Let's Start to Write the Legacy

Events of the day - a trip to Keystone and a chance to ride the lifts with some fine young men of our armed forces, gives me hope, as does news that even Sugarland, Texas knows a bum steer when they see one. Support of Tom Delay in his home district is now down to twenty percent. It's instructive to remember at this point that Nixon had a twenty-five percent approval rating when he left the White House. And Nixon, his shortcomings aside, was one of the reasons I was, for a time in my life, a Republican. The young soldiers on the lifts were a stark contrast to the corrupt congress and inept President that continues to send them to war to establish a Shiite theocracy in Iraq: The young army MP told me he was looking forward to the 2007 ski season because he'd be in Iraq again next year. The Air Force cadets were everything you could hope for in the future leadership of our country's military service. Gentlemen, you are impressive and this veteran salutes you.

Would that the little men who send you to die had your qualities. I can name few in Washington I'd salute, McCain and Murtha come to mind. These chance encounters gave me pause to reflect on twelve years of Republican supremacy in Washington and what it's done for our country.

We now have more million- and billionaires than ever and they keep getting richer. I got a two percent pay raise last year, the average CEO got twenty. I got twenty-three dollars a month in tax relief from the Bushite tax cuts. How many millions did Bill Gates sock away? The economy is good if you're in the upper percentiles of income. If you're a wage earner, it sucks and that's what our Republican majority can't seem to comprehend. As even Reagan, the inventor of trickle-down economic theory realized, it ain't trickling down.

Laura Bush was in Africa today touting abstinance-only prevention of AIDS to a culture that doesn't even have the token prohibitions on sexual activity we Western cultures profess to have. A result of this half-baked idea is the spread, not the containment, of AIDS as people attempt to preach away the disease. Condoms, an effective deterrant, are downplayed in favor of changing a behavior so basic that even the thread of hellfire hasn't been enough to stop it in our culture. I hardly think it will work in Africa.

We have had an actual debate in the United States of America whether it is right to torture people and to hold them indefinitely without trial. The shining example of democracy and freedom is a laughingstock in the rest of the world. How can we preach human rights when we have secret prisons abroad, approve waterboarding as a "severe interrogation" technique and we hold our own citizens for three and a half years without trial by playing a legal shell game? Our reputation abroad is shot, the only thing that keeps us from paraih status is the multi-trillion dollar military service we posess.

Our energy dependence has increased, largely due to the fact that those profiting from our energy dependence are those who made our energy policy. Despite all evidence that conservation, not production, is more important to our economy, our policy makers insist that conservation is bad business sense. We will eventually drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Some day some congressman owned by some oil baron will manage to get it passed. Detroit will dodge the conservation bullet, we'll destroy an ecologically sensitive area we're already destroying with the emissions from use of the product to be produced from the area. And our energy dependence, as well as our national debt, will deepen.

Pay for Play and the K-Street Project, Republican attempts to make lobbyists a part of the Government, leave Congress's reputation, already bad, in a shambles. And it is not a bipartisan scandal - Democrats receive 25% of lobbying funds and it makes no sense to bribe the minority party in our winner-take-all House of Representatives. The lobbying culture is a Republican invention: Ulysses S. Grant invented the term for those who would wait in the lobby of a Washington hotel for Grant to show up after a day's work for his whiskey. The current culture of corruption is a Republican invention, too. The K-Street project, forcing lobbying firms to hire Republicans to have access to the congressional leadership, is completely theirs. It will be a long time before Congress regains any semblance of honor.

We no longer respect the sovereignty of other nations, evidenced by a bombing raid into our nominal ally Pakistan this weekend. This will come back to haunt us when we really need, I mean really need, help from some of these. I'm not looking forward to the day when we have to invade Iran - the drums are starting to beat, people. We're hearing the same rhetoric we heard in the run-up to Iraq but this time the WMD program is real. Who will back us? Where will we base troops? If Iraq tells us to get out, will we, knowing the bases there would be vital in any military action against Iran? I rather doubt we would leave knowing that our departure may hasten the development of a middle-eastern nuclear power that isn't and doesn't like Israel. Of course, we still have Afghanistan....

Hopefully, this time next year, we will be actually writing a legacy of Republican rule in Washington. The Presidency has become such a mess that even his own party is mentioning, however cautiously, impeachment. I'm not in favor of it: President Cheney would be just as neocon as Bush but Cheney's smart where Bush is a frat-boy son of powerful and competent men. A Democratic congress would finally check the frat-boy's rush to near-imperial power and probably put a damper on his self-professed disdain for the Constitution and the law of the land.