[lit-ideas] NYT op-ed

  • From: Carol Kirschenbaum <carolkir@xxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2006 15:30:40 -0700

 FYI:  Recap rant from one of my raving faves. Enjoy?

Carol







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April 27, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Stuck With Bush
By BOB HERBERT
If George W. Bush could have been removed from office for being a bad 
president, he would have been sent back to his ranch a long time ago.

If incompetence were a criminal offense, he'd be behind bars.

But that's just daydreaming. The reality is that there are more than two and 
a half years left in the long dark night of the Bush presidency - nearly as 
long as the entire time John Kennedy was in office.

The nation seems, very belatedly, to be catching on to the tragic failures 
and monumental ineptitude of its president. Mr. Bush's poll numbers are 
abysmal. Republicans up for re-election are running from him as if he were 
the bogyman.

Callers to conservative talk radio programs who were once ecstatic about the 
president and his policies are now deeply disillusioned.

The libertarian Cato Institute is about to release a study titled "Power 
Surge: The Constitutional Record of George W. Bush." It says, 
"Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has 
repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal 
power." While I disagree with parts of the study, I certainly agree with 
that particular comment.

In the current issue of Rolling Stone, Sean Wilentz, a distinguished 
historian and the director of the American Studies program at Princeton 
University, takes a serious look at the possibility that Mr. Bush may be the 
worst president in the nation's history.

What in the world took so long? Some of us have known since the moment he 
hopped behind the wheel that this reckless president was driving the nation 
headlong toward a cliff.

The worst thing he did, of course, was to employ a massive campaign of 
deceit to lead the nation into a catastrophic war in Iraq - a war with no 
end in sight that has already claimed tens of thousands of lives and 
inflicted scores of thousands of crippling injuries.

When he was a young man, Mr. Bush used the Air National Guard to hide out 
from the draft in a time of war. Then, as president, he's suddenly G. I. 
George, strutting around in a flight suit, threatening to wage war on all 
and sundry, and taunting the insurgents in Iraq with a cry of "bring them 
on."

When the nation needed leadership on the critical problem of global warming, 
Mr. Bush took his cues from the honchos in the oil and gasoline industry, 
the very people who were setting the planet on fire. Now he talks about 
overcoming the nation's addiction to oil! This is amazing. Here's the 
president of the United States scaling the very heights of chutzpah. The 
Bush people and the oil people are indistinguishable. Condoleezza Rice, a 
former Chevron director, even had an oil tanker named after her.

Among the complaints in the Cato study is that the Bush administration has 
taken the position that despite validly enacted laws to the contrary, the 
president cannot be restrained "from pursuing any tactic he believes to be 
effective in the war on terror."

This view has led to activities that I believe have brought great shame to 
the nation: the warrantless spying on Americans, the abuses at Abu Ghraib, 
the creation of the C.I.A.'s network of secret prisons, extraordinary 
rendition and the barbaric encampment at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in which 
detainees are held, without regard to guilt or innocence, in a nightmarish 
no man's land beyond the reach of any reasonable judicial process.

The sins of the Bush administration are so extensive and so egregious, they 
could never be adequately addressed in a newspaper column. History will be 
the final judge. But I've no doubt about the ultimate verdict.

Remember the Clinton budget surplus?

It was the largest in American history. President Bush and his cronies went 
after it like vultures feasting in a field of carcasses. They didn't invest 
the surplus. They devoured it.

Remember how most of the world responded with an extraordinary outpouring of 
sympathy and support for America in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11?

Mr. Bush had no idea how to seize that golden opportunity to build new 
alliances and strengthen existing ones. Much of that solidarity with America 
has morphed into outright hostility.

Remember Katrina?

The major task of Congress and the voters for the remainder of the Bush 
presidency is to curtail the destructive impulses of this administration, 
and to learn the lessons that will prevent similar horrors from ever 
happening again.





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