The Cow Pie Presidency: Amoral With The Ability to Shock But Not Surprise
A year ago today, back when a surge was something that you didn’t want to fry your computer, extraordinary rendition was a stirring playing of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, people thought FISA was the federal agency that protected their bank deposits and a Huckabee was a . . . something or other, I posed a couple of questions:
Can we survive two more years of a Bush presidency?
Have we become a nation of sheep?
Looking back over the previous 12 months and ahead to a watershed 2008 election, the answer to both questions is an equivocal “yes.”
The ability of the most amoral presidency since forever to shock but not surprise ripened like cow pie in a pasture on a hot summer day during 2007:
* George Bush’s Forever War morphed into a business deal that merely forestalls the eventual collapse of Iraq: Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki gets coup insurance in the form of a long-term U.S. troop presence and the U.S. gets first dibs at Iraq’s vast untapped oil riches.
* In a fairy tale ending, the president commuted the prison sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff. Libby, of course, had been thrown overboard by his bosses as they lost control of the Wilson-Plame affair, which grew out of one of the administration’s bigger whoppers justifying the war.
* U.S. attorneys were sacked because they resisted becoming handmaidens for a Justice Department that had become a branch of the Republican Party with subpoena power.
* The shroud of secrecy was torn off the administration’s enthusiastic embrace of Nazi-like torture techniques, which so troubled the head of the CIA’s clandestine service — although not for the right reasons — that he ordered the destruction of terrorist interrogation videotapes despite being explicitly told not to do so.
* The administration’s bellicose Iran policy crashed upon the shoals of a report by the nation’s spymasters that Tehran apparently had shuttered its nuclear weapons program four years earlier, an inconvenient disclosure that did not dissuade the president and vice president from continuing to rattle their sabers.
* Two key administration players – presidential mentor Karl Rove and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales – resigned after working tirelessly to suborn the rule of law while stonewalling a feckless Democratic congressional majority in its feeble attempts to call them out. Both men, and most especially Gonzales, face a perilous New Year because of their probable criminal culpability.
* Meanwhile, the U.S. economy increasingly looked like a house of cards as the gap between Wall Street and Main Street grew, the war became a half-trillion dollar albatross and the dollar tanked against major foreign currencies. A home mortgage meltdown long in the making was exacerbated by an administration that shamelessly continued to reward the rich and give the finger to a middle class in crisis through, among other acts, vetoing an expansion of the life-saving S-CHIP program.
Can we expect more of the same in 2008? Absolutely. But that does not diminish the importance of digging deeper into the rotten core of the Bush presidency.
This means bringing Gonzales and other perps to justice, demanding increased transparency in what the administration and Congress does, working to restore civil liberties lost in the unprecedented Bush-Cheney power grab, and insisting that the Republican presidential field either climb out of Bush’s bed or explain why voters can expect more of the same any of them become president.
Will the republic survive another year? Yes, just as the hundreds of terrorism suspects have survived another year without due process in Guantánamo Bay and other way stations in the Rumsfeld Gulag, but there remains the specter of a citizenry even more disenchanted with its president and other so-called leaders and the institutions they profess to represent then at the end of the Clinton presidency.
With low voter turnouts in the first years of a new millennium punctuated by earth-shaking events that cry out for greater citizen involvement (although those hair-on-fire evangelical Christianists certainly are welcome to butt out), have we become a nation of sheep so cowed and addled by the stench emanating from the Washington cow pasture that we would rather retreat to our Barcaloungers than fight?
I gave that question a lot of thought during the year past because an affirmative answer flies in the face of the legendary optimism that has seen Americans through wars, depressions, recessions and other hard times.
But while the lights haven’t exactly gone out across this great land during the Bush presidency, there has been a dramatic downturn in the national mood.
A substantial majority of Americans believe that the U.S. is on the wrong track and that their children will not be better off than they are, a rich vein of discontent that Barack Obama is trying to mine in his long shot bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Can all of this disaffection be laid at the feet of George Bush?
Of course not. For one thing, he has had little control over global economic trends. For another, Al Qaeda and the Islamic jihad against the West was well in gear when he took his first oath of office. (This is not to say that the 9/11 attacks could not have been prevented. The evidence that has accumulated showing that they might have been prevented is persuasive.)
But Bush came to office declaring himself to be the right man for complex and troubled times, boasting that he would be the first CEO president.
That, in retrospect, is tragically hilarious (or is it hilariously tragic?) not because of his manifold leadership failures or inability to make good on any of his promises except deficit-fueling tax cuts, but because he has failed to lead at all, defaulting time and again to rhetoric over reality and politics over policy. In short, he has bankrupted the biggest corporation of all — the United States of America.
The presidency is by its nature an isolating position, but Bush has determinedly taken his isolation to extraordinary lengths, by his own admission watching only Fox News and reading no newspapers, while he never appears before audiences that haven’t been screened for their friendliness.
Look for no major initiatives in the last year of the Bush interregnum. (Thank God!) Look for a punch-drunk American public, especially a middle class already on the ropes, to continue to take a beating. (Ahem.)
And join me in praying that the wheels somehow stay on the wagon in the 384 days before the president returns to his Texas ranch to search among the scrub brush for his squandered legacy.
A final thought: Do you think things will be appreciably better in 2009 with a new president, be it a Hillary, Barack, John or Mitt?
If you do, give me a ring and I’ll help schedule your nervous breakdown.
16 Responses to “The Cow Pie Presidency: Amoral With The Ability to Shock But Not Surprise”
If we end up with a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic House and Senate, thing will improve, slowly, very slowly. It’s going to take thirty years to fix the damage the genius from Texas has done if it can be fixed.
If a Republican gets elected, expect more of the same.
I agree with both of you. What has amazed me is the ability of the administration and its attorneys (like Fred Fielding who maneuvered through Watergate!) to block any attempts by congressional committees to get at the truth. It has astounded me that the president has been able to use executive privilege to hide just about everything said and done in his administration. Why is there no legal consequence for 5 million missing e-mails? How can Dick Cheney get away with claiming he is not part of the executive branch, and so does not have to preserve his records for the national archives? Of course the archivist that brought that little incident to light had his position eliminated, thanks to David Addington.
It seems this administration has learned from the Nixon administration that if you are going to break the law, learn to cover your tracks and stonewall, stonewall, stonewall!
It is humorous how the left talks about the discontent of the middle class while proposing one policy after another that will hammer the middle class.
All of the Democratic candidates support the current situation of open borders and near unilimited immigration. The mass immigration causes schools to fail, neighborhood to declines and the pay of many blue collar fields to slide toward minimum wage.
The middle class has realized that the public schools are failing that unless their children get into an Ivy league they are marked for life as a failure. Yet, the Democratic candidates propose to lower standards and to make it harder for the middle class to use education to improve itself.
The middle class complains about the level of taxes that they pay but face the prospect of much higher taxes under any of the Democratic candidates. Just look at the Clinton Christmas Present advertisement to see how the left views government spending. I have always found it humorous to hear an African-American complain about their taxes since they vote for no one but Democrats who campaign on higher taxes.
Shaun I offer up evidence to further support your post here by Mr. Don Quijote in another post on foreign policy.
If we end up with a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic House and Senate, thing will improve, slowly, very slowly. It’s going to take thirty years to fix the damage the genius from Texas has done if it can be fixed.
All I noticed were the inane slogans of a scared little boy, like that of most
Republicans.Republican politicians are just the manipulators who are inventing new boogiemen out of thin air for you to fear ( Secular humanist, the war on Christmas, illegal aliens, Jihadist, Islamofascist, Nuclear Iran, Iraq’s WMDs, etc, etc.. ) so that their backers can steal everything that isn’t nailed down while the population is to busy cowering in their gate communities.
Convincing proof indeed.
SD the reason I left the democratic party was because it was quickly becoming the party of failure IS the preferred option.
They remain in power because they depend upon Americans misery to keep them there. In order for Americans to be miserable they must ensure that their policies do just that…..Keep Americans Miserable.
Somebody- I guess that’s one way to look at it. I look at it like the GOP likes to stack the deck to make sure their rich donors get richer at the expense of the poor and middle class. That is what has happened over the last 7 years. The Democrats at least try to level the playing field so that all can still advance-not just the wealthy and well-connected.
They remain in power because they depend upon Americans misery to keep them there. In order for Americans to be miserable they must ensure that their policies do just that…..Keep Americans Miserable.
If they were successful at that, no one would vote for them. What was the War on Poverty all about? Or the civil rights laws passed under the Johnson administration? Or an expanded SCHIP,which would have helped the middle class but was rejected by a Republican president??? Democrats are attractive to the poor and middle class because of the misery created by Republican policies, that cut social programs for the poor and middle class to give tax breaks to the rich and corporate welfare to powerful industries like oil, insurance, auto, big tobacco, etc. The reason the Reagan coalition was successful was that the GOP figured out that their fiscal policies would never attract middle class whites-so they threw in a conservative social agenda that would.
Bush’s tax package had little to no impact on anyone middle class and below. Quit acting like he did a favor to middle america. I’m lower-middle on the income range myself and believe me I’d rather we had a balanced budget than an extra few hundred at the end of the year. GOP tax cuts help the rich who are already being helped in every way possible by the administration in the form of the executive branch bending over backwards for them. From supplying them with protection from prosecution
for federal regulation violation on the low end, to the upper end of what appears to have been a war to secure higher global oil prices and resource rights in Iraq. Again, at the expense of the people.
But let’s not get hung up on taxes, those really are a small piece of the pie when it comes to fixing the problems this administration has gotten us into. I’d be happy to know that once again I can’t be declared a “Fill-in-the-blank” and be stripped of my right to a trial, a lawyer, and evidience in my defense.
Bush was a horrible CEO, and he has been an equally horrible president for the EXACT same reasons. Just like Dubya to brag about his screwups as justification for his staying the course.
Sorry, mispoke in the first sentence of my above post. I meant to say his tax package had little to no positive impact on middle class people and below.
Sam:
I could not agree more about the tax package, and if I somehow implied that it was a gift to the middle class, then I miswrote.
*Yawn* BDS…..
You think just by coming up with the term BDS and sneering each time you say it it makes the giant consequences of this administrations screw ups somehow less awful? Gimme a break. Bush has brought us nothing but war, fear, and financial stagnation or worse for anyone not in the upper income brackets.
And Shaun I was referring to SuperD’s comment that somehow reverting to the old taxes would hammer the middle class. Yea right. We are going to have to raise them later to pay for the deficits we’ve been running so far is all. Pay now or pay later with interest. GOP says pay later with interest and passes it off like they are doing us a favor. Also, they push to keep $15bn in tax breaks for oil companies raking it in on $100/barrel oil thanks in large part to the unnecessary war started by Bush.
BDS is based a comprehensive appraisal of the administration. You have it or you have your eyes and ears closed.
Why would things change signifigantly? I thought we put presidents through the meat grinnder to get exactly the kind of president who will place pragmatic realpolitick goals over pure ideology, like clinton and bush did in their own ways.
Thats what I thought too. And to be honest we don’t ask that much of our politicians. Basically its try to at least hide the fact that you’re screwing us for your lobbyists, and try not to get too many people killed in the process. Bush has failed miserably on both counts.
I would go further and say that his tax package was a net negative for the middle & working classes, they saved a couple hundred bucks on their income-tax and saw their property taxes and most government fees go right thru the roof.
“Have we become a nation of sheep?”
I’ll be mercifully brief in expressing my opinion on this, despite the temptation to ramble on about why the answer is so obvious, so tragic, and how we came to this sad state. Besides, I’m tired.
The short and not at all sweet answer is: Yes…
…but with exceptions.