[Mb-civic] Notes for Converts

[George R. Milman]

Huffington Post--3-12-2006
Notes for Converts
By Jane Smiley

Bruce Bartlett, The Cato Institute, Andrew Sullivan, George Packer,  William
F. Buckley, Sandra Day O'Connor, Republican voters in  Indiana and all the
rest of you newly-minted dissenters from Bush's  faith-based reality seem,
right now, to be glorying in your outrage, which is always a pleasure and
feels, at the time, as if it is having an effect, but those of us who have
been anti-Bush  from day 1 (defined as the day after the stolen 2000
election) have  a few pointers for you that should make your transition more
realistic:

1. Bush doesn't know you disagree with him. Nothing about you makes you of
interest to George W. Bush once you no longer agree with and support him. No
degree of relationship (father, mother, etc.), no longstanding friendly
intercourse (Jack Abramoff), no degree of expertise (Brent Scowcroft), no
essential importance (Tony Blair, American voters) makes any difference.
There is nothing you have to offer that makes Bush want to know you once you
have come to disagree with him. Your opinions and feelings now exist in a
world entirely external to the mind of George W. Bush. You are now just one
of those "polls" that he pays no attention to. When you were on his side,
you thought that showed "integrity" on his part. It doesn't. It shows an
absolute inability to learn from experience.

2. Bush doesn't care whether you disagree with him. As a man who has
dispensed with the reality-based world, and is entirely protected by his
handlers from feeling the effects of that world, he is indifferent to what
you now think is real. Is the Iraq war a failure and a quagmire? Bush
doesn't care. Is global warming beginning to affect us right now? So what.
Have all of his policies with regard to Iran been misguided and
counter-productive? He never thinks about it. You know that Katrina tape in
which Bush never asked a question? It doesn't matter how much you know or
how passionately you feel or, most importantly, what degree of
disintegration you see around you, he's not going to ask you a question. You
and your ideas are dead to him. You cannot change his mind. Nine percent of
polled Americans would agree with attacking Iran right now. To George Bush,
that will be a mandate, if and when he feels like doing it, because...

3. Bush does what he feels like doing and he deeply resents being told, even
politely, that he ought to do anything else. This is called a "sense of
entitlement." Bush is a man who has never been anywhere and never done
anything, and yet he has been flattered and cajoled into being president of
the United States through his connections, all of whom thought they could
use him for their own purposes. He has a surface charm that appeals to a
certain type of American man, and he has used that charm to claim all sorts
of perks, and then to fail at everything he has ever done. He did not
complete his flight training, he failed at oil investing, he was a front man
and a glad-hander as a baseball owner. As the Governor of Texas, he
originated one educational program that turned out to be a debacle; as the
President of the US, his policies have constituted one screw-up after
another. You have stuck with him through all of this, made excuses for him,
bailed him out. From his point of view, he is perfectly entitled by his own
experience to a  sense of entitlement. Why would he ever feel the need to
reciprocate? He's never had to before this.

4. President Bush is your creation. When the US Supreme Court humiliated
itself in 2000 by handing the presidency to Bush even though two of the
justices (Scalia and Thomas) had open conflicts of interest, you did not
object. When the Bush administration adopted an "Anything but Clinton"
policy that resulted in ignoring and dismissing all warnings of possible
terrorist attacks on US soil, you went along with and made excuses for Bush.
When the Bush administration allowed the corrupt Enron Corporation to
swindle 

California ratepayers and taxpayers in a last ditch effort to balance their
books in 2001, you laughed at the Californians and ignored the links between
Enron and the Administration. When it was evident that the evidence for the
war in Iraq was cooked and that State Department experts on the Middle East
were not behind the war  and so it was going to be run as an exercise in
incompetence, you  continued to attack those who were against the war in
vicious terms  and to defend policies that simply could not work. On
intelligent  design, global warming, doctoring of scientific results to
reflect  ideology, corporate tax giveaways, the K Street project, the
illegal redistricting of Texas, torture at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib,  the Terry
Schiavo fiasco, and the cronyism that led to the  destruction of New Orleans
you have failed to speak out with  integrity or honesty, preferring power to
truth at every turn. Bush does what he wants because you have let him.

5. Tyranny is your creation. What we have today is the natural and
inevitable outcome of ideas and policies you have promoted for the last
generation. I once knew a guy who was still a Marxist in 1980.  Whenever I
asked him why Communism had failed in Russia and China, he said "Mistakes
were made." He could not believe that Marxism itself was at fault, just as
you cannot believe that the ideology of the unregulated free market has
created the world we live in  today. You are tempted to say: "Mistakes have
been made", but in fact, psychologically and sociologically, no mistakes
have been made. The unregulated free market has operated to produce a
government in its own image. In an unregulated free market, for example,
cheating is merely another sort of advantage that, supposedly, market forces
might eventually "shake out" of the system. 

Of course, anyone with common sense understands that cheaters do damage that
sometimes cannot be repaired before they  are "shaken out," but according to
the principles of the  unregulated free market, the victims of that sort of
damage are  just out of luck and the damage that happens to them is just a
sort  of "culling." It is no accident that our government is full of
cheaters--they learned how to profit from cheating when they were  working
in corporations that were using bribes, perks, and secret connections to
cheat their customers of good products, their  neighbors of healthy
environmental conditions, their workers of  workplace safety and decent
paychecks. It was only when the corporations began cheating their
shareholders that any of you squealed, but you should know from your own
experience that the unregulated free market as a "level playing field" was
the biggest  laugh of the 20th century. No successful company in the history
of capitalism has ever favored open competition. When you folks  pretended,
in the eighties, that you weren't using the ideology of  the free market to
cover your own manipulations of the playing  field to your own advantage,
you may have suckered yourselves, and  even lots of American workers, but
observers of capitalism since  Adam Smith could have told you it wasn't
going to work.

And then there was the way you used racism and religious intolerance to gain
and hold onto power. Nixon was cynical about it--taking the party of Lincoln
and reaching out to disaffected southern racists, drumming up a backlash
against the Civil Rights movement for the sake of votes, but none of you has
been any less vicious. Racism might have died an unlamented death in this
country, but you kept it alive with phrases like "welfare queen"  and your
resistance to affirmative action and taxation for programs  to help people
in our country with nothing, or very little. You opted not to take the moral
high ground and recognize that the whole nation would be better off without
racism, but rather to increase class divisions and racial divisions for the
sake of your own comfort, pleasure, and profit. You have used religion in
exactly the same way. Instead of strongly defending the constitutional
separation of church and state, you have encouraged 
radical fundamentalist sects to believe that they can take power in the US
and mold our secular government to their own image, and get  rich doing it.
The US could have become a moderating force in what  seems now to be an
inevitable battle among the three monotheistic  Abrahamic religions, but you
have made that impossible by  flattering and empowering our own violent and
intolerant Christian  right.

You have created an imperium, heedless of the most basic wisdom of the
Founding Fathers--that at the very least, no man is competent enough or
far-seeing enough to rule imperially. Checks and balances were instituted by
Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, and the rest of  them, not because of some
abstract distrust of power, but because  they had witnessed the screw-ups
and idiocies of unchecked power.  You yourselves have demonstrated the
failures of unchecked power-- in an effort to achieve it, you have
repeatedly contravened the expressed wishes of most Americans, who favor a
moderate foreign policy, reasonable domestic programs, a government that
works, environmental preservation, women's rights to contraception,
abortion, and a level playing field. Somehow you thought you could mold the
imperium to reflect your wishes, but guess what--that's what an imperium
is--one man rule. If you fear the madness of King George, you have no
recourse if you've given up the checks and balances that you inherited and
that were meant to protect you.

Your ideas and your policies have promoted selfishness, greed, short-term
solutions, bullying, and pain for others. You have looked in the faces of
children and denied the existence of a "common good". You have disdained and
denied the idea of "altruism". At one time, our bureaucracy was full of
people who had gone into government service or scientific research for
altruistic reasons--I know, because I knew some of them. You have driven
them out and replaced them with vindictive ignoramuses. You have lied  
over and over about your motives, for example, making laws that  hurt people
and calling it "originalist interpretations of the  Constitution"
(conveniently ignoring the Ninth Amendment). You have increased the powers
of corporations at the expense of every other sector in the nation and
actively defied any sort of regulation that would require these corporations
to treat our world with care and respect. You have made economic growth your
deity, and in doing so, you have accelerated the power of the corporations
to destroy the atmosphere, the oceans, the ice caps, the rainforests, and
the climate. You have produced CEOs in charge of lots of resources and lots
of people who have no more sense of reciprocity or connection  or
responsibility than George W. Bush.

Now you are fleeing him, but it's only because he's got the earmarks of a
loser. Your problem is that you don't know why he's losing. You think he's
made mistakes. But no. He's losing because the ideas that you taught him and
demonstrated for him are bad ideas, self-destructive ideas, and even
suicidal ideas. And they are immoral ideas. You should be ashamed of
yourselves because not  only have your ideas not worked to make the world a
better place,  they were inhumane and cruel to begin with, and they have
served to  cultivate and excuse the inhumane and cruel character traits of
those who profess them.

6. As Bad as Bush is, Cheney is Worse.

 

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