Politics
and other dirty words,
January 24, 2001
Welcome, President Shrub
Politics |
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He had few credentials, less vision, and got fewer votes than his opponent. Still, on January 20, George W. Bush was sworn into office under the heaviest blanket of security and paranoia since Richard M. Nixon. That the National Mall was wrapped in chain link & barbed wire was a fitting begining for an illegitimate Preseidency. I have reneged on my pledge to move to Singapore. Instead, I bought the largest single-cylinder Japanese motorcycle I couldn find for under a grand, the Suzuki Savage 650. It has an obscenely loud engine, loud enough to drown out the pundits, media whores, and my own screaming. My plan is to spend the next four years riding around and chronicling life under occupation. Sometimes when you’re dealt a bad hand, the only thing to do is to ride it out.
But the devil must be given his due, and anyone who has studied human duplicity as long as I needs to grudgingly admire GWB’s slimy stealth-path into power, especially given the limitations that he had to work with. By limitations, I mean not just his own well-chronicled difficulties mastering the complexities of world politics, economic theory, and verb conjugation, but the limitations of the American electoral system itself. How inconvenient for the right wing to have to maintain a veneer of civility while stealing the presidency. An armed coup would have been both cheaper, and easier to engineer.
Such are the rules of the game in this pious republic in democracy’s clothes. And this is all the more reason for us to admire George Bush, however grudgingly. The Shrub is not a complex man. Even those who love him harbor few illusions on this score. But he must understand that those who did not vote for him did so not out of love for his opponent, but from a very real antipathy for him, and everything he stands for. And, unlike most elections, the loser got less votes than the winner. George W. Bush enters office like some heinous criminal with guilt written all over his face who’d just beat the rap on a technicality. He may have been hissed at as he approached the swearing in podium, and he probably had no illusions about being loved. But he won, and that was all that matters. A wise man might ponder the the Machiavellian question:
Wisdom, however, is not one of Dubya’s qualities. He probably realizes that he has little chance of ever garnering the love and support of those who voted against him, i.e. most Americans. Truly, there is nothing more dangerous than a man with nothing to lose, and the fact is not lost on Dubya, or Dick Cheney and whichever other cold war holdouts responsible for “helping” the boy president with his cabinet picks. No amount of compromise will make up for the fact that the far right, aided by the conservative wing of the Supreme Court, stole the presidency on a technicality. Dubya mouthed the word "compromise", but it was strictly for the rubes. In the background, his cronies were and still are consolidating, and compromise be damned.
Case in point: John Ashcroft. A right wing ideologue with white supremacist tendencies, Ashcroft comes from that segment of the GOP that gets stuffed in the closet during election years lest to keep the moderates & soccer moms from getting too freaked out. Choosing him for the position of Top Cop is a resounding “fuck you, I’m in charge now” directed at everyone who stood in Dubya’s way as he slimed his way into the oval office. A confederate apologist, Ashcroft is the senator from Missouri whose right wing leanings so frightened his constituents that they chose a dead man over him in the 2000 senatorial race. Ashcroft is about as far away from a “compromise choice” as the GOP could get without taking a time machine back to 1960 to recruit George Wallace. And of course, having someone in a position of power with Ashcroft’s stance on abortion is precisely what pro-choice voters feared the most when they voted against Bush.
If Ashcroft was Dubya’s gift to women, then Colorado’s own Gale Norton was his gift to Nader voters. What better gift to give environmentalists than Gale Norton, a former associate of James Watt, who, as Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the interior, advocated strip mining the Grand Canyon. . Norton is a long a long time friend of big business and a champion of the idea that industry ought to simply monitor itself. A class idea, and a real time saver at that. I can almost hear the heads of industry now:
...Now where would be a good place to dump these cyanide laced smelting by-products?
That stream looks nice.
Norton has long championed drilling and exploration for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of GWB’s pet fetishes. The ANWR is one of the last undefiled places in the country. As oilmen, Bush and Cheney must be drooling over this like a couple of depraved friars from a Marquis De Sade story watching new initiates being led into the abbey.
There will be some resistance to Ashcroft and Norton, but Democrats, graduates of the Neville Chamberlin school of negotiations, will eventually capitulate after a token fight. Rather than risk angering the new masters, they settled for appeasement in the name of “bipartisanship.” It will be an ugly four years of right wing rape and pillage, and people of conscience can either knuckle under to the new Lords regime or hit the road. A few will continue protesting against the odds, kicking against the pricks come what may.
Joshua Samuel Brown is a jounralist living on the lam. He can be reached at phibes@ficnet.net. Forward his column to friends and enemies alike.
comments? Email me at "josambro at josambro dot com"
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