Quack Quack
Right after Bush was reelected by a hair, the big catchphrase was ‘lame duck’. This was applied to Bush because of his Social Security reform, because it was lame and because it only made sense to quacks.
Edit from later: Was I right or what? Not one but two deadlines for the Iraqi constitution have passed with nothing to show for it. If this is any indication of the rest of Iraq, we’re headed for Vietnam 2000.
But today, I think, is the time when we really have to wonder: how long ’till something happens?
So far we’ve seen pretty much diddly from Bush. The only gain he got was Sandra Day O’Connor leaving-which happened by, yes, dumb luck. So far it looks like Roberts will get through, but who can tell this early? Let’s take a look at what Bush has pushed after reelection, and see how far they’ve all gotten.
Social Security-is actually a budget cut with smoke and mirrors. Alan Greenspan even admitted that it wouldn’t help Social Security. None of his reforms were passed-not even the ones he offerred after realizing people were calling a spade a spade on privatized accounts.
Second, we have… what? We don’t have a second. And that’s my point. For months, all we’ve had is Bush spinning his wheels. It’s hard to notice when small things pop up all the time to take up news time, but nothing particularly important had happened, other than O’Connor’s resignation. Which was, as it usually is for George W. Bush, dumb luck.
Now that we’ve opened our eyes and realized Bush hasn’t advanced anywhere that he can take credit for, let’s take a look at his losses.
Which are, clearly, pretty big. Aside from his approval rating of 38%, an all-time low, we’ve got a pretty big list here.
1. The Downing Street Memo-Establishes the fact that Bush was lied to by Cheney, and thus easily duped-not a good quality in a President-or lied himself and is directly responsible for the lives of many tens of thousands of people.
2. The Karl Rove leak-proof, as if we needed any, that Karl Rove doesn’t care about anything other than election time. And I mean ANYTHING-stuff like ethics, morals, and jeopardizing the life of an undercover agent is all trivial to him. Thank God Karl wasn’t around during the Cold War. Also proof that Bush doesn’t care about anything other than his buddies. And I mean ANYTHING-stuff like ethics, morals, and cutting the budget somewhere that would do some good-Karl’s personal checking account.
3.Support for ‘Intelligent’ Design-reminds us why the phrase ’separation of Church and State’ exists. Also proves that he has not examined the issue thoroughly. (Note: for anyone wanting my full opinion of ID, read my post on it.) I support teaching of ID-in theology classrooms, where it belongs. The reason ID is clammering for press attention is simple-distract people that ID doesn’t qualify as scientific theory. The fact that ID has no evidence, testable, quantifiable or otherwise, disqualifies it from scientific consideration-period. There is no ‘theory’. It doesn’t qualify as a ‘theory’, and even conspiracy theorists get to have theories.
4. Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker says that we probably won’t be scaling back numbers in Iraq next year. Earlier this year, Bush said that if certain conditions were met, we could begin pulling troops out of Iraq. The first of those conditions is that the Iraqis come up with a constitution-the same one that just got its deadline delayed. After that, they have to elect a government based on that constitution. On top of all this is the fact that troop rotations in Iraq are going from one year to two. So aside from the incredibly small chance that the deadlines Bush indicated will be met, there is the fact that troop rotations are now going from one year to two-and the guys in there for two years are the ones that fought in Vietnam. From this, we deduce A) that Bush talked about coming out of Iraq when he had no information to support it, thus making a blatantly shortsided, poll-oriented political move or B) did all the above, but knew for a fact that he was lying. That’s different from making things up, which you can call optimism.
I suspect that as more soldiers die due to fatigue and poor consideration of how much actually keeping our guys alive would cost, support for the war will not exactly rise. And the guys that do come home will have post-traumatic stress syndrome, or shellshock, just like in World Wars 1 and 2. One mother camped outside Bush’s vacation house will be the least of his worries soon enough.
