Bush's Incompetence: A Dangerous Diversion

By: Ron Reed

Living this year in a remote village on the southwest coast of Alaska, I have had occasion to spend many hours surfing the Internet in search of reasonably progressive reporting on the recent malign changes in the political atmosphere in the U.S.

During my scanning, I have noticed a disturbing tendency of many on the left to dismiss the Bush regime as clueless and incompetent, so an appropriate subject for humor. While I believe that keeping our sense of the absurd intact is important when faced with the relentless assaults on common decency and civilized values we endure from the most unprincipled and vicious regime we have seen in our lifetime, and while there is no doubt that the man himself, nicknamed "Dubya" and "Shrub" and openly derided as an ignoramus and a toddler (if not a chimpanzee clone), deserves nothing but amused contempt, it is deeply misleading to focus on the President's malapropisms, his "halting" familiarity with the English language, and his "stupid pet tricks" smirk.

Those with a historical memory will recall the equally derisive and frightened mockery of the last great "dolt" in the Oval Office: Ronald Reagan, called the "cowboy president" in Europe and memorably described by Maggie Thatcher with the phrase, "the poor dear doesn't have anything between the ears". And while the press, in its role as faithful courtier of the powerful, concentrated on the "sleeping president", his advisors Meese, Haig, Kirkpatrick, Cheney, Bush Sr., Weinberger, Reich, Shultz, and Rehnquist quite effectively eviscerated the Constitution and carried out undeclared foreign wars and state terrorism on a massive scale, leading to the deaths of probably a third of a million people and dealing a blow to the social contract from which it has never recovered. It took the collusion of the lapdog media and the nominal opposition in Congress to accomplish these feats, but they were aided immeasurably by the tendency on the part of the few genuinely reform-minded and humane liberals to sneer at the wizard rather than to peer behind the curtain.

When the Iran-Contra scandal broke - in the foreign media, mind you, not in the Nation or Mother Jones - the question was quickly turned by Reagan's spinmeisters and his faithful retainers in Congress (Democrats as well as Republicans) into an inquiry of the level of alleged detachment by the President (who insisted on daily briefings as to the progress of his crimes), rather than the substance of the crimes themselves. While the right and its chosen avatar may have suffered a bit of humiliation in the daily press, they won the only war they cared about, as the late historian and philosopher Walter Karp once said of the regime of Woodrow Wilson: the war against the American people. To be precise, they also successfully accomplished the only foreign policy goal that really mattered to them, namely, the destruction of the sole serious obstacle to U.S. global domination, the Soviet Union, a goal that had eluded the previous seven administrations.

Even the means of attaining office of the two administrations was similar in content if not in form, because both essentially carried out treason against the Constitution: Reagan by consorting with the Iranian "terrorist" regime to delay the release of the hostages so that Carter would not reap the electoral gains that would come with the successful diffusion of that crisis just before the election, and Bush by suborning the Republican majority on the Supreme Court into sanctioning an electoral coup d'etat. And many of Bush's advisors, far from being merely Reagan retreads, are the very same moral monsters not rehabilitated, but simply assumed to be legitimate players by dint of elite acceptance.

How many more hints does the "opposition" need before it wakes up to the fact that the Bush regime is simply running the same scam? And running that scam with the same cast of characters, the same smoke and mirrors, the same deals with and instructions to terrorists, and the same fundamental foreign policy goals. In this case, it is the dismantling of Russia so as to guarantee no future opposition to the U.S. world empire, and the neutralization of China as a potential adversary (even regional powers will no longer be allowed to exist), according to the Rumsfeld doctrine.

It is the same contempt for the people, for the law, and for Constitutional niceties carried to an even further degree. Why is the left wasting its time with niggling objections to the most extreme trial balloons floated by the Nazis in the White House, and then temporarily pulling back to only marginally less objectionable positions? Since when do we allow the enemies of humanity to set the agenda for us?

It is virtually certain that the administration may overlook another devastating "terrorist" attack on American soil before the 2004 elections. Or perhaps sooner as a means of cementing support for the shredding of the last remnants of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. A couple of months ago, a Bush administration official publicly justified the anthrax deaths, which were apparently the work of a highly placed cabal at Fort Detrick targeting for assassination the moderate and nominal official "opposition", as having awakened the American people to the possibility of biological attack. In other words, the American people are being softened up for the next blow.

It is long past time for honest Americans, patriots, humanists, and those who care about truth or the future of the human race to take the offensive. Bush and his camerata should be impeached and tried for treason. The entire rightwing assault on the Republic and the Constitution going all the way back to Nixon (or even to the National Security Act of 1947 and the malign alliances of the Dulles brothers with the leading epigones of the Third Reich) should be the subject of an independent and public inquiry that will expose the dark underside of politics in America: the machinations by which the fascist right and its elite acolytes in both parties have virtually succeeded in destroying the great experiment in self-government bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment.