The illegitimate Bush Administration drove up the National Deficit by $4 trillion, and Congress acted as a willing accessory. With tax revenues cut to the bone, Americans might have wondered why Bush continued spending like a drunken sailor. Grover Norquist, a long time republican advocate of privatization and deregulation supplied the answer. "I simply want to reduce government to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
Politicians turn a blind eye to their Corporate master's tax evasion strategies. Whether taxes are dodged by establishing residency in Bermuda and other tax havens, or creating so many shell companies the paper trail is impossible to follow, the smart politician knows where his campaign contributions come from. If the absolute height of criminal irresponsibility was the Bush Administration's prosecution of war on borrowed money, rewarding the financial industry for ruining the nation's economy was the most outrageous violation of the public trust ever perpetuated by American, representative leadership. In some nations such violation would result in the perpetrators being lined up against a wall and shot.
The bottom of the Treasury was scraped clean of every penny, and today the U.S. must find increasingly reluctant foreign lenders to raise the three billion a day it costs to keep the nation propped up. Americans were successfully persuaded that republican politicians had their interests at heart even as they destroyed the means to the people's well being. In that respect the republicans were phenomenally successful. The American people's acquiescence and calm acceptance of a destroyed social and economic infrastructure is perhaps the greatest fraud ever perpetuated upon an ignorant and unsuspecting populace.
The Republican Party rose to power on the manufactured myth that Americans could compete globally in education and technology while enjoying an infrastructure second to none - all while cutting taxes to the bone. Thus it was that Americans ignored the ancient truth that if something is too good to be true, it probably is.
Ronald Reagan invited Americans to hold their government in contempt, and that call has been echoed by republicans ever since. The message resonated with Americans because the media acclaimed Reagan's simplistic view of government as predatory in its pursuit of evermore tax. Regulations were the lever with which evil Liberal Democrats would upset the very essence of America - free market capitalism. Taxes were the liberal tool by which the nation would ultimately be brought to ruin. Republicans, promising further tax cuts and raving about tax and spend liberals, had ready made and successful campaign platforms.
Reagan's legacy can be seen today in the collapse of the deregulated, financial industry. In fact, Reagan was in office when his deregulatory fixations caused the collapse of the nation's S&L's at a cost of over $700 billion tax payer dollars. This was only according to plan. It was only another transfer of wealth, just as today's bailout of the financial industry is.
The art of compromise that rests at the heart of the political process is dead. Honest compromise can't exist in the poisonous atmosphere that defines modern politics. Politicians, skilled in the art of deception, mitigate the guilt of the ones responsible for orchestrating the economic and sociological failings of government, usually by shifting the blame to the other political party. Manipulative politicians frighten or provoke the citizenry by creating problems they can then step in and fix, almost always to the detriment of the nation.
Like the slamming of a prison cell door, the appointment of George Bush by a corrupt Supreme Court rang as a finality to the American people's disconnect from their nation's future. The world bore witness as Americans meekly accepted the coup de' tat that installed Bush to the presidency. Bush and Cheney immediately began the sacking of the U.S. Treasury, and when they left office the U.S. was economically broken, and socially, politically and globally discredited.
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