The Opinion Mill
NEWS AND VIEWS FOR THINKING PATRIOTS

James Wolcott surveys the ever-growing stack of books about King Dubya, and ends up wondering if an elemental truth about the Bush administration has been missed:

So much of the burgeoning Bush literature, both nonfiction and fiction, is built on the premise that the Bush-Cheney autarchy is a disastrous failure that can be diagnosed as a hulking case of hubris coupled with a righteous dose of blowback. (Earlier this year saw the publication of a book co-written by Michael Isikoff and David Corn titled Hubris, unveiling “the Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War.”) It’s assumed that the plastic fantastic alternative universe fashioned by the Bushies and the neocons—remember the famous boast to Ron Suskind from the unnamed Bush aide in The New York Times Magazine, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”?—has ignominiously popped upon contact with brute reality, sending a former demigod such as Donald Rumsfeld crashing into the cornfield and ejecting Condoleezza Rice into an endless orbit of mortified futility.

But perhaps we’re the ones living in Bizarro World, not the Bushies. Maybe from their vantage point inside the mother ship nearly everything’s worked out as intended, if not exactly as planned, and those in the highest circles have no more reason to examine their consciences or re-trace their steps than the perpetrators of a successful heist. For years, a few voices on the radical edges of the blogosphere have contended that sowing chaos in the Middle East, privatizing war to enrich their corporate sponsors, and letting things slide to hell at home were what the lords of misrule wanted—that the bungling and incompetence of the war and Katrina weren’t bugs, but features. After all, the post-Katrina diaspora has redounded to the benefit of the Republicans with the election of Bobby Jindal to the Louisiana governorship, his victory made possible in part by the dispersement of black voters displaced by the floods.

Comedian Patton Oswalt put it a little more pungently on his 222 album when he said he hated to hear people calling Bush stupid. “He’s not stupid,” Oswalt said, “he’s evil, and there’s a big difference.” Sure, Bush trips over his own tongue when he talks about democracy and justice, but that’s because he couldn’t care less about such things. Get Bush talking about war and destruction, Oswalt said, and “he’s fucking Dylan Thomas.”

Wolcott is right. I’ve talked about this before and nothing I’ve seen during Bush’s tenure in office has caused me to question my conclusion. Viewed in terms of public service and responsible stewardship, the Bush administration has been a catastrophic failure. Viewed in terms of conservative rhetoric about government — that it is the problem and not the solution, that deregulation and corporate tax cuts are the answer to everything — the Bush administration has been a roaring success. For supporters and allies of the Bush administration, it has been an astonishing profit-taking opportunity unlikely to be matched for many decades. When conservatives tell you that government doesn’t work, they’re only giving away half the formula. The complete version is: government doesn’t work, but we sure know how to work it.

Posted by stevenhart