The Conservative Meltdown

The conservative movement is melting faster than the polar ice caps. Speaking of which, a seven square mile chunk of ice just broke off from an arctic glacier the other day. But global warming is hardly the only issue that conservative curmudgeons have mussed up. The Republican establishment has virtually imploded thanks to its incestuous relationships with corrupt lobbyists, rampant sexual hypocrisy among the rank and file of the supposed “values” Party, and the bankruptcy of its economic and social ideologies.

Katrina, Iraq, and the looming Bush Recession. Talk about an axis-of-evils. There’s an overwhelming consensus that when Bush finally leaves office he’ll bequeath his successor the most formidable set of foreign and domestic challenges since Herbert Hoover dropped the Great Depression on to FDR’s lap.

Republican stalwart Phil Graam, until recently McCain’s economic advisor, contends America is in a “mental recession.” But by any measure America’s economic outlook has been pretty bleak of late. After all, the economy has shed jobs seven straight months and the United States is drowning in red ink. Indeed, impending bailout of mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae will effectively double the size of America’s debt obligations virtually overnight.

The fiasco at the heart of Freddie and Fannie is symptomatic of how the Bush administration mortgaged America’s future to pay for yesterday’s tax cuts, which mainly benefited those who benefited the most from rigging the system to their advantage. On the assumption that some institutions are too important to fail (i.e., institutions that spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbyists) America’s taxpayers will be expected bailout foreign investors who bought bad loans (in the form of complex financial instruments) peddled by Wall Street.

Here’s the essence of the problem: the collateralized debt obligations the financial wizards packaged and sold to foreign interests have proven to be as toxic as the dog food the Chinese sell to us with the money we borrow from them. If the American taxpayer doesn’t make good on their losses, then they’ll stop lending us money and interest rates will soar.

Sure, the apple juice the Chinese sell us tastes like radiator fluid, but if foreign creditors like China stop lending us money we won’t be able to afford to buy gasoline from regimes that hate us. The whole economic order will collapse and the United States will descend into a Hobbesian nightmare where life is “short, nasty, and brutish.” Oddly enough, this brings me to Dick Cheney, architect of the Bush administration’s “enhanced” interrogation policy. Enhanced interrogation, of course, is a euphemism for the torture techniques perfected during the Dark Ages by inquisitors and witch hunters.

The civilized world has equated torture as barbarism ever since the Geneva Conventions were ratified. The United States was a signatory and the custodian of that treaty, until George W. Bush unilaterally (and unlawfully) cast them aside as “quaint” relics of a bygone era. In doing so he ignored the advice of counter terrorism officials, law enforcement experts, and human rights activists. Put simply, the experts recognized that torture yields false confessions at least as often as valuable intelligence, as detainees tell their captors what they think they want to hear in order to stop the pain. The case of Ibn al-Shaykh al Libi, for instance, is instructive; after being tortured, al-Libi told his captors that Saddam was in cahoots with bin Laden. In other words, it wasn’t just the Bush administration’s tortured reasoning that brought about the strategic blunder of Iraq.

There is an insidious connection between the Bush administration’s moral bankruptcy and America’s dire economic predicament. The administration has treated laws, regulations, and oversight as impediments to the brute exercise of force. Indeed, with Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, and John Yoo (the infamous trio who crafted Bush’s torture memos) the law was parsed and twisted so finely that the barbarism associated with the Middle Ages was codified and bureaucratized for the 21st century. Simply put, they provided the veneer of legality for criminal acts. Such mediocre political hacks, of course, have been the rule rather than the exception in the Bush administration. Their legal contortions have since been rejected multiple times by the Supreme Court, but the damage to America’s reputation has been as damaging as the images the world saw in the aftermath of the Bush administration’s shameful response to Katrina.

The conservative movement has squandered America’s economic, intellectual, and moral capital at a time when environmental, financial, and military challenges are mounting exponentially. It’s not hard to see where the Bush administration went wrong. Torture and preventive war cannot serve as the basis for a sound national security policy. Rigid ideological assumptions, like the ones that treated the scientific evidence of global warming as a hoax, or the ones that insisted that less taxes and less regulation always led to economic growth, are invariably pernicious. Support for the conservative movement has evaporated, in no small measure because it has been so radically wrong.

Sphere: Related Content