Sunday, May 13, 2007
Opinion
Dumbfounded
have suffered under the political stewardship of George W. Bush for 10 years, from the middle of his first term as governor through today...
By Bob Zaslavsky
Because I lived and taught in Texas (first in Harlingen, in deep south Texas, then in Fort Worth) for nearly a decade before I came to Atlanta, I have suffered under the political stewardship of George W. Bush for 10 years, from the middle of his first term as governor through today.
I have seen him, from the outset, to be a boor and a buffoon, muddled in thought and speech, clumsy in deed and demeanor. In Texas, the governorship is a far less significant office than it is in many other states: The governor there is not full-time and is more of a figurehead than a chief executive. Yet, even there, Bush implemented the style of governance that he has imported to the nation's capital. He surrounded himself with sycophantic cronies whose qualifications for their positions were neither experiential nor substantive but loyalist and servile.
I am dumbfounded that his election to and continuance in office is not a universal embarrassment. It baffles me that, even in Republican party terms, he is compared to Ronald Reagan (however overrated his legacy has become). And since the first political campaign in which I worked, at the age of 10, was the campaign that resulted in the election of Dwight Eisenhower, I firmly believe that Ike (however underrated his legacy has been) would have abhorred the ascendancy of this Bush even more than he abhorred the potential ascendancy of Nixon.
The Bushies have poisoned our political life with official mendacity and hypocrisy. Furthermore, somehow they have mesmerized Republican party legislators to such an extent that to watch them at work in the legislature is like screening the director's cut of "Night of the Living Dead."
This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the twin pillars of the Bush legacy: the invasion of Iraq (a monument to mendacity) and the No Child Left Behind Act (a monument to hypocrisy).
The invasion of Iraq was launched under patently fallacious banners, not the least of which was the implicit conflation of Saddam Hussein's tyranny and the terrorist threat represented by the Sept. 11 attacks. Thanks to our bullying our way into Iraq, that country has become a magnet for purveyors of violence that it never was, and never would have been, without our intrusion.
We invaded Iraq based on a tissue of lies, and every day that we persist there merely perpetuates those lies. If I may paraphrase John Kerry's Vietnam War eloquence, "Who will be the last American soldier to die for those lies?"
The most mind-numbing phenomenon of the Iraq situation is the spectacle of those who sensibly opposed the invasion initially now mounting the barricades to evangelize that we must stay the course.
Even if one truly believed that our persistence in Iraq would generate some good, it is unthinkable that this could happen when that effort is captained by President Bush. The index of this administration's incompetence in Iraq would fill an entire volume unto itself.
On the other hand, the No Child Left Behind Act is nobly titled and enunciates a demand for accountability that is laudable in itself. Unfortunately, that is where it ends since the act lacks substance and meaningful, nationally uniform criteria of accountability.
This is not surprising, because the Bush crowd has shown itself adept at talking the game of accountability while exerting Herculean efforts to avoid
playing the game.
The pernicious governance of this administration will be seen in retrospect as one of the darker corridors of national ignorance. Future historians may conclude—and not unjustly—that, at the dawn of the new millennium, the United States reached a nadir in which a somnambulistic simpleton of a leader presided over the culturally anesthetized populace that put him up and put up with him. SP
Bob Zaslavsky is a retired teacher of our much-neglected humanities.