Contrary to the rather childish conservative argument that all the criticism of Bush is instigated by a group of "Bush-haters" who are out to get him no matter what he does, there is a really good basis for believing that Bush and the conservatives are stealing the dream of an America which really was, in many ways, unique and special in the world. Glenn Greenwald started discussing this yesterday and continues today. Here is a key part of his post from today:
So much of the intensity and anger driving the criticisms of the Bush presidency -- certainly my own, and much of what I read (as exemplified above) -- is grounded in a fervent belief in American political values, its political principles and its constitutional framework. The anger comes not from a belief that the U.S. is an evil and corrupt entity, but from the opposite view. It comes from witnessing the all-out assault on these vaunted political principles and values and the complete corruption, close to the destruction, of our country's national character that has made the U.S. such an important and admired presence in the world for so long.I find the secrecy and willingness to abandon historically successful institutions and legal precedents that are characteristic of this administration to be shocking and exceedingly stupid. The current conservatives are not people willing to establish a fair and effective process and then trust the outcome to that process. Instead they believe that the outcome is all that matters, and any restriction that leads to alternative outcomes must be trampled or eliminated. Unfortunately their view of the appropriate outcomes is based on ignorance, fear, greed and corruption.
To believe in America's political values and to observe the importance of its role in the world is not "American exceptionalism." [Link added - Editor WTF-o] Like all countries, America has erred many times and has been capable of evil. Other countries have critically important virtues that America lacks. As I detail in my book, America has been far too quick to use war as a foreign policy option and has become increasingly imperialistic in precisely the way the Founders so stridently warned against.
But those who focus on America's flaws to the exclusion of its virtues are but the opposite side of the same Manichean coin from the American exceptionalists who believe that we can do no wrong, that America is inherently Good independent of our conduct in the world. What the Pew poll demonstrates is that the face America has shown to the world during the Bush presidency -- at least insofar as the world perceives it, a vitally important metric -- is a fundamentally different one than they saw previously.
The real problem is that by eliminating any sense of justice and fairness in the process sacrifices the real needs of large groups of people. Since those people do not accept the conservative views of appropriate outcomes, the conservatives see them as just additional impediments to what they want. As they ignore the needs and desires of more and more groups who think they are getting a raw deal, the conservatives are learning the true meaning of "No justice. No Peace." A modern nation cannot be governed to suit a small aristocracy. There are too many others who have a real stake in the process and the nation, and their cooperation cannot be ignored.
In addition to Glenn Greenwald, Rick Pearlstein is writing a series of posts that makes the point that the problem of America is not conservatives. The problem is the conservatism of Goldwater, Reagan and the think tanks. On July 4 Rick wrote Independence Day in which he describes the idea behind Daniel Brook new book The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat In Winner-Take-All America. The conservatives want to make everything of any importance in America into a question of financial wealth. Bush has specifically spoken of creating the "Ownership Society" in which a person's value is nothing more than the numerical value of the wealth he personally controls. This is a system which eliminates individual Liberty and replaces it with a society run by and for the wealthy and the bankers. This is also the message of Goldwater's "Conscience of a Conservative" which has large portions about such things as eliminating free and low-cost individual education.
Rick further explains in his post today entitled Big Con Manifesto. A lot of people feel that the problems America is having with the Bush administration are just Bush and Cheney who are abandoning conservatism. This is very far from the truth. This administration is doing its damnedest to implement as much of the canon of conservatism as possible and conservatism itself is proving to be a total failure!
The effort to blame the failures of the Bush administration merely on the failures of Bush and his administration to follow conservative ideology rest on the clear incompetence repeatedly demonstrated by members of the Bush administration. Let's never forget Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Mike Brown, or the sadly incompetent Jerry Bremer who so badly screwed up the early occupation of Iraq. But the problem is not just the incompetence of many Bush appointees. The problem stems from why they were appointed in the first place.
The incompetence demonstrated repeatedly by so many Bush administration appointees comes from two sources. First, Bush and his supporters do not believe in government. They are conservatives, and remember well that both Goldwater and Reagan stated "Government is not the solution. Government is the problem."
Since the conservative appointees consider the very existence of government to be the source of most American problems, they try to solve problems that really need government solutions without using government. This leads to the second problem. Since the demand to eliminate government is not supported by either facts or experience, it has become necessary to appoint to senior government positions ideologues who ignore facts and experience. Those are the only kind of government administrators conservatives can find to try to implement policies which the preponderance of facts and experience show will not work. The result is the utter incompetence demonstrated in the occupation of Iraq and the failures in the Gulf Coast (and especially the Democratic stronghold of New Orleans.) This isn't government administrators who abandon conservatism and thus fail. This is administrators who fervently believe in the conservative ideology and keep trying to implement the ideology in spite of its' failures. [This same procedure was a major reason why the Soviet Union failed. Marxist-Leninism Communism was every bit as much a failed ideology as is modern American conservatism., and similarly required the promotions and appointments of true-believers over experts in their field.]
In short, what Glenn Greenwald is saying is that the criticism of the Bush administration is based on the criminally irresponsible and ignorant conservative government run by Cheney and Bush. The criticism comes from those of us who believe that America was and still could be a very special nation, but conservatives are stealing that specialness from America. Rick Pearlstein goes further to demonstrate that the real problem is not the failure of the Bush administration to properly implement conservatism. It is the utter failure of conservatism itself that is the source of America's major problems today. My final addition to that is to show that the incompetence demonstrated by almost every act of government that the Bush administration has attempted is not based on the incompetence and wrong headed failure to implement conservatism. The demonstrated incompetence is a necessary result of attempting to apply a failed ideology in spite of all factors that show it is not working and cannot work.
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