Obamanomics

Barack Obama is inheriting the most challenging circumstances of any president since FDR. The United States is engaged in two major land wars, it is confronting increasing ecological challenges as its infrastructure crumbles, and it is the midst of a global financial meltdown. Such is the legacy of George W. Bush.

The task Obama faces is monumental. His diagnosis and prescription for America's economic ills, which he outlines in a Washington Post Op-Ed, "The Action America Needs," strike me as commmonsensical and fundamentally sound. In short, he must retool the U.S. economy for the 21^st century. To grasp what Obama must do it is important to understand what America failed to do under the previous administration, which will almost certainly go down as one the worst in our country's history.

For the past thirty years, Washington has largely been enthralled by market fundamentalism. This is the superstition that economic, social, and environmental decisions are best left to a rarified entity known as the "free market." The dogma goes something like this: countless rational actors pursuing their self interest (as they buy and sell with each other) can generate a collective wisdom that no government or bureaucracy could ever hope to attain.

Unbridled faith in free markets was supposed to lead to economic equilibrium; instead it has brought the entire global economic system to the brink of collapse.

Unfettered free markets were supposed to allocate resources optimally, obviate the need for long-range planning, and inexorably expand our economic and political freedoms. Instead, a narrow segment of "financial wizards" enriched themselves, cannibalized their companies, banks, and other financial institutions, while leaving taxpayers to foot the bill for a huge government bailout necessary to keep the financial system from collapsing entirely. As a result, most Americans find themselves financially overextended and insecure.

For the past thirty years, we have had a system that privatized profits, but socialized risk. Not long ago, Wall Street was soaring. But much of the paper profits generated by the financial sector have proven to be a mirage. Wall Street was adept at making money out of money, so long as its customers didn't ask any too many questions about the complex financial instruments that were in fact cobbled together with sub-prime mortgages.

Herein lays the essence of America's current misfortune: making money out of money is not the same thing as making something real. As America's financial sector swelled its manufacturing base dwindled. The United States cannot be a prosperous country without making and selling the goods and services the world needs and wants. Enlisting America's best and brightest to repackage and sell debt was never a sustainable strategy for ensuring our nation's economic success.

The most promising new American growth industry will involve so-called "green jobs." Put simply, inventing and selling the next generation of energy sources and energy efficient technologies is America's best hope of transforming our economy and restoring the United States as the world's leading economic innovator.

Accomplishing this goal will require a new social compact, one that recognizes education, infrastructure, and healthcare as public goods that require sustained and substantial investment from taxpayers. For instance, soon after the United States embraced public education it rapidly eclipsed its European rivals economically. Likewise, the G.I Bill paid enormous dividends for decades in terms of productivity and prosperity. Similarly, both Eisenhower's interstate highway program and the government initiative that led to the Internet demonstrate how far-sighted government policies can open up entire new economic vistas.

Universal single-payer healthcare is a matter of both moral and financial necessity. The current system is grossly inefficient on many levels. By design, private insurers seek to cover those that need healthcare the least and exclude those that need it the most. Therefore, taxpayers that pay for private health insurance also cough up tax dollars to pay for public clinics and emergency room visits by the uninsured. Once again, profits are privatized but risk is socialized.

Employers and employees are increasingly burdened by the current system. After all, the high-cost of mandated health insurance discourages companies from adding and retaining employees. And fear of losing employer-sponsored health insurance discourages many workers from seeking more satisfying and rewarding work. In short, universal healthcare can deliver better care to more people, thus leading to a healthier and more productive workforce.

The Obama administration has opportunity to tie short-term stimulus measures to longer-term investments along the lines I've outlined. Most Republicans remain wedded to the discredited mindset that got us into this mess in the first place. For instance, Linda Chavez proposes giving every American a debit card, presumably so we can by a gas-guzzler or another plasma TV. However, if the last eight years have taught us anything it is that an economy predicated on perpetual consumerism is a dead end.

The sagest economists I've read say that the United States can grow its way out of the economic mess the Bush administration has bequeathed us. However, to do so it will have to invest heavily in education, infrastructure, and healthcare, the things that will ultimately help America reinvent the economy. One thing is certain, pouring money into bailouts or consumer toys is not the way create the prosperity of tomorrow.

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It's Your Money, You Paid for It: How the Bush Administration Bankrupted America

Once upon a time -- eight years ago to be precise -- the Bush administration rudely proclaimed that the American economic and political model was the universal blueprint for all humankind. Today, the Bush administration is standing in the rubble of its own hubris.

The meltdown of America’s financial system is a seminal event. The era of America’s financial and geopolitical hegemony is coming to an end. The debacle in Iraq, the bungled federal response to Katrina, and now the virtual collapse of America’s economic order has exposed the moral emptiness that was at the core of the Republican Party’s governing philosophy.

The Bush administration has accomplished the impossible; it has turned a Superpower into Banana Republic. It has managed to reverse and undermine the nation’s economic fortunes by burying America under a mountain of debt. Trillions of dollars have been committed to Iraq -- and the now the looming Wall Street bailout – but the dividends from these “investments” are dubious indeed.

Imagine, for instance, if the United States has spent the trillions it is now spending to buy off Sunni insurgents, and buy out predatory financiers, had been invested in providing universal healthcare, shoring up our infrastructure, and developing alternative sources of energy. We might be well on the road to greater economic competitiveness and energy independence. Instead, we are stuck in a ditch of the Bush administration’s making.

We are mortgaging America’s future to pay for policies that at best simply mitigate the failures and misjudgments of the Bush administration. The Surge has succeeded in lowering violence in Iraq, but growing anarchy in Pakistan, where al-Qaeda has regrouped, is canceling out the increasing stability in Iraq. Put simply, Bush’s simplistic assumption that defeating al-Qaeda in Iraq would deflate the jihadists is nothing more than wishful thinking. Likewise, Bush’s certainty that changing the regime in Iraq would necessarily serve as a catalyst for transforming the Middle East for the better appears more quixotic than ever. In other words, Don Quixote seems like a realist in comparison to Bush.

Invading Iraq has not enhanced America’s strategic position anymore than Bush’s tax cuts enhanced America’s financial health. Indeed, in some sense U.S. troops are hostages in Iraq, and U.S. taxpayers are financing a $10 billion ransom every month to keep the country from exploding. After all, just think what will happen if we stop doling out $300 a month to each member of the Sons of Iraq. The former Sunni insurgents will once again be shooting at U.S troops, but this time with American supplied weaponry.

Bush’s free market fundamentalism has led to a dead end too. Supply side economics, deregulation, and faith that markets are all wise and self-correcting are ideas that now belong in the ash heap of history.

The United States is in the process of finding out what it means to be hostage to foreign lenders. Dick Cheney, who once said we’d be greeted as liberators in Iraq, also insisted that deficits don’t matter. They matter now, however, big time. After all, the federal government either has to borrow the money to finance the roughly trillion-dollar Wall Street bailout or it will have to raise taxes. Needless to say, given America’s already over extended state of indebtedness foreign creditors are certain to insist on higher rates of interest, which will certainly crimp economic growth. The declining strength of the dollar too, will increase the cost commodities like gas and food, thus we are likely facing a period of stagflation – slower economic growth and rising inflation.

Until now, the U.S. has had the luxury of denominating debt in dollars, which is another way of saying that so long as the dollar was the world’s reserve currency the costs of indebtedness were in some sense borne by creditors. With the dollar falling to a nine year low against the euro, however, the U.S. can no longer devalue its debt by simply printing more money.

All this means that average Americans are entering a period of wealth destruction where the value of their assets are eroded by inflation, the declining dollar, negative income growth, higher interest rates, higher state and municipal taxes, and cuts in government services. I can think of no better slogan to sum up this mess than the one Bush used to justify borrowing trillions to finance his tax cut scheme: “It’s your money, you paid for it.”

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Bush and the Power of Prayer

Three centuries ago, as colonists began displacing Native Indians across the continent, smallpox and other epidemics ravaged many indigenous tribes. Undoubtedly, the settlers in so far as they carried and spread infectious diseases, were at least partly to blame for what turned out to be biological genocide. Tragically, by and large the American Indians effected refused Western medical treatment because they believed that supernatural forces caused the illnesses they faced.

It is hard to blame the mistrust Native Americans had for the settlers. In retrospect, however, the triumph of superstitious beliefs over rational forms of explanation and medicine proved catastrophic. History tends to repeat itself, of course. And today large segments of fundamentalist Christians believe that the cataclysmic weather events associated with global warming are really God’s way of punishing the United States for losing its moral bearings, particularly when it comes abortion and gay marriage.

It is tempting to believe that we live in a just world and that a beneficent Deity metes out rewards and punishment to prod individuals (and even nations) in the right direction. History and experience, however, demonstrate that superstitious notions regarding divine interventions are a luxury the human species cannot afford. The Bush administration, in particular, should be Exhibit A when it comes to debunking the religiously inclined notion that a morally righteous leader has anything to do with national flourishing. For instance, the United States enjoyed eight years of peace and prosperity under Bill Clinton, an adulterer who favored abortion and gay marriage. But the United States is in a moral and financial freefall following eight years under the morally abstemious George W. Bush, a leader who championed the pro-life and sanctity of marriage causes dear to his Christian base.

The Bush administration has been characterized by prayer breakfasts, Bible study groups, and an unprecedented merging of faith and public policy. The results, of course, speak for themselves: disastrous decision making, repeated misjudgments, and a general increase in bureaucratic incompetence throughout the government. Put simply, substituting prayer for rational-decision making procedures is a recipe for failure.

To paraphrase Nikos Kazantzakis, the author of Zorba the Greek, praying to God is like knocking on the door of a deaf man. President John F. Kennedy, I believe, took the most mature attitude to problem-solving when he said that the greatest challenges mankind faces have been created by us, therefore they will have to be solved by us. In this respect, religious assumptions concerning the Will of Providence amount to metaphysical baggage that hinder our ability to navigate challenges like global warming, the credit crisis, nuclear proliferation, and the war on terrorism.

It is no secret that George W. Bush relies on his gut instinct to make decisions. He has also said that he derives great comfort from the fact that millions of Americans are praying for him. No doubt, his many religiously inclined followers hoped and believed that God would illumine the president’s conscience and thinking. The fruits of Bush’s presidency – Abu Ghraib, the bungled handling of Katrina, the disastrously managed war in Iraq, and the economic meltdown on Bush’s watch – all belie the notion that God and politics mix.

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The Bush Legacy

George W. Bush is about as popular with Americans as a funeral director visiting a nursing home. The most reviled president in American history, however, is dead certain he’ll be vindicated by posterity. Several prominent pundits – Robert Kagan, Fareed Zakaria, and David Frum – wrote recently that history might go easier on the forty-third president than liberals imagine. They argue, for instance, that the surge is working, liberals are in denial, and Bush has succeeded in his most important responsibility: protecting the nation against another attack. However, an overwhelming body of evidence suggests that Bush’s tenure will almost certainly rank at or near the bottom of American presidents.

When Bush leaves office the world (and most Americans) will breathe a collective sigh of relief. There is no doubt that the next chief executive will inherit the most formidable domestic and foreign policy challenges any American leader has ever faced. The American financial system is on the precipice of the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression, the U.S military is stretched to brink in two indecisive wars, and ecological and weather-related events are taking their toll on America’s resilience and infrastructure as never before. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden is on the loose and the threats stemming from nuclear proliferation and “loose nukes” is growing more urgent by the day. To make matters worse, the precipitous decline in Bush’s short-lived Pax Americana is occurring at the same time that authoritarian regimes like China and Russia appear to be on the rise.

On the economic front, Bush’s supply-side policies have been a complete bust. The administration’s policies have engendered the weakest job growth in the past sixty years, inflation is rising at the most torrid pace in nearly thirty years, and the country is drowning in debt. As Al Gore trenchantly observed some years ago, we’ve been borrowing money from China in order to keep buying Middle Eastern oil, thus mortgaging our future to a rising rival while transferring wealth to a region brimming with anti-Americanism.

The Bush administration has come close to bankrupting America morally too. The so-called “enhanced” interrogation techniques codified by Cheney’s legal scriveners have decimated America’s moral authority. Put simply, Bush’s decision to unilaterally suspend the Geneva Convention when it came to the War on Terror has proven as unwise as it was unlawful. America’s Constitution refers to the inalienable rights that belong to all persons. Thus, Bush’s efforts to deny a certain category of persons – enemy combatants – all due process and legal rights is nothing less than an assault upon the most cherished and fundamental of American values.

Bush is the first American president to hold an MBA, but his management “skills” makes Drew Carey seem like CEO material in comparison. The bungled mishandling of post-war Iraq and post-hurricane New Orleans shattered America’s image as a can-do nation. Bush’s installation of political hacks at FEMA, the Justice Department, and the reconstruction efforts in Iraq corroded the competencies of institutions Americans count on. And Bush’s gut instinct has proven disastrous when it comes to picking subordinates (e.g., the axis-of-incompetents: Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, & Michael Brown) or sizing up world leaders (Vladimir Putin and Pervez Musharraf).

Bush’s apologists and enablers claim that “victory is within sight” in Iraq. It may be possible to win a phyrric victory in Iraq (“one more victory like that and we are doomed”), but America is sacrificing its global strategic position to “win” in Iraq. How long can the United States afford to spend $10 billion dollars a month in Iraq, essentially paying Sunni insurgents to shoot at al-Qaeda instead of us? It may seem like a bargain, except that al-Qaeda wasn’t in Iraq until after we invaded, and the Sunni militias are likely to start shooting at us and/or the Shiite government if their U.S. taxpayer financed monthly stipends are ever cut off. Meanwhile, Iran’s regional ambition, which include acquiring nuclear weapons and dominating the Persian Gulf, have been furthered because the U.S. toppled the Mullahs’ main enemy, the Baathists, and then got bogged down in Iraq where U.S. soldiers would essentially become 160,000 hostages should America attack Iran’s nuclear program.

The invasion of Iraq set a dangerous precedent because the U.S. came to be seen as a rogue nation. Conservatives have a hard time absorbing this, convinced as they are of America’s exceptionalism. But the Bush administration’s attempt to establish a Pax Americana has instead led to a steep decline in America’s power and prestige. Sensing this, Russia and other authoritarian countries are likely to ally themselves against American interests and cite U.S. hypocrisy to cover their own unilateralism and aggression. Russia’s foray into Georgia is likely just a prelude to an era where the “strong do what they can and weak suffer what they must.”

Scrapping the Geneva Conventions, unilaterally abrogating the ABM treaty, heaping scorn upon the Kyoto Accord, trashing the UN, and ignoring international law was in keeping with the Bush administration’s mind-set, namely that “might makes right.” The concept that peace and stability might be promoted through collective security, international legitimacy, and soft power seemed inconceivable for the ideologically rigid reactionaries that made up the administration. Bush has demonstrated greater flexibility, including an increased emphasis on diplomatic suasion, in his second term, but much of the administration’s energy has been consumed undoing the damage wrought during the first term.

It would be hard to pick the most despicable aspect of Bush’s failed presidency. But certainly, Bush and Cheney’s willingness to let a low-level military personnel take the heat for abusive practices approved at the highest level is especially loathsome. Top legal advisors to the president and vice-president (David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, and John Yoo) crafted torture memos that codified barbarism, sexual sadism, and psychological cruelty. These legal scriveners did for the law what Arthur Anderson did for accounting; they made a mockery out of the ideals their respective professions stand for. For Bush and Cheney to deplore the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo that their policies legitimized is cowardly, hypocritical, and dishonest.

Few thinking Americans take the Bush administration seriously anymore. Bush’s rhetoric has been so at variance with reality that most people sensibly ignore what he has to say. Bush’s greatest accomplishment -- prior to his 5 to 4 win in the Supreme Court, which effectively overturned the will of the majority of American voters – was overcoming his chronic alcohol abuse. Power has a way of revealing character – or lack thereof – and so does history. That’s why I wouldn’t bet a wooden nickel that George W. Bush will look much better once the dark recesses of his shady administration are exposed to the light of history.

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Bush, Obama, and Appeasement

Man, in his unwillingness to understand other men, becomes like the beasts of the jungle. And their ways become his ways. This sentiment comes from the brilliant film, “The Naked Prey,” directed by Cornel Wilde. But it is probably the best encapsulation of all that has gone wrong with America’s foreign policy under the tragic tenure of George W. Bush. Dialogue equals appeasement, or so the architects of the Iraq debacle hold. But these would be vanquishers of Evil have spawned Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and four million Iraq refugees.

George Bush and John McCain have blasted Barack Obama over his willingness to talk to Iran without preconditions. Bush, in particular, has had the temerity to imply that taking to Iran would be Munich all over again, but this time in the Middle East (Munich was the moment the Europeans appeased Hitler). Of course, Bush’s historical analogies involving Nazi Germany might carry a little more authority if he and his bunker buddy, Dick Cheney, hadn’t decided to unilaterally scrap the Geneva Conventions and launch a preemptive war under false pretenses. After all, wasn’t it Herr Hitler who insisted he was “liberating” Eastern Europe after claiming Poland had attacked the Third Reich? Bush would do well to avoid drawing analogies involving the megalomaniacal but hopelessly incompetent Furher.

Bush’s spiel that dialogue equals appeasement is wrong on multiple counts. First, reactionary conservatives during the Cold War argued in favor of preemptive war against the Soviet Union on the grounds that any form of diplomacy with the “Evil Empire” was appeasement. Needless to say, most sane observers now agree that containment, diplomacy, and dialogue were the right approaches to take, while the rollback doctrine that led to calamities like the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs would have been suicidal.

There is a second and even more insidious way in which Bush’s dialogue is appeasement argument is a dangerous delusion. He is applying it not just to al-Qaeda -- the terrorists who attacked America on 9/11 -- but also to Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and anyone else the Bush administration designates in its ever expansive catch-all category: the Enemy. It is worth noting that Iran was the one country in the Middle East that held public rallies demonstrating their solidarity with the United States following the 9/11 attacks, and that the Iranian government cooperated with the U.S. military’s campaign to oust the Taliban. The invasion of Iraq, however, coupled with the Bush administration reckless plans to refashion the Middle East in America’s image, have helped turn an erstwhile ally into an implacable adversary. You are either with us or against us works better when you don’t piss everybody off so much that everyone is rooting against you.

The tragedy, of course, is that moral obtuseness – assuming one always in the right, not listening to other perspectives, and the unwillingness to compromise with adversaries – leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy that has a tendency to bring out the worst in everybody. The irony, needless to say, is that with George W. Bush the War against Evil has only one exit strategy: escalation.

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Bush vs. Justice

Justice is to society what health is to the body. That is, justice is a kind of harmonious interplay between the various components of the social order that engenders optimum functioning. Philosophers, of course, have long inquired about the nature of justice. For a character named Thrasymachus justice is synonymous with the interests and advantage of the stronger, and attitude summed up by the notion that “might makes right.” When the tiny island of Melos resisted the unilateralism of the Greek Empire a forerunner of George W. Bush simply informed the inhabitants that you are either with us or against us. After all, as the official put it, fairness and justice only pertains to equals. And in disputes between non-equals, the sophistic official went on, “the strong do what they can and weak suffer what they must.”

This is a cynical and corrosive understanding of justice, needless to say, since it reflects the notion that justice is little or nothing more than one side imposing its will on the other, through force of arms, rhetorical sleight-of-hand, or whatever means happen to be at one’s disposal. On this account there are no objective standards, save one: winning is proof that one is right, as evidenced by the fact that the victors will get to write history.

In examining this notion, which extols power as the end all and be all, it is worth quoting the words of John F. Kennedy. He wrote on the pitfalls of power not tempered by a poetic dimension:

“When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses”

Eight years of Bush’s unilateralism, zero-sum politics, and legal sophistry have convinced most Americans that the country could use a moral disinfectant to purge the taint associated with an administration that completely squandered the public trust. This was a president, after all, who insisted the United States did not engage in torture, illegal eavesdropping, or manipulate intelligence even though the administration’s own internal memos explicitly contradict his public assurances.

It is now abundantly clear that administration lawyers – particularly David Addington and John Yoo – contrived Alice in Wonderland type rationalizations to legitimize interrogation methods that were outside the U.S. military code of justice, international law, and the Geneva Conventions. Moreover, these logic-chopping legal sophists attempted to promulgate a perverse doctrine whereby the President supposedly had the inherent authority to ignore, interpret, or fashion the law in any way he chose to in his role as Commander-in-Chief. This so-called theory of the Unitary Chief Executive might just as well be called the Humpty Dumpty Doctrine, after the cracked character who tells Alice after she’s fallen through the looking glass that a word means just what he says it means – neither more nor less. After all, thanks to Bush’s signing statements a law means just what he says it means – neither more nor less.

A law that depends on the whim of a single individual, however, is a contradiction in terms. That is, just as the philosopher Wittgenstein showed that the idea of a private language is incoherent, so the idea of a single individual serving as the fount of what is permissible and not is the very antithesis of the law. Bush’s pursuit of executive omnipotence has in fact led to a form of schizoid irrationality – i.e., torture is not illegal if the president orders it or defines it in ways that makes even the most inhumane and degrading interrogation methods acceptable.

Wittgenstein, incidentally, is famous for saying that “ethics could be shown, but not spoken.” By the same token, it might be said that justice cannot be defined, but still we might find examples that exemplify it. I believe Mozart’s great opera, The Marriage of Figaro, contains a sublime illustration of justice. Here the story concerns a decadent aristocrat presiding over a disordered household. To distract himself from the decaying and dysfunctional state of affairs he governs, the Count in question pursues a series of amorous affairs with the household help. His wife, distraught by her husband’s unfaithful intentions, makes plans to exact her revenge: she will impersonate one of the servant girls that is the object of her husband’s lust. In other words, the Count thinks he is seducing a maid, but he is really pursuing the wife he has spurned.

When the ruse is revealed the Count realizes how much he loves his wife and he begs her forgiveness. The tables have been turned and the wife can now extract her pound of flesh, but in one of opera’s most sublime arias she orgives him. We in the audience immediately recognize the poetic justice in the way the conflict has been resolved. As the opera concludes order has been restored, love triumphs, and justice reigns. Life, alas, does not often imitate art, but perhaps it should. In any event, I believe Mozart’s opera provides an archetypal example of justice.

In contrast, the Bush administration’s conception of justice is nothing but a prosaic counterfeit. Everywhere one turns – Bush vs. Gore, Guantanamo, the trumped up case for invading Iraq – one finds only rhetorical sleights-of hand, ad hoc and post hoc rationalizations, and endless excuses and evasions. Deep dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq, the decline of America’s moral authority, and the tanking of the economy are symptomatic of a country that is seriously out of order. There is a lesson here: the arrogance that equated brute force with justice is being undone by a far great power: poetic justice.

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George W. Bush: The Most Unpopular President Ever?

George W. Bush is about as popular with the American people as an undertaker visiting a nursing home would be. Seventy-one percent of the public disapproves of Bush’s job performance, the highest negative rating ever. Not even Richard Nixon was so reviled.

By some estimates a million Iraqis have been killed since the war began, two-and-a-half million Iraqis have fled the country or been displaced, and virtually every expert agrees the invasion has enhanced the influence of America’s chief nemesis in the region, Iran.

The dollar is near an all-time low, gas prices are soaring, and the country is teetering on the brink of what some are predicting will be the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Bush, however, is so clueless that he didn’t even seem to know – or care – when someone told him that gas would likely top $4 a gallon by this summer.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain has described Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina as “disgraceful.” When you factor in the mortgage meltdown; the failure to find WMD in Iraq; the collapse of Bush’s efforts to privatize Social Security; the explosion of the deficit, the discrediting of the administration’s democratization agenda for Iraq; the setbacks in Afghanistan; the failure to catch bin Laden; and the precipitous decline in America’s power and prestige during Bush’s tenure . . . well it’s a no-brainer that George W. Bush has been a monumental failure. You might say that Dubya is kind of like Nero, but without the musical talent.

George Bush has decimated virtually everything he’s come in contact with: FEMA, the U.S. military, Iraq, the economy, and the Republican Party. But you can bet your retirement account and/or your economic future that Forty-Three earnestly believes he’s been doing a “heck of a job.”

Bush likes to claim that he’ll be vindicated by history. Many decades from now, Bush claims, historians will recognize he made the right choices, particularly in regards to his decision to invade Iraq. This is a facile, self-serving, and irresponsible way of looking at things. As chief weapons inspector Hans Blix noted, had Bush delayed his decision by as little as two weeks the world would have know with certainty that Saddam did not posses the dreaded WMD that were the casus belli of the invasion.

Certainly, from a military standpoint, it would be important to know that U.S. troops would not be facing chemical and biological weapons. Needless to say, this would have simplified the invasion, or perhaps made it unnecessary. But the Bush administration has invariably been hostile to evidence that contradicts its ideological convictions, as its foot-dragging approach to global warming demonstrates.

Bush could (and should) have fired the incompetent Donald Rumsfeld earlier. He should have set up a unified chain of command so that Paul Bremer wasn’t disbanding the Iraqi Army on his own. And he never should have allowed political loyalty to trump competence when it came to sending personnel to reconstruct Iraq. Put simply, it’s not just that the choices that Bush has made that have been disastrous, but rather that his entire ideological, managerial, and political style has engendered catastrophe at every step. George Bush, in short, has about as much chance as going down as a successful president as Britney Spears has of winning an Oscar.

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The Case for Gore/Obama

Hillary Clinton has risen from the dead more times that Count Dracula. She’s sending shudders down the Democratic establishment, however, since the more primaries she wins the less popular she becomes. Indeed, with Hillary’s likeablity rating hovering around 35% -- a virtual untenable number for a candidate who hopes to win the presidency – her only shot at winning the Democratic nomination lies in tarnishing Obama. Hence the paradox, the better she does against Obama the more despised she becomes among the younger and better-educated voters that represent the future of the Democratic Party.

Hillary is drawing kudos from conservative commentators for her tenacity. Her single-minded willingness to fracture her party in order to win the nomination is reminiscent of George W. Bush’s obsessive quest to “win” in Iraq even if it means destroying the U.S. military, the dollar, and America’s strategic position. The scorched-earth self-righteous obliviousness of the two “leaders” is more than a little eerie. No wonder right-wing pundits are singing Hillary’s praises; they recognize in her a kindred spirit.

Hillary’s penchant for distorting the truth, her top-down management style, her us vs. them outlook, and her proclivity to pander to the lowest common denominator make her seem like a liberal mirror-image of that discredited “compassionate conservative,” George W. Bush. I don’t believe the United States can withstand another four to eight years with a polarizing politician who has trouble acknowledging the truth and can never admit they’re wrong.

Hillary, however, has exposed significant weaknesses in Obama’s candidacy. The first African American candidate with a chance at winning the presidency has trouble connecting with the so-called Reagan Democrats. I’d like to think this has more to do with the fact that many of the blue-collar workers that have trouble with Obama are anti-intellectual rather than racially bigoted. To be fair, Hillary also has to contend with stereotypes and misogynistic attitudes that unfairly hamper her ability to be judged on the basis of her message, record, and character.

Hillary probably cannot catch Obama in terms of the pledged delegates or the popular vote count. But her efforts to pin the “elitist” label on her rival could well cost Democrats the election in November. It would be a catastrophe for the Democratic Party the country, and progressive values if the Clinton’s perpetual selfishness helps hand the White House to George Bush designated successor, John McCain. The best way to avoid political suicide -- particularly if Obama cannot convincingly close the deal in the remaining contests – would be for Democrats to turn to Al Gore to head the ticket with Obama as his running mate.

For those of us who support Obama – and see in him the potential to be a great president and a champion for progressive values – a decision on his part to accept the vice-presidential nomination would be disappointment, unless that figure was Al Gore. But a decision of that kind on his part would be in keeping with the kind of character Obama has displayed; he would be putting the needs of his country and his party above his own. More importantly, a Gore/Obama ticket would almost certainly present the most formidable team the Democrat’s could field in 2008. Indeed, a Gore/Obama victory would put the final nail in the coffin of the catastrophically tragic Bush era.

Presidential campaigns need to articulate grand narratives. Hillary has failed to do this. Indeed, it seems woefully clear that she lacks the capacity to be a figure that educates the public. Gore and Obama, however, are both leaders with the kind of vision and judgement to chart a new course for the United States after the debacle of Bush’s failed presidency. They were the only two major figures in the Democratic Party, incidentally, to speak out forcefully against the Iraq War, the torture and abuse sanctioned by the Bush administration, and Bush’s other abuses of power. Hillary loses my respect when she refers to Obama’s prescience on the war as “just a speech.” Speaking out against the war was an act of political courage, a quality that is difficult to associate with the competent but dismayingly prosaic and politically expedient Clintons.

Electing Gore and Obama would signal to the world that America has atoned for the morally hideous aberration of Bush/Cheney. Neither the seventy-one year old McCain or the baggage-saddled Clinton has quite what it takes to turn the page the way Gore and Obama would.

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The Media and the Decline of Democracy

Plato equated democracy with mob rule. Watching the media debase the level of political discourse by constantly shifting debate and discussion to the lowest possible level it is not hard to feel the United States has entered a state of terminal senescence. The country is facing some of the steepest challenges in its history – the ongoing threat of terrorism, the disastrous war in Iraq, a housing/credit meltdown that threatens the foundations of the financial system, and an energy/climate crisis that will almost certainly destabilize the planet – but commentators are harping on flag pins, comments made by Obama’s pastor, and Hillary’s gaffe about evading sniper fire. Rome is burning, but the clowns that run the media circus can still divert the masses.

The price of oil just hit a new time high ($115 dollars a barrel). Food costs are soaring. And the record trade deficit means America is maxed out; since 2000 we’ve been borrowing against the future simply to sustain a standard of living the country can no longer afford. The plummeting dollar is a symptom the U.S. is basically insolvent, but Tweedledee (George Stephanopolis) and Tweedledumb (Charles Gibson) still think it’s appropriate to ask candidates Clinton and Obama to make a pledge not to raise taxes on working Americans.

How inane can you get! The Bush administration’s laissez-faire economic policies have led to the largest transfers of wealth in world history as U.S. consumers are now in hock to some of the most unsavory and anti-democratic regimes on the planet (China, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Russia), but the media mavens are trying to extract promises from politicians not to raise taxes on the middle class. What about the dwindling value of the dollar, interest to service America’s debt, and soaring energy/food prices are a stealth tax that Americans will be forced to pay because of the Bush administration’s imprudent policies? Americans are poorer for eight years of Bush’s borrow and spend economics, but they haven’t seen anything yet. The bill for the debacle in Iraq, which by some estimates will cost every American family $50,000, is only beginning to come due.

The credit crisis is just the tip of an iceberg that has capsized the American economy. Housing prices may decline a further 30 percent before things bottom out. This process may take several years, which means the days of homeowners using their homes as ATMs is over for the foreseeable future.

Against this dire economic backdrop John McCain has called for giving Americans a “tax holiday” on gasoline during the summer months. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton promises to investigate oil company profiteering. Neither proposal addresses the inconvenient truth that surging world demand for oil, coupled with the declining dollar, and the increased nationalization of petroleum companies across the globe, have created the perfect storm whereby Americans will have to pay a greater share of their wealth to foreign oil producers. American oil companies have been steadily losing their market share -- a trend the Bush administration hoped to reverse with the invasion of Iraq – and recycled petro-profits are now filling the coffers of Sovereign Wealth Funds in Venezuela, Russia, and the Middle East. Ignominiously, failing and ailing financial firms, such as Citigroup, are now begging these SWF to rescue them.

President Bush’s mishandling of the economy may rival even his mismanagement of the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina. It is now clear that the kind of deregulation and laissez-faire economics extolled by conservatives has brought the financial system to the brink of catastrophe. Free markets work, but only when there is some minimal government oversight. When the financial system is tasked with policing itself you inevitably get insider deals, mountains of bad debt that the taxpayers are expected to assume, and carnivorous CEOs carving up companies and feeding on the spoils, but leaving shareholders and laid off employees nothing but the remains. The CEOs at Bears Stearns and Countrywide did not create value so much as reallocate value, to themselves.

The next American president is going to have to institute measures that will restore credibility and integrity to the financial system, establish a new social compact with the American people (especially a minimum healthcare package), and reinvigorate America’s manufacturing capacity. Put simply, over the last several decades finance became the country’s growth industry as wizards on Wall Street found new ways to package debt, displace risk, and skim money from Main Street. Unfortunately, their financial alchemy did not create new wealth, so much as create the illusion of spectacular riches that would later vanish into thin air once they collected their conjuring fees.

The United States is roughly in the same position as the Spanish Empire under Phillip II. Attempts to plunder gold from the New World could no more keep Spain’s debt ridden empire afloat than the Bush administration’s efforts to establish U.S. hegemony over Iraq’s black gold. As the decline of the Spanish Empire shows, a country known primarily for manufacturing debt cannot thrive economically.

The presidential candidates need to articulate their economic philosophies and explain how they plan to revive America’s economic competitiveness. Unfortunately, the mainstream media would rather focus on trivial matters, such as Hillary’s sniper gaffe or comments made by Obama associates. This is not to say that such questions should not be asked at all, but rather that the media risks turning a presidential contest into a mud wrestling festival if it focuses on trite distractions instead of substantive issues. Needless to say, an army of right-wing pundits is mobilizing to ensure that a flap over flag pins, guilt by association, and other time-tested techniques designed to portray Obama as un-American, will trump the War in Iraq, the Bush recession, and eight years of an inept Republican administration.

The country is going to be in even bigger trouble if the right’s sophistry is able to deflect attention from the moral, economic, military, and strategic carnage conservative rule has wrought. It is positively chilling the way media bloviaters like Sean Hannity are able to manipulate and twist events, situations, and statements in ways that exploit the ignorance and a prejudices of an audience looking for objects upon which they can fixate their anger. Obama’s much maligned comments about small-town voters being “bitter” are right in this regard: if conservative commentators can succeed in making the 2008 election about god and guns they’ll almost certainly prevent the kind of debate the country needs to have to solve its problems.

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The Grand Delusion

Great powers should never entangle themselves in tribal conflicts. That lessons has been lost on the Bush administration, which has managed to tie down U.S. troops in the middle of a civil war in the heart of the Middle East. The U.S. faces a diabolic choice: 1) Leave Iraq and watch the country explode or 2) stay and allow a disastrous war to sap America’s financial and military strength. The Iraq war has revealed Bush’s moral clarity to be nothing but a mushy mirage.

The conventional wisdom among conservative commentators is that the surge is working. Critics of the war, they contend, are in a state of denial about the reductions in violence and the political progress being made. Even worse, conservative commentators insist, opponents of the war calling for a withdrawal would consign the U.S. to a humiliating defeat just when victory is within reach. Once again, so the argument goes, liberals are so blinded by their hatred of President Bush that they would hand al-Qaeda a decisive military and propaganda victory.

All of this reflects a complete misunderstanding of what is happening in Iraq. Put simply, only a small fraction of the violence in Iraq is instigated by al-Qaeda affiliated groups; the vast majority involves criminal gangs, sectarian militias, and the like fighting it out for political supremacy. The U.S. military is the only force capable of preventing Iraq from descending into a full-scale civil war that the ill-advised invasion and botched occupation precipitated in the first place.

Rampant corruption is a virtually ineradicable impediment to reconstruction and political reconciliation. Criminal enterprises and politicians are siphoning off the country’s oil revenue to line their pockets and build their power bases, which insures that there are insufficient resources to rebuild a unified and pluralistic Iraq. Violence is down for several reasons that have little to do with the surge. First, much of the ethnic cleansing has already taken place as the country has been divided up into ethnic enclaves. Second, Sunni insurgents, recognizing they were on the losing end of a civil war, have made a short-term tactical alliance with the U.S. military in the hopes of bolstering their financial and military position for the day the expect to take on the Shiite led government.

Subsidizing Sunni security forces has bought a temporary lull in violence, but it carries with it long-term costs, both to the U.S taxpayer and in so far as it amounts to arming a force opposed to the government we are counting on to keep Iraq from disintegrating. It is ironic in the extreme, of course, to see the Bush administration handing out cash to Sunni security forces patrolling neighborhoods in Iraq while at the same time millions of our fellow citizens are facing foreclosures here at home. When Americans begin to realize that we are paying former Sunni insurgents not to fight us I expect the architect of this debacle, George W. Bush, will be about as popular as Heather Mills would be at a Beatles convention.

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The Bush Tragedy by Jacob Weisberg (Review).

George W. Bush is a Churchill wannabe with the soul of Inspector Clouseau. That, in a nutshell, is the disheartening conclusion I draw from Jacob Weisberg’s illuminating character study of our forty-third president, The Bush Tragedy.

The goal of tragic drama, Aristotle, believed, is to elicit pity and dread as a means of achieving catharsis. After seven years of Bush’s catastrophic misjudgments and squandered opportunities, which certainly invite pity and dread given the stakes for the United States, our country is looking for catharsis. But has America learned anything from watching the tragic spectacle of the Bush administration? The answer to that question may depend on the outcome of the next election. However, as Weisberg’s book makes clear, the lack of introspection, particularly an inability to comprehend one’s hidden motives and correct mistakes, is a fatal flaw, both in a leader and a country.

Weisberg approaches his subject matter from a Shakespearean point of view. That is, he recognizes (in a way that George W. Bush cannot) that life, individuals, and current events are inexhaustibly complex, suffused with contradictions, and utterly resistant to simplistic synopses. Indeed, even George W. Bush eludes any easy categorization, such as historical buffoon.

It is precisely because Weisberg can approach Bush sympathetically that his critical conclusions are so devastating. Bush, is fond of asserting that historians will be unable to get a grip on his presidency for decades. But Bush’s preemptive dismissal of all early-draft evaluations of tenure seems both shallow and self-serving when considered next to Weisberg’s meticulous, studious, and historically informed examination of the administration’s record.

The Bushes are notoriously averse to psychoanalysis. However, Weisberg convincingly demonstrates the Oedipal dimension that is at the heart of the unraveling of forty-three’s presidency and ultimately the Bush dynasty. Put simply, the younger Bush has defined himself in opposition to his father, the forty-first president, to a virtually pathological degree. Whereas the elder Bush was patient, prudent, and civil to a fault the younger Bush cultivated the opposite qualities; he would be brash, impetuous, and confrontational.

Bush Jr. has been haunted by the specter of his successful father for most of his adult life. However, Bush the younger was convinced that his father was a failed president because he failed to capitalize on his success in the Gulf War, failed to finish off Saddam, and failed to be reelected to a second term. Finishing the job his father started but didn’t complete – ousting Saddam for good – would paradoxically allow George Jr. to slay his father’s enemy and thereby exceed his father as well. Bush may not have been cognizant of such dynamics, but advisors like Dick Cheney certainly exploited them.

Weisberg also explores Bush’s extraordinary overconfidence, which he contends masks a deep insecurity. Bush, Weisberg argues, nurtures a deep resentment against intellectuals and liberal elites because of his experience of being ridiculed as a mediocre student at Andover, Yale, and Harvard. Indeed, that same resentment was palpable with both Karl Rove (a self-described “ultimate nerd”) and the taciturn Dick Cheney.

All of this goes a long way to explaining why this administration was so determined to brush aside the advice and input of experts of every stripe. Put simply, an axis-of-ignoramuses despised the bureaucratic know-it-alls, be they experts on global warming, analysts at the CIA, or foreign policy gurus associated with first Bush or Clinton administrations. Who needs experts, after all, when the president has his famous gut instinct?

As a result, the normal decision making procedures were subverted. Political hacks that parroted the president’s ideological outlook were brought into replace competent bureaucrats. And Constitutional principles were eviscerated on the dubious (and certainly undemocratic) theory that only an unchecked, unfettered, and essentially monarchical chief executive could protect the United States against it enemies. The results speak for themselves: the WMD fiasco, Katrina, and Abu Ghraib to name just a few of the administration’s spectacular self-inflicted failures.

Weisberg effectively lays to rest any notion that Bush will someday be vindicated by posterity. Perhaps his successors will manage to mitigate the still grim situation in Iraq, but the magnitude of Bush’s mismanagement and misjudgments virtually insure that future historians will compare him to the arrogant and incompetent Andrew Johnson, rather than Harry Truman. Ironically, Bush himself probably believes that he will join the ranks of great wartime leaders such as Lincoln, F.D.R. and his hero Winston Churchill. Tragically, Bush believes stirring rhetoric, eternal optimism, and unbending will are alone sufficient to insure success. Bush has many shortcomings, but his inability to match means and ends is arguably his greatest fault.

Churchill instinctively knew this in a way that Bush does not. The Old Lion once said that a democratic people could face any adversity, provided they believed their leaders were leveling with them and not living in a fool’s paradise. Reading Weisberg it’s easy to come a way with the feeling that Bush has too many tragic flaws to enumerate. But I think one can argue that Bush’s greatest failing is that he lost the confidence of the American people because he lacked the wherewithal not only to tell the truth, but to even recognize it.

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Top Ten Accomplishments of the Bush Administration (from a liberal perspective).

10). Bush has managed to do what even Bill and Hillary could never hope to do: he has destroyed the Republican Party.

9). Rather than soak the rich through tax hikes he simply bankrupted the country so everyone is poor.

8). Dubya’s close identification with private retirement accounts virtually ensures no politician will ever try to privatize Social Security again.

7). G.W.B. is likely to be the last white guy from a backward southern state to make it to the Oval Office for a long time.

6). Bush has managed to turn Clinton fatigue into Clinton nostalgia. Filegate, Pardongate, Travelgate, Monicagate, & Hillarycare. Ah . . . those were the days!

5). Bush’s flight suit photo-op antics makes Michael Dukakis look like Patton in comparison.

4). Hey, it’s only poetic justice for Bush himself to do more than anyone else to overturn Bush vs. Gore in the eyes of History.

3). After three recessions and four wars under two George Bushes we can be damn well sure the country will never elect another George Bush again.

2). Bush’s malapropisms, the so-called Bushisms, represent some of the greatest political humor ever conceived.

1). Bush managed to fuse elements of Elizabethan tragedy and vaudevillian farce. It’s like having Adam Sandler play King Lear. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, but I can’t stop watching.

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Bush’s State of Disunion

Bush’s State of the Union was a surreal exercise in self-delusion. Virtually everyone – Republicans and Democrats – recognize the Bush administration has been a catastrophic failure, but lawmakers on both sides of the aisles treated our hapless and incompetent president to rapturous applause. It may be a measure of how morally obtuse our political class is that a hoard of legislators sought the autograph of the man who presided over Katrina, Guantanamo, and the tragically mishandled invasion of Iraq.

All the available evidence suggests that George W. Bush is poised to eclipse Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding, and Richard Nixon as the single worst chief executive in presidential history. Still, a dwindling number of Bush sycophants and apologists believe forty-three will be vindicated by history, just as Harry Truman has been. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to square their Pollyannaish views with the grim reality that over the last seven years the United States has suffered an unprecedented and precipitous decline in its national power and moral prestige. Put simply, Bush’s policies have left the United States isolated, drained, and divided while greatly exacerbating the strategic and economic challenges the country faces.

Former Bush scriptwriter, Michael Gerson, tries to put the best spin on Bush’s State of the Union in his column in the Washington Post. Bush, Gerson argues, has remained true to the principles of compassionate conservatism. His faith-based initiatives, AIDS relief efforts, and educational reforms associated with the No Child Left Behind legislation represent the "persistent advocacy" of a compassionate leader. Bush bashing has become an industry fueled on hatred, Gerson implies, of a decent man who aimed to do well.

I’ve never subscribed to the simple-minded view that Gergon attributes to Bush critics, namely, that Bush is "heartless and callous." No doubt, Bush’s legacy will include some admirable and worthy accomplishments. Ironically, however, I believe it is Bush messianic idealism coupled with his personal mediocrity that accounts for the unfolding multiple tragedies his administration is responsible for.

At one time or another, Bush has exhibited an axis-of-mental ills – dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, alcoholism – that probably go a long way to explaining the perverse mixture of hubris and ineptness he has displayed in office. It’s not that Bush is unintelligent, by any means, but his thought processes and reasoning are demonstrably defective. His persistent resort to cliches, mixed metaphors, and non-sequitars, for instance, is a sign of artful demagoguery at best, or serious cognitive deficits at worst.

It’s easy to laugh at the mixed metaphor that has become virtually synonymous with the Bush administration’s spectacular intelligence failure regarding Saddam’s phantom WMD -- "we can’t wait for the smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud" – but as the pundit Karl Kraus recognized long ago, a person’s character is invariably revealed by the way they use language. It’s probably no accident that Bush failed to connect the dots prior to 9/11, and then subsequently connected dots where there was no logical connection (Iraq and al-Qaeda). Likewise, his decision to lump three disparate states into the infamous "axis-of-evil" is another example of Bush connecting the dots where no formal alliance or real-world connection existed.

Bush’s ADD almost certainly has everything to do with the lack of due diligence he displayed in the run up to the Iraq War. Whether it is the infamous sixteen words that everyone agrees should never have appeared in 2003 State of the Union, or the failure to prepare for the occupation of Iraq, Bush’s decision-making processes can best be characterized as rash, impetuous, reckless, and ill considered. He never planned for worst-case scenarios because he mistook prudence for pessimism. And he never allowed evidence or the facts to get in the way of his instincts. Bush’s ADD has made him a deeply irrational decision-maker.

Bush’s "leadership" has been a moral, strategic, and economic calamity for the United States. As recession looms, the deficit swells, and the dollar slumps to new lows it is becoming apparent to most Americans just how much the country has been steered in the wrong direction by the Bush administration. The architect of America’s great unraveling, however, remains largely oblivious to all this. How is this possible? I remember a Town Meeting where President Bush was asked about his decision to go to war with Iraq. Bush defended his war of choice, but surreally blamed Saddam for kicking the UN weapons inspectors out of the country. Much of the audience – and I’m sure Bush too – probably believed the U.S. had done everything it could to avoid war.

The only problem, of course, is that it wasn’t Saddam who kicked the inspectors out of Iraq, it was president Bush that ordered them out because he insisted the inspections weren’t working. Another couple of weeks, Hans Blix contented later, and we’d have known for sure that Saddam never had the alleged WMD stockpiles. Even after the fact, Bush couldn’t admit the truth. It’s a telling revelation of a president who will probably go down in history as the political equivalent of Inspector Clouseau.

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Top Ten Reasons Bush is NOT Responsible for the Recession

10) "Since when has George ever been responsible for anything." -- Barbara Bush

9) "There’s still 11 months time for wealthy benefactors to bail out U.S. economy, just like they’ve always done when Jr. screwed up in business." – Anonymous Administration Official

8) "Dick told me for sure that "Deficits don’t matter."" -- G.W.B

7) "As consumers spend the economy will mend." -- New Cliché/Slogan/Policy the brain trust in the Bush Administration has come up with to deal with the financial crisis.

6) "The Fed Chairman assures me that they have enough green ink and krinkly paper to continue printing dough as long as needed. And may I add, they’re doing a heck of a job over there at the Treasury." -- George W. Bush

5) Bush ordered super-duper secret program to buy Lotto tickets just in case the economy went south. Critics will be eating crow when the Commander-in-chief hits the jackpot.

4) "War, recession, and natural disasters. I’m sure glad my last job as the part-owner of the Texas Rangers prepared me to be a great leader." -- George "Dubya" Bush

3) "Wealthy foreigners have no choice but to keep lending us money or we won’t be able to afford their products. We really have them over a barrel, Big Time." -- Top administration figure speaking from a secure location (well stocked with ammo and canned goods) who would only identify himself as D.C.

2) "The Book of Revelation predicts the mother of all financial meltdowns just before the end of times. This recession is part of God’s plan." – Mike Huckabee (presidential candidate).

1) Sure, it's easy to blame Bush for mishandling Katrina, the disaster in Iraq, failing to capture bin Laden, and the what is shaping up as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, but you got admit the guy is a barrel of laughs.

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The Bush Recession

The politicians in Washington have a sure-fire plan to cure the credit crisis, which is fomenting a recession: borrow money and lend it to over-stretched consumers so they can continue spending like there is no tomorrow. Of course, the knuckleheads in Washington won’t tell Americans how they are going to pay for the $150 billion dollar stimulus package that aims to give individual taxpayers rebates of up to $800. It sounds good in the same way that a prescription for a gallon of chocolate-chip ice cream per day might sound good to a diabetic, but it is only a way of postponing the inevitable reckoning the occurs to every country that lives well beyond its means.

The Spanish Empire faced a similar predicament under Phillip the II before it crumbled. Spain didn’t manufacture much of anything, but it had more than its fair share of financial "wizards" who continually found clever ways to repackage debt. The Conquistadors, too, were big on plundering gold from the New World (which for a time kept the Spanish Empire afloat), just as the Bush administration was banking on exploiting Iraq’s black gold (in order to break the back of OPEC and keep petroleum prices down) as a way of keeping America’s ailing auto industry afloat.

Getting $150 billion dollars into the hands of American consumers makes a lot more sense than hundreds of billions we’ve spent turning Iraqi into a Disneyland for Islamic extremists. But for the most part, the Bush administration has failed to invest America’s resources in wise ways that will ensure a more prosperous future.

Dick Cheney, of course, once argued that "deficits don’t matter" and that conservation cannot be the sound basis of a national energy policy. According to Cheney’s logic, nations that are getting rich hoarding U.S. Treasury bonds (China) or selling us oil (Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) have no other choice but to continue to subsidize our trade deficit, lest we stop buying their products (be they plasma TVs or petroleum). The only problem, of course, is that we are becoming the American Indians who traded Manhattan for beads and trinkets. That is, we are trading our future for lead painted toys, poisoned dog food, and fossil fuels that exacerbate global warming.

Americans are a lot poorer today than they were when Bush took office seven years ago. The price of oil, for instance, has quintupled. And Bush’s massive $1.3 trillion dollar tax cuts exploded the deficit just before huge federal outlays were needed deal with the 9/11 attacks, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the rebuilding New Orleans following Katrina. The steep decline in the dollar is an indication that international lenders have lost confidence in the economic and strategic course charted by the Bush administration.

The fiscal stimulus the Bush administration is touting seems suspiciously like the surge in Iraq. That is, both are Band-Aids intended to buy the Bush administration time so that things don’t fall entirely apart until after they are out of office. Make no mistake, the gathering economic storm clouds are a consequence of Bush administration policies that have been bankrupting the country, both morally and fiscally. Tax cuts without fiscal discipline are the economic equivalent of steroids; they confer a temporary advantage, but they weaken the nation’s fiscal health over the long term. But hey, you can’t say you weren’t warned. After all, George W. Bush always said about his tax cuts, "It’s your money, you paid for it."

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Is it Rational to Hate Bush?

I dislike virtually everything about Bush’s presidency. I’d use the word detest, but then I might be accused by Bush apologists (like the imbecilic Fred Barnes) of harboring an irrational hatred of Bush. But is it really irrational to hate an arrogant and incompetent buffoon who has precipitated America’s precipitous national decline? In other words, is Bush hatred an entirely rational response the unfolding disaster that is the Bush administration?

Anger is an entirely appropriate response to persons who selfishly or thoughtlessly threatens or harms our interests. If someone stole and crashed your car you’d have every right to be livid with them. Likewise, the majority of Americans and Floridians who cast their ballots for the eminently competent Al Gore had every right to be infuriated by the legal shenanigans and sophistry that Bush used to steal the 2000 election.

The blatant dishonesty the Bush campaign used to circumvent the electorate made a mockery of the law. Katherine Harris certified Bush’s 536-vote margin of victory, but that number is about as credible as an Enron balance sheet certified by accounting firm Arthur Anderson.

Bush vs. Gore will probably age about as well as Norma Desmond (or Britney Spears for that matter). Justice John Paul Stevens was eloquent and prescient when he wrote in dissent that the American public and the rule of law would be the biggest losers from the majority’s improvident decision. Indeed, the legal machination employed to seize the election would turn out to be a prelude to the Constitutional and executive abuses that have characterized Bush’s dismal tenure.

All the Alice in Wonderland reasoning Bush honed during the Florida fiasco would be put to use to sell the Iraq War, Bush’s illegal wiretapping program, and the administration’s efforts to scuttle the Geneva Conventions. The false-choices, half-truths, bait-and-switches, and scare tactics that are Bush’s modus operandi have proven to be the political equivalent of steroids; they confer a temporary advantage, but ultimately they have weakened the body politic.

The aforementioned tactics, of course, are an affront to reason that Bush and his minions aimed at the lowest common denominator. The Iraq War was supposed to be a cakewalk that would pay for itself, but now forecasters see the cumulative costs of the Iraq catastrophe topping $3 trillion dollars. Bush didn’t raise taxes to pay for the war, of course. Rather, he pushed through the largest tax-cut in history while VP Dick Cheney insisted "deficits don’t matter." The VP is right, of course, as long as China and other foreign creditors are willing to lend Americans money so we can afford oil prices that are going through the stratosphere.

The Bush administration’s debt-fueled growth is the economic equivalent of taking steroids to bulk up; performance heats up over the short term, but the system rots from within over the long-term. The sinking dollar, the dismal housing market, and debt-soaked consumers are an axis-of-ills that are symptomatic of Bush’s snake oil prescription of paying for everything with tax cuts.

Bush’s credibility is more shot full of holes than even Dick Cheney’s hunting partner, Harry Whittington. Americans have every right to be furious with the mixture of arrogance and ineptitude Bush has displayed. To paraphrase Mark Twain, its not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so that leads to disaster.
Bush has ignored real threats (intelligence warnings prior to 9/11 and global warming, for instance) while overacting to imaginary threats (the hype over Saddam’s phantom WMD that led to an unnecessary war). He ignores evidence he doesn’t like and cherry picks evidence to suit his ideological preconceptions. He has circumvented rational decision-making procedures, relying heavily on his gut instincts, which is a deeply irrational way to govern.

Those of us who have pointed out Bush’s fallacious rhetoric and reasoning from the get go have had to endure insults from the legion of half-wits that were taken in by Bush’s hucksterism. It’s not those who disdain Bush that are being proven wrong, but those who aided, abetted, and enabled his disastrous administration.

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Bush's Recession?

The Iraq War has moved off the headlines, but the costs of the war continue to rise. According to Congressperson Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) each and every American citizen is responsible for forking over $4, 125 to cover the cost of what has thus far been the biggest strategic blunder in American foreign policy since the Vietnam War. That figure, incidentally, is expected to rise to $ 9,250 by the end of the decade.

Bush, of course, cut taxes while launching three unfinished wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, and the War on Terror). He also failed to reform the Alternative Minimum Tax (ATM), which will mean many ordinary taxpayers will soon face steep increases in their tax bill. That’s because ATM was never indexed for inflation, thus tax rates meant for the wealthy decades ago will now snare decidedly middle class earners.

The value of the dollar has been in steep decline, the price of oil is at or near an all-time high, inflation is on the rise, home prices are as depressed as Bush’s approval ratings, and even the president acknowledges there are storm clouds on the economic horizon. Here’s a prediction for you: the Bush Recession will be one of the major stories of 2008. Don’t say you weren’t warned. Indeed, as Bush himself said when selling his snake oil tax cuts, "It’s your money, you paid for it." Bush only got the verb tense wrong.

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The Lessons of King Pyrrhus for Iraq

America’s predicament in Iraq reminds me of the story of King Pyrrhus, who upon receiving notice of his victory over the Romans replied, "one more victory such as this and I will be undone."

When it comes to the Iraq War, the United States may yet snatch a pyrrhic victory from the jaws of defeat. If Iraq somehow manages to muddle through to a halfway tolerable outcome it will be thanks to men like Maj. Gen (Ret.) John Batiste and Lt. Pete Hegseth, two veterans of the Iraq campaign with very different views regarding the wisdom of the war, but who have nevertheless forged common ground regarding the course they believe America needs to take in order to salvage our mission. As a matter of making the best of a bad situation, Batiste and Hegseth manage to achieve the following: 1) they identify key American interests that hinge on the outcome of the Iraq War, 2) they provide a plausible way forward, and 3) their suggestions were formed with the intention of enlisting bi-partisan cooperation and forging a national consensus.

Batiste and Hegseth identify five tenets they believe most Americans should accept:

1) America must win the fight against Islamic extremists
2) Iraq is central to this fight
3) The counter-insurgency strategy of General Petraeus is the correct one for Iraq
4) Iran cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.
5) Our military capacities must match our national strategy.

Batiste and Hegseth characterize our struggle against the forces of Islamic extremism as the Long War. And they rightly lament the fact that the entire burden for this campaign falls disproportionately on the less than one percent of the population that makes up the U.S. military. They conclude that, "We need a regional and global strategy to defeat worldwide Islamic extremism to ensure a safer world today and for future generations."

There is much to recommend in the assessment of Batiste and Hegseth, and much that is overlooked. They claim that Iraq is central to fight against Islamic extremism, but this ignores the fact that geography is largely irrelevant when your are dealing with a global ideology. While the United States has been slogging it out in Iraq, with little to show for it, al-Qaeda has turned the tribal areas in Pakistan into the headquarters of its jihadist movement. Put simply, the central assumption that has guided the Bush administration’s counter terrorism strategy – that a pro-Western government in Iraq would take the wind out of al-Qaeda’s sails – is fundamentally flawed.

Concomitantly, it is a perverse irony that the invasion of Iraq has worked to the advantage of Iran, greatly complicating America’s ability to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. In effect, America’s troops in Iraq are hostages; they are convenient targets for Iranian terror cells should the U.S. launch pre-emptive strikes against Iran.

The large-scale presence of American troops in Iraq also serves bin Laden’s strategy, which seeks to bleed America economically and militarily. Will America’s security interests be served by having a long-term military presence in Iraq in the form of permanent bases? The Bush administration has never given the public a chance to weigh in on this matter, yet this decision may have profound implications for our national security.

Should the United States continue to bet its future on the outcome in Iraq? This is a question that may be decided by unforeseen variables – an outbreak of cholera in Baghdad, a coup that brings down Iraq’s feeble government, or an event half-way around the world that suddenly challenges America’s already overstrained military. To put it bluntly, Iraq is at best a high-cost/low return proposition at this stage.

What would I offer as an alternative to Batiste and Hegseth’s five tenets? I’d suggest:

1)America’s national security depends on achieving energy security – i.e. developing the alternative fuels and energy efficiencies that would make the United States the world leader of the post-hydrocarbon era.

2) A concerted effort to bring down the price of oil through a carbon tax would reverse the huge transfer of wealth taking place, which is impoverishing American consumers and enriching many of America’s adversaries.

3)Reclaim the moral high ground by renouncing torture and extra-legal detentions.

4) Call for universal national service. Those who object to military service should be allowed to serve their country in other duties.

5) Recognize that the struggle against Islamic extremism is primarily ideological and that defeating it will require American ingenuity, consensus building, and bi-partisanship (all traits sorely lacking in the Bush administration).

Check out the views of Batiste and Hegseth for yourself in their Washington Post Op-Ed "How to Win The War."

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Karl Rove Rewriting History

The Bush administration’s spends so much time rewriting history that I’m afraid they’ll run out of ink before they run out of lies. The latest redaction comes from Karl Rove, the president’s former chief political strategist, who told interviewer Charlie Rose that the great untold story of the Iraq War was how the Democratic Congress railroaded the country to war. That’s right. Rove implied that Congress -- not president Bush -- was the driving force that was responsible for taking the United States into Iraq. If only Congress hadn’t rushed the vote ahead of the 2002 mid-term elections, then we might have had time to allow the inspections to work, or assemble a true international coalition to deal with Saddam.

Rove’s argument is a bit like a drunk who convinces you he’s sober, but when totals your car he blames you for giving him the keys in the first place. It was pretty sickening to see the Republican National Committee run war-themed ads, effectively taunting the Democrats with the political consequences of voting to leave Saddam in power. But it is downright nauseating to see a weasel like Rove try and absolve the Bush administration for making the worst foreign policy decision in American history by running away from the historical record. I don’t know if Rove believes his own spin – a pretty scary thought – but Rove’s hopes for a permanent Republican majority are getting buried by an avalanche of lies.

Even Rove's colleagues seem taken aback by his sel-serving interpretation of history. As reported in The Washington Post, former Bush chief-of-staff, Andy Card, suggested that "Rove's brain gets ahead of his mouth." Well, considering the fact that Rove was "Bush's Brain" that's a disquieting thought.

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