What bothers me most about the people comprising BushCo is not per se their conservative agenda (which has the stink of "mission" about it), but rather the sheer incompetencies they demonstrate with each new foray into policy formation.
I have had the feeling since the administrations first days that they are doing almost everything on the fly, cobbling together patchworks of rationales to cover for a lack of a comprehensive framework in terms of both foreign and domestic policy. The Time article indicated in the last post lends credence to that feeling. It paints a picture of members of the administration being persuaded one by one to acquiesce to the insistent neocon ministry of Paul Wolfowitz.
The neocon religion simply outlined goes like this:
"In their belief system, neoconservatives—or neo-Reaganites, as some prefer to be called—are at once pessimists and optimists. The world, they believe, is a dangerous, threatening place. Civilization and democracy hang by a thread; great beasts prowl the forest, ready to prey on those not tough enough to meet them in equal combat. At the same time—this is the optimistic bit—the U.S. is endowed by Providence with the power to make the world better if it will only take the risks of leadership to do so; if, in the current jargon, it is sufficiently "forward leaning.""- and -"The U.S. is unique in its power and its principles. It cannot allow its mission to be tied down by international agreements that diminish its freedom of action. At the same time, neoconservatives insist that theirs is a generous and internationalist vision; other nations, other peoples, will willingly support U.S. policies—which, by definition, are good for them as well as Americans—if only those policies are clearly articulated and implemented with determination."
Its a pleasant enough religion if you are a white American male and especially attractive if you include the parameters of paranoid, wealthy, and intimately connected by bureaucracy post and ivory-towered Reagan-esque think tanks.
But one by one these people who should be leading the country according to well considered and comprehensive plans have somewhat franticly adopted instead what amounts to a horror story to most of the rest of the planet. The rest of us see it as no less misguided than any other fascist attempt by missionaries to "save the savages" by savaging them; by destroying their indigenous cultures and inculcating them with the "Gospel of Gipper" from the Book of Wolfowitz.
Whether the missionaries are Christian or Moslem or Reaganite the outcome is always the same; some people are slaughtered in great numbers and history eventually describes it as an unnecessary tragedy perpetrated by paranoid men with parochial mindsets and desires for inordinate wealth and power.
The BushCo administration is rife with these type of essentially sociopathic people. But what makes them especially dangerous is their unfettered access to the levers of the machinery of the most powerful state that has ever existed.
There has never been more of a reason for the American populace to question the motives and maneuvers of their leadership. Considering the ample evidence of contempt for individual rights shown by the repressive and invasive legislation such as the Patriot Act, et al, purported as necessary to combat the bogeyman of terrorism, and the overarching neoconservative idea that "fierce unilateralism" is essential to the future survival of the US, it is easy to see a pattern of paranoia by an elite group of men leading us all astray. They are like Jack's tribe in the William Golding novel, Lord of the Flies. Jack was incompetent and paranoid and eventually rebelled against the "rule of conch" by trying to survive unilaterally with his own tribe. We all know where that went.
I can't help but see Saddam as the dead parachutist the boys in the novel took to be "the monster" that inspired Jack's fearful and murderous assaults on the other boys and setting fire to the whole island.
Bushco is no more postioned to be a "father who knows best" than Jack was.
After all, their suppositions and resulting policies have been wrong at almost every turn since they started running the show.
New York Times editorialist Paul Krugman has written an op-ed called piece called Delusions of Power that describes the factness of that assertion:
"They considered themselves tough-minded realists, and regarded doubters as fuzzy-minded whiners. They silenced those who questioned their premises, even though the skeptics included many of the government's own analysts. They were supremely confident — and yet with shocking speed everything they had said was proved awesomely wrong."
.: cul:. March 28, 2003 04:38 AM | TrackBackDelusions of PowerBy PAUL KRUGMAN
No, I'm not talking about the war; I'm talking about the energy task force that Dick Cheney led back in 2001. Yet there are some disturbing parallels. Right now, pundits are wondering how Mr. Cheney — who confidently predicted that our soldiers would be "greeted as liberators" — could have been so mistaken. But a devastating new report on the California energy crisis reminds us that Mr. Cheney has been equally confident, and equally wrong, about other issues.
In spring 2001 the lights were going out all over California. There were blackouts and brownouts, and the price of electricity was soaring. The Cheney task force was convened in the midst of that crisis. It concluded, in brief, that the energy crisis was a long-term problem caused by meddling bureaucrats and pesky environmentalists, who weren't letting big companies do what needed to be done. The solution? Scrap environmental rules, and give the energy industry multibillion-dollar subsidies.
Along the way, Mr. Cheney sneeringly dismissed energy conservation as a mere "sign of personal virtue" and scorned California officials who called for price controls and said the crisis was being exacerbated by market manipulation. To be fair, Mr. Cheney's mocking attitude on that last point was shared by almost everyone in politics and the media — and yes, I am patting myself on the back for getting it right.
For we now know that everything Mr. Cheney said was wrong.
In fact, the California energy crisis had nothing to do with environmental restrictions, and a lot to do with market manipulation. In 2001 the evidence for manipulation was basically circumstantial. But now we have a new report from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which until now has discounted claims of market manipulation. No more: the new report concludes that market manipulation was pervasive, and offers a mountain of direct evidence, including phone conversations, e-mail and memos. There's no longer any doubt: California's power shortages were largely artificial, created by energy companies to drive up prices and profits.
Oh, and what ended the crisis? Key factors included energy conservation and price controls. Meanwhile, what happened to that long-term shortage of capacity, which required scrapping environmental rules and providing lots of corporate welfare? Within months after the Cheney report's release, stock analysts were downgrading energy companies because of a looming long-term-capacity glut.
In short, Mr. Cheney and his tough-minded realists were blowing smoke: their report described a fantasy world that bore no relation to reality. How did they get it so wrong?
One answer is that Mr. Cheney made sure that his task force included only like-minded men: as far as we can tell, he didn't consult with anyone except energy executives. So the task force was subject to what military types call "incestuous amplification," defined by Jane's Defense Weekly as "a condition in warfare where one only listens to those who are already in lock-step agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation."
Another answer is that Mr. Cheney basically drew his advice about how to end the energy crisis from the very companies creating the crisis, for fun and profit. But was he in on the joke?
We may never know what really went on in the energy task force since the Bush administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep us from finding out. At first the nonpartisan General Accounting Office, which is supposed to act as an internal watchdog, seemed determined to pursue the matter. But after the midterm election, according to the newsletter The Hill, Congressional Republicans approached the agency's head and threatened to slash his budget unless he backed off.
And therein lies the broader moral. In the last two years Mr. Cheney and other top officials have gotten it wrong again and again — on energy, on the economy, on the budget. But political muscle has insulated them from any adverse consequences. So they, and the country, don't learn from their mistakes — and the mistakes keep getting bigger.