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.

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Top Ten Reasons Bush is NOT Responsible for the Recession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Bush Recession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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