George Bush: Our anti-Midas.
John Kerry: Our antidote?
It's his best hope for re-election.
Disaster by design has, of course, always been a cherished Republican objective.
In domestic politics, the conservative vision since Reagantimes has been "starving the beast" i.e. destroying the financial, political, and ideological foundations of the liberal state so that its despised redistributive and regulatory apparatus would wither away.
Creative destruction as overt official policy enjoyed a brief vogue in mid-2003, when the bloom was still on the short-lived Iraq invasion rose. Neo-con ideologues like Michael Ledeen opined that it was necessary to smash the corrupt political, military, and social structure of the Middle East into fragments, so that a new, better world would rise spontaneously — albeit with some judicious American midwifing — from the ashes.
George Bush adds an overlay of callous opportunism. When action (or inaction) promises benefits to George W. Bush and his coterie of supporters, he gleefully ravages the government's finances, the nation's environmental policies, and our social safety net with an obdurate disdain for whatever negative consequences that might accrue to the citizens he has sworn to serve.
In George Bush's case, shortsighted disregard for consequences is paired with lethal incompetence. Bush's scholastic (Yale), business (Harken and Arbusto), administrative (the dysfunctional foreign policy/national security mess), and ethical (TANG) failures have been well documented.
Probably Iraq will be remembered as the mother of all failures, a colossal piece of strategic, military, diplomatic, political, and financial over-reach that will cast a long and baleful shadow over the United States and the world for the next decade, at least.
But it is not alone.
Narrow, self-serving political objectives pursued in the most irresponsible way imaginable have tainted every Bush initiative, including his cherished tax cut.
Finally, Bushís record of serial deceptions and failure has been brought to the attention of a bewildered public.
But, to our astonishment and dismay, according to the polls a plurality of Americans — enough, possibly, to put him in office for four more years even without Ralph Nader's help — are still ready to vote for a president who hit the trifecta: more incompetent than Harding, more dishonest than Nixon, and stupider than Reagan.
Understandable attempts have been made to discount and explain the polls that show Bush pulling ahead of Kerry even as the Iraq adventure collapses into a $4.5 billion and hundreds of lives/month nightmare and Bush is revealed as a duplicitous, self-deluded charlatan.
"It's early. It's a red state boost only. The Iraq war will continue to eat away at Bush's support".
This, I'm afraid, is whistling past the graveyard.
The truth has come out and it is not — at least not by itself — going to set us free.
Not even if the dark and terrible secrets of Dick Cheneyís Energy Task Force, where thirst for oil, lust for power, and self-righteous megalomania fatally intersected, escape Antonin Scaliaís efforts to embargo them.
Probably not even the Bush-girlfriend-abortion sensation that Larry Flynt is promising for later in the year will be able to overcome the frantic efforts of the White Houseís Mighty Wurlitzer to drown out unwelcome truths.
If anyone entertains liberal/libertarian illusions about the efficiency of the information marketplace, the latest jawdropping poll numbers regarding John Q. Publicís addle-headed take on the Saddam/WMD/al Qaeda/9/11 links should dispel them.
However, the American public has an instinctive understanding of one painful and dangerous truth:
George W. Bush has screwed up things so badly that nobody can see a way out.
Iraq will be a financial, moral, and military millstone around our neck for years to come. The threat of terrorism nourishes an oppressive national security apparatus and nascent Caesarism within our reactionary officer corps. Our social and public institutions have been mortgaged to a future of debt, deficits, and concentration of wealth in the hands of a shrinking, insular upper class. The economy, in one word, sucks.
Enough Americans respond to and profit from conservative pandering to guarantee that organized ideological confrontation and polarization will reliably trump any attempt to solve our problems through consensus and shared sacrifice.
America - a sizable majority, 57%, including at least 20% of the voters who swear allegiance to the Shrub — knows that the country is on the wrong track, according to those polls.
But nobody knows the way out.
In such a hopeless situation, the human genius for denial asserts itself.
When the American public is dead set on sticking its head in the sand, what leader is better suited to mirror the popular mood than that Master of Disaster, President Pangloss, Mr. Invading Iraq Was the Greatest Thing Since Operation Barbarossa, George W. Bush himself!
America loves to share in his faith that, no matter how badly he screws things up, the peculiarly selective mercy of the Almighty guarantees that GWB and the USA will be just fine thank you.
So John Kerry isn't in the catbird seat.
He should be in the position of that guy pausing to put on his sneakers in the bear joke: I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you (you, the worst president in history).
But it's more like he's auditioning for captain of the Titanic: I will preside over the sinking of this ship efficiently, humanely, and in a spirit of unity!
Many Americans prefer to hear George W. Bush a.k.a Capt. Peter Peachfuzz announcing the exciting news: new Olympic pools opening simultaneously on decks 5, 6, and 7!
It's almost funny hearing the right wing trying to smoke out John Kerry by challenging him to propose a solution for the once-in-a-century Iraq mess George W Bush got us into.
Understandably, Kerry's playing coy, hoping he can play whatever cards he has close to his chest and coast to election on the strength of a vague plan whose principal advantage is that it is not George Bush's.
But that's passive — and risky.
John Kerry might turn out to be America's knight in shining armor, a squeaking and risk-averse tin man, or something in between. But for him to be able to energize the electorate, the electorate needs to have hope.
And hope, by accident or design, is exactly what George W. Bush wants to deny this country.
Listen to the right wing snakes labor to denigrate Kerry and his service record, deny him Catholic communion, and demonize him as an immoral flip-flopper.
Of course, the idea is to dim Kerry's luster in the minds of the voters.
But an equally important message is being sent to the right's own followers, enablers, and fellow travelers. The right wing is probing, testing, searching for the magic pieces of the puzzle that will solidify its base in a posture of ostentatious, irreconcilable loathing for Kerry and show the American people that, even if Kerry is somehow elected, the right wing will not allow him to govern.
Unrelenting, organized hostility finally neutralized Clinton and taught us how degrading and destructive the U.S. political process could become.
If Americans become convinced the right wing is going to execute another scorched-earth campaign of ferocious, single-minded partisan persecution against Kerry, people may despair that there is no hope for Kerry, American politics...
...or themselves.
Will Bush's foul, magic touch achieve his own election at the cost of a further, fatal degradation of our nation's political discourse?
Or will Kerry be able to sell himself to America as someone who can transcend the failures and the hatred of George W. Bush and the right wing?
We can only hope.
Hope isn't the only thing we need...
...but it might just be the most important.
