WHAT HATH BUSH WROUGHT?
I would like to challenge those who would claim that the Bush Administration lacks a single accomplishment in its more than seven year tenure.
On the contrary, I believe that George W. Bush and his team accomplished much. Most significantly, they demonstrated that neo-conservatism is a bankrupt ideology, to be relegated to the dustbin of history, to paraphrase Leon Trotsky. My choice of Trotsky’s quote is no accident, since he was one of the chief architects of another bankrupt ideology – communism – which has more in common with the Bush version of neo-con philosophy than most would recognize.
Now some would dispute this overarching conclusion. Some would say rather that the disasters of these last seven years of misgovernment occurred largely due to incompetence rather than necessarily unsound ideals. I would respectfully disagree; one goes hand in hand with the other. Yes, admittedly the senior leadership was incompetent – bumbling fools I would go so far as to suggest – but that is the natural course of things when executive management is based upon ideological purity rather than ability to get the job done. This is especially the case when the bar of ideological purity is placed so high as to exclude almost everyone who is not a demented kaleidoscope-eyed disciple of movement conservatism. If Lord Acton's dictum that absolute power corrupts absolutely is valid, then so too it is that absolute devotion to conviction -- especially when that conviction is shown to be flawed – is the road to absolute folly.
Before they conjured up the questionable “War on Terror,” the chief neo-con bugaboo was Soviet communism, although I often felt they modeled themselves too closely on their erstwhile nemesis. Communist thinkers selectively peeled off the layers of Marxism they admired (like Shrek’s onion) while discarding the core, all the while claiming to be the standard bearers of Karl Marx’s ideals. For their part, neo-con’s wrapped their movement around the American conservative tradition, which sought lower taxes, the inalienable right to privacy, a strong defense, and a less intrusive government in their daily lives.
Communists rapidly escalated their class struggle into a Reign of Terror redux. If all power derives from the barrel of a gun, as Mao postulated, then it was logical that the best way to achieve and maintain control was by shooting your political opponents. Neo-cons were less violent (at least at first), assuming that the rallying cry of lower taxes was all the plebs really cared about. Eschewing the gun (at least at home), neo-cons -- like their kindred communist cadre – quickly made it clear that the chief objective was achieving the chief objective: obtain and maintain power, marginalize or eliminate their opponents, defend the nation against all threats, real or imagined, and to hell with civil rights, civil liberties, constitutional law, privacy and anything else that might obstruct the chief objective.
The Soviets were the paradigms for Orwellian futuristic nightmares of an upside-down universe, but the Bush people have done a great job of mimicking them by appointing unlikely personalities to manage departments they disdained. Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton was a former mining lobbyist; her successor Dirk Kempthorne has been a strong advocate for oil and gas drilling: these are the chief executives responsible for our national parks and conservation efforts. This has been a common thread throughout administration appointments. EPA personnel dispute global climate change. At NASA, we have seen an appointee debunking Big Bang theory. Many critical appointees are hostile to science entirely. There is a strong presence of evangelical Christians in positions of power; they deny evolution and insist that the earth is only 6000 years old. Whereas the Soviets outlawed religion because it competed with them for power over the masses, the neo-cons have co-opted religion, promoting their brand of starry-eyed creationists who would trust to God to show them the way, frighteningly not unlike the mullahs we seek to counter in the Middle East.
The unctuous way we responded to objections of our use of torture in interrogations is illustrative of our cold-hearted similarity to the Soviet communists back in the day. First, we denied that we ever tortured anyone. We reminded everyone that the United States opposes torture. When that failed, we re-defined torture: yes, we used water-boarding, but water-boarding is not torture. Finally, we just threw up our hands and resorted to the old “ends-justify-the-means” excuse: the torturing of really bad men will save lives, and the rights of the few may sometimes be trampled upon to protect the rights of the many. As Kurt Vonnegut once said: “and so on . . .”
The neo-con historical founding-myth has Ronald Reagan single-handedly slaying the evil-empire Soviet dragon (ok, it’s a bear, not a dragon, but it’s my metaphor so I’ll mix it!). Historians know that what really brought the Soviets to dissolution was corruption, incompetence, cronyism, economic instability, and an ultimately weak national defense that paled in comparison to our somewhat paranoid fantasy of insuperable Russian might.
These elements, ultimately fatal to the Soviet Union, have been on parade in our own government for the past seven years.
I find it most ironic that an executive branch that touts itself as strong on national security has in fact weakened the defense posture of the United States more than any prior administration in the last sixty years.
Our troops are stretched thin in an un-winnable civil conflict in Iraq and a questionable mission in Afghanistan. Our inept intervention has left the Middle East even more destabilized than before (amazing that we could achieve that!) and has further discredited us in a region where our credibility was at best shaky, while serving as a veritable recruiting poster for al-Qaeda and all breeds of anti-Americanism. We have abdicated our role as peacemaker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the root of all Mid-East combustibility, aside from encouraging the boneheaded Palestinian flirtation with democratic elections that turned Hamas into a quasi-nation state on the Gaza strip.
We permitted the lunatic North Korean leader to detonate a nuclear weapon without consequences. We have abandoned our commitments to nuclear non-proliferation (as our agreements with India underscore) except as a fall-back pretext for war with Iran. We have donated billions that cannot be accounted for to the also nuclear-armed dictator of Pakistan, who has quietly allowed the Taliban to operate with impunity on his soil while he invests our money and technology into a military buildup that targets democratic India.
We appointed a representative to the United Nations who loudly articulated his conviction that we should get out of the UN entirely, undermining our influence with that international body. We have jeopardized the NATO alliance. We have shown the world that we are unable to conduct war or diplomacy. We have squandered the good will and support of the globe in the aftermath of 9-11, so that like the ancient Athenians on the eve of the Peloponnesian War, we have many enemies and few friends. Capitalizing on our weaknesses are a resurgent undemocratic Russia and a dangerously militarized China, challenging our superpower status in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia and the Pacific.
Our massive deficits, trade imbalances, weak dollar and uncertain economy limit our ability to respond to these growing threats, or even maintain our current precarious position. Before Bush, we were viewed as nearly invincible. Not anymore. The clock towards nuclear catastrophe is ticking faster and the neo-cons have their fingers firmly grasped on the hands of that clock, pushing it in the wrong direction. They may believe in the rapture of Armageddon, but it is the rest of us who will be unwillingly annihilated.
It may not be too late (we hope!) to re-build our troubled nation and restore our status on the global stage.
The abject failure of neo-conservatism should demonstrate to the American people that we must try something new, whatever that may be. The next Congress is likely to be overwhelmingly Democratic, and the Republicans that remain are more likely to forsake the rabid right-wing and return to the middle. The Democratic candidates may very likely destroy themselves in internecine blood-letting by November, but even if the next president is Republican, he is not likely to be a neo-con, in name or deed. It is unlikely that Mike Huckabee could ever succeed in his quixotic quest; I think we’ve all had enough of Presidents talking to God instead of learned advisors. I don’t have a lot of faith in John McCain’s political ideas, but at least he has the conscience to oppose torture (probably because he was tortured) and he probably won’t have the majorities in either house that would permit him the kind of unilateralism that the Bush people enjoyed for most of their time at the wheel.
I try to remain optimistic. Our nation has weathered many storms: Civil War, Great Depression, World War II, the nuclear stand-off with the USSR, Vietnam and Watergate. At the same time, history has shown us that republics are fragile and rare. Just as a millionaire celebrity can lose it all overnight to gambling or drugs, so too can a great nation collapse upon its own hubris, its own conviction that believing you are great is enough to make it so. Only 344 more days till the Bush Administration goes into the dustbin of history. Let’s hope we can make it!
On the contrary, I believe that George W. Bush and his team accomplished much. Most significantly, they demonstrated that neo-conservatism is a bankrupt ideology, to be relegated to the dustbin of history, to paraphrase Leon Trotsky. My choice of Trotsky’s quote is no accident, since he was one of the chief architects of another bankrupt ideology – communism – which has more in common with the Bush version of neo-con philosophy than most would recognize.
Now some would dispute this overarching conclusion. Some would say rather that the disasters of these last seven years of misgovernment occurred largely due to incompetence rather than necessarily unsound ideals. I would respectfully disagree; one goes hand in hand with the other. Yes, admittedly the senior leadership was incompetent – bumbling fools I would go so far as to suggest – but that is the natural course of things when executive management is based upon ideological purity rather than ability to get the job done. This is especially the case when the bar of ideological purity is placed so high as to exclude almost everyone who is not a demented kaleidoscope-eyed disciple of movement conservatism. If Lord Acton's dictum that absolute power corrupts absolutely is valid, then so too it is that absolute devotion to conviction -- especially when that conviction is shown to be flawed – is the road to absolute folly.
Before they conjured up the questionable “War on Terror,” the chief neo-con bugaboo was Soviet communism, although I often felt they modeled themselves too closely on their erstwhile nemesis. Communist thinkers selectively peeled off the layers of Marxism they admired (like Shrek’s onion) while discarding the core, all the while claiming to be the standard bearers of Karl Marx’s ideals. For their part, neo-con’s wrapped their movement around the American conservative tradition, which sought lower taxes, the inalienable right to privacy, a strong defense, and a less intrusive government in their daily lives.
Communists rapidly escalated their class struggle into a Reign of Terror redux. If all power derives from the barrel of a gun, as Mao postulated, then it was logical that the best way to achieve and maintain control was by shooting your political opponents. Neo-cons were less violent (at least at first), assuming that the rallying cry of lower taxes was all the plebs really cared about. Eschewing the gun (at least at home), neo-cons -- like their kindred communist cadre – quickly made it clear that the chief objective was achieving the chief objective: obtain and maintain power, marginalize or eliminate their opponents, defend the nation against all threats, real or imagined, and to hell with civil rights, civil liberties, constitutional law, privacy and anything else that might obstruct the chief objective.
The Soviets were the paradigms for Orwellian futuristic nightmares of an upside-down universe, but the Bush people have done a great job of mimicking them by appointing unlikely personalities to manage departments they disdained. Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton was a former mining lobbyist; her successor Dirk Kempthorne has been a strong advocate for oil and gas drilling: these are the chief executives responsible for our national parks and conservation efforts. This has been a common thread throughout administration appointments. EPA personnel dispute global climate change. At NASA, we have seen an appointee debunking Big Bang theory. Many critical appointees are hostile to science entirely. There is a strong presence of evangelical Christians in positions of power; they deny evolution and insist that the earth is only 6000 years old. Whereas the Soviets outlawed religion because it competed with them for power over the masses, the neo-cons have co-opted religion, promoting their brand of starry-eyed creationists who would trust to God to show them the way, frighteningly not unlike the mullahs we seek to counter in the Middle East.
The unctuous way we responded to objections of our use of torture in interrogations is illustrative of our cold-hearted similarity to the Soviet communists back in the day. First, we denied that we ever tortured anyone. We reminded everyone that the United States opposes torture. When that failed, we re-defined torture: yes, we used water-boarding, but water-boarding is not torture. Finally, we just threw up our hands and resorted to the old “ends-justify-the-means” excuse: the torturing of really bad men will save lives, and the rights of the few may sometimes be trampled upon to protect the rights of the many. As Kurt Vonnegut once said: “and so on . . .”
The neo-con historical founding-myth has Ronald Reagan single-handedly slaying the evil-empire Soviet dragon (ok, it’s a bear, not a dragon, but it’s my metaphor so I’ll mix it!). Historians know that what really brought the Soviets to dissolution was corruption, incompetence, cronyism, economic instability, and an ultimately weak national defense that paled in comparison to our somewhat paranoid fantasy of insuperable Russian might.
These elements, ultimately fatal to the Soviet Union, have been on parade in our own government for the past seven years.
I find it most ironic that an executive branch that touts itself as strong on national security has in fact weakened the defense posture of the United States more than any prior administration in the last sixty years.
Our troops are stretched thin in an un-winnable civil conflict in Iraq and a questionable mission in Afghanistan. Our inept intervention has left the Middle East even more destabilized than before (amazing that we could achieve that!) and has further discredited us in a region where our credibility was at best shaky, while serving as a veritable recruiting poster for al-Qaeda and all breeds of anti-Americanism. We have abdicated our role as peacemaker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the root of all Mid-East combustibility, aside from encouraging the boneheaded Palestinian flirtation with democratic elections that turned Hamas into a quasi-nation state on the Gaza strip.
We permitted the lunatic North Korean leader to detonate a nuclear weapon without consequences. We have abandoned our commitments to nuclear non-proliferation (as our agreements with India underscore) except as a fall-back pretext for war with Iran. We have donated billions that cannot be accounted for to the also nuclear-armed dictator of Pakistan, who has quietly allowed the Taliban to operate with impunity on his soil while he invests our money and technology into a military buildup that targets democratic India.
We appointed a representative to the United Nations who loudly articulated his conviction that we should get out of the UN entirely, undermining our influence with that international body. We have jeopardized the NATO alliance. We have shown the world that we are unable to conduct war or diplomacy. We have squandered the good will and support of the globe in the aftermath of 9-11, so that like the ancient Athenians on the eve of the Peloponnesian War, we have many enemies and few friends. Capitalizing on our weaknesses are a resurgent undemocratic Russia and a dangerously militarized China, challenging our superpower status in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia and the Pacific.
Our massive deficits, trade imbalances, weak dollar and uncertain economy limit our ability to respond to these growing threats, or even maintain our current precarious position. Before Bush, we were viewed as nearly invincible. Not anymore. The clock towards nuclear catastrophe is ticking faster and the neo-cons have their fingers firmly grasped on the hands of that clock, pushing it in the wrong direction. They may believe in the rapture of Armageddon, but it is the rest of us who will be unwillingly annihilated.
It may not be too late (we hope!) to re-build our troubled nation and restore our status on the global stage.
The abject failure of neo-conservatism should demonstrate to the American people that we must try something new, whatever that may be. The next Congress is likely to be overwhelmingly Democratic, and the Republicans that remain are more likely to forsake the rabid right-wing and return to the middle. The Democratic candidates may very likely destroy themselves in internecine blood-letting by November, but even if the next president is Republican, he is not likely to be a neo-con, in name or deed. It is unlikely that Mike Huckabee could ever succeed in his quixotic quest; I think we’ve all had enough of Presidents talking to God instead of learned advisors. I don’t have a lot of faith in John McCain’s political ideas, but at least he has the conscience to oppose torture (probably because he was tortured) and he probably won’t have the majorities in either house that would permit him the kind of unilateralism that the Bush people enjoyed for most of their time at the wheel.
I try to remain optimistic. Our nation has weathered many storms: Civil War, Great Depression, World War II, the nuclear stand-off with the USSR, Vietnam and Watergate. At the same time, history has shown us that republics are fragile and rare. Just as a millionaire celebrity can lose it all overnight to gambling or drugs, so too can a great nation collapse upon its own hubris, its own conviction that believing you are great is enough to make it so. Only 344 more days till the Bush Administration goes into the dustbin of history. Let’s hope we can make it!
posted by Garp83 at 2:17 PM
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