For any number of reasons, John Kerry is, to put it mildly, no prize, even, or perhaps especially on foreign policy issues. The recent endorsements by the New York Times and The New Republic can’t even conjure up much in the way of credible enthusiasm. He really has been all over the map on Iraq, he shows no sign of wanting to rethink our imperial foreign policy as a matter of principle, and it is all but impossible to figure out just what he would do if he were president.
The most hopeful thing one can say about a possible Kerry presidency is that given the closeness of the likely vote, he would almost certainly face a Republican-majority Congress, and an angry one at that. So he would be unlikely to get most of his loonier domestic-policy ideas enacted. I have long believed that gridlock during the Clinton years, far from being the tragedy most pundits want to call it, might well have been an important key to the relative prosperity of those years. There are always independent regulatory agencies, of course, but when government is tied up in knots between the legislative and executive branches, it’s relatively difficult for it to launch new assaults on productive Americans.
All that being said, however, I can hardly find myself in agreement with, for example, televangelist and former 1988 GOP presidential candidate Pat Robertson – who seems to be taking steps to distance himself from Bush, especially on the war issue – that however misguided and even deludedly arrogant Bush might have been about the war (and Robertson, it turns out, has expressed doubts about this war before, including before the invasion), Bush deserves praise and it might even be that "the blessing of heaven is on Bush."
Besides the fact that I don’t know God’s feelings about Bush except that in a general way God loves all of us sinners, it seems to me that from an electoral perspective (which is the main thing he seems to care about), Bush richly deserves to be punished for starting an unnecessary war and planning for the aftermath so incompetently.
Actually, the most blessed thing for Bush might well be to lose this election. Then somebody else would have to deal with the mess his hubris has created and he just might have a chance to come out of that presidential cocoon and perhaps even grow a bit as a human being..
The Book on Bush
Perhaps the most thoroughgoing indictment of George W. Bush’s tenure in office is The Bush Betrayal, by longtime libertarian journalist and author (quite recently of the excellent Terrorism and Tyranny) James Bovard. Nobody can accuse Jim Bovard of being an apologist for Democrats. His previous books Lost Rights and Freedom in Chains skewered the Clinton administration relentlessly. He gets worked up whenever government, whatever party is in power, infringes on the inalienable rights of American citizens or wastes money and resources.
Dubya has given him plenty to be angry about.
In fact, very little of this book is about the war in Iraq (although the brief chapter devoted to it is excellent). Although he leads with the rush to assemble additional power in the hands of government in the wake of the manifest failure of government protection that 9/11 represented, and continues with the war on dissent unleashed by Attorney General John Ashcroft ("To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty . . . your tactics only aid terrorists"), he devotes most of the book to economic and domestic issues.
Bovard is particularly scathing on free trade, given that, "While Bush loves to praise free trade, in reality, ‘free trade’ is whatever George Bush says it is. For Bush, like other recent presidents, ‘fairness’ is the magic word to sanctify almost any trade restrictions." He notes that Bush imposed punishing tariffs on imported steel that destroyed more American jobs than they saved. They were only rescinded when the European Union cleverly threatened retaliatory tariffs on products produced in key "battleground" states in the 2004 election. Bush has also continued the disreputable policy of import quotas on imported clothing, which mainly hurts poorer Americans who would benefit from having less expensive clothing available.
Documenting everything he says several times over, as has been his practice in all his books, Bovard declares the vaunted No Child Left Behind act to be "Ed Fraud 101." "Bush freedom," he writes, "gives schools freedom to meet NCLB deadlines or else be destroyed. The feds have vastly more punitive power over local schools than ever before." Among the perverse results have been dumbing down standards – knowing they would be subject to new federal standards, most states and school districts set their initial standards to be less stringent than what they were actually achieving (which in most cases was pretty pathetic) so they would be seen to be achieving "adequate yearly progress" in subsequent years. And the promise that students would be able to transfer from low-achieving or violent schools turned out to be almost entirely hollow.
Spending as Caring
Bovard documents the increases in domestic discretionary spending and even in dubious programs like foreign aid chapter-and-verse. He notes that the largest recipients of foreign aid "also have poor ratings for corruption, oppression, or both." HUD spending has expanded. The Medicare prescription-drug program is the largest new program since the Great Society, and probably won’t help older people all that much. The administration purposely (and probably illegally, though who’s going to prosecute?) suppressed accurate estimates of how much it would cost until after it had been passed.
The book also skewers the Transportation Security Administration, which manages to inconvenience travelers on a massive scale while still missing guns, knives and various other contraband routinely. Although the Homeland Security inspector general has submitted reports to Congress with a "devastating" verdict on the quality of airport screeners, the administration insists on maintaining the system as a federal monopoly with no liability to any American citizen that is increasingly resorting to bullying and intimidation of perfectly innocent Americans.
Bovard’s book, along with Imperial Hubris by the anonymous CIA analyst, should serve as a corrective to those who insist – as is increasingly common even among critics of the war on Iraq – that the Afghanistan incursion was a wise move and a rip-roaring success. The incursion was based in part on myths that most people have forgotten by now – remember the "news" that al-Qaeda was targeting American nuclear reactors, bandied about in 2002 and admitted to be bogus two years later (which was ignored by most of the media)? – and has accomplished very little. The Taliban is out of power, to be sure, but it’s dubious whether its true power has been effectively diminished. Hamid Karzai can’t move outside Kabul – whatever the election results might be – without heavy guards. And Afghanistan is somewhat less than free or democratic – although continued U.S. occupation no doubt helps al-Qaeda recruiters.
All in all The Bush Betrayal is a devastating indictment of a failed presidency, thoroughly documented, easy to read, and laced with Bovard’s trademark humor. Anyone who is inclined to be even a little charitable toward a president obviously in over his head would do well to read it.
Documenting a Dynasty
I have to confess that I might just have become a bit unfair to political commentator Kevin Phillips over the years. The pathbreaking book that put him on the map, The Emerging Republican Majority, in the late 1960s (said to be a Nixon administration "map") was quite good, but it came along about the time I was losing interest in Republicans, emerging or otherwise. Of late I encounter him mostly on NPR, where he sells what strikes me as a cheap form of faux-populism that, even when he has something valid to say, is delivered in a cocksure, annoying (at least to me) manner.
Having read American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, I feel inclined to issue at least a partial apology for my disdain. This is a serious, well-thought-out, sober but devastating book. It helps to answer a persistent question: Why, in a country that has produced Roosevelts, Rockefellers, Gateses, Adamses, Dodds, Chafees, Kennedys and other families of varying degrees of accomplishment and distinction, is it the Bushes who have created a dynasty that could put a son into the presidency eight short years after the obviously failed presidency of the father, and threatens to spew forth yet another son to contend for the "highest" office in the land?
Phillips explains:
"[T]he twentieth-century rise of the Bush family was built on the five pillars of American global sway: the international reach of U.S. investment banking, the emerging giantism of the military-industrial complex, the ballooning of the CIA and kindred intelligence operations, the drive for U.S. control of global oil supplies, and a close alliance with Britain and the English-speaking community. This century of upward momentum brought a sequence of controversies, albeit ones that never gained critical mass – such as the exposure in 1942 or Prescott Bush’s corporate directorship links to wartime Germany, which harked back to overambitious 1920s investment banking; the Bush family’s longtime involvement with global armaments and the military-industrial complex; and a web of close connections to the CIA, which began decades before George Bush’s [pere] brief CIA directorship in 1976. Threads like these may not weigh heavily on individual presidencies; they are many times more troubling when they run through several generations of a dynasty."
The Bush presidencies grew out of "a four-generation interaction with the so-called U.S. establishment," Phillips contends, and that has consequences. The family’s ties to oil didn’t start with George H.W.’s move to Texas but go back to family patriarch Samuel Bush in Ohio more than a century ago. The ties with intelligence and the armaments industry date to World War I. The family has made some money through enterprise, but it has prospered more through connections than entrepreneurism.
Phillips traces the family’s roots back to Samuel Bush and especially to George H. Walker, who started his rise to fortune in St. Louis. He documents the focus on oil, the fascination with the intelligence services, the passion for secrecy that have been family characteristics for generations. He quite fairly describes the family’s tenuous and essentially exploitative relationship to the religious right.
Perhaps the most provocative passage compares the election of Dubya in 2000 to the Restoration of Charles II in England after the "rightful" monarchy had been overthrown by Oliver Cromwell and Charles I was executed in 1649. "Restoration," Phillips argues, "has one central impulse: to recover the past. Each time, that has involved a return of the courtiers, cronies, and prejudices of the expelled dynasty, often the very figures that had helped to incite the earlier expulsion." The selection of Richard Cheney as veep and bringing back Don Rumsfeld and others from as far back as the Ford administration fits the pattern.
There is much more here, most of it quite troubling. Have we become a dynastic aristocracy where one preeminent family can pretty much call the shots? Will we replace the Bush ascendancy with another representative of the Clinton family? Is this anything like a democracy or a free society?
Read the book. You’ll enjoy it even if it upsets you to gaze upon the presumption of these ambitious, yet modestly talented (except in the wiles of politics and preference), would-be dynasts.
