Is President Bush the leader of our government, or is he just a right-wing talk-show host?
The question comes to mind after Bush's news conference this week in which he sounded like someone who has no control over the government he is in charge of. His words were those of a pundit inveighing against the evils of bureaucrats.
"Obviously," said the critic in chief, "there are some times when government bureaucracies haven't responded the way we wanted them to, and like citizens, you know, I don't like that at all." Yes, and if you can't do something about it, who can?
The body of Mr. Dionne's article is about the 11,000 trailers that are rotting away in Hope, Arkansas instead of sheltering folks. Trailers we paid for that are going to waste. It's symbolic of Bush and the Republican approach to running this country. Running this country into the ground. Their corporate friends got the money, so I guess they're happy.
Hold on: The president of the United States runs the "big government" he's attacking. This is mysterious. If Bush's "good, hardworking people" aren't responsible for the problem, the villains of the piece must be alien creatures created by some strange beast called Big Government.
This episode is important because it is representative of a corrosive style of politics. Bush and many of his fellow Republicans have done a good business over the years running against the ills of Big Government. They are so much in the habit of trashing government that even when they are in charge of things -- remember, Republicans have controlled the White House and both houses of Congress for all but 18 months since 2001 -- they pretend they are not.
And when their own government fails, they turn around and use their incompetence to argue that government can never work anyway, so you might as well keep electing conservatives to have less government. It's an ideological Catch-22. Even their failures prove they are right.
Bush is (mistakenly) touted as the "CEO president". His CEO style is like Ken Lay at Enron: who cares if you wreck the joint and hurt lots of people as long as you get the money? The difference is that Bush doesn't keep the money for himself as much as he uses it for his own demented ends and impoverishes us in the process.
I don't care much for Big Government either. One of the big Democratic failures was thinking that government could solve everything. It can't, but it has a huge role to play in the general tone of how our country operates. It can determine whether we glide smoothly along the rails or derail and end up in a huge smoking, tangled heap.
If we weren't all on the train with the government, I'd let 'em get the thing rollin' as fast as it could go and then blow up the rails in front of them. Problem is, they're doin' it themselves. They're in front drivin' the damn thing so they'll see it coming and jump off in plenty of time. They've all got nice soft places to land, padded with plenty of (our) money. The rest of us, most of us anyway, won't know what happened until after it jumps the tracks, and they don't want us to know because we might stop 'em from carryin' out their Death Ride to Glory.
They don't seem to like the train they're in charge of, so they're determined to stage the grandest train wreck of all time to prove that trains don't work.
Bush in particular, and Republicans in general, have to have their grubby little shithooks pried off America's throttle. We're clingin' to the rails by the sheerest of threads here, folks.
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