You know, some days you log on, and you just get the sense that the universe itself hates the Bush presidency and is trying to kill it. How many more October surprises is the world going to throw him?
But of course really what's happening is that the Bush team's ever-accelerating corruption and incompetence is catching up with it at an ever-accelerating rate. The Foley scandal has very deep roots in the fucked-up pathology of right-wing politics, and cannot perhaps be blamed on Bush personally, though he has certainly done nothing to give any of the Republican congressional leaders the impression that caring about honesty, transparency, or protecting American citizens is part of their job. North Korea likewise has been a thorn in everyone's side for quite some time. But it was Bush's idea to decide back in 2003 that instead of trying to deal effectively with a nutball Communist dictator who was jumping up and down chanting, "We got nukes, yes we do, we got nukes, how bout you?", he was going to war against a completely different country whose nutball dictator didn't have any. It was truly surreal watching it. "It's up to Saddam Hussein to prove he didn't have weapons of mass destruction!" Dude...do you not see the crazy man with the giant nuclear warhead? He's standing over there on the right, just below where China is. _I_ can see him. Look, he's waving at you. Oh look, now he's giving you the...dude, what _is_ it with you and Iraq? Do they have the world's biggest shiny object, or what?
There are going to be all kinds of explanations for why that happened in the history books. Let me be the first to advance the Bored Game Theory.
What is everyone always telling us was the crowning achievement of the Reagan/Bush I administrations? The fall of the Soviet Union and the resultant liberation of eastern Europe. That was going to be the end of history. Remember that? The Cold War was over, and we won. We're the sole surviving world power! Woohoo!
Now, admittedly, in a lot of ways, Bush II's crowd doesn't seem to have fully integrated that knowledge. After all, the right-wingers continue to red-bait us just as if the Soviet Union was still a malignant growth trying to infect the whole world with the cancer of international Communism, and continue to oppose any form of welfare, Social Security, etc. on the grounds that these things are socialism and therefore leading us into the maw of the Evil Empire. And of course Condileeza Rice's background is in the Cold War, and most of Bush's major advisors are guys who are certainly of an age to have been formed by the Cold War and the Vietnam era, and they have certainly shown plenty of evidence of ossified and outdated thinking. But anyway, the point is: Bush came into office already convinced that the Cold War was over and we won. After all, his daddy was there to see the Soviet Union into the grave and tramp the dirt down. Mission Accomplished.
But anyhow, back in the day, when the nuclear deterrent was keeping everyone from everyone's throats, people actually had to _use_ shit like diplomacy because direct confrontation, at least after the Cuban Missile Crisis proved that neither of the Big Two was _really_ crazy enough to push the red button, was right out. Oh, you could have proxy wars like in Korea and Vietnam, but as for just marching your army into your enemy's country and trying to take the joint over, no, you really couldn't do that. And somehow I just feel like Bush II and his crew have always felt like the really _cool_ thing about the end of the Cold War was that they could now afford to start a really exciting _hot_ war.
So when Bush II came in, he was _so_ over the Cold War. To get his jollies he created a shiny new one called the War On Terror, and instead of the Communists under the bed he got everyone het up about the Arab (or Muslim? Islamofascist? Liberal? They're not always precisely clear about this) terrorists working at the 7-11. And, you know, that might have been all right if the object of the game were to get Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. But it became unclear very quickly exactly what Bush thought he was playing for, apart from the chance to play again.
So anyway: why should Bush care about North Korea? He doesn't want to play Contain the Communist, he's bored with that. It's too slow-moving and requires too much strategy and thinking ahead and craftiness and whatnot. He needs something with more action, something with really cool graphics and kind of a first-person-shooter thing. To hell with Risk. If he can't blow shit up, it's just not fun.
The persistence of the North Korea problem is just one more example of the Bush team's refusal to think outside their chosen paradigm. OK, the Cold War is over; but North Korea apparently didn't get the memo. Not too much gets into North Korea from the outside, from what I hear. And their inclusion in the Axis Of Evil always seemed kind of awkward. Clearly, one of these things is not like the others; for one thing it's the only member of the AOE that doesn't have a four-letter name that starts with IRA. Not a middle-eastern country breeding Islamofascist terrorists? No oil? Well, then you can't possibly be our problem. We're fighting a War On Terror here, not a War On The Remnants Of The Communist Bloc. The idea that you might have to work in more than one paradigm at once, and be able to understand the world through multiple lenses at the same time, does not have a lot of currency with this crowd.
Well, so, Bush paid North Korea no mind, and now they have the Bomb. But on the bright side, after years of bloody mayhem in Iraq, now Saddam Hussein DOESN'T! Whereas, if we hadn't invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein...uh...still wouldn't have had one.
Some days all you can say is
,
The Plaid Adder
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Well-said, as always. Nothing that I could add as a reply that would
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LOLS (Laughing Out Loud Sarcastically)
