I remember
the gut-level revulsion toward Bill Clinton that drove right wing
ideologues to seek his impeachment and removal from office. There
was only one way to explain the ludicrously exaggerated case worked
up by Kenneth Starr against Clinton--that it expressed a deep-seated
sense of nausea at the very thought of Clinton occupying the Oval
Office. The nausea was so profound that it led otherwise rational
people to go off the deep end. They could support any trumped-up
argument if it would rid the Republic of that illegitimate intruder.
The
institutions of the Republic, as it turned out, prevailed against
the excessive zeal of the right wing. That may count as one of
Clinton’s great though unsought achievements. He put our public
institutions to a tough test with his irresponsible personal
behavior, and they passed it. Revulsion against the personal
qualities of an incumbent would not in itself suffice to abort an
administration.
***
The
Clinton case comes to my mind each time George W. Bush’s actions
renew my personal distaste. Just as the right wingers believed that
America would be better off as soon as Clinton left office, so I
believe that it will be better off as soon as Bush leaves office.
My
opposition to the person Bush draws on both reasonable and
irrational sources. It is surely reasonable to object to Bush’s
inability to engage in public discourse at the mature level required
of the leader of the world’s greatest power. It is probably
irrational to object so strenuously to his jejune bravado and his
simplistic born-again religious template for the world. In any
case, I resist the impulse to wish him away before the electoral
process works its will in November 2004. But I am doing my small
bit to help unseat him then.
Meanwhile,
I am relieved that he no longer enjoys the immunity from criticism
that he arrogated to himself in the dust clouds of 9-11. The
fallacies of his attack on Iraq and his neglect of the real enemy,
Al-Qa’ida, became the topic of spring 2004 as Richard Clarke and
others dared to criticize. I now believe that his use of the flag
to insulate himself against a Democratic opponent will fail. I
allow myself now to believe that his weak rhetorical resources and
simplistic way of thinking will leave him vulnerable in any head-on
debate with the Democratic nominee. Yes, he will try to compensate
with memorized stock phrases and pat responses; but they will fail
to mask his inability to explain himself or to justify the errors of
his policies at home and abroad. They will remind viewers of the
deceptions and self-righteous demurrers that we have seen in his
years in office. Even some members of “the base” might grudgingly
come to see that he is not competent to lead our great and precious
nation for four more years.
Still,
like Kenneth Starr on Clinton, I have an irrational desire to pile
on Bush. There is never enough damaging evidence. Perhaps the most
cogent case against him and his ideologues comes from George Soros
in his new book, The Bubble of American Supremacy (which I
will take up in another piece). Before reading Soros, however, I
read Kevin Phillips’s odd analysis of the Bush problem. It is odd
because Phillips comes at Bush as a former Republican voice who now
is eager to find fault. It is odd, too, because Phillips constructs
his argument against Bush from a mélange of fact and inference
bordering at times on mere innuendo. But what a heavy bag of
accusation! It warms the heart of any Bushophobe.
Phillips
speaks in sinister tone as he analyzes the Bush family’s dynastic
machinations through four generations and its drive toward revenge
and White House restoration in 2000. The tone holds fast in his
expose of the weird mix of the Bush family’s “crony capitalism,
covert operations, and compassionate conservatism.” It carries
through into the third section of the book, where Phillips conflates
the religious fundamentalism of Bush 43 with his traditional family
commitment to oil deals, international armaments, and war. In his
afterword, the sinister tone climaxes. There, the 2004 political
strategies of Bush 43 become an example of latter-day Machiavellian
deceit: while projecting an upright public front, Bush lies and
dissembles to consolidate his hold on power.
Phillips’s
key words and phrases suggest the range of the faults he finds with
Bush:
deceit and disinformation...hunger for power…crony capitalism…moral arrogance…disregard for
democratic and republican traditions…connections to power bases in
finance, oil and energy, the military-industrial complex, and the
national security-intelligence community…pride, ambition, and
pretentiousness…dissembled…increase the wealth of a small slice of
upper America…deception and disguise…lying has become Bush’s
signature as president (147)…feels God is talking to him…arms
deal…clandestine operations…cover-up…revenging his father.
This
litany is troubling beyond its findings on Bush and his family.
Dedicating his book to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Phillips
quotes Ike’s farewell warning in 1961 against the rise of a
military-industrial complex. It is worth revisiting:
This conjunction of an immense Military Establishment and a large
arms industry is new in the American experience…. We recognize
the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to
comprehend its grave implications.… We must guard against the
acquisition of unwarranted influence…by the military-industrial
complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power
exists and will persist…. We must never let the weight of this
combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
(The trajectory of Dick Cheney's
military-industrial career from Defense Department to Halliburton to
the Vice Presidency stands as a sobering emblem that
America failed to heed Eisenhower's warning.)
Phillips
couples the rise of the military-industrial complex with the
solidification of a national security-intelligence apparatus in the
context of Cold War. Both these structural developments, he says,
had links to international finance, with particular focus on oil and
energy. Then he describes the rise of “American gentrification” and
the turn toward “aristophilia,” America’s newly burnished love of
the rich and famous. His story of the Bush-Walker family largely
weaves around these dominant developments in the nation in the
twentieth century.
***
Phillips’s
sinister interpretation of the Bush family history depends heavily
on innuendo and loose association. But if you broaden the focus and
look through a wide-angle lens, you become troubled less by the
portrait of the Bush family as such than by the change in an America
that now willingly embraces such a house of pseudo-aristocratic
pretension. Phillips’s sorry story of the Bush family is
significant because of what it says, sadly, about contemporary
America.
America
always has been a haven for ambitious business adventurers. Some of
them became icons of our possibilities for individual
success—Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford. The have-nots have always felt
a personal bond with the haves. The rich have always represented
what the poor believed they might become in America, if their luck
would hold and if they would be clever and industrious enough.
Class resentment never became fatally self-destructive because the
poor never completely lost faith in "the American Dream."
Hollywood
had much to do with keeping the door of opportunity open in the
minds of the masses, even in the depths of the Great Depression. It
was no accident that the president who in the 1980s fueled the new
aristophilia and pseudo-gentrification documented by Phillips made
his name and fortune as an actor in Hollywood. In the
twentieth-century American literary myth created by F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Jay Gatsby's violent death resulted from mistaken
identity, not from a failure to seize wealth and create instant
gentrification from underworld enterprise. Tom and Daisy Buchanan
lived on after him, securely wrapped, unrepentant, in their older
wealth and privilege.
But if
Americans have traditionally tolerated the excesses of our rich and
famous, the Bush family, as Phillips sees it, represents something
new and different. The American penchant for entrepreneurial greed
and get-go now permeates a Byzantine governmental establishment that
operates out of the eye of the public in whose name and on whose tax
payments it flourishes. The institutionalization of national
security in a CIA with tentacles in international finance stands as
an ominous symbol of the whole phenomenon, as Phillips tells it.
The war in Iraq will pass, one way or the other, but the meshing of
corporate contractors with the Pentagon—abetted by willing
Congressmen eager for local pork—gains strength each day of our
lengthening involvement there.
A quick
way to glimpse the power against which Eisenhower warned is to look
at the Pentagon's Defense Advisory Board, created, fittingly, by the
Reagan administration in 1985. According to a 2003 article by
The
Center for Public Integrity, nine members of
the board had ties to defense contractors. Two former CIA
directors—James Schlesinger and James Woolsey—were members. Henry
Kissinger, who heads a worldwide consulting firm with confidential
clients and resources, belonged. The erstwhile chairman Richard Perle, whose persistent advocacy of the most hawkish agenda was
heard as an administration voice, is a principal, with Kissinger, of
Trireme Partners LP; it invests in technology, goods, and services
related to homeland security and defense. It was registered in
Delaware two months after 9-11.[Disinfopedia]
Companies
with representatives on the board include the following defense
contractors: Bechtel, Boeing, TRW, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed
Martin, and Booz Allen. The biggest corporate beneficiary of war in
Iraq, Halliburton, apparently does not enjoy direct representation
on the board. But its position in the market for defense services
was well established by its former CEO before he moved over to the
office of Vice President of the US.
One has to
guard against a mindset that sees nothing but skullduggery in such
associations. The Defense Department has to know what weaponry is
on the market and in the works. It seems sensible to invite
corporate sources to come in and give advice that will allow
military planners to think realistically about possible strategies.
As always when greed and graft are free to develop, however, the
process is and should be inevitably suspect. Its integrity
demands transparency and accountability. But the Bush
administration does not prize these attributes of public life.
Abetted by public fears of more terrorist activity, the military-industrial complex
is moving to new levels of "misplaced
power," to use Eisenhower's phrase.
***
The nation
in the 2004 election may rid itself of Bush's self-serving and inept
leadership. But the conflation of military and corporate power in
Washington would remain after him. His administration simply has
carried a noxious system to a higher level. A new administration
with the best intentions will have a hard time changing the
structural problem. But it could start by valuing transparency and
accountability. It could reverse the ingenious handing over of
Pentagon functions to private corporations, a process proudly
authored by Halliburton's Cheney and implemented by the same man and
his party after taking office in 2001. By revising America's
policies on oil and energy, it could cancel the crony capitalism that
throws Bush 41's Carlyle Group into cahoots with Middle East
despots. It could remove the primary responsibility for American
international policy from the Pentagon and return it to the State
Department.
Even if a
new administration could restore some balance to American international
affairs, it would have to deal with the domestic disasters created by
the ideologically blinkered Bush administration. Phillips
demonstrates that "compassionate conservatism" mainly has been a
deception. Bush wrapped his notion of voluntarism in the trappings
of evangelical responsibility for personal salvation. This allowed
him to ignore public programs aimed at helping the poor and needy.
But his faith-based initiative foundered for lack of funds, just as
his education legislation went unimplemented. He created our
staggering deficit by bulling through tax cuts for the wealthiest
few, leaving no financial room for any sensible social
alternatives.
Beyond the
specific threads of his indictment, Phillips makes one wonder
whether America will ever have a national government that responds
more to the people than to reflexive governmental and corporate
structures that divert and pervert their authority. Perhaps Bush's
excesses have served a good purpose, just as Clinton’s did. They
have brought to the surface like a boil the systemic dysfunctions
building up in federal power since Eisenhower's day. Because of the
single-mindedness with which the Bush people have pushed for goals
unassociated with the people's general will, we know the threat
better.
The
November 2004 election will test how well the people see this
threat. Assuming we pass the test, it will be up to us to challenge
the new leadership to begin the re-democratizing of the American
system of government. To win our trust, it will have to show that
it rejects dynastic ambitions, pseudo-aristocratic pretensions, and
Machiavellian sleight-of-hand in the service of power. It will have
to flood the military-industrial complex with light.
America
is always an unstable work in progress. What work lies ahead,
beyond the Bush mistake!
