There are so many ways the utter dysfunction of the White House is becoming more obvious. Let me point to the way the Republicans are destroying fifty years of U.S. investment in foreign policy. Then I will explain the underlying problem.
The White House has been abrogating long-term agreements, attempting to bulldoze allies into support of military adventures, or ignoring real needs of our allies because there is no local American political advantage to working with allies to solve problems. They are destroying a half-century of investment in foreign policy efforts and alliances - based on what? A new theory of American foreign policy?
No, it's not a "new theory." of foreign policy. It is traditional reactionary conservative political ideology which is being implemented haphazardly by a President who sees international relations in black-and-white terms and makes decisions by "intuition" rather than rational analysis.
Part of the problem is his lack of vision. The rest is his non-analytical “intuitive” decision style, of which he is quite proud. Having once made one of his intuitive decisions, he then never revisits it. Revisiting a decision leads to the appearance of lack of certainty. It shows weakness and lack of firmness. For much the same reason, Bush is averse to getting bad news. New but contradictory facts might cause him to revisit an already settled decision. Never show uncertainty. That is worse than being wrong. Other than that, there IS no theory in foreign policy decisions out of this White House, and the decisions which are made are designed to satisfy American Republican voters to the exclusion of all others who might be effected..
The result is a set of foreign policy and military decisions designed to please his American political conservative base. His base consists largely of people who are ignorant of what goes on outside the U.S. and are inherently afraid of foreigners and those who are “different”. If the White House feeds his base a set of public relations lines that will assuage their fears, they loyally vote Republican in the next election. Thus we get a White House that carefully identifies fictional strawmen enemies in black-and-white terms to cause his base to become more afraid, and then he offers to deal with those irrational crazies he just described by using bombast and bombs. Any American or foreign nation that does not buy into this pattern of manipulation is ignored and demonized.
The purpose of this behavior is very simple. The White House is entirely focused on winning that next election. Everything else is secondary to winning that next election and to defending the White House from the many people who recognize the manipulitiveness, ignorance and idiocy when we see it.
The Presidents' method of decision-making, intuition, may be a good way to read the mood of the selected segments of the electorate. It is incompetent governance. There is no measurement of the true results of such intuitive decisions, since the sole justification of every decision and action is winning the next election by any small margin. Since the only indicator of failure is losing an election, any facts that threaten the loss of an election can be dealt with as public relations or political problems. The lies from the Swift Boat veterans and the smear of Joe Wilson's wife are examples of how the White House deals with inconvenient facts. Truth has become subordinate to public relations and threats.
Anything happening outside the U.S. is merely the action of a set of shadow puppets which can be used to influence the American elections. America is "The Superpower", so only American actions matter. Foreign relations, even war, are of no real importance to the White House and Republican leadership beyond providing a series of threats that cause the voting public to react to bombast, jingoism and isolationism by voting Republican.
Labor and the average American are similar shadow puppets, useful as long as they can be exploited to support the "Government-Industrial Complex" which has expanded from a mere Military-Industrial Complex. The political activities of the Republican Party (a remarkably unified national organization) are designed to radicalize and divide the public into Republican voters, the wealthy, Republican politicians and captains of industry who fund their political activities on the one side and on the other side a disorganized mass of mostly non-voting people who the wealthy and captains of industry are allowed to fleece to replace the funds they give the Republican politicians. An example here is the bankruptcy bill which funnel money to the banks and credit card companies. Another is the Medicare pharmaceutical bill that does not allow the government to negotiate prices with drug companies.
And if that doesn't scare the socks off of you, then you just haven't been watching what has happened, or you can't believe what you have seen.
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