The Wright Angle
June 27, 2005

Bush blowhards beginning to bail

By Scott Wright

I would like to share with you all a significant little something I read on the Internet last week.

This direct quote from a magazine article I stumbled across is a real humdinger, I think: “Life has gotten difficult for Americans with incomes below the middle level of around $45,000 per year … high gasoline prices are hitting the wallets of workers and moms who shuttle their kids to school, soccer games and other activities … rising health care costs are hurting those with insurance and squeezing the uninsured … But this is an administration with no mechanism for developing coherent plans to solve these problems.”

Now I know what you're thinking, which is that this columnist probably got that little tidbit from some left-leaning, ultra-liberal publication with an axe to grind against the feeble-minded Bush administration. Wrong, wrong, wrong and right (about the feeble-mindedness). The quote above came straight out of the latest issue of “The Weekly Standard,” the right-wing conservative crap-tacular which is executive edited by none other than Fox News Channel mouthpiece Fred Barnes.

Yep, after weeks of eroding support from legislators in his own party on issues ranging from the Terri Schiavo case to the ridiculous nomination of the John Bolton as United Nations ambassador to the war in Iraq, President Bush's ignorance on all levels -- from his lack of ability to tell the truth, run a war or generally admit he's made more errors than a monkey taking a math test -- has finally begun to chip away at the conscience of even the blinded, diehard blowhards he has counted on to confuse and confound the masses for, lo, these many years.

The article, written by Irwin M. Stelzer on June 21, continued: “The administration knows gasoline prices are a problem, but the energy bill the president has been pushing contains neither an immediate nor long-term solution. And the health care costs that are bedeviling most voters are largely ignored by a president who has chosen to spend his political capital on his plan to reform the Social Security system, even though most Americans are quite content with the existing system.”

Well, well. It's about time someone on the Republican side of the aisle admitted what the other half of us has known for years. Namely, that George W. Bush has just about run the wheels right off this little red wagon, with all of us in it. Typically, the article goes on to divert the blame to others in the administration besides the president, but the facts are there in black and white, and totally indisputable: the people running this country are clueless.

Stelzer didn't bother to mention Iraq, though, which we all know is a total disaster. So let's touch on that a little bit here, shall we?

Last week at a Senate hearing in Washington, skeptical lawmakers on both sides of the aisle heard another unconvincing string of half-truths and overly-optimistic assessments of the debacle currently underway in Iraq from defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The hearing was called after a bipartisan group of House members last week asked the administration to establish a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.

“Public support in my state is turning,” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, S.C., during the day-long hearing. Sen. John McCain, Ariz., said he is “very worried” about the impact of the war on military recruiting.

Apparently, it's worrying Rumsfeld, too, because last week the Pentagon began working with a private firm to establish a nationwide database to keep track of every single 16-, 17- and 18-year-old high school and college student in the country “to help the military identify potential recruits in a time of dwindling enlistment in some branches” of the U.S. armed forces, according to the Washington Post. The newspaper also reported that the database will include personal information such as birthdates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects students are studying.

Say hello to Big Brother, kids. As is typical of the Bush administration, federal laws against doing anything of this particular sort were blatantly bypassed.

It's sort of an ironic situation, really, since the military wouldn't have such an overwhelming deficiency of recruits in the first place if their dim-witted commander-in-chief hadn't lied his way into the Iraq war, sent 150,000 ill-equipped American troops to fight it, failed to prepare adequately for the aftermath of it, and refused to accept the responsibility for all of the above.

Case in point: the Bush administration has been claiming for months that the car bombings we see and read about every day are the last gasps of a dying insurgency. Last month on CNN, Vice President Dick Cheney actually said, on the record, that the bad guys are in their “last throes.” But last week at the Senate hearing, Gen. John Abizaid -- who must not have gotten his “duck and deceive” memo from Rumsfeld -- flat-out confirmed what many people have known about Cheney for some time. Namely, that he's either a bald-faced liar or, like his boss, he's completely and utterly detached from reality.

“There are more foreign fighters coming into Iraq than there were six months ago,” said Abizaid.

How's this for totally detached from reality: Cheney stood behind his “last throes” comment in a follow-up interview on CNN last week. Unbelievable.

It is this ability by the administration to look directly into a camera and tell the exact opposite of what everyone knows and understands to be the truth that should have been enraging Americans on both sides of the political aisle for over two years and is apparently, at long last, finally beginning to do so.

Remember now, just because someone is a liberal doesn't mean he isn't supportive of the troops, or that he hopes the terrorists win. I can assure you, for me personally, at least, that that is not the case. But, good grief, this president doesn't have a clue what he's doing and he's not even trying to hide it. And the fact that Bush is so inept is something that even the most staunch conservatives are finally beginning to get just as angry about as us liberals. Finally! I won't be surprised if this display of disappointment from fellow Republicans and the blind mice in the conservative corners of the national media continues and even intensifies in the months ahead, either, since Bush has shown no proclivity either to admit his errors or attempt to correct any of them.

Faced with the mounting evidence of so many Bush blunders on so many vitally important issues, conservatives are absolutely right to be upset with the president these days, even if it has taken them awhile to come around. Good grief, but he's got to be a major embarrassment, at this point, to his party and every last American who wasted their vote on him.
 

Scott Wright is a member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and an award-winning member of the Society of Professional Journalists. He is a native of Cherokee County.