Down the Tubes

E.J. Dionne of the “Washington Post” wrote a piece a couple of days ago chronicling the Republican Party’s perils.

It represents a D.C. insider’s shake-out of what we can already look back on as, God help us, “The Bush Years.” A shake-out within the party’s rank-and-file whom, Dionne says, “are decidedly mixed in their view of the Bush years...”

Bushism, as a political philosophy, he notes, has not rooted the way Reaganism did.

Reaganism, God help us twice, was successful at least in achieving the goals of the rather rich-people centered political entity known as the GOP.

Under Bush, of course, nobody’s really winning. Nobody at all. Look around and you see losers. Your children, mine, yourselves, the scribe, Democrats and certainly (r)epublicans who are, like it or not, living off one notion: insulting the other guys as mamby-pamby weaklings in the face of the “new kind of war” on terror.

What does that mean, new kind of war? It suggests that the brutalities of the past were somehow milder and therefore we could afford to be sure the person we were holding was actually guilty by extending them a little due process. That we could afford to leave them in the clink to stink without jolting their nuts with electric prods and unleashing dogs on them.

It suggests that this new breed of murderers are especially vicious given that they aim purposely at civilians. But that’s not new to military science and never has been. The United States boiled the waters of Tokyo with its fire bombing and much the same happened in Germany where plenty of people who couldn’t abide by Hitler had their lives snuffed out by the allies.

The administration's posture essentially says that civilian death is more correct when some legislative body full of men in suits and gray hair put their imprimatur on it; when guys in uniforms bomb civilians from above and go home for a good night sleep.

the scribe says not.

And you know what? The Supreme Court recently did, too and now the administration has been forced to put out this memo forbidding inhumane treatment.

It’s sickening really, that such a topic must be broached in an official document. It’s sickening because it really means we’ve been torturing and killing people in our custody. And trust the scribe, it’s no big deal because our little clatch of dictators has decided they need not abide by all the articles of the Geneva Conventions, just those the Supreme Court spanked them on.

And that’s not what we’re supposed to be about.

Which may be why, as Dionne again notes, “Even in this year’s elections, (r)epublicans are fleeing aspects of the Bush record.”

And well they should for it is not a pretty sight to watch a violent and overconfident rich-boy come out and tell us, the way he did on Tuesday, what good news it is that instead of $Y trillions, the deficit will only be $X trillions.

Wonder if he learned that at Harvard Business School?