Caligula. Nero. George III. Louis XVI and his dear Marie. Wilhelm II (yes, he really did say, “If only someone had told me beforehand that England would take up arms against us!”).
Now comes Bushleague II to remind us again why we’ve opted for a meritocratic democracy over monarchical dynasties. The wrong son of the wrong family, he has proven yet once more that genetics is a crap shoot. Sooner or later you’re gonna get a big bummer of a king.
But there’s big, and then there’s big. In the past, these fools could only be expected to liquidate people by the tens of millions. But in the nuclear era, the prospects for going awry take on planetary proportions. Right on cue, Seymour Hersh is reporting on Bush administration plans to nuke Iran.
Sigh.
Sometimes it’s just hard to know where to start with these guys. But then sometimes I’ve also wondered if that wasn’t their very strategy: Grab the reins of power and blow the doors off of everything all at once, leaving the hapless liberals scrambling to defend Social Security, reproductive rights, the Supreme Court, civil rights, civil liberties, the environment and a host of formerly sacrosanct foreign policy pillars, all at the same time.
Fortunately, there are some remaining vestiges of democracy in America, even after 25 years of bludgeoning by the New Right (aka, the old wrong). That means we still have a prayer of surviving Bad King George and his court of sick jesters. And we’re even making progress.
Wanna know how far we’ve come? Two quotes say it all. In the summer of 2002, the Bush junta was at the apogee of its power. And arrogance. This was when Ron Suskind interviewed an unnamed “senior advisor” to the king (my bet is Rasput... er, Rove), who lectured the journalist and we other hapless members of “what we call the reality-based community” thusly, correcting our foolish reliance on superfluous concepts like basing solutions on the “judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Those lines are as jaw-droppingly, breathtakingly, fall-off-the-chairingly astonishing to read today as they were the first time I laid eyes on them. But now they are a lot less frightening. You see, there were two ways we could have gone from that moment. Down one path, we survive, even retaining the constitutional gifts of the Founders with us. Down the other, the imperial fabricators would have been powerful enough to prevail over reality itself, and American democracy would have become just another chapter for the history books. It was close, too (and we’re not even necessarily home yet). Had Iraq gone swimmingly, the Creature from Crawford might have had carte blanche to dismantle the remaining characteristics of this country which once made it a special place.
This could well be the supreme irony in all of history. Seriously. Think about it – it is not only Iranians, Syrians, Cubans and Venezuelans who can thank their lucky stars for the Iraqi resistence which has ground the American military machine down to near its breaking point. It is not too much to say, as well, that these same fighters also saved American democracy – for Bush’s success in Iraq would surely have meant democracy’s demise here at home. Undoubtedly, Americans will never allow themselves to believe it, but losing in Iraq may well have been the best thing that could have happened to them.
Of course, with three years remaining on the clock, and with an administration which has already well proven its bona fides where a willingness to do anything to seize and maintain power is concerned, we are far from saved. But that said, like Berlin in 1945, the circle is rapidly closing around the White House and the movement of regressive politics it has led, to the point where even the old rally-‘round-the-flag standbys seem unlikely to work anymore. Sure they’re thinking of bombing Iran in October – of course they are! – but it’s an open question as to whether that would scare away even more votes for America’s Tories in the midterms than it would gain. Soccer moms, used to shuddering in doubt at the capacity of Kerry and clones to provide security for their children, might just as likely react to bombs over Tehran by instead shuddering in fear at what a three-war president would mean for their children’s future. Just who is America’s real security threat – Iraq, Iran or George W. Bush – might be a question which crossed many voters’ minds for the first time. Even perennially inept Democrats could actually win an election that lopsided.
The measures of Bush’s demise are now manifest and multiple. The special prosecutor has all but accused him of using secret intelligence to attack political enemies, and what he used was cherry-picked and ultimately based on a known lie anyhow. It is now clear that the guy who said, ‘nobody wants to get to the bottom of this leak case more than I do’, was the very guy who was doing the leaking, and the political fall-out from that alone will be severe. The Libby accusation may the most severe blow of all to an administration which has already taken on Katrina-level quantities of water and is badly listing. Bush is nothing without plain-spoken credibility and national security credentials. Nothing. Nobody thinks the guy is smart. No one sees him as competent. Not many are nutty enough to still buy his radical policies. And that whole regular-guy schtick has come to wear pretty thin. Most Americans now ache palpably for somebody just a little less regular than the guy serving them coffee at the local diner to be in charge of running the Free World. Bush fooled enough gullible voters (and fabricated the rest) to push his sorry carcass over the finish line in 2004 on the strength of the trust factor and security fears alone. Take those away and the bonhomie turns to tedium, the tedium to contempt, the contempt to fury.
But L’Affaire Libby is only the most flourescent sign of Bush’s demise. His poll numbers just keep going further and further south. Former military brass are starting to come out and savagely trash the administration’s security policy with the fury of wet cats. DeLay is dead. Abramoff is cutting deals on the savage-looking near horizon. Our ambassador to Iraq warns that we are near to plunging the entire Middle East into flames (No! You’re kidding!). Aznar is history. Berlusconi is finished. Blair dangles, hated, by a thread. Hardly a Latin American country has yet to turn its back on Washington, and those, like Mexico, still on that short list are merely awaiting the elections necessary to ratify the deed. Republicans running for Congress are avoiding Bush like the bubonic plague. In the California district formerly represented by (soon to be dethroned) Republican king felon Randy Cunningham, there are 14 elephants running for the now open seat, and all but one of them have distanced themselves from Bush. Could you imagine even one doing so in 2002? The list goes on and on. You might be thinking this could only get better if a couple of administration figures were also recently arrested for commercial fraud and soliciting sex with a minor over the Internet. Guess what?
But – speaking of distancing – I think the most telling bit of news yet came from this ABC headline: “Lawyer: Bush Left Leak Details to Cheney”. It would appear from the story that Bush is so badly rattled that he is now even distancing himself from Cheney. That is very, very, rattled. Apart from the very real possibility that Bush could be left for some short period of time trying to run a government with neither Cheney, Rumsfeld, Card nor Rove at his side, there’s also the question of whether it’s terribly much in his interest to piss-off ol’ Shotgun Dick. Somehow, I don’t see Cheney doing a Gordon Liddy, rotting away in Leavenworth, waiting for his alleged heart to crap out, and silently taking the fall for the hamster-in-chief (“I made you! You were nothing! I made you!”). I sure wouldn’t want Darth Cheney on my case, and he doesn’t even know all my dark little secrets about bogus war rationales and the outing of American spies (unless, of course, the NSA told him). For Bush to be distancing himself from the Man from Hench can only be a sign of the most amazing desperation. The visage of the formerly imperious Bush and Cheney at each others’ throats reminds me of nothing so much as the evocative lyrics from Mark Knopfler’s aptly named “Done With Bonaparte”, poignantly depicting the once-unstoppable Napoleon’s now-pathetic retreat from Moscow:
And our Grande Armée is dressed in rags A frozen starving beggar band Like rats we steal each other's scraps Fall to fighting hand to hand
Bush is in the toilet, and yet he is nowhere near his nadir yet. For a man with as many personal demons as he has, it’s quite something to contemplate his having the darkest days of his life as yet (but not too yet) to come. We can only hope that he takes us no further along on that tragic ride than the sad distance we’ve already come. On that will depend the courage of the public, the media and the leadership of the Democratic Party. Scary, eh?
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