Can't Buy Me Love

[chiburb]

A great DU front-pager...

Snip:

To tell you the truth, as cynical as I have been for a long time about American politics I never thought I would see that kind of corruption in my own government. We are used to the idea that politics is a dirty business, that a lot of money changes hands and that our representatives will be, as the phrase goes, "beholden to special interests." What we are now seeing is on a different scale altogether. We are watching the end results - domestically and abroad - of an administration made up of people who have no ethical or even emotional investment in the institutions they control. This kind of mess is what inevitably happens when the people running the joint are devoted first, foremost and only to their own profit. After seeing the Bush team show no hesitation about perverting the democratic process and indeed the Supreme Court in order to get themselves into power, we should hardly be surprised that once there, they did not ask what they could do for their country, but rather what their country could do for them.

One of the most-repeated lines from Suskind and O'Neill's The Price of Loyalty is Cheney's snap that "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." That statement makes no sense - especially coming from the party of fiscal responsibility - if the overall health of the economy is something that "matters." On the other hand, if all that "matters" is the continued power and prosperity of the Bush administration and its corporate sponsors, then Cheney's absolutely right: deficits are not going to affect that. After all, they'll be long gone before the bills come due.

And that's the logic driving everything this administration does, from its policies to its PR. Rove has gotten this crowd this far by sticking to the principle that image is everything and substance is nothing. Control perception, and reality can go to hell; in fact, it must, because any time that you spent trying to actually improve the state of the country is time taken away from the much more important project of securing your own re-election. Of course Bush has more time to go to the rodeo than he does to sit before the 9/11 commission. Going to the rodeo will help him; testifying before the 9/11 commission would only help the country understand what created the worst disaster in recent history and figure out how to prevent the next one. Naturally they want him at the rodeo. From Rove's perspective, that's a no-brainer.

The same attitude has produced the administration's increasingly dangerous failures in Iraq and the 'war on terrorism.' Why did we respond to an attack by a mobile, decentralized, highly flexible and adaptable international terrorist organization by waging conventional wars against two nation-states, one of which had no connection whatsoever to said organization? Because actually stopping Al-Qaeda was never the Bush administration's top priority. If they were really motivated by a sincere desire to dismantle the organization that pulled off the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor two and a half years ago and is now merrily exporting violence, terror, and grief to all corners of the globe, why in the name of sanity would they have decided to devote our army and our money to toppling a regime that was actually using its evil powers to suppress Islamic fundamentalism within its borders? And why would they have toppled said regime so incompetently that instead of replacing it with a new one, they have merely turned the country into a swamp of anarchy which is breeding new acts of terrorism daily?

Much more here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/plaidder/04/15.html

[chiburb]

1. If it's good enough for Maha to link to,

It's good enough for a kick to the top!

[hippiegranny]

2. a second kick to the top

this is an excellent piece, and the front page does not have a working link to it right now. but reply #1, above, does.