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 and the Assasination of Benazir Bhutto

George W. Bush has a habit of putting all his eggs in one basket before splattering them on the sidewalk when he trips up. The assassination of Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto is the latest foreign policy mess that has the administration scrambling to cope with its disastrous decisions and bad judgement.

It took the Bush administration roughly a year to broker a power sharing deal between Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf and Bhutto, but it only took al-Qaeda (or whatever extremist elements were responsible) minutes to effectively derail the Bush administration’s democratization efforts for Pakistan.

The administration’s support for the progressive and pro-Western Bhutto, of course, made sense. The former Prime Minister was ousted on corruption charges more than a decade ago, but most observers believe her relatively secular PPP party represented the best hope for a country being torn apart by religious extremism. There is little doubt that Bhutto was willing to do something Musharraf has not, namely take on the Taliban and al-Qaeda elements that are turning Pakistan into a failed state and the new headquarters of al-Qaeda’s international efforts.

Bush’s blunder has been in making General Musharraf the linchpin of the administration’s efforts to combat Islamic extremism in Pakistan. Since 9/11, the United States has poured more than $10 billion into Pakistan with virtually nothing to show for it. Indeed, Musharraf will be blamed for Bhutto’s death whether he had anything to do with it or not. The Bush administration has placed the United States in the unenviable position of being associated with a dictator who disbanded an independent judiciary, cracked down on a free press, instituted martial law, and arrested political opponents.

Musharraf has never been more loathed, nor has his grip on power ever been shakier. By effectively outsourcing the hunt for bin Laden to Musharraf the Bush administration has gotten the worst of all worlds: 1) ineffectual efforts against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan and 2) to the extent that we have supported an unpopular dictator we have no broad base of support among the Pakistani people.

Experts on Pakistan agree that Musharraf has played Bush for a fool. Clearly, the Bush administration’s strategy for Pakistan is in shambles. But Bush’s misjudgment about Musharraf is just the latest in a serial of errors made by our incompetent "commander-in-chief." Among Bush’s blunders are: the failure to heed urgent warnings about the 9/11 attacks, the decision to go after Saddam Hussein rather than 9/11 mastermind Osama bin laden, the botched occupation of Iraq, the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, and more recently the administration’s failure to recognize that Iran had suspended its military nuclear program.

Bush and Musharraf have a lot in common. Both came to power in coups, both act as if they are above the law, and both have completely lost credibility. We are witnessing a failed presidency of monumental proportions.

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Charles Krauthammer: Mission Accomplished II

The physicist Wolfgang Pauli once remarked to a colleague about the lecture they were attending, noting that the speaker was so off the mark that "he isn't even wrong." I often have the same feeling reading Charles Krauthammer’s mediocre missives in the Washington Post. According to Krauthammer, Iraq is on the verge of turning out as a major strategic accomplishment for the United States. Before Krauthammer declares Mission Accomplished II, however, there are some inconvenient facts he needs to reckon with.

Krauthammer argues that an enduring U.S. military presence in Iraq will insure America has a critical ally in the heart of the Middle East. Neither the American people nor the Iraqis have signed on to the idea having permanent U.S. bases in Iraq. If the heavily fortified bunker complex that is the Green Zone is any indication, then America’s presence will be like Fort Apache in injun territory – i.e., an unwelcome presence that continues to fuel extremist resentment against what the jihadists view as an imperial and infidel occupation. Put simply, a large American footprint in Iraq is more likely to inspire extremism than defuse it.

General Petraeus’ counterinsurgency strategy is certainly a marked improvement over what came before. However, the welcome reduction in violence probably has much to do with the fact that many of the factions in Iraq are simply waiting the Americans out. They know, for instance, that the surge is temporary and that the Bush administration’s days are numbered. As one Iraqi put it, the current lull in violence is part of the "great deception" as the various Iraq militias prepare for the day when the United States is forced to scale back forces. Iraqis various factions, after all, would rather fight one another tomorrow than take on American firepower today.

What are the prospects for a political reconciliation in Iraq? The whole point of the surge, after all, was to buy time for the various factions to hammer out oil revenue sharing agreements and the like. In fact, pervasive corruption and black market activity – not to mention the reality that petro-politics in the Middle East is a invariably a zero-sum game – makes it highly unlikely that the various factions can arrive at a sustainable political settlement. Presently, the U.S. military is buying off Iraq’s private militias (convincing them it is better to take our money than fight us), but unless the Bush administration can manage a breakthrough on the political front this approach is likely to prove ephemeral.

The Iraq war must be understood in the context of our larger strategic interests. It has hampered our efforts in Afghanistan, diverted resources from capturing or killing bin Laden, worked to the advantage of America’s chief adversary in the region (Iran), and radicalized a new generation of anti-American extremists. The invasion of Iraq has also decimated America’s credibility, leaving it isolated and drained at a time when China appears on a trajectory to eclipse the United States within the next several decades. The extraordinary costs of the whole enterprise (by some estimates the invasion will cost each American $9,250 by the end of the decade), coupled with a very uncertain potential payoff (a less radicalized Arab world), make the whole venture seem about as sensible as buying Lotto tickets to avoid foreclosing on a mortgage one can’t afford.

The historian Arnold Toynbee observed that societies that remake themselves are more apt to succeed than societies that attempt to remake the rest of the world. Would the United States be better off investing in its own infrastructure and the energy efficiencies and alternative fuels of the future than pouring money into Iraq? We have truly outsourced our future. Of course, neoconservatives like Krauthammer will never admit just how far off the mark they’ve been all along.

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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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"Thank God Bush is President" Did God Want Bush to be President?

"Thank God George W. Bush is President." As a political satirist, I have a special license to spout utter nonsense like this. After all, saying something patently ridiculous can inspire laughter at the pompous fools that govern us. There are however, a small number of congenitally serious people who really do thank God that Bush is in the Oval Office. Conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, for instance, recently wrote a tribute to Bush’s tenacity, which he claims will be the saving grace of his presidency. When a democratic Iraq finally takes root in the Middle East, and madrassahs are replaced by American style malls (minus the serial shooters, of course), then history will vindicate Bush’s obstinacy.

Iraq may or may not muddle through to a tolerable outcome, but given Bush’s extraordinary incompetent handling of the invasion and occupation there is little reason he should get credit if Iraq manages to turn out OK thirty years from now. Future administrations and the Iraqi people may manage turn Iraq into a success, if so the credit should be theirs not Bush’s.

We are seven years into the Bush administration, and virtually all the evidence indicates that Bush’s tenure has been a catastrophe. First and foremost, Bush has no credibility. The American people do not believe what Bush tells them, nor do they think he is up to the job.

Second, Bush surrounded himself with some of the most incompetent public officials that ever staffed an administration, i.e., Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, Condoleezza and Michael Brown, to name just a few.

Third, Bush’s clueless, lackadaisical, and inept response to Katrina revealed what a shallow character he really is.

Fourth, to date Iraq is greatest strategic blunder in American foreign policy since the Vietnam War. Put simply, it has empowered our adversaries – most notably Iran and al-Qaeda – while leaving the U.S. isolated and drained.

Fifth, the torture and abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have decimated America’s moral authority, which has led to an unprecedented decline in American power and prestige.

Sixth, the Bush administration’s decision to scrap the Kyoto treaty and ignore global warming is proving to one of the most fateful and unwise decisions it ever made (and that is saying a lot). Put simply, pouring blood and treasure into Iraq (while America’s infrastructure is crumbling at home) is going to look awful foolish if the scientists in the reality-based community are right about the ecological challenges we’re going to face in the future as a result of climate change.

Seventh, Bush’s fiscal stewardship – until recently Bush’s handling of the economy was considered to be one of the few bright spots of his presidency – appears poised to sink the American ship of state in a sea of bad debt. The sinking dollar, high oil prices, the credit crunch, inflation, and ballooning mortgage rates are going to leave Americans feeling a lot poorer in what shaping up as an election year recession.

Cutting taxes while greatly increasing the size of the federal government have put the United State behind the economic eight ball. Dick Cheney famously declared "deficits don’t matter," but many warned that all the Bush administration’s red ink would inevitably mean less credit available for private borrowers, higher interest rates, and inflationary pressures. Presently, we are approaching a perfect storm where the Fed will be caught in a double bind: forced to lower interests rates to avoid a recession, but lowering interest rates will feed inflation.

Of course, with all the bad debt out there, foreign lenders will eventually insist on higher interest rates, which will only increases the chances of a severe economic downturn. America is boxed in, with little margin for error when it comes to avoiding a rather nasty recession.

Bush’s policies have led directly and indirectly to the free fall of the dollar, higher oil prices, and the credit crisis. The value of the dollar is a reflection of investor confidence in the United States, which at the moment isn’t high. Rising energy prices, of course, are a function of supply and demand, but the Bush administration has done nothing to prepare the United States for the twilight of the hydrocarbon era. It may seem harder to pin the credit crisis on the Bush, but credit markets require an atmosphere of trust, which is not a quality the president and his administration has engendered.

Most controversial presidents have at least one significant foreign or domestic achievement. Bush has nada. Iraq is looking better, but chances are the various factions are just waiting us out till the surge has run its course and America is forced to draw down its forces next year. The way things are shaping up Bush will be forever associated with America’s precipitous economic, moral, and national decline. Sorry Dinesh, but the next time God wants someone to be president He (or She) should register to vote just like everyone else.

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To Torture, or not to Torture?

“A foolish consistency,” Emerson wrote, is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Emerson’s quote captures the important truth that there’s no single maxim, code, or moral formula for navigating life’s complexities. Sometimes bad actions lead to good outcomes. And good intentions sometimes breed disastrous outcomes. We live in a Shakespearean universe where even morality can be bad.

To torture, or not to torture a terrorist: that is the question. The answer is not as easy as it seems. Proponents of Bush’s harsh interrogation methods have argued that waterboarding suspected al-Qaeda suspects has saved lives, while opponents contend that sanctioning torture erodes America’s soul. Do both points of view have validity?

They do to CIA officer John Kiriakou, who believes that waterboarding Abu Zubaida broke up al-Qaeda plots, provided crucial insight into the terror group’s infrastructure, and indirectly helped lead to the capture of 9/11 mastermind Kahlid Sheik Mohammed.

But Kiriakou – who underwent waterboarding as part of his CIA training – has come to the conclusion that waterboarding is torture and that “Americans are better than that." Or at least they ought to be.

It would be easy to write Kiriakou off as a flip-flopper or man without firm moral convictions. On the contrary, the ability and willingness to hold two diametrically opposing views simultaneously (and to weigh and ponder the merits and demerits of both) is the mark of a rare intelligence. Kiriakou is no simple-minded moralist, an ideologue, or a zealot. His capacity to see both sides of the issue – and to be troubled by an either/or – is exactly the kind of person you’d hope to find tackling these concrete moral decisions.

I say this, as someone who believes the United States should take a firm stand against torture. Brutalizing victims has a way of dehumanizing the victim and the victimizer. If the Bush administration’s harsh interrogation methods were to become institutionalized, then I believe we would run the risk of inculcating a culture of sadism among America’s interrogators. History suggests that this would only fuel a vicious cycle of violence.

There are many other reasons for opposing torture: 1) to protect American service men an women from retaliatory treatment, 2) the fact that most counter terrorism experts tend to discount most information where torture is involved, 3) the culture of lawlessness that seems to flow from flouting traditional and international constraints on torture, and 4) to prevent the erosion of America’s moral authority, credibility, and soft power.

Statecraft is an art, not a science. Machiavelli recognized that sometimes a leader must break the law in order to preserve order or prevent a greater calamity. Occasionally, authorities responsible for public safety may have good reason to believe that torturing a suspect is the only way to get vital information. If an attack is prevented, then that should count as mitigating evidence at a trial that holds them to account. Public safety is important, but so are our ideals. If I were on a jury hearing the case of an agent who tortured someone to prevent an attack I’d have mixed feelings about finding them guilty. But morality is a pretty complex affair.

For an excellent overview of the issue see "Waterboarding Recounted" in the Washington Post."

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Top Ten Reasons it Would be Great to Have Bill Clinton in the White House Again

10) With Bill and Hillary occupying the White House, the warmongering right-wing nut cases will be forced to focus on regime change here at home rather than abroad.

9) A reality-based series based on Bill’s everyday life – you could call it Sex in High Places -- sure would beat watching reruns of Sex in the City.

8) Bill will put Dick Cheney’s secure location to better use.

7) Bubba's exploits, as documented in a much anticipated follow-up to the Starr Report, will allow me to spend less money every month on online porn.

6) I’d like to see Hillary use expanded executive authority to order the use of coercive interrogation techniques on Bill when he’s caught in the Oval Office broom closet with another White House intern.

5) Eight more years in the White House will allow Bill to screw the Republicans for a long time.

4) Two terms with Bubba won’t bother me since I have a v-chip installed in my TV.

3) Bill has super duper secret plan to change the national anthem to "I Feel Good" by James Brown.

2) After eight years of George Jr., I don’t care about honor and dignity in the Oval Office, I just want someone who knows what they are doing!

1) Hey, if you are a political satirist wouldn’t you want to put Falstaff and Lady Macbeth back on the pedestal of power, if only to get a second chance at knocking them off their perch.

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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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Bush's Credibility

Bush’s credibility has sunk about as low as Britney Spears' career. In a bombshell (no pun intended), that effectively preempts the administration’s plans to launch a preemptive strike against Iran, America’s intelligence community released its conclusion that Iran suspended its military nuclear program sometime in 2003. The Bush administration was aware of this assessment, yet the president continued to insist that Iran was risking WWIII if it didn’t suspend its military nuclear program. Thus, the White House was forced into to the embarrassing position of having to claim: 1) the president wasn’t aware of the National Intelligence Estimate widely circulating within his own administration, or 2) acknowledge that Bush was lying (once again) to the American people. As Yogi Berra would say, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

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Stem Cells, the Soul, and the Bush Administration's Sophistry

Philosophers from the Middle Ages used to debate questions like: How many angels can fit on the tip of a pin? They also entertained dilemmas such as: At what point during a pregnancy is the immortal soul infused with its temporal body? The latter question posed no shortage paradoxes. For instance, would the soul of a fetus that died before birth make it to heaven? After all, church doctrine held that baptism was a prerequisite entering the pearly gates.

Serious Christian philosophers, such as Thomas Aquinas, believed that each individual soul was created by God, but that it was only some months after conception that the material body of the fetus was developed enough to be co joined with the soul. Many would take issue with Aquinas, of course, arguing that the moment of conception is the point where soul and body are joined. The only problem with both of these views, however, is that they depend on a dualistic metaphysics that no longer has much scientific or philosophical credibility. To put it bluntly, the idea that a human being is a composite consisting of an immaterial soul and a material body is no more tenable than the idea that the earth is flat.

To make my point clearer consider the case of phlogiston, hypothetical substance pre-modern "scientists" invented to explain why a candle goes out when a glass covers it. These ancient thinkers believed that every flame emitted an invisible and undetectable substance called phlogiston. When a candle was covered by a glass, these thinkers reckoned, the flame would extinguish itself after a matter of moments when there was no more room under the glass for the flame to release additional phlogiston. Needless to say, with Lavosier’s discovery of oxygen in 1778, the entire rationale for phlogiston evaporated. Today, most neuroscientists and philosophers find the idea of a soul is about as useful to their work as the concept of phlogiston is to a modern chemist.

Those on the religious right who oppose stem cell research involving human embryos tacitly rely on the outmoded concept of the soul as an immaterial substance. Invoking cliches like "the sanctity of life" to defend the inalienable rights of an embryo is more effective rhetorically than factually. An embryo is not a person, anymore than a recipe is a soufflé.

Nevertheless, embryos can and should be treated with respect because under the right conditions they could develop into persons. Embryos are like seeds. But just as crushing an acorn is not the same as cutting down an oak tree, so discarding an embryo is not the same thing as killing a person. After all, few of us would want to see a doctor or a nurse at a fertility clinic charged with negligent homicide if they inadvertently mishandled a frozen embryo in a way that ended its viability.

Those who oppose federal funding for research involving embryonic stem cells have succeeded in erecting a mountain of impediments to medical research out of a moral molehill. Frozen embryos are routinely discarded by fertilization clinics as a byproduct of helping infertile couples have children, but Bush’s stem cell policy does nothing to "save" these embryos (and no one seems to be clamoring for a ban on in vitro fertilization).

An embryo is not a person. It is estimated that as many as seventy-five percent of embryos spontaneously abort; and in most cases a woman never even knows she was pregnant. Further, two weeks after the supposedly magic "moment of conception" (its actually a biological process that takes hours) a single embryo can begin a process that leads to twins. In other words, it makes little sense to think of an embryo in its earliest stages as an individual.

Stem cell research is filled with promise and fraught with peril. The breakthrough that involves turning skin cells into pluripotent stem cells (cells that could potentially grow into any organ or body tissue) seemingly overcomes a supposed moral issue, but the dilemma here was always more political than ethical.

For a good overview and analysis of this issue see "Standing in the Way of Stem Cell Research" in the Washington Post by Alan Leshner and James Thomson.

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Fear vs. Hope and the Renewal of America

Umberto Ecco once said, "the Devil is faith without a smile. The true lover of mankind endeavors to make the Truth laugh." Ecco’s thought, the more I think about it, is an antidote to our increasingly dour political times. Fear mongers dominate the political landscape, pandering to the irrationality of the lowest common denominator in ways that threaten to take the United States back to the dark ages. Fear of immigrants, fear of terrorists, and fear the Other are easily exploited in an insecure and therefore angry age.

The fulminators are not just political figures. Lou Dobbs has revived his flailing career by flogging "illegal" immigrants 24/7. Bill O’Reilly scapegoats secularists, leftists, academics, media elites, and Hollywood celebrities. Broadcasters and guests ranting against what they dislike dominate much of our airwaves.

There has always been a paranoid streak in the American psyche. The Salem witch trials, McCarthyism, and more recently the Bush administration’s largely irrational response to 9/11.

A rational response to the 9/11 attacks would have included the implementation of a comprehensive national energy strategy aimed at reducing America’s dangerous reliance on Middle Eastern oil. Presently, with oil hovering at the $100 mark, the Bush administration is presiding over the largest transfer of wealth in history as Western consumers fill the coffers of autocratic petro states (like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela) every time they fill their tanks. In a perverse way, U.S. consumers are fueling Anti-American forces, jihadist causes, and global warming all at the same time.

The high price of oil hurts America’s economy and it even hampers the Bush administration’s dubious democratization efforts in the Middle East. For instance, hard-liners in Iran would have a much harder time extending their influence through militias in Iraq (or terror organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah) if the price of petroleum were significantly lower. And clearly, the failure of U.S. automakers to adopt higher fuel efficiency standards has deleterious effect on their competitiveness.

Tapping American ingenuity to develop the alternative fuels and energy efficiency technologies of the future could revitalize America’s manufacturing sector, strike a blow against Islamic extremism, and reduce global warming. This kind of imaginative thinking would shift the focus away from the bogeymen demagogues like to dangle before the public in order to enhance their ratings and/or political prospects. Instead, America’s energies could be directed towards creating the new industries, technologies, and ecological practices that could renew America’s spirit.

For the last seven years the United States has been governed by fear. It is simply a travesty that America is now identified with water boarding, indefinite detentions, and a crusade (including an army of private mercenaries) to convert the Middle East. In many respects, it seems the United States has reverted to the Middle Ages.

Fear and anger corrode the soul because they tend to exclude hope and courage. The Bush administration has undeniably exploited fear for political gain, but its policies are actually eroding America’s economic and national security. The truth is that people rarely thrive where fear reigns.

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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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Is Bush’s Stem Cell Policy Vindicated?

Recently, scientists discovered a method of coaxing ordinary skin cells into becoming stem cells, thus avoiding the ethical quandary of having to harvest stem cells from embryos. Conservative commentators have seized on the apparent breakthrough to argue Bush’s stem cell policy – which denied federal funding for stem cell research derived from human embryos – has been vindicated. Indeed, Charles Krauthammer hyperventilates that "the embryonic stem cell debate is over. The verdict is clear: Rarely has a president -- so vilified for a moral stance -- been so thoroughly vindicated."

Not so fast. Conservative pundits have been taking a licking on issues like global warming, Iraq, and Bush’s counter terrorism strategy so it’s little wonder that they’d like to turn the tables for once and insist the "debate is over." A closer look at the issue, however, reveals that Bush’s stem cell stance yielded few, if any, genuine moral benefits. Indeed, the supposed "moral clarity" Bush exercised in delineating the bright red line around "human embryos" had far more to do with abortion politics than any ethically or scientifically defensible principle. To put it simply, Bush’s policy did not save lives or uphold the sanctity of life. But curtailing federal funding for stem cell lines created from human embryos will have an ongoing pernicious effect in so far as federal dollars and ethical oversight go hand in hand. Let me explain.

At the crux of the matter is the question: is a human embryo a person? The term "human embryo" is at least somewhat loaded in so far as it implies that an embryo meets the criteria to count as an individual. It does not, for this reason: as late as two weeks after conception a single embryo can spontaneously split in two and begin developing as twins. Simply put, individuality, personhood, and the soul are not concepts that can be appropriately applied at an embryo’s earliest stages. This point is reinforced by the fact that as many as 75% of fertilized embryos spontaneously abort before implanting. Nature is simply wasteful and indifferent in the extreme.

Right-to-life advocates, however, are wedded to the doctrine that life begins at conception. This view is often attended by wooly metaphysical dogma about the infusion of soul and body taking place at conception. This view, of course, is difficult to square with the facts cited above (the vast majority of embryos spontaneously abort and a single embryo can spontaneously become twins two weeks after conception).

It doesn’t follow from this, however, that the moral value of an embryo is nil. Given the right circumstances an embryo has the potential to become a human being. Thus, when we speak of a "human embryo" we should remember that we are using that designation primarily to refer to the genetic material as being distinct from that of other species, but we are not referring to a distinct individual that has the moral status of a human person. If we were, then it would be wrong to create surplus embryos to help infertile couples have children. But even most on the religious right aren’t too keen on creating a fuss over surplus embryos created as a byproduct of helping infertile couples have children.

Nevertheless, conservative pundits use the term "human embryo" as a rhetorical sleight of hand, subtly implying each and every embryo is a unique human being. But deep down, most serious people don’t believe this because, or there would be calls to ban in vitro fertilization and outlaw privately funded embryonic stem cell research. As it stands, Bush’s policy does not prohibit embryonic stem cell research that is privately funded. Since federal funding invariably entails greater ethical oversight, however, Bush’s policy actually creates the worst of all possible worlds; less dollars where they are needed and less oversight where it is needed.

The discovery that scientists can coax ordinary skin cells into becoming stem cells is a remarkable breakthrough. The ability to bypass even a perceived ethical quandary is welcome, but it would be mistaken and way premature to insist that this new procedure vindicates Bush’s decision, it does not. Bush’s decision, and the reasoning behind it, deserve respect as a serious effort to grapple with profound and difficult questions. The approach of countries like Great Britain, however, has been even more high-minded and serious because the debate there has not been distorted by abortion politics. Those crowing about Bush stem cell policy being vindicated should be a little way of declaring "mission accomplished."

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Bush Authorizes Secret Program to Torture Language

President Bush has signed a super-secret executive order that authorizes him, in his role as commander-in-chief, to torture the any member of the Axis-of-Information (language, reason, or truth) without court approval. Previously, according to long-standing American tradition, any president who wanted to stretch language to the breaking point, douse the truth, or shock reason had to go before a special magistrate in order obtain a writ of verbias corpus.

Most Americans would probably be surprised to learn that beneath the White House bunker is a secret chamber where men in black hoods use sharp instruments to chop words, dissect logic, and mince meaning. As one former linguistic inquisitor put it: “We have the tools to make language talk. We may have to get a little rough, but we’ll get those damn words to open up. When we’re through with them, they’ll tell us everything we want to hear.”

The Department of Informational Conformity and Kompliance (DICK), which was set up during the last days of the Nixon Administration by a zealous up-and-comer, remains one of the most secretive and sensitive institutions in the bowels of the government. Most officials refuse to confirm or deny its existence, but lawyers for Abdul Hominem, a French national of Arab descent, who was recently held incommunicado in DICK’s chambers for two years, and released only after successfully complying with the Bush Administration’s “Don’t talk, don’t torture*” program, has come forward to expose horrific examples linguistic abuse.

“They’re bending logic like a pretzel, meaning has been turned inside out, and they’ve had common sense tied up without a let up for more than six years. They picked me [A. Hominem] up around election time and flailed me until I was of no use to them anymore. I was putty in their hands. But you should have seen what they did with a couple of guys nicknamed Bait & Switch. They roughed them up so bad they switched sides and are now working for the administration. Talk about flip-floppers. One thing I know for sure, they [the administration] are not interested in the truth.”

President Bush has pointedly maintained that the United States adheres strictly to the Semantics Convention. But after signing Merriam-Webster, legislation that specifically bans tortured syntax, the president issued a signing statement, then winked, and said, “A word means just what the commander-in-chief says it means. Nothing more. Nothing less.” The so-called Humpty Dumpty clause, as critics are calling it, would allow Bush to continue mangling the English language with impunity. As noted linguist and language rights activist Nim Chimpsky puts it, “the Bush Administration War on Language metaphor has led to us an axis-of-clichés – tautologies, non-sequitars, and fallacies – whereby language itself is used to strangle thought.”

President Bush, however, steadfastly insists that he will leave “no slogan behind” on the battlefield of ideas. “Some say the War on Words is just a metaphor. They believe that if we cut and run the axis-of-evil – the grammarians, copy-editors, and smart-alecky satirists -- would leave us plain-speaking, hackneyed, cliché loving Americas alone. They would not; they would follow us home, both literally and figuratively. Which is why I made the decision to fight language abroad, in the realm of thought, rather than here at home, the land of truisms and platitudes. We shall fight to the last cliché.”

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Bush vs. Scott McClellan

It is one of life’s ironies that the so-called “value voters” – the evangelicals and Christian conservatives from the religious right -- were instrumental in installing a president (George W. Bush) who tortures the truth at every opportunity. That Bush is a prevaricator par excellence is not even disputable. His misrule has been predicated on lies, spin, and the subversion of the reality-based community. For instance, the Bush administration spun fabricated evidence to sell the Iraq War, while whitewashing scientific evidence that contradicted their stance on global warming. The end result is an ideological bubble that has burst in the public’s face. One victim of Bush’s mendacity is poor little Scott McClellan, the president’s hapless former press secretary who was asked to disseminate falsehoods on his boss’s behalf. As McClellan explains:

“I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the President himself."

McClellan, of course, is referring to his role in vouching for the veracity of Karl Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, effectively telling the public – falsely – that Rove and Libby had nothing to do with leaking the name of Valerie Plame Wilson after her husband, Joseph Wilson, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times debunking a central argument in the Bush administration’s rationale for invading Iraq – namely that Saddam was allegedly trying to purchase uranium from Niger.

The ferociousness of the administration’s counterattack is startling even by the standards of Bush/Cheney. But there were good reason why the vice-president’s office, in particular, was so intent on attacking Wilson in a way that would send a message to other potential critics and whistleblowers. As Crain Unger reports in his new book, The Fall of the House of Bush, there is more than a little circumstantial evidence to suggest that some key neoconservative figures may have been involved in a 1999 burglary at the Nigerian embassy in Italy.

The break-in, as it happens, was the source of the forged documents that Bush later cited in his infamous State of the Union Address (the sixteen words about Saddam allegedly trying to acquire uranium from Africa). However, by the time of Bush’s 2002 State of the Union, the intelligence community (and much of the administration) recognized that the documents in question were dubious, yet the words were actually re-inserted in the president’s speech!

Was Bush in the dark while Cheney pulled the strings? Did the neoconservatives in the VP’s office fear Congressional, media, or public scrutiny might reveal that key neocon figures might be connected to the forged documents. It is clear that Libby’s lies regarding the Plame leak were not just much ado about nothing; they were a smokescreen intended to protect higher ups and perhaps a conspiracy that brought the country to war by deliberately providing Congress and the American people with false intelligence. Instead of getting to the bottom of the leak, as Bush promised, he had his press secretary lie to the American people and then he commuted the sentence of a convicted perjurer. Well, I guess the Libby case proves that telling the truth isn’t always necessary to set you free.

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Is Bush's Surge Vindicated?

Recently, Bush’s supporters have been chirping that the president’s troop surge into Baghdad has been vindicated because violence in Iraq is in a downward trend. The prospect of a full-scale civil war seems to have abated, and there are encouraging signs that al-Qaeda in Iraq is in retreat. These are welcome tactical developments, but using words like “success” or “victory” would be wholly inappropriate in the context of a war that has otherwise been a strategic and moral calamity for the United States.

For the religious right, however, the campaign in Iraq is not just the central front in the war on terror, but also the central front in a cultural and political crusade to wrest control of the national narrative from the secular left. In other words, the religious right desperately wants to claim some sort of victory in Iraq so that they can declare that God and the tide of history are on their side. When things looked hopeless in Iraq the right insisted that it would be some decades before Bush is vindicated. But when a few encouraging developments materialize the right immediately claims vindication and insists that opponents of the war are in denial.

In reality, the war in Iraq has greatly complicated and compounded the challenges the United States faces. Future historians are more likely to say the Iraq War was “Mission impossible” than they are to say the mission was accomplished, but there are too many variables to know how Iraq will manage to turn out in the end. It is quite possible -- indeed I think it is likely -- that Iraq will be quite better off some decades from now than it would have been under Saddam’s Baath Party rule. However, the benefits of Iraq turning out all right may prove more negligible and irrelevant to America’s interests than the architects of the war ever imagined.

The Iraq War must be understood in a context that includes: the rise of China and India, the twilight of the hydrocarbon era, the challenge of militant Islam, and global warming. The invasion of Iraq has done little to alleviate these challenges; indeed, the botched occupation has drained America’s resources away from these and other pressing issues. It is impossible to tie a single hurricane, wildfire, or similar ecological catastrophe to climate change. But if the United States continues to suffer record economic and environmental devastation predicted by scientific authorities, then even a successful outcome in Iraq will look like an imprudent use of American resources.

The strategic rationale for invading Iraq included the idea of exerting hegemony over the region’s petroleum resources in order that the United States would benefit from China’s voracious appetite for oil. To put it bluntly, the Bush administration wanted to insure that: U.S. and British oil firms benefited from China’s phenomenal economic growth and that oil purchases would be denominated in dollars (which confers enormous benefits to U.S. financial firms). To date, however, the price of oil has risen to $100 a barrel (a five-fold increase since the Bush administration took office) while the dollar is sinking to new lows. In short, invading Iraq has precipitated the exact opposite of the Bush administration’s strategic aims, not just on the economic and energy fronts, but also in so far as it has boosted the jihadist cause worldwide.

The Bush administration is going to have to expend a lot of energy just to undo the damage its ill-considered and ill-executed invasion has wrought. To this end, Condoleezza Rice has organized a Middle Eastern Peace conference to try and contain Iran and ameliorate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An administration that at one time believed to road to peace in the Middle East went through Baghdad, Tehran, and Syria (i.e., regime change) has now flip-flopped in so far as it is embracing diplomacy in a last ditch effort to salvage Bush’s legacy.

The prospects for a positive outcome in Iraq have increased marginally in recent months, but they are still dim. Simply put, the Bush administration’s legacy is at the mercy of external events and the next administration. Unless some cataclysmic event dramatically changes public opinion, neither the next administration nor the American people are likely to be inclined to sustain Bush’s nation building efforts in Iraq. All the parties jockeying for power in Iraq recognize this and they are laying low. As one observer put it, the current lull in violence we are seeing now will be revealed as a great deception.

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Top Ten Policy Achievements of the Bush Administration

10). A lower dollars makes it more likely a foreign buyer can purchase my house before the bank forecloses.

9). Higher prices at the pump means we can afford to spend less on foreign aid that helps oil-producing third world countries like Russia, Venezuela, and Iran.

8). Global warming has really increased the potency of my medical marijuana crop.

7). Getting Muslims to fight each other over there in Iraq so they wouldn’t fight us over here is an idea that should have earned the axis-of-clichés, Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld, the Noble Peace Prize.

6). No Money Down, No Interest. No Payments till January, 2009 sure was an affordable way to buy into a war.

5). Hey, who would have thought that George W. Bush could have done so much to rehabilitate the reputations of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Andrew Johnson, and Richard Nixon.

4). “Spending the government surplus on tax cuts for the wealthy helped insure we didn’t waste the money on deficit reduction, saving Social Security, or providing health insurance for needy brats. Bah Humbug.” -- Ebenezer Scrooge

3). George Bush has done for politics in America what Vince McMahon did for professional wrestling. Ok, neither is really edifying, but they sure are entertaining.

2). Dirt bike trails used by Bush and his Secret Service entourage are sure to be designated national landmarks by Bush’s successor.

1). Bush’s bridge to nowhere is leading back to anther Clinton White House.

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Bush, God, and the Collapse of the Religious Right

Herman Melville once wrote that a sharing a bed with a sober cannibal was preferable to bedding down with a drunken Christian. After seven years of the Bush administration, the intoxication Evangelicals felt at having one of their own in the White House is giving way to a pretty nasty hangover. To put it mildly, there aren’t many on the religious right anymore who think George W. Bush has been the answer to their prayers.

How could the Bush administration – now recognized by most thinking persons as one of the worst ever – go so wrong when Bush and his followers so earnestly prayed to God for guidance? To paraphrase Nikos Kazantzakis, praying to God is like knocking on the door of a deaf man; one shouldn’t expect to get an answer.

The notion of a personal creator God, one that answers prayers and intervenes in history, is not an idea that attracts serious attention among the scientific and philosophically literate. Indeed, many leading thinkers privately believe that religious belief may be a form of mental illness. Certainly, watching the Bush administration self-destruct at it succumbed to its delusions it is pretty hard not to conclude that rationality and religion are incompatible.

Many of the people who helped put Bush into power truly are loony; they believe in preposterous things like the speaking in tongues, Biblical inerrancy, the Rapture, and Armageddon. They also believed that electing a Godly man such as Bush would mean having God’s instrument in the Oval Office. Iraq, Katrina, Abu Ghraib and a thousand other failures of leadership have sorely tested that conviction.

There is nothing more painful than false belief, which is why so many evangelicals are in a state of disillusionment regarding their ill-fated fusion of politics and faith. Surely, the irony is so glaring even fundamentalists can see it: the morally suspect William Jefferson Clinton (the anti-Christ to some on the religious right) is widely regarded as both a successful and popular leader, while George W. Bush is widely recognized and reviled as a disaster.

One of the most salient examples of religious zealotry and foolishness going hand in hand can be seen in the case of Katherine Harris, the Florida Secretary of State who flagrantly used the powers of her office to delay and impede an impartial recount during the disputed 2000 election, effectively undermining the will of the electorate, both in the crucial state of Florida and the United States as a whole.

The flakey Harris, who went on to an undistinguished career in Congress (to put it charitably,) later articulated her belief that America’s leaders needed to be Christians in order to take the government back from the secularists. “If you’re not electing Christians,” she maintained, “then in essence you are going to legislate sin.”

It’s hard to square Harris’ sentiment with water boarding, the sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib, and countless other acts of corruption and lawlessness perpetrated by the Bush administration. But Melville would recognize the perils associated with self-righteous certainty and religious zealotry. After all, his monomaniacal Captain Ahab was convinced he was acting as “Fate’s Lieutenant” as he pursued the incarnation of evil, Moby Dick, “round perdition’s fires.”

Ironically, however, Ahab merely became an agent of the malicious evil he sought to extinguish in his quest to vanquish the great white whale. Tragically, of course, Ahab succeeded only in creating more orphans. There’s a lesson in there for George Bush and his crew; lash out at bogeymen and all too often you come to embody the characteristics you fear and loath.

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Top Ten Reasons to Vote for Dennis Kucinich for President

10) Congressman Kucinich is the only presidential candidate with a comprehensive plan to get all U.S. troops out of Iraq in less than two weeks by using a secret fleet of UFOs based at Roswell.

9) Kucinich’s plan to use his friend Shirley MacLaine to interrogate al-Qaeda suspects telepathically is sure to result in better intelligence than the Bush administration ever got.

8) With the pint-sized Kucinich, we’ll finally have a politician who sides with the little guy.

7) Kucinich’s pledge to name Mr. Spock as his running mate is just what our solar system needs after having Darth Vader reining as VP for eight years.

6) Kucinich’s comprehensive immigration plan will allow extra-terrestrials to apply for a driver’s license, even if they only live on our planet part time.

5) After eight years of Bush as a wartime president it’s about time we had a space cadet as commander-in-chief.

4) Kucinich’s proposal to rename the Defense Department the Peace Department is an idea that’s light years ahead of its time. And so is his idea to rename Air Force One the Starship Enterprise.

3) Kucinich’s plan to reorganize the U.S. Military into a new Starfleet Academy is sure to boost enlistment.

2) It’s about time we had a president who’ll think more about colonizing outer space than the Middle East.

1) Kucinich really is the candidate with the best ideas and values to be president (Unfortunately, the joke here is on Americans who’ll probably end up voting for a candidate as synthetic and artificial as a loaf of Wonder Bread – i.e., Mitt Romney or Hillary Clinton – rather than an authentic human being).

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The State of Emergency in Pakistan

“The world is safer without Saddam Hussein” is one of those statements that sounds meaningful, but is actually vacuous nonsense. Is it safer for most Iraqis? Is the threat of global warming accelerating? Are Islamic radicals closer to getting their hands on WMD, perhaps by overturning Pakistan’s shaky government? There are hundreds of question like these one can ask, but most of the answers are unknowable. There are too many “known unknowns,” as the snow flakey former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld might say.

One thing we do know, however, is that Pakistan -- a pillar of the Bush administration counterterrorism strategy – is crumbling. The recent assassination attempt against Benazir Bhutto, and a state of emergency called by President Musharaff, are indicative of the kind of chaos the country is in. The administration may claim Iraq is making progress, and that this will be a huge setback for the terrorists. But while Iraq has garnered the headlines, Pakistan has arguably become the true front on the war on terror (and to say that we’ve been losing ground in Pakistan would be an understatement).

In a nutshell, the problem with the Bush administration’s approach to Pakistan is that they’ve put all their eggs in Musharaff’s basket. This follows from Bush’s “great man” theory of leadership, the notion that a single individual can turn the tide of history. No doubt, Bush sees himself as a decisive actor, the kind of leader who through force of character and willpower shapes the world’s destiny for the better. It remains to be seen, of course, what verdict History will render regarding Bush: deluded fool or visionary statesman?

It is becoming clear however, that Bush’s destiny increasingly depends on Musharaff’s. The Pakistani general has declared martial law, he is moving to silence journalists and opposition leaders, and he has quarantined the country’s Supreme Court until they ratify his power grab. Whether this will help stabilize or further radicalize Pakistan remains to be seen. It is a test of Bush’s theory of leadership: namely, that great statesmen are a law unto themselves. Pakistan's nuclear arsenal hangs in the balance. Are you feeling safer?

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Bush vs. God

It increasingly looks like evangelicals won’t have a prayer in the 2008 presidential election. The so-called values voters are in a state of disillusionment with George W. Bush, who seems to have fractured nearly everything he’s touched (most notably Iraq, the Republican Party, and the long-hoped for Conservative realignment). Indeed, George Bush’s Road to Nowhere appears to be leading back to the candidate many on the religious-right view as the anti-Christ: namely Hillary Clinton. How could it all go so wrong for the Right?

When you mix religion with politics you get the worst of both worlds. Politics is about compromise, half-measures, give and take, meeting halfway, and cutting practical deals in order to achieve outcomes most of us can accept as we try to make our way in an imperfect world. Religion is about bedrock principles, eternal truths, God’s commandments, and ordering our human affairs to accord with Natural Law. The politician thinks in terms of provisional and incremental progress, while the religious leader frequently surveys the social world and sees social and moral decline.

Abortion, evolution, and secularization are bogeymen as far as leaders on the religious right are concerned. Many of them earnestly believe God will punish the United States if it does not reverse its evil ways, which include a decadent culture, a depraved indifference to fetal life, and an indifference to God in the public arena. I happen to believe that the notion of God punishing the U.S. because Roe vs. Wade is the law of the land is irrational, but that in no way dismisses their legitimate concerns that a widespread and cavalier attitude towards abortion is injurious to the social fabric.

Ironically, many countries that have permissive abortions laws have far lower rates of abortions than countries with Draconian bans on the procedure. The perfect, it seems, is the enemy of the good (a cliché that could well summarize the Bush administration’s tragic errors when it comes to its efforts to export democracy to Iraq).

Evangelicals and the so-called values voters are undergoing a period of heartfelt reflection and reappraisal regarding the infusion of religion and politics. How could a president they prayed so fervently for end up leading America into an abyss of abuse and torture characterized by Abu Ghraib, water boarding, and extraordinary renditions? How could a man of faith, like Bush, make so many fundamental misjudgments? Wasn’t God guiding him?

There’s an Oriental saying that the gods only laugh at those who pray for money. But perhaps prayers directed at political ends elicit heavenly chuckles too. Certainly Bush’s reign has been as much farce as tragedy. Evangelical leaders, incidentally, are distancing themselves from the failures of the Bush administration, a move that more or less excuses the fact that they supported Bush in droves. It seems an agnostic liberal like me – I’ve been sounding the warning bell against Bush ever since the political gods overturned the will of the American people with their indefensible and constitutionally dubious decision in Bush vs. Gore – recognized just how pernicious G.W.B would be for America’s values long before the righteous right did. Now isn’t that a Divine irony? For more on the subject check out this article in The New York Times Magazine.

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Bush vs. Global Warming

Mother Nature is one tough bitch, according to the eminent scientist James Lovelock (originator of the “Gaia Hypothesis). It would be hard to argue with Lovelock after witnessing half-a-million Californians fleeing their homes after yet another season of record wildfires out West. The South East, too, is experiencing dramatically irregular weather patterns, with a record drought depleting Georgia’s water supply so much that residents reportedly have about 90 days worth of water left.

Weather wise, things are starting to get biblical, but according to Lovelock’s the worst is yet to come. Six billion people, Lovelock suggests, may end up victims of global warming. Interested readers can evaluate his dire predictions for themselves at: Rolling Stone. Lovelock, incidentally, doesn't think there's much we can do to stop the worst effects of global warming from materializing because we've already passed the tipping point. Don't the 24% of Americans that still support Bush -- and who once that global warming was a giant hoax perpetrated by the Left -- realize that God would not want a incompetent like Bush to president, unless he wanted to destroy the United States.

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Bush's Balloon

Turkey is threatening to invade Iraq, a record number of Americans (one million) are facing foreclosure, and oil is skirting $90 a barrel. With the housing market hitting the skids, gasoline prices accelerating to $4 a gallon, don’t be surprised if the United States hits a recession by this time next year. All I know is that the administration that botched Katrina, screwed up Iraq, has mismanaged America’s financial situation even more. You can’t cut taxes, flush money down the toilet in Iraq, and expand the size of the government by record levels without some sort of reckoning. The air has been leaking out of Bush’s hot-air balloon for some time, but there may be no soft landing for the rest of the country.

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Bush Wins Nobel Prize for War

George W. Bush is the recipient of this year’s Nobel Prize for War. The announcement made by the great-great-great grandson of the Prussian military strategist Carl Phillip Gottfried von Clausewitz, was greeted by jubilation in the White House Bunker. Previous recipients have included Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Benedict Arnold, General George Armstrong Custer, Napoleon, Mussolini, and the character known as Dr. Strangelove.

The prize, including 250,000 rounds of ammo, will be jointly shared by Bush and the private mercenary firm of Blackwater USA. In announcing their decision the Nobel War Prize committee cited the contribution Bush and Blackwater have made to “capitalize on the fog of war to defeat domestic enemies as a prelude to total war.”

Bush, who has not worn military garb since appearing in his specially-tailored Commander-in-Chief flight four years ago, was on hand to receive the award wearing a black ninja suit and wrap around sunglasses. In accepting the honor Bush quoted his favorite military strategist, Sun Tzu, saying: “Throw your soldiers into positions where there is no escape, and they will prefer death to flight, if they face the death there is nothing they cannot achieve.” The president then winked and added, “All war is deception.”

In winning the prize, Bush once again stole the limelight from former Vice-President Al Gore who earlier won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in educating the public about global warming. Bush was disdainful of his rival, quoting Orwell’s axiom, “War is Peace,” to buttress his conviction that that the decisions he has made as president – to ignore global warming, scrap the Geneva Conventions, to take the week off during Katrina, and spend billions rebuilding Iraq rather than waste the money at home on pork barrel projects – have been the right ones for the country.

Speaking before audience of foreign policy experts, including Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Michele Malkin, Vice-president Dick Cheney argued that his boss’s award vindicated the administration’s war mongering philosophy. Quoting Machiavelli the VP said, “War can only be postponed to the advantage of others.” “We must strike while the iron is hot,” he continued. “Today we are liberating Iraq, tomorrow the world.”

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George Bush and Torture

George Bush’s declamation that the U.S. doesn’t torture is about as convincing as Richard Nixon’s pathetic claim that he wasn’t a crook. The sad truth is that the Bush administration continues to abuse prisoners, the law, and the trust of the American people. Put simply, the coercive interrogation techniques and the culture of lawlessness the Bush administration has fostered are corroding the soul of the United States. Indeed, the Bush administration has managed to virtually destroy America’s good name, a feat no terrorist group could ever hope to accomplish on its own.

After 9/11 the Bush administration made a conscious decision that the gloves were coming off. Ambassador J. Cofer Black, a CIA veteran, who would later go into business with the private security firm Blackwater, promised Bush shortly after 9/11 that he’d have Osama bin Laden’s head on pike for the president. This promise set the tone; the legal niceties against assassination and torture would be suspended. The United States, which ever since its inception had taken a strong stand against torture, would reverse course.

In the aftermath of 9/11 even liberal commentators, most notably Alan Dershowitz, endorsed what is known as the “ticking time bomb” theory, the notion that it is morally acceptable to torture a terrorist if the information we can get from him will help us find and defuse a nuclear device scheduled to blow up a major city. Abstract thought experiments have their utility, no doubt, but reality rarely presents such neat and simple moral dilemmas. Indeed, the ticking time bomb scenario, though improbable in real-life, lends itself to the kind of melodramatic fantasy that passes for entertainment on TV, where good guys can do terrible things (break the law, torture others, etc) and still remain virtuous.

In TV land, torture never dehumanizes the torturer. Likewise, the rouge cop who breaks the law in order to bring the bad guys to justice is vindicated by the time the final credits run. The moral lessons from the typical formulaic TV plot, however, are about as deep as those found in comic books.

The reality, most counterterrorism experts agree, is that individuals being tortured will tell their torturers anything they think they want to hear, thus making it virtually impossible to disentangle solid information from bad. There is evidence that the invasion of Iraq was predicated on false confessions obtained by torture that linked al-Qaeda to Saddam.

The ticking tomb bomb theory is jury rigged in favor of a pro-active course of action. On one side of the scale is enemy combatant whose depravity and guilt are not in doubt, on the other side rests a major metropolitan city with millions of innocent people. But let’s make the scenario more realistic: imagine ten terror suspects, out of which only one holds the crucial information, with the rest of the bunch including at least one completely innocent individual? Would it still be morally acceptable to torture all ten suspects even if we only had 10% percent chance of getting our hands on the right info in time to avert a mushroom cloud?

I assume most of us would find it acceptable to allow a single innocent individual to suffer unjustified torture if in the process we somehow managed to ensure a 10% percent chance of saving millions of people versus a 0% chance if no torture took place. However, modifying the ticking time bomb experiment in this way shows how easy it is to slide down the slippery slope when it comes to torture.

Is it acceptable, for instance, to sacrifice 1,500 Iraqis a month if we stand a fifty-fifty chance of building a better Middle East within the next twenty years, thus reducing the chances of another 9/11? The question seems positively perverse the more you think about it. But the Bush administration has more or less taken a hypothetical query like that and made it official policy. According to the administration’s moral calculus 600,000 dead and 4 million displaced Iraqis are counterbalanced by a hypothetical future where America will be safer because we defused a powder keg in the Middle East. This is a rather messy version of the ticking time bomb experiment. And the line between those we’ve tortured and those we’ve saved is even more convoluted.

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Onward Christian Soldiers

Apologists for the Bush administration’s occupation of Iraq have long claimed that the invasion was a way of “draining the swamp,” so to speak, in the Middle East. The “swamp” metaphor, of course, is a close cousin to their “flypaper” theory, which holds that hordes of terrorists will be drawn to Iraq by America’s presence where they can be exterminated en masse. Ironically, Iraq has become a magnet for another specimen associated with swamplands – Blackwater USA, the mercenary outfit whose headquarters is situated along what is known as the Great Dismal Swamp in the foothills of North Carolina.

Blackwater, which has garnered headlines recently for allegedly massacring unarmed Iraqi civilians in a series of unprovoked attacks, exists at the intersection of a number of troubling trends: the privatization of warfare, the incestuous connection between Republican political donors and public officials, and the hijacking of U.S. foreign policy by right-wing Christian extremists. No firm exemplifies this axis-of-ills more than Blackwater.

Blackwater was founded in 1996 by Erik Prince, a reclusive former Navy Seal. The hyper-wealthy Prince is a devout Christian with ties to many right-wing organizations dedicated to promoting a libertarian and socially conservative agenda. Such groups militantly oppose abortion, homosexual marriage, and secular character of American society. They believe that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that America’s law and culture must reflect our Biblical heritage. Citizens like Prince have funneled vast sums to conservative Republican candidates in the hopes of bringing about a cultural revolution in the United States.

Blackwater amounts to a private army, which includes 20,000 elite troops, twenty aircraft, and a state of the art military base. And the war on terror has literally been a godsend for the company. For instance, by some estimates Blackwater has received close to $1 billion dollars in government contracts, making it essentially “the fifth branch of the U.S military.” Business for Blackwater certainly picked up after 9/11, but the invasion of Iraq was a mother lode for the company. As the Times of London noted, “In Iraq, the postwar business boom is not oil. It is security.” And as the security situation in Iraq worsened, Blackwater’s profit potential exploded.

The invasion of Iraq provided enormous profit opportunities for firms like Blackwater, but many right-wing groups saw the idea of spreading democracy in Iraq as an opportunity to promote Christian teachings and values in the Muslim world, which they believed would be an antidote Islamic extremism. Christianity and capitalism could cure the ills of the Middle East.
Blackwater embodies the idea that one can serve God and mammon. A deeper problem, however, is that democracy and private mercenary armies are incompatible. Put simply, the expansion of for-profit armies erodes democracy (in so far as private interest and the public good are severed). For instance, when the profit incentive for going to war is great, then democratic checks and balances become a nuisance that the military-industrial-security-disaster complex will seek to circumvent and dismantle.

The run up to the war in Iraq is a case in point. That is, if a real democratic debate had taken place regarding the threat posed by Saddam, with the facts, evidence, and arguments weighed and deliberately and honestly, then the United States probably never would have invaded Iraq. But with billions of dollars at stake, then war profiteers had an enormous incentive to manipulate the political process to achieve the outcome they desired. When you add ideological fervor to the profit motive, then making a killing in Iraq can even seem morally justified.

Firms like Blackwater represent and ominous development for self-government and the separation of church and state. The existence of private armies controlled by a single individual (or loyal to a religious ideology) is a throwback to the feudal era. Despite Blackwater’s perfect record of safeguarding every American diplomat it has contracted to protect, the firm has greatly compounded America’s efforts in Iraq with its heavy-handed and that have alienated ordinary Iraqis. “Ye shall know them by their fruits” is a tenet that the Christian soldiers at Blackwater have failed to live up

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Bush's Strategic Stupidity

George Bush’s tenure is turning out to be a tragedy for the United States. Most Americans, by now, are at least dimly aware that Bush is leading the country in the wrong direction, but only as small percentage recognizes how this accidental president has tipped the United States towards a precipitous and probably irreversible decline. Put simply, through a mix of arrogance and obtuseness, Bush has managed to enmesh the United States in a series of vicious cycles that are steadily eroding America’s vitality. If the present tends continue, historians will almost certainly correlate Bush’s ascension to the White House with America’s 21st century decline.

A vicious cycle is a self-defeating pattern where bad habits lead to deleterious outcomes, which tend to reinforce bad habits that lead to even worse outcomes. For instance, imagine a drunk who drinks because he is poor; the more he drinks the poorer he gets, which leads him to drink even more, which only worsens his condition. The United States, courtesy George W. Bush, is enacting similar self-defeating behaviors on a number of fronts.

America’s energy habits are at the heart of several interrelated vicious cycles: 1) global warming, 2) terrorism, and 3) Iraq. For example, America’s voracious appetite for fossil fuels is spewing carbon into the atmosphere, which causes the planet to heat up, which is increasing the potential for ecological catastrophes, which will ultimately threaten the prosperity, stability, and future of civilization itself.

The high demand for fossil fuels has another consequence: high oil prices mean more money for jihadists and anti-American forces. Indeed, as Thomas Friedman notes in what he calls the First Law of Petro-politics: the higher the price of oil, the slower the pace of reform in the Middle East. This is because mullahs, clerics, and dictators flush with petro-dollars can afford to forgo economic development and thwart political and cultural reforms.

The West’s need for cheap oil, of course, is a large reason for America’s presence in Iraq. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was supposed to break the back of OPEC, thus driving down the price of oil to the $15-$20 region, which would have rescued America’s ailing automakers (which can’t sell as many gas guzzlers when oil is expensive). Instead, the botched occupation in Iraq has helped drive oil prices to new highs (and high oil prices benefit American adversaries like Iran).
So, the Bush administration overacted to a threat that didn’t exist (Saddam’s alleged WMD) and failed to act to a real and growing threat (global warming). And the steps it has taken have only compounded the challenges America faces. Most ironically, however, the United States is mortgaging its future by borrowing money from China so that we can continue to buy oil from the Middle East, which only increases the blowback we’ll face from terrorism and global warming. In other words, we are burdening future generations with debt that pays for the foolish and selfish choices the Bush administration is making today.

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Target Iran?

According to an investigative report by Seymour Hersh, “Shifting Targets, published in the New Yorker, the Bush administration is preparing surgical military operations against Iran. As Hersh sees it, Bush/Cheney (rather than admit their own ineptness) have decided to blame Iran for the lack of progress in Iraq. And they are determined to hit Iran hard in order to dissuade Iran from seeking to extend its influence in Iraq.

Hersh makes it clear that the U.S. is already a proxy war against Iran in Iraq. Further, Bush & Cheney believe that a combination of air power and Special Forces ground operations could decapitate and discredit the most radical elements in the Republican Guard. Unfortunately, the same wishful-thinking (and the failure to imagine the worst-case scenarios) that characterized the fiasco in Iraq are being repeated in the run up to a confrontation with Iran. The Bush administration never talks about the lessons of Iraq, which is why they seem destined to repeat their errors on an even grander scale.

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Blackwater Blues

Machiavelli disdained mercenaries, which should tell you something. And so did America’s Founding Fathers. But for a variety of political and economic reasons the Bush administration has increasingly come to rely on a privatized form of warfare. The war in Iraq has been profitable for many American companies, most notably the North Carolina based firm of Blackwater USA . But in more ways than not these firms have undermined America’s efforts in Iraq. Indeed, private security firms like Blackwater have been implicated in numerous incidents – the torture and abuse of prisoners, unprovoked shootings, and even the sale of weaponry to insurgents – that have greatly complicated America’s situation in Iraq.

The recent shootout out involving Blackwater security personnel is a case in point. Eleven Iraqi civilians were killed, including a mother and her infant daughter, after Blackwater employees opened fire on an Iraqi vehicle that failed to stop when ordered. The incident grew so heated that U.S. troops founded themselves in the middle of an armed standoff between Blackwater and the Iraqi Army while one Blackwater employee threatened to shoot another. In short, Blackwater had somehow managed to tick off every faction imaginable, except their stockholders.

Blackwater is proving to be divisive in many other ways; Blackwater personnel tend to make ten times what ordinary grunts make, engendering tremendous resentment among U.S. troops. Further, firms like Blackwater operate largely outside Iraqi and U.S. law, which means that they are almost entirely unaccountable (hence they are deeply resented by the Iraqi government).
The United States has 160,000 private contactors in Iraq, and 50,000 fit in the category of being mercenaries. Perversely, it is in their financial interests that Iraq remains the kind of place where their services are needed. Firms like Blackwater will continue to make a killing so long as the carnage continues.

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Sandra Day O'Connor's Supreme Folly: Bush vs. Gore Revisited

Officials and government insiders are ditching the Bush administration faster than the corporate sponsors that dumped Michael Vick, the disgraced quarterback recently indicted for dogfighting. Put simply, being associated with the administration of George W. Bush is becoming a badge of dishonor. For instance, Alan Greenspan, Paul O’Neill, Matthew Dowd, Colin Powell, and a host of others are stepping forward to preemptively disassociate themselves from the disasters Bush has wrought. The latest is former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who now describes Bush – the candidate she voted for twice in the 2000 election! -- as “arrogant, lawless, incompetent, and extreme.”

O’Connor’s mea culpa is on target, if a bit late. But her broadside against Bush could very well describe the majority’s dubious legal rationale in the infamous Bush vs. Gore decision, where she was the decisive vote that installed the very man she now derides. Talk about flip-floppers.

The vast majority of Constitutional scholars have long recognized that the Court’s decision in that case was right out of Alice in Wonderland – “Sentence first, verdict later.” Put simply, the majority disgraced itself when it abrogated its responsibility to be an impartial umpire and instead allowed itself to become an instrument for pursuing and exploiting partisan advantage.

Justice O’Connor (if putting those two words together don't amount to an oxymoron) put her ties to the Bush family and the Republican Party before her loyalty to the country and the cause of justice and equality before the law. In her most important decision she revealed herself to be nothing more than a political hack. Her legal reasoning, always shallow at best, was especially thin in the case of Bush vs. Gore. Interestingly, in overturning the will of the electorate – the majority of whom had voted for Gore – the fastidious O’Connor went on the blame Florida’s voters for being sloppy and stupid with their ballots. The verdict of history, however, is in the process of reversing O’Connor’s decision. It isn’t stupid and sloppy voters in Florida -- who had to contend with illegal purges, confusing ballot designs, systematic irregularities, inferior punch card voting machines, and the like -- who got it wrong, it is O’Connor who screwed up. And she botched it with a decision filled with stupid, sloppy, and disingenuous reasoning. At least O’Connor can see how wrong she was. Now that’s what I call poetic justice.

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The New Axis of Evil: Bush, Britney, and O.J.

Here’s a story you won’t hear from the mainstream media: following current events too closely may do grave injury to your mental health. O.J. is on the loose, kind of, out on bail on kidnapping charges, which will probably only increase the value his autographed memorabilia is fetching.

The Clintons are once again enveloped in a scandal involving an Asian con artist. It’s seem the Clinton’s political and financial fortunes are about as Kosher as the Pork Chop Suey you might buy from a street vendor in Chinatown. And just as you wouldn’t eat at a Chinese restaurant if you saw them preparing the food, so you wouldn’t vote for the Clintons is you saw where they got their money.

Meanwhile, Britney Spears is still getting behind the wheel, George Bush still has 16th months to go as the leader of the free world, and Dick Cheney wants to nuke Iran. And do you know the worst part of all this? The Mullahs in Tehran want the United States to attack their country to generate an anti-American backlash! Here is a message for the clerics in Iran: If you want to engender an anti-American backlash in among your people, then just invite O.J. and Brittany over for a visit. It will save the Bush administration a lot of cruise missiles and I’m sure Britney would look good in a veil.

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Bush vs. O.J Simpson

O.J is back in jail, a Clinton political donor is in the slammer, and a president named George Bush has U.S. troops camping out in the Persian Gulf. It seems like the 1990’s. Or as Yogi Berra would say, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

Actually, it would be pretty nice to travel back in time to a period when the White House scandals mostly involved sex. Bush has his Democratic Peace Theory – spreading democracy will lessen the chances for war. But I have what I’m calling the Lusty Peace Theory – spreading sexy young interns throughout the White House will lessen the chances of war. Of course, my theory may not hold up if America elects Hillary.

Too bad I don't have a theory about how to keep O.J. out of trouble, except to lock the guy up and throw away the key this time. After all, the argument his lawyers made at his previous trial -- If the gloves don't fit, you must acquit -- was even less persuasive than the legal rationale that decided Bush vs. Gore. And now look at the trouble we're in.

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Greenspan Bashes Bush

George W. Bush is about as popular these days as French philosopher hanging out at a NASCAR barbecue. The deservedly unpopular president lost another aficionado when former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan blasted Bush this weekend for his fiscally ruinous economic policies. Yes, the economy is supposed to be one of the administration’s bright spots in a record marred by Iraq, Katrina, and Constitutional misrule, but if Greenspan is correct the bottom could soon drop out as the country faces an axis-of-ills: recession, inflation, and a monster deficit.

According to Greenspan, who at onetime gave the green light to Bush’s 1.3 trillion dollar tax cut, in future years the Fed Reserve will be forced to raise interest rates to double digit amounts in order to counteract inflation. Raising rates to fight inflation could not come at a worse time because the United States is already facing a credit crunch and an economic slowdown associated with the housing bubble. Many believe that as foreclosures rise, cash-strapped consumers, unable to use the equity in their homes as an ATM machines, will cut back spending, leading to a recession. Put simply, the average American are as maxed from the mall out as American forces are from Iraq.

This brings us to the Middle East. The Bush administration, in its bottomless wisdom, pushed ahead with its 1.3 trillion dollar tax cut at one of the least propitious moments possible; soon after discovering that the projected surpluses from the Clinton years were not going to materialize after all, and just before launching its disastrous venture in Iraq, which by some estimates could cost $2 trillion or more.

If you want unvarnished economic advice from a trusted authority figure, then perhaps you’ll find Dick Cheney’s assertion, that “deficit’s don’t matter,” reassuring. However, if you want my advice you’d be wise to spend your tax cut now before the sinking dollar depreciates even further.

Greenspan also offered his view on Iraq, confessing that "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." Spoken like an honest libertarian (though many less candid libertarians (Cheney, for instance) seem not the least bit apologetic or embarrassed about privatizing warfare).

The Bush administration’s fiscal policies will eventually prove as rash and imprudent as its decision to invade and occupy Iraq. Just as Iraq is a vicious cycle (the invasion has had the effect of driving up the price of oil, which fuels Iran anti-Western forces like Iran and al-Qaeda), so the Bush deficit will push up interest rates, which will hamper economic growth growing forward. Eventually these two vicious cycles will reinforce each other as higher oil prices, higher interest rates, a bigger deficit, and declining dollar lead to slowing economic growth, which will make most Americans poorer and less secure. Well, As Bush once said of his tax cuts, “It’s your money, you paid for it.” At least that sounds more honest than Bush’s latest slogan “return on success.”

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Bush's Simulated Version of Reality

As the governor of Texas, George W. Bush visited a juvenile prison in order to reinforce his image as tough but compassionate conservative dedicated to reforming the juvenile justice system. After Bush’s photo-op tour, a young African-American inmate, a petty thief named Johnny Demon Baulkmon, asked the governor a simple but affecting question: What do you think of us now? Bush seized the moment to demonstrate his tough-love brand of conservatism. He grew misty eyed as he explained to the young man, “The state of Texas loves you all. We haven’t given up on you. But we love you enough to punish you when you break the law.”

The governor’s aides and supporters high-fived one another following the encounter; indeed, Bush frequently recounted the incident to friends and made it the centerpiece of his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in 2000. Bush would run as a different kind of Republican, a compassionate conservative and a reformer with results.

Things would not turn out so well for Johnny Demon Baulkmon, however. He was raped by another juvenile shortly thereafter. And in 2006, Baulkmon, now serving time in an adult prison for petty theft, would say of Bush, “He doesn’t care about anything but himself. He’s complete trash, a horrible evil person.” A harsh verdict, perhaps, but the full story does not reflect well on Bush’s claim to be a reformer with results (or the effectiveness of his Responsibility Era reforms).

One cannot blame Bush personally, of course for all that has gone wrong on Johnny Baulkom’s life. But the incident seems symptomatic of Bush’s penchant for staging phony photo-ops – think “Mission Accomplished” – that allow him to project a grandiose and overly idealized image, but one that is completely divorced from reality. Bush is hardly the only politician to try and make superficial incidents appear substantive. But with Bush, the Baulkmon encounter seems the norm rather than the exception. No doubt, Bush’s aides and supporters were high-fiving themselves after his “Mission Accomplished” speech, but it wasn’t long thereafter when the evidence of sodomy and torture abuses at Abu Ghraib began to surface.

The Bush administration is attempting to present modest tactical successes associated with the surge as a significant strategic advance. However, much of the so-called progress the administration cites is either misleading or likely to be ephemeral. For instance, sectarian violence may have declined, but much of this is accounted for by the fact that four million Iraqis are now in exile, and most neighborhoods have already been ethnically cleansed. Further, the much ballyhooed American alliance with Sunni insurgents against al-Qaeda is a largely tactical alliance of convenience by the Sunnis aimed at offsetting Shiite military superiority. We are very likely arming and empowering warlords and militias preparing for civil war.

The situation in Iraq is grim and it is likely to remain so when Bush leaves office in about fifteen months. The prospect of national reconciliation in Iraq is much lower than the prospect of a larger civil war. Nevertheless, the Bush administration will continue to sell its version of simulated reality. Bush has used Iraq as political prop, but it hasn’t fared much better than Johnny Demon Baulkman.

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