1,001 Reasons Not To Vote For Bush (Vol. 101)
1,001. Because George W. Bush and his administration have established over the last four years that they are blind and deaf to any opinions, any situations, any facts that contradict their preconceptions.
Maybe it's a religious thing -- the zeal of the true believer. Maybe it's a defense mechanism -- if you tune out the naysayers, you bolster your self-confidence. Maybe it's something more nefarious. But from compiling this list over the last few months, this is what I've learned: Bush and his cronies just don't want to hear anything that doesn't agree with them.
It's evident on the campaign trail, where protesters -- sometimes defined as people wearing anti-Bush T-shirts -- are kept apart at Bush rallies and not infrequently arrested. It's evident in Bush's domestic agenda: He's managed to ignore the threat of global warming, which a scientific consensus has concluded is a growing danger. It's evident in Iraq, where Bush and Cheney and the crew might actually have believed what they said publicly: that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators rather than conquerors, that the invasion would be speedy and efficient, that the mission really would be accomplished in a matter of weeks.
But perhaps nowhere was this Bush doctrine more tragically in evidence than on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
Bush and Cheney like to warn that John Kerry is living in a Sept. 10 world. They're wrong, not surprisingly. But it goes deeper than that. The people who lived in a Sept. 10 world were, almost by definition, Bush and Cheney. And Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and the whole gang.
When the Bush administration came into Washington, departing Clinton officials made a point of telling them about the dangers the nation would face from a new kind of enemy, one that isn't based in a state, one that has no tangible boundaries. They warned the Bushies specifically about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. They might as well have been telling Bush about the benefits of solar energy over oil. Bush and his crew weren't listening. It didn't fit the paradigm, so in their minds, it didn't exist.
It's not that Bush is stupid. He's an astonishingly poor speaker, and he certainly has been prone to say the opposite of what he's supposed to say, particularly during the campaign. But the bigger problem is exactly what he's touting as his greatest strength: his conviction that his course is the right one. Certitude is great, but being sure you're right when you're actually wrong carries only one certainty: disaster.
Which has been pretty obvious for some time.
I'm not a student of political science. I started compiling this list as a way of getting involved in the election to a limited extent, and as a way to crack some "Is our children learning?" jokes. But as I chronicled the myriad flaws and errors and shames of George W. Bush and his administration, the unmistakable pattern of willful self-deception emerged.
Would John Kerry be any different? There's no way to know for sure, but I'm reasonably certain he would. For one thing, he sees nuance. Just as Al Gore was slimed in the 2000 campaign for being intelligent, Kerry is getting slimed for being perceptive. (One of the things Republicans do well is run nasty campaigns, although this year's wolf commercial might indicate their streak is nearing an end). But perceiving subtlety and nuance is not a bad thing. Kerry is certainly up to the job of being president, but more importantly, the current president is not.
More than 100,000 Iraqis and more than 1,100 U.S. service people have been killed in the Iraq war. (You remember the Iraq war. It's the one where "major combat operations" ended in the spring of 2003, as proclaimed by a president who stood beneath a banner reading "Mission Accomplished.") If you've read all 1,001 reasons and you still really want to vote for Bush, there isn't much I can say that's likely to change your mind. But think about all those lives lost in this military campaign, and think about why we went there in the first place. Not the rhetorical reasons mouthed by Bush and Cheney and Rice and Powell, but actual reasons to take lives and lose lives in Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction? Nope. Imminent threat? Uh-uh. Any sort of threat at all? Not so much. Keeping the weapons that Saddam didn't actually have out of the hands of terrorists Saddam wasn't actually in contact with? If that's enough of a reason for you, there's a job waiting for you in the Pentagon public-relations department.
Bush has been a failure in foreign relations, in protecting the environment, in job creation, in fiscal restraint, and in being, as he liked to say, "a uniter, not a divider." These are not my opinions. These are facts. Foreign relations: By alienating the UN and most of its members, Bush has virtually isolated the United States. The environment: He started with a repeal of Clinton administration restrictions on arsenic levels in water and continued through his bogus "Healthy Forest" and "Clean Skies" initiatives that produced effects diametrically opposite to their names. Job creation: No president since Herbert Hoover has presided over a net loss of jobs. Until Bush. Fiscal restraint: That tax-and-spend liberal Clinton left office with a federal budget surplus. Bush, through war spending and amazingly ill-timed tax cuts, turned that into the steepest deficits in U.S. history. And do I really need to spell out how Bush's four-year term has resulted in the most polarized electorate in memory?
If you're happy with the way things are -- with the color-coded death threats, and the alternating "wanted dead or alive"/"I don't think about him" approach to terrorist murderers, and the reflexive inability to acknowledge, let alone heed, alternative points of view -- then by all means, vote for Bush, or better yet, stay the hell home on Tuesday. Otherwise, come out to the polls on Election Day and help John Kerry take this nation back from the oligarchy that has controlled it for the last four years.

- posted by Boots @ 10/31/2004 09:24:00 PM