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02/15/2005: Oh...The Party Of The Five-Year-Olds' Continues:
The Bush Administration is still in the First Month of its Fifth Year and is acting just as any Five-Year-Old would.
It began on inauguration day with the $$40+ Million bash for the Bushies...plus sticking it to D.C. residents to be the grown-ups and both pay for and supervise this Five-Year-Old's mess making...to the tune of 11-15 million dollars worth of much needed Homeland Security money.
Just like every Five-Year-Old I know.
This NY Times editorial demonstrates how juvenile and dangerously close the Bushies are to causing a "World Temper Tantrum" of epic proportions in the Global Economy: Importance of Being Earnest.
It states in part:"Lately, Mr. Bush has been talking the deficit reduction talk, but there's no sign that he is willing to walk the walk. In his 2006 budget, he pledges to slash spending, but largely in areas that would have only a small impact on the deficit and where cuts would be politically difficult, not to mention cruel, such as food stamps, veterans' medical care, child care and low-income housing. Meanwhile, he is pounding the table for more deficit-bloating measures - making his first-term tax cuts permanent, at a 10-year cost of as much as $2.1 trillion; putting into effect two high-income tax breaks that were enacted in 2001 but have been on hold, at a 10-year cost of $115 billion; and introducing new tax incentives to allow high earners to shift even more cash into tax shelters, at a cost that would ultimately work out to more than $30 billion a year when investors cashed in their accounts tax-free.
Just like every Five-Year-Old I know.
Bush should have to "eat his Deficit Spinach" with the rest of us Grown-ups at the table...he is after all Five-Years-Old this month.
Unfortunately, Bush is Just like every Five-Year-Old I know.
To read more "kevetching" that I wrote bout this last fall...still applies today...
Click on the "More" button for : The "Refuses to eat their Spinach Crowd"
Some columnists have been writing accusations that the election defeat is about "liberal, over-educated elite's" against a myth of "bigoted red-necks" ala Charles Krauthammer's views.
On some levels I agree with the idea that it's not correctly about "Bigoted ignorant red-necks" as the difference between who supported Bush and the supposed "liberal, over-educated elitist's" who did not.
I'd like to try a different analogy instead. I kinda view it this way: It's like the "refuses to eat his spinach" crowd versus the "taking your medicine...no matter how horrible it tastes...because it's good for you" group. The first group isn't ignorant of the issues critical to our country, like deficits growing, job loss, lack of healthcare, no WMD's in Iraq, etc. but its more like they are refusing to "eat their spinach" (i.e. to have made the hard decision to hold the Bush administration accountable for the various and egregious errors of the past four years.) That, much like the willful intractable and stubborn leader of ours...no amount of proof that these things needed to be taken into account and digested for adding to the decision making process was going to sway them. The more facts that emerged absolutely crying for this accountability...the more they refused to acknowledge them as either important or "enough" to form the basis of reconsideration of the choice they were making. They simply refuse to eat that spinach..and no one can make them...so there!
Also...wasn't it Bush Sr. who banned broccoli from the menu on Air Force One causing all that flap of "setting a bad example to the children." Like Father...like Son, Bush II refuses his vegetables...but his father limited this directive to the literal form of a crop...while the son has transformed this principle to encompass his entire policy consequences: foreign and domestic.
(I'd also like to point out something here...before I finish this analogy...which have been the multiple "supporter editorials" --Tribune included -- that offered good "advice" about Bush should approach his next four years in "reaching out to the other side," "including more voices of opposition and dissent," "keeping those who speak 'truth to power,'" "in avoiding politically motivated 'retribution' for opposition," "in rewarding competence..not just loyalty." None of these things is coming true, not was it even likely in re-electing this man to see him remodel himself after this kind of wish-list of attributes he's never shown nor would he care about once he's consolidated his re-reins of power. To all those "hopefuls" who thought they'd get anything less than a hard, over turn to the loyalists and far-far- far right wingers...they were what I call "Daydreaming in Technicolor.")
To finish my analogy, is the "take your medicine" crowd, who saw the disasters looming from four more years of economic and environmental mismanagement, promoting loyalty over competency, skewing the facts, sugar-coating the awful truth, and other public and governmental outrages and (to some degree) felt that Kerry...not perhaps a picture-perfect candidate, not spouting the picture perfect message, maybe a little rough-around the edges on some issues was "taking our medicine" NOW. An attempt to fix the problems we face both here and around the world to avoid the severe penalties to be faced from continuing the Bush Doctrinaire path to Foreign policy and Homeland governing. These folks, myself included, viewed it better to take our lumps now and correct the Ship of State than face the nasty twin bugs of a national flu-like aches, pains, chills and fever as our economy upends and the constipation of being bottled up in Iraq with no way out until we succumb to the impaction of forces aligned against there.
Finally, this whole "Bush Success" story of some future legacy is not yet written or set in stone. It's not clear that he's either achieved some great goals or will be favorably exalted as the great master of some policy plans based on the final outcome and methods to get there. Maybe, as Bush had noted, "We'll all be dead by then," but maybe not when this "history" is written and recorded for posterity.
Karen on 02.15.05 @ 03:42 AM CST
