Cleaning up George's Mess—Part 11: The National Character

The last part of the Harper's Magazine article "Undoing Bush" is by Earl Shorris. This analysis of the damage Bush has done to "the national character" is the most disturbing of all, as it concludes that the Bush administration has a disposition to evil, and that the rest of us by keeping silent (or, worse, cheering) are complicit. The Bush people have fostered our descent toward evil by employing fear, and by banishing virtue. The Iraq war is the predominant feature of this decline.

"The war did not come about because of a political miscalculation or the misreading of an unavoidable accident. It is not an error. It is an ethical failure that has spread through every department of this administration, into the Congress, and down into the states."

As far as virtue goes, Shorris says that none of the preeminent virtues (courage, temperance, prudence, justice) can be found in the Bush Administration or Congress.

"Cutting taxes for the rich and adding billions to the national debt is not prudent. Leaving millions of people, many of them children, in dire poverty in the richest nation in the history of the world is not just. Silencing the press is not temperate, nor is secret surveillance of the citizenry. Failing to put an end to an unjust war because one is afraid, like the Democrats, of repercussions at the polls is anything but courageous."

This is chilling enough, but Shorris explains how we got ourselves into this mess.

"If there was a method for the accomplishment of the fall, it may have been the wish of the country to engage life at a distance, to think, as I am doing here, of grand issues, the works and minds of philosophers and fools, but not to engage a world where white bread is sold by the slice or a man must labor for an hour to earn a tomato. Distance is a means of managing fear."

We see this disengagement everywhere. Where is the willingness to help?

It gets worse.

"The fear that drives the government comes of the inescapable logic of history and self-regard: if we are good and we killed 140,000 people, maninly women and children, on a single morning in summer and soon thereafter repeated the act in Nagasaki as if to prove our willingness to engage in mass destruction, what can we expect of our enemies who are not good? If we responded to an attack on the World Trade Center by invading a country that had no part in the attack and we are good, what can we expect of our enemies who are not good? We are not gods. We have no sense of atonement."

How will we ever recover? As a nation, as a people, and as individuals we need to understand that the actions of the Bush administration, in which we all have been complicit, have been wrong. As Shorris says, we need to understand that "a disposition to evil is not a resolution of fear." What Bush has done will do nothing to end fear. It's only getting worse. But understanding this will be the first step back to virtue.

Cleaning up George's Mess—Part 10: Diplomacy

American foreign policy today is arrogant. It has been that way for some time, but the Bush administration has taken arrogance to new heights. According to Anne-Marie Slaughter's section of the Harper's Magazine article "Undoing Bush,"

"The paradox of American foreign policy today is that the United States, though more powerful than ever, has rearely been so lost in the world and never more reviled."

She points out that a majority in the Middle East believes that the "war on terror" is meant to secure our oil supply and/or achieve world domination. (I think a lot of Americans believe the same thing.) In addition, majorities in several European nations are less confident that we want to promote liberty, as a result of our actions in Iraq.

Remember that brief period after 9/11 when the world was on our side? And the Bush Administration decided we didn't need international organizations or treaties and if the rest of the world wanted to follow us that was great, but otherwise—too bad.

"An entire generation of citizens around the world is being reared with no memory of the role the United States played in World War II and the Cold War but with plenty of evidence that the world's lone superpower is arrogant, incompetent, and indifferent."

The next President "must launch a diplomatic offensive to restore American moral and political leadership."

Specific actions to be taken: (1) close Guantanamo—we can't lead a fight on terror while stooping to the level of the terrorists, violating international law; (2) get serious about nuclear disarmament; (3) join the International Criminal Court (although then watch for indictments against Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld!); (4) reform multilateral organizations that are considered ineffective because of US dominance; (5) work to reverse global warming.

"These five steps would go a long way toward restoring America's political influence and diplomatic leadership in the world."

More importantly, it seems to me, these steps would restore the values that hold the country together. If it doesn't happen, I see us spinning dangerously out of control.

Cleaning up George's Mess--Part 9: The Military

Edward Luttwak writes about the military in Harper's Magazine's article, "Undoing Bush." He describes a military that is severely depleted, that Barry McCaffrey, a retired 4-star General, says is starting to unravel, and that Colin Powell calls "about broken." It's all due to mismanagement of a war that was a mistake in the first place. The remedy, to allow the military to recover post-Iraq, will be to shrink the services, especially the Navy and Air Force. It is interesting to see how Luttwak talks about the Army's different circumstances, though, since it is already smaller than it should be. At least, he says, it won't be necessary to expel large numbers from the Army for behavior problems as it was after Vietnam.

"Today's all-volunteer Army, which endures drinkless, sexless, funless tours in the featureless landscapes and remarkably ugly towns of Iraq, has by contrast behaved with saintly restraint and shown a grim devotion to duty."

That speaks well for the men and women in the Army and is the reason we can support the troops but not support the war. But that doesn't mean there aren't problems. It is clear that fighting terrorism with an occupying army is a no-win proposition. Tactics need to be refined and the Army needs to become more nimble in order to deal with in the future the the mess that we're creating today.

Cleaning up George’s Mess—Part 8: Intelligence

By now we all know that the Bush Regime not only pressured the intelligence services to produce evidence that would justify the invasion of Iraq, they actually distorted it when they didn’t like what they saw. James Bamford tells the story in the “Intelligence” section of “Undoing Bush” in Harper’s Magazine.

He begins by reminding us that the most significant intelligence error by the Bushies has been to treat terrorism not as a crime to be dealt with by intelligence and law enforcement agencies, but as “an existential military threat.” (Among other consequences of this decision, our policy has actually pushed much of the Middle East into the arms of terrorists who easily use our military excesses as recruiting tools.)

“An April 2006 report from the administration’s own director of national intelligence found that ‘the Iraq conflict has become the “cause celebre” for jihadists’ and was ‘shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives.’”

Meanwhile, where are bin Laden and his main henchmen?

Although we can’t change the fact that we’ve screwed up in Iraq, Bamford says the next president can at least undo Bush’s “aversion to intelligence.” Some of the intelligence bureaucracy could be eliminated, including the director of national intelligence and the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, both redundant positions that impede intelligence and bypass the CIA. Shifting control of intelligence away from the Pentagon to the CIA could help avert the kinds of manipulation that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld will be remembered for.

Cleaning up George’s Mess—Part 7: The Marketplace of Ideas

In the Harpers Magazine article “Undoing Bush,” Jack Hitt writes about the Bush administration’s assault on debate.

“The Bush strategy basically takes any argument that does no comport with the forward momentum of the Bush agenda and, by means of numerous tactics, seeks to tamp down, crush, sideline, segregate, circumscribe, cordon off, isolate, maroon, raze, shunt aside, eschew, or quarantine that idea.”

The tactic of choice, which I can testify has filtered down to the county level if our local Republican operatives are any measure, is to not to attack ideas but to attack the people who hold them:

“The one tactic that has yielded the best results, though, is to enfeeble entire arguments by destroying the reputation of the most prominent person making them.”

It doesn’t matter that the ad hominem attack contains no truth. Once made, it takes on a life of its own, and the brilliant thing is that there are no consequences. Bill O’Reilly calls people “kooky” if he can’t come up with a substantive response to an opinion. Defectors from the Bush administration are accused of criminal behavior or otherwise distracted from reality. Because no one in the Bush administration is ever permitted to change his mind, they see no need for debate and as a result, debate itself has suffered. Hitt’s solution:

“Just as the cure for bad speech is more speech, it seems that the best antidote for our debatelessness may be, quite simply, debate.”

A good idea—if we can find anyone courageous enough to stray from the Bush administration’s tactic of killing the messenger.

Cleaning up George’s Mess—Part 6: The Economy

In this part of the Harper’s Magazine article, “Undoing Bush,” Dean Baker tells us that one of George’s “economic calamities” isn’t entirely his fault. He inherited an overvalued dollar, which has made American goods uncompetitive abroad, and hasn’t done nearly enough to solve the problem which has led to the growth in the trade deficit and to losses of manufacturing jobs. Baker points to the housing bubble as another “economic calamity,” owing in part to historically low interest rates.

How can Bush’s successor solve these problems? Unfortunately, a slow fix will only make the problem worse as new home buyers add their expectations to the bubble. The same is true for fixing the value of the dollar which, if it were to decline slowly, would keep interest rates (which have moved higher, exacerbating the housing problem) too high. In the case of housing, Baker suggests both talking the bubble down (warning new buyers that at unrealistic prices their investments are risky) and regulating risky mortgage products. (It isn’t clear that these steps will be necessary, given what is already happening in the housing market.) In the case of the dollar, a public commitment to seeking a lower value by a specific date will prompt the market to follow suit.

Baker also believes that the Federal Reserve Board should be forced to concern themselves with more than just inflation, that they should take steps to avoid the formation of future bubbles. Lastly, the Bush tax cuts need to be rolled back. That, combined with an end to the war expenses, will go a long way toward eliminating deficits and relieving that pressure on the economy.

Something Baker doesn't talk about is the growing gap between rich and poor, and the risks that the inequitible health care system puts on the poor. With downward pressure on wages, this is another vulnerable aspect of the economy the next President will have to address.

Cleaning up George’s Mess—Part 5: Science

Chris Mooney’s section of the Harper’s Magazine article “Undoing Bush” brings to mind the new Al Gore book, Assault on Reason. “Under the Bush Administration we have seen scientists suppressed, scientific reports forcefully edited or censored, scientific advisory committees politically tilted, and widespread distortion and misrepresentation of scientific knowledge.” This is nothing less than a “war on science” designed to pander to the Republican base and to “manage inconvenient scientific information.” And all of this shady public relations and misinformation has wasted time that we could have spent working to solve important problems. Mooney suggests that cleaning up George’s mess could begin with the appointment of a distinguished science adviser to the next President, but of course it will be up to the President to listen to him or her and not marginalize the position as Bush has done. Mooney also thinks the scientific reputation of federal agencies needs to be restored after the damage Bush has done.

It continues to amaze me that conservatives would rather argue with scientific data than consider the consequences of ignoring the data. The problem, I suppose, is that the truth is inconvenient and gets in the way of the right-wing agenda. The next President has an opportunity to involve the public in the discussion of scientific evidence in a way that could introduce a new Enlightenment, or at least bring us out of the Bush dark ages.

Cleaning up George’s Mess—Part 4: The Environment

Across the board, Bush has weakened environmental protection, according to Bill McKibben’s section of the Harper’s Magazine article “Undoing Bush.”

“We already faced daunting environmental challenges in 2000, of course, challenges that would have taken decades of good-faith effort to overcome. But rather than attempt the difficult and slow reversal of our cheap-energy economy, Bush has eagerly raced forward into whole new worlds of environmental turmoil.”

Not only have carbon-dioxide emissions increased but gas prices have doubled; and we forfeited our leadership role in global environmental protection by abandoning the Kyoto treaty.

“With real effort and real resources, we might have nudged the emerging economies onto a different energy trajectory in 2000, but by now their path appears set.”

The Bush administration, of course, doesn’t believe in multilateralism, which is one reason it finds itself in the mess its in, a mess of its own creation.

Among other steps, besides strengthening environmental protection standards, the next administration must appoint regulators who don’t come from the organizations they’re meant to regulate, a hallmark of the Bush administration. Furthermore, we can’t expect the relevant bodies to do their important jobs without the necessary resources. Bush’s tax cuts combined with pouring money we don’t have into a senseless war have drained resources away from important environmental work. McKibben also notes that the next president will have to put the environment at the center of global diplomacy.

Cleaning Up George’s Mess—Part 3: Civil Service

The third part of the “Undoing Bush” article in Harper’s Magazine is on the damage the administration has done to the civil service. You don’t have to look any further back than the White House’s interference in the corps of U.S. attorneys and the firings of at least 8 in the middle of their terms for political reasons (all the while claiming that the dismissals were performance-related—a lie). But the problem is much bigger—Bush has planted a boat load of political hack’s without the requisite experience or skills throughout the civil service: Kyle Sampson at DOJ, Michael Brown at FEMA, Patrick Rhode at FEMA, Claire Buchan at Commerce. And on and on. All administrations make political appointments, of course, but the Bushies have gone further than their predecessors. Ken Silverstein, an editor of Harper’s, says,

“Where the Bush Administration has undeniably broken new ground is in its insistence that ideological purity and devotion to the president himself serve as a litmus test for appointees, and the rigor with which it has chosen and vetted candidates on only these grounds.”

It’s fair to expect a Republican to appoint Republicans, but they appointees need also to be minimally competent. The same has applied to government advisory panels, where loyalty hardly seems relevant and competence everything, and yet the Bush litmus test was applied there as well.

Furthermore, political pressure has affected research on controversial subjects and the editing of reports to alter conclusions to be more politically desirable. And of course we’re all familiar with the widely suspected interference with pre-war intelligence so that the Bush administration’s decision to invade would seem justified.

To solve these problems, Silverstein suggests having Congress reduce the number of presidential appointees; political interference should be avoided; decision making in general should be more transparent. Finally,

“Above all, we need laws that hinder future administrations from censoring the speech of experts and regulators within the federal government.”

Cleaning up George’s Mess—Part 2: The Courts

Another area that will require fixing when we’re finally free of George is the nation’s court system.

“Under the guise of rolling back decades of judicial activism, he has instead a small army of jurists who think of the law in strikingly active terms.”

So says Dahlia Lithwick, a senior editor at Slate, in “Undoing Bush” in Harper’s Magazine. But the worst that he’s done is appoint to the bench believers in the President’s vision of executive authority, sending the balance of powers out of whack. Among other things that Bush has done is change how judicial appointees are vetted and approved. And then there is the case of the fired U.S. attorneys, which

“bears all the hallmarks of Bush’s tendency to view the courts as extensions of his political will.”

What the next president should do, proposes Lithwick, is “dramatically reform the judicial-nomination process” so that nominees cannot hide their views, and they should have to answer questions about their records. Lithwick also argues that we need to “reclaim the language of the rule of law,” and “recognize . . . that ‘activist judges’ and ‘strict construction’ are political, not legal, code words.” The sooner the better.

Cleaning up George’s Mess—Part 1: The Constitution

In the Harper’s Magazine article “Undoing Bush” David Cole discusses the damage George Bush has done to the Constitution of the United States.

“For a short parlor game, challenge your friends to name a constitutional right that Bush has not sought to undermine. After the right to bear arms and the guarantee against the quartering of soldiers, the game will be over. Those who prefer a longer game can reverse the exercise, but be prepared for an extended and dispiriting evening.”

Cole goes on to describe how the Bush administration has eviscerated the First Amendment right of association, trampled on the Fourth Amendment right to privacy, ignored the Fifth Amendment right to due process, and repeatedly attempted to cut the legs out from under the constitutional principle of separation of powers on which so much of our strength is based. As Cole notes,

“Restoring the Constitution will be a monumental task, but doing so is critical to maintaining the character of our democracy.”

The first step back is the next election, in which the public must demand fidelity to our founding principles. When the next administration comes to office they must put the separation of powers back on sound footing, restore due process, and take additional actions to fix the worst excesses of the so-called Patriot Act. It’s a pity we can’t start this process sooner, but we can keep our focus on 2008 and finally saying goodbye to George Bush.

Cleaning Up George's Mess

Harper's Magazine this month has a great series of essays called "Undoing Bush: How to repair eight years of sabotage, bungling, and neglect." Here's the intro:

"George W. Bush has done more to transform the nation than any American president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Indeed, he may well be the perfect anti-Roosevelt. He has taken a prosperous nation and mired it in war, replaced our national composure with terror, and left behind him a legacy of damage so profound that repairing it will likely be the work of generations. Before the next administration can return to solving the already considerable problems the nation faced in 2000, it must begin to correct the misdeeds and missteps of the current one."

Over the course of the next week or so, I'll be summarizing the conclusions each of the commentators made about George's Mess and then talk about what needs to be done: a road map for the next administration.