My son has monopolized our pc for college applications this weekend, and my daughter had a sleep over with her best friend which took the rest of my computer time so I haven’t kept myself up to the minute informed about all the news this holiday weekend. But ignorance has never stopped me from opening my big fat digitized mouth before.
(cont.)
Here’s my three little thoughts for a Monday morning:
1. Iraq is a lost cause no matter what we do there.
Frankly the solution I would espouse is negotiations with all the regional players (Iran and Syria included) during which time our forces will be gradually drawn down. We can add all the troops we want to the bloody Baghdad streets but that isn’t going to end the sectarian based killing. And we don’t have enough troops to make a difference in any event.
However, rest assured that the diplomatic/political track is not one which Bush intends to pursue. He will continue to kick the can down the road until he leaves office. To be sure, there will be a few well ballyhooed public relations ploys in 2008 in an attempt to swing the election to whomever is the GOP nominee, but any real policy reversals in Iraq will be left for his successor to implement.
2. The coming Congressional investigations will make good political theater, but lead to little substantive change.
Yes, it was nice to win an election and see the Democrats obtain majorities in the House and Senate. Those majorities give them the power to control the Congressional committees and through the power of the subpoena begin investigations into the crimes and other malfeasance of the last 6 years of Republican rule. And many of us have high hopes for what those investigations might accomplish. I’m here to tell you, however, that these investigations aren’t the panacea some hope they will become.
What these investigations won’t resolve is the Bush administration’s culpability for its numerous misdeeds, nor will they result in any impeachment proceedings. Bush and Cheney will simply stonewall the Democrats in Congress, stall in the courts and fight a public relations battle in the media, the arena where they perform at their best, and over which they have the most control. And rest assured our corporate controlled media will comply with the GOP’s propaganda, attacking the Democratic investigations as venal, political mudslinging, rather than doing their job to ferret out the facts and expose the Bush administration’s corruption.
Perhaps some of the crimes that our Republican overlords have committed will be revealed to the American public despite all the smoke and mirrors of the GOP’s media disinformation campaign. Perhaps Americans will come to realize that the Republicans have essentially sold our country down the river to serve the interests of Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big Defense contractors. And maybe that will be enough. Maybe.
But I doubt it.
3. The Religious Right will not slink away quietly.
Sure, they are a wounded animal at present, but they are all the more dangerous for that reason. The more their power starts to slip away, the harder they will grasp to retain it, and the more they will be tempted to take extreme action. Remember, this group is still larger and more politically cohesive than any other group in America, and they consider themselves God’s avenging army on this earth. At the height of their power over these last few years they still ranted and raved about how oppressed they were, and the rhetoric they employed to demonize their “adversaries” (i.e., gays, liberals, and minorities) more often than not raised the specter of violence and eliminationism.
Those calls advocating extremism will only become more shrill in the next two years. God help us if a major catastrophe (terror attack, bird flu, or economic collapse) should strike. They are a hidden culture of authoritarianism just waiting for a crisis to occur and bring them a leader they can raise to power. Huey Long was the dark prince of the Depression era, a man who could have achieved great power had Roosevelt’s New Deal not blocked the advancement of his political career, and an assassin’s bullet not ended his life. I don’t doubt that there are any number of ambitious, dangerous men ready and willing to exploit a national emergency, assume the mantle of leadership of the religious right and ride a wave of violence and unrest to power.
We think it couldn’t happen here, but then we used to think we wouldn’t ever officially sanction torture, or waste our national treasure on a futile and misguided war for oil. Bush has created the conditions by which such an man and such a movement could arise, and he has established a precedent regarding executive power that has left open a door that should never have been opened in the first place. A door that leads to the surrender of our civil liberties and the establishment of one party rule, or even one person rule. Bush himself is too feckless I believe to become that man, but there are others who would be happy to assume the position that Bush’s unitary executive has created in our politics. Given the right (i.e., wrong) circumstances, who can say what might happen?
