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HEMI-GATE!
(or: How to Lose Friends and Influence Juntas!)
It goes without saying that the Bush administration has been an unmitigated disaster internationally, as well as on the domestic front. But there's an interim level between these two that sometimes gets unfairly overlooked: the hemispheric. The near invisibility of news about the rest of the Western hemisphere in our mainstream media is unfortunate, because while stories about Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela may not pack the visceral punch of our ongoing Middle East narratives, examining the evolution of American hemispheric policies under Bush is an education in subterfuge.
Considering the past histories of certain key administration figures in these regions - people like State's undersecretary for arms control John Bolton, US ambassador to the United Nations John Negroponte, and assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Otto Reich - it should come as no surprise that the Caribbean, Central America, and South America now form a particularly volatile political nexus. Today, in their rush to make up for eight years in the wilderness while Clinton was president, the same thugs whose anti-democratic meddling led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in 'secret wars' during the Reagan/Bush era now plot the naked, violent overthrow of regional leaders they find inconvenient.
Witness Venezuela, where evidence continues to mount that the highest levels of American political power were behind the failed 2002 coup against president Hugo Chavez, as well as the onslaught of anti-Chavez propaganda that set the stage for a fraught night-time siege of the presidential palace in Caracas. The whole event was caught on film in the stunning documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, which you all have to watch as soon as possible. But I digress.
To understand the full, psychotic extent of the realignment that happened when the Bush regime re-took the White House, you need only examine the impact of the IRI (an international wing of the Republican party) on the attempts to oust president Aristide of Haiti. By advising and funding local insurgents and Macoutes, these globe-trotting GOPers are actively participating in the ouster of a man whose democratic election was generously shepherded by the previous American administration!
How fucked up is that?!
Scandal Impact Rating: 2 – Most people just don’t care about this kind of stuff.
Scandal Gravity Rating: 7 – Sad to say that subverting democracy so close to home has long been par for the course.
*** **** ***
DOMESTI-GATE
(or: Home is Where the Hurt Is!)
The Preznit and his party suffer from a particularly dangerous form of political schizophrenia. On the one hand, the Neoconservatives who have forged Dubya's foreign policy are addicted to empire, defense industry pork, and budget-blasting no-bid corporate hand-outs that suck frighteningly huge piles of cash from the American treasury.
On the other hand, you have the Free Marketeers pushing for more ideological purity in fiscal policy, less entitlements, more tax cuts for the rich, less government regulation of industry, more privatization of public utilities. Ultimately, this camp wants to do away with public education, public television, public radio... public everything, basically. Their stated goal is to shrink the federal government until it's small enough to "strangle in the bathtub," as shadowy-conservative-with-questionable-terrorist-connections Grover Norquist once vividly phrased it.
Yer old pal Jerky would argue that these two conflicting impulses - libertarian austerity and neoconservative largesse - enter into the sphere of the preznitcy via the august personage of vice preznit Dick Cheney, a man who should know better, but who apparently doesn't care. Either that, or he's privy to information about some impending cataclysmic disaster that renders the exploding federal debt and deficit irrelevant.
The other two forces that have profoundly influenced Dubya's preznitcy are the Christian Right, and the Political Machine. Yer old pal Jerky would argue that these two influences filter down to Dubya through Karl Rove, who is, in and of himself, the Political Machine.
I believe this "Mexican stand-off" of conflicting interests - and Dubya's rotating allegiance - has been the source of much dissonance during his tenure. Furthermore, I believe the Political Machine wins pretty much every argument. How else to explain this supposedly fiscal conservative administration's massive subsidies for the agriculture and airline industries, or their substantial tariffs on foreign steel? How else to explain drastic tax cuts during an unnecessary war of first resort?
How else to explain why every time Dubya gave a policy speech on some bold new initiative - improving health care for seniors, No Child Left Behind, increasing the profile of federal volunteerism organizations - it was a virtual guarantee that he was within weeks of cutting, de-funding or eliminating said program?
How else to explain the farcical budgets produced by this administration? How else to explain the blink-and-you-missed-it promise to set up a permanent base on the moon and send a manned mission to Mars? The promise to deal with the scourge of anabolic steroids? To end the kind of "sex tourism" his own brother enjoyed so well?
And you wonder why they have to run as the God Hates Fags party?!
Scandal Impact Rating: 5 – The cost of living now exceeds the value of labor. People are feeling it, and it’s only going to get worse.
Scandal Gravity Rating: 10 – This diffuse set of scandals is going to cost Dubya the White House.
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