Salon: Bush mistakes can be rectified, "first, he has to go"

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/11/01/nightmare/index.html



Nov. 1, 2004 | "The pure products of America go crazy," wrote William Carlos Williams. The words could serve as a motto for the age of Bush. In years to come historians will likely judge the Bush presidency one of the worst in the history of the republic -- an amalgam of arrogance, radicalism and folly so egregious it's almost laughable. Abandoning common sense in foreign affairs, weakening the rule of law, handing the nation's wealth over to the super-rich, and squandering the friendship and sympathy of the world in rigid pursuit of a chimerical dream of a world that cannot threaten us, the Bush presidency has betrayed the nation's deepest principles, both liberal and conservative.

Alarmed and outraged, half of a bitterly divided nation protested, but it did so alone. Cowed by 9/11 and intimidated by a right-wing media machine that wielded the flag like a spear, Congress and the media, the institutions that should have checked Bush's mad rush to war, abandoned their posts until it was too late. From its dubious beginning to its fear-mongering, vote-suppressing end (one hopes), the Bush era has been a perfect storm in which all the worst aspects of our national temper -- insularity, empty swagger and ignorance -- have come together.

Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of the whole sorry chapter has been the collapse of national memory and accountability. One outrage follows the next with dreamlike regularity, lies about aluminum tubes to 9/11 revelations to Ahmed Chalabi to Joseph Wilson to cooked intel to Abu Ghraib to illegal detentions to lost explosives, and nothing ever happens, no one is ever punished, everything is for the best in the best of all possible six-gun-brandishing worlds. In an age of reality-TV war, where nothing is asked of Americans except that they rage and fear on color-coded command, the death of responsibility offers a happy ending to all -- except for those killed in Iraq.

Yes, everything changed after Sept. 11: The country lost its mind. Heretical as it is to say, the terror attacks proved that it is possible to overreact -- more specifically, to react foolishly -- to an attack that left 3,000 dead. Bush launched America upon a rash and pointless war that is likely to go down in history as one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in U.S. history. The war achieved exactly what it was designed to prevent: It has strengthened radical Islam and increased the number of terrorists. The explosives debacle at Al-Qaqaa perfectly encapsulates this bitter irony: We invaded Iraq to keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of terrorists, but the invasion put those weapons in their hands. In Greek tragedy, this is a classic punishment for hubris. In "The Twilight Zone," it's a favorite plot twist. The Bush presidency has been a tale out of Aeschylus, adapted by Rod Serling.