ANOTHER RAT ABANDONS THE FLOUNDERING S.S. BUSHCO
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NEW YORK TIMES columnist Thomas Friedman has long been an intellectually dishonest apologist and enabler for the worst excesses of the Bush Regime. In some ways he has been even more dangerous than the paid clowns of the semi-official rightist propaganda machine (the Coulters and Limbaughs and Hannitys and O'Reillys et al, ad nauseum) because his proto-fascist writings have a patina of respectability while the others are... well, you know... ravings of drug addicts, sex maniacs and psychotics. But the Bush Regime's callous and incompetent reaction to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and the flooding that ensued was too much for even for an asshole like Friedman. A few days ago Friedman's column in the TIMES almost admits he's been wrong about everything for the last 5 years. But not quite. He does admit that BushCo isn't the remedy needed to cure what ails America-- and that Katrina, and the Bush context of it's catastrophe, will probably spell the destruction of his tragic presidency.
On the day after 9/11, I was in Jerusalem and was interviewed by Israeli TV.
The reporter asked me, "Do you think the Bush administration is up to
responding to this attack?" As best I can recall, I answered: "Absolutely.
One thing I can assure you about these guys is that they know how to pull
the trigger."
It was just a gut reaction that George Bush and Dick Cheney were the right
guys to deal with Osama. I was not alone in that feeling, and as a result,
Mr. Bush got a mandate, almost a blank check, to rule from 9/11 that he
never really earned at the polls. Unfortunately, he used that mandate not
simply to confront the terrorists but to take a radically uncompassionate
conservative agenda - on taxes, stem cells, the environment and foreign
treaties - that was going nowhere before 9/11, and drive it into a post-9/11
world. In that sense, 9/11 distorted our politics and society.
Well, if 9/11 is one bookend of the Bush administration, Katrina may be the
other. If 9/11 put the wind at President Bush's back, Katrina's put the wind
in his face. If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right guys to deal
with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with Katrina - and all
the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at home.
These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much
better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at
defending "intelligent design" as a theology than practicing it as a policy.
For instance, it's unavoidably obvious that we need a real policy of energy
conservation. But President Bush can barely choke out the word
"conservation."
And can you imagine Mr. Cheney, who has already denounced conservation as a
"personal virtue" irrelevant to national policy, now leading such a campaign
or confronting oil companies for price gouging?
And then there are the president's standard lines: "It's not the
government's money; it's your money," and, "One of the last things that we
need to do to this economy is to take money out of your pocket and fuel
government." Maybe Mr. Bush will now also tell us: "It's not the
government's hurricane - it's your hurricane."
An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the toweringly
selfish Grover Norquist - who has been quoted as saying: "I don't want to
abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag
it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" - doesn't have the
instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom I
would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that
was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his
basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his
bathtub when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army
helicopter to get out of town.
The Bush team has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one
underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day. Just spend
money.
You knew that sooner or later there would be a rainy day, but Karl Rove has
assumed it wouldn't happen on Mr. Bush's watch - that someone else would
have to clean it up. Well, it did happen on his watch.
Besides ripping away the roofs of New Orleans, Katrina ripped away the
argument that we can cut taxes, properly educate our kids, compete with
India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving the U.S. infrastructure,
and take care of a catastrophic emergency - without putting ourselves
totally into the debt of Beijing.
So many of the things the Bush team has ignored or distorted under the guise
of fighting Osama were exposed by Katrina: its refusal to impose a gasoline
tax after 9/11, which would have begun to shift our economy much sooner to
more fuel-efficient cars, helped raise money for a rainy day and eased our
dependence on the world's worst regimes for energy; its refusal to develop
some form of national health care to cover the 40 million uninsured; and its
insistence on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to
incomplete levees and too small an Army to deal with Katrina, Osama and
Saddam at the same time.
As my Democratic entrepreneur friend Joel Hyatt once remarked, the Bush
team's philosophy since 9/11 has been: "We're at war. Let's party."
Well, the party is over. If Mr. Bush learns the lessons of Katrina, he has a
chance to replace his 9/11 mandate with something new and relevant. If that
happens, Katrina will have destroyed New Orleans, but helped to restore
America. If Mr. Bush goes back to his politics as usual, he'll be thwarted
at every turn. Katrina will have destroyed a city and a presidency.
posted by DownWithTyranny @ 1:41 PM
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A more reasonable analysis of Bush and Iraq can always be counted on from L.A. TIMES columnist Robert Scheer. This August 31 column he wrote for AlterNet is typical of what needs to be thought about once slime like Friedman get to spew their distortions and bullshit.
Who lost Iraq?
Someday, as a fragmented Iraq spirals further into religious madness, terrorism and civil war, there will be a bipartisan inquiry into this blundering intrusion into another people's history. The crucial question will be why a "preemptive" American invasion -- which has led to the deaths of nearly 2,000 Americans, roughly 10 times as many Iraqis, the expenditure of about $200 billion and incalculable damage to the United States' global reputation -- has had exactly the opposite effect predicted by its neoconservative sponsors.
No amount of crowing over a fig leaf Iraqi constitution by President Bush can hide the fact that the region's autocrats, theocrats and terrorists are stronger than ever.
"The U.S. now has to recognize that [it] overthrew Saddam Hussein to replace him with a pro-Iranian state," said regional expert Peter W. Galbraith, the former U.S. ambassador to Croatia and an advisor to the Iraqi Kurds. And, he could have added, a pro-Iranian state that will be repressive and unstable.
Think this is an exaggeration? Consider that arguably the most powerful Shiite political party and militia in today's Iraq, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its affiliated paramilitary force, the Badr Brigade, was not only based in Iran but was set up by Washington's old arch-foe, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It also fought on the side of Iran in the Iran-Iraq war and was recognized by Tehran as the government in exile of Iraq.
Or that former exile Ahmad Chalabi is now one of Iraq's deputy prime ministers. The consummate political operator managed to maintain ties to Iran while gaining the devoted support of Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, charming and manipulating Beltway policymakers and leading U.S. journalists into believing that Iraq was armed with weapons of mass destruction.
Chalabi is thrilled with the draft constitution, which, if passed, will probably exponentially increase tension and violence between Sunnis and Shiites. "It is an excellent document," said Chalabi, who has been accused by U.S. intelligence of being a spy for Iran, where he keeps a vacation home.
What an absurd outcome for a war designed to create a compliant, unified and stable client state that would be pro-American, laissez-faire capitalist and unallied with the hated Iran. Of course, Bush tells us again, this is "progress" and an "inspiration." Yet his relentless spinning of manure into silk has worn thin on the American public and sent his approval ratings tumbling.
Even supporters of the war are starting to realize that rather than strengthening the United States' position in the world, the invasion and occupation have led to abject humiliation: from the Abu Ghraib scandal, to the guerrilla insurgency exposing the limits of military power, to an election in which "our guy" -- Iyad Allawi -- was defeated by radicals and religious extremists.
In a new low, the U.S. president felt obliged to call and plead with the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution, Abdelaziz Hakim, to make concessions to gain Sunni support. Even worse, he was summarily rebuffed. Nevertheless, Bush had no choice but to eat crow and like it.
"This is a document of which the Iraqis, and the rest of the world, can be proud," he said Sunday, through what must have been gritted teeth. After all, this document includes such democratic gems as "Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation," and "No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam," as well as socialist-style pronouncements that work and a decent standard of living are a right guaranteed by the state. But the fact is, it could establish Khomeini's ghost as the patron saint of Iraq and Bush would have little choice but to endorse it.
Even many in his own party are rebelling. "I think our involvement there has destabilized the Middle East. And the longer we stay there, I think the further destabilization will occur," said Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel last week, one of a growing number of Republicans who get that "we should start figuring out how we get out of there."
Not that our "what-me-worry?" president is the least bit troubled by all this adverse blowback from the huge, unnecessary gamble he took in invading the heart of the Arab and Muslim worlds. "What is important is that the Iraqis are now addressing these issues through debate and discussion, not at the barrel of a gun," Bush said.
Wrong again. It was the barrel of a gun that midwifed the new Iraq, which threatens to combine the instability of Lebanon with the religious fanaticism of Iran.
Similarly, Harold Meyerson, is able to look at the spiffy shiny rhetorical from an intellectually bankrupt hack like Friedman and point out every pathetic twisted flaw and lie. This column from The L.A. WEEKLY last week was entitled THE NEW IRAQ, SPIFFY, SHINY, THEOCRATIC, ALLIED WITH IRAN-- AND WE MADE IT HAPPEN." Has a nice ring, doesn't it? It will be History's ultimate judgement on Bush's disastrous reign. Here's the story:
Looks like George W. Bush has gotten his British political philosophers all bollixed up. After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, he promised that Iraq would move to a Lockean social contract, a democratic compact enshrining majority rule and minority rights in the new Iraq. Instead, Iraq seems headed more toward a Hobbesian state of nature, a war, if not of each against all, then too damned close to that for comfort.
The emerging Iraqi constitution, should it ever be enacted by the country’s interim parliament and then ratified by the voters, seems guaranteed to produce a more Hobbesian than Lockean outcome. After all, the insurgency that U.S. forces are fighting is largely Sunni Iraqi, and it’s the Sunnis whom the new constitution enrages and estranges.
Not that you’d know that from our president’s pronouncements. He has looked upon this factional document — well, actually, Condi Rice has told him about it — and pronounced it good. He has spoken at long last about U.S. casualties in Iraq, and, with echoes of Lincoln at Gettysburg, vowed that, “We will finish the task that they gave their lives for.”
But, of course, Lincoln at Gettysburg did not merely pledge to see the cause through. He redefined for all time the cause for which Union soldiers died; he expanded the scope of the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of human equality; he proclaimed that America would emerge from a Union victory as a freer and more democratic nation than it had been before.
But what is the cause for which U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since they deposed Hussein? If we’re to take the draft constitution seriously, the Iraq we’ve fought and bled to create is to be a loose federation, in which the Shiite South, and perhaps the Sunni center, will be governed by Islamic law, with Shiite senior clerics given special status outside the writ of national law, and Shiite women offered up to the mercies of their friendly local Koranic law judges. Even now, before any formal federation structure is in place, Islamic fundamentalism is being enforced on the South by Shiite militias, who have adorned the walls in both religious cities like Najaf and until-recently secular cities like Basra with posters of the Ayatollah Khomeini. A de facto alliance with Iran is already a fait accompli.
Nor is the sway of the Shiite militias confined to the South. It was a force from a Shiite militia that deposed at gunpoint the acting mayor of Baghdad several weeks ago. But then, as the Washington Post reported last Sunday, Shiite and Kurdish militias are already the dominant forces acting with tacit governmental approval in Iraq. The Iraqi government security forces that the U.S. is endeavoring to build are basically just the militias in official governmental uniforms.
Their battles with the Sunnis, and the Sunnis’ battles with them, are approaching a low-level civil war. That’s not to say things couldn’t grow catastrophically worse. If all goes according to plan, the new Shiite-Kurdish constitution will be presented to voters in an October 15 referendum. The Sunnis, who constitute the majority in four of Iraq’s 18 provinces, are sure to reject it, and under the terms of Iraq’s interim governing rules, a two-thirds no vote in three provinces is sufficient to scrap the new document and force the drafters (or whoever succeeds them) to start over. At that point, if it doesn’t happen sooner, the Shiites and the Kurds might just say goodbye to the Sunni center and establish de facto quasi-states in their home regions, leaving the Sunnis with no oil revenues whatever. Large-scale civil war would be a better-than-even-money bet. And if all-out civil war does erupt, which side, which nationalism, which religious sect do we ask our troops to bleed for?
Accordingly, the Bush administration will surely do all it can to ensure the ratification of this quasi-theocratic document, insisting all the while that it won’t really curtail the women’s rights it will in fact destroy. Indeed, our man in Baghdad, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, has been the driving force behind its drafting and enactment, plainly following the administration’s edict that any constitution is better than none. Getting this constitution right was never as important as getting it Monday.
If the ratification vote count is close, Bush can always send James Baker to oversee the tally. But it’s very hard to believe that any accurate count won’t show a majority of Sunnis in opposition. Already, the indigenous Sunni militias are encouraging Sunnis to register to vote — and vote no — in the October 15 election, acknowledging that their previous abstention from election of the National Assembly was a strategic mistake.
The pronouncements of Bush, Condi, Cheney and Rummy have long been dissociated from the actual state of affairs on the ground in Iraq. Now, they have begun to be dissociated from the new order whose existence we mandated. A factional theocracy arises, and they call it freedom. Our leaders are no longer in simple denial. They are in double denial.
What we’re seeing today in Iraq isn’t the Pentagon’s much feared mission-creep. It’s mission-crumble. Our honored dead have died for a new burst of theocracy, for a government of the people, by the clerics, for the clerics. Worse, there were those in the State Department and the CIA who warned of just such an outcome, but their cautions were ignored by Bush, Cheney and the gang in their rush to war. They got their war, but what do they do with it now?
Friedman finishes with .. "Well, the party is over. If Mr. Bush learns the lessons of Katrina, he has a chance to replace his 9/11 mandate with something new and relevant."
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And does he think bush DESERVES the chance to do this?
Not in my lifetime. Not in our lifetime. Not now!
The best bush can do is keep his mouth shut and hope that while karl rove is in prison, he doesn't hang himself. bush without a brain is a dangerous thing ... as most of us already know.
"when fascism comes to america it will be wrapped in patent leather and latex, carrying a battery operated sex toy"
-anonymous
replace his 911 mandate with something new and relevant?!?!how long exactly does it take for one to feel that the loss of 5,000 american civilians lives is irrelevent?
how about instead we replace the U.N. with something new and relevent?
those who forget history are doomed to repeat it
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