God Bless President Bush.

The 1960's are over, puppy. Nobody cares what you drugged up hippies do
anymore. Your just not that important.

"Dennis McGee" <dennmac@InfoAveExtraneous.Net> wrote in message
news:dennmac-ya02408000R2609031343330001@NNTP.InfoAve.Net...

Endless wars, tax giveaways, budget deficits -- the president
is playing by a radical new set of rules, while the media and
the Democrats give him a free ride.

By Paul Krugman
Rolling Stone
10/02/03

The satirical weekly The Onion describes itself as "America's finest news
source" -- and for the last few years that has been the literal truth. Its
mock news story for January 18th, 2001, reported a speech in which
President-elect George W. Bush declared, "Our long national nightmare of
peace and prosperity is over."

And so it has turned out.

A lot has happened in this country since Bush took office -- stock-market
decline and business scandal, energy crisis and environmental backsliding,
budget deficits and recession, terrorism and troubled alliances, and now,
finally, war. Beyond the headlines, however, there's a political story

that

runs through much of what has happened: the story of the rise and growing
dominance of a radical political movement, right here in the U.S.A. I'm
talking about, of course, about America's radical right -- a movement that
now effectively controls the White House, Congress, much of the judiciary
and a good slice of the media. The dominance of that movement changes
everything: Old rules about politics and policy no longer apply.

Most people have been slow to realize just how awesome a sea change has
taken place. During the 2000 election, many people thought that nothing
much was at stake; during the first two years of the Bush administration,
many pundits insisted that its radically conservative bent was only a
temporary maneuver, that Bush would tack back to the center after
solidifying his base. And the public still has little sense of how radical
our leading politicians really are. A striking example: In the fall of
2001, when focus groups were asked to react to Republican proposals for a
retroactive corporate tax cut, members of the focus groups literally
refused to believe the group leaders' description of the policy.

Even many liberals didn't make much fuss about Bush's fiscal
irresponsibility. A massive tax cut isn't a good idea, they said, but it
wasn't all that important. But by 2003, we saw the unprecedented spectacle
of an administration proposing huge additional tax cuts not just in the
face of record deficits but in the middle of a war. ("Nothing is more
important in in the face of a war than cutting taxes," declared House
Majority Leader Tom DeLay.)

Another example: Those who suggested that Republicans would exploit
September 11th for political advantage were widely denounced for
undermining national unity. Yet they did -- indeed, during the 2002
election campaign, Republican supporters ran ads linking Democrat Sen. Tom
Daschle with Saddam Hussein.

What is happening, and why have most people been so slow to come to grips
with the reality? I recently discovered a book that describes the

situation

almost perfectly. It's not a new book by a liberal, writing about
contemporary America; it's an old book by, of all people, Henry Kissinger,
about nineteenth-century diplomacy.


Back in 1957, Henry Kissinger -- then a brilliant, iconclastic young
Harvard scholar, with his career as cynical political manipulator and

crony

capitalist still far in the future -- published his doctoral dissertation,
"A World Restored." One wouldn't think that a book about the

reconstruction

of Europe after the battle of Waterloo is relevant to U.S. politics in the
twenty-first century. But the first three pages of Kissinger's book sent
chills down my spine, because they seem too relevant to current events.

Kissinger describes the problems confronting a heretofore stable

diplomatic

system when it is faced with a "revolutionary power" -- a power that does
not accept that system's legitimacy. He had in mind the France of
Robespierre and Napoleon, but it seems clear to me that one should regard
America's right-wing movement as a revolutionary power in Kissinger's

sense

-- that is, a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our
current political system.

Am I overstating the case? In fact, there's ample evidence that key
elements of the coalition that now runs the country believe that some
long-established American political and social institutions should not, in
principle, exist -- and do not accept the rules that the rest of us have
taken for granted.

Consider, for example, the welfare state as we know it -- programs such as
Social Security, unemployment insurance and Medicare. If you read
literature emanating from the Heritage Foundation, which drives the Bush
administration's economic ideology, you discover a very radical agenda:
Heritage doesn't just want to scale back such programs, it regards their
very existence as a violation of basic principles.

Or consider foreign policy. Since World War II the United States has built
its foreign policy around international institutions and has tried to make
it clear that it is not an old-fashioned imperialist power, which uses
military force as it sees fit. But if you follow the foreign-policy views
of the neoconservative intellectuals who fomented the war with Iraq, you
learn that they have contempt for all that -- Richard Perle, chairman of a
key Pentagon advisory board, dismissed the "liberal conceit of safety
through international law administered by international institutions."

They

aren't hesitant about the use of force; one prominent thinker close to the
administration, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute,
declared that "we are a warlike people, and we love war." The idea that

war

in Iraq is just a pilot project for a series of splendid little wars
seemed, at first, a leftist fantasy -- but many people chose to the
administration have made it clear that they regard this war as only a
beginning. A senior State Department official, John Bolton, told Israeli
officials that after Iraq the United States would "deal with" Syria, Iran
and North Korea.

Not is even that the whole story. The separation of church and state is

one

of the fundamental principles of the U.S. Constitution. But Tom DeLay has
told constituents that he is in office to promote a "biblical

worldview" --

and that his relentless pursuit of Bill Clinton was motivated by Clinton's
failure to to share that view. (DeLay has also denounced the teaching of
evolution in schools, going so far as to blame that teaching for the
shootings at Columbine High School.)

There's even some question about whether the people running the country
accept the idea that legitimacy flows from the democratic process. Paul
Gigot of the Wall Street Journal famously praised the "bourgeois riot" in
which violent protesters shut down a vote recount in Miami. (The rioters,
it was later revealed, weren't angry citizens; they were paid political
operatives.) Meanwhile, according to the president's close friend Don
Evans, now secretary of commerce, Bush believes that he was called by God
to lead the nation. Perhaps this explains why the disputed election of

2000

didn't seem to inspire any caution or humility on the part of the voters.

Suppose, for a moment, that you took the picture I have just painted
seriously. You would conclude that the people now in charge really don't
like America as it is. If you combine their apparent agendas, the goal
would seem to be something like this: a country that basically has no
social safety net at home, which relies mainly on military force to

enforce

its will abroad, in which schools don't teach evolution but do teach
religion and -- possibly -- in which elections are only a formality.

Yet those who take the hard-line rightists now in power at their word, and
suggest that they may really attempt to realize such a radical goal, are
usually accused of being "shrill," of going over the top. Surely, says the
conventional wisdom, we should discount the rhetoric: The goals of the
right are more limited than this picture suggests. Or are they?

Back to Kissinger. His description of the baffled response of established
powers in the face of a revolutionary challenge works equally well as an
account of how the American political and media establishment has

responded

to the radicalism of the Bush administration in the past two years.

"Lulled by a period of stability that had seemed permanent, they
find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of
the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing
framework. The defenders of the status quo therefore tend to begin
by treating the revolutionary power as if its protestations were
merely tactical, as if it really accepted the existing legitimacy
but overstated its case for bargaining purposes, as if it were
motivated by specific grievances to be assuaged by limited
concessions. Those who warn against the danger in time are
considered alarmists; those who counsel adaptation to curcumstance
are considered balanced and sane... But it is the essence of a
revolutionary power that its possesses the courage of its
convictions, that it is willing, indeed eager, to push its
principles to their ultimate conclusion."

As I said, this passage sent chills down my spine, because it explains so
well the otherwise baffling process by which the administration has been
able to push radical policies through, with remarkably little scrutiny or
effective opposition. To elaborate, let me talk about two big examples:

the

tax cuts of 2001 and the Iraq war of 2003.


War and economic policy seem, on the surface, to have little in common --
and in normal times they play very differently on the political scene. Yet
there was a striking similarity between the selling of Bush's tax cuts and
the selling of his Iraq war.

In 1999, candidate Bush introduced his original tax-cut proposal to
solidify his right-wing credentials and fend off a Republican-primary
challenge from Steve Forbes. Anyone familiar with recent political history
knew that Forbes represented a wing of the Republican Party that always
wants more tax cuts for the rich, regardless of economic circumstances. A
clear-eyed assessment should have been that Bush had signed on to that
position, and thus that his goals were very radical -- as they have turned
out to be. As Dan Altman of the New York Times points out, if you take the
administration's tax proposals as a group, they effectively achieve a
long-standing goal of the radical right: an end to all taxes on income

from

capital, moving us to a system in which only wages are taxed -- a system,
if you like, in which earned income is taxed but unearned income is not.

The point is that on the matter of taxes, the right had more or less
declared its intention to -- as Kissinger put it -- "smash the existing
framework," in this case the framework of the American tax system as we
know it. Yet the American political and media establishment couldn't
believe that Bush would really try to achieve that goal. Despite the
evident radicalism of the people behind the Bush policy, moderates
convinced themselves that Bush's aims were limited, and that he could be
appeased with a limited victory. Furthermore, unwilling to admit Bush's
radical goals, moderates accepted at face value his administration's
ever-shifting rationales for its unchanging policy. At first, tax cuts

were

about returning an excessive surplus to the people -- and many Democratic
senators, alas, voted for the 2001 tax cut on that basis. Then, as the
surplus vanished, tax cuts were about providing short-run economic
stimulus. Then, as it became clear that they weren't serving that purpose,
tax cuts were about promising long-run growth. Even now, with the deficit
projected to hit $480 billion next year, many well-meaning politicians and
journalists find it hard to face up to the truth.

But what about the war?

People who followed debates about foreign policy knew that an important
faction of the right was determined to have a war in the Middle East as
another faction was to cut taxes. Back in 1992, Paul Wolfowitz, then
undersecretary of defense (and now deputy secretary), tried to make what

is

now known as the "Bush doctrine" our official defense posture. The

document

he wrote called for intervention in Iraq and the legitimization of
pre-emptive attacks on other countries. ***** Cheney, then secretary of
defense, initially endorsed that view. He backed off in the face of public
protest, but he and a number of others now in key administration positions
continued to agitate for an Iraq war, and the adoptation of pre-emption as
a regular policy, through the 1990s.

Given this background, it should have been obvious that the proposed
invasion of Iraq, like the tax cut, wasn't really a response to current
events (in this case September 11th); it was part of a pre-existing and
much more radical agenda. Yet as in the case of the tax cut, the political
and media establishment couldn't bring itself to pursue the goals it had
declared. Instead, most people accepted as sincere the ever-shifting
ostensible rationales offered by the Bush administration. A war with Iraq
was at first justified by alleged ties between Saddam Hussein and Al

Qaeda.

When no evidence was found for that link, despite intense efforts, the
issue became Saddam's alleged nuclear program. Concerns about such a
program helped convince many moderates that a war with Iraq was a good
idea, and Congress gave Bush a green light to proceed with a war.

Eventually, the case for believing in an Iraqi nuclear program was
discredited. One of the two key pieces of evidence, Iraq's purchase of
aluminum tubes, turned out to be a misinterpretation: The tubes weren't
suitable for their alleged purpose, uranium enrichment. The other key
piece, documents allegedly showing Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger,
were revealed to be inept forgeries. But by then, Bush was pushing the

idea

that America, by installing a democratic government in Iraq, would

generate

a wave of democratization across the region -- an idealistic goal that,
once again, drew support from many well-meaning moderates. Only once the
war was well under way did James Woolsey, widely believed to be in line

for

a top post in the occupation government, declare the war in Iraq to be the
start of a "fourth world war" (with the Cold War as number three), a
conflict that would involve Syria and Iran as well as Iraq.

There's a pattern here; in fact, pretty much the same story can be told
about energy policiy, environmental policy, health-care policy, education
policy and so on. In each case the officials making policy within the Bush
adminstration have a history of highly radical views, which should suggest
that the administration itself has radical goals. But in each case the
administration has reassured moderates by pretending otherwise -- by
offering rationales for its policy that don't seem all that radical. And

in

each case moderates have followed a strategy of appeasement, trying to

meet

the administration halfway while downplaying both the radicalism of its
policies and the trail of broken promises. The young Kissinger had it
right: People who have been accustomed to stability can't bring themselves
to believe what is happening when faced with a revolutionary power, and

are

therefore ineffective in opposing it.


I am not entirely sure why this is happening -- why we are now faced with
such a radical challenge to our political and social system. Rich people
did very well in the 1990s; why this hatred of anything that looks

remotely

like income redistribution? Corporations have flourished; why this urge to
strip away modest environmental regulation? Churches of all denominations
have prospered; why this attack on the separation of church and state?
American power and influence have never been greater; why this drive to
destroy our alliances and embark on military adventures? Nonetheless, it's
increasingly clear that the right wants to do all these things.

A growing number of people are starting to realize just how serious the
situation is. Maybe Andy Rooney of CBS' 60 Minutes put it best: "The only
real good news will be when this terrible time in American history is
over."

What can bring that real good news closer?

To hope for a turnaround, you have to believe that most Americans don't
really support the right's agenda -- that the country as a whole is more
generous, more tolerant and less militaristic than the people now running
it. I think that's true. Without the right's success in obscuring its aims
and wrapping itself around the flag, I believe that most Americans would
strongly oppose the direction this country is going.

I have a vision -- maybe just a hope -- of a great revulsion: a moment in
which the American people look at what is happening, realize how their

good

will and patriotism have been abused and put a stop to this drive to
destroy much of what is best in our country. How and when this moment will
come, I don't know. But one thing is clear: It cannot happen unless we all
make an effort to see the truth about what is happening.
##

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

----

Excerpted from "The Great Unraveling" by Paul Krugman. ©2003, by Paul

Krugman.

============================================================================
==

"DECONSTRUCTING BUSH"

It's not hard to understand White House policy: Just assume the worst

____________________________________________________________________________
__

1. Don't assume that policy proposals make sense in terms of their stated

goals.

A revolutionary power knows what it wants and will make whatever argument
advances that goal. David Wessel of the Wall Street Journal wrote about a
White House aide who said one thing on the record and the opposite off the
record; when Wessel protested, the aide replied, "Why would I lie? Because
that's what I'm supposed to do. Lying to the press doesn't ***** anyone's
conscience."

____________________________________________________________________________
__

2. Do some homework to discover the real goals.

The way to understand a policy is to look at what its architects want
before they try to sell their plans to the public. When you learn that the
official now in charge of forest policy is a former timber-industry
lobbyist, you can surmise that the "healthy forests" initiative, under
which logging companies will be allowed to cut down more trees, isn't

about

preventing forest fires.

____________________________________________________________________________
__

3. Don't assume that the usual rules of politics apply.

Washington has long had a routine for scandal: Some awkward facts come out
about an official, the press plays up the story, the official is quietly
urged to resign. But the same story line doesn't apply to the Bush
administration. Stephen Griles, a coal-industry lobbyist who was named
deputy interior secretary, intervened in an energy-exploration dispute on
behalf of a former client; he's still there. Richard Perle, chairman of

the

Defense Policy Advisory Board, had business dealings that raised questions
about conflict of interest -- but he took only a token demotion and he's
still there.

A revolutionary power, which does not regard the existing system as
legitimate, doesn't feel obliged to play by the rules.

____________________________________________________________________________
__

4. Expect a revolutionary power to respond to criticism by attacking.

A revolutionary power also doesn't accept the right of others to criticize
its actions. Anyone who raises questions can expect a counterattack; last
April, when Sen. John Kerry called for "regime change in the United
States," Republican leaders questioned his patriotism. According to the
Washington Post, "GOP lawmakers and lobbyists say the tactics the Bush
administration uses on friends and allies have been uniquely fierce and
vindictive." Or as Henry Kissinger puts it, "The distinguishing feature of
a revolutionary power is not that it feels threatened... _but that nothing
can reassure it_. Only absolute security -- the neutralization of the
opponent -- is considered a sufficient guarantee."

____________________________________________________________________________
__

5. Don't think there's a limit to a revolutionary power's objectives.

The right may move us to a tax system in which poor people pay a higher
share of their income than rich people, but it won't take us to a system

in

which rich people actually pay less than poor people -- or will it? The
right may go on from Iraq to Syria and Iran, but it won't start

threatening

already democratic countries with military force -- or will it? I don't
know where the right's agenda stops, but I have learned never to assume
that it can be appeased through limited concessions. Pundits who predict
moderation on the part of the Bush administration, on any issue, have been
consistently wrong. - P.K.

So...we steal from other countries. And...we deserve what we get.
Yep, I pegged you so well DG.