Robert Scheer: A Plague Upon the White House
Thanks to Bush's distorted priorities, not even God can help us.
I am not a conventionally religious man, or even a very superstitious one, but I do wish President Bush would stop asking God to bless America.
What’s next? Pestilence, frogs, locusts or incurable boils? Dare we risk four more years of catastrophic misrule by a “W” alter ego? For those indifferent to the serious implications of that question, I recommend Oliver Stone’s new bio-flick, which brilliantly captures the “banality of evil” that has controlled our political life these past eight years. This phrase from Hannah Arendt’s characterization of the mundane cruelty that so marked the daily experience of European fascism has a frightening applicability to the Republican leadership that has done so much damage to this nation’s reputation for democratic integrity.
Cynicism rules even as ritualistic prayer breaks, as depicted in the film W, abound. The pretense of piety earns Bush and his accomplices a get-out-of-jail-free card; at no point in the film do any in the top ranks of this administration — captured so accurately and depressingly — accept one iota of accountability for how much damage they have wrought.
Unrepentant, the same Republican apparatchiks are employing the familiar Rovian tactic of divide and conquer in seeking to continue their hold on power. Once again, they seek to focus attention on hot-button social issues and patriotic litmus tests to draw attention from the fact that family values are being destroyed by the loss of job and home.
Perhaps Sen. John McCain is not a perfect replica of Bush, but the parallels go beyond McCain’s enthusiastic support for the toxic mix of Bush’s imperial foreign policy and his arrogant indifference to the travails of our domestic existence. Neither man seems to have any sense of how we actually live or what we need from government.
Don’t say we weren’t warned. Bush came into office believing fervently that what was good for Enron and its CEO, Kenneth “Kenny Boy” Lay, Bush’s top financial sponsor, was good for the country. So, too, McCain, who chose former Sen. Phil Gramm as co-chairman of his presidential campaign, ignoring the huge loophole in Gramm’s Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which allowed Enron — where his wife, Wendy, was on the board of directors — to so shamelessly game the energy market.
Trumpeting the benefits of the legislation he tacked onto an omnibus spending bill the day before the 2000 Christmas recess, then-Sen. Gramm stated: “It protects financial institutions from overregulation. It provides legal certainty for the $60 billion market in swaps.” Those swaps created the toxic investments that taxpayers are now stuck with as the nation struggles to save those unregulated financial institutions from bankruptcy.
McCain, who should have learned the cost of radical deregulation from his own involvement in the savings and loan scandal as one of the infamous ”Keating Five,” totally bought Gramm’s line. McCain was the chairman of Gramm’s 1996 presidential bid and up until major Wall Street firms collapsed continued to echo the insistence of the former-Texas-senator-turned-banker that there was no real crisis in the financial markets.
McCain evidences the underlying motivator attributed to Bush in Stone’s movie: the distorted priorities of a son of privilege doing battle with the legacy of more gifted and responsible family ancestors. Both grew up as spoiled screw-ups repeatedly bailed out of trouble by their highly accomplished fathers — in McCain’s case, an admiral — and both assume, as a matter of legacy, that they have a right to rule. What they ignored in their legacy was a Christian’s obligation to make the economic system that handsomely rewarded their kin at least minimally responsive to the needs of ordinary folk.
TruthDig.com editor in chief Robert Scheer‘s new book is The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America. Click here for more information. He can be reached at .
» wrote on 10/10/08 @ 11:01 PM
Maybe Scheer should hire a fact-checker. Ken Lay was a bigger donor to Clinton than Bush.
» wrote on 10/11/08 @ 01:10 AM
Interesting that Mr. Scheer would omit any reference to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, or as The One describes it: “The tragedy of 9/11.”
» wrote on 10/12/08 @ 06:44 PM
Scheer must have missed his calling somewhere - journalism was not it.
» wrote on 10/12/08 @ 07:12 PM
The sharpest pencils in the box work for private cpmpanies, and the civil servants depend on government for welfare or a paycheck.
» wrote on 10/14/08 @ 03:02 PM
Hi Robert,
it is obvious you are not a religious man because you would know nothing is impossible for God. You show you are faithless and do not care about the TRuth! The economy will and has bounced back from countless times that a democratic congress has criminally handled their positions. It will come to pass that all these democrats will be brought to light and exposed for aiding of bad loans from fannie mae and freddie mac and other subprime loans that they helped propagate because they wanted every person to have a mortgage even if they could not afford it. We will see who has plagued the economy and our country! You sir are the poster child for the “Pornography of Power” you represent what is wrong with America and your thinking.