Jane Smiley Says it for Me!

I have been saying for quite sometime that I am tired of so called “Conservatives and Republicans’ calling out this Administration. Mostly I have been tired and perturbed because it has only been of late. Where were these guys over the last five years when this administration was trashing our foreign and domestic policy? You can see call outs here and here.

Where were these “Conservatives and Republicans” when Bernie Kerik was nominated to head up Homeland Security? Didn’t that move by this administration wake them up!?! Oh, yeah, this crowd doesn’t really care about Homeland Security so it fit in to their scheme of things.

So, once again, I am thrilled to see someone that I revere who writes far more eloquently than I could on the same subject.

Here is what Jane Smiley, another horse fanatic, posts about the newly found converts who find this Bush Administration to be wholly unacceptable and gives them a little heads up:

Bruce Bartlett, The Cato Institute, Andrew Sullivan, George Packer, William F. Buckley, Sandra Day O'Connor, Republican voters in Indiana and all the rest of you newly-minted dissenters from Bush's faith-based reality seem, right now, to be glorying in your outrage, which is always a pleasure and feels, at the time, as if it is having an effect, but those of us who have been anti-Bush from day 1 (defined as the day after the stolen 2000 election) have a few pointers for you that should make your transition more realistic.

1. Bush doesn't know you disagree with him. Nothing about you makes you of interest to George W. Bush once you no longer agree with and support him. No degree of relationship (father, mother, etc.), no longstanding friendly intercourse (Jack Abramoff), no degree of expertise (Brent Scowcroft), no essential importance (Tony Blair, American voters) makes any difference. There is nothing you have to
offer that makes Bush want to know you once you have come to disagree with him. Your opinions and feelings now exist in a world entirely external to the mind of George W. Bush. You are now just one of those "polls" that he pays no attention to. When you were on his side, you thought that showed "integrity" on his part. It doesn't. It shows an absolute inability to learn from experience.

2. Bush doesn't care whether you disagree with him. As a man who has dispensed with the reality-based world, and is entirely protected by his handlers from feeling the effects of that world, he is indifferent to what you now think is real. Is the Iraq war a failure and a quagmire? Bush doesn't care. Is global warming beginning to affect us right now? So what. Have all of his policies with regard to Iran been misguided and counter-productive? He never thinks about it. You know that Katrina tape in which Bush never asked a question? It doesn't matter how much you know or how passionately you feel or, most importantly, what degree of disintegration you see around you, he's not going to ask you a question. You and your ideas are dead to him. You cannot change his mind. Nine percent of polled Americans would agree with attacking Iran right now. To George Bush, that will be a mandate, if and when he feels like doing it, because...

3. Bush does what he feels like doing and he deeply resents being told, even politely, that he ought to do anything else. This is called a "sense of entitlement". Bush is a man who has never been anywhere and never done anything, and yet he has been flattered and cajoled into being president of the United States through his connections, all of whom thought they could use him for their own purposes. He has a surface charm that appeals to a certain type of American man, and he has used that charm to claim all sorts of perks, and then to fail at everything he has ever done. He did not complete his flight training, he failed at oil investing, he was a front man and a glad-hander as a baseball owner. As the Governor of Texas, he originated one educational program that turned out to be a debacle; as the President of the US, his policies have constituted one screw-up after another. You have stuck with him through all of this, made excuses for him, bailed him out. From his point of view, he is perfectly entitled by his own experience to a sense of entitlement. Why would he ever feel the need to reciprocate? He's never had to before this.

4. President Bush is your creation. When the US Supreme Court humiliated itself in 2000 by handing the presidency to Bush even though two of the justices (Scalia and Thomas) had open conflicts of interest, you did not object. When the Bush administration adopted an "Anything but Clinton" policy that resulted in ignoring and dismissing all warnings of possible terrorist attacks on US soil, you went along with and made excuses for Bush. When the Bush administration allowed the corrupt Enron corporation to swindle California ratepayers and taxpayers in a last ditch effort to balance their books in 2001, you laughed at the Californians and ignored the links between Enron and the administration. When it was evident that the evidence for the war in Iraq was cooked and that State Department experts on the Middle East were not behind the war and so it was going to be run as an exercise in incompetence, you continued to attack those who were against the war in vicious terms and to defend policies that simply could not work. On intelligent design, global warming, doctoring of scientific results to reflect ideology, corporate tax giveaways, the K Street project, the illegal redistricting of Texas, torture at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, the Terry Schiavo fiasco, and the cronyism that led to the destruction of New Orleans you have failed to speak out with integrity or honesty, preferring power to truth at every turn. Bush does what he wants because you have let him.

5. Tyranny is your creation. What we have today is the natural and inevitable outcome of ideas and policies you have promoted for the last generation. I once knew a guy who was still a Marxist in 1980. Whenever I asked him why Communism had failed in Russia and China, he said "Mistakes were made". He could not believe that Marxism itself was at fault, just as you cannot believe that the ideology of the unregulated free market has created the world we live in today. You are tempted to say: "Mistakes have been made", but in fact, psychologically and sociologically, no mistakes have been made. The unregulated free market has operated to produce a government in its own image. In an unregulated free market, for example, cheating is merely another sort of advantage that, supposedly, market forces might eventually "shake out" of the system. Of course, anyone with common sense understands that cheaters do damage that sometimes cannot be repaired before they are "shaken out", but according to the principles of the unregulated free market, the victims of that sort of damage are just out of luck and the damage that happens to them is just a sort of "culling". It is no accident that our government is full of cheaters--they learned how to profit from cheating when they were working in corporations that were using bribes, perks, and secret connections to cheat their customers of good products, their neighbors of healthy environmental conditions, their workers of workplace safety and decent paychecks. It was only when the corporations began cheating their shareholders that any of you squealed, but you should know from your own experience that the unregulated free market as a "level playing field" was the biggest laugh of the 20th century. No successful company in the history of capitalism has ever favored open competition. When you folks pretended, in the eighties, that you weren't using the ideology of the free market to cover your own manipulations of the playing field to your own advantage, you may have suckered yourselves, and even lots of American workers, but observers of capitalism since Adam Smith could have told you it wasn't going to work.

And then there was the way you used racism and religious intolerance to gain and hold onto power. Nixon was cynical about it--taking the party of Lincoln and reaching out to disaffected southern racists, drumming up a backlash against the Civil Rights movement for the sake of votes, but none of you has been any less vicious. Racism might have died an unlamented death in this country, but you kept it alive with phrases like "welfare queen" and your resistance to affirmative action and taxation for programs to help people in our country with nothing, or very little. You opted not to take the moral high ground and recognize that the whole nation would be better off without racism, but rather to increase class divisions and racial divisions for the sake of your own comfort, pleasure, and profit. You have used religion in exactly the same way. Instead of strongly defending the constitutional separation of church and state, you have encouraged radical fundamentalist sects to believe that they can take power in the US and mold our secular government to their own image, and get rich doing it. The US could have become a moderating force in what seems now to be an inevitable battle among the three monotheistic Abrahamic religions, but you have made that impossible by flattering and empowering our own violent and intolerant Christian right.

You have created an imperium, heedless of the most basic wisdom of the Founding Fathers--that at the very least, no man is competent enough or far-seeing enough to rule imperially. Checks and balances were instituted by Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, and the rest of them not because of some abstract distrust of power, but because they had witnessed the screw-ups and idiocies of unchecked power. You yourselves have demonstrated the failures of unchecked power--in an effort to achieve it, you have repeatedly contravened the expressed wishes of most Americans, who favor a moderate foreign policy, reasonable domestic programs, a goverrnment that works, environmental preservation, women's rights to contraception, abortion, and a level playing field. Somehow you thought you could mold the imperium to reflect your wishes, but guess what--that's what an imperium is--one man rule. If you fear the madness of King George, you have no recourse if you've given up the checks and balances that you inherited and that were meant to protect you.

Your ideas and your policies have promoted selfishness, greed, short-term solutions, bullying, and pain for others. You have looked in the faces of children and denied the existence of a "common good". You have disdained and denied the idea of "altruism". At one time, our bureaucracy was full of people who had gone into government service or scientific research for altruistic reasons--I knew, because I knew some of them. You have driven them out and replaced them with vindictive ignoramuses. You have lied over and over about your motives, for example, making laws that hurt people and calling it "originalist interpretations of the Constitution" (conveniently ignoring the Ninth Amendment). You have increased the powers of corporations at the expense of every other sector in the nation and actively defied any sort of regulation that would require these corporations to treat our world with care and respect. You have made economic growth your deity, and in doing so, you have accelerated the power of the corporations to destroy the atmosphere, the oceans, the ice caps, the rainforests, and the climate. You have produced CEOs in charge of lots of resources and lots of people who have no more sense of reciprocity or connection or responsibility than George W. Bush.

Now you are fleeing him, but it's only because he's got the earmarks of a loser. Your problem is that you don't know why he's losing. You think he's made mistakes. But no. He's losing because the ideas that you taught him and demonstrated for him are bad ideas, self-destructive ideas, and even suicidal ideas. And they are immoral ideas. You should be ashamed of yourselves because not only have your ideas not worked to make the world a better place, they were inhumane and cruel to begin with, and they have served to cultivate and excuse the inhumane and cruel character traits of those who profess them.

6. As Bad as Bush is, Cheney is Worse.

So, six years ago where were these shrieking and shocked critics? Why they were cheering this administration on in everything they did and backed their efforts to divide the electorate, start an illegal war, destroy the economy and the constitution.

Maybe I am being too harsh and they were merely afraid like so many others of dissenting and being labeled treasonous.

Not everyone however was afraid to be called a traitor and call this administration out.

Calling Frank Rich from behind the wall in December 2001:

Confessions of a Traitor

By FRANK RICH (NYT) 1524 words
Published: December 8, 2001

It's no longer just politically incorrect to criticize George W. Bush or anyone in his administration these days -- now it's treason.

John Ashcroft, testifying before the Senate on Thursday, declared that those who challenge his wisdom ''only aid terrorists'' and will ''give ammunition to America's enemies.'' Tough words. They make you wonder what the guy who's charged with helping us whip Al Qaeda is afraid of. The only prominent traitors in sight are the usual civil-liberties watchdogs and a milque-toast senator or two barely known beyond the Beltway and their own constituencies. Polls find the public squarely on the attorney general's side, and even the few pundits who knock him are ridiculed by their journalistic colleagues as hysterics so busy fussing about civil liberties that they forget ''there's a war going on.''

Well, with the smell of victory over the Taliban crowding out the scent of mass murder from the World Trade Center, the Ashcroft defenders have half a point: some people are indeed forgetting that a war is still going on. But it is not those questioning the administration who are slipping into this amnesia so much as those who rubber stamp its every whim.

While I wouldn't dare call it treason, it hardly serves the country to look the other way when the Ashcroft-Ridge-Thompson-Mineta team proves as inept at home as the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Powell-Rice team has proved adept abroad. In the Afghan aftermath, the home front is just as likely to be the next theater of war as Somalia or Iraq. Giving a free pass to Mr. Ashcroft and the other slackers in the Bush administration isn't patriotism -- it's complacency, which sometimes comes with a stiff price.

Just how deep that complacency runs could be seen on Monday, when Tom Ridge issued the administration's third urgent announcement to date of a heightened terror alert. Why even bother? His vague doomsday warning didn't lead every newscast and didn't rouse the public or even law enforcement. On ABC, John Miller reported that the three F.B.I. field offices he canvassed had neither been advised of the threat nor ''told to batten down the hatches any more than they were.'' What's that about? Under Mr. Ashcroft's dictum, asking such follow-up questions is aiding and abetting the enemy. In any event, no one did.

Surely it's also treason to indulge in blunt talk about airline security. Norman Mineta, the transportation secretary, waited only one week after President Bush signed the security bill to abandon all hope of meeting its 60-day deadline for screening checked baggage for explosives. Nor did he call for any stopgap measures to help in the meantime (like enlisting the cosmetically deployed airport national guardsmen to do at least some such screening). Give Mr. Mineta credit for candor, but he might as well have just painted a big target on the back of the nation's commercial airline system as we segue from Ramadan into Christmas. Of course it would be un-American to say so.

I asked Allan Gerson, the George Washington University professor who co-wrote the new and definitive book on Pan Am Flight 103, ''The Price of Terror,'' if our approach to airline security is still preposterous all these weeks after Sept. 11. His answer: ''It's preposterous that we're stupid enough to fly. It's sick.'' On the vast majority of America's domestic flights, he noted, a suitcase containing a bomb (perhaps a bomb planted in an innocent passenger's bag while it lingered at a hotel's bell desk) can be checked curbside with little fear of detection as long as you give the correct answer to the skycap's two security questions while handing over a tip. Paul Hudson, executive director of the Aviation Consumer Action Project, adds that even when the new law goes into effect (or is purported to go into effect), it polices only the country's airlines, not the 240,000 private, charter and corporate planes that terrorists can turn into missiles.

As for the screening of passengers, Mr. Mineta proudly said in answer to a question from Steve Kroft on ''60 Minutes'' last Sunday that he wanted to give the same level of scrutiny to a 70-year-old white woman from Vero Beach as he would to a young Muslim man from Jersey City. (And based on my own air security experiences, he's getting what he wants.) To use Mr. Gerson's language, it's sick that amid a Justice Department crackdown that indiscriminately (and often pointlessly) rounds up young men for questioning on the basis of their ethnicity, the administration is not practicing such profiling at the venue where the strongest case can be made for it -- the airports where 19 hijackers jump-started their crime. Such inconsistency of law enforcement is beyond the Keystone Kops -- it's absurdity worthy of the Marx Brothers.

That would make our attorney general the bumbling Chico of the outfit. But don't count me among those who quake that Mr. Ashcroft is shredding the Constitution. He does respect some rights, after all, like that of illegal immigrants and terrorists to buy guns in the U.S. without fear of government intrusion. And he just doesn't seem clever enough to undo the Bill of Rights, even with the president's backing. You have to have more command of the law than he does to subvert it.

Mr. Ashcroft said that he wouldn't release the names of the hundreds of people he's detained since Sept. 11 because the law forbade it, even though, as his own deputy later pointed out, the detainees have the right to publicize their names on their own through their family or counsel. His other excuse for keeping the names secret was to prevent Al Qaeda from learning if any of its operatives might be locked up, as if our enemy were not cunning enough to figure out on its own which members he might have apprehended (if any). Then, when he couldn't take the heat, he released some of the names anyway. Mr. Ashcroft doesn't even have the courage of his own wrong convictions.

What's more chilling than the potential threats to civil liberties posed by the emergency powers he is grabbing on behalf of the president are the immediate practical threats these quick-fix legal schemes pose to the war effort. The mere prospect of military tribunals is already hobbling our battle against Al Qaeda. Spain, which, unlike Mr. Ashcroft, has actually charged men said to have helped plan the Sept. 11 attacks, is balking at extraditing them to the U.S. if a military trial is in store. Floyd Abrams, the constitutional lawyer, says this could have a ''multiplying effect'' as other European Union countries with similarly valuable Al Qaeda quarry, like Germany and Britain, follow Spain's example, whether because of their aversion to military tribunals or to capital punishment.

While we bog down in negotiating these roadblocks, our lack of easy access to crucial suspects could slow our intelligence gathering. Meanwhile, says Mr. Abrams, ''the practical effect could well be that we may not be able to try the people we want to try the most, and the countries that do try them could lose the case.''

Mr. Ashcroft's detentions and roundups may backfire as well. Eight former F.B.I. officials, including a former director, William Webster, went on the record to The Washington Post to criticize the blanket arrests -- not because they compromise the Bill of Rights but because they defy law-enforcement common sense. By nabbing possible terrorists prematurely, the government loses the ability to track them as they implicate the rest of their cells. The F.B.I. veterans also scoffed at the attorney general's attempted 5,000 interviews of Middle Eastern men. Kenneth Walton, who established the bureau's first Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, said: ''It's the Perry Mason school of law enforcement, where you get them in there and they confess. . . . It is ridiculous.'' Already early reports tell us that most of the invited interviewees aren't turning up anyway, and that those who do need only reply by rote to yes or no questions from a four-page script.

The attorney general keeps boasting that he is winning the war on terrorism at home and keeping us safe. But he provides no evidence to support his claim, even as there's much evidence that he's antagonizing his own troops (the F.B.I., local police departments) and wasting their finite time and resources on wild goose chases that have pumped up arrest numbers without yielding many (or any) terrorists.

If questioning our leaders' competence at a time of war is treason, take me to the nearest military tribunal. But the one thing we learned on that Tuesday morning, I had thought, is that it's better to raise these questions today than the morning after.

And thanks to all the other traitors out there who have raised their voices and lead the cacophony and charge against this the “Worst President and Administration Ever.”

I remember being shocked in 1972 when the American Public re-elected Nixon because I knew what was coming. I was likewise shocked when in 2004 the American Public elected George W. Bush and I knew then what was coming would be worse than what unfolded in the 70’s.

Hell, I knew what was coming down the road on December 12, 2000.

Sometimes I hate being right.