Incomparable
Via Crooks and Liars‘s entry, Bush Supporters Question Iraq War Tactics, here’s a link to an article by Paul Craig Roberts — who is not a leftist. Roberts published an article on Sept.6, 2005 called Impeach Bush Now. It’s available on Creators, which represents syndicated columnists. Creators is not some liberal-lefty hotbed, as this complaint against one of its representative columnists makes quite clear. So let’s just state up front that I’m not referencing Alternet or even Democracy Now here.
Anyway…
On to Paul Craig Roberts’s column, Impeach Bush Now. Among other trenchant observations, Roberts points out the following:
Bush’s single-minded focus on the “war against terrorism” has compounded a natural disaster and turned it into the greatest calamity in American history. The United States has lost its largest and most strategic port and thousands of lives, and 80 percent of one of America’s most historic cities is underwater.
If terrorists had achieved this result, it would rank as the greatest terrorist success in history.
(…)
The destruction of New Orleans is the responsibility of the most incompetent government in American history and perhaps in all history. Americans are rapidly learning that they were deceived by the superpower hubris. The powerful U.S. military cannot successfully occupy Baghdad or control the road to the airport — and this against an insurgency based in only 20 percent of the Iraqi population. Bush’s pointless war has left Washington so pressed for money that the federal government abandoned New Orleans to catastrophe.
The Bush administration is damned by its gross incompetence. Bush has squandered the lives and health of thousands of people. He has run through hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars. He has lost America’s reputation and its allies. With barbaric torture and destruction of our civil liberty, he has stripped America of its inherent goodness and morality. And now Bush has lost America’s largest port and 25 percent of its oil supply.
Why? Because Bush started a gratuitous war egged on by a claque of crazy neoconservatives who have sacrificed America’s interests to their insane agenda.
The neoconservatives have brought these disasters to all Americans, Democrat and Republican alike. Now, they must be held accountable. Bush and his neoconservatives are guilty of criminal negligence and must be prosecuted. [More…]
No kidding. Unfortunately.
The only downside I see in having the former Republican cheerleaders come out against Bush is that they will somehow manage to recoup power, to “fit” this event into a box of things already-known, and thereby lull the electorate back into its fitful sleep. If that happens, there’s a chance that the forces of the status quo (Rep or Dem, don’t matter) will once again secure the next election. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” only not quite as completely beyond the pale as Bush.
Saying Bush is stupid is somehow akin to saying that Hitler fooled the German people: Not quite true.
It’s terribly important that this disaster doesn’t get homogenised and become like all the other disasters blighting our modern lives. Like other unique historical crimes and disasters, the Bush Administration’s criminal incompetence and consequences thereof in New Orleans are unique; it would be sad if, through spin and deceit, this were to blend into a kind of abysmal background, an entropic white noise. In its way, it’s incomparable; we shouldn’t be lulled into thinking this isn’t extraordinary and worthy of our continued regard.
I don’t like being full of gloom and doom, but it seems to me that the cranked-up spin machine is already making so much noise that information is fading and dissolving into that steady white (in so many senses of the word white!) hum.
Comment by maria — September 13, 2005 #
That’s really a danger, isn’t it, that we become so inured to being on a train on its way to a wreck that we don’t think it’s even worth pulling the emergency brake?
Maybe it will look like the historical turning point it should be, with the passage of time. I can’t imagine that all the people, like us, who are saying “wtf” and “enough,” won’t make a difference, and that there aren’t enough of them either already in positions to leverage change, or figuring out how to get into those positions. At any rate, I bet there are plenty of people in other countries who are already framing alternatives to American leadership, and plenty of people are trying to figure out what lessons to draw from this.
More privileged white people, that is. African-Americans don’t have to figure it out — they’ve had centuries of bitter lessons.
Comment by Yule Heibel — September 13, 2005 #