User talk:Danielet

It seems to be a ubiquitous Bush Administration excuse for everything that hurts that we're in a war. But, in fact, we are acting as if we are at war with a global system akin to Communism, not Jihadists. The threat to our survival is an"axis of evil," the thesis goes, serving "Islamofascism," to use Frank Gafney's favorite word. Our lone outpost status is invoked by many neocon think-tanks, insisting that so far we lost Europe to "Islamrope" so it is imperative that we and Israel win in the Middle East.

I'm not surprised that President Bush refered to Iraq aplenty in his State of the Union address and sought to deflect despair by pointing to our success in Afghanistan as lodestar to our prospective success in Iraq only if we persevere. I recommend that he pass out the Kool-ade so we too can wash that down, lest we be unable to swallow his Afghan-Iraqi analysis. At the Defense Dept. it is said of military men who spout the Rumsfeld-Cheney line that they "drank the Kool-ade." Surely many did. As one begins to hallucinate one finds one's self thus earning another star before retiring.

A Democrat, today, would be jubilant. Mr. Bush seems to be stuck at a 39% approval rating for months now-- despite his speech-making blitz-- and the sticking point, according to the pollsters, seems to be Iraq. While no one could rejoice at the sad fate of Iraqis, American soldiers and international relations in general as a result of Mr. Bush following his gut-- he now denies that he ever invoked God as his guiding policy voice-- one can take some small comfort in the obvious fact that the American people were not taken in by his word-smiths' efforts to make him seem, "in charge." White House Assistant Dan Bartlett had said on PBS, last month, that the American people expect President Bush to prove that-- his words-- he "can walk and chew gum" at the same time. Apparently, he could not convince more that 39% of us. More interesting, when asked who should lead America in a new direction, only 25% said Mr. Bush but 52% said Congress!

To understand how this came about, though in its last term Congress was notorious for little more that outrageous pork bills and is awaiting anxiously for the Abramoff revelations, we should really take note of how the Bush Administration, led by a self- avowed "war president," handles war. A good insight comes from the court scribe, of all people, Bod Woodard. His two books, "Bush at War" and "Plan of Attack" dubiously place the President in the middle of things, making decisions, but clearly the National Security Council therein seems to fly by the collective seat of its pants as if he were not there to make decisions. We now also have a number of other books from officials that add to the story confirmation of at least my worst nightmares, leading me to rue my past heart and soul support for Mr. Bush.

But, all the deceptions and untruths aside, the one big question the Bush Administration never answered is why did we thin out in Afghanistan without finishing it off and proceeded to Iraq, where we've been stuck in a tar pit, losing blood and money, only to be now preparing to pull out empty-handed?

In the meantime, Afghanistan looks more and more like a place where the Taliban decided to come back, stand and fight, according to TERRORISM MONITOR of the most reliable Jamestown Foundation. And Iraq looks more and more like a place where we may be forced to choose between Iran and alQaeda turning off the lights after we leave.

I would argue that Mr. Bush unashamedly took the policies John Kerry and the Democrats advocated during the 2004 campaign and made them his own. But by then the patient had already long been in the intensive care unit mismanaged. What might have turned a crash into the rocks for Uncle Sam into a soaring flight to success in 2004, in 2006, may just be too little too late. It thus seems that the Bush Administration seeks to recapture public approval by November by simply bringing back of a lot of the troops, period-- mission UN-accomplished.

Back in 2003, I marveled at the yeoman's job the media was doing exposing the current battered condition of the Bush ship of state. What had from the start seemed like a hermetically sealed vessel suddenly sprang leaks at the waterline as middle level apolitic career bureaucrats in government felt honor bound to let the American people know what kind of "experts" are in charge and what they are doing.

But after the 2004 election, Karl Rove decided to spend Mr. Bush's "political capital" playing hardball. Instead of just selectively giving "inside dope" to favorite journalists, as LBJ used to do, Rove threatened them all with loss of access if they do not cooperate. In these days of 24/7 TV news, that's the professional reporter's kiss of death. So the second term saw many leaks unreported. Seymour Hersh, a most prolific digger-upper journalist, recently expressed utter despair at how the stories disappeared from the media though the leaks are running as fast as ever. But there is no need to despair. For, since the leak to British media of utterly embarrassing information-- the "Downing Street Memos"-- about how the Blair Cabinet functions and then British Ambassador to America Meyer's book, the British side of the alliance in Iraq has been running like a fawcet fully open and in print.

I was one of the early young conservatives there when Bill Buckley started Young Americans for Freedom and during the Goldwater Campaign. Together with the Cal Conservatives for Political Action I helped take back the UC Berkeley campus from the New Left in the 1960s. I was also at one time the New Jersey Chairman of YAF. But while there were many young conservative activists and intellectuals back then that I will always admire, I do recall that many were self-serving opportunists who thought that the only way to succeed was to "think outside of the box" and do things the opposition would never think of. Mr. Abramoff and the K Street Project indicate what "thinking outside the box" really means. Corruption, graft and pork in Congress know no party bounds. But what makes the K Street Project unique, it seems, is that it takes the graft and spends it to make a giant edifice, an institutionalized exclusive Republican graft and influence peddling factory. On the other side of the ledger, where one would hope there would be ideas, national institutions and policies that benefit America, Americans and the globalized world, we get only the equivalent of toxic brain damage from overindulging in Kool-ade. Such incompetence I had never seen in US government. If one were to drive a car with such reckless abandon, one would invariably end up arrested for negligent homicide. And yet, though it was THEIR collective sons and daughters that died or were mutilated in Iraq (I won't mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis) the American people as a whole did not face-up to that reckless incompetence until it hit close to home with the assault on America by Hurricane Katrina. That made it obvious that the top doesn't know what's happening at the bottom.

At this point, no one-- no matter how much one might despise Bush and the people around him-- can possibly want an American defeat in Iraq. The cost to mankind, the Iraqis and we Americans is incalculable; such madness as is seen in the Jihad institutionalized suicide-murder and terror as the best and cheapest way to overwhelm America's power. Now things are desperate, somehow we must all contribute to, in some way, finding a way out that does the maximum good for Iraq and world security and the minimum good for the terrorists.

In Mr. Bush's first term, he was desperately seeking advice from academia, professionals and the public. After 9/11, that despair became hysterical; yet, many said: no way, you stole the election, now sink as president. But the Ship of State, for better or worse, is the ship we are all on. It sinks, we sink. That is why Prof. Juan Cole and other academic colleagues in social sciences, some experts on Eastern Europe, sought to form bodies that remove from the president's eyes the veil of ignorance. Alas, by the time their scholars' operation got going, the Bush Administration was already usurped by the Cheney- Rumsfeld axis-of-utterly-incompetence. Misjudgements and deceptions alternated, dragging America down, down, down. At first there was hope in Mr. Bush's second term, for he had locked Cheney in the basement and turned to Condi Rice to lead him out of his blindness. In Iraq, she let loose Amb. Kalilzad, who may yet make the best of a bad situation. Academia should contact her and offer her all the help it can to regain global alliances lost to past mindless hubris.

But the biggest danger now is that Bush might have had a point when, called on to think of how he will be viewed by history, he simply said: who cares, by then we'll all be dead; he thuoght that with time Americans would treat it all as history, and that they find boring. None of us will be dead by this November, hopefully. And, if the Democrats take at least one House of Congress, there is much hope that the public will be treated to numerous investigations that today are suppressed by a Republican majority of the types that set the record straight on things the way they set the record streight on domestic spying-- with silence. We also need to know how many followed Congressman Cunningham's criminal thinking "out of the box" at the expense of our heroes in the field of combat.

I was, am and will remain a Republican. A life as a refugee from Communism taught me how to hope. But I realize that the dream I dared dream of-- Republican control of both the Executive and Congress-- is as close as you can get to totalitarianism, ie. incompetence covered by lies, covered by incompetence, covered by lies....with power maintained by erosion of power from where it ultimately belongs, in the hands of the citizens. If we as a nation are lucky and survive this vicious cycle of incompetence and deception protected by erosion of the citizen's power, one more repeat of such a Bush Era and we will not survive as a free nation. Whether it be Republican or Democrat, we need to raise much higher the bar on the minimal cognitive ability and statesmanship skills required. The Bush Administration cannot be allowed to remain as a lesson unlearned about intellectual and administrative corruption and incompetence. I would hate to leave my American children ignorance as a legacy, even if we are at war.

The REAL problem is that the facts were always out there for us to imbibe. Thus, those who don't know, don't know only because they don't want to know. With a Democrat Congress two things will happen: (1) the foibles and failures of this Administration totally drunk of Kool-ade will be paraded before the voters. (2) The American people will thus have to face up to what was done in their name and at their responsibility. Perhaps then, they might realize that alQaeda came nowhere near at killing American democracy as we came at killing it ourselves.

The Bush Administration and Republican dominance of Congress can only serve as a sort political flu vaccine if we treat it as a history we must all learn in detail. In truth, the Bush mantra-- getting them there so they don't get us here-- was an inappropriate, campaign gimmick that goes with the self-anointed title "war president." In truth, Pogo said it best: we have met the enemy and he is us.

Daniel E. Teodoru