by
Michael Hammerschlag
"The
President spoke to a meeting in Indiana....", the news said, and I
wondered what the Big Dog was up to now.
"And then," as the smug woman says in the IBM ads,
"it hits you" -- -- its Bush!!! It's like the
difference between House and house, or, in the teenage horror
movies, "the killer is inside the house". For anyone who cares about the economy,
environment, health care, foreign policy, poverty, or women’s freedoms; the
killer is inside the house.
Bush's reign has been unmitigated disaster, worse than I even imagined
it could be: in every field he's been a single-minded automaton working to pay
off his corporate debts. Not distracted
by logic, science, decency, or compassion, he has blithely punched the Company
clock for big oil, big banks, big electricity -- and lo and behold Exxon is the
No. 1 Corp. in the world.
If
President Bush's Texas reign is any indication, he will work tirelessly in the
service of his corporate sponsors for a year and a half, do little else, and
then stop. But he might not have the
chance. The honeymoon may already be over. The opiated jackals of the press seem to
have reached their stupidity saturation point; an accumulation of idiocy that's
simply too great to ignore. First there were the howls of protest over Bush's
mild reneging on global warming, a priority only the delusional thought Bush
had. Of course global warming was a
safe thing to call him on -- there is no absolutely no political will for meaningful legislation on global
warming (p2) and
India's and China's massive use of coal will render it moot anyway. The great danger for Bush is that the press
will go into a vicious feedback loop like they did about Gore’s imaginary lies
and, fed by Bush's steady linguistic lacerations, will decide the STORY is that
our President is an imbecile. Since
there is ample evidence to prove that, the stories, and the drumbeat, could
become a steady roar. Bush's
entertaining self-ridicule may not work for long. His "beloved" quotient is way lower than Reagan's: we
like our presidents to be funny, but not be a joke.
All
one has to do is to study our Loser in Chief's 'deer in the headlight' eyes as
he fumbles desperately for some butchered junior high school cliché and then...
is simply finished. Once you get past
the mindless hackneyed sound bite, there is nothing else. He has nothing else to say because there is
nothing in his head, so he immediately changes the subject or scuttles
away. He is an embarrassment to our
country. En masse, Europe has come to
the same conclusion -- with Mr. Bush's repeated slaps the face, punches to the
stomach, and knees to the groin over global warming, missile defense and SALT
and ABM violations of established treaties, spurning of earlier overtures to N.
Korea, Russia + the Palestinians, reckless piggish tax policy, isolationism,
and love of oil. Of course, they were
shocked and horrified when he won anyway.
Bush's
raison d'etre seems to be vengeance (once he's funneled enough billions into
his corporate sponsors coffers): vengeance against California for the audacity
to vote for Gore, vengeance at the Harvard liberals who dared ridicule him for
his retrograde conservatism -- him, scion of Poppy, hard drinking, skirt
chasing, fly boy -- they laughed at him?
Who were they to laugh at him?
He would show them all. Much of
Bush's motivation can be traced back to this humiliation at the hands of
overbred prep school kids. They can be
savage to a West Texas cracker, as my Texan friends have explained to me (esp.
during the 60’s). Lacking true physical
or academic gifts, Mr. Bush applied himself to relentless ingratiating and
politickin, which is still the secret of his success. His primary reason to run
for president at all was to avenge his father's loss, but his alleged vast
shame at his father's rejection at the hands of the populace shows his
misplaced entitlement-- the Presidency isn't a right -- it has to be earned every
time and its loss to a better man isn't a great shame or a personal
rejection.
It is this deep conviction of the Bush
superiority -- this business of character that's so inexplicable, coming from a
15 year nasty drunk who had every door opened for him, every failure cushioned
and reversed, from a man whose ordained right to win wouldn't be prevented by a
little thing like a half million votes. Any true man of character could never
have assumed the Presidency after losing by such a popular margin, let alone
fought so virulently and dishonestly to wrest it from his opponent. This
obsession with cleansing the White House of Clinton's real and imagined sins is
inexplicable, when Bush's nights of debauchery and vomit far surpassed Billy
boy's (not to mention his girlfriend's abortion). Maybe it's his born-again religiosity from which he derives such
arrogance, hubris, and hypocrisy.
The Enron palm-greasing (lifting price-gouging
controls on power) has devastated the Cal. economy and bankrupted the power
co., which since all things roll downhill from Cal., will percolate malignantly
through the rest of the economy. Bush may get the full scale recession he’s
been promoting. The bankruptcy bill payoff to credit card companies (his
largest contributors) has a particularly bitter irony coming from a man who
would have been forced into bankruptcy 3 times without rich family
"friends" eager for the cachet and influence of the
Bush name. He directly financially benefits from most of his legislation, just
as he did in Texas. In these billions of dollars of sleazy payoffs, Mr. Bush
has in only 2 months become the most corrupt President in American
history.
In
the spy scandal, Bush's vast overreaction was unwarranted and unwise: in our
burrowing under the Russian embassy in Washington we were committing a far
greater transgression. Since they have far
more spies than we do, ejecting 50 of each leave us at a grave
disadvantage. In fact, it may have been
an excuse for getting rid of Democrats in the Moscow embassy who would
oppose Mr. Bush's idiotic missile defense project and reject a harder
line. Meanwhile Putin has assumed
control of the other two television networks, and is moving to place the
entire press under his thumb.
On
the other hand, his weakness and toadying to China after the downing of our spy
plane by an incompetent aggressive Chinese fighter jock is frankly dangerous-
if you talk tough, and then act craven, you embolden your enemies to greater
outrages. The bullying Chinese, who’ve killed up to 1/5 of Tibet in a half
century physical + cultural genocide and constantly threaten Taiwan (separate
since 1897), can’t be offended- lest Wal-Mart be forced out of business in 4
months by an embargo. For a decade we’ve allowed a grubby obsession with trade
to obscure our support for human rights, but even Clinton sent 2 carrier groups to the South China Sea when
the Chinese lobbed missiles 22 miles from Taiwan’s cities and had 150,000 troop “exercises”
across from Taiwan.
Regarding our wondering at
how Bush could graduate from 2 Ivy League schools without being able to read
(perhaps with massive donations- It’s Only Words), we got an interesting
answer from Herb Epstein:
--“How does a "mentally challenged" legacy student
like George W graduate from Yale when he could barely read and write? I was a graduate student at Yale and did
some teaching while Bush was an undergraduate.
"legacy student." A certain number of places were guaranteed
to sons of alumni. The short answer is that it was very difficult to give any
Yale student a failing grade for a course and almost impossible to give them
enough failing grades to prevent their graduating. I'm an expert on this
subject because I tried to give two failing grades (out of about 75 students)
in a course I taught and graded on Soviet foreign policy. (No, Bush was not one
of them). Suffice to say that even
after I proved plagiarism to the satisfaction of a board of
professors, the university administration reversed my grade and the board's
ruling and allowed the legacy student to pass with the minimum grade. They
didn't dispute that he had plagiarized. The fact that he had previously been
reprimanded for the same offense somehow had no bearing. Needless to say
this kid's family give big bucks to Yale before and after the incident.
Next
comes the question of how George W got into Harvard B School. He first applied
to U of Texas Law School and was turned down. Despite the fact that it was his
home state, he had no legacy. He had to
compete. Undoubtedly he was rejected because of his poor undergraduate record
and his low LSAT scores. How could George W, who was a history major, and who
couldn't get into the U of Texas Law School, gain admission to the most
competitive, prestigious grad school in the country --Harvard B school.?” ----
Herb Epstein
On another front, Bush is moving against the
‘Day After’ pill, because it’s use would prevent illegitimacy… but that’s how he came to power.
Copyright © 2001 Michael Hammerschlag
Michael Hammerschlag has
written commentaries for Seattle
Times, Providence Journal, Honolulu Advertiser; MediaChannel, Moscow News, Tribune, and + Guardian; was a TV reporter and produced a documentary
series on the Presidential primaries. His website is http://mikehammer.tripod.com e-mail hammerschlag@bigfoot.com
