had to explain to our president the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, and what their religious and political backgrounds were.

Lying on the record and in speeches about our intentions for going to war in Iraq, the presence of WMDs in that country, and everything else during the run-up to our engagement there, was at least 100 million times worse than Bill Clinton’s sneaky dissembling about Monica Lewinsky. So why no Special Prosecutor? Why no talk, other than from the indefatigable Molly Ivins, of impeachment? Why is this man still the president?

George, Dick and John

On Iraq -- abysmally wrong. On the economy -- shockingly wrong. On Social Security -- hideously wrong. Yet still the president and still the vice-president. And still strutting around and making statements like they're the smartest people on the planet. And still somehow respected by 40% of the (not-paying-much-attention or tragically brainwashed) citizenry.



In George W. Bush, we have a president who has no interest or proclivity for anything literary, anything artistic, anything philosophical or anything scientific. Hell, he even admits that he doesn’t read the newspapers either. So it’s finally happened. Alfred E. Newman has grown up and become leader of the free world!



We’ve heard a lot about the yellow-cake plutonium that was supposedly going to be sent to Iraq, but turned out to be based on forged papers, but what was never really discussed was who perpetrated the fraud. And, since this was his area of expertise, what role John Bolton played in the matter, either in assessment of the original claims -- before the president used the information in his State of the Union speech — or before that (if you get my ... drift).

And, while I’m re-incited on the topic, it was Bush’s claim of nuclear danger in that speech, along with Colin Powell’s U.N. "exposition," of WMD facilities — based almost entirely on a disreputable source named "Curveball" — that propelled us into this costly excursion. So, come to mention it, since it was his area of expertise (top State Department official on WMD) what was John Bolton’s role in the Curveball fiasco?

Bad Intersection

On the corner of Downing Street Memo and K Street Project, we find a dangerous intersection of presidential arrogance and willfull power-mongering, something referred to in earlier times as Imperial Presidency.

That the president and his hell-bent co-conspirators were already pre-agreed to invade Iraq was obvious at the time, despite the statements to the contrary by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. But to see it stated so starkly in the Downing Street Memo, how the invasion was a pre-scripted fait accompli, and the intelligence was about to be "fixed" to fit the plans, was a bit of an eye-opener. We got into the Vietnam War in a similar way, with Lyndon Johnson deciding to have the war, then over-hyping the paltry event in the Tonkin Gulf to get the Congressional vote.

The K Street Project, meanwhile, is an attempt, so far very successful on the part of the Republicans, to turn all the Washington lobbying firms into enclaves for their fellow party members, especially retiring administration officials who then move into the private sector with a high-paying lobbying job. This contemptuous "project" is headed by Grover Norquist, one of GWB’s top henchmen.

The way this highly dishonorable activity has been run is that all the Washington lobbying firms, representing as they do thousands of corporations, conglomerates and special interest groups, were informed several years ago by the weasels at the K Street Project (with the Republican power structure fully backing them up) that the more Republicans who were employed by these firms, the more "access" they would receive to the Republicans in the Congress and the Executive branch. So, when a leadership job would open up in one of these companies, they would be urged to hire a Republican ... or else, the or else being less face time with the powerful office-holders, and less favorable legislation.

One example (and there truly are only a few) of a company that went ahead and hired a Democrat to fill a top company position was the Motion Picture Association, for which there "or else" amounted to losing a tax break worth many millions of dollars.

I’ve known about this scurrilously Un-American practice for a few years, but considered that most lobbyists are jackals, so what do I care how they’re getting reamed. But recently the Norquist group, drunk with their success in getting Republicans in upper and middle management in these firms, has decreed that the secretaries have to be party members as well, and a lot of these women, sometimes long-time loyal employees, have been summarily dismissed. Now that’s just going too damn far, and makes me wonder what’s next for this bunch.

Maybe they’ll start doing a similar number on the Washington media covering the Congress and White House. Wait, they’re already doing that, in effect, by denying interviews and press passes to liberal and moderate media outlets. Journalists like Maureen Dowd of The New York Times can’t get into a press conference, yet the recently disgraced gay prostitute who had a website praising everything Bush did got in many times.

All I can conclude is that woe be to this country if this odious pack of scoundrels isn’t thrown out in 2006 and 2008. Woe, woe, and triple woe.

Gauging George

So let’s summarize what kind of a man is the ostensible leader of the "greatest nation on earth," a country of 300 million which gets to elect a president from a large field of eligible candidates.

His intelligence and articulation are low, his charm is slightly above average (if you’re not overly particular about the first two things), his personal accomplishments in the private sector were at best questionable, his military record was a rich kid’s joke, his charisma is nonexistent (to compare him to Reagan is simply ludicrous), his foreign policy has led us into a non-ending hellhole, and his domestic policies have been centered on making the rich richer and the corporations fatter.

It therefore is not rational judgment that has him in office; it has to be something else, the one thing that unfortunately triumphs over rationality, and that is fear: fear of terrorism, fear of blacks, fear of homosexuals, fear of Godless secularists and liberals who some people are convinced (having been told by their preachers and the likes of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell) are the baby-killing minions of Satan himself.

Missing the Bubba

There has not been a more shameless episode in recent American history than the Bill Clinton scandal and impeachment trial. The Republicans who despoiled our institutional integrity, stalled our rightful government business, distracted and besmirched the public discourse, and made us the laughingstock of the civilized world deserved to be themselves removed from office in disgrace. Instead, incredibly, most are still in Washington, in even greater positions of power and authority.

They weren’t successful in ousting Clinton, but the stench they managed to imbue the Democrats with fell on Al Gore somehow, and contributed to his loss. So the Republicans' politics of personal destruction worked indirectly, in that it helped GWB ascend to the presidency, where he has proceeded to put the country on the slippery slope towards financial insolvency, alienated our allies, handcuffed our scientific community, increased poverty levels, allowed increased damage to the environment and polarized the country.

Comparing the above to the previous administration, Clinton turned deficits into surpluses, reinforced our allies’ trust and cooperation, funded and enabled the tech industries, decreased poverty, reduced pollution and was a master conciliator.

Making Marks of Us All

In 2000, George W. Bush campaigned on the premise that he would safely cut taxes and still allow for balancing the budget. After he took office and that was seen as no longer feasible (and then again after 9/11) he pushed through the tax cuts anyway -- mostly for his wealthy benefactors. Then, after the war in Iraq was obviously going to increase the burgeoning deficit, he rammed home even more tax cuts.

Speaking of the war, the Bush bunch stated, with absolute smug certainty, that the Iraq war effort would cost the U.S. only $1.7 billion, and here it stands at 100 times that and rising. Many, many of those billions have gone to Cheney's Halliburton and other "connected" companies, most of them by a no-bid process. (They're throwing so much money around over there that there's around 9 Billion -- 9000 Millions -- unaccounted for.)

The Bushies assured all the gullible citizenry that the prescription drug bill was at a reasonable expense, but experts now project its cost at nearly triple the Administration’s original estimates over the next 15 years. A staggeringly high percentage of this trillion dollar boondoggle is going directly into the coffers of the pharmaceutical industry.

And now they’re peddling more bogus numbers to try to get Social Security private accounts in place. Private accounts won't cure the solvency problems that this program is due to have in the imminent future (well, 2040 or thereabouts) but it will pump hundreds of billions into selected (by the government) corporate stocks.

When are the American people, or at least an electoral majority of them, going to wake up and smell the grifters in the $3000 suits?

Danger Signs

There are a lot of things about the Bush Administration that disturb me. There’s one thing, though, in particular that, if not curbed, will seriously erode this bastion of democracy that we still have the privilege to live in.

I’m referring to the systematic attack by conservative commentators and administration spokespersons on the three professions in our society from whence our intellectuals proceed — journalists, professors and judges. These are the watchdogs of a free society, truly our best and brightest, who use their mental acuity and judgment as a career, who study and think through issues affecting us all.

A review of any fascistic takeover in history will show that, before that occurred, there was a withering denunciation and demonization of those three areas of society, on those who provided commentary and context for the general public about their government, about their history and culture.

I’m not quite calling the Bushies fascists, but I think they want some of those benefits that dictatorships enjoy, like free rein to foist their policies on the country and the world without serious resistance from the media, the academic world or conscientious judges.

As it is now, courtesy of their attack-dog intimidators on talk radio, at FOX and elsewhere, almost half the country believes that if someone in one of those three professions criticizes the Bush Administration, what they say or write is immediately discounted as B.S. spouted by America-hating liberals.

This administration so relies on people being easily manipulated by their shallow and fear-based appeals, not to mention their overt prevarications and cynical dissembling, that they don’t want the real thinkers to have any credibility. In their place they want to have packaged news and bought journalists. They quote and promote puppet academics who are on the payroll of the right wing "think tanks." And as for judges, the shrill comments of Tom Delay and others has surely sent a negative message to our independent judiciary, i.e., that they better be a little less independent, or else.

Funny aside: Recently, our president tried to use a fancy word, always a hoot. He said that oftentimes Muslim detainees purposely "disassemble," going on to show off his supposed knowledge by saying "that means to not tell the truth." So he butchered both the pronunciation and the meaning! The best one, though, is still Georgie's saying "feces" over a dozen times in a speech when his text read "fetus." Leader of the Free World? God save us!

Impolite Question

Did the people elect George W. Bush in 2000 (well, semi-elect) and then re-elect him in 2004 to run up the biggest deficits in history, loosen environmental guidelines to allow more pollution, increase corporate welfare by umpteen billions of dollars, blur the formerly inviolate lines between church and state, allow 45 million working Americans to live without health insurance, start a new doctrine of preemptive war, mishandle the military and diplomatic missions attached to that war, turn America from a respected super-nation into a resented super-bully, and keep the homosexuals down?

Well, at least one of those things, the one that’s obviously much more important to some people than all the others.

Comparing a Mighty Oak to a Bush

At the time of Reagan's presidency, I disagreed with him on most issues and resented his phony-baloney persona and staged photo-op manner of conducting himself. (That last phrase is a misnomer as, in truth, he was conducted — primarily by Michael Deaver and his wife Nancy.)

They say ‘speak not ill of the dead,' which in this case will prove difficult, but I'll start by admitting that his "Tear down this wall" speech was perhaps the boldest presidential moment of post-WWII administrations, and did contribute, as did his stalwart actions, to the demise of the Soviet Union.

My paramount concern isn't the debate about the late President Reagan, but the current policies of the now President Bush, and how we should react to them. Perhaps the Reagan model can be useful in dissecting the anatomy of this president, especially considering that conservative partisans spent the week after the former president's death spinning like crazy that GWB was the heir of RR, and cut from the same mold. This is a lot of (pardon my French) malarkey.

The only similarity — besides, OK, a basic simple-mindedness — is that they both cut taxes immediately upon attaining the White House. But Reagan, when shown the facts that his tax cuts were too much, and would overly burden the economy and cripple the next generation, raised income and payroll taxes. Pragmatically and responsibly.

Junior Bush, in practically the same circumstance, and with the knowledge that the U.S. was conducting war in Afghanistan, and about to conduct war (and occupation) in Iraq, pushed through even more tax cuts -- because that was the most important thing to his family, friends, and upper-class clientele.

Bush, Bolton and the Bomb

In 20 years, when historians debate what the greatest failure of the GWB presidency was, some will opt for the fact that he cut taxes and raised expenditures just as we entered the era of entitlements overload, and while conducting an expensive foreign war. Others might consider the rupturing of the separation of church and state, and the consequences that befell the generation that followed. But the one that my money is on is the failure of the non-proliferation contingent of the Bush foreign policy.

By his recklessly calling Iran and North Korea part of the "Axis of Evil" along with Iraq, then attacking Iraq, Bush pushed those two countries over the edge into nuclear bomb-building. It can’t be put any truer or simpler. Neither had any nuclear bombs, then they were threatened by the world’s one superpower, then they proceeded to get the bomb.

To step back into the present imbroglio over John Bolton for a moment, the spin doctors of the Bush Administration have been touting Bolton these past several weeks by saying that the non-proliferation aspect of the U.S. foreign policy, headed by Bolton, was probably the most successful prong of our State Department, citing Libya’s stepdown as the glowing example of that policy success.

The fact is that the two nations in the world that we least want to have nuclear weapons, North Korea and Iran, have announced recently that they are moving irrevocably forward with their programs. As for Libya, as a condition of negotiation with Colin Powell, they insisted that Bolton not be present at the table. So even Libya saw him as an intolerably boorish bad actor.

To stay with the Bolton thing a moment, the spin surgeons are now all saying that a tough guy like Bolton is "needed at the U.N. to clean it up," as if his job is to be the U.N.’s new boss. An arrogant speechifier like him will not only be shunned at that establishment, he will further alienate Europe, China and the rest of the world, i.e., the other 95% of the planet.

Now, to bring this full circle, if we had been properly diplomatic (think Clinton, with Madeline Albright and Jimmy Carter as two main envoys) we could have gotten Europe to stop Iran’s program, as Iran has a large economic relationship with Europe. (Of course, not scaring them to begin with would have been the best thing.) But Europe no longer cares to do our bidding; they in fact express their animosity to this White House by doing the opposite when possible.

As for North Korea, if China wanted to stop them, they could at any time, as they are single-handedly propping them up economically. But they too are antagonistic towards us in general and this administration in particular, and wouldn’t mind seeing us twisting in the wind over this. Ultimately, they may very well help to resolve it, however, as the fact remains that if North Korea has bombs, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea will need to have them, which would be a direct threat to China, and exponentially makes the world a more dangerous place. But this will occur after North Korea has produced several bombs, and fissionable material, things they could easily sell.

So, looking back 20 years from now, those historians may well agree that this Bush administration's failed non-proliferation efforts were the worst of its many sins, and they'll undoubtedly show a picture of GWB together with John "Give 'Em Hell" Bolton, both with their crooked fat-cat grins, in the years before the incident or incidents where millions of civilians died by nuclear bombs manufactured in countries where their diplomacy miserably failed.

Just the Facts

Let’s look at the big picture trend of the U.S. economy, to see what all the whining is about. The income going to the richest 1% in the U.S. has gone up almost 350% in real terms in the past twenty years. But how much did that rising tide raise all the little boats? Answer: the income of the poorest 40% went up by only 12%. Put another way, twenty years ago, The top 1% received just 7.9% of the national income, compared to a whopping 16.7% in 2003; a pure doubling. By the time this administration leaves, that should be in the 20% range.

The share of the poorest 40%, in contrast, declined from 18.8% to 13.2%. Compounding the problem for the lower 40 is the fact that health care costs, whether in the form of health insurance or out-of-pocket expenses for the 45 million without insurance, has risen over 250% in that same span of time.

Faced with these facts, the Republican-led Congress, at the behest of the man from Texas, has slashed hundreds of billions off the tax bills of that affluent 1%, while doing nothing about out-of-control rises in healthcare and medical insurance. This has led to untold stress and misery on the part of those struggling Americans trying to protect themselves and their families from the wolf at the door. (And now they are preparing to abolish the estate tax as well, further adding tax burden to the middle class in deference to the very wealthy.)

In a short number of years, when this situation is reversed (and it will be, when the public finally wakes up), the people will look back at this period as the shameful, unconscionable aberration that it is. But an even stronger emotion will be their own embarrassment that, in a democracy, this dereliction of the public trust was allowed to go on for so long.

Hard Truths in Tough Times

Social Security personal accounts are not that bad of an idea on several scores, but it’s not a solution if the solvency of the system (and the U.S.’s future economy in general) is in dire straits. If we were sitting on a large surplus, this would be a peachy-keen idea. But according to the Bush Administration projections, the country would have to finance the personal accounts to the tune of 5 trillion dollars over the first 20 years of full implementation. Even if that’s accurate, it’s way too much added stress on an already morbidly underfinanced economy.

But let’s remind ourselves of other Bush Administration projections. First, there was the claim that there could be a huge tax cut without creating a deficit. During the eventual eight years of this group’s tenure, that misapprehension amounts to a cool 3 trillion (3000 billion!).Next, the Bushies confidently computed the Iraq war cost as $1.7 billion. By the middle of next year the war expenditures will pass 200 billion (9 billion of that is somehow "missing," but that’s another blog entry).

Another example would be the seniors' drug bill. The outlays for that will likely be triple what they swore up and down it would be -- when they were hammering members to pass it.

So, in summary, we have an administration that, like a sleazy used-car salesman or a 17-year-old on prom night, will say whatever is necessary to get you to go along with what they want you to do. The part I don’t get, though, the part I find appallingly disconnected from reality, is how the Bush Administration can be considered to still have a shred of credibility.