It’s the last week of President George W. Bush and in 7 days I will be on the Mall welcoming a new administration. It seems prescient to say goodbye to all the things which I could almost forget in this pathetic closing act of a deceptive and failed American president. For so long, reading a newspaper, rather than make your head spin with fear, made your blood boil. In these last days, let’s not forget the duplicitous media tactics we can expect to move beyond.
It’s hard to focus because we have seen so much, but it all seems to add up to our current predicament. And after gripping victory from the jaws of defeat in the 2000 election, it started off on a dishonest note. He invented the “Clinton Recession” clarifying that responsibility for macroeconomic results lies in the hands of the President unless he is a Republican. He then enticed America’s once-well-regarded and ostensibly-non-partisan central banker, Alan Greenspan, to sponsor some breathtaking tax cuts. But that was just the beginning of the lies... and the deficits.
Then the Iraq War. We were warned not to wait for the smoking gun “in the form of a mushroom cloud.” On May 1, 2003, I watched a President in a flight jacket celebrate a “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. A week later, at my high school graduation, I said goodbye to dozens of classmates who trusted the President and left home to protect America from those they were told attacked America on September 11. Some of them never came home.
At about that point, I started wondering how we were letting this happen. We are not a people who tolerate American deaths in big numbers. Six unfortunate deaths in a failed opperation in the Battle of Mogadishu inspired an intollerance for American casualties so severe the US has watched awkwardly the genocidal decimation of Rwanda, Bosnia, Tibet, The Sudan, Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, North Korea, and Burma. But where was that outrage as this administration racked up casualties in Iraq?
The Bush Administration departed from the respectful tradition of confronting squarely the deaths of US Americans as a direct result of a war the President waged. They achieved this first by simply not talking about it. Bush, somehow, didn’t hold press conferences. And when he did, he didn’t answer question from the press. This remains astonishing.
When he did discuss American death in Iraq, it was presented it as proof that America, freedom, and civil society were in danger. He used death to galvanize people--but not with the honest and credible candor of Churchill addressing a nation making sacrifices for a shared goal. He was the President who peddled a fear that he brought into this world. In this environment, even a military defeat was a public relations victory.
And so we are here. After eight years of conceited politics and warfare this nation has few friends and fewer resources. We ceased raising revenue years ago and racked up an enormous debt of Trillions of dollars that we spent building complicated things that blow-up. But Bush learned from his father that a war wasn’t enough to win re-election; you can’t risk a recession. So the administration conspired in the myopic central bank stimuli of cheap credit that built America’s foreclosed homes and the emasculated regulations that allowed those mortgages to be securitized. This whole business has cost Trillions, will cost more, and unlike any other war in our history, no one who supported it made a bit of a sacrifice--our generation will pay for all of this.
On Tuesday, Barack Obama will place his palm on Lincoln's Bible to take the oath of office. Perhaps the only person more excited than I am is President Bush.
--Walter Lamberson
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