Saturday May 12, 2007

The following article is by David Michael Green a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York.

Most Americans really don’t understand their president.

It’s easy to see Bush as inept, unintelligent, stubborn, lazy and dogmatic, because he is certainly all those things, and he should therefore be seen in that accurate light.

But this view of Bush is also, paradoxically, highly inaccurate, because it is so radically incomplete. It is as if one were to observe a vicious dog once only, while it was at rest. Since it is true that the animal sometimes rests, the perception of it as a peaceful creature would in one sense be quite accurate. But, by virtue of what was omitted, that perception would also be simultaneously woefully incomplete, and therefore woefully inaccurate.

Failure, laziness, arrogance - these are crimes of character and ability. And while most Americans wouldn’t want a casual acquaintance - let alone a president - to possess those qualities, they still don’t come anywhere near to defining the essence of George W. Bush, because they ignore the question of motive.

To see only these aspects of Bush, however unflattering they truly are, is to see the dog at rest. There is much, much more to observe.

But Americans are well-positioned to not make those observations, for the reason.

Of the U.S. people's training. We are raised to revere our presidents, generally. Americans have no equivalent to the British Queen or the German president as head of state. There is no symbolic position here that sits above politics and embodies the hopes and aspirations of the nation. All of that, along with the more tangible governing powers of a chief executive, are invested in the U.S. president, and while Americans may often disagree with the president, or disparage his moral failings, most of American citizens are quite unprepared to imagine that his motives are other than pure.

In fact, the only reason that the U.S. president ever went to Iraq was to get his picture taken holding a plastic turkey, before getting the hell out of there not surprising me that the man holding the plastic turkey was a plastic presidential stand-in as well. Don’t forget that this is a president who ran from Vietnam to the Texas Air National Guard, ran from 9/11 story to Nebraska, and had to have his presidential debate responses radioed in to him.

Few Americans are psychologically prepared to imagine their president as something far, far worse than a fool.

Imagine that you also learned that Bush was destroying civil liberties in his country, jailing people without charge, without legal counsel, without habeas corpus rights.  And spying on tens of thousands of citizens without warrants.  What if, additionally, you found out that Bush was kidnaping foreigners and dumping them in secret jails elsewhere, so that they could be tortured even more egregiously?   Suppose you also learned that the U.S. president refused to fight for his homeland when he was a young man, but was now fabricating from whole cloth justifications for sending his countrymen off to war.  And that he talked all day long about what great heroes these soldiers were, and how anyone who criticized his policies was not supporting the troops, while simultaneously failing to provide sufficient armor and equipment to protect them. But that he was nevertheless doling out heaping scoops of the public treasury and borrowing more to well-connected mercenary and construction companies who do nothing and are paid exorbitantly via no-bid contracts.

What if you heard that the U.S. president staffed his administration with cronies who would do anything he asked of them, but nothing for the people?

What if the U.S. president rearranged the tax structure so that in the future the middle class would have to pay today’s and tomorrow’s taxes for the wealthy, plus interest?

What if Bush told the most outrageous lies about the environmental destruction he was supporting, in order to protect the profits of massively rich oil companies?

What if the U.S. president was too lazy to do anything about the warnings he received prior to his country being attacked, and instead remained on vacation for a solid month?

What if Bush remained on vacation again, when one of his country’s greatest cities drowned, and was left to struggle on its own thereafter?

What if those policies encouraged the international proliferation of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction?

Imagine all of these things, and then ask yourself: What would you call someone with a record like that?

Next, Bush unilaterally changed the traditional rules for the handling of presidential papers, issuing an executive order giving himself complete control of his papers, and those of every other president, for as long as he wants.

Then this junta proceeded to conduct the affairs of their administration with probably more secrecy than any presidency in American history, making the regime in North Korea look like a battered information-leaking sieve by comparison.

If Americans could get beyond their training, beyond Rove’s marketing campaign, and beyond the psychological horrors of first degree cognitive dissonance, what they’d see is a president who came to town to fill his pockets, and just as fast as he could.

And they’d see a president who knew precisely what he was doing, and as such took every conceivable precaution to make sure his tracks were covered, and that no criminal justice institution could touch him. 

But justice might just find him, after all.

'All the Rage'

Saturday April 28, 2007

The following article is by Paul Waldman a senior fellow at Media Matters for America.

American people can’t deny it any longer. There’s no point in hiding it, no point in trying to explain it away. Yes, it’s true: American citizens are angry. And they no longer care if the centrist, moderate guardians of the establishment scold them for it.

Americans' anger is not just some vague feeling whose source they can’t put their finger on. It isn’t based on absurd conspiracy theories and it isn’t illogical.

The U.S. people are angry because of what has happened to their country, because of how they have been treated, and because of the innumerable crimes the conservatives have committed. They are angry at the president, they are angry at the Congress, they are angry at the news media. And they have every right to be.

Yes, American's are angry at George W. Bush. American people are not angry at him because they think he represents some socio-cultural movement they didn’t like 40 years ago, or because Bush hung out with a different crowd than American did in high school. American's are angry at him because of what he’s done.

Yes, American citizens are angry about Iraq, and they may be for the rest of their lives. Americans get angry every day when they open their newspapers and see the photo of another young soldier who died for this, another one maimed for life, another one with a tormented and broken soul. The U.S. people are angry about the couple of trillion dollars this war will cost. They are angry about the thousands of young men around the world who have been driven into the arms of al Qaeda, because of this war. They are angry about the thousands upon thousands of Iraqis who have died in the bloodshed America unleashed, and the living too, those whom the U.S. leaders said were coming to “liberate,” but who now find themselves in a suffocating, endless cloud of fear and misery and death.

American's are angry that when they talk about ending this monstrous war, the soulless hypocrites who are glad to send more and more men and women to be scarred and maimed and killed in Iraq have the anger to accuse American people of not “supporting the troops.”

Americans are angry that in their name prisoners are subjected to sleep deprivation, water boarding and other forms of psychological torture to the point where they are literally driven mad. Americans are angry that their leaders tell them they have to shred American freedoms in order to be safe, and that so many of the fellow citizens shrug their shoulders and think it’s no big deal.

And American people angry that Bush has made the U.S. nation so hated around the world.

American people are angry that their children and their grandchildren will have to keep paying off the U.S. nation’s debt, which now stands at nearly 9 trillion dollars. They are angry because every other industrialized country in the world has a single-payer health care system that works, and Americans pay more and take less. America has 45 million people with no health insurance. Americans are angry that the insurance companies have convinced their obedient servants in Congress that the U.S. has “the best health care in the world.”

Americans are angry that the federal government is brimming with people fundamentally opposed to the mission of the agencies over which they preside, the anti-environmentalists who run the Interior department, the mining company lobbyists in charge of mine safety and the union-busters in charge of worker safety. They are still angry about Hurricane Katrina, that the U.S. government left thousands of its citizens stranded to suffer and die, while the president thought that the guy presiding over the disastrous failure was doing a heckuva job.

American's are angry because snake-oil salesmen like William Donohue can issue a press release expressing patently phony outrage about something somebody said, and get the mainstream press to jump like trained dogs.

Those are a few of the things American people are angry about, and yes, that’s a lot of anger. But you know what? There’s nothing wrong with being angry. Anger is the appropriate reaction to moral outrages, to crimes against the common humanity, to the actions of those who would turn the U.S. into something twisted and ugly.