The Bogeyman Arena

Which bogeyman is going to get us first? We have several major contenders which include: Global Warming; a Bushian nuclear attack on Iran (resulting in a worldwide retaliatory spasm of suicide bombings or a world economic meltdown due to oil price spike); a Sunni-Shiite total war in the Middle East supposedly as a result of a “premature” US withdrawal from Iraq; a meltdown of the global economy led by a collapse of the US dollar (anyone for a Wiemar Republic level hyper-inflation?) the Big One, a 7+ on Richter scale earthquake, that destroys Los Angeles or SF Bay Area (including my house.) Other horrific bogeyman possibilities include: a worldwide avian flu pandemic; a dirty bomb terrorist attack on some major city; an accidental nuclear war with the Russians who still have lots of rusty old Cold War era nuclear subs and and now Bear class bombers prowling around; and, oh yeah, what about a large meteor collision with the earth?

With all these horrific catastrophes in direct competition, the one bogeyman that is real, Global Warming, is the one that is in relation to its importance and our short time frame to react is still getting short shrift. This crisis of all times, this on-going and now throughly documented unfolding event, the irreversible damaging of the atmosphere of our planet by CO2 and methane must compete for the attention with all matter of trivia and day-to-day local and geopolitical emergencies. A jaded public is easily distracted accustomed as it is to hyperbolic overreaction by a corporate advertising-driven mass media. A daily diet of disaster and scandal, if-it-bleeds-it-leads yellow journalism results in a sort of collective state of world weary fatigue and fatalistic resignation. It all seems so hopeless. Global Warming is just more bad news, another 'Horseman of the Apocalypse' that threatening to ride down upon us. To further hamper things, the proposed solutions to Global Warming all seem to lead in the direction or austerity. To a population conditioned to base their 'pursuit of happiness' on material acquisition and the enjoyment of the 'good life', some media-driven idealized upper-middle class level of affluence, these measures are anathema especially to those in the US. where denial of the problem has been especially strong.

I wish I could be more optimistic about the fate of the human race. Any serious discussion among most thinking people on the general state of things soon leads to a consensus of pessimism and resigned cynicism. The entrenched corrupt political institutions usually get a thorough drubbing in any such discussion. This is, of course, unless one or more of the those in the discussion is of a religious bent. 'Believers' as they like to call themselves are much less likely to be that down about things. Religious faith allows people to get above it all and take the 'long view'. The impending downward spiral of mankind into barbarism or worse doesn't really bother these people all that much. In fact some of the more hidebound and fundamentalist even deny man's role in climate change and actually support wars. It turns out they are hoping the unending turmoil in the Middle East (much of it the direct result of US and Israel policy) will hasten Armageddon, the End Days and the Rapture and so forth. Others, ironically the two most implacable foes fundamentalist Islamics and Zionists, pine for the reestablishment of long lost theocratic empires in all their mythical glory – Greater Zion or a new global Caliphate. With these people geopolitical machinations and our industrial-driven environmental endgame are really of only minimal concern. In fact they are hard at work making the situation worse. For them it is the afterlife that matters – eternity with a capital “E.” Irrespective of which brand of religion, it always amounts to a convenient projection into the afterlife or the irrelevance of material reality even as it beats them down. It is easy to write off these people as fools with a low gullibility threshold, but their irrationalities are important and dangerous, and directly feed energy and life into the overall Spectacle (see Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle.)

Human institutions evolve self-perpetuating and self-regulating mechanisms and can survive for thousands of years. A good example is the Roman Catholic Church. These formations become embedded in and in fact define a culture – sometimes to the direct determent of the very civilization that the culture is interwoven into. In other words there can be an inherent incapacity of institutions, especially those that constitute the very underpinning of a civilization, to change even as they are actively (and obviously) bringing down the entire edifice.

Jared Diamond's Collapse is an classic study of this unfortunate tendency. Diamond follows the downfall, seemingly quite predicable and not at all opaque to any thinking person living there at that time, of several such collapses – Easter Island, Nordic Greenland, the Anasazi Indians and others. In each case the warning signs were ignored or feebly reacted to for many years until the point of no return quietly and fatally slid past. The (ex-Polynesian) Easter Islanders could not turn away from their deforestation based religion requiring logs (many logs) to roll huge, massively heavy carved images (graven images?) from the quarry to various sites all around the island. Eventually they created a barren environment with a bad new-micro climate that could not support them. The Nordic Greenlanders couldn't lower themselves to switch from Northern European climate style agriculture and animal husbandry to hunting and fishing practiced by the indigenous population seen by them as lowly savages and heathens. The Anasazi built their cities in a semi-dry climate oblivious to long term weather patterns (Southern California are you listening?) All of the societal collapses that Diamond chronicles (obviously for allegorical reasons) systems that were both simpler and more isolated than ours. Simplicity and isolation were both advantageous and increased vulnerability. Identification and addressing the problem early on could have reversed things especially with Easter Islanders. But they had no external means of help being over 1200 miles (by sail) from their nearest neighbor, Pitcairn Island. Unlike the Easter Islanders we live very close to each other due to the wonders of our tightly knit transportation and communications technology. We live in a time of intricate incredibly complex inter-relationships effecting every nook and cranny of the entire planet. We have become evermore monolithic in terms of our world-wide economy – welcomed by those who own most of it (more markets, more profits.) The economy is our religio-institution that we cannot let go of or change adequately even as it kills us! We are much like the Easter Islander as we decimate our natural environment for short term, hegemonically defined goals.

The process of global warming was recognized by all of those with any degree of environmental consciousness and has been thoroughly documented in peer-reviewed literature by thousands of scientists worldwide. Yet with visible evidence now appearing in every direction, immediate day-to-day concerns continue to divert our attention. We are like the Easter Islanders. Immediate problems and day to day issues keep us from any real collective and unified concern. Just look at any headlines and lead stories in any daily paper or worse turn on CNN, Fox or CNBC. The scale and seriousness of the impending world-historical catastrophe of human-induced climate change cannot compete with everyday pedestrian bullshit. The overall situation, usually bad, at any given moment requires us to direct most of our psychic energy into the immediate crisis a hand - like the war in Iraq. These short term emergencies, short term in relation the crisis of ecocide, are in direct competition for our attention. And this is going to be our undoing. We will continue to piss away critical time let this last closing window of opportunity slam shut. Once its throughly too late the horse is long gone from the barn and things are really drastic, not the usual droughts, floods, hurricanes and heat waves, but huge population relocations and die-offs, then we will 'get crack'in', when it's too fucking late! All sorts of draconian state-of-emergency decrees will be ushered forth by the political class as panic sets in.

Before the Al Gore documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, and all the recent graphic video footage of huge glaciers sliding to the sea but with no less of a deluge of scientific data it was even worse. No one cared. We were all off buying gas guzzling SUV's and huge pickups, building ever larger metropolises in the desert and voting for Green-baiting Republicans. Any media account of the problem had to be counterbalanced by psuedo-science speculation and contrarian doubt planting by the whore's with PHDs on the payroll of Exxon and energy industry public relations outfits. Now even as the concern level rises it has started to become almost like another background noise – another possible bogyman that could get us. It becomes a sort of unconscious source of anxiety that is always with us – kind of like the ever present possibility of a 'nuclear war with the Soviets' during the Cold War years

What I fear about the Global Warming Crisis now that it is officially acknowledged by the US (who is the biggest contributer per capita by far to global warming gases) is that it will get absorbed into the whole overall spectacle itself. It will become (or probably already has) become a mere representation of itself. It certainly happened to the so-called Environmental Movement. The present day Environmental Movement came of age in the early 1970's descending from a convergence of 19^th Century conservationism and the post-Rachel Carson rise of the field of ecology. By the early 1970s damage to the environment was becoming more inescapable, and growing consciousness was emerging. To co-opt it, it became practical even among the industrial corporate sector, who have always made it a standard practice of externalizing production costs by off loading as much waste as possible into 'the commons', to start to get on board – or appear to. Environmentalism was an apple pie issue from the start, good for elementary school field trips and nationally sponsored Earth Days and Coastal Cleanup days. All designed to make us feel good. But by the early 1970s even Republican Party favored the idea with brand new federal agency set up during the first Nixon Administration to enforce a growing set of regulations and laws pertaining to the environment– the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA.) This was all well and fine until the corporations realized they could not pass all the costs of being regulated and force to clean up back to the end consumers – in short it was starting to cost real money. Just Republicans inherently and uniformly oppose labor unions because they cut in to profits and operational prerogatives so did they soon uniformly opposed further environmental regulation. Bu the 80's they had a standard bearer anti-environmental in a cowboy hat with ranch – Ronald Reagan. Soon the Westerners and the corporate sector were in alliance making environmentalism a Democratic “liberal” issue. And it has been ever since.

Once identified has a liberal, do-gooder “Democratic Party issue”, it was easy naturally evolved into another left-center 'special interest' along side of organized labor, consumer rights, civil rights, privacy, universal health care and so on. And it did. A whole industry of beltway connected environmental groups with paid staffs vying for donations and grants sprung up and become essentially just another lobby, another accepted part of the Establishment. And so it has remained for well over 30 years through thick and thin. Mostly thin as Republicans almost as a matter of principal oppose all environmental legislation and when in power precede to minimize or refuse the enforcement of what is on the books – especially under the Bushian Anti-Environmentalist Taliban. The Democrats when in, supported by the same corporations who bankroll the Republicans, only timidly enforce existing environmental statutes and offer only tepid new legislation.

So with this partisan arrangement firmly in place, that is with issue of the throughly environmentalism institutionalized, throughly reified and domesticated that is totally absorbed into the overall Spectacle, along comes the unprecedented problem of global warming. Environmentalists in their scientific, academic, foundation-bound ghetto had been accumulating increasingly alarming empirical evidence of this gathering storm for years. It was originally called the Greenhouse Effect in that the planet would heat up like a hothouse if the buildup of CO2 gases was not arrested and would have increasingly deleterious effects on many sensitive climatic and ecological balances. But the threat of environmental destruction caused by global warming planet was occurring within a unified field of many other environmental threats, many other “inconvenient truths” - deforestation especially tropical rainforests, ozone holes forming every winter over Antarctica, the plundering of the world's oceans leading to plummeting fisheries, massive wetland and mangrove swamp loss, coral reef loss, top soil erosion, dead zones at mouth of rivers, deadly air and water pollution and on and on. It was dizzying and depressing. Each issue had groups that specialized in their issue – Greenpeace (oceans), Rainforest Alliance (tropical deforestation), Coral Reef Alliance and so on. Over the last three decades each group has struggled for support and recognition – and legislation. The public when polled usually pays lip service to environmental concerns and gives some support and money. That is except for those who identify themselves as “conservatives” (strange ironic label for those who did not want to conserve anything), who derisively called the environmentalist “tree huggers” and “greenies.” Anyway, that's all water under the bridge.

So here we stand with a recognized historically unprecedented problem of a global scale, one that could literally “end the world” as we know it and we must watch helplessly as the dithering begins. Our political leadership is fucking joke. Not one single candidate for the US horse race for President in 2008 has placed Global Warming front and center within their campaigns. There are no bold, Apollo Project scale initiatives being unveiled here in ground zero of planter warmers – where we have 1/5 of the world's population but are consuming 75% of its energy – thus we pumping well over our share of climate warming gases mainly CO2 and methane up into the stratosphere where it will stay for thousands of years cooking our fat asses. It not that most politicians are actually crooked and corrupt although many are, it's that there primary focus is on the reality at hand. It has to be or they will be swept aside by others more adaptable to a particular social-political reality. And the social-political reality is defined by pandering, infotainment producing corporate media (owned by anti- environmentalist Republicans) – another classic feedback loop. So they cannot lead but only react. The time and energy they typically devote to a particular cause or issue is in direct opposite proportion to its importance. They will not do jack shit until it is too late and then they will fall over themselves with draconian decrees making us even more miserable as everything collapse around us. It will be way too late. Maybe it already is!

Immigration - a perfect Issue for the Repubs

With the all of the white-guys-on-parade-Repub candidates for Prez flailing around for a means to distance themselves from The Bush, immigration may be the ticket. Nativism runs deep in this country and Latino immigrants, legal and illegal, have now dispersed themselves through out country. So it is no longer simply a regional issue. Who has not gone to a Home Depot or a Lowes and seen all these dudes furtively hanging around (almost like they are selling something illegal) apparently waiting for work, quietly jabbering away in Espanol. TV commentator Lou Dobbs has made a career with his incessant tirades - agitating and exaggerating daily about our Broken Borders. Immigration is one of the few issues George W. Bush has taken a moderate position on and it has only exacerbated his sinking popularity with many Republicans.

With the Demos continuing to disappoint showing little zeal or political courage to steadfastly confront an out of control Imperial Presidency, the Repubs will be angling for an issue to recapture enough of the electorate to again weasel their way back into the Presidency (remember the voting machinery is still in the hands of many GOP state functionaries.) All the clap-trap about the inherent immorality of gays or the sanctity of life of unborn fetuses is starting to wear thin. Such issues no longer have the punch they once had. They need a new wedge. And Immigration with a capital "I" will do just fine. It is divisive enough; it is definitely emotive enough and it is something that George W. Bush actually had a moderate position on - one that they can disagree with and thus redefine themselves as non-Bushian Republicans.

Several categories of voters are vulnerable to the charms of the Repubs on the immigration issue. First of all, immigration is a splendid means to split off many from that portion of those who vote as "independents" or who only weakly identify with either party. This highly sought after pack of shallow thinking, non-committal bozos (whose perennial pursuit drives the Democrats to the right in every presidential election) is always fair game. Included here are what were once called Mugwamps (registered to one party but vote for the other.) This voting demographic tends to vote emotionally rather than rationally. Gun control leniency has elected many a Republican stalwart who has in turn enlisted in the very class war that will economically hurt the very same blue collar gun-aficionado who put in them in - shifting the tax burden on to middle classes, deregulation of the big corporations, pro-NAFTA neoliberalism on steroids, etc. And of course how many Republican voting evangelical Christians have suffered a full decade of a frozen minimum wage at their crummy Walmart jobs while waiting for the Rapture? Try as the Demos do, the Repubs, Karl Rove or no Karl Rove, are masters Pied Pipers at luring these poor saps over the hill and into the arms of their class enemies.

And then there are the many loyal Democrats who, although they despise Bush and his panoply of horrors, also resent the downward pressure on wages produced by the perceived hoards of "illegal immigrants", people who are used to getting for a full day's work for what they get in the USA in a single hour. Many voting Democrats are caught in vise of a seemingly low but relentless rate of inflation (officially 2.36% - can that be real?) and stagnant wages (which continues to lag behind productivity.) To most people the official inflation rate doesn't seem to capture the increasing spread between living expenses and take-home pay. Somehow housing costs, either rents or payments on recently taken out huge mortgages, don't seen to be reflected in the consumer price index (CPI.) Plus many people were seduced into buying gas gobbling, greenhouse gas spewing SUVs and giant pickup trucks in the last few years and now gas prices seems to be only going up. So the "illegal immigrants" whether directly responsible or not will make fine scapegoats for economic stress suffered by the middle and lower middle class voters. The party that can manipulate that frustration and resentment will get a bonanza of votes. Which party is the most intellectually dishonest and conniving? Which party is a virtuoso at getting people to vote against their own best interests?

And then of course there are Repub loyalists - the so-called the Republican Base. They now consist of two rather disparate categories. The first is the the old-line country club patrician ruling class type Republicans. From the small town, small fry Babbits to the Ivy League educated corporate elite (the real power behind the throne), these are the boys who run the show if they can - and they usually can. This group, while numerically small, is quintessentially influential out all proportion to their numbers controlling many institutions (universities, foundations, NGOs) and most importantly the media. Also paradoxically and probably what accounts for Bush's unpopular support for "amnesty for illegals", these guys own many of the factories and farms that now employ these "undocumented" interlopers. For these people it is all about economics - they really do enjoy the promised tax breaks and they enjoy the cheap labor. So they probably are of two minds on the issue. But when comes down to it they know their butter placement and their sides of bread. They really do benefit from privatization, deregulation, anti-union policies, off-shore production (and banking), anti-environmental policies, etc. -in short the whole neoliberal agenda.

The second component of the Republican Base couldn't have less in common with first part. They are the brain dead redneckian right wingers, many from the South, who always gravitate to that position that allows for the most hate, racism and bigotry to be manifested - the audience of Ann Coulter and Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh, etc. This group is rather malleable. To some extent this demographic overlaps with the unaffiliated types cited above. This is essentially an amorphous group of under-educated, binary minded empty vessels that can be used by demagogues and rabblerousers of any ideology - they are the rabble. And (surprise, surprise) they seem to have gravitated to the right on the immigration issue. However, that energy can (and has been) redirected upward toward the upper classes, their real enemy.

The Democrats must come to terms with the so-called Globalization issue. It is international economic forces and damaged ecological systems that have increased this world wide migration rate as the poor are pushed off the land. Subsidized crop producing wealthy developed countries hypocritically and cynically force 'free market reforms' and privitization on underdeveloped countries. As their ag sectors are consolidated and industrialized to compete the excess rural population either winds up in festering slums that ring their overloaded cities, or they flee over the nearest border usually illegally to somewhere where things are relatively less desperate. The illegal immigrants are not freeloaders and opportunists nearly as much as the educated professionals graduates of state supported universities who gravitate legally to higher wage zones. This is commonly known as "brain drain" and it is accepted and encouraged. The travails of the poor on an overpopulated abused planet will not go away - billions live on less than $2.00 (US) a day. Whether they remain in their wretched hell hole festering Third World slums without clean water and have to endure stinking open sewers while living cardboard and tin shacks, or whether they flee over the border willing to work for peanuts, they will not go away.

Unless the Democrats begin to formulate a readily comprehensible analysis and back away from the excesses of the "no holds barred, pedal to the metal, 'free market' capitalism known as Neo-liberalism they will be ambushed by Republicans on the immigration issue. No way will the Democrats Party, a political party with sizable components of ex-immigrants (Mexicans- Americans) and descendants of slaves be able to match the reactionary, racist, Nativist policy that the Republican, no-nothing right can conjure up. The Republicans will come up with a harsh, unworkable but appealing demagogic approach and it will be very politically appealing to the constituency that it is aimed at.

The Democrats must counter with a bold plan of a green rebuilding of the country including luring more investment back into this country. A New Deal scale project using reprogrammed military-industrial monies needs to be envisioned. The Democrats must go where they have not gone since FDR. They must inflame passion and inspire creativity and hope. The people are ready for it. Are the Democrats?

BUSH AND THE MEDIA

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, they never stop thinking of ways to harm our country and neither do we" G. W. Bush

Yes, George W. Bush actually said that. If a Democratic president had misspoken so egregiously we would have never heard the end of it. It would have been broadcast and rebroadcast until it came out of our ears. The pundacracy, the right wing radio talk show hosts and the late night comediennes would have had a field day. For Fox and CNN it would have been Christmas, New Years Eve and the Fourth of July all rolled into one. Remember the hapless John Kerry, at that point still considering another run for Prez, and his inept joking reference to the relationship between guys stuck serving in Iraq and their educational accomplishments or lack thereof. He was skewered endlessly and hung out to dry for good. It ended his plans of running for Prez ever again (thank goodness.) But Bush, as was Reagan in the 80s, is given a pass on all verbal fuck-ups and (more importantly) his many full-on big black lies. The (non-Fox) news on TV, specifically CNN and PBS's Jim Lehrer News Hour, it is appallingly inadequate. They often subject the viewers to some miserable (unwatchable) clip of our El Presidente holding forth on some podium someplace or other. They then lets us take it at face value without much (or any) commentary. Sure he's the president but he is a certified fool. His utterances are always horseshit – prepackaged by his army of speech writers and his pack of Republican-fascist Neocon hacks he calls advisers. If what he says sounds scripted and stale, that is because it is. It is the same old predicable prevarication infested propaganda crafted to con, bamboozle and deceive that remaining hardcore 30% of Bushian true believers. No one but a hardcore of Bush-flavor Kool Aid drinkers now takes what he says seriously. Most people now knows he is a fucking liar - even Republicans! Yet even with his highly scripted presentations he screws up (as in the lead-in quote). But it is when he gets off-script and wriggles out of the clutches of his handlers that the real fun begins. The shallow, superficial, either-or minded real George W. Bush comes shinning through.

And he is a special embarrassment is on the international scene, when he goes abroad to flee from some domestic shit storm of his own making or for some major get-together of the biggies. The other heads of state, wily politicians who have had to gain their positions through skillful and cagey inter-party and intra-party struggle, must have to stifle revulsion and open disdain when interacting with this power-drunk fool. GW Bush didn't work his way up through some byzantine party apparatus, he was thrust into the apogee of power after serving a sort of internship as a governor of a corrupt Republican-controlled state. Then by devious Rovian machinations, “voter suppression” and a politicized Supreme Court (read two essentially 'rigged' elections) he was crowned President of the World (at least in his mind.) Recall the footage of 'The Bush 'coming up behind the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, at some formal international conference and trying to give her a so-called back rub which she interpreted as some lascivious sexist excuse to fondle her body. What a creep! What if Bill Clinton had done that? It would have been blown up into be an international incident of the first magnitude. Of course Clinton for all his 'Lotharioian' inclinations had more class than that.

Something has happened here and we must acknowledge it. We have slid into a very bad place and I don't trust the Democrats to get us out. Their performance so far with a majority in both houses of Congress (albeit by a razor thin margin in the Senate) has been disappointing. They still refuse to play hardball against the Repubs. The Repubs somehow are better at getting their way with a minority in both houses than the Demos can do with a majority in both house. What gives? The stakes are high; time is short. Most Americans have lost their patience. Every day that the Demos hold back from fulling confronting the GOP and its lame duck President the free fall continues. And it is one more day in which the Bush Combine rolls over and grinds into mulch more of our civil liberties, more of our hard won protections from corporate irresponsibility, and finally our very economic wellbeing. The rest of the world mainly the Japanese and Chinese will continue to bankroll us through loans (buying Treasury Bonds) for just so long. And ,of course, there is the selling off of our corporate assets which is happening at an alarming rate, the result the our serious trade imbalance.

Corporate ownership aside whether by foreign or domestic interests, everything we hold dear is being transformed into the profits of these modern day pirates - transnational corporations that are devoid of allegiance to any nation state or any standards of morality. The owners of controlling interest, the top managers and the boards of directors of these of these Dr. Frankenstein monsters, that perversely have all the rights of a private citizen but none of the responsibilities, are but a tiny elite. This small self-serving plutocratic world ruling class ,05% of the worlds population, controls if not outright owns most of the worlds wealth (and its media). This, to paraphrase Paul Simon from a song in the Graceland album, '..a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires' cooperate more than they compete, and only use nationalism as a fig leaf. And they are running things into the ground - and have been for a long time. That is how we ended up a George W. Bush. They (the plutocrats) now tacitly acknowledge (if not openly admit) that placing George W Bush into the US presidency was a monumental blunder and may do irreparable long term damage to their cause (we hope.) W. was seen by the ultra right wing of the ruling class, that has been in ascent since the 1980s, as a latter day Ronald Reagan. Reagan, their proud standard bearer, legacy holder and supposedly brave Soviet Union slaying hero, was longingly missed throughout the Clinton Era even as Clinton departed only minimally from the Reagan script. So they literally catapulted Bush II into the White House using all of the tried and proved tools of 21st Century media manipulation and state-of-the-art political advertising using a mix of pseudo libertarian “ free market”/anti tax dogma and an emotive wedge of the right wing religio-populist issues (guns, God and gays.) But in the end they were still forced to resort to literally stealing the election through blatant 'managing' of the the final vote count in key swing states – Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 (twice unchallenged by the servile media and the august Democratic Party.) And of course in 2000 there was the Supreme Court, chock full of Republican ideologues, there to tip the scale.

Unfortunately Bush is turning out, especially in his second term, to be a profound embarrassment and ever-widening disaster for the GOP. He vetoes bills that a sizable majority (including Republicans) are in favor of (stem cell research, Iraq troop draw down), he pushes an immigration plan that both the influential right and left wings of the GOP and Demos respectively revile (and so far have torpedoed), and of course his foreign policy is a fiasco of world historical proportions. We are entangled in not one but two wars that we are paying for on credit. All of the world-wide empathy and good will resulting from the 9/11 terrorist attack on the US has been dialectically reversed into world-wide antipathy to the US and its policies. The Middle East everyday descends further into a bloody cataclysm, especially the Iraq Quagmire that essentially is now a combination multi-front civil war/foreign occupation and Islamic jihadist recruiting machine. He is tearing asunder (which might not be that bad) the uniformed US military institutions. The officer corp if not in open revolt is retiring in droves, and recruiting shortages are so bad that troops are sent back repeatedly until they either get killed, maimed or (mercifully) their enlistment ends. And of course the National Guard is mis-deployed to Iraq to fill leaving huge gaps in established natural disaster response programs. And the sheer size of the government (and size of the deficit) continues to grow much to the alarm of the old line Republican base. In short it's a fucking mess! Much needed federal funds are spewing out uselessly in all directions mostly on tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires (who in turn do not invest it in local manufacturing facilities producing jobs) and on the endless wars (which are are costing like $10M an hour) and on hypothetical wars (like in space.) National health care has now moved to top of the agenda for the American public but there is now no money to pay for it, especially a single payer system like all other industrialized nation have. The hurricane leveled African-American sections of New Orleans continue to molder in neglect giving the world an ongoing object lesson in American Racism 101. And so it goes. No one is happy with W these 'daze.'

W appears quite insensitive to his situation. He continues in an aggressive high profile style to wallow in his imagined grandeur and artificial status. And in his embattled position on multiple fronts he has becomes ever more hidebound and obstreperous. He is never pragmatic and reasonable like Reagan (on arms control) or even Nixon (on China) sometimes could be. He his a bull in a china shop. Everything he touches he knocks off the shelf and breaks. He makes every presidential predecessor (no matter how demonstratively awful they may have actually been) look like brilliant statesman and golden hearted humanitarians. He is stubborn and pig headed and with rare exception usually gravitates to the worse possible solution to every problem. Then refusing to admit he has erred, he steadfastly goes down with the ship pulling the rest of us down with him like floating shipwreck survivors caught in the suction of a sinking vessel, as he has with Iraq. However one thing one we can say about George W. Bush he did make history. I just wish he would become history.