ANNIVERSARY PLUS ONE

Nick Burbules of Progressive Blog Digest has some interesting thoughts on the five year anniversary of the election of our fearless nincompoop, The W.

Building on something my colleague David Prochaska said, if someone had been saying five years ago that electing George Bush would result in any of the following, they would have been branded as a paranoid conspiracy nut:
• the largest budget surplus in history would be squandered through tax cuts and turned in just a few years into the largest deficit in history
• the government, through lies and manipulation of intelligence, would construct a phony “imminent threat” from another country in order to trick the U.S. people into approving a war costing hundreds of billions of dollars in debt and tens of thousands of U.S. dead and wounded
• following a horrible terrorist attack that brought international sympathy from nearly every country in the world, the U.S. government would within months turn us into a country despised and mistrusted nearly everywhere because of their arrogance, duplicity, and “with us or against us” rhetoric
• the U.S government would secretly approve, and publicly rationalize, the widespread use of prisoner torture and mistreatment expressly forbidden by the Geneva Convention, forever sullying the nation’s moral stature
• a President and Vice-President long affiliated with oil industries would preside over energy policies that they let oil company execs write, turn over to their corporate donors billions in war profits, let them impose extortionist gasoline price hikes, and carry out the aforementioned war in order to boost oil supplies – all without a serious investigation or public outcry
• survivors of the Iran-Contra affair would be rehabilitated and returned to positions of power to re-establish the very same practices of skullduggery and deception that almost brought down the Reagan administration
• religious groups would extend their influence into nearly every corner of public life, taking encouragement from an openly evangelical President to demolish the Constitutional wall between church and state – indeed, denying that such a wall even exists
• the first election of George Bush would come down to a razor-thin vote count in the state run by his brother. When a call is made to recount the vote, the case is taken all the way to the Supreme Court, where the five Republican-appointed judges put a halt to all recounts, saying that their ruling “only applies to this specific instance.” All objective data show after the fact that a full and fair recount would have turned the state, and the election, against Bush. The Secretary of State who oversaw the election in Florida subsequently won election to Congress with strong Bush administration support
•the re-election of George Bush would feature a vast increase in the use of electronic voting machines that are easily hacked and which produce no paper trail of votes – yet when the reported vote totals in two major Bush states (Ohio and Florida) are found to be seriously out of accord with exit polling (polls which are so accurate they are routinely used to check the accuracy of vote tabulations), suddenly it is the exit polls that are thrown into jeopardy. No serious investigation is carried out despite widespread evidence of vote suppression and other electoral irregularities. The Secretary of State who oversaw the election in Ohio now is seeking election as Governor, with strong Bush administration support
• a ruthless and radical House Majority leader would repeatedly violate House ethical standards and abuse the privileges of the majority party without losing his job, or even being seriously admonished
• a handpicked and underqualified Senate Majority leader would be installed in power and then encouraged to dismantle decades of Senate traditions and institutional checks and balances in order to drive through a slate of judicial nominations that include “activists” of the most extreme order
• a candidate openly contemptuous of the United Nations would be seriously considered as the U.S. representative to the same, despite copious evidence of unreasonable, unethical, and possibly illegal conduct
• a plan would be relentlessly pursued to demolish the most successful and egalitarian social welfare policy ever invented
• despite all of this the major media networks, cable news, and even public t.v. and radio would continue to praise the decency and personal popularity of the man presiding over these policies, and not a single major figure would be tried, punished, or removed from office for any of them – in fact, several would receive conspicuous government awards and/or promotions

No this is not a nightmare, it is America 2005 – and this is Year Two of Progressive Blog Digest...

It is becoming more and more apparent that the true struggle over the filibuster is over religious judges and the far-right Christian agenda. Listen to what their leaders say, and you will see why the Republicans take this fight very, very seriously.